Home » Reading & Literature » Contemporary Fiction » Designer's Views Innovative

Designer's Views Innovative

© Robert Powers

Have you heard of Tibor Kalman? I'd bet your answer is in the negative, for Kalman hardly qualifies as a household name. But this multi-talented artist must rank as one of the most creative people on Planet Earth. His ventures range over a massive landscape. Kalman has done just about everything involving artistic endeavors.

The massive, handsome, heavyweight book, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist (Princeton Architectural Press, $60), presents a comprehensive portrait of this fascinating individual. His projects have included music videos, wristwatches, fashion ads, annual reports, corporate logos, film titles, even architecture and urban planning. The 460-page coffee table-sized book has hundreds of color illustrations to aptly demonstrate the range of this man's mind. There are scores of essays by a wide range of contributors, including Kurt Andersen, Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli, musician David Byrne, Jenny Holzer, dress designer Isaac Mizrahi, and even the founder of Barnes & Noble, Leonard Riggio, who gave Kalman his first job.

Tibor, as most folks call him, supplies a number of epigrams in the opening pages of the book, superimposed on gloriously apt half-page color photos. "Rules are good," he says. "Break them." The background picture shows a man being literally mugged.

Another comment: "Good designers (and writers and artists) make trouble." And how about this wry observation, "The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing (you are 9). This assures an interesting and successful outcome." Another: "I am in search of the simple elegant seductive maybe even obvious IDEA. With this in my pocket I cannot fail."

He laments the sad fact that corporations "have been the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America," adding that "Culture used to be the opposite of commerce, not a fast track to 'content'-derived riches." To Tibor, he sees hope in the one percent of what he calls "lunatic entrepreneurs" who know that culture and design aren't about fatter wallets, but about creating a future.

Writer Peter Hall defines Kalman who single motive is a "desire to startle the people around him." As the years pass, Kalman's work has become more and more political. That's not an accident, as Leonard Riggio points out in his short essay talking about the time in the late '60s when Kalman worked in his bookstore near the New York University campus. Those were the days of revolution and Kalman was in the middle of it, "armed with magic markers and posterboard--creating a new poster, it seemed, every 30 seconds."

The copyright of the article Designer's Views Innovative in Contemporary Fiction is owned by Robert Powers. Permission to republish Designer's Views Innovative in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.