Graphic design?
Sometimes in the still hours there’s a wondering, a wandering from memory to possibility to presence and back, a driven drift idly focussed, attentive to the chance that one passing thing might entice further dreaming, a mesmeric analysis of its obverse, its edges and corners, its unnoticed blemishes, textures, microscopic flaws, unfamiliar flavours, one thing, another, this, this . . . lapping, overlapping, infusing, becoming . . . deja vu is close, as is summoning a memory, or something just on the tip of the tongue; then it finds you as you find it, simultaneously, a subject, an object, a single thing or many all at once — it depends. It depends precisely on the particular thing that is wanting to be found at the moment you find it. That is, if it is true — if it is the thing that no matter what will see fruition even in spite of you.
‘The idea’ is something a bit soft but dangerous: a bit open, it demands and leads, is something inherent in actions, in passion, in sensation, in losing, in desperation, in experience, in understanding, in this now, in ‘this is this’, in succumbing, in not being sure, in the beginning and the ending, in dreams . . . in casting doubt aside . . .
An idea here is sort of, perhaps, almost anything — and the key here is to not pre-determine, to (almost) completely discard preference, presumption and assumption and allow the process of working to determine the outcome.
‘The idea’ is something that is the heart of the reason that so many people do what they do, but it is something that exists just out of reach, fleeting and elusive. It is the reason we sing, write, make films, tell stories, live and breathe and find the common ground between each other; and this reason is entirely and specifically because the ‘idea’ is multi-faceted, fluid — it can be an opinion, a principle, a method, a notion, a motif, a theme, a fancy, a conception, a flowering, a surety, an energy, a fuel, a memory, a medium.
An idea is something (and anything), and therefore not something: an idea is a thought that one has to make manifest and get out into the world unequivocally and unconditionally. It is not something that guarantees gain, reward, success.
. . . if you can do it all yourself in your own special way at the same time as others do their thing themselves in their own special way and you can find the best in those things equally letting go of understanding and expectation while fiercely playing as serious as life as momentary as the moment with every approach method pencil camera code mountain a possibility but really the singularity ahead forcing sight senses mind awake taking and using anymeansnecessary here’s a chord here’s a second here’s a third now form a band stealing thieving finding sharing exchanging
overlaying travelling returning talking seeking the unrecognisable unfamiliar unknown unexpected manifesting phenomena ritual conjuring meditative repetition flow memory is the medium holding the first thought throughout while its all finished already at the beginning in your head as you all weave along never no always yes always total fanatical sharing absolute collaboration no hierarchy no prestige in it together no ego letting go of everything but maintaining the essential particular undiluted essence the unique one time only its all brand new the heart the heart thats it there its done here it is now it is now and then just stop its a thing its made its finished.
It seems to me that graphic design is still discovering what it is (and may well never do so . . . maybe that’s what makes it so vibrant, shifting): the ever-present, ever-shifting “is it art/or graphics” thing is indicative of this, I think. The fact that most graphic design requires a client to bring it life is something that often sets it apart from say, furniture or fashion design — at least in the first instance of a thing being conceptualised, a design being made. I’m not saying that there is no ‘client’ in these endeavours, but that the role, and the name of the person/group taking that role is usually different and closer to a patron (unless there is a consultancy/contract situation) than a client in graphic design. Maybe it is the case that this — the ubiquity of the client in the impetus to make a thing — makes graphics different from all other artistic endeavours, but then the line shifts and blurs, and one needs to get into specific examples in order to shed some light on the generalities; but it is this that I think graphic design lacks: there are few graphic design writers/thinkers (like film critics) who will take on the task of dissecting individual pieces of graphic design work in order to understand them. Mostly, there is this (misguided, I think) quest for a grand unified theory that will solve once and for all these cliches, most of which are created in a vacuum, with little reference to actual work. The art of graphic design is in the work, inside it, and ultimately all of these hierarchies, titles, terms and ideas and thoughts (cliches?) are interdependent, not dualistic.
‘Graphic design’ exists in-between all forms of communication and expression, of art and design. The reason I say this is that as a graphic designer (for examples) one is far more likely to find oneself needing to understand the processes of film making than a product designer might be (the examples could go on, but hopefully this makes some sense). There is a sense of always existing in-between, which makes for a bit of an identity crisis sometimes.
Before I started college, I always (naively, maybe) believed that as a graphic designer, in order to be able to make work for clients, you needed to be making your own work: writing, typography, photography, painting, sound . . . otherwise, where would the fuel for the work one would make for a client come from?
I didn’t want to go to college in the first place, but after a couple of years of paste-up/pmt camera operation and hand-rendering and type specification i realised that it might be a good idea, mainly because the kind of design work that first opened my heart (Vaughan Oliver/Peter Saville/Saul Bass etc etc) seemed to me to be like looking into another world, something powerful yet dream-like, possessed of a vitality I didn’t think I’d find unless i took some time to really explore, to learn.
I went to college at the tail-end of the eighties and the early nineties, which I think was an amazing time-a crossover period where I’d be setting type on an early Mac, pasting up artwork to then blow up on pmt cameras and dyeline machines. There was a great letterpress room which was practically unused, which became my home for at least three years of college. The main things, though, were my peers and the tutors.
When I teach now, it seems that the computer is something that keeps students at home, alone, stuck to a screen. I remember a much more communal occupation, being inspired by each other, exchanging, trying ideas, conversation, helping, learning, always learning. Of course, it wasn’t always rosy, but it was always vibrant and eye-opening, amazingly catholic in the range of approaches to work that we were introduced to and pursued: everything had (still has) a value in its context — whether idea or decoration, style or concept, hierarchies of approach in design are useless at best, destructive at worst.
Phil Baines was my tutor for all but my foundation course and first year at Central St. Martins, and he was brilliant (still is). For him, work was a calling, and this rubbed off onto most of us, in different ways. The main things I suppose he inspired in me (whilst at college) were that there was no such thing as the ‘real world’ (a knee-jerk phrase that I think is used as a sledgehammer to beat down ambition, innovation, joy, the sheer playfulness of design, of things), which I have since come to realise was absolutely true; also, that the notion that any piece of graphic design could be a ‘solution’, or even that clients had ‘problems’, was something that seemed to come out of the design phraseology of the eighties and suddenly became some kind of restrictive received truth. This was something we questioned all the time (still do)-and I suppose that is the crux of it. I learnt to question, to never trust in these terms that are used around design, to try to always approach this project in front of me as if it were the first and last thing I’d ever do, but most of all I learnt to learn and keep on learning.
In about 1995 i was given a book, a smallish hardback book, by a Swedish friend. It was called ‘isoleringslager’ and I couldn’t read it — I only looked at the photographs and the arrangement of text on the page. it was written and designed by someone called H.C. Ericson. Poetry and image, shapes, objects, forms fading . . . at the time, although it felt like something, it also felt not quite, but almost absent. A shadow. It sat on the shelf.
A couple of years later I came across another book by the same person, a larger format with more complex binding and materials, a book as object that again I couldn’t read, but this time studied the marks and lines, ellipses and spirals, and the huge bold brightly coloured text that ran throughout the book, the almost children’s book that wasn’t.
H.C. Ericson was a graphic designer, a Swede. Since the sixties he worked for numerous commercial clients and won awards, had exhibitions and taught at colleges in Sweden and elsewhere. He said “I think I could sit for a hundred years with a capital ‘L’ and five colours and still find new ways of using them.” From one point of view he embodied a generation of designers, similar around the world; the sixties commercial artist/graphic designer, committed to the business of design as function, as rubric and pun, as that certain kind of idea that is most definitely recognised as an idea, rather than as concept, as allusion.
But then … then there are his books, and one in particular: Corpus. Published in 2004 by Carlsson Bokforlag, Stockholm, Sweden. Aa 14” x 7”, 200- or so-page ‘life in letterforms’.
A book like this is always hard to describe: it is, as it is, simple — arrangements of poetry and lyric fragments on the portrait-format rectangle, all set in futura book 10/16, accompanied by coloured line drawings of 3d letterforms that somehow resemble childrens’ toys, building blocks sliced and placed one upon the other, repeating and diminshing, larger still larger, the sparse text singing of emptiness, of hearing, of wounds, of memory and love, of the stranger as oneself, of “the search for a particle so small that it doesn’t exist so cannot be seen nor weighed nor counted on.”
This book is a simple, beautiful thing that carries a whole life inside it — a life in and out of graphic design, a book in and of graphic design. H. C. Ericson passed away in December 2012.
Serendipity. Which is very very important-being open to chance throughout the process . . . or even more so, being open to change, possibility, starting again, changing direction . . . a tendency is to set up a very fixed sequence of events (thinking, writing, making imagery, shooting, editing, animating, post . . . which is actually no different really to any other approach to moving image, except possibly some of the tools used . . . numerical systems, grids, game playing . . . conceptual approaches) but within that to interfere, subvert, conceptualise, freeform, play and so on. a state of mind, a philosophical pathway; letting external influences (the weather, how one feels, interruption, distraction, focus, time of day and on and on . . .) affect the work, the process.
“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which the heart first opened.” Albert Camus
Tension that causes events to galvanise the physical and emotional reaction that can resonate far beyond the effects of the ‘fixed’ object. It is pure process at every point, from conception to memory, experience itself, and experience in itself is perhaps the most powerful thing in life. It is life.
The ‘loop’ is a prevalent theme (concept, tool, objective) in most communications; a concept is executed and distributed, an audience experiences it and responds, the originator in turn responds with another concept, and so on . . . even the most isolated of people function in this way (think about gossip, or-even more isolated- neuroses . . . the closed, internal loop) in a philosophical/psychological sense-cycles, circles, call and response, inspiration, influence . . . call it what you will, the loop is a construct that manifests everywhere.
So, with these conceptual terms, how do we explore the aesthetic of the ‘loop’? it could be looked at from 2 viewpoints — macro and micro.
In the macro sense, and if we can allow the notion of ‘aesthetics’ to include the shape of both a body of work and a long term working process, there is one sense in which the loop looms large. This is in the process of a life’s work, the Samuel Beckett thing — “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — which can allude to the sheer joy/enormity of how one makes something, then makes another thing, then another, then another, and so on. This is the looping effort of a working life, and in the broad sense of aesthetics here it comes into play as a long term influence not only on the quality and qualities of work, but also on the ability and desire to do it in the first place. The moment when one realises that, rather than a kind of melange of seemingly chaotic, energising and joyful experiences (when things start, when things explode and everything is possible and possibly wonderful), the actuality is of doing it (whatever ‘it’ is) again and again and again and again (until death!) and constantly trying to maintain a sense of openness and awareness and allowing oneself to be inspired and all of that as if it were the very first thing . . . that realisation can be a bit diminishing. Here, there is a loop of rhythm and pattern in its largest sense-as one grows older, what rhythms, which patterns shift and change? Which become entrenched? Which are discovered to be irrelevant, immature, or damaging? Over time, these are the kinds of things that have an effect on the kinds of things one does, and the reasons for doing them. This is somewhat woolly I think, but has a bearing nonetheless-I’m trying to articulate something that is a feeling to me, like a weather system . . . how that affects your day and can add up beyond the immediate into something potentially overwhelming . . . the psychological effects of it, the questioning of it (and by ‘it’ I mean what one does, and for me that means work), how its received, where it takes you . . . everything. Work has determined my life — I can see that now — and that’s the way my life has gone. This means that my worldview is from that perspective — this is where I find myself. I work therefore I am. This is my loop. This is my life.
In the micro sense — the aesthetic of the loop is central to both process and result. From a process perspective, the form of the loop is a seductive and inspiring thing. Through overlay and repetition new forms can be found unlooked for, as if grown, animate. Shapes, textures, patterns and meaning emerge out of grids, systems, marks and so on, and by continually analysing and re-analysing, thinking and re-thinking, the looping process can lead into unknown territory, which is good. It may sound intense or complex, but often its not. It can be as mundane and as practical as laying out a large amount of type on a grid, or as effortless as daydreaming, but the looping activity is what triggers the mind and eye to look for something intrinsically ‘right’. This notion of ‘right’ (aesthetically) is entwined with the macro viewpoint I describe above — it is do with how one is feeling, what one did before, what could be happening next, and so on. All loops within loops, constantly feeding back. Eno’s concept of looping overlays creating ‘moire’ patterns is interesting here, because its in the moiré that you find what you’re looking for (and sometimes literally it’s a moiré!), somewhere in the tangle and trompe l’oeil there can be a glint of something that implies a whole picture, a suggestion, a moment . . .
Both consciously and unconsciously, influence is like circles on circles, spirals. From nearby and constant, to far away and rare, theres this interplay that shifts and changes over time but never disappears. Cause and effect, ebb and flow, give and take . . . all contributing to what one does with ones life. in this sense, everything becomes ‘both/and’; by this I mean that there are moments of quiet and exploration that might result in a thing that seems fresh, unrecognised . . . and there are times of play, collaborating, taking 2 unconnected things and putting them together to make something other which can feel unproductive . . . and vice versa . . . and so on, back and forth. Total influence, as much and as often as possible. Not only unavoidable, but you wouldn’t want to avoid it — encouraged, sought out, nurtured, enabled to flourish. Contact — collaboration, that close understanding, sharing between people — ultimately, it is the work, the life.
“A way shall be found before a why shall be found.”
Brian Eno
I was brought up in Dover as a crab, and I have, over the last thirty years, done everything from driving to weeping. All ponced up and over 50, weighty, overbearing but happy in my ignorance, I’ve convinced himself of my own importance, and others have too! Right now I’m hoping for the best but can’t see a way through, and my dreams are of meteors smashing into the planet and great flashing lights in the sky. I manage to save my loved ones in an act of self-sacrifice, fortunately, and I die in the knowledge that my bloodline will continue. It is, of course, only a dream.
Current projects include forks, dust, an anti-matter attractor tractor, turkey lurkey (in fette fraktur on an oat) and moving at the speed of an electron.
