{ chrislip.com/matthew : blog }
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03 February 2006
{ Best before }
What is the life expectancy of a good idea?I recently attended a very interesting lecture given by Katherine McCoy (former co-chair of the graduate design program at Cranbrook) titled "Speaking in Tongues." Though very few of her ideas struck me as truly fresh or groundbreaking—perhaps I was introduced to her thinking long before I knew whom to credit—I was impressed with the clarity and comprehensiveness of her synthesis of theories concerning globalization, monocultures, and subcultures. I took advantage of the opportunity to talk with her for 15 or 20 minutes after her presentation, and I left feeling inspired and empowered.
A couple weeks later, while thumbing through the final issue of Emigre magazine, I learned that McCoy has been circulating these ideas since the mid-eighties. My first reaction was to question the continued relevancy of her "pet topic." I began to wonder if she had ever allowed for much reevaluation and development of her theories. If I were to find a transcript of one of her lectures from twenty years ago, how would it differ from the version that I heard just last month?
Of course, my next thought was to question the relevancy of the theories that have shaped my understanding of design up to this point, and I was horrified at the thought that I may have inadvertently restricted my own development to its infantile stages. But then I remembered that my views are changing almost daily. In less than a year's time, I've managed to cycle through upstartish naïveté, theoretical curiosity, anti-intellectual cynicism, and most recently, unabashed theoretical elitism (here's to inaccessibility!).
Which brings me back to the post-Emigre dilemma...
Every generation of designers has its activists. (Some might call these the avant-garde, but I'm beginning to shy away from this term for various inexplicable, intuitive reasons.) The late eighties and nineties were certainly shaped, at least with regard to the role of graphic design, by the work of the pro-digital graphics radicals and their ugly, illegible designs. And the progression of this movement was both documented and directed by Rudy VanderLans's controversial publication. About that...
My haphazard discovery of Emigre #67 (of 69 total) just over a year ago sparked an intense fascination with the world of design theory and criticism. I felt as if I had walked into an obscure café, and spotting a group of well-dressed hippie intellectuals huddled in one corner, I sat down at a neighboring table to see if I could catch little bits of their conversation. I craned my neck in an effort to hear them better, and just as I started to get the gist of what was going on, they all got up and walked out of the café.
So the question, which I've mentioned before in other terms, is this: what do we do with all this empty space that they left behind? Sure, it's a hot question in design discourse right now, but does anyone else feel some sort of personal responsibility to rally the forces? What will happen if I try to take the lead for my generation?
[ posted by Matthew Chrislip at 01:58 : 3 comments :
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