Are Posters Worthy of Gallery Display?
The Opening of the World’s First Poster Museum
My relationship with posters over the years has fluctuated. If you knew me during my adolescence, you might recall my tweens dominated by my obsession with boy bands, chick flicks, and vampy sagas. My fascination with these matters was not confined to chats with pals but manifested itself predominantly as posters of Edward Cullen and the Jonas Brothers taped to my bedroom walls. Now in my early twenties, many of the posters I own have been tucked away into my closet for safekeeping. More recent additions to my collection are framed for permanent display around my apartment fashioning a je ne se quoi feel to my humble abode. My work as a graphic designer has enabled me to appreciate posters for their formal visual qualities, but I am curious if you have ever exclaimed to yourself “wow, this poster is a work of art!”
An article by Graphic Design USA entitled KASA Helps Bring Poster Museum to Life brought to my attention the opening of the first poster museum, Poster House, in New York City. Taking the museum industry by storm, Poster House is applauded for its interactive features and novel concept. Labeled as state-of-the-art by Graphic Design USA, I view this museum as undoubtedly narrowing the boundaries between design and fine art. However, I couldn’t help but wonder, is the consideration of posters as an art form truly a modern concept? Based on my brief study of art history, I find that this idea did not arise within the past few years, it has simply gained more momentum. Viewing graphic designs as art has a rich background in modern art history bound by the similar techniques and intentions of artists and designers at the time.
Exhibit A: The Creation Process
It is no mystery that a designer somewhere in the universe sat down, sketched, and obsessed over your favorite poster so that it looks the way it does. As a graphic designer, I am more than familiar with the amount of time and attention to detail that is required for any visual work, let alone a piece that is meant to sit on the walls of your home. The fundamental steps of designing a poster commercially include defining the messaging points, audience, and tone. Graphic design is like solving a riddle that has been made by four different writers. Efforts in design are driven by a team of art directors, marketers, copywriters, designers, and photographers as each have a very specific function in the production process. What separates the graphic designers from the fine artists is that a designer is typically not creating work for themselves. Their work is an intermediate between an information source (company, non-profit, your friends needing wedding invites…) and their intended audience — which could be you! Fine artists, on the other hand, are typically driven by their thoughts, life events, society, emotions, and anything that inspires them to communicate themselves. This difference, today, has created a divide between traditional fine art and graphic design which has not always existed.
Exhibit B: 19th Century Artist-Designer Hybrids
If you have ever visited a modern art exhibit, you may have left a little confused. The periods of art are blurry, between fauvism, impressionism, realism, it’s difficult to not get overwhelmed. This is because artists, especially during the late 1800s, were widening the boundaries of what was ‘acceptable art;’ art fit for being displayed at grand exhibitions like the Louvre in Paris. Due to improving technology during the Industrial Revolution, especially advancements in printing, design-work became mass-produced. The artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement were less than pleased and focused their energies on what was unique and handmade. These artists even looked at the manuscripts and illuminations of medieval monks — which I view as some of the earliest forms of graphic design. The movement was accepting of writers, architects, designers, and crafters as artists on the hunt to destroy the evils of commercialization.
Exhibit C: Fast forward to the 80s
As a graphic design student, I have learned a great deal about the technological advancements that have shaped the way creatives have worked over the past few decades. My professors, who are in their early forties, recount stories of their university days when their work was all physically produced. Poster designs were not created with the digital help of Photoshop and a laptop but made carefully by hand. Images were scanned, printed, trimmed, and organized physically. Having typography on a poster, for example, the name of a band, was a significant time commitment. The letterforms were either hand-drawn in a humanist style or crafted by typesetting. The name of this technique is just as intimidating as the process. Typesetting involves the manual cutting and pasting of letters and words onto the whole composition. Poster makers at this time used the same tools that traditional artists worked with like x-acto knives, drawing tables, and pencils. However, the goal of their work was always commercially driven.
Exhibit D: Fast forward now
Now that graphic design has been officially recognized as a profession, designers are no longer seen as artists but are merely cogs in the bigger corporate world. The term graphic designer soon became disconnected from the arts and is now highly interwoven with the world of marketing and selling of commodities. Poster House attempts to fight this separation, as their goal is to once again bring graphic design to the roundtable with the arts. It is not the idea of a poster being viewed as art that is novel, as we have seen artists and designers work hand-in-hand in the past. I am excited about the opportunity to one day (hopefully soon) revisit Poster House, and be able to truly appreciate posters as they are meant to be appreciated — as art.
See what the Poster House is currently up to here.
