Today I framed 10 collages titled Future Living Project’s Good Design Is Good Living. I made them at the very end of 2011 and framed them with some cheap white frames that I found at IKEA. Not the best frames or the best mats (not archival) but I figured that it was better than nothing. The title is a little self mocking and the collages themselves were meant to mimic the look of radical architectural theorists of the 60’s and 70’s. Like Rem Koolhaas’ Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The Strip, Project, Aerial Perspective and SuperStudio’s Continuos Monument, I was interested in presenting a discourse on the relationship of the object/architecture to the political and social subject. I wasn’t particularly interested in depicting an overall unifying system of meaning but rather in showing an assortment of contexts between individuals and their surrounding landscapes. For some of the collages I used computer print outs of my own paintings as visual elements. The Invention Of The Isotropic Surface uses a part of Journey Into the Realm of Reason and All Things Future Living Projects uses From Safety ToWhere…? and At the Gates of Dawn. For all of the collages I first found black and white landscapes that I scanned, cropped and scaled to size. I then printed them on quality drawing paper. I had an assortment of cut out images from old magazines and a book on Ralph Lauren that I used as source material. I arranged these elements according to how I thought they best completed the overall composition; I tried to keep the amount of cutouts that I used to a minimum for each collage. The individual titles were all meant to reflect what the final collages represented and were all made using a list of vocabulary words that I had from some of John Miller‘s writings; I kept the list in order to better help remember their definitions. Here are the titles, in order, for the five works below.
Future Living Project’s Good Design Is Good Living: Prologue- The Monument (Continual)
Future Living Project’s Good Design Is Good Living: The Invention Of The Isotropic Surface
Future Living Project’s Good Design Is Good Living: The Capital Is Yet To Be Seen
Future Living Project’s Good Design Is Good Living: This Life Is No Longer Yours
Future Living Project’s Good Design Is Good Living: Epilogue- Our History Is Not Yet Written
Brian Higbee 