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Dark tools of desire
Surrealism is often described as the most influential of all twentieth-century art movements. Its poetic sensibility and way of perceiving reality is so pervasive that we take it for granted now. From the bursts of nonsense and deranged flights of fancy in contemporary humour to David Lynch’s disturbing journeys into the secret backwaters of desire, Surrealism has exposed the liberating power of the unconscious mind. Yet, despite its place at the dark heart of visual culture, Surrealism’s implications for the commercial art of graphic design have never received much attention in academic histories and informal surveys. Dada and Futurism, by contrast, were such fertile sources of new approaches to typography that they remain essential points of comparison and, indeed, benchmarks for all subsequent attempts to manipulate letterforms for expressive effect; and this applies even to designs that share no philosophical or ideological aims with the Dadaists and Futurists.
One reason for Surrealism’s relatively unexamined role in the history of graphic design is that it had no decisive impact on typographic methods and aesthetics. While graphic designers are still working today with typographic conventions that can be traced back to Modernism, Surrealism is not part of this narrative. This raises the question of whether there was ever such a thing as surrealistic typography – we will return to this later.
In A History of Graphic Design, Philip Meggs briefly discusses Surrealism in a section about modern art’s influence on graphic design, without relating the movement to specific moments and developments in design. ‘Unfortunately, the ideas and images of surrealism have been exploited and trivialised frequently in the mass media,’ he concludes, without much enthusiasm. Writing in an entry about Surrealism in his recent book Stylepedia, Steven Heller is similarly lukewarm about its applications in visual communication. ‘As commercial art, Surrealism was a benign tool not a revolutionary language,’ claims Heller. Nevertheless, he believes that as a ‘popular style’ this neutralised concept still has its uses: ‘Surrealism’s dreamy appeal continues to entice, and remains a viable means to convey complex themes in poetic, often abstract, ways.’
Be this as it may, scholarly and curatorial interest in Surrealism continues at full tilt. In recent years, London has seen major exhibitions at Tate Modern (‘Surrealism: Desire Unbound’, 2001) and at the Hayward Gallery (‘Undercover Surrealism’, 2006). In March 2007, ‘Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design’, the first substantial exhibition to examine Surrealism’s influence on design, opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This sounded promising, but curator Ghislaine Wood’s focus in both the exhibition and its accompanying book is primarily on Surrealism in relation to the object: furniture, fashion and the interior take centre stage. Although the show features magazine covers and advertising related mainly to these topics, it does not set out to consider the relationship between Surrealist concepts, aims and methods and the development and practice of graphic design. . .
. . . In the work of Brian Schorn, the connection with Surrealism becomes even more explicit. Schorn studied for two years at medical school where he worked as a microbiology assistant and dissected a human cadaver. His interest in Surrealism and in figures such as Ernst and the poetic box-maker Joseph Cornell began when he switched to photographic studies. Schorn had acquired MFAs in photography and creative writing before I encountered him at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the early 1990s, studying for a third MFA in graphic design. By that time he was thoroughly steeped in Surrealist literature and art: Lautréamont (author of the Surrealist precursor classic Les Chants de Maldoror), Breton, Artaud, Bataille, the Romanian painter Victor Brauner and the contemporary American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin are just a few of the influences Schorn cites. He kept dream journals and experimented with automatic writing.
‘I wrote a tremendous amount of poetry using this technique and I believe that I actually accomplished a kind of total, open door to my unconscious landscape,’ Schorn recalls. ‘It was completely natural and flowing.’ He began to apply similar Surrealist techniques to graphic imagery. ‘Soon, the entire form and content of my designs were informed by Surrealist techniques and ideas, most notably collage, automatism, dreams, fascination with the body, primal urges and non-sequiturs. Everything happened in a purely unconscious state where anything was possible. The work, in a way, spontaneously combusted before my eyes. It was fuelled by a desire to reach content not available to grid-oriented designs or thinking. The works were individual universes without rules of logic.’
While Schorn’s pieces might have seemed superficially similar to other examples of 1990s graphic rule-breaking, his designs for campus events and local clients such as Surreal magazine (published briefly in Detroit) were fluent examples of authentically surrealistic graphic form. The anatomical details and organic formations derived from Schorn’s intimate study of the body’s interior – an education in seeing that few graphic designers can ever have shared – achieve a depth of psychological reality found in the most compelling Surrealist creations: they are dream deposits and residues of a desire beyond words. Schorn’s poetry, published in Emigre with typographic collages based on the letter ‘A’, and in a book, Strabismus (1995), is equally committed to Surrealist aims and imperatives. If the Surrealists had made graphic design a central concern in the 1920s and 1930s, and had brought the same degree of iconoclasm to typography and graphic form that they brought to collage and painting, then Schorn’s and Fella’s output gives a good idea of what it might have looked like. ‘My interest in Surrealism was completely attached to all aspects of my self: mind, body and spirit,’ says Schorn. ‘I lived it and what I produced at that time was a product of it.’
Schorn’s experience suggests that ideas drawn from Surrealism – whether we use the term or not – are potentially limitless in their possibilities for a truly unfettered graphic design, just as they are limitless in other areas of culture. His experience also shows why there are few designers whose work can be closely related to Surrealism as a movement. Surrealism demands a degree of inwardness that is not compatible with the realities of most client work. Fella pursues his brand of uncompromising automatism from a position of semi-retirement. Schorn tried working as a corporate designer in Chicago after Cranbrook, but gave it up in less than a year.
After that he taught graphic design for six years, only to discover that there was little time to engage in personal explorations as intensive as those he had conducted during his years studying photography, writing and design. Today, after acquiring a fourth MFA in electronic music, he works as a musician and performance artist and teaches interdisciplinary art. The strange products of his brief stay in design offer a tantalisingly sharp glimpse of another possible design world, for anyone who seeks it.
‘Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design’ is at the V&A, London SW7, from 29 March to 22 July 2007.
Street of Crocodiles can be found on a double DVD, The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 (BFI). |
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