Andy Cruz of "House Industries" was at Art Center last night.
He delivered a lively, informal and patently sincere exegesis
of how he and his fellow bottle-of-dirt skatepunk "duh-signers"
from Delaware worked their way through punk posters, Lowbrow Art, tiki, and hot-rod retread hand-lettering, to the point where
they are currently...
wait for it...
physically re-constructing Modernist designer chairs
by Richard Neutra, running a chic clothing store in London,
and buying out whole, decaying, analog libraries of mid-century High Modernist International Style typography, which they are digitally retrofitting for contemporary commerce. Huh?!
http://www.houseindustries.com/index.php?page=merchandise
This Cruz lecture was one of the most important and interesting things I've seen in my stay at Art Center. I mean... Bohemians are
supposed to be recuperated by Modernists; Modernists just aren't
supposed to be recuperated by Bohemians. But I just witnessed that, and what's more, they're great at it it. That's like watching
Paris fall to the Mongols and discovering that Mongols are
brilliant at vichysoisse and the can-can.
Yeah dude, we can make, uh, designer chairs
This is a patent example of the street finding its own uses for things. The passage of time and the advent of digital technology have blurred the lines of culture to an unprecedented extent. Plus, they're from Delaware. That is the coup de grace.
Why is toney, top-end Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra
the same grist for the digital mill for these House guys as, say,
dragster freak Ed "Big Daddy" Roth? It's sheer DARING, that's what.
These supreme pastiche freaks don't even have to steal from
real designers; in their coolest alternate-history stunt, they
INVENTED a Swiss modernist type designer, the completely
fictional "Rene Albert Chalet," and they "stole" from him.
http://www.houseind.com/index.php?page=showfont&id=4&subpage=chalet_history
The Brilliant Yet Cruelly Neglected Swiss Master, Chalet
Look at all those design luminaries they got to pitch in on
their blatant hoax: Ellen Lupton, Michael Bierut, Eric Spiekerman,,,
This is without any question the funniest typography joke in
the history of the world... if the world, in point of fact, still
has any "history." These guys are beyond parody. They are walking exemplars of the folk-postmodern.
