For the City and the World
For the City and the World
Interview with Metahaven
Although frequently active in the art world, Metahaven considers itself first and foremost a design studio. On the occasion of their participation in Manifesta 8 and the publication of the book Uncorporate Identity, a conversation about their design practice, so highly regarded in art circles.They often find themselves in unconventional territory, at least for graphic designers. In their recently published book Uncorporate Identity, Vinca Kruk (b. 1980) and Daniel van der Velden (b. 1971), better known as Metahaven, the design studio they founded, take on such issues as geopolitics, the rising power of social networks, the standardization of culture as a result of globalization and the postmodern character of architecture under totalitarian regimes. The book, totalling 600 pages and compiled with the help of Marina Vishmidt, includes contributions by such renowned authors as Boris Groys, Dieter Lesage, Chantal Mouffe and Pier Vittorio Aureli.Since 2004, when both designers were affiliated with the Jan van Eyck Academy, Kruk and Van der Velden have been opening their own field to investigative research in art, and since 2006 under the Metahaven name.[1] Recently, they have been doing this in museum settings. In 2008, for the CACP museum of contemporary art in Bordeaux, they created the poster exhibition Affiche Frontière; and in 2009, they completed their large-scale Stadtstaat project for the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart and Casco, Utrecht. On invitation from Manifesta 8, which opens in October, they documented the network structures and enterprise of regional fruit growers near the Spanish city of Murcia. By operating ever more frequently in artistic contexts, it might seem that they are at least partly leaving the design discourse behind them, but that is not how they see it. They make it clear that they still see themselves as graphic designers.
Daniel, in 2006, you wrote the article ‘Research and Destroy’ for METROPOLIS M (N°2–2006), in which you argued against the idea of designers as ‘the proletariat of the creative industry, silently executing what their clients dictate’. You felt that graphic designers must be capable of behaving politically in order to hold their own in the field of tension amongst communications managers, marketing experts and design managers, or they could better pull out of the world of logos and house styles, and therefore also out of the world of creative industry. Do you still feel the same way?
‘I have always considered the term ‘creative industry’ to be absolute nonsense. I do understand that cultural production is used as an economic engine, but I do not believe that designers should simply be at its beck and call. As a designer, you must be able to act politically, take decisive stances, but you also have to be able to work together with others. It is about finding the right balance.’
In your article, you wrote that graphic designers should start thinking more autonomously and focus more on the production of knowledge. Is the direction taken by Metahaven the answer to that?
‘Writing that article did indeed coincide with the founding of Metahaven, but I did not formulate it quite as succinctly as that. In the text, I pointed out that designers should use the enormous freedom of their profession in order to talk about society, the world. With Metahaven, we seek a balance between commissions from clients and investigative research. I thought at the time that it would be possible to come up with a generally applicable model for research and design, but I have since changed my mind. You can say that along with completing assignments for clients, we are also devoted to issues that we ourselves choose. We sometimes also present proposals to clients with whom we would like to work. In doing so, we keep the function of graphic designers. It is true that we have great affinity with research and are focused on knowledge production, but we do not work according to a scientific method. From an academic perspective, we are fairly anarchistic in what we do.’
‘In the 1990s and early 2000s, the design world saw an enormous expansion, in which all that people could see was success. Today, that is different. Space has been created for more critical design practice. Our way of doing research is closer to journalism than it is to science. We base our work on the facts, but we also allow ourselves the freedom to operate in the arena of imagination and poetry.’
Specifically, your first collaborative project, the Sealand Identity Project (2003–2004), would appear to have been strongly influenced by the post-Marxist thinking of the theoretical programme at the Jan van Eyck Academy, where you were working at the time. In that project, you made a presentation of a national identity for a fictional kingdom, the ‘Principality of Sealand’, a former fortress of the United Kingdom on an island in the sea, taken over by an ex-major of the British Army. The fort, in international waters, falls outside the influence and jurisdiction of the United Kingdom and raises questions about the limitations and extent of established powers. Was this project a reaction to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who, in their books Empire and Multitude, proclaimed the end of state sovereignty?
‘They were certainly important in fuelling the discussion about a place such as Sealand, but the project had no Marxist message or anything of that kind. We were first interested in Sealand, and only later in Hardt and Negri. Sealand was a digital tax haven in which free market ideology was pushed to the extreme. Today, for example, you can see that Iceland is moving towards our Sealand model, by enacting a new law regarding freedom of the press. In Iceland, instead of a data haven, which is what Sealand was with all the Internet servers located there, you get a kind of ‘truth haven’, thanks to far-reaching stimulation of investigative journalism and protection for people who ring bells. These steps have produced a new dynamic, following the terrible economic debacle in that country. This perhaps forms the most interesting reaction to the crisis on the part of any European country to date. We are currently working on a new project specifically about that subject, a follow-up to Sealand.’
In your book, the Sealand Identity Project is also referred to in a discussion about the loss of national identities as a result of the economic crisis. Marina Vishmidt has written an article on the renewed dialectic between speculative capital and national sovereignty. She raises the question of how what you define as ‘uncorporate design’ relates to the corporate design of (old) capitalism. Is ‘uncorporate design’, to put it simply, a logical result of this power game?
‘In the broad sense, the term ‘uncorporate identity’ stands for the lack of believability of core brand imaging in relationship to the organization. In the Sealand Identity Project as well, it was important that the subject not be optimized into a single proposal, but that it show several possible scenarios alongside one another. It questions the way we deal with brands – just think of so-called nation branding. It also refers to more extreme forms: in 2007, in Great Britain, someone was sentenced to 15 years in jail, in part because he helped design a logo for Al Qaeda.’
‘You could also apply the idea of ‘uncorporate’ to organizations that try to keep under the radar. In the book, there are examples of logos introduced by companies in the wake of a crisis, the former Blackwater Security for example, and Fortis Bank. Both came up with a new logo to help people forget their painful histories. I expect that BP will also do something of the kind after the oil disaster. One might also mention David Grewal here. His contribution to our book was about the new power of social organization through globalization, which he refers to as network power. In this power shift, centrally managed organizations make way for collaborative connections without hierarchical structures. In itself, that is already something one might refer to as ‘uncorporate’.’
In your Stadtstaat project, presented in 2009 in collaboration with the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart and Casco in Utrecht, you propose uniting the cities of Stuttgart and Utrecht. The two cities, which are comparable in your view, would adopt the identity of a city-state, with its own tax system, an advertising campaign, an urban maquette and a fictional social network, called Trust. On the posters for the project, a new society is promoted in such texts as ‘Stadtstaat ist ein Sozialstaat (kind of)’, and ‘Extreme Democracy.’ With Stadtstaat, is Metahaven sketching a realistic perspective for the future of cities?
‘Stadtstaat is a comedy, a parody of the near future. The project reconnoitres what is today a virtually unknown territory, in which political management and social networks come together.’
‘For the identity of Stadtstaat, we used logos that remind people of both Internet providers and security companies. The Trust social network hones in on the fact that people are prepared to comply with certain protocols. Such a social network is in fact an open intranet, which exists by the grace of people trusting one another and the creation of a social consensus. This standardization is not imposed from the top down, because everyone who takes part does so by their own free choice – exactly the way they do with Facebook.’
‘In this project, we characterize this standardization as ‘Pizza Dystopia’. We wandered around, taking a look at Stuttgart and Utrecht. What we found were empty office spaces, copy shops, Internet cafés, call centres and kebab and pizza joints. This phenomenon, this voluntary standardizing, which is taking place in all European cities, is far more interesting than the franchising that is occurring elsewhere in the city centres.’
You claim that these are symbols of what you refer to as the ‘society of the Euroslums’. In your book, you conclude that in practice, the ‘Euro-’ preface has already embedded itself far more extensively than one might wish. It has become the standard for cheap and ordinary – just look at the Euroshopper brand and the iconography of the Euro currency notes, with their images of nondescript architecture. Can this surreptitious consensus on the selling out of Europe also be called a form of uncorporate design?
‘On the one hand, the more or less official designs for Europe are suspended in mediocrity, as in, for example, the ‘together’ logo in different lettertypes. On the other hand, more and more companies are associating themselves with Europe by using yellow and blue and the Euro- preface. Instead of basing an identity on a Europe that is always changing and expanding, we think it important to look at actual expressions of diversity. We propose that it is not possible to come up with a single image of Europe. In part comparable to our results in Stadtstaat, we feel that European identity develops from the periphery, not from the centre.’
‘This informal domain, at the margins, offers a better starting point for thinking about what is shared in Europe. In that sense, we find that accepting the Euro- preface as a shared element gives a more suitable image of Europe than the newly designed and supposedly improved European flag, for example, which implicitly follows the old model of the nation-states.’
Has your associating of Europe with sell-out and emptiness not been turned into reality by the current crisis?
‘It does seem that we are a year ahead of the real thing. Back in 2008, we made a fictional series of European Union postage stamps, called Blackmail. The forced coming to terms for various European countries under the pressure of Europe has since become fact.’
‘Ultimately, every design is speculative. In creating an identity, a designer is always anticipating the future of a company or organization.’
‘A “pitch”, a multi-faceted competition for a design commission, is the ultimate form of speculative design. A designer speculates on how a client’s project or organization is going to look. It is therefore speculative until the proposal is actually realized.’
Does Metahaven take part in those competitions?
‘Certainly. We recently entered a competition for the identity of a long-term project, Play Van Abbe, for the Van Abbe Museum. We did not win it, but we are going to design a magazine for them.’
Does Metahaven operate outside the artistic context of art institutes such as Casco, Manifesta and the Van Abbe Museum? I could imagine that major market players, such as the ING and ABN-AMRO banks, might want to collaborate with Metahaven in these times of crisis in order to take advantage of the prophetic value of critical design.
‘We had not looked at it that way: it strikes me as an exciting challenge.’
Leen Bedaux is an art historian, AmsterdamLeen Bedaux is an art historian, Amsterdam
Metahaven & Marina Vishmidt, eds., Uncorporate Identity (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010). ISBN 978-3-03778-169-2, €48.00Metahaven & Marina Vishmidt, eds., Uncorporate Identity (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010). ISBN 978-3-03778-169-2, €48.00
Translated from the Dutch by Mari ShieldsTranslated from the Dutch by Mari Shields
Leen Bedaux
