I saw this book in Powells yesterday. The cover design resonated strongly, it triggered associations with contemporary and classic design by seeming 'wrong' and 'right' at the same time.It was such a strong statement I thought, 'is asymmetrical bleed the new meme?'
Soon after I saw another publication with asymmetrical bleed, and I noticed Anders Nilsen's new zine has asymmetrical bleed as well.
I first became aware of magazine memes in St. Marks Bookstore. When I started flipping through all these new magazines I had a feeling of being connected to a contemporary international culture, one that takes its aesthetic cues from blogs and fanzines. It was a culture I had previously only heard about online. To see it in print felt like a rare privilege.
This design imagery reminds me of seeing a google-translated japanese website that is loading awkwardly on my screen. Not only is it 'right now', but it is committing this fleeting feeling to print. And isn't this what magazines should do?
Is there anything on this chart I left out? Where does McSweeneys fit in? Will this chart be relevent next year? Is it relevent now? When I found out TATE ETC has been using these memes since 2004, I felt 'behind'. Should I pay more attention to the 'high hipster class' or the 'low class'? Which is more contemporary? What is right now? Is it still worth engaging with print culture or should everything be online?
"The blog is the modern drawing. Whatever I say there could be seen as part of my work. It gives the most information; it shows my complete surroundings." -Ai Weiwei
22 comments:
design doesn't work like memes - it is tailored to individual projects. the ai weiwei book is balanced by an assymetrical gradient. it confuses negative and positive space, like a ying yang.
yeah, but it also looks fucking awesomely stupid.
I would switch the content of your middle and low class with one another, but that's just me.
Hey look, asymmetrical bleed.
jason: do you really think that? to me the design seems super smart and 'cool' in a hot-cool spectrum, like it's calibrated precisely. i can see how the gradient could reference that 'awesome stupid' aesthetic of, say, paper rad, but i think in this context it frees itself of all those conotations (except for the conotation of 'contemporary' and maybe the 80's). to me it really seems 'classical' and 'contemporary', much like the way chinese art is perceived today.
sam: thinking about class ... i feel america is like, 90% middle class, where the high-low is distributed between old navy/gap/banana republic, or some similar sort of arbitrary consumer hierarchy. i'm really not sure what low class or high class means, assuming those terms hold some sort of aesthetic meaning. in many ways i think they are very similar, aesthetically, but again, i'm talking about classes i've never really witnessed. both are 'the other' to me, in ways that i romanticize and pine for.
check deez memes.lowest class of all:
http://www.uni-mainz.de/FB/Medizin/Anatomie/workshop/EM/EMAktinE.html
Bob;s gunktech meme
http://www.boboson9th.com/index2.html
don't forget "baby meme"http://www.flickr.com/photos/meemz28/1764777268/
I don't really think it looks classic or anything. It seems to be referencing 80's technical manuals or something. Maybe it's because gradients were popular when I was a teenager, but it's hard for it to look cool to me in a way other than co-opting something from the past that would've only seemed dorky five years ago.
y'know - that razor's edge of transcendence between lame and cool.
matthew: ♥those meemz
middle one's got stretched font - nice.
jason: i hear what you're saying. i guess the 80's is the strongest reference for me, for the gradient, but the earliest implementation off the top of my head would be in ukiyo-e prints. some of those are straight up (almost paper raddy) gradients. i remember this because they were always 'difficult' for me, whereas i prefered the european 'inspired' versions better.
thinking mainly of hiroshige: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Hiroshige_Van_Gogh_1.JPG
that guy uses the 'weirdest' color schemes i could imagine.
except ukiyo-e does seem classic, not dumb at all, elegant. The weiwei book may be referencing that, but, to me, it looks blunt and lame (possibly in a good way, though).
Funny enough, I got a weird, religious book in the mail today that seems to have a similar aesthetic. It's this cheesy minimalism that doesn't use gradients, but has a similar color scheme and ad-hoc computer fonts. But I actually like it in a strange way. See what I mean?
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2707/4080613247_ea172fe995_m.jpg
I like how the chick or emaciated dude is giving the finger to the white part of the gradient like, "I am firmly in the red, fucker!"
Very 2nd wave fem I think.
Very having a period too I suppose.
as an aside, what's your definition of 'beauty'? is beauty immune to deconstruction or whatever? i mean, i feel like everything can be broken down into cultural units, but maybe 'beauty' is 'unbreakable'?
jason, weren't you thinking about this when we first met?
just thought of that because i realized i'm much more comfortable talking about memes than i am about 'passion' or whatever. i feel like a trust the word 'beauty' as much as i trust the word 'god', it seems like a self-validating, all-consuming concept. but i guess you could say the same thing about nihilism (as someone recently did)
Beauty is just whatever hits me as beautiful. It's probably not related to truth (other than as symmetry or harmony or something, but that's got less to do with truth and more to do with the proportions of the human body and binocular vision, etc, I think). It's not necessarily related to the visual aspect of an image. It could be ideational. Most likely, I see something as "classic" because of the culture I grew up in. And while the object I consider sublime might be arbitrary and subject to fashion or caprice, the emotion that it causes to arise within me is the most important thing in the world to me. And I experience the feeling most intensely when I'm not concerned about the rightness of it or of my ability to control what causes it. Surrendering to that feeling, even when what causes it is ridiculous or undeserving, is about transcendence for me. I don't trust the object of passion, but I feel that allowing yourself to experience that emotion can be super healthy.
so.
how was the ai wei wei book anyways
did he eat any babies in it
hehe
it seemed ok. like, he's into dropping ancient vases on the floor or painting them over with cocacola logos. he seems really romantic which is kinda funny. like for some 'art piece' he brought over a thousand chinese people to wherever the art event was being held. like something out of an ancient story or something. i don't think he's a better artist than the comics people we know - i just liked that this international (mid career?) artist was into blogging. that seemed funny\cool.
How bout a new "meme" that whoever says or writes the word "meme" ever again after this is a huge fucking gay asshole?
i support this meme
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