Description:
“Like many other innocents growing up, I began to wonder if the whole complex of libertarian ideas and promises I was told to live by and to defend with my life was not a pious fraud. (…) Pressing forward for some answer to the accursed questions confronting every practicing citizen, I finally began to understand that a ‘revolutionary morality’ is extricably woven into the expanding network of the world’s advance”
– ‘On Creating Revolutionary Art and Going Out of Print’, Truman Nelson
On New Year’s Eve 1968, poet Diane di Prima wrote to fellow poet Audre Lorde about her latest poems enclosing ‘Revolutionary Letters’ in a separate envelope. By 1971 the first batch was published, with more letters added in 1974. Later followed a fourth and fifth edition and di Prima would continue to add to the sequence right up until har passing in 2020. Her last wish for the final edition to be published in 2021, was a plea to change the typeface, claiming it ‘too fancy’ . After some discussion, it emerged that what di Prima really hated about Garamond was the ampersand. “It looked”, she said “like a fat man pushing a lawnmower” resulting in possibly the only book set in Garamond with Miller ampersands.
By way of di Prima’s ‘Revolutionary Letters’, we will investigate the typographical participation in transmitting a revolutionary morality, drawing benefit from the duo meaning of a ‘letter’, as in ‘message’, and ‘letter’ as in ‘symbol’.
The seminar will include guest teaching by British graphic designer and publisher (At Last Books) Philip Baber, who is interested in the ways in which certain poets reimagined the format of the page. Baber will discuss how nonconformist poets and publishers of the later twentieth century appropriate or resist capitalist literary technologies. Swiss graphic designer and publisher (Die Schönsten Schwulen Bücher) Sabo Day will also guest lecture, presenting his experience working on artist books with Bea Schlingelhoff, Sands Murray-Wassink and Nora Turato. Artists who integrate bespoke lettering and typedesign as a direct pushback on mainstream narratives.
Participants of the seminar will produce a full set of letters, and have the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of type history while testing methodologies for creating and using font families, possibly in direct alignment with progressive content or goals specifically aimed on alternatives to artificial intelligence. We will discuss the antagonist tensions of unconventional typesetting, reproduction, legibility, command of language and distribution of critical thinking. As poet Barbara Guest wrote some time after the invention of the personal computer: “I am of the blasphemous opinion that the word processing program, no matter how necessary, can also be a memory falsifier.”
Dates:
- — 12 May: Introduction
- — 13 May: Phil Baber
- — 28 May: Sabo Day
- — 10 June: Workshop
- — 11 June: Workshop
- — 16 July: Presentation
Syllabus:
Diane di Prima: ‘Revolutionary Letters’
Bea Schlingelhoff: ‘The Crooked: Typefaces
For Baseless Rumors’
Sands Murray-Wassink: ‘Money Horse Book’
Phil Baber: ‘Letter, 29 November 2023’
Tauba Auerbach: ‘(P)(E)(R)(S)(E)(V)(E)(R)(E)’
David Bennewith: ‘Marianna, Hey! Together’
Sadie Plant: ‘On Bea Schlingelhoff’s Typefaces for Women against Hitler’
