This Is Not Art
Ivan Reyes, Lena Johnson, Natalie Bolton, Angela Dong
For our second group project in James Grady’s Fall Senior Studio, we were given a prompt to design an installation based on our questions and reactions to chapters 2 and 4 within The Graphic Design Reader.
Our team — Ivan Reyes, Lena Johnson, Natalie Bolton, Angela Dong — first met after having read the chapters to talk about our thoughts and reactions. We first began sharing our own 25 questions, but quickly found a theme within all of them. Our questions all had a similar theme of rejecting what was discussed within the two chapters because we found the two chapters to be pretentious and thought the authors were trying to make graphic design more definitive, thus less accessible. This brought us to question what even were the requirements to be a graphic designer? Or why isn’t graphic design hung up in museums like fine art is? Or why isn’t graphic design considered a fine art? These questions all lead to our concluding statement that defined our installation: This Is Not Art. Because, what even is art or graphic design?
We each took our own approaches to the iterations, but after meeting again to discuss them, found that we had all created work filled with satire that rejected “graphic design norms.” Lena created 25 iterations with a bullet point pen, drawing inspiration from fine art as well as memes. Natalie also created drawings and riso prints, even to create an alien mascot saying “This is not art!” for the installation. Ivan created riso prints inspired by the misogynistic 1950’s artwork at the time, twisting it in a way to combat the misogyny through design humor. And Angela created riso prints inspired by current graphic design trends on Instagram that were put into a video format along with the rest of the group’s iterations.
Our final installation was designed and pinned without a grid and with a bit of an airy feeling. To give a sense of how malleable and undefinable graphic design really is. We used a mix of riso printed posters and vinyl cut outs that varied in styles to create the feeling of looking at a moodboard. Moodboards represent the stage of design where you don’t have any rules in your head yet and just throw any idea on the wall that sticks and we wanted to capture that feeling because it fit our idea of working without a defined structure
Once our work was on the wall we noticed that there was a Covid-19 guidelines poster already posted on so we incorporated it into the exhibition by recreating duplicates of the guideline poster with a twist that brought the concept of dadaism into the project. In order to add an interactive element to the project, we added a small stand where viewers could draw their own doodles to add to the exhibit or take a doodle from the pile that has already been drawn. This ties in directly with the message of our project because it shows how anyone’s small sketch can still be considered art and be added to an exhibition. What is usually seen as just a small doodle that can be thrown away can be considered art by someone else.
