Good Design vs. Minimal Art
Ever since industrial design emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, artistic engagement with its aesthetic has provoked heated debate over dividing lines and common ground. In the art of the twentieth century, far from playing a minor role, industrially manufactured and designed objects repeatedly raised fundamental questions on the place of art and its re-presentations within society and the economy. In the name of art criticism, institutional critique, and a critique of the avant-garde, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed many ideological battles over the territory of design—a domain where ties between the spaces where people live, the industrial economy, and creativity are particularly close.
To show what art is not, references were made to design, and vice versa. The Minimal Art of the 1960s was criticized by Clement Greenberg in the following terms, referring back to the notorious “Good Design” exhibition series organized by the Museum of Modern Art between 1950 and 1955: “Behind the expected, self-canceling emblems of the furthest-out, almost every work of Minimal Art I have seen reveals in experience a more or less conventional sensibility. […] I find myself back in the realm of Good Design, where Pop, Op, and Assemblage, and the rest of Novelty Art live.”[1]
The response from the artists’ camp came immediately, hitting back harder still at the critic. From 1968, Donald Judd regularly organized presentations in his own private space that featured both sculptures and furniture, and in a laconically titled article in Studio International magazine,[2] he accused Greenberg of no longer being able to perceive individual artistic qualities beyond media-compatible group labels like “Minimal Art.” Moreover, in the 1970s Judd actually began producing and selling tables, chairs, and shelves. The atmosphere of his converted loft combined the distancing qualities of a modern white cube with the personal dimension of the furniture he made himself. He took the accusation of producing Good Design and turned it into a spatial situation straddling the border between his work in the fields of art and design, referring to the conventions of presenting industrial design as a commodity, to its function as representative display in the bourgeois household, and to the white cube standard of modern art—using design to further develop a definition of the artwork that was already “fraying” on all sides. The result was an installation that must have come fairly close to the atmosphere of today’s “concept stores.” Judd by no means resolved the potential conflicts between furniture and art object, the roles of host and guest, or the conventions of using and beholding, nor did he reconcile all this with his position as an artist. On the contrary, while maintaining the distinction between the design and art contexts within his production, Judd exacerbated the associated problems by staging exhibitions in the domestic environment of his loft.
In this critical judgment that banishes Minimal Art to the realm of Good Design, the role of industrial design with regard to art is assessed in two ways:
- Good Design is clearly acknowledged by Greenberg as a cultural discipline in its own right, as distinct from the usual anonymous mass production of commodities.
- Good Design acts as a critical anti-image to the art favored by Greenberg.
As a result, in the face of a crisis surrounding definitions, over subsequent decades, of what constitutes art, Good Design has become a category frequently used as an example in critical diagnoses of what is not art. At first glance, this may appear simply as a disparaging polemic against the dominant commodity culture increasingly found in the artworks of the Minimal and Pop Art of the 1960s. But when Greenberg spoke of Good Design, he was referring to a museum category that was acknowledged at the time, at least in the United States. In spite of its negative role in the critic’s judgment, the term also resounds with the appreciation already attained by non-anonymous design as a cultural field in the first half of the twentieth century. As early as the 1950s, well-designed living served as a consumer model in which artistic and industrial progress were to be united as Good Design.
Signs of dissolution
However little this paragon of postwar modernism is the subject of serious debate today, the concept of Good Design has established itself as aesthetic surplus value in contrast to mere utility value. In the 1950s, before the major crisis in the 1960s of traditional definitions of the artwork, the United States saw the emergence of a discipline of design that was adopted as a self-critical instance—although initially as a polemic defensive reaction. In recent decades, thanks to exhibitions, media coverage, and self-referential discourse, non-anonymous design went from being an anti-image to a counterpart sharing common ground—a terrain associated with many artworks as a topic of discussion, source of material, or point of reference. The fact that Greenberg’s defensive stance has now given way to a curious and often even optimistic outlook with regard to design is due primarily to a much expanded definition of design and to ongoing negotiations concerning the borders between disciplines.
Design, a concept used from the end of the nineteenth century mainly for industrially produced items, no longer refers primarily to a specific category of objects, but also to media user interfaces, aesthetic experiences, and spatial environments. While a recent manifesto of Critical Design[3] attempts to establish “inbuilt” self-critical moments in design, the concept of DesignArt situates works in a sphere between design and art. First coined by artists Joe Scanlan and Neal Jackson,[4] the term was later used by British art critic Alex Coles in his 2005 book of the same name to describe phenomena in the art context featuring explicit references to design.[5] At the same time, limited editions or one-off pieces produced for exhibitions at design galleries and museums are also referred to colloquially by many design critics as DesignArt. There is no doubt that the contexts of art and design have come very close, especially with the installation having become the dominant exhibition format. In both design and art, experiencing the exhibition format in aesthetic terms is not only possible, but actually common practice. Even if do I encounter similar formats, however, the contexts are by no means interchangeable. The processes of rapprochement between design and art concern specific themes and presentation formats addressed within each field, but not necessarily these fields themselves. Nonetheless, whether or not these two fields will continue to exist within their current boundaries, in spite of or precisely due to all the self-reflexive efforts of those involved, is a question each critique must answer afresh. For Zurich-based art and architecture historian Philip Ursprung, the discipline of design will soon cease to play the role of anti-image to art, instead becoming a higher-order category for all creative disciplines, as design moves from a culture of shaping products towards a comprehensive economic and social model for society: “In this light, the question is less whether art, architecture, and design will merge, and more whether […] art and architecture will be absorbed into design.”[6]
Does this mean we are about to witness the dissolution of these former antagonists, and thus of the critical role of each field for the other? Although such a development is possible, it seems rather unlikely in the light of statements made by artists and designers themselves (see interviews in this book), all of which point to a stronger self-reflexive separation between the two disciplines. Manifestos like the Critical Design FAQ provide further evidence of this. It is true, however, that any kind of self-reflexive questioning and criticism may ultimately jeopardize the right to exist of who- or whatever is being questioned.
Let us turn our attention back to the period of Greenberg’s critique: at the beginning of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno reminds those in the culture industry what has been jeopardized by permanently expanding the definition of art: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more […], not even its right to exist.”[7] Of course, the expansion of the definition of art in the 1960s cannot be directly compared with the current situation of design, which appears far more comprehensive and touches, as Ursprung points out, on almost all areas of life. So far, however, the “threats” to and expansions of what is considered art (for example, in the 1960s with Pop and Minimal Art) have not caused the field of art to dissolve into Good Design or pop culture. On the contrary: thanks to permanent dialog with industrial design, new spaces, themes, and formats for art have been opened up.
Design as artistic (self-)critique of the present: Martin Boyce
It would seem, in the context of a study of the role of design in art’s self-criticism, to make little sense to invent further portmanteau concepts à la Art+Design=DesignArt, nor to speculate on the unlikely absorption of one discipline by the other. In spite of everything, Greenberg’s verdict from the 1960s is still alive and well in today’s discussions, as indicated, for example, by the approving description of a particular set of artworks as “design in reverse.”[8]
As his contribution to a group exhibition in 2004, Scottish artist Martin Boyce showed an installation with fragmentary icons of Good Design, interpreted by the show’s curator Will Bradley as its exact opposite. The installation included an Eames Storage Unit recreated by Boyce and a wooden mask. But this was not a perfect replica of the well-known piece of furniture included by the Museum of Modern Art in its “Good Design” exhibition series. Instead, Boyce built a version of the shelving unit whose dimensions correspond to the original, but which does not shine in the original’s cheerful primary colors. On the contrary, from a distance the object looks like a clearly structured but overly cool architectural model. In this work, Boyce alludes to the hidden paranoia of Good Design and modern architecture, to their “dark quality,” as discussed by writers like Mike Davis (City of Quartz) or in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. With his different versions of the Storage Unit (1997-2004), initially constructed from memory on a slightly altered scale, Boyce transfers the design of postwar modernism, now enshrined in the museum, into a different design genre, which he dubs “Noir Moderne.”[9] Although the foreground appears more playful than the cold shelving unit, the scene creates a somewhat damaged impression: roughly dismantled parts of Arne Jacobsen chairs hang from the ceiling, attached to a mobile.
Of course, one can follow Bradley in reading this as a simple reversal of the functional-optimistic furniture design of postwar modernism: things here are not functioning (any more) in accordance with the program of Good Design on which they are based. But Boyce’s work knowingly refers to the symbolic value of these items of furniture, which in cultural terms are already established as works in their own right. The artist uses elements of modernist sculpture and architecture to comment on the attribution of new value to design by the museum. This may result in their functionality being interrupted, but their programmatic content is not turned into its exact opposite. So does this interruption of the functional promise simply mean a critique of design? Or does this critical procedure also address the program of art, in whose context the work in question takes place? On one level, the work is an updated critical “status report” on America’s cheerful postwar modernism which in cities like Los Angeles also produced unwelcoming facades and gated communities. But Boyce’s design fragments are also a critical take on the organization of space, as well as asserting the possibility of appropriating objects by other artists that have already been inducted into the museum.
From criticism to self-criticism
In contrast to the binary model of Greenberg’s über-critique—which, from an essentially outside position, identified good and bad, true and false, what I see today is a situation in which every institution already possesses a built-in criticism option. At this moment, another newsletter from an art institution explaining its critical position is probably waiting in my email inbox. Following on from the investigative journalism of 1970s Institutional Critique, which made visible the hidden mechanisms of the art business, artists today use these mechanisms not only in opposition to the institutions, but also in complicity with them.[10] According to Helmut Draxler, design actually played a constitutive role in the artistic praxis of Institutional Critique.[11]
Where I credit certain works with critical potential, I am referring to visible criteria that enable a differentiation within aesthetic experience between various contexts (art/design) and artistic strategies (appropriation/reconstruction/damage). In Boyce’s work, the Greenbergian anti-image of Good Design is still on show—if in a damaged state. For this kind of self-reflexive critique I would like to use the no longer fashionable concept of self-criticism, as defined by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde.[12] In his view, the historical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century were a self-criticism of art in bourgeois society in Marxist terms. He interprets their “avant-garde protest” as an attempt to transfer a praxis of life into art that reveals the link between the nineteenth-century concept of art’s autonomy within bourgeois society and its lack of impact on that society.[13] Rather than integrating art into bourgeois everyday life, however, the artistic avant-gardes wished to bring forth a new praxis of life. For Bürger, however, Pop Art, Happenings, and other art forms in the expanded field of the 1960s represent a failure to integrate life praxis into art, which continues to be “divorced from reality.” A self-critical analysis, focusing less on changing life praxis by means of art and more, in the true sense of the word, on changes in the field of art itself, would doubtless have come to an entirely different conclusion. And from today’s point of view, it seems questionable to present an objective formulated by proxy for the members of historical avant-gardes as a binding goal for the artistic currents of the 1960s.
Looking at the relationship between avant-garde movements in art and the historical development of design—as an exemplary site of exchange between art and life praxis—one can describe the impact on the field of art, even as early as the 1960s, as very far-reaching. For all the resentment and ignorance with which they were expressed, historical assessments of the influence of design do point (especially if one recalls Judd’s “reply”) to the importance already accorded at the time to this terrain from whose influence Greenberg and Bürger wished to protect art and the avant-garde.
What I mean by self-criticism here is neither an inbuilt stance in the sense of self-censorship, nor a binary opposition of the kind Bürger uses with regard to the historical avant-gardes and Pop Art (art versus life praxis). Instead, the concept recognizes the self’s position as being limited by and involved in life praxis, at the same time as articulating the goal of critically rendering differences visible. Compared with the currently very popular concept of “criticality,” proposed by Irit Rogoff instead of the historical terms “criticism” and “critique” to denote the involved state of the critical,[14] “self-criticism” refers more clearly to the critic’s point of view and to the embeddedness of the object of criticism within a system of self-reflexive meanings and conventions.
Structures of difference: Liam Gillick
Critical distinctions are far more difficult to make in the case of works that no longer show individual objects, references, or production methods, offering instead a structure that permeates all possible areas of an art audience. In 2002, Liam Gillick—discussed by Alex Coles as a prime example of the DesignArt merger—greeted visitors to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet with a large-scale architectural installation made of materials that recalled trade fairs and shopping malls. The other works in the group show What If: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design were structured by his grid of multicolored Plexiglas. In Gillick’s work, individual points of reference or traces of the manufacturing process can no longer be identified. But in his many writings, interviews, and other statements carried by the media, the artist does reveal numerous sources to which his work is anchored. At first glance, his exhibition architecture generates the kind of consumerist “ambience” so critically analyzed by Stefan Römer as a parallel to the privatized shopping furniture in public spaces in the 1990s.[15] Does this mean we are encountering art that has become an integral part of a design atmosphere, as predicted by Philip Ursprung? And does this artistic praxis thus mean the end of design’s role as a channel of self-criticism for art? Although this may initially appear to be the case, Gillick is actually more the opposite. Although the artist borrows his material idiom entirely from today’s trade fair design, he does not make the art exhibition space or the conventions of that space totally disappear.
This is especially clear if one compares his work to the total design installations of the 1990s that transformed art spaces into functional everyday settings. In Douglas Gordon’s reading room, Jorge Pardo’s café, or Rirkrit Tiravanija’s canteen, the design of items of furniture often explicitly appealed to viewers to participate in the exhibitions. In contrast to Pardo or Tiravanija, Gillick’s installations do not stage experiences of audience participation in the art space, even if the titles of his works sometimes point to the possibility of doing something. In recent years, he has made several pieces of “discussion furniture”: one table was billed as a Multiplied Discussion Structure (2007), and a year later he made a shelf-like construction, which he placed in the audience’s way as Suspended Discussion.
Although furniture and architecture form a total exhibition design, it only makes a vague allusion to potential usage: who actually participates in the discussion mentioned in the title? And do Gillick’s structures actually facilitate anything? It could be that no one participates, and that nothing takes place. Whereas in works by Gordon, Pardo, and Tiravanija, the audience members actually consume publications, food, or drinks, Gillick’s exhibitions remain a kind of shell, a package with elaborately materialized announcements made of semi-transparent plastic panels, coated aluminum, and large-format wall texts. Precisely because Gillick’s works exhaust themselves, neither providing a service to the audience, nor in the design of the inviting object, they insist on a critical distinction between the two disciplines: one might speak here of structures of difference. “In common with many people of my generation I embraced certain aspects of design as part of a critique of established terms of judgement within the art context,”[16] Gillick wrote in 2002. According to this statement, aspects of design play a critical role on the stage of art by becoming part of an artistic critique of specific conventions of exhibiting and judging art.
Self-critical conflicts
Although Gillick and Boyce approach design in very different ways, they do refer to certain common themes: the atmospheres of (semi-)public spaces, the material aesthetic of “user interfaces,” the modernist design enshrined in museums. And with their parallel further development of the installation, the two disciplines have pursued a presentation format that reflects an expanded concept of what constitutes a work in art and the emergence of such a concept in design. Entirely in the spirit of Judd’s loft presentation, contemporary art, too, often creates exhibition situations that aggravate conflicts between the conventions of the disciplines, but without causing them to dissolve one way or the other. That contemporary artists whose work draws strongly on design do not cross the borders of their discipline, in spite of predictions by theorists and curators that the two will merge, is certainly no coincidence—as this would result in a sudden dissolution of the object of criticism. The fragmentary inclusion of materials and references from design creates conflicts in art which, within the model character of an exhibition, enable a critical discourse on economic and social factors.
Over the past decade, writers have been searching for the right term to reflect the altered relationship between the disciplines and their potential (DesignArt, Critical Design etc.). Finally, however, such attempts to work on a merging of art and design, at least on a linguistic level, lacks any basis in the self-image and praxis of artists and designers. Moreover, I have the impression that for all their positive rhetoric, these neologisms perpetuate the logic of the Greenberg era, implying that art that engages with design really belongs to a different discipline. Creating a “new discipline” is a way of casually dispensing with all the problems that might arise from a self-critical examination of the disciplines of art and design. But such an approach based on threats and incentives, of inclusion or exclusion from the discipline, is unlikely to be a fruitful. If, on the other hand, the past and present differences between the two disciplines are dealt with in the mode of a “self-criticism,” then theory and criticism might finally be able to work on the problems already rendered productive by the reception of design in art since the nineteenth century.
Notes
[1] Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture” (1967), in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1995), 184.
[2] Donald Judd , “Complaints: Part I,” in: Studio International, an illustrated magazine of fine and applied arts, London, April 1969, quoted from: Donald Judd, Complete writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 2005), 197-199.
[3]Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, “Critical Design FAQ,” (2007), developed for the exhibition Designing Critical Design at Z33 house for contemporary art, Belgium. http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0 (visited Jan. 13, 2011).
[4] Joe Scanlan and Neal Jackson, “Please, Eat the Daisies,” in Art Issues 66, Los Angeles, January 26, 2001.
[5] Alex Coles, DesignArt (London: Tate, 2005).
[6] Philip Ursprung, “Disziplinierung: Absorbiert das Design die Kunst?”, in: Gerald Bast; Krüger & Pardeller; Pessler, Monika (eds.), Das Phänomen Raum in Kunst, Architektur und Design (Vienna: Springer, 2009), 144-148.
[7] Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Theory (1970) (London: Continuum, 2004), 1.
[8] Will Bradley: “Design in Reverse – Martin Boyce,” in: Ingvild Goetz, Rainald Schumacher (eds.), Sculptural Sphere (Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 2004), 59-64
[9] Seitenverweis Interview im Buch:
[10] Barbara Steiner: “Corruption, Corruptibility and Complicity,” in: Monika Szewczyk (ed.), Meaning Liam Gillick (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 78.
[11] Helmut Draxler, “Loos Lassen! Institutional Critique und Design,” in: Texte zur Kunst, issue 59, Berlin 2005, 66.
[12] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) (Manchester University Press, 1984).
[13] Ibid., 22.
[14] Irit Rogoff, “What is a Theorist?” http://www.kein.org/node/62 (2006), visited Jan. 13, 2011.
[15] Stefan Römer: “Eine Kartographie – vom Whitecube zum Ambient,” in: Christian Kravagna, Das Museum als Arena – institutionskritische Texte von KünstlerInnen (Cologne: Walther König, 2001) 155-162, (text first published as a lecture in 1997).
[16] Liam Gillick: “The Semiotics of the Built World,” in: Monika Szewczyk (ed.), Liam Gillick, The Woodway (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2002), 81.