Ticking off the list...
Advertising transforms the world into a shopping list…graphic design’s role in visual culture is less concise. In its short history it has been certified ‘modern’, bowdlerized by artists for its pop culture frisson and challenged by the First Things First manifesto (twice!) for being reduced to serving the tills of commerce. So often, talk about graphic design oscillates between these two poles, graphic design as shopping basket or as art object/subject. At any given moment it’s definition will be passing from one description to the next. At the moment, within current modes of graphic design history, the aspiration is clearly to art. Here, we are looking at how these history(s), polemics and representations materialise in design publications and how these definitions are effected by ‘sound bite’ culture and the increasingly reductive use of the ‘list’ as a rhetorical device.
Graphic design books with their large format images and minimal text already read like the exhibition and auction catalogues of tomorrow. The only difference being that whereas the latter tend to deify and valorise their content retrospectively, in contemporary graphic design publishing they do it in a, rather fashionably, pre-emptive way. [Note to Christies: no need to re-set the text, just add prices.]
Graphic design publications so often photograph graphic objects hovering on the pristine white backgrounds of modernist ‘neutrality’, to separate the work from its use value and mimicking, in two dimensions, the three dimensional ‘white cube’ of art display. Have you ever seen anything stay white on the walls and in the thrall of the city? Part of the delight, in the physical presence of the urban objet d’art, is its corroded, pot-marked surface reflecting a history of use. The present imperative seems to be to erase the specifics of place, for an ‘objective’ viewing. Yet like the white-walled galleries of a modernist cultural past, in fact these publications continually codify our stance; they isolate, beautify, they fetishise -and make scanning to Photoshop nice and easy. They list. The list, here, is metaphorical of course, but it usefully draws our attention to how these graphic objects float in time and space: suspended out of historical, cultural and perhaps most bizarrely, user-context What makes graphic design a living, palpable entity? Is it not its use, whatever -and these days you have to be open-minded- that might be? This kind of presentation is fine for the urban graphic gallery-like shops. [No need to add prices as they’re already there; they are the very point.] Yet, as art is trying to free itself from the gallery -both physically and mentally- graphic design is trying to pass from the streets to the interior. Many Artists, ironically, would love to have the whole city as their context and their canvas.
In the absence of a Greenburg or a Pevsner, graphic design’s history is currently a constellation of individual articles/critiques that reprise in the ‘anthology’. Creating a history not supplemented by the article anthology, but largely shaped by it. A history, then, which is largely recorded as a list. This situation has emerged out from the particularities of how graphic design has grown up as a discipline, distinct from the more traditional arts. Graphic design history, it is widely acknowledged, is a late starter and still in it’s stage of adolescent angst. If the intention is to give graphic design and typography a more distinct presence and to promote a more reflexive practice, then it’s worth considering how list-history will not only affect the way we access that collective past, but will shape our many futures. History and theory -at their best- document, record, translate; not to pare down but to put the flesh back on the traces of those lives. History as anthology works brilliantly when the ‘list’ is used to open and facilitate, not close the debate; when -say with suggested further reading- it acts as an intersection, not the end of the line.
Lists, of course, are not new or specific to graphic design. They can be seen to plague traditional art history eventually mutating into the manifesto and have passed from Vitruvius to Futurism, both in a literal and metaphorical way – in the 20th Century Futurism supplied the reams of print and Duchamp the pot to piss in. Marinetti once advised Italians to ‘stop eating pasta’ as it would ‘slow them down’. Now, maybe, visual culture has grown heavy with the list of contemporary manifestos: Dogma ’95; Bruce Mau’s ‘Incomplete Manifesto for Growth’ and ‘First Things First (FTF), ‘64’ and ‘2000’, to name a few. Looking at the two historical incarnations of FTF in particular, the thing that breaks their symmetry, blurs the overlay, is their lists. These show a pattern, a shift from the internal to the external, ‘stomach powders’ to ‘hair gel’. In 2003, this is the problem – the ideology inherent in a manifesto has been replaced by documentation, this time the list.
Don’t advertise. (Dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles.
Do design. (Cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design.)
A list documents, makes rational that which is fractured. Capitalism is fractured, to be sure. Yet so omni-present, so embedded that it perverts both these two lists, unites them not makes them distinct. Advertising not only sponsors but increasingly forms the content of our cultural experiences and information. Our magazines are largely glossy product lists. Our museums – the V&A to name but one- increasingly show advertising as their art. Our signage systems direct us to the duty free in airports, the ‘malls’ that line our motorways and, with equal zeal, codifies our bodily functions; toilets for the disabled, women, women and babies, men, men with…
We now have ‘top 10s, 20s, 100s’ for all kinds of visual material, from ‘boring postcards’ to ‘corporate logos’, the list easily condenses into the sound-bite, where for instance, the Iraq war can manifest into a list of troops, air sorties, bombs dropped, barrels produced… etc… ad infinitum. This is sometimes a collection of dispassionate facts, other times a parade of spectacles as creates the desired effect. Today it is the television programmes that FTF speaks of, which deliver the events in Iraq to us in this way, its films providing the language with which Bush wages war. In this way, all are reduced to the same significance: civilians blasted into body parts (unlisted), lost in bunkers, buildings and other collateral damage (listed).
The problem for the First Things First manifestos is that like resolutions they can at worst be corrupted and at best ignored (or maybe used as a place of refuge). The ideas are important; capitalism needs to be challenged and traditional modes of advertising are a start. The manifesto’s title advocates clarity and thoroughness, and then acknowledges there is more to do. But for us, the real challenge -the thoroughness- in is forging a more robust engagement with every aspect of contemporary visual culture, not just tackling a largely mythical ‘Top 10’.
Naomi Klein has managed to encapsulate many of the undercurrents of contemporary graphic design. She’s not a design historian, but her work is important to this field, and should be used to inform the debate. In the quest for a popular global awakening, her ideas have –necessarily- so often been reduced to sound-bite, the pithiest of them, perhaps – No Logo- her own. They have been taken as a form of two-word manifesto calling would-be activists to draw up a list of the worst offending brands and boycott, subvert or bring them down. Conversely though, Klein’s position is that it’s the obsession, of the last twenty years, with designing, buying and critiquing images –surfaces- which has allowed untold obscenities to carry on underneath. Furthermore -in attempting to expose these global machinations now- she argues that focussing critique on the big brands and corporations deflects attention from those -producers, shippers, packers and all the other go-betweens- who create the most collateral damage. Those who, with no logo, provide no easy target.
Arguably though –and this is perhaps the point with First Things First- the list can help create the sight lines when there is no logo to target…just as the reductive signposting of modernist information design has its optimal use in certain areas of graphic design practice. Yet the territory of graphic design – in particular history and theory- publishing, needs something else. Recently, graphic design students at LCP gave their end of year show the name and theme ‘Relay’. The notion of relay is useful, both as 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 that it informs, augments and generally directs our day-to-day experience; a simple interface between ‘us’ and the world we inhabit. Graphic design isn’t to be found in the shopping basket or as the object on the gallery wall, so much as it is the baton which passes between these 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, and the economics of how history gets written.
Interrogating the series of experiences and relationships we call graphic design with the tools of history and theory could illuminate this embedded, layered, ‘inter’- state. Instead, the temptation can be to ‘flatten’ into images (or listed sound-bites) for easy reproduction. In Photoshop you can’t save if you haven’t ‘flattened’ the layers of an image. But who wants to ‘save’ or make one-dimensional?
Graphic design’s dynamism is its ephemerality, its existence in the ‘real’ world. To create a graphic design history that is dynamic may take more than its current (hit) parade of lists. It needs to account for subtleties, authenticity and specifics of place; to foster that which gives it life. Failing this, the bullet points may end up unintentionally shooting the information, and the imagination, dead. Friendly fire, of course.