The Five Obstruction
The film is a Danish documentary directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. Von Trier's favourite film is Leth's The Perfect Human(1967) and von Trier gives Leth the task to remake it five more times with a specific obstruction each time. The obstructive limitation breaks Leth out of his filmmaking habits. By obstructing Leth's immediate path to success, Trier is able to manage his creative output in further creativity.
Even though there are specific restrictions in other obstructions, Trier didn't set up rules about other parts of the final outcome. It allows Leth to explore possibilities of new modes of filming techniques, as well as character-choicing, storylines and screen layout. These board amount of choices are the white spaces.
The third obstruction(no rules): No restriction leaves Leth in complete confusion of what direction he should go to, it also gives Leth a chance to push himself to another level in filmmaking, instead of producing something with similar pattern from his past works.
The last obstruction: Leth was asked to read the script written by von Trier, he seemed to be trapped as he didn't even have the right to decide on words yet he read it in a unexpected toned emphasised certain words instead some other in order to control the mood of the final vocal outcome.
The Economist
By the beginning of 2001, a large amount of readers unsubscribed The Economist because of the heavy- base context. With the black and white imagery, the texts are harder for readers to enjoy The Economist. The newspaper also kept published in black and white, and a bit of red only- this causes aesthetic fatigue due to long term consistency and losing clients from advertisement du to limited colour choice.
The dense information and high content requirements restrict the designer to undercut the allowance of context number, so instead of increasing type size, Erik Spiekermann used a light typeface and set the type slighty smaller with more leading. In result, the white space between each character and line increase: the context seems more legible and the amount of content remains the same.
Previous version
The new version
http://spiekermann.com/en/why-the-economist-is-thriving/
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909
From http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/
The founding manifesto of Futurism published on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. It celebrated the advancement of technology and urban modernity, and a severance with the traditions of the past. The high saturation of red on the background determined the intense content of the manifesto.
''Throw them all out. Finish them off!'', ''Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.'', ''Away with affected archaeologists with their chronic necrophilia! Down with the critics, those complacent pimps! Down with gouty academics and drunken, ignorant professors!'', etc.
White On White, Kazimir Malevich
White on White (1918) is an abstract oil-on-canvas painted by Kasimir Malevich, which is one of the more well-known examples of the Russian Suprematism movement. Suprematism is an art movement whereas artists focused on basic geometric forms during the time, producing works with circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, etc. They also limited themselves in the range of colours used.
The work measures 79.5 by 79.5 centimetres (31.3 in × 31.3 in), formed by absolutely no sense of colour, depth, or volume, with imprecisely defined boundaries, but two white squares- one with a slightly colder tone in the front, twisted off centre and in an angle. The whiteness suggests infinity in linear form and in 3 dimensional space. Although it is a oil painting, the thin dark 'shadow' along the edge of the white in centre gives a sense of floating visually. The brush stroke in the painting is delicate as the artist tried to make it look as if the tilted square is coming out of the canvas.
The Guerilla Girls, 1985-90
From http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/guerrilla-girls-6858
In 1984, a group of anonymous women, wearing gorilla masks, picketed the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA was opening a show which purported to be a definitive survey of contemporary art, and yet out of the 169 artists featured in the show, only 13 were female. Since their inception, the group have worked to expose the under-representation of women in the art world by targeting galleries, art dealers and critics.
The manifesto is shown in poster-form with bond texts on. Their slogans are displayed with highlights and ironic collages to make the then situation(undervaluation of works produced by women) in the art world.
Grayson Perry, 2014
Red Alan Manifesto By Grayson Perry
From https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/red-alans-manifesto
The manifesto is written under the authorship of Red Alan, a ceramic sculpture of his childhood teddy bear, Alan Measles. Perry explores a new pathway of how a manifesto should be layout, his handwriting in doddle style raises some of art's issue: Can anything be art? Who decides whether art is good or bad? And the visual language of his manifesto shows the concept which is to challenge the current social perspective towards the definition of artwork. This disordered hand written manifesto is definitely a new display among the rest of the time, which matches his first rule- no art is new or old fashioned only good or bad. The artist also includes his understanding of artists' journal in the industry- an artist's biggest work is very very rarely their best.