ARTWORK Fac 235 Robert Breer/William Wegman
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Next to Jamie Reid, Peter Saville is the most recognized
'artist' born out of the heyday of punk, perhaps because he was so vocal
and direct about his artistic influences (accepting that Brody is renowned
more as a designer). Just as Reid visually defined Sex Pistols, Saville
provided the overall `industrial' image for the Manchester independent record
label Factory Records (note: 1977 was the `industrial' year - from the arty
pseudo-futurist noise of Throbbing Gristle to Bowie & Eno's arty collaborations
in Berlin, grey was in). Saville virtually operated like a New York postmodernist,
because he wasn't simply content with unsettling historical artworks and
jettisoning them into the present : his work was clearly involved in the
delicate and sometimes delirious operations of quotation. He launched this
tactic with New Order - the group newly-formed out of the remaining members
of Joy Division after their lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in
1981.
Taking his cue from the band's new name (a typically
punk ambiguous reminder of the fascist New Order), Saville based his designs
for the first three releases by New Order on Futurist posters and book jackets
: Ceremony, Everything's Gone Green and Movement (all 1981). The
point with these designs is that Saville changed only the slightest of details,
consciously applying Jan Tschichold's views on type and placement, and unwittingly
giving us a simple demonstration of Barthes principle of the `second degree'.
But let's sort a few things out here in order to contextualize
this highly conscious operation typical of pre-postmodern tendancies in
retro design : (a) in the late 70s, every punk art student worth their salt
was instantly attracted to the anarchy of the Futurists, the Dadaists and
the Surrealists; (b) those poster images Saville used were much reproduced
in most books on Futurism; (c) punk didn't have a license to deal exclusively
in Kaiser, Nazi and Axis imagery - check out American biker subculture throughout
the 60s, the gatefold spread to Led Zeppelin II from 1969, most of the Teutonic-influenced
hard rock and heavy metal of the 70s, or even Ron (ex-The Stooges) Ashton's
band from around 1978 called New Order; and (d) in art and design courses
over the past ten years, the Bauhaus school and Tschichold's `severity and
brevity' have been popular with every post-punk graphic designer looking
for ways of rejecting the obvious `style' punk had devolved into by 1978.
My point is that Saville's tactic was as clear a sign
of the times as it was clear in its execution and communication to its audience
- most of whom had possibly flirted with an art course at some point in
time. (Don't forget : America had surburban garages for fostering punk groups;
England had art schools.) This means - once again - that Saville's work
which used known artistic works from the domain of fine art history was
playing a fairly unintellectual game, contrary to how it might appear. Saville,
though, developed this quotation further than others.
The second New Order album Power Corruption & Lies
(1981) simply reproduces a scintillating detail of a Fantin-Latour painting
and credits its source : The National Gallery, London. To cue us in on the
mode of reproduction employed, the right edge of the cover carries a colour
check guide in the form of a printer's 4-colour registration code. Here
Tschichold's theories of mechanical reproduction (designing for such processes)
are collided with Benjamin's (the delusions involved in such processes)
making this a pretty clever cover.
Other covers that work along similar lines - some better
than others - are Roxy Music's More Than This (1982) (a Rosetti painting)
; Ultravox's Hymn and Quartet (1983) (reworkings of Symbolist painting
styles); and one with a smug title if ever there was one - New Order's Thieves
Like Us (1984) (a di Chirico painting). Thus Saville's work is neither
a cunning gesture toward quotation, nor an apolitical and bankrupt form
of scavaging (to use the two sides drawn up in postmodern debates in the
early 80s) but an application of Tschichold's modernist theories in a postmodernist
era, so that the foregrounded presentation of `appropriated imagery' is
simply the result of rarifying a process for constructing an image.
We start then with an early work Peter Saville did
for Joy Division - the anthemic and eulogic Love Will Tear Us Apart (1980)
. Like the cover he did for their Closer album the same year, this cover
reaks of the graveyard, signposting a record release as an obituary - and
this is strangely before the band's singer committed suicide - and plays
with the standard erotic quality of marble, with its tactile and textural
connotations of dead white flesh. But as is well known, the material of
the 80s has been marble : for architecture it heralds a gleefully postmodern
rewrite of Las Vegas neo-retro-classicism; for graphic design it simultaneously
`gives weight' to the photo-artwork and accents rich textures which cannot
be generated by any other graphic means. Before too long, though, even this
second degree appropriation of the `marble effect' had degenerated back
into the realm of camp, corn & kitsch.
Saville quickly left the `marbelites' and explored
the erotics of micro detail design textures with a diverse range of photographic/printing
techniques, surfaces and materials, all produced for New Order : the sparkling
sandpaper texture and imprinted lettering of Temptation (1982); the vertically
raised metal sheeting of Brotherhood (1986); the highly textured paper-and-paint
layerings of the decollage for Shell Shocked (1986); and the multi-coloured
oily sheens of Shame (1986) and Bizzare Love Triangle (1987). All these
covers are in a sense `clinical/sterile/barren' but they are so much so
that they end up being vibrant and potent.
Taking cues from contemporary New York artists whose
work privileges the visual simplicity of plain objects (Richard Prince,
Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo - the latter having directed most of New Order's
post-1986 videos) the covers to True Faith (1987) and Fine Time (1988)
(like the inner sleeves to the Substance album, 1987) extend this effect
by highlighting a simple, banal image and with great restraint and decision
select a few colours to enhance the image. (Note, also, the total absence
of any typography on the front covers to all the New Order records mentioned.)
To wrap up Peter Saville's micro detail graphic design,
it's worth noting some work in this vein which bleeds profusely into aesthetic
grain graphic design. Between 1980 and 1982 he did some work for Roxy Music
whose high-style covers produced throughout the 70s by Bryan Ferry (concept),
Anthony Price (styling) and Nicholas De Ville (design) had exerted a strong
influence on many post-glam art students. For the Flesh & Blood (1980) and
Avalon (1982) albums and related singles, Saville took over the role of
De Ville as designer. As such, those covers form a generational bridge between
glam and punk, pinpointing one of the major links in artistic sensibilities
between the two generations (ie. high-style) which accounts for many post-punk
graphic design interests. (Also, the work Saville did for Ultravox is just
as referential : for example, the flat-black on gloss-black stock for Lament
(1984) goes back to Eno's Obscure series.)
While Peter Saville is largely responsible for defining
and refining the post-punk `industrial look' through the Factory releases,
his early work appeared to operate in tandem with that of Ben Kelley. Kelley
did the original design for Orchestral Maneouvres In The Dark's first album
(Orchestral Manouvres In The Dark, 1980) based on a metal industrial grate.
For the first edition the album had the grate-holes die-cut into the card;
in subsequent editions, Saville reworked the shape into a two-dimensional
design. Kelley's other work has a simimilar sculptural feel for materials
- his best effort being The Boomtown Rats' V Deep (1982) which is a definitive
statement in micro detail fine design. Saville, though, was more concerned
with the two-dimensional effect of such material manipulation (as mentioned
in the coverage of his micro detail work). Parallel to this, he explored
the role and effects of digital applications in some of his design work.
His first cover in this realm is Joy Division's first
album Unknown Pleasures (1980) which features a 3-D rendering of an
X/Y axis chart of a sound sample as displayed on the monitor screen of a
Fairlight Music Computer. At the time, most record buyers wouldn't have
known what the image was, except that it looked vaguely hi-tech and archeological.
The irony of the image (ie. a split second of sound displayed as pure digital
information) is generated by the tactile thread-embossed black cover onto
which the image is beautifully printed : the digital rendered tactile; the
untouchable granting pleasure.
Saville then left digital applications alone until
1983 when New Order started working with American record producer Arthur
Baker, who was instrumental in taking New Order's rough post-punk sound
into a dimension of hi-tech danceability. The cover of the first record
in this direction - Blue Monday (1983) - is a return to both Kelley's original
die-cut cover and Saville's own use of the Fairlight image, because this
12" single comes packaged like a computer floppy disc (enlarged from 5"
to 12") complete with the appropriate die-cutting. You remove the record
to play it just as you would a floppy disc : information for your application
and consumption.
The follow-up 12" to this was Confusion (1983) which
features block digital text overlaid on top of itself so that the words
NEW ORDER are on top of the word CONFUSION, making it very confusing to
read or decipher. The trick, though, is that only the word CONFUSION is
embossed, and clearly stands out when caught in the right light. While much
artwork after 1983 started to exploit and realize the potential effects
of the computer revolution in typesetting and layout (the key area of digital
text design, which we shall come to shortly), Saville manly viewed all these
permutations of hi-tech design as a means to reaching a kind of blunt formalism,
as if he were applying Tschichold purely to see how far he could go before
removing himself from the act of designing (marking Saville as one of the
true inheritors of punk's legacy of negativity).
New Order's Low Life (1985) is the most `generic'
design Saville has done to date. The cover is wrapped in tracing paper onto
which is printed NEW in black and - partially recalling the Confusion cover
- ORDER in silver on top of the NEW. The illusion produced makes one think
the silver lettering is underneath the tracing paper as it has the similar
tone of the photo printed on the actual card cover underneath the tracing
paper. It's all part silly perceptual gimickry and part inventive material
exploration, but overall, as ambiguous as most post-punk graphic design.
The lettering choice for this cover - slightly narrowed Helvetica with wide
spacing - relates to a sub-genre of record cover design we could term coporate
design (of the `ugly' 70s variety - not the fashionable `marbelite' look
of today's groovy big businesses).
Key instigator of this move would have to be John
Lydon and PIL, whose first album in 1978 pastiched the bold yet austere
covers of POL, TIME, L'UOMO VOGUE and TIME. At the time this was viewed
as incredibly anti-punk yet credibly within the whole anti-rock politics
Lydon was espousing at the time. (Such a tactic also related to the record
Charles Manson released in 1970 to aid his court costs, where the cover
reworked the LIFE cover with Manson so that all remained the same except
the LIFE logo was changed to LIE.)
Whilst The Human League pastiched a VOGUE cover for
their album Dare (1981) and then used the stylish Times lettering for their
own logo and had all their albums resemble issues of high-style glossy magazines,
PIL reacted against this coporate `logoistic' trend (from The Human League
and Heaven 17 to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire) and went as far
as they could: their 1985 release Album is based on the generic label design
of American supermarket packaging, taking corporate design further than
anyone else wished to go.
To wrap up this slight diversion into corporate design,
mention should be made here of what is perhaps the ultimate digital hi-tech
corporate album design : Devo's Shout (1984). As PIL would do a year
later with their Album, Devo's Shout is so close to a slick-but-bland contemporary
glossy ad image (say, for a children's laxative or a family hair shampoo)
they were able to squash their retro image which had started to inhibit
their further development.
Getting back to Saville, he has been the only designer
to pursue this line of design as far as PIL, as evidenced by his covers
to Peter Gabriel's post-1986 releases. For example, So (1987) skillfully
manages to make a corporate logo out of a two-letter word while using conflicting
typefaces! This is then caried through all connected releases, such as the
Don't Give Up single. While So and Low Life might appear out of place
in this sub-division of digital text, their place in Saville's ouvre confirms
them as perverse considerations of the `restrained extremes' post-punk graphic
design could reach. In his more current work there is a sense of deliberately
choosing not to follow those extremes set up with the Confusion cover (illegible
digitized typefaces cancelling each other out in a negation of shared space),
as if to declare that his refined covers from 1986 onwards are capable of
generating maximum effect in the face of other extremes sought in illegibility.
Excerpt from "Freaky small flat boxes of large sound
and image" POST PUNK GRAPHICS: The Displaced Present, Perfectly Placed.
Copyright:Philip Brophy 1990
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