John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

elationships for hybrid art and design in a rereading of this work. What Coles
calls ‘simultaneous’ is more clearly ‘contingent’ in nature. This type of hybrid
practice is context-based where the practitioner operates either as an artist or as
a designer at any given time in the manner of Delaunay and Pae White (Coles,
2005, p.137). The next type would be ‘dialogistic’ - this type of hybrid is highly
theoretical or political (Coles, 2005, p.35) and works in-between disciplines in a
highly reflexive or critical manner commenting on one domain from another
such as Coles’ examples of Varvara Stepanova and Andrea Zittel (Coles, 2005,
p.39). Coles defines a third type which denies any relationship between
domains - this points to the work of Post-painterly Abstract Expressionism and
Op Art (Coles, 2005, p.41) as examples of a means of deflecting accusations of
decoration for the work of these abstract painters. This seems like a critical
dodge. What seems more appropriate particularly in light of the aim of the
present study would be a genuinely simultaneous ‘hybrid’ model of practice that
produced a new speculative type of work that is both art and/or design.
At the time of writing, Alex Coles has just edited and published a volume titled
‘Design and Art’ (2007) in which he backs away from the term ‘DesignArt’ and
states it should now be discarded. Coles puts this down to the fact that the term
has been hijacked as a marketing tool by ‘glossy lifestyle magazines’ (Coles,
2007, p.11). Coles is also critical of Design≠Art which he describes as ‘artylooking
design or designer-art’ (Coles, 2007, p.11). However, one of the most
striking contributions is from Miwon Kwon in an essay first published in this
volume. Kwon is writing about the work of Jorge Pardo and states
“… any art that touts interdisciplinarity or ‘crosses boundaries’ is
attributed with automatic and unquestioned critical value. But it seems to
me that even while the disciplinary debates/fights continue in certain
sectors of academia, the destabilized state of medium specificity and
disciplinary categories is already the dominant or given condition of
cultural practice. As such, rather than serving an interventionary
function within exclusive art institutions, so-called cross disciplinary
practices or events that blur categorical distinctions may simply be
symptoms of the tendency towards de-differentiation that pervades
cultural experience generally.” (Kwon, 2002, p.80).
This idea of a tendency towards de-differentiation reinforces the characteristic
traits of Postmodernism (see section 2.9.3). It is refreshing to have this
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