Excerpts from the EYE Magazine Profile of Elliott Earls
From Eye Magazine. 45 Vol.12. Autumn 2002
by Rick Poynor -
Even for those who follow his activities with interest, the news that Elliott Peter Earls was to be a designer-in-residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art - a post formerly held by the McCoys and the Makelas - came as a something of a surprise. If ever a designer seemed like a certified oddball, pursuing a trajectory far removed from the obligations of institutional life, it is Earls. He is one of those unclassifiable, mutant blooms thrown up by the fractured landscape of T9905 graphic design. My first encounter with his output came in 1993, when I was working on a survey of new design. A package of material from Cranbrook (near Detroit, Michigan) included several posters by Earls, who was in his final year. In one, an Astro Boy doll bursts through a sheet of glass, accompanied by the copyline, 'The side of my head hurts from thinking in the rain'- an announcement both engagingly direct in its physicality and intriguingly obscure in its state of mind.
The posters, he now reveals, represented something of a crisis. Earls was in the process of reinventing himself and, after that, things just got weirder. In 1995, operating as 'The Apollo Program', he released a CD-ROM, Throwing Apples at the Sun, which invaded the desktop and plunged viewers into a Supercard labyrinth of pop-up windows, sound effects, spoken-word pieces and Quicktime movies, as one layer led to the next. It was some kind of landmark in a medium that had mostly failed to deliver on its early promise, and reviewers were impressed. Around this time, Earls launched a triptych of deranged-looking typefaces - Dysphasia, Dysplasia and Dyslexia - that confirmed his gifts as a practitioner of outlandishly dysfunctional design. One could only wonder at the peculiar mind-space inhabited by their creator, apparently holed up in White Plains, somewhere outside of New York...
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THE LIGHT BULB OVER THE HEAD
Earls, now 36, is a natural performer, intense and charismatic, with sculpted features and a wide mouth - imagine 'Wicked Game' singer Chris Isaak's slightly crazy brother. Watching him move around the stage with such authority, it's hard to believe he was in his thirties before it occurred to him to perform. He's tall, wiry and angular, a fast-talking, powerfully physical presence. His spacious studio at Cranbrook feels like a cross between a workshop and a film set, its floor littered with tripods, cables, gadgets, and the audio rig he uses in performance. His banjo hangs on the wall.
At Jesuit high school in Cincinnati, Ohio, Earls seems to have been one of the jocks. He was a committed athlete and soccer player with no interest in academic pursuits. It was his mother who suggested he turn his skills at drawing and painting into a career in graphic design. Assembling a portfolio with the help of an early mentor, he won a place at Rochester Institute of Technology. After graduating in 1988, he landed a job at de Harak and Poulin Associates in New York. Eleven months later, they fired him. 'I really didn't fit in there,' he says. 'It was a museum.' Mortified by this setback, Earls fled to Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife Darlene. At this stage he knew nothing about designers such as April Greiman and Emigre; he knew only about corporate design. Working at David Cundy Inc. in New Canaan, he finally saw an issue of VanderLans's increasingly influential type-zine. 'Bling! The light bulb went off over my head and I thought this was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.' Earls decided to go to graduate school. Visiting Cranbrook for his interview, he fell in love with its bohemian, commune-like atmosphere. 'I believe in the mythology of the place and I think that was important. I believed in the McCoys. There was a process that I wanted to subject myself to. One of the things that was stressed by the McCoys and the visiting artists Lorraine Wild and Ed Fella came while I was here - was that you have to take responsibility for the quality of your own education as well as your life.'...
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In an Emigre essay, Earls lays out his intention to become a 'prosumptive' designer - a term borrowed from Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave - positioned somewhere between traditional models of production and consumption. For Earls, this seems to translate into a goal of total self-sufficiency, a desire to become a 2 1st-century Renaissance man able to leap between disciplines with a single bound and somehow (this part is unclear) escape the dilemma of a pluralistic environment in which everything is possible and nothing taboo. Of course, the desire not to be constrained by disciplinary boundaries has been a cultural ideal in recent years, to the point of clichŽ, though few have what it takes to become a convincing multidisciplinary artist. Whatever one thinks of his aesthetic, Earls possesses an unusual array of talents and an enviable facility to acquire new skills. He taught himself guitar as a student at Cranbrook, composed songs, picked up practical electronics, wrote a screenplay, and can do almost anything he wants with a computer. In Catfish, he delivers an impressively obnoxious performance as a buck-toothed, hillbilly typeface salesman - as a performer and actor, he sometimes seems to tap into a deep well of inner rage.
Earls's work has undeniable power and he has succeeded in finding audiences outside the insular club of design. If he presented himself purely as an artist or musician, one probably would not even feel the need to ask: what does it all mean? Or, if one were to ask this, it would come some way behind the immersive experience of the work itself. In recent years, many design projects have aspired to be absorbed without thinking, but design's long-standing, disciplinary commitment to 'communication' means the spectre of meaning can never be entirely repressed. Nevertheless, Earls's work resists interpretation. 'The program's construction reinforces the theme of intellectual dyslexia,' notes Kenneth FitzGerald, discussing Throwing Apples. 'Fragments fail to coalesce to definite meaning, nor do they attempt to.' If his creations were less persuasive on an experiential level, one might dismiss them by saying that he is merely 'expressing himself. However, Earls continues to view what he does as being firmly based on design principles, even though artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers use similar compositional principles without calling them 'design'.
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