9 Postmodernism, the Return of Expression
 

Postmodern Architecture

In the 1980s, there arose a number of new parallels between postmodern graphic design and postmodern architecture, as a new generation of architects adopted the same pluralistic, expressive principles as graphic artists. It is difficult to say when precisely the postmodern era of architecture began, but there are a number of important historical signposts that are suggestive of a gradual change in how both professionals and lay people viewed the modern International Style. One eloquent example involves Minoru Yamasaki's (1912-1986) Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing project, built in St Louis in 1953. This type of urban housing for the poor had been designed on the principles of International Style architects such as Le Corbusier, who believed that modern abstract styles carried with them a moral force that could help people improve their circumstances. As part of the Utopian vision of modern architecture, housing projects such as this were built with the belief that the architecture could serve to bring members of impoverished communities into the mainstream.

In 1972, the Pruitt-lgoe housing was demolished, as the Utopian vision of modern skyscrapers serving as a launching pad for new lives had collided violently with the reality of urban poverty. Instead of functioning as an exemplar of moral authority and progress, the buildings had concentrated disadvantaged citizens in densely populated buildings cut off from the rest of society. The open areas around the buildings, which had been intended to serve as welcome green spaces, had become dangerously empty lots ruled by violent young people. Essentially, with the destruction of Pruitt-lgoe the Utopian dream and moral authority of the International Style were completely undermined, as the theories of 1920s architects proved untenable in modern urban societies.

In 1981, Thomas Wolfe (b. 1931) published the book From Bauhaus to Our House, a polemic that attacked what he saw as the cold and unfriendly effect of the pervasive International Style.

Has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested? ... Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a dupli-cating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse ... Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tung­sten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery.

Wolfe's exaggerated characterization of the International Style in architecture as a starkly abstract, incomprehensible, and impracti­cable language that was unpleasant to live in struck a chord with a number of people.

The notion that the International Style lacked zest, vitality, and human scale had an impact on a number of high-profile architects and their work. Philip Johnson, formerly a disciple of Mies van der Rohe, displayed his own rejection of the International Style in the early 1980s, when he designed the AT&T Headquarters in New York City (fig. 9.37). The design of this corporate headquarters building comprised an eclectic mix of historical references to older styles of architecture, including the Renaissance. These gestures to the past were combined with an entirely novel top to the structure, which seemingly replicates the shape of American Chippendale furniture. This subtle witticism on Johnson's part, conflating the shape of a skyscraper with the shape of a dresser, would have had no place in the International Style. Also, the building is clad with a pinkish gran­ite that has no clear relationship to the other design elements. In sum, the building is a pastiche, combining many different styles in an unlikely fashion.

    In order to make the AT&T building function on a human scale, Johnson designed the ground floor arcade to be integrated with the surrounding streets, allowing pedestrians easily to enter and cross through the building. In a holistic sense, the warm col­ored stone, decorative flourishes, and ground floor arcade contrast greatly with the steel and glass, reductive geometry, and separa­tion from the surrounding space of Johnson and Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, an icon of the International Style. The postmodern AT&T building is overall friendlier; it is less austere and serious in its expression, drawing people in rather than repelling them with its abstract grandeur.
 

9.37 Philip Johnson, AT&T Headquarters, New York, 1984.

Postmodern Typography

Nowhere was the introduction of digital technology more rapidly integrated into practice than in the typography community. It is absolutely correct to refer to a revolution in typography having occurred in the 1980s, as the introduction of computer systems changed almost every aspect of type design over the course of a little more than a decade. In just a few short years, all of the older systems for setting type began to vanish, as it became possible for typefaces to be created, produced, and distributed without ever leaving the virtual environment.

Emigre Graphics

The California design team of Zuzana Iicko (b. 1961) and Rudy VanderLans (b. 1955) founded Emigre Graphics in Oakland, California, in 1984. VanderLans, originally from the Netherlands, where he studied graphic design under teachers devoted to the International Style, immigrated to the San Francisco area in 1980. Newly ensconced in the Bay area, he entered graduate studies at Berkeley in photography while pursuing his interest in graphic design on the side. In 1981, he also found work as a designer for a local newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle. There, VanderLans was shocked by the disregard that the editors had for good design.

In Holland, graphic design is well integrated into society. Everything from postage stamps to money to telephone books is produced with a great deal of respect for design.

... Therefore, when I came to the United States and started working at a newspaper, of all places, I was just stunned. ... All the things that they taught me at art school [in the Netherlands] about legibility and good type and bad type were swept aside.

At the Chronicle, editors controlled the design of the newspaper, and VanderLans realized that, although the paper was not beautiful, it successfully served its purpose of distributing the news. Instead of simply rejecting this American disregard for design as an example of provincialism, VanderLans was inspired by the idea that "people read best what they read most," and the design of the paper was perfectly legible to its daily readers. This concept opened up his eyes to the vernacular culture of the world around him, as he realized that there was much more room for experi­mentation outside the strictures of the International Style.

    In 1983, VanderLans founded Emigre magazine, along with two other Dutch expatriates he had met in San Francisco. The name, of course, referred to their status as migrants, and in fact the original vision for this large-format magazine was as a show­case for Dutch artists who had moved to the United States. The first issue of Emigre shows VanderLans's reaction against the International Style, as he laid out torn, collaged photographs in a disorienting fashion alongside typewriter type (figs. 9.38, 9.39). The historian Rick Poynor has pointed out that while the digital revolution in graphic design is widely recognized, what could be called the "Xerox revolution" that began in the 1960s has been largely ignored. The widespread availability of the photocopier in the pre-digital age allowed artists such as VanderLans to appropri­ate fragments of popular culture and use them to create radically unconventional new designs. While the use of the photocopier and the typewriter partly reflected the low budget for Emigre, it also displayed VanderLans's penchant for using vernacular sources; like many postmodernists, VanderLans wanted to use these simple elements not for their own sake, but as a jumping-off point for experiments in graphic design. He also wanted to make graphic design a medium that allowed for the intuitive expression of the artist. This desire is part of the general postmodern trend whereby designers rejected the model of "artist as engineer"—a concept that arose in the 1920s and become part of the fabric of the International Style—in favor of the idea of the designer as a creative, artistic individual who puts his or her own stamp on each project.
 

9.38 and 9.39 Rudy VanderLans, Emigre no. 1. 1983.

Collage and typography.

9.40 Rudy VanderLans, Emigre no. 3, 1985. Collage and typography.

Digital Typefaces and Zuzana Licko

 

Zuzana Licko, VanderLans's eventual partner at Emigre, had been born in Czechoslovakia but immigrated to the United States as a young girl. She met VanderLans while studying first architecture, and then visual studies, at Berkeley in the early 1980s. In 1984, she became one of the first typographers to work with the newly released Macintosh computer. Using a rudimentary program called FontEditor, Licko was immediately attracted to the idea that this new technology could be the basis for a new aesthetic. In other words, she did not want to use computer technology simply to facilitate the creation of old styles; rather, she felt that it was essential that the new technology be allowed to lead to the inven­tion of new forms. The most obvious limitation of the technology of 1984 was the fact that both the screen, and more importantly the then cutting-edge dot matrix printer, could only display 72 dots per inch (dpi). Given this constraint, Licko set about developing bit-mapped typefaces using the Macintosh. ("Bitmapped" means that the individual letters are made up of an array of pixels, tiny dots, and do not have the smooth, unbroken contours of earlier type. For this reason, 1980s bit-mapped type had very low resolution, and the coarse letterforms could not be scaled outside of a limited range.) Bit-mapped typefaces such as Licko's Emperor 8 are characteristic of the genre; Licko established a ratio based on using a two-pixel stem to a one-pixel counter (fig. 9.41). Emperor 8 is dramatically minimalist in its form as it uses the absolute minimum number of pixels necessary to complete the alphabet. The Emperor family of typefaces each feature a number, in this case "eight," which specifies the height in pixels of capital letters. Because of the coarse resolution, a designer cannot simply rescale Emperor 8 into a larger size, but must turn to another typeface, say Emperor 15, which has the same proportional scheme as its sister face.

    In this pre-internct decade, the main route through which Licko's digital typefaces garnered popular attention was through the journal Emigre, which gradually became more and more focused on experimental graphic design. Emigre no. 3 was the first issue in which Licko's typefaces were used instead of the type­writer type of the first two issues (fig. 9.40). In Emigre no. 3 Licko's and VanderLans's experiments in digital design melded together, as he used MacWrite and MacPaint to plan the uncon­ventional layouts of text before printing them on a dot matrix device. In order to make the type look less coarse, the galleys were further scaled down in the printing process. The contents page of Emigre no. 3 shows how effectively the two designers collabo­rated, as Licko's bitmapped fonts and VanderLans's quirky layout coexist without one drowning the other out. Emigres typefaces were also used by technology-savvy designers such as April Greiman in order to indicate the excitement of the digital age even at a time when the resulting work was limited by the con­straints of early technology. Licko and Vanderlans recognized the technological limitations on their work, and embraced the role of digital pioneers, referring to themselves as "new primitives" who would be among the first to explore this new territory.

By far the most successful firm to come out of the digital revolution in type was Adobe Systems. With the introduction of its Postscript language in 1985, Adobe was situated to play a sig­nificant role in the design and distribution of type in the digital age. Postscript, which was soon almost universally adopted by typographers, established a standard for saving information about type in a digital format. Postscript was "device independent," meaning it allowed a designer to command just about any sort of output device, including 3,000dpi professional image setters of all sorts, to print type exactly as it was intended. It also eliminated the need for designers to deal with bit-maps, because it could render type in more sophisticated terms using outlining tech­niques based on Bezier curves, a type of cubic equation that underlies a great deal of computer graphics software. Postscript allowed Adobe to dominate the font business for a number of years, causing Apple and Microsoft eventually to join forces and establish the TrueType language as a competitive alternative.

As digital typography quickly evolved during the 1980s, especially following the release of Postscript, Licko continued to produce fonts that expressed the fundamental parameters of the technology with which they were produced. For example, in 1986 she released Modula, a face that consists of Emperor type that has been automatically smoothed in order to be printable at 300 dpi (fig. 9.42). In this manner, Licko's high-resolution Postscript fonts have the same underlying structures as her earlier bitmapped work; in the example of Modula, she has completely removed her own hand from the work, allowing the automated processes of a software program to become part of the creative process.

    By 1989, the success of Licko's designs both as type and in calling attention to the broader work of the Emigre studio, caused the partners to open up an independent type-licensing business. Their digital foundry grew throughout the 1990s, distributing a wide variety of progressive, edgy designs from around the world. As even the most staid corporations adopted novel design pro­grams during the ensuing years, Emigre's fonts went from being alternative and idiosyncratic to becoming an important part of the mainstream of graphic design. One of the most successful releases by Emigre during the 1990s was Template Gothic, which was designed by Barry Deck (b. 1962) and licensed by Emigre (fig. 9.43). Deck, who studied under the legendary self-taught designer Ed Fella, created in Template Gothic a sort of hybrid that mixes the wavering line of hand-drawn letters with the firm structure of a sans serif such as Helvetica. Another influence on Deck's design was a set of stencils he had seen at a local laundromat, making Template Gothic another example of the appropriation of vernacular culture into the art of design. Template Gothic was a great commercial success, perhaps because it displayed exciting, novel characteristics without looking so radical as to appear illegible or anti-authoritarian. Template Gothic is sometimes referred to as an early example of "grunge typography," a term that refers to the ragged, unkempt look of the letters; this term also connects the type with the graphic design of artists such as David Carson. In many ways, Template Gothic was for the 1990s what Lubalin's Avant Garde had been for the 1970s—a type that somehow caught the spirit of the time and subsequently developed a broad appeal across many segments of the design world.

The computer revolution in type led to new businesses set up in order to serve the needs of new technology. Bitstream, founded in 1981 by Mike Parker (b. 1929), Matthew Carter (b. 1937), Cherie Cone, and Rob Friedman, was one of the first firms to develop a library of digital fonts. While the company released a number of new creations over the years, its core business was the creation and sale of digital versions of typefaces with long established credentials—everything from Bodoni to Helvetica. Bitstream and other firms like it liberated type from being the exclusive property of production companies, so that the whole history of typography was available to anyone who bought a license and had the means to reproduce it. Now, typefaces could be shared among hundreds of firms, and the problem of propri­etary equipment that could not communicate with other systems was eliminated.

While it was common during this period for foundries such as Bitstream to release digital versions of historic typefaces such as Garamond, there was a similar move to release digital adaptations of more recently designed fonts. At this point, typefaces that were only a few years old had not been created on computers. For example, the postmodern typefaces originally designed by Brody for The Face and Arena had been drawn in the conventional manner, so in 1990 Linotype produced a digital version of a few of the most well-known faces, including Arcadia (fig. 9.44). Brody had designed Arcadia in 1986 as a banner for Arena magazine; it has a strong vertical emphasis, hairline cross bars, and an overall stylized geometry that is reminiscent of Art Deco fonts such as Morris Fuller Benton's Broadway of 1929. The new digital libraries created during this era vastly opened up the field of typography, so that novel, "experimental" types which had formerly been confined to niche markets could quickly find a huge commercial audience.

 

9.41 Zuzana Licko, Emperor 8 Typeface, 1984. Bitmap font.

9.42 Zuzano Licko, Modula, 1986. Bitmap font.

9.43 Barry Deck, Template Gothic Typeface, Emigre, 1989.

9.44 Neville Brody, Arcadia Typeface, 1986.

Postmodernism of Resistance

A signature facet of postmodern graphic design is the fact that it is often joined with social activism on the part of the artists. This represented a rejection less of modern style, than of the manner in which the design profession had become completely subsumed by conservative corporate interests, losing its roots in the radical politics of the 1910s and 1920s. This trend draws a stark contrast with the "depoliticization" that was characteristic of the International Style overall, and represents essentially a "repoliti-cization" of graphic design. This type of postmodern work is also another historicist impulse, as artists sought to intervene in political discourse in the same way that earlier generations (the avant-garde of the 1920s) had involved their profession in social action.

    Starting in the 1960s, a number of professional designers sought to reestablish the mass media of the poster as a vehicle for protest. This facet of postmodernism is sometimes referred to as the "postmodernism of resistance," meaning that the message presented in the work resists, or attempts to undermine, aspects of society that the artist wants to change. The revival of the protest poster came out of the politicization of European and American young people in the 1960s, especially university stu­dents, who were outraged by what they saw as racist, sexist, and class-based discrimination in their societies. Events such as the Vietnam War (1965-74), the student uprisings of May 1968, and the civil rights movement, galvanized an entire generation to work for social change.

In April of 1968, the civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968), was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The death of Dr King, a charismatic speaker who had established the viability of non-violent protest as an agent of social change, both horrified and energized his followers. A poster by Peter Gee (b. 1932) (fig. 9.45) consists of four repetitions of a photograph of Dr King in prison after he had been jailed for leading public protests. On the left side the photograph is printed as a positive image, while on the right side it is shown as a negative image, which creates the effect that Dr King is looking at himself. Additionally, the use of positive and negative images is suggestive of life and death. It was through the efforts of designers such as Gee that the photomechanical silkscreen process used here made the transition from being a strictly commercial process to one that was employed by artists as well. The text of the poster, with its repeated invocation of a drum major, is taken from a sermon that Dr King gave two months before he died, in which he expressed the wish that his eulogizer would "say that I was a drum major for justice."

Like the Dadaists of the 1910s, young people in the early 1970s felt that the ongoing Vietnam War had proved once and for all that Western society was immoral and illogical. One of the most shocking protest posters to come out of the antiwar move­ment was Peter Brandt's 1970 Q'. And babies? (fig. 9.46). Brandt, a member of the Art Workers' Coalition, captioned this photo by Ronald Haeberle, which shows the aftermath of the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American forces in 1968. The Art Workers' Coalition was a loosely organized quasi-Communist protest group based in New York City that had been formed in order to protest the exhibition policies of the Museum of Modern Art. In the poster, the horrific scene reproduced in the photo­graph stands out all the more because of the cold, clinical feel of the brief question and answer. The transparent, blood-red lettering hovers above the bodies. Posters like this one played an important role in the counterculture, as they galvanized young people who hoped to change society for the better.

    A number of British graphic designers in the 1970s took up the anti-apartheid cause, calling for an end to the profound racial discrimination practiced by the South African government. For example, the Sharpeville Massacre Tenth Anniversary poster (fig. 9.47), by Derek Birdsall (b. 1934), publicizing a weekend of public rallies in London, used a stark image of the slaughter in the same manner as Peter Brandt. The text at the top of the poster is made up of smooth sans serif letters arranged according to the dictates of the International Style, so it is more the intent of the poster rather than its aesthetic that distinguishes it from the modern movement. Both Birdsall and Brandt effectively revived the "atrocity image" as a tool of the counterculture, borrowing a strategy that had played such an important role in the government-sanctioned propaganda of the First World War.

Perhaps the most well-known graphic designer to take up social activist themes in the 1980s was Barbara Kruger (b. 1945). In the 1980s, after spells working as an art director and graphic designer for Conde Nast publications Mademoiselle and House & Garden, Kruger left the commercial design field in order to pursue her interest in art. She quickly developed a signature style that converted the language of advertising—dramatic photographs melded to strong declarative slogans—into a language of art and protest. In combining black and white photography with red and black rules and Futura bold italic lettering, Kruger found a means by which she could explore the dynamics of gender and social power in American society. Her chosen format mixes the tropes of print advertising with a color scheme—red and black—and a use of photography that immediately call to mind the avant-garde work of the Russian Constructivists. In that sense, Kruger's style is partly a postmodern appropriation of found photography and partly a historicist revival of the avant-garde. One of her most famous images, Your Body is a Battleground, uses a positive-negative dichotomy akin to that in Peter Gee's poster of Dr King to establish a central axis. The work was converted in 1989 into a poster publicizing a protest march in Washington DC (fig. 9.48). Previous chapters showed how established fine artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had ventured into the graphic design field; Kruger is exemplary of the postmodern trend whereby the process was reversed and graphic designers could successfully cross over into the realm of fine art. Her work managed to bring graphic design as well as political protest into the mainstream in the 1980s, establishing a new role for graphic designers in both the art world and in the field of social activism.

 

9.45 Peter Gee, Dr Martin Luther King, 1968.
Black photo sukscraen on black gloss paper. Collection of Olga Gee.

9.46 Ron Haeberle (photographer), Peter Brandt (caption writer), Q. And babies? A. And babies, 1970. Poster.
Offset lithograph. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

9.48 Barbara Kruger. Your Body Is a Battleground, 1989. Poster.
Photographic silkscreen on vinyl.
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica. CA.

Barbara Kruger. Posters.

Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger.