Varoom 01 by James Stanslow

2006

the journal of illustration and made images www. v aroo m-ma g.com

ILLUSTROLOGY: THE VISUAL THEORY OF THE FUTURE BY JOHN O’REILLY

THE WRITER JOHN O’REILLY PUTS FORWARD THE SEDUCTIVE THEORY OF ILLUSTROLOGY. SURVEYING CONTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTURE, HE IDENTIFIES AN ‘IN-BETWEEN’ ZONE WHERE ILLUSTRATORS ARE FREE TO DOCUMENT THE ZEITGEIST, AND WHERE MEANINGS CAN BE STRETCHED AND IMPOSSIBLE RISKS TAKEN.

There’s a new communication space opening up for illustration. While the media looks to rationalize a world of information overload, illustrators are being given a licence to speculate and invent, to cut through the chaos of visual messaging. Illustration is a medium for alternative visions of the world, a radar for picking up cultural and social signals, and translating them on to the page. Let’s give this innate characteristic a name out of the comics, (always the source of impossible and guiding ideas), let’s call this new science ‘illustrology’ – somewhere between news and commentary, art and kitsch, sociology and fiction. And, if we are honest, somewhere between the genius and the idiotic, in that magical place where it overlaps. Take for example Beck’s recent video for his single Girl created by Motion Theory. It’s a theory of illustration as a promo 6 video. On the surface, and it’s all about ‘surface’, it’s a homage to the rich ethnic and cultural mix of Beck’s LA. But it’s also a nod to a genuine slice of late-20th Century Americana – the MAD magazine backpage fold-in drawn by cartoon legend Al Jaffee. As a kid, the promise of MAD never really lived up to its name, it wasn’t insane, or even as weird as your average 12 year-old, but the foldin illustration was a beautiful piece of protointeractive design. A question ran along the top of the page, and if you joined points ‘a’ and ‘b’ on the top of the page, you’d get the answer. In Beck’s Girl video, magazines, walls and even pavements fold-in, and sentences such as ‘Big Ass Limo’ become ‘Less is More’. Al Jaffee gets name-checked at one point on a television screen. The concept is something like, ‘Echo Park isn’t what it seems’. It contains layers, and if you know how to put them together, with the architecture of illustration, then you get the full picture, the whole story, the complete truth. In its knockabout, free-wheeling way, Girl nails the fact that illustration, whether its pictorial representation, or decorative graphics, or satire – it is a medium of the ‘inbetween’. The quirky copycats of photorealism aside, illustration is an invitation to step into a different mental space. Like the 14 MAD magazines gap-toothed kid, illustration points us towards the space of the ‘in-between’, outside visual and cultural norms. Illustration allows people to indulge a little lower-case madness, to expand our everyday narratives beyond the given, whether it’s cartoons on editorial pages, or the mad sociology of The Simpsons which works not just because it’s funny, and smart – but because its shorthand cartoon vision of family life is real. Take Peter Saville’s 1979 cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. It’s a cover that uses illustration to convey the 5 in-between of silence and sound, the simple white lines in the middle of a large black space is demur to the point of silence, and heavy beyond weight. The line drawing actually comes from an Astronomy encyclopedia. They are not just lines, they are pulses, radio waves, from the first pulsar ever discovered. These lines, these pulses, are a message from the ruins of post-industrial Manchester. More than any literal representation of the bleak social and economic meltdown of Britain in 1979, the illustration is a question – a call, from the edge of an alien geography that noone recognized anymore. It’s a definitive image of a nation in transition. The speculative dimension 8 ILLUSTROLOGY 3/6

of illustration means it can be used to express something that is barely perceptible, and barely recognizable, because even we haven’t quite figured out what’s happening. To be literal about illustration working in the folds, take the Target campaign which ran in The New Yorker in August 2005. 2 Target, a sexy, stylish, middle class Wal-Mart in the US, (Target’s Mrs Robinson to Wal-Mart’s Marge Simpson) took over the entire advertising space in an issue of the The New Yorker magazine, and gave each page over to designers or illustrators such as Milton Glaser, Me Company and Bill Brown. The ads were all drawn in three colours, red and white for the Target bull’s eye logo, and black. The New Yorker has a recent tradition of great portrait photography with the late Richard Avedon, and now with Steve Pyke. But visually, The New Yorker 9 brand has always been defined by illustration. From its covers, to its logo of the dandy, a fictional character called ‘Eustace Lilley’ originally drawn by Rea Irvin. Commentators have estimated Target’s spend at around $1.1 million. The issue brought gasps among critics who believed that The New Yorker had blurred the boundaries between editorial and advertising. And if this was in anyway true, it was only because the ‘ads’ were so, so good. There were no words, no slogans, no copy, they were pure illustration. From the scary skyscraper vertigo of Me Company, to Katherine Streeter’s collaged Mermaid with a ‘bob’ on the boardwalk, to the magic of James Jean’s subway rush hour. Target had curated a glorious show of illustration. And it does take conceptual ambition and confidence to let a bunch of illustrators mess around with your brand logo. It hits Target’s core messaging, who have differentiated themselves in the market as a mass retailer with a sense of design and style. Illustration is perhaps the only medium that would have allowed such a client to get away with the limited criticism it got. Aside from the fact the illustrations are outstanding, stand-alone work, the simple fact that illustration is not ‘real’, but gestural, enabled them to get away with so much more. The New Yorker suggested new credible – and mainstream – form of advertising as content, where clients sell a brand, and readers get to see some experimental creative work. Illustration has always been used to signpost a future that’s indefinite, intangible but clearly in the ether. In the 16 90s, Wired magazine championed the technology revolution and the business-driven cultural and social thinking that was flowering from it. Inside, the magazine was all words and visual technolust. The covers artists oscillated between Steve Jobs, Brian Eno and the post-Netscape Marc Andreessen – the poster-boys for the technorevolution, and illustrated covers that tried to knock you out with a futuristic idea that was rocking just around the corner. Inside Wired, illustration was the king of information design. The core visual symbol of Wired was the information panel, which allowed them to inform and speculate wildly – but always grounded by the diagrammatics of illustration. The diagram captured the ebbs and flows of money, networks and systems. Likewise, Wallpaper magazine’s liberal use of illustration in the mid-90s was an eyeopener when illustration had little kudos. And for a trend magazine? But you got the sense that when pitching the latest design and lifestyle trends you don’t want to show

something that everyone recognizes, that they already know. That would be trend suicide. The visuals have got to allow you to project, fill in the gaps a little. If trendspotting is a little vague it’s got to be to remain attractive. Desire is always about possibility. In Wallpaper, illustration was the lipgloss of the future. If Wallpaper re-invented illustration as trendsetter, Carlos, the upper-class Virgin magazine, re-tooled it as a sign of 11 ‘class’ and ‘taste’. There is perhaps no other magazine whose success has been so shaped by the line drawing. It communicates decadence, bohemia and cheek to the business traveler; the postmodern road warrior, inoculated against stress by the implacable designer cool of airports, hotels, and business-class lounges. The illustration in Carlos warms up a professional life where all other signage is designed to calm things down. There’s only so much soothing anybody can take. As an example of ‘illustrology’ Carlos is a sign of the desire for self-expression and differentiation in the post-print world. The visual language of Carlos, the line drawings, the fonts, conjure up the pre-digital age of the 70s. For the upper-class Virgin passenger who has everything, Carlos is an extension of their own self-expression in the digital age. Illustration spells differentiation. In our globalized economy, Carlos has made illustration the mark of the international business class. This vogue for signaling illustration as selfexpression can be seen in the current Windows XP campaign. Despite the obvious fact that XP is selling itself as the ultimate digital organizer, work tool and plaything – XP wants to be the vehicle of self-expression. The ad is surrounded and bathed in swirling, dreamy illustration, pouring out of the imagination of the user. This is ultimately illustration as a sign of the human, of flesh and bone. This visual metaphor is exactly the appeal of the Gorillaz – the most significant virtual band since Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Just as The Beatles used the illustrative conceit of Sergeant Pepper to wrap the most studio-based, technologically driven album of its era, Jamie 3 Hewlett’s illustrations of Gorillaz, a virtual cartoon band, are ironically one of the few signs of humanity in the age of supermarket pop. Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz is avant-garde illustrology on the end of pop as individual expression. We live in a media age where continuity, the seamless and the picture perfect rule. Illustrology lightens things up because great illustration dances with the daft, the weird and the idiotic, like Beck’s Girl promo, or Shaun Ryder’s head singing to an animated figure in the Dare video. Illustrology unpicks the lie of conventional wisdom, because convention is never wise, it’s just the sum of the compromises we make to get by. Take the modest genius of Matthew’s Vescovo’s ‘Instructo Art’ whose work reveals an entire range of human behaviour 1 and points it somewhere else. And in doing that he reveals the core secret of illustration. It is an art of personality, a craft of character. When Esquire art director George Lois showed Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup for a story on the collapse of the 60s avant-garde, he was doing illustrology. The authorial voice is a basic requirement of great illustration, and it’s the craft of that unique, individual expression that takes it beyond what everyone already ‘knows’ and makes great illustration visionary. ◆◆

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The Airkiss Matthew Vescovo, 2002 2

Images of The New Yorker 22 August, 2005 Target’s bespoke ad’ series, created by US agency Peterson Milla Hooks harnessed talents from leading illustrators Matthew Poprocki, Stina Persson, Linda Zacks, Carlos Aponte,

Milton Glaser, André Dubois, Rachel Salomon, Gary Baseman, Jason Greenberg, Katherine Streeter, Bill Brown, Robert Risko, Calef Brown, Oksana Badrak, Yuko Shimizu, James Jean, Anna Augul, Richard Gray, Melinda Beck, Me Company, Liselotte Watkins, Ruben Toledo, Miles Donovan and Kristian Russell.

Gorillaz – DARE 2005 Video stills directed by Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candel. © EMI Records Ltd. Produced by Passion Pictures for Parlophone Records.

Gorillaz -– Demon Days 2005 Album cover illustrations by Jamie Hewlett/Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures 1979 Album cover by Peter Saville for Factory Records.

Beck – Girl 2005 Video stills with illustrations by Martha Rich, Kevin Christy, Ethan Marak and Gary Garay. © Interscope Records. Produced by Motion Theory with director of photography David Morrison.

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Mighty Scared Whitie Matthew Vescovo, 2003

Elevator Fake-out Matthew Vescovo, 2003

The New Yorker 2005

The New Yorker 1931

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Carlos Magazine Issues 9, 11,12, 2005-6 Cover illustrations by Johnathan Schofield. Published by John Brown Citrus Publishing for Virgin Atlantic.

MAD 1989

MAD 2006

Wired 1997

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MAPPING THE TERRAIN

IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES, WE SUBJECT A SELECTION OF ZEITGEIST-DEFINING ILLUSTRATORS TO UP-CLOSE SCRUTINY. WE LOOK AT THE WORK OF INDIVIDUALS, OR GROUPS, WHO ARE MAPPING OUT THE CONTEMPORARY TERRAIN; PRACTITIONERS WHO ARE STRETCHING BOUNDARIES AND REDEFINING THE ANCIENT ART OF ILLUSTRATION AND IMAGE-MAKING.

The ebb and flow of visual communication runs through contemporary culture, carving a glittering path through our media landscape. In amongst the tide of everyday imagery, we find powerful and emotive visual statements made by people with vision; imagery that draws on history to create visions of the future in an explosion of new visual codes and methodologies. Working as a commercial image-maker today demands more than just a Daley sketchbook and a couple of 2B pencils. It demands knowledge of the rich visual heritage that surrounds us, as well as the ability to incorporate personal reflections and observations. To stimulate the debate on contemporary image-making, we have selected five practitioners who contribute to this flow. The work of Alaskan-born illustrator Sam Weber is featured on our cover. He is perhaps the most traditional of our line-up, if only because he uses a pencil. Weber’s work – in both theme and execution, links illustrations’ ancestors with today’s practitioners; his Grimms fairytale narratives sit comfortably in both newspaper supplements and the style-press. Yet even within his more ‘traditional’ skill-set, his range of tools and techniques indicate the growing multiplicity of the modern image. Geneviève Gauckler is an advocate of the image-grab mentality that distinguishes many contemporary image-makers. Originally known for her little black Yeah! people, Gauckler’s self-education in graphic design, her childhood obsession with French TV animation, and her 3D, photographic vision, have caused her work to shape-shift to a new, more spatially-driven direction. Her comic book-meets-installation scenes combine ‘hand-drawn’ illustration with ‘the real’ through photography, set-design and styling. Mixed references, mixed realities and mixed disciplines become merged in her singular vision. This notion of construction, of building new worlds, is echoed in the work of Japanbased duo Zoren Gold and Minori, whose pop-deconstructivism developed from the opposite of illustration – from photography. Gold’s fashion shoots are infused and radicalised by the cut-and-paste illustration

of Minori – resulting in their personal take on the celebrated hybrid style that has been developed by M/M (Paris), and played out by collectives from Hort to Vault49. These practitioners unite photography and graphic design via the scalpel and the software package. Sergei Sviatchenko draws on his training in architecture – a craft grounded in geometry, composition and scale. His dream-like collages use layers of architectural knowledge and skill to articulate common metaphors or reference popular culture – a head is obscured by a cloud, a huddle of scientists grin menacingly at the camera, crude cut-outs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney fight each other on a wonky street lined with political figures. His work leaves you in a state of satisfied confusion – you just can’t quite place what he is doing, what he is trying to say to us – but just as with the logic of dreams, you ‘get it’. Stella Vine is an artist who plays cut-andpaste with pop-culture itself. Her naïve and instinctive paintings capture modern dilemmas in sickly-sweet colours, with dark, dark tones. Rake’s Progress meets Heat magazine as last week’s news is ripped out, reconfigured and retold. Her referential pop-culture journalism merges fantasy and reality in a way that packs more emotional clout than the ‘real’ news. She pushes personal artistic reflection into irreverent social comment, and in doing so creates her own space in the visual community. All of our featured practitioners are carving out their own terrain. As well as showing their work, we have conducted interviews with them in which they describe their influences and their fiercely individual visions of the role of contemporary image-maker. Although diverse in the modes and messages of their imagery, all five share a rugged individualism that marks them out as significant voices in an arena that increasingly only values conformity and uniformity. They are not the only ones; others are exploring new terrains, and in future editions, we will explore other voices. In the mean time, we invite you to savour five visionary takes on the modern made image. FD

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Style & the family tunes Soen Zoren Gold and Minori, 2005 Zoren Gold and Minori, 2005 Gold and Minori combine Fashion editorial. hand-drawing, collage and photography. 14 MAPPING THE TERRAIN 3/26

Personal work Sergei Sviatchenko,2003 Man meets beast in Sviatchenko’s mismatched montage.

Form Genèvieve Gauckler,2003 Gauckler constructs multifaceted worlds from the real and the hand-made.

Personal work Sam Weber, 2003 Weber layers paint and ink and photography to create this mystical portrait.

Jean Stella Vine, 2005 Vine portrays celebrated artist and painter, Jean-François Basquiat.

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Varoom: What are the influences that shape your work?

GENÈVIEVE GAUCKLER

GENÈVIEVE GAUCKLER GRADUATED IN 1991 FROM LES ECOLE NATIONALE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS AND BEGAN WORKING AS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER, ILLUSTRATOR AND ART DIRECTOR IN PUBLISHING, WEB DESIGN AND VIDEO. SHE WORKED WITH THE FRENCH RECORD COMPANY F-COMMUNICATIONS, AND MADE PROMO VIDEOS WITH THE DIRECTORS OLIVIER KUNTZEL AND FLORENCE DEYGAS FOR DIMITRI FROM PARIS, PIERRE HENRY AND SPARKS, AS WELL AS COMMERCIALS, TITLE SEQUENCES AND SHORT FILMS. IN 1999, SHE WAS HIRED BY THE INFAMOUS INTERNET START-UP BOO.COM TO CREATE THEIR ONLINE MAGAZINE. A FEW MONTHS LATER SHE MOVED TO LONDON WHERE SHE WORKED FOR THE DESIGN AGENCY ME COMPANY. SHE RETURNED TO PARIS IN 2001, AND CURRENTLY SPENDS HER TIME MAKING VIDEOS (WITHIN THE PLEIX COLLECTIVE), WEBSITES, GRAPHIC DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION. GAUCKLER’S CLIENTS INCLUDE: BIG ACTIVE, FLAUNT AND LANE CRAWFORD DEPARTMENT STORE.

Genèvieve Gauckler: I’ve always been very curious about architecture, comics, music and contemporary art and design. As a teenager, in my hometown Lyon, I collected English magazines like The Face, Blitz and NME, and vinyl records like New Order and other new wave bands. Naturally, I noticed their great designs made by designers such as Malcolm Garrett, Neville Brody, Peter Saville, The Designers Republic, Me Company and Mark Farrow. Their work was so new, so fresh. I also spent a lot of time looking for rare books about the graphic design of the 50s, 60s and 70s. I became influenced by leading American designers like Saul Bass, Paul Rand, Robert Brownjohn, Herb Lubalin and George Lois. I still spend a lot of time in bookstores and museums – searching for inspiring contemporary artists. My favourite is Ed Ruscha, maybe because of the use of typography in his paintings. But daily life is the most inspiring thing for me – something I see on television, food packaging, or a tree, or cars in the streets, or celebrity gossip magazines. Can you name some image-makers – past or present – that interest or inspire you?

I used to be very impressed by Jan Tschichold’s writings about typography. Nowadays, I admire the work of Rinzen, Graphic Thought Facility, Laurent Fetis, Universal Everything, Kam Tang, Banker/ Wessel, Antoine+Manuel, Sweden Graphics, Gerard Saint, Matt Maitland, Abake, Hort, Build, Neasden Control Centre, M/M (Paris), Klaus Haapaniemi, Josh Petherick, Parra, Kusta Saksi and Jean-Philippe Delhomme. Can you talk about the processes and materials that you use in your work?

GG: Usually technical things inspire me first. I always get ideas when I’m using new software or cameras. A film director has to cope with technical matters all the time, and a writer has to master the language before writing interesting stuff. In a way I like technical difficulties because they’re the basis of the aesthetics and style of my work. All of my images end up on a computer, so of course there is a strong temptation to mix different techniques. If you look at the American magazine Fortune in the 50s, there are some fantastic spreads with a mix of graphics and photography. They are really spectacular, especially because at that time they didn’t have any tools to visualize the final result except drawing. I use illustration because it is straightforward. It has clear outlines and is convenient to use it with typography. It’s related to childhood, whereas photography is more grown-up. Illustration and photography are like the yin and yang of graphic design. Your use of strange alien-like characters is a distinctive feature of your work. It links you to the world of character animation and comics. Is this an area that interests you?

I’ve always been into comics, as well as animation and CGI. As a kid I loved watching the mega-absurd French television series Shadoks. Since its creation in 1968 by Jacques

Rouxel, this show has become a cult in France. Everyone has heard about the Shadoks characters, and that they spend most of their time ‘pumping’, but nobody knows why. The author has created a whole universe, with its own rules, inhabitants, logic. When I watched it as a kid, I didn’t understand anything, but I was fascinated. My older brother Philippe was crazy about the Moebius comic book Metal Hurlant. Jean Giraud’s work is very popular in France and under the name Blueberry he draws fantastic science fiction stories. L’Homme est-il bon? [Do human beings taste good?] is a short story about extraterrestrial people who eat human beings. He’s a genius. I discovered Hayao Miyasaki’s work through My Neighbourgh Totoro, when it came out in 1988. This film is just magic, it’s very touching. It’s about childhood, about growing up and losing your illusions. It also says a lot about Japan. I’m a big fan of Matt Groening, too. And not just for The Simpsons or Futurama, but also for his early work. The cartoons he made for The Village Voice – Love is Hell, Work is Hell, School is Hell – are masterpieces. Drawn in a minimalist black and white with a great sense of humour, the stories are about all the little details of daily-life. You are being approached by some big corporations. Do you find your work compromised in any way?

Not at all. But it means that once you have sold your work to a few big companies, you have to come up with something fresh and new afterwards. The money you earn with advertising buys you some time to explore new directions. The most important thing is to keep the right balance between both activities.

Your most recent work combines photography and hand-made images. Can you talk about your new multi-disciplinary approach?

I like to combine elements that shouldn’t be put together. Like the sacred and the mundane, big and small, hi-tech and low-tech, grown-up and childlike, rounded shapes and sharp shapes, bitmap and vector images. What’s challenging is to mix all this up and to find a kind of harmony or balance. It’s like the yin and the yang again, one can’t exist without the other. The computer is a very useful tool to mix all this material. I feel like a child playing around with toys. How do you see illustration in general developing?

Photography has become a little bit boring for me in recent years and I find illustration more creative, more exciting. I see more and more mixed techniques – like photography combined with drawing and 3D. The frontier between graphic design and illustration might get even more blurred. Are you comfortable with the tag ‘illustrator’?

I’m OK with it, but I still feel that a little bit of me is a graphic designer. I don’t consider myself an artist. I like the idea of being commissioned by someone, or a company, and to have my work in the real world, on billboards or record covers, rather than in art galleries. www.g2works.com

Art Grandeur Nature Genèvieve Gauckler, 2004 Gauckler’s first steps into digitally manipulated constructions paved the way for her new spatially-driven experiments.

Form Genèvieve Gauckler, 2004 Editorial

Robot Genèvieve Gauckler, 2005 Personal work

Head, Heart & Hips Genèvieve Gauckler, 2005 An image from Head, Heart & Hips, a book presenting the multidisciplinary agency Big Active, published by Die Gestalten Verlag.

Love and Peace Genèvieve Gauckler, 2005 Personal work

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Lane Crawford Genèvieve Gauckler, 2006 Gauckler’s unique visual language has now come into play in advertising for the newly opened Hong Kong department store Lane Crawford. Her series transforms store locations such 20 MAPPING THE TERRAIN 9/26

as Times Square or Pacific Place with scenes that mix fictional characters with ‘pedestrians’ and urban landmarks. Her billboards inspire a sense childlike awe and sell Lane Crawford as a dazzling toy shop for grown-ups.

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Lane Crawford Billboards in Hong Kong “The money you earn with advertising buys you time to explore new directions.”

Lane Crawford Genèvieve Gauckler, 2006

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Varoom: How would you describe what you do?

SERGEI SVIATCHENKO

SERGEI SVIATCHENKO GRADUATED FROM KHARKOV ACADEMY OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE UKRAINE, FOLLOWED BY A PHD AT KIEV SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE. IN 1990 HE MOVED TO DENMARK. HE HAS HAD NUMEROUS SOLO AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS ACROSS EUROPE AND THE USA. IN 2002 HE COFOUNDED SENKO STUDIO, A GALLERY SHOWING HIS OWN WORK, AND THE WORK OF OTHERS. SVIATCHENKO’S CLIENTS INCLUDE: NOKIA, DANSKE BANK, GRUNDFOS, DANISCO, DANSK INDUSTRI, PRICE WATERHOUSE COOPERS, SONOFON, SCHUR INTERNATIONAL AND GIOTTO MUSIC.

Sergei Sviatchenko: My background as an architect and artist makes my thinking multilateral. By this I mean the process where news, ideas, emotions, feelings and doubts feed into my mind, and then calmly develop into the finished artwork. Collage occupies me more and more, because I feel that it has become the most useful visual element in my communication with the world. Can you talk about the processes and materials that you use in your work?

It varies from time to time. Sometimes I use an old-fashioned collage technique – cutting and gluing to create new shapes and then adding to them with computer techniques. What are the influences that shape your work?

Mostly my influences are from other creatives who share my ideas. A few magazines, books, films and many other things you see every day, and of course, rock music. Can you name some image-makers – past or present – that interest or inspire you?

My father – architect and great water-colour artist. My teachers at architecture school – you realize later in life just how good many of them were. And the Russian avant-garde [1910 – 34]: Ivan Leonidov, Konstantin Melnikov, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko. Also people such as Salvador Dali, Robert Raushenberg, Tom Wesselmann, Daniele Buetti, Rodney Graham, Rei Kawakubo, Sir Paul Smith, Pipilotti Rist, Andy Simionato, Andrey Tarkovsky, Julian Schnabel, Mark Rothko, Josef Beuys and Isaac Julien. Do you find your creative approach shifting for your commercial clients?

We live and work in a world where we compromise all the time in order to be with each other, but I am absolutely sure that my work is always true to my own original ideas. What direction do you envisage your work taking in the coming years?

I would like to continue my work with the gallery to show my art, and I would like to do some work with magazines exploring specific themes. I’d also like to work with architects – to integrate art into the architectural process, beginning with sketches – this was the subject of my PhD: ‘Means of Visual Information in Architecture’.

You also run Senko Studio – could you tell us about this project and the work that you present?

Senko Studio is located in the centre of Viborg, Denmark’s oldest town. I describe it as a communication space that is open for different projects and ideas. It’s a place where I show work by exciting new artists and designers from the arenas of video, photography, painting, installation and fashion. Potential exhibitors are invited produce designs for a limited edition T-shirt and a postcard. They come from all over the world. Can you describe the ‘Senko Frame Project’?

The idea of the project is to show contemporary video films in a public space. It will create more possibilities to connect changing visual images with the town’s structure. There is a 1.5 x 2.5m screen facing the street which can show videos in the evening. Senko Studio will simultaneously broadcast the video on our website. How do you see imagery in general developing – either locally, or internationally?

Darwin – My Friend Science-inspired installation exhibited in Senko Studio, Sviatchencko’s experimental gallery space.

Head series TBC Sergei Sviatchenko, 2005 The obscured head is a reoccurring theme in Sviatchenko’s work.

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I believe that by using technology it is possible to make strong and original visual art that melts or blends with fashion, design and architecture. www.sviatchenko.dk

Chaos Happens Sergei Sviatchenko, 2005 This recent story, published in thisisamagazine.com, presents another strand of Sviatchenko’s

collage. Visual elements are pieced together as 3dimensional sculptures, and then digitally photographed to create singlular images.

Personal work Sergei Sviatchenko, 2006

Chbl Dreams Sergei Sviatchenko, 2004 Two boxed card collections of Sviatchenko’s work have been published by Senko Studio. 23 MAPPING THE TERRAIN 12/26

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Untitled Sergei Sviatchenko, 2004 Sviatchenko’s montage draws influence from art, architecture and science. 24 MAPPING THE TERRAIN 13/26

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Varoom: What are the influences that shape your work?

Sam Weber: Comic books, movies, childhood power fantasies, growing up in Canada, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Can you name some image-makers that interest or inspire you?

Lorenzo Mattotti and early 20th Century German artists like Beckmann, Dix, Grosz and Kollwitz. Japanese prints – especially Hokusai and Hiroshige. Yoshitaka Amano, Northern Renaissance painting, Neo Rauch, Frank Frazetta. I’m sure I am forgetting something really important… Can you talk about the processes and materials that you use in your work? 23

SAM WEBER

SAM WEBER WAS BORN IN ALASKA, AND GREW UP IN DEEP RIVER ONTARIO, CANADA. AFTER ATTENDING THE ALBERTA COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN IN CALGARY, HE MOVED TO NEW YORK TO ATTEND GRADUATE SCHOOL AT THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS. IN ADDITION TO DRAWING, SAM WORKS PART TIME AS ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR OF THE OPED PAGE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES, WITH ART DIRECTOR BRIAN REA. WEBER’S CLIENTS INCLUDE: THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE LA TIMES, ESPN, SPIN, THE CBC, FLAUNT AND THE VILLAGE VOICE.

Almost everything starts off as some sort of black and white drawing on paper, usually ink drawn with a brush, and maybe some water colour, acrylic, or pencil added in. It is then coloured digitally. How much is done on the computer and how much is done by hand varies from one project to the next – although for the most part, the more time I spend working on the actual drawing, the less I spend in Photoshop.

Do you find your creative approach shifting for your commercial clients?

A little I suppose. My commissioned work always seems to evolve in the direction of my personal work, which at the moment is maybe a little rawer and hand-drawn. What direction do you envisage your work taking in the coming years?

At the risk of saying something clichéd, I think half the fun is not exactly knowing the answer to that question. For now I would like to keep exploring the hand-drawn elements in my work, and hope that the computer doesn’t overshadow my process too much. How do you see illustration developing?

I think many people would say technology is certainly going to effect the way in which illustration is used, made and defined. But for me, making compelling images has always been about evoking a sense of mystery and mood. In a world where so much information is available to us, I think the ability to create a sense of wonder in an audience will become even more important. Are you comfortable with the tag ‘illustrator’?

Sure. I think it’s a pretty accurate description of what I do.

www.sampaints.com

Flaunt Sam Weber, 2006 Cover image art directed by Lee Corbin

Vampire Sam Weber, 2005 Editorial art directed by Jacob Covey for Fantagraphics

J is for Jenny who came from the sea Sam Weber, 2005 Personal work

Eden Sam Weber, 2005 Personal work

Karla Homolka Sam Weber, 2005 Edtiorial for Dose, art directed by Jemai Hamilton

Snow White Sam Weber, 2005 Personal work

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Weber draws lines from Frank Frazetta to Tim Burton, from wood block printing to decorative tattoo art. His stories tell old tales with a new graphic twist. 27 MAPPING THE TERRAIN 16/26

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Lavinia Sam Weber, 2005 Personal work

Gertrude Sam Weber, 2005 Personal work

Weberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal portraits demonstrate the wealth of skills and themes that build his distinctive style. Layers

of texture and technique to create his trademark earthy and mythical creatures.

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Varoom: Can you talk about the processes and materials that you use in your work?

STELLA VINE

STELLA VINE WAS BORN IN ALNWICK, NORTHUMBERLAND AND LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON. VINE GRADUATED FROM HAMPSTEAD SCHOOL OF ART IN 2001, AND HAS SINCE WORKED AS AN ARTIST AND PAINTER. IN 2004 HER PROVOCATIVE PAINTINGS OF PRINCESS DIANA CAUGHT THE EYE OF CHARLES SAATCHI AND ESTABLISHED HER ON THE INTERNATIONAL ART SCENE. TODAY HER PAINTINGS ARE COMMISSIONED FOR FASHION EDITORIAL AND EXHIBITED IN GALLERIES IN LONDON, NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES. VINE’S CLIENTS INCLUDE: BLACK BOOK AND I-D.

Stella Vine: My average day starts with coffee, and flicking through loads of papers and magazines. If I see something that resonates, I’ll rip it out and add it to a massive stash of cuttings. In amongst these piles of images are various personal childhood photographs of people, places and pets. Sometimes I stick them on the walls, so that I will think about them more often. If there’s a story in the news that interests me, I’ll go hunting through piles off stuff, desperately looking for older images connected with the story. There’s no order to any of this, so it’s always a mess. It would be good if they were all filed and named properly. I could do with a couple of assistants. At the moment, acrylics are my main painting ingredient, but I’m getting back to where I was before – just doing whatever I like – collage, printing, drawing, blogging. Can you talk about image-makers – past or present – that inspire you?

I’ve loved Warhol since I was about 13. I was fascinated by all of those people. I was one of those kids who just hung out with a painted white face, tons of eyeliner, and rarely spoke to anyone. It’s incredible how much I identify with his work; it never ceases to amaze me. From his favourite soup, to the horror of the electric chair, movie stars, much more. It’s too overwhelming to pin down. I don’t even want to pin it down. It has subtleties, and deep personal connections. There is also an artist called Karen Killimnik, I really love her work. She paints like a teenager, working really hard with beautiful little oil strokes. It could be of someone who looks like a model and it would say Me at Haight-Ashbury in ‘67, or something like that. I really connect with them. They’re really girly, dark, beautiful, full of desire.

Much of your work echoes or comments on popular culture and society. Do you have conscious objectives when you create your paintings?

Not in an obvious way. It’s not like a statement, it’s so entwined with myself, my own life. Sometimes I guess the paintings are in support of someone like Diana or Kate or Rachel Whitear, but you will also get the world surrounding them in the painting, so sometimes it’s confusing what my take on it is. People presume I’m being cynical, when it’s more that things are really awful surrounding the person’s life. My own life and the life of the celebrity get intertwined, just like they are in my own head, or maybe anyone’s head – this cacophony of people, places, objects, food, handbags, fear, love. I avoid being cool, trying to be clever or cynical. I’m all out for sincerity and passion, even if that makes me a wanker.

Do you have boundaries that define the commercial exposure of your work?

No, I don’t think there are too many boundaries. As long as I was given total freedom to create something, I think I could bounce off pretty much any environment. Maybe if a political movement asked me to do something, like the BNP, I’d say no, although I guess it would be intellectually possible to subvert anything… I’d rather paint my mum or my dog, than have too much of a battle on my

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Superman Stella Vine, 2004 Private Collection, Israel. Vine’s subjects span icons of popular culture to capture the cultural repertoire of our times.

‘Hi Paul, can you come over…’ Stella Vine, 2005 Private Collection, UK.

Mandy and Christine Stella Vine, 2005 Private Collection, UK.

Blackbook Stella Vine, 2005 Vine’s pop-culture commentary continues in her commissioned work. The clothes and

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hands, or the exploitation of others or myself. A company like Gap would maybe be a good example – I guess I’d do it if it was offered, and then do something useful with half the money. I’d ask about slave labour and stuff first, and then come to a decision whether there was some evil shit going on. I don’t feel hugely precious about my images as far as copyright goes, but I guess it would depend on circumstances. I think if something was going to drain me too much, if it was too much of a battle inside or if it was not going to help me express my thing, then I’d turn it down. I can always put on a show in a squat instead, maybe get a good review, and then get closer to getting something in a museum for future generations to see – rather than taking a big wad of cash and feeling controlled and miserable, and unable to do the stuff that’s true to me. You have also been proactive in the arts through curating and presenting shows. Could you tell us a little about these projects?

I like to have a creative home where things evolve from. I ran a gallery in a butchers shop for a while, and that was great. I’m reviving the idea; it’s called Rosy Wilde – a name that inspires creative freedom in me. It comes from the performer Rose English and Oscar Wilde. It’s going to be in an office in Soho. It’s an improvisation. I think it’s going to be like Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’ The Shop – it’s The Shop meets Cloth Kits, a 70s mail order clothing company. I used to love it when my mum ordered stuff from Cloth Kits – they were such beautiful folksy, crafty kind of fabrics with a lot of heart. I’m like Mike Leigh really, you just have to give me the platform and I’ll come up with the goods. People get suspicious of me, they don’t understand – we are all so used to cynicism. The Rosy Wilde art objects are made by people who I think are fantastic, who I relate to, who I admire. Some of them are not part of the art world but they’re making great art, like Hannah Daisy, she makes teenage girly type work, kind of dark too, but she is a teenager studying occupational therapy. I just really relate to it. So Rosy Wilde’s got that sort of vibe: it’s me expressing myself and it’s a piece of art itself too. It’s independent. It’s me making sense of all the art-world experience I’ve had so far, in an honest, stripped-to-the-bone type way, just cutting out as much bullshit as possible. I’ll sell you something beautiful, original and with a lot of heart. Pop heart.

What direction do you envisage your own work taking in the coming years?

I want to be the world’s greatest living painter, so just kind of getting closer to that really. I know that might sound insane, vague, meaningless, but I have to try and not care what people think of me, I’m getting there. My art will make sense in the future, when you can see the whole package, when I’m long-dead. Just putting on shows, curating, making great work, collaborating with great people, helping other people to do their own thing, putting their shows on, stuff like that. www.stellavine.net

accessories of Marc Jacobs are brought to life in Lily, a character who reads Nietzsche, wears Chanel No.5 and dreams of a date at the Ivy.

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Blackbook Stella Vine, 2005

‘I only make love to Jesus’ Stella Vine, 2005 Private collection, UK Vine reworks the news with artistic metaphor and awkward cultural references. As the tabloids revelled in

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accusations made against supermodel Kate Moss, Vine recast the front-page photograph in ‘Must be the season of the witch’, shedding a new light on the mediafrenzy. The series continued

with ‘Holy Water Cannot Help You Now’ and pictured here, ‘I only make love to Jesus’, and were subsequently used in a Sky One documentary aired in October 2005. Her rewritings had sparked different

perspectives on the story and delved into the celebrity culture and its relationship with the media.

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ZOREN GOLD AND MINORI

ZOREN GOLD AND MINORI MET IN L.A. IN THE MID-90S AND HAVE BEEN WORKING AS A CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP EVER SINCE. GOLD WAS BORN IN MUNICH, GERMANY. HE MOVED TO L.A. IN 1995, AND BEGAN WORKING AS A FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER. MINORI IS JAPANESE, AND GREW UP IN HIROSHIMA. IN 1991 SHE MOVED TO L.A. TO STUDY AT OTIS COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN. IN 1996, MINORI STARTED WORKING AS A FREELANCE GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND ILLUSTRATOR. NOW BASED IN TOKYO, THEIR SHARED INTEREST IN ‘PUSHING THE BOUNDARY OF PHOTOGRAPHY’, HAS LED TO THEM TO EXPERIMENT WITH COMBINING PHOTOGRAPHY WITH DRAWING, COLLAGE, HAND-MADE PROPS AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS. THEIR CLIENTS INCLUDE: SONY, MTV JAPAN, WARNER BROS., ELLE, NYLON, NEO2 AND QVEST.

Varoom: What are the influences that shape your work?

Zoren Gold and Minori: Personal desire and dreams. We make images that are open to experiment. They are playful and erotic. We’re driven by the expectation of wanting to see the finished images we create.

Can you name some image-makers – past or present – that interest or inspire you?

There are many image-makers and artists who we take inspiration from, especially in the world of Surrealism, which we discovered recently. Surrealism became a key that unlocked something inside us, and turned our appreciation towards art. Since then, we’ve been discovering and rediscovering art from various eras and genres. We recently fell in love with Picasso, after all these years. Our all time favourites are Max Ernst, the Spanish artist Remedious Varo and the German artist Paul Wunderlich. Can you talk about the processes and materials that you use in your work?

Anything that comes into our minds. Your work combines photography, montage and hand-made images. Can you talk about the development of your multi-disciplinary approach?

Sometimes, we get interested in something – could be anything – and we just want to try it, and see how it works out. Do you change your creative approach for more commercial clients?

We haven’t done much commercial work. How do you see imagery in general developing – either in Japan or internationally?

We find so much resistance to mixing illustration and photography. Some people are afraid of our photography, and find it hard to understand. Why not just celebrate the fact that photography can do more than just capture the moment? 39

Robocop Soen Zoren Gold and Minori, 2004 Zoren Gold and Minori, 2004 Personal work. Fashion editorial.

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What direction do you envisage your work taking in the coming years?

We have no idea... ◆◆ www.mi-zo.com

Qvest Style & the family tunes Zoren Gold and Minori, 2004 Zoren Gold and Minori, 2005 Gold and Minori use modern Editorial tools to make complex multilayered images. Here photography and illustration are combined in a painterly, Klimt-esque fashion portrait. 34 MAPPING THE TERRAIN 23/26

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Atomica Soen Zoren Gold and Minori, 2005 Zoren Gold and Minori, 2005 Editorial Editorial 36 MAPPING THE TERRAIN 25/26

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CHRISTOPH NIEMANN: FORCE OF NATURE BY STEVEN HELLER

FOR CONCEPTUAL ACCURACY, AND DIZZYING SPEED, FEW COMMERCIAL ILLUSTRATORS CAN MATCH THE NEW YORK-BASED GRAPHIC MARKSMAN, CHRISTOPH NIEMANN. THE NOTED COMMENTATOR AND NEW YORK TIMES ART DIRECTOR STEVEN HELLER PROVIDES AN ILLUMINATING ACCOUNT OF THE COMMISSIONING PROCESS AND A DISCUSSES NIEMANN’S PLACE IN THE COMMERCIAL ILLUSTRATION COSMOS.

At 9:30 a.m. on 12 January 2006, I was given a manuscript to be illustrated about the crisis facing the American economy due to unceasing deficits. It was to be included in the following week’s issue of The New York Times Book Review, the publication I have art directed for almost 30 years. To get an illustration into the paper demands a twentyfour hour turn-around, which involves my accepting an idea and then passing it through a gauntlet of editorial approvals. What’s more, given this rather common and trite theme I needed an illustration that would be neither common nor trite. At 9:35, I attached the manuscript to an email addressed to New York-based, Germanborn illustrator Christoph Niemann. After pressing the send button I cross my fingers that he is available on such short notice. He has saved me in similar situations before, but since he has become one of the busiest illustrators in the US, I can only hope he won’t turn me down (if he did I’d have to beg, and supplication is humiliating for any art director). At precisely 9:37, I receive his reply, which reads: “I’m extremely busy, but I’ll give it try.” Knowing Niemann as I do, this means he’s hooked. While many in his position would decline, he revels in taking these difficult illustration assignments as a personal challenge. Ten minutes later – and true to form – he sends me his idea. It is 2 a vampire’s face, his mouth in the shape of a spiky fever chart that also looks like fangs, with a subtle hint of blood where the arrowhead at the end of the fever line tapers down; opposite the vampire is the victim’s face (the American public) profusely bleeding from the neck, the wound resembling the shape of the spiraling chart. Once again, Niemann has taken conventional symbols and tweaked them into a memorably surprising image. Who could ask for anything better?

IT IS NOT THAT I’M SADISTIC, BUT I DO GET OFF ON TESTING NIEMANN’S TOLERANCE

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Arming America 2003 New York Times Book Review.

US deficits 2006 New York Times Book Review.

The Legacy of George W Bush 2005 Esquire magazine.

100% Evil 2005 Ink drawing from a book called 100% Evil, by Nicholas Blechman and Christoph Niemann, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

40 CHRISTOPH NIEMANN 3/6

Well, I guess I could. It is not that I’m sadistic, but I do get off on testing Niemann’s tolerance; so at 9:53 I wrote the following email: “Christoph, nice job! But maybe there’s a better solution that won’t insult those of our timid readers who find vampires offensive?” I press send, lean back in my chair and patiently wait until 10:03, when he wordlessly replies to my email with three more sketches. Of course, he had other solutions and each was smarter and funnier than the next, yet I actually preferred the first one, and that’s what he ultimately sent back as a finished piece by 10:47 a.m. (minus the hint of blood). The entire process, from my original email to Niemann with the manuscript in tow to receiving his final EPS file took only 77 minutes. This was not the first, second, or fifteenth time he’s made such a speedy turn-around. Niemann is a conceptual illustration machine – a force of nature –

and not just churning out rote solutions, but highly sophisticated ones that transcend the conventions (and clichés) of editorial illustration. Others may be more astute, and some are much finer draftsmen (though Niemann’s specific craft is impeccable), but few editorial illustrators working today hit the bulls eye as frequently, and at such a quick clip. What makes him sought after by art directors (and even editors) is his uncannily prodigious ability to transform the commonplace into the extraordinary by routinely coming up with the ‘a-ha!’ idea that so clearly summarizes a story or notion, that it is unnecessary to read the text. Those who have seen the mountains of sketches he keeps in a few loose-leaf binders know that almost every scribble is suitable for publication. Not to minimize the many talented artists I regularly work with, but if there were, god forbid, a pandemic that felled illustrators all over the globe – I could fill my weekly periodical with Niemann’s rejects alone.

“I CAN’T RECALL EVER THINKING OF WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO HAVE A PAINTING IN A MUSEUM. ALL I THOUGHT OF WAS HAVING A DRAWING IN MAD MAGAZINE” At this point you are possibly thinking that this is hyperbole. You might also be asking where is my critical detachment – nobody is that perfect and even if he is, shouldn’t I have a more analytical evaluation? If it were anyone else, I would probably agree. But I am reporting on the quantifiable fact that Niemann hits the mark on difficult subject matter considerably more than he misses (yes, he does miss on occasion). Why? Technique plays a large role. After a phase in his young career when he was producing more time-consuming, detailed renderings, he settled on a curiously generic pictorial sign-symbol mannerism that allowed him an ironic stylistic framework. His economical linear (instructional manual) approach is fairly popular these days, but Niemann doesn’t simply mimic the style, he incorporates it into a keen ability to make believable renderings. Unlike the great conceptualists Ralph Steadman, Brad Holland, or Seymour Chwast, for instance, whose work relies on their quirkily distinctive expressive gestures, Niemann uses minimalism as a stylelessstyle. Even his more narrative images, where a complex story is allowed to unfold, are pure and concise, allowing the concept to reign. His style is so boldly transparent that each image is a veritable logo for the idea he is conceptualizing. My favorite of his Book Review covers illustrates this point. For a

review of a book called Arming America, a cultural history of guns, he conceived 1 a skeleton hand holding a skeleton gun. In one stark, though simple image, he references America’s liberal handgun laws, and the idea that guns are so ingrained in the American body politic that the object is fused into its bones. I remember when he sent this in, how excited I was. Recognition was instant, not even a moment of contemplation between seeing and understanding – the hallmark of a great visual message. Christopher Niemann was born in 1970 in Waiblingen, Germany, and began studying graphic design at the Stuttgart Academy of Art to follow an interest in new media. Despite doing 90% illustration he considered himself a graphic designer and conceiving ideas was his foremost skill. “I never considered fine art to be an option,” Niemann once explained. “I always liked and appreciated fine art, but I can’t recall ever thinking of what it would be like to have a painting in a museum. All I thought of was having a drawing in MAD magazine.” Niemann, who is nothing if not regimented, segments the heroes who influenced his career the following way: Tomi Ungerer from age four-nine; Albert Uderzo, from 10-14; and Mort Drucker and Don Martin, aged 15-20. “Heinz Edlemann, who was my teacher at the academy, influenced me a lot. He introduced me to a modern idea of illustration. It is embarrassing to admit, but until Edelmann showed me their work, I had no idea who Steinberg, Holland, Glaser or Chwast were.” Once informed, however, he was hooked by their talents and became a confirmed emulator. One thing is clear: Niemann could not conceive viable ideas at the rate he does if he were insulated from the world. So out of passion and necessity he is politically aware. “I was always an avid reader of newspapers and magazines,” he explains, “but when I came to New York and started working for The New York Times’ Oped page I turned into a complete addict. It was the time of the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton scandal, when politics was a terrifically entertaining spectacle. Unfortunately it is a lot less fun to be political now, especially since I take it all very seriously, so goofy caricatures of G. W. Bush don’t do much to ease my pain.” Yet to allay this pain he draws incessantly, always searching for the Holy Grail of ideas. What makes the best solution? “It may sound spineless, but I have to admit that I believe that it’s funny when people laugh,” he notes. “Sometimes I come up with an idea, and I am convinced it is the Mona Lisa of the 21st Century, but once the third person I show it to gives me a forced smile or shakes their head I have to accept that it sucks.” On the other hand, he says it often happens that clients praise “a piece that I thought was rather mediocre. There seem to be some pieces people like and I have no idea why.” When Niemann came to New York in the early-90s, more than two decades had passed since the first wave of Eastern European illustrators had introduced symbolism and metaphor to editorial problem solving. In fact, the references to Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism, the influence of Steinberg and the sharp satire that had made such a mark on American conceptual illustration had become something of a stylistic cliché. Niemann’s computer generated clarity and brightly

coloured wit was a tonic. He quickly became the quintessential New York illustrator, and fell comfortably into his adopted city. Niemann is now a destination for young illustrators who he generously advises. Moreover, with a few of his friends and colleagues he’s attempted to rebuild an illustration community that had been ravaged by the various fashions that sidelined conceptual illustration. With Niemann as a model, the field has been given a goose. But he notes that illustration is not monolithic, and niches are key. “What I find interesting is that despite the Internet and national magazines and TV, the rift between East and West Coast illustration seems to grow ever wider. On the West Coast, illustration seems to be more joyful and decorative. It is moving into art galleries and the world of toys and collectibles. On the East Coast it is the conceptual, subdued and sometimes snobby work that still seems to be the main focus.” Snobby? Perhaps but I only know one illustrator who has the temerity to mount an exhibition of 800 of his spot editorial drawings (ranging in size from one to ten square inches) where each is so smart that there is not one single, solitary clinker. Niemann’s show, Little Niemann: 1000 Spot Drawings, which hung at the New York Times Gallery Nine throughout December 2005 and January 2006, despite the false advertising (what did happen to the other 200?), is the most awe inspiring display of visual acuity and wit I’ve seen in decades. So, as long as Niemann maintains his unflappable energy (thanks in part to plenty of coffee – milk, no sugar – and silence), conceptual editorial illustration has a champion. ◆◆ Further reading: Infiltrate: The Front Lines of the New York Design Scene, Alexander Gelman, BIS Publishers, 2004. Contains long interview with Christoph Niemann. Review of 100% Evil: www.a-g-i.org www.christophniemann.com

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12 – 21

Prêt-à-Porter 2003 Front cover, The New Yorker magazine, Prêt-à-Porter – Japan Style issue.

Anniversary issue 2002 New Yorker front cover featuring bitmapped version of New Yorker ‘dandy’ logo.

United We Stand 2002 Front cover, The New Yorker.

Real Estate Bubbles 2005 Front cover, The New Yorker.

Have we Reached the Bottom Yet? 2002 Front cover, The New Yorker.

Let the Games Begin 2002 Front cover, The New Yorker.

Fall Chores 2004 Front cover, The New Yorker.

Financial Column 2000 – 2006 Various illustrations showing Niemann’s sharp wit. Commissioned for the New Yorker Financial Column.

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43 CHRISTOPH NIEMANN 6/6

THINKING THROUGH MAKING: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAN FERN BY ADRIAN SHAUGHNESSY

DAN FERN’S COLLAGES WERE THE HEIGHT OF FASHION IN THE 80S AND 90S. HIS MORE RECENT WORK DISPLAYS QUALITIES OF INTROSPECTION AND PERSONAL CONVICTION. AS HEAD OF THE POST-GRADUATE COMMUNICATION ART & DESIGN COURSE AT THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART IN LONDON, NUMEROUS DESIGNERS AND ILLUSTRATORS HAVE BENEFITED FROM FERN’S ENLIGHTENED APPROACH TO LEARNING.

Dan Fern combines the role of teacher, illustrator and artist with modest aplomb. Born in 1945, he studied graphic design at Manchester College of Art, followed by an MA in Illustration at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1986 he returned to the RCA as Head of Illustration, and has remained there ever since. He is now Head of the School of Communication Art and Design. Graduates from Fern’s radical postgraduate course form a glittering strata of talent that runs through contemporary visual communications. They are often distinguishable by their idealism and radicalism. Yet most have a resilience and pragmatism that enables them to prosper in the commercial world, while simultaneously pursing artistic and ideological interests. During the 1980s and 90s, Fern was one of Britain’s most fashionable commercial illustrators. His finely-judged collage work, often incorporating stray letterforms and fragments of printed ephemera, revealed his early tutelage in graphic design and was a high point in the illustration of the time. Fern has since moved away from purely commercial work to produce imagery that is infused with an intensely personal and meditative sensibility. Walks With Colour, a book and exhibition, is his most recent project. It shows Fern entering a new phase. Inspired by the countryside that surrounds his studio in rural France, his new work exhibits a more naturalistic and painterly aesthetic. He is also involved in making films, often produced to accompany performances by musicians – a collaborative activity that Fern is especially passionate about. This interview took place in Fern’s small, spartan office at the RCA in Kensington, London, during March 2006.

Adrian Shaughnessy: Where did your interest in collage come from?

Dan Fern: When I was studying at the RCA [1967-70] I worked mainly in pen and ink, but occasionally I would cut out a piece of one illustration and add it to another. I didn’t really think about it as collage at the time. I just thought about it as a way of building up an image. I had also become preoccupied with an instrument called the airbrush. When I arrived at the RCA, it was the tail end of the Phillip Castle and Adrian George era, and we were all interested in what they’d been doing. David Hockney had just been here too, and he’d used the airbrush. I liked the lush surfaces you could make. I hardly ever used it as a way of modelling images, but as a way of putting down areas of flat colour. It was attractive and it reproduced well. I’d do a bit of airbrushing on one piece of paper, and cut it out and paste it onto another piece to build up a multilayered image. You abandoned collage when the computer arrived on the scene.

If I was asked to illustrate a story, or a book jacket, or a record sleeve, instead of creating a single image, I’d make a collection of fragments that I’d gathered from different sources and collage them together. Text, images and photographs, brought together in a way that satisfied my own aesthetic needs, and also the requirements of the brief. Of course, making multiple images is what the computer does best, and in the late-80s and early-90s a lot of people were starting to make the type of images that I was making in much less time than it took me! I wasn’t forced into moving away from collage by the computer, but I recognised that it was able to do things that I had developed a skill for; and that I needed to move on.

You’ve talked about opening the plan chest and finding photographic crop boards randomly framing an unexpected image. Do you think this sort of beautiful accident is still possible with software and a computer?

Yes, I’ve found ways of working on the computer that enable me to enlarge or reduce images and crop them in ways that are appropriate to what I’m doing, although I’ve never really exploited the relationship between the computer and print. I still prefer to use ‘real’ material. Since the early-90’s I’ve used it mainly for making films. The computer for me is where I do film editing. You trained as a graphic designer. Recently you’ve talked about the work that comes out of the RCA Communication Art & Design course as being ‘hard to locate’. In other words, some of it might be illustration, or it might be design. What do you think is the difference between graphic design and illustration?

When I started working professionally, the stereotypical graphic designer was regarded as a problem solver, and the illustrator a kind of decorator. The graphic designer would come up with the concept, and then they’d wheel in the illustrator to carry it out. They always seemed to need to have a brief in order to have an idea. One of the things that differentiated designers from illustrators was that illustrators had a working methodology; they either drew, painted or made collages. They had a day-today working method they adapted to whatever the circumstances required; and through that process they developed an individual ‘voice’ or style that was recognisable. A lot of designers didn’t have that. They’d take each job on its own merits. It was as if they were starting from scratch every time. Do you think this is still the case today?

Many designers still find it difficult if they’re not working within certain parameters, so it’s more difficult for them to exist outside a commercial framework. Whereas illustrators, and especially the sort of illustrator that I’ve been advocating, have working methodologies that enable them to do commissioned jobs or, when that isn’t an option, to make ‘their own work.’ I’ve always felt that this was an important distinction between illustrators and designers, and that designers needed to pick up on this, which they’ve done more and more in recent years, especially in places like the RCA. A new generation of graphic designers have become interested in notions of self-authorship and self-expression. I associate this attitude strongly with what goes on here at the RCA.

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Walks With Colour 2006 Walks With Colour is a book, an exhibition and a research project. Shown are two examples of Fern paintings on 46 DAN FERN 3/7

old linen maps, reproduced as high quality digital prints. Threads are pulled from the linen, painted by Fern and added as tracery to the finished surfaces.

Toulouse-Lautrec 2001 Poster commissioned by Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi to produce a poster commemorating the 100th

anniversary of the death of the founding father of European poster art.

There are now more designers interested in setting their own agenda. And I think the RCA is fairly central in promoting that mindset. Self-expression is a slightly pejorative way of describing it – but they have ideas, concepts, projects that they want to do, that they’ve thought of rather than been asked to do. You could call it a form of self-expression, but it’s more complex than that; they’re using the tools and the strategies of graphics to make personal statements. At the RCA, although there is always a strong ethos of self-authorship, both in illustration and in graphics, the notion that you’re able to adapt what you do to the commercial world, but do it on your own terms is prevalent. I think that’s one of the key things that we are about here. The general atmosphere is very optimistic and idealistic. It’s not an accident. We’ve created it. It comes partly from me, but also from the tutors. They all have, without exception, an idealistic, positive and optimistic way of approaching professional life.

There’s an insistence on RCA tutors being practitioners as well as teachers, which seems to be crucial to the success of the course.

I think it’s very important that people are speaking about things that they know implicitly themselves. I don’t think it’s necessarily something that comes into the teaching process. It’s more to do with mindsets and ways of thinking. Of course, there are technical discussions about drawing or computer programmes, or whatever. But our teaching is less about information and more about experience. I’m a great believer in the idea of thinking through making. This has always been important to me and it is very much a part of our ethos. I occasionally come across anti-RCA feeling. You select the people who come here, and so you are open to a charge of elitism. What’s your view on that in our egalitarian age?

We choose from hundreds of applicants from all over the world, so you could say that it is an elite, but it’s an elite of merit rather than anything else. The students come from an enormously wide range of backgrounds, so it’s not as if their family or anything like that has any bearing on the possibility that they might come here. Around 60% come from outside of the UK. But it is definitely elitist and I don’t see how you can avoid that. I know about the criticism, and I know we get a lot of it from parts of the design press, and from graphic designers for whom graphics is a sort of visual wing of marketing and consumerism. But one of the big shifts that has happened with young people generally, and not just here, but all over the world, is that they don’t necessarily want to spend precious years and a formative part of their lives flogging goods and services. They’ve got the rest of their lives to do that if they want to. So for this precious time, they can live outside of that. To lend creative talents entirely to the service of consumerism doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not against it for part of the time, far from it. But I don’t take the D&AD view that that is what it’s all about. Education should be far broader and deeper than that. Graduates from the RCA are among the most commercially successful people in contemporary design; a recent survey of all our graduates over the past five years showed that more than 90% are employed in the profession they were trained for. How would you summarise the benefits of the course?

I think that we recognise how precious these two years are. It’s a fantastically valuable time in somebody’s creative life. It’s a time when really anything ought to be possible. It may well be that graduates go and work in mainstream graphics, but the things that they’ve learned here and what they’ve experienced here will carry on sustaining them in whichever area of work they go into. And that’s to do with attitude, and about being able to share ideas, to collaborate, to articulate ideas, to be responsive and to be socially responsible; we always encourage people to work in socially responsible ways wherever possible. At the same time there’s nothing worse than dogma in education – people have to arrive at this mindset for themselves. We encourage people to look at sustainable development, social responsibility in design, working for ageing populations, the dyslexic, all of those sorts of things. There is a very strong ethical framework here, but it’s a discreet one. Where does the working illustrator who is sympathetic towards these views go for inspiration? Should they look to contemporary art and artists?

We’ve always advocated that illustrators should think of themselves as part of the creative arts and that they should relate as much to the fine arts, the performing arts, to literature and philosophy, as much as to the applied arts. That the provenance of images is very broad and they should look to where the most interesting, most demanding or most provocative images are coming from – whether it’s photography or painting, or different countries, or whatever. That’s where they should be going for their inspirations and source material.

I agree, but of course they would throw the charge back at us, and say ‘well, you creative people don’t know anything about business, about marketing, about demographics’.

The daring of creative artists just isn’t matched by the daring in marketing. There’s that lovely story about the book, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. When it first came out the jacket was very ordinary, and the book didn’t sell. Then someone had the brain wave of getting Jeff Fisher to do the cover, and it became a bestseller. Its success was demonstrably to do with the cover. Can we round off by talking about Walks With Colour?

“ONE OF THE FACTORS THAT IS ENORMOUSLY RESTRICTING TO ILLUSTRATION IS THE LACK OF DARING AMONGST THE PEOPLE WHO COMMISSION WORK. I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT THE ART DIRECTORS. I’M TALKING ABOUT THE MARKETING PEOPLE.THEY SEEM TO BE PUTTING A HAND-BRAKE ON THE POTENTIAL OF IMAGE-MAKERS” I think one of the factors that is enormously restricting to illustration, particularly at the moment, is the lack of daring amongst the people who commission work. I’m not talking about the art directors. I’m talking about the marketing people. They seem to be putting a hand-brake on the potential of image-makers and designers. If your work is tough and daring and individual it scares the marketing people because they think that too few people are going to relate to it. They want something that’s going to hit as many people as possible. I don’t think they are taught how to relate to images. I think their experience in business schools, or whatever, doesn’t include having contact with people who are creative, it’s all to do with economics. Go into any bookshop, and you can count the number of attractive, strong, appropriate images on the fingers of one hand. And that’s not the fault of the illustrators; it’s the people who market the stuff. For all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons, they are timid.

The work I’m doing now is to do with a developing attitude, not only to my own work but to a relationship with landscape, with the earth. It’s a sort of political thing as well. I am increasingly thinking about green politics and sustainable development, alongside my growing interest in the landscape where I have a studio in France. All this made me want to think and write about having a closer relationship with the earth. I had always been excited by cities and modern buildings, and the sort of accidental images you see when someone rips a poster off a billboard. I still liked all that, but I was getting more and more interested in the way trees grow on hillsides, and the light on cliff faces, things like that. It grew partly out of my interest in mountaineering and climbing but also out of a need from somewhere inside me to think more about my physical environment. it also coincides with concern about climate change, and some of the projects that are going on at the RCA to do with sustainable design and sustainable development. Walks With Colour was a way of thinking about these things, a sort of self-evaluation period. It was a way of just stepping off the escalator for a while and asking, ‘where am I now as a creative person?’ You’ve always used bright clean colours in your work, now there’s been a change. You use much darker, more naturalistic tones.

I’ve always loved colour, but I’ve tended to think of it as decoration or pattern. I’ve put colours together because they’re attractive, and not because they’re real. I wanted to start using colours that were actually an honest record of the colours that I saw. For the Walks With Colour project, I’ve also written poetry to fill in a gap that I couldn’t fill with images. The whole project has taken up a lot of time over the past five or six years, and the book and the show is the outcome of that. The book itself has been made as part of a bigger research project here, focused on digital print, and involved a lot of processes that were, in themselves, a form of thinking – thinking through making. ◆◆ Further reading: Works With Colour, Dan Fern, edited by Rick Poynor. Architectural Design and Technology Press, 1990. Dan Fern, The Reputations Interview, by Rick Poynor, in Eye 22 Vol. 6, Autumn 1996. www.rca.ac.uk

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CD covers 1990 Two from a series of covers for Shostakovich Symphonies showing Fern’s interest in Constructivism. Client: Decca. Art Director: Ann Bradbeer.

Record sleeve 1985 Contemporary choral work Cry by Giles Swayne on the theme of The Creation. Client: BBC Records. Art Director: Mario Moscardini.

Architects Journal 1984 Cover story about innovative theatre design. Image based on architectural plans and drawings. Client: Architectural Press.

Vol de Nuit 1978 Cover for limited edition publication, Royal College of Art.

Salvo 1998 Three laser colour copies from a work called Salvo. Published by Royal College of Art in a signed, limited edition of 300 copies.

Selection of the Jury of Ten 1986 Section heading for Annual of Dutch Advertising

Film stills Showing Dan Fern’s interest in the natural world and performance related work.

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Walks With Colour 2006 More paintings on old linen maps from the Walks With Colour project. 50 DAN FERN 7/7

GUARDIAN OF ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY KING

THE GUARDIAN USES ILLUSTRATION WITH A CONFIDENCE UNMATCHED BY ANY OTHER BRITISH NEWSPAPER. WHILE ITS NEWS PAGES MAINLY USE PHOTOGRAPHY, COMMENT AND ANALYSIS PAGES MAKE EXTENSIVE USE OF ILLUSTRATION. IN THE VIEW OF THE GUARDIAN’S ART DIRECTOR MARK PORTER “A PHOTOGRAPH TENDS TO BE MORE ABOUT INFORMATION AND AN ILLUSTRATION TENDS TO BE MORE ABOUT IDEAS.”

The illustrator Marion Deuchars has a short but intense working week. On Wednesday afternoon, or early on Thursday, she receives the copy for the Guardian’s Saturday Comment & Debate essay. Having read the piece – usually around 1,500 words on a weighty issue, written by one of the paper’s well-respected journalists – she has anything between 24 and four hours to produce a powerful and concise image. Her illustration must be an intelligent summary of the text that not only entices readers, but also fills whatever space is left on the page. Once she has finished this illustration, her attention turns to the Saturday letters page. She is sent the text of the readers’ missives some time between 11.00am and 3.00pm on Friday, and her illustration has to reach the section designer by 5.00pm the same day. When that’s done, it is, in Deuchars’ words, time to “down tools, off to the pub,” and of course, to spend time with her two very young sons. Deuchars is exhilarated by the sight of her work in print on Saturday morning, but equally liberated by its redundancy the next day. Working to this schedule since the papers’ redesign last September, Deuchars admits to becoming addicted to “the newspaper-buzz.” This frantic timetable utterly contravenes my assumptions about illustration. In the past, I have held with hackneyed associations between the hand-drawn image and intensive craft and reflection – particularly when set against the immediacy of the more commonplace editorial photograph. Deuchars’ process, however, far from characterised by lengthy consideration and laborious technique, is distinguished by speed and flexibility. When I ask her if she ever feels frustrated that she is given so little time for thinking and making, she replies quite to the contrary, “It’s a fantastic job for an illustrator,” she insists. “My whole way of working has changed. Before, I would have played about, coming up with an idea indirectly through fuzzy logic. Now I’ll brainstorm. I think it is much closer to the way that graphic design works.” Discussing her relationship with the writing, Deuchars suggests that, “You have to adapt to the way they think, coming up with an idea first.” ‘They are the journalists of course and although Deuchars refers to them as the other, I wonder if she is coming around to their attitudes and mores. Asked about her favourite Guardian pieces, it is obvious that her mind goes temporarily blank. Then, gathering herself, she tentatively suggests the image from the previous Saturday. The illustration to which she refers is an effective 4 juxtaposition of well-known symbols – the barrel of a gun pointing at a branch-proffering dove, a hand holding a flower crossed out in red. It is an apt visualisation of the text by Jenni Russell, which describes the State’s subtle incursion into our freedom, and its measures to police even the mildest of dissent – but it is far from the most striking example of Deuchars’ work. I suspect that like a true newspaper pro, she operates on the basis that she is only as good as her last piece. When I suggest this theory to the Guardian’s art director Mark Porter he concurs. “That’s what happens when you work in newspapers,” he explains. “It is so quick that all you can remember is the last thing you did.” This long-term memory loss notwithstanding, Porter boasts that the paper has a long history of taking illustration seriously. “One of the things we’ve managed to do in the 20 years or so since the [David] Hillman design, is to make sure that the 74 THE GUARDIAN 3/6

visual is taken very seriously,” he says. “It has got to the stage where the editors completely understand the concept of visual journalism. Photography is at the heart of it, but illustration and information graphics work alongside.” Porter’s commitment to illustration dates from the beginning of the 80s, the early years of his career, working for the art director Michael Lackersteen. “We were just coming out of the period when the colour supplements used a lot of illustration, the Sunday Times and so on, and it wasn’t long after Nova had gone down,” he recalls. “Illustration was much more part of the magazine vocabulary in those days. Mike took it very seriously and he was quite demanding of the illustrators, which they loved him for.”

“WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING IN THE LAST COUPLE OF MONTHS GOES TO SHOW THAT THERE CAN BE JUST AS MUCH CONTROVERSY GENERATED BY ILLUSTRATION AS THERE IS BY PHOTOGRAPHY” There is little to match the Guardian’s use of illustration in current British publishing, but Porter points to the newspapers of Spain and Poland as important contemporary examples, both countries with a strong tradition of political graphics. In the UK the Guardian is unique in maintaining an expanding stable of illustrators, both young and more mature, and in its commitment to enabling illustration to escape the editorial ghetto of the financial and technology pages. The central Guardian formula for the use of illustration is straightforward. News is visualised through photography, ideally colour photography, which Porter believes readers respond to as an ‘event’ rather than being tempted to see as ‘artwork’, while comment and analysis pages are enhanced with illustrations. Justifying this policy, Porter suggests that, “although there are innumerable exceptions, a photograph tends to be more about information and an illustration tends to be more about ideas.” The designers of the Guardian’s feature sections, however, use illustration in a more flexible way than their central news counterparts. A number of factors determine whether a text is illustrated, the most important being the suitability of the subject, but also in play are the usual implications of deadlines and budgets. These sections, in particular the weekday newspaper-cummagazine hybrid G2, offer a chance to experiment with the role of illustration.

Olivier Kugler’s regular spread in Friday’s G2 creates a visual report on social-interest topics, such as the lifestyle of political refugees, or the daily buzz at a popular fish-and-chip shop. Kugler was first commissioned during the redesign by the then-editor of G2 Ian Katz. His contract is similar to that of a conventional columnist in that he is allowed as much leeway in his choice of subjects and his treatment of them as that extended to a star writer. “I would love to see a few more people like Olivier, and also Joe Sacco 12 [a journalist turned illustrator who is celebrated for his extended graphic reports from the Middle East], who can really function as authors and tell their own stories,” enthuses Porter. He views this situation as evidence of the emphatic embrace of the concept of visual journalism across the paper, and it is something he would like to see develop in the future. Before talking to Deuchars and Porter, my assumption was that illustration was less likely to be controversial than photography. I am quickly disabused of this notion when Deuchars poses the question: “How do you draw a Muslim?” “If you blur the distinction between illustration and cartoons,” comments Porter, “what’s been happening in the last couple of months goes to show that there can be just as much controversy generated by illustration as there is by photography.” So, not uncontroversial, but controversial in a different way: an illustration is less likely to intrude on a person’s privacy, or aestheticise their hardship, but it can easily lapse into caricature or stereotype. Illustrations are useful for communicating abstract ideas, and tend to be a more appropriate place for the deployment of cliché (hence Deuchars’s dove), but if their content fails to rise above the blindingly obvious they become at best a meaningless decoration and at worst a detraction from the writing. Contemporary newspapers need illustration and photography to draw their increasingly visual readers to their pages. Pictures not only make us want to read, but also influence the meaning of the text. Deuchars takes this responsibility very seriously, thinking hard about the demands and desires of both readers and writers. She tells me that she gets no feedback from the columnists whose work she illustrates, and is curious to know their opinions. I pursue the matter with Mark Porter, who promises to try and think of a writer who might have an opinion, but cautions me by saying, “I suspect that they [the writers] don’t have much to say about it, because they are still very focussed on the words. They are not hostile in any way, but they are not interested in how you design the paper, or how you use illustration.” Porter’s view appears to be confirmed when, after a week or so, the name of a potentially interested writer is not forthcoming. So much for the journalists. Thank goodness then for the energy and commitment of the Guardian’s art director and designers, and its visually literate section editors who maintain the newspaper’s pages as a model of contemporary editorial illustration ◆◆ 15

Further reading: The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, by Joe Sacco, Jonathan Cape, 2004. www.mariondeuchars.co.uk www.olivierkugler.com

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The Danish Cartoons Marion Deuchars, 2006 This year, illustration made the headlines as a result of the controversial Danish cartoons. Deuchars’ illustration highlighted questions over rights to free speech, as the public tried to contextualise the tragic consequences of the Danish newspapers’ commission.

Masturbation and Terrorism Marion Deuchars, 2006 The simplicity of the silhouette draws the links between gun violence and male sexuality. On the following page the shapes converge to form a phallic symbol.

Loss of Freedom Marion Deuchars, 2006 Duechars’ editorial illustrations deploy a mix of styles and techniques to convey complex ideas.

Saturday ‘Comment & Debate’ illustrations Marion Deuchars, 2005 – 06 Deuchars’ skill at direct visual symbollism and her ability to play with words creates an alternative commentary on current affairs.

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Joe Sacco on Torture Joe Sacco, 2005 Sacco’s controversial illustrated essays delve into topics difficult to cover in conventional journalism, allowing recollections and unsavoury truths to come into the public eye. This recent

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story responded to growing scepticism over the mistreatement of suspected terrorists with a story of two recently released prisoners, struggling to come to terms with their experiences whilst detained by investigators.

Yangtze / Fruit & Veg Olivier Kugler, 2006 The personal and emotive nature of Kugler’s character portraits allow an intimacy often unattainable through conventional interviews. While his drawings capture the personality of the interviewee,

his meandering soundbites and detailed drawings create a space in the Guardian’s G2 for a quiet cultural commentary, and provide insight into the corners of contemporary British society.

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ED FELLA: THE KING OF ZING, FOREVER BY ALICE TWEMLOW

ED FELLA STARTED OUT AS A ‘LAYOUT GUY’ IN THE COMMERCIAL ART STUDIOS OF 1960S DETROIT, BUT IN HIS LATE-40S HE FAMOUSLY ENROLLED ON A GRADUATE DESIGN COURSE AT THE CRANBROOK ACADEMY OF ART IN MICHIGAN. TODAY, AT 68, HIS WORK IS A BOUNDARYDEFYING, IDIOSYNCRATIC HYBRID OF ILLUSTRATION AND GRAPHIC DESIGN.

Ed Fella is repeating himself. But at 68, Fella is still a towering figure, both literally and metaphorically, and speaks with an intensity that does not invite interruption. “The machine is still running,” he says, repeating a phrase that has been quoted in articles about him written in both 1996 and 2004. The repetition is intentional. Fella’s machine may still be running, but he has decided to hit rewind. He is methodically going back through his personal archive, cataloguing and reusing 50 years worth of illustration, commercial art and typography, plus the contents of 75 sketchbooks. He’s doing this in order to preserve his work and, if Fella himself is to be believed, because his options are limited. He describes himself as an “exit-level” designer. “There’s no future for me, only a past,” he says. “All I can do is to reclaim my work.” The idea of the archive – and particularly his archive, which comprises some cardboard boxes and a big metal file cabinet in his Los Angeles studio – is a major preoccupation of Fella’s right now. When I spent some time with him and his CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) students last October, he talked a good deal about design archives, and the lack thereof – an oversight on the part of design museums and organizations that concerns Fella. The topic was on his mind, I think, because he had spent the summer of 2005 working with his 19 year-old nephew to develop his website – a digital corollary to his archival plan chests. The site is still a work in progress, and dependent on the voluntary efforts of various relations, but its scope is

all mapped out and every section has a link designed as a stack of papers labeled ‘past’, ‘archive’, or ‘antique’. The expediency of raiding the archive for use in his current work attracts Fella, “I like the idea of having the work already done,” he says. “I feel as if I’m mopping up everything, getting to all the things I never got to.” But it’s more than this; his interest in the archive is philosophical as well as practical. It’s related to his acute sense of history, and now, increasingly, his own place in history. Fella grew up in mid-20th Century Detroit, a period when the automakers’ advertising budgets were big enough to keep several advertising agencies and the eight or nine major art studios that served them in business. Illustration and layout, therefore, was a lucrative career choice and attendance at Cass Technical High School, essentially an industrial apprenticeship, ensured Fella a fast-track entry to Skidmore Sahratian, one of the city’s big art studios. Illustrators each had their own promotional booklet that the studio used to sell their work. 2 On the cover of one of Fella’s 1960’s brochures is a satirical portrait of a slick commercial artist with shiny black hair and a smile full of big white teeth. He’s wearing a tuxedo, an ostentatious cravat, cuff links and pointy shoes. He’s sitting on a box safe that, one presumes from his fancy getup and enormous grin, contains his plentiful earnings. Whether it’s autobiographical or not, it’s certainly a telling image of the times. Bill Teodecki, an artist who specialised in car illustrations and their backgrounds,

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Flyer/poster for Pratt Institute 2005 Promotional item advertising a talk at the famous New York art school. Offset printing, black ink on tan bond paper. All the illustrations used in this piece were taken from 80 ED FELLA 3/9

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previous Ed Fella artworks dating from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Self-promotional booklet Mid-1960s Cover and spread from 20pp booklet showing various recurring themes in Fella’s early work: small feet, elongated figures and selfdeprecating view of the life

of a commercial artist. Like much of Fella’s work from this period, there is a marked English influence. As Fella notes: “In the late-50s, I was a big fan of Ronald Searle. I had all his little books about English school life.”

remembers the heyday of the Detroit car art studios as a time when “a lot of money was being made, heavy competition, heavy drinking, pressure, car crashes and a few suicides.” He adds: “All of those guys in New York foamed at the mouth to do car work because Detroit money was so good.” Some of the illustrations in Fella’s booklet would have been used in adverts and as spot illustrations in magazines like Playboy and Good Housekeeping, whilst some of them were straight from his sketchbook. The characters that appear through the book’s pages are utterly bizarre: on one spread alone 3 we find eight men, each seemingly from a different era. A crazy-looking guy, a salesman maybe, clicks his fingers, lets go of his cane and high-steps it across the centrefold, a naked lady on his tie, a cigarette tucked under his braces and a small rent in one of his trouser legs; a clergyman walks on painted toenails; and an imposing gent in knee socks and colonial garb speaks on an Edwardian-era telephone. These satirical portraits of businessmen and fat rich couples don’t seem out of place in the booklet, but the Britishness, the Imperialist digs and the references to Victorian engineering are surprising and somewhat incongruous when you consider it was conceived in America’s mid-west. The booklet is an eloquent demonstration of Fella’s facility with many illustrative styles, the international range of his references, and his obvious relish for satire. Fella makes an art of being contrary. While most designers have ditched the deeply unfashionable term ‘commercial art,’ Fella continues to use it emphatically to describe his work. “I like the word,” he says. “It’s been used in a derogatory way since Rand, you know, the American modernist railed against idiosyncratic commercial art. I think graphic designers should reclaim ‘commercial art.’ Hack. That’s another word I reclaimed…” I wonder if they are actually useful terms, or is Fella just being stubborn? “It’s satirical, but it’s also serious,” he says. “I want to reclaim the honesty of commercial art.” Fella’s insistence on such terminology may come from a sense of nostalgia. When he was in his late-40s, after three decades in the business, Fella famously gave up commercial art and embarked on graduate studies in design. It was 1985 and Katherine and Michael McCoy had recently started the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Fella’s hands-on knowledge of the then-exotic vernacular of commercial art was a powerful influence on fellow students and tutors alike. His work from this period, a peculiar and hard-to-categorize hybrid of illustration, handlettering and composition that had derived from years spent as a Detroit “layout guy,” gained him an international reputation and a definitive position in graphic design’s avantgarde, which at the time was keenly focused on deconstruction theory. This position has continued to be chronicled and confirmed by design critics. Numerous accolades have further cemented his status: in 1997 Fella received the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation and in 1999 an Honorary Doctorate from the Centre for Creative Studies in Detroit. Three pieces of his work hang in MoMA’s design and architecture gallery. He speaks of their inclusion in the museum’s collection, and their positioning next to Paula Scher’s Public Theatre posters, with a mixture of bemusement and delight. “I like the idea of being history,” he says, “I feel like I can relax.” As for the future, Fella makes space for his students to take care of that. He has been

part of the design faculty of CalArts since graduating from Cranbrook in 1987. “My teaching is about encouraging students to investigate the new,” he says. “I get them to do the work.” So while the students look forward, the focus of Fella’s own work is turned inwards and backwards. For most of his career he has worked with a filing cabinet of clip art and references, so recycling visual fragments is nothing new. The difference now is that it’s his own work that he is re-sampling. This act of self-plunder finds expression in 11x17” flyers that document his various speaking engagements, some of which I suspect he may well accept just as an excuse to make another flyer. There are 131 of these flyers, printed black on both sides, on uncoated sheets in muted hues of brown and grey. Those who attend his lectures each receive a flyer, not as a promotion for the event – “the next generation has to do the advertising; I don’t want to interfere with that” – but as a souvenir. The flyers can be seen, therefore, as another facet of the process of self-documentation and archive building. Even though the flyers are predominantly visual, with the typographic elements used as illustrative rather than verbal components, Fella describes them as a form of ‘writing’. “If you read them all,” he says, “you’ll get my commentary on design and life.” However, the language is a very personal one, and even though Fella believes it is available to others if they “sit down with this stuff and unpack it like a poem,” some of the references are pretty obscure. Referring to a poster he made for a conference I organized in Berlin, he admits, “you’d have to know a lot of references and know the context: German design, commercial art, lettering and styles.” Among other things, the Berlin flyer references Armin Hofmann, various styles of German stamps, and a range of Bauhaus lettering. Most of the flyers use the location of the talk as the stimulus for their content, but for a recent lecture at Pratt in Brooklyn 1 Fella’s subject was himself or, rather, his past. The theme of the flyer, stated in an undulating line of handset small courier caps, is ‘Nothing new was made for this piece’. Fella achieved the wave effect by cutting notches in between each letter and then bending it “any which way.” He says of the flyer, made in the spring of 2005, “there’s the whole history of my practice here.” On one side of the poster, a stylized drawing of a hand holding a pencil grows out from the right edge of the page. The pencil is pointing towards, but not quite touching, an electrical socket into which is plugged a shiny plastic Pop Art plug. Connecting the two elements is a genie-like winged creature with devil’s horns. It has its single foot poised on the back of the pencil and one enlarged hand, curled into a fist and extended towards the socket. This character bears resemblance to a picture Fella drew in his 60s promotional brochure, of a devil in evening dress with cloven hooves, and horns easily mistaken for two wings of slicked back hair. Beside him is an electrical socket and in one hand his tail hangs limply, its pointed end charred and curled. The text of the poster – the title of his talk, ‘An Exit-Level Designer: Ed Fella At Pratt History, Commercial Art, Art, and the American Vernacular’ and the date and location – is broken down into phrases in which the words are stacked and staggered horizontally and vertically. The conjunctions ‘An’, ‘At’ and ‘And’ are framed in diagonally thrusting ovals which give the composition movement, and serve to connect the disparate pieces. It’s a beautiful piece of design – deft

in its mixture of spontaneity and calculation, and knowing in its flagrant disregard for typographic rules.

“I REMEMBER THE OLDER GUYS SAYING, ‘OH KID YOU DON’T WANT TO USE THAT STYLE, IT’S HORRIBLE.’ ’ I SUPPOSE IT WOULD BE THE SAME THING NOW IF A STUDENT CAME TO ME SAYING HE’D FOUND THIS OLD STUFF BY SOMEONE CALLED DAVID CARSON OR ED FELLA. I WOULD SAY ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’” The flip side is filled with small images, all interconnected as if part of some crazy plastic model airplane kit. In the top left a fisherman casts his rod, the end of which has caught upon a stack of clip art – a decorative pagoda building silhouetted atop a graphic outline of a stopwatch, atop an eye looking out to the left, contained in a circle atop a dementedlooking sun which radiates rays of light. An ornate frame in the centre is built up using Art Deco references processed through a 70s lens of irony, and on the bottom sits a wideeyed cartoon cricket dating from Fella’s 60s period of caricature illustration. To the right is a highly ornamental flower, the stem of which takes the viewer’s eye down to the layer of images below. It is dense composition, one that rewards in proportion to close study. The other place Fella continues to produce or “discharge” work is in his sketchbooks. He has 75 of them, each with around 100 pages which he compulsively fills with expressive gestures that occasionally spawn a half-recognisable word or phrase such as ‘Beauregard’ or ‘Loose end in 2nd sight’, or a phantasmagorical figure that looks as if it has been summoned from his imagination through a Cubist painting and then a Saturday morning cartoon. He uses one of those fourcolour plastic ballpoint pens that primary school teachers use to mark papers, and a yellow Prisma pencil to add some tonal value. “They’re not sketches for anything,” says Fella of the characters and distorted phrases that crowd the pages, “they exist in process.” There is a dialogue between the sketchbooks and flyers, however, which results in a printed

document. When a sketch shows signs of promise, he’ll transpose it to a flyer and “rework it, fix it, adjust it” into a more final state. “It’s a weird process,” says Fella. “I don’t know quite what to make of it. I don’t know if it’s art or design, or what it is…” Such a willingness not to know, with reference to his sketchbooks at least, is at odds with the extreme knowingness that pervades other aspects of his work. It would appear, albeit with the advantage of hindsight, that Fella has always been a postmodernist. He didn’t need to wait for Venturi and Memphis to come around; he always viewed the world this way – and he still does. Having a sensibility for styles was especially important to him when he was an illustrator because, as he puts it, “whereas graphic design is more anonymous, all illustration is sold for its particular and individual style.” In the late-50s, for example, Fella was interested in the Art Deco or Moderne detailing and lettering that he found untouched in Detroit’s 20s and 30s laundrette and drycleaner premises. He also recalls a brand of potato chips, New Era, which “had its packages done in Art Deco style.” When he started to incorporate elements of this Moderne-style in his work, “I remember the older guys saying, ‘Oh kid you don’t want to use that style, it’s horrible.’ I suppose it would be the same thing now if a student came to me saying he’d found this old stuff by someone called David Carson or Ed Fella. I would say ‘what are you doing?’” Fella’s ability to be always attuned to what is overlooked or unfashionable at any one time is surely a post-modernist trait. “Postmodernism is about a knowingness,” he says, “and at this point in time I don’t think we’ve ever been so self-conscious – of our work, its context, history, limitations, possibilities and so on. There can never be a naïve or authentic art again, except for Outsider Art. Everything else: anti-art, art as pure philosophy, art of the insane, amateur art, low-culture, vernacular, it’s all in there. Everything now is known and academic.” It’s interesting to hear him say this as some might regard Fella’s spontaneous outpourings of his subconscious – illustration-letteringlayout-art – as a kind of ‘outsider’ design. Fella acknowledges, however, that despite the inclusiveness of our current attitude to art, there’s still a hierarchy of quality at work. “I don’t pretend I’m a vernacular innocent,” he says, “there’s a craft, skill and artistry to the work I do that makes it unique. I try to make a body of work that’s undeniable…On the other hand it’s hard to say what that is.” ◆◆ Further reading: Edward Fella: Letters on America. Essays by Lewis Blackwell and Lorraine Wild. Laurence King Publishing, 2000. All Access: Behind the Scenes – The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers by Stefan Bucher. Rockport, 2006. www.edfella.com

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6 7

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GMC truck advertisement. Illustration dating from the 1970s

ChevyVision 70 1969-1970 Art Deco style lettering for front of foldout promotional item.

Chevrolet 1915 auto Early-1960s One of around 50 ink and wash illustrations depicting the history of Chevrolet cars.

Hudson’s Contract Division advertisement 1971 Illustration for contract furniture division of Detroit department store. “l think the ad was run in Time Magazine,” recalls Fella.

“It’s not air brush, but done with one of those small water soluble spray cans, popular in the 70s, now long gone.”

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8 8 – 14

Self-initiated work Mid-1980s Collage work (page size 7x10”) from Fella’s post ‘commercial art’ phase. 84 ED FELLA 7/9

“l was trained in the mid 50s in a technical high school,” he explains, “and in our 20th century art history classes we studied all the European

experimental art movements like Dada and Constructivism (along with American regionalism), but especially the Bauhaus and the work

of people like Moholy-Nagy – all movements that used collage.”

Self-initiated work 2005

Self-initiated work Early-1980s Front and back of postcard, part of a series, showing collage work.

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17 – 18

19 – 21

Self-initiated work Early-1990s Pages from sketch books (7x10” approx) showing handrendered lettering. Executed in Prismacolor pencil.

Self-initiated work Late-1990s More pages from sketch books, this time executed in 4-colour Bic ballpoint pen

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£12 US$25 €20