86—87
Armando Busquets Carballo & María Mercedes Salgado × tutor’s text × posters
The production of posters offers the designer one of the most developed platforms for creative liberty, both for the intellectual complexity that their conceptualization processes demand, and the generalized condition of being a cultural product, freed from its original functions in the market and commercial publicity. However, except for some isolated experiences, the conceptualization and production of posters is not present in the set of processes and learning in the subjects that articulate the curricular design of the careers that the country offers to form professional graphic designers. The current state of publicity in contemporary capitalism makes the poster – as a tool for persuasive publicity – something displaced by the efficacy of more direct and encompassing media, like radio, television, the Internet or more recent information and communication technologies. There are reasons to believe that the vigorous demand in the design market of products for new platforms, just like the design which contributes with marketing and general embellishment of products of mass consumption, determine the orientation and the curricular profile of today’s design and visual communications careers, directed towards forming professionals capable of satisfying those demands, and not others. Unfortunately, the teaching and learning processes regarding poster production have disappeared from the classrooms and workshops of Ecuador’s universities.
Even though the poster had its origins in the advertising demand generated by the most developed economies during the second half of the 19th century, the commercial imprint that marks its birth – always at the service of the urgent consumption of merchandise and goods for use – today derives its channel towards the field of cultural production. In the set of typologies that constitute the fields of graphic design’s professional development these days, the poster becomes a fundamental anchor by supporting derived products of cultural and social activism; these satisfy the diffusion demands of certain elites’ cultural agendas, often related with the production of theater festivals, jazz music or artistic exhibitions. However, this only occurs in developed countries where the financing of culture is possible. Some may think that, given the new production and circulation conditions for the poster – now as a tool that serves the mobilization and circulation of cultural messages – the construction of its value is settled less on the sphere of its informative or advertising functions, and more on the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of its visual and conceptual proposal. For a poster, the condition of the artistic is today one of the most important attributes for legitimation as a product of visual communication, so much that if we had to profile some sort of genealogy of the contemporary poster, this would be aesthetic; maybe that is why, and not on very few occasions, the art museum walls