Logo for MIT Press / Logo for Black Flag

Muriel Cooper, 1965 /  Raymond Pettibon, 1978, vinyl, dimensions variable 

Set side-by-side, the MIT Press logo and the Black Flag bars bear a formal resemblance that, I like to think, is not simply coincidental. Or, rather, I want to suggest that the homology between the two sets up a kind of vibration that can begin to point us in a number of directions simultaneously. [...]

If we allow, for a moment, the proximity of the Black Flag bars and MIT Press logo to lead us simultaneously backward to the Bauhaus and forward, toward the complex, networked terrains explored by Cooper at the Visible Language Workshop, the connections I have been making between the DIY tactics of early American hardcore and early modernist abstraction will, hopefully, become more clear [...] for Cooper, as well as the avant-garde of the early 1920s and American hardcore of the early 1980s, the rhizomatic or networked logic of abstraction makes possible a set of mobile relationships, temporary alliances and hybrid forms that continue to be vital and productive.

– “Graphics Incognito,” Mark Owens, Dot Dot Dot #12, 2006