2020
The term TYPOGRAPHICAL IMAGE has been adopted as a descriptor for identifying the densely self-contained DIGITAL-EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS that Robert R. Reid has produced in collaboration with CAUSA (Collective for Advanced and Unified Studies in the Visual Arts) – for purposeful use within variable curatorial research projects … including the ongoing ROBERT R. REID Digital Ephemera Collection, Massey College Library, University of Toronto … and a longstanding knowledge transfer platform – READING (ACROSS) EAST AND WEST – conceived/developed in association with the University of Manitoba Asian Studies Centre (Winnipeg).
A carefully conceived articulation, the nomenclature “typographical image” links, concisely/expansively, to a thought-provoking epigram by Chuang Tzu (c. 369-386 BCE):
People cannot see themselves in running water. They see themselves in still water, for only stillness can see stillness.
In this frame of reference, Reid’s digital designs — his TYPOGRAPHICAL TELETRANSPORTATION experiments – do not merely ‘decorate’ the MATERIAL WORLD. Rather, they ‘inflect’ a PRESENT MOMENT with the ‘more than visible’ prospect of POTENTIAL PRESENTIMENTS. Here, ‘design practice’ is crucially positioned – within an ALLIED ARTS domain – as a self-defining FIELD OF FORCE … a perpetually ‘contemporary’ presence locating verbal/visual CONNECTIVITIES in ‘fluently functional’ envisagements of ‘forwardly-directed’ DESIGN THINKING.
Marshall McLuhan convincingly clarifies a paradoxical link between DESIGN (intentionally coherent structure) and DISARRAY (accidentally meaningless entanglements) when he observes:
The meaning is in the pattern. Pattern recognition becomes the sole means of learning in an electronic age of speed: you have to spot patterns immediately.
These pivotal clarifications were made in 1967 – as part of McLuhan’s SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY CONVOCATION ADDRESS. He knew (at the time) that he was addressing both faculty and students of this recently formed University’s CENTRE FOR COMMUNICATION AND THE ARTS. (His own Centre for Culture and Technology had been initiated four years earlier, at the University of Toronto.) His incisive mode of address reflects a deeply erudite relationship to both modern and pre-modern English Literature (and the cultural/social contexts of its development). His remarks (lucidly projected towards an inherently self-contained IVORY TOWER COMMUNITY) exposed two major flaws in the then-contemporary ‘art world’: self-serving commitment to ‘AVANT-GARDE/’EXISTENTIAL’ ESTRANGEMENT and self-congratulatory contempt for MASS CULTURE and the ‘GLOBAL’ VILLAGE/GLOBAL ‘THEATRE’ that encloses it. That particular train of thought would have brought to mind (for some ‘alert’ SFU listeners) another brilliantly insightful social commentator – McLuhan’s friend, the artist Wyndham Lewis. Seventeen years earlier, Lewis had located the disingenuous, self-satirizing crux of a COMMERCIAL/DECORATIVE (post-historical) CHARADE. He had brought incisive attention to the SOMNABULISTS/BIG PUPPETS/PUBLICISTS that were dominating post-WWII (Western Hemisphere) visual culture, offering this key revelation:
We ARTISTS do rather live like an Indian tribe, the relics of another civilization, in a Reservation. Rich visitors can come among us: they are initiated into the tribal mysteries, becoming ‘blood-brothers’ – just the way it happens with the Indians of the Taos, or some other dusty centre of exotic tourism.
The INDIANS, you will recall, from what you have read of such resorts, begin to turn out art-objects for sale to these seasonal intruders. When they do that, naturally, the work so produced loses greatly in artistic value. So long as a totemic object is carved or painted, in response to the demands of a tribal cult, it has the power inherent in all belief. Producing it for sale for tourists – or to ‘blood brothers’ who have bought their way in – is another matter. And so it is with the ‘High-Brow’ tribe.
In 1949 (eighteen years prior to McLuhan’s “pattern recognition” probe/pronouncement … and one year before publication of Lewis’ ICONOCLASTIC DISCLOSURE regarding ARTISTIC VALUE and THE POWER INHERENT IN ALL BELIEF), this KINDRED SPIRIT observation was offered by the philosopher Jean Gebser:
It is our task to presentiate the past in ourselves, not to lose the present to the transient power of the past. This we can achieve by recognizing the balancing power of the latent “future” with its character of the present, which is to say, its potentiality for consciousness.
By articulating a new and radical USE OF THE AESTHETIC, Gebser expands upon a SOCIAL RADICALISM that has been continually emerging (despite extraneous fluctuations in fashionability) within an EAST/WEST (ASIAN/WESTERN) CONNECTEDNESS – 1900 to now. And this phenomenon (pertaining always to an open-ended definition of the term “artist”) is nowhere more concisely essentialized than in the following assertion (published in 1940) by the educational philosopher John Dewey:
The artist in realizing his own individuality reveals potentialities hitherto unrealized.
The revelation is the inspiration of other individuals to make the potentialities real, for it is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavour to its depth, but vision of what might be and is not. Sublimation of the artists to any special cause no matter how worthy does violence not only to the artist but to the living source of a new and better future.
As a non-linear link to Robert R. Reid (and the curatorial abundance of his TYPOGRAPHICAL IMAGERY), McLuhan himself offers an unambiguous clue regarding the CONTRARIAN FUTURITY OF ART – its permanent function as COUNTERENVIRONMENT CONSTRUCT – when he avers:
The world of the cliché is itself environmental since nothing can become a cliché until it has pervaded some world or other. It is at the moment of pervasiveness that the cliché becomes invisible.
McLuhan was most certainly not a dilettante; tellingly, he was broadly familiar with both the social history/theory of 20th Century (modernist) Old World/New World architecture and the textual origins of 13th Century Zen Buddhism in Japan. In that regard, two VITAL VOICES can be brought foward so as to locate a sustaining (everlasting) McLUHAN ECHO … HERE/THERE … HERE/NOW.
Listen to Walter Gropius … architect/founder of the experimental and interdisciplinary Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar (1919) … remarking in 1943:
I believe that every healthy human being is capable of conceiving form. The problem seems to me not at all one of existence of creative ability but more of finding the key to release it.
Be alert to Zen master Dogen, when he advises:
It is foolish to despise what is close by or to value something that is far away.
Right now remove all doubts by seeing what you see and hearing what you hear.
These ‘far-reaching’ admonitions remain perennially ‘pertinent’ to our understanding of McLuhan’s inexhaustible contemporaneity – his generous/impartial/regenerative role as a permanently pioneering GRAMMARIAN OF CULTURE.
In 1947 (twenty years in advance of Marshall McLuhan’s Simon Fraser University Convocation Address), Max Horkheimer, a former director of the Frankfurt-based INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, made this trenchant declaration:
Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.
Developed (always) from ‘radical’ aesthetic commitment to a ‘fluent’ curatorial aim … COUNTER-ENVIRONMENT CONNOISSEURSHIP … the nub of a protracted (anticipatory) CAUSA COGITATION can be found in its capacity to interrogate a single (singularly provocative) ‘apperception’ of Marshall McLuhan. His disclosure (in 1959): “We simply have to be contemporaries of ourselves.”
David Bellman
