Stuart Bailey:The impetus was essentially negative, more about wanting to leave Amsterdam rather than live in New York; leaving a small city (or one that had shrunk after five years) for a big one, for the physical surroundings and atmosphere rather than work or community—though of course the reasons are always changing. Being typically English I never really made any headway with the Dutch language, and so was always on the surface of things, back and forwards between there and London or Warsaw, which is typical of the Netherlands as much as my laziness, because I don’t think it’s a very deep place. It’s a surface society, and as such not a very satisfying place. The international community I know live with a sense of passing through: it’s ephemeral. That was certainly true in my case and I just got tired of living in that frame of mind. The new place could have equally been London or Warsaw as far as I was concerned, but New York suddenly made a lot of sense as I already have a certain circle here—a lot of writers for Dot Dot Dot, generally ex-students of Paul Elliman at Yale. And most of all because the designer and writer David Reinfurt was incredibly generous and happy for me to work with and from his midtown studio O-R-G, like some guardian angel.

SB: Well in practical terms of working, the move is certainly backwards, or upside-down. One of the reasons for staying in Amsterdam was definitely that glut of famous arts funding which allowed me to work on more interesting and self-generated projects like Dot Dot Dot, Tourette’s or Franny and Zooey. That implies I apply for money, get it and stay there, but it’s less brutal and cynical than that. At best this 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, which I’m guessing I’m forcing myself into finding, as I’ve worked myself into such a narrow rut of work I’d accept—basically, independent self- or duo-initiated projects, usually books, with friends or artists whose work I admire. Other than the financial implications of such self-righteousness, I’m fine with this, but it’s difficult to say exactly what I hope to accomplish or where I see myself ending up. Fortunately I can at least make Dot Dot Dot from anywhere, so that’s the security blanket.

SB: That’s difficult because it’s just an instinctive phrase; a reflex rather than a plan. You know, when you keep repeating the same thing automatically to people without really thinking about it, leaving any original reason or meaning behind. This is where I find myself, sick of hearing myself saying it and trying to work out what it means in practical terms. It’s exactly the same as spending two years complaining about wanting to leave Amsterdam. Eventually something gives way and you do it. Geography or work, it’s the same thing. Again luckily, I have Dot Dot Dot to work this out with. All this is pretty abstract, I know, but you can find a more defined mapping of this disenchantment with graphic design by observing how the magazine has changed. There was a time after I first graduated from the University of Reading when I was completely immersed in graphic design—the subject, the history, the personalities, the movements and theories. 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. This problem of definition is the same as what happened to the word “modernism”. I consider myself a modernist, but with a lower-case m. in the sense of believing in appropriate, reasoned change. Yet most people consider upper-case Modernism, at least in art and design, as being a fixed, formal style. So I’m really just reacting in some knee-jerk way to the fact that both “graphic design” and “modernism” are so defined in the minds of others, and it makes it difficult to communicate; it’s so easy to be misrepresented. So I think what I do, and what the other people I work with do, is confusing, because it’s difficult to place. This is only really a problem when being represented by a third-party form like this interview. I mean, the work speaks for itself, or should be able to if it’s doing its job. So when I say I’m after an escape route from “graphic design”, it’s from a “graphic design” defined by those quotation marks, from the self-imposed limitations of what that implies (the self-important “industry” or “profession”, its awards and profiles and self-justifying theories …). I and everyone I work with just thinks of what we do as merely “work.” I studied typography and graphic design—that’s my background and it informs what I do—but now I make a variety of work, which may or may not come under those headings. It doesn’t start out being a big deal, it only becomes a big deal when a third party—it could equally be a student or a critic—turns it into a big deal.

SB: I’m glad you put that “practice” in front of “design”. That’s very astute, and the distinction is important. I don’t have any overreaching ideology of design for myself or anyone else. I appreciate intelligent, inspired work in any field. To narrow that down further would just be forcing false generalizations. I don’t trust ideologies, I don’t trust absolutes. But I do have an idea of how and where and with whom I want to work, and under what conditions. So yes, how I want to practice design, not how I want to design.

Is that a belief system? Maybe, but I’d never call it that. That’s part of my problem with writing around graphic design: it uses such grand, revolutionary, pompous rhetoric, and in most cases they just don’t fit the subject matter. I guess it’s because that sort of rhetoric—ideologies, systems, strategies, which seems to ape the language of war and social change—comes from a particular sort of art or architecture writing. When it gets filtered to graphic design, which is mostly everyday and ephemeral, it just doesn’t fit right. I find it a bit embarrassing That’s why most design writing feels like self-justification, which is just dull.

Yes, I’m pretty clear about the sorts of work I want to be involved in, and these are mostly in the arts with friends or people whose work I respect, usually involving the design of language in some capacity but not limited to any particular form. That doesn’t sound too much like an ideology, just some current preferences.

SB: Not explicitly. We don’t sit around thinking about it, at least not until someone like you asks us. The idea of us having an any kind of agenda is laughable. Even that semi-manifesto on the cover of issue one sounds ridiculous to us. We’re far too disorganized, detached and, thankfully, busy, to care about publicly responding to anything. The only time I ever wrote something explicitly about that for Emigre, Rudy Vanderlans told me it sounded like I was being deliberately provocative, trying to upset people and pick a fight. So I told him to withdraw it: that was a fault of my writing not conveying how I really felt, and I couldn’t work out how to do it any better. In that case, I’d rather shut up.

But implicitly, sure. 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. Does that sound like a contradiction? Maybe it is. Maxine Kopsa wrote something recently about the Werkplaats Typografie, where I studied, being defined by a paradox of being at once both self-righteously opinionated and self-effacingly skeptical.

SB: Although it’s true that I’ve always collaborated on maybe 80% of the work, those collaborations were never planned. I think it’s a combination of insecurity and boredom, or to turn those around, it’s about the strength of working alongside someone, both confirming or criticizing each other. After leaving college it’s a big shock to find you don’t have 10, 20 people looking over your back. I was part of a great year at college, we pushed each other with that healthy spirit of competition, and I think I just wanted that ever since—the company, conversation and tangible sense of progression that comes with working with someone with similar interests. You get to places you wouldn’t on your own. Will wrote to me recently that a real conversation is one where you genuinely don’t know what the other person is going to say next. I can usually only work with one other person, though. That’s my natural state—I like to share the responsibility, but I hate groups. I’m like that socially too—I can talk one-to-one, but more people than that and I just clam up.

SB: Well, “choose” is too strong. I know I keep picking at your questions like this, but I think it’s important to convey the vagueness with which these things occur. The clarity only comes in retrospect. At the time they happen without anyone really noticing, and if it works it inevitably carries on. Peter and Will were both good friends before we ever thought about working together. What’s really interesting are the different dynamics you have with certain people, and how you assume alternative roles. Ultimately I have an enormous amount of respect for and trust in both of them, and that’s why it works.

Through making Dot Dot Dot with Peter we’ve become easily discernible shapes. He’s responsible for the financial and organizational aspects, I take on the editorial and production aspects, we both take care of the content, and these are just logical conclusions of our backgrounds and personalities. He’s better with money and is technologically competent, while English is my first language and I’m a bit of a fascist with how the magazine looks. Dot Dot Dot ’s biggest asset is Peter’s magnificent easy-going Slovakian nature. The day he gets an ego is the day it all falls apart. We could never work on some other graphic design project together in any normal sense as out aesthetic sensibilities are pretty incompatible, even though we pretend we don’t have any.

So with Peter it’s like an easy jigsaw, but with Will it’s much more subtle and intricate, and harder to pull apart. The first thing we did together was a music performance. We spent an evening playing each other completely different kinds of music, then decided we should write something together precisely because we were so apparently incompatible. Something remains of this principle today: we share an attitude towards making work which attempts to engage with honesty and love. We come to this from completely different angles, but with a shared background growing up in 1970s/80s England, important for the shared sense of humor and a thousand unspoken references. The two best pieces of work of anything we’ve both done are the ones we made together, for precisely the reason that they could have never been made individually. I’m a big believer in those “third ways”, in qualities you can’t quite isolate. Tourette’s was a collection of found art writing we collected, copied and self-published; essentially just texts we’d copied for each other over a couple of years. The resulting combination is quite strange, almost surreal, but ends up following its own internal logic. Metropolis M is a Dutch contemporary art magazine we design with considerable editorial input. We set that relationship up to allow us to improvise on the edges of the regular content—literally line the margins of the regular texts with references to other interests. We usually consider our working relationship as me being a fast drug and him a slow drug, an upper and a downer, and the form of Metropolis M is a kind of calm in-between state, still wired but able to think and speak lucidly. In Dot Dot Dot 8, Kodwo Eshun wrote: “How fragile it is to form a group, any kind of group. How delicate the task of creating the conditions for a shared belief are.” and so it’s true: we’re on the point of collapse most of the time.

SB:Yes, with artists. But again, it’s always on the basis of friendships, though whether they end up still being friendships by the end is another question. When I made books with Ryan Gander, or Paulina Olowska and Lucy McKenzie, it was on the understanding that we were making a new piece of work—a piece of art, if you like, but again in my mind that’s stripped of all the heaviness and pretension that might imply. I just mean that if we make a book, poster, or whatever, together, they’re more than mere documents of some other piece of work that exists already. Previous work may be embedded in the new form, or may dictate it, but again it becomes a “third thing”, greater than the sum of the constituent parts. Something neither the artist or myself could have made independently. I think that’s different from a lot of artist/designer collaborations, where as far as either parties are concerned, the other half could have been anyone. I made the book Appendix with Ryan Gander, for instance, because we met and got drunk, he started to tell me stories behind his work, I suggested the anecdotes were a lot more illuminating than his gallery presentations and that I wanted to try and capture that essence. I took him a pile of favourite books—the Medium is the Massage, Ways of Seeing, and so forth—and he understood what I was getting at. From there we drank a lot of tea, argued for about eighteen months and ended up with a piece of work, a book, which was very important for both of us. The key factor was the trust that all our arguing was leading to a better result.

SB:The USC experience was great. I’d decided to stop teaching graphic design, partly through feeling a bit uncomfortable teaching something I had doubts about, as expressed above. I realized that what I’d ended up doing after a few years was largely trying to teach writing—I mean in the sense of “designing writing”—disguised as graphic design. That’s fine in itself; I think it’s a useful and relevant aspect, and everyone was always cetainly interested, but the problem was that the Rietveld Academy where I taught most is particularly international, with students from Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Estonia, Latvia etc., for whom English is always a second language, and I was spending more time dealing with the different levels of basic competence, which were nothing to do with designing at all. For that kind of class to work, I think, everyone needs to have a certain proficiency with the same written language, otherwise you can’t compare and contrast. I think such a class only really makes sense in a school in, say, Britain or the US, where the art schools are less international

This was the case at USC, but what was also interesting for me was that they were a class of art students rather than design students. Frances was offering her art students a short summer writing class, to help with their theses. So I was acting more as a graphic designer trying to teach writing, than a writer trying to teach graphic design. I gave a lecture comprising favourite pieces of work by other people, and it surprised me how it worked equally well as a lecture about writing as about design, then realized that’s precisely because all my examples were demonstrations of inseperable form and content, where the graphic and the textual are mutually supportive. The bulk of the class was based on Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style—the book where he rewrites one mundane paragraph in 99 different language styles of language. They each rewrote their own mundane paragraph in 5 new styles, which were drawn from a glossary of terms they’d compiled as a group over the semester, and I was amazed by the results. I’ll copy one of them in here, about a trip to the dentist:

*

MARXIST:
I went to the dentist for a teeth cleaning on Friday. Dr Nyong, although an immigrant, had taken American capitalism to heart, by charging a struggling artist $60 for a few minutes of his time. Obviously the lack of social and medical program meant the money would come from my own pocket money that had already been taxed ad nauseum, to fund wars against the economically downtrodden peoples of foreign countries, and to line the coffers of the soulless elite. I was given a 'red’ toothbrush as a parting gift. Ironic.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM:
DENTIST. POW --

           -----------------> WHITE HURTING

                                                   W H I T E.          60 dollars

KOREEUN

KOREAN                       [upside down] RED TOOTHBRUSH

DR. KOREAN DR.

HEROIC:
Marching purposefully into the enemy’s compound, your narrator forced the foreigner to accept his terms to beautify what God had so generously given him. Keeping a scarlet anti-cavity weapon as a trophy, said narrator marched out into the world.

XANAX:
This dentist is rad. He’s like Chinese or something, but he can totally clean teeth if you pay him. Sucks that it has to be cash though. I totally wanted to pay with my card. What’s up with that Bonaduce shit? Yeah, I got red hair—what are you, a genius or something? Fuck. This place is like on a liquor store. What’s up with this place? Oh cool, a toothbrush. Check out how red this shit is!

ENCOUNTER:
My God, it’s a dentist. Right on top of a liquor store, of all places. Hello, is that a receptionist I see? Our eyes met, and all she could think is 'Bonaduce’. The dentist is touching me, all over my mouth, in a painful yet professional way. We finalize our dance by exchanging gifts to commemorate our time together. I give she $60. She giveth me a toothbrush. The color of a valentine.

*

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.

The book with Frances is interesting for exactly the same reasons as the teaching: she’s a visual artist whose work is particularly literary, so again, the graphic and the textual are inseparable. It’s like looking at what I’m interested in through the other end of the telescope. Again, the goal is to make a piece of work neither of us could make alone. What’s also interesting is that it’s a graphic companion, counterpart, or sister publication to her first book, a collection of her writing. That’s a great limitation and starting point: we can immediately start with questions to do with the family resemblance—in what ways should it relate, formally, to the first book? What makes it a sister, brother, cousin, friend, or enemy? All the decisions are made in relation to the first. And strangely, it seems to be the year of sisters for me, as I’m about to make a second book with Ryan Gander whose whole premise is also related to the first. That was called Appendix, meaning the book as an appendix to his everyday practice. The second one is, of course, Appendix Appendix. The problem (a good problem) is to work out how the second is affected by the first, how it swallows it. I always relate these things to music, so it’s like thinking what’s the second album going to be after the rough debut; more studio time, more pressure, bigger egos, drink problems, etc.

SB:I’m sure it does, but it’s too soon to say exactly why. With Frances, as with Ryan, the obvious goal is to try and translate and condense the graphic work into the pages of a book; but there’s something else more subtle, to do with attempting to convey the more abstract qualities: the vibration, the after-effect, the unexplainable (rather than the inexplicable). In a way it’s doomed to failure, but interesting failure. I anticipate ending up with something else altogether, nothing to do with what you were aiming for in the first place. It’s about setting up certain conditions to make sure you get lost. What’s interesting with Ryan and Frances is that both are incessant thinkers, talkers, and humourists, but in terms of language they’re opposites: Ryan can’t spell and his sentences are grammatically fucked-up. He needs a filter, and that’s one of my jobs, to make him sound like he really sounds, not the pseudo-Ryan that comes out in his writing. On the other hand, Frances is a very accomplished and smart writer, more than capable of capturing exactly what’s inside her head. So at the moment I’m not sure what my equivalent role is. Logically, I suppose to fuck up the spelling and grammar.