ARTWORK Design Museum Brochure
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I think it likely - or slightly more than likely -
that Peter Saville is the only English graphic artist to have had an actor
play him in a major motion picture. The film, 24 Hour Party People, was
entertaining in the way that films full of intense people with good accents
and daft haircuts always are, and Saville comes off quite well, the genius
of the piece in fact, which is probably saying quite a lot, since the Manchester
music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred
self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and
forks.
Manchester - as opposed to 'Madchester', that later,
Kangol-hatted, dungareed, spliff-wielding horror-show, c.1986, which gave
the world such neanderthal hedonists as the Stone Roses and, eventually,
those terrifying knuckle-draggers Oasis - was, in the afterglow of punk,
the most interesting spot on the planet for anyone interested in rock music.
Tony Wilson, a rock show host and frenetic gadabout who ran club nights
in the city for unsigned bands, established Factory Records, which then
released the work of Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti
Column and other new-wave upstarts with big attitudes and small machines.
The bands were the coolest of their period: Peter Saville invented their
visual identity and seemed to consolidate the atmosphere around them. He
is, you might say, the Iain Sinclair of album covers, a small-town Corbusier
of layouts and logos, and anyone attentive to the development of British
design since then will see his influence just about everywhere.
Saville has worked for all sorts of client - fashion
designer Yohji Yamamoto, handbag specialist Mandarina Duck, Givenchy, the
Fruitmarket Gallery - but it is the album covers that make him loved, and
it is these which dominate The Peter Saville Show, at the Design Museum
until 14 September. When it comes to the world of Factory Records, Saville
is a central fact, the ultimate seen that, done that, designed the T-shirt,
and the museum shows this early work in its many tangled stages of development.
If you care for all this, then walking around the gallery is a rather beautifully
nostalgic experience, a meaningful escapade, inspecting the hieroglyphics
of your own pop-cultural generation.
'It may seem strange to anyone who is not a graphic
designer,' Rick Poynor writes in the book accompanying the show, 'but album
cover design has never been highly regarded within the design profession.
General histories of the subject never show many of them. There was always
a feeling among the more hard-nosed kind of design professional that music
graphics were not entirely serious.'* But serious is as serious does, and
Peter Saville went about those covers like somebody on a mission: as period-sensitive
as Andy Warhol designing adverts for shoes, as deadpan iconoclastic as Christo
wrapping the Reichstag, Saville brings a bit of class to the class-conscious;
all his album work seems to give out to the future, with perfect lines,
choice lettering, images that strike the ideal contemporary note, offering,
as he says himself, 'a visual influence which the recipient could take with
them into their adult life'.
At the Design Museum, many of the people walking from
case to case are in their early forties. Most of them, I'd wager, have lived
for twenty-odd years with this artwork sunk deep in their record collections.
They have each owned their own Peter Savilles, and the trip here is a bit
like setting out on an archaeological dig, keen to identify the foundations
of what they know. The gallery space is filled with the sound of New Order's
music, which makes it, perhaps, the only art show in London this year that
will make you want to throw some shapes as you move through it. Luckily,
I had a bad knee the day I bought my ticket.
Saville has never been much of a one for the photo
library; most of his designs seem to arrive out of the drift of his particular
consciousness, his kind of reading, his manner of looking; his signs seem
invoked as much as invented. The gallery cabinets tell a detailed story
of how this worked over time - the journeys through notepads and heavy foreign
books; the testing of colours, fabrics, metals, patterns.
Most of the people I grew up with had never worn designer
clothes, but they could tell a Peter Saville album cover at a hundred yards.
What is his style? Somewhat bare in feel, uncluttered, classic-seeming,
post-industrial, but also filled with a mood of watchfulness, a tremendous
atmosphere of despondency or of suddenly awakened energy. Above all - after
the fanzine riotousness and cut-up of punk - those Joy Division covers seem
to sit at the still centre of a morbid orderliness. They are cold, and the
development of Saville's design, from Factory to the world, is a trip into
warmth and colour, targets and stripes. But there can be no doubt about
it: just looking at the sketches and plans for the Joy Division stuff takes
me back in seconds to a world of box-bedrooms and passed-round cigarettes.
Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division's first album, 1979
- 'is an underpass with iodine streetlights through Manchester at night',
Saville said. Closer and 'Atmosphere' - later Joy Division covers - 'are
the city's gothic revival cathedral and the moors around the Pennines. Manchester
was the first industrial city, and even if you don't know that as a kid,
you grow up with a certain sensibility.' And that is what the Design Museum
is showing: a sensibility. In one cabinet you come across the metal plates
for Joy Division's most famous single, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' - rusted,
scratched iron plates, with the words punched out on them. In some way difficult
to express without resorting to Postmodern wankology, this design seemed
absolutely perfect for the Thatcherite Britain of the time, and becoming
familiar with the style at an impressionable age seemed, in some non-specific
way, to raise one's standards.
Every generation, of course, has its invigorating progenitors
of taste, its moment-capturing image-makers: Aubrey Beardsley's dark-nippled
Europeans, Mark Boxer's economical line-drawings, Nan Goldin's bruised,
droopy-eyed victims, Art Spiegelman's morality cartoons (currently appearing
in the LRB). Walking in the Design Museum, you get the impression that Peter
Saville never closes his eyes, that he is never quite asleep. As Joy Division's
singer, Ian Curtis, dies and the group becomes New Order, as the 1980s and
then the 1990s encroach, you see the covers of the records change as the
music changes. The work moves from minimalism to advertising: by the time
you get to 1993, and the album coverwork for Republic, you are aware of
an artist keyed-in suddenly to the glaring colours and motifs of American
commerce. But Saville is always alive to the ironic backward glance: there's
a lot of the 1970s in the later record-sleeve work. 'If the early 1970s
are your mood board,' Saville has said, 'the West Coast becomes your destination.
It's Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye - that was the movie that I was living
in my head, when I initially went to Los Angeles to work for Channel One.
Film noir meets yellow Daytona. Republic comes straight out of that.'
The pursuit of Saville's work can feel like a proper
journey into the world of now: because he's so adept at not sleeping, so
good at thinking between the lines of fashion and communications, Saville's
great impulse seems more surprisingly descriptive, more searching, and prettier,
too, than much of the work of the blood-and-formaldehyde British artists
who have been spurned into fame in recent years by the Daily Mail.
Along the way, as the exhibition shows, Saville designed
five seasons of catalogues for Yamamoto, and the latter's 'wooden dress'
is hanging in the second gallery. I'm not sure about Yamamoto: Saville wanted
to 'lionise the work', as he said at the time, but I think there's something
too familiar at the heart of these layouts, which often seem to depend on
stock images. For somebody so interested in refinement and Modernism, Saville
never seems desexualised, and never emotionless. The best parts of this
exhibition show a commitment to the adventure, to sensing modern things,
mixing moods, feeling alive and solving problems.
It all comes down, though, for me, to the record sleeves.
The sleeves are the thing. Against a background of Yves Klein blue, a golden
leaf floats down, or is suspended, on the cover for the 1987 New Order single
'True Faith'. It was the great song of that year, and the artwork seemed
even at the time to distil the moment's optimism, yet it also slowed everything
down to let Saville-style contemplation sneak over the noise of everything
that was happening that summer. And what was happening, really, was drugs,
the new drugs soon to be taken up by young people in every corner of Britain.
Saville has always been an interlocutor, not a preacher, and his designs
of this period underscore and eventually describe a new mood in the country's
towns and fields and underpasses.
The actual leaves used for the 'True Faith' shoot are
in a cardboard box in the Design Museum. In other parts of the gallery are
artworks that set the tone for later bands, the leatherette glamour of Pulp
and Suede, but it is the leaf that stays in my mind. It's amazing, the continuing,
personal-seeming drama of pop culture. The golden leaf is now under glass,
and you feel certain that if you touched it, it would crumble away to nothing.
*
Designed by Peter Saville (Frieze, 192 pp.,
£19.95, May, 0 9527414 2 3).
This article first appeared in the London Review of
Books
www.lrb.co.uk and is reproduced
here with the kind permission of the author.
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