Autumn 2004- Columns
C109 Slave to the machine
Visual Arts North
Visual Arts South
Film and Television
Fifth Column SLAVE TO THE MACHINE • Michael Cunningham Typocalypse Now NINE things I've gleaned from Simon Loxley's new book Type: The Secret History Of Letters… 1 TYPE AND PLACE: Before World War II, if you were parachuted 'blind' into Europe, you'd know where you'd landed by looking at the typefaces around you – from the roadsigns to the shopfronts. Nowadays it's far more difficult, as global capitalism homogenizes all in its path. Look at that restaurant's big arched yellow "M" on a red background. Where are you now? In Budapest or Belfast? 2 TYPOGRAPHER TYPES: From Gutenberg's day to the 1960s, top typeface designers seemed to be maverick rock 'n' roll individuals, often in conflict with the mass production world of their employers. John Baskerville "comes across as an 18th-century Brian Wilson to Caslon's Beatles," while Frederic Goudy is a bit of a Warhol or a Malcolm McLaren. These rebel designers often had other key passions in other media. Eric Gill, for example, was more famous in his lifetime for his sculpture and stone cutting than his typography. 3 ZAPF! KAPOWWW! Twenty minutes into the future, our written languages will be replaced by systems of symbols, ideograms…dingbats! Think of the rise of the '@' sign, already shared across all languages – in every e-mail! 4 TYPE FASCISTS! Blackletter, or 'fraktur' (those jagged typeface forms based on monastic script), isn't quite extinct yet. It's still loitering above Ye Olde Coffee Shops and on provincial newspaper mastheads, and in the opening titles of war movies. Nowadays blackletter is as obsolete as, well, an IBM golfball, but it managed to survive in Germany for over four centuries after Gutenberg. It was still the dominant form when the Nazis took power, and despite calls to replace it with roman fonts, the Fascists initially said roman faces were alien, foreign, decadent. Blackletter was traditional, Germanic. Sometimes this 'blackletter v roman' debate became a matter of life or death: designers were sent to prison camps for taking the 'wrong' side. (Yet the Nazis did a U-turn and abandoned blackletter in 1941. Why? Due to the needs of an expanding empire? Or because their pilots found it hard to read aircraft markings at a distance?) 5 GOING UNDERGROUND! The London Underground's custom typefaces are literally a landmark corporate commission – 'London's handwriting'. 6 LET'S GET PHYSICAL: Letterpress is very physical. It's about the colossus machines from a bygone age, and the tactile magic of tiny metal letters neatly arranged in their wooden cases. You can still see them in places such as the National Print Museum in Beggars Bush, Dublin. It's also about the physical feel of letterpress output – the ever so slight indentation of letters on paper, the tangible warmth that that evokes, and the sounds and smells of a publication house. Manual typewriters clacking away in the newsroom. The chug, rattle and clatter of a typecaster at full pelt. The heavy aroma of machine oil, the perfume of fresh ink next to a tin of Swarfega. 7 GOING DIGITAL: In less than a lifetime, printers and designers have moved from hot metal to photosetting, via various detours such as Letraset (no, you never had enough e's), finally making the great leap into digital type in the past two decades. Perhaps the biggest milestone in that migration was Postscript – storing fonts not as bitmaps but as mathematical formulae, freeing the letter from its metal past and its dependence on resolution (x pixels per inch), turning it into a fluid entity. 8 THE AUTEUR TYPE: Typography isn't 'just' design. Loxley writes: "If designers solve other people's problems while artists solve their own, then a typeface can place its creator solidly in the realm of the latter." 9 THE INVISIBLE TYPE? An 'old school' notion: type is invisible, a servant to the message, always doing its job in the background, only noticed when it fails to do it properly. The 'new school' notion: b%l£&@ks to all that. VISUAL ARTS NORTH • Brian Kennedy
Digital fantasies I spent last week learning new digital skills. Ten of us were attending the PVA Media lab in Belfast. As someone with limited skills in this area it was both an enlightening and productive experience. The technology that I saw was so advanced that it made me wonder about where original art objects fit into this new world and how these new technologies will affect our way of thinking about and making art. Richard Serra's torqued shapes in Frank Gehry's Bilbao museum is a good example of technology allowing artists the freedom to create complex shapes that would otherwise be impossible to realize. It is interesting to consider an influence that Serra has referred to. There is a beautiful, small Borromini church in Rome – San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. When interviewed by Sculpture magazine Serra says that it was a 'misinterpretation' of that space that pointed him in a certain direction. So when I look at the torque shapes I think of both my favorite church and technology. Another example of technology and historical art coming together was the 'virtual reunion' of two halves of a Canaletto painting. Canaletto's potboilers were losing their value and the good man himself decided that two four-foot paintings would be worth more then an eight-foot one. So, Cano whips out the pocketknife and low and behold there are now two works for sale – digital technology to the rescue and a painting from a Norfolk country house is digitally reunited with its other half, which ended up in Cuba. Not so sure about this. The artist seems to have little respect for his own work. Art historians had originally attributed the Norfolk half to Samuel Scott. It was not a study of style or a technical analysis of technique that changed their minds. Could it have been the fact that it matched with the half in Cuba that changed their minds? So much for them. When the National Trust who own the painting found out that their half was actually by Canaletto they wanted to buy the half that is in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. They seemed quite miffed when the Cuban government refused even though the one fact in this pantomime that everyone agrees on is that the painting in Cuba is the more interesting half. I think we are entering the seamy side of art here. If you think about it, it is not the digital bringing together of the two halves that is at fault here. It is the attitude of the artist, the lack of good academic research and the way art is marketed. If the National Trust did manage to buy the work then more people would pay to enter their property. A voyeuristic audience has been created of people who must go to the next blockbuster show of original masterpieces. If we consider the digital image, it actually has great possibilities. A museum could be created where great works could be hung on the wall. Not like Bill Gates, where the same-size screens showed different pretty pictures. No, with careful thought the plasma screens could be made the same size as the original works. Unlike normal museums, some thought could be given to the surrounding ambience; it could be made to resemble the original setting more accurately. Triptychs that have been separated for hundreds of years could be brought together. At the touch of a button a painting could be seen before and after restoration. I'm beginning to like this museum; it's fun. I remember walking down a dusty noisy street in Naples and seeing the Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia. I entered and immediately in front of me was Caravaggio's Seven acts of mercy. There in front of me were scenes from the street I had just left. The paintings were separated from the streets on which they were based by only a few meters. It was one of those rare beautiful moments that will stay with me forever. I think that if I cannot see art in context and get the kind of rush I got in Naples then I would prefer to go to the virtual museum. VISUAL ARTS SOUTH • Aidan Dunne Festival fever Arts festivals. Don't you just love them? Aren't they a good thing? Surely no one could say a bad word about events that celebrate the gamut of creativity, draw ever-wider audiences into the cultural net, sweeten the pill of high art with the confectionery of entertainment, and sanction the madness of the carnivalesque – hence providing the kind of cultural safety valve endemic in some form or another to all societies. And yet, and yet… Casting a glance over a crowded summer calendar, one is led to the possibility that the whole arts-festival phenomenon has gotten kind of out of hand. There is, for example, the sheer number of festivals. But that is not necessarily a problem in itself. After all, if the inhabitants of any given town or county want to organise an arts festival, let them get on with it and more power to them. Perhaps the arts festival is supplanting various other species of festival, that is, festival in the sense of communal, ritualised cultural celebration. In the secularised way of things, the arts might be in some way filling a gap, taking on part of the role once played by religion or the agricultural seasons as providing symbolically important markers for the community. Then there are arts festivals that are secure in their own sense of what they are about, events focused on traditional, classical or popular music, for example, or literature. One would be hard put to find anything to quarrel about with them. There is also, though, that genetically engineered hybrid, the catchall arts festival, which sets out to be all things to everyone, which promises more, better, bigger, weirder, louder, and then some. Bread and circuses. Fireworks and strobe lights. Spectacle beyond spectacle. This state of affairs came about, has to have come about, because there is now a recognisable genre of event known as an Arts Festival. To qualify as such, perhaps to attain accreditation and funding as such, your festival must meet certain criteria. Who knows, perhaps a checklist is even provided on the funding application form: street theatre, spectacular performance, interactive everything, always a bang not a whimper. One gets the impression that there is an underlying drive here to be populist, to win over the silent majority who may otherwise give the arts a miss. It is an extrapolation of the art-is-for-the-community argument. So that festival organisers face the implicit question: is your festival widely accessible and user-friendly? But there is a short circuit in the reasoning involved here. Art need not be shamelessly populist, need not strain to please, if it is to be of the community and to serve the community. If the bid to persuade people not to be afraid of art, not to feel it is elitist and difficult, means delivering work that panders to the lowest common denominator, persuading people that they needn't worry, it's just another form of entertainment, then the argument is already lost. Surely it's far better to introduce people to the idea that art of the mainstream, the general currency of the national and international art world, is not something out there and apart from them, but something to be easily encountered, considered and liked or disliked. There were examples of precisely that approach in some festivals this summer or, in the peculiar politics of the professionalised Arts Festival infrastructure, in some events related to festivals but not strictly speaking part of them. One case in point is Earagail Arts Festival's 'Form', particularly the centrepiece exhibition at Letterkenny Arts Centre, where you could wander in off the street and find yourself in the midst of a whistle stop tour of some of the most famous names in twentieth-century sculpture. Another is 'Sculpture at Kells', where you could stroll through the formidable ruins of Kells Priory and encounter a series of works by Glenn Williams – others as well, but Williams was the featured artist, with seven substantial sculptures on site. Both these events arose out of local, individual commitment and vision. In this they were genuinely communal in a way that counts, prompted out of conviction and interest, rather than the need to fill an empty slot labelled 'Visual Arts' in the standardised Arts Festival programme. FILM AND TELEVISION • Stephanie McBride
Is there a writer in the house? Jack Rosenthal's television play Ready when you are, Mr McGill (1992/2002) is a witty deconstruction of the often excessively tedious demands of making television drama. Ironically perhaps, the play also suggests that the writer is marginalised in the process, as the director presses ahead, cutting the writer's lines and characters in his drive to wrap in time and under budget. Rosenthal's recent death prompted the BBC to schedule a week-long celebration of his back catalogue of TV drama on the station's new digital channel, BBC4. Here was a chance to see again the milestone television play Barmitzvah Boy (1976) as well as the more recent Eskimo days (1996) and"Cold enough for snow (1997). Rosenthal was a television author with a distinctive writer's voice which is heard best and most clearly on the small screen. His writing craft developed in the specific contours of the small screen with its domestic appeal, honed and sharpened in his Coronation Street apprenticeship. With empathy in those pressing crises in small lives or humorous insights into the foibles of ordinary people, his TV plays touched on the intimate and local, reaching wide audiences with his very individual perspectives on a slice of Jewish-English life. From removal men and trainee cab-drivers, to the weekly torture of local football matches, his writing is charged and laced with a strong sense of place, location, community and memory. His television dramas – alongside those of Griffiths, Bleasedale, Bennett and Potter – weave a rich, diverse television landscape which encompasses intimate personal dramas and insightful political commentaries, from limited but significant horizons to the issues of the day. That's the British scene over the years. By contrast, though, Irish television drama appears especially thin and forlorn. Where are our Jack Rosenthals and Dennis Potters? There are signs that it may have been otherwise, but identifying the few examples only emphasises the bleakness of the picture. Despite some valuable forays into drama in its history, Irish television in the Republic has not produced the writerly culture or what has been described as a "context for creativity" that encourages the author of television plays. While we can cite A week in the life of Martin Cluxton, or adaptations such as Strumpet city and the rare successful sorties into the television play, or acknowledge the prolific Gerry Stembridge, in general today's schedules continue to tell the same old story. RTÉ is the national broadcaster and buys well. In the past decade, it has often been first to transmit 'quality' drama, mainly from the US – seizing on The west wing, Six feet under and The Sopranos for its schedules. But the consistent issue remains that the bulk of the schedules (RTÉ1, Network 2, TV3 and TG4) continues to be dominated by imported drama, with re-runs of Dallas in the mornings, even in 2004. Home-produced material, where it does appear, is most likely to be magazine-format, or the flabby and fatigued chat-show form, or home buyers abroad. Although there have been recent instances of compelling documentary, special reports and the ratings success of Fair city, it remains a frustration that the changes and events of the past decade in Ireland have not had any sustained writer's treatment on Irish television. Caught up in the multi-authored cliff-hanger pressures, demanded by market forces, the writer's unique voice, as in a Jack Rosenthal television play, is more muted than ever. FIFTH COLUMN • Jacqui McIntosh Walking on murals I'm in the Bloomberg Space, London and I'm momentarily confused. I am looking at Mark Dean Veca's wall painting Debacle (2003). I have looked at it from every angle, walked around it, stood where it begins and where it ends. It sprawls across two walls, overflowing onto the floor and ceiling. Appearing as if caught for an instant, before threatening to grow and envelop the space around it. It seems to be inviting me to walk over it. I'm unsure, tentative about the effect of my spiky heels, yet there are no signs telling me not to. I am so lost in my thoughts that I do not notice the gallery attendant beside me. "You can walk over it if you like," she says. I go for it, but I still feel uneasy. Somehow I wouldn't feel so guilty if it was at least a wipe-down surface. Installation art constantly confuses me and challenges my preconceptions of what art should be. Painting that limits itself to the canvas has simple rules of conduct. Although we interact with our eyes and occasionally our mind and heart, we are separate from the surface. We cannot touch or get too close. As a society dependent on instruction we are untroubled by signs that tell us where to stand and descriptions of what we are looking at. We are comfortable with the concept of the gallery as a place to view precious objects. Installation art converts the art gallery into a space in which to experience, and often there are no rules. Bill Viola frequently requests that his exhibitions take place without instruction. He plunges us into the uncanny and the unreal with only the catalogue to cling to. His work The stopping mind (1991) places the viewer in the centre of four screens with still images that sporadically burst into unexpected motion, whilst a voice whispers and then becomes silent. This is not a piece of art that we can view in conventional terms. We are forced to engage with all of our senses and be open to the unexpected. The lack of instruction and knowledge of what to expect can make us feel uneasy, but it frees us to immerse ourselves fully in the experience. Whilst I was walking over Veca's mural, I began to wonder what would happen to it when the exhibition was over. Installation by its very nature is impermanent and no doubt his work will be painted over, ceasing to exist, except perhaps in photographic form. We live in a materialistic society that likes to collect objects. We place value in permanence, viewing that which is temporary as being of less importance and value. These ideas are challenged by art which refuses to play by the expected rules. As art liberates itself from the canvas, so the viewer needs to liberate themselves from their preconceived ideas about how it is to be viewed. As a viewer, I suspect that I still have the confines of the canvas in my head.
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