Michael Barrett
S. Neil Fujita
I bought a record player recently. I’ve been quietly lusting after one for about 3 years now. In my old neighborhood in Portland, there is a converted gas station which sells pizza. The cool kids working there play punk rock from a milk-crate full of vinyl. I want to travel through time and be them.
One of the reasons I needed a record player was the art work. I love the big 12” square image tuned to the music behind it. One of my very favorites is Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.
The cover is a bit of typography perched over a purple and orange abstract painting filled with circles, orbs, and motion.
This morning I decided to use the google-machine and I learned that this album cover was designed by S. Neil Fujita - he created the layout, typography, and the painting.
Fujita was hired by Columbia Records to create many of their album covers. Now that I know who he is, I realize I’ve seen his work everywhere.
Oh, and he also created the cover art for The Godfather.
There is a series of small paintings by Al Held at the Seattle Art Museum right now. The paintings are based upon letterforms.
They’re very graphically satisfying - like hand painted signage cropped close.
The left wing suspects that art is opium; the right suspects it’s PCP. Neither recognizes it as the conventional, civilized forum that it is. Failing to recognize this, they assume that ordinary citizens are not cognizant of its conventional nature either and thus cannot be trusted to distinguish artifice from actuality, words from deeds, signs from referents, narratives from actions. This is elitist balderdash, yet for the past thirty years, the left and right wings of American culture have urgently conspired to “civilize” art itself. To mitigate art’s ability to civilize us by striving to civilize art itself
Excerpt From Perfect Wave by Dave Hickey
