This article was first published in 1995 in
Emigre 33.
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 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)
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 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 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 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)
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
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 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 simply the pink triangle -
taken from the past and displaced into the present - but rather
a signature mark combining an inverted symbol and typographic message, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 homogenization, 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.
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," in
Eye,
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 book Shakespearean 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.
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 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 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.
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.
