The Academy of Deconstructed Design Ellen Lupton Michael McCoy,
Ed Fella, Katherine McCoy 1991
Students and graduates of Cranbrook Academy of Art are producing some of the world’s most challenging graphic design. Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graphic design program has been accused of hermeticism, formalism, theoretical obfuscation and other crimes against the values of both classic Modernism and the slicker professional mainstream. […] The accompanying shift from rationalism to intuition reflected the avant-garde’s understanding of history as a process of continual revision, which compels each generation to reconfigure the achievements of the last. Katherine McCoy explains that while the experiments of the mid-to-late-1970s concentrated on syntax (the formal relation between signs in a system), the work of the 1980s is informed by semantics (the relation between signs and the concepts they present). In summarising the last twenty years at Cranbrook, the McCoys strike a self consciously avant-gardist stance, describing a series of shifts, which began with the move from International Style Modernism to what Katherine McCoy has called ‘Mannerist Modernism’, and led to a fascination with ‘post structuralist’ theory in the 1980s. […] Post-structuralist theory first came to the attention of graphic designers at Cranbrook when the students designed an issue of the scholarly journal Visible Language (Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer 1978). The issue’s subject was post-structuralist literary aesthetics, and the students responded by progressively disintegrating the series of articles by inserting space between the lines and the words of the text. 36
