Abstract/Summary

This research investigates the design, production and circulation of artists’ publications of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on objects that mixed art and publishing, it examines how the design and production of artists’ publications impacted their circulation or was determined by it. Two case studies are compared, each one being representative of a different kind of publishing-related art practice: the artists’ press, Beau Geste Press, and the curator and publisher Seth Siegelaub. Based on the definition of graphic design history as history of graphic language, the methodology is centred on the interpretation of archives, contrasting the Mayor/Fluxshoe/ Beau Geste Press Archive in the Tate Gallery Archive, the Seth Siegelaub Papers in the Museum of Modern Art, and archives and primary sources related to the underground press, the mass media and to professional design conventions of the 1960s and 1970s. The study of graphic design as graphic language concentrates on discourse analysis and is underpinned by a theoretical approach adapted from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, which informs the analysis of the function of letterforms, photography, materials and printing processes. This research argues that artists’ publications articulated graphic languages familiar to broad audiences, and reached not only restricted circles of artists but also a wider public. However, alternative production techniques such as mimeography and xerox tended to be deliberately chosen and foregrounded in the context of exhibitions and as collectable items. This choice deviated from dominant graphic design practices of that period, articulating a critique of the function of exhibitions, archives and publications as a system of symbolic power. The production of artists’ publications ultimately generated alternative archives, collections, exhibitions and published records that challenged the forms in which history is produced. Moving away from the argument that graphic design history is essentially separated from art, this thesis argues that it is, instead, subject to processes comparable to the ones pointed out by artists’ publications, as graphic design history, too, is informed by a system of exhibitions, archives and publications.