Summer 2024
Images do the talking
Seeing ↔ Making: Room for Thought
By Susan Buck-Morss, Adam Michaels and Kevin McCaughey. Inventory Press, $32.50.
Seeing ↔ Making: Room for Thought is an inventive and challenging new project from the always interesting publisher Inventory Press, now based in Los Angeles. Adam Michaels started the imprint during his time as partner at Project Projects in New York (see Eye 89). In 2012, he published The Electric Information Age Book, a study of experimental paperbacks produced by Marshall McLuhan, Jerome Agel and the designer Quentin Fiore in the 1960s (see ‘Massaging the message’ in Eye 8). Seeing ↔ Making, a still unusual interweaving of text and imagery, situates itself with great sense of purpose in that lineage.
As with the earlier experimental paperbacks, this is a work of shared authorship. The writing is mainly by the American academic, philosopher and theorist Susan Buck-Morss, who is perhaps best known for The Dialectics of Seeing, a highly original study of the German critic Walter Benjamin’s never completed investigation of the meaning of the shopping arcades in Paris. Jan van Toorn often cited Buck-Morss as an influence and she spoke about design and politics at his era-defining ‘design beyond Design’ conference at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where I first encountered her thinking.
The book’s designer is Kevin McCaughey, co-founder of Boot Boyz Biz, a ‘research and production cooperative’ based in New York. Boot Boyz Biz creates apparel and objects for cultural revolutionaries and hipster intellectuals smattered with irresistibly cool textual, pictorial and diagrammatic allusions to artists and cultural thinkers …
Rick Poynor, writer, Eye founder
Read the full version in Eye no. 106 vol. 27, 2024
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.