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The Visible Word : Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909

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The Visible Word : Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909 Johanna Drucker ' 1 The Visible Word Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 ■ Johanna Drucker Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typogra¬ phy—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 representa¬ tion 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 liter¬ ary work and in applications to commercial design throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. (continued on back flap) This book is to be returned on or before the last date stamped below. rj ■>t rncfl RACC LIBRARY 6996 LIBRARY ■ The Visible Word • >■ Experimental Typography and Modern 1 : ■ % :u 1909-1923 T& COMMUNITY COLLEGE LIBRARY The University of Chicago Press Chicago 6- London i% ' s » Johanna Druckeris assistant professor of contemporary art and critical theory at Columbia University. A printer and typographer since 1972, she has produced some twenty letterpress works, many using experimental typographic design. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1994 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1994 Printed in the United States of America 03 02 0100 99 98 97 96 95 94 12345 ISBN: 0-226-16501-9 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Drucker, Johanna, 1952- The visible word: Experimental typography and modem art, 1909-1923 / Johanna Drucker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Printing—History—20th century. 2. Art, Modem—20th century. 3. Art and literature. 4. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—History—20th century. I. Title. Z124.D78 1994 686.2'09—dc20 93-39657 CIP ® The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48-1984. $6 '£o<? DRU Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Background, Parameters, and Terminology i 1 Semiotics, Materiality, and Typographic Practice 9 2 Visual and Literary Materiality in Modem Art 49 3 Experimental Typography as a Modem Art Practice 91 ■ Marinetti: Materiality and Sensation: Mechanical Synaesthesia 105 ■ Apollinaire: Figuring the Vernacular 140 ■ Zdanevich: Inachievable Essentialism and Zaum Typography 168 ■ Tzara: Advertising Language of Commodity Culture 193 4 Critical History: The Demise of Typographic Experiment 223 Notes 249 Bibliography 273 Index 289 ' . ■ Acknowledgments Research for this project was begun under the sponsorship of a Regents Fellowship from the University of California, at Berkeley, in 1983. A Ful- bright Fellowship provided funds for study in Paris in 1984-85 and a University of California Graduate Research Grant allowed me to return in the summer of 1986, as did a Faculty Research Grant from the Univer¬ sity of Texas at Dallas in 1987. A Mellon Faculty Fellowship to Harvard University’s Department of Fine Arts in 1988-89 permitted an initial rewriting and rethinking of the dissertation. To all of these sponsoring institutions I am extremely grateful. Additional acknowledgments go first to the faculty at the Department of Architecture and program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, especially Tony Dubovsky, Marc Treib, and Penny Dhaemers, without whose support I would never have begun, let alone finished, graduate work. Additional thanks for support and mentoring go to Jim Melchert, Hayden White, and Yakov Malkiel. Ralf Weber, Kim Dovey, Paul Groth, Ray Lifchez, Lars Lerup, Maria McVarish, and Emily McVarish all made larger con¬ tributions than they probably realize. Andre Markowitz, Regis Gayraud, and Helene Zdanevich were invaluable in all areas pertaining to Zdanevich research. Olga Meerson provided final information for the captions of zaum work. Harvey Graff, Gwen Raaberg, Mike Montgom¬ ery, Judith Piper, and Hilary Radner offered criticism, insight and argu¬ ments, followed in this thankless task most recently by Dennis Tedlow, Charles Bernstein, Gino Lee, Alice Mansell, Sheila Butler, Amelia Jones, and Natalie Kampen. VII ■ Acknowledgments Finally, however, my greatest dept of gratitude is to Tony Dubovsky, Julian Boyd, and, above all, Bertrand Augst for their enthusiasm and engagement at all levels—professional, intellectual, and personal. This work is dedicated to all three of them with profound respect and ongo¬ ing affection. Introduction: Background, Parameters, and Terminology The research for this book was begun in an era in which semiotics was considered a useful interpretive tool, but the writing is concluded at a moment in which semiotics itself has become the object of historical and historiographic inquiry. What began as a semiotic analysis of typog¬ raphy produced by artists in the 1910s has evolved into an inquiry into the transformation of semiotically based critical practices in the course of the twentieth century. The study of typographic experimentation offers an excellent case study for such an inquiry. Because of its inter¬ disciplinary character, the treatment of typography within critical inter¬ pretation can be used to trace the transformations in the premises on which both literary and visual arts criticism conceive of their object. The place granted to typographic work within historical accounts of early modem art as well as the conceptual premises on which it is evaluated are symptomatic of the developments in criticism in the course of the twentieth century. Fundamental issues with regard to the nature and structure of both visual and verbal modes of signification are necessar¬ ily raised in analyzing typographic practice, as well as profound issues about the formation of subjectivity and history within critical analysis in the semiotic tradition. My decision to focus on experimental typography combined an in- 1 Introduction tellectual interest with an autobiographical impetus. Typographic expe¬ riment, particularly the visually striking work of experimenters within Dada, Futurism, and other artistic movements of the 1910s and 1920s, offered the opportunity to move between the fields of literary and art historical studies in a manner which seemed closer to the activity of the early twentieth-century artists than the pursuit of either field on its own. Straddling the border between these realms, typographic experi¬ ment embodies the synaesthetic investigations of many early twentieth- century artists and poets. The challenge put forth by these complex aesthetic projects was to develop a critical method which was not de¬ rived exclusively from either literary criticism or visual arts theory and which would build on the sources and positions that had informed the original typographic work. At the time I began working on this research, I was also intent on defining a legitimate theoretical basis for typo¬ graphic experimentation in my own writing practice. As a printer and artist I had become actively involved in making use of page format, type style, and graphic design considerations in the structure of experimental prose works. These works incurred a highly negative attack on the part of the circle of poets with whom I was involved in the late 1970s and early 1980s in California, though they found positive reception elsewhere and later. The need both to validate my own work and to inquire into the strong prejudice against acknowledgment of the visual component in lit¬ erary work put an emotional spin on the intellectual project. My original focus was on evaluating the effect of the manipulation of the visual form of language on the production of linguistic meaning (specifically, in literary practice). I expanded from this base to an investi¬ gation of critical theory and to construction of a theoretical model of ma¬ teriality which would be adequate for the interpretation of typographic signification. I have eschewed selection of works which incorporate vi¬ sual images per se and limited my analysis to works which only contain words—albeit, words which form images, are manipulated through their visual form, appear as visual phenomena—but are, still, recogniz¬ able producers of linguistic value. In addition, the artists whose work forms my major focus all had a more or less direct relationship with the production of their work in visual form—they either provided sketches and mockups for layout or worked directly in the print shop in produc¬ tion of the
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