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“These two seemingly disparate fields become something
new, more than the sum of their parts, a delicious undertaking. Alison is adept at working with both
sides of her brain and I compliment her on that achievement”.
Ah, youth. When I went to Art College in the
1960s, I left behind a proper four-year college education halfway through and
my father’s expectation that I would ever amount to anything.
A ‘simple country boy’, as
I am fond of describing myself in retrospect, I went to the big city and
encountered what was initially quite an overwhelming experience. Fellow art students seemed more
talented and sophisticated than me.
The other boys had locks that certainly were longer than mine. That became my first trial then: to
grow my hair.
The second challenge was
to choose a ‘major’ for my studies.
I had arrived with a passion for theatre set design, but there was no
major in that. I chose ‘three-dimensional
design’ because I thought that was a close second.
It turns out it wasn’t.
Three-D was in fact about
Industrial Design: engineering and building models and stuff. I spent the
majority of my time making spidery mock-ups of bridges and such out of balsa
wood strips, which would somehow always get crushed in the journey from my apartment
to class. Sniffing the air-plane glue
used to assemble them turned out to be the only unexpected pleasure of this new
experience. At other times,
perspective drawings were required that needed to be India inked with
Rapidograph pens. Always a few steps
from completion, the pen would tit squirt a huge blob of black ink all over the
drawing and ruin it.
There were other
possibilities in choosing a major at Art College, of course. Painting was one, but those students all
seemed a bit too talented and determined.
Illustration was another, but those with an interest in that seemed
already to have all the skills necessary (and I certainly didn’t). There was Ceramics, but I generally
made a muddy mess at the potter’s wheel at the required introductory
lessons. In fear of no future job
prospects otherwise, I stuck to Industrial Design. No, I was not brave enough
to take a more adventurous gamble on ‘art for art’s sake’.
There were courses in Typography, but I had little
idea what Typography was. The
teacher who ran the Typography course was called “Jim”, even by his
students. This was rare at that
time, because most instructors were called ‘Mr. This’ or ‘Mr. That’. His students, who worshipfully followed
him around between classes, all seemed a bit uh, …well, what we might call
‘alternative’ these days. Word of
mouth was that he was really into innovation, new music, even revolution. His students were going to turn the
world of Art on its head. They
were going to change everything.
He (and they) were quite scary to me.
Now I say scary, but we
must remember that we are talking about a country boy in the big city who was
just learning about the possibilities of other ways of doing, living, being. An example: an ‘older’ student in our
class (who had served in the Navy) invited us to his place one night to listen
to some music. It turns out that
he smoked ‘weed’ and had us listening to some strange folk singer, Bob Dylan. It was too weird for me and I left
quickly.
This is ironic because
only two years later I would be listening to Buffy Saint Marie records whilst doing lines of speed purchased from a go-go dancer. In the final analysis, Madame Bovary had nothing on me in
terms of ruination in the big city!
So this brings us to talk
about Typography more soberly and page design more generally. Eventually, I did learn something about
two-dimensional design from Lenore Chorney, a wonderful teacher of Fashion Illustration who became
my mentor for several years. I embraced
the excitement that she brought to the page in her talks about Dada artists,
Suprematism and Constructivism from Moscow, Bauhaus design from Germany,
Futurism from Italy, and De Stijl from Holland.
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I was a slow starter, but I got there in the end. Because of or in spite of those early
experiences, the visual is of central importance to everything I have done and
still do. I often comment that I learn more by watching what people do than
listening to what they say.
In spite of (or because of)
my visual orientation, I have returned to the concept of text and the page
frequently in my work in Performative
Social Science (See Popularizing Research), particularly in my considerations of
‘audience’ and specifically, the primary importance of the reader when our
outputs are textural. How do we
engage the reader in a dialogue? How do we encourage our readers to invest their
own experiences in their interface with our text?
An early (Jones, 2004) attempt
was made at both audience engagement and alternative use of textural production
in the published results of my interview with social psychologist, Mary Gergen
(”Thoroughly Post-Modern Mary”), where I used a variety of typography and
illustrations within a unique page design to represent that biography in an
academic journal.
Now
we have ‘Stuff’ by Alison Barnes (2010) or ‘Typography as a language of
performance’. ‘Stuff’ is a slim,
beautifully crafted volume that provides unique and personal answers to the
query, ‘What makes your house a home?’
Items such as photographs, travel souvenirs and
childhood toys become autobiographical objects and form a spatial representation
of identity in the book. The
reader truly becomes engaged in a process of interaction. The readers’ experiences
are embellished by their own personal reflections and memories, redefining yet
again, the on-going social construction of the meaning of home.
‘Stuff’ is important to me and to Performative Social Science because it
is a successful example of the fusion of art and social science in a single
project. The levels of both design
and social science compete with each other for praise. These two seemingly disparate fields
become something new, more than the sum of their parts, a delicious
undertaking. Alison is adept at
working with both sides of her brain and I compliment her on that achievement.
I never did complete Art College. Life happened as we like to say and I
moved on with it. Several years
later I did cobble together my credits from the initial college along with
those from the Art College and fashion them into an undergrad degree of sorts by
taking a few more academic credits at a local University.
I fondly recall an Anthropology course
at that University for which I produced a final project—a game in the shape of a
three-dimensional model of a haunted house. It came with little plastic babies
that were the game pieces. You
dropped them down the house’s chimney to play. The professor was taken aback, but he did give me an ‘A’ for
my efforts.
I had been to Art College, after all.
For the time-being, you
can read about Alison Barnes’ journey with ‘Stuff’ (and see some examples) on
her blog.
This blog is produced
using Georgia typeface. I thought
that providing this information would be an ironic touch.
Rufus Stone
has been selected for this year’s Torin Film Festival, 23 Nov-1Dec in
Torino, Italy. Held every November, it is the second largest film
festival in Italy, following the Venice Film Festival.
