Text and Design for Humane Change - Chicago Design Museum: Great Ideas of Humanity

This is an old review that I discovered I had never posted anywhere because I did not like the image selections and edits by the platform that was going to post this, and I retracted the article. This was supposed to be published in 2018. It's a shame, it was a great show.

click on images to enlarge them

The advertising industry helped to completely overhaul American values in the 1950s. Following the lead of Dr. Ernest Dicker, founder of the Institute for Motivational Research, ad guys worked hard to dismantle the traditional American values of restraint and thrift. 

As David Halberstam pointed out in his amazing book The Fifties, Dicker advised that Americans would buy luxury goods if they felt they truly deserved to indulge themselves after sacrifice and hard work, and/or if the ad guys could tap into the irrational and subconscious sexual needs mentioned in Freudian psychology. 

This strategy of cajoling and seducing Americans into buying things provided the Scylla and Charybdis that crushed frugality, allowing rabid self-absorption and consumerism to thrive to this day. 

Chad Kouri design for a Cornel West quote (close-up)

At the same time that this was happening, however, the Container Corporation of America was pursuing its own advertising revolution. Walter Paepcke, CEO of the CCA, and his wife Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke, a designer, had begun experimenting in the 1930s with ads using the talents of contemporary artists. 

These ads avoided direct references to their product (cardboard boxes) and highlighted meaningful, pro-social and often patriotic ideas instead. Mention of the company was peripherally made in the ad, but the CCA appeared mainly as a sponsor of the concept portrayed. 

Bart Crosby design of a quote by Augustine

This evolved in 1950 into one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever: The Great Ideas of Western Man. Mortimer Adler, of the Great Books of Western Civilization series, originally supplied the ideas and Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus-trained designer, commissioned artists and created designs himself to visually supplement the quotes. The name of the Container Corporation of America was discreetly presented with each image and message. For 25 years these ads ran in America's foremost magazines approximately once a month, generating museum shows and requests from schools for portfolios. The CCA became one of the most famous companies in the country. 

Max Temkin design of Brecht quote

Bauhaus, of course, was a design movement that dovetailed nicely with the principles of western liberalism. It glorified technology ignoring the Marxist concern for issues of alienation and exploitation. Rummaging through some of the CCA ads, the overarching principles of liberalism jump out at one – individualism, economic freedom, democracy, the belief in progress etc. Often the artists incorporated images of the great "men" (e.g. Hamilton, Franklin, Lincoln, Einstein), from whom the quotes were taken, into the design. The ads were clearly meant to instill a sense of pride and universalism in regard to the American system by collecting as many famous quotes from as many famous white men as possible and making them look visually attractive. 

Pouya Ahmadi's design for Rumi

The implication was that the greatest ideas of western "man" all seemed to point to the USA as the greatest and most sparkling achievement in human history, just as the USA started to reveal the extent of its institutionalized racism while barreling into a meaningless and criminal war against Buddhist farmers in Asia (which it would lose badly).  

The lesson learned was that the best ad is often an ad that does not look like an ad because it purports to serve a public good. This has been picked up and carried through various socially committed ad campaigns since. It has been a lucrative method of self-promotion. 

The Chicago Design Museum critically revisits the CCA campaign by inviting contemporary Chicago artists and designers to illustrate a new batch of quotes. We, thus, get an idea of what a great ideas collaboration of text and visual art can look like when artists are freed from the relationship with a corporate sponsor predisposed to spread ideological hegemony far and wide. 

Gail Anderson design for Marian Wright Edelman

So we see more racial, ethnic and gender diversity here in the quotes and designs in this show. Indeed, the quotes chosen often reference the theme of struggle against oppression, the need for humane and pacifistic methods in this struggle, as well as a desire for real and sincere justice and equality - instead of touting the values of one gender, one race and one economic class.

  

When an old white guy is used, he turns out to be a cool old white guy, like Augustine, who wrote "Love all men (and women), even your enemies, love them not because they are your brothers (and sisters) but so that they may become your brothers (and sisters). Thus you will forever burn with fraternal love, both for him (or her) who is already your brother (or sister) and for your enemy that he may by loving become your brother (or sister)." (Yes, sorry, I felt compelled to throw the "women" "her" and "sister/s" in there.) 

The design by Bart Crosby uses a strong, hot, exciting and engaging red to reflect the passion of unconditional, merciful and transforming love, with contrasting white text with variations of the words "love", "enemy" and "brother" in bold letters uniting these concepts.  

I especially liked several of the quotes and designs. For instance, Chad Kouri's brightly patterned rippling and expanding design for Cornel West's "We have to be militants for kindness subversives for sweetness radicals for tenderness." 

Alan Chan design for Mencius

Cushing's design reveals a sardonic and ironic Sojourner Truth quote turned upside down: "If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women all together ought to be able to turn it back right side up again."  Max Temkin presents a quote from Bertold Brecht in what seem to be white magnetic letters: "On my wall hangs a Japanese carving, the mask of an evil demon decorated with gold lacquer. Sympathetically I observe the swollen veins of the forehead, indicating what a strain it is to be evil."  

Pouya Ahmadi presents Rumi's quote: "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." by scattering the letters for "bewilderment" so that, at first, we get a disorienting sense of what an antipode to cleverness might be as the word "bewilderment" finally, slowly reveals itself. 

Alan Chan presents Mencius' famous quote "To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads, such is the behavior of the multitude." with a complex geometrical pattern as if one can finally see the complexity of one's social organization, its pressures for conformity, as a strange and beautiful but bizarre external structure. 

Finally, the Chicago Design Museum worked with Chicago Public School kids and encouraged them to come up with their own great quotes. My favorite from this bunch was by 7th grader Alondra D. T. with a brilliant design by Hal Kugeler. Kugeler takes Alondra's quote "I will protect and defend you no matter what." and encases the word "you" within a pillar or fortress-like "I" in the foreground of a storm, representing the strength of selfless love and concern expressed by this young Chicago woman.