Articles
Establishing Regimes Of Truth
Posted: 04.03.07 by to Better Design
WSM: Scott Boylston is a professor of graphic design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. For 20 years, he’s worked on a broad array of design projects for varied clientele, non-profits and social causes, and he’s written extensively on the subject. What follows is an excerpt from his manuscript Establishing Regimes Of Truth: A Study Of The Relationship Between Leaders, Power And Artistic Expression.
In his book The Selfish Gene, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to define the building blocks of human co-existence. A meme is a concise framing of a concept that grants it a legitimacy so fundamentally attractive to a culture that it spreads with the efficiency of a virus. Whether defining an acceptable mode of transportation or the belief that might makes right, the most successful memes become foundations for unassailable societal norms. Even as they are defined by a culture, they transform it, and within their perceived “naturalness” they generate de facto refutations of alternative concepts. While the primary goal of a leader’s rhetoric is to define linguistic memes that are attractive to the populace, artists attempt to define memes by way of visual rhetoric.
The separate acts of artistic creation and leadership are more intimately related than one might first imagine. Art can help leaders emerge and lead by creating visual frameworks to disseminate their core values to an intended audience in a meaningful fashion. Conversely, art can construct visual frameworks that challenge inconsistencies between leaders’ rhetoric and their actions. In both instances, one might consider art a vessel, yet such a conclusion is incomplete. It neglects to account for a fundamental attribute shared by the majority of artists who create it; that of independent vision. While art is merely a vessel, the creator of that art is an active consumer, digester and transformer of social and political ideology.
Artists are critical thinkers who possess the ability to sift through vast and sometimes contradictory volumes of information. More importantly, they possess the ability to synthesize such information into cogent declarations which make use of symbolic codes that, by design, are understood and appreciated by the cultural milieu. In this manner, artists performing in the public arena attempt to construct viable memes as a means to legitimize the arguments of the leaders they support.
Those artists who commit to engaging public opinion do so because they are either aligned with or in opposition to the policies of those in power. A common fate of artists willing to speak out against leadership can be appreciated by studying historic examples. They are demonized, ostracized, jailed, banished and sometimes murdered for their actions. They can be subjected to such treatment even at the same time they are idolized by a large segment of a population. The fate of artists that contribute their talents to the cause of emerging and established leaders, however, is not as well documented. While not nearly as vulnerable to abuses of power against them as artistic dissenters, these artists are somewhat less secure in the new establishment as one might assume. In fact, it is not uncommon for the most creative artists in service to leaders to be deemed unhealthy to the new order once it is firmly established. In such situations, it is often at the moment of victory and consolidation of power that the instincts of the artist and the leader begin to diverge. Innovative artists generally remain committed to exploration and experimentation, even as they mature in life. Leaders, on the other hand, as innovative as they may have been during their rise to power, embrace protectionist and stabilizing tendencies once they are established. While many forms of stasis are favored by established leaders, stasis in any form is anathema to most artists. Furthermore, while many artists explore creativity for its intrinsic qualities, leaders tend to embrace creativity as a means to an end. Once that end is reached, the leaders must reassess their needs and methods, even if it means dispensing with or silencing artists who have contributed to their rise. It is here, then—at the pinnacle of achievement—that fundamental personality traits of artists and leaders create the potential for discord.
Artists that act against leaders, on the other hand, will sometimes do so for the benefit of oppositional political groups, but more often they act out of personal motivations. Even when designing for organizations, they tend to do so only because they share the same enemies. Alain le Quernec, the famous French poster designer, has put it this way: “And so it’s by the negative: why are you from the left in France? Because I think it’s impossible to be from the right. I never wanted to belong to a party. I wanted to be free. Even while I did a lot of work for the Socialist party it was because I had a friend there. But I never belonged to this party because I never wanted to be obliged to follow. I’m not property.”