1 post tagged “modernism”
What is design? Who is a designer?
And what is a designer’s role in culture?
As a copywriter, it was always relatively simple to delineate what I do from the art I make. Things fit into tidy boxes: masturbation, and money-making. But my designer friends have a much tougher task in their quest for creative identity. Are they artists? Sometimes they act prickish enough. Are they corporate greed monkeys? Their client service counterparts would sure like to think so. Are they a disappearing breed of aesthetic social activists? This definition is your design professor’s wet dream. But ask a designer to define his role, to self-identify, and you may find your question answered with steely silence, a glazed emptiness, a cloudy pause. This is not a bowel movement. This is an identity crisis. And from an outsider’s perspective, a come-to-jesus talk seems long overdue.
Design, or Just Nice Decorating?
Hamlet’s Metrosexual Quandry
There are as many definitions of design as there are assholes willing to write an essay (or article). Don’t get me wrong: some of these assholes are the most brilliant assholes of the twentieth century. But they all seem to have a common tendency to define what design is not, rather than what it is.
Paul Rand often defined and re-defined design in a passionate if not evasive way:
You talk about design and there is no definition and everybody has different ideas what design is. One person thinks of his father’s tie. One person thinks of his mother’s nightgown. Another person thinks of his carpet in his living room. Another person is thinking of his wallpaper in his john. You know, that is not design. That is decorating.
Rick Poyner, design writer and journalist, also defines design’s negative space in the essay, The Time for Being Against:
Graphic design is not, in most cases, a thing-in-itself: it’s a formal property, a rhetorical dimension, a communicative tissue of something else. It may be an essential component, and the object may not properly exist without it, but its contribution is still usually just taken for granted… today, with emphasis on self, on style, rather than on content or idea, and in much of what is alleged to be graphic design, communication at best, is puzzling.
Victor Papanek, famous commercial design dropout and author of Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change also tended to define design in absentia, speaking specifically to the absence of social responsibility:
There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier: Advertising design. In persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others that don’t care, it is probably the phoniest field in existence today.
It’s no wonder that graphic designers are secretive or defensive
about what exactly it is that they do: the fact is, they just don’t know.
And if they try to define what they do, chances are they’re told by
some bloated, self-important sod that they’re wrong. This lingering
Modernist philosophy of design, one that embraces design as a positive
societal force, seems misplaced in the sea of coupons and detergent
packaging and all the other shitty things we do in the name of consumer
communications. And yet we long for the greater good, and measure our
worth against this Modernist moral yardstick that we learn about in
design school.
Where are our hopes for the future of design? Why are we lost in translation? Somehow, somewhere, we have been taught that our work defines our moral character; but if we want to be paid for our work, we must betray the very yardstick that defines us. Aye, there’s the rub. This is also called Fucked If You Do, and Fucked If You Don’t.
Modernism And Our Self-Esteem
Milton Glaser seems to address this art/design identity crisis in a more straightforward way. He deserves a big pat on the back.
If one of the definitions we have concerning art is that is serves its public by reflecting and explaining the world at a particular moment in history, it is hard to believe that design does not serve in a similar way. All that aside, the effect of separating art and design, which occurs in the schools, and continues later in life, erodes the perception that design shares with art a responsibility to community, and an ethical center. Designers are placed somewhere between the ethos of art and the ethos of business, and this causes a lifetime of conflicting identifications.
A lifetime of conflicting identifications, indeed. Reading Mr. Glaser’s essays gave me great pause to think: Is this conflict, this moral paradox, the reason why my friends are all so weird? Could our chronic impostorism and insecurity be blamed on something other than narcissistic personality disorder?
Beauty, Truth, and Harmony
The words of Plato, the Tyranny of LeCorbusier, and The Reason We All Feel So Inadequate.
Considering the nagging Modernist guilt we all carry around like a smack habit, what are we to make of our careers as comissioned communicators? Many take the stance of the cavalier Creative Prostitute who enjoys the art of whoring. This role satiates our guilt and absolves us of wrongdoing. We are merely a fly on the wall of the corporate culture: an impostor who’s sole raison d’etre is to see how long we can keep up the charade. But in the end, we know that this happy hooker archetype only exists in fiction; pornographic fiction, to be exact.
Another perplexing archetype is the Designer-as-Misanthrope. Those of us who fall into this category are sad characters, painfully ironic, because we have taken all our self-loathing and our insecurities and externalized them, creating enemies of the very people from whom we’ve made our living seeking the approval of. No one understands us. No one sees the hidden metaphor in our seven-point, varnish on matte typesetting. We throw existential tantrums that give account coordinators night terrors. And we hide our self-perceived inadequacies in snotty self-righteousness.
Finally, we come to the most troublesome creative of all – the Joyless Designer. This shell of a human being has become so disillusioned by their job that they no longer design. Their solutions are like old Mensa analogy tests: hard line is to precision as soft line is to approachable. They fill in the blanks appropriately, the spirit of the challenge long beaten out of them. Often, they are a product of a design firm overrun with account service fascisti. They have recurring dreams of being accepted in the Stepford-like social circles of their clients. And they find no joy in creating something spectacular after hours. They are in a state of perpetual self-starvation. They need our help. Reach out to these designers in your firm with gratitude. More likely than not, they are working on the accounts that you don’t want to. And more likely than not, they have had fantasies about poisoning you.
All these observations would appear to beg a bigger question: Why do we design? Do we design for ourselves, for a greater good, for our supper, for our ego, for our client, for our Creative Director? I submit that we stop clamoring to answer the great Why. I submit that it is no one’s goddamned business. I have terrific sympathy for my designer counterparts, because it too often seems that society is owed an answer: that questioning a designer’s motives, even her ethic, is fair game. No one ever asked me why I was a copywriter, or whether I am arrogant enough to call my creations-for-hire an art form. No one asks whether my short story made $10 or $10000. To make a rather grandiose and faulty analogy, who dares to question whether the portraiture of DaVinci or Gainsborough or Andy Warhol is art or commerce? The question of ethical and artistic purity does not become irrelevant simply because they were paid for their efforts.
In short, I say fuck them.
Admit That You Have a Problem
Self: Hello. I’m Jennifer, and I’m a Modernist.
Self-help group: Hello Jennifer.
Allow me to end, surprisingly, with a solution. Or at the very least, a proposition: That we abandon our longing for the Modernist way of life, and find something new, something, relevant, something revolutionary to replace it. We cannot continue to live within this crippling paradigm. Let us prosper under our own rule, let us define for ourselves what is our art and what is our livelihood. Let us design for the pure and unadulterated joy of it, for in the end, who can argue that communication is art, and art, communication?
I propose that we begin a design movement based on the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters. Futurism seems at least a much more opportunistic sounding name: it looks to the future for answers, rather than the past. It peers into unchartered territory with enthusiasm and passion. I say the false ideology of Modernism and the constipated navel-gazing of Post-Modernism has made us impotent: let us learn a thing or two from some crazy, agitated Italians.
I give you the last paragraph of the Futurist Painter’s Manifesto
With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will:
- Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.
- Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation.
- Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.
- Bear bravely and proudly the smear of “madness” with which they try to gag all innovators.
- Regard art critics as useless and dangerous.
- Rebel against the tyranny of words: “Harmony” and “good taste” and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin…
- Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.
- Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.
The dead shall be buried in the earth’s deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!
Make room indeed.
