No thanks.54 54. ‘Authors, Editor and Contributors: Edited by Pablo LaFuente. Texts by Enrique Juncosa, Sven Lütticken, Tom McDonagh, Maeve Connolly, Jeremy Miller, Bettina Funcke, Volker Pantenburg, Maria Muhle and Ian White’. Available at: https://www.theimmashop.com/en-gb/products/gerard-byrne-images-or-shadows [Accessed 19 May 2024] Even as I write this thesis I am designing a book for a museum with whom I have worked for many years. I receive a draft of the Director’s Foreword in which I’m thanked for my insightful book design. On receiving the final copy-edited text my thanks is gone, while all other acknowledgements down to museum technical staff remain in place. I’m at this long enough not to care, but it does serve to (once again) illustrate the persistent perception that graphic design is transparent; that it simply delivers the ideas of others.
Fig. 25 No Thanks
For Foucault The Author Function is ‘characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.’ (2010: 211). This issue as it surrounds graphic design is highlighted in this ‘No Thanks’ vignette. Of the four characteristics Foucault assigns the Author Function, he first notes that although all discourses are objects of appropriation (ibid.) literary discourse requires validation through the assignation of author: we must know who wrote the text, where, and when, and in what circumstances (ibid.: 213), and through this and our reading of the text (shaped by our own political intertextuality perhaps) we construct or project a ‘being of reason’. Deprived as a discourse, graphic design’s communicative capacity generally goes unnoticed.55 55. ‘Even the design by Peter Maybury, I began to appreciate as both simple and functional – as an object directed towards reading and viewing purposes.’ Ingrid Lyons reviews Everything is Somewhere Else. Available at: https://visualartistsireland.com/book-review-everything-is-somewhere-else. [Accessed 21 March 2025]. There are of course exceptions – graphic designers who attain celebrity or cult of personality which precedes reception of their work – ‘beings of reason’ for whom critics discern “‘deep” motive’, and ‘“creative” power’ (ibid.).56 56. ‘The world that their company, Sagmeister & Walsh, occupies is one entirely of their own making. They are showmen in a world they have placed themselves firmly at the centre of, through the strength of their convictions and considerable design talent. There follows a cult of personality that divides opinion but never fails to get a reaction. The duo trade in sensation and together have built a business and following that has evolved in tandem with the accelerated pace with which design is produced and consumed.’ Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/stefan-sagmeister-jessica-walsh-graphic-design-040618 [Accessed 21 March 2025].
Pablo Lafuente’s Foreword to Images or Shadows [project descriptor] Images or Shadows (2011) was published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art to accompany Byrne’s survey show Gerard Byrne: Through the Eyes. Images or Shadows is stylistically modelled on an educational textbook such as those by Folens publishers. Throughout, the book interweaves material from the making or staging of artworks by Byrne, their staging for installation and exhibition, and the making or staging of the book. The nine essays, many of which refer to the same works by Byrne, are exploited as a framing device through which to present multiple pictorial representations of the works. All image typologies are given equal emphasis, and artwork images, film stills, production stills, archival and reference images, staged images, and installation views are arranged in various combinations throughout the book to prompt multiple readings and associations. is useful in drawing this out further. It is written self-reflexively, and he draws our attention both in its title – ‘Texts, Paratexts, Hypertexts’ – and in the text itself to its function as paratext, alongside the colophon, title, afterword, or acknowledgements, in providing framing and contributing to the institutional requirements of the museum, and this in turn draws our attention to the transtextual nature of Byrne’s work (2011: 3). Lafuente sees that through the book the works, the texts and the images might offer a ‘transtextual range of articulations that show not only how a work can explicitly refer to another, but how it can also elaborate, expand, modify or transform the grounds where it stands.’ Using this Foreword then I can problematise my authorial role in the book. While acknowledging many layered possibilities of the book – the text from which Byrne’s works originate; the works themselves; the texts which frame and recontextualise them – the Foreword does not reference the design of the book – the ‘book art’ through which all of these elements are carried and reshaped. This unseen work – a further transtextual and authorial formation or weave – sits outside of this editorial framing of the book, emerging as it did through my exchanges with Gerard and our mutually constitutive interests.