I want to break free

I WANT TO BREAK FREE

Thesis by Tomáš Janícek ˇ

I WANT TO BREAK FREE

Thesis by Tomáš Janícek ˇ

3 INDEX INTRODUCTION

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF TRAVELING

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THE GRAND TOUR

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MY FIRST JOURNEY

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WALKING AS ART

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PHOTOGRAPHERS AS TRAVELERS

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VISITING NYC

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ME AND CARS — THE VERY BEGINNING

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CAR AS AN OBJECT

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DESIGNERS NOWADAYS

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CONCLUSION

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REFERENCES

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5 INTRODUCTION When I started to think about my graduation project I wanted to connect my two favorite things — cars and traveling. Sure you don’t expect that from a graphic designer, but that was also why I wanted to pursue it. Nowadays when there are so many designers graduating from art academies every year, it can’t do any harm to be one of the strange guys. At the time, I reflected on my trip to Scotland several years ago and realized that it was truly inspirational. I began researching traveling artists, looking for a way to connect my passion for cars and travel with graphic design. My research also included artists who worked with cars, because that is also how I see cars. For me they are not just things that can transport you from point A to point B, but a really meaningful object. And just as there is good art and bad art, there are also good cars and bad cars.

While researching I found a couple of artists who really inspired me and helped me sort out what I want to do. These people are from the creative fields of visual art, sound art and photography.

6 A BRIEF HISTORY OF TRAVELING

The earliest form of leisure tourism can be traced as far back as the Babylonian and Egyptian empires. A museum of historic antiquities was open to the public in Babylon. The Egyptians held many religious festivals that attracted the devout and many people who thronged to cities to see famous works of arts and buildings.

In India, as elsewhere, kings travelled for empire building. The Brahmins and the common people travelled for religious purposes. Thousands of Brahmins and the common folk thronged Sarnath and Sravasti to be greeted by the inscrutable smile of the Enlightened One- the Buddha.

500 B.C. the Greek tourists travelled to sites

[Fig.01]

As humans, we have always been traveling.

Looking back far into our history as early as 2000 years before Christ, travel for trade was already an important feature. Around the year 600 B.C. people also started to travel for leisure.

Fig.01 The first Museum built by Babylonian Princess 2500 years ago.

Discovered in 1925 by archeologist Leonard Wooley.

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Fig.02 Queen Elizabeth I / circa 1580, artist unknown

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9 of healing gods. The Greeks also enjoyed their religious festivals that increasingly became a pursuit of pleasure, and in particular, sport. Athens had become an important site for travellers visiting the major sights such as the Parthenon.

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[Fig.02]

THE GRAND TOUR From the early seventeenth century, a new form of tourism was developed as a direct outcome of the Renaissance. Under the reign of Elizabeth 1, young men seeking positions at court were encouraged to travel to the continent to finish their education.

Later, it became customary for the education of gentlemen to be completed by a ‘Grand Tour’ accompanied by a tutor and lasting for three or more years. One of these men was an English portrait painter Richard Wilson, who became an important landscape painter after attending the grand tour.

In 1750, with the financial backing of his friend Commodore Thomas Smith, the son of Sir Thomas

Lyttleton, Wilson embarked on the mandatory ‘Grand Tour’. In those times, if you were an English gentleman, with any cultural pretensions, you couldn’t avoid the European Continent, especially Italy. Your education wasn’t complete until you could walk into your Club and announce loftily, “Yes, I had coffee at the Cafe degli Inglesi in the Piazza di Spagna. Then we did the ruins. They were so inspiring.You don’t get ruins like those any more.

Although, the other day I had a premonition that we’ll be able to accomplish more striking modern versions in the very distant future.” After crossing the Channel, Wilson went to Venice and remained there for several months, studying the works of Titian and other Old Masters, and working as a Portrait Painter. He befriended a leading Venetian Landscape Painter, Francesco Zuccarelli, and a rich, art-loving Englishman, William Lock. Wilson painted a very striking portrait of Zuccarelli and took seriously his advice to concentrate on landscapes. William Lock bought his paintings and invited him to travel with him. Towards the end of 1751, Wilson left Venice in his company and traveled through various notable towns of Italy en route to that grand destination, Rome.

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Fig.03 Richard Wilson - Italian landscape with three arched bridge

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Fig.04 Piazza Di Spagna, Rome

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[Fig.04]

[Fig.03]

13 During the travel from Venice to Rome Wilson drew several quick sketches documenting what he saw and encountered. After reaching Rome he decided to settle in one of the most fashionable locations in town — the Piazza di Spagna. This was quite a magnet for artists, foreign and local alike, because it was where the Grand Tourists from England gathered and, in those days before photography, he could count on them to buy his paintings of the Roman countryside and monuments and provide him with a very respectable income. Wilson stayed in Rome until 1757.

While ostensibly educational, the pleasure seeking men travelled to enjoy life and culture of Paris, Venice or Florence. By the end of the eighteenth century, the custom had become institutionalized in the gentry. Gradually pleasure travel displaced educational travel. The advent of the Napoleonic wars inhibited travel for around 30 years and led to the decline of the custom of the Grand Tour.

When my research on the connection between art and traveling lead me to the Grand Tour I realized I was attending small ‘Grand Tours’ every time my family and I went on a holiday. There was always a lot of culture and history involved in those trips.

We would travel by car from the Czech Republic and make several stops on the way to our final destination just to see something interesting. It could have been a quick visit to a small town to see the local architecture, a visit to a private gallery, or a museum. My father always had a plan of where to go and what to see. Growing up, I had never been on a holiday that involved more than one day of lying on the beach; there were always so many things to see and to do! Because my brother and I were so young at the time (much younger than Richard Wilson during his Grand Tour) my parents had to make some compromises during their ‘Tours’. For instance, an all day visit to Disneyland when in Paris was paired with an entire day at the Centre Pompidou followed by traverses in the city to all the must-see and important buildings, from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower.

[Fig.05]

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Fig.05 Me and my brother in Brussels, looking over the shoulder of a local artist.

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Fig.06 Hitchhiking in Scotland.

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17 MY FIRST JOURNEY It is 6am, June 11, 2002 and my two friends and I are heading to the Prague Airport. Today we are starting a journey that will leave resonating influences on me. Three weeks ago, right before graduating from the Secondary School of Applied Cybernetics (strange name, I know), me and my two friends decided to try to find a summer job somewhere abroad in western Europe. We wanted to experience something disconnected to the life we were currently living. I, for one, saw myself sitting behind the computer for the rest of my life.

After three weeks of planning and too much of that time spent procrastinating, we ended up with no plan whatsoever. The only thing we decided on was the country: Scotland. We bought three one-way Prague — Edinburgh tickets and here we were, sitting at the airport waiting for departure.

My mother was crying this morning saying goodbye to us. We were planning to spend at least two months in Scotland; most likely somewhere around Dundee, but due to not having any work contract

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It’s been a week since we arrived in Edinburgh.

We are lying in our sleeping bags and looking outside from our tent at the sky. Tomorrow we are finally going to get a job. An old farmer who gave us a ride when we were hitchhiking arranged the job. He looked a bit strange and I had never seen a car as dirty as his. The interior of his Jeep Cherokee was covered in a layer of brown dust so thick that it was next to impossible to see the original color of the dashboard. We had been driving for an hour when he offered us a sleepover in an old house of his. After we agreed, he drove off the main road and turned right into the forest. I have to say, all three of us got a bit scared — the forest was getting deeper and deeper and we really didn’t know what to expect. Then all of a sudden we drove through a

[Fig.06]

planned, we had no idea of what to expect in the following days. The only information we were able to get from our friend who worked there a couple of seasons ago is that there are a lot of strawberry farms around Dundee and Aberdeen. This is all we know for now. We assume that a big adventure is ahead of us since this is the first proper trip we are about to make.

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[Fig.07]

tunnel of roses and arrived at the small courtyard of an old beautiful brick house. I was blown away.

It felt like we were standing inside one of Monet’s paintings, at least that’s how I felt. Honestly now I can’t tell if it was really that astonishing or if it was just such a contrast to our week of struggling.

We were three guys with huge backpacks and one enormous tent, which was so heavy that two of us always had to carry it together. The batteries of ours devices were all out, which meant we had no clue about the time. And I have to say it was the best thing that could’ve happened. Since we weren’t in a hurry, we were leisurely flaneuring through the beautiful Scotch countryside, bathing in the rivers, sleeping in the open and not rushing anywhere.

And now, after seven days of total freedom we are here, at the farm of a guy who gave us a ride and we are getting ready to start working tomorrow.

After two weeks of work, we decided it was enough for us. Surprisingly we were shorthanded by the polish workers, and it wasn’t fair at all, so we decided to continue traveling for a while again.

Hitchhiking around the east coast of Scotland, lying under the sun in the shadows of castles was

20 amazing and truly inspirational. We were trying to find another job but we weren’t lucky so eventually we gave up and got our tickets home. We might not get rich, we might not even earned enough to come home in black numbers. Finding work from the Czech republic through some agency would have been definitely more successful moneywise.

But I’m really happy that thanks to our impotence of arranging anything, we had a wonderful time full of inspirational moments and we’re going back as a totally different people.

This was the first trip that started my passion and curiosity for traveling.

Fig.07 Loch Lomond, Scotland

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Fig.08 Richard Long ­­— A Line Made by Walking (1967)

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[Fig.08]

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WALKING AS ART There are a lot of artist who find walking itself a creative process and the monotonous rhythm of the walk inspires them.To represent this group I picked two artists who I think fit my field of research the best. First is Richard Long, Richard Long belongs to a generation of artists who from the midsixties helped to re-define the boundaries of art practice. “The significance of walking in my work is that it brings time and space into my art; space meaning distance. A work of art can be a journey.”

Still during his studies at Saint Martin’s he walked back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the English countryside, leaving a track that he then photographed in black and white. The work, taken as the milestone in contemporary art, balances on the fine line between performance (action) and sculpture (object), as he described his idea. After seeing the book called A walk across England, which documents his journey from East shore to West shore of Britain, when he just walked and documented the journey with a camera but didn’t

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In 1993 František Skála was nominated to represent the Czech Republic at the 45th Venice Biennale. He decided to walk all the way to Italy and in the Czech pavilion exhibited paintings and fragile objects created from the items he found during his more than 500 miles long pilgrimage.

This concept united several themes. During the 25 days of his journey that he spent virtually alone in the mountains he was creating tiny objects made of materials he found in the surrounding nature and writing a diary. Skála himself observed that the greatest experience for him was to pass the distance at the speed natural to a human being. The diary verges between image and text. “I reached an absolute harmony with nature and was able to perceive everything very intensively.”

[Fig.09]

actually make anything, I became curious about how walking itself reflects in other artist’s work.

Fig.09 František Skála — Travelogues Notes and sketches from the journey to Venice (1993)

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Fig.10 Untitled — Kevin Russ

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27 PHOTOGRAPHERS AS TRAVELERS The photographers I would like to mention are Kevin Russ, Ian Ruhter and Mike Brodie. It seems like traveling across the continent is much easier in the USA. Of course photographers are always traveling, but these three guys took it to the next level and traveling became their lifestyle.

Kevin Russ has been traveling the United States, living mostly in his car as he captures the magic that is the wild west. He’s been shooting landscape photography mostly with his iPhone, and living off the print sales. He rarely pulls out his DSLR unless it’s for a bear or bear cub where he can’t get close.

You can find his work on sites like Istockphoto or order his prints on the Society6. Some might see it as a gimmick, but his work speaks for itself.

Throughout the video a slideshow of the images he’s captured during his travels scrolls by — square crops revealing those shared via Instagram — and

I would say Ian Ruhter is the opposite of Kevin when it comes to using equipment as he described that photography started as an art form for him.

But by working for clients in the last several years it evolved into something less personal and true, a process that has become vapid, much less inspiring and therefore significantly less fulfilling.

He also adds that as his career progresses and with technological advances in the image-making process, he began to lose sight of the analog way of making images. He lost sight of the most important component of the photographic art, the neverending search for that one image powerful enough

[Fig.10]

we found ourselves surprised at the impressive quality and composition of Russ’ shots As he explains in the interview, he has to be very particular about the situations he photographs, choosing his lighting carefully to match the iPhone’s limited dynamic range. From the looks of it, I’d say he’s spot on more often than not.

What he said on his blog recently is that he has been on the road for over 250 days and hasn’t once bought himself a motel room because he can’t afford it.

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[Fig.11]

to reveal a hidden truth. It all changed when he began working with a nineteenth century process called wet plate collodion. This gave both his art and life new direction, losing his direction took him back to the 1800s to help him realize what he wanted to do.

After mastering the process, he bought an old USPS mail truck and rebuilt it into a huge camera on the wheels. Yes, the camera itself is built into the trunk of the van, so whenever he wants to take a picture of something he has to drive with the whole van close to the object and then he can make the picture. The reason why it is so complicated is because he’s using and old camera and a “wet plate” process, first introduced in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer, but Ian’s plates are ‘life size’.

It took Ruhter a painstakingly long time to concur this complex process, with a tremendous amount of trial and error. Through this trial and error it brought to Ruhters attention that the only way to make this temperamental process work on such a large scale, would be to become one with the camera, by working inside it and involving

The last photographer I wanted to mention is Mike Brodie a.k.a. The Polaroid Kidd. He left his home when he was 18 to travel the rails across America. His friend gave him old Polaroid camera and as he started to take pictures; he found himself spending three years photographing the friends and companions he encountered.

Brodie is not a runaway in the sense that he came from a broken home, it’s more like he’s got this fanatical personality. He took his first train ride right out of Pensacola two days after picking up a Polaroid camera off a friend who had it gathering

[Fig.12]

himself with the actual mechanical process.

“Through Ruhter’s tremendous perseverance, despite what people told him that what he wanted to achieve would be impossible, he managed to prove them wrong, by creating the largest Tintypes ever seen!”

After finally reaching his fundamental goal, Ruhter is on a journey to capture the landscapes and the people of America to tell through his mesmerising photographs the stories of these places and people, showing how we are all connected in different ways.

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Fig.11 Ian and his ‘Camera truck’ in Los Angeles.

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Fig.12 Untitled photo of one of Brodie’s friends.

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33 dust in her car. He stuffed the camera in a backpack with some food and, without saying a word to his girlfriend or mother, headed to a spot downtown where trains came slow around a kind of a bend with the idea that he’d ride west to see a friend in Mobile. But he couldn’t wait. Two hours and some fidgeting later, he was poking his head out of the first train that passed, an eastbound freight that carried him clean across the state of Florida in Jacksonville. “I simply just wanted to ride trains, so I got on a train in my town and rode it!”.

34 VISITING NYC It is August 12th, 2012, and I’m sitting here in the MoMA café and drinking coffee. I’m really happy that I decided to get up early in the morning, printed out the entrance ticket at home and get here just after the museum opened. It took me almost 90 minutes to get here with the subway from my apartment in Brooklyn. I’ve been in New York for 7 weeks now but this is my first time here at MoMA. The main reason for my visit was to see the exhibition “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000” which opened two weeks ago and there are some amazing toys designed by Czech designers such as Ladislav Sutnar.

The museum quickly fills up with people, so I’m glad that I started the day early, allowing me to see the exhibition relatively smoothly. I knew that it will be busy here, but this exceeded my expectations. Due to crowds, I did not try to see all of the permanent collection, focusing only of the temporary exhibitions.

Fig.13 Alighiero Boetti’s exhibition ‘Game Plan’ in MoMA, NYC, July — October 2012

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Fig.14 16 DICEMBRE 2040–11 LUGLIO 2023 (1971) The dates had superstitious connotations for Boetti: December 16, 2040, will be the hundredth anniversary of his birth; July 11, 2023, is the date he predicted for his death.

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[Fig.14]

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[Fig.13]

37 What really caught my attention when I entered the museum was an exhibition of Alighiero Boetti called The Game Plan. I have to admit until now I wasn’t familiar with his work at all.

At this exhibition I learned a lot about him but what I find important for my project is that by 1971, when he had become ambivalent about Arte Povera and had rejected the hardwarestore materials that many of the group would continue to exploit. Conceptual artists between 1969 and 1971 were looking for ways to make “dematerialized” art, but Boetti had been trying out new materials — postal stamps, copper panels, Biro pen, embroidery — and traveling to distant places might have opened up rufther possibilities for him.

What I really like about his work is that he started to pursue an idea that artwork might be produced by different parties without collaboration or discussion — A form of authorship that is split rather than shared.

He tested his idea with square embroideries for the first time during his initial visit to Afghanistan in 1971. He supplied the dates to

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Boetti first traveled to Afghanistan in March 1971. In Kabul, he befriended Gholam Dastaghir, a local man whose ambition was to own a hotel.

Boetti provided five years’ rent for a building in the Shar-e-Naw quarter of Kabul and, at Dastaghir’s suggestion, named it One Hotel. They divided the space into 11 rooms (Boetti’s favorite number, due to its doubled nature), and the artist stayed in Room 11 during each of his visits, twice a year until 1979 (when the Soviet invasion made travel to the country impossible). Passing traders, hippies, and friends stayed at the hotel, which Boetti also used as his studio and as the base of production for the increasing number of works he was having fabricated in Afghanistan. In 1973 he described the project as an artwork, insisting that “creativity also means opening a hotel.” As an artwork, it is a precursor to relational aesthetics, a set of artistic practices, emerging in the 1990s, in which the interaction between people and social contexts is the medium.

[Fig.15]

hired embroiderers without further direction, and he was pleasantly surprised when the texts came back surrounded by ornate borders.

Fig.15 The first Museum built by Babylonian Princess 2500 years ago.

Discovered in 1925 by archeologist Leonard Wooley.

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Fig.16 Boetti’s embroidered maps of the world, the “Mappa,” were made from 1971 to his death in 1994.

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[Fig.16]

41 Last thing I would like to mention about Boetti’s work is the story behind one of his embroidered maps of the world, the one with pink oceans. I was wondering why he chose pink for the ocean and found out that in 1979, the embroiderers — unfamiliar with the map image — mistakenly filled the oceans in pink, a color they selected because the thread was in plentiful stock. He loved this intrusion of chance into the design and from then on left it to the makers to choose the color for the seas. He was proud of how little he determined the look of these works, but he did make some critical decisions: for example, in the 1980s he switched the map image from the Mercator projection to the Robinson projection, which, in translating the globe to a flat surface, more accurately represents the relative sizes of the world’s landforms.

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I was trying to find out where does my passion for cars comes from and then I realized, that’s probably partly because of my father and partly because I’m just like that by nature.

I remember when I was three or four years old, I got a picture of a red monster truck for my birthday. My dad drew it for me, he used black ink for the contours and then he colored it in with bright red aquarelle paint, finished with some yellow details. That image hung on the wall above my childhood bed for a long time and it is still very vivid in my head today. The car had a long antenna with a small triangle flag at the end and it was pictured from a bellow, ¾ frontal view.

Because my father is an architect, he used to draw a lot (this was before computers were widely used) and I used to sit next to him in his room and trying to mimic him. My favorite part was when

[Fig.17]

ME AND CARS THE VERY BEGINNING

Fig.17 The first picture of an off-road car I got.

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Fig.18 The first experience with a real off-road car. My cousin-in-law and his Defender.

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45 he got to the point when he had to fill in empty parking spaces in his projects. Those moments I liked the most, he would ask me what kind of car to put there and I would just pick the shape and even the brand and watch him draw it.

In my eyes, we had one more very important artwork in our small apartment. It was quite a large painting, made by my father and his friend, who was also an architect. When doing sketches and drawings, my father was always the one who drew the picture and his friend would color it with aquarelle. The results of this cooperation were always very successful. This particular painting was of a dressing table with a huge mirror and several small shelves filled with various objects. One of the objects was a model of an American truck. I remember myself loving the painting because of that truck. I spent so much time looking at the red Peterbilt and dreaming about driving trucks.

So this is where I think my love of cars began.

As I got older and learned how to read, I started to learn about car brands and car models on my own.

I was very good at it and I still am since then.

Now let me skip couple years in which nothing interesting (car wise) happened. Couple months after coming back from the trip to Scotland that triggered my need for exploring the world my cousin-in-law bought his first off-road car. It was a dark blue Land Rover Defender.

Once he gave me a ride home from their ranch and to show me the capabilities of his new car, he took a shortcut and crossed the river. Till this moment I was very much interested in sport cars and the latest advantages of technologies in them.

But when we crossed that river I realized that that was exactly what I wanted from cars. That was the way to actually connect two of my passions, to discovering the world while driving a car.

Over the years I’ve realized that the reason I was so passionate about cars is because we are living in a society where everyone is trying to make his life more and more comfortable. Of course it is a natural thing, people have long since been doing that, but now I have the feeling that everything is getting more and more complicated.

And I think cars are actually very good examples

[Fig.18]

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47 of this. What was once a decent car is not sufficient anymore today. We are getting more and more lazy and seeking for a comfort at its best without realizing or thinking about it. For me realizing of this also didn’t happen overnight, it actually took me couple years.

[Fig.19]

CAR AS AN OBJECT Predecessors of cars as we know it appeared in artists’ works a long time ago. Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s spring-driven horseless wagon (circa 1478) or Albrecht Durer’s Triumphal car mechanically propelled by a system of hand-driven cog-wheels (circa 1526). These predecessors of modern cars established precedents for the interest shown by 20th century artists, charmed by the new machinery and technology and of course the looks and design of cars. First car was built in 1885 by Benz and in August 1888 Bertha Benz, the wife of Karl Benz, undertook the first road trip by car,

Now we are going to skip couple of decades and take a look on the probably best-known example of cars meeting art. In 1975 French racecar driver and auctioneer Hervé Poulain wanted to invite artist to create canvas on an automobile. So he asked his friend Alexander Calder to paint the first BMW Art Car which was also one of Calder’s last works of art as he died the same year it was unveiled. Poulain then drove the BMW 3.O CSL during the Le Mans race in 1975.

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to prove the road-worthiness of her husband’s invention.

Already in 1896, Toulouse Lautrec produced his lithograph The Automobilist, in late 1912 to early 1913 Giacomo Balla turned from a depiction of the splintering of light to the exploration of movement and, more specifically, the speed of racing automobiles.

“The world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed... A roaring automobile... that seems to run on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” as Fillipo Tomasso Marinetti published in 1909 in Le Figaro.

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Fig.19 When engineers constructed a working model of Da Vinci’s car in the late 1990s, it only traveled 40 feet.

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Fig.20 The first BMW Art Car during the Le Mans endurance race in 1975. Painted by Alexander Calder.

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51 As Poulain explains looking back the deal with Art Cars was that BMW would provide the automobiles and absorb the costs for the conversion and race entry, and the Hervé Poulain / Guy Loudmer partnership would organize the artists. This is what happened with Calder, Stella, Lichtenstein and Warhol. It was also Poulain who entered the Art Cars at Le Mans together with BMW. “None of the four artists received any money.

They did it out of friendship and because of good relationships”, explained Poulain in an interview.

Poulain has written five books about art, including “L’art et l’automobile” and “Mes Pop Cars”, a work focusing mainly on the first four BMW Art Cars.

With the art Car concept, Poulain paved the way for the integration of art into industrial society.

This topic is still quite popular between artists; naturally there are several approaches of using a car in a work of art. As a good example I think I would pick three contemporary artists each of them working in totally different way. I really like a video made by Israeli artist Yael Bartana, who currently lives in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. In the short movie she shows the leisure activity of many

men around the world including me. Several offroad cars are trying to climb up the sand dunes near Tel Aviv. “The phenomenon of 4x4 vehicles is not exclusive to Israel. These gatherings of men in open areas also take place in Europe, the United States and other territories where cars are fashion items representing money and social status, something that has more to do with an image beyond its mere practical function. The reading of the work in the specific Israeli context elicits questions about occupation, aggression and our own affinity with the land.” I disagree with what she said about offroad driving because my friends and my love for off-road cars has nothing to do with representing money or social status. It’s about the pleasure of discovering and realization of being alive when the adrenaline bursts through our veins.

Bruno Rousseaud was interested in cars since he was a little boy; he always had access to car parts from a junkyard. At the young age of 12, he was already adding discarded car parts to his small bike or to the engine of his go-kart. After high school he studied at an art academy and placed his hobby of cars in the back seat, it was not cool enough

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53 for an artist. In 2000, he was asked to participate in an exhibition on inflatable structures. It was in Monaco. He was thinking Rally, Grand Prix, sports cars, and luxury - he got the bug again. He created a design office like a company to market prototypes for his “Turrets for sports cars�: an inflatable assault tank turret attached to the roof.

The appendices confer a tragicomic character to these highly coveted vehicles. The turret, like a stage costume that changes apprehensions toward others and the way we look.

And there is of course one very important Dutch member of this category, Joost Conijn. He is more than just an artist and an adventurer. I especially like the technical way he approaches art. He builds clever machines like a gate that opens itself automatically when a car gets close enough, but he displaces them, putting the gate in the middle of the desert. Or the plane he decided to build and fly (and he succeeded). One of his pieces fit my project the best, and it is the wooden car. He bought an old Citroen DS, used the chassis only and built the car’s body again out of wood.

On top of that he took out the original engine and

54 replaced it with a steam engine he constructed himself. When the car was finished he took it for a journey across Europe, starting in The Netherlands he drove through 15 European countries including Macedonia, Ukraine, Albania etc. The whole trip was video documented and resulted into a 31 minutes long road movie.

DESIGNERS NOWADAYS There is couple of designers nowadays for whom traveling is important part of their life. Of course the most famous graphic designer who travels for inspiration and to recharge his creativity is Stefan Sagmeister. Every seven years he closes his studio for a year and travels wherever he feels like and works and experiments there. As he said he was

Fig.21 Goodiepal’s tricycle being unloaded from a boat in Coppenhagen.

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Fig.22 Axel Peemoeller’s home / office / sailboat.

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[Fig.21]

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57 scared to lose his clients before he took his first sabbatical but nothing like that happened. Ideas developed during the sabbatical inspired some of his most successful design projects.

Truly inspirational I find an interview in the Mousse magazine with Parl K.B. Vester also known as Goodiepal. Goodiepal is a music artist and composer and also a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in Coppenhagen. He has designed audio for The Matrix films, Carlsberg and Nokia. He has spent most of last year cycling through Europe on a three-wheeled fibreglass cockpit to play pre-recorded lectures. I especially like one of his answers in the above mentioned interview for Mousse magazine when the journalist asked him about Vester biking across Europe on his bike and then giving a lecture where he actually plays a video which is online and everyone can see it on his website. Goodiepal answered “Even if you have something to say, you often don’t get people’s attention. Especially not on the Internet. So you have to trick them. My bike travels are such a trick!”

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And as a perfect example could serve the approach of Axel Peemoeller, german graphic designer who lived in Australia for a couple of years came back to Europe and bought an old yacht.

Since then he lives on the boat with his girlfriend and works as a freelance graphic designer working for clients while sailing in the Mediterranean sea.

“Consequently, I live on the ocean – on a sailboat in the Mediterranean. Today I arrived in Tunisia and I am now anchored outside Sidi Bou Said. Four days ago I was ‘living’ in Valletta, Malta. I travel around and work from the sailboat, or travel by plane to where I am needed for a job.”

[Fig.22]

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59 CONCLUSION Traveling is something that in my opinion should work the same as art; it is to pull us out from our daily routine. Alain de Botton says that during the travels “We can reflect upon our lives from a height we could not have reached in the midst of everyday business.” It is something very influential even when a person is not aware of it and that’s why I was interested in different approaches of artists and how it reflects in their work. For my research I divided them into several groups.

Artists traveling to learn new things, where I started with a Grand Tour and mentioned work of Richard Wilson and how he transformed from a portraitist into a painter concentrating on landscapes.

The next group consists of artists traveling and making art on their way. This group is closely connected with walking as art itself. Artists who work during the journey are usually walking,

60 because as František Skála said, the repeating rhythm and moving through nature in speed natural to human being helps him to concentrate and became part of the surroundings. And that leads into being more perceptive.

As a main representative of the last group of traveling artists I chose Alighiero Boetti His idea of letting other people work on his concepts became successful after his visit to Afghanistan in 1971.

Since then he was coming to Afghanistan several times a year and working with hired embroiderers and letting them decide on colors and other details on his works. He described this process: “For me, the work on the embroidered maps achieved the highest form of beauty. For the finished work, I myself did nothing, in the sense that the world is as it is (I didn’t draw it) and the national flags are as they are (I didn’t design them).

In short, I did absolutely nothing. What emerges from the work is the concept.”

These were three groups about traveling artists, but I also took a look into lives of photographers, and was interested by three of them who each took different approach to traveling but in all three

61 cases it became their lifestyle. All of them are or were living on the road. By showing that I wanted to show that it is still possible to do that.

This research helped me to form my graduation project where I’d like to combine several approaches and translate them into creating a unique platform and maybe inspire others to follow. My idea is to make myself completely independent. Combine my passion for traveling and cars and built a prototype of a design studio on the wheels that will be tested during the summer. This would allow me to work independently on location and also be able to cooperate with people on the way.

62 REFERENCES [1]

History of Travel & Tourism

By Sarvajeet Chandra, Date: April 23, 2009 http://ezinearticles.com/?History-of-Travel-and-Tourism&id=2244859

[2]

Richard Wilson - English Landscape Painter

By Sonal Panse, Date: 2010 http://www.buzzle.com/articles/richard-wilson-english-landscape-painter.html

[3]

Richard Long: ‘It was the swinging 60s.

To be walking lines in fields was a bit different’

By Charlotte Higgins, Date: June 15, 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jun/15/richard-long-swinging60s-interview

[4]

The Collection: Richard Long, Museum De Pont, Netherlands http://www.depont.nl/en/collection/the-collection/kunstenaar/long/info

[5]

Travelogues

By Arbor Vitae publishers, date: Apr 19, 2012 http://www.arborvitae.eu/en/publishers/books-catalogue/arbor-vitae/travelogues/

[6]

A Traveling Photographer

By Max Monty, Date: Dec 14, 2012 https://vimeo.com/56803464

[7]

The Giant Wet Plate Photographer

By Tori Khambhaita, Date: Jan 23, 2013 http://www.filmsnotdead.com/2013/01/23/the-giant-wet-plate-photographerian-ruhter/

[8]

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

By Daniel Arnold, Oct 20, 2011 http://www.thefader.com/2011/10/20/mike-brodie-a-period-of-juvenileprosperity/#ixzz2N94oV3ty

63

[9] [10] [11]

Alighiero Boetti - Game Plan

By Christian Rattemeyer, Published 2011 by MoMA. (ISBN 9780870708190)

[12]

The Mercedes-Benz book

by Victor Boesen, Doubleday 1981 (ISBN 0-385-12554-2)

[14]

Symbiosis between BMW cars and art Date: Jan 05, 2010 http://www.bmwdrives.com/bmw-artcars.php

[15]

Catalogue Auto. Dream & Matter.

By Alberto Martn, Date: May 15, 2009 (ISBN: 978-84-613-2088-2)

[16]

Casse Artistique

By Gabrielle Besk, Magazine Garagisme, Prototype Issue, 2012

[17]

Four Sabbatical Lessons from Stefan Sagmeister

by Elizabeth Pagano, Date: Oct 28, 2009 http://mindset.yoursabbatical.com/2009/10/28/four-sabbatical-lessons-fromstefan-sagmeister/

[18]

Goodiepal - El Camino del Hardcor Mousse Magazine no35, by Michael Portnoy, date: October 2012

[19]

Axel Peemoeller Interview The Meander Journal, Issue 2, by Casey Hutton, date: Summer 2012 http://themeanderjournal.com/axel-peemoeller-interview/

64

I would like to thank to my girlfriend Anna for her everyday support, Shiman Shan for helping with my English, and my teacher Marjan Brandsma for her endless support during this late but intense process.

Thank you. © 2013 Tomáš Janícek, ˇ Den Haag www.nationalgraphic.cz This thesis was written during studies of Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)

© 2013 Tomáš Janícek, ˇ Den Haag www.nationalgraphic.cz This thesis was written during studies of Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)