Shortly after composer John Cage passed away in 1992, a series of posters appeared on the streets of Toronto to commemorate the event. Designed by Bruce Mau, they were predominately empty sheets of paper. A sliver of an image running along the side depicted a blurry figure in mid-stride, and a small-ish line of text read something like: “there is so much to do, it is hard to know where to begin; begin anywhere”. Upon first seeing this poster in a friend’s living room, I was initially impressed by the piece’s obliqueness and starkness. But over time, what stuck with me was the choice of material: blueprint paper — probably intended to fade away in the open air. (bad pun alert: de-compose)
‘Inherent vice’ is the art conservation term used to describe materials lacking certain archival properties. Robert Smithson’s earthworks, Albert Pinkham Ryder’s home-made paint additives, Mark Rothko’s overthinned color washes, and Julian Schnabel’s paintings with glued-on crockery all have an inherent vice in their materials. Yet, there is an additional beauty to those pieces which comes from their fragility. Have you ever found yourself at the corner of wabi and sabi when confronting the odd faded poster or musty, yellowing book? This beauty is more about the object’s passage through time rather than the clever hand of its maker.
Design is full of examples where the decayed and decrepit have been mined for imagery: the ring wear of old LPs appropriated for new CD packages; the artfully torn pieces of paper which suggest passion & spontaneity; aged paper scanned for backgrounds; or digitally inserted film scratches and hand-held shakiness in motion graphics. Ultimately, such strategies are artifice and pastiche. The resulting piece may look like trash, but either through client needs or the designers’ desire for eternity, it resists being a sublime trash. Its entropy is worn as a costume.
We create ‘ephemera’ — so why it is rare to see designers fully utilize an ephemeral aesthetic? More common in the artworld —the Nouveaux Réalistes, Fluxus, Happenings, etc — the intentional employment of a material’s inherent vice can add a rich ‘time-released’ dimension to one’s work.
unfortunately, it's getting harder and harder to actually do some of these things anymore-they no longer exist. dyelines are no longer ammonia based, light sensitive, there's no pmt (not sure what you call it in the u.s.-the big old camera you'd wind up and down to make typesetting smaller or larger) cameras anymore, and that was a wonderful thing to make work with-especially if the developing fluid and paper were old or had been slightly exposed to light. i think i bought the last bottle of developing fluid in london (perhaps the u.k.).
i've got old heat sensitve fax paper based things that seem to have changed every time i look at them (about once every year or so)-there's a pmt print i made about 15 years ago that has a red that is still deepening.
found an old roll of dyeline prints the other day, and they're going, paler still paler, although they're not out in the light.
instead of an understanding that all things must pass, the ever-more deeply conservative world of design seems to be entrenching in the belief that the more fixed things are, the more sure (smug) things are.
some ways of working have disappeared over the last five years or so-a tiny amount of time-and it's certainly not in the service of (however dubious, or spurious) progress. more like a regression, a retardment.
On Mar.23.2004 at 04:51 PM