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

I have a chronic and long-standing hatred and contempt for my own work. It’s endemic to the profession, generally… like the common cold of design. Or really, any field where making things out of ideas is the stock and trade.

But so: my dear friend GAC, if you don’t know him, is a supremely excellent photographer based in PHL. He can really point a camera at stuff, and he can really whip a llama’s ass with a belt. After I fretted publicly about not having decent photos of my design crapola, he suggested that he might assuage my stated disparity, and we hatched a plan. We had a raucous 24-hour work-bender-photoshoot, some of the results of which you see here.

But yeah: so it’s really really really fucking nice to see someone else seeing your stuff. Whatever one might say about the stuff in question (and a lot of this is debatably not even “my stuff”), it feels SO GOOD to see it from a point of view that is somehow liberated from your own weatherbeaten prism. Like an eyeball massage or someshit. Yes.

Anyway. I’m just sayin’. Wanted to share and all. You should do this, really, if you’re stuck: have your friend do your portfolio, and do theirs in return. It’ll be awesome.

And yeah I’m sure you already know all this shit already, but I am nothing if not grotesquely naive. I mean, I got swindled out of my gizmos by a pituitary mutant. So you probably saw it all coming a mile away. C’est la guerre, no? Yis!

YO MY WALL IS UP!! Come to the fucking mason building and SEE!!!! I’m very happy with this shit. I know you’re not supposed to like your own shit, but I am taking an exception this time, and liking it. Yeah!

Also I have a new article up on SpeakUp and Writing Design Criticism. Do tell me what you think if you have some time to waste. Because I love you, and your opinion is paramount. Indeeeeed yes!

Anyway that’s it for now. I will be unbroke in about two hours so talk to you after I buy some food and eat it. Until then.

-fish