Like every typeface, the Schwabacher has its history. The well-known typographer Philipp Luidl tells it with many pictorial examples, right up to the day when Hitler banned the Schwabacher Judenletter.
Philipp Luidl was a lecturer in typography at the Akademie für das Grafische Gewerbe in Munich and a board member of the Typografische Gesellschaft.
In “The Aesthetics of Ambiguity: Understanding and Addressing Monoculture” Pascal Gielen and Nav Haq argue that multiculturalism is paradoxically based on monocultural thinking. The publication explores this paradox by exploring monoculture in a variety of contemporary contexts.
The book sets out to analyse monoculture using a multifaceted approach, by bringing together historical, social, cultural and ideological perspectives, using the dual role of art as tool for reconciliation and division in societies. The Aesthetics of Ambiguity gives stage to artists, thinkers and institutional practices who dare to play with the rules of a broader society and thus generate ambiguity ‘at large’.
It represents a quest for (more) ambiguity in order to avoid rigid borders or black-and-white polarities between cultures, as well as between practices of art and scientific thinking. By doing so, the artists, activists and researchers featured in this book plea for a politics and aesthetics of ambiguity to deal with the complexity of our living together on Earth.
Pascal Gielen is professor of sociology of culture and politics. He is based at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA) of Antwerp University. There he leads the research group Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). He is editor of the international book series Antennae-Arts in Society, published by Valiz.
Nav Haq is Associate Director at M HKA, responsible for the development of its artistic programme. At M HKA he co-curated Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics (2014). He was previously Exhibitions Curator at Arnolfini, Bristol and Curator at Gasworks, London. Haq has organized numerous monographic exhibitions and in 2012 he was the recipient of the Independent Vision Award for Curatorial Achievement, awarded by Independent Curators International, New York.
The publication coincides with the exhibition: Monoculture: A Recent History, on show at M HKA from 25 September 2020 – 25 April 2021.
The publication is presented in the framework of ‘Our Many Europes’, a four-year (2018-2022) EU funded programme organized by the museum confederation L’Internationale, that brings together seven major European Art institutions: MG+MSUM (Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain); MACBA (Barcelona, Spain); M HKA, (Antwerp, Belgium); MSN (Warsaw, Poland), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands). L’Internationale works with complementary partners such as HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden) and NCAD (Dublin, Ireland) along with associate organisations from the academic and artistic fields.
With exceptional creativity and in close cooperation with artists and architects, museum director Willem Sandberg (1897–1984) transformed the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum after the Second World War into a dynamic center for modern and in particular innovative art and culture.
“Willem Sandberg – Portrait of an Artist” is based on interviews with Sandberg (from 1971-1981) and offers first-hand insight into questions he felt strongly about, such as: what does the task of a museum director entail? How does art criticism work? What is the essence of being an artist, and what does the ideal museum architecture look like? Many of Sandberg’s ideas about these issues are still intriguing and provocative.
Thanks to this English translation of the revised text, plus photographic material and typographic work by Sandberg, a broad international public can now get to know those ideas which have are still relevant to current debates.
Ank Leeuw Marcar (1939-2015) was a Dutch art historian. From 1966 to 1982 she was a curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
The catalog Berghain Novelle presents works by Lukas Feireiss, Matias Bechtold, Alekos Hofstetter and Florian Göpfert, and MV.Stein. It was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, which took place at Berlin’s Laura Mars Gallery and was inspired by Hermann Skadus’ eponymous Berghain Novelle (1954).
The drawings, cut-outs, sculptures, installations, and animated films documented in the catalog approach both Skadus’ novella and the internationally acclaimed Berlin nightclub, Berghain. They are presented in a variety of artistically interpretative ways, creating a diverse and complex array of meaning.
Berghain Novelle, Skadus’ first and only work, is regarded by Germanists and bibliophiles as a rare and much sought-after collector’s item. Today it is to be found almost exclusively in private libraries at home and abroad.
Only a few days before his disappearance in the spring of 1954, which remains unsolved to this day, Skadus himself published the novella in a limited edition of only one hundred copies. Skadus’ eloquent and profound narration follows the protagonist, an architect by the name of Alberich, on his dreamlike quest into the oppressive, labyrinthine shadow world of an abandoned cogeneration plant in the center of Berlin. In the Kafkaesque tradition, Skadus succeeds in presenting searching for the sake of searching as a gloomy scenario that mercilessly demonstrates to the reader the absurdity, hopelessness, and senselessness of the quest, and the inner despair of the protagonist. Pursued by voices and shadows of discord and doubt, Alberich roams the vast, deserted spaces of the industrial plant, presumably designed by himself. Echoes of a time long past or still to come? Memory or vision? Only hints give the reader clues in this dense textual network. In his interwoven, stylistically complex narrative, Skadus refers to German national epics and to the fantastic literature of E.T.A. Hoffmann and the writings of Gustav Meyrink, as well as to classics of Expressionist film.
Wicked Arts Assignments are bold, unusual, contrary, funny, poetical, inspiring, socially committed, or otherwise challenging. Everyone who teaches art knows them: the assignment that is seemingly simple but which challenges participants, students and pupils to the max. Many artists and arts teachers have that singular, personal, often-used assignment in which everything comes together: their artistic vision, their pedagogical approach and their love for certain techniques or methods.
The almost hundred arts assignments collected in ‘Wicked Arts Assignments – Practising Creativity in Contemporary Arts Education’ connect to the visual arts, performance, theatre, music and design, but more importantly: they encourage cross-disciplinarity. They reflect themes and ways of working in contemporary arts, offering opportunities to learn about ourselves, the arts and the world.
The first part of this book provides a theoretical view on arts assignments from historical, artistic and educational perspectives, complemented by interviews with experts in contemporary arts and education. The second part consists of the actual wicked arts assignments. These can be carried out in various contexts: from primary schools to higher education, from home to the (online) community, and from Bogotá to Istanbul. They are meant to spark the imagination of both teachers and students, contributing to new, topical educational and artistic practices.
In cooperation with Amsterdam University of the Arts.
Selected by the Student Jury as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs 2020!
In a series of thought-provoking essays on a wide variety of subjects, the contributors to this stimulating volume discuss the current artistic and institutional climate. From the difference between nightclubs and museums, to the (im-)possible ambitions of art and the fading distinction between high and low culture. From the response to the increasing artificiality of reality in contemporary painting, to the carefully constructed ambience orderliness and luxury in airports. From fashion’s power to seduce, to the question of whether art can develop symbols that express the values that bind us today. The underlying premise binding these various topics is the idea that art museums must re-establish their legitimacy and engage in a more explicit relationship with society.
In ‘This is the Flow – The Museum as a Space for Ideas’, the museum is redefined: no longer primarily as a place for art and artists, but as a space for ideas.
Award Dutch Best Book Designs 2008
Rafaël Rozendaal’s artistic practice comprises websites, installations, prints and writings. His work takes shape through a range of transformations—from movement into abstraction, from virtual into physical space, and from website to print—with all of them informing each other. All of his works have one thing in common: they stem from a fascination with moving images and interactivity in its most basic form. Rafaël Rozendaal – Everything, Always, Everywhere, reflects on the change that his work has undergone in recent years; looking at both his own evolution as an artist, and the technological progress that has influenced digital art in general. How can the artist play with the ever-growing range of digital possibilities? What is his relationship with Japan and Asia and how does this reflect in his work?
Three essays; by curator and media scholar Christiane Paul; art historian Margriet Schavemaker, and curator Kodama Kanazawa, attempt to answer these questions while simultaneously deepening different issues surrounding the work, focusing on net art and digital art. Through a long interview with Rafaël Rozendaal conducted by Marvin Jordan, the voice of the artist can be heard and lastly his signature can be recognized in the multiple visual essays Rozendaal has created together with designer Remco van Bladel.
Supported by Mondriaan Fund, Jaap Harten Fund, Postmasters Gallery, New York, Steve Turner, Los Angeles, Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam
Best Dutch Book Designs 2017 Award, also selected by the Student’s Jury!
‘White Paper: On Land, Law and the Imaginary’ is an experimental compendium to White Paper (2013–16), a project developed by artist Adelita Husni-Bey in collaboration with several organizations and bodies. Divided into three distinct chapters revolving around the relationship between legislation, property and agency vis-à-vis the right to housing in Egypt, the Netherlands and Spain, this publication chronicles the project’s tactics of representation and diverse methodological approaches across institutions and informal spaces. Ranging from workshops, film production and formal exhibition-making to public discussion, ‘White Paper: On Land, Law and the Imaginary’ provides tools for analysing and acting upon the expansion of speculative neoliberal urban policies, and for re-imagining the space of the commons.
With Beirut, Berlin; Casco, Utrecht; CA2M, Madrid | supported by Graham Foundation
This Way! As a type foundry, we are obsessed with arrows—all our fonts contain additional sets of navigation symbols. This inspired us to go beyond typography and put together broader presentations: type specimen focused on arrows and an exhibition* guide where you can find fascinating stories behind navigation tools that we use every day.
From the specimen introduction:
Have you ever thought where the cursor came from? Or why the oldest arrow ever created was showing the way to a brothel? The answers to those questions are part of those publications. The project aims to explain the historical background of arrows and exciting phenomena related to them. Understanding the context of those signs can help clarify the development of human perception. The spectrum of interpretation is broad: the arrow could have been a tool for killing (as in the case of Robin Hood), it could be an indicator of directions or even a symbol of love (Cupid’s attribute). “This way!” initiative will not set a course for your life, but it might explain some of the stories behind arrows which are an active, but often hidden part of our everyday life.
*The exhibition was part of the Weltformat Graphic Design Festival, Luzern, Switzerland, 2019.
Today, we live in an economic system that revolves around producing and consuming objects made of plastic and metal, electronics, synthetic textiles and other things that do not decompose within a foreseeable amount of time. We start to review the role of these objects in a series of challenges that lie ahead of us. In the design discipline, sustainability and social responsibility have become prolific epithets, generating new products, materials, and technologies, designed to change the course of our future. The intrinsic design ideologies are often not new, but form a fundamental part of design history, reappearing throughout the previous centuries.
This book ‘The Responsible Object – A History of Design Ideology for the Future’ presents a history of socially committed design strategies within the western design tradition, from William Morris to Victor Papanek, and from VKhUTEMAS to FabLab. A critical resource for designers, students, cultural critics, and anyone interested in building a sustainable future.
Marjanne van Helvert explores the dynamics between theory and practice of design. Her main fields of interest are the relations between ethics and aesthetics, DIY practices, gender politics, utopia and dystopia.
Ssupported by Creative Industries Fund
This monumental monograph ‘Walter Nikkels – Depicted | Afgebeeld | Abgebildet’ on the work of Dutch typographer Walter Nikkels (1940) offers insight into his versatile oeuvre; his method, mentality, sources of inspiration, specific role and position, and the interaction with international artists and art institutes.
Nikkels has designed and edited numerous books and catalogues for museums and institutes both in the Netherlands and abroad (among others the Van Abbemuseum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), as well as bank notes, stamps, posters, and much more. He has also designed and installed a number of major exhibitions, including the documenta 7 in Kassel (1982), Bilderstreit in Cologne (1989) and the Van Gogh exhibition in the Kröller-Müller Museum (2003). He was also responsible for the new interior design and architecture of the Museum Kurhaus Kleve (1997, 2012 expansion).
From 1985 to 2008, Nikkels was professor of Typography at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. For his oeuvre he received the H.N. Werkmanprijs Prize and the Charles Nypels Prize.
Supported by Fonds BKVB/Mondriaan Fund, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, Stichting Harten Fonds, Gemeente Dordrecht, Stichting Stokroos and Kunststiftung Nordrhein Westfalen.
Award Dutch Best Book Designs 2013.
‘Failed Images – Photography and its Counter-Practices’ tries to understand photography in its difference from the reality it shows. It sets as a task to analyse the different ways the photograph transforms that which exists before the camera. Photography is not only determined by technical features, but also by a conventional approach to it. This approach can be recognized in what is now called a ‘snapshot’. But the photographic medium enables also very different practices and as a result very different kinds of photographic images. To see this, one needs to look at the diversity of photographic images and practices outside the dominant approach.
In ‘Failed Images – Photography and its Counter-Practices’ the photographic image will be explored by focusing on photographic practices refusing the dominant approach to the medium, namely staged photography, blurred photography, under- en overexposed photography and archival photography.
Supported by Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.
This project is dedicated to the question of what drives people to leave their homelands and try their luck in another. From a birds-eye perspective, migration may easily be presented as a “refugee wave” or a “refugee tide,” moving from a (safe or unsafe) country of origin towards a society where it can be used politically as a “refugee crisis.” The corresponding media images, of faceless trains of refugees and nameless protagonists, help to cement the hegemonic systems and interpretive patterns as “visual constructions”. By recording the stories of these migrants, and giving the phenomenon a face and a voice, Fabian Weiss returns in ‘I Will Call It Home’ some part of the interpretative power to those he has profiled.
How do we want to talk about migration? Which questions should determine the European discourse, and which issues belong on the media agenda? The conversations with the protagonists of this project show that migration within Europe is bound up with new narratives and self-images. In a digitally-networked world, migration will not only be better coordinated and planned, it will also define the self-conception of an expedited and highly mobile generation in which communicative closeness will be more important than regional origin.
The issue of migration will continue to preoccupy Europe in the coming years. While people from Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, or Afghanistan will continue to try and seek asylum, especially in Europe, the EU will probably continue to seal itself off with stricter border controls or transit centres in neighbouring non-EU countries. Apart from this, domestic migration will continue to keep Europe in motion and create the greatest proportion of migrants, something that was further stimulated by the exit of Britain from the EU.
The “Triage-Tasche” by Raban Ruddigkeit × maesh pays homage to collective performance and social cohesion during the corona pandemic. The shape known as the everyday mask has been increased tenfold in size. The upcycling bags from old advertising tarpaulins are not only characterized by their large capacity, but are also dimensionally stable and slightly translucent. This makes the design item perfect as a beach bag, but also sets a very special accent as a wall object.
The bags were designed and produced by “Unter einem Dach / Under One Roof–Society Office & Sewing Workshop”, a social business from Hanover. The non-profit company has set itself the task of helping people from all over the world to arrive in Hanover and to create sustainable prospects for the future. Since 2016, “Under One Roof” has also been running its own sewing workshop. Sustainable and unique bags are made from used maesh advertising banners under the lable MAESH.
15% of the proceeds from the “Triage-Tasche” will be donated directly to maesh / Under One Roof. Anyone who would like to support the social business beyond that can currently do so until May 18th, 2021 at www.startnext.com/maesh
Ar/KATE Mannheim is a specific guidebook connecting architecture and skateboarding. The pocket guide contains ten different urban locations with photographs and a map where a variety of skate spots can be found. Short additional texts inform the interested viewer about both the architecture and the skate spots which also convey new perspectives on existing architecture. Thus, both skaters and those interested in architecture can use the guide equally.
The architecture influences and shapes the creativity and type of skating. It creates the backdrop and at the same time is part of the action. It is both environment and obstacle. Skateboarding itself transforms and reinterprets the built environment and its architectural elements. Skaters’ perceptions of urban structure are also different from the urban impressions that non-skaters have—because skaters are always looking for new skate spots. Thus, every architectural or street structure object is scanned for its “skateable” potential.
Skateparks try more and more to imitate these architectural elements, but often it is nothing more than an attempt. The true character of street skating takes place in real confrontation with real architecture in real urban situations. The architecture influences the scene, the vibe, and the feeling while the skaters are there. The act of skateboarding is deeply connected to the built environment.
Mannheim, a medium-sized city in southwestern Germany, is located between Frankfurt and Stuttgart and is known for its square city layout, its Baroque castle and its buildings from the Brutalist period, such as the Collini Center and the “Neckarbebauung” (Neckar Building). On the other hand, Mannheim is also characterized by its large and networked skateboard scene. No other place shows this more than the “Mezz,” the “old Messplatz” in Neckarstadt, a district of Mannheim. It is the local spot par excellence. And it is the starting and end point for spot explorations within Mannheim.
A smart pocket guide about the famous skate spots of Mannheim and the architecture behind them!
This richly illustrated catalog shows the work cycle “Tannhäuser Tor” (Tannhauser Gate) by the Berlin-Dresden artist duo Alekos Hofstetter and Florian Göpfert. Their series of drawings, begun in 2012, depicts the distance our society maintains to the post-war architecture of modernism in an imaginary way.
In Göpfert and Hofstetter’s “Tannhäuser Tor,” architecture is freed from any functionality and seems to exist only as a remote idea: Far from their original urban locations, modernist buildings appear as isolated, timeless, fortress-like structures on mountains and hills, in a utopian “new home.”
The catalog includes illuminating essays by Lukas Feireiss and Daniel H. Wild, a founding member of the artists’ group BEWEGUNG NURR.
We would also like to draw your attention to “Tannhäuser Tor II.”
Since the Me Too movement, masculine exercise of power, and sexual abuse have been widely brought under close scrutiny. The focus on ‘toxic’ masculinity impacts our perception of male sexuality, which substantially influences the self-image and self-esteem of men. Men are being shamed by others for their transgressive and contemptuous attitudes; and they feel intrinsically ashamed of their own wrong-doings or of the virulent patterns and traditions of Western manhood.
This book explores both positions. It looks at the representation of male sexuality, nudity, fatherhood, male violence, rape, fascism and virility, men and war. It shows works of art that deal with the intricacies and contradictions of these socio-cultural constructs and realities. “Shame! and Masculinity” is hybrid in terms of genre, combining scholarly essays with short stories, personal testimonies, and provocative and intimate artist’s contributions. It stimulates reflection on shame in collusion with masculinity, from male as well as female perspectives. Thus it encourages us to reimagine these issues that simultaneously play a role in society, in our own experience, in history, and in our own bodies and being.
“Shame! and Masculinity” is the second volume in the PLURAL series. The PLURAL series focuses on how the intersections between identity, power, representation and emancipation play out in the arts and in cultural practices. The volumes in this series aim to do justice to the plurality of voices, experiences and perspectives in society and in the arts and to address the history and present and future meaning of these positions and their interrelations. PLURAL brings together new and critical insights from cultural and social researchers, theorists, artists, arts professionals and activists. Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms (Valiz, 2020) is the first book in the PLURAL series.
The extensive publication “Pinhole Shots 2000–2011” presents, for the first time, a collection of Chris Dreier’s various series of photographs taken during her travels throughout Europe. The shots taken by the artist with her self-made pinhole cameras seem like images from a bygone era. A certain blurriness and strong distortions characterize these pictures. Because of the long exposure times, moving things are simply not captured. Only stationary objects leave their image on the photographs and appear as architectural elements of the places.
Dreier developed her predilection for driving around and discovering places in the early 80s. At that time, she studied visual communication in Berlin. To finance her studies, she worked as a truck driver. Through this job she discovered remote places and industrial wastelands.
As motifs, Dreier prefers empty streets, derelict factories, depopulated areas, and neglected new buildings. These remnants of a fragmented history are highly fascinating to her. Thus, her photo series show workers’ clubs in northern England, bunker ruins of the Wolf’s Lair in Poland, battlefields of World War I near Verdun, secluded landscapes in the Oderbruch region on the German-Polish border, Ceaucescu’s palace in Bucharest, and the former Iraqi embassy, an abandoned building, in Berlin. The pinhole photography series are supplemented by found photographs Dreier discovered during her forays through the “Forbidden City”, a deserted Russian barracks town in Wünsdorf near Berlin.
The title, “Im Nahbereich,” translates as “in the immediate vicinity,” which is where Andres Seltzer took the photographs featured in this book. Using an endoscope with attached light projector, he explored the things that surround him: a wallet, his mother’s sewing box, the pocket of his girlfriend’s jacket, a bag of toys … Seltzer’s endoscopies lead us into the small world of household goods, clothing, and all the things we feel at home with.
The search for new perspectives on the familiar, the playful gesture, and the joy of discovery are key elements of Andreas Seltzer’s work. At a flea market, he noticed, by a lucky coincidence, that the size of the round, centrally placed cut-outs of traditional record dust sleeves was an almost perfect fit for his centered endoscopic photographs. Thus, he discovered a relation and a plethora of possible combinations of these respective items of domestic intimacy.
A kind of introspection emerges in “Im Nahbereich”– the afterglow of dialogues between things, of dialogues framed in the pitch black of mythical tales.
Cihan Tamti started treating Instagram like a graphic design gym, and worked on designing a poster every day. Without constraints, he was able to experiment, often creating work that no normal agency would approve. Such freedom of approach allowed him to develop designs with strong, experimental typography and complex compositions. Unexpectedly, these daily designs ended up winning some competitions and attracting some cool clients along the way, which now gave him the last necessary push to publish a book that combines all his ideas and creations.
Cihan’s “Breakout–100 Posters Book” summarizes 100 selected posters from the past few years. These posters include free and personal ones, real commission work, exhibition posters, and award-winning posters. But what it makes even more important is that it encourages and inspires to breakout oneself and to start spreading one’s own visual messages.
How does typography behave under extreme conditions? What visual phenomenons, patterns, artifacts, and graphic elements can be provoked by pushing type through extreme grids and using extreme typographic parameters? At what point does a text step back to its original purpose of informing the reader? When does text become something else: a graphic element, a gray surface, a static noise, or a haptic pattern?
To investigate these questions, graphic designer Juliane Nöst systematically pushed text through various grids in the framework of a typographic study. Starting with the InDesign default-settings, a range of font-sizes and columns were used to generate a broad spectrum of diverse typographic outcomes.
In a further step, existing results were layered and collaged, aiming to create additional sets of unexpected forms and graphics. The outcome of this research leads to a variety of visual peculiarities, creating absorbing patterns, interacting with the grids, sometimes making them visible while disappearing under other parameters.
The 500-page book is a glimpse into the endless possibilities that may emerge when teasing typography.
Sven-Åke Johansson and Thomas Kapielski’s vinyl LP “recovered,” released under the project name Das Moabiter Duo, was published by Fantôme on the occasion of a joint exhibition by Johansson and Kapielski at Berlin’s Laura Mars Gallery.
The LP from Das Moabiter Duo–“recovered,” mixed and mastered by Frieder Butzmann, features a previously unreleased concert recording from 1983. In addition to a download code, the album contains an extensive, format-filling 16-page booklet with drawings by Sven-Åke Johansson, liner notes by Heiner Goebbels, a letter by Thomas Kapielski, and concert photographs by Gerald Domenig.
Das Moabiter Duo performed back then at Berlin clubs like Korrekt—and at the experimental concert series “Materialausgabe”, organized by Heiner Goebbels and Christoph Anders, at Frankfurt’s Batschkapp.
On stage, Kapielski engaged “ingeniously-stockhausianistically” (as he himself puts it as ironically as conceitedly) in electronic manipulations of sounds from everyday objects. Meanwhile, Johansson explored the sonic possibilities of shoe trees, lashed out with towels, grabbed his accordion with its attached rear-view mirror, and, last but not least, played his astonishing drums.
Confusion arose—both during the live performances and, in a completely different way, decades later when Kapielski rediscovered the audiotape of a concert in an old cardboard box—because of one of Johansson’s unique ideas, which Heiner Goebbels describes as follows in the liner notes: “With a professional gesture, in the middle of the concert and while playing, Sven-Åke exchanged the cymbals, mounted on stands to the left and right of the bass drum, for large ‘cymbals’ made of thick foam pads. And he continued to play on them. We laughed—but we heard nothing. Or presumably even more. Each of us something different. That was enlightening—how else would this scene still be so present in my memory after 35 years.”
Obviously, listening to the original recording on which the album is based, one wouldn’t be able to see Johansson playing his foam cymbals, in order to, as it were, hear them before the inner eye. Moreover, little of Johansson’s actual drumming can be heard on the tape—due to, as Kapielski recalls in a letter to Johansson printed in the booklet, the way the recording microphones were placed at the time.
So, after decades, a special kind of improvisation emerges: Johansson has added new, “real” sounds with his drum kit, turning his collaboration with Kapielski into a, not only in a temporal sense, genuinely free-floating undertaking: “recovered.”
Sven-Åke Johansson is renowned as one of the style-defining drummers of the German free jazz era of the 60s and 70s. From the 80s onwards, he pursued an artistic path as a music performer, largely independent of institutions and groups and increasingly involved in visual-arts and new-music circles. His oeuvre includes more than fifty record releases, numerous music theatre pieces, radio plays, visual works, and a lively touring life.
Thomas Kapielski is known as an author (whose books have been published by Merve, Suhrkamp, etc.) and an artist. However, since the early 80s he has also been active as a musician. He collaborated with, among others, Frieder Butzmann.
Interview with Hanna Mattes, Arnold Odermatt, Fatemeh Behboudi, Myoung Ho Lee
Behind the scenes: Allan Porter’s “camera”
In detail: Kodachrome
“Prima Vista. Über das Zeichnen” presents drawings by Andreas Seltzer and—in an insightful collection of polished vignettes and anecdotes—his writing about drawing. This handsomely designed catalog was published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition of the same name, which took place at the Laura Mars Gallery in Berlin.
Andreas Seltzer’s drawings are grotesques that alternate between caricature and black humor, between horror and magical enchantment, between Mannerism and carnivalesque inventions. The colors black, red, and white form the basis of this work. This reduced choice of colors is motivated by the intention to increase the effect of the pictures through economy of means. Black functions as an arsenal that has all possible weights in store to lend—depending on the motif—gravity or sketchy lightness to the pictures. Red, on the other hand, plays the traditional role of the eye-catching signal that provides orientation in the genre of hidden object pictures. White, in the form of outline-like, splinter-like, meticulously captured figurations, is used to show views from above as well as vistas: against densely checkered backgrounds, these elements become actors that make those other parts of the picture dance.
Translated excerpt from “Prima Vista”:
Drawing, Dancing
From the perspective of the fingers holding the drawing pen, the area to be conquered is a vast white terrain full of potential risks. Moving the pen means striving forward while being aware that any lingering results in dark, puzzling spots. Dots and strokes form a team that finds its goal somewhere on the horizon of the playing field while challenging the format. The special thing about these movements is that they are more similar to dancing than, for example, walking is. The rhythm of drawing circles and semicircles, swinging back and forth, securing the sidelines, repeating and varying spontaneous moves and improvised patterns—all this results in flowing lineaments that are nothing but control elements seeking to guarantee step by step, inch by inch the sure-footedness of the endeavor.
Drawing, Remembering
To the extent that drawing, associative drawing, has become the main activity, words lose their power, writing loses its force. Perhaps this activity is some form of memory training with the result that one remembers the visual aspects of things but—now familiar with their metamorphic nature and skeptical of the predeterminations of language—forgets names and terms. Thus, a new variant of dementia might appear: the specter of a babbling, picture-crazy idiot who points to his scribbles while sinking into aphasia.
Drinking and Drawing
In the evening, a glass of wine sometimes happens to be placed next to the inkpot. Then, the temptation arises to portray one of those cartoonists struggling for inspiration and tortured by deadlines, as depicted countless times by Robert Crumb as a self-portrait—cartoonists downing ink: their final act of desperation. Ink is in this case an imagination-enhancing substance, impregnating all internal organs, coloring blood, sweat, and tears, and transforming the whole body into a drawing instrument.
“Ink is my natural element. A beautiful liquid, by the way, this dark liquid. And it is dangerous! How you can drown in it! And how it attracts you!” (Gustave Flaubert)