TYPOGRAPHY
The Familiar
The Modern
IDENTITY
Corporate Culture
Subcultures
Design Cultures
|
|
|
How quickly does a typeface get old? Zuzana Licko's Matrix, for example, was born into a vanguard subculture in 1986, and has since appeared in a Cadillac ad, a McDonald's placemat, and other unlikely places for the avant-garde to take root. Barry Deck's Template Gothic, initiated as a student experiment, has found its way onto annual reports and network television. In a high-speed playback of history, these fonts are very old indeed.
Post-modernism, a word Keedy freely employs in his own writing, proposes a problematic relationship to the "new." The term entered the popular mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s, referring to techniques of pastiche and appropriation, from the neo-classical nostalgia of Philip Johnson's AT&T tower in New York to the overtly artificial identities of Madonna and Cindy Sherman. Post-modernism identifies a position after originality, beyond the period of belief in the continual remaking of civilization. As cultural critic Hal Foster has argued, post-modernism is not just an artistic style but a condition of life in a media-saturated world, embracing everything from art and music to the network news.
© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum