Marina Abramović Live at MoMA

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164mins

From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history. During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's centre, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. A support group for the "sitters", "Sitting with Marina", was established on Facebook as was the blog "Marina Abramović made me cry". 

In fact, I didn’t find any information about the reason why spectators cried when they stared at Abramović’s eyes. And I didn’t visit this exhibition. I actually image more like a kind of film set. There is a huge square of light. And just that square, like lost in translation, in some way. It's so simple, it's like nothing there. It's just artist sitting like mountain. Looking you in the eyes, people don't understand that the hardest thing is to actually do something which is close to nothing. There is no story, any more to tell.

The most important point is communication in design. But sometimes we can’t use our work to communicate with spectators directly, and we need talk about some background about our work to audiences. However, Abramović did nothing else but communicating in how they were breathing or other tiny things with visitors. Therefore, we should explore this question how to achieve exchange of ideas in design.

London transport_Traffic Problem

 

Victor Galbraith, 1959

<The better way is to stagger your working hours>

Another approach to reducing peak traffic urged passengers to stagger their working hours. Galbraith uses caricature form to spread this message simply, using an eye-catching and bold design. And the logo of London underground replaces tires, which enable people easy to understand the theme of poster.

William Kerridge Haselden, 1920

<Traffic>

As commuter numbers increased throughout the 1920s, so did overcrowding during peak travel times. This poster reminds passengers to travel at off-peak times where possible. In addition, Haselden also uses illustration to show this traffic situation.

Aldo Cosomati, 1927

<The pulse of London life>

This poster presents the fluctuating numbers of passengers each day on London's Underground and Bus. Red and blue stand for the London’s bus and underground respectively. What’s more, times and causes of peak traffic are highlighted, encouraging passengers to reassess their journey.

From above three posters, I feel that caricature form is fantastic way in design, which is amusing and makes people receive information rapidly. Furthermore, designers’ inspiration usually comes from their lives and experience (including traffic problem). Maybe designs can’t solve that question, but they can arouse people’s concern. For example, people just know that they caught by traffic jams, but they are not realized that the important reason which leads to traffic jam is they perversely likes to travel at the same moment.