Above: Ministry of Information poster, made but not distributed in 1939, later rediscovered by Stuart Manley of Barter Books.

In her seminal 1970 essay on posters, Susan Sontag begins by making a distinction between the poster and the public notice. “Posters are simply not public notices,” she writes. “Both posters and public notices address the person not as an individual, but as an unidentified member of the body politic. But the poster, as distinct from the public notice, presupposes the modern concept of the public—in which the members of a society are defined primarily as spectators or consumers. A public notice aims to inform or command. A poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal.” There are many tools in the poster designer’s arsenal to create the appeal Sontag describes, and the very rise of the poster as a form is tied to the rise of a technology needed to produce this appeal: color lithography. Implicit in Sontag’s argument, though, is a claim about the form of information itself. The information the public notice offers arrives pure, unvarnished, unadorned. The information the poster offers is designed, decorated, expressed. One’s form is neutral and the other’s is inflected. But is information ever formless? Can it ever be delivered without some influence from its carrier?

The public notice as an object presents us with a challenge: Where does seeing stop and reading start? Where does information end and design begin? As we witness the rise of a sober new Helvetica age, the public notice’s flat language and style shows up more and more in contemporary design. Here’s a look at some of that work, some earlier artistic predecessors, and some of the issues that arise from working with language as a medium in art and design.

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Jason Santa Maria asked me to contribute to his monthlong Candygram series, celebrating the joys of candy. I took on Smarties in my essay “Brain Food.” Here’s a sample:

The Smarties package of my youth was an exercise in minimalism. Its graphic interest, the stripes of color, came directly from the different flavors inside. Its structural integrity came from stacking the tablets atop one another and twisting them tight. It’s as if Ce De Candy channeled Hideyuki Oka’s classic “How to Wrap Five Eggs” when they concocted the package. Today’s Smarties differ in one unfortunate respect: they depict the package on the package itself. Maybe it’s a symptom of our meta-obsessed times, or maybe it’s a fear of pure abstraction, but this minor graphic revision leaves the prospective Smarties consumer feeling a bit of the Dröste Effect with a dash of Cluckin’ Chicken thrown in for good measure.

Read the whole thing here.

Wired editor-in-chief and Free author Chris Anderson giving a lecture in Chile last October. Photo by Carito Orellana.

I’ve just finished Chris Anderson’s Free, which is available free on Google Books or as a free audiobook. There has been a debate raging around Anderson’s book for a week or two now. For those wishing to catch up, Eric Etheridge’s NYT Opinionator blog has a great roundup of yaysayers and naysayers, and it’s well worth a look.

Here’s useful tidbit from Malcolm Gladwell’s pointed critique:

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).

What’s really fun about reading Gladwell’s review is getting a sense of how his mind works. The quote above literally shows him sorting ideas into bins and tagging them as he goes. Fantastic.

Seth Godin responded to Gladwell’s critique in support of Anderson and added a few insights of his own. Worth repeating:

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people.

Very much agreed with Seth on that.

One of the great things about Anderson’s book is its broad look at the idea of “free.” As an armchair read, it’s hard to get bored by all the fascinating examples and stories Anderson shares. However, this breadth is also a trap, because each invested community will tend to read Free narrowly, complete with its own predispositions, seeing holes in Anderson’s arguments as a result.

I see two faults in it as a book, one minor and one major. Minorly, it feels padded: Anderson repeats himself often. (I assume this is because he feels much of his audience will skim the book, not read it in full in order.) Majorly, it feels overreaching: while it’s true that “free” is a game-changer, Anderson occasionally lapses into what an economist might call “irrational exuberance” over his thesis. I think this happens because Anderson wants to fit Free into a category of business book that we all know well from airports and conferences: the “how to think about, recognize, describe, and potentially monetize a current cultural trend” book. This is, of course, a category owned by Gladwell, which is why it’s so fun to see them locking horns here. With this book, Anderson may have triggered the Tipping Point of Free. We don’t get much intellectual bloodsport like this these days.

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One of my top five favorite films, The Limey, turned ten this year, and independently of that started popping up on the pop-culture radar again in a few different places. First in January on Elvis Mitchell’s wonderful podcast The Treatment, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh described his newest film, The Girlfriend Experience, as his most “Limey-like” film since the original. It’s about an elite call girl working in the pre-election hubbub of October 2008 and stars real-life porn star Sasha Grey. Then recently on The Onion’s awesome “New Cult Canon” series (which last week canonized another favorite of mine, Eyes Wide Shut), critic Scott Tobias added not just The Limey but also the film’s DVD Commentary track to its stellar lineup of films.

It was watching The Limey’s DVD commentary several times that spurred me to begin thinking about it in relation to another film I love, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. In 2001 I was taking a course on Hitchcock and proposed an extended comparative essay about the two films as my final project. Most of the introduction is dry and overly academic, but the following paragraph cuts to the core of my interest in making the comparison:

Some of the most heated debates of the ’60s/New Wave were Marxist-Capitalist debates, but in these two films Hitchcock and Soderbergh actually visualize these opposing ideologies by consistently placing them in formal opposition to one another and moving their characters between them. North by Northwest, made in 1959, came at a cusp point of the Atomic Age amidst the post-WWII prosperity in America, and its finale, in which both Communism is thwarted (though it’s not said outright) and a marrage is made, wreckons with these twin late-’50s predicaments. The Limey, made in 1999, came after the end of the Cold War and amidst a wave dot-com prosperity in America. That the Marxist is a villan in one and a hero in the other speaks volumes about these thrillers. That both films are thrillers helps determine exactly how. Again and again, Soderbergh and Hitchcock use the idea of exchange over time, and, more importantly, over space to discuss Marxist and Capitalist ideologies. By coupling movement—which is concerned with the formal kinetics of the characters, camera, and shots—with ideology—which is concerned with the social implications of the films’ content—both directors formulate a relationship between the way things move on screen and what they ideologically represent.

The finest parts of the essay, however, are not these broader theoretical constructions but the two sections that work hardest to closely observe how these films move, how their directors work with the camera, and how their editing schemes organize the scenes and story. This is done first on a formal level and then on a more narrative level, as the each of the films’ characters and settings are aligned with different types of transactions, both political and economic. The essay’s methodological cousin is Frederic Jameson’s worthwhile high-wire analysis of Hitchcock’s film, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” available in its entirety on Google Books here. —RG

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I’m interested in Marcel Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack” from 1914.

“Bottle Rack” is thought to be Duchamp’s first unaltered readymade. He purchased the kitchen tool at a bazaar near Paris’s city hall and left it in his studio for several months trying to figure out what to do with it. He remarked to his sister Suzanne that he considered it a sculpture “already made,” which is where we get the term “readymade,” though Duchamp wouldn’t use that exact term himsef until “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” a snowshovel given to him by his friend Jean Crotti in 1915. Both the snowshovel and the bottle rack were subsequently lost. The bottle rack was thrown out by Suzanne and legend has it that the shovel was mistaken for a “real” shovel at a show in Chicago and used to clear the winter sidewalks during the afternoon before an opening.

With the readymades, Duchamp has removed design objects from their context as functional objects and recontextualized them as objects of art. If design and art were the same thing, Duchamp’s swap would be impossible, because these contexts would be interchangable. He shows us they are not, and usefully so. “Bottle Rack” never lost its ability to dry bottles, it simply lost its ability to be available for bottle drying or even to represent its own availability for bottle drying given its new context. In effect, Duchamp took the bottle rack out of circulation in one context and put it into circulation in another.

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Above: A still from Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad. The screenplay was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

I’ve talked about pantoums before, but we get the form (and word) from Malaysia, where it is an ancient type of verse, though it was not introduced to English until 1812. In a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the following stanza until the final stanza, when two new lines are introduced but not repeated. So writing one is not so much a challenge of rhythm or rhyme but of sequence. The poem has only half as many original lines as it appears to have, but, when these lines reflect or repeat, they can become like a hall of mirrors.

One of my favorite pantoums is Elaine Equi’s masterful “A Date with Robbe-Grillet.”

A Date with Robbe-Grillet

What I remember didn’t happen.
Birds stuttering.
Torches huddled together.
The café empty, with no place to sit.

Birds stuttering.
On our ride in the country
the café empty, with no place to sit.
Your hair was like a doll’s.

On our ride in the country
it was winter.
Your hair was like a doll’s
and when we met it was as children.

It was winter
when it rained
and when we met it was as children.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.

When it rained
the sky turned the color of Pernod.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.
Birds strutted.

The sky turned the color of Pernod.
Within the forest
birds strutted
and we came upon a second forest

within the forest
identical to the first.
And we came upon a second forest
where I was alone

identical to the first
only smaller and without music
where I was alone
where I alone could tell the story.

— Elaine Equi

Alain Robbe-Grillet is, of course, the perfect subject to portray with the pantoum’s looping form: the plots of his novels, and, most famously, his screenplay for Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad, all cycle and refract in the most surreal and dreamlike of ways.

Equi’s poem willfully acknowledges the repetition at the core of its own construction. She writes, “and we came upon a second forest / identical to the first.” Each of the lines in this pantoum is a short but mobile declarative statement whose meaning shifts according to whatever statements may adjoin or accompany it. The phrases “It was winter,” “When it rained,” “within the forest,” contain only the simplest bits if information, but in context they begin to have a hypnotizing effect, as the weight of an image shifts from one line to the next. They frame and reframe, nesting one action recursively into another.

These phrases’ dependency, however, is put in conflict by the poem’s conclusion: “… I alone could tell the story.” A dream is a rearrangement of fragments from reality, but it lives inside a single locked subconscious. What is the story here? What is the meaning of this dream? It’s wedded firmly to the structure of Equi’s pantoum itself.

Above: Portrait with I AM A MAN (Memphis) poster. Photograph by Yoko Inoue.

I was really honored and excited when the editors of Idea Magazine asked me to be a part of their new issue, How does graphic design change? In the description that frames the issue, the editors write, “It is apparent that the line between the private and public domains of activity is blurring. The movement to acquire autonomy in client-oriented, heteronomous activities as well as the movement to gain a larger public audience for the products of self-initiated, autonomous activities are already underway. […] In a modern society, what mode of production will designers attempt to utilize and, on a daily basis, how will they attempt to construct the world in which they live?”

The editors divide their attention into three areas: Everyday Life, Media, and the Commons. The contributors’ projects are a wonderful and inspiring array, including work by my friends at Thumb, Dexter Sinister, and Winterhouse, as well as wonderful projects by Zak Kyes, Metahaven, Will Holder, James Goggin, Mike Meiré, and more.

In a break from the usual magazine portfolio presentation, the editors asked each contributor to take time to write a reflection on the projects they were being asked to show. I found this to be a thoroughly helpful exercise. Many of the ideas in the passage below will be familiar to regular readers of this website, but I include it here as an introduction to some, a compact and easygoing synthesis for others, and, as usual, an archive for myself. —RG

Above: The “Give-and-Take” Business Card Holder by Design Within Reach. With one side for incoming cards and the other side for outgoing cards, a pattern of exchange is designed into the object itself.

In the spring of 2006, I had been thinking a lot about gifts. In a meeting with a cautious client one day, I pointed out that I couldn’t really sell him a finished business card—it would only become his business card when he handed it to someone else, or gave it away. Somehow, even though the design process was finished, the client’s business card could not be fully realized as an object until it was distributed by him. 

This offhand comment stayed on my mind for weeks, and the more I thought about it, the more interested in it I became. It seemed the card worked in a giftlike way. No one asked for it, and no one paid for it, it was simply given. In giving it, some kind of emotion was expected, or some kind of action was undertaken in response. Perhaps the receiver would be excited to have this new person’s contact information. Or perhaps he would pass the card along to someone with his recommendation. Whatever the case, distribution was an integral part in the design process, but it was one that designers seldom discussed openly. How does design enter the world once it’s been made? It seems like that question can be just as important as what the design itself looks like. Certainly that was the case with business cards.

Around this time I read an article in The New Yorker about the Shakers, which also mentioned gifts, and, in looking for a good book to read about the Shakers one day, I stumbled across a book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde and decided I had to read it. The Gift is not a book about design, but it fundamentally changed the way I think about design. I began reading it in the summer of 2006 and brought it with me everywhere I went.

In the meantime, I found myself thinking a lot about the work and writing of Milton Glaser, and particularly his thinking about the ethics of design and the role design plays in our culture. It seemed that—like all gifts—giftlike design could help to bring people together and feel a sense of shared identity, regardless of what it looked like. This idea transcended aesthetics and seemed critically quite important. Glaser, who I later discovered is also a fan of The Gift, put it quite well in a film by Hilllman Curtis: “[The] passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing one another, because they all become part of a single experience. And [Hyde’s] leap of imagination occurs when he says this is what artists do. Artists provide that gift to the culture, so that people have something in common. And I think that all of us who identify with the role of artists in history want our work to serve that purpose.”

When you look at design through the lens of gift exchanges, its objective shifts from making the world more beautiful to making the world more shareable, and its basis shifts from the production of forms by its practitioners to the production of actions by its recipients. The way things look is still important, but the creation of compelling things now serves to maximize appeal and shared experiences. New designs are not always necessary to do create these shared experiences, and in fact often the recycling of forms is more effective in spreading and sharing a message.

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I’m interested in Borge Morgenson’s J39 Chair.

In 1927, a No. 7 armed rocking chair designed at a Shaker workshop in Mt. Lebanon, NY somehow arrived in Denmark, where it immediately captivated Kaare Klint, a leading figure in the modern movement there. It was the same kind of chair Brother Robert Wagan’s workshop had been producing since the 1870s, but the Danes had never seen anything like it, nor had they ever heard of the Shakers. Klint ordered a replica and shared it with his students. In 1947, one of those students, Borge Morgenson, designed his J39 chair, which drew heavily on the Shaker sources. The chair quickly became a familiar icon in Denmark and would soon be one of the first modern Scandinavian designs to be marketed in the U.S. by its producer, the Danish Cooperative FDB Mobler.

It might seem like this is a story about influence, and of course it is, but if you look at it that way it’s because you’re seeing things from the causal side, from the side that considers how an object comes to look how it looks and who made it that way.

If you look at this story in terms of effects, the question, I think, is much more interesting. Is the J39 chair a Shaker chair? Is it only possible for Shaker chairs to be made by the Shakers themselves? Put even more simply: what makes a Shaker chair a Shaker chair?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that only the Shakers can make a Shaker chair. This is a tricky argument to make: not even the Shakers considered themselves the “makers” of the things they made. There was only one maker, and it was God. The No. 7 armed rocking chair was a gift from God. It was no more a Shaker chair as it was anyone else’s.

Nonetheless, to support themselves and their communities, the Shakers were among the first in America to try mass production, and they were so successful at it that the Shaker name became synonymous with quality. Mail-order catalogs of Shaker goods were distributed up and down the east coast of the U.S.

So: who really created Shaker chairs if the Shaker’s didn’t? You might argue it was the people that bought the chairs from the Shakers’ catalogs. Shaker chairs became Shaker chairs not because of their designers, but because of their customers. Identification, after all, rests on recognition.

Anyway, one of those chairs ends up on a boat and the boat ends up in Denmark, where no one has heard of the Shakers. To Kaare Klint and his fellow Danish designers it’s just a chair but it’s not just a chair, it’s a very special chair. They copy it. Were the copy to be purchased by someone who recognized it as a Shaker chair, would that make the copy a Shaker chair? And: is it now a Danish chair also?

Above: Jacobs by Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs in collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs tote.

I was watching this documentary on Marc Jacobs the other day. During a section focusing on his work with contemporary artists and his growing personal collection of art, Jacobs lamented that he was not himself an artist. But his statment seemed odd to me: I had, at least in some sense, always thought of Jacobs as an artist. It was strange to hear him think otherwise. Later, the painter Elizabeth Peyton is interviewed: she considers Jacobs an artist as well, even though she acknowledges that he doesn’t consider himself one. Jacobs’s reasoning for this is that he has investors and bosses at LVMH for his work at Louis Vuitton, and for his work with Marc Jacobs and Marc by Marc Jacobs. The public, of course, has its demands as well. His argument is that he doesn’t enjoy the individual freedom for self-expression that artists enjoy. Even knowing Jacobs’s reasons, however, I still disagreed with him and agreed with Peyton. This got me thinking.

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In this TED talk, Renaissance man Howard Rheingold manages to synthesize a lot of things that I’ve discussed before on L&UL through a lens that’s pretty new: collaboration.

The beginning of Rheingold’s talk focuses on one of the products of collaboration: wealth. This is a key feature of gift economies as well. There is some worth that resides exclusively in the group and is not divisible among or attributable to any its individual members. As tribes of humans farmed and hunted in larger groups, the result was more food than individuals could eat and greater wealth than they could produce on their own. With this new wealth comes specialization, trade, and, ultimately, counting and language. When the printing press emerged, it made language easier to produce and the goal of widespread literacy more possible to obtain. With more people reading, writing, and circulating their ideas, major shifts in thought occurred: the scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and constitutional democracy to name just a few. Rheingold’s point is that new wealth always results from new forms of collaboration, and new ways of managing that wealth are then necessarily devised. In this case, simple commerce morphs into Capitalism, a brand of commerce with its own, more institutionally collaborative instruments like insurance and incorporation.

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