Reasonable Precedents

Hi Noel, I’ve been buggering about all day with various false starts to this ‘interview’ idea, all of which got too complicated, muddy and elaborate. After today’s attempts I do now have some clearer ideas about why I wanted to do this and what I wanted to ask, but I’ll try to start very simply (cleanly) here and then we can get carried away or lost in the quicksand later on.

History obviously has a fundamental role to play in the way a discipline or a practice is perceived, and so to begin with I’d like to  ask what you think about the ways in which local history specifically  has (or has not) informed an understanding of graphic design in New Zealand?

Before addressing your question, it might be useful to examine your assertion that design history is fundamental to the discipline and practice of design, as I think it is important to distinguish between what history brings to the discipline and to the practice of design. Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial was a landmark book in that a Nobel Prize-winning economist recognised the significance of design in understanding the artificial world we inhabit. His assertion of the necessity for a discipline of design with “subject  matter that is intellectually tough, analytic, formalisable and teachable” can be seen as external confirmation of efforts within the design community at that time to better articulate design methodology and theory. History, criticism and theory are the necessary components of a rigorous discipline in that they provide evolving explanations of the past, present and future of design. I would argue that history is a foundation discipline in that, once the facts have been established, we can critic-ally evaluate past successes and failures and put forward theories to explain how design operates in particular social and historical contexts. Or as Etienne Gilson put it “History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.” With the historian’s advantage of hindsight, this should provide some understanding of how design has evolved to the present day.

Practice is primarily concerned with designing for present needs and desires, and while designers may look to the past for inspiration or ideas, in the process of designing, they must be either insightful cultural analysts, trust to foresight or apply new theories if they are to create something genuinely innovative. It is in the application of foresight that I think design history has direct application to  practice. Through scenario building, designers can develop future scenarios as experimental test beds for their ideas. To ensure that these scenarios are plausible, it is necessary to research historical information to identify present trends. This has the advantage of broadening designers’ knowledge of design and understanding of their own practice by considering the contexts and implications of past designs and providing quality benchmarks for designs that have stood the test of time. At its most fundamental level, it also prevents designers reinventing the wheel, or the poster perhaps in the case of graphic design.

If we accept that design history is one of the fundamental constituents of a discipline of design, then the problem we face in New Zealand is that the major constituents of a national history are largely unpublished. As we have discussed, they remain in archives, public and private collections and in the heads of senior practitioners. As regards archives, the fundamental problem is one of definition: design covers a wide range of subjects and does not fit naturally within established categories either within museum or library classifications. After a recent visit to several museums around the country, the predominant curatorial perception of design is one of applied arts. This narrow definition tends to exclude products of industrial and agricultural manufacture and anonymous or collective design. Such New Zealand design exists, but records may be buried within larger company or industry archives. In the nineteenth century, these tended to have a regional basis, and there are many originary claims by manufacturers that need verification in a national and international context. In terms of graphic design, the printing industry and the history of photography and advertising are under-researched, although there is some useful work in the field of bibliography.

This has been complicated by the dominance of art and architectural history framing the discourse around design, and an over-emphasis on stylistic analysis with a particular focus on modernism and cultural nationalism. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins’ contributions are an example of this, although his book At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design remains the best attempt at a national design/architectural history to date. Ann Calhoun’s The Arts & Crafts Movement in New Zealand, 1870–1940: Women Make Their Mark offers a complementary reading with more relevance to graphic design history.

In terms of practice, Hamish Thompson deserves praise for making more widely known New Zealand book and poster design, and these have proved excellent resources for practicing designers, and I am aware of one major contemporary branding campaign that drew on analysis of the material presented in his books. 

Well that's the thing, I don’t think I have a good knowledge of NZ graphic design history, so it’s hard to say. I’m not sure that my growing interest in finding out about certain local precedents is so much to do with any sort of anxiety about globalisation though, but  more about simply seeing how people here, in this particular situation, have made things work (or not). Your introducing me to Robert Coupland Harding’s publication Typo is a good example—being able to locate ones own work within some sort of existing (more relevant?) trajectory is useful. As I’ve been finding out more this has begun to feed into conversations with students, and they certainly respond enthusiastically to that. I think students, and probably even the larger design community, tend to think the lack of local history simply points to the fact that nothing interesting ever happens here. Which I guess is what I was getting at in my initial question.

You’ve been working against that sort of attitude for a while, and have pointed out to me previously that interesting people and important projects are out there but that they are “sitting in the museums, archives, private collections and peoples heads”, and that “designers AND academics need to get amongst it.” (That’s from an email you sent me last year, which I also used in my introduction to the Typo reproductions in The National Grid #4.) Anyway, on reading your “long-winded answer” I thought about that... the getting amongst it, the finding out, and your uppercase “AND”.

It’s an exciting prospect that there’s all this stuff buried away around New Zealand just waiting to be found, but I’m wondering what a designer’s role in that might be? In our very first issue you argued for a “functional design history that establishes local precedents and encourages designers to knowingly develop or subvert them.” That makes it sound like the historian produces the raw material and then the designer sets to work with this in mind. But is that what you mean by “get amongst it”? That has the sound of getting your hands dirty about it. And that’s what I’m after here I think... how, as a designer, I might engage with that sort of initial research.

Ok, I think we share the same motivations for this work in that the absence of an accessible New Zealand design history results in a perception that “nothing interesting ever happens here.” From our own research, we know this to be demonstrably false. Because we are both also educators, we feel a responsibility to correct this misapprehension. This was brought home to me when one of my students went on an exchange to Argentina and enrolled in a design history course to find out about the fascinating history of design in that country. Instead she received a canonical history of industrial design beginning with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London! Now, having given similar lectures, I know that these are easier to prepare than the ones I give on New Zealand design history because of the wealth of primary and secondary sources I can draw from.

So, the next question you pose is the important one of how do we go about doing this kind of research, and you draw an interesting distinction between the work of Hamish Thompson and David Bennewith. Both worked with primary resources, which according to the American Library Association (ALA) definition “are original records created at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories”.

In Hamish’s case that involved working in archives and libraries selecting representative posters and book covers for compilation in commercially published books. David essentially conducted an oral history with Joseph Churchward which was reproduced in The National Grid #3 and #4 with photographic illustration. Both are now great secondary resources to have.

Both also involved designing, as I know that Hamish was intimately involved in the design of his books, although they were mediated by the requirements of a commercial publisher. So, in this sense, I think both were ‘designerly.’ However, the design outcomes clearly serve different purposes, with Hamish’s being primarily historical while David’s posters are primarily about the design process and pay homage to Joseph Churchward’s example. There’s clearly been something interesting enough going on ‘here’ for David to pursue it over there in Holland—and the same could be said for your work with the McCahon typeface.

However, there’s still something niggling me about a ‘designerly’  approach to (historical) research that I haven’t really come to grips with yet. Historians have a tendency to privilege words over images, as they are supposedly more reliable and less open to interpretation. Images, particularly photographs, are often used in a subsidiary role to illustrate the text. This was clearly not the case with Hamish’s books or David’s interview, and David makes it more explicit when he defines his research as involving ‘re-looking’ at Churchward’s designs. By contrast, my article on Alan Loney began with the text and, after discussion with you, involved a considerable amount of re-looking at his book designs. I hope the result, while still primarily biographical and historical, provides more insight into his craft design process. The photographs I took of the book stacks were a deliberate attempt to show a different private press direction in his design. Because this shift came late in the process, we were constrained with black-and-white reproduction and the important aspect of Loney’s use of colour isn’t evident, which I know you regretted. However, as these books are mostly publicly available in libraries I was less worried as the article may hopefully encourage people to have a look for themselves—a different tack on the relationship of primary/secondary materials.

I like to think a reproduction has a different sort of value that runs parallel to the real thing. This is mostly to do with distribution—the ability of the reproduction to travel further and more widely than the original. As students in New Zealand our understanding of art and design is generally built from reproductions in books. I had the strange experience of falling so in love with those books that I actually felt slightly deflated when I eventually travelled overseas and saw certain things, paintings mostly, ‘in the flesh’. Perhaps there’s a danger there where the reproduction is your first point of contact and by the time you get around to seeing the real thing the power is lost somehow? This isn’t always true. If I have a CD re-release of an album I like and I find it on vinyl I’ll buy it every time, mostly for the big 12" cover. There’s definitely a spirit the artefact has that an image of it can never represent—the material, its weight, exact colour, subtleties of over-printing etc, but I think it has something to do with the way time works on things too. You know how people will try and artificially age things—and it never looks right. You can’t fake that very well. The passing of time installs a sort of magic onto things.

Your initial question gets me thinking about an internship I did a few years ago at Hatch Show Print, an old letterpress printer in Nashville, Tennessee. At the time I was interested in the idea that by working backwards—messing around in the past—I might find new ways forward. Like side-roads that were missed the first time around. I’m  not really talking about ‘innovation’ in the grand sense here—formal or technical advancements for the discipline/industry—but rather more simply, and selfishly, just some sort of evolution in one’s own practice. And from David’s comments I get the impression he is interested in something similar. With Hamish’s books however, I can’t shake the feeling that the books could have been designed prior to the research being done, and then the text and images just dropped in afterwards. Although knowing that Hamish is a designer in the first instance, I would assume he would have approached it in a similar way to your working on the Whitcoulls book?

Teaching a studio-based course in an art school that has a strong art history department the idea that historians and artists/designers privilege words and images differently comes up quite often. I’ve been interested to discover though that our art historians, even at  postgraduate level, don’t talk about writing. I was surprised because from my position that would appear to be their craft? Which sort of brings me back to the chase here, and maybe what I’m after is a difference in how, depending on our craft, different disciplines go about interrogating their subjects? And perhaps at the end of the day I’m just wanting to argue for some sort of license to be able to play with history in a speculative and intuitive way? Maybe that license already exists? I was interested to know actually, given your earlier comment about creating “something genuinely innovative”, what do you think about Peter Saville’s example? He, among others, was heavily criticised by the likes of Jon Savage in the early 1980s for superficially rehashing the aesthetics of early Modernism. Yet now he is celebrated as a canonical figure. Is it pushing it to consider his early work (for Factory Records) as some sort of practice-based historical research?

You packed a lot in those three paragraphs Luke, and I didn't really know where to begin—hence the break in correspondence—not to mention all those other things like teaching, research, administration and life that intervenes! So I’ll cut to your chase (which incidentally at least one internet source suggests is a printer’s term relating to the chase of type on the press), and hopefully loop back to cover some of the other interesting  points you raise. Clearly, one of the defining features of disciplines, aside from the subject matter, are the methods by which they interrogate their subjects. Take Art History, a discipline which Design History logically borrowed from in the 1960s and 1970s, when design was largely taught in art schools. At one level its craft was writing in the sense of disseminating knowledge about art and artists, but it was and is also about reproduction of unique artworks, in lecture theatres and publications, so that people could re-look at them in a considered and disciplined way. However, the necessity for this kind of close examination of an elite canon has been challenged both within Art History, and in a more pronounced way in design, where we are talking about mass-produced artefacts, many of which can be seen (if you're lucky) in your local second-hand shop.

The value in understanding our visual inheritance is still, I think, accepted in both creative disciplines of design and art, although the scope of subject matter has been under continual re-negotiation, especially in the last couple of decades. If, as a designer, you are taught under the master/pupil model of art schools, it makes sense to pursue this paradigm in practice. Poor designers tend to seek out masters and mimic them in the hope that their clients won't know the difference, whereas good designers have and, I hope, will continue to seek out past designers to determine how they did what they did, apply it in changed contexts (what if Joseph Churchward grew up with an Apple Mac?) and maybe consider what they didn’t do—your “side-roads that were missed”. This seems to be one end of the speculative play that you mention.

Interestingly, within history, there has been a recent development in ‘speculative histories’ that I am hoping will be a useful method for opening up history to students of design. In the recent New Zealand example, New Zealand as it might have been edited by Stephen Levine, 15 writers move sideways towards designing. They take a ‘what if’ approach to history, changing a key driver e.g. what if the Treaty of Waitangi had not been signed in 1840?, to consider plausible past scenarios. With some adaptation, speculative histories could enable student designers to see history as a live pool of ideas, rather than a stagnant swamp.For me, the former seems like a profoundly more sustainable cultural, and even environmental, model than to believe we are continually inventing the new without regard to past successes and, perhaps more importantly, failures.

It’s interesting that you mention the materiality of things like 12" covers. I've even been known to buy an album for its cover, to later discover I also really liked the music on the vinyl inside. This demonstrates these are important components designed to seduce and attract us, but the design also speaks of the time of its production—all the limitations, constraints and creative opportunities faced by the  designer at the moment of album release. And it is very difficult to fake (although read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel where Germany and Japan won the war, and Dick writes about ‘historicity’ in a world of mass reproductions of ‘authentic’ historical artefacts). Interestingly, the idea of ‘Retro’, which is more a combination of homage and what Forty referred to as an archaic grammar, was adopted by French journalists in the 1970s (in the aftermath of massive social change in that country) to refer to nostalgic mimicry of aspects of the past. We can see the  commodified form of this in the ‘new’ Beetle and Mini, and many other appliances and ad campaigns, but for me, as a historian and former museum curator, it is that materiality that gives me all sorts of clues about its making. Clues that are often excised in reproduction, e.g. a printer’s mark on a poster, or a lithographer’s initials discretely incorporated in an ornamental design. That’s magic and gold for a historian—sometimes—but usually with a lot of other supplementary evidence.

I've got to come back to book design, and your suggestion that the book could be designed prior to the research. I have no doubt this is possible, but falls into the same trap as the design following the research—too many things get determined before the materials of the situation are evident. The research and its writing are the materials of the book, and book-designers have to be responsive to content (significantly more so than with a poster say). Aaron Beehre made this point when discussing his award-winning design of Jingle Jangle Morning on National Radio. The best solution is co-design, so that the designer can shape the research alongside the researcher. I have done this successfully in exhibitions, but have yet to do with a book, where commercial imperatives are more pressing. It also requires a researcher open to a designer’s what ifs, and a designer open to a researcher’s insights into the content. There seems to have been a degree of this with Aaron’s book design, but it was produced as part of the Christchurch Art Gallery’s exhibition programme, which is a different context to a purely commercial publisher.

Finally, I have to pick up on your reference to Peter Saville, as Guy Julier, when he was here last year, discussed an interesting incident when Saville was employed to rebrand Manchester. Without knowing exactly how he went about his Factory Records designs, I’d probably prefer to describe it as design research, whether for practice or theory doesn’t much matter, in that he re-looked at historical examples in some form or other and altered them to fit the context of that particular record label at that particular time—and it worked, whatever Savage had to say about it later. More recently, having delivered the expected Manchester city logo, he then proceeded to publicly dismiss it as meaningless, and said the the real design job was to retain the intellectual capital that passed through the city so regularly but didn’t stay on. This seems to me a designer who has learned the lessons of history i.e. that a change of logo or brand doesn’t change cultures or regenerate cities, and the designer’s job is increasingly about identifying complex problems that require considered and creative human-centred solutions.

Have just got DB’s book. In the Lynyrd Skynyrd song ‘Whiskey Rocknroller’, the singer begins: “An old stupid writer asked me one time: ‘Who are you, man? Who are you?’ Well, this is what I am...”

I’m not going to ask who you are Rev. Gunn, but there is a question of identity hanging over this book. 

The question for me is: Is this a model for future design historical research in New Zealand? I’m interested to know whether you think this is a model for future design research. Let me know if you have any questions for me. You can think about the answers in drink breaks between songs.

Ok Noel, so we should try and come to some more or less sort of natural end soon. Before you leave us for Scotland anyway! Thing is I can see this taking off in whole new direction now. But it seems important so let’s see where it goes.

Firstly can I ask you to clarify a little. I'm assuming that by “question of identity” you are meaning that the David Bennewith-ness is somehow getting in the way of the Joseph Churchward-ness of the book? I’ve heard other people say this in a round about kind of way too I think. Is it that you think that David hasn’t been objective enough?

“Is this a model for future design historical research?” I can’t see why not. I do think David’s project is an exciting departure from the usual sort of artist monograph you might expect. But that’s getting back to what I was trying to get at last year... that this is a different sort of project to say Hamish’s or yours. It’s almost as much about David’s engagement with the man and the material as it is about the man himself. I think there’s a real genuine sensitivity about David’s handling of the project too though, and so in that sense I can’t see a problem. I think Joseph is quite happy with how it’s all turned out. But do you see a problem here with this as a model for historical research?

Well, the Scottish bard said: “The best laid schemes of mice and men, gang aft agley”, and my intention to write this before I left New Zealand became a jumbo vapour trail over the Pacific. However, sitting in Edinburgh University Library with a copy of David’s book (NZ & Holland) and Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (US & UK) seems like as good a place to reflect on this book as any.

The identity question
My initial perception was coloured by David’s presentation at Type-SHED11. He was so close to the book, in terms of publication (it hadn’t arrived yet, you’ll remember), and in terms of the audience: New Zealand’s first gathering of international typographers, but, most definingly, Joseph and his family. I really empathised with him there; who do you speak to? How to tell someone else’s story? This is not like speaking of Robert Coupland Harding, who is long since buried, and whose legacy resides in an archive. He held to Joseph’s first drawing instrument, as a talisman of sorts, but I suspect that, because the book had been printed but not published (released to the audience), he was in a no-man’s land.

I know you want this in the bag, but thought I’d fire you this link to a current issue with the logo for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games that appeared in the Scotsman.2 This brings up the relationship between design history and criticism—to understand the value of the past to the present and possible design futures.

I’d been getting myself all tied up in knots lately trying to figure out what to write back to you when you beat me to the punch and that last email came in. So I want to back up slightly here...

I was feeling a bit unsure about ending this on a critique of the Churchward book. It seemed too specific, and It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when we’d started this. But then looking at the dates here I realise this communication has gone on for over two years now! Of course things are going to move about a bit over that amount of time. Anyway I am genuinely interested in your take on David’s project, and I do still think it serves as a good example here. 

I think all your criticisms are perfectly fair and valid, but, like you say, this isn’t the book you would have made, and David has had other intentions. So what I’m really interested in here is that I see you and David coming to this similar sort of place but from very different backgrounds and perspectives. It’s the nature of this overlapping of cultural spheres that interests me—a kind of design/history venn diagram, with the bit in the middle there.

In that sense I liked your description of the Churchward book as a “collaborative working-book”. That has the ring of getting your hands dirty about it, and that sort of practical engagement with material I was getting at before. Likewise your comment about it being an “operational approach to a serviceable historical record”. That word ‘operational’ sounds right too (although I might be putting my own spin on your words here?). 

Anyway I was trying to think what to make of all this when I received Bruce Russell’s text for this issue. It’s strange, we never plan to have thematic connections within each issue, but they seem to happen regardless, and as an editor it’s nice to know I can just run Bruce’s text after this one. Quickly reading Bruce’s piece, but with our conversation still very much at the front of my mind, I came across this: “He was pre-occupied with the fact that we only know ‘cultural artifacts’ at a remove. While traditional critics and art historians obsessed over the original significance of things for their creators and first privileged recipients, Benjamin was the first to make our ‘removal’ from the creation of an artefact into a virtue—a path to new knowledge.”

That’s Walter Benjamin he’s talking about there obviously. And, at the risk of offending both you and Bruce, I want to say this feels like it has something of what I’m after in it too. He carries on: “His category of experience was intended to de-laminate the work, to dissolve it in an acid of time and uncover its meaning for us... He was striving not to explicate what these things meant in themselves, but what they mean to us, at the point of their reception.”

I can’t help but feel like he could be talking about David’s project here—specifically the nature of his engagement with Joseph’s work. This also describes what I felt like I wanted to try and do with the Robert Coupland Harding material. Maybe it’s just a matter of emphasis? You want a deeper picture of the social context of the specific time the work was being made. I want to see if I can apply that work to my everyday experience as a designer here. And of course there’s certainly some overlap there. So I can see my venn diagram working I think. We need each other obviously. 

Which brings me to another point—the community of design here in New Zealand. Another can of worms, but I’ll be brief. I mentioned it in my introduction to the Harding reproductions, this strange gap between bibliographical historians and contemporary graphic designers. I was really excited when I met you actually—you opened up a world of knowledge I hadn’t known existed. Equally I think when you spoke at TypeSHED11 last year, a lot of the designers in the audience were surprised and excited by what you were showing them. The problem is that conference was the one and only time I know of anything like that happening in such a successful way here. So what I’m getting at is that this ‘needing each other’ is something we could work on. Ways to work together more perhaps? It’d be interesting to see what sort of book you and David might make together.

Before we all run off hand-in-hand though, there’s your last email and those Commonwealth games logos. More than the row over the logo for the Glasgow games, I was really interested in the link to all the previous identities. The New Zealand one from 1950 also stands out as a departure from that imperial symbolism (crowns and sheilds), and seems to be the most modern (in a nostalgic sense) until Colin Simon’s thoroughly modernist mark for 1974. I’m not so convinced by the Auckland 1990 one, but certainly looking through these you could be forgiven for thinking that NZ might have a unique and interesting history of graphic design.