Lets start with Apple, almost everybody I know owns a macbook or an I pod. Most people don’t know that every single product at Apple, from hardware to user-interface design, is based on old designs for Braun during the 50s and 60s made by Dieter Rams. Jonathan Ive from Apple design is clearly inspired by him. Dieter Rams gives the clues for the products of the past present and the future of Apple, he is a furniture maker, architect and product designer.

Maybe a few of you are familiar with my next example, the magazine Monocle. Its an international magazine with its headquarters in London. Its more a book than a magazine, about international affairs, business, culture and design. Tyler Brûlé is Monocle’s editor-in-chief and chairman. He is the guy who brought neo-classic post-European modernism to lifestile publishing. Writers and photographers from over 50 countries deliver stories on forgotten states, political figures, emerging brands and inspiring design solutions. Monocle also works with impressive illustrators who contribute to the magazine periodically. Here are a few examples of illustrations made for the magazine.

Andrew Holder

Lab-Partners

Adrian Johnson

Notice the vintage inspired style and color composition. Few of the readers know that this is not the first Monocle. There was another Monocle , a virtually forgotten, but important magazine that was published from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. the new Monocle however actually looks nothing like the old Monocle.

Maybe all this nostalgia is not for the recent past, but more for the future that it promised, but never came. I present you Hauntology. Hauntology is derived from haunt and ology.

Hauntology is the opposite of nostalgia. The term goes back to 1848. Marx and Engels stated ‘A sprectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism’. It was introduced for the first time in 1993 by Jacques Derrida in his work “Spectres de Marx”. The future can only exists in relation to the past. We are living in a time when past is present, and the present is saturated with ghosts of the past. In hauntology, the present is not only haunted by ghosts of the past but also by  ghosts of the future. Jacques Derrida talks in the documentary “Ghost Dance” about ghosts being part of the future. In the documentary a student asks Jacques whether he believes in ghosts. He answers “Le phantom c’est moi”. In this case, yes it could be himself, since he is asked to play himself and without knowing it, he lets a ghost speak for him, he lets the ghost play his role.

Cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms, its the art of allowing ghosts to come back, and let them speak for you. Watch the interesting documentary “Ghost Dance” (1983), starring Jacques Derrida.

My last example, hauntology can be found also in music. Recording label Ghost Box is an English recording label by graphic designer Julian House and musician Jim Jupp. They describe themselves as a label for artists that find inspiration in library music, folklore vintage electronics and haunted television soundtracks. The name Ghost Box itself is a reference to television and the way previous experiences with this medium can haunt your real-world experience.

I agree with Jacques Derrida that cinematography and telecommunication enhances the power of ghosts and their capability to haunt us. Music also contributes to this power of haunting. To prove it, listen to some of these examples of haunted music and let the ghosts of the past and future speak for you.

Memoryhouse

Broadcast and The Focus Group

Mordant Music

In this work you see influences of Design, Fine arts, Architecture and Graphic design.
A nice thing of this work is that the upper drawing can stand on his own, and therefore can be divided in Fine arts. What Lissitzky is doing in the painted photo below, can be compared with design. Almost all his work contains influences of Design, Fine arts, Architecture and Graphic design. For myself I see it back the most in this one.
I really like the composition and colour distribution and how Lissitzky combines the 2D/3D perspective, which makes the drawing much more architectural.
I think the later work of Kandinsky is in some way comparable. I’m talking about elements of composition, colour distribution wise and form contrasts.
What’s fascinating actually is that for example in these paintings ( K1, L1, K2, L2 ) the triangles, (half) circles, stripes and composition have so much in common. While the ideas of their work are so different. Kandinsky combines painting with music, which Lissitzky does with architecture.

What I appreciate is the modern way of exposing his work. I like the way he puts his drawing and his street-exhibition in one frame on the cardboard. And the fact that he paints on the photo. The street celebration design reminds me a bit of graffiti in legal manners. In Graffiti you have multiple meanings of doing it. Some do it for the adrenaline-kick, some for the group or competition feeling, some to show their design skills and others for  political statements or propaganda. This last example is what I see in a part of Lissitzky’s work.

I think it’s interesting to see how he uses his propaganda work in other work but then he integrates his in his autonomous work (proun. street celebration design).

All in all I think it’s a great work and a unique style. I really admire that Lissitzky makes so many different things, and still keeps it in one theme

Already in 1923 El Lissitzky was thinking further than just a bunch of papers in a hard cover, when he published an interesting little book with poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky accompanied by graphics by him self, under the title “For the voice”.

To make it easy to locate a specific poem Lissitzky made the kind of index we find in phonebooks at the edge of the pages. But where in the phonebooks you look up a name by the first letter, Lissitzky made small abstract symbols or thumbnails of the graphic that accompanied the specific poem in the book.
This way Lissitzky moves the form of the book away from the formal form and at the same time he plays with an already known design, that doesn’t make people confused but rather triggers a desire to explore. I really think that this is a great way to stimulate peoples curiosity to look in the book, which is the whole point of making one. It’s very inspiring.

In terms of fashion, there are many ways to encounter these designs. I myself encountered three major elements that can be related with contemporary fashion: technology,expression and giving emphasis to -suprematist- shapes by utilizing them in a different context.
The use of electro mechanism could have easily inspired the work of Turkish designer Hussein Chalayan. This element comes strongly back in his 2007 spring/summer collection, used as a tool to transform. The remote control dress as an interesting outcome of the same mentality.

Dutch designer duo Viktor & Rolf greatly succeed in establishing moods and characteristics through their designs. Making these -invisible- elements visible and more importantly visual. A resemblance that goes up for every figure from the opera designs by Lissitzy.

British designer Gareth Pugh touches on these elements too, though in a more abstract way. Abstract in the sense that clothing no longer hold on to the outlines of the human body, but -form wise- is completely free to go into any directions. Great representatives of these elements are Japanese fashion designers -or rather fashion sculptors- Issey Miyake, Rei kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto.

In its three chapters FEMALE (FRAU), SIGN (ZEICHEN), MACHINE (MASCHINE) the book XX- examines the way in which administration, communication and technology were an elementary condition of the functioning of the annihilation apparatus in the Third Reich.

The book’s content consists in visual (advertising and propaganda images, files) and textual fragments (contemporary, philosophical, sociological statements as well as statements related to cultural studies and encyclopedic entries). In it, history is interpreted, displayed and arranged. In this sophisticated way of dealing with history which makes its documents visible and discloses them for use the book XX- questions its sources and their perception. In its hybrid composition as a file as well as a book its design employs filing techniques such as a registry, catchwords, numeration and categorisation and embeds these into a book format.

The book XX- is composed as a symbiosis of a file and a book cover and thus refers to its sources: The archive and literature. Constructed solely of visual and textual fragments, it uses available literature (contemporary statements, encyclopedic entries, philosophical, sociological, political and linguistical standpoints as well as statements related to cultural studies) and images (advertising- and propaganda images of the 30s and 40s, files).

In the book, fragments are juxtaposed without them being commented in way resembling an archive. Thus, they demand an independent analysis and an autonomous evaluation of the different opinions by the reader. The selective constellation of the sources takes on the book’s structures: Their succession and compilation are fixed and thus generate a new content. The resulting hybrid presents history and questions its alleged absoluteness and unambiguousness at the same time.

The book XX- questions its sources and their perception In a sophisticated way of dealing with history that makes its documents visible and discloses them for use. Thus the closeness of the book as a medium is abrogated in favour of a new perception of historiography. History is interpreted,  displayed and arranged in a reflection of the medium.

by Elisabeth Hinrichs, Aileen Ittner, Daniel Rother

Title: XX- (The SS-Rune as a special Character on Typewriters)
Series: orange files. Studies on Grammatology # 1 [orange files. Studien zur Grammatologie]
Editors: Julia Blume, Prof. Günter Karl Bose, Institute for Book Design at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts [Institut für Buchkunst der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig] Leipzig 2009
324 pages, 198 images, 420 citations, hard cover, cost €49
ISBN: 978-3-932865-55-8