« Hasil Adkins and Jack Starr | Main | Future imperfect »
March 08, 2005
History as cumulative
In 'Dot Dot Dot 7', Peter Bilak looks at Mevis & van Deursen's typeface (2003) for the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, and their appropriation of the typeface designed by Lance Wyman for the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968. Formally similar - differences in content, time and context, mean "there is a great difference in the final effect of the project." Bilak states that MvD's type stands at a DISTANCE from it's subject matter, "fragmenting the fonts into seperate layers and using them in unexpected ways".
"The project understands history as a dynamic, non-linear process where now and then coexist." Following the text I wrote for ProDesign, I've been thinking about the idea I put forward there where one returns to the past to find a new trajectory 'out' from it again. Could MvD's project be an example of this? In terms of my own enquiry I certainly conceive of history as being non-linear. Anna Gerber mentions this too in her defense of the mistake/accident through history in 'All Messed Up'.
Most interesting is Bilak's reference to Jorge Luis Borges's story 'Pierre Menard, Author of "Don Quixote"', where Borges's character Menard painstakingly rewrites Cervantes's entire book resulting in an almost identical text. When comparing the 2 books Borges claims Menard's rewriting as "infinitely richer". Why? Because it was written hundreds of years after Cervantes, because of it's new associations, and because it RENDERS HISTORY AS CUMULATIVE, including all contemporary references that Cervantes could not have included.
Posted by Luke Wood at March 8, 2005 12:33 PM