Because I am a tosser

When graphic designers mock up a page for a client, they drop in dummy text as a placeholder to show how the published version will look. The old stand-by placeholder text is the very dull Lorem Ipsum, a Latin passage from Cicero which has been used by designers and compositors since moveable type was invented in the 15th century. ("There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . .").

The other day via graphic designer Tina Roth Eisenberg (Swiss-Miss), I came across a site which offers designers considerably more choice than Lorem Ipsum. If you're partial to a bit of anguished Germanic surrealism, you can drop some 'Kafka' into your dummy publication ('One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin'): or if, like me, you're an unspeakable tosser, you can go straight for the full 'Werther' ('I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.')

I really, really like the idea of this Dummy Text Generator as a tool for designers (and if they had a 'Proust', a 'Carver' or a 'McCarthy' I'd be in heaven), although in a way the concept is more likely to appeal to the client -- who is presumably usually the one with the literary pretensions -- than the designer. ('Graphic designers never read the text they're working on,' said a friend once to me, and he should have known, as he was a very experienced one.) On the other hand, having Goethe or Kafka keeping the page warm for one's own immortal words could be somewhat off-putting for the nervous literary client: it sets the bar pretty high, and could well cause writer's block and a log-jam in the production process, something not encouraged by graphic designers.

My feeling is that both 'Kafka' and 'Werther' should probably be used with caution, being primarily suitable as dummy type either for rhino-hided winners of major literary prizes or the anonymous authors of the Innovations catalogue (I'm imagining the positioning of a paragraph beginning 'For a long time I used to go to bed early' beside a photograph of the device you can pee in while driving long distances); for anything in between, sticking to the tried-and-true Lorem Ipsum might well be safer.

Playing on

One of the most recognisable fonts designed in New Zealand in recent years is 'Parihaka', the typeface drawn by Neil Pardington (Kai Tahu), Aaron McKirdy and George Clarke for the exhibition and book Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance at City Gallery Wellington in 2001. The typeface was used for the title of the book, as well as for indvidual chapter headings.


Gifted by the designers to the trustees of Parihaka Pa for their use following the exhibition, the font is now used as a logotype for the annual Parihaka Peace Festival in Taranaki.

Via Outdoor Styles.

The font's ancestry is complex. It's based on the lettering hand-painted on the walls of some nineteenth-century Maori meeting houses, which in itself was influenced by printed letterforms remembered from the early missionaries' Bibles. (The painted word has thus been a part of New Zealand art history from very early days.) While Maori communities lived with their treasures daily, it was not until 1993, with the publication of Roger Neich's seminal Painted Histories, that these early works of art were brought to wide public attention. Re-imagined and hand-drawn in a Wellington design studio in 2000, and finally digitised, the ongoing history of what's now known as the Parihaka font describes the way in which design is fundamentally a circular and cyclic process, the passing of a baton back and forth between artists of different generations and places.

Fiona Pardington, Puhi Wahine/Rere Torohai/Ae: I–V, 2004,(Noble Woman/Rising from underneath/Yes, 2004) video installation, 5 LCD screens, dimensions variable. Via Auckland Art Gallery.

I think it's one of the most important examples of New Zealand graphic design produced in recent years: utterly distinctive, at once elegant and engagingly awkward, informal yet painstaking, it speaks of the shared history of Aotearoa New Zealand while resisting categorisation as an antique aesthetic. Neither historical nor modern but something else again, the Parihaka font is essentially a hybrid, a coming together of diverse cultures and technologies.

I've thought a lot about this font over the years, and hence perhaps I'm unnaturally attuned to sightings of it. I was, however, completely astounded to see a version of it appear on Rhys Darby's pop culture TV programme Rocked the Nation the other night, in a sign held up at a rugby game in about 1990, following Wayne 'Buck' Shelford's dropping from the All Blacks' captaincy.

Here's rather a blurry photo I took off the TV, which I think should henceforth enter the ranks of the Parihaka font's various ancestral iterations.

Always on my mind

Left: Elvis Presley, c.1971. Right: Colin McCahon,1961. Photographed by Bernie Hill. Courtesy of Gordon Brown © New Zealand Magazines. Via Te Papa.


The latest collaboration between Auckland's Objectspace and Jonty Valentine (curator, writer, graphic designer, and academic) is an exhibition and book entitled Printing Types: New Zealand Type Design Since 1870. It's an important event, representing the first attempt to trace the unwritten history of New Zealand's type designers (the people who draw the original letter forms to be made into fonts, rather than typographers, who arrange the type on the page), and includes not only the typefaces but interviews with and original writing from the type designers themselves. There's Joseph Churchward and his 'plumpy' Marianna font; Tom Elliott's Air New Zealand logotype from 1968; Bruce Rotherham's elegant 'Wedge', begun in 1947 and finally completed four decades later.

There's also an extremely interesting article by Luke Wood, discussing the evolution and subsequent dissemination of his 'McCahon' font, a process which he likens to Frankenstein's monster being unleashed on the world. It's a fascinating account, which describes the appropriation of handpainted lettering from informal advertising on farm gates by Colin McCahon, to Wood's digital rendering and publication of the font resulting in a series of unauthorised uses for advertising, to its recent adoption by a juice company to signify 'honesty' and 'down-to-earthness' in its product range, mimicking the original farm gates which inspired McCahon. 'And so,' writes Wood, 'as if through some sort of voodoo or dark magic, McCahon is returned to his point of departure.'

Printing Types is all great stuff, and makes an important contribution to the history of New Zealand's visual culture: but it would be worth acquiring for this quote alone, which, albeit written by a graphic designer (Wood), may be one of the great lines of New Zealand art history.

'And then of course there is Colin McCahon. Who, like Elvis, casts a sort of posthumous shadow over everything.'

Can't believe I didn't think of that one myself. In the spirit of McCahon-ish appropriation, I certainly intend to use it.

Department of creative self expression: This way

I trust I'm not alone in finding the juxtaposition of destinations on this sign at Canterbury Museum unfortunate.

Just asking for trouble, really.



*While the puerile double entendre made me smile, that's more than can be said for the clunky new signage design. Hopefully it's only a temporary measure during their refurbishment.

How to get away from girls

The big guy and I are fans of both artists' books and handprinted books. We don't have many of the former, though we'd like to; but we do have a few of the latter which are among our prize possessions. Almost all of the handmade books on our shelves have been printed by Brendan O'Brien on an old-fashioned letterpress, in various suburban garages in Wellington and at the Rita Angus Cottage, during the term of his residency there. I love the gentle but distinct embossing of letterpress typography; the slight unevenness of the kerning, inevitable even in the hands of a printer as expert as Brendan; the sheer sense of significance of the printed word, composed painstakingly letter by letter.

The small guy, who started school at the end of last year, has been making handmade books of his own lately, again composed painstakingly letter by wobbly letter. Here's his latest, written in the form of a self-help manual for his readers. It relates to difficulties he's been having with a girl at school, who chases him at morning tea and covers him with kisses when she catches him. (I've changed the names on the cover.) It has a fairly tough and uncompromising message.

Last night, after commenting favourably on the unusual right-handed and round-the-corner binding (which has made photography quite tricky), a friend staying with us, who happens to be a prominent Wellington-based graphic designer, described How to Get Away From Girls as 'one of the great New Zealand books'.

Cover art

Paul Anka, The Painter (1975). Cover art by Andy Warhol. Image from Music Artwork.

Most of the time I really like living in New Zealand. Though sometimes I worry that New Zealand's relationship to the world is a larger mirror-image of Te Awamutu's to New Zealand (a trading post for farmers occupied by salt-of-the-earth inhabitants in walk shorts; a few famous people were born there and left as soon as they could), actually I'm happy to stay put in this bolthole at the end of the world. While it can be a little dull, on the other hand the living is fairly easy and the place has much to recommend it. Although I am more an indoors sort of a person (as I heard myself describing myself the other day to a new friend I was having coffee with, who asked me hopefully if the big guy and I went tramping much [#lightlarf]), if you like that sort of thing there is plenty of extraordinarily beautiful scenery to look at here. The food's good. The water, in Christchurch at least, is great. The healthcare's OK. The climate's all right. The government's stable. The only problem, really, is the culture.

It's not the local culture that's problematic; every time I've returned after travelling internationally I've remembered, all over again, just how lucky I've been (and still am, now and again) to work with contemporary New Zealand artists. It probably goes without saying that the top echelon of New Zealand artists is working at the equivalent level of their peers anywhere in the world. Contemporary New Zealand art isn't a crap option globally, it's no one's second-best; nor, to use Tony Fomison's immortal phrase, does it require a haka-and-handstands act in support when it goes overseas [are you listening NZ at Venice organisers?]; artists of New Zealand descent hold their own anywhere, by merit of their own work.

But what is problematic, living in New Zealand, is access to international culture. While the changing economy of contemporary music has revalidated international tours for major recording artists, the huge costs in bringing international visual art to New Zealand means that we only really get to see international work which falls into one of the following categories:

• has low overheads (tends to be video or digital work; you can send the disk through the mail and get sponsorship for the digital gear involved to show it);


• involves relational aesthetics (a series of gestures or transactions carried out by other people at the artist's behest, which might not even require the artist to be present);


• is made on the spot by the artist as part of a short-term residency;


• is either (a) already so famous or (b) can be cranked up into such a media-friendly spectacle that bus-loads of general punters will troop along to see it and pay decent money to do so, thus mitigating the huge costs of insurance, freight, and the usually exorbitant loan fee charged by the initiating museum to show it.

As a result what we don't see in New Zealand are the small or offbeat shows of work by notable international contemporary artists who aren't household names (in NZ at least) -- Cy Twombly, say, or Brice Marden, or Julian Schnabel, or Richard Prince, or Larry Clark, or Louise Bourgeois. The kinds of shows that are important culturally, but in a market sense are neither income-generating blockbusters nor cheap enough to be able to be absorbed by general public art gallery budgets. Although there are a couple of Auckland-based gallerists with international stables (notably Gow Langsford, Andrew Jensen, and Jenny Todd at Two Rooms) who do a good job of showing significant works, it's really access to the modern or contemporary art history I'm after, in curated exhibitions that look at a particular facet of an artist's practice or which in themselves might illuminate the better-known work.

'Warhol Live', now on show at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco is exactly the sort of exhibition project I'm talking about, which I would love to see but which is equally the epitome of the kind of show that never comes to New Zealand: a fastidiously-curated exhibition looking at the role of music in Andy Warhol's work, including the fifty album covers the curators tracked down (Canadian teen-idol Paul Anka's The Painter, pictured above, is one of the better-known.)

Warhol's career as a commercial artist began with album covers, notes Fred Kaplan in the New York Times.

When Warhol came to New York in 1949, fresh out of art school, the long-playing record had just recently hit the marketplace. Warhol called the big labels, offering to illustrate their covers. He won an assignment right away, from Columbia Records, for an LP called “A Program of Mexican Music.” His drawings, of ancient drummers and dancers, were crude, but already they anticipated signature aspects of his later works.

He copied the figures from 16th-century Aztec sketches that he found in a Museum of Modern Art catalog, a forerunner of his tendency to make art from existing images, like the Marilyn Monroe photos and Campbell’s Soup cans. And he used a technique known as “blotted-line” drawing, a basic form of printmaking that foretold his fascination with silk-screens.

These early covers “have pizazz and elegance and a sneaky linearity, like Cocteau with a movement disorder,” said Wayne Koestenbaum, the author of a Warhol biography. “The blotted line gives a jumpy and nervous and emotionally unstable rhythm to the otherwise coherent line, like a dry drunk."

Gee, I'd like to see that. Well, I'm not travelling anywhere in the next little while: guess I'll just have to buy the book.


(Just as a quick sidebar: in thinking about this post I came across Music Artwork, a terrific blog devoted to the connections between art and album covers. New Order's homage to Fortunato Depero's Futurismo; Sonic Youth warming their hands on the flame of Gerhard Richter; The Stone Roses' 'improvement' on Jackson Pollock's No.8. Well worth a visit.)

Sick call

Not much going on today for me: have caught the small guy's foul bug and have been malingering around the house feeling sorry for myself and pretending to do some work while updating my Twitter stream.

However, I thought this was quite funny. In a too-much-time-on-hands kind of way that I don't seem to experience myself much anymore. (Via the excellent Hrag Vartanian.)

And Reuben Paterson's comments on Isaac Julien's New Zealand project were a bit of an eye-opener. Crikey.

And I'm delighted to hear that Deidre Brown's big book on Maori architecture to be published by Penguin is due out soon. Excellent, authoritative, thorough, controversial in parts, much needed, etc. She really is one of our important scholars.

Playdate at Ringo's

In the mid-1980s, I lived in a flat down by the river in central Christchurch. When I walked into town to catch the bus to university, I'd pass by Ringo's secondhand bookshop on Manchester Street. If I wasn't too late coming home, I'd pop in for a quick browse.

Ringo's long gone now -- he packed up shop sometime in the fifteen years I was away, and no one I'm in touch with now seems to know what became of him -- but in his time he was a legend. Friends told me he'd been in the book trade since the 1960s, when, presumably, he also got his name: if the fourth Beatle were tiny, ferrety-faced, wore a greasy cheese-cutter cap, and spent his days listening to the races on a transistor radio with an evil-smelling roll-your-own permanently stuck to his lower lip, they were dead ringers. Back then I was a Camel smoker, but the odour of Ringo's cigarettes was too much even for me. With undertones of damp and old chip fat, the musty fug of twenty years of cheap tobacco hit you in a dense greyish-brown miasma as soon as you opened the door. ("The smell of death," said a friend.) It took a decade or more for the books I bought there to lose the odour.

If you discounted the stench -- no easy task -- I loved popping in to Ringo's. You never knew what you might come across. The books were displayed on trestle tables, wedged together with their spines upwards; new items were stored in cardboard boxes on the floor, waiting for their turn on the table. The odd treasure floated up from a motley soup comprised of a dozen dog-eared copies of Papillon and Jaws, Hillman Imp repair manuals, countless light pink 1970s Mills and Boon hospital romances, and several unwanted volumes of Pam Ayres's poetry. At the time, probably as an antidote to my university studies, I was collecting paperback bodice-rippers. Over a few years I gradually accumulated everything Georgette Heyer ever wrote, as well as the lurid and increasingly improbable adventures of 18th-century French aristocrat Angelique, by Sergeanne Golon (a gallic husband and wife team), in thirteen fat volumes including Angelique: The Road to Versailles, Angelique and the Sultan, Angelique in Revolt, etc etc. (I needn't go on. You get the idea.)


One afternoon, rummaging through one of the boxes under the table, I found a couple of old issues of Playdate. As usual on the cover of Ringo's books, there was a sticker with a dual price written in magic marker: 50c/25c, which meant if you brought it back after you'd read it he'd give you 25c for it as long as you bought something else, in a kind of homegrown book pawning scheme. Initially attracted by the design of its advertising, I paid $1 for the two copies and took them home, whereupon I became completely enraptured by the content: Playdate was an entertainment and popular culture magazine aimed at 'teens to twenty-sixers', published in New Zealand between 1960 and 1972. It featured items on fashion, popular music, movies, and occasionally art. There were also horoscopes, advice columns, interviews with pop culture celebrities and the most fantastic adverts for bri-nylon negligees, pancake makeup and stretch slacks. Pure Mad Men. Maybe a touch of Austin Powers. It was New Zealand, after all.


Over the next fortnight or so, each time I called into Ringo's I picked up another few copies. Initially I found the Playdates in the boxes (maybe a job lot?), then they were up on the table with the 'current' books. On about the fourth occasion I was in, I noticed that the price had increased. They were now $2/$1. Plonking a pile down on the counter I mentioned the increase to Ringo.

"Well, the thing is," he said apologetically, fag bobbing up and down, taking a whistly indrawn breath like a mechanic just about to tell you the bad news about your car, "They've become very popular. Just flying out the door. I've had to put the price up."

But it's just me buying them, I said. If I wasn't buying them no one would be.

I paid up, with bad grace. It wasn't until a while afterwards that I realised Ringo's argument held up either way.

The other day I got the big pile of Playdates out again. They've been with me over twenty years, through seven house removals and four cities; they're such a fantastic record of popular culture in New Zealand that I've never wanted to get rid of them, and in the end I'll probably give them to a library collection as they should be in the public domain (I note that even the National Library doesn't have the whole run). Flicking through them, it was the big guy who first noticed a photo taken by Marti Friedlander (though the caption said Marty). Looking through the magazines again more carefully, I realised that the New Zealand art world of the 1960s features in them frequently in various overt and covert ways. There are painters, photographers, film-makers, art collectors and assorted art groupies... some surprising names.

To this end, I thought that I might post a few pages here over the next few weeks. (Please excuse, as ever, the shoddy re-photography.)

Here for your viewing pleasure is Dick Frizzell's serigraphed Warhol-esque illustration for a short story by Peter John Wheatley entitled 'Blue Capsule', from June 1969.


And Marti Friedlander's terrific photos of The Satirists, a university review from August 1965:



More to come. They still whiff, a bit.

Any bigger and I'd have to join the circus!

Linzie Hunter, Say Goodbye to Love Failures and Loneliness, 2008

Many's the time I've checked my spam folder for stray messages diverted from the real world and have paused, held captive for a moment by the sheer inventive banality of the junk email message titles. Want "restless sticking ability?" "Posh items for your style?" A PhD "by nomination"? [Yes please.] "Tension in your zip?" "A twice-larger King Kong?" It's all laid out there for you with a click of the mouse.

I've wondered, from time to time, whether any artist has used these everyday pieces of electronic junk to make work; or a poet, perhaps, with too much time on their hands and an interest in found language and Burroughsian cut-ups. (Haven't found a great deal of note, yet.)

British graphic designer Linzie Hunter has just published a postcard book, titled -- ahem -- This Secret Weapon will Give More Power to Your Little Soldier, a series of one-liners based on junk email message titles. (Via Art News Blog this morning.) It's interesting, I think, how the slightly aggressive and insidious aspects of the spam messages are almost entirely nullified by the decorative treatment of her illustrations: the mind-sappingly banal rendered jauntily cute.

On the other hand, if you were in NYC today and cumulative banality was your thing (and isn't it everyone's? not just me is it?) you could go and see 70 still-life polaroids by Andy Warhol, on for another 5 days at Paul Kasmin. (Via ArtObserved.) Dating from 1977-83, the images are of subjects from everyday life recorded by Warhol's Polaroid Big Shot camera, a device he referred to as his pencil and paper. The polaroids were intended as starting points for his paintings and screenprints.

Andy Warhol, Can of Tomatoes, 1977, polaroid photograph

This is just the sort of interesting small-scale show I always wish would come to New Zealand but of course never does. It's not fancy enough -- not sufficiently block-buster-y -- to be brought in by a NZ art museum. Not enough people would visit to warrant the expense of bringing it to the other side of the world (though one might think polaroids could fly fairly cheaply?). On the other hand, it's not the kind of right-up-to-the-minute contemporary project that would fit the brief of Artspace or the Physics Room. And I couldn't imagine anything in it for a New Zealand gallerist.

Good news, then, that Kasmin has what looks like the entire show online. (Love it when art organisations are good enough to do that!)

Paramount titles

Woke up to a truly great article in this morning's Guardian online (e.g. one constructed on just the sort of nonsensical track along which my own idle mind runs): newspaper blogger Scott Murray's ranking of six great TV title sequences.

I was completely with him on the quintessentially British existential angst of Reggie Perrin's naked pasty white bottom disappearing out to sea. Then I was bizarrely charmed to see the relentless twinkly creepiness of Picture Box again, which Murray accurately describes as "an utterly hypnotic film of a revolving jewellery box set to a pipe-organ waltz banged out by the hooves of Diablo himself".

And there's no question, of course, at least in our house, that the opening titles to Hawaii Five-O represent one of the greatest works of art of the late 20th century. (The title zooming up against the huge curling wave! The hula dancer! The molten lava flows! The jerky camera work, extraordinarily prescient precursor of a dozen nineties police procedurals! And that mad kamikaze helicopter shot which looks like it's going to end very badly indeed on the skyscraper's cornice, but which instead culminates in Jack Lord giving it, as Scott Murray says, the full Elvis from the balcony. Oh yes. Bring it back, please.)



But as for the chippy animated titles for The Good Life where the pastel flower petals slowly reveal the show's title, a sequence which Murray compares to the best productions of Saul Bass, the designer of the seminal graphics for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, as well as title sequences for Psycho, Casino and North by Northwest, among many, many others ... No, no, a thousand times no, however many happy pre-watershed evenings in the mid-70s Murray spent watching it. (As did I, armed with a large bowl of Bird's Angel Delight. This was England.) Sorry, but absolutely not. You might as well include the opening titles for the Two Ronnies.

Now, I have the greatest respect for anyone with the temerity to put out "best of" lists in the public arena. It's a practice that takes an ounce or two of courage -- or equally the possession of the hide of a rhinoceros. To broadcast one's personal opinion on cultural matters inevitably invites -- at least if the Arts and Letters to the Editor pages of The Press are anything to go by -- dissension, disagreement, and quite probably ad hominem attacks. Many times I've thought that an art curator who puts together a group show, or an editor who produces an anthology, might as well pin a sign to the seat of their pants saying "Kick me". Any reviewer worthy of the name, whether amateur or professional, whether writing in a public forum or chewing the private fat, will immediately come up with several sterling examples of notable omissions from the enterprise as well as several unpardonable inclusions. Ha! Woeful. Take that, etc. That's why curators, editors, bloggers and other assorted cultural list compilers should ideally be drawn from among the ranks of those who like a good argument. Rarely, however, is this the case. (Although blogging makes the possibility of a good stoush far more immediate than in years past.)

Having been on the sharp end of some pointed second guessing myself over the years, it is therefore somewhat sheepishly that I propose some addenda to Scott Murray's list of the great TV opening credits.

For example: how could he have possibly gone past The Prisoner? "I am not a number, I am a free man!" Rev engines. Enter mysterious man in top hat. Cue nerve gas through the keyhole. Etc etc.

For old times sake, I'd definitely pop The Professionals in there ... if only for the titles' undoubted role in the building of genuine excitement each week. "Anarchy. Acts of terror. Crimes against the public. To combat it, I've got special men. Experts from the army, the police, from every service. These are the professionals." Right you are, Cowley old son. Send 'em in.



And then there's the good 'ol boys. Just can't help myself with this one. Guitars, car chases, explosions, cut off shorts, Waylon Jennings; what more could you ask for? As if that weren't enough, the big guy's stories about he and his mate climbing in and out of the windows of his '67 Datsun Bluebird in emulation of the General Lee are the stuff of (rather dubious provincial) legend in our house. (It's just not the same these days with a Holden Vectra and a suit.)

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And of course there's The Avengers, and Doctor Who, and Blakes Seven. But the real contender, the one that might actually give Saul and Elaine Bass a run for their money, is David Milch's opening sequence for Deadwood (which as I may have mentioned before is clearly the best programme in any genre ever to appear on TV, ever). Guns, blood, mud, grit, gold. I must have watched it fifty times without tiring of it.

Jeez Scott Murray, The Good Life? What were you thinking?

The people's typeface

Some years ago, I hired a signwriter for a friend who was coming from out of town to make an art installation. My friend said that he wanted an old-school hand-done sign, painted directly on to the wall. When I rang the sign company and explained what I wanted, there was a slight pause.

"You know that we can do anything you want in vinyl?" said the voice at the other end. "Computer cut. You just send us a file of what you want, and we can just print it out. Put it straight up. It'll look perfect. It's how signs are done now."

It was the early 1990s. Designers had recently moved to Macs from paste-up work, jettisoning scalpels and erasers and tins of bull-gum. Typesetters were going out of business and bromide cameras were being relegated to the back room, relics of an old technology for which there was no further requirement. Like hand-painted signwriting, the physical craft of graphic design now seemed ridiculously old-fashioned. You no longer needed a steady hand, just computer skills and -- perhaps secondarily -- a good eye for the page.

I explained that actually I was after a hand-done look for this sign, wonky bits and all. "It's for an art show," I added.

Unsurprisingly, the man the company sent to do the work was getting on a bit. He was greying, and gruff, and balding, and his stomach overhung his trousers, and his nose was a deep crimson. He looked at my friend and I with a kind of sardonic amusement. But when he broke out the brushes, he was an artist. Steadying his arm with a mahl stick, he painted the few words my friend wanted on the wall, in freehand. I stood there and simply stared. I was astounded at the skill, and the speed, and precision, and was utterly charmed by the great beauty of the lettering. It was my own "hairdesser and tobacconist" moment, although rather than being the formative moment in a subsequent career as a painter, it inculcated in me simply a lasting passion for hand-painted lettering.


Colin McCahon, A question of faith 1970, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 208.0 x 261.5 cm, Private collection, USA. Image from National Gallery of Victoria

(McCahon, on the other hand, famously wrote in 1966 of his point of origin as an artist:

"Once when I was quite young… the hairdresser had his window painted with HAIRDRESSER and TOBACCONIST. Painted in gold and black on a stippled red round, the lettering large and bold, with shadows, and a feeling of being projected right through the glass and across the pavement. I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting. The grace of the lettering as it arched across the window in gleaming gold, suspended on its dull red field but leaping free from its own black shadow pointed to a new and magnificent world of painting. I watched from outside as the artist working inside slowly separated himself from me (and light from dark) to make his new creation. ")

The typeface my friend had chosen for his installation signage was called Dom Casual. He'd selected it, I think, purely on the basis of its visual qualities -- retro, friendly-looking, with its vertical strokes ending at different heights so it had a slightly painterly, hand-done effect even when reproduced in the font book. But when an acquaintance of his told him that Dom Casual was known as the "people's typeface", he liked it even more.

This was all before the internet, of course, back when it was a lot more difficult to find out more about interesting things that come your way. So that's where my knowledge of Dom Casual began and ended, until the other day when I came across a publication which used the typeface, and I remembered the moment in the gallery as my friend was putting his show together and the signwriter held us captivated as the lettering unfolded across the wall, and I felt that it would be a good time to know more.

Dom Casual was designed in America in the late 1940s by Peter Dombrezian, I've discovered, and it seems to be the only font he published. It was originally called Dom Twixt, and was hand-drawn for photo-typesetting. There were a whopping 213 characters in Dom Twixt, allowing the graphic designer to produce many possible versions for headlines and advertisements; but when in 1951 the American Type Foundry converted it to metal type and renamed it Dom Casual, there were only 52 characters converted, making it much less flexible in its applications. Pete Downer writes that Dom Casual:

"was a rare case in which a type design was adapted to an older technology instead of a new one. While thousands of metal typeface designs were copied to film for photo-typesetting, very few faces originally designed for filmsetting were subsequently cast in metal."

Dom Casual was used by Warner Brothers for its cartoon credits from 1960, and has also featured in the titles for Bewitched (and surprisingly, Neighbours). With its handbrushed, informal look, it remains the archetypal 'cartoon' font -- but as French notes, it's ironic that a typeface cast in metal should be so widely regarded as a textbook example of casual brush lettering.

From Hare to Heir, Warner Brothers, 1960: the first WB cartoon to feature Dom Casual in the production credits. From Dave Mackey's Warner Bros Cartoon Filmography and Title Card Gallery.


I think that what I like about this story is that by hand-painting it on the gallery wall, my friend's signwriter effectively converted the typeface back again to its own point of origin. I'm sure he knew what he was doing, though it's taken me 16 or so years to find out.

Remember the soup

I'm always interested in the moments when real life commandeers art for its own purposes -- particularly when the original art being quoted already involved an appropriation from the real world. Here's an ad for Campbell's Soup, dating from 1965 -- three years after Andy Warhol painted his first versions.

Lots going on here: the salon hang of the serving suggestions; the avant-garde white pegboard wall; the Lichtenstein-esque Benday dots on the can opener. But primarily, it's the copywriting that most appeals.

"Any contemporary collection of the creative masterpieces mother cooks up in the kitchen will no doubt include a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup ... Paint pork chops delicious with it ... However Mom does it, it's an art. Ask Pop."


Photographed particularly poorly by myself from Ruth Anna Hobday's Rose Tinted 60s: A Perfect View of the Past.

Vegas boneyard

The big guy and I were in Las Vegas a few years ago, indulging our mutual Ratpack obsession by looking for traces of the old Vegas among the tawdry spectacle of the new mega-resorts. In a town that regularly obliterates its own history, dynamiting obsolete hotels and reinventing itself over and over again on the same site, there wasn't much left: the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada" sign as you approach the strip; the run-down casinos like Binions Horseshoe and the Four Queens downtown, with their feather-bikinied showgirls spruiking for business out the front; the "Elvis slept here" sign outside the decrepit Normandie Motel; a tribute act impersonating the Ratpack.

The first few nights, we stayed at the El Cortez, right on the dark fringes of downtown by the grim concrete block motel compounds and pawn brokers and a 7/11 in which the tension in the air was so palpable you could have cut it with a machete. Our room looked like something out of the second half of Martin Scorsese's Casino, after Sharon Stone cuts her hair: an early 80s symphony of smoked glass and brass bathroom fittings and quilted bronze poly-satin. Downstairs old people dragging oxygen machines behind their motorised wheelchairs played the slots like demons.

Image from flickr

Near the hotel we came across a large and extraordinary object: instantly recognisable as the magic lamp from the old Aladdin, studded with bulbs. Dating from 1966 (a year before Elvis and Priscilla were married at the hotel in a small private ceremony), it had recently been restored and reinstalled on a downtown street. There were more signs from the old days of Vegas being restored, we read, including Vegas Vic and the Silver Slipper; we wondered if The Sands sign was among them; we wondered if it was possible to see them; but then we forgot about it, marking it down later as another reason to go back.

Hearing that Vegas's graveyard of dead signs -- now called the Neon Museum, available to view only by prior appointment -- is the best museum this journalist has ever visited made me rueful that we didn't try harder to get there.

Erin Langner writes:

"Cameras immediately came out of pockets as we flocked to the nearest signs in sight: the Aladdin's silver lamp, the atomic letters from the side of The Stardust, the red Golden Nugget sign used in Martin Scorsese's Casino. These are the fallen relics of popular iconography. In the Boneyard, they are made authentic by the rust, scars, and broken light bulbs—the messiness that's absent not only from mainstream visual culture but also from the flawless museum objects of the present. Their histories are explained through the visual details that remain on their surfaces and at our feet in the form of broken glass, rather than in extended wall text and museum jargon."

The Boneyard of dead signs is a wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, notes Langner, an open-air museum crammed with bizarre objects but mercifully lacking the explanatory devices of contemporary museology which tell you precisely what you're looking at and in the process, remove your sense of curiosity and wonder. "The overpowering curiosity that comes with entering a space abounding with unlabeled artifacts is a natural inspiration to look closely and to ask questions, two tasks that mainstream museums spend large amounts of time, money, and text trying to encourage in their 21st-century audiences."

The Neon Museum has so far restored ten historic signs and put them back into the public thoroughfare in downtown Vegas, thus turning them into public art works accessible to the community and tourists at no cost. The purpose is to build community, by injecting the artefacts of its own history back into a place with no time for it. Back in 1972, architect Robert Venturi (who coined the saying "Less is a bore" as an antidote to Mies van der Rohe's dictum) shocked the modernists by stating that architecture had a great deal to learn from the commercial landscape of Las Vegas: I think his comments may apply to museums, as well.

[I am a bit hopeless at this sort of thing, but to see the Boneyard from the air, type these co-ordinates into Google Maps and zoom in: 36.177312,-115.134498.]

Fancy an ear punch?

I see it most days. Usually I'm driving past, on my way back from the university or the library or the supermarket; and I'm hurrying, trying to get home to cook dinner or take the washing in before the rain comes; and maybe the small guy's chatting in the back, and the baby's grumbling, and The House at Pooh Corner's on the CD player yet again, and school kids are biking three abreast up the road, and my mobile's ringing -- in short I am distracted -- and I see it, and I'm momentarily astounded, and I think that one day I really must stop and have a proper look, but I never do.

It's a shop window, the middle one of an unremarkable block of three shops, deep in suburbia. The shop on the corner is a dairy, one of those dark, maze-like ones with an uneven floor and a blue fly-killer hanging up and only one of each product on the shelves at a time (this is a city where everyone drives; dairies do their best business elsewhere, where people walk to and from work); the shop on the other side is the headquarters of an upmarket personal trainer. There's an irony to this, of course.

I think what first attracted me to the shop window in between was the arch of its main lettering -- an old-fashioned commercial art device like that used in the 'Hairdresser and Tobacconist' lettering which famously inspired the young Colin McCahon to become an artist -- followed by its sheer volume of information which is nonetheless utterly unintelligible to a passer-by. The font is a wrong-un: crazed-looking, slightly volcanic, wonky, like a home-made tattoo which has bled into the skin. It looks like something from Tony de Lautour's blue period. Each time I pass it, it snags at the edge of my consciousness. Until I walked there in the weekend to photograph it, I had no idea what the business actually was. An accountant? A lawnmower repair shop? Ethnic foods?

Now I've photographed the window -- an exercise which has tamed something of its visual craziness -- I realise that it advertises the premises of a hairdresser and beauticians, albeit of an unusual variety which offers "Wolfcuts" along with "Eyebrowsperm" (very tempting to re-punctuate that one) and "Eyebrowstattoo". (Don't fancy an "Earpunch" much though.)

There's something wonderful about walking where you usually drive. I am slowly becoming a flaneur of suburbia, measuring small journeys round our neighbourhood by effort and distance rather than duration. I'm seeing things I've never noticed: strange graffiti, mysterious signs, a letterbox shaped like the head of a robot.


Yet there's a mystery to car journeys absent from the footpath. On the one hand, there is the microscopic detail of the street level view, with its possibilities of human interaction; on the other, there's the passing glance from the car window, at a scene intuited but not properly apprehended. As a walker, you are a participant; you can stop, and look around, and take it in. You're immersed in your surroundings. In a car, you are a spectator, afforded only a single frame of the passing world; you have to imagine the rest.

Having stood outside with my camera I now know what I'm looking at when I pass the three shops: I can see (disappointingly) that the central word is in fact "HAIR" rather than "HATE"; I can see that the font is constructed from angular multiples of a heart, upside down on the ascent and right side up on the descent; I can see that "Diploma" is written in "serious" lettering in the middle of the mad word pile.

But what I'm wondering is whether all this newly-acquired knowledge of the sign's content will make me stop seeing the crazed beauty of the design when I flash past in the car. The attraction of the visually mysterious, one frame at a time.

High-handed

I have a great partiality for photographic facsimiles of documents, something I've blogged about before. Whether it's Ronnie van Hout's school reports, Marie Shannon's love notes or the contents of Marilyn Monroe's filing cabinets, there's something entirely different about the experience of looking at a document up on the screen or the wall than reading the same thing on a page. You become aware of all a document's incidental visual properties when you view it as a picture; and somehow this additional information gives colour and context to what you read, steeping it in the style of its own history.

I also have a terrible sneaking weakness for disgraceful high-handedness, wherever it might manifest itself: a personal amusement which is probably due to an early obsession with Evelyn Waugh's novels of British aristocracy in decline. I can never quite bring myself to act like that, but I greatly appreciate a withering put-down when I hear one.

I was intrigued, then, to see the unusual collision of these two somewhat peculiar personal proclivities in this facsimile of a rejection letter from novelist Kingsley Amis to Granta magazine (a neat reversal of the usual order of things), which Granta have just posted on their site. Nice work.

Nothing special

Gee, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. The image above is from the Archives Study Center at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It shows just a fraction of the 610 cardboard file boxes which Andy Warhol filled each day with the detritus of his life: beginning in 1974, he started chucking it all into a box under his desk, sealing each one up with packing tape when it was full.

Along with lumps of mouldy pizza and a pair of Clark Gable's shoes, Warhol's file boxes -- which he ironically termed "Time Capsules" -- included photographs, newspapers and magazines, fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for art-work, books, exhibition catalogues, and telephone messages.

"What you should do," he said, "Is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey." And he did. The Warhol Museum have painstaking been cataloguing the contents of the boxes, in both words and pictures: you can see some of the surprisingly beautiful results here.


I'm always interested in artists' source material: every time I'm in someone's studio I can't help myself checking out what they're reading, what they're looking at, what they're listening to. But it's rare that this kind of material gets back into the public domain, which is a great pity: you find out a lot more not only about the artist's work, but about the transformative quality they bring to bear on the world, from looking at the source material the artist's used.

When the City Gallery in Wellington showed the big Keith Haring retrospective exhibition from the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1999, for instance, a case of ephemera was exhibited with the early work, full of doodles, clippings, photocopies and photos: it grounded the finished work you saw in a practice, which saw the world in a particular way and transformed it into a particular kind of image and idea. It made me like his work a whole lot more.


The enormous quantity of file boxes Warhol left behind should be -- like the Haring archive -- a biographer's dream, but somehow it's not: there's just so much stuff, filed without hierarchy -- taxi receipts dumped on top of sketches, polaroids on top of fan letters -- that instead it becomes a serial work rather than an informational archive, all about surface and excess and the sheer incommensurability of modern life. Which in a way, is exactly as it should be.

I'm looking at the surface of my own desk tonight, strewn with correspondence and bills and receipts and articles and books I should read but haven't yet and probably won't ever get round to; and I'm wondering if I shouldn't invest in a filing box or two and some packing tape myself; while at the same time I'm reminded of the advice an art museum director of my acquaintance gave me some years ago. He was talking about the great difficulty of simultaneously keeping up with both the movements of the art world and with the sheer volume of correspondence and reports required of him as a public servant.

"My technique," he said, "Is to put everything in a pile. Then I leave it for a month. If it's important, the person will ring me to see why I haven't answered their letter. If it's not important, then I can throw it away after a month and feel good that I haven't wasted my time answering it."

(Mind you, this was a world before email. But I think the principle may translate.)

Gangers test

The other day, back in what I now rather fondly think of as the Phoney Spring, I was riding my bike along the track by the railway line when my attention was caught by a small yellow sign on the other side of the hurricane fencing.

I have a great liking for the old-fashioned hand-painted signwriting that is fast disappearing from the urban landscape, something I share with Jonty Valentine from The National Grid (his "Possibles and Probables" article on the score cards at Carlaw Park is the best design thing I've read for ages). It's the battle between the camera and the brush all over again, although this time the machines are winning: the original hand-done commercial artwork is disappearing under a slew of photographic reproductive processes. Each time I see a faded advertising sign painted directly on to the side of a building (there is a great one advertising "Leed" in Christchurch's Woolston which must have been there 40 years) I expect it to be the very last one.

Again I say it: New Zealand needs a design museum. Soon. Before all this stuff completely vanishes.

The sign I'm talking about is nothing too fancy. It's centred on a yellow drop box nailed to the side of the cabinet which controls the barrier arm at the railway crossing. It's a yellow board, about 20 centimetres square, with black lettering: it looks like something that might appear in the corner of a cut-up work by Rosalie Gascoigne. It's painted by hand, but in a machine-age style. I can't identify the font; it's all caps, sans serif, the ubiquitous plain, no-nonsense, get-the-message-across typeface used by the railway workshops for decades. Or at least it used to be: I wouldn't imagine that NZ Rail's current incarnation still includes painters' workshops in-house. The lettering reads simply GANGERS TEST. No apostrophe necessary.

What I find interesting about the sign is that it's clearly informational -- its yellow and black livery announces that it has something useful to say about this place -- but that its message is completely baffling. It looks like public information, but actually, it isn't: it's written in a private language presumably known only to railway workers. The yellow drop box obviously has a quite specific and useful function, and the sign indicates to whoever needs to know that here is the place where the Gangers Test happens. Whatever that is.

I'd quite like to know what it means, and so I idly toyed for a while with ringing up OnTrack and pretending to be a proper journalist writing a story about the state of the tracks or something, and slipping in a surreptitious question about the purpose of the Gangers Test Box. But on reflection that seemed like quite an effort to go to, with a lot of lies to tell in order to get to the truth, and perhaps these things are better left as everyday mysteries anyway.


A bit further along the track are two rather more informal pieces of amateur graphic design: two large autographs by "Callum" and "Mark" written in bubblegum. These hand-done signs each measure just under a metre wide. They've been there for some years, permanent roadway signatures unmoved by bike tyres or passing feet, though someone recently has run a swathe of white paint through Mark's name. I particularly like the swirling flamboyance of "Callum", rendered in an upright cursive script like an elderly lady's shopping list.

I've never made lettering like this myself, but I would imagine it would take both an enormous amount of bubblegum and a concerted effort to chew one's way through enough product to make signs as big as these. Callum, it seems, had plenty to spare, finishing Mark's off as well as his own with a jaunty underline.

Sticky fingers

News that the Victoria and Albert Museum has just purchased the original artwork for the Rolling Stones' famous "tongue and lips" logo at auction for US$92, 500 (where it will join other items of design ephemera including Eduardo Paolozzi's extensive Krazy Kat archive) has prompted me to think about the history of New Zealand's popular culture, particularly our popular music and entertainment culture. Who's collecting it?

Te Papa undoubtedly leads the way on this one, with their collection of popular New Zealand cultural ephemera such as Split Enz's stage costumes, Fred Dagg's gumboots (which he gifted to them in 2002), and their selection of LPs and EPs by NZ bands from the 1980s and 1990s. They've also got a handful of original band posters from the era. Not that I've seen any of the latter exhibited (I may have missed it?); but it's very good that they're actively seeking to collect this material, which all-too-often falls through the cracks of New Zealand's cultural collecting institutions.


However, absent Te Papa it's New Zealand libraries, rather than our museums, that predominantly collect popular ephemera, as part of their research collections. The National Library has a great collection of posters, underground comics and ephemera from public protests, searchable online. They define ephemera in an interesting way, too, stating that items are typically:

• too insubstantial to be included in the Library’s book collections
• anonymously produced
• of commercial content
• related to popular culture and everyday life
• of interesting graphic design.

I presume that libraries have historically collected this material because they view it as being part of New Zealand's print culture, and thus related to their collections of books and manuscripts. But you could equally argue that it is an important component of both social and design history. New Zealand's major metropolitan museums have been comparatively sluggish in acquiring items of popular culture from the recent past. Which seems crazy to me; leave it too long, until it becomes "history", and the items become scattered and detatched from their provenance, as well as downright expensive.

Robin Neate, poster design (undated, c.1982?)

Suprisingly, to me at least, it's Christchurch Library rather than Canterbury Museum, for example, which holds an archive of posters produced for the Flying Nun bands that played at the Gladstone and the Star and Garter in the early 80s. This was a hugely important time in New Zealand's cultural history which has all but disappeared from view; it's great to see the library having taken the lead on collecting and caring for this material. They've put a small selection online. Like the original record sleeves, many of these posters were silk-screened and over-painted by hand; some were designed by notable artists including Lesley Maclean, Chris Knox, Ronnie van Hout, and Robin Neate.

Ronnie van Hout, poster design, 1981

Not for the first time, I've wondered which national cultural organisation might take it upon itself to collect items from New Zealand's graphic design history as significant items of design rather than of social history: it's my understanding that currently no institution does, which is a woeful state of affairs. More bricks and mortar I know ... but I really think New Zealand needs a national design museum.


Back to the Victoria and Albert's most recent acquisition: the designer of the Rolling Stones logo, John Pasche, was a student at the Royal College of Art when he was approached by Mick Jagger to work with the band in 1970. The brief was to design an identity for the Rolling Stones' new record label: Jagger showed him an image of the Hindu goddess Kali as a starting point.

Pasche's logo was first used on the cover and inner sleeve of the Sticky Fingers album pictured above, and has subsequently become a worldwide brand. He was paid 50 pounds for the job, followed by another 200 pounds a few years later by the band in recognition of the great success of the design.

The photographic cover itself was Andy Warhol's concept, although the 'popness' of the lips logo has caused a common misapprehension that Warhol designed it; the model in the tight trousers was Factory regular Joe Dallesandro, the star of Warhol's Flesh (1970), of whom NY Times movie critic Vincent Canby wrote: "His physique is so magnificently shaped that men as well as women become disconnected at the sight of him."

Well yes.

"Hovering above the others"

Bill Hammond's Jingle Jangle Morning is officially the best-designed book in New Zealand over the past year, winning the 'Best Cover' and 'Best Illustrated' categories, and finally the prize for the Best Book at the book design awards in Wellington yesterday evening. In a fit of the poetics, the convenor of judges Guy Somerset commented that Aaron Beehre's design “hovered above the other books like one of Hammond’s birds”. (And shat all over them, presumably.)

Unlike Bookman Beattie who predicts otherwise, my money's still on Aberhart to take out the Illustrated category at the Montana Book Awards tonight...

A horse goes into a bar

I've had a complaint from a regular reader that for a blog called Art, Life, TV, Etc., although we've had a lot of art and some sneaky bits of life now and again, there's been precious little TV content thus far. That's very true. Regrettably there's none today either.

But here are five etceteras that have been on my mind this week.

1. Quite a lot of thinking about Richard Prince's paintings has reminded me of the only joke I've ever been told by an art dealer.

"A horse goes into a bar. The bartender says, 'Why the long face?'"

(The old ones are definitely the goodies.)

Richard Prince, Nuts, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 112 x 203.5 inches


2. Who would have thought the august British Museum was such a treasure-trove of tat? Following my recent post about Rita Angus's socks, a reader has pointed me to the cultural glories currently available in the British Museum's gift shop: Rosetta Stone tea towel anyone? Tutankhamen's Aroma of Intrigue perfume for men (more must than musk...)? Sacred Egyptian Book of the Dead coffee mug? Nice.

(Thanks B.)


3. A dream about a tidal wave sweeping down K Road. Odd. Art-related in some indefinable way.


4. As well as knock-knock jokes, whoopee cushions are big in our house this winter. Beware anyone who idly sits down on the couch without first checking: an enormous raspberry is likely to issue forth from under the cushions, followed by indignant accusations and hysterical giggling from the small person. Again, doesn't matter how often you hear 'em, the old ones are the good ones, etc., something which is reflected in the classic whoopee cushion's graphic design, which doesn't appear to have changed since it was invented in 1930. (Something for New Zealand's graphic design journal, The National Grid, to look into perhaps?)


When the whoopee cushion's inventor tried to sell his prototype to a practical joke firm, its owner, Soren Sorensen Adams, who had made his fortune in the Sneezing Powder craze which swept America in the first years of the last century, and was the marketer of such gems as the Exploding Cigarette Box, Itching Powder, the Stink Bomb, and the Bar Bug in Ice Cube, passed over the opportunity as he deemed it too vulgar to sell. The mail order company Johnson Smith picked it up instead, and successfully sold it along with their other novelties -- x-ray specs, joy buzzers, and fake vomit -- on the back covers of comics. Which explains why the style of the cartoon on the whoopee cushion (source material for Dick Frizzell if ever I saw it) reminds me so strongly of the adverts for sea monkeys I used to see in comics and lust after in vain as a child ...

5. Thinking about scale of sculptural works after this invitation from the Hamish McKay Gallery popped up in my in-box.
Wouldn't it be great if someone gave Tony de Lautour a whole heap of money to make a really massive version of this work ...