How are positions most effectively developed and demonstrated? Discuss this in relation to a creative practice or text. Then explain how this has helped you think about developing your own emerging position.
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s appointment as the director of studies in graphic design at Yale University School of Art in 1990 symbolised a shift away from the Modernist theory of her predecessor, Alvin Eisenman, and towards a new model of graphic design, with diversity and inclusiveness at its heart.[1] De Bretteville’s postmodernist approach to the teaching of her discipline values a multiplicity of voices, and seeks to create designers that listen, are attentive, and think about how to make sure others are heard, not just themselves. She advocates strongly for putting yourself in your work: “my agenda is to let the differences between my students be visible in everything they do.” The anger with which her appointment was met from some members of the design establishment, notably Paul Rand, who resigned in protest, even further reinforces the exclusivity enacted by the insistence in graphic communication design upon Modernism’s superiority. That he resented the intrusion of “every special interest — women’s studies, black studies, gay studies, and the like” shows just how hostile to difference and individuality proponents of Modernism can be.[2] His language shows that, for many, modernism is seen as the only pure form of graphic design, while anything else is lowly, inferior and undeserving.
De Bretteville’s approach was not so much a rejection of modernism itself, but the attitudes of superiority and exclusivity that are attached to it. Her appointment and her approach to design education, started to shift norms around design practice and education, but also culture more broadly. As a signatory of the 2000 First Things First Manifesto, she demonstrated her conviction to re-examine the values of graphic communication design, and transform the discipline so that it might be relevant to and in touch with the political and social needs of our society. Thus design practice cannot be detached from real lived life. Practice and position must go hand in hand.
Sara Ahmed and Uzma Rizvi both emphasise that an activism as design practice must be lived, discovered, and constantly enacted and worked out over time. For both, their positions, respectively feminism and decolonisation, are something of an iterative practice, continuously enacted and understood through instances of application. As Ahmed says so poetically, “I think of feminist actions as like ripples in water, a small wave, possibly created by agitation from weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching”.[3] Thus for her each instance is a small part of a larger whole, and vice versa, the whole position is made up of small instances of action. Rizvi gives the examples of how such things are enacted: changing the colours of “flesh-coloured” crayons and introducing gender neutral toilets in schools, in both cases to reflect the real range of bodies, and using the word “I” in your academic writing (when we’re taught from an early stage this is not “neutral” and therefore unprofessional) so as to be honest about your personal relationship to the work and your innate set of positions you bring to the research task.[4] De Bretteville is a fantastic example of this type of practice – her values are woven throughout not only her artistic practice, but also her career and her life.
Practitioners like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger create very politically urgent work, with bold statements challenging the state of the world and disrupting the status quo. Their practices are a lot about working out their own positions and opinions—Jenny Holzer’s text-based works (Truisms and Inflammatory Essays) consist of lists of notes she had been making for years: positions, opinions, statements she had gradually been forming—but they also both rely on large, loud, vocal projections into the world. I have never felt that there was anything I wanted to say quite like that – I have opinions, and positions, many of them, but mostly I feel that these are things I’ve picked up and gathered from others, to whom I am indebted. I feel aware of the significant limits to my knowledge, and aware of the degree of privilege I possess. I’m conscious that my voice, if amplified could unwittingly contribute to existing inequalities, and that any opinion I currently hold may shift over time. Of course, projecting your positions out in the world is usually the best way to speed up this process, as people will respond to them, challenge them, and, so long as you are receptive to criticism, a conversation begins and you grow. Formally, Holzer’s and Kruger’s work does not present itself as the opening of a conversation; it is somewhat closed, full of statements, bold letterforms, capital letters. It resembles the ‘final word’ in an argument, or a rejection of something, rather than a question asked. Holzer’s work is most open when her statements are self-contradictory: “Protect me from what I want” – they expose the contradictions built into the fabric of society, and pose questions through their absurdism.
Of course, I admire the positions that both artists take, and feel that both present a fantastic challenge to the prejudices of the art world and society. But I am interested in exploring alternative ways for positions to be communicated, in their innately unfixed and changeable forms. I am particularly keen to situate myself in response to De Bretteville’s call to use my design practice “to forge more attentive and open structures to provide opportunities for others to be heard”.[5]
[1] Lupton, E., 1993. Reputations: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Eye, [online] (8 vol 2). Available at: <http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-sheila-levrant-de-bretteville> [Accessed 13 May 2021].
[2] Kimball, R. Tenured Radicals. XL, XIII. New York, 1990. Quoted in Rand, P., 1992. Confusion and Chaos: The Seduction of Contemporary Graphic Design. AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, [online] (Vol. 10 No. 1). Available at: <https://www.paulrand.design/writing/articles/1992-confusion-and-chaos-the-seduction-of-contemporary-graphic-design.html> [Accessed 13 May 2021].
[3] Ahmed, S. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. p3
[4] Rizvi, U. ‘Decolonisation as Care’ in Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, ed. by Carolyn F. Strauss and Ana Paula Pais. Amsterdam: Valiz Publishers, 2016. pp. 85-95.
[5] Lupton, 1993.