Locating Graphic Design History in Canada
York University/Sheridan Institute
E-mail: brian.donnelly{at}Sheridanc.on.ca
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Abstract |
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The study of graphic design in Canada suffers from a scarcity of written sources and collecting institutions. Interviews conducted by one researcher suggest that, far from preventing the formation of an active design industry or any sense of an historical canon, Canadian designers draw on international examples from a variety of sources and pass values on in a largely unrecorded fashion, almost like that of an oral tradition itself. Canadian designers have a largely coherent and shared, if vernacular, sense of which works and individuals are of historical importance. Because the process of gathering and recording graphic design history in Canada currently leans heavily on recording oral histories, it is framed by many designers’ memories and collections, in interaction with critical and practical analysis of what design history is. The implications of the theory and practice of oral history for design are explored, as is the importance of maintaining the difference between memory and history. Locating that existing, vernacular canon, it is suggested, is the best way to locate and study the post-war history of graphic design in Canada.
Key Words: Canada • canon • design history • graphic design • memory • oral history
1 B. Donnelly, ‘Reading Kurschenska: on the centres and boundaries of design history’, unpublished paper delivered at the Universities Art Association of Canada annual conference, Montreal, October, 2001.
2 It should be noted that the province of Québec, with its distinct national history, has produced some important exceptions, in particular L’Affiche au Québec, Montréal, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2001, and the section on graphic design in Le design au Québec, Montréal, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2003, both by Marc H. Choko, director of the Centre de design at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Posters, in particular, have been covered; see R. Stacey, The Canadian Poster Book: 100 Years of the Poster in Canada, Toronto, Methuen, Toronto, 1979. There have been a number of focused historical articles, which usefully go beyond posters (and beyond Québec), particularly in the journal DA (Devil's Artisan), the trade journal Applied Arts and the Graphic Design Journal, published by the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada.
3 Besides Innis's own late works on communication, notably Empire and Communications (1950), and The Bias of Communication, (1951), an excellent short introduction is provided in ‘The communication thought of Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952)’, ch. 3 of R. E. Babe, Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2000.
4 P. Meggs, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 4th edn., John Wiley & Sons, Toronto, 2005.
5 Design Industry Advisory Committee, DIAC Design Industry Study, Toronto, 2004, www.dx.org/diac.html
6 T. Dimson, Great Canadian Posters, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1979.
7 R. Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, 3rd edn., Hartley & Marks, Point Roberts, WA, 2004.
8 S. Buck-Morss, ‘Visual studies and global imagination’, Papers of Surrealism, no. 2, Summer 2004, www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal2
9 Author's notes, from panel discussion on ‘Memory and History’, including Anne Bush, Judith Williamson, Val Williams and Kerry William-Purcell, Saturday, 29 October 2005.
10 P. Nora, Realms of Memory, Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996, p. xxi.
14 T. Bennett, ‘Stored virtue: memory, the body, and the evolutionary museum’, in S. Radstone & K. Hodgkin (eds.), Regimes of Memory, Routledge, New York, 2003, p. 41.
17 E. Casey, ‘Public memory in place and time’, in K. Phillips (ed.), Framing Public Memory, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2004, pp. 17–44.
18 W. Schneider, ... So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History, Utah State University Press, Logan, 2002, p. 129.
19 ‘Listening to the Internet’, in Technology Quarterly (supplement), The Economist, 11 March 2006, p. 8.
20 P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd edn., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 158.
21 E. Loftus, ‘Tricked by memory’, in J. Jeffrey & G. Edwall (eds.), Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience, University Press of America, Lanham, MA, 1994, 17–32.
22 B. Schwarz, ‘"Already the past": memory and historical time’, in S. Radstone & K. Hodgkin, op. cit., p. 141. Schwarz notes that, for Braudel, memory was to be seen not only as distinct from history but also as its enemy.
23 P. Thompson, ‘Believe it or not: rethinking the historical interpretation of memory’, in J. Jeffrey & G. Edwall (eds.), op. cit., pp. 1–16.
24 A. Callinicos, ‘Marxism and the crisis of social history’, in J. Rees (ed.), Essays on Historical Materialism, Bookmarks, London, 1998, pp. 25–40.
25 M. C. Sims & M. Stephens, Living Folklore, Utah State University Press, Logan, 2005, p. 1ff.
26 M. Riordan, An Unauthorized Biography of the World:Oral History on the Front Lines, Between the Lines Press, Ontario 2004, p. 6.
28 W. Schneider, 2002, op. cit., p. 95ff.
29 See J. Clifford, T. M. Trinh & V. Dominguez, ‘Of other peoples: beyond the ‘Salvage’ paradigm’, in H. Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Bay Press, New York, 1987, pp. 121–50.
30 While their examples tend to the social, as, for example the British monarchy or Scottish tartans, it is a concept usefully applied to design. It might be especially useful in understanding what great significance is assumed to be attached to contemporary design by tracing its roots to the shapes of ancient alphabets and other pieces of distant or pre-modern history. See E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
31 E. M. McMahan, Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and Coherence, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1989.
34 This narrative has been recently and cogently summarized by Paul Greenhalgh in The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts, V&A Publications, London, 2005.
36 This argument has recently been remade by Hal Foster, in Design and Crime, Verso, 2002.