Color Him a Provocateur

Designer Tibor Kalman likes computers.They give individuals the power to fuck things up.

By Brad Wieners

If, as Mickey Knox once quipped, media is like the weather, only man-made, then Tibor Kalman is a man for all seasons. Kalman has excelled as a magazine editor (Colors), an art director (Artforum), a creative director (Interview), and an industrial and graphic design entrepreneur (M&Co) whose clients included Chiat/Day, Jenny Holzer, MTV, MOMA, Talking Heads, and New York's 42nd Street Development Project. Born in Budapest, Kalman emigrated to the US in 1956 at age 7. He grew up in Poughkeepsie, interviewed Timothy Leary for his high school newspaper, and left New York University for Cuba in 1970 to cut sugarcane in the Ten Million Ton Harvest. Recruited by Oliverio Toscani, Kalman launched Colors in 1991 in New York but two years later moved his family to Rome to continue working on the magazine. In 1995, he quit Colors and returned to New York, where he continued to brood over how to make a truly international magazine. His magazine idea is so intriguing, Wired may collaborate with him on it.

Wired: As a designer, you've said you try to make things look wrong. What do you mean?

Kalman : We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-colored or off-fucking-white? You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color - because you don't want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it.
So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay
attention to anyway. We don't talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.

What about those computers? Do they make for more beige, or less?

In a way, computers are helpful, because more and more they are giving individuals the power to fuck things up.

You've said that mass media are horribly beige because sponsors want predictable results. You've also said you want your work to be "mass." So how do you get the sponsorship needed for mass without beige-ing out?

Let's face it: we live at a time when government is less and less

powerful, less and less effective, and the agent of social change, at least for the immedia

te future, is the corporation. So people are going to have to figure out

ways to co-opt corp

orations, to trick them into doing socially responsible things. Colors was a very good example of that. You could look at it as a progressive educator, making people

think in new ways about race. Or, if you looked at it as a Benetton stockholder, you might say, "This is a really great

way to reach the kids."

Yeah, but some look at Colors and think: Benetton uses politics the way Nike uses basketball. They see you co-opted, not Benetton.

Look, if someone is going to permit me to make a publication that is politically and culturally progressive and not tell me to put their favorite movie stars on the cover, if I get to do what I want in an honest way - as I did in the beginning at Colors - then I'm going to do it.
No one gets to work under ethically pure conditions, and I think if you are in touch with your audience and they think what you are doing is honest and credible, then you're on safe ice.

Have media always been so compromised?

There was a time not so long ago when egomaniacs made media to their own personal standards, and when you make something for yourself, it will always be far better and more honest than something you make to please the marketplace. With computers, individuals can be egomaniacs and make the media they think is good.

If you were to design a robot, what would it do?

It would laugh at all my jokes. Actually, intelligent people have spent far too much time talking about robots. What we need is fewer people imagining what robots could do and more people thinking about racism.
How many black people, other than Spike and Mike, work on those cool Nike ads that use African-Americans to set cultural and fashion styles? Let's get robot geniuses working on that shit.

Which is more accurate: "Information wants to be free" or "Information wants you to gimme a hundred dollars"?

Everybody who wants information wants it to be free. People who make it, assemble it, edit it, and publish it want to make a living at it. Some of them want large Mercedes-Benzes. But what I want to know is: How is info supposed to be free when food isn't?

Where are you looking for innovative media?

I don't know. Probably it's being hatched in some garage. It's always the freaks in garages who make things move forward. There's always a garage and antisocial behavior involved. I think without those two things there is no real cultural advancement.
There seem to be a lot of new-media garages. What's your take on them?
I think some of the most innovative Web sites have probably already come and gone. Meanwhile, I think there's tons of room left to experiment with traditional media.

Like what?

I want to know if it's possible to make a movie that's just words, or if it's possible to make a movie on paper. And why can't television be 100 times faster? Or slower? And why are 90 percent of magazines structured the same way? And why do they all stop at borders?

What comes after postmodern?

Relief. Clarity. Faith in the future.