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imomusI had a meeting last week at Sternberg, who'll publish my Book of Scotlands in 2009 (just in time to inject a little insanity into the lead-up to Scotland's likely 2010 independence referendum). Present were series editor Ingo Niermann, graphic designer Zak Kyes, and Caroline Schneider, the publisher. Zak was showing them designs for jackets and posters for the Solutions series.
What immediately struck me was the wrongness of Zak's designs. They were brutally stark, geometric, angular, functional, utilitarian. Looking at a dark poster of the floating eye pyramid from a dollar bill with an inverted triangle superimposed over it, I asked Ingo playfully "If this were a poster for a band playing tonight in Kreuzberg, what would the music sound like?" Ingo hesitated then said "I suppose it would be a Goth band of some sort. Or some kind of weird early 80s death metal."
Now, this is going to get us into all sorts of self-contradictory circles, but when I say Zak's designs looked wrong, I mean they really looked right. I'm not sure if his work is part of The New Ugly we've talked about here in the context of Mike Meiré, but I do think it's got the same kind of energy -- and I stress that word energy, because it's a dynamic quality, a sort of beauty-on-the-move rather than beauty-in-stasis.
Above all, Zak's work isn't coffeetable. The rough design I made when I pitched the book was a "coffeetable" design. It used a funky fat typeface, simple shapes and pretty colours to communicate the idea. Most good design is coffeetable design -- the other day, for instance, we looked at sleeves for records by The Chap (shown above), designed by Non Format. Immediately easy on the eye (another term for coffeetable might be "Easy Looking", a kind of visual version of Lounge), these sleeves, like my Scotlands jacket, aren't bad design -- they might even be good design -- but they don't go the extra length. They don't distinguish themselves. By failing to take a step ahead, they fall, inevitably, a step behind. By failing to risk wrongness they become, themselves, wrong.
This is where we have to talk about Distinction Strategies. A really good designer doesn't just want to work within established paradigms of accepted good taste. He wants to change those paradigms, making something truly distinctive-looking as well as distinguishing himself professionally. Now, you can't do this without plunging people, at least momentarily, into crisis and confusion. You can't do it without making work that looks, in some way, wrong. So my sense last week that Zak's work looked "wrong" was a sign, paradoxically, that he was doing something right. My rough sleeve instantly looked fey, dated, smooth.
Looking at the shelves at Sternberg, it was possible to see a corner being turned as Zak's work for them started to appear. Stuff which looked good in a coffeetable way suddenly started to be supplemented by stuff that looked noticeably different, odd, intriguing, wrong. I could see a battle of legitimation happening there on the shelves. The new look -- rather brutal and ugly, but full of the energy and strangeness of the new -- was starting to assert its wrongness as a new form of rightness. It was doing this by breaking the rules (which of course, in another paradox, is a rule in itself) and embracing the forbidden.
Distinction strategies cannot work successfully (in other words, can't do anything more than make you look like an amateur, a madman or an eccentric) unless they go hand in hand with legitimation, and Zak has that in spades, which is another reason he's so interesting. He's visual director at London's Architectural Association, one of Britain's few institutions wholly committed to the idea of the avant garde ("avant garde institution" is, of course, yet another paradox). He's also curator of the touring critical design show Forms of Inquiry, an important and influential exhibition dedicated to shifting the graphic design paradigm.
Without critical design, without this restless process of legitimation-distinction (and I'm invoking Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu when I use those words), we'd be stuck in a wilting coffeetable world. It wouldn't really be such a bad world -- we'd have pretty colours and catchy shapes that we'd recognise instantly, the way we recognise the chords and arrangements in an Oasis song, the way it sounds familiar even on the first listen. But, like the creative world of Oasis, it would be a limited and lazy world.
I'm making a new album just now, and I'm making sure it sounds "wrong". In other words, that it has the energy of strangeness rather than the comfort of familiarity. I don't know if it's "progress" to keep ripping up rules and habits, but it's change, and that's good enough for me. Sure, we sometimes come full circle and re-invent Goth. Sure, we're brushing up against the 19th century Romantic idea of the artist as madman and the 20th century Modernist idea of the artist as scientist-innovator. And here we are in the 21st century, with the idea of the graphic designer as distinction-legitimation machine, forever teetering on the brink of the forbidden and the forgotten, forever struggling to recuperate, redeem and recontextualize. It's what makes the game, for me, worth playing.
What immediately struck me was the wrongness of Zak's designs. They were brutally stark, geometric, angular, functional, utilitarian. Looking at a dark poster of the floating eye pyramid from a dollar bill with an inverted triangle superimposed over it, I asked Ingo playfully "If this were a poster for a band playing tonight in Kreuzberg, what would the music sound like?" Ingo hesitated then said "I suppose it would be a Goth band of some sort. Or some kind of weird early 80s death metal."
Now, this is going to get us into all sorts of self-contradictory circles, but when I say Zak's designs looked wrong, I mean they really looked right. I'm not sure if his work is part of The New Ugly we've talked about here in the context of Mike Meiré, but I do think it's got the same kind of energy -- and I stress that word energy, because it's a dynamic quality, a sort of beauty-on-the-move rather than beauty-in-stasis.
Above all, Zak's work isn't coffeetable. The rough design I made when I pitched the book was a "coffeetable" design. It used a funky fat typeface, simple shapes and pretty colours to communicate the idea. Most good design is coffeetable design -- the other day, for instance, we looked at sleeves for records by The Chap (shown above), designed by Non Format. Immediately easy on the eye (another term for coffeetable might be "Easy Looking", a kind of visual version of Lounge), these sleeves, like my Scotlands jacket, aren't bad design -- they might even be good design -- but they don't go the extra length. They don't distinguish themselves. By failing to take a step ahead, they fall, inevitably, a step behind. By failing to risk wrongness they become, themselves, wrong.
This is where we have to talk about Distinction Strategies. A really good designer doesn't just want to work within established paradigms of accepted good taste. He wants to change those paradigms, making something truly distinctive-looking as well as distinguishing himself professionally. Now, you can't do this without plunging people, at least momentarily, into crisis and confusion. You can't do it without making work that looks, in some way, wrong. So my sense last week that Zak's work looked "wrong" was a sign, paradoxically, that he was doing something right. My rough sleeve instantly looked fey, dated, smooth.
Looking at the shelves at Sternberg, it was possible to see a corner being turned as Zak's work for them started to appear. Stuff which looked good in a coffeetable way suddenly started to be supplemented by stuff that looked noticeably different, odd, intriguing, wrong. I could see a battle of legitimation happening there on the shelves. The new look -- rather brutal and ugly, but full of the energy and strangeness of the new -- was starting to assert its wrongness as a new form of rightness. It was doing this by breaking the rules (which of course, in another paradox, is a rule in itself) and embracing the forbidden.
Distinction strategies cannot work successfully (in other words, can't do anything more than make you look like an amateur, a madman or an eccentric) unless they go hand in hand with legitimation, and Zak has that in spades, which is another reason he's so interesting. He's visual director at London's Architectural Association, one of Britain's few institutions wholly committed to the idea of the avant garde ("avant garde institution" is, of course, yet another paradox). He's also curator of the touring critical design show Forms of Inquiry, an important and influential exhibition dedicated to shifting the graphic design paradigm.
Without critical design, without this restless process of legitimation-distinction (and I'm invoking Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu when I use those words), we'd be stuck in a wilting coffeetable world. It wouldn't really be such a bad world -- we'd have pretty colours and catchy shapes that we'd recognise instantly, the way we recognise the chords and arrangements in an Oasis song, the way it sounds familiar even on the first listen. But, like the creative world of Oasis, it would be a limited and lazy world.
I'm making a new album just now, and I'm making sure it sounds "wrong". In other words, that it has the energy of strangeness rather than the comfort of familiarity. I don't know if it's "progress" to keep ripping up rules and habits, but it's change, and that's good enough for me. Sure, we sometimes come full circle and re-invent Goth. Sure, we're brushing up against the 19th century Romantic idea of the artist as madman and the 20th century Modernist idea of the artist as scientist-innovator. And here we are in the 21st century, with the idea of the graphic designer as distinction-legitimation machine, forever teetering on the brink of the forbidden and the forgotten, forever struggling to recuperate, redeem and recontextualize. It's what makes the game, for me, worth playing.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 09:14 am (UTC)crazy new shit image
Date: 2008-05-12 09:54 pm (UTC)Thanks for posting my rug - I'm curious as to where you came across it.
Would you please let people know that it's from www.dangolden.com?
Re: crazy new shit image
Date: 2008-05-12 10:32 pm (UTC)It happened to pop up on my Friends Page a few minutes after I posted this, and it fit the theme.
People, it's from Dan Golden (http://www.dangolden.com)!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 10:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 10:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 10:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 10:41 am (UTC)em relação ao post sobre o "new ugly", eu realmente discordo da forma com que você vê essa relação dialética entre culpa e exuberância. me parece que a culpa no corrente século é só mais uma moda, só mais um produto do tédio burguês. um tédio que se disfarça em preocupação com o meio ambiente, com a sociedade. as pessoas se dizem tão interessadas nos golfinhos e na fome na áfrica mas continuam mais preocupadas com a estética que advém disso do que com a questão em si. não creio que aja uma ação dialética nisso. é tudo parte de uma mesma linha perfeitamente equilibrada e reta. jogar o hirschhorn no meio disso me parece um tanto fora de lugar. (pelo menos é o que eu penso especialmente depois de ler a entrevista com ele, feita pelo benjamin buchloh na october. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0162287054769922?prevSearch=allfield%3A%28buchloh+thomas%29)
quanto ao designer, me parece fazer parte da mesma linha. não consigo conceber uma "vanguarda" que já sabe que a legitimação está por vir, ainda mais assim, de pronto. esse processo que você descreve, nos designes do Zak, me parece semelhante a todo processo da sociedade contemporânea em qualquer esfera criativa. arrisca-se quando já se tem status o suficiente (status aliás que tornam o "jogo" um jogo de ganhar ou ganhar, porque, caso se erre, é uma estação que vende-se menos e na próximo volta-se atrás, retoma-se a busca por uma "nova novidade" que emplaque), predecedentes o suficiente. já existe predecessores desse "novo feio" em diversos lugares, você mesmo citou. isso já é mais uma moda, mais uma onda. é só um novo foco para o kitsch. um kitsch que agora advém dos anos 90 (ou mesmo dos já saturados 80), e não dos 50, 60,70. é mais uma reciclagem modista -- isso sim, que me soa como a cara do século 21. estamos sempre procurando lixo de outros momentos para transformar na nova moda. todo mundo loucamente atrás de terrenos baldios, ferros velhos e caçambas de lixo vasculhando por algo para ser a coisa do momento, a novidade. isso pode ser uma característica interessante do século, mas não me parece vanguarda nem mesmo um movimento dialético. só um pouco mais de tédio burguês. só muda a cara da "mesa de café", mas continua sendo estética da mesa de café (há alguns anos tons pastéis e estampas de ursinho tampouco eram "bem vistas") . é só uma questão de alguns meses para todo mundo se acostumar, começar a fazer igual (e nesse caso, acho que já estão todos acostumados) e alguém achar algo novo no lixo dos séculos, décadas passados e pronto.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 10:50 am (UTC)"In relation to the post on the "new ugly," I really disagree with the way that you see this dialectic relationship between guilt and exuberance. I think that the blame this century is just another fashion, only more a product of bourgeois boredom. a
tedium which cloaks a concern with the environment, with society. the people will say so interested in dolphins and famine in Africa but still more concerned with the aesthetic that comes with it than the question itself. I do not believe that an act action dialectic that. is all part of the same
balanced and perfectly straight line. hirschhorn to play in the middle that I seems somewhat out of place. (at least what I think is especially after reading the interview with him, made by benjamin buchloh in october.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0162287054769922?prevSearch = allfield% 3A% 28buchloh + thomas% 29
as the designer, seems to be part of the line. I can not conceive a "vanguard" which already knows that legitimacy is to come, even more so, the ready. this process that you describe, in designes of Zak, I think similar to the whole process of contemporary society in any sphere creative. when it threatens already has enough status (status fact that
make the "game" a game of win or win, because if erre, is a
station that sells itself and less in next round behind, reproduces itself to search for a "new news" that emplaque), predecedentes enough. already exists predecessors of the "new ugly" in various places, you even mentioned. this has
is a more fashion, more a wave. is only a new focus for the kitsch. a kitsch that now comes 90s (or even the already saturated 80s), not the 50s, 60s.70s. is another recycling modista - that yes, to me sounds like the face of the century 21.
we are always looking for garbage from other moments to transform the new fashion. everyone toiling away furiously behind waste land, irons and children caçambas vasculhando of garbage for something to be a thing of the moment, the novelty. this can be an interesting feature of the century, but I do not think ahead or even a movement dialectic. only a little more than bourgeois boredom. only changes the face the "coffee table," but remains aesthetics of the coffee table (some years ago shades of pastels and prints bear nor were "good views"). is only one issue a few months to get used whole world, start doing equal (and in this case, I think we are all accustomed) and someone find something new in
trash the centuries, decades past and ready."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 11:02 am (UTC)I personally am bourgeois enough to enjoy relative innovation and relative originality in the form of tiny storms in teacups. For me, that's enough to make "the game worth playing". Sure, maybe what we call avant garde simply legitimizes the careers of key players and keeps the game alive rather than preparing for some earth-shatteringly new game. But I'd rather that happened than that we simply stood still.
What I notice, though, is that there's a troll-like quality to innovators. We sort of don't need their new styles, but they harrass us until we're persuaded we need them. The new style makes the old one redundant, perhaps prematurely and provocatively. It's certainly part of the cycles of consumerism, or at least symbolic consumerism.
"Poop poop!" said Toad of Toad Hall, as the new automobile -- the first he'd seen -- ran his canary-coloured caravan into the ditch.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 11:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 11:03 am (UTC)and blame instead of guilty. the rest i think you can figure out what i meant.
JOEMUS
Date: 2008-05-08 12:23 pm (UTC)Alex P.
Re: JOEMUS
Date: 2008-05-08 03:29 pm (UTC)Thistle Do Nicely
Date: 2008-05-08 11:47 am (UTC)Re: Thistle Do Nicely
Date: 2008-05-08 11:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 11:49 am (UTC)re-invent Goth
Date: 2008-05-08 12:07 pm (UTC)haha actually the thought of that made me D:
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 12:14 pm (UTC)I know that you probably avoid anything that even remotely smacks of politics like the plague, and would completely understand why you might send a two word reply to this comment, but I'll send it anyway.
For a long, long time now, many at LiveJournal, including people like myself who helped create it long ago, have been extremely frustrated at the management of the site, their policies, their occasional censorship, their weak response to the Russian government's prosecution of a LJer (http://www.theotherrussia.org/2008/03/13/russian-blogger-heads-to-court-after-fiery-comment/) for leaving a comment suggesting that corrupt cops should be publically burned at the stake, etc.
Well, I've created an LJ community called
Specifically, our goal is to work towards defending and restoring the original promises made to LiveJournal's members (http://web.archive.org/web/20040401175244/http://www.livejournal.com/site/contract.bml) by LiveJournal itself.
We want to stand up for the free speech of ALL of LiveJournal's members, restore LJ's original strong support for community-based Open Source Software development, and restore community participation in the successful operations of LiveJournal... because frankly, the people managing the site are also slowly killing it (http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/48335.html) due to their poor policies.
The site is shrinking in activity about 1% a month currently, and it's within the management's power to do something about this trend, rather than contribute to it by further alienating its members.
In the past week or so, I have attracted about 150 fairly motivated people to help out. We're also working with helping candidates for the upcoming LJ advisory council elections who embrace our views.
We've endorsed
We've also attracted several LJers in the Open Source community, who have their own issues relating to the open source side of LJ that need to be addressed, because LJ has turned its back on working with the open source community for its development over the years, shutting out needed improvements to the software. We want to make the case that they should reverse this policy.
Despite current crap Russian management at LJ's parent company SUP, we have some reasons for hope. Recently, they brought in someone who previously oversaw the internet development at ITV to be their general manager, so there seems to be some recognition that they need a bit of a change. Our job is to basically do a far better job in making the case for it, and to lay out where they're going wrong and what the better alternatives would be.
I'd be curious what your concerns are regarding LiveJournal and its future. I hope you haven't given up on us, as I know you have a lot of friends and fans amongst us.
Sure, it would be a wonderful thing to have you join our community, to have your support for LJ United, its goals, and its candidate... but failing that, I invite you to find out more about us us.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 12:50 pm (UTC)(of course the coffee table itself hasn't been static.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 01:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 03:45 pm (UTC)And Jean Snow's favourite current record (I won't mention what it is) sounds to me like a slightly more chipper version of The Rentals -- super-conservative 90s college rock. So I wouldn't necessarily shiver when Snow falls.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 06:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-09 03:42 am (UTC)Antonin
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 02:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 03:20 pm (UTC)I know it's for the sake of satire, but you're being thoroughly undialectical here. This is not my position at all: I want a dialogue between convention and experiment, trad expressivity and startling originality. Have a gander at this (http://imomus.livejournal.com/366159.html):
"What I mostly want songs to do, now, is move me; get me, emotionally, from A to B. I want songs to be "emotional cars" in that sense. If they can move me, who cares whether they're totally fresh? Who cares whether they lifted some of their best gadgets and lines? Who cares whether they're a rip-off of the man next door's car? He needs to be moved too."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 07:40 pm (UTC)dear momus
Date: 2008-05-08 03:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 04:59 pm (UTC)A lovely idea, stated beautifully.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 07:31 pm (UTC)What's with this obsession about changing paradigms and stuff?
I can imagine a perfectly good designer, a master of his profession, churning out timeless work. Do classisists want to "change paradigms"? Aren't they good?
As a matter of fact, how can one "change paradigms" in a post-modern world, when every paradigm, old and "new", is re-combinable in an eternal ho-hum? The most you can get is a new-ish kind of form.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 08:34 pm (UTC)The avant garde is in direct conflict with legitimation.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-09 12:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-09 07:07 am (UTC)Does that make the Stuckists (http://www.stuckism.com/) avant garde?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-09 10:18 am (UTC)Looking for a good Article spinner script
Date: 2008-05-22 08:39 am (UTC)Steven Walsh