This is the fourth excerpt, in which the visitor and the Designer discuss Dutch design history, the importance of fertile ground for cultural development and the canon as a vibrant spatial structure.
The Designer stirred his coffee and let out a deep sigh. He had energetically explained what had drawn him and his colleagues to build this labyrinthine repository – a sprawling maze of rooms, halls, corridors, vestibules, staircases and galleries. But over time, the gloomy undertone that seemed to accompany his story had become rather irksome. Where did this pessimism come from? As far as I knew, the Netherlands was still a mecca for visual communication. Its illustrious past could serve as a wonderful springboard for younger generations. Surely, this was why students from places as far afield as Korea, Moldova, Portugal and Malaysia had travelled to The Hague, Amsterdam and Arnhem to learn the tricks of the trade?
The Designer cut me short. “They have all sorts of reasons to study graphic design in the Netherlands, but in most cases I wouldn’t expect them to be motivated by close knowledge of the Dutch design tradition.”
“Why would you say that?”
“For some of these international students – and the same applies to most viewers of this Gesamtkunstwerk, by the way – the Palace of Typographic Masonry is their first introduction to the richness and diversity of our discipline. They marvel at Ootje Oxenaar’s wonderful banknotes, Susanne Heynemann’s dictionaries and the leaders produced by Mieke Gerritzen for the public broadcaster Nederland 3. It’s often the first time they come across any of these landmark designs. And after that, I have to go to great ends to convince them that these aren’t portfolio samples. They can hardly wrap their heads around the fact that we’re talking about everyday items. In their minds, the splendour, singularity and beauty of these designs put them on a different plane altogether.”
He added: “Don’t you find it absurd that the Netherlands didn’t have some form of institute that dedicated itself to graphic design? For my colleagues and me, working on this temple for the profession couldn’t be more rewarding!”
The clouds seemed to lift in the Palace’s sumptuous reception hall. I took advantage of the lull in our conversation to scan the surrounding installations and temporary exhibitions. They seemed to be standing by, ready to leave the building at any moment. In a sense, the Palace extended well beyond its own walls. I looked at the sheet of tracing paper on the drawing board, which bore marks of the Designer’s latest efforts to revise, add to and expand the palatial structure.
“Maybe we need to go back to where it all started. Why would we actually concern ourselves with the history of design anyway? According to the ancient Greeks, Mnemosyne, the personification of memory and remembrance, was also the mother of the Muses. In this way of thinking, memories – i.e. information that is actively preserved, be it via e.g. an archive or oral tradition – form the foundations for everything produced by artists, scientists, historians, philosophers and musicians.”
He looked me in the eye. I tried to recap what he had told me in my own words, to show him I could keep up. If our shared past forms fertile soil for cultural development, then these memories basically form the building blocks for the stories and art works that we make to visualise and map out our world, in our efforts to fathom it.
The Designer: “Of course, the powers that be are aware of this effect – of these building blocks, as you refer to them. Allow me to give you a rather poignant example. The National and University Library in Sarajevo stood as a symbol of the multi-ethnic state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Yugoslav Wars, the building was razed to the ground by Bosnian Serb forces. Their commanders ordered them to set the library on fire in the evening of 25 August 1992. Nine out of ten books in the facility, of a total of some 1.5 million, were consumed by the flames. This constituted the largest scale burning of books in recent history: a deliberate move to destroy a shared past – for the sole purpose of staving off a shared future.”
A society’s prevailing ideas are reflected in how its citizens handle its memories. I was reminded of Alexander the Great’s globalisation project. Around 300 BCE Alexander had conquered every city in Greece. Citizens were subsumed in a new, far greater entity, separated from their orderly communities, each of which had its own distinctive structure, beliefs, stories and customs. The new power structure didn’t have anything similar to offer in terms of guidance or identification. To resolve this, Alexander introduced the new grand concept of paideia: an educational ideal that was renamed humanitas after its adoption by the Romans. He invested in a new faith in culture, a quest for knowledge and beauty. The Mouseion in Alexandria was the architectural expression of this idea. This ‘temple of the Muses’ also housed the famous Library, which became the leading library of the ancient world. Apart from storing countless books, this institution was also home to a miscellany of objects collected from the then known world.
The Designer was familiar with this story: “The Mouseion was a place where scholars lived together and shared everything they owned. It was a centre of research; people could attend lectures held by a variety of philosophers and savants. In effect, it was the antique precursor of today’s universities: an institute intended to promote knowledge and beauty…”
It felt like I had been sitting on my stool for hours. It could hardly be called comfortable.
“Many centuries on, in 1677, the celebrated English antiquarian, politician, officer, astrologer and student of alchemy Elias Ashmole donated his cabinet of curiosities to the City of Oxford. This turned his formerly private collection – full of antique coins, engravings, peculiar geological specimens and stuffed exotic animals – into the first collection that was open to the general public. As such, it was the first museum in the modern sense: a repository of objects that can be studied, serve as a source of inspiration and be used to tell new stories. A shared memory, which can serve as a foundation for a future culture.”
I reluctantly suggested that this definition of a museum might be outdated.
“Well…” continued the Designer, clambering to his feet. “Of course, over the past 40 years museums have seen themselves forced to develop alternative sources of income, due to successive budget cuts in the public sector. On the one hand, this period saw them change into fairly predictable exhibition mills. On the other, they have increasingly invested in the digitisation and re-cataloguing of their existing collections.” He paced the room. “This focus on one’s own survival as an institute has resulted in a kind of inflexibility. When museums become so inward-looking, they no longer recognise the dynamics of contrasting views swirling beyond their walls.”
I asked the Designer why people no longer invested in this fertile soil.
“They didn’t see any need to! We already touched on how ideology plays a role in this process. By the late 1980s the battle was over! The free market – with its emphasis on short-term results and its relentless pursuit of fresh stimuli – had won for good. And everyone seemed to agree that there was no alternative.”
The so-called ‘End of History’.
“What made this period interesting for me personally is that it arrived just as I was starting out as a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.” The Designer sat down again and fixed me with his stare. “In 1992, De Beyerd in Breda held the exhibition ‘Grafisch Ontwerp in Nederland – Een eeuw’ (‘Graphic Design in the Netherlands – A century’). Not long after, Kees Broos and Paul Hefting published a book by the same title. Since my own social background had never exposed me to this form of culture, I was mightily impressed. Most of the people around me, on the other hand, were pretty complacent about the whole thing – it was old news to them… There was a reason why some referred to it as ‘Grafisch Ontwerp in Nederland – Een geeuw’ (‘Graphic Design in the Netherlands – A yawn’). And indeed, that’s where it all fizzled out more or less. Take the work collected by the Dutch Graphic Designers Archives Foundation (NAGO) or Stedelijk Museum. You can find the entire oeuvre of giants like Wim Crouwel, Ben Bos and Otto Treumann, but examples of relevant work produced after 1992 are few and far between. It’s all rather sad in a way, this abandoned canon.”
The Designer himself fell silent, as if he had lost his train of thought. There was an awkward silence, so I decided to get him back on track. I knew that the word ‘canon’ came from the perfectly straight reed that the ancient Egyptians had already recognised as an ideal writing implement, as well as a solid measuring standard. In the markets of ancient Greece, shoppers and stallholders would refer to a stone kanoon to resolve any disputes they had regarding dimensions.
That’s all the Designer needed. “Thank you! What a wonderful etymology for a word that nowadays denotes a legitimised collection of interrelated works. Works of a certain authority: the canon is said to be elitist, a part of highbrow culture, a tool for the ruling classes to set themselves apart from the great unwashed. While it undoubtedly works that way too, I find it interesting that in this day and age, when a canon’s very value has been called into question and everything has become relative, you could actually see it as a collective structure that can constantly be adapted, updated, rebuilt and internalised. With existing building blocks as well as new ones that can be put forward by anyone. Regardless of who they are.”
I sensed that these musings had brought him back to the fruit of his own interactions.
“Isn’t it a wonderful idea: the canon as a lively spatial structure that can be viewed from a variety of vantage points? A collective edifice of this kind can offer guidance and identity. The consequences of our failure to nurture a rich shared memory can be seen in contemporary social relations. It’s obvious to me that as a society, we should invest in a multifaceted social structure in which the history of design is cultivated as a rich breeding ground.”
Feeling a flash of cynicism, I inquired what the Designer and his colleagues had achieved exactly with their Palace of Typographic Masonry. Wasn’t it primarily of interest to a few people in the know?
“I’m under no illusions in that respect. We have to work on a very tight budget, but like the French postman Ferdinand Cheval – who devoted 33 years of his life to building his ‘ Palais idéal’ – we keep slogging away, enthusiastically expanding, adapting and beautifying this monumental structure. Expressed in, for example, the ornamental portal of Rietlanden Women’s Office, Alex Walker’s constructed lettering, fanfare’s jingles, Kristiāna Marija Sproģe’s tickets, the Metahaven pavilion or Vanessa van Dam’s signposting, this Mouseion of our field can itself be seen as direct evidence of an active design history.” He gestured in the direction of the floor plan. “I can’t show off massive visitor numbers or some swanky monitored impact. But I still think it’s interesting to create past and future continuity for graphic design within the walls of this complex. Look: there’s ‘The Labyrinth of Letters, there’s ‘The Storeroom of Porous Identities’, ‘The Library of Entangled Books’… Each of these rooms embodies the idea that ideals can be given concrete form. That they can be smuggled into the public space – and reach a broad audience in the process. As a case in point, our archive includes works like Mevis & van Deursen’s KPN Agenda, the posters designed for Van Abbe Museum by Jan van Toorn and Wild Plakken’s charity stamps… to name a few examples from the Netherlands. Let’s not forget that graphic design is a democratic art form. It leaves its mark on our collective memory through stamps, books, posters, animation, signposting, annual reports, brand identities, websites, etc. etc.!”
The Designer slammed down his mug – which he had been relentlessly stirring more or less throughout our conversation – and returned with new vigour to drawing lines on the Palace floor plan.
