RICARDO BÁEZ

Archivo Gráfico™ Venezuela

When the mind proliferates images of accord, and designers form the enunciabilities of a nation, the archive is burnished to a dimension bound in static proportion. The velocity and range of a country’s aesthetic regime is articulated in the power of graphic form, surpassing solely the built, concentrated in the mobile projections – record covers, magazines, catalogues, books. Forging a timeline vulnerable to erosion, Venezuelan graphic designer Ricardo Báez formatted a potent repository, Archivo Gráfico™ Venezuela, enabling introspection into types of corporate sponsorship routinely tied to oil extraction, such as El Farol magazine, “where Venezuelans themselves got to know their country through the eyes of a US oil company, Creole”. Pulsating forward new perceptions of modernity, these graphic articles were clearly defined by the engines of industry. Climaxes of identity were situated as masks across frontiers, “demonstrating that design is an autonomous language that defines a way of thinking in Venezuela, something that the Chavista revolution has sought to erase” – surrendering posthumously a compass of Caracas’ enduring voice.

The following interview has been edited for length and translated from the original Spanish into English.

Describe your foundational archive in one sentence.

Archivo Gráfico™ Venezuela is an incomplete and constantly expanding digital archive that contemplates the production of Venezuelan Graphic Design between the years 1950–2000.

How do you view the act of archiving itself, and how do you forge new territories of implementation from these references (with students, collectives, etc, even within your own practice?)

In Venezuela,  memory (cultural, political, social, educational) has been systematically erased over the last twenty years, it's important for an individual or a collective to decide to archive (whatever that may be) to leave a memory of what some wish to keep secret. To know about our past to understand what to do in the present and the future, both the mistakes and the successes. For me personally, as an actively producing graphic designer, reviewing the entire past of Venezuelan graphic design has been more valuable than even having studied academically at a design school. Analyzing design pieces and critically reviewing design decisions made in a specific context can be a tremendous aid to personal and collective development.

What was the initial vision and impetus for recovering, selecting, and presenting these archives?

When I began studying design (PRODISEÑO School of Design, Caracas, Venezuela, 2002), I was instilled with an interest in the history of Venezuelan design, not only to study its "history," but to understand the importance and power of graphic design in Venezuela, in relation to the region (Latin America) and the world. When I began collecting design pieces created here between the 1960s and 1980s, I was impressed by the immense quality of both the graphic design and the exhaustive graphic production they had (printing with special inks, experimental bindings, etc.). It was a pre-Internet era in the country, and there was very little access to global references, except through books and magazines. When I compared what I saw of universal graphic design with Venezuelan graphic design, I began to wonder why Venezuelan graphic design had not been included in the historical canon of graphic design. I tried many times to make connections or upload material to the internet through platforms like Flickr or Tumblr, but it was always very irregular. More than twenty years later, I decided to create Archivo Gráfico™ Venezuela, which draws mostly from my personal graphic design collection. I wanted to begin publicizing the high quality of Venezuelan graphic design, and thus—perhaps it's too utopian an idea—reach researchers so they would at least consider including Venezuela in the universal history of graphic design, given its uniqueness and high quality of execution (in every sense!).

On territory: with the weight of the archive centered on Caracas, were there also regional shifts throughout Venezuela on graphic design culture?

Graphic design (called Venezuelan, perhaps it should be called Caracas graphic design) was produced in Caracas but was distributed and exhibited throughout almost the entire country through specific design pieces, such as the magazine El Farol, which was distributed free of charge throughout the country, with approximately 40,000 copies per issue. It could be said that at the time that magazine was produced, there were almost as many magazines as there were people in the country. By distributing a quality design piece, people are nourished by that aesthetic, and that leads to developing design criteria—albeit unconscious—for everyday life. I also believe there are examples, such as regional museums, where design pieces were produced in Caracas, such as the Barquisimeto Museum (Lara state, Venezuela) or the Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art (Ciudad Bolívar, Bolívar state). We could name many more examples, but there is a design effect produced in Caracas that spread to the rest of the country in multiple ways.

Continuities & Shifts

What does the visual culture of 1960–1990 tell us about Venezuela then — and now?

The visual culture from mid-20th-century Venezuela reveals much about the country then, and it also resonates today. At that time, Venezuela reached a remarkably high—arguably excessive—sociocultural and economic level within the region. As a result, many cultural expressions, especially graphic design, attained extraordinary quality and significance. It also reflects the Venezuela of today: when a political ideology seeks to erase traces of cultural evolution, it affects the nation as a whole. I'm referring to a very specific event that happened a few years ago, when a Minister of Culture requested that all emblems (all designed by Venezuelan design masters) of museums and public institutions associated with culture be replaced with a single indigenous symbol. Such an action, on the one hand, demonstrates great resentment toward the country's past, but it also demonstrates that design is an autonomous language that defines a way of thinking in Venezuela, something that the Chavista revolution has sought to erase. I believe it's difficult for that to disappear. A large part of my interest in creating the Archivo Gráfico™ Venezuela is to counteract this systematic disappearance of what Venezuela was seventy years ago, at least from the perspective of graphic design and its cultural, political, and social consequences.

On geography: describe the influences, challenges, and pressures of design identity across Venezuela, Latin America, and the broader world in context to the period 1960-1990. 

I believe Venezuelan graphic design has its own identity, but it's always strongly influenced by European and North American design. From what I've spoken with some of the key figures of that era, I don't think there was any question about what constituted Latin American design or not, or whether there should be a brand that identified them as Latino. Perhaps some of the exponents of graphic design in Venezuela had that idea, but it wasn't the general idea.

What became a form of ‘vernacular’ and what was considered evolutionary, challenging and innovative?

I think the experimental and exhaustive use of typographic techniques in Venezuelan graphic design is the element that I find most characteristic, and we could say evolutionary and innovative, in its practice throughout the mid-20th century. I think conceiving a design solution primarily from a typographic perspective is something that was widely practiced here, and obviously, it's an idea that's been practiced all over the world. Due to the frenetic production in cultural environments (between all museums and galleries, some 2,000 or 3,000 art catalogs have been produced in 50 years), we can see that all graphic and typographic design was pushed to the limits of ideas and techniques, too.

Arteries of Representation: Sponsorship, Content, Audience

Museums, petroleum companies, corporate foundations — how do you see these channels as representational arteries, extending beyond aesthetics into cultural ideology? To what extent can design be read as a form of cultural propaganda, and to what extent as autonomous invention?

Today, it can be said that Venezuelan graphic design of the last century existed primarily thanks to oil extraction. The largest percentage of the budget allocated to produce design pieces came from oil companies or government institutions, and public museums. It's clear that graphic design in Venezuela was the main communicative and expressive vehicle that helped promote ideological, political, and cultural thought, and the great example was always—once again—El Farol magazine, where Venezuelans themselves got to know their country through the eyes of a US oil company (Creole). I can't see Venezuelan graphic design as an autonomous invention because graphic design as an idea wasn't invented in Venezuela, but I do believe that a way of approaching design was created, a way of thinking autonomous from design was created.