CULTURE: A Vision That Would Bring Me Luck
Peter Saville at the Design Museum
Peter Saville was responsible for my first encounter with New Order. One of the kids at school had a tape with an insert showing these roses, coloured blocks and mysterious writing: FACTUS 12C: Power, Corruption & Lies. I borrowed it purely on the strength of the cover, not knowing anything about New Order except a vague sense that they made music with electronics and messing about with computers. As soon as I got home from school, I played the tape the only way I could: on the mono cassette recorder normally used for storing computer programs for my BBC micro. The music, even through the distinctly lo-fi playback, was like nothing I had heard before. I tried to break the code — not just of the coloured blocks, but of the titles (KW-I: what was that about? Why did none of the song titles appear in the lyrics?) and other annotations. I got another friend to copy the tape — due to some mix-up he omitted half of Age of Consent, but I’ve still got that tape somewhere — then bought the real things: the Blue Monday 12 inch, immaculate enlarged copy of a floppy disk (made being geeky cool — I understood that code, at least for a little while), and PCL on vinyl, on which the Fantin-Latour / Saville sleeve could be observed in all its glory. I was hooked into the beginning of a fascination with New Order, and in due course Joy Division, and eventually with the Factory Records label in its wider glory.
The Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum will delight all fellow Factory obsessives. Of the three rooms in the exhibition, the first and largest is devoted wholly to Saville’s output for Factory and other record labels, and at least half the contents of the third has some Factory connection. The second room focuses on Saville’s work for Yohji Yamamoto, apparently as influential in the fashion world as the Factory material has been in record design. There is some visually impressive material there, but the overall impression is somewhat slight. The third and final room focuses on Saville’s more recent work for a variety of clients (Suede, Pulp, Givenchy, New Order again) which has almost all been created entirely in Photoshop, thus leaving rather less visual trace than the earlier pieces. It’s odd to think that, for visitors not much younger than me, the notion that type is laid out manually using Letraset on paper (room one) rather than digitally manipulated (room three), is likely to seem as archaic as carving letters on blocks of stone. Among the most impressive items in room three are After After Monarch of the Glen, Peter Saville’s interpretation of Peter Blake’s interpretation of Landseer, with blues and oranges reminiscent of State of the Nation, and the Pulp and Suede covers that appear to tell the story of Saville’s lifestyle as interpreted by Saville.
The Absence of the Object is a Presence you can Feel
The first room, with the Factory work as its physical as well as theoretical centre, contains some remarkable pieces of inspiration and work-in-progress, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy (or Astrology, according to part but not all of the exhibition label) in which Barney Sumner found the pulsar wave form for the cover of Unknown Pleasures, the True Faith leaf in a cardboard box (allegedly not the real leaf but a later impostor), and the metal sheets photographed for the Love Will Tear Us Apart 7-inch, looking even more beautifully and hauntingly decayed after all this time.
The categorisation into principal (mostly Factory) and secondary (mostly other) projects provides some interesting insights. The sleeve for Ultravox’s Vienna (secondary display) looks like a pale imitation of Joy Division: whether intentional or not on Saville’s part, the comment is spot on. Some OMD material makes it into the principal displays, including the sleeve of Architecture and Morality and a Futurist-inspired tour brochure. The quality of the material is closely related to Saville’s enthusiasm for the project: he describes his collaboration with Joy Division / New Order as the most fruitful of his career, but also is very positive about OMD. Other than the Factory work, the OMD material and the covers for Roxy Music — Saville’s own fanboy obsession — are amongst the most satisfactory. And there are plenty of items there to make even the most obsessive Factory collector feel in some way incomplete.
It is hard to imagine this exhibition being quite so special for anyone without an abiding interest in Factory. But it should nonetheless be of wider interest as a commentary on graphic design and typography since the late 1970s. In particular, the documentation of Saville’s ‘re-appropriation’ of artistic and design styles is revealing. The neo-classicism of early Factory posters and Unknown Pleasures, the repeated references to Futurism and the Italian avant-garde, industrial motifs, and later reinterpretations of 1960s and 1970s popular design, serve different but interesting purposes.
Paul Morley’s article for the non-catalogue, There was a time when the only art I had on my walls was by Peter Saville, contains a typical combination of silliness and insight:
With such a sleeve [Unknown Pleasures] there was no way the music could not be important. Whatever group of people had come to the conclusion that the album sleeve was going to be so symbolic, secretive and madly composed, were clearly involved in something strangely new.
The idea that high standards of design can and should be applied to ephemera such as promotional concert posters and pop records is a powerful one. And the emotional charge associated with the combination of music and objects means that much of Saville’s visual sense and notion of the design tradition has been transmitted to a generation or more of fans who are now implementing their obsessions in their current endeavours.
The insistence on quality, and the interest in traditional forms and their continued relevance, is perhaps as much Morality & Architecture as Architecture & Morality. Saville’s apparently conservative forms were profoundly radical in the post-punk world, a counterpoint to Jamie Reid’s anti-design kidnapping cut-ups for Sex Pistols and Malcolm Garrett’s Day-Glo Constructivism deployed to such effect for the Buzzcocks. Saville’s designs provided a context that was both timeless and current which is wholly appropriate to the music. It is hard to separate the aesthetics of Saville, Factory, and Joy Division / New Order: the collaboration is a long term one and each stage of it produces appropriate results, whether presciently marmoreal Closer, glossy but endangered Republic or the back to basics approach of Get Ready. The latest instalment is the exhibition soundtrack, Ambient, created by New Order, which plays during the exhibition and which will in due course (delays not attributable to Saville this time) be available on CD.
Thieves Like Us
The source material provides many of the most interesting impressions of the exhibition: Marinetti’s futurist manifesto cover (which directly inspired the cover of Movement), the Birmingham Associated Perforators and Weavers product catalogue (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) and the HMSO leaflet Noise Control on Building Sites (Fac 2, the Factory Sample) give an indication of the range of Saville’s influences. I was particularly taken with woodcuts by Vorticist Edward Wadsworth, included as an inspiration for OMD’s Dazzle Ships. The final room includes a cabinet of found objects and impressions as yet unused: some catholic tracts in garish gold covers with neat typography, some ornaments, some polaroids, hinting at designs to come.
At times, more and better explanatory material would have been beneficial. What appear to be the original spray paintings used for the Temptation / Hurt 12-inch sleeve pass completely unmarked. The games table which inspired the Thieves Like Us 12-inch sleeve is said to have been found in ‘a magazine’ rather than the Scottish country house guidebook where it really originated (and which itself is included in the exhibition).
There is not an exhibition catalogue as such. Designed by Peter Saville (Frieze, £19.95) has lots of good visual material (including many photographs that were new to me at least), a revealing interview, a worthwhile section on Saville’s work for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto and some reasonable criticism, but does not attempt a comprehensive overview of either the Saville portfolio or the exhibition itself. There is some information on source material (the quotation of Josef Muller-Brockmann’s 1960 film poster typography for the cover of Low Life being particularly interesting), but sadly less than in the exhibition itself. It’s a must-purchase for those interested in the designer, but not the definitive catalogue raisonnee that I, for one, was hoping for. A limited edition reprint of Fac 1 is available, and postcard sets are apparently in the works, in advance of Saville’s forthcoming move into fine art editions. But I will keep going back to the artwork for Fac 1, 2 and 10, and to the graph paper origins of the colour coding on Power Corruption and Lies — the start of it all.
Kevin Quince is ERO's correspondent with reference to all stuff electronic.
Kevin Quince, May 27, 2003 10:10 AM