April 23, 2010
 Have you ever had one of those days? Sure you have. As my semester finishes soon at USI, I realise once again how much I despise grading. The solution of course, which my students remind me quite often, is to just simply either give them all 'A's or stop giving them assignments. I must admit, it is sometimes a temptation this time of the year. I started off the semester doing quite well, after my new year resolution of keeping on top of grading. However, as best as my intentions were, I have found the stack mounting. It hasn't been as bad as some semesters but to add to the stress to get the grades posted and feedback to the students I have had the extra burden of being a student myself. The problem is I am seldom happy just slapping a grade on their work. Having taught for a number of years I know what is 'A' work and what is 'B' work, etc. However, I realise the students don't always understand this. Consequently I find myself mulling over their work longer than I should and writing essays sometimes on why they received a certain grade. I keep trying to trim off time and make this easier without losing the feedback I believe they deserve. So…if you see me pulling at my thinning hair and I look too miserable I give you permission to just shoot me and put me out of my misery!
PS—If you are a student reading this, please realise this is only a joke. Please don't shoot me for any reason. It will not help your grade.
Posted by Erich Shelton. Posted In :
Commentary
March 28, 2010
 Finally spring is here. The daffodils have come up, my pussy-willow is in full bloom, as is the tulip tree and a multitude of other bulbs in my garden. I am also noticing more birds coming out of hibernation or returning after a long trip away down south. It is such a nice time of the year. Windows can be opened and the breeze fills my office as I sit here. Soon, however, it will be too warm to enjoy the outdoors indoors so I take full advantage of it as much as possible now. I hope you are all having an opportunity to enjoy the spring and the abundance of beauty it brings with it.
Posted by Erich Shelton. Posted In :
Commentary
March 24, 2010
Some of you have wondered what type of thing I am doing with the classes this semester. Here are a couple of posters I have created for an Exhibition of Stefan Sagmeister's work (fictitious). If you are unfamiliar with his work, you might want to Google him. He is strange sort of bird in many ways. You can't imagine how embarrassing either of these were to get. I was in a local antique store a few weeks back and found a treasure box full of old lead type sorts, used for letterpress printing. I knew I had to have them since one of the subjects I teach is typography. Little did I know they would end up on a poster with my backside showing. Yes…I must confess I didn't realise it, but I have a pimply backside! I really didn't want to be the model but I couldn't find any willing persons to drop their trousers and smile. It was fun asking a few innocent bystanders on the street, but I was afraid it might be misunderstood so I had to give up on the idea. This area is so conservative. All I wanted was a little bit of butt! I promised the photographer that their name would appear nowhere, so I cannot reveal who helped me with this. I sketched out the ideas and arranged the letters as I wanted them and then found a willing person to help me execute my concept. I proudly dropped my drawers and with a smile laid down on the bed, like any respectable model would do. After a number of shoots and Peanut (my boxer) who desperately wanted to be in the image, I took my camera, reluctantly covered myself and took them to the computer to look. Lighting was an issue and so off with the pants again. This time I laid on the floor and was careful to draw the curtains in my office as I didn't need any more excuses for the neighbours to talk. With lights properly set we proceeded with the second round. After retrieving the lost letters sliding into my crack I must confess I was beginning to enjoy this (maybe a little too much). Back to the computer I loaded the images and now the lights revealed something I had not known. I had a pimply butt. OH MY GOD. I never look there. I wonder if pimple cream for faces works on your bare arse? I'll definitely have to check it out.  The toilet photo was particularly exciting. Sagmeister often uses
experimental typography in his work, so I knew it would have to be
something that pushed me outside of my comfort zone or experience. I
used three rolls of toilet roll to create his name. I then went off in
my little green car to find the grungiest, dirtiest, most disgusting
toilet in town and use them as my background. However, this proved a
little difficult. The ones that I find were quite small and would not
provide the ability to get everything into the photo that was needed.
There were a couple that I found that were not bad, but because these
are public toilets I didn't feel it was proper to just go in and start
shooting without permission -—besides, this might end up in an arrest! I
was denied permission in a few places and I'm sure they thought I was
from the health board or something. Working up the courage just to ask
was quite a task. And while I consider myself quite an extrovert, it
felt a little lot
strange asking if I could bring my toilet roll in and shoot their
public/private space.
After several denials I found two places. One was in a shower room at a
local truck stop, which had toilets in them and a place where truck
drivers clean up. The problem with this, believe it or not is that it
was too clean and sterile—apart from a couple of creepy truck drivers.
The second one (shown) was the last place I found and I had given up
with asking permission and decided to risk an arrest for loitering in
the men's toilets.
It too was at a truck stop but also quite clean (I dirtied it up in Photoshop). I
found a handicapped stall and quickly entered, trying to be as
inconspicuous as possible. "Perfect, this one might work," I thought to
myself. After about a half hour there and a number of different photos
and arrangements I felt pretty pleased. With rolls of toilet roll in one
hand and the camera bag in the other I exited the stall to find a
gentleman standing by the sink with a priceless stare in my direction.
It suddenly dawned on me that he must have been there a while because I
hadn't heard anyone enter the toilet. I then, trying to avoid eye
contact, thought of the clicking sound of the camera, the flashes and
the other noises that would undoubtedly have been heard. I have a
tendency whenever I am deeply involved in something to talk to myself or
make strange noises (so I've been told). I'm sure there were a few
'mmmms' and 'oh yes, that's perfect' comments which escaped from my
lips.
Walking ever quicker to the door, I felt obliged to say something or
explain the odd behaviour and the only thing I could say then was, "It's
an art thing." Still avoiding eye contact until I was outside the door,
I turned and looked in his direction. He stood there as still as a
mannequin with his mouth half open and glaring at me when the door
closed. I held tightly onto my toilet tissue and camera and practically
ran to my car. This probably didn't look very good either now that I
think about it.
Posted by Erich Shelton. Posted In :
Design
March 20, 2010
I suppose most people know but I finally restarted my MFA, after quite a lapse in time. I am taking classes from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and thoroughly loving it. It wasn't until the other day that I thought…"I have a blog, don't I?" Then when I looked at the blog, I realised I hadn't posted ANYTHING since January. Where did that time go?
Anyway…I hope to be more regular now that I am situated on a more normal schedule and feel as if I am finally in the swing of things with the studies. It is not an easy task to go back to university after such a long time and being my age, but I have always wanted to do this and am confident it will all be worth it.
Meanwhile I am only working part-time at USI and full-time studying. This means the belt is even tighter than before; especially since I am taking out multiple loans to do this.
If anybody has any spare Ramen Noodles in their cupboards, feel free to send them to me! They will not be wasted.
Posted by Erich Shelton. Posted In :
Commentary
March 20, 2010
 On the rare occasions that an exhibition of graphic design appears,
it’s a safe bet that one complaint will always be heard. Graphic
design, someone will say, just doesn’t work in a gallery. It isn’t art
and it can’t possibly be properly understood out of context. It only has
meaning out in the world in the places where it was intended to
communicate. Curiously, the people making this criticism will usually be
graphic designers.
This objection has always seemed misguided to me. If you are the
kind of person who enjoys looking at exhibits in galleries— historical
artifacts, period costumes, scientific instruments, archaeological
discoveries—it is impossible to confuse the conventions of display with
the sometimes very distant reality from which the object comes. The
experience, aided by captions, maps, contextual images, reconstructions,
and revealing relationships between the exhibited objects, will always
require an act of imagination from the viewer. It’s too bad that we are
not usually able to touch exhibits, considerably reducing access to, for
instance, a book with many pages. But, even so, if it’s valid to study
every other kind of object or artifact in galleries, why should we
exclude graphic communication? The problem isn’t that curators sometimes
have the temerity to display graphic design. No, it’s that in 2010,
there are still so few places in which this can happen.
A visit to Melbourne last summer—and a private gallery there
called, rather beguilingly, The Narrows—started me thinking
about this issue again. The Narrows is on Flinders Street, a
thoroughfare in an area of Melbourne’s central business district
well-established as a location for galleries, fashion companies, and
design studios. The gallery is a small but inviting space with a
mini-bookshop displaying a few carefully curated volumes. Its name is a
reference to a suburb in Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s
Northern Territory, where founder Warren Taylor grew up. (It’s also, as
Taylor knows, the name of the channel of water between Staten Island and
Brooklyn.) Taylor studied visual arts and teaches visual communication
at Monash University.
To encourage cross-fertilization between disciplines, he brings
designers and artists together into collaborations, and he shows art and
graphic design on equal terms. Graphic design subjects presented at The
Narrows since it opened in 2006 have included the artist/designer Ed Fella,
American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones, the Dutch studio Experimental
Jetset, and posters announcing exhibitions at the Museum
für Gestaltung in Zurich. Last December, the gallery showed work by
John
Warwicker, a member of the London design team Tomato. Warwicker is
now based in Melbourne, and the exhibition coincided with the
publication of his book, Floating
World: Ukiyo-e.
All these figures are familiar, perhaps, to American or European
designers, but Taylor has also shown an impressive commitment to less
well-traveled areas of graphic culture, and he has the curatorial
confidence to make his tastes public. An early project covered the work
of American designer and graphic artist Ronald
Clyne (1925–2006), who created more than 500 sleeves for Folkways
Records, giving Moses Asch’s highly regarded label its graphic look. An
exhibition in 2008 focused on the Swedish designer John
Melin (1921–1992), an innovative figure who did brilliant conceptual
work in the 1960s for the Moderna Museet modern art museum in Stockholm
and deserves to be much better known.
These are inspired choices which make a valuable local contribution
to the development of an informed, historically aware viewer of graphic
design. Each exhibition is supported by a poster that usually features
an essay about the subject on the reverse. Taylor’s strategic fusion of
art and design under the same roof makes a lot of sense. Many designers
are drawn to working for the art scene, where they find sympathetic
collaborators, and designers’ visual and editorial talents make
curatorial work a natural extension of designing in some cases.
For years now, a great deal of graphic design has occupied a
productive but not always fully appreciated zone somewhere between art
and design as it was once traditionally defined. The visual or
conceptual complexity that gives this kind of project extra value for
the viewer as communication means that it is entirely suited for more
leisurely contemplation in the gallery. Galleries, like magazine
articles and monographs, offer an opportunity to discover continuities
and departures across an individual’s body of work that might not
otherwise be apparent.
In London, the Kemistry Gallery, started in
2004 by the design company Kemistry and located in Hoxton in the East
End, has specialized in showing more illustrative kinds of graphic
design. In 2005, Kemistry put on an exhibition by Californian designer
Geoff McFetridge (who had a joint show with Ed Fella at the Redcat
gallery in Los Angeles in 2008). Since then, the gallery has organized
exhibitions by, among others, Daniel Eatock, James Joyce, Anthony
Burrill, the French designer-illustrator Geneviève Gauckler,
and Zak
Kyes, art director at the Architectural Association.
Where the style of presentation at The Narrows is generally spare
and art-like, Kemistry’s shows are more immersive, with words and images
often cascading across the walls from ceiling to floor in its
ground-floor space. The shows tend to present buyable artworks,
sometimes one-offs, though more often editions of prints specially
produced by the gallery; any profits help keep the venture going.
Galleries inevitably reflect their owners’ tastes and Kemistry’s
prevailing visual mood is bright, fashionable, cartoon-like, and pop—if
not populist.
Given the size of the graphic design scene in the U.S., and,
indeed, the size of the country, it wouldn’t be surprising to find the
most ambitious graphic design galleries here. But leaving aside
institutional venues such as the AIGA’s gallery in its New York
headquarters, which primarily shows AIGA-related exhibitions, and the
many design school gallery spaces, I’m not aware of any private
galleries in the U.S. that focus on showing graphic design. In other
areas of professional advocacy, promotion, and discussion, American
graphic design leads the world, so this is a remarkable, and
regrettable, omission.
For the most sustained and wide-ranging example of a graphic design
gallery we must look to Paris, where the Galerie
Anatome, located near the Bastille neighborhood, has been mounting
shows since 1999, making it a bewhiskered old-timer among other recent
initiatives. As one might expect, the nonprofit gallery, run by
volunteers, has shown plenty of French designers, including Philippe
Apeloig, Michel Bouvet, Catherine Zask,
and Peter
Knapp. The latest exhibition highlights the work of Malte Martin, a
designer-artist who combines studio commissions with bold typographic
interventions in public spaces. Anatome’s international outlook is
evident in shows devoted to Uwe Loesch (Germany), Wim Crouwel
(Netherlands), Werner
Jeker (Switzerland), Reza Abedini (Iran), and Jonathan
Barnbrook (U.K.). In 2002, the gallery surveyed new Czech work and,
in 2003, it presented “East Coast/West Coast,” a show about American
design. In its curatorial energy and commitment to encouraging public
understanding of the subject, Anatome provides a perfect model of what a
21st-century graphic design gallery might become.
Larger institutions exhibiting design, such as MoMA, the Musée des
Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the V&A and Design Museum in London,
still play a vital role. Only these institutions possess the resources
and space to mount large-scale exhibitions, involving historical
scholarship, extensive borrowing from other collections, and substantial
publications. The bigger the institution, though, and the wider its
remit, the less likely it is to be engaged in closely documenting, from
year to year, the evolution of the field. The national museums are for
grand overviews rather than the small-scale, immediate, topical
responses needed to foster the sense of a thriving discursive culture, a
community sharing a common aim, a vibrant and active scene. At
Kemistry, the youthful crowd at private previews, often running to
hundreds of people, spills out of the door and occupies the narrow
street. A good gallery can act as an event-generator, as an exciting
hub. There is room for plenty more.
[This article appears in April
2010 issue of Print.]
--
About the author:
Rick Poynor, a U.K.-based design
critic and writer, contributes the Observer column to Print . The founding editor of Eye magazine, he has covered design, media and
visual culture for I.D. , Metropolis , Harvard Design Magazine , The Guardian , and the Financial Times . He is the author of many books, including Typography
Now: The Next Wave (1991) and No
More Rules (2003), a critical study
of graphic design and postmodernism. His most recent book is Jan
Van Toorn: Critical Practice.
Posted by Erich Shelton. Posted In :
Commentary
January 8, 2010
We had our first snow of the winter yesterday. As always there is something special about that first snow. Even though it causes chaos when traveling or trying to get to work, there is a solitude and sense of peace that comes with it as well. The earth seems to quieten somehow. All of the peripheral noise of the city is muffled by a blanket of white. The grassy side garden outside my screened-in porch is now covered with snow. Only a few blades of grass peep out above it. The only recognizable features are the trees and my bird feeder, which is empty moments after I fill it. I struggle to remember the beautiful flowers I had this past summer. It seems ages since the bluebells danced in my garden or the aroma of the roses wafted through the air. This poem is about not just the snow, but about how everything in life is only for a season. Whether we are lovers of snow or prefer the summer sun, it is only a season. Whether life if full of pleasure or seemingly unbearable pain, it is only a season.
The fresh snow covers the hardened earth
with its blanket of white.
Quietness overcomes noise.
Unheard stillness echoes loudly in my ears,
raping my senses.
Small patches of brown, withered grass
keeps its head above the blanket,
peering only slightly higher.
“The snow will surely melt.
You may not see me, but I am still here.
It is only a season.”
Covered up, grappling, without strength,
you try to keep your head above it all.
Scales fall from the eyes.
Truth is exposed.
Colour is lost.
Resiliency has died.
Your beauty has fade.
You become the grass.
Trampled beneath unsuspecting feet,
you are invisible to the human eye.
Straining forward in one last attempt,
your pleas fall on deafened ears.
Your voice becomes silenced with the snow.
Where are the children playing at your feet,
the voice of the songbird,
the sound of the young lovers?
In summer, in your prime, you were admired.
Now there is no warmth to be found.
It is only a season.
Pregnant with dissipating hope,
the next season will be better.
Winter turns to spring.
Rejuvenation and rebirth – the words only
muttered, and never known.
Will this blanket suffocate you?
Or is it’s beauty – a mirage or a dream?
Black stands disguised in a cloak of white.
Tenderly, a baby is rocked to sleep.
The ivory blanket covers and slowly
chokes life from its first breath.
How can you know when spring appears?
Will you then be sprung, or will you
slumber in impatience?
Will colour and beauty again be realised?
Will darkness flee in a moment?
Like a man leaving only his footprints,
you are left alone.
Unanswered questions, never known.
Is this life all there is,
or is it, only
a season?
Posted by Erich Shelton. Posted In :
Poetry
January 6, 2010
Many of you remember my wonderful silver little car the Tiburon. It really was a nice car, but it had 83,000 miles, no warranty and was definitely starting to show some wear and tear. Though it was speedy, it wasn't the most economical on petrol either. All of these factors and then some is what led me to my new 2010 Hyundai Accent SE. With my starting graduate school next month, it seemed right to start off with a reliable vehicle that has a full warranty and cheaper miles per gallon in the city 27 and highway 38, and a little less each month on payments as compared to the Tiburon. I will continue to teach part time at USI while I study full time at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. It is all online, apart from the summer months when I plan to go to California for the classes. This will enable me to meet the faculty and they me. The MFA will take about 2 1/2 years to complete and is something I have not been able to fully pursue until now. I had started once before, but due to several factors (car accident) I had to put everything on hold. I'm really looking forward to the new journey and having a new apple green car that gets the BBC World Service on the radio is incredible!
Posted by Erich Shelton. Posted In :
Commentary
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About Me
| Erich Shelton |
| Evansville, Indiana |
I currently teach graphic design and illustration at the University of Southern Indiana. I really love teaching and the challenges which this provides me. It not only keeps me young, but forces me to be that ongoing learner; sometimes referred to as a life-long learner. This goal of continuing to learn as finally brought me back to the role as a student as well. Some years ago I started and MFA, but due to an automobile accident was unable to complete it.
I have just been accepted as a student at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and will finally be able to work on the MFA. The great thing is I can continue working at USI and will visit the AAU in the summer. The rest of the time I am able to take my courses online.
Like technology and life, it is constantly changing and evolving. What a joy to be part of it all!
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