THINKING ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF ARTISTS IN THE 1980S
Based on Danny’s Design Lab session on Monday, I wanted to explore in Blog 3 how artists and designers of the 80s reintegrated ideas and references from previous generations.
The period since 1960, defined by alternative and experimental forms of design, is the postmodern era, when individualism takes centre stage after decades of conformism in the early 20th century.
While Op Art (optical illusion art) and bright colours flooded the landscape, artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed the Pop Art movement by combining commercial design and art. Food packaging, celebrities and cartoons were all potential subjects for pop artists, and the line between art and graphic design became blurred. In Europe, the International Typographic Style (also known as Swiss Style) was favoured in editorial and poster design, with an emphasis on ordered grids and sans serif type. Meanwhile, German designer Dieter Rams is leading a functionalist movement in industrial design. His products for Braun represent a quietly useful aesthetic that graphically reflects the Swiss style approach.
In this process, Andy Warhol, the icon of Pop Art, loved the use of remixing as a form of creation that could alter, add, delete and reinvent existing ‘works’. It first appeared in music, with disco, folk and rock forming their own ‘tribes’ of design styles, and Rolling Stone supporting experimental and rock-inspired graphics. At the same time, the British punk movement spawned its own subculture of anarchist poster and album cover design, which encompassed newspaper collage, neon and handwritten type.
While drawing on the styles of their predecessors, these designers and artists laid the foundations for the subsequent development of graphic design, which in just over half a century has evolved as an industry from a commercial art to a corporate necessity, with large corporations now placing brand design at the heart of their marketing strategies. I don’t think remixing is copying, art forms can be borrowed, it’s just a way of entering the world of art, by which we can see and enter the wider world.