Out There

The difficulty in placing the work of Edward Fella is that his activity lies outside the established discourses of visual culture. It is not art -- not as most galleries, critics or art magazines would construe the term -- and it is not graphic design as the profession would generally define it.

From the outside it might seem to be design. It is ostensibly commercial, though the rewards are small or even non-existent; it is created for a client; it has a 'function', which is promotional; it uses standard reprographic techniques; it is printed in multiple copies with no redeemable value, and it usually arrives in the mail. But to graphic designers, on all the most crucial counts it fails. With only occasional exceptions it has nothing to do with the subjects it advertises and concedes nothing to the demands or wishes of the client beyond the basic need to be announced. It solves no problems. It is completely unprofessional in appearance and riddled with graphic design solecisms and errors. It looks bungled, amateurish, incompetent, ugly.

It inhabits a self-contained world of its own.

Fella, it quickly becomes apparent, is an expert at the inept. Letters are scrawled, scribbled, stencilled, typeset in different weights and styles then jumbled, or handwritten in a laborious antiquated script anchored to guide-lines that look like they have been cut from a schoolchild's exercise book. Pictograms, samples of clip art (the commercial illustrator's stand-by), wayward clusters of curves, solids and rules, and drawings with the irrational precision and purposeless conviction of ink-blotter doodles are scattered, apparently at random and for no obvious reason, across the page. Fella's word-pictures are never so extreme or chaotic as to render the words themselves unreadable. A degree of connective logic is always preserved. But the designer's false starts, wrong turnings, interruptions and digressions repeatedly confront us with the process and effort of reading, and the way in which typography, layout and incidental detail can be used to construct meaning, colour the message, or sometimes deny it.

The fact that Fella's clients are artists and that his subject matter is art only complicates the issue. Fella takes the artist's vision and, without compunction, apology or the artist's permission, replaces it with his own. Often he has not even seen the work he is presenting. He lives in California, where he teaches in the graphic design faculty at CalArts, and his clients are based in Detroit. In his commissions for the publicly-funded Detroit Focus Gallery, from 1987-90, Fella was given carte blanche by the director, Geri Baskin, to use the gallery's posters, flyers and catalogues as a starting point for his own investigations. Implicit in Baskin's invitation, and Fella's response, is a claim that the designer has a right to the same freedom, autonomy and status within his own sphere that the artist enjoys in his. The Detroit artists' reactions to this proposition were not surprisingly mixed. Some were supportive, especially once the series was established and Fella's subversive intentions had become clear. Others took exception to the idea that their art should be treated as little more than fodder for the designer's personal experiments.

Fella's challenge might have less pertinence, though it would be no less intriguing, were he working alone. He is, in fact, a leading figure in a group of American graphic designers who in the last decade have attempted -- with some controversy -- to apply the tenets of French critical theory and deconstruction to their craft. The movement is centred on Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, and the more significant work of the academy's tutors, students and graduates was collected in the book Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse (Rizzoli, 1990). Fella himself belatedly became a masters student at Cranbrook in the mid-80s, at the age of 48, though his influence at the academy goes back to the previous decade when he gave lectures showing his private experimental work. For 30 years he worked as a commercial artist, knocking out decorative illustrations to order, often in a parody Art Deco style. 'I was like those people that Robert Venturi wrote about,' he told Emigre magazine.' The guys that made the signs in Las Vegas.' Fella's interest in folk art and the vernacular was far from naive, however, and he read voraciously in literature and art. He absorbed structuralism, semiotics, Nabokov and Barthes. He was fascinated by issues of meaning, interpretation, double-coding and self-reflexivity. While waiting between commercial assignments he would create books of collages, using photostats of found imagery and type, a habit he maintains with great energy to this day.

In his work for the Detroit Focus Gallery and for his other Detroit art scene clients, Fella was finally able to mesh these interests -- high culture and low vernacular, autonomous art and applied design -- without compromise or constraint. The series came to an end with the appointment of a new gallery director, but the wonder is that he should have got away with it for so long. Most design for Anglo-American artists and art institutions habitually adopts a subordinate role. In the words of the American designer and critic Lorraine Wild, it is one of art's 'invisible support systems'. Its aim is transparency. We are not supposed to notice it because we have far more important things to look at: the art. The formula is rarely broken: titles, text type and captions in discreet sizes (serif or sans serif, it doesn't matter) and fields of white space surround images with the visual equivalent of a reverential hush. In other contexts graphic design articulates, comments on, and sometimes even shouts down its subject. Occasionally, in more image-conscious art catalogues, a certain fashionable inflection is allowed. But the principal measure of success in design for art's sake is its restraint, its dignity, its obeisance, its absence. Art undertakes a dialogue with the world and the critic pursues a dialogue with art, while design, the medium through which this interaction takes place on the page, is given the role of mute and witless observer. Art's grand purpose is to pose searching questions about social relations, political power structures, the hierarchy of values; design, like a good servant, must meekly tow the line.

Fella describes the contrived ineptitude and vernacular energy with which he assaults these conventions and counters graphic design's slickness and perfection as a kind of 'anti-mastery'. 'I hate fine anythings,' he says. His two-sided posters, which double as flyers, are cheaply printed on low quality paper in a single colour. We are accustomed to expect a degree of basic quality and seamlessness in printed communications, especially from art galleries, and the absence of these reassuring signifiers in Fella's work is genuinely perturbing, particularly to other graphic designers. However much designers might talk about finding the most appropriate visual solution, as though their ideas were boundless and literally any outcome were possible, most are inhibited by their knowledge of the discipline's history and rules, by contemporary trends, by habit, and by their own innate, or learned, good taste. The more accomplished a designer is in these narrow, professionally defined terms, the harder it is to break with convention in the use of typefaces, letter-spacing, line-spacing and layout.

Yet this, somehow, is what Fella's anti-mastery has achieved. By drawing on what he understands as an artist, he has produced 'designs' that fly in the face of everything he knows as a designer to be correct. Nothing is sacrosanct, everything is open to revaluation, no area of the sheet or page is off limits. Fella's scatter-grams of tumbling type and delinquent letterforms make one realise quite how circumscribed our conception of 'appropriate' design has become. His fluid distortions force the tired and predictable typographic palette into dramatic new relationships; rejecting utterly the Modernist conception of type as a neutral message-bearer, they are continual reminders of the expressive possibilities of the word as image and of the word-image itself as a carrier of meaning.

So where, to restate our original dilemma, does Fella fit in? Although his work has received some attention in the last year and a half (two magazine features, inclusion in two anthologies) it is not widely known. The Detroit art scene is obviously parochial compared to those of Los Angeles or New York. The professional design magazines, particularly in Britain, offer designers the chance of instant publication -- today's annual report is tomorrow's news -- but Fella has luckily eluded such trivialising coverage. Unnoticed, except by a small circle of interested colleagues and his own students, he has taken his own time to develop a highly idiosyncratic body of work loaded with implications for the dialogue between art and design, if only it were more widely seen or discussed.

But this blurring of categories is precisely the reason for the critical silence that has greeted Fella's experiments, and Cranbrook projects in general. Depressingly few magazines address the complete spectrum of visual culture. Critics in the design camp, if they comment at all, say that the work is 'design about design', that it is visually and conceptually too complicated, that it is preoccupied with style, that it is too personal, that it is meaningless, that it is art -- that it is anything but design. Critics on the art side, unaccustomed to paying much attention to design, or seeing it as a fertile source of cultural ideas, say nothing at all. Neither side has yet developed, or shown much inclination to develop, an adequate critical framework for assessing the hybrid media and new cultural forms which are beginning to emerge at their interface, and which will be further driven by the use of computers like the Macintosh. (Fella's work has until now been created by hand, but its elastic freedoms are a virtual manifesto for the manipulative possibilities of the new digital tools.)

We could, of course, go on saying that anything which falls outside the established boundaries and self-perpetuating discourses of art and graphic design is 'failed art', because it is tainted by commerce and the client relationship, or 'failed design', because it is tainted by supposed pretensions to art. Or we could say: yes, this art-about-design or design-about-art really is something new and specific to our times, an extension of what we know, a different kind of communication -- what is its potential, how can we develop it, and how and where might it be applied?