What Now? A Question Ain’t Really a Question, if You Know the Answer Too: Part 01
“The radio played the hit parade, and I hummed a long with the tune”
Some thoughts on communication informed—in part—by life during the pandemic though not necessarily about life in the pandemic and, if I’m being honest, the writing kinda started beforehand anyways. The essay equivalent of a streaming mini-series in four parts.
If it Bends it’s Funny; if it Breaks it isn’t Funny
It’s August 2020 and I’m writing this piece during the Middle? Lord knows, not the end of the Covid-19 outbreak. I’ve been in quarantine for about five months. I’m in New York City, which was the global center of the pandemic but now just seems to be dying for its sins. My connection to the outside world consists of brief walks and masked expeditions to the grocery store or pharmacy. Ironically, isolation has made the apparatus of communication even more apparent in my everyday life, mostly as I see it break down—from disuse, confined to UI squares, or as it disintegrates with those around me.
I Skype with my therapist, I FaceTime with friends, I’ve tested Houseparty—a chaotic neutral app that lets you drop in on any friends’ ongoing video chats. I moved in with my girlfriend in March. Quarantine started two weeks later. In the beginning we absorbed how weird everything was but took comfort in how lucky we were to be together. Then came the week of depressive malaise, a weighted blanket that smothered us in the realization that this was only the beginning. Our interactions got tangled in the knots of our internal anxieties. We started fighting. Eventually we were fighting about fighting. One day it just got too bad, and I had to move out. I’m currently living in my third apartment since quarantine started, not counting the two weeks between mid-April and May of friends’ couches and the couple nights at the Williamsburg Hotel while I figured out what to do next.
Falling Feels Like Flying
Miscommunication, or network breakdown can offer insight into the parameters of the paths that information travels. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the way information moves as it relates to my field of study. Considered at the level of output, graphic design is difficult to pin down. When the profession coalesced in the mid-20th century, it was the study of visual communication. But the range of applications has moved well past a traditional visual space to a gradient of tangible and intangible messaging. I have directed photo shoots, strategized branding systems and developed a scripted Instagram Stories series for Louis Vuitton. I’ve drawn custom lettering, made an edition of screen prints, hosted a weekly podcast and designed and edited magazines all within a year. As a discipline, graphic design might best be understood as the study of the levers and flows of communication in order to give form to and deliver information. In 1996 Michael Rock published his essay “Designer as Author.” In it he points to the ways a designer can be an author without producing original content. Though younger designers took the title as permission to create and distribute their own material, Rock definitively rebuked this notion with his 2009 follow-up “Fuck Content,” a title that speaks for itself but to sum up talks about the reasons designers should not attempt to initiate or circulate work outside the context of a client brief.
Rock’s writing always comes across to me as a brochure for his lucrative “global design consultancy,” 2×4—there’s a reason for its prominent placement on their public facing portfolio site—except if you read between the lines he’s always also riddled with anxiety. “Designer as Author” relates his client focused practice to auteur theory, the idea that although it’s a collaborative medium, films are ultimately the product of a director’s creative vision. This is a faulty comparison if you consider the kind of observer effect the auteur theory ultimately had. After its inception, many of the so-called auteurs began to write screenplays and expand their own definition of authorship. You can’t avoid the stench of the pitch in the way the essay signals to their clients that 2×4 provides more than a service. Quite the opposite: in their subjugation they make work comparable to some of the best popular art. But it also begs the question, if you’re so full of ideas, why not try to make something original? Because rules?
Cahiers du Cinéma was the French film journal known for publishing and publicizing the origins of the auteur theory. It was also the breeding ground for what would become the French New Wave.
Yes, but no. It’s important to also look at a piece Rock published right between his initial claim that designers are auteurs but before he clarifies that he in no way meant that they should use their skills, training or access to communication networks to initiated and proliferate their own thoughts. In his essay “Save Yourself,” published in 2000, Rock spends some time responding to a recently published open letter, “First Things First.” Printed simultaneously across two continents in Adbusters, Emigre, the AIGA Journal, Eye, Blueprint, Items and Form, all editorial platforms that spoke to and about the graphic design and advertising industries, “First Things First” was an update on a manifesto from 1964, the basic gist of which was that graphic design and ad professionals should consider and do something to combat their complacency in the bottomless and soul crushing consumer cycle of capitalism. The solutions in both the original and the Y2K redux remain vague. They seem to say the answer lives in some kind of practice the eschews more commercial work for something a bit more nutritious. “Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.” To Rock’s credit, this does seem like a fairly narrow solution to an issue so encompassing and systemic that by the turn of the millennium, if not before, these institutions, however sanitized, still ran within a capitalist framework.
Naomi Klein, in her book “No Logo,” investigates the ways seemingly public commons are made private. How they are monetized to benefit the biggest multi-national firms. To get further into the mechanical structures and protocols, Keller Easterling delves into, with equal verve, the ways both performance and underlying trade structure work on that scale, as she alternates almost Puckishly between the lingos of theatre and architecture. A current and salient example of this are private, often no-bid contracts the state pays with public funds to private corporations for services like prison and school cafeteria food, military budgets and, for everyone’s sanity let’s not start in on, the healthcare industry.
Whatever the naïveté or self-styled utopian vision Milton Freeman and his Chicago cohort had when they published the foundation for liberal capitalism. The original idea that economic firms would, through competition, reach an equilibrium is a theoretically sound model, in the abstract. Their thought was that to reach this platonic equilibrium would eliminate unnecessary glut and reduce—or I should say reveal the most efficient—price-tags of both public and private goods and services. However to anyone that can read a simple economic supply and demand chart that argue against things like minimum wage even if it’s parameters no longer can really handle the complexities of their data set. It is interesting to note that Klein published her book in 1999, a year before both the junior manifesto and Rock’s response.
Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg pictured, April 1977. Birkin was famous for her low-brow picnic-basket-cum purse, though a chance meeting in 1983 with Hermès chief executive Jean-Louis Dumas on an airplane got them into a conversation about the bag’s many impracticalities. Dumas decided to create a leather bag that would solve all of Birkin’s needs. The irony is that through various forms of market manipulation similar to those practiced in both the diamond and art markets, the Birkin is the opposite of her iconic and pedestrian whicker accessory: expensive and exclusive.
But Rock’s critique somehow manages to be more frustrating than the subject itself. First he blames the educational institutions that by the 80’s and 90’s had introduced french-theory indebted post-modern critique to the discourse and output of their students. “Perhaps that deep dissatisfaction is a by-product of an education system that promises more than the industry can deliver” Rock writes in direct response to the idea that one could make a statement adjacent to, in spite of or without the concern’s of a client’s bottom line. Ironically one educational institution that famously broke from the mid-century ad model of design and embraced this new critical model was the Yale Graphic Design MFA program run by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville who is credited with this seismic and well needed critical break when she took the reigns of the program from Paul Rand in the early 90’s. She wisely never mistook this emphasis on theory and the subjective as an excuse to ignore the importance of graphic fundamentals, a twinning ethos that I think is partially responsible for a major boom in concept rich and technically rigorous design work made between the early 90’s and the late aughts. Some of their contemporary institutions mistakingly did over-prioritize a conceptual framework, and to my mind most work suffers without at least a self-originated material ethic.
De Bretteville was one of the 22 person cohort to undersign the updated manifesto. Also on that list were Irma Boom and Linda van Deursen, both critics at Yale. Michael Rock was appointed to the Yale graphic design faculty in 1991. Seemingly he has a problem with his own institutional position. We can note too that auteur theory itself is indebted to some of the exact same writings he seems to oppose here, which means Rock is responding to one set of texts and to form opposite conclusion apparently at his convenience. This is especially confusing considering the critical agency he seems to champion in “Designer as Author” and clearly limits to client work in “Fuck Content.” Rock’s critique hinges on a direct analogue—one that goes so far as to be beyond a comparison—between advertising and speech itself. First he writes, “it is impossible to separate good advertising from evil advertising. Changing the content of an advertisement may save the soul of the individual art director but will not change the function of advertising or its operational language.” Where then does he place the authorship of a designer? He goes on to solidify this parallel by saying that “as a form of public speech, it unreasonable to expect that advertising wouldn’t be as diverse, and as often disagreeable, as public speech itself.”
The original “First Things First” manifesto published by Ken Garland, London 1964
So some ads are good some ads are bad just like language itself. Aside from the fact that I’m unclear as to how different this point of view is from the argument from “First Thing’s First”—both are saying that as practitioners and students of communication, it is up to the individual actor to make the right choices, choose the right clients, do better, as the saying now goes. Rock criticizes the same pedagogy he previously championed. But “Save Yourself” ends with a confusing comparison—that if speech is neither inherently good or bad, neither is design. “No one argues we should reform language because people use it to do bad things. (Well actually some do, but that’s a different story.) Simple plans to make everyone start acting nice will never work. Imagine if all writers took a pledge to be meaningful or thoughtful or kind? Can you imagine a world where people only said nice things?” Um, no? But also do I buy this premise? Do I think that working for a socially sanitized institution constitutes an inherently moral practice? Do I think design is the same as the type of literal speech that Rock seems to think it is? Where “First Things First” is muddied and naive, Rock’s criticism hinges on a false premise: that graphic design is limited to the same function as literal, direct, spoken communication.
In 2013, Rock chimed in again in a piece that has been scrubbed from the site but appears in the 2×4 monograph Multiple Signatures, with “Deprofessionalization,” the panicked essay equivalent of LCD Soundsystem’s I’m Losing My Edge.
In it, he essentially asks how does an aging boomer compete when design’s tools, vocabulary, platforms and skill sets have proliferated to a mass of amateurs? The locus of the practice itself had decentralized, and the façade of professionalism was wearing thin. How could he keep up? “Around the conference table all the grey heads turn to the 20-something intern to figure out what to do next. All that work to make ourselves presentable now renders us passé.” He wisely looks at the broader mechanism in play: communication, and locates his answer again in language. “We must view design as an elaborated speech or writing, a common activity, shared by all, on many levels,” he concludes. Except he’s wrong, and again irritatingly ignores at least a century’s worth of linguistic theory—or centuries of religious exegesis—that concludes from many different angles that meaning in language is inherently subject to question. A smarter place to look might have been poetics. In her speech “The Rejection of Closure,” the poet Lyn Hejinian explicates this better than I can. “The incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.”
Pages from the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry journal (Vol. I, No. 3) published by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein that features work by Lyn Hejinian. This was one of the main hubs of Language Poetry, a movement with which Hejinian’s work aligns, that sought out both the physicality and infinite possible interpretations of language.
Rock’s recent writing is less relevant—say what you will about the tenets of national socialism dude, at least its an ethos—and seems to function mostly as a justification for the prominent placement of the Ideas tab on 2×4’s homepage, right next to Work, About and the ubiquitous magnifying glass search feature. This move alone is not something to blow by but maybe something that’s just too obvious, and I’m just too tired to explain. The equal placement of Work, Ideas and About on the agency’s site navigation is a booming signal that Rock’s writing is a key differentiating factor and selling point for his commercial services. Clearly this takes precedent over the need for substance, coherent ideology or point of view. It should be noted that across two recent essays Rock does give roughly 5,100 words to the life and practice of Virgil Abloh.
Don’t get it twisted, I respect Virgil’s practice—with some reservation—most of all his methodology, which is one in which he allows himself to iterate in public as he sees his career as an evolving whole and not something that lives and dies by every piece. Compare that to the crippling anxiety most artists have that makes it hard to finish, let alone publish, any work. I’m also interested in his idea that in a landscape where everything is reference, remix and moodboard, why not make that process transparent with a simple move: to put quotes around things—though I continue to wonder if the fact that he uses the inches mark instead of the proper quotation glyph is on purpose.
But Virgil is also widely known as someone who trawls the avant garde, most problematically the work of young black artists, for "INSPIRATION" and there is always a fine line between reference and copy. Not that I think IP shouldn’t be more fluid. On the other end of the spectrum I think the “Blurred Line’s” lawsuit verdict, which concluded basically that Pharell’s composition had a similar vibe to something by Marvin Gaye and rewarded his estate—we can note here we are not talking about a struggling artist—a healthy settlement. This conclusion ignores the entire history of music, even in the West where concepts of private property were always in the mix; it sets a terrible precedent for the ways in which sharing at least some, broadly defined, intellectual property might be better for everyone in making progress and finding novelty. See also: the history of music that ranges from the ways in which classical composers learned from and upped the anti on each other, how three chords and a five note scale gave birth to several, interrelated American music genres, or the ways in which Indonesian Gamelan music developed over centuries of practice.
And let’s not pretend that intellectual property in arts are structured in ways that even try to benefit the artist. It’s funny that because of an early statute that barred the fundamentals of fashion from copyright laws, originally to prevent anyone owning the idea of something as crucial as pants outright, fashion is actually inverted; the intellectual property policy has conceptually rich outcomes like fast fashion and trend cycles. It is also riddled with critical and humanitarian problems. But this is all also another topic for another time. But maybe for the younger heads, imagine if after doing the first kickflip, Curt Lindgren then owned exclusive rights on that trick which would have prevented Rodney Mullen from taking and exponentially adding to the vocabulary of flat-ground skating. A butterfly effect on this alternate timeline might mean we never see a single film by Spike Jonze, the CKY videos that led to the Jackass franchise or Supreme. Its appropriate to think that skate culture really popularized the logo-flip: the flagrant swipe of a corporate signifier inverted in some way to encode its own message. Also interesting to note that Supreme’s success in design is indebted to both the legacy of the logo-flip and the IP laws surrounding fashion design.
But this digression is all to say that intellectual property is something that we should separate from the legal constructs of private property—something that maybe also needs a rethink—but also to make clear that poaching work from and not properly compensating or crediting its less privileged pioneers is a big problem. When the power differential between a rich artist like Virgil who received his platform as a dowery from Kanye himself and a poor artist—a long list consolidated here into the singular for efficiency in prose—who puts every last dime into something innovative that maybe several thousand people see and at best breaks even, on his material but rarely labor expenses, is one that cannot be ignored. What seems to be the common thread between Virgil and Rock is the way they’ve found ways to remain relevant by taking credit for the work of younger artists and their word-salad relationship to the oxymoronic accelerated embrace and surface critique of capital that seems to pivot around convenience as opposed to any good faith dialectic, for which I will later argue.
Photo of John Prine by Tom Hill, 1975. Prine died of Covid-19 in April, 2020 while I was writing the first drafts on this essay and for that reason along with how this all relates to his personal, confessional and poetic songwriting and the fact that this is one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite songs it also felt like a good expression of the nature of my inquiry.
Part 01 will be archived on hgtv420.substack.com, read Part 02 of “What Now? A Question Ain’t Really a Question, if You Know the Answer Too,” here, and Part 03 will be sent out next week. Feel free to pass around :)