December 17, 2011
Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) is a Japanese artist. He lives and works in Tokyo, and first came to the fore of the art world during Japan’s Pop art movement in the 1990s.
The subject matter of his sculptures and paintings is deceptively simple: most works depict one seemingly innocuous subject (often pastel-hued children and animals drawn with confident, cartoonish lines) with little or no background. His artwork was featured in the album titled ‘Suspended Animation’ by experimental band Fantômas.
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December 17, 2011
Paul Laffoley (b. 1940) is a US artist and architect. As an architect working for Emery Roth & Sons, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center Tower II.
As a painter, his work is usually classified as visionary art or outsider art; most of his pieces are painted on large canvases and combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.
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December 15, 2011
Breakbot aka Thibaut Berland (b. 1981) is a French producer and DJ born.
After studying at the School of Graphic Supinfocom, he made short films (with Oury Atlan and Damien Ferrié called Overtime), advertisements and videos. He is also a CG artist with credits including ‘Arthur and the Invisibles.’
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December 15, 2011
Michael Jackson (1942 – 2007) was an English writer and journalist. He was the author of several influential books about beer and whiskey. He became famous in beer circles in 1977 when his book ‘The World Guide To Beer’ was published; it is still considered to be one of the most fundamental books on the subject.
The modern theory of beer style is largely based the book, in which Jackson categorized a variety of beers from around the world in local style groups suggested by local customs and names. His work had a special influence on the popularization of the brewing culture in North America, and he would later host a popular show entitled ‘The Beer Hunter,’ which was shown on Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel. During his 30 year career as a critic, he wrote columns for a large number of newspapers and magazines. Jackson considered beer as a component of culture and described beers in their cultural context. Although he traveled around the world and discovered different beer cultures, he was especially fond of the Belgian beers.
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December 11, 2011
Stieg Larsson (1954 – 2004) was a Swedish journalist and writer, best known for his ‘Millennium series’ of crime novels, which were published posthumously.
Larsson lived and worked much of his life in Stockholm, in the field of journalism and as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.
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December 8, 2011
John B. Watson (1878 – 1958) was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising. In 1920 Johns Hopkins University asked Watson to leave his faculty position because of publicity surrounding the affair he was having with his graduate student-assistant Rosalie Rayner.
In addition, he and Rayner conducted the controversial ‘Little Albert’ experiment. After his divorce was finalized, Watson and Rayner married in 1921. They remained together until her death in 1935. In his post academic career, Watson worked for many years for J. Walter Thompson, a leading American advertising agency. He is credited with popularizing the ‘coffee break’ during an ad campaign for Maxwell House coffee.
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December 7, 2011
Gerd Arntz (1900 – 1988) was a German Modernist artist – famous for his black and white woodcuts. A core member of the Cologne Progressives he was also a council communist. The Cologne Progressives participated in the revolutionary unions AAUD and its offshoot the AAUE in the 1920s, and in 1928 Arntz was contributing anti-parliamentary prints to its paper ‘Die Proletarische Revolution’ which called for workers to form and participate in worker’s councils. These political prints depicted the life of worker’s and the class struggle in abstracted figures in woodcuts.
In 1926 Otto Neurath sought his collaboration in designing pictograms for the ‘Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics’ (‘Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik’; later renamed ‘Isotype’). From the beginning of 1929 Arntz worked at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and economic museum) directed by Neurath in Vienna. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 pictograms. After the brief civil war in Austria in 1934 he emigrated to the Netherlands, joining Neurath and Reidemeister in The Hague, where they continued their collaboration at the International Foundation for Visual Education.
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November 30, 2011
Steven Heller (b. 1950) is an American author, and editor who specializes on topics related to graphic design. He is author and co-author of many works on the history of illustration, typography, and many subjects related to graphic design. He has published more than eighty titles.
For thirty-three years Heller was a senior art director of ‘U&lc’ magazine, a publication devoted to typography. As of 2007, he is co-chair with Lita Talarico of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has collaborated on books with graphic designer, Louise Fili, who is his wife, as well as with others including the Design Dialogue series.
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November 30, 2011
Hajime Sorayama (b.1947) is a Japanese illustrator, known for his precisely detailed, erotic airbrush portrayals of women and feminine robots. Sorayama’s work ‘Sexy Robot,’ published by Genko-sha in 1983, made his organic robotic forms famous around the world.
For the work, he used ideas from pin-up art, which in the book then appear as chrome-plated gynoids in suggestive poses. His next book, ‘Pin-up’ (1984), continues in the same line. A number of his other works similarly revolve around figures in suggestive poses, including highly realistic depictions in latex and leather. His pinups appeared frequently in the pages of ‘Penthouse’ magazine.
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November 30, 2011
Nobukazu Takemura (b. 1968) is a Japanese musician whose style has run from jazz to house to drum and bass to chamber music to electronic glitch within less than a decade. Born in Osaka he became interested in punk and New Wave music when young. At high school, after a record store job that exposed him to Jazz and Hip hop, he had regular gigs as a battle DJ. In 1990, Takemura founded Audio Sports with Yamatsuka Eye (of The Boredoms) and Aki Onda. Their first album, ‘Era of Glittering Gas,’ was released in 1992 (after which Onda subsequently took control of the project), the same year as Takemura’s first solo album, under the name DJ Takemura. He has also released material with Spiritual Vibes (since 1993) and as Child’s View (since 1994). He is currently paired with Childisc vocalist/composer Aki Tsuyuko under the touring name of Assembler.
He founded the Lollop and Childisc labels; his voluminous releases, remixes, and collaborations make a comprehensive discography difficult, and his music often defies any easy categorization. He emerged in the US after the release of ‘Scope’ on the Thrill Jockey label in 1999, an album that features delicate melodies blossoming from oceans of white noise and staccato electronics. His unique and complex approach to melody and instrumentation has generated a catalog of collaborations with critically acclaimed artists including Issey Miyake, Zu, Steve Reich, DJ Spooky, Yo La Tengo, and Tortoise. Takemura was responsible for the sound design of Sony’s robotic dog AIBO.
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November 30, 2011
Neville Brody (b. 1957) is an English graphic designer and typographer. He is an alumnus of the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art, and is known for his work on ‘The Face’ magazine (1981–1986) and ‘Arena’ magazine (1987–1990), as well as for designing record covers for artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode. He created the company Research Studios in 1994 and is a founding member of Fontworks. In 2011 he headed the Communication Art & Design department at the Royal College of Art.
As an undergraduate, his tutors often condemned his work as ‘Uncommercial,’ often putting a heavy emphasis on safe and tested economic strategies, as opposed to experimentation. By 1977 punk rock was beginning to have a major effect upon London life and Brody’s work and motivation, which was not well received by his tutors. At one point he was almost thrown out of the college for putting the Queen’s head sideways on a postage stamp design. He did, however, get the chance to design posters for student concerts at the college, most notably for Pere Ubu, supported by The Human League. His first-year thesis had been based around a comparison between Dadaism and pop art.
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November 29, 2011
Jean Dubuffet [doo-buh-fey] (1901 – 1985) was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called ‘low art’ and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making.
After a break of several years, he took up painting again in the 1930s, when he made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history. But again stopped, only turning to art for good in 1942 when he started to paint figures of nude women in a impersonal and primitive way, in strong and unbroken colors. Also he chose as subjects people in the commonplace of everyday life, such as people sitting in the underground, or just walking in the country.
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