An oldie-but-goodie today, from Lorraine Wild’s 1996 Emigre essay “That was then and this is now: but what is next?” (aka “The Macramé of Resistance”). This list, in my view, is as inspiring now as it was then: “[T]here are other things that must be added to the education of designers to enable them to participate as something other than visual packagers […]: writing as a means of conceptual and expressive development; techniques of verbal expression, rhetoric, narrative and story-telling (the engineering underneath verbal communication); the grammar of film, particularly the syntax of editing, cross-cutting and sequencing in time to create narrative; sound; the grammar and psychology of games, which function as narrative structures as surely as story-telling or film; techniques of visual rhetoric, syntax and semantics, using examples from the high art to popular culture, including advertising; the awareness and critique of communicative systems as artificial constructs; understanding the social, cultural and functional possibilities within the realms of real and simulated space, the public and the private; collaboration; “knowing what you don’t know,” looking at models of other team-produced design (advertising, film making, architecture) that involve negotiation and accommodation, complex technical processes, and the negotiation of consensus; […] a history that expands to include a social and cultural development of media; and perhaps in contradiction to the last few points, a more serious consideration of fantasy, surrealism, game playing, pranks, simulation, bricolage and other forms of marginal subversion to map out the spaces in between, the entrepreneurial possibilities as a source of stimulation and creativity in approaching new media with a free hand.”

As soon as we’ve realized this, we turn around and see a trail of fish behind us. Fish in John Baldessari’s work,

fish in Mark Dion’s work,

piling up,

and, on page 101 of Supermarket, the name of a fish that’s the name of a town that I’d heard of before.

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Returning to the introduction of Joshua Tree—VanderLans writes, “It is an archetypically American experience to drive through the desert…. Like many artists who helped define and shape the cultural image of California, Gram Parsons was not originally from there.” The question that hovers above these statements, all the time, is deceptively simple: where was he from? The search for origins—a human drive as ancient as Altamira—informs not only VanderLans’s quest to know his rock heroes, but also, as all art does, the quest to know himself. Specifically, to know himself as a designer and photographer and as an émigré to California, and it is this quest, I think, that motivates his fourth and largest book, Supermarket.

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Artist Doug Aitken tips the swimming pool on its side, throwing our equilibrium off like we’ve got water in our ears. Seen this way, the pool evokes the form of the numeral zero. Across from it, in this book, are a grid of billboards, and all of these billboards are blank. Let’s use Aitken’s structure—signs on the left, pools on the right—as we continue.

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That moment is in the early spring of 1997, when Emigre magazine published its 42nd issue. Emigre was initially launched in Sacramento, CA, by Rudy VanderLans (who was born in Holland) as a magazine to showcase the cultural contributions of émigrés like himself. But by issue 3, in late 1985, VanderLans had begun to experiment with his wife Zuzana Licko’s coarse-resolution typefaces, like this one.

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This article was originally presented as a lecture at the Type Director’s Club, New York City, as part of the “Type Salon” program on 21 April 2005.

I want to begin, tonight, with where we are, a darkened room with a screen, and with the context of where we are, a slide lecture. This kind of gathering is not without a history, a set of expectations, and the first slide I’ve brought to share with you deals with that.

This is a photograph of the staging of a play called The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein. It depicts an actor playing the woman we know as Heidi Holland, who is employed by Columbia University as an art historian. The prologue of the play finds Heidi in the midst of one of her slide lectures concerning three women artists that, while well respected in their time and by their societies, are virtually unknown today.

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A discussion between Rob Giampietro and Rudy VanderLans about guilt and loss in graphic design.

Rudy VanderLans, editor, Emigre: When writer/designer Rob Giampietro approached me a few months back with the idea to write an article about graphic design in the ’90s, he brought up an unrelated topic during our conversation that I found intriguing; he mentioned the term “Default Systems Design.” He said it was the topic for another article he had been working on for the past few months. It’s curious how certain ideas reach critical mass. In Emigre #64 a number of contributors, independently from each other, each made note of the emergence of a new kind of graphic design that seems to rely heavily on the use of systems and defaults. Just when you think graphic design is in a coma, something’s taking root. Reprinted here is how we arrived at the topic, as well as edited segments of the rest of the dialogue.

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