A few months ago, I wrote an article about the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound, which ran on SpeakUp and is archived here as part of Writing Design Criticism. My initial assesment of ffffound was super-mega-thumbs-up, but the more I’ve used the site, the more I got kind of bothered by certain fundamental aspects of it. So here’s a devils’-advocate rebuttal to my own article. Indeed.

OK, so: ffffound is to graphic design what Napster was to music. Seriously. Look: I used to blow hundreds of dollars at Other Music and Tower and Satellite and Fat Beats, et al, making my feet sore walking to as many record stores as I could in one fell swoop, all to find that elusive catchy hook or strange beat that I’d overheard someone cooler than me talking about on the train or someshit. But: then came Napster, and its various P2P children and grandchildren, and I didn’t have to leave my seat. Based on the music-snob knowledge I’d already amassed, I could feed the right words into the search engines of the darknet (PDF), and lo: all the music I wanted was just a status bar away.

Now, I go to a record store maybe once a year. Yeah, of course I go to see bands I like whenever I can, and of course I always buy CDs and other merch direct from the table, to assuage the guilt from my gluttony, and to support the music — in that order. I love music with all my heart, and it is that love that keeps this cycle so fantastically well-oiled, throughout all the complex circumlocutions and moralizations that surround the muddled notion of digital copyright infringement.

Similarly (nay, analogously), I used to buy books and read blogs and ferret out design morsels in the library and elsewhere… but now I just look at ffffound. For example: the other day, while I was doing a diagram for a collaborative book my class is putting out on lulu, I skipped through both my personal ffffound archives and those of the ffffound front page, and lasered off about 20 letter-sized images that somehow spoke to what I was doing. Each reflected my idea in some facet of their design — in their type contrasts, maybe, or in their visualization methodology, or in their basic form, or what have you — but they all were from seriously far-flung sources, only temporarily united in the service of my quest only by virtue of their status as ffffound objects.


Figure 1. Some of ffffound’s most popular images.

I pinned them on the wall, sketched a bit, conferred with my colleagues, sketched more, and knocked out the diagram. In the course of all this, I did not pause for a moment and sink into a comfy chair with my well-thumbed edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, nor did I lovingly tease any slowly-oxygenating prints out of my graduated colleagues’ flatfiles, or anything like that. I pretty much stayed in my standard I-am-designing-shit pose, which was: hunched over a computer. Printouts notwithstanding… If I’d had a monitor that was large enough, or if I hadn’t needed to collaborate with my friends in order to do the thing that I was doing, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the lasers (which laserprints — let’s admit it — are totally screentastic in their glossy quick’n’dirtiness).

The point is: ffffound has emerged as a single repository where I can instantly gratify my urge to see new design thingees. I can root through dozens of pieces of other people’s work, with nothing to give me pause, making no payments of any kind, and with no consequence. It was one thing, back in the early days, when the Internet was brand-new… wow! So much design, so much of it from far away, and all right at your fingertips! But you still had to work for it, and engage with your subject matter. To do design research — and I use that term provisionally here — with a computer, you had to balance queries to Corbis with those to Nexis. You had to know when to root through your bookmarks for samples from some weird blog, and when to hit up Flickr or the Prelinger archives, or when to pack it in and buy a fucking stock image of a woman walking along a beach with a sunset.

Or when to stand up from the computer and look in a book. Or when to talk to someone who would know.


Figure 2. Good design. Via ffffound.

Ffffound gives you all that stuff in one place, all conveniently pre-curated by a slaverishly devoted volunteer staff of designers and design fans. You don’t have to have been blessed with one of its coveted invites to subscribe to its main RSS feed, and then there you go: a fountain of fresh design, photography, and art, right there in your feed reader, with new stuff piped in from the zeitgeist minute by minute. Sure, the system hasn’t got any tags or search boxes, yeah, but with a modicum of hunting around, you can find a user whose tastes appeal to your desires, and subscribe to their individual feed. And kablam: their graphic tastes are at your fingertips whenever you like. Ffffound’s look-but-don’t-post invite-only policy promotes a distribution model similar to that which was engendered by Napster and its P2P descendants, in which a small number of taste-making uploaders can distribute a schmorgasboard of content to hordes of downloaders in a vastly asymmetric fashion. But by passing out invitations through the social network of its users, ffffound follows in the footsteps of OiNK (the now-legendary BitTorrnet music hub) in creating a self-reinforcing community standard. Invites only go to those who users think would use ffffound “right”, the nature of which can only be gleaned from observation.

Figure 3. Tips for designers who want to be ffffound. Ripped off from this.

Much as psychoacoustically compressed audio files are delivered minus the grounding context of record packaging and liner notes, images on ffffound are ripped from their context and tossed upon the totalizing non-ground that is the sites’ white background. The “quoted from” link that ffffound furnishes is, in many cases, completely useless — bookmarking an image after going directly to its URL simply renders the “quote” link redundant. Furthermore, if such a directly-posted image is from a site with many users (like flickr, say, or facebook) it is impossible to trace the post back to the page in which it was originally situated. The “quoted from” link is also less than compatible with blogs: if I post to ffffound from a blogs’ front page, and the blogger puts up a few new entries, the originating article will move off of the page. To find the source of the image, then, you’d have to root through the blogs’ archive… a task which ranges from eye-rollingly irritating to nigh-impossible, depending on whose site you’re specifically concerned with.


Figure 4. This image is extremely popular on ffffound (as you can see here)… but the user responsible for the flickr page from which it’s taken seems to have copied it, with no attribution, from this guy. Ffffound’s lack of user control and annotation prevents this fact from being noted within ffffound in any way.

And but so: ffffound users could themselves navigate to the right URLs, only posting images when it is respectful (morally, if not legally) to do so. But they don’t. I know I don’t: when I see an image I like on the internet these days, I almost immediately ask, “is it ffffindable??” I have even caught myself thinking this about actual physical objects I see in real life:


Figure 5. Rrrreal llllife ffffound. It was inevitable.

See, what really drives ffffound, though, is love. I love finding and sharing and swapping and trading ffffound images until I’m swimming in them. We all do. It’s sorta like the card game War, and sorta like going to Printed Matter… sorta del.icio.us and sorta HotOrNot (or, more currently, commandshift3). But I am starting to fear that that love may eventually create something nasty. Ffffound already has climbed to the top of many designers’ bookmark lists; the individuals behind some of the more popular design blogs, like SwissMiss and SpeakUp, have presences on ffffound. Such high-profile endorsement legitimizes ffffound as a resource, and allows visitors to gloss over the complex issues of attribution and intellectual property as they ogle ffffound’s visual schmorgasbord. I fear that with each image we post to it, ffffound gets riper for some sort of reckoning in these perilously unresolved arenas.


Figure 6. Escape, from Mandatory Thinking.

We shall see. Will they add more features? Will they take some away? Will the site remain in beta, or will it open its doors to the public? Will an imitator challenge ffffound’s hegemonous hold on “image bookmarking”? Will such an imitator fall first to legal scuffles? Who the fuck knows. I do not. Yeah.

(Anyway. I’m compiling notes for a longer, non-designy entry about me and my big fat life, but in the meantime, there’s always the tumblelogs, in regular and MFA thesis flavors. Indeed. Salud!

Yo. Before I forget, there are many miscellaneous things you should know. I will now list them.

• Bryan and I were up very late indeed making and installing the SPACE ROCKS! poster (as you see above), and it would be great if you came! It’s next Saturday at the GSD, and a bunch of graphic designers and artists, etc, will be speaking about SPACE. And how it ROCKS, no doubt… the full info is here. Indeed!
• In the course of the making of this poster, I paired Johnston ITC with Mr. Barnbrook’s Bastard Fat, which I am like rilly pleased with in some perverse way. I can’t explain that shit. Rilly, you tell me:

• The day after that, though, I got totally busted by the Mason building’s sysadmin for circumventing the school’s print system. He had documentation of how much ink I had (allegedly!) used, down to the microliter or somesuch. So I am now in some serious trouble. Whoops.
• I love ffffound. My paean to it has been up on SpeakUp for a little while, so maybe you knew that, but still. It’s fucking awesome. Yeah.
• My show went up. I call it “my show”, which is wrong, really; I was one of many many participants in what was the graphic design graduate show, which I curated along with Jerlyn and Hoon. So not at all entirely mine (although I did do the identity posters for it) but in my mind I still call it “my show”, however erroneous that might be. Erm. It was a blast, I’ll have you know, yis.
• Through all of these things, I took copious notes on tumblr, where I post both thesis-related and non-thesis-related miscellaneous shit. In the course of our space rocks work bender, Bryan asked me what the value-add of tumblr was, and I described it much as I described ffffound’s allure: more of a value-subtract, really; the lack of control over minutia that you have with most bloggy things (tags, comments, RSS, APIs, etc) make it kind of a pleasure to use. Many of my friends have been using them, because who cares about most blog features? I, for one, could give less of a shit, for the most part, and so yeah hey.
• I got the thirty-inch monitor, like finally, and the ipod touch, on an impulse. Laura pointed out that these are exactly the things I’d throw out my window, if I wanted to make a Yaz record… but frankly I like “Situation” and its ilk as they are, for the moment. The one thing I will always go gaga for is a bigger fucking monitor, and I think I can safely say with this one that I’m good for a little while w/r/t monitor envy and whatnot. Ok. Yes!
• Looking for thesis advisors. Need to find them, like this week. Can’t I summon my recently graduated friends???? Argh.
• Sleep cycle is pretty fucking abnormal. As such I will kill this list now, cuz bleah. But yeah I have to churn out the writing for thesis, so there will be more drivel here soon, I will warn you. Yis!

love ya

-fish

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