cityofsound

LA Art Weekend 2009 / ForYourArt (Postopolis! LA)

Just a quick shout to ForYourArt, who have been instrumental in bringing Postopolis! to Los Angeles. We literally could not have done it without them.

They've organised the LA Art Weekend 2009, which coincides with/includes Postopolis! LA, and it's on right now. So if you're in the Los Angeles area do have a look at the fantastic programme of events on ForYourArt's website, and get along to a few of them. It's a great line-up (with perhaps an underlying focus on discussion/work related to urbanism?) and neatly illustrates the diversity of art, architecture and design within the city.

ForYourArt / LA Art Weekend

Fritz Haeg / Edible Estates (Postopolis! LA)

Fritz Haeg of Edible Estates kicks off Postopolis! LA with an engaging talk around urban food production, a topic which I’ve become fascinated by since I moved to Australia. Edible Estates is one of the standout set of projects in this burgeoning area, with a particular take on how to bring localised, distributed food production to our city’s streets.

Haeg discussed how he had focused from an early age on architecture and buildings, drawn to being an architect for as long as he can remember. So he says Edible Estates “comes from a place where I had an obsession with buildings”. He got over this obsession though, almost coming out the other side, such that he’s no longer interested in buildings, “or in the physical structure at least.”

When he moved to LA 10 years ago, he started exploring the activity that happens inside and outside of buildings, almost the ‘life between buildings’ as Gehl would put it. (I thought that in the context of Los Angeles this is particularly interesting proposition. Amongst the spaces defined by the more Anglo Angelenos life between buildings is often brief and transient. The Latino community - and others - has utterly changed this, but Haeg’s work focuses on those urban and suburban spaces where “activity outside of buildings”, as he put it, has been most invisible.)

With 30 events over 6 years, all centred around his house, Haeg started started strategies for “inhabiting spaces and occupying environments”. These included events like ‘Sundown Salon’, knitting salons, events for kids where they built a fort and a mudpit, conventional literary salons, hair and makeup days and so on. The output of all these performances/events is being gathered into a book (a 150ft long page of paper with images on one side and text on the other).

With an arch of his eyebrow, Haeg notes that he understandably got a little ‘over’ having hundreds of people in his home every weekend, and then took on the idea of ”reconsidering the role of the home in society”, converting it into something akin to a schoolhouse and running a series of itinerant projects, via a mobile geodesic tent, where he would coordinate community education activities as companion to projects for institutions such as the Whitney, a ‘Philadelphia Training Camp for Expression Skills’ and so on.

On particular project ‘How To Eat Austin’, in which workshops would start with “dirt” in week 1 and progress to cooking in week 8, leads directly to the Edible Estates projects. These grew directly out of the 2004 election, and the perception that the USA was divided in two halves - red and blue. That there was a cultural divide here, at the heart of America. Haeg thought that architecture and art seemed an introverted dialogue and wondered whether an art project could bridge audiences. He started in Kansas i.e. the geographic centre of country, and with the front lawn itself.

Haeg sees the humble front lawn as a space that has so much potential. He says that it “also epitomises everything we stand for as Americans. It represents comfort and prosperity. I mean, how free must you be at the weekend to care of it?” It’s also a space that’s homogenised across America, such that it can look exactly the same in LA or NJ.

For Haeg, architects tend to be obsessed with making a mark - making something permanent. The lawn, for them, has a powerful function in terms of ‘frame’, almost “pushing the landscape down to make room for the awesome building”. The lawn us thus a “repressed vacant abstract nothingness”. It’s an anti-social no man’s land and often polluting.

So could we transform that into productive connecting space? He divided the country up into 9 squares and decided to do one garden each season. He references the High Line project in NYC as a reclaiming of such space for an urban garden (though this isn’t productive as far as I know).

In Salina, Kansas, he worked with people to create these little ‘edible estates’ - productive gardens in what was their front lawn. All gardens are permanent, all are productive.
In terms of methodology, Haeg intriguingly notes that he “dictates the terms on a project and then finds collaborators”. (Hm wonder if there’s more to this process?)

The converted lawns can have a tendency to “piss off other suburban neighbours”, a side-effect Haeg clearly enjoys when it happens. He notes that with one house, one neighbour freaked out, while the elderly German immigrants next door were ecstatic. Haeg finds it fascinating to look at the spectrum of responses to “what is basically, y’know … a vegetable garden”. To see what “responses that space elicits”.

Other projects include some outside the US, at Brookwood Estate, London, commissioned by Tate Modern, creating a kind of pleasure garden in middle of city, which also produces food. He set up an Edible Estates Temporary HQ in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. (The website notes: "This first planting includes fruits, vegetables and herbs: apples, plums, raspberries, currants, tomatoes, aubergine, brussel sprouts, scarlet runner beans, peas, lettuce, rocket, spinach, bok choy, artichokes, fennel, onions, parsley, coriander, sage, bay, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, mint, dill, calendula, marigolds and nasturtiums.")

Other gardens are in Austin and Baltimore, and you can find out more in the book Edible Estates - Attack on the Front Lawn and on edibleestates.org.

Haeg’s clear that he doen’t want to make gardens that are beyond peoples’ means - it must be “something anybody can make In the weekend”. As a result, it might sometimes look “scrappy”, at least as viewed through conventional means.

His next project sounds fascinating. It’s in Chelsea, NYC, and centres on the idea of what the space was on September 10 1609 I.e. a simulation of what it looked like and how native Americans lived off the land. This is linked to a project for the Whitney, ‘Animal Estates’, that explored the animals that used to live in that particularly space, including the construction of a beaver pond and beaver dam in spirit of Whitney architect Marcel Breuer. “Sort of”.

Regine asks a couple of questions, including one about why the use of the word ‘estate’? Haeg notes that graphic design and names are an important part of the work, and that the Edible Estates logo was designed to look familiar to Americans that might have seen suburban housing developments - that he was playing with the idea of legitimising it, of taking a radical activity to the people least likely to accept it (interesting echo here with Stephanie Smith on day two - more later). Haeg knows how hard it is for many homeowners to take the first step to plant the edible lawn there - it’s such “a big break with habit to change the antiquated notion of the lawn we have”.

Regine also asks about how the gardens are later on. Haeg says he’s In touch with all families, and almost all (if not all?) are still tending the gardens successfully. In fact the new owners of one house contacted him to take care of the garden they inherited from the previous owners - you have to be a relatively skilled gardener to pull this off, he notes - and he’s now working together with the family. (I’m interested in the skill level. I know from my own experience how much care and attention is required to grow even the smallest crop, and this seems to be a crucial factor in how this takes off. Having said that, I also know the time taken in such activities is hugely enjoyable, therapeutic, and generates a genuine sense of achievement. Even in the production of a few cherry tomatoes.)

(Distributed urban food production is a fascinating topic, not least for the civic possibilities of people working together in shared community gardens, allotments, and increasingly the little strips of urban space that were previously decorative at best. While it may never supply a ‘base load’ of food, it’s of fundamental importance to our cities going forward, for numerous reasons. It was good to hear Haeg talk about his experience here.)

(A local friend later notes there is a deeper irony here in terms of Los Angeles - again with the Mike Davis 'Magical Urbanism' idea in mind - that the Latino population has an almost intrinsic understanding of  public urban space, as if carried down in some kind of urbanism gene from the cities of Southern Europe, and that they’re increasingly retrofitting this onto LA’s urban fabric. My friend noted that Latino culture in LA has always had chickens running around in the yard, for instance, and this was generally very much frowned upon by the Anglo-Saxon Angelenos. So while Haeg is attacking the front lawn of suburbia, Los Angeles in general may be racing ahead to a future where food production is intrinsically part of the warp and weft of urban space anyway. The productive backyard may engulf the manicured front lawn either way.)

Fritz Haeg / Edible Estates
Edible Estates - Attack on the Front Lawn, by Fritz Haeg et al

Postopolis LA

It's back. I'm hugely pleased to be able to announce another Postopolis, this time in Los Angeles, running from Tuesday, March 31, to Saturday, April 4, 2009. Two years after the first, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC and co-ordinated by BLDGBLOG, Subtopia, Inhabitat and City of Sound - here's a snapshot of that - we now have a different line-up of organisers/curators, covering a little bit more of the globe and an equally diverse set of interests:

• David Basulto from Plataforma Arquitectura and ArchDaily (Santiago, Chile)
• Jace Clayton from Mudd Up! (New York City, USA)
• Régine Debatty from we make money not art (Paris, France)
• Bryan Finoki from Subtopia (San Francisco, USA)
• Me from, well, here, City of Sound (Sydney, Australia)
• Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG (San Francisco, USA)

We'll be taking the same broad brushstrokes approach to architecture and urbanism as last time and selecting a diverse set of SoCal-flavoured attractions for you. More details to follow, including the line-up of speakers and the precise details of the location. Polynodal LA makes picking the location a different challenge to NYC, but we're nearly there. Either way, it'll be free to the public, as easy to get to as LA makes it, and running from 1700 to 2300 each day.

And I hereby publicly promise to attempt to capture the proceedings as I did last time (though those who were there in New York will have noted I ran out of steam on the last day or so - eternal apologies to those with unfinished write-ups). Can't wait - the last time I visited LA it prompted more than a few thoughts. And if it's good enough for Reyner Banham, it's good enough for me.

Postopolis! LA is sponsored by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and ForYourArt, to whom we are very grateful, and it will be part of Los Angeles Art Weekend. Postopolis LA logo by Joe Alterio.

m3 moiré façade model

Back in January, in an entry on façades, I noted a recent, and relatively local, favourite - the extraordinary western face of the Brisbane Girls Grammar School Creative Learning Centre. Brisbane buildings have to posess a trick or two to deal with the fierce sun on their western side, and local firm m3architecture obliged with a protective layer of anodised aluminium slats, overlaid onto a wall painted with black and white stripes ... which just happens to create a gigantic moiré effect as you move past it.

The school sits on a hill adjacent to the six-lane Inner City Bypass, and so commuters witness the entire six-storey façade undulating and revolving as they drive past. In my earlier post I promised a video of the thing in action and I'm yet to deliver, but in visiting the excellent (and aforementioned) 'Place Makers' exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane recently, I captured the next best thing - some rough videos of the exhibition's simplified 1:11 scale model of the western wall.

That is essentially exactly what it looks like, just 1:11 scale. The moiré effect is surprisingly simple, as this close up of the model indicates. (For the curious Wikipedia's definition of the moiré is worth a read.)

Some photos of the model at 'Place Makers', which is also simple but a very effective display.

Some images from an Architecture Australia article, indicating what it looks like in context:

m3 produced some notes on their design for the building on their website, though they don't reveal much detail about the provenance of the moiré idea - except perhaps in the phrase "dynamic space of circulation". I half-wonder whether the feathers of local parrots or the ubiquitous slats and blinds of Queenslanders' verandahs may have provided subconscious inspration.

m3 moiré façade videos at Vimeo
'Place Makers' and architecture scenes
'Place Makers', Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
m3architecture

The Murder of Crows, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Biennale of Sydney 2008

As part of the recent Biennale of Sydney, I took in the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller installation at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay. The festival programme describes the work thus:

“Since the 1990s, the experimental art of Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller has been a fascinating exploration of how sound affects and shapes our experience. World-premiering at the 2008 Biennale is their largest installation to date, The Murder of Crows – an astounding 100-speaker artwork that envelops the viewer/listener in the experience of the sculptural and physical qualities of sound. The large and cavernous space of Pier 2/3 is filled with speakers mounted on stands, chairs and walls, creating a minimalist ‘flock’. The installation is structured like a play or film, but with images created only by voice, music and sound effects. Inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – from the series of etchings called ‘Caprichos’ (c. 1799), which was a denunciation of the evils of society in Spain in his day – the artists have placed a lone megaphone horn on a table in the middle of the space. Out of this horn comes Cardiff’s voice reciting dreams and thoughts as if, like Goya’s sleeper, she is absorbed in her own nightmares. Using multiple soundscapes, as well as compositions by Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, the artists create a ‘sound play’ that physically envelops the listener in a moving field of sound and music. Morphing in a dreamlike way from war marches to lullabies, the piece is a requiem to today’s battered world.” [Biennale of Sydney]

That’s about right, and immersing oneself in a 100 speaker installation is of course an affecting experience. Indeed, I’d seen/heard Cardiff/Bures Miller’s prototype for this work, Forty Part Motet, on a bleak Sheffield day a few years earlier, an extraordinary 40-speaker recreation of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium (1573), with once voice tracked to each speaker. It’s as if you’re a ghost, able to move around a full choir as you please, pausing to listen to one voice, or a group of voices, without the ‘singers’ noticing. (Someone captured a fragment of it here, and there’s more information about it here.)

A few years later, as I through around the forest of speakers placed around Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay, winter sunlight bursting through the high windows and the gentle creak of the old pier introducing itself to the mix, under duress to the harbour’s currents, I can’t help but conclude that Cardiff and Bures Miller - in this mode at least - are a bit 'one-note', which is somewhat ironic given the polyphonic spree that their works increasingly revolve around. It's the same principle as 40 Part Motet, yet with 60 extra speakers. Having said that, it’s still a beguiling trick. Technically adept, often sublime, but I'm not sure how deeply it affects, ultimately. I think perhaps Tallis’s Spem in Alium is also a far superior piece of music, although The Murder of Crows has far more variation.

(Another Cardiff/Bures Miller piece is the The Muriel Lake Incident, seen at Tate Modern years ago, which has a lightness of touch absent in Forty part Motet and Murder of Crows. It's almost penny arcade, but no worse for that.)

The videos below are partly the result of the usual games of ‘exhibition pacman’ with the Biennale’s staff, after I'd noticed a small poster declaring an unnecessary (I thought) ban on the use of cameras. So the first of these videos is taken with the camera behind my back, in my clasped hands, as if I were going for a stroll along a promenade. Hence it looks as it does. You can hear the choral component fading as I move towards the speakers denoting the piano. The other is a little smoother, featuring a segment in which the sound of the ocean dissolves into a woman's voice recounting a dream. The woman's voice is apparently located within the megaphone horn mentioned above. The music varies considerably over the 30-minute duration, so don’t take these elements as representatives of the entire piece. And obviously, any sound recording would struggle to convey the sculptural quality of the sound, distributed as it is, never mind reproduce the fidelity - and certainly not my digital camera.

I did enjoy the work, though wasn’t as moved by it as I was by Forty Part Motet. In fact I was most taken with Pier 2/3 itself, which is a simply wonderful space. One of the 4 salvaged piers that comprise Walsh Bay, right by the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it’s a place with stories to tell for sure, despite its cavernous interior being left unadorned, detritus simply shoved to one side. It has its own distinctive music nonetheless.

Pier 2/3 also contained a reconstruction of Luigo Russolo’s noise-makers, Intonarumori (1914), and a quite beautiful untitled painting by Doreen Reid Nakamarra.

A collaborative map of modernism in Australia

I'd long ago decided to try to deliver constructive criticism with this site. So in discussing the ideas for 'distributed exhibitions' in the previous review of the 'Modern Times' exhibition at the Powerhouse, I decided to try to make an example of what I meant.

The simplest possible offering that still illustrates the point would be a Google Map of 'modernism in Australia' - an artefact that lives outside the exhibition, guiding people to examples of the work that exist outside the exhbition. So I started a map, dragged a few blue markers into place, and then enlisted a few friends and colleagues to help me kickstart it.

And many thanks to Super Colossal's Marcus Trimble, Canberra House's Martin Miles, Rory Hyde from The Architects, who did the bulk of the additions. Stuart Harrison, Andrew Maher from work and a few others formed a supportive advisory panel. We have a few more potential contributions to come from Perth's Best, Max Creasy, architects at Terroir and Hassell, and a few others I hope.

But within a week, we'd got a pretty good set of examples - over 180 buildings and structures, located pretty exactly, and many with links and images (and we've tried to credit images where possible.) Houses, skyscrapers, civic buildings, sculptures, memorials. (And we didn't want to get into a debate of what formally counted as modernism and what didn't - inclusivity was the order of the day. Having said that, if you think there's a property that shouldn't be listed there, for whatever reason, do let me know.)

It's a little skewed towards the south and east, to say the least - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, to be precise. We're hoping to rectify that, with your help. We need contributions for the other major cities in Australia, and I've decided to take a curatorial approach rather than fully open, given the hard work put in by others thus far and the lack of back-up/roll-back facilitites in Google Maps. So if you want to join in, and if you know of examples of modernism in built form - buildings, sculptures, infrastructure, built or unbuilt - drop me a line (email address below-right, where it says 'email me') and I'll happily welcome you in.

In the meantime, we hope you find the map useful, interesting. It's embedded below, though you might find this direct link more useful. I'll also send it to the Powerhouse Museum, offering it up as a potential adjunct to their exhibition, if they're interested.

View larger map of modernism in Australia

Modernism in Australia [Google Maps]
"Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia", Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, plus some notes on architectural exhibitions
Modern Times exhibition [The Powerhouse]

"Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia", Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, plus some notes on architectural exhibitions

The “Modern Times” exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum - part of Sydney Design 08 - is something of a curate’s egg. Containing some wonderful artefacts, the show is worth seeing for a few items alone. However, the unimaginative presentation is fairly disappointing and you walk away sensing an opportunity lost, as much as you are enlightened and enlivened by the possibilities inherent in the material.

The “untold story of modernism in Australia” is a tagline open to misinterpretation. It’s not that modernism in Australia is an “untold story” - as Australian modernism, through the likes of Boyd, Grounds, Seidler, Nolan, Preston, Dupain, the Featherstons et al, has a well-documented history here, and the architectural scene in Sydney in particular has an ongoing relationship with modernism. It’s more that the curators intended to tell a different story of modernism, one that focused perhaps a little less on architecture and built environment, and more on the social and cultural patterns emerging throughout the modern period. (This insight gleaned in an interview with curator Ann Stephen on ABC Radio National’s By Design show.)

While this is laudable, it should not negate engaging with architecture and urban planning - as this is the built expression of those social and cultural patterns. And it’s the buildings that we’re left with, marking modernism in the streets around us every day, long after the fashions, posters and poems have faded. Sure enough, many of the artefacts directly relate to architecture and urbanism nonetheless. In fact, although the exhibition opens on the body, health and the emerging fashion, it tends to become more centred around architecture, cities, and other fragments of built fabric as it continues.

Modular mass production in China

Circa 210 BC, in the Terracotta Army 兵馬俑

“Scholars of this material generally subscribe that the use of a system of ‘module and mass production’ accounts for the diversity. The phrase was coined by the German art historian Lothar Ledderose in 2000, when he used it as the subtitle of his book, which had an image of the Terracotta Army on its cover and contained a compelling thesis about the distinctive nature of creativity in China. Most commentators have picked up on the mass-produced nature of the figures; a display case in the exhibition shows a modern reconstruction in little clay figures of the production line. It is modelled in the style of the Socialist Realist sculpture that was used in Mao’s day to generate such vast agitprop dioramas of life-size figures as Rent Collection Courtyard (portraying the ways of pre-1949 ‘evil landlords’) or Wrath of the Serfs (portraying the ‘evil ways’ of the pre-1949 Tibetan monastic establishment). The point is not just mass production but the mass production of modular forms – three types of plinth, two types of leg set, eight types of torso and so on – which can be combined and recombined and combined again into a simulacrum of diversity. This is not so much mass production in the sense of the Industrial Revolution as in the sense in which it is deployed by Starbucks, where everyone can think they are getting just what they want.”

“Ledderose’s analysis of module and mass production in Chinese culture extends across a range of phenomena, one of them being the Chinese script, where again a relatively small number of modules can be combined to generate forms running into tens of thousands. The contemporary artist Xu Bing used the same principles to generate thousands of unreadable characters in A Book from the Sky of 1987-91.”

From 'At the British Museum', Craig Clunas, London Review of Books.

 

‘Place Makers’ and architectural scenes

Cities can sometimes get too large to have coherent music scenes, and thus they splinter, into Shinjuku, Lower East Side, West London, and so on. just as they can be too large to enable a novel format. So the city-wide scale of Our Mutual Friend becomes the focused suburban view of London Fields.

I find myself wondering whether cities have to be relatively large to enable an architectural scene. The physical infrastructure, higher unit costs and lack of pace endemic to building urban fabric require a little more scale than lighter, more fluid creative industries. A medium- to large-sized city is required, perhaps, to go beyond the influence of a single architect or practice.

The big three eastern Australian cities are certainly big enough to have claims over architectural scenes, though it’d take a braver person than I to offer a detailed demarcation of each. So what follows is a brief theory constructed to provoke and confuse, based on a reading of the city's scenes in which any contrary examples are ignored in order to make my point.

The Melbourne scene is clearly expressive, discursive, chock full of ideas, playful, bold, aware that the rich loam that is the city’s uniquely rich discourse in architecture and design offers up opportunities for experimentation. And thus firms like ARM, DCM, Wood Marsh, Paul Morgan Architects, John Wardle Architects, BKK, Crowd, Andrew Maynard etc. (It’s where FAT would be based, were they Aussie.) Derived from the intellectual platform of Gromboyd rather than their formal approach.

Sydney famously specialises in a regional modernism or organic modernism, derived from the Sydney School (aka ‘nuts and berries’ school. 50/60/70 has more on that.) Thus JPW, Hill Thalis, Stutchbury & Pape, Alex Popov. Cox and Seidler to some extent. The sails of the Opera House and lightness of touch of Glenn Murcutt above all.

But Brisbane has been the story of the last few years in Australian architecture, as noted here before. The freedom afforded by the sub-tropical climate and the rich vernacular of the ‘timber and tin’ tradition combine with a newly found economic and cultural confidence, to enable a scene which plucks what it likes from both the aforementioned traditions and fashions something new. This confidence is manifest in a forthcoming exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art this August to November. It'll necessitate another trip - at least the fourth this year. Oh for a high-speed rail link - but I'm already excited about it.

The exhibition is dubbed ‘Place Makers’, hinting both at the wider remit of good architects and their contribution to the new Queensland. Apparently, it’ll be the largest exhibition of contemporary architecture ever staged in an Australian art museum, so it’ll be fascinating to see how they present the work, as place-making doesn’t necessarily lend itself to models and drawings, as beguiling and useful as they might be.

The place making practices featured are:

Rex Addison / Andresen O’Gorman / Arkhefield / Bark / Bligh Voller Nield / Bud Brannigan Architects / Lindsay & Kerry Clare (Architectus) / Cox Rayner / Donovan Hill / Elizabeth Watson Brown Architects / Ian Moore Architects / James Russell / JMA Architects QLD / m3architecture / Owen & Vokes / Phorm Architecture + Design / Gabriel Poole / Richard Kirk / Riddel Architecture / Steendÿk / Jennifer Taylor & james Connor / Wilson Architects

Some spiel from the exhibition website:

“‘Place Makers’ presents architectural projects that successfully address key aspects of subtropical living, as well as urban renewal and density, and the timeless concerns for basic human needs and wellbeing.

The exhibition reveals the extraordinary diversity of residential work being produced in Queensland, and includes internationally recognised commissions for individual houses, modest suburban ‘infill’ designs, an isolated dwelling in regional Queensland, innovative new public housing, and an exemplary coastal high-rise.

‘Place Makers’ contextualises some of the state’s most exciting recent architecture, and profiles the capabilities and inventiveness of Queensland architects today.”

Place Makers: 2 August-23 November 2008 [Queensland Art Galleries | Gallery of Modern Art]

(Apologies for collating all these woeful websites of the firms featured. What is it with architects and the web?! Any claims that architecture makes in terms of its fitness and facility for digital spatial organisation in general must be resisted until a little progress is made in this most basic of areas. DCM's site is retrievable, maybe one other.)

+&-=X 20 years of typo-graphics from the Tokyo Type Directors Club. UTS Gallery, Sydney

We're temporarily staying near to the intriguingly-named Ultimo inner-city suburb of Sydney, just in time to catch the last few days of an excellent little exhibition entitled: +&-=X 20 years of typo-graphics from the Tokyo Type Directors Club. The show's over now, but I managed to take some quick photos. Running at the University of Technology Sydney's tiny UTS:Gallery, it was curated by John Warwicker, one of the founders of UK design collective Tomato. (Warwicker is now living in Melbourne, I note, where the show started at Monash University. I also note that Warwicker quietly designed one of my favourite Australian magazines, The Monthly.)

"Since 1990, the Tokyo Type Directors Club has staged an annual international design competition to celebrate the visual expression of letters. Along with international judges, fifteen of Japan's leading typographers and graphic designers assess the best work. The award's freshness and vitality has constantly challenged what is thought of as typography and type design."

Warwicker is one of these international judges involved in Tokyo Type Directors Club, so has been well-placed to take a long view of the work emerging from this prestigious award. And sure enough, it's fantastic work. It's mainly poster-based, and seemingly well beyond straightforward typography - that phrase "the visual expression of letters" captures the sensibility perfectly. There are a few typefaces, but far more art, illustration, advertising, a few books, some sharp information design in the form of a wayfinding system, a few objects and so on. Many of the Japanese posters are flavoured with that distinctive vivid lyricism, rendered abstract through my lack of understanding of the language. As such, they have to be appreciated purely in terms of their graphical form, texture, colour. Many of them are startlingly lovely. (Sadly, the exhibition didn't easily list the designers, so I can't tell you who they are. Apologies.) Even the more obviously mainstream commercial work has a graceful elegance about it. In formal contrast, although also appealing, are the posters by the non-Japanese designers. These are more immediate, familiar, easier to decode, identify. Angus Hyland's charmingly direct 'This is a poster' - it's certainly not a pipe - stands out, through its clarity and wit. Likewise Alexander Gelman's poster. See also London's Kerning. But many other works also catch the eye and tweak the synapses.

For a small space, there was a lot of work, but it didn't feel over-crowded. The exhibition design was appealingly spartan, with most posters simply clipped on the wall, though - as ever - I could have done with a little more context. At least a simple guide to the designers, mapped to their work perhaps. So the photos I took (see full set) actually give you a sense of moving through the exhibition as I did, pausing over some of the items, hugely enjoying drifting through the images but unable to delve much deeper beyond that. Also, some of the more beautiful items couldn't really be captured digitally, such as this below, comprising gold printed over black but entombed within a case and suffering the reflection of the overhead lights. It was still possible to see how lovely it was.

A small good thing, this exhibition. Discreet, unpretentious, concise but laced with technique and ideas. It may re-assemble and travel again, so keep an eye out for it. In the meantime, I've compiled a full set of quick photographs I took, over at Flickr.