Between Modern Art and Design

Yoshiaki Tono, 1983

The advertising slogans and pictures of myriad products and events that fill the newspapers and commuter trains every day are essentially transitory phenomena. No sooner have our eyes and minds acknowledged their existence than they slip away into oblivion. It is, therefore, a strange experience to see these pictures, which should already have been “consumed” after serving their brief purpose, reproduced in a yearbook. Here we find advertising designs laid out for inspection, divorced from their spatial, temporal and environmental context, like mounted butterfly specimens in rows of lifeless beauty. This disturbs me in much the same way as reading a sodden newspaper, rain-soaked in the mail box. Advertisements, like newspapers, should be crisply dry, evoking the freshness of news and information.

An episode at an exhibition of “Modern Japanese Posters” held recently at the Toyama Prefectural Gallery of Modern Art, which I attended, vividly brought home to me the uniquely contextual characteristic of graphic design. During the opening party, a graphic designer told me the following story. He was chatting with some guests, when the conversation turned to which was the best poster. He said he felt disappointed when someone nominated the popular poster of film star Toshiro Mifune drinking a certain brand of beer. I would hazard a guess that the person who mentioned the Mifune poster was probably not evaluating it as an expression of graphic design. He most certainly did not know the name of the designer. Of all the famous posters on display, he probably chose that one from intense nostalgia for the brief period when it lined the streets.

This brilliantly illustrates how design is a product of its time. Advertising design always exists as a label for a particular era, a peg on which to hang our memories. To see an old TV commercial is suddenly to be reminded of the student agitation of the 1960s or the 1970 International Exposition. They cannot be separated from the place, time and social context in which they were seen. The same considerations surely apply to the works appearing in this yearbook. With their duty as witnesses of the times over, these slogans and pictures have become nothing more than frozen stock, stacked and stored away in a refrigerated warehouse. It is an impossible question to answer, nevertheless an interesting one to pose: which of them will persist in our future memories as the most evocative of 1981?

But, while it is true that advertising design has been largely limited to the production of transitory creations, its role is undeniably becoming enlarged. This development has taken place against the background of the expanding link between commerce and culture.

In the past, it was very much a question of corporations using cultural activities as a tool for advertising themselves. Recently, however, as exemplified by the Seibu Group, culture is business—and business is culture. An example is the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition, which was held at the Seibu Department Store’s Museum of Art recently. The difference between opening it at some national or public art gallery and handling the advertising in the usual limited art-world way, and taking Seibu’s all-embracing corporate stance in planning, promoting and hosting it as the Grand Exhibition of this Proto-Dadaist, is not merely one of size. It illustrates how advertising design, increasingly, materializes in accordance with an overall concept.

And there is a world of difference in the way it is received. It is not just giving cultural information in a cultural frame of reference; rather, transplanting that culture to the level of general daily activity. Some see cultural projects with a commercial link as “impure.” On the other hand, I feel that there is more significance in a culture that is intimately bound up with the pulsating energy of modern life if, in the process, it is regenerated and transformed.

I find it fascinating that despite Duchamp’s incomprehensibility, his exhibition attracted such large numbers of the younger generation. Duchamp is generally considered one of the most difficult artists in modern art—which itself is often obscure. He has been discussed in profound, even metaphysical terms, and might even be called the “high priest” of modern art. And this esoteric artist was thrust into Seibu’s cultural arena, currently the most avant-garde source of culture for the young.

The Duchamp legend, extolled by the advertising and information media, broke out of the high palaces of art (or rather anti-art) and became an object of contemplation, thought and conversation in an unrehearsed, commonplace setting. On the other hand, if Duchamp is seen in the context of his lifelong attempt to transfer art from the possession of a few privileged artists to “the man in the street,” the development appears to be more natural.

The Duchamp legend, amplified by corporate cultural strategies, drew a record number of visitors, unusual for a modern art exhibition of this kind. Toward the close, the gallery was crammed with over 3,000 visitors a day. Once again, I was taken aback by the power that his combination of commerce and culture had to draw crowds. But they came not just because of clever advertising strategy; rather, because the overall concept for presenting Duchamp and his works touched off a responsive chord in the viewers.

Almost at the same time as the Duchamp exhibition was being held, there was a large exhibition of the works of Kaii Higashiyama, a venerated establishment artist in the traditional style, at the National Gallery of Modern Art. This exhibition, too, became quite a talking point, with a record 20,000 visitors a day. Many of those who flocked to see Higashiyama’s works were elderly women, dressed in kimono. The Duchamp exhibition, on the other hand, attracted mainly youngsters in sneakers. Although both groups “saw” and “absorbed,” there seems to be no connection at all between them. One could simply bracket the old people on their art tour with “authoritarianism” and the youngsters who joined Seibu’s cultural crusade of anti-art with “anti-authoritarianism.” But more important, the so-called mature groups, the middle-aged men who grind away at their jobs, were nowhere in evidence among the crowds of cultural spectators.

Even this yearbook of graphic design underscores the fact that Japanese culture, or commercial graphic art, is overwhelmingly oriented toward the young. Whether fashion or design, healthy, lively young people are the target, and their tastes and trends tend to dominate those of older people. The middle-aged have not become ready absorbers of contemporary cultural influences. I wonder what our graphic designers make of this.

Designers are corporate geisha; artists are art-world geisha, Designers are tricksters beautifying imperfect goods. Artists are cosmetic surgeons beautifying imperfect humans. Designers, discard your complex about art. Artists, develop a complex about design, and recognize its importance.

I wrote these words as a farewell to the graduating students of the design department of the art college where I teach. They were intended as a few paradoxical words to students who had nurtured their dreams of art and design within the aseptic idealism of the college cocoon. At art colleges, design and art are considered so different that no one finds it odd to have them divided into separate departments.

But, to the recipients of those words, the TV commercial last year for the new Honda car “City” featuring the British rock group “Madness” was for more “artistic” than the decadent landscapes of the great names of the neo-traditionalist school of art. If the word “artistic” seems ill-chosen, perhaps I should say that the commercial hinted at a vitality capable of affecting our daily lives. This is the energy so characteristic of culture, whether manifested as design or art. There is no distinction. While it is generally true that design does not disrupt the sense of the daily continuum, but merely expands it, it is also true that radical works of modern art are being hung up on living room walls without producing the least effect.

Art Forum, the American art magazine that introduces and presents critical reviews of the latest in modern art, offers some interesting insights into this phenomenon.

Although until recently the magazine was widely regarded as the preserve of avant-garde diehards, in the three years since new editorial staff took over, a gradual change in editorial policy has taken place. No doubt this metamorphosis reflects the change that came about in modern art itself. When art became too avant-garde, and when minimal art and conceptual art became intellectually sterile, it fell into a trap of its own making and stagnated. As a result, the vital energies of subculture and street culture are being reevaluated, which is giving birth to a movement that seeks to define the border regions between art and daily life, between art and design. That flower of the 60s, pop art, aroused keen interest because the phenomenon was a product of the permeation between art and mass culture. The recent rise of the coarse expressionistic style, comic-strip styles and illustrative styles, variously known as “new wave” or “baroque,” probably are manifestations of the same phenomenon.

The editorial of the February 1982 edition of Art Forum presents some interesting comments on this issue.

Whether we like it or not, much of the significant art of our century has been ‘inaccessible’ even to the well-rounded and well-educated because full access depends heavily on one’s possession of a complex cultural and physical reference system, which expands not only with art-historical information, but with perceptual ability, a philosophy of looking, and a broad vocabulary of signs.

This editorial goes on to state,

This issues seeks to confront artmaking that retains its autonomy as it enters mass culture at the blurred boundary of art and commerce, and partakes of the wandering multiplicities of the body of popular art. Today, the threat to art no longer comes from the outside, but from within, from its isolation and conservatism.

Until now, art has been seen as a dialectical “opposition between serious and frivolous, high and low, pure and impure…between esthetic and utilitarian values, between the unique and the multiple, between the useless and useful, between elite and vulgar.” This has in fact been destroyed by pop art. “The offspring of this relationship between the avant garde and mass culture production is an artistic pantheism affecting all aspects of the merchandising of culture and the culturizing of merchandise.”

In discussing the reason for its choice of the icon of fashion for the cover of the February issue, Art Forum draws some intriguing parallels between fashion and art.

In fashion, the speed of communication is such that meaning disappears and changes from year to year, and lives only within the cyclical notion of the collections. The perpetual turnover of style resurrects previous models. If modernism’s vision of the future has been identified with hostility to the past, then fashion’s continual, reckless ingestion of the phantom of history could be what makes it a modern idea—in fact an idea that relates to the most recent developments in art, be they in architecture, film, music, painting or photography. This is work that depends on the manipulation of preceding models.

In other words, if it is true that postwar art always sought novelty and was nurtured in hostility to the past (one only need think of the continual process of reformation from the 50s through the abstract expressionism of the 70s, by way of pop art to minimal and conceptual art), then it is also true that art in the 80s saw a reaction setting in against the fossilized thing it had become by shedding too many skins in quick succession and by pandering to intellectual snobbery. One result is the current movement among the younger generation to revitalize this art, which borrows continually from the heritage of the past, much like fashion’s “continual, reckless ingestion of the phantom of history.” So, whereas pop art previously made “art” out of the crudities of daily life, art now is on the opposite tack; that of immersion in mass culture. If design surpasses the stage of mere ornamental exposition of the vulgate and disrupts daily existence in a different way from art, so becoming a forceful cultural language, then it is probable that art, too, will cease to stagnate within the isolation of the avant-garde and will attempt a revitalization at the level of fashion or design. In other words, the very question of how design and art differ will, with the passage of time, become a dead issue.