Experimental Jetset Online Archive Lost Formats Links News About this site Contact	Interview 2005 E-mail conversation with Lucienne Roberts, Page 1 of 3   In February 2005, Lucienne Roberts (of Sans+Baum) interviewed us through e-mail, for a publication that will come out later this year. If we understand it well, the aim of this publication is to seek out the relationship between contemporary design practice and modernist design practice. It turned out to be quite an interesting conversation, that's why we decided to publish some fragments here.   01.  Where were you at college? Which designers' work did you admire?   All three of us studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam). Marieke and Danny graduated in 1997; Erwin, who was in another year, graduated in 1998. As for designers we admired: Linda van Deursen was of course a very inspirational person, being one of our favorite teachers at the Rietveld.   Another person that had an huge impact on us was Richard Prince; we were introduced to his work through Linda. We especially liked his 'joke paintings'. We remember that seeing these paintings, displaying a few simple sentences in Helvetica, was really a breath of fresh air in a time when graphic design was more about layered compositions, techno- and grunge-typography, and clogged lay-outs.		Prince's work (not only his 'joke paintings', but also his 'gangs', his grouped photographs) showed that it was possible to analyse/deconstruct pop-culture, but without the deconstructivist aesthetics (that were so fashionable in graphic design around that time, and that we disliked so much). His work had a hard and cool 'punk-minimalist' sensibility that had a huge influence on us. (It's funny; some people assume our work to be heavily influenced by Swiss late-modernists such as Josef Muller Brockmann and designers like that, but actually, we only learned about these designers quite recently. Richard Prince had a much larger influence on us).   Another person that influenced us was Bob Gill, whose fabulous 'Forget All The Rules You Ever Learned About Graphic Design - including the ones in this book' was hidden in the library of the Rietveld [more about Bob Gill in the 'About this site' section].   So that's it, basically. As you see, you can locate us somewhere in the twilight zone between Richard Prince and Bob Gill. We know, that's quite a weird place to be.		02.  In what way has Wim Crouwel's work influenced you? In its form / his approach / both?   What influenced us most is precisely the fact that you can't distinguish between his form and his approach. In Crouwel's work, form and approach are the same.   There's an idiosyncratic quality in his designs: Crouwel's work is highly systematic, but it's a highly personal system, organized according to Crouwel's own logic. From the smallest logo to his body of work as a whole, his designs are systematic worlds in itself.   To be confronted with such systematic work is quite powerful; it's ecstatic and disturbing at the same time. To feel your own logic clash with another logic, to be suddenly drawn into another rhythm, another rationality, a different set of rules: it's a profound experience, causing you to see the world with different eyes. Crouwel's work can trigger experiences like that.   It is often thought that design, to have a subversive potential, has to be unexpected, irrational, rebellious; anything as long as it's not 'boring'. We very much disagree: it is consistency, and an iron logic, that can really throw you off your feet, and change your way of thinking.		We fully realise that Crouwel would never think of his work as having the potential to trigger such strong and destabilizing experiences. But then again, there's always a difference between the designer's intention and the way the design is interpreted. That's what keeps it interesting.   03.  Would you consider yourselves to be modernists? That totally depends on the definition of modernism one employs.   For example, there's the idea of modernism as a very defined, historical classification, starting, let's say, in the 1850's, peaking around 1910, and rapidly fading away after that. That's quite a feasible definition. Another definition would be the more Habermasian idea of modernism, as something yet to be fulfilled, linked to the notion of modernity as a project that started with the Enlightment. That's also a very plausible definition.   In between these two definitions, there are hundreds of others. And since we are torn between all of them, it's quite difficult for us to answer this question.   What we do know though, is that we aren't functionalists (in the traditional sense of the word), as we aren't really interested in the 'narrow' definition of the word 'function'.   Page 2
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