Embedded Messages

An excellent trip last week, to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Oxford 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.

Make Do Type, New York Times, Day Save Time

The New York Times commissioned a typesetting of six poems to "mark the end of daylight saving time". It has been a really enjoyable project; an excuse to develop variants of Make Do Type and building on a notion of how attributes might develop within the rationale, which is to make do with a limiting grid, a monospace set width, a single line weight and, inevitably, a typographic outsider's patched knowledge.

Also to test balance imagery and type. My fascination is the way that type, when drawn from the same hand, can take the onus away from imagery and allow it to be sometimes something other than figurative.

The two variants here, a condensed (created to fit this poem's setting into the column width and maintain a consistent x-height with the rest) and a slab serif. This one does pull on established solutions for optical balance in a monospace 'i', for example. So I looked a lot and gained greater appreciation of Courier and the favourite Prestige Elite. Wanted to see how familiar or not Make Do would become when taking on board some of these features.

And then keeping stray awkwardness in some characters, like the double-height 'g'.

These examples are taken from a great Walker Design Blog piece here by Ryan G. Nelson, on Typographica's 1962 piece on typewriter typefaces.

I'm looking quite a lot at visual explanations (also for a Camberwell teaching project) and wanted the header to read as something almost ornamental, arriving out of dense information related to November and December 2010 Northern Hemisphere moon cycles, onset weather bleakness, land and sea strata. Maybe a cross too, between the influences of Wiener Werkstätte (via) and Susan Kare (very nice article here on the process behind the original Macintosh system software).

The inter-poem patterns were simply referring to time passing, incremental permutation, reversals. Apparently each of the poets sent their pieces mechanically typewritten. All the more reason to set all of this into an inflexible matrix. The type and imagery were all designed to the NYT's 0.2 inch gutter width, which then became a modular grid. Concrete poetry was the first moment early on (as in, Art Foundation Course early on) where I could get hold of some essence of typography as a thing in itself.

Discovered Dom Sylvester Houédard's work in an old ICA catalogue. A Benedictine priest and concrete poet, he corresponded with Herbert Spencer and Typographica through the 1960s. For me the work stands out because it seems less locked into its time of making; aerated in a way that destabilises the Olivetti characteristic or puts the tension between mechanical and improvised composition in an odder place.

He said: "Words: hard and lovely as diamonds demand to be seen, freed in space; words are wild, sentences tame them. Every word an abstract painting, read quickly in a phrase words get lost: in concrete, eye sees words as objects that release sound/thought echoes in a reader. Concrete poems just ARE: have no outside reference; they are objects like toys and tools, jewel–like concrete things-in-them-selves".

I also like Ernst Jandl, much for other reasons, in the purity and acceptance of the letterness of letters.

New Box for New York

Recent projects present the chance to develop further both Hand Werk and Make Do Type. I'm designing variants of Make Do for a typographic setting of six poems which discuss daylight saving and the seasonal clock change to come, for the New York Times Op-Ed section. More on that soon. Shown here is prototyping for a new Hand Werk box, in conjunction with –and to be shown in– Partners & Spade's store on Great Jones St., NYC., thanks to the continuously inspiring Andrew.

Shown is the base layer, with a wider palette of materials, including raw hide leather and hardwoods; more acute use of naturally varying thicknesses to force where pieces double stack as a corrective to bring about an even height. Also to make sense of the two directions which had evolved without my ever standing back; the stacking or permutational and the tool– or gamepiece– like.

The box is longer, to house both these pieces and the petri dish as used in an earlier variant. The dimensions partly come from this envelope, a found, horded element to be included. I picked these up 12 years ago, during my time in Brussels. The colourtone, thin stock and proportion registered then and do now.

The box itself went through several stages but the consistent aim was to have an external akin to the internal. So a plywood inside-out structure, with no clear top or bottom. The one-two-three-four jointing came after numerous experiments with finger joints but this held the right balance of clean and odd.

So there are tallies and harmonies in stacked heights and slots throughout.

Also use of silicone rubber, as a plug, a stopper, a band, a brick.

The end piece, shown in the top image of the post and again here, dictates moments where an interior piece has to slot flush into the apertures. So it becomes a key for, a swatch of, the substances therein.

I have always (and I really mean always) loved Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1954)(via), specifically its rhythmical window compositions. Certainly aware of this when designing the apertures, with cryptic alignments. The next stage will be a small unbound bookwork of granular endpaper-prints, to sit atop the stacking pieces.

By, With and Of: Stair Chair

A little chair, originally intended to go in a small, dark room at the end of the corridor, with a stairway that abruptly stops. The motif is based on the moment a poppy ruptures overnight and the petal unfurls; a silk parachute.

The base artwork here, with the back. Wanted this composition to give space to the motif above but think now that I would have liked to live with it a while longer and given the abstraction some more locale, more inflection related to its partner image.

'My Favo(u)rite Things' is one of my favourite things

By, With and Of (Interlude)

Georges Perec: I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall.

I no longer know what there is behind this wall.

I no longer know this wall is a wall.

I no longer know what a wall is.

From Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974-1993; translated 1997 by John Sturrock).

Berlin: By, With and Of (1)

The first of a little series of posts on the exhibition now at Direktorenhaus, Berlin. The title, 'By, With and Of', comes from a wonderful book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, by Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Taken from a chapter on Eugène Atget's photographs of everyday Parisian interiors, thus:

"An item of furniture is a kind of preposition. 'By', 'with' and 'of' are material intuitions. 'Of' is a cupboard. 'With' is a table. 'By' is a chair'."

So it implies, for the purposes of this work, that which is subject (or indeed subjugate) to , the site. I've said already that the choice was to work with rooms which were not yet restored, with only a patchy diaphragm between the here and now and the then of the Mint's 1935 Third Reich birth and a DDR middle age.

'By', 'With' and 'Of' also imply 'Applied'. This is Room 204, with a heavy scent of the original building, in the panelling, window casing and wall patina. I wanted to think of the room as an organism with a story to tell but incapable of doing so. Recurrently through the rooms on this side of the corridor there are breaks in the panelling for doorways that have since been sealed. An epidermal scrub back to the plaster has revealed the join.

Elsewhere, a vent hole has been knocked through high on the wall and left as a chafed mouthpiece. So I have used these stopped up or ruptured sites for the work.

I've used leather, as a substance something between wood and skin. It was an early decision, to work it with the colourtoned, semi-porous plasterwork. The specific dimensions of this piece. a 'Stub', come from the metric 50cm x 10cm parquet floor modules; the height wedged to the height of the room. It is sequential, seen from the top down and slipping resemblance between a floor, a finger, a cigarette, a leg (secondarily a shin pad, a caliper) until it stubs its toe.

I have an image-memory of Delia Derbyshire, stooping over a console with a cigarette between her fingers. Looking again this image does not exist but it's there imagined and then came into this work as a motif. With the wish to acknowledge this as a bureaucratic building. A hand on a keyboard with a burning cigarette between index and middle.

The peg-board-pores were then open-endedly, skilfully worked with leather thread by Harriet Cory-Wright (photograph by Natalie Kay-Thatcher). The piece is non-definitive. It has allowance for further work and for re-configuration. Increasingly a factor in work of the last two years.

Components must sit between and slip definition. The original notion here was to hold found cigarettes but leaving them out frees other readings.

This pendulous tongue piece was worked through with Rosie Eveleigh, stitching and preparing the leather surface.

Elsewhere, discreetly, a concoction of sourced and made matter. Perching and bedding into the room, they developed to refer to monitors, keyboards and the perpendicular ergonomic between the functionary us and the screen.

Working lunch, eating while tapping.

Sections of the space such as this window slot, have placeholder works. They are sitting there in lieu of something more developed to come in what we hope to be a second phase of works early next year. Another post imminent but at this point it is essential to credit and thank the aforementioned Harriet, Rosie and Natalie, along with Hannah Whitfield. As the rest of the work is described in the next post, their technical involvement is even more apparent.