From BLUEPRINT magazine
October 2003
"From Zero to Hero"
by David Redhead
-There wasn’t much doubt about the main draw for the 500 or so people who attended New Typography, a one-day conference organised in central London earlier this year under the aegis of Kingston University’s Postgraduate Faculty. When I arrived, half way through the afternoon the place was alive with the sort of expectant hum more readily associated with a gig at the Brixton Academy than a serious-minded design symposium at the London Institute of Education. And in the bars the talk among the baggy-trousered crew who seemed to make up most of the audience was all of Elliott Earls and Catfish, the enigmatic DVD/magazine distributed earlier this year by the American publisher Emigre.
The youthful contingent seemed to view Earls, the 37-year-old head of graphics at Cranbrook Academy of Art as the millennial successor to the graphics-meets-art line of cult heroes that stretches back through Tomato, via David Carson to Neville Brody. When the rangy 36 year old appeared on stage there was even the odd rock-n-roll style whoop and when Earls concluded his 20 minute illustrated talk by tossing into the audience a dozen copies of Catfish, there was a real danger of getting trampled in the rush.
It’s easy to grasp why Earls has emerged as a graphic star for the new model digital kid. Catfish offers its requisite ration of the grotesque and cartoonish typefaces, the digital tricks and disturbing drawings that have defined Earls’s work since he first made his international mark with four posters in Rick Poynor’s book, The Graphic Edge. But there’s a new layer to the work beyond the weird imagery, the hairy fonts and the pop-ups and pyrotechnics which first caught our attention. Himself. In the past five years, Earls has emerged as the central protagonist in his own work. Catfish features Earls the actor in a string of different roles. There’s Elliott the mild-mannered and intense graduate student in earnest and anxious conversation with “Professor Gombrick’(sic). And Mr Earls the manic redneck graphic salesman aggressively flogging his own posters and typefaces to the camera, like some cable telly jewellery huckster.
The musical strand seems crucial to Earls’s growing cult status. All the music on Catfish is written, sung and played by “the designer’ and he isn’t content just to fiddle with his graphic programmes in the comfort of his studio, either. Cranbrook Academy’s answer to the club DJ is a multi-media musician (influences range from Hip-hop to country, from Neil Young to Cold Play and from Sparklehorse to Johnny Cash) who has taken his “show’ Ð in which he raps, sings, recites poetry, operates electronic gizmos and plays guitar in front of a bank of giant screens displaying his graphics Ð all over the world. He has starred at the hip New York art centre Here and played at Fabrica, Benetton’s ultra-trendy design lab in Treviso too.
And Earls has added academic respectability to his considerable street cred. Now head of graphics at Cranbrook, the art and design academy near Detroit in Michigan which where he studied for his masters degree in the early 1990s, Earls can count on the support of opinion formers at graphics cutting edge. Writing in “the sleeve notes’ to Earl’s DVD, type impresario Emigre editor Rudy Vanderlans, acclaims him as a “renaissance man and a modern all poured into one wearing multiple hats and embracing everything that technology has to offer.’
Earls’s British fanbase would certainly concur - a straw poll of the New Typography audience revealed disappointment among Earls’s British fan base that the conference budget didn’t stretch to a live gig. But a renaissance man? The obscurity of most of the work that emerges from that hinterland where graphics meet art may not bother the fanatics but I have to admit that ithe reluctance of Fuel or Tomato or David Carson to explain what (if anything) their work signifies has always rather irritated me. Indeed I have often suspected that the air of mysterious inscrutability that surrounds these so called graphic authors conceals a lack of substance. Wasn’t Catfish with its odd and fractured narrative its weird and wonderful special effects and its apparent incomprehensibility just the latest digital manifestation of the emperor’s new clothes?
Bearing in mind my own prejudices I wasn’t expecting an interview with Earls to give me a definitive answer. So when I met him for lunch in a Battersea restaurant day the after the conference I was taken aback both by his personal straightforwardness and his intellectual clarity. Articulate, charming and good looking in a gap-toothed Michael Stipeish sort of way, the 36 year old Midwesterner is refreshingly approachable and open by comparison to his self-conscious British equivalent.
Earls was thoroughly bullish about the basis of his work and happy to confront my criticisms head on. Yes, he does think that typography is a perfectly valid starting point for multi-disciplinary work. Yes, he thinks this has got “everything to do’ with design and he’s not bothered about the mutterings of critics who make “arbitrary and meaningless distinctions between designers.’ But no, he doesn’t think that graphic designers can simply get away with playing the “cool’ card if they want to be taken seriously in the cultural mainstream. He agrees when I suggest that “graphic authors’ ought to be ready and willing to explain and discuss their work rather than just maintaining a mysterious silence. “What I expect is a degree of criticality within the work,’ he says.
As Earls relaxed into an abridged resume of his life I began to wonder if the thoughtfulness that distinguishes him from some of his counter cultural peers owes something to the school of hard knocks. Today Earls may be the king of all he surveys but it hasn’t been an easy ride. By his own account, his stuttering early progress made the American wonder if he had what it took to make a living as a designer at all, let alone to emerge as a cult-hero.
Born in what he describes as a conservative Mid-Western catholic community in Ohio, Earls admits that he was anything but a natural rebel at his Jesuit High School in Cincinnati. He had little interest in design, focusing most of his energy on sport Ð especially soccer. Indeed when the time came for college choices it was his mother who suggested he might translate his drawing and painting skills into a design career.
At first things all went swimmingly. After completing his degree at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1988, Earls bought himself a suit and tie and a Saab, found a job with De Harak and Poulin Associates in New York and embraced the 1980s metropolitan aspirational lifestyle. But within less than a year the dream of making it in New York was starting to turn sour. “I was all set to be a yuppie but suddenly I found I didn’t feel comfortable with the clothes, the lifestyle or the consultancy I was working for.’
Nor they with him. After 11 months, Earls was fired for what he describes with a wry smile as “general incompetence’. “It was an awful shock that devastated and humiliated me, he admits’ Earls retired to Greenwich Connecticut to lick his wounds and to “reassess what I was doing from scratch’. It was during the post-mortem that Earls began to look harder at design culture. He describes the turning point as the moment when he came across a copy of Emigre magazine. “I simply hadn’t known anything about cutting edge type when I was at de Harak and Poulin. I just did corporate stuff,’ he recalls. “But after that I just began to to devour all the experimental stuff that I could find?Neville Brody, Jeffery Keedy, Ed Fella Saul Bass, the Makelas ‘it was a complete revelation’”
Earls got himself a place on Cranbrook’s post graduate course and threw himself into a personal rebuilding process, taking to the open-minded communal experimentalism of the Michigan school like a duck to water. “I loved the fact that at Cranbrook you could do anything you want as long as it had passion,’ he says. He focused his energy on digital skills Ðusing Apple’s early Quicktime programmes to experiment with sequencing on the computer and teaching himself guitar as a new strand. “I can’t say I excelled at graduate school but I did work my ass off, ‘ he says.
By the time Earls graduated in the mid-1990s he had rebuilt his confidence and felt ready for a new shot at the commercial world, quickly finding himself a job as an album cover designer with Elektra records. But the second job in New York turned out even more disastrously than the first - “People at Elektra seemed to think I was arrogant and pretentious. I hate that idea. It was just that I just didn’t feel comfortable with airbrushing the hair and enhancing the images of people whose work I didn’t like Ð like Michael Bolton and Madonna Ð just to make them more successful.’
The crunch came when Earls designed an apparently subversive cover for the Eagles Greatest Hits album which went down like a lead balloon with his boss. He was fired again, this time without even surviving his probationary period. At 26, he found himself unemployed and in emotional turmoil once more. “I was waking up in the middle of the night with worry,’ he recalls. “I felt that I couldn’t call myself a designer and was wondering what the hell I was going to do.’
Reaching this low point galvanized Earls to redefine his ambitions. This time instead of trying to fit other people’s perceptions of what a designer should be he determined to personalise the notion to fit his own offbeat talents. “At a certain point you have got to set out upon your own path,’ he argues. “I think exactly a year after leaving graduate school, I let go of any concern for how my work is culturally located. I figured that the only way to make truly powerful work, is to follow the ?bliss?. It is simply irrelevant whether I am considered a Graphic Designer proper, or a Performance Artist, or a Film Maker, or an Artist with a capital “A’. Society has a desperate need to categorize everything.’
Earls set up on his own account with the aim of evolving the multimedia approach he had been developing in his last year at Cranbrook. He designed type, wrote some music, shot video, designed posters, finally putting out a CD package entitled ?Throwing Apples at the Sun.? Within months he found he had discovered an audience: “ I made a ton of money! I decided to keep a few clients, “cause I liked them. (I guess they liked me too.) Then I made these gold boots, and drew a big portrait of Malcolm X. And I got a speed skating suit ,’ he wrote on the Emigre Website. “I figured out how to hook them all up to the computer. I started to perform at Here in Soho, New York. Then I got a call on the telephone... it seems I won this ?emerging artist? grant from the Wooster Group (you know, Wilem Dafoe’s’s company) and, boy, the phone started to ring off the hook!’
A decade on, performance has become central to his idiosyncratic vision. “Rick Poynor has written that I draw on an “inner rage’ in my performance, he says. “I’m not sure about that but I know that when it works it feels very good? My goal has always been to move people - to make a human connection Ð and to make it look great.’ Even so, while Earls is now something of a star Ð at least in the graphics world Ð and has now played over 40 venues worldwide, he is wary of projecting himself just the latest of graphics cool but vacuous usual suspects. “The global graphic design movement is the equivalent of being interested in Hip Hop but listening to P-Diddy. It is all about just the “vibe.” Fine, great, next. Hit me with the dark meat. Don’t simply tap in to the zeitgeist and reflect! Accept some responsibility for your work! Popularity is simply not the litmus test for good work.’
Accepting responsibility for his work, as Earls sees it, involves constantly rethinking his approach and re-analysing his work so that his performances reach and move more people. He describes Catfish, for example, as a “misinterpretation of the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk?the total work of art’. In essence, according to Earls definition, this means a film with an autobiographical narrative which incorporates everything that he has done over the past eight years from letterform and poster design through animation, stage set and digital manipulation of film to acting and
playing music. “Catfish is a “personal chronicle, a journey through pure semantics and rhetoric back to storytelling,’ he claims. “It was not written so much as ?grown.? Historically, a performer or writer would sit down and write a play or novel, then it would be produced. Over the course of 3 years, I would perform once or twice a month, altering or adding to the material between performances. Catfish really reflects this process.’
But while it’s hard to deny the rigour of Earls’s working methods the problem I still have with Catfish is that, even after the third viewing, I still don’t get what it is about. So, I wonder, does this matter to Earls? Unusually for a “graphic author’, at least in my experience, he is quick to acknowledge the dangers of disappearing up his own self-referential ass. “It was only when I finally began to perform that I realized the true power of traditional narrative,’ he explains. “In my initial performances I found that people enjoyed the animations and colors and sound bites. But at a certain point, they kind of reached saturation and zoned out. It was only when cohesive storytelling crept back in to the performance, that people became truly engaged.’ He is even taking steps in his latest film to render his work more accessible: “It’s quite similar to Catfish on a lot of levels with one exception’, he says. “ It has a compelling meta-narrative that rides on top of everything else. Hopefully this simple act of story telling will help the viewer feel connected to the piece.’
America’s hottest graphic designer, the head of the nation’s grooviest graphics school, and you might think potentially its biggest digital multimedia crossover act to boot. Even this sceptical correspondent has to acknowledge the visual virtuosity, originality, energy, intellectual curiosity and the sheer tenacity of a designer who ten years ago appeared to be all washed up. Even so, I wonder, isn’t there something just a bit perverse in entrusting the education of the cream of American graphic design to a man who has never managed to hold down a job in the commercial mainstream?
The irony has clearly not escaped Earls. “It’s not my strength but I have plenty of respect for the designers who are out there solving commercial problems,’ he says, pointing out incidentally that there are already three or four students in this year’s Cranbrook graduate group who are pursuing a commercial route. Besides he insists, the notion that a whole generation of graphic designers will decide to shape themselves into performance artists in his mould is silly. “It’s a misconception to think that I want people to be like me,’ he tells me. “If I turned out a collection of Elliott clones it really would be a failure.’ What Earls’s experience has taught him however (and what Professor Gombrick tells him in Catfish) is that the work that we do often chooses us as much as we choose it. “I have always tried to follow my instincts,’ he tells me. “And I would always encourage my students to do the same.’
ENDS
(Reprinted with the permission of David Redhead. ©2003. David Redhead, All Rights reserved.)
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