On Camouflage
A brief for a poster from artist Ryan Gander
A1, 2003
Extract from interview with Ryan Gander from Appendix, Artimo, 2003:
RG: The pure version of that is... errrrrrrrrr... I don’t know. Daring to fail, again, I suppose. Maybe it happens when the thing takes on its own direction and you can take your hands off the wheel. Do you know what I mean? The camoflaged poster that John Morgan made is a great example. It was a funny exchange of events. I wrote a brief for a lecture called On Camouflage and asked him to design the poster, like the rest of the series. All the other posters were given to me as computer files, but his arrived from London in an A3 envelope. He’d already been a bit cagey when I’d asked him how many colours it was and how much it would cost to produce. When I opened it some dead grass and soil fell out and I started to worry. The poster was folded, and it was the only one that used a landscape format. It turned out he’d used an actual circus poster and added the information for the lecture in the usual white box at the bottom. Of course these posters are everywhere and because the style has such a tradition you automatically know what they’re advertising without having to read them – that was the camoflage.
