Arjen Noordeman Creative.

[Originally posted on Cranbrookdesign.com [now closed] on 7.12.2005 I wanted to archive the interviews of that website here as a resource to everyone interested.]

Interview: Ed Fella [2d’87] by David Cabianca.

Ed Fella is an artist and graphic designer whose work has had an important influence on contemporary typography in the US and in Europe. He practiced professionally as a commercial artist in Detroit for 30 years before receiving an MFA in Design from Cranbrook in 1987. He has since devoted his time to teaching and to his own unique self-published work, which has appeared in many design publications and anthologies. In 1997 he received the Chrysler Award and in 1999 an Honorary Doctorate from CCS in Detroit. His work is in the National Design Museum and MOMA in NYC. A book of Fella’s photographs and lettering, [i]Letters on America,[/i] was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2000. This interview, conducted by David Cabianca [2d’01], took place via telephone on a Friday evening. Ed had just completed sitting on a week of CalArts final project student reviews.

[NB. The terms “mechanical” and “keyline” were used interchangeably during our conversation. Because they refer to essentially the same thing, I have substituted “mechanical” where necessary for the sake of reading clarity.—David]

The printed piece is conventionally thought to be the final outcome in graphic design, but the more one studies your printed flyers, the greater the amount of labour involved becomes apparent. A number of questions surround the mechanicals because they retain the trace of the artist’s labour and this in turn raises a number of questions about your own attitude about his mechanicals: Do you consider them to be part of the art? For example, Christo and Jean-Claude sell their construction drawings after the event.

Your question about my mechanicals reminded me of a catalog Kathy McCoy designed for Gilbert Silverman and his Fluxus collection [Fluxus Codex: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, New York: MoMA, 1988]. After the catalog was printed, Silverman wanted Kathy’s mechanicals for the catalog design. Fluxus understands that the process of making is part of the essence of art, so for Silverman, Kathy’s mechanicals were “Art.”

I don’t know if she ever gave him the mechanicals, but they would have greatly deteriorated by now. The medium of photostat and rubber cement doesn’t last long. They would be all yellow and brown. I used to keep my mechanicals from the era of photostats for a while and then throw them out because they deteriorate. By the way, back in those days we called them “keylines”—at least in Detroit.

I do keep some mechanicals now, but not the early ones. I keep them in case the flyer is to be reprinted. I am not sure what you would call them because they are not the original artwork. I guess they are paste-ups. The artwork is drawn at large scale and then photocopy reduced, cut out, and pasted onto an 11x17” sheet of paper. So all that appears on the paste-up is the taped up or pasted down photocopied pieces, not the original inked art. The inked art I save and sign and place in glassine envelopes. I am aware of my own history and am leaving some sort of legacy for my heirs; what with “eBay” and “Antiques Road Show” and all, or future yard and garage sales!

In Heller’s essay, “Cult of the Ugly,” he stated that the kind of work that you do was a fad that would soon run its course. Obviously since you are archiving your work, you disagree.

Heller never contacted me prior to writing that article, but has since admitted that he could not have been more off track. He said that he was very wrong about the image of such work being a “dead end.” He was sort of right in the sense that my work is not a dead end but an endpoint. It is an example of hand lettering and its extreme mutation.

Do you then consider the inked work the original art?

The mechanical paste-up is as close to the original as one cane get with my work. They are art in the sense that there is only one of them.

Christo and Jean-Claude sell their process work, and so do architects.

But architects also make blueprints and those are not valuable.

But anything that has had a direct involvement with the architect, anything “touched by the hand” of the architect is seen as somehow connected to his creativity. It is as though the hand is a direct portal to the mind or the creative faculty. Blueprints (even pre-CAD) were seen as after-the-fact, after the moment of creation. They are not reflective of the creative process but the necessary document for the realization of the work. Yet architects understand that creativity does not stop at the commencement of drawing for a blueprint. A lot of development and discovery occurs in this phase.

All my work has reactions and references to other pieces. I learned very early, and luckily so, that as a designer I could make a completely related body of work which is an unusual connection to make. [The flyers] have become a turning of the designer and artist around. The designer is the client: I pay for them. I make them because I want them—which is the artist’s perspective. They have no deadline (again the artist’s perspective). The even is the making of the artwork. The event in design comes after the piece is made. After the event, the [design] piece is thrown away. When I was in New York a few years ago Steven Heller invited me to his apartment which was quite an honor. He had me come over to a drawer and inside he had all these pieces of paper. They were Dwiggins’ paste-ups and his hand lettering archived by Heller. Heller didn’t have the finished printed pieces but the process, in a sense, the original art, as we used to call it. Yes this is what Dwiggins himself “touched”—not the printed pieces. And you could see his additions and changes and parts whited out and cleaned up.

Architects like Michael Graves or Peter Eisenman number and archive everything they touch.

I am very much aware of my hand. I too, sign all of my original pieces. I used to worry about archiving my lettering because they were photostats but with photocopies it is less of a problem, although the tape, etc., may still yellow and dry out. In the past I used to take the paste-ups apart and reuse pieces but now I keep the sheet intact. Also I should say I don’t use photostats anymore—not for years. There aren’t any anymore, but Xeroxes or Canon copies—a different and more stable process than the wet chemicals of Photostat development. I put them down with wax which is also a better archival process than rubber cement.

So where is the original?

Printers keep the films produced to make the plates. I guess that could be one of the forms of the originals. But in graphic design, the mass produced piece is the final form. I have never exhibited my paste-ups, only the final forms of the flyers: the printed pieces. It would be interesting to exhibit the mechanicals alongside the printed flyers. I haven’t done that and no one has asked. It would be an interesting exhibit but I think only because of historical interest, showing a mechanical and hand process gone by.

The reason my flyers are on colored or off-white paper is because this makes them look offset “printed” (as they are). If the flyer is printed on white paper, they look like cheap Xeroxes because believe it or not, that type of offset printing actually looks grayer than the deeper black of current offset technology.

I would have to disagree about whether the mechanical’s only value is as some historical curiosity. Having seen them, they are as much fine art as a conventional painting. In fact, they are reminiscent in their precision as Max Ernst’s “La Femme 100 Tetes.” The hand and the mind of Ed Fella is clearly present. And what’s more, each mechanical is unique. In a digital profession, there is even less necessity to involve the “hand” in the act of direct typesetting.

Yes, you can’t do mechanicals today because printers won’t accept them. You need to supply a digital scan. The ten-year anniversary catalog for the Detroit Focus Gallery is a “mechanical by hand.” When I designed it, I thought, “I’ll paste it up ‘badly’—as though my kid Andrea did it [i][NB. Andrea Fella was Art Director for ID Magazine, a designer for The New York Times Magazine, and is the current Art Director for Nylon.—David].[/i] The credits inside even thank Andrea for the typesetting! It’s a joke that Andrea isn’t too thrilled about. At the time, Andrea would have been about high school age and had no idea that she would become a designer some day herself! I revisited the same idea again in the text for my book, Letters on America, you will notice.

The actual print is considered the final outcome because if the poster is in numerous colors, you need to make separations. In graphic design—at least when I was working in the field—type was set by a typesetter and it would be used to make a proof. You would have to count letters to see what you could fit in a space and at what point size and then send the copy out to be set. It was a real pain if changes had to be made because you would have to start all over again.

But you are not an anonymous typesetter. The work you do is very clearly the product of the hand of Ed Fella and your virtuoso understanding and experience of letterforms.

Well my paste-ups rarely have original [inked] lettering on them. I draw letters large, reduce them and then paste them on. So the paste-up is generally just photocopy with some white-out correction. The paste-up is the final original but there are other originals to be found that preceded it. What determines whether one thing is art and another is not is something I haven’t been able to resolve. Whether the printed flyers are art or design is something for others to resolve.

While I am very self conscious about my hand, I can’t figure out [the flyer’s] placement in the realms of art and design. For example, the reproduction is the “original” in graphic design. It is the intended final state. This is a distinguishing characteristic from art. Art works in terms of the one-off. Graphic design (design in general) deals in mass quantities of reproducibility.

David Carson’s first book, [i]The End of Print,[/i] was brilliant because he asked designers for a piece to respond to the title. I didn’t even make an artful print. It was a raw mechanical paste-up. He just took a photograph of the paste-up and used that reproduction in the book. In the book you can see the slightly off-white paper differences between the pasted on lettering and the background. In the second book, I gave him a mechanical and he used it in the conventional way–not as final art but as a mechanical meant to be scanned.

Can you explain what lead you to an interest in the vernacular? You were paired with the Dutch designer Piet Schreuders in Emigre. Were you conscious of his work?

I had never heard of Piet Schreuders until we were featured together by Rudy in Emigre 17 in 1991. I did see the Dumbar work and the Hard Werken presentation by Rick Vermeulen when I was at Cranbrook in 1986. In fact, Kathy asked I me to do the poster for Rick because I was a perfect match with them in similar interests. My “self conscious” interest in the American vernacular goes back to the late ’60s when I read the Robert Venturi book, [i]Complexity and Contradiction[/i] and later [i]Learning from Las Vegas.[/i] I also have claimed that I was the vernacular because of being a professional commercial artist, although that might be stretching it a bit. Commercial art as I practiced it was of course much more “refined” than the rough vernacular [of Piet Schreuders], but maybe not? We in America were certainly well aware of it as a possible source, at least I was since my “design” education in a technical high school in the mid ’50s, and especially as an illustrator. I have also always claimed that the American vernacular was what we as American designers should look to, to differentiate ourselves from the Europeans and all the wonderful work they always did, how could we top that! My great American hero for that was Charles Ives, you should check him out if you don’t know his music and his history! He is the perfect model for us.

On the Rotterdam Flyer:

The Rotterdam lecture flyer was a de Stijl design. The stat collage on the back is my de Stijl piece.

Even at Cranbrook in the mid ’80s, we would often use stat cutout garbage because you never thought about these things. They made interesting forms that were completely arbitrary. On the stamp, the word “molen” used for the arms of the windmill is the Dutch word for “windmill.”

On the Las Vegas AIGA Flyer:

The Las Vegas flyer was used by the AIGA to produce a three color image silkscreened onto a canvas bag. They did a really nice job. The colors were red, white and blue on a black bag.

[On the Vegas flyer, in the marked off area with three holes at the top], you see the lettering that I didn’t use. Things that were discarded, reworked, false starts. These pieces taped together on a sheet of paper give clues to the process of coming up with the final artwork.

On the 1997 and 2002 UCLA Flyers:

This is an over-the-top version of decorative lettering in its various manifestations. The second piece is a reworking of the same page again five years later for a lecture at the same venue.

The backs of these two flyers give a better idea of the second reworking. The words “Los Angeles” and both backs of the set are an art deco revisit and reworking.

On the Art Center Flyer:

Of course I allowed the individual cut lines between letters to show. I wanted the students to understand how I make my work. So you also see [thumbnail] sketches repeatedly drawn and included.