Main entry:

Drucker, Johanna, 1952- author.

Title & Author:

The visible word : experimental typography and modern art, 1909-1923 / Johanna Drucker.

Publication:

Chicago [Illinois] : The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
©1994

Description:

viii, 298 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-287) and index.
Introduction : Background, parameters, and terminology -- Semiotics, materiality and typographic practice -- Visual and literary materiality in modern art -- Experimental typography as a modern art practice. Marinetti : materiality and sensation : mechanical synaesthesia -- Apollinaire : figuring the vernacular -- Zdanevich : inachievable essentialism and Zaum typography -- Tzara : advertising language of commodity culture -- Critical history : the demise of typographic experiment.

Summary:

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography - including visual poems and collages of words and letters - that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism and literary theory has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by midcentury, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker skillfully traces the development of this critical position, suggesting a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara. Drucker explores the context for experimental typography in terms of printing, handwriting, and other practices concerned with the visual representation of language. Her book concludes with a brief look at the ways in which experimental techniques of the early avant-garde were transformed in both literary work and in applications to commercial design throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Few studies of avant-garde art and literature in the early twentieth century have acknowledged the degree to which typographic activity furthered debates about the very nature and function of the avant-garde. The Visible Word enriches our understanding of the processes of change in artistic production and reception in the twentieth century.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents
Publisher description

ISBN:

0226165019
9780226165011

Subject:

Printing History 20th century.
Art, Modern 20th century.
Art and literature.
Avant-garde (Aesthetics) History 20th century.
Visual literature.
Art, Modern.
Imprimerie Histoire 20e siècle.
Art 20e siècle.
Art et littérature.
Avant-garde (Art) Histoire 20e siècle.
Typographie Histoire 20e siècle.
Littérature concrète.
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
Printing
Typografie.
Beeldende kunsten.
Avant-garde.
Letterkunde.
Semiotiek.
Avant-garde (Aesthetics) 20th century.
Avant-garde (esthétique)
Caractères d'imprimerie dans l'art.
Typography History

Form/genre:

History
Books.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 105544
Call No.: ID Z124.D78; ID:94-B2233
Status: Available