 Good evening. My name is Caroline Bowman. I'm the director of Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and I am absolutely thrilled to welcome all of you here tonight. Cooper Hewitt's purpose is to inspire, educate, and empower people through design. We do this through exhibitions, online content, and discussion, education programs, and the National Design Awards. Programs like tonight emphasize the important role design plays in our daily lives and how design directly reflects the social, political, and cultural values of our times. As many of you know, Cooper Hewitt is undergoing the most ambitious renovation in our history, expanding gallery space by 60%, restoring historic features, and upgrading our facilities. Nothing about Cooper Hewitt will be the same. It's a massive renovation and historic preservation project, but also a complete re-envisioning of Cooper Hewitt and the Design Museum experience. We've been making quite an effort to keep the flame of Cooper Hewitt alive and burning bright during what will be three years of closure at the 91st Street Campus, traveling exhibitions nationally and globally, and holding regular education programs throughout the city. Tonight's talk, generously supported by Cooper Hewitt trustee and design historian, Marilyn Friedman, is a wonderful chance for us to highlight our collection and share scholarship and insight about the intersection of music and design during a tumultuous time in our history. Our curators and the speakers had a grand time going through about 8,000 objects in our collection that date between 1960 and 1980. Among them, over 50 psychedelic posters, numerous album covers, iconic furniture from Bernard Panton, Arnie Jacobson and Herman Miller, tableware, office equipment, textiles and wall coverings. As you can imagine, a lot of vinyl. We are filming tonight as we always do with our programs and the talk will be available on our website shortly after the event. In late fall, and no, I am not giving you an exact date yet, we will be celebrating the grand reopening of Cooper Hewitt. And one of our first public programs will be the next installment in our design revolution, more historic design lecture series. Another outstanding opportunity for those of you who are interested in learning more about our marvelous collection. I look forward to seeing you all there. Now it is my great pleasure to introduce tonight's speakers, Pat Kirkham, who will be leading tonight's discussion is professor of design history and cultural studies at Bard Graduate Center. Joining her are Steven Duncombe, associate professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications at the Steinhardt School of NYU. Paula Cher, principal at Pentagram and the 2013 winner of the National Design Award for communication. And Ben Watson, executive creative director at Herman Miller. Please join me in welcoming them to the stage tonight. Good evening and thanks to everybody who's been involved with organizing this wonderful evening tonight actually, and especially Sarah Freeman and Marilyn Friedman, wherever you are, I can't see you. Okay, tonight we're going to be mainly looking at the USA and Britain. And I just wanted to say that before we start. And we're going to really try and think about this close interrelationships between art, design, music and popular culture in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Sometimes it's really difficult to prize them apart, and sometimes we will and other times we'll keep them very, very totally enmeshed. I'm going to start by giving some indication of the very strong crossover between art and design and music in what came to be called the Swinging 60s in London. I'm starting with Britain because given my age and my origins, it's one of the things I know a little bit about, okay. And what's now officially the birth of British blues, they managed to pin it to a particular night. Two of the three younger men in the band, Keith Scott on piano and my husband Andy Huygenboom on bass, were art students at Hornsley College of Art. And then on drums was a young graphic designer who'd been to Harrow Art School called Charlie Watts. He went on to great fame, as you know, with the Rolling Stones. Now, Charlie was working in a graphic design agency in London called Charles Hobbs and Gray. And then a New York graphic designer arrived there called Bob Gill, some of you may know him. People thought he was great for one reason only, I think. He'd met Saul Bass. It was just this thing. Do you know this man, my God, you know? This man who, he actually went to his house and he met him. And I think it's really important that for people who are art students and design students at the time in London, in 1955 when this man with the golden arm where graphic imagery was set to music and in the beginning of a movie that the still titles moved, that was the very first time that people like Charlie Watts, those art students, Martin Scorsese, 14-year-old boys who were into jazz all over the world saw what was really abstract art and it was those graphics and that music that really introduced them to abstraction rather than actually in later years Jackson Pollock and all the famous American expressionists that we would have in big exhibitions at the American Embassy in London. Okay. Some more connections with art. The two of the original Beatles, Drew Sutcliffe and John Lennon were at Liverpool Art School and I just show you because I didn't really want to make you think that the Beatles were so much cooler and they always wore leather jackets, sometimes at these very moddy clothes for the sixties. And then of course Keith and Brian. Well, Keith was an art student at Sutcliffe Art School. He didn't go very often, he confesses. Brian was accepted at Cheltenham Art College but his reference was so bad they wouldn't even have him. And sticking out here on the left slightly on his own, we've already met Charlie. So I could go on and on but you get the picture there's very, very tight integration of music with art and design that takes us right through the early sixties. So one of the ways that I want you to try and think about this time really from the Beatles to punk I guess it's a lot to think about tonight is to think about a whole movement of cultural broadening, diversification and the reclaiming of the underrepresented, a very fancy way. Sometimes people actually talk about punk but also underrepresented groups like women that we probably won't talk that much about tonight in minorities and those types of movements coming together and something that we came to call post-modernism and as a style of the capital P and Paul is going to pick up on that. And I think it's no coincidence that you have this upsurge of interest in craft traditions and design traditions of pre-industrial societies at the very time that the Western economies are moving, as you all know, from a sort of manufacturing base to what we call post-industrial societies where services and cultural production becomes much more important and you often look back to the things that you no longer have or that you have in a different way, that you have as leisure, that you have as something to collect. Okay, so as we all know the swinging sixties start in the fifties and during the fifties you can see a lot of eclecticism of wit and whimsy, nostalgia, this acceptance of psychological elements of design as well as the rational, the blurring of barriers between many things previously thought to be antithetical and there's a bit of a list but I think they're all important and all going to be important tonight. So what used to be binary oppositions, let's think about them as a big continuum, you know, modernity and tradition, they're not opposed, if you put them on the continuum people and music and objects have their places across that broad spectrum, past and present, machine and hand production, national and international and global, function and aesthetics, the amateur and the professional, I think that we're going to see considerable blurring of that tonight, hetero and gay, high and low culture, the material and the immaterial. So for me this notion of the continuum is important and also I think this idea of my lounge, the mixing together of very disparate and different objects that help us get that really constant and free flow of influences, you know, from politics and I think that's crucial always to music, to art, to design, to popular culture. To have a little quick look back at some of these things in the 50s, particularly this fascination in the even the late 40s and 50s with the Edwardian and Victorian periods and it seems to me that that allows people to go back, it's almost an excuse to go back because modernism had supposedly banished us all from looking at those things, to think about, you know, luxury, glamour, even old-fashionedness and to be nostalgic and I wanted to point out that the Teddy boys in England get their name actually from Edward, from the Edwardian period because of these great so-called Edwardian jackets and then we thought were terribly tight Edwardian trousers. This is what all the bad boys at my school wore and when they went to court for whatever it was fighting on the Saturday night, they came in to the grammar school where we all had our uniforms. They came in wearing these clothes and then they would open their jackets. They have these amazing coloured linings and things and they were the heroes in many ways. Some of those British Teddy boys used to get called punks and I've been thinking a lot about that, this American term of a slur upon someone and in fact in Britain, teenagers were very much looking here, very much looking at American popular culture, about all we thought about and of course, I can't show them all, but James Dean rubbed all of our uniforms as 55. The first time I remember someone saying to me, do you like Elvis Presley? I was in the church choir and I said yes because I really fancied the guy and ran home and said to my brother, you have to tell me about this person. And then I had my first pair of American jeans and the 1950s in t-shirts. So I think there's this lot of cross-cultural and cross-national things going on this evening and talking about cross-national, the Cold War is an important backdrop here. By 1950, both the U.S. and the U.S.S. have weapons of mass destruction. The thoughts of somebody else has an atomic and a hydrogen bomb. I found it really hard, but probably a lot of you in the audience remember all the civil defense drills you've had. We didn't have very much like that, but here there was a very great fear of nuclear attack. Some people still thought, you can see here Walt Disney is one of them, that science was benevolent, that there was no problem. Other people, and I choose again a British example, had a very different view of what would happen if people dropped bombs instead of finding some other political solutions. And this is Henry in 1963 in Britain, the atomic bomb imagery, but with his skull and there's a lot of skulls and bomb imagery actually in the 1960s. So whilst we're thinking it's all peace and love and flowers, there is this threat there behind it, and that actually I think is why there is such a lot of emphasis and why the peace movement is so strong. And I show you here what I think perhaps the greatest graphic symbol of the period we're looking at, which is 1958, the CND symbol, campaign for nuclear disarmament designed by a British designer who's also a pacifist. Okay? And just to also remember that protest is connected to politics, and I've been doing a lot, I'm working on the American blacklist and the Eames has knew some people on the blacklist, so I'm all into that at the minute, but Pete Seeger of course was blacklisted as, and in a lot of the hearings, the anti-communist hearings, they say, you belong to the People's Song Movement in 1946, and this shows you're a communist. And so just even belonging to something as we would think was neutral as American folk music had a lot of political implications and of course those 1950s struggles for protest struggles and civil rights struggles in particular fed very much into the protest of the 1960s. And Pete Seeger's I think important because for me, he was somebody I knew about in two different ways in the 1960s, at the same time through folk clubs but then through Bob Dylan. And here is freewheeling 1963, which I think is a really kind of interesting album, you know, you have these contemporary words through traditional melodies, it opens with blowing in the wind, that becomes that great anthem of the 1960s. And Dylan talks about civil rights, he talks about the anxieties of nuclear war, but this isn't the cover that looks like Henry and there's no skill, there's no atomic bomb, there's not that big peace symbol it's just him and Sarah strolling down the street. And that's another part of the 1960s, this new informality in our lives, this great informality in terms of dress, in terms of address to each other. So I think in many ways this album is so un-slick compared with before then, and I just thought that's another story again but you know trying to make musicians look glamorous, even Bill Haley was always trying to make people who weren't terribly glamorous look glamorous. Okay, so we will leave Bob Dylan for a moment. And I just want to, this is Nixon and Khrushchev having a bit of words in Moscow in 59, you probably all know the so-called kitchen debate. And of course, Nixon's big card is that capitalism can produce this super super abundance of goods and the Imzes said who were in Moscow then said it was really embarrassing that the Americans were showing pop-up toasters and really they didn't think that that was the best thing to represent American society. Most people I think particularly after the war and the depression, you know, most people welcome this super abundance of goods but there are critics in the 50s and 60s and I just showed you quickly here one of Van's papas, you know the waste makers, it's the last of his trilogy of, you know, the hidden persuaders, the status seekers and then 1960 the waste makers and this critique, this anti-materialist critique again I think feeds back into music time and time again and of course at the same time corporate culture in the US it's expanding more rapidly at any time the world has ever known before it's this massive, massive phenomenon and the music industry is right in the middle of that as is the film industry and so popular culture is really embedded very, very tightly into that, right? Another element, you're seeing images tonight actually some of them we could, it's impossible to reproduce this now in a book because the rights are so deeply confused and anyway we'll talk about that later. So pop art, again most people think it's written in the mid 50s with the independent group being obsessed with American popular culture with making art and design by cutting up American adverts and reading comic books and I know there was a great, a great outcry in the states that that was supposedly the cause of juvenile delinquency and then they all thought that if we read them in Britain we would have as many delinquents as you did here. The independent group turned this around and saying here's this very vibrant popular culture and then 1967, I remember this because I was very political. What the hell is going on? What do I make of this album? There's a lot of stuff about the fairground there are floral designs of a type you would only see in a not very good municipal garden. There are these uniforms that are not like the kind of cool ones that we would wear to go down the King's Road. These are like bad theatrical ones in bang up colors. So what is going on? And it seems to me that it's evoking the world of fancy dress, of dressing up, of vaudeville, of even maybe the new romanticism. The outfits have been described as anti-establishment but everything they wore was called anti-establishment. So I think we kind of don't think about that. But I do think it relates to McCartney's notion of the whole album is that you make this fictitious ban, you create an alter ego and then you can do what you like musically and then you can do what you like in terms of identity. It's about performing a performance and that's what we all did for a lot of time. We used to go to work dressed like this really for tutorials and things with clothes like this. Anyway, I said no autobiography tonight. This album cover costs 3,000 pounds at a time when most album covers cost 50 pounds or less. And I know that's even another people are going to be talking about amateur professional top-end quality as opposed to things that you would be running off by hand on a Romeo machine or something. So I just want to mark this one as, you know, this is by Peter Blake, the British pop artist and his American collaborator. He had a very traditional training in printmaking which he's gone back to. But he was just saying, you know, John Lennon at one stage wanted that old Hitler in here, you know. So it's really, it's a hard one to unpick. That album contains a song called Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and millions of pages on the internet still debating. Does the girl with kaleidoscope eyes come out of the sky? Is it LSD or not? You know, I'm not going into that. But some of you know that, you know, I write and talk a lot about the Eamesers and it did strike me that there are some Eames images or at least two Eames films, kaleidoscope shop and then kaleidoscope jazz chair that are much earlier than the 67 Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and people often say to me, where the Eames is on drugs. No way, no way. On the other hand, the 901, the Royal College of Art asked them because he was this famous industrial designer and his artist wife, they wanted to know what their workshop was like. The Eames thought that would be boring. So they were then really, as always, interested in re-looking at the world in different ways. And so they showed this. The students loved it and the faculty, industrial design faculty, hated it. I mean, what on earth. And then, because they're moving on quickly, the Carousel halls is 61 again. I always call this Herman Miller's sort of precursor of Sergeant Pepper. They're dressing their showrooms very, very inventively with all of this stuff, this sort of stuff that the Eames has had in the house and we call it cross-cultural surprise and Ray used to say, well, we didn't think of it as decoration so we called it functioning decoration. Well, it's still decoration. Then Milton Glazer with pop and this very sort of swirling op-art intersecting with this huge interest in Art Nouveau, huge interest in Art Nouveau from that period. And this is, I think, you know, he's taking what we would think of as maybe psychedelia into mainstream music promotion. This is CBS. This is, again, top of the line. I've been buying these recently since I have a grandson called Dylan. So I quite like this emotion that there's no Bob Arnold that it can become a Welsh name if you want. So this seems to me to go back to the big, bold German posters of the 1900s and 1910s as well as Art Nouveau as, you know, a lot of images. And I know we're going to pick up on this later so I'll move straight to the kind of, again, op-art Art Nouveau feeding into what are much, I think, more delirious, kaleidoscopic, my largest of posters for rock concerts and festivals in San Francisco, sorry, from 1966 onwards. These are by Wes Wilson who's a sort of philosophy drop-out but with a real sort of untrained but, I think, very genuine artistic talent. Other people, you know, Rick Griffin had some formal training. So you get a lot of sort of women with undulating hair, you know, you can see it and it's reformulated. And often the graphics are really hard to decipher. It's a kind of, maybe four, I can come on to this, I don't know. It's sort of trick, it's the puzzle, you know, where do you want to be on Saturday night, you know. Oh, I see 24, it's the 25, it's three nights. You finally, you finally get there. And I put the woman's body there to remind myself, really, that by 1968, especially here in the States and very soon afterwards in Britain, a lot of people would be, women would be at these concerts but start to be thinking about, well, why is it always a woman's male body that's here and the beginnings of discourse about gratuitous imagery and things. So again, not something we could go into tonight but part of that pop culture and part of a moment where it's, I mean, the women's movement is set to start in 1968 but of course it's building up then. So I think images that are already being slightly problematised in people's heads. So then, probably the first woman designer we'd have of the evening who only really, this is Bonnie McLean, she gets her chance when her husband Graham, the promoter, falls out with Wes Wilson and she's been doing the sort of, you know, Wilson-type designs on shortboards, little handouts, basically the amateur end of the work and then because of this fallout she's allowed to design the big posters for a while but then, sadly, I found out that they found some other men with better training but they liked better so he just done for it again. But anyway, just to kind of give this picture and this could be, it really does have a great collection of these and what I think is really interesting about them that they took ones that weren't necessarily the greatest arty ones and I think in terms of a popular culture collection, it's really important. So here we have New Year's Eve, 1970. This moment, you know, love, peace, flowers, San Francisco and I thought, my God, I went there a year later thinking it was all going to be like this. Well, it almost was and my very last image, sunglasses everywhere and more naked bodies and I just wanted to end with Victor Moscoso who did have a very, very a double design training in a way commercial world of graphics academic training at Yale with no less than Joseph Albers and however matter we have this sort of modernist theory he's been in commercial graphics and then he wants to do something that's to do with the culture that he feels as his own and so moves to produce these himself very high quality things he can bring home and I'm seeing my winding up and it's right on time, so thank you. I'm going to spend just a few minutes this evening maybe taking a terribly unexpected tact but from a world view of one that's directed from my place at Herman Miller that's not only about the intersection of furniture design perhaps where we are best known but about all the aspects of design that were coming from a corporate culture that ultimately decades on started to influence popular culture today but actually how we can look at that as a hotbed of interdisciplinary design and I hope to actually touch on many of the things that Pat started to and actually maybe give us some reasons to look at the output of the designers of Herman Miller during this period in a very different way. So as a quick orientation this is a lovely photograph that gathered around the eyes closed George Nelson and the most elderly behind him DJ DePri that the founder of Herman Miller and of course to the right of the image seems Alexander Gerard up front and a little bit off to the side and feeling a bit awkward Robert Probst the inventor and designer and really it was the fantastic union the magical union and trust and relationship that DePri and Nelson created together Nelson excuse me DJ in his own words abandoned himself to design and abandoned the company to design and an extraordinary amount of trust he gave to Nelson to actually instill design everywhere in the company so what I'm going to spend a few minutes doing is talking less about the expected furnishings or products of design but all aspects of design at the company that was not only centered from this nucleus of folks but folks beyond that and as we look at everything from architecture to exhibitions to graphics and textile design and beyond perhaps we'll be able to uncover a few consistent or continuous themes so maybe starting at the very center Charles and Ray Ray at their home in Pacific Palisades and so for a moment to detour even though this isn't a Herman Miller project it was a project in architecture and obviously extremely well known I love that Pat used the word melange I want to use the word collage which is absolutely something that runs consistently through popular art and design and its core to the work of the Eames's and perhaps it's nowhere better expressed in their thinking about their architecture but also their interior and so the Eames were extraordinary collectors and collage artists certainly Ray was an extraordinary one unto her own but together they had an attitude that more is always more and the ability to create and this will have a chance to look at some other spaces as well but to create a place that's seen as full of juxtapositions full of places along a spectrum that is extraordinary whether their personal collections from travels, bits from the studio blankets or gifts from friends or tea sets for tonight, it all feels just right, it's functioning decoration the Eames's also did an extraordinary amount of showroom design for Herman Miller beginning in the 50s this is a shot from the New York showroom in the 50s and you start to see this use of abstraction obviously the product of their design being treated in a very abstract way but when we moved to I didn't even know that Pat was going to show that soldier but there you see it here in a a showroom in New York and so you start to see popular art entering their vocabulary as they thought how to create stories or storytelling in places where furnishings could be sold whether that's a flat art built from a children's toy in the background the exploded graphics or if you look to the far left of the image large scale photography so this collage of multiple media of course they continued that throughout their careers they worked in film and beyond but very interesting to see that entering the commercial realm of showroom interiors I have a few shots now of an Eames design of a showroom in the early 60s in Los Angeles again a different approach to collage where you can combine objects as extraordinary as Giacometti as Benal as a Boston fern hoping those will help you look at a plastic chair a little bit differently but I want to spend a moment looking at that tumbleweed the ability to so one big idea I think that was central happening here and among this hotbed of designers was collage the other is this appropriation of the everyday or the use of everyday objects and the tumbleweed happens to be my favorite example we could find it in their use of seed packets on walls jars of candy on tables and I'm talking about the penny candy that's probably cost far less than a penny but this appropriation of the everyday whether that was Andy Warhol putting an abstracted banana on an album cover or a tumbleweed presented as art or I'll take a stretch to call it decorative functionalism was something that the Eames and indeed the milieu at Herman Miller was doing a fantastic job with and really exploring I'm going to jump to another author and in this case Alexander Girard but stay in the realm of interiors and exhibition Girard is best known and the Cooper of course has an extraordinary amount of Girard's holdings in textile design as well as a great deal of his graphic work perhaps he's less well known as a fantastic curator himself and indeed an interior designer really with without compare and so Girard I'd be remiss not to use him to interject my next major theme which is that of the use of color and the extraordinary combinations of color that are unexpected powerful and in fact demanding to anyone who arrived to this era from the years immediately previous perhaps that the best example of and this work of Girard was at his textiles and objects store which opened in 1961 here in the city here you see the opening poster of his design as well and a few shots of the interior and if we didn't use the word colorful we would be remiss I'll also use this image to help take us to the next major theme running through an extraordinary amount of this work which is multiculturalism or a real look to a broader world and indeed Mr. Girard and his wife were extraordinary travelers their personal collections of folk art from around the world from India to Ethiopia and far beyond is both has a permanent home at the Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe which they created, designed and bequeathed but also was the heart of the textiles and objects store which he created so you see notions of that whether they're tapestries, objects jars of candy in the back there but this here is Girard designed poster announcing a sale at the TNO shop both gives us that notion of there's clearly influences from India from Mexico and uses of color and combination which allows me to start to move into maybe some graphic executions from additional artists and those particularly from the Nelson Studio perhaps most notably several designs done by Irving Harper so here the first advertisement at the launch of what we now call the Eames Aluminum Group Collection which was known as the indoor outdoor group at the time when it was first designed actually for a Girard designed interior for the Irwin Miller House so all these folks were terribly woven together in their work but that abstraction of the bird cage and the flying bird the positive and negative of the yellow and the white we start to see that repeated use of collage and here I wanted to grab a spread from done by Ray Eames a simple spread from she did in art and architecture continuing the graphic theme again some work from the Nelson Studio two adverts again focused on the aluminum group but here the bold use of color the strong use of form seems very very powerful and indeed at the time even a little bit shocking the next few images I have allow us to focus back on Mr. Girard and indeed over his 20 plus years with Herman Miller Alexander Girard designed over 350 textiles hundreds of wallpapers an uncounted number of graphics to support those programs and that was just his output for Herman Miller alone let alone those for the other clients he supported as well when we look at this 6 out of 350 isn't isn't much but it starts to give us a sense of that his influences from around the world his extraordinary uses and ability to to bring color together in surprising and complimentary ways Girard also authored a series of what were called environmental enrichment panels the bulk of these done in the early 70s this one hand and dove and here it's actually I think very easy to see the connections to some of the work which Pat was just sharing with us whether it's hand and dove or the three eyes and I also wanted to use this as a stepping point to realize that that design work that was happening inside the corporate culture that was Herman Miller was not contained just to those names that we know but actually created a culture that sponsored design in everything that happened and so also in the collection the Cooper a series of posters designed by our colleague Steve Fricklman and Steve is here this evening which was these posters done once a year for 20 years were simply to announce the internal company picnic and yet there often they were done moments before the picnic began but their ability to abstract forms take everyday objects the ham and the pineapple but to cause us to look at them in a fresh way I think are all they're both visual reminders of the pop moment but also powerful pieces of communication unto themselves thank you so much so when I was 22 I moved to New York City and I began working in the record industry and I was hired by a man named John Berg at CBS records he's the art director of freewheeling the cover that was shown the photograph was by Don Hunstein who was the in-house photographer who was sent down to take the picture and they just turned up that way so many of those things were and you don't know when you're working whether or not something is going to have any kind of historical value or not you're simply functioning in a period of time and at that point in time I was dating and then married a man named Seymour Quast who was Milton Glaser's partner in a business called Pushpin the Dylan poster was a giveaway on this side an album called Blonde Unblonde which was Dylan's album and all those pieces came together and they were art directed, designed and put together at a moment in time and nobody knew anybody would think it would be iconic or that you would remember it at all at any time later I began working first at Atlantic Records doing record covers and then CBS and I worked in a very specific way in America and I absolutely refused to design in any way, shape or form in the international style which was prevalent my heroes were Pushpin and Victor Moscoso those were the people that drove me through the 60s and in the 70s what I did is made analogies, jokes and parodies so this was a title of an album was Common Sense it was a picture of a farmer about to step on a rake the style, the typography is ripped right off it's Caslon, it's right out of the Common Sense pamphlet and these were the kinds of ways I designed things if I had a title of an album like Jinsing Woman it sounded mysterious to me sort of like something out of Murder My Suite and I would hire illustrators, this is David Wilcox the type is Art Deco that's the way I designed at the time it seemed like a 30s or 40s movie image that happened to be color and to Pat's point about sexism in the record industry I got a petition from the National Organization of Women, protesting violence to women on record covers for this particular illustration at the moment working inside the world's most sexist company they were thrilled a woman had done it I had to answer the petition and thank them for contacting me and ask them if they could do anything about my raise this was an album cover that I always thought was very mediocre designed in 1976 for a one hit wonder band called Boston that came out sold 7 million copies and only three months ago it was alluded to on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me when they were talking about the world blowing up and the spaceships leaving the earth like the Boston cover I cannot believe that something from 1976 still can permeate a conversation one friend of mine told me when I died my obituary would say design the Boston cover a nightmare a lot of the projects I did were working directly with recording artists who had cover approval and you built relationships with them and they were my first clients and I have to say everything I know about running a business, talking to clients meeting with people, persuading people this crazy experience in the music industry for 10 years and I think about how I got people to buy into things I remember Muddy Waters was terrified of his face being that big on a cover but I offended him even more by making the shirt pink Here he is by Richard Abaddon at CBS you could hire the best photographers, the best illustrators the budgets were big it was an amazing job and I thought everybody in the world had the same kind of job and had no idea how lucky I was also by Abaddon Johnny and Edgar Winter and a series of covers for Bob James which were very slick and very powerful, they were all large objects blown up at a scale and you have to realize you're looking at things that are 12.5 by 12.5 inches that just seemed big and lush from that series the best one being the match book I think at that time they actually in Japan made a match book that was 12.5 inches you had to light it like this but what fascinated me most was working with eclectic typography and period typography and I would draw it and have it redrawn and I used it on many covers most of them jazz and classical artists, the record company didn't care about it very much because they didn't sell very many records so I would work on something very large scale like Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel and then I could do a Jean Pierre Ron Paul cover and nobody cared it's true but this was I guess what would be termed as post-modern I began working with these eclectic forms of typography in about 1975 I think this one was 1976 and I did it because it was difficult to draw this typography you couldn't find it anymore you couldn't order it out of a type book you had to create your own photo stats from things and redraw them there was no computer so the challenge of it made it fun to do this was I think one of the last ones I did in 82 and I have to say that all of this work really performed my career for a very long period of time and also I learned typography from borrowing from the past which was great and began working with constructivism and then this was New Disc and New Disc was actually began in the 80s and it was a 10 inch record cover things were starting to shrink and these were sort of punk artists and they were done inexpensively and were really kind of a lot of fun but at the end of them the covers turned into about six by six and I was done that's it I'm going to start with an image that Pat put up which this is Milton Glazer's Bob Dylan poster 1966 it's a beautiful design by a respected graphic designer and worthy of its place in the Cooper Hewitt collection 11 years later in 1977 we get this it's a very different music scene it's punk rock with a very different creative and aesthetic ethos really born in the mid 1970s travels through the 1980s into the 90s and even continues today although in the wake of desktop publishing and desktop computers we could have a conversation about whether it's nostalgia at this point but this was essentially the aesthetic of punk rock that you would find in things like fanzines and it was based around this ethos it's one of my favorite of all time graphics this is from the fanzine Sideburns 1977 which you saw before I'll read it to you because it's a little hard it's playing in the band first and last in a series then another this is a third now form a band and this was the ethos of do-it-yourself it was the celebration of the amateur it was largely a reaction against the professionalization of music and actually the professionalization of design that was happening in the late 1960s and into the early 70s it basically said to anyone who was listening that anyone can play music you can be a creator you learn three chords and you form a band this is my little bit of autobiography 15 years old I listened to the Ramones Blitzkrieg Bopp three chords I realized hey if they can do it I can do it and I formed a band and within six months we were playing out and I'll tell you I was terrible the DIY ethos followed into the graphic elements of punk rock here's some fanzine covers this is Unite from Germany this is Life Liberty in the pursuit of I don't know where it goes suicidal tendencies this is from it's from US back there this is from Ireland Radioactive and this is a long time running American one maximum rock and roll the aesthetic hasn't changed this aesthetic style was not only about the covers but also the interiors of these fanzines here's a typical layout in maximum rock and roll another typical fanzine layout and another typical fanzine layout as you can see it's about cut and paste it's about moving around type it's about collage it's about collage nothing is new in that way what is new however is I think the celebration of the amateur creator that is the style is not unique at all we've seen it for hundreds of years but the privileging of the aesthetic skill of the everyday, the creator the non-professional perhaps is and again you see this on posters celebrate the coming apocalypse this is from the US this is fear from the US bad brains early 1980s this is from a latin-american punk show this becomes the international style if you will of punk rock and my favorite of all these the sloppy flyer self-described sloppy flyer but even punk albums from major albums is this style here's the sex pistols debut never mind the bollocks in 1977 and the idea here again is that the aesthetic was amateur key to every punk rock aesthetic is this idea that you can do it yourself it is about emulatability if design in many ways is about virtuosity, professional design punk rock design was really about it is so terrible that you could probably do a better job yourself now go create a fanzine or create a poster anyone can do it, so can you now form a band, create a fanzine, book a show and this is at the core of punk rock and punk culture I spent some time looking through the Cooper Hewitt's really amazing collection I always get sidetracked, that was the problem an hour later I was like no I'm supposed to be looking at punk images and for some representations of punk aesthetics and I'm sure I missed some stuff but what I did find was this which is beautiful design by a very talented graphic designer this is Thibaut Kalman and Emin Company and it's thoroughly professional it's beautiful and it's very appropriate for a collection now this raises a question for the archiving of punk rock material because this valorization of amateur design what does an institution whether it be a collection like Cooper Hewitt or an archive of graphic design or books or historical material do with work which is understandably not very good to look at not very impressive that is institutions are interested in the best of but what happens if the best of within the standards of the culture which is producing the culture actually is some of the worst sloppy slap-dash, short-lived and let's face it by design standards often pretty ugly and so I want to just leave you with this which is what do we do with this thank you I'm in scale Davidson I'm the curator of drawing, prints and graphic design at Cooper Hewitt and there's a reason why you found a dearth of punk material in our department and that's because until now I didn't particularly appreciate it and as a personal formalist I have found it off-putting and also because it's not part of my personal culture growing up I mean I can relate to all the beetle stuff and all of that but I was married with children during the punk period and therefore found it challenging and hard to take but I think that your question is very valid what should a museum be collecting and because obviously we want to document design and it presents a real challenge and a lot of this stuff is very ephemeral I mean I don't even know where I could find it if I wanted to go look for it and maybe you can help us recover some of this material I actually don't know if you should collect it I'm being honest about that I wasn't making a case for collecting it actually it's just to sort of ask a question which is how does one think about things like the best of within a culture in which the best of often was the most upsetting the most sloppy, the most unprofessional and so I'm not sure what to do it, it really is an open question I actually get very upset at the idea that this would be collected and I've seen them now in nice pristine plastic bags and things like that and it sort of horrifies me they're supposed to be thrown out they were given about 20 minutes of thought putting together and so that brings up a question which is again an aesthetic question which is what is the best of the worst and how do we even think about something like that sorry Gail was saying she can see maybe collecting because of connections with Russian constructivism we had a very clear example of futurism or something actually my reaction is that I think it's more difficult for museums that are labelled out and designed museums to collect what is another category it's all about categories in many ways because museums say I'm thinking of Glasgow's People's Palace they happily have Billy Connolly's banana boots in there and they happily have Glasgow's punk history in there and to me it doesn't feel out of place and I actually would like this history to be remembered in a way so for me I think you're raising an aesthetic point but I think it's also about being more proud in a way of our popular culture heritage I would say also if I can just say something Gail is that when you look at this you see David Carson in the 90s these are sort of touchstones so some of them were they were down with the purpose of not looking professional but of course they were very professional at it this wasn't totally naivete and I remember how some of that was done so it's not but you begin to visually accept it is what happens so that you know I look at the sex pistols cover and it's so iconic that it looks like it's absolutely expertly done to look that way and that then people emulate it and it becomes part of the vernacular so that I think it's really not determining you have to determine I think to a degree what's important like what was the influence of it after after it passed and I think that may be a criteria that you might consider there's somebody back there with her yes and I did want to just say thank you for Gail which I thought was a very brave and open curatorial comment it was and it needs complimenting I saw somebody at the back okay you mentioned the sex pistols I mean this was Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood they thought very very carefully about the images that they put out there so I think it's interesting that you put the sex pistols and didn't put up I don't know the New York Dolls or Iggy Pop or any other graphics that they perhaps used here in New York I just threw that up to show that how Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood were very self-conscious about grabbing from the styles which were around them and making them into something beautiful and I think you can really see that in Vivian Westwood's fashion design and we were talking about earlier that one of the places where punk design actually has moved into the institution is actually around fashion but we could have put all sorts of albums up there and so on the albums are a little bit tricky maybe you can talk about this because at the moment you come out with an album of course you're moving it away from the amateur and into the professional realm and so it's more about the appropriation of a style which is at that time being created but then of course reinforces the style which will come later Well what was interesting to me was about the punk movement because I worked inside CBS Records which was a corporation was that the whole goal of it was to look anti-corporate that you were not being packaged by these hucksters who were going to sell millions of records at your expense so that was also part of the movement it was so anti-that I had to put some of those things as they would arrive and the goal would be make sure it's messy that you don't so it is a style and it was deliberate it isn't accidental I was just thinking about the sex pistols I wanted to reproduce the image that still has a lot of problems I think in Britain which is the queen with a safety pin through her nose and even more the Royal Family are a bit more popular again I think that's a difficult one for British museums and I'm sure there are equivalents I decided I was going to publish it in a textbook we've just done and in fact the rights are so enmeshed in a million legal disputes that you can't get it but I think it's a wonderful example of actually just how shocking culturally some of that stuff was and how uncomfortable it made people and that's just one that seems to me it still has that age because it people felt it went too far and that's what I'm always interested in those margins of what seems too far at any moment and that I think reflects collections because I think it's hard for curators like Gale to think what is beyond what's shocking sorry here we are I think it's that I appreciate your use of the word culture and so in this case we're talking generally about popular culture but from this vein of corporate culture whether it was CBS or in this case Herman Miller Herman Miller had the fantastic benefit of being direct although a corporation was directed by a family and indeed the family's values became the corporation's values and so that although they didn't come from a design education it was that perhaps began as a happy accident but that abandonment to design and also of being as early as the 50s committed to being great stewards of the environment those were attitudes that came from the founder of the company and so those Mr. Dupri put those and sconce them into the DNA of the company and indeed they're still there and so I think that's the power of an individual or to create cultures or to influence culture and also the influence of the counter culture on Herman Miller because I certainly bought a lounge chair and Ottoman that had Rosewood on it in the 1980s and it is interrelationship because we're going to stop using those Rosewood when people are telling them it's wrong to do so as well so I think it's interesting that corporate culture doesn't exist on its own With regard to the collections perhaps it's something of a family issue if the Smithsonian is America's material attic is the Cooper Hewitt seeing itself as the material critic and is that the mission going forward Yeah That's a brilliant question Our mission is really to collect across all of the decades and centuries and show the continuum of design so as much as Gail doesn't like those images it is a curatorial team that comes together and votes first before we then present it to the Acquisitions Committee and it is a very very much a team approach to make sure that we are filling all of the important holes in the collection so it's not one person it's really a whole team looking at what is critical to represent design in America's design collection That's correct We have to tell the history of design There's somebody at the back We're waiting I think it's interesting that MoMA does not have a Che Guevara poster and I think that's because of politics I think I'm saying that there isn't any of the famous Che Guevara posters I think they have Paul Davises Well Anyway it's interesting that there's still debate there about what is still offensive to some people even though it's the politics of the 60's and 70's Hi there great variety tonight by the way I was actually struck this isn't so much a question as it is just kind of seeing parallels between all of this stuff because a lot of this has been kind of compartmentalized you have high brow, low brow we like to talk about these buckets but I think it's very striking because Ben, you know, he talked about corporate culture trickling down into popular culture and then, you know, Steve, when you talk about low brow punk, you know, percolating up to, you know, popular culture as well as, you know, the idea of I think Ben, you said, something that struck me was cross-cultural surprise in relation to Nelson and I kind of, I'm looking at this image right here like that is cross-cultural surprise, you know, you see how many different centuries of typefaces you know, that are running through it and I mean, I don't know, I guess it's more meditation on you know, culture with a capital C rather than, you know, putting it into all these sort of arbitrary buckets yeah, again, not a question just more of a meditation When we had a chat on the phone we had a really wonderful discussion all very good points. It's what was the most exciting for all of us is that this moment in time of course it had precedence well in advance but this multiculturalism, this awareness of a larger world and the desire to mash it up across disciplines, across designers and outputs Well, I can see the classic cut signs coming to me from the back so thank you all for coming