Peter Saville on the avant garde, or lack thereof

In front of the car that he designed with Mercedes Benz and wearing his trademark white jeans, Peter Saville, one of the great record sleeve designers of all time thanks to his visionary work for Joy Division and New Order, among others, spoke with The Avant Garde Diaries. He talks about the giant “disco ball of everything” – lifestyle, music, design and art – that makes up cultural life and forms of provocation in 2011, acknowledging the importance of the label he co-established, Factory, in building such a pluralist culture. He ends on a suitably ambivalent point, stating that the avant garde is more likely to be “a label on a hair shampoo than a movement.”