Notes on the D&AD President Lecture: James Jarvis

Peacock Theatre, Thursday 3 November 2006

"I think talking about influences is incredibly obvious."
His influences are listed as follows:
Herge's Tin Tin, Robert Altman's film Popeye, Little Hippo books, Mike McMahon's
drawings in 2000AD, Gary Panter of RAW magazine, Terry Man and work by Richard Scarry.

Jarvis says of Panter: "He was the last artist I really wanted to be before I became myself."


"I like quite existential things."
Jarvis likes illustrations that are full of pathos, suffering and 'philosophy'.
Richard Scarry is good because he gets to 'the essence of things'.

"It's to do with building worlds and assembling realities in a chaotic world."
Jarvis believes Herge is very good, like Scarry, at presenting 'complete worlds'.
He doesn't use the word 'fantasy' but maybe this is what he is alluding to?
Or maybe the worlds are nearly perfect and the details of mise-en-scene match the needs
of the characters who populate those worlds. Building a world that is 'functional'?
Later he says that: "I want things to be very real and draw in a perfectly imagined way".
Also, he says settings are important but characters are secondary. This seems especially true of his final exhibition of work for the RCA.

"Not just an illustrator for hire. People are hiring me for my world".
Jarvis is popular is Japan. He designed Toto - a mascot for the Japanese Football Lottery.
He wanted to keep creative control over his potato-headed characters and luckily the clients didn't want to 'buy into' his existing world. So Jarvis created a totally new character for them.

"We're men in dungarees but we happen to make Art"
Jarvis recounts the story of a favourite book on Avant Garde art.
The photographs included in the book (which belonged to his mother) shows men of action
and activity. In fact, the artists look like artisans or people who are involved in a process.
They are industrious. eg Cy Twombly.

"I like process and the industrial nature of what I do."
Jarvis doesn't like Rothko so much/any more.
He is moving away from Romanticism and towards Realism.
Gustave Dore's Rime of the Ancient Marriner is another favourite of his.

JARVIS SITS AT A DESK ONSTAGE AND DRAWS.
THE IMAGES ARE PROJECTED ONTO A SCREEN BEHIND HIM, IN REAL-TIME.

"I got bored of drawing policemen and wanted to draw men with elaborate moustaches
and wigs"
Jarivs likes 'funny things'.

"Toys are a manifestation of drawing for me."
Jarvis is not into toys 'really'. They are a way of finding a living through drawing.
Doing toys has made him more 'independent'. Due to the financial success of his toy manufacturing, he can now "commission for myself, in a way".
Toys have made me much more logical. I think in 3D.

"I didn't intellectualize the process all the time .. but I asked: why do I draw things in this way?"
Jarvis starts with a bland character and then dresses it up.
He tries to make something elemental.
"I like the particular not the universal".
He tries to make something iconic.
Perhaps distillation would be a good word here? This makes his interest in Muller-Brockmann relevant. M-B reduced design to 'an almost mathematical process'.

He worries about his drawings. When he draws a tree he asks himself: Is this the right kind of tree? Does it fit the world he is trying to build?
His work might look simple but "blobs are always arrived at by a process of angst and pain".

"I hate the process of forgetting what things mean."
Jarvis likes the look of WW2 military helmets but they're not just 'aesthetic'.
You can't forget the conflict or the hats being German.
It might be suggested that this is the problem with pastiche, which is characterized by a lack of concern for the original. Jarvis seems to like playing around with forms but his work carries traces of the intentionality of parody. (See Frederick Jameson on Postmodernism).

"I flush with shame."
Jarvis has given up on re-touching his work using computers.
"Where's the drawing in that? I kinda forgot it."
He shows projects where he just kept drawing and kept the mistakes 'in'.
This leads to his current ethos: drawing as performance.
An A1 poster for Silas is drawn to size. He sat down and did it in one go (6 hours).
The monkey isn't good 'but it's honest'.

THE D&AD PRESIDENT THANKS JAMES JARVIS FOR GIVING AN INSIGHT TO THE WORLD OF 'A LUNATIC'. HE IS ONLY JOKING BUT THE AUDIENCE RESENT THE THROW-AWAY COMMENT. THE PRESIDENT REGRETS HIS FLIPPANT REMARK.

THE AUDIENCE MAKE IT CLEAR: JARVIS IS 'THE MAN'. LONG LIVE ILLUSTRATION!

James Jarvis portfolio
James Jarvis vinyl outlet

Designing Pornotopia, a lecture by Rick Poynor

at Arnolfini Bristol, Tuesday 31 October 2006

The lecture theatre is humming. I bump into colleagues and students; representatives from the region’s Art Schools. It’s a good feeling, this opportunity to discuss commercial art practice in the light of a Critical System.

Poynor has written a new book called Pornotopia that reflects on ‘the realm of pornography’ and its unfolding relations with Graphic Design. It is suggested that designers are taking ‘the new porn landscape’ for granted. They are using images of the body that once belonged to ‘a purely sexual realm’ in an uncritical manner. Poynor refers to their ‘frothy’ representations of sex as ones which are suggestive of a light, superficial touch. These designers are creating a world, he argues, ‘where nothing else happens – just glamour’.

The word pornotopia has been carefully chosen to offer an overview of this contemporary world of pornographic images. Apparently, the term was first used by Stephen Marcus in a book called The Other Victorians to describe how pornography attempts to establish its own distinct universe. The narrative structure is predominantly self-referential, with the image-makers constructing ‘a world where nothing but sex happens’. The suggestion Poynor is making is one that involves social responsibility: ‘It’s now everywhere and no-one’s even asking: is it having an effect?’

Poynor runs through a wide range of examples from the Graphic Design of E-Boy to the recent series of art-pornography films entitled DeStricted. His main aim is to highlight the fact that pornographic imagery is not merely ubiquitous but also given a questionable set of cultural values in the process: 'fun', 'stylish' and, ultimately, the epitome of the new 'sensory domain' of design. He also talks about cosmetic surgery as an aspect of this superficial, ‘frothy’ visual culture, arguing that it acts as: ‘a sign of this new sexual culture ... porn expressions are being normalized in daily experience’.

I think it is useful for Poynor to highlight the unproblematic presentation of pornography within visual culture. However, he seems very short on answers (or even suggestions) about what kind of responses could be made here. He recommends Andrea Dworkin as an example of feminist writing that might assist in questioning the ubiquity of porn and its potential effects (but she’s been heavily criticised for her monolithic view of women as victim, already). Unfortunately this seems like a weak critique, whereby he cites her experience of incurring ‘psychic damage’ as a result of studying pornographic imagery. The point being, it would seem, women aren’t comfortable with this development (and neither is he). In spite of our general misgivings, though, he simply states: ‘I don’t have any answers for this’.

It’s all very well to identify a phenomena and to ask questions of pornotopia, but it’s unlikely the pervasiveness of pornography throughout visual culture has not gone unnoticed. That's the thing about ubiquitous phenomena: they're already everywhere. How could I not see it?

As chief critic within the field of Graphic Design, Rick Poynor always provides the opportunity for discussion in a discipline that often characterizes itself as un- or anti- intellectual. However, his survey approach to images of the nude and bodies-in-flagrante fails to embrace the kind of established critical languages that might allow us to begin the task of analysing the materials on show. He invokes the terms 'porn', 'image' and 'fantasy', however, they are utilised in isolation from other kinds of words that might offer a way into this self-referential world of the pornotopic. An additional vocabulary in this context might include:

Gender: these pornographic images are predominantly occupied by female bodies, either alone, or in relation to bodies of male action. Poynor says of the designers: ‘It looks to me they’re just displaying them as trophies’. These human forms may be stripped bare but their spatial positions and subjective preoccupations are full of recognisable social characteristics: othrewise known as masculine and feminine attributes. One needs to ask: whose trophies? For whose pleasure? (And not assume that the answer is always already 'Men!')

The gaze: this useful tool of Feminism can help in identifying a point-of-view or preferred viewing subject who is established (and served) by the image-making process. The gaze is difficult to discuss without speaking about gender relations and viewing positions and, I would argue, seems integral to Poynor’s observation that: ‘This imagery seems to represent sex from a laddish view’.

Social Relations: a concept that underpins a Marxist approach to culture and one that usefully explores the interconnections between people and objects. The pornotopian images are full of exchanges and extended relationships: from commodity-based transactions (such as the buying or circulation of visual publications) and the exchange of looks between viewer and viewed, to the interdisciplinary connections sex, social life and aesthetics.

Beauty: Poynor’s main point seems to be about the production of self-contained worlds that offer the allure of a perfect surface. Dave Hickey (as mentioned elsewhere in this blog) talks about Beauty – of the image, for instance - as a contemporary concern within the arts. It is a problem, he argues, not because of the seductive surface that gives us so much pleasure. Rather, it is the way it invites us into things and puts us in viewing positions that may go against our ‘better judgement’. The old body/mind dichotomy again.


After hearing the lecture Designing Pornotopia, I felt persuaded that the real crisis lies elsewhere: in the realms of design criticism itself. Semiotics, for example, seems an inappropriate methodology to fully explore surfaces and their ‘affects’. Yet this is one area of theoretical discourse that design critics seem to embrace (see David Crow Visible Signs). Semiotics is a form of analysis that appears overly preoccupied, as does Poynor, with meaning and signification: the effects of language. Clearly we need a way of discussing 'pornotopia' that allows us to examine the pleasures of viewing alongside the impact on existing (and changing) notions of femininity, for instance. (Poynor himself cites Ariel Levy's book Female Chauvenist Pigs, by the way).

In ‘Autonomy of Affect’, Brain Massumi offers a starting point for a design criticism that would like to take viewing experiences seriously, asserting an ontological model that allows us to discuss the body-of-the-viewer as much as that of the imaged nude. He argues: ‘it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in a straight-forward way’ (p.218). Furthermore, ‘affect is their point of emergence in their actual specificity’ (p.226).

Poynor says: ‘A rather strange view of sexuality emerges here’. I would agree. However the strangest view is his, as his critical methodologies seems to share the same problems as pornotopia itself; both are sealed off from the world of action. There are ways of looking at this graphic landscape that would encourage more than a quickie glance and re-presenting voyeuristic events of the eye. I would suggest there are many words that make you think and have the potential to give answers to this. Unfortunately, pornotopia is not one of them.

Hans Bellmer, Whitechapel London

20 September - 19 November 2006

There is a man talking very loudly about 'the banality of golfers' and people who practice hitting balls 'with a stick'. We're in the gallery and you've got to wonder why (I can hear him).

The exhibition handout states that Hans Bellmer 'defied the Fascist state in which he lived by withdrawing from any socially useful activity'. That would account for all the unrelenting sexual references then. Not a disturbed psyche but a politically motivated gesture. According to the Whitechapel, allusions to the body caught-in-the-act and nudity-with-socks-on was 'a powerful tool for social critique in 1964. And there is a list of eminent names to support the continuing value of the work that 'offered an opportunity to a complacent bourgeois, judgmental approach to the world': Deleuze, Foucault, Bataille, Balzac ... but I'm tired of it already ...

In 1964 my dad was trying to earn a living in London, too busy (he frequently recounts) even to listen to The Beatles. An aspiring refugee and (forever) outsider. Yet, I also know he discovered sex (almost for the first time) in that year and was enjoying himself whenever he could (wife and new child allowing/permitting). So it would seem to me at least, that 'bourgeois' or 'aspirant working class' are not opposing terms to 'the body' and sexual exploration. This is one of those myths about the only true opposition is the kind that comes from the outside and is only ever generated by the intentional outsider.

Then I think to myself, 'I'm too tired to think about sex'. It seems like a luxury right now, to fully exercise a libido without restraint. When you're working hard within the system, it can feel beyond the realms of fantasy to get naked (but leave your socks on). So I would like to suggest that any opposing terms that might be at work here are actually 'sex' and 'the working body'. Also, I'm reminded that those operating (supposedly) on 'the outside' only get to be subversive (actually) by virtue of those working on 'the inside'. How fortunate for Bellmer that the busy bourgeoisie found themselves unable to dedicate themselves, wholeheartedly, to the fulfiment of sexual desires ... erm ... to the project of undermining 'socially useful activity'.

Make a doll and take her to a wood, find a body and bind the breasts and thighs. Take some photographs. Feel something. Show something. What's everyone else doing? Not this?! They're too busy being bourgeois to be following 'an obsessive quest for a monstrous dictionary dedicated to the ambivalence of the body'.

And anyway, who says 'body'? I see only women. And tits and shoes and stockings and tights. Is it, rather, that we are witnessing a vast array of images that reveal the ambivalences of the aesthetic 'eye'; at turns all-seeing or omnipotent, voyeuristic, formalist ...

I enjoyed the exhibition in many ways. However I'm not convinced: Victorian 'retro' legs in stripy tights does not a philosophy make.