Meditations on Modernism
Posted July 5, 2006
In this opening chapter from Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist
Design in Our Time, author Natalia Ilyin muses about design education
today and how the history of Modernism has influenced it.
**
Today a woman asked me if I could draw a mouse.
She spotted me in the window of the Blackbird Bakery, where I sat
drinking tea in the middle of the afternoon with my friend the
animal-rights activist. Kristin was just getting into my dog’s anxiety
issues when Meg blew in the door and asked me about the mouse.
Could I draw a Tasha Tudor sort of mouse? A mouse wearing a ruffled
apron with lavender coming out of the pockets? Because her
bed-and-breakfast, the Captain’s House, needed a picture of its mascot,
the Captain’s Mouse, and looking through the bakery window, she had seen
me and remembered that people said I was artistic and that maybe I could
draw that mouse, you know, for money.
I nodded and smiled. Of course! I’d be glad to draw her a mouse. When
should I get sketches to her? She told me and blew back out the door. I
sat back, delighted, but slowly my moment of artistic exhilaration passed.
“How did this happen to me?” I asked myself in a hushed and somber tone.
Only a few years ago I spent thousands of dollars to get an MFA in
graphic design in order to fight my way bare-fisted down the concrete
canyons of New York, hoping to make a bundle creating Citicorp logos
while living in a Dan Friedman–like edgy apartment.
....
I unwittingly followed the No-Draw Rule for years, casting an ironic eye
on those who ignored it. I avoided every opportunity to play around with
colored pencils, or to sketch an arabesque or a curling vine. I spent my
time paring my work down to the essence, to the bones. I spent my time
reducing everything to Frutiger and to line and vector and plane.
But you know what? After a couple of biopsies and a significant root
canal, the realization that I will not live forever hit me at forty and
with it the sudden knowledge that, by God, I like drawing little
curlicuey things. I like soft colors and comfortable chairs. I enjoy the
company of people who do not necessarily shop at Prada. I am just not
interested in spending the rest of my life in the dogged pursuit of
someone else’s definition of perfection anymore. I am drawing that
mouse, damn it, and no one is going to stand in my way.
This is not to say that I have lost my heart to sentimentalism. I do not
mourn the unappreciated genius of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™.
Spiritual exhaustion and design burnout have not led my aesthetic sense
astray. Rather, they have led me somewhere I had never traveled. I’m
looking at things differently from the way I used to look at them. I
can’t help it—I’m looking under the rug. I want to see what modernism
has hidden there.
This is not to say I am not an angry person. Funny people are angry
people, and I am no exception. I’m sick of seeing regurgitated, tight
little examples of seventies typography on design-department walls
during grad crits and degree-project shows. I’m tired of the narrow
language, the small sandbox, the limits of what we deem “good design.”
If I see another effort at ironic distance created with the tools of
Swiss typography it will be one effort too many, and I’m going to wring
that kid’s neck. Or that of her professor.
cont'd....
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2205