TIPOMETRÍAS Tribute to the Spanish Language and the Art of the Book Artistic Creation with Movable Wooden Types Project
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TIPOMETRÍAS Tribute to the Spanish Language and the Art of the Book Artistic creation with movable wooden types Project Sebastián GARCÍA-GARRIDO Index Preface/Presentation Introduction. Western movable wooden types as cultural heritage Birth and evolution of movable wooden types The Western print From calligraphy to typography Typography and the art of the book The form of the letter Identity and geographical features from typographies Typography creators Picasso, Cubism and typography incorporation in painting creator Letters and types in Contemporary Art Typometry Project for the movable wooden types Milennial In the origin of the spiritual sentiment in art Free game between language signs and forms Constructivism and geometrical art inspiration Art and design in the Modern Movement origins Ibero-American Constructivism and geometrical Art Personal journey precedents The Hispanic language, from Alfonso X to the Renaissance Princes Overall Typometry Project Bibliographical Selection Bibliographical notes Apendix. Documentary references about his plastic creation work Preface We are already used to continuously perceive and attend to new creative incentives society and its artists produce, perhaps with greater abundance and speed than have ever been experienced before. Contemporary creators’ material resources and intellectual capabilities produce a stream of incentives that end up leading to the vast estuary the global world where our experiences elapse is. This fact can produce a saturation of messages and sensations that can hardly be read in its entirety and that could retract from these many manifestations. It is because of this, that it is gratifying to find firmly constructed artistic projects, result of a continuous and extensive work, that surface throughout small but important concepts which, just as the tip of the iceberg, appear, announcing a greater impact. Travelling through this book contents I have been able to verify that we are faced with one of these circumstances. Sebastián García-Garrido, starting from primary elements such as wood, as the nature of all things reflection, the craft skill, with its utilitarian capacity to ease a man’s life, and the thinking used to reflect about everything that surrounds us, creates an original, rich and interesting way to contemplate his work. The wooden type, an object we could qualify as industrial, ordinary, technical, instrumental or common, is established as axis of this process. The artist puts it this way: “Regarding to the movable wooden type, this has lost the functionality for which it was created and deprived from that, it acquires by itself the possibility to be considered and looked at exclusively as an aesthetical element, either as a reflection of the letter performed, alone, or in a word related to a defined concept. In this sense referring to a concept or own name, the expressive possibilities of the work grow in the specific sense it transmits”. And it does so in a lengthy and detailed process of work and research, in which the knowledge and experience of someone dedicated to intellectual work has been accumulated. His training allows him to explore the writing and printing cultural legacy in all their manifestations, as well as the remaining graphic arts. He elaborates a scientific reflection process throughout his work, thoroughly analysing every trajectory of the writing culture and its evolution, which allows him to establish a dialogue between the movable type historical notions, especially from wood, and the new aesthetical and conceptual meanings. Shapes that have been used to transmit messages are now messages on their own, in a knowledge deepening process. In this way, he achieves his goal, the artistic creation. It is not usual for an author to make a detailed explanation of the steps that lead him to proceed in a certain way and with a particular material. In Sebastián García-Garrido’s case it is like that, which allows us to better understand the significance of his creations. Thus, the documental complement he presents, which we can see in this book that frames and summarises the artist’s work, is an added value to his works. We are then faced with a solid and justified work that allows us to think about our own culture. José Bonifacio Bermejo Martín Municipal Print-Art of the Book Museum Director, Madrid Introduction Western movable wooden types as cultural heritage In order to exist, each person needs to give testimony of his daily life, To express his creative capacity and preserve the traits of his story. This is only achieved through cultural heritage1 This monograph is the result of a basic research project applied to the artistic creation of the works that have been made since 2011 and which have been named Tipometrías. It is first and foremost a conservation initiative of the artistic and cultural heritage, such as movable wooden types, through the dissemination of its knowledge and reality as a piece of special interest, and highlight their value by means of a previous study and their incorporation into works of artistic creation, as a tribute to the Spanish language and the Art of the Book, as body and soul of their origin. The referents of the study are, therefore, the birth and evolution of our language, from calligraphy and manuscripts codices to the development of printing, the first books printed in Spain, the beginning and evolution of the typography meant for literature and the great writings published in our country. On the other hand, we will resume the appearance and development of the text in works of art, from cubism’s birth, and constructivism’s foundations and geometric art as means to enable that integration of typographical characters and plastic composition. Constructivism and geometric art with special mention to our Ibero-American and Spanish cultural heritage, respectively, without been muted in our case for what is done in other cultures, given that it is a very fruitful connection the mentioning of great names, like, Paul Klee, Max Bill, Bruno Munari, Piet Mondrian or Josef Albers. The study moves quickly until the evolution of this system, through typography design and the traits that these pieces of our heritage keep in the nobility of the wood, ink residues and usage. From there we jump to the reinvention of the press in the renaissance Europe, in which context the necessary data are collected and connected to help build the sequence about the creation and applications of movable types in Spain. In this sense, it amounts to build this evolution from our country, in a comparative study that includes the main international references, as a global reality that has scarcely been studied. Furthermore, it has been partially treated, and even hidden in some of the studies conducted in other latitudes, and underestimated in contemporary studies and forums at national level, apart from a few rare exceptions. However, this task would be too transcendent and complex so as to be resolved in this project, whose essential purpose is simply to provide a coherent and conceptual corpus, from a personal point of view able to absorb this referent in order to develop the necessary spirit to guide the artistic creation of works in which movable wooden types can express their own essential nature in our own language context and the reality of type design, the press and the art of the book, in general, in our nearest physical and emotional environment. Thus, fonts regain their most prominent roles as artistic creations from the open notion of the current works of art, and at the same time as art objects that have shaped the most outstanding creations within visual remembrance, advertising and the art of the book. The harmony in its layouts, its inner coherence to compose alphabets, lines of text, pages, etc. The variety of fine woods in which they were created- given that they were made out of joinery remains of furniture-, the ink footprint in each of the characters, depending on how much use they had had, even some of them intact due to the fact that they are characters not often used in a language… All this substantially expresses the noble course of our cultural 1 Centro de Información de Naciones Unidas para México, Cuba y Rep. Dominicana (United Nations Information Centre for México, Cuba and Dominican Republic): http://www.cinu.org.mx/eventos/cultura2002/importa.htm (04.01.2011) prominent heritage. The course of movable wooden types in the West, and the text graphic element from handwritten calligraphy, in design and contributions to the art of the book, and graphic art in general, in the path of our country-from the beginning of paper manufacturing in Europe, in Córdoba, Toledo and Játiva during the XII century, and the printing of the first books in Spain, in Sevilla 1470, Segovia 1472 and Valencia 1473- will be the topic of this monography. Moreover, its aim is to preserve and to value such an exceptional heritage2. The study and dissemination strategy is complemented by a collection of artistic works, by the same authoring that the previous research, in which we use these types as an essential part, in the way the first Cubists used the collage of headlines and texts from that time. With this, it has been simultaneously studied the rich and lengthy tradition of geometric art in Spain, from the remarkable figures of Cubist pioneers and that, however, has had an unfair and succinct account, inside and outside our borders, even though Spanish and Ibero-American Constructivists are part of an endless list of values that, in times of need and liking to resume the essence of the Modern Movement and Neoplasticism, is necessary to study in order to maximise its value and recognition. Yet, at the same time, typography has not been playing a simple formal and aesthetical role in relation to each period, but about content as well.