I have always loved your name, Experimental Jetset. I know the origin to be a Sonic Youth album, but I’m curious how your opinions and conception of the name may have evolved over the last 11 years.
It’s funny, when you choose a name, as a studio, you have no idea you’ll be stuck with that name for the rest of your career. And while you are evolving, as a studio, the name remains the same. So yeah, it’s an interesting question. Indeed, the relationship between a studio and its name is a constantly shifting one. First you love your name, then you hate it, and then you realize you better embrace it. Then there are times that your name seems to exist completely independent from yourself: whenever we read the name ‘Experimental Jetset’, it usually takes us a while to realize people are actually writing about us. It sometimes feels like a completely different entity, something that exists almost separately from us.
Sonic Youth has always been one of our favourite bands, so we’re still very happy that our name specifically refers to them. At the same time, we realize that the ‘Jetset’-part in our name might come across as a bit tacky, in a sort of ‘lounge lizard’ way.
But then again, there is something to be said for tacky, silly names. Think of the name ‘the Beatles’: an extremely silly wordplay, in no way describing what the band later grew into. Or ‘the Beach Boys’: great name for a mediocre surfband, but not really fitting for Brian Wilson’s brilliance. But at the same time, these names are excellent, exactly because they reveal the beginnings of these bands. It ties these bands to their roots, which is great, we think. Likewise, the name ‘Experimental Jetset’ says something about our own beginnings, whether we like it or not.
Well, ‘Total Design’ is the first name that springs to mind. In many ways, it’s the ultimate studio name, isn’t it? It’s so brutal, so merciless… It would be impossible to pull off a name like that in this current era. In general, people have become a bit too squeamish to handle such an absolute, authoritarian gesture, we guess.
As for contemporary names, we really like ‘A Practice for Everyday Life’. It’s so smart to use your studio name as a semantic bridge between the ideas of Michel de Certeau and the practice of graphic design. What we also really like is the fact that the acronym is a word in itself: APFEL, which is German for apple. And what’s cooler than an apple?
Some of our former students just started a studio called ‘Our Polite Society’, which we think is a very good name as well. And we recently came across a studio called ‘The Luxury of Protest’, which is also quite cool. There are actually loads of very interesting names. ‘The Designers Republic’, ‘Graphic Thought Facility’, ‘Life of the Mind’… It’s impossible to mention them all.
It’s actually a very good subject you brought up. In ‘The Arcades Project’, Walter Benjamin wrote that “through its street names, the city is a linguistic cosmos”. So maybe we can regard graphic design as a sort of cityscape as well, as a linguistic cosmos of studio names. We very much like this idea.
Khoi Vinh wrote an article not too long ago about the state of honest criticism in design. At one point in the article he asks, “are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having?” I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this issue. Do you find there is a dearth of honest and effective design critique happening in the field? How does your studio approach criticism when it comes to your own projects?
This theme, of criticism and graphic design, is a subject that we find very interesting. Although, we have to admit, the way we approach it is quite different from the approach you suggest in your question. We’re much more interested graphic design AS criticism: the idea that a piece of graphic design is a manifestation of a certain way of thinking, a certain way of ordering the world, and that, by functioning in that way, that piece of graphic design is effectively critiquing the dominant way of thinking, the existing way of ordering the world.
Or, in a similar way, we also very much like the fact that two different posters, hanging next to each other in the street, are in fact critiques of each other. To refer again to ‘The Arcades Project’: at a certain point, Walter Benjamin describes the flaneur, walking around in Paris, being confronted by the posters, signs and slogans in the streets of the city: “Under these conditions, even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word) puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing next to it. In this way, every truth points manifestly to its opposite. Truth becomes something living; it lives solely in the rhythm by which statement and counter-statement displace each other in order to think each other”.
So that is the sort of critical discourse that we find most interesting: the dialectical exchange that exists between designed objects. We’re much less interested in this whole sphere of graphic designers publicly criticizing and attacking each other on weblogs and forums.
In a way, we even think that this brand of online peer-to-peer criticizing might be hurtful to what we see as the true critical potential of graphic design. In our view, aesthetic languages should contrast as sharply as possible. Two posters, hanging next to each other in the street, should be as different from each other as possible: the viewer should resolve the tension between these two posters him- or herself. The tension should not be prematurely resolved in online forums, in discussions between designers; it should be resolved in the head of the viewer, by a ‘third party’, so to speak. Only then, to speak with Benjamin, “truth becomes something living”.
We understand this probably sounds pretty abstract; it’s hard for us to explain it in a better way. But we can give a very personal example. We grew up in Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam. We can still vividly remember the contrasting aesthetic languages that were surrounding us towards the end of the 70s, in our pre-teenage years. On the one hand, buildings were carrying signs designed by typical ‘late-modernist’ design groups such a Total Design. Those same buildings also carried punk graffiti, band names, anarchist signs. Precisely because these two languages contrasted so sharply, they collapsed in our heads, and we were able to formulate a ‘third position’, a sort of synthesis of two opposing languages. And it is this synthesis that became the foundation of our own graphic language today.
Now, imagine that the ‘late-modernist’ designers, and the anarcho-punks, would have resolved that tension already for us, in some kind of premature discussion… Where would that leave us? There would have been no tension for us to solve, no synthesis to strive for. There would have been no room for movement at all.
We think this kind of online peer-to-peer criticism is counterproductive on a very practical level as well. In our view, what this whole subculture of small, independent studios really needs is a sense of solidarity. It could do with less bickering, less backstabbing.
We think this whole international scene of small studios is really special, and we should try to protect it as much as possible. The independent studio is pretty much a threatened species. The catastrophic influence from branding-, marketing- and PR-people becomes more and more visible every day. Large advertising conglomerates are taking over the kind of territory that was usually covered by smaller, more cultural studios. The world has gone mad, and even the smallest client suddenly wants to work with pitches and competitions, because they believe this is the way it should be. We really think that, in the middle of all madness, we should stick together. We should use our combined energy to defend this whole subculture of small studios. We shouldn’t be putting energy in complaining about each others work. “I would have kerned this logo in a completely different way”… well, of course you would have kerned it in a completely different way. But what’s the point moaning about that in public? We all have different graphic languages; that’s the beauty of it. Why spend so much energy on what are basically small stylistic differences?
We did enjoy Khoi Vinh’s article a lot though. It’s interesting to notice how people perceive things in completely different ways. At a certain point, he writes that “it’s not hard, in design, to reside in a frictionless environment”. We couldn’t disagree more. In our own day-to-day practice, design pretty much equals friction. As a studio, you constantly have to expose your work, protect it, defend it, alter it, repair it. You have to deal with clients, curators, editors, printers, etc., and on top of that, you have to deal with a design industry that can be quite hostile towards smaller studios. It’s pretty much an uphill battle. So the last thing you need are your peers, attacking you from behind.
It’s also interesting how Khoi Vinh, elsewhere in his essay, makes the connection between criticism and honesty. While, in our personal experience, there is a really strong link between criticism and dishonesty. A lot of the people who have publicly attacked us (calling us lazy, cynical, false, nihilistic, whatnot), have later contacted us, to ask us if we wanted to contribute to their design book or little art project, or if they could drop by at our studio, to visit us. In their mails, some even described themselves as “big admirers” of our work. This phenomenon has always struck us as very bizarre. Publicly they attack you, but privately they admire you. To us, it shows that criticism is often a pose, a facade. It’s certainly not always honest.
The above remarks refer pretty much to peer-to-peer criticism. The professional critics, well, that’s a whole other can of worms. Don’t get us started on that. For now, it might be enough to quote Brecht, who described critics brilliantly: “They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable (…) They want to play the apparatchik, and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat”.
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