We are certainly living in a different world. Why did it take a heads up from friends in Sweden to know about a gig at a venue I frequent? Poor advertising? Certainly.  But it’s also a story of how we share information these days. It’s not just friends around the corner, but those in different parts of the globe that often provide us with timely missives about things they know about. As my wife says, we are truly living in a transnational village.

The concert? Jacob Anderskov on piano with the Americans Chris Speed on sax and clarinet, Michael Formanek on bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. They played pieces from last year’s Agnostic Revelations, released on the ILK label. Squeezed in between a couple of other performers, they managed about 45 minutes of telepathy and interplay. Anderskov’s somewhat angular, and at times economic, style pointed to his Scandinavian jazz roots though the group clearly has forged their own identity. If you didn’t make the gig—and there weren’t many us there—get the album, and look for his name next time he comes around.

Kickstarter is a website that helps creative projects get off the ground with their online fundraising. Many of these you’ve never heard of—and probably won’t, even after they’ve successfully raised funds and launched.

One project that I think you will is from a company called LetterMpress—they are working on a virtual letterpress for the iPad. The interface mimics the actual process of this old way of setting and printing type, resulting in a great “print” when you’re done.  Even if you don’t have an iPad—I don’t—you should check out the video on Kickstarter—you might be inspired to contribute!

In recent exhibitions in the Boston area, we were able to view the work of the artists Sheila Hicks and Fred Sandback, both of whom use various types of thread, yarn, and string. Though they share similar materials, their work couldn’t be farther apart.

Hicks makes work that has a real physical presence, sometimes with relatively flat woven pieces that take advantage of insights gained from her travels around the globe, at other times with huge colorful tendrils that fall from the ceiling or with coils of fiber arranged in loops on the floor. Over a long career, she’s explored many ways to employ the same materials to articulate different understandings of form. Sometimes the color is paramount—not surprising since she studied with Josef Albers, though exposure to Alber’s wife Anni, a textile artist and printmaker, might have had a lot to do with Hicks’ original move into fiber. At other times, texture or patterns are more important. A lot of the work explores the tension between two dimensional work and sculpture.

The show, at the newly reopened Phillips Academy’s Addison Gallery of American Art, also included some of the commercial pieces which paid the bills and an engaging video of the artist commenting on her work as she arranges photos for the book that became the catalog for the show. As a whole, the exhibition revealed a keen explorer of her materials.

Sandback, on the other hand, describes space without really taking possession of it—in the show at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum his geometrical shapes made of acrylic yarn and acrylic cords ask viewers to reevaluate their relationship to the spaces around them without something massive in front of them. He is essentially drawing in space, using the line of the cord to react to architectural interiors and asking us to reorient ourselves. In one piece that stretches from the fifth floor to the second, we come to understand the building as a work itself instead of just a box of art. In fact, I briefly considered lines that were part of the ceiling as works by Sandback.Though he once spoke of using yarn like a No. 2 pencil, it is often the contrast of his pieces with their surroundings that make his “lines” act as edges of 3-dimensional spaces. One might think of these pieces as being simple—and in terms of materials they are—but the range of expression from a few simple colored lines in space in his hands is tremendous.

Unfortunately the Hicks show is no longer at the Addison, but it can be seen at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania beginning on March 24. The Sandback show closes on March 6.

A recent posting on the imprint: EXPANDING THE DESIGN CONVERSATION blog calls our attention to a new book on Iranian typography. As a designer practicing in the United States, it’s often easy to forget about opportunities provided by letterforms different than the ones we use every day. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to see some posters—I believe from Iran, as well—at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery. Some of these took advantage of the idea of type as object—certainly not unfamiliar to audiences here—but with the calligraphic feel of the Persian characters, the effect was often profoundly different.

The catalog is the result of a relationship between Iranian designers and the Basel School of Design, showing 50 years of logo design and posters from the Iran. That’s a lot of history, especially when you consider that the first examples come from a very different world—one in which the country was under the rule of the Shah and much more connected to interests in the West. Looks like this book is worth a good look. More information from the publisher is here. Copies can be ordered from Amazon here.

Crane’s Beach, Ipswich, Massachusetts. 2.13.11

Balloon dog bookends sold by imm-living.com.

The news that Jeff Koons has sued a gallery in San Francisco for copyright infringement—based on his claim that a pair of bookends is a copy of his”Balloon Dog”—I think throws a spotlight on the real “engine” that has driven a good deal of his work: money. (See the New York Times article In Twist, Jeff Koons Claims Rights to ‘Balloon Dogs’) In an earlier age where irony was king, he discovered that copies of popular culture icons and symbols had the appearance of a serious artistic approach and established a process for cranking out piece after piece. An artworld focused on flash enabled success, even though most of the work was yet  another iteration of the same joke.

Both Marcel Duchamp—with his readymades—and Andy Warhol—with his Brillo soap boxes—were making their audiences rethink the relationship between Life and Art, and the artist and his work. However, with Koons, a knowing smirk seems to be the desired response to many of his pieces.

(Photo by Criesca.)

In this light, one has to wonder whether “Puppy,”the giant sculpture made up of flowers in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao, was an accident. It feels like a winner on so many levels: scale, the changing nature of “permanence,” and sheer visual delight among them.

To claim ownership of the idea of a ballon dog though seems like the problem with patented genes—when something is so much in the public or natural domain, how can an individual or corporation claim property rights that bring with them a financial reward? It’s as absurd as corporations being able to exercise “free speech” in the form of unlimited campaign donations. (Oh, I forgot—they can.) I hope this bubble bursts.

I know this image—I think I saw it over 20 years ago as part of a series of prints my father made before he died. This photograph, however, was taken on December 15, 2010, by AP photographer Alkis Konstantinidis in Athens during a violent labor protest over recent austerity measures taken by the government of Greece.

If you look carefully at the movement of the hooded men throwing the molotov cocktails in the photograph, you can see a similar approach in works below by my father and in this image. Is that because of a reality captured by both, or the result of decisions made by the image “makers” about how to animate the rectangle that is their stage? Maybe a little of both.

My father’s series of paintings, drawings and prints were based on a dream of terrorists descending upon a football game at the University of Texas. At the time, the word “terrorist” was infrequently used. Even if we are not looking at “terrorists” in the AP photo—and who’s to say—we are certainly living in a very different world now. What’s interesting is that in both cases, your view of the “event”—and where you stand in relation to it—can swing 180 degrees depending upon what circumstances it is said to represent.

What I’d like to know is, how did my father generate images that were such an accurate portent of things to come?

More information on Robert L. Levers, Jr.