Y H B H S (card catalog) selection 36

Rodney Hill, gallerist, Los Angeles
"These 3 books have stirred memories of my little corner of the pre-internet universe; Detroit in the early 1980s, where I was exposed to some pretty great forms, textures and volumes."








When Rodney Hill responded to my email asking him to pick his favorite book for YHBHS, not only was I flattered, but I was psyched to see what he would choose! Rodney has turned me onto so much art & design that it's just plain ridiculous. He's the type of enthusiast that sends emails of Italian lamps on auction at 3 a.m... Yes, to know him is an honor and an education in design, passion, and generosity.

The email that I received from Rodney Hill reads:



On the last day of holiday vacation, I share three books that have been at close at hand lately and have became knotted together in my mind. These 3 books have stirred memories of my little corner of the pre-internet universe; Detroit in the early 1980s, where I was exposed to some pretty great forms, textures and volumes. I frequented Linda Dresner's amazing boutique (www.lindadresner.com) where they stocked asymmetrical, origami-like Japanese fashion from the start. Meanwhile, wedge shaped, stainless steel DeLoreans with gull-wing doors were on the streets. Nearby, John Portman's "Renaissance Center," a reinforced concrete lobby with conversation pods and a monorail, offered 73 story glass elevator rides.

Juliaan Lampens, 2010
Angelique Campens, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sara Noel Costa de Araujo,
Jan Kempenaers, Francis Strauven, Juliaan Lampens

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These impressive designs and aesthetics established a 30 year imprint in my mind's eye of an ideal way of living, impossible to achieve without a serious code of discipline. When I came to know Julian Lampens' work a few years ago, the immediate sensation was of Deja Vu, then awe -- that living with these forms and textures can indeed be intimate and warm.

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion
by Akio Fukai, Barbara Vinken, Susannah Frankel & Hirofumi Kurino


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Seeing 30 years of Japanese fashion further historicized in "Future Beauty" at London's beautiful Barbican Center was a personal highlight of 2010, and its glossy catalog is already a treasure. The exhibition included extensive amounts of the related graphic direct mail and magazine advertising materials. Another treat: a projected video of a very tense audience responding to Rei Kawakubo's "lump dress" runway show, silence, laughter, and a few courageous people clapping to support it. (The show is still up!)

Arthropods: New Design Futures
by Jim Burns 1972, Praeger, New York


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I think the prescient designers in Arthropods: New Design Futures saw Comme des Garcon's "lump dresses" coming. Inside the books foreboding cover graphics, it's full of B&W eye candy and ideas from 30 international environmental designers who were acting against the un-ecological and dehumanizing urban and corporate environments of the late Sixties (!!!???). Arthopods' "understanding of consequences" reads much like "Green movement" propaganda, practices and product placement of today. There's not much in Arthropods for the consumer, just ideas, and very few built works. An architect friend looked straight through "Arthropods" patina, and commented: "Optimistic !", and I think he was right!

I normally spend my time on blogs like this, and Ro/Lu, etc. where I enjoy the gathering community of people interested in circulating and re-circulating these ideas and images, which often send me back to books like these.


Enjoy the pics!"




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Rodney Hill loves lamps. He is co-owner of Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles. Takayoshi Nonaka is a photographer. He is Creative Director, H. P. France, Los Angeles, New York...






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Y H B H S (card catalog) selection 34

Davide Balula, artist, Paris, France
"It's a nice tool for admiring balance and composition, transposable to every other field, beyond just ceramic pots, branches and flowers."










The Art of Arranging Flowers-
A Complete Guide to Japanese Ikebana
by Shozo Sato



Davide Balula writes from the snowy Alps with his card catalog entry:


"That book was offered to me by a wonderful person, and that makes it a very precious element to have around me. It is a real pleasure going through the pages and it's always a great inspiration. The guide is complete and super precise. Completed as well with nice technical explanations.

It's a nice tool for admiring balance and composition, transposable to every other field, beyond just ceramic pots, branches and flowers. Ikebana is a weird thing, the nature is so artificially manipulated to make it look like it is perfect harmony... but only according to the flatness of a photograph.


Snowy thoughts from the alps, DB"

Davide Balula Born in 1978 in Annecy, France. He lives and works in Paris, France. Exhibitions (selection): 2010 : Au fil de l’oeuvre, La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-Le-Sec, France; 2009 : Un nouveau festival, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France; American Wall Nut, Fake Estate Gallery, NY, USA (solo) ; Return to Function, MMoCA, Madison, USA; 2008: Le Lac, le mensonge, Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (solo).

http://davide.balula.free.fr
http://www.lappareil.com

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Y H B H S (card catalog) selection 19

Liz Arnold, writer, New York
"“It is the hour of lamps."










My Mother's House and Sido,
by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

"As a writer obsessed with interiors and how we live in them, I’m completely absorbed in rereading La Maison de Claudine by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. The 1922 novel, translated as My Mother’s House by the beloved author known as Colette, is a collection of portraits about the author’s family, particularly the mother-daughter bond, using memories in the home to develop character relationships.

In one of my favorite vignettes, the young Colette is rhapsodizing to a childhood friend at dusk about her dreams of becoming a world traveler. But she sees the glow of the lamp in the window of her home, and her mother’s silver thimble as she sews inside. “It is the hour of lamps,” she writes. Colette heeds the feminine call, returning quickly to her mother and setting up the reader for the subtle conflict that plays out in the rather plotless but beautiful book: the tension between mother and daughter, the intimate and public, and the traditional and the hope for change."

- Liz Arnold

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Liz Arnold is the author of Homebodies, a blog about the homes of people she visits. She also writes about homes she’s never visited for a number of glossy shelter magazines. Her work has appeared in Real Simple, Luxe Interiors + Design, The Guardian, and The New York Times, among others. Liz is working toward her MFA in nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’ll graduate in June.

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Y H B H S (card catalog) selection 18

MINUS SPACE, Brookyln, NY
"It includes everything I like: artist couples, an international dialogue and exchange of ideas, the merging of art and design, etc."














Anni und Josef Albers:
Begegnung mit Lateinamerika
Anni and Josef Albers: Encounter with Latin America



"It's a book that I just received as a gift from an artist colleague based in Berlin, the subject of which I believe is highly appropriate for both our audiences. It includes everything I like: artist couples, an international dialogue and exchange of ideas, the merging of art and design, etc."

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from Hatja Canta Verlag:

"Featuring letters and manuscripts by Anni and Josef Albers, this catalogue is the first to document the influence of Central and South America on the work of this couple's work.

It argues that their art would not have been conceivable without their encounter with the southern continent. Anni Albers’ weavings, drawings, and painted studies demonstrate her in-depth knowledge of pre-Columbian textiles. Similarly, the paintings and photographs by Josef Albers testify to the way he developed his special sense of color in Mexico, and how he continued to further inform his own independent concept of photography."

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MINUS SPACE is a platform for reductive art on the international level. Reductive art is generally characterized by its use of plainspoken materials, monochromatic or limited color, geometry and pattern, repetition and seriality, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor. Reductive art is inclusive and pluralistic in its approach, including geographic location, age, gender, medium, artistic strategy, and content of work.

In addition to our comprehensive web site, we operate a gallery in Brooklyn where we mount solo and group exhibitions of pioneering emerging and established American and international artists. Our gallery is the only venue of its kind in the United States, and one of only a handful of comparable spaces on the international level dedicated to reductive art.

MINUS SPACE was founded by artists Matthew Deleget and Rossana Martinez in 2003.

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Y H B H S (card catalog) selection 17


Keegan McHargue, artist, New York












Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects 1982-89

Keegan McHargue writes: "Because I grew up walking by the Portland Building everyday growing up in Portland Oregon, wondering about it's nearly comical notion of classical motifs. It wasn't until much later that I was formally introduced to the work of it's creator, Michael Graves, and learned how large an impact he had not just on me, but on an entire generation (and those who would later rebel against them!)"


















Keegan Mchargue is an artist living in New York. Go to his site here... Upcoming show in 2011 at Galerie Jeanroche Dard, Paris......


"In Keegan McHargue's work, the painting is both backdrop and stage, each work an uncanny tableau from a world not entirely unlike REALITY, in which grotesque characters are caught, unable to escape the capricious and twisted logic that produced them. Cut-out figures float over depthless grids, while the arches and walkways around them dead-end in the sudden flat-coloured ground of the canvas. Monstrous creatures attest to the potential of any part of the scene to develop into any other, to effloresce, bifurcate, become translucent or prismatic, according to the scheme of each unfolding allegory.

Fragmented views of factories of obscure purpose, their arcane pipework dripping flat teardrops, build into melancholy systems whose imagined functions reflect psychological circuits as much as they allude to the arbitrary and controlling infrastructures of the contemporary political economy. The faces that stare out of this fractured, animistic surface range from those of sentient puppets just free enough to flash a helpless, puzzled look to the audience as the scenery melts around them, to the carnivalesque masks of participants in some unknown, degenerate ritual."

taken from here...













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Y H B H S (card catalog) selection 2


Fergus Feehily, artist
"Sometimes it might not be opened for months, or even a year or two, but then it gets pulled out of a stack of other books, fresh and with new meaning to be taken from it each time... "










All Of Us: The Collected Poems, Raymond Carver.


One of the books that means the most to me, often beside my bed or in the studio. Always full of insight, pared back beauty and consolation. Sometimes it might not be opened for months or even a year or two but then it gets pulled out of a stack of other books, fresh and with new meaning to be taken from it each time.

This copy has been all over with me, in Tokyo, Berlin and Dublin. Carver’s work was first put my way by my friend Alan Sherry I think, in the form of the better know short stories and it has meant a great deal to me ever since. The passing of time and getting older reveals more to me each time I reread these poems, it’s hard to believe that I didn’t quite see this or that in them just a few years ago.

Salman Rushdie once said ‘Read everything Raymond Carver wrote. ‘ When you have spent some time with these poems you realize why. Alan went on to run a small record label called Siwa, not perhaps unlike the small publishers mentioned in Carver’s great Some Prose On Poetry.




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Fergus Feehily

"Fergus Feehily’s painting explores a long-term preoccupation with blurring boundaries, often between non-representation and image, text and drawing. There is an undertow of anxiety and ambiguity in his work, an unsettled searching in its making. This constant exploration leads to odd twists and turns- just when you think you are sure what you are getting, the work shifts again and takes another avenue."

(please spend some time with his work here....)
and watch a video here....








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YHBHS card catalog.









For the upcoming month of December YOU HAVE BEEN HERE SOMETIME will be doing things a bit different! Y H B H S has asked Writers, Artists, Interior and Furniture Designers, Bloggers, Gallery and Store Owner/Directors, and various design enthusiasts a very important question:

WHAT BOOK(s) HAS INSPIRED YOU THE MOST? (& will inspire us!)

The next month, YHBHS will be posting the results. I hope you enjoy this feature as much as I have enjoyed creating it. I have had such a great time corresponding with so many talented people, sharing inspiration from all over the world. It continues to blow me away the amount of amazing people I have met from this site. Thank you to everyone for taking the time to write back with your favorite book!!!

All regular postings from YHBHS will resume in the 2011. Happy Holidays~

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So far, the list of participants includes: (with hopefully many more to be added!)



Matt Olson of ROLU DESIGN STUDIO, Brooks Hudson Thomas of SPECIFIC, Rodney Hill, partner MARC FOXX, Jason Roskey of Fern NYC, furniture designer, Gerard O'Brien Reform Gallery , Andrew from AN AMBITIOUS PROJECT COLLAPSING, blogger, Ben & Makoto of SCOUT REGALIA, designers, Paul Sepuya, artist, Ivan Navarro, artist , Don Freeman, photographer, Lindsey Brown of OUNO DESIGN, Anna Sew Hoy, artist, Kristin Dickson of IKO IKO, Fergus Feehily, artist Davide Balula, artist, Genevieve Dellinger, TELL YOU TODAY, designer Keegan McHargue, artist, Walter Manning of OLD CHUM and Old Faithful Shop, , Morgan Satterfield of THE BRICK HOUSE, Brian Paquette, interior designer, Christopher Farr of Christopher Farr, Meaghan Roddy, design specialist, NYC, Galerie Half, Los Angeles, Kevin H Beer, designer, Hollywood Forever, Kevin, Peter Loughrey, Los Angeles Modern Auctions , Liz Arnold, writer, and HOMEBODIES, Suzy Annetta of STUDIO ANNETTA, interior designer, Mary, artist, photographer, blogger UNCHANGING WINDOW, Andy Beach, REFERENCE LIBRARY, Andrew Russeth, 16 MILES of STRING, India Carpenter, designer / artist, Keehnan Konyha, decorator, 2THEWALLS, plus more!

















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