RELATED TERMS: Alienation effect – Verfremdungseffekt; Avant-garde movements; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Detournement; Method and methodology; Psychogeography; Situationist International

In Debord’s theorisation of Situationism, dérive, détournement and psychogeography are closely aligned practices. Dérive translates literally as drifting but it is a more active and purposefully disorienting strategy than this rather neutral term suggests. Debord defines derive as an experimental mode of behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society and the urban environment. It is a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances, according to Debord.

The combined effect of the ‘dérive’ and ‘détournement’ is that an urban environment is encountered, as if by an acutely observant stranger, as an event or situation in all its limitations, risks and possibilities. In being newly experienced and perceived, it is thus in effect destabilised, as is the urban mentality of the psychogeographer (Brooker, 2003: 210).

References

Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.

RELATED TERMS: Interaction; Interaction design; Taxonomy

Paul Dourish (2004) brings to attention Matthew Chalmers’ observation that computer science is based on philosophical assumptions and arguments that were prevalent before the 1930s. Dourish continues,

“Computer-science in practice involves reducing high-level behaviors to low-level, mechanical explanations, formalizing them through pure scientific rationality; in this, computer science reveals its history as part of a positivist, reductionist tradition. Similarly, much of contemporary cognitive science is based on a rigorous Cartesian separation between mind and matter, cognition and action. These are philosophical positions of long standing, dating from the nineteenth century or earlier.”

This dualist, positivist, reductionist philosophical approach has been questioned by the phenomenological approaches of, for example, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as other 20th-century philosophers. Such phenomenological questioning informs the embodied interaction approach to human interaction with software systems.

The phenomenological tradition, by emphasising the primacy of social practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity, can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. Such approaches, extended through what has been called post-phenomenological research into technologies, for example as pursued by Don Ihde (2009, 2010), can be of value for the design of narrative environments, not just those which are digital or which incorporate a digital component.

References

Dourish, P. (2004) Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ihde, D. (2009) ‘What Is postphenomenology?’, in Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 5–23.

Ihde, D. (2010) Heidegger’s technologies: postphenomenological perspectives. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

RELATED TERMS:

Ken Garland wrote and proclaimed the First Things First manifesto in 1963 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was first published in January 1964. Co-signed by 21 colleagues, the manifesto proposed that design effort should re-directed, away from advertising towards more worthwhile, purposeful activities.

A second version, entitled First Things First 2000, was published in autumn 1999, appearing simultaneously in Adbusters, AIGA Journal and Emigre in North America, Eye and Blueprint in the UK and Items in the Netherlands. It later also appeared in Form magazine in Germany. Having a similar structure to Garland’s original, it widened its target to include not just advertising but also marketing and brand development.

The response to this version was polarised, and many in the design industry were angered by the tone of the criticism. As an example, Poynor (2021) cites Pentagram partner Michael Bierut’s riposte for I.D. Magazine, “A Manifesto with Ten Footnotes.”

In 2014, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of First Things First, Cole Peters decided to launch a third version, this time with an emphasis on design in the digital realm. Cole was prompted by Edward Snowden’s disclosures about governmental abuse of communications technologies to consider the question of how culpable were designers in abetting the technological apparatus that was feeding on personal data and surveillance, an apparatus whose appeal was often enhanced through design.

A fourth, online version, First Things First 2020, was written by Namita Dharia, Marc O’Brien and Ben Gaydos. It includes “a checklist of urgent design goals, covering the histories and ethics of design, community-based initiatives, non-exploitative social relations, nature as a complex system, and reconnecting design and manufacturing to the Earth and its people” (Poynor, 2021).

References

Poynor, R. (2021) ‘The Evolving Legacy of Ken Garland’s First Things First Manifesto’, Eye on Design. Available at: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/why-ken-garlands-first-things-first-manifesto-keeps-getting-updated/ (Accessed: 13 September 2021).

Links

First Things First https://designmanifestos.org/ken-garland-first-things-first/

First Things First 2000 http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/first-things-first-manifesto-2000

First Things First 2014 https://firstthingsfirst2014.net

First Things First 2020 https://www.firstthingsfirst2020.org

A Manifesto with Ten Footnotes https://readings.design/PDF/bierut_10_footnotes.pdf

RELATED TERMS: Modernism; Avant-garde movements; Socially engaged art; Critical thinking; Agonism and avant-gardism; Dissensus – Ranciere

Design practice has long been influenced by art practice, and vice versa, for example, the minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s influenced graphic and industrial design, in one direction, while modernist art of the early 20th century incorporated designed artefacts from everyday life into its artworks and pop art explicitly took commercial art themes and icons and re-contextualised them within the institutional gallery system of fine art, in the other direction. Elements of art practice and design practices are, by the early 21st century, well and truly intertwined, which does not mean that they are equivalent.

The practice of designing a narrative environment, then, may incorporate techniques, devices and concepts from art practice directly or indirectly and/or consciously or unconsciously. It is as well, then, to be aware of the relationship between modernist and avant-garde art practices, as this distinction bears upon the question of whether a specific art practice, and by analogy a specific design practice, is separate from society and self-referential or is socially relevant, whether critically or conventionally, and integrated with society.

Jochen Schulte-Sasse (1984: xii) points out that Peter Burger (1984) does not accept the argument presented within the Anglophone cultural history tradition that there was a radical turning point in the mid-19th century, after which a scepticism towards language marked the beginning of modernism, as an important demarcation in art history. By setting the avant-garde within the broad context of cultural politics and the consciousness industry, and by seeing the chances to use the ruptures within this system, as Burger does, a more full understanding of the avant-garde can be obtained. Thus, Burger reconstructs literary history from the development of autonomous literature in bourgeois culture during the period of classicism and romanticism in the 18th century and early 19th century through to the turn to Aestheticism/modernism and on to the avant-garde.

In the Anglophone tradition, the modernist writer of ‘high’ literature no longer refers positively to society by presenting norms and values critically. Rather, the modernist writer attacks the ossification of society and its language. By this definition, in plot construction in modernist literature a writer no longer tacitly assumes that there is a rational structure in human conduct, that this structure can be ascertained and that doing so enables the writer to lend his work a specific order. Assumptions concerning human conduct, rationality, sequence and order are put in question: there is no secure or preordained meaning in the action portrayed. The reader remains uncertain as to the possibilities or horizons of meaning.

The Anglophone tradition holds that from the mid-19th century onwards, beginning with Flaubert, this sceptical tendency becomes predominant. Burger finds in this Anglophone debate about modernism an assumption that obscures the much more radical shift from Aestheticism to the historical avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century.

For Burger, the developing scepticism toward language and the change in relation of form and content that characterised Symbolism and Aestheticism was inherent in the developmental logic of the institution of ‘art’ from the beginning, i.e. from the beginning of the specific institutionalisation of the commerce with art in bourgeois society. Even if the autonomous art of bourgeois culture in the late 18th century criticised society through its contents, it was separated through its form from the mainstream of society.

In Burger’s view, the development leading to Symbolism and Aestheticism is best described as a transformation of form into content, whereby art becomes a problem for itself as form becomes the content of art works, such that the predominant feature of modernist or aestheticism art is that it calls attention to its own material means and media. In other words, the apartness from the praxis of life that constituted the institutional status of art in bourgeois society became the content of works.

The passage from the autonomy of art in the 18th century to the Aestheticism of the late 19th century and early 20th century is, for Burger, a process of intensification of art’s separateness from bourgeois society. In so arguing, Burger departs from the history of the avant-garde in the Anglophone tradition. For Burger, the tendency inherent in art’s autonomous status drove the individual work and the art institution to increasingly extreme declarations of their autonomy. The increasing consciousness of writing techniques and the aesthetic sensitising of art’s audience lead, for Burger, to art works that are characterised by semantic atrophy.

Burger sees no purpose in valorising the purely aesthetic experience that motivates Aestheticist texts. Rather, his contention is that aestheticist art severs itself consistently from all social relevance, establishing itself as a medium of purely aesthetic experience in which ‘content’ withers as the artist/writer turns her/his attention in upon the medium and materiality of her/his own craft.

The development, i.e. the intensification of separation, is the historical precondition for the further development of art at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, Burger argues, aestheticism’s intensification of artistic autonomy and its effect upon the foundation of a special realm of aesthetic experience prompted the avant-garde to recognise clearly the social inconsequentiality of autonomous art and, in consequence of this recognition, to try to lead art back into social praxis.

It can be seen, then, that for Burger the development of the avant-garde has nothing to do with a critical consciousness about language. It is not, Burger suggests, simply a continuation of processes already present in Aestheticism.

The turning point from Aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art comprehended its own status in bourgeois society. The historical avant-garde of the 1920s was the first movement in art history to turn against the art institution itself and the mode in which art’s autonomy functions. By doing so, the avant-garde differed from all previous art movements, whose mode of existence was determined precisely by an acceptance of autonomy and exceptionality. Avant-garde artists actively attacked the institution of art not in an effort to isolate themselves but to reintegrate themselves and their art into life.

Burger shows that the avant-garde’s attack upon art as an institution in bourgeois society was not only designed to destroy this institution but also permitted its existence and significance to become perceptible in the first place. Burger demonstrates that the historical analysis of the social functioning of past art, i.e. its institution, became possible only when, first, the historical unfolding of this institution had reached its end in the radical separation of aestheticist or modernist art from society; and, second, when, due to this development, the avant-garde could attack the institution of art.

The equation of the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘avant-garde’ stems from an inability to see that the theoretical emphases of modernist and avant-garde artists/writers are radically different. Modernism may be understandable as an attack on traditional writing techniques, notably the tendency of realism to use conventional language patterns, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack intended to alter the institutionalised commerce with art.

Thus, Schulte-Sasse stresses, Burger goes beyond those who argue that the key point in the development of modern art was the shift to aestheticism, i.e. modernism, from realism, through his insistence on the importance of the avant-garde’s attack on the institution of art. Burger pursues his argument by highlighting the distinction between the institutional role of art and the concept of the work of art which inhabits a privileged domain apart from society.

By showing how the institution ‘art’ mediated art with bourgeois society, Burger makes clear that the institution itself, and no transcendental concept of the work of art, serves as the essence of art in precise, historical, and recoverable, ways. Nevertheless, for Burger, as for Marcuse and Habermas, art holds a precarious, ambiguous position in bourgeois society. Art can both protest and protect the status quo. In radicalising its autonomy from other aspects of society, art gave rise to a counterculture that was hostile to the possessive-individualistic achievement- and advantage-oriented lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. In this radicalised, autonomous art, the bourgeoisie had to recognise the negation rather than the complement of its social practice.

Anglophone criticism, in exaggerating the significance of the shift from realism to aestheticism (modernism) so much, neglects or insufficiently appreciates the important effort of avant-garde praxis to destroy the shell of the no-longer-beautiful illusion in order to make art pass de-sublimated over into life. In consequence most Anglophone criticism has lost sight of the goal the avant-garde set up for itself.

Avant-garde artists were not just reacting to society with pseudo-existentialist passions of the soul. Nor were they simply reacting to society with efforts to break up and dislodge prevalent styles. Anglophone theories of modernism, Schulte-Sasse argues, emphasised the pathos but not the praxis of modern artists. Schulte-Sasse suggests that French poststructuralist models of modernism may have a similar emphasis.

Unlike modernist art, Burger insists that avant-garde aesthetic praxis aimed to intervene in social reality. The avant-garde recognised that the organic unity of the bourgeois institution of art left art impotent to intervene in social life. The avant-garde therefore developed a different concept of the work of art which permitted the possibility of reinterpreting art into social praxis if artists would create unclosed, individual segments of art that open themselves to supplementary responses.

References

Burger, P. (1984). Theory of the avant-garde. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Schulte-Sasse, J. (1984). Foreword: theory of modernism versus theory of the avant-garde. In Theory of the avant-garde,by Peter Burger, translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xivii.

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Design History; Postmodernism; Utopia and Utopian thinking; Design practice and functionalism; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Modernity; Dasein; Everyday

Eagleton (2021) states that, “Modernism is among other things a crisis of narration, as the world ceases to be story-shaped. History is no longer informed by the plot once known as progress. Progress and continuity are fictions of the ruling class. They are also the delusions of those socialists who believed that capitalism was doomed to collapse, and that fascism was its death throes.”

For Protevi (1999), modernism is a 1920s to 1950s phenomenon in literature and the arts, and includes the work of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Schoenberg, Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and others.

In other accounts, the discourse on modernism in art began with the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire’s book The Painter of Modern Life (Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne), first published in Paris in 1863. In that book, he explains the fundamental difference between the first Modern painter, such as Manet or Courbet, and the academic painters.

The difference between them was not how they painted, but what they painted. The academics painted idealised pictures drawn from Greek or Roman ancient history or allegorical scenes from the Bible. The Modernist painters painted the everyday life of the nineteenth century when they lived. The change in subject matter was shocking to nineteenth century audiences and provoked major scandals at the time.

Some confusion exists in the use of the terms Modernism and avant-gardism. The trends in the complex development of literature and art, beginning with 1905, can be divided into groups and one of the principal groups is that of the avant-garde (Szabolcsi, 1971: 51). While being avant-garde implies being Modernist, it is nevertheless possible for an artist to be a Modernist, and not be an avant-gardist.

One key difference between the Modernist and the avant-gardist lies in the avant-garde’s disruption of the basic expectations of what makes a work of art. The scandals caused by Modernist works arose from violating a prohibition against painting the contemporary, everyday world of the nineteenth century. However, these Modernist works did not fundamentally challenge the idea of “art” itself.

It is this challenge to the definition of “art” that is essential to the definition of the avant-garde.

In literary scholarship in English-speaking countries and in France, Szabolcsi (1971: 50) notes, the term modernism is used in a generalising sense, usually taking it to cover every trend that contrasts with the previous period, which is that of Romanticism and realism. While literary historians date the beginning of the modernist revolt back to the 1890s, most agree that what is called high modernism came after the First World War. The year 1922 alone, for example, saw the publication of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, as well as many other experimental works of literature.

Huyssen (1986: viii-ix) argues that both modernism and the avant-garde defined their identity in relation to two cultural phenomena: traditional bourgeois high culture, especially the traditions of romantic idealism and of enlightened realism and representation; and vernacular and popular culture as it was increasingly transformed into modern, degraded commercial mass culture.

Both Adorno and Greenberg, for example, insisted on the categorical separation of high art and mass culture in the late 1930s in order to save the dignity and autonomy of the art work from the totalitarian pressures of fascist mass spectacles, socialist realism and an ever more degraded commercial mass culture in the West.

References

Abrams, M.H. (1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Baudelaire, C. (1995). The painter of modern life and other essays, 2nd ed. London: Phaidon.

Eagleton, T. (2021). The Marxist and the Messiah. London Review of Books, 43 (17). Available at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n17/terry-eagleton/the-marxist-and-the-messiah [Accessed 4 September 2021].

Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Protevi, J. (1999). Some remarks on Modernity and Post-modernism and/or Post-structuralism [Webpage]. Available at: http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/PDF/Remarks_on_Modernity_and_Post-Modernism.pdf [Accessed 24 September 2013].

Szabolcsi, M. (1971). Avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, modernism: questions and suggestions. New Literary History, 3 (1), 49–70. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/468380 [Accessed 24 February 2016].

RELATED TERMS: Agon; Khora or Chora

Originally developed in relation to the work of artists and architects by Jane Rendell (2006), critical spatial practice has since expanded to include discourse among designers, geographers, planners, landscape architects, activists and philosophers. 

According to Max Willis (2019), three core principles of agonism, in relation to design practices, can be usefully defined. They are Identities, Dialogues and Agonistic Space.

Willis proposes to explore agonism through design strategies based on game, play and interaction design: Identities are investigated through Role-Playing, Dialogues are initiated through Storytelling, and Agonistic Space is manifested as a Third Place [khora].

References

DiSalvo, C. (2012) Adversarial Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rendell J. (2006) Art and Architecture: A Place Between. New York: IB Tauris.

Willis, M. (2019) Agonism and design: dialogues between theory and practice. [PhD thesis]. University of Trento, Italy. Available at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228386346.pdf [Accessed 2 September 2021].

RELATED TERMS: Spatial Practices

As Schalk et al (2017) note, spatial practices is a broad term for architectural, artistic, design and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices engaged in studying and transforming space. Feminism, because feminist politics believes that things can be otherwise and that they can be changed, offers an optimistic outlook on the future. (Söderbäck, 2012). There are, however, many varieties of feminism, or feminisms, and notions about what feminism contributes to the future and how such a future could be produced. 

For Schalk et al. feminist spatial practice may be pursued as a development of Jane Rendell’s understanding of critical spatial practice. Rendell (2011, 24) identifies five prevalent themes, collectivity, interiority, alterity, materiality, and performativity, that suggest both the subject matter that resonates with feminists and the modes of operation that feature strongly in a feminist critical spatial practice. Transgressing the boundaries of disciplines as well as theory and practice, feminist spatial practice develops new terms of engagement, including tactics and ethics of practice. 

Based on alternative experiences, worldviews and subjectivities, feminist spatial practice generates different terms upon which everyday life and social relations can be organised. They are practices of ontological reframing, re-viewing or re-doing differently which cultivate forms of creativity emerging from an experimental, performative and ethical orientation to the world. Feminist spatial practice, as an ontological project, reconstructs both our present practices and our desired futures.

References

Schalk, M. et al. (2017) ‘Introduction: anticipating feminist futures of spatial practice’, in Schalk, M., Kristiansson, T., and Maze, R. (eds) Feminist futures of spatial practice: materialisms, activisms, pedagogies, projections. Baunach, DE: Spurbuchverlag, pp. 13–23.