Category: Writing

U & M-B

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JMB book cover

Nothing is perfect; perfect is nothing.

In his last year, Josef Müller-Brockmann gave a lecture in Mexico on his work. The renowned Swiss designer brought down the house with his final slide—which was blank. “This is my best piece of work,” intoned Müller-Brockmann. According to biographer Kerry William Purcell in his 2008 monograph, Josef Müller-Brockmann (Phaidon), the statement was meant, “as if to illustrate how the reputation of designers always reside in their potential, not their past realizations.” Purcell’s reading may be correct. And the declaration certainly wasn’t tossed off. For the second question of a 1995 Eye magazine interview (vol. 5, no. 19) at around the same time, Müller-Brockmann was asked what work he regarded as his best. The response: “The white reverse sides of my posters!”

That Eye interview was my first encounter with Müller-Brockmann’s own words on his art—and I was taken aback by the declaration. Perhaps it was only puckish humor on the renowned designer’s part—riffing off his reputation. And his answer can be interpreted many ways. Sardonic or not, I thought the answer spoke volumes—big, blank ones—about Müller-Brockmann. It managed to simultaneously claim as exemplary all his works and none—while tersely combining both humility and conceit. I felt it to be the definite statement of a quest not for an expression of the ultimate communication but of formal purity. It was also an astonishing irony. For Müller-Brockmann, the most articulate design was one that literally said nothing.

The incident related in Purcell’s biography hasn’t served to change that first impression. Müller-Brockmann’s oft-caustic self-deprecation offers proof of a sort for Purcell’s interpretation. That combined with Müller-Brockmann’s relentless search for the essential design expression. It’s a pursuit that encompasses and defines the designer’s life.

Purcell’s biography came at a particularly relevant time. Müller-Brockmann’s importance to graphic design and visual culture makes him a suitable subject of recurring study in any era. However, the 2000s saw a purposeful, large-scale return to the formal attributes of the “Swiss International Style” of design of which Müller-Brockmann was the leading theorist and performer.

Josef Müller-Brockmann has a defensible claim as the 20th century’s most influential visual artist. The formality he made iconic transformed visual expression internationally. Fine artists may have a hold on high culture regard but Müller-Brockmann is more widely disseminated within culture.

It might be said in any noted graphic designer’s biography that the subject’s recognition within popular culture falls far short of that figure’s impact. Biographies of designers remain rare, especially if not autobiographies. There’s a significant backlog of historical figures in design deserving of examination—and an over-abundance of monographs on contemporary practitioners early in their careers.

The lives of creative people aren’t conducive to affecting biographies—or shouldn’t be. If the artist is at all dedicated to the craft, time should primarily be spent working. Pretty thin drama. Any escapades must occur during off-hours—with questionable relevance to the work. For designers, sample extracurricular activities typically comprise of drinking, drugging, wrangling with clients, browbeating students, and giving innumerable far-flung lectures extolling the supremacy of one’s concepts.

For an ascetic like Josef Müller-Brockmann the going’s even tougher for the biographer. A fitting chronicler of this subject may be a writer conversant in subtlety and minutia—wringing maximal meaning out of minimal gestures. Nicholson Baker, author of U and I, an intensive-obsessive appreciation of John Updike, may be the man. Perhaps there were bacchanalian excesses that go undocumented in Josef Müller-Brockmann, but it seems unlikely. The latter three spectacles are, however, well represented.

With his biography, Kerry William Purcell has turned in a well-researched and respectful product. Properly, the volume is geared toward the design neophyte: many details will seem obvious or repetitive to a design-aware reader. This is unavoidable as Müller-Brockmann’s ideas are embedded within design’s DNA. As with his posters, Müller-Brockmann honed his doctrine through years of rigorous explication and is left to quote extensively from Müller-Brockmann’s autobiography.

Purcell’s role is then to provide historical and professional context. Additionally, he broadens Müller-Brockmann’s own self-abridged personal and creative narrative. With the expanded portfolio, it’s illuminating to have rarely-seen illustration, exhibition, and set design works. Unsurprisingly, things the artist dismissed as unskilled or unacceptably subjective are lively and deserving. While no patch on the marvels to follow, they deserved recoup as more than curiosities.

When the famed concert posters take stage, the book sings. For the connoisseur, their splendor is self-evident. The work embodies its proof, confirming any rationale offered for their being. Time (and replication) dulls awareness of how startling these posters were (Purcell provides the obligatory complaints of baffled concertgoers)—and still can be. Though Müller-Brockmann scorns designers resorting to “splash,” in their own way, his masterpieces spatter abundantly. Subject matter, artistic intent, and an ideal historical moment produced aesthetically profound pieces that manage to be both intellectually contemplative and visually stunning.

Purcell stumbles over his own exposition of Müller-Brockmann’s accomplishments. These passages are frustratingly abstract and dense. Purcell’s analysis is in keeping with the Modern form-based, dialectical structure claiming objectivity. The works, however, are no less open to interpretation as any other broadside. Purcell’s lone step outside the Modernist frame is a fleeting and obscure statement that “a final meta-language is forever out of reach.” Otherwise, “universality” is presented as a tangible, obtainable state. A design’s “essential character” is discernable and inarguable. Though delivered as self-evident, these assertions are mysticism alchemized into fact.

An authorized biography is an unlikely showcase for a substantive critical examination, especially a contentious one. However, some questioning of Müller-Brockmann would be welcome, if not obligatory. For instance, Purcell chooses to ignore that a substantive challenge to Müller-Brockmann’s agenda came from within Swiss design—in the form of Wolfgang Weingart. This neglect is simply bad history and suggests Purcell is engaged in hagiography.

Through doubt some objective affirmation might be provided for the designer’s claims. Instead, the book obediently supports the patronizing and apocalyptic tenor of Modernist designers: all other methods are shit and civilization hangs on each font choice. Müller-Brockmann’s tacit dismissal of anything non-Constructivist and a preening self-deprecation quickly grows tiresome.

The strength of Müller-Brockmann’s philosophy is its internal consistency and rigorous application. But its essential flaw is that while regarded as objective and neutral due to its mathematical basis, Müller-Brockmann fails to acknowledge that this status is still but one option amongst many. Many geometries are employed to describe our world, each mathematical and objective, each internally consistent. If you stay within a system, you get the right answers. You just can’t cross between or combine geometries.

If you accept the premise of Müller-Brockmann and his conceptual adherents, his system alone is rational. Any other design sensibility is irrationality. However, the reality is that there are separate rationalities—literally, different perspectives. Other systems exist that are just as scrupulous and purposeful. Müller-Brockmann believed he was describing the world in his philosophy. What he crafted instead was another simulacra, another metaphor.

As did many Modernist designers of his generation, Müller-Brockmann thought he pioneered a formality outside of time. Instead, his principles were wholly of the times. The formal foundation of Müller-Brockmann’s philosophy is the grid: “In his own words, the grid expressed a ‘professional ethos,’ supplying the “designer’s work…[with] a clearly intelligible, objective, functional and aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking.’” The grid’s ordering function and representation of societal memes is accurate. But the latter aspect was far from fixed throughout time.

As described by Jack H. Williamson in “The Grid: History, Use and Meaning” (Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, The University of Chicago Press, 1989), and at greater length by Hannah B. Higgins in The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009), the grid structure has a long, complex history. The arrangement has been imbued with and promoted a variety of meanings. Müller-Brockmann’s utilization was distinctly of its time. History belies the transcendent virtues claimed for the grid.

Purcell emphasizes Müller-Brockmann’s ethical profundity but its foundation is shaky. In the book’s introduction, Müller-Brockmann is proclaimed a trailblazing advocate of “socially accountable design,” decades in advance of “the flurry of books on ethical graphics published in the past decade.” Is the rationale for this decree the designer’s decades of work for altruistic or socially active organizations? Was it his stance against rampant consumerism and the reification of corporate design practice? No and no. It’s because Müller-Brockmann was a tireless advocate of design “where the form should reflect the content and the content the form.” In other words, he relentlessly, unashamedly, and daringly championed…himself.

As a practitioner, Müller-Brockmann was conscientious and honest. But his vaunted moral stance was based on his rigid adherence to a formality he considered preeminent for any and all clients. This was no more than the rest of a field condemned as being critically short of such values.

Indeed, the design profession is portrayed as an expanse of conscienceless hacks. This is an unconscionable slur against a multitude of practitioners past and present also possessed of integrity and commitment. These postures demean countless designers and Müller-Brockmann’s achievement. Instead of diminishing Müller-Brockmann’s accomplishments, a broader critical examination could illustrate its true dimensions.

As is the fashion with most designer monographs, other eminent practitioners are given cameos to affirm the subject’s supremacy. Purcell goes top shelf, trotting out Paul Rand at various points to embrace Müller-Brockmann as his peer. (To drive the point home, Rand is given the book’s final words, eulogizing Müller-Brockmann with a “geometric analogy.”) Müller-Brockmann manages to one-up the American design idol, wresting an IBM book commission away from Rand, who, while “supposedly very unhappy,” is magnanimous over a loss on his home turf.

Subsequent events have not been kind to Müller-Brockmann’s status as seer. His predictions are marked more by wishful thinking than a clear understanding of culture. His forecast (in History of the Poster, 1971) that “factual knowledge and powers of judgment and discrimination based on credible information will impel advertising in the direction of objectivity” may still be realized but has, so far, been wildly off the mark. Müller-Brockmann’s own objective advertisements—such as a late 1950s campaign for Nestlé dried milk rendered in his distinct austere style—seem like Print magazine “Humor Issue” parodies of the International style.

Purcell glosses over inaccuracies, continually pressing on to the next project. Design seems almost to die along with Müller-Brockmann, just as no creditable work (outside of his protean peers) is produced during his life. A meaningful appraisal of Müller-Brockmann’s legacy would observe and speculate upon the revival of the austere Swiss style in the 2000s—as most celebrated in the work of Dutch design group Experimental Jetset. On its face, this revival may be evidence of the enduring quality of Müller-Brockmann’s approach. But in the statements of the many young European designers reanimating the austere approach, there is an ambient nostalgia.

They hearkened back to a previous era, insisting upon the continued relevance of this purest expression of modernism. And there was none of Müller-Brockmann’s authoritarianism. Theirs is a deliberate, conceptual quotation of Müller-Brockmann and his influence. Contemporary designers have steered clear of proselytizing the style with the zeal—and fundamentalist fervor—of Müller-Brockmann and his peers. Plus, the revivalists demonstrably embrace pop culture, channeling the Beatles, Stones, and Sonic Youth to mellow the stark mood. (Rock the grid!) The upstarts’ verbosity about their concepts equal Müller-Brockmann’s, yet, conversely, the new products often are more interesting to think about than actually look at.

It remains the special hell of Modern designers such as Josef Müller-Brockmann that their overriding narrative has been overridden—and overwritten—by Post-modernity. While the young Moderns invoke the idealism at the core of the drive to essentialize design, it’s also—if not more—all about those cool forms. So it is for everyone—especially Josef Müller-Brockmann.

The great designer was committed to his design. That passion was his kink, the excess Purcell’s book clumsily details. If design is like a relationship, it was, with Müller-Brockmann, a three-way—him, his design, and you. And it’s your role—proscribed and passive—to observe mechanically, and feel abstractly.

Note: This is an expanded version of the review “Embedded in Design’s DNA” that appeared in Eye vol. 16, no. 64, summer 2006.

The World on Yr Cornershop

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CornershopCover
Imagine walking the streets during a bazaar, street fair, or some other festive gathering where celebration mixes with people’s everyday activities: strolling, shopping, errands. Perhaps you’re in or near an urban park during a festival or parade.

Music animates the air: blaring from boom boxes, spilling out of open doorways, buzzing from loudly tuned iPods, spouting from amps broadcasting musicians on an unseen bandstand; the mixture resounds and rebounds off surfaces and buildings near and far. Blend into this canorous mixture an undercurrent of the speech and song of the milling public, numerous conversations, announcements, ads, chants, shouts, cries, calls. At first, you’re not quite paying attention, simply letting the sound wash over you. But gradually, perhaps even suddenly, a realization occurs—you’re listening to a single, spontaneous song.

At first, the atmosphere seemed a formless audio mélange of diverse musical styles: rock, pop, funk, punk, folk, psychedelia, soul, R&B, reggae, AOR, MOR, electronica, house, gospel, hip-hop. Now, as you walk, the resonances of this locale have transformed into an album. The disparate styles flourishing around you have somehow strangely, wondrously come together. No matter how far or in which direction you walk, or whichever new style rises in the mix, the songs hold true. The underlying rhythm constantly transmutes, threatening dissolution but is held together by one prominent feature. Carrying above the street rhythm is an ambrosial woman’s voice, guiding you through the changes. You don’t know the language in which she’s singing but are transfixed nevertheless. Staggered at first, you start to dance.

This is how I visualize Cornershop’s latest album, Cornershop and The Double ‘O’ Groove Of (Ample Play). For me, a new Cornershop album is a cause for celebration, first because of their infrequency: six records in 20-ish years, seven if you count the 2000 “Clinton” side project Disco and the Halfway to Discontent, plus an assortment of EPs, singles, and remixes. Conveniently, the music contained on each album is an ideal soundtrack for festivity, no matter your mood or melodic persuasion. And Cornershop is the quintessential celebration of popular music through both space and time. Its albums sound like nothing else out there—because like no one else, Cornershop sounds like everything else out there.

Cornershop and The Double ‘O’ Groove Of is another singular and captivating turn in a career defined by defiantly unconventional moves. In the context of typical music world hype, that’s not saying much. Claims that a band commits some form of artistic transgression are commonplace, if not obligatory, for street cred. The rock-n-roll-rebel meme still rules, even as the music has fragmented and mutated. The contravention of choice is to cross over, leading to a surfeit of style sippers and genre skimmers.

Yet even against this backdrop, Cornershop quietly—in that they receive nowhere the amount of press as lesser nonpareils—manages to be truly inimitable in their sound and approach to music making. Adventure and invention abound in their records.

The short history of Cornershop is of a raucous British guitar-based agit-pop group that quickly transmutes into…well, everything. The core of its changing membership has been college chums Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres, with Singh serving as producer, principal songwriter, and usual lead vocalist. Its greatest intrusion into popular consciousness was their 1997 LP When I Was Born for the 7th Time and its smash single “Brimful of Asha.” The record was a landmark of sonic invention and adventure, through the astonishing assortment of musics incorporated into its mix, to stretching the definitions of what constitutes a “song.” Tracks that on first listening seemed throwaway trifles or a clashing blend of elements became revelations of insistent, compelling cross-cultural grooves. Singh’s sonic imagination seemed limitless, especially when he quadruple-downed on the follow up (and Cornershop’s masterpiece to date), 2002’s Handcream for a Generation.*

For its efforts, Cornershop has dutifully received credit for clearing a “World Music” path for acts like M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend. However, more than bringing acceptance to World Music themes, Cornershop does the greater service of demolishing the brittle, patronizing label. In a relentlessly-cited era of globalization, Cornershop stands as a healthy example of pandemic perspective and possibilities.

The challenges the band presents to popular music—its audience and industry—are as audacious as those they assume for themselves. Foremost is a determination stated by Tjinder Singh, “The only thing that all our records have in common is that each one tries to sound utterly different.”

Creatively, there isn’t a more formidable task a band can assume, requiring the broadest musical palette imaginable and the ingenuity to use it. However, that’s nothing compared to the considerable commercial risk inherent in Singh’s declaration. It negates the possibility of establishing a signature sound, a major aspect of economic viability. You might tinker with your sound but not overhaul it wholesale. Due to its frequent guest vocalists, you can never be sure you’re listening to Cornershop unless Singh’s voice is the lead. Keeping an audience guessing if it’s even you quickly leads to the question, will you have an audience? A creative risk without a marketing risk isn’t a risk.

Not only do Cornershop albums each have distinct personalities but are unpredictable from track to track. And then the songs can swerve off on idiosyncratic angles. Amongst it all are offbeat but unerring production touches (sound effects, dialog, children’s choruses, samples). It’s a testament to Singh’s talents that the records spin true instead of flying apart in all directions. On its own, Cornershop is the ultimate mixtape.

Cornershop and The Double ‘O’ Groove Of continues to make good on Singh’s resolve. Its particular trait is extending two signature vocal aspects of the group’s albums. A particular highlight of each has been the Punjabi track, voiced by Singh. With Double ‘O’, the entire album is sung in the language—but by a featured singer. Right away, this is a distancing aspect for mainstream and indie audiences. (Though not unprecedented—and intriguing when predecessors are considered: see Los Lobos’ La Pistola Y El Corazón.)

As front man, Singh has demonstrated no vocal ego, passing the mic to an assortment of guest vocalists. Double ‘O’ spotlights the pseudonymous Bubbley Kaur (a moniker adapted from a lyric of Handcream for a Generation’s “Wogs Will Walk”), who also collaborates with Singh with the songwriting. Traditionally (and contractually) vocals have been the defining element of popular musicianship. Switching what’s typically a fixture into a variable evinces a significant dedication to making musical choices over personal aggrandizement.

“Featuring” is a standard hip-hop credit line as performers bolster one another’s image. With Cornershop, frequent guesting establishes them as more a community than “group,” not so much a band making music than an idea of music making. Collaboration is an vital, ongoing vital aspect: Allen Ginsberg (yes, that Allen Ginsberg), Rob Swift, Paula Fraser, Dan the Automator, Noel Gallagher, Otis Clay, M.I.A., Soko, and Fatboy Slim, are a select few of a panoply who’ve collaborated with or contributed to Cornershop.

At the heart of Double ‘O’ is Singh’s desire to “mix western music with Punjabi folk in a way that wasn’t crude.” “Western music” encompasses a multiplicity of stances and Singh doesn’t skimp, offering ten stylistically dissimilar tracks, unified in accomplishment. As always, Cornershop evade pastiche and formalist exercises.

“I’ve always thought of Punjabi folk as a precursor to hip-hop,” Singh said recently in a interview about his songwriting, “It’s beat-based, storytelling, parochial — what’s going on around a village. A lot of it is to do with functions – weddings, meetings. Other bits are more melancholy — what has happened to her relatives, or the relationship break-ups. But it’s often light-hearted and upbeat.” This succinctly summarizes the textures of Double ‘O’. The traditional Indian rhythm that kicks off the album’s the sassy opener “United Provinces of India,” quickly meshes with funky guitar and scratchy breaks.

As with all Cornershop albums, you never know what’s coming up next—and how Singh and company will make it work. There’s the stately harpsichord that punctuates the soul saunter of “Double Decker Eyelids;” the rollicking piano-driven, clattering timber percussion of “The Biro Pen;” “The 911 Curry” brassy blasts handing off to analog synth etudes; the sci-fi twiddling synths that open the hyperactive sax bounce “Supercomputed;” the regal trumpet samples framing the leisurely march of “Once There Was a Wintertime;” the folksy acoustic guitar picking pop of the joyous closer “Don’t Shake It.” Oh yeah, there’s even a sitar snippet plinking through “Double Digit.”

The binding force of the set is the varied beats and drum cadences that serve as propulsion, bridge, and soloist. Locked in rhythm are similarly jiving and melodic basslines. But the essential presence in the Double ‘O’ fusion excursion is Bubbley Kaur — Beatrice to Singh’s Dante.

In its aural flavorings, the album acts as intersection and realization of intent of two landmark records, 1968’s The Beatles and the 1981 Brian Eno/David Byrne collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The “White Album” is the determinative manifold album, where The Beatles indulged every production and stylistic whim in one sprawling 2-LP set. Double ‘O’ offers the same capricious transitions and escapades.

Eno and Byrne famously — and, at the time of its release, notoriously—layered appropriated vocals over their composed rhythm tracks. Similarly, Singh has disconnected the lyrical “meaning” of Bubbley Kaur’s songs from their musical accompaniment. The results didn’t always go down well with her. Kaur speaks of being taken aback even by their initial 2004 effort, the marvelous double single “Topknot”/“Natch.” Fortunately, she came back for more shocks.

Singh declines to release even the Punjabi lyrics to the songs, wanting to direct focus to the pure emotive quality of Kaur’s voice. By this, the vocal approach comes closer to puirt a beul—“mouth music.” Other touchstones can be found in British pop with Cocteau Twins or, in an American avant-garde mode, Meredith Monk. While I’m an admirer of the elliptical but evocative lyrics typically found on Cornershop albums (Singh hands-down contrives the best song and album titles — sorry, Morrissey), the results here sing for themselves.

Cornershop’s music is a studio-only construct. It’s wholly designed: constructed, sampled, and assembled rather than traditionally performed. The image Ben Ayres provides of its making sounds more like a designer at work than gigster: “Tjinder would be working like a mad professor in his studio on the tracks when I’d turn up….it was pretty intense.”

Music that’s entirely a recording studio creation has been with us for decades. Yet for being engineered, such productions are no less immediate, fresh, honest, and moving—emotionally and physically. Popular music has, of course, been patently constructed since the advent of modern recording technology, notably so in the 1960s. The “studio as instrument” concept recognizes this reality. However, simply having an arrangement enters music into the “designed” realm, far ahead of recording technology.

The sampling and scratching methods prevalent in popular music can provide insightful models for designers struggling to navigate notions of originality and authenticity in a contemporary creative context. Design, which suffers scorn as an inauthentic, derivative form, is arguably culture’s most vital, engaging visual form. Discussing how an artist utilizes the methods is more relevant than if they pioneered a technique. Constructing originality out of samples is counter-intuitive, and for some, flat wrong. But graphic designers should be contemplating contemporary music’s processes to lend context to their practice. (And give a shout out here to Nick Edwards’ dapper packaging designs for the band).

Cornershop is also instructive in the ongoing cultural negotiation of creative identity (i.e. amateur, professional), and the implications of D.I.Y. In interviews, Singh and Ayres have insisted that they aren’t musicians. It’s no disparagement of their instrumental abilities to respond amen. Their true status is more significant: music-making people. This subtle distinction has profound implications on one’s creative identity—what you’re willing to do and how you carry yourself. It’s the difference between a job and a calling.

Tellingly, music is the most common subject of Cornershop songs, more than is exhibited in its song titles (“Born Disco; Died Heavy Metal,” “Brimful of Asha,” “Music Plus 1,” “Slip the Drummer One,” “Button Down Disco,” “Hip-Hop Bricks,” “Wop the Groove,” “Who Fingered Rock n Roll,” “Soul School,” “Non-stop Radio,” etc.) Cornershop’s amazing reach is due to Tjinder Singh’s status as musical omnivore and inveterate record collector. “Brimful of Asha” puts the famed playback singer out front but is a sly paean to vinyl. The tune’s a global jukebox inventory of musicians and record labels, where Marc Bolan gets name-checked. (Another memo to graphic designers: check out the delightful display of faux single bags in the song’s video.)

It may be another ultrafine distinction to pull the thread of music makers compelled by and reimagining their personal record collection. Here, Singh has affinity with James “LCD Soundsystem” Murphy in self-deprecation, no-BS attitude, disdain for rock star trappings, and dance floor apotheoses. Both readily cite their influences and downplay their talents. Murphy’s self-portrait looks a lot like Singh: “I don’t believe I’m this wildly original individual. I don’t believe that I’m astonishingly charismatic and really need to be heard as an individual voice. I do believe I take music very seriously. I do believe I am a very good manipulator of sound and I’m very interested in how sound affects my body and I do believe that is relevant to how it affects other people’s bodies.” In interviews, Singh and Ayres are similarly forthright, wry, and yet idealistic about their enterprise. Their attitude is a refreshing departure from the ongoing, overserious rock star affectation and angst that culminates in little more than “look at me!”

Cornershop matter-of-factly demonstrates the unities and common causes in music. They expose the rhythmic and melodic roots and graft new branches. All actions that unify are welcome, especially if we can dance to them. Proclaiming music to be a universal language is a platitude with merit—with the provision that music is a universal language of music. What audiences like in music is about more than the aural quality. For good and ill, music is bound up with self-identity. The niche fracturing of the marketplace has contributed positively to the dissolution of labels (my iTunes tells me Double ‘O’ is of the “Pop” genre while its predecessor Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast is “Alternative.” How wrong, how right.) But those numerous hybrids all have adherents who won’t hazard crossing a line.

It may not be the most representative sampling of Cornershop’s potency in boundary bounding but my 11-year-old daughter hears a lot of its music driving around with me. She’s always seemed to prefer signing along to the Indian-language tracks. I’ll dial up Double ‘O’ for the additional entertainment of hearing her invented Punjabi harmony. Kaur won’t be denied a treasured spot in your brain, given the chance.

In the circumstances of its making and the evidence of the results, Cornershop grants us music that’s affirming and expansive. The members live in Britain but are indigenous in music. Their particular music may provide creative types some guidance in their necessary obsession with globalism and crossing cultures. Then again, it may not. We’ll just have to settle for some wildly ingenious, infectious tunes.

As its ultimate challenge and promise to listeners, the When I Was Born for the 7th Time track “Good Shit” could be Cornershop’s manifesto. They’re words I live by when contemplating music (and graphic design). In the verses, Singh first offers us a challenge:

I want each and all to switch your tiny mind on
I want each and all switch on your tiny mind

before he slips smoothly into the chorus and its earthy, optimistic affirmation:

Cause good shit’s all around good people
Don’t let it get you down, good people
Good shit’s all around, it’s all about, it’s all around

And, good people, the best shit is found at Cornershop.

*I allege this with great trepidation, as Singh recently wrote on Facebook: “Always been of the belief that when the Handcream LP gets recognised then the group would finally be in a position to stop.” So fans, please do not like this particular album too much.

A Portrait of etc.

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When I was in third grade, I resolved to win an award in my school’s next Art Fair.

From an adult perspective, this wasn’t a particularly challenging an ambition. But as a child, you work within the goals of your immediate world, and this was mine. Saint Joseph’s School was a small Catholic grammar school in a small Massachusetts town. The competition, in terms of numbers, wasn’t great—tens of my peers. It also wasn’t fierce: most of the other kids were far less interested in or attentive to creative pursuits. But there was a measure of accomplishment involved. This was before our current era of universal affirmation (“Truitt Intermediate School, WHERE ‘EVERYONE IS A STAR’”). The nuns—using their own particular measure—were making decisions based on merit, not equally sharing out the gratification.

The resolution was made in the wake of my younger (one year and seven days) sister receiving an award in that year’s fair. It wasn’t that I disparaged Karen or her winning entry—a portrait of flamingos composed in tempera paint, cotton balls, and macaroni. However, my older (one year, eight months) brother Kevin had claimed a blue ribbon in last year’s exhibition. With two siblings being honored for their art, a reputation and expectation seemed to be in play. I drew, painted, and crafted as much as they did. It was important that I establish my own talent.

I experienced typical sibling rivalry; likely exacerbated by the proximity in our ages and names. Two years behind my sister was another brother—Keith. I needed affirmation before he came along. This rivalry would extend into high school. Following right behind my older brother through the grades, I continually suffered the identification as “Kevin’s brother.” In it, I interpreted a diminution of my own identity, especially when it came to art, writing, and musical tastes. It doubly burned because I was following his lead. We all were. And it certainly wasn’t coincidental that all four of us K children (I had two more brothers whose names began with different vowels) went on to art school—but at different institutions.

But in this instance, I didn’t really consider myself in competition with my siblings, or my peers. I was proving something to myself—that I could win an award if I wanted to. Only by having the prize matter could I demonstrate that it didn’t matter to me. I was content doing my art and it was almost an inconvenience to be aware of the Art Fair and that recognition from others was possible—or desirable. My mixed feelings about achievement and acknowledgment didn’t dissipate with time. In my senior year of high school, my artwork was selected for a statewide scholastic art fair to be held in Boston. When that event was cancelled due to the Great Blizzard of ’78, I was mostly relieved.

As I walked through the St’ Joseph’s classrooms where the art was displayed, I took special note of the prize winning works. I examined them dispassionately, looking for commonalities. My own art wasn’t distinctly different in medium of choice—crayons—or in childhood subject matter. A drawing I can still remember today featured a quarterback with arm cocked back to throw a pass during a game. Though I was a pro football fan, the artwork wasn’t meant as strict documentary. I was loyal to my local team (the then Boston Patriots) but portrayed Green Bay Packers in action. Their vivid yellow and forest green uniforms were more satisfying to represent. And the team’s stylized “G” within an oval enchanted my graphic imagination.

In retrospect, my interest in these aspects seems a precursor to a future in graphic design. That I eventually entered the discipline’s orbit suggests a proof. However, I regard it more as simply reflecting my media environment. It wasn’t until early in college that I’d travel to Boston and, for the first time, visit an art museum. Abandoning the crayons, I’d soon take to a new graphic obsession: replicating in colored pencils the map of Massachusetts found in the World Book encyclopedia. It was the particular, peculiar graphic elements of maps that attracted me—I wasn’t engaged or interested in cartography per se. Eventually, this activity was subsumed in my consciousness to reemerge in my 20s when I initiated a portrait series that employed the flat colors, patters, and structure of atlases.

My scrutiny of the Art Fair prize winners yielded actionable information. Subject matter appeared to be the key. The majority of awardees featured either: 1) crowds of people, or 2) religious themes. The popularity of the latter characteristic was obvious, while the former was a matter of brief speculation on my part. All I could presume was that—as I could testify—drawing people was hard. Drawing lots of them demanded special effort. Uncomfortable with the subjectivity required in judging art, perhaps the nuns were seizing on this as an objective determinant of superiority.

For the next year, I set myself to the task of fashioning artworks to this calculated brief. And when the next Art Fair was held, I claimed a first prize ribbon. Today, I have no memory of the winning work. That I might have at least created a Sermon on the Mount scene as an entrant—to cover my bases—strikes me as an adult confabulation. Too good of a story. But it sounds a truer note that I fail to recall my first art honor because the work didn’t mean anything to me. It was a means to an end.

What I swear is an accurate recollection is what I first thought to myself as I stood before my beribboned artwork. It stuck because it was the earliest expression of my ambivalent attitude toward public affirmation. I’m always surprised that I declared it so young: Now I can get on with my own work.

Adventures Close to Home

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my teaching notebook

I recently attended the AIGA design education conference New Contexts/New Meanings at North Carolina State University and participated in the “Social Economies: Enterprise and a New Cultural Geography” topic group as a co-author. While I enjoyed the discussion, I’m uncertain if I ever truly understood the premise of the debate—or contributed anything of value. However, concerns were raised that are of constant interest to me: community and engagement. Toward the end of the session, I had some thoughts that seemed applicable to the course the conversation took. Since time constraints didn’t allow me to test their relevance with the group, I offer them here.

Collaboration, community, and the necessity to “sensitize students to other cultures and socio-economic realities” were focal points of the serpentine discussion. The first two concerns have status as cultural buzzwords. Yet, they are real issues. Encouraging students to believe they are part of something larger than themselves and to work with a disparate group of people toward mutually beneficial ends is meaningful on immediate and abstract levels. The most immediate is that students must actively participate to enjoy a functioning and rewarding class. After that is the practical necessity to work on class projects as a group if so assigned. Abstractly, the class becomes a representation of society overall, and a place to model behavior in the various established and ad hoc communities that life presents.

In the conference session, different strategies were put forth to foster collaboration and cultural sensitivity in classes. One co-author described an ideal and envious team-taught course he’d been able to create at his institution (somewhat on the down low) that brought design students together with those from other disciplines to work on projects. Another proposed immersing students in other cultures directly: through field trips as far abroad as possible (going to China would be great but, failing that—Chinatown). Fostering sensitivity also extended to actions to generate awareness of the implications of design artifacts. Students should be informed in depth on the manufacturing and distribution processes of said artifacts.

These directions have obvious practical problems—obvious if you’re in academia, even if not. For instance, my attempt to fashion a course with a professor in Marketing years ago couldn’t get beyond the speculation stage due to that department’s work load/contact hour requirements. Those rules ensure professors are actively engaging students (well, that we’re put in contact with students, anyway) but squelch collaboration across disciplines. Some institutions are confronting these bureaucratic problems but academia isn’t known for a sprightly adaptation of the new. Field tripping is an institutionalized academic activity but comes with economic limitations for students and school.

It may be no great insight that as the group negotiated how to foster collaboration and community—and the novel structure of the conference itself, I increasingly saw our immediate activity as model and metaphor. The entirety of the ongoing effort to establish a design educator’s community is an enterprise of “new cultural geography.” The membership of just this one conference topic was multiracial, multiethnic, and multinational. The institutions we represented were similarly diverse in location, size, constitution, and resources. We possessed a diversity of opinions on various aspects of the specific topic and the many facets of design and teaching overall. Our conferences are our collaborations toward an intangible “product”—substantive teaching.

How this realization translates into lessons for the student is through transparency and sharing. For most students, education is a “black box”—its inner workings a mystery. I’ve always dished to my students about the behind-the-scenes activities and concerns that inform education—such as explaining the hiring, evaluation, and tenure processes. These are often my most popular lectures. Like it or not, students learn about the personal, professional, economic, and institutional pressures that shape what happens in the classroom. I agree that it’s advantageous to alert students to how things are made to the end of having more thoughtful and socially engaged practitioners. And along with paying a visit to the offset printing plant, I try to pull aside the classroom curtain and demonstrate how we work the levers of teaching.

I’ve also made it a point to inform my students about my conference experiences, just as I encourage them to share their working methods and inspirations. It surprises a significant number of students that their professors are studying and debating methods of teaching. Many might think we just show up and start talking (something I will do on many occasions but is another story). I hope my conference reports provide a direct proof that a broader and deeper discussion about design—deeper than its commercial application—is possible and burgeoning. And that education is a dynamic process that isn’t performed upon them—they must participate.

This transparency and sharing won’t magically create the desired community and awareness. But in our urging of students to engage in life-long learning, it shows we’re practicing what we preach. And that before we go looking far and wide for exotic cultures to immerse students in, we look right in front of us, and describe the cultural geography of where we stand.