Deconstruction and Graphic Design History Meets Theory PDF
Deconstruction and Graphic Design History Meets Theory PDF
Deconstruction and Graphic Design History Meets Theory PDF
Speech/Writing
Natural/artificial
Spontaneous/constructed
Original/copy
interior to the mind/exterior to the mind
requires no equipment/requires equipment
intuitive/learned
present subject/absent subject
The idea that cultural forms help to fabricate such seemingly "natural" categories
as race, sexuality, poetic genius, and aesthetic value had profound relevance to
visual artists in the 1980s. Post-structuralism provided a critical avenue into
"post-modernism," posing a left-leaning alternative to the period's nostalgic
returns to figurative painting and neo-classical architecture. While Barbara
Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Victor Burgin attacked media myths through their
visual work, books such as Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic and Terry Eagleton's
Literary Theory delivered post-structuralist theory to students in an accessible
form.
By framing their exhibition around a new "ism," Wigley and Johnson helped to
canonize the elements of a period style, marked by twisted geometries, centerless
plans, and shards of glass and metal. This cluster of stylistic features quickly
emigrated from architecture to graphic design, just as the icons and colors of neo-
classical post-modernism had traveled there shortly before. While a more critical
approach to deconstruction had been routed to graphic designers through the
fields of photography and the fine arts, architecture provided a ready-to-use
formal vocabulary that could be broadly adopted. "Deconstruction,"
"deconstructivism," and just plain "decon" became design-world clichés, where
they named existing tendencies and catalyzed new ones in the fields of furniture
and fashion as well as graphic design.
Chuck Byrne and Martha Witte©ˆs more analytical piece for Print (1990)
describes deconstruction as a "zeitgeist," a philosophical germ circulating in
contemporary culture that influences graphic designers even though they might
not know it. Their view corresponds roughly to McCoy's sense of post-
structuralism as a general "attitude" or "filtration process" responding to the
"intellectual culture" of the time. Byrne and Witte's article identifies examples of
deconstruction across the ideological map of contemporary design, ranging from
the work of Paula Scher and Stephen Doyle to Lucille Tenazas and Lorraine Wild.
In the mid-90s, the term "deconstruction" was used casually to label any work
that favors complexity over simplicity and dramatizes the formal possibilities of
digital production--the term is commonly used to invoke a generic allegiance with
"Cranbrook" or "CalArts," a gesture which reduces both schools to flat symbols by
blanketing a variety of distinct practices. Our view of deconstruction in graphic
design is at once narrower and broader in its scope than the view evolving from
the current discourse. Rather than look at deconstruction as a historical style or
period, we see deconstruction as a critical activity--an act of
questioning. The visual resources of typography help demarcate Derrida's
ideological map of the biases governing Western art and philosophy. Having
looked at deconstruction's life in recent design culture, we will now locate design
within the theory of deconstruction.
Design in Deconstruction
Saussure revealed that because the sign has no inherent meaning, it is, taken by
itself, empty, void, absent. The sign has no life apart from the system or
"structure" of language. Saussure revealed that language is not a transparent
window onto pre-existing concepts, but that language actively forms the realm of
ideas. The base, material body of the signifier is not a secondary copy of the
elevated, lofty realm of concepts: both are formless masses before the articulating
work of language has sliced it into distinct pieces. Instead of thinking of language
as a code for passively representing "thoughts," Saussure showed that "thoughts"
take shape out of the material body of language.
Phonetic writing is full of non-phonetic elements and functions. Some signs used
in conjunction with the alphabet are ideographic, including numbers and
mathematical symbols. Other graphic marks cannot be called signs at all, because
they do not represent distinct "signifieds" or concepts: for example, punctuation,
flourishes, deletions, and patterns of difference such as roman/italic and
uppercase/lowercase. What "idea" does the space between two words or a
dingbat at the end of a line represent? Key among these marks, which Derrida
has called "graphemes," are various forms of spacing--negative gaps between the
positive symbols of the alphabet. Spacing cannot be dismissed as a "simple
accessory" of writing: "That a speech supposedly alive can lend itself to spacing in
its own writing is what relates to its own death" (39). The alphabet has come to
rely on silent graphic servants such as spacing and punctuation, which, like the
frame of a picture, seem safely "outside" the proper content and internal
structure of a work and yet are necessary conditions for making and reading.
Derrida's book The Truth in Painting unfolds the logic of framing as a crucial
component of works of art. In the Enlightenment aesthetics of Kant, which form
the basis for modern art theory and criticism, the frame of a picture belongs to a
class of elements called parerga, meaning "about the work," or outside/around
the work. Kant's parerga include the columns on buildings, the draperies on
statues, and the frames on pictures. A frame is an ornamental appendix to a work
of art, whose "quasi-detachment" serves not only to hide but also to reveal the
emptiness at the core of the seemingly self-complete object of aesthetic pleasure.
In Derrida's words, "The parergon is a form that has, as its traditonal
determination, not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces
itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy. The frame is in no
way a background....but neither is its thickness as margin a figure. Or at least it is
a figure which comes away of its own accord" (61). Like the non-phonetic
supplements to the alphabet, the borders around pictures or texts occupy an
ambiguous place between figure and ground, positive element and negative gap.
Spacing and punctuation, borders and frames: these are the territory of graphic
design and typography, those marginal arts which articulate the conditions that
make texts and images readable. The substance of typography lies not in the
alphabet per se--the generic forms of characters and their conventionalized uses--
but rather in the visual framework and specific graphic forms which materialize
the system of writing. Design and typography work at the edges of writing,
determining the shape and style of letters, the spaces between them, and their
positions on the page. Typography, from its position in the margins of
communication, has moved writing away from speech.
Design as Deconstruction
Another comparison comes from the history of the newspaper, which emerged as
an elite literary medium in the seventeenth century. Early English newspapers
based their structure on the classical book, whose consistently formatted text
block was designed to be read from beginning to end. As the newspaper became a
popular medium in nineteenth-century Europe and America, it expanded from a
book-scaled signature to a broadsheet incorporating diverse elements, from
reports of war and crime to announcements of ship departures and ads for goods
and services. The modern illustrated newspaper of the twentieth century is a
patchwork of competing elements, whose juxtaposition responds not to rational
hierarchies of content but to the struggle between editorial, advertising, and
production interests. While the structure of the classical news journal aspired to
the status of a coherent, complete object, the appearance of the popular paper
results from frantic compromises and arbitrary conditions; typographic design
serves to distract and seduce as well as to clarify and explain.
In a 1994 interview in The New York Times Magazine, Derrida was asked about
the purported "death" of deconstruction on North American campuses; he
answered, "I think there is some element in deconstruction that belongs to the
structure of history or events. It started before the academic phenomenon of
deconstruction, and it will continue with other names." In the spirit of this
statement, we are interested in de-periodizing the relevance of deconstruction:
instead of viewing it as an "ism" of the late-80s and early-90s, we see it as part of
the ongoing development of design and typography as distinctive modes of
representation. But deconstruction also belongs to culture: it is an operation that
has taken a name and has spun a web of influence in particular social contexts.
Deconstruction has lived in a variety of institutional worlds, from university
literature departments to schools of art and design to the discourse of popular
journalism, where it has functioned both as a critical activity and as a banner for
a range of styles and attitudes. We will close our essay with two examples of
graphic design that actively engage the language of contemporary media: the first
confronts the politics of representation, while the second remakes design's
internal language.
Vincent Gagliostro's cover for NYQ [Figure 10], a gay and lesbian news magazine,
was designed in November, 1991, in response to Magic Johnson's announcement
that he is HIV+. Gagliostro imposed NYQ's own logo and headline over a
Newsweek cover featuring Magic Johnson proclaiming "Even me," his upheld
arms invoking saintly sacrifice and athletic vigor. "He is not our hero," wrote
NYQ over the existing cover. While Gagliostro's layering and splicing of type and
image are shared with more aestheticized, individualized gestures found
elsewhere in contemporary design, this cover does not aim to trigger an infinite
variety of "personal" interpretations but instead explicitly manipulates an
ideologically loaded artifact. Gagliostro's act of cultural rewriting is a powerful
response to the ubiquity of normative sign systems, showing that the structures
of mass media can be reshuffled and reinhabited. The NYQ cover reveals and
exploits the function of framing as a transformative process that refuses to
remain outside the editorial content it encloses.
Spacing, framing, punctuation, type style, layout, and other nonphonetic marks
of difference constitute the material interface of writing. Traditional literary and
linguistic research overlook such graphic structures, focusing instead on the
Word as the center of communication. According to Derrida, the functions of
repetition, quotation, and fragmentation that characterize writing are conditions
endemic to all human expression--even the seemingly spontaneous, self-present
utterances of speech or the smooth, naturalistic surfaces of painting and
photography. Design can critically engage the mechanics of representation,
exposing and revising its ideological biases; design also can remake the grammar
of communication by discovering structures and patterns within the material
media of visual and verbal writing.
Some Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Ellen Lupton,
2004.