This is a review of last fall’s art/design issue of AdBusters. Despite it’s tardiness….Jonathan Barnbrook is still the man.

Somewhere along the way AdBusters fell off. It got confused, had a major identity crisis and now struggles to redefine itself into a form of greater relevance.

The hands of Jonathan Barnbrook, and his talented staff, have brought a small amount of saving grace to the struggling publication. Barnbrook has worked with AdBusters in the past, but never has he taken such commanding presence, (he guest art directed the whole issue.) In my most humble opinion, Barnbrook conveys AdBusters what it truly is, was, and is meant to be. That being, a sociopolitical work that comes directly out of the worlds of fashion, design, and art (visual culture.)

Barnbrook has recently returned to a state of vogue. He’s received a steady growth of press as he prepares his big show at the Design Museum, stitches together a giant monograph, and packages a mega-launch of a 32-face type family Bourgeois. With this return has come a new sensibility that reflects maturity. His typographic excellence has been matched with equally compelling execution of works displayed in his anti-North Korean show Tomorrow’s Truth. While maintaining his non-familiar early-ninties “digital” composition, Barnbrook has adopted a much brighter and punchier palette. This is especially evident in his work with the latest AdBusters, (I suspect this could be the handy work of young-gun Pedro Inoue who has been credited as co-conspiritor.)

The design of this issue revitalizes the increasingly poor design and even poorer production of this magazine. It’s glossy pages on cheap paper stock are revitalized with, the oh so scary word, style. But it is not senseless style. And it is the proper balance of style and communication that makes Barnbrook’s handling of AdBusters so honest. The over-stylization brings the publication back down to a level that doesn’t purport to be informative, manipulative, or even subversive. Rather, it is just bold. It’s there.

The greatest design moment is how the two designers handled Natalya Ilyn’s article on Modernism. The opening spread has gray type on a muted gray background. As the article describes Mies Van Der Rohe’s and Modernism’s momentum, the background flairs with magenta, and pretty much explodes at the end.

It’s a shame that we have to admit that AdBusters probably has run out of steam. But maybe Barnbrook’s studio can help it reposition itself.

This piece will appear in the forthcoming June 2007 issue of 2+3D, in Polish translation, with an English summary. The book in question, Influences, is available here.

When Anna Gerber and Anja Lutz, of Shift!, presented Influences at a lecture at RISD last year, they focused on the unique database application they had concocted¹. At first brush, Influences wasn’t even a book, it was a wiki-esque compendium of design-oriented footnotes and citations. The content they went through ranged from the personal anecdotes of A- and B-list designers², to somewhat more rigorous explications³. Practicing designers, artists, and others who personally knew Anna and Anja had been doled out login credentials to their database, where they could expound on any design-related topic that they chose.

I was convinced that Influences was a website until halfway through the presentation, when Anna and Anja revealed that they had commissioned a tool that could transform the content of the entire database into an InDesign file, rendering a print version of the sites’ dynamic content with the click of a button. This, they described, was how they would produce Influences, the book, as the output of the database “would provide an excellent starting point” for such a project.

What they did not show was how the elaborate cross-linking of the all the database entries would be handled, but I assumed they would come up with a wonderful and marvelous typographic footnoting system, or some such thing. To me, this was the exciting kernel of such an ambitious project. How would such renowned and intelligent designers manage to condense and distill the dynamic power of a modern database system into a book?

How, indeed. Upon first perusing Influences in its final form, I was dismayed to see that nearly every page looked like the raw output of the transformation program Anna and Anja had demonstrated. It's a straightforward two-column layout, with room at the top for thumbnail images. Leafing through, I found only eight or so spreads within the 268-page primary “lexicon” that broke away from this format.

That would be fine, really, if the information in the book was of any use. It’s hard, I will grant, to translate hypertextual information into a legible print system⁴. But Influences fails at the task.

Terms that refer to other terms within Influences are underlined, and preceded with an arrow symbol (→). This makes →most of the text very →difficult to →scan, as you →might →imagine. Furthermore, the actual location of the referent information itself is left as an exercise to the reader; the links tell you to go elsewhere, but they don't tell you specifically where. (The book is alphabetized, which I suppose eases this kind of ad-hoc navigation.)

The linked items themselves are hardly consistent, as well. Consider an entry such as the one for “Grid Systems in Graphic Design”, on page 105. This entry contains seven link callouts, three of which are within a quote. The quotee in this case, one Nik Thoenen, is not himself an Influences referent, so neophyte designers such as myself have to look this Nik person up the old-fashioned way, using reference systems outside of Influences, like Google or Nexis⁵.

This leads me to wonder: is the whole thing a big in-joke? Only friends of the authors could contribute to the database, and the whole thing is impossible to even view online, at the time of writing. In fact, I only know about Influences’ data backend because I attended the lecture. Not only does the book fail to explain this rather critical aspect of its authorship in any way, it explains nothing about itself whatsoever. There is no introduction, no foreword, no “how to use this book” type thing. We are only offered some maddeningly vague, self-congratulatory bullshit that appears in the endpapers:

“Who’s Who” style books are quite the rage throughout most design disciplines. Alice Twemlow put one out last summer⁶ after surveying a broad range of contemporary practitioners. Phaidon has given us their mammoth Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture⁷, and the AIGA regularly pumps out annuals and compendiums that are equally at home on a designer’s shelf or a coffeetable in a Wallpaper* photoshoot. It is therefore hard to understand why Anna and Anja would painstakingly create a system that could set their work apart from the others — their database — and then subsequently use it so poorly. Perhaps they will eventually release the fruits of their contributors’ labors to the public, and create a resource that is truly “cumulative, but always in flux”, as the endpapers say. Until then, Influences will likely suffer a fate similar to Life Style⁸: largely unread by those who conspicuously display it on their bookshelves.

Footnotes:
1. Or, more likely, one that they had commissioned from a technically-minded subordinate. [back]

2. See the entries for “book reviews” and “grandmother” in Influences, on pages 33 and 102, respectively, for examples of this sort of thing. [back]

3. See “internal structures” in Influences, on page 122 (although as with content from Wikipedia and such sources, the veracity and rigor is debatable.) [back]

4. God knows, many have tried, including myself. In my own work, when I had to cite URLs, I used a special footnote symbol, with its own color, to denote a URL. I then listed the URL itself in the margin, and I reproduced a URL index at the end of the book, for maximum clarity.

... To be sure, that’s not the only way to do it. My goal was to give the reader the most information on the cite without disrupting the flow. [back]

5. As far as I could divine, Influences does not include any sort of system for citing references outside of itself. [back]

6. Twemlow, Alice: What is Graphic Design For? Rotovision SA, 2006. [back]

7. Phaidon Press (Editors): The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Phaidon, 2005. [back]

8. Mau, Bruce (Editor): Life Style. Phaidon, 2000. See previous WDC article here. [back]

David Sokol is the acting news editor at Architectural Record, and has written for ID magazine, Metropolis, and others. This article will appear in the forthcoming Public Relations, RISD architecture’s new annual.

Let me tell you a secret. I don’t drink the Kool-Aid known as archi-babble. Really, you care. As an editor and writer, I scout for emerging architects and new designs to publish. And I may pass you by if you’re more prattle than substance.

But this point is so well trodden that I’ve asked the gods to send me a press release, a media kit, something, that states my case better than I could articulate it myself.

Et voila, without tactlessly naming names, here’s an invitation for the final performances of a site-specific work. Let’s choose a few opening excerpts about the artist: “…She challenges the traditional notion of facade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside.”

Neat. Our subject will one-up Vito Acconci by pleasuring herself in a doorjamb, or straddling a windowsill, in full public view.

“Her live performances reflect the tension between art and architecture as a conflict between what is aesthetically pleasing (the seduction of surfaces, facades or the face itself) and the realization that our experience of space is circumscribed and curtailed by the very structures we inhabit.”

Um, all right, perhaps she’s masturbating some Bulthaup cabinets while wearing a prison uniform. Perhaps a copy of Discipline and Punish sits on the counter, representing the shade of Foucault as he blithely takes in the scene.

Well, it turns out that our subject will be strapped in a metal chair, with varying instruments prodding, pulling, and stretching her face into a series of excruciating contortions. What this has to do with our premise, I quote: “The face is rendered empty like an architectural element open to interaction and dialog. At the same time, it also appears immobile [sic] a grimace, a mask. Surprisingly, the fusion of mobile and immobile elements causes the architecture of the face to move and facial expressions to dissolve.” I’ll rephrase my question. WTF?

While our subject is an artist, her esoteric lexicon and garbled-masquerading-as-intellectual syntax has infiltrated architecture. Could the democratization of design have inspired such pretension — that the profession is resorting to fancy language to place itself above the Wallpaper* reader?

This much I do know. Self-torture is almost too juicy to resist. But let’s face it, I’m a member of the media. I mediate. I have to assume my audience wants to understand what I write, and I may not have the time or prowess to weave clarity from our largely incomprehensible art performance.

This piece will appear, in more or less this form, in the forthcoming magazine Public Relations from the RISD architecture department. Many thanks to Dana Ganssle, and her crew, for the edits. Yes!

People often think that bullshitting is the same as lying. This can’t be the case, though… at your last critique, was that long-winded rant you received about “interstitial dualities” or “recontextualization” a lie? Not necessarily. If you got out a dictionary and dutifully parsed out all the branching convoluted sentences, you might find that the nonsense people concoct at these things is actually factually correct. The strain of bullshit that percolates in schools like ours is more about confusion than it is about outright deception.

You can, of course, use bullshit to obfuscate a lie. When James Frey, the now-infamous Oprah-anointed memoirist, was recently found to have fabricated his shady past to make himself seem more interesting, that was a lie. But when called on by Larry King, he said things like “95 percent of my book is true” and “all memoirs are subjective”, citing numerous examples. These things were arguably true, but they were also total bullshit.

I started systematically studying bullshit at RISD shortly after I arrived in the graduate graphic design program. I would be at a crit, and someone would say “Yes, I’m fascinated and inspired by the notion of interconnected linear elements.” Why couldn’t they just say “I like lines” and be done with it? And moreover, how could a rational (and most likely talented) human being say such a thing with a straight face?

My first project was to compile all the bullshit words and phrases I could find into a bullshit dictionary. This was easy and fun; by including commentary, I could finally say what I really thought about such vapid terms like “innovation” or “emergent behavior”. The book is shaping up to be a decent field guide to navigating some of the nonsense we’re exposed to daily in art and design circles.

It became clear, however, that the bullshit goes far deeper than mere words and phrases. There are more complex patterns of obfuscating nonsense at work, and they vary greatly between departments and subjects. For example, one of the first things the RISD graphic design curriculum beats out of its new members is the use of most subjective descriptive terms, like “beautiful” or “disgusting.” So you end up with GD students making bizarrely pseudoscientific proclamations like “This generates a fantastic visceral response.”

That’s just in GD, though. I wouldn’t suggest trotting out such speech-pattern chestnuts over in the BEB. In architecture, you’ll want to talk of systematized spatial logic, of mutant typologies, and of sympathetic abstraction, with maybe a few Italian vocab words like pallazo thrown in to seal the deal. And both of these bullshit methods are entirely different from your average discussion in textiles, where the use of the word “beautiful” is not only permitted but pervasive.

It’s a bloody mess. But it’s our mess, indeed, and I want to help. I’m gathering data like this by visiting critiques in as many departments as I can. I record these critiques on tape, and then transcribe them, allowing the patterns of speech to emerge on paper. The book I end up with from this material will provide a direct window into the bizarro-world of linguistic alchemy that we seem to be brewing.

I wrote an essay on Bruce Mau and “Life Style” last year, for my book on bullshit language in design discourse. Now that I’m finishing that project up, I thought I’d post it here and maybe get some feedback. Because, like, everyone has so much free time on their hands, with finals and all. Erm.

This is last year’s PDF. Just so all you graphic designers know, I’ve totally redone all the type/layout shit since then, and anyway this was from before I took type 2, so I was a little retarded. I’m just sayin. Yeah.

-fish