like Rachel Whitereads' play with Olympic coloured ring stains, others just make me go 'Huh?!' Personally I think the UK has some of the best graphic talent in the world and I would love the Olympic committee to do the same thing with this graphic talent and create a beautiful lasting series of posters. Grafik magazine did something along these lines in 2009 when they asked 39 of the designers and studios in the UK to choose an event and to create a poster for it to raise money for the paralympics UK.
Anyway here are the artist posters in full, all the artists names are in the bottom left corner and the originals will be on show in 2012 at Tate Britain.
With the exception of Whiteread and Morris, these are embarrassingly either irrelevant or just plain bad. It strikes me that the same old names are plucked from the air with things like this rather than setting the whole thing out to everyone. The results won't be remembered like the 1968 Mexico design for instance.
ReplyDeleteHi Strictly Kev,
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to read the piece and to leave a comment, it's always nice to discuss topics. I agree that the posters by Whiteread and Morris are by far the most successful, for me they succeed by engaging with the idea of the games and take it somewhere different, the others in the series feel less developed. It would be interesting to know what the brief was, or even if there was one!
In general the collection feels like someone in the organizing committee has been given a copy of 'British Art Today', bookmarked a few pages and then after some 'consultations' has chosen a series of safe reliable artists who have a high recognition factor among the general public.
As it stands we have a series of images that on the whole say more about the artists than about the UK today or the Olympic games and that will probably sell quite well in the Tate gift shop.