Quarterly
Ed Benguiat A Man of Letters
A Type House Divided
BARBARA KRUGER
American Conceptual/Pop Artist
30 UNDER 30 Top Young Designers to Watch For
BARBARA KRUGER
American conceptual/pop artist
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Pg 4 -BARBARA KRUGER IN HER TRIBECA STUDIO, NYC, 1987. PHOTO: DMITRI KASTERINE. Pg 5 - UNTITLED (WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE?), 1990. COURTESY MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK.
American conceptual/pop artist Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and left there in 1964 to attend Syracuse University. Early on she developed an interest in graphic design, poetry, writing a n d a tt e n d e d p o e t r y re a d i n g s . After studying for a year at Syracuse she moved to New York where she began attending Parsons School of Design in 1965. She studied with fellow artists/photographers Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who introduced Kruger to other photographers and fashion/ magazine sub-cultures. After a year at Parsons, Kruger again left school and worked at Condé Nast Publications in 1966. Not long after she started to work at Mademoiselle magazine as an entry-level designer, she was promoted to head designer a year later.
with her output and its detachment from her growing social and political concerns. In the fall of 1976, Kruger abandoned art making and moved to Berkeley, California, where she taught at the University of California for four years and steeped herself in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. She took up photography in 1977, producing a series of black-and-white details of architectural exteriors paired with her own textual ruminations on the lives of those living inside. Published as an artist’s book, Picture/Readings (1979) foreshadows the aesthetic vocabulary Kruger developed in her mature work. By 1979 Barbara Kruger stopped taking photographs and began to employ found images in her art, mostly from mid-century American print-media sources, with words collaged directly over them. Her 1980 untitled piece
“I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.” Later still she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at “House and Garden”, “Aperture,” and did magazine layouts, book jacket designs, and freelance picture editing for other publications. Her decade of background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. Like Andy Warhol, Kruger was heavily influenced by her years working as a graphic designer.
Her Art
Kruger’s earliest artworks date to 1969. Large woven wall hangings of yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons, they exemplify the feminist recuperation of craft during this period. Despite her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Fischbach Gallery, both in New York, the following two years, she was dissatisfied
commonly known as “Perfect” portrays the torso of a woman, hands clasped in prayer, evoking the Virgin Mary, the embodiment of submissive femininity; the word “perfect” is emblazoned along the lower edge of the image. These early collages in which Kruger deployed techniques she had perfected as a graphic designer, inaugurated the artist’s ongoing political, social, and especially feminist provocations and commentaries on religion, sex, racial and gender stereotypes, consumerism, c o r p o r a t e g r e e d , a n d p o w e r. During the early 1980s Barbara Kruger perfected a signature agitprop style, using cropped, large-scale, black-andwhite photographic images juxtaposed with raucous, pithy, and often ironic aphorisms, printed in Futura Bold typeface against black, white, or deep red text bars. The inclusion of personal
pronouns in works like Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981) and Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987) implicates viewers by confounding any clear notion of who is speaking. These rigorously composed mature works function successfully on any scale. Their wide distribution—under the artist’s supervision—in the form of umbrellas, tote bags, postcards, mugs, T-shirts, posters, and so on, confuses the boundaries between art and commerce and calls attention to the role of the advertising in public debate. American conceptual/pop artist Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and left there in 1964 to attend Syracuse University. Early on she developed an interest in graphic design, poetry, writing a n d a tt e n d e d p o e t r y re a d i n g s .
After studying for a year at Syracuse she moved to New York where she began attending Parsons School of Design in 1965. She studied with fellow artists/ photographers Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who introduced Kruger to other photographers and fashion/magazine sub-cultures. After a year at Parsons, Kruger again left school and worked at Condé Nast Publications in 1966. Not long after she started to work at Mademoiselle magazine as an entry-level designer, she was promoted to head designer a year later.
“I have no complaints, except for the world.” Later still she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at “House and Garden”, “Aperture,” and did magazine layouts, book jacket designs, and freelance picture editing for other publications. Her decade of background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. Like Andy Warhol, Kruger was heavily influenced by her years working as a graphic designer.
Her Art
Kruger’s earliest artworks date to 1969. Large woven wall hangings of yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons, they exemplify the feminist recuperation of craft during this period. Despite her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Fischbach Gallery, both in New York, the following two years, she was dissatisfied with her output and its detachment from her growing social and political concerns. In the fall of 1976, Kruger abandoned art making and moved to Berkeley, California, where she taught at the University of California for four years and steeped herself in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes.
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She took up photography in 1977, producing a series of blackand-white details of architectural exteriors paired with her own textual ruminations on the lives of those living inside. Published as an artist’s book, Picture/ Readings (1979) foreshadows the aesthetic vocabulary Kruger developed in her mature work. By 1979 Barbara Kruger stopped taking photographs and began to employ found images in her art, mostly from mid-century American print-media sources, with words collaged directly over them. Her 1980 untitled piece commonly known as “Perfect” portrays the torso of a woman, hands clasped in prayer, evoking the Virgin Mary, the embodiment of submissive femininity; the word “perfect” is emblazoned along the lower edge of the image. These early collages in which Kruger deployed techniques she had perfected as a graphic designer, inaugurated the a r t i s t ’s o n g o i n g p ol i t i c a l , social, and especially feminist provocations and commentaries on religion, sex, racial and gender stereotypes, consumerism, corporate greed, and power. During the early 1980s Barbara Kruger perfected a signature agitprop style, using cropped, large-scale, black-and-white photographic images juxtaposed with raucous, pithy, and often ironic aphorisms, printed in Futura Bold typeface against black, white, or deep red text bars. The inclusion of personal pronouns in works like Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981) and Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987) implicates viewers by confounding any clear notion of who is speaking. These rigorously composed mature works function successfully on any scale. Their wide distribution—under the artist’s supervision—in the form of umbrellas, tote bags, postcards,
Pg 6 - KRUGER’S UNTITLED (I SHOP THEREFORE IAM),1987.COURTESY MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK. UNTITLED (YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND), 1989. PHOTOGRAPHIC SILK-SCREEN/VINYL. COURTESY OF MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK. UNTITLED (BUSY GOING CRAZY), 1989. COURTESY MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK Pg 7 - UNTITLED (HE ENTERED SHOP AFTER SHOP...), 2008. COURTESY MARY BOONE GALLERY, NEW YORK
mugs, T-shirts, posters, and so on, confuses the boundaries between art and commerce and calls attention to the role of the advertising in public debate. In recent years Barbara Kruger has extended her aesthetic project, creating public installations of her work in galleries, museums, municipal buildings, train stations, and parks, as well as on buses and billboards around the world. Walls, floors, and ceilings are covered with images and texts, which engulf and even assault the viewer. Since the late 1990s, Kruger has incorporated sculpture into her ongoing critique of modern American culture. Justice (1997), in whitepainted fiberglass, depicts J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn—two right-wing public figures who hid their homosexuality—in partial drag, kissing one another. In this kitsch send-up of commemorative statuary, Kruger highlights the conspiracy of silence that enabled these two men to accrue social and political power.
“I’m living my life, not buying a lifestyle.”
Her Style
Barbara Kruger’s graphic work usually consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases usually make a bold statement and commonly use pronouns such as you, I, your, we and they. She juxtaposes imagery with text containing criticism of sexism/misogyny and cultural power structures. Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground.” Since her early years Barbara Kruger has also created installations comprised of video, film, audio and projection (she produced three large-scale gallery installations between 1989 and 1991). Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, her work is consistently about the kindnesses and brutalities of
Source: www.interviewmagazine.com/art/ barbara-kruger#_
BOLLEN: When you go through your studio,
socialdo life: howold wework are to youabout ever find andone areanother. surprised In these installation works Barbara or pleased or horrified by what you made 40 Kruger transferred words and images years ago? directly to the surfaces of the gallery. KRUGER: It feels like I made them yesterday. Each installation featured a text written when type I made still very on theI remember floor in white onthem. a redI’m ground. much in“All touchthat withseemed that the same way you Text reads: beneath you is speaking you now. that seemed probablytofeel about yourAllyounger self and who deaf that hears you. All that seemed dumb person was. knows what’s on mind. All that BOLLEN: When youyour attended Parsons, Diane seemed blind sees through you. All that Arbus was one of your teachers. What do you seemed silent is putting the words right about herWith influence on you? into remember your mouth.” a directness KRUGER: She was really terrific, sortwork, of my that is characteristic of Kruger’s the text addresses the .viewer’s senseto first female role model . . [waiter comes of certainty withthey thewant world. Kruger’s table] I think us toIn order. [Kruger installations the floor now has a voice, the examines menu with weekend brunch offerwalls can hear you, and the architecture ings] They have a brunch now? See, this is the is manipulating the way you speak. influence. Fourteen dollars for brunch. At Tribecan Kruger’s self-titled exhibition at order eggs] I grew coming to this Mary[both Boone Gallery, this up omnipresent, all-knowing andliterally all-seeing surveillance diner, sitting right here in this place. was heightened by the way in which text BOLLEN: I’m glad it’s still here. appeared not only the floor but also on KRUGER: So Diane was one of the first female the walls and ceiling - enveloping the role models I ever had that didn’t wash the viewer. To walk into the room was to be floor sixfrom times all a day. I liked herand as aright. teacher. It addressed sides, left for read a foundation at Parsons, so it was Whilewas one a text,year other messages would subliminally as shebe andtransmitted Marvin Israel, who was an art director one caught hold of a phrase or word and designer. They had an influence on me. in theBOLLEN: corner one’s eye. Hasofphotography in Disrupting general been a the seeming naturalness of the white big influence on you? gallery space, Kruger’s treatment of the have problems a lot of walls,KRUGER: floor,I and ceiling with underscored photography, particularly street photography the way in which architecture and
and photojournalism—objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too. BOLLEN: But there was a lot of photography coming from the artists you were around in your formative years down here. And a lot of respect for the artist as a sort of radical or mystic. KRUGER: For me, the idea of being an artist didn’t have to be tied to a bohemè melancholia. It’s because I come from a different class. I didn’t finish college, my parents didn’t graduate college; we didn’t have a pot to piss in. I’m from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn’t think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.
13 Typographic Faux Pas Avoid bad punctuation and type-crimes at your new job, who needs that type of attention?
ORPHANS
M. Neque Pid num ilit. nos esti pris, Palis? Halium, me ego hae mandeo, P. mei publicid caeli
WIDOW Ex mendam ia vid inumus cut aut notiussimum ompro in Etrae nove, simunte murbis publis auctuus; nostrum que ingulla is ses cre iusupere dessenatu es! Voculture forum publiam
RIVERS Quius, scertebus adhuit L. Untis cons caut gracitiaelum fes a nos ant gra, ses conditante crit, sit, vir ut ius, Catem ad cum nostore crum iampopo popotimo conscrei porsuli contra eo, C
KERN KERNED 6
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1. Failing to kern display type. Unseemly gaps can impede readability and be distracting to the reader. Adjusting the spacing between letters will assuage your guilt.
2. Underlining titles instead of italicizing them. Thou shalt not: The Holy Bible Thou shalt: The Koran
3. Failing to eliminate widows. A widow is a word that sits on a line by itself at the end of a paragraph. Avoid this or risk being cast into a lake of fire and brimstone.
4. Failing to eliminate orphans. An orphan is the last line of a paragraph that sits alone at the top of a column or page. Type does not like to be alone.
5. Rivers in justified text.
Unsightly large spaces between words occur if the line length is too short or the point size of the text too large.
6. Inconsistent leading.
Paragraphs should have the same leading for each line.
7. Indenting a paragraph too far. The first paragraph is never indented, subsequent paragraphs are.
8. Horizontally scaled type. Unrepentant: Scaled Penitent: A condensed typeface.
9. Vertically scaled type.
Purgatory: Scaled Heaven: An extended typeface.
10. Negative letterspacing. Not very readable.
11. Bad line breaks in headlines and body text.
If you don’t break lines for sense, they can be harder to read.
12. Faux italic/oblique, bold and small cap type.
Impure: Italic Pure: Italic Sinful: Bold Virtuous: Bold Unkosher: SMALLCAPS Kosher: Smallcaps
13. Failing to align baselines of type in adjacent columns of text. Baselines of all columns of text on a page should align. This creates a pleasing margin of pure white space.
Heroes Ed Benguait, A Man of Letters
This summer, there is only one show that’s really being discussed around the water cooler. Netflix’s Stranger Things has lured viewers in with its thrilling sci-fi plot, obsessive Eighties pop culture references and charming portrayal of middle-American life. Online, essays mediating on childhood friendship, the show’s treatment of women and the power of nostalgia abound. Stranger Things has made stars out of the pre-teen actors who give the show its heart, and their self-referential Instagram posts show that they know, too. For Winona Ryder, herself a trope of Eighties screen history, it has proved the comeback nobody saw coming.
“..the combination has been described as ‘pure, unadulterated typographic porn’” But Stranger Things has, well, a stranger thing that its followers have become fascinated by: its opening titles, and the font that is used within them. Stranger Things’s opening credits are an ode to typography. The drama’s title emerges only after the credits have woven their way through them, the lines that make up the letters glowing like the red neon bars of a Motel sign. Viewers have found themselves in typography forums, asking to identify the font used. Buzzfeed has dedicated an entire post to writing popular food types (“Macaroni & Cheese”, “Cookie Cake”) in the same style as
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the titles. The show’s creators, The Duffer Brothers, are questioned about their credit sequence endlessly. The Duffer Brothers recently told The Hollywood Reporter that their title font is a “super important” aspect of their show. They wanted to capture the look and feel of the 15 book covers – the vast majority from Stephen King novels - that they sent to a design company called Imaginary Forces. The result was, they said, completely true to the feeling of being “in middle school or high school reading those paperbacks.” Other viewers have experienced a lightbulb moment when they realise that the font is the same that is used on the children’s book series, Choose Your Own Adventure. Stranger Things shares its ability to make viewers travel through time with its title font, ITC Benguiat. The Duffer Brothers wanted the titles to be completely true to the feeling of being ‘in middle school or high school reading those paperbacks’.
“[Typefaces] are like you’re children. You have one child and you say, ‘that’s my favourite’” The man who designed ITC Benguiat is considered one of the type industry’s greats – and one of its longest-living. Ed Benguiat has created more than 600 fonts, many of which you will have used through a standard word processor. He also designed some of the most iconic logos and movie titles of the 20th century. And yet, outside of the graphic design industry, Benguiat is such a little-known name that even The Duffer Brothers hadn’t heard of the font named after him – let alone the man who created it. For Benguiat, however, that’s ok – he hadn’t heard of Stranger Things, either. The first he knew of it, and the fact his typeface had such importance
in it, was when I emailed him to see if he wanted to speak to me about it. The 88-year-old typographer (“But I tell everybody I’m 90”) replied instantly to my email in Helvetica, the font he uses “for mostly everything”, centered, in a range of sizes to make the first letters of our names tower over the others. Benguiat gave me an instant review of Stranger Things’s titles during our phone conversation a few days later. “It merges, it moves in and out, it’s very good. It’s rather pleasing and comfortable too. And yet exciting at the same time. It’s rather appropriate, if I might say. It lends itself to the feeling of the titles, it has a look. It’s like food – it’s hard to describe what something tastes like, or identify a good smell.” For the man who made the font, ITC Benguiat and Stranger Things is the design equivalent of catching a whiff of an apple pie in the oven. For the thousands of design nerds in love with Stranger Things, the combination has been described as “pure, unadulterated typographic porn”. When I told Benguiat this, he simply laughed and said: “Well, have fun! Maybe my royalties will go up!” Benguiat has traditionally used the ebb and flow of his royalties as a means of knowing if one of his fonts has swung into popularity; he had noticed a surge recently, which turned out to be due to Stranger Things. Like The Duffer Brothers, neither Stephen King nor The Smiths, who used the font on the cover of Strangeways, Here We Come, let Benguiat know before they used his font: “I only knew when I saw it on a newsstand or on a magazine, and I’d say, ‘Ooh, that’s mine’. But the royalties come in and that’s what I care about, primarily.” Benguiat recently noticed a surge in his royalties; it was all down to Stranger Things He remembers the days when his royalties were higher, namely because he had designed most of the fonts in existence. In 1970, along with fellow designers Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler, Benguiat founded International Typeface Corporation, one
American’s and lettering artist. Benguiat has crafted designs, here are just a few of his gems... Souvenir® (1970) Avant Garde Gothic® (1974) Korinna® (with Victor Caruso, 1974) Tiffany® (1974) Bauhaus® (with Victor Caruso, 1975) Bookman® (1975) Benguiat® (1977/79) Barcelona® (1981) Modern 216® (1982) Caslon 224® (1983) Panache® (1988) Century Handtooled™ (1992) Cheltenham Handtooled® (1992) Garamond Handtooled® (1992) Edwardian Script (1994). Ed Benguiat Font Collection (House Industries), including: Ed Brush Ed Gothic Ed Interlock Ed Roman Ed Script
Although he still played with bands until the fifties, his career was interrupted by the end of the Second World War. He signed up to the army after Pearl Harbour. “I wasn’t the right age”, Benguiat recalls. “My father forged my birth certificate so I would be the right age to enlist, which most kids did. Once I got in, they told me to be a pilot.” Benguiat became a fighter pilot, flying in combat from Italy over Germany between 1944 and 1945. It sparked an obsession with planes for the rest of his life. “I’m an aeroplane freak,” he says, “I kept flying after the military. I had classic aeroplanes, racing planes. The best.” Now, his favourite pastime is to look up at the sky and watch them fly by. Benguiat was interested in art from boyhood. It was a straightforward ambition that landed him in art school: “I didn’t know anything about it I just wanted to paint naked ladies.” It didn’t entirely work out: “My instructor said I better hurry up and get out of the art industry before I destroyed it because I couldn’t draw anything.” But, Benguiat realised, “if it was technical, I could draw it.” The female form, however, dominated his first job. “Everybody laughs at this, but it’s true: I had to remove the cleavage from photographs of women.” Benguiat worked as a paste-up boy for magazines
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such as Photoplay, Movie Life and Movie Stars Parade. Under the draconian censorship laws of the Motion Picture Production Code, known in the industry as the Hays Code after its president, “licentious or suggestive nudity” and “excessive or lustful kissing” had to be removed from films - and film magazines. “The magazines weren’t permitted to show the cleavage of a woman because Hay’s Office said it wasn’t proper,” Benguiat adds. “So I’d use an airbrush and re-touch it, or use a doily or something. I did that for two years.”
“They’re my keepsakes in my mind so when I walk down the street I can say, ‘Hey, I did that.’ You know. I’m very proud of it.” Typography had been in Benguiat’s family. His father was the display director of Bloomingdales, so he had access to his brushes and pens.
After designing a logo for a company, he was asked to create an alphabet to match. It was his first foray into graphic design and corporate identity. It was when Benguiat started working as a designer for Photo-Lettering, Inc known in the trade as PLINC, a company that set headlines and advertising text - that he first started to see that royalty penny drop: “They sold the alphabets as words from the fonts I did, so that was the beginning for me. “I said, ‘Gee, this is profitable, I can see me doing it’. I made a couple of dollars here and there and then the computer came along and they said, we need fonts. And my fonts were already there so they used the ones I had done previously. They weren’t pretty. They were rather ugly if I must say.” Desktop publishing, and the rise of ITC, eventually spelled the end for PLINC - despite Benguiat’s proposals to digitise their vast library of typefaces. It closed in the Eighties, and its library of letter sets stayed untouched in a storage facility in Manhattan until type foundry House Industries became its custodians in 2003 - only after Benguiat had egged them on to put a bid in for the archive. They collaborated on a small series of fonts inspired by Benguiat’s PLINC collection,
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TOP YOUNG DESIGNERS TO WATCH FOR
Class of 2017
Under
Art
should
Always a
comfortthe Lesson disturbedand never disturbTHE a comfortable Failure BANKSY
Clarissa Mendoza, 26 Living in Long Island but raised in Queens, I love going to the city every now and then to balance out the peaceful ambiance and the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. I first became interested in design in high school when I first got to use the Adobe software. Having an interest in video games and sneakers, I realized that I myself could be designing these things that I like, so I decided to pursue a professional career in graphic design. Using the Adobe software is a great tool for the designer but its not all the designer should carry. There are steps needed to take to achieve a great design, doing research on the work being done, and then putting out multiple ideas on
paper so once a concept is established it can be further developed. My interest for design doesn’t stop there, I love using my camera any chance I can, as my family would probably say “it’s in the gene’s”. I’m a very quick learner but love to learn new things. I’m well organized, hardworker but laidback, and a great listener. I pay way close attention to details, so I’ll be the person to notice all the little things and faults. My beliefs are that someone has their own individual way that they work best, some may need food, some may need quiet, I find I work best with music playing. Another art form to add into any
PASSION DESIGNS
inspiration. Being bilingual can also help my inspiration becuase I am able to speak with designers in other areas to see what is trending on their side or where they may find their inspiration. My influences come from clean simple modern designs, I’ve always liked to look at clean new page like a clean new pair of sneakers.
Typefaces or Fonts? Some new designs with an old twist
LEANT MY MONOSPACED FONT
A G M S Y 4
B H N T Z 5
C I O U 0 6
D J P V 1 7
! @ # $ Two t o % & * " withastcuups, 14
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gan the p g
E K Q W 2 8
F L R X 3 9
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MONOSPACED FONT
A monospaced font, also called a fxedpitch width or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts to variable-width fonts, where the letters differ in size to one another. The frst monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed.
UNICASE FONT
A unicase font is one that has no case, the glyps from upper and lower case are combined to form one alphabet. It is believed that all alphabets were once unicase. Bradbury Thompson’s plan for simplifying and improving our alphabet was, “Alphabet 26”, his project to combine upper and lowercase letters into one consistent set of letters, eradicated most of the lowercases, except for a, e, m and n.
PANIC
RUN
ABCDEFGHiklmn OPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789 .,#?!$
CAUTION NEW TYPE FACE
Wet paint!
Panic & Run designed by Hayden Ruymaker Wet Paint designed by Thomas Sarra
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