2006 saw the launch of Illustrative, a new festival/exhibition in Berlin that celebrates illustration and graphic art. Having taken place this year in Zurich between the 18th and 26th of October, it drew 35 different artists, and showcased over 400 works.

Its main thrust is described as “documenting the influence of illustration and graphic arts on other disciplines like book illustration, fashion and textile-arts, pottery, and animated movies.” The point is to trace how illustration and graphic art feature in, or are essential parts of, the many facets of ‘contemporary art’.

What this really means is you’re getting a ton of great illustration gathered all in one place. And as an excellent sideline, the exhibition hosts a Young Illustrators Award, in three separate categories that include Illustration, Book Art, and Animation.

A funny thing: even though I’m writing on design all the time, I’m still often in the dark when it comes to the genre terms “illustration” and “graphic art”. That’s fine: part of the point of their recent resurgence is the inability to pin contemporary illustration down into one, specific category, as was possible 100 years ago.

Take a look at this interview with Pascal Johanssen, one of the two Berlin-based curators of Illustrative, who outlines what “contemporary illustrative art” means to him:

It’s a new art movement. Unlike classic illustration it is a mix of influences from comic art, graffiti, fashion, advertisement, set design for computer games or animation. This form of illustrative art is marked by very different creative impulses and thus can be design or art.

He also describes the fundamental differences between what he sees as the previous generation of illustrators and today’s. I’ve never really thought about things in these terms before:

The parent generation for me is represented by illustrators like Tomi Ungerer. These have been willful, charismatic drawers. They were close to political caricatures, which was in accordance with the common operational fields of illustration back then. Today´s illustrators are mainly avant-garde regarding innovative means of design.

And finally, he’s asked in which direction illustration is moving at the moment. His answer is probably prescient, but it’s strange–I’ve been hearing a version of this answer, across several disciplines, for some time now. Read on:

Game Art will come up. This will be an art genre which will not only copy the aesthetics of computer games, like Eboy, but uses the graphical, narrative and technological means emerging from computer games and making them possible. Something new will develop in this field.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that games are the new, growing, soon-to-be-fundamental frontier for: advertising, literature, interactive experience, socialization, social networking, and entertainment in general. No one actually knows if it’ll happen, but for the moment I see games as still, essentially, games.

Yeah, there are massive networks like World of Warcraft. There are games everyone in the world plays, like Grand Theft Auto 4. There are games like The Sims 2. But they’re still just games. There are still stores that sell only video games, all staffed by the same 5 dudes that ran them when I was 10. Or at least it seems that way.

I’ll save a further exploration of that subject for another day, but it strikes me that Johannson’s answer here is actually not overblown like many of the video-games-are-taking-over-all-media claims: the area in which games and art will strongly converge might indeed be one where the very facility of young designers with video games (and the technologial means that bring them about) could actually create an entirely new field of art, and a big one at that. Just a prediction.

One can’t miss event during the exhibiton–especially for anyone interested in vintage art or just wonderfully detailed design–was Roman Bittner’s talk on his “Ancient Cities of Tomorrow” series. These are e-boy like illustrations taken to another level and really, really captivating. Check out his studio here.

Anyway, if you were lucky enough to be wandering around Zurich in October, staring at mountains and drinking their water straight from the clean, fresh rivers, hopefully you caught up with Illustrative.

The Design Museum of London is launching a new exhibition in a few days. It’s called Design Cities, and it takes a unique approach to exhibiting a period of design: it focuses on the history of several moments and their associated cities. Far from just showing what group of designers happened to come from which place, the exhibit will “investiage the tangible link between design and the city and will celebrate the key achievements of this relationship.”

The exhibition will feature a full range of objects from textiles and fashion to industrial pieces, furniture and prints. It will include design classics such as chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, as well as work by a spectrum of designers that together will evoke an impression of their era. Key exhibits will include work by William Morris, Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Achille Castiglioni, Ettore Sottsass, Gio Ponti, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Paul Smith, Ron Arad, Zaha Hadid and Ross Lovegrove.

I think it’s useful to look back to a period when cities did draw certain types of designers, when certain sets of studios worked together, or in a common environment, and created something entirely of the time and place–not only because some of those design results were both spectacular and particular, but also because that kind of metropolitan-based cohesion is something largely impossible these days.

The exhibition starts by going back to London in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition, the embodiment of high tech, and prefabrication that was both admired, and abhorred in its time. It ends with the London of today, a city that is once again a global centre for design of all kinds. Between the two, the exhibition focuses on six cities, Vienna, just before World War One, when the language of modernity first started to take shape, then Dessau, the small town in Germany that built the Bauhaus, the most famous school of design the world has ever seen. Paris in the 1930s was the city that became the capital of visual culture, where both Picasso and Le Corbusier made their homes.

Today’s inability to find this kind of cohesion isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way it is. I’m not saying modern cities have lost all their character, far from it–just that the specific aesthetic coming from a city tends to shelter itself under the globalised design world, especially when approached from an online perspective. When I see a chair, a website, a product, anything–one of the last things I associate it with is a city or a specific place.

Sure, you might spot a cultural signpost embedded somewhere in the design (the kind of things that make you say “oh, that looks vaguely Japanese” without really being able to explain much past that), but the give and take of a network society makes it virtually impossible for me to see a product and say “oh yeah, Italian-made all the way.”

The exhibition continues into the post war years and Los Angeles, where Charles Eames built his supremely elegant studio and house was the epitome of the American century. In the 1960s, leadership in contemporary design moved to Milan. And in the 1980s Tokyo made its presence felt, moving beyond the moral certainty of European industrial design, toward a more playful approach. Finally, returning to present day London which is once again the world’s leading centre for design, the base for Ron Arad and Ross Lovegrove, Jasper Morrison and many other leading contemporary designers.

That’s why I’m intensely interested to see the last, ultra-contemporary part of this exhibition, which returns its focus to London: many of the leading contemporary designers are based there at the moment, but is there any kind of specific “London” style of the moment? I doubt it.

London is often recognized as the most cosmopolitan of the world’s cities, and it’s this interconectedness that draws the design world’s leading lights there–the city has more contemporary art installations, innovative designers, and advertising agencies than anywhere (I could write the same sentence about New York, too), but the heyday of “British” design as any kind of relevant force outside of the retro world is largely irrelevant. Thus the return to London as the final destination of the museum’s grand tour leaves me curious to see if today’s “London Style” has anything, really, to do with London at all.

The exhibition runs until January 14th, 2009.

64 designers, 109 works, 7 brand names, 12 products
•     London; Christopher Dresser, Owen Jones, Willam Morris, Joseph Paxton (1851)

•     Vienna; Joseph Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Koloman Moser, Michael Thonet, Janke Urban, Otto Wagner (1908)

•     Dessau; Marcel Breuer, Lena Mayer-Bregner, Wilhelm Wagenfeld (1928)

•     Paris; Le Corbusier, Jeanneret Pierre, Charlotte Perriand, Eileen Gray, René Herbst, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Jean Prouvé, Citroen  (1931)

•     Los Angeles; Saul Bass, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Elliot Noyes, Eero Saarinen, Ford (1949)

•     Milano; Corradino D’Ascanio, Mario Bellini, Achille Castiglioni, Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Joe Colombo, Perry King, Paolo Lomazzi, Vico Magistretti, Angelo Mangiarotti, Bruno Munari, Marcello Nizzoli, Gionatan De Pas, Giovanni Pintori, Gio Ponti, Richard Sapper, Carla Scolari, Ettore Sottsass, Marco Zanuso, Donato d’Urbino (1957)

•     Tokyo; Nigel Coates, Shiro Kuramata, Canon, Olympus, Sharp, Sony (1987)

•     Londra; Ron Arad, Barber Osberby, Hussein Chalayan, David Chipperfield, Tom Dixon, Fernando Guiterrez, Zaha Hadid, Industrial Facility, Ross  Lovegrove, Jasper Morrison, Ross Phillips, Peter Saville, Paul Barnes, Smith, Paul Smith, Mini (2008)