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 Tired of tarting up the work of writers, two artists stand up for freestanding illustration. May 2001
Blechman, former art director of the New York Times Op-Ed Page, calls the series "riffing on a theme"--spinning out drawings based on ideas rather than on copy. Niemann, an illustrator for magazines including the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and the New York Times Magazine, describes the work as "editorial illustration without an editor." Under the guise of 100 Percent, they have completed three projects together: 1998's You Are Here: The Revised Atlas of the World, a book of drawings about geography; Blueprint: One Hundred Thoughts on Architecture, a series of drawings printed on one blueprint sheet in 1999; and Love, published this past February. Once illustrators could more or less draw their minds for commercial magazines--as Saul Steinberg, Seymour Chwast, and other conceptual illustrators did in the 1960s and '70s. But today magazines are increasingly photography oriented, and illustration is viewed as secondary. "There's only one space where illustration can exist, and that's in magazines and publishing," Blechman says. "We're creating an alternative space for drawings." Initially, Blechman says, "we wanted to do those 100 books that have never been published before. But we realized that if we were to do 100 books, it would keep us busy until we were 100." So instead they kept the 100 and changed the rules. Each edition of 100 books is a certain percentage of the whole, as determined by its price. You Are Here is 23 percent because it cost $2,300 to print. One Hundred Thoughts on Architecture is 8 percent and costs $8. Ultimately the numbers will add up to 100. To keep them in the realm of pleasure and not business, the books are sold mostly through word of mouth. You can find them online at http://members.aol.com/xpercent/hom.html, and at the New York bookstore Printed Matter. |
