When the album cover became the CD booklet, designers faced an ultimatum: shrink or die. Either way, an era was ending. As a vehicle for graphic design, the record cover had generated mainstream art out of an experimental form. Standards were set in the early 1960s by Reid Miles and Francis Wolf, designer and photographer respectively at the Blue Note jazz label. Their iconographic portraiture froze Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane behind sleek typefaces and bright colour blocks, transporting fans into the underworld of jazz before the needle even hit the record. By the middle of the decade, everyone had caught on, with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home encouraging the public to expect as much from the artwork as the records. In the 1970s, millions of albums passed over the counter, sprayed with the mythological fantasies of 1970s groups like Led Zeppelin and Yes. Storm Thorgerson's studio Hipgnosis performed startling conceptual feats for Pink Floyd, whose inflatable pig still haunts commuters as they roll past Battersea power station on the 8:56. By the 1980s, the pin-up commercialism of Wham and Duran Duran was no longer distinguishable from marketing material. But the job had been done. Graphic design was part of everyday life.
"The Peter Saville Show" at London's Design Museum, will chart how one man got to grips with the CD jewel case, albeit begrudgingly (don't expect to see his artwork displayed at its actual size). Saville is one of Britain's most admired graphic designers and this, his first retrospective, will celebrate 30 years of sleeve design and art direction. Although he has produced work for Christian Dior, the Whitechapel Gallery and Stella McCartney, he is best known for his record covers, particularly those for Roxy Music, Joy Division, New Order, as well as Britpop groups Suede and Pulp, for whom working with Saville became an obsession. It is no coincidence that as the CD began to dominate the market, Saville's output dwindled. It was only when contacted by Suede's Brett Anderson in the mid-1990s that his interest in the medium was revived.
Saville's cover for Joy Division's Closer recently came second in a Q magazine writers' poll for the greatest record cover of all time (Sergeant Pepper came tenth; Jamie Reid's iconoclastic image for the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen came top). His most enduring work to date, though, is probably the 1983 sleeve for New Order's 12" single Blue Monday, memorable for its prescient image-an enlarged facsimile of a floppy disk (still a novelty in the early 1980s)-and the fact that Saville's extravagant use of fine card and colour meant it cost more to produce than the sale price of the record.
Saville claimed always to be precisely 12 months ahead of his time. During the early 1970s, when his peers were still dabbling in hippydom, Saville was hanging out in a Manchester club with girls whose eyeliner was as cheap as their fishnets. He was impressed by their "achievable glamour," something which Paul Raymond's soft porn magazines and Roxy Music's early album covers had turned him onto. During the cut-and-paste mayhem of the punk era, which saw designers everywhere grappling with scalpels and glue, Saville was reproducing the hard lines of typographic pioneers such as Jan Tschichold. Next, amid the visual pollution of the postmodern 1980s, Saville turned his attention to the cool, monotone beauty of Yves Klein, stripping his own clogged and referential design back to what he called an "essentialism." This resulted in the abstract colour fields for which he is known today.
Saville's real talent lies in his ability to straddle the worlds of pop, fashion and art, drawing references from each. But he has always been aware of the surface nature of design. No one, he once said, ever bought a packet of biscuits on the basis of its wrapper.
With the commercial success of digitally encoded music now looking certain (in early May Apple's online music store sold over 1m songs in its first week of trading) the CD wrapper itself may have to face the music. Having shrunk, record design has vanished. Popular music is jettisoning the images which helped make it consumable, leaving Peter Saville and a handful of his contemporaries as the last great practitioners of a brief and brilliant artform.
The Peter Saville Show, Design Museum, 23 May to 14 September
END OF THE ARTS COUNCILS AS WE KNOW THEM?
Arts Councils have been the more or less unquestioned instrument of cultural funding in Britain since the idea was proposed by Maynard Keynes after the second world war. In England, that remains the case. The Arts Councils of Scotland and Wales, however, have been going through troubled times. There has been a major shake-up of the organisation in Wales, and in Scotland the whole principle of an arm's-length body is being questioned. Jack McConnell, who was returned as first minister in the May elections, is known to be unhappy at the attacks his executive has received from the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) after three years of standstill budgeting. Does this spell an end to the SAC as it has been since it split off from the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1994? McConnell has been talking about "a shake-up of the arts agencies" in Scotland, which could result in an amalgamation of various cultural bodies, bringing them under the direct control of government. That would allow ministers to steer arts funding towards worthy objectives, such as education or social inclusion. Scottish politicians always pay lip service to the arts, but are generally unenthusiastic about the way that the lion's share of the budget goes to big-spending companies like Scottish Opera or the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. They point out that whenever there is a funding crisis, government is usually asked to step in and bail them out. The logical step, they argue, would be for the Scottish executive to take control from the outset. Are ministers the best judges of cultural priorities? Is it the role of government to determine whether an experimental drama programme at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow is more deserving of support than a conceptual art show in Edinburgh? The arts world is appalled at the prospect, but the current feeling among Scottish ministers seems to be that he who pays the piper should call the tune.
IS ART REALLY TORTURE?
A little story about modern art being used as a torture method in the Spanish civil war has been doing the rounds of the international press since January, recently winding up on the front page of the online version of the Art Newspaper. It started when El Pa?s spoke to historian Jos? Milicua, who claims that he found an "artist" who had designed installations for prisons used by republicans in 1930s Barcelona. Supposedly, this was part of a "psycho-technical method," in which abstract patterns related to the work of avant-gardists such as Kandinsky, and films inspired by Luis Bu?uel's eye-slicing scene, were used to dement fascist prisoners. Were Catalan anarchists just too colourful for the standard filth and agony of torture chambers? Or are art writers just being taken in by any old crap on display?
BIENNALE BLARNEY IN NATIONAL PAVILIONS
As the Venice Biennale sets up for its 50th birthday this year, Scotland and Wales have sponsored their own pavilions in the Giardini for the first time. The Scottish pavilion will show works by Jim Lambie, Claire Barclay and Simon Starling, while Wales will be represented by Paul Seawright, Cerith Wyn Evans and Bethan Huws. The "British" pavilion (er, identity overlap?) is showing work by Chris Ofili. Most artists recognise the national pavilions as an anachronism; they are underpinned by an ethos of nationalism which seems OK for athletes but absurd when applied to contemporary art. But such incongruity provides juicy fodder for New Zealander Mike Stevenson, whose intention is to tell the story of the "Trekka," the only Kiwi-made car (although it had a Czech engine and chassis) in the country's history. As if to heighten the surreal conflation of nationalism and art, New Zealand's "pavilion" will be a recently restored 18th-century church, known as La Maddalena, the only round building in Venice. The exhibition is about an obsolete car in a famously car-less city. Stevenson's joke seems aimed at the very idea of New Zealand nationalism.
UNDER THE RADAR Low frequency listings
Letter-openers made of shrapnel and a gavel carved from a bit of a capsized Spanish armada ship feature in Art of the Apocalypse, an exhibition of trench art at the Freemasons' Hall, London, from 30th June.
l Nuala Willis sings All You Who Sleep Tonight, composed for her by Jonathan Dove, at Wilton's-the oldest music hall in Europe-in London's east end, on 16th June.
Leeds's buzzy Northern School of Contemporary Dance unleashes its class of 2003 in Verve at the Lowry, Salford on 5th June.
There's a double dose of eye-slicing at London's Cin? Lumi?re on 23rd May, with a rediscovered version of Luis Bu?uel's Un Chien Andalou screening in a double bill with the standard print.
Sheila Stewart, the queen of Scots travelling music, and Ljiljana Buttler, the Bosnian "Mother of Gypsy Soul" go head to head at the Newcastle Playhouse's Gypsy Music Day on 21st June.
Release your own bacteria into the ether as part of transgenic theatre piece Genterra, at the Natural History Museum, London, from 21 June.
The story of a gypsy curse and a split personality, Arthur Crabtree's Madonna of the Seven Moons is at the NFT, London from 7th June as part of its tribute to smouldering Phyllis Calvert.
