r34// mixing messages New Waves Violating Old Rules . deconstruction fbaul. dc 4 matilde pinto 4789
MODERNISM
The New Realists are exhibited, acknowledging the arrival of Pop Art and artists
INTERNATIONAL STYLE NEW WAVE
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Weingart joins the Basle School of Design faculty “Learn Covers” by Wolfgang Weingart in Typographische Monatsbatter
Push Pin Studio
Sidney Lumet`s film, Dog Day Afternoon
formed by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast
Dan Friedman and the New Wave typography in the USA
Kubrick`s film, 2001:A Space Odyssey Andy Warhol`s film, Chelsea Girls Lubain`s Avant Garde magazine
Armin Hofman begins teaching at Yale Inge Druckrey begins her teaching career Edouar Hoffman and Max Miedinger design Helvetica typeface Robert Venturi writes Complexity and Contradition in Architecture Milton Glaser`s world famous Bob
Saul Bass, Man with the Golden Arms, film poster and graphics
Coppola`s film, The Godfather Emile Ruder, Typography A Manual of Design
Andy Warhol`s Campbell`s Soup Henry Wolf at Harper`s Bazzar The American “Beatnik” generation emerges Herbert Lubain designs Eros
Michael Vanderbyl, Califórnia Public Rádio poster The film, A Clockwork Orange 300.000 people attend a rock concert known as Woodstock George Lucas`s film, Star Wars Robert Venturi`s Learning from Las Vegas, designed by Muriel Cooper Armin Hofmann, was an instructor during the Yale Summer Programme in Graphic Design Brissago Martin Scorsese`s film, Taxi Driver
Armin Hofmann, Graphic Design Manual Weingart became an instructor at the Yale University Summer Graphic Design Program in Brissago Milton Glaser designs cover I LOVE NY symbol Spielberg`s film, Jaws Charles Jenck`s publishes his articles on architectural Katherine and Michael McCoy come to Cranbrook Postmodernism
POST-MODERNISM
The Apple Macintosh computer is designed
MOMA exibition, Deconstructivism Architecture is curated by Philip Johnson Katherine McCoy, Deconstructed Typography
DESCONSTRUCTION David Lynch`s film, The Elephant Man Neville Brody is Art Director of The Face Michael Graves exibition poster by William Longhauser Memphis founded in Milan
The AIGA publishes a defenition of graphic design: “The aaesthetic ordering of type and image in order to interest, inform, persuade or sell.” Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Lick lauch Emigre magazine
Rolling Stone, Perception/Reality campaign by Fallon McElligott and Rice/Minneapolis Muriel Cooper at the Visual Language Workshop, MIT April Greiman, Does It Make Sense, poster for Design Quarterly Tibor Kalman designs a music vídeo for the Talking Heads Robert Zemeckis`s film, Forrest Gump Peter Saville joins Pentagram, London Quentin Tarantinos film, Pulp Fiction Rick Poynor, editor of the new Eye magazine
Typography Now: The Next Wave is published by Rick Poynor, Edward Booth-Clibborn and Why Not Assoiciates Lúcida is designed for laserprinters Francis Ford Coppola`s film, Apocalypse Now Remote Control by Barbara Kruger Stephen Heller writes Cult of Ugly in Eye magazine
Brody and Rossum produce Fuse magazine Peter Saville Associates founded in London MTV plays the first music vídeo
Émigré magazine (and other magazines) publishes First Things Manifesto 2000 Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture at CooperHewitt National Design Museum The exibition Graphic Design in América: A Visual Language History is organized by the Walker Art Center Steven Brower redesigns Print magazine David Carson, Beach Culture magazine David Carson designs Ray Gun magazine
MODERNISM
1950`S // postmodernism influenced by pop art The human-machine interaction that is so important in Rauschenberg’s art as a whole is crucial here. The symbiosis of of the human and the technological. Linda Hults, The Print in the Western World, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
For Jameson, pastiche is the presentation of tunes or stories in the style of another author or composer. For Jameson, parody is the humorous or satirical imitation of an author or composer`s style: pastiche lacks that satirical (political) impulse and is for him more characteristic of postmodernism. Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, Duke University Press, 1991.
The modern quest for the new was informed by a belief in the artist as a unique, expressive self. Modern art was one with modern philosophy in its belief in a trancendental self outside of space and time. Contrariwise, postmodern artists, articulating the same anti-humanist themes of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, abandoned the belief in a self, author, and Creative genius. The artist is no longer the originary and unique self who produces the new in a authentic vision but, rather, a bricoleur who just rearranges the debris of the cultural past. Rather than expanding on the themes of selfhood, authenticity, originality, and liberation, postmodern artists parody them. Rather than inventing new materials, postmodernists quote what`s alredy around and combine fragments in a pastiche — as Robert Rauschenberg pastes texts from newspapers and images from classical paintings onto His canvases, or as rap artists “sample� riffs from past songs. The postmodern turn is well exemplified in the work of Andy Warhol, who boasted he could produce as many Works of art in a day through mechanical reproduction as Picasso could in a lifetime.
Robert Smithson, A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art, Art International, March, 1968
MODERNISM
1954 // Push Pin Studio formed by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast I’m interested in work that doesn’t necessarily look as if it was ‘designed’ but sort of just looks as if it happened. I always liked the idea, that people have to work to understand what you’re showing them. Milton Glaser, http://www.graphic-design.com/design/milton-glaser-inform-and-delight?page=0,2, s/d
I wanted to do work that is public, I wanted to do work that people saw... that was on the street. It didn’t matter if I was called an artist or a designer, illustrator or what ever else, the core value was always the act of making things, and the transformation of an idea that you hold in your mind that becomes real or material. That, to me, is still the glory of any creative activity. Milton Glaser, http://www.graphic-design.com/design/milton-glaser-inform-and-delight?page=0,2, s/d
The Push Pin Studio: An Alternative to Modern What’s fascinating about the Graphic is its seamless melding of illustration and publication design -- that, and its creative use of retro styles and period ornament at a time with the austere Swiss Style ruled. Steven Heller, in his lead-off article (“The Push Pin Effect”), refers to their “reinvention of discarded mannerisms”: using everything from Victorian clichés to Art Deco flourishes to achieve striking contrast and surprising effect. This is the same spirit that infused some of the most creative design work that came out of the UK around the Festival of Britain in 1951: in the face of a standardized postwar modernism, putting old-fashioned visual elements to use in novel ways. Heller quotes Chwast as saying, in recollection: “Quaintness was popular in those days.” Although they were not alone in what they did, the Push Pin designers were hugely influential. The spirit of contrast that informs so much of the best design of the 1950s found itself elaborated in flowing ink lines and techniques like woodcut, collage, and painting on wood; Push Pin pioneered this. Since they were primarily illustrators, Push Pin particularly wanted to offer an alternative to the dominance of photography in modern graphic design. “Their mission was not solely an attack on modernism,” says Heller, but it did clearly offer a different way forward. And novelty is always popular. In the late ‘50s, other designers would use thePush Pin Graphic as inspiration, and new ideas or styles that appeared in one issue might show up all around the New York design world a month later. By the mid-’60s, when the principals’ modes had hardened into brilliant but recognizable styles, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast practically defined a certain end of the visual aesthetic of the time.
John D. Berry, http://www.creativepro.com/article/dot-font-fun-with-the-push-pin-legacy, 2005
MODERNISM
1956 // Armin Hofmann begins teaching at Yale
Armin Hofmann, Kunsthalle Basel/Lipchitz, Linocut printed Two colors Basel School of Design and Its Philosophy — The Armin Hofmann Years, 1958
The influence of money, which one must earn through one’s work, endangers this critical relationship between the work and its ideal manifestation. If financial gain ultimately becomes more important than the product to be created, one will no longer be able to speak of work that fulfills a higher meaning. When industrial working methods divide aspects of design that belong together, fundamental principles of design may be compromised. In any case, to call attention to the tragic breach that has occurred in mankind’s relationship to modern working methods is a matter of extreme importance for, me. In my own work, I feel compelled to set an example: to cultivate a corner of unity and to struggle against dismemberment and fragmentation in the field of design.
Armin Hofmann, From the catalog: The Basel School of Design and its philosophy, The Armin Hofmann years 1946-1986, New York City, 1986
MODERNISM
1966 // Inge Druckrey begins her teaching career
1972 // Learn Covers by Wolfgang Weingart in Typographische Monatsbatter
INTERNATIONAL STYLE NEW WAVE
I found myself in a graphic landscape when designing the letterhead of Inge Druckrey. Instead of evenly spacing the letters and equalizing the lines of type as a typesetter would strive to do. I stretched the words to all lengths until almost unreadable. At a certain point, I did not perceive the information as accumulated separate word units, but read the whole of the message at a glance. This is why I call it a landscape: the type took on a spatial quality. Until the middle of the seventies stretched-out letter spacing and the stepped text blocks weres strong components of my design playground. I continued to discover more variations on these themes and, in, 1972 and 1973, applied the research to the design of a cover series for the professional journal, Typographische Monatsblatter. When I sensed distorting existing typeface and forming new ones by bending metal lines. In the darkroom, through photomechanical process, I made words and lines of type completely illegible. Because we did not have the technical means in the Basel type shop to set longer text as the time, I used an electric typewriter to realize two cover designs for the American journal, Visible Language, I typed the text on ordinary piece of paper and made a negative film of it in the darkroom. With the enlarger intentionally out-of-focus, I exposed the film image onto photographic paper: the result was a self-made bold version of typewriter type. Depending on the exposure time I could make a semi-bold, an extra...
Wolfgang Weingart’s Typographic Landscape by Keith Tam, http://keithtam.net/writings.html, 2001
INTERNATIONAL STYLE NEW WAVE
1971 // Wolfgang Weingart and New Wave typography According to Weingart, “I took ‘Swiss Typography’ as my starting point, but then I blew it apart, never forcing any style upon my students. I never intended to create A “style”. It just happened that the students picked up — and misinterpreted— a so called ‘Weingart style’ and spread it around.” April Greiman
What`s the use of being legible, when n othing inspires you to take notice of it? Wolfgang Weingart’s Typographic Landscape by Keith Tam, http://keithtam.net/writings.html, 2001
Wolfgang Weingart is a German graphic designer credited as the progenitor of New Wave typography. According to Weingart, “I took ‘Swiss Typography’ as my starting point, but then I blew it apart, never forcing any style upon my students. I never intended to create a “style”. It just happened that the students picked up — and misinterpreted — a so called ‘Weingart style’ and spread it around.” “His typographic experiments were strongly grounded, and were based on an intimate understanding of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functions of typography. Whereastraditional Swiss typography mainly focused on the syntactic function, Weingart was interested in how far the graphic qualities of typography can be pushed and still retain its meaning. This is when the semantic function of typography comes in: Weingart believes that certain graphic modifications of type can in fact intensify meaning. “What’s the use of being legible, when nothing inspires you to take notice of it?” Excerpt from Keith Tam It wasn’t until the early eighties, when his American students like April Greiman and Dan Friedman (above 1971 poster) brought back to the US a wealth of typographic arsenals from Basel and co-opted it into the mainstream of graphic design. From April Greiman’s ´hybrid imagery” to David Carson’s deconstructive page layouts, anarchy reigned supreme in the nineties. Those were the days for graphic design superstars, whose style many a graphic designer adored and imitated. While no one can give a definitive answer as to whether these American graphic designers took what Weingart did and brought it to new heights, they certainly managed to make it a huge commercial success. “They were doing it as a style and it was never my idea to create fashion,” denotes Weingart. The teaching at Basel for Weingart is not about trends but a ‘stability’ that they try to move away from, but never totally. Wolfgang Weingart’s Typographic Landscape by Keith Tam, http://keithtam.net/writings.html, 2001
INTERNATIONAL STYLE NEW WAVE
1971 // Dan Friedman and the New Wave typography in the USA Primarily a corporate Identity designer Friedman’s philosophy reflected a rejection of “absolutism of swiss design” for a new “readability” governed by aesthetics founded by DADA and Constructivism.
Radical modernism is my reaffirmation of the idealistic roots of our modernity, adjusted to include more of our diverse cultures. Friedman’s philosophy quoted from Eye shortly before his death in 1995. In the 1960s I saw graphic design as a noble endeavor, integral to larger planning, architectural and social issues. What I realized in the 1970s, when I was doing major corporate identity projects, is that design had become a preoccupation with what things look like rather than with what they mean. What designers were doing was creating visual identities for other people - not unlike the work of fashion stylists, political image consultants or plastic surgeons. We had become experts who suggest how other people can project a visual impression that reflects who they think they are. And we have deceived ourselves into thinking that the modernization service we supply has the same integrity as service to the public good. Modernism forfeited its claim to a moral authority when designers sold it away as corporate style.
Dan Friedman by Peter Rea, New Wave/Radical Modernism, EYE magazine, http://www.eyemagazine. com/feature.php?id=45&fid=54, 1994
INTERNATIONAL STYLE NEW WAVE
1972 // Robert Venturi`s Learning from Las Vegas designed by Muriel Cooper “Naked Children have never payed in our fountains�, Robert Venturi in his 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas, explaining the difference between american and euroupean artistic and architectural expression.
Spread from Learning from Las Vegas, 1972
Postmodernist manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, gloried in the falseness of the commercial facades of the Las Vegas strip and promoted the false surface as a model for a new movement in architecture. No longer did the outside have to be functionally related to the inside. Rather, superficial decoration was allowed, and the resulting contradiction or discontinuity between inside and out was itself a strong critique of the clean, rational exterior of modernist architecture. This love of parodying the falseness of surface appearances in art and architecture had its counterpart in the structuralist movement in French linguistics. Strongly colored by Marxist determinism, structuralism exercised a major influence in American universities during the 1970s, accompanying the demoralization of America and the expansion of Soviet power. Unlike modernism, structuralism held that surface appearances were false and that rationality was itself a surface phenomenon under which lurked a subrational self-unknown to us. The structuralism attempt to demonstrate that rationality, the conscious self, and conscious speech were false fronts for irrational ity was represented in postmodernist graphic design as well.
Victor Margolin, Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, The University of Chicago press, Chicago and London, 1989
1978 // Katherine McCoy, Deconstructed Typography The modernist concepts of originality —as process and originality — as product have been swept aside. Postmodernists deny the existence of singular founding references or points-of-departure; instead the speak of signifiers and deconstructed meanings which produce an infnite array of interrelated and circular interpretations. They are no original ideas in art; images can always be decontructed to reveal antecedent construct and concepts. Roger Clark, Art education: Issues in postmodernist pedagogy, Reston, Virginia: National, Art education Association – NAEA, 1996.
You can do a good and without good typography, but you can’t do a great ad without good typography. Herb Lubalin, Baseline #4, 1981.
The cranbrook theoristist`s aim, derived from french philosophy and literary theory, is to deconstruct, or break apart and expose, the manipulative visual language and different levels of meaning embodied in design. Poynor, Type and Deconstruction in the Digital Era, Typography Now: The New Wave, Cincinnati, Oh: North Light, 1992
POST-MODERNISM
A theory-heavy, mid-1990s look at the concept of Deconstruction, looking at its origins in French post-structuralist discourse and then current use in the design world. The Cranbrook Academy of Art (Michigan), under the direction of Professors Michael and Katherine McCoy, became a center of Post-Modernist discussion from the mid 1970s. What emerged became know as the ‘Cranbrook Discourse’ widely publicized intersection of post-structuralism and graphic design. Designers at Cranbrook had first confronted literary criticism when they designed a special issue of Visible Language on contemporary French literary aesthetics, published in the summer of 1978. Daniel Libeskind, head of the Cranbrook architecture program, provided the graphic designers with a seminar in literary theory, which prepared them to develop their strategy: to systematically disintegrate the the series of essays by expanding the spaces between lines and words and pushing the footnotes into the space normally reserved for the main text. French Currents of the Letter, which outraged designers committed to the established ideologies of problem-solving and direct communication, remains a controversial landmark in experimental graphic design.
Ellen Lupton, Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design, Phaidon Press, London, 1999
1984 // The Apple Macintosh computer is designed What I really want on the Macintosh is a virtual reality interface — armholes in either side of the box so you can reach in and move logos around; a real paintbrush so that you can feel the texture of the surface underneath. Diane Burns, Neville Brody: Designers on Mac, Tokyo: Graphic-sha Publishing Co., 1992
The materialy of the signifier, whether it be word or image, is linked to its capacity to either evoke or designate sensation as it tranformed into perception, and that it in no case has a guaranteed truth value, only the ralative accuracy within the experience of an individual subject. Johanna Drucker, The Visible World: Experimental Typography and Modern Art 1909-1923, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994
I want to take the role of typography away from a purely subservient, practical role towards one that is potentially more expressive and visually dynamic. There are no special characters and presently no lowercase is planned. The font is designed to have no letter spacing, and ideally is should be set with no line space. I decided not to include a complete set of punctuation marks and accents, encouraging people to create their own if needed. Neville Brody, www.type.cp.uk/snet/fuse/statesamp.html, 1996
POST-MODERNISM
Today, typefaces and their configurations contain meaning that is distinct from the words they create. Certainly, calligraphy, decorative type, and italic or bold letterforms have long served to Express tone or heighten the impacto f words. But the proliferation of computer technology into most áreas of social experience, and especially in the field of communication design, has a fundamental shift in the way we decipher information. We are consumers of a complex lexion of type and image — a viewing audience more accustomed to looking into space. But computers alone do not have an effect on the way we read. All Technologies incorporate a set of practices which in turn, presuppose a cultural disposition. Within the field of graphic design, there has been a shift from modern forms to computer-generated, deconstructionist ones. Underlying this trend toward digitization is changing conception of the way we envision the world which generates new kind of cultural meaning. Modernism as a school of thought is supported by a modelo of vision that presupposes a linear path between a viewer`s eye and an object of perception. In this conception, there is no “space” between the eye anda n image because the acto f seeing is not understood to incorporate human experience. Rather, the gazine “eye of distance and infinite vision” is disembodied from the self and shielded from the outside. When the Macintosh computer was introduced to the field in the 1980`s, designers
Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream, New York: Routledge Press, 1989
began to layer and dissolve type and imaginery — a practice that shattered the conception of a detached, objective reader. Designers began to endorse the short of communication that would “promote multiple rather than fixed readings” and “provoke Poynor, Type and Deconthe read into becoming an active participant in the construction of the message”. When typography is treated as imagery — that is, when i tis pushed to the limits of legibility — the result is an enhanced visual involvement on the part of the viewer. As
struction in the Digital Era, Typography Now: The New Wave, Cincinnati, Oh: North Light, 1992
designers tranform the mechanics of representation, more demands are made on the viewer to interpret messages. Designers now expect that something like “projection” will occur while reading. For example, in The End of Print, David Carson`s art direction of magazines such as Ray Gun and Beach Culture is defended on the basis that their audience does not need visual direction. Whereas most magazines “want their readers Lewis Blackwell and David Carson, eds., The End of
to know what to expect, to know where to look and how to read through a page”, these Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson, San Francisco: publications establish “a diferent relationship with the reader”. Chronicle Books, 1995
1990 // 1992 // David Carson, Beach Culture magazine and Ray Gun Dear David I am sory about the end of print It was nice while it lasted I always liked the smell of mimeo copies And you could always tear out the pages after you read them I`ll miss the subjectivity the imprecision But i am ready i think Could you blow this up really big and print it in the wrong color And tell everybody to go back the school and to remember that Form ain`t worth a shit anyway and that content ideas you big Bunch of jerks rules make that part red or something ok? Moira Cullen interviews Tibor Kalman, Eye #20, http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature. php?id=30&fid=167, 1995
If someone interprets my work in a way that is totally new to me, I say fine. That way your work has a life of its own. You create a situation for people to do with it what they will, and you don`t create an enclosed or encapsulated moment. Jeffery Keedy, Emigre #15, 1990
POST-MODERNISM
The less legible a typface becomes, either on its own or in juxtaposition with other graphic elements, the more it takes on an inherent image. When this occurs, words are no longer simply read, but understood within the context of an entire visual construction. This is the visual laguage of deconstruction. Deconstruction, as we learned from Jacques Derrida in Grammatology, is the technique of breaking down a “whole” on order to reflect critically on its parts. When using this method, the designer affirms that different interpretations will be discovered within the fabric that holds a message together. Unlike the linearity of modernism which implies a separation between the viewer and the viewed, and a “withdrawal of the self from the world,” typographic deconstruction compels a viewer to take part in the interpretation of a message. This strategy of visual disorganization was embraced and legitimized by design schools such as the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Swanson, Gunnar Graphic Design and Reading: Explorations of an uneasy relationship, Allworth Press, Allworth Communications, New York, 2000.
Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream, New York: Routledge Press, 1989)
1986 // April Greiman, Does It Make Sense, poster for Design Quarterly TAXI >>“The Mac’s just another pencil!” – In your opinion, what is the Mac of today, or has it remained as relevant and as cutting-edge today as it did in the 1980s? April Greiman>>At that time, it was when the Mac was being compared to other ‘traditional’ tools, disciplines of graphic design. The Mac is both another pencil, but as history would prove this out, a ‘meta-tool’ and an integrative process. TAXI Design Network interviews with April Greiman, Women in Design II by Ninart Lui, http://www. designtaxi.com/article.php?article_id=100192, s/d
Cut-and-paste. Cut-and-paste. What a joy. It saved from wheelchair-bound Matisse from madness. It freed, for him, colors from shapes, shapes from images, images from ideas. By cutting and pasting, bodies are freed from the stranglehold of context, designation, meaning. Greiman shares his joy, and takes it a step further. Her Mac is her scissors. This turns out to be much more than an articulate pair of knives. The capacity to zoom in and out, to isolate and frame and reframe and transpose and turn translucent is a technical advance that Matisse would surely have envied. April Greiman, Something from Nothing, Rotovision, London, Paris, Berlin, 2001
POST-MODERNISM
Two things. First, precisely what Socrates took it for. A thing subject to uncertainty from outside, mischief from within. Bodies confounded the objectivity of science, the equanimity of the law, the integrity of structures. Vulnerable to seduction, they trespass boundaries — others, and their own — and like ghosts, may even embody other bodies. If the mind is something dialectically spirited toward a pre-designated end, the body is something that is spirited by feeling and risk, by intuition toward, the unknown, toward the constitution of what Husserl called, “vague essences”. All things have a body; even words, symbols and signs, those stand-ins, utilities through which The Real is usually mediated. Where the mind has one unequivocal point of arrival, the truth, the body has provisionally many. And, teleological path outside the world of accident and chance, bodies of the type I`m speaking are engaged in accidental and chance encounters. We can see early signs of this in Marinetti`s dizzying use of graphic language, the way words mingle with images in countless Dadaist works. When the body is set loose in the field anything can happen. For sure, the mind keeps the body in check, by assigning it roles, functions. But what happens when these bodies are freed of their roles or assignments? Have no intrinsic utility? Things which exist for the sake of...? The second sense of the body: I tis built-up, a construction, what Deleuze and Guattari call an “assemblage.” It has the capacity to extend beyond itself, code with other bodies, it possesses what Nietzsche calls “plasticity.” And because of this “plasticity”, bodies can change scale, compromise structures, aggress, marry other bodies. In the poster Does It Make Sense, the earth floats over a lunar horizont that is a kind of prosthetic for the cropped shin-bone of her leg. On the other shin we find a cirrus cloud, and at the intersection of her pubis? — a dinosaur, and Stonehenge. A spiral galaxy romantically reaches into her hair and weaves into her. A field, unlike a surface, is something occupied by bodies, of which the human body, including ones`s own body, is only a single instance, just a participant. The world is a field occupied by bodies, and every poster, as a field, is a world.
April Greiman, Something from Nothing, Rotovision, London, Paris, Berlin, 2001
1988 // MOMA exibition, Deconstructivism Architecture is curated by Philip Johnson In art as well as architecture... there are many and contradictory trends in our quick-change generation. In architecture, strict-classicism, and all shorts of shades in between, are equally valid. No generally persuasive “-ism� has appeared. It may be none will arise unless there is a worldwide, new religion or set of beliefs out which an aesthetic could be formed. Meanwhile pluralism reigns, perhaps a soil in which poetic, original artists... can develop. (...) The confluence (of these seven architects) may indeed be temporary; but its reality, its vitality, its originality can hardly be denied. Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture, Exhibition catalogue: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988
A reader comprehend and account for complex differences in signification. Each layer, through the use of language and image, is an intentional performer in deliberately playful game wherein the viewer can discover and experience the hidden complexities of language. Byrne and Witte, A Brave New World: Understanding Deconstruction, in Looking Closer: Critical writings on graphic design. New York: Allworth Press, 1994
POST-MODERNISM
Deconstructivism catapulted into the mainstream design press with MoMA’s 1988 exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. The curators used the term ‘deconstructivism’ to link certain contemporary architectural practices to Russian Constructivism, whose early years were marked by an imperfect vision of form and technology. The MoMA exhibition located a similarly skewed interpretation of modernism in the work of Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and others. Wigley wrote in his catalogue essay: ‘A deconstructive architect is…not one who dismantles buildings, but one who locates the inherent dilemmas within buildings. The deconstructive architect puts the pure forms of the architectural tradition on the couch and identifies the symptoms of a repressed impurity. The impurity is drawn to the surface by a combination of gentle coaxing and violent torture: the form is interrogated’. In Wigley’s view, deconstruction in architecture asks questions about modernism by re-examining its own language, materials, and processes. By framing their exhibition around a new ‘ism’, Wigley and Johnson helped to canonize the elements of a period style, marked by twisted geometries, centerless plans, and shards of glass and metal. This cluster of stylistic features quickly emigrated from architecture to graphic design, just as the icons and colors of neo-classical postmodernism had traveled there shortly before. While a more critical approach to deconstruction had been routed to graphic designers through the fields of photography and the fine arts, architecture provided a ready-to-use formal vocabulary that could be broadly adopted. ‘Deconstruction’, ‘deconstructivism’, and just plain ‘decon’ became design-world clichés, where they named existing tendencies and catalyzed new ones in the fields of furniture and fashion as well as graphic design. In 1990 Philip Meggs published a how-to guide for would-be deconstructivists in the magazine Step-by-Step Graphics. His essay, which includes a journalistic account of how the term ‘deconstruction’ entered the field of graphic design, focuses on style and works back to theory. Following the logic of the MoMA project, his story begins with Constructivism and ends with its ‘deconstruction’ in contemporary design; unlike Wigley, however, Meggs’s story depicts early modernism as a purely rational enterprise.
Ellen Lupton, and J. Abbott Miller, Deconstruction and Graphic Design: History Meets Theory, Visible Language, 1994