Trying to Erase a Shifting Line

It doesn’t take a trip to an art museum to see the work of Milton Glaser. During his 50-year career as a graphic designer, Glaser, 72, has created some of pop culture’s most recognizable icons. The list includes his 1966 poster of Bob Dylan for Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” album and the ubiquitous “I {heart} NY” logo, created in 1975 as part of a campaign to improve the city and state’s image--and so frequently imitated that using a big red heart to stand in for the word “love” has become part of the print vernacular.

Glaser’s work includes pop music posters (Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin, Jerry Garcia); theater and opera posters (the logo for Tony Kushner’s Tony Award-winning “Angels in America” and last year’s series of posters for the opera season in Palermo, Italy); as well as book jackets, CD covers and restaurant interiors. Glaser is the designer of Grand Union Supermarkets, has served as design director for the Village Voice and was co-founder and designer of New York magazine in 1968. He has also consulted on the design of several newspapers, including the Washington Post, Rio de Janiero’s El Globo and the Los Angeles Times.

In 1954, following his education at Cooper Union School of Art in New York City and a two-year-stint in Italy as a Fulbright scholar, the Bronx native, with a group of other designers, founded Push Pin Studios, an influential school of design that challenged the limits of Modernism. Now, Glaser is challenging the definition of art as a whole with his book “Art Is Work”--also the title of an exhibition of Glaser’s posters, sketches and drawings that opens Wednesday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Glaser will be at the gallery Sept. 13 to host a reception and book signing at 6:30 p.m., followed by a 7:30 p.m. lecture.

In a recent telephone conversation from his weekend home in Woodstock, N.Y, Glaser talked about how half a century in the world of design has led him to his new definition of art.

Question: Let’s talk about the title of your book “Art Is Work.”

Answer: I’ve always felt that the direct relationship between design art and fine art becomes difficult. Why do we say that a Chinese vase is a work of art and other objects produced for a utilitarian purpose are not? Whether something being useful discredits it as a work of art is very confusing for people--particularly now where there is such an interchange between the two definitions, and where art now has become half electronic.

My idea is, if we simply call it work, we diminish the sort of hierarchy of art, and the priesthood of art, because everybody is trying to control art and make it theirs. Everyone talks about art as though one has to have some kind of sacred insight into it to collect it, or to show it, or to criticize it. So it’s much healthier to do what the Africans do, which is to say: “We don’t understand that there is such a thing as art, we just do things the best we can.” So my idea is, that work that is done at a very high level, that transforms, that enriches us, we can call that “great work.” Work that is powerful and expressive we call “good work.” And everything else we call “bad work.” You just do the best you can, and whether it’s art or not is something that history will decide.

Q: You also reject the idea of evaluating art by how much it costs.

A: I think a lot of serious artists are trying to go beyond art as a commodity to sell to others as a device to enjoy either financial or social benefits. And I think serious artists are saying, I really don’t want my painting to be hanging above a couch in some rich guy’s house in Aspen. There is a kind of revulsion to the fact that all you read about art now is what it sold for, what the market is doing, who switched galleries, the gossip. The exploitation of art for material gain is the least attractive part of the art scene. It is the scene, I guess.

Q: You mentioned that half of art is now produced electronically; certainly most of what we call design work is now done with the aid of computers. Is there something that’s being lost, something that’s being gained?

A: Well, as with every form of technology, there’s a gain and a loss. People who come out of an older generation are from what the Japanese call a “manual world”--when a show of Push Pin Studios opened in Japan many years ago, the person introducing the panel said, “And now, some people from the manual world”--as opposed to the new digital world. They really made a demarcation between the digital generation and people who were trained through drawing and through physically creating things, which I think has a profound effect on the way you look at the world, the structure of your brain. The world of the computer is more a world of potentially collage-ic activity, using the existing world and applying it. It extends the reach of some people who are not capable of doing things manually, who are not skilled enough, or interested enough, but it also puts you in a realm where everything already exists--you modify what exists, but it’s much harder to originate material at this point in the technology. But we’re in the middle of it, so it’s hard to tell.

Q: When you and your colleagues founded Push Pin Studios, it was in the middle of Modernism, which you also felt limited your range of creativity.

A: We grew up and were educated in the ‘40s and ‘50s; the prevailing idiom of those days was the extraordinary power of the Modernist movement, architecturally and graphically. It was sweeping away the cobwebs. And the most powerful influence graphically was the Swiss school--it was very reductive, very clear. Because of the fact that it could be easily quantified and transmitted, it was a perfect teaching methodology. As a result of that, it was very attractive to academics. It’s a very powerful idea, and it produced at times very beautiful results. But what had happened, as happens with all methodologies, is that it began to weaken, and replicate, and it lost its revolutionary quality.

When I went to Bologna on a Fulbright scholarship when I was 20, 21, I saw the power of history. I saw Baroque architecture for the first time. We were taught, growing up under Modernism, to have contempt for the Baroque. And I thought gee, this is silly--it is such powerful, inventive, marvelous work. We were living in a kind of ideological vacuum that was rejecting too much of what was still useful. We began to create work that was more eclectic, more referential, had more historical influences than Modernism. I suppose you could call us premature Postmodernists, back in the ‘50s.

Q: I understand you borrowed a bit from art history when you designed the famous Dylan poster.

A: I always had in mind something I wanted to use--it is a very powerful cutout of a face that Marcel Duchamp did, a self-portrait of himself. I remembered the extraordinary energy of the black-and-white cutout, and I said, well, why not use it for Dylan, because he has an identifiable profile? And then I just added the hair--I was working in an Art Nouveau style that later manifested itself into the kind of psychedelic language. And for some reason, it just stuck in people’s consciousness. Part of the reason was that so many of the posters were given away with his album, “The Greatest Hits.” I can’t go anywhere without someone saying, “I had that on the wall of my dorm.”

Q: Even more people have seen “I {heart} NY” and its various permutations.

A: [Laughs.] The things you get known for are certainly not your choice, but one cannot complain about this. When I was asked to do the logo by the city, they already had the slogan, and the idea, they just needed a visual equivalent. Even as I was designing it, I was thinking, I must be doing something somebody has already done, what could be more obvious than expressing it this way?

And it worked, the symbol worked. It transformed things. Actually, I’m very happy about it, because you work in this field, communications, with the hope that the things you do will have some effect on the life of your time--and this just went beyond anything I ever dreamed. It also made me aware of how transforming simple ideas can be. A little phrase, a little symbol, changed the direction of a culture. It’s scary, actually. Finally, the only way you can determine whether or not something is art, if you want to make that categorical distinction, is by its effect, what happens when you witness it. We do know that in the face of art, you feel changed, heightened; you feel transformed, enlightened in some way.

Q: You have not limited your endeavors to design: You also helped write New York magazine’s Underground Gourmet column, which spawned a series of Underground Gourmet books. Would you discuss your relationship with food?

A: People have asked me why I am interested in food, because I am such a bad cook. The truth is, when I went to Bologna, which has the best cooking in Italy, I realized there was a whole other category of food beyond my experience growing up in the Bronx. I became interested in food certainly as a kind of social manifestation, in its centrality to culture. In the Underground Gourmet, we wrote articles about cheap restaurants, largely ethnic, because we realized that in terms of what people are looking for in a city, the greatest thing you can find is a good, cheap restaurant.

We have this extraordinary renaissance of food in America, which is almost unparalleled in history. There has been a real transformation of what food is, and what it can be. I don’t know what’s going on in L.A., but in New York, every day a new, fantastic restaurant opens up, with an explosion of activity and imagination.

I think what’s going on with food is much more interesting now than what’s going on with graphic design. *

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“Milton Glaser: Art is Work,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Dates: Opens Wednesday. Hours are Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sundays, noon-5 p.m. Ends Sept. 22. Price: Free. Phone: (310) 586-6488.