Phil Patton

Critic; Curator; Writer / United States /

Phil Patton’s Notable Books of 2013

The Afterlife of Emerson Tang, Overdrive, Hartmut Esslinger.

4 books
Bobbye Tigerman Editor

The encyclopedic Handbook of California Design, 1930-1965: Craftspeople, Designers, Manufacturers gives lasting form to the research and analysis that went into the Pacific Standard Time shows. The reference volume was published jointly by LACMA and MIT Press. It serves as a companion to the  2011 MIT Press/LACMA publication California Design, 1930-1965: "Living in a Modern Way," but also offers an invaluable backdrop for both New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California and Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990.

Included are more than 100 biographies of architects, designers, and craftsman and in a chart or infographic sketches out the social links among them, routed through universities and firms.

The publisher promises that “the book will become an indispensable reference for scholars, students, collectors, and all those interested in modern design.. .. it emerged from the realization that years of research could not be contained the in the show catalog." Entries include a biography and image as well as references. Edited by Bobbye Tigerman, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the book has a mid-century period design by Irma Boom. Individual biographies were written by Jennifer Munro Miller, Lacy Simkowitz, Staci Steinberger, and Bobbye Tigerman. There is also a map of influences and connections and collaborations among the architects and designers, along with an extensive bibliography.

Charles Churchward

Alexander Liberman lived multiple lives—some of them sequentially and some of them simultaneously. He was a vector, as immunologists call it, of modernism. Liberman (1912–99), was born in Kiev under the czars on the eve of the Russian Revolution and his bio tracks modernist history from Constructivism through exile in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s across the Atlantic to the flourishing of modernism in postwar America. Modernism came to America through New York, riding ocean liners and the waves of war and revolution. Liberman stands as sort of node of influences, Kevin Bacon style, of its major personalities.

The son of an economic advisor to the czars who even Lenin found so useful he continued to rely on him for many years, young Alexandre drew and painted and visited museums in Europe after the family left Russia. He ended up educated as a French aristocrat just in time for the arrival of World War II and he moved on to New York.

Liberman was hired at Condé Nast magazines. He rose quickly—aided as much by personal charm as by skill. By 1960 he headed all the Condé Nast magazines, and would continue to do so for more than 30 years. For those magazines he hired Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton and then little-known photographers like Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Deborah Turbeville. (He visited Matisse and Picasso in their studios and made photographs himself.) He was pals with Calder and Motherwell.

But Liberman brought ideas as well as contacts. The book title, It’s Modern, comes from a phrase of explanation he regularly directed at young art directors after altering their work. The torn edges and collaged layers of magazines he ran were some times mocked as “ransom note style.” Happily, actual magazine pages are reproduced in this book, whose format is unusual—a sort of scrapbook of photos, works of art, and sketches. These are interspersed with memoirs, all edited by Charles Churchward an editor, author, art director, and designer who worked with Liberman. (I wrote about Lieberman in the early 1980s. I met him in his office. He was proud how clean and empty his desk was. I did not know then but the book suggests those walks generated waves of terror among employees ahead of his visits.) He could tear up layouts and stories.)

Liberman’s story is a reminder that modernism moved through magazines and advertising as much or more as through galleries and museums. This book makes clear the perhaps surprising tie between the layouts of, say, Self magazine in the 1980s and the cutting-edge newsmagazines in Europe in the 1930s.

Liberman ran his magazine empire while simultaneously forging a career as painter and sculptor. He painted and drew constantly. If during his life his own art was underrated because of his success in the “conventional” (media) world, the examples included in the book, however, stand out well. There is a painting that is visibly aware of the Russian constructivists; it stands comparison to Ellsworth Kelly of the same period, circa 1950. The sculpture is smart and witty.

One of the modernist strains in Liberman’s story is the familiar one of the European falling in love with America and discovering new things there and revealing them to the native. Some European modernists fell in love with American skyscrapers and grain elevators. Lieberman and others found inspiration in what Duchamp called “bridges and plumbing”—mundane structures like T-square girders and piping. Liberman made sculpture of giant boilers and pipe sections. Painted red and welded in 3D collage, they became public sculpture, shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington to and at Storm King sculpture park in New York State. But he was never separated from his origins: the pipes also reminded him of cannons at the Kremlin, he said.

Another of Liberman's lives resembles a Nabokov novel. Hollywood dapper and suave, he recalls any number of film characters and played many roles. He has been described as a chameleon with women. Around 1936 he was briefly married to a German ski champion named Hilda Sturm and became for a time an outdoorsman. But for much of his life he was famously indulgent toward one wife. He ended up married to Tatiana du Plessix, a legendary Russian beauty famous as the muse of the doomed poet Mayakovsky and the mother of Francine du Plessix Gray. I met Tatiana briefly. What left the deepest impression was the famous pool built to indulge Tatiana—an open-air saltwater heated swimming pool in steaming in winter Connecticut. In the middle of those energy crisis years it seemed an indulgence worthy of the czars.

R. James Breiding

The world-weary Orson Welles intones this line in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s classic 1949 film based on Graham Greene’s novel: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” But R. James Breiding’s Swiss Made shows that Switzerland produced much more than that, and besides, the cuckoo clock is a pretty big deal.

Clocks speak of a culture of time and punctuality and of timepiece making, from wristwatch to Swatch, that says much about modern life as well as about Switzerland. Swiss Made, which is subtitled “The Untold Story Behind Switzerland’s Success,” is one of the rare titles to put design in the context of business case studies and cultural economics.

It is full of fascinating stories of familiar products seen from unfamiliar angles. Switzerland is a land not only of hardware but also of software, pharmaceuticals, and prosthetic inventions of all sorts. The stories show the unanticipated ways in which ideas develop. Innovation in elevator design, for instance, at Schindler, came from such unexpected areas as scheduling cars with the so called “hall call” algorithm.

The tale of how the Nespresso coffee system, at first feared by executives as a potential cannibalizing rival to Nescafé instant coffee, took years to grow up at the edges of Nestlé’s empire. Developed at Nestlé’s branch in Japan, and promoted through clubs and shops there, it ended up a very different product before becoming a global success. Breiding explains that “Nespresso took more than a decade to make a dent in the market and Nestlé’s Chairman refused to put a machine in the board room because he was skeptical of its success. Now it is the most profitable among Nestlé’s 4,000 products.”

The source of innovation, Breiding argues, is the Swiss economic model. It has produced high average income without a disproportionate concentration of wealth at the top. Nestlé and Novartis may be familiar Swiss firms, but the book is also full of surprising examples of Swiss companies built on design, such as Logitech, the pioneer of the computer mouse and accessory design, established in 1982. (And of all the Swiss innovations, the cuckoo clock is not one: Breiding says it was developed in Germany.)

Jeff Brouws Editor and Compiler
Wendy Burton Editor and Compiler
Hermann Zschiegner Editor and Compiler

When artist Ed Ruscha offered up books full of his dry documentary photo views of gas stations and parking lots in the early 1960s, he could not have dreamed that he was foreshadowing not just typical content but also a typical business model for art-book publishing in the next century.

Self-published in small numbers, Ruscha’s books bore such titles as Twentysix Gas Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, A Few Palm Trees, and Various Small Fires.

Ruscha’s books began as art, but their approach was soon preempted by others and became a means for analyzing and studying design. The subject matter of the photos in the books—such as gas stations and retail storefronts—was also emerging as subject matter for architectural study. Ruscha inspired both subject matter and approach. An example was Steven Izenour’s book White Tower, a study of the typology of the hamburger chain buildings. The Sunset strip views inspired Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s students of architecture and urbanism in the 1970s as an analytical tool.

Now, a new volume appears treating the books inspired by Ruscha’s books. That is, a book about books about books. The dizzying mirror in a mirror effect suggests the way Ruscha’s work has resounded in the visual culture. Ruscha’s gas stations inspired Jeff Brouws, one of the book’s editors, when he was setting out as a photographer.

The tone of cool detachment of Ruscha's volumes influenced many artists of the conceptualist era. As the authors explain, the Ruschas feature "mundane subjects photographed prosaically, with idiosyncratically deadpan titles." These "small books" were sought after, collected, and loved by Ruscha's fans and fellow artists. Over the past 30 years, close to 100 other small books that appropriated or paid homage to Ruscha’s have been created. Some are imitations, some come close to parody. The best build on the basic premises to introduce something new. For instance, Every coffee I drank in January 2010 by Hermann Zschiegner takes off from typologies of coffee-cup lid designs. It presents photos of the actual individual lids fitted to cups, day by day, many still bearing stains of the beverage. The result is a whimsical diary described as one of “a series of tributes” to New York City. Both the tops and bottoms of the lids have been photographed; on a few occasions the pages reflect that there was no cup consumed, on others more than one. “Zschiegner's coffees of January reside one to a page. Rectos feature the topside of a single lid, versos the corresponding bottom . . . As metonyms and indexes of the coffee that has been consumed, the uniqueness of each lid gives the respective drink a specificity that might otherwise be lacking from a straightforward inventory. The day’s consumption becomes a ritual act that produces a drawing . . .”

The Ruscha-inspired books tend to be limited-edition, even self-published volumes, reflecting a strategy of book making that appears to be growing more popular among photographers and designers. That business plan, like the limited-edition strategy of prints or other artworks, is a form of seriality that reflects the serial arrangement of objects photographed in such books. The result is an even more disorienting contemplation of “bookness.”

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