Monday

Monday Portrait: Death by Pixel

Sandrine Dulermo and Michael Labica shot the cover image and several interior shots, including this one for last weekend's FT How to Spend It.

It is a troubling publication, but more so when it unintentionally elevates itself into the realms of Art.

This image is greatly aided in its print version by the degraded reproduction, but its power deserves acknowledgement: Repulsive and compulsively beautiful at the same time, a great image.

We curate via Google images and asked it to show us images of similar power. Computer says Cranach.

‘Adam & Eve’, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1520

Thursday

Grayson Perry & Minion Yellow

How does the collective unconscious work?

Choices made by intuition which unexpectedly chime with other events, reassure that order of some kind, albeit mysterious, exists. Lesson of the day: trust your instincts!

Yellow is a tricky colour but when it's right, it's right. Grayson knows it, as the new scarf we designed together for Turner Contemporary shows, and so does Pantone as reported in The Guardian.

To be honest, we hadn't heard of Minion Yellow before today but we agree with with the sentiments of Leatrice Eiseman, the Executive Director of the Pantone Colour Institute: PANTONE Minion Yellow "is a colour that heightens awareness and creates clarity...the colour of hope, joy and optimism".

Perhaps minion and optimism are not words one would usually associate with one another but let's not quibble about the details, this is a blog.

This silk scarf has been created for Grayson Perry's exhibition Provincial Punk at Turner Contemporary which opens in Margate on May 23.

Minions

Sunday

Orbit No.1

We keep a list of artists and designers whose work holds a place in our studio's belief system. Sometimes they drift out of sight or mind for a while, but the list is made of those who reappear with reassuring regularity. Selected with 'pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey' precision, here is the first, Marcel Broodthaers.

At your supplier (Vinegar of Eagles) (Chez votre fournisseur [Le Vinaigre des Aigles]) 1968

in the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Comma and Exclamation Mark, 1970

The goose, the wing (L'oie, l'aile), 1970

Les Portes, 1969

Monday

Monday Portrait: amuseum

I have a complicated relationship with magazines, but my defence mechanism failed on sight of this one. amuseum can explain itself better than I can, but it irresistibly resists classification.

Praise for amuseum aside, the cover by Kristian Hammerstad provoked a 5 minute research project into monkeys & art.

The tumlbr page Monkeys in Art History has provided an excellent introduction to the subject.

Skeleton of a monkey sitting on the stump of a tree, c.1730-32,

From: W. Cheselden, Osteographia, or the anatomy of the Bones, 1733.

Lajos Kassák: Animal-collage, 1923

And before I put this subject away for the day, I googled "monkey as Hamlet" and of course there are pages of images.......

Ape with Skull, by Hugo Rheinhold, c. 1893 CE.

Y, The Last Man. Now I can stop.

Wednesday

Lunch Association

Every Wednesday, whoever is in the office, we all sit down for lunch together. Often we chat about our projects but today we started with Brodsky & Utkin and the relationship between revolution and fantasy, then we jumped into Étienne-Louis Boullée, then the Kabakovs..... we thought it would make a nice little trail of breadcrumbs leading to nowhere in particular......