Artist as Designer 002

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Camiel uan Wink:elThe Regime of Uisibility

NAi Publishers, Aotterdam


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3.Information and VisualisationThe Artist as Designer

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Information and Visualisation

'While Jeff is perfectly nice, bordering on the goofy, and loves to chatabout the complexities of his little factory, one can't escape hisfundamental lack of soul. Koons is a reverse chameleon, whose colorsfleeinto the objects around him, leaving him pale and bare. He's notso much a kid who never grew up as a kid who never had the chanceto live like one, and now must elaborately fake it from hunger. Youwouldn't want to be inside his skin.' IThe mockery which critics and artists reserve for Jeff Koons ismore than an innocent side-effect of his fame. Koons is despised andhated - and not just due to his clever marketing tricks. He is hatedbecause he undercuts the dearest truths of contemporary art, preciselyby inflating them into grotesque platitudes. The work of art is a visualcommunication. The artist wants to convey something to the public.The visual appearance of the work is subordinate to the underlying ideas.Such commonplaces are so deeply ingrained in our conception ofart and artists that their objective truth is only contested by theoccasional person who feels uncomfortable with the excess of positiveintentions. But the embarrassment suddenly becomes complete when itis JeffKoons who voices them - Koons, the artist who has assistantspaint pictures of donuts, toys and plastic balloons.

Koons has turned shamelessness into a universal principle. Hewants to make people feel good about themselves and to increase their1.Finch, 'Jeff Koons' Celebration', n.p.

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The Regime of Uisibility

self-confidence. The work of art should bring people together insof driving them apart. 'My work will use everything that it can to~communicate. Itwill use any trick; it'll do anything - absolutelyanything - to communicate and to win the viewer over.' Koons b e t .that his work can reach educated as well as uneducated aUdiences liedoes not want anyone to feel excluded. 'Even the most unsophisti"people are not threatened by it; they aren't threatened that this is t a tedsomething they have no understanding of.' Artists with politicaUycorrect ideas about social context and interaction, attempting to r e a c ha new public outside the established institutions, must be repulsed b yhearing Jeff Koons, of all people, say such things. Their own agendais as banal as his - and they know it. 'The work wants to meet the I l e e d aof the people. Ittries to bring down all the barriers that block peoplefrom their culture, that shield and hide them. It tells them to embrace.the moment instead of always feeling that they're being indulged bythings that they do not participate in. It tells them to believe in sornetbDtand to eject their will."

Koons' point of reference is not the mature individual whosecritical judgment can be addressed, but the child, the unripe cre;ltw~that eats candy during the day and wets its bed at night. Koonsthe power of infantile regression; he wants to convey this knowled_and share the power. He remembers how at the age of four or fivecould not get enough of the colourful pictures on his cereal box.kind of sexual experience at that age because of the milk. You'veweaned off your mother, and you're eating cereal with milk, andvisually you can't get tired of the box. I mean, you sit there, andlook at the front, and you look at the back. Then maybe the nextyou pull out that box again, and you're just still amazed by it; youtire of the amazement.' Thus, sitting at his childhood breakfasthe experienced a visual epiphany; and he understood that one'slife could have such an intensity. 'You know, all of life is like that orcan be like that. It's just about being able to find amazement in"(... ) Life is amazing, and visual experience is amazing.' 3

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2. Cited in Burke &Hare, 'From Full Fathom Five', p. 45.3. Cited in Sylvester, 'Jeff Koons Interviewed', pp. 18-21.


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By affirming and celebrating them without any reticence, Koomakes the banality of widespread art cliches painfully clear - not onain his statements, but also in his work. The paintings he has been n I yproducing since 1999 under the generic title Easyfun-Ethereal are l i k ean all too literal interpretation of the principle that a work of art s h O U l dalways be layered. For him, different audiences can focus on differentlayers. Whoever does not feel addressed by the depicted temptationsof the food and entertainment industry - mere pictures of 'tasty'things - can perhaps take pleasure in the compositional virtuosity ofthe collage, or in the lightly encrypted art historical references.

According to his adversaries, Koons produces shallow and vulgareye-candy; 4 but for his supporters, what he makes qualifies as conceptualart. How is it that such contradictory properties can be attributed tothe work of a single artist? And was not conceptual art precisely directedagainst the reduction of art to colourful wallpaper?

In order to fathom this paradox it is necessary to know whathappens in the artist's studio. The first phase of the painting processis carried out entirely on the computer. 'Colors are not mixed andaltered on the artist's palette,' writes Robert Rosenblum; 'limbs andfaces are not recontoured or repositioned by the artist's brush andpencil; additional images are not inserted by hand. All of this oncemanual work is done on a computer screen, constantly readjustedunder the artist's surveillance to create unfamiliar refinements ofhUejshape, and layering.' When completed, the digitally generated pictureis printed out and handed over to a team of painters who prc,tessiol18llltransfer it to canvas: 'with the clinical accuracy of scientific workersand with an industrial quantity of brushes, paint tubes, and coJorcodes, [they] replicate exactly the hues, shapes, and impersonalof the computer image through the traditional technique of oil oncanvas. What begins as advertising photography is then transmutedback into an electronic product, which in turn is translated back'an old-fashioned medium."


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4. Charlie Finch describes the work as 'cheap knock-offs of the movieToy S to ry ' (Teff Koons' Celebration', n.p.).5. Rosenblum, 'Dream Machine', pp. 52-55.


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Information and VisualisationOne thing is clear from this description: the 'conceptual.' nature

of the paintings lies in the fact that Koons first designs them on acomputer and then has them executed by assistants. His paintings aredesigned paintings. The creative aspect does not lie in the manualexecution, but in the preceding design phase. It is this twofold naturethat explains why his opponents speak of 'mere form' and his admirersof 'conceptual art'. Whereas the former only see calculation, seductionand flatness, the latter emphasise control, planning and detachment.

'( ...) Koons has virtually annihilated the traditions of savoringan artist's personal touch, which now exists only in conceptual, notmaterial, terms. In this new role for the artist, Koons has become animpresario in charge of a high-tech production process supervised byhired experts." The art historian Robert Rosenblum labels Koons asa conceptualist after first touching on all the possible painterly referencesin the work, varying from Baroque and Rococo to artists like Pollock,Magritte and Rosenquist. Only in the final analysis does he implementthe familiar antithesis between painting and conceptual art, contrastingKoons with conventional painters for whom the secrets of the mediumcan never be set down in a recipe or inventory. In this rhetoricalframework, Koons the painter-designer is diametrically opposed toartists for whom the conception and execution of a painting go hand inband, as integrated aspects of a complex and unpredictable process ofadding, removing, correcting and developing. Whatever the value ofthis tried and tested procedure, the meaning and originality of Koons'work would result from the fact that it deviates from it completely.

Is this enough evidence to call Jeff Koons a conceptual artist?Certainly, he says himself. No one may contend that he is just aimingat an aesthetic effect. 'I see [my work] as essentially conceptual. I thinkthat I use aesthetics as a tool, but Ihink of it as a psychological tool.Mywork is dealing with the psychology of myself and the audience."For Koons, the main goal is never a matter of aesthetics. Aestheticsdrives people apart and excludes certain groups from a sharedexperience. Koons sees himself as a conceptual artist, who deploys his6. Ibid., p. 52.7.Sylvester,'Jeff Koons Interviewed', p. 36.

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TheRegime of Uisibilityknowledge of the effect of seductive imagery for the sake of a higher

> I- > I- > I- 8 O a I .A valid argument to designate Jeff Koons - and many others with h U n- as a conceptual artist is that h is way of working would be unthinIcabttwithout the historical phase of Sixties conceptual art. The contellll>Orarytruism 'Art is communication' is the result of a change that occurredin that period, when visual artists started to regard themselvesprimarily as transmitters of information. Conceptual artists adopteda position as brokers of information, in the most literal way. A clearexample is Robert Barry's TeLepathicPiece from 1969, announced by t h eartist as follows: 'During the exhibition I will try to communicatetelepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughtsthat are not applicable to language or image.' The impresario thatRosenblum sees in Koons, the manager or supervisor of a delineatedpath of communication, already appeared in art in the Sixties - not forthe first time perhaps, but certainly for the first time with so muchpertinence and historical weight. The paradoxical confusion betweenconceptuality and design, which has reached a climax in the recentwork of Koons, had its origins in early conceptual art. From the m O I D e D tartists started to think of their work in terms of the conveyance ofinformation, they have been beset by the spectre of design.

According to the standard interpretation, conceptual art revolvedaround the 'dematerialisation' of the art object - the reduction of thework of art to a mere idea. The artists concerned would have occupiedthemselves solely with cerebral, immaterial things, as iftrying totranscend the material realm. This widespread interpretation goesback to the title of a successful book published in 1973: Six Y ea rs.The Dematerialization of the A rt O bject from 1966 to 1972, a collectionof texts, documents, statements and interviews, compiled by LucyLippard." Itwould not be exaggerated to speak of the myth ofdematerialisation. Inreality, the handiwork never disappeared andthe material was never transcended. Some techniques, like painting

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8. Already in 1968 an article by Lucy Lippard and John Chandlerappeared under the title 'The Dematerialization of Art,' in Art r..t~rtUI'tlmllll12,00.2 (February 1968), pp. 31-36.


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and sculpture, may have been replaced by 'deaner' ones, such asphotography, film, typewriting, collage and printing; nevertheless it isstriking how many conceptual artists - such as John Baldessari, OnJ(awara, Daniel Buren and Christine Kozlov - continued using paint oncanvas. Secondly, it is not true that conceptual artists were indifferentto aesthetics. They simply shifted the aesthetic parameters to anotherlevel, or rather let other factors determine them. Between 1966 and1968John Baldessari hired a sign painter in order to make for him aseries of paintings representing a text or a text with a photograph. Thesign painter was given careful instructions; Baldessari determinedexactly what had to be done, but kept his distance. 'Important was thatI was the strategist. Someone else built and primed the canvases andtook them to the sign painter, the texts are quotations from art books,and the sign painter was instructed not to attempt to make attractiveartful lettering but to letter the information in the most simple way."9. Cat. John Baldessari, p. 6.

THIS IS NOT TO BE LOOKED AT.

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Information and Visualisationbeen relocated to marginal regions of the world, where social andenvironmental laws impose fewer restrictions on production. U

Something similar goes for the myth of the dematerialised artobject. Conceptual art of the Sixties and Seventies evoked the idea ofa post-industrial knowledge economy in all sorts of ways. 14 Two note-worthy exhibitions that took place in New York in 1970 demonstratedhow intimate the connection between conceptual art, information andtechnology was thought to be: Software in the Jewish Museum andInformation in the Museum of Modern Art. On display in Software wasa work called News by the German artist Hans Haacke, which consistedof several telex machines connected to press agencies and continuously13. Cf. Dupuy, 'Myths of the Informational Society'. Jean Baudrillard has

a more rhetorical counter-argument: the factory may well be disappearingfrom society, but at the same time society as a whole is transformed into afactory (Sym bolic E xchange and D eath , p. 18).14.Cf. Alberro, C oncep tual A rt and the P olitics of P ublicity, pp. 2-3.

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spewing out news reports. For his contribution to Software DouglasHuebler asked museum visitors to write a personal secret on a piece ofpaper, anonymously, and to hand it in on the spot, in exchange forwhich they received a photocopy of a secret left by someone else. ForInformation Vito Acconci did a work entitled Serv ice Area , consistingof a table and a plexiglass box. For the duration of the exhibitionAcconci had his mail forwarded to the museum where it was kept forhim in the box; every morning he appeared in the exhibition to gothrough that day's letters. Software also included an experimental set-up by M.I.T.'s Architecture Machine Group under the leadership ofNicholas Negroponte (later continued as the M.LT. Media Lab). Thisproject, known as Seek, consisted of a computer-driven miniaturelandscape of individual wooden blocks, occupied by a number of livegerbils, whose behaviour influenced the configuration of the blocks.Instead of a printed catalogue, visitors to the Jewish Museum couldconsult an interactive computer system which offered a selection ofinformation about the exhibition tailored to their personal preferences

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The Regime of Uisibilityartists eliminated the handiwork as much as possible, because it stoOdin their way ideologically, or it simply did not interest them. There aindications, however, that artists who understood their own activity r eprimarily in terms of conveying information, discovered that themaking of works became their biggest problem, for the very reasonone could no longer just 'make' something. Rather than eliminate t h ehandiwork, they started to design it. Christine Kozlov painted thewords 'A MOSTLY RED PAINTING' in white on a red canvas. JosephKosuth had the text 'FIVE WORDS IN BLUE NEON' executed in b l u eneon. Works like these are based on a circular procedure: the conceptamounts to the coinciding of the design and the designed object, b u tthe designed object is also a medium for conveying the concept.

In this phase an artist like Lawrence Weiner was obsessed withphysical work and the processing of materials. His work consisted ofStatements that evoke the material result of a physical action: 'ANAMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOORAND ALLOWED TO DRY'; or 'THINGS PUSHED DOWN TO THE

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BOTTOM AND BROUGHT UP AGAIN'; or '1000 GERMAN MARKSWORTH MEDIUM BULK MATERIAL TRANSFERRED FROM ONECOUNTRY TO ANOTHER'. It would make sense here to speak of anidealisation rather than a dernaterialisation of the art object. Askedwhat his work was about, Weiner replied: 'Materials.' 18 However, healso said that he was more interested 'in the idea of the material thanin the material itself'. 19 His Statements could be carried out, by himselfor by anybody else, but that was not essential, for the work 'relie[d] uponinformation' and all the relevant information was contained in theactual statement. 20

What is it exactly that artists do when they 'design the handiwork'?They subject it to a protocol- a set of explicit prescriptions and rules.They draw up instructions, which they then attempt to fulfil to the best

18.Lippard (ed.), S ix Y ears, p. 73.19.Weiner, 'Statements', p. 882.20. Lippard (ed.), S ix Y ears, p. 130.

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Information and Visualisationof their ability. For his Today Paintings (from 1966 onwards), Onr


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. short instructions printed on cards (such as 'Draw a straight line andfollow it') which could not be carried out without a substantialcontribution by the individual recipient."

Already in 1969 the small but crucial step that determines thedifference between these two positions was subjected to a tentativeinstitutionalisation. For the Art by Telephone exhibition in Chicago'sMuseum of Contemporary Art, conceptual and other artists wereinvited to telephone instructions to the museum staff, who wouldthen execute the work for them. 'In order to make the experiment ofsolely verbal communication a maximum success, the use of drawings,blueprints or descriptive texts was completely renounced,' Jan vander Marek, the initiator of the exhibition, stated." Some of the artistsparticipating in Art by Telephone will have found that for them thetelephone was a suitable medium, corresponding exactly to their ownview of art. Others have probably devised a specific work for theoccasion that would fit within the concept of the exhibition. In bothcases what counted was that 'The artist initiates the informationprocess, but does not conclude it.'26Robert Smithson asked to have atruckload of liquid concrete poured out in a quarry outside the city.Dennis Oppenheim determined that from five materials used inbuilding the museum - plaster, sawdust, cement, metal shavings andinsulants - five piles be made in the exhibition space, each of thembaving exactly the same weight as the artist himself. Once a weekOppenheim phoned the museum staff to tell them his current weight;each time the size of the piles was adjusted accordingly. Mel Bochnerchose a fragment from a piece of art criticism; he had it read over thetelephone to someone in Italy, who then had to translate it into Italianand read it over the phone to someone in Germany, who had totranslate it into German and read it over the phone to someone inSweden. Via the last link in England the text returned to Chicago,where both the original and the final version, plus all the intermediate

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24. Cf.Kotz, 'Post-Cagean Aesthetics'. (The example cited isC om position 1960 #10 by La Monte Young.)25. Van der Marek, 'Kunst per telefoon', p. 58.26. Ibid., p. 60.


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Information and Visualisationtranslations, were included in the exhibition.The idea that a concept for a work of art could be transformed intoinformation conveyable by means of a modern technological mediumlike the telephone, goes back to Usz16 Moholy-Nagy's 'telephonepaintings' - five abstract-geometric compositions on enamelled steelwhich the artist had manufactured in a sign factory by giving instruc-tions over the telephone. 'I had the factory's color chart before me andI sketched my paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephonethe factory supervisor had the same kind of paper, divided intosquares. He took down the dictated shapes in the correct position.'27In 1968 Jack Burnham, critic for Artforum and curator of theSoftware exhibition, referred to the 'telephone paintings' in his essay'System Esthetics'. Inthis text he explicitly linked the desire ofcontemporary artists to move beyond formalism to the conditions ofthe new information age. 'We are now in a transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not fromthings, but from the way things are done.'28During the initial phasesof industrialisation, 'decorative media', including painting andsculpture, had maintained their monopoly on what Burnham callsthe 'esthetic impulse'; 'but as technology progresses this impulse mustidentify itself with the means of research and production.' In thesociety of the future, positions of power would no longer be identifiedthrough the traditional symbols of prosperity and wealth; knowledgeand information were to become the new parameters of power.Artists would have to deal with the same social changes thatmanufacturers, managers and administrators were facing; newdemands were being made on all these groups.

'In the emergent "superscientific culture" long-range decisionmaking and its implementation become more difficult and morenecessary. Judgment demands precise socio-technical models. Earlierthe industrial state evolved by filling consumer needs on a piecemealbasis. The kind of product design that once produced "better living"

27. Moholy-Nagy, 'Abstract of an Artist', p. 79.28. Burnham, 'System Esthetics', p. 31.


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precipitates va t crise in human ecology in the 1960s. A strikingparallel exists between the "new" car of the automobile stylist and thesyndrome of formalist invention in art, where "discoveries" are madethrough visual manipulation. Increasingly "products" - either in artor life - become irrelevant and a different set of needs arise: theseevolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livabilityof the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction,understanding the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships,establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of naturalresources, and defining alternate patterns of education, productivity,and leisure.'29

Burnham's comparison of the outdated formalist art practicewith the activity of industrial designers in the car industry is striking.He overlooked the extent to which the very tendency he supports -an increasing focus on information and communication systems in artpractices - resulted in the artist becoming a designer. Inthat respectthe precedents he mentions, including Moholy-Nagy's 'telephonepaintings' and the L-Beams made for Robert Morris in Chicago, arerevealing. Burnham was perhaps too close to his subject or too eagerto play the apostle of the avant-garde, to realise that it was precisely byrejecting the priority of stylistic issues that artists created a role forthemselves as designers of a communication trajectory.

Paradoxically the presumed conceptual purity of their workscould be seen to approach the purity of 'pure design'. Even the mostradical artists, who felt it not necessary that their concepts or proposalswould actually be carried out, could not get around the design factor.For some observers, many years later, that came as an unpleasantsurprise. In a discussion with Lawrence Weiner in 1998, BenjaminBuchloh expressed his admiration for the neutral presentation ofWeiner's Statements in the late Sixties - for the complete absence oftypography and 'design choices' in the layout of the books. Weinerpromptly corrects him. 'Those early manifestations (...) are so highlydesigned you cannot believe it. I mean, take Statements: there is adesign factor to make it look like a $ 1.95 book that you would buy.29. Ibid.


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Information and VisualisationThe type-face and the decision to use a typewriter and everythingelse was a design choice.' 30***Moholy-Nagy's legendary 'telephone paintings', now part of the

collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, turn out to relyliterally on a legend - on an apocryphal story. In 1972 Lucia Moholy,the former wife of the artist, published a book in which she revealedthat he did not communicate the instructions through the telephone atall, but delivered them in person at the sign factory. He was so thrilledby the result, however, that he elatedly declared 'Imight even have doneit over the telephone!' Lucia Moholy explicitly rejected the idea thatMoholy-Nagy was a predecessor of conceptual art and telephone art."

Exactly the same apocryphal story is doing the rounds in theNetherlands with respect to Wim Crouwel, graphic designer and co-founder in 1963 of the design office Total Design. Crouwel is supposedto have been in the habit of communicating his designs to the typesetterverbally, over the telephone. 'Crouwel shocked his colleagues andstudents as he would just phone through a design"; or he would gohome after an appointment at 110' clock in the evening in order todesign another chair".'32 The persistence of this apocryphal story isrelated to Crouwel's austere visual style and to his rational andbusiness-like design approach. From the late Sixties such qualities30. Buchloh, 'Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in Conversation with Lawrence

Weiner', p. 20. During a conversation with Patricia Norvell in 1969 Weinerstill claimed that the book had no underlying typography or design at all.Perhaps his remark to Benjamin Buchloh was a way of countering Buchloh'scritical remarks on the later work, which, from a graphic point of view,is much more exuberant. See Alberro and Norvell (eds.), RecordingConceptual Art, pp. 107-108.

31 . Moholy, Marginalien/Marginal Notes, pp. 74-79. See also Kaplan,'The Telephone Paintings'.32. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 137.When

asked about the truth of this story, Crouwel denied it, but he admitted thatthe use of layout grids did permit him, in certain cases, to send correctionsover the telephone. (Conversation with the author, 19April 2002.)

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The Regime of Uisibilitywere associated with state bureaucracy and impersonal, large-scalepower concentrations. Crouwel's telephone legend thus acquired ahighly ambivalent connotation. In 1976, when the Dutch postal service(PTT) introduced a new series of stamps drawn by Total Design, someobservers saw a connection between the rising postal rates and theplain appearance of the stamps. 'Inflation seems to have influencednot only the price: even the design is practically worthless. The rumourthat Crouwel phones through his designs must be true after all,'Obstakel magazine cynically commented. 33

At the same time as the managerial revolution was happening inart, it also took place in the domain of graphic design. Wim Crouwelwas the prime representative of this change in the Netherlands. AsHugues Boekraad has written, graphic design in the Netherlands inthe second half of the Sixties amounted to 'a derivative of professionalcommunication'." In the postwar decades the expansion of the stateapparatus, combined with a call for more openness, transparency andparticipation, resulted in an explosive increase in the flow of publicinformation. Both federal and municipal administrative bodies beganto imitate corporations by conducting an active information policy,aimed at communicating with citizens. Increasingly, graphic designwas deemed a necessary and integral part of public relations. ProfessionalPR-departments were set up, and designers - the link between clientsand the graphic industry - were expected to have a professional,business-like attitude."

The 'house style' phenomenon, developed in the USA as 'corporateidentity', made its entrance in the Netherlands in the Sixties. TotalDesign was the first office to combine graphic, industrial and productdesign so as to accumulate the expertise necessary for developingintegrated house styles. The concept of 'total design' even became theircorporate philosophy. Crouwel and his co-founders Benno Wissing,Friso Kramer, Ben Bos, Dick Schwarz and Paul Schwarz, declaredthat they could unify the identity of any client, whether it be an oil33. Reproduced in ibid., p. 160.34. Ibid., p. 175.35. Ibid.


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Information and Visualisationcompany, a temping agency or a ministry. House styles amounted toa standardised design for efficient and clear internal and externalcommunication. Boekraad: 'The client wanted order. On the one handthere is the phenomenon of "corporate identity", motivated by theneed for consistent internal communication within companies andgovernment institutions operating on an ever greater scale. On theother hand, the need is felt to maintain visually distinct concepts in thestream of visual stimuli which capitalism, having become dependenton mass consumption, is deluging the urban environment with. Thechaos that has to be overcome is not that of uncultivated nature,but that of an uncontrolled market. An individual trademark has tobe steady as a rock.' 36 Total Design's modular design method stretchedfrom sugar bags and stationery to company vans and whole buildings.Although the ideal of a 'total design' appeared not so easily realisablein practice, and the business results of the office proved very sensitive36. Ibid., pp. 51-52.

Trademarks and logos


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Information and Visualisationmodernists like Karl Gerstner, Ernst Scheidecker and Gerard Ifert, ofwhich Boekraad says: 'The beauty of their work is (...) graphicallydetermined, built up from the reproduction means of graphic design.' 39Crouwel continued in this line by translating the 'external conditions'that determine the assignment into 'starting points for directing thedesign process.'40 The graphic product should be a direct reflection ofits own conditions of existence. In 1961 Crouwel himself formulatedit as follows: 'Every assignment can be dissected into a number ofelements, all of which hang together. These elements are factors thatdesigners have to deal with as facts. That is what makes our craft anapplied one, why it's called applied art. For every assignment you haveto analyse the factors, pinpoint them as it were on a horizontal and avertical axis, stretch a piece of string between them and then see whatyou get.':" It is no coincidence that at this elementary level there is aparallel with the working method of conceptual artists from the sameperiod, described by Charles Harrison as follows: '( ...) deciding whatkind of work to do had become practically inseparable from learningabout the conditions - both logical and ideological- under which thatwork was to be done.'42In the course of Crouwel's career, substantial technological changesoccurred in the 'reproduction means of graphic design'. At the beginningof the Seventies the graphic industry switched from lead type to film."The twelve point system of typography deriving from the use of leadletters was replaced by a decimal system. The classical layout collapsed,since new printing techniques now made it possible to realise everyimaginable arrangement of text. Designers like Crouwel, however, sawno reason to celebrate this newly attained typographic freedom withwhimsical and unpredictable orgies of form. Instead they opted for a39. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 57.40. Ibid., p. 46.41. Cited in Van Haaren, 'Wim Crouwel', n.p.42. Harrison, 'AKind of Context', p. 21.43. Edy de Wilde calls this transition a 'silent revolution', in: Extra

bulletin: over het werk van Wim Crouwel (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum,1979), n.p.

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The Regime of Uisibilityrigid, standardised typography, based on an efficient and repeatablegrid that reduced the number of variables to a minimum. Only in thisway could the enormous growth in demand for well-designed printedmatter be met. 'The grid fixes the measurements and the positions oftext and image on the page. The width of the text columns are derivedfrom this, as are the dimensions of the reproductions. Text and image,defined as surfaces with a certain grey value, are arranged as suchwithin the grid.' The result is a design that works as a neutral packaging- as 'a universal storage system (...) for every type of text and everytype of image', in the description of Hugues Boekraad." The grid is non-hierarchical: each intersection of Jines is equivalent and each potentialletter position acquires the same symbolic weight. The hierarchical,symbolic value of the c1assicallayout disappeared, to be replaced bya new, largely implicit symbolism reflecting the rational self-image ofdesigners and their clients."

At the time Crouwel saw himself as a functionalist, staying as closeas possible to the content of what was to be communicated. The gridenabled him to do this. 'The typographic field can be divided on thebasis of calculable factors induced by the material and the nature ofthe assignment,' according to Hein van Haaren in an article on WimCrouwel." Above all Crouwel warned against the use of new techniquesto imitate the classical structure of the old lead typesetting. Instead,designers had to discover structuring principles that were compatiblewith automated typesetting and advanced printing technology. 'Oneconsequence could be that letters acquire a fixed width, as is the casewith typewriters, for example,' he wrote in 1974. 'The ordinary type-writer with its simple typographic arrangement, whereby all the lettersare strictly arranged both horizontally and vertically, suddenly appearsto offer a solution to many questions concerning the production offast and legible text at relatively low cost.':"44. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel.Mode en module, p. 200 and

176.45. Ibid., p. 176.46. Van Haaren, 'Wirn Crouwel', n.p.47. Crouwel, Ontwerpen en drukken, pp. 7-8.


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Information and VisualisationThe austere and restrained tone that typifies Crouwel's designs

cannot be traced back to a single source. 'Habit, social demands andprofessional distinction merge in Crouwel's work.'48 His principle thatno formal decisions could be taken arbitrarily - that every designchoice had to be accounted for - certainly had to do with the need thatwas felt at the time to lift the metier of graph ic design out of the sphereof artistic intuition and to develop it into an independent profession.This status still had to be fought for in the early years of Tota! Design.The general tendency to associate designers with artists and bohemiansmight damage the image of professionalism and competence. TotalDesign was the first combined office in the Netherlands," which meantthat pioneering work had to be done with respect to clients but alsoto the in-house staff. Benno Wissing once explained: 'Our early worklooked dogmatic. It had to be that way because at the time we werestill busy training a group of employees who had been taught to takedecisions about form on arbitrary grounds (...).'50 Crouwel even talkedabout 'the conscious avoidance of form'," thus exhibiting an almostcompulsive denial of the aesthetic dimension of the trade - a denialthat in turn was contradicted by his work.

***The fact that a designer regards himself as a functionalist does notnecessarily mean he has no aesthetic preferences. In a certain sense,Crouwel's functionalism was nothing but a preference for a functionalistaesthetic. Such an aesthetic entails that letters and texts are stylisedand layout variables are as limited as possible. Crouwel concealedhis aesthetic preferences by legitimising them with the argument ofmaximum legibility. The reduction of typographical variety wouldnot only make typesetting more efficient, but also increase thetransparency of the design itself. The telephone directory that WimCrouwel and Iolien van der Wouw designed in 1977 for the PTT iscompletely permeated by this aesthetic of efficiency. The decision to48. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 52.4 9. B ro o s, Ontwerp: Total Design, p. 7.SO . Ibid., p. 13.51.Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 32.


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Information and Visualisationrnent of letters. 53 The poster that Crouwel, as the regular designer forthe Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, made for the Vormgeversexhibition in 1968 is a clear example of this. The crucial visual elementin this poster is the layout grid, which for this occasion - an exhibitionabout graphic design - has itself been made visible in printed form.The text features a single typeface, in a large and a smaller variant,mounted onto two different levels of the grid. The font refers to thefunctionality of computer screens and dot-matrix printers; Crouwelhad constructed it by filling in the cells of the grid in a quasi-mechanicalmanner. The way the text is lined up on the left with no margin tospeak of, reinforces the impression of a cerebral anti-aesthetic. Inthis poster Crouwel presents the world of graphic design as a strictlylogocentric universe, in non-pictorial black and white - a digital worldinwhich questions can only be answered with yes or no. At the sametime, the design includes a number of inconsistencies which mean that53. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 177.


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136

the image of a cast-iron ystem again has to be readjusted. The visualisedgrid is the standard grid that Crouwel used for the Stedelijk Museum_but only for the catalogues, not for the posters. In applying it to theVormgeversposter it had to be enlarged several times. Instead of makingtransparent the underlying structure of the design, the grid, in acertain sense, serves an illustrative purpose. Furthermore, the rigidconstruction of the typeface is somewhat softened and rounded at thecorners. Such details suggest that, at crucial moments, Crouwel optedfor the 'arbitrariness' of what worked better visually, rather than rigidlypersevering with a pre-established system. S 4

On the other hand, the priority of maximum legibility was notalways evident either. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say thatevery design system creates its own aporias, especially when followedthrough to the end. Ironically, one of CrouweI's least legible designsconcerned a poster for the exhibition Visuele communicatie Nederland(Stedelijk Museum 1969). Once again the grid - consisting of verticalstripes in groups of three - was incorporated into the design andused at two levels of scale to give the information an order of priority:details (subtitle and dates) were put in a smaller font than the title ofthe exhibition and the name of the museum. The white spaces betweenthe bundles of stripes serve, at the 'high' level, to space the letters-each letter has the width of three stripes - but at the level of the detailedinformation, where each letter is only as wide as one stripe, the spacesoccur at arbitrary places in the middle of the words, thus diminishingthe legibility. The taut rhythm of the letters with their standard width-narrow letters such as i and t have been stretched laterally - is disturbedby the anomalous rhythm of the vertical stripes. ss

> 1 - * *For Wim Crouwel, the essence of graphic design consisted of thevisualisation of information, In 1974 he wrote: 'Applied design ispractised within the situation of an assignment whereby a certain pieceof information, whatever it may be, is visualised in such a way thatthe information will be conveyed at its best.' This had nothing to do54. Ibid., pp. 200-201 and 332-333.55. Ibid., pp. 338-339.


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138

with 'beautification'. 'It is a matter of creating clarity; which form isused to make that happen is not important.' Nor did it have anythingto do with originality. 'Relevant and essential information is fullyoriginal in itself; the designer has nothing to add!' The ethics oftheprofessional designer lay not in his or her involvement with the Contentof the assignment, but precisely in refraining from such involvement.Even though the designer has to be aware of 'what the implicationsare of his efforts', what is paramount is an 'un distorted transfer ofinformation'. 56

Although in contradiction with his actual production, Crouwelconsistently expressed the view that a designer does nothing other t h a narrange and order the information. 'Typography is an ordering processpar excellence. Any design that wants to be more than this is toomuch.' 57Designers clarify the information to be conveyed by reducingthe elements to their most concise and least ambiguous form andordering them with the appropriate graphic means. Even in times ofcorporate expansion and automation they contribute to the efficiencyof the client's communication policy by professionally integratingall the design phases in the production process of the graphic industry.According to Crouwel, the sole responsibility of designers was toincrease the transparency of the information transfer. Just as he deniedthat aesthetic considerations played a role, he also denied that thedesigner does anything more than organise and clarify, so as tofacilitate the communication between client and target group. Thedesigner did not even take part in the communication process himself.'Ibelieve in the upholding of expertise. Let's respect the expertiseof one another. As mediators we should not try to convey the messagebetter than those who actually send it.'58

It is striking that the ordering principles associated with thisdesign philosophy - principles like standardisation, modularity, serialiand reproducibility - seamlessly coincide with the formal proceduresof bureaucracy. Even the goals are the same: efficiency, expediency and56. Crouwel, Ontwerpen en drukken, pp. 12-16.57. Crouwel (1972), cited inBroos, Ontwerp: Total Design, p. 91.58. Ibid.


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Information and Visualisationa gain of time. The following statement by Benno Wissing from 1983made it clear to what extent such organisatorial preoccupations shapedthe philosophy of Total Design: 'Early on in our activities Priso[Kramer], Wim [Crouwel] and I soon discovered that in dealing withlarge projects a number of things had to be standardised; simplifyingthe procedures for information processing would leave us more timeto deal with intrinsic problems. Ifvariations had to occur in the finalproduct, we preferred to look for variations within a modular system,so that correlating, interconnecting, stacking and other forms ofindustrial realisation would require no extra work. The principle wasapplicable in architectural, industrial and graphic design.'59 WhereHugues Boekraad postulates that functionalism 'represents the powerof those in charge of the new technologies'," we could go one stepfurther and argue that functionalism even imitates these newtechnologies of control and adopts them in its own organisationalprocess. All in all, it is not surprising that throughout the SeventiesTotal Design, identified with the person and the work ofWim Crouwel,was often accused of being part of a small clique controlling the Dutch'aesthetic establishment'." As the office acquired more and biggerinstitutional clients, and Total Design's logos and trademarks startedto dominate the cultural landscape even more strongly, the resistancegrew and the criticism became bitter. Some saw Total Design as 'theface of order and neatness, the face of integrity, the face of neutralityand sobriety, the face of timelessness and truth'.62 Others immediatelyassociated the unadorned style of Total Design with the apparatus ofauthority and tyranny. 'It is annoying that this man [Crouwel] has somuch power. To like ugly things may be his constitutional right, butit so happens that his ugly things are our telephone directories, postagestamps, banknotes, so he has the government and all its services onhis side. (...) Crouwel assumes that these things are good for us even if59.Wissing, cited in ibid., p. 11.60. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 179.61 . Ibid., p. 159 ff.62. Gert Staal, 'Het arrogante, ongrijpbare van Total Design', de

Volkskrant, 13May 1983.139


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we don't appreciate them ourselves. There's something in that designerideal that makes you think of the totalitarian state, with its deadlypreference for a calm image on all fronts.i'"***In the context of the managerial revolution that reached the domain

of culture in the Sixties, the graphic designer and the conceptual artistwere each other's counterpart. Both worked with a strict distinctionbetween information and visualisation, to which they attached far-reaching consequences regarding their own responsibility. Designerslike Crouwel did not feel responsible for the content of the message theyvisualised on behalf of their clients. Conversely, an artist like LawrenceWeiner did not feel responsible for the visual realisation of his concepts.Both Crouwel and Weiner evinced a professional indifference,amounting to a complementary demarcation of expertise. Crouwelclaimed to be neutral towards the content of the information to beconveyed (,whatever itmay be'). Weiner left it to the receiver of hiswork to decide at any moment to 'build' it, in whatever way. He refusedto make a distinction between correct and incorrect interpretations.Even the decision to destroy a work, once it had been carried out, wasleft to the receiver. 'People, buying my stuff, can take it wherever theygo and can rebuild it if they choose,' he wrote in 1972. 'If they keepit in their heads, that's fine too. They don't have to buy it to have it-they can have it just by knowing it. Anyone making a reproduction ofmy art is making art just as valid as art as if I had made it.'64

Conceptual art and graphic design can thus be seen as twocomplementary forms of 'delegated production of culture'." Boththe functionalist designer and the conceptual artist rejected theunregulated, 'holistic' approach that had long been dominant intheir respective fields. They started out from a strict standardisationand disciplining of their own production by means of a thoroughlyrationalised and repeatable protocol. This had paradoxicalconsequences. Wim Crouwel felt it necessary to deny and suppress63. Tamar, 'In afwachting van de bal', VrijNederland, 31March 1979.64. Weiner, 'Statements', p. 882.65. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 192.


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the role of aesthetic principles in his work. He even made a distinctionbetween (real' design and a superficial variant that he referred to, witha term borrowed from the fashion world, as (styling'. 'Design is real, itis giving form to something, determined by the function the thing hasto have and the technical conditions of its production, (...) styling isadapting something to a fashion, determined by commercial motives/ "It seems there existed a subtle cultural hierarchy: just as art saw itselfas more content-oriented than the neighbouring discipline of design,so designers looked down on a completely externalised practice whichthey referred to as (styling'. (Design in the sense of styling is animitative activity that relies on incidental whims and conformity witharbitrarily chosen stylistic elements, whether old or new, with nofurther consequences being drawn.' And: (In most cases there is nological continuity at all between the mechanism, or basic structure,and the visual forrn.v"

There were also paradoxical consequences for conceptual art.By separating conception and execution and rejecting the priority ofthe visual, the artists in question may have thought they were takinga stand against the unbridled accumulation of insubstantial andunconsidered imagery, but in fact they started using methods andprocedures similar to those used by designers. At the time when it waspublished Sol LeWitt's polemical proposition that 'Conceptual art ismade to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye oremotions'68 was clearly strategic with respect to the position that heand a group of kindred artists were creating for themselves. But inretrospect it is evident that the suggested antithesis between a cerebraland a 'retinal' form of art - an antithesis that goes back to a notion byMarcel Duchamp - had already completely collapsed by then. In theSixties a painter like Frank Stella had contributed to this just as muchas minimalists like Carl Andre and Dan Flavin. Significantly, DanGraham, Lawrence Weiner and other conceptual artists were stronglyinfluenced by some of their more 'retinal' colleagues. In 1985 Graham66. Crouwel, cited in Broos, On twerp: Total Design, p. 3.67. Crouwel, Vormgeving- door wie?, p. 7.68. LeWitt, (Paragraphs on Conceptual Art', p. 15.

141


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The Regime of Uisibilitywrote that he found Ducharnp's solution to the problem of the valueof the work of art - namely, the introduction of the readymade intothe exhibition space - unsatisfactory, preferring Dan Flavin's solutioninstead." In the interview with Benjamin Buchloh quoted earlier,Weiner revealed his enormous admiration for Frank Stella's BlackPaintings. 'I thought they were absolutely fabulous. I remember a PBS .broadcast of Henry Geldzahler interviewing Frank Stella in the early1960s. Stella looked plaintively at the camera and said, "My God, ifyou think these are boring to look at, can you imagine how boring theyare to paint?" I was very impressed/ "***

After the 'telephone paintings' by Moholy-Nagy, Stella's early workforms another example of 'designed painting'." As an artist whodesigned the handiwork, Stella was an important example for conceptualartists. He divided the production of a painting into two separate steps- the design phase and the execution phase - so as to disengage theartist's ego from the process." Stella created two roles for himself,each with separate responsibilities. In her book Machine in the Stud ioCaroline Jones describes this separation as follows: 'Stella hoped tovanish as a personality in the act of (commercial) painting. He wouldreturn as the ideator-executive: the designer of diagrams and plansthat the artist-worker would execute/ " These two roles - the designerwho supervises and controls, and the worker who executes - have a69. Graham, 'My Work for Magazine Pages', p. 420: '( ...) Flavin's

fluorescent light pieces are not merely a p r io ri philosophical idealizations,but have concrete relations to specific details of the architectural arrange-ment of the gallery, details which produce meaning.'70. InBuchloh, 'Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in Conversation with Lawrence

Weiner', p. 9.71. Sven Lutticken calls Stella's paintings from the early Sixties 'designed

rather than composed' (A ll egor ie s o f Abs tract ion , p. 8). See also Lutticken'sessay 'Het schilderij en de afvalbak'.72. Jones, Machine in the Stud io , p. 124: '( ...) to remove the ego of the

artist from painting'.73. Ibid.

142


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144

Executing a design with paint on canvas turned out to be fairlydemanding work, a 'chore'. Stella painted the stripes by hand, withoutmasking tape, the way a house painter would paint a window frame.He used large brushes and industrial paint, straight from the can. Thepainting technique missed any expressive touch, but for that veryreason the work was exhausting and numbing, writes Caroline Jones,who also speaks of a 'deadpan approach'. 76

In her reading of Stella's work, Jones emphasises the radicalseparation of intellectual and manual labour; yet she underlines notonly the gap between these distinct aspects of his artistic practice,but also the logic of his way of bridging that gap. The gap and thebridging of the gap would imply one another: she refers to 'the originalsplit necessitating that linkage [between worker and executive 1'.77Stella himself, too, made it all sound very logical: 'The remainingproblem was simply to find a method of paint application whichfollowed and complemented the design solution. This was done byusing the house painter's technique and tools.'78 But what is theconnection between house painters and graphic designers in everydaypractice? There seems to be no connection at all. Jones posits a classdifference: the designer is a manager and executive, the house paintera 'lower middle class manual worker'," She disregards the fact that ahouse painter, even if employed rather than independant, would neverhave a graphic designer as a boss. The very incongruity of their linkagecauses the fissure in the production process of Stella's work to remainvisible and thus to become an artistically significant factor.

After the Black Paintings of the late Fifties, Stella pushed the issueof the divide between conception and execution further, particularlyin the Benjamin Moore series from 1961, named after the manufacturerof the paint. Jones argues that these paintings, even more thanthe preceding series, were based on 'clear, preexisting formats whoserelation to the finished painting was that of blueprint to finished76. Ibid., p. 128 and 125.77. Ibid., p. 121.78. Stella (1960), cited in ibid., p. 125.79. Ibid., p. 122.


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Information and Visualisationbuilding'.80 The last traces of painterliness had disappeared from thework. The series was based on six square diagrams, executed in variouspure colours and in two formats. The use of gloss paint on unpreparedcanvas resulted in a sharp linear structure, with no visible trace ofthe brush. Having reached this stage, Stella could in theory begin todelegate the manual work to assistants. If he still executed the BenjaminMoore series himself, this was, according to Jones, because he knewnobody else with sufficient command of the house painting techniquesto be able to accurately apply the diagrams onto canvas." From themid-Sixties, however, he did employ assistants, whom he allowed touse masking tape. The artist emerged as a full-blown manager. 'Thefact that the paintings became ever more disconnected from eventhe workman's touch, and more and more like manufactured objects,only reinforced the sense of them as products of a corporate approach.80. Ibid., p. 177.8 1 . Ibid.

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Stella's eventual turn to masking tape and assistants as modes ofincreasing production around 1965, far from an incidental aspect ofthis development, became its most logical outgrowth. At that pointthe ideator-executive, having delegated to himself the task of paintingearlier canvases, could now delegate the painting to others (...).'82***

In 1966, with conceptual tendencies already appearing on the artmarket, an interviewer made the following suggestion to Frank Stella:'You're saying that the painting is almost completely conceptualizedbefore it's made, that you can devise a diagram in your mind and put iton canvas. Maybe it would be adequate to simply verbalize this imageand give it to the public rather than giving them your painting?' Stella,who may have felt this as a challenge to the uniqueness and the marketvalue of his work - after all, he never 'gave' his paintings to anyone-came up with the following answer: 'A diagram is not a painting; it's as82. Ibid., pp. 157-158.

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Information and Visualisationsimple as that. I can make a painting from a diagram, but can you?Can the public? Itcan just remain a diagram if that's all I do, or if it's averbalization it can just remain a verbalization.T Later the discrepancybetween Stella's statements and his actual studio practice, alreadyevident at the time of this interview, only grew. In the late Sixties andearly Seventies, as his production became larger in scale and morefactory-like, he increasingly emphasised in his public statements thesubtleties and sensitivities of the paint application. If in practice he wasfully delegating the manual execution, he once again started to claima personal authorship. By 1970 the rhetoric of the artist-manager, or asJones calls it, 'the executive artist', had completely disappeared. '( ...)Stella was at pains to emphasize the physical aspect of his labor inmaking the paintings, as if to forestall public awareness of his delegationof much of the routine work.' Increasingly, he became 'jealous of thesymbol of authorship as the bulk of production slipped ever furtherfrom his grasp',"

Yet there were more reasons for artists not to speak publiclyabout their work with the attitude of a production manager.Ironically, by the end of the Sixties a strategy for dismantling thesovereignty of authorship had led to the confirmation of another kindof authority - namely that of the capitalist, manager, factory owner.'Put briefly, by the end of the 1960s artists' claims of delegation toassistants, or aspirations to managerial status, were destabilized bytheir very contiguity with more generalized systems of control. Theywere analogized to claims for the ownership of others' labor (...).'In the political maelstrom at that time, such claims were suddenlyquite dubious. It had become more correct to identify oneself with theworker than with the manager. 'Thus the job of an executive artist mayhave become unappealing, to Stella as much as anyone else.'85

Against this background it starts to make sense why an artist likeLawrence Weiner avoided the imperative form in his work. For him

83. Glaser, 'Questions to Stella and Judd', p. 60. Partly cited in Jones,Machine in the Studio, p. 178.84. Jones, Machine in the Studio, pp. 180-181.85. Ibid., p. 185.


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The Regime of Uisibilitythis was a dear and conscious decision. 'My own art never givesdirections, only states the work as an accomplished fact.'86He made nosecret of his political motivation. 'To use the imperative would be forme fascistic ... The tone of command is the tone of tyranny.'87 The formhe gave to his Statements was not an instruction to do something, nor adescription of something that had already been done, but an indefiniteintermediate form that works both as inference and projection.wStrangely, the very thing that, in a grammatical sense, makes a statementinto a statement, namely the predicate, is incomplete. Weiner's statement'A N AMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY ONTO THE FLOORAND ALLOWED TO DRY' provides the information, the materials,for construing a variety of complete propositions: 'AN AMOUNT OF86. Weiner, 'Statements', p. 882.87.Weiner (1972), cited in Alberro, 'Reconsidering Conceptual Art,

1966-1977', p. xxii.88. Ibid.r 0 . 1::J ::

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Information and VisualisationPAINT [will be/can be/could be/could have been/has been/has tobe/is being] POURED DIRECTLY ONTO THE FLOOR ANDALLOWED TO DRY.' His rejection of the instruction form (,Pouran amount of paint directly onto the floor and allow it to dry') is inkeeping with the observation of Caroline Jones that artists in the lateSixties preferred not to associate themselves with managers and otherindividuals who had subordinates do the dirty work. That Weinereven referred to fascistic and tyrannical practices is, although somewhatoverstated, consistent with the general image of the political andsocial context in which conceptual art flourished: anti-authoritarianmovements, the protest against the Vietnam war, the resistance topatronising authorities - in short, 'the spirit of 1968'.

Yet even within his own circle Weiner received little support forhis rejection of the instruction form. Other conceptual artists oftenused it as the perfect means to separate manual and intellectual work.Jones therefore overlooks something when she states that towards theend of the Sixties 'aspirations to managerial status' had lost their appealfor progressive artists. An artist could well involve other individualsin order to carry out a concept or an instruction, as long as the artistaccepted to have no influence on the 'quality' of the execution - or toput it more generally: as long as the concept entailed that no interactionwould happen between 'ideator' and 'performer'. Once the conditionsand parameters of the execution had been set, the rest would followby itself.

Sol LeWitt's 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' stated it clearly: 'Inconceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of thework. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that allof the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution isa perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.This kind of art (...) is usually free from the dependence on the skill ofthe artist as a craftsman.l'" LeWitt's use of corporate and bureaucraticterms, such as 'decisions' and 'planning', implies that conceptual artistsdid actually aspire to a managerial status, as if they were designing andcontrolling the logistics and organisation of a production process. But89. LeWitt, 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art', p. 12.


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The Regime of Uisibilitythey consciously refrained from the final step - the crucial phase offine-tuning the concept on the basis of an evaluation of the initialresults. The mechanical, blind nature of bureaucratic procedures thuscame to a head: any result was a good result. Quality control did notpertain. Artists carried out their plan to the best of their abilities andpresented the result as dryly as possible. This applied not only to thosewho delegated the production to others (John Baldessari) but also toartists who preferred to instruct themselves (Douglas Huebler). Inthe latter case, the artist divided himself in two - just like Frank Stellahad done - on the understanding that the instructions could not bechanged after the execution had begun, or rather, from the momentthe instructions, often set down in writing, had been determined. Noneed was felt for practising or training. Under no circumstances didthe artistic content of the work depend on a skilful execution.

As regards this last point, however, some variation was possible.Inthe case of artists like Ulay and Abramovic, who never rebearsedtheir joint performances, the strength of the work did indeed stemfrom their endurance and blind dedication during the performance.Tbe opposite went for Bas Jan Ader: the failure of the execution wasa programmed element of the concept. Other artists occupied a middleposition between these extremes. Baldessari's idea of launching fourballs in such a way that, photographed in mid-air, they would form astraight line (Throwing Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, 1972-73),resulted in a series of 36 attempts, of which he showed only the fourmost successful ones. Then again, the results of Huebler's VariablePiece #111were so astounding that the question arises as to whether theartist did not tinker with the rules - and whether that tinkering itselfmay not have been part of the concept.

Sol LeWitt's claim that conceptual art did not depend on thetechnical skill of the artist would seem to refer mainly to traditionalcrafts like painting and sculpting. But again it would be incorrect toseparate in absolute terms the cerebral work of conceptual artistsfrom the retinal work of painters and sculptors. For instance, around1968-69 no more than a gradual difference existed between the artisticpractices of Frank Stella and John Baldessari. Both artists producedpaintings that were 'designed', and botb hired others to execute the

150


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Information and Visualisationdesign. Baldessari's 14 part series Commissioned Paintings from 1969was carried out by Sunday painters whom Baldessari had approachedat amateur art exhibitions. The visual material consisted of a numberof 35 mm transparencies that he had made earlier, each showing a handpointing to something." The painters hired by Baldessari each had tochoose one of the slides and copy it to the best of their abilities withina marked out area on a standard canvas. The paintings were thentaken to a sign painter who wrote the text 'A painting by...' under thepicture, followed by the name of the painter in question. As in the caseof Stella's work, the Commissioned Paintings were meant to be showntogether. 'It wasirnportant that the paintings were exhibited as a group,'Baldessari wrote, 'so that the spectator could practice connoisseurship,90. 'The problem of providing interesting subject matter (...) was solved

by a series [of slides] Ihad just finished which involved someone walkingaround and pointing to things that were interesting to him'. Baldessariin cat. John Baldessari, p. 11.


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for example comparing bow the extended forefinger in each waspainted.'?' In this strange mixture of professional detachment andamateur dedication, visual quality did playa role after all. Anyonewho assumes that Baldessari's disengagement from his own workwas more ironic than Stella's would be hard put to find solid evidence intheir actual production.

***Hidden behind the professional approach of a graphic designer likeWim Crouwel is a rational, mathematical model of ccmmunication,vCommunication is seen as a smooth and uniform conveyance ofinformation between sensible and rational individuals. It ought to bepossible to 'address people without capitalising on their interests ordesires'." The object of the conveyance - the content of the commu-nication - is neutrally referred to as 'statements' or 'information' sentby one party and received by another. If a designer fulfils his or hertask properly, no alteration or disturbance of the information occursduring the conveyance; what the recipient understands is identical tothat which the sender intended. Communication is not disturbed byarbitrary decisions relating to form ('aesthetic noise'), nor by poorlyattuned means of reproduction and transfer. The designer aims ateliminating everything that might threaten the integrity of the commu-nication: misunderstanding, non-information and ambiguities. HuguesBoekraad recognises in Crouwel 'a tendency to reduce ambiguityfurther and further'," Crouwel's cold and business-like image stemmedin part from all the facets of human communication that do not fitinto this model. 'The rational model of communication abstracts ( ...)human imagination, fantasy, imagery and the fluid atmosphere ofthe conversation. It channels the stream of words, signs and knowledge

152

91. Ibid. According to Jan van der Marek, the Commissioned Paintingswere made for the Art by Telephone exhibition, thus entirely at 'longdistance' by means of telephoned instructions. See Van der Marek, 'Kunstper telefoon', p. 61 .92. Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode en module, p. 177.93. Ibid., p. 176, note 5.94. Ibid., p. 177.


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Information and Visualisationinto a fixed, lasting, "consultable", transferable form of writing.'95

The general characteristics of this reduced model of commu-nication seem to derive from the mathematical information theorydeveloped in the USA during and after the Second World War byscientists Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener. Information theoryas a branch of applied science originates in two pioneering articlespublished by Shannon in 1948.96He was at that time researching theproblem of reliably transmitting information through an unreliablechannel, such as a noisy radio or telephone connection. Shannonused statistical techniques to develop a method of calculating theinformation value of a source and the capacity of a channel; this 'bit'(binary digit) became the new, quantitative unit of information.Shannon used this to draw up a theoretical model for counteractingthe effect of noise in the channel by encoding the information.Shannon's second theorem, published in the Bell System TechnicalJournal, holds that, as long as the information flow does not exceedthe capacity of the channel, it is possible to use corrective coding tomake the error rate as small as one wishes.

The great significance of mathematical information theory follows,among other things, from the widespread everyday use of such codingstoday: in CD players, video recorders, digital image and sound fileslike JPE G , M PE G , M P3, and so on. The functioning of these codes hasto do with a phenomenon known as redundancy. Redundancy is aproperty of information caused by the fact that the formal or structuralcharacteristics of a sign system always limit the freedom of choice ofthe sender. The redundant part of the message is the non-informativepart - 'the fraction of the structure of a message which is determinednot by the free choice of the sender, but rather by accepted statisticalrules governing the use of the symbols in question'," The rules ofgrammar and spelling, for example, make the message recognisable95. Ibid.96. See Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communi-

cation; and Campbell, Grammatical Man, pp. 16-17.97. Weaver, in Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of

Communication, p. 13.153


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and, to a certain degree, predictable: a Q is usually followed by a U,an article is usually followed by an adjective or noun, and so on.98 Itis possible to compress a message by reducing the redundancy - inother words, by removing part of the unnecessary, non-informativeelements (as in a text written in 'telegraphese'). With zero redundancy- only a theoretical possibility- the message cannot be compressedfurther; the information value is 100%: each communicated signrepresents maximum unpredictability." On the other hand, redundancyis important because it can help to reduce the effect of distortions(noise) in the communication channel. 100 From experience the receiverknows the statistical characteristics of the language employed, sothat missing signs are easier to fill in. Shannon's information theorypointed the way to methods for reducing the error rate in the transferof information by an artificial increase of redundancy - which alsoincreases the complexity of the communication system. 101 A simpleexample will explain why the use of coding to increase redundancycan make a message less vulnerable to disturbances. A telegram issent; besides the text of the message one also sends the 'redundant'information as to how many words the message contains. The receiverof the message can immediately check whether words have been lostin the transmission. Similarly, in the case of digital data traffic it isuseful to include in every series of bits an extra bit signifying whether98. Campbell, Grammatical Man, pp. 68-69.99. Ibid., p. 72.100. 'When there is noise on a channel, (...) there is some real advantagein not using a coding process that eliminates all of the redundancy. For the

remaining redundancy helps combat the noise.' Weaver, in Shannon andWeaver, The Ma.thematical Theory of Communication, p. 22.101.Campbell, Grammatical Man, p. 73: 'The more complex the system,

the more likely it is that one of its parts will malfunction. Redundancyis a means of keeping the system running in the presence of malfunction.'Campbell then cites a statement by John von Neumann from 1949: '(...) alanguage which has maximum compression would actually be completelyunsuited to conveying information beyond a certain degree of complexity,because you could never find out whether a text is right or wrong.'

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Information and Visualisationthey add up to an odd or an even number. By combining various codesof this sort in an intelligent way, one can ensure that errors are not onlydetected but even corrected automatically. 102

After the introduction of the first micro-processor in 1971, thenumber of commercial applications of the mathematical models ofinformation theory rapidly increased: modems, fax machines, videorecorders, personal computers ... Until then, the range of applicationshad been limited to expensive communications technology for spacetravel and military purposes. 10) It was also in a military context thatClaude Shannon and Norbert Wiener had achieved the initial resultsof their research during the Second World War. 104 Techniques for noisereduction in data transmission were originally developed in order toincrease the accuracy of radar images, for example. At M.I.T. Wienerwas working on electronic techniques for improving the efficiency ofBritish anti-aircraft defences against German bombers (and later V-Is).The result was a guidance system that used statistical calculations topredict the position of a moving target at the moment the anti-aircraftshells would reach it. This innovation indeed made British defencesmuch more effective: after August 1944 the percentage of downed V-Isrose from 10% to 50%.105

The success of information theory led to a considerable hype,particularly in the Fifties and - after a temporary setback - again inthe Seventies. The initial excitement about Shannon's theories inspiredmany scholars from other academic fields as well. During the thirdcongress of the Professional Group on Information Theory (PGIT),held in London in 1956, papers were presented in the fields of anatomy,animal welfare, anthropology, computers, economy, electronics,linguistics, mathematics, neurophysiology, neuropsychiatry, philosophy,phonetics, physics, political theory, psychology and statistics. In thespecialist journal IRE T ra nsa ctio ns o n In fo rma tio n T he ory many articles102. Examples taken from ibid., p. 78.103. Aftab et al., 'Information Theory and the Digital Age', p. 20.104. According to Campbell, Shannon had worked on secret codes during

the war (Grammatical Man, p. 67).105. Ibid., pp. 25-31.

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The Regime of Uisibilityappeared around this time which went far beyond the purview ofscience. Publications in the general press created the impression amona broad public that information theory would unite all possible sCientifi~and semi-scientific fields. Soon the inevitable backlash came with astricter definition of information theory; in the Seventies, however, thehype began anew, stimulated by developments in DNA research andevolution theory. 106

The idea that the concepts and mathematical models ofinformation theory could be applied to all possible domains and sub-domains once again reflects the myth of post-industrial society - themyth that every human action and all social intercourse can be seenin the perspective of information exchange, knowledge transfer andcommunication processes. This myth has been criticised, amongothers, by the cybernetician Heinz von Foerster. In an essay publishedin 1980, entitled 'Epistemology of Communication', Von Foersterrejected the proposition that the information theory developed byShannon and his colleagues was a fully-fledged theory of informationand communication. He argued that communication cannot be equatedwith a mere exchange of signals. 'Exchange' would be the wrongmetaphor, as it reduces human communication to a sort of pneumaticdispatch. ('This suggests that if we are at opposite ends of a dialogueand have successfully exchanged our opinions, Ihave your opinionsand you have mine! Presto!' 1 0 7 ) According to Von Foerster, it is not byaccident that information theory was conceived in a military context.It disregards the human capacity for dialogue and discussion and castsall forms of communication into the rigid format of a command:'( ...) during wartime a particular mode of language - the imperative,or the command - tends to predominate over others (the descriptive,the interrogative, the exclamatory, etc.). In the command mode it isassumed that the following takes place: a command is uttered, it reachesa recipient, and the recipient carries out- the command.' 108 However,106. Ibid., pp. 19-20; Aftab et al., 'Information Theory and the Digital

Age', pp. 8-9.107.Von Foerster, 'Epistemology of Communication', p. 20.108. Ibid., p. 21.


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Information and Visualisationonly in trivial situations could it be upheld that the output is completelydetermined by the input (the emitted signal or command). Von Foersteraccused his opponents of cherishing a behaviourist ideal, according towhich orders are carried out without a hitch. The difference betweensignal and information becomes clear when a recipient refuses to obey;only on such occasions are the conditions met for something new toarise. In Von Foerster's own, ethical view, communication implies thateach participant perceive himself through the eyes of the other. 'Notethat in this perspective of communicative competence, concepts suchas "agreement" and "consensus" do not appear and, moreover, neednot appear (and this is as it should be, since in order for "consent" and"agreement" to be reached, communication must already prevail).' 10 9***This critique of the models and applications of the mathematical

information theory has its parallel in the criticism meted out to WimCrouwel in the Seventies. This came mostly from fellow designers likeJan van Toorn who rejected Crouwel's rational model of communication.Van Toorn's critique focused on the exhibition and catalogue designswhich Crouwel, commissioned by Edy de Wilde, made for the StedelijkMuseum in Amsterdam. Van Toorn himself was responsible for thecatalogue and exhibition design in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhovenunder the directorship of Jean Leering. The quarrel between Crouweland Van Toorn, which erupted in various publications and publicdiscussions, took place against the background of an ideological battlethat De Wilde and Leering fought, concerning the cultural role of theart museum in a modem, emancipated society. 11 0

Van Toorn reproached Crouwel for giving his exhibition designssuch an aloof and sacrosanct character that they automaticallyforced the public into a passive role. The museum would present itselfas a bulwark of professional expertise and hence as an untouchable109. Ibid., p. 27.110. For an account of a public debate between Crouwel and Van Toorn,

seeMijksenaar, "n Rodeo voor ontwerpers'. See further Broos, Ontwerp:Total Design, pp. 91-92; Huygen and Boekraad, Wim Crouwel. Mode enmodule, pp. 117-123.

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frank stella3 oktober tim 22 november 1970

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authority that was not essentially interested in a dialogue with visitors.There was, it was felt, 'a one-way traffic in communication' thathindered 'the formation of independent opinions on the part of thepublic'. Van Toorn's own designs, on the other hand, were aimed atactivating the public. As opposed to the 'canonisation of a final situation'based on specialist criteria that the general public was not familiarwith, he advocated a presentation of the material that would stimulatevisitors to take on the role of researcher themselves. III

The dispute between Crouwel and Van Toorn revolved around theneutrality of the 'means of conveyance'. As strongly as the one believedin this neutrality, the other rejected it. 'Crouwel's fear of subjectiveintervention leads to uniformity, and the loss of a strong identity,' VanToorn stated in a debate in 1972.11 2 Although they agreed that every

ill. Leering and Van Toorn, Vormgeving in [unctie van musealeoverdracht , pp. 2-3 and 10-13.112. Cited in Broos, Ontwerp: Total Design, p. 91.


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desig~er arranges the material and works out a design on the basisof that arrangement or order, Crouwel was of the opinion that makingan optimal design came down to realising or revealing an order thatwas already inherent in the material itself. With regard to designingfor museums, he claimed: 'All design within the framework of an artmuseum should be aimed at showing the art to maximum advantage,so as to best serve both visitor and artist (...).' 11 3 Van Toorn argued onthe contrary that any arrangement of the material by definition reflectsa position and is therefore always biased, arbitrary and more or lessimposed. Instead of concealing this position behind an aesthetic orobjectivised form of presentation, it should be made explicit and clear.Amuseum should always provide insight into its own selection andclassification procedures; the fact that an exhibition has a 'man-made'character ought to be directly readable in the exhibition itself. 11 4Crouwel's response was that everything not emanating from the artitself is redundant and distracting. 'If your aim as a museum is to allowyour public to form an independent opinion about art, you shouldlet the art speak for itself and you should refrain from acting, with allyour good intentions, as a disturbing factor. When art becomes thevictim of a radical communication theory, all this communicatingamounts to little more than noise. The plea for visualising the operationof the museum is a model that mainly generates noise. ' 11 5

The exhibition designs Jan van Toorn created for Jean Leering,including De Straat. Vorm van sam enleving (The Street. Forms ofCommunal Living), were characterised by a mixture of documentaryand collage forms. They featured texts panels with photographs in asetting of utilitarian materials, such as wooden planking and wire meshfences, meant to evoke an atmosphere of concrete reality. 11 6 Whateverthe subject of the exhibition, the main intention was to create a layeredrepresentation in which the decisive role of 'stories and storytellers'113.Crouwel, 'De vormgeving en het museum', p. 15.114. Leering and VanToorn, Vormgeving in fu nctie van m useale overd rach t,p.20.l IS. Crouwel, 'De vormgeving en het museum', pp. 16-17.116.Huygen and Boekraad, W im Crouwel. M ode en m odule, pp. 119-121.

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would also become tangible. 11 7 Such politically motivated 'realism'was at odds with Crouwel's abstract method of design. Yet these twoapproaches, however different, did have one important thing in common:both relied on an ideal of transparency. Whereas Crouwel strived fortransparency through formal reduction and purification, Van Toornthought he could attain a transparent representation by accumulatingmaterial, offering only raw facts or samples and suspending definitivepoints of reference. The paradox is that these designers, with theirconflicting approaches, were both aiming at a zero degree of design:Crouwel by avoiding random applications of form ('styling'), Van Toornby omitting all stages of reduction or translation in the communicationprocess. Both Crouwel and Van Toorn thus produced an extremeversion of d esign that p oses as non-d esign . Each of the two regarded 'theimposition of form' as the biggest sin for a designer: the one because it

117.Van de Ven, R et verhaal van d e D elta -E xp o, cited inHuygen andBoekraad, W im CrouweL . M ode en m odule , p. 121.


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Information and Visualisationwould testify to arbitrariness, obtrusion and unprofessionality, theother because it would be authoritarian and patronising. Each of themthought it was precisely the other who was guilty of 'imposing form'.

***There is little proof that in the Seventies Wim Crouwel was acquaintedwith the mathematical complexities of information theory. Althoughhis inaugural lecture as professor in industrial design (1973) containeda plea for 'the preparation of form according to consistent mathematicalprinciples', he mainly meant by this the development of 'clear modularstructures to improve the formal structure'. 11 8 This mathematical pathwas indicated not so much by Claude Shannon as by BuckminsterFuller, the American designer quoted several times in Crouwel's lecture.Crouwel's interest in mathematics concerned geometry, which wouldallow the application of modular principles - linkable and extendiblebasic forms - to be carried through to its logical conclusions. In a certainsense, this formed his answer to the political and ideological fixations ofthat period. The designer should be content with the humble and demo-cratic role of a 'preparer of form', Crouwel proposed on this occasion.'The task of this preparer of form therefore is no longer to determinethe final appearance, but to search for the logical basic components; theelements to be transformed. Then we shall have reached the point whereeveryone can determine the final form for themselves, instead ofstanding by helplessly.' 11 9 The paradoxical logic here is that Crouwel'saversion to amateurism - resulting in his insistence that designerseliminate their subjectivity - now led to the point where, in theory, adesigner would do little more than supply a range of possibilities, whilethe individual user, on the basis of his or her personal creativity, wouldhave the final say in 'design decisions'. The conviction that design is aspecialist profession that, like any other, has to be approached in abusiness-like way, led via this kink to the ultimate conclusion thateveryone could be their own designer. 'The invention and productionof artefacts should be monitored critically, even when it concernsarchitects, designers and engineers, who are supposedly qualified for it.118.Crouwel, Vormgeving - door wie?, p. 13.119. Ibid.

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The Regime of UisibilityAll too often design results in a sort of immutability, a dead end forcreativity. We need to have the opportunity to express at least OUrmostbasic creative impulses, so as to help shape the identity of

Artist as Designer 002

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