This next topic I’m tackling is sorta big. In fact it’s so profoundly influential (yet completely ignored by graphic design history as it is taught) that I’m splitting it into three parts.
1. DÉTOURNEMENT (THE BEGINNING OF THE END)
The French practice philosophy like a sport. Their intellectually ferocious takes on how to view reality and live a good life have managed to cripple many generations of world thought with their convoluted searching. The two world wars fought in Europe (most devastatingly in France) left several entire generations decimated and the survivors in a quandary over what to think about existence: “What happened?” “What the hell do we do now?” “What the fuck wazzat?”
So it stands to reason that a number of the young intellectuals in post-WWII-era France would think it over and come up with some remarkably sordid and glum new twists on the idea of our shared reality. One such thinker was a fella by the name of Guy Debord. He was part of a group of anarchistic-leaning thinkers that drew off earlier avant-garde/rabble-rousing European art groups (particularly the Dadaists). Debord’s ideas formed while he was a member of the Letterists, and were formally articulated as a philosophy in a group he called Situationist International.
In a tiny nutshell, the basic idea behind Situationism (simply put) was that human society and assumed reality were predicated on the “shared culture” inherited through many generations of tradition. The reason we ended up in those devastating wars was because the CULTURE itself was corrupt and pointless. In order to reach the desired nirvana, one had to somehow DIVORCE themselves from that shared culture. Only then could we see existence clearly and live accordingly.
Just how does one remove culture from our shared existence? Well, you do your best to destroy it. Such an act was known in their circles as détournement. Simply put, you did your best to tear culture down in any way you could. Reduce it to a rubble and then whatever emerged was truth.
Debord went about this in many ways. He wrote manifestos so fucked up due to the rejection of any rules of organization that they were virtually unintelligible. His writings were intentional chaos “designed” to confuse and alienate and force the reader to withdraw and reject. Keep in mind, he was a still a French intellectual, a man of letters. He was educated and refined. But he preached total chaos.
One great early example of his attempts at détournement was a film he made in 1952, when still a member of the Letterists. This film, called Howls for Sade, was publicly screened in full only once. It caused a riot. The “movie” was one hour long. The first 30 minutes consisted of completely blank white clear film with four voices reading quotations and lines from other films. The screen was utterly white light and blank (except for occasional pieces of dirt). Once the dialog ended, the screen turned completely black—the film strip switched to solid black for the remainder of the hour (not that anybody made it all the way through). Ouch.
The audience of sophisticated art snobs and refined culture mavens completely lost it. They threw their chairs at the screen and started destroying everything around them in disgust and anger. Debord was personally attacked. The police had to arrive and quell the disturbance.
This total in-your-face reject of a film caused an angry chaotic reaction from the audience. Simply put, it created a “situation.” This situation was a total breakdown of societal norms and a “natural” reply of violence to grab for order and freedom. The “shared culture” literally flew out the window. The audience was “free.” The use of “the spectacle” as a major tool to create a “situation” was part of the ingrained actions conjured up by the philosophy of Debord’s Situationist International group that he formed in the late ’50s.
That gives you an (admittedly rough) idea what the original Situationist master philosopher was about. His followers, those who really “got” what he was doing, followed suit and swarmed to his side becoming a sort of mad “gang” of “Situs.” Roving alone or in packs around Paris, getting completely wasted (an induced state of “non-culture”), and smashing cultural objects, while shouting doctrine and intentionally confusing provocative slogans.
Pieces of art were made that were crazy stupid “anti-art” (drawing from Dadaist tradition) to provoke outrage. One artist created a book that had sandpaper covers. The idea was that the book, when placed on a library shelf among other books, would destroy the books next to it as it is removed and replaced on the shelf, thus destroying “culture.” The image above is a recreation of such a book used as the program cover for a Situationist retrospective at the ICA gallery in London in the late ’70s.
Granted, these situations were largely symbolic and isolated little events and objects. The original Situationists really had no idea how to bring their thinking to a larger stage.
That is, until a group of university students in Paris in the mid-’60s became enamored of Debord’s and the Situs’ radical ideas and began to incorporate them into their counterculture politics. These students began campaigns of anti-establishment street politics that appeared to us Americans as echoes of our own riots of the same period. But it wasn’t the same at all.
Where our American student riots were fueled with anti-war, anti-bigotry, anti-establishment politics, the French students were coming from a somewhat different perspective. The intellectuals of the scene preached “anti-culture,” and meant to see the entire fabric of French life torn asunder. They began to bring down the old world and it’s institutions. Whatever happened, at least it would be “free” and pure.
They began by doing acts of “détournement,” like placing signs in shop windows that would simply say “Special today—Everything is free!” The resulting onslaught of common shoppers grabbing everything and running out the door created the perfect situation. It destroyed the established order of doing business and caused total collapse instantaneously. These kids were smart.
One wonderful style of propaganda that emerged was the defacing of billboards and advertising with disruptive new ad slogans (“The death of art spells the murder of artists. The real anti-artist appears.”). Another favorite was the simple task of taking an existing popular comic strip (that staple of modern culture) and replacing the words in the balloons with dialog created to expose the falsity and utter lies of modern reality. This sort of activity and the wonderfully graffitied slogans (“Keep warm this winter—make trouble!”, “Save petrol—burn cars!”, “Believe in the ruins”) created the social heartburn that only needed a spark.
It came to an ugly head with the 1968 student riots in Paris. We Americans tend to think that these were riots like we had at home—unhappy draft dodgers and scruffy malcontents letting off a little steam. But the French riots were a bit more disturbing—they were Situationist riots. The goal was to bring down the entire culture of France. They lasted over a week. Today, we still look at the photographs of burned overturned cars littering the famous fragile streets of Paris with more than a little awe.
In the early 1970s a snotty, brilliant and charming British student traveled to Paris to do a study paper on the Situationists. He immediately hooked up with an old friend from back in London who had become deeply involved in the Situationists as more of a real-life activity. The student was gathering ammo, while the “artist” he met up with got actively involved with the actual creation of propaganda and artwork and street actions in the post-’68 Situationist movement.
That was how Malcolm McLaren partnered up with Jamie Reid.
2. CASH FROM CHAOS (LEAVING THE 20TH CENTURY)
Malcolm McLaren was a hustler. Despite all his pretensions, he was at heart a bone-hard capitalist (read: “greedhead”). When he came back from his sojourn in studying the Situationists, he immediately walked away from his schooling and opened a haberdashery. Malcolm was also a bit of a dandy. He liked snappy clothes and fancied himself clever in the preparation of fashionable ensembles.
He opened his shoppe and put his fashion designer wife (the soon-to-be-legend Vivienne Westwood) in charge of the new clothing designs. They started by selling vintage and repro/retro “Teddy Boy” gear. The Teddy Boys were an early British rockabilly subculture group that prided itself on natty threads and a cultish love of stupidity. Malcolm fancied them as a sort of British Situationist “no-culture” ideal. Besides, they looked cool. Malcolm always seemed to confuse rebel fashion with real rebellion.
Soon he tired of that and moved into S&M gear (so naughty!), eventually calling his storefront, at the dismal end of hipster King’s Road, simply “Sex.” It attracted the predictable array of underground fetishists, but soon a new sort of disaffected down-and-out group of kids began to hang out there, mostly because they liked the 45s Malcolm played on his jukebox. He befriended the kids and began to try to figure out ways to take financial advantage of them.
Soon he had a small retinue of thieves and street urchins that were a regular part of his circle of entertainment. One kid, Steve Jones, had a knack for stealing musical gear and other luxuries from tour buses and vans. Before too long, a small group of losers were hashing out a few Top 40 cover tunes in McLaren’s back room with the stolen gear. This inspired Malcolm to have visions of world domination of the pop charts.
Steve Jones was a lousy singer, so they needed a new front man. A street acquaintance was suggested and that was how John Lydon (a.k.a. Rotten) came into the picture. John was a lousy singer, too. But what he lacked in talent, he more than made up in ferocious nasty personal style. The guy was a downright charismatic spit-flying shithammer. Malcolm liked that sort of thing. He could make money by creating a spectacle. Kids like spectacles. Besides, it made for a classic “situation,” ya know?
All the elements were in place to take over the teen world: just a little dance band out to destroy everything. Malcolm had visions of creating social chaos with his little gang of Frankensteins and getting a hit record and selling lots and lots of clothes. He really thought that would be the result.
He needed some “branding” (which is a term that didn’t emerge until decades later). Maybe some posters to advertise the concerts they were desperately trying to arrange. Malcolm accessed the urchin kids hanging around his shop to do the work. Why waste good money on hiring a pro? Why not just do it yourself?
Helen Wellington-Lloyd (a.k.a. “Helen of Troy”) gave it a go. Her initial efforts at creating posters for the band were so abysmally incompetent that it became a new style on the streets of London virtually overnight. She used Xerox and letters cut out of newspaper and pasted it all together. The images were often S&M materials from mail order catalogs. That is how she created the actual logo for the Sex Pistols.
Malcolm was taken by how “Situationist” those graphics looked. So he got in touch with his old cohort Jamie Reid, who was also back in London. Maybe Jamie could add that controversial ignition point. Create a spectacle. Make it SELL!
Jamie Reid had come back from his trip to Paris as a total anarchist/Situationist convert. He began working at a print shop and started a small neo-situationalist printing press called The Suburban Press. He filled pages of newsletters with manifestos and diatribes and crummy anti-graphics and chaotic imagery.
When McLaren hired his buddy Reid to do the “advertising” (such as it was) for his little band project, Jamie went for the throat. He saw an opportunity to spread the word about his passion. He simply took much of his old design and art and propaganda work from his Situationist screeds and street speech broadsheets, then turned them into “ads.”
So many images that Reid initially created as Situationist-style bumper stickers, graffiti, flyers, et al. suddenly were selling rock & roll to the kids. He simply changed out “culture” for “Sex Pistols.” Yet, the message stayed intact.
“Just buy this music and help destroy the world!” What could appeal more than that to frustrated teenage Brits?
This image I post is possibly Jamie Reid’s most iconographic piece. This 45 sleeve is cheaply produced and even more cheaply created. I once had the opportunity to hold the original paste-up for this piece in my hands. It was in a cheap broken picture frame (no glass). It had been sitting in the open somewhere for a very long time and it was gritty with dirt. Much of the newsprint used for the type was extremely yellowed. The edges of the paper in the paste-up had begun to peel up and the dirt and grime was caught under the edges. It was perfect!
When this record hit the streets, the image managed to offend as many people as the music itself did. It was a foul frontal assault on the established culture order of English society. It was banned outright, yet it was the number one selling record in the country.
The public reaction to the song paired with this image was a virtual declaration of war on all things “Punk” in general and the Sex Pistols in particular. A perfect trifecta! A “situation” created through “the spectacle” and then the collapse of social order! Bingo! It was far more than Malcolm had bartered for (he just wanted money). The finest aspect of Jamie’s work was that it essentially removed the craftsmanship from design. The unwritten goal of his thinking was to put himself out of business. His style was crude “anti-design,” where you used garbage as a resource and made the project all by yourself. There was no need to hire a designer or an artist (or a musician or even instruments). Just DO IT YOURSELF (DIY). When culture is erased, we all become creative by definition. Any level of competence was perfectly fine. It was an extremely radical design perspective in a world dominated by corporate control.
When the kids began to see the message that Jamie Reid’s design was screaming at them, they understood and they acted. What followed was a radical redirection of modern graphic design. It was actually a sort of “cultural revolution.”
3. CHARLIE DON’T SURF (DIY AND ANTI-GRAPHICS)
To be totally fair, even though Jamie Reid’s Situationist appropriation may have been the LOUDEST voice out in the wilderness, it wasn’t alone. One of the things that has always impressed me was how this new style of anarchy-as-design seem to erupt all over the world within a few months of the media first noticing it. It was like a plague of great intensity. The hipster underground seemed to suddenly do a violent shift on its axis. It was a firestorm.
In reality, this new baseline culture rebellion had been going on for a long time. In a way, people like Debord were only (in retrospect) seemingly documenting what was already long in progress. In cities all over the world, this new way of “speaking” visually was well underway. It was as if teen angst and snotty brat behavior had become the new high standard of Western civilization.
The accepted narrative states that this new “Punk” style emerged in New York City and then exploded out of London onto the world stage. The truth is far more complicated. I’ve found obvious and direct examples spreading in places as far-flung (and ignored) as Detroit, Seattle, Austin, L.A., Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, DC and so on over a full decade before the big worldwide spectacle of the Sex Pistols and the onslaught of Jamie Reid. Even in England, the visual primal scream of Reid’s graphics were not all that new. It was just media-splattered in a HUGE way, thanks to the genius of those assholes in that little band.
The first punk poster in Seattle (the first classic full-DIY cruddy pasted-up trashy punky-style street poster I’ve ever found) was produced by Tomata Du Plenty a full year or more before the Sex Pistols’ first show anywhere. It gets extremely difficult to credit Jamie Reid for that influence, since it wasn’t even there yet....
The work of Genesis P-Orridge had already established a new visual culture style with his “industrial” stylings. The philosophical position in a nutshell was that the machine of culture dehumanizes the individual to the point where we are really soulless cogs in a larger devouring contraption. And this is a GOOD thing. The graphic language of the culture was an embrace of cold, sterile corporate graphics depicting the worst horrors that modern man can create—genocide, death factories, serial murder. It was a celebration.
Also, out bouncing playfully around the edges of the mainstream graphic world was the trickster godhead of Barney Bubbles. His “irreverent to the point of ridicule” design work for record labels like Stiff and F-Beat, and for acts like Elvis Costello, DEVO, and The Damned utilized errors, confusion, inappropriate retro appropriation, and a desire to constantly push a stick into the eye of the larger mainstream “market.”
The “art school” misfit student intelligentsia were about the only people out there disenfranchised enough to actually pay attention to what was going on in British design, though. Being fashion-hungry and bored out of their skulls with “no future,” they very quickly embraced the thinking of these three individuals (along with scores of other and more obscure designers and artists). Because the three major voices seemed so similar in message (try to spot the defining difference between Industrial and Situationist—it’s not very clear to the average viewer), the young avant-garde hipsters automatically absorbed and fused it all together.
The earliest voices that emerged from this new underground graphic design dialog seemed to come from up in northern England. Designers like Peter Saville saw Genesis and Reid and reduced the DIY graphic design language down to a bare minimum statement, but an extremely frigid and emotive statement. His work for bands like Joy Division echoed fatigue and depression that immediately struck a cold note in the British youth market.
The most important initial conduit for the radical ideas of Jamie Reid’s culture annihilation and Genesis’ celebration of this annihilation and Bubble’s playfully nasty monkey-wrenching was a young student named Malcolm Garrett.
He started work on his friends’ pop-rock/punk band, The Buzzcocks. His approach was identical to the band’s and the non-commercial thinking of the moment: he immediately designed a corporate logo, a corporate color scheme and approached the product design from a severely stilted position.
Garrett seemed to embrace the idea that selling product was the single most important thing (typically trained mainstream advertising thinking, right?) What was different was that he totally embraced the band’s (and Reid’s) idea that if they all managed to sell a lot of product, it would spread the new culture style and hasten the end of Britain. Basically, “Buy this product and you can help destroy the world.”
They went so far as to produce carrying bags and shrink wrap for the record that only sported the new logo and a huge catalog number (bigger than the brand logo)—“Order even more and help destroy even more.” The perversity of such a concept was so sharply contrasted to the standard order of things that it virtually became a new demographic position. “Chaos from cash,” as it were.
Even though Malcolm Garrett’s early thinking was the first real purely evocative pop cultural resonance of the Situationist destruction of culture, the rest of the new British punk scene erupted with such a fury that it became impossible to ignore. Everything that this youth market desired was suddenly ugly, vicious and pushing an exclusive love of itself bordering on psychosis.
Within seemingly weeks, this new voice echoed across the planet. The idea that you didn’t need the larger world, if you needed anything you could simply do it yourself, took in a stranglehold. Self-produced ’zines erupted across the planet in the smallest possible markets. Thousands of new punk bands toured across the world focusing on the new small markets revealed by the existence of these ’zines.
Since the mainstream corporate world saw no profit in this new “fad” (since the commercial failure of the New York punk bands), new local and otherwise ignored bands had as much exposure in these ’zines as the more renowned touring bands. The result was the do-it-yourself stitching together of an alternative world economy culture.
This new culture had a huge economic and societal reach. They were the children of the hopelessly self-absorbed corrupt baby boomer generation—the second wave. The explosive growth of this new culture was dizzying. The boomer generation still hasn’t quite been able to understand that it even exists.
Dozens of new voices emerged from a second wave of British graphic designers, doing posters and record covers and publications (Neville Brody, Vaughan Oliver, Terry Jones, etc. etc.) They took the laughable idea of “new wave” graphics as promoted by the business world and shoved it back into the dark alternative culture of their reality. We saw them because we looked and liked what we saw. What we didn’t see were the thousands of other less spotlighted graphic designers popping up everywhere at the same time. It was like that firestorm had become truly international.
In America a hurricane of new snide voices exploded onto the scene: Gary Panter, James Stark, Shawn Kerri, Frank Kozik, Steve Albini, Winston Smith, Gibby Haynes, even myself. So many new people, way too many to start listing. Let’s just say that the new design voice became legion. The majority of those voices were anonymous one-off DIY designers just doing what came naturally. Taking graphic mainstream advertising promo and shoving it back in your face as a weapon.
This became a noticeable problem for the mainstream. As these new radical thinkers used their graphics as ridicule and weapon, the effort was made by the corporate interests to cash in and usurp what was making money (usually their only focus). So they absorbed the new music and design and art and renamed it something less violent and ugly: “New Wave.” The nomenclature was an echo of a past hip period of rebellion in French cinema. It also sounded so ‘’fresh” and safely familiar. Perfect for exploitation.
The mainstream execs dressed up these new creative voices in bright cheerful colors and made everything sound and look so darn cute and peppy. Even talented designers like Paula Scher and Tibor Kalman stumbled into the trap, thinking they were doing a new safe and intelligent and hip graphic style, never realizing they had invited plague into the kingdom. The prestigious conservative design firm of Pentagram went so far as to hire Peter Saville, since his work looked so conservative and clean and tidy—at least to the uninitiated.
The underlying theme of culture destruction came along and kept chipping away at everything it touched. Saville didn’t last very long at Pentagram, who afterward seemed old and tired and exhausted.
At the same time this bizarre culture war was unfolding, a new technology came onto the graphic design market: the computer, a solid gold hammer. Eventually it allowed literally anybody to become a functional graphic designer. Any level of competence was acceptable. You no longer really needed to hire a graphic designer to do your graphic design—you could learn the software and just do it yourself.
Does any of this sound familiar?
The blind and fearful knee-jerk embrace by the design industry of this new technology sowed the seeds for its own decimation. And it played directly into the hands of these snotty anti-mainstream DIY punk kids. Before too long, the old school was erased and replaced by an army of untrained, unskilled labor all doing adequate versions of graphic design—all working in the latest hip new looks, no depth, no understanding, but they really understood “cool.”
David Carson was a surfer. At one point he was ranked sixth in the world. He also taught grade school. He was still a bored outsider, but he was a hip hustler. Through surfing, he landed a job as the designer/art director of one of the premier skateboard ’zines on the West Coast: Transworld Skateboarding. His work there was a mess. It was all over the place, but the guy had an eye, and INSTINCT that served him incredibly well. Some people are just born this way. Carson definitely was.
The work he did was drawn from every strange dented subcultural world he encountered: surf, punk, skate, thrash, psych, hot rod, new wave, and even mainstream graphic design. His style became a huge polyglot of application and appropriation. Best of all he understood the attitude, the style of the big three: Reid, P-Orridge and Bubbles. I assume he knew their work and ideas. But I really have no idea.
What Carson started to do was throw everything INTO the bath water WITH the baby. He took errors and mistakes and used them. Then he began to replicate the fuckup as a tool. Upside down, grainy, crooked, illegible, chaos, it’s all good.
He and I had a short correspondence when he started his next primal magazine, Beach Culture (it lasted only six issues, but changed the design world). At one point, I was looking at a particularly disastrous two-page spread that was an interview with David Lynch. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The style he used appeared to be “classical editorial design layout.” Closer inspection revealed that everything was way way wrong. The biggest type on the page was the page number, which was in the middle of the page. The photo was blurry and a rusty staircase covered Lynch’s face. If there was a headline anywhere, I couldn’t find it.
Most of the two-page spread was empty, except for a few almost randomly placed columns of small type. Worst of all, one column of text type literally “jumped the gutter.” Now, this was a saddle-stitched magazine. You CAN’T DO THAT! They can’t hold the registration in the bindery process of folding and stapling. It DOESN’T work! It turns out off-register and illegible. Yet, there it was. It was so fucked up.
In a letter, I challenged him on that. He giggled (or so it read) and he said, “Yeah, I know. That’s why I did it.” He then went on to tell me about a list he had from somewhere, titled “The rules of graphic design.” In it, there were listed a couple of dozen concrete rules of graphics that are never violated—rules like “never mix typefaces on a single page,” “never obscure your message,” “never jump the gutter.” He then said he hung that on his studio wall and tried deliberately to break as many of those rules as he could on every single piece he did. He was doing anti-graphics!
Beach Culture was David Carson’s primal work. The following image of a simple editorial page layout from the magazine points to what I’m talking about. It’s a right mess and every rule I can think of is busted wide open and put on display. You can’t even read the damned thing. And it’s beautiful! It’s also all done by hand. For years, folks assumed he was using computers to create this look, but he was using garbage and fuckups. It just happened to look the same as the fucked-up stuff that amateurs were producing on their new computers. After Beach Culture collapsed, he jumped around a bit and then ended up directing a new hip rock magazine called Ray Gun. Then everything exploded.
You see, all of these hip new designers who had just begun to master the computer design programs were now entering the job market. They had never taken a graphic design class in their young lives. They knew almost nothing about design theory or history or practice. But they knew computers and they knew what looked cool—all they had to do was look around them in the magazines and records and posters, etc. Then they copycatted—that grand old design language staple. And there was that really cool-looking “fresh” stuff by David Carson! Utter anti-design became, almost by accident, the “new cool hip fresh style of today’s youth.” Crazy.
Even though (for my money) Carson never again achieved the levels of greatness he managed in Beach Culture, his copycatting in Ray Gun of his own thinking made an enormous impact. The whole graphic design world turned into an amateur version of David Carson for ten whole years or more. You can still see people working to look as much like David Carson as they can. For a brief moment, he was the “most famous graphic designer in the world.” Maybe the first “rock star designer.”
It was a “perfect storm” moment. A vast culture of DIY combined with powerful new technology alongside an invisible pop culture acceptance of culture destruction built right into the style. In 1991, punk broke into mainstream acceptance when Nirvana hit the top of the charts. The culture went ravenous and a million new ships took up the battle—unknowingly. Anti-culture came of age when DIY became the dominant style. The Situationist revolution seems to have been achieved. And it was achieved in classic Situationist style—BLINDLY.
The entire graphic design world collapsed (for most intents and purposes). Design schools lost students as computers became better and cheaper. Two weeks versus minimum two years to become a graphic designer. Which would you choose? Most art and design courses emphasize technology and ignore actual design theory and history. In fact, the history of design is only now being written, but the old-school narrative—no longer appropriate—is still being sliced and diced and repackaged.
Literally every powerful new graphic design voice of the last 30 years has the punk culture to thank for their worldview and thinking. The top of the design industry mavens like Chip Kidd and Stefan Sagmeister and Shepard Fairey are enormously derivative of punk culture and all the baggage that comes with it. The “fine design culture” is so ignorant of the source of their ideas, of this new culture in general, that they’ve hailed them as the new geniuses. The truth is, I can point out to you where virtually every idea they have done originally came from. They are just accepted as heroes, but they are not the true defining warriors.
The reality is that the world of graphic design changed forever (and very dramatically) back in the mid-’70s. It happened quickly and subtly and it took a couple of decades to finally achieve the full changeover. But the old world is gone, the old thoughts fade to black, the good old boy network is feeble and confused, and we, the enemy, are now in command.
And the newbies? Well, they just do what looks cool, do what they want. Just do it themselves. Who needs a designer? Or a copywriter? Or an illustrator? Or a photographer? Or a printer? Or a client? The new crowd goes for the cool and they can do it fast and easy and change it whenever they want, no big deal. They don’t need you anymore. Everybody knows that Charlie don’t surf.