Beware of Creeping Mannerism

The word 'mannerism' crept into my head long ago when looking at certain examples of contemporary art and design that struck me in a particularly negative way, but for reasons I couldn't readily identify. While the art world version of the term originally refers to the garish style of painting that followed the Renaissance and gave rise to the Baroque period, it seems appropriate now to repurpose the word. Just as the Mannerists of old re-used Renaissance tropes (mostly ham-handedly) without quite reaching the depth and rigor of their predecessor, we seem to be in the middle of another mannerist moment in contemporary design. This is not simply a post-modern condition of the 'well, anything goes' sort, but rather a lazy and hackish repurposing of imagery and concepts, sloganeering and empty gesture. Perhaps this has always been the case. But man, it can be disheartening to look around and wonder what the hell everyone is doing. And what is most disheartening it seeing this emerge in your own work.

My goal with Casual Aesthetics, again, is to try and rid myself of Mannerist tendencies – namely, to employ form in the service of nothing. There is a surplus of good-looking and well-meaning design and art that is quite lovely to see, to have and to hold on to. But when that strange hollow feeling arises, it means the form is just an exquisite shell around a billowing gust of hot air. Actually, a billowing gust would be ideal, it's more like a stale, unmoving cloud of halitosis.

Awhile back I was asked to do some illustration and animation for a music video. The director, my pal Ben, wanted it to be very much in the Yellow Submarine/Sesame Street/Schoolhouse Rock continuum. Fair enough. The video concept revolved around a neighborhood party, where the young and hip of all races and persuasions were hanging out with the old folks and the youngsters. In this sense, the Sesame Street style is shorthand for this kind of community-minded positivity, which is fine and dandy for a music video. The addition of psychedelic sequences and imagery is you know, rock currrency.



Wow the youtube quality is bad. Now anyways, to make the animation feel 'vintage', I developed a layering system which basically involved lowering the frame rate, desaturating certain colors and bumping others up, adding a looped 'wash' texture over the piece and adding fake film grain to give it a gritty texture. And all the animated elements had a faked line quality to make it feel like it was drawn with ink. Here is what the digital file looked like originally and how it looked after the layering process.



Anyways – there was a very short deadline and we had to move as economically as possible and still get results. Great, no problem there. It seems like an appropriate response.

The only problem is that I began to use this method on all kinds of other jobs, just because it always looked cool and I knew how to do it easily. While I'm aware that it's unreasonable to think we should be able to do something new or at least appropriate for each job that comes in, especially ones with very quick turnaround which is quite the norm now, I at least want to think that I can move away from this in my personal work. Easier said than done.

SO

Really what I'm trying to get at here is that we need to beware of creeping mannerism. To beware of creating shells with no true content beneath them. Some kind of finely rendered typography of a phrase with no anchor in reality, or in anything meaningful. There is soooo much of this. I get enraged at myself everytime I make a t-shirt with some kind of phrase which has at best a half-meaning. Here's the latest one, soon available on Threadless Select. At least it's formally a little interesting.



It says Folk Rock and Roll. Ha ha. Yeah, if you could actually read it. If I had the wit to actually come up with a phrase I could stand behind, I wouldn't couch all of my work in illegible typography. But yeah. But yeah Folk Rock and Roll, and folk you too.

Just because a piece is rendered in a high modernist style with simple sans serif type and plenty of white space mean that is the product of a rigorous investigation of the content whose only appropriate visualization is a stark and straightfaced reading. Similarly, an idiosyncratic phrase done in a practiced hand-letter style with attendant personal symbology fare any differently, unless there is some story, some content, some idea beneath the veneer, it is all empty signification masquerading as something more.