BACK TALK
Interview By Steven Heller
This interview
addresses his views as teacher, editor, and critic, and the positioning
of graphic design in the nexus of art and commerce.
Heller: What attracted you to the graphic design field?
Bruinsma:
The classic reason: I once wanted to become a designer. But after I was
thrown out of the first year of art academy (I hated having to draw
dried owers), I started to study art history and became fascinated with
the links I found to exist between "autonomous" and "applied" arts.
When you look at culture at large in, for instance, the Renaissance, or
among the 1920's avant-gardes, you can't miss noticing that the
intellectual discourse about art spanned the whole range of artistic
disciplines. I'am deeply interested in that intellectual, cultural,
dimension of the arts. Graphic design is, in my view, a core discipline
in this field; designers deal with cultural content, with the visual
metaphors that we, the participants in that culture, use to describe
and define our communicative environment. So my attention shifted from
the practical to the intellectual aspect of design.
Heller:
Traditionally, art historians have marginalized graphic design. How do
you reconcile your art history background with your design interests?
Bruinsma:
As an art historian, I'am interested in the meaning of images: How does
their language work? What do certain pictorial elements mean in the
composition and context of a painting? What did they mean at the time
the painting was made? With the right training, you can "read" visual
art the way you can read a book. The same goes for the visual codes of
architecture: You learn to analyze the brief, interpret the plans and
elevations and "read" the construction and, ultimately, the
"architectural meaning" of a building. In order to analyze and
criticize graphic design, you combine aspects of these approaches.
Further, I like the "storytelling" aspect of critical or historical art
writing, and I have a high esteem for good argumentation.
Heller:
As the second editor of Eye, you shifted the focus somewhat from
covering the cutting-edge type and layout designers toward a focus on
interactive media and discussions about the nexus of art and design.
The magazine was much more interdisciplinary in focus. Why did you move
in this direction?
Bruinsma: All the arts generally
function within the same cultural discourse, and today this is even
more intensely so. A practical reason to shift the editorial bias was
that the heyday of typographical expressionism is over. With Poynor,
Eye was a critical channel through which these designers were assessed
and analyzed seriously for the first time. Now they're all over the
place, or nearly forgotten. I'am fascinated with "new", screen-based,
media with what is being done with it, and why. In this field we are
witnessing the development of really new ways of interfacing content
with "readers". I wanted Eye to be in the center of that, not by
reviewing the latest version of Photoshop, but by trying to find the
rare designers or designs that suggest a mature, or even plausible,
form for the challenges that these new contexts pose. It's dirty work:
You have to wade virtually up to your eyeballs through the most
desperate visual refuse before you find the gems. But they're there,
somewhere, and I want to find them, and both critically analyze what's
going on in these designs and use them to try and tell the bigger,
cultural picture. Because one thing is sure: What is going to be made
in these new media, the next decade, is going to change the way we
communicate forever.
Heller: Do you mean with print
becoming increasingly decorative (although not superfluous), it will be
superseded by the information complexity (and the need to order same)
on the Web?
Bruinsma: I don't agree with that. Print
will probably become increasingly precious, but that doesn't
necessarily mean "decorative". In a material sense, print can't be
beaten. I for one wouldn't want to swap the sheer sensorial joy of
contemplating a freshly printed magazine for any Web site. And you can
order quite a complicated maze of information pretty well on a set of
printed pages! But hardcore information design will increasingly turn
to newer media than print: A well-made CD-ROM performs better than a
printed encyclopedia, and you'll find my telephone number quicker with
an on-line computer than with a telephone book. But if you want to
really see things carefully, like reproductions of artworks, or poster
designs, or actually anything not meant for the screen, you'll still
need the good old four-color 350+ dpi offset printed page! Not to
mention the poetry of this medium a book can be so beautiful, as an
object!
Heller: With that in mind, what do you believe is the most
important lesson that graphic design students should be
exposed to today?
Bruinsma:
Order and edit: When working with the computer and everybody does you
basically do two things, you order information, and then you edit it.
This may sound somewhat abstract, but I'am convinced that graphic
design (any design) these days is about in nitely more than just making
things readable, or noticeable in an enticing or pretty way. Design is
about structure, order; it is a constructional activity. The fundament
of design is structuring information in a way that turns data into
meaningful messages. As Gui Bonsiepe says, designers are first and
foremost designers of interfaces. This is the editorial core of the
profession: In order to be able to structure data in meaningful ways,
one has to understand the content and the audience and bring the two
together interface them. That is the essential lesson for graphic
designers.
Heller: In earlier times, students were
required to know techniques and technics, now they are exposed to
theory and need a critical sensibility. How has criticism insinuated
itself into the design discourse?
Bruinsma: Design is
a critical operation by itself: Every design, in essence, is a
criticism of the context for which it has been produced. A good design
"activates" those contexts by offering an understanding of, a comment
on, or an alternative to them. So, just as any critic does, designers
should sharpen their critical skills, and knowing theory and the
cultural discourse are indispensable for that. But theory is not about
making, it is about understanding, which is something quite different.
A frequent mistake in designers reception of theory, especially
deconstructivism in recent years, is that they often take it in as a
how-to manual. That is nonsense: You can't build a design from the
teachings of Foucault or Barthes or Derrida. That's like using the
Bible to cook a pie you go to a cook to learn how to make a pie, not to
God. God is for the bigger picture.
Heller: Practically and theoretically, what excites you about graphic design today?
Bruinsma:
In my view, design has superseded art as the main source of visual
metaphor in our culture. Graphic and product design, television,
advertising these are the media through
which our culture reflects
itself. And even in the "autonomous" arts, I increasingly see what I
call a "designer's mentality": More than personal expression, or an
idiosyncratic commentary on
the world, or "the condition humaine",
art purposely addresses specific conditions and contexts, in much the
same way as a design addresses a brief. The media and contents of art
and design are merging, in a sense, to the detriment of the former. And
although I don't think this is an altogether positive development, I do
think it is essential, and exciting. "Context" is probably the most
frequent word in my writing after "the", and so you can imagine that
I'm excited about a cultural environment where "context" is the alpha
and omega. I always ask for the "brief" when I m looking at a design or
an artwork: What is the context it is made for, how does it re ect that
context, does it succeed in linking itself meaningfully to that
context? I get excited when the answers I find to those questions
amount to a deeper understanding of both the product or artwork, and
the cultural milieu it operates in. And then I want to tell you that -
that's
why I write.
Heller: As artists
increasingly appropriate more of the graphic design language, what do
you feel are the benefits of cross-pollination, if any?
Bruinsma:
This "appropriation" proves my point that design provides the means and
language of the visual discourse these days. But of course it feeds
back in all kinds of interesting and rewarding ways; by being, as it
were, drawn into the artistic discourse, designers start to consider
themselves more as "cultural agents" instead of mere subservient
"problem solvers". They have to do both: solve problems (meaning:
answering briefs), and provide visual messages that are meaningful in a
broader context. A closer contact with artists stimulates the latter.
So, ultimately this is (ideally) a real cross-pollination: it is
producing a new breed of visual communicators.
Heller:
Do you feel that students are better off learning about art and
commerce as two parts of a whole, or should "commercial" be separate
from art?
Bruinsma: This is a difficult question
for me. I'm convinced they are parts of a whole, but on quite different
levels. One of the good things about the "merging" of art and design is
that art becomes more socially conscious than it has been for a long
time. The "commercial" is of course part of that social realm. But it
is
a very powerful and problematic part; it is inclusive by
exclusion, by which I mean that commercialism tries to embrace
everything, but discards the parts it can t reach. The cultural value
of a design is very hard to establish in economical terms, so, often,
it is discarded as being trivial to the problem that has to be solved.
This is worrying me. At the same time, there lies a responsibility for
us art and design historians and critics to show that cultural value
and commercial function can coincide in rather nourishing ways.
About this article
The above interview of Max Bruinsma by Steven
Heller originally appeared in the March/April, 2000 issue of Print Magazine's European Design Annual and appears here with permission. Copyright 2000 Print Magazine.
Max Bruinsma
Max Bruinsma, 43, is former editor of Eye magazine, the international
review of graphic design. Before taking this post, succeeding founding
editor Rick Poynor, Bruinsma was an established voice in the graphic
design community of The Netherlands, where he worked as editor of the
Dutch design magazine Items, published several books on graphic design,
and taught at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Since departing Eye
last year over a con ict with the publisher, he has been working in
Amsterdam as an editorial consultant/concept developer of Web projects,
including an educational portal for a cluster of vocational schools. He
also teaches a course on visual essay at the postgraduate design
department of Amsterdam s Sandberg Institute.
Print Magazine
Print is "America's Graphic Design Magazine."