Alan's style is just too much for me. It's like he took my favorite elements of design and abused them. His sense of line is just too much. He takes something so simple and instead of making something complex he just repeats himself over and over in a million ways in ONE design. Also, he has taken Rousseau's sense of color and watered it down with accidental color mixings. And, no, I do not mean color combinations. I literally mean it's like he took a blue marker, colored over fresh ink of another color, or pencil, and continued to color as if nothing was wrong. For his lack of appealing to the eye, he certainly is a creative fellow. Conce
ptually, I love some of his work. He is truly a creative designer and I definitely respect his creative vision.
Surprised! Tiger In A Tropical Storm by Henri Rousseau
[He is one of my favorite artisits, by the way. See how he blends his colors in a way that looks more based on a prism than anything else. Well, Alan just musses that whole blended prism up.]
What's funny is how everything I always envisioned disliking about the 60's and 70's was always something like and Alan Aldridge nightmare. IT might sound funny that I could have pinpointed everything I thought about a place and a time through the work of a designer, but it's true. No matter how forward and creative a design, it still reflects current culture. The Cold War Modern exhibit was a perfect demonstration of that. By comparing the USA and Russia, you could really see similarity in the differences. The work spoke of the times. Both countries were pushing new technological boundaries and trying to create a desireable new world from the ashes of depression and war.
Both societies produced work that was the propaganda of hope. American work blossomed under the idea of expansion and free market, but all of it was based in a stretch for something greater and better than anything before. It was the first real step out of the unique singularities produced by antiquity into cold, hard, and shiny mass-produced modernity. Russian work showed a reformed old world. While there was a focus on objects, the work clearly reflected the new government... a new life for people of the old world. Even when Lenin recognized the Russian people's desire for products of the new world, the design still focused more on the life surrounding the objects and not the objects themselves. Between the two, you see a society moving forward through capitalism, and a society reaching for a future better than its past. At least that's what I saw...
Anyway, I guess what I really took the most was that whatever work I create as a designer will say far more about the world I live in-- the world I want to live in, than it will ever say about me alone. All design is a social commentary.
