Expressions of Australian Graphic Design.
A conversation between Professor Ross Gibson and A.B.
{24th of March 2005}
Is there an Australian graphic tradition?
Well, it’s a given that there’s forty thousand years of graphic tradition in Indigenous culture. That it’s place based, narrative based, that it’s responsive to the environment, that it does informative and knowledge-keeping work. But this long-standing tradition is not necessarily accessible to post-invasion Australian culture, nor should it necessarily be. That knowledge has to be earned.
Though most nations may have a strong graphic tradition, I want to point out immediately that most nations are different from Australia. Australia is a nation formed in the era of modernity. Australia is a nation formed at the end of the relevance of nation states. There is not a long tradition in which definitive stylistic signifiers or definitive processes get bedded down and become nationally defining.
We shouldn’t forget that Australia is actually composed of flotsam and jetsam never ceasing to come in; that it’s an import culture that never actually sets itself and defines itself permanently. In fact the only definitive thing about Australia is that these influences are constantly coming in, either invasively or avidly imported. This is the continuing problem with the Australian economy—it’s an import culture rather than an export culture.
Can there be a nationally defined graphic design culture?
Aaaah …‘What is Australian design?’ I’m really impressed by Gay Bilson’s (celebrated Australian chef) usual response to this kind of question, when she’s asked ‘What is Australian cuisine?’ She usually says, “it’s an irrelevant question … there is no Australian cuisine.”
Biography
Andrew Barnum was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA and raised in Sydney, Australia. He completed his design education at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] before starting his career as an Art Director with McCann Erickson in Sydney.
He returned to the USA to freelance in design and perform as a singer songwriter before relocating to Sydney to start his own creative business The Barnum Group with partner Lissa Barnum.
Andrew has been a lecturer in Communication Design at Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts as well as specialising in Visual Identity for the Viscom program at UTS [University of Technology Sydney].
Most recently Andrew accepted the role of Head of School at Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts
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© Finn 2011
(The rest of this article appears, in print, in Open Manifesto #2)