Tons of words, letters and writing signs can be read in an exhibition which extends from the VOX center to the UQAM Design Center, 450 meters apart. Worth reading and more, for there is much to laboriously decipher, physically experience, and appreciate for its visual richness.
The subject of this written outpouring? The typography. Conceived by two artists who share an interest in design and writing processes — Montrealer Angela Grauerholz and Torontonian Robert Fones — the exhibition ART + TYPO brings together around thirty recent and old works, as well as a range of reference books. With bursts of poetry and music, lighting effects and bursts of color, it has more than one serif to hold on to.
“Typography lends itself to embellishing the reading experience,” proclaim the curators. It is not only a question of language or speaking, but also of beauty (of forms).
No matter which of the centers you begin the visit with, you will face the same initial question, that of readability — or illegibility, depending on your patience or your linguistic knowledge. The statements ofPrints (2008-2024), a mural by Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel, which serves as an introduction to Vox, talks about cognitive abilities. In relief or hollow, of the same whiteness as the walls which support them, they can be read right side up and upside down.
At the Design Center, one of the first works is that of the curator herself. With Schriftbilder (1999) — literally “writing image” — Angela Grauerholz offers a panorama in 20 photograms of the languages of the world. Dead or very exclusive languages. Babylonian, Manchurian, Runic, Tifinagh… Do you read them?
Access to knowledge is a central theme. It takes on a political dimension with the Cree works of Joi T. Arcand. His vinyl intervention on the steps of the UQAM pavilion entitled ᐁᑳᐏᔭ ᐋᑲᔮᓯᒧ (“Do not speak English”, 2024) denounces linguistic hegemony. Dated 2015 and 2017, Karen Elaine Spencer’s works on paper presented at Vox also target social inequities. At the limits of the indecipherable, his texts in positive and negative forms (letters?) refer to the power relationships that emanate from language and discourse in public space.
Contemporary art is not exempt from this anglicization and ART + TYPO reflects it well, whether it is assumed by the commissioners or not. It’s still good when it’s English-speaking artists who express themselves – and Kelly Mark’s language exercises are extremely relevant.
This is less acceptable in front of two examples from the series Cultura profiláctica (2021) by the Cuban Hamlet Lavastida, cut-up texts whose reading requires the absence of letters. Here, the voices of two political detainees on Cuban soil reach us in English. Not only does this choice open up doubt about the authenticity of the papers – is it a minion from a Miami gallery who is writing, a computer? —, but it also silences the difference of a local word.
From gothic to musique concrete
Typography is not just political. It is above all, in reality, aesthetic, marked by different trends. Even if ART + TYPO is not an educational exhibition, parts of history are mentioned here and there.
In three short animated films — “typographic prints on 16 or 35 mm” — Judith Poirier merges with relish history and experimentation, real materials (lead characters from the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz) and digital edition. In Fraktura (2020), she is inspired by gothic writing and horror cinema, making the signs waltz under the organ music of her accomplice Jean-François Gauthier.
With Robert Fones, the other curator, fonts take on the value of images or objects, far from the literary context. In his way of reversing the letters or cutting out their contours, he challenges reading, like Donovan and Siegel, Spencer or Lavastida. He challenges her, but makes her multilingual. The two f’s Fraktur Double f / Window Glass (1992), both sculpture and photography, is infinitely ambiguous.
The wall covered with colorful posters by Allen Ruppersberg, the invasive spectacle in undulating words by Charles Sandison or the affirmation typed endlessly by Klaus Scherübel offer hypnotic moments. Here, English (and the references to Ginsberg’s poetry or Kubrick’s cinema) are secondary because the works have a high degree of abstraction. Scherübel’s proposal draws both from Mallarmé, considered by the curators as the father of “the visual dimension” of a text, and from musique concrete – fascinating, the sound version of the sentence typed by a typist.
Finally, if we had to synthesize the universality and fundamentally varied character of typography, it would be Arnaud Maggs’ project that we should be talking about. His photo series HOTEL (1991), a word without borders par excellence, magnifies the difference that it found in the brands of such establishments in Paris.