Designing with Natural Forms by Natalie d’Arbeloff (review)

Books 277 include men or women. The models’ figures are too young, considerably less than classic and too hirsute, eliciting as much intellectual response as the bathing suit markings of the bleached blonde. Hamm has a photographic eye that lends a touch of commercialism to his sketches. It is in some of his paintings that a certain sensitivity and freedom of expression emerges. His method of emphasizing ‘the terminators’, lightening the shadow areas of a form to emphasize the dark termination of those shadows where they meet the illuminated areas, is a solarizing technique familiar to any photographer who has spent time in the photo processing laboratory. The results are startling, a truly different variation of an ancient theme. Readers should be cautious about using ‘megilp’ along with Hamm’s ‘putrid0 white’. While the latter name could not be more appropriate (it is slang Italian for ‘stinks’), Ralph Mayer advises that the use of such a mixture, and especially megilp, is sure to cause cracking of the paint surface. Designing with Natural Forms. Natalie d’Arbeloff. Batsford , London, 1973. 96 pp., illus. E1.90. Reviewed by S .W. Hayter* This book at first inspection reveals some delightful photographs of water, bubbles, plants, shell and hand forms but the text in some way was disappointing. Such a book immediately arouses one’s curiosity as to what is meant by ‘design’ and, more generally, education, as the reiteration of teacher and student expressions makes it clear that this is its purpose. In this context, one fears that ‘design’ implies the reduction of creative action for purposes of industry, propaganda and publicity with the ultimate result of gain. Such a purpose would seem to qualify students for the practise of a skilled trade called ‘designing’. Education, either literally leading forth (e ducio) or a system aimed at the acquisition of skills for gain, is in this book unwittingly conditioned by the absurd hierarchy of systematic indoctrination that characterizes establishments in our developed countries. And yet we find to our utter astonishment a quotation from Ivan Illich, without doubt the most determined opponent of such attitudes in teaching . According to his theory of education, a leader of any group activity must be capable of approaching the matter of knowledge on the same level as the ‘student’ and this with absolute humility, himself seeking awareness. To examine the book in greater detail, the first section is appropriately dedicated to the subject of water, without doubt one of the most important image resources in our experience. However, instead of the wider aspect of current and standing wave, the large movement of deep water, of confined and shallow ripples, breakers or even the light patterns in a swimming pool, we have indoor experiments with water in trays. Surely more reference to the enormous contrasts of scale and a knowledge of elementary wave mechanics would have been more informative to the reader-in fact, an analysis of the structures in the top left-hand photograph on page 14 might amplify the subject rather than reducing it to pattern. The only excuse for reducing the fantastically exciting interpenetrations of ellipsoid-helicoid spirals in a pineapple to a flat linoleum pattern seems to be the necessity of banal ‘design’. And in the chapter devoted to the hand there is almost a deliberate avoidance of the character of all closing hand structures about a decelerated upward helicoid spiral. But we are perhaps demanding too much from a work intended to cultivate the genius exhibited in the ‘Hand Chair’. But the bibliography given in this book is really of high interest and value. It includes a seminal work like d’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Forin: Sensitive Chaos, for the illustrations but not the text; the limited but provocative Ambidextrous Universe and Koestler’s pretentious Act *12 rue Cassini, 75014-Paris, France. of Creation, which should be valuable for infuriating an active mind. But this also on condition that the bibliography is not approached with the self-limiting attitude of a ‘utilitarian’ view defined by the author on page 86, a note that reconciled me to the idea that the author might actually have consulted these books. Masks: Their Meaning and...