> On Feb 1, 2017, at 9:20 PM, Stuart MEDLEY <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Do you think we will ever see again the likes of an April Greiman or a
> Zuzana Licko to capture the imagination of new graphic designers and incur
> the wrath of the old guard  

Stuart, et al,

Even though April, Zuzana, etc. have been lumped together under the pomo label, I think that glosses over large distinctions, as does the modernist label. I think talking of modernisms—plural--might be more useful. Even during the height of concerns about the post modern, many people were asking whether what was being called post modern was just another phase of modernism. Modernism is/was varied enough to absorb its supposed antithesis.

Was post modernism anti modernist? I don’t think that April made her work in opposition to modernism while Jeff Keedy, Ed Fella, several others in the Cranbrook-CalArts mafia (and many others) certainly did. I don’t have a sense of how much Zuzana saw her work in relation to modernism (as opposed to merely ignoring the then-current strains or dealing with solving new problems.)

Various designers seem to capture my students’ imaginations but the wrath of the old guard will, I’m guessing, be hard to attract (at least on formal grounds.) I don’t know who has the desire or energy to be the rear guard of the avant garde these days. Even Massimo Vignelli and Rudy VanderLans seemed to have made peace before Massimo’s death. And those of us who are old enough to remember how important the battles seemed are too old to remember why.

Although I don’t believe that April was ever baiting modernists (as, say, Ed and Jeff were), she did anger many with her formal transgressions. In retrospect, it seems hard to imagine why her work looked so strange at the time but considering the reaction, I understand why many people thought her work was meant in opposition to then-contemporary modernism. Strangely, the non-modernist work of the Push Pin crew, Herb Lubalin, etc. didn’t seem to cause the distress that April’s did. They might have been seen as eclectic, amusing, and not competing in the same arena as the progeny of the Bauhaus Boys.

Many years ago, Steve Skaggs* suggested that April’s use of ellipses was a symbolic repudiation of the essentialism of the Bauhaus circle. While I don’t claim to know her mind, that didn’t ring true to me so I called to ask her. She was out of town so I called Sean Adams--who had been her design director during a lot of the ellipse era--what he thought. He said he’d once asked her what was up with all of the ellipses and she replied that they weren’t ellipses, they were circles seen from the side. So much of her work of that era was playing with the third dimension and that explanation sounded more like what I assumed than some arid contest over proper shapes.

Various modernists insisted that modernism was not merely a style (a statement I suppose I’d agree with) but was a philosophy (a statement I’m less comfortable fully embracing.) Modernism now seems to persist mainly as a style even if it’s a style that’s often backed by philosophical rather than arbitrary aesthetic preferences. And style in general seems fungible in a way that it wasn’t even twenty years ago.


*By the way, anyone with an interest in Piercian semiotics might want to check out Steve Skaggs' book (coming out in the next few weeks from MIT press.) It’s called *Fire Signs* and is almost obsessively analytical. I am not alone in failing miserably in attempts to use semiotics to good end to understand graphic design. I hadn’t seen anyone produce anything I found satisfying until this book. 


Gunnar

Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University 
graphic design program

http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA

http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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+1 252 258-7006


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