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USA REVIEWS orientations made them seem different; poets, artists, critics and fellow émigrés, her their process was identical, but their varied practice also revealed the fi ssures patterns were unique. Wandering through of a displaced geography and tongue. And in them, one felt the wonder of otherworldly many of her disparate experiments over the forms in nature, but also the deadness of years, the Letraset alphabet would appear industrial production; they were gorgeous, again and again, not as units of signifi cation gross, trivial, sinister, tame and noxious. but as drifting letters, excised from a system, Thus the knee-high inclines embodied inscribed as abstraction and as mute images the word ‘plastic’ – cured to an impervious operating apart from spoken language. individuality but always mutable in the This quiet exhibition at Hannah Hoffman mind, polluting and seducing at once. The Gallery – the space’s inaugural show – chaos of their chemical reactions vied with comprised a range of Schendel’s graphic and the precision of scientifi c formulae and the text explorations from the 1960s and ’70s. crudity of artisanship. The pieces nodded In a small disc suspended from the ceiling, to Minimalism and Land art, but their Letraset ‘r’s are sandwiched between sheets near-kitschiness ribbed those movements of acrylic, and pressed between them are as simplistic and grandiose, founded on more letters whose legibility fades behind puffed-up, spectacular pieties. Carrying only accumulating layers (Untitled, 1974). This tel- the barest conceptual whiff of their storied escoped alphabet appears again in a splayed histories and industrially cheapened treas- tablet from the series ‘Cadernos’ (Notebooks, ure – the scent of the Silk Road and the c.1970s), where beneath thick acrylic a strip-mines of subjugated land – Caesar’s scattered typography converges with spare mutant materials moved not with borrowed geometric lines. If the Letraset dry-transfers life, but their own Aristotelian natures. 2 offer an alphabet-cum-material, the The sculptures and photographs also ‘Datiloscritos’ (Typewritings, 1974) reveal type- accommodated the possibility that their written text as stutterings within the frame. At value might turn out to be a hallucination, MIRA SCHENDEL the centre of the exhibition was a one-metre- like spices, metals or the desert mirages square drawing hovering above the fl oor in and Fata Morganas which Caesar cited in Hannah Ho man Gallery, the main gallery, and here automatic writing the gallery handouts. Unlike his previous Los Angeles gives way to dense handwritten characters. projects, which used garbage as a material Evoking a photographic negative, white clus- for more elevated commentaries, this stuff ters of words and numbers swarm across rice simply risked being trash itself. With it, The launch of Letraset’s dry transfer paper sheets that fl oat within a black surface, Caesar eulogized the philosophy of Western lettering system in 1961 brought to graphic suggesting an exercise in writing presented civilization’s environmental exploitation like design an advanced and effi cient method (again) not as legible language but as unut- Hamlet in the graveyard, with a jaundiced for typesetting, although one that was still terable form. This and another, smaller work eye and a trapped tenderness for the foibles fundamentally tied to the designer’s hand. beside it belong to a series of Schendel’s of a doomed, beauty-seeking species. This, By the early 1990s, Letraset had given way to ‘Objetos gráfi cos’ (Graphic Objects) from the too, is nature, the work seemed to say. It word processing and desktop publishing, but 1960s: wordless images, suspended in a might have been kidding around, but that from its fi rst appearance on the commercial space that is not-yet writing; where text oper- hardly mattered to the sense of loss. market, to its obsolescence decades later, ates in motion, and where the temporal True, the artist had merely channelled artist Mira Schendel diligently incorporated experience of reading through and around a chemical process, arrested materials on this alphabet-made-material into her the transparent surface informs their very their way to becoming something else. But graphic-based practice. palpable presence as objects. could the matter in there, the spice and Schendel was born in Zurich in 1919 While these various text-based metal and petrochemicals, ever be recycled, and, after periods in Milan and Rome, emi- manoeuvres might have spoken for the even as atoms? Could they even be said to grated to Brazil in 1949, settling in São Paolo exhibition as a whole, a series of small, eco- be part of a whole nature anymore? Could four years later. While the enormous body of nomical abstractions formed a powerful concept or artifi ce or art be good enough work she produced there was at once inte- undercurrent. Typography dissolves and the reasons to trap them thus, useless in gral to, and apart from, the language of the calligraphic gesture drifts open in a series of near-perpetuity to the natural fl ux? And if Brazilian avant-garde, her engagement with four ‘Monotipias’ (Monotypes, 1964), in which one of these sculptures were buried in the the problems of abstraction – and the face of delicate lines chart across transparent dust and miraculously germinated, what language itself – were twinned to the intel- sheets of rice paper. Each panel is suspended being would rise up from it? Not a tree, for lectual circles in which she moved (philoso- from the ceiling, and as one moves across sure. Maybe a lonely man, looking for a pher Vilém Flusser and Concrete poet and around the works, there is a sense that pretty rock, in whatever wasteland he found Haroldo de Campos among them). Closely these ethereal graphics could evaporate. The himself wandering. engaged with a community of philosophers, ‘Toquinhos’ (Little Pieces, 1972–80), while attached to the wall, seem equally engaged in IAN CHANG the possibilities for luminous, untethered and shifting pictorial planes. The works here 3 offered only a glimpse of Schendel’s prolifi c practice. She produced, for instance, more 1 than 2,000 monotypes during a period in the Abraham Cruzvillegas ‘Autodestrucción 2’ mid-1960s, and Tate Modern will present a (Autodestruction 2), 2013, full-scale survey this autumn in London. But installation view what this spare installation advanced was a 2 space to refl ect on the tenuous line between Mira Schendel transparency and corporeality, between win- from the series ‘Objetos gráfi cos’ dows and voids – and on the fragile space (Graphic Objects), 1960s, occupied by Schendel’s drawings that speak transfer type on paper with no words. Unmoored from the wall, cast 3 off from language, these abstractions hover Jedediah Caesar ‘out where the stones grow as apparitions in our fi eld of vision, as if, as like roses’, 2013, art historian Briony Fer has said, the shape of installation view vision itself is what’s at stake. LAURA FRIED FRIEZE NO. 157 SEPTEMBER 2013 171 Reviews_157.indd 171 31/07/2013 17:57.

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