Design Anarchy

This radical new aesthetic vision from the founder of Adbusters Magazine looks unflinchingly at contemporary art and graphic design and implicates their seemingly innocuous practitioners in crimes against our culture and our planet. Design Anarchy pioneers a hybrid graphic/text language that is by turns intimate, anarchic, abstract and accusatory, to explore the responsibility of the visual designer and artist in the pollution and redemption of our mental and physical commons. It makes an urgent call for artists, graphic and industrial designers and architects to reengage with the world. And it includes work from some who have already heard that call: Jeff Wall, Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ryan McGinley, Gregory Crewdson and Barbara Kruger. Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, and as its head has launched international social marketing campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and has pioneered the spoof ads, billboard liberations and TV mind-melters featured here. In the battle for a new kind of meaning, Design Anarchy is a 400 page mind bomb without precedent.

The relaunch of the First Things First (FTF) manifesto by Adbusters Magazine in the year 2000 shook the world of design of its very core, implicating its practitioners in crimes against culture and the planet. With Design Anarchy, Adbusters' editor and sometime art director Kalle Lasn takes the FTF debate to another level, using a hybrid graphic/text language that is by turns intimate, anarchic, abstract, and accusatory to explore the role of Design in the pollution and redemption of our mental and physical commons. Handmade elements and a CD-ROM filled with video and Flash pieces expand the debate beyond the page. In the battle for a new kind of meaning, Design Anarchy is a 320 page mind bomb without precedent.