Dada today
ART PAUL GRINKE
One of the several organisations now nurtured in the capacious though draughty bosom of 12 Carlton Terrace is the Designers and Art Directors Association. Every year for the last six years it, has mounted an exhibition (currently 'Design and Art Direction '68') of the best print,- advertising, editorial and tele- vision design and produced a simultaneous illustrated annual slightly reminiscent of a giant 'Christmas comic book. Both are worth browsing through to see what the professional media men really think of the stuff they ceaselessly inflict on the public.
Stan.dards are evidently high for, out of twenty-five awards in various special categories, no fewer than nine, including the gold award for an outstanding item, have been passed this year as none of the work displayed merited an award. The field covered by the DADA, an appro- priate name to my mind, is, of course, enormous, ranging from posters to packaging and from television commercials to feature articles and office stationery. All the work on display reaches an audience that would frighten a good many professional painters, though to be fair much of it gets only the most cursory attention from the public.
Advertising design, however closely it ap- proaches fine art (and surely the difference be- tween Andy Warhol's soup cans and the iden- tical product conceived by some anonymous designer is only one of intent), has the trans- mission of a commercial message as its sole objective. To achieve this the graphic side always slightly at the mercy of the typographer, and good advertising design should be a perfect marriage of the two. As words appear to be more visually arresting than pictures, copy- writers this year have been racking their brains for ever more ghastly puns, instance Grodzin- ski's 'We make crummy cakes,' Tern shirts 'Is your husband in another man's arms?' and booby prize to the Ford Company for 'Car man Jones.' The most uniformly successful de- sign is still fashion layout, which has a very high standard of imaginative photography that makes its point without the intrusion of text beyond conventional captions. The El Al Israel Airlines has achieved a nice blend of text and pictorial matter on the lines of Levy's famous American advertisements 'You don't have to be Jewish . . .' Its slogan: 'A message from our founder,' with apologies to Michelangelo's Moses, was particularly appealing.
Weak point in most graphic design, especially in the magazine field, is the artist's impression. The Sunday Times is the worst offender here with -an evident relish for highly romanticised art work of the women's magazine genre. Amaz- ingly enough, its feature called 'The Middle Age of Jackie Kennedy and You,' which to my mind 'offended every conceivable canon of taste, won the DADA Silver Award for the best piece of editorial art. A close runner-up for sheer grossness was Nova's grisly piece on Prince Charles, 'The Boy most likely to suc- ceed.' The best magazine art today seems to draw ever closer to a cartoon style—the scratchily hieroglyphic pen of Paul Hogarth, which is eminently reproducible, or • the psychedelic superman style of Alan Aldridge. These are conventional styles which do not try to ape painting in the 'fine art' sense and blend happily with the printed word. Lettering itself has taken on a new lease of life with the art nouveau revival combined with the use of day- glow colours, though it is much open to abuse and inclined to constant over-elaboration. A typical example of the misuse of this style is the Madame Tussaud poster which sports a fancifully repetitious art 'nouveau motif rather like the marbled paper used by bookbinders, with no conceivable relevance to Madame Tussaud's.
But there are some splendid things to be seen, from the austere colour photography of Har- vey's Bristol Cream sherry to the packaging and stationery of Hadfield's paint. New Society scores full marks for its uniformly success- ful covers and the Salvation Army has taken a useful look at commercial advertising with its hard-hitting poster campaign. For the sybarite, the series of Pretty Polly hold-up stocking posters take some beating in spite of their somewhat mawkish cry 'The last of the big suspenders.'
An exhibition like this is angled at the pro- fessional" designer rather than the public, but it is a salutary experience to see posters, maga- zines and advertisements out of context as pure art work. There is an enormous and largely unrecognised body of talent at work in com- mercial design, producing work that has the largest conceivable exposure on the widest pos- sible front. Much of it is teamwork -including Photographers, designers and typographers, which makes it virtually impossible to single out individuals for special mention. But we should be grateful for 'the DADA who are pre- pared to recognise and salute their own with: such considered discrimination.
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