The New Yorker Re-Publics during Covid
The image-makers of The New Yorker populate and re-public private and public spaces with people and things, creating an ecology for the post-covid world
Grid Left to Right. Top Row: Christoph Niemann, Eric Drooker, Chris Ware, Pascal Campion. 2nd Row: Owen Smith, Tomer Hanuka, Chris Ware, Christoph Mueller. 3rd Row: Anita Kunz, Barry Blitt (sorry Barry, I got jam on the cover and it got stuck to the table), Roz Chast, Richard McGuire. 4th Row: Kadir Nelson, Diana, Ejaita, Kadir Nelson, Richard McGuire. 5th Row: Christoph Nieman, Grace Lynne Haynes, Wayne Thiebaud, Barry Blitt. 6th Row: Gayle Kabaker, Kadir Nelson, Edward Steed, Chris Ware.
In Kin-innovation one slice of data we look at to understand and track the entities driving a culture and organisation as it re-forms, re-organises, re-publics, is the production and circulation of images. Images often anticipate new forms of value-creation both commercial and social. The cultural, political and commercial power of such images is that they focus our experience of change. They are a measurement of the world at a moment in time.
When the images are creative they teach us new ways of seeing, feeling and engaging with the world. Like innovation management, an image-maker creating a new way for us to experience the world is a teacher: firstly teaching themselves how to create this new vision; secondly teaching us how to understand and use this new data and way of seeing. I was thinking of this as I gathered together The New Yorker magazines I had apparently collected since March 23rd.
The New Yorker covers are particularly interesting in that their genre sits somewhere between an ‘editorial’ images – the classic image that ‘illustrates’ a story alongside, such as the political cartoon or commentary – and a creative ‘conceptual’ image, that forms a thought or an idea without words. These are crude distinctions. The political cartoon can also be conceptual in how the illustrator mobilises animals, objects and non-human life forms to visualise political conflicts and personalities.
Flaps and Woodcut
Plus, unlike old-style magazine covers, and this is changing as physical magazines become more bespoke (and have online versions) The New Yorker cover-image doesn’t have to sell anything. On the newsstand The New Yorker has a cover flap flagging up stories in each issue for casual sales.
But for subscribers like myself there’s a text-free cover coming through my letterbox each week – text free except for the logo, a font simulating a woodcut. As a data sample from the world, The New Yorker cover talks to a very specific but also influential demographic – the title gives it away.
I imagine “metropolitan elites” may be on the tip of your tongue, but the magazine has always commissioned perceptive writers to write at length on the shifting political and social concerns that are above and below the surface, writers such as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Rachel Carson, and most recently Malcolm Gladwell and Pankaj Mishra.
And while it has the institutional blind spots that comes with its heritage, geography and organisational culture, the magazine’s charm comes from its awareness of its own positioning and perspective, most famously in the 1976 cover image by Saul Steinberg, View of the World From Ninth Avenue – which is basically Manhattan and a little bit of the rest of the world.
From Saul Steinberg, Illuminations (2006) Yale University Press,
As an expression of the culture, it is a limited slice, but it’s quick off the mark in identifying shifting concerns and in its selection of leading image-makers to create its covers. Photographic covers of magazines tend to be more ‘zeitgeisty’ – the time period is more recognisable from the models, the styling, the clothes – whereas New Yorker covers are fundamentally an expression of the image-maker and the brief of celebrated Art Editor Francoise Mouly. The image-makers and Mouly are attuned to the mood, to the people, places and things, that are shaping how we think, feel and act.
Measurement and Style
Each cover illustrator has their own means of measurement of New York. The conventional description for such creative measurement is ‘style’, and style is emergent rather than fixed. In our paper on style and foresight (‘Styling the Future. An affective approach to design and scenarios’) my friend and collaborator Dr Jamie Brassett and myself argued that style isn’t that idea of the creative genius imposing his will (it used always be a ‘him’) and giving form to brute matter, but rather style “is something that emerges through a relationship between things” in specific conditions and moments. ‘Style’ rather than being simply a surface thing, is in the skill and practice of how we enable ourselves to be attuned with the world. There are ways of doing this.
Philosopher Mikel Dufrenne (who spent time in a prisoner of war camp during WW2) says something similar which resonates with The New Yorker covers and with the process of what happens when an image-maker innovates, makes a world. Their style cuts through the cliches which shape our everyday way of seeing and behaving creating an atmosphere, an affect. “The aesthetic object manifests a certain quality which words cannot translate but which communicates itself in arousing a feeling,” writes Dufrenne. “This quality proper to the work – to the works of a single creator or to a single style – is a world atmosphere. How is it produced? Through the ensemble from which it emanates. All the elements of the represented world conspire to produce it...” At Kin, rather than looking at ‘culture’ we focus on the ‘tells’ of atmosphere.
So in the top left of my rough-and-ready New Yorker grid (you couldn’t tell I’m not a Graphic Designer), Christoph Niemann (“Critical Mass”) known for his playful mixed materials work for The New York Times signals composes the corona virus as a domino. Just as in the 60s and 70s, US geopolitical strategy was built around domino theory (if one country falls to communism…) Niemann pictures the domino theory of epidemiology [fragility].
Illustrator Chris Ware (“Bedtime”) frequently makes smartphones a narrative device around which emotions, expectations and social arrangements orbit and get pulled into. [family, distance, touch, disjuncture]. His work is about territories and boundaries (see his extraordinary Building Stories) The “Bedtime” image sharpens and dissolves the boundaries of private and public, professional and personal, and are as fragile as the boundaries of life and death.
Tomer Hanuka’s (“A chorus of thanks”) graphic, day-glo image-making creates spaces with angular emotions –cutting through to make sharp urban geographies [belonging, expression]. Love generated from negative space.
Kadir Nelson’s (“Say their names”) heroic, iconic, sculptural mode of inhabiting space and images is carved out in the cover marking the death of George Floyd with an image of Floyd composed of other slain black Americans. It’s a monumental image, a monument of victims. Entitled “Say their names”, what kind of Republic enables and embodies this momument? What kinds of monuments will we all need to re-public our spaces, to publicise the stories of those not in the official history books? Nelson’s image, like the medical measurements of track and trace, is a measure of racism, of where it has been, of who it has killed.
A very different kind of measurement is rendered in the work of Grace Lynne Haynes, an immersive exploration of the creative form-making of colour. Her New Yorker cover images (“Sojourner Truth, Founding Mother” and “Trendsetters”) are creative ecosystems of what ecological thinker Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter”. She tells Francoise Mouly, “When I was an undergraduate, I couldn’t find information on how to paint darker-brown skin tones, so I began painting my characters in a deep black. Since then, the color black has been the focus of my paintings. I want to challenge the notion that black represents evil and showcase how darkness can be positive and pure.”
It’s hard to know what kind of public, or publics may emerge after the shock of Covid. Many thinkers on technology have associated the rise of print culture and its uniformity with nationalism and the nation state. In the age of social media, does the idea of the singular ‘public’ belong to a media previous age? Perhaps the recent failures of public opinion polls may not be a crisis of data measurement, but a crisis of the very idea of the ‘public’ as a measure in an era of niche and fluid publicking?
In their paper on social innovation, ‘Designing Controversies and Their Publics’, Tommaso Venturini, Donato Ricci, Michele Mauri, Lucy Kimbell, Axel Meunier, argue that, “As in the title of Walter Lippmann’s famous book The Phantom Public, the public is a phantom or rather a gaggle of ghosts provisionally assembled around a specific issue and by no means made uniform by it.” But we also know that as people gather around their trusted news sources, certain kinds of publics in the West are becoming more uniform in their public positions on issues such as Brexit, President Trump and the wearing of masks.
The online version of Kaidir Nelson’s “Say their names” is a stark, simple tragic statement that we can no longer pretend not to see. There is no turning back the clock, we will need to re-public. I imagine the re-publicking as a kind of re-wilding, no longer hierarchical republic but flat, rich in colours, curves and conversations. Like Diana EJaita’s “A Family Blooms”. A new kin created from endlessly playful perspectives
Reading
Brassett, Jamie and O'Reilly, John (2015) ‘Styling the Future. A philosophical account of scenarios & design’ Futures, Volume 74, November 2015
Dufrenne, M. (1973) The phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Northwestern University Press.
Venturini, Tommaso; Ricci, Donato; Mauri, Michele; Kimbell, Lucy; Meunier, Axel. ‘Designing Controversies and Their Publics’, Design Issues, vol. 31, no. 3