Graphic Design - Now in Production

In 1989, the year that the Walker Art Center exhibited Graphic Design in America (its first and last comprehensive exhibition on graphic design), corporate Modernism was singing its swan song and April Greiman, the New Wave pioneer of the exhibition's patriotic masthead , was ushering a generation of designers into a decade of graphic expression and individualism. Though the turn was both stylistic and idealistic, it was driven by the presence of the personal computer, which put the means of production in the hands of the designer. Fast forward to 2012, Graphic Design — Now in Production surveys the state of the designer-as-producer in the new millennium. As the tools of the designer have evolved, has the designer evolved with them?

GDNP is currently on display in New York City (previously at the Walker in Minneapolis) on Governor's Island in an unorthodox but charming space in Building 110. It's not often that the field of graphic design has an exhibition, much less one as ambitious as this, so its mere presence is noteworthy. Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton, the show's joint curators, have done a remarkable job funneling such a wide breadth of material into digestible chunks. It's unfortunate to see most of the work presented without context, as if the final products are exactly that and nothing but—products, not processes. Thankfully, the catalogue of the exhibition picks up the slack. If the exhibition responds to the form of graphic design in the 2000s, then the catalogue explores the ideas. With classic (and recent) essays by Michael Rock, Lupton, Blauvelt, and a handful of others, it is a refreshing subversion to the traditional gallery guide, confidently restoring the long-form essay to the designer's library (so much so that it prompted Rick Poynor to ask Read All That?  on Design Observer earlier this year). The catalogue acts as a looking glass through which to view the exhibition.

Lupton's 1998 essay "The Designer as Producer" (reprinted in the catalogue) was prescient in its analysis of German social critic Walter Benjamin's call to action for authors (in Lupton's view, designers) to not only craft words into text but also to question the physicality of their work. Walking through the categorical displays of ephemera on display in Building 110, Benjamin's ghost is ever-present, as most of the work carries an entrepreneurial spirit. Designers have become masters of modern tools, ridding any miscalculations that they would be slaves to technology. They have appropriated it in ways that Benjamin could not have foreseen (nor even Lupton 10 years ago). But the elephant in the room is still Michael Rock's question posed in his 2005 essay "Fuck Content," if designers don't produce content, is their work reduced to pure style? Maybe designers will be confident enough to answer in the next 10 years.

Graphic Design — Now in Production is on display on Governor's Island until September 3, 2012. For more information check it out here.