The Art of Noise

Photo by Pierre Tousssaint

Put simply, Jonathan Zawada does a lot of stuff. The Sydney-based artist, designer, illustrator and animator started out building websites but is now exhibiting his own work at galleries around Australia, designing for Japanese label 20,000,000 fragments, directing music videos for bands like The Presets, working on fanzine Petit mal!”>Petit mal! and art-directing his fashion-based project, Trust Fun. At 28 years old, Jonathan’s relationship with the creative disciplines of art and design involves conflicting motivations. Here, he discusses the tension of working across both realms, and his attempts to mediate between each practice.

by Jonathan Zawada

We understand you started out as a designer?
I’d been doing odd bits of design during high school. My part time jobs were in an animation studio doing tweening and cleanups and these old school hand-drawn animations. I taught myself a lot of it. I started a design degree, but only did six months because I got a job building websites in 1999.

What kinds of sites?
Hideous websites like [Australian telemarketer] Danoz Direct, which had absolutely no design. But I got to do lots of Starbursts and animated gifs — that was good! The experience was also important because through it I met George Gorrow and his brother Steve. George now does [Australian fashion label] Ksubi. They had a little office space out the back of the company that I worked for and I started building the websites that they designed. Then they moved out to start another business and asked me to join up. I became a partner and director in that little creative thing and really learned design there.

by Jonathan Zawada

How would you describe the difference between your art and your design work?
They both come from totally different motivations. Where art is qualitative, design is quantitative. Design is measurable and external, it is produced for a client and an audience and it doesn’t really come into being until it is revealed in the marketplace or the commercial world.

My motivation for design work is not necessarily creative, it comes from the challenge of problem solving. On the other hand, my art is really about exploring ideas that weave between being concrete and abstract. They aren’t produced with an audience in mind and there’s no goal to be achieved or way of measuring success. I really produce art to satisfy my own interests, to explore ideas and concepts. This process lets me learn and research and put things together in my own way.

by Jonathan Zawada

Can you pinpoint anything that has informed this attitude to each discipline?
Really it is just been one long visceral strand of events, but [at least one thing was] meeting my wife Annie. She comes from an incredibly creative and talented family of musicians, painters and writers where all of those forms of expression are taken completely without artifice, affectation or false elevation, instead all coming from a completely natural and honest place. The way she viewed art and design was in polar opposition to everything I thought about it until that point. Her view was that art only needed to be appreciated in the most simplest terms of either “iking” or “not liking” it. Everything beyond that, all academic dissection and analysis was completely moot as it would all eventually be filtered through the initial bottleneck of “like”.

What do you ‘like’ about your own design and art work?
I “like” the practical challenges involved in design [rather] than it being a form of creative expression. And I “like” that my art is completely independent. To generalize, it’s concerned with the aspects of my life that are shaped by technology. It’s really an attempt to take personal possession of all of the meaningful parts of my day-to-day life; the parts that completely lack dimension or form as they are part of a virtual environment. When your consciousness is projected into a virtual environment it never leaves behind any artifacts, so the art is an attempt to create these artifacts.

by Jonathan Zawada

How about your design work? Are there any concrete examples that you are especially proud of?
It’s hard to separate out design that is successful in the world – design that people like — from design that I’m proud of. The cover for the [Sydney-based DJs] Canyons EP is a piece that I really love. The aesthetic simplicity of the execution and the encapsulation of all of the aspects of the job in such a basic form makes it a piece that would be very hard to come upon again. I’m also especially proud of the video for BMW and The Presets, “Are You The One?” re-mix. It involved directing, editing and so many aspects of design to construct the universe within which the video took place. The challenges in the brief made it something completely unique in terms of the problems that had to be solved in the execution — what’s more I still enjoy looking at it!

by Jonathan Zawada

Do you draw on different inspiration for your art and design?
Completely. With my art, I don’t look at too much. It’s more of an internal process. This is another reason that I think it’s really different to design. Design employs the process of looking at reference points. I used to have this theory that art just invents its own terminology and visual language, whereas design, by definition, has to partake in a visual language that already exists in some way. So in that respect I guess you can’t consider design and not consider art as well. Art that’s out there probably informs my design, but it rarely informs my art.

What are you working on at the moment?
Over the last few months I feel like I’ve been a bit shoe-horned into the design side. It’s hard to turn things away when you’re working for yourself as a commercial illustrator or designer and having to produce kind of blank canvas kind of stuff. I HATE open briefs! There’s nothing less inspiring than “do whatever you want, as long as it fits on a T-Shirt, can be printed within three colors and won’t cost us too much to produce and won’t cost you more time than our budget allows.” That’s not freedom at all.

by Jonathan Zawada

Do you think that open briefs are a cheeky way for corporations to co-opt your art?
Open briefs have become an easy way out for people in marketing departments all over to avoid taking responsibility for their jobs. Even worse, they are viewed as an easy way to get PR without having to do or risk anything on behalf of the client. I’ve recently ended up in various degrees of confusion that have resulted from different companies giving me open briefs but then realizing that they could end up in degrees of legal difficulty because of the results. In some cases I’m sure an open brief can result in something great, but I think in 99 times out of 100 it simply comes from laziness and desperation that just diminishes the value of both the art and the brand in the long run.

by Jonathan Zawada

Why then, do you take on these sort of jobs?
The hardest thing to pass up is definitely the money. It is incredible how many friends I have who are in a similar position. We would all love to just be doing our art but have been spoiled by years of working in the commercial realm and earning a decent wage.

You also get used to the idea of having your art (albeit a mutated commercial form of it) sponsored in advance, with no risk. Truthfully though, there is also something appealing about having something mass-produced with your designs and imagery on it. There is something that mass-market design objects can achieve that art can’t, no matter how close the two things come together. There’s something about the ability to create a world within the real world — not just within a gallery — which makes that world you’ve created more real and more inhabitable!

If you could just do art, would you?
Absolutely and totally. I feel like the problems I construct for myself in my artwork are far more interesting that the problems I would get from a design brief. Getting a CD back or seeing stuff on t-shirts isn’t nearly as exciting as it used to be.