Jan van Toorn has turned graphic agitation into a fine art
By Gerard Forde and Jan van Toorn
In a world in which channels of communication are as clogged with pollution as the environment, the Dutch designer Jan van Toorn is seeking to reverse some of the damage. For 30 years, Van Toorn’s aim has been to rescue the media from its role as a distribution network for dominant ideology, and to reassert what he sees as its legitimate function of communication. Few designers are more clearsighted about the part they play in the transmission of society’s assumptions and value.
‘In my opinion designers are connected to the existing order,’ says Van Toorn. ‘That’s the reality and you have to deal with it. But within that you can still make a choice about your position in the field, depending on your background and ideas, and then if you want you can be a hindrance. And I would like to see many more hindrances.’
Van Toorn’s goal is to contribute to what he calls a ‘counter public sector.’ And as the recently appointed director of Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht – where he is establishing a challenging teaching programme for art, design and theory – he will be well placed to continue the political and aesthetic agitation that has marked his career.
Counter Cultural
His first challenge to official culture came in a series of posters and catalogues for exhibitions organised by Jean Leering at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Van Toorn saw the museum as a manufacturer of art-media ideology and sought a way of jarring consciousness through visual unorthodoxy.
Where Modernist predecessors like Max Bill, Otto Treumann and Josef Müller-Brockmann had been content with the least ornate, most rational typefaces – a level of neutrality that Van Toorn viewed as naïve – he sought out the more idiosyncratic fonts, flaunting the typographic taboos of the then all-pervasive International Style. In Van Toorn’s eyes, the post-war period had witnessed the disciplining of graphic design into a gutless mediator between the interests of international economic and institutional forces, and an audience of passive consumers.
Jan van Toorn's Predecessors
Max Bill
Otto Treumann
Josef Müller-Brockmann
Calendar Entries
If Van Toorn’s work for the Van Abbemuseum was, as he says, ‘friendly’, then he was to take a far more combative approach in the calendars he designed in the early 1970s for the printer Mart Spruijt. The collaboration had begun in 1960 with Van Toorn still in his ‘classic’ phase, using formal exercises and typographic jokes as an essentially aesthetic programme.
But Van Toorn’s work soon developed into what he describes as a ‘laboratory situation’ in which he experimented with images of unprecedented power. ‘I found out in these calendars that it is possible to construct a counter-reality, with more brutality and more openness than I will ever dare do again. That’s the challenge I still have.’
Cover of the 1972/73 “People calendar” for Mart.Spruijt. Designed by Jan van ToornCover of the 1972/73 “People calendar” for Mart.Spruijt. Designed by Jan van ToornCover of the 1972/73 “People calendar” for Mart.Spruijt. Designed by Jan van Toorn
