I’ve written two Williams Poems before. “Spraypaint” is my third. I have shown it here in stencil; Williams often used stencils in his work, most prominently in his poem “THE VOY AGE.” In my dreams, “Spraypaint” would be applied using Jürg Lehni’s Hektor in performance. (Hektor is a device I think Williams would’ve really liked.) I have also shown the poem here in two panels, which is another device I have adopted from Williams himself. The poem reads, “A saint I ain’t. I rap in sin. I rain in print. I pray in rap. I rant in pain. An ant I ain’t. I paint.”

Above: Barack Obama’s signature O designed by Sender LLC and Mode of Chicago, IL.

A new day dawns.

The best part? It was there the day Obama announced his candidacy and they never went back, never changed, never wavered. The symbol was fresh and original from the start, but it became an icon because Obama stuck by it and continues to stick by it. An admirable quality in both a leader and a logo. Stay true. The greatest strength comes from confidence, consistency, and vision.

For this second post in this series of highlighted passages (first post here), I’ve chosen “Escape Attempts,” Lucy Lippard’s introduction to her famous book on conceptual art, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Austrialia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. The hyperlinks sometimes illustrate examples from the text and sometimes annotate it with something drawn from my own interests, but hopefully either way they’re worth a click. —RG

On the tenets of Conceptual art
Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or “dematerialized.” […] Conceptual artists gloried in speeding past the cumbersome established process of museum-sponsored exhibitions and catalogues by means of mail art, rapidly edited and published books of art, and other small-is-better strategies. […] [W]e saw “ultra-conceptual art” emerging from two directions: art as idea and art as action. […] Communication (but not community) and distribution (but not accessiblity) were inherent in Conceptual art. Although forms pointed toward democratic outreach, the content did not. However rebellious the escape attempts, most of the work remained art-referential, and neither economic nor aesthetic ties to the art world were fully severed. […] Verbal strategies enabled Conceptual art to be political, but not populist. Communication between people was subordinate to communication about communication. […] For the most part communication was perceived as distribution, and it was in this area that populist desires were raised but unfulfilled. Distribution was often built into the piece. […] Decentralization and internationalism were major aspects of the prevailing distribution strategies. […] The easily portable, easily communicated forms of Conceptual art made it possible for artists working ourside the major art centers to participated in the early stages of new ideas. […] Perhaps most important, Conceptualists indicated that the most exciting “art” might still be buried in social energies not yet recognized as art.

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Above: The same post, before and after. Before, the post’s title was on-grid, but it did not align with either the left-hand margin or the descriptive header above. Now, metadata has been moved to the bottom of the post so the title can align properly. Yellow highlighting has been added to increase emphasis on the title and also to help direct readers that they are not on the homepage but on a sub-level post. The double header bars have been replaced with a single underline. Also, the three vertical links from version 1 have now been incorporated into a longer, chattier header that gives visitors full access to the content of the site.

I’d been admiring the work of designer Randy J. Hunt and his studio Citizen Scholar for quite awhile. I was really knocked out by the beauty and elegance of his work on the great designer goodies site Supermarket, and after that I was determined to find a way to work with him on something. During a break from my studio this summer that has since become permanent, I did a bit of travelling, cleaned house, and then turned my attention to some of those rainy-day jobs you always save for tomorrow. Highest on my list was taking a fresh look at Lined & Unlined, and I dropped Randy a note to see if he’d be interested in helping me out. A design writer himself, he has done a stellar job as our blogger at AIGA/NY for over a year, and I knew our conversation about reworking the site would inevitably take us into thoughtful critical territory as well. After a ton of hard work and a great deal of patience with his demanding client, Randy and I wrapped L&UL v2. A few weeks ago, we sat down to talk about what’s new. —RG

Randy J. Hunt: What interested me most when we first started working, other than the content of course, was the idea of “not changing much.”

Rob Giampietro: That’s a good place to start. I’m fond of this saying by Stewart Brand from his “How Buildings Learn” BBC series. He says, “the chief architect of buildings is time.” I think in a way L&UL was a house I’d lived in for 2 years, and it was just time to move some furniture around, paint a wall, add a new driveway, etc.

RJH: Absolutely. In all cases I try to realize a design in service of content approach, but sometimes that’s difficult. In this case, I don’t think it could have been any other way.

RG: Sometimes when you start a new design project, the temptation is to throw things away. But this can be akin to saving over a file, you lose the thread of your thinking. I think we weren’t looking to throw anything away or save over anything in this case, Renda had done an amazing job building the foundation. We only wanted to look at a site that had grown organically over a good period of time and try to make some specific adjustments that will help it receive more of that kind of content and, also, to endure.

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Above: Jacobs by Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs in collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs tote.

I was watching this documentary on Marc Jacobs the other day. During a section focusing on his work with contemporary artists and his growing personal collection of art, Jacobs lamented that he was not himself an artist. But his statment seemed odd to me: I had, at least in some sense, always thought of Jacobs as an artist. It was strange to hear him think otherwise. Later, the painter Elizabeth Peyton is interviewed: she considers Jacobs an artist as well, even though she acknowledges that he doesn’t consider himself one. Jacobs’s reasoning for this is that he has investors and bosses at LVMH for his work at Louis Vuitton, and for his work with Marc Jacobs and Marc by Marc Jacobs. The public, of course, has its demands as well. His argument is that he doesn’t enjoy the individual freedom for self-expression that artists enjoy. Even knowing Jacobs’s reasons, however, I still disagreed with him and agreed with Peyton. This got me thinking.

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