#plastic modernism

[shapethings]

[yz]

Louise Bourgeois’ ‘The Couple’.

At Mass MOCA in North Adams, MA.

[fumifooms]

Old man wristwatch

[germanpostwarmodern]

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow and Blue, 1932, oil on canvas, 55.3 x 55.3 cm, Basel, Fondation Beyeler. Photo from December 2022.

[skeeverboy]

this is my flow chart for what emo album you should listen to depending on your mood. if your current mood or favorite emo album is not pictured let me know and i may create a sequel

[mannequinsvitrine]

Monsanto Plastics, Serviteurs de l'Industrie Moderne, 1940s.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Marzi's Old House Supply Kit: A Non-Exhaustive List

So you've moved into an old house! Congratulations! No, no, look at me. Look in my eyes. Congratulations. You don't need smart lighting. You don't need paltry things like "showers that don't make ungodly noises if you set the water outside a very specific temperature range" or "logical staircases." Because those people who say They Built Them Sturdier Back Then is survivorship bias are wrong, lead paint is only a problem if you eat it, and your new home is basically a tank

also it might have stained glass. so basically you win

(no but seriously the Survivorship Bias argument is just like. tell me you don't live in a city with large quantities of remaining working-class 110-year-old buildings without telling me. I do. they're sturdier. end of.)

but you might need some things to make it a bit more comfortable. here's what I've found, over eight years of living in houses built 1920 or earlier

Power strips. Depending on the age of your house, it may or may not have had electricity originally. And even if it did, whoever lived there almost certainly had fewer things to plug in than the average denizen of the 2020s. There also may have been gorgeous wall sconces that some asshole heartlessly ripped out at some point, forcing you to use the hideous hateful Overhead LightTM or plug in a bunch of lamps. Either way, you're going to need to turn that single outlet in the room into several more. Hence, power strips.

(hey, I never said this list was free of my design biases. deal)

A Good Fan. You may live in a place where retrofitting with air conditioning was commonplace in the last several decades. I do not. So a good pedestal fan can make the difference between comfort and just not sleeping at all from late June to mid-September. Weirdly, I did once look at a place that was from the 1850s and had been retrofitted with central A/C, which is vanishingly rare in even urban Massachusetts. But I digress.

A stud-finder. "Marzi, you spent years of your life explaining to tourists that picture rails existed because trying to hammer nails directly into horsehair plaster and then putting weight on them did Bad Things." Yes I did. "What did you attempt to do the second week of living in your first house with horsehair plaster?" ...shut up. I used the Poltergeist Method to find solid wood- I don't know if it's actually studs or the lath or what; I'm not a builder -to hang my Lady and the Unicorn tapestry from, namely knocking on the wall until it doesn't sound hollow. You might want to go a bit quieter and more advanced. Or, if you have a picture rail, embrace the "long visible hanging wires" look. It is in fact there for a reason!

Window screens. You are actually required by Massachusetts state law to provide these to your tenants. Doesn't mean my last landlady did. And if you own your place, live in another state, or have a similarly laissez-faire building owner, you might end up needing to Bring Your Own Insect-Blocking Shield. Just make sure you've got them, one way or the other. Because see above re: fan vs. air conditioning in old houses.

WD-40. When's the last time those hinges were oiled? Potentially before television. And they WILL squeak. UPDATE I HAVE BEEN INFORMED THAT WD-40 IS NOT A GOOD LONGTERM SOLUTION. Find "actual oil." Not sure what the more specific name is. Good to know!

That's just what I've found needful so far, but I'm happy to update the list as required!

And you'd better believe, if I owned my own place, this would include "the name of a preservation contractor to undo all the unnecessary ~*MoDeRnIzInG*~ aesthetic bullshit the past owners did since the End of Mainstream Western House Beauty AKA 1920 (That Brief Rococo Revival In the 1930s Can Maybe Sit With Us)"

[arc-hus]

Private House, Lège-Cap-Ferret, France - Lacaton & Vassal

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

Forgive me if this is something everyone else was already aware of, but the 1990s-era Finnish TV adaptation of LOTR was just brought to my attention and this is apparently Finnish Boromir:

And I have questions.

[konjacjellysoup]

Nyonya miku ft miku desserts

A follow up for the other half of my culture?? Genetics anyway

[onlylonelylatino]

Plastic Man and the Justice League by Yanick Paquette

[shapethings]

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Piet Monderian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942-43. Oil on canvas.

Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, one of the many European artists who moved to the United States to escape World War II. He immediately fell in love with the city and with boogie-woogie music, to which he was introduced on his first evening in New York. Soon he began, as he said, to put a little boogie-woogie into his paintings.

Mondrian’s aesthetic doctrine of Neo-Plasticism restricted the painter to the most basic kinds of line—that is, to straight horizontals and verticals—and to a similarly limited color range, the primary triad of red, yellow, and blue plus white, black, and the grays in between. But Broadway Boogie Woogie omits black and breaks Mondrian’s once uniform bars of color into multicolored segments. Bouncing against each other, these tiny, blinking blocks of color create a vital and pulsing rhythm, an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like traffic on the streets of New York. At the same time, the picture is carefully calibrated, its colors interspersed with gray and white blocks.

Mondrian’s appreciation of boogie-woogie may have sprung partly from the fact that he saw its goals as analogous to his own: “destruction of melody which is the destruction of natural appearance; and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm.” —from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art

Photo: Museum of Modern Art

[vasyandii]

Do you guys like my krueger headcanon

[germanpostwarmodern]

Piet Mondrian, Composition No.3 with Color Planes, oil on canvas, 48 x 61 cm, Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Photo from December 2022.

[thatscarletflycatcher]

"Isn't it great how much better acting is these days compared to older movies that were so exaggerated and theatrical?" I have news for you about art and naturalism being a style.