Technology, Production, Value, and the Disappearing Hand of the Producer
By Tom Westbrook
In 1989, while struggling to keep a small gallery and studio open, I began working at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as a temporary worker on the exhibitions crew. When the Walker was organizing large exhibitions, they would hire a number of temps to frame art, prepare exhibition spaces, construct cases and exhibition furniture, install and light the show and, if the show were to travel, build shipping crates. Shows came often enough that we referred to ourselves as “perma-temps.” Most of the crew were practicing artists, and it was a lively and stimulating group to work with: funny, irreverent, and highly talented. We took pride in the design and construction of materials for exhibitions, and the great care we took with the works of art.
When I went to the Walker recently to see the exhibition “Graphic Design, Now in Production,” my thoughts went back twenty-two years to some of my first experiences with the Walker and graphic design. One of the very first shows I worked on was “Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History,” curated by Mildred (Mickey) Friedman, the first comprehensive museum survey of graphic art.
“Graphic Design in America” was an enormous undertaking in many ways. Over 1200 objects, ranging in scale from a huge Mobile Pegasus sign to a collection of postage stamps, were cataloged and prepared for exhibition. To organize and display all of this, dozens of frames and series of wall mounted display cases up to forty feet long, were designed, built, and installed. We knew the show would travel so everything had to be modular and crates had to be built to withstand the rigors of international shipping. The two-dimensional work was displayed in what I think of as “classic” Walker style: clear Maple frames, very rectilinear, simple white or off-white mats, a very minimal, if rigid, look. The many books and other three dimensional objects were housed in the long expanses of cases. Large didactic time-lines and descriptive labels, themselves pieces of graphic design, were incorporated into the design of the exhibition.
My strongest memory of working on that show was meticulously placing stamps, held by archival corners, into a large, deep case. Most of the stamps, many of which were on loan from private collectors or other institutions, had some historical, aesthetic, or monetary value. I was gloved in white, using tweezers and spatulas to place the stamps, when Mickey came by and said, “Oh just lick them and stick them.” I had been framing fine art for years and, despite being new to the job and to how terrifying Mickey could be, I ignored this advice and kept handling each stamp as a precious object.
Most of the items in the show were treated the same way. Posters, advertisements and magazines, material meant to be consumed, were archivally framed. Books, buttons, and small objects were secured in acid free environments in cases and vitrines. Of course these objects, although created as ephemera, had developed value as historical artifacts. Rarity, fragility, and age added to that value. The means of production was usually expensive and difficult, or expensive to recreate. The artifacts used to make the final product—blocks, screens, and offset lithography plates, rows of linotype, moulds, and dies for each letter of type—were long since discarded. Certainly some of the more contemporary work could be and was easily reproduced, but the object in the museum became unique and precious.
When I was working on “Graphic Design in America,” graphic design still had a fairly high cost of production and an even higher cost of distribution. Many of my friends who were graphic designers were still pasting up pages using hot wax. Type and illustrations were reproduced photographically for layout and then photographed again to become an offset lithographic plate to produce the final piece of design. There was a high degree of technical skill needed for even the lowliest of production jobs. There were many intermediary physical artifacts between concept and product.
But we were on the eve of great technological change. Computers were just becoming tools for graphic design. PageMaker, an early desktop publishing program, had been developed just a few years before, and the World Wide Web was still a year away. The appearance of Kinko’s and other copy shops allowed for the production of posters, fliers and “zines” as part of a punk inspired do-it-yourself aesthetic (especially if you had a friend on the overnight shift who would run copies for free). Computers and desktop publishing were discussed in the show and catalogue as the next big wave of change.
Walking through “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” it was obvious how significant a change this has been. Everything from production to distribution has been affected. A single person with a computer has the tools, if not the skills, of an entire design and production department. Distribution no longer relies on a physical object that needs to be produced and transported; it is instantaneous and global. If physical objects are desired, the costs of production are cheap, if not free (through printable PDFs) for the designer/distributor. There is no need for an intermediary physical artifact. The means of production of the design exists as a digital file, endlessly reproducible, storeable in little or no physical space.
The computer also allows the designer to explore multiple iterations of an idea quickly and efficiently. This is most readily apparent and effective in typography and logo design. The explosion in the number of fonts, growing daily, is nearly impossible to enumerate. Type can be tweaked endlessly, grown and shrunk in size at will. Endless versions of logos can be created. New printing technologies allow anyone to produce not only flat graphic work, but t-shirts and coffee cups on-demand.
Many of the objects in “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” even those that exist primarily as digital files and are easily reproducible, are given the same sort of archival treatment the objects in “Graphic Design in America” received. This is to be expected in a museum show, especially one that is slated to travel. But the boundaries of precious object and commercial product are blurred. In a gallery full of modernist tables topped with oddly smoked Plexiglas vitrines, books and objects are arrayed. Along one wall of the gallery, nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the exhibition, there is a bookstore, where you can buy the very objects that are displayed on the tables around you. Exhibition specific bookstores are nothing new, but selling the objects in the show, from the galleries of the show, is. Commercial space in the museum has been expanding for many years and bookstores, catalogs and cafeterias are a major revenue stream. But, usually, the two sides of the museum, the commercial and the curatorial, are more clearly defined. At the Walker, the bookstore is at the opposite end of the building from most of the galleries and the restaurant and cafes are in separate spaces. The seamless merging of commercial sales into the cultural experience is a somewhat disturbing departure from the norm.
Oddly, as the object that is produced by graphic design has become less precious, the producer has become more so. Many of the objects in “Graphic Design in America” are attributed to large design firms or corporations; in “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” the designer as individual artist is the norm. Graphic design becomes as much about the personal expression of the artist as serving a commercial or political purpose. Content becomes less important than image, and in some cases, disappears completely, confirming Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message.” Posters become about themselves and/or their designers. An array of posters produced by laying paper on a group of uncapped markers promotes or elucidates nothing but how ink spreads on paper. As a piece of art or performance it is interesting, but its randomness, uniqueness, and performative aspects make me question it as a piece of graphic design.
Although the presence of the computer along with new production and distribution technologies are predominant in the show, there are a few examples that use old or experimental technologies for production. These technologies create objects that are less slick and shiny than the others in the exhibition. They have a surface that invites touch, a true textural quality. A drawing machine, though computer driven, uses chalk, one of the most ephemeral of materials, on a large blackboard wall to execute drawings. A series of silk-screened posters has a rich, soft, layered look, caused by the physical layering of viscous ink. These pieces, which have the most fragile of surfaces and involve the most handmade production techniques, are displayed in a way that makes them seem less precious than the more mass-produced and easily available objects in other parts of the show: With no frames, no protection other than a low cord on the floor, the posters are presented in an overlapping cascade, draping onto the floor; the chalk drawing, easily smear-able or erase-able, is protected by the same sort of floor cord.
Value in art and design is a tricky thing. Age, rarity, fame, cultural importance can all add value, monetary or other, to a piece of art. Design, with a connection to commerce, is valued primarily for is usefulness. As the boundary between fine art and the design arts is becoming more blurred, as the graphic designer becomes less a part of a large multi-skilled team and more one person alone at the computer, the valuation of a piece of design becomes less straight forward. Design as an activity has long been undervalued. People in other fields with similar levels of education and training usually command much higher salaries. Perhaps one of the only creative activities valued less than design is the making of fine art. The funny thing is, as the designer, through the use of technology, becomes more of an artist, as their production becomes more technological, the product more an example of individual expression, the value of the object seems to rise. Some of this may be a fascination with technology. People trained in digital production can, with a computer and good graphics program, create images that seem to be products of great skill and knowhow. There is not a “My kid could do that” perception on the part of the viewer. While good graphic design does take a great deal of skill and knowhow, technology allows anyone with access to a computer and a program to make things that look like what graphic designers would produce.
Hand work has been become devalued in most areas. Skilled laborers who work with their hands are becoming a rarity. Old knowledge and abilities, how to make a silk screen, how to carve a wooden joint, are being lost. The ability to wield a pen or an X-acto knife is not needed in the digital age. But also gone are those aspects of hand work that cannot be replicated with digital technology. Layered surfaces, minor imperfections, serendipitous accidents are not part of the numerically driven products of the computer. Evidence of the hand of the designer and the limits of the production technique are lost, and with them a certain value of the individual object. As with many things in this modern world, slickness and newness are valued more than skillful labor. I, for one, regret that loss.
Image List
1-6 Photos from the Walker Art Center’s exhibition “Graphic Design: Now in Production.”
7 Photo from coverage of “Now in Production” on coolhunting.com.
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