Last weekend at the Orange County Museum of Art, a friendly and well-meaning volunteer docent inquired whether I was writing a school report, and proceeded to introduce some of the pieces on display in the current ‘Imaging + Imagining California’ exhibit. Alighting on a piece by John McCracken called Dream (Chartreuse Green), 1988-92—a leaning, gleaming, fiberglass plank—she gamely explained that even though it might not look like it, it was, in fact, art.

What struck me about the exchange, other than the delightful thought that I might look like an undergrad, was her perceived necessity to prove the importance of a Minimalist art object to someone she thought was a student of art. She wasn’t far off base: her concern echoed the theme of many discussions I had with my Illustration students in the Media, Art and Design program at the University of Westminster in London. Even after nearly half a century’s worth of art movements and theory that have proven the staying power of conceptual work, these budding designers were skeptical about the value of work that needed to be seen in the context of history to be fully understood. This skepticism was part of an overall reluctance (only at first, of course; they were smart kids) to see history and theory as an important component of their work as designers.

But what’s the possibility of producing meaningful design work without understanding art and design history? Pretty much none.

Going into teaching for the first time, I never thought I’d have to prove the legitimacy of 20th century art to design students. But after a full semester of engaging on just that topic, I started to understand their perspective. A big part of the issue is that avant-garde art is just plain hard. That’s the whole point—it’s intentionally difficult so that it can continually push culture just past the accepted comfort zone. In order to understand difficult work (in both art and design) you have to know where it’s coming from, usually by reading some pretty dense texts. A minimalist green plank is beautiful in its own way, but it’s also an example of an extreme sort of austere Modernism, a practice that opened the floodgates for conceptual work by being so sleekly formal as to became a theatrical object, the antithesis of stand alone Modernism (according to critic Michael Fried).

How would you know that unless you read up? How much more interesting is that plank now that you see how it challenges Modernist rules of formality by leaning against the wall, like a painting, but also sitting on the floor, like a sculpture?

Sometimes it’s assumed that because design is a marketable service, it exists outside an established history of visual culture and theory. Not so, says the wounded history teacher! Just like that green plank, your work is more than just an attractive surface (unless, like the plank, it is self-consciously so).

You cannot make smart, effective design work unless you know your history. No creative act exists in a vacuum—we all pick up cues and knowledge from our cultural surroundings, reacting to the work of artists and designers that have come before. Being a product of history is unavoidable. In fact, it’s so unavoidable that I think I better devote a few more posts to it. To be continued…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Art, Design, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.