Editors’ Letter
Dear reader,
For the next 150-odd pages, we’ve allowed ourselves to indulge in a sweeping interpretation of a topic that has fascinated people— not just designers—for centuries. The term “utopia” was first coined in the 1500s by Sir Thomas More, who borrowed from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place.” And yet, when you consider utopia in relation to design, the immediate association is one rooted in a place in time, namely, in the histories of the Bauhaus and Constructivism, both of which have recently celebrated their 100th anniversaries. In this issue, we look back at these movements before we look forward, and ask the question, “Do those singular, idealistic visions of modern design still have a place in our world?” This is not a yes-or-no question, and issue #06 of Eye on Design magazine explores the theme “utopias” with nuanced stories and design that takes you to some surprising places. We start in London, where modernist architecture failed to meet the needs of its 8
inhabitants—which, in this case, happened to be zoo animals. Moving to the other side of the city more than half a century later, we visit publishing group OOMK, run by three women who are employing a ground-up approach to collective space with their open-access print studio. In New York, we follow student protesters and their decade-long fight to save one of the last U.S. colleges to offer free tuition, and in Ahmedabad we look back at the school that produced some of India’s most ubiquitous branding. We also sought out individuals who are quite literally building the world in which they’d like to live. In a small Canadian town, the cartoonist Seth lives in a house that looks like it sprung straight from one of his graphic novels set in the 1940s—every knickknack, appliance, piece of furniture, and even his signature wardrobe. Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, creative Rendani Nemakhavhani looks toward the future with her alter-ego The Honey, portraying the type of South
Eye on Design #06: Utopias
welcome to our own private utopia.
African woman she’d like to see more of. With so many different versions and visions of utopia from around the world, it’s clear that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. We also discover new perspectives on well-known histories, such as Stefanie Leinhos’s illustrated guide to utopias constructed by women, or Mindy Seu’s index of cyberfeminist projects from around the world. And in an essay on digital nomadism (the working millennial’s spin on the idea of “no place”), artists Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira remind us that working across borders is a privilege not afforded everyone. While utopias may be idealistic, they can’t be separated from their more dystopian counterparts. It’s this approach that makes the theme particularly relevant to Eye on Design magazine right now, as we transition from our tri-annual schedule to an expansive new publishing model (more on that very soon). It’s also why we decided to bring on Na Kim as this issue’s guest designer, whose work
draws from the bold modern designs of the early 20th century, while also remaining fluid and dynamic—perfectly suited to our notion of plurality. Love, The Editors
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Table of Contents
The thing about other worlds is you have to be ready for anything.
Page 8 Editors’ Letter Page 12 Designer’s Letter
Page 14 Modernism Isn’t for Everyone —Least of All, Penguins A cautionary tale about universal solutions, zoos, and ideas about redesigning poverty By Madeleine Morley
Page 22 It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times The publishing collective One of My Kind on zines as a medium for community building in the age of clickbait, statement culture, and rapid gentrification By Anoushka Khandwala Page 35 Rendani Nemakhavhani for PR$DNT The South African art director thrives on creating imaginary worlds that Johannesburg creatives can turn into reality By Neo Maditla 10
Page 40 Upgrade or Die Max Guther’s illustrations accompany a dystopian satire on the future of work By Perrin Drumm
Page 46 Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave The half-satirical, half-earnest, much-memeified aesthetic lived the way it (almost) died By Emily Gosling
Page 55 What Would You Do with 168 Hours? Five designers rework their workweeks to better meet their needs With Forest Young, Kate Johnston, Liana Jegers, Clay Hickson, Jihee Li, Antonia Terhedebrügge, and Mado Klümper Page 65 Free At What Cost? The fight to keep renowned art school Cooper Union tuition-free has earned its students an honorary degree in activism By Meg Miller
Eye on Design #06: Utopias
Page 76 Shift Work A failed Soviet experiment offers a warning to today’s burnout generation By Liz Stinson
Page 113 The Web We Want Imagine an internet that’s owned and run by you and everyone else who uses it. This is the promise of the distributed web. By Gary Zhexi Zhang
Page 85 Herland An illustrated guide to utopias constructed by women By Stefanie Leinhos
Page 116 Fake It ‘Til You Keep Faking It The cartoonist known as Seth has built a real life around his fictional work—set in the 1940s. We pay him a visit. By Zachary Petit
Page 91 What Does it Mean to be a Responsible Designer Today? We asked three design teams what responsibility means to them and their work in the context of today’s global climate emergency. With Seetal Solanki, Robin Howie, Marie Otsuka, and Lauren Traugott-Campbell.
Page 96 Quiet World Order Shy Radicals by Hamja Ahsan proposes equality for introverts and proves that activism needn’t be noisy
Page 105 An Identity of Its Own In the 1960s, the National Institute of Design trained India’s first design educators and produced some of the country’s most ubiquitous branding By Ritupriya Basu
Page 132 The Myth of the Digital Nomad For a generation that can supposedly work from anywhere, freedom of movement isn’t granted to all By Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira
Page 135 EOD™ Presents WeWingIt Satirical sponsored content By Tala Safié
Page 141 The Cyberfeminism Index By Mindy Seu
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Text from “Fake It Till You Keep Faking It.” Image by W.
WE’RE WORKING ON CREATING OUR OWN DREAM WORLD THAT WE WANT TO LIVE INSIDE
Eye on Design #06: Utopias
Free At What Cost?
The fight to keep renowned art school Cooper Union tuition-free has earned its students an honorary degree in activism By Meg Miller
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Free At What Cost?
Student occupiers in President Bharucha’s office, May 2013. Image originallypublished in Vice.
On May 9, 2013, the brownstone building that houses Cooper Union in New York City glowed red. To people crossing the busy East Village streets below, it must have looked like an omen—a blood red bat signal shining below the clock tower of the school’s historic academic building. Behind arched windows, the office of the college’s then-president, Jamshed Bharucha, was packed with around 40 students, sitting cross-legged on the floor and hunched over laptops in office chairs, all bathed in the glow of the red bulbs they’d just installed.
The day before, they had stormed the office to deliver Bharucha a vote of no confidence, and finding no one there, they decided to stay. Now they were projecting their message outward into the heart of the city: Cooper Union, one of the last remaining colleges in the country to not charge tuition, should remain free. It was the end of a disorienting school year, and the occupation of the president’s office was the culmination of a flurry of tense board meetings, behind-the-scenes revenue reports, and simmering unrest in the months prior. During the 2012 spring semester, the college announced that it would start charging tuition for graduate students in the fall of 2014 due to a spate of financial trouble and mounting debt. It would be the first time in well over a century that the art, architecture, and engineering institution, renowned for its progressive founding philosophy, would not be free for its students. The school’s founder, Peter Cooper, a self-taught industrialist and inventor who amassed a fortune from iron milling, insurance, and real estate1, endowed the school in 1859 for the purpose 66
of educating working-class New Yorkers at no cost to them 2 . Cooper was an abolitionist and an ardent supporter of education for all, regardless of gender or race, and that sense of social responsibility, coupled with high qualifications for acceptance due to the full-tuition scholarship3, has earned Cooper a unique reverence in the art and design world. Thomas Edison is a Cooper alum, as are sculptor Eva Hesse and architect Daniel Libeskind. In graphic design alone, the school can claim Herb Lubalin, Milton Glaser, Seymore Chwast, Lou Dorfsman, Stephen Doyle, Carin Goldberg, Ellen Lupton, Abbott Miller, and Emily Oberman as graduates. By December of 2012, the school was tense with anticipation. In response to the announcement of graduate tuition and an inclination that a broader tuition plan was to come, a small group of student activists staged the first of their lock-ins—this one in the Peter Cooper suite, housed in the clock tower. It lasted a week, and in the following months students, faculty, and alumni worked together with the administration to prevent what was at the time still considered a last resort measure. But by April 23, 2013, when the chairman of the board called an early morning meeting in the Foundation Building’s Great Hall, it was already apparent that tuition was on the horizon. As students filed into the lecture hall, they were greeted by the full board of trustees sitting onstage. When they announced that Cooper would definitively end its free-tuition policy for undergraduates, effective the following fall, many of the students who had participated for months in working groups, task forces, open discussions, and public protests felt that they had been given the runaround. In the weeks after the meeting at the Great Hall, a group of students drafted a document to indicate they no longer supported President Bharucha, and more than 400 of their peers signed it in person4. Wanting to deliver it by hand, they forced themselves through narrow hallways and double doors, past the feeble protests of the office administrators, only to arrive at an empty office. It
Eye on Design #06: Utopias
Courtesy of Free Cooper Union.
seemed that Bharucha had heard they were coming. So they set up camp in his office, and they stayed there for 65 days. May turned to June, and the office evolved from a red-tinted symbol of resistance to a well-organized activist headquarters. Provisions were brought in, the police were sent away. Students took calls, talked to press, liaised with the board and faculty, and ran a sophisticated social media strategy, consisting mainly of Vine videos. Occupying students who graduated at the end of the spring semester left the office to cross the stage, then went right back up. “We were connecting with all these people from other countries, wheeling and dealing with the board, having these very intense conversations, and then I would get a phone call that was like, ‘Your student loans are due,’” says Victoria Sobel, an artist and activist who took out loans for her living expenses while a student at Cooper. “There was this real collapsing of time.” After a while, visiting lecturers were brought in so people could keep up with their studies. Art students found ways to transform the cramped office into a makeshift studio space, creating small sculptures out of the dwindling office supplies, making videos, and even staging an art show within the Foundation Building. One night, they held a performative reading of the 41-page board of trustees meeting transcript leaked by the Village Voice, variously taking on the speaking roles of Bharucha and members of the board.
The occupation ended with an agreement that called for the formation of a working group made up of trustees, faculty, students, and alumni tasked with preparing an alternate plan to charging tuition. The working group’s
report— which involved suggestions for restructuring academic programs, cutting costs on administrative overhead, and renting out areas in academic buildings—was ultimately declined by the board in favor of their original tuition plan, prompting a new group of students, faculty, and alumni to sue the school. Last year, as required by the lawsuit settlement, Cooper Union announced that it would reinstate free tuition by 2028. In the five years between the protests and the new plan, the energy amassed and the impact made by the occupation led those former students to explore the crisis at Cooper, and the premise of a free institution in deeper, more probing, and more sustained ways. For many of them, the spirit of protest made its way into their art or design for years following the sit-in. By making social activism and community engagement an extension of their art and work, these students experienced a feeling of agency—of not only envisioning an ideal, but leading an effort that forced an actual change of course. It made them rethink the artist’s role in society, and what they themselves were capable of. Cooper Union remained divided over the board’s decision, which seemed to serve as a sort of microcosm, or at least a sign, of the larger crisis of college funding and student debt playing out on a national scale. If paying tuition at Cooper sounded the death knell for the idea of fully-funded education in the U.S., its students were not going to let it go down easy. “There’s a lot of power in ‘free education’—a simple message that can be understood and that people can rally around,” says Casey Gollan, an artist, designer, and a mem 1. He also designed America’s first steam locomotive and, weirdly, patented the powdered gelatin we now know as Jell-O. 2. In the very early days of the school’s history, some students who could afford to pay did so. 3. Cooper Union is a private college with about 1,000 students per year. 4. Over 2,000 signed an online petition. 67
Free At What Cost?
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ber, with Sobel, of the student protest group Free Cooper Union. “It’s a lot more diffuse once you start to expand those ideas and parse out the different meanings: What is free? What is education?, but that for me is the thing that I’m still interested in doing—pushing those goalposts further and further in exploring what a place like Cooper could be.” After the occupation, both Sobel and Gollan finished school, but neither of them ever really left Cooper. Along with a small group of other students, they continued to run Free Cooper Union, leading reading groups and making it their mission to provide incoming and prospective students with information about recent events that would provide an alternative to the official statements from the school. The group published Disorientation, an extensive website and PDF reader comprised
FREE COOPER UNION A Disorientation Reader
of an introduction to the tuition struggle, a toolkit for joining the cause, and a series of essays that “dig into why Cooper matters, what’s going wrong with education everywhere, and how we might fix it.” Done in the cutand-paste, Risograph-printed style of a punk zine—with snippets of slogans like “Get Your
Thieving Hands Off Our Community Assets” and “A Streetcar Named Tuition”—the reader
is an impressively comprehensive overview of Cooper Union’s story, albeit one with a definite agenda. At the bottom of the website, an illustration of the clock from the Cooper clock tower about to strike midnight flashes red with the scroll-over; beneath it a mantra reads “Stay Free or Die Tryin’.” Sobel and Gollan continued to organize around and teach about free education, and in 2015 they launched Nonstop Cooper, an initiative they describe as a “community residency”
that was housed in the former St. Mark’s bookstore—a beloved neighborhood institution that was forced to move from its space near Cooper Square when the college raised its rent. The timing was right: the lawsuit brought against the school by the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU) had reached a settlement that required the school to return to a tuition-free policy and forced the departure of President Bharucha. “We kind of took advantage of the fact that there was a transition in leadership to point out that there was a very acute lack of community space, and a lot of unresourced time and effort that had gone into what had just happened,” says Sobel. Nonstop Cooper was loosely an outgrowth of the Free Cooper Union group, focused more on public engagement, art, and discourse (including outreach to other institutions, like Ohio’s Antioch College5, which had recently experienced similar tumult) 5. Founded in 1850 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and led by educational reformer Horace Mann, Antioch is a progressive liberal arts college with shared governance between faculty and students and a mandatory co-op education program. It shut down in 2008, but was reopened as a separate institution thanks to a movement organized by students, faculty, and alumni called Nonstop Antioch (where Nonstop Cooper got its name). 69
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than the traditional protest tactics the group had employed before the settlement. After proposing the residency to the school administration, they were given free rein of the vacant space for one month. That month—the end of August to the end of September 2015—coincided with the beginning of the school year, and Nonstop opened its doors to the new students filtering into the dorms and classrooms around them. They held a community discussion with the Cooper board of trustees, held workshops, and brought in guest lecturers, creating a “school outside of the school,” as Sobel puts it. The group quickly made the space their own, covering the broad storefront windows with a mission statement, printed in undulating type. A collective mural painting workshop produced enormous Dalí-esque melting clocks on the white interior walls. A donation of pillows from a “pillow fight flash mob” during student orientation provided lounge seating for a movie night. A theme began to emerge. “We were joking at the time that it was like waking up from a fever dream,” says Sobel. Nonstop Cooper held karaoke nights, potlucks, clothing exchanges, and small concerts. Members logged diaristic accounts of their days to their gradient-infused Tumblr6, which took the form of a calendar. They also took seriously their self-imposed mandate to provide resources and useful context for students about the environment at Cooper7. Their discussions aimed to frame the crisis as a cultural problem rather than strictly a financial one, and question the meaning of “free.” On September 2, 2015, the fourth day of the Nonstop residency, the lawsuit against the
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school ended in a settlement agreement brokered by New York State attorney general. An independent monitor was appointed to oversee the school’s finances, and yet another committee was created, this time by the trustees, tasked with creating a plan to return the school to tuition-free status. This was anticipated by the organizers of the Nonstop residency, most of whom had been advocating to keep Cooper free since 2012, and many of whom had been involved in the lawsuit. But over the course of those three years, Sobel and Gollan started to think more broadly about the prospect of free education in general, and not only within the confines of getting Cooper back to financial solvency. Their correspondence with Antioch College had brought about questions of governance, and whether an institution needs to be run by a board of trustees and an administration, or if it could be self-governed by students and faculty. “Especially in the past couple of years, it’s become less and less clear to me whether we are still even trying to influence the course
Eye on Design #06: Utopias
of events at Cooper, or whether we are just working with Cooper as subject and material,” says Gollan. “To think through some of the questions that this has brought up has became more important than arm wrestling with the institution.” After the Nonstop residency ended, Gollan and Sobel continued their research into free education as fellows at the New School’s Vera List Center, where they looked into the corporatization of art institutions and universities. They’ve lectured at Yale, exhibited as part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and in March of this year, Sobel gave a talk at CalArts amid students protesting a tuition hike. After the lawsuit, the media moved on, and the new administration at Cooper began to focus on developing a plan to return to free tuition under New York state’s regulatory oversight. But Sobel and Gollan wanted to continue to expand the conversation they helped start, even if it was less visible and perhaps less accessible than their early protest efforts at Cooper. After school, Sobel and Gollan’s decision to continue that work came at a very real price, as it did for many of their fellow organizers. Gollan went into debt working freelance and Sobel worked restaurant jobs to make ends meet, with most of their effort, and a ton of their time, going into organizing. Like many college students, Sobel and Gollan couldn’t have predicted the way their careers panned out as undergraduate students studying art and design. But in a less typical turn of events, their college’s story became inextricable from their own. And it still is. Gollan says he now views the dichotomy between art and activism as a false one, especially for students at Cooper. “It’s always been unclear and a little bit contentious around what constitutes artistic practice or activism, and I’ve come to understand it as something that’s inescapable for everyone that’s here,” Gollan says. “Whether you see yourself as contributing to the struggle or not, everyone is part of that system—everyone is implicated.”
In 2018, Cooper Union’s current president, Laura Sparks, released the plan required by the settlement to reinstate free tuition by 2028. Students currently enrolled at Cooper pay $22,275 a year (the full tuition, according to Cooper’s admissions site, is $44,550, but each student receives a “half tuition scholarship”). The price squares with average tuition costs across the country. For the 2018-19 school year, the average tuition price was $35,830 per year for private four-year colleges, and $10,230 at public four-year schools. In 2014, the year the first undergraduate class at Cooper paid tuition, student loan debt in the U.S. had exceeded $1 trillion. Today, it’s risen past the $1.5 trillion mark. Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, college affordability and debt forgiveness are major issues for democratic primary candidates, with at least two—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—proposing policies that would make all public undergraduate education free8. It hasn’t always been this expensive to attend college in the U.S. As Warren has mentioned on the campaign trail, her tuition at the 6. The Tumblr entry for September 1 reads: “One of the first truly bustling days at Nonstop Cooper! Freshmen have moved into the dorms above the space and across the street and are starting their orientation programming, Nonstop offers a space away from the official posturing for students to have access to an alternate telling of the state of Cooper from the perspective of other students, alumni, faculty, and staff.” 7. Another entry on the Nonstop Tumblr page, for example, explains the concept of a cy pres filing, which allows the court to amend the terms of a charitable trust (in this case, Cooper Union). Part of the lawsuit hinged on the CSCU’s argument that the decision to charge tuition by the school’s trustees violated its tax exemption status, which is based on the school providing tuition-free education. They argue that the trustees should have petitioned the court for a cy pres relief to change the terms of the trust before making the decision to impose tuition. 8. Warren has also proposed a debt forgiveness program that would cover about $1 trillion of the current student loan debt, meaning students who have already received their education would have their loans forgiven. 71
Free At What Cost?
Victoria Sobel (second from left) and Casey Gollan (third from left) along with other members of Nonstop Cooper.
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Courtesy of Wiki Commons.
University of Houston was just $50 a semester. In the mid-1970s, the average total tuition, room, and board for all four-year institutions ran at about $2,500 a year. In New York City, Cooper was joined by the City University of New York (CUNY) colleges in providing free tuition until 1976, when a city fiscal crisis led the public university to start charging9. By the early aughts, Cooper’s free tuition program was considered an anomaly—a unique holdover from a time before rising college prices and default rates. While the college was struggling internally to pay off its deficits, to the outside world it looked like it had figured something out that the rest of the U.S. educational system could learn from. On June 30, 2009, in the middle of a recession that had introduced state-funding cuts for education and contributed to rising tuitions, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on Cooper Union with the headline “One College Sidesteps the Crisis.” That turned out to be false, but even in Cooper Union’s best years, its model for free tuition was never broadly replicable across other American universities. Much of Peter Cooper’s fortune was tied up in real estate holdings in what is today some very valuable property in New York City; a sizable portion of the school’s annual revenue, for example, comes from leasing the land beneath the Chrysler Building10. Even with its endowment, though, the school still struggled to keep its finances in the black. That came to a head after it added a $166 million building at 41 Cooper Square11 to serve as the new academic building.
The building’s $10 million annual mortgage, coupled with the investment of $35 million in borrowed funds in the stock market just before
it crashed, is what pushed Cooper into the financial crisis that precipitated the tuition plan. The scope of this financial mismanagement was revealed in the investigation by the state’s attorney general, which resulted in the imposition of a reform plan in 2015. The plan required that the school spend three years developing a strategy to reclaim its tuition-free status, and assigned it an independent financial monitor to ensure that the administration was held accountable for its financial decisions. The details of this type of house cleaning—and the logistics that go into financial planning, cutting costs, and ensuring total transparency—might have been lost on the student protesters at the time of the occupation, but that had quickly changed. “The first questions we were confronted with at the start of this were, ‘What is the root of these problems, and who is responsible? Who can affect the course of events here?’” says Gollan. “A lot of what came out of that was research on the power structures of the institution, finding out for the first time, things like: We have a board of trustees. Okay, who’s on it? And why do colleges and nonprofits have boards?” The unsexy truth is that idealism must be backed by planning and logistics and a real understanding of what’s at play. The path back to its former tuition model had to be informed by these things if Cooper was ever to return to a sustainable model for free education. In April of 2016, Gollan and Sobel got an offer to co-teach a class within Cooper’s art department the next fall term. The class, a studio elective called Projects, almost felt like 9. New York State’s recently announced Excelsior Scholarship seeks to cover tuition for New York residents, but requires certain qualifications. 10. In 2018, revenue from leasing this building alone was $32.5 million. 11. Designed by Thomas Mayne, the new academic building sits across the street from the old Foundation Building, its glittering perforated metal facade and glass lobby provide a stark contrast to the latter’s old New York brownstone. 73
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report on the school’s progress. According to Cooper’s plan, once the school hits a CFI of 4.0 (it is currently at a – 2.01), it will be solvent enough to reinstate free tuition14. Rendering of the Composite Financial Index outside of 41 Cooper Square. Artwork by Casey Gollan.
a curriculum-sanctioned extension of Nonstop Cooper. Gollan and Sobel wanted to give their students the space to see how their work and their ideas were being affected by their academic environment and questions around free education. They saw a similar psychological toll taking hold on their students, who were some of the first to pay to go to Cooper, as they themselves had experienced in their last year at school, when so much of their physical and mental energy was going toward the events unfolding around them. The class existed for six semesters, during which Sobel and Gollan led students to create work that addressed the school’s current state and recent history. In that time, they also watched Cooper change significantly, and they became increasingly disillusioned with what they saw. Since the early, energetic years of protests, their ideas and discussions had become underpinned by extensive research and a real understanding of the historical record of free education. They found precedent in efforts like Wages for Students12, a movement for student compensation that arose from the unrest in the 1970s when CUNY started charging tuition. As students and recent alumni, their activism required them to become familiar with the power structures inherent in nonprofit institutions. And in many ways, the resulting years of working groups, committees, and task forces gave way to an environment of shared governance, in which students played a key role. This instilled in them the belief that artists are more capable of self-governance than they might think. What they were witnessing now, back inside the formal institution, was a much more bureaucratic approach. It had to be: the attorney general had handed Cooper a reform plan with benchmarks for the school to achieve. The state assigned the school a financial monitor to keep Cooper on track to become free again in 2028 and make sure its board remains truthful and transparent about its financial situation. A proprietary “Composite Financial Index”13 which is generated algorithmically based on the school’s financial statements, is used to
For Gollan and Sobel, these methods are too data-driven and normalizing. They believe the plan puts too much emphasis on financial ratios, measurable indicators, and quantifiable improvement—tactics that might work for other institutions, but not for Cooper. They see it as taking standards and approaches from tuition-paying colleges and applying them to a school that had always been the exception to the norm, simply because of the visionary ideas of its progressive founder. Over the last couple of years, Gollan and Sobel watched as the fight back to free lost sight of the movement’s original vision. Now, they’re asking themselves a new question: Free at what cost? “We’re now perceived as ‘against the fight for free,’” says Sobel. And that’s not altogether wrong. Much of the current faculty, many of whom took part in the same fight as the two former students over the past decade, do believe in the school’s new plan. But for Sobel and Gollan, even the language around getting “back to free” is anachronistic and nostalgic, and they’re questioning whether a past version of the school is something it should even want to return to. Time has a way of warping things. In the rhetoric surrounding the course of events at Cooper over the past decade, the story of the school’s founding is often evoked. But less often mentioned is that Cooper wasn’t officially
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a college at first; it was a civic institution with a library and a Great Hall that was open to the public for forum and debates. The first classes allowed people to wander in; they didn’t take attendance. For Gollan, it’s that history that has the most interesting potential for guiding the school into the future. “It’s not inevitable that Cooper is a college by the standard of what colleges are in 2019, and in fact, that might be a failing model, and not an interesting one to carry forward,” says Gollan. “Policy interventions around debt forgiveness and free education are important, but I think they stop short of being visionary and actually leveraging the expertise of artists.”
Through their work and teaching, Gollan and Sobel have been trying to envision what a new kind of institution could be. What they’re proposing now is not a cut-and-dry solution to the rising costs of college—it’s a seismic, idealistic shift in the way we think about education. The last ten years have given them the language with which to talk about their ideas and convictions, and the agency with which to act on them—even when they’re viewed as unpopular or impractical. That’s not something you typically learn in art school.
12. The name riffs on the famous feminist campaign Wages for Housework founded by Silvia Federici in 1972. 13. Per Cooper Union’s website, “The Composite Financial Index (CFI) is a widely-used metric within higher education to measure long-term financial health and determine the financial impact of strategic decisions.” 14. This has been criticized as a flawed metric as to hit the 4.0 score, the school will need to have a minimum of $152 million in reserve. Former trustee Mike Borkowsky, among others, has argued that the high surplus is not necessary. All images couretsy of Nonstop Cooper, unless otherwise stated. 75
Shift Work
translating it into sheer monetary value for that matter. It’s not an overstatement to say many people are experiencing their own form of nepreryvka today, and they’re just beginning to explore how to deprogram their brains from the expectations of constant connectivity. The fallout from this will look different—productivity might rise, computers rarely fail, and there will always be a new, hungrier person to take a jaded worker’s place—but in the end, the same underlying dissatisfaction will remain.
Continuous work week calendar for 1930. Image courtesy of the exhibition Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum of Art.
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by Stefanie Leinhos
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ďŹ g. a Space Composition 4, Katarzyna Kobro, 1929
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Fake It Til You Keep Faking It
Fake It Til You Keep Faking It The cartoonist known as Seth has built a real life around his fictional work—set in the 1940s. We pay him a visit. By Zachary Petit Photography by Zachary Petit
Upon this spot, the morning after the terrible Allan-Bridge Train Disaster of 1912, this 1,000-pound stone was mysteriously discovered. According to local legend, it had not been there the day before. Though no remains were ever officially recovered, locals swore that this same spot was also where the lifeless body of the train’s brakeman had been seen in the fiery aftermath of the crash. In the decades following the tragedy, residents of The Ward have reported strange mists hovering over the rock, ghostly sightings on the rails, and mournful whispers from the surrounding trees. Also rumored is a voice that calls out, ‘Stop the train,’ each year on the anniversary of the crash. This plaque unveiled September 16, 1962. — dedication to The Lost Brakeman This is the marker bolted to a boulder in the front yard of a cartoonist named Seth—yes, just Seth—no last name. Many objects have stories. Why does a boulder need a story? Entrance to the yard is barred by a towering wrought-iron archway, custom-made to read: omnis temporalis. All things are temporary. This archway leads to his turn-of-the-century house, which isn’t so much a 116
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house as it is a private island of Seth’s own making. There isn’t a stone that hasn’t been turned and given a character name and personal history. Three illuminated signs hang on the front porch. There’s one for the Dominion Historical Society, a nod to the fictitious city of Dominion that often appears in Seth’s work. He recreated this town in miniature form in his basement, complete with more than 100 buildings. Another porch sign declares his status as a G.N.B. Double C Member—a reference to The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, a graphic novel he created to document the fictional club. And finally, there’s a sign that announces your arrival at this house, dubbed Inkwell’s End, in Guelph, Ontario, where Seth has been playing meticulous homemaker for the past decade. I step up to the porch. PLEASE HELP YOURSELF to a souvenir free pen as a gift from Inkwell’s End, a plaque—another one—by the front door reads, offering a tray of dimes to insert into an antique Vendorama Ball Point Pen machine immediately below it. I plunk one in and a pen emerges. Compliments of Inkwell’s End is printed on its side in Seth’s trademark script. From the moment you enter his realm, he’s directing you—moving you through his story, his world, panel by panel. I turn the mechanical twist doorbell. And there he is, springing to life from the 1940s—hair neatly cropped and slicked back, tiny circular tortoise-shell glasses framing his eyes, the white lab coat he works in protecting a stunning green suit in a classic cut. He opens the door to a world that is all things past, present, and future, exquisitely crafted and customized. I look at my watch to see if I’m on time, and in a twist of absurdist fate, the battery is no more. It has stopped. Guelph (pronounced “Gwelf”) is a town of roughly 132,000 inhabitants, about an hour and fifteen minutes’ drive from Toronto. The modern settlement was founded by novelist John Galt, and there’s a certain sense of remove to the place. One drives past rural stretches and forests on long highways leading to other places only to emerge into a landscape of chain motels, a mall with an H&M and Old Navy, a KFC/Taco Bell, and a Walmart. In other words: the type of place I imagine to be diametrically opposed to everything Seth stands for, given his work. Inspired by The New Yorker cover artists of the mid-century, Seth made a name for himself with semi-autobiographical literary comics rendered in that classic style, most notably his Palookaville series, including It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken and the acclaimed Clyde 119
6. Gate: Seth designed wrought-iron gates that flank the house, proclaiming “Inkwell’s End” and “Omnis Temporalis.” The archway represents electrical towers, a theme throughout the home.
1. Seth With Book: Inside The Wimbledon Green Memorial Library, Seth inspects a book he had bound: his father’s scrapbook from his days as a scout leader. “This is a thing that’s filled with personal sentiment for me,” Seth says. 2. Lighter: This lighter in Seth’s dining room is one of his most dear possessions. “It’s the only object to survive from my mother’s home in London when it was bombed in the Blitz. I’ve been drawing pictures of that since I was a little kid.” 3. Toys: The stairwell leading to Seth’s basement studio is filled with toys from his childhood, some of which he has repurchased and “reclaimed.” “I like all this stuff—but is any of it really of any great importance? That’s a good question,” he says. “I love these four objects, but I just love them as four objects. It’s not personal.” 4. Plaque: Fact blends seamlessly with fiction at Inkwell’s End. This plaque affixed to a boulder in Seth’s front yard details the legend of The Lost Brakeman. 5. House and Gates: “Inkwell’s End”—Seth’s house next to a historic train bridge in Guelph, Ontario. The lighted signs on the front porch have been known to draw in the occasional passer-by. As one inquired: What is this place? Is it a museum? Seth describes it this way: “It’s a bubble to escape reality. It is kind of a cocoon that I’m building around myself… It’s an art project.”
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Fans. Perhaps this encroaching modern world is what he’s guarding against in his own home in Guelph’s historic neighborhood, The Ward. Many curtains are drawn, and custom stained glass windows with the words Inkwell’s End and Nothing Lasts set in beautiful hues, with an illustration of the house pull you deeper into this world as they seal off the one outside. I sit down in the living room as Seth heads to the kitchen for coffee. He returns and politely requests the chair I have selected. “I’m particular, as you can imagine,” he says. Even his speech recalls the cadence of yesteryear. Seth readily acknowledges the incongruous status of his person in Guelph. There’s a bookstore in the nearby mall, where a clerk directed me to the graphic novel section that includes Clyde Fans—but they didn’t know the author lives roughly 10 minutes away. “I do get stopped and talked to, but I think I might be better known as a kind of local eccentric—the guy in the hat, sort of thing,” he says. Sometimes people read about him in the newspaper and realize, “‘Oh, you’re an artist. I just thought you were a weirdo.’ “A famous cartoonist is kind of an oxymoron. I was just over in Spain, where I was getting the most tremendous treatment, like a real celebrity, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that at home nobody knows who I am.” Reading Seth’s work is like having a conversation with him. His voice resonates throughout his oeuvre, reverberating from page to person and back again—his dry humor, his charm, his unflinching, ruminative perspective on the darker realities of life and what it means to live in this world are omnipresent. “Unlike some artists, I’ve made a very strong effort to personally connect myself to the work—it’s a persona as well. Very carefully, I’ve always been putting myself forward into the world as an image. It’s not something that happened by accident.” Seth was born in Clinton, Ontario, across Lake Huron from Michigan, and, as a kid, he moved with his family from one small town to another. When he was still a baby, his older siblings had already grown up and left home, and his parents fought. Seth’s mother suffered from what he believes to have been postpartum depression after his birth, and was institutionalized. When she returned home, his parents’ routine of drinking and fighting gave way to a deep alienation between them. The family lived largely in isolation. And yet Seth says his parents took an intense interest in everything he did, and he was enormously interested 120
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in them, too. “I was the ideal child in that I wanted to hear their stories over and over.” His earliest narrative drawings (which he calls “proto-comics”) spawned from images he copied from a school reader. By fifth grade, he was drawing ripoffs of Peanuts strips. His father was a shop teacher with access to Ditto machines (early photocopiers, essentially), and he’d print Seth’s comics up so his son could distribute them at school. In a small town, Seth says, you are more or less labeled. He was The Kid Who Could Draw. “I had enough encouragement that somewhere very early on I thought I would be an artist. Although I don’t think I had any idea of what that meant.” In seventh grade, he was assigned to do a project on an artist of his choice, so he consulted the encyclopedia and came across Picasso. He was shocked to discover he was still alive. “I thought he was from the Middle Ages or something. I had no conception of what art was about. It was probably around that time that I started to read comic books, and that’s the thing that really changed my life.” As he drew his own squad of superheroes, he kept his love of comics secret. In fact, he was ashamed of it. Comics were something young kids read, and by this point he was getting picked on enough already. No need to invite any more trouble. “I think that led me to have quite an inner life… I spent a lot of time in busy work: making models, drawing—the kind of stuff all kids did in the ’70s, but I did it very intensely. I think that is the thing that has shaped my whole life, that kind of small world of busy work.” After high school, Seth headed to art school in Toronto, “a typical small town hoser.” He remembers himself in a lumber jacket with a Rush button pinned to it, accented by a small teenage mustache. But the artist born Gregory Gallant had come to Toronto with a plan. He was going to leave Gregory behind and consciously build an entirely new identity. In a small town, he notes, everyone knows you, and you can’t change because, well, everyone knows you. Suddenly, he says, he had the chance to transform into “The more sophisticated person I think I always wanted to be.” He test-drove a series of personalities. He grew a beard. He got involved with an occult group. Then he discovered the punk scene, and things clicked. For one, he says, it felt “super modern.” He’s quick to address the obvious. “That doesn’t sound like something that would appeal to someone like me, but it did then, because it was probably the only time in my life 121
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when I felt in touch with exactly what was going on at that moment. It felt like this was the future. Suddenly you had people with green hair, white hair, wearing shiny silver jumpsuits, and it was all very interesting and modern and kind of ironic... I just really liked the image of it, and it was about creating an individual look for yourself.” He created a new name to go along with this new self: Seth. He regards identity as a central core with layers that form around it, bit by bit. Every book you read, every movie you see, every song you hear and react to—you add those cultural discoveries to yourself as you consume them. But the older he got, the less connected he felt to punk music. At the same time, he had a friend who wore those great-looking suits from the ’40s, and it wasn’t long before he was trying them on for himself. “I think back on it as being kind of bald ambition. The older me would look at the younger me and kind of chuckle because it’s so transparent… Probably my interest in jazz wasn’t because I loved jazz—it was because it went with the suit. Much of it is really calculated, but the interesting thing about calculation is it leads you places. I value affectation. Affectation can be very irritating when you see it in other people, but affectation is a way to earnestly embrace things, and as in art, you learn by copying. There’s nothing wrong with copying. I’m still copying. Anything I get excited about, I think to myself, ‘I’d like to do my version of it.’” His exploration of the aesthetics of the ’20s through the mid-century extended beyond the page to his wardrobe. Eventually, he says, it all became his normal. He doesn’t even think about it anymore—he just wears a suit every day because that’s what he does. When it comes to his work, he just draws the way he draws. “The real connection was my parents. Later I realized that so much of my interest in the postwar world is directly related to them because they were so much older than me; they talked about this stuff all the time and our house was full of these things. This house now is full of things that remind me of that stuff.” The house. Seth sees it as an art project that’s not only directly connected to his work, but to the city of Guelph and the province that runs in his blood. For one, electrical towers are a running theme, depicted in the ironwork outside, in one of the stained glass windows, in the sculptures on the first floor, even in the shower tiles; Seth regards them as a central image of Ontario. Elsewhere, the nearby train bridge and the 122
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two towers of Guelph’s basilica can be spotted in cabinetry masterfully crafted by Seth’s father-in-law. His comic work lives and breathes here, too. For fans, it’s like walking into a museum of the creator’s mind. In the parlor alone there’s a light-up ceramic sculpture of Kao-Kuk, an Inuit astronaut from his book The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. There’s a trio of nesting cookie jar sculptures of the titular character from George Sprott (1894–1975), a series he originally created for The New York Times Magazine; he removes the top of one to reveal a younger Sprott within, which is then removed to reveal Sprott as a child. There are dolls of all the characters from Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World. And then there are the unrelated collections amassed and displayed—a “Canadiana” cabinet featuring his many Mountie and Jasper the Bear figurines. “Primarily I think of myself as a collector, and that informs everything I do, everything I write,” he says. “Much of how I organize the house is about where you put things, because I don’t want it to be overwhelming.” True to intention, the house comes across as expertly presented—lit and staged by someone with decades of experience nestling characters and scenes into tight panels. The tour (conducted with an air of formality, though I’m an audience of one) moves to the dining room, where Seth’s gargantuan shorthaired cat Albert looks on warily from his perch. There’s a bookcase containing a collection of rare New Yorker cartoon volumes. Another shelf houses issues of Model Car Science magazine and old Detroit television schedules that Seth has amassed and bound. He once lived across the border from Detroit, in Windsor. So he likes to open them up and discover what he was watching on a particular day and ponder, for instance, why he was taking in episodes of I Love Lucy when Citizen Kane was on. He has also collected a host of videos (digitized across a variety of formats) labeled “WOC”—recordings of live TV broadcasts “With Original Commercials.” “They were broadcasting every day. Most things didn’t get recorded, but somebody recorded something for their own reasons, and then somehow it found its way into my hands,” he marvels. “That’s very interesting to me.” We move to the kitchen. When Seth and his wife, Tania, bought this home, it was a typical 1980s kitchen, so of course the first thing they did was destroy it. Seth rebuilt it from the ground up with antique 125
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appliances. There’s the ivory stove, with once-rusted panels he sent to California to be recoated. There’s the white Crosley Shelvador fridge that he purchased from a company that rents antique appliances to film productions. At some point, he laments, it will inevitably die, and then “I’ll either have to find another one, or the awful thing is I may have to get one of those reproductions.” Of the many things Seth mourns, it’s the loss of the repair shop. They used to be ubiquitous, but now we just throw things away and move on. Upstairs, his obsession with bookbinding is on full, resplendent display. A door frosted with the words The Wimbledon Green Memorial Library—Quiet Please! and a depiction of its comic-hoarding namesake character leads to a wonderland of paper, replete with its intoxicating aroma. Floor-to-ceiling custom shelves hold everything from a full series of Man, Myth & Magic, to Marvel and Star Trek annuals; there are numerous bound volumes of Seth’s research and groundwork on various projects; Wimbledon Green ephemera, from a bust of the character to Green’s framed fictitious rejection from a comic book club. I ask Seth why he enjoys teetering over the line between his literature and real life. “I’m not really sure why I do it. I like the idea of it. The artists I’m most interested in, one of the things I love about them was how they brought the work they did into their lives.” He cites Max Beerbohm, an early 20th-century caricaturist and writer. “He sat around and fiddled about all this life,” Seth says, noting that Beerbohm would do things like write false inscriptions in his own books from famous people. “Much of his life was just playing, and that appeals to me on a basic level. It doesn’t really have to have a big meaning.” While Seth reads books by other authors, he often draws in them. “Some of them have become quite elaborate, where I’ll have glued in individual characters. These have turned into weird little projects on their own, which I don’t really have any purpose for beyond pleasure.” He has somewhere around 100 of them. Detailing Seth’s inner sanctum could stretch for pages. But how does he see it? “It is a bubble. I’m working on creating my own dream world that I want to live inside. When I go out, I am horrified at the vulgarity of the modern aesthetic. But on another level, you are a product of your own time. This is the world I live in and I’m used to it. “Some architect, maybe it was Philip Johnson, was talking about the Guggenheim in New York and how great it looks, and he said the 126
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Guggenheim looks great because all of the other buildings on the street follow the rules. If all the buildings were like the Guggenheim, then it wouldn’t look great. And to some degree, the reason things from the past are so evocative is because they’re surrounded by this garbage of the present. If everything out there was a perfect representation of 1920, you’d lose the evocative quality that the past has.” Beyond the 1950s television he watches, beyond the stack of old books entitled Breeding Aquarium Fishes, beyond the wall of fake cartooning licenses he made for himself, and beyond the set of custom doors frosted with his name, Seth works out of a studio in his dark basement. Inside, it’s a thrilling disarray, a stark contrast to the crisp orderliness of the library. There are cups of pens and paintbrushes, piles of books, and projects in various stages of completion. Take, for instance, the notebooks on the history of Dominion, the fictive city that often appears in his series. Or the massive model he built of the town, where an errant squirrel once took up residence. It’s one thing for artists to get lost in the worlds of their imaginations, but it’s another to actually build them. It’s all part of following a thread. “Following the thread is what leads you to other work. You don’t know where any of it goes. I lately came up with this philosophy, this idea, which is: When you think up an idea for a project and you don’t do it, it’s like, ‘Oh well, you didn’t do it. It’s not the end of the world.’ The real tragedy isn’t the project that got lost, it’s that you would have learned something doing that project that made the next project. That next project is what’s really lost because you will never go down that road. So following the thread to me is what’s interesting.” There are many, many threads. There are his personal diaries, made using rubber stamps of himself, to which he adds text (he’s at least six months behind); his 40 or so books of paper cutouts; The Ministry of Post-War Drabness, a book he worked on for nearly 10 years, exploring Canadian vernacular design. Maybe one day he’ll publish it. Regardless, “It was fun to do, and it was busy work. Like I said, something that’s part of the process.” In addition to his “real” deadline-oriented work, he tends to have eight or nine other projects going at once. Looking around at the objects amassed in his basement, such as those WOC tapes, I wonder aloud what he makes of people who don’t collect anything. He lights up. “I find it hard to understand! I can’t imagine not gathering things. 127
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It’s a natural process. It’s about you—it’s not really about the objects. Why do you want them? Why do you want to display them? What are you trying to say about yourself? “If I wasn’t making art, would I be bothering to think this much about who I am and what identity is? It confuses me because I think the key thing about life is that you try to figure out who you are.” He ponders for a moment. Sure, he says, he collects things like historical Canadian cartooning because he feels it needs to be done. But then there’s the flipside. “Like, why did I suddenly get interested in doll chairs?” he asks, incredulously. It’s time for lunch. Seth used to love a diner downtown called the Apollo Eleven but, “it recently got turned into a craft brewery. That’s the modern world for you.” Despite it being nearly 70 degrees outside, he dons brown leather gloves, one of his signature hats, and a leather briefcase that he wears like a backpack, and we depart. But rather than walking to the street, he goes straight for the woods to the right of his house—a striking move for a man wearing a custom suit. Sticks crack underfoot as we ascend a steep hill. “It’s a not very well-marked path,” he says. “You have to hang on to a couple of trees here, but it’s the nicest way to go into town,” he says, glancing left and right. “We want to make sure no trains are coming. This is strictly illegal, but I don’t think we’ll get in any trouble.” The soaring railroad tracks take us high above the Speed River. It’s sunny and windy. As we come into town, people stare at Seth—some discreetly, others with open inquisitiveness. He doesn’t seem to notice or care. We arrive at the modern Italian joint Buon Gusto, where the staff knows and warmly welcomes him. He orders Tina’s Meatballs (beef, pork, and veal), a Di Casa mixed greens salad, and a glass of Chianti. “Everything here is perfectly adequate,” he says of Guelph. He prefers old jazz bars, but seems resigned to occasionally patronizing the sports bars that have replaced them. The table behind us breaks out in a rendition of “Happy Birthday.” He smiles and claps along with the family when it’s done. Espresso machines scream, waiters buzz by with pizzas. We discuss politics. Physics. Smoking (a former prodigious smoker, he quit about eight years ago). 128
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Vaping (he’s not a fan, despite our proximity to the nearby purveyor Ponyboy Vapes). His wife, Tania’s, Crown Barber Shop (which he designed, and for which he created a detailed backstory and related ephemera that hangs inside). Naturally, the past comes back. He says, “I think I was trying to build some sort of rationale that the world was better then. This is not an argument I would be making now. Obviously the world was not better in the mid-century, nor was it better in the mid-19th century, nor will it be any better 100 years from now. Life is life and it’s complicated. Some things I think were better, and some were worse. Obviously we’ve made a lot of social progress. Not enough, but we’ve made a lot. “What does appeal to me is a kind of formality to the culture that I feel has disappeared. I like that kind of culture based on structure, civic groups, and parades; all the stuff that is kind of corny definitely appeals to me. Much of that has disappeared from our culture because ours is the ‘keeping it real’ culture. ‘Artifice is bullshit.’ But I think artifice is interesting. I miss that element of it, and I’ve romanticized it for sure. I dress in a very calculated way because it’s what I would like things to be. If I had lived in 1950, I probably would have romanticized the 19th century. It’s probably more about rejecting the current era than anything.” As we finish our meal, I tell him about my watch stopping on his front lawn. “Well, there’s the intro to your story,” he says. Everything a story, always. As I leave, I stop at the massive boulder in his yard and stare at it once again: “The Lost Brakeman.” I consider going back inside because I forgot to ask him about it, and I desperately want to know its truth: Was it here when he moved in? Did he have it brought in? Was there really a train accident? Is there any local neighborhood lore, or is a boulder just a boulder? But I leave. Sometimes a story is best left a story.
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