To mark the occasion of Pierre’s donation of a collection of his posters to HMCT Archive, he has also generously shared his thoughts on graphic design and what it means to be a designer.
Graphic design: What is it all about?
(A point of view among many others.)
Graphic design, like any other human activity, and before any other consideration, allows us to relate. to the other and to oneself. It only makes sense if this connection tends to be established in the long term and keeps in mind the need to renew itself constantly.
Two main fields of activity are available to anyone who wants to practice this profession. The first—the most commonly used— is the commercial field (advertising agencies, communication agencies, media agencies, etc.). The second is the cultural field (but also political, humanitarian, and societal) with apparently more noble and essential commitments.
Whatever our choice, it obliges us.
The mandate is: be responsible, be honest and act for everyone’s good.
The Times They Are A-Changin‘: in 1966 as in 2022, but mostly in-between, new technologies have appeared, served by new tools. New distribution networks, some of them even called “social” have, in real-time, taken over public space and modified vocabulary, grammar, and, therefore, language. “Higher speeds always erase inferior speeds,” predicted the French philosopher Paul Virilio with lucidity already in 1998 in his work, The Information Bomb. New digital times, new spaces of freedom, without limits, without borders. But also new playgrounds without apparent rules, like a prison without walls, under an open sky, but with multiple virtual barbed wire.
And always this truth. Graphic design is not art; designers are not artists. Even if certain aesthetic concerns or societal commitments could at times cause confusion, these make us believe in a convergence of points of view.
Design, applied arts, and graphic design have very often plundered the history of art: Constructivism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Expressionism, and so many others. All of these movements had their own expression, had developed a particular and recognizable aesthetic vocabulary, and served above all to express societal transformations at the heart of their time, often political. They were as much medium as message (“The medium IS the message”) as the philosopher of media, Marshall McLuhan, would point out later.
One must observe that the opposite is also true. Art has been inspired by the world of advertising, of visual communication; Warhol, of course, but also Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, for example, all esteemed representatives of American Pop Art. Like so many others afterwards, they abolished the boundaries between art and design. But what works in one direction does not work in the other. Observing such-and-such graphic designer, claiming to be an artist, gives a sense of artifice. No hierarchies here. We do different jobs. And the differences, always enriching, are well worth cultivating.
The applied arts must function—to respond to expectations, to requests, to the order. This is the essence of the contract that binds two parties (graphic artist, advertiser, designer on one side, agents, institutions, clients on the other). This relationship—this service —honored by the payment of money negotiated upstream, establishes the economic aspect de facto and therefore its constraints.
Art is the opposite of good intention. And applied arts are always well intentioned. One hundred years ago, graphic designers distanced themselves from art, its worlds, its modes of expression, and its concepts. Since then, graphic design has rightly asserted itself as an independent discipline. However, art still haunts the backyards of design studios and universities. (Uwe Loesch)
Before the art market eventually gets hold of it, art has no obligation, owes nothing to anyone except to express itself freely, and in turn to honor freedom itself, the freedom to think differently, to express oneself differently, and to flee as soon as one gets too close; in short, to be where one least expects.
Therefore, graphic designers are certainly not artists. We practice a profession, whether we like it or not, sensitive to the “spirit of the times.” The risk of becoming incompetent, addictive “fashion victims,” ignorant of the past, is great.
Long before the digital era, the World existed on the walls of prehistoric caves, on ceilings of Buddhist temples in India, China, Burma or Tibet, in the fresco paintings of Piero della Francesca and Giotto at the heart of the Italian Renaissance, the images from multiple sources (like those of the much more recent “modern” world of photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, painters, writers, psychoanalysts, priests, etc.), were continuously transformed in order to speak to us, to seduce us, to question us. They were, and still are, life. Without a handwritten, drawn, and later typed text, they were sufficient on their own to establish links, so to speak.
Then other rules were born, other ways to convince, and other ways to “say” were established.
Words were added to the images. Sentences were put into a form according to a new dialectic, and each time reorganized, henceforth constituted the backbone of contemporary communication. What’s more, our professional worlds have been swallowed by an all-powerful computer with unlimited and carnivorous powers.
Fonts multiply and transform before our eyes, displaying an infinite freedom of expression.
Numerous pre-programmed kitschy typographic characters are offered via computer to lust over. These are examples of a new “Art Nouveau,” whose digital ornamentation is exhausted in an annoying decorative arbitrariness. In the same way images which, by dint of being manipulated, photoshopped, filtered, colorized, blacklisted, deconstructed, reconstructed, synthesized, etc. etc. etc., in an endless chase, submerges us, drown us.
The challenge then for the graphic craftsman—the graphic designer — is immense, and they do not get lost in an ocean of noisy vacuity where a search for any meaning is out of reach.
The design and graphic staging —according to the Western case— are the marriage between words and images. Which when added and interwoven according to the codes of the moment: the geographic and mental spaces, the individual’s intentions and aptitudes, they become a place of exchange within the privileged vector between transmitter and receiver. Let’s be extremely careful to keep these communication channels safe and sound, because it’s about maintaining an ethical course in our activity.
It is essential for whoever wishes to acquire and develop a unique point of view, to develop one’s curiosity every day to be enriched by words as much as by images, and to approach all sources of knowledge. As the folds of our lives unfurl, there are lands to be cleared, territories to be explored, and languages to be invented.
— Pierre Neumann, Vevey, Switzerland
An exhibition of Pierre’s work, Photographies et mots croisés, runs September 8–November 13, 2022 at Galerie le Château d’Eau, Toulouse, France