Yo. So I’ve been meaning to post, really… but I will confess: there have been other distractions in the online world. Why conjure up a full-fledged opinion on something, when you can simply ffffind an image or cough up some wierd shit, with a shrug, and be done with things?
Blech. Really. But the recent show I curated (in association with my esteemed cohorts) got me thinking about some shit. And, you know, I’ve got one million ideas, and they’re each worth one dollar… and so. I will commence posting some in-progress writing stuff at this point, and you, the anonymous internet reader, can have at them as per the conventions of “blog” “postings” and what have you. Here, for starters, is a rebuttal to the canonical Graphic Design in the White Cube essay, by Peter Bil’ak. Currently, I am in the process of designing a six-poster series, typeset with both Bil’ak’s essay and my own commentary, targeted for display in an actual “white cube” gallery as per Mr. Bil’ak’s invocation.
So here you go. More work to follow, yes! Ahem.
GRAPHICS DESIGN IN THE WHITE CUBE: A REBUTTAL
I often hear this essay’s opening statement, assertively definitive as it is, repeated by critics of design exhibitions. It certainly sounds convincing. But upon closer examination, it is far from
axiomatic. How, for example, can a poster in a gallery suffer from a lack
of context? Your average event poster is emblazoned with typographic
information: dates, times, locations, and other ancilliary data are most
often integrated with form and composition in such works. Books and other
published printed matter also typically display their own metadata
throughout their construction, from their spines and covers, through their
front matter and running titles. In this way, many archetypical graphic design constructs bring much more
contextual information with them than, say, archetypical fine-art constructs
such as paintings, etchings, sculpture, and the like.
It is easy to say, “Aha, but graphic design is inherently functional. A
poster in a gallery, objectified as it is, is not doing the job for which it
was purposed, which is to disseminate its encapsulated information; whereas
fine-art work like paintings are at home in the gallery space.”
My response to this kind of comment is twofold. Firstly, the assertion that
graphic design is “inherently functional” (or “always to serve a client”, or
“for money”, or any of the other permutations of that idea) is false.
Graphic design archetypes may have evolved out of the necessities of
information storage and transfer, etc, but that does not make all graphic
design objects beholden to this ideal. I would, at this point, illustrate
this point with fanatical elucidation of some of my favorite graphic
practitioners of the past and present, and the work that they do that
straddles the false dichotomy of “art” and “design”… but Mr. Bil’ak has
done that for me himself, later in his essay.
Figure 1: Graphic design versus art. Can we please not have any further discussion of the matter?
Second: it is easy to forget that most fine-art constructs are descended
from equally functional roots. The craft and canon of painting, as we all
know, started out as graffiti on cave walls, and it concerned itself with
where one might go for some good wooly mammoth. The illustrious evolution of
the practice of painting has led it outside the gulag of functional slavery;
why is it “fundamentally problematic” to employ the toolset the gallery offers
to reconsider graphic work, in the manner in which it is used to reconsider
“art”?
One gets the feeling that, in his opening salvo, Mr. Bil’ak was calling out
exhibitions comprised of more pragmatic (nay, functional) design material:
business cards, letterheads, no-smoking signs, community newsletters,
medicine bottle labels… that sort of thing. An exhibition of “graphic
design” of this sort would most likely bore me. If poorly considered, such
a show might suffer from a lack of critical context.
Mr. Bil’ak then immediately seems to reverse his position, describing as he
does the work of Karel Martens, M/M Paris, and other designers who either
directly make art, or who make a case for their design working successfully
in the gallery context. Mr. Bil’ak’s invocation of these practitioners —
and the fact that their work achieves exactly what his bold initial claim
decries as “always problematic” — muddies the essays’ thesis far beyond
its syntax. Indeed, before long, Mr. Bil’ak trots out the old “what is
‘graphic design’ anyway” chestnut. He dances around the definition,
offhandedly citing (and thus summoning the moral authority of) the
established history of the Brno International Graphic Design Biennale, but
then proceeding to suggest that despite “people[’s] created expectations”,
we can “understand ‘graphic design’ … to mean a field in flux”:
Unlike the work of other professionals, the work of a designer is not
restricted or defined by its content; in fact designers are trained to
accommodate and express various, often contradicting ideas. It is a
ghost discipline as Stuart Bailey writes:
‘…graphic design only exists when other subjects exist first. It
isn’t an a priori discipline, but a ghost; both a grey area and a
meeting point…’ Bailey calls attention to an area that many
designers struggle with: the way that they refer to their activity
in their field transcends the established notion of its definition.
… this sort of language carefully positions ‘graphic design’ as a
mercurial complement to whatever it is that it may be engaging with. I agree
with this notion; in fact, it is a very interesting way to talk about
how graphic design works. Mr. Bil’ak seems to conclude that graphic work is
at odds with exhibition in galleries because of its fluid definition… the
tabula rasa of the “white cube” diffuses whatever relevance the graphic
work might bring to the table.
BUT, SEE, IT’S NOT LIKE THAT. ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN…
Generally, contemporary art museums
exhibit designed elements from the entire spectrum of human cultural
production. One can go to the RISD museum, for example, and see recreations
of entire 18th- and 19th-century rooms, each chock full of silverware,
furniture, glassware, tapestries, and countless other accoutrements. Down
the hall from these tableaux are enormous collections of Japanese Noh robes,
assemblages of Roman sculptures, surveys of contemporary music videos, and
other such disparate specimens… all of which fall under the museums’
aegis, the necessity of their construction notwithstanding. They’re all
treated as first-class museum citizens, right up alongside the paintings and
installations and other “art” material.
Bil’ak is not talking about museums, though, nor is he discussing exhibition
space in general. His argumentative feint about the definition of ‘graphic
design’ hides a much larger lexical omission: the definition of what is
meant by “white cube”. It sounds self-explanatory, right? I mean, all
contemporary galleries are just expressions of this nearly Platonic
idealization of exhibition space… right?
The seductive simplicity in Mr. Bil’ak’s employ of the image of a “white
cube” masks the very complex set of social, economic, and spatial conditions
that are produced by the contemporary gallery as much as they nourish and
sustain it. The explication of these dynamics is beyond the scope of this
document in a big way — those interested in the minutia of such things
will no doubt enjoy Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism (or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism)”, if they haven’t already read it — but suffice
to say, the notion of a “white cube” is dangerously dismissive.
I don’t even need to dissect the architectural and socioeconomic frameworks
in which contemporary gallery space is enmeshed to prove this. Mr. Bi’lak
illustrates it himself, if you read the remainder of his essay with care.
After positing his definition of ‘graphic design’, Mr. Bi’lak then goes
on to describe the conceit for “Graphic Design in the White Cube” [the
exhibition] and how it dovetails with the exhibitions put on by renouned
practitioners (like M/M Paris) and accomplished curator/authors (like Rick
Poynor). Notably, from this point on in the essay, Mr. Bil’ak ceases all
references to “white cubes”. While listing his fellow art/design luminaries’
various shows, retrospectives, collaborations, and whatnot,
Bil’ak makes reference to specific galleries in specific places. Moreover,
he freely invokes larger-scale events, such as biennales, and he includes
full-fledged museums alongside contemporary gallery spaces in his
enumerations.
Really, at this point, Mr. Bil’ak’s thesis could be restated as something
like:
“Exhibitions of vanilla, boring graphic design work — like letterheads
and pamphlets — won’t really work in theoretical idealized display
space, as alluded to by some contemporary art galleries.”
… which, yeah, I agree with. Beyond that, any issues incumbent in showing
graphic design in a gallery are not necessarily systemic: bad work, whether
you call it ‘art’ or ‘design’, will not make for a good show. Bad gallery
space will likewise negatively affect the shows held within.
And, really, thank god. As Jane Jacobs said in The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, “Everything that happens in the world happens at some place.” Many
notable practitioners have utilized the unique features of the galleries
they have placed their work in. Consider Sarah Sze’s mind-bendingly
complex gallery installations, or Yayoi Kusama’s sale of her own work as a
protest against the Venice Biennale (which she mentions in this interview), or Jenny Holzer’s employ of the
Guggenheim’s spiral as a single long line of text … to say nothing of
Matthew Barneys’ subjugation of that same space to his fantasmic whim.
These precedents make Mr. Bil’ak’s proposal for “Graphic Design in the
White Cube” [the exhibition] read as anemic at best, and irrelevant at
worst; my suspicions of such were confirmed when I saw the documentation
of the show. Mr. Bil’ak’s notion of commissioning design work for the
gallery implies an opportunity for performance that was squandered, and the
posters that the participants ultimately produced are largely unremarkable.
Figure 2. Poster example with process sketches. From Graphic Design in the White Cube, the exhibition.
The posters themselves are displayed alongside process sketches. While I
take it the sketches were to provide “context” for the work, their
formalized presentation had no analog in the conventions of contemporary
gallery space, and as such their presence was at odds with the work
they were ostensibly there to support.
Most notably, the gallery the exhibition took place in was not a white cube.
There were finished wooden wall panels in some places, and some lighting
fixtures were non-trivially ornate. In the documentation photos, at least
one curtained floor-to-cieling glass window is visible. If this sounds like
a nitpick, I assure you it’s not: Mr. Bil’ak’s fundamental assumption is
that his show is specifically designed for the generic non-place of his
notional “white cube”. The fact that his chosen exhibit hall deviates
nontrivially from this notion is quite telling.
(to complicate matters, “White Cube” is the name of a famous gallery in
London, which is the home base of several high-profile YBAs. As far as I can
ascertain, Mr. Bil’ak is not referencing White Cube of London at all.)
I would submit that demonstrating graphic design as functioning in a gallery
space is unnecessary, because “art” itself is a specialized form of design.
I have “art” in “quotes” for a reason: most Westerners have a romanticized
idea of “art” as a volatile bromide, concocted of passion and creativity in
the name of fundamental human expression. We know this is hardly true, if we
think about it, but such is the myth we construct to explain “art”. This
myth aligns the contemporary gallery space as a selfless cultural bastion, a
la a museum, when in reality a gallery is more akin to a store. (rem
koolhaas wryly notes this, and its urbanistic implications, in his essay
Delirious No More).
As such, contemporary practitioners of “art” can be thought of as multimodal
designers, who target “white cube” space as they work with it, like a medium
in its own right. By “white cube” space, I mean contemporary gallery space
as it is regarded by the myth of “art”. While “white cube” space never
manifests itself as an architectural ideal — a gallery is always some
place — the application of the “art” myth serves to impart some of the
non-place attributes of that ideal. As such, “art” practitioners can gear
their designs towards a generic gallery context, but they are free to
engage their presentational surroundings and create site-specific works.
-fish
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