From left, Walker Evans, “Saint Martin, West Indies” (1974) and a 2007 photo from John Divola’s Abandoned Paintings series.

“What interested me about Walker Evans is probably not what interests other people about Walker Evans. What interests me is that he had a way of looking at things that people made and built, and then appropriating the subjectivity of whoever constructed it. Late in his life he actually collected handpainted signs…he’s photographing buildings that small-scale contractors are making, where they have to make certain kinds of judgments, and he photographs other things as well but there are an awful lot of handpainted signs. That’s something in the work that I’m really interested in—this identifying and appropriating and contextualizing the aesthetic or the literal choices that people make. And in terms of my own work, I’m doing that, except that I’m one of the subjective actors, in a certain sense. I’m taking something that has an inherent set of attributes to it—somebody has either kicked a hole in the wall or chosen to build a kitchen that looks that way or put that kind of wallpaper up. And then my own activity, in relationship to it and in the photograph, simply contextualizes these kinds of actions and choices that are made prior to the capturing of the photograph.”

-John Divola last Friday at Paris Photo Los Angeles, in an on-stage conversation with Richard Misrach and curator Douglas Fogle.

Richard Misrach, “November 20, 2011, 3:36 PM” (2011). Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery.

“I grew up in L.A. and went to Berkeley from ’67 to ‘71. I started out as a math major and ended up in psychology, but that was also when Berkeley was just going insane. I didn’t take formal classes in photography at all. I started taking photographs of tear gassings on the Berkeley campus with my uncle’s camera….I was being exposed to Berkeley street riots and the politics of the time, which was very important to me, but I was also being exposed to the f/64 school of photography—Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange—and I was just falling in love with photography, so I found that that combination of social, political engagement along with my passion for the aesthetics of the medium of photography were coming together very fast and hard. For the last forty years I think my work has reflected those two polarities, and it’s been sort of interesting the way they have been pushed. They’ve never really reconciled—art and politics.”

-Richard Misrach today at Paris Photo Los Angeles, in an on-stage conversation with John Divola and curator Douglas Fogle. Misrach’s work is on view through June 16 at the Cantor Center at Stanford University. A exhibition of his new largescale photos opens next Saturday at Pace/McGill Gallery in New York.

“The Riedel stemless wine goblet is foul to look at and fouler to drink wine from. Calling it a ‘goblet’ is an insult to me as a good Catholic altar-boy who is used to gleaming silver grails at Mass. If you are so antsy about wine glasses having stems, you should get some old ones without stems–especially those with a square crystal base. The idea that you should worry endlessly about glasses of red wine being knocked over is typically one of those irritating middle-class anxieties best consigned to oblivion. If a glass of red wine is knocked over, then it’s knocked over. We will just have to clean it up. Blotches on tablecloths and carpets are the marks of stylish nonchalance and confidence.”

-Sir David Tang, responding to a reader question concerning Riedel wine tumblers, in his most recent “Agony Uncle” column for the Financial Times

“It all began at Graham Hill Elementary School in southeast Seattle, when my third-grade teacher, Ms. Horita, told my parents at a parent-teacher conference that I was good at two things: math and art. My father, a Japanese immigrant, owned and operated a tofu store for 27 years in the Chinatown International District. The day after the meeting, he proudly announced to one of his tofu customers: ‘John is good at math.’

At the time, it signaled something to me that he left out the art part; I just didn’t know what. In hindsight, it was my first experience of the prejudices that cling to accomplishments in the arts, and a catalyst for me to push for the power of interdisciplinary thinking.”

-Rhode Island School of Design president John Maeda, writing in his recent Seattle Times op-ed on the RISD-led “STEM to STEAM” initiative to add Art and Design to the national agenda of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education and research in America. Maeda and the initiative will be honored next Friday in NYC with a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award.

“It used to be that design was all about industry and it was very geographically anchored to the means of production. Then it became more dependent on the tertiary sector of design, on showrooms and fairs. In my opinion, the geography of design is now set by schools. You can’t talk about Italian design or British design—it’s old-fashioned. It really is about whether someone comes from [the Design Academy of] Eindhoven or the Royal College of Art in London. In this kind of scenario, meetings like the Salone are still very important because they are great business opportunities. The problem is that design has spread out in many directions and I think it’s important for the Salone to attract corollary events that are about interaction design and interface design.”

-Paola Antonelli, director of research and development and senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, in an interview with Ermanno Rivetti for The Art Newspaper

Watch Antonelli’s recent appearance on The Colbert Report:

“This is one of the strangest items I’ve ever seen entered into a typography competition….It’s a beautiful book with a blue cover. The title of the book has a blank space for you to fill in. The only typography inside the entire book is some standard text in small print on the copyright page. That’s it. Instead, every page has a grid in light non-photo blue lines. Every few pages the grid changes to another pattern. This goes on for a hundred or more pages. What is going on here?

This is a book about the hidden structure of typography. The blue lines are collected from available empty notebook pages from all over the world–fully 47 different ruling styles, from traditional grade-school line-spacing to music staves and mathematical grid styles. These represent the underpinning structure of all writing and typography, a structure too often ignored today by fashionable high-flying digital designers (who can do literally anything–and constantly do). This little book is a comfortable reminder of the bedrock rules underlying all typography. It’s waiting for you to add the text along the guidelines required. It’s a essentially a typographic ‘Book of Rules.’ (Duh!)”

-Art Chantry on Rimini Berlin‘s Notebook, designed by Till Beckmann, Jenny Hasselbach, and Franziska Morlok. The book, published by Revolver, was Chantry’s Judge’s Choice pick for the 57th annual Type Director’s Club competition. Check out this year’s TDC winners in communication design and typeface design.

“I fell into a job working for a book printer in Los Angeles. He taught me how to set type—metal type, by hand—and that was a learning experience for me, just being exposed to books and piles of paper, pinched together by binding. And somehow the simplicity of that affected me and work. And this printer was a letterpress printer, so I got into the beauty of the pressed letterforms and paper. Somehow that moved me along into doing books. And I didn’t necessarily have to repeat the letterpress idea, but books and pages and flipping of pages, just drove me crazy. I had to deal with it. I had this deep need to make some kind of book, and it didn’t matter what it was about. I just said to myself, ‘I have to make a book. Now is the time to make a book.’

So it sort of evolved, backwards and inside out. I had no logical thoughts behind it, and finally my mind went back to those times when I was either hitchhiking or riding across country, and US 66 and gasoline stations, and they were like belches in the landscape, and I just felt like I want to capture these things somehow, and maybe this is the excuse—to make a book. So it’s the idea of a book that came first and the second was this idea of gasoline stations.”

-Ed Ruscha, in a recent conversation with Paul Holdengraber at the New York Public Library. An exhibition (pictured) of Ruscha’s books, together with books and works of art by more than 100 contemporary artists that respond to his original project, is on view through April 27 at Gagosian Gallery in New York.

“My own theory about why Picasso agreed to do it [create a sculpture for Chicago's Richard J. Daley Plaza in 1965] after many stops and starts, and despite being a totally unreliable and temperamental character, as all interesting artists are, is–and it’s buried in the Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill correspondence–is that somebody told him that Miró was doing something even bigger in a related space in Chicago. And Picasso really was the Michael Jordan of modern art, not just In the sense of being incredibly accomplished but in the sense of being utterly driven by competitive fire and an unrealized sense of grievance at every turn, that somebody else would outdo him or do better than him. And I suspect that played a significant role in getting him to do it.”

-Writer Adam Gopnik on the Chicago Picasso (pictured), in a recent talk at the Art Institute of Chicago, where “Picasso and Chicago“–the first large-scale Picasso exhibition organized by the museum in almost 30 years–is on view through May 12.
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“Advanced fashion usually makes me feel like turning around. I see a neon jumpsuit or a button-down shirt with sentences written on it, and I start thinking about fracking, Fukushima, voting machines, the Bilbao Guggenheim. But, reassuringly, a lot of people seem to agree with me. The future is iffy. I guess that explains the boom is what is referred to as ‘retro,’ which is manifest lately in a return to tailored clothing, beards, gray flannel, tweeds, and waxed-cotton outerwear.

Years ago, I couldn’t find a three-piece suit, so I had one made. I couldn’t find a three-button seersucker suit, so I had one made. I guess I am a fashion leader, but in reverse. Sorry, but I just like reading silver fork novels by candlelight in my smoking jacket.”

-Renegade traditionalist Glenn O’Brien, in an essay that appears in the spring 2013 issue of Bergdorf Goodman Magazine

“Tall buildings are all about statistics. There are entire websites devoted to how to measure the height, which building has the highest square-footage of hospitality space versus residential space; there are many, many categories and there are lots of high-rise aficionados that keep track of those things. There’s a guy in my gym that knows more about the stats of tall buildings than I do. He’ll ask me questions when I’m on the treadmill like, ‘Is the Sears Tower 1,700 feet, or do they count the…?’ and then he’ll rattle back.”

-Architect Jeanne Gang, interviewed by Michael Bullock in the latest issue of PIN–UP