If you want to see Jonathan Zawada’s work via his website you’re going to have to wait. Literally. Rotating upon a timetable system his folio slowly ticks over one hour at a time. That said, through The Presets, KIM, Tina Kalivas and as Co-editor and Art Director of the Modular’s magazine, M, most will already be familiar with his work.

Jeff Burch has also been busy. Working with Therese Rawsthorne of Youth World, contributing articles to doingbird magazine and continuing to establish his own project The Spring Press it is a phenomenon that he finds time to hang up his washing let alone supply us with the transcripts of conversations such as the one to follow. Distracting Jonathan from a new high-score on his Gameboy they laid their professional cards on the table, speaking openly about their experiences and thoughts on the balance between art and commerce.

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JZ – A lot of your work seems to attempt to introduce new elements and tangents with a bit more social cache into the realms of fashion and music, areas of design which traditionally are pretty shallow and fleeting - is it important for you to “mature” (for lack of a better word) those marketplaces?

JB – I do think it’s important to consider, quite critically, what you are creating when you are working within those contexts, but I’m not sure I’m consciously trying to ‘mature’ them per se. Design is inherently ephemeral and I guess one thing I am trying to avoid is becoming one of the many designers that embrace that idea so completely, and as a result produce quite trend based work. I am searching for longevity in design and a form of classicism, no matter what context the work is presented, which may read like an attempt at maturing the marketplaces. Working in this kind of manner can prove difficult, and is often inappropriate, but I think a lot of the people I work for appreciate this approach. There are certain sectors of fashion and music that are in the pursuit of that same ideal.

JZ – Yeah, I know just what you mean. I think for me, because I never really did any tertiary study, for much of my career I’ve been simply learning how to do my job. As a result I think I’ve ended up using many of these classic old designs as my targets in my work - often borrowing quite liberally and rather obviously from them I think. Its amazing how much 100 years of print design can teach you - and more importantly how much easier it can make you life in terms of simply executing jobs! Working so much in fashion and music, a lot of my design is just a value adding veneer that’s added to products. As fun as designing for that can be, it can also be pretty unfulfilling and often that emptiness can make the brief incredibly hard for me to fulfill. The most enjoyable parts of design I think are about practical problem solving, and where those problems aren’t present - like designing a standardized format CD cover or t-shirt print - I really need to add in or construct some problems that need to be solved. That’s where the slightly more conceptual approach that I’ve taken with work in the past has been out of necessity.

JB – Do you think it’s important to bring those conceptual approaches into commercial spaces like that? Do you think doing that may homogenise those ideas in anyway?

JZ – Its a tough thing, just like you say, that conceptual approach ends up being homogenized in order not just to appeal to a broader market but also just because you always have to take several ideas from your clients into consideration. That’s not such a bad thing though, I mean it’s not my role as a designer to produce art, just to make somebody else’s product look as good as I can, and its that co-operative aspect of design that makes my work more rewarding for me in the long term as it’s never just all me, there’s always other people’s ideas and thoughts in every execution.

How do you delineate between art and design? I’ve always had a theory that art is qualitative and design is quantitative but more and more I’m realizing the two things are often the same, its just about the mindset you want to take on them. Is it important to have a separation do you think?

JB – Yeah, I do think you need some separation. I could definitely try and rationalise whether or not a graphic designer exhibiting in a gallery, or a clothing label constructing an installation in some space necessitates art, forever. I think design/advertising is drawing more and more from the ideas surrounding art, but I don’t necessarily think the outcomes equate to the same thing. I think a sort of separation exists whether or not we want it there? Design/advertising is mostly never engaged with at the same intellectual level as art, so I do find it hard to prescribe the same sorts of value. I do think more and more theory is becoming an important part of design but I think generally, depending on where the work is shown, most design is simply read at face value (even by designers themselves) and that is a hard thing to contend with when you do want to consider stuff like theory. Maybe there needs to be a complete shift in paradigm? In saying that, it is hard for me to think about my work in any other terms beside an art approach. For whatever reason that kind of work method seems much more valuable than making decisions based purely on stylistic reasoning, whether or not people are considering the work deeply.

I really like what you were saying about the co-operative aspect of design, I also like what you were saying about ‘borrowing’ and how that in itself is an effective mode of working. How important an idea is appropriation or history for you? Appropriation seems like a very taboo subject in design generally doesn’t it? Someone mentioned to me that your presentation at the Semi Permanent design conference revolved around this idea.

JZ – Yeah, my presentation at Semi Permanent revolved around the idea of appropriation (or stealing as I referred to it) in my design work. I didn’t really get to go as far with it as I’d originally hoped but basically I tried to go through a number of my jobs and identify exactly where the references that combined to make up the final execution came from. I think I was really trying to exorcise some ghosts and also help kids understand that appropriation is a huge part of the job and not at all something to be clandestine or ashamed of. I don’t think the concept of appropriation ever really enters into my thinking on any artistic/design level though, it’s more of a truism of the job I think. For me I really believe that good graphic design, any design for that matter, by its very nature is always going to be a composite of other prior visual ideas. The first and foremost requirement of design is to communicate with an audience, and communication requires a common language that both the speaker and the listener can understand. Unlike art, which isn’t required to communicate to its audience (its enough for the creator to understand it) design is only completed once a message has been transmitted, and so where artists invent visual languages, I think designers borrow from those narrow dialects and translate them to the broader languages of their audience. As wanky as it sounds I think it’s a modernist approach to utilizing post-modernism.

I find there is a strange hang-up in the Australian creative community that revolves around who-came-up-with-what first and who-owns-that-style. I think it’s a real sign of our very, very juvenile design and art culture that really highlights our insecurities of not feeling like we’re up to the European or American standard. I think that attitude is also really responsible for what could become a very stagnant creative culture. Primarily though, for me, the best way to learn is to imitate.

That leads me to think more about how a kind of pseudo art/design culture has developed over the last decade or so, where a huge portion of the creative community is more preoccupied and interested in the work of commercial artist/designers than professional “gallery” artists. Where you have hugely successful entities like Kaws, that don’t seem to quite make art, and nor are they illustrators are designers. How do you see this? Do you think art is simply less relevant or are audiences just no longer interested in challenging themselves?

JB – I would hate to think we’re losing art audience numbers to the bowels of the design art scene. I do think that broader audience you’re speaking of constitutes a different demographic than those that may appreciate Francis Alyss or Len Lye… I can’t imagine they are losing interest in that and opting for Neckface, Silas or whatever.

It’s an important and large part of design community but I do have a very limited understanding or interest in it. It frightens me how fashionable it is. Its references are acute and mostly contemporary so perhaps it’s that false sense of ‘the new’ that is resonating with a much broader audience. Maybe the consumable elements of that trend attracts people too… like a screen-print of a character in a gallery, then on a t-shirt, then a yardage version on a shoe, and then as a plastic toy. But the idea that anyone can own or view work like that and grasp the language is a very important one.

As you were saying that idea of a common visual language (between artist and audience) is a key thread in design as a whole. If design/art like this is already in gallery type spaces how do you view collectives like M/M Paris and their attempts at alignment with fine art? Are these two reaches at fine art comparable, one with a more tasteful aesthetic? Are they essentially the same thing presented in different incarnations? What do you think of more trendy design/art and how do you think that relates to the type of art made by designers?

JZ – I guess a lot of the art/design crossover has been a great learning space for me in the past, in that the immediacy of the visual language of designer art has opened up doors that have made contemporary art accessible and approachable. The designers out there who approach and treat their work like art, both now and in the past, such as M/M Paris or Tomato, seem only ever to maintain a skin deep similarity to art and for me that merely comes from their mutual exploratory natures, rather than ever truly occupying an art space. I guess like all things there are many, many areas of grey out there, but it seems like with art you can always cut through every aspect of the work and simply feel its motivation, and that is what is always going to define something as either art or design. I think its hard to cloak mere academic experiments and explorations as motivations behind art to make them appear as pure creative explorations - and for me that’s the difference between good art/bad art/design art. But really - any way you can make a living, go for it!

JB – Annie mentioned you bought a house?! Beside home loans and domestic bliss what’s on the horizon for you?

JZ – Lately I’ve been trying to develop a few personally motivated projects, the main one being a comic/fashion/magazine hybrid that I do with my
friend Shane Sakkeus which is called PETIT MAL! It’s very hard to see how it will ever become financially viable, but I just love the idea of it so much and its one of the first real design challenges that I find can totally consume me. It’s been a great project too in that the positive response we’ve had to it has been so widespread globally and rather than any level of PR being responsible for it, its just been word of mouth over the internet - we’ve recently done some pages for Lodown and some others for V Magazine based on the concept and people in some bizarre places like the Netherlands and Greece really seem to love it. I’ve also got an exhibition at Monster Children gallery coming up early next year, which should (hopefully) be fun - although based on my previous comments about design/art I’m sure nobody will turn up. Other than that I guess I’m just trying to develop a few more overseas leads on work and now that I have this hideous home loan I’m having to swallow some of my pride and get back into working on actual jobs again - I’ve got to stop being a difficult cunt with clients, which is hard, because I’ve really enjoyed that over the last couple of years!

How about you? Any exciting plans for the near future?

JB – For the next month or so I’ll be concentrating on getting a couple new books on The Spring Press out. They are by a two great photographers Max Doyle and Rachael Cassells, who both do Doingbird Magazine and I feel like I owe it to their photography to get it properly distributed. I’m also working with Paris based photographer Henry Roy on a larger format book which is also very exciting. The Spring Press as a project is very encouraging for me living in Sydney as it’s a chance to really work outward from here… being from dark rainy New Zealand I often grapple with the culture here as it’s quite different! Michaela Sanders and I ( who I work with under And Elsewhere) are working together with Therese Rawsthorne on re-branding Youth World (she is going self- titled) and on getting some larger client work under our belts. There are also other smaller projects including work for New Zealand designer Jimmy D happening here and there.