Camouflage survey

It all started with a great score from Daedalus, a book I’ve been looking for for some time: designer Hardy Blechman’s Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia Of Camouflage (Firefly, 2004—it had previously been available only under a British imprint) for a cool $30—go and check it out at the source, or see Steven Heller’s review in Eye, or the one in Boldtype.

Zeitgeist.

And then, in rapid succession: a BB post on dazzle camouflage, followed by a call for papers for the upcoming Camouflage: Art, Science and Popular Culture, to be held at the University of Northern Iowa Department of Art on Saturday, 22 April 2006. (The conference is organized by Roy R. Behrens, whose False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage—Bobolink, 2002—is the wonky yang to Blechman’s stylish yin; proposals are due by 10 January 2006.)

A dazzly paint-job.

Some snips: in 1917, at the height of the U-boat scare during WWI, a former marine artist, designer, and illustrator—one Lt. Cdr. Norman Wilkinson of the Royal Navy—was assigned to a team tasked with visually altering British ships to improve maritime survivability. Interestingly, dazzle (as it came to be known) did not operate as conventional camouflage—which typically masks a body’s visibility—usually does: dazzle creates a vibrating visual field which makes it difficult for a human observer to accurately determine the position and heading of a potential target, crucial inputs for a successful torpedo-er (prior to the age of radar, sonar, and computerized navigation). Wilkinson’s band tested candidates by painting models and testing their effectiveness by rigging a turntable, water, and periscope optics. (The U.S. and France would follow suit, usually employing fine artists in the endeavor.)

DPM is a rich visual sourcebook, one that gets you heading in all sorts of fruitful directions: it covers camouflage in the natural world, in warfare (of course), but also provides fashion and pop images that serve as great fodder for free-association. Me? I’ve been pondering the morphing of camo from utilitarian to semiotic signal of the military, patriotism, and plainspeaking Americanism (in our fair city, football fans have adopted the uniform, with a bit of tailoring). And in the Costume Institute’s Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed (from 2001), one thread concerned the utility of fashion in hiding unflattering body parts.

For the scholars: a camouflage bibliography, courtesy of Behrens.

Venus de Milo

Eva Green in
The Dreamers

Addendum: From a scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s awkward and forced Dreamers, actress Eva Green is depicted as the Venus de Milo when she camouflages her arms by wearing long black gloves and standing in a dark doorway, dressed only in drapery surrounding the hips. [cws::13 Nov]

New BüKs

Buy it at the BüK Shop

Hey, kids: remember that nutty Valerie Solanas? Before she shot Andy, she published the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, an anti-male polemic—“her radical tract is a stunning salvo in the age-old battle of the sexes”—that has recently been reissued by the folks at BüK.

And what is a BüK? It…

…is an inexpensive pamphlet—just $1.49—containing one provocative essay, short story, portfolio of pictures, collection of poems, or other surprising entertainment, readable in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. At 5 x 7 inches and 16-32 pages, a BüK fits easily into a pocket, purse or backpack, where it is always ready to serve up absorbing material by or about architects, artists, actors, composers, critics, directors, designers, divas, educators, economists, environmentalists, essayists, models, moguls, novelists, photographers, politicians, poets, singers, and scientists.

Buy! There’s a fairly interesting and extensive catalog that includes titles on Liberace, Greenland, and the hobo lexicon.

Bad mags

Tom Brinkmann’s site for Bad Mags, a book “due in 2005,” is such a train wreck you might find it curious that I’m citing it as rich in design resources, but there it is.

Dig deeper: there’s an impressive collection of sixties and seventies zines, sorted by category (Sharon Tate, true crime, occult sex, bikers, punk, blue films) and by publisher (I’m unfamiliar with their names—Seven Seventy, GSN/Classic, TNC/Dominion, Pendulum/Gallery Press, Sari/Press Arts—but almost all of them were based in Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley and carry particular house vernaculars). Warning: the website loads pretty slowly, so you might want to get a cup of coffee in the meantime.

A small sampling of the wares, displayed here (click through for larger images from the website), reveal some pretty cool work, heavy on the clip art and tabloid look but graphically bold, smart, and fun. (Note that promiscuous font-mixing has a long and glorious history, even in the days of paste-up.)

The high priestess of frosty sensuality

(Grambo on Vitti)

On manliness

Contrary to what you might first think, pragmatism is a philosophy, not the dismissal of philosophy. And Teddy Roosevelt was more a philosopher than he knew. His advocacy of manliness reflects the difficulties of pragmatism and tells us something about our situation today. We have abandoned—not reason for manliness like the pragmatists, nor manliness for reason like their tender-minded opponents—but both reason and manliness. We want progress without a rational justification and without the manliness needed to supply the lack of a justification.

From Harvey Mansfield's "The manliness of Theodore Roosevelt," in The New Criterion; his essay is excerpted from A Modest Defense of Manliness, forthcoming from the Yale University Press (2006).

(Lileks)

From Stagworld!