Just last year Michael Winterbottom's »24 Hour Party People« made the rounds through the cinemas, a quasi-fictional biography of music journalist Tony Wilson. The film not only traced Wilson's career as television entertainer, founder of the »Factory Records« label and finally dance organizer for the »Haçienda Club« in Manchester, but also constituted a cinematic fanzine of pop culture history, particularly interesting for fans of pop bands such as Joy Division, New Order or Happy Mondays. This year the London Design Museum is presenting an exhibit of 25 years of the work of Peter Saville, who in 1978 designed the first posters for the Factory Club and, as co-founder of Factory Records, was responsible for graphic design there from 1979 onwards. To put visitors in the right mood, a monitor at the show's entrance plays clips from Wilson's TV shows, and in the first section of the exhibit his record covers are lined up next to picture sources and other information. This arrangement evokes emotions on the part of both fans and enemies: I for one was thrilled to see my first Joy Division maxi-single, »Atmosphere«, displayed in the very first glass case – but shocked to discover that Saville was also responsible for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: record covers simply have that peculiar power of calling up very specific affections and disaffections. Incidentally, Saville also designed an exclusive promo T-shirt for Winterbottoms' film.

Irrespective of its interest for fans and its cult standing, the exhibition effectively demonstrates Peter Saville's development as graphic artist. His work is divided into three periods: first off, the eighties, in which Saville designed record covers and posters, and later also identities for public art spaces such as Fruitmarket in Edinburgh or fashion catalogs for Yohji Yamamoto. In 1990 the company founded by Saville in 1983, Peter Saville Associates, went bankrupt (as did Factory Records), and with this financial downturn came creative frustration. After a short interlude at the well-established Pentagram design agency, Yamamoto rescued him from his plight – ushering in the second period in his work. For the fashion designer, who was disillusioned with the one-dimensional fashion world, Saville developed rebellious advertising campaigns, Christmas cards and catalogs. Finally, the third room shows Saville's return to record covers, his further excursions into the domains of identity and packaging, and some independent works, the so-called »Waste Paintings«, in which the use of digital image editing takes the foreground. Saville's conceptual attitude, however, manifests only two phases: a euphoric period in the eighties and a depressed, perhaps even cynical mood since the nineties.

Saville's collaboration with Yamamoto is of great significance here: inspired by the use of recycled images by Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince, Saville peoples his advertisements with pictures culled from photo agency archives, trying to convey the prevailing lack of imagination in the burned-out graphics and fashion worlds as well as his frustration with life. A Christmas card shows a man sitting at a big desk, his face in his hands, and on the inside one reads that perhaps next year everything will be better. Sometimes this provocation struck a nerve: certain magazines refused to print Yamamoto's ads. Today, as the Design Museum show demonstrates, such efforts to provoke are all too common in the fashion world. But for Saville at any rate this phase appears to have been an attempt at freeing himself from conventional norms.

Prior to this phase the graphic artist had adhered to the teachings of modern typographer Jan Tschichold, drawing ideas from pictures of classical sculptures and the minimalist art of Yves Klein, as well as from the notation of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The latter inspired him to undertake a form encoding for the first single released by Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark; for New Order's »Power, Corruption and Lies« he carried this encoding further in a system of colors; for Fruitmarket Gallery he designed a system out of multiple pixel-like components in the form of an ›F‹. And the first of these – the photographs that Saville used for his cover designs (frequently evidencing a clear symmetry and morbid-looking figures) and Tschichold's geometric aesthetic – determine his image construction and contents, always making reference to European cultural history. Together with the electronic music and the often seemingly depressing views of life expressed by the musicians, Saville's graphic compositions evoke a latently aggressive image of deterioration and machine-based utopia, which was initially often associated with a Neo-Nazi standpoint: after all, Saville produced a visual platform for New Order and Joy Division, whose band names were taken from Hitler's terminology. However, this accusation soon proved without substance (and is not even mentioned in the exhibit). In any case, with the help of Yamamoto, who once again granted him the creative freedom he had enjoyed at Factory Records, Saville no longer relies on recycling picture forms that »aspire to become art« and turns his attention to something new: the imagery of everyday life.

He does this, however, without eliminating his interest in strong symbolic meanings: for New Order he designs images in which the destructive forces of nature intermingle in seamless collages with decadent consumerism. Nonetheless, the use of digital tools seems to take precedence here over the seemingly critical content: Photoshop and Wave help him to recycle previously rejected ideas and old graphics, with the result that the original images become unrecognizable in a sea of melting colored waves and surfaces (or, as in the case of Joy Division's first album cover, electric waves transform them into a three-dimensional object). These incidences of digital recycling are then given titles, integrated into the composition at lower right corner in large type, taking on a formalizing character. This once again emphasizes the act of recycling. Yet in the show these images are simply suspended in space without much context (even though the viewer can see that they reappear on CD covers) – the »Waste Paintings« are evidently not permitted to overstep the status of experiment. By comparison, Saville's more recent commercial designs for the pop bands Pulp and Suede, or for fashion giant Givenchy, look like listless contract work (although the exhibition does claim that the interest taken by the young pop stars revitalized Saville). Perhaps the presentation is to blame that an air of resignation hangs over the final room of the show: here one sees only end products without the rough edges evident in the design drawings and concept sheets that can be viewed in the other rooms. But perhaps this kind of image development no longer exists, since any waste or surplus immediately goes into making Saville's waste paintings.

Finally, Saville seems to have come full circle: he reproduces his own old pictures in a new digital guise, experiences his own rebirth as record cover designer (which he in fact no longer wants to be) and re-uses the waste products from his contract work past and present. His procedure for availing himself of previous images is something that Saville never really changed – the only difference is that he now uses old images of his own making.

The Peter Saville Show, Design Museum, London, 23 May to 14 September 2003; a catalog of the exhibit was published by von frieze London under the title »Designed by Peter Saville«.

 

Translated by Jenny Taylor-Gaida

 

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