Designs on a brighter future

After independence, the ‘bankrupt, scarred’ Irish State used design and our ‘visual culture’ to redefine the country and attract tourism. Faced with similar problems today, can design save us?

CAN DESIGN save Ireland? We’re facing, we’re constantly told, a crisis of historic proportions. The scale of the crisis may indeed be historic, but it’s certainly not the first time we’ve been here.

Back in 1922, when the Free State was established, Ireland “was bankrupt, its people psychologically scarred, romantic nationalist sentiment had been exposed as largely ideologically hollow . . . ” Sound familiar?

This description, by Linda King, is included in a new book, Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity 1922-1992, which describes how Irish identity emerged through, and was shaped by, design and visual culture.

But what exactly is visual culture? Ireland is justly famed for its literature, and also for music. Whether it is the words of our Nobel laureates, the songs of U2, or the beat of the bodhrán; Irish sounds and voices travel well.

Less so our visual culture, even though visual culture forms one of the strongest, though least-acknowledged components of what our sense of Ireland is. A somewhat clumsy and off-putting term for the made things we can see around us, visual culture is made up of logos, signs and symbols, use of colour, typefaces, posters, architecture, craft, design, and even the mundane and utilitarian objects that we see and use often enough to ignore, such as lamp posts, park benches, window panes and door handles.

All countries have their own visual cultures, and the visual signals that are sent are subtle, yet pervasive, such as with as the choice of plain modern typeface (Johnston Sans) and simple logo for the London Underground, and the evocative lettering of the old Paris Metro signs. Each is just a small intervention, and yet shapes the different atmosphere of the two public transport systems.

Some of our own visual culture in Ireland is the result of an organic development, but a great deal is the result of deliberate decisions made at the time of the foundation of the State.

REDEFINING THE NEW IRELAND included painting red post boxes green, creating the Great Seal with its Celtic design and harp logo, designing stamps, and of course, designing the new Irish currency. Tourism was quickly identified as a vital source of income, second only to agriculture. Artists including Paul Henry were commissioned to create images for posters that showed a misty rural Ireland of rugged coastlines and soft days. Tourist imagery is particularly potent. For many, it provided the symbols of a place that had come to represent Ireland while also defining it.

Most of us have decided on a holiday on the basis of a poster or brochure image, maybe of a glorious beach, snow-covered mountains, or a city's iconic buildings. These come to not only stand for the whole, but become the whole in that we ignore those parts of the country or city that don't live up to the poster image. Paris becomes the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe and Seine; while, following the Synthesis of Reports on Tourismfrom 1950 (which became known as the Christenberry Report), references such as "the friendliness of the people, castles and fishing", came to define Ireland. These, as well as Paul Henry's landscapes which so perfectly fitted the de Valerian ideal of what the country should look like, created a self-fulfilling prophecy of the Ireland tourists come to find.

Exploring these ideas in the Irish context, Ireland, Design and Visual Cultureis far more fascinating to the interested lay reader than its rather academic title and various chapter headings might suggest.

In some instances the language is needlessly complex. Nevertheless, the arguments and research are worth reading. Oddly enough for a book about visual culture (possibly this is another self-fulfilling prophecy) it is somewhat over-designed, although the extensive use of orange is a telling example of how far we have come since the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 led to a process of reinclusion of that colour in our visual language “down south”.

Through the book’s pages, we can see how Irish artists and designers created and shaped a sense of Ireland, both at home and abroad, just as much as did the writings of Joyce, Synge or O’Casey.

As Luke Gibbons points out in his introduction, unfortunately titled “Modalities of the Visible”, after Harry Boland was shot during the Civil War and cameras were confiscated at Glasnevin Cemetery for his burial, Jack B Yeats created a painting that not only memorialised the event, but mythologised it too.

Artists were also involved in forming the identity of such massive infrastructural projects as the Shannon hydroelectric scheme at Ardnacrusha, and Seán Keating’s paintings of the heroic Irish workers defined a sense of the project that was somewhat at odds with its realities, including its German design.

The strong international influence on emerging Irish design is shown throughout the book. In some instances, such as with Norah McGuinness’s and Harry Kernoff’s German Expressionist-influenced set designs for the Peacock and Gate theatres, these were the result of a disillusionment that set in with the early ideals of the State in the late 1920s.

In others, such as the Dutch design of Aer Lingus Posters, or the brilliant internationalism of the Kilkenny Design Workshops project – which brought in international craftspeople to work with Irish makers, thus creating something completely new – were due to a growing sense of internationalism (and not a little belief that we couldn’t make it on our own).

As the book also shows, myth-making is not something that is confined to the past, and all constructions of national identity and of tourism sell icons of something that may not exist as we know it.

Nevertheless in today’s Ireland in which many of these first symbols of the new State, such as the currency, are gone, there is an argument to be made for an incorporation of a stronger identity through design into plans for our economic and social recovery.

“Against a background of civil unrest and fading dreams the concrete expression of political and cultural change was made tangible and quantifiable by the apparatus of State authority,” writes King. State authority may be too tarnished these days, but design may yet help to save the day.

Through the various essays in the book, one is struck by the contradictions inherent in the making of the State, but also the energy, ideals and vision that were part of it. Reading about the Aer Lingus tourism posters of the 1950s, one discovers An Tóstal, the Festival of the Welcomes. Set up in 1953, its aim was to target the Irish-American diaspora to boost visitor numbers – and yes, we’re still at it.

There is an increasing level of rhetoric in academia concerning multi-disciplinary approaches, and interactions with the world beyond the ivory tower. Books like this are useful and vital contributions to conversations that reach way beyond the walls of our universities. Just don’t let the titles put you off.

Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity 1922-1992, edited by Linda King and Elaine Sisson, is published by Cork University Press €39