Good design is honest. Good design is thorough to the last detail. Good design is as little design as possible. [Dieter Rams]

There is a brief, but important list of people that I would credit for my love of design, art and architecture. Individuals who’s guidance and mentorship was and is invaluable: my Oma and Opa, painter and photographer, respectively; my father, the engineer and photographer; Pat Dowie, photographer and printmaker; and Jacqui McFarland, interior and graphic designer. The rest, whom I’ve only known in books, photographs, and occasional consumer purchases include John Pawson, Jonathan Ive, and Dieter Rams. These individuals, seen and unseen, have collectively developed my aesthetic worldview, and I carry them with me every day.

All the more exciting then that Rams and Ive, among many others, are included in the list of personalities featured in Gary Hustwit’s latest film, Objectified, which debuted at SXSW, a couple weeks ago. I eagerly anticipate an announcement of a screening here in Calgary.

Printing as a vocation attracts many young and women, because it offers real opportunities for steady work, good pay and advancement.

Job security, stable earnings. Sounds good. Perhaps you’d like to cross-train on a Linotype machine.

For the record, I think about this line of education every day.

Rhode has previously come to light when Nike SB took heavy ‘inspiration’ from his pieces as the basis of a series of advertisments featuring Paul Rodriguez.

His work with BMW on the surface appears to be a long stretch from his foundation as a performance artist, in many cases being site-specific. In ‘Leak’ (2000), Rhode refenced Duchamp’s readymade ‘Fountain’ (1917) by urinating on a hand-drawn urinal inscribed on the wall of Cape Town’s South African National Gallery. Further:

Rhode’s visual and conceptual alphabet is built around issues of desire, loss, and dislocation in a capitalist world while also acknowledging the specific indignities of growing up “colored” in formerly apartheid South Africa. For instance, Park Bench (2000) was a life-size drawing of said object on the wall of the Parliament building in Cape Town, in an area that used to be off-limits to all but white South Africans. Dressed in dark, hooded clothing associated with trouble-making youths, Rhode then proceeded to loiter around his bench and was eventually arrested for defaming state property. [–Walker Art]

It would seem to me BMW wants desperately to identify with Rhode’s rebellious streak. I see that more to be a representation of the BMW of old, rather than the newer, softer BMW, but being a BMW vintage fan (and owner), I suspect I’m a bit biased.