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Graphic design's leading critic asks: What can the profession do besides help sell useless stuff?
By Peter Hall
March 2002
In 1995 critic Rick Poynor began making preparations to write a profile
of graphic designer David Carson, who at the time was riding a wave of international
renown on the back of his work at Raygun magazine and a subsequent
spate of lucrative ad campaigns. But to the surprise of Poynor and our little
community of editors and writers who care about these things, Carson bluntly
and repeatedly refused to cooperate, arguing that Poynor would "put
his own spin" on the article regardless of the designer's input. Undeterred,
Poynor wrote an incisive critique of Carson's work and celebrity based on
interviews with his clients and peers.
The article illustrated to a design press still largely bent on delivering
gushing, sycophantic profiles that lucid analysis can be written without
the assistance of the designer. It was also a simple demonstration of the
widely held literary idea that the opinion of the artist is not necessary
to develop a valid reading of the work. (To much of the design world, this
notion is still seen as sacrilegious.) Poynor, founder and former editor
of Eye, has remained doggedly committed to elevating design criticism
to the level we expect from art, book, and film criticism, initiating an
upcoming series of monographs in which the writer--not the designer--has
final say. As Steven Heller put it, "Poynor has been key in transforming
graphic-design writing from trade reportage to cultural criticism."
Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World, the second anthology of
Poynor's writings, turns the critical volume up a notch, to something approaching
polemic. Unlike the first anthology or the best-selling Typography Now--books
that made Poynor a hot name in London publishing houses--Obey the Giant
has barely a celebratory word to say about graphic design. The essays in
this volume, drawn from various publications to which Poynor has contributed
(including Metropolis), support the bleak view that designers have
become slaves to commerce and accomplices in the construction of an increasingly
imperialistic visual culture.
By his own account, Poynor has withdrawn from a position "towards the
centre" of the profession (as a design-magazine editor) to his current
vantage point outside the industry. But this book also introduces a pulpit-pounding
Poynor with a message for the masses. His interviews with media bigwigs
like Ken Dice, the Sony marketing chief responsible for its magalog Sony
Style, and Tyler Brûlé, the founder of Wallpaper
magazine, become less the focus of attention than fuel for Poynor's fire.
This is not a book where you will meet designers explaining their brilliant
ideas, or even a place where characters leap out from the page, as in Poynor's
previous writings. Brûlé, Min Hogg of World of Interiors,
Martin Parr, and Anthon Beeke all make appearances, but they fade beneath
the harsh gaze of the critic, which Poynor describes in the introduction
as one of "repelled fascination."
The giant in the book's title refers to the "mighty forces, many of
them corporate" that, according to Poynor, "are making decisions
over which we, as individuals, seem to have little if any control."
The phrase "obey the giant," meant to be read ambiguously, is
based on the long-standing art project by Shepard Fairey, who successfully
turned the stencilized face of a long-forgotten wrestler into an international
brand without a product, a signifier of rebellious subculture without a
cause.
This presents an appropriate starting point for Poynor's attack. Graphic
design--be it a Raygun-style British army ad or a
Modernist-style pictogram repurposed for a CD cover--is adept at turning
subculture into mass culture at the drop of a fat check. Where once it
seemed possible to believe that the radical typography emerging from
design schools in the late 1980s and early '90s could represent a new
discourse that exposed the duplicitous operations of design, today its
co-optation by corporate brands goes unchallenged. The commodification
of our dissent, to use Thomas Frank's phrase, took off in earnest with
the appearance of Template Gothic--Barry Deck's "fucked-up world
fucked-up type"--in the Time Warner annual report.
Aligning himself politically with Frank and Naomi Klein, whose book No
Logo is the best-known example of what he considers a "flourishing
new genre of scorching anti-corporate tract," Poynor takes on the image
world with the help of an impressive diversity of sources. In "The
Boredom of Plenty," an essay on photographer Parr, he pulls in the
psychotherapist Adam Phillips on the idea of greed as a response to boredom.
The cultural desert of contemporary "cool" is analyzed with reference
to its more meaningful origin in the 1950s, Miles Davis's Birth of the
Cool. In "Too Much Stuff," Poynor cites the 1993 book Design
for Society as an opportunity to chastise the design press for ignoring
an incisive critique of consumerist design.
Given his wide reading and interests, it is perhaps surprising that Poynor
has focused on graphic design for so long. At the AIGA "Looking Closer"
conference last year, he explained that he was first drawn to the profession
because it offered "the excitement of getting there first" compared
with architecture and art criticism, where all that remains is to "add
footnotes." Yet there is a sense in Obey the Giant that he has
picked an easy target with design, and grown rather tired of slapping it.
By the end of the first section of the book, which is titled "Advertisements
for Utopia," we are left with a picture of a profession of trend-gathering
image makers who unwittingly or cynically keep the consumerist machinery
oiled with fresh imagery. This strikes me as a rather narrow definition
of the job, too dependent on the image of the superstar designer and his
world of hip magazines and ads. One subject missing from Poynor's analysis
is genuinely useful design, less dazzling perhaps but more enriching as
an object of study. The emerging area of information design, for example,
raises the critical issue of how it can assist in the delivery of information
in a data-swamped world. Or the fields of typographic, interface, and navigational-system
design, where the work has a useful effect on everyday life--from catching
trains to seeking emergency assistance.
In the book's second section, "The Resistance Meme," Poynor shifts
his focus from criticism of the mainstream to the question of what the concerned
active designer-artist can do other than help sell useless stuff. The focal
point is the controversial "First Things First" manifesto published
in design magazines in 2000. A call to action for designers to drop their
myopic focus on formal and aesthetic concerns and face up to the cultural
implications of their work, the manifesto stirred up a heated debate, which
Poynor recounts in two essays reprinted from Adbusters magazine.
A motley army of role models arrives in the following chapters, in the form
of "culture jammers" and graphic agitators like Tibor Kalman,
Adbusters, billboard redesigners and graffiti guerrillas such as
Saatchi & Someone, Ben Rubin, and AVI. Again, the picture seems incomplete.
The "First Things First" manifesto does dutifully list "social
marketing campaigns," "charitable causes," and "other
information design projects"; but it is the first genre listed, "cultural
interventions" (rather than, say, better voting ballots), that seems
to provide the preferred way forward. The promised land is less of a well-designed
civilized world (think Sweden) than one of loud resistance and scrambled
media signals (think Williamsburg, Brooklyn).
As a critic, of course, Poynor is not obliged to sketch out any personal
utopia. Instead he nails, again and again, the nagging emptiness we feel
living in a society where we define ourselves according to the brands we
desire. This craving won't magically go away in Poynor's ideal world. The
best that Obey the Giant can offer, it seems, is a poetic vision
of dystopia. Ultimately its critical position is classic Marxism, positing
a dialectic as a means of progression. And it is when Poynor sees this vision
of a world of battling contraries that he begins waxing lyrical--as lyrical
as his most mysterious source, the suspiciously anagrammatic-sounding anarchist
Hakim Bey. "Think of them now: a hundred--a thousand--unknown dissidents
of the electronic age," Poynor writes, "poetic terrorists seeding
the system with the uncontainable flowers of a new democracy and freedom."
There is no doubt that without Poynor design criticism would be a poorer
and duller place. But graphic design increasingly looks like a profession
doomed never to meet his expectations.
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