#not just a subject as a discursive entity that is produced by a subject that is ruled in the process of being produced as discursive

[lost-kinn]

so since we’re all talking about the pale king, i’d like to talk about the moment you see the pale king and realize Hey @ Team Cherry Why’s He So God Damn Short?

i’d like to pose the idea that it is crucial in any coming-of-age story to realize that your parents are people too, because this is what enables you to grow past them and cease to be defined by them.

and if there was ever a coming-of-age story, it’d be hollow knight. it’s the story about the knight growing up, finding out who they are, and becoming their most realized self--which might be returning to the greater void, or becoming the shade lord, depending on your opinion on which ending is the “True” ending. 

but growing up is, as hollow knight recognizes, not only reconciling yourself with your parents. it’s an act of reconciling who you are in relation to your society, to your peers, to your place and history, and religions if they’re involved in any of the aforementioned things.

so just to put that out there: i do think that one of the big narrative arcs of hollow knight is for the knight to grow up, and the rest of this argument follows that one of the big goals of the game is charting the knight’s journey in growing up.

for a child to grow up, they have to realize that their parents are not infallible.

and in order for a person to self-actualize themselves outside of the totalizing influence of a state or god, they also have to realize that their societies and their gods are not infallible.

it’s a very good thing, then, that the pale king is a triple-whammy of three of the most prevalent patriarchal figures of all time: Patriarch, God, and State.  

firstly, i want to highlight that when it comes to fathers, there’s a pretty common narrative that because a child is so young, all they know is their father and their father’s influence (or their parent’s influence, alternatively). their parent’s influence is totalizing.

in the process of having such an all-encompassing influence on their child and their child’s world, the parent creates their child, both biologically and in the act of raising their child.

it’s the issue of “raising” that hollow knight does a really good job of expanding.

think about your own childhood. was it necessarily your parents who had complete influence over you? considering that most of us spend seven hours in school every day, can we say that our parents are most influential, even if our parents were very involved in our lives (to say nothing of people with less involved parents)?

think about the way the government structured your schooling. even if you went to private school, the government still had standardized tests. if you went to public school, the state had a say in everything you learned, the people you were in contact with, even what you wore and what you ate.

if you spent any time in church, religion had a direct impact on your life. but even if you didn’t, religion shaped the history of the country you’re in, shapes the way that you probably think about the world, shapes the values you hold, just by osmosis.

when it comes to creating (“raising”) a young person, hollow knight rightfully pings three sources: parentage/family, state, and god:

1) their influence is usually complete and all-encompassing. particularly in a monarchy, government rule and influence is complete and supreme. in conceptualizations of god, gods are omnipotent and omniscient. for a young child, their parent’s influence is similarly complete.

2) gods are the creation myth of how everything came to be, and the way that the world should be. states will usually also tell you something similar; the american government spoonfeeds a particular history about the american revolution, for example, and posits a set of values such as freedom, individuality, and meritocracy, and all of these values can be difficult to see alternatives to if you’ve never known anything different. similarly, a parent will also provide for you a genesis story—quite literally, your parent fucked your other parent and then you happened—and also impose a set of values.

3) because of these previous two points, family, god, and state are the processes by which people are created, as a direct consequence of the all-encompassing influence they wield.

in hallownest, these influences are easy to see. gods are so prevalent for the sheer extent of their influence, their ability to shape their followers and their subjects to their will (e.g. unn and the mosskin, grimm and the grimm troupe). the extent of hallownest’s government was so strong that its monarch was revered as a god. the actual subjects of the city of tears are physically molded to the king’s will, and the followers of unn, the grimm troupe, and the radiance are all physically altered by the god’s influence. vespa commands a similar control over her hive even in death, even though she’s only a queen and not a god.

the expansiveness of god’s influence is also what aligns god so well with the state, of course; they’re hugely influential, they tell you why the world is the way it is, and they also tell you the way the world should be, brooking (usually) no argument.

we can see this easily paralleled with the child’s point of view of their parent when they’re very young; unable to see past their parent’s influence, their parent’s influence is totalizing.

    of course, the reason why it’s important to see that influence and to name the sources of these influences is because this pattern of influencing the world had some pretty disastrous effects for literally everyone.

a lot of hollow knight is realizing that the kingdom-state of hallownest gave you, the knight, a VERY short end of a societal bargain.

like. that society killed you (the knight), and your siblings, so that it could maintain itself.

hallownest is a Fucked Up Place, one that structured its entire society to give you, the knight, a REALLY short end of a bargain. your society--the kingdom of hallownest--did you, the knight, a huge fucking dirty.

here’s the thing about tying father, god, and state together: it provides the player with personal, ideological, and political reasons to say, “fuck this system.”

it collapses the knight’s coming of age story as a young child into an adult with other storylines, such as the knight’s ascension to godhood and the killing of god herself, and knight’s ascension to kinghood and overthrowing the last vestiges of hallownest (also known as being a revolutionary).

it’s not just that your personal father fucked up—it’s the realization that the entire society has done you wrong, and needs to be either fixed or surpassed. at the very least, it needs to be recognized for its shortcomings. (again, remember that it’s not just a parent who raises a child; it’s an entire society that has a hand in it.)

the pale king becomes the focus of that, even though we know that there were multiple other people who were involved in the plan--the white lady, for one, but it seems like even ogrim was aware of the plan to sacrifice thk, and deemed it an acceptable sacrifice so that hallownest could maintain its power. 

in short, the pale king becomes the embodiment of all of these plotlines in one person.

he gives give the state’s power a face and a name, and that’s not incorrect, per se, since hallownest is a monarchy. he gives godhood a face and a name.

the pale king is a character that says there is no divide between political and personal. it is all personal. the state if our father, god is the state, and if we want to settle the score for the wrongs that have been done to us (and i mean us as both the knight and us as players), then we need to start looking at family, god, and state.

and in hollow knight, the narrative has neatly combined all of these into one character.

    ultimately, the reason why it’s so important to embody father, state, and god all in the same body is because then the issue becomes manageable.

and by manageable, i mean SHORT.

(firstly, i should add that it’s not like the coalescing of father, state, and god is uncommon. if you wanna know how common it is, take a look at that old joke about how the final boss of any JRPG is either god, your father, or both. for a really prominent cultural example, take a look at none other than gendo ikari, who’s shinji’s father, the director of the instution that runs shinji’s life (“state”), and aspires to either kill god or become god or both, depending on your interpretation of evangelion.

and hollow knight brings up this conflation of father, state, and god in a lot of other ways, which i think is important to note. it’s not like the pale king has a monopoly on it. see: the hunter’s remark where he says that the sum of his being goes to the knight because he has “no children, no subjects, no followers.” see also: grimm, who’s an excellent foil to the pale king in this way; he is the master/monarch of his troupe (state), he is a god and The Singular God of his domain, and he’s also a literal father. like, that last bit is almost the entire point of the grimm troupe DLC.)

but returning to my point, the pale king embodies all three at once partly because he then because easily targetable.

it’s like that old adage they say about the monster in a horror film—the monster is only scary up until the point that you see it, and realize that it has a corporeal body that you can kill. (monster theory operates on this, anyway—monsters put a vague, incorporeal anxiety into physical body, which you can then confront.)

but also think about it in terms of government. locating the state in a single person makes it easier to oppose, easier for you to locate its “source.” think about a lot of governments today: their “rulers” are more dispersed, but therefore are more dispersed, and therefore society is more difficult to revolutionize. locating everything within the pale king cuts down the entire idea of The State to a human size.

and think about it terms of god, too. god’s been discussed to death--possibly literally--for centuries. nietzsche declared god dead in 1882. hegel posited that god was only a reflection of ourselves, in that we have created the world around us with the power innate to human beings, and then created god to house that power and use that power against us. god’s been dying for a long-ass time, and it’s been a huge source of both liberation and anxiety, because if there’s no god to keep the world together, what the fuck are we supposed to do? at least when there was a god that ran everything, we had someone to be fucking pissed at when shit went wrong.

and then you put all three of these into a physical body—

—and he’s SHORT.

ITTY BITTY.

TEENY TINY.

and then to add on to the fact that he’s short—poke around the white palace and the extra lore, and you realize that the pale king would have lost in a fight to the radiance because he wasn’t invincible, and that he was desperate for a solution, and that he made some good decisions and some fucking awful decisions, and his influence on the world was insane in its reach but he was still a person who walked on two legs and had a child and a wife and probably actually felt some kind of positive emotion for both of them. this is the part where we realize that the pale king is not infallible, and isn’t some cartoon villain who controlled everything everywhere.

the moment you see the pale king with your own eyes is seeing that the Very Society You Live In, the same society that fucked you over so horrendously, was made by a person who was fallible and even weak like you. this is the culmination of the storyline of the knight as someone who, literally, overthrows the last vestiges of hallownest, and surpasses the society that victimized them.

god was made--or maybe is--a person like you. this is the culmiation of the storyline of the knight who kills god and becomes their own god in the godmaster ending.

your parents are people like you. this is the culmination of the storyline in which the knight grows up.

you were made by people like you. the processes by which you were made are not beyond your power.

the process of growing up, as described by hollow knight, is empowerment. it’s realizing that you have more control than you thought.

like a child realizing that their parent is human for the first time, they realize that their parent’s influence, the world created by their parent, is not infallible or invincible. they realize that their parent’s influence on them is vast, but has a limit. and that this isn’t terrifying or awful, but is a freeing experience. they realize that their parent’s influence can be escaped, destroyed, or surpassed.

in the act of recognizing the humanity of the people who created you, you can recognize firstly the limitations of their power, and the extent of your own.

if they could do those sorts of great feats while also being a fallible person, then so can you.

the playing field becomes equal. they were a person. you’re a person. 

if the pale king is a person, then the pale king is no longer a cataclysmic event that happened to you (the knight). and the instant the pale king is no longer a chaotic, incomprehensible event that Happened To You, you can remove yourself from the position of a passive receptor of someone else’s actions.

you (the knight) are not simply void to be molded by a god, or a knight to be molded by a king, or a child to be molded by your father. you, the knight, are a person.

you, the knight, the victim of this situation, don’t just have to lie back then and let yourself be defined by your own persecutor, or the society that threw you away, and no longer have to be defined purely by your own tragedy.

you have to become more than your tragedy to become a person, but before you can do that, you have to realize that your persecutor had his limits too. you have to define yourself, and your own abilities and your own power, beyond the scope of your persecution.

the pale king needs to be more than the cause of a tragedy to let you do that. he needs to have limits, and in order to grow past him, his limits have to be seen for what they are.

now, let me say for the record: you need never forgive a persecutor, and personally speaking, i don’t recommend it. but i’d propose that it is required to their strengths, their failings, their mistakes, and their limitations, that you can really start to grow past them. and that hollow knight makes this requirement pretty literal, in that you have to see the pale king (and the white lady) to get voidheart.

you can only realize yourself and your potential when you’ve seen, for your own eyes, the remaining husk of your god, your state, and your father, sitting small and shriveled and dead on his throne. 

[giving-an-account-on-youtube]

The apology video 101

The public apology on YouTube operates on a somewhat consistent set of rules, and differs from public apologies on conventional media outlets.

These videos are made by influencers, or “cults of 'micro-celebrity‘”, who become influential to a population by promoting themselves as idols (Cocker and Cronin 456). Cocker and Cronin propose new media micro-celebrities, also known as ‘the common people’, differ from their predecessors on traditional media outlets due to a “communal interdependence between the contemporary culted figure and his/her community of followers” (457). However, the prevalence of charisma leaves their followers vulnerable to manipulation, as influencers often act not for the better good but for their own personal gain (458).

This may help explain why the apology takes on a new form, as the persuasion and manipulation tactics these micro-celebrities have acquired allow them to avoid addressing the real consequences of their actions, leading to the least amount of actual remorse felt and expressed to their audience. 

Let’s learn about how to make an apology video via PewDiePie, an influencer who has a ton of experience doing so:

PewDiePie’s Golden Rules

1. Emphasize that making this video has been painful. Use a sigh for further emphasis.

2. Never admit you were wrong, in fact shift blame at every chance you get! You can also underplay your mistake as much as possible, for instance, emphasizing that it was 6 years ago. However, also emphasize that you take full responsibility.

3. Victimize yourself: “I’m getting cyberbullied; I have received death threats”

Oh, and these aren’t officially stated as rules but:

4. Get someone else to write a script so that it doesn’t sound like you, since you’re bound to mess up. Also use a different tone than your usual videos.

Look at Logan’s energy intonation and language in his apology:

vs. literally ANY other video of him. Just watch the first minute of this masterpiece:

&

5. Treat your apology like your audition for the lead role in the Greek tragedy put on as your eighth grade school play.

Note: it’s obvious that PewDiePie is being sarcastic and that these manipulation tactics are antirules. Or, are they? Perhaps they operate effectively when they are used subtly as to not exceed human consciousness, and when they are not used conjunction. They are after all persuasion strategies that can evoke empathy and the illusion of remorse more than an abrupt “sorry”, regardless if they are unethical and avoidant strategies.

In other words:

An apology video is a convention on YouTube in which an influencer deemed corrupt creates an often scripted, performative account of their mistake that was uncovered. Often pressured into doing so, they are hailed into taking an account of themselves. What they try to conceal is that often, the blame is redirected to someone else while they seemingly are still held accountable.  As well, they often have lawyers and PR teams telling them exactly what to say. This and other manipulation tactics can work to effectively say nothing in the entire video while seemingly addressing the audience in an intimate way.

Why would anyone worship such figures? They sound horrible.

Beyond the entertainment value inherent in their charisma, a sort of in-group mentality forms among the culted followers where their self-worth and status are elevated from being part of the collective, and they come to recognize that they are crucial factor to creating this figure in the first place (Cocker and Cronin 462). I guess you could say, they are in effect playing God.

This mentality is damaging as the followers actually are not actually part of a  democracy, since there is an unequal axis of power between the consumer and influencer (qtd. in Cocker and Cronin 458). As Galloway states, network bidirectionality, once thought to promote democracy, promotes the control and subjection of users (291).

This is carried out through a decentralized network on YouTube where power imbalance is promoted. It is a system where “hierarchical star [centralized] subnetworks, the hubs of which are interconnected via backbone links into a larger amalgam” (288). YouTube itself is not decentralized, but the operations of its users make it appears as a variant of such where users aggregate on multiple channels to be controlled and influenced simultaneously by many different users at once.

According to Jagoda, it is not the form of the network that determines whether or not there is democracy; networks themselves exist in a long tradition of control and capture, leading to inevitable reconstructions of these apparatuses (14). However, Jagoda does not discount the ability for subjects to oppose this power.

In this sense, followers may revolt against an influencer if they feel they are being manipulated. This may be partially based on the fact that their self-identities are threatened by ‘discursive and productive monopolies’ and thus they react to defend themselves (qtd in Cocker and Cronin 467). Criticism towards an influencer can evolve into ‘cancel culture’, an organized boycott of a channel in which former followers delegitimize and “destroy the force, effectiveness or validity of” the influencer (qtd. in Asmelash). This is accomplished by posting hate videos, nasty comments about the person, refusing to watch their videos, unsubscribing from their channel, allegations about the person (both true and false), and/or an overall divestment from their goods and services (e.g. tickets to their live show, their ‘merch’, etc.)

While the radical cases of followers revolting on YouTube marks the potential for power to be redistributed on YouTube, it must be noted that the power structure followers are revolting against are not merely symbolic: they are too in fact people. While influencers fabricate stories and manipulate their audience, the psychological warfare of an army of criticism can lead to negative consequences. For instance, take this high schooler’s account of being cancelled: “I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things. That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?” (Yar and Bromwich)

It’s also unhealthy for those who are doing the cancelling, as Amitay states: "For the people who are doing the cancelling, in the short run it makes them feel good. It gives them an illusion of power, of control, of virtue. Afterward, the people with insight realize, 'I haven't actually done anything good. I'm avoiding my own issues” (qtd. in Cross Country Checkup).

Cancelling someone also prevents the perpetrator from making the decision to improve from their mistakes (Yar and Bromwich). However, it could also be said that cancelling can’t prevent them from repeating their actions again in the future, nor can it reverse the damage imposed while that person was in power (Asmelash). Finally, it is clear that in many cases cancelling someone doesn’t actually work (Ellis). This means that in effect the force of cancel culture is an illusion.

So, if cancelling someone isn’t a solution, then maybe influencers must become more aware of how they impact their followers, and when apologizing address their followers in a way that they at least seem to take responsibility for their actions.

Why give an account of oneself in the first place?

The way that the “I” gives an account of itself is from a position determined by norms and structures external to itself (Butler 4). Thus the self constructs a hypothesis about its emergence, hailed by the structures of power under a ‘system of justice and punishment’ that operate on it (5). Nietzsche believes "accountability follows only upon an accusation... one made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if causality can be established. And we become reflective upon ourselves, accordingly, through fear and terror” (Butler 6). This reflects why influencers may not be regretful of their actions; according to Nietzsche, the driving force behind their account is not primarily moral.

Giving an account of oneself admits the possibility of one’s wrongdoings...

The narrative form of taking an account of oneself implies that we accept causality, albeit not necessarily blame, of our negative effect on others (6). While this does not necessarily mean giving an account is an apology, it links itself intrinsically to a mode of relationality with the world. Maybe an account is a somewhat moral form after all.

Foucault also argues that an account is not a mode of operant conditioning but an outward mimesis of moral standards (Butler 8). The subject’s creation of the self in relation to moral standards is increasingly complex and unresolvable:

“The norm does not produce the subject as its necessary effect, nor is the subject fully free to disregard the norm that inaugurates its reflexivity; one invariably struggles with conditions of one's own life that one could not have chosen. If there is an operation of agency or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free. Its struggle or primary dilemma is to be produced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way. This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one's life, a struggle —an agency—is also made possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of un-freedom” (Butler 10).

The self is always operating in a bidirectionality with others, and is not always aware of its actions, thus operates as a fractured and fluid entity that cannot fully be transparent to itself (10-11). One’s inability to fully account for oneself is insignificant in the service of one’s duty to use that account to relate to others (14). In fact, the self is a fractured, imaginary phenomenon, that only exists when it is linguistically constituted in address to another (16).

So, when an influencer gives an account of themself, they must acknowledge their subjection in the world and reliance on other people, as the social systems around them and the vastness of the other (their audience) can thrust them into this action. They can be constitutive in their self-knowledge only to a certain extent. Hence, we realize that although followers have no control over the actions of the influencer in terms of the future, in the instant of demanding they take account of oneself they have momentarily interrupted the axis of power, engaging in a linguistic levelling of the field.

Okay… So how does one actually give an account of oneself?

The ultimate goals of taking an account of oneself is to use a personal narrative to respond to said accusations. In this process you should use persuasion and accept or deny blame (6). Butler also claims that silence can be expressive in questioning. Does this seem familiar? Yes, PewDiePie seems to somewhat agree! While he may be sarcastic that you should redirect all blame (as he truly believes you should take your responsibility for your actions), Butler’s radical claim is that you can do either.

Further, since the “I” has access only to a partial and fractured account of its history, any narrative of its motives is a fictional creative exercise of making sense of past actions (21). While this means that any justification is made acceptable, since it is not possible to accurately represent the self, there should be no claims to authenticity made during an account.

Taking an account is therefore not a willing act in knowledge but a construction of the self given performative aspirations. It is a relationality with the other through speech act, affective content and persuasion. We could say, in this sense, no influencer is thus capable of learning from their mistakes, as their mistakes too will be forgotten and therefore reconstructed. Any claims to the future become redundant phantasms.

The performative

When influencers claim they will improve on their past actions, they are thus not ontologically accountable for doing so. Any speech act should be regarded as performative.

How shall we construct this performative?

Let’s look at Miller’s essay Performativity​ as​ Performance​/​​ Performativity ​as​Speech ​Act:​​ Derrida’s​ Special​ Theory ​of ​Performativity.

Austin’s theory of a ‘felicitous performative’ indicates the interlocutor as accountable for any speech act due to an enduring stable self (Miller 227). This already discounts the theory from being compatible with an account of oneself. 

Thus we may look at its dichotomous theory, Butler’s performativity doctrine that any act is in effect valid since selfhood is an illusion and thus we can enact any identity we choose (Miller 229). This seems to be more compatible with her own conclusions of taking an account of oneself. 

Derrida would be a contender except that his theory of performativity accepts the possibility of bringing an idea into the world through a speech act, denoting there is causality and truth value to a declaration (Miller 230).

James Charles’ first apology *FAIL*

James Charles redirects his apology to extreme, avoiding taking an account of himself like the plague. This video is total bucket of hogwash, as he effectively does nothing to persuade people as to think he has remorse the entire video. The effect is that nobody believes him or takes him seriously.

Let’s go through each of PewDiePie’s and Butler’s tips on taking an account of oneself and see how James held up:

PewDiePie

1. Emphasize that making this video has been painful. Use a sigh for further emphasis.

James risks looking disingenuous as his sighs were so overexaggerated and frankly ridiculous. PewDiePie notices at one point James starts to smile but blows out air very slowly to try to mask it.

2. Never admit you were wrong, shift blame at every chance you get but also emphasize that you take full responsibility. You can also underplay your mistake as much as possible, for instance, emphasizing that it was 6 years ago.

James claims he takes total blame for what he did, but arguably the most ridiculous part of the video is when he contradicts this saying he already spoke his truth yet says receipts don’t matter. While this is seemingly in line with PewDiePie’s suggestion to contradict yourself, the less offensive way to do this is to redirect responsibility by blaming someone else, rather than underplaying the mistake to the point where you fail to address it.

3. Victimize yourself: “I’m getting cyberbullied; I have received death threats”

While he doesn’t exactly do this, the fact that he says he’s upset that he disappointed people who look up to him as a role model could be a more covert way to blame audience for shaming him.

As well, by saying ‘there will always be people who don’t believe me’ is in effect victimizing himself as someone that will be unjustly hated, while ignoring the fact he has given them no reason to believe him in the first place.

Butler

1. “use your narrative to respond to said accusations. In this process you should use persuasion and accept or deny blame” (6).

Perhaps the largest fault of James’ video is his claim that any account of himself is irrelevant. He thus reveals that relationality is not important to him, and denies the psychic damage he has imposed on those involved in the scandals and his audience, who no longer trust him.

James addresses that he has brought up ‘the Coachella Situation’ twice already and that addressing it again is irrelevant. Yet, a lot of his viewers were left confused as this was their first time hearing about the situation, so the video is in effect pointless.

James also says: “At this point, the truth really does not matter.” He is in effect implying that he has no position on his own innocence, which is exactly what Butler cautions against.

He never discusses any specific damage he has caused to people, nor addresses any of the rumours made about him. He even goes so far to address his mother, who has nothing to do with the situation, and praise her for raising him well. Neither PewDiePie nor I can begin to understand why James would address his mother over his YouTube channel instead of calling her like a normal personal. This really emphasizes how the video is overtly performative and not genuine. The least he could do is apologize to those actually affected.

James says sorry to Tati for everything he put her through over the past few weeks. But, he doesn’t apologize or address the situation with the boys he apparently harrassed to say if he is guilty or not. Nor does he apologize to his audience, who feel that he has been and continues to be disingenuous to them as well.

What’s worse is that instead of taking blame, or appearing to take blame before redirecting the accusations, for actually doing what he did (whatever that is, he didn’t address it!), he takes blame for telling people about it. This really makes him look like he is hiding something, rather than taking responsibility.

2. Silence can be expressive in questioning.

Yes, this is true, however, the amount of silence and parsing that James uses comes across disingenuous. Especially in comparison to his other videos where he talks twice the speed of an average YouTuber. Thus the constructedness of the video becomes apparent. PewDiePie’s subscribers mentioned this on his reaction video, for instance Summer H-B commented “I never thought the day would come when someone would tell James to speak faster, but here we are.”

3. There should be no claims to authenticity made.

James opens up the video by saying “A lot of my career over the past few years has been about me making mistakes and trying to learn from them... But I have always tried.”

This may seem genuine enough, but he then proceeds to say “I wish I could say this is the last time I’m going to make a mistake, but it won’t be.”

If Jameds claims that he tries to get better from his mistakes, he should not move on to claim he will continue to make them. From Butler’s account of performativity, it is okay to make promises as long as they remain empty and believable. As long as the other person can make sense of them being true, there is no reason to ask them to believe you. The onus falls on them to make a decision, as you have no moral ground to be telling the truth. While we know that the self has no real access to authenticity, to a naïve audience a promise of improvement may make his claim to authenticity admissible. Yet, his seeming contradiction takes away any validity from his account.

As he proceeds, he says “I know that I will disappoint people more and more as I continue to grow every single day.”

This phrasing camouflages itself as an attempt to improve the self, but ultimately is exposed by Foucault’s acknowledgement that the self is incapable of improvement without the constitution external to itself by others. In other words, to say you will attempt to improve yourself but do not expect the support of others poses a contradiction, as it is impossible to become a whole person without relationality. Thus any promise of improvement is at once deconstructed by the others conception of the self. James may be phrasing it this way to subconsciously excuse himself from any further reactionary and damaging actions he takes. So any attempt that James made in this video at self redemption are futile. This becomes particularly apparent when PewDiePie deconstructs his actions in the video itself.

PewDiePie’s suggestions to James:

Keep your message clear and concise, the quicker a message is to say the quicker it will spread.

Actually address the situation for those who are not aware, otherwise you do not gain the opportunity for support. As well, it invites people to come up with false accusations since you are not defending yourself.

Don’t say ‘there will always be people who don’t believe me’ because you are trying to persuade these people! You’re putting blame on them which is insulting and further victimizing yourself.

An apology video should be about and addressed to the people you are apologizing to.

James says "Other times I have acted out of impulse,” but nothing has changed in this video. By uploading it the day after Tati’s, it further adds to his image as reactionary and is released when people are still at their height of anger and prejudice against you. It would be wiser to take time to process the situation and come up with a mature and thoughtful response.

PewDiePie suggests a better narrative for James to use: “becoming famous so young has caused a negative impact on my personality and now that I realize that I will work to repair myself and the relationships I have damaged. I’m sorry to everyone that I hurt and disappointed. What I did was wrong.”

From these suggestions, it seems that PewDiePie is advocating for a performative technique to save James’ self-image. However, he closes the video by saying the best technique is to just be honest. This seems to contradict himself, as he admits that he does not know a ton about James or anything at all about the situation, yet he constructs a narrative about how James can ‘be honest’. So, maybe by ‘honesty’ PewDiePie really means to simply take account of oneself in a way that will be positively received by the Other.

Next up... James’ new and improved apology!

In this video he took Pewdiepie’s advice for making a better apology video (not self-improvement), shockingly. First we will go over paranoid reading and the function of knowledge as performative to fully make sense of his strategy.

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Michael J. Golec

One or Three Chairs: An Interview with Michael J. Golec

  Keeley Haftner: Let’s start broader and then go to specifics. In general, your overall project seems to be about defying categorization –for example, you’ve taken an interest in the work of Wendell Castle who muddies design, furniture, sculpture, craft, and you’re the department head of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute but specialize in the study of graphic and typographic design as also seen through art historic and philosophic lenses. Is defying categories important to you?

Michael J. Golec: I think there’s a historical question in there, which is that certain categories are accepted at particular moments in the history of any form of cultural production. As a design historian who was trained as an art historian, one of the things I’m interested in is where within the broader discourses have art and design been understood as distinct practices, and where they overlap. In terms of the discipline, design history is a relatively new field compared to art history. Many of my colleagues within the field are very careful about distinguishing content, topics, and objects that are unique to design. Such objects can’t always count as art objects, and therefore would not require an art historical interpretation based on art historical methodologies. And so a lot of my work really tries to figure out in some ways how particular kinds of objects can circulate between different kinds of practices and while they are objectively or empirically the same object. In each field they act in different ways that are specific to that field. In my book, Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art, I see the Brillo Box as a non-material entity that circulates between art, philosophy, and design. Identifying that object, the Brillo Box, really depends on the epistemological culture that exists for that object, or in which that object is produced. One of the things I was interested in was how three distinct fields of inquiry could produce three distinct objects – a thought experiment, an artwork, and a package design – and how the three of them interpenetrate at different moments, specifically in terms of how they are discursively understood. I mean, categories shift, and while we’re defining them they will become mutable depending on what parties, practice, and epistemological communities are engaged with them. So one of the things I’ve be interested in in my work is trying to figure out where those distinctions lie, and also where they are blurred.

Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art by Michael J. Golec

KH: In the introduction to Brillo Box Archive, you talk about the image of James Harvey, the abstract expressionist painter and designer who was photographed in front of his painting holding his Brillo box after Warhol had made it famous as an artwork, which strikes me as a very apt example of how these categories overlap. Some have spoken of the sensual qualities of Warhol’s Brillo Box and how they are missing in discussions around his work – is the sensual nature of that piece of interest to you?

MG: I think that certain epistemological communities are more interested in the sensual qualities of objects than others, which again is historically contingent. One of the things that Arthur Danto was very invested in was arguing that the material quality of the Brillo Box doesn’t matter, since for all intents and purposes the Brillo Box raises a question in terms of perceptual skepticism. If two things look alike, Danto argues, we can’t judge them based on how they look, so we have to resort to some other kind of framing. For him it’s a theory and history of art that directs us towards identifying specific objects befitting the category of art. For artists and for designers of that period, there are particular material qualities that make a difference in how one comes to terms with those objects. So that was one of the issues I was trying to work out. For Danto’s brand of philosophical aesthetics, materiality doesn’t matter at all. This means that his artworks could be anything relative to how they are received, understood, or framed. He would have been very much in opposition to something like a post-modern deconstructive interest in indexicality, or the materiality of the sign. So that would have distinguished him from other philosophers and critics of his generation.

KH: I’d like to transition from the framing of objects to the framing of the human form in the in the work of Ray and Charles Eames. Through some of the courses you’ve taught over the years, including “Eames Overload” you’ve spent time discussing their work and their affect on design principles globally. Can you talk a bit about how their design principles bring together politics, technologies and aesthetics, and whether or not these principles hold up today?

MG: Ray and Charles Eames are an interesting topic for me. I started working on them while I was teaching at Iowa State University, and saw their work as a way for me to bring design students, engineers and scientists together into a single classroom. So originally I used a very media focused method to teach the first course, which focused on the Eames’ as master manipulators of all kinds of media. I haven’t taught the course for quite some time, but in the meantime I’ve been sort of reintroduced to their work through a colleague of mine, Todd Cronan, who wrote a phenomenal review of a publication called An Eames Anthology, which is a collection of their writings that came out through the Yale University Press. And it’s Cronan’s thinking about the Eames’s in relation to a set of intentions that he perceived they held that got me to reread this material, this time attending to particular statements that Charles in particular would make. I started to notice a repetition of the emphasis on human scale in relationship to the explosion of information that Eames and his colleagues perceived at that particular moment in the post-war era. So I’m currently rethinking that class. For example, one of the questions I’ve always had with Charles is: why the focus on furniture when he was trained as an architect? What it always goes back to is that furniture is a discrete object where designs can be put to the test very quickly, and judged. And I’m starting to believe that this interest in judgement for Charles has a lot more to do with case-by-case situations. The Eames’ were never interested in providing universal design that fit everyone. My new thesis would be that, for them, every interaction with an object, exhibition, or film that they produced required individuals to account for how they relate to that particular thing themselves. It’s that kind risk and coordination that I think allows a certain suppleness to what could be called “Eames Design.”

The other issue that I’m really interested in is that almost all designers who are revered in design history belong to some kind of “school” – especially in architecture, but also to some extent in design. In any overall survey of architects or designers you can find them being organized into different groups that we would call a school, in which there’s a discernable method, and there are discernable principles of design that are executed and then exemplified or embodied within the work itself. The Eames’ didn’t fit neatly into that framework, and I find it ironic that probably one of the most famous design teams in the history of the United States is a couple that belonged to no school. Again this is something I’m just coming to, and am not trying to reconcile that relationship, but rather to make the claim that “non-school” is a kind of school of thought in design that we’ve inherited today. I think this is so interesting, because the Eames’ provide a method that is not a method. It is a kind of post-method approach to design. This counters the trend toward Design Thinking that has been embraced within the past twenty years, and its relationship to the schools of design, engineering, and business. Design Thinking is meant to provide a method for designing that enhances interface between the object and the user. The Eames would not agree that there would be any such method. They believed that there are only case-by-case situations, and that every design, just like every statement, has to be received either felicitously or infelicitously in order for it to work. There is no guarantee, ever. Just as we use conventions so that we understand each other when we speak, there are conventions involved in say, chairs, for example, and those conventions create a certain vernacular that effects the colloquial versions of a chair. To design a different style requires a great amount of risk, and there’s no guarantee that any sitter will receive the intention of the designer that this is something meant to be sat on.

“Powers of Ten”, Charles and Ray Eames, 1977

KH: And the whole over-arching conversation makes me think of their Powers of Ten film, with regard to scale and the individual, but also through their interdisciplinary and borderline scientific way of considering the human subject.

MG: I’ve published a few articles and chapters in books on Powers of Ten. My first impulse was to see that everything known or possibly unknown would be connected to the two human figures on the blanket, which one might call a remnant of the Frankfurt School form of criticism. I’m beginning to rethink that; I don’t think it’s what they really intended. Everyone needs to be reminded that when I say “Eames,” I mean the entire network of individuals that worked within the studio of which Charles and Ray were the most visible; they had armies of designers and non-designers working with them to make what they made. But in Powers of Ten – even though we might call the couple on the blanket the culmination of human scale, there is always a question at every power above and below them. What is the relationship to the human social sphere? I think it’s nicely framed by the picnic blanket. It’s an image of human sociality, however normative it may have appeared in 1968 and then in 1977. But then again, the Eames’ never took norms for granted, which could easily be and was contested by a host of social critics. I think the Eames’s were suggesting that this couple is a convention that is commonly understood, and it is not absolute. So at every layer one can imagine, even down to the molecular and cellular, this prompts a question of what the normative relationship might be. Thus every single power poses a question in terms of the stability of that couple sitting on the blanket. Like I said, you’ve caught me at a moment that I’m really just formulating this, and the class that I’m teaching this semester will help me to frame and expand on that further.

KH: It strikes me that convention has a lot to do with how typography and pictograms are created, and how they evolve over time. Both have been interests of yours… For your Graham Foundation Fellowship (2014-15) you spent a lot of time looking at the REA’s (Rural Electrification Administration) archives in reference to New Deal era attempts to electrify homes between the late 1930s and early 1940s. You say there is a gap in the literature in regard to how design and pictographs were used as opposed to photographs, which by contrast is well studied. What was the convention of the pictograph able to do in this campaign that a photograph could not?

MG: That’s been an ongoing project that I’ve worked on intermittently over the years. It started as part of general history of graphic design course that I taught beginning at Iowa State, and that I still teach here at SAIC when I’m teaching my full load and not chairing. Since I started teaching it the textbooks for the course have changed, or there have been new books that have been introduced into the bibliography. But for a very long time such books included a series of nine posters that were produced for the REA by a designer by the name of Lester Beall. It was commonplace to refer in histories of graphic design to Beall’s pictographs as having a twofold impact in terms of design in the United States. The first was that he chose pictographs because rural Americans were illiterate, so therefore those pictograms or pictographs were easily understood as a kind of basic language. They’re also praised because they’re seen as having integrated European style Modernism into the American scene of design, and famously the isotypes of Otto Neurath of the 1930s and 1940s were seen as a source of inspiration for Beall. When these posters are depicted they’re never shown in the environment in which they were posted – they’re always just floating posters isolated without any background or framing for their reception. So when I introduced this idea of their being used for illiterate Americans – my students, many of whom grew up on farms in rural Iowa, said, “That doesn’t’ seem right – why would you assume that all farmers were illiterate?” So I said, “Great question, I’ll look into it.” And it happened that Iowa State, being a Land Grant and agriculture school, had all the REA news publications from the exact year Beall produced the posters. So I did some research and came back to the students to let them know that in fact the posters were not always or exclusively shown in the context of a rural public; they were often shown first and foremost in Washington, D.C. at REA events, and they were also often shown at county fairs, state fairs, and the like. The logic would be, in order to electrify the farm you would have to own your farm, and most rural Americans who owned farms had some education, definitely high school, and were not necessarily illiterate, itinerant farmers. So there was a mix-up in terms of who the audience might be for those posters. I also found that earlier the REA had employed a person by the name of Rudolf Modley to use a pictograph as a way of communicating statistical information to farmers. So the result of this was that Beall was responding to an already existing graphic vernacular for the communication of information to farmers who could read. So that started to open up the possibility that pictograms were a sophisticated form of communication. We can no longer argue that Beall was using pictograms to introduce Americans to European Modernism, since we had already adopted those images as part of communications.

KH: And they do appear quite sophisticated in their design – I’m looking at them and they’re quite beautiful…

“Radio,” Lester Beall, 1937. Photo courtesy of Michael J. Golec

Shifting gears… you’ve jokingly described yourself as an anachronism at SAIC in the sense that by researching 19th and early- to mid- 20th century histories such as these you are researching ‘ancient history’ in the eyes of your contemporary-minded graduate students and colleagues. I’m wondering if you take a position to ardently focus histories that predate the 21st century, or if you also consider current art and design history in your research?

MG: [Laughs] It’s open, certainly. With regard to anachronism, my point really is that the idea of the contemporary is only relative to a past, and that this past persists in our contemporary conventional uses of all kinds of forms of communication. So as an historian, I think this idea of thinking about the now as unrelated to a past is problematic, and requires I think a great deal more scrutiny. I mean, whatever we think of as “the present” is inundated with “the past” and “the future” simultaneously, so it can be erroneous to make absolute distinctions between them. The typeface that you might be looking at in a contemporary design or art catalogue is an anachronism in and of itself. It may be newly designed, but reproducing it requires technologies that are centuries old. Even though there have been advances in print technology, they’re’ not so advanced that they don’t require ink and some form of depression or coating of paper with a form. So I like to open students up to the possibility of understanding that the present is interwoven with past technologies, conventions, and traditions, and to convey to them that the only way they can think about the future is in a way predicated on those kind of interweavings, if that makes sense at all.

KH: Totally! I’d like to address my particular interests, which are perhaps a little less to do with your specific research focuses but were the means by which I came to in the first place – thinking through Object Oriented Ontology. A chapter of yours in a recent publication, “Heidegger’s ‘From the Dark Opening:’ Image Theory for Human and Nonhuman Worlds” in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, sounds as though it likely hovers around this topic.

MG: For that chapter in that book I was interested in the relationship that Heidegger might have to something most often referred to as Actor-Network Theory, and particularly in this confusion of objects with materiality that happens in design history, but to some extent also in art history. I want to undo is this notion of material and object as being thought of as synonymous. In object theory, if you follow a straightforward account as it���s been put forward by like someone like Graham Harman, such theorists are not interested in the material nature of objects at all. Their argument, specifically Harman’s, is that what is “real” in relationship to objects is always forever and irreducibly withdrawn from us. With the discussion Heidegger presents in terms of Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes, I wanted to work out what the underlying networks not immediately visible were – the invisible networks that Heidegger opened up behind the work. Viewed in that way, the painting itself is a glimmer of the vast networks of agricultural production and labour that would have related to late 19th and early 20th century farming.

“Shoes”, Vincent van Gogh, Oil on canvas,18″ x 21 3/4″, 1888. Image: Public Domain.

KH: Well, I’m looking forward to reading that! What is it that is preoccupying you most these days in your recent research?

MG: I’ve contributed a chapter entitled “Distributing Stresses”, to a forthcoming book Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things, that’s related to the Eames. It addresses the question of sympathy and the DCM chair that the Eames’ produced. It discusses the chair as a means of caring for the body and the psyche of post-war humans. This was written a little bit before I started thinking about Eames and human scale, but I think it directly addresses that theme. So that’s one project. The other is an article related to the “Champ Fleury in the Machine Age” lecture I gave at the School of Visual Arts a few years back, which is currently under review for the Journal of Design History.

One of the things I’m interested in that is this notion of tradition and convention in typography – both its complex story and looking at what would count as modern verses traditional typography in the early 20th century. So I see someone like Bruce Rogers as a modern typographer, someone who is not only interested in reviving old forms but is also interested in addressing a tradition of typography as it relates to his contemporary moment. And this is something I think all designers do, whether they’re typographers or furniture and product designers. The reason why the question of what constitutes “modern” is perhaps more compelling in typography is because it raises the question “what typography isn’t traditional?” In the West we’ve already basically agreed for hundreds of years what our essential alphabet is, and since the 16th century we’ve embraced Roman style letterforms. We don’t really use Fraktur; when forms like this have been revived from the past they’ve been aligned with particular ideologies like National Socialism and dismissed, so we’re pretty much set. So again the question for me is when isn’t typography traditional? Attempts to modernize language like changing to Basic English and producing a universal language have never really stuck… What’s the one language that was introduced?

KH: Oh Esperanto?

MG: Yes, Esperanto! Yes, I mean even when we code computers we still use characters that are established as part of our everyday language. So the distinction in terms of what counts as traditional or what might count as contemporary have to be looked at in different ways. I would just argue that from a contemporary standpoint, someone like Rogers basically creates a new operating system for a very old form of hardware. He creates a new formatting for traditional typography and printing. And that that might be the best we can hope for in our lifetime.

Centaur (typeface), Bruce Rogers. Created 1914 and released 1929.

KH: Anything we missed?

MG: The first thing I would like to say is Keeley, I really appreciate you reaching out, and I’m quite honoured and humbled by being interviewed.

Second, on the face of it I think that there are a lot of different projects that I work on, but the thing that draws them together is my interest in how every day designers have to deal with what already exists in the world. And a problem that I think is not unique to designers, but one which applies to anyone in a creative field, is the question of how to address what already exists in order to add something that has real meaning, and conveys what you want it to convey. That’s the core of my interests throughout all the different examples I draw from. For example, the question for Beall was one of intention: what did he have to work with, and how could he produce something that was unique to his own intentions, but that still drew on an already existing graphic vernacular? And as you observed, he created something quite remarkable – something that alluded to the already existing use of pictographic communication within a bureaucratic administrative field like REA, but with much more. Now these posters exist in every major museum. You can go to the MOMA they’ll have a little design section where there’s always a Lester Beal REA poster. Or, as another example, what does someone like Rogers do when he’s asked by the Grolier Club of New York City to design a translation of Geoffrey Tory’s “Champ Fleury”? Does he try to create something that’s just a facsimile (which is how many people have approached this), or does he try to communicate something from Tory’s ideas within his contemporary moment?

Ostensibly one chair should fit us all. When the Eames’ sat down – pun intended – to design a chair, they had to think about what would count as something that would attract and afford a certain kind of human comfort – something that did not exist, but was still recognizable as something that was chair-like. They drew from history, from their own time, and from a perception of where things might go. Sometimes it’s difficult for people who look at my work to see the common thread, but that’s the source. Even the Brillo Box Archive is trying to distinguish the differences between the three “Brillo boxes”, but also to show how they’re all related. I think this is an increasingly important issue within the humanities, regardless of whether its design history, art history, history of literature and so forth: how we can acknowledge shared and different concerns, and how they can be embedded in the same object, body, or thought? That sort of openness, that acknowledgement of sameness and difference, is something that I think the humanities is well positioned to explore, and that will perhaps have some meaning for our current fractured moment so focused on differences.

KH: Well that was far too eloquent for me to add anything! [Laughs] Thanks for speaking with me, Michael.

MG: Thank you!

  Michael J. Golec is the Chair and an Associate Professor of Art and Design History in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can find his complete bio here.

Episode 95: Old Gold/Boumstein-Smalley/JMOCA

Episode 520: 10 Years of Bad at Sports! The James Elkins art history farewell party

Best Timewaster of the Week: Julian Assange Coloring Book

Episode 234: NADA 4 Awai/Blass

UCLA’s Arts Library Threatened With Closure

Thinks: Michael J. Golec published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[nofomoartworld]

Thinks: Michael J. Golec

One or Three Chairs: An Interview with Michael J. Golec

  Keeley Haftner: Let’s start broader and then go to specifics. In general, your overall project seems to be about defying categorization –for example, you’ve taken an interest in the work of Wendell Castle who muddies design, furniture, sculpture, craft, and you’re the department head of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute but specialize in the study of graphic and typographic design as also seen through art historic and philosophic lenses. Is defying categories important to you?

Michael J. Golec: I think there’s a historical question in there, which is that certain categories are accepted at particular moments in the history of any form of cultural production. As a design historian who was trained as an art historian, one of the things I’m interested in is where within the broader discourses have art and design been understood as distinct practices, and where they overlap. In terms of the discipline, design history is a relatively new field compared to art history. Many of my colleagues within the field are very careful about distinguishing content, topics, and objects that are unique to design. Such objects can’t always count as art objects, and therefore would not require an art historical interpretation based on art historical methodologies. And so a lot of my work really tries to figure out in some ways how particular kinds of objects can circulate between different kinds of practices and while they are objectively or empirically the same object. In each field they act in different ways that are specific to that field. In my book, Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art, I see the Brillo Box as a non-material entity that circulates between art, philosophy, and design. Identifying that object, the Brillo Box, really depends on the epistemological culture that exists for that object, or in which that object is produced. One of the things I was interested in was how three distinct fields of inquiry could produce three distinct objects – a thought experiment, an artwork, and a package design – and how the three of them interpenetrate at different moments, specifically in terms of how they are discursively understood. I mean, categories shift, and while we’re defining them they will become mutable depending on what parties, practice, and epistemological communities are engaged with them. So one of the things I’ve be interested in in my work is trying to figure out where those distinctions lie, and also where they are blurred.

Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art by Michael J. Golec

KH: In the introduction to Brillo Box Archive, you talk about the image of James Harvey, the abstract expressionist painter and designer who was photographed in front of his painting holding his Brillo box after Warhol had made it famous as an artwork, which strikes me as a very apt example of how these categories overlap. Some have spoken of the sensual qualities of Warhol’s Brillo Box and how they are missing in discussions around his work – is the sensual nature of that piece of interest to you?

MG: I think that certain epistemological communities are more interested in the sensual qualities of objects than others, which again is historically contingent. One of the things that Arthur Danto was very invested in was arguing that the material quality of the Brillo Box doesn’t matter, since for all intents and purposes the Brillo Box raises a question in terms of perceptual skepticism. If two things look alike, Danto argues, we can’t judge them based on how they look, so we have to resort to some other kind of framing. For him it’s a theory and history of art that directs us towards identifying specific objects befitting the category of art. For artists and for designers of that period, there are particular material qualities that make a difference in how one comes to terms with those objects. So that was one of the issues I was trying to work out. For Danto’s brand of philosophical aesthetics, materiality doesn’t matter at all. This means that his artworks could be anything relative to how they are received, understood, or framed. He would have been very much in opposition to something like a post-modern deconstructive interest in indexicality, or the materiality of the sign. So that would have distinguished him from other philosophers and critics of his generation.

KH: I’d like to transition from the framing of objects to the framing of the human form in the in the work of Ray and Charles Eames. Through some of the courses you’ve taught over the years, including “Eames Overload” you’ve spent time discussing their work and their affect on design principles globally. Can you talk a bit about how their design principles bring together politics, technologies and aesthetics, and whether or not these principles hold up today?

MG: Ray and Charles Eames are an interesting topic for me. I started working on them while I was teaching at Iowa State University, and saw their work as a way for me to bring design students, engineers and scientists together into a single classroom. So originally I used a very media focused method to teach the first course, which focused on the Eames’ as master manipulators of all kinds of media. I haven’t taught the course for quite some time, but in the meantime I’ve been sort of reintroduced to their work through a colleague of mine, Todd Cronan, who wrote a phenomenal review of a publication called An Eames Anthology, which is a collection of their writings that came out through the Yale University Press. And it’s Cronan’s thinking about the Eames’s in relation to a set of intentions that he perceived they held that got me to reread this material, this time attending to particular statements that Charles in particular would make. I started to notice a repetition of the emphasis on human scale in relationship to the explosion of information that Eames and his colleagues perceived at that particular moment in the post-war era. So I’m currently rethinking that class. For example, one of the questions I’ve always had with Charles is: why the focus on furniture when he was trained as an architect? What it always goes back to is that furniture is a discrete object where designs can be put to the test very quickly, and judged. And I’m starting to believe that this interest in judgement for Charles has a lot more to do with case-by-case situations. The Eames’ were never interested in providing universal design that fit everyone. My new thesis would be that, for them, every interaction with an object, exhibition, or film that they produced required individuals to account for how they relate to that particular thing themselves. It’s that kind risk and coordination that I think allows a certain suppleness to what could be called “Eames Design.”

The other issue that I’m really interested in is that almost all designers who are revered in design history belong to some kind of “school” – especially in architecture, but also to some extent in design. In any overall survey of architects or designers you can find them being organized into different groups that we would call a school, in which there’s a discernable method, and there are discernable principles of design that are executed and then exemplified or embodied within the work itself. The Eames’ didn’t fit neatly into that framework, and I find it ironic that probably one of the most famous design teams in the history of the United States is a couple that belonged to no school. Again this is something I’m just coming to, and am not trying to reconcile that relationship, but rather to make the claim that “non-school” is a kind of school of thought in design that we’ve inherited today. I think this is so interesting, because the Eames’ provide a method that is not a method. It is a kind of post-method approach to design. This counters the trend toward Design Thinking that has been embraced within the past twenty years, and its relationship to the schools of design, engineering, and business. Design Thinking is meant to provide a method for designing that enhances interface between the object and the user. The Eames would not agree that there would be any such method. They believed that there are only case-by-case situations, and that every design, just like every statement, has to be received either felicitously or infelicitously in order for it to work. There is no guarantee, ever. Just as we use conventions so that we understand each other when we speak, there are conventions involved in say, chairs, for example, and those conventions create a certain vernacular that effects the colloquial versions of a chair. To design a different style requires a great amount of risk, and there’s no guarantee that any sitter will receive the intention of the designer that this is something meant to be sat on.

“Powers of Ten”, Charles and Ray Eames, 1977

KH: And the whole over-arching conversation makes me think of their Powers of Ten film, with regard to scale and the individual, but also through their interdisciplinary and borderline scientific way of considering the human subject.

MG: I’ve published a few articles and chapters in books on Powers of Ten. My first impulse was to see that everything known or possibly unknown would be connected to the two human figures on the blanket, which one might call a remnant of the Frankfurt School form of criticism. I’m beginning to rethink that; I don’t think it’s what they really intended. Everyone needs to be reminded that when I say “Eames,” I mean the entire network of individuals that worked within the studio of which Charles and Ray were the most visible; they had armies of designers and non-designers working with them to make what they made. But in Powers of Ten – even though we might call the couple on the blanket the culmination of human scale, there is always a question at every power above and below them. What is the relationship to the human social sphere? I think it’s nicely framed by the picnic blanket. It’s an image of human sociality, however normative it may have appeared in 1968 and then in 1977. But then again, the Eames’ never took norms for granted, which could easily be and was contested by a host of social critics. I think the Eames’s were suggesting that this couple is a convention that is commonly understood, and it is not absolute. So at every layer one can imagine, even down to the molecular and cellular, this prompts a question of what the normative relationship might be. Thus every single power poses a question in terms of the stability of that couple sitting on the blanket. Like I said, you’ve caught me at a moment that I’m really just formulating this, and the class that I’m teaching this semester will help me to frame and expand on that further.

KH: It strikes me that convention has a lot to do with how typography and pictograms are created, and how they evolve over time. Both have been interests of yours… For your Graham Foundation Fellowship (2014-15) you spent a lot of time looking at the REA’s (Rural Electrification Administration) archives in reference to New Deal era attempts to electrify homes between the late 1930s and early 1940s. You say there is a gap in the literature in regard to how design and pictographs were used as opposed to photographs, which by contrast is well studied. What was the convention of the pictograph able to do in this campaign that a photograph could not?

MG: That’s been an ongoing project that I’ve worked on intermittently over the years. It started as part of general history of graphic design course that I taught beginning at Iowa State, and that I still teach here at SAIC when I’m teaching my full load and not chairing. Since I started teaching it the textbooks for the course have changed, or there have been new books that have been introduced into the bibliography. But for a very long time such books included a series of nine posters that were produced for the REA by a designer by the name of Lester Beall. It was commonplace to refer in histories of graphic design to Beall’s pictographs as having a twofold impact in terms of design in the United States. The first was that he chose pictographs because rural Americans were illiterate, so therefore those pictograms or pictographs were easily understood as a kind of basic language. They’re also praised because they’re seen as having integrated European style Modernism into the American scene of design, and famously the isotypes of Otto Neurath of the 1930s and 1940s were seen as a source of inspiration for Beall. When these posters are depicted they’re never shown in the environment in which they were posted – they’re always just floating posters isolated without any background or framing for their reception. So when I introduced this idea of their being used for illiterate Americans – my students, many of whom grew up on farms in rural Iowa, said, “That doesn’t’ seem right – why would you assume that all farmers were illiterate?” So I said, “Great question, I’ll look into it.” And it happened that Iowa State, being a Land Grant and agriculture school, had all the REA news publications from the exact year Beall produced the posters. So I did some research and came back to the students to let them know that in fact the posters were not always or exclusively shown in the context of a rural public; they were often shown first and foremost in Washington, D.C. at REA events, and they were also often shown at county fairs, state fairs, and the like. The logic would be, in order to electrify the farm you would have to own your farm, and most rural Americans who owned farms had some education, definitely high school, and were not necessarily illiterate, itinerant farmers. So there was a mix-up in terms of who the audience might be for those posters. I also found that earlier the REA had employed a person by the name of Rudolf Modley to use a pictograph as a way of communicating statistical information to farmers. So the result of this was that Beall was responding to an already existing graphic vernacular for the communication of information to farmers who could read. So that started to open up the possibility that pictograms were a sophisticated form of communication. We can no longer argue that Beall was using pictograms to introduce Americans to European Modernism, since we had already adopted those images as part of communications.

KH: And they do appear quite sophisticated in their design – I’m looking at them and they’re quite beautiful…

“Radio,” Lester Beall, 1937. Photo courtesy of Michael J. Golec

Shifting gears… you’ve jokingly described yourself as an anachronism at SAIC in the sense that by researching 19th and early- to mid- 20th century histories such as these you are researching ‘ancient history’ in the eyes of your contemporary-minded graduate students and colleagues. I’m wondering if you take a position to ardently focus histories that predate the 21st century, or if you also consider current art and design history in your research?

MG: [Laughs] It’s open, certainly. With regard to anachronism, my point really is that the idea of the contemporary is only relative to a past, and that this past persists in our contemporary conventional uses of all kinds of forms of communication. So as an historian, I think this idea of thinking about the now as unrelated to a past is problematic, and requires I think a great deal more scrutiny. I mean, whatever we think of as “the present” is inundated with “the past” and “the future” simultaneously, so it can be erroneous to make absolute distinctions between them. The typeface that you might be looking at in a contemporary design or art catalogue is an anachronism in and of itself. It may be newly designed, but reproducing it requires technologies that are centuries old. Even though there have been advances in print technology, they’re’ not so advanced that they don’t require ink and some form of depression or coating of paper with a form. So I like to open students up to the possibility of understanding that the present is interwoven with past technologies, conventions, and traditions, and to convey to them that the only way they can think about the future is in a way predicated on those kind of interweavings, if that makes sense at all.

KH: Totally! I’d like to address my particular interests, which are perhaps a little less to do with your specific research focuses but were the means by which I came to in the first place – thinking through Object Oriented Ontology. A chapter of yours in a recent publication, “Heidegger’s ‘From the Dark Opening:’ Image Theory for Human and Nonhuman Worlds” in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, sounds as though it likely hovers around this topic.

MG: For that chapter in that book I was interested in the relationship that Heidegger might have to something most often referred to as Actor-Network Theory, and particularly in this confusion of objects with materiality that happens in design history, but to some extent also in art history. I want to undo is this notion of material and object as being thought of as synonymous. In object theory, if you follow a straightforward account as it’s been put forward by like someone like Graham Harman, such theorists are not interested in the material nature of objects at all. Their argument, specifically Harman’s, is that what is “real” in relationship to objects is always forever and irreducibly withdrawn from us. With the discussion Heidegger presents in terms of Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes, I wanted to work out what the underlying networks not immediately visible were – the invisible networks that Heidegger opened up behind the work. Viewed in that way, the painting itself is a glimmer of the vast networks of agricultural production and labour that would have related to late 19th and early 20th century farming.

“Shoes”, Vincent van Gogh, Oil on canvas,18″ x 21 3/4″, 1888. Image: Public Domain.

KH: Well, I’m looking forward to reading that! What is it that is preoccupying you most these days in your recent research?

MG: I’ve contributed a chapter entitled “Distributing Stresses”, to a forthcoming book Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things, that’s related to the Eames. It addresses the question of sympathy and the DCM chair that the Eames’ produced. It discusses the chair as a means of caring for the body and the psyche of post-war humans. This was written a little bit before I started thinking about Eames and human scale, but I think it directly addresses that theme. So that’s one project. The other is an article related to the “Champ Fleury in the Machine Age” lecture I gave at the School of Visual Arts a few years back, which is currently under review for the Journal of Design History.

One of the things I’m interested in that is this notion of tradition and convention in typography – both its complex story and looking at what would count as modern verses traditional typography in the early 20th century. So I see someone like Bruce Rogers as a modern typographer, someone who is not only interested in reviving old forms but is also interested in addressing a tradition of typography as it relates to his contemporary moment. And this is something I think all designers do, whether they’re typographers or furniture and product designers. The reason why the question of what constitutes “modern” is perhaps more compelling in typography is because it raises the question “what typography isn’t traditional?” In the West we’ve already basically agreed for hundreds of years what our essential alphabet is, and since the 16th century we’ve embraced Roman style letterforms. We don’t really use Fraktur; when forms like this have been revived from the past they’ve been aligned with particular ideologies like National Socialism and dismissed, so we’re pretty much set. So again the question for me is when isn’t typography traditional? Attempts to modernize language like changing to Basic English and producing a universal language have never really stuck… What’s the one language that was introduced?

KH: Oh Esperanto?

MG: Yes, Esperanto! Yes, I mean even when we code computers we still use characters that are established as part of our everyday language. So the distinction in terms of what counts as traditional or what might count as contemporary have to be looked at in different ways. I would just argue that from a contemporary standpoint, someone like Rogers basically creates a new operating system for a very old form of hardware. He creates a new formatting for traditional typography and printing. And that that might be the best we can hope for in our lifetime.

Centaur (typeface), Bruce Rogers. Created 1914 and released 1929.

KH: Anything we missed?

MG: The first thing I would like to say is Keeley, I really appreciate you reaching out, and I’m quite honoured and humbled by being interviewed.

Second, on the face of it I think that there are a lot of different projects that I work on, but the thing that draws them together is my interest in how every day designers have to deal with what already exists in the world. And a problem that I think is not unique to designers, but one which applies to anyone in a creative field, is the question of how to address what already exists in order to add something that has real meaning, and conveys what you want it to convey. That’s the core of my interests throughout all the different examples I draw from. For example, the question for Beall was one of intention: what did he have to work with, and how could he produce something that was unique to his own intentions, but that still drew on an already existing graphic vernacular? And as you observed, he created something quite remarkable – something that alluded to the already existing use of pictographic communication within a bureaucratic administrative field like REA, but with much more. Now these posters exist in every major museum. You can go to the MOMA they’ll have a little design section where there’s always a Lester Beal REA poster. Or, as another example, what does someone like Rogers do when he’s asked by the Grolier Club of New York City to design a translation of Geoffrey Tory’s “Champ Fleury”? Does he try to create something that’s just a facsimile (which is how many people have approached this), or does he try to communicate something from Tory’s ideas within his contemporary moment?

Ostensibly one chair should fit us all. When the Eames’ sat down – pun intended – to design a chair, they had to think about what would count as something that would attract and afford a certain kind of human comfort – something that did not exist, but was still recognizable as something that was chair-like. They drew from history, from their own time, and from a perception of where things might go. Sometimes it’s difficult for people who look at my work to see the common thread, but that’s the source. Even the Brillo Box Archive is trying to distinguish the differences between the three “Brillo boxes”, but also to show how they’re all related. I think this is an increasingly important issue within the humanities, regardless of whether its design history, art history, history of literature and so forth: how we can acknowledge shared and different concerns, and how they can be embedded in the same object, body, or thought? That sort of openness, that acknowledgement of sameness and difference, is something that I think the humanities is well positioned to explore, and that will perhaps have some meaning for our current fractured moment so focused on differences.

KH: Well that was far too eloquent for me to add anything! [Laughs] Thanks for speaking with me, Michael.

MG: Thank you!

  Michael J. Golec is the Chair and an Associate Professor of Art and Design History in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can find his complete bio here.

Episode 456: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon

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Top 5 Weekend! (1/17-1/19)

Propeller Fund Announces 2015 Awardees

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Thinks: Michael J. Golec

One or Three Chairs: An Interview with Michael J. Golec

  Keeley Haftner: Let’s start broader and then go to specifics. In general, your overall project seems to be about defying categorization –for example, you’ve taken an interest in the work of Wendell Castle who muddies design, furniture, sculpture, craft, and you’re the department head of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute but specialize in the study of graphic and typographic design as also seen through art historic and philosophic lenses. Is defying categories important to you?

Michael J. Golec: I think there’s a historical question in there, which is that certain categories are accepted at particular moments in the history of any form of cultural production. As a design historian who was trained as an art historian, one of the things I’m interested in is where within the broader discourses have art and design been understood as distinct practices, and where they overlap. In terms of the discipline, design history is a relatively new field compared to art history. Many of my colleagues within the field are very careful about distinguishing content, topics, and objects that are unique to design. Such objects can’t always count as art objects, and therefore would not require an art historical interpretation based on art historical methodologies. And so a lot of my work really tries to figure out in some ways how particular kinds of objects can circulate between different kinds of practices and while they are objectively or empirically the same object. In each field they act in different ways that are specific to that field. In my book, Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art, I see the Brillo Box as a non-material entity that circulates between art, philosophy, and design. Identifying that object, the Brillo Box, really depends on the epistemological culture that exists for that object, or in which that object is produced. One of the things I was interested in was how three distinct fields of inquiry could produce three distinct objects – a thought experiment, an artwork, and a package design – and how the three of them interpenetrate at different moments, specifically in terms of how they are discursively understood. I mean, categories shift, and while we’re defining them they will become mutable depending on what parties, practice, and epistemological communities are engaged with them. So one of the things I’ve be interested in in my work is trying to figure out where those distinctions lie, and also where they are blurred.

Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art by Michael J. Golec

KH: In the introduction to Brillo Box Archive, you talk about the image of James Harvey, the abstract expressionist painter and designer who was photographed in front of his painting holding his Brillo box after Warhol had made it famous as an artwork, which strikes me as a very apt example of how these categories overlap. Some have spoken of the sensual qualities of Warhol’s Brillo Box and how they are missing in discussions around his work – is the sensual nature of that piece of interest to you?

MG: I think that certain epistemological communities are more interested in the sensual qualities of objects than others, which again is historically contingent. One of the things that Arthur Danto was very invested in was arguing that the material quality of the Brillo Box doesn’t matter, since for all intents and purposes the Brillo Box raises a question in terms of perceptual skepticism. If two things look alike, Danto argues, we can’t judge them based on how they look, so we have to resort to some other kind of framing. For him it’s a theory and history of art that directs us towards identifying specific objects befitting the category of art. For artists and for designers of that period, there are particular material qualities that make a difference in how one comes to terms with those objects. So that was one of the issues I was trying to work out. For Danto’s brand of philosophical aesthetics, materiality doesn’t matter at all. This means that his artworks could be anything relative to how they are received, understood, or framed. He would have been very much in opposition to something like a post-modern deconstructive interest in indexicality, or the materiality of the sign. So that would have distinguished him from other philosophers and critics of his generation.

KH: I’d like to transition from the framing of objects to the framing of the human form in the in the work of Ray and Charles Eames. Through some of the courses you’ve taught over the years, including “Eames Overload” you’ve spent time discussing their work and their affect on design principles globally. Can you talk a bit about how their design principles bring together politics, technologies and aesthetics, and whether or not these principles hold up today?

MG: Ray and Charles Eames are an interesting topic for me. I started working on them while I was teaching at Iowa State University, and saw their work as a way for me to bring design students, engineers and scientists together into a single classroom. So originally I used a very media focused method to teach the first course, which focused on the Eames’ as master manipulators of all kinds of media. I haven’t taught the course for quite some time, but in the meantime I’ve been sort of reintroduced to their work through a colleague of mine, Todd Cronan, who wrote a phenomenal review of a publication called An Eames Anthology, which is a collection of their writings that came out through the Yale University Press. And it’s Cronan’s thinking about the Eames’s in relation to a set of intentions that he perceived they held that got me to reread this material, this time attending to particular statements that Charles in particular would make. I started to notice a repetition of the emphasis on human scale in relationship to the explosion of information that Eames and his colleagues perceived at that particular moment in the post-war era. So I’m currently rethinking that class. For example, one of the questions I’ve always had with Charles is: why the focus on furniture when he was trained as an architect? What it always goes back to is that furniture is a discrete object where designs can be put to the test very quickly, and judged. And I’m starting to believe that this interest in judgement for Charles has a lot more to do with case-by-case situations. The Eames’ were never interested in providing universal design that fit everyone. My new thesis would be that, for them, every interaction with an object, exhibition, or film that they produced required individuals to account for how they relate to that particular thing themselves. It’s that kind risk and coordination that I think allows a certain suppleness to what could be called “Eames Design.”

The other issue that I’m really interested in is that almost all designers who are revered in design history belong to some kind of “school” – especially in architecture, but also to some extent in design. In any overall survey of architects or designers you can find them being organized into different groups that we would call a school, in which there’s a discernable method, and there are discernable principles of design that are executed and then exemplified or embodied within the work itself. The Eames’ didn’t fit neatly into that framework, and I find it ironic that probably one of the most famous design teams in the history of the United States is a couple that belonged to no school. Again this is something I’m just coming to, and am not trying to reconcile that relationship, but rather to make the claim that “non-school” is a kind of school of thought in design that we’ve inherited today. I think this is so interesting, because the Eames’ provide a method that is not a method. It is a kind of post-method approach to design. This counters the trend toward Design Thinking that has been embraced within the past twenty years, and its relationship to the schools of design, engineering, and business. Design Thinking is meant to provide a method for designing that enhances interface between the object and the user. The Eames would not agree that there would be any such method. They believed that there are only case-by-case situations, and that every design, just like every statement, has to be received either felicitously or infelicitously in order for it to work. There is no guarantee, ever. Just as we use conventions so that we understand each other when we speak, there are conventions involved in say, chairs, for example, and those conventions create a certain vernacular that effects the colloquial versions of a chair. To design a different style requires a great amount of risk, and there’s no guarantee that any sitter will receive the intention of the designer that this is something meant to be sat on.

“Powers of Ten”, Charles and Ray Eames, 1977

KH: And the whole over-arching conversation makes me think of their Powers of Ten film, with regard to scale and the individual, but also through their interdisciplinary and borderline scientific way of considering the human subject.

MG: I’ve published a few articles and chapters in books on Powers of Ten. My first impulse was to see that everything known or possibly unknown would be connected to the two human figures on the blanket, which one might call a remnant of the Frankfurt School form of criticism. I’m beginning to rethink that; I don’t think it’s what they really intended. Everyone needs to be reminded that when I say “Eames,” I mean the entire network of individuals that worked within the studio of which Charles and Ray were the most visible; they had armies of designers and non-designers working with them to make what they made. But in Powers of Ten – even though we might call the couple on the blanket the culmination of human scale, there is always a question at every power above and below them. What is the relationship to the human social sphere? I think it’s nicely framed by the picnic blanket. It’s an image of human sociality, however normative it may have appeared in 1968 and then in 1977. But then again, the Eames’ never took norms for granted, which could easily be and was contested by a host of social critics. I think the Eames’s were suggesting that this couple is a convention that is commonly understood, and it is not absolute. So at every layer one can imagine, even down to the molecular and cellular, this prompts a question of what the normative relationship might be. Thus every single power poses a question in terms of the stability of that couple sitting on the blanket. Like I said, you’ve caught me at a moment that I’m really just formulating this, and the class that I’m teaching this semester will help me to frame and expand on that further.

KH: It strikes me that convention has a lot to do with how typography and pictograms are created, and how they evolve over time. Both have been interests of yours… For your Graham Foundation Fellowship (2014-15) you spent a lot of time looking at the REA’s (Rural Electrification Administration) archives in reference to New Deal era attempts to electrify homes between the late 1930s and early 1940s. You say there is a gap in the literature in regard to how design and pictographs were used as opposed to photographs, which by contrast is well studied. What was the convention of the pictograph able to do in this campaign that a photograph could not?

MG: That’s been an ongoing project that I’ve worked on intermittently over the years. It started as part of general history of graphic design course that I taught beginning at Iowa State, and that I still teach here at SAIC when I’m teaching my full load and not chairing. Since I started teaching it the textbooks for the course have changed, or there have been new books that have been introduced into the bibliography. But for a very long time such books included a series of nine posters that were produced for the REA by a designer by the name of Lester Beall. It was commonplace to refer in histories of graphic design to Beall’s pictographs as having a twofold impact in terms of design in the United States. The first was that he chose pictographs because rural Americans were illiterate, so therefore those pictograms or pictographs were easily understood as a kind of basic language. They’re also praised because they’re seen as having integrated European style Modernism into the American scene of design, and famously the isotypes of Otto Neurath of the 1930s and 1940s were seen as a source of inspiration for Beall. When these posters are depicted they’re never shown in the environment in which they were posted – they’re always just floating posters isolated without any background or framing for their reception. So when I introduced this idea of their being used for illiterate Americans – my students, many of whom grew up on farms in rural Iowa, said, “That doesn’t’ seem right – why would you assume that all farmers were illiterate?” So I said, “Great question, I’ll look into it.” And it happened that Iowa State, being a Land Grant and agriculture school, had all the REA news publications from the exact year Beall produced the posters. So I did some research and came back to the students to let them know that in fact the posters were not always or exclusively shown in the context of a rural public; they were often shown first and foremost in Washington, D.C. at REA events, and they were also often shown at county fairs, state fairs, and the like. The logic would be, in order to electrify the farm you would have to own your farm, and most rural Americans who owned farms had some education, definitely high school, and were not necessarily illiterate, itinerant farmers. So there was a mix-up in terms of who the audience might be for those posters. I also found that earlier the REA had employed a person by the name of Rudolf Modley to use a pictograph as a way of communicating statistical information to farmers. So the result of this was that Beall was responding to an already existing graphic vernacular for the communication of information to farmers who could read. So that started to open up the possibility that pictograms were a sophisticated form of communication. We can no longer argue that Beall was using pictograms to introduce Americans to European Modernism, since we had already adopted those images as part of communications.

KH: And they do appear quite sophisticated in their design – I’m looking at them and they’re quite beautiful…

“Radio,” Lester Beall, 1937. Photo courtesy of Michael J. Golec

Shifting gears… you’ve jokingly described yourself as an anachronism at SAIC in the sense that by researching 19th and early- to mid- 20th century histories such as these you are researching ‘ancient history’ in the eyes of your contemporary-minded graduate students and colleagues. I’m wondering if you take a position to ardently focus histories that predate the 21st century, or if you also consider current art and design history in your research?

MG: [Laughs] It’s open, certainly. With regard to anachronism, my point really is that the idea of the contemporary is only relative to a past, and that this past persists in our contemporary conventional uses of all kinds of forms of communication. So as an historian, I think this idea of thinking about the now as unrelated to a past is problematic, and requires I think a great deal more scrutiny. I mean, whatever we think of as “the present” is inundated with “the past” and “the future” simultaneously, so it can be erroneous to make absolute distinctions between them. The typeface that you might be looking at in a contemporary design or art catalogue is an anachronism in and of itself. It may be newly designed, but reproducing it requires technologies that are centuries old. Even though there have been advances in print technology, they’re’ not so advanced that they don’t require ink and some form of depression or coating of paper with a form. So I like to open students up to the possibility of understanding that the present is interwoven with past technologies, conventions, and traditions, and to convey to them that the only way they can think about the future is in a way predicated on those kind of interweavings, if that makes sense at all.

KH: Totally! I’d like to address my particular interests, which are perhaps a little less to do with your specific research focuses but were the means by which I came to in the first place – thinking through Object Oriented Ontology. A chapter of yours in a recent publication, “Heidegger’s ‘From the Dark Opening:’ Image Theory for Human and Nonhuman Worlds” in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, sounds as though it likely hovers around this topic.

MG: For that chapter in that book I was interested in the relationship that Heidegger might have to something most often referred to as Actor-Network Theory, and particularly in this confusion of objects with materiality that happens in design history, but to some extent also in art history. I want to undo is this notion of material and object as being thought of as synonymous. In object theory, if you follow a straightforward account as it’s been put forward by like someone like Graham Harman, such theorists are not interested in the material nature of objects at all. Their argument, specifically Harman’s, is that what is “real” in relationship to objects is always forever and irreducibly withdrawn from us. With the discussion Heidegger presents in terms of Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes, I wanted to work out what the underlying networks not immediately visible were – the invisible networks that Heidegger opened up behind the work. Viewed in that way, the painting itself is a glimmer of the vast networks of agricultural production and labour that would have related to late 19th and early 20th century farming.

“Shoes”, Vincent van Gogh, Oil on canvas,18″ x 21 3/4″, 1888. Image: Public Domain.

KH: Well, I’m looking forward to reading that! What is it that is preoccupying you most these days in your recent research?

MG: I’ve contributed a chapter entitled “Distributing Stresses”, to a forthcoming book Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things, that’s related to the Eames. It addresses the question of sympathy and the DCM chair that the Eames’ produced. It discusses the chair as a means of caring for the body and the psyche of post-war humans. This was written a little bit before I started thinking about Eames and human scale, but I think it directly addresses that theme. So that’s one project. The other is an article related to the “Champ Fleury in the Machine Age” lecture I gave at the School of Visual Arts a few years back, which is currently under review for the Journal of Design History.

One of the things I’m interested in that is this notion of tradition and convention in typography – both its complex story and looking at what would count as modern verses traditional typography in the early 20th century. So I see someone like Bruce Rogers as a modern typographer, someone who is not only interested in reviving old forms but is also interested in addressing a tradition of typography as it relates to his contemporary moment. And this is something I think all designers do, whether they’re typographers or furniture and product designers. The reason why the question of what constitutes “modern” is perhaps more compelling in typography is because it raises the question “what typography isn’t traditional?” In the West we’ve already basically agreed for hundreds of years what our essential alphabet is, and since the 16th century we’ve embraced Roman style letterforms. We don’t really use Fraktur; when forms like this have been revived from the past they’ve been aligned with particular ideologies like National Socialism and dismissed, so we’re pretty much set. So again the question for me is when isn’t typography traditional? Attempts to modernize language like changing to Basic English and producing a universal language have never really stuck… What’s the one language that was introduced?

KH: Oh Esperanto?

MG: Yes, Esperanto! Yes, I mean even when we code computers we still use characters that are established as part of our everyday language. So the distinction in terms of what counts as traditional or what might count as contemporary have to be looked at in different ways. I would just argue that from a contemporary standpoint, someone like Rogers basically creates a new operating system for a very old form of hardware. He creates a new formatting for traditional typography and printing. And that that might be the best we can hope for in our lifetime.

Centaur (typeface), Bruce Rogers. Created 1914 and released 1929.

KH: Anything we missed?

MG: The first thing I would like to say is Keeley, I really appreciate you reaching out, and I’m quite honoured and humbled by being interviewed.

Second, on the face of it I think that there are a lot of different projects that I work on, but the thing that draws them together is my interest in how every day designers have to deal with what already exists in the world. And a problem that I think is not unique to designers, but one which applies to anyone in a creative field, is the question of how to address what already exists in order to add something that has real meaning, and conveys what you want it to convey. That’s the core of my interests throughout all the different examples I draw from. For example, the question for Beall was one of intention: what did he have to work with, and how could he produce something that was unique to his own intentions, but that still drew on an already existing graphic vernacular? And as you observed, he created something quite remarkable – something that alluded to the already existing use of pictographic communication within a bureaucratic administrative field like REA, but with much more. Now these posters exist in every major museum. You can go to the MOMA they’ll have a little design section where there’s always a Lester Beal REA poster. Or, as another example, what does someone like Rogers do when he’s asked by the Grolier Club of New York City to design a translation of Geoffrey Tory’s “Champ Fleury”? Does he try to create something that’s just a facsimile (which is how many people have approached this), or does he try to communicate something from Tory’s ideas within his contemporary moment?

Ostensibly one chair should fit us all. When the Eames’ sat down – pun intended – to design a chair, they had to think about what would count as something that would attract and afford a certain kind of human comfort – something that did not exist, but was still recognizable as something that was chair-like. They drew from history, from their own time, and from a perception of where things might go. Sometimes it’s difficult for people who look at my work to see the common thread, but that’s the source. Even the Brillo Box Archive is trying to distinguish the differences between the three “Brillo boxes”, but also to show how they’re all related. I think this is an increasingly important issue within the humanities, regardless of whether its design history, art history, history of literature and so forth: how we can acknowledge shared and different concerns, and how they can be embedded in the same object, body, or thought? That sort of openness, that acknowledgement of sameness and difference, is something that I think the humanities is well positioned to explore, and that will perhaps have some meaning for our current fractured moment so focused on differences.

KH: Well that was far too eloquent for me to add anything! [Laughs] Thanks for speaking with me, Michael.

MG: Thank you!

  Michael J. Golec is the Chair and an Associate Professor of Art and Design History in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can find his complete bio here.

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Thinks: Michael J. Golec published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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Thinks: Michael J. Golec

One or Three Chairs: An Interview with Michael J. Golec

  Keeley Haftner: Let’s start broader and then go to specifics. In general, your overall project seems to be about defying categorization –for example, you’ve taken an interest in the work of Wendell Castle who muddies design, furniture, sculpture, craft, and you’re the department head of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute but specialize in the study of graphic and typographic design as also seen through art historic and philosophic lenses. Is defying categories important to you?

Michael J. Golec: I think there’s a historical question in there, which is that certain categories are accepted at particular moments in the history of any form of cultural production. As a design historian who was trained as an art historian, one of the things I’m interested in is where within the broader discourses have art and design been understood as distinct practices, and where they overlap. In terms of the discipline, design history is a relatively new field compared to art history. Many of my colleagues within the field are very careful about distinguishing content, topics, and objects that are unique to design. Such objects can’t always count as art objects, and therefore would not require an art historical interpretation based on art historical methodologies. And so a lot of my work really tries to figure out in some ways how particular kinds of objects can circulate between different kinds of practices and while they are objectively or empirically the same object. In each field they act in different ways that are specific to that field. In my book, Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art, I see the Brillo Box as a non-material entity that circulates between art, philosophy, and design. Identifying that object, the Brillo Box, really depends on the epistemological culture that exists for that object, or in which that object is produced. One of the things I was interested in was how three distinct fields of inquiry could produce three distinct objects – a thought experiment, an artwork, and a package design – and how the three of them interpenetrate at different moments, specifically in terms of how they are discursively understood. I mean, categories shift, and while we’re defining them they will become mutable depending on what parties, practice, and epistemological communities are engaged with them. So one of the things I’ve be interested in in my work is trying to figure out where those distinctions lie, and also where they are blurred.

Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art by Michael J. Golec

KH: In the introduction to Brillo Box Archive, you talk about the image of James Harvey, the abstract expressionist painter and designer who was photographed in front of his painting holding his Brillo box after Warhol had made it famous as an artwork, which strikes me as a very apt example of how these categories overlap. Some have spoken of the sensual qualities of Warhol’s Brillo Box and how they are missing in discussions around his work – is the sensual nature of that piece of interest to you?

MG: I think that certain epistemological communities are more interested in the sensual qualities of objects than others, which again is historically contingent. One of the things that Arthur Danto was very invested in was arguing that the material quality of the Brillo Box doesn’t matter, since for all intents and purposes the Brillo Box raises a question in terms of perceptual skepticism. If two things look alike, Danto argues, we can’t judge them based on how they look, so we have to resort to some other kind of framing. For him it’s a theory and history of art that directs us towards identifying specific objects befitting the category of art. For artists and for designers of that period, there are particular material qualities that make a difference in how one comes to terms with those objects. So that was one of the issues I was trying to work out. For Danto’s brand of philosophical aesthetics, materiality doesn’t matter at all. This means that his artworks could be anything relative to how they are received, understood, or framed. He would have been very much in opposition to something like a post-modern deconstructive interest in indexicality, or the materiality of the sign. So that would have distinguished him from other philosophers and critics of his generation.

KH: I’d like to transition from the framing of objects to the framing of the human form in the in the work of Ray and Charles Eames. Through some of the courses you’ve taught over the years, including “Eames Overload” you’ve spent time discussing their work and their affect on design principles globally. Can you talk a bit about how their design principles bring together politics, technologies and aesthetics, and whether or not these principles hold up today?

MG: Ray and Charles Eames are an interesting topic for me. I started working on them while I was teaching at Iowa State University, and saw their work as a way for me to bring design students, engineers and scientists together into a single classroom. So originally I used a very media focused method to teach the first course, which focused on the Eames’ as master manipulators of all kinds of media. I haven’t taught the course for quite some time, but in the meantime I’ve been sort of reintroduced to their work through a colleague of mine, Todd Cronan, who wrote a phenomenal review of a publication called An Eames Anthology, which is a collection of their writings that came out through the Yale University Press. And it’s Cronan’s thinking about the Eames’s in relation to a set of intentions that he perceived they held that got me to reread this material, this time attending to particular statements that Charles in particular would make. I started to notice a repetition of the emphasis on human scale in relationship to the explosion of information that Eames and his colleagues perceived at that particular moment in the post-war era. So I’m currently rethinking that class. For example, one of the questions I’ve always had with Charles is: why the focus on furniture when he was trained as an architect? What it always goes back to is that furniture is a discrete object where designs can be put to the test very quickly, and judged. And I’m starting to believe that this interest in judgement for Charles has a lot more to do with case-by-case situations. The Eames’ were never interested in providing universal design that fit everyone. My new thesis would be that, for them, every interaction with an object, exhibition, or film that they produced required individuals to account for how they relate to that particular thing themselves. It’s that kind risk and coordination that I think allows a certain suppleness to what could be called “Eames Design.”

The other issue that I’m really interested in is that almost all designers who are revered in design history belong to some kind of “school” – especially in architecture, but also to some extent in design. In any overall survey of architects or designers you can find them being organized into different groups that we would call a school, in which there’s a discernable method, and there are discernable principles of design that are executed and then exemplified or embodied within the work itself. The Eames’ didn’t fit neatly into that framework, and I find it ironic that probably one of the most famous design teams in the history of the United States is a couple that belonged to no school. Again this is something I’m just coming to, and am not trying to reconcile that relationship, but rather to make the claim that “non-school” is a kind of school of thought in design that we’ve inherited today. I think this is so interesting, because the Eames’ provide a method that is not a method. It is a kind of post-method approach to design. This counters the trend toward Design Thinking that has been embraced within the past twenty years, and its relationship to the schools of design, engineering, and business. Design Thinking is meant to provide a method for designing that enhances interface between the object and the user. The Eames would not agree that there would be any such method. They believed that there are only case-by-case situations, and that every design, just like every statement, has to be received either felicitously or infelicitously in order for it to work. There is no guarantee, ever. Just as we use conventions so that we understand each other when we speak, there are conventions involved in say, chairs, for example, and those conventions create a certain vernacular that effects the colloquial versions of a chair. To design a different style requires a great amount of risk, and there’s no guarantee that any sitter will receive the intention of the designer that this is something meant to be sat on.

“Powers of Ten”, Charles and Ray Eames, 1977

KH: And the whole over-arching conversation makes me think of their Powers of Ten film, with regard to scale and the individual, but also through their interdisciplinary and borderline scientific way of considering the human subject.

MG: I’ve published a few articles and chapters in books on Powers of Ten. My first impulse was to see that everything known or possibly unknown would be connected to the two human figures on the blanket, which one might call a remnant of the Frankfurt School form of criticism. I’m beginning to rethink that; I don’t think it’s what they really intended. Everyone needs to be reminded that when I say “Eames,” I mean the entire network of individuals that worked within the studio of which Charles and Ray were the most visible; they had armies of designers and non-designers working with them to make what they made. But in Powers of Ten – even though we might call the couple on the blanket the culmination of human scale, there is always a question at every power above and below them. What is the relationship to the human social sphere? I think it’s nicely framed by the picnic blanket. It’s an image of human sociality, however normative it may have appeared in 1968 and then in 1977. But then again, the Eames’ never took norms for granted, which could easily be and was contested by a host of social critics. I think the Eames’s were suggesting that this couple is a convention that is commonly understood, and it is not absolute. So at every layer one can imagine, even down to the molecular and cellular, this prompts a question of what the normative relationship might be. Thus every single power poses a question in terms of the stability of that couple sitting on the blanket. Like I said, you’ve caught me at a moment that I’m really just formulating this, and the class that I’m teaching this semester will help me to frame and expand on that further.

KH: It strikes me that convention has a lot to do with how typography and pictograms are created, and how they evolve over time. Both have been interests of yours… For your Graham Foundation Fellowship (2014-15) you spent a lot of time looking at the REA’s (Rural Electrification Administration) archives in reference to New Deal era attempts to electrify homes between the late 1930s and early 1940s. You say there is a gap in the literature in regard to how design and pictographs were used as opposed to photographs, which by contrast is well studied. What was the convention of the pictograph able to do in this campaign that a photograph could not?

MG: That’s been an ongoing project that I’ve worked on intermittently over the years. It started as part of general history of graphic design course that I taught beginning at Iowa State, and that I still teach here at SAIC when I’m teaching my full load and not chairing. Since I started teaching it the textbooks for the course have changed, or there have been new books that have been introduced into the bibliography. But for a very long time such books included a series of nine posters that were produced for the REA by a designer by the name of Lester Beall. It was commonplace to refer in histories of graphic design to Beall’s pictographs as having a twofold impact in terms of design in the United States. The first was that he chose pictographs because rural Americans were illiterate, so therefore those pictograms or pictographs were easily understood as a kind of basic language. They’re also praised because they’re seen as having integrated European style Modernism into the American scene of design, and famously the isotypes of Otto Neurath of the 1930s and 1940s were seen as a source of inspiration for Beall. When these posters are depicted they’re never shown in the environment in which they were posted – they’re always just floating posters isolated without any background or framing for their reception. So when I introduced this idea of their being used for illiterate Americans – my students, many of whom grew up on farms in rural Iowa, said, “That doesn’t’ seem right – why would you assume that all farmers were illiterate?” So I said, “Great question, I’ll look into it.” And it happened that Iowa State, being a Land Grant and agriculture school, had all the REA news publications from the exact year Beall produced the posters. So I did some research and came back to the students to let them know that in fact the posters were not always or exclusively shown in the context of a rural public; they were often shown first and foremost in Washington, D.C. at REA events, and they were also often shown at county fairs, state fairs, and the like. The logic would be, in order to electrify the farm you would have to own your farm, and most rural Americans who owned farms had some education, definitely high school, and were not necessarily illiterate, itinerant farmers. So there was a mix-up in terms of who the audience might be for those posters. I also found that earlier the REA had employed a person by the name of Rudolf Modley to use a pictograph as a way of communicating statistical information to farmers. So the result of this was that Beall was responding to an already existing graphic vernacular for the communication of information to farmers who could read. So that started to open up the possibility that pictograms were a sophisticated form of communication. We can no longer argue that Beall was using pictograms to introduce Americans to European Modernism, since we had already adopted those images as part of communications.

KH: And they do appear quite sophisticated in their design – I’m looking at them and they’re quite beautiful…

“Radio,” Lester Beall, 1937. Photo courtesy of Michael J. Golec

Shifting gears… you’ve jokingly described yourself as an anachronism at SAIC in the sense that by researching 19th and early- to mid- 20th century histories such as these you are researching ‘ancient history’ in the eyes of your contemporary-minded graduate students and colleagues. I’m wondering if you take a position to ardently focus histories that predate the 21st century, or if you also consider current art and design history in your research?

MG: [Laughs] It’s open, certainly. With regard to anachronism, my point really is that the idea of the contemporary is only relative to a past, and that this past persists in our contemporary conventional uses of all kinds of forms of communication. So as an historian, I think this idea of thinking about the now as unrelated to a past is problematic, and requires I think a great deal more scrutiny. I mean, whatever we think of as “the present” is inundated with “the past” and “the future” simultaneously, so it can be erroneous to make absolute distinctions between them. The typeface that you might be looking at in a contemporary design or art catalogue is an anachronism in and of itself. It may be newly designed, but reproducing it requires technologies that are centuries old. Even though there have been advances in print technology, they’re’ not so advanced that they don’t require ink and some form of depression or coating of paper with a form. So I like to open students up to the possibility of understanding that the present is interwoven with past technologies, conventions, and traditions, and to convey to them that the only way they can think about the future is in a way predicated on those kind of interweavings, if that makes sense at all.

KH: Totally! I’d like to address my particular interests, which are perhaps a little less to do with your specific research focuses but were the means by which I came to in the first place – thinking through Object Oriented Ontology. A chapter of yours in a recent publication, “Heidegger’s ‘From the Dark Opening:’ Image Theory for Human and Nonhuman Worlds” in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, sounds as though it likely hovers around this topic.

MG: For that chapter in that book I was interested in the relationship that Heidegger might have to something most often referred to as Actor-Network Theory, and particularly in this confusion of objects with materiality that happens in design history, but to some extent also in art history. I want to undo is this notion of material and object as being thought of as synonymous. In object theory, if you follow a straightforward account as it’s been put forward by like someone like Graham Harman, such theorists are not interested in the material nature of objects at all. Their argument, specifically Harman’s, is that what is “real” in relationship to objects is always forever and irreducibly withdrawn from us. With the discussion Heidegger presents in terms of Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes, I wanted to work out what the underlying networks not immediately visible were – the invisible networks that Heidegger opened up behind the work. Viewed in that way, the painting itself is a glimmer of the vast networks of agricultural production and labour that would have related to late 19th and early 20th century farming.

“Shoes”, Vincent van Gogh, Oil on canvas,18″ x 21 3/4″, 1888. Image: Public Domain.

KH: Well, I’m looking forward to reading that! What is it that is preoccupying you most these days in your recent research?

MG: I’ve contributed a chapter entitled “Distributing Stresses”, to a forthcoming book Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things, that’s related to the Eames. It addresses the question of sympathy and the DCM chair that the Eames’ produced. It discusses the chair as a means of caring for the body and the psyche of post-war humans. This was written a little bit before I started thinking about Eames and human scale, but I think it directly addresses that theme. So that’s one project. The other is an article related to the “Champ Fleury in the Machine Age” lecture I gave at the School of Visual Arts a few years back, which is currently under review for the Journal of Design History.

One of the things I’m interested in that is this notion of tradition and convention in typography – both its complex story and looking at what would count as modern verses traditional typography in the early 20th century. So I see someone like Bruce Rogers as a modern typographer, someone who is not only interested in reviving old forms but is also interested in addressing a tradition of typography as it relates to his contemporary moment. And this is something I think all designers do, whether they’re typographers or furniture and product designers. The reason why the question of what constitutes “modern” is perhaps more compelling in typography is because it raises the question “what typography isn’t traditional?” In the West we’ve already basically agreed for hundreds of years what our essential alphabet is, and since the 16th century we’ve embraced Roman style letterforms. We don’t really use Fraktur; when forms like this have been revived from the past they’ve been aligned with particular ideologies like National Socialism and dismissed, so we’re pretty much set. So again the question for me is when isn’t typography traditional? Attempts to modernize language like changing to Basic English and producing a universal language have never really stuck… What’s the one language that was introduced?

KH: Oh Esperanto?

MG: Yes, Esperanto! Yes, I mean even when we code computers we still use characters that are established as part of our everyday language. So the distinction in terms of what counts as traditional or what might count as contemporary have to be looked at in different ways. I would just argue that from a contemporary standpoint, someone like Rogers basically creates a new operating system for a very old form of hardware. He creates a new formatting for traditional typography and printing. And that that might be the best we can hope for in our lifetime.

Centaur (typeface), Bruce Rogers. Created 1914 and released 1929.

KH: Anything we missed?

MG: The first thing I would like to say is Keeley, I really appreciate you reaching out, and I’m quite honoured and humbled by being interviewed.

Second, on the face of it I think that there are a lot of different projects that I work on, but the thing that draws them together is my interest in how every day designers have to deal with what already exists in the world. And a problem that I think is not unique to designers, but one which applies to anyone in a creative field, is the question of how to address what already exists in order to add something that has real meaning, and conveys what you want it to convey. That’s the core of my interests throughout all the different examples I draw from. For example, the question for Beall was one of intention: what did he have to work with, and how could he produce something that was unique to his own intentions, but that still drew on an already existing graphic vernacular? And as you observed, he created something quite remarkable – something that alluded to the already existing use of pictographic communication within a bureaucratic administrative field like REA, but with much more. Now these posters exist in every major museum. You can go to the MOMA they’ll have a little design section where there’s always a Lester Beal REA poster. Or, as another example, what does someone like Rogers do when he’s asked by the Grolier Club of New York City to design a translation of Geoffrey Tory’s “Champ Fleury”? Does he try to create something that’s just a facsimile (which is how many people have approached this), or does he try to communicate something from Tory’s ideas within his contemporary moment?

Ostensibly one chair should fit us all. When the Eames’ sat down – pun intended – to design a chair, they had to think about what would count as something that would attract and afford a certain kind of human comfort – something that did not exist, but was still recognizable as something that was chair-like. They drew from history, from their own time, and from a perception of where things might go. Sometimes it’s difficult for people who look at my work to see the common thread, but that’s the source. Even the Brillo Box Archive is trying to distinguish the differences between the three “Brillo boxes”, but also to show how they’re all related. I think this is an increasingly important issue within the humanities, regardless of whether its design history, art history, history of literature and so forth: how we can acknowledge shared and different concerns, and how they can be embedded in the same object, body, or thought? That sort of openness, that acknowledgement of sameness and difference, is something that I think the humanities is well positioned to explore, and that will perhaps have some meaning for our current fractured moment so focused on differences.

KH: Well that was far too eloquent for me to add anything! [Laughs] Thanks for speaking with me, Michael.

MG: Thank you!

  Michael J. Golec is the Chair and an Associate Professor of Art and Design History in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can find his complete bio here.

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Thinks: Michael J. Golec published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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Thinks: Michael J. Golec

One or Three Chairs: An Interview with Michael J. Golec

  Keeley Haftner: Let’s start broader and then go to specifics. In general, your overall project seems to be about defying categorization –for example, you’ve taken an interest in the work of Wendell Castle who muddies design, furniture, sculpture, craft, and you’re the department head of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute but specialize in the study of graphic and typographic design as also seen through art historic and philosophic lenses. Is defying categories important to you?

Michael J. Golec: I think there’s a historical question in there, which is that certain categories are accepted at particular moments in the history of any form of cultural production. As a design historian who was trained as an art historian, one of the things I’m interested in is where within the broader discourses have art and design been understood as distinct practices, and where they overlap. In terms of the discipline, design history is a relatively new field compared to art history. Many of my colleagues within the field are very careful about distinguishing content, topics, and objects that are unique to design. Such objects can’t always count as art objects, and therefore would not require an art historical interpretation based on art historical methodologies. And so a lot of my work really tries to figure out in some ways how particular kinds of objects can circulate between different kinds of practices and while they are objectively or empirically the same object. In each field they act in different ways that are specific to that field. In my book, Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art, I see the Brillo Box as a non-material entity that circulates between art, philosophy, and design. Identifying that object, the Brillo Box, really depends on the epistemological culture that exists for that object, or in which that object is produced. One of the things I was interested in was how three distinct fields of inquiry could produce three distinct objects – a thought experiment, an artwork, and a package design – and how the three of them interpenetrate at different moments, specifically in terms of how they are discursively understood. I mean, categories shift, and while we’re defining them they will become mutable depending on what parties, practice, and epistemological communities are engaged with them. So one of the things I’ve be interested in in my work is trying to figure out where those distinctions lie, and also where they are blurred.

Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art by Michael J. Golec

KH: In the introduction to Brillo Box Archive, you talk about the image of James Harvey, the abstract expressionist painter and designer who was photographed in front of his painting holding his Brillo box after Warhol had made it famous as an artwork, which strikes me as a very apt example of how these categories overlap. Some have spoken of the sensual qualities of Warhol’s Brillo Box and how they are missing in discussions around his work – is the sensual nature of that piece of interest to you?

MG: I think that certain epistemological communities are more interested in the sensual qualities of objects than others, which again is historically contingent. One of the things that Arthur Danto was very invested in was arguing that the material quality of the Brillo Box doesn’t matter, since for all intents and purposes the Brillo Box raises a question in terms of perceptual skepticism. If two things look alike, Danto argues, we can’t judge them based on how they look, so we have to resort to some other kind of framing. For him it’s a theory and history of art that directs us towards identifying specific objects befitting the category of art. For artists and for designers of that period, there are particular material qualities that make a difference in how one comes to terms with those objects. So that was one of the issues I was trying to work out. For Danto’s brand of philosophical aesthetics, materiality doesn’t matter at all. This means that his artworks could be anything relative to how they are received, understood, or framed. He would have been very much in opposition to something like a post-modern deconstructive interest in indexicality, or the materiality of the sign. So that would have distinguished him from other philosophers and critics of his generation.

KH: I’d like to transition from the framing of objects to the framing of the human form in the in the work of Ray and Charles Eames. Through some of the courses you’ve taught over the years, including “Eames Overload” you’ve spent time discussing their work and their affect on design principles globally. Can you talk a bit about how their design principles bring together politics, technologies and aesthetics, and whether or not these principles hold up today?

MG: Ray and Charles Eames are an interesting topic for me. I started working on them while I was teaching at Iowa State University, and saw their work as a way for me to bring design students, engineers and scientists together into a single classroom. So originally I used a very media focused method to teach the first course, which focused on the Eames’ as master manipulators of all kinds of media. I haven’t taught the course for quite some time, but in the meantime I’ve been sort of reintroduced to their work through a colleague of mine, Todd Cronan, who wrote a phenomenal review of a publication called An Eames Anthology, which is a collection of their writings that came out through the Yale University Press. And it’s Cronan’s thinking about the Eames’s in relation to a set of intentions that he perceived they held that got me to reread this material, this time attending to particular statements that Charles in particular would make. I started to notice a repetition of the emphasis on human scale in relationship to the explosion of information that Eames and his colleagues perceived at that particular moment in the post-war era. So I’m currently rethinking that class. For example, one of the questions I’ve always had with Charles is: why the focus on furniture when he was trained as an architect? What it always goes back to is that furniture is a discrete object where designs can be put to the test very quickly, and judged. And I’m starting to believe that this interest in judgement for Charles has a lot more to do with case-by-case situations. The Eames’ were never interested in providing universal design that fit everyone. My new thesis would be that, for them, every interaction with an object, exhibition, or film that they produced required individuals to account for how they relate to that particular thing themselves. It’s that kind risk and coordination that I think allows a certain suppleness to what could be called “Eames Design.”

The other issue that I’m really interested in is that almost all designers who are revered in design history belong to some kind of “school” – especially in architecture, but also to some extent in design. In any overall survey of architects or designers you can find them being organized into different groups that we would call a school, in which there’s a discernable method, and there are discernable principles of design that are executed and then exemplified or embodied within the work itself. The Eames’ didn’t fit neatly into that framework, and I find it ironic that probably one of the most famous design teams in the history of the United States is a couple that belonged to no school. Again this is something I’m just coming to, and am not trying to reconcile that relationship, but rather to make the claim that “non-school” is a kind of school of thought in design that we’ve inherited today. I think this is so interesting, because the Eames’ provide a method that is not a method. It is a kind of post-method approach to design. This counters the trend toward Design Thinking that has been embraced within the past twenty years, and its relationship to the schools of design, engineering, and business. Design Thinking is meant to provide a method for designing that enhances interface between the object and the user. The Eames would not agree that there would be any such method. They believed that there are only case-by-case situations, and that every design, just like every statement, has to be received either felicitously or infelicitously in order for it to work. There is no guarantee, ever. Just as we use conventions so that we understand each other when we speak, there are conventions involved in say, chairs, for example, and those conventions create a certain vernacular that effects the colloquial versions of a chair. To design a different style requires a great amount of risk, and there’s no guarantee that any sitter will receive the intention of the designer that this is something meant to be sat on.

“Powers of Ten”, Charles and Ray Eames, 1977

KH: And the whole over-arching conversation makes me think of their Powers of Ten film, with regard to scale and the individual, but also through their interdisciplinary and borderline scientific way of considering the human subject.

MG: I’ve published a few articles and chapters in books on Powers of Ten. My first impulse was to see that everything known or possibly unknown would be connected to the two human figures on the blanket, which one might call a remnant of the Frankfurt School form of criticism. I’m beginning to rethink that; I don’t think it’s what they really intended. Everyone needs to be reminded that when I say “Eames,” I mean the entire network of individuals that worked within the studio of which Charles and Ray were the most visible; they had armies of designers and non-designers working with them to make what they made. But in Powers of Ten – even though we might call the couple on the blanket the culmination of human scale, there is always a question at every power above and below them. What is the relationship to the human social sphere? I think it’s nicely framed by the picnic blanket. It’s an image of human sociality, however normative it may have appeared in 1968 and then in 1977. But then again, the Eames’ never took norms for granted, which could easily be and was contested by a host of social critics. I think the Eames’s were suggesting that this couple is a convention that is commonly understood, and it is not absolute. So at every layer one can imagine, even down to the molecular and cellular, this prompts a question of what the normative relationship might be. Thus every single power poses a question in terms of the stability of that couple sitting on the blanket. Like I said, you’ve caught me at a moment that I’m really just formulating this, and the class that I’m teaching this semester will help me to frame and expand on that further.

KH: It strikes me that convention has a lot to do with how typography and pictograms are created, and how they evolve over time. Both have been interests of yours… For your Graham Foundation Fellowship (2014-15) you spent a lot of time looking at the REA’s (Rural Electrification Administration) archives in reference to New Deal era attempts to electrify homes between the late 1930s and early 1940s. You say there is a gap in the literature in regard to how design and pictographs were used as opposed to photographs, which by contrast is well studied. What was the convention of the pictograph able to do in this campaign that a photograph could not?

MG: That’s been an ongoing project that I’ve worked on intermittently over the years. It started as part of general history of graphic design course that I taught beginning at Iowa State, and that I still teach here at SAIC when I’m teaching my full load and not chairing. Since I started teaching it the textbooks for the course have changed, or there have been new books that have been introduced into the bibliography. But for a very long time such books included a series of nine posters that were produced for the REA by a designer by the name of Lester Beall. It was commonplace to refer in histories of graphic design to Beall’s pictographs as having a twofold impact in terms of design in the United States. The first was that he chose pictographs because rural Americans were illiterate, so therefore those pictograms or pictographs were easily understood as a kind of basic language. They’re also praised because they’re seen as having integrated European style Modernism into the American scene of design, and famously the isotypes of Otto Neurath of the 1930s and 1940s were seen as a source of inspiration for Beall. When these posters are depicted they’re never shown in the environment in which they were posted – they’re always just floating posters isolated without any background or framing for their reception. So when I introduced this idea of their being used for illiterate Americans – my students, many of whom grew up on farms in rural Iowa, said, “That doesn’t’ seem right – why would you assume that all farmers were illiterate?” So I said, “Great question, I’ll look into it.” And it happened that Iowa State, being a Land Grant and agriculture school, had all the REA news publications from the exact year Beall produced the posters. So I did some research and came back to the students to let them know that in fact the posters were not always or exclusively shown in the context of a rural public; they were often shown first and foremost in Washington, D.C. at REA events, and they were also often shown at county fairs, state fairs, and the like. The logic would be, in order to electrify the farm you would have to own your farm, and most rural Americans who owned farms had some education, definitely high school, and were not necessarily illiterate, itinerant farmers. So there was a mix-up in terms of who the audience might be for those posters. I also found that earlier the REA had employed a person by the name of Rudolf Modley to use a pictograph as a way of communicating statistical information to farmers. So the result of this was that Beall was responding to an already existing graphic vernacular for the communication of information to farmers who could read. So that started to open up the possibility that pictograms were a sophisticated form of communication. We can no longer argue that Beall was using pictograms to introduce Americans to European Modernism, since we had already adopted those images as part of communications.

KH: And they do appear quite sophisticated in their design – I’m looking at them and they’re quite beautiful…

“Radio,” Lester Beall, 1937. Photo courtesy of Michael J. Golec

Shifting gears… you’ve jokingly described yourself as an anachronism at SAIC in the sense that by researching 19th and early- to mid- 20th century histories such as these you are researching ‘ancient history’ in the eyes of your contemporary-minded graduate students and colleagues. I’m wondering if you take a position to ardently focus histories that predate the 21st century, or if you also consider current art and design history in your research?

MG: [Laughs] It’s open, certainly. With regard to anachronism, my point really is that the idea of the contemporary is only relative to a past, and that this past persists in our contemporary conventional uses of all kinds of forms of communication. So as an historian, I think this idea of thinking about the now as unrelated to a past is problematic, and requires I think a great deal more scrutiny. I mean, whatever we think of as “the present” is inundated with “the past” and “the future” simultaneously, so it can be erroneous to make absolute distinctions between them. The typeface that you might be looking at in a contemporary design or art catalogue is an anachronism in and of itself. It may be newly designed, but reproducing it requires technologies that are centuries old. Even though there have been advances in print technology, they’re’ not so advanced that they don’t require ink and some form of depression or coating of paper with a form. So I like to open students up to the possibility of understanding that the present is interwoven with past technologies, conventions, and traditions, and to convey to them that the only way they can think about the future is in a way predicated on those kind of interweavings, if that makes sense at all.

KH: Totally! I’d like to address my particular interests, which are perhaps a little less to do with your specific research focuses but were the means by which I came to in the first place – thinking through Object Oriented Ontology. A chapter of yours in a recent publication, “Heidegger’s ‘From the Dark Opening:’ Image Theory for Human and Nonhuman Worlds” in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, sounds as though it likely hovers around this topic.

MG: For that chapter in that book I was interested in the relationship that Heidegger might have to something most often referred to as Actor-Network Theory, and particularly in this confusion of objects with materiality that happens in design history, but to some extent also in art history. I want to undo is this notion of material and object as being thought of as synonymous. In object theory, if you follow a straightforward account as it’s been put forward by like someone like Graham Harman, such theorists are not interested in the material nature of objects at all. Their argument, specifically Harman’s, is that what is “real” in relationship to objects is always forever and irreducibly withdrawn from us. With the discussion Heidegger presents in terms of Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes, I wanted to work out what the underlying networks not immediately visible were – the invisible networks that Heidegger opened up behind the work. Viewed in that way, the painting itself is a glimmer of the vast networks of agricultural production and labour that would have related to late 19th and early 20th century farming.

“Shoes”, Vincent van Gogh, Oil on canvas,18″ x 21 3/4″, 1888. Image: Public Domain.

KH: Well, I’m looking forward to reading that! What is it that is preoccupying you most these days in your recent research?

MG: I’ve contributed a chapter entitled “Distributing Stresses”, to a forthcoming book Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things, that’s related to the Eames. It addresses the question of sympathy and the DCM chair that the Eames’ produced. It discusses the chair as a means of caring for the body and the psyche of post-war humans. This was written a little bit before I started thinking about Eames and human scale, but I think it directly addresses that theme. So that’s one project. The other is an article related to the “Champ Fleury in the Machine Age” lecture I gave at the School of Visual Arts a few years back, which is currently under review for the Journal of Design History.

One of the things I’m interested in that is this notion of tradition and convention in typography – both its complex story and looking at what would count as modern verses traditional typography in the early 20th century. So I see someone like Bruce Rogers as a modern typographer, someone who is not only interested in reviving old forms but is also interested in addressing a tradition of typography as it relates to his contemporary moment. And this is something I think all designers do, whether they’re typographers or furniture and product designers. The reason why the question of what constitutes “modern” is perhaps more compelling in typography is because it raises the question “what typography isn’t traditional?” In the West we’ve already basically agreed for hundreds of years what our essential alphabet is, and since the 16th century we’ve embraced Roman style letterforms. We don’t really use Fraktur; when forms like this have been revived from the past they’ve been aligned with particular ideologies like National Socialism and dismissed, so we’re pretty much set. So again the question for me is when isn’t typography traditional? Attempts to modernize language like changing to Basic English and producing a universal language have never really stuck… What’s the one language that was introduced?

KH: Oh Esperanto?

MG: Yes, Esperanto! Yes, I mean even when we code computers we still use characters that are established as part of our everyday language. So the distinction in terms of what counts as traditional or what might count as contemporary have to be looked at in different ways. I would just argue that from a contemporary standpoint, someone like Rogers basically creates a new operating system for a very old form of hardware. He creates a new formatting for traditional typography and printing. And that that might be the best we can hope for in our lifetime.

Centaur (typeface), Bruce Rogers. Created 1914 and released 1929.

KH: Anything we missed?

MG: The first thing I would like to say is Keeley, I really appreciate you reaching out, and I’m quite honoured and humbled by being interviewed.

Second, on the face of it I think that there are a lot of different projects that I work on, but the thing that draws them together is my interest in how every day designers have to deal with what already exists in the world. And a problem that I think is not unique to designers, but one which applies to anyone in a creative field, is the question of how to address what already exists in order to add something that has real meaning, and conveys what you want it to convey. That’s the core of my interests throughout all the different examples I draw from. For example, the question for Beall was one of intention: what did he have to work with, and how could he produce something that was unique to his own intentions, but that still drew on an already existing graphic vernacular? And as you observed, he created something quite remarkable – something that alluded to the already existing use of pictographic communication within a bureaucratic administrative field like REA, but with much more. Now these posters exist in every major museum. You can go to the MOMA they’ll have a little design section where there’s always a Lester Beal REA poster. Or, as another example, what does someone like Rogers do when he’s asked by the Grolier Club of New York City to design a translation of Geoffrey Tory’s “Champ Fleury”? Does he try to create something that’s just a facsimile (which is how many people have approached this), or does he try to communicate something from Tory’s ideas within his contemporary moment?

Ostensibly one chair should fit us all. When the Eames’ sat down – pun intended – to design a chair, they had to think about what would count as something that would attract and afford a certain kind of human comfort – something that did not exist, but was still recognizable as something that was chair-like. They drew from history, from their own time, and from a perception of where things might go. Sometimes it’s difficult for people who look at my work to see the common thread, but that’s the source. Even the Brillo Box Archive is trying to distinguish the differences between the three “Brillo boxes”, but also to show how they’re all related. I think this is an increasingly important issue within the humanities, regardless of whether its design history, art history, history of literature and so forth: how we can acknowledge shared and different concerns, and how they can be embedded in the same object, body, or thought? That sort of openness, that acknowledgement of sameness and difference, is something that I think the humanities is well positioned to explore, and that will perhaps have some meaning for our current fractured moment so focused on differences.

KH: Well that was far too eloquent for me to add anything! [Laughs] Thanks for speaking with me, Michael.

MG: Thank you!

  Michael J. Golec is the Chair and an Associate Professor of Art and Design History in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can find his complete bio here.

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