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Walter Phillips

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Casey House 1

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Editorial

This issue of _C Magazine_ ushers in a new visual design courtesy of Raf Rennie. Serendipitously, for this issue’s theme, we turn the lens to graphic design. This is a field which tends to be regarded as a prosthesis to art, a facet of commerce, an effect of mass-production—a discipline bound to service and marketing. Initially, the theme was to be titled “Design and Power” but we decided to simply go with “Graphic Design” and bypass the suggestion that design’s relationship to power is a special case, and recognize that it is rather deeply entangled. Because of the ways in which graphic design is often misrecognized, in this issue, we attempt to sidestep some of the anxious discourses of our field, such as: What can design do (to make things “better”)? How can design solve our problems? Such questions have plagued design professionals and students since the post-war marriage of graphic design with the transnational corporation—from Ken Garland’s First Things First manifesto to the annual Amsterdam-based festival also titled “What Can Design Do?”— as if design does not already do something profoundly consequential.

In essence, this issue is an attempt to ask quite earnestly what _does_ design do? How is design entangled with power and how does it manifest its impositions? Our answer to this question is to readdress graphic design’s disciplinary imaginary to be something not merely constituted by an affirmative parade of visionaries, or even as a specialized domain that holds insights about the fundamental principles of human communication, but rather through the operations of what the media historian Lisa Gitelman calls the _scriptural economy_—a term she borrows from Michel de Certeau to assert that printed, reproducible forms are central to our culture. Gitelman’s study of documents easily translates to the operations of this field, which involve both proliferating and critiquing the scriptural economy. Why not frame graphic design as a matter of knowledge production, or even an epistemological apparatus that makes persistent rational, empirical ways of seeing and knowing, and thus invalidates others?

For this issue, we asked contributors to consider graphic design as a visual practice that gives form to power and shapes ways of knowing. As the issue came into focus, we noticed two distinct trends in how the contributors perceived this relationship. On one hand, some highlighted how design operations serve to obfuscate the way that power works. Others sought new practices to renegotiate graphic design operations away from their historical alignments with capital, colonization and state power. On the obfuscating edge, Chris Hamamoto and Federico Pérez-Villoro’s piece, _The Blackbox Trick_, is a study in the notion of magic as it is deployed by governments, tech giants and branding agencies to obscure the operations of techno-capitalism. Tucker McLachlan’s _Incidental Graphics_ is an attempt to define a category of images which are designed to play a role in the construction of colonial facts. Finally, David Schnitman draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the movements and machinations of capital as it permeates the contemporary articulations of “style” within graphic design. 

Simultaneously, other designers and thinkers are renegotiating, rethinking and redirecting the narrative of graphic design and the urgencies it can address. In this issue, Winona Wheeler and artist Joi T. Arcand discuss the history of the Cree syllabary and consider typography’s potential for undoing colonial historiography. Kalpana Subramanian traces her own pedagogical experience at the confluence of American-industrial-modernist design tendencies and ways of making that are oriented towards local contexts, at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. Tings Chak documents a moment in design history where a limited toolset, an educated design class and a political project all coalesced to birth a vibrant design language which offers an alternative understanding of the term internationalism, beyond its association with corporate modernism in graphic design. Finally, Mary Banas explores the work of Shannon Finnegan, an artist who uses typography as a disarming examination of how the designed environment privileges a narrow range of ability, and playfully proposes new imperatives for accommodating those with disabilities. 

The same dynamic between obfuscation and renegotiation is represented in selected reviews in this issue. With a critical eye towards the way that graphic design functions as a channel to maintain institutional power, Michèle Champagne close-reads the film _Design Canada_ through the lens of Canada’s history as an extractive, colonial project. Steven Chodoriwsky looks at the vernacular genre of the institutionally branded cookie. Additionally, Danielle St-Amour reviews Paul Soulellis’ experimental publication, _QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK_ and Brian Morgan reviews the typeface _Times Newer Roman_, among others. This issue’s Artist Project is a piece by Detroit-based graphic designers Danielle Aubert and Kikko Paradela. The two unearth and reconstitute a series of documents in order to reclaim land seized by eminent domain for General Motors. Gitelman responds to this piece with poetic insight into the authoritative role official documents play in her own relationship to her automobile.

It is our hope that this issue presents a new set of perspectives on the field of graphic design and makes available more of its critical and discursive facets—its epistemologies, histories and rhetorical operations. By inviting new frameworks for critique, we intend to offer a clearer vision of the capacities of graphic design to obfuscate its role in reifying the normative standards that constitute the power of coloniality and nationality; reproducing hierarchies of class, ability and access; generating fault-lines of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, immigration status, ownership, and more, through the scriptural economies design artifacts constitute. It is our hope that people can use design practices to renegotiate these very same urgencies.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Buffalo, New York and Toronto. His research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards and legitimacy. Chris is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY.

Guest Editor

Graphic Design

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Chris Lee and Ali S. Qadeer introduce the theme of “graphic design” for this issue. 

Editorial: Graphic Design

Feature

Joi T. Arcand is an artist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory, currently residing in Ottawa. She was recently shortlisted for the 2018 Sobey Art Award and has exhibited internationally.

Winona Wheeler is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation, Treaty 5 Territory, though her family hails from George Gordon’s First Nation, Treaty 4 territory. She is an Indigenous studies historian at the University of Saskatchewan

While doing research to design a catalogue for Kent Monkman’s exhibition at the Robert Langen Art Gallery in Waterloo, ON, which was to be typeset in Cree and English, I decided I wanted the typefaces to echo some of the themes of Monkman’s work. So, I opted for Cartier, designed by Carl Dair in 1968 and dedicated to the people of Canada on the centenary of Confederation,[^1] and BJ Cree UNI, designed by Bill Jancewicz in 1994 for the Naskapi Development Corporation.[^2] I was interested in exploring the common misattribution of Cartier as Canada’s first typeface, when it was actually preceded by a Cree typeface by around 120 years.

I was fortunate to come across a text by Winona Wheeler (then Winona Stevenson) called “Calling Badger and the Symbols of the Spirit Language: The Cree Origins of the Syllabic System,” which counterposes two origin stories of the Cree syllabary. On the one hand, the syllabary is said to be the invention of an English missionary and linguist named James Evans. However, Cree oral history tells that it was received by an elder named Calling Badger from the Spirit World. Beyond simply supporting the claim that Cree syllabics precede Cartier as this settler-colonial nation’s first typeface, Wheeler’s text compelled me to wonder about how banal genres of graphic design, like the document, legitimize certain forms of memory over others, and also about how things like typography get wrapped up in the mystification of Canadian settler-colonialism as a benevolent civilizing force, bringing literacy, education and modernization. 

When I learned about Joi T. Arcand’s work involving Cree syllabics more recently, I found its speculative charge to be provocative. It didn’t plead or petition to prove anything—it is simply here, in everyday scenes, in neon signs, in what she calls Cree Comic Sans, as if it had always been. The paradoxically matter-of-fact yet quasi-mythological effect of Arcand’s work takes the fallacious colonial narrative of Canada as a benevolent force and uncovers it to be something like the emperor’s new clothes, rendering visible the undergarments of the settler-colonial mythology.

I wanted to bring these thinkers and makers into conversation around their respective work and research as it relates to the Cree syllabary’s history, fact and myth, in the context of this issue on graphic design. I think that what follows reads as an illuminating critique of coloniality, and the ways in which graphic design might be implicated.

—Chris Lee

> **CHRIS LEE**: Some of the threads that run through both of your practices are: an engagement with myth-making, with history and with historiography. I’m playing with the idea of historiography as a genre of design. Winona, you’ve thought about the contrast between the kinds of knowledge and history that are sanctioned through institutions like the university, in contrast to oral histories, which have tended not to be validated or sanctioned as forms of knowledge or history by these institutions—until very recently. And then, Joi, I think of what you’re doing in your work as also engaging in a kind of myth-making, like in your photo series Here on Future Earth (2009), where we see the Cree syllabary populating signage in everyday scenes. There is a charged uncertainty about whether or not these photographs are documents of the recent past or speculative projections of a near future. So, it really occupies this interesting space.

> I am wondering if we can start a conversation thereabouts, and think about both speaking and writing in relation to documents and myths, and also to think about the way the history of Cree syllabary has been told, remembered and passed on.

> **WINONA WHEELER**: Joi, I am fascinated by your work so why don’t you start?

> **JOI T. ARCAND**: Well, I am also fascinated by yours, and have cited your work about the Cree syllabary in my own. I come from a fine art and graphic design background, and obviously I am Cree, so all of these interests kind of came together in that project Here on Future Earth. At the time, I was working at the Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre (SICC), doing layout and design using the Cree language, but also in Dene, Dakota, Nakota, Lakota and Saulteaux. Our clients were mostly First Nations schools that were looking for language teaching materials for people of all ages. It was really tedious work—photocopying, binding educational books—but what I found so fascinating was that I was learning the language by proximity. Knowing that I come from a people whose language was and is passed down orally, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was also picking up the language by looking at it. I was hearing the language when I was seeing it on my computer screen or on paper, so I guess I wanted to look into it further. At the SICC, I had at my disposal all of this information, and it may have been there that I came across Winona’s writing. I also just had the privilege of being around fluent speakers in the office. It grounded my sense of why we were doing this work, why it was so important to have these oral languages written.

> **WW**: The first time I saw syllabics, I was really young and they looked like word poetry, and what struck me was that they were not random, they were so—and I’m not an artist, so I don’t have the language—but they were very poetic. I thought it was absolutely beautiful just to look at them even though I couldn’t read them—the way that they were shaped, the way they partnered with each other, supported each other and operated in family groups of four. 

> There is this Canadian myth, and it’s part of the whole colonial national myth, that a missionary came along and invented syllabics so that he could teach “the natives” how to read and write, and so he could translate the Bible. It just sounded to me like colonial bogus and I wanted to challenge that and know who this guy was, this Reverend James Evans, and where did he get such a beautiful, poetic syllabary?

> I just couldn’t imagine that an English missionary could come up with something so beautiful, and something that was so reflective of the culture. So, I started to study that. The reality was: he was a missionary for quite a long time in Ontario amongst the Ojibway where he had started to develop a writing system. But it didn’t have the same kind of beauty to it; it was more random, it was more alphabetical. And then he arrived in Swampy Cree territory and within two months he had \[apparently\] created the syllabary, and that to me is just totally unrealistic—he could not even speak the language. And yes, Anishinaabe and Cree are related, but the Swampy Cree dialect is very different. So, I started doing more research on him and of course he had a local interpreter. And so, it seemed to me that he probably got the language from his interpreter and his network. So, I started to pursue that evidence and then discovered that he shot his own interpreter “by mistake.” Yeah! This was after there were accusations that he was pursuing his interpreter’s wife. And then he was recalled and there were a number of sexual assault charges—not officially but informally laid against him. And I thought: that bugger! So, there’s a whole story of that. Anyway, I started asking around about this syllabary, and came across a number of people who had bits and pieces of its origin story. And I thought, “Okay, well I wonder what academics have to say about it too.” So, I started searching and researching, and almost every single academic privileges the James Evans myth. But there was this one anthropologist, Verne Dusenberry, who spent time among the Rocky Boy Cree in Montana, and he was the only one that I came across back then who wrote down some of the origin stories passed down in oral history: there was this individual, Calling Badger, who passed away and was taken to the Spirit World where he was given this new language, this new way of communicating called the spirit language. \[As it turned out\], he had actually been having a vision and came back to this world and he shared it. I find it fascinating that \[Dusenberry\] didn’t pooh-pooh it. The anthropologist said that’s their history, that’s what they believe, and in their world that’s legitimate, and why couldn’t it happen? I found that really, really fun. That little article I wrote[^3] was just a small piece, it was just preliminary, and I did it because I was mad—mad about this very colonial national myth \[that syllabary originated from missionary James Evans\], and the people who buy into it. Even some of our own people buy into it. There’s a larger article that will come out later that will expand on that smaller one.

> **CL**: I want to pick up on the way that you referred to the James Evans myth as a colonial myth—because I feel like for many readers that kind of phrasing might be somewhat surprising.

> **WW**: You know, in settler-colonialism and settler societies, there is this driving need to justify the appropriation, the theft, the displacement of Indigenous peoples. You can’t just walk into another people’s territory and assume ownership—you have to rationalize it. You dehumanize people so that they are less than you, and if they are less than you, then they don’t deserve all of this \[gestures her hands to refer to everything around her\]. And, in our situation, \[the settlers\] infantilized us, viewed us as children that needed an education, that needed to be dragged up from the depths of our barbarism through civilization. So, there is that whole settler-colonial narrative that goes on while you are taking our land, our resources, and you have to justify in your own mind that you are superiors, that you are better at doing things than we are, and you see it happening up to today. You got nonaboriginal people who come across as though they believe that they can do something better than we can.

> And I think that settler-colonialism does not see Indigenous peoples as having the intellectual capacity to create a written language. Because it needs a whole lot of smarts—and \[settlers\] didn’t think we were smart. So, to actually give credibility to us inventing the system would go against their best interests, because they have to portray us as simple, stupid, backwards and pagan to justify the whole missionary enterprise. And syllabics were popularized specifically for the whole missionary enterprise. So, they took something really beautiful and they used it against us.

> **CL**: Joi, how do you see the contemporary use of the syllabics, both in your artwork, and in the educational context? The story that Winona tells us is one that has a troubling side and an empowering one.

> **JTA**: Well, when Winona was talking about the gifting of the writing system to our people \[by way of Calling Badger\], in order to ensure that our language carries on… I was getting chills because I was thinking that that moment is now, and we’re seeing the resurgence of syllabics everywhere and it’s really kind of come to a point where people are starting to recognize it as an Indigenous—a Cree—writing system. That gets me excited because it makes me think about how much our ancestors cared about us, that we would have this tool to use. I appreciate the work of people like Winona and other language people who have been pushing back against that myth, and so I just want to add my voice to that. 

> I do that through my art, and most of the time people who have no reference point for what syllabics are assume it’s foreign because they can’t read it. And when they can’t understand something, they get really uncomfortable. That discomfort means that it must be foreign, it must not be from here, or for them. I like playing with that for myself as well, because I’m not a Cree speaker, and I’m trying to learn. I’m trying to battle my own feelings around not being able to speak, and I’m like, “If I am uncomfortable, then you should be uncomfortable too.” As  
> settler people, \[you should\] not have everything just handed to you, without any question or without being challenged in that way, to think about the fact that something that you think is foreign is actually Indigenous.

> **CL**: Yeah, I’ve noticed in the way that you talk about your work, particularly the work that centres the syllabics, that you talk about that it comes from a place. I also find really strong and assertive the fact that you don’t offer translations for your artworks that use the syllabics. It is like, “This is a matter of fact, this is what it is, so deal with it,” which I think is really striking and interesting.

> **JTA**: Yeah, people don’t like that either. \[Laughs\].

> **CL**: Winona, I heard you say in a presentation once that, as a historian, you like paper, which I suspect—maybe since I’m not a historian—is perhaps because paper gives your scholarly andacademic claims legitimacy; there is a kind of materiality to it as evidence.

> **WW**: I don’t think it has anything to do with creating legitimacy or validation as a scholar—I’m a little too rebellious for that. For me, one of the problems is that I’ve got a really crappy memory; my memory is like a sieve, and so I have a hard time memorizing. I was raised in a predominantly oral family, but I was raised in a literate society and so my memory capacity is nowhere near the memory capacity of our ancestors, which was so finely tuned to hold memories. They were trained from when they were very small to develop their memories, and we lack that. In this day and age, I find that writing it down allows for easier dissemination; it gets out there faster, and that’s really important. I take great lessons from many of the elders whom I have worked with, and my late husband, who said it’s not just about writing it down—the whole process of transcribing and putting it down on paper is very complex, and you’ve got to take so much into consideration, with much respect. You can’t just do literal transcriptions and translations because you’re missing all the nuances and all the shared cultural repertoire. When you put it down in a form, you go through a long process, especially if you want to be respectful to that which you are doing.

> **CL**: Joi, I wonder if you see the work you’ve done, particularly the stuff in physical space that has a kind of architectural scale or installation component—the neon signs, the labelling of the steps—as creating evidence? What’s the relationship of your work to creating evidence?

> **JTA**: Yeah, when I’m making these neon signs, I think: “what is this activating  
> and what is this object doing in the world?” And it’s doing a few things for me. At first, I was just like, “this would be so cool to see.” I just wanted to see it, like, “why can’t we see this as urban, Cree people?” And then it does something too for people to see themselves and their language reflected and shining back at them. It instills this pride and recognition. I think one of the most exciting things that I saw was this video of school children who had seen my work at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and I was just, like, “Okay, I must be doing this for a reason,” because they were just so excited to see it. So, I think if that’s the only thing that it’s doing, then I’m fine with that.

> But it’s also about taking over space, and making ourselves visible in these really institutional spaces, like the National Gallery of Canada, like the Winnipeg Art Gallery—all of these spaces that are also a part of that colonial project, and which hold so much \[work by Indigenous artists\]. So, I feel like it’s just taking a little bit of \[space\] back, and also sharing the beauty of the language, educating people, having those conversations with viewers that may be encountering it for the first time. \[My neon work\] is so in-your-face that you can’t ignore it, and I think that’s part of the reason I use lights and texts—so that it causes you to take a second look. You see neon signs every day, and you see them in English or other languages. You pass by them, and maybe you don’t pay attention. But all of a sudden when you can’t \[ignore them\], it jars you a bit to be like, “Oh, what is this saying?” and “Where is it from?” I like that it creates all these questions for people.

[^1]: Katie Daubs, “The man who gave Canada its own typeface finally gets his due,” _The Toronto Star_, [www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/09/27/carl-dair-the-man-who-gave-canada-its-own-typeface.html](http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/09/27/carl-dair-the-man-who-gave-canada-its-own-typeface.html)
[^2]: Doug Lockhart, “Naskapi Missionaries Preserve Language, Culture in Gospel Efforts,” _Charisma News_, [www.charismanews.com/world/38288-naskapi-missionaries-preserve-language-culture-in-gospel-efforts](http://www.charismanews.com/world/38288-naskapi-missionaries-preserve-language-culture-in-gospel-efforts)
[^3]: Winona Stevenson, “Calling Badger and the Symbols of the Spirit Language: The Cree Origins of the Syllabic System,” _Oral History Forum_ vol. 19–20 (1999–2000): 19–24.

Writer

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Indigenous

Conceptual

Public art

Chris Lee, Joi T. Arcand and Winona Wheeler sit down to discuss what it means to reclaim agency over a history that incorrectly credits figures like James Evans with the invention of Cree syllabic writing. Arcand’s clever political signage and Wheeler’s careful historiography reveal an aboriginal history that has been contorted by colonial institutions. 

“I’m a Little Too Rebellious for That”: A Conversation with Joi T. Arcand and Winona Wheeler

Kalpana Subramanian is an award-winning artist-filmmaker-educator from India and a PhD candidate at the Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on transcultural aesthetic approaches to the study of experimental film and media.

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Academia

Critique

Art History

India’s National Institute Of Design (NID) was built on radical educational practices traceable to the traditions of the Bauhaus, the Indian Report of 1958, and the alternative pedagogies pioneered by Rabindranath Tagore. Kalpana Subramanian details a history that outlines the root of this radical pedagogy – she critiques the contemporary market forces that are threatening to reshape the legacy of this institution. 

Entangled Visions: The Birth of a Radical Pedagogy of Design in India

Mary Banas connects people and ideas through design, direction and education in San Francisco.

What if a typeface, one of the most ubiquitous examples of visual design in the world, could be a voice for “the other”? Reading is almost a passive activity as eyes scan storefronts or a newspaper spread. What if, instead of implying mechanical perfection, the letterforms expressed imperfection? Would our shared consciousness around ability shift? Shannon Finnegan’s work uses typography and hand lettering as an invitation to participate in the thoughts, emotions and everyday experiences of a person with a disability.

_Self-Portrait_ (2017) is a collection of drawings in pastel-coloured pencil on letter-size sheets of paper, which, at first glance appear to be flyers on a busy billboard, filling the window of The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, New York. Together, from a distance, the drawings read as a cheerful and inviting quilt. The colourful panes act as a flash, but simultaneously as a kind of camouflage. To at once blend in and draw attention is core to Finnegan’s message: people with disabilities should be seen, although not merely as the “other.” Up close, text in the artist’s distinctive lettering style is revealed—confident but quirky capitals make for whimsical yet behaved compositions. These bursts of text alternate between externalizations of inner desires, like: “A COMPLETELY CUSTOMIZED WORLD WHERE EVERYTHING IS JUST AS I LIKE AND NEED IT” and melancholic, momentary reports from the artist’s daily life, as in “FALLING BEHIND IN A GROUP OF PEOPLE WALKING,” or “DISTANCES TOO SHORT TO TAKE A TAXI BUT TOO TIRING TO WALK.” Taken together, the project constructs an intimate and generous portrait of the artist’s stream of consciousness. Surrounding the lettering, a deliberate and controlled application of coloured pencil hatching grows organically to fill the page, demonstrating a relationship between order and entropy. If order is the way of the built, ableist world, a lack of predictability reflects Finnegan’s experience in it. Lastly, the use of pastel yellows, pinks and blues conjures both a doctor’s office and a cheerful birthday party, making disability uncomfortably familiar and, at the same time, something to be celebrated. 

The artist’s experience with doctor’s visits also surfaces in the project _Anti-Stairs Club Lounge_ (2018), a cozy, welcoming and carefully considered waiting room—or lounge, depending on how you look at it—which was installed inside the Wassaic Project’s Maxon Mills building in rural Wassaic, New York. Modern chairs, pillows patterned with Finnegan’s own needlepoint, and potted plants are accompanied by friendly objects, like yarn-embroidered coasters, and a pink ceramic bowl in the shape of a hand giving a thumb’s-up, filled with candies. There’s a charging station, a sign on top of a mini-fridge that reads “HAVE A SELTZER” and an array of books that ostensibly inform Finnegan’s practice. A large wall quote set in lettering that mimics staircases reads: “THE HIGH\=ER YOU CLIMB THE FARTHER YOU FALL,” a strange platitude that functions as a gentle but clear critique of the lack of access in the converted grain elevator—the only way up is by stairs. Sitting in the _Anti-Stairs Club Lounge_ is an alternative to walking up the historic 32-metre-tall stairs, at the top of which rotating exhibitions from artists are on display.

There are echoes of this space-making effort in Finnegan’s _Museum Benches_ (2018), first shown at Dedalus Foundation in Brooklyn, New York. Each in this series of geometric, Reflex Blue plywood benches, big enough to seat two to three people comfortably, features 18-centimetre-tall, all-caps hand lettering by Finnegan. One backrest reads “THIS EXHIBITION HAS ASKED ME TO STAND FOR TOO LONG,” with the seat reading “SIT IF YOU AGREE.” Another bench, with the same phrase on the seat, reads “I’D RATHER BE SITTING” on its back. Much like the _Anti-Stairs Club Lounge_, this project—and the comfort it proffers—appeals to non-disabled people as much as it does the disabled. Finnegan’s deft deployment of functionality, comfort, humour and stark truth makes _Museum Benches_ a kind of interactive protest sign.

As evidenced above, the pairing of snappy, gently defiant short texts and hand lettering runs through many of the artist’s projects. _Disability Typography_ (2018), a collaboration with artist Gabriel Loeb, uses Paper-Letters—a Javascript- based tool that Loeb created—to manipulate letterforms. The letterforms are a delicate outline of a nondescript sans-serif typeface where random letters have been altered to appear melted, broken, folded or like they have experienced a glitch. If computer typography—namely the various system fonts—represent the mainstream, then Finnegan’s hand lettering represents the personal, the imperfect, the valuable and the unique.

In an episode of the podcast _Designing for Humanity_, subtitled “Advocating for Inclusivity Through Art and Conversation,” Finnegan expanded on the _Disability Typography_ project:

> “I think design is often searching for this elegant, smooth, easy, effortless solution. I think that’s part of what the appeal of universal design is. Like, oh, if we just think about or design for a specific need, we’re gonna make everything better! And there are great examples of that happening. But I think I’m interested in the ways that there might never be a simple solution. There might always be a lot of complexity. It might be really hard. And so, I think of my role in some ways as bringing friction to some of the design process and kind of pointing to complexity and trying to expand complexity, when I feel like a lot of what’s happening is about simplifying and distilling.”

In this vein of promoting complexity and drawing attention to the realm of human experience that falls beyond ableism, Finnegan’s project _Portable Mural_ (2018) declares “REINVENTING THE STRANGENESS OF MY MOVEMENT AS AN ART FORM THAT ONLY I AM THE PERFECT PRACTITIONER OF” in large letters cut from brown kraft paper and decorated with a lightly dotted pattern. This public gesture of radical self-acceptance—which first appeared at Brooklyn Studios for Dance and subsequently in _Means of Egress_, an exhibition of the Art and Disability residency at the Dedalus Foundation—reframes “strange” movement as a singular, artistic capacity, perhaps perfectly epitomizing the artist’s ability to forge a path for a renewed, not “othered,” kind of visibility for disabled people. The magic of Finnegan’s work is that in making the speculative world she wants and needs for herself, she is also making it for everyone else.

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Site-specific

Mary Banas, surveying the works of Shannon Finnegans, asks the reader to reflect on what otherness means in the context of those who are not readily abled. How can typography be used to enable a viewer to participate in the thoughts and feelings of those with a disability? Finnegans work, utilizing this medium, provides several novel answers to this question. 

A Completely Customized World Where Everything Is Just How I Like and Need It: The Work of Shannon Finnegan

Tucker McLachlan is a designer in Toronto.

##### 1.

 Incidental graphics tend not to be designed. They materialize through existing formal conventions to house information that needs to be stored or communicated. They inhabit these conventions so completely as to become, with their world-making originality, undetectable. When removed from their contexts of immediate use (in which they function perfectly and without notice), incidental graphics appear merely as documents.[^1]

##### 2.

 (This can be very mundane, or very magical, or both. When I was five or six and first learning how to write, I added “pop-tarts” to a grocery list stuck to our fridge while neither parent was watching. To my astonishment, and even though my past requests for Pop-Tarts had always been rejected, they arrived amid the groceries my father brought home. He thought my mother had written them. This mischief was a source of much amusement for us, and was perhaps a formative experience.)

##### 3.

 Incidental graphics capitalize on the trust built up in form that follows function, in the expected relation between form and content that accrues in a genre over time. If graphic design handles form in relation to given content, incidental graphics handle content in relation to a given form.

##### 4.

 Graphics can manifest four possible combinations of form and content with respect to expectation:

> A. Expected form and expected content (unremarkable everyday graphics);

> B. Unexpected form and expected content (the celebrated graphics of the canonized genius designer);

> C. Unexpected form and unexpected content (unassimilable, alien graphics; the graphics of unfamiliar cultures); and

> D. Expected form and unexpected content (incidental graphics).

##### 5.

 Incidental graphics will succeed, unnoticed as assertions of an as-yet-unrealized state of affairs, so long as their content is not so unusual as to attract attention.[^2] On a practical level, this matters only when someone is trying to deploy incidental graphics deliberately, as in forgery, legislation or enactments of other kinds.

##### 6.

 To consciously attempt the creation of an incidental graphic risks exposing not only one’s intentions, but also one’s duplicity. The Japanese ambassador Chiune Sugihara defied his superiors to produce some 6,000 transit visas for Jewish refugees fleeing German-occupied Poland in 1940, and lost his job for doing so.[^3] Yet his documents worked. His handwriting, signature and stamp could not be regulated by the diplomatic protocol that intended to govern them; their graphic materiality afforded his civil disobedience. His visas can as easily be read as valid or invalid, forged or not forged, depending on one’s point of view.

##### 7.

 Nineteenth-century British treaty artifacts signed by Indigenous leaders pro- vide the legal foundation for much of Canadian territorial sovereignty even though the land surrenders consistently recorded within them are known fabrications.[^4] The document, and not the treaty itself, produces the truth required for Canadian claims to jurisdiction over land.[^5] This truth production occurs through a series of graphic gestures, yet the resulting graphics are so banal that they are scarcely understood as graphics at all. The same holds true for royal charters, preemptions, deeds and other documents of colonial land appropriation; design histories of Canadian land ownership would reveal persuasive graphics amidst the roots of settler law.

##### 8.

 Affordances—the characteristics of an object that determine how it can be used—are the secret of incidental graphics. Affordances set the terms of an object’s use not only by its nominal end user (the treaty signatory, the refugee, the grocery shopper), but also by the entity that supplies it. An incidental graphic can be an underline, an omission, a folder structure, a calendar invite, an outlined shape, a colour—or any number of other things in the right combination of circumstances.

##### 9.

 Most digital interfaces are incidental graphics by virtue of the software that performs behind them. Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures might be used to mark the transition of graphic design’s main economic function from producing information to providing a surface for quietly recording as much human activity as possible. Graphical user interfaces hide the action of software by their very grain;[^6] they provide the necessarily limited sets of representations and interactions that allow people to use machines made of code. Google, Facebook and many other organizations use this concealing characteristic of the medium with remarkable success to imperceptibly absorb and sell the details of our lives. While digital graphics continue to perform the visible communications that we expect of them—inherited from our expectations of paper and the printed page— they make their greatest contribution to the present as a central affordance of surveillance.

##### 10.

 To “keep the user informed about what is going on” is a declared aim of the design disciplines,[^7] yet in practice this refers almost exclusively to superficial, user-initiated interactions of minimal political consequence. Apple once planned to introduce an update to the iPhone that would have displayed a blue bar across the top of the screen any time an app was collecting location data, which would have made undeclared surveillance on iPhones far more visible and disconcerting.[^8] That this feature was shelved suggests how much must be hidden from public audiences so public-facing software remains commercially viable and, at the same time, underscores the considerable potential for simple graphic interventions to modify social relations mediated by visibility. Snowden’s disclosures surfaced a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation that became an object of playful design critique online. The unfathomable scope of the spying described in the document seemed at odds with its apparently hasty, unconsidered appearance. Its publication seemed to demand better style, and made the slides a case study for designers to comment on and redesign to illustrate the value of professional design expertise. Though ironic, this response maintained a normative investment in graphic design as an end unto itself, in every context, without regard for the meaning of locally resonant visual codes or the contingent relation of clarity to the desired outcome at hand. It is possible that the appearance of the presentation was well crafted for its intended audience, just as it is possible that a clear presentation was not the goal.[^9]

##### 11.

 Design history engages only the artifacts and authors available for public circulation, and leaves absent work whose function hinges on continued non-disclosure. Such graphics are disqualified from the public discourse of graphic design, and their absence haunts it. In this way, graphic design discourse is shaped by that to which it cannot refer: its apparent preoccupation with corporate image and visual identity reflects the presence of only those subsets of graphics most amenable to public reference. Perhaps contrary to popular understanding, graphic design production—unlike art, from which it derives its ideas of author- ship and canon—does not produce artifacts for a public audience as a general rule. That it seems to do so reflects a sample bias that has been amplified and reinforced over time by the outwardly promotional strand of the field.

##### 12.

 In light of this, an attempt to better understand graphic design might draw attention to the proprietary and unknowable majority of its corpus, perhaps by seeking out graphic histories whose need for secrecy has diminished through the passage of time.

##### 13.

 Histories of incidental graphics would unfold the graphic dimensions of other histories. They would do so with a primary interest in affordances and effects.

[^1]: Lisa Gitelman, _Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
[^2]: Ariella Azoulay, _Different Ways Not to Say Deportation_ (Vancouver, BC: Fillip Editions, 2012).
[^3]: David Wolpe, “The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting,” _The New York Times_, October 15, 2018.
[^4]: Alexander Morris, _The Treaties of Canada With the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories_ (Toronto: Willing & Williamson, 1899).
[^5]: Hito Steyerl, “Documentarism as Politics of Truth,” _Transversal_, May 2003.
[^6]: Frank Chimero, “What Screens Want” (2013); [https://frankchimero.com/writing/what-screens-want/](“frankchimero.com/writing/what-screens-want/“)
[^7]: Jakob Nielsen, “10 Heuristics for User Interface Design,” Nielsen Norman Group (January 1, 1995); [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/](“nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/“)
[^8]: Sarah Perez, “IOS 11’s Blue Bar Will Shame Apps That Overzealously Access Your Location,” _TechCrunch_, June 26, 2017.
[^9]: Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” _The New York Times_, April 27, 2010.

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For Tucker McLachlan, typographic artifacts are often used to legitimize historical narratives. McLachlan asks us to consider what programs, what designs, are running in the background of our computers, histories, and policies. He suggests that “Incidental graphics” often mask the software that runs in the background of geopolitical power structures. He cites examples of this graphical code by looking at colonial land treaties and government surveillance programs. 

Incidental Graphics: To Design in and Through Documents

Chris Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro’s work investigates the impact of emerging technologies in contemporary culture and politics. It often includes computer-based media, publications, video, writing and educational initiatives. They have been working collaboratively since 2015.

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How do contemporary technology corporations employ the rhetoric of magic to market their products? What does it mean to make a product seem auto-magical? Chris Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro outline the historical consequences of “blackboxing”. They argue that consumers are susceptible to a corporation’s idealization of technological progress; that belief in this idealization is akin to belief in religious gospel.

The Blackbox Trick: Magic in the Age of Techno-governance and Corporate Secrecy

Tings Chak is Lead Designer for Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

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Printmaking

Tings Chak gives a historical overview surveying the graphical materials produced by the Organization Of Solidarity With The People Of Asia, Africa, and Latina America (OSPAAAL). Surveying the uses of commercial poster art in pre and post revolutionary Cuba, Chak asks the reader to reflect on what it means to be an abolitionist architect or graphical designer. How, Chak asks, can visual culture be weaponized to combat systematic injustice? 

In the Process of Making Themselves: Poster Art, Internationalism and the Cuban Revolution

David Schnitman is a Canadian graphic designer. He has collaborated on art projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, the Ryerson Image Centre and Xpace Cultural Centre. He holds a Bachelor of Design from OCAD University.

A designer’s curious typographic flourish is lifted for the next advertising campaign. At the same time, the designer ironically uses brand iconography in their own postmodern exhibition space. In the endless stream of content, images and advertisements move together in sequence, the boundaries between them increasingly indiscernible.

Graphic design delights in its own self- referentiality, happily abetting a cycle of production, distribution and consumption wherein the commodity and its visual signifiers refashion each other and circulate as one.[^1] Within this economy of the sign, everything is done in the name of style. A designer’s style—their unique process and aesthetic— becomes a kind of value in motion, moving from one form to the other and remaining intact across many formats (i.e., the magazine, the poster, the record sleeve, the billboard). Designers are conduits of style, and their work is valued precisely for its ability to move through the circuits of consumer society and engage an endless variety of commodities and substrates. The successful employment of a style fuels attention, generating financial returns for clients and cultural capital for the designer in question.

Pierre Bourdieu writes that cultural production is structured by an opposition between two fields, that of restricted production and that of large-scale production.[^2] The restricted field is a space of production for producers, an economy defined by a collective disavowal of commercial interest. Here, prestige, celebrity and symbolic capital take priority over quantitative or financial measures of value. In graphic design, the so-called restricted field is constituted by the terrain of art book fairs, MFA programs and critical graphic design. Meanwhile, the field of large-scale production is coextensive with mainstream consumer culture—the realm of branding, advertising, profit and conspicuous consumption—where market demand organizes production. The designers discerning enough to recognize the restricted field of their specialty and participate in its creation view the field of large-scale production as the culturally inferior domain.

The constituents of the restricted field espouse a return to the fundamentals of graphic design in order to define “…the legitimate exercise of a certain kind of cultural practice.”[^3] One example of this orthodoxy is a purely typographic approach to design, as though playing with black type on a white page means organizing the molecular units of the discipline, and therefore, of graphic design itself. For example, with its devout use of the typeface Helvetica, Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset invokes the myth of the typeface’s objectivity while simultaneously noting that “Helvetica refers mostly to graphic design itself. And this self-referentiality is yet another reason why we use Helvetica.”[^4]

The field of large-scale production borrows original styles from the restricted field in order to renew itself; designers draw their livelihood from this process. For example, German design studio HORT Berlin appropriated a bespoke typeface by designer David Rudnick for an unused Nike campaign poster. Given enough time, aspects of large-scale production also flow back into the restricted field as well, primarily as nostalgia.

As it winds itself through different objects, a designer’s style can produce additional value. Style never leaves circulation, but preserves and multiplies itself over and over again. To borrow from Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, an infinite cycle of circulation becomes a spiral, and tightens into a narcissistic loop.[^5] Whether it is a major brand that hires a designer and utilizes their style or imitators who follow in the designer’s wake, the designer’s work ends up producing more within the circulation process than the designer initially threw into it. The centrifugal motion of a designer’s style generates surplus value.

Today, being a graphic designer demands a split-screen view of the world, and a constant awareness of how one’s actions might be perceived in both the restricted field and in large-scale production;[^6] one tab open to Pinterest and another to _The Sprawl_, the website for Metahaven’s short documentary series on propaganda. Earning one’s livelihood means participating in the field of large-scale production, although for many who do, desire still lies in the restricted field. Designers who concern themselves exclusively with large-scale production and profit-maximization risk never being consecrated by the cultural elite of the restricted field. The restricted field haunts the discipline’s mental conception of what design could or should be. A fragile self-consciousness looms over those who believe they are not participating in the field in the “right” way. Designers don’t even show the work from their day jobs in their portfolios, as that is considered by many to be far too embarrassing.

Prone to feeling alienated from the consumer culture that they helped create, designers develop the subfield of restricted production by defining their own vernacular and by producing for one another instead of exclusively for their clients. As seen in various art book fairs, the formal experimentation of self-initiated projects by and for designers encourages new styles and new ways of working. Elite post-secondary educational institutions legitimize this subfield of creative production and organize it with reference to its own internal norms of perfection, pointing their students towards the austere, disaffected typographic style of the international contemporary art world. While designers who decry the consumer world tend to seek engagement with art institutions, sadly, those institutions keep those designers’ work relegated to the gift shop.

The restricted field opposes as ethically bankrupt the economic order of large-scale production, as well as the established figures within it (Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, etc.), or, in other words, yesterday’s avant-garde. Between generations, the young compete with the old for symbolic authority and positions in the discipline’s cultural hierarchy.[^7] Claims about the definition of design are semi-conscious strategies for attaining cultural legitimacy. In Twitterstorms, established celebrity designers are called out and condemned for behaviour that might be construed as sexist, racist, etc.. However, these critiques are often individualized and not structural. As Mark Fisher wrote in his essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” “In all of the absurd and traumatic Twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of _class_ privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race—but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the \_dis\_-articulation of class from other categories.”[^8] An aura of irreverence hangs over the restricted field like a cloud. In trying to es- cape the mass market, have designers simply rented out studio space inside the Vampire Castle?

These two subfields of cultural production are mutually dependent. Restricted production organizes itself by its opposition to the mainstream, cultivating its own logic for the rationing of symbolic capital. Large-scale production, meanwhile, reproduces a relation- ship to capital and sucks living energy from the restricted field. Design sets in motion the dizzying circulation of a style. An endless stream of content where all bearings are lost. Designers who have become increasingly mindful that the form of their work is not commercial in nature should pay attention to the fact that the work’s distribution eventually adheres to the logic of capital.

[^1]: Hal Foster, _Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes)_, (London, UK: Verso, 2002), 18.
[^2]: Pierre Bourdieu, _The Field of Cultural Production_, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 39.
[^3]: Ibid., 117.
[^4]: Rudy Vanderlans, “Helveticanism” (interview with Experimental Jetset), _émigré_, May 2003, [https://experimentaljetset.nl/archive/helveticanism](“experimentaljetset.nl/archive/helveticanism”)
[^5]: Karl Marx, _Capital Volume I_ (Penguin: 1976), 727.
[^6]: Keller Easterling, _Medium Design_ (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2018).
[^7]: Pierre Bourdieu, _The Field of Cultural Production_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 53.
[^8]: Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” _openDemocracyUK_, November 24, 2013 [https://opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/](“opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/“)

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David Schnitman outlines two subfields of graphic design production. On the one hand restricted production organizes itself in opposition to the mainstream, and on the other hand, large-scale production fuels mainstream capital. For Schnitman, all forms of distribution eventually adhere to the logic of capital. He cautions designers to be mindful of this dynamic. 

Now in Circulation

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Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Editorial Director

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Lisa Gitelman teaches English and media studies at New York University.

Planned obsolescence is a sub-discipline of design learned at the knee of General Motors. Change is good, the engine of industry purrs; change is opportunity. Every year brings new models to a car dealership near you.

Unnoticed amid the accelerative tick of industrial design is the inertial pretense of documents. My certificate of title says “Void if Altered,” “Alteration or Erasure Voids this Title,” “Keep in Safe Place.” Change is bad. My car is parked out on the street someplace—parking has gotten way too competitive around here lately—but the title to my car stays locked away in a drawer. It proves that I paid off an auto loan, for one, but it also exerts oversight by the state. It is legible (that is, official) according to the relationship it establishes between this piece of paper and the unique vehicle it specifies. Mapping a piece of paper onto one and only one motor vehicle is tricky business, judging at least from the intricate graphical techniques deployed. The certificate of title reports a unique VIN, or vehicle identification number, and names me as legal owner, but it also has its own control number plus a barcode, a signature, a watermark, an elaborately printed border and more. Such techniques are variously affirmative. This document is real, they seem to say, as (and because) they discourage forgery.

Redevelopment planning is a sub-discipline of governance that Detroit learned at the knee of the auto industry. Change is necessary, the engine of creative destruction purrs; change is opportunity. Confounded by the strategic press of economic development is the inertial pretense of documents. Deeds locked away in drawers were overtaken by eminent domain as Detroit’s Poletown neighbourhood was razed to build GM’s new facility in 1981.

—Lisa Gitelman

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Design

_Poletown Lives,_ by Lisa Gitelman, is a text to accompany the artist project _Poletown vs. GM_ by Danielle Aubert and Kikko Paradela present their project, inserted in issue 141\. 

Poletown Lives

Danielle Aubert is an educator and graphic designer based in Detroit. She is currently working on a book project about Fredy Perlman and the Detroit Printing Co-op

Kikko Paradela is a Detroit based graphic designer and researcher. He runs his own independent practice, You VS Jesus and is currently a Creative Director for MEANS TV, a post-capitalist entertainment provider.

Artist

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Poletown vs. GM is a 12 page artist project insert, with an accompanying text by Lisa Gitalman.

Poletown vs. GM: Insert

Review

Michèle Champagne is a graphic designer who moves between research, creative direction and publication design. She is recognized for her research on the happiness industry at Artexte, for her print catalogues with VPRO, a Dutch public broadcaster, and for her digital literary magazines and e-book covers with Penguin Random House Canada. She lives in Montreal.

What do we mean when we talk about modern Canada? Hockey. Multiculturalism. Natural vistas. Global cities. Humanitarians. And above all, friendly people. Greg Durrell’s documentary film _Design Canada_ is about all of those things and the role graphic design played in forging them. But the film is not only that; it is also a fascinating—if unintentional—look at a world where Canada’s colonial project hides in plain sight.

Burton Kramer plays himself as the designer of the original CBC logo. Patrick Reid recounts Jacques St. Cyr’s refinement of the maple leaf that defines the national flag. Hans Kleefeld revisits his minimalist logo for the Toronto–Dominion Bank as a gesture that parallels Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist TD towers. Stuart Ash. Brian Donnelly. Fritz Gottschalk. Rolf Harder. Julien Hébert. George Huel. George Stroumboulopoulos. Hunter Tura.

The cast of characters is lively, accessible and overwhelmingly white and male. Female designer Diti Katona makes note of this demographic over-representation. Designers Heather Cooper and Marian Bantjes also make appearances, as well as brand manager Ali Gardiner and journalist Hannah Sung. But this is a feel-good film and the characters are necessarily upstaged by a grand progressive narrative, modern images and happy songs.

Soft house beats and cheerful pianos guide every interview and every vintage reel of glories past. There is an overt nostalgic ambiance. The songs may satisfy a contemporary appetite for a chill “Spotify-core,” but the film inhabits the mid-20th century, a time so many modernists and neo-modernists look back upon with undiluted affection.

Another theatrical effect is the energetic performances Durrell elicits from the images of modernist design and architecture. There is the Canadian National Railway’s high-speed CN TurboTrain and Montreal’s Expo 67 with its animal pictograms, geodesic domes and modular homes. There are Summit Series hockey graphics, Shaw Festival posters, Clairtone stereos and illustrations of Olympic stadiums.

The progressive narrative, for its part, offers a wholesome exterior wrapped around a sinister edge, which we follow deep into the film’s central mystery: its inability to address the depth of Canada’s ongoing colonial project—its resource extraction and the identity formations that represent it. _Design Canada_’s slogan is, “Through the lens of graphic design, a nation transforms from a colonial outpost to a vibrant and multi-cultural society.” This begs the question: did such a transformation actually occur?

In the film, artist Douglas Coupland elaborates: “In World War II, Canada was still Britain’s bitch, to be honest. As we began to shake off all the trappings of yesterday, there was freedom that came with it.” In 1867, Canada becomes its own country. In 1965, Canada gets its own, modern flag. In 1967, Canada hits the world stage with the Montreal Expo. In 1976, the Immigration Act ushers in a “fifth wave” of immigrants from all countries and not just the white American, British and European candidates selected by the blatantly racist policies of yesteryear.

The answer is yes, in a way. Some sort of transformation does occur. Canada gains governing authorities, designs a new, modern identity for itself and legislates a new, multicultural immigration policy. This is a true story but one that is thoroughly unresolved and incomplete.

Communication professional Alan Perry describes the modern CN logo and its minimalist, train-track linearity: “It symbolizes the movement of men, materials and messages, from one point to another.” But he says nothing of whose land this movement takes place on; that’s just one of yesterday’s trappings. Here is one of the film’s many inadvertent glimpses into a well-known secret: Canada is, at its root, a colonial extraction project that moves men, materials and messages.

_Extraction_, the Canadian counter-exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, and the related book _Extraction Empire_, showed that the British Crown still owns 95 percent of Canadian land, 75 percent of the world’s mining firms are based in Canada and, in 2013, 48 percent of global mining equity transactions were accounted through Toronto’s stock exchange. _It’s All Happening So Fast: A Counter-History of the Modern Canadian Environment_, a 2016 exhibition and book from the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, explored how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are confronted by and resisting the extraction of natural resources and the accompanying myth of Canada as “a good country,” as Kanien’kehá:ka author Taiaiake Alfred puts it. Legislating, banking, financing, mining, transporting and messaging all play a part in this colonial project.

Between 2008 and 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada published myriad reports on Canadian injustices in the residential school system. In 2016, Okanese journalist Connie Walker launched the CBC podcast investigation _Missing and Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams_? and a second series subtitled _Finding Cleo_ in 2018\. Through these stories, colonialism also appears as a fluid kind of violence that moves through bodies and generations. Residential schools may be closed but their effects persist in the lives of survivors and their kin.

All of this contradicts the progressive narrative.

_Design Canada_’s runtime offers little reassurance when it briefly cites Indigenous art and design from Expo 67’s “The Indians of Canada” pavilion and includes commentary from scholar John Moses, a member of Six Nations Delaware Band, who speaks of Tseshaht artist George Clutesi and his previous work as a graphic designer and book illustrator. The segment lacks breadth and gets trivialized by happy tunes. Like women, Indigenous people remain on the periphery. “\[In Canada\] there is a discomfort with acknowledging that the house has been built with many kinds of complexities and oppressions,” says Kwakwaka’wakw artist Marianne Nicolson, in an interview for _It’s All Happening So Fast_. “There is a desire to create an empty space for pure celebration. But that requires the denial of many realities, and of Peoples who live here—Indigenous and non-Indigenous ones.”

_Design Canada_ is an important film, not as a documentary rife with untold stories, but as a specimen of the dominant colonial fiction—repackaged with progress, modernism and happiness marbled into its spine. The film is also disappointing, because while it is celebratory, it neglects the spiritual, social, political and economic tensions that make Canada what it is, and that still need to be told. _Design Canada_ trumpets but makes not a sound.

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Michele Champagne reviews Greg Durrell’s 2018 film _Design Canada_. She critiques the film’s overly cheerful account of Canadian design history.

Greg Durrell: Design Canada

Steven Chodoriwsky is a designer, artist and writer based in Los Angeles. 

Somewhere deep inside an industrial kitchen on a university campus, a work-study student is mixing ingredients together for a cookie. It is rolled out from standard sugar cookie dough, hand-cut with a template and prepared for baking on large trays. After the cookie bakes and cools, the student applies a white coating of icing and pipes an outline of royal blue frosting. This cookie is emblazoned with the university logo or, formally speaking, its primary academic mark.

“Our primary mark represents the strength and power of the university’s academics. This is the university’s logo and most recognizable mark. It must be presented in its original format, never altered or manipulated, in all communications,” states the school’s website on the topic of its visual identity.

So, it is not any old cookie, but one of a particular species, hard-branded, produced in weekly limited editions and sold exclusively by various vendors on this particular school’s grounds. Variations on this approach are doubtless being cooked up across American campuses, and have been for some time.

The cookie is not especially tasty. But it’s when this modest product—this between-classes sugar transmitter, this nerdy display of school spirit—becomes an artifact of design being put to work that things get a bit more complicated. For a contemporary university, the corporate brand, including colour palette and typography, is deployed at all scales, ensuring a comprehensive system of visual intake. Once identified as school property, artifacts of all persuasions must conform to withering style sheets: the ubiquity of the message is key. Upon creation, artifacts might circulate deep within campus or far beyond it.

A gargantuan vinyl-print banner, hook-mounted over a library entrance, correctly and inoffensively mixes two sanctioned typefaces to transmit a pithy motivational slogan. A cotton-blend hoodie with the school’s secondary academic mark—a historic heraldic shield—is nestled under a parka during a winter semester trudge from cafeteria to classroom. The lock-up on the letterhead exhibits the correct graphic modifiers. The fine print of a keychain is set in Sofia Pro, just as it should be. The eyes and horns of resident mascot Victor E. Bull are a piercing Hayes Hall White, on a faux-fur body in UB Blue.

But amid all these iterations of university representation, our cookie has some ideas of its own. From the hands of work-study students—working shifts between classes, representatives of an overworked, overcharged student body—these one-of-a-kind edible facsimiles of the university’s primary mark might present a productive slip in that visual system.

First, each batch of blue is just slightly off-colour from the sanctioned CMYK 100-53-0-0\. The precise hue is difficult to monitor in the mixing bowl. “No values other than those listed on this page should be used. Tints and shades of these colours are not permitted,” states the school website on the topic of palette.

Each student’s hand-piping has a special unsteadiness. The bulky, showy swoop of the original logo gets botched; or, its copyist loses interest and removes it altogether. On the assembly line, there is no time for close attention to the thins of the serif, which taper just so on the original logo.

Problems for the baker also arise at the magnetic centre of the logo, the interlock of the school’s two-letter acronym. Each and every individual cookie artifact fails to render this complex knot as the design think-tank intended, wherein the curved floor of the “U” merges with the midpoint of the “B.” Instead, we get “U” cowering behind “B,” and this lack of finesse gives it an amorphous feel, like an icy open field with a wobbly little trim.

Designers with different levels of skill and patience negotiate inconsistencies between batches. Icing bulbs up at corners and crevices. It’s an approximate, half-memorized path of piping, the food service worker meandering on and off course, like a student cutting across the quad, roughing up the lawn and frustrating the intentions of an old campus architect.

Of course, while all these quirks can be romanticized creatively, the reality is that the work-study student is on the clock and there isn’t time to linger over any one specimen. And perhaps it’s unfair to fault a baker for their draughtsmanship considering the imprecision of their tools. After all, in food services, it’s most important for a worker to keep getting it close enough, getting the gist of it, to keep moving the trays forward. Some are bound to look better than others, but they’ll all taste about the same.

The cookie is a noteworthy object lesson in the field of graphic design, to help us examine the co-existing agendas of the corporate and the corporeal in a contemporary university setting. It is a vehicle of design culture on campus, circulating elements of both standardizing statecraft and vernacular transgression.

At the end of the assembly line, these quasi-creative moves are cling-wrapped, boxed and distributed to campus food outlets, lodged into clear Plexiglas cases right before the cash register, sold back to the school that bakes them and eaten by the student body that draws them. As a consecrated host, the cookies are ingested to sustain students’ attendance of classes in the school that hosts them. “Ours is a living brand, and accordingly, this is a living document,” states the school website in its branding guidelines.

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Steven Chodorwisky details the production process of sugar cookies at the University at Buffalo. He uses this case study as an analogy to criticize corporate university branding. (??-ongoing).

University at Buffalo: Sugar Cookie

Brian Morgan is a designer and editorial art director based in Montreal.

Times New Roman was created in 1932 as part of a redesign of _The Times_ —a British daily newspaper based in London—and is attributed to Stanley Morison. An autodidactic scholar-designer, Morison had published widely on the history of typography. He was a member of a circle of artists and small-press printers who sought to revive Arts and Crafts ideals in the graphic arts. Times New Roman would later go on to become ubiquitous, used for legal briefs, magazines and encyclopedias. In the late 20th century, the proliferation of personal computers in homes and offices across an increasingly networked world established Times New Roman as the de facto typographic voice of administrative authority.

When the redesign commenced in 1929, _The Times’_ circulation was small but well connected, as the paper was a long-time champion of empire and was widely read by its administrative class. Morison and the management decided to create a new typeface. With Victor Lardent from the paper’s advertising department, Morison was to produce something close to Monotype’s Plantin, but with cupped serifs similar to those used in Baskerville. The result, Times New Roman—in contradistinction to Times Old Roman, the Victorian typeface previously employed—was considered by designers at the time to be a very legible type. Times New Roman’s chief virtue, however, was its economy; it allowed the newspaper to cram more words onto a page.

Times New Roman was a typeface whose every quirk and eccentricity was suppressed—its skeleton was meant to appeal to the traditional sensibilities of an establishment eye, nostalgic for the past glories of Georgian England. The finish, however, had, in Morison’s convoluted phrasing, “the merit of not looking as if it had been designed by somebody in particular.” Morison’s aim with the typeface was that no one would notice the changeover. It worked, and it affirmed Morison’s doctrine, which Robin Kinross called the “hegemony of invisibility.” (It’s no accident that Morison’s friend and colleague, the brilliant writer and scholar of typography Beatrice Warde, famously called for typographic design to be invisible in an address to the British Typographers’ Guild at the St Bride Foundation Institute the same year the typeface was introduced.) This approach had a reader-centric ethic, as it emphasized a comfortable reading experience, but it also gave _The Times_ a feeling of authority without a centre. The typeface was the perfect summation of bland, invisible power.

In the years after its commercial release in 1933, Times New Roman’s spatial efficiency made it a very popular typeface, but its total world domination really began with personal computing. Microsoft licensed the type in 1990, and it was set as the default for many Windows applications for the next 20 years. In 1994, Adobe licensed Times New Roman from Linotype as part of its updated PostScript language, along with Helvetica, Courier and Symbol; PostScript would become the _lingua franca_ protocol for describing the appearance of a page for digital printing. Times New Roman’s early adoption meant that as desktop computers began to proliferate, it became a standard for all types of communication.

Times New Roman was designed to sink into the soft paper that _The Times_ used in 1932; the slight squish of the type into this paper thickened its sharp serifs and strengthened its thin strokes. As a result, Times New Roman looked disappointing on the smooth, thinner stock _The Times_ switched to in 1956\. The newspaper eventually abandoned Times New Roman in 1972\. Since then, the typeface has been slowly falling out of use by governments, law offices and designers. It also doesn’t work well on screens because, when it was digitized, this “soft paper” effect wasn’t built into the outlines. The digital version was just a little too high contrast. Microsoft replaced it with Calibri in Word in 2007, though its fellow core typeface Helvetica has proven to be a better fit for digital environments and has fared better. Academia is the safe, high point on Times New Roman’s otherwise eroding island.

Times Newer Roman (2018) was created by MSCHF Internet Studios, which refers to its storytelling medium as “internet,” and is also responsible for software interventions like Tabagotchi, a Chrome app with a little creature that dies if you open too many tabs in your browser. MSCHF took Nimbus—a later, German knock-off of Times New Roman—and redrew it. The result looks like the original but is deliberately less efficient: a 15-page document set in Times Newer Roman will contain 15 percent fewer words than if it was set in Times New Roman, thus allowing slackers to turn in shorter school papers. MSCHF released the font for free in September 2018, and more than 5,000 copies were downloaded on the first day alone.

What makes Times Newer Roman a brilliant move is that as a stroke, it repudiates two of the original’s key attributes: it’s intentionally inefficient, and by creating a lookalike, it challenges the status and integrity of Times New Roman as a standard. This breaking of the spell of Times New Roman was long overdue. Times New Roman is an example of an old technology that no one has properly renewed for the current age. Its attributes, developed for a specific physical environment, aren’t optimized for present-day digital environments. In the last 30 years, type designers have created scores of versatile typefaces for digital and mixed environments. 

There is also the question of the tone that Times New Roman lends to a text. No font is neutral. As Aleida Assmann points out, “power needs origins.” Times New Roman presents us with a lineage that draws from British imperial identity, which its bland shroud largely conceals. Users—designers, desktop publishers, office workers—take what typeface designers give them and develop their own associations, which become reinforced by practice. Times New Roman would seem an odd and cold choice for a birthday card, but not for an eviction notice, for example. A similar process happened with Helvetica—it was used for everything that the International Typographic Style (aka, the Swiss Style) stood for: modern, progressive, neutral and universal. Times New Roman, on the other hand, was the font of choice for dull writing: it was Helvetica’s grey, administrative cousin. Ubiquity implies standards, norms and stability.

The authority of print is real, but thankfully this authority cuts more than one way: as Jack Goody observed, it can strengthen princes, but also organize dissent—in this case, giving academic writers a bit of leeway within the shackles of word counts. For any piece submitted in Microsoft Word, however, the substitution would be obvious at once: unless the recipient already has Times Newer Roman installed on their computer, and is hence in on the joke, the type would be substituted with (most likely) Cambria. One can only dream, therefore—or use PDFs and hard copies.

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Brian Morgan reviews MSCHF Internet Studios’ 2018 Times Newer Roman typeface. He praises how the new font stands to break tradition. 

MSCHF Internet Studios: Times Newer Roman

Danielle St-Amour curates, writes and makes work in and around Canada. She is currently curator in residence at SBC Gallery in Montreal.

In Issue 3 of the web-based design journal _The Manual_, published in 2012, educator, publisher and graphic designer Paul Soulellis’ bio describes him as a “recovering perfectionist.” His contribution, entitled “Design Humility,” is described in the subhead as an “embrace of chance and vulnerability.” Addressed to both himself and his peers in the graphic design community, Soulellis’ piece makes a call for the development of a new reflexivity within the practice. He opens with a description of a mycological tour he once took at the old Black Mountain College grounds in North Carolina. He was looking for ghosts, he explains, amongst the mushrooms, and despite a certain softness, doing so with a kind of urgency. “I found myself walking slow but looking hard—at tree trunks, along the bottoms of bushes, within patches of grass, at the edges of things. There was intention, and a focused observation, but still—we were wandering. A focused wander.”

You aren’t meant to do much on a tour beyond observe, maybe listen, hopefully learn. A tour of something with a knowledgeable guide can be a muse, can encourage a new somatic choreography, can be a boon (or a curse) for a busy mind. Soulellis describes his experience of walking through the wooded space of the campus as “a slow ramble: sensing, collecting, and being fully present to changes in light, weather, and sound. Searching, discovering, and acknowledging one’s own presence in the environment but without placing our selves at the center… The value in the focused wander is tremendous.”

This note, teasing out a practice of randomness, self-reflection and humility in design (against the “sleek object”) feels key to understanding Soulellis’ work. A varied practice and life are marked online in reflexive and vulnerable, personal musings, scattered across a variety of locations. Soulellis writes that he closed his successful design studio sometime before he made this call for “design humility,” in this same issue of _The Manual_ —marking the beginning of a new kind of working and thinking about permanence, vulnerability and design.

Soulellis’ practice has produced multiple archives from content dispersed across the web. These are projects wrapped in vulnerability—the printed books he creates from them, of which there are finite copies, risk marginality, the online source material risks the oblivion of deletion. His project _Library of the Printed Web_ (2013–2017), now housed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was a practice of turning one thing—publications and projects composed of material scraped, grabbed or transformed from the web—into another: an ever-growing collection of documents collected, printed, which he describes as “a semi-annual publication dedicated to web-to-print discourse.” In an interview with _Document Journal_, Soulellis outlined the _Library_’s first gesture: “How do we take something that is meant to be seen for less than a second and pause that? How can we slow down our experience with the internet?” In a moment just preceding the protests at John F. Kennedy Airport against immigrant detention and the so-called “Muslim ban,” Soulellis’ friend and collaborator Sal Randolph described the project like this: “The _Library_ is a document of a moment and a sensibility that seems simultaneously contemporary and historical—just by being gathered in this way, the manifold and subtle affects and design choices gather force and become expressive of a period. As I held the books I felt them slipping out of my grasp.”

_QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK_ (2018) (_QAW_) was initiated after the 2016 US elections, after the acquisition of _Library of the Printed Web_ by the MoMA and fresh within what some have called the “post-truth” era. Printing the web took on a new meaning as whole tracts of policy disappeared from government websites (such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s redaction of any mention of climate change) and social media was weaponized by politicians, lobbyists and other backward-facing agendas. Reactionary reporting, the rewriting and erasing of facts and a thick carpeting of revisionist histories overwhelmed news feeds as information proliferated and vanished at a pace almost too fast to follow.

In an essay that followed _Library of the Printed Web_ #4 entitled “Urgent Archives,” published in 2017, Soulellis reconsidered the tactics the _Library_ had thus employed. Hunting, scraping, grabbing and transforming as practices, as actions, had been changed and revealed in the charged landscape 2016 had wrought. He wrote: “…formal moves like these no longer suffice; we now need to look deeper at the power structures that flow into and out of works of appropriation. Who owns the platform? Who profits as the work circulates?” and “Does the act of appropriation work to reveal an imbalance of power, or amplify an underrepresented voice, or expose a site of oppression? Might the work even repair or stitch together broken relations?”

_QAW_ is an urgent, present response to those questions. Positioned as a recursive thought within the practice of a printed web, _QAW_ is a folded, unbound collection commissioned and gathered of materials that mark this urgency. Its design complicates the project’s status as archive or collection: several tabloid-sized newsprint pages, double-sided posters, variously sized booklets and loose sheets contain work from artists American Artist, Somnath Bhatt, Jeffrey Cheung and Gabriel Ramirez (Unity Press), Demian DinéYazhi´, Jack Halberstam, shawné michaelain holloway, Nora N. Khan, nicole killian, Be Oakley (GenderFail), Allison Parrish, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Nate Pyper and Sal Randolph.

The labour of queer archiving is one of reconstitution, creating, sourcing and grappling with a history marked by silence and erasure. Pulling together a constellation of thinkers and artists, _QAW_ draws from and extends this work, creating a laterally historic meta-image of both “queer” and “archive,” by both performing and rethinking these strategies. Writing from stalwart queer-thinker Jack Halberstam revisits Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Toolkit,” reading her call for both discretion in tool choice as well as an urgent appeal for demolition beyond reconstruction. LA-based American Artist’s text on family trees and Ancestry.com documents a family reunion in Troy and traces the troubling relationship between colonialism, access and Big Data/genealogy corporations for black Americans. Writer and game-maker Porpentine Charity Heartscape contributes an epic piece of post-apocalyptic softly erotic horror fantasy. GenderFail archivist Be Oakley’s manifestos and short-essay posters pay homage to fonts seen on protest signs from the early days of the gay liberation movement, assembled from upper and lowercase letters intermixing without hierarchy. With each of these works, the shifting possibilities of _QAW_’s physical configuration generates new understandings, relations and conclusions.

Narrative is often applied over or within an archive, and the desire for an individual understanding of a history almost always influences the making of an archive. What gets archived, and what does not, how it is organized, where it is stored, who cares for it, all play to the politics of the formation of an archive. _QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK_ feels like a conscious document of this fact, a refusal and an unfixing. In a moment of rapid change and urgency, you can feel it too, slipping out of your hands as you hold it. It is an archive because it has a slow intention, of care and of narrative; a collection because it is necessarily personal, unstable; and it is work because it’s being done—by holding it, you’re doing it; it’s urgently required.

Wandering can be a way to avoid a prescriptive back-looking while still keeping an eye on shape, form and design as things fold and unfold. It can help to determine the obscure and robust logics that publishing practices—loose and unfixed, framed by dispersion, marked by a series of processes, places, actions—both utilize and create. _QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK_ offers that: a set of vulnerable tenets, an open collection of movable, wandering evidence.

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Sexuality

Technology

Danielle St. Amour reviews Paul Soulellis’s 2018 publication _QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK_. She situates this work in the context of mass information erasures leading up to and following the presidential election of 2016. 

Paul Soulellis: QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK

Noa Bronstein is a researcher and curator based in Toronto. Recent curatorial projects include _THE ANNUAL_ (2012) at the Gladstone Hotel, where she was the Director of Exhibitions and Cultural Promotions, and _Out of Sorts_ (2011) at the Design Exchange, where she was the Director of Public Programs and an Acting Curator. Upcoming curatorial projects include _Memories of the Future_, co–curated with Katherine Dennis, at Gibson House Museum and _Data Mine_ in Gallery 44’s vitrines, both opening September 2014\. Noa is currently the Head of Exhibitions and Publications at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography. 

Today, lineage, like everything else, has become commodifiable. The recent proliferation of self-service genetic testing kits, including 23andMe, MyHeritage and AncestryDNA have made clear that, for some, ancestry is purchasable and easily ascertained. The unspoken narrative of these testing companies is that identity is genetic inheritance and avoids the messiness of associations being born of emotional labour, relationship-building, kinship and togetherness.

Beneath the surface of Crystal Mowry’s thoughtfully curated exhibition _I’ll be your Mirror_ at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery simmers the tensions at the core of recent interests in tracing one’s genetic lineage. The exhibition offers a counter-view to simple and reductive notions of family and social bonds. The photo and video works within the exhibition make visible practices or projects informed by artist–parent collaborations. In her curatorial statement, Mowry positions the exhibition as a commentary on intergenerational relationships that are formed, cared for and challenged by way of various lens-based strategies. She explains that “for many of us, our first introduction to photography is grounded in the discovery of our own subjectivity. As children, we perform in front of the lens, acting out a narrative shaped by our parents and the manner in which they prefer to remember us.” All of the nuances of how the familial and the photographic inform one another are poetically worked through by each of the artists within this carefully realized exhibition.

The exhibition opens with a series of black-and-white photographs from the widely circulated series _The Notion of Family_ (2001–2014) by LaToya Ruby Frazier. These domestic images convey a sense of vulnerability, but also resiliency, set to a backdrop of economic decline and community uncertainty in the artist’s hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Frazier shares the frame with her mother in a turn that shifts the visual record to redress histories of erasure of black families and labour within grand narratives of working-class cities throughout the US.

Erika DeFreitas’ project encompasses video, sculpture and printmaking. Collaborating with her mother to consider anticipatory grief, the installation is framed by two video works— _an earnest weight in the crease_ (2017) and _real cadences and a quiet colour_ (2017)—that are set up at either end of the gallery. One video focuses on mother and daughter gently caressing each other’s hands, while in the second video, two sets of restless legs dangle from a couch with floral upholstery. Between the videos we find a series of white clay casts of the space between the bodies of DeFreitas and her mother as they pose for photographs, accompanied by prints of these same voids rendered in a way that is reminiscent of topographic maps. In this work, DeFreitas registers the many ways that relationships are formed through body and gesture.

Vivek Shraya’s _Trisha_ (2016) offers a less direct approach to collaboration. This project pairs photographs of Shraya’s mother in her twenties, newly emigrated from India to Canada, with the artist meticulously mirroring the clothing, poses and gaze from the original images. Subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions between the image pairings seem to point to the different ways that each photographic subject performs and negotiates their femininity. It is not the first time I have seen this work, but that does not diminish its capacity to evoke a deep sense of how we are able to speak to one another and to ourselves through images. 

Opting not to enter the frame with his parent collaborator, Neil Goldberg offers a simple and weighty action presented to the camera and to the viewer in his work. Goldberg’s video _My Father Breathing Into a Mirror_ (2005) centres on his father as he inhales and then exhales onto a small hand-held mirror. The rhythmic action is suffused with metaphor—this basic method of checking for vital signs could be read as relaying the anxieties of losing a parent.

Somewhat unfortunately, at least for me, is that the exhibition’s many quietly suggestive punctuations are absent in Milutin Gubash’s _Born Rich, Getting Poorer_ (2008–ongoing), a series of episodic videos starring his own family members. Mimicking the well-worn genre of the sitcom, with an annoying laugh track included almost entirely throughout, the video moves through various domestic scenes. While the work does present an interesting commentary on dominant representations of the family within pop culture, it might have been better served in a different context. The brashness of the video seems out of place next to the other, more subtle works within the exhibition.

Across from the main space, Stephanie Comilang’s seductively dizzying two-channel video _Yesterday, in the Year 1886 and 2017_ (2017) takes up its own gallery space. The video combines distinct modes of visualization ranging from the documentary to the speculative in a manner that is typical of Comilang’s work. The accompanying didactic text explains that the video connects the biographies of two notable Filipinos— nationalist intellectual José Rizal and archivist Lourdes Lareza Müller. A third character, a drone animated by a Tagalog voiceover (provided by Comilang’s mother), narrates shots of open spaces, domestic interiors and monuments. These various memoryscapes appear to reveal how meaning is produced in the reflexive translation of narratives exchanged among family members.

_I’ll be your Mirror_ operates within a cultural moment increasingly concerned with ancestry but moves against it by positioning lineage as something to be felt and lived rather than commodified. There is a real sense of generosity in the works and in the curation. To be invited into these parent-child relationships is to encounter and be embraced by attentive intimacies.

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Noa Bronstein reviews the 2018 exhibition _I’ll Be Your Mirror_ curated by Crystal Mowry at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario. A commentary on the contemporary obsession with sites like ancerstry.com, Bronstien cites I’ll be Your Mirror as an important commentary on the commodification of lineage. (October 5, 2018 – March 17, 2019).

I’ll be your Mirror: Stephanie Comilang, Erika DeFreitas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Neil Goldberg, Milutin Gubash, Vivek Shraya

Farid Djamalov is a writer and an art history major at Dartmouth College. He is currently interning at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.

Preserving a memory is an active process, one that requires its keeper to isolate—or inevitably dislocate— its constituent fragments. Berlin-based Canadian conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel grapples with the transmission of memory in this exhibition, which was conceived during a research residency in the Krakow home of the late Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor. _A Dream In Which I Am You_ deviates from the work on institutional critique for which Schwebel is more commonly known. Through Kantor’s namesake foundation, Schwebel studied not only the heritage of the Polish artist but also his absence.

A set of diaphanous curtains with imprinted flower shadows greets visitors to the exhibition. Their ethereal quality is echoed by a pile of semi-translucent letters spread meticulously overtop an oblong table. Two pedestals flank the table, one with a package addressed to Schwebel and the other with a stack of books atop it. As visitors approach the end of the room, a score of crickets lures them into a life-size rendering of Kantor’s bedroom assembled out of papier mâché. In reconstructing Kantor’s intimate space, Schwebel cherry-picked a constellation of visual references that reconstitute the late artist’s aura: a simple chandelier with a matching floor lamp, a rustic bed and a modest cupboard with a slide projector audibly rotating a collection of pictures.

In reconstructing and relocating Kantor’s memory in Montreal, Schwebel engages Kantor’s concept of _emballage_ (French for “packaging”). This concept manifested in various ways throughout Kantor’s life-long practice and hinged on the human inclination “to preserve,” “to isolate,” “to conceal” and “to transfer.” Kantor’s treatise on this concept, formed _via negativa_, lies on the aforementioned table; in it, he equivocates between the metaphysical potentialities and morbid meaninglessness of _emballage_ and ultimately admits that a clear definition is unattainable. “It might be imprudent to attempt at generalisations or to set forth definitions; besides, it is hardly possible at all.” Schwebel’s subtle intervention of underlining the four infinitive verbs mentioned above is generous, and might also be thought of as a cursory guide to his own approach to various aspects of the show.

Kantor’s absence is not the only one implicated here. Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, another Canadian artist chosen to complete the Polish residency at the same time as Schwebel but who eventually quit, complicates Schwebel’s already ambitious pursuit by layering on yet another absence. _A Dream In Which I Am You_ prompts Schwebel to imagine what his potential collaborator might have accomplished had he remained part of the project. From a solitary pressed wildflower placed amid the collection of correspondence between the two artists, to a hidden arrangement of dried petals tucked under the papier-mâché bed, Schwebel appropriates motifs from work that Ramsay had begun to make in Poland and, in doing so, renders him present. The floral prints lining the cupboard and gracing the bedsheets presumably mimic elements of Kantor’s actual bedroom and also enter into a dialogue with the assemblage of dried flowers inspired by Ramsay’s work. These intertwined absences manifest through Schwebel’s floral vocabulary and produce a dialogical exchange across distant—or impossible—moments of contact.

In an attempt to implicate Ramsay, or nurture a collaboration that might have occurred, Schwebel engages in a curious kind of appropriation. As it turns out, in attempting to honour the absent by reconstructing some facet of them or their work, it can be unclear at what point appropriation becomes plagiarism. For example, while Ramsay was still in residence, he told Schwebel about an idea he had for an audio walk. Schwebel brought that idea to fruition— creating the audio work _The Wanderer_ (2016). Ramsay expresses anger about that action in one of his many letters that Schwebel provides for the public to read:

> “I feel all the romance and flattery of your request, while also feeling protective, and almost feeling that I have been deceived. I was vaguely aware of how my withdrawal from the Kantor project influenced your own artistic contribution but to learn that you took my idea of an audio walk for _The Wanderer_ and made it your own, without telling me until after the fact, elicits a flash of possessiveness and a feeling of betrayal. Some of it is leftover resentment for how the residency unfolded, some of it is a disbelief that a program of artistic activity that responds to both Kantor’s traces and my own could have taken place without anyone informing me. Some of it is a personal artistic frustration without a name.”

In mid-July, as part of a performance arranged with Schwebel, Ramsay appeared at the gallery to read letters he had written that both condemn and condone this exhibition.

In another one of the letters, Ramsay—who is taller than Schwebel—describes a dream in which he was Schwebel, and points out the perspectival shift in his spatial perception in the dream. In turn, Schwebel penned a book with his sister Shoshana Schwebel in the form of a fictional dialogue, wherein he impersonates Ramsay, and his sister plays her brother. In this way and others, the exhibition hinges on what Ramsay has aptly called a “mysterious collaboration,” with unstable and interesting subjective contours. _A Dream In Which I Am You_ explores the fraught processes of memory preservation. In doing so, this exhibition honours the absent and employs interesting appropriation techniques to imagine the ways that a memory keeper might transcend the limitations of their own subjectivity.

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Farid Djamalov reviews Joshua Schwebel’s 2018 exhibition _A Dream In Which I Am You_ at Darling Foundry, Montreal. He praises Schwebel’s mediation on the memory of Tadeusz Kantor (June 21 – August 19, 2018). 

Joshua Schwebel: A Dream In Which I Am You

Vanessa Lakewood is a writer, educator and curator, as well as a Vanier Scholar and Ryerson Image Centre Research Fellow. She is of mixed settler and Indigenous ancestry and is based in Toronto.

What do we do with the cracked histories we’ve inherited? How do we participate in active recovery? These questions are as pragmatic as they are philosophical. In an exhibition that explores aesthetic practice in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, curator cheyanne turions examines art’s capacity to speak back to settler-oriented histories and “support interruptions where new kinds of stories become possible to tell.”

In the curatorial statement, turions explains turn- ing toward the writing of David Garneau, who used the phrase “extra-rational aesthetic action” to describe the affective responses provoked in him as a result of artworks that engage in cultural decolonization. Garneau was considering three such examples: “Rebecca Belmore’s yell before a panel discussion; Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s threat to decapitate a woman during a work of performance art; and Terrance Houle’s presentation of his naked, fleshy belly in photographs and performances.” Laying out the startling associations that compel him toward these acts, Garneau theorized about the political potential found in disruptive awakenings of the senses—a potential that might burn through the effects of his own colonial conditioning. _I continue to shape_ is a curatorial progression of this concept. For turions, it is clear that the generative potential of decolonial aesthetics lies in our responses to collisions between familiar cultural forms and gestures that disrupt how we expect them to behave. Acknowledging that it is not necessary to depart from one’s experience to inquire deeply about our own colonized thinking, _I continue to shape_ is an experiment in de-conditioning that feels especially radical given the complexity of our current political moment.

“History, like all stories, is told slant, subject to distortion by those with the power to represent it,” reads the exhibition’s opening line. The role of images in directing representational power and re-inscribing colonial fantasy is apparent from the title work in the first gallery. Nicholas Galanin’s searing C-print _Things are Looking Native/Native’s Looking Whiter_ (2012), combines Edward S. Curtis’ ethnographic portrait of an unnamed Hopi woman, hair looped in butterfly whorls, with a celebrity picture of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in _Star Wars_, sporting a white outfit and cinnamon bun hairstyle. The image presents an immediate critique around traditional hairstyles and cultural appropriation in the construction of a Hollywood idol. But looking at the work up close, I am more pre-occupied with how the Hopi woman’s face is mask-like in its stillness, her expression unyielding. Does her gaze suggest a representational strategy against the frontality of Curtis’ lens—an emptying-out of the self while holding a pose before the camera? Positioning her face alongside that of an actor playing a resistance leader, Galanin may be encouraging this equivocation.

While Galanin’s title image insists on the recognizability of cultural icons, an adjacent installation of altered black-and-white photographs by Maria Thereza Alves offers indistinct views onto Indigenous sites of habitation in the Amazon. Refusing the clear passage into place that contemporary viewers have come to expect from landscape photography, the series _NoWhere_ (1991–2018) is overlaid with cryptic black lines, referencing centuries-old plans of conquest and modern architectural drawings influenced by Sir Thomas Moore’s writings on utopia—which emphasized the disposability of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The effectiveness of this work lies in Alves’ broader intervention into the gallery: angling through and across these images are wooden two-by-fours that divide up the wall space at seemingly random junctures, their edges balanced at uneasy angles. Evoking scenes of displacement while asserting its nature as a site-specific series, _NoWhere_ prompts viewers to consider the catastrophe of colonial contact in this place too.

Echoing the scale and materiality of the two-by- fours are Charlene Vickers’ 10-foot-long cedar spears, _Diviners_ (2010), which are presented in dialogue with Alves’ work, installed on the opposite wall. A means of locating the invisible, Vickers’ divining rods summon the presence of murdered and missing Indigenous women into the museum space. These forms were en- visioned by the artist to double as extra-large porcupine quills—a creation of nature, for protection and survival. Situated alongside Galanin’s small, vitrine-enclosed _Native American Beadwork: Rape Whistle Pendant_ (2014), these works together envision culturally specific strategies to confront gendered violence on colonial territory, uniting the tactile with the tactical. Such well- known objects and images act out of line with our expectations, and thus invite our participation in defining new meanings.

Foregrounding the voices of artists who observe how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are mutually transformed by the processes of colonization, _I continue to shape_ asks to viewers engage in ways of being otherwise. There are gathering places that encourage movement and dialogue. For example, in the centre of Cathy Busby’s floor-to-ceiling text installation _We Call_ (2017)—which reproduces selections of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action for academic and cultural institutions—is a meeting table and chairs. They are part of a malleable scenography created by choreographer Justine A. Chambers that encourages visitors to rest from the work of reconfiguration that the exhibition asks of us and find contemplative space. This scenography was staged in front of Mickalene Thomas’ resplendent _Origin of the Universe_ (2012), a nude self-portrait studded with rhinestones.

To activate the setting, Chambers brought in collaborating artists for three separate performances— meaning that its physical layout changed over the course of the exhibition. In Deanna Bowen’s activation of the site, she began by recalling her experience in the gallery weeks prior, overhearing two white men (probably University of Toronto students) deriding Thomas’ nude figure. From a clothesline suspended from wall to wall before the work in question, Bowen draped black blankets, creating a curtain behind which the black female body could take rest from being the object of looking or objectified in the museum space. The move was incredibly powerful. Perhaps more than any other artwork, Bowen’s performance reinforced the exhibition’s call to recover individual agency and interpersonal responsibility amidst the lineages of racism and violence that are part of our environment and condition our ways of seeing. _I continue to shape_ is an invitation to not turn away, but to turn and face the structures that have shaped us, in order to step into new possibilities of being.

Vanessa Lakewood reviews the 2018 group show _I Continue To Shape_ curated by Cheyanne Turions at The University of Toronto Art Centre. She sees the show as living up to its goal of mobilizing artists in response to the hails of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (September 5 – December 8, 2018). 

I continue to shape: Maria Thereza Alves, Deanna Bowen, Cathy Busby, Justine A. Chambers, Nicholas Galanin, Ame Henderson, Maria Hupfield, Jessica Karuhanga, Lisa Myers, Michalene Thomas, Joseph Tisiga, Charlene Vickers

Chelsea Rozansky is a writer from Toronto. She was formerly the Writer in Residence at C Magazine.

That language is a structure of power is obvious to anyone who’s had an encounter with Foucauldian theory. That the previous sentence is a performance of said power locates a paradoxical problem at the centre of theory-based practices: by the same token that language provides a stage to give voice, it alienates, excludes or subjugates its practitioners. “That’s what I don’t like about art,” my roommate says when I tell him about the exhibition I’m writing about. “Like, only art people will get it. It’s just a circle jerk.” “No, but the show is commenting on that,” I say, kind of annoyed. “There’s, like, a lot of self-reflexivity.”

“I never wanted to be wrong about the artist’s intent and so I would read first and conquer later,” goes the voiceover in Evan Tyler’s _fear, irony, and curating in the 90s_ (2011), the first of seven videos curated by Lauren Fournier in _Autotheory_. “I would take notes in my Moleskine black book. You know, big words and key phrases, things that I could incorporate in my own dialogue with contemporary culture.” This hits home—there are a lot of tabs open on my computer: \[Krauss\_VideoN\]\[Full text of “Ti\]\[Butler (200\] \[Autotheory-by-\]\[Facebo\]\[Preliminary Ma\]\[Vttape | The\].

“Autotheory” describes works that weave philosophy with autobiographical or otherwise first-person expressive modes. The term to represent such practices is relatively emergent, but as Fournier discusses in her essay accompanying the exhibition, the impulse to engage with, respond to or perform theoretical texts and concepts is not. Situating autotheory in post-’60s feminist practice, Fournier put together her program with works from the ’70s onwards.

A performance is almost always an interpretation of a text, art critic Rosalind Krauss points out. “Most immediately, this sense of something having come before refers to the specific text for the performance at hand,” Krauss writes in “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” “But in a larger way it evokes the more general historical relationship between a specific text and the history constructed by all texts of a given genre.” History contextualizes. New work inevitably functions inside that history, and if it critiques, it critiques from within.

Krauss goes on to suggest that video’s medium is psychological rather than technical, and that its particular psychological state is narcissism. The cam- era and monitor situate us inside a claustrophobic feedback loop of reflected images. Discourse can also be narcissistic. Madelyne Beckles’ _Theory Of The Young-Girl_ (2017) suggests as much. In the video, whose title is derived from the French philosophical group Tiqqun’s _Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl_ (2012), Beckles, playing dress-up like Mattel’s target consumer, recites excerpts from the text in front of varying pink backdrops. Hugging a binder with the word “Theory” written on it in foam letters, Beckles announces: “The young girl originates in the failure of feminism.” She paints her nails on the binder and applies hairspray and lip gloss. She holds a handheld mirror up to the camera, all the while staring deadpan. Beckles illustrates Tiqqun’s point about narcissism under capitalism. “This larger history \[of prior texts in a genre\] is the source of meaning for that gesture,” writes Krauss. But making kissy faces into the camera while riffing off Marxist texts—even as a critique—is preaching to the choir.

Beckles knows this, though. In the last shot, she walks in from off-camera to stand in front of a green screen, which we see for the first time instead of cutesy substitutions. Staring unflinchingly, pigtailed and donned in pink, Beckles pauses in the centre of the frame and says, “The young girl is not expected to understand you.” Here, again, she is quoting directly from Tiqqun—but this time there’s a change in tone from her otherwise clear monotonic utterances typical of sarcastic didacticism. There’s a slight emphasis on “understand” and a corresponding head tilt, subtle petulance in operation. It’s the kind of tone usually understood as talking back. Krauss identifies some tactics of offense against video’s narcissistic form: “tapes that exploit the medium in order to criticize it from within” and “tapes that represent a physical assault on the video mechanism in order to break out of its psychological hold.” The green screen is our pull-the-curtain reveal. But more than critiquing commodification and artifice, which the video, as the Tiqqun journal, does, this last scene critiques the theory (of the Young-Girl) itself. Beckles isn’t merely quoting from the text anymore. She’s talking back to it—to its potential for impenetrability, and therefore its irrelevance.

In Hiba Ali’s _Postcolonial Language_ (2016), a rectangular frame hovers over a grid of faces, bouncing between each one. Every time it lands, the performer framed inside says the name and age of a child killed by drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. Ali offers a performance of Judith Butler’s concept of grievability: we mourn what we know. Representations of certain lives, and the exclusion of others, dictate for whom it’s possible to grieve, rendering some lives meaningful and others invisible. The frame in the video lags sometimes. Names are mispronounced. Many are missing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read Butler, you still get it. This is a testament to the strength of _Postcolonial Language_, and perhaps, without its activation, the weakness of theory.

Elsewhere in the video, talking heads mispronounce “colonialism” and its affiliate conjugations. Disembodied, warped and floating around inside goofy graphics like meme-y TV newscasters, they dictate: “Please comply with the standard security measures.” They inform us that “the experience of the immigrant is deemed either as ‘too personal’ or ‘too political,’” and recite facts about migration. They glance at each other, and down at their scripts, stuttering, voice cracking and uptalking. The sound is badly mastered and captions are out of synch. What are otherwise understood as products of amateurism and technical difficulty, in Hiba Ali’s _Postcolonial Language_ (2016) they animate the gap between theoretical or political discourse and actual lives affected. The propagators of power, the voices of authority, are here only messengers. They’re subjugated too. Their tone is confused and apprehensive in a deliberate bastardization of tropes that make newscasters seem legitimate and trustworthy, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Their words still rule.

Ali’s video opens with a sequence of essay pages. framed as a companion to an academic paper. As an audience, we struggle to keep up. The shots cut too quickly for us to read. Subtitles overlap so we can’t take it all in. Text alienates. “But, what does the term of ‘post-colonial language’ even mean?,” asks one talking head (belonging to the body of a racialized woman). “This is where the value of self-worth and its tied authority enter. Because, do ‘i’ \[sic\] have the right to enunciate this term?”

The videos shown in _Autotheory_ exalt the intersection of language and its performance. Performative language calls something into being by saying it; the pronouncement makes it real. (See Butler’s: “It’s a girl!” which a doctor proclaims at birth, simultaneously describing and constructing an identity.) It can be an act of violence when language overdetermines its subjects. Hence Beckles’ force-fed robotic utterances like “I’m so happy! I could give a shit about being free,” or Ali’s reckoning about claiming her own words. _Autotheory_, maybe, emerges from a desire to read yourself into a text. Say it really speaks to you. But the videos exhibited here suggest ambivalence: an acknowledgement of the alienating power of texts despite whatever intimacy or love we feel towards them. It isn’t narcissism, but a kind of badass move, to assert your presence in a discourse that marginalizes you: that talks about you, but only to itself. Here, we locate the autotheoretical impulse. A self emerges when you put something in your own words. Theory obscures people, but in the very act of speaking for yourself— either in cultural production, or in life—you claim your right to do so. You perform yourself into being.

issue-141-p84-87.pdf

Autobiography

Chelsea Rozansky reviews Vtape’s 2018 exhibition _Autotheory_ curated by Lauren Fournier. Rozansky uses Fournier’s works to ask questions about what it means to perform a history (November 20, 2018 – January 26, 2019). 

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C Mag

Issue 141