Women + design

Name a genius.

Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, or Mozart may be some of the names that popped in your head, but you probably didn’t think of any woman. Why?

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, women were blamed for having too much passion, imagination, and sexual appetite. By the late eighteen century, however, these qualities had been valued and appropriate for male artists. As new and old concepts of woman and genius clashed, there evolved a rhetoric of sexual apartheid which today still affects our perceptions of cultural achievement. (Battersby, 1990)

The term “genius” and its trappings (the brilliant, the sublime etc.) in the past have been exclusively bestowed onto men, narrowing the definition of whose cultural contribution is worthy. The lack of women and minorities in the art and culture scene is a social issue that has been addressed by numerous contemporary artist, such as the Guerrilla Girls.

Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. They formed in New York City in 1985, with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality in the fine arts into focus within the greater community.

They use facts, humour and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture. They believe in an intersectional feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for all people and all genders. I listened to some of their interviews, and I found myself agreeing with them on many topics.

Some people argue that the representation of all genders in art is not a real issue. Since the average person visiting a museum is not an art expert, they don’t necessarily know whether the artist is male or female and only acknowledge what they see. They expect art to speak for itself, instead of being gender identified.

The problem with this mindset is that even if people don’t realise it, being surrounded by the representation of only one minority narrows extremely your exposure to diversity. If we are always, only represented by the same category of people, art will never look like the whole of our culture. Because of this system, there are so many great artists that aren’t even being taken into consideration.

Today, an elite of billionaire collectors and art dealers controls the art world. They’re on museum boards, and pay for what the museum collects. They’re more likely to spend for the same art they already have and that appeals to their values, but we think it should look like the rest of our culture too. In their hands, the history of art turns into the history of power.

For centuries, kings and queens told us what art was about: mostly pictures of them. But now, living in a democratic society, we want art to reflect our collective culture. To be about all of us, and not only white man.

Unfortunately, this is still not a reality.

In 30 years, the issue hasn’t been solved.

I don’t have a solution for this problem, and spreading awareness is all I can do. There’s only one thing I know for sure: we need a change.

 

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Some inspiring women:

• Susan Kare, Iconographer
• What’s Underneath Project
• (I will complete this list, I swear. but right now I have a catalogue to design and no time sorry)

Sources:

• Women in Design lecture slides
• Battersby, C. (1990) Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxBQB2fUl_g&list=LLiLZz7ACIEPbA7WSOvae-CA&index=1
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WqBI20bd2k

On exhibiting (CTS 26/2/16)

This lecture/workshop by Jona and Mark was focused on exhibiting: what it is, how it evolved through history and who are some significant artists in the field.
So, what is exhibiting? It’s to expose, show, demonstrate, inform, offer.

Exhibitions and museums
We started the session talking about the history of museums; how at the beginning they were private and not intended to be seen by anyone but their owner. We discussed different theories on exhibiting by different authors, like Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, professor of Museum Studies. To answer the question above, she deconstructed it.

“What counts as knowledge in the museum? […] How are individual people expected to perform in museums? What is the role of the visitor and what is the role of the curator? How are material things constructed as objects within the museum? How are individuals constructed as subjects? What is the relationship of space, time, subject, and object? And, perhaps the questions that subsumes all the others, how are ‘museums’ constructed as objects? Or, what counts as a museum?” (Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, 1992: Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, p.3)

The process of exhibiting
According to Michael Baxandall, professor of art history and curator at the V&A museum,

“It seems axiomatic that it is not possible to exhibit objects without pufng a construction upon them. Long before the stage of verbal exposition by label or catalogue, exhibition embodies ordering propositions. To select and put forward any item for display, as something worth looking at, as interesting, is a statement not only about the object but about the culture it comes from. To put three objects in a vitrine involves additional implications of relation. There is no exhibition without construction and therefore–in an extended sense–appropriation.”

Exhibiting as discourse
Expository agency stands for the subject of the semiotic behaviour in which the constative use of signs prevails. It includes practices like constative language use, visual pointing (display in the narrow sense), alleging examples, laying out arguments on the basis of narrative, mapping, and laying bare. It is bound to subjects and embedded in power structures. Only those who are invested with cultural authority can be expository agents.

Exhibition design
Exhibition design has evolved as a new discipline integrating all media and powers of communication and of collective efforts and effects. The combined means of visual communication constitutes a remarkable complexity: language as visible printing or as sound, pictures as symbols, paintings, and photographs, sculptural media, materials and surfaces, color, light, movement (of the display as well as of the visitor), film, diagrams, and charts. The total application of all plastic and psychological means more than anything else, makes exhibition design an intensified and new language.

Exhibition experiments
During this section of the lecture we discussed the work of various exhibition designers. We started with the Humboldt-Lab “Pre-Show” by Barbara Holzer, Tristan Kobler and Karin Sander in the foyer of the Dahlem Museums, Berlin, 2013.

The installation “Identities on Display” was the result of this project, consisting of 26 display cases. They were set up in a staggered formation, serving as glass cloakrooms. The overall impression was defined by the coats and possessions of the changing visitors, like a narrative of presence and absence, like an airlock between the exterior and the interior of the museum – and a trigger, to inspire a new way of seeing the presentation of the ethnological collections.

Then we talked about Sophie Calle and her “Birthday ceremony” project.

“On my birthday I always worry that people will forget me. In 1980, to relieve myself from anxiety, I decided that every year, if possible on 9 October, I would invite to dinner the exact number of people corresponding to my age, including a stranger chosen by one of my guests. I did note use the presents received on these occasions. I kept them as tokens of affection. In 1993, at the age of forty, put an end to this ritual.”

We ended the lecture with a workshop that allowed us to put in practice what we heard about exhibitions:

Devise and produce an exhibition, here and now.
As a team, consider:

• What you want to put on display (an object, a series of objects, a piece of music, a video, yourselves as a group?)
• What is the message you want to communicate?
• How you want to put this on display (is it going to be surprising, instructive, didactic, informative, poetic, weird, conventional or all of the above?)
• Who is your audience and how will they experience your exhibition?
• What do you need (materials? Support? Additional content?)

1. Produce the exhibit (here!)
2. Write a 150 word rationale that explains your exhibit
3. The private view is at 12pm

Me and my group decided to put on display Elephant and Castle, using the window as a curtain. We found material on its history, and showed through photography its past and future, leaving the work currently in progress on the shopping centre as the temporary present.

 

Pose! That’s not me!

In this lecture we talked about photography, from its early history to more complex questions: is it possible to take an imposed picture of yourself? Do we own our own image? But let’s start from the beginning.
We were shown an image, and asked to describe what was happening in it.

Some of the guesses were that the crows in the photo was witnessing a sport event,an explosion or some sort of public performance. Mark then told us the story of what happened:

“Rare bird alert: Red-necked stint spotted in Keys; first sighting ever in Florida”

Within hours, the “rare bird alert” was posted on several birding websites. Bird watchers from around Florida and even a retired couple from Iowa began flocking to the Keys to try to see the red-necked stint for themselves.

They came armed with binoculars, scopes and cameras with long lenses. Many wore floppy hats to ward off the sun and try to stay cool in the 90 degree heat and humidity.

Barbara Brown of Des Moines was getting laundry out of the dryer when her husband, Don, told her: “I’m going down to Key West. Want to come along?”

They hopped on a plane the same day so that Don Brown could try to make the red-necked stint No. 734 on his life list of North American birds.

Looking back at the picture, it seems incredible that a bird could generate so much excitement and gather that many people. In fact, that didn’t happen.

After camping out for days, tourists look up into the sky as Apollo 11 rocketed into space. (David Burne/Contact Press Images)

In the summer of 1969, all eyes turned to a spit of land on Florida’s Atlantic coast—the site of the Kennedy Space Center, named for the president who had challenged the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. That July, the Apollo 11 mission would attempt just that.

(Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/moonwalk-launch- party-31100115/#rA7R0O0mZrZ1BjTu.99)

After this introduction, we talked about the history of photography. Started looking at the first picture ever taken, we took a step back and saw some of the first pre-photoghraphy “photographic” techniques.

Then we talked about photographing people, and how it changed through history. We learned that at first photography required a really long exposure time, which meant that to take a clear picture of someone, the subject had to sit completely still for a really ling time, sometimes hours.
We experimented posing for an early photographic portrait, posing still for an entire minute before our partner took the picture.
Then we discussed the difference between a self-portrait and a selfie, and if it’s possible to take an unposed self-portrait. I tried, and failed.
Then we examined Philip DiCorcia’s work, and were asked how we thought that those picture were taken.
Because of the sharp, strong lighting and the dramatic tone of the pictures I thought that they were taken during a play, the recording of a movie or some sort of performance.

What actually happened, is that the artist captured unposed portraits of New Yorkers with an  innovative technique that used strobe lights. Over the course of two years diCorcia took more than 4,000 of these photographs, though he chose only 17 for the series.
DiCorcia’s series was at the center of a debate between free speech advocates and those concerned with protecting an individual’s right to privacy. In 2006, one of diCorcia’s subjects sued the artist and his gallery for exhibiting, publishing, and profiting from his likeness, which was taken without permission. While critics claim that the project violated his subjects’ right to privacy, diCorcia explained that he did not seek consent because, “There is no way the images could have been made with the knowledge and cooperation of the subjects.
I personally find this explanation ridiculous, and what the photographer has done is an abuse of power. I understand that the pictures needed to be taken without the subjects knowing, but after taking the pictures he should have contacted them and ask for permission before exposing them in a public exhibition.

As Susan Stoning said, “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

Brand identities: construction, complication

This lecture was focused on brand identity, a topic we approached by discussing its construction through design and advertising.

The purpose of branding is to convey to people the shape and nature of organisations, that would otherwise appear formless either because of their geographical spread or because they came to existence through the merging of smaller organisations. Design is a way to convey an image of collective identity.

We analysed the redesign of some brands such as Lucas, and learned that some companies such as Pentagram are specifically focused on this rebranding process.

The growth in wealth and cultural influence of multi-national corporations over the last fifteen years can be traced back to the fact that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products.

Nowadays there are very little to no difference between many brands and products within the same category, so companies that sell exactly the same things need to create an identity around them to differentiate themselves. A good example are mobile provider companies: they all sell exactly the same product, and that’s why they need a strong brand identity.

This need started to appear in the mid 80’s, when mechanical production invaded the marked with mass-produced products less and less distinguishable from one another, requiring companies to rely on competitive branding rather than individual products.

 

We talked about rebranding, taking BP as an example. During the process, there were two primary challenges to address. The first was to develop an identity and a name for BP Amoco that would help to unify the cultures of the four previously independent companies, and the second was to help the new enterprise break away from the petroleum sector and become one of the world’s leading brands.

Landor, the company who directed the process, recommended the name BP be kept, the new BP present itself as being greater than British Petroleum, and BP become a single global brand.

The Helios mark was developed, symbolising the newly merged company. Bright and bold, the identity evokes natural forms and energy that represent, respectively, BP’s position as an environmental leader and its goal of moving beyond the petroleum sector.

Guidelines rule (CTS 30/10/15)

This session was focused on the role of guidelines in design, and how verbal and visual language can be an expression of authority.

 

“Rules are instructions for behaving in ways which will bring about an intended or desired state. Hence they presuppose a knower of the appropriate behaviour, who needs to transmit that knowledge to someone who does not have the knowledge.  Knowledge is one source of power, and consequently, if both participants agree on their role-relationship, the application of power is unidirectional; there is no hint of negotiation for control.  The source of the rules is in a hierarchical relationship to the addressees, in which it is assumed that he has the right to manipulate their behaviour. Superiority of knowledge and status gives the rule-maker the authority to issue commands, […]”

(Fowler and Kress, 1979: 26–27)

 

But who makes the rules in design? For who? And why?

An example of useful rules in design are those ideated for skills transfer, which guide you through the process of learning a new skill correctly. They help you to learn something in the right way, and are usually developed by someone experience in the field.

Another example is brand guidelines.

 

Exhibition-making has a set of rules too, concerning the use of words and writing in labels, reading conventions, heights, and general graphic guidelines.

 

The purpose of those guidelines is to achieve the best accessibility of the content for the public, and we could say that they’re essential since everyone benefits of them. On the other hand, however, some people see them as a limitation that can potentially constrain the creative process.

 

“These types of graphic guidelines specify the design of particular graphic objects, object labels, section panels, subsection panels. They are concerned with conventional types of exhibition graphics. In other words, the guidelines, that are issued by the museum to the graphic designer, reiterate conventions of exhibition making. In doing so, they preempt questions such as: Do we need object labels? Do they need to look like object labels?”

 

So, what makes a good design guideline? Do we really need them? And what does that have to do with art direction?

Answering to the last question, guidelines have everything to do with art direction. They’re one of the fundamental devices of the director to address the creative process in the right way, and at the same time they’re his limitation.

And as much as nobody likes being told how to work, a project with no rules is chaos. Sometimes, being able to create something worthy despite the rules you have to follow, is what makes the difference between a good artist and a great one.