«Projector» magazine. Issue #24
First, our friend, photographer Dima Goriachev, came to the office of Projector, and gave us a beautiful old meat grinder. That was long ago. Then, a day before we sent the issue to printing, I still couldn’t come up with an idea of its cover. This is when I saw the grinder again! That would work, I thought. It anyway didn’t until I placed the entire banner head and the publication announcements right into it. In fact, the magazine is nothing else but a grinder, mincing designer meat into ground information.
This month’s historical column features Joe Colombo, the famous futurist designer from Italy of the 1950-60s. He passed away too early, and didn’t have enough time to implement every radical idea of him. However, what he did, is anyway more than enough to claim for a place in the history of design.
Dima Kravko, featured in this issue, is a person beyond design. It’s now quite difficult to define Dima’s professional field, as he is constantly expanding it. He is into graphic, art actionism, and video. In a big interview with him, Dima tries to figure out why he feels cramped in the framework of graphic design. Also, this summer he’s been invited to participate in Poster Stars Program we organized in New Holland.
Environment shares the interview with Winy Maas, the celebrity architect and the head of the Dutch bureau MVRDV: «I believe today’s architects have quite a limited toolkit: stone, glass, steel, that’s first. Secondly, we’re now scrutinizing each other much more than we used to. People from Thailand or Vladivostok are same aware of our architecture as the Dutch. We don’t copy but influence each other. I like it that we share with each other, that architects now have common goals. People want to work with urban and nature areas. We’re similar».
Next comes the story of the «White city» — Tel-Aviv, the largest world center of modernism, the heritage of Bauhaus. By the end of the 1940s, it did not evoke so much interest as previously, and the buildings started gradually losing their sophisticated image: there came flankers and stanzas covered in glass, stucco was getting darker and falling down. These buildings seemed to be something conventional until 2003, when the UNESCO considered the White town a world art heritage site. Over 2000 buildings got under the protection of the UNESCO, and an extensive restoration program started.
In «Photography» section, Maria Gavrilchik tells about the works of Dimitry Provotorov, a photographer from St.Petersburg: «While duping, you may take the glass scratched and dusted to a different extent; to reveal texture, drop glue or diluted acryl, or apply semi-translucent cellotape onto them. Next stage is complex toning, pseudo-solarization, which gives the clearest scale of black, dark brown, gray, and white».
«School» section has another insanely beautiful student project Semyon by Taisia Lysenko and her curator Konstantin Startsev: «The obvious hit at defending graduation projects was an alive poster grown in handcrafted paper. That was a miracle! Taisia had planted seeds along the perimeter of the logo, and it got decorated with the green leaves right on the day wnen the students were defending their graduation projects».
Our expert Mikhail Karasik tells about a masterpiece of constructivist books — Arithmetic by El Lisitsky: «He wholeheartedly adopted the new religion, while the later attempts to romantize the spirit of creative labor of that generation don’t purify the great artist in the minds of his descendants, but dilute and simplify his art concept».
Now back to Mayakovsky: the publishing agency of Timofey Markov is almost ready with a new issue of the famous «Bedbug» illustrated by Georgy Kovenchuk. It’s going to come out in December, but the artist has already shared the story of how the historical Bedbug was designed in the early 1970s, and how the new book is being made: «I created it at one sitting. At first, the publishing agency loved it, but then I started noticing their second thoughts. The editors were especially puzzled with the episode in the second part of the play, where Prisypkin resurrects. Well, I drew RE-SUR-RECTION all over the three spreads. I found it a very successful solution, but the publishing agency didn’t appreciate it».
In our special project «ProArt» Alexander Borovsky on the project of the monument to a tyrant by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: «This is when Kabakov amazed me. He is the founder of Russian conceptualism. Having lost the resistible environment, he started playing mind games. In his eighties, he’s still gaining strength. From my perspective, the monument to a tyrant is his best work, because it’s simple and clear, this is a Russian narrative».
