Daily Features

Something Old-Fashioned from Michael Rock

The author of Multiple Signatures on love and beauty and design

August 8, 2013

Multiple Signatures by Michael Rock, 2013 (Rizzoli International Publications). Courtesy of 2x4

The following is excerpted from the Afterword to Multiple Signatures by graphic designer Michael Rock, featured earlier this week on Designers & Books.

“There are two kinds of sex [design], classical and baroque. Classical sex [design], is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex [design] is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation’s sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual [design] relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration).” — Ellen Willis on sex [Michael Rock on design.]

Faced with such a dichotomy, what’s a design-lover to do? Are we classical or baroque? Or maybe more to the point, in the synthesis of the two, are we ironic or earnest? We have, over time, come down on different sides of those questions. One thing is for sure, we are serious about what we do … except when we are not.

But if we have to takes sides I would argue that we most consistently fall in with the baroque: we have a commitment to the political potential of irony. There is a game to be played: author, maker and reader enter into a dynamic wherein the rules are inscribed and elaborate pageants acted out accordingly. The invisible limitations of the system reveal themselves to the participants through the playing. (We can only decry limits if we see them!) In our universe those rules are shared understandings: the rules of the mass media, of culture, the fashion system, the shop floor and museum gallery, and the rules of typography, color, composition and line. We expect our readers come to our work well-armed and ready to rumble.

To stay interested in this job you have to take an interest in how that game is played, and what you take away from it, personally. There are projects and there are clients and money and there are big issues to solve and there are big issues we make for ourselves, but are these motivational? I am not sure any of those things are our prime motivation (much as we love to think of ourselves as problem-solvers). At the end of the day we are driven by beauty, that old-fashioned concept we never discuss in public. We like to make things. Beautiful things, ugly things that make you question what is beautiful, secret things that only we think are beautiful, cheap things that when handled correctly become beautiful, luxurious things that try too hard to be beautiful … There is a motivating joy in making something distinct, in being there at the inception. If beauty is a combination of things arranged in ways that please the senses, we take an expansive notion of senses. We want to touch every nerve. I guess, in the end, we want to be good lovers, in the baroque sense of course, “pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous ….”

Beauty — Michael Rock

Clichés, 13 Flowers. From Multiple Signatures by Michael Rock (2013, Rizzoli International Publications)

Michael Rock’s Book List: The Visual Presentation of Language

Design Matters Podcast on Books: Debbie Millman & Michael Rock

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