Signified : art, design, media and more
Thank you for your interest and welcome to this second edition of our newsletter.
We expect to be sending out a newsletter every month (or so) with editor’s picks as well as ways to get more out of our growing content… Still very much a ‘work-in-progress' so, we’re keeping it brief this time with a small selection of beautiful books, useful online resources, and a round-up of the three most popular articles published in Signifier since our debut newsletter last month, which marked our first anniversary on Medium…
When Brit Was It
During the 1990s, a group of young artists swiftly rose to prominence in the UK. Championed by the Saatchi Gallery and monopolising the Turner Prize scene, they briefly achieved a cultural standing on par with soap actors and pop stars. The newspapers loved to lampoon their often challenging art, but it seems the Great British public embraced their wild weirdness and for a time, art was foremost in the public consciousness…
Roman Statues in the Greek Style
The Romans based much of their culture on that of the ancient Greeks and their art was copied directly. Roman sculptors would hone their skills by copying the bronzes of the classical Greek masters. To begin with, most Roman statues perpetuated the same conventions of style and aesthetics, though gradually things developed and Roman style diverged, albeit subtly, from the Greek. This is a good example of how the art of society, and that society’s attitude toward art, signifies its core values...
Driven to Abstraction
Abstract is a word often misused when talking about art. Some critics doubt that truly abstract art can ever be produced through human agency and is therefore impossible! Basically, abstract art needs to be purely formal without any figurative reference. More precisely, abstract work should contain nothing that remains representational… Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky was, arguably, the first to successfully achieve abstraction as an art form. Though he was not the first to use abstraction in art. So, before we consider his innovative improvisations and compositions, let’s take a look at some precursors and, briefly, discuss what makes them abstract… or not...
Books about Art and Artists
If the articles you’ve enjoyed in Signifier have piqued your interest, this section of our newsletter provides links to further reading related to topics covered or artists mentioned. These are Amazon Associate links to carefully selected books and will open on an Amazon product page where you can preview the book and browse reader reviews. If you decide to purchase the book via one of these links, Signifier will receive a small referral fee that will help to keep quality content coming but won’t cost you anything extra.
- Wassily Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction, edited by Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird, for Tate
- The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert Smithson’s Earthwork Through Time and Place by Hikmet Sidney Loe, for University of Utah Press
- Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art by Ian Jenkins, for The British Museum
Featured Resources
The Signifier avoids including too many links that take the reader off-site, but in each newsletter we will list just a few quality online resources that remain relevant to our recent content:
- The official website for Christo and Jeanne-Claude is a comprehensive overview of their long and influential career with records of their major projects form initial concepts, preparatory work, to completion.
- Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective — this excellent exhibition from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is viewable online and comprises 105 of LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawings, spanning the artist’s career from 1969 to 2007.
- The UNESCO Göbekli Tepe site has information and a gallery of good images showing the archaeological site with some details of the art carved on the surfaces of many of the monoliths.
Support Signifier
As The Signifier is a Medium publication, Medium members can support us just by reading our articles! Claps can help to spread the word and show appreciation as does engaging by highlighting interesting passages, or leaving comments. Whether you’re a Medium member or not, you can also help support us by sharing links to articles you enjoy on your social media, or forwarding this newsletter to a friend who might enjoy our articles about art, design and media!
You may also enjoy content published in our sister publication The Scrawl, a literary journal with exclusive author interviews of interest to readers and writers…
From Wigan to Grandville — an interview with Bryan Talbot
Bryan Talbot is one of the most widely recognised and respected practitioners of graphic storytelling. His long career has produced a hugely varied, always relevant, body of work that spans many genres from superhero fantasy to documentary realism. His subjects cover machine-gun toting badgers, imaginary giant rats, civil engineering, history, social geography and biography.
Since the mid-1980s he has steadily accrued a string of top accolades. In 2009, Talbot was the first graphic storyteller to be given an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by the University of Sunderland, and in 2012 was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by Northumbria University. That same year, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a clever graphic memoir he co-created with Mary Talbot, won the Costa Biography Award. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018...
