Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1986 - 20

designer focus this issue for us. Victor Papanek, in his book

Design for the Real World, states:
In an age of mass production when everything must be
planned and designed, design has become the most powerful
tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and,
by extension, society and himself). This demands high social
and moral responsibility from the designer. It also demands
greater understanding of the people by those who practice
design and more insight into the design process by the public.'
Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New observes:
People believe what they
see in photos, on the movie
screen, or perhaps the TV
set, but few would even
claim to extract the moral
and factual information for
the conduct of their lives
from looking at works of
art. Art is a small thing,
though an expensive one,
compared to the media. It is
a vibration in a museum; it
deals with nuances that have
no objective importance. It
is not even a good religion.
But once it gives up its claims
to seriousness it is shot, and
its essential role as an arena
for free thought and unregimented feeling is lost. The pop sensibility did much to take
these claims away, dissolving them in the doctrine that the
medium was the message. All that slogan came down to was
the idea that it no longer mattered what art said. Manifestly
this was not enough: the human animal is an animal who
judges, and even in a culture split as disastrously and in so
many ways as ours the problems of choice, taste, and moral
responsibility for images still remain. In fact, they get harder.'

Any dissatisfaction that I'm talking about, anything I'm
complaining about, is inside the theatre. The trouble lies not
with the audience but with how we are doing it. We're not
doing it well.
I know that design can help change the theatre, can help
change its direction. But all I can do right now is voice my
frustration and say that it's no good. From now on I refuse
to work in the theatre as it is, unless to change its direction.
I don't mean that tomorrow every theatre has to be popular
or [ won't work in it; I mean that its direction must change
to have reference to me in our time. There are things happening in our time that ought to have something to do with
the theatre and the theatre
with them. Tomorrow we'll
be on the moon; we can't do
Moliere on the moon.'

HERE

TENSION IN OUR

This emerging view 0
the ethical responsibility 0
design is not, however, a re
turn to the fuzzy, mystica
theories of an arcadian uto
pia of "Pure Theatre." Tht
romantic - primitive ideas 0
the "Theatre As Salvation'
and the "Temple Of Tht
Arts" do not apply here
The designer fulfilling hi:
ethical responsibility wil
not redeem a single soul. I
is not a religion. It is, however, a new awareness. Sear
Kenny again spells this out:

PROFESSION-A

TENSION BETWEEN

WHAT IS DONE AND

And Ming Cho Lee in an interview with Theatre Crafts magazine asserts:
There is something very important about the arts-or in the
semi-arts like theatre design. Theatre is unique in that it
really deals with living and life. Not too many professional
endeavors really do that. It's custom-made. Not assembly
line. There are very few jobs that demand your whole life
experience-how you live, how you feel. The end product
has to be esthetics and quality. Moral issues can never disappear from our work [emphasis mine]."
The technology that lies at the base of the scenographic
theory, the elevation of the designer's role to a place of coequal creative status, the pre-eminence of event over text:
all means that the designer is brought face to face with the
ethical responsibility of his work. Designers know that their
work and the theatre can and should directly and powerfully
influence and affect what people think and what they do.
Most often, however, designers perceive their work and the
theatre as having no impact. Sean Kenny, in his essay "The
Building Or The Theatre," articulates this dilemma in impassioned terms:
Lorca said the theatre must impose itself on the audience.
It has to; the reason we're doing it in the first place is for an
audience: not for ourselves. We do it initially to make a life
for ourselves and eventually for an audience.
18

Thealre Design oS: Teehnolog)

USITT Spring 1986

IT IS DON E.

This theatre, like a baseball bar, would hit you over rhe head
with ideas. It would offer new breakaways, show new breakthroughs, suggest how there can be more to life. It would
show us how to be more individual-not beller, not good,
but more individual; it would tell us how to release the emotions half-hidden within ourselves. It would be a place for
man: for each and everyone of us.'

The emergence of the scenographic theory, coinciding a
it does with the development and availability of the sophis
ticated technology of our time, and the intense dissatisfac
tion on the part of designers with the status quo, points to <
change in the form of the theatre. One could almost call i
a revolution. Would that it could be. But an honest viev
has to conclude that the millenium is not contained in thi
change. Yet, an equally honest view would have to concludl
that this change will not dissipate. The forces at work in thi
change are too powerful, too universal, and too well com
municated. The question of design ethics is before us.
What is the ethical responsibility of the designer? Th,
outline of the answer is just beginning to emerge. And it ha
emerged, as might be expected, not in the theatre but in thl
field of art and art criticism. Harold Rosenberg, in his bool
Art On The Edge, formulated seven propositions that he fel
were necessary for the creation of art in the present day ant
its critical appraisal. While Rosenberg's concern is with thl
problems of the studio artist, his comments apply equally t<
the problems of theatrical design and need to be examined a
some length.

Proposition 1: That creation of art in the twentieth century
is an activity within the politico -cultural drama of a world
in the process of remaking itself.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1986