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CA 45th Anniversary fredrik Broden Visiting the Virtual Museum Kohnke Hanneken Steve Bradner Design in China fxhibit

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March/April 2004 Eight Dollars www.commarts .com

[by Matthew Porter]

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redrik Broden's mother-in-law has only herself to blame. She is the person most responsible for opening his eyes to the potential of a career in photography. She said yes when she could have said no. She bought a camera that her young daughter would send to Broden as a Christmas gift in 1985.

Before that decision, Fredrik Broden was well on his way to becoming a Swedish travel agent. Not her son-in-law.

We all make choices. Some of them just work out-sometimes to perfection.

Fredrik Broden, 40, was born and raised in the modest textile town of Bods, Sweden, a place then noted for perpetual rains and mail-order fashion.

As he describes it, Bods was not a bad place in which to grow up, it was simply a middle-class city situated between Goteborg and Jonkoping, large enough to be in an Adas, but not enough to be in a Frommer's guide. Everything about it seemed to him, well, middling, a commodity kind of place of intermediate size and intermediate position somewhere safely inside the Civilized World.

Braden's father, Sven-Ake, worked as a buyer in the town's mail-order industry.

As a young student, Fredrik visited his dad's office from time to time and acquainted himself with the company's photography studio. There, images of

long coats and pantsuits, leisure wear and knee boots and elastic undergarments were captured for display in the thousands of catalogs sent out to consumers every season. It was a place where the catalog sales reps made scotch-plaid housewives yearn for something more than pickled herring and caviar paste.

Broden recalls, "I was intrigued by the company photography studio, the lights, the sets, the production crew, the layouts. But also, I was captivated by publications that lay about the place by the hundreds, stacked and dog-eared copies of American and European fashion magazines that contained images I never encountered at the local news kiosks or bookstores. " Even then, photography did not cry out to young Fredrik as a possible avocation, much less vocation. It was merely something that helped him pass the time while he visited his father's office. Somewhere beyond the predictability of his daily life, there was something-at the time, he just didn't know what it was.

Meanwhile, he continued, completing his studies at Hogstadium, then entering Swedish Gymnasium, a more focused distant cousin of American high school, where he was required to start lending

direction to his life. As far as diversions, he occasionally traveled with his family on seasonal trips to the Spanish coast, and later to a family-acquired beach bungalow on the West Coast of Sweden, behaving and rejoicing in his teens like many other middle-class European boys coming of age in the rapidly-expanding economies of the 1960s and early '70s.

In 1980, after his first year of Gymnasium, Fredrik applied to be an exchange student in the United States. He dreamed that a year abroad would bring him somewhere distant, different and exciting-somewhere new: New York or Los Angeles, anywhere that excitement

Right: Article, "Are We Working for the Same Company?" for Global magazine (a Deloitte & Touche in-house publication). "Within multinational corporations, an appearance of global sameness often belies a profusion of cultural differences ." Tom Brown, designer; Deloitte & Touche, client.

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Sharp ines and savage wit

by Anne Telford self-confessed news junkie, for nearly three decades Steve Brociner has used his trenchant, often savage wit, and superb talent for caricature to skewer and draw attention to, the faces and personalities of those in power. Thanks to a raft of political controversies, from Nixon's fall , to Clinton's peccadilloes and any number of financial and sexual woes that seem to go hand and glove with politics, he has suffered no dearth of material. His illustrations and cartoons are staples in American magazines from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone, and in 2000 he received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

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For Brociner, 2004 is not only an election year, but one in which he will realize a dream come true-the publication in May of the first major retrospective of his work, the aptly named Freedom Fries, The Political Art ofSteve Brodner.

Published by Fantagraphics, and timed to coincide with the presidential campaign, the book will also include illustrated reportage of the Colt Firearms strike and his coverage of eight national nominating conventions.

"Politics have been a huge part of my life. It's been the place where I've spent most of my energy-covering stories. I'm lucky that I've carved out a niche for myself as a political artist. My fortunes rise and fall with the willingness of America to engage in political discourse. That means that after 9/n-nothing!

Nobody wanted to touch the subject matter, or Bush. " Although, he adds, "My phone does not stop ringing, now!

"It's a surreal experience; it's great fun ," Brociner claims, of covering politics. "For me to cover a campaign is really to ask a question, 'Who's behind the candidate?' The candidate is not nearly as important. How do they get out of particular rhetorical jams? They are slicing pieces of themselves off to serve to various people and you wonder what will be left.

Politicians do have to form coalitions. What I'm interested in is who really is involved in this campaign and why and what effect does this campaign have on people and who do they think the candidate is.

"I guess it all comes from being a product of the 1960s," 78

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the New York-based illustrator explains. "We're all a product of our environment, the people we knew, and the types of events that took place when we were children. I recently did a job for Newsweek and the art director asked me, 'Are you familiar with Newsweek?' I said to him, 'I have been subscribing to Newsweek since 1967, without stop.' That's the kind of kid I was, I was twelve in 1966 and I was a news junkievery interested in every twist and turn and nuance of what was happening in the news. I was doodling and drawing cartoon characters off of television.

"I think that's part of the culture I come from, tempestuous New York," he continues. "There was always tremendous turmoil of one kind or another. That's not even beginning to mention the national crises of that time: Vietnam and civil rights." One event made a particular impression on the young school newspaper editor and emerging artist. His high school, Samuel J. Tilden in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, was closed for three days in a moratorium led by (the now Rev.) Al Sharpton, who was in the same class as Brociner.

It's clear that this was a galvanizing time for the young artist: "Everything was highly politicized, even the songs on the radio. It was all about movements; large groups of people organizing themselves to make things better."

Brodner's career evolved from a need to express himself, through his fluid draftsmanship. "I started out doing political caricatures for myself," he says. "One summer when I was fifteen, I began with cartoons of local New York politicians, and then I started doing them for the high school newspaper. " He remembers, "One day I went to the local Brooklyn newspaper, the Kings Courier.

I brought my drawings and ended up with a weekly gig. The editor would reach into his pocket and give me ten dollars. I can say I've been doing this professionally for 30 years!" he says with a laugh.

This page : "Lyndon B. Johnson as fashion plate for GO, 2002." Matthew Lenning/Fred Woodward, art directors .

Right: "Reality TV, a Back Page for the New Yorker, 2002 ." Franc;oise Mouly, art director.

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No Sleeping Dragon

by Robert L. Peters, FGDC

The dawn of graphic design in China "Pessimists study Russian. Optimists pick up English. Realists learn Chinese." I recall this tongue-in-cheek counsel for language study from my high school days in Germany in the early 1970s. At the time, three superpowers held the world in relative balance. The Soviet Union was building ballistic missiles, the U.S.A. was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and in the world's most populous nation, Chairman Mao was orchestrating the "Chinese Cultural Revolution."

Three short decades later it seems much has changed and that advice to optimists and realists could well be interchangeable.

Today, the People's Republic of China (mainland China) is by every measure a giant. Its population of nearly r.3 billion citizens is five times that of the U.S.A., and more than a fifth of all humans. Covering nearly 9.5 million square kilometers (3. 7 million square miles, slightly larger than the U.S.A.), its massive, resource-rich and varied terrain ranges from the world's highest mountains (Mount Everest in the Himalayas) to vast deserts (like the Gobi) to fertile plainsits diverse climates vary from subarctic in the north to tropical in the south. The third largest country on the planet by landmass, it can now claim the world's second largest economy with its GDP of $5¡ 7 trillion (2002). With one of the world's greatest civilizations, China outpaced the rest of the world for thousands of years. Chinese inventions included paper, printing, gunpowder, porcelain, silk and the compass, to name just a few. In 2003, China became the third nation to send a human into space, a matter of great national pride.

During the past hundred years, China has experienced profound changes as it struggled through a transformation from a weak and defeated feudalistic society, distanced from the outside world, to a powerful and modern state with great global influence. Along with the remarkable social, industrial and economic boom now taking place, graphic design is emerging as an exciting, new and vigorous profession.

His ory You can't understand today's China without some sense of how it evolved. To begin, one must look back more than 3,000 years to the Bronze Age, when the roots of Chinese traditional class and social structure took hold. During the Yin-Shang and Zhou dynasties (1766 B.C.-256 B.C.) priests, military leaders and administrators emerged as a ruling elite, intent on giving form to a well-ordered societal framework. Confucius (551 B.C.-448 B.C.) and other philosophers of the time con86

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tributed doctrine aimed at providing harmony in thought and conduct, stressing virtue and natural order, love for humanity, ancestor worship and reverence for parents. New ideas and new philosophies proliferated, including Taoism (which would later influence Zen Buddhism) and legalism (featuring ironfisted rule and suppression of dissent). As the class structures became legitimized, mutual societal obligations were defined, growing to become the "traditional" Chinese principles of ethics, morals, politics and statesmanship.

China became a unified empire under the Qin dynasty (221 B.C.-206 B.C.) at the dawn of the Iron Age. During this time much of the Great Wall was being constructed through the linking together of old packed-earth defensive walls.

Rulers of ensuing dynasties acted as protectors of the country's cultural traditions, building elaborate palaces to demonstrate their own fitness to rule, providing patronage support for written expression and visual artists and promoting drama amongst remote residents not literate in Chinese language.

Chinese imperial social order was a classical hierarchy that persisted effectively for more than 2,000 years. The emperor and his attendants were in the top strata. Below him were the imperial bureaucracy and elite scholar officials who administered the state and imposed authority and control-when necessary, by means of the army and imperial police. The next layer down consisted of farmers , soldiers, merchants and artisans. Chinese social order was patrilineal and patriarchal, a trait still evident today in spite of attempts to make modern Chinese society less male-centric.

The Legacy of n Over 90% of today's Chinese are of Han ethnicity, tracing their origins to the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D. ), when citizens of the north, central and southern plains and basins of eastern China began to identify themselves as a coherent group. Part of what it meant to be Han was to distinguish themselves from the "barbarians" along their periphery-the

Commun ication Arts

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Sarah A. Friedman

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Location : New York, New York, www.sarahafriedman.com and www.ha-reps.com.

Duration :

Six years.

Myself and the appropriate freelance producer, location scout and assistants for the job.

Staff:

Education : B.F.A. , School of Visual Arts, New York City.

Cultural Influences: The

Streets of NYC, teaching and my students, musicparticularly hip-hop- travel, photography and film/video , art, food, fashion, pop culture, subcultures.

Order inside of chaos.

Fast-paced controlled energy in all corners of the world.

Environment:

Philosophy: To always value other people's individuality and to respect my own.

Staying true to myself has allowed my career to unfold organically. I'm always looking for a new perspective to see from, even if I'm looking at the same thing. I embrace reinventing myself and change.

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