neomania

“A 15-year-old girl has filed a $50,000 claim against the Burbank school district for suspending her because the sweat shirt she fashioned to mourn a slain classmate was imprinted with Old English-style letters that school officials regard as gang symbols...,” the Los Angeles Times recently reported. The cover of the Constitution is printed in the same lettering, the student’s ACLU lawyer observed. “‘We thought that was the nicest looking writing. Even Disneyland uses it on some of its signs,’ the girl’s mother, Ruth Cisneros said... ‘How can they object to a typeface and not the message?’” ¹

From the Halls of Justice to Sleeping Beauty’s castle, forms gain their meaning through cultural agreement, rather than through an intrinsic nature of their own. Within each new context, Old English lettering becomes a stylistic signifier, encoded through its use. “Gang style” or “Authoritarian style” or “Storybook style” are descendant mutations of texture, a calligraphic writing style prevalent throughout much of Medieval Europe. In the Gothic era it served a functional purpose; its compact design helped conserve the expensive parchment of the educational and liturgical books produced in monastic scriptoria.

Historic forms are up for grabs. As the pace of our culture accelerates, surfaces are stripped away, their skins lifted, reapplied and reassigned meanings with increasing frequency. In this cultural condition, graphic design is both participant and product. In practice, the design profession embraces stylistic fashion and fleeting design stars. Yet at the same time, the rapid turnover dizzies the Rational Functionalist in each of us; the apparent reign of surface style leaves us on unsure footing.

If we fast forward to contemporary America, where the image has come to replace not only specific realities but, increasingly, verbal communication as well, we see that style has begun to feed on itself, entering into a monologue of self-reference. In the ensuing procession of stylistic simulacra, forms give their original meanings the slip. Imagine, a type style that began in an ascetic cloister now signifies both an urban street gang and State power. Increasingly, “...objects in practice become signs and signs objects and a second nature takes the place of the first the initial layer of perceptible reality.” ² Specific styles refer only loosely to their origins, if at all. And stylistic change itself acts as a signifier for progress and evolution: the most recent (regardless) has become synonymous with the best, a legacy of planned obsolescence. While the condition itself is not new, it now moves with unprecedented speed.

Styles are assimilated overnight in the search for the “ever-evolving new.” Not only is real history up for grabs, but also each and every new look as it originates, surfaces, and is instantly sucked-up, at which point it is deemed “history.” Its very existence guarantees its death. “Style is something to be used up. Part of its significance is that it will lose its significance.” ³

We live in an era of sound bytes and hyper-time. The immediacy of television, satellite connections, fax machines and phone modems has propelled our reality into hyperdrive. These technological advances when combined with the American values of freedom of consumptive choice, upward mobility, and progress through rapid turnover, in part a byproduct of consumerist growth strategies of 20th century commerce, create an insatiable appetite for the new. “Roland Barthes called this phenomenon neomania, a madness for perpetual novelty where ‘the new ’has become defined strictly as a ‘purchased value,’ something to buy.” ⁴

Surfaces come and go. Meaning is in a constant state of flux. Weingart’s approach, his spirit of rebellion, and his use of intuitive decision-making still resonate, but unfortunately, his formal vocabulary is burnt out. Whereas the look of Kathy McCoy’s work continually transforms while she holds onto a belief system that is essentially a set of professional ethics. She is openly nourished by new influences: linguistic theory, the vernacular, MTV or Photoshop. Her formal vocabulary is broad and changing so her work always appears fresh. Ideas have more staying power (but are by no means timeless) while forms have an increasingly shorter life span.

If we accept that the nature of graphic design, like style, is ephemeral, and, like Old English, carries meaning via context, changing concommitantly with cultural shifts (whether or not our ideas, process, or values also transform) then our formal styles should respond with fluidity over the span of our personal continuums. Each new step in the continuum is not necessarily better, maybe just different; at once a reply to the work that preceded it and a manifestation of the cultural forces that shape the new environment. The motivation for change is multi-layered: personal growth, new influences, shifting contexts, and social and economic conditions contribute. As these conditions place pressure on our performance, it is important to recognize them for what they are, and to assess how they influence values we accept as natural.

It is time to take stock of the contradictions between design rhetoric and realities. Well-intentioned designers wishing to make a positive contribution to the world begin to feel like decorators rather than communicators, when work is evaluated in functional terms (where function = market share). Many are, but is that inherently evil? Are aesthetic contributions enough?

The current challenge, then, is to address the realities of neomania without being seduced by it; to understand the impact our shifting culture has on both the aesthetic milieu and self-defined value system of our profession; to honestly analyze the forces overlooked by early Modernist philosophies: the personal continuum and the reign of style; and to reevaluate a rewards system that is both superficial and near-sighted. Acknowledging these realities leaves us in search of a better answer, preferably a set of answers that are not so sweeping and concrete that they cannot shift with time and can therefore connect more closely to individual concerns, not pretending to answer universally. A set of ideologies that accepts and analyzes rather than disdains and dismisses the shifting nature of style and the value of aesthetic pleasures may lead to a more realistic connection between theory and practice.