ARTWORK O M D Talking Loud and Clear
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Imagine trying to edit a career: laying out the artifacts
of your life, the fruits of your labours for over 20 years and attempting
to assess what is important and what is worth keeping, what to leave in
and what to cast aside.
This is the task that Peter Saville has been undertaking
for the majority of 2002 as he prepares for the publication of his book,
Designed by Peter Saville, and a retrospective of his work at the Design
Musuem to take place in May 2003 entitled the Peter Saville Show. To aid
in this process, the exibition space of Britannia Row 2, in Clerkenwell,
has been generously provided for two months of collation and presentation.
There is an enormous amount of work to sift through:
a remarkable working life laid out across decorating tables resembling some
kind of art installation. It's all here starting with Saville's work for
the legendary record label. Factory, leading right through to identities
for Givenchy and sleeve work for Pulp. Each project is housed in a cardboard
box: inside is everything from original artwork to the notes and writings
that led to the ideas and the invoices, which marked their completion. There
are the sheets of metal used for the cover of New Order's Brotherhood, notebooks
of lettering by Brett Anderson of the group Suede for the band's Coming
Up sleeve, the original leaf shot for New Order's True Faith and the Fantin-Latour
postcard brought at th National Gallery to use on the band's Power Corruption
and Lies album.
There are a great many people to be satisfied if this
project is to be successfully completed, not just publishers and curators
but also the great many fans of Saville's work who will be keen to see the
components that make up a project, along with seeing rarer examples of work
that has defined the graphic language of the last few decades.
Each project is assessed in reference to a number
of factors. Is there supporting material? Does it fit into the history of
his work? Does he still like it? Without wishing to give away to much about
the content of either the retrospective or the book, it is safe to say that
whatever passes this stage will not disappoint.. Take the Joy Division cover
for Unknown Pleasures, for example. Not only are there copies of the release,
including the CD card carrying case for your car, but there is also the
page out of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Science where the illustration
was sourced from, along with typed credit notes. There are even sketchbooks
containing a plethora of information which provide a key to Saville's thought
process, showing the rejections that were made along the journey.
For Saville it is something that he's wanted, and
dreamt about doing, for some time. "I have not seen a lot of the work since
1993 when it was packed at Pentagram and went to Los Angeles. In the spring
of 1994, Brett Wickens and myself went through a lot of material, in some
empty rooms at Frankfurt Balkind in order to share out portfolio examples".
At this time, Wickens, Saville's former partner, had decided to stay in
California and Peter was to return to London. "It was a weird experience
for both of us."
"Seeing it all again is quite overwhelming.
It would be nice just to leave it there, for a year maybe, and I could go
and look at it at my own pace. There are some things that are really familiar
to me and there are other things I cant even remember doing -- which is
quite surprising. When I do remember it's a nice feeling, rather like finding
a box of old diaries or some old birthday cards... something that is not
really there in the conscious of your memory but somewhere in the sub-conscious.
The very act of remembering draws out other things around it."
After this transient stage the next time this work
will be seen is in a book and on the walls of a museum. "The physicality
of the work from the 1980's is quite evident in the archive. It is quite
tangible. Twelve-inch covers made out of special paper, posters on unusual
materials, invations using unusual types of printing processes. This material
sense in the work is quite pre-dominant between 1978 and 1990."
This is something that Saville became aware of around
1989. After a couple of years of screen-based design, his sensibilities
about materials, paper and processes had slipped away. The screen had orientated
the work exclusively towards the imagery he was dealing with. "We didn't
notice it happening. It was only when Brett and I looked back that we realised
that we hadn't specially treated anything for a while. Obviously because
we were designing on screen. Formerly we had to look at a piece of black
and white paste up and use our imagination vis a vis colour and material.
Working on screen you would see these things immediately. There is the dynamic
of colour and a psuedo-dimensionality that you could have never envisaged
in your mind's eye staring at a paste-up artwork. Formerly, materiality
was in your hands. On screen everything is flat -- it doesn't exist and
it can be, in this fantasy flatness, anything you want it to be. It is an
end in itself. On screen you make a satissfying piece of work and you can
say 'print it'. Paste-up alone wasn't satisfying at all"
Pushed as to whether he misses paste-up, Saville maintains
that this is not an issue. "What I think about now has moved away from any
sense of craft, I think that you can see that in the work. A physical presence
is missing. Working digitally you need to be aware of that. You have to
think about it and realise that if you are seduced by what you see on screen
you might be overlooking some other qualities.
"The archive shows that in the first five to
ten year period I quite obsessively collected everything we did. I tried
to make sure we had examples of everything because the opportunity to do
the work was so special. In later years a kind of laissz-faire attitude
has crept in. This exercise has shown that we do not have examples of everything
that we have done. Of course we have examples of record covers but we don't
have the promotional CDs, the advertising or any of the tour material. It's
just not there."
Saville's greatest disappointment is not having a
full set of posters of eveything he has done. "The companies are not as
forthcoming as they used to be in giving out copies. The whole system operates
so quickly now. Usually you find that these things are printed and distrubuted
before you have had time to pick up the phone."
Also Saville has not been as conscientious because
much of the work is not regarded as special any more. The work of his earlier
period was seen as breaking new ground with material, product and promotion.It
was a period of exploring new ways of working. In the latter period, those
new ways have been thoroughly absorbed by the system and are now an extension
of "marketing" and as such they do not have the same challenging qualities.
"At Factory, when we put something in an unusual package it was in order
to question the system and challenge people's perceptions of how a piece
of music could be presented to the public. In the 1990s if you see unusual,
or what is now called 'special' packaging it is a deliberate marketing device,
on behalf of the company to seduce the consumer. It has no genuine counter-cultural
value. It isn't questioning -- it's a marketing ploy.
"The development of imagery has become more
important to me. My early work was retrospective, an appropriation and recycling
of known visual forms from history: they were used as codes to symbolise
an attitude and position something. Creating imagery has become the only
way for me to work now, as opposed to retrieving imagery. I have no wish
to make new work that is the re-creation of an earlier work or period. Since
the 90s, I have been attemting to create images that could not have existed
before, [there has been] a consequent shift in emphasis from materiality
to imagery."
As an example of this shift, Saville suggests comparing
the sleeve for Suede's Coming Up with that for Joy Division's Closer. "Coming
Up is about a moment and a technology now, whereas Closer evokes a former
moment, even in the materials used. They are both time capsules."
But can anything be learnt from the former moment?
For Saville, presenting communications in forms other than full colour litho
print on coated paper is being superseded by a wave of interest in other
processes as a counter reaction to the 'finish' of product, the blandness
of commodity. "In the places of cult spirit, wherever they exist, the communications
can be raw. In fact it feels better like that. I love buying CDs that aren't
in jewel cases but the question is 'is it different or just pretending to
be?'"
The process of laying out the work has added to the
questions and answers that already occupy Peter Saville. "There has been
a debate in my mind for years, about what I'm asked to do and its validity.
When I look at the archive I recognise the work that was created outside
the conventional system, the work that I wanted to do, done the way I wanted
to do it. I recognise what was belief and what was business."
"I will be relieved to see the most enduring
[pieces] in a book and a show. I have never been able to present an adequate
portfolio of my work to explain or present myself to anyone. I have not
had a comprehensive way of saying this is what I am about. This has been
frustrating. The work needs context. My thinking needs context in order
to quantify it. Colour copies in a portfolio do not create contex. Seeing
the work finally organised chronologically and narratively will be rewarding."
Designed by Peter Saville is to be published by Frieze
in May,2003.
This article originally appeard in Creative Review
Copyright Centaur Communications Ltd
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