Hasta La Ideas

In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Luigi Caccia Dominioni.

Dan Friedman: Born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1945. Died in New York City, 1995.

The best a designer can do is consistently offer forthright attempts at communication, by way of an open and multifaceted mind. The offerings of most designers are meant to be metabolized instantly, as minor tweaks to existing models; this is commerce without content. It is a rare designer who resists what is a very seductive and embedded process. Rarer still is a design practice that weds a loving knowledge of her/his craft with reflections of the self, the client, the globe and the cosmos. The latter description was Dan Friedman.

Friedman was central to the 1980s New York scene. The decade and place was ridiculously fertile, breeding genius in every corner of culture—home to the likes of Sherrie Levine, Alan Buchsbaum, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haim Steinbach, John Zorn, David Byrne, Paul Auster, Keith Haring and on and on… This multidisciplinary, multicultural, gender-role-fighting, polysexual vanguard is often placed under the banner of postmodernsim, though many involved bristled at this ism (Friedman referred to himself as a radical modernist). Friedman came to this place of hardcore and restless bounty by way of a fairly rational progression, almost pedigreed. From the Midwest he went to college at Carnegie Mellon, from which he traveled to Basel to study orthodox modernist graphic design under Armin Hoffman (and others) at the Schule für Gestaltung. In the ’70s he was the epitome of success in his field, with teaching posts at Yale and positions at Anspach Grossman Portugal and Pentagram. But in 1982, deeply disenchanted, he restarted his private practice. “What I realized in the 1970s, when I was doing major corporate identity projects, is that design had become a preoccupation with what things look like rather than with what they mean.”

Left: Friedman’s 1988 Fountain table for the Formica Corporation. Right: Friedman in front of his 1985 assemblage The Wall. Top image: Astral shelving and wall elements (left) and Friedman’s apartment circa 1982

Left: the Corona chair for Neotu (1991). Right: a Friedman collage for the Cultural Geometry show at Deitch Projects in 1988

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