Abstract
On exhibition at the Artists Space gallery is a collection of around 200 items of printed material tracing the practice of the designer Richard Hollis from the 1950s to the present. It is an unusual exhibition, for its attention to the materiality of design, the ways in which design can be exhibited, and for its attempts to place these works in a social context. This exhibition is also unusual in that its subject is a freelance designer who has had little recognition for his design work, from either side of the Atlantic; rather Hollis is better known for his books, Graphic Design: A Concise History (2001), an inexpensive standard text for undergraduates, and Swiss Graphic Design (2006). And, although Hollis may be considered a ‘designer’s designer’, the objects in this exhibition have rarely been shown or reproduced elsewhere, and are certainly not part of the canon of design history that Hollis’s writing has helped form. 1 In fact, this is a body of work that is, at first glance, underwhelming. This is an exhibition of rather humble everyday printed objects designed for cultural, literary and social institutions, such as posters for the Whitechapel Gallery, covers for Penguin, magazine layouts for New Society, a book on safety in the workplace for Pluto Press. These works are, for the most part, jobbing designs, printed on cheap paper in two colors, and the designs themselves are not formally or stylistically innovative. However, through closer inspection, this is an impressive body of work, for the sustained care, craft and collaborative philosophy that clearly created it. It is the very formal restraint, in fact, that has allowed these works to become part of the texture of the everyday, rather than standing apart as totems to Hollis’s personal artistic achievements. Moreover, as a body of accumulated work, this exhibition becomes a visual cultural history of leftist London during periods of growth and retrenchment, from the cultural milieu of the 1960s and 70s which supported social and artistic initiates, to that of the 1980s and 90s, this culture retreated in the face of corporate privatization.
A key element in the exhibition is the video of a talk Hollis gave at the ICA London, commissioned by Artists Space, in which he discusses some of the designs in the show, weaving them chronologically through a history of his career. Taking up one wall of the large gallery, this temporal structure is established in the talk’s opening image: the octogenarian Hollis shows us a photograph of himself as a child in the Second World War, as we watch his frail figure dwarfed by his childhood self. The chronological arrangement continues throughout the show, as the curators Emily King and Stuart Bailey have displayed his work according to the sequence that Hollis establishes in the hour-long video. In shaping the exhibition through Hollis’s own telling, Hollis in effect becomes our guide to the exhibition and through this structure, allows the curators to resolve a central issue that afflicts many design exhibitions: context. 2
Critical for Hollis is the importance of grasping the social circumstances in which a design was produced, not only its wider social conditions, but also the relationships between the designer and the client and between the client and society more broadly, leading him to argue that ‘in a sense the designer is a go-between’ (Kristensen, 2011: 191). Preserving this role of mediation, Hollis relishes interaction and collaboration, intentionally keeping his studio small by working with just one assistant. An unusual contemporary situation for a graphic designer in a field dominated by international design groups, Hollis’s studio attempts to work in a similar small-scale manner to that which was the standard when he began designing in the 1950s. Nowadays, according to Hollis, design has become marketing, with the history of design often located in these larger studios. In this context, Hollis, and indeed this exhibition, are anomalies.
Another radical change in graphic design practice that has happened over the course of Hollis’s career is the enormous technical revolutions in how design is created and produced, with Hollis weathering the three major technological shifts, from letterpress, to paste-up for offset lithography, to digital design. At the start of his career, when design was based on the physical manipulation of letterpress type, photographs, and paper, Hollis had extensive encounters not only with clients but also with the craftsmen – with the typesetters, the reproduction houses and the printers – who produced and reproduced his designs. This materiality of design practice is brought sharply to our attention through one of Hollis’s images displaying the tools used to produce camera-ready artwork for reproduction by lithography, the scissors, the scalpel, glue, rulers, a magnifier, and a calculator.
This theme of the materiality of design is emphasized in a number of ways throughout the exhibition. The works are placed in rows on angled wooden shelves, rather than being framed behind glass and hung vertically, so that the viewer is able to get close enough to examine the texts and images and grasp the qualities of ink and paper. Printed material is therefore displayed in the plane on which it is located in everyday use, when it is held in our hands or propped up on a table. Likewise, in a telling move, Hollis’s poster designs are tacked directly onto one gallery wall with pushpins, continuing his resistance for them to be characterized as artworks. Through this form of display, this exhibition reinforces the message that these posters were never intended to be museum pieces but rather were to be located in the everyday, seen on the Tube or in the street, or bought at the Whitechapel or the Barbican from where they were taken back home and used to decorate a bedroom. 3
There are, however, a small number of works displayed within vitrines. In one vitrine, at the entrance to the exhibition, are a group of artifacts related to Hollis’s most well-known work, his collaboration with John Berger, Mike Dibb, Sven Blomberg and Chris Fox on the book Ways of Seeing (1972). Juxtaposing the shooting script for the television series and the manuscript for the Ways of Seeing book with the book itself, displayed together with Hollis’s designs for Berger’s other books, visitors’ examination of the material is accompanied by the sound of Berger’s voice from Ways of Seeing (2008[1972]), extracts of which are played on an accompanying monitor.
As a perfect example of Hollis’s ad hoc collaborative networks, his involvement with the Ways of Seeing project began at the leftist weekly publication New Society, where Hollis was the art director and Berger was the art critic. They knew they could collaborate and the resulting book was a unique interpretation of the television series.
Set in confident Univers 65, it is a marriage of text and image in which the type, in keeping with Berger’s television performance, was as bold and dramatic as the images. Taking a clear point of view, each design decision was carefully thought through, despite the frenetic production process. The result was visually inventive, accessible and inexpensive, the antithesis of existing art books and in line with Berger’s sense of Ways of Seeing, as he notes in its introduction: ‘The form of the book is as much to do with our purpose as the arguments contained in it.’ 4
In 1969 Hollis began another notable body of work, this time for the publicly funded Whitechapel Gallery, initially under the directorship of Mark Glazebrook and later Nicholas Serota. Hollis produced an identity that was designed to achieve the maximum from every printing and every sheet of paper for the under-resourced gallery. In line with his aim to get as much out of the budget as possible, the Whitechapel posters were designed so that they could be folded for economical mailing in standard DL business envelopes rather than being mailed in tubes; the gallery’s type was carefully laid out so that it was never caught in the folds; and careful overprinting using red and green ink produced the illusion of three colors including black. After Serota and Hollis’s departure, later redesigns of Whitechapel’s identity lost the specificity of Hollis’s system, substituting a generic art world sheen as the gallery itself moved to a more hermetic program. 5
Unlike the global reach of current design groups with international offices, Hollis’s designs emerged from local networks that can be traced through the work on show, with many of his relationships traced in the exhibition by tangible printed things, all shaped by Hollis; magazines, books, flyers, invoices, and business cards. There are letters from gallery directors and publishers written on the paper he had designed, not pristine paper, but paper in use, anchored in everyday circumstance, sustaining the collaborations by which the designs are implemented. As all of his commissions emerged from his web of contacts, Hollis, somewhat unusually for a practicing designer, never needed to market his services. Another example of his practice is his 40-year connection with the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, founded by the poet Ted Hughes in 1965, the result of his friendship with Hughes and his wife Sylvia Plath, formed when they were neighbors.
Amongst the ephemera of his work for clients are other more personal designs: changes of address cards, collaborations with his second wife, the satirical cartoonist Posy Simmons, a birth announcement of his son. This interweaving of a social history of leftist London with Hollis’s personal narrative through the bric-a-brac of a life, through objects which document change of location, change of relationships, change of business practices, creates a compelling narrative and allows for multiple readings of the work. A magazine that Hollis art directed in 1972 simultaneously becomes, therefore, a designed artifact, a piece of evidence in both media history and political history, as well as a marker in his own narrative. In its evocation of a time of public sponsorship and left-wing initiatives and struggles, this is an exhibition that allows us to interweave these stories. My own narrative as a designer living in London in the 1980s is similarly woven through this exhibition. Like thousands of others, I saw Hollis’s Barbican posters, visited the Whitechapel shows, read New Society. And like those thousands, I had no idea these were all designed by Hollis.
On the one hand, this exhibition can seem very much out of time and place; the somewhat socialist London evoked could not be further from Mayor Bloomberg’s Manhattan. For, while this material has strong resonances with my generation, younger Americans, who make up the majority of the gallery’s visitors, have little idea of the political context in which Hollis’s work was made. However, in the context of contemporary New York City politics, the timing of the exhibition occurs at a particularly loaded moment, the election of the first Democratic mayor for two decades, Bill de Blasio. By American standards, De Blasio is a liberal and expectations are high that his tenure will bring a shift of emphasis towards more progressive policies. Perhaps Richard Hollis’s sustained practice may yet provide a similarly progressive model for a new generation of New York creative workers to seek out their own pragmatic small-scale socially engaged collaborations.