Leonardo Constructions and Pictures Based on Letters and Words: 'Logomorphs' and 'Wordforms' Author(s): Brian Shaffer Source: Leonardo, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 276-282 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574601 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 23:05 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Leonardo. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
Leonardo
Constructions and Pictures Based on Letters and Words: 'Logomorphs' and 'Wordforms'Author(s): Brian ShafferSource: Leonardo, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 276-282Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574601 .
Accessed: 15/06/2014 23:05
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CONSTRUCTIONS AND PICTURES BASED ON LETTERS AND WORDS: 'LOGOMORPHS' AND 'WORDFORMS' Brian Shaffer*
Abstract - Many recent visual artists have used words and letters in their works, sometimes making use of the associated meanings and sounds. Logomorphs and Wordforms are the author's termsfor the pictures and 3-dimensional constructions he makes whose content is based on either chosen symbols (letters, numbers) or words. Those chosenfor a work determinefor him itsform, medium and technique. Meanings and homonyms of words play an important role. Only conventional letters and numbers are used; however, they may be so transformed that viewers may not recognize them until a title of a work is known or an explanation is provided The works are intended to be aesthetically satisfying without being explained, though fuller appreciation depends on an understanding of their meaning as conceived by the author.
I.
When I first visited the Italian city of Florence, in 1948, I learnt from Vasari's biography of him [1] that Michelangelo carved his giant David out of a block of marble that had previously been botched and marred ('storpiato', 'mal concio') by another sculptor. Michelangelo's achievement in neverthe- less sculpting a magnificent and well-proportioned statue was hailed by his contemporaries. But the thought that struck me then, and remained with me, was that an initial condition or restriction that limited the range or the number of possible responses could be a positive artistic asset. Figura- tive artists find such limitations in aspects of the world they observe. Most non-figurative or abstract artists, too, impose strict limits on their works. Some limit their material, for example, to steel building components or to fluorescent lamps; some their equipment, say, to a welding torch or a computer; some to the shapes they use, perhaps to grids, or squares or stripes or, even more strictly, to wavy stripes or to straight ones. Many such artists have apparently chosen their limits quite arbitrarily or, at least, have not disclosed the basis of their choice.
When I began work as a professional visual artist in 1964, I sought the creative imperative of a system that would impose strict limitations not only on shapes and forms but also, ideally, on medium and technique. But as I knew I should not be satisfied working with one medium and a small range of techniques, I made the further demand of the system that it would impose quite different limita- tions for different works, and, thus, require me to explore many media and a wide range of techniques,
as well as to develop new ones. Finally, I wanted the system to yield a sufficient diversity of potential works for me to be able, by strictly subjective criteria, to choose works to execute that would be visually satisfying, in at least some respect, not only to myself but even to a viewer lacking any knowledge of their generating system. Rather rapidly, I realized that such a system could be based on words by exploiting the shapes of their letters and their semantics.
The visual aspects of letters in words have been exploited since ancient times for purposes other than reading. They have been so used in magic and in religious symbolism, in calligraphy and inscrip- tions, in Concrete Poetry, in a plethora of fantastic alphabets (erotic, callisthenic, bestial, vegetal and inorganic) and in drawings, paintings and collages [2-5]. Advertising designers have exploited many versions of the Latin alphabet to represent pictori- ally the meaning of certain words (for example, those connected with hot, cold and speed) and to render logos and trade names with individual letters or with whole words depicting a product. Computer graphics have made the kinetic transformations of letters a commonplace of television titling and commercials and of animated cartoons; but these uses are necessarily restricted to letter shapes that can be read almost instantly.
Complete and fragmented statements, complete and fragmented words, letters and ideograms have been incorporated in many recent art works. In some cases, they have served as strictly formal components of design without intrinsic meaning, as in the works of many individual calligraphic painters and of the French Lettrists. In their manifestos the Lettrists [4] claimed to provide the basis of a new aesthetic, neither figurative nor non- figurative, and capable of transforming not merely pictorial art but also poetry, theatre, philosophy
276
I _
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
and the sciences. Specially invented symbols can convey general statements about language and communication but no specific overt message. (A symbol is defined here as a collection of marks that do not resemble the thing signified, whereas a sign does so.) In the case of well-established or standard symbols, either their specific meanings or sounds, or both, may be exploited as essential or even dominant components of a work. But whatever the purpose and whatever the final medium, Latin lettering incorporated in recent art works has, in the large majority of cases, closely followed standard printed, typed or handwritten versions.
My works, which I call alternatively either Logomorphs or Wordforms, display at least one, and usually more, of the following characteristics: (1) The ideas embodied in a work are multiple and relatively complex. (2) The medium and/or tech- nique are specified, as well as the basic form. (3) The Latin alphabet, Arabic numerals and standard symbols are transformed to such a degree that they are usually not recognized by viewers.
I shall now discuss these characteristics in specific works.
II. 1. 'Flawscape' series
An early series of works was called 'Flawscape'. In these works I exploited the fact that the addition of an f transforms law into flaw. Though not etymologically connected, the meanings of these two words are interestingly related. In some senses they are opposites. Law implies regularity, order, pattern;flaw, a breakdown or a negation of a law or rule, an irregularity, a disorder. As blasphemy presupposes the prior existence of religion; a weed, cultivation; so a flaw presupposes some sort of rule or 'law'.
In a 'Flawscape' (Fig. 1) the letters L, A, W are repeated to form a regular matrix, a 'lawscape'. At one point a single F is introduced, which disrupts the pattern by its size, its orientation, or simply by its presence as an extra element. In the same way, a message in the genetic code, which is read by splitting a continuous sequence of chemical 'letters' into three-letter 'words', is turned into nonsense if a single extra letter is introduced.
Flaws need not be seen strictly negatively as declines from some ideal; what is more interesting is their innovative aspect. The disturbance or break- down of existing patterns may lead directly or indirectly to the development of new ones in social, political and legal systems and of new hypotheses in economics and in the natural sciences. In metal- lurgy, impurities are deliberately introduced to disrupt or to flaw a crystal structure to produce new metal alloys and semi-conductors. In the 'Flaw- scapes', the introduction of the letter F does not merely disrupt the original lawscape, but can pro- vide a new pattern, a new 'law'.
Thus the letters F, L, A, W and the concepts associated withflaw were used to generate the form of
Fig. 1. 'Flawscape', vinyl and linoleum floor tiles, hardboard, polyvinyl acetate paint, 203 x 158 cm, 1966.
the 'Flawscapes'. What was the medium to be? The materials had to allow easy repetition of the visual components; and the verbal similarity (in English pronunciation) of flaw and floor suggested the use of floor tiles (Fig. 1), which are, of course, designed for assembly into regular arrays of repeating units.
The resemblance of flaw to floor interested me because a flaw in a floor is so critical that it may undermine the whole structure built on it. (I was particularly conscious of such a possibility because at that time I was working in a studio whose floor was attacked by dry rot. I had steadily to abandon a larger and larger area of the studio as the floorboards crumbled away; and, indeed, I made two 'Flawscapes' in which the letter F could be glimpsed only through a hole in a depicted floor, having, as it were, fallen below floor level.)
I would have welcomed the opportunity to construct 'Flawscapes' from heavy, hard tiles (marble, slate, ceramic) but such are most suitable only for long-term installation. Instead I used light, easily cut, flexible tiles (vinyl and lino(leum)). After cutting, the letters retained enough of the original square outline for them to be assembled in an array. The tiles I used were manufacturers' rejects and thus already flawed. But as I did not find these uniform, bland, commercial tiles visually satisfying, I added more 'flaws' to them both by mechanical means and by mounting them back to front. The rear surface displayed a highly variable range of subtle earth
277
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
colours and interesting flaws: machine marks, abrasions, traces of glue and blurred printing.
The 'Flawscapes' are examples of works in which I thought of the title first and then sought an appropriate material or a technique for making the object.
2. 'Ex-pence' series With other works, of which the 'Ex-pence' series
is an example, I had become interested in and often collected a material, or experimented with or developed a technique, long before I thought of a title that would demand and structure its use.
When the British currency was decimalized in the early 1970s, the old pennies were withdrawn. It seemed to me that these bronze discs 3 cm across would make useful sculptural building blocks. So, just before they ceased to be available in banks, I bought a large quantity of them. But what could I do with them? I eventually coined the title 'Ex- pence' to provide the organizing principle. Ex in Latin and in English has a variety of meanings, with the general sense offrom and out of. It can indicate the material of which something is made; the cause of something; the derivation of a name; a change of state; a former role; a loss or a lack of some feature or some property. Each of these meanings are implied in the 'Ex-pence' series.
By exploiting the common contraction of ex to x (often used in advertising and trade names), the title also provided the basic geometrical structure of the composition, namely a St. Andrew's cross. Com- pare this with the transformation of the word Christ into the Greek chi and, thence, into the look-alike but otherwise completely unrelated Latin letter X (as in Xmas, which can even be pronounced eksmas).
There are many other reasons why artists might decide to work with crosses. They might wish to explore the visual characteristics of two intersecting diagonals or, perhaps, sculptural relationships with monuments they have seen. They might regard a cross as a symbol with many religious and secular associations [6], as a sign for either negation or deletion, or simply as a basic element of design. In my own works, although the basic shape or form is generated by the components of the title, if it has other associations I exploit as many of them as are relevant. I consider the above-mentioned associations of a cross, for example its use as a sign for deleting or x-ing, to be relevant to 'Ex-pence'.
An early 'Ex-pence' was simply a large X-shaped heap of coins covering most of my studio floor. As the number of coins in the heap was variable and unknown to me, x also carried its normal algebraic significance. When several layers deep, the coins turned out to have an unexpected new property. When one walked on them, they made a loud, crepitating sound-another transformation of role. In a gallery installation, the public was invited to walk over the heap. This progressively scattered the coins to form a uniform layer without any arms: the X was exed.
In the rest of the 'Ex-pence' series, the coins underwent manifold transformations and progres- sive deletion-a repeated process of 'exing'. The coins were glued together to form chains-straight, kinked or writhing-and two or four chains assembled into an X, either as a free-standing sculpture or mounted in front of a wall panel. The coins were further transformed by painting or by chemical patination. The shadows the chains cast were themselves ex the original coins and led me, as a further step of exing, to pattern the background panel with shapes that mimicked and/or counter- pointed them. Figure 2 shows how these 'ex- shadows' visually interacted with the real shadows and with the painted chains in front. With alu- minium panels (Fig. 2), the 'ex-shadows', made by rubbing with abrasive paper, appeared either darker or lighter than the rest of the panel, or even disappeared completely, depending on one's view- ing point. With hardboard panels, the 'ex-shadows' were produced by spray-painting profiles of the coin chains. Some later works, as in Fig. 3, consisted solely of these abraded or painted derivatives, the actual metal coins having been completely deleted. Ironically then, although the title 'Ex- pence' was introduced to specify a use for my large store of coins, the strict application of the meaning of ex and x carried to its logical limit led me to ex, or eliminate, the metal pence entirely from the works. Figure 3 was sprayed with powdered bronze ex the metal of the coins; and it shows how the painted profiles can appear so transformed from coins as perhaps to suggest either organic forms or clouds.
The process of exing, in its widest sense, can be seen as the basic art process of deriving an image
Fig. 2 'Ex-Pence', bronze coins, polyurethane paint, aluminium panel, 152 x 115 x 33 cm, 1972.
278 Brian Shaffer
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Fig. 3. 'Ex-Pence', powtdered bronze and acrylic paint, canvas, 122 x 97 cm, 1972.
Fig. 4. 'Brand Expence', melamineformaldehyde resin. chipboard, 80 x 60 cm, 1980.
from an external object, whatever the degree of abstraction. This adds significance to other logo- morphs I have made based on other words beginning with ex. However, what is particularly interesting about the coupling of ex with pence is that money is the most general means of exchange, and, thus, itself a means of transformation or of exing. Moreover, the homonym expense reminds one of the all-too-common present-day view of art works as financial investments.
3. 'Brand Expence' Series As is well known, in the art world of critics and
commerce, there is pressure on an artist to provide works that can be irhmediately recognized by possessing some highly personal visible character- istic. Thus, early in my career, a London gallery owner told me that he was prepared to handle my works, provided only that I made nothing but one particular series, which was constructed of silvered glass; this series was to be my 'trademark' or 'brand'. I thought of this experience when I began work on a new series, entitled 'Brand Expence'. This was a continuation of the 'Ex-pence' series, using a technique I developed for it, a technique dictated by the earlier but still current meanings of the word brand as partly burnt wood and an identifying mark burnt into something or into someone. The works (e.g. Figs. 4, 5) were made of wood-particle board covered with a layer of resin, most commonly melamine-formaldehyde, which was branded with hot metal pence. By varying the temperature, pres- sure and duration of application, I achieved a rather
wide range of colour and texture, mainly browns and blacks, but also cream, pink and green, and smooth, crackled and crusty.
4. 'C-Saw' series The primacy of vision-both literal and meta-
phorical-in one's life is reflected in several titles. Some exploit the fact that eye and I sound the same; 'C-saw' the fact that C and see do so. A playground seesaw carrying one alternately up and down may be taken as an analogue of the capriciousness of fate. Moreover, as when one is up one can see things one cannot see when one comes down again, one alternates between states when one sees and when one saw-states of vision and blindness, illumina- tion and perplexity, characteristic of serious en- quiries, whether artistic, scientific, philosophical or spiritual. These ideas are the basis of the movable 'C-Saw' in Fig. 6 (see colour plate). There are two diagrammatic eyes, both painted entirely out of C shapes: a triangular profile and a circular cross- section. A bow frame wood-saw, chosen because the bow (when hanging down) has a flattened C shape, pivots about the centre of the round eye and can be swung by hand in an arc up and down over this eye's right side. A mechanical linkage makes the eye in profile simultaneously move up and down along the left edge of the round eye. The moving eye 'sees' except when, at the very top of its swing, it is blinded by the saw. In Fig. 6 the moving eye and the saw are near the top of their swings.
279
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Fig. 5. 'Brand Expence', melamineformaldehyde resin, chipboard, 88 x 46 cm, 1980.
Several years after making this 'C-Saw', I happened to snap a steel band-saw blade. As I was about to discard it, I noticed that the toothed, springy steel, previously forming a closed loop, now formed a large C which reminded me of the breaking ocean wave in Hokusai's well-known print 'The Great Wave'. This led me to make a new kind of 'C-Saw'. A length of blade is supported at two points, which holds it in the form of a C-shaped wave. When one arm of this 'sea-saw' or 'sea-soar' is deflected, the whole blade is set vibrating, pro- ducing continuously varying C shapes in a complex movement that fuses the motion of a breaking wave with the up and down of a seesaw. One is also led to see a saw in an entirely new light. Double C-Saw' in Fig. 7 shows two such saw blades in tandem.
5. 'Explane' Series 'Explane' is a title that dictated technique as well
as form. It led me to initiate the series by using a
Fig. 7. 'Double C-Saw'. steel band-saw blade, 138 x 288 cm at rest, 1979.
wood plane to remove shavings from the surface of the dirty, scuffed floorboards in my studio to form a contrasting X of clean, newly exposed wood. The X was ex plane in further senses: it had been introduced below the plane of the original floor surface and was itself not flat but varied in depth. But the title has many other levels of meaning. The Latin word planus means both flat and plain, and, in English too, a plain is land that is primarily flat (plane), though also featureless (plain). From, or ex, planus comes the word explain, to make plain. These meanings were embodied in the later works. They were made of plain, unpainted, wood boards: chipboard, blockboard and plywood, many with a surface appearance suggestive of a uniform land- scape on a small scale. Shaped blocks of these materials were assembled in fours to make the arms of an X, as in Fig. 8. The four blocks were chosen to be each of different thickness, so their surfaces would be in different planes. Into the surface of each block was cut one of various kinds of arrow, such as are used in explanatory diagrams in many academic disciplines. The four arrows may be thought of as together constituting an 'explanation'. As far as possible, they were cut using a narrow plane. In a larger work, many 4-block groups were assembled
Fig. 8. 'Explane' transformable, plywood. chipboard and block- board, the arrangement shown 30 x 46 cm, 1974.
280
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
in an X-shaped array extensive enough to cover a gallery floor. The mathematical convention that the horizontal plane is called the x-plane dictated that the blocks should not be displayed on a wall but on a horizontal surface. This restriction, because it meant that the blocks did not have to be fixed in position, inspired me to make the works into transformables, shaping the blocks so that they could be assembled to make a very large, and sometimes virtually unlimited, number of arrange- ments or 'explanations', with the sole restriction that the overall form should be an X. Figure 8 shows just one of the arrangements possible with one particular set of blocks.
6. 'Fourground' Series I chose several titles because they were related to
terms used in visual art. Of these 'Fourground' was particularly interesting. Firstly, it generated the 'form'; each work consisted of four panels or grounds, each panel bearing a different representa- tion of the number four as an Arabic or a Roman numeral (Fig. 9). Secondly, the title specified the technique-grinding-and, thus, led me to try a variety of rotary grindstones and to develop visually distinctive styles of grinding, of which I used four in each work. Thirdly, the title was obviously a playful variant on the word foreground, and, so, I wanted the works to be foreground in some special sense. This was achieved by using panels of transparent Perspex and mounting them alongside one another in the panes of a sash window or behind one another in a box placed in front of a window, through which viewers would see the out-of-doors as a background. This arrangement echoed a very traditional type of landscape painting, which places figures in the foreground, though in the present case, of course, the figures were not human but numerical. Other versions were ground on stone blocks intended to stand in the foregound of a garden vista. In yet other versions, as in Fig. 9, the Perspex panels, set in a window frame or a box, were
backed by a mirror, so that the room and the people in it, including the viewer, now provided the background. Thus, in these landscapes, the numer- ical figures forced the human ones into the background. (In Fig. 9, to make the pattern of grinding more clearly visible, reflections from the mirror at the back have been suppressed, so it appears to be black.)
Fore-ground may be understood in quite a different sense, namely, ground on the front or fore surface rather than the rear. Accordingly, the panels were ground on the front side. A backing mirror gave the rather nice bonus that fore-ground marks became back-ground when seen in reflection.
Yet another layer of meaning refers to the special use of the terms 'figure' and 'ground' in the psychology of visual perception and art criticism [7-9]. Figure is used to refer to that part of a composition or a view that the brain picks out from the (back)ground as being the significant shape to which it should pay attention. There are well- known drawings that can be read in two mutually exclusive ways according to which part one takes as figure and which as ground (e.g. E. Rubin's vase or faces [7]). In each panel of 'Fourground', if one takes the figure to be the numeral four, one can say that only the ground is ground (subjected to grinding) and the figure is left unground. The figure thus remains invisible, defined only by not being ground (Fig. 9). Each panel was carefully planned so that the number four was defined by grinding exactly four areas around it. If one now reverses one's reading of the depiction, these four ground areas become the figure-a new way of representing the number four-and the unground Arabic or Roman number becomes the ground.
7. Other works I shall not here describe my many other quite
different logomorphs, because I have preferred to give a fairly detailed account of the above five series, to reveal their multiple layers of meaning. It so happens that in four of these series, only a single letter or a numeral (X, C, 4) generates the shape, the rest of the title being represented in the medium or in the technique. But this is not a regular feature; 'Flawscape' has four letters in the depiction, and many other titles contribute each of their letters. The role the titles play in stimulating my artistic work may be judged from the following list of some of the things they have recently led me to work with (titles in parentheses): clocks ('Ten Times Table'); smoke ('Please Observe the No Smoking Sign'); plastic rulers ('Not More Than Sixteen Square Feet'); multiple solvent flows to transport dyes through paper ('Cascade', 'Tide', 'Confluence', etc.); polar- izers and infrared radiation ('Shadow of Nothing'). In the main, my works have been based on words in my native language, English. However, I have also used Latin, and I believe the system could make use of any alphabetic language.
Fig. 9. 'Fourground'. Perspex. mirror, wooden windowframe, 90 x 128 cm, 1974.
281
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:05:31 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Contemporary visual art ranges from the strictly conceptual to the strictly aesthetic; my work combines the two. I hope that in many cases the concepts I use are of sufficient interest to merit consideration by themselves, quite apart from the physical art work derived from them, and that the physical objects provide sufficient visual interest to give enjoyment by themselves unpropped by ex- planations of their generation or even by titles. However, despite the intended self-sufficiency of concept and of depiction, I hope that a viewer will find them far richer in combination. Alas, I have found that a large proportion of people associated with the art world find it difficult to accept this double interest. Visually puritanical conceptualists find the actual objects too 'sweet' or not 'tough' enough. In contrast, not a few persons whose approach is primarily sensual have expressed pleasure in works of mine but been aghast when apprised of the thoughts behind them.
The execution of one of my works is not simply the blind copying of a preexisting 'blueprint' because, although a title may provide limits for its form, medium and technique, it does not limit them
so strictly that there is a unique product; much is left to subjective choice. It is during the process of execution that the media and techniques indicated by the title are explored and developed. This leads to some previously attractive outcomes being rejected and other possibilities replacing them. The new media and techniques, in their turn, suggest to me new titles that can give them employment.
REFERENCES 1. G. Vasari, Vita Di Michelangelo Bonarotti, pittore, scuttore, e
architetto Fiorentino (Rome: Pagliarini, 1760). 2. Massin, La lettre et rimage (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 3. B. Bowler, The Word as Image (London: Studio Vista, 1970). 4. Between Poetry and Painting, catalogue (London: Inst.
Contemporary Arts, 1965). 5. G. P. Broutin, J. P. Curtay, J. P. Gillard and F. Poyet,
Lettrisme et hypergraphie (Paris: G. Fall, 1972). 6. T. Healey, The Symbolism of the Cross in Sacred and Secular
