UNIVERSITY OF READINGWORK IN PROGRESS: FORM AS A WAY OF THINKING
Stuart Bailey

PhD, Department of Fine Art
Submitted September 2014

	
  

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ABSTRACTAt the heart of his 1962 book The Open Work, in a chapter on ‘Form as Social Commitment’, Umberto
Eco writes: ‘Form must not be a vehicle for thought, it must be a way of thinking.’
Over ten chapters that alternate between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, I attempt to articulate, elaborate andperform how this ethos plays out in a hybrid art/design practice today.
The ‘theory’ chapters discuss key aspects of forming-as-a-way-of-thinking. The first identifies those
aspects of Eco’s original argument most relevant to my extension of it here. The second shows how
self-reflexivity in art can productively model such an approach, without becoming an end in itself.
The third considers what it means to make and keep work ‘in movement’, adapting to and registeringcontingencies along the way. The fourth argues how this can make for markedly ‘articulate’ objects– work that refuses the crutch of supporting material, effectively captioning itself, and so embodying
a particular sense of ‘decency’ and ‘good manners’. The last chapter contends that a borderline
art/design disposition is peculiarly suited to this way of working, and that the grey area between thetwo domains is fertile ground for it to play out right now.
Each ‘practice’ chapter recounts an idiosyncratic publishing project, usually produced together withDavid Reinfurt under the name Dexter Sinister in response to an open invitation from an art institution.
The last of these took place during the final few months’ work on the thesis, and as such, epitomizes
the essence of the work advocated here: it is emphatically in progress.
The work draws freely from art, design, literature, and philosophy, with recurring reference to a coregroup comprising both seminal figures (e.g. T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, David Foster Wallace),
marginal polymaths (e.g. Stefan Themerson, Anthony Froshaug, Richard Hollis) and close colleagues(e.g. Robin Kinross, Mike Sperlinger, Jan Verwoert). I also refer throughout to other art and artists pastand present, with extended thoughts on a number of recent artworks to illustrate points made in the
essays.
In ‘Form as Social Commitment’, Eco laid out an aesthetic theory to explain why he considers what he
identifies as Open Works to be the most exemplary art of the era. Some 50 years on, I argue why thework described and performed here can be deemed just as ‘authentic’ – timely and pertinent – today.

	
  

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I confirm that this is my own work and the use of all material from other sources has been properly andfully acknowledged.

	
  

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Acknowledgements
This work is written first for Francesca Bertolotti, my almost wife at the time of writing, who dislikes
the fact that significant others are generally mentioned last in lists of acknowledgements like this.
In any case, she has simply been its most insightful and outspoken reader.
Any reference to ‘my’ or ‘our’ work here always refers to that made in collaboration mainly withDavid Reinfurt under the name Dexter Sinister, or less frequently with Will Holder as Will Stuart – andeven these pseudonyms often involve members of the larger constellation of colleagues that has grown
up around Dot Dot Dot (since 2000) and its successor Bulletins of The Serving Library (since 2011).
When relevant, I’ll indicate the precise nature of each collaboration as and when it crops up in the text.
Although David and Will are complicit with my drawing together this array of collaborative work,
the outcome naturally leans towards my own biases and interests; they are hugely responsible forprovoking and shaping the ideas here, but it would be wrong to assume they unequivocally share them.
Still, after all the disclaimers: this work is also theirs – and duly dedicated to them, too.
Further thanks are due to: Angie Keefer, co-founder (with David and myself) of The Serving Library,which really amounts to the next chapter; Paul Stiff and Karel Martens, my two most incisive teachersat The Universty of Reading’s Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, and the
Werkplaats Typografie in Arhnem, respectively; Robin Kinross and Richard Hollis, consistently
exemplary practitioner-writers and guiding lights; John Russell and Alun Rowlands of The Universityof Reading’s Department of Fine Art, for overseeing the development of this thesis; and then Mark
Beasley, Peter Bilak, Ruth Blacksell, Michael Bracewell, Paul Elliman, Ryan Gander, Karel Martens,
John Morgan, Paulina Olowska, Lucas Quigley, Robert Snowden, Mike Sperlinger, and Arlo &Frances Stark. Further colleagues and collaborators are listed in footnote 42 on pages 68–69.
Finally, thanks to my parents for their continuing support of, and interest in, these frequently obscureactivities.
SB, Liverpool, July 2015

	
  

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CONTENTS

Note on orthography ix
0Skeleton 1

1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5

Form as a way of thinking 9
Key aspects of The Open Work 10
Glossary: aesthetic, poetic, art, design 11
The ‘true’ essay 13
The ethics of organic art 15
The Open Work’s aesthetic theory: art as a kind of social work 18(a) Social dialectic: the necessary back and forth with the world 19(b) Aesthetic dialectic: the necessary conflict with formal conventions 21
Authentic art in the industrial age – ‘at the level of structure’ 23
Intrinsic and social: two case studies 25
Synthesis: ‘opposites grasped in their unity’ 27

1.6
1.7
1.8
2
2.1
2.2
2.3

2.4

Dot Dot Dot 35
What we’d become 35
How we might usefully develop 40
Four surrogate editorials 42(a) In response to a painting: ‘that’s what we’d like to paint’ 43(b) In response to a letter: ‘what helped me get over my dialectical mental block’ 44(c) In response to an article: ‘and so writing about it is accordingly elliptical’ 48(d) In response to an exhibition: ‘a very particular graphic Esperanto’ 53
On to The Serving Library 70

3
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7
3.8
3.9

Self-reflexivity as a model 77
Species of self-reflexivity 77
At the time of writing 82
Self-reflexivity in contemporary art 86
Varieties of modernism 90
The modern movement as a constant habit 92
Extra-conscious 95
Cynical limits 98
Trope versus Temperament 100
Duplicitous example 107(a) A being-word rather than a doing-word 108(b) The exact speed of thinking 109
3.10 Communicating communicability 110
3.11 Incomplete 112
4
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
4.8
4.9

Various True Mirrors 119
Just in time 119
Proof of the fact that a mechanical device can reproduce personality 121
Message-Signal-Noise-Channel 133
I I I I I I I I Quote 137
The Shadow Goes … 142
As if you could ever work that out in advance 145
How bits of sentences travel 147
Always production, never documentation 151
Dramatized not as self-reflexive but as a collective reflexivity 157

5
5.1
5.2

Work in movement 163
Sketch versus blueprint 163
Unscripted insight 165

	
  

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5.3
5.4
5.5

Applied art: running room 166
Mature instinct 169
Hardy perennials 170(a) Always the same, always different 172(b) When cantankerous attitude becomes form 176
5.6 Thinking contingency 183
5.7 The Mafia Game: a ‘matter of concern’ 187
5.8 Vocal registers: three films 189
5.9 ‘Urbane Image’, ur-example 194
5.10 Coda 196
6
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
6.9

Black Whisky and The First/Last Newspaper 201
High-end spirits 201
Black art, transparent art 204
Letter from the source 207
Hangovers 217
Further reading 218
Projection of a post-industrial film 222
The letter versus the spirit of Futurism 226
What You See Is What Will Be 234
Op-ed, Stop press, Review 242

7
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
7.7
7.8

Articulate objects 247
Teaching a reader how to read 248
Modernism as a tool 252
Reading things 255
Speak for yourself: two exhibitions 259
Lower-case ethics 264
Three palimpsest talks 274
Friendly fire 279
So-called ephemera 284

8
8.1
8.2
8.3
8.4
8.5
8.6
8.7

Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Fonts and ‘Identity’ 301
A good idea in advance of its realization 301
How to keep things moving 317
Open-mindedness made manifest 319
Artistic license 340
How things come across 350
Debatable 351
Quoted out of context 353

9
9.1
9.2
9.3
9.4
9.5

Grey area 373
Surplus to requirements 373
Orphaned interests 375
The truth about Hollis 377
The morning after 387
Anatomy of a duckrabbit 394

10
10.1
10.2
10.3
10.4
10.5

The Last ShOt Clock 401
Like an arrow I was only passing through 401
A live Venn diagram 414
Solstice event 419
Time signatures 423
More depth than progress 430
Appendices 433
Bibliography 473

	
  

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Note on orthography
The main body is typeset in one of three main ways. Foremost, my own newly written text is set inTimes, like this.
Previously written material that I’m either fully or partly responsible for is set to the same margins inHelvetica, like this. (See also the note the first time it happens in the middle of page 36.)
Longer quotations of others’ work are indented in Courier, like this.

Additionally, where it has seemed particularly relevant and relatively convenient, I have maintained theoriginal typography of a previously published piece, along with its spelling, punctuation, and former
pagination. When and why this happens is always obvious, and the original context fully noted.
Finally, I sometimes use a pair of *bracketing asterisks* as a form of emphasis distinct from italics,
a technique developed together with my co-editors for Bulletins of The Serving Library (see §2.4)
that’s become habitual. The asterisks are intended to insinuate something along the lines of a *knowing
acknowledgement* – or at least something more winking and less vigorous than plain italic.

	
  

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‘The nature of uncarved blocks is how to describe what’s hard to describe.’1‘I reckon it would take a year to write, and in a year I should pass through a rich variety of moods– so would the book – in that at least it would have some verisimilitude to life.’2‘As soon as this is written it will be full of holes.’3	  1Taoist proverb.

2

Charles Pry, the protagonist of E.C. Large’s Asleep in the Afternoon [1938] (London: Hyphen Press, 2008).

3

Germano Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrila War’, Flash Art, no. 5, 1967.

	
  

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0: SKELETONIn 1962 the Italian polymath Umberto Eco published The Open Work, a cross-disciplinary survey ofincomplete or ambiguous artworks designed to be ‘completed’ by the artist, performers or audienceduring the particular performance or reception.1 In Eco’s opinion, this was the truly ‘authentic’ art ofthe modern era – meaning timely, pertinent and exemplary.
Inasmuch as we perceive the world exclusively through forms, he says, we require ‘perceptive tools’
appropriate to the human condition in order to properly apprehend it – ideally with a view to improving
it. Consciously or not, all aesthetic work provides these tools, so all those working with form are insome measure responsible for the way in which we comprehend the world.
In Eco’s view, the ‘socially committed’ artist works to develop forms that are appropriate to, which is
to say congruent with, the contemporary condition. This is the perpetual vocation of the avant-garde(a term that Eco uses without hesitation, though it is clearly passé today): grappling with outmoded,
impotent forms in the push for newly potent ones. This approach is less concerned with representing or
expressing already-held impulses and ideas, more with seeking new ones.
At the heart of The Open Work, Eco proclaims: ‘Form must not be a vehicle for thought, it must be away of thinking.’
Now, if in their most general senses ‘form’ means a lasting encounter between atoms that hold good
together,2 and ‘thinking’ the process of relating two or more discrete ideas in order to yield new ones,
then ‘form as a way of thinking’ in its most skeletal and pedantic sense describes the process ofmanipulating sensory matter – whether verbal or graphic – by juxtaposing, connecting or configuring
already existing ideas with a view to generating new ones. It is a fundamentally constructive,
progressive process.
Eco’s thinking remains entirely plausible 50 years on, and it is a springboard for the present work.
The aim is to explain and elaborate the mechanics and dynamics of forming-as-a-way-of-thinking –ultimately in order to draw out an implicit relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and withparticular reference to work being made in the grey zone between art and graphic design today.
Although I refer to many instances of my own and others’ work, I want to articulate means not ends.
Following Eco, the work I have in mind usually involves setting up conditions for work to play out in
situ, in view of indirectly registering rather than directly commenting on the contemporary condition.
It’s a working ethos that consists in how something is made as much as what; that practises in lieu of
preaching, and is all the more convincing for doing so.
I’ll make my case by zigzagging between parallel chapters of so-called theory and practice.
The ‘theory’ chapters comprise free-ranging essays that elaborate my own ideas extending from Eco’s
work. They draw on related insights from as many close colleagues as seminal thinkers,3 along with
examples of art and artefacts past and present. The first comprises an overview of The Open Work,summarizing those aspects most relevant to my thinking, fleshing out Eco’s idea of what makes for	
  1

Umberto Eco, The Open Work [1962, Italian] (Cambridge MA: Harvard, 1989).

2This line paraphrases the following: ‘what do we mean by form? (a lasting encounter between atoms, joined together): they turnout to be lasting from the moment when their components form a whole whose sense “holds good” at the moment of their birth,stirring up new “possibilities of life” on a coherent level, in order to create a relationship to the world.’ Nicolas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics [1998, French] (Paris: Les Presses du réel, 2002), p. 19.
3

These two types are clearly distinguished in the thesis. Following the initial mention of a full name, I continue to refer to‘close colleagues’ (which is usually also to say close friends) by forename and ‘seminal thinkers’ by surname. This may seem
overly casual, but it feels right – simply because most of the ideas here have developed in sustained dialogue with the many
people who’ve contributed to the two journals I’ve co-edited. That’s to say, the lack of ordinary academic distance anddisinterest seems worth acknowledging and replicating here inasmuch as it seems integral to the work.

	
  

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properly ‘authentic’ art, and suggesting why I think forming-as-a-way-of-thinking inevitably results insymbiotic form and content. I then describe how a certain strain of artistic self-reflexivity can be seen
to model this approach.
Next I elaborate the nature of ‘work in movement’, whereby a series of conditions are set up for a
project to ‘play out’ and register contingencies met along the way. Constituent of this idea is thataesthetic impulses have a life of their own to be pursued with more or less fidelity to the fundamental‘DNA’ of an idea, and that such work can usefully incorporate the story of its own making. Contrary to
a commonplace, recondite sort of contemporary art that leans on the crutch of supporting material, thisbreed of work is positively didactic to the extent that it ‘captions itself’. I’m after a working
embodiment of ‘decency’ and ‘good manners’, a set of working principles that seeks rather than shuts
down relations. I propose that a borderline art/design disposition is peculiarly suited to this ethos, andthat the confluence of fine art and graphic design is currently a productive place for it to play out,
trailing work that ideally embodies, cultivates, and so perpetuates it.
Embedded within these chapters are a number of talks, letters and interviews that I’ve delivered,written and conducted since starting this thesis in 2010. These set pieces – a transcription of a talk, or aletter to a friend, for instance – are left more or less intact in view of embodying two key points: that
forms can usefully carry the trace of circumstances; and that the form of the writing can communicate
as much as the writing itself.
Between these ‘theory’ chapters, the ‘practice’ ones comprise case studies of realworld projects
produced under the umbrellas of Dot Dot Dot, a left-field arts journal I co-founded and -edited between
2000–2010, and Dexter Sinister, the working name of myself and David Reinfurt since 2006; and sothey amount to about a decade-and-a-half’s worth of thinking-by-doing. Like their theory counterparts,
these accounts incorporate autonomous bits and pieces of writing produced at the time, transmitted
from the middle of the project in question. Given that one of the crucial ideas here is the graphic andmaterial realization of writing as part and parcel of the project, these excerpts are reproduced as close
to their original form as is possible within this new container.4 Inevitably, many of the ideas recounted
in theory recur in practice, and vice versa. Generally speaking, I have not made any attempt to iron out
such repetitions, as they are endemic to the whole process.
This all amounts to an argument for – and embodiment of – a self-generating praxis: a pertinent way oflooking informs a pertinent way of working, which in turn informs a pertinent way of looking, etc.
The chapters alternate as follows – theory on white paper, practice on light grey.
1. Form as a way of thinking: As stated, this first theory chapter is an overview of The Open Work
– a distillation of Eco’s key ideas and an expansion of those most pertinent to my thinking. I focus
particularly on his account of what makes for ‘authentic’ (= exemplary) art in any era, and reinforce itwith a few commensurate concepts, inlcuding T.W. Adorno’s explication of ‘essay’, Walter
Benjamin’s ‘political tendency’, and Alain Badiou’s ‘fidelity to an event’. Eco notes that Open Worksprioritize production over representation or expression as art’s essential ‘forming action’, anelaboration of his mentor Luigi Pareyson’s aesthetic philosophy. For them, ‘form’ is synonymous with‘organism’, and art duly conceived as an organic process governed by autonomous laws in which eachnew case (piece of work, situation) generates its own ‘forming logic’. Forming-as-thinking therefore
implies the inevitable symbiosis of form and content. I close with some similarly ‘anti-dualistic’
thinking from other fields.
2. Dot Dot Dot: Over ten years and 20 issues, Dot Dot Dot moved from being patently concerned withgraphic design to something far more heterogeneous, sprawling across the humanities. At the sametime it became increasingly ‘performative’ in the sense that contributions began to actively
demonstrate as much as passively articulate a subject. This tendency extended to the manner in which

	
  

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– at least in terms of local formatting (meaning how the work was typeset and configured) if not actual format (meaning theoriginal material, size, and surround). Although the text in between all the recycled matter in these practice chapters essentiallytries to recuperate information lost to the original contexts, ideally of course the whole thing is made new in the process.

	
  

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entire issues were produced; #15, for instance, was made entirely on-site over three weeks from the
middle of a group show in Geneva, with the setup deliberately designed to leave some very visible
marks on the product. All the ideas in this dissertation were incubated in the journal, to the extent thatthe present work effectively begins where the final issue (#20) left off. As such, the first half of thisinitial ‘practice’ chapter recounts the journal’s ten-year trajectory as a practical preface, via a numberof ‘surrogate editorials’ published in that final issue. The last and longest of these tells the story of aparallel action, the continuing collection and exhibition of diverse ‘source material’ (a polaroid, an oil
painting, a Ouija board, etc. – each of which originally illustrated an essay in the journal). The chapter
ends by explaining what happened next: a change of scenery called The Serving Library.
3. Self-reflexivity as a model: ‘Self-reflexive’ implies an automatic act of reflection on the matter at
hand – like this sentence. In terms of art, it usually involves a given work ‘bending back on itself’ inorder to draw attention to some degree of artifice, typically manifest by rendering a work’s structure on
a level with its subject matter; its form or style as apparent as its content or substance. Take a classic
recursive text like This statement is a lie, or an image like a Mise en abyme: both set in motion a mental
pendulum that induces intellectual vertigo. The work I have in mind likewise performs this oscillationof form and content to the degree that they are essentially one and the same, part and parcel. This is thesense in which self-reflexive work ‘models’ the symbiosis constituent of forming-as-a-way-ofthinking: it exemplifies and so propagates it. I argue that the most convincing cases are less theconsequence of disinterested deployment of self-reflexive tropes, which are usually ironic, contrived
and tired, but rather derive from a self-critical temperament, which is essentially earnest, constructive
and so perpetually valid. I don’t mean to make a case for self-reflexive work per se, only for working
self-reflexively.
4. Various True Mirrors: ‘True Mirror’ is the trade name of a mirror specifically engineered to reflectreality without inverting the image on the horizontal axis like most mirrors do. It shows us how we
appear to other people rather than the left/right switch we’ve come to take for granted. (This makes foran unpleasant experience that sets off a vain process of frantic self-adjustment.) We adopted the True
Mirror as an emblem for a project at the 2008 Whitney Biennial that involved producing around 40
nominal ‘Press Releases’ in collaboration with a bunch of artists and writers who were invited tobroadly reflect on the show. Each gnomic release was edited, designed and published by David andmyself (as Dexter Sinister) in pronounced real-time over a concentrated three weeks, working from ahidden room in one of the Biennial’s auxiliary locations. Although never sanctioned by the Whitney,these releases circulated under its auspices in view of injecting noise – a bit of productive slowness andconfusion – into its usual PR channels. The diverse results included a rumour, a fax, a composition forcello and office machinery, and an unusually vocal elevator operator. Typically, the project was carriedon via further iterations, most prominently a ‘cubist variety show’ based on a compact microfiche thatre-channelled all the Press Releases made during those initial three weeks.
5. Work in movement: Back in 1936, Walter Benjamin urged artists to actively involve themselves inroot-level production processes (e.g. printing, publishing, distributing) in order to circumvent thedomesticating effects of conventional ways of doing things. In his view, every artistic tendency carriesa political equivalent. Here I more fully articulate an approach that involves establishing a set offundamental conditions or instructions for a work to ‘play out’: a program that runs a script. Eco
frequently uses the term ‘work in movement’ alongside ‘open work’, and my summary understandingof the distinction is that where the latter cultivates multiple interpretations or ambiguous meanings, theformer involves some kind of live, realtime aspect to convey a tangible sense of working from inside aflow of events. This is particularly apparent over a long period of time, when a single piece of work
gets reworked, adapted or updated; or equally when entire bodies of work become increasingly re- anddefined over an oeuvre. Along the way, I consider some discourse surrounding a recent groupexhibition that offers some useful insight on the nature, difficulty and point of ‘thinking contingency’ –the tenuous, uncertain and surprising – in art and philosophy today. I suggest that any contemporary
work which abides Eco’s sense of authenticity is similarly compelled to refract the sense of ‘radical
contingency’ that dominates our contemporary condition.
6. Black Whisky and The First/Last Newspaper: Both these projects involved virtually extinct andso particularly telling production processes. In the case of the whisky: distillation and letterpress; in thecase of the newspaper: ‘WYSIWYM’ typesetting and ‘Paste-up’ layout. This chapter tracks the ways in

	
  

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which these techniques influenced a number of written and visual forms. Black Whisky is the name ofa co-operatively-funded 12-year malt distilled together with ex-publisher Christoph Keller in 2011. The
idea was – or became – an excuse to meditate on the similarities and differences between publishingand distilling; to think through the benefits of ‘slowness’ relative to both; to explore communal
production by assembling a cooperative share system; and naturally to make a plausible scotch along
the way. While Keller oversaw the product, we ‘framed’ it by making a single piece of work with athree-fold purpose: to advertise, certify and label the eventual product. Meanwhile, The First/Last
Newspaper was made from a space facing The New York Times offices in midtown Manhattan. Over
three weeks, we produced six editions of a double-sided broadsheet under the auspices of the city’s
2010 Performa festival of performance art, designed to reflect on the seismic shifts in news industry ata time when online competition was forcing many long-established newspapers to fold. We gathered anumber of writers to report from the middle of this paradigm shift. As none of them were otherwise
directly employed by the news industry, they offered an unusually disinterested vantage on thesituation.
7. Articulate objects: Ideally the outcome of that work in movement, by ‘articulate object’ I mean
work that ‘speaks for itself’, that is legible and autonomous in the sense that it doesn’t rely on the
crutch of supporting texts or other supplementary material, but is ‘self-captioning’. Ideally, it teaches areader how to read it. Consider, for instance, the line left by a pen hooked up to trace the tremor of anearthquake. This is partly an argument for the sort of work that offers the key to unlock the story of its
construction, the work’s ‘genes’ carried in the traces of technical processes (which might productively
expose virtual products’ relation to digital code as much as material products’ relation to mechanicalmachinery). I then consider the ethics inherent in this ethos – the aforementioned ‘decency’ and ‘good
manners’, two terms lifted from the sardonic yet earnest work of the Polish polymath Stefan
Themerson, who was well aware of how pious they sounded, and intending to provoke. Building on his
ideas in particular, I consider how the various qualities of openness, self-reflection, momentum andclarity related in the previous chapters amount to a kind of aesthetic decorum, and so too an ethicalorientation analogous to Eco’s ‘social commitment’. The overarching interest in the confluence ofaesthetics and ethics here is rooted in a particular conception of ‘the modern movement’ acquired byosmosis while an undergraduate at The University of Reading’s Department of Typography & Graphic
Communication, literally a stone’s throw from Fine Art. In recuperating this largely lapsed term, ‘themodern movement’, I mean to emphasize a specific set of attitudes essentially distinct from customary
conceptions of modernism. There’s a rhetorical shortcut to all this: I want to isolate the ‘movement’
from the ‘modern’ and run with it.
8. Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Fonts and ‘Identity’: Next up are two projects that
explore subjects native to graphic design using digital media. In 1979, the computer scientist Donald
Knuth wrote a piece of software called Metafont, that was designed to harness the essential‘intelligence’ of letterforms in view of generating an infinite supply of fonts using a limited set ofparameters. In 2009 we picked up where he left off in the mid-1980s, updating the idea to run oncontemporary computers. We were less interested in making a tool to produce endless new fonts, andmore in thinking about and around the idea of Metafont. We developed the software for use in a
number of practical circumstances (exhibition signage, publications) and wrote a pair of accompanying
essays set in the font whose story is told in the text. Both essays have been published on numerous
pages and walls, each time revised according to the new context. They have also found form in digital
media, most recently an animation-of-sorts called Letter & Spirit, and an identity for an art foundation,
both of which involve a new parameter, Time – and so too a further promiscuous essay. This isfollowed by a parallel project called ‘Identity’, a three-screen ‘projection’ we developed in 2011 thatcharts the emergence and proliferation of graphic identities since the turn of the 20th century. It’s amongrel cartoon-informational-film-essay that animates the typically fraught relationship between
cultural and corporate spheres as contemporary art spaces become increasingly preoccupied with theirown image. Three case studies are taken as coordinates from which to plot a broader landscape: theCentre Pompidou, MoMA, and the Tate. The projection’s voiceover script was assembled almost
entirely from existing texts, quoted and paraphrased way out of context. It’s the most extreme instanceof a working method that’s cropped up to lesser degrees in the other projects recounted here: aparticularly open-sourced kind of writing.

	
  

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9. Grey area: Finally, I articulate more clearly how the practical projects recounted here embody thetheory chapters’ chain-link of ideas. To recap: I’m after a temperamentally self-reflexive way ofworking … that involves setting up the conditions for projects to play out in practice … ideallydepositing articulate objects that speak for themselves … which amounts to an essentially humanist
ethos commensurate with Eco’s sense of ‘social commitment’. Where once clearer channels for asocially-oriented design seem blocked, if not totally eradicated, the neighbouring domain of art is, forthe time being at least, a space ambiguous and expansive enough to accommodate such orphanedinterests. This displaced ‘speculative’ design is clearly no longer a straightforward problem-solving
activity, nor does it claim to be. Like all modern art, its products aren’t ‘useful’ in any obvious sense,
only in the offset, fuzzy manner in which aesthetic work can function as intellectual-utilitarian tools forthinking. This ethos is apparent in a certain strain of contemporary work I see as having evolved in
response to the increasingly dumb – mute, obfuscating, hermetic, stand-offish, and ultimately
alienating – art of recent decades. I suggest the way in which they perpetuate Eco’s 1962 sense of‘authentic’, mirroring today’s vanguard concerns. To conclude, I consider why a borderline art/design
disposition is well suited to this work, and why the ambiguous zone between fine art and graphic
design is a fertile place for it to take root right now.
10. The Last ShOt Clock: The thesis closes on an actual work in progress at the time of writing. It
begins with a conversation between David and myself in advance of an event on Summer Solstice 2014
at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. A year beforehand, we had participated in the
joint Lithuania/Cyprus Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennial, which was staged in a sports hall under
the reversible title Oo or oO. The show’s locus was a basketball court flanked by concrete bleachers,
and we proposed to manipulate the two large scoreboards at both ends, retooling them into two
identically esoteric, hexadecimal clocks. On our way to an inaugural Oo-oO party staged in the same
venue and lit solely by our clocks, we were falsely informed that it had been shut down and so headed
off elsewhere – only later to run into a couple of wasted Lithuanians who said we’d in fact just missed
a memorable event. And so under the working title ‘The Last Shot Clock’, our idea was to invoke theparty we’d managed to miss by assembling a time-travelling incantation. We initially programmed theclocks with no particular purpose in mind, but in Lithuania they would finally be put to use – a use that,
as we expected, was waiting to be realized all along. Ultimately, the clocks would become timemachines, their logic used to structure a compilation of various ways and means of extracting oneself
from the regular coordinates of time and space. The whole thing effectively happened backwards,
synthesizing all the qualities variously inventorized in these chapters into a single summons.
I recently came across an interview with the Danish critic and curator Lars Bang Larsen.5 In response
to a closing query, ‘Are you an idealist?’, he replied: ‘The question remains, how to combine idealismwith the scepticism and self-reflection that turns it into an artistic tool rather than an end in itself?’
Answering the question by issuing a further question (and a pointedly productive one at that) seems tome an exemplary response. The key parts of the present skeleton can be slotted into the structure ofLarsen’s anti-answer: the ‘idealism’ of the modern movement, the ‘scepticism’ against the dualistic
thinking of form and content, the ‘self-reflection’ of self-reflexivity. Moreover, Eco’s still-urgent
imperative – that form must be a way of thinking – is latent in Larsen’s call for a ‘tool’ rather than morecommodities. In which case, the text that follows will ideally serve as a kind of all-purpose wrench;or perhaps a tuning fork, as we shall see.

	
  5Lars Bang Larsen, ‘Art is Norm’, Internationistisk Ideale, no. 3, 2010, p. 13.

	
  

6

	
  

7

Richard Hamilton, How a Great Daily Organ is Turned Out (1990), composite print from 20 plates

	
  

8

	
  

9

1: FORM AS A WAY OF THINKING

This first theory chapter is foremost an overview of Umberto Eco’s The Open Work; a summary of its
key ideas, and an expansion of those most relevant to the thesis at large. For Eco, ‘authentic’ art – bywhich he means timely, pertinent and exemplary – emerges when form is a way of thinking as opposed
to a means of dressing already-held ideas. This, I argue, inevitably results in symbiotic form andcontent. Otherwise put, such symbiosis is a consequence of forming-as-thinking. I intend to articulate
and demonstrate this idea here.
After briefly noting three pivotal aspects of Eco’s book, I disambiguate a couple of recurring terms(‘aesthetic’, ‘poetic’), then set up a rudimentary distinction between ‘art’ and ‘design’ in view of moreconvincingly merging them later on. Next, I compound Eco’s sense of authentic by folding in a few
commensurate concepts. The first is T.W. Adorno’s account of the ‘true’ essay, itself based on aprevious one by Georg Lukács. That I begin with a definition of ‘essay’ is no coincidence: it’s at least
partly intended to acknowledge my relatively haphazard approach – ranging freely across time, andreferencing both seminal figures and close colleagues. Seth Price’s ongoing essay-artwork Dispersion
is offered as a recent case in point.
I move on to some related theories by Luigi Pareyson, Alain Badiou, and Walter Benjamin. Pareyson’s
notion of ‘organic form’ prioritizes production over representation or expression as art’s essential‘forming action’. From this vantage, ‘form’ is synonymous with ‘organism’, every germane artwork
inscribed with its own ‘forming logic’ (or ‘life-force’), and the artist can be seen to proceed in amanner more or less faithful to this ‘DNA’. Benjamin also advocates the primacy of production in his
essay ‘The Author as Producer’, but to more explicitly social and political ends. Writers, he writes,
ought not merely espouse a correct (i.e. Marxist) political alignment, but actively demonstrate a correct
political tendency by actively working ‘at the level of production’, perpetually challenging orthodox
forms of distribution. Both ideas chime with Alain Badiou’s more recent notion of ‘fidelity to an
event’, a promiscuous philosophical concept he applies across disciplines.
This leads on to the expansive aesthetic theory at the heart of The Open Work. Crudely put, Eco firstdescribes a fundamental social dialectic in order to more clearly articulate an aesthetic equivalent.
Namely: in the same manner that self-aware citizens reluctantly participate in society in view oftransforming it, avant-garde artists necessarily engage with formal conventions in view of transforming
them. This is as good as it gets, he concludes, and it’s not that bad. Extending from this, the final idea
elaborated from The Open Work here is that, in a modern industrial context, rather than focusing on,
say, the decoration, representation or fictionalization of reality, progressive contemporary art operates
at the level of structure, focusing on the mechanisms by which meaning is produced in a given
discipline. Art turns self-conscious, and so self-reflexive.
Next, an interlude attempts to dissolve and arising contradiction. On one hand, I’m arguing for form
that is ‘intrinsically derived’; on the other, for form that is ‘socially motivated’. But this is no paradox:
the best work simply combines the two, an idea I demonstrate using one example from graphic design,and one from fine art – also in view of showing that the similarities between the two fields can begreater than the differences.
I end the chapter with a deeper consideration of the nature of this form/content synthesis, assembling
previous attempts to deal with (or transcend) the duality by commentators such as Clement Greenberg
and Susan Sontag. A quick synopsis of Bruno Latour’s work serves as a postscript. Latour is similarly
out to dissolve pernicious binary thinking (particularly the commonplace nature/culture divide), andit’s instructive to consider the ‘symbiosis’ I continually advocate here in light of Latour’s free-ranging
sociology. This same strain runs throughout the present work: ‘micro’ aesthetic concerns are not only
analogous to ‘macro’ ethical ones, but ideally inform them – and vice versa. In this back-and-forth
between the world and the world of forms, we chase ways to handle the messy question of how to live.

	
  

10

1.1: KEY ASPECTS OF ‘THE OPEN WORK’My interest in The Open Work is three-fold:– First, because it is a prescient account of art that is left radically incomplete or indeterminate in termsof form or meaning, in order to be worked out – iterated, interpreted or completed – by either the artist
or performers during its production, by the audience during its reception, or both.
In a founding survey that became the book’s opening chapter, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, Ecodescribes a number of recent pieces of avant-garde music by such as Stockhausen and Pousseur, whosescores are designed to foster some degree of improvisation during the performance. He then relates theliterature of Kafka (whose narratives resist singular comprehension or interpretation), Joyce (whose
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are rife with multiple meanings, fragmentation, and cosmic chaos
generally), and Mallarmé (whose unrealized Livre was an exercise in extreme multiplicity, conceived
to be rearranged by the reader). He also acknowledges Calder’s kinetic mobiles (in perpetual motion
and so without fixed composition) and the plays of Brecht’s Epic theatre (that typically relate a series
of inconclusive facts for its audience to resolve).
In reaching back as far as Mallarmé, whose earliest seminal work dates from the 1860s, Eco suggeststhat the origins and development of open works are commensurate with modernist tendencies in art
generally. He further points out that the essential ambiguity common to such an approach mirrors thevanguard theories of relativity, uncertainty, discontinuity and indeterminacy being explored bycontemporaneous science, philosophy and mathematics. Art’s equivalent ‘openness’ is inevitable, hesays, because
the artistic process that tries to give form to disorder,
amorphousness, and dissociation is nothing but the effort of a reason
that wants to lend a discursive clarity to things. When its discourse
is unclear, it is because things themselves, and our relationship tothem, are still very unclear.1

In other words, tentative aesthetics plausibly reflect tentative experience. (More on this later.)– Second, because The Open Work is itself a prime example of the work it advocates. The shortinaugural ‘Poetics’ piece spawned a number of offshoot essays written for various Italian journals andeventually assembled into a single volume. The book was republished several times, and on eachoccasion reconfigured – added to, amended, prefaced, and so on. The eventual English edition (1989)
followed suit, incorporating, among other bits and pieces, some of Eco’s later writing in order toemphasize the link between this early aesthetic theory and his more renowned work in semiology. As amodest palimpsest, then, the assembly of the book mirrors its argument, embodying why such a rollingsnowball of thought is both timely and pertinent: self-critical, discursive, flexible, open-minded.
While I realize that this is by no means unusual or unique, i.e. that writing or any other artistic act
almost always involves some kind of working-itself-out by some form of thinking-in-action, to forge aconcrete opinion or more ineffable aesthetic – in both cases, a gesture – along the way, I claim onlythat The Open Work is to an unusual degree both about and an example of this process; subject andobject are one and the same. It practices what it preaches, and is all the more convincing for doing so.
– Third, The Open Work is foundational for me because of the way in which Eco explicitly andconvincingly accounts for what he calls the ‘authenticity’ of such Open Work by reverse-engineering
an aesthetic theory to support his case. Eco’s ‘authentic’ means something like ‘timely pertinence’.
He argues that the only truly apposite work is that which struggles half-blindly against impotent formal
conventions and, in doing so, generates newly relevant ones. This is, of course, the definitive vocation	  1Eco, op. cit., p. 157.

	
  

11

of any artistic avant-garde,2 not to be mistaken for adolescent posturing (killing fathers for the sake ofkilling fathers) but more righteously conceived as an attempt to supersede forms that have lost or are
losing their perceptive and affective power.
For Eco, the work that emerges from this struggle is exemplary to the extent that it fosters our ability
to cognitively apprehend the current cultural condition, ideally in view of positively affecting it.
The question of aesthetic authenticity is therefore a question of more or less appropriately and so moreor less meaningfully refracting lived experience by working on forms. The middle third of the present
chapter summarizes this aesthetic theory, as a foundation on which to build the rest of the thesis.
But first, some upfront clarifications:

1.2: GLOSSARY: AESTHETIC, POETIC, ART, DESIGN
Eco’s assertion that ‘form must be a way of thinking’ is an aesthetic principle constituent of a poetics.
These terms require a little elaboration.
By ‘aesthetic’, I mean the form by which an idea is communicated graphically or verbally, how it
comes across. This is consistent with Eco’s use of the term, as clarified by David Robey in his
introduction to the English edition. Robey notes that much of the book is founded on Eco’s ‘generalaesthetic theory’,3 which is, in turn, an extension of his mentor Luigi Pareyson’s notion of ‘organic
form’ (particularly his insistence that it is the modo di formare – the ‘way of forming’ – that constitutes
the aesthetic essence of an artwork). Eco stresses this active aspect of ‘aesthetic’, synonymous with
Nicholas Bourriaud’s definition of style as ‘the movement of a work, its trajectory’.4 Robey also draws
attention to Eco’s use of the term ‘aesthetic idiolect’, which is especially telling inasmuch as ‘idiolect’means ‘an individual’s speech pattern’, and so implies a kind of native particularity – a subjective
sensibility or temperament.
Trailing Eco again, by ‘poetics’ I mean a set of more or less explicit intentions, a drive, approach orattitude. This is derived from poetica, ‘a work’s artistic purpose’, and conceived of as a conscious
means, a plan of action or set of working principles (as in Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘a treatise or collection ofnotes’) towards an anticipated end – even though that ‘end’ may be indeterminate, vague or abstract.
Certainly the ‘purpose’ of artistic work is ambiguous in Eco’s account, inasmuch as he advocates anecessary and desirable ‘blindness’ rather than a projected outcome. In other words, Eco’s sense of
purpose is markedly front-loaded – a drive, push or reach, more diving board than landing pad. It isthus better conceived of as purposive, which is to say in view of a nominal end congruent with Kant’s
well-known description of nature’s design as ‘purposiveness without purpose’; form that suggests somekind of utility, however phantom.5‘An aesthetic principle constituent of a poetics’ is thus conceived as the program that determines howform takes shape in its appeal to the senses. This implies a value judgment: at least a critical measure(what makes for ‘good work’?), at most an ethical code (what sort of ‘good’ does this work do?).

	
  2Given that the term is two or three times passé today, I’ll generally avoid ‘avant-garde’, apart from when referring to or quoting
someone else’s use in a more innocent context. Eco uses it without any such hesitation, though in a later article on ‘The Death of
the Gruppo ’63’ (chapter 9 in the English edition of The Open Work) he wrote: ‘now that Samuel Beckett has had the Stockholm
treatment, the word “Avant-garde” can hardly keep its meaning.’ That said, I always mean to at least imply a contemporary
avant-garde, which is to say I agree with Eco’s assertion that authentic work is necessarily – if often inadvertently – topical, thatit manifests the zeitgeist, etc.

3

Eco, op. cit., p. xiii.

4

Bourriaud’s line is itself a variation on a maxim proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: ‘The style of a thought is its
movement.’ See: Bourriaud, op. cit., p. 114.

5

Given that fine art since, say, Duchamp is a fundamentally ambiguous occupation anyway, this tenuous sense is already impliedin that qualifying ‘artistic’ of ‘artistic purpose’.

	
  

12

A further signal appeal of The Open Work is precisely that it alludes to a general ‘work’ rather thanthe end product of a specific discipline – and by implication, a polymathic working ethos. In this sense
too, then, Eco’s thesis is itself conspicuously ‘open’ from the outset. Although the present text sets out
from aesthetic theory, it deliberately circumscribes influences and examples from across the liberalarts. In doing so, I mean to show that the working ethos I’m after grasping applies across disciplines –in my particular case, to design as much as art. Even though art and design traditionally proceed fromdifferent premises, this approach is commensurably manifest in the products of both practices.
As mentioned, Eco spends a large part of The Open Work making a case for the ‘authenticity’ of avantgarde art. The nearest semantic neighbours from a century of design discourse tend to be even morevague and insipid (‘good’, ‘honest’, ‘unaffected’), but graphic design can be conceived of as more orless authentic in a sense wholly consistent with Eco’s articulation, and in due course I’ll be as precise
about what makes this ‘good’ good as Eco is in authenticating his ‘authentic’. For now, it’s enough to
say that I consider design a kind of socialized art, and though I’ll later posit that the working ethos I
want to articulate is particularly apparent in the grey area between art and design, it’s worth
acknowledging some rudimentary distinctions at the outset in order to know exactly what’s being
merged. To paraphrase British art critic J.J. Charlesworth, cross-disciplinarity is meaningless without
reference to a primary set of discrete disciplinary foundations.6 That said, bear in mind when reading
the following two paragraphs that I’m temporarily attempting to keep the fields at arm’s length
primarily for the sake of clarity at the outset.7 I’ll proceed by tentative distinction rather than harddefinition.
Fundamentally, both art and design involve the manipulation of sensory phenomena. From there they
diverge:
Relatively speaking, art tends towards the speculative creation of new forms, and is thus founded on
more or less indefinite intentions and outcomes (though often produced for specific audiences, clients,
spaces and contexts). It is typically autonomous, meaning without ostensible purpose in the obvious
sense, and strongly marked by a relatively long tradition of history and theory (i.e. Art History) thattypically remains focused on the singular, ‘auratic’ art object, latterly supplemented by broader
immaterial concepts, experiences and relations. The domain is relatively hermetic and remains
foremost associated with subjectivity, catharsis, poetry, etc.
Graphic design, on the other hand, tends towards the meaningful rearrangement of existing forms,
founded on more or less definite intentions and outcomes, generally produced for specific audiences,clients, spaces, and contexts. It is typically tied to commerce (i.e. the serial or mass production of
goods and services). As such, it has a relatively short history, beginning only around the end of theindustrial revolution, and so lacks the sustained intellectual inheritance of Art History. Due to its ties
with industry, graphic design has tended to be more immediately and emphatically affected byvanguard technologies. The domain is comparatively ‘social’, and more closely associated with
objectivity, functionality, science, etc.
So when I say design can be conceived of as a ‘socialized art’, I mean only that it is oriented more
towards reception than creation. But let’s not get hung up on definitions. (To paraphrase‘cabinetmaker, designer, poet, and teacher’ Norman Potter, people often seem to be far more concernedwith their job title than what they actually do.)

	
  
6
7

J.J. Charlesworth, ‘Crisis at the ICA: Ekow Eshun’s Experiment in Deinstitutionalisation’, Mute, vol. 2, no. 15, 2010.

In his 2007 essay ‘The Surface of Design’, Jacques Rancière draws a useful comparison between the poet Stéphane Mallarmé
and the industrial designer Peter Behrens. Rancière thinks the distinction between fine and applied art has been historically
exaggerated; more pointedly, he says, both work on ‘surfaces’ in the general public domain of ‘sensibility’. See: Jacques
Rancière, ‘The Surface of Design’, The Future of the Image [2003, French] (London: Verso, 2007).

	
  

13

1.3: THE ‘TRUE’ ESSAYThe Open Work describes, embodies and promotes a positively precarious disposition, which is as
decent a definition as any of the essay form as such. Essay literally means ‘attempt’, which implies
reaching beyond one’s knowledge, understanding or ability, and, to a slightly lesser degree, a makingit-up-as-you-go-along. It is thus distinct from the journalistic article, report or profile, which are all
essentially narrative accumulations of facts. (Naturally, the categories aren’t watertight.)
According to T.W. Adorno’s essay ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958),8 itself based on Georg Lukács’‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’ (1910),9 an essay is never started from scratch or written in a
vacuum. Rather, it assimilates existing material, drawing together ‘culturally pre-determined objects’that through the act of writing are reconfigured and transformed into a new entity. According to
Adorno, the success of this compound – the essay’s plausibility and authority – hinges on how
convincingly its constituent parts hang together, the extent to which they are mutually supportive. The
effective essay thus forges its own logic and then corresponds to it. For Lukács, this amounts to writing
into existence a ‘truth’ inasmuch as it expresses a ‘newly-formed essence’ without prior equivalent.
Adorno expands: the ‘true’ essayist never aims at abstract absolutes, but remains grounded in concrete
contingencies. ‘Not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory … rather, to make the transitory
eternal.’ This freewheeling spirit, he continues, originated in Kant, who supplanted Western
philosophy’s strictures of verbal definition, a sedimentary process (‘One can only seek truth if one
discovers fundamental principles and builds on them’10), with a line of inquiry, a trajectory of thought.
Kant’s Critiques ushered in the spirit of critical reason, an unprecedentedly self-conscious paradigm
that, contrary to the staunch scientific attitude that insists stubbornly on ‘the pre-critical job of
definition’, sought ‘an understanding of concepts as part of the process in which they are temporarily
embodied.’11 And precisely because this undertaking is always in the midst of things, it is necessarily
incomplete, and so always ‘at risk’. Adorno summarizes:
Just as [empirical education] remains exposed to error, so does the
essay as form; it must pay for its affinity with open intellectual
experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm ofestablished thought fears like death (...) It is not so much that the
essay ignores indisputable certainty, as that it abrogates the ideal.
The essay becomes true in its progress.12	
  Moreoever, he writes, the path of such progress is mysteriously ‘hidden to the essay itself’, and thisdesire to make sense – quite literally to build meaning – its driving force. The essayer thus pursues thelooping logic of ‘autopoiesis’, which means self-generating, self-sustaining. In writing this newly
peculiar sense into existence, the essayist as exemplary Open Worker labours to crystallize thosemutually supporting parts. According to Adorno, this ‘expresses the utopian intention’ by alluding to asocial equivalent; namely, the notion of a mutually supportive community, of communality.
Writing some 40 years on from Eco in one of the multiple (and conspicuously open) iterations of his
essay-artwork ‘Dispersion’ since 2002, contemporary New York-based artist Seth Price makes muchthe same claim – or excuse – as Eco, that	
  8

T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’ [1958, German], New German Critique, no. 32, Spring/Summer, 1984.

9

Georg Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’ [1910, German], Soul and Form
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974).

10Jack M. Balkin quoted in: Céline Condorelli, Support Structures (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 21, fn. 17.

11

Both Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, op. cit.

12

Ibid., p. 161 (my italics).

	
  

14

since one can only adopt the degree of precision appropriate to thesubject, this essay is written in a provisional and exploratory spirit[and as such] may itself be a disjointed series of naive propositions
lacking a thesis.13

Since the late 1990s, Price has worked across the entire spectrum of contemporary art, often producing
works that are emphatically analogue or emphatically digital, and tend to inscribe their particular
moment in media history. One typically self-consciously ‘signature’ series comprises vacuum-formed
wall pieces that fossilize in plastic some piece of clothing from a distinct moment in fashion (e.g. a
1980s bomber jacket) alongside the artist’s name. Price has also produced films, videos, paintings,
records, mixtapes, clothing, books, and other printed matter.
‘Dispersion’ has been dispersed in numerous formats – published as a printed booklet, channelled via
numerous other books and magazines, and circulating as a freely downloadable PDF. In it, Price
proposes ways of working outside the circumscribed confines of the art world by focusing on (or atleast prioritizing) forms of distribution over forms of production. He posits that how a piece of work
circulates can be as important as what circulates, and that in a saturated and neutered art system basedon commodity exchange, this How is a more potent point of focus right now. ‘The art system usuallycorrals errant works,’ he states, ‘but how could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks?’14
Because Price also produces high-profile commodity-artworks himself, ‘Dispersion’ has since served,
perhaps inadvertently, as a de facto manifesto – ‘a stand-in for the artist himself’, according to critic
Tim Griffin, who also notes that Price’s work is then obliged to measure up to his own public call for
constructive ways of operating outside the critical mass.15 This idea of a self-imposed mandate seems acommendably awkward way of raising the stakes against oneself: can I answer to my own critique?
Where Eco wrote in praise of openness over fixity in The Open Work, Price now champions slowness
over speed. Slow art, he says, ‘works against all of our prevailing urges and requirements’ based on thecontemporary mandate of don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop. He recalls the rear-guard tactics of
Duchamp, who famously cultivated the property of ‘delay’ via a series of enigmatic deferrals designed
to ‘return the investment with massive interest.’ Price seeks analogous brakes in the backwaters ofcommunication that could circumvent the dominant circuit of an art market that reflexively absorbs anddomesticates any sting of topicality.16 ‘Moving with the times places you in a blind spot’, he continues,
because ‘if you’re part of the general tenor it’s hard to add a dissonant note.’ This general tenor was
once disparaged as ‘scene art’ by Clement Greenberg, who meant work that merely goes throughwhatever motions are currently in vogue. Considering that Price’s very portable document format
seems to have been widely read – and influential – in the decade since its release, and so at the very
least against the general tenor of the glut of art writing that disappears without impact, ‘Dispersion’ canalso be seen as duplicating The Open Work in that it likewise performs its point.
Something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, then, Price’s essay has proliferated not only in terms ofnumbers and circulation, but also across his larger body of work. Bits and pieces of the palimpsest havebeen variously silkscreened onto those vacuum-formed wall pieces, or written into the narrative of hisvideo lecture Redistribution.17 Considered as a whole, in fact, Price’s practice is markedly essayistic.

	
  
13

Seth Price, ‘Dispersion’, 2001–, http://www.distributedhistory.com (unpaginated).

14

Ibid.

15

Tim Griffin, ‘The Personal Effects of Seth Price’, Artforum, Summer 2008.

16

The examples in ‘Dispersion’ include a hypothetical science fiction novel as briefly postulated in the short-lived art theory
journal The Fox, mixtape cassettes such as those circulated as works by Price himself, and Jorge Pardo’s own-home-asexhibition, 4166 Sea View Lane as a singular instance of a genuinely heterotopic artwork, simultaneously open and closed tothe public while pointing to the paradox.

17

See §7.6.

	
  

15

Dispersion can be considered an update of The Open Work in one further sense: in frankly surveying
the contemporary scene, both works attempt to articulate it in order to move; in order to supersede it.

1.4: THE ETHICS OF ORGANIC ART
As distinct from science, mathematics and philosophy, writes Eco, art specifically ‘knows the world
through its own formative structures’. It can be thus considered ‘intelligence in form’18 – an intelligencethat participates in the world (interprets it, affects it) by arranging and organizing those forms. Eco’s
thinking here derives from – and extends – his mentor Luigi Pareyson’s theory of ‘formativity’
outlined in the seventh chapter of The Open Work, ‘Form and Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson’s
Aesthetics’. It opens with this abstract:
To the idealistic notion of art as vision, Pareyson’s theory offormativity opposes the concept of art as form, in which the term
‘form’ means organism, formed physicality with a life of its own,
harmoniously balanced and governed by its own laws; and to the conceptof expression, it opposes that of production as forming action.19

The ‘idealistic notion of art as vision’ in the opening clause refers to the concept of ‘pure intuition’contemporaneously popularized by Benedetto Croce in his 1912 lecture series and later publication,
The Essence of Aesthetic.20 Croce unequivocally posits internal subjective ‘feeling’ as the essence ofart, which by implication has nothing to do with morality or knowledge, and so is categorically devoidof any social impetus or obligation. (Significantly, perhaps, this conception was dominant in Italy
throughout the Fascist period.)
Contra Croce, then, Eco assumes the task of elucidating the obscure ethics inherent in Pareyson’s‘formativity’. Morality is entwined with artistic action, he writes, not as a set of binding laws, but as acommitment, an attitude, a mission. Duty compels the duly committed artist to pursue the guiding
principles suggested by an initial ‘cue’ or ‘germ’ of an idea, which is gradually realized in a piece ofwork as it becomes progressively autonomous.21 This cue or germ – a good idea in advance of its
realization, or aesthetic precognition – is ‘the pretext, the goal, the lure, which engages consciousness
in formal processes of transformation.’22 This is the sense in which every piece of work is ‘selfgoverning’, which in turn implies a cybernetic process of trial-and-error, ‘from the vague realm of
aspiration to a concrete awareness of the possibilities of the material at his disposal.’23
In a conversational struggle to distinguish between mere ‘illustration’ (i.e. hackwork) and superior‘invention’ (i.e. art), Francis Bacon once described this ‘life’ as characterized by minimal caution andsurplus instinct:
What has never yet been analysed is why this particular way ofpainting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has
a life completely of its own. It lives on its own like the image one’s

	
  
18

Eco, op. cit., p. 144.

19

Ibid., p. 158.

20

Ibid., p. ix, fn. 2.

21‘Autonomous’ here meaning ‘that which is free, but gives a law to itself’, a definition drawn from: Douglas Burnham,
An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 70.

22

Susan Sontag, ‘On Style’, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), pp. 33–4.

23

Ibid.

	
  

16

trying to trap; it lives on its own and therefore transfers theessence of the image more poignantly.24

This is key: both the object-under-scrutiny and the subject-of-capture are equivalent, sovereign entities,
and both are marked by blatant idiosyncrasy.
It follows from all this that, in Pareyson’s view, the artist ought not be conceived as a genius-seer
who summons fully formed revelations, but a producer who realizes-in-action. The same idea was
advocated around the same time by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Author as Producer’ (1936),
and later elaborated with endless nuance in T.W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (posthumously publishedin 1970). For Benjamin and Adorno, as for Pareyson and Eco, artistic creation is not merely or
primarily a mental phenomenon conjured in the mind of the maker, but rather a plastic process inwhich a given medium is acted upon, manipulated and transformed. This is by no means an arbitrary
procedure; on the contrary, it requires a correct response to the unfolding work – and here is the firstinkling of the ‘ethics’ that underpin Eco’s conception of authenticity.
The development of any piece of work obviously involves making choices – a platitude that art
historian Thierry de Duve has formulated as follows: ‘If the word art means making, and if making
means choosing, then we are left to draw the most general conclusion possible: art means choosing.’25
De Duve is in fact paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp, who, in a conversation about his readymades,
proclaimed that
The word ‘art’, etymologically speaking, means to make (...) Now what
is making? Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red(...) choosing the place to put it on the canvas, it’s always choosing(...) Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.26

The choice implied by Pareyson, however, is not simply synonymous with ‘preference’, which implies
something subjective and superfluous. Crucially, it derives from the work-in-progress. This kind of‘choice’ is integral, ingrained, and so in some sense pre-ordained. Hence the decisions made along theway of the work can be plausibly conceived of as more or less faithful to principles immanent in theemerging work.
Pareyson calls it ‘formativity,’ and the idea is analogous to what contemporary French philosopher
Alain Badiou calls ‘fidelity to the event’. The ‘event’ in this case is, again, something like the founding‘germ’, ‘cue’, or ‘intuition’ of an idea in advance of its realization as a piece of work. According to
Badiou’s very particular ontology, as set out in such as Being and Event (1988),27 philosophicalthinking ‘assembles truth’ relative to one of four fundamental ‘conditions’: Science, Politics, Love, andArt. Philosophy is thus conceived as a meta-domain that only exists in counterpoint to these conditions,and the sole means of refracting their respective truths is by reflecting on them via what he calls ‘truth
procedures’. Crucially, these procedures are always timely and specific. Truth is gleaned in action andnever hoarded into doctrine – an emphatically non-axiomatic philosophy.
Moreover, each of Badiou’s four conditions manifests a discrete and specific type of truth which– to continue using his terms – is revealed only when an ‘event’ ruptures an otherwise indiscernible
situation, and this rupture is pointed at (or ‘named’). In other words, when someone or somethingregisters an unprecedented way of perceiving the world, and so instigates a potential paradigm shift interms of how we think about things. These events occur at all levels, from minor quotidian happenings
to major structural shifts, both personal (a love affair) and public (a social revolution). The determining

	
  
24

Quoted in: Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2010), p. 79.

25

Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 162.

26

Ibid., p. 161.

27

Alain Badiou, Being and Event [1988, French] (New York: Continuum, 2005).

	
  

17

factor is simply that the event exceeds existing value systems; there is no way to immediately judge,
contain or otherwise ‘domesticate’ it. And precisely because such an event is no longer commensuratewith any existing measure, it may be pursued with greater or lesser fidelity relative only to itself – thatis, to the essence of the original rupture.
Badiou discusses the ‘truth procedures’ specific to the Art condition in his Handbook of Inaesthetics(1988). ‘Inaesthetic’ is his term for the true art event inasmuch as it contradicts existing aesthetic
conventions, something like ‘an unprecedented creative idea’.28 It bears repeating that for Badiou thetruth procedure is always strictly a procedure – which is to say a one-off, occurring in the moment andcontingent on the specifics of a given situation. (Badiou calls it ‘generic’.) Hence it is futile to conceiveof a general rule to validate the fidelity; it is possible only to sketch an overarching concept as a frame
through which to consider each new case.29
Both Badiou’s fidelity-to-an-event and Pareyson’s organic formativity conjure the promiscuous
metaphor of DNA, obligatory shorthand for all contemporary phenomena involving some kind of
immanent anticipatory code. To discover the legitimate form of a given piece of work is to properly
realize a trajectory according to a sovereign law that is already inscribed – a law that guides andvalidates those decisions made by the duly attuned artist along the way. Consider this in light of thefollowing definition of ethics by the German critic Jan Verwoert:[While] Morals are the set of values which a society and those who
rule it declare to be binding for all that live in that society (...)
Ethics is about the attitude to life that is immanent to – andmanifests itself through – the particular way people live their life.
Your ethical principles reveal themselves in the particular style of
how you go about what you do. In art and intellectual discourse, styleis ethos and ethos style.30

As an active Marxist, Walter Benjamin was committed to the notion that the technologies ofmanufacture – the ‘means of production’ – ought to be owned by the people who operate them.
In ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934),31 rather than the usual focus on factories and workers, he considers
the same idea in view of a socially committed art. Writing and the other arts, he writes, are always
grounded in social structures such as educational institutions and publishing networks, and though thesocially-conscious and politically-engaged intellectual may query how his (or anyone else’s) work
stands in relation to these structures, this is not enough; he needs to query rather how it stands in them.
Benjamin demands that intellectuals refrain from merely adopting political ‘content’ and propagating
an ideological cause, and instead work to transform the root-level means by which their work is
produced and circulated. This approach, he concludes, will inevitably manifest what he deems to be a‘correct’ political tendency.
Benjamin’s first case study in ‘The Author as Producer’ is the Soviet writer Sergei Tretiakov, who
lived and worked on an agricultural commune for extended periods before writing his experiences up
into a novel. He is offered as an exemplary ‘operative writer’, who actively implicated himself in thematter at hand, as opposed to the common hack who merely observes and ‘gives information’.

	
  
28

Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics [1998, French] (Stanford University Press, 2004).

29

Similarly, Kant claims that the artist ‘does not himself know how the ideas for [the work] have entered into his head, nor has
he it in his power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate the same to others in such precepts as would
put them in a position to produce similar products.’ For Kant, the ‘rule’ that verifies art ‘cannot be set down in a formula [...]
for then the judgment upon the beautiful would be determinable according to concepts. Rather the rule must be gathered from theperformance, i.e. from the product [...] a model [...] not for imitation but for following.’ Immanuel Kant, The Critique ofJudgement [1790] (Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 171.

30

Jan Verwoert, ‘Politics Must be Invented’, Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (Berlin: Sternberg Press,
2010), p. 103.

31

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’ [1934, German], Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969).

	
  

18

Benjamin’s preferred example, though, is his immediate contemporary and colleague, Bertolt Brecht,
who subverted orthodox drama by way of his Epic Theatre’s celebrated ‘distancing’ effects –leaving the lights on, allowing the audience to smoke, renouncing expository narrative and instead
presenting a series of objective situations in order that spectators draw their own conclusions. Via theseand other manipulations of technique, Brecht transformed ‘the functional relation between cast andaudience, text and production, director and actor.’
Necessarily leading by his own and others’ example, then, Benjamin urges artists to reconsider theirrole away from prevailing norms, job descriptions, professional conventions, and outside expectations
generally. What might the work of a constructively minded ‘writer’ involve? Are the abilities to distill
an opinion and turn a phrase adequately deployed via the regular mediums, like (say) newspaper
columns, books, journals and pamphlets – or might they be more usefully channelled through writing(say) captions to photographs, scripts for plays, or screenplays for movies; or indeed by renouncing
writing altogether and taking up photography instead? Hence the essay’s title, ‘The Author as
Producer’ is also its proposition – that the writer should be less a hemmed-in author and more a freeranging producer, closing the divide between her ‘intellectual’ and ‘material’ activities.

1.5: THE OPEN WORK’S AESTHETIC THEORY:
ART AS A KIND OF SOCIAL WORKThe sixth chapter of The Open Work is called ‘Form as Social Commitment’, a title that promises ananswer to a question which, for the time being at least, ought to be read with automatic scare quotes:
In what sense exactly might form be said to ‘commit’ itself ‘socially’?
I say this only because I more readily concur with contemporary Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie, whosays that ‘social engagement within art today is more often than not a form of trompe l’oeil.’32 Still, theaim here is to drive for convincing responses to these questions without being cynical, pretentious, ordeluded.
The question could be slightly elaborated thus: What is the actual relationship between working inaesthetics and positively affecting the community-at-large? Or again, abiding my own vested interests:
What does a genuinely socially constructive art or design or hybrid practice look like in the second
decade of the 21st century?
Eco was originally commissioned in 1962 to write the piece that became ‘Il modo di formare come
impegno sulla realtà’ (literally, ‘The Way of Forming as Commitment to Reality’) for two special
issues of the Italian journal Il Menabó (‘Dummy’, in the sense of a model, template or blueprint) on therelationship between literature and industry. Eco used the opportunity to assemble an aesthetic theory
to underpin his earlier survey of Open Works, and so too the book that eventually incorporated bothpieces.
The resulting essay, ‘Form as Social Commitment’, articulates what David Robey sums up as theavant-garde’s ‘special political function’. Eco was, however, careful to point out that in the formula
proposed by his theory, art ‘understands but doesn’t remedy’ and should be considered political only tothe limited extent that aesthetic practice prioritizes gesture over action. In other words, it works,
consciously or not, to render visible what might otherwise remain invisible and possibly pernicious.
The extent to which the products of Eco’s approach can be deemed ‘progressive’ – or simply ‘good
work’ – in a broader ethical or social sense is therefore according to their capacity to

	
  
32

Lucy McKenzie, Chêne de Weekend (Cologne: Walther König, 2009), p. 12. The idea in context: ‘I do not wish for Victorianvalues; I merely propose that the independent artist need not necessarily be a global nomad bureaucrat. Rather something closer
to the classical artisan, but one who nevertheless creates their own language, relationship to commerce and self-definition.
Social engagement within contemporary art is itself a form of trompe l’oeil. I admit that my position in this is unclear,appropriate under one set of criteria and questionable under another. I currently enjoy work simultaneously as an independent
contractor for hire and as a fine artist in the normal habitat.’

	
  

19

provide our imagination with schemes without which we might not beable to understand a large part of our technical and scientificactivity – which would then really become alien to us, and assume
control over our lives.33

Eco’s thus formulates a value judgment. The approach he advocates is by no means the only way thatwhat goes under the name of ‘art’ is made, nor the most frequent, but, according to his measure ofusefully apprehending the world, the only meaningful one. Crudely put, we understand ourenvironment exclusively through our perception of it, and we perceive exclusively through forms(strictly speaking, all visible matter). It follows that we can only perceive the world adequately by
constantly advancing new ways of forming equivalent to it. Otherwise, we have no means toappropriately apprehend the ever-changing social environment.
‘Form as Social Commitment’ comprises two parts. Eco diagnoses a fundamental social dialectic in thefirst in order to articulate an aesthetic equivalent in the second. Together they support his claim for theparticular pertinence of Open Works from the vantage of 1962, though the theory is expansive enoughto ratify the authenticity of art in any era. Let’s summarize these two dialectical movements by moving,with Eco, from the general to the specific.

(a) Social dialectic: the necessary back and forth with the world
Eco begins by noting the then-current vogue of the word ‘alienation’, which propels a long rumination
on how its original meaning has shifted over time to something approaching the opposite. Specifically,
he considers Hegel’s use of the word in the first half of the 19th century via Marx’s critique of Hegel inthe second. In doing so he diagnoses two contradictory senses of ‘alienation’ entwined in modern usage– and so too a paradox lived in our daily experience.
Hegel’s sense of ‘alienation’, he says, denotes a positive objectification, in which a person identifies
with an object or situation and so becomes one with it in order to effectively use or engage it.
Conversely, Marx’s version refers to a negative dissolution in which one loses oneself in the sameprocess and is perniciously acted upon as the object or situation takes control.
And in his meta-reading of both, Eco wonders – through Marx’s eyes – how Hegel could have been so
naive. He concludes that from the vantage of Marx’s epoch, dominated by an industrialization that wasbarely underway during Hegel’s, the consequences of alienation had become immeasurably more
pronounced; that’s to say, increasingly complex and with myriad knock-on effects. The semantic slidefrom a positive to a negative sense of ‘alienation’ can thus be simply seen as reflecting this change inkind. Where Hegel innocently conceived of alienation in terms of, say, becoming one with a spade inorder to extend the body’s capabilities, Marx had since witnessed the mature consequences of such‘prosthetics’ once developed into machines, then factories of machines where people were not justusefully alienated into objects as before, but now perniciously alienated into entire systems – andconsequently from the products of their labour.
Crucially, Eco’s overview is neither positive nor negative. He transcends the Hegel-good/Marx-bad
dichotomy, surmising that the situation is incontrovertibly dialectical and inevitable, with no possibilityof escape. ‘To modern man,’ he writes, ‘alienation is as much a given as weightlessness is to an
astronaut’34 – a foregone conclusion. Otherwise put, the vicious circle of alienation is tautologous withthe human condition itself, and the only way to reasonably address the situation is by meeting it headon, by participating in it. Not in order to ‘conquer’ it – which is impossible, futile – but to temporarilytranscend it.

	
  
33

Eco, op. cit., p. 157.

34

Ibid., p. 136.

	
  

20

What’s important here – the enlightened perspective according to Eco – is to never lose sight of theoverall situation. Although alienation is irremediable, insurmountable, the choice to participate is atleast a choice. Consequently, an individual’s conception of social interaction is either deluded (that theforces of social alienation are absolutely hostile) or aware (that the situation is necessarily dialectical).
And while this is an intellectual disposition, it has practical consequences: for Eco, only theappropriately aware individual has, if not the capacity to overcome then at least the capacity toconsistently transform their situation – in which case they are never wholly disaffected. This is as goodas it gets, Eco concludes with a shrug, and it’s not that bad.35
He illustrates the point with the example of citizenship. An individual necessarily relinquishes his or
her individuality in order to participate as a member of a social group (to whatever end, whether
personal/selfish or communal/benevolent). In doing so, they are obliged to enter into any number oflabyrinthine and more often than not malevolent social systems beyond their immediate control, i.e. all
the familiar bugbears of the social contract. However, the situation is bearable and sustainable, he says,
as long as he or she bears in mind that his or her dissolution is temporary, contingent, and generally ameans to ultimately desirable longer-term or larger-scale ends, i.e. as long as he or she first realizes andthen remembers to remember that it is both possible and inevitable that the communal citizen will flip
back to sovereign individual.
The individual can thus resist being truly or totally alienated by merely maintaining awareness of thisdialectic, which obtains at all levels of social relations – domestic, industrial and political. Admittedly,
this point of view assumes a certain degree of social agency and latitude already, in the sense that it’s
hard to conceive how it might convincingly apply to the radically repressed or underprivileged. In his
defence, Eco made it clear that he was writing specifically and explicitly from within, and about, arelatively advanced western milieu from the earnest vantage of the early 1960s.
All of which boils down to the trite truism that critical consciousness is a tool for psychic survival.
The fact that it’s trite doesn’t stop it being true, or difficult to maintain, or useful to try to explicate here
apropos of art.
In ‘A Walk in Thin Air’ (2010), a meditation on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, curator and critic
Dieter Roelstraete points out that contemporary art is precisely the domain where the free speculationof this critical consciousness occurs.36 (Adorno called it ‘the secularization of transcendence’.) Art isthus conceived as the playground of critical consciousness, where those with the benefit of Eco’s
enlightened perspective, the supposedly self-aware and non-deluded, go to get outside or above or
beyond themselves – ideally depositing artistic gestures along the way. For Roelstraete, the metamascot of this place is the aloof protagonist of Caspar David Friedrich’s über-Romantic 1818 painting,Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

	
  
35

Eco’s resignation here recalls philosopher Richard Rorty’s retort to critics of his outspoken relativism (the most notorious
example being the idea that Nazism was only relatively evil – it all depends on your point of view) which involves his
short-circuiting the charge that a given view can be dismissed as ‘merely’ relative by claiming all views are a priori relative.
The unbeatable logic of this argument divides people into two groups: the congnoscenti who are aware that all is relative, and thedupes who are unaware and so extra-oppressed.

36

Dieter Roelstraete, ‘A Walk in Thin Air’, Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010.

	
  

21

(b) Aesthetic dialectic: the necessary conflict with formal conventions
A few pages ago I outlined Eco’s mentor Luigi Pareyson’s concept of ‘formativity’, in which artworks
are conceived as ‘organisms’ that are nurtured or ‘worked out’ during the process of production.
I mentioned, too, that Pareyson’s ideas were opposed to Benedetto Croce’s notion of art as vision, yet
Pareyson’s theory itself remains in the abstract aether of idealist philosophy. Eco’s goal in ‘Form as
Social Commitment’ was thus to explicate Pareyson’s concept – and the ethics implied – in view ofmore clearly materialist, applied ends.
According to Eco, the pseudo, false or inauthentic art practice consists in merely rearranging existing
forms. Through force of repetition and familiarity, the cognitive and communicative potential ofaesthetic conventions inevitably weakens, their transformative power expires, and they harden intoclichés. The result is irrelevant art, dead on arrival.
The literary critic Gabriel Josipovici has recently recounted, for instance, how early 20th-century
writers conceived of the 19th-century narrative novel as perceptually inadequate. This conviction, hesays, was less thought than felt – an intuition rather than an ideology. Those avant-gardists who‘feel at the level of form’, he continues, sense that ‘a certain language game can no longer be played’,37
that the old forms ‘cannot really satisfy us, since they do not speak to our condition.’38
The art critic Robert Garnett describes the same moment. Long before theory, he writes, art ‘senses’
when a problem has become a false problem – that is, when it has become a ‘critical’ or ‘academic’problem, at which point ‘it’s time to go elsewhere, to create new problems.’39 Art knowingly
problematizes in order to freshly perceive.
Eco’s prime caricature of the conventional and so socially irrelevant artist is ‘the man who writes the
lyrics for Liberace’ – a cipher for anyone who regurgitates slight variations on long-familiar tropes.
Likewise, in a later chapter on poetry, he laments the situation in which the word ‘September’ invokes
an immediate shortlist of rhyming words that immediately constrict the work’s scope: remember,ember, November, December. Once-generative conventions (in this case the rhyming couplet) becomerote templates and artistic straitjackets. Recalling the imperative of his social dialectic, ‘as much agiven as weightlessness is to an astronaut’, Eco asserts that this aesthetic regression is similarly
inevitable and unavoidable. His advice for how to deal with it is the same, too: first be aware of thefact, then stay on top of it.
The ‘socially committed’ artist in Eco’s estimation is one who takes such artistic questions seriously,40
in the sense that he or she worries over their work’s actual transformative impact in a given milieu.
They can therefore be considered ‘truth-seeking’ in the sense of chasing some verisimilitude to lived
experience. This doesn’t necessarily imply mimesis, analogy or allegory, only some sense in which thework itself lives. Stereotypes, conventions and orthodoxies, says Eco, confirm an established order ofthings. Such orderly form isn’t a bad thing per se, but only valid – i.e. adequately perceptive andrepresentative – in an accordingly orderly culture. In circumstances otherwise characterized bydisorder, uncertainty, chaos and fragmentation, i.e. those that mark our modern world, so-called‘stable’ forms are conspicuously false and so again inauthentic.41

	
  
37

Josipovici, op. cit., p. 167.

38

Ibid., p. 164.

39

Robert Garnett, review of ‘John Russell, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow’, frieze no. 96, January/February 2006.

40(which isn’t at all the same thing as those who make serious-seeming work; more often than not the opposite, in fact).

41

Robey points out that Eco stops short at suggesting how (according to what measure, exactly) we might judge forms as pasttheir expiration date, or, conversely, on what grounds we can conceive of artworks as adequately transformative. Eco admits
upfront, however, that his only concern in The Open Work is to set out a general theory, not to use it to evaluate specific cases.

	
  

22

Eco is, however, alert to a double bind: namely, that ‘it is impossible to describe a situation by meansof a language that is not itself expressed by that situation’. In other words, whatever forms might
conceivably qualify as un-conventional, anti-orthodox or counter-sentimental, and so constitute the sortof work Eco variously advocates as authentic, pertinent, and so on, cannot be generated in a vacuum.
These exemplary forms must derive from the existing inventory too, as more or less drastic
modifications to it, simply because that existing inventory is the very premise of communication, is
what makes communication possible at all. All languages, including formal ones, are by definition setsof conventions and so categorically communal. So-called ‘new’ forms of communicating can therefore
only ever be greater or lesser bastardizations of the old ones.
This is the bottom line of Eco’s argument: the quality that distinguishes authentic from inauthentic
forms – to be duly assembled into living, moving art – is the artist’s ability to actively, profoundlytransform extant matter rather than passively, superfluously rearrange it. In either case, the process isnecessarily derivative, second-hand. This recalls Lukacs’ description of the essay as always based on‘something already formed, or at best, with something that has been’. The essayer, he writes, ‘gives a
new order to such things as once lived’, and, bound to them, ‘must always speak “the truth” about
them, find, that is, the expression for their essence.’42
Eco’s aesthetic dialectic consists in this double bind, which is analogous to the insurmountable social
one already described. First, the committed avant-garde artist participates in the world in order totruthfully ‘describe’ it. To this end she necessarily engages with the prevailing world of forms (whatelse could she do?) and so in terms of Hegel’s dialectic, positively alienates herself into them.
However, in perceiving these conventional modes as ineffectual, as read in terms of Marx’s dialectic,
the committed avant-garde artist becomes negatively alienated from them; at which point her proper
response is to push, manipulate, pervert and distort those same conventions. In doing so she newly
communicates through the manner of that pushing, trailing artworks in public as cognitive tools withwhich an audience might usefully apprehend, ideally comprehend, and ultimately bend contemporary
conditions.43
Adorno similarly writes that moral attitudes are immanent in ways of working, best conceived of as‘ethical procedures’ than ‘moral pronouncements’.44 A properly autonomous art is paradoxical, he says,
inasmuch as it can be considered ‘social’ by virtue of its very opposition to society: ‘By crystallizing in
itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as“socially useful” it criticizes society by merely existing’, therefore: ‘What is socially decisive inartworks is the content that becomes eloquent through the work’s formal structures’.45 This is the sensein which art performs its obscure brand of ‘social work’, and Adorno stresses that there is no need toapologize for the lack of direct action. Artworks barely ever intervene politically in any direct sense,
he says; their social effect is rather ‘an extremely indirect participation in spirit that by way ofsubterranean processes contributes to social transformation’.46 Such transformation of consciousness
is no less practical for being barely apprehensible.
So where the social dialectic involves an inevitable back and forth with the world, the aesthetic
equivalent involves an analogous struggle with the world of forms. This is the condition of modern art

	
  
42

George Lukács quoted in: Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, op. cit., p. 151, fn. 2.

43

Vladimir Nabokov puts it this way: ‘What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage,
which becomes a new mir [‘world’ in Russian] by the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in.’ Vladimir
Nabokov, Strong Opinions [1973] (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 112.

44

See for instance the ‘Society’ section of: T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970, German], (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997).

45

Ibid., p. 230 (my italics).

46

Ibid., p. 242 (my italics).

	
  

23

that, to repeat Eco’s social resolve, is as good as it gets and not that bad. The artist Paul Chan recently
summed up this ‘speculative form of revelation’ in a single word: spirit.47
It’s worth adding that while this theory at least implies that the relative potency of forms follows
a one-way process of dialectical progression, in convoluted practice their use-value tends to fluctuate.
Used-up forms become recharged when clichés are potentially put to useful work as clichés, performedin new ways under new conditions. To paraphrase the archaeologist and art historian George Kubler,
the situation is more knot than arrow.
But Eco’s point is not to divide the world of forms into new and potent versus old and impotent, which
would be to fall back into the pernicious obsession with hoarding definitions at the expense offluctuating pragmatics. Like Adorno’s sense of ‘essay’, he is rather oriented towards the empirical andspecific rather than the abstract and general, concerned only to consider their efficacy in actual
practice.

1.6: AUTHENTIC ART IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE –‘AT THE LEVEL OF STRUCTURE’
In The Open Work’s introductory ‘Poetics’ chapter, Eco had already described how authentic art
mirrors dominant ways of perceiving the world, from the comparatively fixed, hierarchical conceptionof the cosmos in the Middle Ages, through the shift from tactile to visual that marked thecomparatively ‘Copernican’ art of the Baroque era. By further contrast, the worldview of Eco’s own
Modern age is foremost determined by industrialization and characterized by instability. In a context
dominated by mass-production, says Eco, art progressively transforms – and so authenticates – itself by
operating at the level of structure, in an explicitly machinic manner, ‘through the way it organizes its
constituents rather than through what those constituents themselves represent.’48
Adorno concurs in Aesthetic Theory that, properly conceived, ‘modern’ art has nothing to do withchronology. ‘Modern’ does not simply mean the latest, newest thing; it refers (or ought to refer) rather
to work in which ‘the most progressive and differentiated technical procedures are saturated with themost progressive and differentiated experiences.’ For Adorno, aesthetic procedures are ‘critical’ to theextent that they duplicate contemporaneous social ones, and to this end, truly modern works
must show themselves to be the equal of high industrialism, not simply
make it a topic. Their own comportment and formal language must react
spontaneously to the objective formal situation.49

Take the previously mentioned 20th-century novelist who, on perceiving the conventional 19th-century
romance to be an outdated, impotent format, focuses his attention away from the surface plot andtowards its underlying mechanics. (Canonical examples here would include such as Joyce’s Ulysses(1922) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).) The same vanguard sensibility in music resulted inequivalent developments ‘at the level of structure’, such as Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system (in the
1920s) and, later, new ways of scoring compositions and performances (John Cage in the 1950s,
Cornelius Cardew in the 1960s). In painting, the proto-modernist movements of the late 19th and early
20th centuries (Impressionism, Cubism etc.) became preoccupied with technique and structure tovariously manifest the apparatus of perception, followed by the Abstract Expressionists’ focus on the
picture plane itself (from the 1940s on). Marcel Duchamp had already inaugurated the same shift in the

	
  

47

‘This speculative form of revelation that unveils the seemingly inevitable course and consequence of a society progressing
over time by virtue of an unending conflict that pits itself against its own best – which is to say, human – interests, has anillustrious name in the history of ideas. It is called spirit.’ Paul Chan, ‘The Spirit of Recession’. October, no. 129, Summer 2009,
p. 6.

48
49

Eco, op. cit., p. xiv.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit. For Adorno, art refracts social changes by way of what he says is a perennial paradox:‘a spontaneous reaction that is a norm’.

	
  

24

meta-medium of the art system as early as 1917 (with the Fountain). In all these cases, and many morethat followed in their wake, the work is definitively centred on its workings.
Eco’s key examples in The Open Work include the ‘Aeolus’ chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses (which, set in
the offices of a Dublin newspaper, is written in clipped journalese punctuated by headlines) andMichelangelo Antonioni’s film Eclipse (which, set against the backdrop of the Italian stockmarket,
involves listless characters who act in apparently random ways that mimic the unaccountablefluctuation of the economy). In these works, as in all Eco’s other ‘open’ examples, formal techniqueduplicates subject matter, or vice versa, to the extent that structure and substance are indistinct.
In Badiou’s view, too, modern art’s ‘events’ are no longer achieved through representation, allegory or
symbolism (as they have been potently in the past), but by transfiguring root-level operations – the‘technics’ by which things are made manifest. In the Handbook of Inaesthetics he writes that themodern poem, for instance, is not merely ‘a thought offered up in the flesh of language’, but rather ‘theset of operations whereby this thought comes to think itself.’50 Again, this necessitates drawing
attention to the given medium’s thought processes, its way of thinking; and once again, too, the artwork
is conceived as an organic, vitalist entity with a life of its own.
For Badiou, Mallarmé is archetypical of this specifically modern approach, the poet’s signature selfreflexivity tautologous with poetry itself. A whole chapter of the Handbook is devoted to Mallarmé’s‘Afternoon of a Faun’, in which the protagonist faun contemplates chasing a couple of nymphets;
meanwhile, at a more subterranean level of consciousness – which seems as obscure to the faun as it isto the reader – he simultaneously chases the desire of the chase, which is, in turn, analogous to the
pursuit of the poem itself. What we might ordinarily identify as the poem’s discrete form and content
are here a single coefficient.
Otherwise put, ‘Afternoon of a Faun’ is only nominally about its ostensible subject matter, because
Mallarmé isn’t attempting to capture (represent) that subject matter as much as capture (freeze-frame)
his own process of capturing. And this self-reflexivity can’t be dismissed as gratuitous, or
masturbatory, because the act of artistic capture duplicates an equivalent theme of capture in the poem.
It serves a distinct function. Mallarmé is out to grasp ‘the opposite of mimesis’ because ‘the poem
surpasses … what the sensible is incapable of itself’. He’s using form as a way of thinking.
It bears repeating that for Badiou this isn’t merely an account of a certain type of self-reflexive art,
but of modern art generally, with Mallarmé as a notably prescient example and influence. This is abackwards way of saying that all modern art is fundamentally self-reflexive, or at least that it isproduced from within an unavoidably self-conscious milieu and hence any art that attempts someverisimilitude to lived experience is unavoidably marked by the fact. Or again: once self-consciousness
is manifest in aesthetic practice, it is impossible to return authentically – without contrivance – to aprior state of relative innocence or ignorance. All subsequent authentic art must admit this premise,
which Adorno called ‘second reflection’:
It is the opposite of its usual philosophical concept (...) wherereflection means burdening artworks down with intentions. Second
reflection lays hold of the technical procedures, the language of theartwork in the broadest sense, but it aims at blindness.51

In contrast to traditional art, which was ‘arranged and calculated’, Adorno continues, ‘new art accentsthe once hidden element of being something made, something produced’. And precisely because thiswork flaunts its production process, the product is necessarily unresolved – it precludes closure. Every

	
  
50

Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, op. cit., p. 21.

51

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 27.

	
  

25

such work, he says, ‘is virtually what Joyce declared Finnegans Wake to be before he published thewhole: work in progress’.52
Inasmuch as it ‘registers’ the world rather than ‘makes pronouncements about it’, art approached withthe sense of ‘social commitment’ described above will inevitably reflect the vanguard concerns of otherfields. It’s therefore no coincidence, says Eco, that Open Works occur around the same time as thetheory of relativity, the revolutionary worldview of which is expressed in other domains in terms suchas ‘field’ in physics, ‘entanglement’ in quantum mechanics, ‘chaos’ in mathematics, and ‘possibility’ inphilosophy. All describe new ways of conceiving cause-and-effect as a dynamic and complex process,rather than a rigid and unidirectional one; a worldview that emphasizes subjectivity, indeterminacy,
and how context influences behaviour.

1.7: INTRINSIC AND SOCIAL – TWO CASE STUDIES
So far I’ve been pursuing, through the lens of Eco’s ideas, two apparently distinct and even seemingly
contradictory lines of argument concerning what makes for what has been variously described asauthentic, truthful or simply ‘good’ work: on one hand, the idea that such authenticity is derived fromthe intrinsic nature of a given piece of work, as is the case with Pareyson’s organic formativity,
Badiou’s fidelity, vitalism, and all those concepts summarized by the metaphor of DNA immanent in agiven piece of work; and on the other, that such authenticity is assembled relative to the particularsocial and historical context, as is the case in describing the dialectical back and forth with the world
and the corollary world-of-forms.
In fact, these ideas are not mutually exclusive, but far more co-dependent (or, ironically, chicken-andegg) than this DNA metaphor suggests, because that DNA is not, so to speak, ‘autonomous’, but itself
equally determined by the social and historical situation. Adorno repeats the same dialectical refrain
throughout Aesthetic Theory: the ‘dual nature’ of artworks as being simultaneously ‘autonomous
structures’ and ‘social phenomena’.53 This twofold character of art ‘severs itself from empirical reality
and thereby from society’s functional context’ (= strives towards autonomy as a fully-formed thing-initself according to its own laws) yet is at the same time ‘part of empirical reality and society’s
functional context’ (= grapples with extant conventions in view of their potent transformation andapplication).
The duality is tangled up with the distinction between art and design mentioned in §1.2. Let’s pause
here to describe the nature of this knot (rather than try to untie it).

	
  
52

Ibid., p. 26.

53

Ibid., p. 248.

	
  

26

Representing ‘design’ for the sake of elaborating this distinction, consider this modest postcard-sizedpiece of work by the typographer Anthony Froshaug. It’s a sample chart, an inventory of metal typein his own workshop, printed to show what’s available and possible: a table of tools. The various
elements are clearly configured according to their relational meaning; arranged, that is, according toa ‘logic’ immanent in the raw material, the information to be conveyed. Hierarchically, the types aregrouped first according to historical style (the four categories set to read vertically up the left edge:
Moderns, Egyptians, etc.), then, within these sets, listed roughly according to size from small to large,
grouped in families (roman, italic, bold, etc.) and coloured black or red according to availability.
The whole is organized around a central axis that proffers examples of each typeface (A’s, 1’s and,
where available, fractions), with sizes-in-stock set in a matrix that runs off to the left andsupplementary data (year designed, designer) to the right.
It’s plain to see, therefore, how the subject matter of the card (the material possibilities of a particularpress) along with the card’s specific purpose (to show it as clearly and quickly in as small a space aspossible) have determined what I propose we can therefore conceive of as an ‘authentic’ configuration– in the sense that it has been articulated ‘true’ to the intrinsic nature of the information, according to
its relational meaning. However, this also means that the configuration functions in the first place
according to the extrinsic, communal conventions of language.

And in (temporary) contradistinction, here’s a work of ‘art’ by Michelangelo Pistoletto called Struttura
per parlare in piedi (Structure for Talking While Standing, 1965–66), one of a series of so-called‘Minus Objects’, each of which was conceived as materially and conceptually distinct from the rest.
Given that the objects’ sole shared quality was to be designated part of the group, the collective title issardonically recursive: one of intentions of the series was to protest the market-friendly imperative tocultivate a signature style. An accompanying statement further explains that objects are conceived lessas additions to the world-of-things and more subtractions from Pistoletto’s mind-of-ideas, hence the‘minus’. The Struttura in particular is deliberately poised between sculpture and furniture, at once
poetic and practical. Finally, the objects were initially exhibited crowded together in Pistoletto’s own
studio, which further added to their ambiguous – indeed, open – status.
All told, I consider the Struttura a clear, even exaggerated, illustration of the struggle with prevailing
artistic conventions (against the necessity of a signature style, of sculpture conceived as non-functional
objects, of the aura of the gallery space, etc.). At the same time, such extrinsic ‘social’ gestures relating
to the art historical situation are channelled through a piece of work assembled according to certain
intrinsic formal reasoning just as decisive as that which governs the design of Froshaug’s card, such as
the frame’s structure, scale, weight, and finish – all of which are rendered as minimally and efficiently
as possible; which is to say, without surplus.

	
  

27

To elaborate: first, both works are naturally developed from an initial impulse. In the case of design wecan call this a brief, and in the case of art an insight. In design, the ‘generating logic’ of a piece of workis thus given and responsive, supplied by a third party; namely, the job, situation or problem to beworked out (like Froshaug’s card). In art, on the other hand, the equivalent ‘generating logic’ of a pieceof work is not exactly given but something closer to conjured or elicited; that is, drawn from an idea or
impulse originating in the artist himself (like Pistoletto’s frame). Reasonably enough, we commonly
consider the outcome of design as a more or less practical solution to a brief, and of art as a more orless metaphorical articulation of an insight.
That said, while work under the umbrella of design is habitually thought of as more subservient toexternal, ‘objective’ conditions, requirements and restrictions, a similar set of extrinsic forces are justas decisive in art – not issued as direct demands of a brief, but in response to a more obscure or covert
sources, i.e. the dialectical development of forms relative to the trajectory of art history, as describedearlier. And, mirroring this line of reasoning, while art is habitually thought of as derived from internal,‘subjective’ impulses, intuitions and sublimations, a similar set of intrinsic forces are just as decisive indesign, only in the less immediately obvious sense that communication necessarily involves deriving
meaning from the pool of common sense, i.e. the shared conventions of language – whether verbal orgraphic.
So where ‘good’ or ‘authentic’ design in the sense I want to argue for here (such as Froshaug’s card)means fidelity to both the content (the willingness and ability to assimilate the particular demands ofthe material to be transformed, rendered legible and intelligible) and the context (mindful of audienceand circumstances, and adjusted accordingly), a corollary ‘good’ or ‘authentic’ art alludes to an
equivalent ‘fidelity to content’, which implies a readiness and ability to realize the formal potential ofan idea or insight, and an equivalent ‘fidelity to context’, which implies being mindful of the actual
effect of work on an audience in specific circumstances, including those of art history at any given
point. In short, where in design content and context are supplied by a third party, in art they arevoluntarily mined.
The less palpable point is that, as well as being by no means watertight, these distinctions aren’t
mutually exclusive either. It is in fact entirely possible (and desirable) to conceive of work that,while offering a functional solution to an external brief, also incorporates some sort of artful reflection.
This is one reason I prefer to speak in terms of ‘work’ rather than art or design – because such labels
carry presuppositions that serve to shut down the possibility of their productive confusion. These twopieces of work by Froshaug and Pistoletto exemplify this double condition: they are poetic andpractical, and hence blueprints for the sort of work I’ll be touting throughout the rest of my thesis.
By now it should be clear why the various ‘generating logics’ alluded to in this chapter presuppose avalue judgement, a measure of relative validity. Any given piece of work develops more or less inaccord with a design brief or artistic insight, or both, ideally sensitive to the specificity of the situation
and alert to the work’s likely effect; in which case, it can be deemed more or less correct.

1.8: SYNTHESIS: ‘OPPOSITES GRASPED IN THEIR UNITY’
Now to the particular implication of all the above that I mean to draw out.
If Eco’s chapter title ‘Form as Social Commitment’ implies the question, In what sense exactly mightform be said to ‘commit’ itself ‘socially’?, then an answer is inscribed in this fundamental aesthetic
principle:
the only meaningful way in which art can speak of man and his world isby organizing its forms in a particular way and not by making

	
  

28

pronouncements with them. Form must not be a vehicle for thought;
it must be a way of thinking.54

Logically speaking, it follows that the opposite approach, i.e. beginning with a relatively fixed end
in mind, a ‘statement’ or ‘message’, then casting about for a form with which to pronounce, express
or dress it, yields comparatively closed works. Eco never actually uses this counter-term himself;
it is merely implied. But in the threat of closed work, at least, initial content and eventual form areconceived as discrete and so seemingly equivocal. In an open process, there is no ‘initial’ and‘eventual’; form and content are necessarily symbiotic, hence apparently inevitable and unequivocal.
When form is a way – a means – of thinking, it is fundamentally misleading to conceive of a distinct‘content’, because form as thinking is content, a single entity, a tautology. This is where Eco’s generalaesthetic theory clearly aligns with and so supports his timely examples of Open Works. Form-asthinking demands an open-minded disposition, because it involves setting up the conditions for workto ‘play out’ in practice. Possibilities are opened up (as opposed to statements being laid down), andEco’s exemplary Open Workers – Stockhausen, Joyce, Mallarmé, Calder, Brecht, and so on – areemblematic of this approach.
Writing on the ‘necessity of formalism’ in 1971, Clement Greenberg appears to support the same idea:
Quality, aesthetic value, originates in inspiration, vision,‘content,’ not in ‘form ...’. Yet ‘form’ not only opens the way toinspiration; it can also act as a means to it; and technicalpreoccupations, when searching enough and compelled enough, cangenerate or discover ‘content ...’. That ‘content’ cannot be separated
from its form.55

Although written towards the end of his career and influence, this is congruent with Greenberg’s earlier
conception of modernist art published a decade earlier, the same year as Eco’s ‘Poetics’. There hefamously classified ‘Modernist Painting’ as
the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-criticaltendency that began with the philosopher Kant ... the use of thecharacteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline –not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its areaof competence.56

Greenberg’s pointing to ‘technical preoccupations’ echoes Eco’s account of artists operating ‘at thelevel of structure’. ‘In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience,’ says
Greenberg, ‘the poet or artist turns upon the medium of his own craft’. The way in which a piece ofwork is made becomes its theme (or one of them); means become ends. Thierry de Duve formulates
Greenberg’s observations this way:
The FORM of a work is what makes its SUBJECT MATTER visible and offers
access to its CONTENT or QUALITY.57

This statement usefully departs from the lazy habit of conflating ‘content’ and ‘subject matter’.
Greenberg’s ‘subject matter’ clearly refers to an ostensible topic or theme, while his ‘content’ is a lesstangible sum of such prosaic parts. And yet his definition still falls short inasmuch as form can’t be

	
  
54

Eco, op. cit., p. 142 (my italics).

55

Quoted in: De Duve, op. cit., pp. 209–10.

56

Ibid.

57

Ibid., p. 210.

	
  

29

written off as merely offering access, generating or discovering content. Form can also constitutecontent. Ultimately, it seems to me that any such attempt to dissemble art into discrete parts in this way
hinders rather than helps our getting a useful grip on the matter, and is prone to distort the sort ofdeliberately ambiguous art works recounted by Eco (and exemplified above by Pistoletto’s Struttura).
Whether artist or audience, how to avoid this reflex tendency to bifurcate the two?
While Eco and Greenberg were writing primarily from the perspective of making art (despite not being
makers themselves – at least not in a material sense), Susan Sontag wrote along similar lines from thepoint of view of observing it. In her 1965 essay ‘On Style’, she admonishes fellow critics who claim torenounce the supposedly passé distinction between a ‘pure’ content and its relatively ‘superfluous’form (i.e. the view that considers style a mere accessory to substance), only to unconsciously practicesuch dichotomous thinking in their own work.58 Such purportedly enlightened critics, she says, pay
little more than lip service to the idea while seeming to consider themselves ‘sufficiently protected by atheoretical disclaimer.’59 In this way they flaunt a double standard constituent of an orthodoxy that’s
deep-rooted enough to undermine all good intentions. Decent theory succumbs to bad practice.
This orthodoxy derives, in turn, she continues, from wrong-headed assumptions concerning therelationship between art and morality. On the face of it, it seems reasonable enough to conceive of theappearance of a work as essentially subservient to some kind of naked, pre-formalized conception(in advance of being ‘dressed’, so to speak), and that the work is therefore ‘about’ a distinct subject,or that it ‘represents’ one. This notion suggests that the work’s style, its formal manifestation, is merely
the visible tip of a submerged ‘content’ which requires some sort of interpretation to get at what’s
concealed (with or without a critic’s help). Keeping the iceberg in mind, we can consider this a verticalpremise – that is, of style as a pejorative façade, surface as a superfluous afterthought.
However, Sontag firmly argues the opposite case, i.e. that style, being the mark or register of volition,is that statement, the ostensible content. In other words, there is no underneath. The ‘iceberg’ is asingle, entirely visible entity – no obscuring waterline, no apparent tip, no nine-tenths of ‘content’
below. An aesthetic phenomenon only exists in any meaningful sense, in the gesture of its
formalization – when made public in some way, audible or visible. Sontag’s alternately horizontal
conception of a piece of work, then, consists in precisely all that is apparent and nothing more.
She writes thatpractically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on theinside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse
the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style ison the inside. (...) In almost every case, our manner of appearing is
our manner of being. The mask is the face.60

Sontag clarifies the point by explaining how the idea of a supposedly ‘neutral’ style is a misnomer,
because formal ‘transparency’ or ‘degree zero’ affectlessness – that of the so-called International Style,for instance – itself inevitably connotes a certain meaning, whether intended or not (passive,businesslike or mundane, for example). She describes the celebrated ‘white style’ of Albert Camus’s
novel The Stranger – ‘impersonal, expository, lucid, flat’ – as being entirely consistent with theprotagonist’s drained worldview.61 Here style is not merely a carrier of content; it epitomizes it. Again,
Sontag is at pains to point out that this is something ‘everyone knows or claims to know’, while theiractual work suggests otherwise,62 a discrepancy between theory and practice. And this is precisely her
point: to push for an integrated praxis, not merely in the gesture of the artwork, but in lived experience,

	
  

58

Susan Sontag, ‘On Style’, op. cit.

59

Ibid., p. 25.

60

Ibid., p. 26.

61

Ibid., p. 25.

62

Ibid., p. 25.

	
  

30

too; to claim exemplary artworks as models that might exert some influence on how we deal witheveryday ethics, how we live according to held principles.
Though immediately concerned with literary criticism, Sontag’s celebration of style readily applies
across the arts. ‘Style’ can thus be read as more or less synonymous with other ‘facing out’ terms like‘form’, ‘surface’, ‘rhetoric’, and so on. What Eco only insinuates, Sontag claims outright: that pertinent
criticism, like pertinent art (or indeed criticism conceived as art, as a form of thinking itself) necessarily
resists splitting its subject along a form/content fault line. What is perceived is content: appearance
is existence. There is no dichotomy. For Sontag, as for Eco, this amounts to a working ethos.
(There’s another sense in which ‘On Style’ duplicates The Open Work: When the essay was included in
the a volume of collected criticism Against Interpretation, a year after first appearing in print, it served,
together with the equally polemical title essay, as a statement of intent; the rest of the book thenproceeds to practice what this dual preface preaches, or at least sets itself up to be read in this light.)
Sontag does, however, admit a useful distinction between this expansive notion of style, form, etc.,
and what she calls ‘stylization’, meaning that which typically defines canonical movements like
Mannerism, Rococo or Art Nouveau that ‘in some obvious way cultivate style’.63 This kind of work,
she writes, is the result of making ‘the by no means inevitable distinction between matter and manner,
theme and form’. It is essentially a product of irony and ambivalence rather than earnestness andconviction – ‘of wilfulness rather than will’.64 Stylization is a fully conscious act, contrived in bothsenses of the word, and so implies a ‘closed’ work in contrast to Eco’s ‘open’ – less a meansof fostering thought, more a way of adorning a statement already conceived. Against this instrumental
conception of the artwork, she reminds the reader that
Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is athing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. (...)
the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form orstyle of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (likea fact or moral judgement) in itself.65

This is the supposedly outdated conception of morality in art that Sontag rallies against – of style, form
etc. as merely referential, tethered to moral opinion. Her exemplary modern artwork is a form ofknowledge produced in passing – that is, by moving through a working process without
preconceptions, and bearing the traces of choices made in the moment. Such work facilitates andrecords its own process: a form of character building.
The overarching project of contemporary philosopher Bruno Latour is pitted against the sort of binary
thinking denounced by Sontag. From a background in social anthropology, Latour has emerged as akind of professional polymath, out to dissolve categories and embrace the complex flux of present-day
hybrids, networks, coalitions and conglomerates. The most pressing duality under Latour’s attack is
one firmly rooted in Enlightenment thinking: Nature vs. Society. During the scientific revolution, he
explains, nature and society were considered discrete domains – and the grand project of ‘scientificreason’ accordingly worked towards the diagnosis, treatment and closure of their respective issues indifferent departments. And precisely because they were considered in isolation, the new paradigm was
fundamentally as distorted and malevolent as the medieval one it set out to supplant.66

	
  
63

Ibid., p. 27.

64

Ibid., p. 28 (my italics).

65

Ibid., p. 30.

66

More specifically, in Latour’s view the ‘official’ critical project instigated by Enlightenment-based positivism, and so that ofmodernity generally, proceeded along two contradictory lines: on one hand, a visible, culturally-sanctioned project of
purification (the separation of ‘society’ and ‘nature’); and on the other, a relatively covert mediation (the acknowledgement of
nature/society hybrids as bundles of fluid, interconnected issues involving both material and non-material ‘players’).

	
  

31

The same flawed thinking endures today, Latour continues; only now the dualism is not just pernicious
but quite possibly fatal if it continues to inform our approach to, say, global ecology – where so-called‘nature’ and so-called ‘society’ are of course inextricably entwined. Latour’s key work here is We Have
Never Been Modern (1991),67 which tells the story of how quickly and resiliently the objective,
irrefutable, stand-alone fact became the prime epistemological currency during the scientificrevolution. While the ‘matters of fact’ of scientific reason were useful in tearing down previously held
myths, he says, they simultaneously suppressed other ways of contemplating the world, and so too thepossibility of other ‘modes of existence’. He conceives of critique not in terms of diagnosis or problem
solving, more as a kind of coping mechanism, an attitude of orientation.
Much of Latour’s work is propelled by language, not least the recuperation of mundane or outmoded
terms. He argues, for instance, that we ought to supplant our misguided faith in these ‘matters of fact’
by instead trying to grasp the complexities of communal ‘matters of concern’, and calls for ways ofwriting, speaking and visualizing that circumscribe the actual, ephemeral and contingent nature of
networks, assemblies, allegiances, contingencies, vested interests and contradictions.68 Such chains oflike-minded words recur again and again in Latour’s writing, epitomizing the relentless connectivity,
overabundance, and flux of forces that constitute his worldview. Relations are considered in terms of‘things’ – a word etymologically rooted in ‘bundles of issues’ as opposed to sovereign ‘objects’; and hehas semi-seriously proposed a revolutionary ‘Compositionism’ – a term that playfully points to several
relevant linguistic neighbours such as combination, composure, compromise, and compost.69
Although Latour’s writing is concerned with The Critical Project in the broadest cultural sense, histhinking aligns easily enough with such as Eco’s and Sontag’s specifically aesthetic concerns. If Eco
advocates a holistic, ‘organic’ approach to producing artworks, and Sontag posits the same in terms ofcontemplating them, Latour’s philosophy neatly integrates the two. That’s to say, only by authentically(= accurately, appropriately) apprehending a situation or matter can it be authentically (= efficiently,
constructively) worked on towards transformation. In his summary prognosis, then, the pernicious
parallax of dualistic thinking can be corrected only by distributing our attention across the entire
scenography of a situation – taking in the fullest extent of how any given thing is composed, and howthat composition manifests itself. To this end, he recommends ‘kayaking’ between polarities:
The absence of a bridge is not such a problem. What counts is yourability to equip yourself with the right paraphernalia so that you cango down the river without drowning yourself. (...) you will probably
agree that the two riverbanks are bound to look rather different once
you apprehend both of them from the point of view of such a kayaking
movement forward. This flowing lateral direction, turned at 90 degrees
from the obsessive question of bridge-building is, if I am notmistaken, what William James has called ‘pure experience’.70

Whether conceived in terms of nature/society or form/content, I read this ‘pure experience’ as
synonymous with Eco’s sense of authenticity. That’s to say, it has nothing to do with overarching laws,
rules, or any of the other absolutes that Latour derides as the misleading holy grails of modern
thinking. On the contrary, it is always immanent in, and specific to, a given situation – a singular,
momentary ‘truth’ that is always fleeting (and necessarily ‘on hold’ in quotation marks).
All of which implies a further merger of another popular binary – that of theory/practice. The notion ofa critical maker is circular: a pertinent way of looking (contemplating, critiquing, theorizing) feeds apertinent way of working (producing, making, practising) that feeds a pertinent way of looking, and so

	
  
67

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [1991, French] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

68

For example see: Bruno Latour, What is the Style of Matters of Concern? (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2008).

69

Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’, New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 3, Summer 2010.

70

Latour, What is the Style of Matters of Concern?, op. cit., p. 14.

	
  

32

on. The self-swallowing Ouroborus, the snake-eating-its-own-tail, turns back on itself in the image ofmomentum performed as self-reflexivity; and the recurring attitude related throughout this chapter islikewise Ouroboric in the sense that it proposes a shift from a strict point of view to a more diffuse
awareness. It is predicated on, and perpetuates, a moving philosophy: form must be a way of thinking… thought must be a way of forming … and so on, and so on.
And so to end, a few questions in order to begin:
If Eco argues that authentic art is necessarily timely, and posits his deliberately ambiguous OpenWorks as exemplary, how long exactly is the Open Work’s moment: for the century or so following
the industrial revolution, bookended by, say, Mallarmé and Stockhausen? Or longer still – the entire
post-Enlightenment modern era, perhaps? Had it reached some kind of critical mass or apotheosis in
the early 1960s, or did it continue? More pointedly, does Eco’s 1962 poetics remain a valid way ofworking today; and if so, according to its own operating logic, the dialectical transformation of forms,
and with Latour’s ‘entire scenography of a situation’ in mind, what does this way of working look
like right now?

	
  

33

Cover of Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010

	
  

34

	
  

35

2: DOT DOT DOT

This is essentially a second, parallel introduction, intended to trace the genealogy of interests that
inform the present work up to the point of starting to write it. Far and away the main means of
exploring the ideas laid out in chapter 1 – form as a way of thinking, symbiotic form and content, theconfluence of aesthetics and ethics, and so on – has been the biannual arts journal Dot Dot Dot.
I co-founded the journal in 2000, then continued to edit it up to and including the final issue (#20) at
the end of 2010. However, inasmuch as a successor called Bulletins of the Serving Library immediately
continued with the same circle of contributors tapping the same cultural vein in the same format on thesame schedule, this issue was at most only ever pseudo-final.1 The point was purely rhetorical – partly
to flag certain structural shifts (root-level changes in our publishing mechanism, a slight adjustment ofeditorial priorities), but equally to stage a series of what were, for us, unusually candid reflections on
the publication’s gathering interests, trajectory and philosophy. In other words, the issue posed as aconclusion in order to contemplate what we’d become, and how we might usefully develop.
The majority of the present chapter comprises a series of ‘surrogate editorials’ that were originally
written for that last Dot Dot Dot. Together they relate the journal’s concluding preoccupations inadvance of being recalibrated and reincarnated under a new guise. Before starting on this relative
present, first it’s necessary to dash through its past.

2.1: WHAT WE’D BECOME
In the beginning, Dot Dot Dot was resolutely from and about graphic design – to the extent that theheart of the pilot issue comprised an encyclopaedia of previous design periodicals. This was an early
inkling of the self-reflexive streak that would gradually become its defining trait. Soon, however, thisrelatively narrow focus on a single discipline expanded to circumscribe the full range of the plastic,
applied and liberal arts – particularly fine art, music, film and literature. Later it drifted even further
afield, skirting the edges of sociology, cultural studies, mathematics and philosophy.
To give an idea of the range within a single issue, #4 from 2002 included a profile of seminal Swissgraphic designer Karl Gerstner, an overview of the extra-curricular projects of Talking Heads’ vocalist
David Byrne, some thoughts on literary translation inspired by the writing of Milan Kundera, aninterview with British cultural critic Judith Williamson, and an annotated CV of rogue U.S. filmmaker
Harmony Korine. Its front cover included three unsolicited descriptions of the journal by other people:‘a. Archaeological Aesthetics, b. Based on true stories, c. Stroppy/Revelatory’ – which is as good acompound summary as any at the time.
But the real watershed moment involved a stray essay in #5 by deadpan American vocalist andsometime cultural analyst Ian Svenonius called ‘The Beatles/Stones Dialectic’. The piece is a tonguein-cheek Marxist meditation on One Plus One, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 oddball documentary based onfootage of The Rolling Stones composing and recording their equally oddball track, ‘Sympathy for theDevil’. Even more than the stuff in #4, this essay had nothing at all to do with even the loosest idea ofwhat constitutes graphic design.
At this point our editorial policy was based on some vague notion of what a graphic design journal
ought to include, more or less informed by that encyclopaedia of past models – in which case ‘The	  1

Dot Dot Dot #’s 1 and 2 were published in 2001, #’s 3 and 4 in 2002, etc., and Bulletins of The Serving Library continued thisbiannual schedule exactly a decade later (#’s 1 and 2 in 2011, etc.). Dot Dot Dot was founded by myself, Peter Bilak, Jürgen
Albrecht and Tom Unverzagt, but by #3 this group had already dwindled to Peter and myself. The two of us continued to edit thejournal together until #10, at which point I moved to New York, effectively taking the journal with me, and David Reinfurt
slowly supplanted Peter as co-editor. After Dot Dot Dot #20, David and I established Bulletins of The Serving Library together
with Angie Keefer, and the three of us continue to edit it at the time of writing. The final part of the present chapter elaborates on
this shift.

	
  

36

Beatles/Stones Dialectic’ would be exempt. Fortunately, we were too enamoured with Svenonious’s
piece, ran it regardless, and from here on avoided second-guessing others’ expectations. We became
ourselves, which is to say a piece no longer had to be about graphic design per se, only instructive as an
approach to culture in general – which naturally includes graphic design. Though obvious enough inretrospect, this slight switch in thinking – parochial to cosmopolitan – made all the difference. Almostby accident, this is how the journal came to reflect the wider precariousness of the discipline of graphic
design (indeed its very lack of discipline) over the same period.
Up to a point, this newfound elasticity was entirely productive. For a while, at least, Dot Dot Dot was
defined by its ambiguity and promiscuity, probably exacerbated by the fact that we never really took
the trouble to articulate our free-ranging interests as clearly as we might have done in editorial asides orother rhetorical mirrors. Among certain art and design circles, the journal duly acquired – and to somedegree played up to – a reputation for being reticent and abstruse. Here, for instance, is a typicallynebulous, deliberately unpunctuated blurb (‘A ROMANCE’) from the back cover of the tenth issue(‘X’), halfway through the journal’s decade of existence:
Since its conception in 2000 DOT DOT DOT has attempted to essay a jocuserious fanzine-journalorphanage based on true stories providence and elementary mathematics deeply concerned with
art-des-mus-film-lang-lit-arch-etc. through uptight optipessimistic stroppy/revelatory ghostwritingby past & present tense spirits mapping B-sides and out-takes pushing for a resolution in bleak
midwinter and latesummer as local and general aesthetics are wound on an ever-tightening heterotopic
coil of the applied fantastic.2

Note: For the remainder of this thesis, longer excerpts of my own previously published writing are set
to the same measure as the main text but in Helvetica, as above, in order to distinguish them from thelonger quotations from other writers, which are indented in Courier. The former includes instances inwhich I had an editorial role strong enough to reasonably claim them as ‘mine’ – which more often
than not really means ‘ours’, i.e. worked on together with David Reinfurt or Will Holder under the
auspices of Dexter Sinister and Will Stuart respectively (see Acknowledgements).
It’s important to emphasize that all this obfuscation wasn’t exactly contrived – we weren’t trying tocome across as arrogant or hermetic, but simply spent our time and energy worrying over what toinclude rather than how to frame it. That said, it’s true enough to say that we had little idea how or why
to elucidate the drift from one domain to many, that such elucidation felt unnecessary, and even insome equally obscure way misleading or inappropriate. If there was ever anything like a pivotal idea
behind Dot Dot Dot, then, it was (paradoxically, elliptically) to remain emphatically in flux – athermostat of a journal set to regulate its reason over the slow accumulation of issues, with as muchvariety between them as within a single one.3
Still, as one judicious commentator noted around Dot Dot Dot’s half-life, while the journal wasn’t
explicitly about graphic design, it always remained resolutely from it. Its essays were concerned withwhat are essentially transferable ways of working, and what distinguished the journal from its nearest
neighbours was the fact that these approaches or attitudes were not only directly addressed in thewriting, but equally embodied by the design of the writing. By which I don’t simply mean the graphic

	
  

2

The blurb continues into a second paragraph headed ‘BUT WITHOUT SENTIMENT’: ‘X is a montage of articles drawn fromissues 2–9. This is NOT A RETROSPECTIVE ACT, more a logical next step; a slight return in response to the self-righteousstatement of intent on the cover of #1 (which makes good fire); a reply to ourselves after five years’ trial and error which asks:
why shouldn’t we travel at different speeds?’ Just as the rest of the issue is a compendium of previously published pieces, thisblurb is assembled from other issues’ ‘subtitles’ (e.g. ‘Not exactly a graphic design magazine, more an attempt’; ‘Graphic
design’s B-sides and out-takes’, and so on).

3

In fact, an editorial statement on the front of the pilot issue already declared itself to be ‘a magazine in flux / willing to adjust
itself according to content’. I’m fairly sure that this was an attempt to convince ourselves and others that a lack of direction was
productive without really understanding why; but more charitably, maybe we initially sensed why being ‘in flux’ might be a good
idea, and only latterly realized it along with the tools to articulate why. That said, that pilot issue contained a number of articles
about other design magazines past and present that we considered a kind of fundamental research – and this at least served the
purpose of forging a direction by articulating what we didn’t want to be. The elliptical nature of this footnote is a fairly goodgauge of Dot Dot Dot’s editorial tone over the years.

	
  

37

design of a given essay (which alludes to the visual organization of a contribution, i.e. the typesetting
and layout); I mean that the verbal structure of the writing in Dot Dot Dot was often more deliberate
and prominent than in most of its equivalents – and usually amounted to a substantial part of whatever
point was being made. What started out as an occasional tic became habitual: rather than passively
writing about things, we became somewhat adept at actively demonstrating them.
On the cover of #9, for example, we listed our various debtors (bookstores, distributors, advertisers)
along with their debts (on the spine) at the end of a short piece about pro-active editorial strategies andthe economic oxymoron of independent publishing, thereby performing the subject on the surface ofthe object.4 Surprisingly enough, this actually had some effect, as some half of those listed were duly
shamed into paying what they owed (which guaranteed the journal’s existence for at least anotherissue) – and this was part of the reason for trying it. But the blacklist was equally conceived as aplayful attempt to activate a subject that would otherwise be as engaging as anyone complaining about
their tax returns.

	
  4

Editorial, ‘Elementary Mathematics’, Dot Dot Dot #9, 2005.

	
  

38

	
  

39

A couple of years later, #15 was produced entirely on location by a small team of writers and printersworking concertedly over a two week period in a large open gallery space at the Centre d’Art
Contemporain in Geneva.5 The situation was set up to explore two themes: first, the notion of‘collective writing’, which was most prominently realized in the issue by American novelist Jonathan
Lethem in an essay on plagiarism, itself entirely plagiarized from multiple sources stitched together soseamlessly that it’s fairly shocking learn two thirds of the way through that you’ve actually beenreading a collection of excerpts (that are then exhaustively inventorized in a pair of postscripts);6 andsecond, the contemporary imperative to ‘perform’ as a freelance cultural worker constantly on call,inspired by a recent essay on overproduction and exhaustion by German art critic Jan Verwoert.7

The plan was to install Verwoert into a cartoon version of the cultural condition he was calling into
question. We duly flew him in from Berlin, set him up at a makeshift desk with a blanket in the cornerof the gallery, and asked him to extend his essay according to an unusually tangible deadline – a groupof anxious editors in uncomfortably close, constant proximity, and a brooding printing apparatus thatwas effectively draining our budget as long as it remained inoperative. The rest of the issue grewaround this premise, with several other collaborators writing in the margins of his polemic. A note to
the issue suggests how the setup was slowly made manifest:
Over a compressed fortnight … the issue then emerges in real-time … advancing through the 14
staggered cut-off points dictated by our eccentric technology’s 8-page signatures (14 x 8 = 112
pages). We originally had elaborate plans to plot these various flows of time, money and people ongraph paper, but have since realized a more pertinent representation: a living, breathing bar chart – justover there to the right – where one stack of blank paper is slowly sinking as another covered in ink rises
exponentially.

Mindful of this experience in Geneva, #17 was also emphatically both realtime and in situ – anexhaustive transcription of three consecutive evenings of talks we programmed at Somerset House in
London.8 The talks were themselves concerned with ways of graphically representing verbal language,especially different ways of speaking to a public audience. Both event and publication – and event-aspublication-as-event – were publicized according to this multiple choice blurb:
Dot Dot Dot 17 will be (read) (spoken) (delivered) from two (lecterns) (supports) (props) at the
Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, London on 29/30/31 October 2008 in advance of being(transcribed) (translated) (transfixed) and returned at the close of the exhibition (multiplied) (published)(distributed) on 21 December 2008.

	  5The project took place within the context of a group exhibition, Wouldn’t It be Nice? Wishful Thinking in Art and Design,
Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, 26 October – 16 December, 2007.
6

Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’, Dot Dot Dot #15, 2007.

7

Jan Verwoert, ‘Use Me Up’, Metropolis M, no. 1, 2007. The considerably extended version for Dot Dot Dot #15 was titled‘Exhaustion & Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform’.

8

These evenings were organized for the London iteration of Wouldn’t It be Nice? at Somerset House, 17 September – 21
December, 2008. The show also stopped off at Zurich, where we exhibited the newly produced Dot Dot Dot #15, along with a
few artefacts we’d made along the way.

	
  

40

Similarly, too, #19 was assembled from a few weeks’ concentrated production, this time working on
something we christened The First/Last Newspaper from a space opposite The New York Times in
Midtown Manhattan.9 Here the idea was to reflect – and reflect on – major shifts in the news industry
from an unusually disinterested vantage, while physically working from as close to the source aspossible.
These last examples demonstrate how, in setting up the conditions to assemble the journal in a specificlocation on the basis of some peculiar premise, the theme becomes tangled up with the mode of
production. Such a setup ensures from the outset that the form and content of the result are symbiotic –a proposition that had repeatedly cropped up in my own irregular contributions to Dot Dot Dot over theyears. Here are three brief instances, the first excerpted from a piece in #5 (2003) about British graphic
designer and historian Richard Hollis, auspiciously titled ‘Way of Working’:10
This trail of work developed because the commissioning parties in each case had recognized Hollis’s
previous work and interest. In each case a relationship was established on the basis of his approach.
Because of this implicit understanding, the shared wavelength, the final product ends up greater than
the sum of its constituent contributors. An intense working relationship results from a joint search forthe best means of communicating ideas, through familiarity with the subject matter and the author’s
relation to it. Rather than the books being editor- or designer-led, they push for a third, uncharted way.

Or, from a list of introductory anecdotes called ‘Dear X’ in #8 (2004), this one concerning Joyce’s
Ulysses:
Another duality: the industry of Joyce scholarship is divided into two camps – those who consider thenovel’s structure central, versus those who consider the narrative central. But Oxford scholar JeriJohnson suggests that both camps spectacularly miss the point that Ulysses’ genius lies precisely inthe fact that it is both at once, and they are fundamentally inseparable. Again, the composite is theessence.

And from the penultimate paragraph of ‘Science, Fiction’, an essay on the work of English biologist
and novelist E.C. Large in #17 (2009):
While it seems that, professionally at least, Large never really reconciled the division of his scientificand literary work, it is precisely the symbiosis of the two that animates his early fiction today. His
writing is defined by a wide-ranging set of interests, temperament and capacity which is equal parts
classic and romantic – a duality which extends to any of the parallel dichotomies itemized by Robert M.
Pirsig in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Scientific versus Artistic, Technical versus
Human, or Rational versus Emotional. Pirsig sets up these opposites in order to assert that thefundamental misunderstanding, disinformation, mistrust and hostility which characterizes modern
societies are rooted in the personal and communal inability to reconcile these two poles.

2.2: HOW WE MIGHT USEFULLY DEVELOP
I said that Dot Dot Dot’s ambiguous character was productive ‘up to a point’. Sometime around 2010,
after 10 years and 19 issues, the ambiguity and demonstration had culminated in an overwhelming
predilection for all things self-reflexive. This was beginning to seem rote, stale, and ultimately
something closer to solipsism. It seemed imperative to throw some kind of a spanner in the journal’s
works in order to maintain the momentum that had propelled it so far.
Moreover, as we became less and less clear about where the publication was coming from, the same
could be said of its purpose. We found ourselves wondering what the journal had hoped – and might
still be hoping – to advocate or otherwise accomplish. The idea behind the final issue of Dot Dot Dot	  9See chapter §6.7–9.

10

See also §9.3.

	
  

41

was therefore to write as plainly as possible what the magazine and its constellation had come to standfor over the previous ten years, as well as what it wanted to achieve with that stance – any cultural orpedagogical ambitions, big- or small-p political sympathies, and so on. It bears repeating, though, thatthe main reason for wanting to be unusually direct wasn’t in order to stake some kind of claim orotherwise alter our relatively esoteric bearing, but because we’d become fairly comfortable presenting acertain kind of work, and this comfort was suddenly discomfiting. The most obvious way to break theusual thing, we reasoned, would be to attempt its opposite. The idea of rallying ourselves to make anunequivocal statement of intent in 2010 seemed such an awkward, alien idea for us that it could surely
only be productive.
In the six months leading up to #20, I’d been chasing this avowed ‘directness’ in various ways. One
was to transcribe from memory a public discussion with my close colleague Will Holder about ‘thechanging face of art and culture in Britain since the 1960s’ while leaning on Michelangelo Pistoletto’s
Struttura per parlare in piedi at the entrance to a gallery at Tate Modern.11 Another involved writing
longish letters to a few people after hearing them talk on certain subjects and in ways that seemed
pertinent to the same subject. And in the meantime, a small bunch of other likely contributors
inadvertently trailed crumbs of related insight. As I stalled, waiting to have written something definite
enough to invite this modest crowd with the proper decorum, i.e. to offer a springboard or frame ofreference for what they might write, the obvious dawned slowly and way past the deadline: only
through writing to those people would I be able to spill and refine anything I had to say.
Here, I wrote and rewrote to them individually, was the problem: I could only get at this so-called
directness with people I already knew, in discussions based on mutual references and priorconversations. When I tried to reassemble the same ideas for the journal’s phantom audience in an
essay or article or editorial or even a transcription, naturally I had to insert all the references to avoid
total obfuscation – and as soon as I did that the whole thing started to sag. What had previously seemed
fluid, pointed and efficient now became glib, sanctimonious and turgid. Simply put, the directness
no longer came across as direct, or at least was grossly overwhelmed by these other, lumpen qualities.
All of which made me very uneasy becauseb it’s tied up in knots with one of the very things I was
hoping to be direct about – something, as ever, to do with the relationship between form and content.
More specifically: if, on reading back my attempts to be direct, what comes across is not nearly as
direct as, say, trite, then it follows that the actual directness has to be filtered or doctored in some way
in order to come across as the kind of ‘direct’ I’m after. It needs to go through some kind of language
mangle in order to translate what’s on my mind into words with equivalent sense and volition. This
involves rhetoric – or ‘style’, or ‘surface’. And one of the more frequently recurring topics ofconversation with Will and everyone else referred to above concerned the extremely mediated nature of
the condition we’re all living through; of the difference between things wanting to come across as
something as opposed to simply being what they are – indeed, of culture ‘wrapped in quotation marks’and the task of tweezering stuff back out of them. Yet here I was looking for a way to mediate my own‘directness.’ Hypocritical, surely (?)
I should have read Susan Sontag’s essay ‘On Style’ much earlier. There she makes a potent and whatfrom this vantage suddenly seemed patently obvious case for the authority of style.12 Sontag inverts thereceived wisdom that form is interior and content exterior, asserting instead that whatever is perceived
is content. In other words, there’s no dichotomy – no division between what and how something iscommunicated; in which case there’s no contradiction in the idea that this attempt to be direct is not‘pure’ (as I’d imagined), but in fact wholly contrived – and rightly so.

	
  
11

For further thoughts on Pistoletto’s piece and the rest of his ‘Minus Objects’ see §1.7 and §5.3. The conversation took place
under the rubric Tourette’s V at Tate Modern, London, on 2 May, 2009, as part of the group show Stutter (26 April – 16 August,2009). Although the discussion was supposed to be about ‘the changing face of art and culture in Britain since the 1960s’, weended up circling many of the same issues I meant to deal within the journal – not least the limits of self-reflexivity. See also our‘preparatory’ conversation ‘in §7.7, as well as the ‘Publick Notice’ (published to accompany our contribution to Stutter) in the
Appendix.

12

See §1.8.

	
  

42

The more I considered the idea of standing for something, along with any outcome of that stance,
the more I saw that the essential quality we’d always been chasing in Dot Dot Dot was something like‘movement’ – or more precisely, ‘momentum’. Rest assured any satisfaction at this realization was
soon vanquished by the dubious nature of its flimsy abstraction. Still, consider the trajectory of thissimple bell curve drawn by Swiss curator Anthony Huberman to illustrate an essay he wrote for thatDot Dot Dot #15 made in Geneva:

On a graph that plots information (X) against human curiosity (Y), the vector begins at zeroinformation and zero curiosity, rises to a midpoint of adequate information, maximum curiosity andtotal engagement, then falls as surplus information yields diminishing interest. The question Huberman
asks – in view of making and showing art – is: How to surf the top of the curve by offering just theright amount of information to maintain momentum, but not so much as to kill it? How to maximize
potential energy? 13 Or, if this is still too abstract, consider the same sentiment written as a sentence by
the other half of Dexter Sinister:
The ongoing process of attempting to understand (but never really
understanding completely) is absolutely productive. The relentless
attempt to understand is what keeps a practice moving forward.14

With Anthony’s diagram and David’s sentence in mind, I came to finally realize that Dot Dot Dot wasalways invested in the simple documentation, the more difficult demonstration, and the implicit
promotion of ‘momentum’: to keep ourselves moving, and ideally move the reader en route.

2.3: FOUR SURROGATE EDITORIALS
So far so obvious, but what becomes quickly apparent is that writing as much down isn’t a very good
documentation or demonstration or promotion of it. In fact it’s the opposite inasmuch as any
articulation or definition of it means – by definition! – that it’s been apprehended, fixed, domesticated,
neutered. Otherwise put, it’s stopped moving: it’s static.
The most we can achieve ‘directly’ is to point directly at this fact – a second-level directness, certainly,
but a directness nonetheless; a ‘directness’ in quotation marks.
And to take this spiralling line of thinking to its logical, which is to say paradoxical, non-conclusion,
such directness can be achieved only indirectly, which is to say by glancing, bouncing, and refusing toaccept the paralysis that this contradiction suggests.
At which point it dawned on me that the flaw in my initial approach to this ‘testimonial’ issue of
Dot Dot Dot lay precisely in focusing our attention back on the journal itself. The same week,a whisky guru called Charlie McLean told me of a phrase he and his colleagues used as shorthandfor pretentious, self-absorbed writing during his days as a copy editor. ‘Eyes … Gloss … Over …’,
he said.	
  It was only when I wrote it down later that I noticed the acronym EGO – and understoodthat my whole approach was suffering from the same problem, effectively short-circuiting itself.

	
  

13
14

Anthony Huberman, ‘Naive Set Theory’, Dot Dot Dot #15, 2007.

For reasons too involved to go into here, the essay has the same title as Huberman’s piece: David Reinfurt, ‘Naive Set Theory’,
published in Dot Dot Dot #17, 2008.

	
  

43

It became just as clear to me, too, that all our concerns and interests still surface – without thedeadening weight of narcissism – when the subject matter lies somewhere other than in the mirror.
That’s to say, when we aim at other targets, writing about the world rather than our world, obliquely
flirting with truth rather than crudely propositioning it.
So Dot Dot Dot #20’s eventual assortment of articles duly refracted the same themes of reevaluation
and reinvention. A number of interrelated pieces contemplate the benefits and pitfalls of ambiguity and‘non-knowledge’, for instance, while others consider paradigm shifts in art, philosophy and technology.
But ‘clarity’ and ‘values’ and ‘ethics’ are most prominently tackled in the handful of so-calledsurrogate editorials. They’re surrogate in the sense that they address topics that can be considered
proxies for the Dot Dot Dot itself; namely, (1) a painting, (2) a letter, (3) an article in anothermagazine, and (4) an exhibition. Here follow these four ‘glancing, bouncing’ attempts to discern
ourselves, plus a postscript. Each one is briefly introduced, then reproduced verbatim.

(a) In response to a painting: ‘that’s what we’d like to paint’
The first surrogate is titled ‘A Word on the Cover’. This refers not only to the fact that it actuallycaptions an image on the front, but also to the fact that this image amounts to a word – a very
self-reflexive beginning to a very self-reflexive issue. Grey Painting: Text version 2 (2008) is one ofa series of small oil paintings by British artist Philomene Pirecki.15 Three blobs of primary red, blue
and yellow are messily, progressively combined within the work to construct four geometric letters:
G, R, E, and Y. These characters are superimposed directly on top of one another to form a monogram,a composite character that bleeds off the edge and so doubles as a painted frame. Palette and canvas
are one and the same, literally and metaphorically spelling out its own composition.
Auspiciously enough, the canvas is more or less the same format and proportion as Dot Dot Dot, whichmeant we could reproduce it at actual size by direct contact with a flatbed scanner. The brushstrokes
are therefore to scale and so unusually apparent.
The ostensible ‘caption’ takes the form of an informal letter from the editor to the painter, and, inspelling out the implications of this particularly elliptical painting, serves to preface to the entire issue.
The letter recounts a recent lecture by German cultural critic Diedrich Diderichsen on the notoriously
prolific production of German artist Martin Kippenberger; a pathologically incessant approach that’s
then implicitly claimed as ‘painterly’ in the sense that (like Pirecki’s painting) time is markedly
manifest in the work.
Folded into this brief text, too, are a few of Pirecki’s own thoughts (in italics) on the workings ofher painting’s assembled illusion, particularly the way it invokes what she calls a ‘double perception’by alternately flipping between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects – not unlike that classic gestalt cartoon
duckrabbit who pops up later in the issue, and generally serves as a kind of mascot throughout.

Dear Philomene,
As you know, I’d like to reproduce that deceptively modest painting of yours – the one whose primarycolours combine to spell out their composite and form their own frame – on the cover of this last

	
  
15

Reproduced in greyscale as the frontispiece to this chapter.

	
  

44

Dot Dot Dot. I’d also like to find a way of folding in some of your written thoughts around this piece
and another, related work. Your writing about how it sets up the possibility of seeing both the illusionand ‘disillusion’ simultaneously, for example, started me thinking how the cross-semantics of that‘disillusion’ are wholly pertinent to this issue.
You go on to write about how the illusion continues to work on me despite also seeing its undoing,a bit like not being able to help yourself from always laughing at a joke even though you know thepunchline already, which reminds me of a talk Diedrich Diederichsen gave to inaugurate a recent
Martin Kippenberger retrospective, ‘The Problem Perspective’. Diedrich’s thoughts hung on two waysof considering Kippenberger in terms of broken joke structures. The joke is already a familiar motif in
Kippenberger’s work, not least in the shaggy dog stories he infamously dragged out at openings andother events. On this occasion, though, Diedrich was referencing a specific painting in the show,in which a single panel of Matt Groening’s comic strip ‘Life in Hell’ is repeated across the canvas so
one character incessantly tells the other ‘I hate you’ … ‘I hate you’ … ‘I hate you’ …
Diedrich distinguished between two types of broken joke: (1) a joke without a punchline, and (2) a joke
in which the punchline is repeated over and over again, and proposed that both (at once) areanalogous to Kippenberger’s work in general, in the sense that each new piece or project served as thestarting point for the next, without end or hierarchy. So a painting would lead to a series of paintings
which would be collected into a show which would require a poster which would be collected withother posters to be published in a book whose cover would be reproduced as an invitation card which
would be deployed in a talk, and so on. All production fed this snowballing momentum, and its
perpetuation was paramount – in effect, WAS the work. Neither of Diedrich’s un-jokes amount toanything laugh-out-loud funny, of course, but being both trite and true, the act of telling them is loopily
consonant with the rest of Kippenberger’s redemptive melancholy – with his work’s surplus of good
humour.
Finally, you note that while the illusion doesn’t physically change, your perception of it does. Here I
can take a first stab at articulating the fundamental point of Dot Dot Dot by substituting ‘culture’ for‘illusion’ – although, sure, culture changes too. My point is: doesn’t this realization of the grey area
between illusion and disillusion amount to perceiving rather than observing; aren’t we involved insetting up the conditions for a reading and looking that’s active rather than passive? As you rightly
conclude: The illusion only exists when it’s seen. It’s the viewer who brings it into being (in theireye/mind). And the two-way mirror not only reflects the image but also the viewer in the moment ofrecognition or figuring out what’s going on.
Insight as the precondition and goal of self-reflexivity: that’s what we’d like to paint.
Regards,
Stuart(b) In response to a letter: ‘what helped me get over my dialectical mental block’
At the heart of the last issue is a bona fide (if aggressively solicited) letter to the editor from art critic
and sometime Dot Dot Dot contributor Mike Sperlinger. This spurred a second surrogate editorial
response, and both were gathered under the title ‘A Half-Open Letter’. We’d conceived thecorrespondence as an excuse to think through an offhand remark he’d made a year or so beforehand
during a presentation on one of those three evenings at Somerset House: that ‘Dot Dot Dot’s discourse
is always to a higher power.’ This was an early acknowledgement of our burgeoning self-reflection,
though Mike admits in his letter that he ‘felt, secretly, at the time, that this formula was glib, even as
shorthand, or that it risked caricaturing Dot Dot Dot as somewhat glib – Escherizing it, so to speak.’
The new missive would attempt a more substantial account of what a discourse always to a higher
power might have been ‘shorthand’ for.
Fundamental to whatever convictions have driven Dot Dot Dot to date, he says, has been precisely thelack of self-theorizing. That is, the journal has effectively demonstrated what it ‘stands for’ by showing

	
  

45

rather than telling – and by implication also omitting. That said, he continues, ‘the risks of codification
are very real’, and it seems therefore correct to seek to ‘broach or break’ our editorial reticence now,
a decade old.
Rather than simply commending the journal’s self-reflexive streak (which that initial ‘higher power’
seemed to imply), he now warns of its limits, albeit with reference to a ‘honourable strain’ of artists andwriters latterly working in a similar vein. The problem is, he says, any strategy of relentless
self-consciousness ultimately devolves into ‘reified reflexivity’ – a futile and increasingly irritating
attempt to step out of itself in order to see itself. The problem is commensurate with the conundrum
noted by Umberto Eco in the ‘Form as Social Commitment’ chapter of The Open Work; namely,
the impossibility of describing a system by a language that is not itself influenced by that system.
Mike writes:
If it is dangerous or diabolical, it is because the more this idea ofreflexivity flirts with mathematics and analytic philosophy the closer
it edges to the precipices of pantomime and formalism. If reflexivity
merely means infinite regress, mise-en-abyme, it is regressive andabysmal – a ‘bad infinity’, as Hegel would put it. To put it anotherway, reified reflexivity falls into the same trap that Jeff Wall
identified as the fate of early conceptualism, reducing the process ofreflection to mere intellectual tautology or a formal tic.

He then asserts that ‘The fundamental risk reflexivity runs, in this mode, must be quietism’ – that’s tosay, a project invested in clarifying confused thinking, but without necessarily putting that clarification
to use. Reflexivity, he says, ‘is gestural and fundamentally ironic’, and at the crux of his commentaryclaims that ‘any process of self-reflexivity worth its salt’ – a constructive reflexivity – ‘would have to
run the risk that its own premises were untenable and be prepared to act radically on this knowledge.’
Mike posits ‘dialectics’ as a more athletic, ‘less clubbable’ strategy inasmuch as it is less constricted or
short-circuited by its own methodology. Yet dialectics is still a fundamentally passive method, a tool
for thinking rather than acting. Naturally thinking can stimulate action, but the immediate question
remains: in terms of working in art and design, how to be involved and aware, inside and outside; or interms of Mike’s observations, how to inhabit an active dialectics?
The letter concludes with a nod to German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophical
Fragments,16 a collection that Mike describes as ‘at once incomplete and a self-sufficient totality’.
Finally, he signs off with the following passage, which seems to insinuate, obscurely, that
acknowledging and accepting such duplicity is part and parcel of the ‘ethical bent’ we’re chasing in our
exchange:
Schlegel explicated his idea of the fragment entirely throughfragmentary aphorisms, which are themselves both accretive andrecalcitrant, positing understanding as an infinite process. Schlegeland his fellow German Romantics were also interested in reflexivity –‘It is a sublime taste always to like things better when they’ve beenraised to the second power’ etc. – but with an ethical bent which amore analytic, mathematical sensibility might have to elide. I think,
too, of his most infamous pronouncement: ‘It’s equally fatal for themind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decideto combine the two.’ Meta-the-difference-between-the-two ...?

My own letter back starts with a summary of what Eco’s getting at when he claims that properly avantgarde art equates a certain kind of ‘social commitment’, which I figured must be more or lesssynonymous with ‘an ethical bent’. The summary of Eco’s thesis is really an excuse to posit the work

	
  
16

Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments [c. 1797, German] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

	
  

46

of American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace as a recent example of it. Although
Wallace’s often literally sickening17 facility for articulating self-consciousness is indeed the productof ‘an analytic, mathematical sensibility’, his work is equally concerned with quotidian ethics,or ‘how to live a compassionate life’.18
From this vantage, too, Wallace’s work can be seen to embody Schlegel’s equilibrium.19 The chain ofwords on which Mike ends, ‘Meta-the-difference-between-the two’, was in fact penned by Wallace
himself as a means of dissociating himself from the two main strands of postwar fiction in the U.S.,
realism and metafiction. Wallace’s self-appointed project – the social contract of his commitment toform, so to speak – was to work through present-day ‘realist’ issues through an uncharacteristicallyentertaining kind of metafiction. Otherwise put, he transcended the dichotomy. This breed of selfreflexivity, at once meta and grounded, sounds like a plausible escape from the trappings noted in
Mike’s letter – and to this extent might serve as a model for our own attempt to evolve.20
In Wallace’s work, form embodies its themes in view of not merely describing the world but more
palpably apprehending it. When a subject is truly grasped, it is digested, processed, transformed –squeezed into a new shape – and ideally the same thing happens on the receiving end in the mind of thereader. This purposeful alignment of form and subject matter is what Dot Dot Dot had been halfblindly aiming at, too; and with the benefit of hindsight it explains why, during the final issue’s grandobjective of clarity, we paradoxically found ourselves instead approaching some pinnacle of selfreflexivity – in order to exhaust or exorcise and ideally transform it, and ourselves, as subject andstrategy. Purged, perhaps, we could turn to less involuted matters where, in Mike’s words, ‘lesssymmetrical and pleasant possibilities’ might open up. Again: how to inhabit an active dialectics?
Dear Mike,
Thanks for your letter, which is about as resounding a clanging chair as I could hope for in this issue.21
I’d just written to someone else about how the word ‘dialectics’ sounds like ‘dentistry’ to me, though I
wish I’d troubled over the analogy more. All I meant was that for me it’s an off-putting word, or rather
one, like ‘hermeneutics’, that no matter how many times I read its definition or have it otherwise
explained to me, never sticks. We carry around those voucher-quotes you mention as tokens of the
opposite – realizations, assimilations, when we really get it, and as such they describe a classic gift
economy. This being the case, I want to complement the two references gifted at the end of your letterby offering one more in return. This is what helped me get over my dialectical mental block.
The ref. in question is approximately the first half of the chapter ‘Form as Social Commitment’ fromUmberto Eco’s The Open Work (1962). I skipped to this one first because its title seemed to promise
explication of something that’s been bothering me in relation to all the self-reflexivity that’s hopefully
reaching some kind of climax in these pages. The question was: what, in the end, is the point of theself-reflexivity that seems to be the closest we have to a common denominator of all we’ve shown,demonstrated, and promoted in Dot Dot Dot?

	
  
17

Zadie Smith writes: ‘The effect on the reader is powerful, unpleasant. Quite apart from being forced to share one’s own mental
space with the depressed person’s infinitely dismal consciousness, to read those spiral sentences is to experience that dread of
circularity embedded in the old joke about recursion (to understand recursion you must first understand recursion).’ Zadie Smith,‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace’, Changing My Mind (London: Penguin, 2009).

18

This clause refers to the subtitle of his posthumously published commencement speech: David Foster Wallace, This is Water:
Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

19

More on this in §3.8

20

i.e. inasmuch as metafiction is, in Wallace’s own estimation, a stereotypically male, masturbatory genre that’s normally‘hellaciously unfun to read’.

21

This ‘clanging chair’ refers to one Mike had inadvertently knocked over when arriving late to one of Dot Dot Dot #17’s
Somerset House nights, aptly interrupting one of the other talks on Pragmatism.

	
  

47

Eco starts his chapter by discussing the contemporaneous vogue of the word ‘alienation’, first by
relating Hegel’s use of the term as equivalent to ‘objectification’, in which man alienates himself in or toan object in order to use it as an extension of the body (e.g. a spade). He then counterposes Marx’s
use of the term roughly a hundred years and an industrial revolution later. Marx berated Hegel for
stopping short at the positive aspect of this objectification, and went on to describe the extent of thenegative, when the object (or social situation, love relationship, etc.) starts to work against theprotagonist; in other words, when the object starts to use or control the user to a greater degree thanthe user is using or controlling the object.
Since moving to L.A., my favourite example of this is the car. In the positive sense (Hegel’s), then, youalienate yourself to or in the car in order to travel large distances at great speeds. The idea is of course
to become one with the vehicle, a man-machine, to the degree that braking and steering andaccelerating, etc. become second nature. Alienation, in the form of this objectification, allows the driverto prosthetically extend his natural abilities, as McLuhan later famously expounded. However, pushingquickly on to the negative sense (Marx’s), no sooner am I happily man-machining around in theVolkswagen than I find myself implicated into a myriad other, larger, more abstruse, insidious and (asyou say) diabolical systems: the Highway Code, national and local driving laws, parking, gas, climate,congestion, prestige, planned obsolescence, and so on.
It follows that alienation in this mise-en-abyme of systems within systems within systems is a greater
likelihood and problem in an industrial (and even more so in a post-industrial) society, because there
are simply far more systems in place than in, say, Hegel’s time. This is surely close to your artist friend
Merlin Carpenter’s description of the horse as these days constituting Troy itself: ‘the whole of Troy is
now a horse’. Eco rereads Hegel via Marx because Hegel’s point of view can now be more clearly
understood in contradistinction to Marx’s, and he spends so much energy explaining the difference
between them, these positive and negative senses of ‘alienation’, in order to clarify that the infinite
oscillation between them – the dialectic – is nothing less than the nature of the human condition itself.
He concludes that chronic alienation defines contemporary society, ‘as much a given as
weightlessness is to an astronaut’, though the resignation comes less as a shock than a shrug. Eco is
not despondent, only realistic: the situation, he says, is merely dialectic, and this diffidence is vital. As it
cannot be overcome or dissolved, the only way to deal with it is by, well, dealing with it – by engaging,
acting, working, producing, and so on, yet crucially never losing sight of the broader systems within
which the engaging, acting, working and producing are taking place.
There are a myriad other ways of expressing Eco’s dialectic in old issues of Dot Dot Dot. Off the top of
my head: Stewart Brand (‘Pause. And begin again.’), Paul R. Halmos (‘Read it, absorb it, and forget it.’),Jean-Luc Godard (‘The problem is: to get back to zero.’), and of course Samuel Beckett (‘I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.’) Common to all these pithy formulas, as with Eco’s rereading of Hegel and Marx, is theimplicit weight of experience that informs each form of recalibration, whether Brand’s restarting,Halmos’s discarding, Godard’s returning, or Beckett’s continuing.
What I find so ‘totemic’ in David Foster Wallace is simply an updated articulation of the same drive –
ultimately in the face of our own era’s brand of alienation. I’m not thinking about a particular piece orstory or book, but rather the general trajectory of his intentions as recounted explicitly in interviews andimplicitly in the work; in his worrying over moral and ethical purpose, e.g. ‘Look, man, we’d probably
most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing
but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? … Right now I’m pretty much open to a brass ring.’
The writing that emerged from this aporia is technically stripped-down, severe, lucid, and thematicallyconcerned with religion, relationships, and boredom. Technically speaking, the form and content of thislater writing seem markedly mundane in view of his earlier postmodern excesses. I read it as a kind of
forward-facing return (like walking backwards on a moving sidewalk going forwards), by which I meana poetics devoid of the reactionary or conservative overtones that an unqualified return might imply;
one that’s plausible precisely because of the baggage of experience discarded. This is the dialectic you
think is disastrous: inadvertently posturing as the Wise Old Fish. What you find sentimental, I findmoving. Duck-Rabbit. Q.E.D.?

	
  

48

Back to Dot Dot Dot: perhaps all this points toward a renewal of interest in our founding ‘discipline’,graphic design. If the commonest use of the word ‘design’ is now analogous to a broad ‘mediation’rather than the previously more specific ‘problem solving’ (which was still lingering when we began adecade ago), this sense seems to me to have bifurcated into two opposite poles. The first is essentiallynegative and more or less synonymous with spin, which implies deliberate twisting, obscuring,obfuscation and ambiguation. This form of mediation is concerned only with how an object (or event, or
relationship) comes across, which may have little to do with its essence.
The other pole I have in mind, though, is essentially positive and more or less synonymous withtranslation. Any form of communication is rooted in the transposition from one form to another.
Most obviously this could refer to the translation from one language to another, more abstractly fromthought to expression, or, in our business, from a message to its linguistic/graphic form. As we noteda couple of issues ago, Anthony Froshaug wrote a nice equation for an ideal design, that consists‘in translating all the problem, set of problems, into another language, another sign system, with love.’
And so we’re clearly on this side of the fence.
I wholeheartedly agree with your prognosis of an enlightened self-reflexivity as being one that ‘would
have to risk the discovery that its own premises were untenable, and to be prepared to act radically on
this knowledge.’ For now, I would say that that action involves extracting ourselves from any and all
quotation marks. This could equally mean a retreat from the often futile, insipid gestures of fine art, or aconcerted refusal of that currently spun version of design – and to offer in its place a clearly signposted
alternative, not a commodified ‘alternative’.
From the horse’s mouth,
Stuart(c) In response to an article: ‘and so writing about it is accordingly elliptical’
These ideas were carried over into what became a third surrogate editorial, ‘Another Open Letter’,which requires less prefacing than the last one. It’s an attempt to articulate how the latter’s abstractions(‘extracting ourselves from quotation marks’) have played out in concrete terms at the cultural end ofgraphic design in recent years. ‘Cultural’ is here typically, if always too crudely, opposed to‘commercial’ – here shorthand for work traditionally made for galleries, museums, biennials and art
publishers, and more recently marked by self-organized imprints, spaces, events and suchlike.
The letter is nominally addressed to the prominent design critic Rick Poynor in response to a brief
Op-Ed piece of his that (rightly) criticized the wilful ambiguity and socio-political impotence of somerecent activities attributed to graphic designers (wrongly) grouped under the banner of ‘criticaldesign’.22 With Eco’s drive for discursive clarity when discourse is unclear in mind, I argue that thedefining characteristic of this marginal scene is ‘lost’ – intellectually invested in their base discipline
yet equally disillusioned with its commercial saturation, and so searching for worthwhile applicationelsewhere. This seemed to me a more accurate explanation of current confusions than the ‘killing offathers’ line that Poynor was spinning, and of the general spread of the grey area between art anddesign.

	
  22

As is only half-explained in the letter itself, this was written in reaction not only to Poynor’s ‘Observer: Critical Omissions’(Print magazine, October 2008: http://www.printmag.com/Article/Observer_Critical_Omissions), but also in response to a
response to that piece by Zak Kyes and Mark Owens, as well as Rick’s further response to their response. All are archived at thetime of writing at the same address, and I recommend reading all three in advance of what follows in order to make the fullest
sense of what was originally a closed letter that I’d decided not to send but didn’t quite manage to forget about and so ‘half
opened’ up again. The thoughts still seemed (just about) timely, and very much in line with the editorial breeze blowing throughthe rest of the issue. The Forms of Inquiry exhibition and related material referred to throughout was first assembled by Kyes andOwens at the Architectural Association in London in late 2007, then toured around Europe, efficiently tracked and now archived
at http://www.formsofinquiry.com.

	
  

49

Dear Rick,
What follows is in response to ‘Critical Omissions’, your opinion piece for Print magazine about the
recent use and misuse of the term ‘critical design’, with particular reference to the exhibition ‘Forms ofInquiry’. For better or worse, I hardly ever read the design press. I knew about this, however, because I
happened to show up at the house of Mark Owens – one of the people implicated in the piece – while
he was in the middle of drafting an impetuous response. As I both agreed and disagreed with aspectsof both your comments and his reaction, I thought it worthwhile to try and pinpoint where I stand in
precarious relation. The fact that I was directly mentioned as an example a couple of times in ways I
thought misleading helped me muster the energy to do so.
I should also admit upfront a kind of anterior motive: I’m trying to conceive a ‘last’ issue of Dot Dot Dotthat tries to be as clear and direct as possible about both what the publication and its constellation
have come to stand for, then what it hopes to achieve with that stance, i.e. precisely the sort of
explication your piece calls for. Already I suspect that what I’m about to write will still come across aswilfully ambiguous, but for now at least I’ll stick to my guns and suggest that this is mainly because
when I say ‘as clear and direct as possible’, I honestly (meaning as close to ‘objectively’ as I can get)think that it isn’t that possible to articulate what I’m after very clearly and directly. I mean that the stuff
at the heart of that description is inherently slippery, and so the writing about it is accordingly elliptical.
In any case, the artistic process that tries to give form to disorder,
amorphousness, and dissociation is nothing but the effort of a reason
that wants to lend a discursive clarity to things. When its discourse
is unclear, it is because things themselves, and our relationship tothem, are still very unclear – indeed so unclear that it would be
ridiculous to pretend to define them from the uncontaminated podium ofrhetoric. It would only be another way of escaping reality and leaving
it exactly as it is.23
To add to this little stack of disclaimers, first, I know relatively little about the background of the term
‘critical design’ beyond your potted history, and second, I only actually saw a half-assembled versionof the Forms of Inquiry exhibition in its first incarnation at the Architectural Association. I do, however,
have the book. I’m emphasizing these points only because I want to present a straightforward personalaccount of how the various exhibitions, books, and histories you mention actually coalesce to affectsomeone of moderate involvement, in order to describe the gap between how things tend to comeacross to others in reportage, and what really happens. I think this is the only ‘problem’ I’m trying toaddress here: the distorting effects of pigeonholing. My ambivalence to terms like ‘critical design’ – andexhibitions or publications dealing with it – has been fairly consistent from the early 1990s onwards,
even when I was much more preoccupied with Design as a subject. For those in the corner of thegeneration I’ve grown up with, all that designer-as-author/editor/producer/publisher/ critic business
was always at least mentally prefixed with a ‘so-called’ and some eye-rolling. James Goggin recently
described this collective shrugging in a piece called ‘Practice from Everyday Life’,24 in which he points
out that the day-to-day activities of graphic designers are typically nuanced and expansive enough torender such renaming – rebranding really – unnecessary, therefore superfluous, and so (again, my main
bugbear here) misleading. And as long as things are misleading, they’re harder to deal withproductively, to change things for the better, so all this is in the service of constructive clarity.
My first impression of your piece and Mark’s response was that the two arguments miss each otherentirely. You write: ‘if the implicit aim [of design] is simply to help clients sell more doodads, then allthat matters is how effectively design achieves this goal’, to which I’d immediately respond that this isabsolutely – patently – NOT the implicit aim of the work of the majority of the people contributing tosuch as ‘Forms of Inquiry’. Rather, these ‘designers’ are quite plainly working away, as you later

	
  
23
24

Eco, op. cit., p. 157.

James Goggin, ‘Practice from Everyday Life: Defining Graphic Design’s Expansive Scope by its Quotidian Activities’,
Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2008 (Bern: Swiss Federal Office of Culture, 2009).

	
  

50

acknowledge, in various arts margins. They tend to make work that documents or otherwise organizes
other people’s work, sometimes their own. Selling anything – doodads or otherwise – rarely comes into
it. Such work is, rather, subsidized somewhere along the cultural food chain, whether by grants andawards (particularly common in The Netherlands, Switzerland and Scandinavia) or relatively benign
cultural institutions (such as the AA). I understand you’re only trying to set up what ‘design’ tends tomean for a broad audience in order to pitch ‘critical design’ against it, but I think this simplification isalready too much of a distortion, or at least disorienting. Further, I seriously doubt whether any of theparticipants would ever think of themselves as ‘critical designers’, which is how it comes across.
(Metahaven maybe – though I can’t imagine them wearing the badge voluntarily.) Such terms are only
really employed by journalists and curators.
The main effect of this (your) distortion is to suggest that these ‘Forms of Inquiry’ participants andorganizers are ‘critical’ towards designers who are involved in selling things. Again this is misleading:reproach has nothing whatsoever to do with this work. There’s a difference between not doing
something, and thinking someone else shouldn’t be doing it either. The question it does raise, though,is: if neither selling doodads nor busy criticizing the selling of doodads, what are these so-called criticaldesigners doing? Or: what do they think they’re doing? What’s the point? What are they after? etc.
And I think the answer is that they don’t yet know what they want, other than opportunities andoccupations to accommodate their interests. Their defining characteristic as a group is Lost,
sometimes happily adrift, sometimes unhappily insecure. They care about working, and the nature ofthat work, but not particularly about either $$$ or Big Causes. They’re more commonly seeking toperpetuate and share interests – in art, literature, music, and all the other usual tools for psychic
survival. They’re busy stabbing about looking for channels and outlets that aren’t immediately obviousor might not yet exist. ‘Forms of Inquiry’ indexes this displacement, and any attempt, whether by its
organizers or its critics, to label the pack as a whole are bound to be wide of the mark because it’sfundamentally all over the place. The premise of the exhibition is supremely useless: to produce
posters that engage in an ‘architectural inquiry’ towards no apparent end. Lacking any real sense of
requiredness, that it comes across as whimsical, obscure and without urgency is hardly surprising. And
yet it can’t help betray a group of well-read, engaged, invested and restless minds at play. In thissense, the exhibition is completely timely – and its title weirdly apt, though not really for the reason
its curators imagined.
Journalists have conquered the book form. Writing is now the tiny
affair of the individual. The customers have changed: television’saren’t viewers, but advertisers; publishing’s not potential readers,
but distributors. The result is rapid turnover, the regime of the best
seller. But there will always be a parallel circuit, a black market.25
From what I’ve seen or can gather, the exhibition is what you might expect: obfuscating, in-jokey, andfull of barely articulated references. But this doesn’t necessarily amount to exclusionary, elitist andwasteful. I’m inclined to accept Mark’s claim that the main purpose of the show was to provide aformat for people to meet, for further events to occur, and in order to organize and extend theireccentric and far-reaching reading room (despite it coming across as a supplement to the main event).
And this is, it seems, precisely how the constellation (exhibition, book, reading room) has functioned –as a red herring (or a carrot) that’s resulted in a number of makeshift communities (participants,
audiences, institutions). Michel Foucault’s term ‘heterotopia’ is useful here: a space wherecontradictions can exist, an actual place rather than a utopia, but as yet without any clear purpose
other than representing something outside the status quo. At best, this is a form of criticality itself – aquiet, local declaration of independence. It’s admittedly far from the public criticism and accountability
you’re advocating and I’m by no means against, but surely there’s room for both. Perhaps the former
even leads to the latter. I could sum this up by saying that these practices are, by implication, small-p
political or small-c critical, working something out for and by themselves. Their attempts can function

	
  
25

This is freely translated and paraphrased from the series of TV interviews L’Abécédaire, available on DVD with English
subtitles by Charles J. Stivale as Gilles Deleuze from A to Z (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

	
  

51

as a public model too, just not a very spectacular or glamorous one – and so one that doesn’t easilytranslate into column inches.
Frankly, I also find it difficult to imagine what kinds of broader channels you imagine your Dunne &Raby-like critical designers might utilize. Your prime example of Metahaven (whom I appreciate) still
only operate in a pretty limited art and design ghetto, with pretty much the same insular codes as therest of whoever might constitute a scene these days, and it’s hard to conceive of any broader reach.
Their ‘Forms of Inquiry’ poster is as impenetrable and ostensibly useless as any of the others, at least
without the sort of contextualizing text that have tended to emerge later in those supplementary talks
and interviews I mentioned. This is significant, and not a necessarily negative observation either, justrealistic. If anything it points to the fact that the exhibition’s elements are wrongly weighted in the
public mind. I think this is a big problem of a lot of more or less art-domain projects these days: that
where the work really lies – in the captions, the didactics, the books – is wrongly weighted, de facto
relegated. Put another way: the really valuable work doesn’t announce itself clearly enough as such.
In fact, designing new modes of dispersion – setting up independent channels and outlets – seems tobe precisely what’s occupying this bunch right now. Even within the last couple of years, enterprises
like Corner College in Zurich, castillo/corrales in Paris, Bedford Press in London, Split/Fountain in
Auckland, and Primary Information in New York, are all examples of small, generous, spirited groups
who have collapsed production and distribution into a single, fluid activity. None of them set out with aloud Political agenda, but they end up making a quiet political point: that this is possible.
These projects aren’t exclusive and are open to anyone who isinterested in their activities, but their existence doesn’t rely on
being connected to a global network. They don’t reject that network as
much as express confidence in their autonomy from it.26
Often I have been asked, by Washington policy intellectuals andCalifornia environmental activists, why Harper’s Magazine doesn’t
publish program notes for a brighter American future or blueprints forthe building of a better tomorrow. All well and good, they say, topoint to the flaws in the system, or to suggest that the leading castmembers of the Bush Administration be sent to sea in open boats, but
why so many jokes, and to what end the impractical criticism? Where
are the helpful suggestions and the tools for forward looking reform?
... If I had answers to the questions I’d stand for elective office;as an editor I’ve been more interested in the play of mind than its
harnessing to a political bandwagon.27
This brings me to the issue of our immediate prehistory of ‘critical design’, specifically the insinuationthat our merry band of nepotists are deliberately covering over the tracks of those who preceded us in
the 1980s and 1990s. Speaking again for both myself and, with some confidence, my immediate circle,
the nature of the influence of such as Emigre magazine is similar to that of the various venues I
mentioned above, i.e. the simple fact of its existence is the actual extent of its legacy. Meaning: wenever really read it, engaged with it, related to it, took its ‘debates’ very seriously – and we don’t refer
to it in retrospect either. But not because we were desperate to kill fathers as you suggest – as Mark
rightly points out, we were simply more fond of our grandfathers, or stepfathers, or our friends’ fathers,
or indeed mothers. As far as I recall, we were hungry enough to talk – just not about what Emigre wastalking about. The U.S. art school take on French Deconstruction was hard both to swallow and takeseriously (though we couldn’t have articulated why until Robin Kinross did so eloquently in his
pamphlet Fellow Readers28), and its supposed points of contention came across rather as storms in

	
  
26

Anthony Huberman, ‘I Heart Information’, Afterall, no. 16, Autumn/Winter 2007.

27

Lewis H. Lapham, ‘Notebook: Blue Guitar’, Harper’s Magazine, May 2006.

28

Robin Kinross, Fellow Readers: Notes on Multiplied Language (London: Hyphen, 1994).

	
  

52

teacups. As myself and others have said before, and I’m sure you can appreciate, what we turned to or
tuned into instead was the scarce but deep influence of the British designer and writer Paul Elliman andnot many others. This was a different kind of intelligence: luminous, full of idiosyncrasy, wit, and the‘breath of life’ you once quoted him as promoting in a piece we recycled in Dot Dot Dot #9. So Emigre
was an influence, yes, but no more or less than an independent record label, or a band, or your big
brother doing a newspaper round in order to buy his own bike.
Though we disregarded the tradition you’re making a case for (the nineties’ schools: CalArts, Art
Center, Rhode Island, Cranbrook), we did very much have our own, or made our own, and continue todo so. The lineage won’t surprise you: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anthony Froshaug, Norman Potter, Stefan
and Franciszka Themerson, Jean-Luc Godard, Vladimir Nabokov – and on to Barney Bubbles, Muriel
Cooper, Richard Hamilton, and everyone else that crops up irregularly in our publication and related
projects. The key quality common to these mavericks, I think, is that, whether within a single discipline,or spanning two or three at once, they’re all generalists, polymaths; their work seems at once
technically specific and broadly allusive. Mark Owens, for instance, recently wrote a piece about
Californian post-punk band The Germs as a way of pointing at the existence and discussing the natureof these alternative histories and entry points outside the canon.
Throbbing changes, stops and starts, revisions and omissions,additions and ambivalences emanating from a corpuscular network resist
any monopolizing thematic analysis. The process ensures that its
strengths always will reside in specificities.29
Finally, by way of explaining this generation’s supposed dismissal of its predecessors, you write that‘it’s just the latest example of graphic design’s endemic lack of faith in its own worthiness’ and that ‘Art
and architecture [are] conspicuous sources of envy among the new critical designers – many of theirprojects are for artists.’ Now, I’d be the first to agree with the lack of faith in the (canonical version of)graphic design’s worthiness, as well as to suggest that this lack is justified (by its basic surplus,
superfluous aspect). But it doesn’t automatically follow that the individuals involved are sitting aroundself-flagellating. First, I’d argue that the apparent lack of available channels to produce work that these‘designers’ might consider worthwhile simply forces them to look further afield. And so, as we’reseeing, they become writers, editors, printers, publishers, distributors, shop owners, event organizers –all practical extensions of previous roles, taking matters into their own hands.
There’s a great line (I forget who wrote it, though if it wasn’t Marshall McLuhan it might as well havebeen) about a railroad company in the U.S. going bust because they made the mistake of thinking they
were in the business of railroads rather than transportation. It’s easy enough to apply this to what I’m
talking about, and say that we’re all just trying to stay focused on the fact that we’re in the business ofcommunication rather than graphic design. Second, I don’t see why working on projects with or for
artists or architects equals envy. I can understand why a fair proportion of our generation or circle orwhatever feel closer to the more playful, exuberant legacies of conceptual art than, say, the sadly
scarce residue of semiotics or information design, but I think you’re closer to describing the realcharacter of the current state of affairs when acknowledging the importance afforded to collaborationand community. The affirmative persistence of the drive to participate and communicate … these arethe ‘politics’ at stake here. In short, the bonds seem far more prevalent and relevant than the divisions,and what is actually happening far more prevalent and relevant – and thankfully less watertight – than
the terms used to describe it.
I abhor averages.
I like the specific case.30

	
  
29
30

Dustin Ericksen, ‘The Red Crayola/The Red Krayola: An Approachable Subject’, Afterall, no. 19, 2008.

Louis Brandeis quoted in: Larissa Harris, ed., The Curse of Bigness, exhibition catalogue, Queens Museum of Art, 2010,
p. 237. See also §8.1.

	
  

53

(d) In response to an exhibition: ‘a very particular graphic Esperanto’
Since around Dot Dot Dot’s half-life, I (and later we) have assembled a number of exhibitions oforiginal artefacts that were at some point reproduced as images in the journal’s pages – record covers,
paintings, photographs, and other items that typically illustrate the essays. Initially, there were threebarely-formed reasons for doing so. First: to set in motion a permanent, and permanently itinerant,collection that would continually expand as new objects were prompted by new texts. Second: to set
ourselves the productive problem of appropriately captioning the whole thing; to write a whole atleast equal to the sum of its parts. And third: to understand the impulse to start such an endeavour
in the first place. The pilot version in Tallinn (2005) duly comprised some 20 or 30 items stuck to theload-bearing columns of a large, dilapidated space. To inaugurate the show, my original co-editorPeter Bilak and I hosted a one-off walk-through, relating abbreviated versions of the essays behindthe objects.31
As usual, the plan didn’t play out as neatly as imagined. Because the objects cost so much to shiparound, and given that gallery wallspace wasn’t exactly forthcoming in the beginning, a few of the first
iterations of this emphatically material collection were ironically forced into more or less immaterial
formats. The second occasion, for instance, consisted of a corollary collection of digital images‘captioned’ by a pre-recorded lecture at the annual Festival d’Affiches in Chaumont, France (2005).
Inasmuch as the founding physical collection is more or less flat (in order that the pieces can be framed
and so more conveniently protected, shipped and displayed), the Chaumont talk was conceived as anopportunity to assemble an equivalent collection of stuff that was relatively rare, expensive, 3D, orotherwise difficult to acquire. The talk was reproduced in a book published on the occasion of thefestival, and then typically folded into the upcoming issue of Dot Dot Dot (#11).32
In this talk, I claim that ‘the majority of what passes for graphic design doesn’t really stick to any
reasonable notion of form following function’ but tends to ‘fuck’ it instead. With the benefit of ten
years’ hindsight this seems a bit much, but what I think I was getting at is that contemporaneousgraphic design is more commonly marked by a discrepancy between form and meaning. In otherwords, the relationship seems equivocal and contrived rather than intrinsic and inevitable.
The third exhibition was also immaterial, on this occasion supplanted by a handful of films in Utrecht(2005).33 The fourth, however, was a much-expanded assemblage of the physical collection back on awall and supported by a substantial budget at the 2007 Lyon Biennial.34 All subsequent iterations moreor less resemble the format established in Lyon: a large salon-style hang with some particular andusually less than satisfactory attempt to caption it. There, for instance, it was accompanied by anumbered, Sgt. Pepper-style outline diagram that referred the objects back to their founding essays inback issues of Dot Dot Dot.

	
  
31

We decided to title each installation of the collection progressively by letters to parallel the journal’s numbers – butthey often had subtitles, too. This first one at Kaleri Tartu in Tallin, Estonia, 2–9 April, 2005, for instance, was called DDDA:
Edasi Olevikku [We Shift Gear Into Present Tense]. This set off a further tradition of titling first in the local language, often
dubiously translated from an English original.

32

Stuart Bailey, DDDB: Peu importe les conneries (d’aprés Jamie Reid) [Never Mind the Bollocks (after Jamie Reid)],
reproduced in Paul Elliman and Maxine Kopsa (eds.), Dutch Resource (Arnhem: Valiz & Werkplaats Typografie, 2005);
republished in Dot Dot Dot #11, 2006. It begins: ‘A couple of years ago I was invited to give a talk at some event in Barcelona,
replacing Jamie Reid who had pulled out at the last minute. I decided to use the opportunity to present a collection of friends’
work that I admired. Upon realizing this didn’t amount to very much, the idea stretched to encompass a general collection ofwork from the past century by a gang of both dead and living spirits who made work with some common link; a bond – like anumbilical cord – stretching through the 20th century from some anonymous modernist mother. I might reluctantly describe thiswork as being cerebral, rigorous and worthy, if those words weren’t so cerebral-, rigorous- and worthy-sounding. So instead
maybe: charged, luminous and illuminating, like a series of momentary cartoon light bulbs flashing on and off above my head.’33

DDDC: Stel me een retorische vraag [Ask me a rhetorical question]: an involuted composite film evening, 1963–73, Casco,
Utrecht, 19 November, 2005. This line is drawn from one of the films, Andy Warhol’s Beauty no. 2 (1965), in which off-camera
Chuck Wein invites a drunken Edie Sedgwick to ‘Ask me a rhetorical question … see if you can get an answer.’

34

DDDD (Untitled), 2007 Lyon Biennial, 19 September 2007 – 6 January, 2008.

	
  

54

26

5
8
14
1

3

4

2

2

2

16

27

22

17

4

6

9

27

19

10

11

12
15

2

23

20
24

18

13
21

28

24

29

25

30

31

7
1. see: Louis Lüthi & Radim Peško, ‘Mitim(Gamma)’ in DDD13, 2006 (source: Louis Lüthi &Radim Pesko, type specimen screenprint, 2007)
2. see: Stuart Bailey, ‘Equation for a Composite
Design (2): Best Of’ in DDD8, 2004 (source:
Wire, Pink Flag LP, 1977; Chairs Missing LP, 1978;
154 LP, 1979; On Returning compilation LP, 1989)
3. see: Paulina Ołowska, ‘Ĉi Vu Parolas
Esperanton?’ in DDD5, 2002, (source: Esperanto
motto screen, 2005)
4. see: Mark Owens & David Reinfurt, ‘Group
Theory (A Short Course in Relational Aesthetics)’
in DDD7, 2003 (source: Total Design publicity
photograph, 1982)
5. see: Mark Owens, ‘Graphics Incognito’ in
DDD12, 2006 (source: Raymond Pettibon,
Black Flag logo, c.1990 / Muriel Cooper, MIT Presslogo, c.1970, adhesive vinyl)
6. see: David Reinfurt, ‘Global Branding’in DDD8, 2004 / Stuart Bailey, ‘Elemental
Mathematics’ in DDD9, 2004 (source: ‘Money’spread from The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1972)
7. see: Ryan Gander, ‘Hergé’s Realisation…’
in DDD9, 2004 (source: Ryan Gander, Hergé’s
realisation that Alph-Art was conceptually flawed,
Georges Remi’s realisation that Alph-Art wasconceptually flawed and Kuifjé’s realisation that
Alph-Art was conceptually flawed, dry transfer, 2003)
8. see: Will Holder, ‘These Woodcuts Could
Safeguard a Nation!’ in DDD9, 2004 (source:
Edward Wadsworth, dazzle ship woodcut, c.1920;
lithographic proof, c. 1970)

9. see: Louis Kaplan, ‘Hanging Up Moholy’in DDD13, 2006 (source: Dexter Sinister, Blazon
for Moholy-Nagy, lithograph, 2007)
10. see: Sytze Steenstra, ‘David Byrne:
Getting the I Out of Design’ in DDD4, 2001
(source: Robert Rauschenberg design for Talking
Heads, Speaking in Tongues LP, 1983)
11. see: Stuart Bailey, ‘Wyndham Lewis’ in
DDD11, 2005 (source: Chris Evans, Wyndham Lewis,
airbrush painting, 2005)
12. see: Michael Bracewell & Jon Wilde,‘Mark E Smith’ in DDD11, 2005 (source: Chris
Evans, Mark E Smith, airbrush painting, 2005)
13. see: Rob Giampietro, ‘Collected Words’
in DDD14, 2007 (source: Richard Hamilton,
Collected Words, London, Thames & Hudson,
1983)
14. see: David Greene, Samantha Hardingham& John Morgan Studio, ‘I.U.’ in DDD11, 2005
(source: John Morgan Studio, poster for theInvisible University, screenprint, 2005)
15. see: Gerard Byrne, ‘1984 and Beyond’in DDD13, 2006 / Emily Pethick, ‘On 1984 andBeyond’ in DDD13, 2006 (source: Gerard Byrne,
On 1984 and Beyond, photograph, 2007)
16. see: David Reinfurt, ‘Post-Master’ in
DDD12, 2006 / David Reinfurt, ‘Superdollars’in DDD14, 2007 (source: Portrait of BenjaminFranklin, etching, c. 1770; photograph, 2007 /Tony Law, Trying to find flaws, if any, in an
enlargement of a ‘superdollar’, photograph for
The New York Times, July 23, 2006)

17. see: Steve Rushton, ‘Like Sailors on theOpen Sea’ in DDD14, 2007 (source: Otto Neurath,
Strikes and Lockouts in the section ‘Society andEconomy’ of Atlas, 1930; facsimile print, 2007;
courtesy Stroom, The Hague)
18. see: Stuart Bailey, ‘Equation for a
Composite Design (1): Two Ideologies’ in DDD8,2004 (source: Stuart Bailey, Two Ideologies,
Merry Pranksters ‘Furthur’ LSD blotter, c. 1970 /Sex Pistols, Pretty Vacant 45" single, 1977)
19. see: Diedrich Diederichsen, ‘AA
Philosophy’ in DDD8, 2004 (source: Scritti
Politti, Asylums in Jerusalem/Jacques Derrida
12" single, 1983)
20. see: Katrine Herian, ‘Obituaries 1999’
in DDD11, 2005 (source: Katrine Herian, from theseries Obituaries 1999, silver gelatin print, 1999)
21. see: Paulina Ołowska, ‘Bauhaus Yoga’ in
DDD6, 2002 (source: Paulina Ołowska, photographof Bauhaus Yoga performance at Botanic Garden,
Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 2001; courtesy
Cabinet gallery, London)
22. see: Stuart Bailey, ‘On Graphic Design,
1982’ in DDD2, 2001 / Stuart Bailey, ‘On Graphic
Design, 1979’ in DDDX, 2005 (source: XTC,
Go2 LP, 1979)
23. see: Stuart Bailey, Alice Fisher &Ryan Gander, ‘Little Bastard (The Invention andIntroduction of a New Word)’ in DDD11, 2005
(source: Ryan Gander, The Spoilt Brat of theDictionary – But One It’ll Never Enter, photograph,2005)

24. see: Howard Singerman, ‘Extended Caption’in DDD14, 2007 (source: Alfred H. Barr, page from
Cubism and Abstract Art, New York, MoMA, 1936
/ Mike Kelley, sketch for Entry Way (Genealogical
Chart), 1995; courtesy Kelley Studio)
25. see: ‘Paul Elliman, ‘City Turned Upside
Down’ in DDD8, 2004 (source: Harry Beck,sketch for the London Underground map, c.1930;
photograph courtesy Ken Garland, 2004)
26. see: Paul Elliman, ‘A–Z, 0–9, Yes/No’ in
DDD13, 2006 (source: Paul Elliman, Ouija Board forJosef Albers, hardboard, 2002)
27. see: Seth Price, ‘Décor Holes’ in DDD13,2006 (source: Seth Price & Dexter Sinister,Courtesy of Seth Price (Mallarmé), lithograph, 2007 /Seth Price & Dexter Sinister, Courtesy of Seth Price(Broodthaers), lithograph, 2007)
28. see: Maxine Kopsa, ‘Dear Dear Dear
Kippenberger’ in DDD11, 2005 (source: Martin
Kippenberger, Untitled, 1995, pencil on hotel
stationery; courtesy Estate Martin Kippenberger /Galerie Gisela Capitain)
29. see: Justin Beal, ‘Decoration*’ in DDD14,2007 (source: Justin Beal, Decoration, photograph,2007)
30. see: Paul Elliman, ‘A Late Evening in the
Future’ in DDD5, 2002 (Paul Elliman, The Shipping
Forecast, faxed drawing, 2002)
31. see: Kim Levine, ‘Doing Nothing(A Conversation with Eugene Menard)’ in DDD2,2001 (source: Eugene Menard, Butcher’s Bar,
London EC1, photograph, 2001)

After Lyon, the installations were increasingly conceived as teaching set-ups. Meanwhile, we also
started to publish, in a motley range of formats, a written account of the collection. What we started tothink of as an ‘extended caption’ was as sprawling and palimpsest as its subject, usually accompanied
by a scale reproduction of the latest arrangement of the wall. The project now advanced by oscillating
between text and exhibition, the next one always based on the vicissitudes of the last.35
And so the latest, most substantial version of this extended caption found its way into that final Dot Dot
Dot. It was conceived as a kind of Last Word on the collection (before being shelved for good in The
Serving Library; more on this below) – and so, too, a last surrogate editorial in the form of anillustrated transcription of a voiceover that played throughout a show of the artefacts at Kunstverein,

	
  

35

In exhaustive chronological order, subsequent incarnations of the collection took the following forms: a single-day seminar
spent ‘disambiguating’ the wall, DDDE: Begriffsklärung [Disambiguation], Kunstverein Munich, 24 May – 1 June, 2008;
the first attempt to account for the wall in words, ‘DDDF (Untitled)’, Map, no. 15, Autumn 2008; a public conversation with Jan
Verwoert on the opening night of DDDG: Extended Caption, Culturgest Porto, 25 April – 27 June, 2009; a large-format printed
sheet, DDDH (Untitled), made in Paris as part of a ‘printed exhibition by Christophe Lemaitre, Répétition dans l’épilogue,c. Winter 2009/10; a public workshop, ‘On Library, Archive and “Service”’, alongside the exhibition DDDI (Untitled), Office forContemporary Art, Oslo, 2 December 2009 – mid-February, 2010; a framed version of the broadsheet DDDH hung alongside thelatest version of the caption as DDDK (Untitled),within the group exhibition Between Sight and Sound, Green on Red, Dublin,
6–29 May, 2010; as a fold-out section in a catalogue of events at the Kunstverein Munich, ‘DDDL (Untitled)’, in Stefan Kalmár,ed., Be Nice Share Everything Have Fun: Kunstverein München 2005–2009 (Cologne: Walther König, 2010); and finally for
now, the written version reproduced below, ‘DDDM: If you stuck a tag on them …’, Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010. (The missing ‘J’must have fallen through the cracks of this haphazard program.) Somewhere around this point we dropped the alphabeticalcoding as the collection and teaching became fuzzily folded into our nascent institution, The Serving Library (see the last part ofthe present chapter). However, we carried on programming the same bunch of stuff in the same vein: a series of seminars under
the rubric ‘Applied Art’ within A Model of The Serving Library at Kunstverein Amsterdam, 29 May – 24 July, 2010; a two-day
workshop and panel discussion along with the exhibition Re-Applied Art, LiveInYourHead, Geneva, 4–24 November, 2010;
a six-week summer school titled ‘From the Toolbox of a Serving Library’ within the exhibition The Serving Library, Walter
Philips Gallery, Visual Arts Department, The Banff Centre, 10 July – 4 September, 2011; an ‘expo’ version (in advance offinding a permanent home) also titled The Serving Library, Artists Space, New York, 20 October – 15 January, 2012; a hang of
new items acquired since Bulletins of The Serving Library took over from Dot Dot Dot within the exhibition programme
The End(s) of the Library at The Goethe-Institut Library, New York, 1 April – 21 June, 2013; and an installation within analtered version of French architect Claude Parent’s ‘Art Hill’ structure, The Serving Library, Tate Liverpool, 7 November 2014
– 8 February, 2015.

	
  

55

Amsterdam.36 The text tracks the sequence of works arranged within its boxy apartment interior byartist Giles Bailey, who also lent his voice to what was essentially an ‘audio guide’ that played on aloop throughout the space for the duration. This is what he read:
The title is overheard from a short film, Pulmo Marina, by Aurélien Froment:
If you stuck a tag on them to track them the way certain fish aretagged these days they would sink instantly.
The opening quote is from Stefan Themerson’s General Piesc, a story in which the General finds
happiness only when he has forgotten his mission:
The Greek males thought geometry was the thing. Dr Zamenhof thought
Esperanto was the thing. Jesus-Christ thought the dialectical loaf ofbread was the thing. And geometry produced bazookas. And polyglotism
produced more quarrels. And love produced hatred. And none of thesegreat things has proved to be more (what is the right word)efficacious (?) than what I, in my female way, would like to call‘good manners’.37
This is the 13th occasion of showing this group of artefacts, or pictures of those artefacts, whose only
objective connection is that they have appeared in the pages of Dot Dot Dot at some point since its
conception in the year 2000. This collection of source material was first assembled in 2004. By source
material, I mean the original items represented in print by screened images. In the regular hierarchy ofthe magazine, texts are generally primary and images secondary, and the fundamental idea of these
exhibitions was to invert these roles, as a kind of parallel operation.
The magazine’s contributors rarely write directly about how this kind of cultural residue looks, but draw
on it rather to trigger, illustrate, or reference broader sociological, philosophical or art-historical ideas.
Take the cover of Scritti Politti’s 1982 double A-side single hanging at the top of the stairs, featuring
the song ‘Jacques Derrida’, for example.38

8This image accompanies a piece by Diedrich Diederichsen which, rather than discussing either themusic, lyrics, or sleeve design, more broadly recounts a moment in the eighties when a certain strain of
British post-punk enjoyed the same intellectual currency as French pop philosophy. Or to the right of‘Derrida,’ next to the door, the upside down photograph of an early sketch of Harry Beck’s 1931
London Underground map.

	
  
36

Dexter Sinister, A Model of The Serving Library, Kunstverein, Amsterdam, 29 May – 24 July, 2010.

37

Stefan Themerson, General Piesc (London: Gaberbocchus, 1976). See also §7.5 and §7.8.

38

All architectural references – such as the ‘stairs’ here – refer to the interior of Kunstverein. The numbers adjacent each image
note the issue of Dot Dot Dot where they originally appeared.

	
  

56

8

The sketch itself was accidentally hung the wrong way up when first exhibited at the V&A, effectively
prioritizing its abstract qualities over its representational ones. Paul Elliman introduces this anecdote toframe some thoughts around the idea that abstraction – and by extension modernism – was only
acceptable to the British public when grounded in function. Let’s move on.
Another sense in which images are secondary in the magazine is that they’re often second-rate. By
which I mean poor quality, black and white, and printed on uncoated paper, which reduces definition.
This is partly practical, as we’ve never really been able to afford decent photography or colour printing,but also in deliberate reaction to how ‘graphics’ were typically reproduced in the eighties and nineties –as seductive full-colour surfaces that barely began to relate the stickier and generally more compelling
substance underneath. In other words, these images were only skin-deep. Our response was todownplay the surface in an attempt to get at the depth through the writing. A good example of this,behind the door, is the ‘Money’ spread with images of an antique cash register, dinosaur and bar chart,from the 1969 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, a kind of seventies counterculture Yellow Pages.

8This has appeared twice in the magazine. First as an illustration to David Reinfurt’s three-page singlesentence biography of Stewart Brand, who founded and edited the Catalog. Then alongside a shortpiece on the cover of the subsequent issue about candid editorials and the economic oxymoron of
independent publishing. This particular spread of the Catalog relates the publication’s financial
mechanics by presenting its own accounts – a gesture towards editorial transparency in line with its
general D.I.Y. ethos.
The mediocre scan of this spread that accompanies both pieces in the magazine is, then, foremost akind of evidence – an ‘Exhibit A’ – which at best offers an impression of the Catalog’s uniquescrappiness. In the physical exhibition, however, actual pages are torn from an original copy and its
maverick production process is now tangible: pages assembled on the fly according to a distinctly
west coast stoner logic, marked by hole-plugging idiosyncrasies such as the short story that runs
across the bottom right-hand corner of each page, all set on thin newsprint, cheap and low-bulk, once
timely, now quickly browning and fading. Stripped of its explanatory text in the magazine, the object isleft to speak for itself, and as part of the bigger group is forced to interact with the other objects, like abunch of strange kids in a playground.
So what you’re looking at here is, at its most allusive (and ignoring for a moment the obvious
contradiction) a claim against representation which amounts to Dot Dot Dot’s very particularconception of modernism: a faith in objects rather than pictures of objects. This could be transposed toexperience over convenience – and by extension perhaps conversation over monologue orcommunity over individual, too. This is why it seems useful to regard this collection with that opening
quote from Stefan Themerson in mind – a statement profoundly modernist in both spirit and rhetoric.

	
  

57

Applied to this collection, then, Themerson’s manners are manifest in a certain (what is the right word)
momentum (?). Its common denominator is a way of thinking – an approach, an attitude – in line with
Themerson’s alacrity and good humour. I’m clearly grasping for words and left wanting here, but what
I’m getting at is more efficiently summed up by those Wire LPs hung on the East wall at knee height,
running chronologically from 1977’s Pink Flag to the 1989 best-of composite On Returning. This is
one of the easier-to-relate reasons for collecting and showing this stuff: if you look hard enough it
actually moves.

8

Like ‘modernism’, the word ‘aesthetic’ has been eroded, aggregated, and flattened beyond useful
distinction. Its earlier reference to something approaching ‘the emotional-sensory reaction to visual
stimuli’ – or more simply ‘having an experience’ – has by now been diluted to little more than aeuphemism for ‘formal’. The objects sought after here, though, are those I could imagine might
combine or curdle to invoke that original sense of the word.
Two items are rooted in a magazine piece called ‘Equation for a Composite Design,’ which comprises apair of ‘ideological buses’, high up in the top right hand corner of the East wall next to the window.

8

On the left is a square of miniature replications of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters’ notorious midsixties hippy van (immortalized by Tom Wolfe), with its lovingly misspelled destination FURTHUR
painted over the front windscreen. And on the right, one from a Jamie Reid Sex Pistols collage boundfor NOWHERE. When it came to tracking down material carriers of these immaterial images, thePistols’ vehicle was easy enough, printed on the reverse of the sleeve for ‘Pretty Vacant’, whichreached number 6 in 1977, and so pretty ubiquitous in second-hand record shops. Its psychedelic
equivalent was less apparent, at least until I came across a cartoon of Kesey’s bus on a piece of LSD
blotter art. This could still be bought – unloaded – from his son Zane in Berkeley, California. The blotter
art arrived ready-perforated into single trips and signed by old Pranksters – an odd counterpoint to thedrab coffee rings that stained the Pistols’ single.
The morning after the first incarnation of the show in Estonia, a corner of ten tabs had been carefully
torn off – most probably by the gang of itinerant Russians who had been hanging about all night,
according to the locals. Later the piece was lost, perhaps seized, on a flight to London, and so a new
sheet had to be ordered from Zane.
Extra-formal accidents, such as these inadvertent allusions to psychedelics and stimulants, suggest
something of the reason for actually gathering rather than merely depicting these items; setting up theconditions for something other to occur. Further examples of particularly loaded objects include,
opposite the buses on the West wall, the indigo stencil print of Muriel Cooper’s pioneering 1977 selfportrait-by-Polaroid-simultaneously-video-imaged-and-printed.

	
  

58

12, 15Or, further along and below, Paul Elliman’s 2001 ouija board for Josef Albers, originally made for aséance at Yale, which utilizes the Bauhausler’s 1926 modular typeface, stencil-cut from a piece ofsquare hardboard the same format and medium Albers used for his colour paintings.

13

And at the end of the same wall, Jason Fulford’s small 2007 Droste effect C-Print of an Ulrich Roskialbum cover, along with a test Polaroid of the same image incorporated to fold time into the equationof its own production.

17

The buses are an example of two objects arriving in reverse, by excavating a single worldly object backfrom a multiplied image. A similar pair are the juxtaposed versions of what appear to be proportionallyenlarged scans of original pages from Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal 1897 poem, ‘A throw of the dicewill never abolish chance,’ and Marcel Broodthaers’ 1969 adaptation, which abstracts and/or censors
Mallarmé’s arrangement, subtitled ‘Image’ in relation to the original ‘Text.’

13

Again these scans have both appeared in juxtaposition twice in Dot Dot Dot: on the first occasionaccompanying if not exactly illustrating a text, ‘About Nothing’, by Peter Bilak; and more recently
alongside Seth Price’s ‘Décor Holes,’ a loose history of sampling, with Mallarmé and Broodthaers as
one thread of its prehistory. Price writes:

	
  

59

Broodthaers claims and then augments Mallarmé’s poem to produce a new,third body, a field between the works. The whole is without novelty,
save the spacing of one’s reading; the blanks, in effect, assume
importance. The madness of the ‘a self-annihilating nothing’prescription. But this was only to be expected since Broodthaers wasan imitation artist. It may be that the supreme triumph of thisvalidity is to cast doubt on its own validity, mixing a deep
scandalous laughter with the religious spirit.39
Before their inclusion alongside his piece in Dot Dot Dot, however, Price digitally altered the Mallarméand Broodthaers scans, cutting, pasting, and minimally reconfiguring the lines to open up a fourth field.
The pages were then captioned ‘Courtesy of Seth Price’ in modest reference to the conceit, and thisparticular line of sampling further protracted here through their reproduction as metre-high capital-A
Art lithographs framed for the wall. To clarify: these are blown-up facsimiles of two pages from themagazine rather than the original books, and any blanks, gaps, fields, and grey areas between thesevarious generations of images, formats, mediums and media are imprecisely where any new work lies.
On the face of it, there’s no reason to assume these objects should share any formal characteristics,
because (a) their umbilical texts have been written by a wide range of people, with different
backgrounds and interests, at different times across the past decade, and (b) Dot Dot Dot has no
particular aesthetic mandate. In fact, anything approaching an ethos would rather stand against any
kind of prescribed or standardized style in favour of unique form drawn from specific content. Such as
David Osbaldeston’s 2008 Diagram for a Search Engine, which is above and slightly to the right of(Mallarmé/Broodthaers)/Price.

16– which both mocks and affirms the romantic gesture of its medium, the woodcut, as well as its
rhetoric, the heroic avant-garde polemic. And yet it seems disingenuous to deny the blatant graphic
synchronicities across the collection. The trouble is that the nature of these synchronicities is as
profoundly difficult to articulate as they are easy to perceive. This is because they are primarily cerebral
not visual, more abstract than concrete, and again most accurately considered ‘ways of thinking’ mademanifest. Perhaps this is why definition is so elusive: because abstraction lends itself to opening up
spaces rather than delimiting them. Or ‘And … and … and …,’ as Mark Owens quoted John Rachmanparaphrasing Gilles Deleuze back in Dot Dot Dot #12.
One recurring graphic strain here is, of course, abstraction itself – to various ends. A poetic, ‘soft’ form
is described by the two transformations in the Mallarmé and Broodthaers works. Or facing this pair on
the opposite wall next to the door, Paul Elliman’s handwritten outline of the British coastline, faxedfrom London in 2002, which traces the regional waters famously relayed during BBC Radio 4’s
midnightly Shipping Forecast.

	
  
39

Seth Price, ‘Dispersion’, op. cit. (unpaginated).

	
  

60

5

And also the adjacent spread from Ettore Sottsass’s statement on ‘Decoration’ as doctored by Justin
Beal in 2007; the book abstracted as photograph, statement as image.

14

Moving further to the left on this East wall, a more applied, ‘hard’ abstraction is found in thetransformation of statistics to serial graphic information in the two Isotype charts. The top one, forexample, presents the relative numbers of workers’ ‘Strikes and Lockouts’ – symbolized by red fists –in Britain, France and Germany from 1913 to 1928.

14

Or in the unwitting sister logos by Muriel Cooper for the MIT Press in 1963, and Raymond Pettibon forhis brother’s hardcore band Black Flag, circa 1978,12drawn together by Mark Owens in his piece ‘Graphics Incognito’ to make the unlikely point that
De Stijl-inspired graphic reduction is intrinsically bound up in the community, fluidity and Calvinist
work ethic of both MIT and Black Flag.

	
  

61

A couple of items now missing from the wall remain anecdotally conspicuous. One was a rough sketchby Mike Kelley for his 1995 work, Entry Way (Genealogical Chart), a bizarre fictional town sign which
substitutes the usual emblems of Rotary Clubs and Women’s Institutes for a far more esoteric,personal assemblage, including the Rainbow People’s Party, Ding Dong School, Optimist International,
and the local Goodwill thrift store.

14

This was originally adjacent Alfred Barr’s classic 1936 diagrammatic history of ‘Cubism and Abstract
Art’, and both have since been replaced by Barney Bubbles’s electric-abstract portrait of John Cooper
Clarke. As Howard Singerman writes in his own ‘Extended Caption’ to the juxtaposition of Barr and
Kelley, these two formative histories represent a fundamental shift – from Barr’s neat, linear teleology
to Kelley’s messy, lateral association; a switch in social epistemology from Freudian patriarchy tosomething much looser, more random, self-determined, nebulous, amorphous, and without obvious
hierarchy – a condition where family and order are supplanted by friendship and interest. Curiously, likemuch of the content that lies in the stories behind the items here, this two-in-one piece was at once
‘about’ the work it describes as well as ‘about’ the nature of the context that frames it here. In otherwords, Kelley’s ‘genealogical chart’ diagrams the nature of the collection it belongs to.
A second absence is located in the gap below the Whole Earth money spread, which originally hungover Ryan Gander’s 2004 triptych, Georges Remi’s realisation that Alph-Art was conceptually flawed,
Hergé’s realisation that Alph-Art was conceptually flawed, and Kuifje’s realisation that Alph-Art wasconceptually flawed.

9– a tiny cartoon, serially repeated three times in letraset, composed from the lines and stars that rendera character dazed and confused in a comic strip. This piece of conceptual melancholy refers to the plotof the last, unfinished Tintin cartoon, which involved the invention and subsequent theft of a mysterious‘Alph-Art’, but was interrupted by death of Tintin’s creator Hergé, a pseudonym of Georges Remi,
whose real-life nickname was Kuifje: a Russian Doll of authorship.
The triptych was withdrawn after an argument with Ryan about the dubious status of his work in
relation to the whole, particularly as articulated through information surrounding the show, i.e. whether
the exhibition was presented as a collection of independent pieces, or a single piece comprised ofcomposite parts; as a general group show, or one with an explicit curatorial theme. And by extension,
who was being represented, exactly: the individual artists, the group of artists, Dot Dot Dot, its editor,
or Dexter Sinister, its publisher. I didn’t really have a good answer, or rather I had a non-answer: thatthe only intention in this respect was to present something – for better or worse – outside any of those
designations. This didn’t assuage him, so we pulled the piece.
I realized, though, that one immediate effect of this collection is to level regular distinctions anyway –between high and low, expensive and cheap, rare and ubiquitous, limited and mass-produced, old andnew, exclusive and available, famous and anonymous, canonical and overlooked. All are lowered or

	
  

62

elevated to the same plane. The vertical strip of photographs of science fiction writers from a 1963
group interview in Playboy, ‘On 1984 and Beyond’, is an extension of a work of the same name by
Gerard Byrne, which has assumed a number of different formats since 2005.

14

Similarly wary of its new status in regard to this odd collection, Gerard emphasized only that I should
clearly present it as, quote, ‘an “illustration” of an aspect of the work, rather than “the work” itself’.
Here he summarizes the potential violence of the whole project: that all this levelling is in danger ofironing out the very particular poetry inherent to each individual work in the first place. To recompense,the violence has to be justified by a counter-violent trade-off – or, less dramatically put, a guaranteethat the sum is at least as good or ideally greater than its parts.
Now moving through to the front room, on the West wall to the left of the mirror, this ‘hard abstraction’is most succinctly applied in a proof of one of Edward Wadsworth’s 1918 woodcut illustrations of a
Dazzle Ship – a war artist recording the practical abstract camouflage used by the British navy in order
to confuse and delay the enemy’s recognition of their target.

9

Facing this on the wall behind the door, Raymond Savignac’s Bic logo – supposedly a ‘stylized
schoolboy’s head’ – heralds a whole other collection of symbols and their parallel, shrinking definitions.
The whole was originally conceived in 2006 as a kind of modern type specimen for a supplement to
Dot Dot Dot’s house font Mitim, which resuscitates a number of obscure literary, mathematical,
scientific and other symbols. Its co-authors Radim Peško and Louis Lüthi reformatted the page into
this metre-high screenprint in order to ensure the tail-end paragraphs were finally legible.

	
  

63

13

This explains its scale and latitude (at eye level) in relation to the other items, and again the individual
piece mirrors aspects of the larger collection: the binaries of image & text, evidence & explication, form
& content, surface & depth, and so on.
The group has become unwittingly dominated by pairs, doubles and juxtapositions: I’ve already noted
the buses, the (Mallarmé/Broodthaers)/Price pages and MIT/Black Flag logos, but in this front room
between the mirror and window, see also Chris Evans’s dual airbrush portraits of Mark E. Smith and
Wyndham Lewis from 2005.

11

They were originally painted to illustrate a couple of interchangeable biographies – the newer Lewis
piece based line-for-line on an older Smith one – as a time-travelling alignment of ostensibly kindred
spirits. And facing them are two portraits of Benjamin Franklin.

12, 14On the left, a classic 1783 engraving which fronted David Reinfurt’s compressed account of Franklin’sprescient networking as original ‘Post-Master’ of the U.S.; and on the right, the same image on a dollar
bill under scrutiny for forgery in 2006, which accompanied the same writer’s account of fake North
Korean ‘Superdollars’ two issues later.

	
  

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During a public disambiguation of a previous wall instalment in Lyon, Jan Verwoert pointed out anapparent contradiction concerning transparency and opacity, which seems pivotal in terms of making
sense of the various forces at play here.
To reiterate, both publication and collection stand to perpetuate a trajectory of independent, criticalmodernist movement – and are perhaps chasing a new word for it. Founded on the inclination tounderstand and relate how things really work, including vested interests, this self-reflexive impulse
works towards exposing the mechanics of form, oscillating between container and contained. All ofwhich is grounded in social, moral and ethical purpose (or can be). And so we’re back to Themerson’s
good manners.
Recall the Isotype chart as one of the more obvious canonical (if still marginal) examples of this‘transparent’ tradition – originally part of an inter-war travelling exhibition that propagated social
awareness on an international scale. Or, played out as pop, Robert Rauschenberg’s design for the firstedition of Talking Heads’ 1983 Speaking in Tongues LP between the North-facing windows of the front
room.

4

This is a plastic collage assembled from three acetate circles that combine with the record’stranslucent vinyl to form a full-colour image – a concerted reflection of the album’s mesh of glossolalicreferences, as Sytze Steenstra points out in his article on ‘Getting the “I” out of design’. And moretransparent still, back next to the Dazzle Ship, Hipgnosis’s watershed 1978 album cover for XTC’s Go2
album, with its deadpan deconstruction of its own conceit: ‘This is a RECORD COVER. This writing is
the DESIGN upon the record cover. The DESIGN is to help SELL the record. We hope to draw yourattention to it and encourage you to pick it up …’.

2

But equal to all this transparency, Verwoert suggested, is Dot Dot Dot’s persistent attraction to theopaque; work that is distinctly obtuse, hermetic or sophisticated. Paulina Ołowska’s 2001 photographof a ‘Bauhaus Yoga’ performance, for example, whose accompanying text notes the shared utopian
ends of both schools6– a text which, like this one, is a distinct component of the work, not just a caption subservient to it.
Or up above one of the cupboard doors next to the exit back to the hallway, the remarkably considered
dust jacket for Richard Hamilton’s 1992 book of writing, Collected Words

	
  

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14

– a compendium of graphic styles, mediums, references and in-jokes, exhaustively annotated by Rob
Giampietro in his own ‘Collected Words’ for Dot Dot Dot.
Moving through the door and into the small pink room, next to the window is Walead Beshty’s 2008
folded paper photogram overprinted with test elements from Adobe Photoshop in homage to asupposed experiment by László Moholy-Nagy that, it turns out, never existed.

17

Having pointed out this simultaneous transparency and opacity, Jan wondered both (a) how to resolve
this apparent paradox, and (b) whether it’s necessary or desirable to do so. Here’s the beginning of areversible answer, which draws heavily from his own ideas:
First, Dot Dot Dot is opaque to allow access to the transparent. I have in mind two angles on thenature of exclusivity. One is that secrecy and obliqueness are used to deny certain parties (i.e. readers
and audiences) access to information (i.e. art and other cultural detritus). While this clearly seems
negative, the same qualities could be considered positive if you accept that an understanding of
cultural codes allows a form of initiation into a community – or rather a commitment to engage andparticipate with one. Perhaps this could be more simply understood as the difference between theimmature and mature student. (Nothing to do with age, of course.) If so, this could only reasonably bedeemed adverse if any interested party were actively refused entry to this ‘school’ by whatever
metaphorical bouncer.
The rainbow text that announces the ‘Invisible University’, on the same pink room’s East wall next tothe bookcase, operates on this principle.

12

	
  

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Made in 2005 by John Morgan for an ongoing project founded by architect David Greene, thisscreenprinted announcement utilizes deliberately clipped yet expansive language to itemize a few
working principles that float the idea of a school freed from institutional confines. Its rhetoric is
enigmatic but not elitist – a playful set of open statements carefully designed to dislodge received
wisdom and common practice.
However, Dot Dot Dot is equally transparent to allow access to the opaque. Regardless of theefficacy of distribution, location or promotion, publishing and exhibiting are – intrinsically – acts ofengagement. They are foremost gestures of multiplication and connection towards the sharing ofideas. If those works transparently articulated or exhibited are then opaque, I’d continue to argue thateach individual piece of work (text, image or object) presupposes its own balancing act between thegeneration and killing of curiosity via supplementary material; and a return to zero in each case.
The apparent paradox Jan is describing was understood, resolved and labelled by Michel Foucault as‘heterotopic,’ a term he borrowed from biology to describe spaces, mental or physical, wherecontradictions can co-exist. A heterotopia is an actual place (as opposed to a utopia) that presupposesa mechanism of opening and closing, simultaneously allowing and restricting access to an environment(He originally applied the term to public spaces). And according to Foucault, the most efficient
metaphor here is the cruise ship, which is not a paradox at all.
Anthony Huberman responded to a previous version of this overextended caption by arguing:
What I thought Jan was talking about was how what is interesting,today, is the question of style, not the questions of mechanics, or
self-reflexivity, or transparency, or opacity, or exclusivity, or
democracy ... the ‘style’ with which one shares secrets (‘secrets’ notin the sense of a ‘caper’ or ‘mystery’ or ‘trick’ or ‘shadow economy,’
but in the very ordinary sense that 100% of all communication involves
the sharing of secrets, and that there is nothing special or shadowy
about that at all). Performing in a ‘key’ is what matters ... the‘key’ is where an artist exits from the flat binary space of OpacityTransparency or Black-White or Yes-No or Knowing-Not Knowing, andenters the ‘infra-thin’ other space, something more 3-D, in a musicalsense ... the sense of crawling inside of Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ andletting notes push and pull you every-which way, not map-able, not‘conceptual art’, not ‘the form reflects and exposes and illustrates
the content’, but much less name-able. ‘Pleasure’ is a word thatcomes to mind.
But at the same time, this is what you talk about and what you do ...
your images are ‘irrational accompaniments that operate alongside’,
not as ‘illustrations’ ... done in such a way as to establish a moodin the reading experience ... and it works so well, lets that moodlinger and coat the reader’s experience in its nebulous way ... the‘mood’ being the Good Manners you talk about.
And then I think the mood gets broken every time the idea of ‘meta’ or‘form reflecting its content’ or words like ‘transparency’ or‘opacity’ or ‘exclusivity’ enter the picture ... they are not only
irrelevant, but they also seem counter-productive ... they somehow act
like mood-breakers ... like the kind of information that makes
everything seem pragmatic, efficient, calculated, and conceptuallysound ... when what the reader is enjoying is how it all seems so
inefficient, un-sound, erratic, misbehaving, but, somehow (and this is
the magic) still well-mannered and generous!
But hearing how while it seems erratic, it’s all actually a highly
efficient system, a delicate and deliberate balance of transparency

	
  

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weighed with opacity, with the form being a careful illustration ofits method ... well ... it’s as if I was watching a light-footed andelegant dance, done in ‘the key of the generous,’ with interpretive
doors opening and closing along the way, with different viewers
slipping in and out of them, and the guy next to me leans over andtells me that the number of steps the dancer was making, actually,corresponds to the number of something clever-and-appropriate, andhow, conceptually and pragmatically, it therefore forms a system that‘is’ what it is ‘about’, and isn’t that so interesting ... If the guy
next to me told me that, in that moment, as I was slipping in and outof experiences, I think I would consider it a case of bad manners!40
All of which is wholeheartedly agreed with in principle, but not in this specific instance of practice –simply because the present text, long-windedly and ungraciously falling over itself to ‘explain’ its
subject, is on this occasion the style or key or mood. Which is to say, these various instalments of walls
and pages – or in this case speakers – aren’t really ‘about’ either the mute collection or the didactic
caption at all. Rather, they’re intended to summon the infra-thin point between the two:a talking point, or point of entry. It’s quite literally a set-up, a premise to be written or spoken about.
This supposed equilibrium of transparency and opacity is hardly a controlled ecosystem. Such notions
are only apparent in retrospect, and even then only when trying to work out what might be going on.
As such, surely all this operates one level further removed from that basic opacity/transparency
dichotomy. I too find being told what’s ‘meta’ or ‘form reflecting its content’ or explicating‘transparency’ or ‘opacity’ or ‘exclusivity’ fundamentally bad mannered. But the reason for not simply
good-manneredly letting the objects or images speak for themselves here is precisely because here
they’ve been stripped from their contextualizing texts and so don’t have a voice to speak with. Or tofollow Anthony’s metaphor, they’re steps with no music to dance to.
This text, an articulation of the ‘reasoning’ – the back-stories, criteria, connections – in as plain, direct
and frankly discomfiting a manner as possible is, then, a form of compensation. The task is to refill
those holes created by removing the objects’ original contexts, only now with a different kind of
substance. In the course of this forced labour, perhaps something new and instructive is made.
Now might be a good moment to move back to the hall where we began. Once again: the abiding
interest here, over and above any particular discipline, medium or cause, is in simultaneously
documenting and practising work about and through self-reflexivity. The closest I’ve come tounderstanding why is embedded in the following quote, courtesy of Albert Appel Jnr.’s annotatedversion of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:
The vertiginous conclusion of a Vladimir Nabokov novel calls for acomplicated response which many readers, after a lifetime of realistic
novels, are incapable of making. Children, however, are aware of otherpossibilities ... One afternoon my wife and I built a puppet theatre.
After propping the theatre on the top edge of the living room couch,I crouched down behind it and began manipulating the two hand puppetsin the stage above me. The couch and the theatre’s scenery provided
good cover, enabling me to peer over the edge and watch the children
immediately become engrossed in the show, and then virtually
mesmerized by my improvised little story that ended with a patient
father spanking an impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away
by his story’s violent climax, knocked over the entire theatre, whichclattered onto the floor, collapsing in a heap of cardboard, wood andcloth – leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now
visible over the couch’s rim, my puppetted hands, with their naked

	
  
40

Email from Anthony Huberman, April 2010.

	
  

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wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children remained intheir open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space
where the theatre had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did thekind of double-take that a comedian might take a lifetime to perfect,and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before –and not so much at my clumsiness, which was nothing new, but rather at
those moments of total involvement in a non-existent world, and at
what its collapse implied to them about the authenticity of the larger
world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own
fabricated illusions. They were laughing, too, over their sense ofwhat the vigorous performance had meant to me; but they saw how easily
they could be tricked and their trust belied, and the shrillness of
their laughter finally suggested that they recognized the frightening
implications of what had happened, and that only laughter could steel
them in their new awareness.41
I could carry on itemizing here – the recurring censor lines, the monochromes and rainbows, thereversals and mirrors – but would rather contrive to tie this up by pointing to that text reversed out of
the burgundy field hung above the lavatory door on the landing. This is a screenprint stencil,
conveniently hung by its frame back-to-front, of an old Esperanto motto: Logika, Neutrala, Facila

4– Logical, Neutral, Easy. It was included in an early Dot Dot Dot alongside Paulina Ołowska’s 2002
billboard campaign Ci vu Parolas Esperanton? (Do you speak Esperanto?) Back then, I naively
assumed such sentiments described the magazine too, but have since slowly come to consider it far
closer to the polar opposite: Mallogika, Partia, Malsimpla: Illogical, Biased, Complicated.
All previous incarnations of this collection have tried to find two forms of balance: the first between
presenting the group as an overall image and as a set of individual ones (preferably in that order);the second between letting the objects speak for themselves and labelling them (preferably in thatorder). Rather than a ‘hang’ or ‘exhibition’ or ‘collection’ or ‘print’, perhaps this thing is more accurately
named an ‘attempt’ – which happens to be the original meaning of ‘essay’. This is, then, the latest
attempt: a leporello-folded transcript of a voiceover that captioned the most recent hang of objects in
an apartment space in Amsterdam determined by their previous reproduction as a printed sheet ofimages in Paris displayed in Dublin based on the previous arrangement in Munich based on a previous
leporello based on a previous wall based on a previous leporello based on a previous wall, with certain
pieces added or subtracted according to various circumstances met along the way …
On each occasion, the collection’s arrangement can be accounted for by this ever-loosening coil of aplan; and at this point let’s consider it simply, or complexly, the thirteenth provincial arrangement of avery particular graphic Esperanto.42

	
  
41
42

Alfred Appel, Jr., ed., The Annotated Lolita [revised edn., 1991] (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. xxx–xxxii.

At this point, the collection is clearly the work of a very large constellation. With thanks on this particular occasion toGiles Bailey (the voice), Maxine Kopsa, and Krist Gruijthuijsen, and to the various lenders of the works past and present(Justin Beal, Paul Elliman, Chris Evans, Jason Fulford, Ryan Gander, Katrine Herian, Paulina Olowska, and Stroom, Den Haag);with due regard to the original courtesies and permissions to reproduce these images in the magazine; to the contributors
who originally introduced them (Justin Beal, Mark Beasley, Walead Beshty, Michael Bracewell, Gerard Byrne, Diedrich
Diederichsen, Paul Elliman, Alice Fisher, Ryan Gander, Mark Geffriaud, Rob Giampietro, David Greene, Samantha
Hardingham, Will Holder, Andrew Hunt, Louis Kaplan, Alex Klein, Kim Levine, Louis Lüthi, Eugene Menard, John Morgan,

	
  

	
  

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The single anomaly to the collection’s oscillating exhibition/essay format was DDDG: Extended
Caption, a large-format book assembled from scans of pages ripped from all those Dot Dot Dot articles
the artefacts had originally illustrated.43 The project had evidently come full-circle: from print to wall toprint again. It was published on the occasion of the collection’s installation at Culturgest Porto,
Portugal (2009), with the idea that it comprised half the show.

The situation was, however, entirely unreasonable in that it was patently impossible to absorb anything
more than a fraction of this supposed ‘caption’. Conversely, without any umbilical link to thesefounding texts, any onlooker would likely miss nine-tenths of what made the stuff worth illustrating in
the first place. In a public conversation with Jan Verwoert spent discussing the book in front of thewall, we concluded that our talking about all the above before an audience ought not be conceived asmerely a supplement to the project, but instead its very essence – as ‘publishing’ in its most expansive	  Neil Mulholland, Paulina Olowska, David Osbaldeston, Mark Owens, Emily Pethick, Radim Peško, Seth Price, David Reinfurt,
Steve Rushton, David Senior, Mark E. Smith, Sytze Steenstra, Jan Verwoert, Jon Wilde, and Christopher Wilson); and to
Jerome O. Drisceoil, Aurélien Froment, John Lovett, Pablo LaFuente, Stefan Kálmar, Daniel Pies, Julia Maier, Régis Tosetti,
Scott King, Roger Willems, Sam de Groot, Mário Valente Almeida, Susana Sameiro, Jan Verwoert, Isla Leaver-Yap, Emily
Pethick, the Werkplaats Typografie, Kristjan Mändmaa, Christophe Lemaitre, and Frances Stark.
43

Stuart Bailey, ed., Extended Caption (Amsterdam: ROMA, 2009).

	
  

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sense: making things public. The manifold public articulations of this batch of artefacts aren’t ends inthemselves, but generators, catalysts: precisely, forms as ways of thinking.
Verwoert had also written Extended Caption’s only new text – some emerging thoughts that I
compressed into a small blurb for its back cover:
Modernism never really failed, it just became hermetic. To initiate oneself into the experience thatavant-garde works offer takes time, and initiating oneself is a labour of love.
Here’s the problem: given that the creation of a revolutionary artistic language designed to appeal to– and change the minds of – anyone anywhere was the stated objective of many an avant-gardist’s
attempt to radicalize the project of enlightenment, the crude fact that the world didn’t listen would
seem to imply total failure. This might be true if we judge those avant-gardists by their intentions andsuccess, but is it not rather their ideas and work that concern us?
In which case, the question becomes: how can we address – engage with, speak about and do justiceto – work that originally intended to talk straight, but now, hermetically, only speaks in code? We haveto know how to decipher the code, and, at the same time, talk straight enough to allow others to sharethe secret.
The continued insistence on sharing the secret of avant-gardism is vital, not least because keeping thesecret safe only confirms the status quo. It’s what all conformists do: competitive academics andmarket players alike avidly protect their secret, i.e. the exclusive rarefied knowledge (of what is ‘true’and ‘good’ and what is not) they supposedly already possess. They must, as it is their capital and thefoundation of their power position. On the other hand, struggling to share what remains difficult toshare – the experience that underlies all good avant-garde work – means to squander that capital,
irreverently, through art, pedagogy and publishing. There is a madness to the insistence on speaking
about hermetic things. But it is precisely through this mad anticapitalist stance of insistently sharing
secrets (rather than banking them) that such an irreverent artistic, pedagogical and publishing practice
puts its avant-garde inheritance to use: the mad belief that the secret of something good could beshared with anyone willing to experience it.
So, if modernism never really failed and just became hermetic, the labour of love of initiating oneself
and others into its experience involves sharing the secret of something good by speaking in code while
talking straight, i.e. in a language that might at first seem completely unhinged.

2.4: ON TO THE SERVING LIBRARY
In the closing stages of assembling Dot Dot Dot #20, I came across three instructive examples ofreflexive reinvention. The first was in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, French philosopher Jacques
Rancière’s 1981 biography-tract of Joseph Jacotot, a 19th-century revolutionary pedagog who
propounded a ‘horizontal’ egalitarian alternative to ‘vertical’ patriarchal forms of learning. Upon
realizing that the principles of what he called ‘Universal Teaching’ had become institutionalized and,
consequently, debased beyond recognition, Jacotot dissociated himself from what his ideas had becomeby adopting a new term, ‘Panecastic’, which etymologically means much the same thing.
Similarly, in 1936 Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht discarded his coining ‘Epic Theatre’ in favour of‘Dialectical Theatre’ once it ‘had become too formal a concept to be of use anymore’. And again, after
co-founding the multi-disciplinary Tropicalia movement in the late 1960s, then witnessing its rapid
assimilation and dilution, Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica denounced the name and declared he would
henceforth work under the new banner of ‘The Suprasensorial’. In all three cases, an idea issuperficially disowned yet essentially perpetuated thanks to a simple linguistic switch, a safeguard
against domestication or commodification.
So far in this account of the last Dot Dot Dot, I’ve avoided mentioning the fact that amid all thesurrogate editorials there was a perfectly straightforward one, too. ‘Final Words’, the last piece in the

	
  

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issue, is more or less an abbreviated version of the story I’ve just finished telling here, which ends onthe following thought:
A conversation with my better half about some of the things I was grappling with here ended with her
telling me to stop saying ‘we’ when I really meant ‘I’, or at least make it clear who that ‘we’ actually
thinks it speaks for. For me, though, editing Dot Dot Dot was increasingly defined by the luxury ofasking others to articulate things that I suspect I’ll be interested in – to be able to assemble a brain withmore capacity and capability than my own. (In fact, I suspect that ‘articulating things I suspect I’minterested in’ is the reason I was drawn to graphic design in the first place.) So yes, I had often used avaguely royal ‘we’ to refer variously and indiscriminately to myself in the singular, myself plus one oftwo close collaborators, the wider pool of Dot Dot Dot’s contributors, and probably sometimes even toits collective readership. But usually the pseudo-plural is simply the most accurate way of alluding tothis larger cephalopodic mind – one that not only performs how with greater efficiency and speed, butalso (unlike computers and other common prosthetics) contributes to the collective why too. This is thesense in which I mean we.

The abstruse reference to cephalopods in the penultimate line alludes to an essay by Angie Keefer(soon to become the third co-founder of The Serving Library alongside David and myself) called ‘An
Octopus in Plan View’. Edited by Dexter Sinister together with artist Shannon Ebner in response to a
Frieze commission in late 2010, it was initially produced as an audio piece, recorded in a makeshiftcabin at the art fair in Regents Park, London, to be played to a dedicated audience in an office halfway
up the Chrysler Building in New York. A revised, illustrated version of the essay ended up as the large
heart of what was effectively the 21st Dot Dot Dot, but actually published as the inaugural number of
Bulletins of The Serving Library.
The emerging idea was to continue the journal under this new name, effectively introducing itself as
the house journal of a nascent non-profit institution called The Serving Library. After five years of
responding reflexively but a little arbitrarily to unexpected invitations under the name Dexter Sinister,
it seemed time to ‘superficially disown yet essentially perpetuate’ our gathering interests in line with amore considered, longer term plan – consonant with the drive to set up a more socially answerable
project that propelled the last Dot Dot Dot, only now applied to a nascent institution rather than an
established journal.44
The octopus text started life as part of a whole other essay by Angie, eventually titled ‘Duck-Rabbit
etc.’ and included in Dot Dot Dot #20. It is concerned, like ‘Final Words’, the extent to which language
can or can’t reflect the ‘truth’ of a situation. An early draft of ‘Duck-Rabbit etc.’ included a passage
about how certain physical attributes of the octopus vulgaris anticipate the notion of ‘post-symbolic
communication’ among humans, most succinctly explained by way of the octopus’s eye.
An octopus eye has the same basic structure as a human one, only the latter has evolved to the pointof becoming folded back upon itself (inexplicably, in orthodox engineering terms). As such, there’s a
gap between information – in the form of light – being received on the surface of the eye, and its
subsequent transmittal to the brain. This means that, in a human eye, light waves need to be translated
into neurological activity. An octopus’s eye, meanwhile, is not folded back upon itself; eye and brain
comprise a single organ, therefore there’s no gap in transmission, and so no translation necessary.
As such, communication by and among such cephalopods is, in theory at least, immediate, and this isthought to relate to other remarkable (and metaphorically rich) faculties of the octopus vulgaris,such as the ability to shape-shift, or to produce a decoy of itself in ink.
In the end, this passage proved too long and distracting from the main thrust of ‘Duck-Rabbit etc.’ so
we duly removed it with the idea of turning it into an essay in its own right. The result has eight parts,or ‘feelers’, each of which relates one aspect of the subject, from the etymological roots of the word
‘octopus’ (which sets up the notion of the changing, flexible nature of language), through various

	
  
44

See the small-print ‘Article of Incorporation’ at the back of each printed issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library, reproduced
here in the Appendix. This is a summary of the Library’s component parts, written three ways to serve different purposes:
compressed, casual, and corporate. See also: http://www.servinglibrary.org/about.

	
  

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allusive physical characteristics (the eyeball, camouflage, sex organs), to those qualities that allude to
20th-century media concepts including Information Theory and Virtual Reality. Together, the eightchapters float the idea – and ideally the sensation – of what it might mean for human communication to
evolve beyond symbol-based language. This was inadvertently emphasized by the communal listening
event in the Chrysler Building: a roomful of people focused on this unusually involved text, and sopresumably more or less thinking about the same thing at the same time in the same space. It sounds
strange or exaggerated, but there was a strong sense in the room that everyone there could feel the
implications of this communal listening relative to the subject matter, even if no one could articulate it
exactly.
There are two particular implications of Angie’s essay that explain the presence of the cephalopod inthat final paragraph of the final words of the final issue of Dot Dot Dot, and worth emphasizing inpointed anticipation of the rest of this thesis. First, that the body of this extraordinary animal – its
surface, its style – is its language, i.e. what’s seen is what’s meant; thought and expression are a single
procedure, a gestalt. The second is that the so-called ‘baffle patterns’ on the animal’s skin are, like all
good non-sequiturs, apparently purposefully designed to disorient its audience, i.e. hostile predators;
hence the analogy with Virtual Reality, which, by similar means of disorientation, is thought by someto be a means of expanding our sense of possibility, changing our ways of thinking, and so too ourways of changing.
By this point it should be clear that all these pieces recounted from the last Dot Dot Dot are, like thejournal generally, emphatically palimpsest in nature – intended from the outset to be overwritten,
reconfigured, extended and dispersed in new forms and formats. In the ‘P for Professor’ section of thetestimonial TV interview L’Abécédaire (1988–9),45 Gilles Deleuze stated that his main aim as aphilosopher and teacher was always to introduce concepts, not in view of establishing them (and so
forging a ‘school of thought’) but in order that they might circulate freely in others’ discourse, appliedand manipulated in unforeseeable ways, in perpetual movement and so ideally taken further. The
various tentacles of Dot Dot Dot reach out in the same spirit – as lures, prompts, excuses for ideas andinterests to be pushed and pulled, elaborated and refined by the people and conditions met along theway.
Dot Dot Dot #20 seemingly moved from the intention to ‘be direct’ towards what might appear to be
the opposite – an apex of solipsistic self-reflexivity, reflecting inwardly on itself rather than the world
at large, not unlike Giuseppe Penone’s self-portrait with mirrored contact lenses, To Reverse One’s
Eyes (1970), which was one of several emblematic images included in the issue.

And yet this about-face did nevertheless yield its own moment of recursive clarity: that ‘directness canbe achieved only indirectly, which is to say by glancing, bouncing, and refusing to accept the paralysis
that this contradiction suggests.’ Otherwise put, considered from a higher vantage, a point of
disinterest, paradox turns resolution.
This ‘refusal to accept the paralysis’ recalls Umberto Eco’s self-help against alienation in The Open
Work: meet the dialectic head-on and stay mindful of its contradiction. The root-level situation doesn’t

	
  

45

On DVD with English subtitles: Gilles Deleuze from A to Z (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

	
  

73

change, but your practical perception of it does – from a negatively deluded resignation to a positively
cognizant outlook.
The fundamental drive behind Dot Dot Dot generally, and this last issue in particular, was always towork out what it is by doing it. One of those things it ended up being is a response to the researchquestion that this thesis originally set out to answer:
How is Umberto Eco’s maxim ‘form must be a way of thinking’ articulated, elaborated and performed
today at the overlap of art, design and typography?
By essaying an account that generates another question, or set of questions, more fundamental thanthe last.

	
  

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Diego Rivera, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931), wall mural, San Francisco Art Institute

	
  

76

	
  

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3: SELF-REFLEXIVITY AS A MODEL

The image on the preceding page shows Diego Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco Showing the Buildingof a City, a mural painted in 1931 on an entire wall at one end of a gallery at the San Francisco Art
Institute. It’s a trompe l’oeil with an extremely shallow perspective that depicts two distinct layers.
Furthest from the viewer is an ‘inner’ mural with scenes of industrial urbanism, while the closer ‘outer’
one shows a scaffold that supports the various people contracted to produce it. These are actual
portraits of those involved in making the work, including Rivera himself perched just above the centre,
buttocks overhanging a plank as he contemplates the first layer. The surrounding cast includes a few
assistants, architects, technicians, civil servants, and the philanthropist who commissioned the piece.
All in all, Rivera’s mural is an example of an emphatically self-reflexive artwork.
Now, I want to begin by distinguishing working self-reflexively (a process, an adverb) from selfreflexive work (a product, a noun), and assert that one doesn’t automatically imply the other. That’s tosay, work that comes across as markedly ‘self-reflexive’ needn’t have been made self-reflexively; andconversely, working self-reflexively doesn’t necessarily yield work that comes across as markedly‘self-reflexive’. (The quote marks say it all, of course.) This is pedantic, but I mean only to stress thatwhat’s important is that work moves, not that it moves back on itself. My aim in this chapter is not topromote self-reflexive work per se, but to suggest how it can usefully model the movement we’re after
when forming is a way of thinking.
I start by getting to grips with the term via a compilation of fundamental ‘Species of self-reflexivity’.
This is followed by a rapid dialogue, ‘At the time of writing’, assembled for a book that’s equallyinvested in the subject. ‘Self-reflexivity in contemporary art’ is self-explanatory; in ‘Modernism as aconstant habit’ I hone in on how contemporary art’s essential self-awareness and self-criticality havebeen (and still can be) put to constructive use; then dwell on its ‘two-fold’ nature in ‘Extra-conscious’.
‘Cynical limits’ worries over how the strategic application of self-reflexivity typically turns tired,ironic, and ultimately useless. In ‘Trope versus Temperament’, I counterpose this with a positivelytransparent, earnest disposition, first with reference to the work of late American author David Foster
Wallace; then in view of British artist Ryan Gander – a ‘Duplicitous example’. ‘Communicating
communicability’ notes Giorgio Agamben’s use of a related term, ‘mediality’; and this leads into my
not quite concluding with some broad thoughts on the limits of self-consciousness: ‘Incomplete’.

3.1: SPECIES OF SELF-REFLEXIVITY
In the broadest sense, ‘self-reflexive’ refers to something that refers to itself. Both ‘self-reflective’ andthe unqualified ‘reflexive’ have been used to mean much the same thing. To my ears, though,‘reflective’, with or without the prefix, has ponderous overtones that are largely superfluous to myconcerns (‘noticing the hammer, she reflected’), while ‘reflexive’ insinuates something voluntary as
derived from ‘reflex’ (‘his knee jerked reflexively’). ‘Self-reflexive’ is anyway more frequently used in
the realm of aesthetics than, say, psychology or physiology, so I’m sticking with this catch-all term.
That said, there is a further discipline-specific inflection of the lone ‘reflexive’ worth noting. In social
theory it describes a process of cause and effect in which the act of reflecting directly affects an
outcome – that is, when the observations or actions of observers in the social system affect the situation
under observation.1 Reflexivity thus conceived is not an end in itself, but part of a cybernetic process,a self-adjusting mechanism. The presence of an anthropologist at work in an isolated village may,for instance, affect the behaviour of its citizens he or she is studying; or an individual’s response to asociological survey may be influenced by the fact of having been asked to respond in the first place.

	
  1This same kind of unsurmountable paradox is known in physics as the ‘observer effect’, more or less commensurate with
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics (see fn. 9 below). See also the notes on Set Theory later in §3.11.

	
  

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Inasmuch as it undermines claims to objectivity, sociological ‘reflexivity’ clearly has negative
connotations. It points to the fallacy – or at least the limits – of a supposedly ‘pure’ poll. An affirmative
instance of reflexive cause and effect, however, can be seen in what’s known as a ‘True Mirror’.
In a regular mirror we’re accustomed to seeing our own image inverted on a horizontal axis (unlikea photograph, in which we see ourselves as others do). This is so habitual that we don’t notice theinversion, and are therefore relatively unaffected by the reflection. A True Mirror, though, isconstructed from two regular mirrors positioned set facing each other at 45 degrees, so each one
reflects the other’s reflection back at the viewer. These two angled mirrors are then boxed in a deep
12-inch square frame, and fronted by a pane of non-reflective glass that flattens the whole construction
and gives the illusion of a direct reflection. Stood directly in front of the box, you now see yourself
as others do – the ‘right way round’.
However, because we’re used to seeing the same inverted reflection in regular mirrors all our lives,
we become accustomed to the inevitable asymmetry of our own face by mentally compensating for its
irregularities; and so most of us don’t think of ourselves as looking particularly asymmetrical. Devoidof this habitual illusion, a True Mirror suddenly reveals such disturbing discrepancies which (trust me)
only become increasingly pronounced the more an alarmed onlooker struggles to re-adjust theirfeatures in front of an image that suddenly won’t behave. The common – reflex – reaction is to alter
one’s expression in a vain attempt to correct or compensate for the shock of seeing the new ‘true’ self.
Because right and left brain are out of whack, as you try to move to the right, your reflection moves –correctly – to its right; and so you find yourself stuck in a loop of broken cause and effect. Watch
someone else looking into a True Mirror and you’ll see someone miserably struggling to readjust to
this new and disturbing ‘truth’.

As it happens, the cybernetic notion of feedback is classified either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. Positive
feedback is a self-generating mechanism without checks or limits that effects increasing entropy orchaos over time, while negative feedback describes the regulated result of a system maintained bysome kind of self-checking device. In a semantic slip, then, the essentially progressive effect of such asa True Mirror is classified ‘negative’ in cybernetic terms.
All of which is a circuitous way of beginning this chapter by acknowledging first that (self-)criticism
ideally works in the direction of (self-)improvement; then that Lars Bang Larsen recently pointed outthat as well as being self-generative or ‘autopoietic’, feedback is also self-manifesting: ‘Because it isself-generative, feedback is considered an organism which carries or embodies a message.’2
So: at the very least we can say that self-reflexivity embodies the critical spirit – and at most that it
perhaps fosters it too. How does this play out specifically in the arts?
My own formative experience of self-reflexive art was courtesy of Grimble, a singularly flippant
children’s book by Clement Freud from the late 1960s about an eponymous ten-year-old withoutrageously bohemian parents. Towards the end of the story, Grimble goes ‘into a stationer’s shop and	
  2Lars Bang Larsen, ‘NNNNNNWAHHHHH!’, Bulletins of the Serving Library #4 (2012), p. 13. Larsen is here paraphrasing thefather of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener. The idea is commensurate with Luigi Pareyson’s definition of art as ‘form’, synonymouswith 'organism’: ‘formed physicality with a life of its own ... governed by its own laws.’ (Eco, op. cit., p. 158.) See also §1.4.

	
  

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there were some good red stick-on arrows that cost 19p, and as this left exactly 50p and the shop sold abook called GRIMBLE by Clement Freud for 25p, he bought two.’3
All forms of self-reflexive art involve some such demonstration of meta-awareness; that is, of being
aware of being aware. The intention is generally to rupture the illusion of a work’s self-containment,
most obviously its fictional conceit (visually in the Rivera mural, verbally in Grimble), in order todismantle the implied boundary between the work and the world. This is famously known as ‘breaking
the fourth wall’, a phrase commonly associated with Brecht’s Epic Theatre. It alludes to the imaginary
wall that typically separates an audience from the actors, as if it has been removed to reveal ‘real life’.
Brecht presented the conceit of a ‘play’ as plainly as possible, abandoning those structural conventions
designed to lull an audience into perceiving some parallel fictional world (as noted in §1.4): the lights
were left on, smoking was permitted, and actors read their parts flatly to avoid the conceit of ‘getting
into character’; all of which amounted to the so-called verfremdungseffekt (variously translated as‘alienation’, ‘distancing’, ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘estrangement’ effect). The normal format is ‘madestrange’: counter to the typically detached, passive experience of art, the work is emphatically involved
and its audience actively implicated in its themes – in Brecht’s case frankly dialectical, Marxist ones.
The ‘offset’ aspect of self-reflexive work – the structural revelation – doesn’t always involve rupturing
a fictional world to reveal the real one. It can equally occur within a work by recourse to someequivalent form of meta-reference. An obvious example is the knowing aside, i.e. when a character
comes out of character to directly address either an actual live audience, or a nominal one beyond theimplied boundaries of a fictional scenario (whether camera frame, theatre stage, or written narrative).
The device is by no means new, equally native to Shakespeare, Woody Allen, the cartoonist who draws
his own hand to rub out Daffy Duck, or the singer who shouts ‘chorus!’ as a lead-in to the chorus.
By drawing attention to the seam between the work and the world, the artist sets up an apprehension oflevels: an enveloping effect; and in acknowledging the simultaneity of these levels, the payoff for bothartist and audience is a kind of perceptive frisson.

One of the earliest and most familiar emblems of self-reflexivity is the mise en abyme (literally, toplace ‘at centre’ or ‘into infinity’), a heraldic term that describes a coat of arms inscribed with a smaller
version of itself. The artistic application of the idea was chronicled in French literary critic Lucian
Dällenbach’s The Mirror in the Text, particularly in view of its implications for the then-contemporary
noveau roman.4 Dällenbach taps a rich vein of literature since André Gide, who first used the term as a
general aesthetic descriptor, and draws in a few prescient instances from painting (Van Eyck,
Velásquez). Extrapolating from Gide, Dällenbach defines mise en abyme as ‘any aspect enclosed
within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it.’5	  3

Clement Freud, Grimble [1968] (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1974), pp. 117–8.

4

Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text [1977] (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

5

Ibid., p. 8.

	
  

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A classic early example is Las Meninas (1656), in which Velásquez depicts himself painting thepainting, as though the border of the canvas coincides with a mirror within the scene. Gide was thefirst, too, to attempt to grasp the poetics of such involution, writing that the subject of such work istransposed at the level of the characters: ‘Nothing sheds more light on the work or displays the
proportions of the whole work more accurately.’ Otherwise put, this self-mirroring device – the whole
duplicated in miniature – is offered as a key to reading the work, potentially in terms of both structureand subject matter.
Whatever the variety of involution,6 the phrase ‘mise en abyme’ always implies (as its most familiar
iteration as image clearly shows) that its recursion potentially continues infinitely and abyss-mally ineither direction, in or out. The term is now commonly used to refer to any such text or image whose
form is fundamentally recursive, the familiar nesting logic of the Matryoshka or Russian Doll. Thereare endless variations on this theme, such as the graphic Droste Effect, named after a brand of Dutchcocoa whose packaging flatly depicts the same sort of embedding effect set off by a body between twoparallel mirrors.

Literary equivalents include the story-within-a-story, such as Scheherazade’s narrative deferrals in the
Arabian Nights; the perpetually branching narrative of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveller; or the conceit of an author writing himself, the reader, or some other realworld character into
a fictional narrative, as in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Diderot’s Jacques lefataliste. The same self-similarity is found in fractal geometry. Whatever the field, and whether
manifest as text or image, the effect is essentially vertiginous, consonant with Kierkegaard’s

	
  

6

Dällenbach’s book traverses a detailed typology, and it’s worth noting his three-part definition of the mise en abyme’s formal
conceit (‘any internal mirror that reflects on the whole of its narrative’): a. Simple: a single duplication of a work inside itself;b. Infinite: the same thing, only repeated indefinitely; and c. Aporetic: in which the ‘enclosed’ work itself encloses the ‘outer’
one, and is therefore structurally paradoxical or specious in the manner of an Escher illusion.

	
  

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description of anxiety as ‘the dizziness of freedom’ or ‘freedom’s actuality, the possibility ofpossibility’.7
Alongside the collapsed fourth wall and the mise en abyme, a third species of self-reflexive metaawareness consists in the sort of ‘intertextual’ work that references other art. An immediate example isanything by the very contemporary Jonathan Monk, who typically references earlier originals like John
Baldessari’s Baldessari Sings LeWitt, which had already seemed to simultaneously assert and mock Sol
LeWitt’s paradigmatic Sentences on Conceptual Art back when both were made in 1969. A more
recent and unsettling example is Mark Leckey’s Made in ’Eaven (2004), a CGI rendering of Jeff
Koons’s silver rabbit impossibly transposed to Leckey’s apartment in London, spookily devoid of theusual reflection of the photographic lens or viewer’s own image on its animated chrome surface.
The obligatory example from literature is Jorge Luis Borges’s metafictional gem ‘Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote’ (1939), the protagonist of which rewrites parts of Cervantes’ Don Quixote word
for word. This kind of arch interplay has been further referred to in terms of a fifth wall, projectingfrom a yet farther remove from reality. When the fifth wall is broken, a character within one fictional
world refers to a previous character in a totally unrelated second one. This next-next-levelconsciousness aligns with the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry’s concept of the ’pataphor as ‘a metaphor
extended into a virtual space entirely of its own’.8 In one notorious instance from TV, Star Trek’s
Captain Kirk, William Shatner, plays another role in an entirely unrelated series, the plot of which
involves a ‘theoretically’ impossible (or at least nonsensical) meta-allusion to his Kirk character.
Of the three broad species of self-reflexivity inventorized above – breaking the fourth wall, assemblinga mise en abyme, introducing the intertextual (they are by no means mutually exclusive) – I’m mostconcerned with the first, i.e. with work that’s more or less concerned with showing its own workings,
the recipe as well as the cake. And I’m particularly interested in those instances where there’s no clear
distinction between the two, because the process can be a telling topic too.
Perhaps the clearest instance of the particular denomination of self-reflexivity I’m interested in here
is William Greaves’s 1968 film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm – a experimental documentary that documents
its own making. Reportedly, Greaves’s idea was to apply Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle9 to themicrocosmos of a film production: a group of actors are assembled to audition for a fictional movie,
and three separate film crews each instructed to film a different aspect of the proceedings. All involved
slowly come to understand that the eventual film will consist solely of this ‘incidental’ footage(i.e. that there is no ‘other’ film), and Greaves simply allows this knowledge to seep in while recording
its psychological knock-on effects. In one typical scene, the cast and crew assemble to discuss – andrecord themselves discussing – what they think of the director’s conceit, what his motivations mightbe, and so on. On the fault line of that sociological sense of ‘reflexivity’ mentioned at the start of thissection, the film is a study of how the awareness of a given situation affects that situation; but it’s also
the story of the changing relations among this particular cast, crew, and a director who remains
productively inscrutable throughout.

	
  7

Josipovici, op. cit., p. 44.

8‘Just as ’pataphysics extends metaphysics into the realm of the imaginary,’pataphors extend metaphors into a virtual spaceentirely their own. So if there is thunder (fact) and that thunder is like a bolt thrown by an angry god (metaphor) then that god’s
whole world, his interactions with other gods, the power he draws from his celestial position, his bolt-throwing abilities – all ofthat persists on the level of the ’pataphysical – a networked set of metaphors with minds of their own and implications for theworld of the real.’ From: Rob Giampietro, ‘I am a Handle’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #2, 2011, p. 128.

9

In quantum physics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a means of quantifying the degree of unpredictability in the way
particles react as a consequence of the act of observing them. Greaves took the related term ‘symbiotaxiplasm’ from social
theorist Arthur F. Bentley’s 1954 book Inquiry into Inquiries. In Greaves’s own words, the term refers to ‘those events thattranspire in the course of anyone's life that have an impact on the consciousness and the psyche of the average human being, andhow that human being also controls or effects changes or has an impact on the environment.’ Greaves added the ‘psycho’ inorder to stress the film’s focus on the crew’s mental vicissitudes. See: http://fastcheapmoviethoughts.blogspot.co.uk/
2010/05/william-greaves-and-steven-soderbergh.html.

	
  

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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is the most exemplary of all the examples here inasmuch as its self-reflexivity
is more a generator than a gesture; that’s to say, I’m less invested in contriving vertiginous fictions inview of aesthetic effects, and more in setting up situations that productively fold the observation of thatsituation into its outcome – an assertively conscious means of getting things done. Those devices I
consider more the emblems of self-reflexivity (all the mises en abymes and intertextual references)
certainly crop up now and then in allusion to such practical ends; but a more apt image of thisindustrious self-reflexivity is the sort of exploded diagram where the parts of some kind of machine ormechanism are just as apparent as the simultaneous whole.

3.2: AT THE TIME OF WRITING
What follows is an email conversation between myself (S) and the other half of Dexter Sinister,David Reinfurt (D). It was written in order to think through how we might contribute to a book,
From Berkeley to Berkeley.10 The book comprises a set of conversations between all the artists who’dexhibited at Antwerp gallery Objectif during the three-year tenure of director Mai Abu ElDahab, andan equal number of judiciously chosen interlocutors. We had promised to contribute some sort ofaberrant glossary, index or other such structural device, but (as the transcript tells) ended up offering
this working dialogue instead. ‘Will’ is the book’s designer, Will Holder; ‘Eden’ is David’s then-sixyear-old daughter. Explanations of other references follow where necessary.
S: I understand that at some point in the past year you’d agreed on our behalf to make a glossary orindex or at least some kind of supplementary machine-part for the Objectif book. What were you
thinking?
D: Having just read first Will and Mai’s conversation and then skimmed the rest – and having received
e-mails from Mai saying that she has no precise recollection what we’d agreed the glossary/index idea
should be either – I now think that (a) an index is more appropriate than a glossary; and (b) Bishop
Berkeley + ‘To be is to be perceived’ = the key.11
Seeing as most things I’ve been thinking about in the last weeks revolve around John Smith’s short film
The Girl Chewing Gum, combined with the last seven days’ bedtime reading Through the Looking
Glass with Eden, I started thinking that the best possible thing would be a ‘reverse index’, which is tosay an index that’s wrapped back into the text the first time you read it. The indexical chain is snapped

	
  

10
11

Mai Abu ElDahab, ed., From Berkeley to Berkeley: Objectif Exhibitions, 2008–2010, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011).

An allusion to the Anglo-Irish Idealist philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, twice named in the title From Berkeley toBerkeley (which highlights both the looping logic of dialogue, and dialectical sense-making generally), with particular reference
to his best-known maxim Esse est precipi (‘To be seen is to be perceived’). This flags the idea that the conversations that makeup the book don’t merely ‘represent’ or ‘document’ the gallery’s past activities, but actively constitute one of them in the present.
As Will Holder puts it in an introductory exchange: ‘initially titled X talks to Y, these interviews weren’t necessarily
conversational productions, but manifestations of an artist’s practice representing itself through the addition of a secondary
voice.’ Ibid., p. 9.

	
  

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and instead of being a pointer backwards to an original it becomes just the thing itself. Or maybe better
said, it is both things at the same time and one does not cause the other. This chimes with somethingthat Michael Stevenson says in the book about loosening up causality:
In this case, the stories themselves point to something underpinningnarrative, something you could call causality. This often limits theway we see events unfold which is at odds with retrospectively viewing
history, and part of this uncomfortable relationship is our propensity
to inductively reason. Being caught by the turn of events is thisuniversal experience and a fascinating aspect of our thinking and,somehow, it is based on how we perceive things to have behaved in thepast ... The model narrative we cultivate in our heads concerning theevent in question comes unstuck; the model narrative is broken, andthis seemingly inherent aspect of our thinking is in itself actually
one of the most compelling narratives.
[The Polish reporter Ryszard] Kapusinski describes in great detailthe unstable moment shortly before revolution, coup, and regime change... a moment he had experienced many times. He describes the situation
whereby nothing of what has happened is useful in understanding what
is and what will potentially happen.12
This made me wonder how a reverse index might manifest itself. In Through the Looking Glass, there
are wonderful bits set in parentheses in which the narrator describes how Alice described what justhappened to someone else after the fact. My simple idea for the Objectif book is that I run theOrdered-Reading-Gleaner script I made long ago that counts word frequency, then take maybe the top
five or ten results and have these words very slightly typographically distinguished where they appear
in the actual text itself. I suppose that they could be set in a different typeface, or slightly emboldened
versions of the book’s two typographic voices – or however else Will might want to deal with this slight
imposition. Actually, I can think of a typographic signal that would lift these from the text to an
appropriate degree: they could look like *this*?
S: Hmn, I think this is *okay,* but also have reservations. Is this idea really doing what it thinks it’sdoing? That’s not a rhetorical question. Let’s see … you’re talking about a Reverse Index in the sensethat you haven’t actually compiled it yet … so in effect the reader would perceive the act of taking
inventory in advance of that inventory being shelved elsewhere … as if the algorithm were caught in theact. That’s piecemeal lexical engineering, of course, and having read the footnote in the introduction I
see why it’s apt,13 but I think it’s the in effect and the as if that are bothering me. In other words, thatit’s such a representation of that idea rather than an actualisation of it. It seems a bit clunky – hoary? –to capture something that would actually happen imminent-immanent-immediately in the digital aether*like this* in print. Not to mention the fact that I’m presuming it would require some essentiallyfraudulent reverse-engineering to make sure those Top Ten words weren’t a mundane collection of ifs,
buts, and thens – to limit the lassoo to capturing large nouns, say.
This is one of the main seams that runs through the book – setting up the circumstances for complex
actualizations rather than simplistic representations to occur. Sure, they result in drawings, films,
performances, and this book-in-progress, but these all seem distinctly – and here I mean more

	
  
12
13

Michael Stevenson and Esperanza Rosales, ‘Telling Stories’, ibid., p. 136.

From Holder’s footnote again: ‘“Piecemeal social engineering” is a term introduced by Karl Popper in The Open Society
and Its Enemies, with the view that a society is equivalent to the sum of its members, that the actions of the members ofsociety serve to fashion and to shape it, and that the social consequences of intentional actions are very often, and very largely,
unintentional. Popper advocated what he terms “piecemeal social engineering” as the central mechanism for social planning– for in utilizing this mechanism intentional actions are directed to the achievement of one specific goal at a time, which makes
it possible to monitor the situation to determine whether adverse unintended effects of intentional actions occur, in order tocorrect and readjust when this proves necessary. This parallels the critical testing of theories in scientific investigation (…).’
Ibid., pp. 8–10.

	
  

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insistently than a lot of art – deposited rather than, say, sculpted. Does that make sense? The
actualisation is foregrounded, the representation back-grounded, the usual figure/ground relation
inverted. This isn’t quite the same as saying that the structure is the substance or the medium is themessage. ‘The condition is the catalyst’ – perhaps.
In short, I think the spirit of your index idea is right, but not the side effect. On the other hand, I’m not
at all sure what I have in mind is right either. It’s basically the same thing but even more clunky –although its clunkiness would now be part of the point, i.e. resolutely human. Basically, we’d follow thesame dia-logic as the rest of the Objectif book and contrive a conversation. In it, we’d discuss the idea,
and in the process of doing so perhaps index the book from memory. I can already recall a lot of tellingrecurrences – *recursion* being one of them. What else? Off the top of my head, maybe*domestic**diagram**engineer**Chaplin**structures*
Even more than such equivalences across conversations (and exhibitions), I was struck by the similarityof the various voices at play. I don’t know whether that was by design – maybe the whole was very
deliberately edited into an aggregate – but I did have the sense that Mai had assembled a very
particular collective sensibility, all tuned to the same kind of humour, temperament and concerns.
I suppose this is hardly surprising, but interesting in light of her candid remarks during the introductory
conversation with Will about how the program was actually quite narrowly directed (contrary to Will’s
model of the radio DJ who projects into the void, to everyone potentially and no one in particular).
In other words: Objectif was actually quite Subjectif!
D: But what form would this idea take? I somehow think it should read as if it were mechanical, andthen we just assemble an index from our brains post-reading, no? Practically that seems like anightmare, whereas scripting it would be more a slight tremor.
S: Yeah, the decision here is basically who does the indexing – man or machine, librarian ormainframe? Perhaps we ought to tinker this text into the idea for an index or glossary. We can thenexcuse ourselves from actually having to run the script, and instead just run the notion through theminds of anyone about to read the book. To this end, perhaps it’d be better at the start of the book.
Didn’t Will mention that he’s intending to bind the book in order that it doubles back on itself anyway,
in order that the end is already at the beginning?
D: The main drawback I see in this is that the focus then falls so squarely on Us. It still seems to meslightly better to have a machine watching over us – the automation might yet save the whole exercise
from feeling unnecessarily laboured, or at least align the amount of actual effort with the payoff.
S: Agreed, but then I think it’s just a case of refocusing on whatever other objective purpose thispseudo-index might serve. I can imagine it doubling as a kind of blurb – that you glean the book’s
common denominators in advance of reading it; or equally, a neat summary of them afterwards.
Academics, of course, famously head straight for the footnotes and references before the main body inorder to gauge a book’s plausibility. I can imagine some sort of second-hand utility along those lines.
Will and I were talking recently about thought being a looping process – that we think the same things
over and over on repeat (as represented by the self-swallowing *serpent*, the Ouroboros, also alluded
to more than once in the book), broken only by the aesthetic gesture that formalizes that thinking at
any given point. A spanner is thrown in the works, those works are cast in metaphorical plaster, and –here’s the important part – consideration of those casts sets new loops in motion. I wonder whether
you think there’s a particular value in perceiving art in this way?
I also wonder how this might relate back to The Girl Chewing Gum. I recall that you recently called thata ‘reverse narrative’, but to me that term suggests something quite plain – a story told backwards, likethose movies Memento and Irréversible. The Smith film does something different because it’s always

	
  

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moving forwards, only out of sync, so it’s more something like a preemptive or offset narrative, a seriesof continual stopgaps. I wonder why that film seems like such a motif for Objectif? Maybe, aproposKapuściński and Stevenson, it reminds us that actually we have no idea what’s going to happen next;
or rather, that we absolutely do have an idea, only it’s a (very human) delusion. I think this is a quality
common to a lot of the rocks in the Objectif cairn, a sensibility that expects the unexpected. But it’smore kitchen sink than science fiction – and in my opinion all the more affecting for it.
D: Yes, ‘reverse narrative’ is certainly not quite right. I so hated the idea of Memento that I never saw it,
and given its retrograde premise, I’m pretty sure that I’m allowed to dislike it in advance of seeing it.
Meanwhile let me describe The Girl Chewing Gum, as I’m now aware that I’m writing not only for you inthis e-mail, but at least equally for other readers if we follow through this idea we’ve started. So: The
Girl Chewing Gum (1976) is a 16mm black-and-white film shot across a busy London street in one takeon a typical day. About two minutes in, the camera begins to slowly pan up from street-level, acrossthe storefront and to the second story roof where a public clock is mounted. You hear John Smith’s
voice-over, ‘instructing’ the camera:
Hold it ... And I want the clock to move gently towards me. Stop. Now
I want the long hand to move at the rate of one revolution every hour
and the short hand to move at the rate of one revolution every twelve
hours. Now – two pigeons fly across and everything comes up again
until the girl chewing gum walks across from the left.
So, maybe you get some idea of what’s going on – John Smith simply filmed twelve minutes of a busy
London street, and then went back after-the-fact and added his voice-over which seems to be thevoice of the film’s director instructing the actors, camera, etc. but which is really only a post-facto
description of the film as it was originally shot. So it’s a kind of reverse narration that preempts theaction and seems to conjure the street scene into being. This reminds me of an idea that an artist
friend shared recently that every narrative film is both a fiction (the story being told) and a documentary(about the making of the film). Simple.
I can describe at least the affect of the film, if not name what it’s doing precisely (I suspect that’s partof the point). With The Girl, yes it is an offset narrative, but the result (at least for me) is a kind of
projected agency. That agency seems to move both forwards (the director’s voice speaking things into
action) and, equally, backwards. It’s pretty quickly obvious what’s happening (the film shot first,
narration added in post-production). So you hear John Smith’s directorial voice narrate a street scene
after it happened as if he had made it happen. This is exactly the point. So when you call out the firstidea I was offering for this Index on account of its as if quality, I suppose that’s more or less precisely
what I like about it.
S: Yeah … the frisson of perceiving an impossible simultaneity, something that doesn’t register withthe common laws of cause and effect.
D: Now I agree that typographically and otherwise it is a bit suspect (as if the small graphic/
typographic flagging up of a few words throughout should have so much an effect on a reader). And ofcourse, this sense of a growing index in the reader’s mind is precisely what should happen when
you’re reading a book anyway – particularly in a collected set of themed and edited conversations. The
river that runs through all these conversations is maybe something near the looping process that you
describe talking about with Will a few paragraphs ago. I can easily enough imagine that equally either
your index retrieved through memory or alternately my own programmatic version of the same may
actually be the consideration that does set off new loops of consideration and reconsideration.
I mentioned reading Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There with Eden over the last
week, and the parenthetical goodies that Lewis Carroll addressed directly to the reader but which
seem to arrive at a different time than the principal narration. It is as if these were added after the book
was published. Anyway, I found a nice one to give you a clearer idea. I’m not sure how directly relevant
this is – perhaps it’s the recipe-and-the-cake quality of reading two times at once. Here: ‘But it
certainly was funny’, (Alice said afterwards, when she was telling her sister the history of all this,) ‘to

	
  

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find myself singing “Here we go round the mulberry bush”. I don’t know when I began it, but somehow
I felt as if I’d been singing it a long long time.’
AS IF!! I still can’t exactly put my finger on how The Girl Chewing Gum works and I don’t want to think
about it too much. Right now it buzzes with potential and analyzing too closely would most certainly killit. (Time will do the dirty work anyway, soon enough.) Still and meanwhile, back to the matter at hand: I
can imagine a postindex that is projected back to the original text and which includes perhaps ten‘keywords’ which are some kind of hodgepodge of the few you mention from the top of your memory
in combination with the five words that my computer programs tell me are the most frequent. In fact,
when I run it while telling the script to ignore words shorter than seven letters, the top five results
amount to a certain poor poetry:*something**between**performance**different**through*
S: Great. Let’s not do it.

3.3: SELF-REFLEXIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY ARTCountless examples of modern and contemporary art involve such self-reflexive structural revelation,
both at the level of the artworks themselves (the idea could equally apply to cubism andconceptualism), and more recently at the level of the social constructs that contain them; from, say, thevarious Museum projects of Marcel Broodthaers to the majority of work gathered under the broadauspices of Institutional Critique and Relational Aesthetics.
Then again, it could equally be argued that any art outside the mimetic tradition qualifies to somedegree as ‘self-reflexive’ by virtue of its automatic claim to self-containment, which is to say any art
not primarily conceived as a semblance of the world must be otherwise determined by some kind of‘internal logic’ ontologically discrete from the usual grounds of representation. The broadest sense of
self-reflexive – ‘something that refers to itself’, according to the beginning of this chapter – therefore
reasonably applies to any instance of abstraction that has no ostensible referent beyond its own
boundaries, which in turn implies any work since art in general became aware of its modern status asart for art’s sake.
The beginning of this inward turn is obviously contested, conceivably rooted in Impressionism,
Realism or Romanticism, but we may as well follow Thierry De Duve’s Kant After Duchamp (1999)
and take Duchamp’s 1917 readymade urinal Fountain as marking the moment.14 De Duve argues thatthe readymades specifically mark the shift from conceiving of art in terms of discrete disciplines andvalue judgments (‘Is this a good painting?’) to general ontology (‘Is this art?’). He refers to its signal
incident as ‘The Richard Mutt case’ – by which he means to circumscribe the entire scenography ofcannily contrived incidents and accidents that projected the urinal into the canon. In its wake, artworks
became less defined by their surface than their surround – by theory, backstory, reputation and otherpreviously auxiliary factors, i.e. all the thinking around and about the work. Joseph Kosuth cemented
this claim in his essay ‘Art after Philosophy’ (1969), proclaiming that ‘All art (after Duchamp) isconceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.’15 A little later, an incredulous Tom Wolfe
satirized the same in The Painted Word: ‘without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting’ he wrote

	
  
14

De Duve, op. cit.

15

Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art after Philosophy’, Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991).

	
  

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in view of the dominating influence of the ‘kings of “Cultureberg”’ – critics Clement Greenberg,
Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg.16
In his essay ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), Greenberg posits Kant’s philosophical interrogation ofphilosophy itself (circa 1780) as the signal moment of self-consciousness and defining aspect of themodern frame of mind.17 He then observes in the incipient avant-garde of the 20th century atransposition of the approach from philosophy to art. ‘The essence of Modernism lies, as far as I cansee it,’ he wrote, ‘in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself –not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.’18 According toGreenberg, the modernist trajectory of painting (in the first instance) was headed towards what hetheorized to be the medium’s essential quality of ‘flatness’. The subsequent vicissitudes of Abstract
Expressionism gradually eschewed any reference to the world beyond the edge of the canvas in favourof ‘pure’ painterly abstraction, an appeal to the senses, and recourse to theory.
On the face of it, the thinking behind certain self-reflexive strategies that are now considereddefinitively modernist (breaking the fourth wall, for instance) appear contrary to the essence ofGreenberg’s ideas: where Brecht sought to bring art closer to life by removing the boundary between
audience and artwork in order to be more directly affecting, Greenberg’s modernist poetics worked in
the opposite direction – towards self-containment, thereby separating the work from the world.
The disjunct dissolves, however, if we consider that where Brecht’s Epic Theatre emphatically points
at itself relative to its surroundings (its structural support), and that Greenberg’s formalism equally
points at itself, only as a discrete entity (its sovereign status). Another way of putting it is that where
the former is outwardly self-reflexive in order to seek relations at the level of the art context, the latteris inwardly self-reflexive in order to assert autonomy at the level of the art work.
Similarly ‘self-contained’, much early Conceptualism from the 1960s onwards ostensibly maps alinguistic equivalent to Greenberg’s modernism. But while Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism andother non-representational art operate in the realm of sensation and perception, early Conceptualist
work was rooted in the thoroughly cerebral logic, linguistics and metaphysics of Anglo-American
Analytical Philosophy. Kosuth denounced Greenberg’s theories as amounting to little more thanglorified taste. Despite the theoretical framework within which the Abstract Expressionists worked to‘exacerbate the medium’s fundamental flatness’, in Kosuth’s view the validity of their results still
consists in the critics’ entirely subjective claims about what the works actually do (i.e. how and why
they ‘work’); and inasmuch as they are fundamentally subjective, he continues, they lack any wider
objective purpose.
Kosuth further proposes that, in the wake of the death of the continental European philosophic
tradition, a timely, relevant art ought to pursue a line corollary to the analytic propositions put forward
by vanguard philosophers like I.A. Richards and A.J. Ayer. Early Conceptualism was duly grounded inrecursive, tautological – and so wholly self-reflexive – rhetoric that referred exclusively to art (andlanguage) as such. For Kosuth and his circle, such expressions had proper utility as tools for thinking tobe applied to more empirical or ‘synthetic’ situations (which was, naturally, the same claim made forthe logically watertight propositions of Analytic Philosophy). Taste had nothing to do with it.

	
  
16

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975).

17

See also §1.8.

18

Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ [1965], in Francis Frascina, Charles Harrison, eds., Modern Art and Modernism:
A Critical Anthology (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 5.

	
  

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Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1928–29) is prototypical. Or take for instance Keith Arnatt’s
Keith Arnatt is an Artist (1972): that statement on a wall next to a convoluted paragraph on semantics
that clinically qualifies the claim. Or equally, the juxtaposed iterations of the ‘same’ item in physical,
photographic and linguistic forms that constitute Kosuth’s own One and Three Chairs (1965). Or thedeadpan tautology of Ian Wilson:
I. My project will be to visit you in Paris, April, 1970, and there
make clear the idea of oral communication as artform.
II. Ian Wilson came to Paris and talked about the idea of oral
communication as artform.19

Following a more material strand, Hans Haacke assembled cybernetic quasi-sculptures to perform
regulated feedback processes in his 1960s works of ‘systems art’. The earliest involved natural
ecologies, like Ice Stick (1966), a phallic copper coil attached to a refrigeration unit that graduallyattracts environmental vapour manifest as a thick layer of frost. Later pieces explored social
equivalents, typically by polling an audience and displaying the results in the same space, as in Gallery
Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969). More resonant, though, is his installation Norbert:
All Systems Go (1971). Norbert was the name of a mynah bird trained to repeat ‘All Systems go!’– a phrase famously exclaimed by cybernetic positivist and father of feedback, Norbert Wiener.
Once exhibited in a cage in a gallery, however, the bird asserted its poetic license by refusing tocomply, thus breaking the loop of ‘progress’.20
In a further strain of conceptualist self-reflexivity, a work’s technique, technology or material doubles
as its subject matter. Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of brushstrokes from the mid-to-late 1960s, forexample; Art & Language’s acrylic painting of the words Titanium calcium 83% and Silicates 17% thatliterally amount to its 100% Abstract title (1968); Rosemarie Trockel’s industrially-manufactured wooltapestries (late 1980s) with their field of industry-standard wool icons; and more recently, Christopher
Williams’s photographs of dissected cameras, such as Cutaway model Nikon Em (2009), that show themechanisms of the machine used to make the image you’re looking at.
Structuralist film is categorically self-reflexive. For instance, Hollis Frampton’s Maxwell’s Demon(1968) comprises various shots of a man performing rudimentary bodily exercises. The footage isorganized according to a Fibonacci scheme that performs the principle of entropy, and the mounting
visual chaos emphasized by the sound of the film’s leader holes catching in the editing apparatus.
As such, the form of the film is tangibly entropic itself – an embodiment of its subject. In a similarvein, Morgan Fisher’s Projection Instructions (1976) involves a sequence of variously audible andvisible instructions for the film’s projectionist, designed to cycle through the full extent of machine’s

	
  
19

Quoted in: Catherine Moseley, ed., Conception. Conceptual Documents 1968 to 1972, exhibition catalogue, Norwich Art
Gallery, 2001, p. 51.

20

It seems that the ‘piece’ never actually left the studio, only circulated as an anecdote. See: Luke Skrebowski, ‘All Systems Go:
Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art’, Grey Room, no. 30, Winter 2008.

	
  

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capabilities. Text: ‘Turn the lens to zoom in until it is as far out of focus as possible.’ Audio: ‘Turn thelens back to optimum focus, then zoom out until it is as far out of focus as possible.’ And so on.
A century or so on from Duchamp, it’s safe to say that self-reflexivity has become one of contemporary
art’s defining characteristics. Indeed, the curator Anthony Huberman recently listed self-reflexivity
among five other key tropes of present-day art practice whose common denominator is something like‘knowing disinterest’:21

Against this inventory of what he sums up as an approach to art that consists in strategic ‘chess moves’,
Huberman advocates something more instinctive and irrational – towards an ‘anarchistic knowledge’that ‘proceeds against method, allowing accidental encounters and personal idiosyncracies to guidediscoveries’ and ‘shock philosophy’s interiority’.22 In the face of the knowing strategists, then, hecounterposes a progressive nonknowledge, a loosening of received wisdom that ‘makes knowledge lessknowledgeable’. The patron saints of Huberman’s nonknowledge are Swiss double act Peter Fischliand David Weiss’s blundering, hysterical alter-egos Rat and Bear, who wander off the ‘playing field’
altogether.23 Touting an elliptical motto by Robert Filliou, ‘Art is what makes life more interesting thanlife’, Huberman asserts that in the wake of so much explicit strategy, work that otherwise operates ‘inthe dark’ carries what he calls an ‘immanent truth’.24
The way of working I have in mind conflates Huberman’s extremes of knowing strategy and instinctive
nonknowledge. Specifically, it knowingly sets up the conditions for nonknowledge to play out –a premeditated score for an unwritten script. Again, this is precisely why self-reflexivity is posited here
as a model – a shorthand, a diagram, an emblem, a working principle – and never as a goal. The point
is not to compile a history (or prehistory) of self-reflexive ends, nor an inventory of its means oreffects, but rather to draw out its essential quality (or qualities) in view of articulating why such work
seems in some sense to model Eco’s ‘form as a way of thinking’ – and then to hone in on precisely
what sense.
Why? Because self-reflexive work embodies self-consciousness. In what sense precisely? First, in thatit epitomizes the thinking process, which in turn implies self-criticism and a loop of improvement.
Secondly, in the double, offset aspect that’s manifest as a consequence of this self-awareness. In sum,
we can say that a ‘model’ self-reflexivity is fundamentally constructive and inevitably two-fold. I’llelaborate on these qualities in the next sections, tracing their development as both driving force andconsequence of the modern movement.

	
  
21

Anthony Huberman, For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat that Isn’t There, exhibition catalogue,
St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009, p. 143.

22

Ibid., p. 146.

23

The Rat and Bear, (presumably) Fischli and Weiss in fancy dress, starred in two films, The Point of Least Resistance (1981)
and The Right Way (1983).

24

See also: Anthony Huberman, ‘How to Behave Better’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #2, 2011. The notion of ‘immanent
truth’ is consonant with Alain Badiou’s concept of ‘inaesthetics’. See §1.4.

	
  

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3.4: VARIETIES OF MODERNISM
In its broadest sense, modernism refers to the cultural tendencies of the Modern Era rooted in theAge of Enlightenment, that itself began in Europe roughly around the end of the 17th century.
It is foremost characterized by: the demise of religious belief; the positivist faith in science; the rapid
expansion of markets and commodification brought about by industrialization, urbanization andcapitalism; and the attendant growth and influence of mass culture.
In terms of the arts specifically, modernism advances from around the middle of the 19th century –from such as Manet and Mallarmé onwards. Gabriel Josipovici’s recent What Ever Happened toModernism? (2010) is a useful measure of the term’s current sense. He begins by applauding art
historian T.J. Clark’s characterization of the movement, in Farewell to an Idea (2001),25 as comprisinga series of parallel and by no means necessarily commensurate tendencies. These include: anaggressive break with the prevailing milieu and its teleological tradition, now considered futile;
allusions and references to earlier (pre-Romantic, particularly Classical) eras and forms, intended to
draw parallels and distinctions between then and now; the self-conscious drive to ‘progress’ and‘innovate’, oriented towards the vanguard and original, particularly nascent technologies like theindustrial machine; the reduction to elemental forms, including primary colours, basic shapes andabstraction generally; the pronounced distinction between, and juxtaposition of, ‘high’ and ‘low’
culture; the portrayal of subjective inner consciousness; the focus on the metropolis; and those alreadymentioned ‘distancing’ techniques applied to reveal a work’s underlying ‘works’ – it’s structure or
artifice – at the same time as its ostensible subject matter.
Jan Verwoert has likewise recently noted that our current conception of modernism amounts to ‘anessentially vague set of conflicting promises, made by different people for different purposes indifferent places around the globe in different ways’. He demonstrates the extent of these conflicting
promises by itemizing a number of contradictory inclinations: ‘lies and new myths, clarity and magic,
truth and intensity, materialism and spiritualism, progress and redemption’ and so on.26
Suffice to say that modernism in the arts circumscribes a vast range of intentions, which naturally gave
rise to an equally wide range of outcomes that resist strict boundaries – and really any convincing
collective definition beyond the common struggle against what was seen to be the irrelevance andimpotence of prevailing forms. This is the vocation of any serious-minded avant-garde; and a further
characteristic of modernist art is the gathering of this avant-garde into geographically-, socially-,intellectually- or formally-discrete (though often overlapping) groups and schools in the wake of theFirst World War, the most prominent and influential being Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia,
and Futurism, Vorticism, De Stijl and Dada in Western Europe.
Earlier in this chapter I noted that, as the locus of the avant-garde shifted from Paris to New York in
the decades surrounding the Second World War, modernism’s meaning was honed and formulatedby the authoritative New York critic Clement Greenberg, especially in relation to what was then still
the dominant medium, painting. In Kant after Duchamp, De Duve suggests that Greenberg effectively
wrote himself into a corner with his modernist theories – that ‘flatness’ was from the outset a fatally
limited horizon. Modernism thus conceived was already an endgame; and with regard to painting inparticular, the checkmate written into the theory all along – its epitome, its logical conclusion – wasabsolute flatness, a.k.a. the blank canvas. Greenberg duly recalibrated his modernism as a moregeneralized ‘formalism’. This was an art not only for art’s sake, i.e. freed from any outside commission
to represent the world, but whose sole reference was to itself – and by implication to a particular
academic discourse.
Greenberg later wrote that modernism ‘defines itself in the long run not as a “movement”, much less a
program, but rather as a kind of bias or tropism: towards esthetic value, esthetic value as such and as an

	
  

25
26

T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

Both: Jan Verwoert, ‘Crooked Modernisms – Oh! Crooked Indeed’, Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want
(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).

	
  

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ultimate.’ 27 This is a long way from ‘the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize thediscipline itself’. In fact, he appears to acknowledge what Joseph Kosuth had argued in ‘Art after
Philosophy’: that his own conception of modernism ultimately amounts to the terminal bias ofsubjective judgment, an end in itself otherwise known as taste, essentially elitist and so devoid of any
obvious social connection or obligation.28 In short, it’s a conception of Modernism that’s definitively
inward- rather than outward-looking. Certainly, it’s hard to see any ‘objective’ benefit of Greenberg’s
call for aesthetic entrenchment beyond the specious idea of an individual work or entire discipline
becoming more intrinsically ‘itself’. So what?
This line of thinking duly suffered a kind of nervous breakdown in the 1960s and 1970s, which
precipitated various dematerializations or transformations of the art object (conceptualism,
minimalism, arte povera, land art, installation art, anti-art, happenings, pop, op, etc.) alongside theexplicitly politicized work of feminist and other previously ostracized groups … and then on to
post-modernism.
Let’s switch to consider these attitudes relative to graphic design. At the time of the first stirrings ofmodernist art in the late 19th century, graphic design was not yet recognized a discrete field. The
design of books, posters, labels and other ‘jobbing printing’ was still part of the secretive ‘black art’ ofthe printing trade. Graphic design emerged as a distinct domain in the early 20th century to meet the
myriad new demands of industrialization: to advertise, inform and entertain. It gradually supplanted
pure typography, referring to the broader possibilities for combining text and images afforded by newtechnologies such as photography and mechanized typesetting.
The so-called heroic period between the wars was characterized by the rejection of orthodoxies similar
to those that dominated fine art; broadly speaking, this involved a move from passive etiquette, beautyand order, to active reason, asymmetry and dynamism. But it’s misleading to separate the fine art andgraphic design of this era. Robin Kinross writes that modernist graphic design was – and often still is –seen ‘as a bunch of artists blundering into the quiet provinces of the printing industry’.29 Many ofmodernism’s seminal figures made no distinction between art and design, and worked across mediums,
from magazines to paintings. The schools and movements were likewise polymathic – to the extent thatsuch loose, cross-disciplinary attitude can reasonably be considered another key aspect of modernist art
and design.
The modernist narrative described by Boris Groys in his essay ‘The Weak Universalism’ (2010) is
characterized by the perpetual domestication of socially constructive gestures.30 He refers tomodernism’s stereotypical abstractions, elements and universals as ‘weak’ signs. Given that these
forms were supposed to be read and understood by anyone and everyone, ‘weak’ is meant in a positive
sense of being dilute enough to transcend individual artworks. In other words, the nebulous spirit of thecommon signal is more important than its material realization: weak signs carry an as-yet-unformed
will to emancipation. However, says Groys, this spirited proliferation of weak signs was literally
institutionalized by collectors and museums. When modernist artworks are exhibited and canonized,
those weak forms turn ‘strong’; they become fixed, reified, contained, and so implicitly finished. While
such strong forms have become the popular, common impression of modernism today, their very
establishment marks the end (and inverse) of those originally spirited social intentions.
Josipovici, too, argues against this ‘strong’ canonical view of modernism. The danger of seeing it thisway, he says, is that modernism is reduced to a style, a period of art history, ‘and therefore somethingthat can be clearly defined and is safely behind us’. Properly conceived, he says, modernism amounts
to an awareness of art’s ‘precarious status and responsibilities’. There’s no turning back from this

	
  
27

Clement Greenberg, ‘Necessity of “Formalism”’, New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 1, 1971, p. 171.

28

Kosuth, op. cit.

29

More on this in §7.2.

30

Boris Groys, ‘The Weak Universalism’, Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).

	
  

92

realization: art is ‘a response by artists to that “disenchantment of the world”’31 – a permanent force
against alienation.
Fundamentally, Norman Potter also concurs with Josipovici and Groys. He notes that the usual meansof accounting for the modern-ness of modern work is in terms of ‘influences and precedents, thetechnological and social pressures, new materials and techniques, the convergent history of ideas, andso forth’. This, he says, results in a backwards-looking stasis – an orientation that ultimately duplicates
those stagnant forces modernism reacted against in the first place. Potter emphasizes instead the legacyof what he prefers to call ‘the modern movement’, practising its principles rather than reiterating its
styles, and elaborating them with reference to specific concrete instances rather than ‘abstracted verbal
propositions’. What Josipovici diagnoses as existential disenchantment with the world, Potter
conceives in more grounded terms as the ‘shoddiness of our environment’. He strongly urges thosedepressed by it to ‘study the spirit of the modern movement’,32 yet warns that ‘anyone who sees themodern movement in stylistic terms will fail to understand its radical nature.’33
The crucial period of modernism, says Potter, can be split into two distinct phases, both of which arenecessary to forge a new paradigm.34 The first, ‘heroic’ phase was characterized by negative,
destructive tendencies against what went before; the second, ‘social’ phase by positive, constructive
ones in view of the new. And the most fundamental principle of this second, constructive wave, hecontinues, is that of ‘relation-seeking’ – an approach grounded in human values rather than value
judgements. The archetypal modernist-humanist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy once expressed the same
sentiment with this motto: ‘Man, not the object, is the end in view.’	
  3.5: THE MODERN MOVEMENT AS A CONSTANT HABITIn ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852), Karl Marx anticipated that an enlightenedsocial revolution would avoid replicating the situation it would displace thanks to an unprecedentedly
self-aware praxis (= practice affected by theory and vice versa). Individuals, he wrote, would‘criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, and return tothe apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh’. However, Marx effectively short-circuits
the argument by adding: ‘until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible’.35
This ‘praxis’ is thus ‘constant’ only up to a point – which is an oxymoron.
Like Marx, received wisdom holds that constructive criticism is essentially less a looping than a linear
process: observation > reflection > criticism > agency > change. Across domains, this cause/effectmodel is variously considered the holy grail of 20th-century sociology, the basis of political activism,
the premise of most psychotherapy, a founding principle of modern art, and the path of awarenessgenerally. It is the psychological premise of, among others, the Frankfurt School, whose overarching
project was founded on the assumption that revelation leads to freedom, and therefore change is tied toagency.
All of which might seem too banal to bother noting here, but in fact Gilles Deleuze asserts the opposite.
The idea that awareness begets agency begets change, he says, is fundamentally flawed; change ought
not be conceived as a hard-won result, but rather a precondition, a ground, a constant. In which case,

	
  
31

Josipovici, op. cit., p. 11.

32

Both: Potter, What is a designer, op. cit., p. 36.

33

Ibid., p. 37.

34

See the whole of chapter 4 (‘What is good design?’) in What is a designer, ibid.

35

See: Dexter Bang Sinister, ‘Good Shit’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #4, 2012.

	
  

93

the critical question switches from ‘how to change things?’ to ‘how do things come to stay the same?’
What we really ought to scrutinize, according to Deleuze, is not the nature of change but of habit.36
In ‘The Surface of Design’, a chapter in The Future of the Image (2007), Jacques Rancière proposes tore-connect Greenberg’s ‘flatness’ with some sense of social efficacy by conceiving of aesthetic value inless hermetic and more openly egalitarian terms.37 Like Kosuth, he condemns Greenberg’s concept offlatness as prime instance of art’s claim to ‘autonomy’; specifically, because it constitutes a perversionof actuality – a world warped by overextended art theory. Rancière counters that the concept of flatness
could be more constructively (= democratically) used to refer to a cross-disciplinary ‘surface ofcommunication’ on which ‘words and images slide into one another’. This, he concludes, ‘might lead
us to reassess the dominant paradigms of the modernist autonomy of art and of the relationshipbetween art forms and life forms’.38
In Modern Typography: an Essay in Critical History, design historian Robin Kinross starts from moreor less the same premise as Greenberg, but ends up somewhere else altogether – or rather, doesn’t
end.39 He begins the book by claiming its title to be a tautology, inasmuch as the essence of modernity
is already implicit in the term ‘typography’. Properly speaking, typography refers to the articulation ofvisible language by mechanical means. This implies the configuration of alphabetic elements according
to reason – which is to say more or less definite, verifiable, shared meaning. Moreover, although his
subject is certainly rooted in the Enlightenment, Kinross marks the birth of typography not with
Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press (around 1440) but instead the publication of the firsttreatise on the subject – the first how-to guide, more than two hundred years later.40 This is the moment
when knowledge of the subject is written down, explicated, disseminated, made public.41
In other words, and consonant with Greenberg’s description of Kant turning philosophy’s tools on thedomain itself, the field comes of age – matures – the moment it turns self-conscious. Moreover,because the publication of a treatise naturally prompts comparison, discussion, disagreement, counterarguments, improvements and updates, such newfound awareness obviously sets off a chain of constantimprovement. Like Greenberg, then, Kinross considers self-awareness to be the root of ‘modern’ work.

	
  

36

Given the fact that things are changing all the time, Deleuze’s vantage conjures a vertiginous sense of too much possibility– to the extent that limited agency seems a more useful premise for production. In aesthetic rather than social terms, this idea isfamiliar enough from the panic that sets in at school when the teacher announces that today you can write about anything you
like. In one particular passage of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Robert M. Pirsig’s alter-ego-protagonistteacher Phaedrus assigns his undergraduate class in Rhetoric an expansive but straightforward task: to write an essay on some
aspect of the United States. He becomes preoccupied with one particular student who, despite a reputation for being serious
and hardworking, finds herself in a state of perpetual crisis, unable to think of ‘anything to say’. He obliquely recognizes in her
block something of his own paralysis in not being able to think of anything to say’ back to by way of help beyond suggesting a
subject: the local Opera House. This doesn’t help her either, but after next proposing out of sheer frustration that she should
focus on a single brick, something gives and the student produces a long, substantial essay about the front of the building.
Initially baffled by his own involuntary insight, Phaedrus reasons that the student was blocked by the expectation that she ought
to be repeating something already stated elsewhere, but freed by the comic extremity of his suggestion. There was no obvious
precedent to an essay about this particular brick, therefore no right or wrong way to go about it, and so no phantom standard tomeasure up to. By this curious, circuitous, yet in retrospect perfectly logical method, the student is liberated to see for herself andact independently. In this way, Pirsig/Phaedrus instructively enacts his bald reconsideration of the question ‘how to teach?’ infront of his class. He continues to perform variations on this exercise for the rest of the semester (‘Write about the back of yourthumb for an hour’), which yields similarly successful results, and concludes that this tacit expectation of imitation is the real
barrier to uninhibited engagement, active participation, and a plausible sense of progress.

37

Rancière, ‘The Surface of Design’, op. cit.

38

Ibid., pp, 103–4.

39

Robin Kinross, Modern Typography (London: Hyphen, 1990).

40

The book in question is Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: or the doctrine of handy-works applied to the art of printing(1683–4). See in particular Modern Typography’s first two chapters.

41

More on this in §7.2. It’s worth noting, too, that, unusually if not exceptionally, typography is a medium that spreads
knowledge about itself via its own praxis. Although there are novels about novel writing or films about film-making, for obvious
reasons the book has traditionally been the self-accounting medium of choice in other fields too. In this sense, perhaps
typography has always been a degree more self-reflexive than the other arts.

	
  

94

Unlike Greenberg, who as we have seen forces that awareness to specific ends as isms, Kinrossmaintains the ‘open’ aspect by ensuring that his own essay, a history of ‘critical makers’, remains ameans:
There is some connection between this critical spirit and an
approach to the production of artefacts and their eventual form.
This connection will be left undefined here: it is open for
discussion and exploration.42

In L’Abécédaire, the series of TV interviews made in the late 1980s,43 Deleuze draws a distinction
between schools and movements. A school, he says, is a typically negative force characterized byauthority, hierarchy and bureaucracy, and therefore heavy, fixed and exclusive. A movement, on theother hand, leans more towards intentions, attitudes and the passage of ideas, and is comparatively
light, flexible and open. Surrealism was a model school, with André Breton serving as headmaster –imposing rules, sacking staff and settling scores; Dada was an exemplary movement – a flow of ideasthat continues to touch many people, places and forms while still devoid of any sense of overriding
order.
In the same spirit, Kinross prefers the ‘ongoing’ inflection of that largely lapsed term ‘modern
movement’ to the usual Modernism. Though both obviously derive from the same cultural ferment, inrecuperating the term here, too, I mean to emphasize and advocate a specific set of attitudes distinct
from (or lost to) the more commonplace conception tethered to Greenberg’s legacy. The term‘modernism’ is anyway notoriously slippery and promiscuous, and one reason for siding with Kinrossin supplanting it here is to avoid such disorienting multiplicity. Specifically, then, by ‘modern
movement’ I’m alluding to a markedly social and implicitly socialist denomination of modernism.
Antithetical to the set of stylistic tropes that amount to that canonical, formalist Modernism, themovement I have in mind consists in an essentially pre-formalized approach, i.e. in advance of being
formed – hence the constant recourse to ‘attitudes’, ‘approaches’ and ‘ways of working’. Typographer
W.D. Dwiggins abruptly summed it up already back in 1928: ‘“Modernism” is not a system of design –it is a state of mind.’44
All of which chimes again with the conclusion of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’(1936),45 his analysis of what constitutes a properly politicized art that ends on this self-reflexive note:
It has perhaps struck you that the train of thought that is about tobe concluded presents to the writer only one demand to think, toreflect on his position in the process of production.46

Here Benjamin advocates a constant state of checking oneself, a thinking-in-action in line with Marx’s
praxis without short-circuiting it, and which is wholly consonant with Deleuze’s claim that adapting
one’s habits is a more opportune means of moving than the deluded reach for some specious idea offundamental change. In this way, he equates an approach to aesthetics with social ethics – a ‘politicaltendency’ that’s open-minded, flexible, and pragmatic, and which automatically precludes both abstract
moralizing and aesthetic axioms. The same difference is apparent in a note by Kinross on the writings

	
  
42

Kinross, Modern Typography, op. cit., p. 144.

43

See chapter 2, fn. 45.

44

W.D. Dwiggins, Layout in Advertising [1928] (New York: Harper, 1948). Dwiggins is also widely credited as having coined
the term ‘graphic designer’ in 1922.

45

See §1.4.

46

Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, op. cit., p. 236.

	
  

95

of two other typographer-theorists, Stanley Morison and Eric Gill: ‘Where Morison is sententious,
attempting timelessness,’ he writes, ‘Gill is down-to-earth and pointed.’47

3.6: EXTRA-CONSCIOUS
In What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Josipovici concurs with Greenberg and Kinross that thefundamental property of all work properly conceived of as ‘modern’ is a newfound, progressive selfconsciousness.48 Josipovici follows Kinross, too, in claiming that the true legacy of modernism consists
more in critical spirit than canonical style, and begins his own book by duly deliberating over the vague
boundaries of his subject. He cites a number of early harbingers, an advance guard of the avant-garde
who challenged formal conventions in ways that anticipated the full-blown ‘heroic’ assault of the early
20th century. Reaching back beyond the Enlightenment, even, Josipovici’s ur-examples registerexhaustion, listlessness, stasis and chaos. Take Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia (1514) – an etchedportrait of ‘a terrestrial craftsman cut off from all tradition and therefore cut off from productive work
… thinking furiously but incapable of action’49, and so entirely emblematic of a general state ofbrooding self-awareness.

Switching to literature, Josipovici first cites Rabelais and Cervantes, whose work dislodged thetrappings of genre fiction, more concerned with the ‘ontological status’ of the novel over and above theusual worldly topics. On a fault line between adhering to genre and transgressing it, Cervantes’s Don
Quixote (1605) is a self-contained world of fiction that simultaneously points to itself as fiction,
repeatedly stalling the reader by way of flippant, elliptical storytelling that precludes narrative closureand so too any straightforward absorption into the story. What instead ‘allows the book to keep
moving’,50 says Josipovici, is the oscillation between the ‘interior’ story and ‘exterior’ authorial offset– a ‘distancing’ effect as propulsive as Brecht’s Epic Theatre some 400 years later. Widely regarded as
the first novel and the first anti-novel, Don Quixote is thus a particularly prescient instance of the
twofold nature that would characterize much work made under modernism’s auspices.
Josipovici’s prehistory proceeds through the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of such as Hegel and Schiller,
and later on to Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich, ‘not so much visionaries as explorers of what
it means to see and what it means to paint or write’. All are concerned less with expression than the

	
  
47

Kinross, Modern Typography, op. cit., p. 16.

48

Josipovici, op. cit.

49

Ibid., p. 24

50

Ibid., p. 38.

	
  

96

nature of expression; more specifically, with the relationship – with the tension of the relationship –between the two. The most flagrant instance of this dialectical premise is Kierkegaard’s philosophicaldouble-novel Either/Or (1842), essentially a pair of discrete but editorially entwined books that
represent two mutually exclusive ways of living: Romantic vs. Conservative. The dualism is mirroredin the book’s conspicuously alternating styles, once again designed to draw attention to the way in thework has been assembled in order to achieve its effects. All is thrown into existential doubt, and thebook emphatically registers this anxiety or ‘unhappy consciousness’.
Josipovici finally arrives at the swell of disenchantment around the middle of the 18th century among alarger number of artists aware of the increasing impotence of conventional art forms. The emerging
avant-garde considered the mimetic, narrative and anecdotal techniques of the Romantics to be uselessextensions of bourgeois morality, incapable of conveying a plausible sense of contemporary existence,
to the extent thateverything we do seems false, laboured, second-hand; it feels likepadding, pretence, a lie perpetrated by those who like to think ofthemselves as artists, in collusion with a market which knows thatenough people need to feel they are in touch with some higher truth to
make the art business profitable.51

The immediate response was to draw attention to the inadequacy of the old modes via satire –parodying them in order to push on to something else. And as in the work of those modernist forbears,
this resulted in what Josipovici continually refers to as a ‘double’ or ‘offset’ effect. What’s offset isagain a philosophical aspect – a ‘surplus’ commentary on the nature of the work, a level out from its
first-level ‘purpose’. Whether picture, book, chair or building, this double layer performs awarenessitself. Exemplary of the epoch, Mallarmé summed up this attitude in these two statements: ‘I advanceshowing my mask’, and ‘My work is allegorical of itself’.
Recalling Kosuth’s dismissal of Greenberg’s creed of Modernism on the grounds of its ‘anti-social’nature, Francis Bacon once dismissed the work of the Abstract Expressionists precisely for lacking any
such ‘offset’:
One of the reasons why I don’t like abstract painting, or why it
doesn’t interest me, is that I think painting is a duality, and that
abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on
one level (...) I believe that art is recording; I think it’sreporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there’s no report,
there’s nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few
sensations. There’s no tension in it.52

He goes on to assert that while artists ‘owe a double allegiance: to the object out there in the world, andto the artwork’, 53 the abstract painters have allegiance only to the artwork and themselves.
Consequently, their work is fatally one-dimensional – both literally and metaphorically – and so
ultimately solipsistic. In Bacon’s view, then, ‘pure’ abstract painting eschews any clear connection to
the world and declines to communicate, or at least refuses to be realistic or forthright about the limited
degree to which it communicates. The vitality Bacon is after, adds Josipovici, is inherent in any workthat recognizes the pitfalls equally native to realism and abstraction and seeks to conflate, if notnecessarily resolve, the two.54

	
  
51

Josipovici paraphrasing the spirit of Thomas Mann’s novel Dr Faustas, ibid., p. 27.

52

Ibid., p. 121.

53

Ibid.

54

Ibid., p. 187. This recalls the ‘insurmountable dialectic’ described in §1.5.

	
  

97

In his 1967 lecture ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, Italo Calvino describes how literature advances byrearranging its existing forms until one new arrangement unwittingly reveals a previously unexpressed
aspect of the unconscious.55 This age-old procedure, he says, accounts for the specifically self-reflexive
tendencies of then-contemporary literature, especially the nouveau roman. By this point in the 20th
century, he says, ‘narrative possibility’ has passed ‘beyond the level of content to touch upon therelationship of the narrator to the material related and to the reader’,56 and this naturally yields a kind ofmeta-writing, a writing about writing that ‘consists no longer in narrating but in saying that one isnarrating, and what one says becomes identified with the very act of saying’.57 Giorgio Agamben calls
it ‘the communication of communicability’.
Calvino concludes his lecture by paraphrasing German poet and critic Hans Magnus Enzenberger,
who points to the recent work of Jorge-Luis Borges and Alain Robbe-Grillet as exemplary. Their ‘twotier’ narratives, he says, are ‘one inside another like Chinese boxes’, designed to disorient and so force
readers to mentally reorient themselves as they read – an effort that ‘acquires a particular value, almostthat of a training for survival.’ Josipovici invokes a similarly intimate pedagogy when he describes the‘real protagonists’ of Don Quixote as being ‘the writer and the reader’ who ‘both undergo adventures
enough to last them a lifetime, even if neither ever quite understands what these are.’ He calls thisobscure, latent comprehension an ‘exercise in delay’.58 The aesthetic experience is something to beworked at and lived through, more slow-burn apprehension than momentary revelation, which itself
amounts to a further lesson – in attention.
‘Such seeming double agency is important as an artistic strategy,’ writes cultural critic Michael
Bracewell, ‘and contains within it the “hilarity” that Duchamp deemed vital to art.’59 This implies that,at least since Duchamp instigated art’s self-conscious paradigm, its humour is always the knowing
variety. Meanwhile, art theorist Robert Garnett draws a useful distinction between humour and irony.
Irony, he writes (quoting Deleuze), is ‘always prepared in advance for the encounter’60 – which is tosay, essentially predetermined, thought-out, already ‘complete’ and so in a certain sense dead on
arrival. In other words, says Garnett, there’s always a pre-text to irony, always an idea decided upon inadvance that the work is referring back to, or building upon. Humour, on the other hand, is animmanent intelligence that arrives not before but after the event – or rather during it, then lingering on.
Norman Potter once referred to this state of positive precariousness as ‘contingency without
precedence’.61
In making a case for unaffected humour in the face of jaded irony, Garnett also advocates an open
rather than closed approach. What makes for a decent art scene, he says, is ‘attitude as an affirmationof possibility’ – an approach that’s impervious to cynicism and positively unabashed. Considered fromthis angle, self-reflexivity is a kind of ‘duality machine’ that shows the workings of the work in orderto pre-empt and dismantle preconceptions and clichés that fall out of excess cynicism. When selfconsciousness is geared towards progressive ends, the outcome is more humorous than ironic, rooted ingood rather than bad faith, and designed to develop rather than denigrate.

	
  
55

Italo Calvino, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ [1967], The Uses of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986),
pp. 3–27.

56

Ibid., p. 7.

57

Ibid., p.25.

58

All quotes ibid.

59

Michael Bracewell, ‘A Prose Kinema: Some Notes for Pale Carnage’, Martin Clark, ed., Pale Carnage, exhibition catalogue,
Arnolfini, Bristol, 2007, p. iv.

60

Robert Garnett, ‘How Criticism Lost its Sense of Humour’, Robert Garnett, Andrew Hunt, eds., Laboratory of Synthesis:
Gest #1 (London: Book Works, 2008), p. 106.

61

I’m paraphrasing; he actually wrote: ‘Contingent affirmation in a world without precedent.’ See: Norman Potter,‘The Literalist Movement’, Models & Constructs, op. cit., p. 90.

	
  

98

To recap, the formal characteristic common to the various species of self-reflexivity listed above is an
explicit revelation of what might normally be thought of as a work’s structure (its form) along withwhat might normally be thought of as its substance (its content) – which is to say, making apparent atleast two distinct levels. Whether an estranged Brechtian lehrstuck, an aside to the audience, avertiginous mise en abyme, a story-within-a-story, or a knowing reference to some other fiction, alldraw attention to their formal conceit. And in the most extreme cases, this parallax view of structureand substance is not merely constituent of the work, but its very essence. This is how self-reflexive
work can serve as a ‘model’ of forming-as-a-way-of-thinking, and so too of its consequence, thesymbiosis of form and content: because it caricatures the ‘reconciliation’.
Inasmuch as a caricature is blatant by nature, a larger-than-life cartoon of itself, it is easy to ‘read’, toapprehend, and so to transpose. Like any good model, it’s an effective means of both sketching an idea
and abbreviating a larger point. It’s easy to relate to, and so to relate to others.

3.7: CYNICAL LIMITS
Above I’ve noted a few positive payoffs of this fundamentally ‘double, offset’ aspect of self-reflexive
art. First, apropos Bacon, that in ‘double allegiance’ to the real world (figuration) and the world of art(abstraction), it works towards assembling a communicative ‘tension’ between the two. Second,
apropos Calvino, that by labyrinthine design it can exercise intellectual muscle as a kind of training forpsychic survival. Third, apropos Garnett, that, when progressive in spirit, it fosters a galvanizing
humour in the face of listless cynicism. Morevoer, apropos no-one in particular, it usefully caricatures
the notion of symbiotic form/content and so propagates work that carries unequivocal conviction.
To switch tack slightly: if, per The Open Work, authentic art is considered the outcome of a perpetual
dialectical movement through successive forms, which involves discarding those forms once rendered
impotent by rote repetition,62 surely it’s disingenuous to claim that self-reflexive forms remain potent
some hundred years after art’s modern, self-conscious turn, some 50 after its appropriation by postmodern mass media (the burgeoning self-parody of broadcast TV and advertising, the demise of thesuspension of disbelief, the ubiquity of what was previously ‘behind the scenes’), and some ten after
the ubiquity of Reality TV?
In other words, isn’t self-reflexivity itself then a ‘form’ that has been so frequently and thoroughly
employed as to neutralize (territorialize, recuperate, domesticate) any constructive purpose it might
once have had? Isn’t it as hackneyed a trope as those examples ridiculed by Eco, like Liberace’s lyrics,
or the poet who automatically rhymes ‘remember’ with ‘September’? Seen in this light, self-reflexivity
is merely one formal tactic among many, with as limited a lifespan as any other; productively
surprising for a time, then increasingly superfluous.
Self-reflexivity is often conflated with irony, which is accurate inasmuch as both qualities sharethat offset aspect described above, that ‘knowing’ character, more than meets the eye. Both projecta kind of false front, and are frequently sarcastic. In ‘E Unibus Pluram’, an essay on U.S. TV andliterary metafiction, David Foster Wallace paraphrases essayist Lewis Hyde’s writing on irony.
According to Hyde, says Wallace, irony ‘serves an almost exclusively negative function (…) criticaland destructive’, yet is ‘singularly unuseful when it comes to anything to replace the hypocrisies it
debunks.’63 As such, he warns that irony ought to be used only in emergencies, before quickly
supplanting a more constructive drive. Sustained over time, irony becomes ‘the voice of the trapped
who have come to enjoy their cage.’64 But where the defining quality of irony is that surface meaning

	
  
62

i.e. as discussed in §1.5 (b). See also the early examples of modernism cited above.

63

David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ [1993], A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:
Essays and Arguments (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), p. 67.

64

Ibid.

	
  

99

and underlying meaning are deliberately different, self-reflexivity doesn’t necessarily involve any suchdiscrepancy.
And yet the gist of Wallace’s (and Hyde’s) concern remains valid enough for self-reflexive tendencies
too; for if unchecked by its own critical premise, the approach soon amounts to little more than a showoffish, irritating conceit – from tactic to tic.65 More pointedly, then: why might I seem to be suggestingthat self-reflexivity maintains any efficacy within contemporary art when it’s been so blatantly coopted and troped-out everywhere else? The highly self-aware mechanisms of advertising, branding, or
spin-doctoring are hardly news these days. Strategies that incorporate meta-awareness clearly manage
to work just as well in the service of selling things regardless of the long-established critical-theoretical
recognition of how and why they work. Here’s a not untypical point of view from within contemporaryart, not so much cynical as exhausted:‘It is certain that today self-consciousness (...) has bad press;
and that if we are tired enough of philosophies of consciousness,
we are even more fatigued by their logical completion inreflexivities, self-knowing and self-aware lucidities, and ironies ofall kinds.’ And so we arrive at our final destination, namely Grand
Hotel Irony, just down the road from Grand Hotel Abyss (...)66

Wallace’s essay reflects on how, in the second half of the 20th century, under the pervasive influenceof savvy advertising, major U.S. TV channels began to parody their own formats and so simultaneously
satirize their viewers. Amid general concern over the increasing amounts of time people spent
watching TV, says Wallace, cutting edge programmers adopted the detached posturing of postmodern
irony (TV shows about making TV shows, for instance). Recall the period related earlier in thischapter, when the early stirrings of the modernism responded against Romantic orthodoxies bysatirizing them; this was TV’s equivalent reaction to the increasingly tired formats of its own culture,
which by the middle of the 20th century was dominating and affecting all the other arts. Only by now
such ‘first wave’ self-reflexivity had undergone a change in kind: the impulse was not so much criticaland constructive, as cynical and commercial. In Wallace’s estimation, the idea was to flatter thealready-excessive TV viewer with in-jokes, affirming his or her sense of self-awareness andsophistication, and simultaneously diverting concerns about the danger of watching too much TV.
The net effect was to maintain the status quo, i.e. a captive audience (= advertising revenue). Selfreflexivity was employed to maintain the dominance of TV rather than dissemble it.
Josipovici likewise describes this cycle of domestication, in which originally constructive criticism
turns destructive, progressively pleased with itself and so congealing into bad rather than good faith:
The irony which at first made one smile, which was at first so
satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used to puncture
pretension, in the end comes to seem like a terrible constriction,a fear of opening up to the world.67

When self-awareness becomes a trap rather than a tool, self-reflexive forms become stylish tropes–effects contrived towards particular (e.g. commercial, show-offish, or self-aggrandizing) ends.
This brand of self-reflexive work totes an essentially cynical and superficial semblance or gesture of

	
  
65

Consider for instance this perfectly ironic description of the self-reflexive skills necessary to claim status as a contemporary
philosopher in 1969: ‘Whereas the entire Witz of philosophy is to make the subject “I” into an object and vice versa, thephilosophy of the Witz nowadays is one that similarly tries to ensure that the ideas of this subject-object are treated subobjectively; in other words, I am being profound and serious if I say: “I am registering the fact of reflecting on the reflexion of areflexion on a brush” ... Such depths are beyond the reach of some people!’ Jean Paul, quoted in Dällenbach, op. cit., p. 38.

66

Dieter Roelstraete, ‘(Jena Revisited) Ten Tentative Tenets’, e-flux journal, no. 16, May 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/
view/137. The first part of the paragraph quotes Frederic Jameson.

67

Josipovici, op. cit., p. 174.

	
  

100

criticality. It’s a clip-on option –‘equivocal’ in the sense that, cultural condition permitting, the choiceof trope might equally have been its inverse: sincerity.
Recall Susan Sontag’s distinction between style and stylization in ‘On Style’:‘Stylization’ in a work of art, as distinct from style, reflects anambivalence (affection contradicted by contempt, obsession
contradicted by irony) toward the subject-matter. This ambivalence ishandled by maintaining, through the rhetorical overlay that is
stylization, a special distance from the subject.68

She then posits ‘style’ as the opposite – which is to say a mark of engagement with (investment in,commitment to) a certain subject matter. For Sontag, style is virtually synonymous with art itself,
characterised by the lack of distance or disinterest, the opposite of ambivalence.
As useful as Sontag’s distinction is, and while I essentially concur, ‘style’ still smacks too much of‘stylishness’ for my taste – especially given the word’s 50 or so years’ worth of corruption by
postmodernism and ‘designer’ culture since. I prefer to think the difference in terms of trope andtemperament. Self-reflexivity conceived of as a trope describes that applied as a strategy, with what
Sontag summarizes as more or less deliberately contemptuous, ironical or disinterested intent.
A positively temperamental self-reflexivity, on the other hand, derives from an inherently earnest,cself-conscious and critical sensibility. Less extrinsically applied to the work, this one is more
intrinsically drawn out while working on it: the trace of a naturally candid disposition.

3.8: TROPE VERSUS TEMPERAMENTThis section comprises my contribution to an afternoon of talks at Artists Space, New York, titled‘The Whole of Troy Is A Horse’,69 programmed in response to the exhibition then installed, Anarchism
Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1975–1979).70 It was preceded by somethoughts on the work of British conceptual artist Keith Arnatt by Mike Sperlinger, who organized theevent, and followed by cultural critic Esther Leslie on Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘petrified unrest’.
In the event, my stint was interrupted by representatives of the then-nascent Occupy Wall Street
movement, which added curious gravitas the whole idea of ‘getting out of the horse’ in ways I still
haven’t been able to unravel.
Good afternoon.
The following thoughts, excerpts and afterthoughts are assembled in response to an invitation from
Mike to consider ‘the problem of self-reflexivity and its limits’. I’ll start by reading his introduction:‘No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect,
until he is at the same time above and beyond it,’ declared Hegel.
This assertion is not only enough to send most analytic philosophers
into frothing apoplexy; we might ourselves think that we know(or even feel) that it is proved false in every living person’s life,
on a more or less minute-by-minute basis.
Self-reflexivity certainly allows us to confront, and perhaps totranscend, some of our limits. But what happens when our consciousness

	
  
68

Sontag, ‘On Style’, op. cit., p. 28. See §1.8.

69

12 October, 2011.

70

Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1975–1979), Artists Space, New York,
10 September – 16 October, 2011.

	
  

101

of our situation, for example, is in excess of our ability to change
it? In such circumstances, is self-reflexivity productive or just aband-aid for a beautiful soul? Peter Sloterdijk notoriously diagnosed
the universe of late capitalism as governed by cynicism, or‘enlightened false consciousness’: we can see through the ideology,but, powerless to overcome it, we play along anyway, resigned andcomplicit. We can’t go on. We’ll go on.
In art there has been a strain of work since at least the 1960s which
has explicitly reflected on its own conditions of possibility, from
Adrian Piper and Lee Lozano to Andrea Fraser. Institutional critique,in the broadest sense, was a concerted effort to address reflexively
art’s own (political) limits, but, as Fraser and others have noted, it
has had to navigate an increasingly narrow strait between piety andresignation. Self-reflexive gestures seem to risk becoming rote, if
not irrelevant, or as the artist Merlin Carpenter put it: ‘”Get out of
the horse”, Colin de Land used to say to artists who claimed to
criticize from within – but you get out today and you are still in abigger horse, the whole of Troy is a horse.’
How can we distinguish whether self-reflexivity is being used as aresource for better engaging the world, or as a solipsistic retreat
from it? What do we do when we realize we have reached the limits of apractice, artistic or otherwise? And when, rather than seeking newlevels of reflection, do we simply seek the exit sign?
My contribution extends from some fairly involved letters Mike and I have been exchanging over the
past year or so. Self-reflexively enough, our discussion initially concerned the changing nature of thejournal Dot Dot Dot, which I co-edited since 2000 up until the 20th and final issue about a year ago.
The exchange began after I asked Mike to elaborate on an offhand remark he’d made (also in a publictalk) in which he described the journal as being defined by ‘a discourse that is always to a higher
power’.71
While I could feel what he meant by this pithy claim – and its veracity – I found myself curiously unable
to decompress it into a more discursive and answerable form. In fact I had already been trying forsome time to get straight in my own mind, with little success, some thoughts about self-consciousness
and self-reflexivity that Mike’s summary seemed to insinuate – so I asked him to carry on. Such is theluxury of being an editor: getting other people to think and write about things you’re not quite capableof thinking and writing about yourself. If you’re lucky.
Dot Dot Dot had started out as a journal both from and about graphic design, but over its decade had
equally bled into the other so-called liberal arts. While happily untethered from any particular domain, it
did, however, become increasingly defined by a strain (in both senses) of self-reflexivity – individual
pieces and overall production processes that reflected emphatically back on the magazine itself,
exposing its mechanics or otherwise projecting some sort of meta-editorial vantage. Over the years
this happened quite organically, by which I mean without our contriving or really even noticing it; butlatterly I had begun to wonder why. Specifically, I wanted to probe a strongly held but, the more I
thought about it, less-than-watertight conviction that there was something inherently righteous about
self-reflexive work, something morally correct in its claim to ‘transparency’. It became increasingly
difficult to gloss over the precise nature of this implied virtue, or at least explain in what sense this‘transparency’ was, say, honest rather than, say, trite.
The sort of question gnawing at me was: why assume self-reflexivity is a fundamentally ethicalstrategy, especially seeing as it often involves some form of trickery, or at least a certain clever-cleverand often seemingly cynical intent? Or equally: why consider self-reflexivity a viable way of working

	
  

71

See §2.3(b).

	
  

102

given that it’s by now perhaps half a century since it had any real power to surprise, upset, loosen,
dismantle and shift points of view; since it had the critical collateral to force an active rather than apassive reading; not to mention the considerable distance of a number of obvious ancestors at least as
old as, say, Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy? Why now, still, when self-reflexivity permeates all
media, most apparent in the hypertrophy of so-called Reality TV where the co-called ‘reality’ underobservation is patently not all that real, in which whatever-the-set-up comes implicitly bracketed by atleast one pair of automatic scare quotes, and where the tropes of self-reflexivity – the structure laidbare, the suspension of the suspension of disbelief – have been assimilated, domesticated, and to all
intents and purposes rendered passé?
In view of all this, I’d been talking with Mike about David Foster Wallace, the American writer whose
work I first discovered in the wake of his untimely death in 2008. Prompted by reading his novels,
shorter fiction, essays, non-fiction and interviews, I began to think that there are perhaps two distinct
types of self-reflexivity which, in a dumb and deliberately provocative way, I’ll classify here simply as‘good’ and ‘bad’, though it’s by no means really so clear cut.
The distinction I’d like to draw is between self-reflexivity as trope (that’s the bad one) and selfreflexivity as temperament (that’s the good one). Self-reflexivity conceived as a trope is essentiallycynical: a stylistic conceit, an adopted attitude, a contrived effect. It’s a form applied to a subject,equivocal and arbitrary. Self-reflexivity conceived temperamentally, on the other hand, is essentiallyaffirmative – a quality drawn from working on material, and consequently unequivocal, specific. It
carries the sense that it ‘couldn’t be helped’, that it’s inevitable.
Umberto Eco has a nice way of putting this in his book The Open Work. ‘Form must not be a vehicle
for thought,’ he says; ‘it must be a way of thinking.’ The easiest way to clarify what that means is byusing the example of what we all probably have in mind when I say ‘activist art’. Form conceived as avehicle for thought implies starting with a statement in mind, then casting around for a form in which todress it. Form conceived as a way of thinking, on the other hand, implies working out that statement
through the manner in which you make it. In short, your ethics – the way you choose to live and work –rub off on the result. Walter Benjamin called this political ‘tendency’ – as opposed to ideology.72
The same chapter in Eco’s book – which happens to be titled ‘Form as Social Commitment’ – contains
another line germane to today’s topic. He says: ‘It is impossible to describe a situation by means of alanguage that is not itself expressed by that situation.’73 This idea might sound familiar to anyone who
knows a bit about mathematics, as it approximates the mathematician, logician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell’s famous well-known Paradox, which asserts that any account of containment always
contains one root-level instance that cannot itself be contained by that account. In other words, there’s
always an exception to the rule. To cut a long story short, this was effectively dismissed (orcircumvented) by Russell at the turn of the 20th century, and then resolved – or rather met head-on –later by his fellow mathematician, logician and philosopher Kurt Gödel's theorems of ‘incompleteness’a few decades later.74
I mention this only to float the idea that Gödel's incompleteness is somewhat akin to Eco’s notion of anOpen Work – by which he means art that’s left radically undone to be somehow completed during a
specific performance by the artist, performers or audience (or is in some other way ambiguous bydesign). And both align, too, with an equivalent incomplete- or open-ness suggested by thatstereotypically ‘transparent’ quality of self-reflexive art I mentioned earlier. To be clear: such work is‘open’ in the sense of exposing its workings, and ‘incomplete’ in the sense that such a naked state
reveals how it can always be further adapted, or could have been otherwise.

	
  
72

See §1.4.

73

See §1.5(b).

74More on this below in §3.11.

	
  

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Anyhow, by conflating these ideas I mean to more robustly assert three things. First, that self-reflexive
temperament is ‘sovereign’ or ‘independent’ or ‘free-spirited’ or ‘open-minded’ or simply itself enoughto let a piece of work be carried along by its subject matter. Then that the impossibility of ‘describing asituation by means of a language that is not itself simultaneously expressed by that situation’ needn’t
be deemed a hindrance or disqualifier, but rather – with a nod to Gödel – a catalyst, a driving force.
And finally, that the temperament that accepts the limitations of a given situation yet carries on
regardless in this manner amounts to a working ‘ethics’.
I’m using scare quotes there myself as I’m scared that Mike now has his head in his hands. He can’t
stand the sort of fuzzy humanism this is starting to sound like. I should have said before that in ourletters back and forth, Wallace soon became ‘a useful thistle on which to differ’, as Mike nicely put it.
And so now I’m going to complement my own soft claims by drawing on the hard fact of Wallace’s
writing. I’ll read four brief excerpts, which are, of course, the literary equivalent to Mike showing images
of Keith Arnatt’s photographs a few minutes ago: some textual snapshots.
Simply put, Wallace does self-reflexivity better, or at the very least to a degree – an nth degree – morethan anyone else. Before becoming a writer, he, too, was an accomplished student of mathematics,
logic and philosophy. By way of introduction, then, the first extract is from a relatively late non-fiction
book that conflates this triad of interests. It’s called Everything and More, essentially a history of theconcept of infinity with particular reference to its key articulator, Georg Cantor. The following is freely
assembled from Wallace’s opening chapter:
Here is a quotation from G.K. Chesterton: ‘Poets do not go mad; but
chess players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative
artists very seldom. I am not attacking logic: I only say that thisdanger [of madness] does lie in logic, not in imagination.’ [He] iswrong in one respect. Or at least imprecise. The danger he’s trying toname is not logic. Logic is just a method, and methods can’t unhinge
people. What Chesterton’s really trying to talk about is one oflogic’s main characteristics – and mathematics’: Abstractness.
Abstract thinking tends most often to strike during moments of quiet
repose. As in for example the early morning, especially if you wake up
slightly before your alarm goes off, when it can suddenly and for noreason occur to you that you’ve been getting out of bed every morning
without the slightest doubt that the floor would support you. Lying
there now considering the matter, it appears at least theoreticallypossible that some flaw in the floor’s construction or its molecular
integrity could make it buckle, or that even some aberrant bit ofquantum flux or something could cause you to melt right through.
Meaning it doesn’t seem logically impossible or anything.
– at some point you realize that the process ... can, at least in
principle, go on forever. The ability to halt a line of abstract
thinking once you see it has no end is part of what usually
distinguishes sane functional people – people who when the alarm
finally goes off can hit the floor without trepidation and plunge into
the concrete business of the real workaday world – from the unhinged.75
OK. Now, the next excerpt is also non-fiction, drawn from a sprawling essay about the relationshipbetween American TV and metafiction since around the middle of the 20th century. More or lesssynonymous with ‘postmodern literature’, metafiction refers to the sort of emphatically self-reflexive
writing typical of the younger generation working after the War. It’s an umbrella term for fiction that is,
at least in part, about the writing of fiction. Its figureheads include such as Thomas Pynchon, John

	
  
75

David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ (New York: Norton, 2003), pp. 6–17.

	
  

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Barth and William Gaddis; and Wallace himself is widely considered a prime inheritor. This next
fragment demonstrates his virtuosity in both perceiving and articulating spiralling levels of awareness:
A problem with so many of us fiction writers under 40 using television
as a substitute for true espial ... is that TV ‘voyeurism’ involves awhole gorgeous orgy of illusions for the pseudo-spy, when we watch.
Illusion (1) is that we’re voyeurs here at all: the ‘voyees’ behindthe screen’s glass are only pretending ignorance. They know perfectly
well we’re out there. And that we’re there is also very much on theminds of those behind the second layer of glass, viz. the lenses andmonitors via which technicians and arrangers apply enormous ingenuity
to hurl the visible images at us. What we see is far from stolen; it’sproffered – illusion (2). And, illusion (3), what we’re seeing throughthe framed panes isn’t people in real situations that do or even could
go on without consciousness of Audience. I.e., what young writers arescanning for data on some reality to fictionalize is already composedof fictional characters in highly formalized narratives. And, (4),
we’re not really even seeing “characters” at all: it’s not Major FrankBurns, pathetic self-important putz from Fort Wayne, Indiana; it’s
Larry Linville of Ojai, California, actor stoic enough to endure
thousands of letters (still coming in, even in syndication) frompseudo-voyeurs berating him from being a putz from Indiana. And then(5) it’s ultimately of course not even actors we’re espying, not evenpeople: it’s EM-propelled analog waves and ion streams and rear-screen
chemical reactions throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not much
more lifelike than Seurat’s own impressionist commentaries onperceptual illusion. Good lord and (6) the dots are coming out of our
furniture, all we’re really spying on is our own furniture, and ourvery own chairs and lamps and bookspines sit visible but unseen at ourgaze’s frame as we contemplate ‘Korea’ or are taken ‘live toJerusalem’ or regard the plusher chairs and classier spines of the
Huxtable ‘home’ as illusory cues that this is some domestic interior
whose membrane we have (slyly, unnoticed) violated – (7) and (8) andillusions ad inf.76
Next up, here’s an excerpt from a short story that satirizes the hypertrophy of self-reflexivity in theadvertising industry. It’s called ‘Mister Squishy’, the name of a (fictional) confectionary firm thatspecializes in cutting-edge cake snacks. Most of the action takes place inside the company’s
conference room, where a motley focus group is working out the line to spin on a new luxury chocolate
product provisionally named Felony! In this relentless excerpt, one marketing man is telling anotherabout a particularly convoluted campaign:

	
  
76

... the idea’s gist’s thrust here involved what was known in theindustry as a Narrative (or, ‘Story’) Campaign and the concept ofmaking some new product’s actual marketers’ strategies and travails
themselves a part of that product’s essential Story – as in forhistoric examples that Chicago’s own Keebler Inc.’s hard confections
were manufactured by elves in a hollow tree, or that Pillsbury’s Green
Giant-brand canned and frozen vegetables were cultivated by an actual
giant in his eponymous Valley – but with the added narrative twist or
hook now of, say for instance, advertising Mister Squishy’s new
Felony! Line as a disastrously costly and labor-intensive ultragourmet snack cake which had to be marketed by beleaguered legions of
nerdy admen under the thumb of, say, a tyrannical mullah-like CEO who
was such a personal fiend for luxury-class chocolate that he was
Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, op. cit., pp. 23–4.

	
  

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determined to push Felonies! into the US market no matter what the
cost- or sales-projections, such that (in the proposed campaign’s
Story) Mister Squishy’s advertisers had to force Team Δy to manipulate
and cajole Focus Groups into producing just the sort of quote unquote‘objective’ statistical data needed to greenlight the project and get
Felonies! on the shelves, all in other words comprising just the sortof arch tongue-in-cheek pseudo-behind-the-scenes Story designed toappeal to urban or younger consumers’ self-imagined savvy aboutmarketing tactics and ‘objective’ data and to flatter their sense thatin this age of metastatic spin and trend in the complete
commercialization of every last thing in their world they were
unprecedentedly ad-savvy and discerning and canny and well nighimpossible to manipulate by any sort of clever multimillion-dollar
marketing campaign. This was, as of the second quarter of 1995, afairly bold and unconventional ad concept.77
Finally, from the same collection of stories, Oblivion, here’s a fragment from the climax of ‘Good Old
Neon’, a curiously matter-of-fact account by an ambiguously fictive narrator ‘David Wallace’ of themundane events leading up to the suicide of an identity-scrambled protagonist, who ends up fatally
driving his car off a bridge. The story has at least two more-or-less parallel endings that are not exactly‘false’ or ‘alternate,’ but rather convey something of the multiple, consecutive dimensions of time,
character and consciousness that amount to the story’s description of death (a tantalizing payoff that’s
advertised early on in the text):
All right, now we’re coming to what I promised and led you through thewhole dull synopsis of what led up to this in hopes of. Meaning what
it’s like to die, what happens. Right? This is what everyone wants toknow. And you do, trust me. Whether you decide to go through with itor not, whether I somehow talk you out of it the way you think I’mgoing to try to do or not. It’s not what anyone thinks, for one thing.
The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know thedifference between the size and speed of everything that flashes
through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever letanyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what
seems like the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only
parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of thosetiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are alltrying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

	
  
77
78

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you
think. But what if you could? Think for a second – what if all theinfinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every momentof your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible
afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if
afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passageof time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need
any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be inanyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas andfacets?78

David Foster Wallace, ‘Mister Squishy’, Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), pp. 60–1.

Cutting and pasting fragments from Wallace’s prose was unexpectedly difficult; not because apt examples were lacking (quite
the opposite), nor because they were particularly diminished by being cut away from the body (though they were notably
difficult to compress), but because on closer reading the writing seems so specifically designed for personal, private reading as todefy any attempt to speak them in public. This is only partly explained by Wallace’s famously extensive use of footnotes,
endnotes and other devices that require clumsy and fatally disorienting or distracting explanation when spoken; it’s also due tothe rhetorical mechanisms that demand intimate, concentrated reading. That’s to say, the haywire combination of extremely long

	
  

	
  

106

To drive toward some semblance of a conclusion, then: Wallace is my prime instance of a breed ofself-reflexivity that is the inevitable trace of a particular artistic temperament, rather than applied as a
cynical trope; in other words, a temperament that deposits its self-reflexivity rather than constructs it,
and as such more engagingly convinces, moves an audience. Curiously enough, Wallace often getscriticized for being exactly the opposite: cold, show-offish, aloof, macho, chauvinist even. So maybe allthis is equally a matter of one’s own temperament as a reader. This is the sort of chicken-and-egg
observation I imagine will inevitably mark a lot of today’s un-conclusions.
Mike would argue – has argued – that Wallace is solipsistic, which can be equally grating or soporific,
but for me the work is fundamentally directed out at the world, never merely turned back in on itself. In
the words of a designer called Norman Potter, it is essentially relation-seeking. This qualifies Wallace,
too, as an instance of what his fellow writer and close friend Jonathan Franzen once called a ‘contract
author’, a label he invented to describe work that explicitly sets out to honour a contract between
author and reader. The contract writer is not arrogant, aloof, cut-off or self-obsessed, but writes above
all with commitment to the idea of establishing a mental bond, determined to connect.
So: as you can hopefully glean from these excerpts, Wallace’s writing might be profoundly, even
preposterously, turned in on itself; but it is simultaneously directed outwards – and it’s precisely thisdoubling, this both-at-once-ness, that’s the crux. Incidentally, or not, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or was
reportedly a favourite work of his.
Naturally, Wallace had already considered all I’m trying to say – to that nth degree I mentioned before –and duly deposited a number of far more phosphorescent self-analyses. In one short piece on teaching
Kafka, for example, he portrays American humour as a unidirectional cause-and-effect mechanism thatworks towards simply ‘getting it’, and contrasts it with Kafka’s far more complex and ambiguous
variety. For Wallace, a typical Kafka character is a deeply ironic proposition – ‘not only not neurotic but
anti-neurotic [which is to say:] heroically sane … the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote,“unconsciousness”.’79 Otherwise put, Kafka’s humour is deliberately designed to rub both ways: isfunny and not funny at all (is funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar), and therefore true to the everyday
schizophrenia of human consciousness that is tragically and thankfully equipped to laugh at despair.
The point is, Wallace’s writing is similarly multivalent, or schizophrenic – at once involuted andoutgoing; and this, too, sums up its relation to today’s topic. It is neurotically aware of the futility oftranscending one’s condition, yet heroically attempts to transcend it regardless. Wallace once sent
a letter to an editor at Penguin explaining his work to be neither primarily ‘realism’ nor ‘metafiction’
but, if anything, ‘meta-the-difference-between-the-two’. This suggests a dogged pursuit of his own‘Both/And’ formulation, pushing for a third way in order to escape the trappings of one-dimensional
self-reflexivity
And it’s precisely this attempt that makes the difference, because although the contradiction can’t beovercome, it can be transformed – into art. What appears to be a dead-end from one perspective looks
like a life-force from another; it all depends on the end of your telescope.
Thank you.

	
  sentences, clauses within clauses, speech rhythms, repetitions and deliberately elliptical phrasing demand the reader’s own
looping back and forth, reading and re-reading, sticking, stalling and starting again; all of which necessitates considerable – andentirely profitable – mental labour. This is particularly true of that last extract from ‘Good Old Neon’, in which repeated rereading to work out what and how and who the hell is going on is necessary not only to ‘fully apprehend the meaning’ or ‘makesense of the plot’, but more profoundly to instill the dread of extreme self-consciousness that is its subject. This is one litmus testof what I’m calling temperamental self-reflexivity: that it can’t be readily reduced, modulated or paraphrased because too
idiosyncratic to survive any transplant – and it all tends to wither in explanation.
79

David Foster Wallace, ‘Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness’ [1999], Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown, 2005),
p. 64.

	
  107

On reading this talk, my friend Sharon Kahanoff wrote to me that ‘a self-consciousness bearing out tothe world is engaging and a self-reflexivity boring in is a kind of solipsistic retreat.’80 Note the double
meanings of her ‘bearing’ and ‘boring’: the former in the senses of being borne (i.e. carried) as well as
borne out (i.e. fulfilled) that together imply a sociable, relation-seeking, genial work that aspires above
all to communicate; the latter in the senses of tiresome (i.e. for anyone other than its maker, thereby
eschewing the community that communication presupposes) as well as drilling in (i.e. goingunderground, hermetic, solipsistic).
Moreover, she calls for a self-reflexivity ‘that bears its self-reflexivity, not bares it’, which is to say,for work that offers up its workings as a matter of course rather than exhibitionism – like the graphic
trail of a piece of long division written out by hand:This is the reflex tendency of an open demeanour, a candid disposition: contrary to the self-righteous
pomp of top-down reflexivity, Sharon argues for an easygoing ground-up consciousness to the pointthat it ‘becomes a material like any other, toward the expression of your working out the question,
instead of the goal.’

3.9: DUPLICITOUS EXAMPLE
A few months later another friend, Perri McKenzie, sent along this piece of steady self-analysis:
The key, I think, to what I’m trying to do, is attempting selfreflexivity. Recently I spoke about Jack Spicer translating the poetryof Federico Lorca through poetry (rather than another language).
This might be further articulated as ‘pushing beyond a discipline
through the manner of that pushing’, or as Gilles Deleuze says in
L’Abécédaire, ‘I want to get out of philosophy through the meansof philosophy.’ This is analogous to my position – to get outside ofart through the means of art.81

Using the means in order to transcend the means recalls Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous injunction to‘throw away the ladder’ of his philosophy after having surmounted it. There’s nothing remotely cynicalor ironic in Perri’s (or Wittgenstein’s) slant on self-reflexivity either; it’s not a ‘move’ or a ‘tactic’ or a‘strategy’, more a quietly personal philosophy that bears a sense of having slowly and even surprisingly
come to realize its own nature. (Here I mean philosophical in the soft, patient sense: Well I’m trying tobe philosophical about it.) This modest, unassuming disposition chimes, too, with the un-proprietary,
cross-disciplinary and polymathic propensities of the majority of those whose work I’m writing about
here. Hopping across the nominal boundaries of whatever field they’re rooted in without making a big
deal about it, their work conveys a felt rather than theoretical sense of disciplinary borders being more

	
  

80
81

Email from Sharon Kahanoff, 23 February, 2012.

Email from Perri McKenzie, 1 March, 2012. (I might as well add: ‘to get out of design by design.’) As it happens, the piece oflong division above is hers too. See: Perri McKenzie, ‘∆’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #2, 2011.

	
  

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arbitrary and porous than is generally assumed. Consider, for instance, that art, poetry and philosophy
are all compressed into my friend’s brief paragraph above.
Now I want to consider all the above in view of two different series of work made in the last decade by
British artist and close friend Ryan Gander.

(a) A being-word rather than a doing-word
In a talk I saw Ryan give a couple of years ago at UCLA in Los Angeles, he made the following claim:
Between my having an idea for a piece of work and its eventual
production, nothing really changes. There’s no ‘development’.
The product arrives fully formed, so there’s a 1:1 relationshipbetween idea and result.

He then proceeded to denounce contemporary painting – specifically, that he couldn’t see the point ofpainting in the 21st century. While there’s nothing particularly new in this, neither in terms of thegeneral sentiment, nor in Ryan saying as much to provoke an audience he knew would likely contain ahandful of young painters, in retrospect his 1:1 comment shed some useful light on this bald dismissalof an entire medium. To put as bluntly as Ryan does, a crucial part of the painterly process he’s
missing, or refusing to admit, is precisely the idea that the process (the colon in his ratio) could be
more the point than the finished painting – or at least as much.
That’s to say, ‘painterly’ can refer to a procedure of development in which ideas are worked out inrealtime – a notion that’s clearly the opposite of Ryan’s own way of working’s equivalence between
idea and result, during which ‘nothing really changes’. This painterly platitude of working-somethingout-by-doing isn’t exclusive to painting, of course, nor does it by any means apply to all painting; it is,however, particularly apparent in painting due to the medium’s surface plasticity. It’s relatively easy
to imagine paint on canvas having been in its liquid state thanks to the traces of the tools that were used
to push it around.
Ryan’s statement is also worth contemplating inasmuch as self-reflexivity has itself become somethingof a medium for him: the meta-reflection in his work is a kind of signature – a trademark or brand,even – in the sense that, say, ‘delay’ was for Duchamp.
One fairly typical example from 2010 comprises an involuted series of photographic prints that register
several degrees of recursion. Each work in the series is based on an apparently arbitrary detail of afamiliar (or at least familiar-seeming) Neoplasticist painting – an abstract composition of primary andsecondary colours. These source works are drawn from the collection of the Haus Konstruktiv in
Zurich that both commissioned and eventually exhibited Ryan’s project. The paintings are by Dexel,
Lohse, Maatsch, Graeser, and Glarner. Each particular fragment is output as a high-resolution, highgloss, large-format photographic print – as if output to proof the colour values of an eventual ‘proper’reproduction; indeed, the print includes a sample strip of colours used to check the equivalence
between original and copy. Then that reproduction, colour chart included, is itself photographed withthe same high-end precision, and this second-degree facsimile output as the final ‘outer’ print, also
including its own colour reference (now two-levels removed from the original). In sum, this last printindexes the genealogy of representation across three distinct moments – or four if you count theoriginal painting. All of which sets up a vertiginous riddle: what’s matching what, exactly, and in whatorder, and how, and why?

	
  

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Each piece in the series consists of two adjacent photographs from the two stages of documentation ofa single work, titled by a variation on this template: Investigation #15 – Although you've given me
everything (Glarner).82
It’s easy enough, then, to see this piece as a clinical, mechanical 1:1 realization of an idea in whichnothing has changed between idea and iteration. It’s a one-liner, a concept sprung ready-resolved from
Ryan’s mind that, while presumably anticipating the considerable complexities of production involved,
is essentially bereft of any sign of contingency met along the way. As such, I consider it a primeexample of self-reflexivity affected as a trope: an applied knowingness, with all the flavour andintellectual kudos of the meta-vantage, yet lacking vital life (i.e. any trace of that looping ‘sociological’cause-and-effect of self-reflection and development noted at the start of this chapter). While certainly
a reflection, the work doesn’t register the act of reflection. It’s a gesture more noun than verb, a beingword rather than a doing-word, mise-en-abymism practiced as sport.83
In worrying over tropes and counterposing them with temperaments, I’m hoping that ‘trope’ suggests
some kind of entrenchment or territorialization prone to the forces of fashion with a cultural sell-bydate. In his book The Program Era (2009), literary critic Marc McGurl calls this worn-out state‘autopoetic’, a pun he coins from autopoiesis, which means ‘self-making’.84 McGurl is specificallyalluding to the ‘routinely reflexive operations’ of later modernist literature and by implication all
rearguard modern art – and it is of course precisely the ‘routine’ aspect (automatic, habitual,normalized) that turns it into a trope.
Partly to be fair to Ryan, but also to reinforce the bigger point, here’s a second instance of his work that
I think demonstrates the opposite: a temperamental inverse of the autopoetic trope.

(b) The exact speed of thinking
The Last Work is a video made in London in the winter of 2007 that comprises a single shot from
Ryan’s studio in Hoxton to his house in Aldwych, 40 minutes door-to-door.85 As the camera rolls at

	
  
82

All are similarly numbered ‘investigations’; the phrase in the middle stays the same while the proper name changes
accordingly.

83

In fact, this mise en abyme became even more abyss-mal the following year, when Ryan further developed the series of pairs
by digitally transposing the composite images from the photographic prints to mechanically produced oil ‘paintings’ on canvas,
thus bringing the images back full circle to their original medium. Each new pair was titled Remember me, mistakenly – Although
you've given me everything.

84

As derived from the ‘perfectly routine (…) self-making activities of the biological organism’ and latterly adopted by systems
theory to more broadly describe ‘the self-referential closure of all systems, biological, social, or otherwise.’ See: Marc McGurl,
The Program Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 111–2.
85

There are a few details that, though more or less extraneous to my point, are worth noting down here: (1) The video was madein advance of a year long sabbatical, hence its title; (2) It’s the focal point of a larger installation, back-projected onto a small

	
  

	
  

110

walking pace along darkening streets, members of a verité crew with conspicuous production gear
casually move in and out of shot.

This footage is accompanied by a monotone female voice-over. Given the patently personal (or maybe
pseudo-personal) nature of the script, along with the title and other sundry bits of information in thework’s peripherals, the voice is patently a stand-in for Ryan himself, i.e. the sound of him absently
thinking aloud. As the camera advances along the route, the ‘narrator’ notes passing details that trigger
anecdotes, memories and half-thoughts, variously trailing off or instigating further loose associations.
At the same time, these observations cue a series of structuralist visual devices. A second, slightly
smaller frame superimposed on top of the initial image, for instance, shows the view from a second
camera tracking behind the crew, masking all but the original’s outer edges.

As the film continues, references to other media pop up on further embedded frames (e.g. the opening
sequence of Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat, a recent music video) and form increasingly complex
composites as multiple channels play over each other, gradually accumulating before ‘resetting’ backto a more basic image.
But while the work’s heady effects are akin to the multiple levels of reproduction in the Investigations
series, here the meta-impositions don’t seem clever-clever, just clever. Or: the video’s self-reflexive
giddiness seems less contrived as an aesthetic end in itself, more called up by the script true to the ebb
and flow of rolling contemplation. Beyond some sort of skeleton script, it seems to me that the piece
could only possibly have been made by having being written along the way; or is otherwise such afaithful recollection that it mentally transports to the same degree.
In any case, it amounts to a compulsive impression of absent-minded meditation, a lucid daydream that
captures the exact speed of thinking. Ryan assembles the conditions to make his mundane strange
again, and in the end it’s this 1:1 relationship – between the world and the work, not the idea and its
product – that renders the outcome so plausible. Precisely because The Last Work was palpably madeup-as-it-went-along, instead of coolly reflecting on it, we’re warmly drawn into its haphazard flow.

	
  screen built into the corner of a specifically-designed room with a white carpet and ‘chroma-key’ blue walls (as is noted in thevoiceover); (3) In a sequel made the following year, The Last Work Too, the same journey is filmed in reverse – from home tostudio – exactly half a year later on a summer morning, while the new audio track consists of a group of schoolchildren singing
all the ideas Ryan jotted down in his notebook during the interim. In his own words, the narrative ‘attempts to demystify theromanticism around notions of the studio and [artistic] practice’.

	
  

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3.10: COMMUNICATING COMMUNICABILITY
In his book Means without End (2000), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben attributes a very specificmeaning to the word ‘gesture’, which he variously describes as ‘the exhibition of a mediality’ and‘making a means visible as such’.86 It’s hard to find a decent definition of ‘mediality’, but it seems to
run something along the lines of ‘a perceived reality generated by a specific medium’. In lessconvoluted terms, Agamben’s ‘gesture’ means to show the way the workings work – the mechanism aswell as its outcome. It’s therefore commensurate with the self-reflexivity as described throughout thischapter.
He cites pornography as a case in point. Pornography, he says, comprises ‘People caught in the act ofperforming a gesture [as] a means addressed to the end of giving pleasure to others’ – and inasmuch as
those filmed or photographed are ‘kept suspended in and by their own mediality’ they ‘become themedium of a new pleasure for the audience’.87 It is the act of showing a process, generally speaking inorder to provoke a particular type of attention or apprehension – a sort of applied empathy. An
equivalent gesture in language communicates its own communicability.
Elaborating on the definition, Agamben quotes a passage by ancient Roman scholar Marcus Terentius
Varro on the distinction between making and acting. Varro says that while it’s possible for a person towrite a part in a play but not act it, and equally to act a part in a play they haven’t written, the proper
sense of gesture involves both at once: making and acting conceived as a single process. The gesture,then, is the natural outcome of the theorizing practitioner, or – to use a marginally less tedious term –the critical maker: actor-director, singer-songwriter, poet-performer, writer-designer. Such generalists
don’t outsource but prefer to publish (in the broadest sense of ‘make public’) themselves.
Once again this recalls Benjamin’s author-as-producer who, by involving himself at the root levelof production processes, draws no distinction between the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aspects of a piece ofwork and is therefore responsible for the tone of voice or the intricacies of typesetting as much as thechannels of dispersion and context of reception. The critical maker embodies what economists call‘vertical integration’, where the various elements that make up a product (designing, processing,packaging, distributing) are assimilated under a single umbrella company at one location rather thanseparated and outsourced to remote specialists. Varro further characterizes the work of this generalist
auteur type as ‘enduring’, ‘carrying-on’ or ‘supporting’ in the sense of maintaining a tradition.88
The implication is that by involving himself at the outset, the critical maker inevitably embeds
the story of the production process into the formal realization of its object.89
Varro then quotes Aristotle who, in the Nicomachean Ethics, wrote that ‘production [poiesis] has an
end other than itself, but action [praxis] does not: good action is itself an end’, a sentiment that thePolish polymath Stefan Themerson distilled into a single clause: ‘means are of greater importance thanaims’.90
This pre-empts Agamben’s essential point in ‘Notes on Gesture’, that gestures properly belong to therealm not of aesthetics but of ethics and politics. The compound writing-and-acting gesture of the

	
  

86

Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’ [1992, Italian] Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000).

87

Ibid., p. 58. My italics. This recalls Kant’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’ – his formulation of form that suggests but stops
short of fulfilment.

88

Ibid., p. 58.

89

More on this in chapter 7.

90

Themerson made this claim during a lecture in order to then assert that ‘decency of means is the aim of aims’. In the broader
context of the talk, he was making the political point that force ought not be used to counter force, that wicked means ought not
be pitched against other wicked means, even in view of achieving decent ends. For Themerson there are no aims, ends or goals
that ought override common decency – no extenuating circumstances or ‘states of exception’. In aesthetic terms, his ‘common
decency’ translates as a commitment to clear and honest communication. More on this in §7.5.

	
  

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critical maker is significant beyond the aesthetic realm, he says, because it connects with the wider
world and is socially potent to the extent that it mimics, reveals and so fosters the realization of ourpersonal mediality. Otherwise put, by showing the workings of the work, artistic gestures can makeapparent the equivalent workings of the social systems we’re part of – our position in the scheme ofthings – and in doing so cultivate a more athletic sense of agency in view of changing that scheme.
In The Open Work, Eco maintains that ‘form as a way of thinking’ is inherently ‘political’ because
by pushing beyond closeted theory and setting up in broad-daylight practice, the critical maker issuddenly answerable: his or her ethical orientation is inevitably inherent – and manifest – in thedecisions taken while making the work;91 attitudes are acted-out, which is to say lived. Likewise for
Benjamin, where the mere theorist stops short at declaring his sympathy with a political cause, thewriter-as-producer manifests a political tendency – and work that exhibits the correct tendency ‘needshow no other quality.’ In short, the work projects an ethical or political orientation not by simply
claiming but actually embodying it. ‘I make it my own’, he goes on; ‘But in doing so I abstain from
asserting it dogmatically. It must be proved.’92 The critical maker denies himself the possibility ofpontificating in the abstract.

3.11: INCOMPLETE
In Kant After Duchamp, De Duve writes that incompleteness is a biological fact of life. We are born
premature, he says, meaning literally before our bodies and organs are fully developed. He then adds
that this constitutionally unfinished aspect of the human character applies not only to our biologicaldevelopment, but to our cultural sensibility too. In this light, ‘Anticipation is not just the desire forprediction and mastery’, he says, but a far more intrinsic drive – nothing less than ‘the biological dutyof mankind!’93 We are, then, prenaturally disposed to open-endedness.
Russell’s paradox is a well-known logical conundrum dating from 1901 that derives from the 20thcentury analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell’s acknowledgement of a flaw in the 19th-century
mathematician Georg Cantor’s Set Theory. Set Theory is a foundational branch of mathematics
concerned with formulating principles of relations among sets of objects. Crudely summarized, in theface of Cantor’s unsatisfactory formulation, Russell asserted that any account of containment always
presupposes one root-level instance that cannot itself be contained by that account (any statementthat accounts for ‘all other statements’, for instance); or to put it in terms of Naive Set Theory, whichis the technical name for set theory expressed in normal language,
Any definable collection is a set. Let R be the set of all sets thatare not members of themselves. If R is not a member of itself, thenits definition dictates that it must contain itself, and if it
contains itself, then it contradicts its own definition as the set of
all sets that are not members of themselves.94

Formulated at the crux of the modern era, Russell’s paradox is a seminal articulation in the fields ofmathematics and logic of the same self-consciousness that propelled much modernist art. The paradox
has widespread application beyond its founding domain, as it alludes to the impossibility of everwholly transcending a situation in order to objectively observe it (because the observer is always
already inevitably conditioned by that situation). It’s the kind of contradiction that comprises

	
  
91

See §1.5.

92

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, op. cit., p. 221.

93

De Duve, op. cit. See pp. 366–8.

94

Adapted from http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Russell's_paradox. A well-known ‘applied’ version is the Barber Paradox:
Suppose there exists a barber in a village who shaves all those men in the village who do not shave themselves and only thosemen who do not shave themselves; does the barber shave himself or not?

	
  

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simultaneous sense and nonsense, of the sort that also characterizes recursive semantics like ‘All
statements are false’ and looks something like an Escher tableau.
Russell made no attempt to resolve his containment paradox in the (therefore non-encyclopaedic)
encyclopaedia of axioms Principia Mathematica, which he co-authored with A.N. Whitehead a decade
later (1910–13). A number of other mathematicians did, but their theories were only consistent within
specifically circumscribed limits – which kind of misses the point. Then in 1931, the Austrianacademic Kurt Gödel published two ‘incompleteness’ theorems. These are categorically open-ended
proofs that basically claim containment to be both possible and not possible, without formal
contradiction:
1. If the system is consistent, it cannot be complete.
2. The consistency of the axioms cannot be proven within the system.
The point is: there’s always an exception to the rule. What does this have to do with art?
Gödel’s ‘incomplete’ resolution is congruent with the ‘insoluble dialectic’ – or fait accompli – of social
alienation described by Eco in The Open Work (discussed in §1.5(a)) whereby individuals arecompelled to participate in social systems despite the fact that those systems frequently seem to work
against their personal desires and interests. By extension, it is also commensurate with Eco’s equivalent‘insoluble dialectic’ of aesthetic work (discussed in §1.5(b)), in which artists are bound to work withexisting conventions despite the fact that those conventions are inevitably headed for artistic
impotence.95 Recall how Eco expresses this latter truism in terms very close to Russell’s conundrum:‘It is impossible to describe a situation by means of a language that is not itself expressed by thatsituation’; and that Eco proceeds to argue that the realization of this paradox ought not be perceived asa dead-end but an affirmation. The very apprehension and acceptance of the condition, says Eco,fosters a conscious, enlightened way of working rather than an ignorant, deluded one. 96
What can we extrapolate from all this? That in terms of both society at large and art in particular, therealization that our situation is fundamentally open and incomplete is a better means of proceeding
than banging one’s head against the fundamentally futile goal of absolute or axiomatic ends.
While this sounds plausible enough, it’s not easy to push on and account for the specific benefits of thisrealization beyond the vague ‘movement’ I’ve been claiming it cultivates. Fortunately, my pragmaticcolleague David Reinfurt nailed a more convincing explanation in this most un-axiomatic of axioms:
Truth must always be produced (through practice) and never simply discovered.97
He said this in a talk that was eventually turned into a piece of writing called, as it happens, ‘Naive
Set Theory’ – so named at least in part because David was unabashedly performing his own ‘naive’(i.e. amateur) understanding of actual Set Theory (he had just enough of a grasp of the subject, heassured the audience, to be able to convey it to an equally lay crowd). But then he did this mainly byrelating it to other subjects, which is precisely what the talk was about – hence the title’s ‘naivety’
equally alludes to the propelling action of ignorance, enthusiasm and good humour. In sum, hearticulated a set (fixed) theory about the benefits of a naive (loose) practice.
He further noted that the ongoing attempt to understand is entirely productive. It’s commonplace to saythat it’s useful to work in view of a nominal goal and within defined limits. But it’s equally productive
to proceed ‘naively’, blindly, open-minded and supple enough to modify a course of action as asituation develops; otherwise, you’re in danger of force-fitting ideas into forms unsuited to them.

	
  
95

See §1.5.

96

See chapter 1, fn. 35.

97David Reinfurt, ‘Naive Set Theory’, op. cit., p. 113.

	
  

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This is the sort of ‘ethical orientation’ or ‘political tendency’ that gets inscribed in the ‘gestural’work of the critical maker. The push and pull of freedom and order during the making of a piece ofwork is manifest in the final product, which can then model an equivalent push and pull at the levelof social arrangements. Such work can be thus conceived as a tool for thinking about and aroundequivalent subjects. It can never have ‘social impact’ in any immediate or obvious sense; at best it
can convey an ethical approach to aesthetic work that potentially influences equivalent social attitudes.
Certainly, this social effect is relatively subtle, delayed or ambient (and likely beyond verification
or measure), hence the focus in this thesis on intentions over outcomes. This is not to make a case for,say, ‘artists who write’, or more generally ‘plainly articulate practitioners’; only to assert that art
seems more answerable and so more substantial when measured against an explicit set of intentions.
Work otherwise seems arbitrary, to neither address nor answer to anything worldly.
Finally, for now, I’d like to draw out the connection between David’s summary insight and the natureof self-reflexive art I’ve been concerned with here. First I’ll emphasize one more time that I’ve
considered the topic at length not in order to make a case for self-reflexive art per se, but solely in viewof its purposiveness as a model (‘a mode of address, of attitude and approach, rather than outcome orconsequence’98): a pending product as a talking point on the way to something else, then happily
discarded like Wittgenstein’s ladder.
Plainly I’m paranoid about seeming to be rooting for self-reflexivity. This unease is germane to the link
between incompleteness and self-reflexivity. Here’s why:
Human consciousness naturally reaches beyond itself. As time passes we become increasingly
aware – on both personal/subjective and historical/objective levels – of our environment, culture, self,and so on, and (theoretically, at least) are capable of contemplating it all with gathering sophistication.
Up to a point this is consonant with Hegel’s teleology of dialectical progression towards ‘universal
consciousness’. Hegel’s metaphysics is no longer plausible to contemporary minds because his
notion of an absolute end – the realization of the ‘universal spirit’ – has surely been superseded itself.
As already noted, ‘absolute’ ideas are not nearly as credible as they used to be. We’ve effectivelytranscended Hegel’s own ideas according to the apparently unforeseen logic of his own philosophy(a Hegelianism that transcends Hegel’s Hegelianism, you might say). As also noted above,contemporary consciousness is more at home with the idea that existence consists in relativity, chaos,indeterminacy, and contingency; incessant change and uncertainty as a rule. (The only rule is: there areno rules.) As such, any credible progressive or constructive disposition today must necessarily accept
and properly align itself with this condition – perpetually in progress, under construction, forever
pending, and so on and so on.
Likewise, we can perceive readily enough how, historically, art has become increasingly consciousof itself as a discipline. 20th century art follows a trajectory of mounting self-awareness. However, as
noted in §3.5, this self-consciousness advances with equally growing awareness that the critical spiritthat has driven such movements doesn’t necessarily have much actual, tangible affect on the subject
under scrutiny. At best it maybe mirrors it. The assumption that self-reflexive art is in some concrete
sense productively critical is dubious at best; as an actual critical force today it’s more plausibly‘redundant’ or ‘superfluous’. As one bystander noted: ‘Must [we] consult some picture or trinket tounderstand that identity is administered, power exploits, resistance is predetermined, all is shit?’ 99
And yet I don’t mean to make a wholly antithetical case against self-reflexivity either, only to noteits limits – which are precisely akin to those shortcomings of Set Theory. In sum, contemporary
consciousness acknowledges the necessity of goals and limits all the while aware of the pitfalls of
approaching the world in terms of ends and absolutes. It acknowledges, too, the need to adapt in
the face of contingencies along the way.

	
  
98
99

Potter, Models & Constructs, op. cit. p. 35.

Seth Price, ‘Dispersion’, op. cit. (unpaginated). An alternate version of this line in a different version of the piece reads:‘In any case, must I consult art to understand that identity is administered, power exploits, resistance is predetermined, all ishollow?’

	
  

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The ideal is to work in a state of pointed flexibility, and self-reflexive art is a means of taunting thoughtin view of this exemplary disposition. It’s an awareness-tool.100

	
  
100

This is what Will Holder was talking about in the reference to Bishop Berkeley mentioned during the back and forth of §3.2.
The extended reference is to a dog called Berkeley in Stefan Themerson’s novel Cardinal Pölätüo who incessantly chases a bow
attached to his tail. Will was acknowledging Themerson’s use of Berkeley as a metaphor for a self-consciousness (or atheoretical approach) that similarly ‘chases its own tail’ and so needs application (function, practice) to break the loop, in orderthat such application sets off new loops of thinking (new connections, new ideas). See: Stefan Themerson, Cardinal Pölätüo(London: Gaberbocchus, 1961).

	
  

117

Dexter Sinister, twin press releases from the opening night of the 2008 Whitney Biennial

	
  

118

Dexter Sinister, twin press releases from the opening night of the 2008 Whitney Biennial

	
  

119

4: VARIOUS TRUE MIRRORSThis second practice chapter recounts an unusually long chain-link of projects gathered under the title
True Mirror. A certain amount of preamble is necessary for the trajectory to make sense.

4.1: JUST IN TIME
Dexter Sinister, which means Right & Left in the language of heraldry, was supposed to be the name ofa publishing imprint due to operate under the auspices of the 2006 Manifesta Biennial in Nicosia,
Cyprus. The curators that year were planning to break from the usual biennial format (i.e. turn a city
into an art capital for a month or two) by setting up an art school on the island. This would be anemphatically speculative school designed to reflect on past, present and future models of art education,with the possibility of eventually turning it into a permanent institution.
After a year or so of preparations the entire project was abruptly terminated for ostensibly politicalreasons, rooted in the fact that both Cyprus as a whole and Nicosia in particular are split along a
Greek/Turkish divide, marked by a no-man’s land and policed by the United Nations.1 Before thewhole thing collapsed, David Reinfurt and I had planned to set up a workshop responsible fordesigning and dispersing all communication materials as and when required by the nascent school;
an in-house publishing department that, as well as simply handling the school’s immediate needs,
would serve to document the overall project as it progressed, and archive it afterwards. We resolved
to use whatever technologies we could beg, borrow or otherwise scavenge locally (whether
mimeograph machine or MacBook Pro) and operate according to a Just-In-Time model of economic
production.
Famously implemented by the Toyota Corporation in the 1950s, counter to the prevailing model of therigid Fordist assembly line, the J-I-T approach is comparatively fluid, flexible and reflexive. It aims to
reduce costs and so maximize profits, partly by more efficiently utilizing its workforce (more all-roundskills, more latitude for employees to move between different aspects of production, and more
responsibility generally), and partly by avoiding storage costs by manufacturing products as and whenrequired. For our purposes at least, J-I-T could be considered the more progressive, ‘free-thinking’ of
the two. In consecutive proposals to the curators and bits of auxiliary writing about and around ourideas in the initial stages of the project, we proposed to set up a project that would consider of the stateof contemporary art, education and publishing in view of these contrasting production models.

We intended this workshop to be fully visible and publicly accessible in a shop front with full-heightwindows on a corner of Nicosia’s old town, on display as a ‘gestural’ work in the biennial while
simultaneously operating as a practical arm of the school – a secretary’s office in a vitrine. The name’sright and left (brain or hand) became the basis of the school’s badge, the rudimentary form of which
was inspired by an idea recalled from an essay by Steve Rushton in an early issue of Dot Dot Dot,
‘Sinister/Bastard: interchangeable paragraphs on a typographical sign’.2 Here’s one of thoseparagraphs:

	
  
1
2

For more on the project’s collapse, see: Martin Herbert, ‘School’s Out’, Frieze, no. 101, September 2006.

Steve Rushton, ‘Sinister/Bastard: interchangeable paragraphs on a typographical sign’, Dot Dot Dot #4, 2002. The piece is soprescient to my thesis that it’s tempting to quote the entire thing, but I’ll limit myself to one more paragraph: ‘But what about themonsters it produces – these interdisciplinary chimeras with the head of an administrator, the hands of an artist and the body of a

	
  

	
  

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The oblique stroke appears at first sight to be the signal that thebinary opposition between categories (speech/writing or love/hate)
won’t hold – that neither of the words in opposition to each other isgood for the fight. The stroke, like an over-vigilant referee, must
keep them apart and yet still oversee the match. The stroke highlights
the inadequacy of each word. Just when we think we have a word that
seems up to the task of describing a thing, it obscures the thing it
is describing. This sets up (you know the old story) a chain ofsignifiers, re-establishing the ‘metaphysics of presence’. The obliquestroke emphasizes difference but implies possibility. It excites thewords on either side of the stroke into motion toward each other andyet divides them irrevocably.

Elsewhere in the piece, Steve pictures the forward slash ‘swinging like a catflap between one category
and another. Flicking rapidly from the diagonal to the vertical, to the reverse diagonal, allowing
passage for the meaning of words.’
We managed to squeeze out one publication, Notes for an Art School, a few months before the wholeproject fell through.3 This was a collection of newly commissioned essays published in tandem with aweekend conference held on the island in anticipation of the main event. The book was an opportunity
to try out what we were hoping to occur in our anticipated workshop, i.e. that whatever technologies
we happened to gather in the course of setting up a cheap, efficient office would emphatically dictate
and mark the form of each new piece of work. Hence this pilot publication was made using a fairly
eccentric print technology, a Risograph stencil-printing machine belonging to a community centre in
The Netherlands we’d worked with before.4 The relatively severe limitations of this machine leave
fairly visible marks on its products (in terms of format, paper, colours, margins, etc.) – particularly ifthat product is knowingly designed to make the most of its idiosyncrasies. The book was thus
conceived as a kind of demonstrator – of this particular mode of production, certainly, but equallyemblematic of our intentions for the Nicosia project as a whole.
Although the book turned out to be the only official trace of Manifesta 6, many of the school’s
proposed departments played out later in other locations and situations.5 Dexter Sinister was part of thisdiaspora, too: we transplanted the ideas developed for Nicosia – and the badge – to a basement space
we began to lease around the same time on New York’s Lower East Side.

	  sumo wrestler? Part theorist, part editor, part curator, part designer? And could there be points of division where a distinction
can be made even between inter-disciplines? Is it possible that an as-yet undeclared infra-slim specialisation may exist in the
diagonal line between puppeteer and weightlifter? And deep in the blackness of the stroke is there another stroke?’
3

Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle, Florian Waldvogel, eds., Notes for an Art School (Nicosia: Dexter Sinister, 2008).

4

These machines, the printed effect of which falls somewhere between photocopy and silkscreen, have since become fairly
ubiquitous at the entrepreneurial-literary end of the design scene.

5

For example, the Berlin bar/seminar room unitednationsplaza organized by one of the Manifesta 6 curators, Anton Vidokle;
or Objectif Exhibitions, an independent space in Antwerp directed for a while by another, Mai Abu ElDahab.

	
  

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Transposed from the relative backwater of Nicosia to the locus of Western capitalism, this new‘workshop’ became involved in selling as much as manufacturing. To this end, we opened a modest
bookstore,6 initially with the idea of dispersing various publications we were involved in producing,while cutting out as many middlemen (publishers, distributors) as possible. The shop included
Notes for An Art School, as well as a bootleg internet-produced Print-on-Demand edition when theoriginal sold out, plus sundry publications made by close colleagues. We launched the space with thissummary statement of intent based on our thinking through those two economic models relative
to publishing:

In due course we also stocked a wider range of books, including a modest range of related fiction,
but wound this down when we found ourselves spending more time running the shop than making
things to put in it. For a time the shop surprisingly subsidized the rent of the space, and it remains today
a means of circulating our own Dot Dot Dot (and later Bulletins of The Serving Library) outside theusual sluggish, costly channels.

4.2: PROOF OF THE FACT THAT A MECHANICAL DEVICECAN REPRODUCE PERSONALITY
About a year after the Manifesta breakdown, we were vaguely invited to participate in the 2007
Whitney Biennial; ‘vaguely’ inasmuch as the invitation was very ambiguous. The curators eventually
floated three possibilities: we could design the catalogue; contribute an autonomous section to acatalogue designed by someone else; or participate directly in the biennial alongside the otherexhibiting artists. We opted for the last, as it seemed the furthest from a foregone conclusion and so
likely the most fertile. Like the curators, though, we had no idea what form this participation mighttake, nor any obvious precedent to work from.
We’d loosely set up Dexter Sinister to explore publishing in its most exploded sense; that is, to querywhat present and future publishing might involve beyond the established ways and means. To the

	
  

6

The early days of the Dexter Sinister basement are variously documented in: Anthony Huberman, ‘Out of Circulation’,Artforum (April 2007); Peter Nesbitt, ‘Who is Dexter Sinister?’, Art on Paper (March/April 2007); Edward Lovett, ‘This Year’s
Model’, Print (July/August 2007); and Adam Kleinman, ‘Dexter Sinister’, http://www.bombmagazine.org/article/3117/dextersinister.

	
  

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extent that we could articulate it at that time, this meant not only exploring the possibilities afforded by
new technologies (circulating texts via URLs or downloadable PDFs, to take two obvious examples),but equally that an event – a book launch or music performance, for instance – might be considered asmuch a form of publication as a material artefact like a book, magazine, or their immediate immaterial
equivalents. And so it made sense to steer the Whitney’s invitation in this direction too.
Above all, we were keen to address the specific character of this particular biennial, i.e. a relatively
glamorous, much-discussed, well-attended, often easily-criticized but generally well-regarded surveyof contemporary American art in the heart of a media-saturated art capital that, as such, is characterized
by the sort of self-aggrandizing hype common to New York specifically and art biennials generally.
The Whitney Biennial typically receives a substantial amount of press, often compressed into a binary
verdict – a requisite yes/no, good/bad, rich/poor, timely/untimely, relevant/irrelevant, betterthan/worse-than the last one.
With this in mind, we wondered how we might assemble a set of circumstances to foster the opposite,
i.e. to complicate or otherwise slow down the show’s reception. Thought out in more concrete terms,
we gradually conceived of producing some kind of parallel publicity that, although released fromwithin the Biennial (and by extension its umbrella institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art),
would circumvent its official sanction. In other words, we would set up some kind of parallel circuit of
Public Relations. An obvious point of reference was the ubiquitous Press Release, although we were
far less interested in its typical forms (sheet of paper, fax, email, website) than its typical functions(to advertise, inform, seduce, entertain). Moreover, we were drawn to the fact that the Press Release isa medium that rigidly emanates from within an institution before haphazardly circulating outside it,variously repeated verbatim, paraphrased or cannibalized into soundbites. In short, the nature of thePress Release is to become increasingly tenuous, vulnerable and prone to distortion the further it moves(in both time and space) from its source.
Our continued thinking yielded a fairly rudimentary set of metaphors: mirrors, reflections, shadows,
gaps and doubles. When it came time to gather these free-floating notions into a concrete proposal(or at least stall for more time to do so), it seemed most expedient to make some kind of repository
document to contain the disparate texts and images we’d assembled in the basement since beginning
to reflect on the subject. We figured the form of this ‘bank’ would likely anticipate – and perhaps
summon – our as-yet-unrealized intentions. So, although this inaugural offering was nominallyaddressed to the curators, it was as much if not more a means of making manifest to ourselves an
outcome we hadn’t quite yet seen.
As it happened, this ‘repository’ morphed into the first of three preparatory documents that served
this purpose – congealing, oddly enough, into a long poem built from fragments of found prose.
These excerpts were often compressed or otherwise retooled, and all referenced via a set of thumbnail
image ‘endnotes’. This was precisely as lucid as we could get regarding our intentions at the time;and so we arranged to meet the curators and recite this poem-proposal:

	
  

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If a reader mentally squints, the net effect of this repository ought to evoke our broad thematic
territory – the ‘parallel circuits’ and ‘black markets’ of distribution. It’s a kind of sideways advance,or an advance in abeyance, consonant with Eco’s description (quoted already in chapter 1) thatthe artistic process that tries to give form to disorder,
amorphousness, and dissociation is nothing but the effort of a reason
that wants to lend a discursive clarity to things. When its discourse
is unclear, it is because things themselves, and our relationship tothem, are still very unclear.7

As noted, the poem (or more accurately, the fragments of prose assembled into the stereotypical formof a poem) that makes up the first half of the document is annotated by a sequence of ‘mirror’ images
in the second that refer to the sources of the writing we’d borrowed and butchered. These images
weren’t included merely as a graphic counterpoint, but also to show that each verbal idea has a visualcounterpart (logotype, book cover, photograph, and so on). This in turn suggests that any so-called
textual ‘releases’ we might contrive for the Whitney would similarly presuppose their own uniqueformal carrier, as specific and diverse as the ‘press’ they would transmit – and that could conceivably
be an equal or greater part of the message being ‘released’ …
Take the first annotation to lines 1 through 13, cut and pasted from a long short story by J.D. Salinger,
then reconstituted as a stanza. The story is titled The Inverted Forest, after these lines from a poem by
the story’s protagonist:
Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
With all foliage underground

This disorienting image serves as an inaugural emblem for the Whitney project. Not untypically for
Salinger, his fictional poet Ray Ford is both a sage and a prodigy, yet these two lines are the only
evidence of his work. The entire premise of Ford’s genius (and so the story’s plausibility) hinges on thepromise of this pregnant couplet. Transposed to the context of our incubating Whitney idea, the samelines flag an equivalent promise to ‘invert’ the museum’s media, and the corresponding graphic‘annotation’ is a flatly literal translation of this intention: the museum’s Brutalist logotype flipped andmirrored, less immediately inverted-looking than vaguely alien, perhaps Cyrillic, yet iconic enough toremain recognizable on first glance.
The poem’s other images include a number of germane book and magazine covers, plus a few artworks
that likewise abbreviate our thoughts-in-progress. They include:– Ryan Gander’s Parallel Cards (2007), a set of playing cards with the suites printed on both sides
yet without corresponding backs and fronts, so when a regular game is played using one side of the set,
an irrational ‘parallel’ one occurs on the reverse;– Rodney Graham’s oddly spectacular upside-down photograph Main Street Tree (2006);– Richard Hamilton’s Five Tyres Abandoned (1963) and Five Tyres Remoulded (1971), twin iterationsof an exercise in extreme perspective, the original drawing scrapped when it proved too difficult forhuman rendering, then realized eight years later once computer technology was developed enough toplot it mechanically;– Ed Ruscha’s A Sun on USA (2002), one in a series of palindromic drawings, in which each reversible
phrase is set underneath a blank Platonic book spread;– Stephen Willatts’s proto-utopian schematic plotting of The World As It Is And The World As It Could
Be (2006);	
  7Eco, op. cit., p. 157.

	
  

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– and Giuseppe Penone’s Rovesciare I propri occhi (To Reverse One’s Own Eyes, 1970), a well-known
photographic self-portrait of the artist wearing mirrored contact lenses that project not only his own
gaze back on itself, but, by implication, also that of the viewer – by proxy of the camera – back at him
or her too.
The last image shows the origin of the poem’s title. ‘True Mirror’ is the name of a very particularmirror first patented in 1887, yet (so far as we could ascertain) designed and manufactured only since
1992 by a company of the same name that at the time of the Whitney project was based in Brooklyn.
This is their logo:

Unlike a regular mirror, which inverts – ‘mirrors’ – the viewer’s true image (i.e. you see the left sideof your face on the right side of the reflecting surface), a True Mirror provides an actual reflection(i.e. the real and reflected left now correspond).8 We first came across one in 2005, in the bathroomof a mediocre bar called The Pink Pony, a few blocks north of Dexter Sinister. Three years later,
both the nature and name of the device suddenly seemed very propitious, given that the project wasshaping up to ‘reflect’ (truly or not) on the institution itself. Next, we invited a number of our regularcollaborators, plus a few relevant strangers, to contribute articles, opinions, essays and other‘reflections’; and also planned to circumscribe those responses to the biennial by the orthodox media,
i.e. newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs. Ultimately, we wanted to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ theshow’s audience by manipulating its prejudices and expectations – and provoke them to do the same.
To recap: at this point the idea was to slow down or complicate the reception of the Whitney Biennial
by manipulating the sort of PR that tends to foster pre-digested, clichéd, bland or cynical readings, inview of opening up more thoughtful, expansive or idiosyncratic ones.
When we met the curators at The Pink Pony to read them the poem, it turned out they knew all about
the bathroom and its funny mirror (‘that’s why we never come here’) – and had guessed this had
something to do with what we were about to suggest. This seemed auspicious enough already, so wejust handed over the poem and left.

4.3: MESSAGE-SIGNAL-NOISE-CHANNEL
Unusually, the main body of the 2008 Biennial was to be augmented by an off-site program for the first
three weeks at the Park Avenue Seventh Regiment Armory building, one of the city’s old military
institutions that occupies an entire block about ten streets south and a couple east of the Whitney itself.
Built around a vast drill hall, the Armory otherwise comprises a number of grand ceremonial rooms,
scattered offices and a few musty annexes. These days it serves as something between a low-key
museum and an eccentric public event space, and here the idea was that it could more appropriately
house the sort of work that operates outside the usual white walls of the museum’s gallery spaces,
under the general rubric of ‘performance’.
A couple of weeks after handing over the proposal we were summoned to the Armory and shown a tiny
cupboard of a room that the curators rightly suspected we might appreciate – a clandestine dressing
chamber behind a false wall in the old Commander’s quarters accessible via a secret door among the

	
  

8

See §3.1 for an explanation of how the mirror works. The device had acquired a certain notoriety over the previous three
decades, especially in New York where the company had a store also in the Lower East Side during the 1980s, right round thecorner from the Dexter Sinister basement. The True Mirror Co. astutely marketed their product as an esoteric self-help device
that would, convincingly enough, reveal the way others see you, and so perhaps a true(r) sense of self. The company also
published their less convincing ‘Hair Part Theory’, which declaims on the universal laws of hair/personality perception.
See: http://www.truemirror.com.

	
  

133

regular panelling that sprang open when a secret button was pressed. We were free to use this room if
we wanted, and indeed ended moving in for the entire three weeks of the Armory’s auxiliary operation.
As mentioned, by this point we’d decided to invite a pool of kindred spirits to reflect or reflect on
the biennial – an invitation entirely open to interpretation. Our first and most important task was togalvanize this group into responding with appropriate decorum and urgency. How to incubate the sortof rigor and commitment necessary to make such a nebulous project plausible and meaningful?
And then: beyond this initial set of requests, what was left for us to do, exactly? We resolved to begin
our own direct contribution only when the Biennial opened, producing whatever needed to be producedon the fly during those three weeks in residence, designing and circulating those as-yet phantom
contributions as and when they arrived.
In order to hone and communicate this we drafted a second document. Like the poem, what became asingle compressed page designed to be sent to the Whitney office via fax was only nominally addressedto the curators, in the sense that we were more pointedly using it to realize and crystallize our role in
the enterprise. The double agency of these documents seemed an increasingly efficient and instructive
way to go about developing the project.
Along with the various literary references written into the poem, we’d also been busy assimilating apair of interrelated concepts developed around the middle of the 20th century: Claude Shannon’s
Information Theory9 and Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics.10 Information Theory is concerned with thequantification of communication in terms of abstract ‘bits’ of data, while Cybernetics is the science of
feedback, adjusting future conduct on the basis of past performance. We would propel the project by
dual means: (a) by introducing ‘noise’ into whatever channels of communication seemed appropriate to
the nature of the incoming writing (Information Theory); and (b) by regulating our approach according
to whatever happened in situ, emphasizing the live, real-time aspect (Cybernetics). We could imagine,for instance, adjusting the relative clarity or obscurity of what we were up to as a whole according to
how we perceived the public’s perception of the project as it unfolded in time.
Starting from the 2008 Whitney Biennial press preview, Dexter Sinister plan to set up a temporary information office at the 7th
Regiment Armory building. Over the following 3 weeks while the Armory operates as a shadow site for the exhibition, DS will issue
a series of press releases through multiple distribution channels -- variously commissioning, designing, editing and releasing texts
parallel to the regular biennial PR.

The press release is a form whose distribution aspect is already inscribed. Typically compressed into a series of literal sound-biteson a single sheet of paper, they are designed to be easily re-purposed -- copied, pasted, combined and inserted back into other media
streams. By adopting this form, existing information pathways could provide a fluid channel for dispersing alternate and multiple
points-of-view, both found and newly-commissioned. Where most press texts are written with an obvious vested interest -- just as any
published text comes framed by the context of its publisher (whether it likes it or not) -- these releases will exist without an editorial
umbrella, or at least one obtuse enough to resist contamination. Further, the specific nature of each contribution will precisely
determine the form of its distribution channel. In other words, The message, plus its resultant form, multiplied by the channel of
distribution, divided by the context of its reception, equals the substance of its communication. The forms could be equally commonplace(a group email or fax) or sophisticated (a private phone call or reactive concerto for muted trumpet.) Allowing the process ofchanneling to unfold over 3 weeks, the intention is to slow down the typically immediate consumption of the biennial project.

In addition, four small Armory projects are proposed in advance of the 3 week residence, to act as signals towards a reading of theactivities to come. These are equally considered as “releases,” but already in place for the press preview. The signals are: 1. PUBLIC
PHONES -- the 3 ground floor public phones rewired to carry live or pre-recorded texts, serving as one very local distribution channel;
2. TRUE MIRRORS -- custom-built True Mirrors installed in all publicly-accessible Armory restrooms; 3. KLIEG LIGHT -- a spotlight basedon the description by Margaret Wertheim in her New York Times Op-Ed piece, June 20, 2007: It’s quite easy to conjure up a faster-thanlight shadow, at least in theory. Build a great klieg light, a . . . version of the ones set up at the Academy Awards. Now paste a piece of
black paper onto the klieg’s glass so there is a shadow in the middle of the beam, like the signal used to summon Batman . . . The key to
our trick is to rotate the klieg . . . At a great enough distance from the source, our shadow . . . will go so fast it will exceed the speed oflight. This pure signal can function as both sign and release -- a marker of the Armory’s location and its shadow relation to the Whitney
Museum ten blocks away; and 4. PRIVATE ROOM (Commander’s room/Colonel’s dressing room) -- working from this hidden room for theduration, the visible Commander’s room door will remain locked, and the office accessible only by pressing the panel and releasing thedoor. DS are listed as occupying this space, but there should be no announcement of this as “hidden” or “secret.” The public may accessthe room by the panel, though again, the existence of this button should not be announced; the fact that the operation is out of sight isof little consequence, or at least without any explicit claim to performance.

This second document was written under the influence of another found graphic, this time drawn fromCharles & Ray Eames’s short film A Communications Primer (1953):
It is critical to this proposal that the resources required to operate autonomously and efficiently are provided up-front. (Timing iseverything with press releases, professionals assure us.) First, a budget for the upfront projects needs to be secured, as well as obvious
contact resources including the biennial email, postal mail and broadcast-fax lists. Then, a separate operating budget should bearranged for the 3-week period that would cover writers’ (or, equally, performers’) fees, reproduction and distribution costs. On
the conclusion of this 3 weeks, a close reader, collecting the accumulated press releases, may form a composite, alternate reading of
the biennial. And perhaps more effectively, the echoes of these releases could continue to resonate through other media channels
as the releases are re-released, circulated and distorted long after the show closes. The result may be a time-delayed shadow, or evenrefracted image, of the event rendered indistinct by its own circulation. And remember:
Quality is merely the distribution aspect of quantity.
Quantity is merely the distribution aspect of quality.

Here is Claude Shannon’s diagram by which almost any communication
process can be schematically represented. The information source
selects the desired message out of a set of possible messages, thetransmitter changes the message into the signal, which is sent overthe communications channel to the receiver, where it is decoded
back into the message and delivered to the destination. Every such
system contains noise. Noise is a term used in the communications
field to designate any outside force, which acts on the transmitted
signal to vary it from the original.11

Shannon’s simple flow diagram traces the path of transmission from sender to receiver, interrupted and	  9Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1949).

10

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948).

11

Charles and Ray Eames, A Communications Primer (1953). See: https://archive.org/details/communications_primer.

	
  

134

affected by noise, which can be aural (a siren, an air conditioner, scratches on a record) or visual(fog, traffic, scratches on a film).
We understood that the majority of our work would occur at the beginning and end of the project,with the actual writing of the Press Releases occupying a protracted middle period. As such, True
Mirror as a whole could be slotted into Shannon’s diagram too, with our setup conditions as ‘input’,
the writing as unpredictable ‘noise’, and the eventual releases as consequently affected output.
We faxed this second part of the proposal to the Whitney office from a Fed-Ex shop around thecorner a couple of minutes before our next meeting, in order that it arrived at more or less the sametime we did. Again the idea was to accentuate how the specific means by which a message ischannelled can embody and ideally reinforce its proposition. So for example, a relatively primitive (infact virtually extinct) fax machine would provide a markedly low-grade, cartoon demonstration ofnoise (i.e. its binary black-or-white signal and limited resolution). This clarified things: the different
responses from our ‘correspondents’ would be sent via as many different channels, both in terms offormal template (e.g. the poem) and technological medium (e.g. the fax), according to the nature ofeach incoming missive.
Covertly titled Message-Signal-Noise-Channel, the fax comprises a set of soundbites, written inview of being used in the same manner we intended for our eventual Press Releases, i.e. cannibalized
and re-circulated in another time and place. As the Eames film notes, obscurity and longevity – in theform of delay – is endemic to certain kinds of communication:
In any communication system, the receiver must be able to decode
something of what the transmitter coded, or no information gets to thedestination at all. If you speak Chinese to me, I must know Chinese tounderstand your words. But even without knowing the Chinese language,
I can understand much of your feelings through other codes we have incommon.
	  But there are also many examples of times when the message has been
conceived and the signal sent long in advance of understanding or
acceptance of the code employed. In the case of Galileo or Socrates,
it did not in time matter, but the receivers of their time were nottuned to receive their signal. The ultimate transmission of such a
message represents communication of a very complex order. Other highlevels of communication occur in very different areas. A wave breaking
on a beach brings a world of information about events far out at sea.
It can tell of winds and storms, the distance and intensity. It canlocate reefs and islands and many things. If you know the code.

Besides the general proposal, the fax lists a few ancillary ideas similarly conceived as ‘delayed’ signals– obscure hooks or clues that would advertise or otherwise allude to the main project. In the event, a
couple of these ideas proved impracticable (the rewired public phones in the foyer, the twin klieg lights
on the opening night), but four actual True Mirrors ended up installed in the Whitney’s and Armory’s
public toilets for the duration of the biennial – and only one broken, apparently by the fist of a freakedout reflection.
Here follows the Message-Signal-Noise-Channel as fed into the Fed-Ex fax:

	
  

135

Starting from the 2008 Whitney Biennial press preview, Dexter Sinister plan to set up a temporary information office at the 7th
Regiment Armory building. Over the following 3 weeks while the Armory operates as a shadow site for the exhibition, DS will issue
a series of press releases through multiple distribution channels -- variously commissioning, designing, editing and releasing texts
parallel to the regular biennial PR.
The press release is a form whose distribution aspect is already inscribed. Typically compressed into a series of literal sound-biteson a single sheet of paper, they are designed to be easily re-purposed -- copied, pasted, combined and inserted back into other media
streams. By adopting this form, existing information pathways could provide a fluid channel for dispersing alternate and multiple
points-of-view, both found and newly-commissioned. Where most press texts are written with an obvious vested interest -- just as any
published text comes framed by the context of its publisher (whether it likes it or not) -- these releases will exist without an editorial
umbrella, or at least one obtuse enough to resist contamination. Further, the specific nature of each contribution will precisely
determine the form of its distribution channel. In other words, The message, plus its resultant form, multiplied by the channel of
distribution, divided by the context of its reception, equals the substance of its communication. The forms could be equally commonplace(a group email or fax) or sophisticated (a private phone call or reactive concerto for muted trumpet.) Allowing the process ofchanneling to unfold over 3 weeks, the intention is to slow down the typically immediate consumption of the biennial project.
In addition, four small Armory projects are proposed in advance of the 3 week residence, to act as signals towards a reading of theactivities to come. These are equally considered as “releases,” but already in place for the press preview. The signals are: 1. PUBLIC
PHONES -- the 3 ground floor public phones rewired to carry live or pre-recorded texts, serving as one very local distribution channel;
2. TRUE MIRRORS -- custom-built True Mirrors installed in all publicly-accessible Armory restrooms; 3. KLIEG LIGHT -- a spotlight basedon the description by Margaret Wertheim in her New York Times Op-Ed piece, June 20, 2007: It’s quite easy to conjure up a faster-thanlight shadow, at least in theory. Build a great klieg light, a . . . version of the ones set up at the Academy Awards. Now paste a piece of
black paper onto the klieg’s glass so there is a shadow in the middle of the beam, like the signal used to summon Batman . . . The key to
our trick is to rotate the klieg . . . At a great enough distance from the source, our shadow . . . will go so fast it will exceed the speed oflight. This pure signal can function as both sign and release -- a marker of the Armory’s location and its shadow relation to the Whitney
Museum ten blocks away; and 4. PRIVATE ROOM (Commander’s room/Colonel’s dressing room) -- working from this hidden room for theduration, the visible Commander’s room door will remain locked, and the office accessible only by pressing the panel and releasing thedoor. DS are listed as occupying this space, but there should be no announcement of this as “hidden” or “secret.” The public may accessthe room by the panel, though again, the existence of this button should not be announced; the fact that the operation is out of sight isof little consequence, or at least without any explicit claim to performance.
It is critical to this proposal that the resources required to operate autonomously and efficiently are provided up-front. (Timing iseverything with press releases, professionals assure us.) First, a budget for the upfront projects needs to be secured, as well as obvious
contact resources including the biennial email, postal mail and broadcast-fax lists. Then, a separate operating budget should bearranged for the 3-week period that would cover writers’ (or, equally, performers’) fees, reproduction and distribution costs. On
the conclusion of this 3 weeks, a close reader, collecting the accumulated press releases, may form a composite, alternate reading of
the biennial. And perhaps more effectively, the echoes of these releases could continue to resonate through other media channels
as the releases are re-released, circulated and distorted long after the show closes. The result may be a time-delayed shadow, or evenrefracted image, of the event rendered indistinct by its own circulation. And remember:
Quality is merely the distribution aspect of quantity.
Quantity is merely the distribution aspect of quality.

	
  

136

4.4: I I I I I I I I QUOTE
Following the poem and the fax, the third and final preparatory document was a letter of invitation to
our prospective writers. We’d settled on soliciting around 40 people, each of whom had at some point
written or otherwise produced something ‘in line with the project’s concerns’.
It was composed on another almost bygone technology, an electronic IBM golfball typewriter we’drecently found abandoned but still just about working on the street outside the basement. For reasons
outlined in the letter, our thinking was to write it as we typed it, line by line. The machine had otherideas: it died before we managed to run through a single clean version without errors, so a master had
to be collaged from previous attempts – with a few visible scars – before being duplicated by Xerox.
The letter’s recondite tone is as much a consequence of having been inadvertently collaged in this way,
as the slow and stilted effect of typewriting per se.
Once again this was an opportunity to synthesize a few loose but unformed ideas in a manner that
embodied them; and inasmuch as the ambiguous premise of True Mirror was already markedly unusual(compared with more commonplace publicity, at least), it would likely yield equally ‘off’ and soparticularly telling results. In which case we could reasonably expect our releases to be purposive,
despite lacking any obvious purpose.
Where the poem compacted a large pile of research in order to convey our broad interests using afamiliar rhetorical form with readymade typographic conventions (lines broken according to rhythm
and meaning, numbered stanzas, annotations), and the fax pushed some subsequent ideas through amachine with graphic limitations that left their mark in line with some of the ideas in that message,
the letter conflates the two. Its severe, halting tone is a consequence of having been written ‘live’on a very particular – and particularly temperamental – technology; and so again the medium is atleast one integral aspect of the message:

	
  

137

	
  

138

Working from the top down, the letter’s scramble of elements begins with a patently out-of-character
Whitney logotype, its elegant script roughly printed from a second-hand rubberstamp found by chancein the store where we went to order equivalent blocks of the Whitney’s actual identity. In fact the script
is more or less the polar opposite of the proper logo’s blocky font, which, given the general interest in
mirroring, seemed extra-felicitous.
The ‘Doublin’ address is a double allusion too – in reference to both the general idea of duplicating theWhitney’s regular PR, and to James Joyce’s nickname for his hometown Dublin. Duly inspired, we
mailed all 40 letters in a single package to Ireland, and had a friend re-mail them to the individual
addressees from a Doublin’ address, figuring that most of the recipients would be surprised to receive a
letter from Ireland and so already curious. This is precisely the sort of roundabout means ofengagement we had in mind for the whole project.

Another appropriated element, this time a symbol quoted out of context – then adopted as a recurring
signal throughout True Mirror – is the muted post-horn from Thomas Pynchon’s novella The Crying of
Lot 49, the plot of which involves a sub-rosa postal service known as W.A.S.T.E. whose collection
points are marked by this ‘silent’ trumpet. We’d already stencilled the horn onto Dexter Sinister’s
gatepost a couple of years beforehand, but here this icon of clandestine distribution seemed even more
apposite. We used it as the central symbol on a website we eventually set up in order to track our Press
Releases as and when they were produced, then stamped or otherwise inscribed the symbol to serve as
an obscure imprint on most of material releases, and finally had it engraved into a magnet that capped
the button that released the door to our Commander’s Room office.

Moving through the letter’s text, here are some further annotations:– That presumptious Dear cooperator alludes to two other, interrelated recent pieces of work: a large
piece of frottage, and a small enamel panel. The former is a 150 x 120 cm wax rubbing of a ‘monument
to cooperation’, a brass relief from 1885 that sets out the socialist principles of a housing community
around the corner from Dexter Sinister. The rubbing was made by Will Holder in the summer of 2007,
then subsequently hung in a number of appropriate contexts – such as on a gallery wall later the same
year during the production of Dot Dot Dot #15 in Geneva. It was also photographed and used as a title
page of one of that issue’s essays, ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, a piece of and about plagiarism by
novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem.12 Like our Whitney letter, Lethem’s essay is a compound text
comprised exclusively from fragments of others’ writing and stitched together so seamlessly that it’sfairly shocking two thirds of the way through to learn you’ve actually been reading a collection of
excerpts (that are then exhaustively referenced in a pair of postscripts). The other piece, a small enamel
panel headed ‘A Contract’, was conceived as a modest update of the housing monument for the
Information Age. In 2009 we had the text silkscreened onto hand-sized pieces of aluminium, red onwhite, and have intermittently nailed them to the walls of a number of the more collegial institutions
we’ve worked with since.

	
  
12

Lethem, ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, op. cit. For more on the Geneva project, see §2.1.

	
  

139

– The solemn reference to a community of convalescents and its attendant ethics (not because you canor can’t but because you care and will) are transplanted from an essay we’d recently worked on withart critic Jan Verwoert called ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’.13 Here Verwoert addresses thecontemporary imperative to be permanently ‘on call’, i.e. perpetually ready and willing to work at theexpense of all else. He counterposes a number of ways to defy such a pressure, and in the closing
paragraphs of the essay finds solace and inspiration in a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story
The Man of the Crowd (1840). Forced to convalesce after a debilitating illness, the story’s protagonist
spends the story regarding his surroundings – initially with disinterest, then increasing curiosity, andfinally vitality. Verwoert then applies this model of recuperation relative to the discourse ofmodernism, and concludes by claiming this state of convalescence to be a wholly positive moment ofheightened awareness and recalibration, a gathering of new resources, purpose and momentum:
As a state of suspension between exhaustion and activity, between the
I Can’t and the I Can, the state of convalescence is the epitome of anempty moment of full awareness. In this moment the illusion ofpotency, interrupted through illness, is not yet restored (there is no
way that you can go back to work in this state) but still the sense of
appreciation is redeemed as the I Care returns in its full potential:
you begin to care about life again, more than ever.
Could we imagine this state of convalescence as a shared condition ofexperience, or rather a condition shared through art and thinking?
If, living under the pressure to perform, we begin to see that a stateof exhaustion is a horizon of collective experience, could we thenunderstand this experience as the point of departure for the formationof a particular form of solidarity? A solidarity that would not lay
the foundations for the assertion of a potent operative community, butwhich would, on the contrary, lead us to acknowledge that the one
thing we share – exhaustion – makes us an inoperative community, an
exhausted community, or a community of the exhausted. A community,
however, that can still act, not because it is entitled to do so by
the institutions of power, but by virtue of an unconditional,
exuberant politics of dedication. In short, because, as a community ofconvalescents, we realise in an empty moment of full awareness, that
we care.14

	
  
13

Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform’, Dot Dot Dot #15, 2008. See §2.1.

14

Ibid., p. 110.

	
  

140

– The letter goes on to quote one of its sister documents, the True Mirror poem (another example
of involuted plagiarism), in the long indented excerpt that begins Proof of the fact that a mechanicaldevice can reproduce personality, and that quality is merely the distribution aspect of quantity.
The line is drawn from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Bend Sinister.15 The ‘mechanical device’ is a
padograph, a fictional typewriter that can be customized to mimic the owner’s handwriting and sopresent the illusion of a personal inscription ‘with repellent perfection’. In the context of Bend
Sinister’s fascist dystopia, the device is emblematic of a phony humanism:
Although, of course, a close examination of the script never failed
to reveal the presence of a mechanical medium, a good deal of more orless foolish deceit could be practised. You could, for instance,
have your padograph based on the handwriting of a correspondent andthen play all kinds of pranks on him and his friends (...) one
purchaser after another enjoyed the luxury of seeing the essence of
his incomplex personality distilled by the magic of an elaborate
instrument.16

The second half of the same quoted sentence is a slippery, reversible maxim that we put to use
elsewhere in the Whitney project: ‘Quantity is the distribution aspect of quality / Quality is the
distribution aspect of quantity’. And this is followed in the letter’s cannibalised poem by a few
commensurate thoughts on the dismal state of popular publishing, freely reworked from Deleuze’s
meandering thoughts in the TV interview L’Abecedaire. ‘Journalists have conquered the book form …
writing is now the tiny affair of the individual … the customers have changed: televisions aren’t
viewers, but advertisers; publishing’s not potential readers, but distributors.’ Yet he concludes on an
optimistic note: ‘There will always be a parallel circuit, a black market.’– Next, the phrase I hope that my formula of ‘disinterestedness plus admiration’ will seduce you islifted from an Open Letter by poet-turned-artist Marcel Broodthaers, specifically one that announced
the opening of the first of his series of fictitious museums in 1968.17 Like that Dublin postmark, thephrase is primarily appropriated here as enigmatic punctuation, yet it’s fitting to consider our letter
itself ‘disinterested’ in the simple sense of being set up to function at a distance – to create theconditions for something else to happen in due course. We also parrot Broodthaers’s repeated self inthe parenthetical ‘I I I I I I I I quote’, a line from another, earlier Open Letter later repurposed (i.e.
Broodthaers quoting himself) in Telephone, a vacuum-formed plastic ‘industrial poem’. These aresmall plastic plates moulded with blind-embossed text that inscribe an ‘industrial’ substrate withequally ‘industrial’ language, thus modelling what we were out to achieve with our Press Releases:
symbiotic form and content.
– Lastly, the letter’s final words, And what do you do? You just SIT there, are poached from the middle
of a short text by cultural critic Michael Bracewell. We were so taken with this ominous reproach that
we stuck it at the foot of the letter, suffixed by an asterisk to the line in the main body that ends
‘because you care and will.’ It comes from ‘A Prose Kinema’, some notes written to accompany agroup exhibition, Pale Carnage, at Arnolfini in Bristol a year beforehand.18 That show’s title andtheme are drawn from a poem by Ezra Pound that describes the exhausted state of art at the outset ofmodernism. Michael’s introductory notes augment this sense of cultural anaemia, which in turn recalls– and anticipates – the ‘used up’ condition of contemporary culture that Jan describes in ‘Exhaustion
and Exuberance’. At the end of his Cantos, Pound wrote: ‘I have brought the great ball of crystal; who
can lift it?’ Bracewell’s odd little provocation – And what do you do? – was likewise put to work as a

	
  
15

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister [1947] (London: Penguin, 1974).

16

Ibid., p. 65.

17

See: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Industrial Poems, Open Letters’, Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1988).

18

Michael Bracewell, ‘A Prose Kinema: Some Notes for Pale Carnage’, op. cit., p. iv.

	
  

141

little moral conscience at the end of our invitation, the aim of which, after all, was to urge its
respondents into action.

4.5: THE SHADOW GOES …
Although the three mediums and messages recounted so far fulfilled entirely practical ends along
the way, they also limbered us up for the real thing. A couple of months later, on the morning after
the Biennial’s opening night, we installed ourselves in the Commander’s Room with the 40 or lessresponses now due to arrive at irregular intervals over the next three weeks for us to edit and design
at speed into a parallel circuit of PR.
In the event, the so-called Press Releases ranged from fairly prosaic formats, such as laser prints andemails, to the more far-out and sophisticated. The weirder end of the spectrum included: photographer
Jason Fulford’s set of ambient ‘audio guides’ montaged from conversations discreetly recorded at
the Biennial’s opening; artist Sarah Crowner’s republication of both issues of The Blind Man, theseminal pamphlet co-produced by Marcel Duchamp, the first of which was made for the first public
exhibition of the European proto-modernist vanguard – the 1913 Armory Show; writer Steve Rushton’s
10-minute YouTube video primer on Cybernetics and Information Theory; typographer Will Holder’s
day-long stint as an elevator operator at the Whitney building spent in dialogue with the Biennial
audience as they moved between floors; and musician Alex Waterman’s ‘B for Bartelby’, a languid
composition for cello, an archaic stroh violin, and various bits of modern office machinery, written in
homage to Herman Melville’s short story Bartelby the Scrivener (the protagonist of which famously‘prefers not to’ work) and performed one time only for an audience at the Armory building one
afternoon.
The idea that our Press Releases might productively circulate in ‘outside’ media streams, increasingly
removed from the source and perhaps increasingly degenerate, happened sooner than expected. Less
than a week after the show opened, a journalist writing a brief review in popular conservative tabloid
The New York Post reported:
The first thing I did upon entering the Whitney was race toward thesecond-floor restroom – not out of necessity, but out of curiosity.
Would there be art displayed in there? It’s happened before, and is apretty sure gauge of the Biennial’s free-for-all ethos. Sure enough,there was something above the hand dryer: A black metal box with anangled mirror inside.19

A day or so later, we re-released this review ourselves via the regular Whitney press mailing list. Cutfrom the page of the Post, we juxtaposed it with a brief description of those True Mirrors he refers to in
the bathroom found in an old issue of Harper’s Magazine:

	
  
19

Mario Naves, ‘Alas the Biennial is … Kinda Boring’, New York Post, 11 March, 2008.

	
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142

[Press Release]

A MIRROR

FOR THE REFLECTIVE

From a press release issued last summer by the True
Mirror Company in New York City. A 12"xl2"
True Mirror costs $195.
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before, especially what can be best described asthey do. It will show them who they actually are
their "inner spark" or "light." This is possibly a reand what they really want out of life.
sult of the split between the left brain and the rightbrain. Because the brain has two different parts, it
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sends different messages ftom each side; these mes"How
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Comments from viewers:"How often I have looked in mirrors and no-

FOR ticed
RELEASE
MARCH
2008
that theIMMEDIATE
pieces and parts13don't
flow. This
True-- DEXTER SINISTER WILL OCCUPY THE COMMANDER’S ROOM
AT THE
REGIMENT
EVERY
DAY
Mirror7TH
showedme that IARMORY
am beautiful
withinand FROMREADINGS
31 4 MARCH TO 23 MARCH 2008 RELEASING A SERIES
without."
OF PARALLELTEXTS THROUGH MULTIPLE CHANNELS OF DISTRIBUTION WHICH REFLECT ON THE 2008
WHITNEY
BIENNIAL.
IS AVAILABLE ON THE TRUE MIRROR WEBSITE:"Is this
who I really MORE
am? NoINFORMATION
wonder other peohttp://www.sinisterdexter.org/
ple relate to me differently than I expect.""Thank you for providing an outside method forinner vision. You've taken a prop of vanity andturned it into a tool for growth."

READINGS

31

	
  

143

On the third day we set up a website, www.sinisterdexter.org, in order to track the Releases. So far
we’d reasoned that documenting them all in some higher-level container would override the specificityof their various individual channels of distribution, which was after all one of the main points of the
project. In practice, working on up to ten releases at any given moment, all at different speeds andwith varying degrees of complexity, we started to realize that a website could serve as a useful docket,
a means of keeping tabs on the work in progress, as opposed to merely archiving it after the event20– hence tracking seemed a more appropriate verb than documenting. Each new Release then required atitle for the site’s inventory, usually a gnomic fragment from its text: ‘Facts are totally untrue’, ‘But
that’s the confusion the contemporary scene poses’, ‘Five Whys and The Hundredth Monkey Effect’,‘WBPR08’, and so on.
On the face of it, the fourth entry, ‘Sans Comic’, by local artist Cory Arcangel, was simply the
Whitney’s official press release reset in the ubiquitous ‘joke’ font Comic Sans; but his contribution was
far more insidious than that. During the first couple of days, Cory rigged up a mainframe in theCommander’s Room that allowed us to send emails and other digital documents so as to appear (on thereceiver’s end) to have come direct from the Museum’s regular press office. His real ‘release’ therefore
consists in providing us with the tools necessary to mimic the official channel, with the Comic Sans
PDF serving as a decoy proof – an inaugural document sent out to the Whitney’s press list to check
whether the duplicate mainframe worked.
Cory’s piece indicates why True Mirror was a difficult project to document without misleading, or atleast wrongly weighting the work. Some contributions defied even cursory archiving, with the very
first release – in many ways the simplest and oddest of all – being a prime case in point.
Fundamentally, ‘The Shadow Goes’ found form as a rumour, ideally be circulated by word-of mouth.
It was inspired by a recent Op-Ed piece in The New York Times that describes how to make a shadow
travel faster than the speed of light;21 and in fact for some time we’d been lobbying the Whitney torealize the technically challenging setup described in the article, in view of assembling a pair ofglamorous Klieg lights to shine from the Biennial’s two locations on the opening night. According to
the author of the article, Margaret Wertheim from the mysterious LA-based Institute for Figuring(‘dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and engineering’), what we
hoped to achieve required applying a black silhouette of the (flipped, inverted) Whitney logotype to thesurface of each spotlight that, if rotated at a certain speed in the night sky, would project a shadow of
the graphic that would supposedly move faster than the light surrounding it. (!)
But the plan was flawed: we were unable to source any material for the silhouette that would resist theheat generated by such a lamp, and were forced to scrap the idea. In homage, then, we produced asomewhat lesser but far more practicable version in the form of two complementary single-sheet Press
Releases laser-printed in large quantities just in time for the opening.22 The one distributed at the
Whitney claimed that a Klieg light with such a Whitney shadow was stationed at the Armory Building
projecting towards the Museum ten blocks away, while the one distributed at the Armory claimed
exactly the opposite. Neither was actually true, of course, but in looping between the two locations therumour at least established a mental projection of the beams with their shadow logos crossed in the sky,looping between the two locations – a metaphorical beam. We also used this first release – named forthe article, ‘The Shadow Goes’ – to announce the rest of the project about to occur.

	
  
20

That said, www.sinisterdexter.org is still online at the time of writing. Visually if not literally a mirror site towww.dextersinister.org, it’s about as neutral a container as it gets.

21

Margaret Wertheim, ‘Op Ed: The Shadow Goes’, The New York Times, Wednesday 20 June 2007. A fragment of this text had
already appeared in the True Mirror poem, plus an image of the article in the ‘sources’. See § 4.2 above.

22

See the double recto/verso frontispiece of the present chapter: spot the difference.

	
  

144

4.6: AS IF YOU COULD EVER WORK THAT OUT IN ADVANCE
One of the more substantial Releases involved Jan Verwoert again, this time in the form of three
instalments of a Socratic dialogue written on-site in the Commander’s Room. His aim was to articulate,and ultimately advocate, the vicissitudes of conceptual art with particular reference to this year’s
Whitney show. Casually assembling observations and anecdotes from our immediate surroundings,
Jan asserts a distinction between what he calls a ‘hermeneutics of desire’ founded on utopian notions ofstraight-talk and transparency native to the first wave of conceptual art in the 1960s, and a contrary
contemporary hermeticism of desire that, while rooted in the same progressive ideas, tends towards
antithetical devices: secrets, innuendos, codes and doublespeak.
From this perspective, the project of conceptual art ought not be conceived as a failed or ended project,
only one that has changed its mode of address; and by alluding to the project he’s currently embedded
in himself, he uses True Mirror’s means to reflect on those means:
IF THIS IS CONCEPTUAL ART, THEN WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
If you ask me, you’re right to raise the question! For what was conceptual art about if not the hope tomake art communicate meaning differently – clearly – without shrouding it in mystery as artists haddone for centuries?
Wasn’t the transparency of ideas and intentions part and parcel of the utopian promise ofconceptualism? This is why artists used this very medium – text – rather than imagery, to reduce
ambiguity, to convince rather than seduce, and finally make direct contact with the people on thereceiving end.
It’s probably true that in understanding art as a tool for information, conceptual artists were adapting
their working methods to the latest standards of immaterial labour imposed by Information Capitalism –and that, by presenting documents as artworks, they were unwittingly paying homage to the logical,
authoritative air of bureaucracy.
Yet, it still stands to reason that the driving force, or if you will, the desire articulated through the new
language of art as text, or art as idea, was not that different from the spirit of free experimentation
with the conventions of social communication that the hippy culture of the time was politically andemotionally engaged with. What is conceptual art if not one such experiment in creating the conditions
for a better, less alienated life by changing the ways how we communicate; an attempt to cut thecrap and find a way to reach other people and talk freely? Take Lee Lozano’s Conversation Piece,
for example.
Negri and Hardt argue in Empire that social communication, and the human potentials to create
communality – in short all that defines social life – has become a resource for the growth economyof the creative industries.23 To re-appropriate the means of production today, they say, means toclaim your life back and set the terms of how you want to communicate. In light of this analysis, itwould seem productive to go back to the early 1970s and re-experience the ways in which people
were searching for new forms of communication and communality … Does that answer your question?

Actually it doesn’t – satisfy his interlocutory double, that is; at least not yet. But in the two sequels
written the following two days, Jan thinks through various retorts to his fairly brazen claims; and it
becomes gradually apparent that what might initially come across as a markedly self-reflexive exercise
is fundamentally a call to ‘work it out together’. His ‘conceptualism’, like ours, is foremost acommunal project:

	
  
23

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000).

	
  

145

IF THIS IS A CONTEMPORARY ART SHOW, THEN WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
It’s difficult to say, I agree. We don’t even quite know what it means to be contemporary. What is thetime that we live in about? People say we live in times of uncertainty. Is this the one certainty we share,
then? How do we even know that this much is certain?
IT’S WHAT THE ART SHOWS US: ‘UNCERTAINTY’ IS WHAT THE ART REPRESENTS AND
EXPRESSES, ISN’T IT?
Well, yes maybe you could say that … but still, how can we be certain that the art here represents
contemporary uncertainty? For it to do that it would surely have to be certain in its expression for these
expressions of uncertainty to convincingly represent the contemporary sentiment. I’m not trying to beparadoxical or contrarian here. I’m simply not convinced that art relates to the contemporary by‘representing’ or ‘expressing’ it.

To paraphrase what comes next: the way art could function beyond the either-or representation/
expression binary, he says, is by fashioning ciphers, pre-emptive codes, that anticipate culturalconcerns – a national or global recession, for example – and in doing so prepare us for them. ‘Isn’t thatthe fascinating thing about contemporaneity … that to be truly contemporary you actually have to beslightly ahead of yourself, you have to be decidedly uncontemporary in order to prefigure, presage, andprepare yourself for what’s to come.’ He recalls his own adolescence as a case in point: ‘the first timearound … trying to initiate myself in the codes of alienation as a teenage goth … I deliberately put on arecord I didn’t like very much … The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy’.
IF YOU’RE DESCRIBING A KIND OF CRISIS SCENARIO, WHAT SHOULD WE DO?
I’d say we’re doing a lot already. For some years we’ve been preparing ourselves for crisis andpresaging its eventual occurrence by developing a code of crisis in art, fashion and music– a contemporary form of dark new romanticism (call it ‘neo-goth’ if you like; I don’t think I’d want to).
Anyway, if that code wasn’t already firmly established, I don’t believe we’d even be in a position torecognize, describe and experience the current situation of recession as a crisis. We’d simply lack theterms to do so. Naming a crisis as such already demonstrates that we’re defining and controlling the
moment. To give a name is to sign a contract, and our contract with contemporary culture is now
signed in the name of crisis. That’s the cipher we’ve chosen to interpret – or encrypt – our experienceof the present moment. And so I believe we’re already proficient in the use of that code. We know it
off by heart … but still rehearse it to initiate ourselves further.
To be honest, as a European I’m always amazed, and even slightly jealous, when I see how fast
U.S. culture recodes its codes to prefigure and frame the near future. Where I come from people put
styles and ideas through the mill for what seems like forever, and whatever survives the grind might
be reasonably sound but deeply unattractive – to the point that there seems to be no reason to evenbother immersing yourself in the experience these styles and ideas may have once enabled you to
have.
Don’t get me wrong: I like it fast. I admire the agility of U.S. culture to recodify its codes, re-encrypt
its ciphers; revisit, recycle and revivify its icons in different incarnations. Just start your tour of the
Whitney from the ‘old’ collection on the top floor and you’ll see what I mean. It’s the image of a country
and culture overwritten, reconfigured, recast and recoded ceaselessly, insistently, and most of all,performatively. It’s a constant performance of recodification. And it’s a great performance. The rest of
the world lines up at the box office to go and see it.
DO I SENSE A TRACE OF IRONY IN WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?
Um, yeah maybe … but I think only because the situation is inherently ironic – by which I mean that
although I’m aware of producing and consuming a rapidly codified culture while being endlessly
attracted to it, I still feel slightly uneasy about its codes. It’s not a question of morals, really. I don’t
mind being corrupted and consumed by ciphers that promise attractive experiences. After all, how else

	
  

146

would you learn about what you feel and think? Still, there is a certain discomfort with regard to howthat codification works here. Speed is not really the problem.
Okay, you might argue that the fast pace at which all this happens is set by the market, because aslong as it’s still thriving it needs products to circulate – and that, if people took a bit more time to think
about what they’re doing and what they actually want, the products that they would eventually put
out would be coded differently – or not products at all. Then again, so much of this so-called extra
time or ‘non-productive’ time taken tends to be consumed by the anxious desire to figure out the rightthing, the legitimate thing, to do. As if you could ever work that out in advance – sanctifying your causea priori, categorically and unassailably. In the end, I think, it’s better to get your hands dirty and deal
with the challenge of the code.

The last ‘response’ cuts off mid-sentence:… perhaps not to reject the act of codification and passion for the secret as such, but to perform it
differently, with a different mode of address, one that interrupts itself before it arrives at a workablecipher and engenders the values that …

To stick with Jan’s Release as an exemplary instance of the project at large: on receiving his words as
raw material, how might we appropriately disperse this particular contribution on the basis of, say, it’s
happy paradoxes (supremely timely, yet avowedly out-of-time; pontificating directly about the virtues
of indirectness)? In this case, we edited each day’s instalment to fit a single page of Legal-format paper
to be digitally printed and collated at a local copy shop into 500-sheet block pads, glued at the top inorder that Biennial passersby could tear off a sheet to pocket and read later. They were produced andinstalled as soon as possible after they had been written, set on the floor at the entrance of each of thegalleries on the Whitney’s three main floors (the first day’s text on the first floor, second on the second,
third on the third), with new pads made when they ran out.
In attempting to grasp the nuances of his immediate response to the Biennial, Jan telescopes between
art history generally, this year’s biennial specifically, and – by implication – our project, too. But
despite his conclusion that the situation is (positively) hermetic, his own writing is the opposite:
pointed outward, a generous account of the current situation, to the extent that it can be assimilated andarticulated in situ. There’s an odd humour to Jan’s piece that’s more earnest than sarcastic, and socounter to the didacticism of the patriarchal authority he condemns in passing. He’s careful not to letthese ideas harden into ideology: interpretation remains the responsibility of the viewer or reader.
‘Who could embody those powers more forcefully’, he asks, ‘than any individual who assumes the
position of the juror of the past? Without a judge there is no trial, and in the absence of a verdict any
case can be reopened at any time. Oedipus Schmoedipus …’

4.7: HOW BITS OF SENTENCES TRAVEL
Here’s one final Release that took the form of a brief email exchange with Dutch art critic Arie Altena,
tracked under the cumbersome title ‘RE: OPEN LETTER from Dublin as doublin’ signed Dexter
Sinister’. As with Jan’s conceptual dialogue, this one’s so exemplary of the haphazard discursive spirit
we were chasing with this project that it’s worth quoting at length.
We’d sent one of our letters from Dublin to Arie because of his interest in the work of James Joyce –which is to say, due to the loose association of our having stolen Joyce’s Doublin’ pun (which itself
shows how loose the qualification for invitation could be). On this occasion, the exchange didn’t
conclude in a product per se, yet still seemed pertinent enough to warrant some kind of Release; and so
we ended up simply forwarding a lightly edited version of the email correspondence to the True Mirror
mailing list and simultaneously shelved it on the website like all the rest:
Dear Arie,
I guess I have to write this assuming you received a letter from Dublin, though the bastards didn't put
that on the franked postmark, right? If you haven't received a letter you'll have no idea what I'm talking

	
  

147

about here. In which case, a scan of the same can also be found on the True Mirror website we’ve justset up: www.sinisterdexter.org.
Our project for the Whitney Biennial has nothing directly to do with your possibly writing an article
for us about Joyce's reference to Dublin as doublin', but everything to do with it indirectly. Both areconcerned with mirrors, shadows, gaps and parallels as metaphors and points of departure.
Why is this so difficult to explain? All I'm trying to say is that we'd love you to contribute something tothis Whitney project.
OK.
The letter you received was sent to a small list of people, who all have some vested interest in the sortsof things we’re hoping to think through together. It’s intended as a starting point for a discussion
regarding what and how you might contribute (if willing and able). I'm sure a lot needs to be clarified or
elucidated, and if you respond with a sign of interest we could start that procedure. Basically, from thetrigger of the generic term ‘press release’, anything is possible.
-Dear Dexter,
Yes, the letter of invitation arrived in the post a few days ago. I'll pick up in the next few days, and see
if doublin' up a shadow piece on Joyce might intersect with a strange double of a press release …
As for press releases, writing, journalism, in general … I see what you mean and to a large extent
I agree. I have been guilty in a sense of much of what you say too. It’s how the ‘writing’ & journalism
industry is organized nowadays, and how it is necessarily organized around selling the writing (be itat one remove – the paying magazine acting as a contractor, which is good, as it can also ensure alarger independence/disinterest of the writer; this is the classic model, of course). A writer is hired anddoes his/her job as well as possible. I think this is basically okay, and I think most writers/journalists
try to do their job well. They at least try to write well. But time is short; especially thinking-time.
What we miss in the ‘fast media’ is time to reflect. What I miss personally is time to look much harder,
read harder, think harder. (It does not always pay off, of course.) My intention in writing is never tomake people go to see/hear/read something as it is to see/hear/read better. And I’m afraid I often do abad job at that – as a hired writer with a deadline. But then, I’m still learning to write.
I have also written press releases and descriptions of art works for catalogues (you know the genre).
I must say that I enjoy doing it, because it has taught me a lot about writing – how to make sentences
work, how to try to put as much information as possible in a sentence and still be clear, how to notstate the same twice, or even three times. I also see how these texts stage the interpretation given ina lot of quick reviews (not in all cases – not at all; the situation is not that bad). But it is funny to see
how these things function.
In a sense I find it fascinating to see how certain bits of texts are circulated, rewritten, keep on coming
back: the description of a work of art given by an artist (asked by a despairing curator, who needs text
tomorrow, no, today, for the PR person to advertise the show); the bits of text stating the aim of ashow, or festival, or the description of a festival theme (worked out over a long time, written for the firsttime for a subsidy request, re-used for publicity, for a press-release, as an introduction to a night ofdiscussions – such texts evolve over time and are re-used again by the reviewer who states what ashow might be about &c.)
BTW: There is no ‘world’ that searches so hard again and again for the ‘new’ as the world ofcontemporary art. It is worse – much worse even – than in the world of pop music. I have neverunderstood that. 95% of what is ‘new’ for one person (or world) is old hat for a much larger group– especially as the world of culture and art evolves slowly; certainly now. It is much more interesting
to see how culture/art evolves in practice, in all these different pockets of the world (and here I mean
‘world’ in a geographical sense rather than, let's say, a ‘group’).

	
  

148

Well, I'll just dispatch this, not even looking again at what I wrote, hoping it makes sense …
-Dear Arie,
Sorry I'm only getting around now to responding … though even as I'm writing that I’m thinking,why am I apologizing for the slowness (focus, attention) we’re supposedly advocating? Since when has
three days been slow?
Frankly, I wasn't expecting such a gratifyingly involved response. There’s a hell of a lot in your mail tobuild on. Whether this is tied up with Joyce at all is completely open (maybe only by implication or
influence). I’m going to separate and elaborate the various possible lines of thinking we might pursue:
1. The economy of interest/disinterest. How the concrete job (being paid to be interested) enables theabstract musing (in what you're actually interested in), or at least an understanding of where these
aspects do and don't intersect. I enjoy, too, the idea of your writing about something that would usually
be seen as negative (at its most extreme/melodramatic form: prostitution) from a positive, progressive
viewpoint. Mark E. Smith always talks about his group The Fall as if it were any other community ofworkers, which I suppose here means ‘manual labourers’; and specifically about how he, being theboss, had ‘mouths to feed’. ‘It’s that kind of industry’, he says, i.e. anything but glamorous remove
from the world the pop group is or was supposed to represent. I admire that kind of candid contrarian,
the practical polemicist – antagonistically taking the opposite opinion to the orthodoxy for its own,
productive sake. Smith again: ‘Whenever l say anything, I often think that the opposite is true as well.
Sometimes l think the truth is too fucking obvious for people to take. The possibilities are endless andpeople don’t like that. They go for the average every time. Well, that doesn’t interest me in theslightest.’ Michael Bracewell called this ‘The ability to provoke and doubt, simultaneously’, which headds ‘has often been cited as being fundamental to great art.’24
2. Time to look/read/think harder. This reminds me of a line I loved in a video work that Ryan Gander
first showed at the Stedelijk Museum last year called The Last Work.25 As he's musing, recording(it seems to me) the exact speed of thinking while drifting from his studio to his home in East London,
he dwells on the idea of taking a sabbatical, taking time off, and how people are very suspicious of theidea. He says: ‘just because you're not producing, doesn't mean you’re not working. If you're a certain
kind of person you're always working, even if the working is just thinking.’ I'm probably paraphrasing
wildly, and in retrospect it seems very banal, but still, for me at least it has the ring of an infrequently
acknowledged truth.
3. Still learning to write, and the idea that you always are. Since writing to you, I haven’t been able toget the beginning-end-continuum of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake out of my head: how sublime thatfirst/last looping word ‘riverrun’ is, connecting the end back to the start, seamless and unpunctuated.
Writing as perpetual practice. The idea is very close to home at the moment due to my involvement inpublishing a couple of novels by a forgotten English writer called E.C. Large. He’s a model of thepractising, constitutional Sunday writer; writing because he had to, to stay sane, in the guise of ahobby. In many of his early articles scattered around the little literary and philosophy journals of the
1930s you can sense him limbering up to write the four books he eventually published – and thislimbering has its own specific quality. This in turn reminds me of a report on the 1966 English World
Cup victory by another below-radar British writer, B.S. Johnson. It’s an incredible slow-motion accountof the game, razor-sharp and economical, but then also only special if you read it framed by his otherwriting. This is how a lot of art works too: Ryan's line about ‘always working, always thinking’ wouldn't
have meant much to me, for better or worse, if I didn't know him personally. This kind of positive incest
is a very tricky thing to deal with, or at least acknowledge, in writing about and around art – and yet

	
  
24

All quotes from: Michael Bracewell and Jon Wilde, ‘Mark E. Smith’, frieze, no. 6, September/October 1992.

25

See §3.9(b).

	
  

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we’re all prey to it. There’s something interesting to explore here, perhaps, about that taboo of writing
about friends; how it both helps and hinders.
4. The circulation of texts. Even the brief experience of the few bits we've had to write for thecatalogues, programmes and wall captions at the Whitney is very telling. Given the premise of what
we’re up to here, we've been trying to manipulate such formats more forcibly than we otherwise might– for example, inserting fragments into descriptions, statements, biographies etc. that might appear to
be editorial oversights, deliberately repeating lines, or subjectively rewriting supposedly objective
descriptions of ourselves. You write: ‘In a sense I find it fascinating to see how certain bits of texts are
circulated, rewritten, keep on coming back.’ This is precisely what we're interested in exploring.
5. Newness. Reading your comments on the mindless drive for the ‘new’ in art, I keep returning to
Nabokov's line about ‘reality’ being the only word that should always be set in quotation marks.
We could carry on like this, perhaps.
-Dear Dexter,
I know, I know, this will be too late. You’ve been sending me mails, tiptoe-ing, reminding me of a text
to be written, promised earlier. My inbox is my to-do list, and this weekend it contains four e-mails
from sender ‘Dexter Sinister’.
Is it that we always overestimate the time we'll have in the future? I certainly seem to. Or is it rather that
we underestimate how much attention and concentration the task will need? Looking back, I always
think: but I must have had the hours to do it. Maybe I did have the hours, but I did not have the time tothink, to give attention. ‘I need more time’ might signify ‘I need more hours in a day’. It might alsosignify ‘I need more concentration, undisturbed moments, more flow, more getting caught up in theflow of things, more attention’. More time to reflect – and I think ‘time to reflect’ and ‘attention’ are notmeasured in hours-of-work.
Time and money – they are always on the mind of a writer. Joyce's letters are filled with money
matters, not with musings on literature. Samuel Delany states somewhere in one of his essays in About
Writing that novels are always about money. I don't want money. I need ‘time’. But this is about money
too; it always is. I’m lucky to have a decent job that pays the rent. I don't have to worry too much.
But the jobs take time, and I have hobbies that take time, (I need cycling trips to stay sane …), livingwith someone takes time. Priorities, you say … you have to set priorities. But I’d like to do it all. I haveto cut back somewhere, and that is about money …
But we were going to talk about writing, not about time and money. We were going to talk about how
texts travel through different media and contexts, how they are used and re-used, edited, re-written,
translated, transformed.
Some text-work is ‘just work’, it’s ‘labour’ – I don't intend anything negative with that. When youorganize a show, or a festival, you need text. In the first place to make clear to yourself, and then also
to others with whom you are working, what you are up to. Then you need text to convince others tocollaborate, a means of presenting to your ‘boss’, your colleagues, and the institutions that will
hopefully give you money. And then, you need text for the first publicity and text to invite other artists
and lecturers. As you approach the event, you need more text for publicity, but also for critics andjournalists that you hope will visit, will interview the artists and lecturers that you've invited with yourtext. And of course you need text for the exhibition – descriptions of the art, of what's going to happen
around it. Although all these texts are just one part of the process of organizing an event (other people
talk on phones, face-to-face; so many informal e-mails going back and forth), I find it fascinating tosee how bits of sentences travel through that whole process.
Writing a press release is really something other than developing, in text, the content for an event.
Of course, you say. Writing the press release partly consists in ransacking the texts already written –

	
  

150

for those good sentences, to repurpose them, rewriting them, refining them, as you go along. And soit happens that the first press release text turns out to be better than the previous texts, and is thenused for the e-mails, for stating the theme of the event, becomes the text for the website. It might bere-used and rewritten again for a late or later subsidy request, improved again, maybe extended a bitfor that purpose, and that text then is used again for later press releases, slightly rewritten, shortened.
This is the economy of texts. And once the publicity takes off a bit, you see your texts turning up in
different contexts: blogs and magazines refer to it, put it in their agendas, etc. etc.
What I was getting at was this: the labour of writing and editing such texts does take time, it does takeworking hours. It is labour that can be done when one is tired too. It can be done at the last instance
before the deadline: a last check, a last correction, a few last re-phrasings.
An e-mail like this one, on the other hand, needs a different type of attention. it needs (in my case)a feeling of F L O W (being caught up in a stream of ideas, you have an idea of what you’d liketo say, and you give it shape with every sentence, and out of the improvisation a structure is built).
I cannot ‘just do it’ (though once I sit down to do it, it feels like I could've done it at any time). It needs
to be there in my head for days, slowly ticking away in the back of my head, taking shape even while
I’m not thinking about it. Attention, not hours. TIME, not time.
Regarding the problem of friendship, this is a difficult area. Not so much for the ‘incest’ thing.
Generally, you or I wouldn’t push friends’ work without being 100% convinced by it, but because
knowing the author/artist of a work makes you see so much more – where it comes from, what it'sconnected to.
You tend to fill in the significant gaps with information known from the friendship. That makes it more
subjective too – and so difficult to assess the quality. But if the work is truly good, I think, anyone else
can fill in the significant gaps and, well, have a worthwhile experience/thought/emotion.
What I find troublesome to deal with is the call for the ‘new’ and the ‘newest’, ‘latest’. Where critics
and organizers almost become the prophets of what will come after. I was once on a panel about art
and biotechology when someone in the audience interrogated me critically for failing to come up witha prediction of the next thing in contemporary art. As if that's what I would obviously be interested in.
As if art is this progression from the comeback of conceptual art, via the new blossoming of painting,towards locative art, and then after that, biotech art, and then, yes, then what? Can you pleasepredict? (These things are important for the art market: ‘How will such and so be doing in two years
time; is it a good way of making my money work?’) (‘Well, a good way of making your money “work”
is making sure that art is to be made, put your money in organizing concerts, give funds to artists,
et cetera.’) (Ah, money again.) Of course, you try to be topical, organizing something (a festival, an
exhibition), you set a context for the now (and the future) and you rewrite the past. Of course you canhit exactly the right note, and you can equally hit the wrong note too. And of course things change;
for instance, painting nowadays (however interesting) simply does not bear the same cultural weight it
had, say, 100 years ago; and 200 years ago there was no biotechnological art (though there was art
that reflected on the progression in science). Back to ‘new’: what I can deal with is the Poundian‘MAKE IT NEW’, without the call for the newest and the latest, which is something else altogether.
‘We could carry on like this perhaps.’Sure.

4.8: ALWAYS PRODUCTION, NEVER DOCUMENTATION
It’s probably apparent from all the above that the majority of True Mirror was undercover, slowburning, obfuscating, often aimed at very specific audiences or otherwise barely circulated. Contrary to
our initial determination to avoid documenting it, on perceiving this limited reach towards the end of
our time in the Commander’s Room we resolved to re-channel the whole thing through some sort ofenveloping format.

	
  

151

However, we were still concerned about the danger of diluting or misrepresenting the component parts,and the more obvious containers – a book or an exhibition, say – seemed less than satisfactory, again
likely to obliterate the essential specificity of each release and so fundamentally at odds with at least
one of the project’s founding interests.
Then we thought of microfiche – a material carrier that seemed apt for a number of reasons. This is
an archiving technology that, in 2008, was, like the typewriter and the fax, on the verge of being
wiped out by its digital equivalents. Being an emphatically modest medium (diminutive, typicallymonochrome), like many of the other more eccentric Releases it yields a very particular form.
It is typically made by photographing the pages of a document (usually, but not exclusively, printed
matter), developing the sequence onto 16 mm film (the ‘microfiche’), then cutting and arranging thestrips of film into a contact sheet (the ‘fiche’), both of which can be duplicated in negative. The
outcome is a highly compressed analogue carrier. Somewhat counter-intuitively, then, we reasoned thatthe format of the fiche was so particular as to transcend being merely a container and turn into
something else altogether. That’s to say, in line with a phrase that had become a mantra over the three
weeks, Always production, never documentation, we could reasonably conceive of a fiche container as
becoming an autonomous piece of work in its own right, pointing forwards rather than backwards– a dash rather than a full stop.
Unlike most fiches, ours would house a collection of separate documents rather than the pages of asingle one. We chose an icon to represent each release (usually a symbol, the front page of a document,
or a photograph of an object) and arranged them in chronological order:

Then the further idea emerged to project it as a backdrop to a lecture that would serve to map its
structure. Always production. This became True Mirror Microfiche, staged later the same year at
The Kitchen, a performance space in Chelsea, New York.26 We billed the event as a ‘cubist variety
show’ – though someone else later also called it a ‘documents opera’. Basically, extracts from all the
Press Releases were read or otherwise performed by a motley cast of collaborators (including some
who recited parts of their own texts), along with fragments of pre-recorded audio, video, and live
music. These elements were chronologically strung together and edited so as to draw out the project’s
broader themes – the exhaustion and exuberance, Cybernetics and Information Theory, the ways in

	
  
26

Dexter Sinister, True Mirror Microfiche, The Kitchen, New York, 25 November, 2008.

	
  

152

which information gets affected by its carrier, communal production, and so on. In short, all theprevious Releases were squeezed through a new channel as idiosyncratic and telling as the rest.
The action was simultaneoulsy fixed and free in the sense that the content and order were very tightly
scripted, yet patently improvised within this structure. In effect, the ‘variety show’ was edited andmixed live by David and myself, more or less haphazardly directing the performers, recordings, props
and lights (the relative volume and visibility of things) as we went along.
The same script we were using to direct the proceedings was also supplied to the audience, albeit withtruncated versions of the parts to be read and pithy descriptions of other planned incidents; and so they
were well aware that we were trying to maintain some semblance of this plan while assimilating
accidents and attempting to draw out any passing resonances. Meanwhile, someone in the audience wasinstructed to (try to) follow where we were in the diagram of the evening on the projected fiche with alaser pointer – a precarious dot on a trajectory. From the audience’s point of view, the net result of all
this was almost certainly more slapstick than streamlined.
In a second version performed at the ICA in London a few months later,27 the idea was to precisely
duplicate (again fractionally but crucially distinct from ‘document’) what had happened the first timearound, while aware that it would be fundamentally impossible to do so. In order to exaggerate thefact that the production was already a level removed from the first iteration, rather than return strictly
to the original script, we gathered a cast of London-based colleagues to restage what their New Yorkcounterparts had ended up doing.

We also assembled a ‘trailer’ for this second True Mirror Microfiche by splicing that original strip ofpositive 16 mm film into a loop, compressing the 53 icons of the Whitney releases into a two-second
flicker-film and projecting it small on a wall in the ICA’s entrance corridor.28 The more iconic images– a portrait of Wyndham Lewis, the cover of The Blind Man, Pynchon’s Post-horn – were just about
legible for a split second within this strobing animation. An adjacent caption noted the date and time ofthe eventual event.
This is the revised London version of the script that we and the ‘players’ had to work from, and theaudience had to hand:

	
  
27

Dexter Sinister, True Mirror Microfiche, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, May 30, 2009. This iteration occurred under
the auspices of the larger group exhibition, Talk Show, 6–31 May, 2009, curated by Richard Birkett, Will Holder and Jennifer
Thatcher,28

This Trailer for True Mirror Microfiche played for the duration of Talk Show. It was partly conceived as a visual counterpart
to the Press Release made for True Mirror by Mark Beasley. Tracked as ‘WBPR08’ on www.sinisterdexter.org, this is an audio
recording of the official Whitney Biennial press release compressed to 1.316 seconds in homage to British hardcore band
Napalm Death’s notorious 1.316-second track ‘You Suffer’ (1988).

	
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155

4.9: DRAMATIZED NOT AS SELF-REFLEXIVE BUT
AS A COLLECTIVE REFLEXIVITY
Shortly after the London version of True Mirror Microfiche, one of its key participants, writer andfilmmaker Kodwo Eshun (who played New York’s Michael Portnoy) sent along an email that was suchan astute summary of our own complicated sense of the event(s) that it became the starting point for yet
another extension – in this case, a communally-written text.
Kodwo’s email was a private note and therefore naturally full of shared references and allusions toprior discussions that anticipated our reading as much between the lines as the lines themselves.
By way of necessary explication for a wider audience, then, we plugged the semantic gaps withextracts from the Microfiche evenings, which were of course already distillations of the original
Whitney Releases. In sum, this is an extremely compressed, processed bunch of words, touched andaffected by many people, places and technologies over a considerable period of time – andsimultaneously about this process. In the version below, the lines from Kodwo’s original email areindented and the rest excerpted from the performances, all fronted by a capital line from Michael
Bracewell’s release, ‘Time Machine Wheel Clamped’:29
IT IS ONLY WHEN ONE MANAGES TO SOMEHOW GAIN A GREAT HEIGHT OVER THIS NEWLANDSCAPE AND LOOK DOWN UPON IT, THAT YOU REALIZE WHAT HAS HAPPENED
It was totally absorbing to take part in True Mirror.
A True Mirror reflects true images of its viewers. Constructed from two mirrors positioned at an exact
90-degree angle, it does not reverse images the way all other mirrors do. When a person looks in an
ordinary mirror and raises his right arm, what he sees is his image raising the arm on the left side.
In a True Mirror, the reflection actually raises the right arm; the mirror thus provides a true picture of
how he appears to others. It will help people understand why others react to them the way they do,
and show them who they actually are and what they really want.
Your statement – I am paraphrasing here – ‘always production neverdocumentation’ gave me a real insight into the project.
Being new is often understood as a combination of being different and being recently-produced. We
call a car a new car if this car is different from other cars, and at the same time the latest, most recent
model. But to be new is by no means the same as being different. The new is a difference without
difference, or a difference beyond difference – a difference which we are unable to recognize. The only
medium for a possible emergence of the new is the ordinary, the ‘non-different’, the identical – not the
OTHER, but the SAME.
To be part of a transmission circuit – or to be a medium – or achannel – in a diagram means that you re/transmit a part of a text oran image or a sound before you know exactly what that text or image
is doing.
There are many examples of times when the message has been conceived and the signal sent longin advance of understanding or acceptance of the code employed. In the case of Galileo or Socrates,
it did not in time matter, but the receivers of their time were not tuned to receive their signal. A wave
breaking on a beach brings a world of information about events far out at sea. It can tell of winds andstorms, the distance and intensity. It can locate reefs and islands and many things – if you know the
code.

	
  
29

You perform a part in a system in advance of a total understanding ofthat system.

The consequent compound text was first published in the art writing journal F.R. David: ‘Keep it to yourself’, 2009; then in
Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010.

	
  

156

So much of our so-called extra time, or ‘non-productive’ time, tends to be consumed by the anxious
desire to figure out THE RIGHT THING – the LEGITIMATE thing – to do. AS IF YOU COULD EVER
WORK THAT OUT IN ADVANCE – sanctifying your cause A PRIORI, categorically and unassailably. In
the end, I think, it’s better to get your hands dirty and deal with the challenge of the code.
The distinction between opacity/didacticism, or secrecy/transparency
and then your elaboration of this – opacity as the portal todidacticism and vice versa – is helpful here.
(This is the question of hermeneutics versus hermeticism: whether we still believe art to be a tool oflearning which serves to render the world and our desires transparent, as the hermeneutic approach
maintains; or whether we would not rather assume art to be a hermetic language of coded innuendothat yields knowledge only to those willing to initiate themselves into its opaque codes and participate
in the experience of codification. In the light of our scepticism that any language could ever betransparent, it seems that the hermetic take on how art makes meaning was much closer to the way
things actually work.)
I see it as part of a turn towards cybernetics –I’d like to oppose feedback to the notion of ‘top-down’ media – that’s the media where we sit aspassive objects, consuming. Feedback is a neologism that was invented in the late 1940s by Norbert
Weiner. Cybernetics is based on Kybernetes, a Greek sailor whose knowledge of the tides, the wind,and how the vessel operates, helped him guide the ship into port. So Cybernetics is a guidancesystem: what Kybernetes is doing on the prow of his ship is anticipating what will happen andchanging his behaviour in accordance to a change of wind or whatever. That’s essentially the notionof feedback.
diagrammatics(The MESSAGE
Plus its resultant FORM
Multiplied by the channel of DISTRIBUTIONDivided by the context of its RECEPTION
Equals the substance of its COMMUNICATION)– which has 2 results:
1. Reflexivity is dramatized not as self-reflexive but as a collective
reflexivity.
While Socrates’ discussion of language privileges speech over writing because writing makes people
forgetful of what they know, his dialogue with Phaedrus has been discussed, debated, refuted, andrepublished for nearly two dozen centuries. Through writing, that speech has endured and enriched us,
and it is here that Socrates got it very wrong. Thanks to books, we know Socrates distrusted books.
Writing, reading, editing, printing, distributing, cataloguing, reviewing, can be fuel for that conversation,
ways of keeping it lively. It could even be said that to publish a book is to insert it into the middle ofthat conversation, that to establish a publishing house, bookstore, or library is to start a conversation –a conversation that springs, as it should, from local debate, but that opens up, as it should, to allplaces and times.
2. Reflexivity becomes an energetic principle – more an impersonal
current that starts to move and amplify in unpredictable paths.
The campaign originally exists only in the form of a vague idea manifesting itself first in loose verbal
associations, then in a circular letter, and finally in a press release. It is thus an allegory of what one
can do with words. The campaign only exists because people start to speak about it. The World As It Is
And The World As It Could Be. The World As It Is And The World As It Could Be.

	
  

157

3. To name this as ‘activating the archive’ or ‘the archival impulse’or ‘knowledge production’ doesn’t quite capture an impulse which feels
more like 4. A resurgent autodidacticism.
Negri and Hardt argue that social communication, and the human potentials to create communality– in short all that defines social life – has become a resource for the growth economy of the creative
industries. To reappropriate the means of production today, they say, means to claim your life backand set the terms of how you want to communicate. A community that can still act, not because it isentitled to do so by the institutions of power, but by virtue of an unconditional exuberant politics ofdedication.
5. A home made cybernetic pedagogy.
In fact it seems worth reconsidering across the board (and here I mean for everybody) why urgency interms of production increasingly seems to overshadow urgency in terms of expression. Journalists
have conquered the book form. Writing is now the tiny affair of the individual. The customers havechanged: television’s aren’t viewers, but advertisers; publishing’s not potential readers, but
distributors. The result is rapid turnover, the regime of the best seller, but there will always be a parallel
circuit, a black market.
6. More to follow on this.
From the vantage point of hermeticism this text, like any text, is not just a text but also a contract
between you and me. But what arrangement it implies and what it would mean for either you or me tosign it, I cannot tell you. Perhaps we can work it out together … that seems to be the only viable way tocontinue. What do you think?30

In view of Eco’s assertion that ‘form must be a way of thinking’, Eshun’s ‘collective reflexivity’describes the situation of a group forming something (a performance, a piece of work) in order tothink a subject collectively,31 yet without any individually-preconceived ideas of exactly what isbeing considered or communicated – that is, without any common idea as to what the various parts
might amount to as a whole. Contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls this process‘transindividuation’. He explains:
if you want to understand the individual, you need to inscribe theindividual in a process of which he is only a phase. As such, theindividual has no interests. The individual is only an aspect, or
phase of a process, but the process is what is important. So what is
this process? It is the process of individuation, that is oftransformation (...)32

And so in the instance of True Mirror, we established a nominal structure (a premise, an environment,a script) along with an ostensible subject matter (the mechanics of communication, with particularreference to art PR). At the outset the substance is not yet determined, and there is plenty of room for

	
  

30

The parenthetical fragments are from, in order of appearance: Michael Bracewell (title), The True Mirror Company,
Boris Groys, Charles & Ray Eames, Jan Verwoert, Steve Rushton, Rob Giampietro, Gabriel Zaid, Stephen Willats, Frances Stark
merged with Gilles Deleuze, and Verwoert again.

31

Eshun’s ‘collective reflexivity’ could readily apply to a few other recent art practices and works, such as New York-based
Bernadette Corporation’s chain-written group novella Reena Spaulings (2005); the science fiction exhibition and workshop
Philip, set up by Mai Abu ElDahab (at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2006–7) to generate an eponymous work of fiction, likewise
written by a loose group of artists, writers, curators and critics; and the various iterations of New York’s Continuous Project,a self-described ‘consultancy’ that has playfully repurposed bits of art history via various publications, panel discussions, andexhibitions.

32

Stiegler’s term ‘transindividuation’is conceived as an extension of fellow philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s ‘individuation’.
See: Bernard Stiegler and Irit Rogoff, ‘Transindividuation’, e-flux journal, no. 14, March 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/
view/121, p. 3. More on this in §7.1.

	
  

158

manoeuvre. As with any self-reflexive work, the nature of this setup is made apparent to its audience(in this case an entire situation is reflected back on itself). And as with any live performance theaudience also plays its part in the cybernetic drive, affecting the ‘findings’ of the ‘investigation’.
Since the twin microfiche events, there have been still further dots along the True Mirror trajectory:
two versions of print-on-demand books with the complete scripts of the Kitchen and ICA events
subtitled Post-Script and Post-Post-Script respectively;33 a ‘double AA-side’ vinyl LP, with Alex
Waterman’s ‘B for Bartelby’ Release assembled from three live performances at the Armory,the Kitchen, and the ICA on one side, backed with Dan Fox’s ‘Refracted Light Through Armoury
Show’, after his audio essay Release on the gap between European and American art (with particularreference to Marcel Duchamp and Talking Heads);34 and most recently a 12-minute video compiled
from footage of the ICA event based on the text based on the email from Kodwo Eshun.35
Each new iteration of this project was based on the previous instalment, then significantly re-worked
according to the nature of the new circumstances and its attendant technology. During this serial
process, the information written into those original Whitney Releases is increasingly subject toprocessing, and so enacts the ideas behind those two founding interests Cybernetics and Information
Theory. Like the increasingly affected message in the classic Telephone Game, the work moves from
A to B to C to D and on, though D may be quite different to A – quite probably degraded, but also
possibly refined. The various ‘true mirrors’ recounted here record this difference between input andoutput, with the noise in between generated by us in order to register what happens in between.

	
  
33

Dexter Sinister, True Mirror Microfiche Post-Script (2009) and True Mirror Microfiche Post-Post-Script (2010), bothproduced via the online publishing site lulu.com. The most recent version is still available at the time of writing to download as a
PDF or order as a book. See: http://www.lulu.com/shop/dexter-sinister/true-mirror-microfiche-post-post-script/paperback/product-11599807.html.
34

Dexter Sinister, True Mirror Microfiche Double AA Side, 12-inch record (D.S. Al Coda #2, 2010).
See: http://www.dsalcoda.org.
35

Dexter Sinister, True Mirror Microfiche (video, 12 mins., 2010). This was first shown as part of the group exhibition Critical
Complicity, Lungomare, Bolzano, Italy, 25–28 November, 2010.

	
  

159

J.D. Salinger, spine design for Hapworth 16, 1924, c. 1996

	
  

160

	
  

161

5: WORK IN MOVEMENT

In The Open Work, Eco often refers to ‘work in movement’. The sense in which this means something
distinct from ‘open work’ is never entirely clear, but my summary understanding is that where an
open work cultivates multiple interpretations or ambiguous meanings (such as Joyce’s novel Ulysses(1917) or Antonioni’s film Eclipse (1962), to give two of his examples), a work in movement involves
some live, real-time aspect to convey a tangible sense of working from inside a flow of events(such as Calder’s kinetic mobiles (c. 1930s) or John Cage’s abstract scores (c. 1950s)). Here I’ll more
specifically articulate an approach to art and design that involves establishing a set of fundamental
conditions or instructions for a piece of work to play out in this way: a program that runs a script.
‘Sketch versus blueprint’ begins by contrasting an agile, open-minded approach with a stubborn,blinkered one. ‘Unscripted insight’ notes how this requires immersion in the work at hand, in order to
respond to circumstances in real-time without inhibitions or preconceptions. ‘Applied art: runningroom’ argues for work that resists lazy categorization, in order that a more agile, athletic (i.e. ‘moving’)
work can occur outside the bounds of fashion or received wisdom. ‘Mature instinct’ alludes to theability to identify and follow the course of an aesthetic idea, rather than either stopping short at a oneliner, or otherwise thrashing about aimlessly. ‘Hardy perennials’ is a close reading of two instances ofslow-motion form-giving – the still-going-strong New Yorker magazine, and famously obstinate author
J.D. Salinger. In different but commensurable ways they exemplify the positive consequences of the‘movement’ I mean to draw out here: the particular and peculiar over the commonplace and bland.
Next, work in movement is equated with ‘Thinking contingency’, with extended reference to a recent
exhibition and related book that suggest why this idea is timely and urgent in contemporary art andphilosophy. ‘The Mafia game: a matter of concern’ is a not entirely serious response to Bruno Latour’scall for new ways to represent highly contingent social, political and environmental issues – a means ofmodelling how to deal with perpetually moving targets. ‘Vocal Registers: three films’ suggests how
three recent audiovisual works demonstrate all the above: each seems to have been made on the fly,supple enough to allow its language to adapt along the way and so end up appropriately skewed. And
Richard Hamilton’s triptych magazine piece ‘Urbane Image’ (1963) is offered up as an ‘ur-example’that likewise grapples with a timely topic on the topic’s own terms – an attempt to articulate a subject
as directly as possible while prominently affected by it. The writing gets involved, inspired, goes awry,
and in such a state registers something of the contemporary condition.

5.1: SKETCH VERSUS BLUEPRINTIn his 2009 book The Craftsman, Richard Sennett draws a useful comparison between the Villa Moller(1928), a late architectural project by Adolph Loos, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s near-contemporaneous
house for his sister in the Kundmanngasse, Vienna (1929).1 Sennett couches the story in terms of‘The Janus Face of Obsession’ – positive in Loos’s case, negative in Wittgenstein’s. It’s an especiallyinstructive comparison because both advocated the progressive, utilitarian principles of Weimar
Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit, which is to say the sort of formal sobriety and ‘honesty’ compressed
into moral aesthetic maxims like ‘form follows function’ and ‘truth to materials’. As such, he says, we
can attribute the disparity in their work to temperamental differences rather than ideological ones.
Wittgenstein designed his sister’s house (below left) as an exercise in ideal proportion, his ambition
nothing less than to present ‘the foundations of all possible buildings’. A crude reading might alignsuch absolutism with his early axiomatic philosophy; indeed, the outcome is similarly severe, minimal,
and mathematically minded: uniform sets of windows are placed in equidistant trios along the façadeof the first three floors, for instance, while handles are positioned exactly halfway up window frames
and on doors. The result is perfect and, in Sennett’s opinion, perfectly lifeless.

	
  1Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). See pp. 252–67.

	
  

162

Wittgenstein later disowned his design, stating that although the house possessed ‘good manners’ itlacked primordial life. Sennett suggests that the house suffers from the unlimited budget afforded by
the wealthy Wittgenstein family, and thus a total absence of useful constraints to which the design
could respond. Because anything was possible, Wittgenstein’s vision of a generic, universal form could
be realized down to the finest detail without compromise: the entire ceiling of one of the larger rooms
was lowered by an inch as the project was nearing completion, for instance. Money suffocated the
project.

Loos’s Villa Moller, on the other hand, was continually beset by problems – a stream of mistakes,
accidents, impediments and other contingencies that had to be handled in the midst of construction,
and with a limited budget. However, contrary to Wittgenstein’s dictatorial mania for perfection, says
Sennett, Loos was willing to engage in ‘a dialogue with form and error’, and this is precisely what
affords his house the life that Wittgenstein’s lacked. Sennett goes on to emphasize the crucial role ofthe sketch in Loos’s work in keeping things fluid and flexible – of ‘not knowing quite what you’re
about to do when you begin’. This is not to say that Loos avoided any planning at all: ‘his experience
prepared him for the type-form,’ writes Sennett, ‘but he went no further until he got on site.’
While Wittgenstein’s reference drawings were technically sophisticated, Loos’s informal sketches wereof an entirely different order – ‘a working procedure for preventing premature closure.’2 Loos spentconsiderable time sketching the play of light on the villa’s site at different times of day, then placedand sized windows accordingly, with the result that where the Kundmanngasse house was conceived asa set of discrete, self-contained rooms, the Villa Moller was reflexively designed to emphasize thepassage between spaces.
Sennett therefore advocates Loos’s deliberately unresolved sketch over Wittgenstein’s ‘blueprint’
inasmuch as it allows a positive ‘measure of incompleteness’. He also notes the importance of knowing
when to stop ‘at the moment when one is tempted to erase all traces of the work’s production in orderto make it seem a pristine object’, because letting those traces show usefully points to the story of the	
  2

Ibid., p. 262 (my italics).

	
  

163

making of the work.3 Where an unhealthy obsession strangles its object, he concludes, a healthy,
well-balanced one ‘interrogates its own driving convictions’.

5.2: UNSCRIPTED INSIGHT
The U.S. literary radio host Michael Silverblatt once noted how he conscientiously avoids preparing
questions before interviewing people in order to ensure that a dialogue can better develop ‘a life of its
own’ by ‘finding its own form’. In the following fragment, he gropes towards a description of how
such a freewheeling approach manifests itself in form, and it’s all the more persuasive for having beenthought aloud during an on-air conversation itself, as he ends up describing not only a certain strain of
postmodern fiction, but equally his own gradually meaningful mess of a sentence:
To name the problem does not put the writer above the problem ...
it locates the writer in the problem ... the problem becomes something
like the tar baby.
The writer gets caught both outside and inside ... or more inside
than outside ... and the book seems like ... the recording of theprocess of trying to find an extrication point ... while suspecting
there is none.
This may be what I’m describing as mess, or beautiful mess.4‘When the work – or the conversation or any other human activity – is going well,’ writes Robin
Kinross, ‘then you forget what time it is and whatever else you should be doing’5 All the approaches
referred to in the present chapter relate the same aim of total engagement – ‘the bliss of immersion’ –and consequent oneness with the work. They aim for a state outside time that ideally affords theoutcome the same sense of timelessness, a.k.a. conviction. ‘There is some quality in artefacts that is
like this process’, says Kinross; ‘[the work] presents itself to you in a very immediate and unavoidable
way. But it seems inevitable. Its novelty isn’t an issue. It isn’t expressive, except of its own content.’6
John Cage once explained that experiment is necessarily a procedure without a preconceived end,
because expectations automatically presuppose terms of success and failure.7 The experimenting
artist is therefore like a tourist in the best senses of the word: naive, curious, eager and unabashed.
Cage is thinking specifically of music that directs attention towards many things at once, including
environmental sounds; in other words, the sort of work that overflows our usual understanding ofmusical performance and so precludes easy categorization. Similarly, genuine conversation for him
occurs only ‘when the second thing that is said is not in the mind of who said the first thing.’8
Gilles Deleuze is often regarded as a philosopher of movement. In the ‘P for Professor’ section of
L’Abécédaire, he discusses his work as a teacher.9 In the first of many moments of unscripted insight,
he describes the enormous amount of preparation required to ‘get something into one’s head’ just

	
  

3

Ibid., p. 258.

4

See: http://www.dfwaudioproject.org/wp-content/uploads/interviews-profiles/Bookworm-Brief-Interviews-promo2.mp3.
The ‘tar baby’ reference alludes to a parable in which an already sticky situation is made worse by struggling with it.

5Robin Kinross, ‘More Light’, Monotype Typography: Quarter-point, no. 3, 1993 (my italics).

6

Ibid. See also the idea of ‘organic’ art in §1.4.

7

See: John Cage, Silence: Lectures and writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 13.

8‘I think conversation works best when the second thing that is said is not in the mind of who said the first thing.’
From: ‘19 Questions with John Cage’, The Complete John Cage Edition: vol. 30: From Zero, DVD (Mode, 2004).
9

See chapter 2, fn. 45.

	
  

164

enough – to a teetering degree of comprehension – to be able to convey it to a class with the sort ofconviction and inspiration that is only conjured through live realization. This preparatory work is like arehearsal for a performance, he says – a planned improvisation. If the speaker doesn’t find what he’s
saying of interest himself, no one else will. The ideal is to learn something while conveying it, though
this shouldn’t be mistaken for vanity: it’s not a case of finding oneself passionate and interesting, hesays, only the subject matter.
Deleuze frequently champions the dynamic and transient, in line with his commitment to philosophy
as a fundamentally active vocation. The job of the philosopher, he says, is to develop concepts notin view of establishing them, in which case they would become something as definite and ordinary
as a school (in fact he denounces Wittgenstein’s followers as an especially staunch and humourlessbunch), but in order to perpetually circulate and develop them – manipulated, refined, refuted, altered,supplanted and overturned by a potentially endless succession of subsequent interests and talents.
Deleuze’s own concepts are famously promiscuous, widely applied in many different fields.
In L’Abécédaire he recalls enthusiastic correspondence from groups as diverse as paper-folders andsurfers in response to his work on the concept of ‘the fold’.
Deleuze and Guattari say that where philosophy elucidates concepts, art coaxes sensations – a categorythat breaks down further into perceptions (of objects and states) and feelings (of the transition from one
state to another).10 ‘Percepts’ and ‘affects’ are instances of perceptions and feelings wrested from anartist’s experience and compounded in ‘blocs’ of sensations to rouse equivalent perceptions andfeelings in an audience. The artwork, then, ideally assimilates its subject matter in order to make a
durable recording of a dynamic experience – and like Deleuze’s industrious teacher, gets duly
animated in the process. (It’s no coincidence that aesthetic experiences are often positively describedas moving or transporting.)
Art therefore forges a kind of aesthetic empathy: the object-of-capture and the artwork-that-captures-it
possess not identical but commensurate idiosyncrasies. In effect, the work ‘does the seeing’:
What matters is not, as in bad novels, the opinions held by charactersin accordance with their social type and characteristics, but rather
the relations of counterpoint into which they enter and the compoundsof sensations that these characters either themselves experience ormake felt in their becomings and their visions.11

5.3: APPLIED ART: RUNNING ROOMThis section is recalled from a short talk given by Dexter Sinister at an art and design school in
Vancouver, 2010.12
How has the term ‘Applied Art’ been applied to art?
In 1973, MIT Press published the first of now some 30-odd printings of Donis A. Dondis’s A Primerof Visual Literacy,13 an update of the Bauhaus foundation course published on the cusp of thecomputer age and marked by the influence of semiotics. Among its lessons is a brief one in relativism:
three diagrams here trace the shifts in the perception of the standard arts disciplines according to thedenominations ‘Fine’ and ‘Applied’.

	
  
10

See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Percept, Affect, and Concept’, What is Philosophy? [1991, French] (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994).

11

Ibid., p. 188.

12

Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, 28 January, 2010.

13

Donis A. Dondis, A Primer of Visual Literacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), p. 4.

	
  

165

	
  
While it might at first seem plain to assume that ‘Fine’ refers to academic, abstract, aesthetic andintellectual ends, while ‘Applied’ points to more industrial, material, functional, useful ones, these
diagrams show that such a binary classification (and, by implication, class) system is, over time, hardly
watertight. Just look at painting’s lateral drift from right to left, for instance: it’s not inherently imbued
with either beauty or use; rather, these qualities are attributed according to the cultural conventions of
the era. With this in mind, how might we productively re-apply the term ‘Applied Art’ today?
In his 1962 book The Shape of Time, Mesoamericanist and art historian George Kubler proposed amodel that broke apart and reconstituted the prevailing compartmentalization of the arts.14 Kubler
considered art less a symbolic language than a system of formal relations that follow each other overtime. He proposed a realignment of art history gathered around parallel streams of formal problems
from different times and different disciplines, rather than the chronological one-upmanship that typified
his field. Art history, he suggested, proceeds in fits and starts, loops and simultaneous streams– ‘more knot than arrow’ – and Kubler’s re-ordering also flattened typical distinctions between theFine and Applied arts, calling to replace the regular distinctions of Useless (= art) and Useful (= design)with those of Desirable (= objects that last) and Non-desirable (= objects that don’t).
Bruno Munari already spanned a number of disciplines – including (at least) graphics, industrial
design, painting, sculpture and photography – when he wrote Design as Art in 1966.15 In one of a seriesof short articles written for an Italian newspaper, Munari made a polemical call for artists to ‘cast
off the last rags of romanticism’ and work as designers, meaning directly within society rather thanart’s corollary fantasy space; the artist ought to be ‘prepared to make a sign for a butcher’s shop
(if he knows how to do it).’16 In Munari’s view, accountability and humility trump aura and pretension.
He reminds his readers that an Etruscan vase, today admired on a pedestal in a gentleman’s home,
was originally designed as a vessel for carrying and storing olive oil.

	
  
14

George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the history of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).

15

Bruno Munari, Design as Art [1962, Italian] (London: Penguin, 2009).

16

Ibid., p. 25.

	
  

166

Working parallel to the Vienna Secession, Adolf Loos published his famous diatribe ‘Ornament andCrime’ in 1908, attacking the decadence of Art Nouveau’s florid forms and applications, particularly its
collective emphasis on the Gesamtkunstwerk.17 In an earlier allegory, Loos portrayed a ‘poor little richman’ who commissioned an artist to decorate and furnish his entire house in the Art Nouveau style.
Once this total environment was complete, according to Loos, the patron was ‘shut out of future life
and its strivings, its developments, and its desires.’ The effect was suffocating, without what Loos’sfriend Karl Kraus called ‘running-room’ – the space for development, improvement, or change opened
up by imperfection, incompleteness, inconsistency, or ambiguity. Instead, Loos proclaims, ‘He is
finished! He is complete!’18
A century or so later in 2002, Hal Foster updated Loos’s critique in his book Design and Crime,
asserting that contemporary Western culture (having supplanted Loos’s bourgeois patron) is now
burdened by a totality of design.19 All aspects of the cultural landscape – from surfaces to institutions
to lifestyles, and so on – have been designed, redesigned, considered, reconsidered and thoroughly
mediated. As a result, the modern citizen has been designed to within an inch of his life, enveloped bythis totalizing design with almost no ‘running-room.’ In this densely realized world, Foster, following
Loos, calls for some room to live and breathe, and his book goes on to describe and promote practices
that take a crowbar to this in-between space, loosening up the cracks between suffocating categories.
Produced in the early 1960s, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Minus Objects were a collection of works that
had no discernible connection to each other beyond their collective title. They were made fromdifferent materials, at different scales, and articulated a variety of interests and themes.20 According to
Pistoletto, the only constant is that each one represents a unique idea developed to its logicalconclusion, made so deliberately and properly manifest, without surplus or superfluousness, topreclude ever having to make it again or pursue the idea any further. This is the sense in which
Pistoletto considered them ‘minus’: their production was such a definite realization that the idea wasthen effectively liberated from the realm of possibility, and therefore (for him at least) a release rather
than a product, a subtraction rather than an addition.

The Minus Objects were originally shown crowded into the modest space of Pistoletto’s studio,
exaggerating the limited amount of room left for visitors, who were forced to circulate in the gaps
between. Pistoletto emphasized in his writing of the time that objects create restrictions and pathways
that limit and direct our paths through the world, both literally and symbolically. He says simply that the
only space to move in the world is that which remains between objects. Further, the Minus Objects’lack of formal consistency and institutional framing together renders them slippery, difficult to grasp,
place, or reduce to an easy label – an ambiguity that compounds by their dual status as props andmetaphors, at once functional and poetic.

	
  

17

Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ [1908, German] in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century
Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
18

Adolf Loos, ‘The Poor Little Rich Man’ [1900, German] in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1982).

19

Hal Foster, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002).

20

See also §1.7.

	
  

167

Take one of the Minus Objects, the Structure for Talking White Standing. Exhibited in 1966, first in
the studio and later in galleries and museums without any particular conversation or context in mind,
the object is evidently gestural – a pointer, a tool for contemplating the idea of conversation (or, moregenerally, social interaction). But it’s also equally functional, in the sense that it is simply a frame onwhich anyone in the studio, gallery or museum can simply lean and have a chat. The purpose of theobject oscillates between these two poles of gesture and function – which is to say between theorthodox distinctions of design and art. Thus the structure highlights the negative space between the
two and, in the process, opens up a precious bit of running room.

5.4: MATURE INSTINCTThe idea that a piece of work can possess its own intrinsic ‘logic’ or ‘law’ was made clearer to me inconversation with artist Dave Hullfish Bailey. We were bemoaning the sorts of ambiguous claims
made by art students in lieu of straightforwardly recounting the decisions that have influenced the formof their work – along the lines of it just feeling right, instinctively and inexplicably. More specifically(and awkwardly), we wondered why such responses seem so lazy and unacceptable when this
supposedly instinctive, inexplicable state is precisely what we’re chasing in our own work, i.e. thosemoments when stuff begins to curiously cohere and convince though the reasons why are, for the time
being at least, obscure. Was it possible to vindicate this double standard, or were we just being
arrogant?
The teacher/student premise implies a distinction between what we could think of as mature andimmature instinct. Dave put it this way: immature work is characterized by apparently arbitrary choices
that, to the proxy audience that an art mentor represents, don’t ‘make sense’ or ‘stand up’ or ‘speak forthemselves’ or ‘gel’, while the mature counterpart simultaneously forges and reveals its logic, its
intelligibility – the sense in which it makes sense – along the way. This logic can be pursued with moreor less fidelity, which in turn yields more or less convincing work.
Otherwise put, the choices apparent in our supposedly mature work are not at all arbitrary but pointed;
hence the transition from art student to working artist (so to speak) implies the development of theability to first apprehend, then properly follow the bait of aesthetic instinct.21 Naturally, this is notnecessarily about the difference between immature students and mature teachers, only the gap between
sterile and resonant work. Following Nietszche’s famous imperative (in The Gay Science) to ‘become
what you are’, how to help an idea become what it is – to find a form that fits?
Another artist/teacher friend, Sharon Kahanoff, told me an illuminating story about one of her students.
The student was in the process of making a film that she (Sharon, not the student) described as being‘like a really bad version of The Blair Witch Project’ – shorthand for an emphatically anxious, vaguely
gothic film. Part of the plan involved filming with an infrared camera along a particular stretch of roadat night in an attempt to capture a sense of apprehension and fear. It’s easy enough to imagine the scene– and this was precisely Sharon’s point; that the sequence was so resolved in advance that it precluded
the possibility of coaxing or registering any unscripted events – which implies she was too blinkered toappreciate their value. Suffice to say, this early footage visibly lacked life.
During the filming of a later scene, however, the same student busy filming at night along an equally
premeditated route suddenly realizes she’ll need to pass through a notoriously dangerous tunnel under abroad bridge she’d apparently overlooked; and according to Sharon, the moment she enters this tunnel,
the footage palpably registers her actual anxiety as she subtly reacts and recoils. Basically, the camera
captures a few moments of real fear. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the effect yields the sort ofaffect (feeling, emotion) that was patently lacking before. This is exactly what Eco’s getting at when hedescribes form as a way of thinking – in this case, a means of advancing in the dark.

	
  
21

This aligns with Pareyson’s biological metaphor of art as organism, in which the germ of an idea is ‘nurtured’ to the point at
which it becomes self-generating. See §1.4.

	
  

168

Newly aware of this gap between artificial and actual fear, the question becomes: how to achieve thesame power for the duration? How to harness the surprise? Shoot backwards and reverse the footage?
In an unknown location? With an inexperienced crew? Blindfold? Reconfigure the work entirely on thebasis of the ‘real’ rupture? In any case, this inadvertently effective bit of video is the seed of the socalled logic or law of this particular work I’m suggesting might be profitably pursued by an adequately
alert – mature – instinct.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of ‘vestige’ in his book The Muses describes the student’s moment in thetunnel as the trace of a cause. This isn’t quite the same as either an image of the cause, or of thecause’s effect. Nancy elaborates with two simple examples: the smoke of a cigarette, and the footprintof a shoe. Both are clear traces of the causes of specific actions, or actions made latent, i.e able to beperceived, or re-conceived, but only by indirect means. And because an essential aspect of any trace isthat it’s a step removed, always in the process of evaporating or dissipating or fading, it can never bewholly grasped (fixed, domesticated, reified, neutered). Essentially and elliptically, I think he’s sayingthat this ‘vestige’ of art is art.
In the first number of the magazine BLAST (1914), chief Vorticist Wyndham Lewis wrote that thepower of art lay in its evanescent, fleeting aspect – its ‘glorious contingency’.22 He further noted how
the most perishable colours in painting are the most brilliant, so that which burns brightest burns mostbriefly. And in an essay that draws a line between Lewis, Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, the Sex Pistols,
children’s comics and Day-Glo paint, cultural critics Esther Leslie and Ben Watson assert that‘in true modernist fashion brilliance must be but fleeting, timely, not eternal, a coincidence of moment,
viewer and object.’23 Hence the power of Nancy’s vestige-as-art lies in the fact that it’s merely avestige – a momentary, glancing side-effect (like a sunspot).
Bruno Latour’s early work Irreductions, a sort of autobiographical-metaphysical manifesto, is written
in the form of a series of branching axioms (possibly in homage and/or a pisstake of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus).24 The opening axiom and its attendant footnote are as follows:
1. Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anythingelse.** I will call this the ‘principle of irreducibility’, but it is aprince that does not govern since that would be a contradiction.

It’s the footnote I really like: a prince-iple that doesn’t govern! – an ethos that resists hardening into
ideology. The snake-eating-its-own-tail form of the sentiment embodies its meaning and admits its
limits. This fleeting one-liner is about the most convincing instance I’ve come across of the nature ofwork in movement I’m after grasping.

5.5: HARDY PERENNIALS
What follows is a lightly reworked version of a talk in two halves originally presented at Yale Union,
an independent arts institute in Portland, Oregon, during an exhibition of seminal cartoonist andillustrator Saul Steinberg’s work for The New  Yorker magazine.25 The show consisted entirely of backissues of the magazine, thus presenting Steinberg’s work in its natural habitat, a curatorial conceit that

	
  
22

Wyndham Lewis, ed., BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex [1914] (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1997).

23

Esther Leslie and Ben Watson, ‘Comic Marxism: Punk’s Day Glo and The Bash Street Kids’, Dot Dot Dot #11, 2006.
The reference is to Lewis’s essay ‘Futurism, Magic and Life’ in BLAST (ibid., p. 30).	
  24

Irreductions is published as an appendix to: Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France [1984, French] (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988).

25

STEINBERG, SAUL. THE NEW YORKER. NEW YORK, 1945–2000 (HAROLD, WILLIAM, ROBERT, TINA, DAVID, EDS.),
Yale Union, Portland, OR, 16 June – 10 August, 2012.

	
  

169

cannily avoided turning Steinberg’s drawings – drawn to be published in print-runs of many hundredsof thousands – into precious art. The show’s format also quietly forwarded the idea that the medium –the carrier – is as telling as the drawings themselves. ‘Everything has a message’, Steinberg noted;‘The circulatory system has a message, the page has a message, the ads have a message, theneighbourhood of fiction and news have a message, all of it makes for juxtapositions as eerily apposite
as anything the French surrealists or a blender could come up with.’ The talk was concerned not with
Steinberg, however, but with two other New York institutions that, I argue, carry the same sort ofconviction as Steinberg’s work, and for the same reasons.

BoTSL#6 2014 JuL 30 12:35 PM

From June 6th, 1959, this single page auspiciously touches all points of the triangle of my talk – The
New Yorker itself, J.D. Salinger (whose novella Seymour: An Introduction first appeared here), and Saul
Steinberg (whose drawing happens to grace the same page). At the top of the third column, Salinger
nicely offers up a bouquet of parentheses – prescient for me, as I actually want to put Steinberg inbrackets for the rest of the talk, not unlike his own parenthetical man at the foot of the page. That’s tosay, this evening I want to shift him from the fronts to the backs of your minds, because while I’m notgoing to say anything about Steinberg himself, I’m hoping it’ll become clear how what I do want to talkabout – slowness, steadfastness, longevity, and most of all, refinement – easily apply to Steinberg too.
The New Yorker, Salinger, and Steinberg are also related in the sense that they’re all distinctly New
York institutions – another useful baton for me, as I mainly want to talk about how the graphic designof both the magazine and Salinger’s book covers became positively institutionalized. Obviously,
institutions are generally synonymous with the kinds of bureaucracy and bigness that tend to suckrather than perpetuate life – or lively work. And so when I say positively institutionalized, I don’t mean‘positive’ as some passive filler, but as an active qualifier. In other words, my two subjects are
unusually good institutions, something to aspire to.
I’ve been told me that the germ of the idea for the exhibition here began to incubate already a coupleof years ago, and that the time taken to realize it since was ‘just right’ – not too quick and not too slow,
more a kind of percolating process. This seems an unusually correct way of going about things thesedays, and all the more reason to draw attention to it. The way of working, I mean. Not out of selfcongratulation or self-reflexivity, more as a reminder that this is how good work happens.
I want to suggest, then, that the formal outcome of this right-amount-of-time-taken is marked above all
by inevitability – the feeling that it couldn’t be any other way. It’s convincing, which is to say beautiful,which is to say resolved in precisely the sense I want to get at in this talk, and also precisely becauseof the reasons I want to get at in this talk. As such, the usual relation is reversed: rather than this talkserving to introduce the show, the show is a proof of what I’m about to say.

	
  

170

(a) Always the same, always different
Some years ago, I was invited to write a paragraph about my favourite magazine designs. After
drawing a total blank, I concluded that this came down to something I’ve been repeating for so longthat it’s become a kind of mantra (or maybe a prayer): Design is a verb not a noun. The question ‘What
are your favourite magazine designs?’, though, is clearly based on the inverse premise. Rather than theways in which things get made (ways of working, approaches, attitudes) the invitation asks for a list ofthings themselves (results, objects, products), and so it’s anathema to my way of conceiving design.
But there’s a way toreverse– orparallelpark – into the question, which is to point to those magazines
StuartBailey:HARDY
PERENNIALS
that seem to capture those so-called ‘ways of thinking’ more emphatically than most, those whose
editorial character is ingrained and palpable. The immediate examples that spring to mind are certain
to speakof, and no ready pool of contributors beyond a few members
familiar, stalwart and, as it happens, frequently New York-based publications: Harper’s Weekly,of a few
small literary circles, most famously the Algonquin Round Table,
Time,  Time Out, National Geographic,  The New  York Review of Books, and  The New  Yorker. All of whichmost ofarewhom
alreadyfor othergetting
on a bitwrote
in magazine
years,magazines.
and this is precisely the point: to an unusual degree they’vebeen designed by time; that is, refined through a slow, sculptural process that involves hordes ofindividuals passing through the publication over an extended period, tinkering and modifying withinstrictly guarded limits.
In an industry marked by incessant redesign and ersatz improvement, and with a high turnaround of
personnel often more intent on asserting their own personalities in the short-term than perpetuating an
imprint’s personality in the long run, such slow, organic evolution is the exception rather than the rule.
And to my mind it’s  The New  Yorker, above all, that manifests the benefits of such caution, having
maintained a virtually unchanged editorial format for what’s now approaching 90 years.
The magazine was founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, an ex-newspaper man. He’d done his homework,and from the outset had a clear notion of the sort of thing he intended to put out: a distinctly local,
sophisticated humour
journal, in which the humour
Harold Ross
Rea Irvinwas ‘actually funny’. At the same time he had little
idea how to flesh out such a broad sketch – no real precedent to speak of, and no ready pool ofMore thananyonebeyond
else, ita wasanotherofmemberof Ross’s
circle,particularly
the self- the Algonquin Roundcontributors
few membersa few small
literary circles,
titled “artconsultant”
Reaalready
Irvin, wrote
who wasresponsible
for the way the first
Table,
most of whom
for other
magazines.

issue looked, and so to a remarkable degree for the way it looks today.
More who
than anyone
another memberof Ross’s
circle,self-titled‘art consultant’ Rea Irvin,
It was Irvincreatedelse,
andit waschristened,
for instance,thatinimitable
cover
who
was
responsible
for
the
way
the
first
issue
looked,andsotoaremarkablemascot Eustace Tilley. Variously remodeled, Tilley still fronts each year’s degree for the way it
looks today. It was Irvin who created and christened, for instance, that inimitable cover mascot
anniversary
issue and presides weekly over the gossip section that was
Eustace Tilley. Variously remodelled, Tilley still fronts each year’s anniversary issue and presides
initiallyweekly
called over
“Of theAll gossip
Things”
and thatlatterlythe ‘Of
Town.”He alsosectionwas “Talk
initially of
calledAll Things’
and latterly ‘Talk of the Town’.
drew that
distinctive
headlinefont(sincemechanized,
digitized,
and now
He also drew that distinctive headline font (since mechanized, digitized,
and now known simply as Irvinknown type),
simplyassetIrvintype),
andset
familiaroftwo
and
those
familiartwoor thosethree columns
textorperthreepage, columns
dense and economical yet still
legible.
of text highly
per page,dense and economical yet still highly legible.

74

But
pulling  
BoTSL#6 2014 JuL
30 12:35
PM The New  Yorker’s graphic devices apart from its editorial approach in this way seems

fundamentally wrong. What is editing, exactly? Deciding what to include, and how to include it; andBut pulling The New Yorker’s graphic devices apart from its editorial
verbalandinvisual
aspects
werealways unusuallythat is, exactly?
approachthis wayseems
fundamentallywrong.symbiotic,
What is editing,mutually
supportive.
Here
are
two
quick
examples.
At
some
point
fairlyDeciding what to include, and how to include it; and at The New
Yorker,early
complainedthat always
Irvin’s text
pagessymbiotic,
were “toothat
loose,”
verbalon,
andRossvisualaspects were
unusually
is, needed171	
  “tighteningup,”andproposedaddingverticalrules
betweencolumns.
mutually supportive. Here are two quick examples. At some point fairlyHe
rejected
Irvin’s
first sample
rule fortext
being“toowerestraight”—
too rigid,
early
on, Rosscomplainedthat Irvin’s
pages“too loose,”neededtoo
formal,notirregular
enough;so
Irvin
returnedtothedrawingboard
at  TheNew  Yorker,
verbaland visualadding
aspectsverticalwere always
whichinis to say mutually“tightening
up,” andproposedrulesunusually
betweensymbiotic,
columns.
searchof Herean Irvin’s
adequately
decadent
and
only
some
days that Irvin’s
supportive.
are twoquick
examples.
At
fairlyearlyafteron, Rosscomplained
He rejectedfirstsamplerulereplacement,
forsomebeingpoint“toostraight”—
toorigid,
text
pages
were
‘too
loose’,
needed‘tightening
up’, andproposedaddingverticalrules between
came
back
with
a
concreteline
thatmatchedtheabstractone
inRoss’stoo formal, not irregular enough; so Irvin returned to the drawing board
incolumns.
He
rejected
Irvin’s
firstsample
rule
for
being
‘too
straight’–toorigid,
tooformal, not irregularhead.
Itremains
intacttoday,
ifnow
horizontal.
search of an adequately decadent replacement, and only after some days
enough; so Irvin returned to the drawing board in search of an adequately decadent replacement, and
came
back
with
a concrete
matchedoneabstractin Ross’s
only
after
some
days
came backline
withthata concreteline thethat abstract
matched theone in Ross’s head.
It remains
intacttoday,
if now horizontal.
Ithead.
remains
intact today,
if nowhorizontal.

Conversely, Irvin played a significant part in the evolution of the classic
New Yorker cartoon — arguably the magazine’s most distinctive
innovation—Irvinbyestablishing
thatpart
spokencaptions
bethesetclassic
bothitalicizedConversely,
Irvin
playeda significant
in partthe evolutionofNew  Yorker
Conversely,
playeda significant
in the evolutionof theclassic cartoon – arguably
andinquotation
marks.
This
doubleemphasis
affordedpunchlines
a sensethemagazine’s
most distinctive
innovation
by establishingthatdistinctive
spoken captions
be set both italicizedNew
Yorker cartoon— arguably
the –magazine’s
mostof
pronounced
immediacy,
asif
capturingasplit-second,
that
made
the
and
in
quotation
marks.
This
doubleemphasis
affordedpunchlines
a
sense
of
pronounced
immediacy,
innovation — by establishing that spoken captions be set both italicizedasif capturing
a split-second,
that
made
theandprevious
convention– out —of quotes
and in plain romanprevious
convention—
outof
quotes
in
plain
roman
type
seem
and –inseem
quotation
marks. This double emphasis afforded punchlines a sense
type
stilted by comparison.
stiltedbycomparison.
of pronounced immediacy, as if capturing a split-second, that made theprevious convention — out of quotes and in plain roman type — seem
stilted by comparison.

75

These
minor details – a casual dividing line and an emphasized punch-line, a graphic
BoTSL#6
2014 two
JuL 30apparently
12:35 PMchange instigated by the editor-in-chief and a verbal one instigated by the art director – are typical of
the attention to detail, equally focused on meaning and feeling.

BoTSL#6 2014 JuL 30 12:35 PM

75

The magazine advanced by such instinctive trial-and-error, a small committed core of New  Yorkers
floating between departments and roles, flailing towards something that didn’t yet exist – a compound
identity no-one could quite put their finger on. By its own estimation, the magazine had a far stronger
grip on what it wasn’t than what it was, a tendency marked by the self-reflexive tic of referring to itself
in its own pages. One writer psychoanalyzed this tendency as amounting to ‘hanging up a series ofmirrors in the hallway of the magazine’s childhood … hoping to catch from time to time an accurate
and becoming reflection.’ Precisely: busy trying to perceive what it was in the process of becoming.
In a favourite typographic exchange, the German artist Kurt Schwitters declared: ‘Innumerable laws
may be written. The most important is: never make it as someone before you did.’ To which the English
typographer Anthony Froshaug responded: ‘Schwitters is quite wrong. Make it as they did, unless theconstraints are changed.’ He went on: ‘When constraints change, the important thing is not to spray a
random pattern across the page, but to assess the old, with the new, requirements.’
It’s important not to take Froshaug’s reaction as reactionary. If you dwell on this statement closely (say,for about 18 years, as I have) you might come to realize the following points. First, that constraints, or
circumstances, are rarely, if ever, exactly the same. Second, that all language, verbal or graphic, is bydefinition based on what someone before you did – on conventions. Meaning is necessarily shared.

	
  

172

And third, that Froshaug is therefore simply – and complexly – making a case against novelty for its
own sake, but absolutely for clear and lively communication. He would have liked The New  Yorker.
Here’s an apparently restrained memo from the editor responding to some proposed change or other:I think it would be a foolish mistake, would violently impair thewhole personality of the magazine. I don’t think there is any argument
in favour of it whatsoever ... My definite conviction is this: theformat of the New   Yorker is all right; it’s been adequately proven all
right by several years of signal success. All attempts to ‘high power’
the magazine ought to be kicked in the teeth.26
It would be wrong, too, to read Ross’s attitude – ethos, really – as mere conservatism. He’s by nomeans anachronistic or luddite. On the contrary, I’d say his stubborn decorum is quietly subversive.
In refusing to bow to fashion, industry convention, or the whims or demands of readers, advertisers,
and distributors, his editorial integrity is radical in the deeper sense related in these lines from
Dispersion, an essay-artwork by New York artist Seth Price:
An argument against art that addresses contemporary issues and topicalculture rests on the virtue of slowness, often cast aside due to theurgency with which one’s work must appear. Slowness works against allof our prevailing urges and requirements: it’s a resistance to thecontemporary mandate of speed. Moving with the times places you in ablind spot: if you’re part of the general tenor, it’s difficult to add
a dissonant note.27
Note that this isn’t against speed per se, only the mandate of speed imposed by others. Harold Ross
was a staunch man, described by one of his staff as ‘constitutionally resistant to change’. But hegenerally had good reasons to remain so. Until 1992, for instance, writers were named only at the endsof their texts, and the reasons were entirely pragmatic. For starters, few articles were more than a pagelong, so the author’s name was anyway easily found. More interestingly, most of the early writers were
moonlighting, and had to sign their work with clandestine initials or pseudonyms. In those earlier,slimmer years, Ross was also reportedly embarrassed by the number of pieces written by the same
people in a single issue, and preferred to hide the fact. For similar reasons the magazine managed toget by without a table of contents until 1969.
As  The New  Yorker  gathered longer articles and a reputation, its own stable of writers became morethan happy to be credited. But even though Ross’s sound, if somewhat neurotic, reasons to downplay
individuals gradually dissipated, he chose to maintain the convention of names at the end for a new,emerging reason: the anonymity served to establish a first person plural, a ‘we’ that was not only acipher for a collective editorial, but for New  Yorkers generally – a demographic flattered by association
with the magazine’s gathering sophistication. And so Ross thought it prudent to push the notion that,in a vague but pervasive way,  The New  Yorker was made not only for but also by its readers.
It might sound counterintuitive, but it seems that the relative fixity of the magazine’s structure allowed
for the relative chaos of its burgeoning content, and that Ross’s and Irvin’s founding decisions wereless important than the fact that they rigorously maintained them. In this way,  The New  Yorker wasallowed to ‘become itself’ – to grow into its fancy dress. The content was not simply forced to fit theform. While Ross saw that sticking within confines was completely productive, a decent compost inwhich to flourish, he was equally adamant that the writing always came first. In most magazines,
contributions are written or cut to lengths dictated by the format. Not so at  The New  Yorker, wherelayouts are preferably reworked or pages added – often to extreme extents.  ‘When I started this

	
  
26

Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), pp. 42–3.

27

Seth Price, ‘Dispersion’, op. cit. (unpaginated).

	
  

173

magazine,’ Ross wrote, ‘I didn’t allow an art editor within three blocks of the premises and gave thetype the right of way.’

This is typical: in accounting for the editorial essence of The New  Yorker, I paradoxically bounce fromapplauding its restrictions and conventions, to equally applauding its openness and elasticity. Which
StuartPERENNIALS
leadsBailey:
me to HARDY
think thatthe real point to be made is how the magazine’s singular verve isn’t the result of
one or the other, but an active synthesis of the two, the simultaneously careful and haphazardssue), all of which met
with theof sortof indignation
resistanceyou displays the defining quality of any decent
negotiation
freedom
and order. Inand
short,  TheNew  Yorker
magazine:  thatessentiallyplastic medium.
ht expect from the older
school ofit’sreadersanda writers.

This patient,barely perceptible
development
continued
pite Brown’s controversial
direction,
the immediacyand extent
of through the tenure of Ross’s equally legendaryand equally steadfast successor William Shawn. The magazine’s first and only real rupture came as
ch was of course absolutely
alien to the magazine’s regular crawl,
late as the early 1990s, following the appointment of Tina Brown, a 38-year-old Englishwoman freshen current editor David
Remnick took over six years later, consensus
from a successful revamp of Vanity Fair. Brown refurnished the magazine with unabashed populism:nion suggests he swung
themoney,magazineback
to its relatively
staidgossip,power,
profanity,and celebrity(Roseanne Barr was invited to guest-edit an issue),ilibrium, though he also
manyinnovations
like you might expect from the older school of
all ofmaintained
which met withthe ofsortBrown’sof indignation
and resistancereaders illustration.
and writers. If you compare this week’sr photography and edgier
e with the original 1925 one, though, the similarities remain far more
Despite Brown’s controversial direction, the immediacy and extent of which was of course absolutely
king than the differences.

alien to the magazine’s regular crawl, when current editor David Remnick took over six years later,consensus opinion suggests he swung the magazine back to its relatively staid equilibrium, though
his point, some 90 years
Ross many
set it ofup,Brown’s
The New
Yorkerincluding
is an colour photography and edgier illustration.
he alsoafter
maintained
innovations
remely well-oiled machine,
one that’s
institutedownof standards
If you compare
this week’s
issueitswiththesetoriginal
1925 one, though, the similarities remain far morethan theThe
differences.
an internal sense ofstriking
proportion.
hardline is such that when ader comes across something like this page from a sci-fi special issue
At thisa point,some 90 years
Ross set
it up,  Theouple of weeks ago, withcircumscribing
box,after
sanserif(i.e.
sans-New  Yorker  is an extremely well oiled machine;
one that’s instituted its own set of standards and an internal sense of proportion. The hardline is suchn) type, and more white space than normal at top and tail, what wouldthat when a reader comes across something like this page from a sci-fi special issue a couple of weeks
ount to a minor moveago,  withfor anya othermagazine seems comparatively
circumscribing box, sanserif   (i.e. sans-Irwin) type, and more white space than normal at top
mic in The New Yorker.
It’ssurprisingly
surprising,
andmove
I likefortoany
think
and tail, what would amountto a minor
other magazine seems comparatively seismic
this fosters a sensitivity
subtlety.It’s surprisingly surprising, and I like to think that this fosters a sensitivity to subtlety.
in  The to
New  Yorker.

As thea typographer,
one of lessons
the moreIenduring
lessons I cameever absorbed came out of a discussion with ana typographer, one ofmore enduring
ever absorbed
exacting
teacherofmine
calledPaul
Stiff.
We
weretalking
at the level of micro-typesetting, specificallyof a discussion with a teacher of mine called Paul Stiff. We were

014 JuL 30 12:35 PM

about the proper way to order and space the various pieces of punctuation in a sentence that ended
80within a larger quotation that was then footnoted:with a quotation

of micro-typesetting, specifically about the proper way
the various pieces of punctuation in a sentence that	
  tion within a larger
quotation that was then footnoted:

174

PQWPæä12noun”.’12noun”’.12
Clearly the issue not as straightforward as it might initially seem. Apart from considering the differencesin British and Americanprioritizeseem.
linguistic and aesthetic sense respectively, further
not as straightforward
as itstandards,
mightwhich
initially
decisions involve more slippery conventions, plus the possibility of manual spacing to tighten theering the differences
inBasically,
BritishandAmericanwhole thing up.
there’sa wholemicrocosm of standards,
possibility down there. Paul’s point was that if
you can make sound judgements at this level of detail, the same sensibility can be transposed to a
guistic and aesthetic
sense respectively, further
broader scale, in terms of what we might more grandly call ‘composition’. To repeat an adage that thelater Zen-Buddhist Salinger
agree with, of
this kindof learning involves seeing rather thanore slippery conventions,pluswould
theprobably
possibility
manuallooking, otherwise known as insight.
he whole thing up. Basically, there’s a whole microcosm
This brings to mind a cluster of notes by architect Rem Koolhaas – from the book titled S,  M,  L,  XL,there. Paul’saptly
point
was
if youcan makesoundenough– thatthat
record his
first impressionsof meetings
in Japan. It’s written as a sort of long-form
haiku that nicely performs the precision he’s in the process of absorbing from his hosts:
level of detail, the same sensibility transposes to a
had been
6 timesto Japan call a sense oferms of what weWe
might
more
grandlyeach time for 7 days;
we had‘meetings’:
repeat an adageeach
thatdaythe
later
Zen-Buddhist Salinger
25 people together from 8 A.M. to 10 P.M.;
ree with, this kindof learning
involves
seeing rather
at eachmeeting: 200–400
points.
#1: please choose between 2 greys
wise known as *insight.*
for the bathroom;#113: foundations don’t work.28

To Koolhaas’s(Western) sensibility,
sequence – in—which
they discuss the choice of decorative
cluster of notes
by architect
Rem this
Koolhaasfrombathroom tiles before sorting out the building’s foundations – is absurdly out of whack, and he
XL, aptly enough—whether
thatthisrecord
hisa Japanese
first impressions
wonders
betrays either
inability to define hierarchy (a disturbing lack ofproportion or pragmatism), or is perhaps a deliberate strategy to keep foreigners on their toes. Then hean. It’s writtenregisters
as aa third,
sortmoreofexciting
long-form
haiku that nicely
hypothesis: that for his Japanese colleagues no point is ever
unimportant.
This, hewould explain
the bewildering,frequently maddening attention to detailsion he’s in theprocess
ofmuses,absorbingfromhis hosts:
and, by extension, the unusual density of quality in Japanese building. No single decision is considered
any more important than any other: god is in the details and the superstructure.

mes to Japan The New  Yorker   is jam-packed with these kinds of lessons at all levels: the benefits of its eccentric
orthography (like those notorious umlauts used to distinguish twin vowels: ‘reëvaluate’); how to fit soys;many words within such a thin column with so little hyphenation; the easy articulation of its complex
listings sections; and on up to the eminently foldable, roll-able, pocket-able, durable paper. In all thesemeetings”: cases,
consider how easy they are to use, then comprehend why. Such careful details populate
publications too, of course, but again,  The New  Yorker is exemplary because of its
from 8 A.M.countless
to 10otherP.M.;
unusual degree of consistency. As DJ John Peel used to say about postpunk stalwarts The Fall, it’s
00–400 points.
‘always the same, always different.’ Robin Kinross put it like this: ‘The mannerisms are apparent but
they don’t stay still.’
between 2 greys

don’t work.

29(b) When cantankerous attitude becomes form
Curiously enough, the novelist J.D. Salinger was outspoken on the subject of graphic design, and his
antagonism was formative to my own ambivalence. From the point of view of an angry young man, his	
  estern) sensibility,
this sequence — in which they discuss
Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).
ative bathroom tiles before sorting out the building’s
Robin Kinross, ‘Let the Object Speak’, Eye, no. 11, Winter 1993.
bsurdly out of whack,and he wonders whether thisapanese inability to define hierarchy (a disturbing lack
28
29

81

	
  

175

was always a usefully offset vantage – that of an unusually invested author who was (via the bitter
mouthpiece of Holden Caulfield) famously against ‘phoniness’ in all its forms. This remains a fairly good
euphemism for much that operates under the name ‘graphic design’ these days.
In the wake of the success of The Catcher in the Rye   in 1951 – which is to say, once he’d acquired acertain clout in the publishing world – Salinger issued a caveat in his contracts that forbade illustrations
to be used on the covers of his books. In effect, he was making sure to limit the amount of damage
graphic design,  then in the process of shapeshifting into ‘marketing’,  could do.
Stuart Bailey: HARDY PERENNIALS

Stuart Bailey: HARDY PERENNIALSThe particular instance that supposedly triggered Salinger’s rancor wasa fantastically inappropriate cover drawn for a collection of short stories
titled after one of them, For Esmé —with Love and Squalor. The Esméin question is, typically for Salinger, a gifted prepubescent, whose kindly
conversation redeems a soldier on the verge of a nervous breakdown
during the Second World War. The illustration on this edition, however,stylistically reduces the book to pure pulp, its suggestiveness — of“a painful, pitiable gallery of men, women, adolescents and children”—
far removed from Salinger’s tender heroine, to say the least.

83
The particularinstance that supposedly triggered Salinger’s rancour was a fantastically inappropriate
cover drawn for a collection of short stories titled after one of them, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor.
Here’s a clear andexaggerated
case,of aa gifted
form prepubescent,that,
Theunusually
Esmé in questionis, typicallyfor then,
Salinger,whose kindly conversation
while admittedly redeems
followinga soldier
its commercial
function,is clearly
way outof the Second World War. The illustrationon the vergeof a nervous
breakdown
duringline with its content.
Tofront
useofathis
term
I’ll comebackstylisticallyto later, reduces
it’s *equivocal*on theedition,however,the book to pure pulp, its suggestiveness– of   ’apainful, pitiable
men, could
women,and children’ – far removed from Salinger’s
in the sense of being
non-specific;
thegallery
sameofstyle
beadolescents
readily applied
tenderheroine,tosaytheleast.
to different instances, as a clip-on part. This Esmé is, then, clearly an
BoTSL#6 2014 JuL 30 12:35 PM

KORQUVGTCECUGQHHCNUGKFGPVKV[$P WPGSWKXQECN HQTOQPVJGQVJGT
Here’s a clear and unusually exaggerated case, then, of a form that, while admittedly following its
hand, would correspondto that sense of inevitability I mentioned earlier:commercial function, is clearly way out of line with its content. To use a term I’ll come back to later,conclusive, plausible,
andhard
to imagine
I’m notthesuggesting
it’s equivocal,
in thesense of otherwise.
being non-specific:
same style could be readily applied to different
the seductive, marketedhere part.
is irrelevant—is,she’s
made-upinstances,Esmé
as a clip-on
This Esméthen, wellclearly
an imposter … a case of false identity.
A contrary
unequivocal
form, onThethe otherhand, would
correspondto that sense of inevitability I
to sell books, after
all — only
irresponsible.
numerous
editionsofmentioned
earlier:conclusive,plausible,
and
hard
to
imagineotherwise.
I’m not suggesting that theSalinger’s work published since his forbidding clause include some lively
seductive,
marketed
Esmé
here
is
irrelevant  (she’s
well
made-uptosellbooks,
after all),  only
responses, such as the oddball calligraphy of this early American volume,irresponsible.  The numerous editions of Salinger’s work published since his forbidding clause include
or this subsequent
Penguin edition, which manages to stick within thesome lively responses, such as the oddball calligraphy of this early American volume, or thisrules of their seminal
seriesPenguin
design edition,by “quoting”
the former
lettering,
subsequent
which manages
to stickwithin the rules of their seminal series design
effectively turning
it
into
an
image
and
so
in
accordwiththeirby ‘quoting’ the former lettering, effectively turning itaesthetic
into an image and so in accord with theirpolicy.
aesthetic policy.

BoTSL#6 2014 JuL 30 12:35 PM

None are more in tune with Salinger’s attitude, though, than this set of covers, published by Little,
84in print.
Brown, and happily stillStuart Bailey: HARDY PERENNIALSe more in tune with 	
  Salinger’s attitude, though, than this set of
published by Little, Brown, and happily still in print.

176

to imagine
Salinger himself
was editions,
responsible for these editions, though obviously I don’t thinkimagine that SalingerI likehimself
was that
responsible
for thesethat
he literally
prepared
the artworkor wrote aor
brief, only that they correspond entirely with theobviously I don’t thinkthat
he literally
prepared
the artwork
sensibility of his prose. That’s to say, the Little, Brown books seem inevitable: a family of modest,
brief, only that they correspond entirely with the sensibility of his
diminutive paperbacks typeset without pretension or fancy, with an uncoated card cover only slightly
That’s to say, the Little,
Brown books seem *inevitable*: a family
stiffer than its light-as-a-feather interior, which makes them easy to pocket and cheap to mail; the title
st, diminutive paperbacks
typesetwithout unspaced
pretension
or fancy,
and author
in unaffected,
capitals;
and literally cutting across such austerity, that stilluncoated card coversurprising
only slightly
stifferthanitslight-as-a-feather
abstract rainbow at top left. All seems fully consonant with the maverick Zen philosophy
workingin andhis title
later fiction.
which makes them Salinger
easy towas
pocketandoutcheap
tothroughmail; thehor in unaffected, unspaced capitals; and literally cutting acrossIt’s useful
to pauserainbow
here and atquicklysummarize
Salinger’s bio- and bibliography. After attendingsterity, that still-surprising
abstract
top left.
All seems
various colleges in and around New York, then an apparently traumatic stint in the War, Salinger begansonant with the maverick
Zen philosophy Salinger was working
publishing short pieces in the higher-brow society and literary magazines of the day. His first piecend through his later fiction.
published in  The New  Yorker was ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ in 1948. The Catcher in the Rye, hisonly proper novel, was published three years later to immediate success, followed by only three more

ul to pause here andbooks
quicklysummarize
Salinger’s
bioand title of For Esmé  ) in 1953, Franny and Zooey  in 1961,
in hislifetime: Nine
Stories  (thealternateanothercolleges
double bill,
Raisearound
High theNew
RoofYork,
Beams, Carpenters, and Seymour: an Introduction inaphy. After attendingand
variousin andwhich
wereSalinger
assembledfrom publishingstories previously published in (and in a couple of cases,
apparently traumatic1963.
stintAllinofthe
War,
began
rejected by)  The New  Yorker. They became increasingly, and in the end exclusively, concerned witheces in the higher-browsociety and literary magazines of thechronicling the Glass family, an Irish-Jewish pack of supernaturally gifted and singularly precocious
first piece publishedsiblingsin The– New
Yorker was “A Perfect Day
particularly its eldest brother, sage, seer, mystic, and suicide, Seymour, who shoots himself
anafish” in 1948. The
CatcherthelastRye,his  ‘Bananafish’,  along
only proper novel,in thehead inintheline ofwith his younger brother Buddy, the family’s happily
lished three years laterto
immediate
success,
secluded nominal biographer. followed by onlyore books in his lifetime: Nine Stories (the alternate title of1953,
in the inwakeof theattention
lavishedon bill,
The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger withdrew frommé ) in 1953, FrannyInand
Zooey
1961,
and
another
doublepublic
view,
then
spent
the
remainder
of
his
life
isolated,
like Buddy, in rural New Hampshire, due
igh the Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction
north of New York. Persistent rumours claimed he was writing further Glass episodes with no particular
All of which were assembled
from stories previously publishedintention to release them. What remains his last published story,  ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, was publishedn a couple of cases,in  Therejected
by)
TheonNew
becameNew  Yorker
JuneYorker.
19, 1965.They
In fictional
chronological time, however, this is actually the first

30 12:35 PM

installment of the Glass saga, in the form of a 26,000-word letter sent home from summer camp by
85
an insanely literary – and perhaps literally insane – seven-year old Seymour. The story takes up mostof the issue, running over some 80 pages. Unlike Salinger’s other New  Yorker  pieces, though, it wasnever turned into a book, most likely because it met with an embarrassed silence, generally deemed
a conceit too far along the obtuse, mystical trajectory his stories had followed since he was firstpublished in the magazine. It was taken as evidence that Salinger was ‘on his way to hell in a
handbasket’, as one of many critics put it.
When I first came to New York in 2005 there were two let’s say ‘official’ ways to read ‘Hapworth’.
First, by acquiring a copy of the original issue, which was by this time, some 40 years after publication,
selling upwards of $400, despite the magazine’s massive circulation at the time. (It must’ve beenaround the 400,000 mark in 1965; it’s currently just over a million.) Or otherwise by finding an archived
copy either bound in volumes or recorded on microfilm at a well-stocked public library – though
reportedly, pages 32–118 have been ripped out of many library copies.
You could of course try to get hold of a second-hand duplication of either, but even these weren’t easy
to come by.  ‘Hapworth’ was also conspicuously absent on the burgeoning internet when I began

	
  

177
Stuart Bailey: HARDY PERENNIALS

searching in earnest back then, presumably due to Salinger’s notorious vigilance. Years earlier, he had

Hamilton,won
thata resulted
in Hamilton’s book being cut to around half its
protracted court case against a British biographer, Ian Hamilton, that resulted in Hamilton’s
original lengthandsoaof itsself. Basically,
Salingerbook being cut toshadow
around half
its former
original lengthand so a shadowof itswas
former self. Basically, Salinger
someone was
whose
copyright
takenwasvery
seriously.
someonewhosewas
copyright
takenvery seriously.

So one ofSotheonefirstthings
I did onmovingto NewYork
wastothe Public Library on 5thof thefirst things
I did
on movingto NewYork
waspaypay aa visit
visit toAvenue.
Clearly,I
wasn’tthefirstperson
to
have
had
this
idea.
The
microfilm
was so badly warped that
the Public Library on 5th Avenue. Clearly, I wasn’t the first person toIneededalibrarian’s
help
affixing
ittothespindle,andthescratchesweresosevere that I had tohave had this idea. The microfilm was so badly warped that I needed areverse the printer setting to white on black. Even then the text was barely decipherable. Three hours,
librarian’s help affixing it to the spindle, and the scratches were so severe$12 in dimes and a half-dozen paper jams later, my expedition was complete. I read ‘Hapworth’ slowlythat I hadover
to reverse
the printer setting to white on black. Even then thethe next few weeks, four or five pages at a time. This was partly due to the strain on my eyes oftext was barely
decipherable.
hours,
in dimes
and a half-dozen
the blurry
white-on-blackThreetext, butmainly$12
becauseI suspected
it would be the last thing I’d ever read
paper jams
myforexpedition
by later,Salingerthe very firstwas
time.complete. I read “Hapworth” slowly
over the next few weeks, four or five pages at a time. This was partly
last paragraphis actuallywholesalefrom an article
in 2005 in the Brooklyn Rail, which
due to theThestrainon my eyesof the liftedblurrywhite-on-black
text,I readbut mainly
prompted me to make the same expedition. It was written to celebrate the release of The Complete
because I suspected it would be the last thing I’d ever read by Salinger
New  Yorker, an 8-DVD-ROM archive containing half a million pages from all 4,000-plus issues sincefor the very
first time.
1925. I became intrigued by the various entwined values suddenly in flux: the ‘auratic’ value of the loststory, the romantic value of the pilgrimage to the library, and the monetary value of the original

The last paragraphwholesale froman article
I read inseclusion. I was curious, too, topublication –isallactuallyof whichlifted
were significantly
heightenedby Salinger’s
2005 in theRail, which
prompted
me would
to makethe same
seeBrooklyn
how the releaseof the digitizedarchive
recalibrate
this expedidelicate economy, given that such as
the
Seymour
issue
mentioned
at
the
start
of
this
piece
would
suddenly
be made available, cheap,
tion. It was written to celebrate the release of The Complete New Yorker,
convenient,pristine,
and
to
some
sensitive
types,
perhaps,alittlemundane.
an 8-DVD-ROM archive containing half a million pages from all 4,000plus issues since 1925. I became intrigued by the various entwined values
Of course, those eight DVDs were already almost obsolete. After only a couple of years they weresuddenly supplanted
in flux: thebyauraticvalue of the lost story, the romantic value ofa portable hard disk, and now the whole archive is online and fully available tothe pilgrimage
to theAs
library,
monetaryvalueof theoriginalpub- affected (original copies ofsubscribers.
it turnsand
out, thethe monetaryvaluedoesn’t
seem
to havebeen
lication —theall ‘Hapworth’of which weresignificantly
heightenedby Salinger’s
seclusion.
issue remain
at a steady$400), though
I expect the
numbers of romantics making thepilgrimage
Library
havedigitized
fallen offarchivea bit.
I was curious,
too, totothe
seeNew
howYork
thePublic
releaseof thewould
87

NYPL’s fiche reader can output directly to a laser printer, which is the source of the distressed
BoTSL#6 2014 JuL 30The
12:35 PMfragments below. I want to point to three things in these scans. First, Salinger’s opening line in‘Hapworth’, which could double as an epigraph to the present essay: ‘Some comment in advance, as
plain and bare as I can make it.’ Second, the small advert for a fragrance called ‘Summer Camp’ onsale at a store in Manhattan called Serendipity 3, which was purported by Salinger cultists to be a
postmodern hoax in reference to Seymour’s camp Hapworth. And third, how the scratches from thefiche’s general wear and tear trace the story I just told, an unwitting graphic testament and example ofwhat I’ve come to think of as form as a kind of deposit or side-effect – a form of evidence.

a postmodern hoax in reference to Seymour’s camp Hapworth. And
third, how the scratches from the fiche’s general wear and tear trace thestory I just told, an unwitting graphic testament and example of what I’ve	
  come to think of as form as a kind of deposit or side-effect — a form of*evidence.*

178

Stuart Bailey: HARDY PERENNIALS

cause itself, which isn’t quite the same thing. The distinction is admittedly
infra -thin, but thankfully he magnifies it with two simple examples: thesmoke of a cigarette rather than the cigarette itself (or its ash), and thefootprint of a shoe rather than the shoe (or body) of the person who
made it. Both are clearly *traces of the causes of specific actions.*
All of which is blatant enough when a machine inadvertently yet conspicFrench
philosopher
Jean-Luc
Nancy
describes
somethingsimilarin a chapter
on ‘Theuously creates thistophilosopher
trace
some
40
years
of
committed
readers.
Thevestige
FrenchJean-Luc
Nancy
describes
somethingsimilarin Vestige of Art’
30
in
his
book  The
Muses.
His‘vestige’approximates
‘the
trace
of
a
cause’
asopposedHowever, as youa mighthave
I wantoftoArt”
claim
thatbookthere’schapteron guessed,“The Vestige
in his
Thean
Muses. His “vestige” to an image ofthe cause itself, which isn’t quite the same thing. The distinction is admittedly infra-thin, but thankfully
approach to designing,or form-giving,
thatofprecipitates
similar state
approximates“the trace
a cause” asaopposed
to an image of thehe magnifies it with two simple examples: the smoke of a cigarette rather than the cigarette itself— a sort of form-TAUNTING.
(or its ash), and the footprint of a shoe rather
88 than the shoe (or body) of the person who made it.
BoTSL#6 2014 JuL 30 12:35 PM

Both are clearly traces of the causes of specific actions. All of which is blatant enough when a machine

Now, I said that inadvertently
there wereyet
twoconspicuously
official primarysourcesof “Hapworth”
creates
this vestige
to trace some 40 years of committed readers.
However,
you amight
have
want to claim
thatthere’s an approach to designing, orin the archives, butthereaswas
third,
lessguessed,
official Imeans,too —a notorform-giving,that precipitates
similarastate  —  asort reportof form-taunting.
ious bootleg publishedin 1974.
The same ayear,
newspaperclaimed that, “During the last two months, about 25,000 copies of these
Now, I said that there were two ‘official’ primary sources of ‘Hapworth’ in the archives, but there was a
DQQMURTKEGFCVVQJCXGDGGPRGFFNGFKPRGTUQPVQDQQMUVQTGU
third, less official means, too:  a notorious bootleg published in 1974. The same year, a newspaper
at $1.50 each byreport
menclaimed
who always
call themselves
John Greenberg
andthat ‘During
the last two months,
about 25,000
copies of these books, priced at $3 to
say they come fromBerkeley.
Theirdescriptions
havevariedfrom$5 … have been peddled in person to bookstores at $1.50 each by men who always call themselvescity to city.” John Greenberg and say they come from Berkeley. Their descriptions have varied from city to city.’

cover ofbootleg
the original
bootleg  –  atas it’s
far asit’s possible to know these things secondHere’s the coverHere’sof thetheoriginal— atleast, asleast,
far aspossible
hand
–
that
now
retails
onlineforatleast$1000.
Copieswere
eventually seized by Salinger’s lawyers
to know these things second-hand — that now retails online for at leastand pulped. And next to it, a remake from 2000, which was similarly apprehended and the bootleggers$1000. Copies were eventually seized by Salinger’s lawyers and pulped.
penalized. Then sometime in 2007 I inadvertently came across a couple of password-protected PDFs
And next to it, aofremake
from 2000, which was similarly apprehended andwhat I assume to be the second samizdat on an Eastern European website. Fortunately thethe bootleggers password
penalized.was
Thensometime
in 2007
I inadvertently
attached,
and I wasable tomake an editioncame
from that PDF which I wrapped in a coveracross a couple theof password-protected
PDFs
of what
I assume tobe thesame indigo as the original
bootleg.
Unsurprisingly,
I sooncame across another counterfeit edition
made fromthe same website.
PDF, put out
by a tiny hobbyist
second samizdatevidently
on an Eastern
European
Fortunately
the imprint that shall remain truly nameless– also with a blank cover.

89

BoTSL#6 2014 JuL 30 12:35 PM

It perhaps goes without saying by now that the form (or in this case, non-form) of this genealogy ofcovers is distinctly drawn from the specific circumstances of their production. It just about bears
repeating one more time that, as such, they come across as inevitable and unequivocal.

	
  
30

See §3.10.

	
  

179

It’s hard to keep tabs on exactly which of the various ‘underpublished’ stories (as they’re nicely known)these pirate editions contain, but hidden in the back of at least one of them are two pieces from 1970
ascribed to a certain ‘Giles Weaver’, who’s rumoured to have been Salinger writing under apseudonym. A fairly solid case for the claim was made in a short article by Mark Phillips from 1985.
If it is Salinger, the ante of curiosity is upped by the fact that this remains his most recent output by aconsiderable margin of five years since ‘Hapworth’. And for someone as revered and reclusive as
StuartBailey: HARDY
PERENNIALS
this particular
writer,this is obviously a Big Deal.

tions and daily affairsGiles
thatWeaver’s
seem fully
consonantwithin Salinger’s
writing
is an enigma
its own right.life
His entire body of work comprises two installations
are titled‘Notes from sense
the Underground’  inthe form of a ‘log’ (that anticipates all theew Hampshire (not of
towhatmentiona pronouncedof resentmentof what what
we nowknow toa blog) published in subsequent issues of  The Phoenix,
an abiding interest incharacteristics
Eastern religion),makesthebecaseaself-proclaimed‘pacifist
literaryjournal’foundedin the 1930s. Terminated by the War, the journal
icularly convincing, it seems to me, is that the writing doesn’t merelyrose again, phoenix-like, in 1970, and Weaver showed up in the first two numbers of this new series
e Salinger’s previouswith
style
or interests, but rather anticipates whata pair of markedly odd diatribes that often border on gibberish – but fascinatingly so. Other thanmight have plausiblythebecome
if carried on along a certain manic
fact that they describe locations and daily affairs that seem fully consonant with Salinger’s life inectory. That’s to say,
Weaveris eitherdisguise, senseor of resentment and an abiding interest in Eastern
New Hampshire(not to Salinger
mention ain
pronounced
eone who could anticipate
write
a plausible
impersonationof it seems to me, is that the writing doesn’t merely
religion),and
what
makes
the case particularly
convincing,style
interests,
but rather anticipates what they might have plausibly
Salinger might haveabide
beenSalinger’s
writing previous
five years
onorfrom“Hapworth”
becomeinifitself
carriedon alonga certain
manic trajectory.
which as an act of mimicry
would
be an
impressive
literary That’s to say, Weaver is either Salinger in
disguise, or someone who could anticipate and write a plausible impersonation of how Salinger might. Here’s a sample:
have been writing five years on from ‘Hapworth’ – which, as an act of mimicry, would itself be
an impressive literary feat. Here’s a sample:r Phoenix, This here isn’t meant to be a definitive analysis of ouration and if anyone pleases
themselves
regardit assuch meantor pleases
Dear
Phoenix, toThis
here
isn’t
to be a definitive analysis of oursituation
if anyonepleasesthemselves to regard it as such or
mselves to publish it as such
I will beandpleasedto render
unto thempleases
to publish
it my
as fist,such I will be pleased to renderuckle sandwich right in the
kisserthemselves
not via typewriter
but with
unto
them
a
knucklesandwichrightino speak, so to speak due to the fact of the matter — that is to say, the kisser not via typewriter
but with my fist, so to speak, so to speak due to the fact of thed bloodshed a form of communication.
31
matter   –   that is to say, I find bloodshed a form of communication.

ch, as Phillips notes,Which,is a stylistic
maneuverwhollymanoeuvre
Salingerianas Phillips
notes, is aso
stylistic
so wholly Salingerian that it’s hard to conceive
it’s hard to conceiveanyone
anyonewritingin quitethemanner.
same manner.
elseelse
writingin quitethe sameeaver” prefaces his ‘Weaver’log entries
by listingthecontents
of anprefaces
his log
entriesby listing
theenvelope
contents of an envelope supposedly sent to the editor
to the editor of Theof  ThePhoenix
along withhishismanuscript,
includingthis self-portrait – a Xerox of a paper collage that’s
Phoenix  alongwithmanuscript, including
duly
his request,
with the piece.
self-portrait, a Xerox
ofprinted,
a paperpercollage
that’stogether
duly printed,
per hisIf this is Salinger writing, it’s certainly an
intriguing
about-face:thepublicity-despising
writeruest, with the piece. If this IS Salinger writing, it’s certainly an who consistently refuses any and all depictions of

14 JuL 30 12:35 PM

his prose, and photographs of himself, here providing his own self-portrait to front what essentiallyamounts to an91
autobiographical diary.

	
  
31

Giles Weaver, ‘Notes from the Underground’, The Phoenix (new series), no.’s 1 and 2, c. 1970–1.
See: http://www.dextersinister.org/MEDIA/PDF/GuileWeaver.pdf.

	
  

180

There’s a ring of truth-being-stranger-than-fiction about the Weaver case, and here are two more
pieces of prosecuting evidence. First, Salinger’s character’s names often tended towards thinly veiled
double entendres, the most famous and obvious instance being ‘See-more Glass’ as alluding to thesaintly visionary of a sensitive, fragile family. With this in mind, says Phillips, could ‘Giles Weaver’ notserve to similarly cloak a surreptitious weaver of guile? Second, a biographical note in  The Phoenix
describes the writer as ‘the pseudonym for a writer living like a solitary bushman in America’s Kalahari.’
Hmn.
To wrap this up, in the late 1990s rumours started to circulate that a book edition of ‘Hapworth’ wasfinally due to be released by a tiny publishing house from Virginia called Orchises Press. Although acatalogue number appeared, further details were suspiciously scarce – a series of deferrals and little
else. Eventually I stopped checking its progress, but a couple of months after Salinger died at the ageof 91 in January 2010, New York magazine ran a short story by the founder of Orchises Press, Roger
Lathbury, who had written to Salinger on a whim back in 1988 saying he was keen to properly publish
what still remained the author’s most recent and severely underpublished output. Lathbury was duly
shocked, he recalled, to receive back a typed note, signed ‘JDS’, saying he’d consider it.
The publisher received a follow-up in the spring of 1996 – that’s eight years later – from Salinger’s
agent to announce that a personal letter was on its way granting the request, along with a caveat ofexacting standards. It seemed that Lathbury had somehow been positively vetted, presumably for not
being pushy or otherwise representing the commercialism that Salinger resented. A breezy letter from
Salinger followed, proposing lunch, followed by a phone call, and the two met the next week at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Lathbury had hastily prepared a hardback dummy he hoped would satisfy Salinger’s demands.
For instance, he made sure to set the story with plenty of leading – the space between lines of type –to ensure that, quoting one of Salinger’s letters, ‘Seymour could breathe’. This, Lathbury realized,
would also usefully serve to bulk up a novella that, although long for a magazine, was notably short fora book. And this, in turn, appeared to solve another problem: Salinger had stated that he strongly
preferred type on a book’s spine to read horizontally rather than vertically – that’s to say, across thewidth of a spine rather than along its length. Obviously, the thinner the book was, the trickier thiswould be to achieve. Lathbury goes on:
As I worked out the specifications, I tried deliberately not to makethe book ‘elegant.’ He had been quick to object to my use of the word,
which to him connoted narcissism and preciousness. The buckram heasked me to use is the functional, unpretty material that libraries
use to rebind worn-out books. Hapworth, the book, was to start out
this way: straightforward and pure.32
The two met to discuss further protestant requirements: no running heads, a plain blue fabricheadband to match the plain binding, no dust jacket (of course), and on the buckram cover nothing
except the title and Salinger’s name – in that order. In the months that followed, a few more esotericrequirements were insisted upon, including the remarkable condition that distributors and stores would
have to buy the book for the same price as the customers, meaning no wholesale and no mark-up.
In other words, the sole profit that any bookstore wishing to stock it would be the privilege of being
able to sell it!
Such estimable arrogance continued to drive Salinger’s increasingly unhinged art direction: on second(or forty-second) thoughts, the title and name were to be omitted from the cover and left only on thespine. Then, when Lathbury regrettably informed Salinger that the spine was actually too small for thetype to be stamped cleanly into the fabric, the author proposed that it should instead run downwards,
strung out on a very slight diagonal as a minor concession to legibility. According to the by now

	
  
32

Roger Lathbury, ‘Betraying Salinger’, New York Magazine, 4 April, 2010, http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/65210.

	
  

181

heroically long-suffering Lathbury, the dummy spine he had made according to this spec was ‘awful:
ugly, difficult to read, ostentatiously weird.’33
In my humble opinion, though, it’s about as close to sublime as graphic design – if you can call it that –gets: a graphic equivalent of that little bit of perfect prose about bloodshed-as-communication.
So few elements, such an outlandish result.
Gilles Deleuze once described the nature of true friendship as the ability to apprehend the particularnature of another’s madness, the nuance of their peculiarity. If the appreciation of art (or literature,or graphic design) can be considered an equivalent type of ‘friendship’, one that involves an analogous
kind of connection and empathy, then it follows that our appreciation of a certain work amounts toour recognizing its own intrinsic ‘madness’, its own idiosyncratic trace that guarantees it sprung fromone mind, and one mind alone. This rings entirely true to me. It grasps the nature of what’s particular
about Salinger’s writing and these book covers, both born of the same temperament. And so it seems
fitting that Salinger’s last work ends up bound in a cover analogous to the story’s return to childhood– a kind of Zen form, if you like. (It’s surely impossible to make a claim for ‘Zen’ in this context withoutsounding faintly ridiculous, though if I could make it sound grounded rather than flighty, this is still theword I’d want to use.) And so it came to pass that a few weeks before the book was finally due tocome out – now almost a decade since Lathbury had first proposed it – Salinger pulled the plug on theentire project, on the grounds that Lathbury had registered the book with the Library of Congress,
distributors had taken note, and advance copies were being touted on the internet. Unforgivable.
More recently, though, someone else (who had obviously read the New  York magazine piece) made theedition that Orchises Press didn’t – a couple of people, in fact, at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in
Maastricht in 2010. They did a remarkably thorough job, and the result is as pure as surely even
Salinger could hope for.
This returns me, finally, to that earlier point about insight. Learning how to regard, to really see this kindof work – products that emphatically capture the thought that accompanies making – fosters working
in the same manner, with the same care, with the same attention to detail, and at the same patient rate.
Such objects are inherently pedagogical: lessons can be learned, and those lessons put to further use.
I have no real sense of how clearly the two halves of this essay overlap – or need to, really. But at therisk of repeating myself one more time, the point of bringing them together here is that the similarly
slow, stubborn attitudes of the collectively-minded New  Yorker and the single-minded Salinger are
similarly manifest in inevitable and unequivocal products. At once impervious to passing fashion andreceived wisdom, they are sibling instances of bracingly neurotic design.34

5.6: THINKING CONTINGENCY‘Contingent’ variously means: ‘dependent on something not yet certain’ (tenuous, precarious);‘liable to happen or not’ (uncertain, indefinite); and ‘happening by chance or without known cause’(surprising, accidental). New York to London and Back was the title of a group exhibition organized

	
  
33
34

See this chapter’s frontispiece.

Sometime between presenting the original talk and writing it up into the present section, I came across the following
announcement: ‘But starting on Monday, New  Yorker fans are going to notice some small but subtle design changes (...)
The magazine is updating its table of contents, contributors page, “Goings On About Town”, Briefly Noted and Fiction sections.
These changes include changing the number of columns, redrawing the Irvin typeface and introducing Neutraface as a secondary
one. (…) Mr.  Remnick said he expected to receive some complaints from readers next week.’ (See: The New  York  Times,
September 15, 2013). Then I came across another: ‘Now, with the release of a new biography by David Shields and Shane
Salerno (and the companion documentary), comes the claim that five new Salinger books will be published between 2015 and2020  –  including  The Family Glass, an anthology of existing Glass stories as well as new material and a genealogy of theeccentric clan  …’. (See: www.entertainment.time.com/2013/09/07/discovering-j-d-salingers-lost-stories).

	
  

182

by New York gallerist Miguel Abreu and installed at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, 2011.35
It was also the premise for an evening of talks and discussion, later collected into a slim volume
called The Medium of Contingency.36‘Thinking contingency’: this phrase recurs throughout the book, and seems to allude to at least three
things at once: (1) thinking about the topic of contingency, (2) thinking in a way that accommodates
contingency, and most importantly (3) thinking in a contingent manner. Inasmuch as the sense of‘thinking contingency’ is in abeyance, it models its meaning – hence the sense of contingency as a
‘medium’, as a means rather than an end.
Contingency is itself nothing new, as Robin Mackay acknowledges in his introduction:
The formation of the solar system, the emergence of life on thisplanet, the determination of the structure of our unconscious throughbiological, hereditary and social evolution – itself now subject tothe accelerated technological reformations of capital ... We are theproduct of contingent events, material, histories, webs and networksof anonymous forces.37

However, he continues, the necessity to ‘think contingency’ has latterly turned urgent. The pronounced
interest in contingency in art and philosophy right now is inevitable, he says, in an age in which world
events ‘just strike (…) befall us, from outside any pre-registered set of possibilities’, and with what
seems like increasing frequency and impact. Devastating world events – global terrorism, civil
revolution, financial collapse, ecological disaster – seem radically contingent, i.e. on an unprecedented
scale. Hence thinking through how we might respond to this condition is a pressing concern with‘very real consequences’ across the board.
As was laid out in chapter 1, in the early 1960s Umberto Eco promoted the idea that artworks are toolsthat allow us to perceive the world in a manner congruent with an era’s most pressing, vanguard
concerns. The Medium of Contingency duly comprises a few attempts to ‘think contingency’ throughart and writing. Much of the thinking in the book extends from Quentin Meillassoux’s recent
metaphysical treatise After Finitude (2008), the central argument of which is that our prevalent ways ofthinking are delusional and pernicious because founded on prediction and probability.38 Instead, heattempts to think beyond such a stable, containable worldview: how to operate from within a situation
rather than attempting – and inevitably failing – to harness it from outside? From Meillassoux’s
vantage, there is no outside – all is one ‘great outdoors’.
Properly contingent thinking, he says, is ‘in direct violation of all dogmatic systems of metaphysics,
philosophies that bind in principle every event, past and future, within an account of what must be.’
It implies the polar opposite – a fundamentally open-ended philosophy not bound by dogmas, laws
or absolutes.
To restate this slightly: in attempting to think contingency ‘on its own terms’, any predictive
philosophy short-circuits itself because based on some kind of ground; real contingency is ‘that which
thinking can only grasp as event’, i.e. in situ and in action. From this perspective, the concept of a

	
  
35

New York to London and Back, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 18 January – 19 February, 2011.

36

Robin Mackay, ed., The Medium of Contingency (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), p. 4.

37

Ibid., p. 3.

38

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency [2006, French] (London: Continuum, 2008).

	
  

183

‘contingency plan’ is a contradiction in terms, because any attempt to tame contingency misses its
mark by ‘reabsorbing the contingent event into a new rational metaphysics’.39
What are the implications of these ontological concerns for art?
Duchamp’s readymades introduced the idea that merely naming something as art qualified it as such,hence the very paradigm of modern art was inaugurated by the realization of its own contingency,
says Mackay. However, in the wake of this expansive introduction, The Medium of Contingency’s
other contributors focus on a far narrower category of work concerned with the contingency of specificmaterials. What they mean exactly is hard to say, as they don’t refer to any specific artists, works,
schools or movements, but I assume they mean such as Abstract Expressionism, Process Art, and thatwhich involves chance procedures or instructions loose enough to yield indeterminate results.
In any case, in line with their blanket dismissal of any ‘rational’ or ‘grounded’ philosophy’s ability
to address contingency, The Medium’s speakers basically reject this sort of work (that explores thecontingency of materials) as insufficiently extreme: feeble ‘neo-romantic’ gestures in the direction ofcontingency. Such nominally open work doesn’t adequately inhabit or do contingency, they say;at best it weakly represents or celebrates it.
How might we think contingency via art and writing appropriately, then? Another contributor,
critic and philosopher Reza Negarestani, reasons that any claim to openness is always limited
because the artist admits only as much openness into the working procedure as he or she can ‘afford’.
Real contingency has no such convenient threshold. ‘We cannot simply be open to contingency,’
he says, ‘because our openness and consequently our modes of interaction are determined by ourcapacities.’ So again: how to productively insinuate ourselves into situations beyond our capacities
and expectations, to overreach ourselves?
Negarestani argues for what he describes as a decisively ‘twisted’ interaction with form, counterintuitively insisting that this must be based not on openness but closure. If ‘romantic’ open works
merely domesticate contingency, a sufficiently ‘closed’ equivalent within strict bounds (a goal and adeadline, a context and an audience) might be organized in such a way as to offer itself up as
what he calls ‘a good meal’ or ‘genuine prey’ for its proper expression. In this scenario, circumstances
are let loose on the as-yet-unrealized work that registers them as a kind of recording device, like aseismograph.40
What he’s getting at is that it’s less useful to instigate a piece of work with no ostensible goal beyond
the superficial ‘playing out’ of its materials (e.g. paint running ‘autonomously’ down a canvas, or asculpture deliberately set up to decay) than to embark on a project that, while undertaken in viewof a definite goal, is susceptible and supple enough to register events along the way. This implies asense of the plot thickening – an artistic sixth sense that confirms things are going awry and so headedin the right wrong direction.
Each of the The Medium of Contingency’s contributors run with Negarestani’s notion of twisting time
as a means of cultivating or ‘flirting with’ the illogical and unpredictable. Former stockbroker Elie
Ayache approaches the subject from the ostensibly remote point of view of financial forecasting, yet
his thoughts align entirely with both Mackay’s general philosophical remarks, and Negarestani’s
application of the same in view of making art.

	
  
39

There are significant echoes here of Set Theory and Incompleteness, i.e. the impossibility of transcending a ‘subjective’situation in order to get an ‘objective’ handle on it, as discussed in §3.11.

40

This is somewhat analogous to design maxims like ‘drawing form from content’ and ‘letting the material speak’. To let
an object ‘design itself’ implies disregarding preconceptions and personal preferences. Negarestini’s artistic closure canthus be thought equivalent to a design task with an upfront brief and an end product in view, and ‘thinking contingency’ ascommensurate with the way the peculiarities of given material influence formal decisions along the way; a designer in thissense facilitates rather than directs.

	
  

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Ayache states that while market speculation is typically based on probabilistic models, which on firstglance seems reasonable enough, financial markets are in fact radically unpredictable. On reflection,
this is obvious enough, because any degree of predictability would automatically undermine the pointof ‘speculating futures’ in the first place. Drawing on his first-hand experience, Ayache insists thatthe predictive models typically employed are, without exception, completely useless (because a modelthat predicts, say, the ‘volatility’ of a derivative value would properly require a second-level measureof volatility itself – the volatility of volatility – and so on unto infinity). Simply put, the ground ourhabitually deterministic way of thinking assumes must be in place simply isn’t there; what we take to
be a system is in fact completely arbitrary; market traders literally don’t know what they’re doing.
The situation therefore epitomizes contingency, and the 2008 global financial collapse is but one
brutally clear and recent consequence of the flawed philosophy that continues to underpin the industry
even in its ostensible recovery. Precisely: the inability to think contingency.
It goes without saying that the mechanisms of global finance are a defining aspect of the present
condition; and if the tools for thinking around and about those mechanisms – the philosophical tools –are flawed and inadequate, there’s no chance of using them constructively to better ends.
Again, this echoes the anti-foundational foundation of Meillassoux’s metaphysics. In After Finitude
Meillassoux insists that contingency is a priori, that it presupposes being. His mentor Alain Badiou
laid the ground for this thinking in Being and Event (1988), in which an event is defined as something
beyond anticipation or prediction.41 The market according to Ayache is thus a perpetual event –permanently in a state of surprise or novelty. Inasmuch as it can’t be anticipated or predicted, Badiou’ssense of event inverts the regular ‘law’ of cause and effect. Like a police procedural, it’s an effect that
retroactively makes apparent a line of causality, a ‘backwards narrative’. This chimes, too, with
Ayache’s ultimate example of thinking contingency: writing.
Writing ... is something that is beyond probability and ‘states of theworld’. It’s something where the writer can really throw himself into
a process of writing, blindly, so to speak – and one of my favourite
expressions is that he is then traversed by contingency, so he almost
surprises himself with what he is writing. To me, that’s writing. Even
though you may have thought about it, and you had planned it ... there
are thoughts that you can only have through the material process ofwriting.42

The phenomenon of realizing what you think through writing (as opposed to first realizing what you
think, then writing it down – which is also to say writing as a way of thinking) is familiar enough toanyone who essays on a regular basis. Ayache pinpoints the essence of this process by suggesting thatsuch ‘real’ writing involves (here’s that word again) twisting our usual habitual ideas of chronology
and teleology; in other words, by teasing or tricking or distorting or destabilizing our regular,
unidirectional sense of time and purpose to the extent that written ‘effects’ amount to literary ‘events’,reverse-engineering unanticipated lines of pending reason.43 Italo Calvino wrote something similar
about this catalytic capacity of writing in more technical terms:

	  Did we say that literature (...) is merely the permutation of a
restricted number of elements and functions? But is the tension inliterature not continually striving to escape from this finite
number? Does it not continually attempt to say something it cannot
say, something it does not know, and that no one could ever know?

41

Badiou also provocatively violates the foundational axiom of Set Theory by claiming that an event is a set that contains itself.
Inasmuch as this notion asserts its own sovereign logic beyond the established laws of metaphysics, it recursively qualifies as an
event itself, thereby neatly (and smugly) proving its own point. See also chapter 1, fn. 35.

42
43

Ibid., p. 24.

This is an idea native to gestalt psychology: wholes are not conceived as simply a sum of pre-existing parts; rather, a wholegenerates its parts. Otherwise put, the parts didn’t exist as such prior to the perception of the whole.

	
  

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A thing cannot be known when the words and concepts used to say it
have not been used in that position, not yet arranged in that order,
with that meaning.44

In sum, we can say that artists who coax contingency to traverse their work via a necessarily twisted
writing are akin to those speculators who successfully play the market. Traders in financial futures
literally write the market in real-time, reflexively generating the conditions for their own work in a way
no analytic model can account for. ‘It has nothing to do with knowledge’, insists Ayache; ‘To be atrader, you have to be a performer, like on a stage.’
As an entrepreneur of financial modelling well aware that predicting futures is a contradiction in terms,
Ayache’s aptly twisted conclusion is that it remains necessary to produce the old useless probability
models – not in order to apply them, but to go beyond them. A probability model that models what not
to do: a second-level purpose, a meta-model, perhaps, but a model nonetheless.

5.7: THE MAFIA GAME: A ‘MATTER OF CONCERN’
This section is adapted from a preface and an afterword to ‘The Original Mafia Rules’ – an article that
relates the mechanics of a game initially developed as a psychological experiment. The game’s rules,
which are summarized below and widely available online, were published verbatim in Bulletins of The
Serving Library largely to provide an excuse for this brief essay, which diverts the original point of thegame to other ends.45
The Mafia Game is a rudimentary role-play game. Conceived as an academic experiment by Russian
psychologist Dimma Davidoff in the late 1980s, it was designed to show how the economy ofknowledge plays out in an enclosed community. In the bastardized, popularized version that has
circulated as a party game since, this ‘knowledge’ amounts to who’s Mafia and who’s not.
Here’s a quick account of how it works. First, everyone in the group receives a secret note thatassigns them the role of either Mafioso (= corrupt) or Citizen (= honest). Then the game cycles throughproxy days and nights. At night everyone shuts their eyes, then, at the word of a communallyappointed God who oversees the proceedings, Mafia awake (open their eyes) while Citizens remain
asleep, and silently choose together (by eye contact and frantic pointing) one Citizen to knock off.
They sleep again, all players awake, and God announces the brutal death, which leads into much
speculation and accusation regarding the possible perpetrator. There’s a round of voting to decide
on a prime suspect Mafioso assassin (which involves a lot of double- and triple-bluffing by the actual
Mafia). Finally a verdict is reached and the accused lynched, even if innocent. Then the whole thing
starts over: another night, another killing, more speculation, accusation, voting and lynching.
The aim of the game, depending on your proxy allegiance, is for all Mafia to eliminate all citizens
without being identified and killed off themselves; or conversely, for the citizens to successfully identify
all Mafia and hang the lot. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik describes the game as demonstrating‘the many and pressing kinds of double-bind logic that fill a social group if its members suspect there
are enemies within it’. He continues:
The ostensible pleasure of the game lies in testing your own skills as
a dissembler and as a spotter of dissemblers – in lying and spotting
liars. Both eager cooperation and absolute paranoia are essential to
the strategic game. Yet the really fascinating thing about Mafia isseeing how much pure irrationality lingers in its play, how little
real deduction and how much sheer panic govern its conduct. The game

	
  
44

Calvino, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, op. cit., p. 18.

45

See: Dimma Davidoff, ‘The Original Mafia Rules’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #2, 2011.

	
  

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quickly breaks down, as social groups will, into small circles ofbelief, which become lynch mobs of distrust on the next turn.46
Over the past decade or so, Bruno Latour has propagated a distinction between ‘matters of fact’ and‘matters of concern’. 47 Fundamentally, he’s out to demolish the bedrock faith in scientifically proven‘facts’ constituent of Modern-era, Enlightenment-based thinking. Because scientific assertions are
based on experiments performed in a vacuum (both literally and metaphorically), he argues that while
useful for debunking all manner of long-held myths, their ‘truth’ is ultimately a distortion of reality,
too. In other words, facts are fundamentally flawed precisely because they are conceived in detached
and autonomous circumstances, and so remain a pernicious means of perceiving – and dealing with –the world at large.
Latour calls instead for the facility to grasp not isolated objects but the profoundly open andunpredictable relations among interconnected things, meaning the constantly shifting scenographies ofinterests, accidents, contradictions, conspiracies, changes in fortune, allegiance, currency, weather,and so on. And while, amid the ever-increasing prevalence and visibility of networks, we are surely
becoming better at apprehending these relations – and their knock-on effects – and the effects of
those effects – he maintains that our ways of looking are still way too grounded in the old mode. In atalk titled ‘A Cautious Prometheus’ (2008), he notes how the fallacy of facts is reflected in the oldmodels of modelling, from architectural renderings and mechanical blueprints to scale models andprototypes, from perspective drawing and projective geometry to Computer-Aided Design and Google
Maps.48 In their various distillations, flattenings and abstractions, he says, all bear a marked lack ofresemblance to the phenomena they purport to represent; ultimately, their simulations or ‘gatherings’
are less utopian than simply atopic. Hence his persistent call for new ways of drawing things together– making things public not from a resolutely objective, external point of view, but from within and while
going with the flow.
Offered here as a thought experiment, then, the mundane Mafia Game is a simple, precarious and notaltogether serious means to set up a different kind of vantage – of what openness and contingency
look like from the inside. Contrary to the usual omniscience of the bird’s- or God’s-eye view common
to the modelling techniques listed above, when called upon to play either Honest or Mafioso, one’s
perspective of the whole encounter is always from within, as an invested player. Indeed, as a proxyparticipant of what’s gaining ground as Object-Oriented Philosophy, Latour often speaks of ostensibly
inert phenomena in terms of fully-loaded ‘betting’ and ‘gambling’ ‘agents’ and ‘actants’. It’s not
surprising, then, that easy-assembly role-play seems an appropriate format to witness how a given
situation’s ‘object’ plays out – or perhaps orients itself.
Crucially, the game’s short-lived alliances, enmities, suspicions, accusations, and protests assemble
and collapse not only within a single round or single game, but with exponential complexity from one
game to the next, and from one day or week to the next. When a recurring group of players becomeacquainted with both each other and the game, and as burgeoning real-world relationships overflow
into the fictional scenography, negotiations become perceptibly contaminated and, naturally enough,entropic. As the game’s founder Dimma Davidoff proclaims: ‘The third game is great.’ Beyond that,
who knows?
Davidoff further asserts the enigmatic and wholly Latourian injunction that ‘Players are free to introduce
new procedures during the game, but no one has to follow them unless s/he finds their usage at thatmoment reasonable.’ Such chronic, baffling contingency sounds a lot like that recounted by Latour in
his summation of ‘The Year in Climate Controversy’ for Artforum in December 2010. He writes:

	
  
46

Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate [2006] (New York: Vintage, 2007), p. 245.

47

See §1.8.

48

Bruno Latour, ‘A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter
Sloterdijk)’, lecture at the conference Networks of Design, Falmouth, UK, 3 September, 2008, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/
articles/article/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL.pdf.

	
  

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of course, there is no single institution able to cover, oversee,
dominate, manage, handle, or simply trace an issue of such shape andscope. Even a summit of all the nations of the earth, preceded by themost strident media campaigns, could not digest an issue so
intractable and so enmeshed in contradictory interests as this one ...
myriad changes at all levels of existence, from cars to clothes, fromarchitecture to industry, from agriculture to sewage. How could we
imagine a global agreement amid so many entangled interests?49
With this in mind, potential players are pointed in the direction of Wikipedia’s Mafia (party game) page
to witness the extent of supplementary roles that have been added to the game’s countlesscommercial and hobbyist adaptations over the past couple of decades. Examples include the Teenage
Werewolf who must say the word ‘werewolf’ at least once each round, the Dentist who may select anyother player at night and remove all of their teeth to prevent them speaking during the following day,and the Village Idiot whose only objective is to convince the rest of the town to kill him.
Davidoff dismisses such additions as superfluous, merely distracting from the game’s basic coefficient:‘The only knowledge in the game is Mafia connections, everything else is artificial.’ And yet Latour
would surely counter that an altogether artificial game is entirely appropriate these days; in fact, implies
a whole other scenario in which the redesign of the game – and the ability to observe theconsequences of that redesign as and when they happen – and to respond to those consequences insitu – becomes the game itself: The New Mafia Rules.
During the week beginning 18 July, 2011, for instance, a group of us introduced our own new
character, a ‘Rupert Murdoch’ who, in addition to his/her initial designation as Honest or Mafioso, isalso privvy to the nightly carnage. First thing next morning, Murdoch is required to deliver the news to
the whole community, the veracity of which depends entirely on his/her daily discretion and/or whim.
Ultimately and uniquely, Murdoch’s aim is neither to eliminate nor safeguard the rest of the players,
only to perpetuate the game – and his or her presence in it – for as long as is practicably possible.

5.8: VOCAL REGISTERS: THREE FILMS
The Medium of Contingency articulates in depth what that phrase ‘work in movement’ insinuates:
total immersion in a working process in view of manifesting precarious, uncertain and surprising
events. Moreover, as the book’s various thinkers seriously attempt to articulate the point of working
this way, it ends up markedly more generous and engaging than the actual artworks in the exhibition
that spawned their discourse in the first place. By all accounts, these works appear to have leaned
heavily on the conference, book, and other gallery paraphernalia during the run of the show, whilebarely communicating much of anything at all in and of themselves.
This gap in communication is clear from a discussion following the talks also included in the book.
Someone in the audience asks what a particular piece of sculpture by Alison Knowles – anunremarkable piece of worn-down driftwood – is ‘doing’ in the show exactly, i.e. in what way it
connects with the ideas put forward by the speakers. Curator Miguel Abreu responds by accounting
for something like contingency in Knowles’s working process (she scavenges objects and lives withthem for a time; their form gets refined and accumulates meaning), while Robin Mackay concurs
that such objects serve as ‘points of reference’ for the general ideas under consideration, hooks onwhich to hang thoughts. But both only serve to confirm that the work relies on the crutch of attendant
speaking and writing – which is only to say, it’s as dumb and in need of assistance as mostcontemporary art these days.50

	
  
49
50

Bruno Latour, ‘The Year in Climate Controversy’, Artforum, December 2010.

To be clear: I have no problem with the idea that the conference and book perform this ‘explanatory’ work per se, i.e. that they
are constituent parts of a greater whole, only that the formats are unevenly weighted. In the usual scheme of things, individual

	
  

	
  

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By dumb I mean to imply ‘silent’, ‘inscrutable’, ‘recondite’, ‘obscure’ and so on – and to push for the
opposite. I’m vouching for a kind of work that, while, sharing The Medium of Contingency’s ambition
to produce work that ‘overreaches itself’ in order to be usefully ‘traversed by contingency’, is equallyas concerned to communicate this premise and its outcome as clearly as possible without immediate
recourse to what artist Joseph Grigley calls ‘exhibition prosthetics’. In other words, I’m after a kind ofwork that effectively ‘captions itself’ to the extent that any necessary elucidation is no longer discrete
but constituent.51
Given this predilection for clarity, in the case of most of the artworks recounted in this thesis, the raw
material set up to be worked over by circumstance is usually primarily verbal (i.e. rather than graphic)
language. To recall Negarestani’s metaphors, the artists responsible provide a good meal forcontingency: the work lays bare language in order that it gets appropriately twisted during the working
process, and registers aspects of the contemporary condition (e.g. social mores, nascent technologies).
And this is especially potent when trying to deal as clearly as possible with some timely subject
that is by no means clear-cut. Displacement is a common theme here – between humans and machines,
between past and present, between remembering and forgetting, and other such polarities that get
refracted in equally displaced forms of language.
Here are three recent video works that seem to me to ‘think contingency’ in a far more spirited andself-evident way than the comparatively inert work that that made up the From New York to London
and Back exhibition:

French artist Aurélien Froment’s short film The Fourdrinier Machine Interlude comprises asingle slow tracking shot across a working replica of one of the world’s earliest papermaking machines,
as raw pulp is being transformed into ready product. Patented by Henry Fourdrinier in 1800, thiswas the first machine to fully mechanize a process that had been done by hand since as early as 8BC.
The film records a 1960s model on display in a museum in the vicinity of Basel, Switzerland, where
this particular iteration of the paper-making process was originally invented. The camera matches thelanguid pace of the machine as the incipient product is carried through an extremely elegant assemblyof rollers and gears.
‘Interlude’ has a double meaning here – a literal one in the sense that the seven-and-a-half minutefilm was originally produced to be inserted between other films during the 2010 Basel Art Fair,
and an allusive one in the sense that the film temporarily isolates the machine in order to consider its
cultural backstory and effects. There are a few versions of the same film. In the one I saw, the imageis accompanied by the voice of what sounds like a high-school-age girl with a soft Irish accent.52
She recounts a brief history of paper-making generally and the introduction of Fourdrinier’s machine	
  artworks and gallery exhibitions are clearly presented as primary, and talks, books, etc., as supplements or afterthoughts.
The reasons for maintaining this hierarchy in a market-driven mileu are obvious enough, but it’s worth noting that a crop of
fairly recent independent institutions seem to share a common interest in levelling or even inverting the usual structure.
In these cases, what are usually considered as surround or support – architecture, events, publishing, talks – are no longer
subservient but at least as substantial as artworks or exhibitions. See for instance: castillo/corrales in Paris; Kunstverein in
Amsterdam; Support Structure in Birmingham; Yale Union in Portland, Oregon; Kadist Art Foundation in Paris and San
Francisco; and Reena Spaulings, The Artists Institute, Triple Canopy, Primary Information, and Cabinet in New York.
51
52

See chapter 7.

Multiple versions of the film have been made with different people reading approximately the same script, including a French
version read by a young boy, and an Italian one read by the Italian translator. These changes clearly and deliberately affect thefilm’s broader allusions.

	
  

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specifically, along with a few offshoot anecdotes concerning such as the machine’s influence on labour
organization, the division of the working day into three eight-hour periods (labour, recreation, sleep),and the rapid abundance of diverse types of paper (for writing, blotting, typing, tracing, filtering,making cigarettes, and so on). The commentary highlights the discrepancy between what such amachine meant when first invented, and what it came to mean in light of the social and economic
forces it significantly affected – including its current status as a museum piece.
But just as prominent is the gap between the sort of professional voiceover we’d normally expect toaccompany such footage, and the girl’s amateur attempt. It takes a few beats longer to register that thegirl is actually reading at the threshold of her comprehension. She has a hard time articulating longer
words, technical terms and foreign names, for instance, as well as some of the trickier bits of grammar
and intonation. She also speeds up and slows down, trying to race to the end as soon as possible but
continually tripped up by the text. And so it dawns that the reader is in the process of becoming literate
herself, made possible in no small measure by the product she’s describing – not to mention the endlessinertia of the fact that the paper made on such machines was used to produce widely disseminatedbooks that help make better versions of all those products, etc. etc. This inadvertent literacy-in-action
is insinuated in more subtle ways, too. She doesn’t seem particularly mindful, for instance, of how her
mumbled, rushed reading will come across to an audience, yet the film has the odd effect of projecting
a time when she’ll be more lucid, having likely absorbed such skills – along with other aspects ofsocial conformity.
The Fourdrinier Machine Interlude’s conspicuously involuted narrative, verité recording, and othersuch self-reflexive traits are by no means gratuitous. Rather, they reinforce aspects of the subject.
We can clearly hear the sound of the (paper) script being turned and creased in the girl’s hands,
for instance, and such moments seem incidental rather than contrived – accidents and allusions happily
absorbed into the final outcome. This seems true of the film’s closing moments, too, when the camera
suddenly breaks from its regular tracking shot as if momentarily distracted, then comes to rest on a bare
patch of wall as the young narrator simultaneously trails off into the museum’s natural surroundings:... located in a former paper mill in the area of St Albantal.
On one side, it extends off the Birs River, which rises at the foot of
the Pierre-Pertuis pass in the Swiss Jura Mountains. On the otherside, just below the mill, it re-joins the Rhine, and reaches the sea
further to the North.

Remembering that this picturesque region is also where the film was first projected, in that installment
at least the ‘interlude’ has come full-circle – further duplicating the self-sustaining inertia of thebreathtaking drive of literacy itself.

Irish artist Gerard Byrne has based a number of pieces of work on ‘1984 and Beyond’, the title of aroundtable discussion between a group of leading science fiction writers that was published in two
consecutive issues of Playboy in 1963. Luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Rod
Serling share realworld predictions on diverse topics including space exploration, new technologies,
sexual attitudes, drugs, the Cold War, and the daily life of millennial man. Playboy’s questions aim two
decades ahead in homage to George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984, though the writers’ responses are
considerably more optimistic – or naive – than Orwell’s bleak prognosis. Algis Budrys, for instance,
confidently predicts that ‘our children will doubtless be able to buy a ticket to the Moon on a civilian
ship, and it’s quite likely the process will be as simple as buying an airline seat today. The per-mile
cost will likely be a fraction of present airline fares’. Meanwhile, Frederik Pohl asserts that ‘if in 1984

	
  

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you feel depressed it will be because you want to feel depressed; if you don’t, you’ll need only open
your medicine cabinet to feel just about any way you want, including erotic to the nth power.’
The most substantial piece Byrne has made using ‘1984 and Beyond’ as source material is an
eponymous 40-minute video. It was shot at two locations in The Netherlands that approximatein (late modernist) architecture what the writers were after in their prospective fiction: inside the vast,
high-ceilinged lobbies of the 1971 Provinciehuis in Den Bosch; and outside the 1964 sculpture
pavilion at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, amid looming Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore
sculptures that seem at once archaic and futuristic. In Byrne’s adaptation, the writers hang out incongenial conversation drawn from the Playboy article, loitering in groups of twos and threes as if
talking shop on a weekend retreat.
What started out as an extended conversation, transcribed then presumably edited, rearranged andrefined for publication in print in a hugely popular magazine with a relatively short life expectancy,
is now reconsidered, recompressed and rearranged for other channels 40 years on. Byrne started
by staging a public reading of the Playboy piece, in which the actors developed their charactersfor the pending film. Then a condensed shooting script was assembled from the live event, its various
sequences shot on location, and the footage finally assembled into a film to be screened in sundryart venues. Byrne highlights the discrepancies between these various shifts, so the film becomes asmuch about the process and politics of editing and re-enactment as its nominal subject, the future.
Like Froment’s Fourdrinier, the thematic dislocations in 1984 and Beyond – slippages across time(1949, 1963, 1984, 2004) and between media (literature, architecture, film, art) – are cannily refracted
in the film’s form. Where the Playboy article simply projects ahead a couple of decades, acontemporary viewer of Byrne’s restaging is naturally well aware of watching from the actual beyond
that the writers are imagining with such misplaced conviction. Just as jarring is the film’s cartoonish
aspect – all chunky cardigans, polo necks, pipes and heavy spectacles, compounded by the distancing
effect of heavily-accented Dutch actors reciting English words originally spoken by mostly American
writers. In all these ways, the film acts out the project’s skewed genealogies.
It adds up to something like a parody of the suspension of disbelief, which, in turn, seems to mirror
the sci-fi writers’ wayward imaginings. Even allowing for the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to believe
they really believe what they claim to believe in 1964. Likewise, the contemporary viewer of Byrne’s
restaging can’t ignore the fact that the set, the actors, and the acting are all a bit much. And so
Byrne’s transforms the original roundtable into a markedly arch piece of work, reflecting the writers’
fantastical imaginings in the fantasy of its own mise en scène, as duplicitous as the genre underconsideration: ‘science’ in its ostensible claim to forensic re-enactment; ‘fiction’ in the way it flaunts
its artificiality. Once again, this curious marriage of form and content seems to have happened less bydesign, more as the welcome result of a loose, searching process.

Frances Stark’s My Best Thing is a feature-length digital cartoon first made for the 2011 Venice
Biennial, a self-proclaimed ‘real life novel’ made using a rudimentary CGI software called Xtranormalthat generates 3D-effect avatars akin to plastic Playmobil men and women. The fragmentary story
unfolds over ten-and-a-half brief episodes via a series of exchanges between Stark’s protagonist double
and two (purportedly) Italian men she meets online at a live video sex/chat site. These comic alter-egos
interact against a lurid green cyber-backdrop, nominal cipher of a neutral ‘possibility space’ outside
quotidian coordinates that, as Mark Godfrey has noted, serves to emphasize the characters’ melancholy

	
  

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‘lost-ness’.53 Private parts obscured by absurdly chaste fig leaves or underpants, the pre-and post‘coital’ banter between the Adams and Eve is variously flirtatious, intimate, distracted, hystericaland profane, and the outcome unusually compulsive. This is partly because of its alarmingly candid
dialogue, but also due to the dissonance between the work’s emphatically childish graphics andemphatically adult subject matter.
Equally as magnetic is the way the film perpetually sidetracks from the relatively instant gratificationof casual virtual sex into slower-burn philosophical concerns. These mostly mine the discomfiting
contradictions inherent in a contemporary art career. In one sequence, for instance, the limits of Stark’s
critical agency and audience are offset against one of her virtual partners’ brutally practicalparticipation in Italian street riots then underway. Later, the characters contemplate why so many of thephilosophically inclined writers they admire end up as suicides.
In oblique homage to Federico Fellini’s 1963 movie 8½, Stark’s equally im-proper ‘novel’ cycles
through fascination, obsession, frustration, and ultimately disillusion with virtual sexual relations.
Initially pursued as relief from intellectual reflection and so time away from work, Stark’s recreationalsex is inadvertently processed into work regardless. Vicarious life is transformed into a reflective story
rife with equivalences and paradoxes that are simultaneously exhilarating and sad: first, sexual
promiscuity is mirrored in the work’s manifestly Open Source production; second, just as the chat site
is a very public portal to a very intimate exchange, the artwork is a very public exhibition of a very
personal experience; third, old-school copyright is flouted by excerpting from Fellini’s classic in directcontrast with free-floating music videos and riot footage rechannelled from YouTube.
In this way, the cultural issues thrown up by the nascent technology of the sex site and its attendant
links are less explicated than registered: the hegemony of English as lingua franca of global capitalism,
the ambiguous boundaries of domestic and social spheres; the push and pull of desire andresponsibility; the changing shape of sexual mores; the limits of connectivity, self-exploitation,
artificial enhancement, diminishing attention, and so on.
My Best Thing sticks a further flag in the zeitgeist by assimilating the distracted and distracting speed
and compression of contemporary writing – all the acronyms, abbreviations, condensations, coinings
and misspellings familiar from emailing, type-chatting and texting, further compounded by the
Italian avatars’ bad grammar via online translations. The ubiquitous LOL meme is as proliferate andtelling as the rest of the queasily current cultural subject matter flaunted here. Familiar inanity lightens
this distinctly heavy artwork, but the deeper you get into My Best Thing, the more sinister thoseincessant LOLs become. John Kelsey recently described the meme as marking a double loss oflanguage and of laughter that, disembodied and abbreviated, ‘seems to reveal both the ecstasy andanxiety of our nonstop displacement within social media’.54 By force of repetition, LOL’s compressed
convenience reveals the absence of actual laughter it supposedly signals – ‘ever more applicable indirect correlation to the degree that we overkill and wear it out’.55 It’s not a laughing matter.
Stark has often quoted the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s frustration that an audience neverperceives more than a few ‘accursed parts’ in lieu of the glorious whole of the artwork that the artist
alone has in mind. But she seems to have wrested a solution with My Best Thing by meeting theanxious, overcrowded, distracted conditions of the Venice Biennial head-on. It was produced as a cycleof A.D.D.-friendly parts, each trailing a bite-size summary as one minor cliffhanger after anothercoaxes the viewer to stay the distance, and the piece’s considerable power lies in this rapid stop-startpace. It’s an expert editing job that captures the coefficient of addiction and boredom characteristic ofvanguard communication technologies, hyper-designed to nurture the state of being forever on the

	
  
53

Mark Godfrey, ‘Twenty-First century Art’ in Jennifer Papararo and Kitty Scott, eds., Frances Stark: My Best Thing(Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2012).

54

John Kelsey, ‘Next-Level Spleen’, Artforum, September 2012.

55

Ibid.

	
  

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verge of turning away, switching off, but never quite mustering the willpower to do so. And so in spiteof itself, My Best Thing ends up an ominously hypnotic and highly dubious fix of art.

5.9: ‘URBANE IMAGE’, UR-EXAMPLE
In his 1980 book Collected Words, 56 Richard Hamilton recalls how in the early 1960s, in the wake of
having painted what were later recognized as some of the founding works of Pop Art like Hommage a
Chrysler Corp (1957) and $he (1958–61), he was invited to contribute to the second issue of ICA’s
short-lived Living Arts magazine. He staged an elaborate tableau conceived as a self-portrait to form awraparound cover: an aerial photo of what would become a stereotypical Pop assemblage comprisingwhat appears to be the top of a rocket ship, an open-topped Ford Thunderbrid, an American football
player, a half-undressed model, a well-stocked refrigerator, a Dualit toaster, and other conspicuously
modern appliances on a vivid pink ground.
The same issue also included Hamilton’s short text, ‘Urbane Image’. This was only the second piece hehad published; the first was on Duchamp. In the preamble to Collected Words he writes that he‘persevered’ with writing because ‘the things I wished to express were not likely to be said by anyone
else’:
I felt it necessary to justify what I was doing, or at least describe
how certain things had come about, even though I was very consciousthat written explanations of paintings by the painter must reveal a
doubt in his ability to make himself understood by the graphic means:
I said to myself often enough, if the paintings don’t make sense inthemselves, words won’t help them.
Perhaps it was impatience, or maybe a distrust in other people’s
capacity, or willingness, to read the personal symbols that an artist
has necessarily to create. It could have been an over-eager wish to beunderstood by others when I barely understood what I was trying to domyself, and writing things out certainly made things clearer for me.
Even so, it is unlikely that I would have made the effort had it notbeen for requests.57

Hamilton was therefore partly writing to bridge some gap in communication he thought the graphic
work was incapable of achieving alone, and also in order to realize in concrete terms what he was up
to on a more intuitive and ineffable level. It took an outside request (an invitation, a commission)
to force the issue – to channel his work through a text-based medium that, compared to the relatively
hermetic context of a one-off gallery show, would be widely multiplied and disseminated. In terms ofreach, the stakes were considerably raised.
‘Urbane Image’ comprises 12 super-compressed paragraphs of heady, clipped, conspicuously
American jargon. It begins:
Chrysler Vice-President Virgil Exner models the plump detailing of thesleek ‘flight sweep’ – lining the crustacean recesses of Plymouth’s
headlamp hood with mirror-like chrome and giving it the dark
brilliance that even Life and Look can’t press onto the pages of theirmultimillion editions.58

	
  
56

Richard Hamilton, ‘Urbane Image’ [1963], Collected Words (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 7.

57

Ibid.

58

Ibid., p. 49.

	
  

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The piece then continues to inventorize – big business, automobiles, advertising, movies, domestic
appliances – as if rapidly clicking through a carousel of slides:
She’s built (37, 22, 36), sociable (show a record player and a coupleof highballs), intelligent (use a record sleeve with Zen in thetitle), available through the Bell system (Princess handset)59

And it ends, inevitably enough for 1963, in outer space, with a final word in homage to the final wordof Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘yes’:
As the lens zooms slowly out they recede, minute against the immensevoid of Space. He murmurs ‘Are you ready?’ Shafts of golden lightradiate from them as we await the immaculately dubbed response:‘Affirmative.’60

Particularly notable is the extent to which the text assimilates its subject matter’s idiosyncratic
language. Its terminology, semantics and syntax are all streamlined and immaculate, each line a fullmeal compressed into a single pill: ‘Howard Hughes/Hawks found their answer at the drawing board’;‘The loaded, tight shapes that feed Exner and Earl are brought full CirclOform by the ad-man’;‘Passing UNO, NYC, NY, USA (point a)’; ‘Aluminium is this century’s colour’. The phrasing iselated, infectious; clearly it was a joy to write.
But the piece is actually a triptych. Trailing the main body, a glossary details the array of timely
cultural and technical references (Jane Russell, Jello, Varaflame, Depth of field) – a list so extensivethat it ends up twice as long as the body text being annotated. Then comes a corollary graphic glossary,a set of images (Michelangelo’s God, a Bug-Eyed Monster, a Playboy Playmate) that crop up
elsewhere in Hamilton’s past, present and future work. The whole ensemble is one big repository ofideas, a kind of multi-dimensional manifesto without the format’s usual self-righteousness.
‘Urbane Image’ is thus a prescient and remarkably accomplished instance of the sort of intrinsic
self-captioning I’m arguing for here – to such a degree that it virtually caricatures the idea.
Moreover, the piece dissolves art, writing and graphic design into a single compound that defies easy
categorization. Disseminated via a magazine, it precludes the distracting value mechanisms of thegallery world. And most instructively of all, Hamilton recounts that ‘interest in my work was
established among a small group of London cognoscente solely by this publication and it produced
an invitation to exhibit that had been refused me for eight years.’61 As such, ‘Urbane Image’
not only captions itself; it equally serves to retroactively annotate Hamilton’s earlier work – and byextension that which came later. This happenstance attempt to explain the relatively ambiguous,coded forms of his graphic work in the relatively definite, unequivocal terms of written language
was a useful point of entry – a primer and a guarantee:
And I said, ‘Why, after all these years, are you interested in mystuff?’ And he said, ‘Well, I saw that article you wrote for Living
Arts and I thought it was very interesting.’ ‘What about it madeyou change your mind?’ And he said, ‘Before I read that, I didn’tknow you were serious.’62

Inadvertently, Hamilton laid the foundations for others to appreciate the work. And because ‘Urbane
Image’ attempts to set down in words what the graphic works attempt with visual forms, inasmuch as

	
  
59

Ibid.

60

Ibid., p. 50.

61

Ibid., p. 7.

62

Quoted in: Michael Bracewell, Re-make/Re-model (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 102.

	
  

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the two are consistent, the common language is apprehended rather than interpreted, grasped rather
than explained. ‘Urbane Image’ circumvents the regular path of critical appreciation written at aremove, i.e. third-party confirmation or paid opinion. It articulates a body of work on its own terms,
as Hamilton acknowledges: ‘I managed to achieve in that text something that was the equivalent of
the paintings.’63

5.10: CODA
Giorgio Agamben closes his ‘Notes on Gesture’ in Means Without Ends with a short meditation on
the word ‘gag’, initially in the most literal sense of ‘something that could be put in your mouth tohinder speech’.64 The gag is a device, he writes, that directs attention away from what is being said
towards what cannot be said; and by temporarily suspending the possibility of language, the gag points
to the phenomenon of language as such, and by implication to what cannot be said. ‘Every great
philosophical text’, he concludes, ‘is the gag exhibiting itself, being-in-language itself as a gigantic
loss of memory, as an incurable speech defect.’65
Agamben’s metaphor recalls the American artist Paul Chan’s oddly affirmative description of art as
trying to say something while choking, i.e. the simultaneous struggle to breathe and express the factthat you can’t breathe, ‘the urgent play of shapes and colours and lines and spaces and sounds thatmatter most when something is stuck in your throat.’66 It bears repeating: an attempt to speak (or write)that deliberately draws attention to the nature of that attempt as much as what the speaker (or writer)is apparently attempting to say (or write).
Where we have spoken openly we have revealed nothing, but where wehave written in code we have spoken the truth.67

Back in The Open Work, Eco contrasts contemporaneous French Structuralism with what he calls‘serial thinking’. The two approaches are not incommensurate, he says, but polar opposites. Where theStructuralist identifies and uncovers already existing and increasingly elemental ‘codes’, the ‘serial
thinker’ forges and realizes his or her own new ‘codes’ in the making:All messages call into question their code; every act of words
constitutes a discussion of language to which it gives life. In its
extreme sense this means that every message postulates its own code,that every work of art is the linguistic foundation of itself, thediscussion of its own poetic system. It releases itself from the bonds
which previously claimed to define and circumscribe it: every work of
art is thus the key for its own reading ... The effect of serial

	
  
63

Ibid. Hamilton continued to fold such ‘equivalent’ words into many later works, where they similarly served as something
between self-commentary and tautological reinforcement. As a prime case in point, the 1970 screenprint Kent State, based on
the crude image of a student shot by police in Ohio, USA, the same year, was accompanied by four paragraphs of text that track
the image’s transmission from the original cine-film taken by a bystander through myriad channels – satellite, television,
photograph, scan, silkscreen – to end up in both gallery and book. The text thus describes what’s registered in the extensive
15-colour print, the inevitable degradation and atomization of the image as information is lost the further the image travels fromits source: ‘That evening, the message is re-transmitted as part of a BBC news broadcast to be detected by a TV receiver;information is decoded and divided among three guns in its cathode ray tube. They spurt out streams of electrons which excite, tovarying intensities, spots distributed evenly in triads over the surface of the tube.’.

64

Giorgio Agamben, op. cit., p. 58.

65

Ibid., p. 60.

66

Chan, ‘The Spirit of Recession’, op. cit , p. 12.

67

Seth Price, ‘Dispersion’, op. cit. (unpaginated).

	
  

195

thinking is the evolution of codes and the discovery of new codes, nota progressive recoil toward the original foundational code.68

At this point in the thesis it occurs to me that these chapters are similarly ‘serial’, and for the same
reasons. Rather than advancing an argument step by step, they are parallel means – like a line ofChristmas lights in different colours – of generating a more robust, cubist sense of forming-as-a-wayof-thinking. Ideally this composite itself constitutes a change in kind, a transformation, generates its
own new code – and maybe, too, a code of conduct.

	
  
68

Eco, op. cit., p. 246.

	
  

197

Printing the ‘blind proof’ advert/bond/label for Dexter Sinister and Stählemühle’s Black Whisky,
Edinburgh College of Art, 2009

	
  

198

	
  

199

6: BLACK WHISKY AND THE FIRST/LAST NEWSPAPER

The first half of this chapter tells the story of a relatively long-term project on its way to becoming
an actual product, a 12-year ‘German Scotch’ Black Whisky. The second half recalls the relatively
short-term turnaround of a temporary printed broadsheet designed to document the news industry ina moment of crisis. Both emphasize markedly telling production processes.
The whisky developed out of a couple of meetings and a published interview with German publisherturned-distiller Christoph Keller. Christoph had founded the art book imprint Revolver in 1998 andreleased some 470 volumes over the next six years, but along the way became increasingly
disillusioned with the state of both contemporary art and publishing – and particularly the conflation of
the two. Amid this malaise, Revolver had expanded to the extent that burgeoning professionalism had
begun to supersede the amateur reasons for publishing in the first place. ‘(“Amateur”: one wholoves.)’1 In order to resist this inertia, Christoph sold the company in 2004.

6.1: HIGH-END SPIRITS
The snatches of conversation that crop up in this section took place one evening on Christoph’s farm,
Stählemühle, remotely located in the triangle between Stuttgart, Zurich and Lake Constance in Southeastern Germany. The questions were asked by artist Sarah Crowner and myself.2
SB: What does the word ‘publish’ mean to you now, in 2007? I mean, if one party asks another topublish something, what’s being solicited? Money? A distribution network? Some form of caretaking,organizing, enforcement of standards, proofing … or something else; ‘risk’, maybe? None of thevarious parties involved seem sure precisely what their roles are any more, the nature of the division oflabour. Everything’s up for grabs, and naturally everyone wants to claim the prestige of involvement
while doing the least amount of work.
Of course, in the end the real caretaking – I mean literally taking care, worrying over a project, a book,as opposed to ‘organizing’ it in a more disinterested sense – typically defaults to the end of the foodchain where there’s more investment in culture than business; a kind of unconditional love. It’s a grossgeneralization, but I imagine this would ring true to most people involved in arts publishing at the
moment.
CK: Yes, and in the last 20 or 30 years there’s been a related shift from the publisher being the one
who invests, to the whole setup of arts publishing in Europe being subsidized, so it’s always state or
public money. That’s the big difference with the U.S., because every book that’s made in the art
world in Europe is subsidized in one way or other by some form of public money trickling down to thevarious institutions – publishers, galleries and museums. Never directly, of course, and no-one ever
admits it too loudly.
In the case of Revolver, we started with 30,000 Marks from a friend and made eight books with artists
we liked in the first year. We had to do it cheaply, of course, but that stage was paradise. We didn’t
sell anything, and suddenly the money was gone, so we had to change our whole approach. At which
point I started to collaborate with institutions, and realized that the nature of the subsidized funding
directly influences the kinds of books that then get commissioned, the types of artists and subjects.
On the face of it you have a job, but ultimately you’re part of a system to keep people off the street!
In this sense it’s crazy, and a real problem. On the other hand, without that money there wouldn’t be asingle book on art … or, at least, even the smallest book would have to sell for something like 120
Euros if calculated according to real costs.

	
  
1
2

Norman Potter, What is a designer [1969], revised 4th edn. (London: Hyphen, 2002), p. 24.

The full conversation is transcribed here: Stuart Bailey, Sarah Crowner, and Christoph Keller, ‘Right to Burn: a drink with
Christoph Keller’, Dot Dot Dot #14, 2007.

	
  

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Revolver was simply an attempt to counteract the existing situation, and I think we actually achieved
that, more or less, by the time I bailed out. In my opinion, all these big arts publishing houses today
aren’t really publishers at all, precisely because they don’t take any risks – they don’t put money
in books at all, they only work with funding institutions. The only ones that are independently viable
are Taschen, some Phaidon stuff, and a few obvious large-scale catalogues. For the rest, it’s only
about generating marketable contexts, and to a lesser degree intellectual contexts – and though
it’s not necessarily what we like, it does generate a framework.

We met Christoph just as he had sold the company – which subsequently went bankrupt within two
years – and was in the process of moving his family from Frankfurt to the countryside. We werecurious to find out more about this move, as he appeared to be actually realizing something that friends
and colleagues were constantly banging on about. Namely, the possibility of withdrawing from various
contemporary rat races, as discussed in such as Jan Verwoert’s essay ‘Exhaustion & Exuberance:Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform’ that we’d published in Dot Dot Dot #15:3
How can we address the current changes in our societies and lives?
Some say that we have come to inhabit the post-industrial condition –but what does that mean? One thing seems certain: after thedisappearance of manual labour from the lives of most people in theWestern world, we have entered into a culture where we no longer justwork, we perform ... But what would it mean to put up resistanceagainst a social order in which high performance has become a growing
demand, if not a norm? What would it mean to resist the need toperform? Is ‘resistance’ even a useful concept to evoke in thiscontext? 4

Christoph first came across the phrase ‘Right to Burn’ at the foot of an advert for the farm. Like me,
he initially assumed it meant the new owner would inherit the right to raze the building in order torebuild on the land, but later he learned the phrase was local slang for the license to distil bound up
with the terms of the property. The verb ‘to distill’ is Brennen in German, which derives from ‘to burn’(the distillation process involves burning produce.) This license is hard to get and so highly coveted,
not least because farmers are permitted to pay off a considerable proportion of their taxes by supplying
alcohol to the state. The government then (reportedly) puts it to either military or medical use, which
implies a fantastically circular ecology. The process is therefore ferociously regulated. Each distillery,
however ‘amateur’, is closely monitored, obliged to surrender 60% of their net output, and required toundertake production at least once every three years.
As it had been two years since the previous owner of Stählemühle had operated the still, Christoph
was forced to decide immediately whether to attempt to continue using the still in order to maintainthe license. However, being a formidable autodidact and dilettante-enthusiast, rather than work to yield
the cheapest, fastest, low-grade tax-relief product like most of the surrounding farms (moonshine,
basically; not necessarily intended to be drunk at all), he resolved to attempt the opposite: to produce
a high-end alcohol using traditional, laborious methods to process locally-grown organic produce.
In that region of Germany, wheat-based spirits are typically distilled with the sugars of various fruits,
and according to tradition, all aspects of the process ought to be present in the final taste. In otherwords, the drinker of a Williams Pear schnaps – Stählemühle’s first output – ought to be able to taste
the fruit’s journey from tree to ground to still to spirit. In other words, with nothing is lost in translation
as sugars transform into alcohol.

	  3Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion & Exuberance’, op. cit. Shortly after Christoph’s move to the country, in 2006 I organized a gatheringof around 15 people at Stählemühle over a long weekend. Broadly speaking, the idea was to collectively consider Verwoert’scultural diagnosis in a context far removed from the regular schedule of perpetual production. This was effectively the inverse of
the setup we’d contrived for Dot Dot Dot #15 in Geneva, which involved putting Jan and ourselves into a cartoon version of thecondition he was writing about. For more on this see §2.1.

4

Ibid.: 90, 92

	
  

201

By 2006, he was already winning major industry awards.
SC: The process of publishing seems to parallel that of distilling. Do you think of these bottles in thesame way as the books?
CK: The big difference for me is that for all these years we were making books, inevitably giving themaway to people, and the reaction is always, oh yeah, yeah, nice, good, thanks … and that’s it. With abottle of schnaps, on the other hand, people will literally tear it away from me – it’s amazing! How canI get some? I’ll buy a whole box! It’s an immediate, genuine reaction, which is hugely rewarding.
I keep joking about winning these medals that I don’t take too seriously, of course, but sometimes it’s
good to get some kind of objective opinion about what you’re making. It’s quite difficult to know forsure because my nose is not so elaborate. I can evaluate books a lot better than I can schnaps, so it’s
important. Being dilettantes doesn’t stop us wanting to make schnaps at a very high level.
SB: But is that ‘high level’ consonant with Revolver’s approach to publishing? – I mean, in relation towhat you were saying about creating a context that doesn’t exist already: a space, aura, position,community, or however you want to describe it.
CK: With the alcohol it’s a bit different, because the traditions are already in place. Unless I make acompletely new schnaps, which is virtually impossible, the only thing I can do is give it a new context,
with regard to how we make it, then how we present it – to indicate signs of a science or craft, of analchemist tradition and the sheer effort involved. We use old techniques and believe in associatedideas of purity, anyway, so this way of working fits with the recent general interest in organic
production. The only thing I can try to do with the schnaps itself, outside of its presentation, is produce
objective quality.
That’s the big difference with publishing, because if you want to read one of the art books I’ve
published you have to have studied art history. If I gave any of these books to my farming neighbours
they’d immediately ask, How the hell do you make a living out of this? They wouldn’t understand it
because they don’t know about art.
SC: And you don’t have to have an education in alcohol to get the schnaps.
CK: Exactly. You simply don’t have to be an expert. Of course there are schnaps experts and it’s good
if they like it too, but ultimately it’s about this immediacy of you being able to say, yes, I like this one,or no, I don’t like that one so much. Both responses are fine, but it’s the visibility and immediacy of
the reaction that makes the difference. We were just talking about subsidies in European art, butthey’re peanuts compared to subsidies in European farming, which is virtually total and so extreme thatit’s getting to the point where farmers don’t care what they harvest any more. It’s not important tothem because they only get paid for the quantity rather than the quality of whatever they’re cultivating.

6.2: BLACK ART, TRANSPARENT ART
In the wake of this conversation and a couple of schnaps tasting events that we organized together
in New York and Munich, we floated the idea of Dexter Sinister co-producing some particularalcohol with Stählemühle. The idea was to carrying on thinking through the implications of the ideas
in Verwoert’s ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’ essay by pushing them through a concrete production.
This would give us the opportunity to actively query those similarities and differences between
publishing and distilling. With Stählemühle responsible for the distillation, and Dexter Sinister
overseeing its parallel ‘publication’, the idea evolved into our setting up a co-operative investment
scheme, and so we busied ourselves advertising and selling shares in a long-term production. Although
this meant the eventual product was bound to be quite exclusive, i.e. a limited product for a closed
community of shareholders, numerous tangential forms and formats have since spun off the project,including essays, interviews, talks, and so on.
(Although all parties involved have some investment in what Christoph refers to in the interview as
intelligent dilettantism, it’s worth emphasizing that we were always intent on working towards a

	
  

202

product that would at the very least meet the regular standards of what constitutes a decent drink– a plausible product in its own right, not one excused by its dubious grounding in art.)
CK: Perhaps that’s the law of dilettantism: as soon as you start getting interested in something byreading or researching, it automatically gets more interesting, a self-generating energy. Obviously
there are a lot of connections between producing alcohol and art because its the same form ofexperimentation; it’s a research-based activity; it involves knowing a lot, doing a lot, and acquiringexperience because you can always improve. It’s also very time-consuming … but in the end it’sfundamentally a beautiful process of alchemy that turns this pile of rotten fruit into this pure white– no, transparent – liquid that smells and tastes fantastic. My fascination with distilling is rooted in thefact that it’s such an old technique: 4,000 years old, maybe even 10,000. If you think about the factthat a bunch of people had this idea to heat something up and separate the different evaporation
points simply to see what they get from it … such a simple technique and in the end it produces
this form of magic.
SB: And it’s more satisfying working with a bunch of apricots than, say, Jonathan Meese?5
CK: Yes. Well, no, actually … it was also great to work with Jonathan Meese, I have to say. Funnily
enough, we actually just made a Jonathan Meese wheat schnaps for a bar he’s making in the house
where Marx was born. But yes, it is a lot more satisfying and interesting working with fruit farmers
than all the various parties usually involved in subsidised publishing, that’s for sure.
SB: This implies that some or all of the dissatisfactions of working in publishing we’ve been talking
about are resolved by working in alcohol. Is this because the distribution of labour hasn’t changedin the same way? Given the ubiquity of desktop publishing software since the 1980s, the print industry
could be thought of as having changed from a secretive ‘Black Art’ to an openly ‘transparent’ one.
That sounds like a positive thing, but it implies the dissolution of the professional trade, with all its
attendent checks, standards and quality controls. Curiously, you just referred to alcohol’s transparency
in positive terms – as purity.
Anyway, my question [laughs] is: are you out to reclaim something you eventually found lacking inart publishing? Having heard you describe the alcohol industry as extremely traditional, conservativeand controlled, it seems impervious to the sort of dissolution that characterizes contemporary
publishing. And this is surely emphasized by your relatively minor scale, isolation, interest in thealchemy, and so on. It all seems much more … human-sized.
CK: Yes, absolutely. But also, as a book designer or editor you’re not the author – you’re more or lessa service, and therefore only more or less involved. In producing agriculture, though, you’re the author… although kind of from God’s grace, if you know what I mean.
SC: The apricot is stronger than you!
CK: Kind of, yeah. I don’t think of these things in terms of a big unchanging omnipresent creation,
because these things can actually be modified. But still, I’m essentially working with material I haven’t
invented – that’s the difference. And I have to find the people who make those things with the same
love, because for sure 99% of the quality of this schnaps is the fruit, and only 1% is the art of the
distiller.
It might seem to be an isolated process, working out here on the farm, but it’s not at all. It involves a
community and a network, and this is why I include these small texts on the bottles in addition to the
obvious name labels, which go into some detail about the varieties of the spirits, and often include
which farmer I got the fruit from – just to point out that you need these specific people to make thisspecific drink, and all are equally essential.

	  5He had recently made a one-off spirit with Meese, a German artist.

	
  

203

But I like this idea of distilling as a transparent art so much because of what I mentioned about theimportance of the objective reaction – or is it subjective? In the end, maybe that’s the point: in terms of
distilling schnaps, subjective and objective are one and the same.
There’s one other thing I can try to relate very quickly. It has something to do with coming from a city
to the country with no previous connection to farming, which I can best describe as a fascination for
the utterly out-of-balance economy of nature, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in a metropolis.
Take the salad we were just eating, for example. If I calculate my hours in the sense of what we thinkof as a regular fee for labour, or even minimum wage, it would cost something like $30, accounting
for the time I spend in the greenhouse, seeding, caretaking, and so on – so it’s completely out of
whack with any economic thinking we’ve grown up with elsewhere. On the other hand, it’s such a great
feeling to actually do this work, even when it’s bad, if it’s raining or I’m tired, or things are going wrong… and in the end I work a hell of a lot for a tiny little bit of food.
Again, on paper it’s financially crazy because you could go to the best top-quality organic supermarket
and buy this salad for much less. But of course there’s some other quality that is less easy to define or
relate – a feeling, a sense of rightness and equilibrium. It’s very simple: I donate a part of my day towork for my food.

We eventually decided our collaborative production would be a whisky, for a few reasons. Above all,personal preference; next, because although Christoph’s repertoire had extended considerably (gin,various herb liquors, absinthe), he hadn’t yet attempted a whisky; third, being the spirit with the mostimposing connoisseur-base, producing a plausible whisky seemed like the biggest challenge; andfinally because, in the attendant context of economic meltdown, the whisky industry was reportedly
one of the few that continued to thrive (a pattern supposedly historically consistent in times ofdepression for more or less obvious reasons). Indeed, the whisky industry was frequently in the news
around this time (roughly 2008–2010), usually in view of the burgeoning popularity of Japanesebrands.
More specifically, we resolved to make a quality Scotch (traditionally made from malt and so distinct
from North American Bourbon, traditionally made from corn, or Canadian Rye). More accurately,
given the fact that to be legally designated ‘Scotch’ the process must occur within Scotland itself,
we’d actually be making something reasonably equivalent.
There are other rules that govern qualification as Scotch – and that therefore ought to apply to any
good imposter, too: its strength by volume must be between 40 and 94.8%, and it must be aged inan oak barrel for a minimum of three years, with superior varieties usually aged for 10, 12, 15 or 18
years. We settled on 12, which seemed an adequately awkward span for a production and productat once both ‘practical’ and ‘gestural’. Certainly, otherwise keen investors baulked when we got roundto mentioning the waiting period involved: 12 years is not forever, yet long enough to flush from
temporary memory, and this seemed useful in view of the broader allusions we had in mind. As graphic
designers we’re used to engaging and maintaining an audience by visual means – and that’s part of
the attraction of the slowness here, too: to coax investment in terms of curiosity and attention, as wellas hard cash. This involves a certain amount of seduction, the effort of connection.
In sum, we were after producing a high-end single malt Scotch-type whisky – a ‘German Scotch’,so to speak. Finally, we decided it ought to be black. It’s hard to recall precisely when, how, or why
this idea evolved – perhaps simply because it sounded a bit sinister. Christoph had recently
manufactured a couple of liqueurs naturally coloured by the pigment of their base herbs, at least one ofwhich was more or less black. We initially presumed we might achieve the same effect with someflavourless pigment, but discovered this was highly inadvisable – not to mention ‘illegal’ inasmuch asadding any extra ingredients further tips the drink away from properly qualifying as Scotch, which
ought to retain the colour, aroma, and taste of the raw materials used during production and maturation.
As it happened, that ‘black’ ended up referring to something else altogether. Decent whisky is madewith ‘soft’ water (which contains a minimal amount of minerals), hence the vast majority of high-end
whisky is often produced in the islands and other remote parts of Scotland, Ireland and Japan, wherewater is relatively pure in a workable climate. From the outset, Christoph had been concerned that

	
  

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water sourced locally in Germany would be too ‘hard’ (i.e. mineral-rich), forcing us to have toimport softer water from a foreign source which would inflate costs and likely render the entire project
unworkable. Then out of the blue, Christoph heard there might be an adequately soft source within acouple of hours’ drive of the farm. He made a quick trip to perform a few routine tests and confirmedthat the tip-off was correct. Auspiciously enough, this adequately soft spring was located in the heart ofthe Black Forest.
And of course the product would eventually circulate within a black market of our own making.
SB: Remember when Jan Verwoert was here on the farm, talking about communities? He started withthe simple idea that we’re a self-made community borne out of mutual sympathies – and that this
could apply equally to Dot Dot Dot or Revolver or the farm. These are groups and relations formed fortheir own sake, not towards any explicit ends beyond their own continued existence – by which I reallymean rather than in view of, say, an explicit Political or Social end. This struck me as one of those
things so stupidly obvious that you don’t notice it until suddenly refracted through someone else’s
words.
I recently experienced something similar working in our basement bookstore. As dumb as it sounds,
I realised for the first time what capitalism was. I mean i felt it, not as an abstract system I’m vaguely
conscious of being complicit with at some indeterminate remove, but in light of a customer stood infront of me holding a book and asking how much it costs – to which I always have the urge to answer(and sometimes do), ‘whatever you’re willing to pay for it’. In short, I was reminded how value isessentially arbitrary. I guess this is the same hands-on practicality you’re talking about with the farm:primitive in its obviousness but revelatory nontheless.
I’m not sure whether this is leading to a question – maybe only to another drink! – but all theseexamples seem to describe a kind of circular, self-feeding energy that’s generated not in order to sell,
but to sustain. Money is essentially removed from the equation, and the equilibrium involves a balanceof other elements instead.
CK: It’s also crucially based in the present rather than the future or on some idea of an end result,an attitude concerned with the here and now, with effort and commitment. It comes back to the various
art systems we’re involved in, which – particularly at the moment – revolve around this idea of only
doing things because someone else invites you to, or will pay you to, or because you’ll gain someperceived outcome … money, respect, prestige, fame, immortality, more invitations, whatever.
The idea of getting together or making something without those preconditions is increasingly rare,
and that’s a shift for the worse.
For me, the reasons for spending time growing these things is also just a simple reaction to not being
able to find value or satisfaction in other things. Today I can say I’ve never felt more satisfaction thanwhen I spend an afternoon here in the stables, for example. Why should I spend so much time doing
things like publishing when I could also spend it generating food and drink for myself and family andfriends? That feeling only increases, then it becomes an obsession, because if you have a farmsuddenly you’re bound to think about the idea of ‘land’ which, of course, you don’t have to consider inthe city. As an artist, at least, you’re now trained to live as flexibly as possible – don’t own anything,have your suitcase packed and ready. But if you’re on a farm, one of the things you find is that you’resuddenly responsible for is the ground, very literally, with a heritage to consider. If we don’t mow themeadows correctly, the farmers next door come and say, hey, this isn’t good enough. There’s aninherent ethos that the land has to be cultivated properly.
Again, it’s simple and obvious: you own something and suddenly it’s important to maintain it. Owning
becomes interesting again. Take livestock, for instance, which involves the responsibility for their lives– a completely different relationship to the possessions than the one we’re used to. Spending time withthe animals becomes a complex thing, because it’s not solely – or visibly, or immediately – aboutmoney. It doesn’t work in the same way.

	
  

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There was another, more straightforward reason for settling on making a whisky rather than any otheralcohol: we were due to spend a few weeks working in Scotland, and anticipated undertaking a certain
amount of fundamental research there.

6.3: LETTER FROM THE SOURCE
July 2, 2007
Dear Christoph,
As promised, here’s a feature-length prose home movie from Scotland. There’s been a reassuring
amount of whisky drunk in the name of our project, so it may be a little out of focus. In my mind,
at least, the trip was going to involve a lot of reading, walking, and recuperation. The previous two
weeks in Europe had already been quite involved, and worth recounting in advance of what I’m
about to report.
So:
The first stop-off was to install an exhibition in Porto – an iteration of the salon-hang of objects
originally reproduced in Dot Dot Dot that you saw in Munich last year, now titled Extended Caption.6
A book of the same name constituted half of the show. It contained all of the pages of all of the articles
that originally introduced all of the objects, torn and scanned from the original issues. The ‘caption’,then, is patently impossible to digest in front of the wall, and the wall impossible to digest without any
contextualising text; and this double bind was something Jan and I discussed (in front of the wall, in
public) a couple of weeks after the opening. Trying to get to the point of such an apparently irritating
setup, we arrived at the idea that our discussion – and the gathering of people who came to hear it –was at least part of point. In other words, the work lies precisely (or imprecisely) in the gap between thewall and the book. Now this already sounds like the sort of vague one-liner justification we’ve becomea bit too comfortable with recently, and why the aim of this letter is, conversely, to be as direct as
possible.
The second week was spent in London, limbering up for a filmed conversation between Will Holder
and myself at Tate Modern. This was one aspect of a piece of work embedded in a small groupshow called Stutter, basically the fifth realisation of a ongoing publishing project of ours called
Tourette’s.7
To explain as briefly as possible, we borrowed a piece of work by Michelangelo Pistoletto from themid-1960s called Structure for Talking While Standing, then filmed ourselves leaning on it, talking toeach other for an afternoon (again in public) about social changes in art and industry in Britain since
the Second World War. The idea was to edit the discussion into a series of short vignettes following,say, five or six threads, to be shown back in the gallery on Tate TV later in the year. Along the way,
we were attempting to paraphrase rather than directly quote others, as a development of the previous
instances of Tourette’s. We also published a four-page ‘Publick Notice’, available to take away fromthe same space. This was a bunch of notes based on our discussions with Pistoletto and the Stutter
curators about the politics of borrowing or replicating the piece.

	  6

DDDG: Extended Caption, Culturgest, Porto, 2009. See also the accompanying book: Stuart Bailey, ed., DDDG: Extended
Caption (Amsterdam: ROMA, 2009). More on this project in §2.3(d).
7See chapter 2, fn. 11, and the ‘Publick Notice’ in the Appendix.

	
  

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In the days leading up to this recording, we made several walks across London trying to hone what
we wanted to talk about, to reach some productive cusp between having discussed the stuff wewanted to cover enough to be able to speak about them lucidly enough for an audience to follow
along, while simultaneously open enough to develop a genuine, live conversation, i.e. with an elementof surprise, not knowing what the other person’s going to say next. It was very useful to walk and talk,not least because we began to point out examples of what we were discussing in the immediate
environment.
One example of this that didn’t make it into the filmed version was an afternoon spent searching for apub (we later discovered it was called The Ship) that I’d been to once beforehand some 15 years ago.
It’s at a place called Mortlake in Sheen, a district on the south bank of the Thames. The pub had stuckin my mind because it was next to a large brewery that manufactured the UK version of Budweiser,
which is supposedly nothing like the North American one. There had been a pipe running directly fromthe factory floor to the bar. According to a friend of mine who used to work there, it was a fairly wellkept secret and the best pint in London.

This recollection effectively distilled a large part of what we had ended up talking about – namely, theincreasing distance between products and consumers. Not only the geographical distance between,
say, a toy made in Taiwan and a kid playing with it in California, but also in the more abstract sense ofdivision between a product’s essence (a cup of coffee) and its presentation (a Moccacino). This might
be better variously articulated as products ‘mediated beyond their essential state’, or ‘wrapped in thequotation marks of “identity” or “lifestyle”’, or again, ‘less what they are and more what they’re trying tocome across as being’. In short, the cause and effect of the exacerbation of branding.
We talked about how design has become synonymous with mediation; how mediation could beconceived either positively as something like ‘translation’ or negatively as something akin to ‘spin’; andhow the latter has gained such an upper hand as to be now more or less synonymous with design.

	
  

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This is why we tend to want to have nothing to do with the field, or at least try to work on terms outsidesuch assumptions and associations – if not just switch to another discipline altogether.
We evenutally found The Ship, only to discover, of course, that while the brewery itself was still there(under threat of closure), that direct pipe to the superior Budweiser was long gone. The bar now served
the usual, and it had been visibly spun into some common denomination hybrid sports bar-gastropub.
We started to consider this shift in terms of those contrasting models of corporate expansion, verticaland horizontal integration. Where horizontal integration describes the act of assimilating othercompanies that produce the same product (or supply the same service) in view of monopolizing themarket, vertical integration involves assimilating the various subsidiary processes of manufacture.
In the case of, say, a liquid soap company, this could refer to activities as diverse as producing theirown bottles and labels, running in-house rather than third-party distribution, or setting up dedicatedsales outlets.
The old version of The Ship suggests vertical integration (factory and bar once intimately linked, bothconstituent of a local, independent brewery) and the ‘redesigned’ one horizontal integration (factoryand bar now discrete, run according to the standardized templates of international conglomerates).
And as you might expect, we’re firmly on the side of those qualities implied by the older, verticalmodel, i.e. the particular, the local, the self-contained and fully-realized, and against those implied by
the horizontal, i.e. the bland, the ubiquitous, the surface-deep and soon-to-be-obsolete.
We had the benefit of a practice public conversation in advance of the Tate filming, midweek at asmaller London gallery, where we staged a trial conversation before of a modest audience for a coupleof hours. The idea was to get used to speaking in public both to each other and to others; and toassimilate the immediate feedback of the situation in view of putting things across more expediently,
live-editing the relative accessibility of our language, assumptions and examples.
The point of recounting all this was to say that, on arriving in Scotland on the back of this week in
London, our time there was coloured by an unusually focused series of events. I wasn’t expecting
Edinburgh to be so overwhelmingly social. This was partly happenstance, as I arrived at the same time
as a swarm of people up from London to see a bunch of stuff centred on a Cerith Wyn Evans show atInverleith House. But it was also because the presence of anyone passing through the art school
apparently serves to galvanize the local scene. Unusually, this scene comprised people from all partsof the school; not only teachers and students, but also sundry bureaucrats, directors, secretaries andalumni, along with an eccentric crowd of local benefactors, collectors, curators and gallerists. It felt
unusually heterogeneous. Naturally, a good deal of the talk ended up at whisky – on a loop of drinking
and thinking about drinking.
In the middle of all this it became clearer that, as you’re obviously in charge of the actual distillation,
our job is to provide the frame through which the product’s perceived – the container, the packaging.
This is a slightly uncomfortable realization in light of my ranting about branding a few paragraphsago. And yet the premise here is a little more complicated than that, because the raw material of thisidea isn’t just the whisky, but equally the structure that surrounds it – its co-operative setup. It’s a
two-fold venture, a product and a gesture, to be drunk and contemplated. It should both be a whisky– a good whisky – and, to an unusual degree, be about whisky, too.
Soon after David showed up, we were obliged to deliver a lecture at the National Gallery, and decided
to end by talking about the whisky project in order to announce the availability of shares. To get there,
we first related a few previous projects in order to posit the whisky as an instance of publishing in its
broadest sense.

	
  

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We’d recently drawn some very simple axonometric drawings of some very simple pieces of furniture
we’d designed, produced and put to use in diverse contexts. On one hand, each performs its obvious
function (e.g., a shelf to display and store books; a pair of twin lecterns to read from in public);
but they’re equally conceived as ‘models’ in the sense that they’re also about that function (e.g. theshelf represents the idea of dispersing information; the lecterns are an emblem of formal public
speaking). You could say they’re simultaneously utilitarian and poetic, or again, functional and gestural.
That’s what we were aiming for, anyway.
During the talk we spoke a bit about Stählemühle and your schnaps, juxtaposing you with the story of
Dr Bronner’s Pure-Castille soap. You might recall this product from a piece by Dmitri Siegel in an earlyissue of Dot Dot Dot.8 Bronner was a Jewish immigrant and ex-mental patient who invented a liquidsoap in order to disperse a fairly entertaining and not entirely unconvincing quasi-religious holism thatboils down to the minimal message ‘ALL-ONE!’The product still sells well – it’s a good soap. But it’s also notorious in the U.S. for its wacko packaging
that relates Bronner’s righteous self-help guide, his ‘moral ABC’ manifest in something like 5,000
words of miniscule type on the labels on the bottles and bars of the soap. He was a philanthropist as
well as a nutjob, and though he died some years back, the company remains a family business with ahuge output that’s widely considered a model in terms of employee relations and social accountability.
You might say, then, that Bronner’s soap wisely remains close to its source – a model of vertical
integration that’s resisted selling out its founding principles. But the real interest for us lies in the
product’s two-fold nature. First, it’s an unusual instance of a product invented to distribute its
packaging, not the other way round. Second, the product and its philosophical message are symbiotic
in the sense that the Doctor’s sermon equates oneliness with cleanliness. Moreover, it does so in a way
that’s far more convincing than many equivalent New Age-y products, which I put down to the rigourof it’s idiosyncrasies. That’s to say, Bronner’s weirdness doesn’t seem contrived but genuinely far-out.
Or, contrary to what I described before relative to the exacerbation of branding, it is what it is rather
than what it wants to come across as being: a decent soap with a direct philosophy.
Here’s a lesson for our incipient whisky, then. Bronner’s soap fulfils its dual aims and claims – aspiritual agent and a cleaning agent – because product and packaging are likewise equally weighted:
it’s demonstrably ALL-ONE!

	  8

Dmitri Siegel, ‘Message on a Bottle’, Dot Dot Dot #12, 2006.

	
  

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By contrast, someone had brought along to our talk a bottle of an existing, literally black whisky called
Loch Dhu (‘Black Lake’ in Gaelic, though no such lake exists). We’d heard about this 10-year old
pseudo-Scotch from two locals: Alan Johnston, a local artist and teacher, and Charlie McLean, aninternational whisky authority responsible for several books on the subject. According to both, Loch
Dhu enjoyed some fleeting notoriety in the whisky world, a novelty brand aggressively marketed at the
U.S. market that never took off. The bottle at the talk was purportedly borrowed from someone’s
neighbour, so we were only allowed a modicum. It wasn’t exactly awful, but it wasn’t Scotch as weknow it (more like whisky-flavoured molasses, which it turned out wasn’t too far from the truth). From
here on we were careful to explain upfront that the black in our product won’t refer to its colour.
Incidentally, ‘tincture’ is synonymous with both ‘colour’ and ‘medicine’. And as you likely know already,old spirits were often referred to as a ‘tincture of …’ followed by the name of the base herb.
Auspiciously enough, we’ve already made a bunch of work involving tinctures in recent years – allrooted in our continuing interest in heraldry. In the middle ages, when heraldic devices (coats of arms)
were depicted in monochrome printing, colours were graphically translated using a system of blackand-white cross-hatching, dots and other specific patterns. Similarly, graphic elements and theirconfiguration – bars, divisions, shapes, animals, plants, weapons, etc. – are described using a precise
vocabulary and native grammar originally derived from French aristocracy.
Here’s an image of one of artist and teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s series of Telephone Paintings from
1923 – a small set of modernist abstractions that Moholy supposedly ordered from a paint factory byreferring to a diagram over the phone. The firm then manufactured the same abstraction in various
sizes according to the same instructions. Next to it is a detail of a heraldic tincture-based translation ofa Telephone Painting that we produced as a ‘lithographic proof print’ a year or so ago:

	
  

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We were simply interested to see what happened when we translated Moholy’s abstraction, originally
painted in red, blue, yellow and black enamels, into the cross-hatched tinctures of heraldry (above
is a detail of the lower cross). This led to our writing a text (or phone call) addressed to Moholy,
but that’s another story.9 For now, I only want to point to the particular bit of cross-hatching made fromvertical and horizontal lines in this detail of the broad vertical strip: this is the abstraction of ‘sable’,the heraldic term for black. More on this in a minute.
During our last week here we’d managed to get ourselves invited to one of the two local members-only
whisky societies. This one was in Leith, the waterfront district that merges with Edinburgh proper.
Though Leith has always been the rough, industrial end of the city, this particular club was housed
in a stately Georgian, dark-panelled drawing room with a single picture window that looked out onto a
dilapidated housing block. Each season these clubs order stock from more-or-less local distilleries,
then sell it by the bottle or the glass until each batch runs dry. Our group of four made it through 14
different kinds in one long evening. To give you some idea of the nuance involved, the one I remember
most was described on the menu as having an aftertaste of ‘burnt Formula One tyres’ – and it did.
The passive aggressive formal/informal interior of this place seemed like the blueprint of an idea
we’ve had for some time now: to establish what we’ve been thinking of calling a ‘Serving Library’.
The nascent idea of this institution – part club, part reading room – is built on a few disparate
influences, rooted in a conversation I had in Los Angeles with British artist Nick Relph some months
ago. At the time, he and his colleague Oliver Payne were conceiving a short film that would be set
in an abandoned public library in West Hollywood. Apropos of this, we started discussing some kindof hybrid between library and bar, then simultaneously remembered this passage from Renegade,the recent ghost-written autobiography of Mark E. Smith, vocalist of The Fall:
I had an advance from Polygram, the record label. I wasn’t living
it up or anything. I spent a lot of time in these small, specialized
science and law libraries. They were the perfect places to go andkill a few hours before you had a drink. I’d peruse all these great
psychiatric reports and law files. I spent a lot of time in there,
just reading bits and pieces from these strange papers. It was likea second education in a way. I’d never read anything quite like that
before. And, more importantly, it was all free. Anybody was allowedin there. It’s not closed off like it is here, where only a doctor
knows what a doctor does. You could have a cig in some of them aswell. Some fellows used to bring hip flasks in; you’d see them sippingaway while reading about the 19th-century law. It was very civilized.
That’s how it should be in England. Go into a library around here and	  9See: Dexter Sinister, ‘Blazon 4 Moholy-Nagy’, Portable Document Format (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009).

	
  

211

you’ve got a lot of repressed stormtroopers gawking at you. It’s nowonder kids don’t read as much as they used to.10
Nick and Oliver went on to make a short video that takes raw footage of the interior of the empty
Hollywood library and populates with crude Google Sketchup renderings of books and booze, alongwith a few nominal humans: an artist’s impression of this phantom institution.
At which point we decided that, in tandem with your various researches about the whisky’s distillation,
we ought to articulate and refine our ideas about how to frame it by trying to summon a suitable
form. This form, we concluded, would need to serve three purposes: (1) as an advert or announcement,(2) as a share certificate or trust bond, and (3) as the eventual label for the eventual bottle.
In each of the various contexts we could anticipate ‘publishing’ this three-fold thing, we figured that
one of these three aspects would dominate, while usefully alluding to the other two – and so indicatethat we’re as interested in the community that assembles to fund the product, as we were are inworking outside the default mechanisms of profit and surplus, as we are in the drink itself. Not greater
than, but equal to. And we decided to work this composition out ‘live’ in movable metal type, in theprint room at Edinburgh College of Art, i.e. to write it while typesetting it, in view of printing it on a
nearby Heidelberg letterpress machine.
Our writing, along with any ‘extra-textual’ aspects, would then be productively governed by thetechnology’s severely circumscribed means of articulation (a restricted number of available fonts, thestrict bounds of the printing frame, etc). Otherwise put, we would embrace the circumstances in orderto make an emphatically in-progress piece of work, in which the graphic and linguistic semantics areclearly ‘all-one’.

	
  
10

Mark E. Smith, Renegade (London: Viking, 2008), p. 174.

	
  

212

()
8cZ%Mfc%c

Jk_c\d_c\
nnn%jkX\_c\dl\_c\%[\The bottle you hold in your hands is
a contract, executed some  years ago.
As one of a community of cooperators,
you agreed to pay
per cent of the total
production costs (this container, its contents).

The contract you hold in your hands isa bottle, due around .
As one of a community of cooperators,
you agree to receive an equal
per centof the total product (this bottle, its whisky).

9cXZbN_`jbp
Between the agreement and its isomorphic
translation to spirit, nothing was lost
and there is no surplus. (All one.)
This process is transparent—regarding tax,
there has always been a black market.
The product is published by Dexter Sinister,
New York City, U.S.A., and made available
at the Serving Library.
Form must be a way of thinking.
Set in Edinburgh, Between the raw material and its isomorphic
distillation to spirit, nothing will be lost
and there will be no surplus. (All one.)
This vessel is transparent—regarding tax,
there will always be a parallel circuit.
The alcohol will be distilled at Stählemühle,Eigeltingen-Münchhöf, Germany,
using water from the Black Forest.
Content must be a way of drinking.
Set in Edinburgh, See Message on a Bottle (), www.servinglibrary.org

See Right to Burn (), www.servinglibrary.org

Interested parties please contact info@dextersinister.org
Further reading:Eco, U., The Open Work ()Froshaug, A., Typographic Norms ()Kubler, G., The Shape of Time ();J).','0

Giff]

Here’s what we ended up with:K`eZkli\

	
  

213

	
  

214

And here’s a stab at unravelling how this ad-bond-label came to look-read the way it does, so far as I
can recall:– The overall shape and fundamental left/right division of the design is based on the classic optical
illusion of an inverted book, with its spread of ‘pages’ alternately projecting inwards and outwards.
We’re intending to adopt this as an emblem for that aforementioned Serving Library; and, just as I
described our working out how to frame of the whisky by following the lead of letterpress technology,
the whisky is itself one means of working out what this embryonic Serving Library could be (not leastan outlet for the spirit 12 years hence). Anyhow, the negative silhouette of the double rhomboid thatsets the basic structure of the ad-bond-label is defined by three triangles ‘coloured’ with heraldic
sable, i.e. that vertical/horizontal cross hatching that translates as ‘black’.

– The relative scale of the composition’s various elements – and the relations between them – weredirectly determined by the type available in the workshop. We made several false starts. We’d begin
working with a certain fount (meaning a specific size of a specific typeface: 14-point Perpetua Roman),then gradually realize we’d likely run out of the limited supply of (say) the letter ‘e’ before being able tofinish a whole paragraph. Each time we’d start over using a smaller fount with larger quantities ofletters – all again while in the process of writing the text itself (which meant there was no ‘raw material’
to speak of, no free-floating ‘content’ apart from and in advance of its container).

– Parallel to this last point, the two columns of text and their nearly duplicated text were set/written inpractical response to our mounting realization that, with only three days to undertake the wholeenterprise before leaving Edinburgh (which meant setting, printing, dismantling and redistributing thevarious founts back to their original cases), we had neither type nor time to set much more than one
paragraph. Hence we ended up writing interchangeable paragraphs on ‘distilling’ and ‘publishing’based on the same template text, so we could first print the left hand side, quickly switch out certain
words and clauses, then shift the frame across and print the right hand one.

– A few other bits of auxiliary information are allocated as logically as possible within the surrounding
space, including: the whisky’s age; links to Stählemühle and Dexter Sinister; three pointers to ‘further
reading’ that reference some of the broader thinking around the project generally, and this piece ofletterpress specifically (see §6.5 below); a date-stamp; and those allusive terms ‘Proof’ and ‘Tincture’.
We’d come to realize there are a number of pertinent homonyms native to this project, not to mention
the wonderful time-mind/spirit/ghost of zeitgeist as you pointed out during our interview:
There are two different ways to make schnaps. One is to distil theactual fruit, and the alcohol is produced from the sugar in the mash,which carries the aroma with it — this is what is called fermenting.
The other is to take neutral alcohol and mix it with the fruit.
Instead of fermenting, the neutral alcohol sucks the aroma out of the
fruit. The process used largely depends on the type of fruit, and thelatter is better for raspberries. We’ve always used the first method,
however, which involves the geist – a beautiful word, because it means... well, yes, it means spirit ... like zeitgeist — the spirit of thetimes.’11	  11Bailey, Crowner, and Keller, op. cit., p. 89.

	
  

215

As you know, ‘whisky’ derives from the Scottish Gaelic term uisge beatha, or ‘water of life’ (in Latin:aqua vitae). It was co-opted into English as usquebaugh, then gradually aged into whisky. When finally
ready to print, we found we were unable to get an even impression of ink. It turned out the type was so
old that it was basically too degraded and irregular to produce a relief even enough to yield areasonably legible print. After wasting a day or so trying to improve or otherwise work the situation this,it dawned on us to roll with the failure and instead print it ‘blind’, meaning without ink; to emboss thepaper rather than mark it and so literally create a ‘ghost’ impression. In fact this technique is alreadycommonly used to proof metal type – the form run without ink so as to check for mistakes without
needing to clean up each time. And so we ended up ‘proofing’ as an end in itself.
There’s a fantastic article in the upcoming Dot Dot Dot (#18, printing on Monday and subtitled‘Set in Edinburgh’, with the ad-bond-label on its back cover) called ‘The Uneditor’, in which Americangraphic designer Mark Owens interviews Canadian ‘textual scholar’ Randall McLeod.12 McLeod’s
subject is medieval books and other early printed matter, only he looks at rather than reads them,preoccupied with the material qualities of printed matter. Moreover, he’s a self-described ‘uneditor’
who’s ‘into demolition’, a maverick academic with a self-appointed crusade against what he considers
the irresponsible arrogance of unwarranted claims about early printed matter by self-appointed‘authorities’. In more broadly philosophical terms, you might say he’s against all forms of absolutism,
all claims to ‘truth’. Best of all, his writing is entirely in line with this attitude: propulsive, inventive,
playful and loose, it demonstrates what he insinuates.
To give you some idea of the jaw-dropping level of detail at which McLeod typically works, at somepoint during the interview he recounts his study of the ghostly imprint of the ‘bearer type’ left on thepage in a certain copy of an early printed book from 1501, the Philostratus. In manual typesetting(such as we used in Edinburgh), bits of type, lead spaces and other bits of ‘furniture’ are typicallylocked tight into a frame that must be entirely stable in order to print properly. ‘Bearer type’ is the nameof un-inked type that can be locked in below the surface of the relief in order to fill excess space, butwhich, if any single impression happens to be strong and deep enough, can inadvertently leave its own
slightly embossed imprint, that’s only really legible by shining raking light to pick out the shadow of its
relief. Naturally, when we came to emboss our Black Whisky design instead of printing it, McLeod’s
bearer type and raking light were on our minds.
And so in the final analysis, the fact that there wasn’t a ‘final’ inked impression at all, only a relief,a halfway version, seemed wholly consonant with the fact that the entire process was conceived not inview of producing an object per se, but foremost as a means of working out the configuration of a text.

As you’ve seen, we’ve since recreated the form as a fully legible positive black-on-white version too,in order for it to be printed or digitally displayed in other media (it wouldn’t be a very good advert
otherwise). The non-printing, relief version served foremost as a catalyst to coax that triplicate form.

	
  
12

Mark Owens, ‘The Uneditor’, Dot Dot Dot #18, 2009.

	
  

216

All of which amounts to the sense in which we’ve since been referring to what we made in Edinburgh
as a ‘blind proof’.
The first purpose this ad-bond-label will serve is in its capacity as an advert for the sale of thecooperative shares. It’s already due to appear in a variety of upcoming magazines and books, as wellas that new issue of Dot Dot Dot. Incidentally, there are a couple of thematic threads running throughthis issue to do with the automobile and newspaper industries – both of which are obviously in thethroes of crisis right now. As such, they make for odd counterparts to the whisky, which, as I said, notonly survives but apparently thrives during times of economic depression such as the one we’re living
through. Salut!
Stuart, DS

6.4: HANGOVERS
P.S. The last day of blind printing on our last day in Edinburgh was a little shaky. The previous night
we’d invited around 15 people to dinner, including that Scotch guru I mentioned, Charlie McLean.
By sheer force of personality, Charlie became the evening’s compere, and his opening ‘So why the hell
are we here?’ precipitated a knockabout discussion, by turns informative, aggressive, rambling, andcontentious. For no good reason, Joseph Kosuth showed up around 11pm with another bottle.
One thing that stays with me from that night is how, despite all the talk, Charlie didn’t really everseem to grasp what we were up to. Because we were approaching this from some oblique art angle,
I think he imagined we were somehow interested in representing whisky over and above making it,
and couldn’t get past this idea. (Explaining Dexter Sinister as a ‘publishing concern’ hardly helped.)
On reflection, trying to explain the project to such an oddball group while inebriated didn’t exactly
lubricate understanding. But this is why I noted that public Extended Caption in Porto back at the startof this letter, during which Jan Verwoert and I far more soberly discussed the gap between the workon the wall and the work in the book: we were struggling to make roughly the same point aroundthe table in Edinburgh – that the real work lies in between all the production. The objects or artefacts
or props or products are merely catalytic converters. Well, not really ‘merely’, more ‘profoundly’– if profound could sound un-profound.
I’m well aware that all this could easily come across as elevating a night out, a drink and a chat, tosome pretentious state of art. Only I’d argue again (it seems important to keep reminding ourselves ofthis point) that it’s both a drink and about the drink. This is the sense in which I think of all we do as‘models’: situations set up to allow ourselves and others to observe ourselves and others in thosesituations. One of the best things about the ICA’s Talk Show month13 (which was on at the same time)
was how the gatherings that took place in the wake of its many performance evenings seemed so
unusually full of people directly discussing the work rather than the usual random chatter – a real talkshow after the event. There was a giddiness and an urgency that I haven’t felt for some time. I think
this is what we’re preoccupied with, too – setting up events that nurture a bit of urgency; something
to get hold of and throw around, like a bottle.
P.P.S. There’s one other thing (and this really is the last, I promise) that stays rattling around my headfrom talking with Charlie McLean at that last supper. In his opinion, our freshly pressed ad-bond-label(which was being passed around to solicit co-operator-investors) was, frankly, pretentious. Pressed tobe more specific, he told us that, in his days as a copy-editor, whenever he and his colleagues cameacross a word like ‘isomorphic’ (as on our proof), they marked it in red ink ‘E.G.O.’ – a disparaging
acronym for a reader’s Eyes Glossing Over. As far as he could see, he said, we had first be far clearer
about what it is we wanted to make, and why; and having established that, then design the label – andthe whisky – in view of those stated ends. At which point it became clear that this was crux of themisunderstanding. Charlie was patently (for better or worse) talking about giving form to an idea fixed

	
  
13

See §4.8 (exhibition details in fn. 27).

	
  

217

in advance, while we were patently (for better or worse) talking about working that idea out by doing it.
We were talking precisely at odds, at cross-purposes.
On the other hand, there was a mysterious presence at the dinner called Chloe who, so far as we could
establish, was an academic from Dundee who fundraises in the arts for medical research, and an
autodidact equally familiar with the intricacies of hot metal type and alcohol distillation. In contrast toCharlie, she seemed to intrinsically understand all we were struggling to explain.
Ultimately this is, of course, a large part of the point too: to talk about things we don’t yet quite know
how to say. This is the sound of Tourette’s – when you just can’t stop yourself failing to articulate.
It reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase ‘to make language stutter’,14 and Paul Chan’sdescription of art as ‘the urgent play of shapes and colours and spaces and sounds that matter mostwhen something is stuck in one’s throat’.15
We could perhaps caricature Charlie as the Resident Expert, entrenched in a specific discipline, andChloe as the Transient Polymath, flitting across many fields. It struck me recently that what’s common
to all the characters that frequent Dot Dot Dot (yourself included) is precisely this free-ranging set ofinterests that fosters a generalist attitude or approach; and that the work made by these multitaskers
betrays that way of thinking. Seriously loose, it reaches beyond the confines of what we could call any‘founding’ subject. Or, to return to the term that cropped up in our interview – which I suspect is
actually borrowed from Brian Eno – it manifests an ‘intelligent dilettantism’.16
This brings us up to date. The next step is to disperse this ad-bond-label. Alongside all the print andweb ads, there seem to be a few upcoming opportunities to show the raking-light proofs in various
vitrines, windows, gallery offices, stores, and other liminal art spaces. Supposing that this works andwe sell shares, clearly the next step is to calculate the total cost of production then work backwards to
fix the co-operative share price. So: could you write us an inventory of projected costs, including all
labour, shipping, water transport, storage, and whatever else? I suppose we also need to account for
longer-term aspects – licensing, the eventual bottle, its label, and so on.
In Scotland we found out that, due to some historical butterfly effect, any Scotch worth the name has
to ferment in a used Bourbon barrel. From my cursory research, it seems these can only be bought
direct from the source: Kentucky, U.S.A. So I guess we need to start looking into getting one from the
middle of nowhere over here to the middle of nowhere over there.
At the end of the day, these three anchor points – Scotland, Germany, and the U.S.A – nicely diagram
our triangular production.

6.5: FURTHER READINGThe mini-bibliography at the lower apex of the ad-bond-label references three key influences on its
final form. Foremost, Eco’s Open Work (1962) alludes to our appropriation in the left column of his
maxim ‘form must be a way of thinking’,17 mirrored on the right by something approaching a non-

	
  

14

See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature [1975, French] (Minneapolis, MA: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986)

15

Chan, ‘The Spirit of Recession’, op. cit., p. 12.

16

Sure enough: ‘For me the great strength of dilettantism is that it tends to come in from another angle. It doesn’t always, ofcourse. The other way of being a dilettante is just by doing the most pedantic and obvious things. But an intelligent dilettante will
not be constrained by the limitations of what’s normally considered possible. He won’t be frightened, he’s got nothing to lose.
You know, a person who has his career at stake on every piece of work is obviously going to be a bit more defensive about what
he does, whereas the dilettante who just kind of says, oh, I’ll try this for a while, is not so frightened of failure, I would imagine.
But to maintain a dilettante attitude consciously is also rather suspicious.’ Brian Eno quoted in: Dan Fox, ‘Refracted Light
Through Armory Show’, Dot Dot Dot #17, 2008.

17

See chapter 1.

	
  

218

sequitur, ‘content must be a way of drinking’. The point of including it here is to draw attention to theparticular way in which the composition’s own formative process – a ‘print’ assembled from a specificcollection of moveable metal type at a particular time and place – pre-empted our own ‘way of
thinking’ about and around the subject, as related in the previous section.
It’s difficult to say what the second ‘Further reading’ reference is, exactly. Properly speaking,
Anthony Froshaug’s Typographic Norms (1964) isn’t a book, booklet or pamphlet. It’s not even reallya ‘text’; and it’s certainly not an artwork (though it’s certainly as poetic as it is practical: ‘beautiful
constellations; mysterious reports on typography’, according to Robin Kinross.18) It’s somewhere in therealm of concrete poetry, probably closest to the word/image symbiosis of the calligram, but mostaccurately summed up as a ‘sample chart’ or ‘possibility diagram’. Physically speaking, it consists of anumber of Chinese-folded sheets, hole-punched to be collected into a ring binder or by independently
binding with screws, plus an unpunched blurb sheet.
Froshaug was a Norwegian-born typographer who also wrote and taught.19 He worked predominantly
in and around London from the 1940s onwards. One of few practitioners to fully grasp and attempt to
introduce principles of continental modernism into Britain, on two separate occasions he temporarily
relocated to remote Cornwall to undertake what can reasonably be considered deliberate experiments inausterity in terms of both life and work, and produced a modest range of remarkably precise ephemera
and modest booklets, all set and printed by himself in metal type on a small hand-operated press.
Alongside local, commissioned work, Froshaug worked on many of his own assignments designed to
explore the potential of his technical setup, making the most of strictly limited means. As opposed to‘experimental printing’ in the sense more typically associated with artists’ books (those of Dieter Rot,for example), these pieces undertake precise arrangements according to fixed meaning.20
Typographic Norms is an extreme instance of such an exercise, charting the extent of typographic
possibility inherent in the standardized components native to a particular technology – in this case,the metal type machines of the Kynoch Press. It’s is a tabular manifestation of the mechanical support,
the spaces between units of type rather than the type itself, ‘a visual-verbal presentation of defining
materials and concepts of typography’:21 Froshaug first tabulates the standard numerical values of linespacing elements, then repeats the same in purely graphic form. Solid impressions of these modular‘blanks’ are configured to show their interrelations as ‘the most tangible way of conceiving thecoordinates of typography.’22 The charts on this spread, for example, show the sizes of standard piecesof lead used to space lines of type ascending from left to right and top to bottom in both numerical (onthe left) and physical form. Its horizontal axis runs to its own ‘natural’ length (on later pages showing
larger components, the paper scrolls laterally as far as both necessary and convenient, and is thenleperello-folded down into the document’s closed A4 format).

	
  
18

See: Robin Kinross, ed., Anthony Froshaug: Typography & Texts (London: Hyphen, 2000), p. 71

19

See both volumes: Kinross, Robin (ed.), Anthony Froshaug: Documents of a Life / Typography & Texts (London: Hyphen,
2000).

20

See for example the card shown and described in §1.7.

21

Kinross (ed.), Anthony Froshaug: Typography & Texts, op. cit., p. 71.

22

Ibid.

	
  

219

The title and publisher’s names on the cover already refer to this pronounced materiality, printed inblack ink on black card, heat-embossed and slightly raised. This is followed by an exhaustive
introductory note. Froshaug begins: ‘Two constraints are imposed by the Kynoch Press on the designerof any one of these ephemera: a page format of A4 and a top limit of production cost. Apart from these,
the designer is free to impose his own.’23 He then cycles through all the reasoning that went into the
document. In this way, Typographic Norms helps others working at the press understand the extent of
its possibilities. By literally diagramming the machines’ standardized components, the document
renders visible what’s usually vaguely conceived in the abstract, and so potentially dismantles habitual
thinking by offering a complete overview of alternate means. It is thus quite literally an exemplary
object: ‘When all the imposed and self-imposed constraints thus interact and reinforce each other, theconsequent design only synthesizes analytics; the arbitrary is minimized.’24
In sum, Typographic Norms was a useful model for the ad-bond-label on two counts: as a means ofconceiving the possibilities of moveable metal type, and as an example of what it means to make aform that manifests its mode of production.
The final bibliographic reference is to George Kubler’s polite polemic The Shape of Time (1962).25
Kubler argues against what he perceives as the prevailing approach to art history, founded on
conceiving of artworks art as symbolic expression that communicate more or less hidden, discrete‘meanings’. He advocates instead (a return to) primarily conceiving of art as form; form as meaningful
in and of itself, that is, not just in reference to a secondary level semantics.
This idea is consonant with Eco’s conception of form as thinking-in-action rather than a vehicle for an
essentially discrete, preconceived thought. It also appears to reassert Greenberg’s historicaljustification of ‘formalism’:the avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas which were
infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society. Ideas
came to mean subject matter in general ... This meant a new andgreater emphasis on form, and it also involved the assertion of thearts as independent vocations, disciplines and crafts, absolutely

	
  
23

Ibid., p. 180.

24

Ibid., p. 181.

25

George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).

	
  

220

autonomous, and entitled to respect for their own sakes, and not
merely as vessels of communication.26

Elsewhere Greenberg writes that ‘In turning his attention away from subject matter of common
experience, the poet or artist turns upon the medium of his craft’, but is careful to add that
The nonrepresentational or ‘abstract’, if it is to have aesthetic
validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem fromobedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once
the world of common, extraverted experience has been renounced, canonly be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art andliterature have already imitated the former. These themselves become
the subject matter of art and literature.27

And this is the essence of Greenberg’s seminal conception of Modernism as ‘the use of thecharacteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline – not in order to subvert it, but toentrench it more firmly in its area of competence.’28
Kubler, on the other hand, is not out to ‘entrench disciplines’ or ‘preserve their autonomy’, but quite
the opposite: he wants to shake up the prevailing ontology. He points to the limits and biases of any‘teleological’ approach to the history of art, of styles and movements cut into convenient chunks andbased on biography, propsing instead an alternative ‘history of things’ based simply on those objects
that are desirable enough to have survived. The same set of basic forms, he says, have always beenaround, modified according to the vicissitudes of different eras, epochs, and milieus.
Kubler’s desirable/unwanted classification ignores the usual distinctions between utilitarian artifacts
and works of art, between useful and useless, between originals and replicas, and between tools andexpressions.’29 The surviving, desirable objects literally shape our time, he says, in the sense that asthey constitute the sensory surface of our world at any given point, and so influence our thinking.
This, in turn, continues to influence and shape subsequent artefacts and artworks, and so on – at least,
until the next paradigmatic break that sends things off on an entirely other tangent, beyond therefinement of the prevalent stereotypes. He argues, too, that our thinking about man-made objects has
been misled by an overwhelming but essentially arbitrary reliance on biological metaphors – thetendency to conceive of art in terms of artists, schools and movements that are ‘born’, then ‘blossom’,‘flourish’, ‘thrive’ and ‘die’. Metaphors drawn from contemporary physics are far more appropriate,
he says: kinetic energy, impulses, generating centres, and relay points.
Our arrow to Kubler’s argument here, then, points to the fact that our ad-bond-label doesn’t easily fit
into the usual categories:
Let us suppose a gradient between absolute utility and absolute art:
the pure extremes are only in our imagination, human products always
incorporate both utility and art in varying mixtures, and no object isconceivable without the admixture of both.30

Our interview with Christoph ends on the same theme:
SB: And the new value is a certain intensity of feeling?

	
  

26

Greenberg, Modernist Painting’, op. cit., p. 301.

27

Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 5, 1939, pp. 34–49 (my italics).

28

Greenberg, Modernist Painting’, op. cit., p. 5.

29

Ibid., p. 9.

30

Ibid., p. 14.

	
  

221

CK: It sounds very kitsch, but it’s very true.
SB: ‘Intensity of feeling’ is quite clear in terms of the publishing and distilling, but less obvious in termsof ownership. It’s interesting to consider the idea of ‘owning things’ as being fundamental to both
capitalism and your life on the farm, even though we’re generally implying they’re opposites. Perhaps
it’s the difference between the hollowness of gratification and richness of responsibility; you’re distilling
the good parts of the idea of ownership. That’s pushing it a bit, but you understand what I mean.
CK: Yes, again it’s to do with taking care of things. I’ve never really spoken about this with anyone
before, but sometimes I need two hours in the evening to just walk around and look at everything.
And though I’ve seen it many times, it’s nothing to do with pride, it’s simply about watching, looking
properly … what happens over here, what happens over there … those plants are dying now, thoseplants are growing … the tiles have come off the roof here … just checking the status of things.
It’s almost embarrassing to describe this walk, but that’s what happens; it’s a strange level.
SB: Any last thoughts before we start on the absinthe?
CK: Maybe I should just say that, in relation to the surface of what you’re interested in here – thechange from publishing books to publishing alcohol – I have to confess that my involvement has alsochanged my idea of what design and designing is, and that’s also precisely in terms of thinking about
it less as a surface, and more towards to the notion of changing material from one form to another.
By the end of Revolver, I could maybe understand the idea of designing being an act of transformation,of translation, of transposition, but now I understand it more clearly – more transparently – throughobserving the tangible changes from plants and fruit to other forms.

6.6: PROJECTION OF A POST-INDUSTRIAL FILM
The costs were listed on the following prospectus and the share price calculated according to thelogic of a not-for-profit co-operative production. This means that each individual investor will receivea percentage of the total yield of the eventual product directly proportional to the percentage ofthe overall budget he or she contributed in the first place, a system that eschews any profit margin
in favour of a 1:1 equivalence of investment and return.
The ‘quantity of the eventual product’ is ambiguous at this point only because it’s impossible toaccount for the exact output of any particular batch of whisky due to the ‘angel’s share’ phenomenon –the unpredictable amount of liquid that evaporates or is otherwise lost as the whisky matures in thebarrel. That said, it’s easy enough to guestimate the maximum loss, and a cursory calculation suggests
an approximate minimum of two 750 ml bottles per share.

	
  

222

	
  

223

Over the next year, the blind proof and this accompanying prospectus circulated in various contexts as
and when opportunities arose. Framed versions of the original embossed version were variously
exhibited,31 while the black-on-white PDF version did the rounds as an advert in a number of books,
magazines and newspapers.32 Word of mouth helped too, of course. In the meantime, Christoph wasbusted for unregistered overproduction and issued a six-month ban, but used the opportunity to rebuild
the Stähelmühle distillery from scratch. Production was duly postponed until the Spring of 2011, bywhich time all the shares had been sold, the run of certificates distributed, and a new state-of-the-art
still installed at Stählemühle.
The only outstanding aspect was the barrel. As briefly noted above, through some historic twist of
circumstance Scotch whisky came to be distilled in used Bourbon barrels, which emanate exclusively
from the U.S.A. And it turns out that the barrel industry is monopolized by Brown-Forman, the parent
company of, among others, Jack Daniels, both of which are based in Kentucky. On realizing this,along with the fact that any other type of barrel (a brand new one, or one previously used to age wine)
would compromise quality, we began the extremely protracted, labyrinthine process of trying to securea single used Bourbon barrel while remaining within our projected (and collected) costs. It soon
became apparent that we were unlikely to find a single barrel for sale anywhere outside the monopoly– at least, not one guaranteed to withstand 12 years of use according to industry standards.33
The only option was to try and acquire a barrel from Brown-Forman co. by tapping some point in
the channel of manufacture. We first tried to do this in Scotland, figuring that we could cut shipping
costs to Germany by buying one already imported; only it seemed that all the barrels from Kentucky
were imported through a single agent, and here we hit a dead end – either no response or point-blankrefusal. And so were forced to approach the master company, only to hit upon the same problem:a policy refusal on private sales, and no interest in exceptions to the rule.
Obviously reluctant to concede what appeared to be our only possible means to bring this project tofruition (i.e. the whisky’s beginning), it seemed increasingly necessary to make the trip to Kentucky inorder to speak to someone directly, possibly provoking some degree of personal interest that mightoverride company protocol. We duly organized a road trip, stopping off first at a distillery on the
Kentucky Whisky Trail, a fairly useless tourist tour, then more promisingly at Brown-Forman’s barrel
factory in Louisville. We were led along the production line by a rep from their Public Relations
department – from a stockpile of raw timber to a room of hand-finished barrels (including a walled-off
part of the factory that housed a top-secret process of burning and smoking). Then we were ushered
into a meeting room where we asked again the question that hadn’t been straightforwardly answeredby letter, phone or email, i.e. whether we might be able to order a single barrel and to ship it to Europe.
The PR guy said: ‘We retail a minimum batch of 220.’ I said: ‘That’s 219 too many.’ And that seemed
to be that. No exceptions and no alternatives.
But not quite.

	
  
31

For example: Black Whisky (Blind Proof), 2nd Cannons, Los Angeles, October 25 – December 5, 2009; An Invitation to an
Infiltration, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 21 January – 28 February, 2010; and Vertically Integrated Manufacturing,
Murray Guy, New York, 9 January – 20 February, 2010. The latter show’s press release described it in these terms: ‘Black
Whisky is a speculative collaboration between Dexter Sinister and Stähmühle, an artisanal schnaps producer in the Black Forestof Germany. Sinister approaches whisky production self-reflexively and transparently, returning to a codified form of production– one which results in a potable product with a measurable standard of quality – to examine possibilities of strict vertical
integration (conception, manufacturing, advertising and distribution) amidst changing systems of circulation and exchange.’
See: http://murrayguy.com/exhibitions/vertically-integrated-manufacturing-2010.

32

For example: Fillip, no. 10 (2009); Common Circular 2: Common Room Presents Dexter Sinister Presents Common Room,(2009); Dexter Sinister, True Mirror Microfiche Post-Post-Script (New York: Dexter Sinister, 2010); Dexter Sinister (eds.),
Portable Document Format (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), Jenifer Papararo, ed., An Invitation to An Infiltration, exhibition
catalogue (Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2010).

33

There are plenty of ‘cosmetic’ used barrels available, typically sold and used as garden ornaments or waste bins, but they’relikely to leak. In the regulated industry each recycled barrel passes through a series of checks and repairs before being sold on.

	
  

224

For some months we’d been trying to contact a curator of a gallery on the ground floor of a recently
opened hotel in Kentucky. We’d heard, in fact, that the hotel was set up in order to get planningpermission for the gallery that would house the owner’s collection of contemporary art. Anticipating an
off-chance of interest in what we were up to, we were particularly interested to talk to this curator,
especially after we learned the owner had links to the Jack Daniels family. As it turned out, thecollector’s wife was a third or fourth generation descendent, and currently heir to the company. For
some six months the curator hadn’t responded, but we did now manage to contact him while still in
town – ostensibly in order to book a room at the hotel. Following our disappointment at the barrel
plant, and just before leaving back to New York, we met him for a drink and recounted the story.
‘You should have got in touch with me.’
‘We tried.’‘Well, I’m pretty sure I can get [name of Jack Daniels’ heir-husband] to waive the rules for one barrel.’‘…’‘Let me know what you need exactly and I’ll call you next week.’
Improbably, this did actually pan out. Six months of haranguing later, a barrel reportedly showed up at
the curator’s office. Then it was transferred to the hotel’s storage facility where it sat for another season
while we attempted to arrange the shipping from a distance. Suddenly, sometime over Christmas 2009,
the barrel was put on a pallet, Fed-Exed, cleared both U.S. and European customs without question,and showed up at the farm intact around mid-January.

Four months later the whisky was in the barrel, and three miniature samples sent as proof to New York.
The one we opened in celebration tasted like nail polish. It was in the backs of our minds when we
first conceived of this project, that we might document the entire process in view of making somekind of industrial film (i.e. that very particular breed of educational documentary that tracks some raw
material or other along an assembly line through to the final product and its eventual distribution,
usually set to music, occasionally with a voiceover). But the idea was only half-formed when we theproject got underway, and we anyway worried over the point of pursuing such an obviously
anachronistic form. Why make an industrial film in a post-industrial context? In any case, we didn’t get
it together in time and the idea faded.
In retrospect, though, the information age equivalent of the industrial film’s tropes – tracking shotsof chains-of-events and flows-of-production; jump-cuts from forest to truck to delivery depot to factory
floor to retail outlet; the machines’ automated choreography – now consist in the myriad immaterialinteractions, the endless emails that had to be written in order to get the stuff into the barrel. In whichcase, a post-industrial film is perhaps best kept in terminal pre-production.

	
  

225

6.7: THE LETTER VERSUS THE SPIRIT OF FUTURISM
This chapter now switches track to chart the development of a newspaper project that got underway
around the time the whisky was starting to ferment.
Performa is a biannual festival of performance art held in New York since 2005. In 2009, we wereinvited to consider the possibility of producing a corollary newspaper to accompany that year’s events.
The biennial was programmed in homage the centenary of Futurism, a hundred years since theimprobable publication of F.T. Marinetti’s incendiary ‘Futurist Manifesto’ in mainstream French
newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. As far as we could gather, Performa’s reasons for‘producing a corollary newspaper’ didn’t seem to extend much beyond merely referencing thishistorical moment, or perhaps very weakly mimicking it – and even then, copying the container rather
than its contents. This didn’t seem reason enough.
Whatever the format, Performa did have some vague idea of publishing ‘news’ about and around therest of the programme taking place across the city over the festival’s three weeks as and when it
happened – dedicated announcements, reports, profiles, interviews and reviews. However, mindful of
the actual institutional stress that generally accompanies such ambitious high-profile arts events,
especially in New York where secondary media coverage often seems to outweigh all other priorities,34
it was difficult to conceive there’d be adequate time, energy, rigour or fees to foster the sort of writingthat would amount to a worthwhile publication (as opposed to a cheap advertorial rag, which wasconversely all too easy to imagine). From our point of view, Performa were casting about for some
worthwhile material to squeeze into a formal conceit, which seemed to be exactly the wrong way ofgoing about things.
The more we thought about it, the more the Futurist premise seemed to be most ill-considered kindof ‘celebration’ – a monument to a movement that fundamentally resisted monuments (Smash themuseums! etc.). Trying hard to avoid being completely cynical, we considered the invitation froma whole other angle: according to the spirit rather than the letter of Futurism. What might weconceive to be ‘transferable’ Futurist qualities that transcend the original context and circumventthe movement’s characteristic violence, destruction, provocation, confrontation, glorification of themachine, war, and machismo generally; and that aim instead to capture time, space, speed, scale – allthose dynamic, haptic aspects of the moment – in view of putting them to newly pertinent work … ?
This line of thinking chimed with Performa’s suggestion in the sense that a newspaper is obviously arelatively immediate format. It seemed significant, too, that at this particular moment in 2009, theentire news industry was in the throes of serious upheaval, painfully working through a paradigm shift.
The impact of the inevitable switch from material to digital formats on publishing’s production anddistribution mechanisms was massive. Less and less economically viable, newspapers were fast
becoming Old Media.
The technological shift also raised attendant questions about the veracity of contemporary journalism,
and the long-established authority of the old models was challenged by major independent online
news sites; local, niche, and personal blogs; crowd reporting and other forms of audience participation,and so on. Major established newspapers and their local equivalents were either closing down for goodor seriously downsizing and recalibrating, with the surviving ones experimenting vigorously withdigital replacements, counterparts or supplements; but as the economic viability of these new formats
was yet to be standardized or regulated, the process was highly tenuous and expensive. 2009 seemed tobe the locus of this crisis, which was of course reflexively reported through those very channels incrisis. ‘The news’ was in the news, and being debated at an especially high pitch.
And so we resolved to tap the moment by making some form of newspaper, too. In a sense, we would
only be adding to all the debate already circulating – but with a few marked differences. First, we could
reasonably assume we’d be working with our usual circle of contributors, none of whom are

	
  
34

See chapter 4.

	
  

226

professional journalists (or avowedly non-professional journalists), or otherwise directly involved in
the industry. As such, they’d be writing a step removed, i.e. without any immediate or obvious vested
interest or particular leaning towards one or other side of the various debates at play (e.g. material vs.
digital, professional vs. amateur, old hierarchy v.s new ‘democracy’. Our take would be essentiallydisinterested. Moreover, we’d be releasing that writing outside any clearly established editorial rubric,or at least one obscure enough to resist ‘contaminating’ its material: we’d be coming at the subject
from a typically obtuse art angle, a relative anonymity that might be put to good use. Finally, it seemed
an attractively ridiculous proposition to start a newspaper under such conditions, which already
implied a certain approach if not yet a clear direction. Our hope was to grasp something of the moment
by way of projecting its future, approaching an on-topic from an off-angle. This seemed a far more
pertinent use of ‘futurist’ spirit.
And so we began assembling the conditions to allow these intentions to play out, starting with a dumb
title, The First/Last Newspaper. ‘Last’ was meant in that obvious sense that physical newspapers wereclearly becoming quickly obsolete. ‘First’ was foremost a material reference: we would adopt theformat of the earliest newspapers – large-format, single-leaf ‘broadsheets’ dating from early 17th
century Europe (and around a century later in the U.S.A.). Although such a full-circle return to themedium’s point of origin was an attractive enough allusion, our reasoning wasn’t sentimental. The
broadsheet format was well suited to our circumstances: easy to conceive, cheap to make, simple toproduce, and convenient to disseminate. Moreover, broadsheets were initially hung to be read in public
in advance of individual copies being disseminated for private reading, a tradition perhaps worth
reviving in this first/last context.
Having settled on a name and format, we began casting about for an equally productive approach to its
layout (i.e. the graphic articulation of text and image according to the constraints of the page) – onethat would similarly embody its mode of production or other underlying ideas. A key influence here
was Robert Smithson’s article ‘Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space’ (1966), originally publishedover four pages in Arts Magazine.35 This characteristically compressed, elliptical piece of work
debunks what Smithson considers the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of biological metaphors habitually attached tothen-contemporary Abstract Expressionism (e.g. the work of such as Willem de Kooning or Jackson
Pollock). He posits counter-examples of artists preoccupied with solidifying ‘ideas of time’ (e.g. thevoid of Ad Reinhardt’s abstract paintings; sculptures by Ruth Vollmer, Eva Hesse, Lucas Samaras andDonald Judd).
Drawing on diverse historical examples, including Kubler’s The Shape of Time, which was publishedfour years earlier, Smithson’s commentary runs through a central field marked off by a thick framefrom a large ‘ultramundane’ margin (equivalent in area to the ‘body’ text itself) populated by acollection of images (and texts) that zoom in and out between micro and macro, between ‘expanded’
and ‘contracted’ views of the universe. He plotted the basic idea in this sketch:

	
  
35

Robert Smithson, ‘Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space’ [1966] in: Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected
Writings (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).

	
  

227

fdLike many of the works in its margins, the layout conveys its subject matter – a Russian doll of apage that functions as a kind of iconic mnemonic.
This idea of ‘specific form’ in terms of page layout was developed in the abstract by one of Smithson’s
margin examples, Dan Graham, in his magazine piece ‘SCHEMA for a set of pages whose component
variants are to be published in various places’ (1966). The schema comprises a list of verbal andtypographic ‘placeholders’, such as ‘(number of) adjectives’, ‘(perimeter of) page’ to ‘(number of)words italicized’:
In each published instance, it is set in its final form (so it defines
itself) by the editor of the particular publication where it is toappear, the exact data used to correspond in each specific instance tothe specific fact(s) of the published final appearance. The work
defines itself in place only as information with simply the external
support of the facts of its external appearance or presence in printin place of the object.36

Graham’s piece suggests why highlighting those generic aspects of a format’s form might usefully
inform an artful approach to a newspaper: it lays the process bare in order to consider the subject
from scratch. For the same reason, Hollis Frampton once introduced a talk on the history of film as‘A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes inWhich the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench.’37
At different points in time but for related reasons, Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan bothclaimed the newspaper to be a new archetype of visual-verbal communication. In 1936, Benjaminasserted that ‘technically speaking’ the newspaper represents the most important literary position of thetime.38 Writing from an explicitly Marxist standpoint, the principle of communal ownership wasparamount – in art as in industry. Benjamin saw the modern newspaper as usefully loosening up
traditional antinomies such as ‘science and belles letters’ and ‘culture and politics’. It was ‘a theatre ofliterary confusion’ whose content is ‘subject matter’ and its ‘form of organization’ fundamentally
imposed by ‘the readers’ impatience’.39 Benjamin duly deemed the newspaper a properly common
property that bridged the distance between author and public. Via the new possibility of letters to theeditor and so forth, citizens were now also potential writers, and literature ‘gains in width what it
loses in depth’. In the shift from being a narrowly bourgeois medium to becoming a broadly egalitarian
one, the newspaper served as a revolutionary testament as well as a revolutionary tool.
Benjamin thus urged the progressive writer to actively involve himself in his or her vocation’s rootlevel machinations rather than passively work at its tail end. Even the most left-wing commentatorperpetuates the status quo, he says, as long as he or she fails to directly address their work’s underlying
conditions, such as the formats dictated by the technology’s default settings, or the vested interests of
the institutions they serve. Instead of merely reporting on them at a remove, Benjamin’s requires his
self-aware and socially committed writer to transform them from within – specifically, ‘in the directionof socialism’.40 Nowadays, outside the Marxist context, Benjamin’s model author might be moregenerally thought of as someone who constantly measures the effect of his work against the degree towhich it advances positive social change – and works with vanguard technologies in view ofmaximizing that effect.

	
  
36

Which duly resulted in a number of published versions of schema and outcome, such as: Dan Graham, ‘Poem, March 1966’,
Aspen, 5/6, Fall/Winter 1967–68.

37

Hollis Frampton, ‘The Invention Without a Future’, October, no. 109, Summer 2004.

38

Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, op. cit.

39

All ibid.

40

See also §1.4.

	
  

228

Writing in 1967,41 McLuhan focused more fully on the graphic analogue of this ‘literary confusion’ interms of the ‘problem of orchestration’ of this ‘simultaneity of focus’; the ‘jazzy, ragtime
discontinuity’, ‘front page cubism’ and ‘symbolist landscape’;42 and he draws clear links between its
multivalent character and equivalent cases in other fields:
It is on its technical and mechanical side that the front page islinked to the techniques of modern science and art. Discontinuity isin different ways a basic concept both of quantum and relativity
physics. It is the way in which a Toynbee looks at civilizations,or a Margaret Mead at human cultures, Notoriously, it is the visualtechnique of a Picasso, the literary technique of James Joyce.43

	
  
41

Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man [1951] (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1967).

42

All ibid.

43

Ibid., p. 3.

	
  

229

At this point we paused to propose our recalibrated idea of what a properly ‘futurist’ newspaper mightlook like in 2009. In order to perform it to Performa rather than merely explain it, we produced a series

	
  

230

of poster-size ‘pages’ that assembled the basic idea together with a bunch of immediate references
according to the readymade template of Smithson’s ‘Quasi-Infinities’; the idea being to give a sense of

	
  

231

how we might approach the whole thing rather than project an explicit outcome. The following four
pages were blown up to broadsheet format and installed along one of the walls in Perfoma’s offices one

	
  

232

DS080409

A"CURRENT"PROPOSAL1.

(""*&" !!"
thing'we'should'stop'doing.'We'
should'stop'calling'ourselves'new.'We'are'not.'They'were'new.'We'are'
old,'and'we'have'not'necessarily'
aged'as'well'as'we'should.'To'cite'
Eliot'again:'he'reports'himself'as'answering'someone'who'objected'
to,'I'suppose,'Shakespeare,'Dante,'

AROUND'FOUR'BLOCKS'of'print'we'shall'postulate'four'ultramundane'margins'that'shall'contain'indeterminate'information1'as'well'as'reproduced'reproductions.'Within'these'cascading'pages,'we'will'outline' A' CURRENT' PROPOSAL' from' Dexter' Sinister'for'THE'LAST'(OR'FIRST)'NEWSPAPER.'

Altered'cover'of'Paul'R.'Halmos,'Naive Set Theory,'1960“From'kindergarten,'most'of'us'
remember'the'Broken'Telephone'Game.'One'person'whispers
a'word'or'a'phrase'into'the'ear'of'
the'person'next'to'him.'That'person,'in'turn,'repeats'it'quietly'to'
the'next.'And'so'on'until,'at'the
end'of'a'long'line'of'people,'the'#*!"!" ! Dispersed'information'is'information'spread'too'thin.'In'efforts'to'
stop'information,'younger'artists'have'made'their'work'to'operate'
inside'of'a'Broken'Telephone'Game,'generating'a'slippage'of'meaning'and'welcoming'processes!" !")"&'Huberman,'‘Naïve'Set'Theory,’''Dot Dot Dot 15,'2007“At'Gavin'Brown’s'Enterprise,'a'gallery'in'Greenwich'Village'in'
New'York,'I’ve'admired'for'a'while'the'painted'statement'that'wraps'
round'the'façade'of'the'corner'
building.'It'says'‘the'whole'world'+'the'work'='the'whole'world.'It'
is'Work Number 300'by'Martin'
Creed'and'implies'a'worldview'in'
the'form'of'a'simple'mathematical'
equation'that'seems'to'embed'the'logic'of'Naïve'Set'Theory.'Underlying'this'simple'sentence'is'again'
simple'Set'Theory.'The'set'of'the'Whole'World'contains'everything'in'the'whole'world'and'the'Work'
is'a'thing'in'the'Whole'World,'so'then'the'Whole'World'must'necessarily'completely'contain'the'

Monday morning.

and'Homer'on'the'grounds'that'
we'know'more'than'they'did'by'
replying,'“yes,'we'do,'and'they'are' !&%"%%) !
Frampton,'‘Invention'without'a'
future’,'lecture'from'November'
17,'1979“This'book'has'a'lot'to'say'about'
Ancient'Greek'perspectives'and'
their'meaning'but'there'is'one'
perspective'it'misses.'That'is'their'
view'of'time.'They'saw'the'future'
as'something'that'came'upon'them'from'behind'their'backs'with'the'past'receding'away'before'their'eyes.'When'you'think'about'it,'
that’s'a'more'accurate'metaphor'than'our'present'one.'Who'really'
CAN'face'the'future?'All'you'can'
do'is'project'from'the'past,'even'when'the'past'shows'that'such''
projections'are'often'wrong.'And'
who'really'can'forget'the'past?'"!!" "%)'Robert'M.'Pirsig,'‘Afterword,’'in'
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance,'1974.

“As'far'as'I'am'concerned,'there'
are'no'such'things'as'forms'that'are'more'or'less'up'to'date.''All'forms,'materials,'ideas,'and'means'are'available'and'to'be'used.'Walking'by'means'of'stepping'to'one'side'takes'us'out'of'the'system'that'goes'straight'ahead.'
There'is'no'goal'before'us'with'
# ! "* !"" $
!! "!") 
Pistoletto,'‘Famous'Last'Words,’'
Bit'2,'June'19682.

( #!*"!")Arts
Magazine,'1966),'latent'Futurist'predecessor'Robert'
Smithson' leaned' heavily' on' Yale' historian' George'
Kubler’s'little'book'The Shape of Time 2'to'assert'that'time'moves'not'forward'in'a'straight'line,'but'instead,'intermittently' and' coincidentally' in' retreating' and'recursive'loops'—'more'knot'than'arrow.3'

3.
Work.'Adding'the'Work'back'to'
the'Whole'World'leaves'you'again'
with'only'the'Whole'World.''
This'idea'of'art-making'echoes'the'ideas'of'James,'Gödel'and'Halmos.'
The'Work'is'produced'only'by'practice'and'is'only'added'to'the'Whole'World'which,'although''it'contains'every'thing'in'the'%% !!&*"
" &$&)'David'Reinfurt,'‘Naive'Set'Theory,’'
Dot Dot Dot 17,'2008“The'exciting'thing'about'all'this'is'that'as'it'is'new'it'is'old'and'as'
it'is'old'it'is'new,'but'now'we'have'come'to'be'in'our'way'which'is'an'" & "%&) " #Stein,'Narration: Four Lectures,'1969

Optical'illusion“It’s'quite'the'same'here'as'anywhere'else,'but'here'it’s'made'quite'clear:'space'is'generated'by'
need.'Let’s'say'you’d'like'to'take'a'walk.'You'simply'project'in'front'of'you'the'necessary'space'which'you'walk'across'as'and'when.''The'same'with'time.'Just'as'a'spider'secretes'the'thread'down'
which'she'climbs,'so'you'secrete'the'time'you'need'to'do'whatever'
you'need'to'do,'and'you'proceed'
along'this'thread'which'is'visible'behind'you'but'usable'only'
in'front'of'you.'The'key'lies'in'% "#"  &') 
Daumal,'A Night of Serious Drinking.'1938

	
  

1.

3.$Ezra$Pound,$Make it New,$1934“The$man$who$claims$to$be$mod%! (&'#%"2!'!'est$degree,$for$unless$he$can$atone$
by$creative$ability$for$his$break$with$tradition,$he$is$merely$disloyal$to$the$past.$It$is$sheer$juggling$
to$look$upon$a$denial$of$the$past$
as$the$same$thing$as$consciousness$of$the$present.$Today$stands$
between$yesterday$and$tomorrow,$
and$forms$a$link$between$past$and$future;$it$has$no$other$meaning.$
The$present$represents$a$process$of$transition,$and$that$man$may$
account$himself$modern$who$is$
conscious$of$it$in$this$sense.
$ Every$good$quality$has$its$
bad$side,$and$nothing$that$is$good$
can$come$into$this$world$without$directly$producing$a$corresponding$evil.$This$is$a$painful$fact.$Now$
there$is$the$danger$that$consciousness$of$the$present$may$lead$to$
an$elation$based$upon$illusion:$
the$illusion,$namely,$that$we$are$the$culmination$of$the$history$of$
mankind,$the$fulfulment$and$the$end-product$of$countless$centuries.$If$we$grant$this,$we$should$
understand$that$it$is$no$more$than$
the$proud$acknowledgement$of$
our$destitution:$we$are$also$the$disappointment$of$the$hopes$and$expectations$of$the$ages.$The$modern$man$is$aware$of$this.$He$has$&!"*!2!'%&!
technology$and$organisation,$but$
also$how$catastrophic$they$can$
/% (&') (!0#%tual$Problem$of$Modern$Man,’$$Collected Works,$1953

ETAOIN$SHRDLU$is$the$approximate$order$of$frequency$of$the$twelve$most$commonly$used$letters$in$the$English$language$and$
best$known$as$a$nonsense$phrase$that$sometimes$appeared$in$the$,&"."'',#/#%!'#(&-233

“The$rest$of$time$emerges$only$$
in$signals$relayed$to$us$at$this$$instant$by$innumerable$stages$$
and$by$unexpected$bearers$…$$
The$nature$of$a$signal$is$that$its$
message$is$neither$here$nor$$!"*(''%!'!/$George$Kubler,$The Shape ofTime,$1964

2.

A$restoration$that$evolved$into$$
a$redesign.

AND$ SO$ WE$ DEPART$ from$ February$ 20,$ 1909—$
F.T.$Marinetti’s$manifesto$appeared$today$on$the$front$
of$Le Figaro.1$We had been awake all night my friends      
bowls were constellated like our very souls …$ Then$
this$morning’s$New York Times p.$A14$under$“Detroit$"(%!/'!%&. ! %! +#% !',*&##%&"*"'",/ 2$ It’s$ a$ big$ news$ day$ in$ Detroit:$ Michigan$ State$
made$the$Final$Four$basketball$playoffs$to$be$held$in$
the$Motor$City$next$weekend,$and$yet$more$bad$news$
for$the$city’s$auto-industry$as$the$new$administration$
demands$GM$surrender$Chrysler’s$independence$to$
a$partnership$with$Italy’s$Fiat.$However,$these$stories$
merely$frame$the$real$subject$of$the$article:$how$the$local$interest$in$both$events$has$brought$the$current$
crisis$in$the$newspaper$industry$into$sharp$relief.

The New York Times,$National$$
section,$Tuesday$31$March,$2009

All$ of$ this$ news$ would$ have$ landed$ on$ hundred$of$thousands$of$Motor$City$doorstops$on$
Monday$ morning,$ in$ the$ form$ of$ The Detroit
Free Press$and$The Detroit News.$Would$have,$that$is,$except$that$Monday—of$all$days—was$'"!#!!2%&',"'!*&##%&1
new$ strategy$ for$ surviving$ the$ economic$ $crisis$by$ending$home$delivery$on$Mondays,$
Tuesdays,$ Wednesdays,$ and$ Saturdays.$ Instead,$on$those$days,$they$are$directing$readers$to$their$Web$sites$and$offering$a$truncated$
print$version$at$stores,$newsstands$and$street$boxes.$ “This$ morning$ I$ felt$ like$ something$*& &&!/ & !, &'% - .%
*&'&!" #'!&&/$$ These$three$column$inches$offer$a$pretty$concise$distillation$ of$ the$ economic$ issues$ directing$ largescale$newspaper$publishing$now—it$is$a$perfect$time$
to$hollow$out$the$old$form,$and$MAKE$IT$NEW.$3“New$work$always$involves$objections$to$the$old,$but$these$objections$are$really$relevant$only$to$
the$new.$They$are$part$of$it.$If$the$%%*"%&2%&'%''&" plete.$New$inconsistencies$and$limitations$aren’t$retroactive;$$they$concern$only$work$that$is$being$developed$…$It’s$not$like$a$movement;$anyway,$movements$no$longer$work;$also,$linear$history$
&(!%)&" *'/$"! (0#2'&1
1965;$and$Untitled,$Etching,$1974

ing.$Linotype$operators$who$had$
made$a$typing$error$couldn’t$easily$"'"''!'"2!ish$the$line$before$they$could$eject$$
the$slug$and$re-key$a$new$one.$
Since$slug$would$be$discarded,$$'$(&'*,'"2!&'!*&'"%(!2!%"*!',&
creating$this$nonsense$phrase.$$Occasionally$and$accidentally$the$*"%&##%!2!'"!

“It$is$up$to$the$reader-viewer$to$$
decide$how$to,$so$to$speak,$circle$'&$(%/ %"%%"$The Futurist Movement: AvantGarde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rapture,$1986“In$other$words—and$this$amounts$
to$an$aesthetic$system—the$only$
meaningful$way$in$whcih$art$can$speak$of$man$and$his$world$is$by$
organizing$forms$in$a$particular$way$
and$not$by$making$pronouncements$
with$them.$Form$must$be$a$vehicle$
for$thought:$it$must$be$a$way$of$'!!/ %'" "The OpenWork,$1962

	
  

234

,*""&3&"+/

Various$recent$standard$
newspaper$formats,$culminating$-"+!+!0 )'*!+1')%+
Guardian$(since$reduced$to$the$0 )$"&)14

“To$start$with,$the$marginal$
position$should$not$be$mistaken$
for$plain$dissent,$which$in$terms$
of$‘stance’$or$‘posture’$often$
merely$inverts$what$it$dissents$
from,$and$re-institutionalises;$
nor$does$the$margin$involve$
secession$(or$even$countenance$it).$Margin$dwellers$are$balancers,$
contributory$yet$withdrawn.$
Bridges$may$be$built$there,$or$
ropes$thrown$across,$though$more$
often,$connections$are$merely$
pointed$to;$alternatives$weighed$and$canvassed;$sources$noted.$
The$line$that$divides$the$margin$
from$the$text$is$more$than$one$of$
address$and$identity$—there$is$usually$an$economic$barrier$—but$
it$is$wise$to$remember$that$the$margin$needs$its$text.$Forgetful$of$this$a$margin$is$apt$to$become$a$chasm.$Recognisably$the$expertise$
of$a$marginal$is$apt$to$be$narrow$
but$deep;$a$feature$that$suits$their$
habitat;$but$of$course$when$the$%) "&$*3&+!+.+-!'$$/
unacceptable$they$will$tend$to$develop$their$own$pursuits$in$
some$depth,$cramped$as$they$are$for$working$space.$This$always$
shows,$even$when$rationalised$as$
minimalism.$On$the$other$hand$a$
margin’s$interactive$function$—even$if$temporarily$suspended—is$actually$its$saving$grace,$and$
can$out-perform$any$Debray-like$parallel$structure,$which$has$no$
declared$relative$scale,$or$means$of$crossing$over.$The$margin$does$
not$hesitate$to$foray$into$the$text$
when$its$offerings$otherwise$go$unheeded,$or$when$food$is$scarce.$
There$can$even$be$frivolity,$and$$
an$exchange$of$artefacts.$The$$
Citroen$2CV,$for$instance,$plainly$
a$margin$vehicle—it$has$that$narrow$look,$and$the$conceptual$
rectitude—was$of$course$designed$“Art$histories$may$be$measured$
in$time$by$books$(years),$by$magazines$(months),$by$newspapers$(weeks$and$days),$by$radio$and$TV$(days$and$hours).$And$the$gallery$proper—instants!“$Robert$Smith*'&2,*""&3&"+"*&+!$
Waning$of$Space,’$Arts Magazine,$
1966$

OUR$ INTENT$ IS$ DIRECT.$ This$ November$ 2009$ as$
part$of$the$visual$art$performance$biennial,$we$wish$to$
produce$THE$(FIRST)$(LAST)$NEWSPAPER,$strictly$
in$the$continuous$present 1$on$a$daily$basis$for$three$
weeks.$Half$publishing,$half$performance,$our$newspaper$won’t$present$only$the$NEWs,$but$will$borrow$promiscuously$ from$ the$ past,$ present$ and$ future$looping$back$both$to$where$newspapers$started$and$
to$where$they will$go.
     0  12$ —precursor$
of$the$modern$newspaper—set$up$to$report$past$and$future$events$as they happen;$designed$to$be$looked$
at$as$much$as$read,$in$private$and$in$public,$engaging$
both$ a$ general$ and$ a$ local$ interest.$ In$ other$ words,$
this$is$a$newspaper$that$self-consciously$PERFORMS$"+**("3,$+,)$'&+.+
$ Although$news-on-paper$existed$both$before$and$after$the$invention$of$moveable$type$in$the$mid-15th$
century,$ the$ broadsheet$ format$ established$ a$ newspaper’s$ key$ technical$ and$ typographic$ conventions$which$ (just$ about)$ remain$ today.$ The$ broadsheet$ is$still$the$largest$standard$newspaper$format,$characterized$ by$ long$ vertical$ pages.$ The$ term$ is$ derived$
from$popular$prints,$usually$single$sheets,$sold$on$the$streets$and$containing$various$types$of$matter$from$
$$* +' ('$"+"$ *+") ! 3)*+ )'*!+ -*
$*'+!3)*+,+!&-*(()Courante uyt Italien,
Duytslandt, &c.$published$in$1618,$Amsterdam.$Prior$
to$ this,$ news$ periodicals$ had$ been$ pamphlets$ in$quarto-size.$ Broadsheets$ developed$ further$ in$ the$New$World$after$a$British$tax$of$1712,$levied$duties$
on$newspapers$based$on$the$number$of$pages.
$ Crucially,$the$broadsheet’s$large$format$was$designed$at$dual$purpose—to$be$posted$in$PUBLIC$for$
communal$reading$and$to$be$taken$away$to$be$read$in$
PRIVATE.$This$tension$between$the$essential$publicity$of$a$newspaper$and$its$dense$contents$remains.

for$the$text,$and$is$somehwhat$
uneasily$back$there$in$a$renewed$
lease$of$life.$In$sum,$therefore—
and$not$to$stretch$this$line$of$
thinking$too$far—the$margin$
may$be$a$place$of$relegation,$or$
of$voluntary$exile,$but$for$those$
whose$natural$habitat$it$is$(and$I$
speak$of$my$friends),$this$is$one$
place$for$active$people$to$be.$!))'+!)*1')%&'++)
Models and Constructs: marginnotes to a design culture,$1990

2.$Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt,&c.,$June$1618.$The$Courante$$
was$a$single$folio$sheet,$meaning$
a$full$sheet$folded$once$to$form$
4$pages$and$then$cut$open$at$the$'$!3)*+"**,*-)()"&+
on$just$one$side$of$the$sheet,$initially$without$a$serial$number,$date,$or$publisher’s$imprint—
features$now$considered$essential$
to$newspapers,$and$which$were$to$follow$in$subsequent$years.$The$
main$text$runs$in$two$columns,$
separated$with$a$gutter$and$a$
line$running$in$it.$There$are$no$
empty$lines$within$the$body$text.$
The$body$of$the$text$is$printed$
in$Dutch$black-letter,$except$
for$the$numbers.$Roman$type$is$
used$for$datelines$which$also$act$
as$headlines$for$the$news$items.$
!+.+"*,$$/#,*+"3&
the$beginnings$of$paragraphs$)"&+"3-"+!"&&+*approximately$the$size$of$the$lineheight.

The Rocky Mountain News
(nicknamed$the$Rocky)$a$daily$
newspaper$published$in$Denver,$'$')'()"&+"+*3&$
edition$on$February$27,$2009.$
The Rocky$was$the$most$recent$victim$of$the$savage$economics$
of$contemporary$newspaper$
publishing.$The$front$page$of$its$
3&$(())/$+!)'&+'"+*
3)*+)'% ()"$  $/)
with$a$solemn$goodbye$note$to$its$
faithful$readers.

	
  

235

‘Once%it’s%typed%it’s%published’,%
John%Chris%Jones,%Spanner,%1979“No%sooner%has%this%text%been%%
written%than%it%will%be%full%of%
"&- % !" !'. %'Povera:%Notes%for%a%Guerrilla%War,’%Flash Art,%1967

Umberto%Boccioni,%The Development of a Bottle in Space,%1912

1.%Street%newspaper,%China“SCHEMA%for%a%set%of%pages%whose%component%variants%are%to%be%
published%in%various%places.%In%
each%published%instance,%it%is%set%%!'&0!"% &"'0!&
itself)%by%the%editor%of%the%particular%publication%where%it%
is%to%appear,%the%exact%data%used%'""%%&#"!!&#0
!&'!'"'&#0'&2"'#(&0!##%!
*"%0!&'&!#only%as%information%with%simply%
the%external%support%of%the%facts%
of%its%external%appearance%or%presence%in%print%in%place%of%the%"'- ! % %

WE%PROPOSE%TO%USE%THE%COURANTE%(trans.%current,% common,% prevalent)% AS% A% WORKING% MODEL,%
and%produce%a%series%of%daily%broadsheet%newspapers%
during%the%three%weeks%of%PERFORMA.%These%would%
be% single-sided,% relatively% inexpensive% web-offset%#%!' 1' !*&#%!' &'& &&  %"  "!central%location%and%dispersed%from%several%off-center% ones% (even% other% cities 1,% i.e.% Detroit);% displayed%
"'1'(!!#("%"')"!&'%!!"'"'!*+"%#%)'%1'"!% We%will%be%responsible%for%all%aspects%of%production% and% distribution% including% necessary% editorial%
collaborations.%Remaining%holes%in%this%current%proposal%will%be%plugged%in%the%coming%months.
% *IMPORTANT*% The% nature% of% this% project% re$(%&'"!0% '"!"&!( #&( ('
negotiated% and% delivered% in% advance.% The% precise%outcome—size% of% the% format,% quantity% of% the% printrun,%extent%of%its%content,%and%scale%of%its%dispersion%
is% DIRECTLY% RELATIVE% to% the% $$$% afforded% to% the%project.%You%very visibly%get%what%you%pay%for.%We%generally%ask%for%a%working%fee%of%around%half%the%production% budget.% Bearing% all% this% in% mind% and% given%
that% we% intend% to% work% full-time% during% these% three%
weeks%in%November%as%well%as%concertedly%from%now%
leading% towards% the% project% while% anticipating% the%likely%production%costs%involved,%we%suggest%a%sum%of%
minimum%$30,000.
% Our%broadsheets%must%be%both%UNAPOLOGETIC%(not%excused%by%their%ambiguous%status%as%an%art%project)%and%PLAUSIBLE%(organized%and%edited%with%rigour%and%conviction);%and%they%must%be%produced%under%the%twin%principles%of%(a)%THE%REFUSAL%TO%TREAT%THE%
PAST% AS% PAST% and% (b)% whether% NEWSPAPERS% or%
FUTURISTS,%WE%MUST%COMPLEXLY APPLY%RATHER%
THAN%SIMPLY CELEBRATE%THEIR%INHERITANCE.
DS“The%present%is%the%future%of%the%#&'!'#&'"'('(%-
Robert%Smithson%quoting%Ad%%!%'.(&!0!'&%
and%the%Waning%of%Space,’%Arts%
Magazine,%1966

!%1'"!*%&%
news%doesn’t%need%a%press%release.

If%asked%to%judge%which%of%the%two%
piles%illustrated%is%equal%in%height%
and%width,%most%people%would%
choose%the%one%on%the%right—but%
measurement%will%show%that%it%is%in%
fact%the%left-hand%pile.

“Try%writing%what%you%have%written%
in%the%past%tense%in%the%present%
tense%and%you%will%see%what%I%mean.%
What%we%have%to%do%is%to%give%back%to%the%past%we%are%writing%about%'&"*!#%&!''!&-%"&&"%
Greg%Dening,%website,%2002“Hot%media—newspapers,%novels,%
and%especially%such%white-hot%media%as%scholarly%and%stat%correlations—will%pre-empt%all%hotness.%In%their%detachment%(amidst%
the%general%coolness)%they%will%draw%even%further%back,%in%order%
to%maintain%and%to%become%even%more%themselves%in%their%own%
right%and%hotness.%The%‘footnote’%
will%be%the%hottest%point%in%these%0%&.""'!"'/*(''%
detachment%and%dis-engagement,%a%radical%and%liberal%barrier%behind%*'"0'"%("those%escaping%the%global%village.%
The%last%and%perhaps%only%means%of%those%escaping%the%‘appearance’%
of%appearances.%Or%the%‘state’%of%the%modern%state.%Or%the%‘disposition’%of%others’%dispositions.%The%‘form’%of%forms.%The%‘function’%of%functions.%The%‘condition’%of%conditions.%The%‘temper’%of%tempers,%
the%‘dilemma’%of%dilemmas,%the%‘plight’%of%plights,%the%‘aspect’%of%aspects,%the%‘pomp’%of%pomp,%the%‘mode’%of%modes%the%‘tenor’%of%tenors%the%‘style’%of%styles%the%‘end’%of%beginnings%the%‘middle’%of%middles%
!'.!!!&/"'!-
Donald%Porter,%As if a footnote to
the Final Glory,%1974“In%October%1978,%during%the%midst%of%a%two-week%printers’%
strike%which%completely%halted%
daily%publication%of%The New YorkTimes,%an%alternative%newspaper%
appeared%in%street%boxes%one%
morning.%Created%by%a%consortium%
of%sharp%wits%including%George%
Plimpton,%Christopher%Cerf%and%
Nora%Ephron,%Not The New YorkTimes%was%a%spiritual%companion%
to%The Times%produced%as%a%precise%doppleganger%but%with%less-thancompletely%true%stories.%For%example,%an%interview%wth%Genghis%!,-!"'&("*-,
that%orginally%appeared%in%1241%
was%reprinted%as%an%author’s%favorite%and%followed%by%a%report%
of%the%collapse%of%the%Queensboro%
Bridge%under%the%weight%of%10,000%
runners%in%the%Rheingold%Beer%
Marathon.%“After%The New YorkTimes,%November%14,%2008

	
  

236

Within the body of ‘Quasi-Infinities’, and quoted in our margins here, Smithson writes that ‘Art
histories may be measured in time by books (years), by magazines (months), by newspapers (weeks
and days), by radio and TV (days and hours). And at the gallery proper – instants!’44 In our First/Last
Newspaper, we anticipated some kind of conflation or at least blurring of these ‘traditional’ media
speeds: working according to the weekly-daily schedule of the newspaper, yet in view of creating
something that might reasonably resonate months or years afterwards45 – but instantly, too, by literally
producing the thing in public (as if on display in a ‘gallery proper’).
Oddly enough, Performa had secured the use of a storefront space in a corner of New York’s uptown
Port Authority Bus Terminal building, opposite the brand new New York Times offices. The spot was
about as civic as it gets – in the heart of Manhattan, a few blocks from Times Square, embedded in a
major public transportation hub. The proposal was accepted, and we began assembling a team of likely
contributors to work in this temporary newsroom.

6.8: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT WILL BE
It now seemed necessary to establish some productive limits. We decided to publish six broadsheets
during the festival, meaning two per week. They would be double-sided, black-and-white, printed tobe distributed on Tuesdays and Fridays on a web press at a local Chinese newspaper printers in
Queens, a couple of subway stops away from Port Authority. A print-run of 1,500 would be distributed
via various means: first, at all the other Performa events and a number of dedicated information hubs
about town; second, by volunteers on the street at a number of locations in Manhattan with highfrequency foot traffic; and third, on four specifically designed ‘street readers’ (triangular wooden
stand-alone structures) positioned inside the Port Authority terminal, in the foyer of Condé Nast, at the
Cooper Union School of Art, and at its point of production, our makeshift office.
We then assembled a modest bunch of ‘correspondents’ from our usual constellation that we could
trust to respond to a series of very tight deadlines, particularly those with interests relating to thesubject (e.g. essayist Steve Rushton, who was then writing on contemporary media and surveillanceby way of Michael Foucault, Ant Farm, Jeremy Bentham, and Norbert Wiener; and curator Francis
McKee, who was particularly interested in channelling the various denominations of American
journalism around the middle of the 20th century). We also enlisted the help of a few photographersand illustrators on ambiguous terms – to be called upon as and when necessary.
Besides a few readymade historical pieces (including the first ever article in the first U.S. newspaper,‘Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick’; a fantastically reflexive piece that amounts to thelongest sentence ever published in a newspaper that we retitled ‘Record Bites Dust’; and a selection of
Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss’s ‘Order and Cleanliness’ diagrams46), the general idea was to write andassemble the whole thing in pronounced realtime. That, we reasoned, would be to the ‘performative’slant. The remainder of our up-front preparation involved trying to work out how to make theproduction as expedient as possible in advance. This led to our designing a template for the newspaper,
hand in hand with two very particular techniques: TeX typesetting and physical paste-up.
(Incidentally, this preamble is clearly already very specific. It’s fine to skip any of these technicalparagraphs and pick up the next section.)
TeX is an automated typesetting system developed by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s in order tofacilitate professional typographic production. It remains popular today in certain academic fields,

	
  

44

Smithson, op. cit.

45

For example, when the project as a whole has been shown in exhibitions such as The Last Newspaper, The New Museum,
October, 2010 – 9 January, 2011; or equally, all the occasions we’ve referred to it in talks and publications since (including here
and now, already five years later).
46

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Ordnung und Reinlichkeit, printed pamphlet, 1981. See: Bulletins of The Serving Library #2,
2011.

	
  

237

particularly the mathematics and the science communities. As opposed to the arts industry-standard
page-layout softwares that implement a What-You See-Is-What-You-Get or ‘WYSIWYG’ paradigm,
TeX operates according to a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean or ‘WYSIWYM’ one. WYSIWYGbased software such as Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word immediately display changes intypographic articulation as and when implemented, such that I can perceive a word italicized as soon as
I alter it. WYSIWYM, by contrast, involves a semantic markup language that separates the
instructional input and the graphic result. The system effectively cuts out the need to make on-the-spot
design decisions, pouring the raw language into a pre-formatted (and highly efficient) set ofparameters.

PUBLICKOCCURRENCES
BOTH
FORREIGN
These two columns show a typical programmed input and processed output: at the word level, TeX has
applied the instruction code ‘/textit{}’ to render the indicated text italic, AND
while at the paragraph level
the text has been set to a certain predetermined type size and interlinear ‘leading’, justified across acertain column width with words broken according to fixed hyphenation values.
DOMESTICK
47

BOSTON&''&IT&is&designed,&that&the&
Countrey&shall&be&furnished&once&a&moneth&(or&if&any&Glut&of&\textit{Occurrences}&
happen,&oftener,)&with&an&Account&of&such&considerable&things&as&have&arrived&unto&
our&Notice.
In&order&hereunto,&the&Publisher&will&
take&what&pains&he&can&to&obtain&a&\
textit{Faithful&Relation}&of&all&such&things;&and&will&particularly&make&himself&beholden&to&such&Persons&in&\textit{Boston}&whom&he&Knows&to&have&been&
for&their&own&use&the&diligent&Observers&
of&such&matters.

BOSTON — IT is designed, that the Countrey shall be furnished once a moneth (or if
any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener,)with an Account of such considerable things
as have arrived unto our Notice.
In order hereunto, the Publisher will takewhat pains he can to obtain a Faithful Relation of all such things; and will particularly make himself beholden to such Persons
in Boston whom he Knows to have been for
their own use the diligent Observers of suchmatters.
That which is herein proposed, is, First,
That Memorable Occurrents of Divine Provmay not
be precisely
neglected thisor forgotten,
as to aOne perceived advantage of our using TeX to produce theidence
newspaperwasreversion
they too often are. Secondly, That people
division of labour (‘reversion’ because since the advent of desktop publishing WYSIWIG has been theevery where may better understand the Cirnorm in art and design software for obvious reasons; technicallyspeaking,
it’s justas ‘contemporary’).
cumstancesof PubliqueAﬀairs,both abroad
The idea was to foster a more efficient line of production andby strongly
editing
proceduresat home; separating
which may not
only direct
theirThoughtsproofreading)at all times, but
at sometimes
also(those activities focused on the text: writing, editing, subediting,fromgraphic
designto assist
their
Businesses ofandarticles;
Negotiations.
ones (those activities focused on the page: the hierarchy, order,andarrangement
the jigsaw
That on-screensome thingfutzing,
may bei.e.
done
of text and images). Such separation would seem to precludeThirdly,
all the usual
thetowards the Curing, or at least the Charmtendency to make perpetual changes because it’s perpetuallypossible
to
do
so.
In
short,
adopting
ing, of that Spirit of Lying, which prevailsTeX
would likely force us to assume the sort of discipline and amongst
focus necessary
to getnothing
the thingoutbetwice
us wherefore
shall
en- a
week – and so amount to another pragmatic anachronism.tered, but what we have reason to believe
is true, repairing to the best fountains for
ourpaste-up
Information.
And whenorthere
appears
The same goes for the second key aspect. The technique ofis a generation
two old,its
any material mistake in any thing that is colheyday roughly the middle of the 20th century, when pages
wereassembledbyarrangingmaterial
lected, it shall be corrected in the next.
blocks of texts and images, ‘pasting them up’ (i.e. sticking themdown)theon Publisher
a larger sheet,oftenaMoreover,of these
Occurgridded template. Completed sheets were then individually
photographedorder whereas
to makethere
printing
rencesis willing toinengage,areFalse Reports,
maliciously
made, andplates. Today the process is almost extinct: pages are nowmany
configured
using digitaltechnology,
organized and output either as printed or digital files.48 spread among us, if any well-minded person
will be at pains to trace any such false Reportso far as to find out and Convict the FirstWe imagined a three-fold benefit of using paste-up at PortRaiser
Authority.
First,
wethiscould
workon theof it, hewill in
Paper(unlessjustmicro detailing of words, sentences and paragraphs entirely
apartbefrom
macro
Advicegiventheto arrangement
the contrary) of
exposetheNameof suchperson,as seeA malicious
elements like headlines, blocks of text and images. Second,
it would
allow
us to
the pageRaiser
at actuala falseReport. with
It is thesuppos’dthatwenone
size, which, given the relatively large format (707 x 1000 ofmm),
combinedfact thatwould
will dislike this Proposal, but such as intend
necessarily be working on relatively small laptop screens, meant we would only ever be able to see
to be guilty of so villainous a Crime.

either 10% of the page at 100% scale, or 100% of the page at 10% scale – neither of which areparticularly practicable. And third, given that a group of people can gather around an in-progress
pasted-up 1:1 page, we would be able to make ‘actual size’ decisions collectively. All these factors fed

	
  

47

More on TeX in §8.1.

48

More on paste-up in §9.3.

	
  

238

into a base template that we conceived as containing the DNA necessary for anyone in the team to beable to produce a page.
Here’s a much-reduced image of this skeleton page, followed by some notes:

	
  

239

	
  

240

– The underlying grid and some ancillary information (measurements, line numbers, edition numbers,
dates, contact details of the printers, etc.) are printed in non-reproducing blue, an ink native to paste-upthat resists photographic reproduction. It’s actually a combination of two grids laid on top of eachother. The first is a fairly commonplace newspaper template: 7 vertical columns derived by protracted
trial and error relative to the particular styles and sizes of typeface, leading (the space between lines)
and gutter width. The second abides the more esoteric ‘matroyshka’ logic of Smithson’s ‘QuasiInfinities’ piece, centred on a rectangular block identified by a collection of ‘IN BRIEF’ fragments.
Consecutive ‘rings’ expand then outward from this focal block, identified by diagonal shading on topof the regular horizontal baselines. The vague idea here was to negotiate both grids at once in view ofsome productively ‘schizophrenic’ organization of material – the obvious top-left-to-bottom-rightmovement of any regular page combined with this other, ‘centrifrugal’ logic. This might imply a ‘lead’
article or image positioned at centre to confuse or subvert the regular hierarchy, with sundry knock-on
effects.
– The masthead repurposes Shannon Ebner’s 2009 ‘Strike Alphabet’, a set of letters built from
U.S.-standard cinder blocks.49 The name of the paper is reduced to an acronym, TF/LN, so as to bevisible from a distance. (Other than the forward slash, Shannon’s panels are blank on the empty
template.) Next, there’s a sample ‘article’ at top left, which doubles as a general announcement andwas later left in place as the opening ‘editorial’ to the first issue. The sample demonstrates theformatting of a standard headline, lead-in, and body text (paragraph level), then its internal articulation(sentence level), concluding with a diminutive black ‘halmos’ oblong.
– The text sample is accompanied by a similarly generic image and caption. It’s a still from the film
Farewell etaoin shrdlu (1980), a lost documentary about the last day of hot metal Linotype typesettingat The New York Times on 1 July, 1978, as well as the morning after when its new electronic computer
system gets up and running.50 The documentary therefore simultaneously mourns and celebrates thenews industry’s last major technological shift – from a pre-press operation largely still based onmechanization and manual labour (and largely unchanged since Gutenberg’s invention of the printingpress in the mid-15th century) to a digitized, automated equivalent.

– In practice, as soon as each front and back had been satisfactorily assembled from laser prints on thetemplate, we re-made the same arrangement digitally. Once again, the reasoning behind this ostensibly

	
  
49

We had latterly worked on a book of Shannon’s photographs, and so were familiar with the alphabet’s poetic allusions, such as
to the modular nature and ‘weight’ of language. See: Shannon Philayne Ebner, The Sun As Error (Los Angeles: LACMA, 2010).

50David Loeb Weiss, Farewell etaoin shrdlu (1980). We screened an original 35mm print of the documentary to launch ourpaper on 4 November, 2009, just as we sent the first edition to print. The event was attended and introduced by the film’s
narrator and now retired New York Times typesetter, Carl Schlesinger. In a short introduction, Mr Schlesinger lamented that for
him the main change between the old and new paradigms – both the analogue-to-digital switch of the 1980s, and today’s
material-to-immaterial one – was the gradual and insidious elimination of communal work, decisions hashed out face-to-face bya group (which was precisely the point of our paste-up). Incidentally, ‘etaoin shrdlu’ refers to the two non-words formed byrunning a finger down the left side of the mechanical Linotype keyboard in order to signal an error and run on to the end of a lineor ‘slug’.

	
  

241

circuitous route51 was ultimately practical. Our main circulating medium was inevitably a PDF,
i.e. the ubiquitous cross-platform Portable Document Format, which is now also the standard format
any regular litho press uses to output plates for printing. This meant we could simultaneously go toprint and disseminate the same file via digital channels without further adjustment or translation(just a little compression). Just as importantly, though, passing from digital (TeX) through analogue(paste-up) to digital again (PDF) effectively precipitated a series of extra checks: proofing for
mistakes is far easier when switching between mediums because perception is constantly aggravated.
Moreover, each step of the process had its own specific deadline, which helped keep things moving
along.
This set of typographic premises was in place to begin production as soon as the first contributions
arrived on 4 November, 2009 – and thereafter each subsequent third or fourth day to yield a totalof six editions. Each one was announced by email and simultaneously made available throughwww.dextersinister.org. They remain archived there in a reverse-chronological list throughout themonth of November.
Here is PDF of the first, and a photograph of the print edition of the last:

	
  
51

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246

	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  
	
  

	
  

247

Stefan Themerson, cover of a four-page leaflet for Gaberbocchus Press, c. 1953

	
  

248

	
  

249

7: ARTICULATE OBJECTSThis chapter elaborates on how work can be thought of as ‘self-captioning’, in the sense that it‘speaks for itself’ without recourse to external support, and more generally how this is constituent of
a particular set of ethics. ‘Teaching a reader how to read’ begins with an overview of Jacques
Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which tells the story of how early 19th-century pedagog
Joseph Jacotot taught using objects equally strange to both ‘master’ and student. Next I note somethoughts by Bernard Stiegler on what it means to actively read something, in the sense that it changesor ‘individuates’ the reader; then how that payoff is ideally transmitted across generations to form
‘long circuits’ of culture. These days, he says, those circuits are becoming ever shorter, and theirre-activation increasingly urgent. Switching to literature, I consider David Foster Wallace’s novel
Infinite Jest a case in point – and an example of his mandate to ‘remind readers how smart they are’.
In ‘Modernism as a tool’, I examine Robin Kinross’s use of the term ‘articulate product’, withparticular reference to a conversation with graphic designer/historian Richard Hollis about how objects
can be imbued with a ‘didactic’ aspect – that teach you how they were made, and by extension how tomake them yourself, a quality they consider an enduring legacy of the modernist project. ‘Reading
things’ hones in more specifically on what it means to ‘read’ articulate objects in three different fields:sociologist Bruno Latour’s account of a very local key; artist Alighiero e Boetti’s long-term series ofoutsourced Mappa; and the breakdown of a self-made toolrack by designer Norman Potter. To end, in‘Speak for yourselves’ I consider two recent instances of prominent ‘self-captioning’ at the level of theexhibition rather than the individual work. These case studies, of shows by Mark Manders and Paul
Elliman, are considered in light of Joseph Grigley’s thoughts on the productively ambiguous status of‘exhibition prosthetics’.
In the second half of the chapter, I mean to spell out as clearly as possible the nature of the ‘ethics’that I’ve hinted are part and parcel of the particular approach to making things described in this thesis
so far. Considered in terms of art and design, this ethical disposition boils down to four aspects,
manifest in a way of working that (a) intrinsically draws form from the material, as opposed to forcing
preconceived ideas onto it; (b) is emphatically outward-looking and so fundamentally aims to engage,connect, and communicate; (c) is open-ended and open-minded enough to meet and make use ofcontingencies encountered along the way; and (d) considers all aspects of a given piece of work
equally important, from the superstructure to the smallest details.
For the most part, I’ve so far considered how these attitudes are carried by individual artworks ordesigned artefacts (as well as the two exhibitions noted above); but they’re far easier to apprehend as
they recur across an entire body of one person’s work in different contexts and formats. Inasmuch as
self-reflection and doubt are fundamental to this working ethos, it’s also manifest in how the work
itself changes over time. The rest of chapter therefore leans heavily on one particular body of work,that of the Polish polymath Stefan Themerson, via two transcriptions of talks. The first, ‘Lower-caseethics’ is a general introduction to Themerson’s own rebel decorum ‘against customary modes ofthought’ via two longterm preoccupations: his satirical technique of ‘Semantic Translation’, and his
account of Kurt Schwitters’ work in England. Both projects passed through a number of different
formats, reworked and refined over long stretches of time. And at the end of the chapter, ‘So-called
ephemera’ considers how the same approach plays out at the other end of his ouevre, in a number ofmodest bits and pieces mostly written and designed as publicity for the imprint he founded together
with his wife Franciszka, Gaberbocchus Press.
These parts are joined by a couple of other angles on the ethos. ‘Palimpsest talks’ suggests that thesame spirit that marks Themerson’s oeuvre is manifest in three particular works (or series of works) by
three contemporary artists, Ryan Gander, Seth Price, and Mark Leckey. Each of these recent pieces
seems founded on a genuine (non-ironic) desire to explain things as candidly and transparently as
possible – a gesture that seems all the more pointed given that their work generally has a reputation forbeing the opposite, i.e obscure and esoteric. The didactic premise is emphasized by the fact that all
three works are based on an overtly didactic medium, the public lecture. Moreover, each piece in eachcase has been amended as it passes through different formats or iterations over time, and again thisrevision and refinement seems part of the point. Like a lot of the individual sections here, all three

	
  

250

examples could reasonably fit elsewhere in the thesis – as case studies of self-reflexivity, or works inmovement, or articulate objects. They are juxtaposed with the Themersons simply in hope of teasingout the ethical implications – the decency and good manners inherent in the attempt to explain stuff
that isn’t that easy to explain.
Which leads us into ‘Friendly Fire’, an exchange of letters with typographer Will Holder loosely basedon our respective love/hate of the work of two outspoken artists from a century or so ago, Wyndham
Lewis and Gertrude Stein. We argue over the ethics of ‘good friendship’. As usual with these set pieces
carried over from other contexts, the form of the piece is an attempt to embody its topic – in this case ademonstration of the ‘cybernetics of conversation’.

7.1: TEACHING A READER HOW TO READ
French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation, tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French schoolteacher who, through a kind of inspired
accident, discovers that he is able to teach things he doesn’t know himself.1 In exile from France
following the Restoration, Jacotot was invited to teach a class of students at a university in the Flemish
town of Louvain. Because neither party spoke the other’s language, Jacotot searched for a common
item to use as a teaching tool. He discovered a recent bilingual edition of François Fénelon’s adaptationof Homer’s Telemachus, and set his class the task of reading and discussing it in French.
Starting with the first word, relating it to the next, then deducing the relationships between individual
letters to form words, words to form sentences, and so on, Jacotot made his students discuss the work
they were learning to recite by heart, using the terms they learnt from the text itself. The experiment
was a success: within a couple of months his students had a substantial grasp of both the book and theFrench language. The learning process, Jacotot observed, was played out strictly between Fénelon’s
intelligence and the students’ intelligence – that is, without mediation. The chance experiment led him
to conclude that ‘everything is in everything’, a principle that recognizes the fundamental equality
between things. Once something – strictly, anything – is learned, it can be compared and related toanything else. Jacotot’s role as a ‘master’ was then necessarily limited to directing his students’ will tolearn by asking them to continually respond to a 3-part question: (1) what do you see? (2) what do you
think of it? and (3) what do you make of it?
Jacotot’s method was based on a rudimentary idea. Because the art of Telemachus was the productof a natural intelligence common to all humans, everything required to ‘understand’ it – everything
required, that is, for the transmission of the writer’s ideas to a reader’s mind – is contained within
the book itself. It doesn’t require explanation from a third party such as an ‘Old Master’; the artefact
is able to speak for itself, and, with due attention, any student is able to understand it without aid.
Every willing student, says Jacotot, possesses the same inherent intelligence, and all are able tocomprehend and learn from things in exactly the same manner he or she had learned to speak as achild, i.e. by an initially blind process of mimicking, repeating, correcting, and confirming in order tointeract meaningfully with another human possessing the same fundamental intelligence.
A set of footprints on a beach constitute a language. Their shape is the same as your own feet, therefore
they must be human. Their size and the distance between them relative to your own suggests thathuman’s approximate size and age. Their placement reveals the direction they went, whether they
were walking or running, and so on. Any such phenomenon can be taken as a starting point, which can
automatically become a talking (or thinking) point; by talking (or thinking) you relate that thing toother things; and by relating to other things you gain insight. In Jacotot’s words, ‘The problem is toreveal an intelligence to itself. Anything can be used … a prayer or a song that the child or ignorant one	  1

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation [1987, French] (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991).

	
  

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knows by heart. There’s always something the ignorant one knows that can be used as a point ofcomparison, something to which a new thing to be learned can be related.’2
These ideas became the foundation of what Jacotot called ‘universal teaching’, founded on the bedrock
notion of equality as a presupposition rather than a goal. As such, both Jacotot’s method and Rancière’s
resuscitation of it amount to a moral philosophical position, which is implicitly political as well as
pedagogical. The ‘Old Master’ model of explication, Jacotot/Rancière argues, maintains the division
between the supposedly ‘wise’ and the supposedly ‘ignorant’. The new model, on the other hand,
proposes emancipation – above all through the personal realization that one is capable of learning, andthereafter through the ability to teach oneself by contemplating the relations between observed facts.
The emancipated human is simply conscious of the true power of the human mind, as opposed to theunconscious acceptance of received wisdom. And the only precondition of teaching another to be
emancipated is to be emancipated oneself.
When the term ‘emancipation’ became equivocal, i.e. when it had lost any usefully specific common
meaning, Jacotot simply discarded the term. He referred instead to his teachings as panecastic(= ‘everything in each’) and preferred to think of them as pragmatic ‘stories’ rather than high-flown
philosophy. This chimes with one of the more affecting aspects of The Ignorant Schoolmaster pointed
out by translator Kristin Ross in her introduction to the English edition; namely, that Rancière
consciously and consistently appropriates Jacotot’s technique of storytelling by subtly confusing thesource of the narrative voice to invoke rather a fundamentally anonymous, timeless, form of address.
Indeed, as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern who’s ‘speaking’ exactly –Rancière or Jacotot? And this neatly embodies two of the book’s main principles. First, by telling astory rather than writing an essay, the writer (whoever he is) puts himself on the level of the reader,or rather does away with levels altogether in order to recount his tale person-to-person rather thanphilosopher-to-student. Second, by confusing the voice’s source, he defies the regular conception of
accumulated, gradual history – which precisely mirrors his rejection of accumulated, gradualeducation. The impersonal, open-sourced paraphrase is congruent with notions of influence, passing
on, continuation, movement. It’s a form in which all are equal.
I recently attended a two-day conference devoted to Rancière’s work.3 To recap all the above in theterms that dominated this event: Rancière, speaking for and through Jacotot, posits a horizontal,
egalitarian pedagogy against a vertical, hierarchical one. In the old, vertical model, authoritative
masters typically stultify students by dispensing knowledge piecemeal, progressing step by step
towards a complete intelligence. In Jacotot/Rancière’s horizontal alternative, the ‘ignorant’ masteremancipates by insisting that intelligence is the precondition of learning rather than its goal.
Understood from this perspective, the student essentially teaches him- or herself; the ‘master’ merely
creates the conditions for this to occur by providing articulate objects (a book, say, or some otheraesthetic artefact) that will ‘reveal an intelligence to itself’.
What struck me at the conference, though, was how the principles being espoused and debated were
unwittingly enacted by the presentations themselves. It became harder and harder, in fact, to pay
attention without reflexively evaluating to what extent the various speakers were acting in line with
their subject, i.e. whether they were behaving like an explicating authority or a fellow ignorant.
The social implications of Jacotot/Rancière’s thinking were manifest, too, in the more mundane
aspects of conference decorum: speakers overrunning their slots, panel discussions without discussion,
obfuscating academic jargon, and other sundry opinions and mannerisms that seemed suddenly
heightened either in accord or at odds with Jacotot/Rancière’s lessons. The net effect was a kindof meta-conference as well as the ostensible one. All of which merely demonstrated the difficulty of
putting principles into practice, even if you wholeheartedly adhere to them in theory. Regardlessand because of this, the point remains: Rancière’s writing is carefully contrived to prise the reader– or proselytizer – out of inertia and into action.

	
  

2

Ibid.

3

Everything is in Everything, Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, 11–12 March, 2011.

	
  

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The idea that a piece of work can ‘teach a reader how to read it’ implies an audience deepening theircomprehension of a medium via the medium itself; that’s to say, without external assistance. The mostgeneric ‘surrogate’ form of assistance in the realm of art is the caption.4 By ‘self-captioning’, then,I mean work that doesn’t rely on the crutch of outside support, but patently explicates itself. Hence theconnection between Jacotot/Ranciere’s philosophy of articulate objects, and self-explanatory artworks(or other aesthetic projects).
Contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler considers the transformative effect of works of art on an
audience in terms of ‘individuation’,5 a form of self-realization whereby a reader is activelytransformed by the experience of reading. (Stiegler usually talks in terms of books, but the same idea
reasonably extends to any other art form.) The transformative effect of art is by no means inevitable –anything can be experienced without lasting effect or consequence. Moreover, as culture becomesdominated by technics and so increasingly, perniciously convenient (pre-digested, bite-sized, dumbed
down), those truly transformative, individuating experiences are less and less frequent and less and lesslikely. These days, says Stiegler, we’re more likely to read without really reading at all, without being
significantly affected, because we lack due attention – and so, too, the art that fosters that attention.
Further, ‘transindividuation’ refers to the transformation between individuals passed across generations
via what he calls ‘long circuits’. Multiple individuations occur during this broader process of culturalbaton-passing. More precisely, transindividuation describes the dialectic between the two – the process
by which personal and collective individuations transform one another over time. In Stiegler’s view,
this dialectic is the basis for all social transformation, yet our current cultural condition tends towards acontrary ‘short circuit’ thinking which is increasingly supplanting those essential long forms – theconsequence of contemporary ‘technics’ that are both the cause and effect of diminishing attention
spans. In other words, formerly long circuits are increasingly short-circuited, and the loss is perniciousand profound. Long circuits involve attachment to a rich span of collective knowledge, are constituent
of a broader process of cultural transformation, and can therefore be considered more properly social
in the long run.
A dearth of transindividuation effects attenuated social agency, hence Stiegler’s call to recognize theimportance of perpetuating long circuits. In the late 19th century, he explains by way of example,
subscribers to the Paris Opera were sent the score and transcription of each upcoming recital, alongwith a commentary. As this was before the advent of sound recording, such extensive preparation was
the only means of hearing or otherwise assimilating the music in advance of the event. Moreover, themajority of the bourgeois audience for such events at the time could typically play an instrument andread music themselves – not least because ‘Being capable of playing music was a condition forlistening to music’. Stiegler refers to this (after Bergson) as the loop stimulus: ‘You can receive if you
can give. If you can engage, you are also able to exit. If you are able to engage critically, then a process
takes place that would otherwise remain static.’
In a conversation with journalist David Lipsky, David Foster Wallace states that one of his key aims asa writer is to make work that cultivates the degree of attention and involvement necessary for Stiegler’s
sense of individuation to occur.
DFW: ... I think that if avant-garde stuff can do its job, it istremendously difficult and not that accessible, and seduces the reader
into making extraordinary efforts that he wouldn’t normally make.
And that’s the kind of magic that really great art can do.
DL: But the best thing is to show what TV can’t, to use the ways
books are better than TV.

	
  4

There are many others, though: the wall didactic, the press release, the information sheet, the catalogue essay, the walk-through– all of which could be reasonably thought of as ‘captioning’ the work, too.
5

The term is drawn from the work of Gilbert Simondon. See: Bernard Stiegler, and Irit Rogoff, ‘Transindividuation’,e-flux journal, no. 14, March 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation. See also §4.9.

	
  

253

DFW: Except of course the hard thing is to do both at the same time.
Because a book has to teach a reader how to read it. So the structure
stuff starts right at the beginning (...) We sit around and bitch
about how TV has ruined the audience for reading – when all it’sreally done is given us the really precious gift of making our job
harder. You know what I mean? And it seems to me like the harder it is
to make a reader feel like it’s worthwhile to read your stuff, thebetter a chance you’ve got of making real art. Because it’s only real
art that does that.
DL: But as it gets more complex, a reader will feel they’ve wandered
into a classroom where they missed the first few weeks of the course.
DFW: You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought hewas. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson
that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re thesort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it
easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot
more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think (...) is seriously
engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.6

Wallace is suggesting that a book’s structural ‘lesson’ should be productively difficult, and, crucially,taught by the text itself as opposed to some form of external commentary. In interviews he frequently
claimed that his own goal was to transcend the polarization of highbrow meta-fiction (with its
reputation for being academic and alienating) and lowbrow pop fiction (with its reputation for being
approachable and anodyne) – that is, to balance technical sophistication with compulsive
entertainment. Some 50 years on from Eco’s Open Work poetics, Wallace’s intentions are notably
less ideological, or at least cut through with comparatively personal politics – for instance, overcoming
solitude, boredom and addiction, exercising slow consideration in the face of high-speed media,
or parsing the pros and cons of contemporary citizenship.
All of which is embodied in Wallace’s major novel Infinite Jest (1996), a satire on entertainment andaddiction in contemporary America, the plot of which hinges on a lethally entertaining samizdat video
cartridge so addictive that it induces any unwitting viewer to watch it repeatedly until they expire.
(A master copy of this literally mindless piece of entertainment is assimilated as a weapon and fought
over by rival terrorist groups.) Wallace recounts having explicitly set himself the task of writing anostensibly ‘difficult’ avant-garde novel that would be nonetheless compelling to read, thus mimicking
the qualities of the plot’s propelling device to the extent that the reader senses its effect.
True to his mandate, then, on one hand the novel is indeed compulsive reading and hugely entertaining– it satirizes a culture founded on instant gratification by performing it. On the other, it’s equally hardto take due to its stop-start non-linear narrative, deluge of technical data, highly esoteric language,
copious endnotes that contain essential plot information, and so on. By doing lowbrow and highbrow
in equal measure, it ends up somewhere else altogether.7
Taking Wallace’s ambition at face value, in what sense can we regard such a book as ‘teaching a reader
how to read it’? What’s the so-called structural lesson that Infinite Jest means to convey?

	
  6David Lipsky, ed., Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York:Broadway, 2010), pp. 70–2.

7

By contrast, Wallace’s unfinished, posthumously published novel The Pale King is thematically rooted in contemporary notionsof personal freedom and civic responsibility. Set in a major branch of the Inland Revenue Service, the narrative follows a numberof employees whose work involves checking the validity of U.S. citizens’ returns. Much of the subject matter is outwardly,
palpably ‘boring’ – endless tax minutiae; accounts of the crushingly dull, repetitive workload; yet it’s knowingly written a levelout, a parody of tedious prose, and ultimately a portrayal of boredom that’s paradoxically compelling.

	
  

254

In constantly balancing effort and entertainment, Wallace coaxes the reader into doing the increasingly
involved work necessary to keep up with an increasingly convoluted (and hysterical) story. The reader
is compelled to stay involved, despite herself. Duly addicted, and duly conscientious, she accepts theterms of this strenuous mental tennis, becomes attuned to the writing’s considerable idiosyncrasy,
and ends up a more robust reader for her trouble. Crucially, the novel is organized in such a way thatthe reader immediately understands the terms of this payoff, then gradually gleans how it duplicatesthe story’s theme.
As such, Infinite Jest is a case of what Wallace’s colleague Jonathan Franzen calls a ‘contract’ novel,8meaning one that knowingly and deliberately establishes a mutual exchange between author and reader
on equal terms, and in doing so fosters an active rather than a passive reading (in line with Simondon
and Stiegler’s ‘individuation’). Franzen contrasts ‘contract’ with ‘status’. A status novel faces inward:
the writer writes foremost for herself (or close colleagues) and the motivation is usually academic orsolipsistic. A contract novel faces outwards: it seeks relationships.
In sum, a second-degree sense in which art can be considered ‘social’ is the extent to which it works tofoster such connection, teaching its ‘readers’ to ‘read’ it – an active, self-motivating process. Jacotot
and Rancière show us how any object can be read to educational and emancipatory ends. Stieglersuggests that, due to the ever-increasing convenience of culture, such self-realization is becoming lessand less common, and its reactivation all the more urgent. And Wallace elaborates his own personal
poetics in this direction: the attempt to make people realize or remember the extent of their own
intelligence. In a short memoir on the filming of what became Deleuze’s L’Abécédaire, the French TV
director Pierre-André Boutang recalls how the series seemed to foster precisely this quality:
There are shoots where the technicians slack off ... Here, they werelistening, they were interested. Like everyone else, they felt very
intelligent. There are a lot of people who feel very intelligent infront of the Abécédaire. That’s one of its great qualities. When it
came out on tape, people stopped me on the streets to tell me theylistened to it a little every morning when they woke up. 9

7.2: MODERNISM AS A TOOLIn Modern Typography, Robin Kinross writes:
The thought that accompanies making need not issue as printed or
written words, nor even as speech, but it may still be traced in the
product. In this way products can themselves be ‘articulate’, though
their makers may not have spoken.10

Modern Typography in general is an argument for a ‘critically reflective practice’, and Kinross duly
begins by reflecting critically on the conventions of his own practice, design history. It is conceived
as an essay in the most literal sense11 – as a searching, speculative attempt to reconsider how the field
is conceived from scratch. He contends that a discipline turns truly ‘modern’ only when it becomesproperly self-aware and reflective, marked by the spread of knowledge about its own technologies
and techniques. From this perspective, typography turns modern (comes of age, matures) not with
Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press circa 1450, but on the occasion of the first book to
document its own production processes, spreading knowledge of the formerly clandestine ‘Black Art’

	
  

8

Jonathan Franzen, ‘Mr Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books’, The New Yorker, 30 September,
2002.

9

Pierre-André Boutang, ‘L’Abécédaire’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #3, 2002, pp. 4–5.

10

Kinross, Modern Typography, op. cit., p. 13.

11

See §1.3.

	
  

255

and inaugurating a chain of criticality, improvement and progress. The case in point is Joseph Moxon’s
treatise Mechanick Exercises, printed some 250 years after Gutenberg.12
Kinross writes, however, that ‘modernist’ tropes in the field of typography are more typicallyconsidered to be the result of ‘artists blundering into the quiet preserves of book printing (…) violating
the wisdom of tradition and convention’.13 As in other domains, those tropes involve the reduction toelemental ‘universal’ forms (circle, triangle and square; primary colours) and dynamic asymmetry(directing viewing by organizing the relative weight of those elements). Against the usual before/afterconception of ‘modern’, he aims to show rather that ‘there are modern elements in what has been
regarded as traditional, and … a tradition behind what has been taken to be just “modernist”.’14 In otherwords, he highlights the spirit, approach or attitude that prefigures outcome. From this angle it’s
possible to see more similarities than differences between, say, the Arts and Crafts movement and the
Bauhaus: universal forms, standardization, economy of means, and a socially-oriented poetics.
One cause of such blunt traditional/modern polarization, he argues, is a fundamental misconception of
the word ‘design’:
This may appear odd to those who assume that the design is the
product. That is a view superficial in the literal as well as
metaphorical sense of the word, and which ends in equating design withornament. In this essay, ‘design’ is understood not as a noun but as averb: an activity and a process. And, in this light, ideas become asreal as inked sheets or paper.15

Kinross anticipates and defuses the objection that this emphasis on ideas ‘gives undue prominence tothe articulate’, to those examples which have managed to survive and pass on these ideas. In fact, heturns the objection on its head: it’s precisely because of being unusually articulate – which requires anunusual degree of engagement and investment – that such work survives to carry on communicating inmeaningful ways. In which case, he gives due prominence to the articulate. A recurring example in
Kinross’s writing is the work of the Isotype group who, working from Vienna around the middle of the20th century, developed a graphic language to render unusually clear charts of social statistics. The real
legacy of Isotype, he asserts, is the intense intelligence compressed into these charts – elements
configured according to meaning, often counter-intuitively, and without any recourse to precedent.

The term ‘articulate object’ crops up in a published discussion between Kinross and his colleague
Richard Hollis on the problems involved in writing about the history of design, such as the vague

	
  
12

See also §3.5.

13

Kinross, Modern Typography, op. cit., p. 11.

14

Ibid.

15

Ibid., p. 12.

	
  

256

boundaries of the domain, the daunting scope of material, and – again – the absence of obvious
precedents. 16 The premise for this discussion was a design history book Hollis was working on at thetime,17 and his thoughts seem particularly potent for having taken place during this process, while thebook’s character was still plastic and so susceptible to change.
Their talk is full of digressions and diversions that likewise reflect aspects of Hollis’s way of working
on the book. For instance, where more regular design history books tend to regurgitate canonicalexamples rescanned from increasingly degraded reproductions in previous ones, Hollis is guided by theavailability of actual sources able to be studied first-hand (whether conveniently archived, or otherwise
available and affordable). The relative scarcity of historical material is part and parcel of compiling asurvey of graphic design rather than art: although its artefacts tend to have been produced in greaternumbers, they are also generally more ephemeral. But these positive ‘limitations’ are acknowledged
from the outset, which also sets the tone of the interview: pragmatic, anecdotal and specific.
Kinross begins with a friendly provocation, asking Hollis – at that point mainly a practising designer18– what he thinks he’s doing writing a history, i.e. trespassing on a foreign profession. As Hollis doesn’treally offer an answer, Kinross provides his own. Characteristic of Hollis’s writing on design, he says,
is the rigorous description of the technical processes behind the works; and that this is consonant withhis practical work inasmuch as it similarly ‘exploits process’. Hollis says this is more the consequenceof ‘not being a professional writer’, and so of time spent ‘struggling to find a way of saying
something’. That sounds a very pragmatic approach, replies Kinross; a good way to avoid lapsing intoclichés.
The majority of work they discuss from Hollis’s book-in-progress dates from the decades of ‘heroic’modernism (broadly speaking, between the wars). The best work of this period, says Kinross, is loadedwith didactic potential, to the extent that modernism might now most usefully be considered a body ofknowledge about ‘ways to do things’ manifest in the most articulate products of the time.
More specifically, the examples that particularly lend themselves to Hollis’s technical storytelling,
he suggests, are those that visibly allude to their own production processes and so demonstrate
how the thinking behind a piece of work works in tandem with the technology used to realize it.
The conscientious observer is then able to perceive not only the end result, but also what it took get
there – a synthesis of rational thinking and attendant technology. Certain work amounts to a kind ofkey, he says – and ‘once you’ve got the key, you can unlock something pretty instantly’.
The particular qualities common to the work in his history are ‘finesse’ and ‘conviction’, says Hollis– and that his main task is to deduce and explain what the processes evident in the work meant at thetime as opposed to how they might come across in retrospect; first in terms of how commonplace or
counterintuitive the thinking would have been, then how easy/difficult and cheap/expensive it would
have been to achieve it. Obviously, most of his examples were made using far more mechanicalprocesses than today’s equivalents. Those didactic traces of production processes are accordingly far
less tangible in their contemporary digital counterparts, the workings of which tend to be relatively
hidden, if not entirely obscure.
Finally, they note that most of this ‘heroic’ work was typically made in relatively local, specificcircumstances before the advent of marketing departments, public relations or focus groups, and so far
more likely to channel the focused intelligence of a single person at work. Today it’s far more likely
deflected and compromised.

	
  
16

Robin Kinross and Richard Hollis, ‘Conversation with Richard Hollis on Graphic Design History’, Journal of Design History,
vol. 5, no. 1, 1992, pp. 73–90.

17

Published two years later: Richard Hollis, Graphic Design: a Concise History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994).

18

See §9.3.

	
  

257

7.3: READING THINGS
Let’s examine a little further what it means to ‘read’ an articulate object. Here are three examples fromthe domains of sociology, art, and design.
Bruno Latour’s essay ‘The Berlin Key’ is an instructive case study from social science: an accountof an eccentric door key native to certain residential blocks on the outskirts of West Berlin.19 Oddly,
the key is symmetrical, with two ‘heads’ and no ‘handle’ at opposite ends of a regular shaft – or maybe
two handles in the shapes of heads. Latour means to show how a complex series of events can be
deduced from inanimate objects, hence the subtitle ‘How to do Words with Things’ (a neat inversionof the title of a well-known book).

Latour imagines himself into the shoes of a ‘careful archaeologist’ trying to comprehend the Berlin
Key’s particular purpose. She wants to know both how it works and why it was designed that way,
and the deduction works both ways; that’s to say, thinking through the key’s possible social function
can reveal how it works technically – and vice versa. As a proponent of ‘object-oriented philosophy’
this is Latour’s point: there’s no distinction between so-called ‘subjective’ social forces and so-called‘objective’ products. Each is a complex ‘assembly of issues’, which is the etymological root of theword ‘thing’. The essence of a thing therefore consists in its connections and relations. With this inmind, Latour caricatures the contrary tunnel vision of discrete disciplines like sociology oranthropology by making his Berlin archaeologist a bit of a hapless character.
Logical reasoning gets her nowhere, but she finally figures it out through protracted trial-and-error.
It turns out that they key is used to control the comings and goings of residents in a communal building
according to the hour. During the day, a resident can insert their key on the outside and unlock thedoor – but then can’t pull it out on the same side without relocking it. Because of the symmetry,however, it can be pushed through the keyhole and retrieved after locking the door again from theinside. The ingenious crux of this double agency is a simple notch cut into one side of the key that slips
into a lip inside the lock.
The situation is further complicated at night when, at a certain hour, the building’s concierge adjusts
the mechanism’s setting with his own unique skeleton key – thinner and minus the one-way notch – toprevent anyone locking or unlocking until morning again. Latour’s summary point is that, with due
attention and a lack of preconceptions, the riddle of the key’s utility is inscribed into – and reasonably
deduced from – the thing itself. The inanimate object betrays its communal, social purpose.
One commensurate example of a ‘readable thing’ in contemporary art – an articulate assembly ofissues – is Alighiero e Boetti’s series Mappa (‘Map’), around 150 of which were produced in cycles
from 1971 until his death in 1994. In a pre-emptive piece titled Political Planisphere (1969), Boetti
coloured the flags of the world’s nation states within their respective borders on a large wall map
in felt-tip pen. Thereafter, he supplied (mostly) groups of Afghan women with an outline templateof a world map and commissioned them to embroider the flags the same manner. Boetti always used
up-to-date maps, so each new piece bears witness to the historical moment of its production – which

	
  
19

Bruno Latour, ‘The Berlin Key or How to do Words with Things’ [1990] in P.M. Graves-Brown, ed., Matter, Materiality andModern Culture (London: Routledge, 1991).

	
  

258

was a relatively long moment, given that each map typically took up to four artisans about a year to
make.20

Seen as a series, then, the gradual reconfiguration of national borders records the flux of geopolitical
relations, sometimes even giving rise to new flags. Afghanistan’s own flag was frequently contested
during this period, and Boetti always let the artisans decide how to colour the country at any given
moment; in one map from 1983 it is even left blank. Production was suspended for a number of years
in the wake of Russia’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and several unfinished Mappa hidden away.
When they were recovered some years later, Boetti left these ‘war victims’ unfinished in testimony tothe events. He never returned to the country after the coup, but continued to oversee the production of
more maps in Afghanistan, as well as in neighboring Pakistan where many families had fled.
At the material level, the fact that the Mappa were handmade meant that personal aesthetic preferences(such as the choice of incidental colours) and techniques (such as the length and direction of stitching)became prominent aspects of the work, along with other incidental factors (such as the availability ofyarn). Boetti also assimilated happenstance ‘mistakes’, preferring to accentuate rather than level out thedifferences between the works. For instance, on receiving one with the oceans stitched pink rather thanblue, he encouraged further ‘discoloured’ versions. Most of the works are framed by a statement,
stitched in Boetti’s signature square alphabet along with the rest of the canvas in a variety of languages.
Some are informative, noting such as the time and place of production along, while others arecompletely cryptic, and a few even composed by the artisans themselves.
Though outsourcing material production is commonplace in art today, Boetti’s hands-off ‘directorial’
role in the whole process was prescient: ‘I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world ismade as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them.’21 The work
is fundamentally based on a single, simple idea, yet the nucleus of this idea altered over time as one
map became several maps, and several maps a series; each new advance brought about new
implications. By outsourcing the work, Boetti wasn’t out to omit his own signature and emphasizeindustrial production, as was the impetus behind such as Laszlo Moholy Nagy’s Telephone Paintings(five formats of an identical same abstract composition in enamel paint that he supposedly ordered byphone22). Instead, the ostensibly ‘same’ maps register the differences inevitably imposed by manual
labour and the passage of time.
Art critic Luca Cerizza has described Boetti’s work in Homeric terms of a tension between contrasting
but complementary ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Penelope’ modes – the ‘adventure’ of Ulysses tempered by the‘patience’ of Penelope. In other words, the Mappa consist in the rift between a eureka! moment of

	
  
20

See: Luca Cerizza, Alighiero e Boetti: Mappa (London: Afterall books, 2008).

21

Alighiero e Boetti quoted in: Alberto Boatto, Alighiero & Boetti (Ravenna: Essegi, 1984), p. 122.

22

More on this in the middle of §6.3.

	
  

259

inspiration and the slow-burn complexity of its steady realization: a ‘one-liner’ work with an
unexpectedly rich payoff. Even the fact that the flags can be readily unstitched seems a simultaneously
insipid and profound allusion to the tentative state of global relations.
Like Latour’s key, all these aspects and more can be reasonably read from the artefact (which isn’t to
say a bit of elucidation and backstory doesn’t help). Like a shaggy dog story, this accumulated reading
amounts to another sense of the work altogether – it undergoes a change in kind, more story than dog.23
My third example is far more prosaic. Norman Potter called himself a ‘cabinet-maker’, but hewas actually an accomplished polymath – a designer in the broadest sense, as well as a teacher, writer,
poet and ‘out-and-out modernist’. In terms of practical design work, he specialized in small-scaleinterior architecture and furniture. His second book, Models & Constructs, is an autobiographicalaccount of this work, and of his life in the margins of design culture.
Much of the book recounts his conceiving, establishing and running a local, resolutely independentworkshop set up to take on miscellaneous architectural projects. The book’s opening section is basedon a talk given to carpentry students on the subject of ‘Universals & particulars’, in which Potter
recounts his thinking through the layout of what on the face of it appears to be an unremarkable
toolrack he designed to accompany a woodcutting machine at the heart of his workshop. This, hesuggests, will offer ‘an excellent transition from theory to practice’, its configuration being aremarkably considered amalgamation of several competing factors of display, accessibility and safety.
Located in the midst of a potentially chaotic and dangerous space, the stakes are high: ‘Everything
must come to hand in the right sequence, without fuss or confusion.’ He writes:
Perhaps you are wondering why a toolrack should be taken so seriously.
Surely it needs no more ‘designing’ than comes naturally with a bit ofcommon sense? Well of course design is that; perhaps a little more;
but it is certainly an everyday activity responding to everyday
demands. Design for Sundays is always suspect, like Christianity witha similar fixation. It is usually over-dressed, weak in the head, andtoo easily sold on appearances.24

Potter cycles through the reasoning behind his tool rack’s layout, which, he says, ‘provides a visualequivalent, in the form of a graphic diagram, to the way the machine works.’ This diagrammatic aspectof the rack is emphasized by the book’s image of it, a photocopy of a photograph in which the objects
are usefully degraded into crude abstract shapes on the board’s white ground, then numbered according
to a key in the margin.

	
  
23

Here are two more instances. First, in the earlier years the women who worked on Boetti’s maps often didn’t comprehend theimages they were embroidering, as they had little or no knowledge of world geography, the schematic representation of space,or the graphic language of national flags – and so the works were quite literally didactic in the sense of educating the workers.
Then, after Boetti’s death, some of the artisanal circles who worked on Boetti’s maps continued to make work in a similar idiom,
but now to commercial ends – the most notorious being rugs depicting the two planes about to hit the twin towers with the dateand event commemorated in text written into the image.

24

Potter, Models & Constructs, op. cit., p. 23.

	
  

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The rack is primarily configured according to a simple Cartesian grid: tools used for with-the-grain
cutting on the horizontal axis, those for cross-grain on the vertical, and those for both at theintersection. Within this grid, specific parts are placed according to their relative size, function,
frequency of use, and interrelations. A further organizing principle is to hang those most frequently
used on the left end nearest the machine, with less frequent ‘spares and specials’ petering out
towards the right. Certain groups of items have their own internal alignments, like the descending
circles of parts 2, 3 and 4; or the deliberate exclamation mark made by parts 10 and 11 at the board’s
far end. Similar pragmatics determine the ‘exceptional’ position of the flag that sticks off the board’s
main ground at top left to announce a first-aid box, and the shallow shelf for temporary items
underneath it. Potter calls it all a ‘ghostly dance of conceptual reference’.
Inasmuch as all this formal reasoning can be extrapolated from its surface, the rack is anotherexemplary instance of an emphatically articulate product – one that Potter says integrally ‘points up’rather than superfluously ‘arts up’ its internal relations. He’s careful to acknowledge, too, that contrary
to the sort of logical ‘crossword puzzle’ this sounds like in retrospective telling, the actual practiceof realizing something so apparently obvious is usually far more akin to a haphazard game of ‘snakes
and ladders’, i.e. not straightforward at all.
In an interview, Kinross recalls that during the preparation of Modern Typography, Potter pushed
him to design the book himself, because doing so could and should be an embodiment of its thesis.
‘He said something like: “You have to publish it yourself. That’s part of the content.”’ And then:‘He thought that the book itself should be a kind of demonstration: an existential acting-out … It’s anexaggeration, but publishing the book myself was a kind of validation of what I was arguing.’25
Potter had already done as much with his own first book, What is a designer – and also elucidated thereasons. Towards the end of the chapter ‘Questioning Design’, he anticipates a reader wondering why
his book is bereft of images and compiles a list of answers that ends on the assertion that ‘the form of
the book should be at one with its message.’ 26 In Models & Constructs, Potter claims that this sort ofanswerability – the willingness to explain how and why particular choices have been made – is‘historically and ideologically rooted in the evolution of what is now being called “modernism” and alittle earlier, “the modern movement”.’27 And at the end of the toolrack chapter he writes:
There is a certain sense in which we are wholly involved in metaphor
and in which a small construct such as this – local to its context and

	
  
25

Stuart Bailey and Robin Kinross, ‘Questions without question marks’, Dot Dot Dot #14, 2007, p. 9.

26

Potter, What is a designer, op. cit., p. 159.

27

Potter, Models & Constructs, op. cit., pp. 34–5.

	
  

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wholly a one-off – may show some value also as a model, which willthen be a mode of address, of attitude and approach, rather thanoutcome or consequence.

Then:
I hope however that by veering so alarmingly between the general andthe particular, and between the realms of metaphor and practicality I
have suggested to you that every technical possibility has a wider
equivalence, and a positive need to seek relationship with its
neighbours.28

7.4: SPEAK FOR YOURSELVES: TWO EXHIBITIONS
I recently came across a couple of demonstrations of what I’ve been referring to as ‘self captioning’sustained across a whole show rather than compressed into a single piece of work. This may soundcontradictory, inasmuch as I’ve been arguing so far for markedly self-contained works that speak
for themselves rather than rely on the help of, say, third party press releases, wall texts, articles, essays
or catalogues. However, I mean to refer here to the sort of exhibition emphatically intended to amountto a whole greater than its parts, specifically by means of what artist Joseph Grigley calls ‘exhibition
prosthetics’.29 He means those ostensibly supplementary conventions we think of as existing on themargins and fringes of the ‘actual’ work (such as the formats listed above), only treated in such a way
as to become an intrinsic part of the art, not merely an extension of it.
According to the original gestalt theorists, the term ‘gestalt’ properly refers not to a whole greater than
the sum of its parts as is commonly conceived, but one essentially different from the sum of its parts,
i.e. a whole new entity, a whole new part, in itself. Likewise, here I mean something markedly moreconcerted than any old exhibition’s banal claim to coherence (on the premise of, say, bringing a bunchof essentially-discrete-yet-somehow-related artworks together in the same space); something moreakin to a Gesamtkunstwerk. Like the examples of work by Aurélien Froment, Gerard Byrne andFrances Stark referred to in §5.8, I mean a total work of art that articulates itself in an appropriately‘off’ manner.
In Exhibition Prosthetics, Grigley refers to the obvious sense of prosthesis as a useful attachment or
extension to a body – in this case the ‘body’ of an exhibition. He wonders where an exhibition begins
or ends, and asks ‘What is, and what could be, the nature of the relationship between exhibition
practices and publication practices?’ He elucidates with a story about a label headed ‘Edison’s last
breath?’, notably contained within a vitrine at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, adjacent a test
tube that possibly contained or contains what the caption claims. ‘What is compelling to me’, says
Grigley,
is not whether the story is true or not, but that the story exists as
it does narrated within the vitrine. If exhibitions involve showing,
they also [can] involve a process by which the act of showing issubsumed by the act of telling – of constructing narratives that elide
distinctions between words and images, or between artifacts andartifictions.30

Grigley suggests his interest in the role of such supplementary forms is partly a consequence of his
deafness since age 10. This realignment of the sensory world, he says, provokes further questions like

	
  
28

Ibid., p. 35.

29

Joseph Grigley, Exhibition Prosthetics (London: Bedford Press, 2010).

30

Grigley, op. cit., p. 6.

	
  

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‘What does the world look like with the sound turned off’ and ‘How might it be that language can besaid to capture human experience?’31 In this light, exhibition prosthetics map the implications of‘the disjunction between visual and auditory experiences’. A prosthesis, he says, necessarily becomesa part of the body it extends and supplements, and so is something more than just a fine art equivalentof Gérard Genette’s literary concept of the paratext (those textual forms that exist alongside a main
text: footnote, title page, critical essay, etc.). A prosthetic is, rather, assimilated into the main body;it turns constituent. According to Grigley, ‘belonging’ is the perfect word to describe this relationshipbetween body and prosthetic. It is dialogic – each informing and supplementing the other, or in termsof exhibiting, showing and telling. Exhibitions, he concludes, tend towards the bad habit of saying
too much, and this is particularly the case of the labels, captions and wall texts that characterize
contemporary practice, and which present themselves as ‘disinterested authorities’.
By contrast, the first exhibition I have in mind is Mark Manders’ 2012 Parallel Occurrences /Documented Assignments at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles,32 a sequence of ten or so rooms
sparsely populated with installations and sculptures. These were combinations of Arte Povera-inflectedmaterials (untreated wood, metal, plaster), quotidian items (teabags, cups, office furniture) and surreal
inventions (obscure plumbing, sleeping clay animals) – all typical enough for one of the ongoing seriesof Manders’ shows under the rubric Self-Portrait as a Building.33
More surprising, however, were a series of concise remarks that annotated the work throughout.
Although set on regular caption cards, they were totally at odds with the museum’s usual didactics,
written in a distinctly oblique but by no means obtuse voice. Written in the first person, Manders had
clearly written the captions himself. Also, all the captions were contained in quotation marks;
this is perhaps because they were actually drawn from a previous publication, but they served also toemphasize a weird intimacy entirely in keeping with their objects – a sense of being spoken casually
yet seriously.

This delicate assemblage, Shadow Study (2010), for instance, was accompanied by the following
statement:‘If you think about the evolution of cups, it’s just a beautiful
evolution. The first cups were human hands: folded together, they took
the water out of the river. The next cups were made from things like

	
  
31

Ibid., pp. 26–7.

32

Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrences / Documented Assignments, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 25 September, 2010
– 2 January, 2011.

33

Self-portrait as a building is an evolving series of architectural plans begun in 1996. The work is conceived as a fictionalbuilding that represents a fictional artist, ‘Mark Manders’, an alter-ego distinct from the artist Mark Manders.

	
  

263

hollowed pieces of wood or folded leaves, and so on. The lastbeautiful moment in the history of the cup was when it got a handle.
After that, nothing really interesting happened with cups, just small
variations, mainly ornamental. Many generations worked on it, and now
you can say that the cup is finished in terms of evolution.
A few times a day there is a cup very close to my upper leg bone, andI slowly discovered that if you turn an empty cup upside down there isa shadow falling out of the cup, falling upon my leg. I wanted to keep
this shadow, have it and own it, so I turned it into an image.’

On another wall, Perspective Study (2010), a sculpture-of-sorts apparently assembled from some of
Manders’s previous printed works (plus some uncanny foreshortening), was accompanied by this tersestatement:‘Since the Renaissance, every artist should make at least one
perspective study. This one is made with fake newspapers.’	  As these two examples suggest, the labels vary in length from piece to piece: point made, note stops.
The key quality of this writing is it’s sharp sense of pace; beyond that, without the levelling effect of aregular tone or template, they read as if written for this particular arrangement of these particularpieces, with just enough commentary to tip an audience towards a take on the work without spoilingthe enigma. In this manner they quietly assert themselves as counterpart to the works they supposedly
underscore, which further implies that the artworks effectively illustrate the texts to the same degree
that the texts caption the artworks: a reversible means of perceiving the work without pinning it down.
The thread that runs through these labels, these ‘pointers’, recalls George Kubler’s thesis in The Shapeof Time, in which he relates how the same iconic forms recur throughout history in different styles andmaterials at different times and places. The first room of Manders’ show contains a plinth with a single
sculpture, Obtrusive Head (2010), a vertical sliver of a giant plaster cast of a Greek head clamped
together with chunks of wood, like a row of book spines. The attendant text reads:‘I made this work early in 2010. It really should have been made in
the 1920s, but I simply was not alive at that time.
It is a composition with verticals that form one harmonious musicalchord, and it covers a small gap in art history.’

And this in turn seems to be a model or cousin of a larger version of the same motif made with similarmaterials only now constituent of more complete furniture that appears later in the show with anentirely different but equally prosaic title (Still Life with Books, Table, and Fake Newspaper (2010))

	
  

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and an equally flippant label – both deceptively throwaway and therefore entirely in character withthe rest of the show:‘If you are in a room with two books, a table, some clay, some pieces
of wood, and a newspaper, this is one of the things you can make andplace in front of you.’

The second illuminating instance I happened across was an installation by Paul Elliman as part of a2012 group exhibition of historical and contemporary works that explored ‘the material qualities ofwritten and spoken language’.34 The conceptual and physical locus of the show, Elliman’s main
contribution was a tableau presentation of his Found Fount – an ongoing, accumulating ‘material
alphabet’ made of found objects and fragments collected since 1989. He elliptically describes
it as ‘a system for describing the world using the world itself’.35
Elliman regularly employs this expansive, ever-expanding and potentially infinite character set topractical and poetic ends, its bits typically assembled into gnomic and often self-referential statements(e.g. ‘I will work at your destruction’) in publications, prints and photograms, and on posters. Half acentury old, the majority of the collection has never been applied in this way, nor will it necessarily
be in the future, and this ambiguity is key. Assembling a potential alphabet by persistently repurposing
detritus as letters is a reminder that the Roman alphabet is essentially redundant, in the sense that its
component forms are arbitrary, modular and non-figurative, as opposed to, say, Chinese ideograms.
Flickering between object, shape and character, the project makes language strange again, a permanent
verfremdungseffekt.
The rogue collection is bounded by a few basic parameters. First, the materials must be man-made,thereby carrying the trace of a means of manufacture conflating the construction of language with theconstruction of the built environment. Second, its elements must be small enough to fit in a humanmouth or be passed from hand to hand. Third, no character form may be ‘applied’ – i.e. used as anelement in an artwork or piece of graphic design – more than once.

At MoMA, the collection was emphatically shown as a collection – sorted into discrete categories,
set out in archive boxes, some under plexiglass, and clearly labelled. Each label comprised an allusive
title, minimal description and list of materials, playfully arranged by Elliman into curt prose poems thatare, rhetorically speaking, all over the place – variously offhand, formal, straightforward or abstruse(sometimes all on the same card). They generally describe each new category’s ‘found’ context byeither alluding to some specific backstory or implying some future linguistic use, loosely grouped into

	
  

34

Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language, MoMA, New York, 6 May – 27 August, 2012.

35

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/ecstaticalphabets/works/elliman-scissors/

	
  

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several species according to type (keys, scissor handles, shims), material (cardboard, processed ferrite
oxide), aesthetic properties (colour, transparency) or location (often with particular industrial
resonance: Birkenhead, Detroit, Cupertino, etc.). Like the texts in the Mark Manders show, they are
unusually generous yet anything but bland – extending a hand to a viewer, pointing to the work andunobtrusively colouring it.
Some refer to a specific social backstory:
The Battle of Waterloo, 1998–, Die-cut cardboard shapes; ongoingaccumulation. ‘The Battle of Waterloo’ refers to a homeless persons’encampment at Waterloo Station in London. Called Cardboard City,
it was forcibly removed in 1998 in order to build an IMAX theater.
Brushes, a.k.a THE CROSSING SWEEPER (from the series Magic in Modern
London), 1993–, Broken steel blades; ongoing accumulation. These
objects can be used as dashes, slashes, or underscores, but for me
they have a more abstract relationship to language that doesn’tnecessarily tie them to a specific typographic mark. At first I didn’tknow what they were. It took a while to figure out that they wereelements of the metal brushes that sweep the streets of London.

Others focus on their alphabetic potential:
Dead Scissors, 2004–, Scissors handles: processed metals and plastic,
digital print; ongoing accumulation. Several characters can beinterpreted from these forms, including lowercase d’s, b’s, p’s, acapital Q and P, and a 6 and 9.
Wild Asters, 1996–, Paste jewelry: rhinestone, lucite, glass,plastic, pewter, silver, nickel, brass, and other materials; ongoingaccumulation. The print is a production drawing for a set of
typographical asterisks.

Plus a couple from the more oblique, suggestive end of the spectrum:
Endgame, 1997–, Cork, felt, HDPE, wood, rubber, and cardboard gameboard; ongoing accumulation. These tops and stops are pieces for aboard game in which the only rule is to bring the game to a close as
quickly as possible. They could be rendered in drawings and used for
punctuation as periods.
Black Spot (from the series Magic in Modern London), Black stone;
ongoing accumulation.

Finally, Elliman’s labels – again like those of Manders – are deliberately inconsistent; a series ofindividual inferences attained by anecdotal means as various and scattered as the Fount itself,each with its own character. The elliptical aspect of Elliman’s writing (‘A system for describing theworld using the world itself’) is integral: a multifarious, conspicuously open language that mirrors
a multifarious, conspicuously open collection of material. In this way, the captions reflect (duplicate,multiply) the collection. They are simultaneously a product and demonstration of the things theydescribe, subject and object. As such, it’s hard to imagine either of these exhibitions having thepotency without their allusive labels. (Incidentally, ‘allude’ comes from the Latin alludere, whichmeans ‘to play beside’.)

	
  

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7.5: LOWER-CASE ETHICS
The other day I came across an odd little piece by the writer Martin Amis. It was a short tribute to theunorthodox manners of his outspoken friend and colleague Christopher Hitchens. Amis recalls a few
everyday instances of what he calls Hitchens’s ‘spontaneous eloquence’ – in a restaurant, hailing a cab,and so on. Though Hitchens frequently comes off as a petulant and obstreperous in public, he says, in
actual fact he’s invariably practising root level good manners in the face of conventional etiquette – akind of principled rudeness. What particularly impresses Amis is how his friend’s contentious remarks
and retorts are so immediate, so fully formed; and this frank, unfiltered quality, he goes on, carries over
into his friend’s writing. Basically, there’s no distinction between his social character and the characterof his work: what you get is what you see. Amis elaborates:
Art is freedom; and in art, as in life, there is no freedom without
law. The foundational literary principle is decorum, which means
something like the opposite of its dictionary definition: ‘behaviour
in keeping with good taste and propriety’ (i.e. submission to an ovine
consensus). In literature, decorum means the concurrence of style andcontent – together with a third element, which I can only vaguely
express as earning the right weight. It doesn't matter what the styleis, and it doesn't matter what the content is; but the two must
concur.36

This rebel decorum – the opposite of its dictionary definition – is, broadly speaking, what I mean toelaborate in these next sections. By which I don’t mean to invoke some debased, tediously glamorous
sense of ‘rebellion’ (i.e. contrarian for the sake of being petulant, or vice versa), more a modest stateof independence that involves operating outside the sanctions of others, yet with a deep sense of
personal responsibility. ‘Christopher’s everyday manners are beautiful (and wholly democratic)’ says
Amis, ‘because he knows that in manners begins morality. But each case is dealt with exclusively on
its merits.’37
Amis’s tribute applies precisely to the work described in the following talk. It was presented atMuseum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland, on December 11, 2012, where it was intended to serve as a trailer fora rare retrospective of the Polish couple Stefan and Franciszka Themersons the following season:38
Tonight I’m going to focus specifically on Stefan’s work, though to cleave the couple’s work apart isgenerally misleading. He was a polymathic man of letters – in no particular order, a poet, artists,
novelist, essayist and philosopher. She was a similarly peripatetic graphic artist who made drawings
and paintings, but also worked in theatre, exhibition, and graphic design. Her pictures often
accompanied his writing, but only to the extent that his writing accompanied her pictures. Otherwise
put, they made profoundly mutual work together.
In Warsaw in the 1930s, they made a number of popular children’s books, as well as five avant-garde
films before migrating first to Paris, then on to London during the war, where they remained for the restof their lives – until 1988. They founded the fiercely independent Gaberbocchus Press in 1948 in orderto publish their own work as well as that of like minds past and present, from Aesop and Alfred Jarry to
Bertrand Russell and Raymond Queneau. For a couple of years from 1957, they also hosted an avantgarde literary den in their basement called the Common Room. So together they were also filmmakers, publishers, and catalysts.
To avoid confusion, from now my ‘Themerson’ will be shorthand for Stefan alone. I meant to do thewhole thing using his Christian name, but recoil at the improper intimacy this suggests (the way some

	
  
36

Martin Amis, ‘He's one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has seen', The Observer, 24 April, 2011. My italics.

37

Ibid.

38

The Themersons and the Avant-Garde, Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland, 22 February – 5 May, 2013.

	
  

267

people refer to Warhol as ‘Andy’). I’m certain he would have disapproved too. For the time being, then,with no disrespect to Franciszka, Themerson refers exclusively to male of the species.
Specifically, I want to focus on Themerson’s ethics. I could maybe substitute ‘ethics’ with ‘politics’ or‘social commitment’, but have to admit I don’t have enough of a grip on any of these terms to say forsure. What I can say for sure – because he said it – is that Themerson wasn’t interested in capital-E
Ethics, by which he meant the academic discipline, only in lower-case-e ethical phenomena; that is,
ethics as actually lived rather than abstractly theorized. Such was the crux of his work.
He was a steadfast pragmatist then – as long as you hear that as a common not a proper noun too,
which is to say, nothing particularly to do with capital-P Pragmatist philosophy, nor for that matter withthat eponymous brand of politics we’ve come to know since. In fact, if anything, you might say he wasa lower-case-ist through and through. To quite literally perpetuate this line of thinking, I want to lookat how this ethical orientation is manifest in his work. I don’t just mean how he explicated his approach
to living in his writing, whether in his own talks and essays, or as channelled through his fictional orsemi-fictional protagonists – where it’s always obvious enough; I mean to examine how this attitude
comes across in less patent, more subterranean ways.
This attitude manifest amounts to what Walter Benjamin called ‘political tendency’. In 1936, Benjamincalled for writers – and by implication artists generally – to further the cause of social and politicalprogress not by merely writing to align themselves with one ideology or another, supporting a cause
and thereby likely preaching to the converted, but by tinkering with and possibly subverting the rootlevel workings of their field. He wanted writers and artists to focus not merely on what they were writing
and making and disseminating, but at least as much on how they were doing it.
By implicating themselves in this way, Benjamin said, writers could usefully work things out in public –a ‘working out’ that both carries the work (propels it) and is carried in the form of the work (is reflected
in it). For instance, a writer might observe that writing a certain kind of journal essay or a pamphlet is,
to all intents and purpose, irrelevant or impotent, and so resolve to seek newly charged ways of writing
and dispersing, of communicating-at-large – considering from scratch what they have to offer in viewof the whole ecology of publishing, both within and beyond its conventions. Through this process ofreflection and action, says Benjamin, the work will then inevitably manifest a political tendency. The
writer doesn’t merely choose sides, left or right, but forges ahead by precarious example. In this way,
his or her political alignment is actively refracted rather than passively reiterated.
I want to look at Themerson’s work through this ethical lens in order to draw out such tendencies in his
own considerable body of work. If this seems contrived, it’s worth noting that he consistently andexplicitly dealt with the subject of ‘ethics’ himself – though never in a manner as dry as I’m making it
sound. I’ll offer a few specific examples, and we’ll end by watching a film that features the man himself
and hopefully embodies what I’m getting at.
I first came across his work as an undergraduate studying Typography in the early 1990s. Flipping
through a book called The Visible Word, I was arrested by a couple of pages of eccentrically-typeset
text. This technique, I learned, was called Internal Vertical Justification, or IVJ for short.

As you can see, it involves arranging language in order to emphasize meaning – an extreme example ofthe project of typography generally. Paragraphs, sentences and words are carefully configured

	
  

268

according to their relational grammatical sense. The Visible Word was a compendium of experimentsthat pushed the possibilities of verbal graphic language, but compared to the other examples, which I
can only describe as more ‘academic’, it stood out as funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, more a sort ofwinking – distinctly off, and so especially engaging. Also unlike most of the rest of the book, it worked;
the method proved itself.
I later found out that Themerson had invented (if that’s the word) Internal Vertical Justification whilelearning English. When searching for the correct word to translate from Polish, he would list
alternatives, then carry on with the sentence – a running Thesaurus. You can see the residue of thatbasic logic in its sophisticated development. At the time, this seemed even more instructive to me– that Themerson had taken a practical, mundane means for more efficiently learning a language,
and transformed it into a more broadly operational proposal for more efficiently communicating ideas.
As such, it’s one minor instance of what I think Benjamin was getting at – in this case, reflectively
tinkering in the machine room of language, possibly in order to subvert it.
The lesson IVJ has to offer in the longer term is to show how verbal and graphic language – what it
says and how it looks – can be productively conflated. That’s to say, it’s
two-fold
simultaneousentwinedmutually-affecting
symbiotic(though not without some obvious drawbacks, such as the space necessary; the real estate of thepage.)
Anyway, IVJ lodged somewhere in my mind. I didn’t realize at the time it was only a gear in a muchbigger machine, which I’ll come back to later.
Now, General Piesc is the title and protagonist of one of Themerson’s later short novels – just 54 pages– from 1976. (Could someone pronounce that for me … ? That’s right – sounds like ‘punch’ in English,
and means ‘fist’ in Polish: another symbiosis, in this case a multilingual one.) Having suddenly won a
lot of money and become unwittingly liberated from his wife who’s run off with another man, thisapparently discombobulated general sets out to fulfil a lifelong mission. Along the way he forgets thenature of that mission, at which point he finds happiness.
This brisk tale is mostly told through a handful of letters exchanged between the protagonist’s family
and friends, the most consequential being a plea to the general from his daughter, a Princess Zuppa,
that includes the following exhortation:
The Greek males thought geometry was the thing. Dr Zamenhof thought
Esperanto was the thing. Jesus-Christ thought the dialectical loaf ofbread was the thing. And geometry produced bazookas. And polyglotism
produced more quarrels. And love produced hatred. And none of thesegreat things has proved to be more (what is the right word)efficacious (?) than what I, in my female way, would like to call‘good manners’.39
I’ve put the paragraph up on the screen so you can witness the character questioning herself in the lastline – worrying over the word ‘efficacious’, just like Themerson deliberating the exactitude ofalternatives from his Polish-English Thesaurus. Note that she/he is careful to choose the correct word
as well as point to her/himself carefully choosing. I take this as part of the point: that worrying over

	
  
39

Themerson, General Piesc, op. cit., pp. 32–3.

	
  

269

nuance, the concern to communicate correctly, is itself a very good-mannered, perhaps even the‘female’ thing to do.
Now I’ve always considered this statement profoundly modernist, though not in a sense particularly
congruent with what most people take ‘modernism’ to mean. What I mean is nothing to do withneoplastics or international styles or any other brand of formalism. It is, however, in line with what wasonce called ‘the modern movement’, which I personally read as shorthand for an attitude or set of
attitudes in advance of form; attitudes that fundamentally resist hardening intorules
doctrines
ideologies
dogmasabsolutes
In other words, a state of mind perpetually oriented towards breaking from what Themerson once
called ‘customary modes of thought’, that embraces – attempts to embrace – contingencies,
particularities and exceptions.
Moreover, these are qualities native to the literary form of the essay, which literally means ‘attempt’– to some extent, then, a making-it-up-as-you-go-along, a reaching. According to T.W. Adorno(who wrote an essay about it), the procedural logic of the essay is ‘comparable to the behaviour of aman who is obliged, in a foreign country, to speak that country’s language instead of patching it
together from its elements, as he did in school.’ Here’s another fragment:
He will read without a dictionary. If he has looked at the same word
thirty times, in constantly changing contexts, he has a clearer graspof it than he would if he looked up all the word’s meanings; meanings
that are generally too vague in view of the nuances that the context
establishes in every individual case, just as such learning remains
exposed to error, so does the essay as form; it must pay for its
affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security ...
[As such] The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it
beyond itself, and not in a hoarding obsession with fundamentals.40
Returning to General Piesc, it gradually dawns on the reader that the general’s ‘mission’ is some suchfundamental goal, some heroic sacrifice or other, and one that the princess is trying desperately todivert by awakening in him a let’s say pointedly freewheeling attitude instead. ‘You see’, she says,
we don’t want saviours anymore. All saviours disrupt normal
evolutionary processes, which anyway will go their own way. The way
may be tragic ... But what saviours do when they start meddling withit, is to make the tragedy still more painful.41
In conclusion, she asserts that ‘all ideologies, all missions, all (capital-A) Aims corrupt good manners.’
In his hysterical analysis of historical models, Themerson notes that the Greeks’, Christ’s, Zamenhof’sand Marx’s plans for progress all are founded on Saving Graces and Big Ideas, that these Savers areinvariably men, and that the premise of the Big Idea is always conceived in view of end results: once
achieved the rest will fall into place. Problem solved: end of story.
On the contrary, Themerson’s female ‘good manners’ are always contingent – radically contingent –because the efficacy of whatever deed is always relative; it always hinges on the specific

	
  

40

Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, op. cit., p. 161. See also §1.3.

41

Themerson, General Piesc, op. cit., p. 32.

	
  

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circumstances. It’s not always good manners to help old ladies across roads, only particular old ladies
who want to cross particular roads. Real good manners, then, don’t take the form of axiomatic aims,
but bunches of habits, which we could sum up as ademeanour
disposition
bearing
temperament
inclination
When I first read Themerson’s ‘good manners’ as an infant graphic designer, I understood it,
obscurely, as a maxim for designing, for organizing stuff with intelligence. The idea seemed to tally withcertain pedagogical platitudes: work without preconceptions … meet the limits of the brief … resist
stylistic fashions … let the content speak … and so on. That’s what that modern movement means tome: strictly movement: a thinking-on-your-feet and a keeping-on-your-toes.
Themerson’s other novels are likewise full of such ethical insight, sharp and blunt at the same time.
In the perpetual attempt to say it more carefully, more precisely, he induces the reader on the otherend to think more carefully, more precisely. Themerson teaches by example: considerateness ispassed on by osmosis.
There’s a theory about language you hear a lot these days that goes something like this: Because weknow the world through language, as the nuances of language get eroded, limited, simplified, dumbeddown, it follows that our interface with the world, and so our experience of it, will follow suit. In otherwords, it will become
impoverishedbland
monotonous
one-dimensional
wastedIf these sentiments sound familiar, you’re probably remembering a well-known essay from 1946 by
George Orwell called ‘Politics and the English Language’. Like Themerson’s, Orwell performs his
opinions with alacrity. ‘Most people who bother with the matter at all’ he writes, ‘would admit that the
English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot … do anything about it.’This fatalist point of view says: ‘Our civilization is decadent and our language must inevitably share in
the general collapse.’ He goes on:
it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately havepolitical and economic causes ... But an effect can become a cause,
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form ... A man may take to drink because he feels himself
to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because hedrinks ... [The same thing is] happening to the English language. It
becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but theslovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolishthoughts.42
Orwell’s point is that this process is not inevitable but actively reversible. Modern English is full of bad
habits, he says, ‘which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble … to let themeaning choose the word, and not the other way around.’ In fact, he continues, ‘It is probably a goodidea to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can throughpictures and sensations.’ Then afterward, ‘one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will

	
  
42

George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, Horizon, vol. 13 no. 76, April 1946, pp. 252–265.

	
  

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best cover the meaning …’. Finally, he says that although his suggestions may sound elementary,
in fact they require ‘a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style
now fashionable.’43
Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Orwell’s point is political as well as
literary, and, true to his text, he makes this perfectly clear: ‘If one gets rid of these habits one can think
more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration’.44
Themerson dealt with ethics most directly in one of his latest pieces of work, a 1981 lecture titled ‘The
Chair of Decency’. In it, he elucidates Princess Zuppa’s allusion that good manners are categoricallyfemale. The talk’s key idea is that, contrary to received wisdom, man is a biologically gentle species,(benevolent, altruistic, loving) who turns aggressive (vicious, corrupt, savage) through cultural influence.
He supports the hypothesis by pointing out the fairly foolproof evidence that mothers don’t eat theirchildren, which he calls ‘innate decency’.
A friend recently wrote to me about the critical theory’s relationship to the notion of change. She wrotethat social or political theory as conceived by, say, the Frankfurt School (i.e. the Marxist critical theory
that was practiced by Benjamin and continued by Adorno, among others) involves reflecting on a given
condition in order to suggest a solution that’s designed to improve that condition. This sounds
reasonable and obvious enough: illness, examination, diagnosis, prescription, health.
However, Gilles Deleuze considers this way of conceiving the world exactly the wrong way round,because it implies that the default condition is stasis where the real constant is in fact change. From
this inverted critical perspective, then, the aim is to consider how and why things resist the natural flowof change, then work to remove whatever blockage. I’m simplifying wildly, but what’s instructive interms of Themerson and ethics, is that Deleuze rethinks political or personal agency away fromanticipating ideal outcomes and towards altering ongoing habits. Themerson put it this way: ‘in thischanging world, the way from premises to conclusions is temporal and stormy, and you can’t force
your Yesterday upon your grandson’s Tomorrow’.
This adds up to Themerson’s formula that ‘means are more important than aims’ – that ways of going
about things (naturally decent ways) are ultimately more important than what is done. ‘There do exist
tragic situations when wicked means have to be used to suppress some other wicked means’, headmits; ‘but to use wicked means to promote aims – defeats the aims.’ It short-circuits them. (To stepout of the abstraction for a moment, you only have to think of how wicked means have been used topromote the aims of certain foreign policies in the past decade to see what he’s getting at. He’s talking
about the sort of hypocrisy that has very real effects on very many lives.)
Which brings us to a lovely elliptical motto at the heart of his talk: decency of means is the aim of aims.
If you stare at it long enough you’ll see this is a recursive sentence – not unlike ‘this sentence is a lie’.
In fact, it has to be a recursive sentence in order to aptly embody itself, i.e. to remain perpetuallyactive. It’s a sentence that refuses to settle, but that doesn’t mean you can’t glimpse its meaning.
Next, I want to discuss something between an essay, a diagram, and a timeline called ‘Kurt Schwitterson a Time Chart’. It’s Themerson’s visualization of the German dadaist’s work relative to what wasgoing on in the world before, during, and after it was made. They met by accident at a conference inLondon in 1943. Themerson was preoccupied by Schwitters fiddling with a piece of bent metal during
the lectures. They started talking, discovered they were fellow intellectuals and creative independents,
and remained in close correspondence until Schwitters’ death five years later.
What I want to emphasize is that as well as being a piece of history, the time chart itself has a long
history, and that this history is folded into its evolving form. It started life as ‘Schwitters’ Last
Notebook’, an informal talk that Themerson gave at the Common Room in 1958, a decade after the

	
  

43

All ibid.

44

Ibid.

	
  

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artist’s death, probably to a bunch of people not unlike ourselves who had gathered to look and think
about someone else’s work.

Later the same year, a rewritten version of the talk was the basis for this Gaberbocchus publication,
Kurt Schwitters in England, combined with reproductions of Schwitters’ collages, poetry and prose toform a particularly tactile object – a visibly spirited, knockabout kind of a monograph.

Then, three years later in 1961, Themerson prepared a revised version of the talk, presented in a moreformal setting to a group of 20-year-old students in Cambridge. After a brief introduction, he drew atime-line on an overhead projector, then plotted three dots. The first one marked when Schwitters was
20 (in 1907). The second one marked when Themerson himself was 20 (in 1930). And the last one
marked now, today – meaning then, in 1960 – when the audience were 20.

	
  

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He later recalled the apparent force with which the normally passive, detached students seemedsuddenly thrown into time: ‘history’ was now alive, activated, and they were accordingly implicated,
involved. (Just as we are tonight, too – all variously 20 somewhere around here, off the edge of thechart, and even further along tonight.) As the talk proceeded, Themerson continued adding elements
to the chart, gradually assembling the broader cultural context in which Schwitters made his work.
We’re all used to considering art in regard to its original context, to the extent that it would be
impertinent not to at least pretend to do so. But Themerson goes a step further here, visualizing it tosuch a degree that his audience is effectively trapped: as this map materializes live before you,there’s no way not to ‘contextualize’. You might say he resuscitates the idea – breathes new life into‘contextualizing’ in a way that’s both provocative and playful. Not unlike his subject.
Themerson had good reasons for doing so. He reminds the audience of the horrific crucible (‘thatbloody stinking pit of European history nobody wants to remember’) in which Schwitters’ frequently
delicate and beautiful work was concocted. He also shows how the work changed and continues tochange according to when and where and how it’s seen.
The time chart is a collage, Schwitters’ own medium of choice (or circumstance): discrete foundelements reassembled to form a new whole, the graphic equivalent of how Adorno describes the essay
form. What ought to be apparent, though, is that what’s going on here is not a simple aping of
Schwitters’ style, but a complex extension of his spirit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because what you’ve been looking at is not the acetate drawn andprojected at Cambridge, but a later graphic translation of the same. If the Common Room talk was thefirst iteration, the England book the second, and the Cambridge lecture the third, this is the fourth,
prepared some six weeks after the lecture but only published six years later, in 1967 – and then only
just, as the last piece in the last issue of an 18-year old magazine called Typographica.
The chart was configured to scroll at 90 degrees through the magazine’s A4 portrait pages in red andblack ink. Themerson’s first draft ran to 28 pages, which was almost double the editor’s offer of 16, so
it had to be cut back to 20, presumably with much difficulty and negotiation. Given the technology of
the time, assembling this thing for print was no straightforward task. This only makes what I consider amasterpiece lecture in plan view even more impressive; but in a letter accompanying the artwork,
Themerson wrote:
Here it is. And I am horrified. I have read it again, and I hate every
word of it ... What I would really have liked – well, I would have
liked to be able to enjoy Kurt Schwitters’ work lightly, for the‘pleasure it gives to the eye.’ And yet I couldn't write it in thatkey. It's wrong, possibly, nevertheless it irritates me when I see
people handling a collage by Schwitters as if it were a bunch of
lovely flowers.45
He added that the editor could print this disclaimer a post-script to the chart – but it seems they really
had run out of space, or time, as it didn’t appear in the version eventually published.
In a few minutes we’re going to finish with a 40-minute film made for Dutch TV, directed by Erik van
Zuylen in 1976. Zuylen also wrote the script, though it’s mostly based on Themerson’s writings.
A 66-year-old Stefan stars in it as actor and interlocutor.
The film needs a bit of prefacing for a few reasons. Foremost, because it’s often difficult to make out
what's being said. This is the effect of heavy Polish and Dutch accents speaking English, compounded
by a general stiltedness arising from the fact that much of the time the players are visibly reading froma script. There’s a lot of noise in the signal, then, but there’s also a certain amount of self-reflexivity

	
  
45

Stefan Themerson, ‘Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart’ [1967] (Oude Tonge: Huis-Clos, 1998), inside cover.

	
  

274

and time-travel at play too, and while understanding the references is by no means essential toenjoying what’s going on, I’m pretty sure that at least some background knowledge makes the wholething less baffling. Trust me, I’m trying my hardest here to feed you only enough for starters that you
remain hungry for the main course.
The film is in three parts. The first takes place on or around a bandstand in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark;
the second comprises an interview with a spectacularly annoying professional orator; the third involves
a walk along a very windy beach, during which Themerson continues to be interrogated by a sort ofpersonal ‘policeman’ played by Dutch neo-Dadaist Wim T. Schippers. Of these three, only the opening
scene in the park requires elucidation.
One of Themerson’s earliest books from 1949, Bayamus, is an absurdist skit. The philosopher Bertrand
Russell called it ‘nearly as mad as the world’. In it, a vaguely autobiographical protagonist meets thecharacter Bayamus who – this will give you some idea of the tone – skates around London on a
genetically evolved roller-skate at the end of his third leg. The narrator recounts his journey, under the
direction of Bayamus, to a lecture at the Theatre of Semantic Poetry, the nature of which is as
mysterious to the narrator as it is to the reader. About three-quarters of the way through the tale, he is
met at the entrance of this Theatre by two well-dressed gentlemen and, to his surprise, led up onto thestage, where it gradually dawns, with understandable discomfort, that he’s the one expected to givethe lecture.
This is the point at which we enter the film – with the added twist that Themerson the author is playing
the role of his protagonist double some 26 years after writing and publishing him.
Now – again just to be clear – this ‘Semantic Poetry’ was something that Themerson had, in his own
words (or something like them, as I’ve never been able to relocate the source), ‘invented using amachine made from certain parts of my brain’; and Bayamus was one of several vehicles he used todemonstrate its efficacy. It’s a literary method that subverts existing forms of language, typically
poems or songs, by replacing the original words with precise – that’s extremely, absurdly, sarcastically,
righteously precise – dictionary definitions. Themerson semantically translates, then, in the sense thathe extracts strangely exact meanings from vague clichéd allusions. The method is usuallydemonstrated by comparing existing poems or songs with a semantically translated version. Again
you’ll notice the line back to Themerson grappling with his Polish-English dictionaries and thesauruses,
the toolboxes of language.
For example, from this:to this:Semantic Translation is more double-edged than this brief description suggests. Although it’sostensibly an attempt to reclaim the ‘truth’ behind words, the proposition is essentially ironic, not

	
  

275

proselytizing. It’s more accurate to say that at best ‘truths’ are more properly ‘beliefs’, and that beliefs
should be treated with the utmost suspicion. One of the great benefits of the technique is that it
reminds us how ‘the world is more complicated than the language we use to talk about it. The natureof reading through the pedantic extent of a piece of Semantic Translation is to experience language
made strange, to perceive both its technical depth along with its limitations. Themerson referred to thisas ‘scratching the form to reveal the content’.
On one hand Semantic Translation is very funny – albeit what he calls ‘a poker-faced kind of humour’,
which points to the fact that, as usual, Themerson’s intentions are as serious as they are comic.
Semantic Poetry Translation was his brain-machine’s natural reaction to political demagoguery.
It called attention to the fact that politicians had latterly begun appropriating poetry’s means – rhyme,syntax, repetition, alliteration and other tools of such as Themerson’s trade – to dubious or downrightevil ends, variously intoxicating or lulling public minds into potentially pernicious ‘customary modes ofthought’. As such, Themerson isn’t making a serious plea for linguistic reform, as Orwell was, butrather a hysterical, satirical, political gesture: a fist and a punch.
I said near the beginning that I’d return to that typographic technique of Themerson’s, Internal Vertical
Justification, and here it is. Although he pulls pedantic definitions out of words throughout the story,
and his writing generally has a similar technical precision, Semantic Poetry is always organizedaccording to the eccentric but entirely meaningful logic of IVJ: ‘IVJ for SPT’, as he nicely abbreviates itin the book. There’s nothing stopping anyone writing or typesetting such a semantic translation incontinuous lines – except common sense, because, as you can imagine, it would be very difficult toread or comprehend. There’s something else going on here too, to do with horizontal harmonies andvertical chords, but the film explains all that well enough.
The various genealogies of work I’ve recounted here manifest a self-critical spirit, a propensity tochange. Ideas are perpetually revisited, revised, refined, but never merely recycled, always strictly
transformed. The body of work has a life of its own. Themerson was vehemently against the sortof literary biography that joins the dots between a few loose anecdotes about an artist’s life and a few
concrete pieces of work, and I think this is because, to an unusual degree, he’s very palpably in thework already. If you’re looking to the art for any insight on the life of the artist, then you’re looking inprecisely the wrong place. ‘Bibliography is my biography’, he once said. Meaning: anything ofconsequence for anyone else is strictly in the work; all else is superfluous.
Back at the start I said my task was to look at how Themerson’s ethics ‘come across in less blatantways’ than in his writing. Here’s a by no means absolute summation:
First, in Gaberbocchus’ loose, knockabout publishing program, which was equally happy putting out
eccentric children’s books, surreal novels, philosophical cartoons, and pointed memoirs. One fan
noted that there’s ‘a madness about various Gaberbocchus books which is the spice of life, aningredient somewhat lacking in the world of (most) book production.’
Second, in the particular brand of serious humour – perhaps not far removed from that madness – that
infected, and still infects, pretty much everything Themerson made.
Third, in the readiness to work outside received wisdom – not for the sake of being different or new,
but certainly to interrogate those ‘conventional modes of thought’ that if unchecked might turn malign.
Fourth, in the agility to hop across – or flat-out ignore – disciplinary boundaries, and otherwise eschew
categories or classifications generally.
Fifth, in the way the work is well-adjusted; meaning, aware of its audience and pitched accordingly,
yet without ever toning down its essential anarchy. (A quick flip through any of their children’s books
proves this point.)
Sixth, in the modesty and self-criticality that led to certain works being reworked, refined over time:a perennially active flow of thought, now and then made public in presentations and objects.

	
  

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You’re probably all familiar with this poem, ‘Il Pleut’, the well-known calligram by 19th-century Frenchpoet Guillaume Apollinaire. Themerson was a huge fan, and wrote an exemplary essay on his work.
I’m ending on this image (or is it text?), as a mascot-of-sorts for the talk, because the calligram, as you
know, is a poetic form whose meaning and appearance are tautologous, one and the same: thearrangement of the letters of a poem about rain that form the image of rain.
I put it to you, then, that it’s no surprise Themerson was so fond of the calligrams, because what he’s
after ethically is precisely in line with what Apollinaire achieves aesthetically. What I mean is, as a
generic form – as a ‘type’ – the calligram is useful shorthand for practising what you preach … which,in doing so doesn’t seem to preach at all. Better yet: it cuts out the need for preaching altogether.
As a case in point, then, let’s watch Van Zuylen’s film, which you’ll see is a very odd creature. Whenthe director first proposed the idea, Themerson refused; not least, apparently, because the proposal
involved an interview, a format that Themerson distrusted just as much as biography, and forpresumably similar reasons. This didn’t stop him parodying the technique in his fiction, usually in theform of a police interrogation. His objection, however, set in motion a dialogue that led Van Zuylen to
re-propose turning Themerson’s own technique back on himself: interrogated by his own policeman,his own body of work placed under suspicion and scrutiny. Together, in dialogue, they take the format,
the customary mode, and customize it. This, I conclude, is a prime case of aesthethical decency, too.

	  7.6: THREE PALIMPSEST TALKS
Next, some work by three contemporary artists, the first two of whom have already cropped up in
previous chapters: Ryan Gander, Seth Price, and Mark Leckey. The particular pieces I want to consider
are not typical of any of them. They are hybrid works, various compounds of patently ‘pedagogical’,explanatory formats including the public lecture, the artist’s talk, the documentary and the essay film –

	
  

277

– only these genre conventions are abused as much as used in order to end up larger-than-life, a little
bit askance. This deliberately affected quality becomes the essence of the emergent work.
In each case, the artists attempt to get outside of their usual flow of production in order to take stock,
to shed light on their work from a more disinterested vantage (and perhaps cut a new path in theprocess), and to come out of the stock enigmatic character of the contemporary artist – a drive I like tothink is in deliberate reaction to the more common and comfortable appeal to obfuscation. Like
Themerson’s line of work on Schwitters, each case involves making something new by either directly
referring to their existing body of work, or by dealing with a topic that has an obvious metonymical
relation to it.
And so I mean to suggest that these two aspects – candidly attempting to explain things clearly for
once, and reworking work in order to improve it – are contemporary instances of the ethical gesturesthat characterize Themerson’s work.

Ryan Gander’s Loose Associations Lectures have been delivered – or ‘performed’ – in one form or
another around a hundred times since its debut to a handful of people in 2002.46 As the title suggests,
the lectures comprise a series of anecdotes connected by tenuous relational glue. Many of the links
are coherent enough, but Ryan also deadpans just as many contrived ones to make it clear that thewhole thing is as much about the structure as the stories. The talks are typical of his wider body ofwork in highlighting everyday formal phenomena that are easily overlooked – especially those that are
ubiquitous to the point of invisibility. They are about paying attention. The first iteration of the firstlecture begins:
These are desire lines. At least, that’s what spatial planners callthem. This first photo was taken in Kassel in Germany ... I’m talking
about the lines on the ground here. When spatial designers planpavements, there are always bits of waste ground left between them andwhen they don’t design them properly you get these desire lines thathave been worn away by people who cut across the middle ...47

The talk then proceeds through a compendium of this sort of miscellany, from lines via signs via
appropriation via censorship via codes via graffiti via typefaces via symbols to end up at fictional
languages – specifically, Star Trek’s Klingon. Ryan runs rapidly through the anecdotes, punctuated byquick-fire images and circumstantial banter. It’s an ideal medium for a natural raconteur, and after adecade or so of repetition, the lectures still come across as freshly reigned-in streams-of-consciousness.
But this enduring vitality is just as much a result of their gradually changing function. The lecturesbegan as a practical bank of backstories, a scrapbook of fundamental research that Ryan gradually drew
into other, more regular work – photographs, sculptures, installations, films, and so on. In these half-

	
  
46

There are actually two versions (the second picks up where the trail of the first leaves off), both of which tend to expand or
contract depending on the particular context – the nature of the audience and allotted amount of time, etc. Both have been
published in Dot Dot Dot (#s 6 and 7), as well as a variety of other publications including: Ryan Gander, Appendix (Amsterdam:
Artimo, 2004); Stuart Bailey and Ryan Gander, Appendix Appendix (Zurich: JRP, 2007); and Ryan Gander, Loose Associations
and Other Lectures (Paris: Onestar Press, 2007).

47

Bailey and Gander, Appendix, op. cit., p. 102.

	
  

278

sarcastic, happily self-conscious talks he’d stumbled on a unique and uniquely generative format, acore work and a repository for the rest. Moreover, where that ‘more regular’ work tends to be in-jokey,
self-referential and abstruse, the lectures are the polar opposite: straightforward, endearing andaccessible. And so, in line with his rising profile, these frequent performances of the loose associations
that permeate his larger body of work have served as a point of explanatory access. I imagine anunusually large audience has been introduced to Ryan’s work via this oddball running commentary.
The work is its own PR, all the more plausible for having been written in the first person.

Back in the first chapter, I noted Seth Price’s essay-work ‘Dispersion’ (2002–) for two reasons.48 First,
because it exemplifies the original sense of ‘essay’, being an attempt to nail some free-ranging thoughts
in hard text written in a spirit of interrogation. Second, because the way that it operates – loosely
assembled, perpetually overwritten, freely distributed, widely read and discussed – embodies its topic,
i.e. ways to overcome the domesticating effects of the current art system. It’s at once a timely slice ofart history, a statement of intent and a case in point: in its own words, ‘a direct expression of a processof production’. As Tim Griffin says (of Price’s pseudo self-help book How to Disappear in America(2008)): ‘Someone, it seems, is telling readers how to tell stories, forge false trails, or cover up oldones, but only while telling stories, forging false trails, or covering up old ones – showing by doing.’49
Five years on from ‘Dispersion’, Price’s similarly open-ended video piece Redistribution (2007–)
continues in the same direct, searching and self-illustrating vein as ‘Dispersion’. It’s based on footageof an actual, stereotypical artist’s talk given at the Guggenheim Museum (‘Hello. Thanks, Nancy. I’mgoing to show slides of my work from the last six or seven years …’) overlaid and intercut with otherstuff – illustrations, additional voiceover comments, digital effects, along with images and excerpts ofPrice’s older work. It begins:
I’m like a person who makes things. You do it one after another,
unending. It goes on for such a long time: something new, andsomething else, and something something. Here come a lot of different
strategies and arrangements, all interesting, all interlocking,mutatis mutandis ... Such a lot of things! And then the question
will be put to you: If you have something to say, why not simply
say it? Why the elaborate games, the things that stand in forother things ...50

Where ‘Dispersion’ was scattered with examples of conceptual work that pre-empted Price’s concerns(‘interventions into the social consciousness’, e.g. Dan Graham’s Harper’s Bazaar ads), Redistribution
draws more on Price’s own work since. In ‘Dispersion’ he described Duchamp’s urinal Fountain as
consisting in ‘a circuit of reading’, a ‘palimpsest of gestures, presentations, and positions’. For
instance, Duchamp’s own anonymous article about the work in the self-published journal The Blind
Man, or the signature photograph of it he commissioned from Alfred Stieglitz. Price builds on thismodel in Redistribution by juxtaposing his work with curious observations – such as the meditation ona turd at the front of a Breughel painting. He pre-empts third-party interpretations by asserting his own

	
  
48

See §1.3.

49

Tim Griffin, ‘The Personal Effects of Seth Price’, Artforum, Summer 2009, p. 285.

50

Seth Price, ‘Redistribution (video transcript)’, Price, Seth (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2010), p. 77.

	
  

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circuit of reading. Griffin concurs, noting that Price’s self-captioning work is means of avoiding a fixed
identity courtesy of others’ analysis: ‘the artist is likely aware of being continually measured against
the existing record – his own or that of his antecedents’. Past and future tend to collapse in art, he says,‘as the production and reception of each new work alters the way older ones are read, and as each newreading of an older work changes the terms for a new work’s reception.’51
Beyond all the earnest essaying, there’s something else, something extra going on in both ‘Dispersion’and Redistribution; an ambient weirdness conjured by the scattershot, open-sourced nature of the
supplementary material. Iconic art and other historical references (Dürer’s Melancholia, Duchamp’s
Rotoreliefs, Breughel’s Kinderspiele, the patents for Edison’s electrical devices) are interspersed withwacky clip-art, ersatz graphic patterns (Memphis wallpaper, airbrush textures, technical graphs, foundicons), screensavers and digital after-effects that were once aggressively futuristic and are now
distinctly retrograde. The jumble of elements is artlessly arranged by a kind of anti-design that’s notexactly ugly, more deliberately clunky, based on the defaults and templates of whatever software has
been used in each case; and these defaults and templates are, of course, simultaneously part of theendless flow of digital matter under consideration.
The curator and writer Polly Staple has observed that ‘Dispersion’ is often taken as a stand-in for Price
himself – a soft manifesto, a means of simultaneously recording and asserting a set of intentions.52
Redistribution does this more explicitly, an attempt to work out in public what the work is and where it
might fit. It ends on this inverse illumination:
There’s a question to which no artwork has an answer, to which every
artwork is susceptible, which is, so what? There is no answer. You ask
it of yourself, as an artist, and there’s only silence. It’s not a
nihilistic question, or pointless scepticism, because the silence
produced is actually useful. This silence records an echo: the artist
has made a noise and prepared some kind of recording device to capture
the echo that comes back. Your utterance now has a shadow that cannot
be cast off. That shadow is the work.53

My last example of positively palimpsestuous work is similarly explicatory, ingratiating and selfreflexive. It’s a triptych of lecture-based pieces by Mark Leckey. Though not conceived or presented
as a series by Leckey himself, inasmuch as each new work builds on the most propulsive aspectsof its predecessor, the sequence suggests as much. Again the whole combines conventions common to
performance, film, video, installation, and lecture; and its three parts have circulated, variously edited,as texts.
The first, CINEMA-in-the-ROUND (2009), began life as a talk at a film festival, an attempt toapprehend the ways in which 3D matter – weight, density, volume, mass, stuffness – are made palpablein 2D media like films, videos and paintings. It begins:

	
  
51

Ibid., p. 287.

52

Polly Staple, ‘The Producer’, frieze, no. 118, October 2008.

53

Price, ‘Redistribution (video transcript)’, op. cit., p. 101.

	
  

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This presentation is an attempt, by me, to try and grasp a particularexperience that I have with certain things in the world, things that
I mistake for images or pictures, but that somehow impose on me theiractual weight, density, and volume—their being in the world. Thissensation is further enhanced when a picture is moving. This wholething then is called CINEMA-in-the-ROUND. It is in four chapters,
the first one being ‘Meat and Potatoes’ ...54

Leckey assembles others’ work (Philip Guston’s paintings, films by Gilbert & George and Hollis
Frampton) together with examples from pop culture (Roadrunner, Titanic, various cartoon cats), stuck
together with a seriously stylized commentary – a glut of plummy, heavily onomatopoeic language,
the verbal equivalent of Guston’s meaty torsos and limbs:
So they are Grey and they are Pink
They are Dense and they are Rude
They are Earthy and they are Hearty
And as paintings that feel like sculptures – or as the Campbell’s adat the time said: They are the soup that eats like a meal.55

Two versions of the same talk were filmed and combined into a single work, with its copious source
material edited into the flow of the footage (i.e. rather than playing on a screen behind Leckey
at the podium) along with a number of peculiar moments that confuse the straightforward sense of
documentary (Leckey lifting a bottle of beer to the camera, suddenly wearing an outsize Homer
Simpson mask, etc.). The result is distinctly unrefined, a deliberately dumb, punchy populist piecein line with its block-headed subject, closest in spirit to a TV skit, sketch or variety show.
The same character is carried over into the performative lecture Mark Leckey in The Long Tail (2010).
This one’s more pointedly staged than it’s predecessor, with an array of props from a blackboard toa giant furry tail with a life/mind of its own. Like CINEMA-in-the-ROUND, though, the script tries
to get a handle on a hard-to-grasp phenomenon. This time it’s the prevailing shape of culture founded
on a ‘long tail’ model of consumerism currently supplanting the pyramidical one that dominatedthe 20th century. This ‘shape’ charts the rise of esoteric interests and niche markets into an amorphous,anonymous mass of culture facilitated by internet-facilitated swarms, seeds, peers and leeches.
It supplants the top-down, hierarchical model of Bestsellers and Top Tens.
Like the former talk, too, Leckey’s language ventriloquizes its subject:
The swarm machine begins to thrum again, humming the song of myself /their fugue begins / and once more I am assumed by the swarm / mademanifest in its multitude / between like minds / swarming out andsurrounding me / here in this moment / this moment of shared mutualism/ and I surrender / I surrender to the attraction / I surrender to theattraction of increased pleasure / and I become ascendant in the swarm/ I am of the swarm / I am the swarm / and the swarm is me ...56

The Long Tail assimilates Leckey’s earlier (and continuing) preoccupations with local subcultures
and talismanic objects. However, as with Gander’s and Price’s talks, compared to their previous output
these new ‘container’ pieces are almost comically accessible.

	
  
54

Mark Leckey, ‘CINEMA-in-the-ROUND’ in: Mark Beasley, ed., Hey Hey Glossolalia (After) (New York: Creative Time,2009), p. 149.

55

Ibid.

56

Mark Leckey, ‘The Long Tail’, Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010, p. 149.

	
  

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This is less true of the most recent of this group, the existential Greenscreenrefrigerator (2012),
a blunt return to objecthood after the immaterial Long Tail. Leckey again recorded himself in front of
an audience, this time speaking the part of a monumental black Samsung fridge-freezer stood in the
middle of a chroma-key green backdrop. This allowed for the later superimposition of other stock
images, footage and animation. Leckey’s heavily Auto-tuned scouse accent – supposedly the sound ofwhat happens if you suck fridge coolant – is just about discernible as it emerges from the aether as thevoice of the anthropomorphic fridge:
Each to each. In each order. In each group. Address each one. They ask
and they answer. They ask, each one answers. Each one carries the
news. Standing here. Standing here beside myself. Out of my mind. Outof my mind, I liken myself to other things. A dark mirror. A walled
garden. A monstrous insect ...

The appliance goes on to contemplate its limited lifespan in geological time, and the inevitable returnto the earth along with all matter. It is an odd and oddly moving soliloquy to the material world.
By attempting to speak as clearly as possible from the middle of their subject matter, Gander, Price andLeckey transform their recurring interests – and often their former work – into something distinctly
other. At the same time, they knowingly point to themselves being overtly communicative – that’s partof the subject matter, too. The direct address is in good faith, though, and stands in relief against the
proliferation of lazy, mute, or otherwise brazenly uncommunicative work that dominates the current art
scene – the sort of stuff that seems to consider itself exempt from bothering to engage an audience atall.
Price refers to this act of reconciliation as the ‘real work’:The ‘artist’s statement,’ for example, or lectures like this one: theartist is used as a bridge from one frame to another. In a funny way,
to speak about my own work now, looking at these slides of older work,
feels like a splitting. People often hear what the artist has to say,what lies ‘behind’ the work, yet at the same time it’s taken as
performance ...57

7.7: FRIENDLY FIRE
This exchange of letters between Will Holder and myself was begun in view of a contribution to theTate’s in-house journal Tate Etc.58 They were written in anticipation of the fifth iteration of a running
project of ours called Tourette’s that was due to take place at Tate Modern a few months later under
the rubric of a small group show called Stutter.59 As is recounted in the opening paragraphs below,
Tourette’s had so far found form as two collections of writing and one concentrated week of events.
These letters were partly contrived to ‘inadvertently’ fill in the background of the project for a potential
audience, and to anticipate the themes likely to guide our contribution to Stutter. I’m including themhere as another attempt to describe (and perform) the ethics inherent in Themerson’s work. The key‘ethic’ under interrogation here might be summarized as: the necessary awkwardness of real friendship.
Dear Will,
You’ve been accusing me of repeating myself like a drunken bore, quoting me back at myself to makeyour point. This makes for very uncomfortable reading. Last night I came across the following, which

	
  
57

Price, ‘Redistribution (video transcript)’, op. cit., p. 84.

58

Will Stuart, ‘An Exchange of Letters in Advance of TV’, Tate Etc. (2010).

59

See chapter 2, fn. 11.

	
  

282

sums up your accusations: ‘This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say themfor me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself,
inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, forlistening to.’Shall we step out of this closed loop? Stop quoting and try to understand enough to paraphrase eachother instead, to work out how to proceed with TOURETTE’S V (TV) by raking over the coals ofprevious editions.
Remember the note we wrote in the colophon of the first: ‘TOURETTE’S believe that a lot has been
said already, and if we all keep trying to repeat and improve ourselves in new ways, some of the nicest
things might get lost in the resulting pile.’ We needed an event to flag up that one’s existence, whichbecame TOURETTE’S II (the word made flesh), eight evenings of performance, films, readings andtalks, encouraged by a curator, Ann DeMeester, who recognised what we were up to was ‘adolescent’.
Thinking back reminds me how a lot of what we haphazardly strung together had the same qualities weintended with the title: the uncontrolled tic of sudden, repetitive urges. So whether that excerpt fromMichael Haneke’s film The Seventh Continent (1989) where a family systematically destroys their own
house; the audio recording of a séance with Yves Klein bathed in wall-projector blue; or Paul Elliman’s
talk on fireworks with simultaneous demonstration and Chinese translation … all seemed to share asimilar explosive release.
Which brings me to anticipate various forces at play behind the next, TOURETTE’S V, another event,
this time at Tate. I’d say our current interests are three-fold: The first relates to conversation, and thisgoes back at least as far as your paraphrasing John Cage: ‘A real conversation is when you don’t knowwhat the other person is going to say.’ Since our adolescent yammering, then working-apart-together,it’s seemed necessary to set up these admittedly contrived conditions for a ‘real’ conversation because(a) we now live on opposite sides of the world, slaves to the disorienting time- and energy-lags ofemail, and (b) to override the fact that communication among colleagues is increasingly paranoid,or poisoned by small-talk.
The second is to do with directness. We’ve always discussed a productive balance between clarityand obscurity in our own and others’ work, and I’d say we still err by default on the obscure side.
Recently, though, we’ve been sending each other more direct, succinct, even brutal examples ofwriting which deal explicitly with the social conditions of their immediate past. Which we both wanted
to communicate to those closer to home who don’t make up our regular circle – parents and siblings,
for example.
And the third is concerned with friendship. Both Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis have appeared
more than once in previous TOURETTE’S, and it seems useful to assemble some scaffolding aroundthe fact that Stein’s project was as pertinent for you as Lewis’s was for me. Lewis repeatedly attacked
Stein’s work in public, and her response was silence, a refusal to acknowledge why Lewis set himself
up as ‘The Enemy’: with the idea that friends, being friends, are reluctant to upset you, and adjust thetruth of their perceptions accordingly. In which case only enemies are truly to be trusted. Et tu?
StuartDear Stuart,
Very telling that, towards the end of your letter you allow Gerty and Wyndy to enter stage like Mr and
Mrs Punch. (By the way, did you know that Piesc – the General, in Stefan Themerson’s story, who only
finds happiness when he has forgotten his mission – is pronounced ‘punch’ and means ‘fist’ in Polish?)
You then introduce notions of friends and enemies, and that friends are people who would never want
to upset or confuse you, and ‘adjust the truth of their perceptions’ in order to keep the peace. As you
know, I feel that Wyndham Lewis’s necessary ‘Enemy’ in society is a typical 20th-century idea of what
it means to be ‘avant garde’: over-exerting oneself in order to demonstratively destroy the previous
generation’s idea of progress (killing one’s father), in order to secure one’s own definition of progress.

	
  

283

In a recent interview that became more of a conversation, Vanessa Desclaux asked me how I saw my(and our) work in relation to friendship, and pulled in Hélène Cixous by the hair (a close reader andfriend of Jacques Derrida), who, on first reading, would seem to agree with the enemy-as-best-friend
idea: someone who wants to halt your progress, arrest your development, and force you back into that
insecure childish state of not-knowing-for-sure. Imagine finding a large black monolith in the middle ofyour garden path, stopping you from getting to work, and this being so demanding that you need totake a day off to understand why it’s there. I’m not sure if this is as generous as Gertrude Stein’ssilence towards Wyndham Lewis, but I am sure that the generosity is extended through her writing notpointing directly at something we all take for granted: that if you say ‘apple’ you mean ‘the round fruitof the tree of the rose family, which typically has thin red or green skin and crisp flesh.’
Stein is often accused of being repetitive (a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose), or in Lewis’s words, ‘This
child throws big, heavy words up and catches them; or letting them slip through its fingers, they breakin pieces; and down it squats with a grunt, and begins sticking them together again. Else this far-toointellectual infant chases the chosen word, like a moth, through many pages, worrying the delicate life
out of it.’60
I would sooner say that this child is intensely observing the nature of each word by allowing it to berepeated within slightly different instances. Her care for the chosen word is demonstrated by her
progressive use of it, observing how it becomes something else, putting it into new situations so its
potential can be demonstrated. I can’t imagine a word being ‘worried’ by her overuse, I’d sooner say it
must be happy to be that alive. A friend reminded me that human beings only use about 20% of thebrain’s potential capacity. Perhaps this is a better way of explaining how Stein wishes to extend thepotential of language beyond its accepted capacities. Would you say her treatment and intentions are
enemy or friend to the use of language? Is it friendly to spare people the use of their brains?
If we repeat a word often enough, it becomes meaningless. Write ‘apple’ down a hundred times andyou won’t recognise it any more but you will be aware of it being unrecognisable. Couldn’t we thenconsider words not as signs meant to be read-through (as invisible ‘carriers’ of meaning), but as signs
which stop the reading-through, in which reading becomes a stuttering inquiry into why text is on a
page in the first place? John Cage said something like ‘a true friend is someone who confuses you’,and someone told me recently that the idea of a relationship is when you ‘know’ somebody. Not readthrough them to something beyond them that says ‘mother’, ‘friend’, ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’. Suchknowledge does not have labels, and is the essence of friendship: allowing the other to be introduced
to a blockage. A true friend will stop to get to know the blockage, most other people-on-a-mission will
not want to spend time with it. Doesn’t this have to do with what you nicely referred to as thecybernetics of conversation?
Will

Will,
While Stein remained silent, Virginia Woolf did respond to one of Lewis’s punches with a kind offriendly exasperation: ‘for God’s sake don’t try to bend my writing one way or the other’ – but it seems
to me this was Lewis’s unapologetic point, bending other people’s stuff to fit his various arguments,
repurposing it to stake his own philosophical claims: ‘As to the unimportance of those I have chosen
for attack … Well, in themselves, most of these “enemies” are, of the most perfect unimportance.
But they are rather ideas than people … the names of notions, associated with other (and far more
powerful) notions. In the influence they exert it would be foolish to deny their “importance”.’61

	
  
60

Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Prose-Song of Gertrude Stein’, The Enemy, no. 1 [1927] (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1994),
p. 83.

61

Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Political Philistine’, The Enemy, no. 3 [1929] (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1994), p. 14.

	
  

284

Lewis’s criticisms were concerned with a general drift into what he called ‘Time-philosophy’, andStein’s writing was merely a literary embodiment of this form of thinking he felt amounted to a kind ofcultural brainwashing – one he attempted to reveal and perhaps reverse. Lewis called on her work as
evidence for his prosecution, which is why there’s always gratitude in his mockery. By his own later
reckoning, however, Lewis wrote about things ‘which only a handful of people in England know or careabout … I might as well have been talking to myself all the time and that’s a fact.’62
This very self-awareness is really Lewis’s defining quality, and legacy, for me. He frankly admits his
adoption of the ‘father-killing Avant-garde persona’, but only as one of the many he encouraged (‘leave
your front door one day as B: the next march down the street as E’63). For Lewis, writing was preciselya ‘character’ that one assumed in justification of one’s ‘actual’ work. He later complained of Stein’s
refusal to come ‘out-of-character’ and address her readers in a more conventional voice, detachedfrom that of ‘the work’. This was the essence of what he found ‘fraudulent’ and (to use the current
pejorative catchword of U.S. politics) ‘elitist’ in Stein. I wonder how you feel about this accusation
concerning the lack of plain speaking about (rather than within) her art in such as her ‘Composition as
Explanation’. How does this square with the ‘generosity’ you claim for her?
Actually, let me try and anticipate your answer: that it’s generous inasmuch as it forces the reader toexperience the ‘difficulty’ of the new form, to work through it, and to ‘understand’ – feel, appreciate,
absorb – by doing. This is Calvino’s argument in the ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ essay you sent me last
week, how the labyrinthine writing of Borges, for example, is deliberately designed to disorient, to lose
the reader, in order that their effort of re-orientation has its own aesthetic payoff, or as he dramaticallydescribes it, ‘a kind of training for survival’. This is more prosaically put in Mancunian by Ryan Gander:‘a work means so much more when you get it yourself, when it’s not handed to you on a plate.’ Aren’t
we talking about enlightenment, and about the value of experience over convenience?
In a favourite anecdote of mine, a writer recounts building a puppet theatre for his children in such a
way that he can see their faces as they watch the ‘stage’ – a cardboard box propped up on the back of
the couch. During the play’s violent climax he clumsily knocks the whole thing over while still watching
his children, and notes how their expressions switch from surprise to shock to hilarity as they realise
how easily they’ve been tricked, absorbed into the setup.64 Lewis called this the realisation of ‘theincredible false bottom that underlies every seemingly solid surface’. The father’s profoundobservation, though, is that for the first time observing his own children during this split-second loss of
innocence he saw that ‘only laughter could steel them in their new awareness.’ I wonder how thecollapse of the cardboard box frame and narrative puppets on his wrists might relate to Stein’s writing.
Would you say her famously writing in the ‘continuous present’ is both at once, a flattening of thedivision between form and content? And is there anything ‘hilarious’ about it?
StuartDear Reader,
I hope you’re still with us. I had expected Stuart to be wearing his editor’s hat: keeping you in mind andcorrecting our course, which I intentionally deflected with a denser block to demonstrate my point.
Remember: I am not the only reader he is writing to.
I will assure you: his natural editing ability is demonstrated best when Stuart speaks, and he seems
to be much calmer when he wants to tell you something face to face. I, on the other hand, always wantto say too much when speaking publicly, and often make a stammering and fumbling fool of myself.

	
  
62

Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombadiering [1937], revised edn. (London: Calder, 1982).

63

Wyndham Lewis, ‘Code of a Herdsman’, The Little Review, vol. 4 no. 3, July 1917.

64

The full anecdote is told in the middle of §2.3(d).

	
  

285

I can imagine that you understand Wyndham Lewis’s changes of character (‘blasting’ enemies and‘blessing’ friends), just as you can appreciate how difficult it must be to only have two hands whenarticulating the Crocodile, the Policeman, the Butcher, the Baker as well as Mr Punch and Judy.
Let alone get all the different voices right. This is something we all do every day, of course: adopt
different tones of voice depending on who we’re talking to – when ordering your dinner, or asking
the newsagent to send you the Herald Tribune or Daily Express every morning, for example.
We’re unaware of this very social gesture 99% of the time, but I think it should be pointed out that
Wyndham Lewis was certainly ‘talking to himself’ when he imagined Stein as being unable to adapt
her voice: ‘She would roll her eyes, squint, point in a frenzy at some object, and, of course, stammer
hard. She would play up to the popular ignorance as to the processes by which her picture had
been arrived at, in short. She would answer “in character”, implying that she was cut off from therest of the world entirely by an exclusive and peculiar sensibility.’
In fact, one only has to read her Lectures in America (1935) to understand that contrary to being‘cut off’, Stein was rather pre-occupied with whoever was listening. Her writing displayed a continuous
esteem and estimation of this audience, understanding that – much like the activating position of averb in a sentence – one must change one’s case in acknowledgement of the surrounding words.
The subtitle of her novel The Making of Americans … Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925) canbe read as a small model, 99% of which is, following Lewis’s idea, ‘unimportant’ to most. However,
you have to live with that family, become friends and give them your time if you want to understandthe 1% that makes them different from their neighbours.
Please note the use of ‘different’ as opposed to ‘better’, ‘one-up’ or ‘important’. Understanding thatthe course of this ‘history of a family’ depends on every member, then could we say that history falls
out of character, has no single author, is out of anyone’s control.
It seems to me that Stein is attempting to get us to understand that the machine of writing, ofrecording, is one that needs to be understood in terms of time (at once momentary and infinite) andpushed to its extreme (can it get worse than Celebrity Big Brother?) in order to result in a simpler, morehuman state of correspondence, without the need to name names. The apparent futility of recording
the history of one family over a thousand pages is more palpably a demonstration of your participationin those pages, and how we are all oiling – and oil in – the machine. By reducing the machine’s
components to smaller units (words) that remind us of their flexibility through banal repetition, Stein
points out how reading and writing is something we all do with different levels of care – and that theselevels can change, according to the optimistic, reductive simplicity of the modernist programme.
Or should that be program?
Stuart?

Dear Will,
It seems to me that all our mis-firings during these letters (which don’t forget, Dear Reader, have beenedited out or at least smartened-up before you read them) prove the point we’re flailing to make here.
When I haven’t followed something you’ve written, or shared something you assume we’ve mutuallytaken for granted, surely the feedback of your realising or my telling as much amounts to thosecybernetics of conversation you mentioned, rather than cause for frustration. For example:
I’m with your last letter all the way until the middle of the last paragraph, where I stall, re- and reread,and this time repetition isn’t working. By the time you’re after ‘a simpler, more human state ofcorrespondence’, you’ve (ironically) lost me. So let me try and paraphrase what I think is being saidusing my clunky abc’s, and you can adjust where appropriate.
You’re saying the aim is (a) to encourage an audience to participate in reading and speaking thatemphasises how and why things are being said as well as what, that (b) this very activity constitutes
knowledge rather than generates it, and will (c) make for a community that, however local or general,takes better care of what and how they communicate; is in short more considerate – in all stuttering
nuances of the word. If so, I would certainly agree.

	
  

286

This morning I noticed something I’d overlooked, or maybe avoided, in one of your older letters.
I mention it here as a great example of an apparent contradiction that hopefully illustrates (a!) the needfor clarity, even over-stating the obvious, because I didn’t understand what you were getting at; butthen (b!) precisely because of this lack of clarity, I went through a little dis- and re-orientation myself,and having done so, now more clearly understand the ‘machine’ you write of.
The letter begins with Lewis’s portrayal of Stein (negatively) as a child chasing the moth of language,
which you then equate with the machine Calvino (positively) writes of. Namely, language as the device
which will record: ‘Some day then there will be a history of every one and every thing that ever is wasor will be …’ – a self-stuttering literary device as an end in itself, rather than one that impartsinformation in a journalistic sense. You add that Lewis probably couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept thisnotion of the machine as metaphor for social construction: the idea that a forced awareness of andsensitivity to the nuts and bolts of a condition (here meaning language, but by implication equally acommunity or a country) automatically leads to a re-questioning of it.
The other evening another friend was asking me why, if Lewis apparently speaks to my temperamentand Stein to yours, I felt the need to ask you to ‘explain’ Stein to me. This would seem to be the worst
kind of didacticism we typically dislike in an institution of the Tate’s scale: ‘It’s on display so it must be
good … but tell me (again) why I should appreciate it – ?’ But it’s precisely because I ‘know’ you
beyond the mere label ‘friend’ – and because the conversation is difficult and draining if not downrightirritating that I suspect something important can be drawn from it. What you say about how calmly I
can speak is precisely why I trust there’s something I can learn from Stein: as an attempt to evolve.
When speaking ‘in public’, I’m increasingly conscious of repeating myself to the point where I start towonder whether I still believe what I’m saying while I’m saying it. This is the same apprehension you
describe in relation to Stein: words burnt-out through overuse, with no relation to what might actuallycross my mind if I really stopped to think. And so I need a tool to unhinge myself.
However, thinking aloud, or attempting to operate on a permanent feedback loop can surely cause
both stuttering and insanity, so there has to be some kind of healthier balance. I think it’s called‘well-adjusted’. The well-adjusted Gilles Deleuze spoke of his teaching as an immense amount of
preparation towards a single (and by no means guaranteed) moment of insight. His lectures wouldn’t
be planned as such, but rather organised towards the possibility of his students witnessing a thought
being formed in front of them, live. Isn’t this in line with Stein’s (and our) ‘continuous present’?
X

7.8: SO-CALLED EPHEMERAThis is a transcription of some notes that informed a seminar held the library at the Museum Sztuki
in Lodz, Poland, in the context of exhibition The Themersons and the Avant-Garde.65 The group ofpeople was small enough to allow our passing round the various bits and pieces from the museum’s
Themersons archive as and when they were mentioned – an intimacy that encouraged the sort of
up-close scrutiny and careful reading that the talk advertently promotes. By including a second longreflection on the their work (again focused on Stefan in particular), I mean to show how the same
principles that inform what would naturally be considered their ‘main’ body of work find form inequally telling objects at the ‘minor’ end of the spectrum.
Given the exhibition, I’m assuming we all know by now the considerable extent of the output of Stefan
and Franciszka Themerson. But to restate briefly: he was a philosophically inclined writer, she ashrewd artist and graphic designer. He once tried to cheer her with the following telegram:

	
  
65

See fn. 38 above.

	
  

287

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL STOP PLEASE ALLOW FEATURES ASSUME EXPRESSION
INDICATIVE OF AMUSEMENT JOY PLEASURE BENEVOLENCE ETCETERA BY DRAWINGUP CORNERS OF MOUTH AND GENERALLY RELAXING FACIAL MUSCLES STOP LOVEFOR ALL STEFAN STOP
In Warsaw in the 1930s they worked together on children’s books and experimental films before
moving to Paris, but were soon forced apart during the War. They eventually reunited and settled in
London, where they established their Gaberbocchus Press, an avant-garde publishing imprint thatchannelled much of their subsequent work.
The modest stack of folders and packets that comprise the Themerson archive here in the museum
library are littered with bits of ephemera – the technical term for those miscellaneous pieces of print likeannouncements, invitations, pamphlets and promotional material that gather in the margins of the socalled real work, meaning the books, films, drawings, paintings, costumes, masks and so forth that are
on display a few streets away in the gallery.
As the name suggests, ephemera is designed for – and often on – the spur of the moment. Like atelegram, it isn’t really meant to last, so it’s somewhat paradoxical that this sort of material has been
carefully archived for posterity; thankfully so, as it tells us a lot about the Themersons’ attitude andapproach – about their pragmatic humour. I want to take a closer look at this ostensibly minor
miscellany and think about the ways in which it both feeds and extends their ostensibly major artworks,
and vice versa. In fact, I think the distinction is moot, and that it’s precisely this lack of distinction thatmakes their oeuvre all the more convincing.
I often think of the Themersons’ output as publishing in its most exploded sense. I mean exploded in
two fairly distinct senses. First and most obviously, I mean to allude to an expanded idea of whatpublishing – literally the drive to make things public – might mean. So not just (say) magazines andbooks, or latterly PDFs and websites, but equally readings, performances, films, animations, andindeed talks like the one you’re listening to right now.
As for the second, less obvious sense, picture the sort of exploded diagram that portrays theconstituent parts of, say, a microwave – the metal casing, spinning tray, fan, plug, and screws – andshows in isometric projection how they all fit together. While you clearly see these separate bits andpieces, you can likely equally still visualise what the appliance looks like when sucked back into its
finished whole. I mean to allude, then, to a publishing house for whom house is as pertinent as
publishing, one that deems all its component parts equally important, however apparently insignificant
or supplementary, yet is equally concerned with the sum of those parts – with the imprint of theimprint, so to speak.
Both senses of exploded imply questioning the platitudes of publishing, which is one of the things the
Themersons and their Gaberbocchus Press were all about.
In a lecture a couple of years ago I saw the German writer Diedrich Diderichsen speak about theGerman artist Martin Kippenberger’s work in terms of two broken joke structures: first, the endless
shaggy dog story that goes on and on without a punchline; and second, the joke that ends with thesame punchline repeated over and over again.66 Kippenberger, he said, similarly conceived his work as
an incessant chain, in the sense that each new piece became the premise and excuse to make thenext – a painting painted as one of a series to be exhibited in a gallery to be advertised by a poster tobe collected into in a book of posters to be announced by a postcard and so on and so on. He also
once wrote that he’d rather be a comma than a full stop. Wonderful. According to Diderichsen, thiscareer mechanism conflated both types of broken joke – that’s to say, (1) the same generating principle
on repeat in order to (2) perpetuate an incessant stream of work. Constituent of this attitude, hecontinued, Kippenberger worked without any sense of hierarchy between media, so painting andpostcard were on equal terms in this unusually ‘egalitarian’ body of work.

	
  
66

A fuller version is recounted in §2.3(a).

	
  

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I want to keep this anecdote in mind when looking through the museum’s Themerson archive.
When the same sensibility plays out in diverse circumstances and multiple media, the character thatruns through an accumulating body of work is easier to grasp – especially if we ignore the usual classsystem of art and artifacts. Its common denominator (essential identity, peculiar charm) is offset ingreater relief. Nick Wadley, one of the guardians of the Themerson archive in London, once recalledthat when, after having been familiar with Gaberbocchus publications for some time, he finally met the
Themersons in person, he was shocked to discover how completely the books’ ‘personality’ mirrored
their actual personas. ‘Subtle, wise and funny –’, he summed up, ‘affectionate, ridiculous, mercilessand moral.’I’m well aware that I’ll be using the term ‘ephemera’ very loosely here. There are few anomalies that
don’t really fall under the technical classification, but then they don’t very easily fit into any othercategory either. I do, however, have a couple of other terms in mind that might help place this stuff inthe scheme of things.
The literary theorist Gérard Genette coined the term ‘paratext’ in the 1980s to refer to those bits oflanguage surrounding – or ‘parallel’ to – a main text, that serve to present it. The paratextual zone, in
Genette’s words, is one ‘not just of transition but of transaction’ – that is, ‘the privileged site of apragmatics and of a strategy, of an action on the public in the service … of a better reception of thetext and a more pertinent reading – more pertinent, naturally, in the eyes of the author and his allies.’
This loose definition circumscribes any number of supporting devices within the physical bounds of abook, including the author’s name, running heads, contents list, illustrations, footnotes, index, preface,and cover blurb, all of which are sub-classified ‘peritextual’. But the concept of paratext also covers
material in some way related to the text yet published apart from it, at another time or in another placesuch as biographies, autobiographies, articles and interviews, all of which are called ‘epitextual’.
In any case, the crux of the definition of a paratext is that it is something outside the main body thatthe author has had a role in or otherwise consented to. It might add sense or authority to the ‘main’or ‘primary’ text, or simply publicize it. With a little artistic license, then, I want to transpose the notionof the paratext as it relates to the text, to the example of Gaberbocchus ephemera as it relates to
Gaberbocchus books.
As with a talk I gave here a few months back (i.e. §7.5), because most of work I’m going to talk about isdecidedly more Stefan than Francisczka (even though most incorporate her drawings in some form,
and were otherwise likely touched by her in one way or other), and because I hate using first names, forthe next hour or so my use of ‘Themerson’ refers to Stefan alone. Please excuse this.

ITEM:

	
  

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The first example is, then, an epitextual newspaper profile of Themerson based on an interview of sorts
by a journalist called John Hall, cut from the February 27, 1971 issue of The Guardian.67 It’s important
to know that Themerson had an extremely low opinion of the biography genre. Once, a fairly closefriend and collaborator of his, the typographer Anthony Froshaug, sent along a draft of a brief
introduction to Themerson’s life and work for his subject’s approval, and received this typically curt
though not altogether unkind response:
Mixture of biographic data & personal reminiscences (...) I do not
like that kind of literary research which consists in finding bits ofauthor’s life & ad hoc connecting them with some bits of his work.
It seems to me essentially non-scientific, prejudicial, irrelevant,misleading, & altogether too easy.68
Themerson added that he should prefer to learn some irreverent things about a character in one of his
novels than some irrelevant things about its author, and elsewhere unequivocally sniffed ‘bibliography
is my biography’.
I’d go further and suggest that his work in general is so radically idiosyncratic as to manifest an
equally exceptional degree of personality. Given this disdain for literary biography, it’s no surprise tolearn that this ‘objective’ newspaper profile is fraught, caught between Themerson’s presumably
reluctant consent to a little welcome publicity for the Press, and his reflex refusal to play along with
commonplace journalistic formulas. Certainly a conventional advertorial wouldn’t do a Gaberbocchus
publication justice, and sure enough, Themerson’s contrarian attitude yields a markedly odd profilethat ends up, against all odds, as sharp and illuminating as any other piece of Gaberbocchus work.
His strategy is simply to deflect all of Hall’s questions, obliging the interviewer to more or less answer
them himself in order to give his readers first some idea about what the work is (already no easy task),
then why.
In fact, the interviewer acquits himself very well, distilling a few of his subject’s dense and often obtuse
books via a series of well-executed pastiches of Themersonian technique. The piece begins, forinstance, with a police-style interrogation, a narrative device that recurs in a number of his subject’s
novels; then Hall describes him lighting his pipe using Themerson’s own technique of Semantic
Translation – replacing stock phrases with their full-blown dictionary definitions.69 Then he getsannoyed:Stefan Themerson is a kindly, thoughtful speaker who tends tosubstitute nodding ruminant smiles for answers, which makes for
restful afternoons, but lousy interviews. That is, when you have apreconceived notion of what an interview should be; like for example
when you think it might kick off with some reference to the writer’s
origins and past history. He replies: ‘That is not important; whatmatters is what I am now.’ Allowing that this is water under thebridge, might Mr Themerson say what sorts of things he has been
attempting to say and do, which have required such a diverse output?
(Being the second in a series of preconceived notions about
interviews.) Answer: ‘That is for you to tell me, because I’m justdoing things and I’d like somebody to tell me what I’m doing.’
Mr Themerson and I nod and smile ruminantly in unison. OK I give in.
How is an interview supposed to run?
Themerson replies:

	
  
67

John Hall, ‘Woof woof, or who killed Poetry London?’, The Guardian, Saturday February 27, 1971.

68

Themerson quoted in: Kinross: Anthony Froshaug: Fragments of a Life, op. cit.

69

See §7.5 above.

	
  

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‘If I wish to learn something about a strange animal, I go along to
the zoo and I observe that animal in its cage. But I do not ask for
its own observations upon itself ...’And Hall counters that this particular rhetorical manoeuvre recalls the pedantic deadpan of
Themerson’s convoluted essay on logic and ethics, Factor T, which obliges him to flesh out thereference again. By now the pattern is set, the interviewer writing himself out of the holes left byhis subject’s non-compliance.
But I don’t think Themerson’s simply being awkward or arrogant. There’s a method to his
obstreperousness – a generous one, even. The strategy is common to the Gaberbocchus roster:
to coax readers, critics and journalists alike into thinking for themselves. This sounds too severe;
Gaberbocchus work is on the whole captivating and frequently hilarious – only not straightforwardly so,and not in a necessarily convenient or comfortable way either. Audiences are lured into reorienting
themselves and, in the process, get affected. This is how the work happens: connections made,perceptions tilted.
This thinking explicitly informs Gaberbocchus’s publishing mandate – to pass on past and present
ways of thinking at odds with the mainstream, cajoling their readers into an unusual degree ofintellectual investment and involvement to match the Themersons’ own. To this end, they were always
pointedly provocative. It’s apparent even in ‘self-portrait’ that accompanies Themerson’s Guardian
profile: the camera at arm’s length and pointing sharply upwards so he’s barely recognizable,
subverting the stereotype to the extent that attitude overrides image.

ITEM:

Next I want to quickly show this simple folded sheet that declares itself an ‘unnecessary supplement’to a handful of Franciszka’s acutely observed cartoons of men interacting with abstract sculpturalforms and machines. In case its faux-auxiliary conceit is unclear, a subtitle adds that it has been‘especially compiled for those who like their pictures to be attended by a discourse of reason’. This
‘discourse’ amounts to a pithy maxim per image, each quoting some kindred spirit and by no means
disposable:
18. While the old method of presenting truths in the abstract has beenfalling out of use, there has been a corresponding adoption of the new
method of presenting them in the concrete. (Herbert Spencer)
22. It is a fact that human beings do not solve problems unless they
are put to them in a very drastic way. (J.D. Bernal)

	
  

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The piece is thus only disguised as ephemera – its proper place is, in fact, tucked inside the booklet,
where it indeed serves to tether Franciszka’s ambiguous ‘abstractions’ to concrete ‘meanings’– if the reader is so inclined. Moreover, in emphasizing the option, this supplement points out that thedrawings can be read in different ways. It’s a wry comment on our discomfort with ambiguity, our needfor hard meaning. In sum, the leaflet points to its ostensibly secondary status in order to complicatethat status.

ITEM:

The next document, Paper In Action, is the pilot issue of what seems to have been intended as abiannual bulletin, a proto-advertorial piece of PR issued by a London paper manufacturer in order‘to demonstrate the variety and importance of paper and printing in contemporary society.’ Its editor
and designer, Herbert Spencer, was an important practitioner and promoter of graphic design in
Britain. He edited the celebrated journal Typographica, a rare channel of the bookish end of avantgarde, though he was equally well connected with the burgeoning postwar business industry, as thisproject testifies. Spencer was already a friend and sometime publisher of Themerson, who on his
request turned in an essay-of-sorts to accompany a scrapbook array of contemporary printed mattersuch as tickets, signs and stamps – mostly ephemera, in fact – reproduced in saturated full colour.
It begins:
Imagine a thought. Something one cannot touch with the tip of one’s
fingers, something one cannot measure, either in inches or in seconds,
or put on the kitchen scales, something – one can’t even say where
it is – and yet, in spite of all that, it is enough to take sometwenty-six kinds of sticks of metal, arrange them in a specific order,
ink their faces and press them to the surface of a sheet of white
paper – and hey presto! – the thought has become a sensible fact: theimmaterial Lady can be caught by the tail of the Fox into which wehave turned her ...
Later, he quotes W. Grey Walter, who, in pointing to the enduring relevance of print in the nascent TVage, anticipates Stiegler’s call to maintain culture’s ‘long circuits’:Society seemed for a time to reflect in its diversity, plasticity, andadaptability the generosity of the brain function; now it seems to bedegenerating into something more like a spinal cord, able to receive
instructions and implement reflex coordination but incapable ofinitiating any independent or original idea. A passive solitary childat the screen of a television receiver amuses only itself – the need

	
  

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to gaze does not promote or evoke habits of creativeness or
generosity.
The essay is increasingly augmented by these citations, to the extent that it becomes difficult to follow
who’s speaking. Sure enough, as the essay draws to a close, Themerson acknowledges that copious
and conspicuous appropriation seemed the best way to account for the enduring efficacy of theprinted word – that it is ‘specially suitable for compiling this printed object because it is about otherprinted objects.’
Themerson worried aloud that future generations of readers might regard Gaberbocchus publications
as merely ‘historical curiosities’. On the contrary, their mandate was explicit: to perpetuate thinking thatremained timely or was newly useful, whether drawn from the distant or recent past, whether classicalAesop, modern Pol-Dives, or contemporary Queneau. In the essay, Themerson writes: ‘Only a few
words, joints, are mine … The flesh, bones, glands, arteries, etc. have been vivisected from the printed
body of various authors, some dead, some alive.’ But his comments amount to more than mere glue –especially this one, on how written language is useful not only for passing on ideas, but equally
generating them in the first place:
Thought not only lives on paper by the pen; often, it needs paper andthe pen to be created. When you have drawn some co-ordinates, andthen, patiently, find a number of relevant points and join them
together to create a curve that tells you one thing or another, thefluctuations of the £ or of the sun-spots – you are not yet trying tocommunicate your thought, you are trying to find what to communicate.
And when you write a poem, or prose, and cross some words out, and add
new lines, and recross them – it is not always that you do it in order
to express better what you want to say; often, you do it because youwant to find out what you want to say.

ITEM:
These next two pieces show alternate ways of designing what’s basically the same material. Now, as atypography student I frequently worked on projects that involved everyone in the class dealing with thesame raw material – same text, same images, same audience, same context – to be turned into thesame thing – a plausible timetable or poster or magazine or signage system, whatever. However,recently I’ve noticed that the design schools seem allergic to this kind of homogeneous class project,which has been usurped by the solipsistic personal one. This is unfortunate, because where the groupproject affords the whole class the considerable benefit of seeing the same thing designed in different
ways, the personal project tends, naturally enough, to answer exclusively to itself. In other words,
it’s conceived in a relative vacuum, which precludes the possibility of observing and speaking together
about why certain works worked and others didn’t – including debating what ‘working’ might mean ineach new case. Direct comparison affords the opportunity to make work that’s more answerable.
That said, all I really want to show with these two documents is how, although the same information isrendered in very different ways, both remain entirely Themersonian. To reiterate, I’m interested inshowing how the range of what they produced, even at this micro-level of throwaway matter, allows
onlookers like us to grasp its idiosyncratic essence. The two items in question are modest catalogues
of Gaberbocchus books that I imagine were intended for prospective readers and booksellers alike.

	
  

293

The first is a pale yellow sheet printed on one side, with the Gaberbocchus inventory turned into a
cartoon scroll by Franciszka’s familiar line. This list is flanked on the left by a matrix that sorts theroster according to category (art, poetry, humour, drama, fiction, essays, biography and ‘varia’), and on
the right by the cost of hard and soft cover editions. It’s a quietly exemplary instance of information
design, articulating a large amount of data in a small space without fuss, and entirely accessible.

The second is a more conspicuously inventive stack of square slips of thin yellow, pink and white
paper, each minutely offset from the last and fixed with a metal rivet, exaggerating its three dimensions– like an axonometric projection of Post-It notes. Most of the squares announce individual books,
interspersed with Franciszka’s biblio-themed doodles.
The paper mechanics are typical of Gaberbocchus invention. The Press was entirely homegrown,
first in the basement of the Themersons’ house, then in a building around the corner. Their work thus
escaped the standardizing, levelling influence of the regular printing trade; they didn’t have to convey
their ideas to a third-party via written, graphic or spoken instructions, so nothing could be lost intranslation. Rather, stuff was designed reflexively at the source, more or less in view of the technologythat was about to reproduce it, a proximity that visibly coaxed and enabled less standard, more ad hocways of doing things. Whoever made these modest catalogues evidently had a good time doing so.
They carry the same sense of knockabout experiment as the books they advertise – a common
character that seems less applied (as we might say of an institutional ‘identity’ today) than deposited;the opposite of contrived, anyway.

	
  

294

ITEM:

Themerson has handwritten this next folded flyer, a rejoinder to an apparent letter of complaint fromone ‘Lady Celia’ who asserts that Gaberbocchus books are high-minded, elitist, and generally too
arrogantly avant-garde for the common herd.70 The letter is possibly real, possibly fictional, and I’dguess most likely a composite of the two. In any case, Themerson responds:
Dear Lady Celia,
You are quite right – and at the same time, quite wrong. You are rightwhen you say that we are not your cup of tea. And you are wrong inassuming that we want to be your usual cup of tea. We have so far beensuccessful at least in restricting our publishing ventures to what welike to publish, and we hope to continue that way ...
To explain the name ‘Gaberbocchus’, he lapses into Lewis Carrol’s nonsense argot Jabberwocky,
which leads into another advert:
Yet before you snicker-snack your vorpal blade through our body, we
advise you to borrow from your Public Library our new book, written by
an illustrious Pedant, and illustrated by a wretched Nincompoop. You
will find the definitions of these two words – and of 24 others – inthe book. It is The Good Citizen’s Alphabet by Bertrand Russell, andfor all its lightheartedness it is also a flaming indictment of silly
notions. It has a preface which, like all the definitions, ispictorially interpreted by Franciszka Themerson. 56 pp., 9” x 7”,
cloth, 8/6 net.
The approach is familiar by now: the task turned into a game that generates a useful text – not unlike
the challenge he forced on the Guardian journalist. Here, Themerson addresses the Lady’s complaints
with passing reference to as wide a range of Gaberbocchus publications as possible. In this manner hesummarizes not only the backlist, but its comic disposition, too, and ends by calling into question her
prejudices:
Perhaps it may be as well to tell you that what we do it is not amillionare’s fancy. We are just taking advantage of the freedom
provided by the private enterprise that still exists within the

	
  
70

Reproduced actual size as the frontispiece to this chapter.

	
  

295

publishing world in this country, defying as we can the laws of
economics and paying the full price for our barbarous pleasures.
Like the two booklists, the ‘domestic’ style doesn’t comes across as stylized – that’s to say, it doesn’tstrain to look amateurish. It simply is what it is – a casual, expedient means of advertising the bookswith a bit of impromptu blurb that reads less like marketing and more a limbering up to write something
else.

ITEM:

Here’s a flyer for Themerson’s Factor T, visibly patched together from a bunch of different reviews
along with a summary cartoon-diagram. Once again it’s plain to see how the particular premise, acollection of clippings, suggests a particular form, a collage. The previous item looked like a letter fromthe publisher, which is what it was; this one looks like an assembly of others’ opinions, which is what it
is. Things being what they are: so-called ephemera.

ITEM:

	
  

296

Themerson reflects on how typography influences reading in this essay with the dual title ‘A welljustified postscript … Topographical Topography’. It’s the last piece in the 1965 Penrose Annual, ayearly collection of essays on the graphic arts, once again edited by the ubiquitous Herbert Spencer.
The item in question is a complimentary ‘run on’ copy of Themerson’s article, a discrete signaturesometimes offered as a courtesy to authors. I mention this only to flag once more the fact that it’s nottechnically or literally ephemeral, but certainly an orphan format.
The first half of the title is a play on the term ‘justified text’, which is when consecutive lines are forced
to correspond in (visual) length by inserting different amounts of space between the words. This results
in a squared-up ‘block’ of type. Conversely, in ‘unjustified text’ the spaces between words are allidentical and lines left to run their own length. This yields an irregular or ‘ragged’ edge on one side,usually the right – like the text you’re reading right now.
To digress a little, probably the most celebrated and loaded debate in the history of typography is thatof symmetrical versus asymmetrical layout, the crux of which is compressed into two articles publisheda few months apart in a Swiss design journal immediately after the Second World War. The first was astatement by the eminent German typographer Jan Tschichold, followed by a loosely veiled rejoinderby the equally eminent Swiss modernist polymath Max Bill. In the postwar context, their apparently
aesthetic argument of minimal consequence was unusually charged with social and ethicalimplications.
Tschichold was and still is regarded as the godfather of modern typography, largely due to his seminal
books Die Neue Typographie (1928) and Typografishce Gestaltung (1935), which remain the urarguments for ‘active’ asymmetry. The premise of asymmetric typography is that texts and images
ought not be arranged according to some idea of ‘pleasing composition’ (a ‘classically balanced’page), but emphatically configured in line with their specific meaning. But Tschichold drifted from his
early hardline, and in a 1946 article publicly renounced his earlier pronouncements as too extreme,
advocating instead the values of conventional etiquette, balance and order, the essentially ‘passive’application of a consistent set of principles. Bill, meanwhile, steadfastly renounced such traditional
conventions on principle in favour of an approach that coupled Tschichold’s earlier doctrine andtechnological positivism. Crudely summarized, symmetry capitulated to conventions, while asymmetry
demanded a return to zero in each new case.71
Although it was never addressed in Tschichold’s early work, the question of justified versus unjustified
text can be conceived as something of a distillation of this debate. Justified setting conforms tosymmetrical tendencies inasmuch as it forces any text into a classically-established, orthodox frame,
while unjustified setting equates with asymmetrical ones inasmuch as it allows text to run its own‘natural’ course and so determine its own shape. In short, form as externally applied versus intrinsicallyderived. As Robin Kinross notes, ‘the social implications are obvious’.
Unjustified setting was the modernist party line on two main counts: it broke from tradition, and it was
rational. Contrary to what might be expected from someone wholly aligned with the avant-garde and arare representative of broadly modernist ideas in Britain, then, Themerson’s ‘well-justified postscript’sets out actually arguing the case for justification. Crucially, though, his reasoning has nothing to dowith abstract principles of balance or geometric order, nor with upholding traditional values, but the far
more prosaic fact that conventions are shared codes that can usefully frame the text the reader isabout to read. It’s a testament to Themerson’s fiercely independent thinking.

	
  
71

To elaborate the social and ethical implications: for Bill, the set of conventions collected under the awkward shorthand of‘symmetry’ were analogous to the conservative, traditionalist, decorative and by implication fascist tendencies of Nazi Germany,
while ‘asymmetry’ aligned with progressive socialist, positivist attitudes, associated with austerity and renewal. Tschichold,meanwhile, equated asymmetry with the sort of blind ideology proclaimed by such as Bill, which now seemed unacceptably
doctrinaire. For him, the all-out push for asymmetry was so blindly authoritarian, and uncritically obsessed with ‘machineaesthetics’ that it obliterated many useful lessons of tradition. Most pertinently, militant modernism disregarded the notion thatdifferent kinds of text might require different solutions – some symmetrical, some asymmetrical.

	
  

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The piece is written as a dialogue. It opens with an apparently autobiographical protagonist opening abook, reading a line, and slamming it shut. A second character, Brutus, asks him why he’s so angry:‘Because it is prose.’‘And you expected it to be what? Poetry?’‘Yes.’‘Why?’‘Because of its layout. A silly new fashion: unjustified setting.
I wonder who could justify it.’
‘Surely, this isn’t of such great importance ...’, he began.
‘It isn’t,’ I agreed. ‘All the same, I’m used to it that, when I open
a book, I can tell at once, without reading a word – “O, this is a
novel; and that one is a play. Here is pure mathematics and there is amusical score. This is a dictionary, that is a telephone book, andthat other one is a volume of poetry.” Now because of unjustified
setting all that is no more possible, something essential has been
destroyed.’
The melodrama continues as Themerson’s protagonist proclaims, first, that only justified setting affords
a page of prose a unique gestalt or ‘face’ (to the extent that a page of Hemingway is immediately
distinct from a page of Proust); second, that justified columns foster easier reading by virtue of being
invisible, unlike ragged columns that disruptively draw attention to the structure; and third, that the line
ending has always been one of the poet’s key ‘weapons’, the power of which is about to diminish
thanks to this recent vogue for ragged lines.
Then again, the story equally illustrates that such conventions can be usefully broken, as its
protagonist proceeds to introduce an extreme instance of unjustified setting called ‘Internal Vertical
Justification’, or IVJ, a technique that occasionally crops up in Themerson’s wider body of work.
IVJ takes the idea of active, asymmetric layout to radical ends. Paragraphs and sentences are nolonger merely linear, but reconfigured on two axes in order to emphasize meaning. It is therefore
entirely at odds with the premise of justification, which arranges language at the level of the page,i.e., according to some aesthetic principle or other. In short, the aesthetics of IVJ derive from thesemantics of a text. Shorter still: semantics = aesthetics, There’s no distinction.

In the second half of the piece Themerson demonstrates IVJ by applying it to a transcription of aspeech by the editor, Herbert Spencer himself. And so in this deceptively throwaway ‘postscript’,
Themerson quietly offers a third typographic philosophy: neither wholly symmetrical nor asymmetrical,
but a considered balance between relative order and relative freedom according to the particularnature of the particular instance. He thus projects beyond the binary of the Bill-Tschichold debate.

	
  

298

The point is not that every text is unique and so conventions must be perpetually scrapped, butthat every case involving text deserves fresh consideration because each specific situation affects
the relative importance of questions such as justified vs. unjustified setting, or symmetrical vs.
asymmetrical layout. Pragmatism trumps ideology: the benefits of conventions, says Themerson, ought
to be perpetually weighed against the benefits of breaking them, and neither propounded in the
abstract.
Themerson’s ‘third way’ also suggests a social-ethical corollary. Robin Kinross once describedpublishing as ‘a social act that provides a forum for dialogue and exchange’. It therefore follows that‘making text deliberately hard to read is … a public offence’. With this in mind, he goes on, thefreedom and order of an otherwise modest, well-designed page can be conceived of as ‘a model forsocial arrangements too.’72
A few other aspects are worth noting. First, in typically writing up his thoughts in the form of a goofy
dialogue, he emphasizes such questions should always be debatable – a conversation with oneself,a client, an audience, or whomever else is usefully at hand. Next, in creating a character who takes his
typography far too seriously, the author shows he doesn’t take himself too seriously. Lastly, the real
postscript here is that nothing is sacred, conditions are always prone to change, new axes are always
opening up; when they do, perspectives and requirements change too. This last point is succinctly
made at the end of the article when the protagonist casually lets slip that his interlocutor, Brutus, is infact a talking dog.

ITEM:

This final piece qualifies as ephemeral in the sense that it appears to be a working proof – there are acouple of unfolded sheets in the archive – of something Themerson made together with thetypographer Anthony Froshaug. It’s a ‘prospectus’ (a sample, a teaser) of a ‘Semantic Sonata’ written
by Themerson and printed letterpress by Froshaug according to those aforementioned principles ofInternal Vertical Justification.
In fact, the two first met when Froshaug was curious about an IVJ section of one of Themerson’s
pieces of writing published in Polish. Not speaking the language, Froshaug was unable to comprehend
the meaning that appeared to dictate the arrangement, so the two translated it together, stacking
possible words on top of each other. Later they worked on this ‘Semantic Sonata’ in tandem. At thetime, Froshaug was living in austere conditions in Cornwall, exploring the possibilities afforded by theextreme limits of a small hand-operated press. Where Themerson was interested in exploding

	
  
72

Kinross, ‘Let the Object Speak’, op. cit., p. 33.

	
  

299

paragraphs and sentences, then sticking them back together so as to emphasize their internal
relationships, Froshaug was engaged in a similarly elemental, back-to-basics investigation of printing,and the way Themerson was dissembling language was mirrored in the obstinate materiality of
moveable metal type. Arranging the Sonata’s uncommonly large and varying indents would involve an
equally unorthodox use of the press, so language was being radically re-assembled in physical as wellas conceptual terms.
Back in that piece we looked at called Paper in Action, Themerson noted how contemporary
philosophers are interested in the idea that the pattern of language ‘reflects the relationships that are in
the world, and therefore [that] the study of the pattern can tell us something about the world.’ Out on alimb with few clear precedents, aesthetic adventures such as the ‘Semantic Sonata’ suggest a further
analogy with social organization – the theoretical ease and practical difficulty of conceiving newly
meaningful arrangements.

ITEM:

Here’s a bonus discovery I’m repurposing as a full stop. It’s a detail from the Gaberbocchus-publishedversion of Themerson’s essay on ‘Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms’. It focuses on how the French poet
forged unusually symbiotic relationships between words and the things or ideas they represent.
To introduce the idea, Themerson replaces the word ‘red’ with a small red sticker. It’s a lovely gesturethat marks a quality common to all his work that I’ve alluded to a few times here; namely, the idea ofthings being themselves – without excess or mediation. This is the best place to glimpse the nature ofthat social and ethical orientation.
It was already evident in the Themersons’ earliest work together in Warsaw in the 1930s, first
producing photograms, then the films they conceived as moving photograms. A photogram is a print
made by direct contact, which means:
It doesn't represent anything.
It doesn't abstract from anything.
It is just what it is.
It is reality itself.73
The same drive underpins Semantic Translation, Themerson’s satirical method of supplanting worn-out
clichés with their equivalent dictionary definitions.
In conclusion, whether visually or linguistically, earnestly or sardonically, Themerson is always out toconvey the unmediated truth of a situation. This might sound strangely inflated in view of the sort of

	
  
73

Stefan Themerson, The Urge to Create Visions (London: Gaberbocchus, 1983), p. 57.

	
  

300

close reading and looking we’ve been concerned with here; but if you take a relative ‘untruth’ to mean
the sort of total mediation we reflexively associate with today’s advertising, marketing andpropaganda, the ethos that’s channelled through the long circuit of the Gaberbocchus Press remains
wholly pertinent for contemporary artists, designers, writers, and hybrids.
The most apposite word to describe the Themersons’ work, from enduring art to throwaway ephemera,is a compliment that sounds like an insult: artless.

In conclusion:
Spoken or written languages are less vague than visual ones for two obvious reasons: first, more
people use them; second, because of this, they are based on relatively definite, fixed (i.e. widely
shared) meanings. Relative, that is, to the equivalent meanings of the supposed ‘languages’ of, say,brushstrokes or colours or styles or framing devices. In other words, to the extent that they can beconceived as such, visual languages are comparatively ambiguous. Paradoxically, they are easier tojustify in the abstract – with words! – and less convincing in practice.
The particular power of the work recounted in this chapter lies in the fact that its makers are unusuallyunafraid of erring on the side of clarity rather than obscurity. They attempt to talk straight, yet are
constitutionally incapable of doing so; in which case they twist conventions that don’t seem catalytic
enough to keep up with thought – and this is what keeps the work vital.
In sum, the works recounted in this chapter are model ‘articulate products’ in the sense that they‘speak for themselves’. Such work has a didactic aspect: it teaches a reader how to read it; thisknowledge constitutes a key that can be used to unlock other work; and, inasmuch as that conscientious
reader comprehends the mechanics, the whole process potentially teaches them how to do it, too.
This is the sense in which this work can be considered generous and constructive. As Walter Benjaminsays:
An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters,
therefore, is the exemplary character of a production, which is able
first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an
improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the
more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is, readers orspectators into collaborators.74

	
  
74

Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, op. cit., p. 233.

	
  

301

Dexter Sinister, ‘Identity’, 2012, installation view of three-screen projection (using Meta-The DifferenceBetween-The-Two-Font) at Artists Space, New York

	
  

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8: META-THE-DIFFERENCE-BETWEEN-THE-TWO-FONTS AND ‘IDENTITY’

This practice chapter comprises two distinct projects rooted in the history of graphic design, explored
via contemporary software programming and animation.
The first, concerned with a very particular font, is made up of three discrete but complexly entwined
essays, ‘A Note on the Type’, ‘Letter & Spirit’, and ‘A Note on the Time’, all written in the name of
Dexter Sinister.1 The first two are concerned with a piece of software we developed in tandem with thewriting.2 The whole thing is based on Metafont, a largely forgotten typographic experiment instigatedby computer scientist Donald Knuth in the late 1970s. Knuth was interested in developing not a single
font or a family of fonts, but a set of ‘meta’ parameters that could be tweaked to generate an endless
number of letterforms. The third essay falls in the line with the others inasmuch as it was adapted into alicense to allow Kadist Art Foundation to employ one iteration of our development of Knuth’s project.
These three essays are even more promiscuous and palimpsestuous than the other Dexter Sinisterprojects recounted elsewhere; the genealogy of each is recounted in the footnotes.

8.1: A GOOD IDEA IN ADVANCE OF ITS REALISATION
The first piece, ‘Note on the Type’, for example, is one version of a text that has sprawled all overthe place, published in at least eight different places, on walls as well as pages, with the basic template
amended according to each new format and context. Fundamentally, it tells the story of our updated
version of Knuth’s Metafont, called Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font (MTDBT2F),
a project we conceived more as an excuse to think about and around the implications of Knuth’s work
then and now, than to make a ‘working font’ per se.
The story begins with Knuth’s dissatisfaction with the crude standard of the typesetting technology
used to set his own published articles. Being a computer scientist, he resolved to develop a better
alternative. This turned into a mammoth project that resulted in TeX (pronounced ‘tek’),a sophisticated system still used by many academic communities today. Most commercial software
today uses what’s known as a WYSIWYG interface. This stands for What You See Is What You Get:
if I select a bit of text and make it italic or bold or a different font, the formatting is immediately
apparent on my monitor. Knuth’s TeX is based on an earlier paradigm, WYSIWYM, or What You See
Is What You Mean. This involves attaching bits of code to my ‘raw’ text as I type, to be processed into
the visual result at a later stage, so there’s a procedural division between the idea and its actualization,
between labour and product.
Metafont was originally conceived as a component aspect of TeX, a program that generated thetypefaces to be configured by the master application, but Knuth developed it as a discrete piece ofsoftware too. But I’m already trespassing on the upcoming essay, so I’ll stop this story here for now.
In early 2010, we began to develop a new version of Metafont based on what scant information
we could find out about the original work. The aim was to write a program that would generate endless
PostScript fonts – the current standard protocol – using Knuth’s original parameters; and we found afitting excuse to do so in the form of an exhibition, The Curse of Bigness, at the Queen’s Museum in
New York.3 This was a group show comprising artworks that, in various ways, modelled larger social,political and economic systems. The title is borrowed from a book by the show’s mascot, Louis

	
  

1

Of the many bits and pieces of texts by ‘Dexter Sinister’ included before and after this chapter, it’s fair to say that all were
written and edited equally by the two of us (or at least, it was both difficult and unnecessary to recall who’d done what, exactly,
at the point of publication). It’s necessary to state that this rule holds less here. Although there was still a lot of back and forth,
the two ‘Notes’ were predominantly written by David, and ‘Letter & Spirit’ predominantly by myself (the first drafts, anyway).
It seems imperative to include the whole set here for reasons I hope will become obvious.
2

And the ‘we’ here is wholly misleading: without exception, all the programming was and is exclusively done by David.

3

The Curse of Bigness, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 16 May – 3 October, 2010.

	
  

304

Brandeis. Brandeis was a respected U.S. supreme court judge with a righteous reputation as a ‘trustbuster’: he worked to minimize the destructive tendencies of outsize corporations and governments inthe decades before and after the Great Depression.
We happened to know from the exhibition’s curator, Larissa Harris, that an overhaul of the Museum’s
shoddy, piecemeal signage system was long overdue. We proposed to refurbish it using our as-yetundeveloped Metafont update, with one foot in and one foot out of the exhibition. We would develop it
as a ‘piece of work’ under the umbrella of The Curse of Bigness (and so funded by its budget), but thento remain indefinitely in place after the show closed. As the project developed, we further proposed to‘caption’ the new signs – to be applied in black vinyl on the walls – with an extended piece of writing.
This ‘note on the type’ would relate the font’s backstory, along with our particular interest inresuscitating it now in relation to the show’s overarching theme. We initially conceived of this as amodest booklet, available to take away from the show itself.
But this idea expanded too. Alongside the signage, we ended up compiling, editing and publishing notjust the intended caption, but an entire book – a primer on the idea and legacy of ‘the curse of bigness’
assembled from a handful of essays that Larissa had initially passed on as background reading.4
We typeset the essays with Knuth’s TeX system, using its default font Computer Modern. Then we
added our own extremely distilled versions of each essay – flash summaries – set in the same update ofMetafont developed for the walls. The book was therefore designed to be both read and looked at,without prioritizing one or the other. Our first version of ‘A Note on the Type’ became the last piece inthe book, its supplementary relation to the other texts identical to that of the book relative to the show.

These are our pages from that book:	  4Harris, ed., The Curse of Bigness, op. cit.

	
  

305

A NOTE ON THE TYPEWEIGHT = 100, SLANT = 0, SUPERNESS = 0.75,
CURLYNESS = 0:
,Q?DKBPDEO>KKGS=OOAPEJ,AP=PDA@E~ANAJ?A>APSAAJPDAPSK%KJP =PULAB=?A@AOECJA@>U#ATPAN2EJEOPANEJ=J@@ANERA@QOEJC,AP=%KJP PDAJKSPDENPUUA=NKH@
?KILQPANPULKCN=LDUOUOPAILNKCN=IIA@>U#KJ=H@*JQPD
in 1979.
,AP=%KJPEO>KPD=LNKCN=IIEJCH=JCQ=CA=J@EPOKSJEJPANLNAPAN =OSEBPPNE?GSDANAEP>KPDLNKRE@AO=RK?=>QH=NU
=J@@A?K@AOEPOOUJP=T>=?GPKPDAJ=PERA>EJ=NUI=?DEJA
H=JCQ=CAKBO=J@O*JQPDKNECEJ=HHUEJPAJ@A@,AP=%KJP
=O=DAHLAN=LLHE?=PEKJBKN3A7 PDA?KILQPANPULAOAPPEJCOUOPAIDA?NA=PA@PKB=?EHEP=PADECDMQ=HEPUPULKCN=LDU
@ENA?PHU>U=QPDKNO#KJ=H@*JQPD =2P=JBKN@LNKBAOOKN=J@=QPDKNKBPDAIQHPERKHQIA?KILQPANO?EAJ?A|!E>HA}
3DA NPKB"KILQPAN/NKCN=IIEJC  S=O@EOI=UA@
KJNA?AEREJCC=HHAULNKKBOBKNPDAOA?KJ@A@EPEKJKBDEO>KKG
3DALQ>HEODAND=@FQOPOSEP?DA@BNKIPN=@EPEKJ=HDKPIAP=HPULAOAPPEJCPK=@ECEP=HOUOPAI=J@PDAPULKCN=LDE?MQ=HEPUS=OB=NSKNOAPD=JPDAKNECEJ=HA@EPEKJ*JQPDCQNA@
PD=POAPPEJCHAPPANOKJ=L=CAS=OOEILHU=I=PPANKBEJG
KNJKEJG KJKNK~ KN =J@PDANABKNA=LANBA?PLNK>HAI
BKNPDA?KILQPAN'ALH=JJA@KJOLAJ@EJC=OETIKJPD
O=>>=PE?=HSNEPEJC=PULAOAPPEJCLNKCN=I=J@LNK@Q?A@
=HIKOPUA=NOH=PAN PDAJA=NQ>EMQEPKQO EJI=PDAI=PE?O=J@O?EAJ?ALQ>HEODEJC =JUS=U ?KILQPANPULAOAPPEJCLNKCN=I 3A7,AP=%KJPS=O@AOECJA@BNKIPDAOP=NP
=O3A7{OI=JQ=H=OOEOP=JP=J@B=EPDBQHOANR=JP LNK@Q?EJC
=ONAMQENA@ PDADECDMQ=HEPUBKJPO=PSD=PARANOEVA=J@shape on-command.
,AP=%KJPS=O=HOKEJPAJ@A@=O=PKKHBKN@AOECJEJC
259

	
  

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DE73$12(-(23$1

JASPULAB=?AOKJEPOKSJ O,AP=%KJPS=OLNKCN=IIA@>U*JQPD =I=PDAI=PE?E=J PDANAOQHPEJCPULKCN=LDE?@AOECJIAPDK@NAHEAOKJAMQ=PEKJO IQHPER=NE=>HA=HCA>N==J@=>EPKBRA?PKN=NEPDI=PE? PKOLA?EBUHAPPANBKNIO=J@?KILQPAN?K@APK?KILEHAPDAOAEJOPNQ?PEKJOEJPK=QOA=>HABKJPy=HH
KBSDE?DEOIKNAPDAJ=PERALNKREJ?AKBI=PDAI=PE?E=JOPD=J
PULA@AOECJANO(JPDA IANE?=J,=PDAI=PE?=H2K?EAPU{OLNAOPECEKQO
)KOE=D6EHH=N@&E>>O+A?PQNAKB)QHU  *JQPDC=RA=P=HGPEPHA@|,=PDAI=PE?=H3ULKCN=LDU }=J@OQCCAOPA@
PD=P |6AI=U?KJ?HQ@APD=P=I=PDAI=PE?=H=LLNK=?DPKPDA@AOECJKB=HLD=>APO@KAOJKPAHEIEJ=PAPDA=NPEOPOSDK
D=RA>AAJ@KEJCPDAFK>BKNOKI=JUUA=NO}3NQAAJKQCD >QPPDANAH=PERAHUOPAALPA?DJE?=HOHKLAKBQOEJC,AP=%KJPBKN
PULA@AOECJANO?KI>EJA@SEPDPDAHEIEPA@EJPANAOPEJI=GEJCPULAB=?AO>UI=PDAI=PE?E=JOD=ONAOQHPA@EJKJHUOARAN=H
D=J@BQHOKB,AP=%KJPO>AEJCLNK@Q?A@KRANPDAH=OPPDENPU
UA=NO OOQ?D O?=JP@K?QIAJP=PEKJ=J@OQLLKNPATEOPOBKNOKIAKJAPNUEJCPK?NA=PA=,AP=%KJPPK@=U.* HAP{O?D=JCAPDAL=N=IAPANOKBSD=PUKQD=RA>AAJNA=@EJC>UOAPPEJCPDEO>NEABAT?ANLPBNKI3KI
,?"=NPDU{OJKRAH1AI=EJ@AN  EJ,AP=PDA@E~ANAJ?A
between-the-two-Font with WEIGHT = 26, SLANT = 0.3,
SUPERNESS = 0.7, CURLYNESS = 20. Like so:Moving across the landing and down the staircase, I felt
like an astronaut taking his first steps — humanity’s
first steps — across the surface of a previously untouchedplanet. I’d walked over this stretch a hundred times
before, of course — but it had been different then,just a floor: now it was fired up, silently zinging withsignificance. Held beneath a light coat of sandy dust
260

	
  

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A NOTE ON THE TYPE

within a solid gel of tar, the flecks of gold and silver inthe granite seemed to emit a kind of charge, as invisible
as natural radiation — and just as potent. The nonferrous-metal banisters and the silk-black wooden rail
above them glowed with a dark, unearthly energy thattook up the floor’s diminished sheen and multiplied its
dark intensity. I turned the first corner, glancing throughits window as I moved: light from the courtyard bent
as it approached me; a long, thin kink travelled acrossthe surface of the facing building, then shot off away towrinkle more remote, outlying spaces. The red rooftiles
were disappearing as I came down, eclipsed by theirown underhang as the angle between us widened. Then
I turned again and the whole facade revolved awayfrom me.
I continued down the stairs. Sounds travelled to me— but these, too, were subject to anomalies of physics,
to interference and distortion. The pianist’s music ran,snagged and looped back on itself, first slowing downthen speeding up. The static crackle of the liver broke
across the orphaned signals cast adrift from radios andtelevision sets. The Hoover moaned on, sucking matterup into its vacuum. I could hear the motorbike enthusiast
clanging down in the courtyard, banging at a nut toloosen it. The clanging echoed off the facing building, theclangs reaching me as echoes almost coinciding with theclangs coming straight up from his banging — almost
but not quite. I remembered seeing a boy once kicking afootball against a wall, the distance between him and thewall setting up the same delay, the same near overlap.
I couldn’t remember where, though.
I moved on down the staircase. As I came within
261

	
  

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DE73$12(-(23$1

four steps of the fifth-floor landing I heard the liverlady’s locks jiggle and click. Then her door opened andshe moved out slowly, holding a small rubbish bag. She
was wearing a light-blue cardigan; her hair was wrapped
up in a headscarf a few white, wiry strands were
sprouting from its edges, standing out above her forehead
like thin, sculpted snakes. She shuffled forward in her
doorway; then she stooped to set her bag down, holding
her left hand to her back as she did this. She set the bag
down carefully — then paused and, still stooped, turned
her head to look up at me.
We’d spent ages practising this moment. I’d showed
her exactly how to stoop: the inclination of the shoulders,the path slowly carved through the air by her right handas it led the bag round her legs and down to the ground(I’d told her to picture the route supporting arms on old
gramophone players take, first across and then down),
the way her left hand rested on her lower back above thehip, the middle finger pointing straight at the ground.
We’d got all this down to a T — we hadn’t succeeded
in working out the words she’d say to me. I’d racked mybrains, but the exact line had never come, any morethan the concierge’s face had. Rather than forcing it —or, worse, just making any old phrase up — I’d decided
to let her come up with a phrase. I’d told her not toconcoct a sentence in advance, but rather to wait till the
moment when I passed her on the staircase in the actual
reenactment — the moment we were in right now —and to voice the words that sprung to mind just then.
She did this now. Still stooped, her face turned towards
mine, she released her grip on the bag and said:“Harder and harder to lift up.”
262

	
  

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A NOTE ON THE TYPE

4JHEGAIKNA?KIIKJ?KILQPANKQPHEJABKJPBKNI=POOQ?D=O3NQA3ULAKN/KOPO?NELP3ULA =,AP=%KJPBKJPEO?KJOPNQ?PA@KBOPNKGAO@N=SJSEPDOAPSE@PDLAJO(JOPA=@
KB@AO?NE>EJCPDAKQPHEJAKBPDA?D=N=?PAN@ENA?PHU>U@N=SEJC
A=?DHAPPANOD=LAEJOE@A=J@KQPOE@A ?KQJPAN=J@HAPPANBKNI =,AP=%KJPHA@AO?NE>AOKJHUPDA>=OE?LAJL=PDKNOGAHAPKJHAPPAN/AND=LO>APPANEI=CEJA@=OPDACDKOPPD=P?KIAOEJ=@R=J?AKB=L=NPE?QH=NHAPPANOD=LA =,AP=%KJP?D=N=?PAN
EO@AJA@KJHU>U=OAPKBAMQ=PEKJON=PDANPD=JD=N@?K@A@
?KKN@EJ=PAO=J@KQPHEJAOD=LAO2KEPEOPDAJLKOOE>HAPKPNA=P
L=N=IAPANOOQ?D=O=OLA?PN=PEK OH=JP OPNKGASE@PD OANEBOEVA  ?QNHUJAOO =J@OKKJ=O=>OPN=?PA@EJLQPR=HQAOPD=P?=J?D=JCAEJA=?DCHULD@AJEPEKJ ?NA=PEJCJKP=OAPKBOAP
HAPPANO >QPEJOPA=@=OAPKBOAPL=N=IAPANO =JUKBSDE?D
?=J>A?D=JCA@A=?DPEIAPDABKJPEONAJ@ANA@!U?D=JCEJCPDAR=HQA=PKJAHK?=PEKJEJPDA,AP=%KJPHA =?KJOEOPAJP?D=JCAEOLNK@Q?A@PDNKQCDKQPPDAAJPENABKJP3DANAOQHPEJC
?KHHA?PEKJKBCHULD@AJEPEKJO=J@EJLQPL=N=IAPANOEOJKPPDAJ=OEJCHABKJP >QPEJOPA=@ =IAP=BKJP+AP{OPNUPD=P=C=EJ8KQI=UNA?=HHBNKIA=NHEAN
PD=P,AP=%KJPEO>KPD=H=JCQ=CA=J@EPOKSJEJPANLNAPAN
6D=P@KAOPD=PIA=J 3=GEJC=?HQABNKIPD=PNE@@HA SA?KQH@PQNJ,AP=%KJP{OJ=IA>=?GKJEPOAHB >UP=GEJCEP=L=NP >ACEJJEJCSEPDPDAAJ@y|BKJP}
|%KJP}EO=SKN@SDKOA?QNNAJP?KIIKJQO=CA
L=NPE?QH=NHUEJPDA?KJPATPKBLANOKJ=H?KILQPANO D=O
PSEOPA@EPOAT=?P@AJEPEKJ1APQNJEJCPKEPONKKPO =|BKJP}
EOOEILHU=?KHHA?PEKJKB?D=N=?PANOKBKJAL=NPE?QH=N@AOECJ 
KNLNA?EOAHU PULAB=?A,KNAOLA?E?=HHU=|BKJP}EOPDA
L=NPE?QH=NNA=HEV=PEKJKB=?ANP=EJPULAB=?AEJ=?ANP=EJ
IA@EQI =??KN@EJCPK?ANP=EJL=N=IAPANOOQ?D=OOEVA 
SE@PD SAECDP OPUHA ?KJPN=OP=J@OD=LAyBKNAT=ILHA 
263

	
  

310

DE73$12(-(23$1=BKJPKB6EHHE=I"=OHKJ{OHAPPANO?=OPEJDKPHA=@=PLKEJPOKN=BKJPKB2P=J@=N@&NKPAOMQA=PLKEJPOI=@A
EJK=GKNARAJ=BQHHBKJPKBLETAHHAPPANOOPNAP?DA@=J@NAJ@ANA@KJ=@LEO?NAAJBNKIPDA NE=HPULAB=?A
'KSARANPDEO?KHHA?PEKJKBL=N=IAPANO OEVA SE@PD SAECDP 
AP? =??KN@EJCPKSDE?D=BKJPEONAJ@ANA@BNKI=L=NPE?QH=N
PULAB=?A=NAJKPTA@-ASL=N=IAPANO?=J>A=@@A@=PSEHH
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|,AP=}EO=LNATKB&NAAGKNECEJPD=PKNECEJ=HHUOEILHU
IA=JP|=BPAN} >QP@QAPK=OPN=JCAPQNJKBARAJPO ?=IAPK
IA=J|KB=DECDANKN@AN >AUKJ@}EJ+=PEJ=J@H=PANIK@ANJ
H=JCQ=CAO AT?HQ@EJC&NAAGSDANAEPNAP=EJOEPOKNECEJ=H
IA=JEJC 
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|,AP=LDUOE?O}?KIAOBNKI J@NKJE?QOKB1DK@AO OP?AJPQNU!" SDKS=OPDANOPA@EPKNKB NEOPKPHA=J@
LH=?A@PDA>KKGKJPDA,AP=LDUOE?O=BPANPDA>KKGKJ
PDA/DUOE?OEJDEO?KILEH=PEKJ OK EPS=OMQEPAHEPAN=HHU|=BPAN}PDA/DUOE?O !AOPNAC=N@O #ANAG
2KPDAJUKQD=RAIAP=H=JCQ=CAO H=JCQ=CAOQOA@PK
@AO?NE>AH=JCQ=CAO IAP=DEOPKNU PDAOPQ@UKBDKSLAKLHA
REAS=J@OPQ@UDEOPKNU IAP=PDAKNAIO PDAKNAIO=>KQPPDAKNAIO IAP=NQHAO NQHAO=>KQPNQHAO AP?(J@AA@UKQ?=J
|IAP=}FQOP=>KQP=JUPDEJC
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@E~ANAJ?A>APSAAJPDAPSK%KJP}2KNNUI=J


	
  

311

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

EP{O=>=@J=IA >QPUKQ{HHOKKJNA=HEVAPD=PUKQNOAHRAO(SKJ{PLNAOO({HHFQOPS=EP=NKQJ@{PEHHUKQOAAEP+AP{OPNU=JKPDANRANOEKJ @AIKJOPN=PA@>UPULAOAPPEJC=JAT?ANLPBNKI3DA IANE?=J-KPA>KKGO>U-=PD=JEAH'=SPDKNJA  SEPD6$(&'3 2+ -3 
SUPERNESS = 0.7, CURLYNESS = 0:
As our thoughts repose again, after this interruption,
SAJ@KQNOAHRAOC=VEJCQL=PPDAHA=RAO =J@
?KIL=NEJCPDAEN@E~ANAJP=OLA?P PDA>A=QPEBQH@ERANOEPUKBCNAAJ =OPDAOQJEO@E~QOA@PDNKQCDPDAI=O=
IA@EQI KNNAA?PA@BNKIPDAENCHKOOUOQNB=?A8KQ
OAA PKK DANA=J@PDANA @A=@=J@HA=AOO>N=J?DAO 
SDE?DUKQD=@JKIKNA>AAJ=S=NAKB>ABKNA PD=JEBPDAUD=@=OOQIA@PDEOKH@=J@@NU@A?=UOEJ?AUKQ
O=P@KSJQLKJPDA>=JG+KKG=PKQNBAAP =J@DANAHEGASEOA=NAK>FA?PO=OCKK@=OJAS3DANA=NAPSKHEPPHANKQJ@SDEPABQJCE SDE?DLNK>=>HUOLN=JCBNKIPDACNKQJ@EJPDA?KQNOAKBH=OPJECDP ?QNEKQOLNK@Q?PEKJOKBPDAIQODNKKIPNE>A =J@SDE?D >U=J@>U SEHH>APDKOAHEPPHAPDEJCOSEPDOIKGAEJPDAI SDE?D?DEH@NAJ
?=HHLQ~>=HHO(OPDANAJKPDEJCAHOA8AO DANAEO=SDKHA?KHKJUKBHEPPHA=JPDEHHO =NA=HREHH=CAKBPDAIPDAU=NAOI=HHNKQJ@DEHHK?GO BN=IA@KBIEJQPAL=NPE?HAOKBCN=RAH SEPD=JAJPN=J?AEJPDA?AJPNA=J@PDNKQCD
OKIAKBPDAI>H=@AOKBCN=OOKNOI=HHODNQ>OD=RA
OLNKQPA@QL LNK@Q?EJC=JA~A?PJKPQJHEGAPD=PKBPNAAOKRANOD=@KSEJC=DKIAOPA=@'ANAEO=PULAKB@KIAOPE?
EJ@QOPNU yLAND=LO PKK OKIAPDEJCKBIQJE?EL=H
EJOPEPQPEKJO yLAND=LO HEGASEOA  SDKGJKSO PDARANUIK@AHKB=?KIIQJEPU SDE?D%KQNEANEPAO=J@
265

	
  

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DE73$12(-(23$1

KPDANO=NAOPQI>HEJCEJLQNOQEPKB/KOOE>HUPDAOPQ@AJPKBOQ?DLDEHKOKLDEAOODKQH@CKPKPDA=JP =J@J@
PD=PJ=PQNAD=OCERAJDEIDEOHAOOKJPDANA,A=JPEIA 
HEGA=I=HARKHAJPCAJEQO (@NKL=BASCN=EJOKBO=J@
EJPKPDAAJPN=J?AKBKJAKBPDAEN@SAHHEJCO =J@PDQOMQEPAK>HEPAN=PAEP J@ >ADKH@DANA?KIAOKJAKBPDA
EJD=>EP=JPO SDKD=O>AAJ=>NK=@QLKJOKIALQ>HE?
KNLNER=PA>QOEJAOO KNLAND=LOPKAJFKU=B=JP=OPE?
S=HG y=J@?=JJKP=JUHKJCANJ@DEOKSJ@KKNy
SD=POQNLNEOA SD=PDQNNU SD=P?KJBQOEKJKBIEJ@ =NA
ATLNAOOA@EJDEOIKRAIAJP'KSEJATLHE?=>HAPKDEI
IQOP>APDA=CAJ?USDE?DD=OA~A?PA@PDEOIEO?DEAB
3DAEJ?E@AJPSEHHLNK>=>HU>AHKJCNAIAI>ANA@EJPDA
=JJ=HOKBPDA=JP?KHKJU =J@>AP=HGA@KBEJPDASEJPAN@=UO SDAJPDAU=NAI=GEJCIANNUKRANPDAENDK=N@A@
LNKREOEKJO!QP?KIA EPEOPEIAPKIKRA3DAOQJD=OODEBPA@
DEOLKOEPEKJ =J@D=OBKQJ@=R=?=JPOL=?APDNKQCDPDA
>N=J?DAO >UIA=JOKBSDE?DDAHARAHODEON=UOBQHHQLKJKQNDA=@O8APJKS =OSA=NEOA =?HKQ@D=O
?KIA=?NKOODEI =J@I=GAOARANUPDEJCCAJPHUOKI>NA
EJ=JEJOP=JP,=JU?HKQ@O RKHQIEJKQO=J@DA=RU =NA
O?=PPANA@=>KQPPDAOGU HEGAPDAOD=PPANA@NQEJOKB=
@NA=IAN{O4PKLE=!QPSASEHHJKPOAJ@KQNPDKQCDPOPDEPDANS=N@JKS JKNP=GAKJAKBPDAIEJPKKQNLNAOAJPK>OANR=PEKJO3DA?HKQ@OKB=JUKJA@=U=NAI=PANE=HAJKQCD KBPDAIOAHRAO BKNPDAK>OANR=PEKJKBAEPDAN=JE@HAI=JKN=LDEHKOKLDAN J@JKS DKSJ=NNKS 
O?=JPU =J@IA=CNAEOPDEONA?KN@KBK>OANR=PEKJ ?KIL=NA@SEPDPDAEIIAJOEPUPD=PS=OPK>AK>OANRA@ 
SEPDEJPDA>KQJ@OPD=PSALNAO?NE>A@KQNOAHRAO'KS
OD=HHKS=J@OI=HH=OPNA=IKBPDKQCDP PKK yKB
266

	
  

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A NOTE ON THE TYPE

@EOPEJ?P=J@ATLNAOOA@PDKQCDP y?KIL=NA@SEPD
PDA>NK=@PE@AKB@EIAIKPEKJO E@A=O =OOK?E=PEKJO 
SDE?DSANAKSEJCPDNKQCDPDAD=QJPA@NACEKJOKB
EI=CEJ=PEKJ EJPAHHA?P =J@OAJPEIAJPOKIAPEIAOAT?EPA@>USD=PS=O=NKQJ@QOOKIAPEIAOSEPDJKLAN?ALPE>HA?KJJA?PEKJSEPDPDAI6DAJSAOAADKSHEPPHASA?=J
ATLNAOO EPEO=SKJ@ANPD=P=JUKJAARANP=GAOQL=
LAJ=OA?KJ@PEIA
(J 3DA-AS8KNGANN=J|3DA4JJEODA@ }=LEA?A=>KQP IANE?=JSNEPAN#=RE@%KOPAN6=HH=?ABKHHKSEJCDEO
@A=PDOETIKJPDOLNAREKQO,E@S=UPDNKQCDPDAPNE>QPA #3,=TMQKPAOBNKI=JA=NHUHAPPANPD=P6=HH=?AOAJPPK&AN=H@'KS=N@KB/AJCQEJ!KKGO EJSDE?DDAATLH=EJOPD=PDEOSKNGEOJAEPDANLNEI=NEHU|NA=HEOI}JKN|IAP=?PEKJ }
>QPN=PDAN |EBEP{O=JUPDEJC EP{OIAP=PDA@E~ANAJ?A>APSAAJPDAPSK}3ULE?=HHUEP{O=PDNKS=S=UHEJAPD=PNAPQNJO PDAJOP=UOSEPDUKQ#KAOPDA|@E~ANAJ?A}DANANABANPK=
I=PDAI=PE?=H@EOPEJ?PEKJEJMQ=JPEPU KNPK=IKNA?KIIKJOAJOAKB@EOPEJ?PEKJKN@EOOEIEH=NEPU KNARAJ@EO=CNAAIAJP .N>KPD6=HH=?A{O?D=EJKBSKN@OEO=OOHELLANU=OPDA
HKCE?=HHUNA?QNOERAOAJPAJ?A|3DANOPNQHAEOPDANA=NAJKNQHAO }>QPSEPD=@E~ANAJ?A(JOPA=@KBOEILHUOAPPEJCQL=J
AJ@HAOOHKKL>APSAAJPSKLKHAO EPK>OANRAOPD=PHKKLBNKI
=DECDANLKEJPKB?KJ?AJPN=PA@@EOEJPANAOP3DANA{OJKOEILHA
S=UKQPKBPDEOKJA =J@UAPPDANAOAAIOPK>AFQOPAJKQCD
PDANAPKGAALPNUEJC
9=@EA2IEPDI=GAO=?=OABKNPDEOEJ=JAOO=U
KJ%KOPAN6=HH=?A QOEJCDEOODKNPOPKNU|#ALNAOOA@/ANOKJ}BNKI!NEAB(JPANREASOSEPD'E@AKQO,AJ
267

	
  

314

DE73$12(-(23$1=O=N?DAT=ILHA|3DAA~A?PKJPDANA=@ANEOLKSANBQH QJLHA=O=JP0QEPA=L=NPBNKI>AEJCBKN?A@
PKOD=NAKJA{OKSJIAJP=HOL=?ASEPDPDA@ALNAOOA@LANOKJ{OEJJEPAHU@EOI=H?KJO?EKQOJAOO PKNA=@
PDKOAOLEN=HOAJPAJ?AOEOPKATLANEAJ?APD=P@NA=@KB
?EN?QH=NEPUAI>A@@A@EJPDAKH@FKGA=>KQPNA?QNOEKJPKQJ@ANOP=J@NA?QNOEKJUKQIQOPNOPQJ@ANOP=J@
NA?QNOEKJ }
3KATLKNP6=HH=?A{O?D=EJBNKIHEPAN=PQNAPK=IKNACAJAN=HQOA SA?KQH@LHQCKPDANR=HQAOEJPKPDAAMQ=PEKJ%KN
|NA=HEOI}SA?KQH@EJOANP|LN=?PE?A}=J@BKN|IAP=?PEKJ}
LAND=LO|PDAKNU} 3DAOALKHAO?=J>AAJ@HAOOHUOS=LLA@
SEPDOEIEH=NHULNK@Q?PERA?KJBQOEKJyPNU|?KJ?NAPA}
|=>OPN=?P}KN|IK@ANJEOI}|LKOPIK@ANJEOI}  J@UAP
PDA|IAP=PDA@E~ANAJ?A>APSAAJPDAPSK}>APSAAJ=JUKBPDAOAPSKEOJ{POEILHUNAOKHRA@>UOKIA=H?DAIE?=HBQOEKJ =OEJ|LN=?PE?A} |PDAKNU}|LN=TEO }LN=?PE?AEJBKNIA@>UPDAKNU=J@RE?ARANO=+AOOKB=?KILKQJ@PD=J=J
ATPN=?PEKJ IKNA=OQ>PN=?PEKJPD=J=J=@@EPEKJ IP@>P
EOPDAJ=?PQ=HHU=OGAHAPKJ =O?NELP KN=CKK@E@A=
EJ=@R=J?AKBEPONA=HEV=PEKJ#KJ=H@*JQPD>AC=JDEO)KOE=D&E>>OHA?PQNA |,=PDAI=PE?=H3ULKCN=LDU}SEPD=J=LKHKCUKBOKNPO O=UEJC
|(SEHH>AOLA=GEJCPK@=U=>KQPSKNGEJLNKCNAOO EJOPA=@
KB?KILHAPA@NAOA=N?DPDEOS=OJKPIUKNECEJ=HEJPAJPEKJSDAJ(?DKOAPDAOQ>FA?PKBPDEOHA?PQNA >QPPDAB=?PEO(?KQH@J{PCAPIU?KILQPANLNKCN=IOSKNGEJCEJPEIA} J@
DA?KJPEJQAO |%KNPQJ=PAHUEPEOFQOP=OSAHHPD=P(@KJ{P
D=RA=JEODA@LNK@Q?PPK@AO?NE>APKUKQPK@=U >A?=QOA
NAOA=N?DEJI=PDAI=PE?OEOCAJAN=HHUIQ?DIKNAEJPANAOPEJC
SDEHAUKQ{NA@KEJCEPPD=J=BPANEP{O=HH@KJA}


	
  

315

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

,AP=PDA@E~ANAJ?A>APSAAJPDAPSK%KJPD=O=OEIEH=NHUEJ?KILHAPA?D=N=?PAN O=OAPKBOEILHAHAPPANBKNIO
=J@=?KHHA?PEKJKBIAP=@AOECJL=N=IAPANO ,P@>P
%SEHH?NA=PAQJAJ@EJCJQI>ANOKB@E~ANAJPBKJPOBNKIJKSKJS=N@O =HS=UOKJHUIKREJCBKNS=N@=J@?KILEHEJC
=?KHHA?PEKJKBOQNB=?AA~A?POKJPKEPOAOOAJPE=HOGAHAPKJPKLNK@Q?A=CNKSEJCB=IEHUKB|DKHHKS}BKJPOSDKOABKNIO
D=RAIKNAEJ?KIIKJSEPDD=J@SNEPEJCPD=JPDAU@KSEPDDKPIAP=H?KQJPANLQJ?DAO JKPPKIAJPEKJIK@ANJ@ECEP=HBKJPO 3DA?HQIOUNAOQHP=J@EPO?DASUJ=IA ,AP=PDA
@E~ANAJ?A>APSAAJPDAPSK%KJP =NNERAO>ABKNAPDAA~A?P
PD=PEO=LLHEA@PKEP NAPQNJEJCPK=IKIAJP>ABKNABKJPO FQOP>ABKNA&QPAJ>ANC{ONOP>H=?GHAPPAN&KPDE?PULAO=PPAILPA@
PKI=P?DPDAO?NE>A{OLAJI=JODEL PPDEOLKEJP PK?KILQPAN=QPKI=PAPDALNK@Q?PEKJKBD=J@SNEPPAJ?=HHECN=LDU =J@
PKIKNAKNHAOOECJKNAUA=NOKBPULKCN=LDE?PN=@EPEKJ 
EOAOOAJPE=HHU=>OQN@(POAAIA@HEGA=CKK@E@A==PPDAPEIA
.JAJ=HPNE=H PDEOPEIAQOA@PKOAP=JAT?ANLPBNKI
3DA O?AJP =?D=LPANEJ6EHH2AHB{OODKNPOPKNU|2?=HA}
 SEPD6$(&'3 2+ -3 24/$1-$22
= 0.6, CURLYNESS = 0:Some of my innovations regarding the new genre of“Motorway Verse” have been poorly received, bothby the critics and by the reading public. My claim, thatwhat my motorway verse is trying to do represents areturn to the very roots of poetas, an inspired attempt
to link modish hermeneutics to the original function oforal literature, has been dismissed SANS PHRASE.
I myself cannot even understand the thrust of
this criticism. It seems to me self-evident that the
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DE73$12(-(23$1

subconscious apprehension of signs by motorway
drivers is exactly analogous to that act whereby thepoets of primitive cultures give life, actually breathe
reality into the land.
Taking the M40 as an example of this:Jnctn 1. Uxbridge. Jnctn 1A. (M25) M4.
Jnctn 2. Slough A365. No Services.
On M4O . . .
would be a very believable sample of such a “signingup” of the country. Naturally, in order to understandthe somewhat unusual scansion, it is necessary that
NA=@ANOEI=CEJ=PERAHULH=?APDAIOAHRAOEJ=CQN=PERAcar that is actually driving up the aforementioned
motorway. Metrical feet are, therefore, to be
determined as much by feeling through the pedals theshift from macadamised to concrete surfaces, and byhearing the susurration produced by alterations in theheight and material construction of the crash barrier, as
by the rhythm of the words themselves.
Furthermore, a motorway verse that attempts
to describe the ascent of the Chiltern scarp from the.TBKN@ODENAOE@ASEHH KB?KQNOA >ALNKBKQJ@HU@E~ANAJP
to one that chronicles the descent from Junction
5 (Stokenchurch) to Junction 6 (Watlington). For
example:Crawling, crawling, crawling. Crawler Lane
Slow-slow O’Lorry-o. Lewknor. 50 mph max.
11T! Narrow lanes, narrowing, narr-o-wing,na-rro-wing.
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A NOTE ON THE TYPE

as opposed to:F’tum. F’tum. F’tum.
Kerchunk, kerchunk (Wat-ling-ton) . . .
6AHH ({I?ANP=EJJKKJANA=@EJCPDEOD=@=JU@E~E?QHPU
in divining which was which!
.JPDA"KJPEJAJPPDAU=NAJKP=~HE?PA@>UPDA
resistance to the modern that so entirely characterises
English cultural life. In France, “VERS PEAGE” isa well-respected genre, already making its way on to
university syllabuses. Indeed I understand that a criticalwork is soon to be published that concerns itself solely
with the semantic incongruities presented by the term
“soft vierge.”
It has occurred to me that it could be myintroduction of motorway symbology itself, as if it werean extension of the conventional alphabet, that has
hardened the hearts of these penny-ante time-servers,possessors of tenure (but no grip), and the like. But
it seems to me that the white arrow pointing down,
obliquely, to the right; the ubiquitous “11T” laneclosing ideogram; the emotive, omega-like, overhead“[X]”; and many many others all have an equal rightto be considered capable of meaningful combination withorthodox characters.
On bad days, days when the tedium and obscurity
KBIUHEBADANA=P!A=?KJOAH@OAAI=HIKOPFQOPEA@ 
I am embarrassed to say that I console myself withthe thought that there may be some grand conspiracy,
taking in critics, publishers, editors and the executives
in charge of giant type-founders such as Monotype,
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318

DEXTER SINISTER

to stop my verse from gaining any success. For, wereit to do so, they would have to alter radically the rangeof typefaces that they provide.

This exhibition book was?KKN@EJ=PA@>U#ATPAN2EJEOPAN=J@
LNEJPA@>U+EJ?K +KJC(OH=J@"EPU 0QAAJOKJPDAK??=OEKJKB3'$"412$.%!(&-$22=JATDE>EPEKJ=P0QAAJO,QOAQIKB NP
KNC=JEVA@>U+=NEOO='=NNEO=J@
opening May 16, 2010.
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319

8.2: HOW TO KEEP THINGS MOVING
Through writing and rewriting (and rewriting and rewriting) this ‘note’, we came to realize that theessential difference between Knuth’s Metafont and our update is that we’re far less interested in
the practical application of an endless variety of fonts than in thinking and writing about and aroundthe idea. The original intentions of Knuth’s project remain embedded in MTDBT2F, but secondary to
our thinking through their implications today – relative to, say, the perception of time, the vicissitudes
of digital technology, and the nature of change generally. MTDBT2F swallows its referent whileemphasizing the act and implications of this swallowing, with productive indigestion.
‘A Note on the Type’ combines two stereotypical forms: the editorial that comments on its own design
or redesign; and the ‘type specimen’ traditionally produced by type foundries to demonstrate theappearance of different typefaces at different sizes, often set in ‘filler’ text such as the well-known
nonsense Latin that begins ‘Lorem Ipsum …’. Our narrative is interspersed with three such ‘dummy’texts; in this case, though, they are not nonsensical, but chosen to allude to the themes of both thefont and the exhibition. The three such fragments in this first version of ‘A Note on the Type’ are by
Tom McCarthy (a scene of re-enactment from his 2005 novel Reminder), Nathaniel Hawthorne(on the sensory affect of nature from his 1842 American Notebooks), and Will Self (on a satirical formof automated poetry, from the elliptical short story ‘Scale’ in his 1994 collection Grey Area).
Some months after The Curse of Bigness, all the above was reconstituted into a solo show called
The Plastic Arts at a modest university gallery in Chicago.5 Though the general structure of the‘Note’ remained the same, the text was seriously compressed, re-edited for a standing viewer readingfrom a wall instead of a sitting reader with a book. We took the opportunity to embed new excerpts– in this case a repeated collage of lines from a meditation on ‘Habit’ by the American pragmatist
philosopher William James. His account of the plasticity of the brain was instructively analogous to
the font.
When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of
the first things that strikes us is that they are bundles of habits.
In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity
implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it
seems, to a great extent, to be the result of education ... The habits
to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some ofthose due to education would by most persons be called acts of reason.
It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life ...6

This ‘wall essay’ was displayed as a series of identically sized blocks of text, along with a few related
works.7 From a distance they looked like a series of light and dark grey paintings, according to therelative weight of the morphing font at any given point.

	  5

Dexter Sinister, The Plastic Arts, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, 7 September – 23 October, 2010.

6

William James, The Principles of Psychology [1890] (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

7

Such as Philomene Pirecki’s Grey Painting: Text Version 2 (seen in the photograph here), as previously featured on the coverof Dot Dot Dot #20 (see the frontispiece of chapter 2).

	
  

320

Since then, ‘A Note on the Type’ has been recycled and reworked a further four times for wall, paperand screen, with new dummy excerpts on each occasion selected relative to the context. The next wasalso a wall exhibition (based on the Chicago one) alongside another vinyl signage system, this time atemporary one at the Turin art fair Artissima in 2010, with excerpts from three Italians (Bruno Munari,
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Umberto Eco) on the grey area between art and design.8 Another version
became the opening piece in the last issue of Dot Dot Dot (# 20) the same year, with excerpts fromthree British cultural critics (Alisdair Gray, Michael Bracewell, Julie Burchill) lamenting thedownward spiral of local postwar culture.9 The following year, a subsequent iteration was publishedmore or less simultaneously in Afterall magazine and Dot Dot Dot’s successor Bulletins of the Serving
Library #1, with a sequence of vignettes by Bruno Latour on his ‘matters of concern’, ending on a callfor ‘Compositionism’.10 The most recent version at the time of writing was initially delivered by David
as a conference paper in 2012, then collected as part of a related book, Graphic Design (History in the
Making), published in 2014, that comes full-circle to the source by integrating an excerpt from Knuth’s
original article on Metafont, along with a couple of testy collegial responses.11
To give an example of how these dummy excerpts were intended to function: As related in §1.8,
much of Latour’s recent writing makes the case that our Enlightenment-based epistemology is still
predicated on what he deems pernicious ‘matters of fact’ (i.e. absolutes, certainties, along with thecritical project of ‘purifying’ them). Against this way of apprehending and dealing with the world, heposits an alternative perspective of ‘matters of concern’ (i.e. networks, contingencies, and the criticalproject of ‘mediating’ them).12 This chimes with the wayward, haphazard ‘concerns’ of MTDBT2F
too – proliferating wildly here as a bunch of documents generated over time, a roaming operation that
contemplates the backstories, connections, contradictions, vested interests, and real-worldcontingencies that attach themselves to past, present and future versions of the font. Each new
articulation of MTDBT2F adds to this rolling snowball of a project, and this is the sense in which thefont can be considered a conduit for thinking as much as (or meta-the-difference-between-this-and)a means of disseminating language.
Further, to convey the extent of the sprawl, a number of closely related yet essentially separate bitsof writing have been poured into ‘A Note on the Type’’s graphical-rhetorical template, still typeset in
MTDBT2F, yet without any direct reference to it. First was ‘A Note on the T’, an account of an
identity-in-progress for The Artists’ Institute in New York, published on a wall in English and an	  8Dexter Sinister, A Note on the Signs, Artissima 17, Turin, 5–7 November, 2010; ‘A Note on the Signs’ [English/Italian],
Palinsesto (Artissima 17 magazine), 2010.

9

Dexter Sinister, ‘A Note on the Type’, Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010.

10

Dexter Sinister, ‘A Note on the Type’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #1 (Spring 2011); Afterall, no. 27, Summer 2011.

11

Dexter Sinister, ‘A Note on the Type’, Graphic Design (History in the Making) (London: Occasional Papers, 2014).

12

See for example, Bruno Latour, What is the Style of Matters of Concern? (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2008).

	
  

321

accompanying book in Italian, as part of the exhibition Graphic Design Worlds in Milan, 2011.
Then there have been five exclusively page-based variations of a meditation on time and contemporary
media titled ‘A Note on the Time’. The first was published in the inaugural issue of Bulletins of
The Serving Library13 with various excerpts from Pistoletto, Alighiero e Boetti, and Régis Debray.
Then it was variously retooled for an issue of Art Journal,14 a bilingual pamphlet in English and
Italian released on the occasion of Alighiero e Boetti Day, a conference in Turin15 (all in 2011),
and as part of a larger PDF-based publication constituent of the group exhibition Counter-Production
at Generali Foundation, Vienna (2012).16 Most recently, it was transfigured into a miniature bookletof ‘instructions’ for Watch Wyoscan 0.5 Hz, a reverse-engineered Casio digital watch we producedwith irregular New York publishing platform Halmos (2013).17

8.3: OPEN-MINDEDNESS MADE MANIFEST
The second essay proper here, ‘Letter & Spirit’, is a free-ranging follow-up to ‘A Note on the Time’;or rather, just as we eventually conceived of Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font as
effectively swallowing Metafont, the sequel swallows its prequel. It begins by recounting aphilosophical debate between Knuth and a couple of colleagues in the early 1980s, then moves quickly
through a prehistory of the drive to rationalize letterforms, and on to some contemporaryconsiderations. It concludes with the proposal to extend MTDBT2F into a fourth dimension by adding
a parameter not in Knuth’s original set – namely, Time. But again I don’t want to overtake the essay
up ahead; I’ll only note that it’s written ‘a level up’, from ‘a higher point of concerted disinterest’.
This time the propellant was another large-scale group exhibition in New York, a half historical, halfcontemporary survey at MOMA concerned with ‘the material qualities of language’ under the double
title Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language.18 We were invited to contribute in a typically vague way,
and up basing the upcoming third issue of our biannual Bulletins of The Serving Library journal on thesame broad theme in order to serve as a ‘catalogue-of-sorts’ to the show.19 As with The Curse ofBigness, this exhibition and its attendant pseudo-catalogue seemed an ideal opportunity to apply the‘time’ idea while writing about it at the same time.
And so we developed what’s essentially an animated version of the font to become the medium ofwhat ended up as Trailer for The Exhibition Catalogue, a ‘moving image’ piece hung among theother works in the show’s main gallery, essentially advertising the journal/catalogue for sale in themuseum’s two bookstores. The animation is markedly minimal: lines of the constantly morphing,white-on-black text spell out across the middle of a high-definition wide-screen monitor, then hang fora beat before moving on. The text comprises a 16-and-a-half minute looping series of hystericallycompressed summaries of the publication’s 13 component essays, the last of which is our ‘Letter &Spirit’. Its animated advert runs:

	
  
13

Dexter Sinister, ‘A Note on the Time’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #1, 2011.

14

Dexter Sinister, ‘A Note on the Time’, Art Journal, Summer 2011.

15

Alighiero e Boetti Day, Auditorium RAI, Turin, Saturday 28 May, 2011.

16

Counter-Production, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 7 September – 16 December, 2012.

17

See: http://www.halmos.us.com/watchwyoscan.html. The instruction manual is available here: http://www.halmos.us.com/
Wyoscan-booklet-pages.pdf.

18

Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 6 May – 27 August, 2012.

19

Bulletins of The Serving Library #3, 2012.

	
  

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How to keep things moving?
LETTER & SPIRIT
is the story of the font you’re reading right *now*
Its predecessor, called ‘Meta-font’
was set up to generate an infinite number of fontsby tweaking a few simple parameters
at different points in time.
But what if
we make one of those parameters*time* itself?
Send that point constantly moving
through an imaginary cube(a 3-dimensional space of possible values)
and as it wanders randomly
it trails a script that renders an alphabet
which morphs according to its current position.
The result is this:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font-4-D

What’s difficult but crucial to explain here is that what you’re reading on the screen is a recordingof a computer script processing in realtime. That’s to say, properly speaking the Trailer (and the later‘moving image’ version of ‘Letter & Spirit’ that was made in the same way) is not video or film or
animation, but a program – computer code – in progress. This is made apparent in the Trailer itself
when, during the line that spells out the font’s new, appended name (-4-D), the animation suddenly‘ruptures’ as the ‘behind-the-scenes’, root-level script is shown live-rendering the action above andto the left of the main text for a few seconds.

And here’s the full version of the long-form essay as published in the MoMA issue of Bulletins of The
Serving Library:

	
  

323

Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRITIn the early 1980s, on the pages of academic design journal Visible
Language, a classic thesis-antithesis-synthesis played out around the tech            
Stanford professor Donald Knuth begins with his article, “The Conceptof a Meta-font” (Winter 1981). Two years prior, Knuth had conceived
and programmed MetaFont— a software that enabled users to generate
unlimited numbers of fonts by controlling a limited set of parameters.
The article is a performative account of his intervening attempts, using
MetaFont to harness the essential “intelligence” of letterforms. In Knuth’sview, the way a single letter is drawn — an a priori A, say — presupposes
and informs all other letters in the same font. This information can beisolated, turned into a set of instructions, and put to work computer-auto               
two or more variables such as weight or slant.
Such intelligence is (and has always been) implicit in any typeface,      
He acknowledges that this preoccupation with designing meta-level
instructions rather than the fonts themselves is typical of the contemporary
inclination to view things “from the outside, at a more abstract level,with what we feel is a more mature understanding.” From this elevatedvantage, MetaFont was set up to oversee “how the letters would       A year later, fellow mathematician Douglas Hofstadter responded withhis “MetaFont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics” (Autumn 1982).
While “charmed” by Knuth’s thesis, and admitting the bias of his own
              
to shoot down his colleague’s apparent claim that the shape of any given
letterform is “mathematically containable.” To support his case, he invokes
mathematician Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, which assert thatany account of a logically coherent system always contains one root-levelinstance that cannot itself be contained by that account. Hofstadter’s
antithesis then usefully couches the debate in terms of “the letter ofthe law” versus “the spirit of the law,” a familiar antinomy that posits an              of principles. Our prevailing legal system is, of course, based on both:      
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Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRIT
Douglas R., Meta-Font, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics: Comments on Donald
unchartedHofstadter,
territorybythefull16:4
rangeof theirexperience to bear
Knuth's"The Conceptof a bringing
Meta-Font" , Visible
Language,(1982:Autumn)
p.309
& #   "'! "$   !adapts.

Hofstadter argues that an accordingly *spirited* conception of type design
would therefore renounce Knuth’s ur-A-FORM in favor of a yet-higher        %
that Hofstadter’s notion of “intelligence”extends beyond a Platonic shape,
allowing for the concept of *what constitutes an A* to change, too —beyond what we can reasonably conceive of this possibly being in the
future. Each new instance of an A adds to our general understanding of
this idea (and ideal), which is necessarily assembled backwards overtime.
Hofstadter includes this illustration of two letters vying for the same
“typographic niche,” to make himself clear: "!"    %"
Sampson drafted a brief response to Hofstadter’s response to Knuth,
titled “Is Roman Type an Open-Ended Question?” (Autumn 1983),
which, it turns out, is decidedly rhetorical. Sampson argues that
Hofstadter’s hairsplitting unfairly and unnecessarily exaggerates Knuth’s
claims to the point of warping both his meaning and intentions. There isenough metaphysical latitude, the linguist referees, to accommodate both
points of view without recourse to the misery of analytical one-upmanship.
Sampson’s synthesis of letter and spirit contends that it is perfectly
reasonable to conceive of letterforms as both a closed system (Knuth’s
A-shape) AND as an open-ended system (Hofstadter’s A-ness).
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Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRIT

Relatively speaking, it depends *what you’re after.*...
The history of typography is marked by a persistent drive to rationalize.
Following the invention of movable type in the mid-15th century, theRenaissance saw several attempts to prescribe the construction of the
Roman alphabet: Fra Luca Pacioli’s alphabet of perfect relations, Albrecht
         "
humanistic rationalizations. These attempts were, however, essentially           ! #
apply Enlightenment rationality to properly technical ends was the socalled Romain du Roi, or the “King’s Roman.” Commissioned by LouisXIV in Paris at the end of the 17th century, it was a typical Age of
Reason project — the imposition of a mathematically-rigorous structure
on forms that had, until now, developed organically, initially shaped by thehuman hand (calligraphy, inscriptions, woodcuts) and adapted according
to the various demands and opportunities of the printing press and its
attendant technologies. Designed by “a royal committee of philosophers
and technologists” from the Academy of Sciences, the Romain du Roi
was initially plotted on an orthogonal 48 x 48 grid, and a corollary “sloped
Roman” italic variant derived by skewing the upright version.

      #                     $ or state-approved materials. In this way, the King’s letters exerted state
power like a great seal or particular signature.
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Such ratiocination was revived at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, in line with
two of the school’s foundational principles set up to meet the demands ofindustrialization: the omission of ornament and the reduction to geometricelements. The most celebrated outcome was Herbert Bayer’s 1925
Universal Alphabet, a pared-down sans-serif comprised exclusively of
lower-case characters. Bayer adapted the basic glyphs for typewriterand handwriting, experimented with phonetic alternatives, and proposeda wide family of variants, such as the condensed bold version drawn on
this panel:

Alongside the basic character set (minus a presumably redundant o,
but with alternatives to a and g, as well as two d’s that anticipate lighter
weights), Bayer has further abstracted the tools he used to draw it:
ruler, T-square, set square, compass and protractor. As such,the drawing captions itself, pointing to its point — that this is a project*intrinsically concerned with a particular mode of construction.*
Around the same time, fellow Bauhausler Josef Albers followed similar                       shapes, also typically isolated and presented alongside the assembled
letters. Drawn and photographed for exclusive use in the school’s own
publications and publicity, these elemental Bauhaus fonts remained
closeted explorations rather than properly industrial products. Neither
was properly developed into a “working” typeface, mass-manufactured
in metal for wider use. Outside the school, though, prominent Werkbunder Paul Renner toned down the hard geometry with gentler, “humanist” sensibilities — more modulation, less harsh on the eye — to yield
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his commercially successful Futura. When it was issued in 1927, godfatherof the nascent “New Typography,”Jan Tschichold , wrote thatit cannot be open to one person to create the letterform of our age, which
is something that must be free of personal traces. It will be the work of             During the 1930s, British type designer Stanley Morison was in charge "% "" "  solicited by The Times., London’s principal newspaper, to take out a'    " "
the page himself, because the newspaper’s existing design was in sucha dire state. This conversation reportedly carried itself up the Times’
chain of command, prompting its director to invite Morison to oversee acomplete overhaul of the paper’s typography. Morison accepted, again
on one condition — that the paper abolish the use of full points after  "&  
prime example of the sort of typographic depravity he intended to stamp  $    
aboard.
Newspaper typography is a particularly sensitive art. Minute adjustments  $     #  "  "  %The
Times. In a 25-page memorandum, Morison concluded that the house
typeface needed to be updated. What became Times New Roman, however, was neither redrawn from scratch nor merely an amendment of the!        $
typefaces made at various points over the previous 400 years. The mon $"    doesn’t exactly “match” the lowercase a — at least not according to theusual standards of typographic consistency. Up close, Times New Roman
is full of such quirks.

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Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRITThe design of letterforms usually manifests an individual designer’s aesthetic impulse at a given point in time, but Times New Roman was the bastard
% !
!$something like that of producer, editor, or arranger. The most frequently
repeated account of the type’s development suggests that Morison gave
an existing type sample and some rough sketches to an assistant in thepaper’s advertising department, who duly cobbled together the new font.
Whatever the story, in a note on HIS type, Morison concluded, auspiciously enough: “Ordinary readers, for whom a type is what it does, will bepleased to leave them to analyze the spirit of the letter.”French type designer Adrian Frutiger took the rational mapping of theRomain du Roi to another plateau with Univers, released by the foundry
Deberny & Peignot in 1957. In line with the all-encompassing aspirationsof mid-20th century Swiss design — locus of the so-called International
Style — Univers was conceived as an unusually extended family of fonts.
The standard palette of variants, traditionally limited to regular, italic,
bold, and sometimes bold italic, was expanded sevenfold, yielding a totalof 21 fonts to be cut at any given size. In the foundry’s publicity, thefamily was usually housed in a two-dimensional matrix: an X-axis charts
relative WIDTH interspersed with POSITION (Frutiger’s term for slant),
while the Y-axis charts relative WEIGHT. The family DNA is manifest ina few eccentricities, such as a square dot over the i and a double-barred
lower-case a, while individual character sets are named according to their" #     

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Univers’ matrix implies that the family could potentially procreate in any
direction  , and, in fact, the project has remained notably open
since its inception. Frutiger himself reworked the typeface for digital
release by Linotype in 1997, raising the total number of distinct character      
the chart (Ultra Light and Extended Heavy), along with new monospacevariants, requiring a third number to be added to the identifying code.
In the wake of Univers’ popularity, further dimensions have since been
introduced, including extended character sets such as Central European,and non-Latin alphabets such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Japanese .
This globalization culminated in 2011 with Linotype rechristening theentire design “Univers Next.”...
Towards the end of “The Concept of a Meta-font,” an admirably frank
Knuth wonders: “The idea of a meta-font should now be clear. But what
good is it?”Hofstadter, for one, had an idea: “Never has an author had anything  #     
work.” Indeed, seeing his own writing in print years earlier, Knuth had
been so upset by the shoddy standards of early digital typesetting that
he resolved to do it himself — not unlike Morison with his Times ad. It
took longer than expected, but a decade later, Knuth had designed TeX,
an automated typesetting system still in wide use today within academic
publishing. MetaFont was initally developed as handmaiden to TeX, togenerate the fonts to be used within the broader tasks of document
markup and page assembly. However, as MetaFont developed as a project
in its own right, its purpose was less immediately apparent. At the timeof his Visible Language article at least, MetaFont appears to be more acase of hobbyist tinkering in search of an eventual application.
To be fair, Knuth does propose a few uses, all of which were alreadypossible but certainly enhanced by the speed of computer processing. One
is the ability to adjust the details of a particular font in line with the limitsof a given output device — to make letters thinner or less intricate, for    !#" BoTSL#3 2012 APR
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Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRIT(on low-resolution monitors). A second is the possibility of generating      %  
to compare and contrast. But a more surprising (and most emphaticallystated) third function of MetaFont, according to its creator, is to meet the“real need” of “mankind’s need for variety.” In other words, to create
%   % 
And so the notion of developing MetaFont as an autonomous project rather
than as one of TeX’s machine-parts appears to aim foremost at expanding
the possibilities of literary expression — anticipating “greater freedom,” a“typeface of one’s own,” “multiple fonts to articulate multiple voices,” andso on. It’s worth recalling, though, that when Knuth invented TeX in order
to better typeset his own pages, or Morison refurbished The Times, theirimpetus was fundamentally reactive, not constructive. They weren’t out toexpand the possibilities for expression per se, only to reinstate standards     !      & 
articulate written language as clearly as possible, not to pile on the effects.
As Knuth himself states, typefaces are more medium than message, to theextent that “A font should be sublime in its appearance but subliminal in its
% $    "      "real need for variety would tend towards the wholesale takeoever ofnovelty as an end in itself.
...
In his 1928 book One -Way Street, the German cultural critic Walter        "# & 
appearance of his or her work,” alluding to the artistic ends that an          &
cally, he predicted that the writer will start to compose his work with a
typewriter instead of a pen when “the precision of typographic forms
has entered directly into the conception of his books,” to the degree that“new systems with more variable typefaces might then be needed.”
By writing directly into a mechanical form rather than a manuscript (aswe’re doing right now) the writer would be working closer to the natureof the multiplied result, and through an increasing awareness and gradualmastery of the form’s new limitations and possibilities *the writing itself
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would evolve;* the shorter the distance between the raw material ofwords and their processed output, the more entwined the content andform from the outset. This line of thinking was more famously expounded
%%(     
Reproduction,” which more broadly argues that an authentic, pertinent
art is the result of engagement with the latest technological innovations.
Benjamin was an active Marxist, committed to the notion that the technologies of manufacture — the “means of production”— ought to be ownedby the people who operate them. In 1934’s “The Author as Producer,”instead of focusing on factories and workers, he attempts to pinpoint thenature of a *socially committed art.* Writing and the other arts, he writes,
are grounded in social structures such as educational institutions andpublishing networks, but rather than merely asking how an artist’s work
stands in relation TO these structures, he queries how it stands IN them.
He demands that artists refrain from merely adopting political “content,”
propagating an ideological cause, and work instead to transform theroot-level MEANS by which their work is produced and distributed. This
“progressive” artistic approach INEVITABLY manifests a “correct”
political tendency. The work practices in lieu of preaching.
'+  !%( !  !)  " 
writer Sergei Tretiakov, who lived and worked on an agricultural commune
for extended periods before writing his experiences up into a novel . He*$%( "# )  
matter at hand, as opposed to the common hack who merely observes
and “gives information.” Benjamin’s Exhibit A, though, is his immediate
contemporary Bertolt Brecht, who subverted orthodox drama by way of  ' ( * )& "  
renouncing expository narrative, presenting a series of objective “situations” in order that the spectators draw their own conclusions. Via theseand other manipulations of “technique,” Brecht transformed “the functional relation between the stage and the public, text and production,
director and actor.”
Necessarily leading by his own and others’ example, then, Benjaminurges the artist to perpetually reconsider his role away from prevailingnorms, job descriptions, professional standards, and outside expectations
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generally. What MIGHT the work of a constructively-minded “writer”
constitute? Are the abilities to distill an opinion and turn a phrase
adequately deployed via the regular mediums — newspaper columns,
books, journals and pamphlets — or might they be more usefully channeled+!)', !.)"+"& */(+"'&*+'(!'+' )(!*')*)"(+*+'%#5$%* or indeed by renouncing writing altogether and taking up photography
instead? Hence the essay’s title is also its proposition: the writer (orartist) should be less a hemmed-in author than a free-ranging producer,
closing the divide between her “intellectual” and “productive” activities.
...
&2 '+'&+!/(3  .()-"',*$/'4)!"*+')/&
extension of Knuth’s MetaFont project. Our appreciative “note” (morea love-letter written 30 years late) was then typeset in our own updated
version of MetaFont — basically Knuth’s project rebooted for the
PostScript generation and, following a throwaway remark by the late-"'*+)$$)!)"*+&+!"4)& +.&!
Two-Font. That “single” note has since been published in multiple contexts
and formats — on screens, pages, and walls. While all conform to thesame basic essay template, each new instance adds three bits of writingby other people, each typeset in unique, freshly-generated MTDBT2-fonts
to demonstrate the software’s essential plasticity. These extra texts havealluded to various facets of the project — *repetition,* *habit,* or *thegray area between art and design,* for example — that have suggested
themselves as it has rolled palimpsestuously along.
+!"4)& +.&!.''&+("#,(.!)&,+!1*+'&+$+'4&++!'&$/ "4)&+.&
the two is that the new version was re-scripted in contemporary code to),&'&,))&+'%(,+)*!&+/(*)),+''&'4"+*'
information, the typographic norms established by metal type (and carriedover into photocomposition) are no longer bound to material necessity
0 +!/&" &')&%'"5&+!"*"*()"*$/.!+&,+!"
However, it was only with the advent and proliferation of PostScript in
the early 1980s that typefaces became “device independent,” freed fromtheir association with particular composing machines and their controlling'%(&"* ,+/'&+!"*&'%"&$2$& , "4)&3  
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remained more or less faithful to MetaFont’s founding principles — notleast its wacko parameters borrowed from Knuth’s Computer Modern
font, which include “SUPERNESS,” “CURLINESS,” and so on.
 !      !   
make it *then,* and what it means to make it *now.*
In his essay “On the New”(2002), Russian art theorist Boris Groys wrote:""*&"'#'"("%&'##&#!"'#"#"0%"'""%"' +$%#( % %'&%&0%"'%#!#'%%&"''&!'!' '&'!#&'%"'!# $%#(('& %%$#"'#(''#"*&+"#
!"&'&!&"0%"''"*&      #%%"**%(" '#%#",(&'&"#'% ''#"+$%)"&'%('(% #
He continues:#% %%'%#%'#" +!(!#%$#&& !%"#'"*&'#%"%+'."#"%"'/'"' - "#'' ('' 
MTDBT2F is, more-or-less, the same as MetaFont, abiding the obvious
fact that it swallows its predecessor. Although the result may look thesame, it clearly can’t be, because in addition to the “productive” software,
the new version embeds its “intellectual” backstory — a story which is
not merely supplementary but absolutely essential. MTDBT2F is a tool
to generate countless PostScript fonts, sure, but it is *at least equally*a tool to think around and about MetaFont.
This broader notion is already ingrained in that original Visible Language
debate, again most keenly foreseen by Hofstadter, who wrote that oneof the best things MetaFont might do is inspire readers to chase after theintelligence of an alphabet, and “yield new insights into the elusive ‘spirits’ "      
call ‘letters.’” Hofstadter is still referencing fonts and computers here, but
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his sentiments can easily be read under what art critic Dieter Roelstraete
recently called “the taunting of thought.” In fact, Walter Benjamin closed“The Author as Producer” with the following summary: #! " "
#""     At least as much as MTDBT2F serves as a functioning typeface, or setof typefaces, then, it is also a red herring, a carrot, and a mirror. It is anominal setup for a nominal subject to play out, typically moving in and"!" #(!!) !  !! 
In this unruly manner, the font serves us (or anyone else) exactly as itserves language — as rubber cement, a bonding agent.
...
&    "'"(& "!  "'
from 2004, design critic Ellen Lupton writes that Benjamin “celebrated
the proletarian ring of the word ‘production,’ and the word carries those!! !!"!'(" &$!!
ialism, a chance to reengage the physical aspects of our work.” To claim,or reclaim, the “tools of production” in the arts today, though, shouldn’t
imply some form of engagement, or worse, REengagement, with heavymachinery, hand tools, hard materials, or the studio (art-equivalent of the!%* " %! !Code resides in The Hollows , the curiously-named engine room of immaterial media, domain of scripts and programs , that has been likened bydesign group Metahaven to the stock market crash: “surface without
surface, the exposure of the naked infrastructure or root level system"$  "!  "$!"!! (! '
Another recent essay titled after Benjamin and written by Boris Groys,“Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” invokes the protagonistsof The Matrix as being uniquely equipped to perceive the workings of The
$  $!)  !
average spectator “does not have the magic pill ... that would allow him
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or her to enter the invisible digital space otherwise concealed behind thedigital image.” And auspiciously enough, Groys also draws on our by-nowfamiliar terms, letter and spirit.
In updating Benjamin’s title, Groys signals the same basic investigation— of an existing phenomenon (this time religion rather than art) in a new
milieu (digital rather than mechanical). Religious practice, he writes, has
always involved the reproduction of institutionalized forms, but as Westernreligion has become increasingly personal and privatized, an unconditional“freedom of faith” has devloped alongside traditional, conditional forms.
      $     $ !"   !"— material and external rather than essential and implied. This antinomyof “dead letter vs. living spirit” (which tallies easily enough with the legal
one related by Hofstadter) informs all Western discourse on religion.
On one hand, the typically “spirited” anti-fundamentalist account favors
a living, powerful tradition capable of adapting its central message to#          
Conversely, the ritualized repetition of the fundamentalist “letter”amounts
to a kind of revolutionary stasis or violent rupture in the ever-changing
order of things. Religious fundamentalism can thus be conceived as religion*after the death of the spirit:* letter and spirit are separated and polarized
to the extent that the former no longer guarantees the latter. “A mate  #    # "! 
          # 
at a deeper level.”
While earlier media suited and so precipitated the circulation of conditional religion (1:1 mechanically-reproduced texts and images disseminatedvia orthodox channels), contemporary web-based media more closely
approximate and so facilitate the unconditional — the wild disseminationof idiosyncratic views. And as digital reproduction supplants mechanicalreproduction, the video image becomes the medium of choice. The cheap,
anonymous, promiscuous character of digital information guarantees
reproduction and dissemination more than any other historical medium.
But what’s REALLY being duplicated is, of course, the image’s code
— its invisible DNA.
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Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRITIn the 1930s, Benjamin had reasonably assumed that future technologies
would only continue to guarantee the resemblance between an original andits copy, but now the opposite is true: each manifestation of the original
EO=?PQ=HHU @E~ANAJP >A?=QOAPULE?=HHUKRANNE@@AJ=J@NA?=HE>N=PA@
according to each spectator’s local preferences (resolution, color calibration, style sheets, etc.) while ONLY THE CODE REMAINS THE SAME.
(J&NKUO{J=H=J=HUOEO OLENEP=J@HAPPAN=NAPN=JOLKOA@BNKI=IAP=physical to a technological plane, where “spirit” is script, and each new
visualization of that script is a corresponding “letter.” (Picture m4v’s,
jpeg’s and mp3’s as angels “transmitting their divine command.”)
By now the terms are confused to the point of inversion: the so-called|OLENEP}KB@ECEP=H?K@AEOTA@ SDEHAPDAOK?=HHA@|HAPPAN}KBEPOR=NEKQO
I=JEBAOP=PEKJOEOQE@"KJOAMQAJPHU BKNIO y OQNB=?AO y =NAJKHKJCANPAPDANA@PK@AJEPAIA=JEJC JKHKJCANLH=QOE>HA =J@OKJKHKJCANPK
be trusted.
This is old news. However, as digital media become increasingly ubiquitous, templates increasingly homogenous and entrenched, the most
likely place a “writer” might usefully “produce” today is in The Hollows .
Hidden or invisible, and otherwise inaccessible to most, this is where
we might conceivably reconnect spirit and letter, essence and identity— for “Ordinary readers, for whom a type is what it does.”...
How to keep things moving?
,AP=%KJP=J@,3#!3%SANA>KPDOAPQLPKCAJAN=PA=JEJJEPAJQI>ANKBEJ@ERE@Q=HPULAB=?AO>UPSA=GEJC=BASOEILHAL=N=IAPANO=P@E~ANAJP
points in time. But what if we make one of those parameters *time itself*?
First let’s transpose the extant ones onto a 3-D graph, running WEIGHT(a kind of bold) along the X-axis, SLANT (more or less italic) up the Y,
and extending SUPERNESS =GEJ@KB?DQPVL=D K~EJPKPDA9>AUKJ@
We’ll ignore CURLINESS for the time being, but we do have to accountfor a fourth factor, PEN, best conceived as a digital “nib” that determines
the line’s fundamental shape and angle at any given point.
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Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRITY

9X

Now let’s send that point *constantly moving* through this imaginary
cube. As it wanders randomly and aimlessly through the space, it trails
a script that renders an alphabet whose form morphs according to its
position relative to the other parameters — not forgetting the fact that
PDALKEJPJE>LAJEPOAHBEOEJLANLAPQ=HQT  J@ ?NQ?E=HHU EPJARANOPKLOThe outcome might be usefully apprehended as the potentially endlessmatrix of Frutiger’s Univers, amalgamated over time like Morison’sTimes New Roman, articulating itself in the manner of Bayer’s Geometric
Alphabet, over the precise wireframe of Louis XIV’s Romain du Roi.
Which amounts to a typographic oxymoron: a SINGLE typeface that’ssimultaneously MANY typefaces and never stops moving.
Naming this shapeshifter is easy enough — just shunt another coupleof boxcars onto the end of the night train to arrive at (deep breath),AP=3DA#E~ANAJ?A!APSAAJ3DA3SK%KJP# KN,3#!3%#
for short.
...
Writing in one place inevitably *performs* in another.
'ANA BKNAT=ILHA NAA?PEJCKJ'KBOP=@PAN{O=J@,KNEOKJ{O=J@&NKUO{
various assimilations of the terms “letter” and “spirit” fosters a morerobust, compound sense of their allegorical purpose. It produces a
cosmopolitan thought. When grappling with ideas in one domain is brought
PK>A=NKJ=JKPDAN PDKOAE@A=O=NAIKNANIHUCN=OLA@=J@OKIKNA
readily utilized somewhere else ... towards considering (say) the ways
in which relative chauvinism and relative open-mindedness manifest
themselves in daily life and work.
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Dexter Sinister: LETTER & SPIRIT           language, the sole purpose of which is to generate two words that markthe border between instruction & instance. Swaddled in asterisks and set
without a full point, this text always reads:**Hello world**

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There’s something not quite consistent about this initial version of ‘Letter & Spirit’, in that it doesn’t
embody its subject and so doesn’t perform its point to the same degree as its predecessor. The many
versions of ‘A Note on the Time’ were typeset in multiple instances of its subject – an essentiallymultiple font. To achieve the same performative tautology, ‘Letter & Spirit’ would need to be ‘set’ inthe moving ‘4D’ version of its subject, rather than one of the theoretically infinite yet momentarily
fixed ‘2D’ ones. But after having worked on the MoMA Trailer, the elements were in place. All we
had to do was cross-pollinate the essay with the animation.
As usual, the transposition from one medium to another required a huge amount of re-editing.
The plausible amount of attention we’re able to devote to reading text on a screen (both in public andprivate) is famously way less than that afforded to printed pages. Based on the template of the Trailer,
we worked out that a similarly animated version of the unabridged essay would end up a few hours
long, so it was clearly going to require some serious compression.

In spring 2012, we had cause to make a trial version of the animated version of ‘Letter & Spirit’ to be
used as a sample text on an eccentric mechanical subtitling device, which was on temporary display ina church during an annual graphic design festival in Chaumont, France.20 We squeezed out a first draftof the reduced essay, and from there honed it into increasingly shorter, denser versions for a couple ofother venues later the same year. First on a large cinema screen part of a film programme at Tramway,
Glasgow,21 then as part of a day-long series of events that launched a long-term ‘research program’ on‘black-and-white psychedelia’ that we assembled together with Lars Bang Larsen and Angie Keefer
under the compund name Dexter Bang Sinister.22 Then we showed a ‘finished’ version, clocking in atjust over 16 minutes, back at the same church at the same French design festival exactly two years after

	
  
20

23rd International Poster and Graphic Design Festival, Chaumont, France 26 May – 10 June, 2012. The machine was part of
Jürg Lehni’s project, ‘Moving Picture Show’.

21

Tramway Festival of Artists’ Moving Image, Friday 14 September, 2012. Letter & Spirit was shown together with John
Smith’s Slow Glass (1991), which also served to inaugurate our three-screen projection ‘Identity’ at the same venue (see §8.5–7
below). Around the same time, the animation was also running on a TV set over on the other side of the city as part of a groupshow at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (formerly the 3rd Eye Centre).

22

Research Programme: Dexter Bang Sinister, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark, 21 January – 28 October,2012. Its themes were developed in Bulletins of The Serving Library #4, 2012.

	
  

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the initial demo.23 As the festival is based on the town’s collection of seminal posters, we ‘borrowed’a hundred-year old cigar advertisement that hung in a local hotel and repurposed it as an announcementfor our piece, the essence of which we finally managed to distill into an accurate subtitle: a *program*that runs a *script*.
Dexter Sinister presents

LETTERSPIRITA *PROGRAM* THAT RUNS A *SCRIPT*

CHAPELLE DES JÉSUITES, CHAUMONT
17 MAI – 9 JUIN 2014

Concluding this section is a quick two-part speech we read out at Tramway in Glasgow to introduce
one of the early screenings of Letter & Spirit along with with British structuralist filmmakerJohn Smith’s Slow Glass (1988–91, 16mm), a 40-minute meditation on time, change and memory
considered relative to the industrial production of glass. Moreover, we juxtaposed the two in order toallude to and inaugurate our three-screen projection ‘Identity’,24 which was about to open elsewherein the building later the same evening.
Before the films we read this:So tonight we’re going to show John Smith’s Slow Glass from the late 1980s, and our own Letter &Spirit made earlier this year, both chosen in view of our exhibition on ‘Identity’ which we can go roundthe corner and see afterwards. The first thing to say about these two films, perhaps, is that the second
one isn’t properly a film at all. It’s a video. And then it’s not even really a video, but rather, as it statesitself, a running computer script – a bunch of code being rendered in realtime.
The first is by John Smith, a British structuralist who as you might know has been making short films
since the 1970s. At 40 minutes, this is one of the longest he’s made to date. His most well-known isprobably The Girl Chewing Gum, a 12-minute gem from 1976 that consists of a more or less fixed
10-minute-long shot of a drab junction in Dalston, London, while he retroactively narrates what’s about
to happen about a second in advance of it actually happen on screen. He then appears to direct thevarious passers-by, animals, vehicles, and even a clock on the top of a building across the street.
You might recall him instructing the clock’s minute hand to make one complete revolution every 60

	
  
23

25th International Poster and Graphic Design Festival, Chaumont, France, 17 May – 9 June, 2014.

24

See §8.5–7 below.

	
  

342

seconds. The scene is banal, sound and image are sent out of sync, and it’s improbably funny, likemost of his films.
Slow Glass is apparently autobiographical but still primarily concerned with time, particularly the plastic
nature of change and memory. In it, a number of disparate vignettes are linked by a running threadabout the manufacture of glass that reminds us of the ever-alarming fact that glass is actually a liquid.
This is the point of overlap with Letter & Spirit, which runs for 17-and-a-half minutes. It’s a supercompressed version of an essay of the same name that we wrote for the last issue of the journal wepublish, Bulletins of The Serving Library. Both the article and its animation tell the considerablycomplex backstory of a fundamentally plastic typeface we’ve been developing over the past few years.
As such, both Slow Glass and Letter & Spirit are industrial films – by which we mean they conform in
more or less twisted ways to that largely lapsed genre of documentary that would typically track thejourney of Coca Cola bottles or cars or computers along their respective assembly lines. So Smith’sfilm is about the material production of glass, and ours about the immaterial production of a font.
But there’s something else going on too: both are equally – or maybe predominantly – about the
production of metaphors: the production of glass comparative to the plasticity of time, for instance.
In this sense, they’re perhaps more rightly thought of as meta-Industrial films – though that sounds
pretty unappealing. As it happens, when Plato first used the term ‘metaphysics’, he didn’t mean toconnote anything like ‘beyond’ or ‘transcendent’, but just ‘after’. His book on metaphysics simply
came after his book on physics. Abiding this sense, then, we can perhaps more usefully conceive of
these two pieces, Slow Glass and Letter & Spirit, as post-industrial films. That’s how we’d like tothink of them tonight anyway.

And after the films we read this:So now we’re going to take a break from the film program and invite you to the gallery to inaugurate
a three-screen projection called ‘Identity’ – that’s in quotation marks as well as italics. In order to linkfrom here to there, we want to quickly point to the two conjunctions in our apparently unremarkable
compound title of the double bill you just saw; namely, ‘Slow Glass and Letter & Spirit‘
Although the two ands in the title sound the same, the first one is a regular A-N-D that separates (orjoins) the two films, while the second one is an amspersand (&), the single looping character originallyderived from the conjoined, calligraphic French for ‘and’ (et, an E and a T) that separates – or joins –the ‘Letter’ with the ‘Spirit’ of our piece. The distinction describes a subtle class system, a hierarchy.
We were both schooled in typography, which is to say the art, or maybe craft, of the articulation ofvisible language; and we were taught that an ampersand asserts a closer bond between two words
than a regular AND – a more intimate link
like salt & pepper,or knife & fork,or fish & chips,
or left & right,or Bonnie & Clyde– all are twin terms that constitute their own unit.
The films we’re just seen are both concerned with making apparent things that are usuallyimperceptible, like the invisible crawl of time – which hopefully chimes with this subtle difference
between & and AND.
Also worth pointing out is the fact that, unusually for the Roman alphabet, an ampersand actually looks
like what it does. That’s to say, it’s a fundamentally entwined character, a line that threads through andconnects with itself, contrary to a plain old AND which, in a more typically arbitrary fashion, doesn’tlook like what it does.

	
  

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And this proximity, or lack of proximity, between what something is and how it comes across – theform in which it’s dressed – happens to be the main theme of the ‘Identity’ projection elsewhere in thebuilding tonight.

8.4: ARTISTIC LICENSE
A couple more practical applications for both 2D and 4D versions of the font cropped up. The firstwas quick and straightforward. We were invited to design a cover for one of 12 centenary issues of Art
in America, specifically the magazine’s annual gallery listings edition. As the cover had to prominently
list the basic categories being inventorized, we simply proposed using different MTDBT2F for eachword – but then suggested they extend this logic to the entire listings inside. Surprisingly, they agreed,
and the whole issue ran exclusively as if contaminated by the font for one issue. We duly ran the latest
verison of ‘Note on the Type’ in smallprint on the last page.
And finally, we were able to put MTDBT2F4D to work as a particularly fluid graphic identity for theParis and San Francisco-based Kadist Art Foundation, essentially a private collection of art with public
ambitions. One of the Foundation’s curators seen the signage and attendant wall essay at Artissima in
Turin back in 2010, and now, a couple of years on, asked whether they could adopt one or more of the
fonts generated by our software as part of their new identity, which involved the usual overhaul of theirwebsite, printed matter and other PR. We proposed to not simply supply a single instance or set of the
2D original, but to license the 4D extension for a circumscribed period of time. Given that the font
would primarily be used as a logotype on their website (www.kadist.org), the script could constantly
run live and hence the letters change constantly. However, we set the tempo in order that the font
would morph very, very slowly; so slow, in fact, that’s its beyond (current) human perception.
We settled on 10 years as a reasonably unreasonable amount of time to license the font – the idea being
not only to allow Kadist to use the software for that long, but equally bind them to doing so. Under the
influence of the ‘Identity’ project we were working on around the same time,25 we were interested towork against the frequent turnaround of institutional identities, which are often readily scrapped either
by a new management seeking to assert itself, or simply in view of keeping up with the latest fashions.
We also convinced the Foundation to acquire this specifically tailored MTDBT2F4D for theircollection, thus complicating the identity’s own identity – another case of ambiguously applied art.
And so we ended up handing over a piece of software set to randomly alter their logotype over a periodof 10 years. The ‘KADIST’ embedded in the website would be constantly active; and as and when thename was required to be manifest elsewhere – on a piece of print, for instance – the particular state of
the logo at that particular point in time would be output for single use. As such, the logo would visibly
change across the legacy of relatively ‘fixed’ media, too.

The whole package was presented to a public audience at Kadist’s San Francisco wing on the eveningof 19 January, 2013. We introduced the project, played that last version of Letter & Spirit, fieldedsome questions, then read the binding part of the contract out loud and had the Kadist management
undersign it along with ourselves in front of a large crowd of witnesses. And in what then amounted tosome kind of warped full-circle, this ‘contract’ was written into a version of one of our ‘Note on theTime’ pieces – which by this point had branched off into its own haphazard family tree. To really sign
off from this project, we finally published versions of the three essays that make up the present chapter
in the guise of a ‘style guide’ to Kadist’s new acquisition, available to download from their site:

	
  

25

See §8.5–7 below.

	
  

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Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIME

The time right now is 2011 Feb 18 3:34 PM. Now, have a look at the
PEIAOP=ILA@=PPDA>KPPKIKBPDEOL=CAPD=PI=NGOSDAJPDEOHAS=OH=OP
edited. It reports 2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM. What’s going on? These two
PEIAO?KQH@JARAN>ALNA?EOAHU=HEGA y A=?DEO=OLA?E?/.(-3 =J@JK
two are ever exactly the same.
Both originate from the same source though — a networked time server
maintained by Apple Computer and named, simply, time.apple.com. This
ATPANJ=H>A=?KJ?KII=J@OJKPKJHUPDAK?E=HPEIADANAKJIU,=?!KKG 
but also synchronizes its local clock with those of Apple users worldwide(laptops, desktops, phones, pods, pads, who-knows-whats-nexts). It’s
easy enough to think of time.apple.com as a master clock, but actually it isitself only a network of time machines, a collection of counters comprisedof a circuit of servers — computers named time1.apple.com, time2.apple.
com, time3, time4, time5, time6 and time7. (The server my laptop is using
right now (time4) is located at 20400 Stevens Creek Blvd. in Cupertino,
California, just a few blocks away from Apple’s appropriate corporate=@@NAOO (JJEPA+KKL
All of these servers communicate and agree what time it is at time.apple.
com. But this covers only North and South America, and also must
synchronize itself with time.asia.apple.com and time.europe.apple.com to
LNKRE@A=QJEA@=JOSAN HHPDEO?HKOA?KKN@EJ=PEKJ ?KIIQJE?=PA@KRAN
distance and time, is governed by Network Time Protocol (NTP), a set oftime-sharing conventions developed in advance of the World Wide Web in
1985, by University of Delaware professor Dr. David Mills. It is one of theoldest, and essential, Internet protocols.
NTP runs as a Ponzi-scheme. Each layer in the scheme organizes a setof time servers, who both receive the correct time from the layer above(each layer is properly called a “stratum” in the protocol) and also areresponsible for dispersing the correct time to computers in the next layer
down. At each level, more and more computers are connected.
The protocol works by sending a message between two points on a
network containing two bits of information: 1. what time it is now at thesource, and 2. how long it took to transmit this message to its receiver.
Simple addition tells you what time it is on the receiving computer2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM

33

	
  

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Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIME

changing typeface(according
to the sender).
to serveSo,
as thewhat
logotypetime is forit, precisely?
Kadist. This
Multiply
font software
thistransaction through the layer-cake of millions of computers redundantly
SEHH>ADKOPA@KJHEJA=PSSSG=@EOPKNC=J@LNK@Q?A=PEIAOLA?E?BKJP
organized around the Network Time Protocol, and you’ll begin to see a=JUPEIAEPEO=??AOOA@1=PDANPD=JKJAOLA?E?=HHUE@AJPE=>HABKJPPK
collective consensus emergePDEOQE@PULAB=?ASEHHNAJ@AN@EOPEJ?PHU=P=JU
I=NGPDAE@AJPEPUKB*=@EOP
that passes for accuracy.
moment in time. This custom typeface may be used by Kadist in print=LLHE?=PEKJOKJPDAEJPANJAP=J@EJKPDANQJOLA?EA@QOAOPD=P=NEOAKRAN
Turns out thatin order to send a MESSAGE between two POINTS, it’sthecoming10theyears.
essentialthattwo points AGREE on what time it is, otherwise the?KIIQJE?=PEKJEOFQI>HA@ MQE?GPDKQCDPCUIJ=OPE??KJNIO8KQHERAEJ
Los Angeles
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me, “Hey! In one minute the eclipse is going to start, you’d betterrun outside right now to see it (don’t forget your sunglasses)!” and I drop
whatI’mbegindoingthisto rushrightoutside.
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in one minute still!” In the midst of this tedious exchange, surely the
IEJQPA=J@HKKG=C=EJ=PPDAPEIANALKNPA@EJPDANOPOAJPAJ?AKBPDEO
moon
has passed
in handed
front of down
the sunand everyonein question
has missed
text. This
time wasthroughthe cascadeof networkedtheWhata misunderstanding!
timeparty.
servers
described
previously, but where did the original “time”
come from and how was it set?
These kinds of missteps multiply exponentially over a network, and it
shouldbe blindingly
how Time
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In the top
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is hookedisnow, inpresent.
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this is theperhapstime is moreof aClockmediumthan aatmeasure.
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time
it is. Atomic clocks rely on the fuzzed logics of quantum mechanics.
NIST-F1.
As electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom, rather than winding downSometwoinyears
agolikeweawereapproachedby Kadist
Foundation,
graduallyenergypendulum,they lose
energyArt
in discrete
chunks,who
asked
if they
our Meta-the-difference-between-the-twoat which
point
the could
circlinguse
electronjumps down to the next closest orbit
Font
for their
graphiclike
identity.
thought,
instead,thatThese
it wouldbeproducingsomethinga veryWe
very
very faint“click.”steps
more
useful to forextendby makinga versionis constantly
are consistent
any MTDBT2F
one atom, andthis quantity
is its that
resonantchanging,
evolving
over 10ofyears.
Everyoneand wefrequency.gradually
The resonant
frequency
the cesium
atom,agreed,for example,
drafteda letter onHertz
21 October
2011:
is 9,192,631,770(or cycles
per second). And in a twist of recursive
E@AJPEPU PDA-(23D=OOAPPDAK?E=HOP=J@=N@BKNOA?KJ@PK>AAMQ=H
to 9,192,631,770
vibrations of
the cesium
atom. SInISTERThe UnitedandStates’This
is a letter of agreement
between
DEXTER
primary time
frequency standard
is setthen will
by NIST-F1
and isKaDIST
aRTandFOUnDaTIOn.
DexterSinisterprovide graphic
accurate
to within production
one secondandevery
60 million years.
designconsulting,programming
services. We will design
and program a custom software program that generates a very slowly
2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM

34
35

	
  

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Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIME

2KUKQ?=JJKSIKNAKNHAOO=OOQIAPD=PPDAPEIAOP=ILA@EJPDANOPHEJAKBPDEOPATP@KAON=PDAN=??QN=PAHUNAA?PSDAJPDANOPOAJPAJ?AS=O
written.
6A{@=HH=CNAAPD=P%A>/,E@AJPEAOKJAOLA?E?/.(-3
in time, a forever unrepeatable instant that disappears as quickly as
we can stamp it. 18th-century empirical philosopher David Hume would
certainly concur. Working from the center of the Scottish Enlightenment,
Hume described his particular, uncompromised version of empiricism.
He asserted that everything we know or can know about the world arrives
to us only through direct sensory experience. Nothing exists outside of ourown practical encounter with it as we move through the world. Further,he suggests that any sensible experience is composed of a single indivisible
sensory building block which is marked by the limits of our perception.
If you can’t experience it, it does not exist. Hume most certainly was an
essentialist.
While American empirical philosopher William James built many of his
ideas on Hume’s scaffolds, he also rejected Hume’s reductive essentialism.
In James’s second-wave or “Radical” Empiricism, although knowledge
about the world still arrived through direct experience, he dismissed
what he called Hume’s “atomism” or the idea that this experience was
ever-assembled from smaller elementary blocks. James was, instead, a“Gestaltist”— a totalist who, although insisting on the incrementalism ofbuilding the world piece by piece, also understood that any one experience
was whole and complete in and of itself, neither equivalent to nor reducible
into any constituent bits.
2KEBSA?KQH@MQANU'QIAKJKQNPEIAI=NGA@EJPDANOPHEJAKBPDEOPATP 
he would identify it as one irreducible moment. However, ask William
James and he says that this POINT is really more of a DURATION. Timeis like that — both point and duration. This is how it can bend and warp.
SAAG =OA?KJ@ =OA=OKJ=HH=NAOLA?E?=J@@EO?NAPA >QPJKJA=NA
the same. The present can be cut to any number of lengths, from a single
vibration of a cesium atom to the 3-month run of a contemporary art
exhibition.
On Fri, 4 May 2012, about six months late, and after many technical2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM

36

	
  

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Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIME

hurdles, the slowly evolving typeface was ready. We sent an email to
Kadist describing the software apparatus involved which (anticipating
PDA@E?QHPUKBGAALEJC=HHPDEOOPN=ECDPH=PAN S=OSNEPPAJ=OIQ?DBKN
ourselves as for the record generally . The subject line was “10 years
from now”:
How to keep things moving?
Meta-the-difference-between-the-2-Font-4-D (MTDBT2F4D) is aliveand has been running at a considerably sped-up pace for the last week ontemp.kadist.org, depositing new fonts once a minute continuously. It is now
ready to go live and begin making new fonts once a week for the next
10 years.
This is how the whole thing runs: the software is composed of many parts
made under different circumstances by different people at different times
built one on top of each other, like a lasagna of sorts. at the bottom of
the heap (the starting point) is MetaFont, a software written by Donald*JQPDEJ,AP=%KJPLNK@Q?AO >EPI=L BKJPOKJPDAU OLA?E?PK
the output device, using a framework of essential skeletons for each letterthat are drawn as required with a particular pen. The skeleton of a K, forexample, will look quite different on each occasion depending on the explicit
parameters fed to the software when it’s run.
So Knuth’s MetaFont (MF) already existed. We updated the frameworkthat sits on the top of it, which both allows MF to run on a contemporary
OS, and also massages the parameterization process, adding and alteringsome of the adjustable values. These additional or adjusted parameters
include SLanT, SUPERnESS, WEIGHT, and PEn (which includes
sub-settings for the form, rotation, and ratio between the width and height
KBPDAJE> 3DAOAOAPPEJCO=NAATLNAOOA@=O=JASOAPKB,%OKQN?AHAO
The next layer is made of a tracing software (mftrace) and a fontproduction program (fontforge), both automated through a bash script.
This combination produces a newly convenient, installable TrueTypeformat font from the the 30-year-old MF sources. a subsequent set offiles are used with four MORE programs (shell scripts that mix python
and bash which call fontforge routines) also written by us.
2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM

37

	
  

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Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIME

These are MTDBT2F-compile (assembles one proper MTDBT2-Font),
MTDBT2F-convert (automates the batch creation of alternate versions),,3#!3%I=GA SNEPAO,%OKQN?AHAOKJPDAU=??KN@EJCPKOLA?E?
values fed in), and MTDBT2F-4D (a daemon-like process that moves
the parametric values within an imaginary cube).
We imagine the resulting Meta-the-difference-between-the-two-Font-4-D
as existing within the possibility space of this cube. any one (momentary)
instance of MTDBT2F4D exists as a point in the 3-dimensional space,@AJA@>U6$(&'3=OPDAT=TEO 24/$1-$22=OPDAU=TEO =J@
SLanT as the z-axis. We then take PEn — actually the most variableand perhaps consequential parameter in how the font looks — and set
it traversing the 4th dimension of time. (PEn’s values are also always
incrementally changing within their own limits .) The minimum andmaximum values for any of these are set before the process starts
running, and, given that each step is made according to a random value
generated by the software, and that the *changing* step values multiply
through four dimensions, then the resulting forms (MTDBT2F4D fonts)
can’t be predicted.
On the kadist.org server, then, the entire shebang is controlled as a cronFK> =PEIA@ARAJPKJPDAOANRAN?KILQPAN PD=PPNECCANOKJAJ=HODAHHO?NELP ,3#!3%NAHA=OA 3DEOLANBKNIOPDADA=RUHEBPEJC EJOP=HHEJCJ=HHAOEJPDALNKLANLH=?AO ?HA=JEJCQLAP?  OUKQ?=JOAA EP{O=BQOOU 
messy recipe, though considerable care was lavished over its assembly.
PPDEOLKEJP SAKJHUJAA@PKEL=OSEP?D EA ?D=JCAPDA?NKJFK> PKCAP
the thing running at the 10-year pace — so you just need to let us know
when that time comes. Given the protractedness and patience that has
necessarily accompanied this baroque process so far, we’d prefer sooner
than later.
The whiplash of this email back and forth between technical details andsomewhat grander notions is pretty much the experience of the wholeproject — so we must say again thanks to all involved for the time, spaceand spirit necessary to make it happen. It’s certainly a heap of work to
produce something that “simply” updates and swallows a software from40 years ago. now we get to spend the next 10 watching it grow. Maybein the meantime we’ll evolve slower eyeballs.
2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM

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349

Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIMEMTDBT2F4D went live (well, in a trial run that lasted another six months,
during which time we troubleshot any issues as the new Kadist website
was being built) and things moved on. But let’s double-back one more time
PKPDAPEIAOP=ILA@EJPDANOPOAJPAJ?A%A>/, J@=HOK 
to the time as it stands right *now*: 2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM. We’ll agree
that the difference between these two points describes a length, but how
can we measure it? Our meter-stick won’t do. Time is nothing until it iscounted, and for that we need a clock.
In From Sundials to Atomic Clocks (Understanding Time and Frequency),
James Jepsersen and Jane Fitz-Randolph describe keeping time as only
a matter of counting the ticks of any regular, cyclical action. They also
describe the constituent parts of a “clock” (or more properly a “clock
system”). Schematically, it looks like this:First, you need a device that can produce a periodic phenomenon (forexample, a pendulum). This is the RESONATOR. Next you’ll haveto sustain the periodic motion by feeding it POWER (for example, thewound coil of a mechanical clock spring). Finally you need a means forcounting, accumulating and rendering the ticks of the resonator. This is the
DISPLAY (for example, a clock face and arms). Together, these three
LEA?AO@AJA=?HK?G!QPKB?KQNOAPK>AQOABQHyPKIA=OQNA=HAJCPDy
our clock must be RUNNING. With all of these conditions met, we can now
OEILHU@APANIEJAPDA@QN=PEKJ>APSAAJSNEPEJCPDANOPOAJPAJ?AKBPDEO
text and editing this one: 537 days, 0 hours, 59 minutes. And this delivers
KJAJ=HL=N=@KT3EIA?=JKJHU>AIA=OQNA@>U,.5(-&This “clock system” Jespersen and Randolph describe can be easily
applied to the KADIST logo. In this case, POWER comes from the hodgepodge collection of softwares wrapped up into the Meta-the-difference2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM

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Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIME

between-the-two engine. This runs on the www.kadist.org server,
automatically producing new versions of the font once a week, regularas, umm, clockwork. This timed release is the regular tick-tick-tick of the
RESONATOR. Finally, the DISPLAY is the actual KADIST logo, and its
OLA?E?PULKCN=LDE?BKNI =P=JUKJALKEJPEJPEIAKB?KQNOA
Now, in order to guarantee that this 10-year speculation is allowed to run
its course, we need to seal the deal by signing a contract to license thesoftware. It is based on M IT’s concise template, with certain pragmaticand poetic alterations to suit this case.
Software © 2013, DEXTER SInISTER
1AHA=OA@QJ@AN=IK@EA@, (3+E?AJOA
Permission is hereby granted to KaDIST aRT FOUnDaTIOn for
10 years from the counter-signed date of this license, having legally
K>P=EJA@=?KLUKBPDEOOKBPS=NA=J@=OOK?E=PA@@K?QIAJP=PEKJHAO
(the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, or modify (but not merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of) the Software,subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
The Software is provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind, Express
or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of Merchantability,
PJAOOBKN=L=NPE?QH=NLQNLKOA=J@JKJEJBNEJCAIAJP(JJKARAJPOD=HH
the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or otherliability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from,out of or in connection with the Software or the use or other dealings in
the Software.
The Software relies on platforms and protocols that will inevitablychange over the next 10 years, as the speed of technology continues toaccelerate to near-terminal velocity. nevertheless, every reasonable effort
will be made in good faith by DEXTER SInISTER and KaDIST aRT
FOUnDaTIOn to maintain the Software over this time period.
2013 Jan 22 3:45 PM

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353

8.5: HOW THINGS COME ACROSS
The remainder of this chapter tracks a project that takes a broader view of art institutional identities– and by proxy the rise of marketing culture in general. It began as a loose commission and ended up asa ‘three-screen projection’ for Artists Space, a privately sponsored, non-commercial gallery in New
York’s Soho. Established in 1972, the space was initially artist-run, and each consecutive exhibiting
artist was responsible for choosing the next. It was unusually community-based and socially-minded,setting up benevolent initiatives like the Emergency Materials Fund and Independent Exhibitions
Program, as well as the world’s first artist registry, the Irving Sandler Artists File.
In 2008, German curator Stefan Kalmár was newly appointed as director. He immediately stripped out
all the walls that had amassed in recent years to uncover a light, spacious shell, and around the sametime approached us with the vague suggestion to work on ‘something about the graphic identities of art
institutions’. Artists Space’s archive included a considerable amount of audio-visual four decades’
worth of exhibitions and events, along with all the attendant printed matter – stationery, letters, press
releases, invitations, posters and other publicity.
Early on, Stefan proposed we might draw on this collection of ephemera to tell the story of the space’s
graphic identity as it evolved over time. The material ranged from early eclectic iterations of ‘nonidentity’ (i.e. made according to the whim of whoever happened to designing such material for any
given event; often the exhibiting artist), through increasing consistency in the late 1970s (though still
decidedly ad hoc), then a sequence of more conspicuously stylish treatments during the 1980s (marked
by the colder look courtesy of newly affordable personal computers), and on to something distinctly
more rigid, ‘corporate’ and ‘branded’ during and since the 1990s. In short, the collection was a
textbook teleology of graphic fashions over the past 40 years, and Stefan saw how this simultaneously
traced the ways such institutions perceived themselves – and so contrived to present themselves – inthe context of a burgeoning global culture industry.
We suspected the real reason behind all this implied research was that Stefan actually meant todevelop another new identity for Artists Space – only in some adroitly ‘off’ manner, perhaps somehow
analogous to the space’s newly skeletal interior. We could vaguely conceive how this might extend
from, say, similarly reconsidering institution’s history to yield some form of self-swallowing metaidentity– something conceptually over and above a mere redesign, at least. It didn’t sound great.
We said we’d think about it.
Although the idea of a meta-identity did hold some attraction, not least because we couldn’t thinkof any immediate precedent, or what it might even mean,26 we were reluctant to get involved because
designing identities for institutions – art-based or otherwise – was the sort of work we’d spent a longtime trying to avoid. One main refrain in this thesis is that concerns over ‘identity’ have come todominate the field of design; that way too much time, energy, and money is spent worrying over
how things come across as opposed to what things fundamentally are. The reasons why ‘face values’
are the driving force of contemporary commerce are patent enough, as are the ways in which suchvalues are socially corrosive. Like many others, we were trying to conceive how to work outside
and/or against and/or in spite of this condition where image presides over actuality. At the very least,
we preferred to turn our attention to other ends if and when possible.
As it turned out, we’d been wrong about that imagined real reason behind Stefan’s invitation, becausesoon afterwards Artists Space was reborn with a new identity designed by Berlin-based ManuelRaeder. Although not exactly a ‘step removed’ in the way we were dimly trying to perceive, it was
nonetheless curiously and attractively simple: a no-nonsense, almost equilateral triangle that mightvariously and interchangeably suggest a primitive letter A, an upward-pointing arrow, an elemental
Bauhaus reference, and so on.

	
  
26

All this happened before we made the animated identity for Kadist Art Foundation, which reasonably qualifies as one suchattempt (see §8.4 above).

	
  

354

With this phantom obligation out of the way, we reconsidered but found ourselves still procrastinating.
At this point in our intermittent discussions with Stefan and a new co-curator, Richard Birkett,the material could equally have congealed into a book, exhibition, series of talks, or any other orthodox
format. The lack of a clear target was less a reason for being stuck, however, than the fact that the
project’s stakes just didn’t seem high enough. If the idea was to tell the immediate story of theinstitution’s graphic identity in order to offset some broader allusions about the rise of parallel andcommensurate cultural tendencies (from, say, political spin to identity politics), the story just didn’t
seem urgent or interesting enough to warrant the work.
Otherwise put, the story of the rise of identity as a cultural concern seems so self-evident (and old hat)that it was hard to see how any ‘interpretation’ we might bring to it could be anything but trite. Since
the end of the 19th century, commercial enterprises have needed to distinguish themselves from othercommercial enterprises, and their products from others’ products, first in order to assert proprietary
rights, then foster reputation, then recognition, and eventually loyalty. All of which underwent achange in kind – intensified – when the brand itself became the product rather than merely a signifierof one. More to the point, the mechanisms of identity – branding, marketing, PR – continue to work on
us even as we readily comprehend how and why they work.

8.6: DEBATABLE
Variously self-described as a ‘think tank’, ‘research group’ or ‘speculative design studio’, Dutch duo
Metahaven have recently worked with similar subject matter, though on a far more ambitious scale:global rather than local, political rather than cultural, and centred on the precarious identities ofcontemporary nation states. It’s the running subject of their Uncorporate Identity (2010), a book thatcombines their own ‘speculative design’ projects with essays that cut across contemporary sociology,
cultural criticism, political theory, anthropology, and philosophy.27
In 2008, just before we started thinking about Artists Space, they also published a 48-page pamphlet
called White Night Before a Manifesto. The document is a terse, bombastic account of contemporary‘design’ as having come to be more or less synonymous with immaterial, digital ‘surface’.28 Graphic
designers are remodelled as ‘information architects’, uniformly tasked with imbuing endlessly
multiplying surfaces with spurious, unaccountable values within spurious, unaccountable economies.
It’s a troubling, vertiginous narrative that, although certainly a reflection of its subject, is also partly
the result of Metahaven’s equivocal use of the word ‘design’.
But the really discomfiting aspect of Metahaven’s dystopian description is how airtight it is, i.e. thefact that it doesn’t admit other possibilities. This is all the more curious given that their own work
clearly demonstrates one such alternative – not least in the case of the pamphlet itself, which, although
about surface, certainly examines it in considerable depth. By writing in a propulsive, engaging way
about past, present, and future roles of what goes on under the name ‘design’, Metahaven are far from
simply affording some abstract surface nebulous value. On the contrary, they complexly explore apertinent issue, presumably for the greater good. It’s a deliberately debatable document – and this is
one way they exceed the dreary template they otherwise portray as one big fait accompli. 29
Here’s an example of the sort of agency that Metahaven assert by design, demonstrating rather thanarticulating it. White Night concludes with a hanging question: namely, what happens to the
traditionally declarative, outspoken statement of a manifesto once released from a corporeal carrier,when it’s dispersed as immaterial, diffuse and freely manipulable information?

	
  
27

Metahaven, eds., Uncorporate Identity (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2010).

28

Metahaven, White Night Before a Manifesto (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2008).

29

David and I discuss the pamphlet’s pros and cons in §9.4.

	
  

355

Only they don’t just ask the question, but embody it by pointedly publishing the same document
in two formats, one material and one immaterial, and strongly emphasizing (= drawing attention to)their contrasting qualities. The physical pamphlet (below left) makes the most of its ‘object quality’:
it includes a functionally redundant but elaborate, embossed passport-style cover bound around the
top left corner; the main body is on far thinner stock and runs to the number of pages that officiallyconstitutes a pamphlet (i.e. the stereotypial manifesto format); and it’s a showcase for contemporary
digital ersatz, making extensive use of Adobe Photoshop filters and effects, approximating in print abunch of stylistic features more native to the screen. In short, it has the look of surface, conferring
value via ink on paper. The digital PDF (below right), meanwhile, is as zero-degree as it gets: blackon white 12 pt. Helvetica, enabling it to be efficiently copy-pasted across other devices and platforms
and so circulate as widely as possible. ‘The hollows’ is a term Metahaven coin in the document as
referring to ‘root-level’ information below or in advance of the public interface; and this freely
circulating, immaterial format has the look of raw material before the application of surface value.

Metahaven
White Night
Before A Manifesto
May 2008
PDF version

Also available in an offset printed and illustrated editionwww.metahaven.net

White Night’s two distinct carriers are thus very much part of its point. This is precisely what an
intelligently ‘speculative’ approach to graphic design can hope to achieve, i.e. to assemble‘extra-textual’ qualities that are very much part of its ‘text’ in view of more robust, palpable, engaging
and sophisticated meaning.
In any case, our considering White Night in this way gave us a handle on the Artists Space project.
What seems obvious in retrospect was a revelation at the time: namely, that the manner of navigatinga subject can be more or just as telling than the hard facts of what’s being navigated. And so webegan to read extensively about and around the subject of graphic identity, with a view to pointedlytransforming the material. The aim became to project a history of graphic identity in such a way
as to demonstrate a sense of design counter to the one being narrated. That is, to make something thatwould be, to a cartoonish degree, naked, direct and animated to counter its dilute, duplicitous andalienating subject.

8.7: QUOTED OUT OF CONTEXT
The rest of this chapter comprises the eventual script of our ‘Identity’ projection, typographicallyformatted as follows for a small booklet made available to take away from the show. This booklet
ended up an integral aspect of the exhibition, not least because the script was eventually composed
entirely by quoting others’ writing way out of context. While we were obviously mindful not to
warp those words away from their original meanings, because we’d taken unusually reckless liberties
in terms of truncating, paraphrasing or otherwise entirely reworking the material, we exhaustively
compiled the original sources at the back of the booklet. One function this publication served, then,

	
  

356

was as an inventory of sources (and possibly a copyright loophole) – hence the easy-reference line
numbers on the right-hand side of the script.
In this source section we reinstated as much of the script’s fragments’ surrounding text (including
original orthography and spelling) as seemed necessary to reinstate the fullest sense of the doctored
part. This often meant padding the excerpt with several paragraphs of the original (and in one special
case even an entire piece: Terry Eagleton’s fantastically merciless review of identity oracle Wally
Olins’ book On Brand. And so what’s ostensibly an extended colophon or set of endnotes ended
up more like an appendix of further reading that, even reduced to smallprint, ran to twice as many
pages as the script itself.30 We also came to consider the booklet as integral rather than supplementary
to the projection, because it offered an audience the chance to digest what ended up being over
20 minutes of fairly relentless information in more conducive circumstances.
Here’s how the whole thing was described on the wall, handout, and press release:‘The danger is that it’s just talk. Then again, the danger is that it’s not. I believe you can speak things
into existence.’ – Jay-Z, Decoded, 2010
‘Identity’ is an exhibition that charts the emergence and proliferation of graphic identity since the turn of
the twentieth century, with particular reference to contemporary art institutions – museums, galleries,and so-called alternative spaces.
The period since the 1960s in particular has seen significant shifts in the perceived role of contemporary
art in society, as well as the impact organizations displaying art have on economic and politicalinfrastructures (and vice versa). ‘Identity’ attempts to animate the typically fraught relationship between
cultural and corporate spheres, as contemporary art institutions become increasingly preoccupied
with their own image. How do changes in the graphic identities of art institutions over the last five
decades reflect the shifting landscape of institutional policy and strategy? How does the conception of‘identity’ – through an organization’s use of graphic design, its marketing and branding – function to
mediate between audience, artwork, and institution?
Initiated by Stefan Kalmár and Richard Birkett of Artists Space, ‘Identity’ has been developed over a
two-year period by Dexter Sinister – the working name of designers, publishers and writers Stuart Bailey
and David Reinfurt – with research assistance from Robert Snowden. The resulting exhibition centers
on a three-part projection that functions as part informational film, part minimalist cartoon. This audiovisual essay uses three case studies – London’s Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and theCentre Georges Pompidou in Paris – as coordinates from which to plot a broader landscape. Looking at
the evolution of their ‘brands’ over the last 50 years, the film projects how art organizations negotiate
their positions on a spectrum of ideology and economy.

	
  
30

They are duly included in the Appendix here for the same reason.

Ramakrishna Sudheen

Ramakrishna Sudheendra

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2010: Open. Diverse. International. Entrepreneurial. Sustainable.
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Sometimes doubtfully, sometimes reluctantly, art institutions haveadopted the idea of brand – usually in a limited way. Now theyneed to fully embrace it.
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a suitably slick account of a supremely shallow phenomenon.
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but the more discerning among us have not yet been reduced tothis tragic condition.
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came the brand then came the product.
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80

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Sometimes, I use another nickname: Pomps. I guess in English
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361

pou. Not that I think that Claude Pompidou was as glamourous as
Betty Boop, but I really like alliterations.

110

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20th century art, but many, and every work is capable of multiple
readings.

120

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was based on an entirely new set of carefully created, honed andmanipulated perceptions.

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departure from Hong Kong, devolution, integration with Europe,and Princess Diana’s death.” It goes on to detail the degrees ofembarrassment “Britishness” provokes at home and abroad– abundant with bad food, snobbery and poverty.
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and the deregulation of the private sector.

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The government necessarily understood the importance of how
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whose structural lines echoed the rising stock indices.

170

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180


	
  

	
  

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  $     &!
Beaubourg in the present moment at the risk of its going out offashion.” Still, pressed to develop ideas for a possible emblem,
they presented this set of symbols:a triangle for the music institute,a circle for the industrial design center,a diamond for the library,     190

%    &  
&
VDA’s objective, however, was to convince their clients that such" ' "  "
and the team continued according to its initial proposal: no logo,
no symbol.
The Centre Beaubourg is neither a bank nor an airport nor a grandhotel.
ALL

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200

ALL

Above all, what counts is what’s done and lived rather than what is
said: things count, not their appearances.
CENTER
1972: American designer Jay Doblin wrote that in order to learn toread logos you had to know at least 3,000 different signs – a task !   #  210

He then asserted the uselessness of such symbols: total wastes oftime and money – rumor had invoices rising to $100,000.
Concluding his diatribe, Doblin suggested abandoning logos to
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their fatal perversity and adopting typography instead: “A little
Helvetica lowercase can get the job done.”


220

  *(),.'()'./ "%%(,'!$())%'!(!(thought of as a marketing ploy, ideologically contemptible, and so
totally at odds with the ambition of a cultural institution.
The new civic arts center in the heart of Paris planned to bring four-!()!$!$()!)*)!%$()%) '*$'%$'%%!$"*!$) )!%$"
*(*#%%'$')
As there was no particular need to identify the new center beyond
its location, it was provisionally called the Centre Beaubourg,)') $! %' %%!$) '!(!()'!)+$)*"".!),(given a proper name to honor the former Conservative prime
minister.

230

CENTER  $(*##'+)!%$!$'#%$)) *(*#%%'$')/(0'()!')%'"''' ).&%'& !&!& $.
 #*(*#/(%0!"'+!)!%$,%*" ) %* )be better served by a lowercase “o.” A colleague responded:

240

Dear Helen and Alfred,Haven’t you two characters got anything better to do than spend
an entire summer haggling over the problem of whether the
'+!)!%$( %*",'!))$(%'%
I must say that in this instance I think the lady is right. In all my.'(!$) #*(*#!)$+'%*'')%#)%*("%,'( “o.” It may be correct but it gives me terrible visual hiccups.
I can only conclude that the estimable A.H. Barr Junior is losing
7

	
  

365

his sight and mind in Greensboro.
RIGHT  #)"- # " - "'' '(- &"#"') ("-#  "'+'#"#(4&'("'#('kind. Although commonplace today, the notion of creating a$#&(&(##!$"- 2"')'%)"( -)(-"(($()&
– was almost unheard of.

260

$&'0#&$#&("((-1+'#""( '(#'&#+ #"#&".(#"/'*' !"'((#"'&'"(#&(#&"(+# ''#(+('$4
theme, attitude, or personality.
(#" ."(##')'-!# '!$&(#(practice: “Incisive, balanced, open, its personality does not&$&'"("-$&() &'$ .(#"1

270

CENTER   ((&"#&()')!##&" &(+'&(by Chermayeff & Geismar, who also designed logos for American
& "'&#,"# !#"#(&'-+&&(#&(0 ""'(&(#&+&(-$#&$"((-(#&5(the museum’s major renovation.”#&"(# &!-&" "#('0((/'!#&" 280
with roots … It has some character, and therefore some warmthabout it, and some sense of the hand – i.e., the artist. It makes a#(#'"'#&()')!+'"#(#" - ##"(#()()&
but also looking to the past.”“It is obvious to us that unless a symbol is truly appropriate to()')!('((&"#((#*#"(&3")!&#
different directions, none of which led to any satisfactory solutions,
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perhaps because there IS no one symbol of modern art.”
290

ALL

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ALL

An “image” is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan, or an
&,%  %#'(%'&&'("(&,%'#%&"!',#%"1
CENTER
'*&,"%'&!'''( %&" ! .!'%!'"!(&!&&!&"%#"%'"!/*& !'#( !!'"./#%",' "&'+#!&)! "&'
valuable abbreviation in history.

300

A team led by Eliot Noyes developed its streamlined trademark,'"#%"'$("'.! #%&&)/ 
ALL

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!*(&'*"% *#!,"!&&&'!'"!
'*!*'*&!*'&%,'% 0!*+#%&&
our preferred interest in what is to be seen.

310

CENTER  !!"'"!&  "%"(!'!""&
Albers stated:.%!"'! "%"&'%""-"""%"%
&'&"!&)(!'!'%'#"!+!"%'
320
unicorn, we have dug up no helmet and plume, nor have wetacked on learned mottoes. Instead, as a symbol of union, we have"&!& #,& #%!'&! #&-%!'" #&-
coming together. Or, it is one circle within another: color and*''!&"*!! !''!""! ,#(--
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367

over cryptic monograms, we give our full address.”
RIGHT  #"(!!&-$/!!-&%!($#!
!!&-!!# ('!'$&(#&!&&$"
National Gallery of British Art.

330

CENTER  )')"$$&# &($%###-'(&(!!(&( &''(/&'("$& "&##'(()($#($,()&$%#$&#'"
$&(/&'(-&'()')"+' #$+#-(')!!#"rendered in geometric letterforms typical of the Bauhaus, and$&#'"#&!!-

340

The clear geometric form is one of the most easily comprehended.
Every possible form lies dormant in these basic elements. They are
visible to him who sees, invisible to him who does not.
'%&$/!#*&$)'*&'$#'&%&'#(( ))'("&Dessau, and Chicago. It replaced this original Bauhaus symbol,"$& #($'$#.'"& 

Around this time, German electrical company AEG put architect,engineer and designer Peter Behrens on retainer as artistic
consultant, in charge of designing products such as bulbs, kettles
and heaters, as well as the company’s logotype, publicity, andeven buildings.
Behrens wanted to reduce objects and icons to essential –or “typical” – forms: geometrical motifs and streamlined curves('#$$('($%%&$,"('!$'!-'%$''!their function, and the design of the icons that represent them

360

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,())*(0#&,+%(+%1+)(++#%,(,"#' (*&,#(',"1*
supposed to provide about those objects.
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All we want to do is to show that there is a difference between an
urn and a chamberpot, and that in this difference there is leeway
for culture.


370

5 -(-*!6&'+5-,# -%.#%%!6-,#'," ,"',-*1,"
*/+$'(/'+54 9%(,#'+%-*'-&8*(-'67(*5#%,"1#+%'number 1.”
RIGHT  ",&,&*!,,"'( ," ,"',-*1
when philanthropic sugar magnate Henry Tate donated his(%%,#('( (*')#',#'!+,(,"0#+,#'!,#('%%%*1
of British Art.

380%%,",4+( ;#%(&&-'#,#('+&,*#% (*,%+,,";*+,
1*+(*,"(1%(,(  *&+," ,(#&!( all national public institutions.
Heraldry is a graphic language evolved from around the 12th century,(#',# 1 &#%#++,,+'(,"*+(#%!*(-)+)#;.#+-%
(*&+1#%+)#;&'#'!+''1"*%#.##++*#390
by both a written description or BLAZON, and its corresponding
graphic form.
%2('+ (%%(/+,*#,+,( *-%++*#1'',*#.(-%*1*#. *(&*'"*#+,(*1"#.#+#('( +"#%(*0&)%#++*##',*&++-"+/"#"&'+“right,” and SINISTER, which means “left.”
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A given heraldic form may be drawn in many alternative ways,
!!$#('&*+!#)*()()!))' ".%'#)#variety of fonts.
400

ALL

ALL

ALL

No two things or acts are identical. Every act is an invention,
yet we can grasp the universe only by simplifying it with ideas ofidentity by class, types, and categories.
  $(#0)!)($##),#/##)'),$'!0(410
rear view mirror – a chasm separating earlier cultures from our$,# '#($'")$#(#")'!*!)*'('+"*$)')
1,($#$$'($#,.#)0(A Bar at Folies-Bergère is-%)$#!
Look at the counter. You’ll see two bottles of Bass Pale Ale, with)'"!'')'#!!$$)0('#))"#.$*( #$,2'()
hand. Seeing it in the painting connects us in a wink with the late
19th century. All at once, via a commercial logo, we’ve discovereda bridge over that cultural chasm.
420#)0(%#)#"*()!($$*'!$#()'*###-"%!$%'$*)%!"#)' )'()((-*!)  .'($
-%$(*')$)'##!!'(#')$$ ( 1))0(!$)$
eyeballs!
RIGHT   )'"' (!!!.%'$))()$!))'(%)*'or a design, identifying a particular product.
430

$()(*!'# '(#+#($"+'.('$*($#($#0)
#$,)))')'#!,$'#(+'.$))!()2'()
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trademark issued in the UK.
$'$" "#$"$$'
an employee of the Bass brewing company stood on line all night$#%"$$$"'%$,"#$$
books, closely followed by a Red Diamond for their strong ale,%$""$",$" #$%"*&"#
440

ALL

ALL

ALL

"## +#!%""$" +$$""$#
plastic language.
 
#!%"" "#$#$'"$#""
RIGHT



The circle is the traditional symbol of eternity and the heavens.
CENTER
The triangle is a symbol of generative power and spiritual unity.
Although these broad interpretations occur in many cultures
throughout history, because of their formal simplicity they can be&#$'$,$#%$&#
460

ALL

ALL

ALL

' ($" )$&"##&#
,%"$ ##&$# $)##$"%$%"
CENTER#$#$"%$( % ") )
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enough, the way to move beyond a pair of binary opposites is to   

470

It’s obvious when you think about it in terms of simple geometry,
and it invokes a baseline metaphor about the development of ideas.
!  " # one adds a second dimension, the simplest structure of which is a   This is a PROJECTION:

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A
NEW
SYMBOLPROPOSED& PROJECTEDINSIDE THIS SPACE
IS (LIKE EVERY LOGO)ALL SURFACE: A BUBBLEBLOWN AROUND NOTHING
INFLATED TO BURSTING POINT
BY THE LAZY ASSUMPTION THATWHAT WE LOOK LIKE IS WHO WE ARE
IN OTHER WORDS, “IDENTITY” = IDENTITY



	
  

	
  

373

That calligrammish triangle on the final page ended up being the only bit of text in the whole script wewrote from scratch, i.e. that wasn’t borrowed and amended. It was intended in good faith as a nagging,hanging question without a question mark.
The regular Artists Space logo was supplanted by this ‘hollows’ version for the run of the show – in all
printed and electronic communications, and on flags announcing the show in the neighbourhood.
We even tried to bring the whole project full circle by proposing that the text triangle ought to replace
the usual version for good – and so become the actual new identity after all. Apparently that was a step
too far, for the solid, surface version was reinstated as soon as the projection came down.

	
  

375

Tuning fork

	
  

376

	
  

377

9: GREY AREA

This is the last bit of theory before concluding with the elaborate practice of time travel. Here I want tohone in on the peculiar nature of the work being done by Dexter Sinister and their ilk – meaning
whoever else is applying the ways and means of graphic design to indeterminate ends in the contexts ofcontemporary art. What is it they think they’re doing, exactly?
At various points in these pages I’ve noted that, over the past few decades, the channels for a sociallyoriented graphic design practice have been largely eradicated by an all-pervasive corporate sensibility
that prioritizes profit over culture – and hence bureaucratic concerns over aesthetic ones. This is theprovince of focus groups, marketing and Public Relations departments for whom design is synonymouswith mediation, typically done by committee under the banner of creativity and the mindset ofbranding. It results in a social environment dominated by dilute, bland, monotonous forms: the look of
the lowest common denominator. How to work against it, or in spite of it?
The first section, ‘Surplus to requirements’, quickly recounts a recently written dictionary entry on‘graphic design’ in order to consider its very lack of definition. ‘Orphaned interests’ notes how those
designers with a humanist urge to resist capitulating to big business have branched out into morediverse roles. This is followed by a lengthy talk concerning the work of Richard Hollis, a graphic
designer and historian,1 whose own practice is as telling as the work he writes about. The trajectory of
his career traces how the role of the graphic designer has changed in the past half-century or so.
Hollis always considered graphic design a kind of ‘social work’. If his career traces the diminishing
agency of the graphic designer (at least in the form conceived by his generation), the next section
tells how the assorted venues of contemporary art have become productive places to work out thesame progressive impulse – crudely put, to make the world a better place to live – via a certain breed ofinterrogative, philosophically-inclined projects at the art end of design and the design end of art. In along conversation, ‘The morning after’, David and I discuss what’s good and bad about White Night
Before a Manifesto (2004), a polemical pamphlet made by a couple that operate in the same grey area
as ourselves, self-titled ‘speculative designers’ Metahaven. This document became a useful means ofrefracting some awkward concerns inherent in our own enterprise.2 According to the pamphlet, the roleof the contemporary designer is bleak and uncompromising, yet their own practice suggests something
far more hopeful and constructive. Indeed, Metahaven’s Daniel van der Velden has proposed thatdesigners ought to applying their expertise in view of designing themselves a whole new vocation.
With this in mind, ‘Anatomy of a duckrabbit’ tries to nail the benefits of the art/design hybrid, i.e. theparticular qualities of those respective artist/designer dispositions supposedly being merged. The
popular duckrabbit is emblematic of the way of working promulgated by this thesis, which is in turnoffered as a proof of that maxim that served as our starting point: form must be a way of thinking.
I consider how this borderline art/design work usefully registers aspects of our condition in a similar
way Eco’s Open Works did 50 years beforehand – and how it might continue to do so.

9.1: SURPLUS TO REQUIREMENTS
In an astute summary of Stefan Themerson’s Semantic Translation,3 Mike Sperlinger noted that the‘clarification of meaning’ that the technique supposedly offers is essentially parodic. By satiricallyreplacing worn-out clichés with their dictionary definitions, what’s actually being clarified, he says,
is that it’s impossible to truly clarify meaning, because ‘meaning will always escape and proliferate’.

	
  1Richard already cropped up in dialogue with Robin Kinross in §7.2.

2

White Night was aready briefly noted as food for the thinking behind ‘Identity’ in §9.4.

3

For a full description of Semantic Translation, see §7.5. Mike’s comments are drawn from his introduction to the film
Stefan Themerson & Language in Dot Dot Dot #17, 2008.

	
  

378

As Themerson often reminded us, ‘the world is more complicated than the language we use to talkabout it; therefore it must also be more complicated than the truths about it which we express in that
language’.4
I had this in mind when asked to suggest a definition of ‘graphic design’ for a new Design Dictionary
in 2008:5
Rather than the way things work, Graphic Design is still largely (popularly) perceived as referring to theway things look: surface, style, and increasingly, spin. It is written about and documented largely interms of its representation of the zeitgeist. In recent decades, Graphic Design has become associatedforemost with commerce, becoming virtually synonymous with corporate identity and advertising, while
its role in more intellectual pursuits is increasingly marginalized. Furthermore, through a complex offactors characteristic of late Capitalism, many of the more strategic aspects of Graphic Design are now
undertaken by those working in ‘middle-management’ positions, typically Public Relations or Marketing
departments. Under these conditions, those operating under the title Graphic Designer tend to be
responsible mainly for those aspects of production (typesetting, page makeup, programming) at the
tail-end of this system.
On the other hand, in line with the ubiquitous fragmentation of post-industrial society into ever-smaller
coteries, there exists an international scene of Graphic Designers who typically make work independentof the traditional external commission, in self-directed or collaborative projects with colleagues inneighboring disciplines. Such work is typically marked by its experimental and personal nature,generally well documented and circulated in a wide range of media.
As these two aspects of Graphic Design – the overtly commercial and the overtly marginal – growincreasingly distinct, this schizophrenia renders the term increasingly vague and useless. At best, this
implies that the term ought always to be distinctly qualified by the context of its use.

On reading this passive-aggressive anti-definition, a friend complained it was far too subjective.
He added that it might be a good idea to subject it to an objective Semantic Translation. I think hewas joking, but I duly outsourced the task to a group of design students, partly in order to find out
how accurate they thought my original description was, and partly because I thought it would be a
productive task for them. I split the definition into bite-size sentences and randomly assigned them tothe class. Here’s one such chunk from the end of my definition’s first paragraph, after it had passed
through the semantic mangle of one of the students:
Additionally, through a group of related circumstances contributing to
the descriptions of recent profit-based trade, many of the more
carefully planned features of the art or profession of visualcommunication that combines images, words, or ideas, are undertaken by
those earning income at the level just below that of senioradministrators, typically those helping to maintain a favourable
public image or those in the territorial divisions of an aggregate offunctions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer.

I can’t say the rewrite changed my mind about the validity of my definition, but it was a productive
exercise for the following reason. Because so many of the sentences dispersed among the students
contained the same base terms, not least ‘graphic design’ itself, when we came to recombine them backinto one collectively-translated composite, their new ‘definitions’ of the same word were paradoxicallyso diverse that we were forced to settle on one – which effectively meant amalgamating a few – in orderto make the composite version clear and consistent. In other words, we were impelled to transform abatch of relatively specific meanings into more diffuse, abstract ones in view of their broader	  4

Stefan Themerson, ‘Before publication’, an interview with Stefan Themerson on Radio Polskie, Warsaw, April 2, 1964.

5

Michael Erhoff, Tim Marshall, eds., Design Dictionary (Berlin: Birkhauser, 2008).

	
  

379

application by a larger number of people. This amounted to a bracingly empirical lesson in the knotted
implications of definition and democracy.
Another interlocutor argued that my definition pulled its punches by not pointing to the more
fundamental point that the overtly commercial and overtly marginal poles of graphic design are equally
impotent: the commercial end inasmuch as the kind of work typically commissioned by corporate
enterprises has become insipid and innocuous, stuck in a loop of catering to market-researcheddemands that are themselves based on desires based on the previous round of market-researcheddemands; the marginal end because its intellectual collateral, i.e. personal interest and investment,
is predominantly hobbyist, and so devoid of social or political motivation and efficacy.
The same colleague argued that the role of design has rotated 180 degrees from solving problems tocreating desires; and that, regardless of whether these desires are pointed towards commercial or
intellectual ends, they are always essentially surplus to requirements, i.e. trivial and inconsequential,
without urgency. In his view, the serious contemporary designer ought to design him- or herself a
new role altogether – a ‘research’ position devoted to entirely speculative projects with no obligation
to produce actual products; a breed of graphic design roughly equivalent to what’s meant by ‘paperarchitecture’.

9.2: ORPHANED INTERESTS
In view of joining the ends of the circle of this thesis, I want to reiterate some of the ideas that cropped
up in a letter reproduced back in chapter 2 concerning the way graphic designers have assimilated otherroles in the broader ecology of the communications industry. Back then I described these orphanedinterests as ‘lost’.6
Based on my own experience and others’ accounts, it’s safe to say that in earlier eras of graphic
design’s relatively short history (a hundred years, more or less) there used to be many more prospects– avenues, opportunities, incentives, enthusiasm – for the socially-minded, constructive graphic
designer than are apparent today. With national bias, I’m thinking in particular of design groups in thewake of the Second World War like Design Research Unit, or the long-term legacy of famously‘design-conscious’ public institutions such as London Underground, British Rail and the Departmentof Transport.
In these and other cases, design was more plausibly considered a form of ‘civil service’. Paul Stiffsums up the conspicuously ‘modern’ approach of this milieu as one of ‘articulate advocacy’, concernedwith shaping ‘a visual argument or persuasive statement’ by deploying ‘a wider range of verbal andvisual resources than imagined by printers or commercial artists.’7 Such positivism was applied to awide variety of everyday products and services intended to make the world more convenient andefficient, namely timetables, signage systems, maps, government forms and other civic printed matter;basically, the sort of work that ‘aims to be ameliorative, prescribes improvement, and flourishes best
within conditions of well-grounded optimism about social progress.’8
Naturally all these items are still made in one form or another. The point is, they’re no longer being
made by designers working from the bottom up, but by bureaucrats operating from the top down.
It’s broadly acknowledged, too, that designers in the cultural and even commercial sectors weresimilarly more involved, and so more engaged, during, say, the middle third of the 20th century. They
were involved from the outset, working not only at the surface of communication (i.e. at the level ofcomposition, colour, etc.), but equally in depth (i.e. equally responsible for thinking through the	  6See §2.3(c).

7Paul Stiff, Introduction to Typography Papers 8: Modern typography in Britain; graphic design, politics, and society,2008, p. 4.

8

Ibid.

	
  

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context, format, language, etc.). The designer’s current role, by contrast, is more akin to a software
operator who works at the 5% tail-end of the design process, applying relatively superfluous form tothings that have, to all intents and purposes, been 95% designed by someone else already.
This is obviously a massive generalization. There are still certain pockets where a plausibly ‘social’
graphic design can flourish, driven by cultural forces other than quantification – in the realm of
infographics, for instance, such as the daily diagrams made by the in-house team at The New YorkTimes. Still, the general decline is patent enough. Most contemporary graphic design discourse today
tends to invoke a zero-sum distinction between ‘commercial’ and ‘cultural’ work, with the ‘social’
an excluded middle. That ‘cultural’ is generally taken to mean the arts (and sometimes charities);
but as cultural institutions and products are fast becoming just as subservient to market forces as anyother more overtly profit-seeking enterprise, even these two categories barely hold. A more accurate
division can be drawn between ‘commercial’ and ‘uncommercial’ work.
The American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James once wrote: ‘The currents once
in, must find a way out.’9
There have been plenty of marginal, experimental attempts by graphic designers to avoid or defer
capitulating to the corporate default, not least the inclination to simply branch out, seeking roles
where designing frays into other aspects of publishing. The trend recalls Walter Benjamin’s call(back in the 1930s) to look beyond the default forms of a given milieu and get involved with its rootlevel mechanisms.10 Countless imprints, stores, spaces and schools have emerged from the orphanedinterests of the ‘committed’ design scene – publishing, writing, selling, producing, manufacturing,organising events, and so on. Definitively set against the mainstream, such enterprises are naturally
precarious, usually in search of cash and an audience, and frequently short-lived. But there havebeen notable successes.
However, in view of the myriad private presses and other very local publishing projects that populate
the surprising number of art-inflected book fairs in New York, Berlin, London, and so on, design critic
Andrew Blauvelt has rightly noted that the process of making the product has seemingly become
more important than the result.11 In other words, the production is the product – the books andmagazines and websites and any of the other nominal ‘goods’ being produced by this scene are carrots
and red herrings. Such culturally invested yet utterly marginal publishing seems increasingly anaemic
because it’s foremost made for the people who made it.
Design for design’s sake doesn’t make nearly as much sense as art for art’s sake does. If profit-based
commercial design work is more or less a superficial add-on to what are usually already luxury
products targeted at mass markets, the uncommercial counterpart is generally drawn from someone’s
personal, niche interests with no real profit motive and no urgent need for an audience either. Suchproductions inevitably foster a certain amount of community and goodwill, and it would be churlish to
see this as negative; but in being so self-serving they’re not really ‘socially-oriented’ in that former
sense either. It’s hard not to sense a considerable amount of denial in this scene – a communal delusionthat what’s being produced has more cultural reach, agency and effect than is actually the case.
If the situation is confused and confusing, one thing’s clear enough: we’re no longer working within‘conditions of well-grounded optimism about social progress’ that Paul Stiff deemed necessary for aproperly constructive approach.

	
  9James, ‘Habit’, op. cit.

1011

See §1.4.

Andrew Blauvelt, ‘Tool (Or, Postproduction for the Graphic Designer)’ in: Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton, eds.,
Now in Production (Minneapolis: Walker Art Gallery, 2012).

	
  

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9.3: THE TRUTH ABOUT HOLLISThe following talk was delivered at Artists Space in New York as part of a retrospective of Richard
Hollis’s work that I co-curated with design critic Emily King.12 Like many other sections, it could
easily have been slotted into other chapters – to illustrate the notions of work in movement or articulate
objects, for instance. (Since all are constituent of the same general set of working principles, thisshouldn’t be too surprising.) It ended up here near the end, though, in view of summarizing a lot ofwhat’s gone before, such as the inflections of ‘modernism’ mentioned in the opening paragraphs, or theelaboration of technical processes native to graphic design; as well as serving as a concerete case of
how a formerly more autonomous, engaged vocation became eroded by social, political and economic
forces.
Back in the exhibition, on one wall we projected footage of Hollis speaking about his work in front of
an audience in London a couple of weeks beforehand, then organized his work to match to thesequence of his presentation in order that an audience could walk through the work in sync with his
account. As such, I tried to avoid repeating here what he was articulating there.
Much of what I’m going to say tonight about Richard Hollis’s work follows in the large footprints ofBritish typographer, publisher and design historian Robin Kinross, who was the first to pinpoint theparticularity of Richard’s work in an article titled ‘The New Tradition’ back in the late 1980s.13 Robinused the term to flag the fact that Richard’s work is very much its own thing – an approach rooted in
the modern movement, yet worked out in a unique way – personally, practically and pragmatically;‘on the ground’, so to speak.
In recuperating that largely lapsed term ‘the modern movement’, I mean to emphasize a specific set of
attitudes related to, yet essentially distinct from, more commonplace conceptions of modernism.
‘Modernism’ is of course a famously slippery and promiscuous term, and one reason for supplanting it
here is to avoid its hydra-headedness, which tends to blur into useless ambiguity. More specifically,
then, by ‘modern movement’ I’m alluding to a markedly socially grounded and implicitly socialist
denomination of modernism, contrary to a set of stylistic tropes particularly common to the conceptionof the term over here in North America.
Generalizing wildly, I could summarize this even more specifically New York-based idea of modernism
in terms of fine art with reference to Clement Greenberg’s definition of the term as the self-awarenessof a medium, working towards the realization of its most fundamental characteristic (most famously the‘flatness’ of painting). Or I could equally summarize it in graphic design terms by pointing to theelemental forms and one-liner concepts that characterized the huge amount of work developed foradvertising and big business from around the 1950s onwards.
By contrast, the modern movement I have in mind has less to do with form or style, but consists rather
in an attitude or disposition. There’s a rhetorical shortcut to all this: I want to isolate the ‘movement’
from the ‘modern’. Fundamentally, I think this is what Richard did: he took modernism and ran with it.
Now, as well as being a graphic designer, Richard is also an important design historian and, to a lesser
degree, a theorist. Actually, it’s more accurate to say he was a very good distiller and synthesizer ofother people’s theories as part and parcel of his histories. He dislikes overly academic writing, andexpressly avoided what he considered unnecessarily technical jargon such as ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’– but he was always careful to explain why he was avoiding it too. He writes as engagingly andunderstandably for as wide an audience as possible, and this is one of many subtle ethical aspects of
his work: both the stuff that he makes, and his accounts of other people’s stuff, are unusually clearheaded and generous.

	
  
12

Richard Hollis, Artists Space, 21 September – 10 November, 2013. Richard was introduced earlier in the thesis, in §7.2.

13

Robin Kinross, ‘The New Tradition’, Blueprint, no. 46 (April 1988), pp.38–39.

	
  

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A teacher of mine once said to me: understand history and the present will take care of itself. Richard isa prime case in point. He has his interests, obsessions and influences like anyone else, but over 50
years of work he also properly digested and transformed them. Morevover, he’s a rare instance ofsomeone equally accomplished as a historian and a practitioner, and both roles significantly feed eachother. In this sense he lives in the same place in my mind as Jean-Luc Godard. It always amazed me todiscover Godard was an encyclopaedic and outspoken film critic years before making films. How did
he manage, I wondered, to make that first propulsive decade of movies without being hindered if notentirely paralyzed by the weight of his own theoretical upbringing, as is surely far more common?
Graphic design is famously alien to art galleries, because it’s quoted so far out of context as to alienate
any audience trying to grasp what makes it good. Let’s begin with a definition. Richard has a very niceway of defining graphic design that’s counter-intuitively straightforward – like much of his work.
‘Graphic design’, he says, ‘is what is made by graphic designers.’ It’s a deceptive tautology. He’s not
being funny; he’s making the point that the vast majority of things that are categorically graphic weren’t
necessarily designed – laid out, configured, articulated – by someone who considers him- or herself adesigner. Graphic design on Richard’s terms, then, is work made by someone well aware that they’rein the business of manipulating text and image, ideally according to meaning.
I’m deliberately using the word ‘ideally’ there, because with this redundant-sounding definition Richardmeans to imply that this awareness is critical – that’s to say, self-doubting and constructive. And fromhere it’s only a short jump to say that graphic design is something made by someone committed to theidea that the practice has its own histories, theories and peculiarities. For him, then, calling somethinggraphic design is already a value judgment, and on more than one occasion he’s lamented that thissense – of engagement with the discipline, of the discipline of the discipline – is increasingly scarce.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, though I know why Richard thought so considering where thefield seemed to be headed back in the early 1990s when he said it. More on this later.

This book jacket – not to be taken very seriously, mainly to show where the talk’s title comes from –has been on a high shelf in the toilet next to Richard’s basement studio in London’s Clerkenwell for as
long as I can remember, which is to say around 1995 when I started working with him. It was a few
years before I actually pulled it off the shelf to discover the cover had been doctored by a friend toinclude a fragment from a biographical note in one of Richard’s books. Anyway, back then Richard had
just bought his first Apple Mac and wanted me to show him how to use it. I was just as interested inlearning from him what’s known as ‘paste-up’ – a technique that was then fast approaching extinction.
Richard always says that graphic design can be considered in terms of three key aspects – social,technical and aesthetic; but that far too much attention is devoted in writing and teaching to theaesthetic at the expense of the other two, in which case you miss at least 66% of what’s interesting
about a given piece of work. With this in mind, I’ll start with an overview of the technical aspect in thetime of Richard’s work; the social and aesthetic ones will emerge in due course.
The work upstairs crosses three technical paradigms, beginning in the 1950s with letterpress (aprocess that had remained largely unchanged since Gutenberg’s invention of moveable metal type in
the first half of the 15th century). The emerging figure of the graphic designer typically provided
instructions for a printer to follow when assembling the metal or wooden type into a frame from which

	
  

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to pull an impression, sometimes together with engraved images. The designer had to specify hisdesires in the language of the printer and photoengraver. He was limited by the types the particular
printer had in stock, and other factors such as the formats available on specific machines.
Next, photosetting and offset printing began to supplant letterpress during the 1960s. Here thedesigner was required to literally paste up bits of paper – strips of type known as galleys, perhaps
supplemented with dry transfer lettering, handwriting, or even sticking together words letter-by-letter,
combined with photographs or drawings. The composite result was itself photographed and a printing
plate made from the negative. Designers had their own process cameras and made their own halftone
images, the equivalent of scanning an image today. As such, they began to take control of the
production process.
And photosetting has in turn been superseded since the late 1980s by computer page-makeup, whichof course involves programming digital instructions in order to output on-off ink values to make plates,
without the need to go through a middleman.
You can clearly see the traces of each of these processes – from letterpress through photosetting tocomputer page-makeup – across the chronology of the work upstairs. The middle process of paste-up– to make master sheets for photosetting – was probably used to make the majority of it. Richard oftenemphasizes how fundamentally physical graphic designing was before the advent of personal
computers. As this book cover for Rod van Uchelen’s Production Techniques and New Applications(1977) suggests, paste-up epitomizes this physicality, assembling what’s essentially the final material
to be reproduced at actual size. This is very different from designing for print on a computer, in virtual
space and likely not at the same scale as the object itself (unless it’s a web page or digital document,of course) and therefore at a far greater remove which, make no mistake, affects things enormously.

Incidentally, the British pop artist Richard Hamilton appears to have paid homage – or ripped off – thePaste Up cover for his 1980 book of Collected Writing; and actually it’s instructive to consider the workof Richards Hamilton and Hollis in parallel, as similar temperaments working respectively in art anddesign during the same postwar period. Both worked freely across a wide variety of media, both werefirmly rooted in their disciplines’ respective histories, and their work is similarly marked by a strong
literary interest. The key difference is that where Hamilton articulates his own interests, Hollis
articulates those of others; but in my opinion the similarities are greater than this disciplinary
divergence, not least in that they both somehow managed to stay young – by which I just mean theirwork never seemed to slip from anything other than a state of total engagement.
To reiterate slightly, the perennial problem of a show like this, endemic to showing any graphic designin a gallery, is that it’s by no means given that a viewer comprehends how it was made and in what
context – and both can directly affect the way it looks. The danger is that you read the form as though
it sprang fully formed from the designer’s mind, in which case you tend to read it as an exercise instyle, as formalism to compare and contrast with, say, Art Nouveau or International Style or the postersof Toulouse Lautrec. This is what happens if you’re unable to adequately deconstruct the work.
By which I don’t mean to tick the boxes of French theory, only emphasize that you can learn aboutgraphic designing by performing a kind of calculus on it. By mentally dismantling a piece of graphic
design you can understand how to do graphic design – and other things besides. So another claim
I’ll make for Richard’s work is that, for those inclined to look for it, it is unusually didactic.

	
  

384

In a published conversation from 1992, Richard talks with Robin Kinross about Graphic Design:a Concise History, a book that Richard was then in the process of compiling, and which came out two
years later.14 Richard is very digressive in conversation, and it’s useful to see how this character trait
feeds and feeds into his graphic work – as open-mindedness made manifest. Robin, who edited theconversation, clearly understood this, and so the final version includes a number of incidental
digressions. For instance, they’re in the middle of talking about those differences between Europeanand American modernism when Richard happens to look out of the window and notice two contrasting
British Telecom vans. BT were the sole public telecommunications company in the UK until 1984
when it was typically privatized by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.

At first, Richard thinks the vehicle behind is an old one over-painted by another company, then realizes
it’s actually BT’s newly implemented identity. The pied piper motif was designed by Wolff Olins, thetrailblazing design firm who more or less single-handedly introduced the concept of Corporate Identity– the wholesale repackaging of a company’s image according to how it wanted to be perceived, thus
inaugurating the era of spin doctoring that, in the UK at least, reached some kind of logical conclusionin Tony Blair’s New Labour.

Incredibly enough, then, this snapshot of the two vans freeze-frames a shift in graphic design corollary
to the socio-political moment, away from the sort of ubiquitous second-generation geometricabstraction rooted in modernist ideas of social construction – however flawed or naive – and towards
an era dominated by Public Relations and marketing. Robin adroitly describes Wolff Olins’ piper as‘such a pathetic, wispy image – pipe-dreams’, and in actual fact it was publicly reviled as the ‘prancing
ponce’. Later, as the vans drive off, Richard exclaims, ‘It’s incredible: the old van and the new van.
You see: there’s “graphic design” moving away, followed by “marketing”.’15
And just to give you a further idea of the sharp and answerable nature of their dialogue, in a later
section concerning the work of the Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold, modernist graphic design’s firstand most eloquent propagator, Robin wonders whether Richard is talking and writing about design
purely in terms of ‘formal values’ or ‘stylization’. In other words, he accuses him precisely of isolating
aesthetics from context and technics. Richard insists not; what he’s trying to do, he says, is work
backwards to get at the embedded attitudes that underpin the work. Compared to the ‘heroic’modernists like Tschichold, he says, there’s now a scarcity of serious thinking behind what is, in theend, a social service – which is why ‘bad or incoherent design is offensive.’ He illustrates the point byreading an excerpt from the current draft of his book-in-progress, a description of this poster byTschichold:

	
  
14

More on this in §7.2.

15

See also the script for ‘Identity’ in §8.7, which included this line.

	
  

385

This is a poster of extreme economy and precision. The image is aphotograph in negative, its left-hand edge on the centre of the sheet.
The word-element ‘photograph’ starts at the edge of the image. This isoverprinted on the image, and so forms a unit of meaning with it, andis the first part of a subtitle ‘his apparatus’. The second half ofthe subtitle, ‘his works’ is placed after a dash. The dash bridges
between the image area and the white paper of the sheet, so that theworks are literally the outcome of the process. The rest of the
textual information is related by size and position according to its
importance. ‘Where’ is aligned horizontally with ‘what’. This isrelated vertically to ‘who’ at the top, and the start of the main
title below ...16– and so on.
This sort of work can therefore be properly labelled ‘heroic’ because so much attention was dedicatedto its realization using brand new technical means without reference to established conventions.
A huge amount of intelligence is duly compressed into these pioneering artefacts that record thedevelopment of a graphic language. Now, ‘graphic language’ is the sort of term that tends to getbandied about a lot in design discourse, its meaning vague enough to sound profound when it’susually another euphemism for formalism. But thanks to the sharply focused lens of Richard’s patient
description, here you can appreciate how Tschichold’s poster is arranged according to a plausible
grammar. It explicitly makes sense, and so the idea of a ‘graphic language’ carries some weight.
Richard goes on to say that such innovation can be distinguished from its later imitation by a certain‘finesse’ and ‘conviction’. However, as these essential qualities are all but impossible to glean bylooking at tiny pictures of physical objects, his extensive written descriptions are designed foremost tocompensate for the information lost in translation, to reinstate in text what’s lost in the image.
By writing so rigorously about the technical processes at play in the work, thanks to his first-handunderstanding of them as a practising designer, Richard demonstrates how to ‘read’ it. He gives you
the tools and shows how to use them.
This is the real purpose of writing a history, he concludes; and against the likely demands of his
publishers, whom he predicts will argue, why provide a lengthy, ink- and time-consuming description of
an image that’s already in front of the reader?, he’ll answer: because without a proper understanding of

	
  

16

Kinross and Hollis, op. cit., p. 84.

	
  

386

the social and technical conditions under which is was made, which is more or less inevitable if they
haven’t lived through the period in question or produced these things in the same way, the reader
won’t be equipped to read them correctly. The graphic literacy that Richard’s writing teaches allows
you to apprehend the depth of thinking that went into the work. Without it, you limit the extension ofyour own knowledge and so lose the full constructive effect. Graphic design then becomes simply– and boringly – an exercise in formalism: elements arranged one way or another, big or small, red or
green, top or bottom … whatever.
Robin then nicely points out that Richard is acting just as heroically by insisting on his exacting
descriptions – unprecedented in existing design histories, underappreciated by his publisher,
yet carrying on regardless. ‘The social cannot be estimated merely in terms of numbers produced or
numbers of people who see and use it’, writes Robin elsewhere. ‘It’s a question of human spirit andhuman culture … beyond and against the expectations of societies ordered by accounting economics
and material and human waste.’17
To return to the view from Richard’s window, those auspiciously departing and arriving BT vehicles
mark a second shift – namely, in Richard’s career at the turn of the 1990s. Like the majority of his
generation of designers working in London from the 1950s onwards, he suddenly found himself facing
a significant transition. The postwar design scene was initially populated by small inventive studios
and individuals, who had such a regular supply of cultural, social and political work that they were able
to casually pass work back and forth to each other. However, through the 1980s and 1990s, all threesectors began to assimilate the ways and means of big business, preoccupied with quantification– of user-friendliness, audience participation, attendance figures, and so forth.
As like attracts like, these newly corporatized cultural bodies, with their attendant departments devoted
to developing and maintaining public image, now preferred to work with design companies of a similar
stripe. That is, with equivalent ambition, stature, clout, and other facets of the corporate scheme(secretaries, fax machines, interminable meetings). The smaller-fish studios were swallowed by thisnew model (i.e. subjugation to market forces), and the work made under such conditions was inevitably
more compromised.
Fortunately, Richard had enough of a reputation by this point to survive such a paradigm shift, butfrom this point on, his work became notably more polarized between what we might call the extremely
marginalized (for charities, small galleries, and friends) and extremely protected (as a sort of designerby-royal-appointment-to-Bridget Riley, for instance); certainly nothing that came close to the senseof long-term investment in cultural development that characterizes his work for Penguin, the BBC,
Pluto Press, the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, or the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Robin summarizes in‘The New Tradition’: ‘When the [Whitechapel] Gallery was reopened in its upmarket guise in 1985,
Hollis was replaced by a design group. The new graphic style, in tune with the building, went whiteand expensive.’18
By the end of the 1990s, the privatization and corporatization of mainstream culture was seemingly
complete, and remains that way. At the same time, the increasingly rapid, extensive, fluid andinexpensive connectivity afforded by the nascent internet upended long-established economies ofscale in publishing. This in turn led to the so-called ‘long tail’ of culture, the flipside of that corporate
mainstream populated by myriad niche interests, countless instances of relatively small numbers of
unusually devoted readers and viewers. This is where that so-called heroic spirit – that attention anddedication – that Richard lamented as having declined or disappeared since the heyday of modernism
now surfaces: elsewhere, but by no means eradicated. Again I’ll come back to this at the end.
The other week, Richard told me he’d found a note to himself from his time as a teacher that readalong the lines of: it’s far more useful to talk about one work in depth than superficially cut across alarge batch. With this in mind, I want to look at three specific examples of his work. The first is Ways of

	
  

17

Kinross, ‘Let the Object Speak’, op. cit., p. 33.

18

Kinross, ‘The New Tradition’, op. cit., p. 38.

	
  

387

Seeing, the seminal book he made in 1972 as one of a team of five: its author, John Berger, an artist,
Sven Blomberg, a TV producer, Mike Dibb and a ‘critical friend’ of Berger’s, Chris Fox. In the event
their roles were reportedly far less distinct, with plenty of room for manoeuvre and a lot of argument;
the democratic spirit upheld, too, in Berger’s insistence that the royalties from the first printing weresplit equally five ways.
In showing such a well-known and well-regarded book as Ways of Seeing here I mean emphasize that
one of the qualities of his work I admire most is how obvious it is – and yet counterintuitively obvious,
if that makes any sense. It’s so straight that it’s peculiar in a way makes more ostentatiously ‘weird’work seem overly contrived. Robin once described Richard’s work as inventive rather than innovative.
There’s no ego here; no new-for-the-sake-of-being-new.
Back to Ways of Seeing. The book was borne of a chance meeting in the mid-1960s with Berger, backthen an artist, critic and novelist. Hollis was the art editor of New Society, a weekly journal of social andcultural commentary, and Berger was a regular contributor.

Hollis found himself arguing with Berger at a party, criticizing something he had recently said on TV
for being ‘exaggeratedly Marxist’. The ensuing debate led to Berger inviting Richard to help realize his
fourth novel, G. Berger originally intended to illustrate this in the style of surrealist chief André Bréton's
1928 novel Nadja, which married text and images to form a composite portrait of a Parisian woman.
In the end Berger’s idea never really developed beyond the inclusion of two small illustrations, though
there are notable experiments with spacing paragraphs relative to shifts in time, thought and meaningthat clearly pre-empt the filmic devices of their later work together. Hollis remembers Berger fondly as
being the rare sort of writer modest enough to happily to cut or extend his text to fit a paragraph or
page – likely a hangover from his work as a journalist. Berger clearly appreciated the collaboration too,
as he asked Hollis to work on the book to be tied in with his four-part BBC TV series. Ways of Seeing
was an unprecedented approach to the public discussion of fine art, essentially an illustrated
monologue that explored the idea of art as commodity and its relation to society – to pornography, toadvertising, to children, and so on. It was also an explicitly new way of dealing with art on TV.
Rather than the book being primarily author-, editor- or designer-led, the book pushes for a third,
uncharted way. Equivalent examples that come to mind are the close collaborations between Marshall
McLuhan & Quentin Fiore (e.g. 1967’s The Medium is The Massage), and more recently Rem Koolhaas& Bruce Mau (e.g. 1995’s S, M, L, XL). The form and content of both books is similarly symbiotic.
All exemplify of what I’ve come to think of as a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction aesthetic – in the sensethat a willingness to draw form from content rather than apply a personal stylistic agenda makes forwork that ends up more visually radical than a purely formalistic approach where radicality itself is themain aim.
Yes, the book is attractively odd. Yes, it offers a whole new way to think about book design in thesame way the TV series departs from the usual ways of showing art on TV. But it’s equally worth
appreciating Ways of Seeing for its bloody-mindedness. It begins already on the cover, which
immediately announces both its maverick character and its outspoken point of view. Berger’s opening
line: ‘The child looks and recognizes before it can speak’. You see the idea of the

	
  

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text starting on the cover before you read the words, just as you see Magritte’s image before you readthe explanation – an immediacy and authority that’s reinforced by the unusually bold body type.

The bold type was intended to match the visual weight of the images, as well as Berger’s strident TV
voice. It is left-justified, unhyphenated, broken and manipulated in order to duplicate and reinforce
meaning: pictures of work are inserted as and when they are mentioned in the text, their size
determined by aligning the left edge on the large text indent and scaling according to what spaceremains on the page. Hollis and Berger reasoned that full picture captions would interrupt the flow of
the argument, so most of the information is pushed to the back of the book while a simple name, title
and date runs up the side of each image – a method also designed to discourage speed-reading thebook by images alone. In the opening pages Berger writes: ‘The form of the book is as much to do with
our purpose as the arguments contained in it.’ And so it duplicates the TV series in this sense as well –self-reflexively drawing attention to its own design in line with its founding principle: criticalengagement with the work at hand.
A Ways of Seeing that didn’t begin on the cover, or with images divorced from the text, or assembled
into a different format, or set in different type, would be a very different thing (recent editions
demonstrate this well enough). Not everyone liked it, though: apparently, the first time Penguin’s headdesigner Hans Schmoller saw a copy of the first edition he threw it down the corridor in fury.
The next examples of Richard’s work I want to look at are the catalogues and ephemera he produced
for London’s Whitechapel gallery. Spanning a total period of 15 years, this body of work shows thesubtle shift from a relatively dogmatic approach to something far more flexible and easygoing. Early in
his career, Richard was preoccupied with Concrete Art, in which the form of the work derives from a
set of rules. Here’s a typical painting he made at the time: the relative proportions of the stripes are
based on units of three, and the pattern repeated after the central axis. He calls it a ‘visual statement’.

The equivalent tendency in graphic design was most fully realized in Switzerland after the Second
World War. Richard’s second major history book from 2006 documents this movement, which wasvariously known – paradoxically – as both Swiss Modernism and the International Style, demonstrated
and propagated by a number of accomplished practitioner-theorists such as Karl Gerstner, Josef
Muller-Brockmann and Max Bill. One of the genre’s defining features is the underlying grid structure.
Relatively strict, complex templates are particularly useful when working with Swiss material because it
is often multilingual and so requires setting in German, French and Italian. It makes obvious sense to

	
  

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run the three languages in parallel to avoid repeating images, and this requires well-organized andclearly articulated pages.
Though it made less overt technical sense elsewhere, thanks to a few imported magazines andinfluential teachers, this clean, clinical Swiss look was commonplace in 1960s London. More than mostof his colleagues, however, Richard adapted the grid to his own, idiosyncratic ends; the emphaticallysquared-up page became a means of combining words and pictures in unusually pronounced andarticulate ways. One feature that’s particularly evident in Richard’s work for the Whitechapel gallery is
his use of large text indents, often as a second axis on which to align images. As with the Tschicholdposter, the underlying structure affords a clear graphic grammar – a means of carrying a reader
through the material. Though Richard’s prominent use of grids was by no means gratuitous, i.e. by nomeans merely stylistic, it’s no contradiction to say it was also stylish; it became characteristic.

Even more formative than the Swiss influence is a folding broadsheet titled I, Eye. This is a record of atrip Richard made to Castro’s Cuba. He (Richard, not Castro) was responsible for all aspects of the
document – taking and developing the photographs, writing and editing the observations, then pasting
both together in negative on a glass sheet lit from below by a lamp. A printing plate was made directlyfrom this master; the title was added by hand at the end, along with an impression from a Cuban
rubber stamp. What’s particularly prescient here, is how the folds form a physical grid on which tohang the unfolding narrative – that is, a framework on which work out the relative order and freedom in
the arrangement of material. In fact, the DNA for a lot of what came after is encapsulated in thismodest piece of reportage, and it’s plain to see how the same hands-on thinking informs and plays out
in many different ways over the decade that Richard worked for the Whitechapel.
It’s instructive to see how the same intelligence plays out in different circumstances. Many of thefeatures that made Ways of Seeing so distinctive are carried over into the Whitechapel work (not leastthat large text indent again), but there are a few new demands and responses as well. Where Ways of
Seeing is a linear argument sustained over 160 small-format pages, occasionally making inventive useof the page break, the Whitechapel’s various invitations, leaflets, pamphlets and posters were
designed to unfold from smaller discrete panels to larger composite ones, with various bits of
information arranged according to this sequence. It puts the ‘physical grid’ of the Cuba document towork for the Whitechapel – an unusually tangible and active identity.

	
  

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The folds became as much part of the identity as the typeface. This was a redrawn version of Block,a German font that dates from the same period as the Whitechapel building and happens to recall its
distinctive architecture. Richard also made the most of a cheap two-colour palette, combining different
percentages of halftone screens to make a range of secondary colours, and often overprinting themto make something like black. Such economy of means – how to achieve the most with the least – wasa common modernist dictum, of course, though Richard thinks it was just as much a consequence ofbeing brought up in the austerity of postwar Britain.
I already quoted Richard as saying, ‘my own view of design is that it is inevitably part of the social
servicing, and that is why bad or incoherent design is offensive.’ In pointing to its clarity, invention andanswerability, I want to claim his approach as a form of ‘social work’, too. Robin expanded on thisidea:
Multiplication of text is a social act that provides a forum for
dialogue and exchange; deliberately making text hard to read is thus apublic offence (... Consider) a page of words that say something ofinterest, [set in] an ordinary typeface, without pretensions (...)
In its freedom and order, it is a model for social arrangements too.19
To wrap this up, I want to flag one final shift in Richard’s career that again mirrors a shift in culture atlarge – this time in the period since he began to wind down his work rate. Consider the recent
proliferation of those who started out as (for want of a far better term) ‘straight’ graphic designers
branching out into other roles in the broader ecology of communication. Over the last ten years or
so there have been countless instances of people working not only at the coalface of graphic design,
but doing the commissioning or producing or selling things themselves. I’m referring to people trainedor otherwise versed in graphic design starting up publishing imprints, galleries, summer schools,
event spaces, journals, magazines and shops; myself included.
I think this is a logical enough extension of the reason many people get into the field in the first place,i.e. to share information and articulate it accordingly; and I think it’s a logical enough response to thegeneral scarcity of engaging work and conducive working relationships (for all the reasons related tothe corporatization of culture I outlined earlier). I mention it mainly to say that I don’t think thecommitment to hard thinking and constructive communication that Richard lamented as having all but
disappeared since Tschichold and his heroic modernist ilk has disappeared per se; rather, it’s been
displaced. In the face of what seem to be apparently diminishing if not yet extinct opportunities to workin more obviously social areas, whether designing public transport signage, or government forms, orculturally-oriented publishing imprints beyond the grip of the marketing mentality (and here I mean thedigital versions of these things too), this cultural diaspora have begun preoccupying themselves by
manufacturing culture rather than graphic-designing it. Or actually, to manufacture it in order to thengraphic design it too. They make their own work. Hence the general turn to publishing in its most

	
  
19

Kinross, ‘Let the Object Speak’, op. cit., p. 33.

	
  

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exploded sense, which is only to say a return to its original etymological sense: making things generally
known.
And while on one hand this could be seen as entirely positive, on the other it’s difficult to see how
it can be sustained without the support of state subsidies or private beneficiaries in one more or lessclandestine form or another. It’s equally difficult not to feel that this is going to dry up at some pointsoon once various cultural policy plugs are pulled, as happened in a shockingly short space of timein The Netherlands a couple of years ago.
It’s hard to ignore the feeling, too, that the situation produces simply too much stuff made with toomuch love. That might sound ridiculous, but I can’t be alone in walking around events like Printed
Matter’s book fair at PS1 here in New York last weekend with the pressing feeling that the amount ofprinted matter being lovingly produced with often astounding dedication and no less astoundingly
refined graphic design seems out of all proportion to its imagined readership; and that there’s no way
more than say 5% of this avalanche of printed matter can possibly matter, or at the very least be
adequately digested relative to the amount of work put it. In short, the system is out of whack, and I’danticipate an impending survival of the fittest on the horizon. Something has to give.
Okay, I’m generalizing wildly now, and possibly delusional, but I like to imagine that exhibitions such as
the one upstairs, showing work produced under such distinctly other, largely lapsed conditions might
excite actual commissions that emerge from the kind of social spirit that originally generated much of itin the first place – from outside as well as inside the arts. Even Richard has spent the last few years
publishing – and editing and designing – a few books by friends and colleagues under his own imprint.
And in this sense I’d say he remains entirely in tune with the current generation of those who still passfor graphic designers on the basis of his own definition. That’s to say, those who are in it for culture
rather than capital, and conceive of graphic design as something more than mere marketing,something made instead with what I like to think of as a telling intelligence.

9.4: THE MORNING AFTER
Another way those fugitive designers ‘in it for culture rather than capital’ have resisted corporate
takeover is by seeking refuge under the relatively welcoming umbrella of contemporary art, operating
under the diverse auspices of the ever-mounting numbers of museums, galleries, independent spaces,
biennials and so on. Art’s borders have become expansive and permeable enough in recent decades toaccommodate neighbouring interests; and inasmuch as contemporary art remains at least principally for
art’s sake (meaning without a commercial mandate – at least relative to graphic design20), it’s an
obvious enough place for a more searching, philosophical kind of publishing to take root, tap someinstitutional cash, and seek new audiences. (That ‘philosophical’ is here meant firmly in the soft sense,
i.e. thoughtful, contemplative, reflective; perhaps also stoical, and in a certain sense resigned.)
What I want to argue is that this tendency stretches beyond simply ‘appropriating the broader roles ofpublishing’ in order to forge a new type of work altogether. It’s become somewhat commonplace toassume designers are out to ‘become artists’ in some sense, but that’s not how I see it. What is true isthat the strain of work I have in mind takes place in spaces that were formerly the exclusive domain ofartists. There’s a difference.
What follows is a discussion between David (D) and myself (S) that we recorded and edited into acontribution for a group exhibition, Pre-Specifics, at Onomatapee, Eindhoven, in 2010.21 The idea wasto respond to that pamphlet by Dutch design think tank Metahaven called White Night Before a

	
  
20

… regardless of whether the institutions are funded by the state, by commercial activities, or by private donors, which is awhole other matter; and without sidetracking into the whole tedious issue of the art market as a driving force.

21

Pre-Specifics: Access X!, Onomatopee, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 23–31 October, 2010.

	
  

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Manifesto, which had been published by the same institution a couple of years before.22 We were bothat once taken with and troubled by this document, a polemic about the confused and confusing
situation of working in graphic design during the shift from material depth to immaterial surface in theage of web 2.0. What particularly disturbed us was the airlessness of the account: the contemporary
designer seems condemned without respite to imbue an endless supply of virtual ‘surface’ withnebulous ‘value’.
But this is usefully complicated by the fact that Metahaven operate outside their own grim description– not least in this very pamphlet. In other words, the way they go about making their argument seems
inconsistent with what they argue – and so it seemed useful to try to unravel the contradictions.
We also meant to take the exhibition’s title at face value by making something literally ‘pre-specific’,i.e. gather some loose thoughts in advance of a more resolved response, specifically a sequel pamphlet
with the working title The Morning After (which in the end never happened).
This is a transcription of the recording, which emanated from the bottom of a black box in the
exhibition. Our voices played over the sound of bubbling water as though we were speaking sat at thebottom of the ocean. This may have been a reference to the loss of ‘depth’ lamented in the discussion,
but it probably had just as much to do with our colleague Jan Verwoert’s enthusiasm for the philosophyof underwater cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants.
(Bubbling)
S: So the idea is to pinpoint why we’re so bothered by Metahaven’s White Night Before a Manifesto.
For starters, I’d say that our discomfort is less in response to their actual overview, which is full ofconcise insight, and more to do with how the extremely bleak condition they describe comes across as
a foregone conclusion. That said, given that the last part of the pamphlet dwells on the history andnature of the art/design manifesto, it’s plausible that their dead-end view is deliberately exaggerated– and ought to be taken as a provocation. In which case, it’s simply difficult to work out to what extent
they believe the situation to be as alienating as they make out. Admittedly, I prefer my analysis lesscoldly diagnostic and more warmly progressive, but it seems fair enough to say that what they’ve
described feels like only half the story. In talking it through, maybe we can arrive at a clearer, more
expansive view – and hopefully find some ways of moving forward in this foggy territory between art
and design.
D: Fair enough. Go on.
S: Well, the more I consider the pamphlet, the more I appreciate a whole host of more subtle qualities
beyond what the text actually says – what we might call ‘extra-textual’ aspects that get overwhelmedby the polemics. That title is already quite loaded, for instance. Calling something a manifesto thesedays is hopelessly anachronistic, but to write before a manifesto is to slip the idea into a reader’s mind
without short-circuiting their reading – winking at the idea without actually carrying it out. Now that’s
inspired. There’s some humour in it, too.
Then they go on to state that the sole sorry task of the contemporary designer is to imbue the world's
endlessly proliferating virtual surfaces with some nebulous sense of value. And yet they themselvesclearly operate outside this limited position. The pamphlet itself is a case in point: not some marketdriven manipulation of surface, but a seriously considered slice of cultural criticism. In thinking all thisstuff through – articulating it, publishing it, contributing to a discussion or otherwise starting one –they’re doing something quite the opposite of ‘surface’. Again, the problem is that this basic fact iseasily overlooked. And if only a handful of readers get the work’s subtler, more constructive qualities,

	
  
22

Metahaven, White Night Before a Manifesto, op. cit. For a fuller description see §8.6.

	
  

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then Metahaven are surely forfeiting the ‘repoliticization’ of design – the greater social reach and effect– they’ve claimed elsewhere to be out to achieve, and that I think is well worth aiming for.23
D: Yes, I think everything about how the pamphlet is designed, including the language and the way it’s
been published, amounts to an invitation to respond. It’s a call for collective action. However, I don't
find the actual argument about surface and value as convincing as the way it’s all been put together.
I don’t think it corresponds with the reality of the situation; it's all a bit too glib and certainly defeatist.
The part I find most difficult to swallow is the distinction between surface and whatever else issupposed to be lying beneath it – some sort of ‘hard ground’. Let’s see what they say exactly … that
surface is ‘disconnected from the non-negotiability of the brutal material ground, historical structure
and political struggles on which, originally, surface itself was premised.’24
They talk about this more concretely in terms of how the today’s designers fill out already-existing
templates, which suggests that this has replaced a formerly ‘deeper’ way of designing ‘from theground up’. Now, I think their account of how surface multiplies is right-on – it’s a productive thought.
Unlike geographical territory, they say, there’s no limit to the proliferation of virtual worlds. This follows
what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt write in Empire about the breaking down of nation states andsovereignty: borders become permeable and begin to be articulated in different ways, at all levels.25
Formerly distinct lines between the production and consumption of software, for instance, are far more
permeable than before. One person’s consumption becomes someone else’s production. Facebook is
an obvious example: as soon as you participate in that community, ‘consuming’ relationships withother people, you’re automatically working, ‘producing’, for the corporation. So I think these ideas
about proliferating surface and porous borders are very accurate descriptions of the way the world isworking right now.
S: Is that porousness so new? Consider that, say, a hundred years ago the production of goods was a
one-way process: a company makes a product based on a perceived need or desire. Soon, with theadvent of market research, focus groups and so on, a feedback loop develops and manufacturing
becomes more of a two-way process: those products are still created on the basis of those projected
needs or desires – only those desires are increasingly created by the availability of products in the firstplace. The net effect being that consumers increasingly influence what’s produced. The situation
becomes increasingly reflexive, the feedback loop ever tighter, and the result an increasingly anodyne,
predigested and predictable culture. This is precisely the condition implied by White Night. Surely
anyone with a serious investment in culture would want to work against it.
D: That’s why the tone of the pamphlet is difficult for me to swallow – because it accepts that position
rather than offering or imagining an alternative to it.
S: Well, again, I think it does suggest an alternative, but by example rather than argument, by doingrather than describing. The problem is that this embodiment is too obscure. Metahaven call what theydo ‘speculative design’ or ‘research’. Whatever it’s called, it’s a distinctly ambiguous kind of work, andthe places it plays out are usually ambiguous too. Where does this work live? What is it? Art? Design?
Sociology? Political science? All of them, in a way – but that hardly helps focus anyone’s reading of it.
All of which suggests that this kind of work requires a very careful setup – more attention paid to its
positioning, its captioning.
D: Yes, that alternative, that redemptive possibility is never explicitly mentioned in White Night,
whereas in Empire, for instance, it’s part of the argument. About three-quarters of the way through

	
  

23

‘One of the main challenges is how to build a new “we”, a new collective beyond stylistic differences. The lack of a functional
purpose existing in design today should not lead to cynicism, but to research and investigation; it may allow us to become
political again.’ Daniel van der Velden quoted in: Magnus Ericson, ‘Interview with Metahaven on Design and Research’, Iaspis
Forum on Design and Critical Practice: The Reader (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 261. See also ‘Designers and thepolitical: an interview with Daniel van der Velden’, Idea, no. 320, 2007.
24

Metahaven, eds., White Night Before a Manifesto, op. cit. (unpaginated).

25

Negri and Hardt, op. cit.

	
  

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Empire there’s a fuller description of immaterial labour practices, where those borders between
production and consumption are completely broken down. Negri and Hardt say that the fact that these
activities occur in one common virtual space affords the possibility of using the fluid connections toresist the very system people are working inside. The situation contains the seeds for unravelling thesituation. That’s why the book has a reputation for being a new communist manifesto: it’s a call forcommon resistance to the totalizing aspect of that blurring production-consumption loop.
S: Does that mean the margins are the only place where that resistance can happen?
D: Well, the idea is that where there used to be countless discrete ‘marginal’ communities with nopossibility of gathering enough momentum to react against the mainstream, the connectivity affordedby the internet – the ultimate porous border – means those groups are now able to assemble into aneffective force without ever losing their essential status as discrete phenomena. I think it’s more usefulto think about the ‘surface’ Metahaven describe as being one such common area.
S: This is the case Jacques Rancière makes in ‘The Surface of Design’.26
D: Yes, and to be fair Metahaven do allude to the idea too, they just don’t spell it out.
S: Which is why it’s useful to offer some kind of commentary alongside the piece itself – the way you
might momentarily step outside the flow of a prepared talk to elaborate something you intuit isn’t
coming across to a particular audience. When I’ve read White Night with students, I’ve backed it up
with bits of Metahaven’s interviews and essays, and I always hope that this broader view draws more
attention to the kind of agency that their sort of reflection ideally affords. But the ideal would of course
be to produce the kind of work that doesn’t need this kind of compensatory annotation, where there’s
no gap between saying and doing.
D: We were just describing a time when consumption was more distinct from production, when thatmarket research feedback loop wasn’t so advanced. But when the only things that get made are thethings that people ask to be made, there’s no longer any space for speculative products. I mean
speculative in the sense that art is speculative: art puts ideas out in the world, and possibly people
gather around those ideas to contemplate their implications. I’m all for a kind of design that does thesame sort of thing – and in fact I think this was more the case back in the time before those focus
groups became so dominant.
In ‘The Surface of Design’, Ranciere suggests there’s a commonality in the work of the French poet
Stéphane Mallarmé and the German industrial designer Peter Behrens. Both, he says, are particularlyinterested in types – that is, essential, typical forms. In Mallarmé’s case, the layout of a poem waspotentially as expressive as the words; he worked at the level of structure, consciously referencing
typical poetic forms. Around the same time, Behrens was working to standardize the product line of
AEG, the German electrical company, by designing typical functional forms across the board, fromlight bulb to graphic identity.
S: Reading Rancière on Behrens makes clearer to me what Metahaven mean when they write about
the present-day ‘impotence’ of corporate identity.27 I could never really imagine what a contrary potent
identity might mean back in, say, the 1920s or the 1960s. Now I can appreciate there was more space
to fold some ideological aspect into the work – like this progressive idea of ‘type forms’.
D: Yes, and I think that this kind of speculative design, the sort of work that claims the agency topropose that certain forms are correct, or most expedient … well, I think that’s very powerful and I hate
to see it given up so easily. I want to read White Night as a call to reactivate that kind of conviction in
the same way that Empire pushes for a marginal-but-collective way of working. ‘Designing’ didn’t

	
  
26

Rancière, ‘The Surface of Design’, op. cit.

27

See for instance: Metahaven, eds. Uncorporate identity, op. cit.

	
  

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always mean giving form to someone else’s idea. It originally meant casting new ideas – in the shape ofthings – out into the world. It was closer to ‘inventing’.
S: It seems to me that Metahaven have always been too preoccupied with a sense of design thatderives from the adjectival use of ‘designer’ – the fashion- or gimmick- or label-based ‘designer
culture’ that’s implied by white designer walls or black designer clothes, shorthand for a very 1990s
type of elitism. But that’s only one of many inflections. Another problem with the pamphlet, I think, isthat the term ‘design’ is used indiscriminately – sometimes generally and sometimes specifically,
without qualification. And in the confusion, I think that older but just as valid meaning of ‘design’ you’retalking about to gets lost. In White Night, the word ‘design’ certainly means something more akin to
fashion than planning or invention.
D: Clearly Metahaven have used design as a particularly active agent in articulating their ideas – interms of the language, its graphic design, its complementary physical and virtual formats, and the ways
they’re respectively distributed. And you’re completely correct in saying that it would be very easy for awider audience to miss the design cues. One simple ‘corrective’ would be to take the pamphlet andannotate it in order to attach it to a broader field of thinking. Small cues can have great effects if thosecues are highlighted by some other context. This is how painting works, for example.
S: You mean in an art historical context?
D: Yes. When you throw an artwork out into the world, you have some idea where it’s pointing. Modest
gestures become meaningful once they’re understood within some range of … well, other people’s
work, essentially. Graphic design doesn’t have the same kind of ‘preparatory’ context, the same
frame of reference, so you can’t assume subtle codes and gestures will be magnified in the same way.
Again it follows, then, that the stuff made in this grey area between art and design needs to work
extra hard in terms of framing itself in order to ensure that it’s read as intended.
S: Interesting work can happen here precisely because of the lack of precedent. Personally I think thestrongest work performs a gesture and does the job of contextualizing that gesture.
D: To switch topic a bit, I don’t completely follow Metahaven when they say that contemporary surface
is inhabited by ‘defaults’. At first they say surface requires ceaseless seductive innovation in order toproliferate and supplant physical territories; later they say it’s characterized by ‘default’ forms (such as
the cellphone that looks like a piece of jewellery). More intriguing is their coining the term ‘the hollows’
to mean a kind of zero-level surface – ‘the naked infrastructure or root level system language which
precedes surface itself, surface without its effects.’28 Perhaps a skeleton is a more pertinent image.
The skeleton is a useful metaphor because (to mix metaphors for a second) it conjures both the recipe
and the cake. Naturally, the skeleton is essential, the base of the body. More interestingly, though, it’sfull of cues that insinuate how the body works. The more you look at a skeleton, the more its structuresuggests that it contains channels (nerves, vains), that it encases things (organs), that it’s padded (withmuscle) and covered (with tissue and skin). What’s apparent helps you perceive things that aren’t
apparent. The skeleton helps you get it.
The other night a friend and I agreed that if we were able to go back and study a different subject itwould be biology, because understanding the way other animals work gives you an enormous amountof insight. It’s a specific, generous and fundamentally generative kind of knowledge. It's not about
accumulating facts. Once you understand how, say, a cat’s anatomy works, you understand the world
in a richer, more complex way. The use value of that little bit of knowledge is multiplied a hundred-fold.
Okay, this isn’t exclusive to biology – philosophical ideas work this way too, for instance. The point is,until you make the provocative, speculative gesture of putting the skeleton out there in the world,
there’s no way to comprehend those essential mechanisms.

	
  
28

Metahaven, eds., White Night Before a Manifesto, op. cit. (unpaginated). See §8.3 and §8.6 for more on ‘the hollows’.

	
  

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S: Krysztof Kieślowski, the Polish film director, once remarked that you need to describe something inorder to start speculating about it. If something hasn’t been described, there’s nothing to refer to.
D: Yes. Again, you offer up that essential type form; and again, I think the gesture is native to design.
I suppose biology seems particularly instructive because it’s not concerned with man-made artefacts,
which are always of course artificial, but about life – about things that change over time and that grow.
If you want to understand something about life, the best thing to do is study life!
S: You could also say: if you want to study the nature of things – the essentials, the root mechanisms –the best thing to do is study nature. Moreover, change is fundamental to the study of biologicalprocesses. Where it’s not necessarily so prominent in other fields, it’s the very basis of biology.
D: Exactly.
S: The other day I was speaking with Dave Bailey about his contribution to this same Pre-Specifics
show. He was busy organizing a bunch of research materials on his studio wall while simultaneously
trying to assemble the same thing on a computer in order that it could travel more efficiently to
exhibition. He noted how difficult it was to switch back and forth between physical and digital versions,and gradually realized the messy bit of wall was far closer in nature to his actual thinking on thesubject. When he fed the same stuff into the computer, he was already forced into working with thesoftware’s defaults, and that automatically meant a more linear, less fragmentary, more sensible
arrangement than it actually was. The computer was foreclosing thought where the wall allowed it toproliferate. In conclusion, the wall version was the more appropriately ‘pre-specific’ arrangement– and so that’s what he’s ending up sending.
D: Yes – it’s apparently common knowledge in academia that the best mathematicians make sure towork on as large a sheet of blank paper as possible.
S: The problem, he realized, is always how to combine the best of both worlds: the analogue as a moreaccurate reflection of the way his thinking actually works, the digital to enable that thinking to travel.
D: White Night contains a lot of chronological cues that indicate it was written at a certain moment.
For example, they make a point of noting the software they used to write the piece, Neo-Office.
I’m obviously supposed to notice this and wonder why they did that. What does the use of ‘Neo-Office’in 2008 imply in terms of, say, the degree to which digital technologies still mimic their analogue
predecessors? The same sorts of questions are raised by the extreme use of drop shadows andother graphic effects.
S: Yes, and in that sense it’s very much a piece of Graphic Design in capital letters. It says ‘look at me– I’m clearly made this way for a reason’, even though that reason might be obscure. As well as theostentatiously printed pamphlet, White Night equally exists in the form of a very plainly typeset, freely
downloadable PDF that’s about as opposite as possible, formally speaking. And so at the level offormat and distribution, too, they draw attention to the gap between the highly mediated surface of theprinted copy and this relatively unmediated, digital ‘hollows’ version. The text notes that the PDF is
susceptible to alteration, amendment, refinement, and as such queries the tentative status of the
manifesto form in such an open environment: what happens to timely, declarative statements in an age
when they can be so easily overwritten? In other words, they contrast the old-model print version with
the new-model PDF version in order to draw out the implications of the differences between the two.
To me, that’s the proper potential of speculative designing, that asserts some agency in the same spirit
as Behrens at AEG. And again, that may well get missed.
D: These speculative, provocative products we’ve been alluding to – the sorts of stuff Behrens madefor instance – tend not only to carry traces of how they came together, but also cues that anticipate
how they might be put to use in the future. A good example closer to home is the steel ring that sat in
the middle of our basement floor last year. Coming across that mysterious ring for the first time, you’rebound to wonder why it ended up there, what it’s all about. It doesn't seem to have a use but it looks
functional. Significantly, perhaps, it’s also a notably skeletal form.

	
  

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S: It seems to have a ‘deeper’ purpose.
D: Yes – it’s not just an annoying obstruction. We know already, of course, that the ring was originallyintended to guard against walking into a freestanding oven in the middle of the Dutch architect Aldovan Eyck’s apartment.29 But its form is open enough to suggest a bunch of further uses in the future,none of which are very determined. That's what's beautiful about it – its unresolved potential, as wellas its accessibility. You want to understand.
In any case, I think it’s a pretty good idea to take White Night and make what would essentially serve
as a guide to reading it. Inasmuch as time is explicitly embedded in the original document, it calls out
for a future response that might simultaneously complicate what it’s saying and make it moreaccessible – to draw out what’s written between the lines. I think we’ve touched on the major points
to write about. We reject the idea that there’s a distinction between surface and whatever else
underneath. The goal is to find an apt form to articulate complex ‘matters of concern’. And our mascot
is the skeleton.
S: I have in mind Albrecht Dürer’s Death and the Landsknecht, which depicts a skeleton holding anhourglass in front of a clothed man. Inscribed into the surface of the woodcut – all on a level – are thedate, 1510, Dürer’s monogram, and an ominous loose bone on the floor. That seems emblematic ofwhat we’re after.

	
  
29

See: Common Circular 2: Common Room Presents Dexter Sinister Presents Common Room, June 2009,http://common-room.net/common-circular-2.

	
  

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9.5: ANATOMY OF A DUCKRABBIT
Writing from within ‘the situation of postmodernism’ back in 1979, art critic Rosalind Krauss statedthat what might seem to be merely eclectic from one point of view can be seen as ‘rigorously logical’from another. Practice is no longer defined in relation to a given medium, she continues, but ‘inrelation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium – photography,
books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself – might be used.’30
More recently, art theorist Boris Groys pointed out that while in the modernist era the ‘art context’
was regarded as stable, in our time it is regarded as the opposite – changing and unstable. Working in
the realm of art today therefore involves creating new contexts: where art used to operate exclusively
on the level of form, the most potent art today necessarily operates a level out, working with ‘contexts,
frameworks, backgrounds, and new theoretical interpretations’.31
And more recently still, in 2008, artist Paul Chan described his work as neither ‘critique’ nor ‘cultic
object’, but rather an ‘art of affirmation’. ‘Now I don’t know what that means’ says Chan, ‘But thatsounds right to me … [T]here are no formulas for this.’32
Let’s consider the anatomy of our hybrid art/design enterprise in light of these three observations.

Philosophical interest in the classic reciprocal duckrabbit image can be summarized as follows. First
you perceive one animal, then the other, but your perception of the second is affected by having seen
the first, then, looking back at the first again, your perception is further affected by having seen both.
In order to get a handle on what’s being merged, let’s begin back at a baseline distinction between art
and design. To synthesize a number of related observations elsewhere in this thesis, the general terms
that seem most accurate to me are as follows. Designers typically and essentially work from others’interests (subject matter) supplied or imposed from the ‘outside’. Artists typically and essentially workfrom personal interests (subject matter) drawn or assembled from the ‘inside’. (Both can be directed
towards more or less commercial ends; this is beside the point.)
From this typical, essential difference, designers and artists alike work to articulate those relatively
exterior or interior interests, usually in view of making things public – that’s to say, sharing them oncollective, worldly, appreciable terms.
(This is not a question of fixing a job description, only of getting at what’s particular about the kind ofwork I’ve been writing about, where and how it plays out, and how it might be constructively carriedout by ourselves or anyone else in the future.)
The contrary constitution of a reversible duckrabbit species of work is as follows:

	
  
30

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8, Spring 1979, p. 42.

31

See: Boris Groys, ‘On the New’, 2002, http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html#bibliografia.

32

George Baker, ‘An interview with Paul Chan’, October, no. 123, Winter 2008, p. 209.

	
  

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– Our work’s raw material is not imposed, arbitrary or alien, but corresponds with our own interests.
However, those interests are usually rooted in the mechanisms of our founding field, graphic design.
The work is inherently self-reflexive because it is about writing, editing, designing and publishing,while explored through writing, editing, designing and publishing – hence its typically parallax aspect
One consequence of this is that it tends to be more ‘technical’ than ‘emotional’.33 In any case, to theextent that it deals with self-imposed if work-related subject matter, we can admit the duckrabbit isakin to art (-as-traditionally-conceived) in that it pursues its own interests.
– Then again, the opportunities to perpetuate these interests are always rooted in some kind of
realworld application – or at least an invitation that comes tethered to a particular context and a set of
conditions. In which case our duckrabbit faces outward (at the worldly context) as much as inward(at its own workings). Such function gives the work gravitas: ideas are pushed out of the abstract andinto the concrete. It is forced to demonstrate as well as channel them, which means there’s a distinct
measure of success or failure. The work puts itself on the line, so to speak. In any case, to the extent
that it is made in view of practical – if often eccentric – application, we can admit the duckrabbit isakin to design (-as-traditionally-conceived) in that it responds to vested interests.
– Moreover, a stereotypical artistic disposition is reaching, searching, speculative; it seeks unlikely
juxtapositions and connections; it is constitutionally averse to orthodox means of going about things
because they just don’t seem catalytic enough; hence the relentless ‘blind’ push for new forms.
The counterpart designer disposition, meanwhile, concerns itself with how clearly things come across– how they are carried and framed, measured relative to conventions; and it seeks confirmation that it
has achieved its aims. And the healthiest instances of our hybrid combine the best of both.
In The Medium of Contingency, Reza Negerastani offers a metaphor for this two-fold temperament in
the image of a tuning fork – a stem and two prongs.34 One prong is a razor, he says, while the otherrepresents reason. The razor is ‘a romantic and blind tool’ that ‘cuts for the sake of being extreme’;reason contemplates and makes sense of the cut; and together they resonate and ‘tune the field ofspeculation’. He stops short, however, at pointing out that the fork needs to hit something in order tobe useful. This substrate is the work, the project.
This work bears certain characteristics of other mediums. Like a certain kind of painting, time is often
patently written (and re-written) into its surface. Like a certain sense of sculpture, it tends to be
protracted, incremental, and manifests those slow changes slowly. Like certain lines of conceptual art,
its base material tends to be text, it is constitutionally self-referential, and the ‘setup’ or ‘conditions’ areoften emphasized in line with Sol LeWitt’s formula that the idea is ‘the machine that makes the art’.
Each of the Dexter Sinister projects recounted in this thesis amounts to a speculative investigation of
the techniques, tools and mediums native to graphic design, whether Public Relations, press releases,
Information Theory, Cybernetics (True Mirror), letterpress printing (Black Whisky), newspapers,
WYSIWYM typesetting, paste-up (The First/Last Newspaper), computer programs, typefaces(MTDBT2F), graphic identities or marketing (‘Identity’). All are elaborated, caricatured, blown out of
proportion to allusive, philosophical purpose. As such, they can be held up in view of other domains.
Connections are drawn and elaborated, channelling and registering timely social and technologicalissues that in turn invoke ethical and political ramifications. (When the work works, of course.)
John Kelsey sums this up when he writes that the contemporary artist ‘doesn’t just produce and present
objects and images [any more, but] production itself … images and ideas of these that are at the sametime (like it or not) ethical propositions.’ And more than anything else, he continues, ‘he makes
momentum … in frozen glimpses … built on speed and work.’35

	
  
33

(Though it’s often more romantic than scientific.)

34

Mackay, ed., op. cit., p. 58.

35

John Kelsey, ‘Decapitalisation’, Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), p. 68 (my italics).

	
  

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So for example, when the work informs an audience about an exhibition; when it advertises, validates
and labels a product; when it circulates as a twice-weekly broadsheet; when it’s used to typeset books,
journals, signage systems and institutional identities; when it documents a certain historical trend.
All aim to foster a kind of offset or ambient understanding – that with any luck turns into insight.
Specifically: The multiple iterations of True Mirror reflect what happens when information isdispersed through ambiguous channels, how it proliferates and alters according to the medium and thecontext. Making a Black Whisky is conceived as an excuse to explore cooperative production, thenature of surplus and waste, the parallels and dissonances between publishing and distilling, and thevalue of slowness in an expeditious milieu. The First/Last Newspaper obliquely reports ‘live’ on thecurrent state of ‘news’ – who writes it, edits it, circulates it, and how, and to what ends. The various
dimensions of Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font consider ‘the letter versus the spirit of thelaw’ in more everyday terms of chauvinism versus open-mindedness. And ‘Identity’ wonders how thepreoccupation with how stuff ‘comes across’ – often in marked contrast to the reality of things – cameto dominate all aspects of contemporary life.
To recap the trajectory of my thesis:
First, I’m after a temperamentally self-reflexive way of working; one that’s self-aware and self-criticalenough to avoid lapsing into easy self-reflexive tropes. This frequently makes for work that bears thetrace of its production, the ‘structure’ as evident as the ‘substance’ to the extent that they’re one andthe same. It involves setting up conditions to allow a project to ‘play out’ in practice, supple enough tousefully register contingencies met along the way. Ideally such an approach yields articulate objects– ‘self-captioning’ works that ‘speak for themselves’ without recourse to the supplements. All of whichamounts to an essentially humanist ethos, generous and relation seeking. It sounds something like anaesthetic denomination of the ‘new species of thinker’ called for by the speculative realist philosopher
Graham Harman: ‘half-philosopher and half-engineer’, in which philosophy is conceived as ‘reverse
engineering’ and an ‘infra-physics’.36
Back in chapter 1, I noted how Eco argued that the most authentic works of art of any era are those thatpush the development of forms, not for the sake of novelty, but in view of making truly affective work.
Work, that is, with the real ambition and ability to agitate thought and action (permanently unsettled
and unsettling) as opposed to that which merely repeats or refines existing stereotypes (maintaining thestatus quo). This is the sense, Eco also argued, in which it can be thought of as ‘socially committed’:as a tool for thinking, for psychic survival.
Here I’ve attempted to make the case for a way of working that continues this legacy. On first glance,
this would seem to be neatly compressed into the old platitude ‘it’s not what you do but the way thatyou do it’. That’s true enough, only ideally the way that it’s done determines and so infects and somarks the work; in which case, it is what you do, too, so long as it manifests the way of working – andso long, too, as (to quote Moholy-Nagy) ‘Man, not the product, is the end in view.’
This credo underpins the emphatically ‘exploded’ approach to publishing described here, characterisedby the push and pull of two forces: from one side, the ambition to communicate as directly as possible,
i.e. in accordance with the shared conventions of verbal and graphic language; from the other, the drive
to push untapped possibilities of those languages in view of exciting and engaging an audience. This
makes for an irregular, dynamic form of publishing that offers itself up as a model in the sense ofworking itself out in public, willing to flaunt as much failure as success.
This performative publishing could be thought in terms of a return to the values that underpin asocially-oriented approach to design. Such time travel is hardly possible, especially since formerly
effective ways and means of working in the civic sphere have been so severely disabled since the point
we’d ideally return to. Hence the same energies are spent through the far less practical, direct andquantifiable, more speculative, intellectual and delayed contexts of contemporary art. And how this

	
  
36

Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism (London: Zero, 2010), p. 91.

	
  

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work is presented, visualized – how it all comes across – is precisely where art and graphic design canusefully overlap in the form of an artful graphic design and an earnestly-communicative art. Such
practice is characterized what the theorist Stephen Wright has very recently called a ‘double ontology’… that’s ‘both what it is, and a proposition of what it is’ … on a ‘1:1 scale’.37
Recall, too, Eco’s claim that by forging new forms rather than passively employing conventions,avant-garde art in the most constructive sense automatically registers the era’s most pressing issues,and so gives us the means of apprehending those issues in advance of dealing with them. This kindof publishing works in view of the same ideal, in the sense that it speaks in tongues its editors don’tquite understand yet, and in so doing so reflects the milieu’s breaking news.
Where Eco’s Open Works were equal to the mid-20th century indeterminacy and chaos, today’s
millennial equivalents record the sound of speed, exhaustion, obscurantism – the corporatized society,the post-natural environment, the pharmacologically-altered human landscape – and the daunting‘radical contingency’ described in chapter 5.38 The dominant character of the contemporary conditionis perhaps best summed up as: unhinged.
Back before I began this thesis, I was drawn to Eco’s chapter title ‘Form as Social Commitment’,as it seemed to promise to account for the elusive social aspect (i.e. aimed at improving our collective
condition) that I always felt somehow drove what we were up to with such as Dot Dot Dot and
Dexter Sinister, but which always came across as spurious, deluded or self-righteous in explanation(i.e. more or less the polar opposite). By the end of the chapter it was clear that what Eco meant by‘social commitment’ was very general, grand, historical and heroic – namely, the dialecticalprogression of forms in order to ensure that society has adequate, commensurate means of perceiving
events that befall it.
What I’ve come to realize in these pages is a far more mundane, quotidian, but perhaps also more (?)
efficacious sense of that ‘social commitment’. Namely, that how you work rubs off on the work.
But the real realization is that both Eco’s lofty sense and this grounded one essentially amount to thesame thing; they are macro and micro versions of the same sensibility, or, as Norman Potter would
have it, ‘universals’ and ‘particulars’. Both are essentially humanist – abiding the original, leastpretentious, sense of the word, naturally.
The trickiest aspect of all this self-analysis is to ensure that these intentions are plausibly aimed atsociety-at-large rather than self-serving pockets. Art’s fundamental ambiguity is all too often taken as
an excuse for forgetting the fundamental, categorical point of publishing in the first place: to makethings public, to share matter. Hence the need to stay on top of the fact that we’re in the social businessof communication as opposed to the anti-social business of masturbation. This means working against
the odds towards a more athletic sense of urgency. For now, the biggest job is to make these intentions
as plain as possible without dumbing them down, which would only be to duplicate the levelling
tendency of contemporary culture that we’re actively trying to work against.
What I’m describing isn’t reactionary or anachronistic, but a forward-facing return.

	
  
37

See: Stephen Wright, Towards a Lexicon of Usership, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013).

38

Particularly §5.6.

	
  

403

Dexter Sinister, Work-in-progress (2013), installation view of reprogrammed basketball scoreboards,
joint Lithuania/Cyprus pavilion, Palasport, 2013 Venice Biennale

	
  

404

	
  

405

10: THE LAST SToP CLOCK

This final account of a project under the Dexter Sinister umbrella took place during the final
few months’ work on this thesis. It comprises four texts written at approximately two-month intervals
between October 2013 and June 2014: an interview, an email, an invitation card, and an incantation.
As is necessarily reiterated in each part, the whole thing was based on a pair of eccentric digital clocks
made for the joint Lithuania/Cyprus pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Back then we had no realidea why we were making them. Unlike the work recounted in the previous chapters, these clocks
weren’t made in response to a specific invitation, nor did they otherwise serve any patent function.
We simply had the urge to see them exist and so insinuated ourselves into the show.
Slowly, though, an initially free-floating idea assembled itself into a time-travelling talk and an
exhibition-of-sorts – and all this backwardness became a key theme of both.

10.1: LIKE AN ARROW I WAS ONLY PASSING THROUGH
Sometime in the summer, after the Biennale opened in June, we were invited to contribute to an art
journal, Durch.1 The request was conditional: each of us was to start up a conversation with one of theother artists involved with the institution over the last year, to be edited it into a format suitable for the
new issue. David and I decided to use the opportunity as an excuse to think through those clocks a bit
more – what they were exactly, and what they might become. And so to the annoyance of Durch’s
editors, we offered to ‘interview’ each other.
S: The most recent issue of our journal Bulletins of The Serving Library was gathered around the themeof ‘Germany’ and produced according to a kind of motto, Wie ein Pfeil lief ich einfach durch. This is atranslation of a line from the American not-quite-country singer Bill Callahan: ‘Like an arrow I was only
passing through.’ I’d like to carry the sentiment over to this conversation for a publication auspiciously
titled Durch – the idea being to forge a few ideas in advance of a work-in-progress provisionally titled
The Last Stop Clock, to be realized on Summer Solstice 2014 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At this year’s Venice Biennial, Dexter Sinister was one of the players in the joint Lithuanian-Cypriot
Pavilion, which was curated by Raimundas Malašauskas, staged in a Brutalist sports hall called
Palasport round the corner from the Arsenale, and presented under the reversible rubric of Oo or oO(depending on your point of view). For some reason, we were invited to contribute as honorary
Lithuanians. The show’s locus was a basketball court flanked by concrete bleachers, and we proposed
to manipulate the two large scoreboards at either end. We supplied instructions in order to produce a
new chip to be inserted in the operating desk that would effectively turn the twin scoreboards into two
identically esoteric, hexadecimal clocks that loop through 16 configurations of the characters ‘O’ or ‘o’.
These configurations abide a binary, off/on logic to form a digital abacus at odds with our orthodox
sense of time: what we commonly understand as 0 translates to ‘oooo’, 1 to ‘oooO’, 2 to ‘ooOo’, 3 to‘ooOO’ and on up to the maximum 15 as ‘OOOO’ before returning to zero. The sequence advanced
every second, the two scoreboards in sync – though naturally it was impossible to ever look at bothclocks at the same time. An adequately curious onlooker would perhaps gradually realize that what
initially seemed to be a random sequence programmed to generate an abstract pattern, was in fact aregular pattern – albeit a pointedly eccentric one.
So far so goOd. Then, on our way to an inaugural Oo-oO party that took place within the same hall,
lit exclusively by our clocks and organized by someone I was yet to fall in love with, we ran into
someone who told us the whole thing had shut down already. Naturally, we headed elsewhere, then	  1

The journal is published very intermittently by Kunstverein Graz, Austria (11 issues since 1986; the last in 2001).

	
  

406

later ran into a couple of Lithuanians who told us it wasn’t true – and that we’d missed a great night,
which by now was dead for sure.
And ever since, we’ve conspired to somehow attend the party we missed by way of our time-bending
clock. Finally it can be put to use – a use that, as we might have expected, was waiting to be realized
all along. So far as we’ve been able to discern, this will take the form of some kind of talk, or
doublespeak which, under the working title The Last Stop Clock, will be designed to invoke the party
we’d managed to miss – to assemble some kind of *incantation*. In effect, the dual clock becomes atime machine. And what we ought to work out here in all this Durchtalk is what on earth to talk about –to summon and extrapolate whatever clues are doubtless lying around in fronts of our minds. As far as
I can dimly perceive these right now, the talk ought to concern itself with the ways and means of
extracting ourselves from the regular coordinates of time and space – and ideally ‘concern itself’ byembodying what it’s talking about.
To begin, then, the other week you gave a small talk on Italian applied artist Bruno Munari, withparticular reference to his work for Italian communications media firm Olivetti, and also to an exhibitionof neo-avantgarde art called Arte Programmata that took place at the firm’s showroom in Venice in
1962. With the chip, clock and party in mind, I’d like you to recount as briefly as possible three aspects
you touched upon that I think will be instructive here for obvious reasons: first, the relationshipbetween a ‘program’ and its aesthetic outcome; second, the juxtaposition of so-called ‘useless’ andso-called ‘useful’ objects; third, the similarities and dissimilarities between the original 1962 show anda restaging of it in 2012.
D: It is, first, essential to agree on what ‘programmed’ meant in Milan, in 1962, amongst this group ofpeople. The exhibition Arte Programmata translates to ‘Programmed Art’. It was organized by Bruno
Munari and together with Giorgio Soavi at Olivetti. The theoretical framework of the show camecourtesy of Umberto Eco, who was hard at work himself on what would soon become his classic text,
The Open Work. Anyway, Eco wrote in the catalogue for the show this description of what the word
meant. He writes:
Thus we can speak of ‘programmed’ art, and admire the kinetic
sculptures that a man of a coming future will install in his house, inplace of the old prints of the modern masterpieces reproduced. And if
someone should observe that this is not painting, nor even sculpture,
it should be of no concern. One could then start a contest to find a
new name, but let us not be frightened by a question of names.2
Which is only to say that the word applies to the work in the exhibition. He clarifies a bit in the ensuingparagraphs and identifies this work as *not* containing any particular expression or representation assuch, but rather that it has instead a ‘propositional function’. Now that’s a lovely idea, but I suppose
easy enough to say about lots of work.
Eco gets more particular however when he identifies the proposition (he calls it a ‘continuallyattempted adventure’) of being a work that is persistently, irreducibly variable. However, and this isabsolutely central, the mutability occurs only *within* precisely determined limits. (A ‘possibility space’,if you like – I suspect you do.)This limit, then, is the ‘program’ to which ‘Programmed Art’ refers. It’s a definite set of instructions,an algorithm, a step-wise recipe whose end result is explicitly, unchangeably, indeterminate. The sum
total of all the possibilities of a particular program is easily enough worked out, but the moment that
presents itself *now* is utterly unpredictable.

	
  2English translation from the revised version of the original exhibition catalogue: Marco Meneguzzo, Enrico Morteo and Alberto
Saibene, eds., Programmare l’arte: Olivetti e le neoavanguardie cinetiche (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2012).

	
  

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Then this is where it gets interesting, as that unpredictable moment is the now when a viewer is taking
in the piece. And the viewer also helps the work along by witnessing it. I could go on about this, but am
afraid I’m falling off track.
There are a couple more things that will be quite useful in understanding what ‘program’ meant then,there. One: Olivetti was making forays into manufacturing computers with its newly formed andambitious Olivetti Electronics division. They were principally developing room-sized mini computers but
also had just released what is sometimes cited as the first desktop personal computer, the Programma
101 programmable calculator. Anyway, computers and the programs that made them worthwhile wereincreasingly making an impact in the collective imagination of this circle. Two: ‘program’ at thismoment had specifically social overtones, and as Olivetti was a company committed to acting for thegood of all society, then this meaning was particularly relevant. So think ‘program’ as in ‘social
program’ or a definite plan for the future of a large group of people, whose outcome at any particular
moment was unpredictable, but whose entire shape over time was visible and intentional.
Meanwhile, Bruno Munari’s most insightful and prolific critic Marco Meneguzzo describes what itmeans like this, which is just concise and precise. Perhaps I might have started here:
It was not a question of putting technology up on the pedestal oflegend, but of the indispensable use of the ‘future’ – renderedvisible by movement – to create a form adequate to the future of theworld.3
Ok. I am afraid I have to leave your next two questions open. I’m certain we will get back to them,and maybe in the meantime it occurs to me that there is a distinction you could help render more
distinct: in The Open Work, a book I know that is important to you, Eco marks a difference between an
Open Work and a Work-in-Movement. Can you sharpen this up? What precisely is the difference
between the two?
S: It’s a bit misleading to describe Eco’s book, or the essay from which it grew, as a ‘classic’.
I mean, it’s become something of a classic for us, but it’s still a minor blip on the radar of aesthetic
history. However, I’ll take it as an opportunity to digress and wonder exactly how *timely* his ideas
were, or are.
The main point I take away from Eco’s book is the assertion that Open Works were the mostmeaningful – or ‘authentic’ – form of art being made in the time he was writing. Truly pertinent work,says Eco, is that which mirrors an era’s general epistemology, so where Medieval art reflected
a fixed idea of the cosmos, and Baroque art reflected a shifting, less anthropocentric worldview,
Open Works are simply (and complicatedly) the artistic equivalent of contemporaneous thinking thatis simultaneously playing out in, say, science and mathematics in terms of relativity, chaos,indeterminacy, and so on.
Now, Eco was writing about this stuff – and Arte Programmata is a good example of it – in the early
1960s, which suggests that this is its point of maximum impact, being the moment it becomes
conscious of itself. However, in The Open Work he draws on many examples from as far back as thesecond half of the 19th century, Mallarmé	
  in particular, and then on through such as Joyce, Brecht,
and Calder, ending up in his own era with examples mostly drawn from avant-garde music, like
Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Cage. So it begs the question, how long exactly does Eco’s NOW last:
The Modernist era? The 20th century? Or does it extend to circumscribe everything after the
Enlightenment? More to the point, are we still in it, and what’s next? Which is to say, what constitutes
an authentic, urgent art today?
But getting to your question, Eco is a bit vague on this distinction between Open Work and Work-inMovement. Often he seems to use the terms interchangeably, but my summary understanding – which	
  3

Marco Meneguzzo, ed., Arte Programmata e Cinetica in Italia 1958–1968 (Parma: Galleria d'Arte Niccoli, 2000).

	
  

408

I may well have willed into existence according to what I want it to mean – is that where Open Works
can refer equally to work that is deliberately *ambiguous*, in the sense of being designed to foster
multiple meanings or open interpretations (Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, orBrecht’s Epic Theatre, for instance), Works-in-Movement incorporate some explicitly *live* aspect; they
involve setting up conditions for something to happen in *realtime*. The work as consists in a script,
a set of instructions, or what you just called a ‘propositional function’ that precipitate a *happening*.
Perhaps it’s then unclear exactly where the work lies – in the known script or in the as-yet-unknown
performance. In fact, I’d say one of the most interesting things about Works-in-Movement, abiding thisdefinition at least, is that the work is both, or neither: it cancels out the question. In this sense, in theArte Programmata show, a work like Gruppo N’s Bispazio Instabile (below left) is ‘in movement’
because the balls can be shuffled, where a static, ‘finished’ piece like Enzo Mari’s Timor (below right)
isn’t. Or: a Calder mobile is, but a Riley op-art painting isn’t. Or: an abstract Cardew score is, but a
Stockhausen symphony isn’t.

Back to Vilnius, all this chimes in the sense that we have an end result in mind: time travel.
Appropriately enough, we need to work backwards in order to make it *happen* – which on the face of
it isn’t straightforward! But the word that keeps popping up, in my mind at least, isn’t script or
instruction but ‘incantation.’ Which is perhaps to admit that the nature of what we’re after seems lessclinical and more, well, spiritual. That’s not quite right either, but messing around with space and timecertainly suggests something beyond the orthodox laws of physics, more cerebral than physical –Kierkegaard’s ‘trembling,’ perhaps. Stuff that makes you go funny in order to exit regular behaviour.
Someone was telling me the other night about a German artist who recently lived for a time according
to a 21-hour day, which meant he cycled in and out of the lunar cycle. Obviously this connects withour clocks.
But I’ve also been thinking along the lines of a symbol or glyph or gnomic text that induces alteredconsciousness, or even just plain fear – like the Black Spot in R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Something similar happens with the Jesus Prayer in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Franny has decided
to follow the instructions derived from a book called The Way of the Pilgrim to recite the prayer‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’ incessantly until it becomes unconscious and reflexively in timewith her heartbeat, so she’s praying without ceasing. At which point: enlightenment.
What interests me right now is the idea that there are all these different ways and means of achieving,or supposedly achieving, such a state in different mediums (the word ‘medium’ being especially loaded
here, of course). Maybe articulating these different ways and means to an audience primed for suchan event to the point of trembling in one night on a significant date in the lunar cycle will amount tosome multi-dimensional or extra-sensorial grasp of what it means to travel through time. So for thesake of setting off another couple of tangents, if you’re going to circumvent the questions I sent firsttime round, how about these:First, attached are two versions of what’s essentially the same piece of music. It’s called ‘Goodbye
Precious Mountain’, by a group that was around in London in the 1990s called Quickspace. Although
the tune is essentially the same, the instruments, arrangement and atmosphere are quite different;
the main distinction, however, is that one is in 3/4 and one in 4/4 time. I recall that you once tried to

	
  

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make a single piece of music with two time signatures – or did I dream it? Second, can you retell me
the story of that painting in the Lithuanian painting that was hanging innocuously high on one of thewalls behind one of the clocks, and whose name we transposed to our own work? Was it just The Last
Painting?
Damn, I’ve just listened to the tracks again and they’re both in 3/4! Why did my ear remember one
as 4/4?
D: My first instinct when I sat down to write this reply was that you had made too big of a deal about
the word ‘classic’ that I put in front of The Open Work to describe it. I thought I might go back to myoriginal email and edit it – remove the ‘classic’ and continue on as if nothing happened. Obviously it
would be easy enough to do, but I quickly realized it was a bad idea.
Now, don’t worry – I’m going to answer your questions but let me stay on this thought for a minute.
What happens if I go back and remove that ‘classic’ from my response? Your reply would then be
nonsense. My temporal hijinks would come only at the reader’s expense who is trying to string one
idea to another in an ongoing chain of cause-and-effect in order to produce meaning.
Still if I’d done it, you could still go back and change your response and seeing as we’re writing thiscompletely before it is published then nobody would be the wiser. In fact, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t
matter in any way, ethically, conceptually, or practically. We would have gone back and changed what
happened in the past but the final printed page would keep our secret.
But email exchanges assume a chronology. The question must come before its response. Or as Bruno
Munari said in 1972, ‘One thing leads to another.’ He later used the phrase to title a series of formaltransformations of an oak leaf. This one was the starting point:

Two Sundays ago I heard a neuroscientist give a talk about how we use spatial metaphors andgestures to talk about time. He described a series of clinical trials where subjects were asked to talkabout experiences in the past and experiences in the future. I had never thought of saying thatsomething will happen ‘on Thursday’ as a metaphor. But a little bit of thought and you realize it is.
Well, he videotaped his subjects talking about events in the past and events the future. These were
English speakers and almost universally they gestured towards the past with their left hand andtowards the future with the right. The neuroscientist suggested this was because the subjects readfrom left to right. English is written from left to right therefore what we read is in the past or left andwhat we’ve not yet read, what is not yet happened, is to the right. He said that speakers of languages
that work the other way around, such as Arabic, consistently referred to the past on the right in the
future on the left. Interesting enough, but then he decided to test the idea.
He subjected English speakers to one hour of reading mirror writing, which of course goes the otherway. Our brains adapt quickly to reading this way. But then he has the same subjects to them tell astory about the past and about the future, their directions had flopped (past on the right and future on
the left) after only one hour of reading in the other direction. It seems impossibly simple to redirect theflow of time through a simple act of writing and reading, but maybe this is what Lewis Carroll’s Aliceknew already from her looking glass world.

	
  

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Anyway, I’ve exhausted your patience and so I’ll drop this for now and get on to answering thequestions, but file it for the future.
You asked me to describe the painting that hung in the Lithuanian pavilion high in the space on thewall of the gymnasium. It’s a work by Kazys Varnelis from 2007–8. He was an abstract painter working
in Chicago for most of his life, but in his last 15 years he returned to Vilnius and continued to work.
On returning home, he found his reputation preceded him. But I think you know this already as youwere in Vilnius last week and went to the Varnelis Museum. You sent me pictures and everything.
I can’t wait to see it myself.

The work in question’s name is The Last Shot and from what I understand from Raimundas
Malašauskas, it was the last painting that Varnelis made. Now what you may not remember is that Rai
was describing this work to me about nine months before the Venice Pavilion opened when he came to
New York. When he told me the artist’s name I said, ‘Wow, I know Kazys Varnelis. I had no idea hemade paintings.’ Well, turns out I know his son. Kazys the Younger lives in New York. He’s an architectand he teaches at Columbia. His interests overlap with mine, especially around the archeology ofcomputers and their application to design.
So then I thought it was the son while Raimundas was talking about the father. We continued to
discuss ‘Kazys’, developing a shared idea of this composite figure, half-father half-son, half-architect
half-painter – an old man, a young man. You could say it was two different instances of the same thing,
but anyway it was clearly a problem of version control. The mistake has kept me thinking since.
Trivial, I suspect. Nonetheless, the painting has a nice title and I suggested that we rename ourformerly titled Work-in-Progress, The Last Shot Clock. This connects back to the painting that initiatedthe exhibition and hung in the rafters, high above and presiding over the exhibition and our clock. And
it also suggests a basketball shot clock, which forces the action and keeps the game moving forward.
Now back to what you wrote. You attached two MP3s which your memory told you were the same
song recorded in two different time signatures 3/4 and 4/4. 4/4 is the most common time signature forwestern music and pop music in particular. The beats of 4/4 count 1 2 3 4 with the emphasis on 1 and3. 3/4 is a bit less common, it’s probably easiest to summon to mind by humming a waltz. The beats in
3/4 time are counted 1 2 3 and the emphasis is on beat 1.
Well I have in fact tried small experiments before to combine a 3/4 time signature and a 4/4 time
signature at once. I remember making a small computer program to do this with beeps and it simply
overlaid one time on the other. I’ve no idea where this program is, but the logic is simple. I could
remake it easily and I probably should do so. The composite effect that I was so interested in was
putting 3/4 on top of 4/4 so that each regime of time, and as the music moves forward, things line up
for a minute and then fall quickly out of sync. It’s a simple idea, ‘polyrhythms’ – although actuallyrather impossible to play, or at least beyond my abilities.
Now I’d still like to return to the questions I left unanswered in my first response: the one about
usefulness, and the one about restaging a show from 1962 in 2012. But I’ll let these hang right for awhile longer while my brain processes them. And this is quite enough for now.
I know you told me that sitting on the bleachers in the Lithuanian pavilion next to Francesca on
returning at the end of August was intense. I wonder if you’d like to describe that sensation here.

	
  

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And perhaps related perhaps not, you seem to be lurching towards the idea of a kind of symbolmeditation-word. Any ideas about what this gateway glyph might look like?
S: Now, of course I was well aware of overstating your ‘classic’ prefix, but precisely because it was away into what the word made me realize I wanted to talk about (in that particular case, Eco’s*timeliness*). And I know you know this because you pulled the same stunt. It all makes me realize thatgoing back and tinkering with some apparently innocuous detail or other – such as the word ‘classic’ –is the classic narrative hinge in all stories about time travel.
With the benefit of hindsight, then, what apparently innocuous detail from the past might have a usefulknock-on effect in terms of getting us to the party on time? As we know, the reason we got stopped
in our tracks on the way to the party and rudely diverted to an otherwise unremarkable evening at a
nondescript bar on the Via Garibaldi, was because our friend Mai Abu ElDahab insisted – I mean reallyalmost suspiciously insisted – that it was all over and useless to even double-check, even though
we were only some 200 meters away from the building. So her flawed conviction is clearly the fork,
the portal, the dark matter in this backstory.
When I was in Lithuania talking about all this with another curator, Jonas Zakaitis, last week, hesuggested that we ought to make sure Mai attends our Solstice event in Vilnius, but then make sure
she gets stopped on the way and told the whole thing has ended. Okay, that’s more cosmic payback
than tinkering with cause and effect, but perhaps it triggers something.
I’m going to address both your questions. They’ll be on the long side, so I suggest we eventually
cut-and-paste the second one to somewhere later in the text. That way it’ll seem more like a steadyflow than a deluge.
In the pavilion with Francesca – where to start? Basically, within the first few minutes of entering the
sports hall on the morning of the opening day of the Biennial I fell in love. The crux of this event
involved our sitting and talking at the foot of the steps in the sports hall for about ten minutes. To say
this was ‘intense’ is the biggest understatement of this discussion, even though half of it is yet to be
written. Suffice to say that from this point on everything changed irrevocably: I knew and thought
things I had simply never known or thought before.
However, you’re asking not about this occasion, but rather our revisiting the same spot at the end of
the summer, now as a bona fide couple. The sense of strangeness in returning to such a romanticallycharged location can’t be that unusual, of course, but I do think it was heightened by being so
relatively soon after the original event, as though the magnetic pull between the two times was still verystrong. ‘Magnetism’ is actually a fairly good description of what I felt sitting on the bottom step thesecond time around. I don’t just mean this in an obvious romantic sense, but physically – as if I were in
an energy field. One consequence of this was heightened perception. This is going to be hard toswallow, I know, but I swear I could see all the works, including the clocks, in higher definition.
But I also recall feeling somehow confused by the order of these two times at the foot of the concrete
bleachers. No, not confused – I was fully aware, of course, that I was recalling the first time during thesecond. It was more a sense that the order didn’t matter; that these two times on the step in June andAugust were somehow the same moment. No time had passed, or all the time in the world had passed.
I could perhaps best summarize it as a suddenly holistic sense of time.
Love is, of course, famously out of time – beyond the regular laws of time and space, I mean. Here’s afragment from Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed I came across around the time we started thisexchange. I’ve been waiting for a chance to share it ever since:
Ecstasy means being ‘outside oneself,’ as indicated by the etymologyof the Greek word: the act of leaving one’s position (stasis). To be‘outside oneself’ does not mean outside the present moment, like a
dreamer escaping into the past or future. Just the opposite: ecstasy
is absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting ofpast and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present

	
  

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moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside
time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity,
which too is the negation of time).4
So yes, this is the sort of thing I felt on the steps – outside myself and outside chronology. It’s well
worth adding, too, that Kundera notes that the classic state of ecstasy, and so the classic state ofbeing ‘outside’ is the orgasm. Which is perhaps a bit much to expect from a talk in a Contemporary Art
Center, Summer Solstice or not.
Regarding the glyph: I have no idea what I’m talking about, what I’m trying to conjure here, but atleast one instructive instance comes to mind. There’s a remarkable short story by David Foster Wallace
called ‘Good Old Neon’ that consists in a matter-of-fact account of events leading up to the suicideof an identity-scrambled protagonist. The story initially seems to be recounted in the first person– albeit from the afterlife – by someone called Neal; but later a second character called ‘David Wallace’claims to have projected the whole thing. All of which is deliberately obfuscating for good reason.
What is clear is that the ‘first’ protagonist deliberately and fatally drives his car off an unfinished bridge.
But the story has at least two more-or-less parallel endings. These are not exactly ‘false’ or‘alternative,’ but rather convey the multiple dimensions of time, character and consciousness thatamount to the story’s fairly plausible-sounding description of what it’s like to die – the promise ofwhich is causally advertised early in the text:
Right? This is what everyone wants to know. It’s not what anyone
thinks, for one thing. The truth is you already know what it’s like.
You already know the difference between the size and speed ofeverything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it
all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is thisenormous room full of what seems like the whole universe at one timeor another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze
out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in
older doors.
And then:Because listen – we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cacheslopes slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you canjust make out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s
never open anymore, the last sign before the bridge – so listen:
What exactly do you think you are? The millions and trillions ofthoughts, memories, juxtapositions – even crazy ones like this, you’re
thinking – that flash through your head and disappear? Some sum or
remainder of these? Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since
I told you I was a fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the
RESPICEM watch hanging from the rearview and seeing the time, 9:17?
What are you looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has
passed at all? The truth is you’re already heard this. That this iswhat it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside
you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies ofdifferent voices, the infinities you can never show another soul.5

Ok, two things I want to add here:	
  4Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed [1993, French] (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 83.

5David Foster Wallace, ‘Good Old Neon’, Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), p. 178–9

	
  

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First, Wallace’s writing in ‘Good Old Neon’ seems to affect me not only cerebrally, but physiologically.
This certainly has something to do with his famously overextended use of footnotes, endnotes, andother formal mechanisms that deliberately disorient by setting off parallel tracks of writing liable toinduce a certain nausea – something akin to carsickness or vertigo. More particularly, though,Wallace’s writing is, I think, designed to demand an emphatically involved reading. All the absurdly longsentences, clauses within clauses within clauses, idiosyncratic speech tics, countless repetitions,
elliptical phrasing, and so on, force the reader to read and re-read, constantly in a state of stalling andre-orientating. This involves considerable – and to me entirely profitable – mental labor. In a word:
investment.
‘Good Old Neon’ is an extreme case of the loopy focus necessary to work out what and how andultimately who the hell is going on – and this is fully consonant with what I read as the ambition to
articulate a sense of having transcended time, one that’s commensurate with Kundera’s descriptionof ecstasy.
This seems to overlap with your account of how writing direction influences our mental conceptionof time – that the structure of writing does something to the body above or below consciousness.
Both point to the idea of a particularly libidinal writing that induces some sort of altered state.
The same goes for Franny Glass’s prayer. She was after the peace of enlightenment; we’re chasing
hypothetical transport into the past. Nice this term, too: *transporting*.
Second, I said that ‘Good Old Neon’ has ‘at least’ two parallel endings, and that’s because there’s aplausible third in the form of a mysterious glyph at the bottom right-hand corner of the last page,
ranged right a couple of lines after the end of the main body of text. Properly speaking, it’s not a glyphat all, more a cluster of characters, but they certainly operate on me in the way I’m imagining the way
a time-travel trigger might.
On first glance this impenetrable little row of characters seems innocent enough, but it increasingly
gave me The Fear. I read it, vaguely, as some kind of ultra-compressed language from the afterlife, avirtual message in a bottle [in brackets] as though if you could crack the code you’d release an infinityof thought and feeling (which is more or less how Wallace describes dying), like a linguistic pi.

However, according to some cursory internet sleuthing, it turns out that the ‘glyph’ is actually nothing
more sinister than a composite baseball rating, ending with a batting average (.418). Inasmuch as thestory’s protagonist seems to be based on an actual colleague of the actual Wallace in high school orcollege (initials NMN), it’s plausible that this value is real-world character’s actual rating that year (’80)
on the date of his death. If so, it thus serves as a very odd and very American ‘in memoriam.’ It’s
perhaps clear, then, that the story is performing, or Fostering, its own brand of scrambled semiautobiographical time-travel too.
I want to leave you with the thought that the mere suggestion that this sports rating meant something
more was all it took to set me off on my own speculation, which as I say was partly physiological– a queasiness induced by the mere anticipation of what it might contain: ‘sick with anxiety.’ But alsothat this ‘glyph’ works only in conclusion, that is, in the wake of a 40-page setup that’s already played
havoc with your temporals. In other words, it more readily transports the close reader whose
sensibilities have been adequately primed.
Anyway, no new question for you. I’ll leave you some space to answer the earlier one.
D: No question is a gift, seeing as I have two held in reserve from before. An absolutely trivial thought,
but one that never leaves my brain: it is endlessly fascinating how the same thing held in delay means
something different when it finally appears. I find it reassuring (not sure why) that one thing can stay thesame over time and yet the world spins around it and when that thing that has stayed the same

	
  

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appears again later, then it is changed by virtue that everything else has moved on. It is in no way
related to nostalgia or conservatism, but often gets mistaken for such. I simply find it fantastic that athing can change without changing, yet it happens every day.
Since it has been a number of paragraphs and a matter of months since your initial questions that
I’ll answer now, I should restate them: you asked about ‘the juxtaposition of so-called ‘useless’ andso-called ‘useful’ objects’ in the Arte Programmata exhibition that Bruno Munari staged with Olivetti in
1962; you also asked about ‘the similarities and dissimilarities between the original 1962 show and a
restaging of it in 2012.’ I’ll take the first question, first.
The Olivetti showroom in Venice was brand new when Arte Programmata opened in 1962. Secondgeneration company director Adriano Olivetti commissioned local architect Carlo Scarpa to design thespace in an existing building on Piazza San Marco in the heart of the city. As with many of Olivetti’s art
and design commissions of the time, this space was as much a place to showcase Scarpa’s
architectural talents and Olivetti’s enlightened commissioning program as it was to display Olivetti’s
typewriters and calculators. The interior of the small space is rather like a jewel box, arranged on twolevels with sightlines and view portals throughout. From upstairs in the corner, you might catch aglimpse of the bronze sculpture that anchors the entrance while passing by a textured concrete wall
and walnut cabinetry. It is absolutely ‘modern’ but in Scarpa’s specific vernacular it feels connects to amuch longer time-scaled tradition of design, there. It seems assertively Italian, or Venetian anyway,
from what I can tell.
Inside the showroom are rows of Olivetti products sat on shelves and presented one after the other.
It is more or less a 1962 Apple Store, but as it is both from that time and in Italy, the ahistorical sheer,slick surfaces and glass staircases of Apple are replaced by textured concrete, inset brass, andbeautifully worked walnut, old and new at once. The stark modernity of the Olivetti products are given
a historical frame to live in, and the result is both generous and shocking. It must have looked bracingly
new and absolutely fantastic in 1962 as far as I can tell from 2013.

The artworks included in the exhibition organized by Munari were much like products themselves.
In fact, the artists that participated in the show often insisted on this rhetoric in place of ‘artwork’ toname the things that they were making. Most of the artists worked collectively (Gruppo T and Gruppo
N, for example) and their works were made as multiples, rather than as unique objects. Each also
insisted on the industrial manufacture of their ideas, which facilitated production and a corresponding
pricetag much closer to a product than a sculpture.
The installation of these works in the show was done in line with the existing products, so that the newpieces were added to the existing display as if they were simply another Olivetti offering. The purposeof, for example, Gruppo N’s Bispazio Instabile is not quite as concrete as say what the Olivetti Lettera
22 typewriter is meant to do, however the exhibition design placed these two cheek-by-jowl to induce
an explicit correspondence. The artworks in the show, produced as multiples and framed as products,
were intended to be useful, to be functional. The artists rejected conventional wisdom that use is theenemy of art, and suggested another more complicated equation. As a glass-sided vertical box

	
  

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containing something like 100 small red and white balls and a handle on the side of the object intended
to mix the arrangements of the two to produce a new composition, this Bispazio Instabile was an
artwork that signalled a specific function. Its handle makes it read first as something to be used,
to be manipulated. And in fact this was the point – the work provides an explicit invitation to remake
it yourself, to shuffle the balls, produce a new constellation, and in so doing, to get an intuitive feelof what it is to rearrange reality, to change the current situation, to simply move forward in time. You’ll
remember from before that I quoted Marco Meneguzzo on how the works work, and I am afraid thatbears repeating:
It was not a question of putting technology up on the pedestal oflegend, but of the indispensable use of the ‘future’ – renderedvisible by movement – to create a form adequate to the future of theworld.
In 2012 the Fondazione Olivetti restaged the exhibition in its original Venice venue. In the meantime,
Olivetti had withered to 1/4 of its 1962 size – by the 1990s, typewriting and calculating were not thegrowth industries they once were. The company’s computer efforts were not having any successagainst dominant rivals. By 1999, and already part-owned by Pirelli and Benetton, Olivetti attempteda hostile takeover of the formerly nationalized Telecom Italia. Although a fraction of its target size,
Olivetti succeeded in taking over the phone company only to realize that what they got in return was amountain of debt. The relationship was soon inversed with Telecom Italia retroactively swallowing
Olivetti. Since, Olivetti has half-heartedly entered the tablet computer business. A similar fate attended
the San Marco showroom, and by the 1990s it was sold and refashioned as a tacky tourist souvenir
shop.
In 1998, Bruno Munari died. Ten years later, the Olivetti foundation had re-acquired the original
showroom space and was working to restore it to its previous splendour. The renovation job was
immaculate, refinishing all of the space’s surfaces, its architecture, and artwork, as well as restoring acomplete collection of Olivetti products, which would have been displayed in the space in 1962. To
mark the reopening of the showroom in concert with the 2012 Architecture Biennale, Arte
Programmata was scheduled to be reinstalled in the space as well. The new version of the exhibition
was titled Programmare l’Arte in a pun that shifted the original title and converts the original adjective‘Programmed’ to an imperative verb: Program.

In the intervening 50 years, although the showroom and the exhibition were materially the same as they
were in 1962, everything else around them had changed. So the showroom, which was initially built toshowcase Olivetti’s most current technology, now functions as a museum of antique products from
Olivetti in the 1960s. These typewriters and calculators are presented exactly as they were then,although with contextualizing labels so that we can read their original functions at such a temporal
distance. The works from Arte Programmata were also installed in the space as they were originally.
Many of these works were either rehabilitated or reconstructed, but given their original dictate ofindustrial manufacture then this seems entirely appropriate. The relationships between useless anduseful had directly inverted in the meantime, like a switch that throws the direction of electrical current,
swapping its positive and negative poles: the products were no longer really products, but historicalartifacts, and therefore not explicitly useful; the artworks however, remained more or less the same –as useless and/or useful as they had been when originally exhibited. I’d even guess that with 50 years,

	
  

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their values have hewed closer to being useful through an explicitly educational aspect which teaches
us how to think about the way things change.
I’ll just end on the idea that I’ve set on your mental table previously. When we originally made thework in Venice, we proposed it under the title Work-In-Progress with the idea that whatever we would
make for the exhibition using the scoreboards would evolve over time and even likely not be present at
the opening of the exhibition. We nearly got our wish when the chip that we had made to alter theelectronic scoreboard’s program managed to short circuit the controller and send the display into afreakout less than two hours before the opening visits. Graciously, the electronics reconsidered andwe were able to get the setup working in time for the jury’s visit and opening.
As part of our Work-In-Progress, we suggested that the scoreboard display sequence would act as ascore for a performance to follow some time after the show closed. To that end, we arranged a fairly
elaborate setup to record the twin displays in the space with the idea that the resulting video would be
our score. Well, in the meantime, I’ve had further thoughts that perhaps it would be a measure moreproductively uncanny to remanufacture the scoreboard itself and use two of these during our intended
performance in the space at Centre for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, to act as our performance timer
and travel vehicle. As I write this, I have Wallace’s menacing glyph up on my screen and I too find it
fascinating. I can barely keep my eyes off of it and I suspect these scoreboards might function similarly
to provide cover for when, during the midst of our doubletalk, we *poof* disappear to attend a previous
engagement.
S: There’s something in this sleight of hand you describe, I’m sure. Do you remember that New Yorker
article not so long ago about the Las Vegas ‘magician’ who specialized in pickpocketry? It included asurprisingly technical account of the psychological manipulation involved – the guy’s ability to divert
the immediate attention of the person in front of him …
D: Yes, I remember.
S: Well, it reminds me of a quite possibly apocryphal story on a somewhat grander scale that I heard
years ago and still think about a lot. (I could check whether it actually happened easily enough,but like the idea too much to risk spoiling my version.) It took place during some massive gig by either
Jean-Michelle Jarre or David Copperfield – who seem to have morphed into a single personality for me,
like your and Raimundas’s composite Kazys. The event took place on the Champ de Mars in Paris in
front of the Eiffel Tower. As it commenced, giant curtains were hoisted up around the audience tomask out the view of the tower. The show proceeded along tediously spectacular lines, thenculminated with Jarre-Copperfield announcing that he had moved the Eiffel Tower. The curtains felland (touché!) the Tower was indeed no longer in front of the audience, but (gasp!) behind them. Turns
out he’d pulled off the illusion by having the audience sat on a construction that rotated imperceptibly
throughout the show, so by the time of the climax they’d turned exactly 180 degrees.
About remanufacturing the basketball clocks: I’m by no means averse to this, but practically how doyou imagine doing it, given that they presumably cost about Eu 50,000 a shot and our budget is more
likely about 1/50th of this? I’m supposing you’re thinking of newly fabricating along the same lines as
the Programmare l’Arte, i.e. these are industrial products that can effectively be duplicated any time
any place. I think I agree in principle that this would be a good deal more psychically potent thansimply showing the videos of the previous clocks, but another, cheaper option would be to have a live
transmission of the clocks rebooted to function once more according to our base-16 time. This wouldof course appear identical to the films, yet amount to a whole different proposition; and seeing as how
we’re deliberately messing with fate here, a far more appropriately charged one – charged not least
with the distinct possibility of the transmission fucking up. Incidentally, the chips that change the clock
to our time are still in a safely guarded envelope somewhere in the offices of Palasport.

	
  

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A further option, though, would be to produce our own ‘real’ clocks (to operate in situ during the talk)as primitively and inexpensively as possible. By which I mean to assemble our own analogue binary
4-unit base-16 version of that basic clock diagram we’ve written about before, employing the mostrudimentary forms of power, display and resonator. I can picture two attractively jerry-rigged devices
that hypnotize in the same manner as Fischli & Weiss’s The Way Things Go, for example – which I caneasily imagine usefully ‘diverting the immediate attention of the people in front of us’.
Perhaps it’s useful to remind ourselves of the actual ‘possibility space’ we’ve decided as the setting forthe solstice event – a marble-paved courtyard bang in the middle of the Contemporary Art Centre moreusually occupied by smokers at openings. Seems to me it’s a perfectly ‘limited’ space in which to‘program’ something at midnight on the cusp of June 20 and 21.

It’s also possible to occupy the three walls just inside the building that run around the courtyard, and I
wonder if it mightn’t be a good idea to populate those walls with some of the potentially totemic items
we’ve listed here. For instance, Varnelis’s painting (which happens to be housed across the road),an Olivetti typewriter or calculator or computer, one or more of the pieces from Arte Programmata or
Programmare l’Arte, and perhaps some other obviously related pieces, such as the manipulated Casio
watch we made with Eric Wysocan (in which time snakes through the LCD), the 1200 dpi scan wemade of an analogue watch (to capture its second hand bending back across 5 seconds), or Alighieroe Boetti’s print Contatore (that shows an odometer on the point of changing from 8999999 to
9000000). I can imagine such artifacts getting drawn into the event, becoming props – and perhaps
such a display could serve as a preface or epilogue before and after the Solstice moment.

	
  

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Funny that I remembered our calling our thing ‘The Last Stop Clock’ and you ‘The Last Shot Clock’.
Once again, I guess it’s both. A stop clock (or stopwatch) is based on time counting up, while a shotclock (which counts down basketball’s 35-second deadline) is based on time running out. It seems tome that many of the clues assembling here similarly imply performing two essentially opposite things
at once – see too the Casa and Ospiti (Home and Guests) on the scoreboard.
One last thing I want to mention concerns the book you implored me to read around this time last year,
Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren.6 As you know, this is an extremely close and fairly
bizarre reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal 1897 poem ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira lehasard’. Meillassoux’s analysis, which is more police procedural than literary criticism, unpacks
Mallarmé’s intentions via a highly specific (and contentious) numerology. Note that numerology means‘any study of the purported divine, mystical or other special relationship between a number and somecoinciding observed (or perceived) events.’
I don’t want to go into the book in detail here, only remind you of the closing pages in which
Meillassoux reflects on the case he’s just finished making. He basically acknowledges that it must be
difficult to gauge how serious or ridiculous his thesis is – even how much Meillassoux himself isconvinced of his fairly wild reasoning. To ask this question, he says, is precisely to miss the point; whatmatters is not that an idea is plausible, only that it has ample energy – an energy that is in this caseideally manifest as a piece of work, as art.
Otherwise put, Meillassoux, like Mallarmé before him, is possibly taking the piss, possibly not, but it
doesn’t matter either way. There’s footage online of him delivering an abbreviated version of the bookat Miguel Abreu’s gallery and he remains fantastically inscrutable throughout.7 Even when the audienceis laughing at some of the more dubious leaps and bounds in his theory, his delivery remains totally
deadpan, always almost smiling the half-smile of someone who knows he’s onto something: a work-inprogress.

10.2: A LIVE VENN DIAGRAM
The last of the images included in-line with the interview text sent off to Graz was this photograph of apiece of work we’d made in the interim called Poster for an Infinite Solstice Event. It’s an immaterial‘poster’ made from a lozenge of light projected through a 35mm slide onto a wall, with the projector
set at an angle so the image appears as a kind of cartoon poster receding off into a third dimension. The
poster’s immaterial material, light, doubles as an image of the anniversary’s fundamental point. It wasmade for inclusion in the group exhibition Reflections from Damaged Life at Raven Row, London, in

	
  

6

Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren [French, 2011] (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012).

7

http://vimeo.com/42719285.

	
  

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late 2013.8 As usual, there’s a longer backstory; the short version is that the ‘poster’ was originallyconceived to advertise a specific solstice party in Copenhagen in June 2012, only the idea expanded to
become a perpetual advert, designed to promote any summer solstice event (which always occurs on
the 20th or 21st of June).
And so when we started to plan the event in Vilnius, as with the latent function we were busy
contriving for the clocks, we could likewise put this poster to use by programming the incantation totake place on the 20th or 21st June (or as it happened, on the cusp). This nominal deadline finallyforced some focus:
David,
Yesterday I began to think more concertedly about the script or score for Vilnius. To sum up what I
think is more or less on the tip of our minds, the idea is– to write some long talk-lecture-performance-show, with both of us reading, maybe in tandem for atleast some of the time, or more likely ping-pong from one end of the ‘court’ to the other, racking up‘points’;– these points will be anecdotes/vignettes that have something to do with ways and means of
extracting ourselves from orthodox perceptions of time and space, along with the premise andsubsequent narrative of our involvement in the Lithuanian Pavilion in Venice;– which ought to amount to some kind of *incantation*, a spell that allows us (and an audience along
for the ride) to attend the party we missed a year before, as an embodiment of the sorts of time travel
we’ll have been talking about.
Now, working pragmatically backwards, which is to say, per William James, according to an attitude
of orientation that involves ‘looking away from first things (preconceptions, principles, categories,and supposed necessities) and towards last things (results, fruits, and consequences)’,9 we can also
dimly perceive in that this thing– ought to last as long as an audience can reasonably take, which is to say the same as any usual
public talk, maybe a half-hour minimum (to get into something with a reasonable degree ofconcentration) and two-hour maximum (Quentin Meillassoux’s notably lengthy talk on Mallarmé atMiguel Abreu’s gallery was roughly that long, and I was with him all the way.10– might involve assorted props, bits of other media (music, film, images, objects), possibly otherpeople, and immediate or latent reference to stuff on the walls surrounding the courtyard.
– would ideally be recited (from memory) rather than read or improvised. Incidentally, it occurs to me
that the *asterisks* we’ve started using as an orthographic emphasis distinct from bold or italic,
already seem in the realm of incantation; I always see them a kind of *clandestine* emphasis, more ofa hint or allusion, something *secretive* at least. You have to get it to get it, but it’s not that hard to get– and once you’ve got it once you’ve got it for good!
All of which suggests to me to write the thing according to some specific meter. Partly because
repetition is a classic characteristic of an incantation (like the physiological effect of Franny Glass’s‘Jesus Prayer’ that I mentioned in our Durch discussion), but also because, if we’re intending to learn itin order to recite it, such a rhythm would likely function as an aide memoire. Plus of course, the whole
event is anyway based on the strict repetitive rhythm of the clocks.

	  8

A History of Irritated Material, Raven Row, London, 26 September – 15 December, 2013.

9

William James, Pragmatism [1907] (London: Signet, 1970).

10

See fn. 7.

	
  

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Bear with me.
I began by reminding myself of a play written by the British writer B.S. Johnson called You're Human
Like the Rest of Them, an unremittingly bleak piece of work from 1964 concerning the decay of thehuman body. What’s interesting for us is that he wrote it according to a syllabic system – in this caseten syllables per line. There’s no obvious connection between this formal system and the subject
matter, other then perhaps matching the terseness of its point. But the fact that there isn’t one could
be instructive: what might such a direct link between meter and matter mean? That said, Johnson did
allude to something like the ‘timely pertinence’ of this formal conceit, writing that syllabics ‘is moresuited to 1964 than clapped-out stress meters’. In other words, he’s arguing for something less rigid
than older conventions that involve certain repeated patterns of stress or vowel length. I don’t
understand why syllabics might be more in tune with 1964 than 1864, but I’m curious.
Here’s an excerpt. You can clearly see/hear the syllabics, with the lines of ten syllables broken bya slash:Shut up you little bastards, just shut up!/
I’m trying to teach you something real, real!/
Something that I’ve learnt for myself this time/
Something that has to do with all of you/11
Also interesting to note is that not all the lines in the play are necessarily spoken in their entirety by thesame actor; they can be split among actors so long as the rhythm is maintained.
So this was the sort of thing I had in mind. It led me, obviously enough, to the thought that we ought tostructure our thing not according to 10 but 16 beats – 16 syllables – in order to match the clock’s
hexadecimal loop. It occurred to me, too, that, as we’d each be facing a clock, we could conceivably
read to the same speed – in which case the live sound and the prerecorded image would be ‘doing thesame’. There must be something in that synchronicity.
Looking into the mechanics of prosody a bit more, meter refers to the basic rhythmic structure ofverse. There are four basic types: (1) accentual, (2) syllabic, (3) accentual-syllabic, and (4) quantitative.
The first three are fairly self-evident (i.e. a poem can be primarily based on accents or syllables,or both equally). ‘Quantitative’ refers to poems organized according to vowel length rather than stress;
it’s an anachronism, specifically used in classical Greek and Latin verse.
The most elemental units of meter are feet. These can comprise any number of syllables, but they’remost commonly in twos or threes, because repeating patterns of more than that would be hugely
limiting. The most well known meter is the 10-syllable iambic pentameter: five feet each comprising aniamb, which is the name for a two-syllable foot comprising a weak and a strong accent in that order.
A further useful technical term to introduce in this brief poetry primer is scansion, which refers to theway of representing the relative stress of metrical units. Unlike musical notation, there are many typesof scansion, which can be as rudimentary as ‘der-DUM’. I’m going to stick to what seems to be about
the most common: a weak accent represented by ‘x’, strong represented by ‘/’. So an example of aniambic pentameter would be:
×

/

×

/

×

/

×

/

×

/

i.e. ‘so LONG as MEN can BREATHE or EYES can SEE’
To some extent all of this will be important later, but without going into too much detail you canimagine all variations of weak and strong stress applied to the binary of a two-pronged foot: ‘x x’ or ‘/ /’or ‘x /’ or ‘/ x’. As I'll explain in a bit, we might be concerned with the last one, which is to say strong

	
  
11

Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The story of B.S. Johnson (London: Picador, 2004), p. 177.

	
  

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stress first, or iambic in reverse, which is known as noun trochee or adjective trochaic. A trochaic
pentameter is:
/

×

/

×

/

×

/

×

/

i.e. ‘SO long AS men CAN breathe OR eyes CAN see’
The main thing to take from this, simple as it seems, is that an iambic or trochaic foot is binary,
and another way of writing the relative stress would be using not ‘x’ and ‘/’ but ‘O’ and ‘o’. Hold thatthought.
Now, as well as pentameters, comprising 5 feet of however many syllables (in the above examples,
2 each), there are tetrameters (4 feet), trimeters (6 feet), heptameters (7 feet), and octameters (8 feet)– and in theory proceeding beyond in either direction, but again, barely used for obvious reasons.
To work within a meter that corresponds with our clocks’ 16, then, the most obvious choice would be
the last one listed here, octameter. That’s 8 feet with (in the simplest, most manageable and commonform) 2 syllables each: 8 x 2 = 16.
It all sounds more complicated than it actually is, but it seems important to understand thearchitecture. To be clear, we could simply write in lines of 16 syllables without any stress pattern– technically speaking, ‘a bunch of 16-syllable lines’; octameter specifically refers to 8 instances ofa recurring pattern on a single line – a pattern that could be iambic or trochaic or etc.
I started looking a bit more into octameters; turns out it’s a very rarely used system. The most famoususe of octameter by a long shot is by Edgar Allen Poe in his most well-known poem, The Raven (1845).
Here’s the first verse:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door –Only this, and nothing more.’
The Raven isn’t comprised exclusively of octameters;. Poe also occasionally mixes in heptameter andtetrameter lines. These are all conventions, not officially imposed rules; poetry frequently involves
setting up such a system in order to break it to expressive effect. In any case, Poe was after something
distinctly new here. In one account he writes that The Raven was a concerted attempt to form
something new out of two existing ideas that so far as he knew had never been combined. One was aparticular kind of story of the sort such as X writes; the other was a particular form of poetry such as
Y writes. He laments that X typically used dull means to tell his great stories, while Y was the opposite– interesting forms, boring tales. X was all about content, Y all about form. Poe’s aim was to combine
the two in one poem. Sound familiar?
Incredibly, a year after writing The Raven, Poe wrote a backwards account of how he came to write it
called ‘The Philosophy of Composition’.
So I’ve started to try and write something based on this appropriately backwards philosophy drawn
directly from our Durch conversation, turning rambling prose into tight pseudo-poetry comprising
16-syllable lines, to be read in either octametric iambics or trochaics (I’m not sure). It seems to *work*,
whatever the hell that might mean. What do I mean? I think simply that the form felt natural, fluid,
generative – a set of tangibly productive limits.
I should add that The Raven is written (mostly) in octametric trochaics, meaning the stress comes on
the first beat of the binary feet. Also, this ‘stress’ is not as straightforward as it first sounds. You mightreasonably assume that stress is inherent to the form/pronunciation of a given word; however, different
people accentuate words differently according to, well, their accent. So for instance the word ‘delay’
could be spoken equally ‘DE-lay’ or ‘de-LAY’ and both would be correct. Even regardless of accents,

	
  

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you can anyway stress words as you like, of course. Try reading the first line from The Raven according
to both iambic and trochaic emphasis – you can do it, only one sounds more perverse and contrived
than the other because Poe, being a poet, chose his words according to the specific format. In somecases, a ‘perverse’ effect might be entirely desirable, too. In any case, it helps to think in terms of beatsor pulses rather than accents – slightly less specific terms and more apt because of it.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The Raven is generally regarded as a ‘mesmeric’ poem, and further, that this quality is partly orlargely down to the particular use of octametric meter. If you buy that, octameter seems ideally suitedfor our purposes, given that we’re out to achieve some kind of group hypnosis. Moreover, in obscureconfirmation of its mysteriously ‘mesmeric’ quality, Poe describes The Raven as ‘octametre
acatalectic’. ‘Acatalectic’ means dropping the last syllable or syllables for effect, so it refers tosomething deliberately structurally ‘incomplete’ or ‘open’. And even more moreover, according to aclose friend who knows Greek and Latin, ‘catalectic’ derives from the same root as catalepsy:
A physical condition usually associated with catatonic schizophrenia,
characterized by suspension of sensation, muscular rigidity, fixity of
posture, and often by loss of contact with environment.’
Origin: 1350–1400; Medieval Latin catalēpsia, variant of Late Latin
catalēpsis; Greek katálēpsis seizure (akin to katalambánein to holddown), equivalent to kata- cata- + lêpsis, a grasping (lēp-, variant
stem of lambánein, to grasp + -sis -sis)

Loss of contact with environment + grasping = perfect. Then again, we don’t particularly want to
induce this:Finally, or rather in parallel, I started to envisage a structure for the solstice event. We talk briefly in the
Durch thing about how the build-up, the expectation, the anticipation, is essential to the proper
functioning of a spell or incantation. The ominous black spot in Treasure Island can cause a hardened
sailor to faint on sight if his nervous system has been adequately wound up by force of rumour. And so
we ought to frame the event in such a way that guarantees maximum suspense, building towards a
climax that coincides with *realizing* the party.
To that end, my instinct is to intersperse the Venice narrative with a series of more generalized
space-time vignettes, in such a way that their combinatory *point* is only gradually revealed. Classic
storytelling, of course, but in this case it’s a two-fold story. What I mean is:– Narrative 1: Venice; Lithuanian pavilion; making the clocks, as yet without explaining how they ‘work’,
or even insinuating there’s a pattern at all.
– Anecdotes 1: So for instance the ‘Good Old Neon’ glyph, or the Arte Programmata principle, Franny
Glass’s prayer, or backwards handwriting, or any other relevant anecdote we’ve come across sincethat Durch discussion, like the theory of ‘Superposition’ in Quantum Physics – or indeed Poe’s ‘Theoryof Composition’.

	
  

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– Narrative 2: Missing the party, as yet without saying that what we're trying to do here is get back to it;
ideally, if we construct this correctly, an audience will gradually start to suspect/intuit/guess that’s what
this is about – or even better, will realize it at exactly the same moment we come clean, so to speak.
– Anecdotes 2: More of the same.
– Narrative 3: Explanation that what we’re attempting here is then to get back in time by summoning
instances from other domains – entirely straight-faced.
– Anecdotes 3: Ditto.
– Narrative 4: Explanation of the clock pattern everyone’s been in/advertently staring at for the past
X minutes and explanation of the *equivalent* form of the octametric script we’ve been reading(we’d be able to quote lines from The Raven without disrupting our meter); perhaps this is the part
we read in parallel.
– Coda: Close with some sort of transcendence/comedown vignette – ?
My thinking is that, after the composite two-fold buildup, that *double reveal* of the clock and thescript really triggers what we’re out to achieve – time *thickening*. The audience would comprehend
as a group that the visual structure of the clocks and the linguistic structure of the script overlap– the grey area, the dark matter, in a live Venn diagram. Surely that would add up to some kind of*trembling*. OooooOOOOooOOOOoooOOo.
That doesn’t seem like such a long shot. It excites me to no end, anyway, and that’s what mattersright now.
Finally, in light of all this, consider what a useful writing template might look like – something equivalent
to the blank staves on a standard page of sheet music. I imagine dividing each line into 16 units withdiscreet hyphens (-), plus a caesura (|) in the middle to allow for easier reading/breathing, and perhaps
some indication of the relative stress of the beats, whether iambic or trochaic (assuming we decide tostress the feet at all). We ought to also make sure to leave space above or below lines to work out
these lines, as I imagine it’s going to take a whole lot of trial and error to force-fit our logorrhea intosuch a small container.
For now,
Stuart10.3: SOLSTICE EVENT
With the basic idea in place, we settled on that graphic template and began compressing the Durch
text into syllabics. Meanwhile, we also began to inventorize a number of pieces of work that could
serve as visual ‘annotations’ to the spoken piece, all in some way concerned with ‘exiting regularmodes of time.’ About half of these were things we’d made ourselves in the past few years, such as thereverse-engineered digital watch we made with Eric Wysocan, Watch Wyoscan 0.5hz (in which thecurrent time snakes through the elements of the LCD display on the verge of legibility); the 16-minute‘program that runs a script’ Letter & Spirit (which tells the story of our update of Donald Knuth’s
Metafont project),12 and that infinite solstice poster.
The other half was made up of others’ work past and present, including a number of Italian artworks
from the 1960s and 70s (a multiple by Bruno Munari, a print by Alighiero e Boetti, and a photo-collage
by Giuseppe Penone). The most recent and earliest work was a commissioned copy of an oil painting

	
  
12

See §8.1.

	
  

424

by Kazimir Malevich titled Sisters. Dated 1910 on the back of the canvas, on first glance the painting
appears to be a rudimentary exercise in Impressionist technique.

It turns out that Malevich actually painted it in the late 1920s, then backdated it to appear as a logicalpoint on a trajectory of stylistic progress. We’d come across the work thanks to some notes written by afriend of a friend, Perrine Bailleux, after she came across the painting and its accompanying caption ata recent Malevich retrospective in Amsterdam. According to her deadpan thesis, the backdating ought
not be dismissed as some amusing attempt by a vain, geriatric Malevich to rewrite his career into
something more art-historically consistent – a heroic march through Modernist platitudes towards theBlack Square. No: his far more radical reasoning, she posits, was to radically confound the usual
teleology in line with the Suprematist credo to obliterate history altogether. The key clue, according to
Bailleux, is the painting’s subject: those so-called sisters are not sisters at all, she says, but rather one
woman painted on the move; an early visualization of time-lapse faked to appear as if painted two
years before Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912).13
As the Vilnius plans became more complex, it seemed increasingly necessary to articulate its parts asclearly as possible for an audience. The principal point to get across was the nature of the relationshipbetween the incantatory talk in the courtyard (one night only, at the beginning) and the work on thesurrounding walls (which would remain installed for two months). It seemed mandatory to convey thefact that the works essentially ‘fell out’ of the founding talk.
An uncommonly informative invitation card seemed the most straightforward way to set up theexhibition’s ‘two sides’ – one side announcing the opening of the exhibition on the first of the twoconsecutive solstice dates, the other announcing the staging of the event on the second. The exhibitionside contained detailed captions of 24 works along with thumbnail images grouped chronologically infours. A consequence of the card’s tight squeeze, these chance clusters, later determined thearrangement of the actual works on the walls in the same groups of four.

The other, event side contained our attempt at the first ‘stanza’ of the talk in four verses of 16-syllable
lines (without specific stress, which had proved too limiting). This was the first of the four projectednarrative parts, due to be interspersed with 16 anecdotal stanzas of the same form and length. And so
this dense card was designed to (a) adequately prime an audience before the whole thing opened and(b) give a good idea ofwhat was at least supposed to have happened after the event.

	
  
13

The whole idea was developed into: Perrine Bailleux, ‘Sisters?’, Bulletins of The Serving Library #7, 2014.

	
  

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426

SOLSTICESTAGING of Dexter Sinister’s The Last ShOt Clock,a two-sided incantation/talk written to conjure a party
inadvertently missed one year ago

Precisely one year past at the 55th Venice Biennial
As part of the joint Cypriot-Lithuanian pavilion
Which was titled big-O little-o, and equally little-o big-O,
Depending on your point of view (depending on your point of view)
We were asked to participate ‘as honorary Lithuanians’
By Raimundas Malašauskas, who assembled the whole show
In the Brutalist Palasport — a monumental sports hall with
A central court for basketball flanked by rows of concrete bleachers.
Our idea was then to hijack the court’s two opposing scoreboards
And turn them into dual clocks (though you’d never see both at once).
These clocks would count time not by means of normal decimal numbers,
But using big-Os and small-os, that binary character set.
We sent along instructions to the scoreboard’s manufacturer
To burn a microchip that would alter its usual function
And reprogram the system to display this maladjusted time,
Then christened it Work-in-Progress — in order to be continued . . .
Doors open 10:30 pm
Event begins 11 pm SHARP

CAC
Vokiečių 2, Vilnius
www.cac.lt

21.6

XII Baltic Triennial

	
  

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10.4: TIME SIGNATURES
Here’s how the script assembled itself, prefaced by a series of notes for future performance:
It starts with a piece of music played extremely loud in the empty courtyard at around 11pm.
The courtyard is approaching darkness, lit only by the moon and the red LEDs of the two clocks hungopposite each other to mimic the scoreboards in the Venice Palasport. The track’s refrain: There’s
always work / In progress / You’re always in / Work in progress’. It plays on repeat for as long as it
takes for an audience to gather. We aim to climax around midnight.
Four more pieces of music punctuate the rest of the hour. Each one is introduced by an improvised(or at least non-scripted) description of the piece, along with the fact that they all employ unorthodox
time signatures – they are aural, abstract equivalents to both the stuff hanging on the walls, and thestories about to be recounted.
The two of us each install ourselves below one of the two clocks, then speak from that spot for theduration. The four NARRATIVE parts are read by both of us – one immediately after the other, half aline at a time. (e.g. I say: ‘Precisely one year past at the’. David repeats it. Then I say: ‘55th Venice
Biennial’. David repeats it, and so on.) This is equally intended to accentuate the meter and make surenothing gets missed. In the script, the narrative parts are set in 16-line stanzas divided into 4 verses,
with line breaks (/) and caesuras (|) to facilitate easier reading based on to the rhythm and repetition.
Although written to the same meter, the 16 ANECDOTAL parts are set in paragraphs, the four verses
divided by paragraph marks (¶) without further distinguishing the syllabic lines. The idea is toenunciate these parts according to the ebb and flow of meaning as opposed to the regular pulse of themeter. Each anecdote is a numbered ‘point’ counting down from 15 to zero (in line with the clocks’
reverse hexadecimal sequence), and these are read out along with each part’s title. D and S alternately
read the parts (as indicated by the letter in parentheses after ech point’s heading).
Between these two forms of delivery, one emphasizing structure, the other substance, ideally theaudience will apprehend an underlying pattern, without it distracting from what’s being spoken;
a sense that the evening is in the grip of a structure, but – as with the clocks – the precise nature ofthat structure is, for the time being, elusive.
Finally, there are two moments of ‘rupture’. The first occurs halfway through (before point 7):
the clocks are stopped while D or S explains the workings of this particular clock system (again semiimprovised, unscripted), then set off again for the second half. The second rupture occurs at the end:
the clocks are halted again while one of us explains the composition of the piece of music about to beplayed in conclusion. Then they are set off again, now advancing in perfect sync with our ‘Theme fromThe Last ShOt Clock’ which plays for the final 17 minutes – until around 00:00.

And so it begins:

	
  

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[Music: ‘Ya Wanner’ by The Fall, 2005, 05:02, on repeat]
Precisely one year past at the | 55th Venice Biennial /As part of the double Cyprus | -Lithuania pavilion /Which was titled big-O small-o | and equally small-o big-O, /Depending on your point of view | (depending on your point of view). /We were asked to participate | ‘as honorary Lithuanians’ /By Raimundas Malašauskas, | who assembled the whole show /In the Brutalist Palasport | – a monumental sports hall with /A central court for basketball | flanked by rows of concrete bleachers.
Our idea was then to hijack | the court’s two opposing scoreboards /And turn them into dual clocks | (though you’d never see both at once). /These clocks would count time not by means | of normal decimal numbers
But using big-Os and small-os, | that binary character set. /We sent along instructions | to the scoreboard’s manufacturer /To burn a microchip that would | alter its usual function /And reprogram the system to | display this maladjusted time. /Then we called it ‘Work-in-Progress’ – | in order to be continued … /POINT 15: PROGRAMMED ART (D)Just over 50 years ago, the artist Bruno Munari organized an exhibition for Milan firm Olivetti in theirbrand new Venice showroom, where in place of calculators was an exhibition of art that was produced
by programming. ¶ The artworks were much like machines – made with motors, lights and mirrors,
moved by a set of instructions which is called the artwork’s ‘program.’ All the work’s possible
outcomes are easily calculated, but each particular moment cannot be known ahead of time. ¶Munari’s own Tetracono is a typical example: a black plastic cube with four cones, all painted half-red,
half-green; each spins at a different tempo to make a repeating pattern, which moves slowly fromgreen to red on an eighteen minute cycle. ¶ Spin the cones and start the process, the work’s function
comes in focus: colour changes before your eyes – as long as you pay attention. And so it serves as amodel of the way that the world changes: A sunrise is not a picture, and the sky’s never simply ‘blue.’

POINT 14: THE CLOCK TOWER (S)A tall building in San Marco in the middle of the city, Torre dell’Orologio dates from the 15th century.
It was built to broadcast the time to the citizens of Venice so they could share a single clock and agree
on what time it is. ¶ This tower has several faces, each with a different sort of clock. At the top sit twobronze figures who strike a bell on the hour. Next, a row of four shifting tiles that turn through minutes
and hours (minutes in Arabic numbers and hours in Roman numerals). ¶ Then the largest clock isa ring split into 24 units marked along its rim by letters, each of which stands for an hour. A secondring sitting inside, and moving a bit more slowly, contains signs of the Zodiac that mark out the sun’s
position. ¶ Each example tells the same time with a different set of symbols, fixed forms that markpassing moments in many configurations. The way time is represented influences our sense of it – time
provides the algorithm, but we must produce its meaning.

POINT 13: VERSION CONTROL (D)
There’s a painting called The Last Shot, a large abstract landscape canvas that’s the final piece ofwork by the artist Kazys Varnelis. It’s a composition in greys, and painted on top of another (not thatit’s so unusual for a painting to be repainted). ¶ Over lunch last year in New York, this is how the work
was described by the curator to his friend – but they seemed to have their wires crossed. ‘Hey, I know
Kazys Varnelis! I thought he was an architect …’. Seems both of them were right (and wrong): there

	
  

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were two – a father and son. ¶ Neither of them realized this until quite a few hours later, so they carriedon discussing this double, composite figure, half-painter and half-architect, a grey area – old andyoung. An intermediate person; not one Kazys or the other. ¶ It’s an everyday instance of the problemof ‘version control,’ a term from software programming that describes how changes are tracked. It
records what happens to forms as they move through generations, a self-portrait of time itself – always
the same, always different.

POINT 12: THE SHOT CLOCK (S)You know the moment in the game: time is running out for your team; a player arcs the basketball fromdowntown as the buzzer sounds. Hold that image for a minute while we focus on the ‘shot clock’ – arecent invention that dates from back in the 1950s. ¶ Time used to count up as usual, then somebody
crunched some numbers to make the game more exciting by adding a tighter deadline; he figured 80
points per game would best hold a crowd’s attention, and working backwards deduced that 24
seconds was the key. ¶ In the new game the clock counts down from 24 back to zero. Within this small
window of time the team in possession must shoot – otherwise they forfeit the ball which goes back totheir opponents. Then the stopwatch counter resets, which keeps the game moving forward. ¶ So theshot clock runs a tight loop, resetting over and over, keeping things constantly urgent, in a permanentstate of stress. As both metronome and timer, this clock serves a twofold function – on one hand
checking duration; on the other, forcing action.

[Music: ‘In C’ by Terry Riley, 1964, 45:32, excerpt]

In Venice to install our clocks | by plugging that chip in the desk, /All that showed up on the scoreboards | were random abstractions of dots. /Seems the chip had been programmed to | run on another control desk /– Which the caretaker found downstairs | and got working right just-in-time. /Then, on our way to the party | thrown in the hall the next evening, /A friend we met insisted that | we’d only be wasting our time … /The party was already through … | we’d be better off going elsewhere. /It turned out none of this was true | – too late! we’d missed our own event! /This sounds like the narrative hinge | on which time travel tends to swing, /The adventure back to the past | to adjust a temporal loose end, /That decisive forking moment, | the dark matter, or the portal, /Which then shuffles the backstory | and influences the present. /Those clocks were made in advance of | any particular purpose, /But now we had good reason to | reverse-engineer an idea: /To somehow get to the party | that we’d accidentally missed, /By using these altered scoreboards | as a score for incantation. /POINT 11: LEFT AND RIGHT (S)A neuroscientist gave a talk a couple of Sundays ago on how we use spatial gestures and metaphors
to relate time. Did you realize, for instance, ‘On Thursday’ is a metaphor? – or that when we point to
the past it’s invariably on our left – ? ¶ The future, on the other hand, is invariably on our right. The
reason why is straightforward: we read and write from left to right – a simple enough idea that we’ve
come to take for granted. So what’s been read is left behind while what’s to come is right ahead. ¶The scientist then organized an experiment to learn more by subjecting English speakers to an hour of
mirror writing, where letters go the other way (d looks like b, god becomes dog). Our brain adapts
quickly to this. It’s plastic matter, after all. ¶ When the direction of writing was changed to run the
opposite, their feeling of past and present was reversed in just the same way. Can it really be that easy

	
  

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to redirect the flow of time, writing from the back to the front, ending up at the beginning – !?

POINT 10: THE MODEL AIRPLANE (D)On a trans-Atlantic Concorde about 1978, the artist got up from his seat and threw a small model
airplane made of very light balsa wood right down the center of the aisle, enabling him to say he’dlaunched the fastest aircraft in the world. ¶ Obviously never recorded and so potentially untrue, theairplane piece disappears when the anecdote’s no longer told. In this lighter-than-air idea, the medium
is the rumour. Sometimes hearsay’s all it takes to propel a work into movement. ¶ That model plane in
the real one exits normal time and space – a bit like being ‘outside yourself,’ otherwise known as‘ecstatic.’ This heightened state in no way means outside of the present moment, but rather totally in it– forgetting all past and future. ¶ Orgasm is the classical, most ubiquitous example; another is hysteria– better, hysterical laughter. In which case, we can consider the model airplane’s line of flight as aprototype and apex of supernatural levity.

POINT 9: SUPERPOSITION (S)The coldest place in the cosmos is in a small computer firm called D-Wave, east of Vancouver, where achip sits in a freezer. This microchip’s at the centre of a new type of computer based not on binary
logic but the oddball rules of quantums. ¶ One very weird aspect of which is known as ‘superposition.’That’s where a system can be in more than one state at the same time; moreover – and even stranger –in two different places at once (famously like Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive in the box). ¶Regular computers work with information contained in bits. ‘Bits’ stands for ‘binary digit.’ Each bit canbe zero or one. But quantum computers work with another unit called ‘qubit.’ It can be one or zero,too, and also both values at once. ¶ Qubits in superposition can become what’s called ‘entangled,’
where something that happens to one also happens to the other, so information is tethered across twopoints in space and time. What happens in the here and now also affects a there and then.

POINT 8: POINT AND DURATION (D)The time now is 4:38, June 11th, 2014. Look at your watch, what does it say? Certainly it can’t be
the same. These are specific points in time – no two can be identical. One ‘now’ when the words are
written, and another when they’re spoken. ¶ There’s a certain Casio watch with a specially-doctored
clock, its insides manipulated to change the display of its face. It still tells conventional time, but eachnumber gets drawn slowly, snaking through the LCD screen from the left to the right hand side. ¶It’s designed so you can fine-tune the duration of this cycle to take from one to three seconds (in sync
with your own inner clock). The watch is set correctly when it is only just legible, so the time reaches
the reader at the limit of perception. ¶ In other words, you could say that this watch takes time to tell
the time: a couple of seconds’ focus for a single discrete moment. But time is curious that way – atonce both point and duration. And time is curious that way – at once both point and duration.

** RUPTURE: CLOCK EXPLANATION **[Music: ‘Clapping Music’ by Steve Reich, 1972, 05:20]

To repeat: these clocks at each end | are identically eccentric, /Re-programmed to behave outside | of our orthodox sense of time. /Rather than decimal digits | (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on) /Ours are based on a binary: / on or off, or big-O small-o. /The far left signal stands for eight, | the next for four, then two, then one. /So all big-Os stand for fifteen | (that’s eight plus four plus two plus one) /

	
  

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And all small-os stand for zero | (that’s none plus none plus none plus none)
With all combinations between | to make sixteen units in all. /[n.b. In the following ‘verse’, D says the numeral as S simultaneously relates the corresponding pattern,saying ‘big’ for ‘O’ and ‘small’ for ‘o’, so ‘(15) big big big big’, ‘(14) big big big small’, etc.](15) O O O O, (14) O O O o | (13) O O o O, (12) O O o o /(11) O o O O, (10) O o O o | (9) O o o O, (8) O o o o /(7) o O O O, (6) o O O o | (5) o O o O, (4) o O o o /(3) o o O O, (2) o o O o | (1) o o o O, (0) o o o o /By this point, are you focusing | on the structure or the meaning? /If anything, it’s more meta | the difference between the two. /It’s a bird’s-eye view, a gestalt, | part and parcel, one and the same.
And the binary past and present | can be thought in unison too.

POINT 7: PARALLEL CARDS (D)A standard pack of playing cards with its hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades. If you look more closely
you’ll see that it’s not that standard at all. We’re dealing with parallel sets – an inner and an outerone – of cards printed both front and back; a single deck, two different games. ¶ The joker who madethis twin pack said recently that the impulse grew out of fascination with the notion of a ‘multiverse.’
He imagined endless equal, alternative realities, where each new decision implies infinite courses ofaction. ¶ He used to want cards with two backs for building up houses of cards (back when he thought
the numbers side was purely for decoration). But now he wants cards with two fronts to visualize thismultiverse and see what new games might emerge out of this anomalous pack. ¶ A bridge that helps
you apprehend two parallel actions at once – your game and its doppelgänger played in a different
time and space. What if you frowned in the mirror and your reflection laughed right back, or simply
walked off to leave you staring at where you used to be?

POINT 6: THE EIFFEL TOWER (S)It’s not unlike a story from more than a decade ago – David Copperfield live on stage in front of
the Eiffel Tower. As the spectacle unfolded, giant curtains were hoisted up, surrounding the wholeaudience and blocking the Paris skyline. ¶ The magician then pressed on with his captivating
performance, declaring at the finale that the Eiffel Tower had vanished. The curtains fell, and, sureenough, the monument had disappeared … then the crowd swung round to find it now towering rightbehind them. ¶ This illusion had been achieved by means of a moving platform rotating imperceptibly
underneath the feet of the crowd. It slowly turned them back to front over the course of the evening,
so by the time of the climax they were facing the other way. ¶ This story is a bit too good to checkits credibility. For art’s sake, it’s irrelevant whether sincere or deceitful. An idea need not be viable,
it just needs ample energy. An idea need not be plausible, what counts is only that it moves.

POINT 5: SUPREMATISM (D)Sisters is a timeless painting made by Kazimir Malevich that shows two ladies on a walk, so similar
they could be twins, done in the late 1920s in textbook Impressionist style, but retroactively dated
1910 – 20 years before. ¶ The fake date had everyone fooled ’til the end of the century – proof of atransition in style that never actually happened. Now that we know the actual date, the work is typicallydismissed as a vain attempt to backdate consistency and completeness. ¶ But there’s another way
to see the chief Suprematist’s gesture: those near-identical siblings aren’t two different people at all,but a single woman shown twice as she moves right to left through time, a primitive time-lapse image(like a nude descending some stairs). ¶ Malevich once wrote everything is infinite and therefore null.
Suprematism added up to one big eternal zero. Not ‘progressive,’ but out-of-time – outside normal
chronology. Spanner in the cosmic counter, time’s gears prevented from turning.

	
  

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POINT 4: THE JESUS PRAYER (S)Franny Glass was a New York girl lost in a spiritual crisis, who came across a modest book titled‘The Way of the Pilgrim.’ The pilgrim teaches disciples a chant known as The Jesus Prayer – a personal
invocation and channel to enlightenment. ¶ How it works is to repeat: Lord Jesus Christ have mercy
on me, Jesus Christ have mercy on me, Jesus Christ have mercy on me, Jesus Christ have mercy
on me, Jesus Christ have mercy on me, Jesus Christ have mercy on me, Jesus Christ have mercy onme. ¶ Said long enough you come to speak the sentence on auto-repeat. Eventually the prayer
becomes coordinated with the heart. The chanter chants unconsciously, dissolving any distinction
between the meter of the prayer and the rhythm of the heartbeat. ¶ To Franny’s mind, the best part isyou don’t need to believe at all – it’s a self-generating loop, a serpent eating its own tail. Between themeter of the prayer and the rhythm of the heartbeat, if repeated often enough, gradually you’ll get
the message.

[Music: ‘Fratres’ by Arvo Pärt, 1977, 10:41, excerpt]

Now: the score we’ve been speaking here | mirrors the logic of the clocks. /Each line has the same syllables | (up to and including this one), /Technically called ‘octameter’ | – eight beats per line, each with two feet. /And that equals sixteen pulses | … the same rhythm as our shot clocks. /Among the many types of poems | and variations of technique, /Octameter is rarely used, | with one infamous exception: /Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’ | from the early eighteen-forties /(‘Once upon a midnight dreary, | while I pondered weak and weary …’) /Poe later noted his reasons | for writing his lines in sixteens /Came down to how it ebbed and flowed, | its mesmerizing quality. /He went on to describe its form | as also ‘acatalectic’ /Which means to purposefully drop | a beat from the end of a line. /No surprise that ‘catalectic’ | shares its root with ‘catalepsy’. /That’s a ‘seizure’ or a ‘grasping,’ | ‘loss of contact with surroundings.’ /In other words, a state of mind | well-primed to meddle the present, /And transport a willing body | to some former-occurred event. /POINT 3: CAUSE AND EFFECT (S)There’s this guy who traded options and so knows about the market, and its models used to predict
prices, claims and contingencies (by noting all the possible scenarios that might occur and giving every
likelihood a probability rating). ¶ But truly contingent events are something else altogether – beyond
predictability, in a space that can’t be modeled. A curveball out of nowhere, like the appearance of a
black swan – not even in the wildest dreams of possible situations. ¶ The reasons for such an event
can only be known in its wake; cause and effect switch places so the effect produces its cause.
Consequence begs explanation; the narrative’s worked out backwards. Less a theory, more a medium,its rules are written in realtime. ¶ The futures market works like this, unpredictable by nature. Traders
don’t know what they’re doing and make it up in the moment. By getting inside the event and goingalong with the flow, the trick is somehow to twist time and make room for what’s yet to come.

POINT 2: SPELLS (D)The one thing feared most of all in Stevenson’s Treasure Island is a simple graphic cipher, black ink
on a paper circle – the terrible, dreaded black spot, a threat and a summons to death, the mere sightof which was enough to paralyze its receiver. ¶ The spot’s a simple instance of the workings of a

	
  

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common spell – a set of precise instructions, a sequence of words or glyphs, formulated to be invokedby reading, speaking or writing. The whole thing unfolds in your mind beyond the trappings of theworld. ¶ Point is, merely the suggestion of some other-worldly message is all it takes to instigate aprocess of transposition … to tune a mind to such a pitch that all it takes is a trigger … to loosen thegrip of ‘realtime’ and set other modes in motion. ¶ The Fear, The Rapture – both achieved via
heightened expectation, the nervous system set on edge, and a quickening of the heart. Some kind ofchant (or doublespeak) meant to invoke an altered state. Some kind of chant (or doublespeak) to set
off a certain pending.

POINT 1: TUNING FORKS (S)Tuning forks produce the purest instance of a specific pitch. Hit the fork and it begins to resonate at afrequency, which depends on the exact length of the pair of parallel prongs (made of some resonant
metal – for example, Sheffield blue steel). ¶ Mid-19th century Paris, a machine sits in a workshop: twotuning forks, two small mirrors, a lens, a screen, and a light source. It’s all set up to visualize various
types of vibrations – like the frequencies of two sounds, each tuned to a different tone. ¶ Let’s see how
the setup functions. The light is focused through the lens. The beam hits mirrors that are tied onto thetwo prongs of each fork. When you strike the forks to vibrate, two sine waves appear on the wall,
combined in a single figure that looks a bit like a pretzel. ¶ Some look like loops of cosmic string,others look just like plain circles. The shape depends on which two forks are made to resonate at once.
Two forks in tune with each other, the same note an octave apart, make for a ‘perfect interval’ anddraw the sign: ∞POINT 0: TWO INFINITIES (D)A certain mathematician who theorized sets and limits concluded there are several distinct types of
infinity. It runs counter to common sense that they could be different sizes, but consider these twomain types of endless series of numbers. ¶ The first kind of infinity is the one you’ve known sincechildhood: start at zero, then count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and the sequence goes on
forever. The number we can’t ever reach is known as ‘infinity null’. ¶ The second version, by contrast,
doesn’t go upwards but deeper. Take for starters zero and 1, find the number halfway between;
now repeat this process using that new number as the endpoint. Find the midpoint and its midpoint …
going further and further in. ¶ You’ll soon realize there’s no end to this process of division. In between
any two numbers lies another infinity. And stranger still, this second kind is even larger than the first.
There’s more space in one of these gaps than any number of numbers.
There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers. /

	
  

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** RUPTURE: TUNE EXPLANATION **[Music: Dexter Sinister, ‘Theme from The Last ShOt Clock’, 2014, 17:00]

10.5: MORE DEPTH THAN PROGRESSAs was stated back at the beginning of this thesis, the new bits of writing (like this paragraph)that glues together those already written (like the script above) amount to a kind of compensation,
recovering those aspects lost to the original time and place, that elude transcription.
A few last gaps still need to be plugged.
To restate the crux and climax of The Last ShOt Clock: there are two types of infinity. One goes up andup – advancing. The other goes in and in – penetrating. This last stanza ends on the apparently
nonsensical claim that the ‘deep’ version of infinity is a greater infinity than the ‘progressive’ one.
This last verse therefore hangs on the implication that this infinity of *depth* is the best vehicle forattending that once-missed party. The stanza ends by extending into a chant, the last line is repeated
16 times: ‘There’s more space in one of these gaps | than any number of numbers /’.
What can’t be conveyed in the script (any typographic treatment only confuses the issue) is thatthese lines are delivered in the form of *a circular round*. This also repels description, but it’s worth
a shOt.
D repeats the 16 lines without pause at a steady pace, while S reads the same lines slightly offset witheach respective verse – first by a quarter, then by a half, then by three-quarters, then by a full measure.
(D speaks the first line, then about ¼ of the way along S starts the same line, and they continue to recite
the line offset by this split-second for the first 4 lines. At the start of the 5th line S shifts to begin hislines now ½ along D’s continued reading; at the start of the 9th line, he starts ¾ of the way along; andfinally, at the start of the 13th line, he reads a full measure along.) This patterning means S and D readin tandem for three lines, with S speaking a last one alone. (There’s always something that doesn’tquite compute; always another gap.)
The circular round is a preemptive attempt to see what ‘one of these gaps’ sounds like – and so too,
how it feels. The closing ‘Theme’ then aims at the same, only now using the more plastic matter ofmusic.
So in the second and last rupture, with the clocks momentarily suspended, we explain the philosophy ofthis composition. It’s another translation of the clock system. This time, the four positions of big andsmall O’s each translate to a musical note: C, D, E, and F. To guarantee the purest pitch, these notes are
sampled from tuning forks, then played over and over according to the pattern of the clocks. Abiding
the usual binary, a big O means ‘on’ (the fork hit, the note sounds) and a small o means ‘off’ (silence).
So, as the clock displays ‘15’, or O O O O, all the notes are played, C, D, E, F, and left to resonate overeach other. Considerably amplified, the pitches collide and generate a miscellany of sine waves.
The waves can be felt as well as heard.
Counting backwards (as usual), as the clock displays ‘14’ or O O O o, all notes but the last are played:
C, D, E, -, and left to resonate again. However, as tuning forks produce a long sustain, these new notes
also resonate over the previous round’s – the ‘14’s over the ‘15’s – and yield even stranger vibrations.
And so the theme continues according to this pattern, down through ‘1’ (o o o O), which means only
the last note is played (-, -, -, F), and finally ‘0’ (o o o o), meaning a round of silence (-, -, -, -).
And then over again: the whole sequence of 16 cycles 16 times, and this somehow lasts 17 minutes.
During which, the sound waves collide in increasingly erratic ways, and the collective ear starts tofocus not on the notes themselves, but on what occurs between the notes.

	
  At which point the whole thing appears to end.

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437

APPENDICESThe Serving Library, ‘Article of Incorporation’Will Stuart, ‘Publick Notice’
Dexter Sinister, ‘Identity’ script source material

	
  

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The Serving Library: ARTICLE OF INCORPORATIONThe Serving Library is a cooperatively-built archive that
assembles itself by publishing. It will consist of 1. an ambitious
public website; 2. a small physical library space; 3. a publishingprogram which runs through #1 and #2.
IN OTHER WORDS
Here is a thought-experiment. Imagine yourself in a virtual
space surrounded by icons: a claustrophobic negative photo ofa woman, apparently underwater; a large asterisk; an open
book in a heraldic shield, underscored by the phrase “Lux etVeritas”— Light and Truth; a man blowing what appears to
be a handful of feathers but turns out to be a disintegrating
book; a curious-looking alien glyph; a familiar optical illusion
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then out again; and an odometer on the brink of changing from
9999999 back to zero.
These are the front pages of a number of Portable
Document Formats, and this is www.servinglibrary.org,
engine room of The Serving Library. Each PDF is a “Bulletin”
containing an article or essay that constitutes part of someQXGTCTEJKPIVJGOGQTVJGOGU â KPVJKUECUGHTQOURGEKìEVQ
general: Libraries, Media, and Time. The essay behind thelarge asterisk, for example, contemplates the possibilities forhuman communication in light of some extraordinary physicalattributes of the Octopus Vulgaris. As it turns out, that
“asterisk” is actually *an octopus in plan view.* This and theother PDFs are available for anyone to download for free.
Contributions to the latest theme are added from time to timeover a six month period, and at the end of the season they arecollected together into a single document, printed and publishedin both Europe and the USA, each in an edition of 1,500, as
Bulletins of The Serving Library. The PDFs remain available
on the website, while a new theme is developed over the next
half year.
One copy of Bulletins of The Serving Library is boundin hardback leatherette, catalogued, and placed on a shelf inthe physical home of The Serving Library. Here it joins pastissues, along with twenty issues of its predecessor, the leftìGNFCTVULQWTPCNDot Dot Dot. A neighboring shelf carries alarger collection of older, most frequently referenced booksby the circle of contributors to both Dot Dot Dot and theBulletins — on art, literature, philosophy, and so on — thatmaps a far-reaching but still very particular constellation ofinterests. And on another shelf, is a further assortment ofrelatively recent titles covering a wide gamut of contemporary
publishing that had been sold from — and often publishedby — Dexter Sinister, a design workshop and bookstore on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side that was run as a primitive
form of The Serving Library by two of its founders from2006 – 2011.
The walls that surround these shelves are hung withseventy or so framed artifacts. These are wildly diverse insize and medium, from a huge red wax crayon rubbing of a
“Monument to Cooperation” (the original of which is locatedoutside a housing estate, around the corner from Dexter
Sinister) to a double portrait of Benjamin Franklin (the classic
etching of a smug Postmaster General next to a photo takenof four people checking for evidence of forgery in a giant
blow-up of the same portrait on a fake US$100 bill, otherwise
known as a North Korean “Superdollar”). Other objects
include paintings, lithographs, record covers, faxes, acid blotter
artwork, and a ouija board. At some point, each of these items
appeared, scanned or photographed, as an illustration in anissue of Dot Dot Dot or the Bulletins, typically accompanying
or triggering a piece of writing. As such, each one has anelaborate backstory. The ouija board, for example, was madeBoTSL#6 2014 Jan 17 7:24 PM

159

by British polymath Paul Elliman while a professor in design at
Yale University in the early 2000s. It utilizes a version of the
Bauhausler’s modular geometrical typeface to render A–Z,
0–9, a “yes” and a “no,” laser-cut from a square of the same
hardboard Albers used in his famous color paintings. New
Bulletins published from The Serving Library suggest new
anecdotally-loaded objects to be sought, acquired, framed,and added to the wall.
A resident caretaker presides over these two collections ofpublications and artifacts. This is a rotating position which turns
on the same six-month cycle as the Bulletins. His or her duties
combine those of a regular librarian — cataloging, maintaining,
and updating the collections — with those of an events
organizer and editor. The caretaker is a constant presence at
The Serving Library, available to open its doors to groups orindividuals by appointment, then to supervise and direct their
WUGQHKVUTGUQWTEGU+GQTUJGCNUQRTQRQUGUTGEQPìIWTKPIthe collections, drawing out certain books for display — perhaps
highlighting an essay in an early Dot Dot Dot that explicates
one of the artifacts, or juxtaposing some of the older, classic
books in order to trace a history of, say, Pragmatic philosophy.
Or, equally, reassembling the artifacts — chronologically,for example, or grouped by medium. The caretaker is also
involved, to a greater or lesser degree, in the production of theBulletins published during his or her tenure. Ideally, assuming
the necessary skills, experience and insight, he or she will
guest-edit the season’s material, proposing, coercing, andworking on contributions.
The caretaker also attends — and attends to — amodest pedagogical program, which takes place in the Libraryenvironment during an allotted period every year. It is basedon a reconsideration of the traditional Bauhaus Foundation
Course, still the default model in contemporary art and design
schools. Given that the Bauhaus was set up in direct response
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why does it remain the standard today? Through the Librarycourse, this question is considered in relation to the Photoshop
toolbox icon — adopted essentially as a surrogate for any
contemporary arts software. Working backwards from the factthat such digital “creative suites” constitute the consensus of
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deconstruct the toolbox by isolating a component — pointer,brush, pencil, paint, type, dodge & burn, magic wand, etc.,
then discussing its analogue past, virtual present, and potential
future. These investigations are conducted through seminars
and workshops, which draw frequently on the Library’sbooks and artifacts for immediate example and insight.
This reconsideration proposes — initially for the sake ofargument — that color wheels, circles, triangles and squares
and other principles of cross-disciplinary “basic design” are
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relate contemporary conditions, by practicing the forms ofreading, writing, and speaking that facilitate their articulation.
In other words, the course will aim to build a critical faculty
to comprehend the culture in which art and design operate inadvance of (or parallel to) operating in it.
As new component classes are clipped onto the basic“handle” over time, a new metaphorical toolbox is assembled
by the Library, which replaces the old foundation with someVJKPIOQTGíWKFRGTVKPGPVCPFTGíGZKXG$PFVJKUEWUVQOK\GF
palimpsest set of soft tools-for-thinking is also folded backinto The Serving Library’s live archive, a pedagogical branchof servinglibrary.org’s network that can be followed remotely
online, as well as taught in the local space. As aspects of theteaching programs are hardened into new Bulletins to be
published, which in turn feed back into subsequent teaching,
the growing Library automatically charts its own development.

	
  

439

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BoTSL#6 2014 Jan 17 7:24 PM

	
  

	
  

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440

WILL STUART

on the positioning of Michaelangelo Pistoletto’s
Struttura per parlare in piedi (Structure for talking while standing), 1965–66
from the series Oggetti in meno (Minus objects)
Terms and conditions• Order is not determined by a priori will but is a combination formed by accident
or by a series of accidents.

• The position outlined in this notice is the fruit of contingent need, expressed throughnegotiations leading up to a contribution to Stutter, an exhibition at Tate Modern’sLevel 2 Gallery from April 23rd to August 16th 2009.

• Stutter is a group exhibition curated by Vanessa Desclaux and Nicholas Cullinan,

which explores the themes of disruption and discontinuity within processes of thought
and language. The list of artists reads: Sven Augustijnen, Anna Barham, Dominique
Petitgand, Michael Riedel, Will Stuart and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

• “Pistoletto” is not placed alphabetically after “Petitgand” because Will Stuart haveincluded his Struttura per parlare in piedi (hereafter known as ‘[the] Structure’) as part oftheir contribution. As such, the “and” between Will Stuart and Michaelangelo Pistoletto
refers to this situation, rather than to Mr. Pistoletto as one of the artists in the group show.

• TOURETTE’S V (or TV) – the fifth of a series of publications – is Will Stuart’s

contribution to Stutter. TOURETTE’S believe that a lot has been said already, andif we all keep trying to repeat and improve ourselves in new ways, some of the nicest
things might get lost in the resulting pile.

• Previous issues of TOURETTE’S demonstrated a recognition of one’s own positionin the words of others. With TOURETTE’S we acknowledge the repetitive natureof knowledge and language, and stress the importance of privileging other people’s
voices rather than our own, hosting a conversation between divergent opinions andworks from different times and places. Hence the vital present.

1

	
  

441

PUBLICKWILLNOTICESTUART

outlinedin An exchange
letters inthat
advanceof TV toin common
the Springopinion
2009 issue• As• Mr.
Pistoletto’s
assistant ofconfirmed– contrary– theofambiguity

Tate
is founded
onand/orthree interests– conversation,
directness,friendship–ofEtc.,
theirTVstatusas objects
their relationshipto an audience
wasandNOTformulated
forto
reasonsthatarecompressed
intotheassertionthat
trueconversation
is
when
you
question the role of the gallery space in particular. He emphasised that the Minus
don’t
knowwere
whatfirst
the shownother person
is going andto saynext. As far– as
the intenObjects– deliberately
significantly
in isthepractical,
artist’s own
studio.
tion is to avoid the trappings of a singular event – “you had to be there” – in favour ofafter&aends‘show’
and whichis detercontinuity,that happens
duringTatework
Modern’s
gallery before,or public
spaceandbeginsis,hardto define,yet• Wherei.e.,
mined
by
the
variouscontingencies
encountered
on
the
way.
This
noticeisoneexample.
an appropriate space to display the Structure might be, say, between galleries, wherevisitors tend to hang about and talk. Or at least in a position which might diminish
Pistoletto’s
Structure
was originallyto our attentionand
byaPaulElliman,• Mr.
a gallery’s
obvioustendency
to impose broughtsilence, contemplation
readingof thewhoStructurereferred‘simply’
to it as ‘theleaning post’. Fromwords,
his pointof view,
parodies
as sculpture.
In otherto ensure
thatthe– Structure
without having
tohowreadtheadidactic
art-world/art-historicallens
has
becometheculturalequivalentwall text – the publick implicitly understands the title: Struttura perof aparlare
birdwatcher’s
hide. In contrast,
the Structure’s
imperative
is notso focussed,in piedi (Structure
for talking
while standing);
it is what
it says
it is.
more ambiguous and comparable to casual forms of writing. Such an easy-goingnatureis potentiallysubversive,
theStructuresame way
humouris. be identified as a partwas expressed
thatintheshouldclearly• Concernof Stutter, and should be positioned in the immediate vicinity of the Level 2 Gallery.
is onewasof theseries Oggetti
meno (Minus
objects).
Each individual• The
An Structure‘ideal’ position
proposed:
directlyinoutside
the gallery’s
entrance.
From aworkin
thisseriesisasinglewordinadiscussion
which
could
last
a
lifetime
and thewhich
position within the exhibition, the publick could look at the Structure throughglass
is alsolanguage
uponitself. Boththeglassarchitecture(the material
and thewould
wallaanddoors,closed
along inwitha captionon thefacing inwards.
This caption
discursive
space)and the exhibition’s
curatora specialtheboth
Structure.
be illegible(mirrored)
for those outside
thecarrygallery
able toresponsibility,‘use’ (lean on)for
contribute to how the Minus Objects will ‘enrol’ the spectator. This refers to the way
in which
spectator’srole‘ideal’
will beposition
allottedwas
to himby æstheticmeans ofone.
this positioning.
that thisnot orthehermost• It wastheagreed
written towith
Mr. Pistoletto,
askingpermission
to make aitreplicathe• A•letter
Uponwasconsultation
Tate Modern’s
designatedauthorities,
provedofimpossible

Structure,
theStructure
understandingtransporting
the original
work
storageto installonthe
outsidethatof theLevel 2 gallery
confines,
forfromtwo reasons:in BiellatoLondoncould
notbecoveredby
theexhibition’sbudget.
The
request‘indemnity’ and ‘thoroughfare.’was dispatched
to Mr.
Pistoletto
by outside
Tate Modern’sKathy
a visitin thata positiona galleryspaceNoble,
wouldduring
raise thequestion of-‘Indemnity’
regardingfutureloans.
Preferring
tolistento
Miss
Noble’s
accountoftheunaccounted insurance against possible accidents involving the workletter,or the publick;
Mr. Pistoletto
gave
his
consent
fortheproductionofareplica.
-‘Thoroughfare’ being the ideal passage to & from, or in & out of Tate Modern’s
gallery spaces.
• Two intentions were outlined in this letter: (a) to use the replicated Structure as a propand• aThemetaphor,‘quoting’ things
the original
the samemannerthat than
TOURETTE’S
vice of byconsidering
only inintheirfullness– ratheras an incrementalroutinely
quote
existing
writing;
and(b)toengageinaclose
reading
of
it as
basis
series of ever-changing contingencies – draws our attention away fromthethefact
thatre-structuring
since
the
Minus
Objectsof aninvestigation
into
art,
industry,andsocialwe can only circulate in the physical channels which are left open to us by objects.
werepointswereentrance
in anticipationof athepublick
conversation
severalIn produced.
its current Bothposition,at theto Stutter,
Structure
is now in withdangerofculturalcommentators,
whosewritings
were
had
been
publishedinothereditions
being an obstacle rather than a support, walked around and read as an unwittingoficon
TOURETTE’S.
Laterifitnot
wasdownplayed
decided thatbya devices
conversation
betweenourselves
would
for the whole showsuch asthis notice,and thelarge
be moreappropriate,
paraphrasing
what
wealreadyknew
wewantedthem
tosay.
doormat left in place.
This conversation will take place in the same space, anchored at the Structure,on •Saturday
May 2nd, from
12pm onwards.
The conversation
on Saturday
May 2nd will be filmed. The recording will be edited
and produced as a series of short TV documentaries, to be broadcast by Tate Modern
Pistoletto
withdrew
his consent,
explaining
the work
only
• Mr.
after
the closelaterof theshow. Each
programme
will bethat
prefacedby acould
lead-inscripted by
be reproduced
if
ALL
the
Minus
Objects
werereplicated,rather
than
just
one
Paul Elliman. The script for this will be on display in the Level 2 gallery. fromthe series. However, it then became possible to borrow the original Structure when
included with a larger shipment of works for other exhibitions at Tate Modern.
2 3

	
  

442

PUBLICK NOTICE

expressedin thisnotice are not necessarily those of the authors.
• The opinions
5  ,*(%%#'+3,*'+,*,!14*)(*,'-*1 ))

• This notice paraphrases or quotes words previously written by Stuart Bailey,
the brand
is still Eco, Paul Elliman, Pascale Gielen, Will Holder,
Earle Brown,
John personality
Cage, Umberto
always changing
and Michaelangelo
Pistoletto.
always Tate
Modern’s
regulardistribution programme, one copy of this Publickand Tateeverything
Tate doesis• In line withwelcomingand collaborative
NOT a citadel
Notice willOPEN:
be sent
to the British
Library. Administrationand postage costs would (',&)(**1'&'1.(#)*#,%
usually be included in the purchase of a publication by other libraries. This is a free
INTERNATIONAL: with art and attitudes beyond the west NOT parochialpublication,and cannot be partof this andconstruction.
Asbureaucratic
and when other libraries order
ENTREPRENEURIAL:
ambitious
inventive NOT
other TateSUSTAINABLE:
Modern publications,a copyof thisNOT
Publick
Notice will then be sent to them,rigorous andtrustworthy
faddishfor deposit, in the same postage. The task of librarians is facilitated using the following
the brand proposition is now
information:
look again
think again
Libraryjoin
of inCongress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data*(&,#+
Stuart, '.*10)*#'Will, 2002–
EXTRAORDINARY not mundane
Publick Notice/Will Stuart
EVERYDAY not esotericp. cm.
ENJOYABLE not worthy
ISBN 978900300 60not
5 (alk.
paper)
and 1ENGAGING
didactic
theunderlying
purposegrows:
1. Design – UK 2. Design – USAdemocratising
3. Tourette’saccess
4. Artto art by provoking
dialogue
I. Stuart, Will, 2002–, Publick Notice, II. Title
tone of voice

BIC (Book Industry Communication) subject category (version 2): ABC,0)%#'+"(/,(/*#,%*%1 (*.*1(' ,)-,+ (*/*%*,*-+,
points of view,#'+)#*+"(/,(!,-#'+0#,1*, ,"%%'!+#'+)#*#'!
asking, provoking
,#'.#,+"(/,(%,(,"*+".,"#*+1 ,%,+!(%%(/#'!#%(!-,(happen,+(%# ,)(*(-+
, (*!*(-' ,$!*(-',60+#2 ,70#%

17Will Stuart, Tourette’s, for the Publick Good, April 22nd 2009

	
  

443

A  

&+7*5$&00<0.26On Brand32)32!-&1*68)632  45&2).2,7-*2.6139.2,.2732&7.3265*,.326&2)(.7.*6$-*5**06*.6.7,3.2,
$*0032*3+7-*40&(*673033/.67-*63(.&06*(735!-.6.6.2(5*&6.2,0<'*.2,
)*6(5.'*)&67-*!-.5) *(7357(3145.6*6&(3140*;:*'3+35,&2.=&7.32645.2(.4&00<)*C2*)'<7-*+&(77-&77-*<)3237*;.67731&/*&453C786*81635(-*675&6
art galleries, and universities are all part of it. So are charities.

A 
44  &+7*5$30++0.26?86*81*;7@5*4357*(*1'*5 The ideas of ‘museum’ and ‘brand’ don’t naturally go together. People tend toassociate ‘museum’ with institutional integrity, and ‘brand’ with commercial*;403.7&7.32
In many museums, brand isn’t talked about, or only in the marketing department.
In our survey, 23% of delegates overall said brand is ‘a dirty word – too commercial’.
!-.6&77.78)*.64&57.(80&50<1&5/*).27-*" &2)6.&&(.C(But the picture is changing. 61% of the delegates said the word is ‘OK – a usefulpart of modern life’.
And some museums have very clearly become ‘brands’: they’ve captured the48'0.(.1&,.2&7.32!-.6.64&57.(80&50<758*3+'.,1807.6.7*.267.787.326:.7-.(32.(
'8.0).2,60./*!&7*&2)8,,*2-*.12)3856859*<(32C51*)7-.66/*)732&1*
186*81'5&2)67-*<&)1.5*)*0*,&7*64.(/*)C9*.24&57.(80&5!&7* 1*27.32637-*86*813+3)*5257*:%35/ 1*27.326#7-*#.(735.&0'*5786*8132)32 1*27.3263895* &2)8,,*2-*.1!&7*6(35*)
highest in every part of the world, even among delegates from the USA.
The way these big brands work varies. One is a brand based on subject matterB3&2)13)*52.61(3840*-&9*&'5&2).)*&7-&7(39*56&:.)*55&2,*
of subject matter with a particular approach or attitude – Tate and V&A. Three ofthe brands depend on architecture – most people’s ideas about Tate, Louvre and8,,*2-*.1&5*-*&9.0<.2D8*2(*)'<7-*.51*27&04.(785*3+4&57.(80&5'8.0).2,6
35&003+7-*173).++*5.2,)*,5**6'5&2)82.7*6&1807.6.7*34*5&7.32B
Guggenheim most famously.
As these big brands have emerged, museum branding has become a live topic.
&5,37$&00&(*>6'33/Museum Branding gives a basic primer. Angus Hyland
and Emily King’s c/id gives case studies, with a strong visual bias.
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But neither of these books recognises the full potential of branding for museums,
beyond marketing and beyond visual identity.
1/'6+/'5&17$6(7..;51/'6+/'54'.7%6#06.;1(6'037'56+10+0).;/75'7/5
have adopted the idea of brand, usually in a limited way. Now they need to fully
embrace it.

@  #(6'4 '44;#).'610?'#&+0)On Brand,” review of On Brand by"#..;.+05Eye1 *662999';'/#)#<+0'%1/('#674'
2*2+& A& 
4#0&+0)75'&61+081.8'56#/2+0);1745;/$1.106*'B#0-1(51/'&7/$%4'#674'
#0&019#&#;5+081.8'556#/2+0)+6#%41556*'+4 5*+465"#..;.+05#/#09*1
10'5752'%65917.&$4#0&*+5190-0''%#25+(6*'4'9#5241A661$'537''<'&(41/it, has written a suitably slick account of a supremely shallow phenomenon. Olinsis the kind of corporate consultant who believes that rebranding may help solve the241$.'/51(!<$'-+56#06*'241$.'/51(6*+5%17064;9*+%*+54'276'&61$1+.+65
'0'/+'5#.+8'+56*#6+6&1'50>6*#8'#5':;'017)*+/#)''4*#25$1+.+0)2'12.'
alive simply needs to be rebranded. In this book, which sometimes reads as though
it has a marketplace where its mind should be, a relentlessly trivialising practice has
found its true chronicler.
Chilling
Trivialising, but not trivial. Olins believes that branding is becoming more vital than
$16*6'%*0+%#..;#0&A0#0%+#..;$#5'&$75+0'55#0&#551/'10'9*1%*+42+.;
4'#5574'56*#6=9*'0;172#%-#)'+6'(('%6+8'.;;17%#0'8'05'..9#6'4':2'05+8'.;>
he should know. The corporate types he advises are not the sort of people to whom
one would entrust the water bottles on a trek across the desert, unless you had a well
stuffed wallet. Like many of his tribe, however, he is an odd combination of cynicism
and naivety. On the one hand, he churns out chillingly Orwellian injunctions suchas ‘Train your people to live the brand’; on the other hand he earnestly informs us
6*#6%#4%1/2#0+'5#4'=241&7%6.'&>,756+0%#5';176*17)*6 1;16#52'0&5+656+/'
/#4-'6+0)+65A4'&4+..6'%*0+37'54#6*'46*#0+65/16145
Boneheaded"*'0.+056'..5756*#670&'4#21.'10=6*'9*1.'1(4#0%'9#54'$4#0&'&>
he is clearly unaware that this kind of boneheaded comment is usually to be found
not in a sleek Thames and Hudson volume, but among a coachload of American
6174+5659*1/+555''+0)6*'%4121.+5B#5*$;6*'+49+0&19$'%#75'6*';#4'
611$75;A&&.+0)9+6*6*'#+4%10&+6+10+0)010'5'05'*'+52'4('%6.;#9#4'6*#6
much of what he is peddling is garbage. Branding, he writes with what is supposed
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"%# !#!") !#!#""""
manipulate people into buying products and services’. Seducing is certainly the word:
most of us have felt thoroughly screwed by the corporations at one time or another.
%!%$ % +"'!!# "" !) "!"!+""!"" !$ "# #"# * !'  
being manipulated as a gift, but not all of us share this psychological kink.
Bloodless ""!!!'% "" !%""No Logo campthat branding is often ‘manipulative and misleading’, and that their arguments against ! )""*#"$!"'!% '%'%"""!" #"! $""#" "!!
however, he then proceeds to defend it. ‘Global companies’, he reminds us, ‘do not"' #!!! " # !!*" "  "!
#"""" !"  "!! +"$ !" "line of defence. It is rather like arguing that muggers do not claim to be vicars, and socannot be faulted when they scamper off with your handbag.
Cynical" #!""" !$'#, "'#""" !!'! !  $ "'!"') #""" "'!!
!  "!! "#"*) *"!#!)'" $  
!"! %!$#!(& !!" #% #$!# !
and some pithy soundbites.’ Political justice is on a level with junk food. Greenpeace!  " "! "!) ! *
Brainwashed
On Brand’s view of the world is as nastily dehumanised as a workhouse. ‘A cleaner at
Banjul airport in Gambia’, Olins writes, ‘scrapes and saves to buy Nike running shoes
as a signal to himself and others that he is able to share at least some of the richworld’s glamour and fashion’. There is no hint that he regards this obscene situation
as anything but acceptable. Naomi Klein and co., he comments, ‘demonise’ big  "! ) "!"   #" !!# !#$ ""#" "!" "#$
too little to customers everywhere, brainwashing people with relatively little money
into buying products they don’t need and don’t really want and that might harm" '"#''!"#! +" !*" "!!  "' """&"!!" #"" top adviser to Renault and Volkswagen. Astonishingly, it never come up. Unable to !!"! !"'" "!" !!'"""' '" # ! ! "!!""!!"" 

20

	
  

	
  

	
  

446

Indefensible#$%%$ #! #% $#&$$$%  * %% #
for people. In short, he joins the critics rather than beating them. Second, branding
$&$* !# -% &%-%$$&$#%$% $$! #%%#%&#%%#
as well. It is true that you can probably only produce Shakespeare’s The Tempest
 (*$* &'%$! $ #$!  # $&#(#% #%%* %$&$%%%%$$%# &$*!$%)%$  #
into culture and politics is more an argument against it than in its favour. Third,
Olins insists, real power lies with the consumer: ‘The brand’, he writes, ‘is controlled
by us the customers.’ In the end, it is up to us to decide which brand to opt for.
Here, in fact, is the kernel of the book’s defence of the indefensible – though this,
too, turns out to be rather a rotten nut.
Grubby# %%$&$% %%%#&! !&#! (#$ $%( #$
#$ #*,$  %##$$&$%$#%% #%
# %*$  $ #$  %% $! %%%*$%%
#  ($(!#%&#$% #&*%%!% $% #$$%
&* #%$ %*( &%  %&$%%( #$
#*,$&%%((%#$ &#$%(%% ! &%   %!# &% 
(%#$ &#$%  $!%&$$&!! #%$!%$% ##($&*! !&#$ ! $$
Spineless(#%$!&$$* %* +%#% *$$%'  !*,' &#!$
such as Columbia, which must surely rank among the spineless euphemisms of the
$%$& !$##$(%)"&$%*+'$% #*
which by today’s standards of political correctness does not bear very close scrutiny’.
$(#  &#$%% % *%! $ &%*&
!#$ ( &-%$$% #*$#&&% $ %'% &#% $*
so, so he hides behind the convenient straw target of political correctness.
Circular
The argument about consumer power is in any case circular. If the customers control%#%#.&$%&$% #$% !&! #% # %#%
Olins scuppers his own argument. To defend branding against charges ofbrainwashing, he has to suggest that it’s not nearly as effective as we might suspect.
&% ##% $%*$ &$$$#&$ #)!%%# #
countries a branding programme ‘can act as a catalyst for change’. Curiously, what
can transform whole nations can’t lay a glove on individual freedom of choice.

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447

Contradictory
Olins’s whole case works on the assumption that branding works marvellously
well, an assumption he also has to deny if he is to avoid looking like an advocate of!4,(+%00%+*!%/%*0$!,+/%0%+*+"0$!,+.*+#.,$5'%*#3$+%*/%/0/0$0*++ 5"+.!/5+10+30$2% !+/+"3+)!*!%*#/!41((5$1)%(%0! 7!+,(!8$!.!).'/
7'*+3,!."!0(53!((3$00$!5.! +%*#8 10/+ + .1# !(!./! +*80,!.)%0
ads urging people to push heroin or kidnap toddlers on the grounds that they canalways ignore them.
),!(5.4%/0$0.* %*#!4,(+%0/%/*+0&1/0,!+,(!8/#1((%%(%05100$!%.,+%#**0!*0%.!(5.!/+*(! !/%.!0+!(+*#0+/+)!"+.)+"+.,+.0!!4%/0!*!(.#!.0$*0$!)/!(2!/%*!/+%(+. !.#%2!*0+#.!! * /!("%*0!.!/0**+0"1(=(0$%/
.+(!.1#0.1'/+.*$!/0!.*%0! $2!0+/0!,%*%*/0! *3.%0%*#+10.* %*#(%*/$/,.+ 1! *%),!(5.4%/0/01 5-1%0!#%*/0$%/
%*0!*0%+*/+.!+.(!//!2!.50$%*#$!$/0+/5+*0$!/1&!0#+!/0++*=.)3$0
0$!.4%/00. %0%+*$/(+*#.#1! +10(%!*0%+*.!%=0%+** 0$!"!0%/$%/)
+"+))+ %0%!/*"00$!+*(5.0%+*(!4,(*0%+*"+.0$!.//*!//* 
((+3*!//+"0$%/++'%/0$0(%*/%/(!"03%*#%*=(0.0+.)+*#+.,+.0!05,!/+100+ %/.! %00$!)5!4,+/%*#0$!(+#%+"0$!(+#+3%0$/1$.1!(* +1.+( $!.0!
7 .* /8.#1!/((5(%*/%*On Brand, ‘represent identity.’ It may be that hehimself only knows who he is because of his brand of underpants, but the morediscerning among us have not yet been reduced to this tragic condition. To avert any/1$ .! "1("0!0$!.! !.3+1( !3!(( 2%/! 0+#%2!0$%/,%(!+"+( $!.0! 
cynicism a miss and buy Naomi Klein’s No Logo instead.

; "0!. .+(%*!+**!((*9+3. /0!+ !.* 0.+*#!* 
1* %*#:,((5(%*/(0!.3.+0!0$0(%'! * 5.$+(3/.* /+3/0$!0!3%0$%0//1.* /+"0! .%0%*0!+ !.*0!02!/!% !*0%=! 0$00$!0!
Shop online is also part of the powerful museum gallery brand, along with the Tate)#6%*!$0(%*/3/,.+,+/%*#3/0$00$!+*/1)(!.* 3/>1% <=./0)!0$!.* 0$!*)!0$!,.+ 103$0$!,.+,+/! 3//$%"03%0$%*
0$!.!()+"0$!.0#((!.5"+.%0/%0%6!*/0+).'!0(! .* 0$!0!#!.! 
0+3. /0$!)+ !.*+*/1)!.0!8/.!.* %*#%*/!*/!!#*!"+.!+(""(%*/
was appointed – the embryonic change began as early as the 1970’s when it began
to develop a different vision.

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448

B!  &+9*7&>$  6:49*).339-43>128A1.''*79.,.''*9&#.114@9-*<.85&14<37  *&8438#->7&5-.(*8.,38499-*88:*A
Afterall4 !:22*7  55  
39-*).,7*88.;*(&)*3(*84+9-**=9*7!.3.89*7843,'44043(*(&11*)Dot Dot
Dot, soon the Bulletins of the Serving Library<-&9.8)*243897&9*)-842:(-
7*.9*7&9.431*97&55*7&>$&38<*7?"-*)&3,*7.89-&9.9@8/:899&109-*3&,&.3
9-*)&3,*7.89-&9.9@8349'*1.*;*>4:(&385*&09-.3,8.394*=.89*3(*@B!  &+9*7-&71*8<479-A7.8.8&99-*04<8-:3@8=5*7.2*39
in Deinstitutionalisation,” Mute*'7:&7>  -995<<<2*9&2:9*47,*3
(439*39(7.8.8%&9%9-*%.(&%*04<%*8-:3%8%*=5*7.2*39%.3%)*.389.9:9.43&1.8&9.43
Eshun is the ICA’s own best critic, of course. At the 10 December meeting, he
7*5*&9*)-.82&397&9-&9?&112:19.&79885&(*8&7*7*9-.30.3,<-&99-*>3**)94)4"-*5489<&724)*73.8957*8*39&9.434+&79.834143,*77*1*;&39&3)9-*3**)8
a vision for what this means.’
Eshun’s ‘vision’ has been long in coming. In a ‘vision’ document circulated in
Spring 2009, Eshun wrote that a key challenge for the ICA was how it might ‘update9-*97&).9.43&124)*14+9-*&798(*397*<.9-.988.141.0*574,7&22.3,897:(9:7*@"-*3*<;.8.43<&894'*43*4+D:.).9>D*=.'.1.9>85439&3*.9>&3).9.3*7&39
programming, taking its cue from the model of biennials, fairs and festivals, each of<-.(-4++*7*)?&247*D:.)&3))*(*397*)24)*14+&79857*8*39&9.43<.9-&+4(:843
3*<(422.88.438@"-*(4:1)?4((&8.43&11><470.3&8.2.1&785.7.97*(43C,:7.3,
4:78*1;*8&8&842*9.2*+*89.;&1&+7**+47285&(*4+&79.89.(*=5147&9.43)*).(&9*)
to articulating a particular mood or movement.’ :9<-&9)4*8:5)&9.3,9-*?8.141.0*@574,7&22.3,897:(9:7*4+9-*&798(*397*
&3)8**0.3,&?247*D:.)&3))*(*397*)24)*14+&79857*8*39&9.43@&(9:&11>2*&3.357&(9.(*3*2.,-9&7,:*9-&98-:3@8&39&,43.8294<&7)89-*?5489<&7
modernist art centre’ would seem to run contrary to the ICA’s 1947 founding
charitable objects:"4574249*9-**):(&9.434+9-*(422:3.9>'>*3(4:7&,.3,9-*:3)*7
standing, appreciation and development of the arts generally and particularly
4+(439*2547&7>&79&8*=57*88*).35&.39.3,*9(-.3,*3,7&;.3,)7&<.3,
poetry, philosophy, literature, drama, music, opera, ballet, sculpture,&7(-.9*(9:7*)*8.,385-494,7&5->C1287&).4&3)9*1*;.8.434+*):(&9.43&1
and cultural value.
+(4:78*&8*94+&79.89.()*8.,3&9.438&8&39.6:*&89-*8*3**)85*7.4).(:5)&9.3,
nor does it prescribe the form or structure an organisation should take to deliver
8:(-&574,7&22*:98-:3@8+&8(.3&9.43<.9-9-*9*2547&7>9-*D*=.'1*&3)
the decentred, of a cultural outlook in which nothing is permanent, was translated
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"',(&' *"%)(%"1(/*"' (/',!3+"%(%"$4)*,&',%)*( *&&"' +,*-,-*(,!(* '"+,"(',,!(+,(%(++(-*,(*"%0)*,"+',(*+!-'",((%"+!,! 4+".'" *,+)*,&',"+"('which drew acrimonious responses by practitioners in the live and media arts
community. And with the resignation of the Talks department in December 2009,"'*+"' %1,!*+)('+""%",1(*'1(*" "'%)*( *&&"' %%,(0!"","('+,!('%1)*( *&&"' )*,&',,(!.'#(1'1+" '"5',- ,"'*+
under Eshun’s directorship.
There is of course another term to describe the process occurring in this new3',*4*,',*,"+3+$"%%"' 4!."+"('(6-"60"%,&)(**1
institution is, ironically, entirely concomitant with a general trend towards
-*-*,"+,"('',!(%","('(0)*,"+"'(* '"+,"('%+,*-,-*+,!,
mediate between cultural practitioners and arts policy. This has been vividly evident"',!!' +"'*,+-'"' ("+"'*',1*+(*0&)%,!*&(.%(*,
(*&+)"5."+(*1)'%+/+'*%1"''(.,"(', *,+ (-'"%' %'-'*
New Labour. A similar process destroyed the British Council’s artistic departments"'%,/!'","+'",+5%&*&'%",*,-*+" ''
visual arts departments, amalgamating them into a single ‘arts team’, organised*(-'"2**&' &',)!(*"+&++-!+3*( *++"."%",,"('43*$,
',%%" ',/(*$43'(/% *'+*-',"('4'3(*'"('*4'(,!
organisations, the political instinct has been bureaucratic; to withdraw authority
'"')''*(&+,))("',(*,!"*$'(/% ()*,"-%*5%(
artistic practice, in order to better administer whatever policy imperative happens
to be coming from central government.
-,,!!(+,"%",1(-*-*,+,("')'',-%,-*%0)*,"+'%+(&))(',(,!))*',%1-,,"'  -*,(*"%)*"."% "' (60"%!(programming, and both have the same useful managerial outcomes: fewer staff and&(*)**"(-+,&)(**1&)%(1&',(',*,+!"+"'(*0)*,"+/",!"'
*,+)(%"1,!"'$"' %+(*6,+1'"%%$((&&",&',,(,!"')''of cultural forms, a trivialising indifference to the value those forms have achieved,''(+++"('/",!,!&("%,+,+(3,!)-%"4+,!5'%*",*(-%,-*%
value. In Eshun’s hyperventilating vision document he asks which ‘faces should&(+,-*,%1*)*+',,! '(/ 4('%-+,+!(-%,!*,"+,"5 -*+,!,(-*-"'&"*++!(-%
celebrate them in our communications as our heroes, our star names
already, because our audience believes they are cool. And we should keep"'&"',!,"'/$,(1*!'&'1(,!(+5 -*+/"%%'(%(' *
be relevant because there will be a new set or more urgent names to hail.
All that matters is now.
",!*,(*,"+,"*-''1++,+,!"+1(-('4,'-*,(*"%0)*,"+or an opinion regarding what art is worth supporting and championing – you justneed Simon Cowell.
24

	
  

	
  

	
  

450

Such abdication of curatorial authority to the audience presupposes that what
the audience wants is merely what the institution should do. It does not acknowledge
that a presenting institution such as the ICA might have a relationship to communities
of artistic practice that have distinct cultural and organisational histories, and theirown attendant audiences. Such distinctions cannot simply be wished away by a bit,#/"&*$&+""/&+$,# 2)12/)*&00&,+011"*"+1#1%"/1&01& /")"3+ ",#1%"
has reputedly dwindled during Eshun’s tenure, it perhaps has something to do with%,4+"*-1&"!,21*,!"),#2!&"+ "#""! (+!7"/)6!,-1"/81/"+!#,)),4&+$
" *"0201&121"#,/$"+!0"11&+$,/ /&1& )3&0&,+,#1%" 2//"+1011",#/1+! 2)12/",//")/1&01&  2/1,/&)/")1&,+0%&-04&1%!&##"/"+1/1&01& +!
cultural communities.
 %&0&0+,1+/$2*"+1$&+017 /,00!&0 &-)&+/&16821&1&0+/$2*"+1#,/
1%"# 11%17 /,00!&0 &-)&+/&168/".2&/"01%"/")&16,#!&0 &-)&+/60"#,/-/ 1& "&+1%"</01&+01+ ",/*0,#/1&01&  /"1&3&16/"+,1&+ ,+01+1=25,/
1/+0#,/*1&,+1%,2$%1%"6!, %+$"%&01,/& ))621 ,)"0 "&+1,0201&+"!
practices and communities of artists and audiences. This is not an outdated ‘mode’,#1%"7-,014/*,!"/+&01/1 "+1/"821/" ,$+&1&,+1%13"+2"*6-)6%,01
to multiple artistic cultures and communities, which it is not wholly instrumental
in generating and sustaining. By contrast, the tendency to abolish programming!"-/1*"+10/&!0+,/$+&01&,+,#01##4&1%"5-"/1&0"+! ,**&1*"+11,-/1& 2)/<")!0,# 1&3&161&0*,3"4%& %!"+&"01%"21,+,*6,#!&##"/"+1/1&01& <")!00
1%"6)/"!6"5&01,210&!",#1%"&+01&121&,++!12/+01%"&+01&121&,+80/,)"#/,*1%1
of forum and enabler for those communities, to a regulator of which artistic practicegains visibility. In other words, it reduces the claim that communities of artistic
practitioners can make on cultural institutions, and elevates the institution’s arbitrary
power over artists by distancing itself from already present communities of practice.

; 
2006, p.1:

#1"/)2'&9+&0&)"%+$"0:2+-2)&0%"!!, 2*"+1

“If you raise a lot of money, I will give you great, great architecture. But if you raise
really a lot of money, I will make the architecture disappear,” promised architect
,0%&,+&$2 %&4%"+%""$+1%"/"3*-,#1%"20"2*,#,!"/+/180
2&)!&+$ *&))&,+!,))/0)1"/%&0(,+%0" ,*" 1 %-%/0"4&1%01& (&+$
power long after the completed project’s 2004 unveiling. The building’s hefty price1$0""*01,-,&+11,&+3&0&&)&160+"4(&+!,#)252/6 &180)*,010&#,
can afford not to appear.

;  #1"/+!/"4)2*9%",!"/+801%"/"+,31&,+:The New YorkTimes, September 21, 2003:


	
  

	
  

	
  

451

.6!#!4)/.).2%%.3"/2/4).4(%35--%2/&
,&2%$!224(%53%5-/&/$%2.24<3@234$)2%#4/2(!$!.%0)0(!.9(%-53%5-<3/&@#)!,!""2%6)!4)/.
?,/.'=>?7/5,$!224(/5'(4"%"%44%23%26%$"9!,/7%2#!3%=/> =/>.,%44%233%.4&2/-4(%#)49()3#/,,%!'5%34//+)335%7)4(()3(/,)$!9
musings; “it gives me terrible visual hiccoughs,” one wrote.
 (%()##/5'(3!00!2%.4,94//+$%#!$%34/35"3)$%47!3.<45.4),4(%-)$ <3
4(!44(%-53%5-$%%-%$=/>02/0%2%./5'(&/253%).-%-"%2#/--5.)
cations, and another decade passed before the acronym appeared on banners outside4(%-53%5-/$!94(%-53%5-2%#/'.):%34(!4-/340%/0,%)$%.4)&9)4"94(%7/2$
=/>?./4*5344(%3/5.$/&4(%!#2/.9-"54!,3/)43,//+=(!4,/7%2#!3%;/<
42!00%$"%47%%.4(/3%47/<3#2%!4%3!5.)15%7/2$3(!0%4(!4)342!.3,).'5)34)#>
$53:$)2%#4/2/&4(%-53%5-<3'2!0()#$%3)'.$%0!24-%.43!93=4<3!##%33)",%
to people who don’t speak the language.”
So it’s with a sense of great care that the museum’s leaders introduce their,!4%34)../6!4)/. !2%$%3)'.%$/,/'/!.%7,93#25""%$&!#%"97()#(4(%revered institution will soon present itself to the world on signs, coffee mugs and35"7!9!$3!.$4(2/5'(/544(% /3()/!.)'5#()$%3)'.%$%80!.3)/.!.$2%./6!4)/.
0,!..%$4//0%..%!24(%%.$/&3"%@43!#(!.'%/&35#()-0/244(%
redesign was undertaken with much attention: the museum hired perhaps the world’s&/2%-/34490/'2!0(%20!)$()-).4(%,/7@6%@'52%3!.$30%.4%)'(4-/.4(3
3#254).):).'%6%294).934%0).4(%02/#%33 (%/54#/-% %,,)4<335"4,%/57/5,$(!6%4/,//+2!4(%2#,/3%,94/3%%)4842%-%,9#,/3%,9.&!#4
someone could set the old logo and the new logo side by side and stare for some4)-%"%&/2%$%4%#4).'%6%.4(%3,)'(4%34$)34).#4)/.(%&/,+37(/,%$4(%%8(!534)6%
makeover process couldn’t be more pleased.
 3-)'(4"%%80%#4%$/&3/-%/&4(%-/346)35!,,9!7!2%0%/0,%).4(%7/2,$
4(/3%7(/(!6%7/2+%$/.4(%/$%2.<3490%&!#%3(!6%!2%-!2+!",%()34/29
/&490/'2!0()#3%,&3#254).9. 4(%-53%5-2%0,!#%$)43'%/-%42)#,%44%2&/2-3490)#!,/&4(%!5(!53!.$%2-!.-/$%2.)3-7)4(2!.+,)./4()#//.%/&
4(%'2!.$%34!.$-/34&!-),)!2/&-%2)#!.490%&!#%3%3)'.%$). "9/22)3
5,,%2%.4/.).%23%9)492!.+,).)33)-5,4!.%/53,9-53#5,!27)4(!.)-0/3).'
weight, and humanist, with letterforms reminiscent of the strokes of the calligrapher’s
pen rather than a mechanical compass. “Quite simply, it’s a face that’s modern withroots,” Ivan Chermayeff, the designer who made the selection for the museum,recalled recently. “It has some character, and therefore some warmth about it, andsome sense of the hand – i.e., the artist. All of which seemed to me to make a lot of
3%.3%&/24(%53%5-/&/$%2.247()#()3./4/.,9,//+).'4/4(%&5452%"54
also looking to the past.” 2(%2-!9%&&<3,/')#(%,$503)$%&2/-7(!4253:#!,,3!=",)0>!2/5.$
4(%4)-%4(%-53%5-<3%80!.3)/./0%.%$). 4(%-53%5-(!353%$2!.+,).
#/.3)34%.4,9&/2.%!2,99%!23/7(%.4(%/$%2.!3+%$4(%/2/.4/"!3%$
26

	
  

	
  

	
  

452

!"0&$+"/ /2 "21,"5-),/"/+$",#-,00&&)&1&"0#,/1%"+"42&)!&+$900&$+$"
<&+ )2!&+$/,2+!"/*,/"06**"1/& )16-"# "0<%"#")101/,+$)61%1/+()&+
0%,2)!")"#1),+":3"/6,!6$"101&/"!,#1%"&/,4+3,& ";/20&!#/,*%&0
studio in Toronto, “and so they want to change it. But I was like: ‘Don’t mess with it!
190+"51/,/!&+/6)+!*/(&!"+1&16 !,+911%/,41%"6,214&1%1%"1%41"/9; %"*20"2*90!&/" 1,/)"+,4/6$/""!:"),,("!1))0,/10,#,-1&,+0
+!0&!8,2(+,44"!,+91+""!1,$,1%"/"92/0")#&*$"%0+910%&#1"!0,!/*1& ))61%1,2/&!"+1&16+""!01,""5-/"00"!&++211"/)6+"446"!,+91
+""!1,$,#/,* %&+171,01/&-"0;21/2+,1& "!1%11%"/+()&+1%"*20"2*4020&+$!&!+910""*1,%&*)&("/+()&+1)),*"4%"/"&+1%"-/, "00,#&10"3,)21&,+#/,* "+1,+90,/&$&+)
metal type to the readily available digital one it had lost some of its spirit, becoming:%6/&!!&$&1)0,2))"003"/0&,+;&+/207904,/!0"1)16-"1/!&1&,+))6%00)&$%13/&1&,+0"14""+-,&+10&7"01, ,*-"+01"#,/1%"-/,-"/1&"0,#&+(+!
differences in proportion. But digital versions of historic typefaces are often created#/,**"1),/&$&+)0,#0&+$)"-,&+10&7"<0401%" 0"4&1%1%" ,**"/ &))63&))"/+()&+1%!""+!&$&1&7"!#/,**"1)16-",#0*))0&7"!&01"+!&+$1%"-/,-,/1&,+01&10)/$"/0&7"0+ "&10!"#" 104"/"/" ,$+&7"!1%"6" *"$)/&+$ 1%")"11"/04"/"0.21+!-2+ %60--&+$))1%"")"$+ ",21,#1%"4%&1"0- ""14""+1%"*&1%0,*",#1%"0&$+$"--)& 1&,+0&+1%"+"42&)!&+$/".2&/&+$16-"#,2/#""11))1%"0*))3/&1&,+0" *":%&!",20;/2070&!
 %"*20"2*--/, %"!1%"-/""*&+"+116-,$/-%"/11%"4 /1"/,21:/"#/"0%&+$;1%"16-"# "+1%" &+%&01%&/!>,,/4)(2--/1*"+1&+*/&!$"00/ /1"/%0!"0&$+"!*+6,#1%")"11"/#,/*04"04)),4
daily in unthinking gulps – among them typefaces for National Geographic, Sports
Illustrated and The Washington Post, as well as Bell Centennial, used in phone books,
+!"/!+1%"& /,0,#10 /""+#,+1/&+"!,/&$&+))6016-"#,2+!"/<1%"
-"/0,+4%,#,/$"016-"#/,*%,1*"1)</ /1"/-&,+""/"!16-,$/-%6901/+0&1&,+
1, ,*-21"/0"!!"0(1,--2)&0%&+$&+1%" 904%"+%"%")-"!#,2+! &101/"*
1%"=/01!&$&1)16-"#,2+!/6"40,+",#1%"=/011,"*/ "1%"&!"1%116-"no longer necessarily began with metal forms and ended as an impression on paper;&1 ,2)!"!"0&$+"!&*-)"*"+1"!+!/"!4&1%,21"3"/"0 -&+$1%" ,+=+"0,#
the computer screen.
 "#/"0%&+$/+()&+40/ /1"/0&!:)&("0(&+$+/ %&1" 11,!"0&$++
"5 1/"-)& ,#2&)!&+$; 21&140',%"40%--61,!, :%1,--,/12+&161,
really study these letterforms and capture them as faithfully as I could was sort of an
education to me.” &010(40&!"!6"&$%11/60,#*"1)16-",#/+()&+,1%& ,1%1%!
02/# "!+,1),+$"#,/"&+1%",!"/+900"*"+1,1(+,4&+$11%"1&*"4%1%"4,2)!!,4&1%1%"*/2074%"")"!1%"1/60,+"6,+",+!"0( %&/!,4+
1%"), (1,%&01"*-,//6,#= ",+1%" 3"+2",#1%" *"/& 0/ /1"/0 ++"!
-/&+1"!0*-)"0#/,*1%"1/60+!20&+$0,#14/"-/,$/* ))"!,+1,$/-%"/
27

	
  

	
  

	
  

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#%,2&#*-,%.0-!#11-$.*-22',%2&#!304#.-',21$-0#!&*#22#0>21)0#/3'0',%
2&#$3**#62#,2-$&'1*-,%*#0,#"!0$2#*1-&"2-',4#,22&#40'#27-$!&0!2#01
27.'!*-$+-"#0,$-,212&2"'",:2#6'12',2&#+#2*>!300#,!71'%,1,"!!#,21
$-0#6+.*#&#0#13*2',%27.#$!#>25-1*'%&240'2'-,1!23**7-,#$-01'%,%#
,"-,#$-02#62>0#,-5 #',%2#12#"-,+-!)3.1 72&#-"#0,:1%0.&'!"#1'%,"#.02+#,22-1##&-52&#7*--)',"'$$#0#,21'8#1,"$-0+1,"$2#07#2+-0#
tweaking, will soon be installed on computers across the museum.
 325'**,7-,#,-2'!#;131.#!22&2'$5#:0#0#**713!!#11$3*2&#.3 *'!5-,:2
0#**7,-2'!#2&#"'$$#0#,!#'25'**(312$##*0'%&2<0-5071'"4#,'$2&'1'1
!0#$3**7!*!3*2#"#6#0!'1#', 0,"',%2*#12'2:1203#,#0*7!-+'!**71-2-2&#+'11'-,-$2&#+31#3+*#11-,!2&, 3,!&-$#12&#2#1120',%22&#
shape of their own name until their eyes cross. Perhaps in the sharpened interstices-$2&#;+<-02&#1*'%&2*7+-0#.',!&#"#**'.1#-$2&#;-<2&#0#+'%&2#6'12
122#+#,2-$5&22&#-"#0,5,212- #>7-3(312&4#2-1/3',22-1##'2;2&',)
that’s really at the heart of the institution’s premise, which is a deep and profoundrespect for the past, and an absolute willingness to engage the present – and a0#!-%,'2'-,2&22&#7:0#,-2+323**7#6!*31'4#<0-5071'"
No, but sometimes they do look pretty similar.

=

$2#0'!&0"-**'1#+'*2-2302'*#70!& 

2:12&#/3*'27-$2&#"#!'1'-,+)',%,-22&#!-,2-02#"#* -02'-,-$90#1#0!&:
2&2"#?,#,',12'232'-,#6.0#11#"','219'+%#:2:1"'$?!3*22-4-'".322',%
5-0"1', 0!)#21>2&#7:0#1-1*'..#07',31#&#0-*#-$.3 *'!0#*2'-,1,"5&-*#
departments …

= $2#0*3(';,'1' *#&,%#1<3,.3 *'1&#""-!3+#,2 .. 
--2&'!:10-3%&*7<""'2'-,+3!&*')#2&#,'%3!&' 3'*"',%0#.0#1#,21
,#6-0 '2,2+-3,2-$+-,#72'+#"#!'1'-,+)',%,"!-** -02'4##$$-02
But unlike the revamped architecture, the change in the logo was one that the people#&',"'2"'",:20#**7#6.#!22&#%#,#0*.3 *'!2-,-2'!#,$!22&#+31#3+:1
director, Glenn D. Lowry stated in the article that “[I]f … we’re successful, the public
won’t … notice the difference. It will ‘just feel right.’” -,1'"#0',%2&#+-3,2-$+-,#7',2&#*-5?4#?%30#12&#!0#2'-,-$-
Gothic took to produce invisible, it “just feels right” results, it’s hard not to speculate
about other unseen strategies the museum might have suggested by such a!&,%#, -2&#6+.*#1-:1#+.&1'1-,2&#',4'1' '*'27-$'21"#1'%,'1,-2!1#-$0,"-+* #*',%-3*"'2 #2&25'2&2&#3 '/3'27-$*-5 0-5"4#02'1',%
28

	
  

	
  

	
  

454

today, the museum senses a growing disdain in the market towards the visible,'4*:.;9).559+9:.+56659/:+85;:+E"   ',:+84*8+=2;3C#.+5*+84B9:.+8!+45<':/54D
%9++C/4+9 D'(5<+&E"  ',:+8+40'3/4#.58+2+3'/2:5'</*!+/4,;8:'8).

 



59:5,:.+:/3+4583'29/:;':/549'?+';(5;8-58 536/*5;58++4:8+
Pompidou. I tell people I am going to Beaubourg or to the Centre Pompidou;
let’s meet at Beaubourg, let’s meet at Pompidou, let’s meet in front of Pompidou,
in front of Beaubourg; there’s that show at Pompidou; there’s this opening at
+';(5;8-:54/-.:'4*955459:5,:.+:/3+/:*5+94B:3+'4:.+3;9+;3'99;).(;::.+62')+:.+(;/2*/4-58:.+6/'@@'/4,854:5,/:
Sometimes, I use another nickname: Pomps. I guess in English we would=8/:+ 536B9:B98':.+8'68/<':+051+=/:.542?',+=,8/+4*945:,853:.+'8:
=582*96+)/G)'22?:.5;-.=./).2/1+/1+8+?5;-5/4-:5 536B9 58+8'8+2?'4*359:2?=8/:/4-:+>:3+99'-+9'4*9.58:+3'/29=/:.2+99+8
friends then, I sometimes say Pompompidou, or Pompompidoupou. Not that I
think that Claude Pompidou was as glamourous as Betty Boop, but I really likealliterations.

E" ',:+8#.+#':+'22+8?TGMA, Ten Principles for Interpretation for
TGMA#':+'8)./<+#    '8). '97;5:+*/4'852/4+544+22'4
Towards Tate Modern: Patronage and Funding 66  $52,2/49A3'81+:/4-(8/+,,58:.+4+=#':+;9+*:.+=58*C+>6+8/+4)+D9+<+8'2
times throughout the document. The new Tate vision was to shift away from theformer parameters of art spectatorship which was made more user friendly and'))+99/(2+(?:.+,;41?4+=(;/2*/4-#.+#':+.'*:.+H+>/(/2/:?:5(+8+(8'4*+*
(+)';9+/:='9)54G*+4:5,:.+4+=3'81+:=./)./:.'*)54:8/(;:+*/43'1/4-
Concerning the museum marketing Olins declared “… more people now visit
museums and galleries than attend football matches – the potential for increasing
its audience was clearly enormous. The second motivation was to establish adistinct brand appeal through accessibility and a forward thinking approach toart …”
 8/'45?2'4:.+2+'*3'4,853$52,2/49='9'665/4:+*:5+9:'(2/9.
C#+468/4)/62+9,58/4:+868+:':/54,58#%#':+'22+8?5,5*+848:&F'8).
 #')145=2+*-+9:.'::.+8+/945:'9/4-2+).854525-?5, :.)+4:;8?
29

	
  

	
  

	
  

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art but many histories, and that every work is capable of multiple readings.
-423&."#,&0&/0,&3/#&$/.=%&.3"#/433)&*1/6.'&&,*.(23/6"1%2-/%&1.".%$/.3&-0/1"18"13 !*2*3/129&70&$3"3*/.21&20/.2&2".%&70&1*&.$&2
-423#&4.%&123//%".%-423*.>4&.$&920/,*$*&2".%01"$3*$& 42&23)&3&1-:*.3&101&3"3*/.;3/*.$,4%&&%4$"3*/.".%*.'/1-"3*/. .3&101&3"3*/.
-"+&2".*.3&,,&$34",$/.31*#43*/. &5&,/0*.(&7)*#*3*/.2".%%*20,"82*2"collaborative activity concerned with ideas and communication of those ideas;
it acknowledges the positive value of creative tensions involved in this process.
43)/12)*0)&,023/-"+&"00"1&.3"."136/1+92-4,3*0,&1&"%*.(2#8)*(),*()3*.(just one, and it helps visitors to engage with art in a more personalised way.
-423"$$/--/%"3&"6*%&20&$314-/'5/*$&2'1/-*.2*%&".%/432*%&3)&*.23*343*/.#/3)"13*232".%./."13*232.3&101&3"3*/.".%$/--4.*$"3*/.2
-4236/1+*.".*.3&(1"3&%6"8../5"3*/.&70&1*-&.3"3*/.".%&5",4"3*/.
"1&+&8/00/134.*3*&2'/13/04124&6)*,&#4*,%*.(/.3)&#&2301"$3*2&/'
the Tate.”<LINE 132 after Robin Kinross, “Conversation with Richard Hollis on Graphic Design
History,” Journal of Design History!/, / 0
/8/43)*.+3)"392314&)"5&.933",+&%"#/433)*2*.6)"395&61*33&.2/
far. And I don’t know whether it’s going to become the – [distracted by a radio in
the street, looks at the British Telecom vans again, now preparing to move off] It is
incredible: the old van and the new van. You see: there is graphic design moving
away, followed by marketing.

<  "'3&1*$+&,0):7$&1032'1/-". .=.*2)&%$1*03;1&22&,&"2&&1",%31&&3 00 
30

	
  

	
  

	
  

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) -/# #$-().#$+*!*#)*-- ''/#  .$") *0)$'#*-")$5 
$.0..$*)"-*0+! /0-$)"1-$*0.# 14#$// -.$- 1$0/)(') )/**#) "-/4*!1 -/$.$)"" )4 -/'  *"'  "-/4!-*(-*./$)"
advertising, design and journalism, the purpose of which was to consider Britain’s$ )/$/4//#  )*!/#  )/0-4# 9)$)".*!/# $.0..$*)2 - +0'$.# in a paper called New Brand for a New Britain on the very same day that New
Labour won the general election with a huge majority. Shortly afterwards, a report
was commissioned to develop some of the ideas put forward in the paper, and to see#*2/# 4($"#//-).'/ $)+*'$4# %*2.2- /* (*./#$)&/)&
2$/#'*. /$ ./* 2*0-)0) -/# $- /$*)*! *!!0'")2#*2*0'eventually become a special advisor to Blair. Titled BritainTM, the report featured a5$)"4'$( *1 -4*'!!'$).2#*/# (. '1 .#"*/$)*)/# /+0'$.#$)"/# .0-1 4 $)/# 82#*. .//$./$.++ -/#-*0"#*0//#  (*.- +*-/8)+-*0$)"9'( . "( )//#/$- *)/# 
7.The Money Programme inwhich they proposed redesigning the Union Jack.
BritainTM "$).6 -$/$)7.$ )/$/4$.$):03 ) 2 )/$*)'*)9 ) 
in the arts, fashion, technology, architecture and design has coincided with thedeparture from Hong Kong, devolution, further integration with Europe, theimminence of the millennium and Princess Diana’s death.’ It goes on to detail the
degrees of embarrassment ‘Britishness’ provokes at home and abroad. The generalconsensus is that it is a country whose few positive attributes are seen to be9-('4#$./*-$'*0)0+$)/# /-$/$*).)93  -/$)/$ .*!/# +- 2-)
$(( $/ +*./2- -0))/2$/#!**.)* -4)+*1 -/4/# 
UK is held in low regard throughout the world, if it is regarded at all: ‘To most people$) #$)*- -5$') 1 )/*()4$)/# )$/ // .*-0..$ -$/$)#.) $/# -a positive nor a negative image. It simply has no clear image at all.’ The domestic. '!$(" $.)*/ !*- $)"'*. -$)/ -/2$) /*$/.*- $)./$/0/$*).(*)-#4/# 
/#)*/# -)/$*).)$/$./# - !*- (*- 10') -' /**)!0.$*))
disillusionment when those institutions betray the public trust or are under
threat. […]The report mentions the arts repeatedly – held as vital in embellishing the)/$*)'-)2$/#" )/' )*)*)!*-($/4)4)($.(/./ !0'/-)$.#
These various cosmopolitan trills, Leonard suggests, could come together as a
#*-0.$) 3#$$/$*).)(0. 0(.#*0. $)$-+*-/./*"- /$)/ -)/$*)'1$.$/*-.)//&(* #$'$+ */# )$- /*-*!/#  2#$##*./ . -$ .*!
+- '$($)-4'0)# .2# - *)/-$0/*-./*/# - +*-/9-./$.0.. .*( *!/# . $ ..0"" ./ /#//-1 '$)" 3#$$/$*).*-")$5 4/#  -$/$.# *0)$'.#*0'./*+"*$)"6*2)*'*'*)$'-*0/ . .#*0'"*/*.#$)"/*))/& *1 -the National Gallery there. It is time to think big!’ The indistinct word ‘arts’ actually++ -.' ..!- ,0 )/'4/#)$/./- )4*0.$)/#  1 )(*- ) 0'*0.6- /$1$/47
In the ergot of marketing, the term ‘creativity’ is so useful because it acts as acatchall – it can just as easily be used to describe a new design for a wine rack as
31

	
  

	
  

	
  

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it can a painting. In addition, whereas ‘the arts’ refers to the tangible manifestationsof various practices – the play performed, say – ”creativity” can encompass both6+(241'7&6,10,65(.)6+(6$.(0651)$&6145',4(&614&1567/('(5,*0(6&$0'$.51
6+(%75,0(556+$65744170'5,66+(0,)6;52105145+,2'($.241/16,10$.&12;$0'
51100)$&66+(&4($6,8,6;6+$6'1(50>6',4(&6.;;,(.'$0;6+,0*6+(274(52(&7.$6,8(idea, could arguably be said to be the most valuable kind to the entrepreneurialclass. By this point in the late 90s with the concept of job security increasingly
under threat and the rise of the internet harboring in new systems of access,distribution and gain, the weightless creative thought began to have more and more&744(0&;4($6,8,6;,06+,556$6(9$5($5,(46164$05/,6$0'4(&(,8(14&1126,)
0(&(55$4;6+$'6175($B0$0&,$.6(4/.,37,',6;(5&4,%,0*6+('16,0+,54,/(41) ,57$.,6(4$&;10,510',556$6(56+$6=!+(0$0;.,37,'/$6(4,$.,5'4122('
on a surface, it assumes a rounded form, even it does not simulate a perfect dot.’
+(4170'(')14/9+,&+9,..&1/(61524($'6+417*+6+,56(:6.,-()41*52$90
,06+,5,056$0&(/$6(4,$.,<(5619$4'6+((0'1)BritainTM as an illustration featuring
5,:18(4.$22,0*&,4&.(59,6+,0($&+$=5614;>1)9+,&+4,6$,0&17.'%(2417'Shaping our identity=4($6,8(4,6$,0>$/10*6+(/6.11-5016+,0*.(556+$0$0(9C$*

	
  








UnitedHub UK
colours ofBritainOpen for
businessCreativeislandNation of
Silentfair play
revolutionary






Figure 10 A new identity for Britain.
A
 $)6(40'4(9.7/?+(1'(40>56+(4(018$6,10@
"5((?,0(5 @$%18(#A
$)6(4,&-(.2+?:&(4265)41/$00B0,5+('&4,26@
4(55(.($5((4$.'64((62



32













Demos 59This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved.
Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess

	
  

	
  

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6..&3(%/)++!12.&(!3#(%1)2,6%1%/1)5!3)9!3).-.&3(%/4"+)#2%#3.1!-$
deregulation of the private sector. Government interference was to be kept at aminimum whilst the public, now free as ‘individuals’ within an open market, wereencouraged to use their initiative, to partake in an ‘enterprise culture’. Lord Young
was one of the chief proponents of enterprise within government and by 1987
had been promoted to Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry.
By this point in the 1980s a wave of consumerism had been unleashed and the#.4-3186!2$1.6-)-')-#(.)#%)3(%5%183()-'2%%,)-'+8&.12!+%3(%'.5%1-,%-3
had necessarily understood the importance of how things are sold and had initiated a&4++"+.6-!-$4-/1%#%$%-3%$+.5%!&&!)16)3(!$5%13)2)-'!-$$%2)'-(%%/!13,%-3
.&1!$%!-$-$423186!2#%-31!+3.3()2$%5%+./,%-3!-$!33(%"%04%23.&.1$
.4-'6!2)32%+&')5%-!,!*%.5%1"83(%"1!-$#.-24+3!-#8.+&&+)-2.4-$%$
)-3(%,)$ 2"8)#(!%+.+&&!-$!++8+)-2!-$6(.2%%!1+86.1*)-#+4$%$3(%branding of the London borough of Camden and the design of the labels for Apple
%#.1$2.+&&+)-26!2.-%.&3(%@123!-$,.2324##%22&4+!'%-#)%2.&)3238/%
+3(.4'(#.,,.-/+!#%3.$!83(%,%3(.$2.&%73%-2)5%1%2%!1#(4-$%13!*%-3."4)+$
4/!*)-$.&/.131!)3.&/4"+)#/%1#%/3).-.&!#.1/.1!3%#+)%-3?!-$3.24"2%04%-3+8
beautify that picture – were almost unheard of. Because there was no competition!33(%3),%.+&&+)-26%1%.-3./&1.,3(%23!13.1.1$ .4-'3(%8$%2)'-%$!9)//8+.6%1#!2%+.'.3(!31%#(1)23%-%$3(%$%/!13,%-3!23(%).,/1)2%$.&
!2#%-$!-3+%&33.1)'(3$)!'.-!+23(%+.'.22314#341!++)-%2%#(.%$3(%1)2)-'23.#*
indices of the time. By the time of this titular shrinkage, the DTi’s budget was swellingto nearly £14 million, a more than threefold increase from 6 years prior, and with the
DTi acting as conduit a good amount of this government money was being channeled)-3.3(%%2)'-.4-#)+!-.-$%/!13,%-3!+".$8()23.1)#!++82.,%6(!3)'-.1%$
by Downing Street but now seen as a vital intermediary between companies and3(%%5%1)-#1%!2)-'-4,"%1.&$%2)'-!-$"1!-$#.-24+3!-#)%2(%%2)'-.4-#)+
."+)'%$6)3(3(%4-$%$.-24+3!-#8#(%,%)-6()#(#.,/!-)%26%1%.&&%1%$ days free consultancy on a design project, and in publications and brochures like:1.@3"8%2)'-;)-6()#(3()-'26%1%1%!++8,!$%%7/+)#)3:./43)32),/+83(%$%2)'-/1.#%22)2!/+!--)-'%7%1#)2%3.,!7),)9%2!+%2!-$/1.@32;>  !&3%1!3(%1)-%$%,%3<".43-%31)/%$%#3!-'+%
%!-)$,%1!-$3(%%-31%.,/)$.4.'.=Design Issues Vol. 26 No. 1
)-3%1 //  
+3(.4'(3(%@123!//%!1!-#%2.&3(%231)/%$%,"+%,6%1%$41)-'3(%%-31%;2inaugural period, it wasn’t yet part of the Centre’s visual identity. At the beginning of
1977, it had just been designed and it led an independent, reserved, and confused%7)23%-#%36!242%$&.1%7!,/+%)-!2/%#)!+)224%.&L’Express devoted to the
opening. It was reproduced in various places on its own without any connection to
33

	
  

	
  

	
  

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other elements of the guidelines. […] Indeed, VDA had not yet carried the day, andjust a few weeks prior to the opening some people felt that the need for the logo
was more pressing than ever. A response wasn’t slow in coming—eleven stripes
4+*6:&1<.)9-89&(0*)43*&'4;*9-*49-*7&19*73&9*1>'1&(0&3)<-.9*4749-*7
'&(0,74:3)(4147+472.3,&7*(9&3,1*(7488*)'>&9<*1+9-'&3)9-&9?.,?&,,*)
from the lower left to the upper right corner. Thus one of the most successful logos&3)2489897.0.3,*=&251*84+,7&5-.()*8.,3.37&3(*.39-*8*(43)-&1+4+9-*
twentieth century was produced for the sake of compromise by a designer who
9-4:,-9.98:5*7E:4:8

C  &+9*7&9-*7.3*)* 2*9A'4:93* 97.5*)*(9&3,1**&3#.)2*7&3)9-**397*425.)4:4,4BDesign Issues Vol. 26 No. 1
#.39*7 5 
The matter of the logo, dismissed by VDA, was nonetheless far from being decided.
A59.3,+47&)*8(7.59.;*14,4B(1&.2*)9-*9*=99-&9"8:'2.99*)+479-*
(425*9.9.43A<4:1)2*&3D=.3,*&:'4:7,.39-*57*8*39242*39&99-*7.804+.98
,4.3,4:94++&8-.43B<-*7*&89-*D72@87*(422*3)*)841:9.43<4:1)A.38(7.'*
Beaubourg in history.” In spite of these arguments and the effectiveness of the574548*)8>89*29-&9).)<.9-4:9&14,49-48*.3(-&7,*&9&80*)#.)2*7&3)
Hiestand to develop ideas for a possible emblem. In the fall of 1974, VDA presented
9-*7*8:1984+9-*.77*(*39.3;*89.,&9.438!-*.7)4(:2*39The 1st Concept of theTrademark Image for the CB1.89*)A9-*5488.'.1.9.*8+47).++*7*39.&9.3,&243,;&7.4:8
)*5&792*398B<-.(-.3(1:)*)&8*94+8>2'418&97.&3,1*+47&(.7(1*+47&).&243)+479-*1.'7&7>&3)&86:&7*+479-*51&89.(&798&11,*42*97.(+4728
9-&9(4:1)D994,*9-*794(4389.9:9*&8.3,1*D,:7*"@84'/*(9.;*-4<*;*7&8
#.)2*77*(&11834<<&894(43;.3(*)4:'9*784+9-*54.391*883*884+8:(-&8>89*2
which would be redundant with the color coding. Their persuasion was eminently
successful: symbols were dropped from the plan of action, and VDA began work
according to its initial proposal.
“The Centre Beaubourg is neither a bank nor an airport nor a grand hotel,”pointed out the document originally sent to the competitors. Even if some details
8-4:1)'*7*D3*)9-*>8-4:1)3@9'*9&0*3A944+&7B!-**397*&.2*)&'4;*&1194'*
A&99-*8*7;.(*4+).;*78*(&9*,47.*84+9-*5:'1.(*85*(.&11>9-*>4:3,.39*7*89*).3
intellectual and artistic pursuits.” The signage system and its supports “should
be carefully done, precise, and effective” while at the same time appearing “simple
and unaffected.”C     &+9*7:89&;*++*:15.3$1'*79*.89*7%.3:(&7*.The so-called
utopia of the centre beaubourg – An interpretation43)43440#4708  55 
34

	
  

	
  

	
  

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Ten years have passed since the Centre Beaubourg was inaugurated, and still'7'3:0/'#4,4.'50)+7'.:#%%06/50(#/'91'3+'/%'8*+%*#5$'45*#4$''/
considered a utopia, but more often an attempt to sabotage our culture, a threat to5*'(6/&#.'/5#-7#-6'40(06340%+'5:'3'#&+/)5*'/'841#1'340(5*#55+.'
the sarcasm of the ones on the right and the annoyed scepticism of the ones on
the left, remembering the interventions of the parlimentarians, demanding for theorgies and the sacrilege to be stopped, remembering the offended academics andthe outraged Parents, remembering the outcry of the bishops and the bitterness
0(5*'%'/40345*'165&08/40(5*')3#..#50-0)+454#/&0(5*'%36.1-'&'5%'5'3#4
But don’t worry, I do not intend to come back on these subjects and all that has
been said and written since, once utopia began to appear less foolish and thinkers
started to engage with it anew, analysing it, dissecting it, conceptualising it,
lacanising it, demonstrating in short that in fact it was not a true utopia but justnonsense and emptiness.
It is therefore useless to attract attention to such rubbish, to the elaborations#)#+/45+5#/&(03+5+5806-&46(?%'50)0505*'-+$3#3:50?/&'7'3:5*+/)5*#5
has been printed on the subject. Above all, for us beaubourgians, what counts iswhat is done and lived rather than what is said: things count, not their appearance.
(%0634'5*'3'8+--#-8#:4$'#//#9#)03#453:+/)50%0/7+/%'645*#58'*#7'been clever because we have hands, but these people form part of the cohort of
epigones, of the prophets of the aftermath.
So, what I would like to describe here is what we have done, with all thedetails of the actual hurdles that we had to overcome. Isn’t that actually what we'91'%5(30.#/#%%06/5

>    #(5'3#5*'3+/'&' .'5<$065/' 53+1'&'%5#/)-'
'#/"+&.'3#/&5*''/53'0.1+&060)0=Design Issues Vol. 26 No. 1
"+/5'3 11  Among “problems to be resolved,” formulated for the sake of the competitors,
5*'7'3:$#-&-:#4,'&<4#-0)03'26+3'&(03'#6$063)(/058*#5806-&
:063'%0..'/&=!3'410/&'&7'3:1-#+/-:/0-0)0/04:.$0-/5*+410+/5
the winners didn’t differ much from the other competitors, who were almost
unanimous on this subject. Although the issue of descriptive signage was the orderof the day, converging with the very fashionable trend of “environmental design,”-0)048'3'+/#45#5'0(%3+4+46454+9:'#34#(5'3#: -0)048'3'5*06)*5
of as a marketing ploy and viewed as ideologically contemptible, totally at odds
with the ambition of a public institution with a cultural mission. Even when it cameto the image of companies with business goals, the notion of a trademark was theobject of lively criticism. Already in 1967, the American designer Jay Doblin had+30/+%#--:'.1*#4+;'&5*#5+/03&'350-'#3/503'#&-0)04+58#4/'%'44#3:50,/08

	
  

	
  

	
  

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-?81->? 05221=1:?>53:>J-?->7->/;9<81C41<;5:?10;@?->2-9585-=5E5:3
oneself with Chinese ideograms. Doblin, who had formerly worked with#-D9;:0;1BD-:0/;2;@:010B5?4'53:1885/71=>?=;9-:0 ;;=0-?41
01>53:K=9&:59-=7:?1=:-?5;:-8?B;D1-=>.12;=17:1BB4-?41B->?-875:3
about. Owning up to his own illiteracy in the matter, he then risked the provocative
hypothesis of the total uselessness of such symbols. Total wastes of time andmoney – rumor had invoices rising to $100,000 – they could even be obstacles tothe prestige of the enterprises they were meant to enhance. Concluding his
iconoclastic diatribe, Doblin suggested abandoning logos to their fatal perversity
and adopting typography instead: “A little Helvetica lower case lettering can
31??416;.0;:1H:?4-?><5=5?41=9-D122-:015>9-=4-0/4;>1:=-:785:
;?45/2;= 1B);=7F>@>1@9;2;01=:=?%45>91=5/-:>-:>>1=52?D<12-/1
was designed at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its use in writing?419@>1@9F>:-91>@2K/10?;3@-=-:?11?419@>1@9F>A5>@-8501:?5?D
%41/;:?=-/?5;:>!-:08-?1=;/-91-.;@?;:8D8-?1=%41>;8@?5;:
?4-?'<=;<;>102;88;B10?4-??=1:0.@?B5?4-?D<12-/11C<=1>>8D/;:/15A10
for the Centre.

I $
-2?1=-?41=5:101$91?G.;@?!:1$?=5<10#1/?-:381
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Dear Helen and Alfred:Haven’t you two characters got anything better to do than spend an entire>@991=4-3385:3;A1=?41<=;.819;2B41?41=?41-..=1A5-?5;:2;=?41@>1@9;2;01=:=?>4;@80.1B=5??1:->!;=; 9@>?>-D?4-?5:?45>5:>?-:/1?45:7?418-0D5>=534?:-889D D1-=>5:
?419@>1@95?:1A1=;//@==10?;91?;*@>1+-8;B1=/->1G;H?9-D.1/;==1/?
but it gives me terribly visual hiccoughs. I can only conclude that the estimable
A.H. Barr is losing his sight and mind in Greensboro—the only prairie town in the
36

	
  

	
  

	
  

462

entire lush State of Vermont. I drove through there once and we had a sand storm
and I left hastily.
Sincerely,
James t. Soby

D!   ',9+7/)0 +15.B=)+7598,742'3#3E3/8.+*!)7/59C
%8++B/3+8  C'(4;+&D!   ',9+7$'11>1/38On Brand43*43".'2+8:*843  55   ".+5.7'8+@)47547'9+/*+39/9>A8++2894.';+(++3)4/3+*842+9/2+/39.+  8
(>$'19+7'7-:1/+84,9.+5/43++7/3-#!)438:19'3)>/55/3)499'7-:1/+894
*+8)7/(+9.+')9/;/9>/3<./).'114,9.+47-'3/?'9/43A8;/8/(1+2'3/,+89'9/438'7+
*+8/-3+*94)7+'9+')4.+7+39)47547'9+<.41+'884)/'9+*</9.'85+)/E)9.+2+
attitude or personality. The concept of corporate identity was of course directly*+8)+3*+*,7429.+<470)'77/+*4:9(>9.+'3*(+,47+9.'99.+-7+'93/3+
9++39.)+39:7>7'/1<'>)425'3/+8(:9/9<'857+8+39+**/,,+7+391>2:).247+
)422+7)/'11>$.+3.+<470+*,4739+73'9/43'1'7;+89+7'3*8/2/1'7.:-+)425'
3/+8'7-:1/+89440*+8/-3)438:19'3)>7/-.9/3949.+)47547'9+.+'791'3*".'308
partly to people like him and also to a changing commercial climate in the 1960sand more particularly in the 1970s and ‘80s the corporate identity discipline took offaround the world, especially in the US, followed closely by Britain. The traditional
:745+'3('8+**+8/-3+71+*/*+39/9>574-7'22+8</9.';'-:+'3*./-.84:3*/3-(:97'9.+7-+3+7'1/?+*5:7548+2:9'9+*/3948>89+289.'9)4:1*.+15)425'3/+894
sell themselves and their products. Computer companies, automobile companies,'/71/3+84/1)425'3/+8'3*9.+347-'3/?'9/438/3E3'3)/'18+7;/)+8(+-'3941+'73
that they could project a clear and differentiated idea of themselves to all of theiraudiences, from shareholders to customers to staff, by using visual identity systems<./).*+243897'9+*9.+/78+38+4,5:7548+479.+/7;/8/439E7892:).4,9./8
')9/;/9><'81+*(>*+8/-3+78'3*'7)./9+)98'3>4,9.+,'24:83'2+8/39.+E+1*
at this time were themselves designers or from a design background. Eliot Noyes/39.+#!<.4<470+*,474(/1'3*<'8')1'88/)./-.2/3*+**+8/-3+7+1+*'<'>,742:++333+7+574/394@824*+73439.+('8/89.'924*+73
+6:/52+39.'*94144024*+731+9).+747(+8'3*/11'*+8/-3)438:19'3)>9.'9
2:9'9+*/3949.+./-.1>8:))+88,:1+39'-7'25'793+78./5/89.+)1'88/)+='251+
of this kind of business. As I write, happily it still thrives. But gradually the moodchanged.
 '791>94)45+</9.9.+)4251+=7+6:/7+2+3984,9.+/7)1/+3985'791>/3'3+,,479
to learn to speak the same language, and partly because they saw an opportunity
37

	
  

	
  

	
  

463

to get closer to their clients on a longer term basis, design consultancies ofvarious kinds and levels of sophistication began to employ marketing people
whose background was in commerce and industry rather than design. These newconsultants working side by side with designers, were educated at business<,1885<*7-1*-<"1.B,8>5-7E=-.<207+>==1.B,8>5--.*5@2=1=1.2;,52.7=<
87.7=2;.5B.:>*5=.;6<+.,*><.=1.B,*6./;86=1.<*6.+><27.<<+*,40;8>7-
They had the same disciplines and attitudes.

H!   */=.; 2,1*;-8552<Graphic Design: A Concise History87-87"1*6.<>-<87  9
8><.<=B5.*7-,8;98;*=.2-.7=2=B27;*7,.-2-78=*==12<=26.*==;*,=*<6>,1
.7.;0B*<276.;2,*+>=8.@BE<*;2<8/I,.1*-+..7*,=2?.<27,.  7  
=1.91*;6*,.>=2,*5I;6 8><<.5#,5*/*-89=.-*8.@B<B6+8578=>7524.=1*=8/=1.1*<.*71*==*7+*74-.<207.-+B1.;6*B.//.2<6*;=@*<,8698<.-8/=1;..2-.7=2,*59*;*55.5580;*6<*;;*70.-<B66.=;2,*55B@2=127*7.:>25*=.;*5=;2*705.
5.*?270*<2625*;.:>25*=.;*5=;2*705.*==1.,.7=;.8/=1.-.<207*7B0.86.=;2,*5
26*0.<8/=12<427-,8>5-+./8>7-27*;.*-B;./.;.7,.+884Hornung’s Handbookof Designs and Devices *=287*52C270=1.,182,.8/<>,1<B6+85<+.,*6.,8;98;*=.
2-.7=2=B9;*,=2,. 8><<.5#,5*/E<2<=B92,*5D7,2<2?.+*5*7,.-89.72=<9.;<87*52=B
-8.<78=;.9;.<.7=*7B9*;=2,>5*;<9.,2*52C*=287*7-*558@<=1.0;8>9E<2-.7=2=B
=8.A=.7-+.B87-=1.,87I7.<8/=1.91*;6.,.>=2,*527-><=;BE

H!   */=.;*5*>32F7$2<2+5.1*70.<G>79>+52<1.--8,>6.7=
2006, p. 8:
F"1.8-.;7G+.,*6.F8G*7-2=<I;<=>72I.-?2<>*52-.7=2=B*99.*;.--.<207.-+B=1.=1.77.@5B.<=*+52<1.-1.;6*B.//.2<6*;.@'8;4+*<.-<=>-28%1.712;.-/8;=1.38+27  1.;6*B.//.2<6*;@185*=.;-.<207.-
7>6.;8></*6252*;,8;98;*=.5808<27,5>-2706.;2,*72;527.<&.;8A*7-8+25*68708=1.;<1*-+..7*<4.-=8,;.*=.F*,5.*7*7-<=;*201=/8;@*;-
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(<..F27.< G*+8?.)

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?   #(6'4='2146616*'75'7/1(1&'4046>18'/$'4 1#4%*+8'

A. Symbol
6+51$8+1756175#0&616*'75'7/6*#670.'55#5;/$1.+5647.;#224124+#6'61
6*'75'7/+6+5$'66'401661*#8'10'0+08'56+)#6+0)2155+$+.+6+'5(14#5;/$1.
we tried a number of different directions, none of which led to any satisfactory
solutions, perhaps because there is no one symbol of modern art, or of the diverse#%6+8+'51(6*'75'7/*'4'(14'9'*#8'%10%.7&'&6*#6+6+5+/2155+$.'(146*'
75'7/1(1&'404661*#8'#5;/$1.9*+%*+5/'#0+0)(7.!'#.51(''.6*#66*'
75'7/+5+001215+6+1061establish a symbol, whether meaningful or not.
*'#/17061(':21574'+06*''56#$.+5*'&%1//70+%#6+105/'&+#+06*15'#4'#5
1765+&'6*'75'7/<5#.4'#&;%#26+8'#7&+'0%'+58'4;.+/+6'&0#0;%#5'+6+5
37'56+10#$.'+017412+0+109*'6*'4#0+056+676+1057%*#56*'75'7/1(1&'40
Art should, under any circumstances, have a symbol.

?    #(6'4#0+'.11456+0The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Eventsin America '9"14- +06#)' 2 !*+.'#..6*'5'75'51(6*'+/#)'*#8'$'%1/'/14'+/2146#069+6*'#%*&'%#&'
of the twentieth century, a more abstract kind of image is the peculiar product of
our age. Its tyranny is pervasive. An image in this sense is not simply a trademark,a design, a slogan, or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted
2'4510#.+6;241@.'1(#0+0&+8+&7#.+056+676+10%14214#6+10241&7%6145'48+%'6+5#8#.7'%#4+%#674'5*#2'&+06*4''&+/'05+1051(5;06*'6+%/#6'4+#.57%*+/#)'5
+0'8'4+0%4'#5+0)07/$'45*#8'$''0(#$4+%#6'&#0&4'+0(14%'&$;6*'0'9
6'%*0+37'51(6*'4#2*+%'81.76+10?    #(6'4#0+'.11456+0The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Eventsin America  '9"14- +06#)' 22  
It was by elaborate design that the cumbersome name “International Business#%*+0'514214#6+10>9#5/#&'+06*'27$.+%/+0&+061=>*+5+5241$#$.;
6*'/156':2'05+8'#0&/1568#.7#$.'#$$4'8+#6+10+0*+5614;0&'46*'%4'#6+8'
direction of Eliot Noyes and a design group consisting of Paul Rand, Charles Eames,#0&'14)''.5106*'@4/&'8'.12'&+65564'#/.+0'&64#&'/#4-61241,'%6#=%.'#0+/24'55+8'>+/#)'19#&#;5#64#&'/#4-+55'.&1/#5+/2.'$;241&7%61(other activities. It is not merely the name, initials, or signature of the maker or owner,
or a hallmark assigned by a guild. Usually it is produced by specialists.

39

	
  

	
  

	
  

465

J $  
-2@1>-:518;;>?@5:The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Eventsin America    1C);>7'5:@-31  <<   (41:C1A?1@41C;>0H59-31I5:@45?:1C?1:?1C1<8-5:8E/;:21??-05?@5:/@5;:
.1@C11:C4-@C1?11-:0C4-@5?>1-88E@41>1-:0C11D<>1??;A><>121>>10
interest in what is to be seen. Thus an image is a visible public “personality” asdistinguished from an inward private “character.” “Public” goes with “image”
as naturally as with “interest” or “opinion.” The overshadowing image, we readily
admit, covers up whatever may really be there. By our very use of the term we
imply that something can be done to it: the image can always be more or less?A//1??2A88E?E:@41?5F100;/@;>10>1<-5>10>12A>.5?410-:059<>;B10=A5@1-<->@
2>;9@4;A34:;@1:@5>18E5:01<1:01:@;2@41?<;:@-:1;A?;>535:-8;2C45/4@41
image is a public portrait.

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C575%-@1-2@1>H%-@1I8-?@9;05K10!/@;.1> 

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4@@<1:C575<105-;>3C575A?1A9,;2,;01>:,>@J $ 
-2@1>:0>1C8A9H%41;01>:G?!@41>#1:;B-@5;:I*?11H5:1? I-.;B1+

J $  -2@1>;4-::1?@@1:  =A;@105:>-:7(45@2;>0Bauhaus;:0;:%4-91?A0?;:  < 
Itten thought it impossible to consider colour apart from form, and vice versa,?5:/1;:1/-::;@1D5?@C5@4;A@@41;@41>?4;>@1??-EC45/441C>;@15:  
gives the essence of his theory of colour and form.
The clear geometric form is the one most easily comprehended and its basic
18191:@?->1@41/5>/81@41?=A->1-:0@41@>5-:381B1>E<;??5.812;>9851?
dormant in these formal elements. They are visible to him who sees, invisible
to him who does not.
40

	
  

	
  

	
  

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F"  (-;,9!0*/(9+6330:Graphic Design: A Concise History65+65#/(4,:<+:65  7 #/,:,+,=,3674,5;:-964?79,::0650:4;6>(9+:-<5*;065(30:4(5+-964/(5+*9(-;
towards design for machine production, can be traced in the changing graphic design(;;/,(</(<:;/,-(46<::*/6636-(9;:(5+*9(-;:,:;()30:/,+05&,04(905  ;:L9:;3,;;,9/,(+<:,+;/,;@7,-(*,+,:0.5,+)@,/9,5:,+0I=(3#/,:*/663C:L9:;
,4)3,4>(:302,(4(:65C:4(92(:79,(+,(.3,+L.<9,*(99@05.(36-;(7@9(40+@  ;/0:/(+),,59,73(*,+)@;/,.,64,;90*0A,+796L3,6-(/,(+(+(7;,+-964(4<*/,(930,9+,:0.5)@:2(9"*/3,44,965,6-;/,:;(-->/0*/*6<3+),:0473@
reproduced from printer’s ‘rules’ – strips of wood or metal that printed as solid lines.

F"  (-;,9(*8<,:!(5*0J9,D#/,"<9-(*,6-,:0.5E05The Futureof the Image65+65%,9:6 77   
5;/,,=,5;;/,8<,:;06540./;),-694<3(;,+(:-6336>:>/(;9,:,4)3(5*,0:
;/,9,),;>,,5";K7/(5,(33(94K(9,5*/76,;>90;05.Un coup de dés jamaisn’abolira le hasard in 1897, and Peter Behrens, German architect, engineer anddesigner who, ten years later, was in charge of designing the products, adverts and,=,5)<03+05.:6-;/,Allegemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft5;/,-(*,6-0;
;/0:0:(:;<70+8<,:;065(33(94K0:256>5(:;/,(<;/696-76,4:;/(;),*(4,05*9,(:05.3@9(9,:/69;(5+8<05;,::,5;0(3(:/0:76,;0*(9;+,=,367,+#/,3(;;,90:
.,5,9(33@,70;640A,+)@(*65;9(:;),;>,,5;>6:;(;,:6-3(5.<(.,(*9<+,:;(;,
that serves for communication, description, instruction, and hence for a use ofspeech analogous to the circulation of commodities and currency; and an essential
state that ‘transposes a fact of nature into its virtual vibratory disappearance’so as to reveal the ‘pure notion’.
 &/(;9,3(;065:/070:;/,9,),;>,,5(76,;;/<:+,L5,+(5+ ,;,9,/9,5:
(5,5.05,,905;/,:,9=0*,6-(4(169)9(5+796+<*05.)<3):2,;;3,:69/,(;,9:
$5302,;/,76,;,/9,5:0:05=63=,+05;/,4(::796+<*;0656-<;030;(90(5,8<074,5;
5+/,0:(3:6;/,:<7769;,96-(<50L,+-<5*;065(30:;=0:065,>(5;:,=,9@;/05.
submitted to the same principle of unity, from the construction of workshops tothe brand’s logogram and advertising. He wants to reduce the objects produced;6(*,9;(055<4),96-B;@70*(3C-694:&/(;/,*(33:B047(9;05.:;@3,C;6/0:L94C:
output assumes the application of a single principle to objects and to the icons thatoffer them to the public: stripping the objects and their images of any decorative
prettiness, of anything that answers to the routines of buyers or sellers and their9(;/,9:033@+9,(4:6-3<?<9@(5+:,5:<(373,(:<9,,/9,5:>(5;:;69,+<*,6)1,*;:
and icons to essential forms, geometrical motifs, and streamlined curves. According;6;/0:7905*073,/,>(5;:;/,+,:0.56-6)1,*;:;6(7796?04(;,(:*36:,3@(:76::0)3,
;6;/,09-<5*;065(5+;/,+,:0.56-;/,0*65:;/(;9,79,:,5;;/,4;6(7796?04(;,
41

	
  

	
  

	
  

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as closely as possible to the information they are supposed to provide about
those objects.

A  $)7(5$5/5$86  4827(',1$/267(5Design and Crime21'21(:!25.(562
33  
Loos began his battle with Art Nouveau a decade before “Ornament and Crime.”
A pointed attack comes in 1900, in the form of an allegorical skit about “a poor
little rich man” who commissions an Art Nouveau designer to put “Art in each andevery thing”:
$&+5220)250('$6<03+21<2)&2/256&203/(7(,1,76(/) $//6:$//
&29(5,1*6)851,785($1'0$7(5,$/6:(5(0$'(72+$5021,=(,17+(0267$57)8/:$<6$&++286(+2/',7(0+$',762:163(&,B&3/$&($1':$6,17(*5$7('with the others in the most wonderful combinations. The architect has
forgotten nothing, absolutely nothing. Cigar ashtrays, cutlery, light switches– everything, everything was made by him.
This Gesamtkunstwerk does more than combine architecture, art, and craft;,7&200,1*/(668%-(&7$1'2%-(&7?7+(,1',9,'8$/,7<2)7+(2:1(5:$6(;35(66(',1(9(5<251$0(17(9(5<)250(9(5<1$,/@257+(57289($8'(6,*1(57+,6,6
3(5)(&7,21?!28$5(&203/(7(@+((;8/76727+(2:1(5877+(2:1(5,612762685(7+,6&203/(7,21?7$;('"+,6#%5$,1@$7+(57+$1$6$1&78$5<)52002'(51675(66+,657289($8,17(5,25,6$127+(5(;35(66,212),7?+(+$33<0$168''(1/<)(/7
deeply, deeply unhappy … he was precluded from all future living and striving,developing and desiring. He thought, this is what it means to learn to go about/,)(:,7+21(>62:1&2536(!(6,1'(('(,6B1,6+('He is complete!” 257+(57289($8'(6,*1(57+,6&203/(7,215(81,7(6$57$1'/,)($1'$//6,*16
2)'($7+$5(%$1,6+('25226217+(27+(5+$1'7+,675,803+$1729(5&20,1*
of limits is a catastrophic loss of the same – the loss of objective constraints
5(48,5('72'(B1($1<?)8785(/,9,1*$1'675,9,1*'(9(/23,1*$1''(6,5,1*@$5)520
$75$16&(1'(1&(2)'($7+7+,6/2662)B1,78'(,6$'($7+,1/,)($6B*85(',17+(ultimate trope of indistinction, living “with one’s own corpse.”
Such is the malaise of “the poor little rich man”: rather than a man of
48$/,7,(6+(,6$0$1:,7+2877+(0$6$127+(5,(11(6(6&285*(7+(*5($7
129(/,672%(5786,/:28/'6221387,7)25:+$7+(/$&.6,1+,69(5<&203/(7,21
is difference or distinction. In a typically pithy statement of 1912 Kraus would
call this lack of distinction, which precludes “all future living and striving,”$/$&.2)?5811,1*5220@
Adolf Loos and I – he literally and I linguistically – have done nothing morethan show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot$1',7,67+,6',67,1&7,21$%29($//7+$73529,'(6&8/785(:,7+5811,1*5220
[Spielraum]. The others, the positive ones [i.e., those who fail to make the
42

	
  

	
  

	
  

468

distinction], are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot andthose who use the chamber pot as an urn.
Here “those who use the urn as a chamber pot” art Art Nouveau designers?18?*7<<827/=;.*:<<1.=:727<8<1.=<252<*:2*78+3.,<<1.,1*6+.:98<Those who do the reverse are functionalist modernists who want to elevate the=<252<*:2*78+3.,<27<8*:</.?A.*:;5*<.:!*:,.5=,1*69?8=5-<:=69+8<1
sides with his dysfunctional urinal, Fountain, presented as art, but that’s another;<8:A8::*=;<1.<?862;<*4.;*:.;A66.<:2,*5H+8<1,87/=;.=;.>*5=.
*7-*:<>*5=.H*7-+8<1*:.9.:>.:;.27*;6=,1*;+8<1:2;4*:.0:.;;2>.
indistinction of things: they fail to see that objective limits are necessary forE<1.:=77270:886F<1*<*558?;/8:<1.6*42708/*52+.:*5427-8/;=+3.,<2>2<Aand culture. This is why Loos opposes not only the total design of Art Nouveau+=<*5;82<;?*7<87;=+3.,<2>2;6E27-2>2-=*55A.@9:.;;.-27.>.:A7*25FNeither Loos nor Kraus says anything about a natural “essence” of art, or an
absolute “autonomy” of culture; the stake is one of “distinctions” and “runningroom,” of proposed differences and provisional spaces.

G "&    */<.:E,8.=:-.$*:2;5.C.7<:..*=+8=:0DF*,,.;;.-
#,<8+.: 1<<9???,.7<:.98692-8=/:.-=,*<287:.;;8=:,.;"&*:,12<.,<=:.
.7<:.$8692-8=*=),8.=:)-.)9*:2;9 1<6

G "&    */<.:E'1.2;<8:A8/'*<.*<!255+*74F*,,.;;.-#,<8+.:
1<<9???<*<.8:0=4+:2<*27+=25-27012;<8:A1<6G "&   */<.:E&.*:,1%.;=5<;'*<.2;<8:A&<*<287*:A;F*,,.;;.-
#,<8+.: 
1<<9??? <*<.8:0=4:.;.*:,1:.;.*:,1;.:>2,.;*:,12>.
;18?,*;.:.;=5<;3;9<1.6. 8+3.,< G "&  */<.:.@<.:&272;<.:E(.(8=5- 24.<8&1*:.&86."8<.;87*$8;;2+5.&,1885*-0.FNotes for an Art School "2,8;2*.@<.:&272;<.:
27;2-.+*,4,8>.:;..*5;81<<9???-.@<.:;272;<.:8:052+:*:A1<652- 
Heraldry is a graphic language evolved from around 1130 ad to identify families,;<*<.;*7-8<1.:;8,2*50:8=9;&9.,2I,>2;=*5/8:6;A2.5-;9.,2I,6.*7270;
*7-<1.;./8:6;6*A+.,86+27.-27*727<:2,*<.;A7<*@8/6.*7270*7-
representation. Any heraldic device is described by both a written description andits corresponding graphic form. The set of a priori written instructions is called a5*B87H<802>.2</8:62;<86+5*B87
43

	
  

	
  



	
  

469

In order to ensure that the pictures drawn from the descriptions are accurate"/%3&"40/"#-:"-*,&-";0/4'0--08"453*$54&50'36-&4"/%4)"3&"6/*26&
vocabulary. Objects, such as animals and shapes, are called Charges; colors arerenamed, such as Argent for Silver or Or for Gold; and divisions are described in
5&3.446$)"4&95&3<3*()5=*/"5*/"/%*/*45&3<-&'5=
A given heraldic form may be drawn in many alternative ways, all considered&26*7"-&/5+645"45)&-&55&3<=.":#&13*/5&%*/"7"3*&5:0''0/54)&4)"1&
0'"#"%(&'03&9".1-&*4*.."5&3*"-"/%%*''&3&/5"35*454.":%&1*$55)&4".&-";0/*/4-*()5-:%*''&3&/58":4 )&-";0/*4"?9&%"#453"$5-*5&3"3:53"/4-"5*0/0'5)&01&/3&13&4&/5"5*0/"-
(3"1)*$4:.#0-"/%7*$&7&34"4*/("-*.*5&%#6513&$*4&70$"#6-"3:'6--%&4$3*15*0/40'4)*&-%43"/(&*/$0.1-&9*5:'30.5)&3&-"5*7&-:4*.1-&
Azure, a bend Or505)&3&-"5*7&-:$0.1-&9
(Party) per fess, Vert and Gules, a boar’s head erased Argent, langued Gules,
holding in his mouth the shank- bone of a deer proper, in chief: and inbase two wings conjoined in lure reversed Argent. Above the shield is placed               a Wreath of the Liveries is set for Crest a hand proper holding a Celtic crosspaleways, Or, and in an Escrol over the same the motto “l’Audace”.
0%":4$)00-4$0.1"/*&4"/%05)&3*/45*565*0/4.":0#5"*/0'?$*"--:3&$0(/*;&%
forms from heraldic authorities, which have the force of a registered trademark.
&3"-%3:.*()5&26"--:#&$0/4*%&3&%1"350'"1&340/"-03*/45*565*0/"-)&3*5"(&"48&--"4"4"."/*'&45"5*0/0'$*7*$"/%03/"5*0/"-13*%&08&7&3."/:64&34
of modern heraldic designs do not register with the proper authorities, andsome designers do not follow the rules of heraldic design at all.
Bastards.

>    "'5&3&03(&6#-&3The Shape of Time: Remarks on the Historyof Things&8"7&/!"-&/*7&34*5:3&44  1
Returning now to the place of invention in the history of things, we confront
0/$&"("*/5)&1"3"%098)*$)"304&&"3-*&3*/5)*4%*4$644*0/5*45)&1"3"%090'(&/&3"-*;"5*0/$0/$&3/*/(6/*26&&7&/54*/$&/05805)*/(403&7&/54$"/
occupy the same coordinates of space and time, every act differs from its
predecessors and its successors. No two things or acts can be accepted as*%&/5*$"-7&3:"$5*4"/*/7&/5*0/!&55)&&/5*3&03("/*;"5*0/0'5)06()5"/%
-"/(6"(&%&/*&45)*44*.1-&"'?3."5*0/0'/0/*%&/5*5: &$"/(3"415)&6/*7&34&
only by simplifying it with ideas of identity by classes, types and categories and#:3&"33"/(*/(5)&*/?/*5&$0/5*/6"5*0/0'/0/*%&/5*$"-&7&/54*/50"?/*5&4:45&.
of similitudes. It is in the notion of being that no event ever repeats, but it is in the
44

	
  

	
  

	
  

470

nature of thought that we understand events only by the identities we imagine
among them.

C! 
'4:'7>  ('88'2+.932

',9+7A '7/8  *5:'7*'4+9++98'882+BWig & Pen,
.996</-6+4(25-8659)53   +*5:'7*3'4+93++98

!:7+<+@7+9.+8'3+86+)/+8'89.+5358'6/+48*+6/)9+*/467+ 9.)+49:7>
6'/49/4-8(:9<.5.'84@9,+29'*/8)544+)9<.+4-'?/4-/49.+'79<572*@87+'7;/+<
3/7757D').'838+6'7'9/4-+'72/+7):29:7+8,7535:75<449.'997'48,573'9/548
/43'9+7/'2):29:7+*+8+7;+3:).5,9.+)7+*/9$./)./854+-55*7+'854<.>
*5:'7*'4+9@8A Bar at Folies-Bergère, painted a year before his death in 1883,/8+=)+69/54'2
Look at the counter of the bar in the above painting. You’ll see two bottles ofBass Pale Ale, with their familiar red triangle logo. It’s a brand that many of us know
F789.'4*!++/4-/9/49.+6'/49/4-)544+)98:8/4'</41</9.2'9+ 9.)+49:7>
6'975483'4>5,9.+36+7.'687/9/8.95:7/898'952/+8+7-E7/+22'954)+;/''
commercial logo, we’ve discovered a bridge over a cultural chasm.
Ironically, many Americans have told me that they’ve seen the painting but.';+4@9459/)+*9.+(++7!53+5,9.+3'7+459(++7*7/41+78/-.959.+78<.5are,however, be subject to the invisible gorilla trap, i.e., failing to see something in front
5,9.+/7458+8(+)':8+/9*+F+89.+/7+=6+)9'9/548
A Bar at Folies-Bergère3:89'285(+5:7254-+897:44/4-+='362+'2(+/9/4'*;+79+495,675*:)962')+3+49'71+9+78'9'883:89+=:29127 years of
exposure to the brand in galleries and art books – that’s a lot of eyeballs!

C!  ',9+7'4/+255789/4The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America  +<%571#/49'-+  6  
97'*+3'71/49+4*+*95(+)53+'89'4*'7*,570:*-/4-'22675*:)985,')+79'/4
1/4*/8'2+-'22>6759+)9+*8+95,2+99+78'6/)9:7+57'*+8/-4/*+49/,>/4-'6'79/):2'7
675*:)9+)':8+97'*+3'718'4*3'4>5,9.+59.+7/3'-+8G55*/4-5:7+=6+7/+4)+8
'7+2/1+358959.+768+:*5+;+498+=6+48/;+95675*:)+853+54+'2<'>8.'8'4
/49+7+89/4*/88+3/4'9/4-7++4,57)/4-'4*+=625/9/4-9.+3"42/1+59.+789'4*'7*8
they can be owned. To keep them legally valid as trademarks, the owner must
constantly reassert his ownership.

C!
 ',9+7A54+/8./4@BThe Gentleman’s Guide to Cocktail
Conversation67/2   .996--9))<57*67+88)53)'9+-57>)5)19'/28

	
  

	
  

	
  

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the spatiotemporal continuum in order to account for the structure of the universe in1:%'=4813-41644'63*#41(('3'&#5'05#5+7'&'B0+5+101(*+4/64+%#.813-8*+%*
!-4:1)>4:-&55*394E3)>4:78*1+&99-*'&73*=99443*4+9-*.39*7*89.3,9>5*8
+071.7'45*'5'3/>B'.&1(2144+$+.+5+'4?0(#%55*+44*1845*#5*'+423'2#3'&51
>4:-45*)>4:2.,-9E3)47)*7&&881*.+&;&.1&'1*89-*'&79*3)*7,4*84++94
$13318581'953'/'.:3'7'#.+0)5'%*0+%#.5'3/4(31/%105'/213#3:%6.563'
getit, casually remark: “You know, normally I resist branding as much as possible,!*'015+101(>B'.&?+42317+&'&$:2*:4+%4#0&+/2.+'4#3'7+4'&7+4+101(5*'%.#44+%
but
every time I see Bass, I can’t help but want one. It’s a bit like the original Lacoste
3'.#5+104*+2214+5'&$'58''0%#64'#0&'(('%5#4#3+)+&10'&+3'%5+10#.4:45'/018
crocodile.”
Now, if you’ve managed to catch your neighbor’s attention – and we will#%1/2.'9+05'32.#:1(/15+7'(13%'4+4'07+4#)'&#%10B)63#5+101(2144+$.''7'054
57*9*3)9-&9>4:-&;*>4:(-&72.3,+*114<>4:D>4:@111.0*1>,*9&3*=(*59.43&11>
a complete dynamism of structure. The notion of “possibility” is a philosophical(43+:8*)1440.37*9:73"-.88-4:1)3498:757.8*>4:489(&8:&1)7.30*78&3)*;*3
%#0108*+%*3'C'%54#8+&'423'#&5'0&'0%:+0%105'/213#3:4%+'0%'5*'&+4%#3&+0)
somevery serious ones, don’t know that the Red Triangle which adorns every bottleof a static, syllogistic view of order, and a corresponding devolution of intellectual
4+&881*.89-*E78997&)*2&70*;*7.88:*).39-*##65*13+5:512'3410#.&'%+4+10%*1+%'#0&41%+#.%105'953+&(9.3  <-*39-*"7&)*&70 *,.897&9.43(9'*(&2*1&<&3*2514>**
of the Bass brewing company stood on line all night to make sure that, when the
4+E(*45*3*).39-*2473.3,9-* *)"7.&3,1*<4:1)'*9-*E789439-*'4408
@  
#(5'31/'0+%-//+3#5+>
536%563''5#2*13105'/213#3:
(148*1>+4114<*)'>&*).&243)+479-*.789743,&1*%4:(4:1)54.3994*&(-9.2*
Art,” Art
Lies1 23+0)
6//'3 of a%17'3
Apple
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for something
modern analogue.
 !4.+9-*1440>4:,*9'&(0.843*4+45*35:??1*2*39<.9-&94:(-4+(:7.48.9>
Recently I read Bruno Latour’s We Have NeverBeen Modern, from 1991. I’d gotten>4:8-4:1)8**E994(439.3:*A$*119-*
*)"7.&3,1*>4:8**43*;*7&88'4991*
the sense from talking to my more intellectually conscientious friends that Latour.8&(9:&11>9-*E78997&)*2&70*;*7.88:*).39-*#9<&8&'.94+&89&9:88>2'41
had a lotto foundsay aboutthe current
moment,which of
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which
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that, if rappers had+02#35+%6.#3+0#35+54''/4#0+0$'58''05+/'&'4%'0&'&#(5'35*''%101/+%
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collapse,Ifdrawing
to a close
periodmycompatriots
mind by, on attention:
the one hand,Patron.”you’ve madeit thisafar
and dominatedmaintained in
your
well
4#.#$.'0'1(13/#.+45813-*18'7'3+05'..'%56#..:,645+B'&*18'7'3+/$3+%#5'&done.
Ask her what she’s having.
+0%104+&'3#5+1041(231%'44*18'7'3)11&#0&105*'15*'3#55'/254513'7+7+(:
21.+5+%#.#%5+10+0#35+0%.6&+0)5*'1$4'44+108+5*6512+##0&5*'1$4'44+108+5*
2'&#)1):!*'$11-=4#+/+451B0&#8#:$':10&5*'+/2#44'5*#5$'%#/'%.'#3
C!
 &+9*7-.1.5"-425843*9*7&;*35479The Dictionary of Visual$:5*'.#5' 4  '#3.:=4$'58''01$7+164.:(#.5'3+0)/1&'30+5:#0&#4''/+0).:
Language43)43*7,897424>1*
5 &'#&'0&2145/1&'30+4/+7'05*'2#44#)'1(58'05::'#3410'816.&5*+0-
we had moved beyond this problem. But in fact theforked
last decade’s
*3*7&1!.,38"-*(.7(1*86:&7*97.&3,1*CROSS,
emblem.reinvestigations
These are signs
1(/1&'30+4/+0#35*#7'/'3'.:4'37'&513'+04%3+$'+547+46#..'9+%100&8#4
which
together form the basic plastic language. The circle is the traditional symbol+053+)6'&51B0&2#3#..'.4$'58''0#5163=4  #0&1635*'#35813.&=4  
4+*9*73.9>&3)9-*-*&;*38"-*86:&7*7*57*8*3989-*<471)&3))*349*847)*7
since
the livelier
artworkofI haveseen people
in attempts
to moveforwardThe
triangle
is a symbol
generative
power making
and spiritual
unity. The
CROSS
is a
3'%#..451/'5*'.#5'=4'#3.:=48+5*(1%64'4105'%*01.1):5*'$1&:#0&
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5*'+3+05'3#%5+104A5*'(#5'1(2'3410*11&17'3#..+0#/'&+#5+;'&#)'
symbolfor the trinity, is also an emblem for the paths of life. Although these broad
Latour seems
to love
breaking
downknowledge
into visual formats;
We Haveofinterpretations
occur
in many
religionsandcultures throughout
history, because
Never Been Modern('#563'406/'31645#$.'4#0&&+#)3#/4"*+.'2'364+0)5*'/
9-*.7+472&18.251.(.9>9-*>(&3'*.3;*89*)<.9-.3E3.9*8:'/*(9.;*2*&3.3,8
3'#.+;'&5*#541/'1(5*'%'053#..:+/2135#05&+#)3#/43'4'/$.'&5*14'+0
14#.+0&3#644=+0<< %6.2563'+05*'92#0&'&+'.&?  231&6%'&+0*'3018
canonical attempt
to account for the efforts
of artists
ranging from Sol Lewitt toC!
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&+9*7#2'*794(4The
Open
Work &2'7.),*&88&7;&7)
RobertSmithson55  who were developing work with new relationships to art and nature.
3#644'92.+%+5.:%+5'45*'4163%'(13*'3&+#)3#//+0)/'5*1&#45*'.'+0)3162
commontheoverambitious“human sciences.”
Presumably
Latour,is a ‘humanHence,
it isinnot
to detectin the poetics
ofwho
the “open”
workscientist’,– andis familiar with the Klein group, so familiar as to have incorporated it into his own*;*31*88849-*A<470.324;*2*39BD247*471*8885*(.E(4;*7943*84+97*3)8.3
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47
46

	
  

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#( # !$"" #$!#"#"#!$#' 
upon a binary, and logically enough, the way to move beyond the pair of binary
opposites is to triangulate !$  $!"$"#"#!$###!$!
#!"&!" #$!"# "# #)"%$"&($#$###!"
of simple geometry, and it invokes a baseline metaphor about the development of
"& #" "#!'"#(#""
dimension, the simplest structure of which is a triangle.
The methodology of this essay obeys the following geometry: a circle with
tangents issuing from every point along its edge where the author adduces a new"$!# !(#+$! "#&$!"#!(!
static.

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48

	
  

	
  

	
  

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books
Adorno, T.W., Aesthetic Theory [1970, German] (Minneapolis, MA: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
Agamben, Giorgio, Means Without End: Notes on Politics [1996, Italian] (Minneapolis, MA: University of
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Appel Jr., Alfred, ed., The Annotated Lolita [revised edn., 1991] (London: Penguin, 1995)
Badiou, Alain, Being and Event [1988, French] (New York: Continuum, 2005)
Badiou, Alain, Handbook of Inaesthetics [1998, French] (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Bailey, Stuart, ed., DDDD: Extended Caption (Amsterdam: ROMA, 2009)
Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972)
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968)
Benjamin, Walter, Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978)
Birnbaum, Daniel and Isabelle Graw, Careers and Canvasses Today: Criticism and its Markets (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2008)
Blauvelt, Andrew and Ellen Lupton, eds., Now in Production (Minneapolis: Walker Art Gallery, 2012)
Boatto, Alberto, Alighiero & Boetti (Ravenna: Essegi, 1984)
Bourriand, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics [1998, French] (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002)
Bracewell, Michael, Re-make/Re-model (London: Faber & Faber, 2007)
Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre [1957] (London: Meuthen, 1964)
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., ed., Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1988)
Burn, Steven J., ed., Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi
Press, 2012)
Burnham, Douglas, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
Cage, John, Silence: Lectures and writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961)
Cabanne, Pierre, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp [1967] (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971)
Calvino, Italo, The Uses of Literature [1967] (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986)
Cerizza, Luca, Alighiero e Boetti: Mappa (London: Afterall books, 2008)
Clark, Martin, ed., Pale Carnage, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2007

	
  

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Clark, T. J., Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001)
Coe, Jonathan, Like a Fiery Elephant: The story of B.S. Johnson (London: Picador, 2004)
Condorelli, Céline, Support Structures (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009)
Conrads, Ulrich, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1970)
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