And the Rietveld Academie only made this sense of authorship stronger. So when we arrived at art school, this whole post-punk period was still very much a part of our outlook. We produced little zines and comics, which we traded through channels such as Maximum Rock & Roll and Factsheet Five - all in all, this was a very formative period for us. Through record sleeves and fanzines, we learned about movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, and the Situationists - so in that sense, post-punk was our cultural education.īut it was also through post-punk that we got our first taste of authorship, of self-expression. This was the beginning of the ’90s, when we were still in our early twenties - we just came out of the ’80s, which we spent as teenagers completely immersed in post-punk subcultures (from two-tone ska to hardcore punk, from new wave to garage rock, from psychobilly to trash metal, and everything in-between).Īnd this ’80s post-punk landscape was incredibly important to us - to kids like us, coming from working-class backgrounds, post-punk had an almost emancipatory effect. Applying to an art school seemed a logical way to pursue these activities. We came from a background of making zines, publishing mini-comics, screenprinting band-shirts, etc. When we applied to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, 25 years ago (time does fly), we certainly didn’t go there to become ‘neutral’, ‘objective’, manager-type, business-minded ‘problem-solvers’ - we went there to find a way to express ourselves. We’ve always seen graphic design as a legitimate platform for creativity, authorship and self-expression - we’ve never regarded it in any other way. Selected spreads from Statement and Counter-Statement (2015)Īlthough I’d been following your work for years, it wasn’t until reading Statement and Counter-Statement that I realized how you’d been able to inject your own point of view and visual aesthetic into all your work, regardless of client. I’m honored and excited to include an edited version of our exchanges below in this special text-edition of Scratching the Surface. I’ve enjoyed getting to know them better through these exchanges. I’m thankful for the time they spend considering their answers, which were consistently thoughtful, interesting, and provocative. Over the last few months, I’ve been emailing back and forth with the trio to talk about their work, the role of writing and theory in their practice, and how they think about the current state of design criticism.
They’ve been able to operate at the fringes of the field, consistently enacting their theories and aesthetics in projects large and small, from small European publishers to large American museums, with equal rigor and authority.Īnd this is still what’s so interesting to me about Experimental Jetset’s work. Flipping through these pages, as projects and quotations blur together, spanning twenty years, a decidedly clear worldview, a consistent practice, emerges. It occurs to me that they are one of the few studios we can confidently call auteurs. In a review I wrote of the book in August, I said: While spending my days working with the identity during my internship, I picked up their recent monograph, Statement and Counter-Statement in an attempt to better understand their work and methodology.
Their solution - dubbed “the responsive W” - was an innovative and reflexive identity system that, to me, felt completely unexpected and strangely perfect. In 2013, as the museum prepared to move to a new location in lower Manhattan, Experimental Jetset was commissioned to rebrand. And as someone interested in design theory, I was equally drawn to the detailed summaries they wrote about their process on their website.īut I found myself really thinking about the studio’s work in a deeper way last summer when I interned at The Whitney Museum of American Art’s in-house design team, between my two years of graduate school. As a Helvetica-loving undergrad student, I was immediately attracted to their blend of Swiss Modernism and punk aesthetics. I don’t remember when I first came across their work, but it feels like I’ve been a fan of their work for as long as I’ve been a designer. Their work ranges from printed matter to site-specific installations but always retains a recognizable thought process and aesthetic. The Amsterdam-based design trio consisting of Danny van den Dungen, Erwin Brinkers, and Marieke Stolk have been working since 1997 and are a staple in both history and studio courses. I’m not sure Experimental Jetset needs an introduction.
0 kommentar(er)
