I'm in the middle of working on a book project which my friend Paul commissioned for his parents anniversary, so I've been thinking about design and materials a lot lately. It's a sort of bastard project: half scrapbook (with recipes, photos and letters) and half hand-made book (original cover design and binding, hand cut and pasted and bound). I've been buying paper and materials for it all over town and having a great time doing it. One of my favorite stores to dig in has been Paper Presentation in the Flatiron District, which has recently doubled in size and has a lot of scrapbooking supplies now too.
So today, while I'm home sick and catching up on my blog reading (and if that isn't a procrastination tool, I don't know what is), I ran across this piece by Jessica Helfand on Design Observer. It's half tongue-in-cheek, and half arrogantly dismissive, rife with the dis-ease one set of professionals has for those down the pecking order. It would have been funny if it weren't so completely absurd.
It starts with a mildly amusing bit about going to a store that sells "craft supplies, which masquerade in many parts of the American retail environment as art supplies." My first thought when I read this sentence was What? Did I miss that lecture in art history about proscribed materials? I thought art got made with whatever it needed to be made with, regardless of the materials' original purpose. Did someone say, "Thou shalt not make anything with fuzzy pipe cleaners or popsicle sticks and call it art"? I mean, look at Duchamp. I'm pretty sure he didn't get the materials for his sculpture "Fountain" at an art supply store.
She has some preconceptions about photography that I find peculiar too:
It may come as little surprise that as photography becomes more a function of the individual and less a consequence of institutionalized production, so, too, should the way an individual’s photos be displayed be more idiosyncratic. Arguably, in the hands of the average civilian (read “non-designer”) such photos typically dwell in scrapbooks. A hundred years ago — back in the days when taking the family snapshot was colloquially referred to, in certain places, as “going Kodaking,” a person’s favorite snaps could be affixed to the pages of an album using something called photo corners, little triangular pieces of acid-free paper with one side primed for gluing. You scribbled the time, place and names of the individuals underneath the pasted-down photo and you were done.
Isn't that cute?
Unless she's thinking of all those stock photo houses that provide so much of the fodder for designers, I wonder when she thought photography was ever not an individual pursuit of amateurs and professionals alike? In the 50s, 60s and 70s large segments of the general population had either Brownies, Kodak Instamatics, or Polaroids. Her description of this ubiquitous pursuit makes it sounds so quaint as to be almost exotic, like the odd habits of Stone Age tribes. And those photo corners? It wasn't until the 70's that alternatives presented themselves, and half of those have ruined photographs I took then. Digital cameras and camera phones haven't exactly sparked a revolution here, except in the ease of production and printing. Not that taking your roll of film to the drug store to be printed ever slowed any amateur photographer down. Sometimes, that was half the fun.
There are at least a couple of levels of discussion going on here, whether Helfand realizes it or not (and she must; she's not only a professional graphic designer herself but a critic at the Yale School of Art). One of these, of course, is who gets to define art and who gets to call themselves artists and who decided that. In addition, there's the fairly new professionalization and specialization of various creative pursuits, and the overly broad definition of the concept "creative" itself. There's also the old art vs. craft distinction, art vs. illustration, and the newer conflict between art, design, and graphics. All of these discussions beg the question of whether any of these categories are really necessary, and who they serve.
Helfand writes about scrapbookers with an almost comical frisson of horror, as though they were performing dangerous genetic engineering experiments in their basements. "It's at once horrifying and fascinating to witness the degree to which design is being discussed online by people whose concept of innovation is measured by novel ways to tie bows." Oh no! They might get out and be mistaken for real design! Why, these untrained amateurs are actually discussing fonts! And layout! And learning how to take and crop photographs! They are actually putting—gasp!—captions on their photographs. Really, how could they?
"Naturally," Helfand says, "any self-respecting graphic designer wants nothing whatsoever to do with any of this." Naturally. Just as no self-respecting artist wants anything to do with graphic design or illustration (see, the perennial Maxfield Parrish: artist or illustrator argument).
Pause for a moment while I roll my eyes until I'm seasick. I will be the first to admit that I am, yea, one of the great unwashed mass of untrained amateurs messing about with glue and paper and photographs and whatnot. I'm a little uneasy about starting to call myself a book artist since I've only got a few under my belt and my best one was a collaborative effort with a truly professional artist. But in art, as in anything, one learns by doing and reading and observing, and by not being constrained by pre-conceived ideas. The mass of scrapbooking supplies out there, from preprinted captions to (my favorite) the paper-doll scenery and objects from Jolee by You, are only as tacky or brilliant as the end-user, like any other material. If you can make art with plumbing fixtures, why not with "trinkets, patches, themed eyelets and page pebbles"?
The dirty little demarcation line between professional artist and what Helfand calls "civilians" is imagination and talent and drive in combination, not materials, not medium, not genre. Scrapbookers are not setting out to make professional art as a career; they're making heirlooms and historical and genealogical records. No one is setting up professional scrapbooking firms, or offering them for sale to galleries (and who would buy it?). This is like worrying about home videos destroying the integrity of Hollywood. What's Helfand got her knickers in such a twist about?
It all comes out in the last paragraph:
Of course, scrapbooking is not now, nor has it ever been about achieving design excellence. But where do we draw the line? We can't simply dismiss scrapbooking on the assumption that its decorative nature and personal content relegates it to non-design status. Sure, it's goofy and its homespun (if there's such a thing as outsider art, maybe this is insider art) but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take it seriously. At the end of the day, I suppose if someone gets really serious, they can always break away from the pack and start calling themselves mixed-media artists. Or even — graphic designers.
Where will all that hard-won accreditation go if these people start passing themselves off as professionals? Where do we draw the line?
Where there is one, the line draws itself. Helfand's just worried about which side of it she's really on.
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