BB Can you tell us a bit about the background of The Paint by Number Museum? How did you come up with the idea?
ÉF & FGM We have been sharing an ongoing interest towards amateur practices. The idea to work with paint-by-number came up last summer. We previously worked on a project together which was about us learning a new craft and our personal apprehensions regarding what we were producing (Ceramics with Émilie / Ceramics with François). With the Paint-by-Number Museum, we wanted to take another approach and distance ourselves by involving others in the project. We indeed produced (and designed?) a certain amount of the artifacts that are on display within the show, but the border between found material and designed material is purposely blurred, or at least not specified.

BB Do you see any parallels between paint-by-number and graphic design processes?
ÉF & FGM We think that there are multiple levels of understanding how paint-by-number can/could be related to graphic design. The most straightforward approach would be to talk about Dan Robbins’s work within the Palmer Painting Company. Robbins categorized himself as a freelance commercial artist. This implies that he was in a semi-precarious position (freelancing, like most graphic designers we know of) and also stuck in the ambivalence of a creative practice that explicitly deserves commercial purposes. He had to negotiate between his personal desires and what was expected of him – to come up with a product that would appeal to the largest audience possible. This means concessions. Design-wise, his first tryout, an abstract painting-by-number, was a failure. He had to figure out and play with the archetypes of what was the American middle-class most desired imagery (saturated landscapes and domestic animals per se).
On another level, we’d like to enable connections between the activity of paint-by-number as a hobby and the label applied to contemporary graphic design activities. We talk about a professional community of graphic designers, but could think of us, and others, as vocational designers or even look at graphic design as a hobby.
What is the purpose of a self-initiated project? It’s multiple, we can’t really stress an answer properly. But if we look at the introduction of Amateur Craft, we can recognize a similarity between amateur practices as activities that want to resist traditional definitions of work and labor (in economic terms, as exchange value) and graphic design activities that do not wish to fit within the spectrum of the commissioned work pattern.

BB How does the project you have prepared for the Off Programme fit into the larger context of your practice? Are you working on something related?
ÉF & FGM We are careful about specifying what might define our practices. Are we in an identity crisis? Maybe we’ll figure it out one day, but from what we’ve seen from now, it seems more that the need for labelling is rather requested by current institutions. So let’s just say that we like to play with our identities and form of representations. We hardly see ourselves as professional designers (even if we have a VAT number).
Our current activities are quite vague and our agenda disrupted. Between commissions, part-time jobs and self-initiated projects, we also have ideas of future projects to speculate on. Émilie says ‘you’ll see…’ and François says ’that’s right!’.

BB This edition of the Brno Biennial responds to the metamorphoses and the state of contemporary graphic design; its multitude, variety, vagueness and apparent superficiality. Can you identify some of the basic parameters, current themes or motivations of contemporary graphic design?
ÉF & FGM Do we need a Graphic Design Expert TM for this one? Okay… well… let’s just argue, well… that graphic design is the surface of the content, the varnish of the purpose. A nice, glossy varnish. Nevertheless, we want to be purposeful, but it’s been a long time there hasn’t been any consensus on how to be purposeful (after modernism). What we feel is that designers build up working frameworks according to personal beliefs and ideologies and this is what generates their purposefulness. Since we all have different values, this might explain such a variety of approaches toward graphic design, as the framework influences the shapes of design. But having different approaches doesn’t mean we can’t understand each other, because we share a common ground.