The path of most resistance

Para-graphic design at Zero Station

By Chris Thompson

“Adversary: a touring exhibition (of) contesting graphic design” opens May 5 at Zero Station, 380 Cottage Road, South Portland. Call 767-2788.

“TRUTH”: by Rick Valicenti of Chicago’s Thirst.

There is no such thing as nature when you can copyright color. Kodak owns the rights to its yellow. William S. Burroughs once explained to Canadian artist AA Bronson that Kodak’s yellow is an example of what he called “image virus.” Everything that is intentionally or accidentally that kolor has been “infected” with Kodak’s korporate agenda.

Bronson was part of a group of artists-designers-theorists-critics who called themselves “General Idea.” Feeling that conventional activism didn’t stand much chance of making a palpable difference in the world, they decided to think virally. In the early 1970s, they appropriated LIFE magazine’s logo and layout, and made their own magazine called FILE. They used it to reverse-infect popular culture with perversions of its own messages, and critiques of its media-made myths. It wasn’t long before Time-Life slapped FILE with a lawsuit. Bronson came to find out that Time-Life had the copyright on “white block lettering on a red parallelogram.” It was at this point, says Bronson, that General Idea knew they were on the right path.

This path of media-savvy resistance is also the one charted by “Adversary,” the show of contemporary graphic design that will open Saturday at Zero Station in South Portland. The show has been organized by Kenneth FitzGerald, a graphic designer, writer, professor, and also the brother of Zero Station proprietor Keith FitzGerald. He describes the show’s participants — consisting of four collaborative ventures as well as twenty-two individual designers — as a sampling of “the current graphic design counter-force” whose work “challenges and/or expands common perceptions of design’s purpose, content, and process.”

One of the first and foremost targets of Adversary’s resistance is the narrow tendency to equate design with advertising. For some time now, there has been a growing critical presence debating the responsibility of designers for the work that they create and the impact that it has in the world. In 2000, the Adbusters group, in conjunction with six major design magazines (including Emigre, a participant in Adversary), revised and reissued a new version of a manifesto entitled “First Things First.” Initially written in 1964 by a group of designers in England, the manifesto argued for a committed consideration of how design might be used to address social issues. The 2000 version underlined the earlier manifesto’s call for designers to put their skills “to worthwhile use,” pushing it a step further in keeping with the rapid growth of global commercialization: “Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing, and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers think, feel, respond, and interact.”

Although for FitzGerald the manifesto is not without problems of its own — he argues that some of its most vocal proponents were people who didn’t have to worry about making a living exclusively from their commercial design work — he believes that it makes crucial points. More importantly, it has sparked a timely discussion, one that he hopes that “Adversary” can help focus. “Sure, it’s interesting to talk about formal issues,” he says, “whether something is beautiful, and so on. But I’m more concerned with what purpose it serves.”

It’s refreshing to see that he includes his own organizational role in this series of considerations; the publicity materials for Adversary refer to it not as “curated” but as “collated by Kenneth FitzGerald.” It’s a fitting distinction — whereas “curating” has the connotation of guardianship, caretaking, having charge of a collection, “collation” is defined as comparing elements, texts, or statements in order to find points of agreement or disagreement. FitzGerald likens “Adversary” to a giant, public studio critique, with the kind of immediacy that comes from works being fairly crowded together in an environment that’s both informal and dedicated to tackling complex issues.

He says that he chose “collator” in an attempt to distinguish the kind of encounter we often have in museums or galleries of contemporary art from the kind of encounter he hopes that people might have with “Adversary.” We tend to come to galleries prepared for a certain kind of experience, and then go through the more or less stock motions of experiencing it. In a 1998 Emigre article entitled “Skilling Saws and Absorbent Catalogs,” FitzGerald wrote: “Our reaction to art is hardly spontaneous — culture instills it . . . We respond as a result of training.” His hope is to permit the work to confront, surprise, and provoke the visitors, as it has done for him. He explains that while he asked certain designers to participate, in many cases he just gave them the general theme of the show and asked them to put together whatever they wanted. This makes “Adversary” less of an exhibition and more of an intervention.

As apparent as this is in FitzGerald’s discussion of the project, it’s even more so in the work itself, which covers an entire range of media, from Kay Huang’s ink on rice-paper deconstructions of Chinese writing to Elliot Earls’ interactive CD-ROM music/text/image extravaganzas. There’s a similarly incredible variety in the content of the work on view. U.K.-based “Women’s Design + Research Unit and girlsinflight” provides resources to designers seeking to communicate with one another about these and other issues of design ethics. In her “The Natural Order of Things,” Colette Gaiter gives participants an intense and haunting record of her time spent in post-Apartheid South Africa. And in the Emigre-produced book Cucamonga, Rudy Vanderlans journeys in search of/in tribute to Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, piecing together images of Southern California, its sights and its inhabitants.

Looking at works like these, it’s not difficult to see why FitzGerald is highly critical of the bias — one that is just as prevalent among designers as it is among artists — that design in its essence serves business, and that art in its essence serves an elevated desire for transcendent self-expression. Along with this comes another bias, namely that designers aspire to have their work considered “art” while artists shun the idea that their work might be described in terms of design. At the root of this is the myth that art is inherently good for us, that culture is undeniably necessary for a complete and civilized existence. As FitzGerald says: “Billions of people live healthy lives without being exposed to art. Both art and design can be meaningful, both draw on a range of rhetoric that can really do things, but not when it’s mired in peoples’ self-aggrandizement, whether artists or designers.”

It would be naïve to think that graphic design, like art-making or insurance sales, can extract itself from the processes of commodification and commercialization. FitzGerald argues that the only difference between art and design is that each one deals with and is shaped by a slightly different marketplace. The notion that art is an activity that is somehow more pure or refined than design is one that strikes him as being almost blindly romantic. Artists are just as capable of whoring themselves as designers, politicians, lawyers, or any of us. Far from denouncing art and/or design, “Adversary” issues a request for a square and thorough look at reality and at history. We are all shaped by consumer culture. To try and run away from this into an idea of pure artistic expression is ultimately only to play right into it.

Far from compromising the integrity of what gets produced, the acknowledgment of these kinds of ethical, aesthetic, as well as practical questions gives the show as a whole a sincerely productive set of tensions. Who’s making what, why, how, and for whom? Or as FitzGerald succinctly puts it: “The world’s in flames, and we need another picture show?”

Chris Thompson can be reached at: xxtopher@hotmail.com.