Designing Pornotopia, a lecture by Rick Poynor

at Arnolfini Bristol, Tuesday 31 October 2006

The lecture theatre is humming. I bump into colleagues and students; representatives from the region’s Art Schools. It’s a good feeling, this opportunity to discuss commercial art practice in the light of a Critical System.

Poynor has written a new book called Pornotopia that reflects on ‘the realm of pornography’ and its unfolding relations with Graphic Design. It is suggested that designers are taking ‘the new porn landscape’ for granted. They are using images of the body that once belonged to ‘a purely sexual realm’ in an uncritical manner. Poynor refers to their ‘frothy’ representations of sex as ones which are suggestive of a light, superficial touch. These designers are creating a world, he argues, ‘where nothing else happens – just glamour’.

The word pornotopia has been carefully chosen to offer an overview of this contemporary world of pornographic images. Apparently, the term was first used by Stephen Marcus in a book called The Other Victorians to describe how pornography attempts to establish its own distinct universe. The narrative structure is predominantly self-referential, with the image-makers constructing ‘a world where nothing but sex happens’. The suggestion Poynor is making is one that involves social responsibility: ‘It’s now everywhere and no-one’s even asking: is it having an effect?’

Poynor runs through a wide range of examples from the Graphic Design of E-Boy to the recent series of art-pornography films entitled DeStricted. His main aim is to highlight the fact that pornographic imagery is not merely ubiquitous but also given a questionable set of cultural values in the process: 'fun', 'stylish' and, ultimately, the epitome of the new 'sensory domain' of design. He also talks about cosmetic surgery as an aspect of this superficial, ‘frothy’ visual culture, arguing that it acts as: ‘a sign of this new sexual culture ... porn expressions are being normalized in daily experience’.

I think it is useful for Poynor to highlight the unproblematic presentation of pornography within visual culture. However, he seems very short on answers (or even suggestions) about what kind of responses could be made here. He recommends Andrea Dworkin as an example of feminist writing that might assist in questioning the ubiquity of porn and its potential effects (but she’s been heavily criticised for her monolithic view of women as victim, already). Unfortunately this seems like a weak critique, whereby he cites her experience of incurring ‘psychic damage’ as a result of studying pornographic imagery. The point being, it would seem, women aren’t comfortable with this development (and neither is he). In spite of our general misgivings, though, he simply states: ‘I don’t have any answers for this’.

It’s all very well to identify a phenomena and to ask questions of pornotopia, but it’s unlikely the pervasiveness of pornography throughout visual culture has not gone unnoticed. That's the thing about ubiquitous phenomena: they're already everywhere. How could I not see it?

As chief critic within the field of Graphic Design, Rick Poynor always provides the opportunity for discussion in a discipline that often characterizes itself as un- or anti- intellectual. However, his survey approach to images of the nude and bodies-in-flagrante fails to embrace the kind of established critical languages that might allow us to begin the task of analysing the materials on show. He invokes the terms 'porn', 'image' and 'fantasy', however, they are utilised in isolation from other kinds of words that might offer a way into this self-referential world of the pornotopic. An additional vocabulary in this context might include:

Gender: these pornographic images are predominantly occupied by female bodies, either alone, or in relation to bodies of male action. Poynor says of the designers: ‘It looks to me they’re just displaying them as trophies’. These human forms may be stripped bare but their spatial positions and subjective preoccupations are full of recognisable social characteristics: othrewise known as masculine and feminine attributes. One needs to ask: whose trophies? For whose pleasure? (And not assume that the answer is always already 'Men!')

The gaze: this useful tool of Feminism can help in identifying a point-of-view or preferred viewing subject who is established (and served) by the image-making process. The gaze is difficult to discuss without speaking about gender relations and viewing positions and, I would argue, seems integral to Poynor’s observation that: ‘This imagery seems to represent sex from a laddish view’.

Social Relations: a concept that underpins a Marxist approach to culture and one that usefully explores the interconnections between people and objects. The pornotopian images are full of exchanges and extended relationships: from commodity-based transactions (such as the buying or circulation of visual publications) and the exchange of looks between viewer and viewed, to the interdisciplinary connections sex, social life and aesthetics.

Beauty: Poynor’s main point seems to be about the production of self-contained worlds that offer the allure of a perfect surface. Dave Hickey (as mentioned elsewhere in this blog) talks about Beauty – of the image, for instance - as a contemporary concern within the arts. It is a problem, he argues, not because of the seductive surface that gives us so much pleasure. Rather, it is the way it invites us into things and puts us in viewing positions that may go against our ‘better judgement’. The old body/mind dichotomy again.


After hearing the lecture Designing Pornotopia, I felt persuaded that the real crisis lies elsewhere: in the realms of design criticism itself. Semiotics, for example, seems an inappropriate methodology to fully explore surfaces and their ‘affects’. Yet this is one area of theoretical discourse that design critics seem to embrace (see David Crow Visible Signs). Semiotics is a form of analysis that appears overly preoccupied, as does Poynor, with meaning and signification: the effects of language. Clearly we need a way of discussing 'pornotopia' that allows us to examine the pleasures of viewing alongside the impact on existing (and changing) notions of femininity, for instance. (Poynor himself cites Ariel Levy's book Female Chauvenist Pigs, by the way).

In ‘Autonomy of Affect’, Brain Massumi offers a starting point for a design criticism that would like to take viewing experiences seriously, asserting an ontological model that allows us to discuss the body-of-the-viewer as much as that of the imaged nude. He argues: ‘it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in a straight-forward way’ (p.218). Furthermore, ‘affect is their point of emergence in their actual specificity’ (p.226).

Poynor says: ‘A rather strange view of sexuality emerges here’. I would agree. However the strangest view is his, as his critical methodologies seems to share the same problems as pornotopia itself; both are sealed off from the world of action. There are ways of looking at this graphic landscape that would encourage more than a quickie glance and re-presenting voyeuristic events of the eye. I would suggest there are many words that make you think and have the potential to give answers to this. Unfortunately, pornotopia is not one of them.