PHOTOGRAPH Nigel Shafran
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"I like art that grows up not knowing that it's art," says Peter
Saville, referring to a favorite Claes Oldenburg quote. It's a phrase that
offers an interesting insight into the juncture at which Saville now finds
himself. The past thirty years have been a slow, sometimes painful "getting
of wisdom" process for the famous British designer. Influential and
celebrated he certainly is, but he's also spent years struggling to find
a place for himself in the world of graphic communication. Now he's discovering
that the only route is to do what he always did best, to simply pursue his
own vision.
There's a big reputation surrounding the name. Saville is renowned for his
anti-social working hours, lateness, stormy client relationships, impeccable
fashion sense, and long nights at London's Groucho Club. "To work with
Peter you have to understand that Peter never stops working. You have to
embrace the long waits, the late night sessions, his perfectionist ideal,
the Champions League, the Groucho Club and his impressions of comedians
Paul Whitehouse and David Brent," affirms Saville Associates' Howard
Wakefield.
Whether you buy into the Peter Saville myth or not, at the core, he remains
synonymous with his timeless Factory sleeves. Encased behind bits of glass
in The Peter Saville Show they look fantastic. Stashed against the walls
of your boxy bedroom as a teenager they looked even better. Saville has
lost count of the people - usually males in their 30s and 40s - who have
approached him to say they got into design because of his work at Factory.
"Peter apologizes when people say they became a designer because of
him, especially if they work on fish finger packaging," comments Wakefield.
"I too was influenced by Peter to become a designer. Who isn't? And
thankfully by working with Peter, there are only sexy jobs." Saville's
Factory covers were the first pieces of art many aspiring designers seriously
learned to love. Saville didn't just change the way we look at music packaging
- his vision helped change visual culture across the board.
From all accounts, Factory was a unique working environment. Answerable
to neither band nor record label, Saville simply created sleeves to please
himself. "I found a stage where I could pursue my own interests within
the context of design. I have never had any other working situation that
is comparable with it - probably because it doesn't exist," Saville
comments. "I was not asked to service the records, I was just doing
a piece of work that would be released that year along with the music. I
was able to produce that piece of work in an autonomous zone, so it had
to have a completeness in itself, because it was created independently of
the music,"
In a sense, they weren't record covers at all. They certainly didn't look
like them. Take Unknown Pleasures, Saville's first Joy Division sleeve:
an uncompromising black square, centered by a flow of whitely drawn sonar
pulses. An elegant piece of understatement - no band name, no mugshots,
nothing to indicate that this was the first major release from a brand new
record label - simply an impeccable sufficient object.
But then again, most of the covers are objects d'art. According to Rick
Poyner, what "set Saville's designs apart from most of the competition
was that they were conceptually lavish, too." Asked of his favorite
from that period, Saville cites his sleeve for New Order's Power Corruption
and Lies. While its cover reproduces a luxuriant still life of a bowl of
roses by Henri Fantin-Latour, the reverse side resembles a floppy disk and
uses a colour-coded alphabet to "spell out" the words New Order
and the album's title. Saville describes it as "romantic idealism juxtaposed
against the modern, the technical, and the cool since one part is just incredibly
florid and nostalgic whereas the other is completely cool and hard-edged."
Saville describes the appropriation of the Fantin-Latour image as "working
in a kind of curatorial way, bringing together old and new." Growing
up in Manchester and traveling to college each day from a semi-rural landscape
to the inner city, he watched the two meld, the proximity of one enhancing
the other. Saville, therefore, instinctively feels the charge of juxtaposition:
of entwining discordant strands. Think of the cover for Joy Division's Closer:
modern vinyl, swathed in classic typography and neo-classical imagery -
such a compellingly discordant object to hold in one's hand.
This so-called "curatorial approach" dominated the first decade
of Saville's output. He calls it an "early form of sampling,"
the "edge" of which hinged upon startling the expectation. "I
was using familiar codes, but shifting the context." Power Corruption
and Lies, like many of Saville's designs, "depends on the sense of
contextual displacement," Poyner observes. Saville's selected codes
were not used arbitrarily: "They were appropriately picked and always
idea-driven."
Gradually though, Saville questioned this referencing process: "I remember
20 years ago, after I'd cleverly quoted Muller-Brockmann and Jan Tschichold
- I realised I'd competently copied some good people. But when I designed
the sleeve for the True Faith single I didn't copy anyone - it was my own
idea. I saw something from real life, a leaf floating past my car, and I
thought 'That looks good.' So I started to challenge myself to do only new
ideas, truly new ones."
However, originality and profitability make uneasy bedfellows. "There's
no point confronting a client with a concept they don't get, " Saville
claims. "In commercial work there's a comfort zone of rapid assimilation.
It's already your favorite record cover, your favorite book jacket. You've
seen it before... you get it straight away. Where would contemporary communications
be without that sense of familiarity?"
At Factory, Saville claims, profit was never the bottom line. His ongoing
refusal to bow to false idols has arguably been his greatest asset, but
(for his bank balance at least) it's also his biggest problem. He is incapable
of summoning interest or energy for that which has no integrity or originality.
"His relationship with clients can be stormy, but I think that is because
they don't realise how potentially good Peter is for them," says friend
and collaborator Nick Knight. "They're not ready to accept his advice.
Peter often comes up with the right answer and then the client tries to
meddle with it - and when he's forced to compromise, Peter goes of the job
because he's not interested anymore."
"I only want to get out of bed for something that's worth doing,"
admits Saville resignedly. As a commercial designer, this makes his life
difficult. He's not interested in shifting product for the sake of it, "Design
has become the cover for unnecessary consumption," he comments. "So
you go from being a rebel who wanted to change the system and improve the
world, to being mercenary. I don't want to take part in the wholesale, consumerised
rape of a nation. If people had the money, it might be more acceptable.
But they actually don't, so it's offensive. If you don't actually respect
the product itself how on earth can you encourage people to buy it? I would
like to write across packaging and ad campaigns, 'Don't bother, you don't
need it,'" he adds defiantly.
Saville finds it quite dispiriting that his vision fed this very machine.
"We've seen 25 years of style running away with itself. It's not supposed
to replace content; it's supposed to better reflect it. This is one of the
reasons I feel design had devalued itself, and designers have devalued themselves,"
he comments. Saville's original aim was to make the everyday look better:
so he put his own aspirations into the media available to him, and this
sensibility has filtered through into more or less every product and shop
you see around today. But if making the world look better was Saville's
aim, then he'd be the first to say be careful what you wish for: "Content
has sort of gone awol," he states, "image has become preeminent.
It's a misleading and superficial state of affairs."
"Saville would sell out if he could," Emily King observes in the
foreword to Designed by Peter Saville, "but he is constitutional unable."
In refusing to collude, Saville's ongoing dilemma is how to pursue a creatively
rewarding life while staying financially afloat. Asked if he's happy, he
replies, "If I could establish how to make my living now, then I would
feel much happier." Saville Associates continues to operate, but Saville
himself is increasingly drawn to avenues beyond graphic communication, "somewhere
between the business of design and the business of art," columnist
Peter York finds.
Paging through his book Designed by Peter Saville, I find myself going back
to the same image: a simple colour study entitled "Rhododendrons, Holland
Park 30.05.87." Strips of oranges, greens, purples, and reds torn from
a Pantone book are assembled horizontally on a sheet of white paper, the
title simply typed across the top. "I don't think of it as a piece,"
Saville explains when asked about it. "It isn't work - it's just what
I do. I walked through Holland Park one day and the colours were so great
that I asked my girlfriend at the time to go back with a Pantone book. I
want to do the same in Snowdonia." It wasn't even Saville's idea to
put the piece in the book, and yet, as scraps of beauty go, it's a perfect
offering: simple as a Haiku, purely rendered in squares of colour.
It's a nice little insight into how Saville sees the world. The handover
between fine and applied art, he believes, is getting closer all the time.
He spent years on what he describes as "a fine art correspondence course
with myself." Now he's hoping to cross the boundary properly. Ironically
it's only as he tentatively negotiates what he calls "the really big
league" that his stylish sensibility hinders him. Saville is discovering
that aesthetics aren't really the issue at all: "The motivational agenda
of the designer and the artist are completely different. As designers, we're
on a mission to make things look good. It has to seduce to be effective.
Contemporary art is not about looking good. It's the quintessential first
trap: designers or applied artists, given free reign to express themselves,
can't help making things look good, so they're immediately drawn down an
already-trodden path. In some way they will be quoting ready-made visual
codes. The art world doesn't want that. It's already got it."
Saville has spent his life, albeit unwittingly perhaps, working for art
that grows up not knowing that it's art. "I think that what I'm good
at is not being Jan Tschichold nor Yves Klein nor Andy Warhol or any of
those role models," says Saville. "I'm good at being me, and I'm
good at spotting potential. I don't take brilliant photographs, I don't
sculpt, I'm not a fantastic typographer, but I see all the connections and
I think I do that in a unique way."
"He has the most singular understanding of modern visual life,"
affirms Knight. "Stand him in any city in the world and he will have
a relevant, pertinent comment to make. I've never met anyone who can understand
the world the way Peter understands it." In his short essay on the
designer, critic Paul Morley perceives an especial Saville effect that takes
you to "where a mind meets an outside world on the inside." The
kernel is within those Rhododendrons in Holland Park: how Saville sees the
world has always been the most absorbing part of the story.
This article originally appeared in Graphis July/August 2004. Copyright
Graphis Inc / Paula Carson.
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