4002/4003 - Studio Practise & Set Briefs: September 2014

In this session we discussed the wide possibilities to create without the use of a computer, the differences between creating with computer versus by hand and the limitations of computer. We played with different size letters to create a piece of work based on typography. we had had to research famous artist like Cecil Touchon which I found really inspiring and also research of typography associated with Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism and the DeStijl movements. Some of these pieces or work I have attached are collages I made at home as part of my work outside college. I've attached and some pictures of works of Cecil Touchon and also I have researched what represents the art movement ''Italian Futurism'' and ''Russian Constructivism''

Created at home

Cecil Touchon:

Born in Austin, Texas, artist and poet Cecil Touchon earned a BFA in art at the University of Texas at Arlington. In his visual poetry, he deconstructs found language by dismantling text from open sources such as spam e-mail or street posters into sub-letter units and reassembling the results as visual collage, which Touchon then replicates into paintings using trompe l’oeil techniques. In his artist’s statement, Touchon speaks of this practice as “liberating the forms of language from the practical utility of being carriers of some commercially driven corporate message, allowing them to exist purely for their own sake as shapes, curves, rhythms and colors.”

Touchon uses nothing but the figure/ground relationships of letter. The shapes that emerge are without question letteral, though they are operating in a space where it is impossible to read them in a literal way. These pieces are looking at the material of language as a thing that can be cut apart and re-arranged, and while they cannot be read, the part of our vision that is involved in reading is actively engaged in the process of viewing them. In this way these red images are read images, as well.In his series ''Suprematist Non-Objective Collage Poetry'' Cecil Touchon explores the boundaries between art and poetry in these elegant and intimate papiers colles composed of bits of lettering and the empty spaces between them. Stripped of literary meaning, these works rely on composition, rhythm and visual movement to convey their meaning which is ambiguous and intuitive. These works are constructed from distressed street posters that have been carefully edited into inlayed bits of printed matter creating passages that move from figure to ground and then reverse back to figure through gentle curves, irregular grids and subtle shading techniques:

Cecil Touchon

Suprematist Non-Objective Poetry

The Italian Futurism

Futurism (1909-1944) was perhaps the first movement in the history of art to be engineered and managed like a business. Since its beginning, Futurism was very close to the world of advertising and, like a business, promoted its product to a wide audience. For this reason, Futurism introduced the use of the manifesto as a public means to advertise its artistic philosophy, and also as a polemic weapon against the academic and conservative world.

Italian Futurism was officially launched in 1909 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian intellectual, published his “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in the French newspaper Le Figaro.

"Up to now, literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. . . We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice." T.Marinetti

Futurism, as opposed to Cubism, an essentially visual movement, found its roots in poetry and in a whole renovation of language, and featured the concept of the New Typography. Since 1905, Marinetti had promoted from the pages of his magazine Poesia (Poetry) the idea of verso libero(free-verse), which was intended to break the uniformity of syntax of the literature of the past. Then, just after the launch of the Futurist movement, verso libero evolved into the parole in libertà (words-in-freedom), the purpose and methodology of which were outlined in a manifesto dated 1913 and bearing the long title Destruction of Syntax/Imagination without Strings/Words-in-Freedom.

"Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility that has generated our pictorial dynamism, our antigraceful music in its free, irregular rhythms, our noise-art and our words-in-freedom . . . . By the imagination without strings I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation."

Marinetti's theory of "words-in-freedom" was central for the renewal of typography in this century:

"I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book of passéist and D'Annunzian verse, on seventeenth Century handmade paper bordered with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, elaborate red initials, vegetables, mythological missal ribbons, epigraphs, and roman numerals. The book must be the Futurist expression of our Futurist thought. My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page. On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colors of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicolored variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words."

To be a Futurist in the Italy of the early 20th century was to be modern, young, and insurgent. Inspired by the markers of modernity—the industrial city, machines, speed, and flight—Futurism’s adherents exalted the new and the disruptive. They sought to revitalize what they determined to be a static, decaying culture and an impotent nation that looked to the past for its identity.

Letterpress design on Italian Futurism, playing with their typography themes.

Francesco Cangiullo, Piedigrotta, 1916.

Cover by the author.

Francesco Cangiullo, Poesia pentagrammata (Poetry on the Staff), 1923.
Cover by Enrico Prampolini.

.T. Marinetti, Les mots en liberté futuristes (The Futurist words-in-freedom), 1919.

With this fundamental book whose subject was the so-called "words-in-freedom," F.T. Marinetti summarized about 15 years of research in the field of the renewal of poetic and literary language. This book features several typographic compositions spread in fold-out pages where the author shows his great creativity in typographic composition by using typefaces of very different style and size, as well as hand-designed typefaces and calligraphic writings. The results are of striking, impressive, visual effects that have since influenced many writers and poets.

.T. Marinetti, Les mots en liberté futuristes (The Futurist words-in-freedom), 1919

Guillaume Apollinaire ''Il Pleut''('It's rainting) , typset version, 1916

An Anthology by Lawrence Rainey

Fortunato Depero, Depero futurista 1913-1927 (Depero the Futurist 1913-1927), 1927.

Book bound with two bolts.

This book is a first-hand account of the Futurist Fortunato Depero's (1892-1960) approach to Futurism until 1927. It featured for the first time a mechanical binding consisting of two bolts holding the pages together, as conceived by Fedele Azari, the publisher. Influenced by the focus on the machine that characterized Futurism in the early 1920s, this book should be considered a manifesto of the Machine Age. However, Depero's innovation was not confined to the cover; the inside text features a wealth of typographic inventions including the use of different typefaces, the text formed into various shapes, the use of different papers and colours, and several other devices.

Fortunato Depero, Depero futurista 1913-1927

Russian Constructivism

A movement with origins in Russia, Constructivism was primarily an art and architectural movement. It favored art as a practise directed towards social change or that would serve a social purpose. Developing after World War I, the movement sought to push people to rebuild society in a Utopian model rather than the one that had led to the war.Constructivism called for a careful technical analysis of modern materials, and it was hoped that this investigation would eventually yield ideas that could be put to use in mass production, serving the ends of a modern, Communist society.

Constructivists proposed to replace art's traditional concern with composition with a focus on construction. Objects were to be created not in order to express beauty, or the artist's outlook, or to represent the world, but to carry out a fundamental analysis of the materials and forms of art, one which might lead to the design of functional objects. The seed of Constructivism was a desire to express the experience of modern life - its dynamism, its new and disorientating qualities of space and time. But also crucial was the desire to develop a new form of art more appropriate to the democratic and modernizing goals of the Russian Revolution. Constructivists were to be constructors of a new society - cultural workers on a par with scientists in their search for solutions to modern problems.Constructivism rejected the idea of art being autonomous from the rest to society: to them, all art and design was a political tool. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. Themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional.

Graphic Design in the constructivism movement ranged from the production of product packaging to logos, posters, book covers and advertisements. Rodchenko's graphic design works became an inspiration to many people in the western world including Jan Tschichold and the design motif of the constructivists is still borrowed, and stolen, from in much of graphic design today.

Stylistically,
Constructivism is marked by:

organization of abstract, geometrical elements to make dynamic or visually stable forms
combinations of different sans serif typefaces for their visual and formal properties as well as their literal meanings
simple, flat, symbolic colours
extensive white space as part of the design
photography (rather than drawn illustrations) and photomontage