I went to see the ‘Typography Workshop’ (Alan Kitching and Celia Stothard) at the Advanced Graphics gallery. It’s an inspiring show, and had me planning my next visit to the Letterpress as soon as I saw the first print. There is some information and lots of pictures on the Eye Blog.
I made this pair of plaques for the show. The theme of ‘Inner/Outside’ reminded me of ‘Two Exercises’ by George Brecht, 1961. The original text is this: Consider an object. Call what is not the object “other”. Add to the object, from the “other”, another object, to form a new object and a new “other”. Repeat until there is no more “other”. Take a part from the object and add it to the “other”, to form a new object and a new “other”. Repeat until there is no more object.
The first show for MA Graphics opened in Wilson Road on Tuesday. Overall it was a success, I think we all agree. However it was a bit disorganised, and not very many people came, but then with the posters up a couple of days before and all of them getting stolen from the notice boards it wasn’t surprising. Here are some photographs, thanks to Mei Li and Darrell Chandler for providing them. I showed ‘Relates to Brecht’, and the rubber ‘Mackdoor’ sculpture.
Mackdoor Slosses Over on the plinth
Sigunne Hamman set the class a project, to make a film which looks at narrative structure. She showed us a selection of films that use particular narrative devices, such as circular narratives (La Jetée by Chris Marker), repetition (The Oral Thing by Bjørn Melhus), and multiple viewpoints (Short Cuts by Robert Altman). She showed a diagram which illustrated the conventional structure of most films, going from introduction into a period of ‘rising action’, which leads towards a climax, which is then followed by ‘falling action’ leading towards a conclusion.
Mackdoor Slosses Over, in this case into rubber. The randomly generated phrase finds another form.
The first MA Graphics exhibition opens later today. It was my idea to do a time consuming and difficult to produce screen printed poster. Joana Monteiro did the typography and Marcus and Nina did the hard work. They look nice on the wall and at least one has already been stolen from the notice board which is hopefully a good sign.
I went to the Ed Ruscha exhibition in the Hayward Gallery on Monday. It was good to see these paintings, which are often reproduced, first hand. The word pieces, such as ‘OOF’ are interesting to see in their banal glory, but pieces I found the most arresting were the silhouette paintings, these paintings are atmospheric and mysterious and need to be seen full size to appreciate the full fuzzy effect.
Robert Morris, Green Felt Piece, 1983-4
At one point I had the whole word ‘Mackdoor’ suspended as a mobile. Something snapped after a few minutes and the whole thing fell apart but I did take a few photographs.
John Stezaker is a collage artist but in the most simple way. His compositions typically consist of only two original images. This apparent simplicity makes them all the more uncanny.
