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1999 AIGA MEDAL
In the mid-1980s two names changed graphic design: Macintosh and
Tibor. The former needs no introduction. Nor, with various books
and articles by and about him, does the latter. Tibor Kalman, who
died on May 2, 1999, after a long, courageous battle with
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was one of the few graphic designers whose
accomplishments were legend within the field and widely known
outside as well. Tibor may not be as influential on the daily
practice of graphic design as the Mac, but his sway over how
designers think—indeed, how they define their roles in culture
and society—is indisputable. For a decade he was the design
profession's moral compass and its most fervent provocateur.
I first saw Tibor in the 1980s when, as master of ceremonies of
the annual AIGA New York “Fresh Dialogues” evening, he transformed
the navel-gazing event into a cultural circus. He assembled a cast
of a dozen relative unknowns and a few prematurely forgottens to
enlighten and entertain, each through five minute offerings about
the overall visual culture, rather than their own design work.
Though at times it was reminiscent of an elementary school
show-and-tell, most of the presentations shed light on generally
ignored issues of environmental waste, the virtues of
unsophisticated design, and the divisions between Modernism and
postmodernism. Some were funny, others serious—together they were
truly fresh dialogues.
Tibor was a tough ringmaster. If any speaker went thirty seconds
beyond his or her allotted time (or if Tibor felt that the talk was
unbearably dull) the amplified sound of barking dogs would pierce
the presenter's soliloquy, signaling the end of the segment. In
addition, Tibor introduced quirky short films, an unexpected pizza
delivery (by a nonplussed delivery boy), and souvenir handouts
(designed by a job printer and reproduced at QuickCopy) that showed
design at its most rudimentary, yet communicative. As a new twist
on the old ventriloquist's dummy, Tibor's onstage straight man was
a Mac Classic with a happy face that quipped at programmed
intervals. This was the first of many public salvos against the
status quo. It was also vintage Tibor.
Not since the height of American Modernism during the late 1940s
and 1950s had one designer prodded other designers to take
responsibility for their work as designer-citizens. With a keen
instinct for public relations, a penchant for Barnum-like antics,
and a radical consciousness from his days as an organizer for SDS
(Students for a Democratic Society), Tibor had, by the late 1980s,
become known as (or maybe he even dubbed himself) the “bad boy” of
graphic design.
When the clothing company Esprit, which had prided itself as
being socially liberal and environmentally friendly, was awarded
the 1986 AlGA Design Leadership award, an irate Tibor anonymously
distributed leaflets during the awards ceremony at the AlGA
National Design Conference in San Francisco protesting the
company's exploitation of Asian laborers. Tibor believed that
award-winning design was not separate from the entire corporate
ethic and argued that “many bad companies have great design.” In
1989, as co-chair with Milton Glaser of the AlGA's “Dangerous
Ideas” conference in San Antonio, he urged designers to question
the effects of their work on the environment and refuse to accept
any client's product at face value. As an object lesson and act of
hubris, he challenged designer Joe Duffy to an impromptu debate
about a full-page advertisement that he and his then partner,
British corporate designer Michael Peters, had placed in the
Wall Street Journal promoting their services to Fortune
500 corporations. While most designers admired this
self-promotional effort, Tibor insisted that the ad perpetuated
mediocrity and was an example of selling out to corporate
capitalism. This outburst was the first, but not the last, in which
Tibor criticized another designer in public for perceived misdeeds.
By the early 1990s, Tibor also had written (or collaborated with
others in writing) numerous finger-wagging manifestos that exposed
the pitfalls of what he sarcastically called “professional”
design.
Tibor saw himself as a social activist for whom graphic design
was a means of achieving two ends: good design and social
responsibility. Good design, which he defined as “unexpected and
untried,” added more interest, and was thus a benefit, to everyday
life. Second, since graphic design is mass communication, Tibor
believed it should be used to increase public awareness of a
variety of social issues. His own design firm, M&Co (named
after his wife and co-creator, Maira), which started in 1979
selling conventional “design by the pound” to banks and department
stores, was transformed in the mid-1980s into a soapbox for his
social mission.
He urged clients like Restaurant FIorent to use the advertising
M&Co created for them to promote political or social messages.
He devoted M&Co's seasonal self-promotional gifts to advocate
support for the homeless. One Christmas he sent over 300 clients
and colleagues a small cardboard box filled with the typical
Spartan contents of a homeless-shelter meal (a sandwich, crackers,
candy bar, etc.) and offered to match any donations that the
recipients made to an agency for the homeless. The following year
he sent a book peppered with facts about poverty along with twenty
dollars and a stamped envelope addressed to another charity.
Tibor was criticized for using the issue of homelessness as a
public relations ploy to garner attention for M&Co. And indeed
he was a master at piquing public interest in just this way. But he
was also sincere. Perhaps the impulse came from his childhood, when
as a seven-year-old Hungarian immigrant fleeing the Communists in
1956, he and his family were displaced—virtually homeless—in a
new land. Although he became more American than most natives, he
never forgot the time when he was an “alien.”
He savored the nuances of type and had a fetish for vernacular
design—the untutored or quotidian signs, marquees, billboards,
and packages that compose mass culture—but understood that being
a master of good design meant nothing unless it supported a message
that led to action. Even most stylistic work must be viewed in the
context of Tibor's persistence. Everything had to have meaning and
resonance. A real estate brochure, like one for Red Square, an
apartment building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, had to be
positioned in terms of how it would benefit the surrounding
low-income community. One message was never enough. When Tibor sold
a “design” to a client, he did not hype a particular typeface or
color, but rather how the end result would simultaneously advance
both client and culture.
Tibor did not, however, rebel against being a professional—M&Co was in business to be successful and he enjoyed the
rewards of prosperity. But he questioned the conventions of
success. “Everyone can hire a good photographer, choose a tasteful
typeface and produce a perfect mechanical,” Tibor once railed. “So
what? That means ninety-five percent of the work exists on the same
professional level, which for me is the same as being mediocre.”
Tibor ardently avoided any solution, or any client, that would
perpetuate this bete noir. About clients, Tibor said:
“We're not here to give them what's safe and expedient. We're not
here to help eradicate everything of visual interest from the face
of the earth. We're here to make them think about design that's
dangerous and unpredictable. We're here to inject art into
commerce.”
With little patience for mundane and insipid thinking, whether
it came from clients, other designers, or M&Co, Tibor was
intolerant of mindless consistency and was not reluctant to make
people angry—including associates, friends, and allies. For
example, in a speech before the Modernism and Eclecticism design
history symposium, he accused two friends, Charles Spencer Anderson
and Paula Scher, who revived historical styles at that time, of
being graverobbers who abrogated their responsibility as creators.
Curiously, M&Co had developed a house style of its own based on
vernacularism, the “undesign” that Tibor celebrated for its
unfettered expression, which also fed into the postmodern penchant
for referring to the past. While Tibor's ire sometimes seemed
inconsistent with his own practice, he rationalized M&Co's use
of vernacular as a symbol of protest—a means of undermining the
cold conformity of the corporate International Style.
M&Co left scores of design artifacts behind, but Tibor will
be remembered more for his critiques on the nature of consumption
and production than for his formal studio achievements, which were
contributed to by many talented design associates. Despite numerous
entries in design annuals, and the catalogue of objects in his own
book, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist (Princeton
Architectural Press, 1998), the heart of Tibor's accomplishment was
enlarging the parameters of design from service to cultural force.
And this was no more apparent than in his later work. For when
Tibor realized that stylish record albums, witty advertisements,
and humorous watches and clocks had a limited cultural value, he
turned to editing. First, he signed on as creative director of the
magazines Artforum and Interview. But he mostly
guided the look, not the content, of these publications. In fact,
without total control he was frustrated by his inability to
experiment with a new pictorial narrative theory that he was
developing. As a teenager he was an avid fan of Life
magazine, and believed that in the age of electronic media,
photojournalism was still a more effective way to convey
significant stories. While editing pictures for the photographer
Oliviero Toscani, who had created the pictorial advertising
identity for Benetton, the Italian clothing manufacturer, Tibor
helped produce a series of controversial advertisements focusing on
AIDS, racism, refugees, violence, and warfare that carried the
Benetton logo but eschewed the fashions it sold. For him, this was
sublimely subversive.
Productless commercial advertisements were not altogether new.
In the 1980s Kenneth Cole and Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream companies
devoted advertising and packaging space to promote social and
environmental causes. But in the 1990s Benetton went a step further
with what began as The United Colors of Benetton, a product-based
series of multicultural kids promoting ethnic and racial harmony,
which evolved into captionless double truck journalistic
photographs. Ultimately the ads led to the creation of Benetton's
own magazine, Colors, for which Tibor became
editor-in-chief and where he continued to reject fashion magazine
cliches in favor of sociopolitical issues. Colors quickly
became the primary outlet for Tibor's most progressive ideas. And
shortly after launching the magazine, he closed M&Co's doors
and moved to Rome.
Colors was “the first magazine for the global village,”
Tibor announced, “aimed at an audience of flexible minds, young
people between fourteen and twenty, or curious people of any age.”
It was also the outlet for Tibor's political activism. In his most
audacious issue devoted to racism, a feature titled “How to Change
Your Race” examined cosmetic means of altering hair, lips, noses,
eyes, and, of course, skin color to achieve some kind of platonic
ideal. Another feature in the same issue, “What If...” was a
collection of full-page manipulated photographs showing famous
people racially transformed: Queen Elizabeth and Arnold
Schwarzenegger as black; Pope John Paul II as Asian; Spike Lee as
white; and Michael Jackson given a Nordic cast. “Race is not the
real issue here,” Kalman noted. “Power and sex are the dominant
forces in the world.”
Through its vivid coverage of such themes as deadly weapons,
street violence, and hate groups, Colors was a vivid
contrast to Benetton's fashion products. Even the way it was
printed, on pulp paper, which soaked up ink and muted the color
reproductions, went counter to the brightly lighted Benetton shops
with happy clothes in vibrant color. Yet Colors served to
“contextualize,” as Tibor defined it, Toscani's advertising
imagery. Indeed, the basis for criticism leveled at Benetton's
advertising campaign had been the absence of context. Without a
caption or explanatory text the images appeared gratuitous—shocking, yes, but uninformative. The campaign signaled that
Benetton had some kind of a social conscience, but the ads
themselves failed to explain what it was. With Colors the
advertisements appeared as teasers for a magazine that critically
addressed war and peace, love and hate, power and sex.
In 1997, cancer forced Tibor to return to New York, where
despite grueling chemo and radiation therapy, he re-established
M&Co with a mission to take a pro-active approach to design and
art direction. Foreseeing his last chance to do meaningful work,
Tibor accepted only projects that would have lasting impact. He
began writing OpArt critiques for the OpEd Page of the New York
Times, attacking smoking and noise pollution, among other
issues. He designed an outdoor installation of photographs of real
people commenting on their relationship to Times Square, which hung
on the scaffold around the Conde Nast tower in Times Square. He
taught a weekly class in pictorial narrative in the MFA/Design
program at the School of Visual Arts until a week before he died.
And he continued to contribute articles on popular and vernacular
culture to various magazines. As his last testament he designed
“Tiborocity,” a retrospective exhibition at SFMoMA, constructed as
thematic “neighborhoods” that integrated Tibor's work with his
graphic influences from the '60s and '70s.
Of the two names that changed design in the '80s and '90s—Mac
and Tibor—one changed the way we work, the other the way we
think. The former is a tool, the latter was our conscience.
Copyright 1999 by AIGA.
Resources
New York Times obituary by Steven Heller, May 5,
1999.
The Independent obituary by Rick Poynor, May 17,
1999.
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