Excerpt: Pixelated Glories The Graphic Excursions of Kathy T. Hettinga 0 comments

Karen L. Mulder's full essay can be found in Image issue 66.

Design is ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestation is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizons. The democracy of digital invention compounds this bombardment, glorifying the most amateurish efforts: now, everyone designs (Monstertemplates.com); everyone publishes (iUniverse); everyone exhibits photographs (Flickr). In sum, everyone assumes greater aesthetic competency by appropriating the boilerplates of anonymous designers, who remain as nameless as Romanesque stonemasons. Even scrapbooking demands its due, valorized by its sincerity as a vernacular art form, accesible to anyone with scissors and a fresh gluestick.

This glut prevents us from really seeing much of the design that crosses our visual cortex; we can’t possibly take it all in. The sheer overload forces us to do some censoring. In such a context, how do specialists in the graphic arts generate impact, confronted, as they are, by double dilemma of democratic, non-juried design, and the nonstop drubbing of visual stimuli? What distinguishes the labors of the professional?.

Kathy Hettinga’s works tend to defy simple categorization, cycling among mass-produced print design, digital mediations of the photograph, and the relatively new terrain of artists’ books. She has been called a graphic artist, printmaker, digital designer, photographer, and, somewhat waywardly, an installation artist. Not even her own description of her calling, as a love affair with pixels, quite captures it fully. Her achievements as artist, educator, and graphic designer bridge a period of art history characterized most by its revisions of traditional forms, spanning the era that philosopher Arthur Danto called “the end of art” and that others consider the beginning of “Altermodernity”—a term coined in 2005 by Tate curator Nicolas Bourriaud as a rubric for the latest moment in art, which defines art-making as a relational process rather than an object-oriented activity with fixed ends.

Hettinga’s career began in 1979 at the Greeley Tribune in Colorado, near her birthplace, at a time when compositing equipment amounted to hot wax, razors, steel pica rulers, and endless nimbuses of cigarette smoke. Dissatisfied with the job’s limitations, after undergraduate studies in art at Calvin College, she completed a master’s degree in printmaking and photography at Colorado State University in 1985, and immediately accepted a teaching post at Indiana-Purdue University. After expanding the graphic design curriculum at Indiana-Purdue and receiving several impressive accolades, she found herself at an awkward junction between professional goals and confessional faith. At this time, the chasm separating religious expression from mainstream art yawned to a cavernous extent; transgressing it amounted to a dangerous gamble. People virtually perished in the gap. So, when a small, inter-denominational liberal arts college unknown to Hettinga called her “out of the blue” to develop the first specialized graphic design program at a Christian institution, she was impressed, but wary. Her colleagues sternly admonished that any flirtation with the Christian scene would effectively bar her from future jobs in the mainstream. Conscience dictated a different response.

To read the rest of the essay, please purchase the issue here.