My first instinctive reply is: I don’t know.
a cura di Giorgia Antonini and Naomi Sabato
I can read the question in two ways: as a request to provide a personal account or an evaluation of what counterculture has meant from a historical point of view. I will briefly attempt to do both things. For me, as for many people of my generation, the first encounter with countercultural events took place through music. Listening and, in some cases, spending time closely with people making “low culture” music, especially the early 1980s Postpunk scene, amounted to placing myself – even as a mere consumer – in a proudly marginal position from which to watch the world, with all the intellectual arrogance and naivety typical of adolescence. To me, counterculture as a historical phenomenon was born out of a desire to stand up against a dominant culture. Even more so to start with, it stood out for its willingness to find or establish ways of producing and spreading a culture that were utterly different from those employed by people who are comfortably found at the heart of the media or institutions which traditionally generate culture or information. As a matter of fact, right from the start, there has never been counterculture without dialogue with the cultural industry, and not only for the constant danger of absorbing the most experimental experiences into the mainstream.
The first instinctive reply is: I don’t know. Nowadays according to many, the idea of an authentically “other” culture has disappeared, not because there no longer are areas of expression available, but precisely for the opposite reason (at least if we talk about the wealthy part of the world). To package and distribute a cultural product of professional standards has become relatively easy for any outsider, while the very industry of culture has often taken on fragmented, flexible and light patterns. According to this view, to place oneself at the margins of dominant culture is much more difficult as it harder to understand where its centre is. There has been a lot of truth in this (or at least there once was), right from the introduction of digital technologies and media. However, never as at present – when the very digital technology has shown its less open and democratic sides – is there an urgent need of counter – narratives, perhaps less referring to jargon but more to contents. In my view, it is not the need to spread contents that would be rejected in contexts where the “dominant” narrative is developed that has died. It seems to me that the real problem now consists in having these con-tents reach outside the sphere of our “friends”, those who already think like us.
There is no shortage of very interesting archives and collections. I’ll name two of those I have had the chance to see personally, but there are many others:
– The Prandi Fund, gifted by Alberto Prandi to the Marciana Library of Venice: 500 among volumes, pamphlets, brochures and leaflets published between 1964 and 1975 by people close to movements and parties on the Italian extra – parliamentary and revolutionary Left.
– The Primo Moroni Archive, located at Milan’s Calusca bookshop, a place where you can literally immerse yourself in countercultural production.
– The wide internet archive, I think it’s full of evidence and materials shared by users also in relation to this field.
I imagine the years are those of youth protest, of the emergence of underground culture and even of a sort of counter design in Italy (radical design and architecture): the 1960s and 70s in short. During that time, the jargons were quite different depending on the kind of phenomenon we are discussing: the subcultures which, whilst enthusiastically joining the consumer culture, played a role also in drastically transforming it, had a way of expressing themselves which was later defined in various ways, but which we can reasonably consider part of the pop phenomenon. Certainly in this case the jargons, more than being something corrosive and confrontational, aimed to meet a strong need for identity. Young people (a demographic category that emerged with force at that very time) adopted the consumer culture altering it, seeking within it room for expression. On the contrary, forms of counterculture showing greater awareness, political and ideological concerns, explicitly asserted their refusal of consumerism and challenged the economic structure of Western society, adopting jargons what intentionally stood out from professional graphic design, from all that was glossy but also excessively structured (e.g. the “Swiss” modernism and the International Typographic Style). From here, a reversal to rustic manual labour, illustration, to the dirty sign, stylistic eclecticism, but also the deliberate quest for unintelligibility or at least the refusal of direct and deceivably transparent communication (behind which, in their eyes, the propaganda of power was hidden), to use images and typesets requiring a critical decoding effort by the reader. There is no marked division between these ways, but it is a distinction we should bear in mind.
It is hard to say what one should pick out in this very vast and varied world. As regards design, I find extremely contemporary all that was achieved in the 1970s by a designer like Ugo La Pietra (who always preferred to call himself an arts worker). In graphic design two figures like Gianni Sassi and Magdalo Mussio stand out. As for the rest, I’d urge people not to stop at the 1960s and 70s, and not only at traditionally more political forms but also, for instance, at movements of sexual and gender liberation (whose jargons, often very innovative, usually do not get into the history of design). I’d look not only at the Paris May riots or the hippie culture, but also at the fanzine world connected with Punk, right through to electronic music and the rave party culture. There were also experiments of a greater artistic and literary nature, independent publishing. The history of graphic design can only but benefit from the inclusion in its narrative of a series of phenomena which have nothing to do with the traditional view of the profession. Any suggestion is welcome. So as not to avoid the question all together, I’d say that if you wished to understand the dynamic that evolved at one point between mainstream and underground, modernism and opposition graphic design, it would be very useful to look at two records:
1. The issue of Almanacco Bompiani dedicated to ”Alternative graphic design”, published in 1973, with contributors such as Umberto Eco, Ugo Volli, Franco Quadri and Daniela Palazzoli among others.
2 The all – Dutch debate between Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn, in 1972 (available nowadays in English in The Debate. The legendary contest of two giants of Graphic Design, The Monacelli Press, 2015).
I’ll reply with a quote by Umberto Eco (found in another Bompiani literary almanac of 1971 dedicated to youth cultures): “Many young people who had they been around thirty years ago would have written poetry, now create abstract comics, and therefore draw using few words. On the contrary, those who thirty years ago would have painted, now write posters”. The invitation, which was so powerful in those years, to regard graphic design as a language open to everyone to express their point of view and not just a profession intended to convey one’s clients’ messages. This is perhaps what I would salvage. There is a strong intellectual component in being a designer. Sometimes design can be used to express one’s views and suggest an alternative vision of the world. And you can do this as a designer, therefore handling knowledgeably production and communication media. Deciding not to have a voice, as well as not being politically advisable, wouldn’t be much fun I believe.
Perhaps I partly answered earlier. But in general I don’t like giving advice to young people. In my own way, I try to make available tools of critical evaluation, which everyone uses as they see fit. I would say that in line with countercultural and underground groups, alongside self – production and self -management, we could add forms of self – advising.
I feel like saying the fashion system. There is nothing scientific in about I am about to say (and I seek the forgiveness of the many fashion expert friends I have), but I have the feeling that nowadays fashion is one of the most productive experimental areas where alternative cultures are ground and reground, and at the same time of the one of the biggest culprits of the removal of every line of distinction between culture and counterculture. The quest for otherness and independence is useful to the logic of a system like that of fashion which has – for a long time now – ransacked (or welcomed, included, fed? depending on the point of view) anything that comes from the streets.
When as a boy I used to go to the market at Resina (near Naples) to buy second – hand coats and shoes, I was naively
under the illusion that I was doing something outside the consumption system (and it certainly wasn’t so even then). Nowadays the more radical fashion tribes (who reclaim anything that may be reclaimed from the past) don’t even ask themselves this: they go around dressed in such a way that they could still frighten some old lady perhaps, but their look is the result of a manic study, almost philological, of anything that the fashion brands produce and have produced: from the more popular ones to the niche ones. I don’t think there is something bad in this. Indeed, it is very interesting. Could the celebrated counter – narratives perhaps also come from here – from fashion and all that rotates around it? I wouldn’t rule it out but wouldn’t be so sure either.