Design Anarchy (I.D.)
June 6, 2006
Design Anarchy, edited by Kalle Lasn, founder of the Canadian anti-mercantilist magazine Adbusters, has an identity problem: It is a costly coffee-table book for readers who resent the very idea of coffeetable books. I understand their distaste. Coffee-table books are, after all, Crate and Barrel-ish signs of aesthetic compliancy, to be grouped with recessed halogen lighting, Coldplay and The New Yorker’s poetry selection. Any glam $65 tome inspired at once by Situationism, the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, The Futurist Manifesto, The New Statesman, the Whitney Biennials of the 1980s and early ’90s, Adbusters’s own Buy Nothing and TV Turnoff days, and perhaps also adolescents who make their own clothes, is sure to be rife with paradox. And indeed Design Anarchy, like Adbusters, rinses, lathers, and repeats its contradictions.
To start with, Design Anarchy tweaks billboard corroded psyches with a post-idealist pastiche of text and image. The intention is to decontaminate the degraded mental and physical social commons that the reader must navigate everyday in the cities, suburbs, and exurbs, cleansing the reader’s mind with photography, occult fonts, art brut collages, and modernist-purist aphorisms. Each page intends to forward our rejection of commodification and to announce the coming of a new stylistic paradigm. One page reads , “An Entirely New Design is Possible.” Another instructs: “What design needs/is ten years/of total turmoil.../fuck-it-all anarchy...after that maybe it will/mean something again...” Elsewhere “Kick It Over!” is tagged in a crayon-like scrawl next to the handwritten phrase “neoclassical economics.”
Throughout the book, the imperative “Insert Commercial Here” repeats, each time spread across two pages in white illuminated text like an after-The-Rapture Jenny Holzer. Yet ultimately, the images’ distressed sleekness reproduces the look and feel of today’s visual culture—the same culture that Adbusters and now Design Anarchy wish to purge. The book contains so many images and texts that the experience is less one of purification than overwhelming sensation. Some of the best pages in this jumble, to my mind, are by visual artists whose work I like (and covet) such as Ed Ruscha, Ryan McGinness, and Thomas Dworzak. Other art stars moonlighting as skate rats include Barbara Kruger, Jeff Wall, Andres Serrano, and Gregory Crewdson. One of the most eye-catching is a large photo of a young man with a Nike symbol stitched with thread and blood on his cheek: The legend beneath reads “The People vs. The Corporate Cool Machine.” Paging through these layouts, I felt a bit like Warren Beatty in “The Parallax View,” inundated with pictures and words, all testing whether I was a citizen or a sociopath.
That said, I like the contradictory visual culture that Design Anarchy represents. The book is of a piece with other contemporary and likeable radical simulations—the Weatherman-inspired novels, the Vietnam War–referencing Biennial reinstallation. It is better than, but nicely complements, the Patty Hearst icon T-shirts, au courant haircuts aping Hanoi Jane Fonda in “Tout Va Bien,” the recent re-release of old Brian Wilson songs on Smile, and the fraying anti-fashion fashion-sense of contemporary teens mobbing up via mobile phone and MySpace.
Some of the latter are among Adbusters 120,000 readers, but, of course, most of these sorts of readers will not be able to afford the book. They will have to make do with the teasers for it, which they can find online. The cost made me recall an article by “Stay Free!” editor Carrie McLaren: Adbusters’ cover price of $5.75, she wrote, “pretty much prices out the masses/students it’s designed to reach.” She also derided the magazine for its “graphics fetish” and its preponderance of “catchy, meaningless” slogans like “Economists Must Learn To Subtract.” In Design Anarchy, the graphics fetish remains and is very much a part of the expense: The book extols amateurism and wants to look as if it were put together by the freshman communards in art school—so raw and anti-authorial that individual artists’ names are omitted from the page and listed in the back on a folded-up piece of white paper—yet, with the excellent paper stock and the art stars, it is clearly a luxury product.
Given the book’s gargantuan size and price, there were times when I saw it as a metaphoric coffin for ’zine culture. And yet I also found it kind of beautiful, a dictionary of a movement they call “uncooling” and the equivalent of a teen-rebel bedroom as reconstructed by adult professionals. An improved version of the “real world,” it’s a space that exists ostensibly to help readers defend themselves however briefly and partially from the chaos, trauma, and sterility of grown-up life.