Interview

I was running a little behind schedule in getting to the 24 Hours Plays Benefit last night in time for an 8 PM curtain, but so were the starry lot of performers. By the time I got to American Airlines Theater, only a few autograph hounds were still lurking outside on 42nd Street, poised for a glimpse of a Crudup or an Aniston.

Presented by Mont Blanc, 24 Hour Plays on Broadway is an annual one-night-only event—this being its ninth year—that benefits the Urban Arts Partnership, which supports arts education in public high schools across the city. And this year featured the most stacked lineup yet.  
 
There are almost too many big-name actors to run down in a single breath, but here it goes: Anthony Mackie, Billy Crudup, Eva Mendes, John Krasinski, Rosario Dawson, Julia Stiles, Jennifer Aniston, Rachel Dratch, Emmy Rossum, Rosie Perez, Brooke Shields, and a trio of power actor couples–Ashton and Demi, Liev and Naomi, David and Amber. (Well, OK. Cross and Tamblyn, FYI.)

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For non-members of the cult of Bruce Mau, the dispute is usually with his outlook. Mau is the Canadian industrial and graphic designer admired and criticized not so much for any identifiable aesthetic than for his forward thinking and (some say naïve) optimism. His Toronto and Chicago studios, Bruce Mau Design (BMD), employ filmmakers, architects, writers, and artists who all work under the aegis of innovation for a better future. Mau is both a professor and advisor to his employees—they've been known to refer to BMD as "Bruce Mau University." And for young designers with heady ideas of solving the world's problems through design, Mau represents a sort of figurehead.

Mau's best-known works—S, M, L, XL, the 1,300-page book he co-authored Rem Koolhaas designed to jolt contemporary urban architecture out of its conventional thinking; Incomplete Manifesto, an articulation of Mau's approach to problem-solving; Life Style, a collection of Mau's essays that first consolidated his reputation as a leading thinker in design; and Massive Change, a multimedia project on sustainability—are social projects that propose ways to think about and change our lives for the better. They're more an architecture of ideas than physical design objects. (LEFT: AN INCOMPLETE MANIFESTO FOR GROWTH, 1998)

Last week, "Manifesto," a show of contemporary graphic design, opened at XYZ Gallery, a new nonprofit space in Treviso, Italy. Organized by Venice design studio Tankboys and copywriter Cosimo Bizzarri, "Manifesto" features thirteen design all-stars (Mau, Stefan Sagemeister, Mike Mills, Enzo Mari, Bob Norda, and others), each of whom contributed a graphic poster representative of their personal "manifesto." Mau was a natural choice for the show—his every project feels like a manifesto, in degrees; they all have a clear vision for the near-future that is unrelenting, and hopeful.


ZHONG: For "Manifesto," are you doing something new, or are you using an older piece?

MAU: We did a new version of the Incomplete Manifesto. The tension in the project is to articulate both leadership and collective.

ZHONG: And how is that expressed in this piece? It looks like a word puzzle.

MAU: I've always had a leaning toward games and systems.

ZHONG: You give the people who work for you autonomy. How do you manage that?

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Tonight feels a bit like the Fall inauguration ball in New York, across all media. West in Chelsea, Jacob Kassay, James Hyde, and Younger than Jesus alum Brendan Fowler combine media and forces in Nicole Klagsbrun's Project Room, while on the same floor of 526 W. 26th young New Deal curators Kyle Thurman and Matt Moravec co-host the opening of their second show in the past year, at Marvelli; a few blocks away, at PaceWildenstein, Maya Lin opens her spectacular geo-installations to the public; all the while, all over the city, Fashion's Night Out kicks off fashion week; if you head downtown to Soho, the Swiss Institute is putting up 5 parallel shows at once (and they're all good); and just up the street, catty-corner from Interview's offices, there is a curious little art happening happening. (LEFT: BRILLO, 2009)

We may not need to travel far to get to the opening act of the brand-new pop-up gallery Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi, but the artists certainly had to come some ways to get to us. MBK's first show features Y Liver, the Paris-based duo of David Liver and Rugiada Cadoni. "David is so excited to come to New York," one of the co-curators, Karen Bookatz, tells me. "He's never been before. Fa'iz [Marhami, another of the MBK principals] found Y Liver online. He contacted David, and they have been friends ever since. Fai'iz went to visit them in Paris and stayed on their couch. We actually started this gallery to show Y Liver's work to the world." (Which still begs the question: Which is the chicken and which is the egg?)

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Untitled, 2008.

Armed with a 5x7 large-format camera, a copy of John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, and a proper sense of awe, photographer Victoria Sambunaris headed West from New York last September. A longtime documenter of the American West and its incumbent landscape, both natural and manmade, Sambunaris met up with the Wyoming geologist Charlie Love, whose father was the renowned geologist David Love, and whose great-uncle was the environmentalist John Muir—a deep-set genealogical history traced by McPhee in Annals.

"I had not planned to stay ..." wrote the great nature essayist Gretel Ehrlich about Wyoming. Something about the landscape of that wide-open state, and the knowledgeable guidance of her travel companion David Love—they went on a four-day journey to visit Wyoming's most prized natural beauties, including Yellowstone National Park—caused Sambunaris to return a month later, on her own.

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