Graphic Design History - Unlisted
Discussion about graphic design so often oscillates between two poles: graphic design as an agent of consumerism or as an art object/subject. At any given moment its definition will be passing from one description to the next. At the moment, for many designers, and writers on design, the aspiration is clearly a move towards art as a legitimate mooring for graphic design history. Here, we are looking at how these particular history(s), polemics and representations materialise in (graphic) design discourse and importantly form a ‘context’ for the work of contemporary graphic designers.
Increasingly, starting in the 1980s, the graphic design ‘object’ is seen in books, magazines etc, pasted into 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. Graphic design books with large format images and token text already read like the exhibition and auction catalogues of tomorrow. The only difference being that whereas the latter tend to lionise, deify and valorise their content retrospectively, in contemporary graphic design publishing, they do it in a (rather fashionably) pre-emptive way.
Have you ever seen anything stay white on the walls and in the thrall of the city? Part of the delight of much graphic design, its physical presence as 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 white-walled galleries, museums and other cultural spaces, in fact these publications continually codify our stance; they isolate, beautify and fetishize – creating a list of tick boxes for the connoisseur. The idea of a 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? Surely its dynamism is its use, its existence – often ephemeral – in the ‘real’ world. Yet as many artists try to free themselves from the gallery – both physically and mentally – graphic design, advertising and the high-end world of commerce are all trying to pass from the streets to the interior of the art world. Ironically, this is an enclosed environment which has been continually contested and debunked by a chain of avant-gardism for a hundred years or more. At the close of the 19th Century the Salons of London and Paris held a restricted ‘guest list’ of legitimate art and artists – it is the Salon des Refuses in Paris, exhibiting the artists left off this list which broke the ‘stasis’ in the development of art history and at the same time, the hold of a small coterie of connoisseurs. A few of these Refusés artists, Édouard Manet in particular, helped direct Modernism towards its eventual 20th Century developments.
If we look at an artist or designer through an imaginary curriculum vitae, we see their lives manifest as lists; in the case of the former it is a list of exhibitions, the latter clients. The artist Michael Landy in his exhibition ‘Break Down’ took this life as list to its extreme. In 2001 over a period of 14 days, in a vacated shop in London’s Oxford Street, he methodically destroyed all his physical belongings; it was part insulation art and part performance. Here, we are not trying to discuss Landy’s work in an art historical context or, even, its value as art; but as an example of the list in action.
When entering the ‘Break Down’ exhibition, after the initial impact of the physical apparatus of the show, including 160 meters of conveyor belt, you are aware of the paraphernalia of list-making; inventories, sub-headings, sponsors and other to-do lists that literally acted as an aide memoir of Landy’s life at that moment. At the end of the 14 days, over 5000 personal items had been granulated, crushed, shredded and carefully logged. This infantry eventually materialised as a book to document the event and separately, a limited edition bound copy of the list of items destroyed – his life reduced to a graphic artefact. But this list – which is all that is left behind – does not reduce Landy’s life to a series of bullet points but ‘breaks it down’ so it can be looked at as a resonant representation of identity. As artist Michael Craig-Martin comments the list is ‘the physical manifestation of memory’. Here, the list essentializes, makes personal. For, reading this list you can share in the memory of a David Bowie album or question the choice of branded trainers… you become involved with the detritus of a life. In this sense it is a piece of information design, par excellence. ‘Break Down’ provides a list which helps bring context to a life.
A more conventional, utilitarian piece of information design is the telephone directory; its main function is not to convert a life to a list but rather reduce a whole town, city or country to a template of columns and type specifications. The directory conflates both the history of graphic design and typography. The telephone and its accompanying directory are weaved into the history of modernity: together they represent both the development of technology and the rationalization of space in the modernist project. The directory developed exponentially as telephony spread – its design became an exercise in utilising space and in the 20th century, for graphic design, space is synonymous with the ‘grid’. The urban sociologist Richard Sennett, commenting on the use of the grid in city planning, sees it as a form of erasure – a way for the new metropolises of America to erase any sense of place and its accompaniment of memory, context and history (ownership). The phone directory is a ubiquitous item in most people’s lives, with its contents dominated by the demarcated white space of the grid selected and its typography reflecting a stratagem of scientific thinking rather than social mores or identity – the list in its most benign form. Some Graphic designers have attempted to address this notion of erasure, both historical and cultural. The typographer Martin Majoor, like Michael Landy, is conscious of working within the historical context of his art form. In the early 1990s he redesigned the telephone directory for the Dutch telecommunications company KPN. In the existing directory, he inherited the sterile plains of a Univers landscape, barren of any fidelity to anything bar its mechanical discipline. His answer was to design a typeface, ‘Telefont List’ and ‘Telefont Text’ within the technical parameters of the commission, yet not reduced to a formulae – something more organic. He created a typeface with cultural inflections which build upon, rather than erase, a visual cultural form. Majoor’s typefaces reflect established typographic precedents (histories) and develop, layer upon layer, each layer always translucent to the one beneath. In these examples, both Landy and Majoor, have created ‘lists’ from their art which are more than a sum of their parts. Although they reduce flesh, traces, memory, narrative, even history to a series of names and numbers, this is to a new and different end…which in turn is a beginning comfortable with its own history.
Conversely – and this is our real concern here – graphic design as a discipline, because it is very young, could be reduced to a 'list' before it has ever established a 'history'. This would have very negative effects on graphic design as both a discipline and a profession. You can have a top ten of artists because of the robustness of 'art history' which provides a textual ground which builds up, movement to movement, artist to artist – but a top ten of graphic designers might only be a list of the images (without any sense of context) which are the current favourites, until erased by the next fashion statement or corporate demand. The designer Elliot Earls would seem to reflect this position in his comment on graphic design:'Don't just simply tap into the zeitgeist and reflect. Accept some responsibility for your work. Popularity is simply not the litmus test for good work.’
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 of 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 its stage of adolescent angst. The intention is to give graphic design and typography a more distinct presence and to promote a more reflexive practice and so is much needed. Yet it’s worth considering how list-history will not only affect the way we access that collective past, but how it 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 as starting points have of course been rife, if variously motivating, in the form of the manifesto in traditional art history. They 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 [not] 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. First Things First is particularly interesting here, for the title is an everyday phrase that explicitly suggests the presentation of a listed agenda to follow. The agenda here, first set in the 1960’s, was responding to the spiralling consumer culture which was engulfing all in the post WW2 economic boom. The signatories wished to see graphic design as something more than a tool of commerce. In 1998, in the climate of Naomi Klein’s phenomenally successful book No Logo, which encapsulated the zeitgeist, First Things First was re-issued. This second incarnation recaptured the spirit of the 1960’s original but in the context of current anti-globalization debates. In each manifesto, there are two lists. One flags up the kind of commercial things which constitute a waste of designers’ talents, the other delineates areas in which these skills may be more benignly, more resourcefully and socially usefully used. These lists deal with part social but mainly commercial concerns, an over simplified (it was the 60s) dichotomy of good customers/bad customers. These days it is increasingly problematic to talk only in terms of heroes and villains, yet forty years apart, these lists show little change. The main change is a shift from the internal to the external. Manifestly, we see a change of what constitutes a ‘bad customer – from packaging ‘stomach powders’ in ’64 to ‘hair gel’ in 2000. Almost covertly, over the years – the internal ideology inherent in a manifesto has been replaced by the external, ostensibly the documentation – a bit like a corporate manual – that is the 2000 list. But both reduce graphic design to a series of lists – a common opposition to an increasingly globalized world..
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. Globalization rationalizes, – harmonizes- a world in which we all drink the same “lattés-to-go”…with the hieroglyphs of graphic design providing the visual narrative – or syntax – for the experience. Advertising not only sponsors but also increasingly forms the content of our cultural experiences and information. So many magazines are, in essence, glossy product lists. Our museums – the V&A to name but one – increasingly show advertising as their art. In 2003 the corporate world can’t be ‘broken down’, listed and then destroyed, bit by bit, like Landy’s art work – a few bricks thrown through Starbucks’ windows in different Capitals of the world does little to undermine corporate culture.
Naomi Klein, a writer who has managed to encapsulate many of the undercurrents of contemporary graphic design, supports these points. Her influential book, No Logo (2000) has been taken by many as a form of two-word manifesto, calling would-be anti-capitalist/globalization activists to draw up a list of the worst offending brands and then to boycott, subvert or bring them down. It seems that Klein’s position is the reverse of this. For her, it is the obsession of the last twenty years with designing, buying and analyzing 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 a list of big brands and corporations deflects attention from those producers, shippers, packers and all the other go-betweens who create more widespread collateral damage. Those who, with no logo, provide no easy target. Arguably though – and this is perhaps the point with manifestos/lists – the list can help create the sight lines when there is no logo to target.
The rationalized signposting of modernist information design has its optimal use in certain areas of graphic design practice, yet within the territory of graphic design history and theory it’s no use simply directing people to recognised ‘landmarks’ – we need to forge a more robust engagement with every aspect of contemporary culture, including all the detours and blind bends on the way. In the Summer of 2003, 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. Graphic design isn’t to be found in the shopping basket or as the object on the gallery wall alone, so much as it is the baton which passes between these worlds of Art and Commerce. How we see 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’ the layers 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’ if it makes two-dimensional? Lists of graphic design or anything else – be they the visual or verbal sound-bites – can so often only do this.
Recently we have seen the Iraq war manifest into many kinds of lists: lists of troops, air sorties, bombs dropped, barrels produced…ad infinitum: Bush’s ever rotating axis of evil; civilians blasted into body parts (unlisted); bunkers, buildings, soldiers and other collateral damage (listed). Lists here, reduce all to the same (in)significance. In the long run there needs to be more than this. The task is to go back and question the list, fill in the details. Failing this, the bullet points may end up shooting the information – the imagination, the memory – dead. Friendly fire, of course.
originally written for dot dot dot / view correspondence