After our first class yesterday, I had lively chats with quite a few of you who had strong reactions to Oliver Klimpel’s presentation and his project. Apparently I wasn’t alone as word has it that other discussions perpetuated in the studios. It seems so many of us were trying to process what we heard: To understand what the project was (it didn’t seem entirely clear); why he made the conceptual and aesthetic choices that he did; did those choices made sense; and what did his approach to the project mean to our practices? — to our context and circumstances? These are just some of issues that seemed to constitute the banter, but they represent a need and a desire to process, weight and wrangle with what happens in the classroom.
One of my conversations following our class was with Rachel and Elliot, the Aesthetic & Politics Program students who have joined us. As participants in Design Theory I, I believe they’ll bring a different dimension to our conversation — in one sense because they’re accustomed to the culture of “intellectual inquiry.” We spoke of the need/hope/possibility of “off-line” discussion and thus the need for a blog as best form thorough which that might happen. So here it is.
Elliot and Rachel will kick us off, but all of you are invited, encouraged, and welcome to post and/or to comment. This is place to exercise your chops at articulating your thinking. Sometime you’ll stumble and fall and sometimes you’ll be brilliant and insightful. But you’ll have to take the risk at failure if you’re going to have any shot at saying something worthwhile. Do it!
I walked away from Oliver’s talk confused. I also felt that slightly it was self indulgent and exclusionary. That said i liked some of the work, and maybe i would have a better understanding if i had seen the curated spaces in more detail. I appreciate that this depth of dialogue exists within design, but am not sure his communication was effective. What do others think?
Hello there, to be honest I was pretty confused too, until the later part of the lecture. For me I saw his graphic design kept shifting roles between being a communication tool and the representation of the issue itself, and I think this is a nice trial as well as the part that can lead to ambiguity and confusion.
After the lecture I mentioned this to him, but he did not give a clear answer or further explanation (he does point out most of the details were under well consideration). And I myself are still thinking about the possibilities of graphic design as the issue itself and that can speak to audience “directly”, as opposed to being the end product conveying meaningful text. What do others think?? It is possible? Or is this an issue?
I shared some of the experiences expressed by Hayden and Jessica. I felt like Oliver’s design (the displays for the exhibitions and the books themselves) did alternate between a tool for communication and a representation of issues. Perhaps, in that way, Oliver was more of an artist participating in the exhibition than a designer acting as a mediator between the work and the audience. However, I think there were elements of the design that did clue the audience into certain aspects of the exhibition. The best examples I have are the three displays: one inspired by art nouveau and what was describes as nostalgic typography, one inspired by Neville Brody and the punk/DIY/new wave aesthetic of the fairly recent past, and one relating to more recent trends and what Oliver called neo-liberal typography. I may be projecting my own desire for a pattern here, but the collection of those three displays helped me to understand the scope of the exhibition—that the works spanned from the past to the future, reaching into many different locations, histories, issues and experiences throughout Europe, and that the exhibition was not bound together by any one idea, style, experience, location or agenda. So, in that way, I feel like there was an attempt to connect to the audience directly and allow a connection to the work in the exhibition. It is unclear if I would have reached the same conclusions about the design if I had seen it without the advantage of Oliver’s presentation. I am curious if others read the design of the displays differently.
Thanks for these responses, Hayden, Jessica, and Brooke! You’ve hit some significant issues about the presentation and I appreciate the speculations about what he was trying to do given somewhat scant information.
A few texts were sent to me yesterday by Oliver and written by him. They do help to explain his thinking and rationale for the design approach to Europe-n as well as what were the components of the program. These document do make it a little (if not a lot) more clear, although he’s quite verbose and I got a bit tired of reading them. But all-in-all good in that he really probes (theorizes!) how to approach a difficult challenge and, I believe most significantly, illuminates issues of contemporary branding.
I’ll send the texts via e-mail and/or Canvas.
Below I attempted to respond to the PDFs Louise forwarded today from Klimpel, and the Harvey reading for this week. I still find this work overly complex, and hope we can discuss further.
“ Every company has an identity today: every art space, every initiative, every project,
commercialor alternative, non-profit or not. So what could branding mean for a heavily contested and ambiguous and multifaceted entity, or political monstrosity?” –Oliver Klimpel
Two themes that are consistent in both Klimpel’s presentation and the texts he’s since sent on for us are fluidity and plurality. What seemed anachronistic before the vantage of the new PDFs I can now appreciate as a designed opening for experiment. Klimpel’s design appears as a meeting point between organic (process) and democratic product – a parliament of styles is exhibited, though they don’t always meet with visual grace.
However, this combative relationship amongst his graphics apparently represents the contemporary market and political competition. He intentionally contradicts the idea that as the market expands (globally), the consistency and simplicity of the brand is that much more urgent. Instead a complex and allusive brand, defined by radically divergent historic trends and varied locales, is even further complicated by asking non-regional questions to regional representatives (the curators). I’ve found it difficult not to digest what I’ve seen of this work as applying the following logical structure or procession:
Theory > concept > form > social value (function) > theory
That is,
Postmodern aesthetics > Europe > Europe(n) > experiment/experience > postmodern aesthetics*
For example, Klimpel writes: “The Graphic Scenarios themselves represent the testing ground for visual ideologies related to Europe– the monstrosity and the mystical hope in equal terms– and how these are fairing in our specific context.” This idea, that the graphic “scenarios” model visual ideologies (styles) that, as manifested in Europe(n), are also vessels of hope, harkens the thought of Modern critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin theorized that through reviving the ruins or remnants of the past we profoundly come to understand the present, from which we can move from static hope to optimistic action. Benjamin’s proposition of hope could potentially be read as central to Klimpel’s explanation of his Graphic Scenarios. But this is only one of many references that seems to play out in Klimpel’s experiment, which is why “postmodern” is both too perfect and too easy a way to meditate on the aesthetics of Europe(n).
While there is real fluidity between concept and product, local and global, etc., the theory underlying the visual decisions dominates from every side. For me, the theoretical dimension of the work bookends my experiencing of the work itself. Finally I’m left with big old postmodern questions. Is Europe(n) a heterotopia? Is its message in some ways suggesting that Europe has or should become a heterotopia? Can a political economy and heterotopia coexist, as design?
And a more general, situated question: What criteria can we use to measure this work in terms of success and failure?
*By postmodern aesthetics, I defer to the Harvey reading. It seems that Klimpel has, within the project’s underlying theory, collaged a variety of postmodern “tropes” together, which is in itself…
Part of what confused me about Oliver’s presentation was that he did not seem to identify a specific problem or reason for for embarking on the project before delving into some of its more nuanced, theoretical aspects. Perhaps he had assumed that his audience had more of a context than we actually did. However, after reading the excerpts from the “Scenario-Book” (which I would have loved to have read before his lecture) his vision and jumping off points are a bit clearer to me. It seems that Oliver uses the European media’s often skewed coverage of recent “hysterically narrated episodes” of European politics as an illustration of a problem that needs solving, potentially with the help of design. He identifies the core issue as one of a misrepresentation of proportion that continuously results in equally disproportionate responses, certainly a valid issue that deserves addressing, in my opinion. In his writings he begins to touch on how “Europe-n” uses art and design to challenge these generally accepted and widespread practices of skewed representation but I am again perhaps lacking the context to make any real connections between the little work I can see and remember from his presentation and those written ideas. While I don’t think Oliver’s explicit goal with project was to incite some sort of socio-political response from his audience, I did find his anecdote about the museum staff refusing to wear his custom “Europa” shirts as a sort of insight as to the kind of questioning he was hoping to invoke (i.e. “Why should I wear this shirt that has no clear meaning to me?”, “what are my feelings, as a European, about the current state of Europe”). What was a little more clear to me in terms of intention and desired result was the branding aspect of the project. I found the questions interesting: how does an aesthetic/style emerge and how does it then become connected to a certain ideology? To what degree does a visual identity of a nation/corporation (he also touches on how the lines are somewhat blurred between these two things) manifest itself in political responses and in creating (perhaps false) notions of nationalism and unity? I think by using a sort of anti-aesthetic (“neo-liberal design?”) as the chosen style for the branding, Oliver forces the audience to consider the semiotic implications of branding and what effect that has on politics, society, business, etc. Alternatively, after reading Rachel’s response which I only saw towards the very end of my writing this response, all of this could be lost on me.
Thanks Rachel and Elliot for doing some additional processing of Oliver’s documents. It seems that what he was after was to create an “effect” through the graphic and conceptual strategies. That effect was a struggle by the audience to make sense of the approach. Hmmm. I understand that he was trying to deal with an exhibition about the impossibility of reconciling various conceptions of Europe but, yes, we’re left with the dilemma as to whether the struggle represents success or failure of the design. For me the graphic outcomes seem to mimic current graphic trends and I really have to wonder whether the signification of “currentness” superseded any other reading or effect.
Just wanted to chime in before our class, in the hope of summarizing my own thoughts on this massive undertaking. There’s a lot to say, but as Rachel mentioned, I hope we’ll have an opportunity to discuss this further.
I set out to formulate a cursory evaluation of the question I had after our initial glance at the project last week—how do these “testing ground[s] for visual ideologies” negotiate the complex ideological history and relationship Europe has with images?
There’s a few points to address beforehand: I’m sure we can all recognize that, using Arial as prominently as Oliver has, was implemented with hip- and current-ness in mind. That said, from within the contemporary graphic design epoch, the “branding” project itself seems to be a real reflection of ways in which neoliberal and “post-ideological” politics have impacted the horizons of our thinking.
Although the “Glyphs of Network-Power” scenario is what he was referring to as neoliberal, it seems to me as if the entire project—the “Flags” aspect, the Europe(n) brand—follow this logic. The individualized, decentralized production techniques (the flags being produced as “an original variety within a seemingly restricted system,” for example); the high-gloss marketing tactility of the books; the goal of “a visual identity for an art project that is both non-representational and speculative”; even the refusal of museum staff to wear branded t-shirts is indicative of the increasingly service-based economy that communication designers (and other immaterial labourers) find themselves in.
At the same time, his claim that “the dependency on visual signs and narratives has not been reduced but significantly increased” is only a small indication of the larger role signs and symbols play, especially in Nye’s concept of soft power. As Oliver points out in his rationale behind the “Glyphs of Network-Power” scenario, our public(s) are becoming more diffuse and spectacular—not only does this just “have consequences for visual relationships”—the visual relationship becomes the primary one: the stock market relies not on what a company is actually “doing,” but on perceptions and speculations; policing strategies focus on visible crime, not its underlying causes; tax dollars are systematically devoted to attaining symbolic achievement over real achievement, etc. As Oliver seeks to “decipher the whole,” I think he misses the main point: that this “competition between different graphic fictions” is what produces the reality in the first place.
The main question I’m left with is similar to Rachel’s, in terms of defining “success”: Is this use of the “elasticity of signs and symbols” effective in demonstrating the present crisis in visual identity, specifically through graphic design? Or does it suffer from THE constitutive element of ideology: Marx’s “they do not know it, but they are doing it”? Even if that is the case, what criteria can we use to judge the project?
This is a test of the comment notifications. Can you forward the notification email to brookeirish@alum.calarts.edu if you have received it? Thanks.
B