Indepth Arts News:
"Tiborocity: Design and UnDesign by Tibor Kalman, 1979-1999"
1999-07-16 until 1999-10-26
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, CA,
USA United States of America
This exhibition is the first comprehensive museum presentation of the work of
graphic designer and provocateur Tibor Kalman (1949-1999). Tiborocity: Design and
Undesign by Tibor Kalman, 1979 - 1999 is organized by Tibor Kalman, in
collaboration with Aaron Betsky, SFMOMA curator of architecture, design and
digital projects. The exhibition will consist of approximately 200 works drawn from
Kalmans personal collection and the archives of M&Co, Kalmans design firm in
New York.
Tiborocity will feature Kalmans ideas and projects in a setting designed by Kalman
to evoke a mythical village located in a non-industrial country. The village is divided
into nine sites that serve as metaphors for various themes that have influenced
Kalmans oeuvre. These include a classroom, a humor house, a vernacular store, a
coffee shop, an international post office, a jail cell, a music and video shop, a
museum of practical ideas and -- with a vision toward the future -- a forest beyond
the village. Each theme will be presented visually, experientially and in three
dimensions. The look of the village and the exhibition will be an unlikely mixture of
Modernism and the commonplace, the past and the future. Kalman and M&Cos
projects relating to each theme will be displayed within the settings. Film and video
projects will be displayed on video monitors, and listening stations will be available
for visitors to hear excerpts from M&Co-designed CDs and albums.
Over the past twenty years Tibor Kalman and the work of M&Co have rejected the
slick, superficial application of design that was so widespread in the 1980s for a sort
of undesign that embraced the vernacular. In his goal to use design as a language
that communicates something meaningful, Kalmans work has explored and
encompassed not just the print medium, but also film, video and product design.
This presentation acknowledges the iconoclastic genius of a designer whose
practice has had an enormous impact upon our culture.
Born in Budapest and a resident of the United States since 1956, Kalman was
raised in Poughkeepsie, New York and educated at New York University. In the
1970s, he worked at a small bookstore that eventually became Barnes & Noble. He
soon supervised their in-house design department, a position he held for eleven
years. In 1979 Kalman established the multidisciplinary design firm M&Co, which
appealed to a generation of clients who were receptive to popular culture. His clients
ranged from corporations such as The Limited and Chiat/Day advertising to rock
bands, including the Talking Heads, to governmental organizations such as the New
York State Urban Development Corp. and the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project.
M&Cos work was characterized by an affinity for vernacular advertising and signage,
and an affection for humor, found image and brash typography.
In 1990 Kalman became the founding editor-in-chief of Colors, a Benetton-sponsored
magazine. Published as a magazine about the rest of the world, more than
500,000 copies of the magazine were distributed globally. Colors explored the ways
in which people are both similar and at the same time very different. Controversial
images, including a white Spike Lee, a black Queen Elizabeth and an Asian Pope
John Paul II, served to raise readers own consciousness of racism. Colors design
mantra was to present vast amounts of information as clearly and concisely as
possible; the magazine was image-driven so it appealed to the widest possible
audience. In fact, Kalmans last issue of Colors was designed without any text, only
images. At the time of his departure from Colors in 1995, Kalman had, in the words
of one critic, evolved a design language that functioned on a global level, by
allowing a culturally diverse readership to contemplate both the particular and the
universal concept. Kalman returned to New York in 1995 and re-established M&Co
in 1997 and has since engaged in a range of design work, including book projects
and nontraditional art exhibition designs for NYNY: City of Ambition (1996) at the
Whitney Museum of American Art and Keith Haring (1997) both at the Whitney and
SFMOMA.
Tiborocity: Design and Undesign by Tibor Kalman, 1979-1999 is accompanied by
the 1998 Princeton Architectural Press publication Tibor Kalman: Perverse
Optimist, a 420-page overview of Kalmans work.
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