From Art to Design and back again... a proposed lecture on theory and practice
Students of the School of Graphic Design at London College of Printing recently gave the theme of 'Relay' to their graduation show. ‘Relay’ acts as both a metaphor and an adjective for Graphic Design and its role in visual culture. The modern city is a matrix of information, mediated through sound, text and image. Graphic Design provides the syntax or visual language for relaying this information. In this guise, it provides a simple interface between ‘us’ and the world we inhabit. In addition, Graphic Design is also the baton which passes between the worlds of Art and Commerce. It is the signage that directs us through the museum, the logo that glows above the art gallery door and uniquely, ones perception of Graphic Design can pass from mere branding and instruction, to object, to artefact, finally reaching full apotheosis as a piece of Art. This sequential passing of ‘meaning’, is dependent upon many things, curatorial choice, practitioner’s intent, history and economics.
Visual Culture & Theory, provide a workspace where designers are both encouraged and enabled to see Graphic Design within its historical context. Art is explored both as a methodology and a critical context for modern Graphic Design practice. It is not just an historical cupboard full of visual booty to be plundered and appropriated, but a dynamic, formative, landscape where Graphic Design can be seen to (re)establish itself under the influence of, Futurism, Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus etc. This influence, allows Typography/Graphic Design to became a more distinct presence on the modernist skyline. Following on, with the arrival of the 1960s, Fluxus, Pop Art, Op Art, and Kinetic Art, influence and reignite the role of Graphic Design in the public and Art sphere, which in turn is passed on to the Punk generation and its postmodern descendents. So the process goes on, the baton moving from hand to hand…
Looking at Warhol’s iconic silkscreen print ‘Electric chair’ 1971, the chair empty, the next man on ‘death row’ absent, the man who throws the [relay] switch remains outside of the frame, anonymous. We begin to see Warhol’s image as text, the image diminishes and the critique embellishes – weeks later, the image sparks an idea in the designer’s mind, not as image but as method…a way of seeing. Importantly, both the Warhol image and work inspired by it, remain separate and intact, the former as Art and the latter as Design.
Just as architectural practice changes when architects are freed from the confines of load supporting walls and we see the skin of the building float free from the underlying structure, so with Graphic Design. As its long term incarceration by the grid is broken, we see the white space of Swiss Modernism, smeared with the inks of technology and experimentation – Graphic designers, once anonymous and in the shadow of a Modernism which both created and obscured ‘Art’, (often making Graphic Design its ‘other’, or at most, the rational ground upon which the hallowed oils are applied), can now be visual authors, designers, propagandist, artist, professionals, naives etc etc…
So, Art and Design occupy not different spaces but the layered space we experience in our day to day urban lives, where the visual is made up from car number plates, street signs, graffiti, billboards etc etc… There, meanings multiply as our experience expands, the hierarchy of high and low culture changes each time the pack is shuffled.
Design can be, according to Prof. Richard Buchanan,…”the bridge between theory and the way we actually live our lives”. Theory, documents, records and translates, putting the flesh back on the traces of our lives whilst Graphic Design, informs, augments and generally directs our day to day experience of the world. Both help to construct our visual world, often only separated by the smallest of margins. This relationship is echoed in the phrase Theory and Practice.
Through the theory(s) of Art, Design, Film etc., theory strives to provide a space for the student/practitioner to develop the critical analysis and rationale already discussed vis a vis the parameters of theory and practice.
Visual Culture and Theory oscillates between these two worlds, pulling at the threads of both. We look upon the relationship between the studio and theory, not as a formal relationship where didactic application of theory leads to material results in studio practice, but more as an acceptance that the relationship is always latent and materialises in serendipitous ways.