In And Around, Parts I & II

In And Around cultures of design and the design of cultures parts i & ii

Andrew Blauvelt

In And Around cultures of design and the design of cultures parts i & ii

Andrew Blauvelt

In And Around Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

in and around cultures of design and the design of cultures Parts i & ii

Andrew Blauvelt

1994-1995 Emigre, Inc. berkeley, california

part i The paradoxical nature of being both in and around is familiar to the cultural anthropologist, who might work in the field among the observed and at the same time remains apart from the observed. It is this observer status given to the anthropologist that creates this necessary dilemma.

The conventional wisdom supporting the role of cultural anthropology has been its intention to study the cultures of other peoples as a way of reflecting on our own culture, or to borrow a phrase from Liberal Humanism, “To know others so that we may better understand ourselves.” The situation between an observer and an observed can never be neutral, however, since the power relationships are inevitably unequal.

The graphic designer shares a similar dilemma of being both instrumental in the making of cultural artifacts and living in the society through which they are distributed.

Graphic designers are often asked to remove themselves from their social positions and experiences and offer themselves as professionals, specialists in the various forms of visual communication. This detachment, which we might call “professionalization” or “specialization,” creates the

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

mythical, autonomous observer in the design process. This is a learned method of being professional and a consequence of the “problem-solving process” at the core of every graphic design procedure. We are asked to be objective and to render rational decisions (solutions), and doing so places graphic design on a par with other professions.

The graphic designer is, of course, a member of society and thus lives with the artifacts of his or her making, as well as with the artifacts of other designers. In this way, designers are asked to be professionals outside of (to be around) culture, and at the same time, to be a part of (to be in), culture.

We are, with others in society, witnesses to and participants in the consumption of cultural artifacts and, therefore, share in the moments of seduction and repulsion that these artifacts generate.

I am seduced by the messages of others I appreciate the materiality of the finely printed book I respond to the urgency expressed by the political poster ... and I shop at the mall.

I am repulsed by the messages of others I am appalled by displays of injustice I am threatened by the signs of hatred ... and I shop at the mall.

The important lesson of this confession is that we consume cultural artifacts and their messages in different ways.

While we consume these artifacts in the conventional manner of conspicuous consumption, which renders consumers as passive, blank slates upon which all forms of messages can be written, more recent research efforts have demonstrated another dimension to this idea of passive consumption, showing that we also consume artifacts symbolically and

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Part I

even ironically through small acts of individual resistance.₁ I watch Melrose Place ironically, for the melodramatic plot lines and the obvious acting - it’s so bad, it’s good - while I resist buying cable television because that’s just too much television.

The Discovery of Difference The dilemma of being both in and around culture exists at another level: at the level of individual subjectivity. I have already asserted that the phrase “in and around” constitutes a subject position, if only a paradoxical one. Just as a subject position will only be meaningful if it is defined in relationship to other positions, so too is the subject of that positioning. We need other things to mark the boundaries of ourselves, our identities and our cultures. Psychoanalysis tells us that this process happens at a very early age, when the child recognizes itself as a self; that is to say, as an individual, and also recognizes others as others. Similarly, cognitive psychologists have suggested that we seem predisposed at the earliest ages to recognize difference, the exceptional, as a way of making sense of the world around us.

This process of differentiation continues on a social level through identification with race, ethnicity, gender, age, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, class, etc. These social and cultural positions are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are. We find that we are culturally constructed as subjects and we are socially constructed through the identities we claim or the categories we are placed in.

It is easier to understand that class is a social construction but harder to consider how race is a construction, and not simply a natural phenomenon, until we realize that the idea of race emerged in a historically specific way, bolstered by the truth claims of science for various political ends. Race is

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

not natural, it is cultural. Gender is not natural, it is cultural.

These statements are made to counter the extent to which ideas about woman, blacks, gays, etc. are so intertwined in the fabric of society as to appear inevitable and unquestionable - natural.

The relationship between self and others is a two-way street, producing effects on all parties within a power structure that is typically unequal. This “discovery,” of others - that moment of first contact between different groups and their subsequent relationships - has been characterized by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida as essentially “violent”: “... the anthropological war [is] the essential confrontation that opens communication between peoples and cultures, even when that communication is not practiced under the banner of colonial or missionary oppression.”₂ This violence occurs at the level of actual, lived experience and at the level of symbolic existence, through words and images; i.e., representations.

Design’s relationship with cultural identification is a very important, that is to say, financially significant one. The “discovery” of various cultural groups within society coincides with their definition as an audience and as a market. It is no coincidence that Big Business “discovered” other audiences after the social turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s; the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Movements to name but two.

We are, in fact, witnessing a renewed discovery of cultural diversity under the banner of multiculturalism, a phenomenon that is reflected in “progressive” advertising campaigns.₃Tellingly, many of these campaigns are for fashion clientele, contributing to the notion that such “diversity” is “fashionable.”₄ In our discussions of others in this culture, it is hard to imagine a scenario that is not a product of larger economic forces. This applies to the economic development of colonialism that brought slavery to the New World and

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Part I

with it the foundations of racial supremacy, as well as to today’s effects of global capitalism which turn those old feelings of supremacy into longings for contact, even intimate contact, with others - their skin, clothes, language, music, crafts, cuisine.₅ It is this longing for contact with others, their exotic appeal, which drives the desire for cultural appreciation through cultural appropriation.

Imaging the Other: The Digital Fiction of First Contact This “discovery” of cultural difference through the recent guise of multiculturalism can be seen in a fall 1993 issue of Time magazine entitled “The New Face of America.”

Created as a special issue and devoted exclusively to issues surrounding what we now call “multiculturalism,” this publication effort was sponsored, exclusively, by Chrysler Plymouth Corporation. From the cover: “Take a good look at this woman. She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a remarkable preview of The New Face of America. How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.” We learn inside that this new woman is a composite creature created through the digital “morphing” process combining specified amounts of ethnicity: 15% Anglo-Saxon, 17.5% Middle Eastern, 17.5% African, 7.5% Asian, 35% Southern European, and 7.5% Hispanic. Least we consider her some sort of ethno-techno-Frankenstein, we are told that this woman stole the hearts of several magazine staffers, obviously unaware of her virtual existence. Of course, it doesn’t take a cynic to realize the fallacy of asserting that today’s America represents the world’s first multicultural society. The history of the world’s oppressed would say otherwise. Even though the issue contains a story on interracial marriage and what it

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

calls “crossbreeding,” complete with real husbands and wives and their real mixed-race children, it expends a great deal of effort in the presentation of its digital ethnic-mixing “times table” shown in the next spread. Using the same “morphing” technology as the cover creation, they have assembled 49 others using a 50-50 mixing formula.

In a similar vein, the magazine Colors sponsored by the Italian fashion corporation Benetton, in a spring/summer 1993 issue devoted to race, offers a six-page section of digital “possibilities.” In these pages, celebrities are transformed, much like Ted Turner’s colorizing technique, creating a “black” Queen Elizabeth, a “black” Arnold Schwarzenegger, a “white” Spike Lee, an “Asin” Pope John Paul II and a “white” Michael Jackson. The absurdity of these “possibilities” as reality creates the humor that makes us laugh. These possibilities do not represent any lived reality but a mythic realm where we can now dissolve the outward boundaries of “us and them”-ness through the wonders of digital imaging.

Our fascination with others has been rethought by anthropologist Michael Taussig, who turns the table on the observer and the observed. Taussig asks “Who is fascinated by what?” when he questions early anthropological expeditions and their use of the camera and the phonograph to make contact with and record other peoples. According to Taussig, “the more important question lies with the white man’s fascination with the non-whites’ fascination with these mimetically capacious machines [the camera and the phonograph].”₆ Similarly, we need to ask ourselves who is served by the wondrous potential of digital imaging to transform pictures of race, ethnicity or gender? Who are these images for?

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Part I

“The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained - ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

-Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, 1967, The Medium is the Massage Over a quarter-century has passed since this prophecy about our technological relationship with others by media guru Marshall McLuhan. In the racial turbulence of the sixties, McLuhan saw the impact that increased information exchange would have on society, particularly on our relationships with other people. Tinged with the optimism that pervades all technological revolutions, McLuhan injects a message of civic responsibility - an ethics of mutual dependency.

Fast-forward to yesterday: “Our critics felt that Matt Mahurin’s work changed the picture fundamentally; I felt it lifted a common police mug shot to the level of art, with no sacrifice to truth.

Reasonable people may disagree about that. If there was anything wrong with the cover, in my view, it was that it was not immediately apparent that this was a photo-illustration rather than an unaltered photograph; to know that, a reader had to turn to our contents page or see the original mug shot on the opening page of the story.”

-James R. Gaines, Managing Editor, Time, July 4, 1994

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

This statement was a defense for the use of Matt Mahurin’s digital photo-illustration of O.J. Simpson for Time.

This recent event underscores the relationships among electronic technologies, representation and cultural identity and the many issues their convergence raises. There are many instances in recent memory of the manipulation of photographic imagery by digital technology, such as the head-of-Oprah-Winfrey + body-of-Ann-Margaret collage for T.V. Guide or National Geographic’s shifting of the Great Pyramids at Giza, which stirred numerous public controversies over the myth of “the truthfulness of photographs.”₇ In the case of the O.J. Simpson cover, Time decides to use as its defense the argument that the illustration transcends the original mug shot photo and becomes art, thereby placing it in a special cultural category reserved for suspended judgments, a place where my taste is not yours, yours is not mine, let’s agree to disagree and other relativisms that seemed to have been inherited from the “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” ‘70s. By placing this commission in the realm of art, the editor can argue that the artist who created it (or rather re-created it) gave it something it lacked. This lack occurs, of course, because of the kind of image it is - a mug shot. Justification for Mahurin’s image hinges on displacing everything we know about the social significance of mug shots as documents of suspected criminals and re-reading the image as an intervention of the artist’s hand and eye, thereby elevating the commonplace mug shot to the extraordinary realm of art.

The greater at-large and largely negative reaction to this image occurs at a level of understanding about how images are conceptually framed in society. According to Time management, detractors didn’t read the image “correctly” as a work of art, but rather as what it is, a technological alteration of a mug shot - a photographic document of criminal

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Part I

surveillance.₈ What was read, at least by some, was the darkening of Simpson’s skin tone, which shows that some grasped the fact that this was not the “original” because it did not conform to what they knew (mostly from other pictures) about O.J. Simpson. It did not correspond to the “truth.” The reinscription of a police mug shot, #bk4013970 06-17-94, into the red frame of a Time cover, trades our abstract belief in “innocent until proven guilty” for the tacit knowledge of assumed guilt. The resulting re-creation mixes several other social messages: the story of a fallen public figure (“An American Tragedy,” reads the cover) subconsciously translated in many minds as the verification of everything they think they know of black males and criminal activity.

This mini-controversy is but the latest episode in the on-going struggle for representation in our culture that is dressed in the high-tech clothing of digital imaging, while revealing the same old social truths. McLuhan saw a social opportunity but lacked critical insight into the social reality that limits individual options that seek to operate in opposition to established social truths.

What is interesting to me is how new digital technologies have been harnessed for representing racial “possibilities.”

These ethnic fictions populate the world of cyberspace in ways that picturing others used to reside in the mind, moving away from imagining the other to imaging the other. Unfortunately, little has changed in the conceptions of race, only the spaces in which they are articulated. The representations of other cultures have moved from the conspicuous colonialism of stolen and bartered objects found in the curiosity cabinet and the natural history museum to the neocolonialism of appropriating cultural representations, including the creation of yet another “other:” a fictive one you can’t know because it doesn’t really exist.

It is this aspect of fictitiousness that distinguishes the use

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

of digital imaging techniques to capture and fix the image of the other. Photography has been consistently used to “capture” others, particularly in the field work of anthropologists or the surveillance of police. These photographic depictions have their own level of conceit but always remain true to their claim to capture reality “as it was.” These recent uses of digital imaging techniques, however, relinquish their claims to reality in favor of picturing reality “as it isn’t,” or “as it might be.”

The fictive domain of the digital construction can be seen more obviously in another Colors (June 1994) depiction, a portrait of former President Ronald Reagan with skin lesions next to an obituary citing his recent death from complications with aids. The fictitious photo and obituary rewrite the Reagan-era policy on aids and extol the virtues of a man who “is best remembered for his quick and decisive response to the aids epidemic,” under the headline “Hero.” While at great pains to establish a level of reality for their story, Colors declares the fictitious nature of the story in a footnote and uses the word “manipulation” in the attached photo credit. These are offered to prevent misreading the story as true, while trying to preserve the supreme irony of the story itself. Again, the absurdity of the story plays havoc with the reality of its presentation. Unfortunately, we are left with the “wishful thinking” of the obituary and the all-too-real historical record on the subject.

The fictive fantasy of digital “possibilities” seems so appealing because they offer us a form of pleasure through their refusal of a known reality.₉ The ease with which such productions are made is in contrast to the difficulties of easing racial conflict or ending political apathy towards the aids pandemic.

As a counterpoint to these instrumental uses of digital technologies by mainstream media is the use of similar tech-

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Part I

nologies by British artist Keith Piper, whose video installation “Surveillances: Tagging the Other,” deals with the use of that technology within the climate of European racism.

Piper appropriates the slang term of “tagging” - the marking of territory by a unique graffiti signature - and applies it to the use of electronic technologies to mark and track others. In this way, Piper shows how, for example, a proposed New European State could utilize digital technologies and information networks to target social “undesirables” and keep them under surveillance. Piper’s digital images foresee a distinctly 21st-century vision of documenting and analyzing cultural differences in much the same way as 19th-century phrenologists studied the head structures and facial features of others, particularly the insane, the criminal and the “Negro.” Keith Piper’s use of the same technology creates a different digital fiction: one you fear because it might just exist.

Picturing Difference / Representing Diversity We come to know ourselves and others less often through actual contact and more usually through representations in society. Cultural identification is a factor of representation.

For example, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, speaking about the concepts of woman and sexuality, said it succinctly: “Images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman. It is representation, the representation of feminine sexuality... which conditions how it comes into play.”₁₀ The debates about multiculturalism are debates about representation. Although many people consider the issue in terms of sheer numbers - a quantitative approach to representation - the issue is not necessarily a lack of representations but the diversity of them; for as the art critic and

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

theorist Craig Owens reminds us: “In our culture there is, of course, no lack of representations of women - or, for that matter, of other marginalized groups (blacks, homosexuals, children, criminals, the insane...).”₁₁ Representations can be depictions of others as a kind of shorthand that we substitute for specific cultural categories.

The effect of the linkage between dominant political interests and the use of various representations can be seen when we confront wholesale categories that are themselves amalgamations of sex, race and class, without imagery. For example, what image do you form for “welfare mother,” “crack addict,” or “aids patient?” These code words are the cultural shorthand for young, unmarried, poor, African-American woman; young, poor, African-American man; and young, white, gay male respectively. Their power derives from their ability to exploit media images of these scenarios in the minds of the public without directing attention to their misogynic, racist and homophobic roots.

Picture This: Voice and Agency The debate on representation for the graphic designer seems to reside in the space between Karl Marx’s empowering dictate, “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented,”₁₂ that is to say, act for others, and Gilles Deleuze’s categorical rejection of such presumed authority - “the indignity of speaking for others.”₁₃ Marx’s famous dictate is the more typical task that artists and other cultural producers have assigned themselves: to speak for others. Less typical is the statement by Deleuze that suggests, perhaps, letting others speak for themselves.

The negotiation of representational strategies seems central for the graphic designer (and others) who are routinely asked to speak for others. Graphic designers and other

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Part I

cultural producers are just beginning to rethink the terms of representation, away from speaking for others and towards speaking with and to others.₁₄ The factors that would allow others to speak for themselves deal with access to the means of representation that is ultimately a function of power. The debates around multiculturalism can be seen as a struggle for control over the means of representation. As Craig Owens states, it is representation itself that takes away the ability to speak for oneself.

However, the traffic in representations will not end since it is fundamental to the operation of our society. So, while increased instances of represented others (tokenism) inject some presence into the picture, they do little to explain the previous exclusions. Fundamental change is unlikely to occur through the pages of multinational corporate advertising no matter how many others are depicted. After all, have you “Come a Long Way, Baby!”?

Fundamental change is much more likely to come at a broader social level through a multitude of changes from any number of sectors and inevitably it will be reflected in the construction of various representations, made by graphic designers and other cultural producers and ultimately incorporated in the constitution of identities. After all, corporate advertising campaigns and token representatives (spot the black, the Asian, the woman in the scene) do not create diversity but merely reflect it.

The work of socially engaged activists, artists and designers tries to undermine the stereotype in innumerable ways; through disruptive strategies such as appropriation, subversion and inversion, as well as the destabilizing tactics of deconstructive textual readings and demystifying widely held views.₁₅ True inclusiveness, as a result of empowerment or agency, includes access to both the means of producing cultural representations and to the modes of their distribu-

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

tion in society. In this way, the voices of others will be heard only when those others have access to the larger public sphere.

While graphic designers may claim an independent status, like that of neutral observers, we find that their role is a central one in the system of representations. As producers and consumers of various cultural artifacts, understood as both tangible goods, such as books and magazines, as well as the more intangible products, such as ephemeral messages and images, graphic designers find themselves both in and around culture.

So what is the answer? The problems are multifaceted and much larger than design, which means we need a variety of responses on a variety of levels. It helps to remember that we are both designers and citizens. In this way, you can be part of the solution even if you are not designing for it. It also helps to remember that graphic design is about messages, and that our solutions are merely contributions to a larger effort.

There must be greater cultural diversity in the people who design, including an analysis of why these people are not there now. We need greater critical awareness that the teaching and practice of design occur in larger social frameworks, governed by rules of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, etc., particularly for those individuals who may not experience it themselves. We need a greater range of methods and options for practicing graphic design that begins to step outside of a reactionary response to problems with its outmoded, pyramidal (top-down) structure and towards a more inclusive, responsive position found in activities like, for example, collaboration and co-authorship. Much to the disappointment of many, these issues will not disappear with dismissals of “political correctness” since they reflect a fundamental social change that has been underway for quite some

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Part I

time, no matter how slow it seems in coming for the rest of us. Quite simply, design has no choice but to get used to it.

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part ii As a spectator to the saber rattling of recent articles arguing, in very different ways, for graphic design to understand its social consequences and function, I am led back to their usual foil: style. In this line of reasoning “style,” particularly when seen as formal experimentation, is explicitly or implicitly contrasted with “substance,” usually understood as the content or message.₁ Of course, these oppositions of style and substance, form and content, are as old as the art versus design debate. The newness of recent arguments, however, lies in the epiphany that graphic design is a product of larger social forces and contributes to this thing called “culture.” This reasoning extends the analysis beyond the substance of any particular message to examine content in the bigger picture of cultural consequences and social functions; in short, its context.

As an articulate contributor to the debate, Andrew Howard in his essay, “There is such a thing as society,” notes that the concern for understanding graphic design in a larger framework of society does not “preclude an exploration of the formal representation of language.”₂ This statement is made to counter the extent to which discussions of social and cultural context seem to situate themselves against the

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

kind of intense visual experimentation associated with recent graphic design. In this way issues of form are separated from issues of content while style is severed from meaning. I believe it is necessary to rejoin these artificially constructed oppositions in order to engage in a more meaningful discussion of graphic design. For graphic design to understand its relationship to culture, we need to consider how its visual language operates in society; its locations and dispersals and how these, in turn, effect meaning. We also need a better understanding of why graphic design exists in society, which requires a critical examination of the interests it serves and can serve.

With this in mind, I would like to consider a space that is opened through an understanding of the relationship between the concepts of design and culture. I wish to explore this design-culture relationship through two terms borrowed from recent work in historical studies: circulation and negotiation.₃ These two terms describe a relationship between design and culture in two related ways. I use the term “circulation” to speak of the traffic in visual languages, or styles, focusing on their location within particular groups and their dissemination among other social groups through forces like appropriation. Negotiation relates to the idea of the transference of visual languages or styles from one group to another, not as simply a wholesale acceptance, but as a consequence of some give and take. These forms of exchange should not be thought of as somehow even or balanced, because the social positions of who gives and who receives are different, thereby reflecting an unequal distribution of power. Additionally, the circulation of visual languages is not unidirectional, flowing one-way from the top down or from the bottom up, but rather, an exchange among various social strata, where they attain specific meanings and associations and generate new meanings through each transference.₄ 

Part II

The Traffic in Signs The traffic in signs is the big business of professional graphic design. The high contrast marks of corporate symbols and logotypes and the ubiquity of the international signs of the pictograph are the products of this business of graphic design, signaling the way through the contemporary public sphere. Graphic design literally packages the commodities of consumer culture as it shows us the way to the bathroom.

The corporation’s identity is protected through its status as a registered trademark as it makes its way through the global marketplace asserting its uniqueness, its difference, in the face of utter homogenization - illustrating a basic premise of consumer promotion, the first principle of advertising: how to be a unique individual while being like everyone else. It is the particular nature of corporate culture which can speak of difference through the language of sameness.

This condition of sameness should be familiar to anyone who has lived with its environmental equivalent, suburbia.

Now referred to as the “Wal-Marting of America,” the feelings of sameness and placelessness can now be exported on a global scale under one of the many signs of late-capitalist corporate culture. Just as an economy based on old trade routes fostered the development of colonies and colonial imperialism, the new global economy continues this, shuttling products between countries and consolidating capital in certain places, namely the U.S., Japan and Western Europe.

This vision of globalism with its transcendence of cultural differences is different than earlier, decidedly modernist visions of universal communication based on the hopes for a shared visual language.₅ While English may be the international language of business, it is the language of capital that facilitates the exchange

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

of goods, the accumulation of wealth and the ever increasing penetration of foreign markets by transnational corporations.

At a global scale, the circulation of graphic design is predicated on its instrumental use by and for dominant interests. However, reactions to the forces of corporate imperialism and cultural homogenization vary from wholehearted embrace to subversive resistance, including much in-between these opposing positions. It is some of these uses or reactions to the more dominant forms of visual language, and the interests they support, which I would like to journey through.

Trickle-Up Aesthetics: Artistic Appropriations The world of logos, symbols and pictographs, as the invention of graphic design, becomes the material of artistic production through the work of numerous artists who came to typify artmaking in the 1980s, using the language, style, and the promotional strategies of mass media advertising.

The roster of names should be familiar, from “image-scavenging” artists such as Barbara Kruger to “word smiths” of language such as Jenny Holzer, all of whom provide, in different ways, a critique of mass media. In these artistic strategies the traffic in signs moves from the spaces of popular culture to the spaces of elite culture - into the world of museums, galleries, alternative spaces, art journals and eventually art history. The work of three artists serves to illustrate the reuse of two types of signs; one type held within the public domain and the other circulated within the public domain but protected from infringement through copyright and trademark registrations.

The signs, symbols, and pictographs of the public sphere are the subject of artist Matt Mullican’s work. These signs

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Part II

should be familiar to anyone who moves about in today’s society; high-contrast, simplified, and silhouetted forms, some personified with names like “Mr.Yuck” but the vast majority living life in anonymity. These signs constitute what Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller refer to as a form of contemporary “hieroglyphics,” occupying a “space between pictures and writing,” and combining “the generality of the typographic mark with the specificity of pictures.”₆ These signs exist in society for the purpose of conditioning our behavior and controlling our actions, limiting choices by simplifying options. As Henri Lefebvre notes, “the signal commands, controls behavior and consists of contrasts chosen precisely for their contradiction (such as, for instance, red and green)”₇ thereby paring down options by setting up binary oppositions, organized into systems of codes.

Mullican appropriates and originates these marks and recasts them, sometimes literally, into situations which point out their presence in the world and that presumably make us question their social function.

Critics have been quick to point to the subversive quality of Mullican’s work, particularly his more public projects.₈ Walter Kalaidjian describes how Mullican’s works “function to disorient and estrange the ‘normal’ traffic in social communication”₉ and then relates Mullican’s reported reaction to a work that caused Belgian and Flemish nationalist tensions to run high when he placed a large flag over a museum in Brussels using yellow and black, unbeknownst to Mullican as the Flemish national colors: “When I put an image on a flag, I found it meant something very different than when I put it on a piece of paper.”₁₀ Mullican’s discovery that a change in format changes meaning is incomplete without the recognition that the concepts of cultural specificity and context - those colors, that site, those cultures - are necessary for a more complete 

In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

understanding of the event. In an ironic turn of events, Mullican and his New York gallery, Mary Boone, are upset with a banner hanging in the clothing store next door, Max Studio.₁₁ Mullican is arguing that the store’s logo is a work he first unveiled as a flag at the 1982 Documenta art fair. The store argues that a graphic designer created their image independently of Mullican and with symbols in the public domain. In this case of ownership and property rights, symbols circulated in the public sphere and considered generic are now argued as unique, protected works, whether by artist or designer. The sites of consumption, whether gallery or clothing store, attempt to control the system of codes and find, to their surprise, the truly subversive irony of their struggles.

The corporate domain consists of legally protected symbols, logotypes and other graphic marks circulate globally and have come to represent the corporation itself. Indeed it is argued that these marks come to represent the “personality” of the corporation, its (inter)face with the public.₁₂ It is presumably the concept of differentiation which enables each corporate body to have a unique, memorable face.

Corporate uniqueness is played against corporate sameness in the need for an image that is able to transcend specific cultures and national boundaries, not only in the form of a global spokesperson or universal human themes, but also in a way that obscures the compulsion to consume and the realities of industrial production. The advent of zip code clusters and increasingly sophisticated tracking methods enables a narrower demographic profile of consumers and their consumptive patterns. This penetration of everyday life is supported by the massive saturation of corporate-sponsored images and messages that have effectively substituted the value of the image itself for a product’s inherent usefulness or exchangeability.₁₃ 

Part II

The artist Ashley Bickerton gives us the quintessential late-capitalist consumer portrait in his construction “Tormented Self-Portrait,” emblazoned with the corporate emblems that constitute the life of his subject, including Bickerton’s signature - effectively objectifying the phrase: “You are what you eat.”

Mullican and Bickerton appropriate the marks of public life knowing that their reception within the world of art galleries and museums will be received with a knowing irony, effectively negotiating their meanings from their circulation in popular culture to the institutional spaces of elite culture.

This pattern of circulation and negotiation shifts meaning from the specific character of a generic existence (the logotype or pictograph in the world) to a generic character of specific existence (the logotype or pictograph in the art world).

While Mullican and Bickerton offer us one critique of contemporary life by representing these signs in a different context, other artists such as Hans Haacke have deployed a social critique of corporate life that focuses on exposing its instrumentality by adopting its language. In a range of works Haacke subverts the propriety of corporate symbols and advertising codes not simply by appropriating them outright but by manipulating them to expose corporate interests that lie behind logos, ad campaigns and spokespersons. A particular example is Haacke’s 1976 exhibition titled “The Chase Advantage.” In this project, Haacke appropriates Chase Manhattan Bank’s symbol, the octagon shape designed by Chermayeff & Geismar in 1960,₁₄ and inserts into its empty center an “advertisement” juxtaposing a statement made by Chase’s chairman justifying the company’s support of and investment in modern art and another statement by a public relations expert extolling the need for a company to “induce the people to believe in the sincerity and honesty 

In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

of purpose of the management of the company which is asking for their confidence.” This project was part of a series exposing the interconnectedness of corporate patronage of the arts thereby implicating the art world system in a larger framework of corporate interests and demystifying the seemingly neutral status of the museum or gallery. The controversy and censorship that greets much of Haacke’s work stands in contrast to the subversive qualities attributed to Bickerton or Mullican.₁₅

Stealing the Signs: Voices from Left Field At another point on the cultural spectrum, in the space of subcultures, we witness another series of appropriations.

Stealing the signs of commerce - appropriation is, after all, a term reserved for art - is the ultimate copyright infringement. The equity of the sign, its semiotic investment, is emptied and dominant meanings subverted. The high-jacked symbol or pictograph is pressed into service, delivering a new message and engaging in what Umberto Eco calls “semiotic guerrilla warfare.”

British fashion stylist Judy Blame’s T-shirt design brandishes the message against the intellectual pollution of neo-fascism by recycling the image of “tidy man” putting litter in its place. Blame substitutes the paper wad of the famous pictograph with the Nazi swastika, which was previously borrowed from its ancient associations with good luck and fortune, now recovered from history by Neo-Nazis. The obviousness of the political message of Blame’s design points up the seemingly apolitical nature of the original pictograph.

To say that Blame’s design politicizes the pictograph is to miss the original encoding of tidy man - a sign that compels our allegiance to prevailing social standards of hygiene and ecology. Blame’s message registers with its intended audience

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Part II

through the recontextualization process, an intellectual project made famous by the Surrealists, who knew the power of the unexpected.

Another symbol of Nazi Germany is the subject of recontextualization, this time by aids activists. The Silence=Death Project inverts the pink triangle used by Nazis to identify homosexuals in concentration camps and subverts its infamous meaning from a sign of stigmatized visibility to an outward gesture of the invisibility of the aids crisis.

This symbol of aids activism does not borrow wholesale from history, but rather alters the original by rotating its orientation from downward to upward and incorporating the typographic message “silence=death.” Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston relate the linkage between a symbol associated with Nazi death camps and the contemporary aids crisis: “silence=death declares that silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.”₁₆ Stuart Marshall, co-chair of Positively Healthy, an organization of people with aids, has pointed out the problematic nature of this historical appropriation. Marshall argues specifically against the use of the pink triangle as it fosters a notion of victimization, “which has tended to stress death, annihilation, and holocaust and genocide analogies in its attempts to stir the state into a caring response to the crisis.”₁₇ Marshall’s arguments are well taken, particularly as they relate to one form of aids discourse dominating the voices of those surviving with aids. However, although Marshall relies on a specific historical understanding of how the Nazi’s dealt with homosexuals (understood as gay men, lesbians are not mentioned), he seems to inadequately address the recontextualization of that symbol or the circumstances of its contemporary reception. The mark itself is not simplythe pink triangle - taken from the past and displaced 

In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

into the present - but rather a signature mark combining an inverted symbol and typographicmessage, with its own history. The meaning of this transformed symbol registers with its audiences not only because of the familiarity of its previous existence - even if it is a suppressed history - but also because it is transformed in the act of possession.

Capturing the language of oppressors, making it one’s own, is seen as an important event on the way to ending that oppression and underscores the importance of controlling the codes of representation.₁₈

The Ecstasy of Communication The appropriation of the symbols and images of popular culture is by now a well-documented tactic of youth culture in its subcultural manifestations, such as the punk movement of the 1970s and the rave culture of the 1990s. The graphic design produced for rave culture (promoting its raves as well as its diversified interests in things like clothing), illustrates an interesting recent phenomenon of the circulation and negotiation of visual styles as they move from design cultures to popular culture and back again to design culture.

The rave graphic represents the technological mutation and synthesis of pop culture imagery and the typographic manipulations available on the personal computer. The rave graphic entrepreneur, especially as an untrained professional, represents graphic design’s technophobic nightmare. The demystified technical processes of graphic design are readily available to “kids” educated on Macintosh computers who have the ability to transform found images and to skew, outline, bend, and otherwise “mutilate” type.₁₉ As graphic designer Jeffrey Keedy suggests, the source material for much of this work is the stuff of professional graphic designers of yesterday: “The old and low cultures

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Part II

that rave designers borrow from are primarily American corporate and package design of the seventies and eighties (now there’s some hacks)! Rave designers love logos, lots of color and outlined type, and hey who doesn’t? The fact that the ‘professional designer’s’ work is now being reworked like any other bit of ephemera might be some kind of poetic justice, but it fails to be an interesting design strategy. That’s because their work (like their predecessors) is essentially a one-liner that has little resonance beyond the ‘shock of the old.’”₂₀ This maybe true if you are judging this work with the values near and dear to graphic design, a notion of stylistic invention as innovation inherited from the avant-garde, where newness is next to Godliness. The work is interesting to me because it represents both a form of corporate cultural appropriation and subcultural invention, and it achieves this using the latest tool of graphic design, the personal computer. Unlike the photocopier aesthetic of the punk graphic, the rave graphic gains its legitimacy, its threatening posture to professional design, from the computer’s ability to sample images and seamlessly integrate the results. Gone are the mystifying processes and technical skills that supported graphic design’s professional autonomy and what remains intact are the designer’s claims to originality and innovation.

These claims seem to be the last defense against professional collapse.

The availability of the personal computer enables the maker of rave graphics to have access to the means of producing graphic design and carries with it the residue of its making. That is to say, the multitude of rave graphics carries the signature of the computer - its “information texture,” to borrow a term from April Greiman. Suddenly the distancing of the designer of the rave graphic as somehow outside the profession becomes problematic when we are confronted 

In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

with the highly celebrated designs of a professional graphic designer like P. Scott Makela, whose work carries much of the same technological residue. Makela as a self-described “hacker”₂₁ certainly toys with the distinctions and refuses the boundaries of a graphic designer with his work in other media.

The creation of the rave graphic produces another code, another style. The unfortunate consequence of subcultural resistance is pop cultural commodification; as Dick Hebdige notes: “Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones...”₂₂ The subcultural, as a code, becomes incorporated or assimilated into mainstream culture through commodities where any subversive power is lost. The circulation of rave graphics into the space of popular culture creates new effects on other designers. For the professional graphic designer, the rave graphic becomes a vernacular form, an oddity on the mundane visual landscape of cultural life. It comes to represent a challenge to mainstream society and visual culture, it has the currency of the “code.” It becomes the representation of a prevailing style used to articulate a subculture’s difference and the professional sees this as an available language with which to engage others. Thus, the language of the rave graphic is employed by the designers of ReVerb to promote a fund-raiser for the literary and art journal Now Time. For the designers of ReVerb, the rave graphic is but one more style available in the heterogeneous cultural milieu that they ascribe to Los Angeles.₂₃ For ReVerb the resulting mixture, the clash of styles, is to be prized for its inclusive approach, rejecting the exclusivity of modernism.

The hybridity that results from this clash of styles generates new forms and new meanings. As Lorraine Wild, 

Part II

a partner in ReVerb, states: “We use styles like maniacs but we never use them lock, stock and barrel...We would usually manipulate them to create some kind of tension. No style is good or bad, it’s just another style - whether you use it wholesale or not.”₂₄ Authentic culture is gone, if it ever existed, and what is left is the material of invention. Ripe for quotation and parody, the styles of multiple cultures are presumably available to all. The graphic designer, seeking to speak to different pockets of culture, draws upon a range of styles supposedly denied it under the guise of modernism or the rules of professional practice. If the multiple cultures of Los Angeles represent a vernacular language, then a case could be made for ReVerb’s work responding to the unique conditions and particular circumstances that are endemic to L.A. - a condition Kenneth Frampton labels “critical regionalism.”₂₅ A much larger cultural space of appropriation is envisioned by the Designer’s Republic, who would go as far as another planet for inspiration and certainly as far as Japan, without ever leaving Sheffield.

In the Age of Information, firsthand contact seems potentially corrupting for designer Ian Anderson: “In some ways [a trip to Japan] may mark the end of an era, as I would loose my isolationist naiveté about the Japanese culture.”₂₆ In an interview with Rudy VanderLans, the Designer’s Republic sets itself up as thoroughly postmodern, in tune with pop culture and reveling in the contradictory stances that are indicative of graphic design’s anonymous social status and the celebrity status that comes with an identifiable style.

Anderson describes the appropriation tactics of their style as it relates to the bigger social framework of contemporary life, where everything is up for grabs: “If there’s something which suits our purpose, we’ll use it, but we don’t discriminate when it comes to inspiration. There is no hierarchy in 

In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

the age of plunder, there is equality; from the humble sweet wrapper, through the billboard on the side of a bus right up to sacred texts of Bradbury Thompson and Weingart himself.”₂₇ In this way, the potential subjects of appropriation are equally available for reuse, while all other hierarchies are preserved, especially the role of the designer. In a particularly telling passage commenting on someone who appropriated a Designer’s Republic design, Anderson states his conditional approval: “I don’t really have a problem with it as long as it doesn’t detract from what we do, as long as it is used to create something new, something more than it was before and providing there is a reason for it beyond lack of imagination.”₂₈ The values to which they subscribe are precisely those that are used to sustain professional graphic design: originality, innovation and rationality; and these are, ironically, the virtues we associate with modernism, not necessarily postmodernism.

Anderson, however, does not wish to change the social status of graphic design itself and does not believe that he is in a “position to improve [society’s] condition,” and will continue “to enjoy the game I find intriguing.”₂₉ Part of that game is establishing a position within graphic design that simultaneously tries to defy it - extending beyond the confines of the profession and into the global flow of images.

In what might be an emblematic image for this position, the Designer’s Republic has merged the icon of ‘70s pop culture, the smiley face, with one of the icons of “good design,” Paul Rand’s Westinghouse symbol of 1960. In a gesture indicative of cultural genetic engineering, the Designer’s Republic has created a symbol of the hesitant space between a highly protected corporate image and a highly marketed cultural image, effectively fusing pop and corporate culture’s 

Part II

underlying sameness: the ubiquity of the mantra “good design-is-good business” with the banality of “have a nice day.”

Makela, ReVerb, the Designer’s Republic and others distance themselves from graphic design proper in their respective ways: by transgressing professional boundaries, rejecting professional standards, or denying that you’re a designer at all.

What Goes Around, Comes Around The circulation of signs comes full circle, weaving its way from the corporate culture of the anonymous design found in the mini-mart to its subcultural manifestations in the rave graphic back into the public space of urban culture and to the institutions of high culture - filtered through the professional culture of graphic design proper where it can be dismissed today and copied tomorrow.

It is the public sphere where graphic design circulates and it is this space that is highly contested, regulated and protected. Dominant cultural interests favor the exchange and circulation of symbols and images to take place in the marginalized spaces of youth subcultures, artistic enclaves, and design avant-gardes. As the artist Keith Piper laments: “... in this mass media, mass broadcast age, it has become easy for the artist to siphon information and images off for our own use, it however remains almost as difficult as ever, to find a space to return and distribute the results of our activities within that mass media. Access to the existing channels of mass communication still remain firmly in the hands of the enfranchised and empowerment within those channels remains their closely guarded preserve.”₃₀ The invention of style, whether on the street or on the screen, will continue in spite of the forces of homogeni-

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

zation, because it is thought to reflect the heterogeneous quality of life. Style could be better understood as a manifestation of culturally specific communications rather than a byproduct of some nebulous cultural “fallout” or an exotic language of difference. The designer needs to consider his or her role in a society that is increasingly stratified and culturally differentiated. Perhaps this is what Lorraine Wild had in mind when she says: “We need more graphic design particular to the tribes, not less.”₃₁ Any attempt to understand design as somehow fixed in a hierarchy of cultural spaces (high or good design versus low or kitsch design) or in a historical linearity of precedent and influence (originators and impostors) seems futile. Design should know that its place is not fixed, that design resides in all spaces. The traffic in signs that design produces circulates among these spaces, negotiating the differences of multiple positions of social and cultural identities. The privileged space reserved for the professional designer, either real or imagined, has been perforated by the historical and theoretical demise of modernism as well as by the technological democratization of the means of producing graphic design.

The resulting trauma of this violent perforation in the social fabric of design culture allows us the opportunity to discover our own precarious position, both in and around.

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Part II

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Part I ~ Notes 1. The now classic example drawn from work of popular culture is Ien Ang’sWatching Dallas, first published in the Netherlands in 1982. Ang gathered responses from women by placing an ad in the Dutch woman’s magazine Viva, addressed to those who either liked to watch the American soap opera Dallas or disliked it. Ang discovered three general positions toward the program: one group of fans, a second set of viewers who watched the program ironically and a third group who hated the show. Ang’s work demonstrates that the consumption of cultural artifacts (in this case watching t.v.) is a complex negotiation involving sometimes the wholesale acceptance of the show’s message (by fans), sometimes an outright rejection of such debased messages and meanings (by haters) and sometimes an inverted re-reading of the show’s message and meaning (by ironists). Ang’s work is important because she examines how pleasure is produced through consumption, in rather complex ways with contradictory value systems, rather than seeing consumption as simply an end in and of itself.

2. “The Battle of Proper Names,” from “Part II: Nature, Culture, Writing” in Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, 1976, p.107. Derrida’s comment is in context of a discussion of the “Writing Lesson” by the anthropologist

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

Claude Lévi-Strauss. The linkage between violence and representation is fully present in this allegorical image of “America” by Philippe Galle in the late 16th century.

The New World is rendered as a naked, violent woman.

Why a naked, violent woman?

3. The advent of “multi-culti” advertising has produced a bewildering amount of information on the consumptive preferences and buying patterns of various ethnic groups. For example, we now know that Korean Americans consume more Spam than any other ethnic group or that Chinese Americans drink more Cognac.

In the words of one executive, “Today’s marketing is part anthropology.”

4. The most visible of these campaigns is the on-going “United Colors of Benetton.” A critical analysis of Benetton is made by Jeff Rosen in his article “Merchandising Multiculturalism: Benetton and the New Cultural Relativism,” New Art Examiner, November 1993, pp.18–26. The critical difference lies in how the concept of multiculturalism will be allowed to exist as a force in society. Will multiculturalism act as a force for substantive change in how we deal with other cultures? Is it to be seen as a form of marginalized pluralism? Or is it simply a relative concept perfect for the marketing of our times?

In the reported words of Benetton’s creative director Oliviero Toscani, “Products change, images capitalize.”

Or as Rosen notes, “Toscani has it backwards: Images change, products capitalize.”

5. “The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes

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Part I ~ Notes

spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” - bell hooks from “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992, p. 21.

6. “The Talking Machine,” in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses by Michael Taussig, 1993, p. 198.

7. For an extended account of what he calls the “pseudo-photograph,” see William J. Mitchell’s book The Reconfigured Eye:Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992); in particular, the chapters “Intention and Artifice” and “How to Do Things with Pictures.”

8. For a critical account of the use of photography in the service of documenting criminal activity, see “The Body and the Archive” by Allan Sekula, reprinted in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, 1989.

9. This thought parallels some of the conclusions of Ien Ang (see note 1), who argues that fantasy and fiction do not “function in place of, but beside, other dimensions of life (social practice, moral or political consciousness).

“It...is a source of pleasure because it puts ‘reality’ in parentheses, because it constructs imaginary solutions for real contradictions, which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of existing social relations of dominance and subordination.” (p.135) 10. “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality,” by Jacques Lacan inFeminine Sexuality, edited by Juliet Mitchell, 1982, p. 90.

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

11. “‘The Indignity of Speaking for Others’: An Imaginary Interview,” by Craig Owens in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, 1992, p. 262.

12. The comment is from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire in a discussion of the French peasantry. This is discussed by Owens (see note 10), who adds: “Here, Marx uncritically assumes the traditional role of politically motivated intellectual - or artist - in bourgeois society: he appropriates for himself the right to speak on behalf of others, setting himself up as their conscience - indeed, as consciousness itself. But in order to occupy this position, he must first deny them (self-) consciousness, the ability to represent themselves.” (p.261).

13. Michel Foucault, “ Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977, p.209.

This statement by Deleuze about Foucault’s work comes from Craig Owens’s essay (see note 10).

14. Undoubtedly, designers are discovering that issues of cultural diversity and social responsibility can be found in their own back yards. As I write this, the premiere issue of Sphere has arrived at my door, a publication by the World Studio Foundation. The stated intent of the Foundation is threefold: to “examine the role of cultural identity in the design disciplines,” to “collect and disseminate information about social projects in the global creative community” and to “encourage projects that empower individuals and communities to participate in the shaping of their environment.” While their intentions are laudable I am left with an uneasy feeling. Perhaps it’s cynicism, maybe it’s the Colors-like design that makes me suspicious, or maybe it’s the $50 subscription price.

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Part I ~ Notes

See the brief report on World Studio,I.D. magazine, November 1993, p. 26.

15. It is easier to see the work produced by artists as instances of “others speaking for themselves” and in the process enabling another voice to be heard. I think of Carrie Mae Weems, and African-American woman, whose photographic series “Ain’t Jokin” with titles such as “Black Woman with Chicken” or “What are the three things you can’t give a black person?” or of the Native-American artist Jimmie Durham’s work, both of whom undermine the prevalent stereotypes produced by and for dominant culture. It is harder to see this activity in the realm of graphic design proper, much of which is produced by and for dominant cultural interests.

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Part II ~ Notes 1. I subscribe to the notion that style carries meaning and is neither simply a meaningless ornament attached to nor separable from some truer, deeper, or purer structure.

This dichotomy is argued by J. Abbott Miller, who makes a case for such an opposition between style and structure, in his essay “The idea is the machine,” inEye,Vol.3, No.10, 1993, pp.58-65.

2. Andrew Howard, “There is such a thing as society*,” in Eye,Vol.4, No.13, 1994, pp.72-77.

3. These terms are borrowed from Steven Greenblatt as exemplified in his bookShakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

4. The trickle-down theory of stylistic diffusion, a sort-of supply-side aestheticism, is typically attributable to certain modernist sensibilities borne out of elitism, while the trickle-up theory of stylistic diffusion is of a more recent vogue, as exemplified by the MoMA exhibition, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.

Corrective variants exist for this model including Ellen Lupton’s critical examination of the graphic designer’s love affair with the “vernacular.” See Lupton’s “High and Low: A Strange Case of Us and Them?” in Eye,Vol.2, No.7, 1992, pp.72-77.

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

5. The modern drive to collapsing the boundaries between nations occurs both verbally and visually through utopian projects like developing an Esperanto, or common verbal language, or in the development of pictographic systems such as isotype. Modernist qualities of objectivity and rationality reign in Otto Neurath’s isotype system, which adopts the abstract, reductive forms we now associate with signage programs meant to facilitate our movement through places like airports or the Olympic Games.

6. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, “Critical Way Finding,” in The Edge of the Millennium, Susan Yelavich, ed., New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1993, p.223.

7. Henri Lefevbre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p.56.

8. Nancy Princenthal in an introduction to an exhibition catalog for Matt Mullican,Untitled, 1986/7, states: “[Mullican] likes to place his work in public places, but its status there is subversive. He does not endorse standard stick-figure/plane geometry signage, but instead returns it to aesthetic consideration.” (p.5) 9. Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 224.

10. The original statement was published in “Sign Language,” Peter Clothier,ArtNews, Summer 1989, p.146.

11. “Theft, Coincidence, or Art,” in AIGA Journal of Graphic Design,Vol.12, No.2, 1994, p. 48.

12. The foundational text promoting this idea is Wally Ollins’s The Corporate Personality, London: Design Council, 1978. For an excellent critical analysis of

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Part II ~ Notes

Ollins’s text, see: Steve Baker, “Re-reading the Corporate Personality,” in Journal of Design History,Vol.2, No.4, 1989, pp. 275-292.

13. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981.

14. The abstract, reductive forms of modern art that were favored by David Rockefeller, CEO of Chase Manhattan and an officer of the Museum of Modern Art, go hand in hand with the design of the Chase Manhattan Bank symbol, which Philip Meggs describes as “an abstract form unto itself, free from alphabetical, pictographic, or figurative connotations” that “could successfully function as a visual identifier for a large organization.” In this way the “free” symbol can stand in for the corporation.

Haacke trades on this substitution, “grounding” the symbol in the history of Chase Manhattan policies and corporate ideologies with its use of seemingly neutral art.

15. Most, if not all of Haacke’s projects meet with controversy and a few with censorship, including his Hans Haacke: Systems exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971 and his Manet-PROJEKT ‘74 in Germany.

16. Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, aids DEMOGRAPHICS, Seattle: Bay Press, 1990, p.14.

17. Stuart Marshall, “The Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich,” in How Do I Look?

Queer Film and Video, Seattle: Bay Press, 1991, p.89.

18. This phenomenon is by now widespread including the appropriation of terms like “queer” and “fag.”

Historian Stephen Greenblatt describes the first act of appropriation on the part of colonizers is the abduction

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In And Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures

of natives to serve as translators. See “Kidnapping Language” in Marvelous Possessions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp.86-118.

19. See Michael Dooley’s essay, “Frequent Flyers,” in Print, xlvii:ii, March/April 1993, pp.42-53+.

20. Jeffrey Keedy, “I Like the Vernacular...not!” in Lift and Separate: Graphic Design and the Quote/Unquote Vernacular, New York: Herb Lubalin Study Center of the Cooper Union, p.9.

21. Michael Bierut, “Sampling the Candy: P. Scott Makela,” in I.D.,Vol 41, No.1, January/February 1994, p.55.

22. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen, 1979, p.96.

23. Anne Burdick, “A sense of rupture,” in Eye,Vol.4, No.14, 1994, pp.48-57.

24. Ibid, p.53.

25. Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster, ed., Seattle: Bay Press, 1983, pp.16-30. “The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place....But it is necessary...to distinguish between Critical Regionalism and simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.” (p.21) 26. Interview with Rudy VanderLans, Emigre #29, 1994, p.16.

27. Ibid, p.18.

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Part II ~ Notes

28. Ibid, p.11.

29. Ibid, p.19.

30. Keith Piper, “Forty Acres and a Microprocessor,” in Place, Position, Presentation, Public, Ine Gevers, ed., Maastricht, the Netherlands: Jan van Eyck Akademie, p.263 & 266.

31. Laurie Haycock Makela and Ellen Lupton, “Underground Matriarchy,” in Eye,Vol.4, No.14, 1994, p.46.

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This publication of

in and around cultures was designed

by Natalie Blodgett using InDesign CS6 the following typefaces: Bembo, Trump Mediaeval title page ornamentation from utexas.edu September 2014