More is More is a photo collection of installation art by Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann (who go by Lang/Baumann or L/B). In beautifully detailed photographs, More is More features a number of everyday scenes that have been irreversibly altered by L/B’s fantastical concepts; bright bars of color weave their way along the worn pavement of an old-fashioned village, the underbelly of a simple park bridge is transformed into an abstract scene, twisting white stairs to nowhere climb out of a green lawn in front of wild-looking coastal trees.

The book also features many of their gallery displays. The average artist’s approach to a gallery show is to decorate the walls, but L/B’s approach is to visually reconstruct the entire interior of the building; decorating the walls has been done, they seek to alter the space. Such displays include rooms painted in ways that make the walls seem to warp in odd directions, rooms filled with geometrically intertwined inflatable white tubes on a goliath scale, and half straight, half spiral stairs that seem to hover in the air of their own volition.

But it is not just the art in More is More that makes the book such a fascinating perceptual experience; the photographs and their arrangements on the page are artistic feats of their own. The photos are taken at off angles and each one is juxtaposed against a reflection of itself on the opposite page. The resulting effect is the illusion of one, symmetrical image. In some instances, the effect is downright disconcerting. When viewing the mirror images of Beautiful Wall #3, I turned my head and leaned so far to the left that I nearly toppled over, and still the image seemed to be spinning away from me. I can only imagine what it must have been like to stand in that room.

A further enhancement of the book experience is the collection of artist’s drawings and notes in the back of the book. These drawings allow for a rare insight into the artists’ planning and creative process in the pre-production stages. The notes include details about the actual construction, as well as the reactions of the locals to having the installations in their towns. In Spiral #3, a boxy white structure that temporarily climbed the tracks of a shutdown cliff railway, the residents of the neighborhood were noted to have “embraced the work as a welcome symbol of their efforts to reinstate the funicular.”

The photographic angles and the back-of-the-book insights can only add to the phenomenal experience that is L/B art installations. Between the golden covers of More is More, L/B have compressed goliath-scale structures and psychedelically bright-colored expanses into a one heck of a coffee table conversation starter.

Reviewed by Jaidree Braddix

More is More was published by Gestalten

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“Now that culture is for everyone and everyone is for culture, culture is everywhere.” It’s a bold statement indeed, and one that appears along the spine of this smartly bound hardback title recently put out by Gestalten Press. Identity is a reflection of the cultural tempo of the times. museums, theaters, galleries, and other cultural hubs have come to represent spaces that educate us, and eventually culture us. However, when we look at the posters, banners, catalogs, and transport graphics that have been the reticent voices of these institutions for decades, we begin to wonder what has pinpointed the cultural tempo most effectively. Is it the artwork housed within these venues, or the design of the institution’s tangibly branded press artifacts?

Branding has been associated with industry, a comparatively lowbrow sect of culture, at least when defined in comparison to cultural institutions. Yet the gap between high and lowbrow culture is rapidly closing and overlapping. As art has become increasingly commercialized and branded, institutions have had to follow suit. This phenomenon is responsible for the evolving function and identity of the cultural institution as a whole.

This book reveals exceptional graphic designers that have worked with curators, forming an alliance or bridge between “institutions, artwork, and audience”—synthesizing a personality for these institutions that visitors engage with on a regular basis. Introducing: Culture Identities pays homage to the graphic designs and branding patterns that have shaped the way we perceive these salient cultural institutions. Graphic design in all forms, however subtle, from local to national museums, galleries, art fairs, and theaters, creates a web connecting cultural identities. The glue of this web is a connective aura produced by selective branding.

This title presents a collection of case studies and analyses forming a superb recourse for understanding the role of museums and other institutions. It is often overlooked that museums, such as MoMA, do in fact engage their viewers with highly effective branding tools, not unlike the ones we would find at the local Starbucks or dare I say it, McDonalds.

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