Sifting the Trash by Twemlow Alice;

Author:Twemlow, Alice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

3.7

Cover of Blueprint, November 1984, showing the use of mirrors in Phil Sayer’s portrait of designer Ron Arad. Courtesy of Design Curial.

3.8

First issue of Blueprint, October 1983, featuring Eva Jiricna, the Czech-born interior designer, photographed by Phil Sayer. Courtesy of Design Curial.

In an era fascinated with the construction of identity, the journalistic device of the interview assumed new significance. With its intimate, lengthy, and often unedited interviews with celebrities, the American magazine Interviewtypified the genre. As Paul Atkinson and David Silverman have observed, “The interview, with its implied invitations toward self-revelation, is a pervasive device for the production of selves, biographies, and experiences. It furnishes the viewer/reader/hearer with the promise of privileged—however fleeting—glimpses into the private domain of the speaker.”88

Blueprint’s profiles of prominent designers were based on interviews, with some of the most incisive pieces written by Janet Abrams, who clearly relished the potential of the format for intense debate with the big minds in design. She considered that her role as a journalist, far from merely reporting the facts, was to figure as a co-protagonist in the story. A profile of architect Peter Eisenman began: “‘Are you going to do a number on me?’ Peter Eisenman inquires when I phone to arrange this interview. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Ivy League architect-academics is to veil their rapturous delight in publicity with feigned outrage at the mere prospect; Eisenman is perhaps the archetype of the genus.”89

Until Blueprintbegan to prioritize the interview-based profile as a journalistic format, most designers had stood well behind their work, keeping their private lives separate from the more public and carefully constructed environments of their studios. Increasingly writers asked for access to designers’ homes and observed them in their daily lives, giving rise to a new kind of pseudo-psychoanalytic character analysis in design journalism.

Sudjic was a keen observer of identity himself. In a 2006 article about his first visit to his parents’ hometown of Belgrade in twenty-five years, he traced the roots of his own need to decode identity as a response to his immigrant parents’ and his own uncertain status in relation to British culture and entrenched class divisions. He wrote: “How identity is manufactured has always interested me from the first time that I began to wonder why money in Yugoslavia was in the form of banknotes embellished with portraits of heroic power station workers and apple cheeked peasants, and in Britain money is signified by men with whiskers and big wigs. These are the clues that you need to decode in order to get a grip on exactly who you are.”90

Sudjic attempted to answer the question “Are you what you own?” in Cult Objects: The Complete Guide to Having It All, a 1985 catalog of the accouterments of the designer lifestyle.91The same year, his peer Stephen Bayley’s exhibition and catalog The Good Design Guide: 100 Best Ever Productsseemed to be motivated by the same question. The Guide featured such status-conferring design icons as 501 jeans, Oxford shirt, Panama hat, Zippo lighter, Oyster Rolex, Raybans, Bass Weejun shoes, K100 motorbike, and a Porsche pipe.

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