All Things Matter

As a concept (let alone as a formal objective) abstraction was, back in those days, something of an albatross. We were taught to look, really look, and then to look some more — and it was this discipline, this ineffable scrutiny that framed our lives in the studio, where studies in composition taught us to identify and resolve asymmetrical relationships with ruthless objectivity. And so, we studied composition and letterform, book design and poster design, all of it rather vaguely governed by this unspoken adherence to a kind of modernist dogma that had filtered down from our faculty, many of them Swiss, most of them schooled in the geometric rationales of strict Bauhaus ideology. These pedagogic principles were framed by a kind of rigor which I will to my dying day associate with all that is perhaps comically Swiss: our work was disciplined and restrained, balanced and neutral. This was the fundamental institutional zeitgeist, and the work we produced was, not surprisingly perhaps, suitably analytic and hard-edged. Still, there remains a kind of improbable beauty in this kind of work, and as a testing ground for understanding the fundamentals of design as a formal language, it proved an excellent foundation for study. Fun, however, it wasn’t.

Curiously, while we were expected to hone our ability to engineer form, there was a sort of implicit assumption that we were expected to keep to the plan — a plan that only accepted certain kinds of form as, well, plausible. Just as we availed ourselves of a rather classical, even restrictive menu of typefaces to work with, so, too, were our compositional impulses expected to remain in check. If we were to divest ourselves of such notions, we were counseled to proceed with extreme caution, for to deviate from the canon was to give way to a kind of random, willy-nilly world of questionable outcome. And that was not graphic design.

Until those photograms came along, I had no idea that abstraction could literally make my pulse race. I came from a family of collectors and historians, where there was (still is) a premium on logic and narrative and clear communication. The idea that something gestural could, at once, infiltrate your brain with one story and whimsically attack your other senses with another was simply astonishing to me. How, after all, could you explain it? How could you define it? And how, in all honesty, could you possibly teach it?

I was mesmerized by photograms not only because the objects in play were real and recognizable, but because of the way they behaved, a series of oddly disenfranchised shapes that challenged the eye and by conjecture, the mind. They were dynamic, these images — compositionally irregular and physically compelling, with shadow where line should have been, and tricky overlapping edges making you rethink what, for example, constituted a foreground? Lines brushed against dots, which read as musical notes dancing across the surface of the paper. There were infinite shades of grey, and the possibility for even more, but more spectacular still than any of this was the fact that these fractured forms were incapable of duplication: they were one-offs, idiosyncratic and mysterious and unique. They couldn’t be codified because they possessed no intrinsic code. Unlike the principles which had come to define my design education, the photogram comprised no such rules, and inhabited a space with no clear definition, no certain boundaries.

I was in love.

Of course, although it would take me a long time to realize it, abstraction had everything to do with graphic design, but it was — and is — hard won. Having spent the first half of my life struggling to free myself from the constraints that constitute “good” design — the legibility and clarity of intent, the consistency that by definition embraces, say, responsible communication — I now find myself more and more drawn to the mystery of abstract form because, in the end I suppose, it is more haphazard and unpredictable, more organic and emotional, more human and, to me at least, more a reflection of a kind of basic, if complex, human truth. (Life is messy. So is abstraction.) When I look at the photograms we made that day, I remember all over again why I became a designer. And I owe it all to a soft-spoken, Swiss teacher of mine, who showed me that principles are not the same as rules; that two dimensions can so easily gesture to three; and that even though what we make as designers is by definition meant to be duplicated, we need never, ever, ever repeat ourselves. Which is a lesson that, even now, bears repeating.