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Profile of Graphic Designer Tibor Kalman

by Thomas Frank, from ArtForum, February 1991:

“Tibor Kalman is a graphic designer, a crafter of corporate logos, a producer of presentation materials, a maker of menus and restaurant posters. But Tibor Kalman is so much mere than that.

According to most of those who judge such things (with whom I concur, by the way), he is accomplished, even brilliant at what he does. He may even be the greatest graphic designer of his generation. Certainly his output of the last twenty years, just collected in the three-and-a-half-pound book Perverse Optimist (Princeton Architectural Press), sparkles with witty solutions to the problems typical of corporate presentation. But why stop there? Kalman is, we are told, a radical — a breaker of rules, a dealer in astonishment, a deft questioner of the corporate order. In a manifesto co-authored in 1990, he insisted that graphic designers be ‘bad,’ ‘disobedient,’ ‘insubordinate,’ that they refuse to be ‘a cog in the machine,’ that they must make clients ‘think about design that’s dangerous and unpredictable.’ It’s no surprise that accounts of Kalman’s oeuvre take pains to note his SDS exploits in the late ’60s.

The question that inevitably arises, though, is why a corporation should be so keen to hire a ‘radical’ graphic designer. What makes Kalman’s radicalism, such as it is, a desirable quality in what is possibly the most constrained branch of creative endeavor? What does ‘radicalism’ even mean in such a field? It certainly isn’t readily apparent from his work. What impresses one first about Perverse Optimist is not Kalman’s radicalism but his weird omnipresence in the most modish precincts of corporate-sponsored culture of the last two decades.

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