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 Maud Lavin looks at the precarious position of graphic design. Can it ever be more than corporate window dressing? June 2001
Lavin is probably most familiar to design readers as an art historian with a special interest in montage and Modernism. She is the author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife, a book about the photomontages of Hannah Höch. Her essay about Kurt Schwitters and the 1920s circle of new advertising designers is reprinted in Clean New World along with several other historical pieces, among them a fine essay about commercial design originally written for the Graphic Design in America exhibition catalog. As it happens I had recently reread that essay before encountering the revised version of it published here, and I was struck by how pertinent Lavin's criticisms still seem. "The accepted function of the designer," she writes, "has become one of providing a service rather than generating ideas to be communicated; this self-definition discourages explicitly political expression." If that was true in 1989, it is even more the case today. In Clean New World's introduction, Lavin develops these ideas and outlines the issues at stake with an exhilarating clarity of purpose. Few now are writing specifically about the connections between power, politics, visual culture, and design. So much contemporary design writing--like the profession it serves--exhibits a marked reluctance to face up to design's implications or to really stretch its communicative potential, preferring to bask instead in the kudos of an assumed "radicalism" that is never critically tested. Lavin's fascination with graphic design, she notes, comes from the fact that it is a strange example of "hamstrung power." Designers concentrate on the details of how things look and have a tremendous power to communicate visually, yet they often know little about what their clients do and have no real power to influence the content. Who then, Lavin asks, does have a voice in our culture? Who gets to say what to whom? What happens to private expression when public forums are owned and controlled by commercial forces--when huge global corporations dominate the media, and the mall replaces the town square? The "clean new world" of her title is one in which design's strictly cosmetic role is to filter and purify the mess of reality for its commercial masters. Lavin, on the other hand, is for a design practice that encourages public dialogue by being open, democratic, and alive to pleasure; by revealing complexity; and by winning for itself the power to make a difference. The book's fundamental concern is how design might position itself to achieve these ends. As Lavin demonstrates, design has always grappled with these problems. She argues that by reproducing John Heartfield's photomontages divorced from their original contexts in the pages of AIZ, art historians tend to overlook the degree to which their meaning is determined by their mass-media framework, where they engage in a dialogue with the adjacent photojournalism and comment on media constructions of reality. Lavin's discussion of the ring "neue werbegestalter" reveals some remarkable continuities with contemporary practice. The ring designers were well intentioned and committed to progressive principles, but they preferred to focus on form rather than ask questions about industrial ownership, labor practices and profits, or the function within capitalism of the innovative corporate advertising they created. However, other designers were ahead of their time. In a fascinating essay on the two-woman team ringl + pit (Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach), Lavin shows how they used humor and nostalgia to challenge the tendency in German advertising of the 1920s to depict women as mannequins and commodities--and how commentators chose to ignore this. It's a pity that so few examples of this less familiar work are shown. Lavin has evident sympathy for highly motivated activist image-makers, and her account of political art coalitions in the "decade of greed"--the 1980s--is another valuable text. Groups such as the Guerrilla Girls (art-world agitators), Gran Fury (AIDS awareness campaigners), and WAC (Women's Action Coalition) are in a direct line of descent from Heartfield, as indeed is Barbara Kruger. The one place I would take issue with Lavin is in her conclusion that anonymity can be counterproductive because many people operate best with the "ego boosts" that come from recognition. That may be true, but it takes an exceptional individual to put him or herself on the line, and some of the activist groups Lavin cites achieved what they did because they had the personal and legal protection of anonymity. For designers who don't wish to imperil their commercial position with overt displays of disaffection, anonymity can be a good strategy for contributing to occasional initiatives and actions. This essay left me eager to hear about some contemporary examples of committed design practice, but Lavin's portfolio of women designers--including Jessica Helfand, Bethany Johns, Marlene McCarty, Paula Scher, and Lorraine Wild--is disappointing. It takes the form of a brief intro followed by edited statements from the 20 women that vary greatly in insight and interest. Lavin proposes a definition of design authorship that amounts to little more than a vague hope that "the designer's style and content are evident" in the work. She acknowledges that this sounds "mild"--and it does. Authorship is an area in which big claims have been made by designers in the last 15 years. So far not much has been achieved. It seems an obvious task for a critic to ask why, and given Clean New World's thrust, this was the ideal place to do so. But Lavin makes no attempt to sift and analyze--let alone to question or contest--her respondents' positions, or to compare their aims with their work. Yet the more incisive replies suggest that the possibilities for an engaged critical practice through corporate design are severely limited, as the book's introduction seems to suggest. "What I'm finding is that self-generated work is increasingly not graphic design work," Helfand says. Johns, a member of WAC, concludes that "less work for more money" commercial jobs don't actually exist, and commercial projects eat into time she would prefer to commit to content-driven collaborations with not-for-profit clients. Wild, designer of over 65 books, points out the financial penalties of turning your back on the corporate sector: "Younger designers should know that some kind of price is attached to making an independent path." Lavin notes at the outset how the tone of the pieces evolves over time, from an art historian's academic detachment (though she doesn't pretend objectivity) to use of the first person, as she becomes an "observer-participant." This makes Clean New World an uneven read--from dry to funky--and it never quite lives up to the introduction's polemical flair. Nor is it clear, despite Lavin's claim to be engaged in a "multitasked critical practice," quite what juncture she has now reached as a critic. It's good to see most of these texts reprinted, but the book could do with a few more pieces in the second half elaborating her current agenda and methods. As it is Clean New World concludes, somewhat weirdly, with an essay detailing Lavin's experiences as a writer (one of eight) on the 1997 Web-based drama called The Couch. This was unfamiliar to me, so I looked it up and read some of Lavin's diary entries for her character, Celeste, a fictionalized version of herself. It was a project about writing and identity--by turns irritating, amusing, and wise--and design seemed to be a relatively minor component. This just added to my sense that the essay is in the wrong book. The effect of placing these "confessions" at the end is to imply design's limitation as a form of authorial engagement. Clean New World's challenge, for the most part, is that it argues exactly the opposite. Rick Poynor is the author of Vaughn Oliver: Visceral Pleasures. |
