Don't let your dogma overwhelm your DecoRational

Curtain Wars

Link: by Joel Sanders.

Perhaps the best evidence of the porous boundaries between architecture and decoration can be found in the work of those most responsible for erecting the borders in the first place—the first generation of modernist architects. As the literal separation between inside and outside breaks down with the development of the transparent curtain wall, so too does the boundary between architect and interior decorator. And that quintessential invention of modern architecture, “built-in” furniture (a hybrid between architecture and freestanding furniture), underscores the difficulty of determining where one practice ends and the other begins.

"Cuts, borders, and ornaments..." Book

Link:
Cuts, borders, and ornaments selected from the Robinson-Pforzheimer Typographical Collection in the New York Public Library
. (Plan to visit the NYPL soon!) Rob Roy Kelly notes that the library has Elrie Robinson's collection and "the printed limited editions of catlogues illustrating typographic Americana of the 1800's." [Kelly, 212]

Womack and me

(Recent online chat with David Womack)

DW: I agree that the computer has come a long way...but with regards to craft and ornament, the advances have in some way taken us in an uncomfortable direction. It used to be that you could judge the significance of an object--the commitment the creator had made to the object, through the amount of ornamentation. every swirl and bead required effort to apply. now with cut and paste, ornament is effortless and therefore loses a lot of its signaling value. (You used to also be able to judge the seriousness of a writer by the absence of typos.)
DGC: You could say that these measures of craft were important then, but are not now. Other skills and concerns have replaced them, or added to them as the tools made certain aspects easier. Just because we used to wash dishes by hand doesn't make the act more honorable now, or rather more noble than using a dishwasher. As the craft changes, the criteria for quality and innovation shift relationally. So we scrap some things that were deemed important and valuable and raise the bar so to speak. Proficiency in the digital realm is measured differently. Cut and paste doesn't "cut it." And as with any craft, the sophistication to select well from many options (now a bizillion options) is key to demonstrating skill. I see students using every filter and gyroticulating thingymabob available and the work suffers. Over time they learn discretion, and to finesse the tool.

~&~

DW: So where is the bar now do you think?
DGC: Well, I think the programming is now part of the craft. I've recently spent some time on Peter Cho's site and he's doing some surprising stuff with type, through programming. also...
DW: I think that craft has a different definition now... Instead of seeing craft as a means of making something new, I think a lot of youngsters see craft (as in doilies and afghans) as a way of making more of something old...the soothing mindlessness of repetition.
DGC: Yeah. Ish. That's vernacular versus professional. Sentimental. nostalgic. sweet and not interesting.
DW: Not interesting intellectually but relaxing and deeply seductive...especially for people who want to take a break and just do what they already know.
DGC: Well, again, this popular version doesn't define the trajectory, nor influence the progression of the applied or graphic arts. There have always been levels of skill and ranges of motivation. I enjoy the challenge of making something I haven't seen before and growing my skills and stretching my preconceptions. Oh, and making something beautiful or compelling. But that's such hard work! As you know, crafting anything WELL is not exactly soothing, but is satisfying.

~&~

DW: I have a Russian friend who I was telling about the place in france we go to... how it doesn't have a television or internet and barely has a telephone. He thought this was the most bourgeouise (sp?) thing he could think of. A real redefinition of luxury. And that may be part of where design--not as an elite activity but as a popular movement-may be heading. Towards "freedom from."
DGC: I think he's right. And the "freedom from" in design is evident in all kinds of things, from the resurgence of hand drawing in graphic design to the craft-y movement. I do think you need to make a distinction between leisure and discipline though. The "freedom from" is happening in all directions. The center of my universe right now is this typography book and I'm realizing that the tone of it, what i'm writing, is all about moving past the stunted approaches to typography.
DW: How stunted?
DGC: Mired is a better word.
DW: As a short person I prefer it
DGC: :D
DW: :-!

~&~

DGC: Typography should be liquid now...rather it *is* now liquid because of the computer. Working with it should be freedom! But you don't hear this sensibility from most educators and practitioners. It's like that spelling rule you referred to. Good writers known by good spelling. BAH! Give me spell check and let me ride the wind. ;-)
DW: Why, because they say its supposed to be difficult?
DGC: It IS difficult because it's so flexible, and the parameters for reading it and experiencing it have expanded. Like those bizillion options, it's about knowing what questions to ask not knowing the answers. (I'm sure there's some connection to the decorative and digital craft in all this!)

~&~

DW: Do you think you need to know how to program to be a real digital designer?
DGC: You don't need to, but it increases one's insight I think.
DW: Interesting, how does it increase ones insight?
DGC: You can't invent without knowing something about the engine running your ideas. not all the ins and outs, but the basic logic. The trick is to come up with stuff programmers haven't figured out yet so it's fun for everybody! ;-) Used to be that way working with printers.
DW: But why stop with the basic logic. Sounds lazy. Why don't desingers have to know the ins and outs.
DGC: We can't. if we could then that doesn't say much for the craft of programming now does it!
DW: I don't know...I would think that designers should know their tools inside and out...
DGC: That was fine when the tools were a ruling pen, an exacto and pantone paper. It's a different world, a wholly unique "tool."

~&~

DW: What's wrong with this defition: programmers are designers that actually know how to make something.
DGC: Knowing how to make and knowing how to communicate aren't the same thing. Besides, designers understand printing but they can't run a press. I started out on the printing side of design, and that knowledge of separations and tinting and signatures and what can be done on press has inspired ideas that otherwise wouldn't have occurred to me.
DW: I think you're right. But I know that the designers who I am most interested in digitally are master programmers. Jurg Lehni comes to mind. He wouldn't let anyone else touch a single 1 or 0. AND he makes beautiful work...
DGC: You're talking too about a new breed, an emergent being.
DW: I have an article in this months EYE about a group of designers who make their own tools that plug in to illustrator (http://www.scriptographer.com). One of the things i really like about it is that these computer geeks are creating new tools....for print!
DGC: Yes, very good exploratory stuff...

Ornamentalism?

I'm reading a book I found entitled Ornamentalism: the new decorativeness in architecture & design, published in 1982! (Robert Jensen and Patricia Conway). Much of the work chronicled anticipates the pastiche and formal wit of the mid- to late-eighties, and follows the paths forged by architects a decade earlier including Venturi/Scott Brown, Archigram and other anti-modernists. (Venturi/Scott Brown's BEST stores and Institute for Scientific Information in Philly are included.) The authors cover some Memphis stuff, Studio Alchymia (Milan), Michael Graves of course, but also beautifully crafted furnishings and tile work by people I was unaware of: Judy Kensley McKie, Wendel Castle, Pedro Friedeberg, William Bell. And fabric pictures by Miriam Shapiro. What's not to love about an image made of "acrylic, fabric and glitter?"

Looking back at it now, I find the scale play and disassociated decorative details to be aggravatingly clever. While there's an honesty or straight-forwardness to Venturi/Scott Brown's facades, and a lot of exhuberhance from the Italians, overall the work shown is slick, studied, even vacuous. In particular, the architecture and interiors seem to wink themselves into a coma. I can see now the decade's parity with the "Deco" era (which for my money is more interesting, more original...or maybe it simply has a cultural patina that the eighties stuff hasn't yet acquired).

How Decorational of Me

Re: The festival, ArtCity 2005 and the poster I designed to commemorate my participation.

El Otro Lado

The drawn letters are rooted in Tuscan letterforms, and inspired by wrought iron:

The frame is built from a chain of images of a the low walls of a bridge heavily "decorated" with carvings by locals and transients:

The frame in the poster is made up the complete span of the bridge.

spits and sputters of a woman fished out of the inky drink

Andrea Zittel was quoted in an online article in the The New York Times Style Magazine: ''I am getting tired of clean modernism. I love this whole baroque thing happening in design."  New York design retailer Murray Moss (of Moss) who "taught hipster Minimalists to love Nymphenburg figurines" is also covered in the piece. The decorative is the it girl of the decade.

I draped my brass chandelier (a replica of an early 20th c. replica of a 19th c. fixture that was installed in the Raleigh house when we bought it) with the gold Tord Boontje florals. I don't know if it's baroque, but I like the surprise of them together. 

There is much to be considered about the relationship of the decorative to collecting, collectors, collectibles, and those who design. It's not your grandma's embroidery.

The Lovely Sullivan

I have referred in the past to Louis Sullivan; a cursory nod but acknowledgement nonetheless of the last  modern (American) architect to not only embrace the decorative as an end in itself, but to invent a unique visual, material language within it.  (Frank Lloyd Wright integrated modernist motifs of the decorative sort as well...to be continued.)

I recently discovered the story/performance/book/DVD, Lost Buildings, written/edited by Ira Glass and ilustrated by Chris Ware. It tells the story of  Tim Samuelson, a Chicago native who in his lifetime watched several Sullivan buildings disappear to make way for progress. Tim also worked with Richard Nickel in the sixties attempting to generate interest in saving the buildings, and when unable to accomplish that, helping to salvage bits and pieces from the weighty edifaces as they returned to dust.

One of my favorite objects at the College of Design campus is an intricate iron piece from what I can only assume is one of those dismantled buildings. I pass it daily, stop and wonder as to the work that went into such a detail, the sensibility that created the necessity of what likely hovered six stories above the street, above careful scructiny. The piece is astounding in its complexity and craftsmanship. But I like to think about it as part of a whole, highly considered building, and as part of a transition from one set of modern concerns to the next.

It's hard not to be nostalgic about this work (Glass's story does a pretty good job of walking the edge).

In light of globalization, some concepts of the decorational: COMPLETION, CONNECTION, OWNERSHIP of COMMON IDEAS, ATTACHMENT, and the role of so-called “decorative” expression to engender these effects. as opposed to what is available now.

The title of my most recent talk is "The Time and Space of the Decorational." It opens up the Decorational concept to other concerns, and begins to position the sensibility as one of resistance. This new episode does beg the question, why ask design to play a role of resistance? Aren't I asking design to do what art (literature, visual art, media art) does?

So maybe design proper is not the place for the decorational to exist. But then again, it must be the place. The decorational is about material culture, the stuff that we all use, the stuff we make that reflects and shapes, that engages. One of the final assertions of the talk is that the decorational seeks attachment, which is something I think design is uniquely capable of doing.

At my talk at California College of Art in San Francisco, a woman asked what I meant by "attachment" in design.  I might use the term "connection" as well, but I like attachment better because design frequently tends to place itself somewhere above its audience or the reader, so it's just a way to remind us that we're talking to a person, not at someone.

My Function(slap) My Decoration(slap) My Function(slap)

"Functionality, in a post-protestant culture, is a moral value in itself, and makes a covert appeal to authenticity. What's functional is good to the extent that we value the utilitarian, the empirical, the pragmatic. These are core metaphysical values in protestant and post-protestant cultures. The value of things working is all tied up with the value of work, the 'work ethic'. Values like decoration and aestheticism are seen as 'Catholic', indulgent, feminine, subjective. From Design Rockism by Nick Currie

I don't know from the metaphysical, and the whole post-protestant culture thing is debatable. BUT the relationship of the work ethic to functionality is an intriguing equation. Does not making decorated things take work? Isn't female labor historically underpaid or near-slave labor? Or worse, domestic labor?

And that authenticity might be tied up with manufacturing... so ironic. Mass production of fake craft is bad, righto. But Brand, now that's the new craft. The new authenticity. (1) William Morris is very, very sad today and (2) Where is Baudrillard when you need him?

Gombrich's Point (one of many)

”Nothing comes out of nothing.…It is much easier to modify, enrich or reduce a given complex configuration than to construct one in a void. Hence certain formal sequences resemble the game of cat’s cradle, with every craftsman taking over the threads from the hands of his predecessor and giving them an extra twist.…the development must have taken its starting point from a less complex form…and reached the end points through the collective efforts of generations of craftsmne. It is sequences of this kind which are most readily described as ‘logical’, but they are logical only if we assume that maximal complexity was the aim from the very beginning.…it would be in accord with a logic of situation to say that it is rational for human beings to want to advance in the pecking order. Thus patrons and craftsmen vie to ‘outdo’ each other for the sake of attention, prestige and fame.”

And finally: “The idea that a style becomes ‘exhausted’ must always be somewhat suspect, for how should we know what fresh possibilities a genius might still have discovered in a given repertory of forms?” [Gombrich, 210]

The logic of artisans and patrons—that is the system within which craftsmen worked—was multi-faceted but must have appeared too facile to early modernists. Modernism’s logic attempted to stop the “extra twist;” to break with the past and reinvest the work of the maker with authority and originality. The decorational sensibility doesn’t value authority, knows originality is not possible; but it can pick up threads.

There must be order

My first response to making design is practical. The motives for giving form to ideas begin and continue for some time in some system of logic. It's as if movement, mark-making, naming, imagining will not germinate and grow into design unless planted in some irrefutable sense. Intuition is not let loose until the ideas are firmly rooted.
{Okay, goofy metaphors...glasshoppah must do bettah.}

The logic can manifest in simple systems or highly sophisticated systems such as code, but the goal is to discover, generate complexity. Joshua Davis' work is an example of logical system that ultimately generate complex images that appear intuitive: "I prefer to write programs (or machines, as I like to call them)... and it's these programs that generate the compositions for me. With this method, the end result is never static; making room for as many anomalies as possible, every composition generated by the programs I write is unique to itself. I program the "brushes," the "paints," the "strokes," the rules and the boundaries. However it is the machine that creates the compositions -- the programs draw themselves."

But the system is not complete unless it is applied to a whole, which is part of what makes something design over decoration.

Contextual Originality

Digital technology as a design tool continues to surprise us designers in part because it easily duplicates techniques originating in the hand and in the mechanical. Typewriting in a “window,” imitating a pencil line on the screen, that sort of thing. Fascinating and satisfying, too, from a making standpoint, is instantaneous reproducibility. So compelling, in fact, that the drive to create an authentic artifact seems to fade proportionally to how caught up one gets in the tool and the thing being made.

PERHAPS: the real, the authentic begins to feel like some distant ideal the designer once fiddled with. We can happily separate the value of authenticity from a different value, one of contextual originality; that is, prowess within a genre, within a visual vocabulary of craft. And what a giant leap for decorational-kind!

Missing Discourse

It's not that the decorative impulse in graphic design has been dormant, nor that designers have dutifully avoided embellishing for nearly a century. Of course not. But what has gone missing is written, public analysis: a useful discussion of its value. My studies and stumblings consistently wind up at the door of architecture whose theories, histories, and criticism have always opined at least in some part how ornamentation is to be understood. On occasion it became a central issue. And so I wish to make the subject of the decorative a focus in graphic design, and to do it in addition to the craft concerns and in conjunction with architecture's discussions.

Once we can do all, what will we do?

Textiles, woven patterns in particular, are the pure marriage of decoration, technology and structure. When then a pattern or motif is printed on a woven surface, it takes a step closer to being augmentation of the artefact. Not so pure.

Ornamentation in furnishings and objects constructed from the material of the thing or crafted analogously (carved wood cabinet doors, coral inlaid into ebony, iron grillwork, molded flora in plastic) is integral to the object and therefore natural to the materiality of the artefact. In rationalist terms, printing on plastic or painting on wood weakens the integrity; the economy and poetics of form begin to break down and the work is suspect.

Graphic design is by definition applied—speaking specifically of the print medium—and therefore could be considered most of the time to have less integrity (book design might be an exception because of book craft tradition). Among the decisions a designer makes, the most frequent are determining which surfaces to use and how the material of graphic design (text, images, color) is to exist on those surfaces. (See previous post Graphic Design is Not a Thing.)

On the one hand screen-based design might have more in common with industrial design or woven textiles in which decoration, technology and structure coalesce purely. Yet the screen is also the place where anything can be replicated.

So a question might be Should the decorational sensibility embrace all potential for the superfluous?

Oh my no! Quite the contrary. The decorational should seek economy of means while it embraces exuberance of representation. Things created on the computer that originate in other (physical) media are pretty, sometimes magical, more often familiar, which is in part their appeal. The design choice to represent or use homecrafts such as sewing and stitchery of late might also attempt to empower traditionally undervalued forms of expression. Other decisions to import the hand onto the screen appear to be mining areas that had yet to be tapped with ironic or plain funny results (see Cranbrook's student site). If it can be scanned or photoshopped or outlined or shadowed or whatever, it can live on the screen.

But once we can clearly do all, what will we do and why should we? We have access to (perhaps are driven by) technological means of every sort. A decorational sensibility, responding to such plenty, might strive to manipulate the material world once it is transformed into data and then pixels and even as things becomes material again. For instance, the decorational might choose to explore complex systems, enabled by the computer, to deliberately reflect and give form to the complexity we are, and to technological sophistication.

Clearly the decorational sensibility is not for everyone.

Dragging my Decorated Ass

Theoreticians and critics have been denouncing the usefulness and even truthfulness of the functionalist rhetoric for some time. Reyner Banham offers several explanations of, or perspectives on the likes of Le Corbuisier and Adolf Loos—that they were either self-decieving about their acceptance of the machine (though the aesthetic it inspired was never trivial)1 or that the focus of their evangalism differed from how the position went on to be interpreted.

Banham posits, for instance, that Adolf Loos’ influence, the circumstances that insured lasting impact of his attack on ornament, and finally his less than dogmatic position—indicate that Loos was really not so much anti-ornament as pro-engineer: “To build without interference from architects, and their preoccupations with style and the Styles, has for Loos at this juncture an important consequence. In the style of his own time, can only mean, in Loos’s view of the evolution of ornament and culture, an undecorated style. Freedom from ornament is the symbol of an uncorrupted mind, a mind which he only attributes to peasants and engineers. In this view succeeding generations were to follow him…laying further foundations to the idea that to build without decoration is to build like an engineer, and thus in a manner proper to a Machine Age.”

Peter Blake takes on the "form follows function" philosophy in his book Form Follows Fiasco: “Much of the time, form is nothing more than an educated guess about function. Much of the time, for better (but probably for worse) form follows the mortgage interest rate. Much of the time, form in modern architecture is anti-functional. Much of the time, this may be all to the good.” 3

Otl Aicher, co-founder of the Ulm school, shifts the purview of "functional." Setting up the new interpretation, he observed that "it is only possibly [sic] to make oneself distinct from the world of purpose and order by nonsense, or putting it somewhat more modestly, by not-sense, by senselessness. that is why functionalism has been pronounced dead and buried today. things that are sensible, purposeful, useful, reasonable have no place in the class of the sublime."

Aicher goes on to redefine functionalism as that which distinguishes itself from art (unlike Le Corbusier) and that "reason and functionality are nothing more than insights into the way in which the world works.…Nature knows no aesthetic opposed to reason." 4

And I continue to find indications that at least the philosophy has been in disfavor for a long while. Yet...

It's influence and the values that have become wrapped up in the concept linger in just the most subtle ways. It's like identifying the U.S. ethic as "puritanical" which is in so many ways true, but no one would identify himself a puritan, per se. It's just part of the fabric of the culture.

And so I have faltered in my resolve, and my investigations have slowed, weighted a bit by the inappropriateness of this line of decorational thinking. I will get over it.

--------
1. Reyner Banham, "The Machine Aesthetic," [Architectural Review, April, 1955; Reprinted in Design By Choice, (ed. Sparke, P., New York: Rizzoli, 1981).
2. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Macine Age, Architectural Press, 1960.
3. Peter Blake, Form Follows Fiasco. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974.
4. Otl Aicher, "Aesthetic Existence," The World as Design, Berlin: Earst & Sohn, 1994.
(Aicher concludes, indirectly supporting the Decorational sensibility: "Beauty is power. Only someone who can offer beauty has a chance of dominating the market. Only someone who has slipped into an aesthetic existence has leadership qualities." A bit dogmatic for my taste, but food for thought.)