maddamura » Curating

Graphic design, exhibiting, curating / 6 – Not to exhibit?

maddamura — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 14:28:31 +0000

While one might have feared in past years that exhibitions could strip design of its meaning and diminish its understanding, today we might wonder whether we are reaching a point in which it is the exhibition medium and apparatus that are being stripped of their qualities, for design’s own sake.
In 2013 oncurating – a very interesting online journal supported by the Zurich University of the Arts – devoted one issue to the theme “Design Exhibited”. One of the conversations it included was “The exhibition as a medium of production”, between Sarah Owens, communication designer and design theorist, and Urs Lehni, a Swiss graphic designer who works mainly in the art/culture framework and, among other things, is the founder of Lehni-Trueb office, Rollo Press print studio, and Corner College cultural space in Zurich. In their conversations they thoughtfully discuss the issues of exhibiting design and more precisely those of graphic design in the exhibition context. They consider different cases of graphic design displays and exhibits held in such diverse contexts as museums, study centers and specialised events, and they reflect on the kinds of experience that are offered to visitors as well as the impact these events can have and the sorts of criticism or discourses that they actually help – or do not help – generate. This conversation is certainly worth reading. Here I would like to focus on one instance that is reported therein.
At the very beginning of their conversation, Lehni says that when he was awarded the INFORM Award by the Leipzig’s Museum of Contemporary Art, he had the opportunity to make a show of his work: “There was no obligation to produce an exhibition”, he declares, “but those awarded during the last few years chose to do so, most recently Zak Kyes, who also tried to work with this problem” (see Zak Kyes Working With…). Apart from expressing his view that the “overly intellectual” and referential approach of this show corrupted the appreciation of certain graphic design qualities, Lehni recounts that while he himself considered the possibility of doing some things in the exhibition space at the Leipzig’s museum, eventually he decided that, instead of an exhibition, he could design a new website for the gallery.
Without intending to over-interpret the personal motivations of these designers, or to determine what is right or wrong, I sometimes wonder if “not” doing an exhibit – or not calling a project an “exhibit” or a “curated” show – is about to become the next expression of a critical approach to design.
Jokes apart, any communication project requires a critical consideration of the appropriate channels, media, formats and contexts according to the intended purpose. And certainly there is no obligation to choose the exhibition.

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Graphic design, exhibiting, curating / 5 – Schools of exhibition

maddamura — Sat, 28 May 2016 14:26:21 +0000

Design schools play a crucial role in sustaining ideas on and uses of the exhibition medium. Anyone who has had the opportunity to work in or to visit a design school knows well how the life therein is studded with hectic exhibitionary activities, sometimes to the point of obsession. Anything becomes an opportunity to exhibit, and even traditional creative writing courses claim the right to exhibit their installations of paper sheets. To exhibit is to exist, and vice versa. Understandably, exhibiting is part and parcel of the institutional and educational mission of design schools: during semesters and special workshops, as well as for their thesis projects, students are usually required to design and make prototypes that need, in the end, to be presented to an audience of peers, teachers, friends and relatives, and potential stakeholders.
Thesis sessions are an occasion on which the boundaries between exhibiting design and designing an exhibition can become blurred and ideas confused. The year in which I was carrying out research on graphic design and exhibiting practices at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bolzano, Andreas Trenker, then a graduating student in visual communication – who was supervised by Giorgio Camuffo and Emanuela De Cecco, the latter an art critic –, asked me to talk about his thesis with him. In Bolzano, graduating students are required not only to present ‘documentation’ – printed documentation (usually a booklet), illustrating the thesis project and process – and a ‘leporello’ featuring pictures of the final results, but also to book and set up a space, inside or outside the university, in which to exhibit their project for the discussion in front of the faculty committee. Thus, in addition to the thesis project itself – which can be anything from a carousel for children to a kitchen prototype, from a pair of 3D printed eyeglasses to a video documentary – graduating students must always also conceive and design a book and a display or installation. It should be added that the undergraduate curriculum includes Interior and Exhibition design; while this teaching is compulsory, though, it is given less time and space (just one afternoon during the semester) than the main design and visual communication studio courses (two and a half days in dedicated ateliers).
When Andreas came to my office he was in a delicate phase: he had conducted fieldwork but was still unsure about how to translate his findings into a communication project. Urged by a personal willingness to experience and, possibly, understand what it means to live in areas of conflict and wartime turmoil, he had visited the area along the Gaza Strip just after the Gaza War of November 2012. In the town of Sderot and in the neighbouring kibbutz Nir’Am he had the opportunity to meet people of different ages, as well as conduct interviews, take pictures, and develop a project in a bunker. During his visit he had taken lots of notes: I remember him sitting next to me showing his sketchbooks and a number of small red notebooks with drawings made by school children. He did not aim to explain the conflict, but share his personal experience in relation to it and promote debate regarding the militarisation of Israeli society. He was looking, however, for a way to connect all those fragments. Certainly, he was going to make a book, in what was to be his ‘documentation’, a sort of diary of his experience. But the question of what to do for the required exhibition remained.
Given he had collected and produced several original stories using various media and formats, however, it appeared clear to me that, in his case, the exhibition could be not just the presentation of something else – the re-mediation of the book, for instance – but rather the very thesis project itself. That is what I suggested him to consider. The nuance might seem slight, but, as he confirmed later, to him this was a crucial shift of perspective which led him to fully value the exhibit as a means of multimedia communication.
His final project consisted of a light, wooden structure (portable and easy to install), made to reflect the space of a bunker and one that supported different materials – texts and images, booklets, projections, videos, sounds. The colour red was a unifying feature, a reference to the “Red Colour” (Tzeva Adom) alarm system used by the Israeli Defence forces to warn against Palestinian rocket attacks – the sound Tzeva Adom was repeatedly played.
Mastering the art of presentation is certainly an essential skill for designers. However, it is problematic and reductive if prospect designers are brought to believe that exhibition design is just a complimentary and servile field of practice and not a field to be explored in and of itself. In the end, it would be like to believe that graphic design should just be taught in order that students learn how to prepare portfolios and presentations of design works.

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Graphic design, exhibiting, curating / 4 – Designing as exhibiting?

maddamura — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:26:57 +0000

While some may still discuss whether the exhibition context is suitable for graphic design, in recent years graphic designers themselves have shown growing investment in exhibitionary activities. As with the interest and investment in self-publishing and editorial practices in the early 2000s, exhibitions have now become a common platform for producing and disseminating design, for collaborating and sharing interests with colleagues and friends, for self-articulation and reflection. This phenomenon may be relatively limited but still noticeable, especially among a number of progressive designers who have pursued an authorial or a so-called ‘critical’ approach to design and who work pre-eminently in the field of art and culture, and with reverberations among new generations of graduate designers who intend to follow those designers’ lead.
In the past decade, the exhibition context has been variously explored and appropriated by designers. Apart from the occasional display of their work in solo or collective shows in art and design museums and galleries, designers have engaged with producing original installations for display only, have organised exhibitions in different settings – including the cultural institutions with which they collaborate – and have turned their offices into cultural spaces for meetings, lectures, presentations, workshops and exhibits. Along with more traditional displays of commissioned as well as self-initiated works, in recent years it has been possible to see exhibitions consisting of site-specific installations; exhibitions conceived to reveal the design process behind the works on display, including those made just specifically for the show; exhibitions of editorial projects that, in turn, originate new publications or printed works, as if in an endless game of mirrors; and, vice versa, graphic design works conceived and presented as exhibition spaces. We have also witnessed exhibitions conceived as opportunities for designers to meet with each other and with like-minded people to come together in order to produce and circulate new projects, as well as graphic designers inhabiting an exhibition space and designing their projects while being on show. Texts and discourse that have spread this phenomenon reveal that graphic designers who have engaged in exhibiting activities regard them as part and parcel of their design practice, but also as an expansion of it. Among these designers, furthermore, while some of those who have organized exhibitions acknowledge, cautiously, the differences between curating and designing, others argue that curating is itself a form of designing, likened by some to the role of the editor and by others to that of the author.
The abating of negative preconceptions concerning the exhibition context and format on behalf of graphic designers is certainly to be welcomed: the exhibition is a powerful communication device. In order for this engagement to develop into an opportunity for advancing the practice and discourse of design in novel directions, however, I believe we shall begin to question certain trends and attitudes that emerge from within it. I would begin with the following.
First, while on the one hand there is the risk of too naively calling any display of graphic works, and of designers, wherever and however made, a ‘curated’ exhibit, on the other hand it is also problematic when exhibition making is too easily equated with designing graphics – manifesting a disregard for the complexities and specificities of the exhibition medium, which is more than a layout.
Second, it is reductive if graphic designers use exhibitions as mainly opportunities for individual or collective exposition, self-reflection and self-articulation, for mediating and re-mediating their work, in order to talk about themselves and among themselves, or for instigating commentary from sympathetic colleagues and friends. Designers have learnt well that organising and participating in exhibitions, with all their appendices and extensions, offer space for attracting attention, establishing relationships and producing discourse that are needed for their personal positioning as well as for advancing their community and discipline. However, designers who intend to expand the scope of their practice and field could do more by exploring ways for contributing – along with other experts and professionals – to the building of exhibits that can engage diverse audiences and communities on topics that are meaningful to them.
Finally, behind and beyond these issues, the attraction that graphic designers manifest towards the approaches and values of the art world may become a liaison dangereuse, an impediment to their vision. As mentioned above, designers who have recently experimented with exhibiting and curating usually work in the service of the art and culture systems. In the recent years, the world of contemporary art has particularly offered several graphic designers the opportunity to not just carry out work but also experiment and push the boundaries of their practice. The opening up of a space for dialogue and collaboration between art and graphic design is due to, among other things, the interest on behalf of artists and curators in all of the conceptual and material components and formats that sustain and surround the mediation of art – a consequence of the renewed wave of ‘demystification’ of the production and dissemination of art through exhibitions. Those components include that which is graphic designers’ typical bread, such as editorial design. In turn, and unsurprisingly, graphic designers have become acquainted with and have appropriated attitudes and concepts of the art world which eventually trickled down to design discourse – think of ‘relational’, ‘collaborative’, ‘performative’. The involvement and interest of graphic designers in the exhibition context can also be read in the framework of this development, evidenced by the more or less knowingly iteration and imitation of modes of art curating as well as by the reverberation, within some graphic designers’ writings and discourse, of references to the history and tradition of art exhibitions.
While it is certainly important that designers who intend to specialise in the service of art production/mediation understand this field, as well as its practices and discourse, this should not be mistaken for a comprehensive understanding of the exhibition medium and apparatus and its potential. Designers should remember that other uses and articulations of the exhibition medium and context are possible, some that may be less biased towards the establishment and sustainment of a closed system of references and relationships. In order to move in this direction, a shift of focus, could help: from the exposition of design and the generic idea of exhibiting as designing, towards the idea and practice of ‘exhibition design’ and of designing exhibits. A critical re-appraisal of the history and tradition of exhibition design – in all its interpretive, imaginative, informative, expressive and constructive manifestations, and as an art in and of itself, and not just as a device to support artworks – can provide designers with a broader toolbox and set of perspectives from which to look at and engage with the exhibition as a medium of communication.

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Graphic design, exhibiting, curating / 3 – A typology

maddamura — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 17:35:38 +0000

Exhibitions are means for communicating with audiences. While there is no single recipe, going back to basics can be useful for thinking about or making exhibitions.  Giovanni Anceschi, Italian designer and theorist who has dealt a great deal with issues of graphic design and visual communication, can provide excellent guidance. In a 1991 text – “Le strutture narrative della scena ostensiva”, in 1961-1991 Mobili italiani: Le Varie Età dei linguaggi (Milano: Cosmit, pp. 111-116) – Anceschi outlines a “typology of exhibitions” from the perspective of communication, one that draws from rhetorical studies carried out in the 1960s.
The primary criterium upon which this catalogue of types is built is that of the “overall style of argumentation”, the “communicative intent” or the “expected or intended effect”. According to this criterium, two approaches or families can be identified: at one extreme lies the transmission or information intent which is the backbone of educational/ didactic exhibitions (which are aimed at advancing a cognitive process) and purely informative ones. At the other extreme, lie those exhibitions that are conceived in order to persuade or to convince, such as the “agitational” kind of display – which aims to promote a specific activity and to change people’s behaviour (including inducing one to purchase something) – and the “propaganda” exhibit, which requires the recipient to form a certain idea or make an evaluation about something (including the mass exhibits at international fairs as well as the elitist show found at art galleries). While the informative kind of exhibits are similar to publications in that they address the audience who wants to learn, the persuasive shows are comparable to stores and follow the logic of supply and demand.
 Analysing the two “families” of exhibitions, Anceschi details their various identifying aspects, from the conceptual models behind them, to the role of the exhibition designer and the most practical and technical features of installation work.
Conceptually, he argues, the first group is based on the information flow model, that is, on the idea of a channel of emission and transmission. Here content is given centre stage and objects and texts on display are meant as mere metaphors for it. The visitor is regarded as a passive receiver who will diligently follow a predetermined and closed path resembling a “string”, such as a sequence of panels for linear reading. In this case the exhibition designer is more of a translator of a given communicative intention. The persuasive kind of exhibit is instead based on the model of the mise en scène where objects – be they artworks or goods – and perception are given centre stage. Here the visitor is also given prominence as an active element of the communication process. S/he will be offered a higher degree of freedom and the opportunity to follow her/his curiosity among the various sensorial stimuli that are provided within an open path. Instead of a string, the structure and morphology of this kind of exhibit resembles that of an encyclopaedia to be consulted, or of a “network” or hypertext, enabling visitors to jump from one impression to another. The exhibition designer in this case is more of an interpreter, a stage director (Anceschi speaks of registica in Italian = directing) who, erasing or concealing the pre-existing architecture, builds an environment, sets the scene, develops an ideal storyboard, while expertly positioning objects and props, and taking into consideration all the possible views, movements, and actions.
 Clearly, the typology drawn by Anceschi is meant as a yardstick. As he warns, it is built from the perspective of the prevailing message or intention; in reality there exists no “pure” kind of exhibit, and every communicative event is in fact a mix of components: agitational, propagandistic, educational, informational, etc. It is important to add that, in the past decades, the landscape of exhibition-making has witnessed the emergence of new modalities, contexts, approaches, and concepts. Examples of these are the relational, discursive, performative and collaborative dimensions within the art system, or the role of digital technologies and the augmented visiting experience in scientific museums. However, even in this broader landscape of modalities, the typology illustrated above can still offer a safe haven to which to return and from which to depart when faced with the ocean of exhibitionary opportunities, from the plain display of existing works to the choreography that is as much about people as it is about objects, that is as much about the material as about the immaterial.

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Graphic design, exhibiting, curating / 2 – Chaumont 2015

maddamura — Thu, 14 Jan 2016 07:50:50 +0000

Organising design exhibitions is important not solely for enhancing the visibility of the field and of its protagonists, but also for advancing different views, for inciting reflections on design and, at best, through design. How this should be done, however, is open to question – rightly so.
In May 2015 I had the opportunity to attend the Festival de l’affiche et du graphisme in Chaumont, where the issue of how to exhibit graphic design is of specific concern. While the annual edition of the poster competition continues to feed the permanent collection of the International Centre for Graphic Design (CIG) in the city, the Centre’s new venue has finally been completed and will be opening in 2016, as a space for sustaining and promoting graphic design through shows and other initiatives.
This year’s Festival, along with hosting several shows, also featured a panel devoted to “Graphisme dans l’exposition”. Chaired by Étienne Hervy, artistic director of the Festival, it called three speakers to discuss and compare their views on the topic: the graphic designers Annelys de Vet and Giorgio Camuffo, and the design historian Emily King. All of them, in different capacities, had been involved with the organisation of the exhibits on display in the spaces of Les Subsistances.

Camuffo was a member of the award jury and therefore had participated in the selection process of the more than 150 posters on display, in plain sequences, along the walls of the ground floor, and accompanied by no other information than the designer’s name, country of origin and the client’s name. Along with the other jurors, Camuffo had also been invited to exhibit his own work, a request to which he responded by presenting a selection of posters that in the 1990s he, as the director of Studio Camuffo in Venice, had commissioned to other international designers. Hung on a wall facing these posters was a series of drawings which Camuffo made after them and which included personal notes on his encounter with the posters’ authors.

De Vet, head of the design department of the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, coordinated this year’s jury for the student competition and curated the show of the over 30 selected works. The theme for the competition, Unmapping the World, was taken from a previous exhibition project de Vet had organised at the Experimenta International Design Biennial (2013). Students were invited to create original projects that would rethink the ways we represent the world, and to embrace more inclusive and multimedia approaches to mapping in order to account for the “liquid times we live in”. The selected works – including posters and infographics in print or on fabrics, booklets, videos, web projects, and a series of carpets – were on show on the first floor of Les Subsistances, in a setting that was meant to suggest the school environment, with desks and chairs and with blackboards displaying captions and introductory texts.

Finally, Emily King contributed a presentation text for the exhibition, Syndicat et Matthieu Laurette présentent MATTHIEU: Une rétrospective dérivée, 1993-2015. This retrospective was a rather peculiar exercise of remediation and production made by the graphic design team Syndicat of the work of artist Matthieu Laurette. Syndicat decided to transpose images documenting Laurette’s work – which is usually developed outside of traditional art contexts and formats – into every possibly imaginable form of merchandise item that could be purchased online, from toilet paper to iPhone covers. As one learnt from King’s short text, printed on A4 sheets, Syndicat uses “exhibitions as vehicles to explore the interaction of craft and economics behind the production and distribution of text and images”. The merchandise thus collected was then displayed within a wooden grid on the floor, which in turn was placed on top of a giant poster portraying Matthieu Laurette participating in an applauding TV audience. Close to the retrospective, and in similar grids, two other projects by Syndicat were also on display, including “Ricardo” – after the name of the economist David Ricardo – a poster that had been printed in different countries.

The panel began with the speakers invited to briefly introduce their personal experience with exhibiting graphic design. Besides illustrating the concept behind the student competition and show, de Vet recounted her engagement in recent years in organising exhibitions such as those related to her Disarming design from Palestine label of products, made in Palestine and aimed to incite reflection on the condition of life in that country. Focusing on this project, she compared the exhibit to a sort of “marketing tool”, in the sense that the show can become a tool to “feed the discourse”, as well as a space where cultural objects can help foster narrations.
As for Giorgio, he explained that the primary impetus for organising an exhibition – ever since the organisation of Pacific Wave in Venice in 1987, which introduced Californian graphic design to an Italian audience, and up through to his most recent co-curation of an historical exhibition devoted to Italian graphic design (La Grafica Italiana, 6th edition of the Triennale Design Museum, 2013) – has always been his own curiosity and interest in others’ work and in discovering new things and sharing them with a wider audience.
Finally, King explained that curating came to her as an extension of her practice in the field of design history. Comparing writing and exhibition making as both forms of argument building, she expressed the pleasure she takes from the latter, from the greater freedom and possibility to collaborate with other people that it offers. Interested in reviving or providing a new understanding of the cultural meanings of objects by connecting and juxtaposing them in novel ways – she mentioned the exhibition of the work of Richard Hollis that she curated – she also declared her perplexity towards the production of design just for the sake of exhibitions.

Ultimately, the speakers and chair generally all agreed that exhibitions are means to generate new insights, understanding and knowledge.
However, their positions progressively departed from one another, especially when the discussion was brought to focus on the specific case of the exhibit of selected posters for the competition. At this point all sorts of issues were called into question and members of the audience also made their voices heard. I try to recap, in my own words but drawing from the notes I took, some of the questions that were raised: Does displaying design out of context reduce understanding or does it offer new opportunities for discovery? Is it enough to show graphics as autonomous aesthetic artifacts? How does one avoid the effect of pinned butterflies, i.e. how does one avoid reducing graphics to mere decoration or images? Shouldn’t design be presented as a cultural object, about which multiple layers of meaning are to be conveyed? Won’t audiences have difficulty in understanding, for example, posters in a foreign language – such as those in Russian selected by the jury – or how they were produced, unless you provide this information along with them? But does one realise how difficult it is to collect and provide contextual notes on contemporary graphics, given that designers themselves do not intend to provide information? After all, is there really an audience interested in exhibitions of graphic design? Non-specialists, are they not bored by graphics? Or is it instead graphic designers who tend to believe so, while, instead, non-specialists are actually very interested in graphics and would like to learn more? And yet, when you provide information on the content of certain graphics, for example, would you still call it a “graphic design” exhibition? On the other hand, isn’t it contradictory to try and explain graphic design, when it should communicate by and for itself? On the other hand, why exorcise the aesthetic and the visual impact of graphic design provided, with regards to the specific case of the exhibition of posters submitted for the competition, that these aspects were in fact the main criteria for selection, so that one could say that the actual show is an honest rendering of the very selection process? But then shouldn’t this, or any other, intention behind the installation be explicitly stated? And so on.
The panel seesawed for a while between too general and too specific, even too practical, issues. It was like watching a discussion between a group of curators who would probably never succeed in organising a show. The fact is that the views expressed, the approaches put forward, and the questions and opinions raised were all valid and legitimate. However, no definitive answer could be reached unless the panelists first agreed on what they intended or wished to do. As de Vet remarked, at some point, one needs to first ask her/himself what the goal of an exhibition is, what the purpose is, and whom one wants to engage. A simple and good point, indeed, which is further complemented by another point advanced, quite firmly, by King: that exhibition making is actually difficult, and it should be so, in the sense that it is a practice that requires commitment and dedication, time, resources, as well as experience.
So while the common refrain that design is difficult to exhibit may still be heard, one should not forget that, ultimately, to organise a design exhibition is to organise an exhibition, which means asking such basic and difficult questions as why, what, who, and how?

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