Logotypes

A great album of logotypes from a mid-1970s textbook - World of Logotypes

Wallpaper from the '70s

Here's an interesting online shop where you can buy rolls of great 1970s wallpaper designs.

Hillary and Bill Clinton in the 1970s

How it works - the computer

Great Ladybird book from 1971 reproduced here.

The Usborne book of the future

First published in 1979.

The economic story of 2007

Interesting blog post here:

"The economic story of 2007 isn't Facebook being worth $15bn, its not the subprime mess and the resulting credit crunch, its not the fact that the US economy seems eerily similar to where we were in 1975."

Loraine Leeson: Art for Change

A retrospective of Loraine Leeson's practice over 30 years combining activism, politics and education. Leeson’s grassroots campaigns using classic photomontage techniques are important documents of East London’s rich social history over the last 30 years.

The exhibition Art for Change celebrated Loraine Leeson as an artist whose work has influenced and supported social change for over 30 years. The exhibition presents a retrospective of work from the mid 70s to the present day. Combining activism, politics and education Leeson's collaborative grassroots campaigns are among the most exciting in East London's rich social history.

Touring LA with Rayner Banham

Lovely set of photos on this virtual tour of LA here...for more background see this earlier post

Thamesmead, Riverside School 76 - 78

Fantastic, evocative photo set here.

"In my early days I was employed, at my second school, as a science teacher at Riverside School, Thamesmead. Situtated on the Bexley/London border, it was a relatively new school in a "London" housing estate. Riverside School is now Bexley Business Academy.

I went into teaching full of belief and idealism, knowing that our children had limitless potential. After 5 years I realised that there was no place for idealism in teaching. I left in 1978 not knowing what I would do.

Some of the photographs in this set were shown in a "Half Moon Photogaphy Workshop" exhibition in 1979. I titled the exhibition "Lost at School". Of course I was referring to my own situation, not that of the children in the photographs".

Museum visitors will also, of course, know that Thamesmead was the main location for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). There's nothing that sinister in these photographs though.

Qdos = whodos??

Not strictly speaking a 1970s post, but I thought the way in which this new 'service' is being marketed smacks of some of the surveillance/identity anxieties tracked elsewhere in this blog...don't really know if its thrilling or chilling....certainly conjures up some sort of big brother moment...

Conference in Portsmouth, July 2008

1970s BRITISH CULTURE

The School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at University of Portsmouth
have been awarded a large research grant from the Arts and Humanities
Research Council to write the history of British visual culture in the
1970s. This is headed up by Professor Sue Harper. Part of the project is to
run an interdisciplinary conference on the 1970s exploring the relation
between the society of the period and its culture in the broadest sense.
This conference will take place in Portsmouth on
1, 2 and 3 July 2008.

We are looking for papers on the following areas:

Cinema
Video
TV
Avant-Garde practices
Media (radio/magazines/journalism)
Design/graphics/architecture
Literature (novel/poetry)
Fashion
Politics
Theatre/performing arts/dance
Sexual and gender politics
Music
Race/class/national identity
Sub-cultural practices
History of theory

This list is not exhaustive so please forward abstracts for other areas
relating to 1970s culture that are not included.

Please send abstracts of 250 words to:
Peri Bradley – peri.bradley@port.ac.uk
and Professor Sue Harper – sue.harper@port.ac.uk

The deadline for abstracts is 31 January 2008. Please ensure you include
your name, affiliation, email address and a brief biography at the top of
your abstract.
For more information, please visit our website: www.1970sproject.co.uk

Running on Empty

From Metropolis Magazine:
"With fuel prices reaching record highs and concern about the planet’s dwindling resources mounting daily, Mirko Zardini, director and curator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), thought the time was ripe to revisit the moment when the reality of an energy crisis first crashed into the public consciousness. The exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas, on view at the CCA until next April, considers that decade’s oil crisis and the architecture community’s response, which included sig nificant experiments and research that Zardini fears are now being ignored. “Architectural thinking is very strange,” he says. “These people were heroes for a few years, and they have been forgotten. I feel that it is intellectually necessary to go back and pay homage to their contributions.” But if the show is in part a celebration of green pioneers like Michael Reynolds and Steve Baer, it is also a warning to contemporary architects enamored with solely technological-driven solutions, and a call for societal changes to combat looming ecological disaster."

More information here.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark's artistic project was a radical investigation of architecture, deconstruction, space, and urban environments. Dating from 1971 to 1977, his most prolific and vital period, his film and video works include documents of major pieces in New York, Paris and Antwerp, and are focused on three areas: performances and recycling pieces; space and texture works; and his building cuts.

Interesting collection of films here.

McLuhan comments on the 1976 Ford/Carter televised presidential debates

That's one of the reasons why Reagan beat Carter in 1980 - he understood TV. Joshua Meyrowitz analysed this intelligently in his 1986 book No Sense of Place.

Marshall McLuhan on YouTube