The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 / Edition 2

by Johanna Drucker

Overview

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism 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 mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary.

Drucker suggests 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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226165028
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/01/1997
Edition description:	1
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and a distinguished professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of Fulbright, Mellon, and Getty Fellowships and in 2019 was the inaugural Distinguished Senior Humanities Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Her artist books are included in museums and libraries in North America and Europe, and her creative work was the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks 1972-2012: 40 Years of Books and Projects. Her publications include Visualizing Interpretation, Iliazd: Meta-biography of a Modernist, and The Digital Humanities Coursebook.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Background Parameters, and Terminology
1: Semiotics, Materiality and Typographic Practice
2: Visual and Literary Materiality in Modern Art
3: 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
4: Critical History: The Demise of Typographic Experiment
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Drucker (art and critical theory, Columbia U.) says that later art criticism and literary theory distorted the view of the Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists early in the 20th century who had developed innovative uses of typography as a means of blurring the distinction between visual art and literature. By midcentury, New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized them to such an extent that the works were incomprehensible. They must be approached in their own method, she concludes, and shows how with the works of four artists. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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