Meaningful Amibguity Within Design and Art

Junior, Senior, Fifth-Year, Graduate Elective – 3 credits

Spring 2009

For well over one hundred years, designers and artists have abstracted and blurred the distinction between “design” and “art”.

From Matisse’s plush interior for Rockefeller center in New York City; to Josef Albers’ large-scale murals; to Jorge Pardo’s playful environments, to Sonia Delaunay’s hand-printed fabrics and tapestries from the 1920s; to the fabric designs Takashi Murakami recently conceived with Marc Jacobs; one can identify an often overlooked strand in the history of design and art.

The “practice of contemporary design and art” constantly requires the construction of new lineages – new histories – to render and illuminate the interaction between design and art. Since the traditional boundaries between art and architecture, graphic design, film, product design and other disciplines have dissolved in critically significant ways, this studio will trace the rise of the “design/art” phenomenon through active design inquiry. The studio will introduce highly innovative interdisciplinary projects generated by several different—even contradictory—forms of design/art making that contest commonplace assumptions of what design and art are.

Through participatory practice and observation of historical work students will examine multiple theories about the relationship between design and art from the Renaissance perspective to today’s digital culture.

Taught by:   Hammett Nurosi      

Course #: GRAPH 3290

Graphic Design majors only