ARTWORK Electronic Getting away with it
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The entrance to Peter Saville's London home is deceptively
unadorned. A run-down facade, overgrown with shrubs, masks a dazzling Day-Glo
interior that shelter magazine have lined up to photograph. Tall velvet
curtains and a baroque mix of modern furniture, Asian objets d'art and fluorescent
artwork dominate the open plan. ''It's very neo-Performance,' don't you
think?'' says Saville, 47, referring to the psychedelic 1970 film. It's
certainly an appropriately eclectic environment in which to interview a
pioneer of British style culture who is feted for his reinterpretation of
disparate visual codes. But there is one off note: the Enyaesque CD of ocean
sounds playing in the background.
''It's naff, I know, but it relaxes me,'' Saville says.
The recording certainly seems to be doing the trick: Saville may be long-term
house minding (the place is owned by a fashion industry friend who lives
mostly in Paris), but he's at home with all manner of subjects. The conversation
jumps from the Pleasure Chest in Los Angeles -- ''the best fetish store
in the world'' -- to the interior of the George V hotel in Paris, whose
palette and patterns remind him of the American Express Corporate Card. His sentences are often
punctuated with ''blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,'' which the otherwise deliberate
Saville reels off as quickly as a tape recorder on fast-forward (a tic he
shares with his longtime friend and collaborator, the photographer Nick
Knight).
But, as ever, the conversation with Saville returns
to work. He walks me through an old exhibition catalog of his oeuvre, the
contents of which help to explain why he is so revered by his peers (Creative
Review readers this year voted Saville the most admired figure in the design
world), why clients like E.M.I. continue to beat a path to his door and
why he is the subject of a forthcoming book and a major exhibition in London.
''I don't have a portfolio,'' says the floppy-haired
graphics guru, juggling a glass of Champagne and a Marlboro Light. Flipping
through the catalog, Saville's blue-chip fashion clientele emerges from
the pages like so many store signs in a high-rent shopping district. Yohji
Yamamoto. Jil Sander. Givenchy. Christian Dior. Then, of course, there are
the groundbreaking album covers in which Saville successfully managed to
converge his passion for art, fashion, music and style, in the process elevating
an underappreciated skill into the realm of fine art. His reductionist hand
is visible in the ultra-real renderings for recent Brit bands like Pulp
and Suede. But it is Saville's neo-classical cover art for Joy Division,
and later New Order, that cemented his place in the pantheon of pop culture,
alongside his compatriot designers Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett. As
one of the founding members of Factory -- the Manchester movement, portrayed
in the recent movie ''24 Hour Party People,'' that spawned Factory Records
and the Hacienda nightclub -- Saville emerged as the default creative director
for a style-obsessed generation.
''I had just finished art school in '78 and had total
freedom to express my own vision,'' Saville says. ''No client, no brief,
no budget, no deadlines, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The myth of Peter
Saville is based mainly on those album covers for Factory, but that work
was done in a weird autonomous zone.''
Perhaps Saville's best-known work is the cover of the
New Order album ''Power, Corruption and Lies.'' Saville had unsuccessfully
trawled London's art galleries for a Renaissance painting of a suitably
Machiavellian character. Frustrated, he found himself in the gift shop of
the National Gallery buying postcards. ''I pulled out this card of the Fantin-Latour
still-life of roses from the shelf,'' Saville recalls, ''and my girlfriend
at the time just slid alongside me and said, 'You're not thinking of using
that, are you?' I knew then I had to use it -- it's so much better than
the bleeding obvious.''
The design critic Rick Poynor concurs. ''It's doubtful
that many New Order fans would have known much about Fantin-Latour or enjoyed
the image as an oil painting,'' Poynor says. ''But by recontextualizing
the image and contrasting it with the music, Saville achieved the sort of
ambiguity and complexity of resonance more usually associated with art.''
But if Saville is acknowledged for his modern appropriations
and uncanny ability to read the culture, he also has the reputation of being
a notoriously lousy businessman who works to his own schedule.
''I just don't fit into the graphic business,'' Saville
says. ''And I don't conduct my life in a businesslike, professional way.''
Emily King, the editor of the forthcoming ''Designed
by Peter Saville'' (Frieze), confirms that as an art director, Saville plays
against type. ''Saville's story can be read as a refusal of commercial success,''
King says. ''The moments he has come closest to being able to carve up his
talent for considerable profit are when he has behaved at his very worst
-- the nocturnal schedule, the procrastination, the anxieties about the
quality of his work.''
Saville's inability to exist in the corporate world
was demonstrated by his ill-fated association with the occult-sounding design
group Pentagram. In 1990, Pentagram saved Saville from insolvency, but the
marriage proved to be short-lived. ''I was only there for about two years,
but I managed to drive the company around the bend with my willfulness,''
he says. ''Looking back, I probably wouldn't do anything differently. There
was a philosophical divide between Pentagram and me, but there is a philosophical
divide between any graphic design firm and me.''
Another enabler, Aubrey Balkind, of the New York design
firm Frankfurt Balkind, later sponsored Saville and his colleague Brett
Wickens to move to Los Angeles and work on a doomed multimedia concept.
''Nobody had any idea what we were doing there,'' Saville says. ''Neither
did we. We lived in the Sunset Marquis, we had no car, no salary, no visas,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It went on for months, until they finally
gave me a visa for outstanding aliens, which I thought was apt. By the time
it arrived, though, Frankfurt Balkind and I were parting company.''
In the absence of any real work, Saville had maxed
out his corporate card reinventing himself for L.A. ''Nobody got it at the
time,'' he says. ''People were appalled by my house in the Hollywood Hills,
with dark wood paneling and shag pile carpet, but it's very now. And my
personal style mutated into what I guess people now call
Gucci. It was '93, and it was obvious to me that's how
you dress in L.A.''
Those who know Saville insist that his personal style
has not wavered since he was a middle-class teenager in Manchester obsessed
with Roxy Music, Kraftwerk, early Armani men's wear and ''Bonnie and Clyde.''
''For someone so fixated with the way that culture evolves, he has always
worn exactly the same clothes and hairstyle,'' says Alice Rawsthorn, director
of the Design Museum in London, which will house an exhibition of his work,
''The Peter Saville Show,'' opening on May 23. ''Warren Beatty, especially
in 'Shampoo' and 'Bonnie and Clyde,' has influenced Peter's behavior as
much as his wardrobe and hair. His other icons are two little-known British
pop singers called Paul and Barry Ryan from the 1960's, who wore these neat
little mod outfits of black polo necks, narrow lapeled jackets with white
jeans and Chelsea boots.''
If Saville's look has remained constant, it's probably
because he's allergic to the idea of design for design's sake. ''We have
a situation now where you want to clear the cultural space,'' Saville says.
''Designing things is vulgar. That's why I can't be bothered doing it anymore,
why I do it by special appointment only. Next year will be the 25th anniversary
since I left college, and as far as I'm concerned, I'll just take the gold
watch and go. I don't want to be like Phil Spector: 'Hey, I have a great
idea, let's get that old guy.'''
If Saville sounds like a diva threatening to leave
the stage, not everyone is buying it. ''For as long as I have known him,
Peter has said that he's retiring, that he's bored with graphic design work,''
Rawsthorn says. ''Peter is this extraordinary combination of supreme solipsistic
self-confidence and acute insecurity, and that's what powers his work.''
While he may not admit to high expectations for his
own future, Saville is excited about the retrospective exhibition and book,
also slated for May. But the most important task, he says, is sifting through
the mountains of printed ephemera he has collected over the years. ''The
thing I feel most pressure about is making sense of this, curating the estate
of Peter Saville,'' he says rather dramatically, pointing to three enormous
piles of paper.
Mixed among the stack of erotic imagery -- ''It's rarely
found its way into my work, but it takes up a fair amount of my time,''
says the self-confessed porn junkie -- there are random musings, like ''London
losing war on crack'' and ''Design is the new advertising.''
Occasionally, he stops to make sense of a McNugget
of pop posturing he's jotted down over the years. ''Sometimes it takes me
minutes to work out what I was thinking,'' he says, trying to remember what
prompted him to scribble down the words ''Free exchange of values and unregulated
exchange of ideas.''
''Oh, I know,'' he says. ''It was an idea for the trading
of values on the stock exchange. Can you imagine? Warhol is up, but Louis
Vuitton is down?''
There are hundreds of similar skeletons for ideas --
a fictional German nuclear family for use in an art project, thoughts on
repositioning CNN, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah -- waiting to be fleshed
out. You get the feeling that it will be years before he finally allows
himself to retire to the sounds of waves crashing: ''What can I say? I am
an art director. It says so in my passport.''
Horacio Silva is the deputy editor of Men's Fashions
of the Times.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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