From visual to textual : typography in/as conceptual art

1995

Art History, 1997

October, 2011

The graphic designer and artist Edward Wright literally shaped many of the words that were decisive for architectural culture in mid-1950s Britain, yet he himself has remained largely in the shadows. Wright designed a number of remarkable alphabets during these years, schemes for public lettering developed in close collaboration with architects, such as the letters for Alison and Peter Smithson's House of the Future in 1956 and the ambitious design of murals, letters, and icons for the 1961 Union Internationale des Architectes congress, realized with the architect and editor Theo Crosby. Wright's interest in the shaping of letters went in a direction different from the established rubric of "lettering," a discourse strongly marked by a revival of nineteenth-century British vernacular traditions following World War II. 1 Wright saw the letter in a broader field; looking to understand changes in the form and technique of writing was part of a larger attempt to comprehend changes in the means of communication operating within the postwar metropolis. Wright came to typography and graphic design by way of architecture and art; in addition to alphabets, printed ephemera, posters, and books, he produced drawings, collages, and paintings, as well as exhibitions and large-scale murals. Wright was part of the circle of architects and artists who would define New Brutalism, a group that included not only Crosby and the Smithsons, but also Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, with whom Wright taught at London's Central School of Art. Like these five, Wright sought to recover the legacy of continental avant-gardes, his own interests ranging from Constructivist architecture and Soviet cinema to Dada and the work of the Dutch artist and printer H. N. Werkman. As a teacher (first at the Central * I would like to extend thanks to Hal Foster and Alex Kitnick for their comments on previous drafts of this article, as well as to Ann Pillar for her assistance during my visit to the Edward Wright collection at the University of Reading. 1. Typographical historian Nicolete Gray began in the early 1950s to contribute regularly articles on lettering to the Architectural Review.

2019

Kate Briggs A bit, a piece, a thing, a twin 23 Esther Draycott 1979, Women's style in four objects 29 Calum Sutherland Departure of Biography (for Lei Yamabe) 35 Daisy Lafarge Cliché is the sediment of sentiment that collects in my ear 38 Kiah Endelman Music She had found her world in touch and found it (so) uncomfortable 45 Imogen Harland Homepage: Design and Desire 53 Alison Scott A stain, a sting 59 Susannah Thompson After (After)

2006

An artist-as-artist has always nothing to say, and he must say this over and over again. Je vais essayer de parler peinture, non en homme de lettres, mais en peintre. (I am going to try to talk about painting, not as a literary man, but as a painter.) (Paul Gauguin, 1902 2 )

American Book Review, 2011

October, 2000

After a number of years of observing the resurgent interest in Conceptual art in Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia and Latin America, I was motivated to produce a project that would raise some questions about its return. This return has taken various forms: retrospectives, revived careers, academic and press attention, market interest, the coining of the term neo-conceptualism, and, more recently, books. The intended purpose of this project was to slow down the rapidity with which this return occurred, in order to be able to look more closely at its significance. I thought that if I asked artists to speak from memory about conceptual projects from the past, the recountings would include both valuable recollections and the fallacies of human memory. It seemed that these fallacies, the stutters of memory, so to speak, could trouble the fluidity of the official return. In 1998, I sent letters to sixty artists, asking them to participate in this project. Forty artists agreed to respond to the following statement: "Briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed/experienced at the time. For the sake of this project, the definition of conceptual art would be broad enough to encompass such phenomena of that period as actions documented through drawings, photographs, film, and video; concepts executed in the form of drawings or photographs; objects where the end product is primarily a record of the precipitant concept, and performative activities which sought to question the conventions of dance and theater." * This project was first exhibited in September 1999 at American Fine Arts Gallery, New York, and in January 2000 at The Oliver Art Center, CCAC, Oakland. Another version was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, 2000. Note that in order to capture some of the spoken quality of the recordings in text form, pauses in speech are indicated by ellipses. Although the installation format allows the spectator to distinguish between male and female voices, the printed version does not. Thanks to Makram El-Kadi, who assisted in the coordination of the project, and to all the artists for their generous contributions of time and thoughts.