Here's my notes from today's discussion. Everyone is encouraged is chime in with responses, questions, thoughts, arguments...
NOTES ON "DECONSTRUCTION AND GRAPHIC DESIGN"
Summary: Examines the term and use of “deconstruction” in graphic design in 80s/early 90s and discusses “the place of typography in the work of Jacque Derrida who initiated the theory of deconstruction.”
SECTION 1:DECONSTRUCTION IN RECENT DESIGN CULTURE
What did it look like in graphic design?
“Chopped up, layered, fragmented, ambiguous futuristic overtones
What is deconstruction?
It’s a mode of questioning everything about having to do with representation – all the technologies, formal devices, social institutions, and metaphors.
“It is a strategy of critical-formaking”
Who’s using it?
It’s now completely part of academic and visual culture. But “became vanguard” in U.S. in 70s and 80s.
When did it start?
Started with Derrida’s book, Of Grammatology, published in France in ‘67 and in U.S. in ’76.
What was Deconstruction’s about?
Instead of criticizing content, Deconstruction focused on all the systems BEHIND the making of the piece.
“HOW REPRESENTATION INHABITS REALITY”
Huh?
Most of Western culture is based in Platonic notion that there’s reality and then there’s representations.
But Derrida shows the falsehood of this opposition. That things aren’t so simple – so “black and white” or “either/or”
Derrida had a shtick about writing vs. speech. What was that about?
In western culture since Plato, I believe, writing has been seen as the denigrated representation of speech. Derrida looks at writing (and the design of writing) as part of the thoughts previously thought to belong exclusively to spoken ideas.
Derrida showed that even speech was a form of representation because it was not thought itself, but the expression of thought.
So, what’s grammatology?
Study of writing as a form of representation –including the typography and graphic design.
Grammatology was the “field of inquiry”/deconstruction was the mode.
What’s the relationship between deconstruction and post-structuralism? What’s post-structuralism anyway?
Deconstruction was part of post-structuralism, which was a movement that looked at modes of representation. (Foucault, Baudrillard, Barthes). Deconstruction picked apart signs that made cultural forms seem natural/truthful – race, gender, and sexuality – and showed how and why these signs were constructions.
This had a big effect on artists in the 70s and 80s.
What about how post-modernism fits in this picture?
At the time, post-modernism was looking at pre-modernist representation – classic architecture and figurative painting. Post-structuralism gave PM a critical stance.
So how and when did deconstruction get introduced to graphic design?
Introduced by other visual arts – photography, architecture, performance and installation art. Daniel Libeskind, the architect and then head of Cranbrook’s Architecture Program in the 70s, introduced Kathy McCoy and GD students to literary criticism. The students then created a special issue of Visible Language, a peer-reviewed design journal from MIT, for summer 1978 issue, where they “progressively expanded the spaces between line and works and pushing the footnotes into the space normally reserved for the main text.”
Expands in 80s when Jeff Keedy introduced Barthes. (Although there were other ideas afloat and post-structuralism wasn’t the exclusive methodology.
How did post-structuralism play out at Cranbrook?
It became an attitude for making “visual and verbal experiments” that played with reading – the reader playing an active role in the creation of meaning. Post-structuralism was both a mode of expression and a subject of research, but it lacked the political critique associated with PS, they preferred theories that embraced vernaculars and popular that Venturi and Scott Brown introduced.
At Cranbrook PS was about a poetics not criticism.
So, what did post-structuralism become in design?
It became “a romantic theory of self-expression” based on a “cheerful” response to “death of the author” which in literary criticism was concerned with how the author works within “a grid” of possible strategies (i.e. Fiction, history, interview, essay). Post-structuralism worked against this grid.
How did “Deconstructivism” get introduced and what’s it about?
Architectural show as MoMA.
SECTION 2: DESIGN WITHIN THE THEORY OF DECONSTRUCTION
Where did Derrida’s theories come from?
His readings of Sassure about structural linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology (structuralism). He was especially interested in the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified as part of a system – structures that generate meaning rather than meaning in the thing itself in a vacuum. THOUGHTS TAKE SHAPE OUT OF THE MATERIAL BODY OF LANGUAGE.
So then what was Derrida’s argument in Of Grammatology with Sassure?
Sassure saw writing (phonetic and ideographic) as corrupted speech.
Derrida pointed out the speech/language was a representation itself and showed that there were signifiers in writing that were neither phonetic nor ideographic like punctuation, roman/italic, upper/lower case and spacing.
THERE IS NO OUTSIDE to speech. Everything is part of the system of signifiers and signifieds.
So what does typography and graphic design have to do with this?
They materialize writing! All the conventions of typography are part of Derrida’s idea of grammatology (writing as form of representation). This way of seeing things allows us to look at the history of typography as the history of relationships between content and form. Grammatology would produce a catalog of forms.
DERRIDA SAW DESIGN AND TYPOGRAPHY AS DISTINCT MODES OF REPRESENTATION AND SAW THEIR FUTURE AS AN ONGOING DEVELOPMENT.
What did Richard Eckersley demonstrate about typography in Glas? (point out examples)
That was how Derrida saw Deconstruction, but what did deconstruction become in schools and other social contexts?
It became a form of criticism, but also a style.
What was Lupton and Miller’s final analysis of the significance of deconstruction for graphic design?
“Design can critically engage the mechanics of representation, exposing and revising its ideological biases; design also can remake the grammar of communication by discovering structure and patterns within the material media of visual and verbal writing.”
NOTES ON "LOW AND HIGH"
Summary: Lupton and Miller deconstruct how "low" and "high" have been co-opted by artists and designers, argues that there is not longer any distinction, and insists that designer should take critical positions from within the culture rather than above.
• 1990 show at MoMA, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture showcase low/pop cultures influence/inclusion in modern art – low becomes high
• Graphic designers also interested in low into high through their inclusion of vernaculars in their work.
• In the conceptual shell of high vs. low, vernacular becomes the other, not part of design – the sophisticated designer pitted against the naïve other.
• This critical positioning began with William Morris – design as critic from above
• While Learning from Las Vegas seems to reject this sort of high-mindedness, actually treats Las Vegas ethnographically – from above
• Survey of designers who turned low into high: Milton Glaser/pushpin, Charles Anderson, M&Co, Stephen Doyle
• Cranbrook’s deconstruction of ketchup label actually an odd contradiction since this label was part of a pioneering sophisticated branding strategy from the late 19th c.
• There is no inside and outside any longer. Mass culture has infiltrated everything.
• Dividing high from low was fundamental to Modernism.
• On the other hand, there are some use of vernacular styles acknowledge the design as spectator inside their own culture. View from street exemplified by remaking national trademarks “into emblems for alternative ideas” Examples: Spy magazine and Jeff Keedy’s typeface Manuscript.
• Designer are taught Visual style over social function cause designer to overlook “relation of design to institutions of power.” Style is not free of the politics of everyday life.
• Avant guard was about design in everyday life. Modernism tried to occupy outside while transforming the inside. We must critique from within NOT above.
