Design Symposium

Guerilla Girls at MassArt

April 30

I was first introduced to the Guerrilla Girls in my undergrad. I think we were studying post-modernism and looking at works that combined text and image. Among these was the Guerrilla Girls’ 1989 Poster, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?. The work was evocative in nearly every way–the crudely edited photo, bright yellow backdrop, heavy black type, and ultimately it’s overarching message which reads, “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”

The prospect of seeing the Guerrilla Girls at MassArt was pretty exciting. Since 2018, I’ve followed them loosely for inspiration. The morning of the lecture I did some research and familiarized myself with the wide history of their work. I was impressed by their willingness to adapt to each message and location and use both photography and text to capture their audience.

Freida Kahlo was an enticing speaker and I felt like she really resonated with everyone in the room. A lot of the topics addressed seemed tailored for art schools and art museums which I think was appropriate given the venue. I really appreciated the way Kahlo spoke of changing minds because I think it ties in directly to the ways that the Guerrilla Girls use both art (photos, speech, performance) and design (statistics, text) for example. Despite Kahlo identifying more as an artist, it seemed to me that her personal love of (very funny) copywriting is what we would have come to classify as design, including the way that said text is paired so well with evocative imagery.

Laurie Anderson Artist Talk

March 29

I really enjoyed Laurie Anderson’s take on an artist talk. I found myself arrested by the engrossing stories she was telling and the way she presented the stories. By combining aural storytelling, music, and video, she transcended what is expected for a lecture–especially one navigating the challenges inherent with webinars during COVID.

I think she exemplifies an artist. The way she talks about her work, including her analysis after the effect, leaned heavily on abstract ideas and drew comparisons with the natural world and her experience living in New York. This thinking comes through her music, I was particularly moved by Love Among the Sailors.

I found the mechanics of her presentation fascinating. A lot of it was familiar to anyone who lived through 2020–a floating head and torso on a virtual background. Her words and the music captivated me andI’d find myself looking down at the video from time to time. Some time I would see the familiar image, and other times I’d hear her voice coming from someone else’s mouth. The humor helped cut through the heady, sometimes metaphysical topics she was speaking to, especially when she hit on 9/11, her husband, and the pandemic.

I wasn’t familiar with Laurie Anderson before this video but I am excited to watch the remainder of her talks.

Art and Reality & Good Design, What is it for?

February 30

In Art and Reality, the author asks us to imagine design without people, situations, things, norms, or power. In each case the author creates a compelling argument for why those elements are necissary. In this, the author explores the idea of personhood and how being a person is defined. My initial reaction to this was to consider faith, believing in something that is intangible something that exists outside of human conciousness. But upon reflecting, I think the author is convincingly explaining that without a person–these experiences, i.e. this art does not exist. Likewise for situations. Norms and power are both interesting topics in their own right. Norms are often the driving force behind art. Having an opinion to express, whether for or against the social convention. The author argues that it is important to have a place for art that challenges these norms even if they are not acceptable in the society of which the artist lives. Lastly, the author categorizes politics–a hotly contested topic in 2023–as "the fundamental purpose of politics is to protect the rights of persons." Much like personhood, art is and has to be concerned with norms, ethics, and poltics.

Good Design, What is it for? was written by George Nelson, a designer with a 50-year career that included the director of design at Herman Miller. In this piece, Nelson argues that design exists to “ornament existence, not to substitute for it.” Nelson was the director of design at Herman Miller throughout the 1950s. During that time he worked on projects including the iconic Ball Wall Clock and the prototype for the cubical office (which he later came to regret). In 1957, when Nelson penned Good Design, Modernism was the prevailing design movement. Modernism had signaled a break from the past and as Nelson says, "we live in a period which tends to reject old things and to get bored with new ones." "By pretty general consensus, the only good design today is contemporary design..." Nelson explains that what is generally considered "good design" is not always the highest quality or "satisfyingly aesthetic". He adds, "there is no necessary connection between the level or type of need and the quality of the design." Nelson left Herman Miller in 1972 and passed away in 1986. During that period, Postmodernism emerged, a movement that rejected the foundations of Modernism. In Good Design, Nelson explores many of the ideas that would be addressed later by postmodernism including pluralism, and conspicuous consumerism. Nelson argues that good design is the "capacity of the human spirit to trascend its limitations," not the aesthetic du jour or movement of the day.

Yearning, Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

Hooks calls attention to the art world’s values by introducing us to her grandmother, Baba. Baba was an accomplished, yet formally unrecognized quiltmaker. Hooks references quotes by white male art historians to remind us that the art establishment has been and is still predominantly gatekept by white men. Her grandmother’s “craft,” i.e. her eye for beauty and skillful hand work, went largely uncelebrated in her lifetime. We can recognize this as a product of the systematic minimization and indifference to the labor of women and people of color.

Hooks makes mention of the systematic struggle that her grandmother, a woman of color experienced throughout her life. She opens describing the idea that her grandmother would have acknowledged her own artist-hood.

I think this is an insightful metaphor. Her grandmother didn’t have the words to describe herself an artist. Neither does, it seems, society as a whole. In order to value quilt making we must first classify it for what it is, skillful work done by experienced artists, providing value for themselves, their families, and their communities.

“Baba did not read or write. She worked with her hands. She never called herself an artist. It was not one of her words. Even if she had known it, there might have been nothing in the sound or meaning to interest, to claim her wild imagination. Instead she would comment, “I know beauty when I see it.” She was a dedicated quiltmaker— gifted, skillful, playful in her art, making quilts for more than seventy years, even after her “hands got tired” and her eyesight was “quitting.”

I argued in my first post that art is defined by its ideas. It might seem, from our typical Eurocentric “white male” viewpoint, that quilt making is devoid of deep, groundbreaking thought. But much like the examples I surfaced in that piece, it is important to understand the context that this work lives in. Despite the radical act of surviving, Baba would have known, through years of listening, watching, and feeling, how to construct a quilt that was functional, aesthetic, referential, and sustainable. Hooks describes Baba’s eye as a finely sharpened tool, developed over time. Is this not the work of an expert artist?

Hooks laments that her grandmother will not be recognized in a museum or by the art establishment, and yeah, fuck them. She should be celebrated. But her craft–her art–her ideas continue to live on. In every piece that she made with her aging hands, to warm her family, black folks who she cared for and loved. Her ideas will live on in the lessons that she passed down to Hooks and that Hooks has so generously passed onto us. Like Baba’s quits, a patchwork of skill, sharpened by years of hard earned work continue to live on in the stories that it, and the act of it, tell.

If that’s not art, then I don’t know what is.

Chat GPT Definition of Art vs. Design

What is the difference between art and design

"Art and design are related but distinct fields. Art generally refers to the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. Design, on the other hand, is the process of creating functional objects or environments with a focus on problem-solving and meeting specific requirements or needs. In general, art is more focused on self-expression and individual creativity, while design is more focused on practicality and functionality".

On the Word Design: An Etymological Essay

In On the Word Design, Vilém Flusser describes design as:

“...just about any situation in which art and technique (including evaluative and scientific thought) combine forces to smooth the way to a new culture.”

Flusser traces the term "art" to the latin, "ars," meaning, "to twist" (used in phrases like artifice or artificial to mean flexibility, maneuverability, swindling, and cheating). He traces "technique", or "tektōn", to an ancient Greek word referring to woodworkers, craftspeople who bring shape to “unshaped material.”

This combined definition, bringing art and technique together draws a picture of a craftsperson who is able to manipulate their creations to ends, greater than their means. That idea is reinforced later in the same essay when Flusser describes (in 1990) the commoditization of plastic pens:

“For example, plastic pens are getting cheaper. The material is practically worthless, and the labor (according to Marx, the source of all value) will be carried out by fully automated machines, thanks to ingenious technology. The only thing that gives the plastic pen its value is its design, which enables us to write with it.”

I believe Flusser’s definition and example of the pen applies to digital art and the internet. Since digital files are, in theory, infinitely replicable, there is no scarcity of resource. An artist could post their work on social media and have it screenshotted, plagiarized, remixed, and meme’d in a matter of seconds. The value in their work therefore no longer lies in the bits themselves. This allows the work to be distributed at a much greater scale, removing the exclusivity typically associated with artwork and imparts a much lower value to artist intent in the reproduced pieces.

Conceptual artist, Sherrie Levine tested the idea of photographic reproduction in her piece, After Walker Evans (1981), in which the artist photographed multiple pieces from a printed catalog featuring Evans work and printed and displayed them as her own work. Her pieces raised questions of authorship, copyright, subject agency, and re-feminization.

In the case of Levine, her design, i.e., her combination of art and technique, lies in her subversion of traditional authorship and appropriation, in other words, it lies in her ideas. In the case of the web, technologies like Crypto and NFTs create the value of scarcity without actual scarcity. In reality, the value of those pieces lies in their design, the ideas and techniques that compose them not in the bits themselves.

Whether or not good ideas are a scarcity is another question, altogether.

Sources