Re-writing (graphic) design history: part one

Recently, I read an article at Design Observer on the subject of relational design. It is a thoughtful beautifully scripted essay by Andrew Blauvelt. Any student of design writing should seek it out as an excellent example of structure and argument. The essay breaks down the last 100 years or so, demarcating 3 historical ‘phases’ in Design: from a preoccupation with form at the beginning of the 20th Century, to cultural semantics in design starting in the 60s, and finally the third stage – an investigation of the performative nature of design. The essay concludes by framing the ‘relational’ as a defining element to design today.  By and large, I agree with the essay’s conclusion and have written on the subject myself – if not as cogently.

The article stuck in my mind, and over the following days I gradually acquired an uncanny feeling about knowing /not knowing what had been said in the essay. At first reading it made perfect sense, uplifting even, and the essay covered an area I am interested in to boot! On second reading I realised that the tightly woven structure had in fact, paragraph-by-paragraph, loose threads of enquiry – frayed historical edges – and it was this that had drawn me back to reassess what I had first read.

Although my rereading is not quite as forensic as the above sentence might lead you to believe – the essay is not a simple piece of journalism and as such, rewarded a closer consideration of its thesis.

For Blauvelt, the first phase in modern design starts in the early 20th Century – a phase he states, of ‘isms’ and avant-garde innovation. His argument is cogent, but in trying to construct a history of design it conflates and misrepresents many key issues. It might be useful here, to explore in more detail his periodisation, in the first instance, the key isms he alludes to and finally, the role of the avant-garde during the period under discussion.

I feel it is very important to place design in a historical timeline, which maps in commercial enterprise and not solely artistic innovation – to this end the history of design and the history of art are not perfectly   syncopated historiography. My reading of these different trajectories might be at the bottom of differences between Blauvelt and myself (and, it must be said, other writing on art & design).

In any design history, it is important at the outset to make explicit the relationship between design and commodity. Furthermore, where you place the beginnings of modern design is important too, not only for historical accuracy but to allow you to trace how design has developed in its cultural / critical context.

Historical moorings are usually attached to key events – political, cultural and economic. So I would look to the Great Exhibition in London (1851) as key to modern design. Not only was it a designed event; housed as it was in the glass and iron splendour of Joseph Paxton’s modular Crystal Palace. But it introduced design – as consumable product – to a far wider public than ever before. The exhibition provided a shop window onto the bric-a-brac of modernity. There were reactions against the exhibition. Many lamented the quality of the products, both aesthetically and in workmanship. The Arts and Crafts movement, for one, argued for an industrialisation that might maintain aesthetic/spiritual integrity by not erasing all trace of the craftsman. But in many ways the cat was out of the bag – as it entered the 20th Century – design was indelibly linked with commodity and mass production.

A significant reason for placing (modern) design where I have is to provide a background to understand how design is categorised in the critical theory of the late 19th, early 20th Century. This writing on culture, art, and design, tried to make sense of the times: from Veblen’s ‘conspicuous consumption’ to Simmel’s treatise on Money and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’. This period is crucial in understanding the position design finds itself in today. Much of this writing eloquently, but incisively, subjugated design to the wider aesthetic concerns of Art and Avant-Gardism.  This division is explored when Simmel observes:

‘The essence of the work of applied art is that it exists many times; its diffusion is the quantitative expression of its usefulness, for it always serves a need that it is shared by many people’ and critically he concludes ‘ each of these things have a law outside of itself’ (Simmel, Frisby et al. 1997)

In the critical thinking of the time (as it is today?), design is suspect to the ebb and flow of ‘taste’ and, as important, the continuum of technology. Mechanization and its direct influence on design process. Without the Original, as found in artistic production, the designed object is never the subject of its own fate; its cultural resonance is destined to be fragmentary and temporally determined.

One way of countering this position, as Blauvelt does in his article, is to assume design a place in the canon of art history– especially avant-gardism. So Constructivism, say, is simply an ingredient in graphic design history. When [graphic] design is re-attached to various ‘isms and ignores the cultural and ideological complexities of avant-gardism, for instance, it ultimately provides a disservice to design history. It implies that by simply witnessing an event design becomes an active participant in the unfolding philosophical / ideological discourse. This is misleading and conflates ideological praxis with facsimile. So, when Blauvelt plots a genealogy of Constructivism, which he quiet rightly defines as a moment in art history where art tries to bridge ‘literate versus oral culture’, he commits the sin of conflating two histories when he continues:

‘to the abstracted logotypes of the 1960s and 1970s that could help bridge the cultural divides of transnational corporations: from El Lissitzsky’s “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” poster to the perfect union of syntactic and semantic form in Target’s bullseye logo’ (my Italics).

This is a misleading tautology – like fruit flies share nearly 60% of human genes. Firstly, comparing the 60s expansion of capitalism with the 1920s project led by Tatlin, El Lissitzsky et al, is a neo-liberal re-writing of visual history. This rewriting, I think, is proven by my second concern. Comparing Target’s bull’s-eye logo with Constructivist aesthetic evolution (aesthetics can never be seen as divorced from ideology).

Constructivism tried to provide a visual language that was open, and, in modern parlance, transparent: film, plastic art and sculpture shared syntax, and a paradigmatic shift to clarity in ideological expression – autonomy if you like. One further element to Constructivism that is important to make clear was the need to provide an art form, which all could practice.  The opposite is true in most, if not all, corporate logo design. Modern ‘corporate’ graphic design is about specialisation and professionalism; it is about providing a read-only language. Target’s bull’s-eye logo, might share some surface comparison – or rationalization – to Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism for instance, but it is a false comparison.  It is comparing ideological agency to mimicry in the creative process.  The ‘evolution’ of the Target logo is not connected to avant-gardism but to the growth and codification of Capital.

The semantic and ideological constructions of logo types is well documented elsewhere. So, here, let me reiterate; at best the logo acts as a keyhole, through which we can glimpse corporate operations, it provides a very limited, some would say distorted, view of the mechanics of any given corporation: minimum wage, global warming etc.

So, why have I been so pedantic over the opening paragraphs of a well crafted essay? It is because I feel there is a history of design that can co-exist independently to the canons of art history. It was Adrian Forty, 22 years ago in ‘Objects of Desire’, who introduced a design history which, embedded in Society and the Commodity, largely ignored the networks of art history. For Forty, the rationalization of the logo – Lucky Strike cigarettes for instance – is placed in the domain of manufacture and commodity rather than art history. Raymond Loewy, who was commissioned to redesign Lucky Strike cigarette packaging remarked on his redesign; ‘its impeccable whiteness…It automatically denotes freshness’.  This comment from Loewy illustrates the danger of conflating design and art history: Avant-gardism is driven by issues of agency rather than technical problem solving (or simple semiotics).

The problem with Forty, and the ‘New Design History’ from the 1980s to today, is it allows for no cultural arena for agency in design – it fixes the binary between art and design. This, for me, is as equally extreme as positing design and art have the same histories.

I think you can disentangle design from the commodity and, in doing so, allow it to have agency whilst still being true to its commercial roots. This will allow design to act beyond simple ideological statements of ‘only work for charities’ or the ‘homeless’ etc. This disentanglement needs to start with the critical theory of the 20th Century and continue by delineating upon how design has developed in late modernity. It is through this methodological approach, I would argue, you might find the ideological slippage which could empower design to stand on its own two historical feet.

One area ripe for investigation is what Blauvelt calls the third stage of design – the relational. I feel this is an area which can be excavated. To show how design can work independently in the culture of what Roland Barthes calls ‘sympathetic metaphors’. Relational has become one such metaphor.

Colin Davies 2008

Simmel, G., D. Frisby, et al. (1997). Simmel on Culture: selected writings. London, SAGE.