The 1968 Mexico City Olympics Logo Design: A Symbol of Peace or Protest?
The 1968 Mexico City Olympics, designed by Lance Wyman, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, and Eduardo Terrazas, significantly changed the design approach to the symbols by creating a series of graphic forms based on the glyphs from Native American artwork. Instead of using full bodies, the symbols attempted to represent activities using parts that would be instantly recognisable to everyone and shapes that could be used in a variety of contexts. Boxing, in this case, could be represented by a glove instead of a boxer in motion, while a swimmer could be represented by a simple arm stoke instead of an entire swimming body.
But the context in which it was created and its significance as a cultural artefact make it a perfect case study in the accretion of meaning — and warrant a deeper analysis. During that time, anti-government protests were happening frequently enough in the summer of 1968 that the government began to get uneasy that their Olympic Games, scheduled to open in October of that year, were under threat. The Mexico City 1968 sports pictograms provided student protesters with an icon-based language for communication that defied modernist abstraction. This visual language allowed students to express their sentiments of discontent, rage, and determination against the regime.
This appropriation of the identity and acts of graphic détournement exposed the hypocrisy of the Olympic slogan, “Everything is possible with peace.” What was your response to seeing your identity used for this purpose? The shop owners throughout the city were given decals of the dove symbol to put on their storefront windows. To express their sentiments of discontent, rage, and determination against the regime, students would walk by and spray a red spot on the white dove and let the red paint drip down the decal as if it had been pierced by a bullet or a knife.
The student protesters also riffed off of the silhouette system, specifically the postage-stamp designs, switching images of athletes for images of protestors being beaten by the police. And they even replaced the sporting event symbols with images of grenades, gas masks, bayonets, boots, and bombs.
The visual language of the Mexico City 1968 Olympic Games design, paradoxical as this might sound, had a major impact on the future careers of protesters who followed design-related professions. Some of them were students of design who later became influential design professionals and educators. Such was the case of Juan Antonio Madrid, later the director of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In 1985 at the University of Mexico in Mexico City, after a lecture by Lance Wyman, Madrid expressed his gratitude to Wyman for “giving him a language,” and presented him with the book Gráfica del 68, which includes a collection of various graphics produced by the student movement in 1968. This indicates not only a moment of reconciliation but also the blurring of the official and the unofficial, the authoritative and the subversive, in the long trajectories of design history.
