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January 14, 2006
Posters, Karl Gerstner, galleries and research outputs
Jenny asked when I would be having my exhibition here... I'd obviously mentioned this last year, when as part of my coming to NYC involved taking part in a group show with other Masters students from RMIT. In fact I'd also planned to try and organise a couple of other smaller, maybe even solo, shows in or around the Manhattan/Brooklyn area. The RMIT thing fell apart... this bugged me at the time, not only because I thought we had a show and seminar series organised, but because this 'plan' was a part of my application to the university for my funding to be here! Anyway, that was a while ago now, and I'd practically forgotten about it. What caught me by surprise in Jenny's question was that I'd not even considered approaching a gallery since arriving here almost two months ago now.
Because Jonty was here as well, this sparked a brief conversation about "research outputs", and how my putting up posters all over Brooklyn wouldn't really be scoring me any research outputs at the university back home. Obviously this really bugs me! But then I've been thinking, it's kind of interesting in relation to my project's unplanned but inevitable questioning of what it means to "research in the medium of design". The answer seems obvious... one is generally invited to show work in a gallery, so you can say there's usually some kind of peer review involved. But what if, as Designer you're not interested in showing your work within the conventions of the art gallery? For years now I've been doing posters (even for galleries!?), and it makes sense for me to be carrying out my research in public, on the street. I guess the problem, for the university (or more precisely, the 'PBRF'), is that anyone can stick up posters on the street... so how can the research be quality assured? Rather than be negative and disgruntled, I'd like to think this could be a part of my thesis perhaps... there is an epistemological issue here about the nature of Design Research and it's evaluation.
I was reading Dot Dot Dot #4 this morning (Lisa has it!?), and in it is an article on Karl Gerstner (that's him above) by Richard Hollis (see also Eye book review). In the article Hollis says...
If Gerstner naturally integrated his work as an artist with work as a designer, and considered the designer to be an artistópart of the everyday economic and cultural lifeóhe was also keen to confront the public with artists' work, to make it more accessible and, produced as multiples, more affordable. He founded a company to produce art in multiple editions, and in 1961 persuaded the company that owned poster sites to display signed prints by his Concrete artist friends and got them printed free. They went up for twelve weeks on 500 sites in central Zurich.
The image at the top here is actually from last July in Christchurch, a project I did, One Week Poster Project, where I put up a poster as I was designing it at the end of each day for a week until it was "finished". I'm linking to this here as I'm thinking the project(s) I'm embarking on here might, in format and convention at least, follow on from this one... but also because much of what I've mentioned here occured to me then.
Posted by Luke Wood at January 14, 2006 04:21 AM
Comments
hey i went down and saw where you put up the posters last year (i was staying right by there and recognised from the photo).
hope your studies are going well.
Posted by: Duncan at January 14, 2006 09:26 AM