| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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which I geeked out on him regarding my love of art that (which?) includes words. I'm thinking primarily of the works of Jenny Holzer and Ed Ruscha -- the former deals exclusively with words, and the latter has painted other things (pictures...huh!) but paints a lot of words, too. Like, he paints just words. Sometimes it's just words, sometimes phrases. Jenny Holzer I've mentioned on the boards before. She's my favorite living artist, and I'm thrilled that the MFA in Boston (which I can enter free with my student ID, praise be) has one of her pieces -- it's an LED screen that scrolls some of her Truisms, if I'm not mistaken. (I was at the MFA today but neglected to pay this a visit.) Jenny Holzer. If I had to steal anyone's art and pass it off as my own, it would be hers. First of all, I love the look of words. Typography honestly turns me on. The idea that the way a word looks influences its meaning or reception is so thrilling to me. A phrase resonates differently with you depending on the way you see it -- is it scrawled in graffitti on brick, or is it carved in roman capitals in marble, or is printed in sans serif font on a poster? Of course, the different styles imply different authors, and different types of authors -- disaffected youth, some stately organization, a corporation. (This is why I love Holzer's series of Survival statements printed as subway posters -- you initially think they must be ads for something, but there is no attribution line...nothing to indicate who wrote them or what for what purpose. Imagine seeing: this printed in sans serif caps, say, yellow letters on a pink background, on a poster in a busstop. What would you make of it?} Then, it's also the mere look of the letters I like...the alphabet itself, and the way the letters are formed and how they look next to each other. I love words with an "e - consonant - e" pattern, like serene (extra good) or austere. I can't explain why -- it's just satisfying somehow. And the shapes of A, e, f, J, N, W, R....these are great to draw in creative lettering of your own device. I'd go on, but I'm starting to scare myself with how autistic I sound. |
BR> out of the URL for it to work. Sorry. |
BR> out of the URL for it to work. Sorry. |
What about this? Photographs of Idaho, so large and vivid, you feel like you're looking at the landscape through a window, and you're reminded so much of Montana you find yourself crying. |
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Today is a low day. |
but i'm not sure that link is what you intended even with the <BR> removed, so i can't comment. your photographs of idaho link doesn't seem to work, either. so, uh, yeah? |
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words. poets are so fucking happy about their words. most times, i can't read a poem and experience the words because i'm stuck on the image of the proud poet. when i read a poem, i don't want to know who the author is, and i especially don't want to know if they're famous or not, respected or not. that said, the new melvins album is pretty damn good. they actually use real lyrics this time -- not just random and nonsensical words and phrases. http://www.southern.com/southern/band/MELVN/IPC82.php |
up like that. Dave -- the cool thing about Jenny Holzer is that, at least at the beginning of her career, you could see her things everywhere, but you'd have no idea who did them. Now, projecting words onto buildings at night...you clearly need permission for that, so it's not anonymous, but early on, she'd just paste posters, print- outs, stickers, etc. all over and never indicate that they were hers. They were just anonymous messages left out there in the world. And also, the ideas she expresses are not necessarily her own. Her Truisms series specifically sets out widely-held ideas, and if you look at a list of the statements in the series, many of them contradict each other, because they're not believed in by the same group of people. Survival (which I -- and jack -- linked to) is another series of statements that aren't attributable to her and her personality...they're statements from fictional people on the edge of living. I have a book of hers that includes an interview with her, and she doesn't consider herself a poet -- she says she cares only about writing clearly. |
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scrawled a message in chalk on the brick siding of an apartment building. It read, in all capitals, "YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT HE CAN'T." I approve of this as art. The building is adjacent to the College of the Museum of Fine Arts, so it's possible that the message was intended as art and not as a warning to potential dates that some guy is impotent. |
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It's great. He takes you from Gutenberg's blackletters up to the present, and he's got a really cute, dry sense of humor which brings all the characters (like the huge Caslon family...and I'm talking fathers and sons) to life. He also calls Univers "efficient, but the coldest typeface ever produced," which makes me love him. And this caption to a late 19th Century concert poster -- A typical nineteenth-century riot of display letters... "Who can exaggerate the horrors of those letters?" wrote a commentator in 1895.-- made me laugh out loud. That anonymous commentator has a place in my heart. It's so much fun to hear about all the detractors of the various fonts (e.g., Baskerville's typeface with its narrow strokes, people complaining that he'd make them go blind)....font was so contentious back then! |
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spider, do you know ellen lupton's books? probably worth a look. |
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i discovered that wiki has a section on typefaces. I'm working my way through the whole thing. omg Univers is the mac keyboard font. FUCK THAT. |
