(THE FONT ROOM)

The Font Room is part of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum's exhibit "Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture," curated by Ellen Lupton. It has already been shown in ID magazine, and a review from The New York Times appears below. The room consists of back-lit, frosted plexiglas panels with type samples ranging from traditional to experimental. We had a rough time photographing it since it is so bright; but please check it out in person!! It will be on display until February 16. Visit this important show or its web site at http://mixingmessages.si.edu/.

From THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 20, 1996

Graphic Design Review: Reopening and a Kind of Carnival

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP


NEW YORK -- One day, somebody up there will realize that New York does not need a monument to Andrew Carnegie's taste for dark, carved wood. It needs a clean, well-lighted place for Cooper-Hewitt, the National Design Museum, resident since 1976 in Carnegie's upper Fifth Avenue mansion.

Until that day arrives, however, visitors to this institution can expect to see two shows in one: a changing exhibition housed within a permanent display of ponderous Edwardian gloom.

But the gloom has lifted somewhat. This week, with the completion of the first phase of a two-year renovation program, Cooper-Hewitt reopens after a year's hiatus. Designed by James Stewart Polshek & Partners, the renovation is not the radical overhaul one might hope for. Nonetheless, the mustiness is gone.

The floors of the ground-floor galleries no longer creak. The southern windows in the building's main hall are no longer blocked by fixed display cases. Some of the interior surfaces have been painted a brighter hue.

And if these and other improvements do not fully dispel the museum's Addams Family atmosphere, at least they convey the impression that the family's mood has lightened up.

"Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture," the show that inaugurates Cooper-Hewitt's newly spiffed-up quarters, conveys much the same impression.

In place of the heavy, politically themed exhibitions that have lumbered through these halls in recent years, "Mixing Messages" is a lively carnival of a show. Organized by Ellen Lupton, the museum's curator of contemporary design, it offers a bright, colorful, often hysterically funny look at developments in the field of graphic design over the last 15 years.

Those who still associate the term graphic design with the sort of crisp, immaculately legible graphics perfected earlier in the century by Swiss designers are in for a shock.

Among the memorable items on view are a full-scale newsstand, complete with rows of Good and Plenty candies and copies of the Italian tabloid that published the picture of Princess Stephanie's husband dallying with a Belgian entertainer; such video novelties as a mock television ad for something called Crystal Gravy ("See? No lumps!"), and a little pink garment-care tag from a line of cheap clothing for girls: "NEVER! wash these pants."

Though the show includes a few examples of classic modern design, like Massimo Vignelli's cover for the newsletter "Skyline," its heart lies closer to the twisted comedy pioneered by Tibor Kalman, designer of M & Company's popular screwball wristwatches, and to the cheeky designers of "rave notices," irreverent, street-handout invitations to subterranean pop concerts.

A curmudgeonly Gutenberg advocate might object that the show would be better titled "Typography for the Age of Illiteracy." It is post-linear, post-structural and often bafflingly post-meaning.

There is, however, a serious subtext to this playful display: the strained relations between writing and design that have grown up in recent years throughout the mass media.

Installed within a handsome setting designed by the Boston architectural firm Kennedy & Violich, the show is thematically organized. It opens with a rousing salute to "The Street," the urban billboard on which posters for products, events and political causes are fleetingly mounted.

At the entrance, a row of giant movie posters makes a good transition from the street into the gallery and helps to ground in physical, urban space a field of art now at risk of evaporating into the ether of cyberspace. Defense d'afficher? Forget about it. Graphic design covers the world.

A small room full of brightly lighted, blown-up typefaces introduces a section on "Typography," the graphic designer's stock in trade. The gallery just beyond features the application of these (often historical) typefaces by today's designers. And it's here that a viewer begins to get the uncomfortable sense of a war going on, or at least some kind of parasitic invasion.

In some of the projects, the point is unmistakably made that the aim of much graphic design today is not to aid comprehension of the written word but to engage in some kind of contest with it.

The heart of this section is the work of Katherine McCoy, a teacher at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., from 1971 to 1995 who developed theories about how to enrich comprehension by fusing images with text.

While the theories may be substantial, their realization will leave some visitors feeling frustrated, confused, even angry. A lithographic poster, designed in 1991 by Andrew Blauvelt, James Sholly and Laura Lacy-Sholly to illustrate Ms. McCoy's ideas, superimposes visual images over blocks of text, leaving much of the latter illegible.

And when, a few steps farther on, you encounter a video presentation that baldly asks, "Why words?," you may want to reach for a vintage copy of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media" and hurl it into the screen.

Yet there is serious experimentation going on here. It harks back to McLuhan's influential theories about media in the 1960s: his proclamation of the obsolescence of linear thinking and the written word, his insistence that the medium was more important than the message.

I don't recall that McLuhan ever proclaimed graphic design as the next great step in Western culture -- his obsession was with electronic media like television, a medium in which graphics would hold roughly the same status as words: both were little more than irrelevant pieces of content.

But in 1966, McLuhan did collaborate with a noted graphic designer, Quentin Fiore, on "The Medium Is the Massage," a mass-market paperback intended to popularize McLuhan's ideas. And that book, unrepresented in this show, is nonetheless the seed from which its underlying idea has sprouted: that consciousness can be affected by the knowing collision of verbal and visual information.

The typography section leads to a gallery on "Identity." Corporate identity is represented by a half-scale tail from a jet plane, emblazoned with the Fed Ex logo on one side, the Continental Airlines globe on the other.

But the gallery's focus is on graphics produced by the cultural underground: marginal rock groups, fringe fashion designers and some political action groups. This section is the heart of the show. At least, it raises the most serious issues.

Here, we see graphic designers deeply engaged in dual, even hypocritical roles. They are at once decorators, compelled to misrepresent, gloss over or lend a dubious sheen of authority to the identities of their clients.

At the same time, many of them are artists, creatures of conscience, who wish to punch through the veneer of the status quo that they themselves have helped to create.

The solution to this ethical quandary, for many designers, has been to treat graphic design as a medium of humor. From Beaumarchais to Joe Orton, there's ample historical precedent for regarding humor, even the darkest, as an instrument of social change, as a technique for invading the mainstream with radical ideas.

That tradition is carried forward here by designs like a grisly parody of a Coca-Cola ad, its trademark ribbon underscoring the message to "Drink AZT."

But an unsettling feeling emerges from this part of the show, too. Though graphic design is clearly a field of great importance for social activism, it is also a field in which the line between social responsibility and commercial opportunism is neither easy to discern nor easily blurred.

What we're looking at, in this section, are sophisticated forms of propaganda, from both the corporate and the oppositional ends of the spectrum.

This is not to suggest that both kinds of propaganda are equally bearers of truth. It is rather to question whether graphic design is a medium that makes it easier or harder to sort out truth from propaganda.

Perhaps this is a medium that is useful only in purveying sensation. It deals with images, myths and emotions, not with the facts or arguments that might lead people to recognize a myth as false, an image as misleading, an emotion as manipulative.

Unsurpassed at selling, it is less effective at putting into perspective the shortcomings of a consumer culture based on buy and sell.

"Mixing Messages" is itself a superlative, three-dimensional example of the subject it surveys. It is long on stimulation, short on analysis. But there is intelligence behind the selection of the work on view.

Ms. Lupton is herself a distinguished graphic designer, and if she brings to her subject neither rigorous analysis nor an informed historical perspective, she has at least enlivened it with the discrimination of a visually sophisticated, socially engaged insider.

It is encouraging that the show concludes with "Publishing," a section on books, displayed, appropriately enough, in Andrew Carnegie's library and a small room outside it. True, some of the books are arranged decoratively here. They hang from strings, like sleigh bells from a Yuletide mantel. Still, the segment gives hope that visitors will probe beyond the issues that the show raises but does not fully explore.

At its best, contemporary graphic design is the jester in our midst, gleefully turning conventions upside down, jarring perspectives and taking on the traditional carnivalesque task of pointing beyond normal daily routine toward deeper truths. It falls to other media to take it from there.

"Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture" remains at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Fifth Avenue and 91st Street, Manhattan, through Feb. 16. The show was financed by Mead Corp.



Copyright 1996 The New York Times