Designer as Author
Sunday 1 October 2023
Lectures
draft
Notes for a presentation briefing a project on the concept of the designer as author. This is intended for a third year (level 6) audience.
1
In this short introduction I want to give a very brief overview of what is a very long-standing debate. That is the role of the concept of authorship within design practice.
2
“Authorship may suggest new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with the communication rather than the origination of messages. But theories of authorship also serve as legitimising strategies, and authorial aspirations may end up reinforcing certain conservative notions of design production and subjectivity... What does it really mean to call for a graphic designer to be an author?”1
3
Two woodcuts of Mary in the Robe of Wheat Ears
As Michael Rock says, in its historical reconstruction, graphic design – as a discipline separated from the rest of artistic production – has been concerned mainly with communication or reproduction over ‘origination’. That is with processes of duplication and dissemination rather than the creation of original works. Writers create works of literature and designers produce the books and typographic systems that disseminate them. Painters create works of art, and designers create reproductions of them for wider distribution.
Here we have an example of two woodcuts – the risograph of medieval europe – both depicting Madonna or Mary in the Robe of Wheat Ears. In the second image, a replica from the 15th or 16th century, a portion of the inscription reads: “The image is the image of Our Lady when she was in the Temple; [...] and in this way she is depicted in the Cathedral of Milan.” As historians have pointed out, what is interesting here is that the inscription comments directly on the process of duplication: drawing our attention at first to the historical scene of Mary in the temple (“The image is the image of Our Lady”), but also to another picture in Milan, which this picture is supposed to be a picture of.
4
Much of the time, confusions around historical forms of authorship arise because we are trying to think in a very modern way about what is a very old practice. As we can begin to see in this European example, production and replication have not always been so distinct from one another. Instead, such images acted as direct ‘substitutions’ for one another, linked by a chain of replications that did not diminish the idea of its originality, but rather stood in for it (and perhaps enhanced it). Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood call this a ‘substitutional’ approach to authorship, one which views artifacts in terms of replication and, through this replication, as “belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously.” (A temple in Jerusalem, a Cathedral in Milan, and a church in Germany where it was found?). The power of the image is derived not from the figure of the original named author, so much as the many anonymous authors who have produced and reproduced these historical substitutions.
This ‘substitutional’ mode is counterposed to the ‘performative’ mode of authorship. As Nagel and Wood write: “To describe the authored work as a performance is to emphasize its punctual, time sensitive quality. [The] work restages the given and creates an impression of novelty.” Here what is emphasized is not the manner in which a given artwork reproduces the past, but instead how it restages it to intentionally produce a novel effect. “The author does not simply deliver a preexisting packet of information but generates something that did not exist before.” Something new.
5
Madonna of the Yarnwinder Leondaro Da Vinci (c16th)
This idea of the performance formed the basis of artistic value for early humanists and renaissance men like Leonardo da Vinci, who saw the singularity of the artist as underwriting the singularity (and the significance) of their work. In the 15th and 16th century he wrote of painting as the highest of all sciences for this reason: “Painting alone remains noble, it alone honors its author and remains precious and unique…”. For Da Vinci, and other artists of the High Renaissance, a humanist philosophy came to define the power of authorship, elevating the performance of the individual artist to a historic level: “...[intervening] in time by performing a work.”
Here we can see a novel evolution of the image of the Madonna, similar to the woodcuts of Mary in the Robe of Wheat Ears but in many ways completely transformed: the composition, the setting, the materiality, the use of linear perspective. Many aspects of the painting render an image unmistakably authored by Leonardo da Vinci, and this fact – that it is made by Da Vinci – becomes as important to the work as what it depicts.
6
Various reproductions of Madonna of the Yarnwinder
Through this understanding of authorship we see, over the course of European art history, the concept of a cannon forming – one infamously composed of white, male, western-european artists (which you will remember from your work in ‘Whose History’ last year). In the case of painting, we can find evidence of this canonization quite simply through the number of copies made of a single painting. In the case of Madonna of the Yarnwinder, almost forty copies survive, many painted in the century after its original production. (Which was a lot for the 15th century!)
7
The problem of the cannon is, however, not only its lack of diversity however, but also that – through its structure, ‘by design’ – it frames the preconditions of interpretation, critique and inquiry entirely around the figure of the author. If you think of a timeline of art history – or the history of graphic design – one tends to imagine it as a straight line punctuated by historic figures, authors and artists. Is it possible to imagine it in another way?
8 & 9
In his essay The Death of the Author – which really is central to this whole debate – Barthes challenges this historic centrality of the author, writing that (9): “The author is a modern figure” – which is to say a historically determined figure, and therefore capable of change – “a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages, [...]·it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the 'human person'.” And that, by virtue of this prestige, a critic’s “...explanation of a work is always sought in the [person] who produced it, as if it were always in the end, [...] the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.”
10
Returning to Rock’s essay, he explains the problem or at least the limitations with this dependence on the author: “...the author as origin, authority and ultimate owner of the text guards against free will of the reader. Transferring the authority of the text back over to the author contains and categorises the work, narrowing the possibilities for interpretation. The figure of the author reconfirms the traditional idea of the genius creator; the status of the creator frames the work and imbues it with mythical value.” And this is, of course, true not only of text or painting – but any form of cultural production open to free interpretations, including design work.
11 – 13
Mnemosyne Atlas, Aby Warburg (1925—1929)
Panel 39 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, Aby Warburg (1925—1929)
Mnemosyne Atlas, Aby Warburg (1925—1929)
However, at the beginning of the 20th Century there were some who were working to design an alternate framework for interpreting these historical works of creative practice and history itself. For most of us today, it’s natural to look at many pictures at the same time. We do it every day via internet searches and digital pinup boards.
But viewing fine art pictures in this nonlinear way, with no accompanying text and outside of a museum, was radical 100 years ago. This is partly what makes Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne (nemosenee) (the goddess of memory) Atlas,” in English, an encyclopedic collection of almost 1,000 images, so significant.
Warburg, a German art historian and cultural theorist, worked on the atlas from 1925 until his death in 1929. To make it, he took reproductions of artworks and images of coins, celestial maps, calendars and genealogical tables, as well as advertisements posters and postage stamps, and pinned them to wooden boards covered with black cloth. He rearranged the panels in his library in Hamburg and used them in lectures, and wanted to publish the atlas as a book.” 2
In this way Warburg sought not to create a linear timeline of art historical practice, focused on styles and authors, but instead a non-linear atlas, focused on recurring motifs from antiquity to the present day and how they continue to condition and inform contemporary life. That is why, in his collection, we see postage stamps next to Greek coins, advertisements next to historic sculptures.
What Warburg is interested in here is not the author but the reader. In the process of producing the atlas he decentres the historic authors of the work he reproduces, and even himself as an author of the atlas, instead producing a resource for others to interpret their own history in a radically new way.
14
In this he echoes the sentiment of Roland Barthe’s Death of the Author: “...a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”
15
In a more explicitly design-oriented context, Ellen Lupton builds on this theme in her essay The Designer as Producer. She writes that, as designers, “There exist opportunities to seize control—intellectually and economically—of the means of production, and to share that control with the reading public, empowering them to become producers as well as consumers of meaning. As Benjamin phrased it in 1934, the goal is to turn “readers or spectators into collaborators.”” Giving us a goal to work towards as designers engaged in authoring our own work.
As Warburg’s atlas shows, design practice often sits between these different modes of temporality and authorship, the substitutive and the performative – trying to work with the affordances of each. More, perhaps, than in fields of fine art or literature, design is concerned with the reader, the audience – and through this concern does not tend to author individual works so much as systems of understanding other works. The idea of a cannon, for example, is the result of a design process. One that goes on to condition future acts of design – some call this idea ‘ontological design’.
16
Over the course of this journey from the 15th to the 21st century we see many reversals take place. From a collective, mysterious ‘substitutional’ mode of medieval authorship to an individualistic ‘performative’ mode in the renaissance. In the 20th century we see attempts by Barthes, Warburg, Lupton and others to challenge this individualistic framing, looking to engage the reader directly in the production of meaning within creative practice.
This is in part why the production of archives, collections and systems for remixing previous work have taken a central role in how we think about contemporary design practice.