Utopian Image: Politics & Posters

UTOPIAN IMAGE: Politics & Posters

Atelier Populaire, We Are All Undesirables, poster, screenprint, 1968

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n early May 2008, as the European along the spine so that the hand-printed posters could be removed and mounted media recalled the demonstrations that took place on the streets of Paris on the wall. The book was also on sale at 40 years earlier, a telling display could Paul Smith shops in Leeds, Paris, New be seen in the window of the Paul Smith York and Los Angeles. fashion shop in Floral Street, London.

The commodification of these revoluTo celebrate the anniversary, Smith — tionary images was a possibility that an enthusiast for all forms of popular participants in the Atelier Populaire, which began at the École des Beaux-Arts culture — was showing a screen-printed poster produced by the Atelier Populaire, in Paris, both anticipated and rejected, in support of the protests by French stu- refusing to put the posters on sale either dents and workers, mounted on a jagged during or after les événements. As they explained in 1969: slab of concrete. Inside, shoppers could buy an exclusive, hand-covered, hard- Their rightful place is in the centers of back album, priced at £1,200 ($1,800) conflict, that is to say in the streets and on and limited to just 68 copies, consisting the walls of the factories. of 40 of the most powerful posters then To use them for decorative purposes, to on show at the nearby Hayward Gallery display them in bourgeois places of culture in an exhibition titled “May 68: Street or consider them as objects of aesthetic Posters from the Paris Rebellion.” The interest is to impair both their function soft white recycled pages were perforated and their effect. . . .

Rick Poynor | Essays

Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an “outside” observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the ruling class. [1] Yet 40 years later, the Atelier Populaire’s fears have come to pass, for what could be more bourgeois than a shop selling expensive trendy clothes? How many Paul Smith customers who saw the displays, let alone bought the album, would perceive these utopian images as anything other than attractively “edgy” decorative objects utterly divorced from political struggle? From the perspective of anyone involved in that struggle, could Paul Smith’s incongruous act of an international fashion brand be seen as anything other than a sign of the May uprising’s total failure? Nor was the

France or Cuba has the credible aims enjoy a privileged status, isolated from of scholarly understanding and public other workers in “an invisible prison.” [5] education, this curatorial enterprise In a workshop teeming with activity, cannot escape the Atelier’s words of several students, paint brushes in hand, warning. To step back from the political might collaborate on a design and posters struggle to study its products with were printed at great speed, around the detachment is implicitly to accept the clock — photographs by Philippe Verestablished order that makes this manner mès, one of the students, show rows of of study possible. For the museum, the them drying on lines. “We’re there night posters are indeed “objects of aesthetic and day making posters,” recalls Gérard interest” taking their place in a collection Fromanger, another participant. “The that charts the formal evolution of whole country is on strike and we’ve the poster, as well as providing docnever worked harder in our lives. We’re umentary evidence of their political finally necessary.” [6] moment. The Atelier Populaire posters have retained their Between 15 May and 27 exceptional fascination June 1968, the Atelier as examples of socially (Poison comes to the home) Populaire des Beauxengaged image-making Arts created more than for three interrelated reasons. First, be400 designs, while the Atelier des Arts cause of the anonymous and collective Décoratifs created more than 100. [7] manner of their production. Second, Estimates of the total number of copies because considered in purely formal put into circulation vary between 300,000 terms, as combinations of well-honed and 600,000. [8] The posters’ recurrent copywriting and simplified imagery, they themes include the need for particare singularly effective pieces of commun- ipation, continuing struggle, unity ication. Third, because of the cocerted of the workers, strike action and the manner of their public use in the streets education of the people, as well as the of Paris and elsewhere in France, which iniquities of the production line, secret made them central to les événements ballots, the “Gaullist cancer,” and the and central, as a consequence, to the media — one poster in the Stedelijk’s photographic documentation of the collection shows a forest of TV aerials events by Magnum and other photogwith the legend “L’intox vient à domiraphers. One might also add a fourth cile” (Poison comes to the home). At reason, which is the sum of all the others. the height of the protests, 10 million For anyone inspired by the idea of using French citizens were on strike and the provocative graphic communication in posters declare solidarity with metal the service of a radical or revolutionary workers, postal workers, boatmen and cause, the posters continue to offer deep-sea fishermen. The designs are a paradigm of how such production always constructed around the slogan. techniques might be applied in other Their form is highly reductive, with struggles. Even a poster’s depoliticrudely fashioned, cartoon-like imagery, cized appearance in a clothes shop window offers evidence of how striking and original these 40-year-old pieces of ephemera still look as graphic images so many years after their creation.

“L’intox vient à domicile”

Niko (Antonio Pérez González), poster, screenprint, Cuba, 1968

Atelier alone in its concerns, in the late 1960s, about the speed with which revolutionary communications emerging from bourgeois society could be attacked at first, then neutralized and assimilated. “Capitalism transforms all objects, including art, into commodities,” writes Susan Sontag.

“And the poster — including the revolutionary poster — is hardly exempt from this iron rule of cooption.” [2]

In a collection of Cuban revolutionary posters published in 1970, Sontag points out how these images, regardless of their makers’ intentions, have become “one more item in the cultural smorgasbord provided in affluent bourgeois society,” their final resting place not the streets, town squares or factories, but the living room wall. [3] It was only a short step from the fashionable home to the equally bourgeois setting of the contemporary museum. In 1971, the Stedelijk Museum presented Cubaanse Affiches, a wideranging exhibition of Cuban posters still cited by experts in the field, with an accompanying catalogue. [4] While the interest of an institution such as the Stedelijk in political posters from

The Atelier Populaire broke with the individualistic norms of both art and design practice, suppressing the bourgeois idea of personal authorship.

The artist would no longer Atelier Populaire, Paris, May 1968. Photograph: Philippe Vermès

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Paris, May 1968. Photograph: Marc Riboud

which has great vitality and immediate communicative power, and rough, handdrawn lettering. Most posters are printed in a single color: green, brown, purple, blue, red or black. The students wanted to avoid ambiguity and applied the most elementary criteria to every image: “Is the political idea sound? Does the poster put over this idea well?” [9] A famous poster from the Stedelijk’s collection, showing the laughing face of radical student leader Daniel CohnBendit, as he confronts a policeman in a helmet, exemplifies the Atelier’s graphic strengths. The half tones in Jacques Haillot’s news photograph, source for the image, have been “posterized” — simplified into black and white. In the Stedelijk version (one of several variants), the state’s menacing uniformed enforcer has become a dark blue hulk, while the gleeful features of Danny the Red, as he was then known, seem to glow with a wild light, an effect intensified by the close cropping of the original picture.

The quickly drawn letterforms, mixing lowercase with capitals, suggest the urgent voices of protesters suddenly united in passionate resistance — “We are all undesirables” — to an inflexible authority determined to disregard and subdue them.

The speed and scale of production made bers of Grapus, formed in Paris in 1970, possible what one commentator calls their experiences in the second Atelier an “absolute interpenetration of art and Populaire at the École des Arts Décoratifs event.” [10] The posters were a vital part in May 1968 would be a formative influof the struggle shared by students and ence. Miehe, a committed communist, workers, expressing its key ideas in the had taken a leading role in the graphic most direct public language available, workshop and Bernard identified with inscribing the streets of Paris with these his dedication to the working class. urgent messages, and attaining a level of visibility and impact on the consciousness Those interests, I believed, would be in of spectators, in some locations, normally better hands with the PCF [French Comachieved only by commercial advertising. munist Party]. . . As a designer I wanted Examining the idea of utopia in relation to work for the forces of revolution. My to modernism, Christine Lodder distin- artistic ambition and my vocabulary as guishes between several types of alternative world: spiritual, Dionysian, rational, political, communist and social. She characterizes social utopias, the most relevant form for this discussion, “as those visions formulated within the context of capitalist societies, which therefore embody an element of aspiration and struggle, are related to the Atelier Populaire, Paris, May 1968. Photograph: Philippe Vermès perceived evils of the present and include strategies for attaining utopia a designer, I expected, could come into within the limitations of the existing their own in the service of the party. [12] social structures.” [11] This precisely The name Grapus, a play on the words describes the role played by the Atelier crapules staliniennes (Stalinist scum), Populaire’s posters in May was both a gesture of political allegiance 1968. The students’ welland a sardonic provocation to potential organized campaign of critics. One criticism that has been made graphic rebellion, still an of the Atelier Populaire posters (and of unusual event in the history similar protest posters) is that their visual of visual communication, lexicon of clenched fists and factory can be seen as a genuinely roofs offer an old-fashioned represenutopian moment, like the tation of reality. In Robert Philippe’s upsurge of political longing view, “They have the same communica that it expressed. tive value as the antiquated post horn in For Pierre Bernard, Gérard the international series of road signs.” [13] Paris-Clavel and François This, he argues, is a needless limitation Miehe, the founding memof visual communication. Bernard’s La

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Paris, 1968. Photograph: Jacques Haillot

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design combined with an extreme economy, an almost aphoristic compression, of form. In a poster for a Henry Moore exhibition (1959) Tomaszewski carves the sculptor’s name from white paper shapes that become sculptural elements in their own right, and treats one as a pedestal for a sculpture. While little of Moore’s work is shown, the graphic construction, most of it comprising empty blue space, still conveys a sense of the British artist’s formal and spatial concerns. [14] “I learnt from Henryk Tomaszewski that ‘the economy of means is founded on the richness of thought,’” notes Paris-Clavel. [15] Bernard and Paris-Clavel were already Atelier Populaire, This is the Police Speaking, poster, screenprint, 1968 steeped in the calligraphic tradition of Polish poster depolice vous parle poster, designed at the sign, represented by Tomasze Atelier, shares this directness — its sinister, wski better than anyone, when dark-eyed cop barking into an ORTF they took part in the Atelier microphone simply illustrates the verbal at Arts-Déco. Their predilecimage — but the formal devices used by tion for the handmade image, Grapus in the 1970s and later mark a for the splatter, the blotch significant expansion in the graphic vo- and the explosively scribbled cabulary of the politically engaged poster. line, would become the basis of their graphic method as Grapus. This work In the mid-1960s, both Bernard and was, however, much more than merely Paris-Clavel had studied with Henryk gestural: Grapus’s effectiveness as graphic Tomaszewski at the Warsaw Academy of Art. The Polish master’s posters were activists came from their understanding notable for a strong emphasis on his own of meaning and how to manipulate it.

“We discovered semiology and it was hand as a visible shaping force in the

very important to us,” says Bernard.

“It allowed us to deconstruct images, so we could say to political commissioning bodies: ‘We are going to make images for you which will have real meaning. We are going to make true political images.’” [16]

Grapus, Expo Grapus, poster, offset, 1982

In a monograph about Bernard, Hugues Boekraad argues that Grapus negotiated an “erratic middle course” between two design strategies: demystification, in Barthes’ sense of exposing the myths by which we live, and a utopian impulse to

Henryk Tomaszewski, Moore, poster, offset, Poland, 1959

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imagine an alternative order that is unattainably distant from present reality. [17] Yet one might also propose that the work’s very existence, the autonomy it claims, the example it provided to others at the time of creation and, later, as a model for possible practice, can also be considered in utopian terms. Grapus’s output is, in other words, a kind of proposal. As with modernism, its radically informal method of composition, the stylistic collisions and casual violations of image and surface, embody a new way of thinking and a new set of values.

A poster Grapus produced to represent the studio, for a retrospective in Paris in 1982, can be interpreted as a kind of manifesto. They were internationally celebrated as designers by this stage, but their body of work bore no relation to the orderly, well-mannered modernism seen in the work of contemporaries operating at a comparable level of achievement and acclaim. [18] Their exhibition poster is much closer in form and spirit to the anarchic impulses, cultural irreverence and indifference to good taste found in punk graphics of the period. At the most obvious level, this can be seen in the scribbled lines, dabs of crudely slapped on color, and rejection of formal typography for clumsily scrawled handwriting. The poster’s only precisely drawn and formal graphic element, the arrow saying “Expo,” is gripped in the grinning figure’s mouth, making it clear that any engagement with design conventions will have to be conducted on Grapus’s own terms. They make their communist sympathies fully evident by placing the Soviet hammer and sickle opposite the French national colors, and turning it into a winking eye, and they invoke the libidinal energy (and imagery) that runs through their work by means of a pubic hair nose and the painted breastlike shapes that form the shoulders.The jocular iconoclasm and slightly threatening demeanor of an image that appears to have sprung into view like a jackin-the-box is underscored by satirical allusions, within the same ambivalent figure, to the Smiley face, Disney’s

and become involved in discussion.

Grapus’s poster reveals an awareness of the importance of image to the communication of political ideas that was years ahead of its time. In reality, the party did not want Grapus to reinvent its image, either then or later, because according to Grapus, it had no idea what image it was trying to project. [19] Although the group worked on occasional campaigns for the PCF, the party never gave them overall responsibility for its visual identity. In 1985, Bachellot, who had been a member of the PCF for more than 30 years, described Grapus’s way of handling the political organizations they worked for: Grapus, Let’s Go, poster, offset, 1976

Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler. In both form and content, this and other posters enact an ideal of social, cultural and personal freedom that would prove to be difficult to sustain as French politics moved to the right in the course of the 1980s.

“An optimistic glimpse of a brighter future”

Grapus avoided working for the commercial sphere, preferring to commit its efforts to the PCF, to which all of the members belonged at the outset, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), a Communist trade union, and to other progressive organizations and causes, such as theater companies, social institutions, educational initiatives and town councils. Jean-Paul Bachollet and Alex Jordan joined in the mid-1970s and Miehe left in 1978. The group continued to operate collectively, with each piece of work being attributed simply to “Grapus.”

A quintessential image from this period is the On y va (Let’s Go) festival poster they designed in 1977 for the PCF’s youth section, the Jeunesse Communiste. The massive sans-serif lettering of the title gives the announcement great authority and the rainbow-like gradations of color filling the letters turn them into windows that seem to offer an optimistic glimpse of a brighter future with the party. The informal handwritten additions, scattered like graffiti across the solid, symmetrical structure, invite the viewer to participate

I did not want to become part of a situation in which one loses one’s freedom of opinion and one’s freedom of power.

This means that a trade-union leader or a politician who comes and visits us will be respected, but he will not have any power at all. He will have the power to convince, not to impose. [20] By this time, Grapus was no longer working for the Communist party. From the mid-1980s, starting with an identity for Grapus with Michel Quarez, Festival of Youth!, poster, offset, 1976

romising course, founded a not-forprofit association, Ne Pas Plier (Do Not Bend), restating political aims and ideals closely allied to those of the Atelier Populaire. The group, consisting of artists, architects, social workers and economists, set out not to create “graphic design,” but to produce and distribute texts and images about social and political issues.

As they explained:

Adapted poster image shown in Ne Pas Plier s.v.p. catalogue, Stedelijk Museum, 1995

the Parc de la Villette, the group began to engage with larger institutional clients.

While some members still wanted to design only for political causes, Bernard felt that graphic communication could be an instrument of change when applied to social institutions. Paris-Clavel, on the other hand, was unhappy about the way that big institutions “confiscate and reclaim” the meaning of even the most radical designers’ work in their own interests, and end up “filtering reality.” [21] The turning point came with a commission to design an identity for the Louvre. Grapus now employed 20 people; it had become a business.

“We could either continue as an agency — making a profit but losing our capacity to agitate — or we could separate,” recalls Paris-Clavel. [22] On January 1, 1991, Grapus disbanded. Bernard then began a new studio, Atelier de Création Graphique, and Jordan committed himself to Nous Travaillons Ensemble (We Work Together), which he had started in 1989 within Grapus. [23] Paris-Clavel, pursuing the most uncomp6

of giving the images away for free rather than selling them: these are the guiding ideas of Ne Pas Plier. [24] In 1989, while still a member of Grapus, Paris-Clavel created a poster that shows a starving African child with Mickey Mouse ears formed from inverted images of the globe to suggest an infantilized corporate worldview. He traps the boy’s emaciated face between the accusatory words “Money World.” Refusing to offer viewers the escape route or consolation of aesthetic pleasure, which can often disarm the campaigning anger of political posters, this brutal, almost disrespectful montage is extremely uncomfortable to look at. Colleagues criticized Paris-Clavel for depicting suffering so shamelessly, but the poster proclaims an outrage against humanity that should cause universal offence and, once seen, it cannot be forgotten.

For Ne Pas Plier, an image is not an inert object to be contemplated, nor is it a political tool in itself. Only when inserted into action or struggle does it produce political effects; only when carried by individuals or groups does it come alive, generating meaning in return. The static image, frozen on the wall, is countered by an image that is carried, used, overwritten, et cetera — drawn into a social and human dynamic.

Leave behind the museum space for the stage of social struggle, refuse the “This image is less unbearable than its reality,” rules, values, and categories of the art counters Paris-Clavel. “This child dies as a victim market, abolish the artist’s proud solitude of someone else’s decision to sell him. through work conceived as coproduction, reverse the fetishism of the original and . . . This world is despicable, let’s resist it of the unique piece by proposing “images and change it!” [25] It is hard to imagine whose original is multiple,” adopt the that such a troubling poster could ever principle of free exchange to the point become a sought-after saleroom commodity or turn up in a fashion shop window. Ne Pas Plier’s work always drives home its messages with images of unmitigated bluntness, dismissing any notion that the viewer might be too “fatigued” by more news of grim reality to muster the will to respond.

The work’s humanistic assumption is that people are still capable of passionate engagement in causes that matter without it being necessary to soften the message, or make it more palatable. An image called Urgent-Chômage (Urgent-Unemployment) shows two heads aflame with enthusiasm as they restate the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. This was inspired by the words of an unemployed person: “It’s like a fire in your head, then an explosion.” [26] Grapus (Gérard Paris-Clavel), poster, screenprint, 1989

By 1995, Ne Pas Plier had produced several thousand copies in the form of posters, tarpaulins, self-adhesive prints, and petition cards demanding aid for the unemployed as they applied for benefits, and the image was often carried at demonstrations by APEIS (Association Pour l’Emploi, l’Information et la Solidarité).

Paris-Clavel and his Ne Pas Plier colleague Marc Pataut, a photographer, would march with the jobless, too. The problem with many political posters created by well-meaning designers is that they never reach their target: they influence no one and change nothing.

For Paris-Clavel, it was the act of distribution,not just the content of the images, which made them political, and the quantities were equally significant. “With ten images you might get into specialized magazines, you might be called an artistic progressive. But with 40,000 you are using a social, person-to-person approach to distribution.” [27] Here, once again, Paris-Clavel’s practice as an activist recalls the lessons of May 1968. ParisClavel’s manner of operating with Ne Pas Plier was self-consciously utopian. He doubted that democratic and cultural institutions could be relied upon to generate and distribute genuinely radical ideas,

and he used the word “utopia” — the opposite of advertising signs that seek to channel vital energy into unconscious behavior. to describe the economic Culture as a way for human beings to express their independence from institusolidarity with each another. [29] tions and major commissions that he now believed was Ne Pas Plier’s posters and placards shared essential to pursue his aims this purpose and protesters used them as a militant. (Later, Ne Pas in the same way. Working with others Plier would sometimes collab- in friendship, living alongside them, orate with public institutions.) To express sharing their emotions and collaborathis hopes, Paris-Clavel borrowed the ing with them in social struggle was also a utopian ideal. In Paris-Clavel’s phrase “Utopia of Possibilities” from a view, “social and artistic work doesn’t book by the philosopherPaul Ricoeur, hang in museums. It moves with people, and, in a Stedelijk Museum catalogue, it lives in encounters and exchanges.” [30] he quoted Ricoeur’s view that, “Utopia This assertion captures the unavoidable paradox of the political poster. Despite the distance it seeks to place between itself and the gallery wall, even Ne Pas Plier’s work has been collected, catalogued and, in some sense, contained.

It joins posters by the Atelier Populaire, Grapus and Nous Travaillons Ensemble in the Stedelijk Museum not only is constructed from the memory of things because it belongs to the same lineage, which one has not yet achieved.” [28] but because, like those posters, it stands The image of utopia also became the out as exceptional of its kind. The basis of a series of cards widely distrib- curatorial challenge is to convey to the uted by Ne Pas Plier: “Utopiste à l’arrêt” viewer, who may know nothing about (Utopian on pause), “Utopiste debout” the original context of any of these (Upstanding utopian), “Apprenti utoposters, and may have only the vaguest piste” (Apprentice utopian). As theorist impression of the causes and passions Brian Holmes, a member of Ne Pas behind them, that they represent moPlier from 1999 to 2001, explained, ments of refusal, resistance and hope these prints were meant to facilitate for necessary change. Today, thanks to and multiply hand-to-hand exchange, . . . the influence of designs like these, the vchance to create meaning with signs handmade poster is a well-established that are specifically oriented and yet graphic vernacular within the landscape open, unmanipulative of international visual communication.[31] Nevertheless, to view these images

“They represent moments of refusal, resistance and hope for necessary change.”

Urgent-Unemployment poster image used in a demonstration by APEIS, Paris, 1996. Photograph: Marc Pataut

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purely as influential examples in the history of graphic style is to turn a blind eye to the utopian visions they affirm.

While the posters’ expressive qualities were vital to the way they communicated, their reason for existing was to inform, inspire and mobilize their viewers. If it is in the nature of institutions,

standing at a remove from the action, to filter and subtly distort reality, then this is one area in which the museum should endeavor, as a matter of public and political necessity, to resist itself.

Viewers must understand these images as documents of a continuing struggle.

This essay appears in Stedelijk Collection Reflections (2012) published by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and nai010 Publishers. It is republished here with permission. Some illustrations have been changed.

See also: Why the Activist Poster is Here to Stay Notes 1. Atelier Populaire, Posters from the Revolution. Paris, May 1968 (London, 1969), n.p. See also Les Affiches de Mai 68 ou L’Imagination Graphique, exh. cat. (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1982); and M. Rohan, Paris ’68: Graffiti, Posters, Newspapers & Poems of the Events of May 1968 (London, 1988). For a general history of French graphic design, including the Atelier Populaire, see M. Wlassikoff, The Story of Graphic Design in France (Corte Madera, 2005).

2. S. Sontag, “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity,” in M. Bierut, J. Helfand, S. Heller and R. Poynor (eds.), Looking Closer 3: Classic Writings on Graphic Design (New York, 1999), 214.

Originally published in D. Stermer, The Art of Revolution (New York, 1970).

3. Ibid., 218.

4. Cubaanse Affiches, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1971).

5. Atelier Populaire, Posters from the Revolution, op. cit., n.p.

6. G. Fromanger, “L’art c’est ce qui rend la vie plus intéressante que l’art,” Libération, 14 May 1998. Quoted in K. Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002), 16.

7. M. Wlassikoff, Mai 68: L’affiche en heritage (Paris, 2008), 25.

8. J. Carrick, “The Assassination of Marcel Duchamp: Collectivism and Contestation in 1960s France,” Oxford Art Journal, 31 (2008) 1, 9. Atelier Populaire, Posters from the Revolution, op. cit., n.p.

10. Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, op. cit., 16.

11. C. Lodder, “Searching for Utopia,” in C. Wilk (ed.), Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, exh. cat. (London, 2006), 34. See also V. Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 (Chicago, 1997).

12. Quoted in H. Boekraad, My Work is Not My Work: Pierre Bernard: Design for the Public Domain(Baden, 2008), 104.

13. R. Philippe, Political Graphics: Art as a Weapon (Oxford, 1982), 282.

14. See Henryk Tomaszewski, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1991).

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15. U. Held, “Gérard Paris-Clavel,” Eye 27 (1998), 13.

16. R. Poynor, “Pierre Bernard,” Eye 3 (1991), 10.

17. H. Boekraad, My Work is Not My Work, op. cit., 80.

18. See, for instance, the selection of work by 18 international designers in F.H.K. Henrion, Top Graphic Designers (Zurich, 1983). As well as Grapus, the book includes work by Otl Aicher, Alan Fletcher, Shigeo Fukuda, Rudolph de Harak, Bruno Monguzzi, Odermatt & Tissi, Henryk Tomaszewski, and Wolfgang Weingart.

19. J. Wesselius, “Grapus: The Image of Pleasure and the Pleasure of the Image,” in Grapus 85: Various Different Attempts (Utrecht, 1985), n.p.

20. Quoted in ibid, n.p.

21. G. Paris-Clavel, Ne Pas Plier s.v.p., exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1995), n.p.

22. Held, “Gérard Paris-Clavel,” op. cit., 10.

23. See F. Robert, Nous Travaillons Ensemble (Paris, 2003).

24. G. Paris-Clavel, “Everything is Possible,” in J. van Toorn (ed.), Design beyond Design: Critical Reflection and the Practice of Communication (Maastricht, 1998), 101-102.

25. Paris-Clavel, Ne Pas Plier s.v.p., op. cit., n.p.

26. B. Holmes, “Ne Pas Plier — Déplier / Do Not Bend — Unfold,” in k-bulletin 3 (2000), n.p.

27. Held, “Gérard Paris-Clavel,” op. cit., 12.

28. P. Ricoeur, L’Idéologie et l’utopie (Paris, 1997); and G. Paris-Clavel, Ne Pas Plier s.v.p., op. cit., n.p.

29. Holmes, “Ne Pas Plier — Déplier / Do Not Bend — Unfold”, op. cit., n.p.

30. G. Paris-Clavel, “Utopia of Possibilities,” in Van Toorn, Design beyond Design, op. cit., 32.

31. See S. Heller and M. Ilić, Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age (London, 2004); and F. Studinka (ed.), Poster Collection 11: Handmade (Zurich, 2005).