quote of note

According to VW design chief Klaus Bischoff (pictured), the designers were given the brief to “design a new original” rather than updating the New Beetle, introduced in 1998.

“The new car retains the round headlights of the New Beetle as well as the angular aero chin of the new generation of Volkswagens. A bar along the rocker panel — a vestigial running board, if you will — visually emphasizes the car’s length.

It is the rear end that nags the eye. The symmetrical double arcs of the previous model’s fenders have given way to an elongated rear fender. The lines of the fender, roof and hatch meet haphazardly, like the intersection of three meandering country roads.

Then there is that squashed roof. It makes the car seem deflated — the pneumatic New Beetle with a slow leak. As you look at it you get the feeling that when the designers finished the car they gave it a final whump on top — like the pat you’d apply to fat Dagwood sandwich before you took it to the den to watch the second half of the game.”

-Phil Patton, reviewing the 2012 Volkswagen Beetle in The New York Times. Read his full assessment on the “all-new,” bud vase-free Bug here.

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“The audience was made to suffer. At one performance the only person allowed to sit was Duchamp. He said, ‘I am very old, and I cannot stand, please let me sit down.’ I thought, ‘Maybe it’s a trick. But then again, he was very old.’ I think Duchamp went to everybody’s performances. ‘Nekropolis I’ ended with us all becoming mice, dressed in burlap bags. We crawled out into the audience slowly; we couldn’t see. Then we were supposed to just drop somewhere and not move until they went home. According to the story I wound up on the feet of Duchamp. But I couldn’t see who it was. It’s a good story, but as time goes by you wonder, ‘Did this really happen?’”

-Artist Claes Oldenburg recalls for Carol Kino what actually happened at the Happenings, in an article published in today’s New York Times. A critic writing in 1962 described “Nekropolis I” as enjoyable for “the heavy slow clamor of these bulky creatures crawling and messing around in that bulky ‘environment’ of burlap, paper, paint, and other assembled junk.” Oldenburg was singled out for having “made wonderful nondescript jungle sounds and heaved his considerable weight from mound to mound like a natural denizen.”

Pictured: Lucas Samaras, left, and Oldenburg in a scene from “Nekropolis I,” from 1962. (Photo Claes Oldenburg; All rights reserved Robert R. McElroy/VAGA, NY)

“The most tragic moment of my life was the first show I ever designed for. I had been asked to make shoes for Ossie Clark‘s show in the early ’70s. I was so inexperienced that I didn’t put the steel in the heels of the shoes, which is required to support the shoe and the wearer. So the girls came out walking very strangely in these rubber, bendy high-heeled shoes I had made. I thought ‘Oh dear god! This is the end of me.’ But after the show, even David Hockney and Cecil Beaton said to me ‘It was so interesting that the girls were moving in such a different way.’”

-Manolo Blahnik, in an interview with Tina Gaudoin in The Wall Street Journal

Pictured: Blahnik’s first shoe, designed for Ossie Clark in 1970. (Courtesy Manolo Blahnik)

“The birds developed out of gag strips and short experiments I had started with. They began to develop personalities….But I didn’t really know how to draw comics. To a great extent, the story of this book is the story of me trying to figure out what I’m doing exactly. For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent a lot of time drawing pictures, and probably for that reason it was something I had become reasonably good at. Making comics, however, is about more than just being able to draw well. It involves rhythm and timing, directing the reader’s focus, making objects and faces recognizable from one panel to the next. Things as subtle as a character’s posture and the way a panel is framed convey information, whether intentionally or not. Part of the pleasure of drawing for me has always been to watch an image take shape in front of me, and to adapt and respond as it unfolds. There’s a way that drawing can be very improvisational. But in comics, if it isn’t consistent, you risk confusing your reader. If that happens more than once or twice, she will take her attention elsewhere.”

-Author and artist Anders Nilsen on his magnum opus, Big Questions, recently published by Drawn and Quarterly

“I hate collections when I am done with them. I love the show when…you know, if the show is at six o’clock, I like the show at ten to six, I’m like, ‘Wow. This is so amazing.’ After the show, everybody goes to a party, I go home. I wear pajamas, I call Pizza Hut, they do a delivery. Cheesy crust. And I sit home and I watch a movie by myself, and then at midnight they send me a video of the show. I look at it and my heart is beating, and I say, ‘Oh my God, it’s horrible.’ I went to Regine [a psychic] and I asked her, ‘What is wrong with me? How come I liked it one moment and I hated it the next?’ And she didn’t have an answer, but I did. I thought that, especially in my job, if you love too much what you do, you go nowhere. The fact that the moment I’m done with it I don’t like it anymore, it gives me the chance to go back to work and start all over again.”

-Alber Elbaz, creative director of Lanvin, in a conversation last fall at the embattled Centro Niemeyer in Avilés, Spain, with Cathy Horyn of The New York Times

“Glimpses of the USA (pictured) made [Charles and Ray Eames'] career soar, as well it should have. Charles’ greatest interest was in ideas. Glimpses of the USA was not to show off; I think he just loved doing what he did. When he did the do-nothing machine, for instance, that was just because he liked to play. This was a guy who never grew up—he was never ashamed of what he did.

I think Glimpses of the USA was their biggest impact. They were lovers—with one another, with the world, and with their work. And that came through, so that it wasn’t just information well told (which it was). It was a kind of a love affair with America that Charles had that made him a good propagandist, because he really believed that this was a good country for him and for the rest of us. I think the inspiration derived from the enthusiasm and the commitment, as well as from any mechanics of design. So while the chairs changed their careers as designers, Glimpses of the USA changed their public roles as filmmakers and communicators.”

-Filmmaker Bill Jersey, whose feature-length documentary, Eames: The Architect and the Painter, premieres Monday on PBS

“People who love type have been known to confess to each other in secret that in certain moods they are emotionally moved by Optima. Its echoes of renaissance carvings evoke nostalgia for a lost and unrecoverable past. Its streamlined curves evoke the forward-looking hopes of the machine age. Like other great works of art it prompts intense mixed feelings, a double sense of loss and gain: it simultaneously portrays something that has receded into the abyss of time and something that is still emerging.

Helvetica is the ideal typeface for corporate logos and any other function in which individual persons have little value of their own. Optima, in contrast, is a typeface that can be put into service to indicate the unique value of individuals. When Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, she chose Optima as the face in which the names of the dead would be etched into the polished stone wall. Every name—each signifying a particular, irreparable loss—is recorded in letters that had been designed by one person’s singular hand.”

-Edward Mendelson on Hermann Zapf‘s Optima, “a face that is technically—but not in spirit—a sans-serif, and which seems to me one of the triumphs of twentieth-century art,” in The New York Review of Books’ NYRBlog

“The work kind of reflects me as a person. It’s the way I live my life. It’s the way I’m happy and comfortable with—making work that’s produced very simply. I print it all in a local print shop near where I live, and it’s all very simply made. It kind of talks about, I suppose, my life philosophy and a different way of living that’s not about amassing huge amounts of consumer goods. It’s just this different way of doing things, being independent and positive in the way you live.

There are a few different strands in my work. I do work with more abstract imagery that’s more visually colorful, but the text stuff is the most direct. It’s about a very simple message, communicated in the simplest way. The phrases are things that I hear in conversation. ‘I like it. What is it?’ That’s something my wife says quite a lot. Things that are quite everyday, really, but when you make them into a poster and the typography’s very strong and bold, it seems to give them an importance.”

-Designer and illustrator Anthony Burrill, whose work is featured in the exhibition “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” in an interview with Paul Schmelzer

“The ‘designer,’ loosely defined, has secured a prominent place in the cultural dialogue…[and] ‘interior design’ as a pastime has never captured more general interest. A growing appreciation for the value of design has fueled the advancement of the professions, but it has also led to dilettantism in the field. Cable television shows and shelter magazines loudly proclaim that anyone can design, thus diminishing recognition for the designer’s unique skills and abilities. As a result, the widespread impression of the role of the designer is that of surface stylist and form giver. There is also an unrealistic perception of the mystique of a talented few ‘artists’ who shape new trends by combining unusual shapes and materials with a certain flair. While this interest in design serves to raise a general level of visual interest among the public, ‘design’ is this most rudimentary sense falls far short of what is needed for the meaningful improvement of the human condition. Regarding interior design as an instrument of the ‘cool,’ ‘trendy,’ or stylish ignores its most important contribution: the advancement of well-being.” -Shashi Caan, president of the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers, in Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment, published recently by Laurence King

“I want labor to be the point, because everything in our lives is miraculously made with no idea of how it’s done. As an active and critical consumer, and as someone who has attempted to make the flawless and failed, I wanted a transparency of construction here. If we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it.”

-Artist Tom Sachs, in an interview with Carlo McCormick in Paper. An exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Sachs is on view through December 17 at Sperone Westwater in New York. His mission to Mars blasts off in May 2012.