Parade

Variations épicènes # Chaumont

Context

The first Variations épicènes exhibition (Ungendered Variations, September 2020) was commissioned by the Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz: The task was to curate a group show of work by women graphic artists. It was organized into two main frameworks. In one segment, seven sets of works of varying genres were installed in seven rooms, each highlighting the unique and coherent approach one of these graphic artists has taken in her explorations. The other segment featured work displayed in a documentation room, as if it were the prequel to the exhibition or the studio from which it emerged. 

The eponymous version at the Centre International du Graphisme, a graphic art bastion, deploys an ensemble of projects conceived by French graphic artists. The selection is generous, its density attesting to the contribution they have made to French culture and society. This list is long, coherent, far from exhaustive yet deliberately overflowing, almost dizzying, like a never-ending column, an out-of-control monument whose index – in books, the index of women’s names always falls sort of reality – is an ever-expanding and uncontainable directory. 

As Martha Scotford, an American historian of graphic design, wrote in 1994, the history of graphic design encompassing the question of women can be “messy”. And for good reason, since for decades few women have been admitted into the ranks and lineages of its history and exhibitions. Feminist perspectives and interrogations of gender tend to blur lines, indexes and customary centring. Introducing the reality of the personal shakes up the idea of public interest. The personal is political. 

Decoration

A layout by the graphic designer Cassandre (1901-68), attractive packaging and wrapping, a variable identity, an art in the service of…, a minor art, a subset of decorative art… In common thinking graphic design conjures up pejorative qualifiers and imprecise definitions. Perhaps that’s why Cassandre chose a gender-neutral, slightly melodramatic stage name that presaged the miseries and difficulties to come. Graphic designers get hit. They defend their compositions against all odds, so that their work can attain visibility in the hyper-formatted and locked-down society of the spectacle whose marketing mechanisms encourage them to stay in their lane, avoiding any striving, let alone thinking.  

All the work on view here, whether previously called into real-world existence or made for this show, has something ineffable in common: they are “Trojan horses”,[2]  graphic objects where the artist has put forward her grammar and vocabulary, her “raw materials”, sometimes on a terrain somewhat hostile and indifferent at best. Objects in which she has wrapped up her convictions, ambitions and utopias. Nothing spectacular, the almost imperceptible inherent power of the shared visible. In this sense, each of their objects deserve particular attention. The exhibition provides a safe space and time for concentration on these graphic design objects. Reading, understanding, pondering – these are the core objectives of the installation layout conceived by Pernelle Poyet.

Counter-blocking

Group shows without women are absurd. The idea of specifically female artworks has proved to be baseless. That’s even more the case in graphic design, where the context of commissioned work, public exposure and collaborative practices have put paid to the notion of some intrinsic womanly characteristic. Yet this exclusion has persisted since the end of the nineteenth century, despite their dogged incursions, and it equally applies to our collective memory. But despite everything, women artists need to be there. During their lifetime, they are, necessarily, subject to much criticism, but afterward they turn out to provide precious tools, constrained but liberating tools, sources to be documented, useful examples of their art to be interrogated, even if they remain unrecognized, obscure or totally unknown. They make it possible to expand the domain of knowledge and narrow the abyss that swallows up the work of many women artists. We have to invent and persist in ways to counter-block this phenomenon: how can we keep essential graphic design works from being buried, from disappearing? How can we make sure that they do not stay silenced, that they speak to us about the society they activate, about the process at work in them?

How did the poster designer Jane Atché (1872-1937) feel in 1896, when she saw the first printing of her ad poster for Job cigarette-rolling paper? What went on in the mind of Claudette Duparc  when she designed a grid suggesting a woman’s silhouette for the cover of the edition of the Anatole France novel Lys Rouge published by the Club Français du livre in 1955? What came into being in 1959 when Sylvie Joubert (1923? - 1973?) dropped Cassandre’s name from her studio’s title and ventured forth as nothing more or less than the “Atelier Joubert”? 

We can make assumptions and try to connect the dots, but we don’t have the necessary documentation for any firm conclusions. In considering these graphic artists of the century that only recently came to an end, historians usually come up empty-handed. In writing about archival issues concerning  women, Arlette Farge explained, “We rediscover these women as if finding a lost species, an unknown plant, tracing their portraits as if trying to fill in a hole in our memory with whatever remains available, just as we tentatively sketch out portraits of the dead.” For the sake of freeing our discipline from the ghosts of so many Jane Does and so much dead-end research, the exhibitions Parade and Variations Épicènes demonstrate just how consequential an awakening would be for these graphic designers and for graphic arts institutions in general, how important it would be if there were a real understanding of the need to protect and document their work.  

 A parade, multitudinous, brightly coloured, gloriously mixed and in no particular order, for this thirtieth edition. 

 A momentary collective action: all these graphic designers, all together.