Type mostly, but not only

For me [collaborating on books] it’s about a willingness to exchange ideas and be in dialogue about the process of making something together. It’s this togetherness but also belief, belief that the end result is not simply a product but is a result of shared time and so the collaboration becomes material evidence of this shared time and the immaterial conversations that were exchanged within this space get put into a form, in the case of many of my collaborations that form is the book. This question reminded me of something that Will Holder made when working on a project with Stuart and David [Reinfurt] called A Monument of Cooperation. It’s an actual crayon rubbing of a monument on the lower east side. I don’t know too much more about it but it does seem fitting to me that the basis of a good collaboration is like a monument to cooperation.

His other font designs are a mixture of pop-horror and comic/graffiti/gaming/sci-fi dingbats, so, along with ‘pornography’, we encounter the all – too – familiar construct and pursuits of the young, male, adult mind.

In type design what’s ‘good’ and ‘true’ is usually linked to – or measured by – precision; what is ‘bad’ is imprecise, messy and is therefore ‘untrue’. These ideas are strongly connected to the typeface and its resulting product – the font. Making a font functional for standard use (like for rendering text) takes many hours of repetitive refinements and cross-checks, work which can easily strip a typeface of more of the esoteric qualities that it might have had at the outset of its design. It is also work that might eventually encrypt the type designers ideas and intentions: leaving the final product neutral enough that a user, or viewer, has the privilege to bring their own connotations to it. So, in the professional and technical world of type design, maybe the design of the font lies more in the negation of the body in the letter.

“International Art English” has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically,space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal,autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visualbecomes visuality, global becomes globality,potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes … experiencability.