View From the Top > Conversation
Milton Glaser talks with Beth Elaine Wilson

Milton Glaser was born in New York City in 1929. He studied at the Cooper Union Art School in New York and won a Fulbright scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he studied with Giorgio Morandi. In 1955 he co-founded Push Pin Studios with Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel.

As an illustrator and designer, Glaser helped alter the course of American graphic design by departing from the spare language of European modernism. The Push Pin style celebrated the eclectic and eccentric design of what was then considered the passé past while it introduced a distinctly contemporary design vocabulary, with a wide range of work that included record sleeves, books, posters, corporate logotypes, font design, and magazine formats. The innovations that emerged from the firm so deeply affected contemporary design practice that the impact of his decision to leave Push Pin in 1974 has been compared to the break-up of the Beatles.

Perhaps most famous for his "I Love NY" logo, which replaced the word "love" with a graphic heart, Glaser has had a hand in so many things—from posters advertising the "Mostly Mozart" concert series to the redesign of Grand Union supermarkets and founding New York magazine—that it would be difficult to imagine anyone in America spending an average day without encountering (mostly unwittingly) something or other originally dreamt up in his studio.

Setting off on his own he founded Milton Glaser Inc., where he continues to work on numerous multi-disciplinary design projects, with clients such as Starbucks. In addition, he has taught a design class at the School of Visual Arts in New York for over 35 years.

Glaser's work will be on display at the Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery at Ulster County Community College from October 11-November 8. He will be giving a slide presentation there at 7PM on October 11 with an opening reception immediately following.

I met with Milton Glaser at his Woodstock home in August.

-Beth E. Wilson

Beth E. Wilson: What do you have planned for the upcoming show at UCCC?

Milton Glaser: It's a show of work about the theme of music. I've done so many posters and albums and music-related things, and given that this is such a passionately musical area, we thought it would make a nice subject. There will be a whole bunch of things, record albums and posters, and so on. I don't have a count yet, but I imagine there will be something like 75 posters. It will be largely posters because they're more dramatic and easier to show. There will also be some ephemera, some drawings, some preliminary sketches and album covers, and even some CDs.

BEW: It's been a big change for designers, moving from big LP covers to little CD boxes.

MG: Those used to be a gigantic playpen for designers, and now we've been reduced to this little midget square. The truth of the matter is that you can do something nice on a smaller scale as well, however.

BEW: What kind of music do you like?

MG: As I am with everything in my life, I'm totally eclectic.

BEW: I should have expected that.

MG: I have no favorite anything. There's blues and then rock and classic jazz and classical music of all kinds-chamber music, early Baroque….

BEW: It's one of the things that makes your design career hard to pin down, it's been so-omnivorous.

MG: It's all over the place, that's true.

BEW: Looking back on your career, what contributions do you feel you've made to the field?

MG: It's hard for anyone to evaluate their own contribution. But I would say I was a premature postmodernist. When I grew up, it was very much in the heyday of modernism, with the allegiance to the idea of purity, effectiveness, clarity, simplicity; all this was very much in the air. Already in high school I was deeply convinced that modernism was the way to see the world. What changed me was when I got more interested in art history, and then when I went in the early '50s to live in Italy, seeing the passage of styles of the Baroque and the Romanesque and the Roman and the Gothic-you couldn't say that the modern was in any way a superior way to express an idea. It was just a different way of saying things. When you look at a Baroque facade, you're totally overwhelmed.
So as I've said so often, I have the idea that there isn't any truth in style. Style itself is just an expressive tool that you use in a particular moment, but it doesn't embrace any particular truth. It's very temporal, bound to the moment that we live in and the way we see things. You have to recognize it as a fugitive idea, and if it's useful to you, fine, if not you move on to something else. I always liked the idea that you could always make reference to anything in human history as a resource. If I did something that references art nouveau, I did it because it was appropriate to this particular work. It didn't seem to me that you had to only work within the tradition, the zeitgeist that surrounded to you. In design, you have to be sensitive to the vernacular range of what's being spoken around you, but then there are other ways of addressing visual problems.

BEW: Even with all this postmodernist sense of the interchangeability of styles, there's still a certain deep classicism to your work-your emphasis on draftsmanship, a continuity of meaning within the piece….

MG: I'm a great believer in the continuity of history, the idea that everything is linked to everything else. So I never see anything as unrelated to something that's preceded it. I like that continuity; it's what gives resonance and depth to all our work. It's also what provides the basis for comparing things.

BEW: But there's the type of postmodernism that attempts to deconstruct those connections in such a way as to collapse everything into everything else, creating a sort of relativist limbo, and out of that worldview I've seen design done for the sake of design, without any attention to the deep structure of meaning of the work.

MG: That's not the kind I'm talking about. There are many roads into postmodernism. I think that postmodernism became an excuse for academics to put themselves in a position superior to the works that they were looking at, [a position] which I think has run out of gas now. But the postmodern idea of going beyond modernism as an ideological construct is what interests me. The idea of obliterating the past in the sense you were talking about, it would make more sense if modernism in America had embraced the political ideology of modernism, but it didn't, it only embraced the surface qualities, so it became thin. It also ran into communication problems because you can't express everything in the same voice. The problem of graphic design using the modernist vocabulary was that it wasn't broad enough to deal with the subtleties of what needed to be said.

BEW: In Europe, there seemed to be a real utopian program attached to the idea of modernism, which didn't make it over here.

MG: When it got here, it became much more pragmatic, and became a corporate tool. It lost interest for me, although I still believe that for certain kinds of ideas it can be useful. It's just one way of doing things.

BEW: As an example, I found it interesting to see you resurrect the Futurist manifesto in your work for Jay Chiat's enterprise a few years ago, which is certainly a classic modernist source.

MG: Oh yeah anytime, I'll take anything from history. I'll even steal from modernism. I always liken these things to cooking. You can have an ideological position on cooking-this is what food is, this is how you prepare it, and so on-every culture has this. But in our time, we suddenly realized that we can have Chinese food on Tuesday, Mediterranean food on Wednesday, German spaetzle on Thursday…we now feel that the history of the world is our patrimony. Of course you can't simply copy what's been done before. I see it now as becoming, like every idea, weakened by the condition where there is no centrality of belief about anything that's being done, and that's problematic.

BEW: If you think about these earlier examples, there existed a commonality of intention or belief in the creation of individual cultures. But now, treating it as a sort of pu-pu platter to choose from recontextualizes these things in a troubling way.

MG: Well it can. I think you also have to do it with a certain sense of reverence, not parody. I don't like parodies, using things as a device to poke fun and say "look how clever I am and how stupid they were." That's not my view of the use of history. First of all, usually, particularly with people in design as opposed to painting, and there is a difference, those references are understood by people, they've seen other things. Whereas for many people, many communities, many audiences, modernism is still an incomprehensible form. Nowadays, it's become quite popular to use vernacular forms, like graffiti and so on, basically the debased forms of our time. It's much harder to do that with the Renaissance, partially because most of the people in the field can't draw, and that's a big limitation.

BEW: Thinking about the uses of style, it strikes me that in the context of globalization and the attendant economic pressures of corporations, design is being pressed into service to homogenize things-think of the ubiquity of McDonald's, for example, or the fact that the Coca-Cola logo is the single most recognizable corporate emblem around the world.

MG: The downside of globalization is that it eliminates the local characteristics of everything. Of design, food, clothes, behavior, and so on. That's the intrinsic nature of globalization, you eliminate the idiosyncratic, the distinctive, the peculiar, all of which goes. Somebody has described this as "postcultural", and to somebody like me, that's absolutely dreadful. And it's so powerful because it's linked to everybody's economic life.

BEW: You signed a manifesto a few years ago, "First Things First," along with a group of other designers, which discussed the perils of making design completely dependent upon economics, of having to just serve the interests of corporations.

MG: It was a totally Marxian idea, not a new idea, but a totally relevant one. The fact of the matter is that commerce is basically the heart of design. It's very hard to be in and out of it at the same time. So you have to ultimately recognize that what you're doing is communicating to people about what to buy, which is not totally bad, given that the engine of commerce has produced such extraordinary changes in people's situations. It's one of the reasons why I am relatively cautious about what I do. I do a lot of work for cultural institutions because although they may not be entirely harmless, they're more benign than other institutions. It's not a question of staying "above the fray," that's a position that doesn't really exist. Either you're a practitioner-people come to you with problems to solve, and you help them-or else you become a theorist, or an academic, or a painter, or something. But you get out of the system. It's hard to be in it, and be aloof from it. The best you can do is to be selective about it.

BEW: You've written about the ethics of those decisions, with your checklist "The Road to Hell."

MG: That is all about understanding what you are participating in, doing it knowingly, saying "yes I do this." I don't know why it is better to admit to what you do than not to, but it is. The only possibility we have for any change for anything is being aware of what is. At a class two weeks ago that I was teaching, I gave them the Road to Hell questionnaire. The questions start from the relatively benign (making a package appear larger) to the last step, participating in selling something that would cause the user's death. It's a slippery slope, from one to the next, and I realized at the end a good percentage of the class, five or six out of twenty-nine students, said that they would see it all the way to the last step. They saw it as part of being a practitioner, and excused it by saying that if they didn't do it, someone else would come along and take the job, so why not? But after Nuremberg, that's not such a good idea.

So I asked them, would you do this for your family? For the people next door? And they all said "No, no way." So it struck me that the issue, as usual, is that these people cannot imagine that their audience is real. What they have is a fuzzy generality about the people "out there." The most profound thing I ever read in my life was something by Iris Murdoch. She said, "Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than the self is real." The problem with these kids is that they don't understand that these people are real. And much of the mischief of the world comes from the inability to accept the reality of others, and to see only reflections of ourselves.

BEW: This is complicated by the nomenclature of marketing, demographics, and so on, the way that mass audiences are divided up by commerce…

MG: You're talking about audiences, undifferentiated masses-they've become a statistic. There are no grandmothers or cousins or wives, they're just markets. They're just consumers, not real people.

BEW: Hasn't the design community contributed to this development?

MG: By and large, design that is linked to advertising has the most pernicious role in this case, the most obviously dangerous role. Design is very much linked to this question, because what you're doing with design is constantly communicating values and ideas, desires, to an audience. You're shaping an audience's desire, their sense of meaning, what they want, and what they aspire to. So you have to ask yourself, "What the hell am I doing here?" and if these people are real, not just markets, you have to seriously consider this. In the article ["The Road to Hell"] I suggest that maybe the first step should be to resolve to "do no harm."

BEW: And you know how well that one has worked for doctors!

MG: Yes, the doctors haven't done such a good job with that one.

BEW: So through these sorts of proclamations, are you casting yourself now as the elder statesman of the design community?

MG: It's not a role I cast myself in-after a while if you live long enough you get cast in many roles, including wise guy-I just always have tried not to do anything that I was ashamed of. On one level that's been about not doing bad work, in graphic or professional terms. But in a more significant way, not to do things that I thought would be harmful to somebody. I've tried to distinguish between things that are quite obviously harmful, as opposed to those that might have more indirect impacts. You can never entirely know, but you need to continue working, using your judgment to avoid the obvious pitfalls.

BEW: So immobility is not quite an option.

MG: Not for me.

BEW: It's interesting that you've come to make ethics such a central issue in design. Most people don't even worry about it, it seems.

MG: It's too hard to think about. It's too embarrassing, too difficult. It's never thought to be appropriate to think about ethics in design.

BEW: But it seems very important, given the way that design functions to literally shape people's lives. Although it seems that it happens today in a very different way from Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus utopianism, when he thought that creating a sans serif typeface-with no capital letters-would radically change the world somehow.

MG: There are still those, a coterie of designers on the left, who concern themselves overtly with issues of social reform, but it's very hard now, because of the dominance of the economic model in America, and basically because of the fact that any ideas of Socialist or left wing or Communist activity have been parochialized or demonized in our time. After the collapse of Soviet Russia the possibilities for the left became very remote. Not only that, people became so cowardly, liberals became so despicable. The situation's awful. I grew up in a very left wing community as a kid, and I saw a strong labor movement that accomplished a lot, leading to the civil rights movement. But now in our time we see the total collapse of such things, by and large. I do work for the Nation magazine, because I see them as some sort of voice of opposition to these things. But one of the great sadnesses of my life is the collapse of liberal ideology and passion in our time. It's a disgrace, a complete disgrace. The lack of political courage in America is appalling.

BEW: What's your view of America post-9/11, with all the saber-rattling, bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age (even though it was already in the stone age), and so on?

MG: It's a terrible time for us all, and the idea of discrediting anybody who opposes anything, as though it was unpatriotic…we have an idiot leadership. We have an unqualified, incompetent human being leading the nation, and it becomes more and more apparent every day. So it's a terrible problem. So much of what you hear now is just phoney-baloney, pseudo-patriotism, and exploiting the moment.

BEW: What seems to be lacking is the ability or desire to reflect on the situation, the hubris of being the most powerful country in the world overwhelms any real possibility of addressing the situation.

MG: There's no sense of gravitas. This is all trivial crap that we're talking about in our response. It's all knickknacks and color-coding and all the rest of this nonsensical pseudo-response. There's no dignity or seriousness about it. It's like it's a game. Talk about reality. People don't understand that this is real; anytime you kill somebody it's real. But maybe we're getting too far afield now.

BEW: In light of all this, however, you do have a direct connection with the events of 9/11, having done the design work for Windows on the World. Do you have any comments or reflections on what's going on with the World Trade Center site?

MG: What's really interesting is to see the bureaucratic response to what should be done, and seeing the six proposals [for rebuilding the site] repudiated. Because many other times in history and many other places they would have just gone on to the next level and actually be produced without anybody being able to resist it or say, "what the hell is this?" At least one is encouraged that the process became slightly transparent.

I had an idea for what they should do down there-they should put in a working farm, use that land to grow vegetables and grain. In the middle of it there should be a sort of pyramid, with tiers, that is planted and designed every year to be extraordinary, with flowers and grasses and so on, and it would grow and change with every season. It would be an idea of renewal and it would be gorgeous, and everybody would come to see it. It would be different every year, and people would look forward to the new floral design, and have a process to solicit new proposals for it each year. And then we would have this farm, growing grain, and having some animal husbandry, with cows to milk and cheeses to be made, as kind of a prototype for paradise. People would come and sit under the trees and have wonderful coffee and milk from the cows and bread baked from the grain that was grown there…it would be an alternative to urban life. A lot of kids have never seen a cow being milked, or grain being sown, and they could work as volunteers to run the farm. It would cost infinitely less than anything that's being proposed, it would be infinitely more interesting, and it would be about the idea of renewal and regeneration, not an inert monument or block of stone or a stupid piece of sculpture. It would be an exercise in regeneration each year.

BEW: What do you see as the future of design?

MG: I never do that future thing-it's just too susceptible to error. I sense a fin de siécle sensibility right now, that we're at the end of a moment of time. What is demonstrated more than anything else is the collapse of all institutions of belief. There's absolutely nothing that anybody can believe in anymore, anybody who has a brain-the government, business, religion-even the nutritional tables are out the window now; they're saying we can eat fat again. Suddenly it turns out that everything that we learned about growing up is all wrong. It's absolutely characteristic of a fin de siécle sensibility. What happens is it gets swept aside by an alternative vision, and everybody says "oh, I've got it now," and you're off on another hundred years of whatever. So I have the sense that we are on the cusp of a process where everything is breaking down. And somewhere somehow eventually people are going to say, "this time we're gonna get it right," and the whole thing will start all over again. And every notion about form, design, money, and ethics will go through the wringer once more, and we'll have the eureka moment-"Aha, here is the meaning of life!"

BEW: That's where things get really scary for me-when people think they really have "the answer." Isn't that how Hitler got started?

MG: Belief is a dangerous thing. There's nothing more dangerous. But we're at that point-where nothing means anything anymore, there's nothing left. I don't know what people do who are religious now.

BEW: The closest I get is looking at Caravaggio.

MG: [Laughs.] I know what you mean.