February 22, 2006
Stuart Bailey
Speak Up, a design website, yesterday posted a lengthy interview with my friend Stuart Bailey, a graphic designer in the loosest sense of the term. (Link found via Design Observer.) Stuart is the editor and designer of dot dot dot, a magazine to which I am contributing an essay, as well as one of the designers of Metroplis M, a longstanding Dutch art magazine. Here are a few excerpts.
On moving to New York:
At best [the Dutch] economy maintains a healthy tradition of support, manifest in the healthy presence of young one- or two-person practices, an abundance of small-scale, experimental, low-attendance events, with a budget embedded in every other funded project for printed matter or public art, etc. That’s nice to be around and involved with for a while, and I’d be stupid to think I’ll be able to keep up the sort of work I’ve become used to in New York, which is the opposite situation of large studios, an established art scene directed by money, and little official support for marginal activities as independent publishing.But in the end, of course, there’s also way more crap produced over there, a lot of waste of materials, time and energy, with people taking advantage of the easy ride. It breeds a certain lethargy, and a certain lethargic kind of art and design. There’s exactly the same imbalance of good/bad rigorous/slack relevant/irrelevant inspired/uninspired work as anywhere else in the world—but in far greater quantities. Like swallowing too much sugar, you can only take it for so long before you get sick, and that took me five years. So, as the cliche goes, the head-on brutality of the situation in New York comes with some sense of relief, and I think that’s why I’m here. I’m also looking for an escape route from graphic design.
On his definition of graphic design:
I’ve tried to explain elsewhere how I don’t really see graphic design as deserving of being treated as an independent, navel-gazing discipline. It exists entirely in relation to other subjects. There’s nothing mysterious about this, it just took me a while to realise it. To look at it from another angle, though, I suspect what I’m really against is what that term “graphic design” has come to represent, i.e. synonymous with business cards, logos, identities and advertising, and, again simply put, those are things I’m just not interested in. To me that idea of “graphic design” is as far removed from my interests as being a milkman or a lawyer. In fact, I’d rather be a milkman.
Explaining the editorial vision of dot dot dot:
During one of those frequent resurgences of manifesto-fashion we’d be asked “what do you stand for?,” “what’s your position?”, and it seemed obvious to us that whatever we publish is what we’re interested in. So that’s what we believe in, if you like; it would be more accurate to say we publish material we think worthy of sharing, and that includes the way in which it is presented.
Lastly, summarizing an exercise conducted with students at USC:
The implication of this in terms of graphic design is that any piece of work could be designed in (at least) 99 different ways, using a graphic vocabulary rather than a textual one (or, obviously, both). I’m interested in learning, or teaching, how to be able to recognize and use those different styles in a manner appropriate to each new piece of work, starting from zero every time. That’s exactly what graphic design and modernism mean to me. The sort of work I like and aspire to make is based on this pluralism, intelligently drawing from the whole spectrum of style rather than sticking to one slavishly.