Trends of the past will always come back to
bite the hand that fed because the human condition craves nostalgia. Fashion is
flexible in its ability to meet needs, but the tried, tested and loved will
always maintain celebrity status. Contemporary artistic design is similar in
that it is a living, changing pattern; it creates bridges between cultures and
makes use and a celebration of history. So it’s an idea that a difference
between high end and lower end design could be the license to create history and use history for reputable reasons. With technology at its peak,
context is definitely a largely contributing factor to the development of the
zeitgeist; the twenty first century spiritual, cultural, ethical, intellectual,
political climate; the ambient, moral, sociocultural direction and mood of an
era.
The overall achievement of an image can be
marked against three main criteria: emotional impact, technical skill and
originality. This subjective but mathematical approach can find itself more
linked to sales-pitching than art-campaigning, but it gets your voice heard. We
have so much and know so much that there is little point in the ‘shocking’ but for
a not-quite-yet exhausted lust for irony- to take the edge off that guilt we
all have for our overindulgences.
Tradition is a good excuse to do anything, but
a good idea is like the ultra-excuse.
The design lifecycle changes but perpetually
goes around. With so much information bombarding us, dichotomies are a good way
to express feelings relative to a point or message. And with a fine line
between the ‘ironic’ and the textbook/hollywood special effects, illustration
in its own world can pull off any ‘style’ with the warranty of the world’s
identity crisis it caters for.
So with values economically shifting, is fine
art meeting its match with real happy-go-lucky
throw-away culture?
Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, in the book:
‘Illustration: A Visual History’ query this paradox of going back in time from
the golden age to current bronze age: celebrating the deemed ‘second cousin to
fine art’ as a significant popular art ‘that is often more visible,
recognisable and memorable’ than the higher arts.
An international environment has given illustrators
the right to empower a kind of free-for-all: giving the public and private collectors guilt-free access
to imagery as obscure, strange or ‘distasteful’ as they please. Imagery with
the original weighty contexts removed, often a reaction to the darkness the commerce
of journalism has become. Work is appreciated for its artistic sensibility rather
than the heady story it accompanied; it compliments you as the person who decided to extract it. The identity crisis
comes from the difficulty to be selective: not people who don’t know what they
like, but how to express their ideas
for fear of them being received incorrectly.
The book quotes: ‘in illustration, the
Postmodern sensibility was not a revolution against Modernism’, and the
situation remains the same. Design communication which aims to be incongruous
will often look very polished and that which looks inappropriate is actually
doing exactly what is says on the tin. We are becoming primarily aesthetic
learners taught by colloquial slogans; the more designers understand the
psychology behind the times, the less you even have to think about what you are
looking at (or know what it is you
are looking at i.e. a joke, an installation or expensive vintage).
The idea of movements in art therefore, is one
way to pick and mix your eclectic taste knowing at least a bit about what each
thing actually means. The consequence of postmodernism in two-dimensional image
making is a removal of the movement-system for a much less formal approach:
style collaging; nifty little spaces between truth and fiction that fat-headed
corporation directors can’t fit their ‘big ideas’ into.
The examples of work in the book show the
change of genre as something which used to dictate certain ‘looks’- to something
which is frequently used to describe the
look of a thing.
The alternative to ready-mades is
doing-it-yourself; the now common approach.
Examples of illustrators practicing
purpose-made styles:
Cartoon Expressionism: Andre Francois, 1960
Collage/Montage: Lou Beach, 2009
Neo Deco: Jose Cruz, 2006
Neo-aesthetics are about flattening planes and encouraging associations.
Pixel Art: eBoy, 1998
Further examples include: Neo realism and neo surrealism, digital, sampling, anthropometric art, caricature, folk art, political and conceptual.
The coming future is very accepting of decorative
form: so long as it is still representational. Airbrushed, streamlined,
sculptural surfaces mixed with rough and ready nostalgia. There is currently a
huge market for the games-aesthetic, from the scratchy and pixelated to the
photographically rendered; achieved ‘using the abstract, default language of
the computer to critique the stereotypical media of illustration.’ Satire
evoking a comic sense of the future is a way for the masses to cope with
technological evolution.
What is comforting about illustration is the
license to revisit by-gone themes and brand anything in any creative way: be it
commercial or not. It takes the term ‘low’ and makes it respectable- youth
culture has its own graphic code i.e. skate culture which is just as
good-looking as any more grown-up form of communication. The ‘good’ ideas take something
unattractive: and give it pleasurable or intelligent visual relevance.
The issue becomes then a case of abundant
average ideas (mostly wasted) with which to reinvent, or a stand for less
ambiguous and more widely appreciated ideas, of which there are less- probably
the elitist option.
Humanitarian philosophers would dictate that
illustrators who deal with the free-country public realm have just as much a
right to conceptualism as private custom or gallery-housed fine artists; but
the reality is a job description, and how valuable ideas are to people as
things they cannot create nor want to come up with themselves. Philosophy Now
magazine writer, Tim Delaney, from the popular culture edition 2007 in ‘Pop
culture: an overview’ explains how our need to label something ‘Pop’ will never
die[1]. And the basic fundaments
of philosophy as explained by Tim Madigan, proves design as an important
fundament of existence- in whatever way you are involved[2]. Perhaps ‘good’ then:
meaning intuitive design.
Epistemology in design has taken cultural
value over philosophy; logic has overruled metaphysics; ethics have overruled
aesthetics.
Whether creating, looking at or buying artwork,
the way we think has been changed quite radically due to evolutionary
conditioning.
There is definitely a type of ‘bad’ idea that
can be applied to anything.
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