Our Polite Society

Specially for Constant 1 0 1 Our Polite Society has created a unique typeface based on Constant’s work. Together with design studio thonik they have developed the project’s identity.

On Constant

When they moved to the Netherlands in 2004 to study Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, they entered the incredible cosmos of Dutch art and design. They remember the overwhelming experience of diving into this history through books, exhibitions and personal encounters, and slowly becoming part of it themselves, first in the context of the international community of students and teachers at the academy, and later, after founding the studio in 2008, through collaborations with artists and cultural institutions.

Through former Rietveld teacher Henk Groenendijk they learned about Constant and the New Babylon project for the first time. Once Constant was on our radar, they encountered him regularly. What strikes them in retrospect is that these encounters happened in both art and design contexts, and were often unexpected.

Context

The Netherlands as the country where art and design come very close – where borders get blurred, making a different kind of work possible – is the reason why Our Polite Society came to study here in the first place, and why they stayed afterwards to build their practice.

Constant’s body of work is certainly one of the examples where this interdisciplinarity is realized in the work itself. Besides the richness and beauty of his oeuvre, this is what strikes and touches OPS the most, and what puts him in line with other references that are important to them, such as Bauhaus and its various post WWII continuations in Europe and overseas.

It’s his forward-thinking, society-focused, and utopian approach which gives birth to works of a specific nature, open-ended, pointing in different directions. This also makes the work difficult to categorise, and at the end of the day it suffers a similar fate as Bauhaus: certain moments being highlighted while others remain underexposed and forgotten, resulting in a one-sided picture, sometimes dangerously close to kitch.

While Polite Society has to acknowledge that this is the way in which history has been written for a long time – in categories, linear – this seems to be the moment in time where they should challenge and question these models, and look back again from the perspective of their own context and time. There are (untold) histories of art and design which should not be left to historians, but also to artists & designers themselves, to be rediscovered, reactivated, and renegotiated within their own context and with their own means.

Previous work

Among others, Our Polite Society have produced works for Bauhaus Dessau, the University of Stockholm, the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, the New Institute Rotterdam, Malmö Konstmuseum and Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA). Their self-initiated work investigates how typographic form mirrors social phenomena, and how it relates to ideology and the distribution of knowledge. Since 2017 they are publishing typefaces under the imprint Our Polite Society Type. Their work has been exhibited at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the International Poster & Graphic Design Festival Chaumont, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Tallinn Art Hall, and State University New York; it has been endowed by the Creative Industries Fund NL, was awarded with the Best Dutch Book Designs, and is part of the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Teaching and research

Our Polite Society are currently teaching at the Konstfack University Stockholm, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam and the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague; they have lectured in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Leipzig, Ghent, Brussels, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Prishtina, Sofia and Montreal, among others. From 2015–2019 they have produced an archival research project in the content of the Research Institute Art & Public Space (LAPS) at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, which was concluded with the exhibition and book The FACIT Model – Globalism, Localism & Identity, published by Spector Books/Leipzig.