Moving The Markers

There are many paths to follow as a graphic designer. You can concentrate on producing annual reports for corporations, specialize in designing signage systems, create intricate maps and graphs at a newspaper, or become an art director at a life-style magazine. You can work in an advertising agency and put your talents to work seducing the masses into buying products they don't need, or you can design poetry books for small independent publishers. You can create CD covers for major or minor record labels, or be part of a team of designers redesigning the identity of a multi-national corporation. You can put together web sites, do film titles, design clothing tags and logos and letterheads and book covers, or design labels to help people better understand the contents of a bottle of cough syrup. Graphic design can be applied in myriad ways, and there are as many different types of graphic designers as there are jobs. But they all have one thing in common: graphic designers need clients. Graphic design happens by commission. It waits for opportunity. It is a reaction. Art, on the other hand is pure action. It needs only the active mind of the artist to spring to life. It creates opportunity. This is what sets art and graphic design apart. For the most part, at least.

Shawn Wolfe is a graphic designer in the traditional sense of the word. Or so it would seem at first glance. He has various clients who give him commissions. But there's another dimension to Wolfe. Tired, perhaps, of waiting for opportunity to come knocking, Wolfe took action. He started a company called "Beatkit" which, parallel to his "professional" practice, generates graphic design, but without the commissions of clients. Beatkit produces and distributes its own posters, ads, magazines, T-shirts, stickers, etc. Beatkit even has a logo, a serious looking logo.

What Beatkit manufactures looks suspiciously like graphic design. It feels and smells like graphic design. Until you take a closer look. Then you notice that the posters have a lot to say, but ultimately tell us what appears to be nothing, that the ads advertise products that don't exist, and that the Beatkit logo states "From 1984, Until 2000." Imagine that, a company that knows, at its inception, when to call it quits.

What's Wolfe's racket?

Graphic designers are visual spin doctors. They take the raw information handed to them by their clients, give it a twirl, and then present it to the public. They gloss and buff and generally make the information (and by extension the clients) look much better than it really is. As such they help create a reality that is mediated to various degrees. The public accepts it as the truth because it looks professional.

Wolfe's Beatkit products look professional, too. They seduce us. They seem to have real purpose. This is how he draws us in. But then we find out he delivers nothing. At least nothing we expect. Instead, his work exposes the levels of conceit inherent in most printed matter. He reminds us that the world around us is man-made, and that we would do well to question it on occasion. Wolfe's work is like a distorting mirror held up to the face of this manufactured world. He deftly and selectively appropriates the familiar language and imagery of style and commerce with the self-assurance of a weathered graphic designer - his years of working on the "inside" as a design hack paying dividend. And while some may argue that Wolfe in his Beatkit persona is really an artist, not a graphic designer (after all, Beatkit has no clients), it is his ability to draw on graphic styles so cunningly that sets him apart from most artists who in their work deal with the issues of commercialism and mass communication.

Wolfe has seized an opportunity. He has created a hybrid form allowing design to be an action. By sidestepping the traditional ways of operating as a designer, and by using the means of graphic design to comment on itself, new opportunities are created for design. The question is, without a client footing the bill and distributing the goods, is there an opportunity for this work to evolve into something permanent, something that can continue to be explored? Beatkit's promise to end its run in Y2K may indicate that Wolfe himself realizes the limitations of his ways. I predict Beatkit will return in some configuration or another. Once you free yourself from the traditional restraints of graphic design, as Wolfe did, it's difficult to give that up.

Rudy VanderLans, Berkeley, 1999


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