Friedman challenged corporate modernism in both theory and practice by
creating an oeuvre that adapted original modern humanist ethics while
transcending the functional blandness that had turned the younger
generation against it.
By the late 1970 s he began to propose the idea of having students
make “dysfunctional” messages in order to measure the true limits of
communication, a method that has had exponents in many other design
institutions. He wrote, “[G]raphic designers should work past some rather
naïve positions. It may be an illusion that the newest orientation to
typography is automatically better and has more layers of meaning than
previous experiments that were either more or less concerned with
formalistic possibilities. It may also be an illusion that the new digital
technology... has a higher authority and represents a kind of progress,
considering that technological progress has often caused some erosion of
human values.”
Friedman wed formalism to activism. Whether for an AIDS
project or for a cultural institution, his work displayed a passion for play
with color, composition, and contrast. He was deeply motivated by the
spiritual. “Landscapes have always been a theme in my work because they
suggest a source for transcendental reflection,” he wrote. His nongraphic
design, including furniture and sculpture, appear most naturally to
incorporate activism, formalism, spiritualism—and eccentricity. Friedman’s
tour de force was his own apartment in an otherwise nondescript postwar
building on lower Fifth Avenue in New York, which he regularly
redecorated with abstract forms and bright cartoon-like colors inspired
by East African art contrasted with elements of the New York street.
Graphic designers who practice fine art are usually separatists,
preferring not to taint one with the other. Apart from the physical
differences, Friedman’s art and design are compatible, if not in application,
then in spirit. Even his most visible corporate campaign for Citibank,
created in 1975 while working for Anspach Grossman Portugal, is evidence
of his artistic evolution that followed. In this campaign, he adapts and
synthesizes the experimental typography introduced at Basel, the result
being a refreshingly lighthearted image for a conservative corporation.
After the success of Citibank, Friedman could easily have made pseudo-
experimental work for corporate clients, had he not realized its limitations.
Instead, he decided to veer toward the margins “to avoid being eaten up by
the center.”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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