Dr. Sheena Calvert has over 20 years experience in graphic design and typography; art and critical theory, gained in both in the UK and The US. She has taught at various universities and art schools, including Rutgers University, The London College of Communication, Central St. Martins, The University of Westminster, and Norwich School of Art. Her professional practise includes the establishment of a New York-based design studio, working for various non-profit and cultural organizations.
In undergraduate and graduate work at the Central school of Art, Yale University, and the Jan Van Eyck Akademie she investigated the relationship between the materiality of typography, and various philosophies of language. Her PhD work looked at the interconnections between art/language, paradox, and meaning, arguing for a ‘sensual logic’ to supplement conventional philosophies of language. She has a particular interest in letterpress printing as an experimental medium, in which theory and practice intersect, and runs her own letterpress and artists’ book studio, the .918 press, in Hackney, London.
Abstract: Materia Prima – Text as Image.
“All language, whatever its medium, involves what is said, and how it is said, or substance and form”[1]
It is with the materiality of language, or ‘Materia Prima’, that this paper will is concerned; with reflecting upon the ‘surface’ of text, as an image in its own right. There is a clear difference between text as an image (as in onomatopeia, or the use of text as imagery), and text as image, where our attention is directed to the surface of a text, to its material form, rather than its content, or communicative function. According to the philosopher of aesthetics, Richard Shusterman, the surface of the literary text is frequently invisible: it often has no more than a residual impact upon our conscious apprehension, in the same way as windows or pixels:
‘We do not usually notice the surface of our glass windows because we are looking through them; nor do we notice the particular color and size of the pixels on our computer screen as we look at them to grasp the images they constitute’[3] – p.159, Shusterman, Surface and Depth.
Shusterman argues that our ‘aesthetic blindness to surface, a failure to see the importance of the visual face of literature’ (p.159) is rooted in long-standing traditions of indifference to the visual aspects of written language, from Plato onwards, which favour accounts of language’s oral properties, or ‘spiritual’/metaphysical dimensions. Speech, or the auditory/acoustic qualities of language have long been held to be aesthetically central to literature and poetry, and Shusterman describes this privileging of the oral in language, as a lack of attention to those instances when the ‘visible is visible’.(p.169), this term relying upon a distinction between two meanings of the word ‘visible’. The first one suggests being ‘able to be seen’, while the second suggests the ‘conspicuous’ or ‘strikingly manifest’ aspect(s) of the seen (in other words: passive and active modes of the visible). The printed surface of language, where the ‘visible is visible’ has traditionally been viewed as irrelevant in philosophical accounts of language. The material words or letters are ignored by such influential writers on aesthetics as Monroe Beardsley, and as a consequence, the visual aspect of language: its physicality, and its visual ‘presence’ is frequently suppressed or rendered secondary.
However, in a simple example, from an e.e. cummings poem, it is clear that the visual presentation of language has a deeply supportive, if not primary role in establishing meaning, and that the visual and the literary are intimately entwined: (a leaf falls) oneliness – E.E. Cummings
This is the knowledge that artists, designers, typographers and illustrators bring: that the material word is a crucial co-partner in the production of meaning. This paper will engage with those practitioners’ whose work interfaces with these concerns, in direct and indirect ways.
[1] John Dewey, Art as Experience p.106.
[3] R. Shusterman, ‘Deep Theory and Surface Blindness: On the Aesthetic Visibility of Print’, in Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (Cornell University Press, 2002).
