Modernism – General
By the 1920s,
industrial production had accrued diverse cultural meanings, holding forth the
utopian promise of social transformation as well as the ominous threat of war
and destruction. In Europe in the early twentieth century, the American factory
became a paradigm for economic and social planning. There was a growing
adherence to Taylorism, a theory of management that, by advocating the
objective analysis of human labor, promised to maximize profits while enhancing
the lives of workers. Fordism, named after Henry Ford and his mass-produced
Model Ts, crossed the Atlantic to Europe, bringing the concepts of the assembly
line and the creation of vast markets for low-cost, standardized goods. The
administrators of this freshly mechanized civilization were the engineers,
professionals equipped to apply scientific methods to the organization of
people, procedures, and environments. The new production experts helped the
factory shed its image as a squalid site of exploitation and emerge into the
healthy light of efficiency and rationality. (Eccentric to Whom?
“Eccentric to Whom?”
Essay by J. Abbbott Miller, published in special issue
of AIGA Journal of Graphic Design on eccentricity, edited by
Steven Heller, 1992
)
The glib equation “art
+ business = design” sums up a whole genre of design journalism produced from
the 1930s through the 70s, which portrayed art as the wild beast tamed by the
civilizing interests of commerce.
Modernism – In design
Individualistic work. the "Iine"
of the artist, are the exact opposite of
what we are trying to achieve. Only
anonymity in the elements we use
and the application of laws transcending
self combined with the giving up of personal vanity (up till now falsely called
"personality-) in favour of pure design assures the emergence of a general,
collective culture which will encompass all expressions of life – including
typography. (TNT Foreword Robin Kincross)
He argues for a revised orthography that would
be phonetically exact and consistent, and for a single set of letters. The
argument is shot through with the rhetoric of modernism: for economy of means,
consistency, speed of action, greater comprehensibility, and (perhaps
implicitly) abolition of hierarchy, It is part of the reform of life, and nothing
to do with mere fashion, Tschichold insists (the advertisement from Vogue set
in lower case, reproduced on page 80, sums up the empty fashionable manner'),
(TNT Foreword Robin Kincross)
the Bauhaus went "lower case" in
its publications and internal communications, as part of a general shift
towards a more industrially oriented modernism (TNT Foreword Robin Kincross)
He also came to emphasize a set of more
purely typographic objections
to modernism in this field. Thus in an
exchange with the modernist
"Swiss typographers" (as they are
now termed) who came to prominence in
the late 1950s, he made a number of
powerful criticisms of the New
Typography (or, more exactly, the
typography that it had by then led to in
Switzerland).64 Among these objections
were: that it was essentially limited
to publicity work and to the subject matter
of the modern world, and could
not deal with the complexities of book
design; that in relying on sanserif, it
used an unbeautiful letterform that could
not be read easily as continuous
text; that the DIN paper-sizes were
inappropriate for many purposes,
books above all; that it tended to adopt a
rigid formalism that failed to
articulate the meaning of the text; that it
lacked grace. (TNT Foreword Robin Kincross) JAN TSCHICHOLD AGAINST MODERNISM
Post Modernism
Modernism sought a
common language built on systems and modularity; in contrast, the
post-modernists valorized the special idioms and dialects of cultures and subcultures.
(Univers strikes back – Ellen Lupton)
Designers began to
realize that as mediators of culture, they could no longer hide behind the
"problems" they were "solving." One could describe this
shift as a younger generation of designers simply indulging their egos and
refusing to be transparent (like a crystal goblet). Or you could say they were
acknowledging their unique position in the culture, one that could have any
number of political or ideological agendas. - ‘Graphic Design in the Postmodern
Era
By Mr. Keedy
This essay was based
on lectures presented at FUSE 98, San Francisco, May 28, and The AIGA National
Student Design Conference, CalArts, June 14, 1998. It was first published in
1998 in Emigre 47.’
Since the 1960s,
postmodern artists and designers have rejected the idea—cherished by the
builders of the Bauhaus and other modernist institutions—that communication
might have a universal basis. Postmodernism asserts that a cultural artifact
can be understood only in terms of a specific place, time, and audience.
The post-modern
arsenal is not about to disappear from the practice of art and design. “Remix”
and appropriation are facts of contemporary life. They are the normal science
of our time. Borrowing and sharing have become second-nature (and are thus the
site of heated legal and economic contest).
LEARNING TO LOVE TECH
Universal design as it
is emerging now, after post-modernism, is not a generic, neutral mode of
communication. Rather, it is a visual language enmeshed in a technologically
evolving communications environment stretched and tested by an unprecedented
range of people. Individuals can engage this language on their own terms,
infusing it with their own energy and sensibilities in order to create
communications that are appropriate to particular publics and purposes.
The clean, smooth
surfaces of modernism proved an unsound fortress against popular culture, which
is now invited inside to fuel the creation of new work. Image and text eat away
at the vessels that would seal them shut. Forms that are hard and sharp now
appear only temporarily so, ready to melt, like ice, in response to small
environmental changes. All systems leak, and all waters are contaminated, not
only with foreign matter but with bits of structure itself. A fluid, by
definition, is a substance that conforms to the outline of its container.
Today, containers reconfigure in response to the matter they hold.
The one-world,
one-language ideal of heroic modernism is an untenable solution for design in
the next century. (“Critical Wayfinding,” essay by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott
Miller, published in The Edge of the Millennium,. ed. Susan Yelavich. New
York: Whitney Library of Design, 1993. 220-232.
)
McCoy was willing to
take the heat and the glory for staking out the potentially unbeautiful
aesthetic manifestations of literary deconstruction, or, if you will,
postmodernism. (“Underground Matriarchy in Graphic Design,” essay by Laurie
Haycock Makela and Ellen Lupton, published in Eyemagazine, 1994. )
De Bretteville’s
appointment at Yale signaled changes and rifts within the design world. Since
the late 1950s, the Yale program had been entrenched in high modernist theory,
associated in particular with the work and philosophy of Paul Rand, a legendary
corporate designer and stalwart defender of modernist ideals of direct
communication and simple form. De Bretteville arrived at Yale advocating a more
socially oriented, critical approach to design that would address the needs of
multiple audiences. Rand resigned after de Bretteville’s appointment and
convinced other key faculty to do so as well. In an angry manifesto published
in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Rand railed against the violation of modernism
by screaming hordes of historicists, deconstructivists, and activists.21 Behind
each of these challenges to modernism stood a powerful woman: behind
historicism was Paula Scher, behind deconstructivism was Katherine McCoy, and
behind activism was Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. (Women Graphic Designers Excerpt from essay by Ellen Lupton from Pat
Kirkham, ed. Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000. London: Yale University
Press, 2000.)
Katherine McCoy,
co-director of the design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield
Hills, Michigan, from 1971 to 1995, promoted ideas of postmodernism and
critical theory in relation to typographic practice. She developed pedagogical
exercises that converted modernist grids and letterforms into vehicles of
personal expression, grounded in vernacular, rather than universal, forms. She
and her students developed a model of “typography as discourse,” drawing on
post-structuralist literary theory, that posited the reader as an active
participant in the communications process.22 Designers at Cranbrook employed
layers of texts and images to create complex, deliberately challenging
compositions. ((Women Graphic Designers Excerpt from essay by Ellen Lupton from Pat
Kirkham, ed. Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000. London: Yale University
Press, 2000.)
McCoy’s 1980 poster
“Architecture Symbol and Interpretation,” created with Daniel Libeskind, shows
how the theory of postmodernism that was gripping the architectural community
was finding its own life in the field of graphic design.
(Women Graphic Designers Excerpt from essay by Ellen Lupton from Pat
Kirkham, ed. Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000. London: Yale University
Press, 2000.)
On the aesthetic side,
the influences of Andy Warhol and Robert Venturi helped re-invent the way
designers saw the pop culture environment that formed the context of their
work. Hitting 30, the singular aesthetic of abstracted modernism was not to be
trusted, and the stiff cultural hierarchy between "high" and
"low" was beginning to crack. Though the modernist style was not
fully abandoned at this point, graphic design teaching and practice was briefly
energized by this moment of hippie modernism, where the conceptual problem was
once again foregrounded because of the challenge of having to think in larger
terms about a future where designers would connect utopian goals to their
audiences through the peaceful use of technology. (That was then, and this is
now: but what is next?
By Lorraine Wild This
article was first published in 1996 in Emigre 39.)
the onset of semiotic
theory, cultural criticism, postmodernism and to a certain extent, graphic
design history as conciousness-raising in graphic design education. The
influence of these theories (even when mistranslated or misunderstood by
graphic designers) brought new life into a field that was in serious danger of
terminal trivialization. Patterns in the production and consumption of public
imagery began to be discussed, and the "natural" assumptions of the
profession began to be understood as constructions.
Simultaneously, the
number of graphic design students kept increasing. The number of designers kept
increasing. Different kinds of people, such as women, gays, and minorities of
all types, began to shift the profile of the profession. Students and teachers
reading theory started questioning the basis for the values and hierarchy
inside and outside of the profession. And around the same time that designers
started reading Derrida, these pale gray machines that made awkward looking
typography were multiplying in their offices.
(That was then, and
this is now: but what is next?
By Lorraine Wild This
article was first published in 1996 in Emigre 39.)
“That whole argument
that you have to be either a follower of David Carson or of the Swiss School is
not the debate we have now – I’ll take the best of both and anything else
that’s around. The old way of things was movement followed by anti-movement,
now the culture swallows the past and moves on instead of defining itself
against what has gone before,” he argues. “I’m not against what may have gone
before, I just think this is more appropriate for here and now. At the core of
the Swiss ideal is efficient communication – well, this is the most appropriate
way to communicate to our audience.”
Steve Slocombe Creative review the pretty
ugly.
Contemporary Design – Trends
Cranbrook became such
a powerful design cult because people look for family refuge, and the McCoys
ran a foster home for design addicts. They recently have decided to retire from
Cranbrook after twenty years, now that those weird little mid-Western lab
experiments have grown to powerfully influence international design trends.* (“Underground Matriarchy in Graphic Design,”
essay by Laurie Haycock Makela and Ellen Lupton, published in Eyemagazine,
1994. )
Contemporary Design – Re appropriation
The “remix culture”
that emerged in the 1980s and 90s has become a matter of course. The sampling
of everything from audio loops to computer code—once employed by artists as a
critical strategy—has merged into normal life. Media critic Lev Manovich
describes “Generation Flash” as a new cadre of producers for whom the
distinction between art and design has melted away, and for whom the
borrowing—and sharing—of information and ideas has become second nature. A new
modernism is on the march, valuing production over critique and the design of
tools and situations over the creation of finished work
(Design and Social Life Essay published in Design Life Now:
National Design Triennial (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum,
Smithsonian Institution, 2006).
Since the 1960s, postmodern
artists and designers have rejected the idea—cherished by the builders of the
Bauhaus and other modernist institutions—that communication might have a
universal basis. Postmodernism asserts that a cultural artifact can be
understood only in terms of a specific place, time, and audience. This
relativist position makes it futile to speak of any inherent meaning in an
image or object, as all people will bring their own cultural biases and
personal experiences to bear on the act of interpretation. As postmodernism
itself became a dominant ideology in the 1980s and 90s, in both the academy and
the marketplace, the design process got mired in the act of referencing
cultural styles or tailoring messages to narrowly defined communities of users.
Contemporary Graphic Design
‘The place mats were
produced without a client, and captured an erotic and exotic hyper-dimensional
vision. Using a clicky kind of humor, April found a glamorous, funhouse,
zen-like center to the practice of design. She threw the Swiss grid on its
back, and lovingly fucked it with color and wild imagery. This was a galactic
brothel compared to the retentive, methodological aesthetic of corporate
design. April was undoing the bow-tie life of graphic design.’
(Underground Matriarchy “Underground Matriarchy in Graphic Design,”
essay by Laurie Haycock Makela and Ellen Lupton, published in Eyemagazine,
1994.)
“the edge” is an
important place to be.
During a pivotal period
in the mid-1980s, the insistence of something called subjectivity wedged open
the tight rightness of “good” design.
Ten years ago,
“good” design still meant objectivity, obedience, cleanliness, and correctness.
Into that impossible modernist environment, these women placed the concept of
subjectivity. Messy, permissive, full of idiosyncratic logic, and essentially
feminist in nature, subjectivity is at the heart of the explosive avant-garde
in American graphic design today.
LHM: I was teaching at
California Insitute of the Arts when Lorraine Wild arrived from Houston in 1985
as the new chair of the visual communications program. Soon after, two more
Cranbrook graduates—Jeff Keedy and Ed Fella—joined the faculty. Within a year,
the fires were set. The four of us taught a graduate seminar whose students
included Barry Deck, Barbara Glauber, and Somi Kim. Informed by theory and
history, Lorraine set a tough standard for critiques that often mocked
conventional design standards of meta-perfection and problem-solving. The
students’ formal and critical skills developed within an authentic and radical
contemporary art environment. The rigorous exchange between Cranbrook and Cal
Arts and the emerging influence of Emigre magazine (and Zuzana Licko’s
typefaces) all helped create a dizzying centrifugal force for our times, a
virtual supernova in design evolution. All the while, Eric Martin and Scott
Makela presided like magicians over the MacLab, introducing one and all to the
wonders of new design technology.
Contemporary Graphic
Design – Feminism
Kathy McCoy has said
that “the modernist design paradigms of objective rationalism are typical of a
male sensibility, safely disengaged from emotional involvement.”
Women seemed
particularly well-equipped to grapple with the decentering of the times, or at
least to be a center for decentered thinking. Kathy found her students
agressively rejecting traditonal approaches to visual communication. She
encouraged their private dialogues, strange and culty works with a fascinating
influence of Dutch design, twisted by post-structural theory and a man named Ed
Fella.
Contemporary – technology
During the 1990s,
cultural recycling and visual “scratch mixing” became graphic design’s standard
operating procedures, inside and outside the classroom. The digital
transformation of design processes encouraged this transformation by enabling
the endless recirculation of existing material. It also forced educators to
focus energy on teaching software, which was seen as a necessary evil on the
path to becoming a designer.
Yet while design
educators had turned away from formal analysis towards a more impressionistic,
culturally based, referential approach, software writers had been
systematically organizing image-making into menus of properties, parameters,
filters, and so on, converting the Bauhaus theory of visual language into
comprehensive visual tools. Photoshop, for example, is a systematic study of
the features of an image—its contrast, size, color model, and so on. InDesign and
Quark Xpress are structural explorations of typography; they are software
machines for exploring leading, alignment, spacing, and column structures as
well as image placement and page layout.
These tools have cast
a net around our field of practice, filtering our daily production of
typography, symbols, images, and information systems. To what degree do we
understand the formal constraints and possibilities of these tools? No theory
or pedagogical practice has appeared to address the role of digital technologies
in shaping and describing the formal language of design.
Essay published
in Artifact 1(3): 149-158 (2007). Ellen Lupton
SAME ESSAY LOOKS AT BAUHAUS TEACHING IN
SCHOOLS
The advent of the computer generated the phenomena
called desktop publishing. This enabled anyone who could type the freedom of using
any available typeface and do any kind of distortion. It was a disaster of mega
proportions.
A cultural pollution of incomparable
dimension. As I said, at the time, if all people doing desktop publishing were
doctors we would all be dead!
Typefaces experienced an incredible
explosion.
The computer allowed anybody to design new
typefaces and that became one of the
biggest
visual pollution of all times. – Vignelli
Canon
“Making a magazine is
about finding the right look for its content, its attitude,” Meiré argues. “To
me it’s the only way to create a unique identity. [In doing so] maybe you don’t
please the [mainstream] anymore – but you become who you are, authentic in your
own way.”
The
new ugly
The Modernist principles that educators of
the time were presenting to students must have been attractive to the aspiring
designer, the proposition of creating ‘efficient, clear’ communication under
the same premise as a unified group of designers is still attractive. The
Bauhaus was a characterization of this allure, a home for the Modernist, at the
forefront of Modernist innovation. The Bauhaus’ legend is renowned; known to
any self-confessed designer, the Bauhaus, alongside Cranbrook and CalArts must
remain idols of any creative institution. The prospect of being part of an
institution with equal or surpassing impact on society
‘The Bauhaus Vorkurs or Basic Course remains today the model—at least
nominally—for first-year foundation programs in countless art programs, which
aim to expose students to a common language of form underlying all the arts.’ (Ellen Lupton, 2007)
‘Modernism was for the
most part formed in art schools, where the pedagogical strategies were
developed that continue to this day in design schools…
All kinds of claims
can and have been made in an effort to keep Modernism eternally relevant and
new. The contradiction of being constant, yet always new, has great appeal for
graphic designers, whose work is so ephemeral.’ (Keedy, 1998)
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