John Bass
In 1968 the Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers assembled eagle-depicting artifacts for his fictive Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section XIXe siècle . In Broodthaers’ museum, gallant sculpted or painted eagles from European museums were displayed adjacent to eagles decorating utilitarian objects like bottle caps and notebooks, or eagles giving authority to flags. Broodthaers employed an arbitrary organizational scheme intended to negate the assumed meaning of eagle, thereby obliging the viewer to see the ideological impulses that figured in the use of the eagle as a sign. Broodthaers’ project works because of its simple principle of editing out everything that is not an eagle, including the origins of the eagle artifacts. It is a principle that reveals how the selection and organization of an exhibit’s material furnishes an orienting context to the viewer. Designer Bruce Mau, curator of Massive Change: the Future of Global Design currently at the Vancouver Art Gallery, offers no such principle. Similar to many of Mau’s book design projects, the overflowing material in Massive Change is an experience of breadth, and not of depth. Although the show is organized as a series of eleven design economies, the uneven presentation of the various economies suggests that the objective of exhibiting a lot of material is not a virtue in and of itself. For instance, why is a critical theme expressed in some areas of the exhibit, for example in the Urban Economies and Material Economies sections, but not in others? Why are surveillance and scanning technologies presented in a value neutral way? In the Military Economies section, one is given a very ambiguous assessment: are we to conclude that ‘spin-ons’ from commercial product design to military applications are either just fine or just a fact of life? Don’t the design and application of genetic
John Bass joined the University of British Columbia School of Architecture faculty in fall 2002. He was previously a design critic at Harvard Design School and adjunct associate professor at California College of Arts and Crafts. Bass is the organizer and coordinator of the Delta National Park Travel Guide, a multi-disciplinary research and design project for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California. A part of this work has recently been published in GAM01 – Tourism and Landscape, published by the Technical University of Graz, Austria. is increasingly a precise science, made possible by armies of data miners and the growing saturation of product they place in the various micro-spatial economies. Mau’s curatorial omission, conscious or not, of the methods of commodifying and designing information belies his plan for a kind of neutral inclusivity. Soaked through and through, the exhibit is the watery gleam of the designers’ micro-spatial economy, and while the exhibit’s image appears transparent it is in fact entirely opaque. It is the mirror of reification, of presenting an idea in the guise of designed objects, a process Broodthaers knew well and that Mau apparently chose to ignore. Mau and the VAG curators optimistically imply that designers are producing a better world through design. The belief in the ability of design culture to guide a benign technology is not new and was called into question long ago. Perhaps Mau isn’t aware of Ulrich Beck’s argument that capitalist democracies need to engage in ‘reflexive modernism’, the process through which we might begin to make choices about how we define our reliance and constraints placed on technologies. Engaging in such a process is critical, requires clarity, and is neither pessimistic nor naïve.
modification technologies deserve as rigorous an examination as the history of computer input devices or a day’s flights between New York and London? Surely, he and his co-curators at the VAG must have an opinion. Do these remain unexpressed because the undertaking of giving the unwieldy material some kind of thematic and visual order supplanted the work of selective editing? The task of organizing Massive Change must have been a daunting one, and there are many inventive methods used to thematically and visually organize the show. One moves through this show often engaged and sometimes bedazzled, and leaves it least slightly winded, hoping that something was learned in there. I think most thoughtful people will come away from the show thinking the show interesting but full of contradictions, and less thoughtful people will leave stimulated by the cool bits and pieces, unburdened by any requirement to understand them in relation to the structures that produce them. One could make the argument that the task of illuminating has been the historical mission of the museum, and that Mau and the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is Vancouver’s de facto museum of modern art, have produced an experience we normally associate with a trade fair rather than a museum. And so what is the hidden sign of Massive Change ? The designer’s soft machine lies just behind the designed surface of the show, one that is never revealed although it is intrinsic to each of the design economies Mau presents to us. There is no material describing the commodification of the Information Economy because that material is the show itself. In all things marketing, from selling credit cards to selling exhibits, what was once a commercial art
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