Artistic Haight-Ashbury Street

     As I went through this week's reading, I was so glad to see that our familiar places, bay area especially San Francisco, features a lot of post modern artworks starting from the period of after war.
As the textbook mentioned that "the first wave of poster culture emerged from the late 1960's hippie subculture centered in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco" (448), nowadays we can still see a lot of psychedelic and colorful wall-arts, posters and buildings in that area. It's one of my favorite place to go anytime.
    Here is pictures of Haight-Ashbury street which I take, as you can see there still exists a traits of post modern art culture in the atmosphere. Especially, the second image is a typical example of psychedelic concept of wall-art, which visually makes me feel so high. Usually psychedelic art are inspired by such as drugs, music especially rock and reggae, that is to say hippie cultures, and are created with vivid colors thus those artworks are impressive to our eyes. You can see a lot of unique shops with unique yet psychedelic designs.

There is a museum called Haight-Ashbury museum of psychedelic art and history (http://www.haightashburymuseum.org/) and you can still see a lot of artworks of old and latest psychedelic posters. Also there is a NPO called "Haight Ashbury Street Fair" (http://www.haightashburystreetfair.org/), they are dedicated to celebrating the cultural history of Haight and Ashbury and artists sells their posters, artworks which are mostly related to music and hippie culture.

     It's such a pleasure that those art traits still exist and popular among people. I hope kind of people's attempt and eager to art continues to go on, and at the same time it helps them to create a new genre of arts. 

Company logos around the world

     For this week's reading, I really enjoyed Chapter 20 mentioning about how company logos or multilingual signs had been created which are still in use today. 

     Looking at several logos of companies, I noticed that there is always coherence between actual design and its meaning, and every single type faces, line strokes, structure, and colors are related to each other. And I found interesting pictures about color of the famous company logos around the world.

 The first picture classified logos into color scale, and you can see what is the most used color in the world. As you can see, there are many blueish logos around us. According to the picture of color chart below, blue means trust, dependable and strength. In color study, blue is recognized as a color to make people calm down, by contrast to red color. However red captures our eyes the most thus it's suitable for public advertisement in order to get people's attention, so that you can also find a lot of logo marks with red color around us. I found out that company with rainbow colors are famous for world wide such as Google, ebay, and Windows. Rainbow can be anything, in other word knowledgeble.
Also logos such as Bank of America, NBA, American Airlines, and Mobil use blue and red colors, which is the colors for the American flag. So colors of the logo can be their national color to imply its origins.

     I really agree with what Tom Geismar said that symbol must be memorable and have "some barb to it that will make it stick in your mind", and at the same time it must be "attractive, pleasant, and appropriate. " The logos and symbols we can see around us today have a great impact so that it remains the same for several decades up to now. 

Japanese students in the Bauhaus

     Chapter 16 has a lot of interesting information and I got really interested in the Bauhaus. Needless to say, the Bauhaus has a lot of influence on artworks, architecture, and particularly artists, which made a new step to the Modernism. I wonder if there is still the Bauhaus exists, what influence can be applied to the modern arts. It is such an unfortunate that it had closed due to the conflict between Nazi. 

     There were two Japanese students who went to the Bauhaus to study architecture and designs, Takehiko Mizutani (http://www.bauhausreedition.com/contemporary-bauhaus-design-furniture-complements/mizutani-takehiko/), the first Japanese student there, and Iwao Yamawaki (http://www.artnet.com/artists/iwao-yamawaki/) and his wife Michiko. Mizutani attended lectures of urban city planning, condominium and apartment design, and furniture design by Joseph Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and many other famous professors and artists. After he came back to Japan, he introduced what he had learned and seen about the Bauhaus and applied their educational strategy, policy and courses to Japanese fine arts education. Likewise, Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki also learned about architecture and photomontage in the Bauhaus and they applied the latest technology to Japanese architectural design. Among all those Japanese students, Iwao Yamawaki was the only person who actually constructed architectural building using the Modernism philosophy and technology cultivated in the Bauhaus. Mr. and Mrs. Yamawaki also created one artwork named "The end of the Dessau Bauhaus." This artwork includes the photomontage of Nazis army and the Bauhaus. 

     Before the beginning of the World War , there were less influence from abroad in Japan. But thanks to those people who went to study abroad and brought back the latest technology in Europe to Japan, now we can see many of Modern artworks. It can be also said to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who went to America and opened the art design school in Chicago. We can greatly appreciate those artists' effort today.

Surrealism and Photomontage

     Every decades and centuries, new art styles take place of old styles and thus the sense of art became flexible. There is nothing like "what does it have to be art." I learned this by the Dada movement through Surrealism, one of my favorite art movement, because they have done what I, probably the people in that era as well, have not expected which is really unique and caught my eyes.

     One of my favorite art technique is photomontage. Until I read Meggs' History of Graphic Design, I didn't know that Dada artists claimed to have invented the photomontage technique such as shown in the picture of the poster made by Hannah Höch (p266 13-29). Here I'd like to introduce one of my favorite photographers called Jerry Uelsmann (http://www.uelsmann.net/). He is an American photographer know for the forerunner of photomontage and sort of a surrealist for his unique and unconventional designs in 20th century. All of his artworks are made in his black room, mounting several films together without using any digital tools we have today. I really like how he made his photographs by using traditional techniques just like people in that era was used to do. 

     Not only the artworks made by using techniques of photomontage but also collage, those artworks tend to be unique and transcended the common sense of pattern and form, thus viewers have to think carefully what are the messages that those artists are trying to deliver. This makes those designs impressive and the impact received by designs stuck in our head.  Here is a quote from Jerry Uelsmann, saying "One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye." One thing I have noticed throughout reading these chapters is, like he said, artists tend to express more of their inside conflict, concerns, and opinions during the era of confusion by war.