“… All communication of the contents of the mind is language (…) The existence of language, however, is coextensive not only with all the areas of human mental expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent, but with absolutely everything.” — Walter Benjamin
According to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington: “The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.” This shocking statement serves to emphasise the significance of language: not only does it trigger actions, but it is itself a powerful form of action. To look at speech critically and even in the light of moral philosophy is thus essential to any enlightened and just society! Whilst this is true of language using words, it naturally also continues to be true of visual speech – which, today, is significantly guided by graphic designers. Unfortunately, we find that no broad-based public discourse on this subject exists.
Graphic design occupies a key position in the communication activities of diversified and transnationally active societies. It is the arena in which the interpretations and translations that take place both within and between societies are developed and implemented. The responsibility that results from this cannot be expressed within the logic of any standardised working process. Criteria such as readability, ability to hold attention, contemporary qualities, originality, and signature style do not provide a sufficient basis for a critical discourse on the discipline. What is called for is an intensified (culturally) critical and transdisciplinary process of engagement and reflective thought.
If one reads the First Things First manifestoes of 1964 and 2000 it becomes plain that a disquietude regarding the power of graphic language – and thus a consciousness of what constitutes responsible graphic design – came into being at the same time as the discipline itself. The idea is that designers should not be compliant implementers of questionable content directed by the hands of others, but should instead operate in a critical and opinionated manner. 20 or 50 years later respectively, pretty much every graphic design website states that the graphic designers who are advertising their services operate in a wide-ranging field of progressive publishing, and that they are interested in a maximally intensive collaboration with the clients (thus, with society).
Naturally, this person is principally interested in others in generalised way, regardless of whether – or precisely because – this other is new, old, and/or unconventional.
It is generally stated that this person is interested in a genuine exchange, in exploring the unknown, in diversity – and consequently interested only in design solutions that, regardless of personal style, are precisely tailored to the content for which the design is required.
Mission statements of this type make easy, palatable reading. They sound earnest, distinctive, sensitive, in-touch, even modest, and the politically opportune tone of their wording contrives to imply quality.
However, when I look at the international uniformity (with heavy European emphasis) of the commercial mainstream – and this also applies to the avant-garde mainstream – I find myself asking how many laudable-sounding banal platitudes and how many implied claims are actually being presented here. In other words, what degree of manipulative whitewashing has now become “common sense” in the presentation of self and client, and how much analytical and critical consideration is actually being performed and implemented?
When I take a closer look, I find myself additionally asking whether these statements, which sound as if they are intended as a way of asserting quality standards, are ultimately nothing more than flowery descriptions of a procedure, quite possibly well-meaning but providing no standards for the quality or significance of an artefact or process. After all, Nazi graphic artists would also have researched and analysed to communicate in a pithy and relevant way. If the Nazi graphic designers – or those of the early Soviet Union – were compliant implementers of a totalitarian ideology, I sometimes ask myself: are we today not perhaps naive facilitators of a neoliberal egomania and arbitrariness?
The architect Hans Kollhoff writes that: “Before anyone can become an architect, he must become a citizen. He must not be satisfied with things as they are. Instead, through the way he constructs buildings, he must set an example of how things should be – in the best traditions of a civic citizen. This is truer than ever when traditional obligations are dissolving and becoming a question of taste, and, as Rüdiger Safranski states, bad taste is being given an easy conscience.”
Perhaps we should adapt the statement made by the socialist revolutionary Thomas Sankara, “A soldier without education is a potential criminal“, as follows: a graphic artist who does not think is a potential deceiver?
Peter Sloterdijk says that design is nothing other than “skilled processing of the non-skilled” and sometimes a “simulation of confidence” that helps “to retain a form amid that which disintegrates forms”.
In our modern world of products in which stable qualities no longer exist, design has the task of keeping the mechanisms of continuous surpassing and increase going, of keeping a permanent process of rejuvenation moving forward, with a fixed gaze. Additionally, the applied art of design offers modern mass society sufficient help in striking the right balance between dismantling and building up illusions: “Everyone should have access to the feelings of being a winner.” As mass “self-designing”, it provides “its smart wearers” with an “up-to-the-minute competencies bundle of tempo, information, irony and taste” – but with an associated corresponding recklessness.
Friedrich von Borries conceives of a different way of thinking about design: “Design is a Janus-headed discipline that can react swiftly and flexibly to changes in society or in the environment. It has a dual nature, belonging simultaneously to the world of art (with all its freedom) and the world of economy (with all its effectiveness). […] Design has the power to create positive pictures for the future, to make desires visible, to further emancipation and to develop concepts for how to implement a good life for all. The tension inherent in design between its roots in the day-to-day society and economy, speculative desire production and the power of the artistic imagination can produce an effective force that transcends boundaries and conceives new possibilities for the world.”
I want to pose the question of how graphic design and visual communication operate within the tension that exists between all these factors. This can only be accomplished by bringing together thoughtful and critical attitudes in the field of graphic design – artistic and academic – in order to expand, stimulate, and make public the voice of a critical discourse on graphic design.
Anyone wishing to exercise criticism must constantly ask themselves: what is, in fact, the object of my criticism? To exercise critical discrimination means to put things in context, to measure them, to weigh them, and to interpret them – criticism is thus a dynamic dialogue between how things are and how things should be in which each dialogue partner influences the other.
Different perspectives are essential in this dialogue in order to produce a constructive opposition: From inside of the discipline of graphic design working designers must ask themselves the question of what graphic design today can do, and what it does in fact do. Philosophers, and sociologists, psychologists, communication and politics scientists, literary scientists, art and design theorists must interrogate the praxis of graphic design. Curators, critics, and those commissioning design work must develop essential criteria fueling a critical graphic design discourse.
Graphic design orientates itself on action and on experience. Graphic design is a mediated discipline whose focus is on a communication that is in many respects ephemeral. Its primary requirements: a thirst for knowledge and doubts, initiative and experience, enthusiasm and empathy. Graphic creators work with language, dialogue, and translation. All three of these phenomena require dedication and distance, an ability to let go and an ability to decide. All three of these phenomena are brought to life by convention, personal attitude, and surprise. To put it another way: the attitude of a graphic designer shows itself in how he or she engages personally with the phenomena of language, dialogue, and translation, and in how he or she engages in exchanges concerning these phenomena.