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April 2016 $12.99

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arts | culture | design

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Orange issue

Table of Contents Art show guide

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Arts Week In New York City

The Orchestra

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George Prochnik

First Things First

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A Manifesto

Beige 6 Andrea Codrington

Lists 6 Alice Twemlow

And I Thought Church Was Fun

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Sara Cameron

Interview with Wes Anderson

8

Terry Gross

Whitewood under Siege

9

Jacob Hodes

Jacket Required

9

Alexandra Cardia

FORENSIC TOPOLOGY

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Geoff Manaugh

The Decriminalisation of Ornament

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Alice Twemlow

RE-USE 20 Jenny Tobias

Art show guide to Arts Week in New York City Thursday April 7 – Sunday April 10 4

ADAA: The Art Show Whether you’re a serious collector or a casual art fan, this vast fair, run by the Art Dealers Association of America, offers the chance to peruse some of the world’s most impressive museum-quality pieces on the market.

Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue The Armory Show This year’s event features a specially curated section devoted to Chinese contemporary art, featuring 16 galleries from Hong Kong and Mainland China.

Pier 92, 711 Twelfth Avenue Fountain Art Fair Founded in 2006 as an alternative art fair, Fountain remains the one art fair that emphasizes performance art along with other mediums.

69th Regiment Armory, 68 Lexington Avenue SCOPE Features more than 50 contemporary art galleries from around the world, as well as additional venues taking part in SCOPE’s Breeder Program, which welcomes start-up venues to the art-fair scene.

Skylight at Moynihan Station, West 33rd Street VOLTA Billing itself as the invitational show of emerging solo artists’ projects, VOLTA’s seventh edition includes 90 galleries from 30 countries, each presenting the work of a single artist.

82 Mercer Street

COVER | April 2016

The Orchestra

by George Prochnik

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.—Sir Thomas Browne In the first years of the twenty-first century, New York City police officers had six different siren noises at their fingertips to alternate and overdub as they attempted to bore through stagnant traffic. The “Yelp” is a high-pitched, rapidly oscillating, jumpy sound that suggests a small dog with large teeth has hold of your thigh and is not about to let go. The “Wail” is the classic keening noise that the Furies might release while pursuing vengeance. The “Hi-Lo,” or “European,” is whiney, forlorn—prone to depression, but undeniably civilized. The “Air-Horn” is vulgarity incarnate—a burp, a rasp, an all-out bursty blast. The “Fast” or “Priority” resembles a hysteric who’s just mainlined crystal meth. The “Manual” is an outcast loner raising its rifle in a solitary low-to-high pulse. The summer of 2007 saw the first broaching of the possibility that a seventh instrument might be added to the ensemble.

The Rumbler™, developed by Federal Signal Corporation, is described in the company’s promotional material as an “intersection-clearing system.” The “revolutionary new concept” behind this technologically simple combo of an amplifier, two high-output woofers, and a built-in timer is the Rumbler’s capacity to interact with most existing siren amplifiers and create secondary, low-frequency tones. A Florida highway patrolman dreamed up the device while listening to the law-flouting, bass-thumping audio on local boom cars.

Rumblers copy the primary siren signal, drop the frequency seventy-five percent, then hyperpump the volume. Federal Signal (the defendant in multiple class action suits

by firefighters with hearing loss) reports that the depth of bass attained by the system has “the distinct advantage of penetrating solid materials, allowing vehicle operators and nearby pedestrians to FEEL the sound waves.” The Rumbler sounds like a gang of renegade computer games escaped from the screen and storming the streets. 2001: A Space Odyssey meets The Warriors.

When New York City began entertaining the concept of introducing a new siren sound, many had qualms about the Rumbler’s potential to be unduly terrifying. But other police departments around the country, citing the need for stronger measures in an age of cell phone-iPod-ACcocooned car interiors, began loading the siren and relishing its capacity to bust the bubble. Washington DC police chief Cathy Lanier, head of the first large police force to adopt the Rumbler, remarked, “In the age of technology there’s always something that distracts folks. This helps shake that distraction.” The new siren thus became an interventional tool promoting social focus.

Robert S. Martinez, director of the New York City Police Department’s fleet services unit, found that every time he tried out the test model pedestrians and traffic were brought “to a dead stop.” Concurrently, prominent auto blogs began touting the “booty-shaking” effects of the device. One described the gluteal vibration induced by the Rumbler as “the best part of being pulled over.” A public yen for irresistible sensation dovetailed fortuitously with the authorities’ increasingly desperate need to command attention.

Rumbler use continues to proliferate around the country, and these über-sirens are now a standard instrument in the police officer’s sound-mixing dashboard.

First Things First Manifesto We, the undersigned, are designers, developers, creative technologists, and multi-disciplinary communicators. We are troubled by the present state of our industry and its effects on cultures and societies across the world.

We have become part of a professional climate that: ∞∞ prizes venture capital, profit, and scale over usefulness and resonance; ∞∞ demands a debilitating work-life imbalance of its workers; ∞∞ lacks critical diversity in gender, race, and age; ∞∞ claims to solve problems but favours those of a superficial nature; ∞∞ treats consumers’ personal information as objects to be monetised instead of as personal property to be supported and protected; and ∞∞ refuses to address the need to reform policies affecting the jurisdiction and ownership of data.

Encouraged in these directions, we have applied ourselves toward the creation of trivial, undifferentiated apps; disposable social networks; fantastical gadgets obtainable only by the affluent; products that use emotion as a front for the sale of customer data; products that reinforce broken or dishonest forms of commerce; and insular communities that drive away potential collaborators and well-grounded leaders. Some of us have lent our expertise to initiatives that abuse the law and human rights, defeat critical systems of encryption and privacy, and put lives at risk. We have negated our professions’ potential for positive impact, and are using up our time and energy manufacturing demand for things that are redundant at best, destructive at worst.

There are pursuits more worthy of our dedication.

Our abilities can benefit areas such as education, medicine, privacy and digital security, public awareness and social

campaigns, journalism, information design, and humanitarian aid. They can transform our current systems of finance and commerce, and reinforce human rights and civil liberties.

It is also our responsibility as members of our industry to create positive changes within it. We must work to improve our stances on diversity, inclusion, working conditions, and employees’ mental health. Failing to address these issues should no longer be deemed acceptable by any party. Ultimately, regardless of its area of focus or scale, our work and our mindset must take on a more ethical, critical ethos.

It is not our desire to take the fun out of life. There should always be room for entertainment, personal projects, humour, experimentation, and light-hearted use of our abilities. Instead, we are calling for a refocusing of priorities, in favour of more lasting, democratic forms of communication. A mind shift away from profit-over-people business models and the placing of corporations before individuals, toward the exploration and production of humble, meaningful work, and beneficial cultural impact.

In 1964, and again in 1999, a dedicated group of practitioners signed their names to earlier iterations of this manifesto, forming a call to put their collective skills to worthwhile use. With the unprecedented growth of technology over the past 15 years, their message has since grown only more urgent. Today, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, we renew and expand the First Things First manifesto, with the hope of catalysing a meaningful revolution in both our industry and the world at large. This manifesto needs your voice. Only by coming together as a community can we affect the kinds of changes that so urgently need to happen within it. http://firstthingsfirst2014.org/

April 2016 | COVER

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Beige

by Andrea Codrington

Beige is the color of evil, or at least that’s what Aaron Priven thinks. Priven, the author of the Internet’s only website dedicated to that most unassuming of hues, writes: “Most people think if colors have attributes such as good or evil, that the color of evil is either the red of arterial blood gushing from a wound, or the deepest black of the darkest night sky. While these are certainly evil colors, they are not as evil as beige… The most evil color has to appear benign.”

Apple Computers, one of the most obvious progenitors of the consumption-as-rebellion method of advertising, has position of distanced itself from decades of cranking out what tech aficionados disparagingly term “beige toasters.” An interview with iMac designer Jonathan Ive on Apple’s website even bears a headline that read “Sorry, no beige”—thus shifting blame from the company to the color.

(Interestingly, when German designer Hartmut Esslinger first created the original Macintosh in 1984, the company lovingly referred to the beige box as “Snow White.”)

Of course to every revolution there is a counter-revolution, and recent years have seen a return of low-key colors

Lists: From the (a) Trivial to the (b) Deadly Serious, Lists Dominate Visual Culture

by Alice Twemlow

The 21st century is full of lists: they appear in magazines, on advertising billboards, in business presentations, on the Web, in literature and art. Though they are seductively easy to read and apparently provide a way of getting to the ‘essence’ of a subject, do we lose something by reducing valuable (or not) information into a series of bullet points?

In recent times, the editors of slick style and popular culture magazines have increasingly taken it upon themselves to reduce the world and its riches into bite-size chunks. As a result, lists—and specifically hierarchical ones—have evolved into a new super-species of lazy article.

The economics of the epidemic are simple. The supply of ‘the world’s most exclusive spas’, ‘badly dressed men’ and ‘the best rock anthems of all time’ is endless. And, in a

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in fashion. But far from representing suburban normality or old-school comfort, high-style beige is all sharp tongue and urban angularity. “Beige is like the martini of color,” says New York-based club organizer Erich Conrad in an Esquire article called “Ecru Brut.” “It’s quiet but toxic.” There is certainly some evidence to the contrary. The commercials for Gap Khakis seem to reposition beige as the methamphetamine of color. But whatever your poison, too much of either might land you in the infirmary. And according to Sir Elton John—who knows a thing or two about substance abuse and sartorial extravagance—beige is one color that should be kept in the clinic. At a VH-1 Fashion Awards show a few years ago, John spoke out against “boutiques looking like hospitals, selling a lot of beige suits.”

Evil. Toxic. Hospital-like. Could these terms really apply to a hue that Webster’s describes as “the color of undyed wool?” Could the wolf really be dressed in sheep’s clothing? A quick numerological evaluation of color chip 468C in Pantone’s ubiquitous matching system reveals an astounding answer. Adding the color’s three numbers amounts to the number 18. And we all know that the number 18 results when you combine 6 + 6 + 6.

consumer society obsessed as much with the language of consumption as it is with actually buying things, the demand is certainly there. According to Folio, a US magazine industry journal, ‘best of ’ list issues of magazines tend to be bestsellers.

The proliferation of lists in magazines results from a collision of conditions: dwindling editorial budgets (when you are paying by the word, conjunctions seem superfluous), the popularity of search engines such as Google that allow editors to generate lists in infinite combinations, and the aesthetic appeal of a neat vertical story that provides the illusion of order and completeness.

A list, especially one that ranks or categorises, can be a salve for the anxiety of living in an era of information overload. But the relief is short-lived. Listing the options is not the same as selecting one of them to stand by. Unless you have something to say with your list, the experience of both its creation and use ends up being hollow.

And I Thought Church Was Fun: the Midwest Gives a Vegas Girl a Run For Her Money

by Sara Cameron

It was only a short trip—a vacation, an exploration, an investigation into the heartland. I didn’t think that six days in Branson, Missouri, would be enough to win me over. After all, I spent 16 years in the original cultural wasteland of Las Vegas—it was a little difficult to comprehend the mechanisms of a Las Vegas wanna-be that seeks the glory of being an Entertainment Town without relying on the aid of gambling, prostitution, white tigers, or anything open past 10pm. But Branson beckons millions beyond those (like myself) who seek to decipher the American mystique by crossing through hell and high water (a torrential downpour over Memphis) to reach this jewel of the

Bible Belt. I found its true cunning to lie beneath the bright lights and second-rate entertainers that lure caravans of recreational vehicles driven by seniors from around the Midwest. This Missourian Mecca, where good Christians come to let their hair down to the rockin’ melodies of Bobby Vinton, held a secret seductiveness I wanted to decode.

Branson’s remarkable celebration of mediocrity offered me a deluge of culture shock that will remain with me until the end of my days. The elements of which it seemed most proud were those that would have been laughed out of the state of Nevada for their amateurish proclivities.

I was astounded by the sub-par excellence of Shoji Tabuchi, the Japanese bluegrass fiddler whose showcase of the most base features of show business somehow makes Wayne Newton’s recently penned 10-year contract in LV seem sensible. Then there was the sense of regional pride for the “World’s Largest Banjo” at the all-you-can-eat pizza

and salad restaurant. Now, I know from overblown spectacles, and let me tell you, that banjo... it ain’t that big. Yet through some miracle of psycho-cultural subversion, some deeply rooted sleight-of-hand, I loved Branson from the bottom of my Southern Nevada heart.

I spent my days at Silver Dollar City, a Godfearin’ amusement park with a pioneer theme, over-dosing on Kettle Corn, a truly delectable popcorn concoction with both salt and sugar that Bransonians devour in frightening proportions. It’s no 50-cent shrimp cocktail, but that Kettle Corn sure is good.

My nights were whiled away at Jimmy’s Keyboard Lounge, one of Branson’s few true watering holes, watching the proprietor (you guessed it… Jimmy) passionately emoting via his Hammond B-3 organ.

This was not your everyday piano lounge. Listen up, Vegas lizards—this guy had mirrors behind his organ pedals and patent leather shoes. The man was not playing around, and this,

dear readers, is the kind of thing that won me over: the untainted experience, the sheer under-the-top-ness of it all.

The Branson “Strip” has its fair share of neon and a notion of the “bigger equals better” concept that makes Vegas great, but it possesses an innocence that shines through the façade.

During my brief stay, the Pandora’s box of the Missourian enigma was not completely opened up to me, but my teenaged companion on the Silver Dollar City log ride offered me a glimpse of the key. It was at this point when I realized that my sense of self and my Las Vegas experience were my only notions of reality, and they were being slowly undermined.

Her statement, although bordering on the surreal, instantly secured my appreciation of the Branson mystique. “I love it here!” she cried, as we were about to be hurled to our dampened destinies. “I mean… I thought church was fun, but this is great!”

Who needs Vegas?

This is living.

April 2016 | COVER

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Interview with Wes Anderson

by Terry Gross

Anderson’s films include The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom. He speaks with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about telling his first historical fiction story and how the film’s set came together.

On what it's like on his sets

The editing… and the construction of the sets and the design of the sets, even if it’s on location—this is all carefully planned. …We gather all of the ingredients and we have it very prepared so that when the day comes to shoot, everything is sort of quite set in that way.

But the actors—I feel like what happens is we all get together, they come on the set and then it’s just chaos, and they take over and it goes one way or another. We tend to do a lot of takes but very, very quickly, one right after another, and anything might happen on the next take.

That’s my feeling of what it’s like on the sets of the movies I do. I think there’s choreography, but I always feel like it’s coming from them. Maybe that’s an illusion.

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be if there was such a place. …This department store that we found, we made into our hotel—the big entrance hall of our hotel—and then we found everything else from the movie within a certain radius of that department store, and we discovered all sorts of things and people as we traveled around, figuring it all out. We made a pastiche of the greatest hits of Eastern Europe.

On the use of miniatures for sets

First, I love miniatures. It’s just an old movie technique, an old-fashioned approach. …There’s a certain charm to miniatures to me, I just like them. But also, when you’re doing a miniature it means you can make the thing exactly the way you want. You have essentially no limitation. We were quite inspired by these paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and their views. A whole spa town would be presented in a painting, a mural with the miniature in it. And we did it in the style of Caspar David Friedrich, so it became a miniature and a painting.

On shooting on location

On having characters side by side, looking straight at the camera

I felt like I [didn’t] want to work in a movie studio. I’ve done it before; I don’t like it. I like to be on location; I like to have input from the real world that is helping to shape what we’re doing…

For The Grand Budapest Hotel we found this department store in this town called Gorlitz, which is in Saxony.

Half of it is in Germany and the other half is in Poland. It’s on the border and it’s about 20 minutes from [the] Czech Republic, so in a way it’s really right where our story would

I have my own way of blocking things and framing things that’s built into me. I compare it to handwriting. I don’t fully understand it—why my handwriting is like this—but in a way there’s some sort of tonal thing with the kind of stories I do. They tend to have some fable element, and I think my visual predilections are somehow related to trying to make that tone and make my own writing work with performers.

COVER | April 2016

Whitewood under Siege

by Jacob Hodes

There are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the United States.Í They are in the holds of tractor-trailers, transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of: sweaters, copper wire, lab mice, and so on.

They are piled up behind supermarkets, out back, near the loading dock. They are at construction sites, on sidewalks, in the trash, in your neighbor’s basement. They are stacked in warehouses and coursing their way through the bowels of factories.

The magic of these pallets is the magic of abstraction. Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction.Ú

Jacket Required

by Alexandra Cardia

Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as referring to “a protective (and usually decorative) paper cover placed around a bound book, usually with the title and author’s name printed on it,” the phrase “dust cover” or “dust jacket” was first used in the late nineteenth century. The earliest dust jackets, dating to the 1830s, encased the entire book. Their primary function was as protective wrapping, which means that many nineteenth-century dust jackets were disposed of or lost after being removed from their books.

One of the earliest-known dust jackets was recently found at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Hidden in an assortment of book-trade ephemera purchased in the 1890s and never fully catalogued, the worn and faded piece

Some pallets also carry an aesthetic charge. It’s mostly about geometry: parallel lines and negative space, slats and air. There is also the appeal of the raw, unpainted wood, the cheapest stuff you can buy from a lumber mill—“bark and better,” it’s called. These facts have not escaped the notice of artists, architects, designers, or DIY enthusiasts.

In 2003, the conceptual artist Stuart Keeler presented stacks of pallets in a gallery show, calling them “the elegant serving-platters of industry”; more recently, Thomas Hirschhorn featured a giant pallet construction as part of his Gramsci Monument. Etsy currently features dozens of items made from pallets, from window planters and chaise lounges to more idiosyncratic artifacts, such as a decorative teal crucifix mounted on a pallet. If shipping containers had their cultural moment a decade ago, pallets are having theirs now. Í

Estimates of the number of pallets vary, and none are precise. This number comes from Philip A. Araman, a researcher at the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the coauthor of a forthcoming statistical study of the pallet industry.

In discussion with the author, 10 January 2014. Ú James L. Howard and Rebecca M. Westby, “U.S. Timber Production, Trade, Consumption and Price Statistics 1965–2011, Research Paper FPL-RP-676” (Madison, WI: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, 2013).

Available at treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/43952.

of paper imprinted with black ink had long been separated from the volume it encased, an 1830 gift book entitled Friendship’s Offering. Literary annuals were richly decorated volumes, bound in silk, leather, or glazed paper, and designed to be given away, particularly around the holidays.

Dust jackets, such as the one at the Bodleian, ensured that the gift reached its recipient in perfect condition. Such a dust jacket is more accurately described as a wrapper, “protecting the book from handling damage (which could include dust).”

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as publishers began to employ more durable bookbinding materials, the need for strictly protective wrappings diminished. The sober, utilitarian cover gave way to the dust jacket as advertising vehicle, culminating in the vivid graphics, stylized fonts, and “special effects” such as embossing and metallic inks that today scream from bookstore shelves everywhere.

April 2016 | COVER

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FO-

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Geoff Manaugh

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COVER | April 2016

In the 1990s, Los Angeles held the dubious title of “bank robbery capital of the world.” At its height, the city’s bank crime rate hit the incredible frequency of one bank robbed every forty-five minutes of every working day. As an FBI Special Agent formerly based in Los Angeles but now stationed in New York City joked at an event hosted

by Columbia University’s school of architecture, the agency even developed its own typology of banks in the region, most notably the “stop and rob”: a bank, located at the bottom of both an exit ramp and an on-ramp of one of Southern California’s many freeways, that could be robbed as quickly and as casually as you might pull offthe highway for gas.

In his memoir Where The Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World, retired Special Agent William J. Rehder briefly suggests that the design of a city itself leads to and even instigates certain crimes—in Los Angeles’s case, bank robberies. Rehder points out that this sprawling metropolis of freeways and its innumerable nondescript banks is, in a sense, a bank robber’s paradise. Crime, we could say, is just another way to use the city.

A piece on car chases in Los Angeles for the New Yorker implied that the high-speed chase is, in effect, a proper and even more authentic use of the city’s many freeways than the, by comparison, embarrassingly impotent daily commute— that fleeing, illegally and often at lethal speeds, from the pursuing police while being broadcast live on local television is,

well, it’s sort of what the city is for. After all, the piece states, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, you’re going to find at least a few people who want to really put those streets to use. Indeed, this seems to argue that a city gets the kinds of crime appropriate to its form—or, more actively, it gets the kinds of crime its fabric calls for.

Of course, there are many other factors that contribute to the high incidence of bank robbery in Los Angeles, not least of which is the fact that many banks, Rehder explains in his book, make the financial calculation of money stolen per year vs. annual salary of a full-time security guard—and they come out on the side of letting the money be stolen.

The money, in economic terms, is not worth protecting.

In literature, of course, the detective is a well-known trope for a method of obsessively close attention to the details of the built environment—the detective story as applied urban hermeneutics—and this can be seen everywhere from Paul Auster and Alain Robbe-Grilletto whatever thriller is currently topping the airport bestseller list. But in the world of architecture and urban planning, it is altogether too rare that this particular, if fictionalized, point of view on how humans take advantage of the built environment as a spatial opportunity for crimes of various types is taken seriously as a critical perspective on urban form.

burglary is an explicitly spatial crime, insofar as it requires the perpetrator

It is no less true that FBI special agents and other police officials tasked with solving burglaries also have their own version of this interpretive expertise—a body of spatial knowledge through which they hope to more thoroughly and accurately understand the city than do the criminals they are trying to track. They analyze a work of architecture, for instance, not for its aesthetics or history, but for its security flaws or ability to record evidence. This is spatial knowledge in at least one specific legal sense: burglary is an explicitly spatial crime, insofar as it requires the perpetrator to enter an architectural structure illegally, thus differentiating burglary from mere theft or robbery. Put another way, burglary requires architecture—with the effect that solving certain burglaries can often take on the feel of an architectural analysis.

In June 1986, employees at a First Interstate Bank in Hollywood, at the corner of Sunset and Spaulding in a building that now houses a talent agency, began to report strange mechanical sounds coming from the ground near the vault. However, neither police nor the bank’s security team could find any evidence of wrongdoing or attempted entry—and none of the vault’s own internal sensors had been tripped. Police had simply dismissed the sounds as “just a rat running around inside the walls or something,” and so nothing was done. Another week went by and the noises continued. The power occasionally went out, as did the phones. Then the bank’s internal

Muzak system abruptly kicked in late one evening, startling a manager. Bank employees started “joking about the ‘poltergeist’ that had taken up residence at the First Interstate,” as the security company still found no breach of the vault itself and, incredibly, a supernatural haunting of the bank’s electrical system appeared more likely than someone tunneling up from below.

The sounds were not, however, caused by ghosts but by a group of three or four men at least to some degree professionally trained, the FBI now believes, in tunneling: a closeknit and highly disciplined team, perhaps from the construction industry, perhaps even a disgruntled public works crew who decided to put their knowledge of the city’s underside to more lucrative work. After all, their route into the bank was as much brute-force excavation as it was a retracing of the region’s buried waterways, accessing the neighborhood by way of the city’s complicated storm-sewer network, itself built along old creek beds that no longer appear on city maps. As an LAPD lieutenant present on the day of the tunnel’s discovery explained to the Los Angeles Times

To Enter An Architectura 14

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The tunnel snaked down and around

back in 1987, the crew behind the burglary “would have had to require some knowledge of soil composition and technical engineering. …The way the shaft itself was constructed, it was obviously well-researched and extremely sophisticated.”

Photographs revealed how impressive the scale of the tunnel really was. With its tight corridors chipped through the sandy ground of subterranean LA—a geological reminder that this whole region was once part of the Pacific seabed— it looked more like the catacombs of Rome or Cappadocia than anything you might find in Southern California. The tunnel snaked down and around and finally ended at the featureless concrete pipe of the storm sewer. The burglars had actually driven Suzuki 4-wheelers through the tunnels beneath Los Angeles, using them to haul equipment in and then haul their booty out—more than $172,000 in cash and as much as $2.5 million worth of personal belongings ripped from safe-deposit boxes.

The story of the break-in is itself astonishing, but then something even more extraordinary happened. The burglars

and finally Ended at the featureless Concrete

Continued on page 62

l structure illegally.

pipe of the storm sewer.

not only succeeded; they utterly disappeared—until, that is, more than a year later, when they struck again. This time, it was at the intersection of La Cienega and Pico, where they were attempting to burglarize two banks simultaneously. But this time, things did not go so smoothly. The group actually did make it into one of the vaults—but without the preliminary false alarms and the reported poltergeists of the First Interstate in Hollywood, their tripping of the alarm was taken seriously and they were interrupted right before they could make off with their haul. They escaped—narrowly— and remain uncaught to this day.

The stakes of this second robbery were huge; It could have been the biggest bank burglary in the history of the world. In addition to the sheer hubris of tunneling simultaneously into two banks and even more than the possible monetary take—is the disoriented, almost psychedelic,

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Alice Twemlow

Ornament is clearly an integral part of the dominant visual language of the moment. The extent to which it has resonated with the public at large can be judged by the ubiquitous presence in the homes of shoppers of the Toord Boontje filigree light shade. In Copenhagen, an entire hotel was redesigned from the inside out, as part of a Volkswagen-sponsored initiative called Project Fox. The carpets, wallpaper and furniture now teem with the kaleidoscopic explosions and fantasy pattern-scapes created by a group of designers and illustrators selected by the trend-conscious Berlin-based design publishers Die Gestalten. In Barcelona, too, the Maxalot Gallery has commissioned designers such as Hideki Inaba, Joshua Davis, eBoy and Rinzen to create a collection of wallpaper designs that, as they put it, ‘celebrates the re-birth of wallpaper’.

Dense patterns multiply and foliage unfurls across computer screens, fuelled partly by improvements in Flash-based technologies. Mobile phone users can paper their tiny screens with a Geneviève Gauckler or a Laurent Fétis design commissioned by companies such as Yakuta Mobile Visuals.

In the past few years the pages we turn, the screens we summon, and the environments we visit are sprouting with decorative detail, geometric patterns, mandalas, fleurons, and the exploratory tendrils of lush flora. In a design climate that, for the larger part of a century, has been famously hostile to the generation, application or even mention of decoration, what has happened to allow for this decriminalization of ornament discernible in

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today’s design practice and thinking? And, beyond the palpable trendiness of these recent reinvestigations, what is its deeper significance?

Ornament has had a turbulent past. For a considerable part of the past two centuries, ornament has been the subject of debate in design, at least as it related to buildings and their interiors. In the mid-nineteenth century, discussion focused on the meaning of decoration, its classification and its most appropriate uses and sources. The roles of nature, history and sources from outside Europe were all hotly contested. The development of machine-made decorative detail further complicated the debate. As ornamentation became a more affordable and thus widely available feature of everyday household items such as textiles, wallpapers, books, cups and saucers, so the discourse that surrounded it began to take on a more moral, social and even political tone.

It became inextricably bound up in discussions of beauty and taste.

By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851—an event where the objects on display were, according to architectural historian Brent C. Brolin, ‘covered with clouds of putti, acres of acanthus, and cornucopiate harvests from the vegetable kingdom’—ornament was in disgrace with the taste-making cognoscenti. There followed attempts to tame and codify decoration. The most

of colours and hues.

Owens Believed that, ‘All ornamen

oncerning the use and placement

famous and enduring of these was the architect Owen Jones’s didactic Grammar of Ornament, published in 1856, which laid out 37 propositions relating to the appropriate uses of decoration and pattern and showcased in brilliant colour (made possible by the recent introduction of chromolithography) thousands of examples of ornament from around the world. Owens believed that, ‘All ornament should be based on geometrical construction,’ and gave very detailed instructions concerning the use and placement of colours and hues. He forbade the use of ‘flowers or other natural objects’ unless they were ‘conventional representations […] sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended images to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate.’ Such passionate commitment to the cause of using ornamentation correctly was not uncommon in this mid-nineteenth century period of design reform. John Ruskin’s writings about ornament were also shot through with similar concerns. And the moral tone of the critiques was further honed in the early twentieth century by the belief among avant-garde circles that products that disguised their modes of construction with ornament were dishonest and, therefore, fundamentally flawed. The moral resistance to ornamentation found its most vehement

t should be based on geometrical

construction,’ and

gave very detailed instructions c

Continued on page 72

RE Stock photography plays a role in all contemporary media, from print to cinema to television, from the analogue to the digital (including computer games). It appears in news and entertainment media, and in commercial, literary, and scholarly publishing. It’s also intertwined with art photography, because artists both produce and use stock imagery. In the categorizing spirit of the industry, let’s define stock as the commercially motivated creation, collection, organization, and/or dissemination of professional but anonymous or corporatized images. Stock increasingly includes photojournalistic, moving-image, art historical, and fully computer-generated work—and even audio clips. One need only start reading photo credits to discover stock’s pervasiveness.

No credit? That’s often stock too, at several removes from its origin.

As a product for sale, stock’s context is consumer desire, and the index of this interest is the agency classification system. How do people search for images—that is, how do they locate in the plethora of available goods the particular picture-commodity they wish to buy? A 2001 micro-study in Creative Review, a publication serving the advertising and graphic design industry, reflects the often clumsy process of

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h c a te g. n in e th yth d r n (a eve n t r a us e l tr o is t m e v o ha s) t u r o y the o matching a general idea to a particular representation. In the informal, month-long survey of stock agencies, top search categories included Baby, Business, Computer/s, Family, Flower/s, Internet, Water, Woman/en, and the more specialized science-photo category Human Body. The survey suggests that the search process tends to begin with simple nouns like these, and end with subtle abstractions.

For example, Getty customers who searched on their own most often queried People, Business, or Computer, while the most frequent searches mediated by a stock-agency rep were Escapism, Absence, Cut Out, Nobody, Strategy, Afterlife, Role Reversal, and Communication Problems.

Because of this unstable relationship between ideas and images, categorizing is the focus of much research and development in the world of stock, and “keyword” is now a verb. Keywording writes the new master narrative.

Master narratives of photography’s history, however, are only now recognizing stock photography. Long marginalized along with that of most commercial photography, the

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history of stock photography is as fragmented as its images.

Still, historians who have tackled the subject seem to agree on four elements central to stock’on s development: the professionalization of photography, advertising, and modeling—especially modeling by women—in the late nineteenth century; the popularity of photographic entertainments like the stereoscope; the rise of the picture press in the early twentieth century; and the sheer magnitude of stock itself— the quantities of photographs available for use and reuse.

In the twentieth century, stock emerged as a discrete commercial practice. Of agencies that have been studied, sales records from the H. Armstrong Roberts agency date to 1913, and it published a catalogue in 1920 that is believed to be the first of its kind. The Black Box studio in New York and Photographic Advertising Limited in London were

selling stock by the early 1930s, and the Bettmann Archive was founded in late 1935, less than a year before the debut of Life magazine. By mid-century, stock agencies were integral to journalism and advertising. Culver Pictures, prominent through the 1950s, was born of just such a confluence: working at a Philadelphia newspaper in the 1920s, D. Jay Culver repurposed unused publicity photographs, reselling them as photo essays to New York magazines. As television and other non-print media became prominent, successful stock agencies reinvented themselves to suit. Beginning in the late 1980s, intense consolidation resulted in mega-agencies, notably Getty Images, which now commands 70 million visual assets, having acquired major stock archives and similar repositories of audio, film, art, sports, news, and celebrity photography. Its holdings include Time-Life images as well as the major collection of British photojournalism, the Hulton Archive. Whatever the medium, the first century of stock is the history of speculative interrelationships between journalism, art, and commerce, in which a source can be a client, a client can be a source, and sources might be once or twice removed from their original context.

By the 1980s, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and other media-conscious artists of the “Pictures Generation” had almost a century of journalistic and commercial photography to mine for their investigations of the generic image. Their works questioned notions of originality, as well as the gender and ethnic stereotypes perpetuated by stock photography. And of course, advertising itself soon re-incorporated the postmodern lessons of media appropriation and recontextualization. Addressing the interconnectedness of art and commerce, in the early 1990s artist and designer Tibor Kalman edited Colors, an advertisement in the form of a magazine published by the Benetton clothing company.

Colors made extensive use of stock, with particular emphasis on recontextualization. Kalman claimed to use photography to show that “you have to learn (and then teach others) to mistrust everything. …To be responsible, those of us who Continued on page 87

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