Rebellion and Responsibility via Van Toorn, Laasen, and Rock

Jan van Toorn

Over the past two days I've read three articles with the common theme of the designer breaking out of her comfortable inertia and answering the call to criticism. It's kind of funny how in my last post I was struggling to gather thoughts around how the outlier becomes mainstream and what is left that can really capture people's attention as a radical approach (truth?) Funny because the next thing I read was "Design and Reflexivity" by Jan van Toorn (1994). 

Van Toorn points out the duality of design's role: as servant of the public interest, and in private service to the client's and the media's needs. Design thus becomes a mediator aimed at reaching consensus, makes compromises, and reduces its power for criticism. A related tension for design is between the need for a renewed vocabulary, and the need to be universally comprehensible.

Describing it as the conflict between "le pain et la liberté," Van Toorn says designers like the idea of making a living in freedom, but this brings the loss of a critical and reflective tradition. The dominant culture creates a symbolism, turns it into "the common instrument of knowledge and communication," and forces the rest of society to define itself within that symbolism.

The simulacrum of institutional culture hides reality. It is useless to replace this simulacrum by creating more in its place--designers need to organize opposition and explose what is behind the message. Van Toorn quotes Felix Guattani, saying we have to "untie the bonds of language and [open] new social, analytical and aesthetic practices." He writes, "The point is no longer to question whether the message is true, but whether it works as an argument."

The reflexive mentality will stimulate a message's audience to deal more actively with reality. "The aim is to arrive at a working method that produces commentaries rather than confirms self-referential fictions."

Van Toorn notes that "all cultures have communicative forms of fiction that refer to their own fictitiousness in resistance to the established social order." Maybe the Dove ads I cited in the last post are an example of this idea. They're forms of fiction themselves, and they highlight the fictitiousness of the advertising system in which they themselves are active participants.

Kalle Laasen's "Design Anarchy" (2006) is a brief statement about artists toppling the establishment, particularly in the ways they interact with mass media, and the ways they produce meaning. He advises that design anarchy is madness, but leads to a deep satisfaction in the value of one's work.

In "The Designer as Author" (1996), Michael Rock gives a brief history of the development, ebb and flow of the concept of authorship. He writes that being unauthored gave early texts a certain authority, as though the information was from God, or from a general truth that was just waiting to be uncovered. Early sacred texts were unauthored, and after the 18th century scientific texts became unauthored. In that same time period, literature became authored, and the author became the focus of public scrutiny, receiving praise and blame for the content of the authored works. Post-structuralism criticized the prestige of the author, ceding responsibility for interpretation of the text to the reader.

Postmodernism brought a decentralization of the text. Rock writes that in this time, "rather than working to incorporate theory into their methods of production, many so-called deconstructivist designers literally illustrated Barthes' image of a reader-based text...scattering fragments of quotations across the surface of their 'authored' posters and book covers." Ellen Lupton called this kind of work "a romantic theory of self-expressionism."

Josef Muller-Brockmann's grid systems relied on what Rock calls "tropes of submission," foregoing personality, and submitting to the "will of the system." By the 1970s, designers were abandoning this kind of rationalist grid.

In 1968, the primacy of the reader resonated when Roland Barthes published "The Death of the Author," as it diminished the author's totalitarian power.

Auteur theory emerged in the 1960s as a way to legitimize film as an art form. It created a central author (the director) for the intrinsically collaborative projects of films. In order to be an auteur, the director had to have 1) technical expertise, 2) a stylistic signature, and 3) consistency of vision and interior meaning (which has to come mainly from its aesthetic.)

Rock points out a major problem with auteur theory (which we, nonetheless, continue to apply to design today): the requisite interior meaning is intangible and unquantifiable, varying from personality to personality.

The designer acting as author suggests transcendence and purity, making design equal with "more traditional privileged forms of authorship." However, Michel Foucault maintains that authorship is not liberating, because it pins all authority on the author, and leaves out any agency for the reader.

Rock recognizes the problem that many working designers see with the notion of authorship--in reality it's pretty hard to come by when the designer's voice so often has to reflect the voice of the client, and when so many projects are collaborative. Designers might want to be authors to take a deeper responsibility for their work, or just to feel greater agency. Rock says that in the end, the goal should be to look beyond the idea of designer as hero and be able to say "What difference does it make who designed it?"

Is the truth avant-garde enough?

Tonight I'm reading Steven Heller, "The Underground Mainstream," which discusses the way the avant-garde is appropriated and brought into the mainstream becoming, as he puts it, "the schlock of the novel."

As an example, Heller discusses the way the 60s psychedelic movement started with a small group of people who into sex, drugs, and anarchic behavior that threatened mainstream society. Artists found expression for the group's ideals, and these art forms were eventually popularized, watered down, and embraced by TV shows and other mainstream media. Commercial interests wanting to reach a youth market took the edge off the psychedelic art forms to make it more palatable. I love the way Heller puts it: "The avant-garde was commodified and the result was a mediocre, self-conscious rip-off. A hollow style that denoted an era remained."

Heller maintains that design outsiders eventually have to join the mainstream, if they want their work to be seen by anyone other than those in their immediate circles. Those designers, many working for advertising companies, try to pull their avant-garde ideas into the mainstream work they do.

I am sure that Heller is right when he says it's harder and harder to shock a mainstream audience with "outsider" design. I believe, however, there must still be ways it can be done. Can you reach an audience through design by being radically truthful? By telling the public the truth, either about the product you're selling or about something else that's hard for people to hear about themselves, or about our society?

Dove did something sort of like that with its "True Beauty" campaign (though it rings a little phony since they purportedly retouched photos and since Unilever, Dove's parent corporation, continued to market skin-lightening products to women in India.)

This might be a giant stretch, but I'm thinking about the Montague Bookmill, a funky little bookstore in a small town near me. Their slogan is, "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." Is it be possible to take that kind of funny, funky, self-deprecating attitude, incorporate it into design, and remain an outsider by pushing the limits of people's discomfort? Or maybe by the time you do that on any kind of a large scale, people are already immune to being pushed that way and the idea has lost its edge. Heller would probably predict that it would be so.

Packet 1 due today

Trunk & tusks

Today I'll turn in my first packet. It will include four PDFs capturing what I've been working on for the past month:

• My reading notes, captured in a Josef Muller-Brockmann-style grid booklet
• A classical book design
• A modern manual design
• A book with the first 50 of 100 iterations of elephants that I have been working on

I have learned a lot through the work I have done so far. I wanted it to feel foundational, and it has. My big questions now are mostly about what comes next.

I'm inspired by a 1998 essay by Lorraine Wild in the Armstrong book, called "The Macrame of Resistance." Wild discusses craft as the combination of the theory required to understand concepts and the knowledge gained by accumulating experience and mastery.

"When craft is put into the framework of graphic design, this might constitute what is meant by the "designer's voice"--that part of a design that is not industriously addressing the ulterior motives of a project, but instead follows the inner agenda of the designer's craft. This guides the 'body of work' of a designer over and beyond the particular goal of each project."

Wild references a couple of writers, including Peter Dormer and Malcolm McCullough as well as artists like WA Dwiggins, Alvin Lustig, Imre Reiner, Sister Corita Kent (whom Matt quoted, movingly, in our convocation), Big Daddy Roth, and Ed Fella. I'd like to pursue learning more about these artists from a craft perspective and reading the Dormer and McCullough she cites, and see where that takes me.