The essay draws attention to the growing numbers of contemporary artists who are exploring and exploiting the creative protocols of design in their work. It is argued that this trend has become an important theme and pressing issue in contemporary visual art. Though it is an uneven, fragmented, widely dispersed and apparently incoherent phenomenon without any clearly defined, unitary objectives, the essay proceeds from the assumption that the adoption of design as creative idiom by a wide variety of artists is informed by social dynamics and material resources that are coherent enough to be meaningfully identified and described. It therefore sets out to develop and account of this phenomenon by situating it within our contemporary historical context. To this end, the essay first addresses the conceptual resources that are currently available to artists. The author proposes, in this regard, that a gradual mutation in the general epistemological sensibility of Modernity over the last number of decades has come to transform our understanding of the nature of, and relationship between, art, aesthetics, cognition and ethico-political life, and therefore of how art could potentially function in our individual and collective consciousnesses. More particularly, these broad epistemological developments have registered in contemporary art practice through the coagulation of two distinct sets of conceptualist priorities. It is argued that these two sets of priorities both accommodate, if not facilitate, in their own ways, the adoption of design as creative idiom in contemporary art. The essay also addresses the social conditions within which contemporary artists’ creative practices are situated. In order to identify and describe the social conditions and dynamics that may contribute towards the poignancy and currency of design as creative idiom within in art, the author utilizes the insights of a number of prominent scholars from the field of Sociology. These authors’ observations suggests that a significant transformation has taken place in the material basis of social life, over the last number of decades, under the combined influence of a number of important technological and economic developments. Together, these developments have conspired to produce a dynamic and disorientating world full of uncertainty and insecurity. The author suggests that this fluid situation may have contributed, in various ways, not only to the current prominence of design in social life, but also to the apparent willingness of artists to explore design as creative idiom in their work. Arguing that significant relations can be drawn between the work of individual artists based on the shared intellectual climate and social dynamics within which it is developed, the author tries, in the final section, to ground his observations in the concrete singularity of individual artistic practice. To this end, the work and interests of American artist Andrea Zittel is examined and interpreted. Zittel’s work is explored as an example of the complex ways in which personal motives, social forces and intellectual currents meet at the intersection of art and design.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/5377 |
| Date | 15 August 2008 |
| Creators | Morland, Arno |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 2658203 bytes, application/pdf, application/pdf |
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