Iso Type of Thing

A trailer for the new film on the US' public education system, Waiting for Superman, from Buck. Note the interplay of narration, type, image, motion. The language's info–graphic heritage in Otto Neurath's Isotype, imaged by Gerd Arntz.

Embedded Messages

An excellent trip last week, to the Pitt Rivers Museum and theOxford University Museum of Natural History. Neighbouring but entirely separate entities, with contrasting taxonomies. Apparently, originally, there was an intent to demonstrate a social Darwinism in the Pitt Rivers, by juxtaposing objects of common function from 'primitive' and 'advanced' cultures. The net effect is opposite, with beautiful examples of the symbiosis of available materials and requisite making. I always return to the cabinets containing object–systems for writing and counting.

These West African Oroko and other symbolic systems, communicate personal insults, calls to battle, requests for foodstuffs, news of death, bids for friendship. The number and orientation of cowrie shells denotes an array of meanings, as described here. The intrinsic character of a cowrie is human and therefore connotes a human situation. Where they face away from one another they really are facing away. Elsewhere, knotted string gives the intuitive property of distance and space to travel.

I reflected afterwards (in the light of messages and matter) on another trip, back in September and in Berlin. The Museum of Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind is the original site, where around thirty blind and deaf Jews were employed—and therefore shielded from internment—by Weidt to make brushes and brooms in the early 1940s. Under constant threat, they hid within concealed spaces in the workshop and Weidt obtained false identities (as above, for Marianne Bernstein) and bribed Gestapo officials; any means to stave off the inevitable.

The museum has humility, weighted only by the original nature of the spaces and the stories of individuals who, in the majority were killed and the exceptions who survived. This is the recto and verso of a postcard, thrown from an Auschwitz–bound transportation train by Alice Licht and addressed to Otto Weidt in the remote hope of it finding him, which it did. Somebody picked it up and sent it on.

Alice parents were killed in Auschwitz. She was later transported to Groß–Rosen. Weidt managed to make contact and organised a safe hiding place in Berlin, to which she fled during an evacuation in 1945. She emerged few weeks later, surviving the war and then emigrating to the US. She died in 1987.

This poem, Zurück–Glück (Return–Happiness), written after her escape in April 1945.

Beyond the stories, the walls within the hidden spaces.

Walter Benjamin: "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger".

A certain resonance in straightforward effects and documentation, telling a human tale. Perhaps the gap to think. The frankness of a factual item. Christian Boltanski has referenced and used as a raw material, the emotional impact of piles of clothes belonging to those deported, discovered in the Nazis' storage warehouses. The specificity of belongings, indicating an individual's life, over the anonymity of a naked body. This piece, Inventaire des Objets Ayant Appartenu a une Femme de Bois-Colombes (1974), from a series of five (I think) bookworks which fully documented the belongings of a woman living in a suburb of Paris.

At no stage do we see an image, a likeness of the woman. Only her taste in books. Which tells a greater truth?

Back to the Pitt Rivers and some more from the Writing & Counting cabinet.

This beautiful correlation of one available material with the form to which it refers and encodes, a reindeer herder's register of his herd's ear notches, cut into birch bark.

Nearby, a cabinet displaying scrimshaw and other notchmaking, markmaking in bone. An object behaving as a page.

Visions of cities– the multisensory city

Umberto Boccioni's (1911) 'Futurist' painting, The Noise of the Street Penetrates the House attempts to reproduce the multisensory experience of the modern city, with its noise and endless movement, within the frame of a two-dimensional work, with a fracturing of the traditional Renaissance fixed-point perspective. (The way in which this is also a painting about 'a view' somehow reinforces the point that perspectival representation is inadequate for conveying this multisensory experience).

Literature is a medium well capable of conveying this multisensory experience of the city.

See how Charles Dickens achieves this in this excerpt from Great Expectations (first published 1860-1), Pp 163-4, describing Pip's experience of the City of London:

'When I told the clerk that I would tke a turn in the air while I waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into Smithfield. So, I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul's bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison. Following the wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with straw to deaden the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of people standing about, smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred that the trials were on.'

An earlier example, from the Romantic era, is to be found in William Blake's poem 'London' (Songs of innocence and of experience, 1794), which, as in Dickens, includes appeals to the ear and touch as well as the eye, along with an embodied feeling of walking in the City.

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness,
marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues
the marriage-hearse.

Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010

The truly great Louise Bourgeois has died, aged 98.

The Great And Powerful's Letterhead

This is MGM's letterhead from 1939, promoting what is amongoneofmanyofour favourite films, The Wizard of Oz (via A Rook's Foundry). Very nice and odd hand rendered, nib-pen type, something we discussed in pre-term-end Macmillan Children's Book sessions.

An echo of Peter Blegvad's renderings for the English language imprint of Tove Jansson's 1952 The Book About Moomin, Mymble And Little My (via), translated by Sophie Hannah in 2001. Some control of the colour, inflection and pictorial within the type so it doesn't tread on the toes of the imagery.

Fact & Fiction Too

Camberwell Illustration's Second Year exhibit this week, in the second 'Fact & Fiction' show of work made in response to the projects discussed on this blog. The poster here designed and hand-silkscreened by Liam Cobb and James Cartwright.

Type setting and hand lettering

Here's a look at one of Alfred Wainwright's pictorial walking guides. These spreads are from The Outlying Fells of Lakeland. What's amazing about these guides are that they are entirely hand rendered, yet at the same time they look like they have been carefully typeset. Fully justified columns of prose, careful consideration of caption text size, title text size and body text size, use of all caps, italics and indentation are all used to carefully create hierarchies of information in the book. At the same time seamlessly tying together treatment of the text and the images.

Here's another example of familiar forms of typesetting. Again hand rendered but imitating typesetting conventions so that we know that this is a letter as soon as you look at it.

The conventional layout of a letter is so recognisable we don't even need the words to identify it.

THE AUTHOR-DESIGNER AND THE READER-USER (3)

What was underlying the previous two posts was a discussion on the relationship that the reader-user has with the work. The point I think I was trying to get at was that the spectator is always an active participant in the work. Whether they play a physically active role in its creation, say changing something in it, finishing it off etc., or just a mentally active role, by bringing it into existance through their interpretation of it, they are never the less active in both instances.

THE AUTHOR-DESIGNER AND THE READER-USER (2)

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone. The spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

Taken from a recording of Marcel Duchamp made in 1957 titled 'The Creative Act'

The spectators interpretation of the work is both enabled but also clouded by cultural references built up over their lifetime. That's why, with its dominance in the international bank of references, this is recognised as being a sign for Coca-cola

and in London this is recognised as being a sign for Costcutter. So while it's true and important that we all interpret things differently we also all interpret things very similarly.

The Author-Designer and the Reader-User

Umberto Eco:
“In a narrative text, the reader is forced to make choices all the time...the model reader of a story is not the empirical reader. The empirical reader is you, me, anyone when we read a text. Empirical readers can read in many ways, and there is no law that tells them how to read, because they often use the text as a container for their own passions, which may come from outside the text or which the text may arouse by chance...If you have ever happened to watch a comedy at a time of deep sadness, you will know that a funny movie is very difficult to enjoy at such a moment...if you happen to see the film again years later, you might not still be able to laugh.”



“Any narrative fiction is necessarily and fatally swift because, in building a world that comprises myriad events and characters, it cannot say everything about this world. It hints at and then asks the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps. Every text, after all, is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work.”

THE THING QUARTERLY

We've just made a pack of double fronted playing cards in collaboration with the artist Ryan Gander. They were published by a quarterly periodical based in San Francisco called The Thing. The reason I mention it is because as a publication The Thing is quite unusual. In the words of their website: "The Thing Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create a useful object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers"

This is Issue 6, by Allora & Calzadilla. It consistes of a blank book, entitled "Problems and Promises", which is attached to a tennis shoe. One of the tennis shoe laces is sewn into the spine of the book.

WHY PUBLISH?

From the book burnings of China's 3rd century BC Qin Dynasty to the recent censorship of google.cn the control of published information has been a preoccupation for those in power across the world.

Book burnings in Berlin, 10 May 1933.

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1873, an institution supposedly dedicated to supervising the morality of the public.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Complete Broadcast

Here's the whole radio drama by Orson Welles, broadcast in New York on 30 October 1938. The radio play was an adaptation of the 1898 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells and part of a series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

The headline on The New York Times the next day indicates the effect the broadcast had. The way Welles plays on the format of radio and in doing so demands that listeners question what they hear on the radio in future is an approach that could be taken to any medium.

Inside Nobrow

Sam Arthur and Alex Spiro will be coming in this Wednesday to talk about Nobrow, their young-but-already-influential independent publishing venture. Their print ethic makes this a platform both for the craft itself and for emergent voices.



These two films (via Creative Review) give a good idea of their set-up and process. Thanks to our own Natalie Kay-Thatcher for the link to this. And special mention to Clark Keatley, who graduated last year with some amazing printmaking , now spending a portion of his time with Nobrow.

Some Publications #1

A glimpse of some publications available via Stand Up Comedy, based in Portland, Oregon. All quotes from the site.



"Veneer (or, alternately, Ve) is cultural critique via gesture, phenomena, documentation, and detritus. It's also the arithmetic of print and its possibilities, with an emphasis on technical minutia stretched to the edge of absurdity as its epistemological approach."







"The Kingsboro Press is operating out of New York and is edited by Megan Plunkett and Daniel Wagner. It's without imprimatur, that is to say, it's without judgement."



And so it has curiously judged. It's raw art and lit, and it changes formats each time. It is winding through a certain underground path."



"Sasa Annual Report 2007. The Korea-based conceptual artist compiles annual reports of his activities, purchases, and general living. An on-going archival project that takes a different form in each volume."



"This year's report is interpreted in a series of bar graphs. Strange how analytical information takes on an abstract quality. Folded poster in dust sleeve".