Modern Poetry, Relative Poetry, & Shimmers of Hope
Experimental Jetset, 2011
The second chapter of Guy Debord’s autobiography Panygeric (1989)—devoted to his life on the streets of Paris—contains a paragraph that still resonates deeply with us. Right after he quotes the playwright Aristophanes (“I too grew up in the streets!”), Debord states,
After all. it was modern poetry, for the last hundred years, that has led us here. We were a handful who thought it necessary to carry out its program in reality, and certainly to do nothing else.
There is an analogy to be made with our own situation—as an underground subculture of tiny design groups and independent artists trying to carry out the program of Modern graphic design in reality, in the streets of Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, Paris, and New York City. A handful of people dedicated to a Modernist project that started more than a hundred years ago.
We too grew up in the streets, but streets filled with signs and logos created by designers like Wim Crouwel, Ben Bos, and Benno Wissing. Airport signage, telephone books, school atlases, stamps—the visual landscape of our childhood—were designed in large part by Total Design and similar studios. This particular language, so-called late-Modernism, shaped us profoundly, leaving an irreversible imprint on our way of thinking, working, and living.
Moreover, as children we intuitively grasped the poetic dimension that was hidden in this language, a poetic dimension that, to this day, is denied not only by the critics of late-Modernism, but also by the late-Modernists themselves. Crouwel, for example, would never regard his work as poetry. We, who grew up amidst his work, know better.
And so we find ourselves, years later, as graphic designers, working with the cultural material that was handed down to us, rightfully interpreting it in our own way. Critics may regard Modernism as a failed project, but they cannot stop us from speaking the poetic mother tongue in which we were brought up. Modernism might be dismissed as a dead language, but it lives on as a forbidden dialect, spoken in various networks and undercurrents, surviving in fanzines, weblogs, esoteric publishing projects, short-lived exhibitions, and in the day-to-day practice of a small, marginalized subculture of graphic designers.
Unlike people such as Crouwel and Massimo Vignelli in the late sixties and early seventies, we do not head multinational, million-dollar design firms. Instead, we run small assignments. Late-Modernist designers were able to convince themselves, and their clients, that their solutions were the most functional, the most objective, the most neutral. We cannot do that anymore—not to ourselves and not to our clients. It is impossible to call ourselves functionalists, as nowadays functionality is fully defined by “what the public wants”—an empty concept light-years removed from the dialectical stubbornness of Modernism.
Additionally, today’s corporations, and even cultural institutions, have been completely taken over by marketing, branding, and communications departments; the last thing they are interested in is the aesthetic or conceptual integrity of the printed object. To them a poster is first of all a parking space for sponsor logos. No wonder that large corporations and institutes would rather work with huge, marketing-driven advertising agencies than with small, ideology-driven design studios.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us barely surviving, living on almost nothing, moving from one small assignment to the next. Owning nothing but our tools and creativity, we are operating in the margins of popular culture, working for a tiny circle of loyal clients. To sustain ourselves we hustle: borrowing money, living on our credit cards, applying for grants. We beg, steal, and borrow through life, all for one reason: to carry out the poetic program of Modern graphic design.
Debord concludes the second chapter of Panegyric with the following:
Somewhere between Rue du Four and Rue de Buci, where our youth was so completely lost, as a few glasses were drunk, one could feel certain that we would never do anything better.
These words sum up our own feelings. Despite the periods of misery, the relative poverty, the great uncertainty, we know these are probably the best days of our lives. We are producing lots of work, going places, meeting people, writing, teaching, thinking, living. We wouldn’t trade it for anything else.
Looking at the list of design studios and individual designers featured in Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography, we are immediately reminded of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and his words about hope written in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The principle of hope) (1938–47). Bloch insisted that, although the utopian dream might have been shattered, fragments of utopia can still be found in art and popular culture—in architecture, dance, fashion, music, film, traveling, jokes, fairy tales. Each of these fragments contains a utopian potential, a shimmer of hope. Each piece of the puzzle still represents the puzzle as a whole.
The Modernist project might have exploded a while ago, but the fragments remain. The designers and studios featured in this book, each in their own way, contain a utopian potential, a shimmer of hope—an international underground of graphic designers carrying out the poetic program of Modernism, against all odds. We are proud to be a small part of this.
