November 2024: Alexander Girard, Independent Practices, and a new book on collage
Also! Talking about talking about writing about design.
In October, we spoke with Taylor Levy and Che-Wei Wang of CW&T about building small, experimental practices and the new dean of design at OCAD Lesley-Ann Noel about designing social change.
EDITOR’S NOTE
October was an unusually busy month for public presentations for me. I was honored to moderate a panel at this year’s AIGA Design Conference featuring Louise Sandhaus, Elizabeth Goodspeed, Caspar Lam, and YuJune Park about archives as a way to imagine new futures for graphic design. It was a lively and fun conversation that I hope hit at some new ways to think about the role of archives in design history.
I also did two remote talks about Scratching the Surface: first at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand at the invitation of Luke Wood. Luke’s is a designer who moves across publishing, music, and other experimental practices and his students are interested in similar modes of practice. It was a treat to present to them but even more of a treat to be a part of the dialogue that happened after. Then I was invited by Julia Gamolina to speak to her Architecture in Media class at the Pratt School of Architecture. This was a group of architecture students thinking about how their work fits within larger media infrastructures — the type of class I wish I could have taken when I was in school.
I always love giving talks like this because it’s a chance for me to reflect on why I do this show and why it continues to bring value to my life. The strategy I’ve adopted in these presentations is to speak for as short a time as possible to allow a robust Q&A. Finding out what the room is interested in is always more exciting. As I say in most talks: dialogue is more interesting than monologue. If you’d like me to speak at your school, institution, event about podcasting, my work, design media, etc, I’m always open. Send me a note!
And as a reminder, Scratching the Surface and this newsletter is supported by paid subscribers. You can upgrade to a paid tier right here on Substack. Subscribers get bonus interviews each month and access to an archive of old posts. Plus, you send us a signal that you value this work and want to see it exist in the world. For that, I’m so thankful.
Until next month,
Jarrett
SCRATCH
Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.
PAST GUESTS
Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.
📐 Justin Davidson reviews the new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition on architect Paul Rudolph.
✍️ For the Dallas Morning News, Mark Lamster also reviews the exhibition.
😂 And here’s Michael Kimmelman, in The New York Times, on the exhibition.
🫠…okay, last one: Paul Goldberger also wrote about it for AirMail.
🪦 For The Nation, Kate Wagner remembers the late Frederic Jameson.
🛌 and in Curbed, Kate Wagner writes that Megalopolis is just another Neri Oxman fantasy.
🗣️ Josh Owen was interviewed by Designculture about his career, teaching, and the Vignellli Center.
🍲 For Dirt, Alexandra Lange on the faded popularity of Tupperware.
🎬 Beka and Lemoine will debut their new film, Softly Brutal, at Opus Bonum at Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, taking place between October 25 and November 3, 2024. Watch the trailer here.
📷 Rob Giampietro interviewed designer Scott Williams about Aperture’s recent design refresh.
💘 Speaking of photography, in his New Yorker column, Kyle Chayka writes about an iPhone app that helped him fall back in love with taking photos.
💿 For ArtForum, Helen Molesworth interviewed Bill Horrigan, the longtime curator of Film and Media the Wexner Center for the Arts, who is retiring.
✊ For Fast Company, Dori Tunstall interviews to Cheryl D. Miller about her new book, Here: Where The Black Designers Are.
BOOK ROUNDUP
Recent books that have arrived in the studio. All links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. If you order through Bookshop, we get some money to help support the show!
Luciano Fabro: Reinventing Sculpture by Margit Rowell (Phaidon)
Luciano Fabro was an original member of Arte Povera, the materials- and experience-based art movement that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s. He went on to be exhibited internationally, becoming the first artist from the group to receive a major US retrospective, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992. This monograph, written by critic and curator Margit Rowell, who collaborated with Fabro repeatedly in his later years, is the first complete overview of Fabro’s career, published with the full support and participation of the artist’s estate and international galleries.
1000 Marks by Pentagram (Thames & Hudson)
Originally produced in a limited print run by Pentagram themselves, this edition offers more than double the content and will be an invaluable source of inspiration for all designers working on identity projects, as well as a fascinating study of the trends and evolution of over sixty years of Pentagram's logo design.
Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage by Freya Gowrley (Princeton University Press)
I’ve always wanted a good text on the history and theory of collage and I think this might be the one I’ve been waiting for. Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims' religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion.
READ/WATCHED/HEARD
Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.
🍿 This is my catnip: inside the MoMA succession sweepstakes.
👭 On the historical side, a new book focuses on the fourteen women who helped shape MoMA.
🤑 Ford Foundation gives $10 million to the Studio Museum in Harlem.
🖼️ It’s Art Historian Aby Warburg’s World. We’re Just Living In It.
JOB WATCH
New jobs, retirements, and promotions in and around design.
The Hammer Museum selects former architecture and design curator Zoe Ryan as its new director.
POSTSCRIPT
In the aforementioned essay on Aby Warburg, I discovered a project I didn’t know about before: Mark Finch’s Book of Knowledge, a series of collages taken from a 1950s set of encyclopedias of the same name. As a lover of collage (see above), I was immediately taken with this body of work. It’s almost like an experimental version of another project I love: Gerhard Richter’s Atlas.