graphic design at the edge of a new millennium a cura di Simone Restifo Pilato
Simone Restifo Pilato | 914298 quaderno di ricerche | postmodernismo
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Introduction
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Timeline
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FROM STYLE TO THEORY The Medium Is the Massage | Marshall McLuhan 1967 Learning from Las Vegas | Robert Venturi 1977 Mapping the Postmodern | Andreas Huyssen 1986 Typography as Discourse | Katherine McCoy, David Frej 1988
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PAINT THAT NEVER DRIES Interview with April Greiman | Emigre 1988 Amtion / Fear | Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans 1989 Hybrid Imagery | April Greiman, Eric Martin 1990 A Brave New World: Understanding Deconstruction Chuck Byrne, Martha Witte 1990.
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DECOSTRUCTING TYPOGRAPHY The Academy of Deconstructed Design | Ellen Lupton Michael McCoy, Ed Fella, Katherine McCoy 1991 Legible? | Gerard Unger 1992 The End of Print | David Carson, and Lewis Blackwell 1995 Graphic Design in the Postmodern Era | Mr Keedy 1998
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POSTMODERNISM IN MOTION Our Decentered Culture | Jack Solomon 1998
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The Qatsi Trilogy | Peter-Wayne Vivier 2010
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Text Sources
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Sitography and Archives Bibliography
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Introduction
Rudy VanderLans, cover, Emigre #31, photography by Allison White, performed by Bryan Green. USA, 1994
Negli ultimi decenni del millennio passato sono avvenuti cambiamenti radicali, dovuti a nuove tecnologie ma anche ad una nuova visione del mondo. Un mondo sempre più connesso ha fatto emergere nuove voci, le voci degli altri, che tentano di tornare ad un'espressione individuale. Gli ideali assoluti, senza tempo, hanno perso il loro fascino così come le grandi narrazioni sono ormai arrivate al loro capolinea. Questo è un momento di rottura, l’uomo si è ritrovato in una condizione in cui non si era mai trovato prima: cerca di dare senso ad un nuovo mondo privato dei suoi punti fissi, quindi più complesso e sfaccettato, ma anche ricco di opportunità. Il luogo che meglio rappresenta questo cambiamento, e su cui si concentra principalmente la ricerca, è il Nord America e più in particolare gli Stati Uniti. La ricerca racconta questo fermento culturale riflesso nel graphic design e come i progettisti abbiano contribuito attivamente ad esplorare la nuova realtà. I testi che seguono trattano alcuni nodi cruciali, contribuendo ad una riflessione sul ruolo del progettista. Per questo passaggio sono stati scelti alcuni testi di autori come Venturi e McLuhan, che vedono da punti di vista molto differenti questo cambio di paradigma; seguiti da una inquadramento di Huyssen sul postmodernismo dagli anni 60 agli anni 80 negli Stati Uniti e da un brano di Katherine McCoy e David Frej che introduce al contesto del graphic design post-moderno. La seconda sezione affronta la rivoluzione digitale, vista in prima persona dai progettisti coinvolti, come April Greiman, Zuzana Licko e Rudy VanderLans che hanno reso il digitale un elemento fondante del loro lavoro e della loro estetica. Questi autori affrontano l’introduzione del computer nella loro professione e di come abbia rivoluzionato il loro modo di pensare e operare. La transizione verso il digitale è un aspetto cruciale per la storia più recente delle comunicazioni visive, così come l’influenza delle idee decostruzioniste di Derrida, che hanno trovato nel digitale il loro mezzo ideale. Nella sezione successiva si è scelto il punto di vista di progettisti che hanno avuto un ruolo cruciale con il loro approccio decostruzionista, come Carson e Mr. Keedy. Per tutte e tre le sezioni sono stati individuati artefatti rappresentativi delle tematiche dei brani antologici e dei graphic designer coinvolti nelle vicende trattate. La scelta delle immagini è stata fatta per individuale gli aspetti più caratterizzanti del periodo, e che hanno data forma all’estetica di fine millennio. La ricerca si conclude con un brano sul lavoro di Godfrey Reggio, la sua trilogia realizzata con delle sequenze di immagini e suoni aperti all’interpretazione dello spettatore, apre uno scorcio su nuovo mondo, fatto di impressioni, veloce, in mutamento.
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FROM STYLE TO THEORY
Robert Venturi Learning from Las Vegas
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1982
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1980
1979
1978
1977
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1975
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1973
1972
1971
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1968
1967
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi
Marshal McLuhan The Medium Is the Massage
1966
1965
publication year of anthologized text
DECOSTRUCTING TYPOGRAPHY Jeffery Keedy Graphic Design in the Postmodern Era
Katherine McCoy with David Frej Typography as Discourse
PAINT THAT NEVER DRIES
Gerard Unger Legible?
David Carson, Lewis Blackwell The End of Print
Rudy VanderLans Interview with April Greiman
April Greiman Hybrid Imagery
Jack Solomon Our Decentered Culture
Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans Ambition/Fear
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1998
1997
1996
1995
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1993
1992
1991
1990
1989
1988
1987
1986
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Chuck Byrne, Martha Witte A Brave New World: Understanding Deconstruction
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1983
Andreas Huyssen After the Great Divide Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
POSTMODERNISM IN MOTION
Ellen Lupton, et al. The Academy of Deconstructed Design
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FROM STYLE TO THEORY Questa prima sezione affronta alcune delle spinte culturali che hanno dato forma al graphic design post-moderno. Queste idee hanno fatto da presupposto per il passaggio da una visione stilistica del postmodernismo ad una piÚ teorica e critica. Cambiamento che avviene con il lavoro di alcuni progettisti, che con gli strumenti propri del design esplorano l'emergere di un nuovo modo di vedere, un nuovo modo di essere, che si è imposto con i cambiamenti epocali avvenuti alla fine del millennio.
The Medium Is the Massage Marshall McLuhan 1967
The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology— is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.” And they’re changing dramatically. Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media. The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology— mechanization. Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. 8
Our “Age of 30-million toy trucks were bought in the U.S. in 1966. Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools-with yesterday’s concepts. Youth instinctively understands the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media. [...]Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “space” has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun againto structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.
Quentin Fiore, spreads from The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan, 1967
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Learning from Las Vegas Robert Venturi 1972
A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things. The commercial strip, the Las Vegas Strip in particular—the example par excellence—challenges the architect to take a positive, non-chip-on-the shoulder view. Architects are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at the environment, because orthodox Modern architecture is progressive, if not revolutionary, utopian, and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture has been anything but permissive: Architects have preferred to change the existing environment rather than enhance what is there. […] Modern architects work through analogy, symbol, and image—although they have gone to lengths to disclaim almost all determinants of their forms except structural necessity and the program—and they derive insights, analogies, and stimulation from unexpected images. There is a perversity in the learning process: We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to go upward. And withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.
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Denise Scott Brown, Architettura Minore on the Strip, Las Vegas, 1966.
Billboards Are Almost All Right Architects who can accept the lessons of primitive vernacular architecture, so easy to take in an exhibit like “Architecture without Architects,” and of industrial, vernacular architecture, so easy to adapt to an electronic and space vernacular as elaborate neo-Brutalist or neo-Constructivist megastructures, do not easily acknowledge the validity of the commercial vernacular. For the artist, creating the new may mean choosing the old or the existing. Pop artists have relearned this. Our acknowledgment of existing, commercial architecture at the scale of the highway is within this tradition. Modern architecture has not so much excluded the commercial vernacular as it has tried to take it over by inventing and enforcing a vernacular of its own, improved and universal. It has rejected the combination of fine art and crude art. The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere’s laundry across the padrone’s portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66. 11
Mapping the Postmodern Andreas Huyssen 1986
Postmodernism in the 1960s: An American Avantgarde? What were the connotations of the term postmodernism in the 1960s? Roughly since the mid-195os literature and the arts witnessed a rebellion of a new generation of artists such as Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, Burroughs and Barthelme against the dominance of abstract expressionism, serial music, and classical literary modernism. The rebellion of the artists was soon joined by critics such as Susan Sontag, Leslie Fiedler, and Ihab Hassan who all vigorously though in very different ways and to a different degree, argued for the postmodern. […] By the 1960s artists and critics alike shared a sense of a fundamentally new situation. The assumed postmodern rupture with the past was felt as a loss: art and literature’s claims to truth and human value seemed exhausted, the belief in the constitutive power of the modern imagination just another delusion. Or it was felt as a breakthrough toward an ultimate liberation of instinct and consciousness, into the global village of McLuhanacy, the new Eden of polymorphous perversity, Paradise Now, as the Living Theater proclaimed it on stage.
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Postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s By the mid-1970s, certain basic assumptions of the preceding decade had either vanished or been transformed. The sense of a “futurist revolt” (Fiedler) was gone. The iconoclast gestures of the pop, rock, and sex avantgardes seemed exhausted since their increasingly commercialized circulation had deprived them of their avantgardist status. The earlier optimism about technology, media and popular culture had given way to more sober and critical assessments […] It was easy to see that the 1960s were over. But it is more difficult to describe the emerging cultural scene which seemed much more amorphous and scattered than that of the 1960s […] In political terms, the erosion of the triple dogma modernism/ modernity/avantgardism can be contextually related to the emergence of the problematic of “otherness,” which has asserted itself in the sociopolitical sphere as much as in the cultural sphere. I cannot discuss here the various and multiple forms of otherness as they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender and sexuality, race and class, temporal Ungleichzeitigkeiten and spatial geographic locations and dislocations. Robert Rauschenberg. Axle, USA, 1964
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Typography as Discourse Katherine McCoy, David Frej 1988
The recent history of graphic design in the United States reveals a series of actions and reactions. The fifties saw the flowering of U.S. graphic design in the New York School. This copy-concept and image-oriented direction waschallenged in the sixties by the importation of Swiss minimalism, a structural and typographic system that forced a split between graphicdesign and advertising. Predictably, designers in the next decade rebelled against Helvetica and the grid system that had become the official American corporate style. In the early seventies, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture emerged alongside the study of graphic design history as influences on American graphic design students. Simultaneously, Switzerland’s Basel school was transformed by Wolfgang Weingart’s syntactical experimentation, an enthusiasm that quickly spread to U.S. schools. […] Here on the edges of graphic design, the presence of the designer is sometimes so oblique that certain pieces would seem to spring directly from our popular culture. Reflecting current linguistic theory, the notion of “authorship” as a personal, formal vocabulary is less important than the dialogue between the graphic object and its audience; no longer are there one-way statements from designers.The layering of content, as opposed to New Wave’s formal layering of collage elements, is the key to this exchange. Objective communication is enhanced by deferred meanings, hidden stories, and alternative interpretations. Sources for much current experimentation can be traced to recent fine art and photography, and to literary and art criticism. 14
Allen Hori, Typography As Discourse, lecture poster, 1989.
Influenced by French poststructuralism, critics and artists deconstruct verbal language as a filter or bias that inescapably manipulates the reader’s response. When this approach is applied to art and photography, form is treated as a visual language to be read as well as seen. Both the texts and the images are to be read in detail, their meanings decoded. Clearly, this intellectualized communication asks a lot of its audience; this is harder work than the formal pleasures of New Wave. […] The focus now is on expression through semantic content, utilizing the intellectual software of visual language as well as the structural hardware and graphic grammar of Modernism. It is an interactive process that—as art always anticipates social evolution—heralds our emerging information economy, in which meanings are as important as materials.
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Denise Scott Brown, The Stardust Resort and Casino, Las Vegas, 1968.
Dan Friednam, Typografische Monatsblätter, no. 1, magazine cover, Switzerland, 1971
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Willi Kunz, pages from 12 T y p o graphical Interpretations,1975. Marshall McLuhan noted that Kunz understood “the resonant interval in structuring designs.�
Katherine McCoy, Richard Kerr, Alice Hecht, Jane Kosstrin, Herbert Thompson, Visible Language: French Currents of the Letter, 12.3, July 1978.
Willi Kunz, Strange Vicissitudes, exhibition poster, USA, 1978, Photographas by Friedrich Cantor.
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Edward Fella, Artemisia, Lithograph. USA, 1987. Richard Eckersley, The Telephone Book by Avital Ronell, book spread, University of Nebraska Press, USA, 1989
April Greiman (design and typography) and Jayme Odgers (art direction, photography, and design), poster for California Institute of the Arts, 1979. The printed surface is redefined as a continuum of time and space.
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Allen Hori, Poster, announcement: “Lines Presents the Reading of Gender, March 1989� (for conference at Detroit Institute of Arts & Part of Lines Series), ca. 1989.
Jeffery Keedy, Calendar for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), December 1988/January 1989.
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PAINT THAT NEVER DRIES Il titolo di questa sezione, che racconta l'impatto della rivoluzione digitale nel graphic design, è una citazione tratta da Hybrid Imagery di April Greiman, “the paint never dries, in the Mac universe" che rende evidente come il digitale apra a nuove concezioni. Il progetto grafico perde ogni possibilità di essere completo, nel mondo digitale, è sempre aperto all’incertezza e a nuove modifiche. Diventa quindi sempre più forte la spinta verso la sperimentazione, l’apertura verso l’errore e il sovvertimento di ogni visione rigida, univoca, codificata. Nasce un nuovo mondo di infinite possibilità.
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Interview with April Greiman Emigre 1988
Emigre: Do you design differently now that you work on a computer? April: This would be very hard to articulate. I think that I design completely differently since I’ve become Mac-fluent. Everything at one point or another goes through the cone of my Mac. We’re able to bring in 35 mm slides, scan them into the Quantel graphic paintbox, bring in a Mac image or a digitized image, bring in live video, then put all these things together. This provides a whole new texture. And for sure, the most profound part of this is the Macintosh influence. Emigre: Will the Macintosh contribute to a change in graphic design mostly in the area of production, or will it influence design aesthetics as well? April: Both! In principle, I would agree that the Mac saves us time and all that. But what I experience is rather than just doing something quickly, we’re looking at more possibilities. Instead of doing more work, we are seeing more options. Now we spend more time visualizing and seeing things, and before the Mac, we spent more time doing things. You wouldn’t look at twelve different sizes of a headline type, because it would involve setting the type and then statting it and you would just say, “Oh come on, I don’t have to try this subtler difference.” But with the Mac, once the information is stored, you can just look at seventy-two thousand variations. And then the accidents happen and you say, “Oh that’s so much better, why don’t I go that way?” And then you are off trying a whole new idea. This pioneering, where you don’t have an aesthetic yet and you don’t have tradition, is both time-consuming and wonderful. To feel lost is so great. There are only a few areas in this very controlled industry that you can feel like that.
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April Greiman, Does It Make Sense?, poster for Design Quarterly, no. 133, 1987. It was composed of digitized images was output by a low-resolution printer.
Emigre: Where will these experimentations lead to? April: There are two ways that we are pushing this technology. One is by imitating and speeding up normal processes of different disciplines, such as production and typesetting. In those cases the technology is a slave and is simulating what we already know. But I think that, if we all keep going the way we are going and other people jump in, all desperate for new textures/ new languages, then the other area in which it’s going to advance is a new design language. Rather than get the language that’s built-in to speak to you in English, you say, well, I know it can speak English, it does that very well, but there’s also a new language. What do digital words really mean and say? There is a natural language in that machine and I am interested in finding out what that is, and where the boundaries are. 23
Amtion / Fear
Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans 1989
Computer technology provides opportunities for more specialization as well as integration. Today, less peripheral knowledge and skills are required to master a particular niche. For instance, a type designer is no longer required to be a creative mind as well as a skilled punch cutter. There is also the possibility of better communication, allowing for increased crossover between disciplines. Designers can control all aspects of production and design, no longer requiring an outside typesetter or color separator. Text, image and layout all exist as manifestations of the same medium and the capability of simultaneously editing text and composing the layout will influence both design and writing styles. It is now possible for one individual to take on all functions required in publishing, including writer, editor, designer, and illustrator, thus bringing together a variety of disciplines and consequently streamlining production. The integration of previously isolated disciplines makes computeraided design a seamless continuum of activity similar to that experienced by children. In fact, computer technology has advanced the state of graphic art by such a quantum leap into the future that it has brought the designer back to the most primitive of graphic ideas and methods. It’s no wonder that our first computer-generated art usually resembles that of naive cave paintings! This return to our primeval ideas allows us to reconsider the basic assumptions made in the creative design process, bringing excitement and creativity to aspects of design that have been forgotten since the days of letterpress. We are once again faced with evaluating the basic rules of design that we formerly took for granted.
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[…] But what separates digital art from its analog counterparts aesthetically? Mostly it is our perception. There is nothing intrinsically “computer-like” about digitally generated images. Low-end devices such as the Macintosh do not yield a stronger inherent style than do the high-end Scitex systems, which are often perceived as functioning invisibly and seamlessly. This merely shows what computer virgins we are. […] Creating a graphic language with today’s tools will mean forgetting the styles of archaic technologies and remembering the very basic of design principles. This is perhaps the most exciting of times for designers. Digital technology is a great big unknown, and after all, a mystery is the most stimulating force in unleashing the imagination.
Rudy VanderLans, cover for Emigre, no. 11, 1989. Three levels of visual information are layered in dimensional space.
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Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design April Greiman, Eric Martin 1990
Since its introduction in 1984, the Macintosh computer has rapidly become an essential tool for designers, not only tor familiar tasks but also for its ability to suggest entirely new solutions. At April Greiman lnc it was immediately recognized for what it is-a new paradigm, a conceptual “magic slate” opening up a new era of opportunity for graphic artists. lt has since become an integral part of every project at many levels: brainstorming, camera-ready art, typesetting, electronic page composition, and on and on in ever-expanding applications. […] The renowned friendly Macintosh environment, with its cozy iconic mimicry of familiar tools like erasers and paintbrushes, makes it supremely easy to use. At the same time, this reassuring familiarity obscures what is provocative about this new tool, much of which contradicts ordinary practice: •
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The “Undo” function allows you to take back something you just did, without a trace or, with another click, restores it. The traditional way of thinking would call this a great way to correct mistakes. In fact, you learn to think of it as a means to attempt them. Mistakes are accidents, and accidents often reveal unexpected possibilities.
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lt’s so easy to edit as you go along that editing becomes part of the original act of creation, instead of being something “done later.” This is wonderful, but takes getting used to. lt makes so many things that were so hard so easy that there’s a renewed emphasis on why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first piace. In other words, how good is your original idea? Nothing is ever “finished” in the conventional sense. The paint never dries in the Mac Universe. You may stop working on a piece any time you wish, but you may also, years later, wake up a document and go right on manipulating it as if you had never stopped. Everything is always alive.[…] Perhaps the most profound implication for the future is that digital technology collapses all media into a single desktop tool speaking one digitai language. lt is really a single metamedium. A sound is generated, edited, and remembered as a unique pattern of the same computer “bits” (on / off electronic impulses) that describe a color, for example. This is why the generic Mac “Cut and Paste” function is so effortless. Previously separate media begin to diffuse, to merge with others. Cut a picture, paste it into a song. A word is a color is a sound is a movement. The new significant media are hybrids. The age of the specialist is replaced by the age of the dedicated generalist. - EM
April Greiman, for the Fortuny Museum, Venice “Pacific Wave” exhibition 1987.
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A Brave New World: Understanding Deconstruction Chuck Byrne, Martha Witte 1990
Today, the technological changes taking place in typography have been brought about by the personal computer. […] The ability of the computer to allow variations at low cost gives the designer the freedom to experiment until the page seems “right,” whereas previously, tried-and-true formulas were necessary in order to predict the outcome more certainly, and avoid undue expense at the typesetter. Today’s seemingly boundless freedom precludes the need for many typographic conventions and even brings into question the need for that most sacrosanct of mid-twentieth-century graphic design devices-the grid. Grids are but one means of organizing visual material, a means to an end, not an end in themselves. […] The grid may be dead, and if so, the computer will have been the culprit. But while the computer provides the technical ability to accomplish a seemingly new look in typographic design, it is certainly not the only inducement to aesthetic innovation. The evolutionary temperament of general culture is capable of producing an atmosphere that stimulates a variety of creative disciplines to respond simultaneously, sometimes similarly, sometimes dissimilarly. And designers often find concepts and images generated by disciplines remote from design seductive and worthy of appropriation. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy writes that two of the most dynamic revolutions in twentieth century typography, Futurism and the Bauhaus, were fueled by the excitement of ideas generated by such seemingly unrelated developments as the automobile, Einstein’s theory of Relativity, 28
and Freud’s theories of the self. According to Moholy-Nagy, the inventive quality in all of these ideas had to do with motion, and so typography, “in it’s age old function of filtering the great artistic movements down to a residue of simple communication, then took upon itself this restlessly evolutionary trend.. ..” Within the last few years, typography and design in general have been influenced, either directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, by the concept of “deconstruction.” Most designers moving in deconstructionist directions vehemently deny any knowledge of deconstruction, much less admit to being influenced by this encroaching concept from critical thought and philosophy. But design does fall under its influence, if for no other reason than because designers live in the culture that gave birth to deconstruction.
P. Scott Makela, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, exhibition announcement, USA, 1990
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April Greiman, “Shaping the Future of Health Care” poster, USA, 1987.
April Greiman in collaboration with Jayme Odgers. WET Magazine cover, 1979.
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The actual screen image of the entire poster “Does it make sense?” of April Greiman, in its “Reduce to Fit” size on screen on MacDraw.
Rudy VanderLans, Zuzana Licko (type design), advertisement page for digital typefaces, from Emigre n.6, 1986
Rick Valicenti, ( Thirst ) Poster for Lyric Opera of Chicago 1988.
Zuzana Licko Oakland, USA, 1985. Zuzana Licko digital typefaces of the late 1980s such us Oakland were originally designed as bitmapped fonts for 72-dpi resolution.
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Template Gothic, typeface designed by Barry Deck in 1989. In 1991, it was released by Emigre. Deck designed Template Gothic while studying at California Institute of the Arts under artist and graphic designer Edward Fella. Glenn A. Suokko and Emigre Graphics, cover for Emigre, no. 10, 1989. Traditional typographic syntax yielded to an experiment in unconventional information sequencing for a special issue about a graphic design exchange between Cranbrook and Dutch designers.
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John Plunkett, Barbara Kuhr (designers and art directors), WIRED magazine, premiere issue, 1993. , Wired magazine, front-of-book spread. The “Electronic Word� section is a graphic and theoretical exploration of the expanding digital world. Jennifer Morla, poster for the National Museum of American Art, 1995. For the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, Morla included different images of land, water, and animals, all watched over by human eyes.
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DECOSTRUCTING TYPOGRAPHY
Questa sezione racconta gli esiti dei temi trattati nelle due sezioni precedenti, i presupposti teorici e gli strumenti tecnici, hanno permesso al graphic design di avere una nuova forma, anche caotica, in cui il designer interpreta i contenuti - aldilĂ di leggibilitĂ e norme precostituite - e cerca di comunicarli, lasciando aperta la comprensione a molteplici letture. Il rifiuto delle regole, e il pensiero decostruttivista hanno portato ad una vera e propria ridefinizione della tipografia e del graphic design.
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The Academy of Deconstructed Design Ellen Lupton Michael McCoy,
Ed Fella, Katherine McCoy 1991
Students and graduates of Cranbrook Academy of Art are producing some of the world’s most challenging graphic design. Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graphic design program has been accused of hermeticism, formalism, theoretical obfuscation and other crimes against the values of both classic Modernism and the slicker professional mainstream. […] The accompanying shift from rationalism to intuition reflected the avant-garde’s understanding of history as a process of continual revision, which compels each generation to reconfigure the achievements of the last. Katherine McCoy explains that while the experiments of the mid-to-late-1970s concentrated on syntax (the formal relation between signs in a system), the work of the 1980s is informed by semantics (the relation between signs and the concepts they present). In summarising the last twenty years at Cranbrook, the McCoys strike a self consciously avant-gardist stance, describing a series of shifts, which began with the move from International Style Modernism to what Katherine McCoy has called ‘Mannerist Modernism’, and led to a fascination with ‘post structuralist’ theory in the 1980s. […] Post-structuralist theory first came to the attention of graphic designers at Cranbrook when the students designed an issue of the scholarly journal Visible Language (Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer 1978). The issue’s subject was post-structuralist literary aesthetics, and the students responded by progressively disintegrating the series of articles by inserting space between the lines and the words of the text. 36
By the end of the book, the text had been fractured into a field of floating fragments. The extreme to which this well publicised project pushed the rules of syntax drew ridicule and rage from designers committed to an ideology of problem-solving. […] For Katherine McCoy, post-structuralism is a channel into personal expression. ‘Syntax is the hardware of graphic design, while semantics is the software. Syntax is grammar, system and structure while semantics is soft, referential meaning. It’s subjective and emotional.’ McCoy sees post-structuralism as a further reason for emphasizing the subjective element of the design process that has always been a crucial component of classic Modernism. Will post-structuralism become the tag for a new design style, replacing postmodernism as the label for the newest incarnation of a perpetual avant-garde? […]
Katherine McCoy, poster The Graduate Program in Design, 1989. A photographic collage of student projects is layered with a listing of binary oppositions and a communications theory diagram.
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Legible?
Gerard Unger 1992 Suddenly legibility is under siege. While printed text, just like God, has been declared dead a few times, legibility, until recently, was still considered sacred. However, during the past few years, many doubts have surfaced. In trade magazines, panel discussions, and in the hallowed halls of graphic design, new interpretations of legibility are being considered. Wim Crouwel (graphic designer and former director of the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) was recently quoted as saying that everything we knew about legibility twenty years ago is now invalid because the notion of legibility has been stretched so much since that time. We are inundated with so many different texts in such varied manifestations that we have become used to everything and can read anything without difficulty. In Eye No. 3 (May 1991), Michele-Anne Dauppe suggests that legibility relied on set rules and could be measured against absolute standards that were obtained through optical research. Those rules no longer apply, she believes. The standards are shifting and legibility is pushed to extremes. Two issues of Emigre magazine (No. 15, 1991 and No. 18, 1991) contribute to this discussion. In Issue No. 15, Jeffery Keedy states that too many people strive to omit ambiguity (which is exactly what good, legible, typography aims at).
Rudy VanderLans, Zuzana Licko, spreads of the essay Legible? from Emigre#26, 1993
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Keedy believes that life is full of ambiguity, which is what makes it interesting. His typefaces emphasize this belief. In that same issue Zuzana Licko proclaims “You read best what you read most.” She hopes that her typefaces will eventually be as legible and easy to read as Times New Roman is today. She also states that letters are not inherently legible but become more legible through repeated usage, and that “legibility is a dynamic process.” In issue No. 18, Phil Baines fully agrees with these statements and goes one step further when he adds that “the Bauhaus mistook legibility for communication.” There seems to be a general consensus that the ultimate legible typography is extremely dull. It overshoots the mark because no one feels invited to read it. [...] Although typographers would like to pride themselves on the logic and precision of their profession, it is in fact not so clearcut. Typography seems exact because much of it has been done in the same way for so long. There are really only a few fundamentals that are set: we read from left to right and from top to bottom. Letter shapes and letter sizes are reasonably limited. But beyond that we rely primarily on emotion.
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The End of Print
David Carson, Lewis Blackwell 1995
[‌] Content is the big issue in design today. The question is what relationship does the visual language have with the verbal one? We think we are so familiar with our own (verbal) language, it comes as a shock to realize it is never received pure, without being coloured by the transmission. We are used to seeing words as the content and then either as text that is typeset for a layout and perhaps illustrated, or perhaps as a script that is performed live or to a camera, again framed and illustrated in various ways. However, we are increasingly aware that these words change in the telling: the emphasis, the context, the distractions. And we are aware that these words cannot exist in communication without some form of telling: thus the shaping and the shaper of that visual/verbal language inevitably goes beyond the word or the writer. Perhaps this changing perception is one explanation of why the designer has been thrust up as some kind of hero of our age over the past decade: suddenly these former crafts operatives are seen as genius arch-manipulators that can make the world a better or worse place. This hype obscures the fact that any designer is just part of the whole process too, only able to add a personal contribution as an artist may or to abnegate this contribution and simply operate as some technician in the vast message machine that goes on operating all around us. But some people do stand out for expressing matters many thousands every day. [‌] 40
David Carson and Chris Cuffaro (photographer), “Morrissey: The Loneliest Monk,” Ray Gun, 1994.
RIGHT, THE PAGES DON’T FIT. Against those columns of text, neatly boxed pictures, steady relationships of headline and body copy and captions, numbered leaves, these freeform inked sheets are more akin to paintings than publication design. The reliable features that dominate our daily diet of print are here questioned played with, broken, or simply ignored.[…] “YOU CANNOT NOT COMMUNICATE” is the designer’s belief as he seeks to explore the full range of expression possible within the page. The work has moved to an integration of word, image and the medium, seeking to forge a new way of reading across sequential pages. From the early Transworld Skateboarding work to the more recent Ray Gun, there is an evolution from one-off visual and verbal playfulness to a position of, at times, graphic abstraction. Increasingly marks and color exist not as elements that build or frame pictures and sentences, but make emotional contact directly as marks and color. They are not metaphors, but often seem to exist beyond rational explanation.
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Graphic Design in the Postmodern Era Mr Keedy 1998
[…] In the postmodern era, the line dividing modern and classical, good and bad, new and old, has, like so many lines in graphic design today, become very blurry, distressed and fractured.In the late 80s, an anti-aesthetic impulse emerged in opposition to the canon of Modernist “good design.” It was a reaction to the narrow, formalist concerns of late Modernism. It staked a larger claim to the culture and expanded the expressive possibilities in design. The new aesthetic was impure, chaotic, irregular and crude. A point that was so successfully made, in terms of style, that pretty much everything was allowed in the professionalized field of graphic design, and from then on typography would include the chaotic and circuitous as options in its lexicon of styles.[…] How we communicate says a lot about who we are. Looking at much of today’s graphic design one would have to conclude that graphic designers are twelve-year-olds with an attention deficit disorder. Designers today are representing our present era as if they were using a kaleidoscope to do it. Or more precisely, a constantly mutating digital collage machine, filled with a bunch of old “sampled” parts from the past, and decorated with special effects. Ultimately what we are left with is a feeling of aggravated and ironic nostalgia. This electronic Deja-vu-doo is getting old, again. Maybe now it is time to dive below all the hype and sound bites of the advertising industries media stream, where graphic designers can have the autonomy to set their own course, even if it means swimming against the current now and then. Postmodernism isn’t a style; it’s an idea about the time we are living in, a time 42
that is full of complexities, contradictions, and possibilities. It is an unwieldy and troublesome paradigm. However, I still think it is preferable to the reassuring limitations of Modernism. Unfortunately most graphic designers are currently not up to the challenge. A few postmodern ideas like deconstruction, multiculturalism, complexity, pastiche, and critical theory could be useful to graphic designers if they could get beyond thinking about their work in terms of formal categories, technology, and media.
Jeffery Keedy, Emigre Type Specimen Series Booklet No. 4 Keedy Sans, USA, 2002
In the postmodern era, as information architects, media directors, design consultants, editors/authors, and design entrepreneurs, we have been chasing after the new and the next to sustain excitement and assert our growing relevance in the world. But inevitably the cutting edge will get dull, and the next wave will be like all the previous waves, and even the new media will become the old media. Then the only thing left will be the graphic design, and what and why we think about it. [‌]
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Katherine McCoy, P. Scott Makela and Mary Lou Kroh, Cranbrook design: The New Discourse, book page, Rizzoli, USA, 1990
David Carson, Beach Culture, August/ September, USA, 1990
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R. Scott Makela, Dead History, typeface for Emigre, USA, 1990
Rudy VanderLans, spreads Emigre #19, Starting From Zero (1991)Typeface design: Barry Deck (Template Gothic) Printed at Lompa Printing, Albany, CA.
Jeffery Keedy, Fast Forward, book spread, California Institute of the Arts, USA, 1993
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Rudy VanderLans, Emigre #34: Rebirth of Design spread 1995
David Carson, Raygun magazine, Bryan Ferry spread, USA, 1994
Edward Fella, “For Edward Fella”, poster, USA, 1995
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Jennifer Morla, Capp Street Project, USA, 1995. Elliott Earls, Dyspasia, typeface family poster, USA, 1995
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POSTMODERNISM IN MOTION La condizione postmoderna, secondo Lyotard, ha visto il declino della narrativa a causa della tecnica e della tecnologia. Nel cinema troviamo questi due aspetti uniti e allo stesso momento in contrapposizione, ed uno dei registi che meglio ha saputo utilizzare questi elementi è Godfrey Reggio, con la trilogia Qatsi. Le tre opere possono essere lette contemporaneamente come celebrazione e critica delle società contemporanee. La trilogia è quindi un'esperienza che lascia totale libertà allo spettatore di trovare i significati che sente propri.
Our Decentered Culture JACK SOLOMON 1998
[…] The postmodern eye and ear have been shaped by the culture of contemporary industrial and postindustrial civilization. I can think of no better example of this than Godfrey Reggio’s 1983 feature film Koyaanisqatsi. At once an illustration of postmodern aesthetic technique and a criticism of the culture that produced it, Koyaanisqatsi is a sign both of where we are going and where we have been. With its disconcertingly narrativeless flow and violent juxtapositions of discontinuous images, the film presents a postmodern parody of traditional film documentaries to show us just how senseless and disharmonious the modern world has become. Paradoxically enough, it’s a postmodern denunciation of the culture of postmodernism. […] To begin with, it has no characters, no dialogue, no words, no subtitles, no narrative, nor anything recognizable as a plot. Without commentary or overview, the cameras simply juxtapose such violently contrasting images from the natural and the industrialized worlds […] Koyaanisqatsi, clearly, is a film with a message. […]The moral of Koyaanisqatsi could just as easily have been expressed in a Sierra Club newsletter, or in a traditional documentary format complete with interviews, statistics, and narrative voice-over. For the semiotician, how ever, it is the distinctively postmodern medium of Koyaanisqatsi that provides the deepest insights into the state of contemporary American culture. Here the medium, not the moral, is the message.[…] What would be squalid or repellent to the naked eye becomes fascinating when transformed by the magic of video technology. Koyaanisqatsi cameras enable us to see our world as we have never seen 50
it before, slowing it down, speeding it up, soaring high into the sky, and swooping down into the meets. Ultimately, the sheer spectacle overwhelms the moral. Social criticism becomes postmodern art. And that ‘s the semiotic secret concealed by the overt moral message of Koyaanisqatsi at the technological resources of the television age have souped up our apprehension of reality. We don’t really care whether things make sense as long as they look interesting. Electrically powered and technology-wise, postmodern consciousness is entertained by what it sees. If the modern world’s a wasteland, it’s a very entertaining wasteland. […] Postmodernism, then represents a certain intellectual adaptation to the conditions of modern life. An era dominated by technology can be expected to produce a technological consciousness. […]
Godfrey Reggio, frame from Koyaanisqatsi, 1982
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The Qatsi Trilogy Peter-Wayne Vivier 2010
As with any trilogy, there are certain unifying themes and threads that tie the three entities together. […] All three films are framed between an opening title sequence in the beginning and a definition of that title at the end. These titles and their definitions represent the only words in the films. The Hopi word ‘qatsi’ means ‘life’ and when compounded it indicates ‘way of life’. In each of the titles ‘qatsi’ is compounded with another word in the Hopi language, resulting in a different meaning in each case. Briefly, Koyaanisqatsi can be interpreted as ‘a way of life that calls for another way of living’, Powaqqatsi means ‘a way of life that feeds on others to advance itself’ and Naqoyqatsi means ‘life as war’. […] common to all three films is their decentering nonnarrative style and it is a cinematic style for which Reggio has become known. It features a pioneering arrangement of image and sound that does not privilege the one over the other. […] The style of the Qatsi films shows that they were sculpted for multivalency. The style promotes a space for viewers to insert their own meanings and interpretations. The viewer must fill in much of the data and while Reggio does have his own specific meaning for these films, he does not insist that everyone should derive his meaning, or take on his point of view. He states: “I look at the structure of each film in a ‘trilectic’ sense. There’s the image, there’s the music and there’s the viewer, each with a point of view casting a particular shadow” […] Reggio explains that Koyaanisqatsi is a film about the Northern hemisphere, which includes the cultures of America, Western Europe and Japan. Since these cultures epitomise the hypo-kinetic industrial world of high technology and modernity, Koyaanisqatsi is a critique on modernity […] While Koyaanisqatsi is about the North and Powaqqatsi is about the Southern hemisphere, showing a fundamentally different world, but also a world in transformation, Naqoyqatsi’s subject is the entire globe. Reggio points out that Naqoyqatsi is an expression of the “globalised moment in which we all are.” Naqoyqatsi is also more abstract than the first two films, less apparent, requiring more work on the part of the viewer. 52
Next page: Godfrey Reggio, frames extracted from Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, 1982-2002
Koyaanisqatsi
Powaqqatsi
Naqoyqatsi
Director: Godfrey Reggio
Godfrey Reggio
Godfrey Reggio
Producer: Godfrey Reggio
Mel Lawrence Godfrey Reggio Lawrence Taub
Steven Soderbergh Joe Beirne Godfrey Reggio Lawrence Taub
Writers: Ron Fricke Michael Hoenig Godfrey Reggio Alton Walpole
Godfrey Reggio Ken Richards
Godfrey Reggio
Philip Glass
Philip Glass
Graham Berry Leonidas Zourdoumis
Russell Lee Fine
Film editing: Ron Fricke Alton Walpole Anne Miller
Iris Cahn Alton Walpole
Jon Kane
Distribution: IMC
The Cannon Group
Miramax Films
1988
2002
99 minutes
89 minutes
United States
United States
Music: Philip Glass Cinematography: Ron Fricke
Year: 1982 Running time: 86 minutes Country: United States
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Text Sources
FROM STYLE TO THEORY 6 Mcluhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York, Bantan Books, 1967, pp. 8–10. 8 Venturi, Robert, et al. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolic of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA, The Mit Press, 1972, pp. 3–6. 10 Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Theories of Representation and Difference). Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 188–199. 12 McCoy, Katherine, and David Frej. “Typography as Discourse.” I.D. Magazine, New York, 1988, pp. 34–35.
PAINT THAT NEVER DRIES 20 Licko, Zuzana, and Rudy VanderLans, “Interview with April Greiman.” Emigre n.11, 1989. Original interview: Los Angeles, 28 October 88. 22 Licko, Zuzana, and Rudy VanderLans. “Ambition/Fear.” Emigre n.11, 1989. 24 Greiman, April, and Martin, Eric. Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design. London, Architecture Design And Technology Press, 1990. pp. 55–57.
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26 Byrne, Chuck, and Martha Witte. “A Brave New World: Understanding Deconstruction.” Print, Vol. 44 Issue 6, 1990. p. 90.
DECOSTRUCTING TYPOGRAPHY 34 Lupton, Ellen, et al. “The Academy of Deconstructed Design.” Eye No. 3 Vol. 1, 1991. 36 Unger, Gerard. “Legible?” Emigre n.23, 1992. Reprinted with a forword by Rudy VanderLans in 2003 in Emigre 65. 38 Carson, David, and Lewis Blackwell. The End of Print: Graphic Design of David Carson. London, Laurence King, 1995. 40 Keedy, Jeffery. Graphic Design in the Postmodern Era. FUSE 98. This essay was based on lectures presented at FUSE 98, San Francisco, May 28, and The AIGA National Student Design Conference, CalArts, June 14, 1998. First published in 1998 in Emigre 47
CINEMA 46 Solomon, Jack, Our Decentered Culture, Berger, Arthur Asa. The Postmodern Presence: Readings on Postmodernism in American Culture and Society. Walnut Creek, Ca, Altamira Press, 1998, pp. 36–40. 50 Vivier, Peter-Wayne. The Postmodern Aspects Reflected in the Qatsi Trilogy. Pretoria, SA, Tshwane University of Technolgy, 2010.
Sitography and Archives
Aiga Design Archives www.designarchives.aiga.org
Emigre Magazine www.emigre.com/Magazine
Art Center Archives www.archives.artcenter.edu
Internet Archive www.archive.org
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Online Collection www.ooperhewitt.org
JSTOR www.jstor.org
David Carson Online Archive www.davidcarsondesign.com Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, Archives Digital Collections www.center.cranbrook.edu/archives Cranbrook Art Museum Online Catalogue www.cranbrookartmuseum.org DesignObserver www. designobserver.com Eye Magazine www.eyemagazine.com
Letterform Archive www.oa.letterformarchive.org MoMA Online Collection https://www.moma.org/collection/ Monoskop https://monoskop.org/Monoskop The Rochester Institute of Technology Digital Archive https://digitalarchive.rit.edu Walker Art Center Design Quartely Digital Collection (A Timeline of Design History) https://walkerart.org
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PAINT THAT NEVER DRIES
Avital, Ronell. The Telephone Book: TechnologySchizophrenia-Electric Speech. Lincoln; London, University Of Nebraska Press, Cop, 1989.
Baroni, Daniele, and Maurizio Vitta. Storia Del Design Grafico. Milano, Longanesi, 2003.
Danto, Arthur C, and Stefano Velotti. La Trasfigurazione Del Banale. Roma; Bari, Laterza, 2011 Hilar Stadler, et al. Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Zurich, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2015. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986. Jean-François Lyotard, and Geoff Bennington. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, Minn. University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Mcluhan, Marshall. The Medium Is the Message. Corte Madera, CA, Gingko Press, 2005. Venturi, Robert, et al. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolic of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA, The Mit Press, 1972. Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester; New York, Manchester University Press, 2013.
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Bierut, Michael, et al. Looking Closer Critical Writings on Graphic Design 3. New York, NY Allworth Press, 2010. Greiman, April, and Martin, Eric. Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design. London, Architecture Design And Technology Press, 1990. Heller, Steven, and American Institute Of Graphic Arts. Graphic Design USA 11: The Annual of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. New York, Watson-Guptill Publications, 1990. Hollis, Richard. Graphic Design : A Concise History. London, Thames & Hudson, 2001. Meggs, Philip B. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Meggs, Alston W. Purvis. New York, Wiley, 2016. Kinross, Robin. Tipografia Moderna: Saggio Di Storia Critica. Viterbo, Nuovi Equilibri, 2005, p. 179.
DECOSTRUCTING TYPOGRAPHY Aynsley, Jeremy. Pioneers of Modern Graphic Design: A Complete History. London, Mitchell Beazley, 2004.
Bierut, Michael, et al. Looking Closer 5. New York, NY, Allworth Press, 2006. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Seattle, WA, Hartley & Marks, 2016. Carson, David, and Lewis Blackwell. The End of Print: The Graphik Design of David Carson. London, Laurence King, 2000. Derrida, Jacques, and Gayatri Chakravorty. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, , C, 1997. Fiell, Charlotte, and Peter Fiell. Graphic Design of the 21st Century. Köln ; London, Taschen, 2003. Lupton, Ellen, and J Abbott Miller. Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design. London, Phaidon, 1999. Kalle Lasn, Design Anarchy. Vancouver, B.C., Adbusters Media Foundation, 2006. Poynor, Rick. No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism. London, Laurence King, 2013.
POSTMODERNISM IN MOTION Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Bay Press, 1998. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, Michigan, Black & Red, 2016.
Dempsey, Michael. “Quatsi Means Life: The Films of Godfrey Reggio.” Film Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3, 1989, pp. 2–12. Degli-Esposti, Cristina. Postmodernism in the Cinema. New York, Berghahn Books, 1998. “Koyaanisqatsi - Life out of Balance.” Www. Koyaanisqatsi.Org, Institute for Regional Education, www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php. “Naqoyqatsi - War Life.” Www.Koyaanisqatsi. Org, Institute for Regional Education, www. koyaanisqatsi.org/films/naqoyqatsi.php. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020. “Powaqqatsi - Sorcerer Life.” www.Koyaanisqatsi.Org, Institute for Regional Education, www.koyaanisqatsi. org/films/powaqqatsi.php. Accessed Apr. 2020. Reggio, Godfrey, et al, Koyaanisqatsi. (DVD) Santa Monica, CA, MGM Home Entertainment, 1983 Reggio, Godfrey, et al, Naqoyqatsi. (DVD) New York, NY, The Criterion Collection, 2012 Reggio, Godfrey, et al, Powaqqatsi. (DVD) Santa Monica, CA, MGM Home Entertainment, 1988 Solomon, Jack, Our Decentered Culture, Berger, Arthur Asa. The Postmodern Presence : Readings on Postmodernism in American Culture and Society. Walnut Creek, Ca, Altamira Press, 1998, pp. 36–40.
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Simone Restifo Pilato Politecnico di Milano - Scuola di Design Design della Comunicazione Quaderno di ricerche - Postmodernismo Storia delle Comunicazioni Visive C2 Proff. Luciana Gunetti / Walter Mattana A.A. 2019/20
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