Nymus_mag by nena tsamparli

ISSUE No 8

/ June 2010

a graphic design Magazine

ART + DESIGN VA K A L O

mus Ny

2 index 4

editorial

18 jr

GIG photography THREE SONGS AND YER OUT by mark paytress

THE MAN WHO OWNS THE BIGGEST ART GALLERY IN THE WORLD by christofer bedford

FROM PUNK TO PRODUCTION DESIGN by malcom garrett

shock tactics THOUGH INSPIRED BY UK PUNK by bazooka

apeloige EXPERIMENTAL MODERNIST by john dreick

honour thy error CAN HAPPY ACCIDENTS SAVE US FROM CRUEL PERFECTIONISM by anna gerber

The myth of genius — which promotes the artist as a lone, pioneer – emerged when craftsmen first strove to become respected members of an elite. But before designers get too excited about winning artist status, perhaps some caution is required. In an essay entitled “God’s little artist”, art historians Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock examine how the myth of the genius as a creative individual is tied to the emergence of a new meaning for the word “artist”. Until the eighteenth century the term was applied to an artisan, craftsman, or someone who displayed taste. Parker and Pollock maintain that the modern perception (which developed from the Enlightenment onwards) of the artist as imaginative, creative, unconventional – a bohemian and a pioneer – is a constructed idea that came into being as certain craftsmen strove to become more respected members of the cultural elite. In an interesting parallel, graphic design is increasingly encroaching upon the thought processes and spaces once designated for art, and its practitioners are calling themselves artists. This is bound up with the desire, over the past twenty years, to earn for graphic design the status of a “legitimate” discipline, a liberal art alongside respected fields such as architecture. Giant leaps have been made towards uncovering its history and bringing critical theory and other rigorous methods to bear upon it. As this has progressed, there has been a tendency to blur the boundaries between graphic design and art. Critical discussions on this subject have often focused upon “graphic authorship”, one of the most prominent coming from Michael Rock in “The designer as author”. Rock states: “The figure of the author reconfirms the traditional idea of the genius creator; the status of the creator frames the work and imbues it with mythical value.” Rock compares this with film’s auteur theory which emerged at a time – the 1950s – when film and film critics were seeking to elevate its status from popular entertainment to work of art. The basic assumption was that if one can identify an “artist” behind a work, then one can call the product art. Despite Parker and Pollock’s view, the figure of the maverick graphic designer is a cliché that’s hard to delete. Even when the word “genius” is not uttered, its myths are everywhere, reproduced by design critics, journalists and designers themselves. John A. Walker’s Design History and the History of Design notes that the process of canonisation first requires an increasingly high profile and suggestions of future greatness from a number of sources. True canonisation occurs once a single positive source resonates within the design community.

edíto

Three

Songs

and

Yer Out

TEXT BY MARK PAYTRESS

The

dying art of gig photography

“Rock’n’roll is such a dramatic art form, the images we took still shape the way we experience music,” says legendary rock photographer Mick Rock. And not even the ubiquity of the music video, prompted by mtv in the early 8os, can compete. “There’s something about the static image that imprints itself on the mass psyche,” he insists. “Think of Iggy [Pop] and most people will think of Raw Power. Think of Lou [Reed] and it’ll be Transformer.” Of course, the man who captured glam rock in all its gaudy glory would say that -he shot the covers. But there’s little doubt that the denning images in rock tend to hail from bygone eras. Some insist that’s because today’s rock stars are onedimensional and lack charisma. But talk to half a dozen of the finest rock photographers from the past 30 years and, while some support that view, all are in agreement that something far more sinister has been going on. It’s the business itself, they say, that’s been largely responsible for flattening rock’s visual landscape. And, charismatic or not, that includes the bands themselves. “I used to do a lot of work with the Stones,” says Michael Putland, ex-Sounds photographer and onetime boss of photo agency Retna. “So when they were here in 2006,1 called their office and said: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to photograph the gig the way we used to? None of this first three songs and you’re out nonsense.’ Great idea, they said, but they’re a corporation now. They need permission from 1,500 people. Of course it didn’t happen.”

obert Ellis, who cut his teeth shooting for the

rock weeklies during the 70s, is in no mood to mince words. “Music photography is virtually being destroyed by the music industry,” he claims. Like Mick Rock, Jill Furmanovsky, Ian Dickson and even post-punk photographer Steve Gullick, Ellis now enjoys a neat sideline selling high quality prints of his classic shots. But when it comes to jostling for position in the photographers’ pit, he tends to avoid what he calls ‘an unmitigated disaster area’. Hampered by restricted access, harassed by security guards, and handcuffed by contracts

-from both artists and magazine publishers - photographers feel robbed of their own work. In such circumstances, it’s little wonder they question whether, as Putland says, “the role of a rock photographer even exists any more”. With the rise of digital hardware, not to mention the sea of mobile phones pointed at the

stage, more photographs are taken at rock gigs now than ever before. Quantity, however, does not equal quality. “When was the last time you saw a set of wonderful live pictures?” asks Putland. Oasis, perhaps, I respond. “Exactly. And why was that? Because a lot of those were taken by Jill Furmanovsky, who knew the band and was givengreat freedom. It’s all about access.” “I was sent to a stadium in Madrid to photograph Madonna in the mid 90s,” says Fur-

manovsky. “I knew I’d be restricted by the first three songs rule, which was already in place by then, [The three-song rule, which is now standard practice, dictates that no professional photographers are allowed after the third song of a set] but I had no idea I’d be expected to shoot from way back where the mixing desk was. I was packed in with all these press photographers up on ladders with lenses that looked like missiles. I couldn’t work like that so legged it and went down the front and shot from among the crowd. Distance is a major obstacle in shooting the big artists.”

” The message that you can’t have

”

sweaty pics of Madonna came

from them, and to me, that’s the

complete antithesis of rock’n’roll. They’ve completely sanitised it.

an Dickson blames the PRS. “The message that

you can’t have sweaty pics of Madonna came from them, and to me, that’s the complete antithesis of rock’n’roll. They’ve completely sanitised it.” Others insist the problem goes deeper than that. “The bean counters - lawyers, accountants and managers - have been in control since the early 8os,” insists Robert Ellis. It’s especially revealing, Ellis adds, that Madonna left Warner Brothers last year and signed a huge deal with concert promoter Live Nation to handle her work. “There’s been an explosion of live performances in the last 15 years,” he says. “Now it’s the live experience that’s dictating an artist’s career, not records.” Consequently, the iconography associated with the old record sleeves - which had already received a battering when vinyl albums got shrunk down to CD size has diminished in importance. By rights, concert photography ought to have entered an exciting new phase to reflect this change. Instead, the despised three-song rule was introduced, and has for many years become the norm. That its arrival roughly coincides with claims that rock’n’roll

has lost much of its surprise and sparkle is likely no coincidence. “Actually, things began to change in the early 705,” Ellis continues. “Flash photography had been prompted by the American market which demanded high quality images, and bands soon got pissed off with that going off in their faces all the time.” By mid-decade, artists such as the Stones and Eric Clapton were instructing photographers to restrict their activities to the first three songs. While venues maintain it is a policy they implement on behalf of artists’ management, manag-

“What had started out as an attempt at image control by some of the bigger artists was subsequently adopted, or so the argument runs, by live music venues themselves. Not wanting to run the risk of upsetting the big stars and driving them away, venues enforced the three-song ruling as an industry standard.” ers argue that it is a ruling upheld by the venues. To get that ruling overturned seems to require such a degree of negotiation that few bother to try. The result is everyone’s loss.

“It’s crazy,” says Jill Furmanovsky. “Everyone knows that it’s during the last three songs that all the action really takes place.” That’s when, for example, Pennie Smith would have taken her stunning, poll-topping shot of Paul Simonon smashing his bass down onto the stage (as featured on the cover of The Clash’s London Calling album). Or when Robert Ellis took his band-defining shot of AC/DC’S Angus Young, shirtless, hair flying and bent manically over his guitar. And when Michael Putland caught all the drama of a live Who show with a shot that simply featured Pete Townshend’s hand and his guitar flying into the air. “One of my best,” he maintains, “but it would be impossible to capture that under today’s circumstances. I admire

photographers like Steve Gullick. He does remarkably well under the circumstances.” I catch Gullick, who’s been in the business some 20 years, on his way to a shoot in Glasgow. While most of today’s rock photographers have day jobs in order to make ends meet, Gullick’s reputation as one of the finest portraitists of his generation has enabled him to survive - despite everything the industry stacks against his profession. “It’s fucking tough,” he says. “The music industry is in dire straits, so there’s less money around. I’ve fallen out with various publishers over the years, not least because I refuse to sign contracts that give them sole rights to syndicate my images, and I’ve just found out this morning

”

I enjoy innovative music and it’s generally

”

part of the package that people who create that are fairly individual themselves.

that they’ve stopped making my favourite film pub gig.” stock.” Gullick doesn’t do digital. “I don’t wanna sound Gullick has earned his reputation via a combinacorny, but digital pictures have no soul. When tion of perfectionism (“I always aim for a picture you shoot on film, the light interacts with the that I can hang in an exhibition”) and choosing his “Inspired by Syd Barrett, I picked up a camera emulsion on the film. There’s a physical reac- artists carefully. “My choices are always dictated in 1969 while on an acid trip, and from Syd and tion. Digital is cold. It can’t deal with light prop- by the music,” says the man who specialises in David [Bowie] to [Thin Lizzy’s] Phil Lynott, I erly.”

left-field artists such as Nick Cave, Bjork and Jo- identified so strongly with those characters that anna Newsom. “I enjoy innovative music and it’s it got me into a lot of trouble later on when I

Like his peers, he has little time for big name generally part of the package that people who developed my chemical habits.” stars at tightly policed events. “I used to do a create that are fairly individual themselves.” lot of live stuff,” he says. “But I’ve no longer got

These days, the now-recovered Rock himself

the patience to put up with the pain in the arse It’s empathy with a performer that has guaran- has become something of a celebrity. “When I restrictions.

teed Mick Rock his place in history, too, though go to launches, they shoot the photographer,” by his own admission it almost cost him his life. he laughs. “But when people ask me why I got

When I do live stuff, it’s more likely to be a small “My interest was totally with the artist,” he says. all the best glam rock photos, I have to say that

back in 1972, I was the only one shooting Lou and Iggy.” It was, however, Rock’s relationship with Bowie that sealed his reputation.

“David was very sophisticated visually himself,” he concedes. “But it also helped that I could shoot when I wanted. That’s why the pictures were better back then. I’d got to know David’s moves so well that I could anticipate what he’d do next. That was crucial.”

Ian Dickson agrees. “The most important thing is anticipation. If you see the shot in the viewfinder, it’s too late.”

If concert photography has largely been strangled by restrictions (though check out ace Mexican snapper Fernando Aceves on Jill Furmanovsky’s rockarchive.com for someone who bucks the trend) the staged publicity shoot still offers the opportunity for a photographer to unleash his or her creative talents. But with the music industry in freefall, budgets have been hit hard, and opportunities are severely limited.

“I always get budding photographers coming to me for advice,” says Ian Dickson. “And the first thing I tell them is don’t become a music photographer. There’s no future in it. Or if you do, opt for studio-based photography.”

Jill Furmanovsky is rather more hopeful. “We get a lot of letters,” she says. “And we say, go to your local pub and help out your local band. You might be lucky and find out that they become the next Arctic Monkeys or Razor-light.” LA based music photographer, Autumn de Wilde, concurs.

She advises those early on in their careers to: “Start with bands that aren’t famous and grow with them.”

De Wilde, who has documented the careers of Elliott Smith, The White Stripes and Beck,

among others, also advises more established photographers to consider pro bono work with upcoming artists they feel passionate about.

Death Cab for Cutie were one such band that de Wilde shot for the love of it, so she could “record their development and remember”. And if it turns out that your artist becomes the next Rolling Stones, she adds, pragmatically: “Well then you have a major investment on your hands.”

Failing that, there’s always the ever-lucrative paparazzi of course....

Qualifying Photography as Art, JR: or, The man Is Photography who owns All It Can Be? Text by CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD

the biggest art gallery in the world

JR owns the biggest art gallery in the world. He exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not the museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit. After he found a camera in the Paris subway, he did a tour of European Street Art, tracking the people who communicate messages via the walls. Then, he started to work on the vertical limits, watching the people and the passage of life from the forbidden undergrounds and roofs of the capital.

In 2006, he achieved Portrait of a generation, portraits of the suburban “thugs” that he posted, in huge formats, in the bourgeois districts of Paris. This illegal project became “official” when the Paris City Hall wrapped its building with JR’s photos.

In 2007, with Marco, he did Face 2 Face, the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on the both sides of the Security fence / Separation wall. The experts said it would be impossible. Still, he did it. In 2008, he embarked for a long international trip for “Women”, a project in which he underlines the dignity of women who are often the targets of conflicts. Of course, it didn’t change the world, but sometimes a single laugher in an unexpected place makes you dream that it could.

JR creates “Pervasive Art” that spreads uninvited on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle-East, on the broken bridges in Africa or the favelas in Brazil. People who often live with the bare minimum discover something absolutely unnecessary. And they don’t just see it, they make it. Some elderly women become models for a day; some kids turn artists for a week. In that Art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.

After these local exhibitions, the images are transported to London, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam where people interpret them in the light of their own personal experience.

As he remains anonymous and doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t explain his huge full frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter.

This is what JR is working on. Raising questions...

With medium specificity confined chiefly to the seem prosaic and anachposition and relative validphotography—within the art. In addition, the same tently irrelevant to those out that many of the most and well-collected arttury—Thomas Demand, Becher, Cindy Sherman, name a few—all use the instrument. Furthermore, as art is rarely drawn into currency of the medium is necessarily follow that the photography as a practice understood, and inteof contemporary art, asalongside traditional media drawing, as well as new and video? In other words, photography in art history not, why not? Is photogphotography criticism—all

Not surprisingly, one of the most astute theorizations of this quandary was offered—albeit obliquely—by Michael Fried in a wide-ranging essay on Thomas Demand published in 2005. Discussing Demand’s by now familiar technique of fabricating and photographing sculptural models of judiciously chosen, historically charged sites, Fried summarizes the results of the artist’s exacting enterprise as follows: “Simply put, he aims above all to replace the original scene of evidentiary traces and marks of human use—the human world in all its layeredness and compositeness—with images of sheer authorial intention, as though the very bizarreness of the fact that the scenes and objects in the photographs, despite their initial appearance of quotidian ‘reality,’ have all been constructed by the artist throws into conceptual relief the determining force (also the inscrutability, one might almost say opacity) of the intention behind it.” While seizing on a timely vernacular to capture and critique the ineffable heterogeneity of the world has been and will likely remain the fundamental charge of the most ambitious painters and sculptors, that same world arrives in the hands of the competent photographer—assuming he or she possesses the requisite instinct for detail, composition, and topicality—as a readymade of sorts. The camera provides the language, and the world at large is a rich well of potential subjects. Fried seems keenly aware of this rather problematic dialectic, and equally keen to establish photography’s currency as a more determined, intention-laden industry than is commonly presumed.

a passé historical concern pages of art history, it may ronistic to question the ity of a single medium— world of contemporary question may seem pawho might justifiably point eminent, critically lauded, ists of the twentieth cenJeff Wall, Bernd and Hilla and Andreas Gursky, to camera as their primary the status of photography question, and the market beyond dispute. But does it fundamental ontology of has been fully interrogated, grated into the discourse suming its rightful place like painting, sculpture, and media such as installation does photography exist as and criticism today? And if raphy—and by derivation it can be?

Throughout his generally laudatory account of Demand’s achievement, Fried argues that the artist’s critical value issues directly from his resistance to the observational, documentary impulse. Demand’s concomitant embrace of a harder-won, multi-faceted process, Fried suggests, operates in arch, critical relation to the assumption that a photograph is an indexical cohort with reality. Demand’s working method interrupts this neat indexical relation, forcing the viewer to think explicitly about the intention of the maker and conjurer with an additional layer of interpretive difficulty. Fried notes that photography per se is not important to Demand, just the conclusion brought to bear on the artist’s process. Demand’s photographic practice does not direct our attention to the subject captured or the technical aspects of photography, but to the artist’s tyrannical control of his process, which ultimately brings order and conceptual coherence to the project. The ultimate referent is, therefore, not the form or content of his images, but the authorial concept. This being the case, the onus on Fried to develop a sophisticated understanding of the relationship of form to content, and of facture to ultimate effect in the photographs themselves, is somewhat mitigated, since purpose and meaning have been located so convincingly elsewhere.

So what is lost in this interpretive account? Fried’s essay is characteristically suggestive and fertile, but it rests on issues removed from a close analysis of photography as a specific technical practice that mediates and directs understanding. How Demand’s photographic methods actually operate in the context of his conceptual scheme gets distinctly short shrift. Instead, the currency of his practice is defined by the various stages of production that precede the execution of the photographic image. In effect, it is these discrete, mappable phases that make Demand’s photographs intelligible and critically potent; there is no need to look carefully at the image itself. Demand’s photographs, then, achieve legibility and encourage art critical exegesis principally as a result of their non-photographic features. Demand is just one example of an artist/photographer—other obvious examples include Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall—who has achieved prominence and whose work generates interest because process and concept can be located in the work that precedes the moment a photograph is taken. The photograph is simply the incidental conclusion, the polished index of a more complex backstory to be researched and unpacked by the viewer/critic. In this sense, the photograph is not independently productive of meaning but is rather the document that records and implies the extended process behind the image.

In the context of the present essay it is important to cite Michael Fried, who, for many contemporary art curators, has offered a convincing and select entry point into the vast and diverse terrain of photography. Fried’s emphasis rests upon intention. For although we as an art critical community no longer use artistic intention—the most outmoded of methodologies—as the infra-logic for interpretation, we do place an implicit premium on intentionality, and we take it for granted that an object arrives in a gallery or museum saddled with some degree of authorial purpose, even if that intention does not figure vitally in the meaning of the work as enumerated by the viewer, critic, or scholar. Demand’s work is thick with explicit indices of intention, intellectual reflection, and considered action, all of which—in a sense— mimic the minute decisions and adjustments that take place during the execution of a painting, for example; every detail, therefore, may be understood as intentional and vigorously interpreted as such. This, of course, leads to a rich critical record, but Fried’s emphasis on Demand’s pre-photographic processes also leads the reader further and further away from the specific objecthood of the photograph.

Fried’s account of Demand’s work is an unusually sophisticated and provocative example of art critical writing on photography. More often, what passes for photography criticism in major art magazines discounts issues of facture and ontology entirely in favor of a descriptive mode that slyly ignores questions raised by medium. Generally speaking, the nuances of the photographic process are poorly understood in the art critical community—the present author included—and this shortfall radically limits the discourse. The effects of this situation can be measured through brief reference to the discourse surrounding painting in the twentieth century.

Through the 1960s, Clement Greenberg’s Kantian understanding of the central imperatives of modernist painting remained the yardstick against which contemporary abstraction was measured. According to Greenberg, the essence of modernist painting “lay in the use of the characteristic methods of [the] disciple to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” As a result of Greenberg’s position, critics and artists were compelled to evaluate the fundamental ontology of painting, a compulsion which resulted in a hermetic, highly self-reflexive discourse that bore down ruthlessly on the relationship between a given canvas and Greenberg’s maxims. This contention framed the discourse around painting for at least two decades and set the stage for the Minimalists, whose principal goal was to subvert the logic of Greenberg’s system through objects that relied not on the relationship between their constituent parts, but on the interaction between object and viewer. Though medium specificity is no longer a salient issue in contemporary art practice, the discourse of Greenbergian modernism, and the various dissenting positions that emerged in its wake, have provided today’s critics with the language and critical tools to describe and evaluate an artist’s use of media, and to apply this understanding when interpreting the way a given object makes meaning. In this sense, the inheritance of Greenbergian discourse is both obsolete and invaluable.

Unfortunately, no such model exists for evaluating photography as a specific medium in art critical circles, and so the majority of art critics writing today lack the requisite descriptive vocabulary and technical understanding to account for and evaluate the appearance of a photograph, and to relate those observations to the critical rhetoric of the image. This deficit in understanding is readily explicable, deriving in part from the simple fact that the technical aspects of advanced photographic practice are elusive to all but those who consistently operate a camera and produce pictures. More importantly, perhaps, the relative opacity of facture in photography— the absence of the artist’s hand—means that the much-vaunted consonance (or dissonance) of subject and form, so often the lynchpin of successful painting and sculpture, is much harder to bear down on and evaluate in the case of a photograph. While there is room for improvisational descriptive language and speculation in characterizing the way a painting was executed, no such possibility exists when describing, for example, a photograph by German-born Florian Maier-Aichen, whose large-format photographs are obviously manipulated, but utterly opaque to the lay viewer. As a result, the meaning of a given work is often located in what can be easily discerned simply by looking, leading all too frequently to facile observational descriptions that do not account for the ways in which the conditions of production inflect how we interpret content. The elusiveness of photography as a medium and the relative invisibility of process, therefore, have resulted in a radically impoverished mode of criticism.

“observe and 31 record” Photographers who have been greeted with the most emphatic critical endorsements—Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand, for example—have, generally speaking, achieved notoriety by folding into their photographic programs additional processes that mitigate the necessity to evaluate their photographs alone. Photographers who instrumentalize photography as one component of a broader practice have therefore accrued far more critical and commercial traction than photographers who hue more closely to the essentialist, “observe and record” model of photography, simply because their work is more accessible and intelligible to art critics. The latter process of seeing, electing, and shooting is too connoisseurial, too ineffable, and too intuitive to qualify as an intelligent and intelligible conceptual strategy according to the imperatives of the contemporary art world, where a premium is placed on conceptual sophistication. As Maurice Berger has noted, such work is assumed to be “weak in intentionality.”

However, the presumption that this essentialist model of photographic production relies on intuitive knowing rather than on rigorous thinking can only undermine the credibility of so-called “traditional” or documentary photographers in the context of art criticism because no adequate framework exists by which to measure the achievements of these photographers. And no commonly acknowledged measure exists because the ontological understanding of photography and its methods among art critics is far less sophisticated than is the case for painting, sculpture, and performance art. Demand’s work, for example, is uniquely conducive to the logic of narrative exegesis and seems to presuppose its own theorization; rather predictably, therefore, his photographs have spawned a vast literature. Standard photographic practice, on the other hand, is not so easily parsed and theorized; its ontology is comparatively elusive.

The key, then, is to enumerate even the most prosaic aspects of conventional photography (the physiognomy of an individual photographer’s practice, the ebb and flow of intentionality through the process from choice of film or digital back through to print type and size); to claim these considerations and procedures as the basic ontological condition of photographic work; and to re-theorize the ways in which these factors shape the image, direct the viewer’s attention, and contribute to the production of meaning: in effect, to remake the technical and conceptual discourse around traditional photography within art criticism. Such a process would not only throw into high relief the fundamental nature and limits of the medium, as well as the achievement of photographers’ photographers such as James Welling, Christopher Williams, Jean-Marc Bustamante, and Thomas Struth, but it would also radically enhance—and perhaps recast—our understanding of photographers already entrenched firmly in the canon of art history.

Ultimately, there is only one effective, long-term remedy for the instrumentalization of photography in the broader context of art production, and that remedy begins with the production of advanced critiIf photography is to be understood cism that addresses photo- as a medium always and deliberately graphs with a deep awareness productive of meaning in the same of both the tech- sense as painting, this will require a nical conditions of photographic rich and thorough understanding of production, and the myriad decisions that precede the the concomitant conceptual production of a photographic image, implications of ranging from the these technical conceptual and obtuse processes.

to the mundane and pragmatic.

Such technical awareness is the necessary precondition for the production of art critical writing that operates with a full ontological awareness of photography as a unique medium. Only then will an advanced and, dare I say, medium-specific discourse emerge that mines the rich territory between fact and facture, process and product, form and content, sign and signified.

The development of such a self-aware critical discourse will signal photographyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s equal passage into the world of contemporary art, and only then will the problems and questions posed in this essay be truly anachronistic.

LA ART SCHOOL FROM PUNK TO PRODUCTION DESIGN: THE WIDESCREEN CAREER OF ALEX MCDOWELL BY MALCOLM GARRETT

Alex McDowell sees his work as a film production designer as a form of painting in multiple dimensions. His unique and collaborative approach implicitly questions the accepted view of the insular workings of the auteur. Working on mainstream films in nearly every genre, including Fight Club, The Crow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he builds virtual models for the construction of fullsize sound stages and computer-generated imagery for post-production and he has pioneered digital tools to pre-visualise film sets, camera angles and shooting sequences. His experiences working with scientists and futurologists while researching the future world of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report have inspired him to form Matter Art & Science, a virtual alliance of thinkers and practitioners across a diverse range of interrelated disciplines.

‘I am b sion o eginning to f not o co-ordina think that M te nl every y within ar d thinking atter is the th a t, r exists ing. I’m co but in eng cross all bo eal expres .T in u n the ta he raw m cerned w eering, sc ndaries, ith ie le a be go nt. Every terials of fi how a ne nce and film h l o as the m are the twork cosocial d or bad. pe W sa struct ure w hat’s diffe me oppo ople and r rent i orks.’ s the tunity to way t hat th e ‘I am beginning to think that Matter is the real expression of co-ordinated thinking across all boundaries, not only within art, but in engineering, science and everything. I’m concerned with how a network co-exists. The raw materials of film are the people and the talent. Every film has the same opportunity to be good or bad. What’s different is the way that the social structure works.’ Yet in many ways McDowell has remained true to his roots in the turbulent days of London’s Punk scene. Back in 1975, while studying painting at the Central School of Art, he was involved in staging the first ever full concert by the Sex Pistols. Forging a friendship with Glen Matlock, he briefly printed T-shirts for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and then managed Matlock’s career for a short time. He set up Rocking Russian to design record sleeves for Matlock’s band Rich Kids, and later designed covers for Iggy Pop, Siouxsie & The Banshees and others. Assisting Terry Jones, he coedited i-d magazine at its launch. By the early 19805 he had moved on to art-direct pop promos for hundreds of artists, including Madonna, and from

there tv commercials for the likes of Levi’s and Nike. These were influential and formative years packed with energy, ideas, connections and openings. There was never any master plan: McDowell merely followed his instincts, immersing himself in each new creative challenge. Yet his work, while seldom displaying any obvious or overriding sty-

listic sensibility, has an overall conceptual framework that informs the varied projects that come his way. For McDowell, seeing the Sex Pistols play was ‘a life-changing moment’. Until then, he had been making paintings that ‘were just about trying to shock people in the most extreme way possible’, but within Punk he instinctively saw a place of dissolving creative boundaries with few entry restrictions, where he could explore a more constructive yet no less rebellious way of working. ‘Coming from painting, my perception was that I was still a fine artist, but my translation into music, fashion and street culture was via an appreciation of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Rocking Russian was

going to be the open network space that would be able to do whatever it wanted to do. It was a fine art project in the back of my mind. It wasn’t entrepreneurial -1 knew nothing about business. There was a naive sense that you could launch off with the best creative intent and stuff would fall into place. We were surrounded by bands who’d picked up a guitar the week before and were producing records a week later. That’s the way the

world worked. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any frame of reference other than if you wanted it to happen, it would happen. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Whatever opportunity raised itself I took, because I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t prioritise between them. I was equally interested in magazine design, releasing albums, selling T-shirts and designing record sleeves. It was all one big art project, and I continue like that to

this day. In fact I am really back full circle now, to the point where I am really clear about the travesty of too much categorisation, too many sub-divisions of talent into speciality areas.’ A fortuitous opportunity in the mid-igSos landed him in Los Angeles for an initial extended period. He had gone over with director Peter Care to shoot a Bananarama video, but when that was cancelled they ended up with Robbie Neville instead. When Neville’s single went to number one, McDowell and Care were inundated with more work. For a lengthy period he was immersed in establishing himself on the West Coast, letting instinct guide him. Tor a while, throughout maybe 1988 to 1990, I was jumping back and forth between commercials and music videos, working with David Fincher. I worked with him for almost a full year exclusively, seven days a week - he never stopped. It was at this point that I made the mental transition from music videos - quite smallscale, just do what you can with the money - to the whole process being practice for movie-making. Everything Fincher was doing was just a way of him honing his

film-making muscle with outrageously complicated stuff. We did nine at&t commercials, where the sets had only ten seconds of screen time in each, yet they were full movie sets. For him the whole thing was a showreel for movies, and it absolutely gave me the confidence when I was hired for my first movie.’ Recommended by one of the team who had also come over to shoot Bananarama, McDowell took on production design for The Lawnmower Man, a low-budget movie scripted by a Silicon Valley scientist and based on a reworking of a Stephen King novel. The core ideas are interesting, in as much as they talk about virtual reality, but the budget was so low that you could just stumble your way towards solutions, so it was a great learning curve. Then I went back to commercials for nearly two years, because I just got offered a bunch of terrible B-movie sci-fi scripts.’ Again the chance element, coupled with McDowell’s growing skills in realising remarkable results with minimal budgets, had laid a useful grounding for the future. For one who has allowed himself to be guided only by such career choices as presented themselves at the time, his ascent through the Hollywood network has shown remarkable prescience. A glance at his film credits reveals a diverse but curiously coherent portfolio. Although I don’t know if it was very considered, the most valuable lesson I

learned in film was that the only control you have in your career is what you turn down. And it is just luck what you get offered. In fact the next good thing offered to me was The Crow, directed by Alex Proyas, a commercials director who I already knew. It was another life-changing experience, and as commercials became less and less important for me, I was beginning to think of film as a full-time job.’ Fifteen years since this first foray into film, Mc-

Dowell has now settled in Hollywood permanently and has forged a substantial career. He has worked on groundbreaking movies in both live action and animation with Terry Gilliam, Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton as well as Fincher. His designs have framed starring roles by Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp and Brandon Lee (in The Crow). Earlier this year he was nominated for a BAFTA award for his remarkable production design for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As his projects have increased in complexity, he has naturally advanced from the simple concept sketches for music promos to setting up large design departments for major multi-location productions. Concerned as much with story facilitation as with storytelling, a graphic design background has enabled him to organise large amounts of visual information. McDowell has also been quick to recognise the potential of digital tools in film. David Fincher introduced him to Previs (30 visualisation software used to mock up film environments) when they were working on Fight Club, and he has continued to develop and expand the usefulness

of what he now calls ‘o-vis’ (design visualisation) within the art department. Bringing together director, writer, cinema-tographer and visual effects at an early stage to plan in detail those aspects of the production which would be otherwise difficult to envisage, allows films to be developed in a practical, economic and visionary way. Although it is more than eight years since McDowell started using Previs, it has only recently become an industry buzzword, and most still use it inefficiently. One significant result of this approach has seen his art department become the natural operations centre throughout the whole of the production process. The design workflow, set up during early preproduction, creates a circular flow of information throughout a wider range of processes. This drives the shooting and all aspects of post-production,

breaking down the traditional divisions between departments, the results of which not only maintain the integrity of the look of the film, but also support a consistency of vision in photography, editorial and visual effects. ‘Film production is a highly complex machine designed to create a unique and coherent world for its audience,’ explains McDowell. ‘With technology changing at a rapid rate, the production designer has an increasingly central role in the new landscape of cinema. Progressive film design, using digital technology combined with traditional process and centralised in the art department, provides an unprecedented degree of control in the creation of a film.’ McDowell has not abandoned traditional methods, however, and he has strict guidelines regarding the effective and economic use of o-vis. ‘There’s no point letting digital technology erase the memory of 100 years of expertise. The visual effects from the very beginning of film are still a resource in film in a way that they’re not in the real world. I think we’re trying to find a place where conventional and contemporary tools can co-exist. We’re just extending the range of tools we have with digital and it’s a huge extension -but we’re not letting that

the n i y l e visib seamt i u q seen or in the arlie e b n Hat, pas in Ch re is ca v e h t D lts of he Cat in pa-Loom y was mo u s e r was The sets for T the Oom chnolog m i a e e t f d o th e te d distor integration actory. Th al, where wer woul te F a less l ermin hat the vie uestion it. o T c e o h h eC in T rld t not q and th deployed ealistic wo subtly e such a r at to cre

wipe out existing tools.’ Paradoxically, this use of digital technology allows more visual solutions to be produced on set and thus remain ‘in-camera’, which is reflected in more believable results on screen. McDowell continues: “There is no such thing as a “traditional” art director. It’s the job of an art director to stay current with all film-making processes. The heads of other departments can be Luddites if they choose, but it’s the art director’s job to coordinate all aspects of the film-making design process with full peripheral vision. If an art director chooses to stay “traditional”, that is in denial of one of the basic truths of film-making, which is that it is an art which is constantly reinventing itself. As a young medium it really doesn’t possess a traditional label at all.’ The results of D-vis can be seen quite visibly in the distorted sets for The Cat in the Hat, or in the seamless integration of the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The technology was more subtly deployed in The Terminal, where the aim was to create such a realistic world that the viewer would not question it. The most significant career opportunity came when McDowell was appointed production designer for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report The film demanded the design of a believable future world that was genuinely visionary, yet sufficiently recognisable to a contemporary audience. Spielberg insisted that all of the technologies seen in the film, many of which are key to how the plot unfolds, were to be suitably advanced yet potentially realisable when projecting forward from the current understanding of science. ‘We had all sorts of theories of what would be cool but Steven wasn’t interested in anything that was cool for cool’s sake.’ To meet the challenge, McDowell enlisted the help of many scientists and futurologists, both as consultants and as a permanent part of the

design team throughout the production. ‘Minority Reportwas an amazing opportunity, the importance of which I only fully registered halfway through the production. To work with Spielberg was another one of those life-changing things. He runs film production unlike anybody else, because he can. He has an absolutely dedicated crew whose members have worked with him for more than ten years. When you step in as a first-timer, you step into this well oiled machine and you have

front n i g n i nduct ut of our o c e Cruis straight o age for m o T u e ge of reen cam hnical lang of this a m i iconic sparent sc fic and tec know any r det a h ‘T tran a scienti idn’t ework fo art e d h I t f g f o ent o e beginnin nded fram ent digital r m p o l deve cript. At th e an exte a 75 per c imation fo the s t it becam . We had he an in-house t l l a u d y e b stuff, technolog e develope the scienc language w ad ual ing ’ velop tment and ere. We h e film’s vis ne before. depar duction th nd over th r been do ve ma pro to hit the ground running.’ post- d full com hat had ne t a The initial task was to make real Spielberg’s viand h in a way sion of a non-dystopian world that we would all recognise, and that functioned well. ‘It hadn’t broken down, it wasn’t post-apocalyptic, it was green - it had all sorts of things working better about it than our world has. Very clearly Steven

wanted to seduce the audience into wanting “Precrime” to be a good thing, not questioning the idea that the elimination of murder was a good thing. But he wanted at the same time, through the Tom Cruise character, the realisation that it was an abuse of civil liberties. That we should look around to check that that wasn’t happening in society right now. He wanted the audience split down the middle about how good Precrime really was, and relate it to its own situation.’ McDowell was hired the same day as the writer. There was no script - just a Philip K. Dick short story. This proved to be a defining factor that ensured that the design really influenced the film - possibly as much as the writing. By leaving space for the suggestion of technologies such as the gesture recognition interface and the mag-lev (magnetic levitation) cars, rather than being squeezed unrealistically into or around an existing script, the visual language and design components directly contributed to its development. ‘That iconic image of Tom Cruise conducting in front of the transparent screen came straight out of our development of a scientific and technical language for the script. At the beginning I didn’t know any of this stuff, but it became an extended framework for developing technology. We had a 75 per cent digital art department and we developed all the ani-

mation for post-production there. We had the science in-house and had full command over the film’s visual language in a way that had never been done before.’ Drawing influence from rigorous scientific thinking was an enlightening experience for McDowell, who as a result has formed Matter Art & Science, an expanding virtual group of designers, scientists, artists, engineers and film¬makers. Besides the creative benefits, he wants this to be a way to address the lack of cross-fertilisation of experience that he sees in the film industry. ‘It’s terrible that there is such a low transfer of knowledge. People develop their own way of doing things, because when you are working on a film you live in a vacuum. We’ve evolved these hermetically sealed production bubbles which shut down completely every time a film is completed. You get very little continuity of information from one film to another, and in anyone’s career all you carry with you is what you have in your pockets and what’s in your head. ‘With Matter we’re aiming to filter what was perhaps the best aspect of the old studio system but in a virtual and flexible way. We’re creating a network archive, a pool of knowledge that anyone can dip into. Cinematographers, for example, have a real impetus to embrace technology because of the huge steps made with digital cameras. ‘The larger films develop new technology more rapidly but they are also separate from one another, often because of studio security issues. They may have some secret technology, or there is an aspect of the marketing campaign which they don’t want people to see yet.’ For a multi-disciplinary visionary like McDowell, collaborative and integrated thinking is rewarding. The film production designer creates a fully developed immersive world for the audience, seamlessly weaving setting with narrative so that the audience remains immersed in a film, and on each re-visit is able to delve deeper into the experience. Where I have been able to develop design ideas either in advance of, or simultaneously to, a film script, the story has been enhanced by being placed squarely in an already imagined world space.’ Until recently McDowell was sceptical of interactive storylines. This has changed following work last year with writers and game designers who are developing truly interactive worlds that could be inhabited and continue to evolve for years. ‘For a designer this is a fascinating prospect -to create an immersive world where the environment itself is the main trigger for a story, where there is no place for linear narrative when 1000 players may inhabit virtual space simultaneously. The Minority Report think-tank suggested that designers, artists and craftsmen would have an increased value to future society. It turns out they may be right’ ‘I have always been interested in the edges of things, the places that exist between and adjacent to those places of identifiable genre and style. In the late 197051 went from fine art to graphics to music to film at a time when all the rules were being thrown into the air. Again we find ourselves in a time of uncertainty, but this time created by accelerated technology, rather than Punk. It is time to start gravitating back towards the edges, where maximum convergence is occurring. I feel very fortunate to be working in such a place, in proximity to the chaos.’

Though inspired by UK punk, the Bazooka collectiveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s violent, sexy graphics spoke in a French accent

There is a traditional story of punk graphic design. It begins with ‘great men’ like Jamie Reid (with the Sex Pistols) and Malcolm Garrett (the Buzzcocks), detours to take in the lesser men who designed for the indie label explosion, and ends up with post-punk, typically symbolised by Peter Saville (New Order, etc.). As a narrative, it’s certainly ‘designery’ and geographically

contained

(visual

anarchy in the uk). The trouble is, it has been re-told so many times, there

is a danger of boredom setting in. B-dum, as punks used to say, b-dum... There are other stories: no less spectacular, but often ignored for understandable reasons, and one such originates in France, and concerns the exploits of a bunch of graphic revolutionnaires calling themselves ‘Bazooka’ - a mixed-sex collective. They had their own handle on the punk aesthetic, and came up with a look - or rather series of looks - that matched anything by Reid, Garrett et al. in terms of inventiveness and visceral im-

Who were Bazooka?

pact. Their influence spread to the uk and us thanks to a handful of devoted fans. One of these was Andy Johnson (then calling himself ‘Andy Dog’), who went on to pioneer a dif-

ferent kind of post-punk design for the Some Bizzare [sic] label - more about him in a moment. What follows, then, is a Gallic-flavoured twist on events, and a belated ‘salut!’ to some forgotten combatants in the graphic design punk rock wars.

They came together in an art school in Rouen in 1974, coalescing around the splendidly named Kiki and Loulou Picasso (real names: Christian Chapiron and Jean-Louis Dupre). Other collective members comprised Olivia Tele Clavel (aka Olivia Clavel), Bananar (aka Bernard Vidal), Lulu Larsen (aka Philippe Renault), along with invited artists such as Philippe Bailly, Bruno Richard, Jean Rouzeau and Pascal Doury. Art school was the place they came into contact with ideas from both fine art and graphic design - especially Dadaism and neo-Dadaism - but it was also where they learned how to print their own material. Other inspirations included student recreational reading matter such as satirical monthly Ham Kiri and American underground comics. Very quickly they were

experimenting as a group with putting out self-published zines, and an us-against-the-world mentality was taking shape. When punk exploded in 1976-77, it was the UK rather than the us version that Bazooka found interessant. American punk either had a headbanging feel, as in the case of the Ramones, or a self-consciously arty aesthetic, as exhibited by the Patti Smith Group and Television (bands that idolised French poets such as Verlaine and Baudelaire). British punk, by contrast, seemed to stand for earthier attitudes, such as negationism, class-based politics (with a stress on ‘working-class credibility”) and an all-important belief in DIY [‘do-it-yourself’].

This approach was much more Bazooka’s line, and indeed it was the favoured

interpretation

among

French youth in general. All the key British bands (including the Pistols,

the Clash and the Damned) played in France very early on, and the first European Punk Rock Festival took place at Mont de Marsan, in the south, in

‘Back then 1976. Dozens of French bands formed I was doing overnight, and though we never things very heard much of them in the UK at the quickly,’ he retime, many were rather good, as evicalls from his denced by the slew of compilation Paris home. CDS that have appeared recently. (And, nope -Plastic Bertrand was Belgian.) Newly energised, Bazooka worked both

together

and

individually.

They would share zines, sometimes

jamming on comic strips and other graphics,

sometimes

contributing

solo efforts. They increasingly saw themselves as a kind of rock band, and although their ethic was that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;anybody could do itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, they were always aware that having been trained at art school they werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just anybody. Similarly, while they were smart enough to know that punk was something new, they were at

the same time conscious of the huge legacy (in France) of May 1968. Thus, their work in the period 1977-78 became abatement both against the failure of the radical manifestos of les evenements, and in favour of punky provocation for its own sake. Two members of the group in particular were notable for fusing these themes.

The first was Kiki Picasso, whose style was the most distinctive. He developed a technique based on the Situ-

ationist trick of’de’touming’ found art. He cut up magazine photos, collaged them together, painted over them and added script - often handwritten streams of consciousness. ‘Back then I was doing things very quickly,’ he recalls from his Paris home. “This was before computers, and we were using images that were pornographic, violent and politicalincluding Chinese and Cuban propaganda posters - in order to make a spontaneous point. Sometimes we had as little as an hour to put something together.’ Picasso’s messy appropriations became a trademark, and if there is one of his images that stands out, it is 1977’$

‘Crash’, a page of doctored photos of a car wreck. There’s ‘no future’ for the middle-class family involved, and every wound, every piece of mangled metal, is lovingly depicted. ‘The images were from a medical textbook, and I immediately realised their similarity to pornography. They were crude, violent and they disturbed people. My aim at the time, of course, was to do just that -disturb people.’ At first glance, ‘Crash’ looks like a

comic strip (and does fit Scott McCloud’s definition of’images juxtaposed in deliberate sequence’), but its fetishistic nature cleverly spoke to a strain of sexuality within punk, and foretold Picasso’s own subseOccasionally, terrorism would enter the frame, as in

quent design work for sex clubs.

the case of references to the Red Army Faction (RAF).

Above all, it tapped into punk’s ro-

The hipness of this particular group of’urban guerril-

mantic attitude to self-destruc-

las’ within punk circles was underlined when several

tion. Car crashes were everywhere in

bands wore or utilised their very cool logo (‘RAF’ su-

lyrics, from Wire to the Weirdos, and

perimposed over a machine gun superimposed over

Ballard’s Crash was an often-refer-

a red star) - including the Clash. But, in the end, the

enced punk. In short, ‘Crash’ remains

Faction were merciless killers, and the association

one of the simplest, cruellest and

with them took punk into regrettable territory.

most brilliant pieces of art to come out of the period. Olivia Clavel was the other pole around which the Bazookas spun. Her work was more conventional than Picasso’s in that she was further interested in narrative comic strips. But her spontaneous cartooning often involving scratchy artwork and script with crossings-out, presented on ripped-out pieces of notepaper - was just as new and just as punk. It was in sharp contrast to the airbrushed fantasy art favoured

by leading French comics periodi- If Picasso and Clavel were the most ions - albeit within a leftist speccal MetalHurlant, and in retrospect distinctive of the Bazookas, the pol- trum. For example, the two Picassos her work was the Gallic equivalent itics of the group were hard to pin had worked with French communist of the ‘ratty line’ style then taking down. They wore their collectivism youth organisations, while Clavel shape in Britain and the us. Clavel’s with pride, and declared themselves became known for contributing to most famous strip character had a against all forms of auteurism (in- the gay and lesbian press. TV screen for a face, and became a cluding the kind of hero worship Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the potent symbol for

punk that was accorded Metal Hurlant most overtly political Bazooka ma-

distrust of the stance

that

creasingly the

Ba-

No swas-

media - a contributors like Moebius). But this terial flirts with leftist imagery would

in- ‘no more heroes’

become part of masked

the

approach without being explicit: a reference

fact

that to anarchism here, a communist star

zooka repertoire. different members had tikas

ferent

political

opin-

dif - there. Occasionally, terrorism would en-

ter the frame, as in the case of refer- of attacking France as a ‘failed na- confronted by an old woman who ences to the Red Army Faction (RAF). tion’, or of despoiling the flag - as slapped her across the face. Even if The hipness of this particular group had happened in Britain. Similarly, the tale is not actually fact, its exisof’urban guerrillas’ within punk there were no swastikas. This tired tence speaks of a wider truth.) circles was underlined when sever- staple of certain strains of UK punk ‘Happy Terrorists’ al bands wore or utilised their very design was clearly too loaded to No sooner had the Bazookas estabcool logo (‘RAF’ superimposed over be used in France. In a country once lished their confrontational, sexy, a machine gun superimposed over a occupied by the Nazis, the irony was spontaneous, sometimes politically red star) - including the Clash. But, never going to work. (There is a story, ambiguous style, than they began to in the end, the Faction were merci- possibly apocryphal, of how a young be co-opted into the mainstream. THE less killers, and the association with Siouxsie Sioux, of the Banshees, wore PROCESS WAS GRADUAL AT FIRST, AS THEY them took punk into regrettable her swastika armband on a walk STARTED TO PRODUCE RECORD SLEEVES territory.

through Paris, and was promptly FOR THE SKYDOG LABEL AND TOUR POST-

There were political symbols the Ba-

ERS FOR SELECTED BANDS. But then

zookas would not touch. There is

they themselves started to be treat-

no sense in their work, for example,

ed like rock stars by the media: a status they’d always secretly courted, but which became a very French kind of celebrity. For example, as a group, they were invited on to radio and television shows - something that could never have happened to Reid, Garrett et al. in the UK due to the relatively lower cultural standing of designers and artists. THE ATTENTION WAS CLEARLY SOMETHING THE BAZOOKAS RELISHED. On one notorious occasion, they were special guests on a live TV pop show, and turned up dressed for the occasion - a motley gang of spiky vagabonds, with Lulu Picasso (hilariously) swathed in bandages. When it was time for another guest, an oldwave chanteuse in the Bonnie Tyler

“By now, Bazooka’s influence was extending internationally. In the UK, Andy Dog was spreading the word (see page 61), and the group landed a gig designing an issue of the NME devoted to French rock. In 1978 they were invited by Barney Bubbles (see Eye no. 6 vol. 2) to contribute to the fold-out sleeve for Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces LP. “

mould, to sing her song, all of a sudden the punk mummy lollops across the stage and ruins everything. It’s a very funny clip - and the French equivalent of the ‘Grundy moment’ (when the Sex Pistols swore on primetime TV). The natural outcome of this process of cultural rapprochement was that Bazooka were invited to collaborate with more commercial publications. The most notable of these

was Liberation, the august left-wing stead, they took it upon themselves we wanted to play with that. Readnewspaper (maybe not yet the ‘main- to redesign what they saw as a bor- ability wasn’t our first priority.’ Not stream’ publication it would become, ing layout. Photos were cut up and surprisingly, the new team was fired, but definitely not underground). re-situated, columns were jumbled and the Picasso ‘brothers’ ended up ‘We rationalised the alliance,’ says and re-pasted, and new captions being physically ejected from the Picasso, ‘by telling ourselves that if and comments added. ‘We wanted building. However, Liberation’s readregular artists could work in galler- to make the paper more beautiful,’ ership was not as against the new ies, then we could work in the media.’ he says without irony. ‘In a conven- look as its management, and the paThings did not start well, when they tional newspaper, the image is at the per devoted a double-page spread to agreed to be hired as part-time edito- service of the article: it’s there to letters of reaction to the Bazooka rial cartoonists and illustrators. In- back up what the journalist says. But sacking. Cautiously, very cautiously,

the punk rock nightmares were invited back -this time to produce a supplement. At least now the Bazookas could do their own thing, in their own space. This turned into a short-lived monthly magazine, entitled Un regard moderne (1978), which many believe to be the group’s finest hour. With a regular schedule, and the luxury of two-colour covers,

acknowledged

inspiration,

were

taking their toll, and there were reports of addiction within the group. ‘There was a stage when we were all pretty much off our heads,’ laughs Picasso. It all pointed to a very rock star end, and when Lulu Larsen was alleged to be self-harming, a la Sid Vicious, Bazooka fans’ worst suspicions seemed to be confirmed. Above

they set about commenting on topi-

all, punk was dying - and without

cal events via oblique graphic es-

a soundtrack, Bazooka’s graphics

says (‘We saw it as encapsulating the

would inevitably die too. The 19805

month’s news in images’, according

and 19905 were years of obscurity

to Picasso). The result was a honed

for the group. They reconvened

version of what they’d been doing

sporadically, but mostly went their

before - very French, very ‘moderne’,

separate ways. The newer stars of al-

and not quite post-punk. By now,

ternative graphics in France, such as

Bazooka’s influence was extending

the Dernier Cri collective, did their

internationally. In the UK, Andy Dog

best to hail them as pioneers: but no-

was spreading the word (see page 61),

body was listening. Eventually, the

and the group landed a gig design-

rump of Bazooka made a largely un-

ing an issue of the NME devoted to

remarked return in 2002 in the form

French rock. In 1978 they were invit-

of a website. None of them had any

ed by Barney Bubbles (see Eye no. 6 vol.

Web design experience or knowl-

2) to contribute

edge, but in true punk spirit they did

to the fold-out sleeve

for

Elvi-

Costello’s Armed Forces LP. Meanwhile in the us,

Does this renewed attention, 30 years-plus after Bazooka’s formation, represent their rehabilitation at last?

it anyway - appropriating images from across the internet, colourising them digitally, and generally having a riotous time. They called the site www.unregardmoderne.com,

and

they were becom-

like its namesake it became home to

ing hip in under-

topical essays - mostly anti-globali-

ground

sation rants. It gave new meaning to

circles;

though it wasn’t until the early

the term ‘cyber punk’, but by now a

19805, when sAWStarted to republish

thousand angry youths were doing

the work of Kiki Picasso (including

the same thing - and often better.

‘Crash’), that they became better

Then, in 2005, Bazooka were suddenly

known. ished in 1978, and it seemed

back on the map.

like they had nowhere else to go. They attempted collaborations with other publications, but were dogged by accusations of selling out (some members’ work even appeared in Metal Hurlcmt). Drugs, once an openly

EXPERIMETAL MODERNIST Text by John Dreick

Philippe Apeloig, born 1962 in Paris, has a remarkable career: While still a student at the Ecole superieure des arts appliques Duperre, he took two internships of a few months at Total Design in Amsterdam. Back in Paris, in 1985, he won a competition for a position as graphic

designer for the Musee dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Orsay, which was then still under construction. Later, a grant from the french government allowed him a stay with April Greiman in Los Angeles, then another one at the Villa Med-

ici in Rome which in turn lead to a job as design consultant for the Louvre in Paris. Since 1999 he teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and is on the Maryland Instituteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s faculty.

The posters of Philippe Apeloig are all about poise. One exemplary piece shows a photograph of a Japanese Butoh dancer crouched before an upright egg the size of his head. A ghostly glow illuminates the dancer’s face as he approaches the egg, his fingers nervously splayed before him. Hovering vertically to the left is Apeloig’s delicately balanced type bearing the name of the dance troupe, Sankai Juku—“studio of mountain and sea” and the title of the work, Unetsu—“the egg stands out of curiosity.” The type seems to approach the egg with the same trepidation as the dancer, and for Apeloig, a deft typographer, the relationship between the two is not accidental. Moving type around is a great deal like choreography, he says. “When you read a text most of the time it’s very static— you don’t even look at the shape of the letters, you consider the meaning—but one of the goals of the designer is to make text appear spectacular, like a show that really catches your eyes.” In fact, Apeloig, who was born in Paris in 1962, spent ten years of his early childhood learning to be a dancer, before arriving at the revelation that he wasn’t a natural. “I was very bad, I think, because I never had rhythm, but I loved the movement.” He discovered graphic design “by accident” he says, at the Paris École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, where a general arts degree included a class in what the school titled “visual expression.” This led him to calligraphy and a schooling in the French-traditional approach to design (think Cartier). But it was during internships at the Dutch graphic powerhouse Total Design that he acquired a taste and understanding of the Modernist approach that became the underpinning of his work.

“the egg stands out of curiosity.”

Apeloig is a Modernist in the experimental sense of the word exploring the formal limits of a predetermined medium, materials and palette. His monograph, to be published this Summer by Lars Muller, is devoid of interactive design, TV graphics, or CD covers and almost entirely full of posters. “I’m not fascinated by TV or the Web,” Apeloig explains of his pursuit of the poster. “You have to protect yourself and to learn to not see. It’s very hard to keep a clean eye. There are millions of images surrounding us polluting our visual capability.” His work is rooted in the typographic language and compositional tenets of the International Style, yet couldn’t be more different from that of an arch disciple of Swiss Modernism like, say, Massimo Vignelli. Two posters from 1998 illustrate the point. The first, for the Octobre en Normandie festival, based on the theme of “birth/rebirth” or “naissance/renaissance,” is a duotone montage of rays of light, a butterfly, a dying—or dancing—figure. It would not be out of place lined up next to a Herbert Bayer or Moholy-Nagy, were it not for the dimensional depth and seamless production qualities that bring it into the 21st century. From the same family is a Caribbean literature poster for a book fair. Riffing on the tropical theme, it depicts an abstracted sun casting rays of light over salsa-dancing blocks of translucent type forming patterns reminiscent of windswept palm trees. As both dancers and designers know, flexibility is the ticket to fast learning. After two years working as a designer of posters and graphics for the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Apeloig visited the US and befriended the digital graphics pioneer April Greiman, a designer he admired for merging irreverence and freshness with a strong typographic sense. Apeloig was inspired enough to obtain a grant from the French Foreign Ministry and left for California, where Greiman had offered him an internship in her studio. Arriving in LA in 1988, however, he was horrified by the sight of designers lined up at computers like secretaries. “The Musee d’Orsay is about the 19th century,” says Apeloig, “and arriving in LA was like jumping into the future with all these people with their keyboards and their screens.” After a few months, Apeloig came to the inevitable realization that he couldn’t return to Paris without having learned to produce work on this then-emerging Macintosh computer. He began to pick up on Greiman’s appreciation of pixellated, low resolution and moired textures, and learned the basics from her. “It was so painful at the beginning,” he says, “and I made so many mistakes, but the mistakes also opened doors.” Greiman notes how Apeloig’s dynamic compositional sense and strong type was transformed by the impact of digital tools. “I think the technology here really influenced his work a lot,” says Greiman. “He was able to experiment more easily and hybridize things. Before that he was pretty much a traditional graphic designer.”

70 “My goal was to create a typeface using solid objects like wood or stone”

A poster for a 1992 exhibition of Apeloig’s work at Arc en Rêve, a center for contemporary design in Bordeaux, bears certain similarities to the Greiman approach positioning sans serif type on a fine grid of shifting planes reminiscent of a screen-test pattern. By 1994, when Apeloig had arrived in Italy armed with a fellowship for the French Academy of Art in Rome, he was incorporating elements of the computer’s modular approach to type in his design. Inspired by the classical lettering inscribed in stone all around him, he began developing an architectonic typeface called Octobre. “My goal was to create a typeface using solid objects like wood or stone,” he explains. He used it for a poster promoting a dance and music festival in Normandy, where it appears in various sizes arranged on a grid and connected by rules in a composition reminiscent of a choreographic diagram. The rather traditionalist-minded client, expecting a photographic image rather than an all-type poster, initially balked at the idea. Apeloig won the fight and the Tokyo Type Directors Club liked it enough to give it a gold prize.

n g i s e D “ is a e id ” d e t n e i r o Now a full-time professor at The Cooper Union School of Art, Apeloig is attempting to bridge the gap between the technological obsessions of his students and the perennial need to develop a typographic sensibility beyond the defaults of the computer. Having come of age at a time when the computer was first embraced as a radical solution, he is now witnessing it take over. “Design is idea-oriented,” he says, “that’s what’s missing in the US, which is more technologically driven.”

As part of the antidote, he has invited a roster of internationally known designers to give one-off

lectures at the school, including Wang Xu from China, Malcolm Garrett from Britain and Wolfgang

Weingart from Basel, the latter a designer whose direct influence on Greiman is well documented, and

whose rigor and individualism played an important part in Apeloig’s development.

“It’s important that students don’t limit themselves to what they learn from their teachers,” he says. As for his own work, it has taken a turn toward the sparely executed conceptual wit that is enjoy-

ing something of a renaissance in New York at the moment. His exemplary poster in this vein is one

advertising an exhibition of, appropriately enough, posters. The names of participating designers are

printed on nine mini posters within the large sheet, their edges turned over to reveal brightly colored

reverse sides. Only when viewed from a distance does the game reveal itself. The mini posters in fact

form letters spelling out two words, “the poster.”

Philippe Apeloig By chance. When I was younger I was interested in drawing, in contemporary dance and in theatre. I took classes for many years, thinking I would become a choreographer, a director or a set designer. But I was too shy, I decided not to become a performer while still attending many concerts, plays and dance performances. I envied those in the theatre who seemed to have a special relationship to others, an emotion to transmit, a message to communicate. I chose painting and writing as a way of replacing those first passions. I enjoy manipulating images and words, developing ideas, reading and writing. I am very comfortable in the world of books. Graphic design brings together three things: communication, image and concept. My interest in printed form grew to encompass the form itself, as I became more aware of letters, not only as a vehicle for conveying thoughts, but as the raw material for creation itself. My art school classes also brought me to graphic design. At the School osf Applied Arts, I had one class called “visual expression” – which I signed up for without entirely understanding what it was. I had chosen this class by eliminating certain others: interior design, textiles and styling. In the first year, along with drawing classes, we learned calligraphy and font design. My teacher, Roger Druet, was intrigued by my perfectionism in working on line and composition, and at the end of my second year he advised me to contact the Total Design firm in Amsterdam to set up a professional internship. So during the summer of 1983, I went off to Total Design, on the shores of the Herengracht – working as part of Daphné Duivelshoff-von Peski’s design team. At that time, not many French people were venturing so far north to join a Dutch team, especially one so prestigious in the cultural context of the Netherlands. I was quite impressed with the other interns, who were English, Swiss, German and American. We checked each other out, we compared our various talents -- and lack thereof. I realised I still had a great deal to learn, clearly my fellow interns had been better trained. I drove myself with a ferocious will to adopt their rigourous discipline as well as the working methods used at Total Design. I made myself useful to the designers, participating in several poster projects and working on the catalogues for the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and the Heineken company’s annual report. I learned about the rich history of Dutch graphic design, a clever combination of tradition and modernity. I felt I really was in the right place at the right time, I loved the quality of well laid out typography that had been meticulously thought out, pure, informative functionalism, in other words the antithesis of the decorative and the anecdotal. The value of this kind of highly sophisticated graphic design seemed avant garde to me – and I was sure it could only improve the urban landscape and culture. From that moment on I became a hardcore admirer of Dutch graphic design. Two years later, rather more seasoned, I went back to Total Design to do another internship, to finish my training. I had made my considered decision, graphic design was going to be my world. When I got back to Paris, I took more classes at the School of Decorative Arts, and while still a student, applied for a job at the Orsay Museum, which was still under construction. It was 1985, there was a competition -- and the jury selected me. And so I began my professional career.

HOW DID YOU BECOME A GRAPHIC DESIGNER?

WHAT ARE YOUR INFLUENCES, YOUR SOURCES OF INSPIRATION?

I often look at the Russian constructivists El-Lissitsky and Malevitch, and while I was in Amsterdam for my two internships I discovered the de Stijl movement. I was also impressed by the paintings of Mondrian in his progression toward abstraction, as well as by the implications of his work evident in Dutch design. The work of Gerrit Rietveld, Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Zwart, respectively, was for me an absolute revelation, strongly influencing my interest in modern and expressive typography. Later, I was inspired by the rigor and diversity of the Swiss posters I saw in various books and magazines. And in France, the work of Adolphe Mouron Cassandre is one of my references, he was in my opinion a complete designer: a typographer, a poster designer, a creator of logos (his logo for Yves-SaintLaurent is a classic), and even a set designer! Finally, in the United States I was impressed by the imaginative power and precision of Paul Rand. Other influences come from other art forms, from design, painting, abstract sculptures like those of Brancusi and Henry Moore, and of course from architecture – all of them come with me in my travels.

HOW DID DESIGN BECOME PART OF YOUR ARTISTIC UNIVERSE?

Graphic design is an art. However the fundamental objective of the graphic designer is to communicate. The artist, whether he is a painter or a sculptor, does not worry if he does not have an explicit message to deliver. The graphic designer applies his talents to the communication of a message or a piece of information that the client has asked him to transmit. In this way the vocation of the graphic designer is similar to that of the actor, who must create a character and communicate the writer’s words to the other actors and the audience, in the clearest, most specific way possible. His acting reveals his talent: if the text is incomprehensible and his interpretation of the role not credible, they say he is a bad actor, and the play is a flop. The graphic designer does the same thing in respecting the needs of his client. His job is to interpret them visually. If he changes either their direction or their intent by rendering them indecipherable, he screws up his mission. He must also take into consideration the reception of his images by the public. The virtuosity of a graphic designer consists of finding a visual concept which is the right one – because of its clarity, its originality and its ability to be memorised.

YOU WORKED IN MUSEUMS FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE CULTURAL COMMUNICATION? It was an obvious choice. I had barely finished my studies and yet I was hired as a graphic designer at the Musée d’Orsay. (The museum was not yet open to the public). Even before it opened, there was a competition to help determine its visual identity, which was won by Bruno Monguzzi and Jean Widmer. I inherited a logotype and a set of well-written graphic guidelines which allowed me to express myself quite freely. The principal constraint was that we had to use the font chosen for the Musée d’Orsay, called Walbaum. I tried to create images without compromising the initial graphic mindset. By the way, I have always gone to museums and exhibitions. I am a perfect city dweller. I communicate that which I know best. Museums, publishing houses and festivals are the organisations for which I work most often.

Even though cultural communication does not usually have access to large budgets, it is still stimulating to participate in cultural projects which resonate with my own interests. It is a chance to enhance the expanse of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s knowledge in the work, to follow the intellectual progress of scientists, artists and editors. I am less at ease when I must resolve purely technical problems, such as the execution of different kinds of signage. I also do not like giant projects requiring long meetings and overly detailed administrative followup.

HOW ABOUT ADVERTISING?

HOW DO YOU FIND YOUR IDEAS?

French graphic designers are rarely called upon by the big advertising agencies who think they have a monopoly on creativity for the masses. Advertising people tend to think graphic designers are elitists and they look down on them. They think they are capable of creating, but the graphic poverty of their production speaks for itself.

I observe, I record what I see every day in the street, in museums and in books. My ideas flow out onto the paper depending on the subject, the question which is asked, and the speed with which I must come up with the answer. Sometimes my ideas come to me rather backhandedly. I imagine a certain composition, then through the drawing process another one becomes clear. To make an idea communicative, precise and concise, it is necessary to reduce, to leave behind what appears at first to be indispensable. I find a fine balance between sobriety, simplicity and complexity. Sometimes I think I am not minimal enough in my compositions, that I still have too much in them. When I begin a poster, I lay out construction lines which will serve as support for the text. In addition to the pertinence of the concept, I take into consideration the structure of the page. In the next step, I break up the rigidity of my composition. I like it when a poster gives the illusion of movement. There must be an impression of spontaneity, even if the result is really a product which has been precisely and minutely detailed. I also dislike working with known quantities, those that are already ossified. This explains my constant hesitation, my temptation to do and redo things. Most of the time I start from a text, from typography, and I continue with images. I use the editing techniques from film editing, I carve my ideas into pieces and then reassemble them in a different order. I manipulate them until the composition is right and it is strong enough to fix itself in the visual memory of the public. The development of ideas is a very complex labyrinth.

HOW IS IT DEALING WITH COMMISSIONS? I don’t like it much, but I can’t avoid it. Presenting my work is a test. At the same time I am stimulated having to deal with someone else’s opinions. I need the commissions in order to work. I need an interlocutor to whom I must both present and defend my work. I enjoy the process of persuasion but I hesitate a great deal before showing a project. I need time to look at it myself, until the moment a solution appears which convinces me. Sometimes I also reveal the developmental process to my clients, stage by stage, explaining methodically how I am working. Of course, some of my research is not worthy of being shown, I keep that stuff in my workshop. Sometimes those pieces reappear, at which time I develop them fully and eliminate all unnecessary sketches and draftings. When I feel I can go no further, the project is finished.

I willingly accept constructive criticism

I maintain a

from my employers, those who have commissioned my work â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but not if they

good

try to tell me what I

relationship

should be doing. I maintain a good relationship

with those

with those who are interested in my approach and do not impede the flow

who are

of my ideas, in fact they stimulate those ideas. Unfortunately it is too

interested in

rare an occurrence. When a client is afraid

my approach

of taking risks and asks everyone what he or she thinks, he only reassures himself, if that! Trying to satisfy everyone he pleases no one, and the result skews far from the initial idea and eventually engenders bitterness, disappointment and frustration. The relationship between a graphic designer and his client is a delicate one, built on mutual comprehension and a respect

for the skills of each person.

and do not

The client joins in the creative process with the

impede the

clarity with which he lays out his commission, and by the confidence he has in the graphic d esigner. If he intervenes onstantly he slows

flow of my ideas, in fact they stimulate

down the creative process. Too many constraints kill the imagination.

those ideas.

The client joins in the creative process with the clarity with which he lays out his commission, and by the confidence he has in the graphic designer.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF PUBLIC COMMISSIONS?

82 They are an excellent field of action, how could it not be? I was offered the chance to begin working in one of the most beautiful museums in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay, which was tasked with creating the museum. They trusted me and made me share their enthusiasm. I was barely 23, and with them I felt free in my work. I now realise what a great opportunity that was. I have had others, for example when Pierre Rosenberg, the director of the Louvre Museum, asked me to design the museum’s publications beginning in 1996. He had seen my work when I applied to the Ministry of Culture for a grant to go to the Villa Médicis. He was president of the jury, and we saw each other in Rome. He challenged me to rethink the graphic conception of all the Louvre documents, which definitely needed something new, since the last competition to define its corporate image was way back in 1989. And in another domain, which isn’t a public commission – I cannot forget the vote of confidence I got from Alice Morgaine, the editor in chief of Jardin des Modes, when she asked me to become the artistic director of the magazine – after she had interviewed me for over two hours. But in France, those giving the commissions (mostly cultural institutions subsidised by the State or regional communities) think of graphic designers as service employees, whose mission is not to create but to execute. They seem not to be aware that graphic designers are above all creators, which confirms their artistic talents. They tend to forget or ignore this. Anyone positing that graphic arts are not art does not recognise their work product, and certainly does not respect the quality of that work. The communication directors of companies and state institutions suffer from a fundamental lack of knowledge of the culture of the image and of typography in particular. Their concept in terms of communication is limited to checking out the positioning of their logo, of those of their partners and others. They spend too much time organising competitions, writing consultation dossiers and detailed contracts, irrespective of the work to be done, even if it is on a small scale, ranging from greeting cards to the creation of an entirely new branding logo. Administrative and legal details frequently overwhelm artistic considerations. Graphic designers are constantly asked to work under mediocre financial and organisational conditions. Proofreading texts and making up for the editors’ delays is often more their job than applying their imagination. And overachieving is not encouraged. Graphic designers are asked merely to repeat themselves in a mechanical fashion, which slowly kills their creative sense and energy. Believing that the graphic production generated in situations like this is commensurate with what the designers aspire to -- would be a mistake. The archaic nature of the commission system and its administrative bulimia beats out artistic quality. There are some fine creations, of course, but they do not happen by chance or because the clients want them – they are the result of a long exchange between the clients and the designers, who show great dexterity in avoiding obstacles.

I maintain excellent relationships with clients who allow me to create freely and who are respectful of my work. I am thinking in particular about the Fête du livre in Aixen-Provence, and also the October in Normandy Festival. Their support is and has been important. I am also involved with and very supportive of galeries which show work by graphic designers, of those in the press who are interested in us, and also of other graphic designers who are organising in order to be further recognised.

YOUR ANALYSIS IS SO DARKWHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?

Graphic designers don’t have many other terrains in which to work beyond those of the communication departments of national and regional communities. The profession needs to be developed. Along with this sad analysis, there are nonetheless a few reasons for optimism, in this beginning of a new era, where the imagination is supposed to be empowered! The all too few personal initiatives deserve to be defended.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE COTRIBUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY IN THE PROFESSION? They all interest me and involve me. The poster “Chicago, naissance d’une métropole” for the Musée d’Orsay was the first work I did with a computer. The word Chicago appeared in perspective, like a breeze blowing down the middle of the street. It even follows the curve of the street corner. The syllable “go” is deliberately provocative. The obliqueness of the photo accents the feeling of dizziness, as well as the image of the first skyscrapers in the history of architecture. Beginning with that poster, I became more and more interested in projecting the illusion of three dimensions in a two dimensional medium. The idea of depth and space fascinate me as well as the idea of stillness in movement. Computers help us to bring an architectural dimension to the text. New technology has also changed our way of working. Publishing and editing software, drawing and drafting and Photoshop -- the speed and flexibility of computers has helped us create new ways of working. Creation develops differently, using audiovisual media for example. The massive power of computing has also brought about complex and daring innovations in printing techniques (which we also see in architectural work), as well as in animation and interactive applications. Is this then the death of the printed poster? Giant screens will replace our billboards. They have already begun changing the urban landscape in certain cities, like Times Square in New York where advertising is an enchanting futuristic spectacle. Finally, internet communication has made brutal changes in our lives as consumers of images, offering an unending source of information. Of course most of the sites do not deserve our attention or our interest, they are visual pollution. The existence of interactive masterpieces means that we may expect a new avant-garde to come out of the use of computers. In short, new technologies will not change the creative process, which still depends entirely on the imagination of the designer. I am not attached to my computer, I often step away from it to work with a pencil and a sheet of white paper, allowing my creative mind to zigzag as it likes.

LOOKING AT YOUR WORK, I SEE THAT TYPOGRAPHY REALLY DOES SEEM TO PREDOMINATE. WHY IS THAT?

I am more interested in the text than in the image. I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stand busy-ness or decoration. In my posters I try to obtain the maximum effect with a minimum of means in order to guarantee its success in communication. Illustration for me is secondary. It rarely attains the level of conceptualisation which typographical composition offers. Typography is the essence of drafting: the balance between full and empty, light and shadow. Typography is a discipline half-way between science and art. It is an exact and arbitrary thing, functional and poetic. I like modern, experimental, even clumsy typography, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s alive when it is a little gauche and fragile. In this case, the sensitivity of the artist blossoms and overflows in a radical or original way. The graphic designer who uses typography as a means of expression fully defines the idea of design: a fusion between form and concept. I leave the dry, boring stiffness to the technicians. It is true that designing letters is still rather obscure in the eyes of the public. Most readers read without noticing the font of the letters they are deciphering. Typography belongs to the world of the non-remarkable, behind it is concealed an astonishing mass of work the reader knows nothing about. Fonts share our lives with neutrality, modesty and greatness, they are the raw material of communication, in the service of men and their exchanges. Confusing the reader with the text is to alter the reading process, forcing him to notice the presence of letters and symbols as shapes. Typography is not only a mechanism, the designer must attempt to make it clear, if not spectacular. Creating a font is above all asking questions about its function. What will it be used for? How will it be reproduced? I believe that typography can also move away from purely utilitarian constraints. When I design fonts, I go beyond the functional aspects to make the font an abstract graphic element. I work with them using a nearly mathematical precision. Their massive silhouettes guarantee their readability even from afar, which is ideal for the composition of posters.

They all interest me and involve me. The poster “Chicago, naissance d’une métropole” for the Musée d’Orsay was the first work I did with a computer. The word Chicago appeared in perspective, like a breeze blowing down the middle of the street. It even follows the curve of the street corner. The syllable “go” is deliberately provocative. The obliqueness of the photo accents the feeling of dizziness, as well as the image of the first skyscrapers in the history of architecture. Beginning with that poster, I became more and more interested in projecting the illusion of three dimensions in a two dimensional medium. The idea of depth and space fascinate me as well as the idea of stillness in movement. Computers help us to bring an architectural dimension to the text. New technology has also changed our way of working. Publishing and editing software, drawing and drafting and Photoshop -- the speed and flexibility of computers has helped us create new ways of working. Creation develops differently, using audiovisual media for example. The massive power of computing has also brought about complex and daring innovations in printing techniques (which we also see in architectural work), as well as in animation and interactive applications. Is this then the death of the printed poster? Giant screens will replace our billboards. They have already begun changing the urban landscape in certain cities, like Times Square in New York where advertising is an enchanting futuristic spectacle. Finally, internet communication has made brutal changes in our lives as consumers of images, offering an unending source of information. Of course most of the sites do not deserve our attention or our interest, they are visual pollution. The existence of interactive masterpieces means that we may expect a new avant-garde to come out of the use of computers. In short, new technologies will not change the creative process, which still depends entirely on the imagination of the designer. I am not attached to my computer, I often step away from it to work with a pencil and a sheet of white paper, allowing my creative mind to zigzag as it likes.

WHAT IS THE SOCIAL ROLE OF GRAPHIC DESIGNERS? HOW DO YOU SEE THE EVOLUTION OF INVOLVED VISUAL COMMUNICATION? This question often comes up whenever graphic design is being debated, and whenever we try to fully define the profession. Is social involvement inherent to the good quality of graphic creation? Are graphic designers invested with a humanitarian or political militantism? It is true that visual communication implies knowledge of the intent behind and the object of the fabrication of images. A graphic designer, like all other creators, is free to determine his own social responsibility, and the need to use his talent to defend his political ideals. Does that mean it is his duty? It is really more a personal choice. We cannot live in illusion, nor pretend to hold a monopoly on the truth, even less to try to awaken someone’s moral conscience. There is a general escalation in the world of graphic design, including those who create mostly moralistic or politically engaged posters. They are showered with awards and are usually printed for free, to unanimous praise. Personally I have always been wary of them. Most of the images do not have much influence socially and are not worth more than other approaches which do not share the same ambition. You can dedicate your career to fighting for noble and just causes, to awakening public opinion, to be “useful” to society by creating images. Or you can choose different commitments, slightly less media-friendly. For example, demanding the practical function of the design such that it facilitates the reading of certain documents. Or perfecting the technologies of communication between individuals. Making sure that the transmission of knowledge is offered to all without respect to money. My work is not a critical commentary on our society, it is a part of the cultural and artistic world. Several times I thought of doing political posters. However, no one has ever asked me to create any, and I have not created any on my own. I also am not looking to be compensated for my feelings or my reflections. I am aware of the tradition of the politically engaged poster, especially in France. I admire those who have consciously used images to speak to a period of time. I am thinking specifically of Tomi Ungerer’s poster “White power/ Black power” which was created in the United States in the 60s. The image consisted of the crudely-drawn bodies of two men, one black, one white, placed head-to-toe and munching exaggeratedly on each other’s feet. The drawing is deliberately rudimentary, which accentuates the aggressive aspect of the conflict existing between the white and the black communities in American society. I discovered this poster when I was a student and it still seems very relevant today. I consider the question of political and social involvement in my work as a daily requirement, even if it is often imperceptible. I find it impossible to disregard my personal experience, as it affects my actions and how I react. How many situations, relating to my origins, my political orientations and events in my life -- spark my revolt! I am however not an intellectual who decides he must intervene in political debate, nor do I publically take positions on the important problems of our time. I do not want to give lessons, to be the spokesperson for a cause, to pass judgment. I do not wish to change my personal indignation into denunciation. But my convictions appear quite naturally in my work. For example in my logo project for the Judaic Art and History Museum, I was inspired by the symbolism of the seven-fingered hand painted by Chagall as a cultural and artistic image. If I design posters and am interested in typography as a means of expression, it is above all so that the work of graphic designers can be included in the art world. This printed work, in essence ephemeral, deserves to be recognised and survive the passage of time. In spite of its fragility, it deserves to remain in our collective memories, far from the media hullabaloo and the exacerbated egos of certain artists. This is why, by staying loyal to my ideals of independence, I do not want in any way to give up my freedom of creation, working for a party or “politically correct” organisations.

Honour

thy ERROR By Anna Gerber

Can happy accidents save us from crude perfectionism?

t a time when perfectionist technology dictates our visual language, the beauty of accidents seems to have been airbrushed from day-to-day discussions and working methods. Perhaps we need to remember that the creative process is not only victim to accidents but also in constant need of them. We need mistakes and accidents to evolve, to move forwards. ‘Mistake-ism’ encapsulates the idea that mistakes and”accidents should be applauded in the name of creative progress and process. To give it a name gives us the space to appreciate and recognise the importance of accidents and mistakes. We can think of mistake-ism in two ways: as a visual language where mistakes are used, intentionally or not, and as a process where the artist creates a system to encourage the unpredictable.

Work such as Edward Fella’s photographs, Tomoko Takahashi’s Word Perhect online project, Alan Kitching’s typographic illustrations and type design by 2Rebels and Paul Elliman all use happy accidents and chance as part of their visual language. And we can see mistake-ism applied as a system in Dada poems. the ‘automatic writing’ ofPhillipe Soupault and Andr. Breton, in William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up methods, John Cage’s use of the [Ching and the ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards by Brian Eno and the late Peter Schmidt.’ And mistake-ism has now entered the perfectionist and technologically driven world of international cinema, exemplified by the Dogrne 95 film-makers and Harmony Korine’s julien donkey-boy. The theoretical and practical issues behind mistake-ism were aired at ‘The Art of the Accident’, a conference hosted in r998 by V2, a centre for art and technology in Rotterdam. Speakers such as Ed van Megen and Dick Raaijmakers discussed the way technology has a tendency to malfunction and how such technology can be re-evaluated in the face of failure. (The idea of malfunctioning technology was best seen on the ingenious Deaf98 website, the temporary site for the conference, where

A FRIEND (FELLOW MUSICIAN MIKE WATT) LEFT A SERIE OF MESSAGES ON SONIC YOUTH ‘S OFFICE ANSWERING MACHINE. ONE OF THE BAND MEMBERS ACCIDENTALLY LEFT A BROKEN AMPLIFIER ON OVER NIGHT. the hits and crackle of the amplifier combined with the answering machine messages made up the track ‘providence’, on the album ‘daydream nation’.

the more you used the site, the more unreliable it became.) The conference brought people (designers, artists, computer programmers, academics) from all over the world to discuss the idea of the accident: to strip the term ‘accident’ of its negative connotations: or, in the words of the organisers: We live in a world of accidents. The things we produce have a tendency to malfunction as much as they function... Yet malfunction and failure are not signs of improper production.’ (Brouwer, Joke ed. (r998) The Art of the Acddent Rotterdam. NAI Publishers/v2 Organisatie). Almost a decade before the conference, French social theorist Paul Virilio wrote an essay called The Museum of Accidents’. Virilio, whose work was covered extensively in the conference, writes that

we should stop thinking about the accident as something separate from the world. Instead, he claims, we should think of the accident as a given, and hence on an equal footing with perfection. He says: ‘The beginning of wisdom would be, above all, an awareness of symmetry between substance and accident, instead of constantly dissimulating them:’ [n an attempt to offer a practical adjunct to his theories, Virilio demands that we ‘make room in public information for “fallibility”,’ a ‘room’ that he calls the ‘Museum of Accidents’, where the idea of progress is understood in a new way. He explains

IN THE LATE 1980S, IN A SERIES OF PRINTS KNOWN AS WHERE THERE IS, WHERE THERE, JOHN CAGE EXPERIMENTED WITH BRANDING ON SMOKED PAPER AND USING A HOT PIECE OF

iron at a “chance determinated” point (based on random numbers), he would brand the paper with circle or a line, or in some cases both.

that if we are to really understand progress as something other than linear and continuous, we must consider ‘beneficent error’, The purpose of Virilio’s ‘Museum of Accidents’ is to familiarise researchers. scientists, engineers with the unexpected - with error - so that they might better avoid the dangers of habit. As he puts it, habit is a ‘deformity’ that comes from a complacent belief that technology works flawlessly. He uses the invention of the train as an example. He says that to invent the train was also to invent its derailment - that without the derailment (error) there would be no train. We can think ofVirilio’s museum as a symbolic. abstract space,. where we can witness and celebrate dysfunctional objects, where it is possible to understand mistakes as essentially positive, to avoid the blandness of habit and thoughtless routine. It is likely that Virilio sought inspiration for his ‘Museum of Accidents’ in Chaos

Theory, a scientific concept that entered language in the 1970S~ in which apparently random phenomena such as thunderstorms or the irregular oscillation of a swing are shown to have an underlying order.

Typographic pollution

Fabrizio Gilardino, of the type foundry 2Rebels, designed a typeface called Duchamp Dirty. The typeface is a ‘noisy and polluted’ version of Letter Gothic - designed by rubbing Letter Gothic characters with sandpaper, physically cutting and pasting them, scanning and altering them. The typeface is made up of irregularities, or what could be thought of as nuances. Paul Elliman based his Bits font (for Fuse) on a bag of junk that he used to carry around with him. Although Bits - sc~d digitised – has

been used for various projects (including Lost And Found) the character set continues to decay and deteoriate, allowing the unpredictability of time to constantly affect and change it.’ So, what is it that we find so appealing (aesthetically and conceptually) about a typeface that looks dirty? Or one that decays? Is it because there’s something human about them? In his book, The Defence of the Acddenta~ philosopher Odo Marquard discusses how accidents are what makes us human, how without them, we would lose our sense of freedom. Word Perhec~ the online project by artist Tomoko Takabash~ provides a provocative and entertaining illustration of Marquard’s theories,’

Word 1’erhect is a ‘mistake-is!’ version of the word processing programme Word Perfect. Users are given the choice between typing and handwriting, a messy and neat option, the delete option literally crosses out words and windows open as hand.written notes taped on to the screen, complete with stains, rips and all the wondrous irregularities of masking tape. Word 1’erhect is laden with ‘imperfections’, all in an aim to challenge what can seem as the dehumanising process of standardised word processing software (and on a larger scale, standardised language). Word 1’erhect celebrates the wonder of human error, and in doing mistakes become inseparable from the programme, which echoes Virilio’s ideas and Chaos Theory, insofar as the (manufactured) nuhave become the programme. Taking this one step further, just as 1’erhectcould not exist without mistakes, nor could we. As Marput it, ‘To get rid of what is accidental would... mean. . . to rid man his too-humanness.. .’

Systems

so the both ances Wo r d quard of all

Having explored the idea that mistakes and accidents are not only positive but also necessary. we need to think about the systems of rules that are created to invite accidents into creative processes. Using a

ONE NIGHT, WHILE EDITING FACES IN THE MAKE-SHIFT EDITING SUITE AT THE CASSAVETES HOME, JOHN CASSAVETES’ MOTHER-IN-LAW LADY ROWLANDS, ACCIDENTALLY LEFT HER FRENCH POODLE LOOSE. THE DOG EMPTIED HIS BOWELS OVER AN ENTIRE ROLL OF FILM.

the unruly dog played what turned out to be a classical role at a critical stage in the editing process of the film.

system to incite the unexpected is nothing new. What with automatic writing in the 1920S (where Andre Breton and Philipe Soupault filled notebooks with ‘automatic’ sentences and published them as Magnetic Fields, considered to be the first surrealist novel); the Dada Poem (invented by Tristan Tzara); the ‘cut. up method’ (an updated version of the Dada poem by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, where a piece of writing was constructed from a chance arrangement of words, sentences. passages cut from newspapers), and John Cage’s idea of indeterminacy (where he used various chance methods, such as the I Ching or radio signals or the prepared piano, to make music)- the idea of looking to something beyond oneself for the unexpected has informed some of the greatest work of our time. Film-maker Harmony Korine, whose credits in~de Gumma, went so far as to use a spinning, wheel the set of julien donkey-boy, on which he pinned various set locations. He explains how he did this when he said, ‘Because I really wanted

chance to play a big part, I made this cardboard box with different locations with a little pinwheel. And I would just spin it, and wherever it landed I would decide to shoot that day just to keep everybody on

IN SPITE OF A LEGAL DISPUTE WITH THE PRODUCER OF HIS FILM FROST, WHICH SAW THE MASTER REELS CONFISCATED, GERMAN FILM DIRECTOR FRED KELEMEN, IN FACT KEPT ONE ROUGH CUT WHICH HE PREMIERED AT VARIOUS FILM FESTIVALS. EACH TIME THE FILM WAS SHOWN THE FILM DETERIORATED.

for many critics, the already grainy quality of the film was made better by this accident d e c a y .

their toes.’ Korine used the spinning wheel in much the same way that some artists and musicians’. use Eno and Schmidt’s ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards (each of which contained a provocative instruction or question. such as ‘Honour thy error as a hidden intention’ or ‘What mistakes did you make last time?’ or ‘Do something boriog’. In ‘955, John Cage coined the term ‘indeterminacy’ to mean, a ‘truly experimental state of mind and action’ because it produces events ‘the outcome of which cannot be foreseen’... Cage explained that he wanted to strip himself from the ‘dictatorship’ of a composer to ultimately achieve a selfless (ego-less) creation, and to allow for chance to ‘arrange’ his compositions. A good example of this ambition is the famous piece Imagina’]l Landscapes, where Cage arranged a stage with twelve radios, with two ‘players’ for each receiver.

Questions of intentionality

The score called for one performer to adjust the station dial, and the other to regulate the dynamics. The unpredictable nature of the composition was a result of the different and unknown frequency bands (and consequently unknown content) in different cities.”

How do we get out of our own way? We create systems or situations where we become ego-less. Korine delegated decision.making to the spinning wheel, just as Cage did with the twelve radio dials. Yet although mistake-ism as a visual language does not have to be ego-less, mistakeism the process most likely will be. Mistake-ism is a visual language that ac- attention to the artist’s role in the crecepts planned mistakes and pays little ative process. While mistake-ism as a process can be thought of as a conceptual approach, made up of systems that take many different forms, the common thread in these systems is that they are more likely to be ego-less. In other words, in setting up such systems, the artist has to look to something beyond the self to encourage the unpredictable. By accepting the accident as positive and necessary (ViriIio), as something inherently human (Marquard), that need not be considered a nuance (Chaos Theory), we can create a space to create (mistake.ism) in which work by champions of chance, arbiters of the accident and diviners of the ‘perfect’ mistake can be embraced and applauded.