Signs vs Artists

An intriguing proposition implied at Homo Ludens: the legacy of the avant-garde is not to be found in an ever-more tedious conceptualism ('an endless rehash of old questions and debates', meaning presumably the readymade, is-it-art, the suffering artist, ad nauseam) but in the most basic means of orientation, such as railway maps. Harry Beck as a true Suprematist, and the maps based on his design as Modernism's most conspicuous presence, stressing abstraction and connection over 'the facts on the ground', in turn changing the facts themselves (the revelation that a geographically inaccurate diagram was more useful for navigation than the 'real' map) . Another possible version of this could be via the schematic road signs of the 1960s: those Playmobil people that can be seen still striding round and instructing one not to get run over on every intersection in the country, accompanied by the delightful tubular Transport typeface.



These, in turn, seem to show more than a hint of the example of Isotype, the system of pictorial information developed by Mitteleuropean Marxists Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz. Intriguingly, Isotype could be used not merely as a means of description and orientation, but also as a schematic means of political protest. Neurath apparently selected Arntz as the appropriate designer for a universal modern language on the basis the image above, 'Mitropa', where the class war was represented in a form a child could understand, without being patronising (this was Kino Fist's little tribute a couple of months ago). Isotype ended up as 4000 pictograms, cut onto linoleum by Arntz. 600 of these can be found at this fantastic website, alongside activist linocuts, images from books of statistics, etc. This all suggests a possible answer to the quandary here - of what use a left-aesthetic fixated on the drift, the labyrinth and a gradual disappearance up one's backside might be. Instead, this work proposed a truly revolutionary sharpness and clarity, a Brechtian 'usefulness'.