Warning: This post contains images of human genitalia that some readers might find objectionable or otherwise not safe for work.
Today Boingboing linked to a photograph of two towers created by artist Jack Daws using only McDonald’s french fries and Heinz ketchup. Think freedom fries. Think freedom tower. Think September 11th. Think American cultural imperialism. Think our childish, naive approach to foreign policy.
Think how perfectly rectangular those McDonald’s fries are.
So I scrolled down through the Greg Kucera Gallery’s online exhibition of Daws’ August 2003 show (mostly looking for something I had been warned would be NSFW) when I stumbled upon another piece I’m sure I’d heard about before, but don’t remember ever seeing.
I was struck by two opposing thoughts during my letterpress class. The first was, if this was my job, to manually set type, I’d go crazy scheming for a more efficient solution—something not unlike the combination of word processing software and a laser printer. Thank you Xerox Parc for doing the heavy lifting.
But in the moment, I was completely enthralled by the process of setting type. It was almost soothing—a feeling I imagine may have been more widespread up until the time industrial presses and affordable computers sat everyone in front of a cathode ray tube instead of a California job case.
I keep thinking about the little sacrifices we accept with every technological advancement. What has concrete wrought on architecture, photography on painting, computers on writing, and now digital photography on chemical? Isn’t there something to gain by adding (rather than removing) constraints?
Surely the productivity and accessibility associated with new technologies far outweigh the idiosyncracies of the old, but how cognizant are we of what we lose when we upgrade?
The time and care involved in using a press suggests it may be put to better use in making art. The combination of beautiful, heavy paper, and the precise physical impression of type, handset text on handmade paper. This emphasis on handmade these days seems to fly in the face of everything we believe about progress. Why do we value handmade goods (usually made in other countries, objets more relevant in the context of other cultures), but spurn the manual labor required to make them?
Perhaps it’s a question of having the choice. At work I do everything I can to reduce the amount of work I have to. Not by dillydallying or procrastinating, but by finding more efficient, effective, consistent, streamlined ways of doing things. But when I’m not at work, the constraints are different. I want to have the time to savor what I’m doing. As Brian says, I want to slow down. I want to appreciate the process as much as the product. Handmade makes sense at home. And I think for a few lucky people, handmade can become a sustainable venture.
And these days it seems that art is being invoked on incredibly personal levels (in addition to the incredibly industrial: think Apple’s iPod). With the internet (as Robin mentions in the comments), what might have been hobbies before now take on the mantle of art in the eyes of an expanded community. They still may number no more than a dozen, but a dozen unencumbered by geographical diversity.
Maybe it was that I had just moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress, a blogging platform in the company of Movable Type, both of which have names evocative of earlier printing technology.
It also may have been the fact that in moving from North Carolina to California, I was going to be working for an actual publishing company, one that produces physical books, though I’d be part of their online publishing group.
In any event, the universe was seeming to say, look into this. The funny thing is that it took so long. I’m not sure what the impetus, but last October I found myself looking at printing presses on eBay when I discovered the San Francisco Center for the Book. Sounds almost quaint in the age of the internet, doesn’t it?
Much to my delight, they offered classes. Unfortunately all the intro letterpress ones were booked through the end of the year, so I got myself on the mailing list and eventually squeezed into a class that was held this past Saturday.
I have to say, it was phenomenal. Other than having to wake at 7 on a Saturday to get to the city by 9, I can’t express how excellent it was. I felt like I was completely transported out of my life for a single day.
The instructor, Mary Laird, was a charming and loquacious woman with her own small press in Berkeley. She demonstrated small book binding, explained type and type sizes (em’s and en’s, points and picas!), as well as leading and spacing. Over the course of the day we were going to create a book (!) and print enough copies for each of us to take 5 home.
Here’s what type looks like. Each of those drawers contains one typeface, in one point size, in one style. Like Garamond 18pt Italic. One whole drawer, just for that.
On Saturday I went down to the city with Stephanie and her mom, Chris. Stephanie had a meeting for most of the morning, so her mom and I drove all over the city, starting at Lake Merced then winding our way from Daly City to Twin Peaks. I’d never been before, and the weather was cold, windy, and drizzly, but I still managed to get out and take a picture (which was pretty much black and white to begin with).
Afterwards all three of us went to the Fisherman’s Wharf in search of lunch and some souvenir magnets for Stephanie’s sister. We stopped in at the new Boudin Bakery and had chewy sourdough pizza and salad in their downstairs cafe. We were in a bit of a rush, with Chris’s flight back to France leaving at 4:15pm, so we spent a few minutes looking for magnets, found the perfect one in the shape of a cable car, and got on our way to SFO.
I was sad to see Chris go. I realized later that I’d known Stephanie with her mother around almost as long as I knew her alone. Chris had been in California since mid-December, and in that time, she cleaned Stephanie’s apartment, cooked us delicious French meals, gave me a haircut, accompanied Stephanie to her dance classes, and somehow managed to knit like a dozen scarves (écharpes).
Afterwards, Stephanie and I had a few hours to blow, so we drove over to Pacifica and watched the surfers ride waves in the rain.
Then we headed back up to Marin to see the Pilobolus dance company perform. Their dancing is very acrobatic with graceful, almost weightless movement of connected bodies. Think Cirque Du Soleil but without the cirque.
I haven’t seen much dance in my life, but somehow back in the day I went to the American Dance Festival as an undergrad, and happened to see Pilobolus perform. I know this because I remember quite clearly a piece where they flooded the stage with about an inch of water and slid across it in a very controlled, almost choreographed manner. They did that again on Saturday night to close out the show.
I can’t recommend going to see them enough. It really gave me an appreciation for the human body and would probably expand (or at least challenge) most peoples’ preconceptions about art.
