Ugliness Contextualised

The definition of ugliness, like its counterpart beauty, is subjective to a significant extent. In this chapter, I will establish my definition of ugliness through different methodologies, and further contextualise how it manifests in the New Ugly.

Cult Of The Ugly

It would be an understatement to say that the contemporary design world still favours order, clarity, purity, minimalism, and function over everything else. This assertion is not unreasonable at all: the Transport for London railway map presents itself in an orderly manner so passengers know how to get around its service; the 1964 Summer Olympics pictogram symbols clearly communicate their meaning that their legacy remains today; Apple’s founder’s posthumous principle of minimalist design still attracts a cult following... While minimalist and utilitarian styles dominate the field, I believe ugliness, dissonance, and disruption hold unique potential for future evolution.

Intuitively, the idea of ugliness should be in opposition to those aforementioned dominant traits in the graphic design industry. When contemporary design practice is dominated by the strong Western influence of the clean and orderly Bauhaus and Swiss international styles, one could only imagine ugly graphic design to be chaotic, disorganised, and unruly. Rule-breaking and rebellion against the authority of aesthetics is a pattern of postmodernist graphic design. An example is Swiss designer Wolfgang Weingart, a leading figure of The New Wave movement predating the postmodernist graphic design movement.2 Trained as a typesetting apprentice, Weingart was taught the ‘right’ and ‘correct’ ways of typography, which he saw as obstacles against his artistic expression:

It seemed as if everything that made me curious was forbidden: to question established typographic practice, change the rules, and to reevaluate its potential. I was motivated to provoke this stodgy profession and to stretch the typeshop’s capabilities to the breaking point, and finally, to prove once again that typography is an art.3

Like other creatives, postmodernist graphic designers have transformed the stylistic element of the ugly into a critical tool, attesting to the Frankfurt School’s idea of aesthetic violence, that ugliness is an important defence against the commercialisation of beauty in modernist aesthetics. To be ugly is to be critical, to be dissonant is to challenge the status quo of harmony. Or, in the words of literary theorist Peter Uwe Hohendahl:

The autonomy of the artwork depends on its oppositional force, a quality that is enhanced by the ugly. It is precisely the violation of the traditional aesthetic code that separates the advanced artwork from the threat of the culture industry.4

An appropriate manifestation of Adorno’s aesthetic violence might be the postmodernist graphic design popular during the 1980s to the early 2000s, as seen in the interconnected yet different aesthetic attributes of the works of students of the Cranbrook Academy of Arts [Fig. 05-06], British graphic designer David Carson, and French graphic artist collective Grapus, with their fragmented collage of chaotic imagery and irregular types. Many critics of postmodern graphic design, as well as its predecessors such as the New Wave movement, saw the stylistic innovations as ‘obstacles to the lucid transmission of the client’s message,’ and they often called movements like this as ‘a passing fad.’ Many believed in the pure commercial and utilitarian essence of graphic design, while others felt tedious from the constant dissonance revoked in those designs.5 ‘Designers used to stand for beauty and order. Now beauty is passe and ugliness is smart,’ wrote design critic Steven Heller in his famous 1993 Eye article, ‘Cult of the Ugly’, ‘How did we get here and is there any way out?’ Heller used Output, a desktop publication designed by Cranbrook Academy of Art students a year before, as a prime example of the genre of ugly designs he was commenting on:

2. Rick Poynor, No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (London: Laurence King, 2003). 19.

3. Ibid, 20.

4. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ‘Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”’, Cultural Critique No. 60 (Spring, 2005) (2005): 171.

Output is eight unbound pages of blips, type fragments, random words and other graphic minutiae purposefully given the serendipitous look of a printer’s make-ready. The lack of any explanatory precis leaves the reader confused as to its purpose or meaning, though its form leads one to presume that it is intended as a design manifesto, another ‘experiment’ in the current plethora of aesthetically questionable graphic output. Given the increase in graduate school programmes which provide both a laboratory setting and freedom from professional responsibility, the word experiment has come to justify a multitude of sins.6

Heller’s description is a good summary of what this school of ugly design looks like. Closely related to the New Wave movement of graphic design, posters of Cranbrook students and alike often include elements like freeform collages of photography, overlapping and distorted text, often set in various typefaces and sizes, which all became technically easier to accomplish with personal computers replacing phototypesetting at the end of the twentieth century. With technological advancement came ideological change. The grid system, legibility, structuralism, and other principles that symbolise the order of Modernism could no longer represent the ever-changing new ideas of the new world. Designers took inspiration from postmodern literary theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, and they attempted to reinvent graphic design as a practice in itself, rather than a tool solely for instrumental and commercial use.7

Heller criticised this aesthetic by saying it was not justified by a certain motive. ‘While the proponents are following their various muses’, he wrote, ‘their followers are misusing their signature designs and typography as style without substance’. As a response to Heller’s critique, in the following issue of Eye, Joani Spadaro of North Carolina State University wrote a letter to the editor defending and explaining the importance of Output:

[...] Output was created to establish a dialogue among voices who are not often heard in the design field: students creating experimental/ personal work with the context of their culture, but outside the prescribed construction of design for commerce.

[...] Only after a sufficient amount of information had been transmitted and discussed via fax machine, video and ‘care packages’ could an appropriate visual language be determined to convey the ideas and information that had been exchanged. Students have designed the piece as a collaborative effort, not only among their own student groups, but also between each institution.8

In Spadaro’s opinion, Output matters not only for its pedagogical significance but also for innovation in the discourse of graphic design. The seemingly careless visual style was actually produced with much attention, and it offers an opportunity for young designers to express their creative freedom outside of a commercial or professional setting. Seeing how trends like anti-design and digital brutalism flourished and continue to grow in the year 2022, as well as how higher education institutions are encouraging more experimental explorations, Heller’s critique certainly seems like reactionary commentary on such a movement with new possibilities, and we can conclude that dissonance, or opposition against the standard of beauty, has revolutionary potentials.

The Ugly And The Ordinary

On some level, the New Ugly is similar to postmodernist graphic design. They both show defiance towards capitalism-specifically the commercialisation of graphic design as a tool. Western critical graphic designers demonstrate this by creating something not applicable or profitable to the market of their specific time period, while Chinese graphic designers re-appropriate something that is already in the market in an ironic fashion. However, the visual styles of the two should also be differentiated. While the elements of impurity and deconstruction are significant components of postmodern graphics design, the New Ugly is geared towards a slightly different kind of ugliness.

Historically, the discussion of beauty is often related to two other conceptsthe grotesque, and the sublime. However, the ugliness in the concept of this dissertation is almost the opposite of those things. Instead of the overwhelming feeling invoked by the greatness and transcendence of the artistic property,

5. Poynor, No More Rules, 26.

6. Jarrett Fuller, ‘How Cranbrook’s Design Program Redefined How We Make and Talk About Graphic Design’, Eye on Design, 22 July 2021, https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/ how-cranbrooks-designprogram-redefined-howwe-make-and-talk-aboutgraphic-design/ the ugly is a mundane and vernacular experience. It is ordinary, proletarian. In their book Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi, Brown, and Izenour offered an inspiring insight into what is considered ‘the ugly and the ordinary’ (‘U&O’) in architecture:

7. Steven Heller, ‘Cult of the Ugly’, Eye, 1993.

8. Joani Spadaro, ‘Output Explained’, Eye, 1993.

Architecture may be ordinary-or rather, conventional-in two ways: in how it is constructed or in how it is seen, that is, in its process or in its symbolism... Artistically, the use of conventional elements in ordinary architecture-be they dumb doorknobs or the familiar forms of existing construction systems-evokes associations from past experience. Such elements may be carefully chosen or thoughtfully adapted from existing vocabularies or standard catalogs rather than uniquely created via original data and artistic intuition.9

While the authors explained in detail their understanding of U&O in the context of architecture, their central idea may be applied elsewhere: one is considered ordinary and ugly if both its substance and image remain conventional. When translated into the realm of graphic design, this idea manifests as a work which both uses common, cheap materials or techniques, and appears commonplace or mundane. We can also understand this through an anecdote about the publishing of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas. The book featured a clean and modernist cover designed by MIT’s Muriel Cooper, and was a largeformat hardback completed with a translucent glassine wrap. [Fig. 07] With its sophisticated design and refined production choices, Learning from Las Vegas quickly sold out and became a collector’s item. However, the authors found it ‘too monumental for a text that praised the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental,’ and later offered a redesigned paperback version as a more affordable and appropriate vessel for their argument.10

This idea of the ordinary and the ugly is more compatible with the kind of ugliness the New Ugly refers to-the badly designed stickers scattered throughout the city, the flyers with bad typography thrown on the streets, the simple text and stock images on the subway handle... It is the ordinary and the ugly. [Fig. 08-09]

Tu The Earth, Soil, And Dust

One significant concept highly related to The New Ugly is the Chinese term of Tu [土]. Literally translates to ‘soil,’ ‘earth,’ or ‘dust,’ the word refers to a specific Chinese notion that could be described with rustic, unsophisticated, uncouth, vulgar, tasteless, or uncultured.11 When it is specifically descriptive of visual qualities, it refers to the visual style connected to lower-tier China with bold colours and loud patterns.

Many of the works related to the New Ugly, could be described with Tu. In the past, the use of the word was inherently pejorative and established a clear class difference: the speaker assumes their superior taste, commenting on something supposedly of a lower-tier origin. However, several factors have contributed to the revival of this aesthetic. First, some attributed it to the younger generation who grew up around and after the 2000s. Not having to see China in a chaotic and economically deprived state, they are generally more proud of the local aesthetics of China, rather than the older generations who might assume an intrinsic negative connotation to Chinese culture, that it is worse in quality than designs and aesthetics from the West.12 Second, the prevalence of video-based social media such as Douyin (TikTok) and Quaishou made interactions between classes and regions of China more easily accessible than traditional text or image-based social media. These two phenomena play a significant role in making the disruption of power, region, and class dynamics possible.

A derived concept from Tu is called Tuku [土酷], which simply extends the word with Ku, meaning cool. The term is also a wordplay, since it sounds like ‘too cool,’ and indeed, it refers to an opulent use of Tu aesthetics, that it almost becomes too cool. Tuku is particularly popular amongst younger generations, especially those who identify themselves with a non-mainstream culture

Tu is a beautiful concept If we look at this word in a purely metaphorical aspect. The kind of ugliness it implies is like soil-it is ordinary; it is everywhere. While some consider Tu negligible, in the eyes of others it holds fertile potential-an opportunity for creation of the new.

9. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, 17th print (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000). 128l129.

10. ‘Learning from Las Vegas, Facsimile Edition’, The MIT Press (The MIT Press), accessed 1 June 2022, https:// mitpress.mit.edu/books/ learning-las-vegas-facsimileedition

11. ‘土’, in Wiktionary, 19 March 2022, https:// en.wiktionary.org/w/ index.php?title=%E5% 9C%9F&oldid=66174964

12. ‘Balenciaga’s 2020 Qixi Campaign: Another Cultural Misstep by a Luxury Brand or Deep-Rooted Understanding of Chinese Gen Z Subculture?’, Yuzu Kyodai (blog), 9 February 2021, http://www.yuzukyodai. com/2021/02/09/balenciagaqixi-china/