July 2011
This article was published in Bangkok Post on July 20th 2011. Bangkok Post is the most respected English newspaper in Thailand. The official title for this article is The Life of Design: Famed British designer Jonathan Barnbrook visits Bangkok. Written by Brian Curtin an Irish-born artist and curator living in Bangkok.
➜ What is the difference between art and design? Well, surely there are many differences. Design serves a practical function in a way that art doesn't, or cannot. The process of creating design is comparable to art but design typically serves a client and art is typically an individual, or personal, pursuit. Moreover, design often requires a number of different skills and therefore can be perceived as a collaborative to a degree that visual art isn't. Finally, art doesn't look like design unless it is saying something about design, which means its art anyway.
However, the question of these pervasive, if not normative, distinctions came to mind at a recent lecture by famed British designer Jonathan Barnbrook in Bangkok. Organised by the International Programme in Communication Design at Chulalongkorn University and titled "What You Want Is Not What You Need", Barnbrook's survey of his innovative, often political, and usually very memorable, designs was the culmination of a 4-day official visit to the capital.
The distinctions I sketched above are, in many ways, nonsense. Barnbrook runs a purposefully small, eponymous studio in London and 40% of his work is not-for-profit. His influences are diverse ("I look around the world and include everything in it"), he claimed he doesn't understand the commercial aspects of his job, and his sensibility was formed under the influence of both the aggressive visuals of Punk and the evocative minimalism of the legendary British band Joy Division.
Barnbrook works across a range of media and contexts: From typography to interior design; and specialist book design to film and motion graphics. In 2001 he designed a billboard with the slogan "Designers, stay away from corporations that want you to lie for them" in LA as a greeting to delegates at an AIGA (American Professional Association for Design) conference in LA. He has worked for uber-artists Damien Hirst and David Bowie in a way that is described as intense and collaborative to a degree that defies the traditional designer-client relationship.
And, further, the products are sometimes eminently collectible.
Barnbrook's work with Hirst includes Pharmacy, a painfully fashionable but short-lived restaurant in London's Notting Hill that was open from 1997 to 2003. The design reflected Hirst's preoccupations with medical imagery and technology, and included a sculpture of the artist's DNA structure, displays of pillboxes and glass-backed urinals. Barnbrook revealed that one problem with the restaurant was customers stealing small items, including menus designed with stock photographs from the pharmaceutical industry. He also reported that he worked on this project for little money. However, when Pharmacy closed, the contents were auctioned at Sotheby's and earned Hirst 11 million. Art? Design? Branding? Go figure.
Another project between both was a monograph of Hirst's art that took 2 years to complete and was featured in MoMA's books of the 20th century. It broke the mould of surveys of an artist's career and included pop-ups and pull-outs concerned, again, with Hirst's obsessions with the human body and the cool rhetoric of the medicine industry. The book began life selling for 16 and now goes for a 1,000.
An album cover for Bowie relies on the singer's iconic face for recognition and the title, Heathen, was printed upside down. Further, imagery on the inner sleeves was inspired by a photograph of a Rembrandt painting vandalised by acid splashes. The museum where this occurred refused Barnbrook permission to republish the image for fear it would encourage Bowie fans to carry out copycat acts.
So, instead, Barnbrook invented his own images of slashed Renaissance paintings. These are somewhat disconcerting in their assault on seemingly sacred icons, as they draw our attention to the disposability of otherwise revered objects.
Barnbrook's most explicitly political work includes agitprop fly posters downloadable from his company's website. One of these links US politicians to their corporate interests in a map-like formation and is bluntly titled "The Corporate Vermin That Rules America". He is currently working with students on re-designs for Northern Ireland's famous tradition of murals that demarcated Protestant and Catholic areas in Belfast.
In a telling moment in his lecture, Barnbrook discussed how one of his typefaces, titled "Exocet" after a war missile, was used by a racist organisation in the US; against, of course, his intention or permission. This is telling insofar as the incident reveals something essential about Barnbrook's oeuvre: How the social and cultural life of design has significance way beyond utilitarian value. And, further, how design can force us to think critically about the world we live in. This is a quality we more readily attribute to art.
