INTRODUCTION TO DECONTRUCTIVISM

• Text and type in a critical way
• What its role is it the construction of meaning
• Introduction to deconstruction

Examples of deconstuctive graphic design


Became a dominant mode of Graphic design in the 80's and 90's
'Deconstructionist'
Practise relying on theory and realised in practise.


Approach coming out of post modernism - A technique, is of post modern age


Po-Mo attitude - questions conventions
an aesthetic - Multiplicity of styles and approaches




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TASK
5 examples of Post Modern design - Write a couple of sentences


Elements of postmodernism - Exhaustion, pluralism, pessimism (everything gone wrong)  and disillusionment ( an idea of absolute knowledge). High art and popular culture.
Post Modern aesthetics - Bricolage (mix and combine) , re-using images (parody and irony)


A definition:


Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It emphasises the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Postmodernism has influenced many cultural fields, including literary criticism, sociology, linguistics, architecture, visual arts, and music.

"God save the queen" - The sex pistols

A combination of high and popular culture. Combining a range of mediums. Referencing the British national anthem, using photo, newspaper, and music to create an image; Bricolage.  His designs weren't about creativity but an attack on what is meant to be artistic.

Richard Hamilton

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

This modern piece forms a collage of mass consumptions and the consumerist society we live in; using pins ups, comics, films and even convenience food; bricolage. A piece of work filled with popular culture,  embracing everyday art. The Pop Art movement rejects abstract expressionism and instead celebrates material consumer culture.

Marcel Duchamp

'Fountain'

Described his work as ready made, he simply put the urinal used in 'fountain' into a place in which art was displayed, and suddenly an inanimate everyday object became 'art'. Proving anything, in the right context, can be considered just that.

Barbara Kruger

A montage artist 

'Your body is a battle ground'

This is about identity, she is focusing on the construction of people. 

An idealised view of how someone should look through the media, this image is post modern due to it's combination of photography, print, and the newspaper media type.

Andy Warhol

'Campbells soup cans'

Using mundane commercial objects to create art, combination of high and popular culture. He repeats the image, produced in a 'new' method, to create a mass duplication. The 'copy of a copy' apparent, each image exactly the same.

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Deconstruction


Mode of questioning and differencing
Approach associated with post structuralism and Jacques Derrida (influence by deconstructionism)


Blended with 20's Russian Constructivism = Deconstructionism in architecture


Visually interpreted in Graphic design = Sometimes called deconstructionism


Design, Writing, research.org
1st essay good explanation
Book layout - playing with conventions of how the book should appear


Cranbrook academy of art, US, Invented deconstructionism in graphic design


'Not a style, a way of analysing'


Definition:
Approach to texts which analyses their systems of representation - the systems which frame their communication.


Hidden contradictions between surface level meaning


Binary oppositions:
e.g speech VS writing
Privilege one over the other
Written language only exists because of speech, Just there to copy speech
Original VS copy
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TASK


What frames Typography
What elements of type influence content
e.g Book content = Idea's and message
Form = Type and image = now communicated
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'The crystal Goblet'
Design is secondary to content
You should try and be the crystal Goblet


Typography conventions:

• Legibility
• Serifs
• San
• Spacing
• Page setting

Affects content?

Secondary?

Create content?

Depends on purpose ok book

Just transmitting content as voiced?

Form (type) converses as much as content

takes what seen to be natural

Book seems to be just words to read

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TASK

Refer to 'text document'

Read it - highlight

500 word summary on key point it makes, role of functions of type in communication and meaning

Use key points to discuss one piece of deconstructionist graphic design.

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Roland Barthes
Death of the author


Structuralism - a response
Levi Strauss
Barthes
Saussure


Examples Cranbrook
Visual Language special Issue
'French current of the letter'
1978 - journal deconstructs itself
Challenging in the way we read it




FD fella: exhibition posters, detroit focus
Gallery - 'anti mastery' - smash controls of sleek design

Allen Hori : typography as a discourse poster 1989

No order, doesn't start anywhere, avoids conventions

Barry Deck, Template gothic, 1990

David Carson, Ray gun magazine, 1992 - 1995

Overwhelming 

Explosion

Stylistic

No order

Architecture

Peter Eisenman house III 1970

Deconstructionist exhibit MOMA 1998

Frank Gehry, house, Santa Monica, 1977

Peter Eisenman tokyo office block

Highlights tha you can break representation, by building their exposing

Bernard Tschami

Le parc de la Villette Paris

1982 - 1992

Points, surfaces, lines

Daniel Libeskind

Jewish Museum

Berlin

1989 - 96

Dertida Glas

Designer Richard Echersley

Marinetti : words in freedom

El Lissitzsky for the voice 1923

To define:

To destabilise given meanings and representations which have been created. To expose this system of limitations.

THE EFFECT OF TYPE

ON HOW YOU READ CONTENT

DEFINING THE AVANT-GARDE

Associated with art, to apply to graphic design.

THE DEFINITION:

• Cutting edge, whats now.
• idea of doing art/design work that is progressive
• Refers to a group of people being innovative
• Being avant-garde in the work you do; challenging, innovating.
• Being a member of the avant-garde

Definition found on Tate Gallery website

Originally a French term, meaning in English, vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest). Applied to art, means that which is in the forefront, is innovatory, which introduces and explores new forms and in some cases new subject matter. In this sense the term first appeared in France in the first half of the nineteenth century and is usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism. He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society. In 1825 he wrote: 'We artists will serve you as an avant-garde¿ the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas¿ What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function and of marching in the van [i.e. vanguard] of all the intellectual faculties!' Avant-garde art can be said to begin in the 1850s with the Realism of Gustave Courbet, who was strongly influenced by early socialist ideas. This was followed by the successive movements of modern art, and the term avant-garde is more or less synonymous with modern. Some avant-grade movements such as Cubism for example have focused mainly on innovations of form, others such as Futurism, De Stijl orSurrealism have had strong social programmes. The notion of the avant-garde enshrines the idea that art should be judged primarily on the quality and originality of the artists vision and ideas. 
 

Concept of avant garde being neutralised, loss of meaning. It's being used in a reductive way within many forms.

Avant garde - Leading the way forward as a social movement

MARCEL DUCHAMP

'Fountain' - 1917 (metaphorical name for a urinal)

'Mona Lisa' - L, H, O, O, Q

I believe he is trying to prove the loss of meaning to the word 'avant garde', using it in a reductive way compared to what it historically means and was used.

'Fauves' Wild beasts

A new progressive ?

Not gone to art school, did something different, gesture against conventions.

Issuing a challenge through convention?

Conventional art form accepteted as a form of art.

Historic style of art

Uphold convention

Art schools in the past

Long hours copying master until you become accomplished enough to become an artist yourself. Voice is heard through style of another.

HENRY WALLIS - Death of chatterton

Ahead of his time

Myth of artist as tortured genius

Implication death is our fault

Stone breakers

Political gesture - workers are worthy of being the subject of art

Painting realism - a real world

The audience has changed from upper class to lower. Attempt to challenge convention

ART FOR ARTS SAKE

Whistler in black & gold: the falling rocket

Just aesthetically annotative 

Not concerned with politics or world

System of aesthetic experimentation

The idea that the artist 'knows whats important, doesnt matter if you don't' 

Isolating self from society

CLIVE BELL

"The relations and combinations of lines and colours, which when organised give the power to move someone aesthetically"

Art seen of more value - a lot of people

Writing why art is valuable, produces a system. Critics only needed if art is meaningless to people.

Value given to art by taste makers.

CLEMENT GREENBERG

All art had been leading towards abstract

'Pollock' Lavender mist (1950)

Russian avant-garde

Expresses capitalism in Pollocks work

Elite that doesn't care about the masses

To be able to communicate, art has to be conventional. But to be experimental, its seems you have to rely on conventionality.

Jock Kinnear

No one will understand this is graphic design.

Therefor succeeds as graphic design as its invisible.

Stephen Sagameister (1997)

Design more important than content.

No successful?

Design for designs sake

Vernacular typography - In the common language

KITSCH

DEFINITION: A tasteless copy of art, a form of art considered inferior, worthless imitation

To make something kitsch, you have to determine taste. To make a value judgement. Snobbish in a sense.

Still trying to do what art is doing, but not very well. Aspires but fails.

 Strive for identity and fail

"Theres no dispute in matter of taste."

Like things because were told there good?

Art can only be considered that in a gallery? An elitist stance

Art given privilege because its the preserve of the rich

Artists try to out avant-garde each other

Damien hurst Art

Status symbol

Why art seems to be more valuable

Prices of art suddenly went up and up. We had more respect for it.

When in fact it was drug dealers needing to rid of money.

Misconstrues our idea of art

To challenge conceptions of what we take for granted as art. Avant garde to push forward our meaning of art. Aggression to conservative values of art.

Can't be original until we are an 'expert' and taught by a certain set of rules, we work to a brief, for clients.

ART HAS A HIGHER STATUS

Art seems to have a higher status than design, when in fact, 'art' can now be considered as anything. Is it's high status changing?

Art not innotative or 'genious'

Political form of avant garde

TASK

300 WORDS

DESCRIBE WHAT THE CONCEPT OF AVANT-GARDE IS TO ME

FIND TWO EXAMPLES OF GRAPHIC DESIGN WHICH SHOWS THIS

I believe the concept of avant-garde has been neutralised and has lost the meaning it once had; to be that of progressive and new. For the word to be appropriate in describing something, has to have a deeper social and political message, to be passing off an opinion and to challenge conventions and conceptions within art and design work. I'm very much impressed by Marcel Duchamp and his almost 'mocking' pieces of considered artwork. I feel he's being avant-garde in his approach and proving art has lost its once high status and value, and now, absolutely anything can be considered art it the right circumstances and surroundings.

Here are a few examples of what I would consider as avant-garde graphic design. For the reasons that, aesthetically designs don't have to be beautiful, not photo and image quality. These I feel heighten the message trying to be put forward. For instance, a man, wearing a rather cheap, tacky looking santa costume, holding a home made sign, the paper itself crinkled and distraught, with visible Sellotape add's to the message actually on the sign.  The topic about the debt christmas creates. This approach to graphic design gives a personal, gritty and believable element to it.  

Campaigns are a favourite of mine, when it comes to getting a message across. A recent Starbucks campaign about the increase in drink size, adding to the american obesity crisis. Using destruction and manipulation to their corporate logo, and a clever use of language, gained the media attention protesters wanted. It's avant-garde in its approach to sending out a message.