![]() ![]() Today, the Toynbee Tiler would have an easier time writing a blog, but the film shows his attempts to use other methods to find an outlet and audience for his message, from ham radio transmissions to calling in to talk radio shows. Through interviews and by tracing clues scattered in the tiles, newspapers, and minutes of an esoteric organization, they suggest that the tiles were primarily a means of communicating a public message in a pre-Internet world. While the film is fascinating on a variety of levels, one of its most poignant aspects is the way the filmmakers create a portrait of the unknown Tiler. While the basic message doesn’t vary, he adds, at times, addenda and marginalia that range from mentioning the USSR to critiquing the media. The tiles defy explanation, though they have the stylistic consistency of a single artist. The Toynbee Tiler has been prolific, installing his pieces since the 1980s in the asphalt of urban streets from his home base in Philadelphia, across the Rust Belt, to South America. The tiles have a central, cryptic message that invoke historian Arnold Toynbee and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick: While the film plays out as History Detectives for hipsters, the story is compelling. In the award-winning 2011 documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, four men from Philadelphia search for the creator of an idiosyncratic series of public art pieces that, in its consistency and repetition, can be seen as an exhibition. The Toynbee Tiler’s main style, in Philadelphia’s Center City.Īt its heart an exhibition is a display of objects, grouped together by a shared theme, style or message, and designed for public consumption. ![]()
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