Eye Magazine

Art & Graphic Design is a tantalising title, encapsulating a relationship, or at least an adjacency, that is always present, sometimes explicitly alluded to, but never definitively addressed. Designers are often fascinated by a visual practice in which the maker enjoys an enviable autonomy usually unavailable to themselves. Designing catalogues for artists gives the designer a ringside seat in the art world, but underlines the subservience of the relationship. On the other side of the coin is art that depends to some degree on graphic design – on its techniques and conventions – for its expression. The most likely exponent is an artist educated as a designer, as was the case with George Maciunas and Ed Ruscha, two of Art & Graphic Design’s case studies.

Any account of the ‘art & graphic design’ relationship (for Benoît Buquet, the ampersand signifies their interlacing) must be situated somewhere and will be determined by that viewpoint. It’s possible to imagine a researcher who could address the subject equally from both directions, but it isn’t very likely. It would require degree-level knowledge and career experience of both fields and, even more elusively, a non-hierarchical openness and sympathy for both activities …

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