Design
Anarchy
by Kalle
Lasn
Adbusters Media Foundation, Vancouver,
British Columbia, 2006
416 pp., 420 illus. Cloth, $65.00
ISBN: 0-9746800-9-5.
Review by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture
Washington State University Vancouver
jfbarber@eaze.net
Adbusters magazine was founded
in the late 1980s, calling itself "a journal
of the mental environment." Since then,
each issue has focused on confronting
mass consumption and blind devotion to
corporate identities. Design Anarchy,
a new book by Adbusters founder
and publisher Kalle Lasn, is not only
a worthy compilation of some the journal's
great moments, but a jolt (which Lasn
defines as a "technical event" that forces
your mind to take notice and search for
meaning, even if there is none) for anyone
mindlessly following the consumer cycle,
dulled to one's sense of self and place
in the world.
Like the earlier Culture Jam, also
by Lasn, Design Anarchy, is personal
statement, manifesto, and text book. "I
wanted to be an artist, but I became a
graphic designer," says Lasn at the beginning
of Chapter 2. As a graphic designer, Lasn
admits to pushing bits of information
around until they accumulate "a kind of
slickness," each branded and marketed
for conspicuous consumption. Graphic design,
says Lasn, is everywhere, touching everything
we see, do, and buy. As a visual manifesto,
Design Anarchy reprints many of
the urgent reconfigurations of prominent
advertising campaigns found in Adbusters
as well as other activist texts and images.
As a text book, Design Anarchy
is an introduction to culture jamming,
of stopping the flow of bits of information
long enough to interrupt the spectacle,
to promote the jolt, to allow the process
of awareness.
Comprised of images and words from thoughtful
and thought-provoking artists, designers,
architects, and other creative thinkers,
Design Anarchy is designed to light
bonfires under the uncritical acceptance
of propaganda from the news, fashion,
automotive, beauty, tobacco, or food industries
and others. Lasn cuts up, scrawls over,
and reconfigures his own work and that
of others to make the point that, as Marshall
McLuhan pronounced so many years ago,
media images and cultural information
share nearly equal weight. Yet, says Lasn,
one is not necessarily the same as the
other, especially when ethos and ethics
are lacking, or missing in the efforts
of innocuous designers.
Lasn makes his position perfectly clear
when he scrawls a quote from the late
designer Tibor Kalman across one of the
book's unnumbered pages: "Don't work for
companies that want you to lie for them"
or invites "Insert your commercial here"
on multiple others. Both are message and
motto for designers and consumers, especially
when both, implies Lasn, are responsible
for the pollution and redemption of the
mental environment.
If, as predicted by McLuhan, World War
IV will be fought in newspapers, magazines,
on the radio, on television, and the Internet,
Design Anarchy is a call to arms.
The weapons of choice are memes, units
of information, catch phrases, concepts,
tunes, notions of fashion, philosophy,
or politics that can change minds, alter
behavior and transform cultures. In the
information age, whoever makes the memes
holds the power. Right now, corporations
control much of meme production. By sharing
examples from Adbusters' repurposing
of several corporate advertising campaigns,
Design Destiny becomes a tool kit
for artists, designers, consumers, and
citizens wishing to tilt the balance of
power.
Lasn claims that we, members of civil
society, can begin by demarketing ourselves,
our lives, bodies, and brains. Then we
can join with others to demarket chief
rituals co-opted by commercial forces.
We can change the way we interact with
mass media, the way information flows,
the way in which meaning is produced.
The old American dream was about prosperity
in vacant obliviousness. A post-consumer
generation will demand greater meaning
from its life, and new economies: true-cost
or ecological. Once we break the commercial
monopoly on making meaning, we can create
a new dream, one about spontaneity.
In the end, Design Anarchy is a
provocative and incendiary coffee table
design book. It is also just as well a
first attempt by Lasn to develop and portray
a new graphic/text language whose anarchist
beauty strikes a formidable political
stance. In a design world where, arguably,
surface is all that counts, Design
Anarchy is a first-draft blueprint
for leveling the propaganda arena surrounding
the conception of shopping as a patriotic
act.