This Indeed Makes Perfect Sense:

A Brief Analysis of the Identity Piece “Does It Make Sense?”, by April Greiman

Zachary Pearl
2008
When assessing the reasons why April Greiman’s experimental poster,” Does
This Make Sense?” was a groundbreaking piece of graphic design, it is critical to
examine the context of the time period and social regime of the culture that it
was produced within. Emerging as a major designer in the early 1980s, Greiman
embraced the zeitgeist of digital imagery and technology’s integration into the
designer’s toolbox while advancing a period of aesthetics in the United States that
had only a decade earlier begun to see the representation of the female perspec-
tive. Setting herself apart from contemporaries such as Kruger, Holzer, and Birn-
baum, Greiman’s work crossed over pre-conceived boundaries of not only tech-
nology and design, but also the way in which Western culture traditionally views
the female body and its role in visual communication.

It is rumored that at the time Greiman created her famous piece for a spread in
Issue #133 of Design Quarterly, she was heavily reading philosophy byWittgen-
stein. More specifically, she was interested in his writings on how art should
convey the restrictions of its medium. However, the content of her piece, and the
visual elements that Greiman chose to implement would seem to imply a care-
ful reading of Peter Burke; issues of anthropological linguistics and acquisition.
Described by Greiman as a personal piece about identity, “Does It Make Sense?”
succeeds on an ironically universal level to provoke a discourse of personal ico-
nography and its potential to communicate through a purely visual language. Its
array of symbols and small illustrations are outside their original appearance and
syntax; digitally altered, spatially rearranged, graphically decomposed. And yet,
Greiman’s sensibility of a designed context creates a conscious and archetypal
matrix of relationships between her imagery that warrants further investigation by
even the most experienced designers of today. In this piece, Greiman achieved a
remarkable amount of depth and narrative, using nothing more than a computer
and a scanner. These were devices that, at the time, were conceived to be cold
and sterile, robbing the human element from graphic design by removing evi-
dence of the hand. On the contrary, Greiman managed to render an open-ended
taxonomy of the instinctive quest for human identity; a kind of psychological
portrait, while retaining a sophisticated heirarchy and a system of personal ex-
pression.

In effect, it could be said that with this piece Greiman sought the creation of her
own visual language. Perhaps, this is where we see an intersection with Wittgen-
stein; paying homage to his theory of a solipsistic language that is beyond utter-
ance in the physical world. However, the implications of Greiman’s piece are
far more informative to theories of meta-language posed by philosophers such as
Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both believed that language acts simultane-
ously as the primary vehicle of expression and yet as a constant form of imprison-
ment of pure human expression. (Storey 92) When Lacan states that the mirror
stage is a time of recognition and simultaneous alienation from the self, he means
that we realize the powerful separation of mind from body, of mental identity
from physical reality, and how language is innately frustrating to the human
phenomena. However, in the recognition of the corporeal self there is immedi-
ate curiosity with the image that one sees before itself. How does this inaccurate
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 representation of the consciousness work, and how can we manipulate or expe-
rience it?

In order to experience our own identity we must enter some kind of discourse
within ourselves, and this moment (the same one that moves us from the sym-
bolic symbiotic relationship of the mother figure to the child figure) is also the
creation of what we understand to be true human cognition. We question, for
the first time, our own existence and in what context we exist. By the simple
act of asking a question we have unconsciously entered the overall human dis-
course, and positioned ourselves within a structure of terminology, of labeling
and branding. We are taught from a very young age that each thing in the world
has a name, a specific and “correct” way in which it should be addressed, and
for one to waiver from that standard is to exist outside the boundaries of society,
and ultimately to be un-human.

Foucault, who became especially interested in the study of human sexuality as

it related to our evolutionary development as a culture, addressed the issue of
the Victorian “regime” and its long term affects on how modern-day members
of English-speaking societies speak about their bodies in both public and pri-
vate domains. In ”The History of Sexuality” which he wrote shortly after the
commencement of the sexual revolution in the United States, he mentions the
haunting effects of European bourgeois society during the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries. During that particular time period, a paradigm shift
occurred in which the acceptable forums to speak about the body, sexual acts,
and miscellaneous bestial natures changed dramatically. In fact, since the great
Enlightenment, discussion of the body and sexual behavior had steadily moved
further and further into the public domain until the ascendance of Queen Victo-
ria I to the throne of England. Although the Queen herself had very little to do
with the censorship of sexual acts and the discussion thereof, a powerful restric-
tion was placed upon the people that any words relating to such subject matter
were prohibited in the public domain and were not to be uttered.

It is at this point that Foucault believes the English-speaking culture was set back
centuries in its development. As soon as their freedom to continue the discourse
of sex and instinctive human behavior was hindered it began a self-imposed
cycle of repression and secrecy, which transformed the public realm into a place
of constant criticism and insular behavior.

“A control over enunciations as well: where and when it was not possible to talk about such
things became much more strictly defined; in which circumstances, among which speakers, and
within which social relationships. Areas were thus established, if not of utter silence, at least of
tact and discretion: between parents and children, for instance, or teachers and pupils, or masters
and domestic servants. This almost certainly constituted a whole restrictive economy, one that
was incorporated into that politics of language and speech—spontaneous on the one hand, con-
certed on the other—which accompanied the social redistributions of the period”(Foucault 18).

And so, the private realm became an uncomfortable environment for the individ-
ual, in which boundaries of man and woman were blurred between the personal
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desires of the parties involved and the implied gender roles that society enforced.
It is important to point out that Foucault believes that society enforced these
values unconsciously, through a contract of convention. In other words, when
the society’s ability to openly talk about their corporeal forms and their physi-
cal interactions was forced beneath the surface of the vernacular and labeled as
inappropriate it dehumanized that society, making it more difficult for the indi-
vidual to establish his or herself as an actualized person. At the same time, this
phenomenon made it easy for those individuals to slip into a mass programmed
model of the automated citizen.

April Greiman’s piece relates strongly to this concept of ethical and natural
expression of the body, and how human beings experience and documents itself
and it properties. To better illustrate this connection, let us analyze the visual
signifiers:

To begin, Greiman is nude in the image, which removes preconceived notions of

her class, her status, and her culture. This creates a more universal platform for
her message. But, simultaneoulsy, her nudity automatically genders how her text
is read, and it sets up the circumstances for the traditional privileged and patri-
archal gaze. However, Greiman appears with eyes closed, negating the viewer’s
presence, communicating the experience of an internalized space. The added
separation and distance from the viewer to the naked body through Greiman’s
layering and overlapping mixtures of image resolution seems also to deny a
familiar and immedate connotation to the female body. This disrupts our natural
tendencies to focus on the physicality of the body and pushes us toward ideas of
the psychic (or spiritual) body.

In terms of of iconography, Greiman uses powerful, cross-cultural symbols in her

design, such as a large spiral that is nested in her hair and to the right of her face.
While it has been stylized, this symbol would suggest a reference to the shape
of our own galaxy. It is a form that can be both casually and empirically ob-
served throughout all of nature, connoting larger ideas of the vast networking of
space and time in which human experience resides. The spiral also symbolizes a
constant flux of movement, both inward and outward. She has placed it next to
her head, perhaps signifying the oscillation of the Self that pervades human con-
sciousness; the dualism of being aware of ourselves, and yet never truly knowing
our surroundings (because we cannot possibly exist outside our own conscious-
ness).

In terms of expressing a method or a mode of thinking, the spiral/galaxy is con-

nected by a thin elliptical line to other pertinent symbols that seem to speak
about cycles. The ellipse grazes Greiman’s nipple (a possible tongue-in-cheek
inclusion), and then passes through pictograms of the moon, both in waxing and
waning phases, as it rounds its way back towards her head. These three items are
strong signifiers of femininity, not only the sexual connotation of the nipple, but
also its reproductive ability to produce milk/sustenance. The pictograms of the
moon then symbolize the stages of the menstrual cycle and subsequent themes
of creation, destruction, and renewal. Other images that correlate to gender
specific issues are the zodiac symbols for Venus and Saturn, which run along the 3
pseudo-timeline that occupies the bottom of the composition. These two are his-
 toricallly opposite in nature, the first referencing fertility and procreation, while
the second references rigidity, discipline, masculinity, and destruction. This
relationship is also cyclical in the fact that if one were to read the progression
of symbols similar to a written text, from the left of the poster to the right, one
would begin in creation and end in termination.

Greiman also makes bold statements about the hierarchy of the culture, or in a
more specific context the existing system of patriarchal “knowing”, by placing
the image of the aroused man with his bird staff directly over her, and the image
of the sauropod curling inward as if to gesture penetration of her genitals. Both
of these examples, along with several other images used in the composition use
the literal spatial relationship of stacking layers of images/information on top of
one another to talk about the priority of gender in our culture and how we, as
products of such a culture, are scripted to read these signs. This poster’s role in
the “birth” of Postmodernism is perhaps best seen through this relationship and
its subsequent examination. As the presence of so many of these connections are
compiled into a singular, compressed plane of information it illustrates the con-
cept of the omnipresent and increasingly complex structural meanings of objects
that we encounter and interact with in the daily world.

A critical aspect of this piece, that I have not yet mentioned, is that its concep-
tual and practical development was prototypical. Greiman’s process entailed
working closely with early developers of the Adobe Photoshop program, which
pioneered and advocated working within a system of visual layers. Before this
process became practical (let alone possible), design was a careful craft of the
arrangement of objects in space; a segregation and specialization of visual ele-
ments and typographical information. Modernity as an era came to a close when
its younger practitioners began to realize that modularity is inherently devoid
of singular formation, “truth”. The concept of a structure, or a graphic identity
being broken down into equal parts and recombined to form variable solutions
is a contradiction of theoretical movement, both talking about terms that Lacan
prized over and over again when defining the Ideal “I”, the concept of the uni-
versal and the particular. For example, one cannot deny that a cube is made of
six sides, and that all six sides being equivalent are interchangeable. However,
one then cannot deny as well the fact that each possible combination of those six
equivalent sides in turn produces a particular outcome that is then equivocally
not interchangeable with any other outcome. It is in this manner that Greiman is
able to use her own image, a self-portrait, and symbols of her own choosing that
most likely signify very personal meaning to her as a human being, a woman, a
designer, etc. and still reach a broad audience effectively and intrinsically. The
atom, for example, that is positioned on the left side of her abdomen may have
personal significance to her that an outside viewer would never be certain to
know. However, its layers of meaning as they pertain to science of the body; the
fact that all objects and organisms that we can experience in reality are com-
prised of atoms, reaches beyond the definition of its physical appearance and its
intended meaning to communicate ideas about the relative similarity between
those organisms, and perhaps the lack of reasoning in the arduous specification
of ethnicity and sexuality in our culture.
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These layers of language and meaning can be successfully manipulated and per-
sonalized, and the expression of the personal narrative can be achieved through
a universal visual vocabulary. But, only when one understands the pluralistic
nature of symbols. One must first be conscious of the interplay of these sym-
bols to know how they co notate many specific meanings, but innately trigger a
root meaning, or a ritualistic response image as Joseph Campbell would say. It
is through this method that Postmodernism began to define itself continuously
on the extension outwards of context and the impossible quest of mapping the
connections of that object to its sign, rather than the Modernist quest of isolat-
ing the transient “form”, the so-called categorical imperative of that object. The
innate suitability of graphic design to this effort to map sign to signified has, for
many artists and designers, served as a vessel for the deconstruction of contem-
porary discourses. The movement of information in graphic design is through a
rhyzomic process-a dissemination of materials, and the use of a system, a grid; a
mathematical formula that is calculated by the eye and occasionally by isomor-
phic references or suggested invitations to the viewer. But, it is within the past
decade that the explosion of computer aided designs, which are very much the
descendents of Greiman’s quintessential piece, have lost track of investigating the
medium’s potential to depict the message of the universal within the particular,
and instead sacrificed it for the pursuit of aestheticisim.

Because technology has influenced the way in which we design, it has influ-
enced what our designs must exceed, if in fact, they are to remain solely an
expression of the human experience that philosophers like Lacan and Foucault
dedicated much of their lives to investigating. Greiman’s own ethic towards
design—that its process and its meaning are foremost determined by its context
and an investigation of its medium—overrides the sacred image of the end prod-
uct. However, the hegemony of contemporary design, especially that of graphic
design (even in its most earnest effort), is now most often compromised by a sub-
servience to consumerist culture and the pocketbooks of large corportations and
monopolized funding.

The mediocre design of today is the end result of a filtration process by minds
and decision-makers that do not instinctively comprehend design or its process.
And in turn, they foil many new and innovative ideas, experimental mediums
and formats, and most devastatingly the true intentions of the Designer. This
factor of forced removal from true creativity and free expression for the Designer
is the cause of the current visual rupture that those of Western society are expe-
riencing today. The large proportion of surface-value and ambivalently-minded
communication that overruns the media (and essentially our discursive lives) is
a constrictive and self-negating force on the progress of any evolving aesthetic
philosophy in Design. As Ann Jefferson has once written: “Looking (at yourself)
while you leap is a highly dangerous thing to do, and on the figurative plain the
effects of such self-regarding attitudes can be just as devastating, because they
empty acts of their substance and purpose, and action is, significantly, turned
into play or gesture”(Brottman 10). What Jefferson alludes to in this statement
that is so pertinent to design is that creative works produced under restrictions of 5
 a capitalistic society are by nature an authorless expression, and only tangential
in relation to the original spirit of those works. The symptoms of these implica-
tions can already be seen in today’s visual culture, and we must accept the new
rift between practioners of Design and practioners of design, between the pure
study and documentation of visual realtionships and the mass production of at-
tractive marketing materials.

Applying this strain of thought to the analysis of “Does It Make Sense?” in the
overall perspective of Design, I believe that Greiman’s piece was an epitome.
It fuses exemplary traits of Design, unafflicted by social agenda or supply and
demand, through the highly accessible format of a magazine. It is an artifact of
Postmodernity for the fact that it pushed boundaries of visual achievement and at
the same time remained internally human and organic in the way that its content
was delivered. The specific arrangement of the composition and its suggested
meaning hints towards a spiritual knowledge map, expressing the constant du-
alism of our existence. And yet, it is not a concrete and definitive statement of
graphic design, nor should it go forward continuing to be labeled as such within
a canon that relies on models of past experimentation in order to provide itself
with grounds for future endeavors. The simplicity of its execution should be
admired and acknowledged, but its more empowering and underlying theme is
truly a common thread, running through the course of every human experience.

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 Bibliography

Brottman, Mikita. High Theory/Low Culture. New York : Palgrave Macmillian,

2005.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction.

New York : Random House, 1978.

Kleiner, Fred S., Mamiya, Christin J., Tansey, Richard G. Gardern’s Art Through
The Ages: Eleventh Edition. Forth Worth : Harcourt College Publishers,
2001.

Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism:
Second Edition. Essex : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, An Introduction: Third Edition.
Essex : Pearson Education Limited, 2001.