n°56 — Graphic Designers as Iconographers. Author: Thierry Chancogne
End of 2025
More infos to come
n°56 — Graphic Designers as Iconographers. Author: Thierry Chancogne
End of 2025
More infos to come
n°04 — A communication: invitation cards by the artist Stanley Brouwn. Author: Céline Chazalviel
Author: Céline Chazalviel.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A1 poster, CMYK (reserved for subscribers or on demand)
6th December 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
Author: Céline Chazalviel.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A1 poster, CMYK (reserved for subscribers or on demand)
6th December 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
If we could attribute to Stanley Brouwn a desire to dissociate his artistic production from who he is and to reveal otherness through the mastery of his image and that of his work, we could also divine an intention to focus the public’s attention on his exhibitions. Behind the standards put in place for the communication related to his exhibitions—the use of lowercase and Helvetica exclusively, the refusal to reproduce images of his work, to produce (or allow production of) written commentary on the subject of the same work, to appear in the context of a vernissage or even to answer an interview—the artist builds his identity by way of ellipses. Since his participation in documenta 5 (1972), the stories linked to this attitude have come to draw the outlines of an artistic posture that goes beyond any one particular case. The invitation cards for his solo exhibitions provide a symptomatic example: set almost exclusively in Helvetica, the absence of uppercase, flying in the face of the graphic identity of the gallery or the host institution, they seem impossible to date, give or take twenty years.
This mastery reveals that graphic and typographic choices represent one of the spaces of neutrality built by Brouwn, like other artists and theoreticians of his generation, and generations that came after. According to one of the positions of Sol Lewitt, “conceptual artists are more mystical than rationalist,” and the case of Brouwn gives weight to this idea. Whether it be by way of a mediation adopted by the artist himself and the relationship with the institution that it entails, that of the myth of the autonomy of the artwork, of the relationship with documentation, with commentary and the analysis of an artwork or even the conditions of reception, Brouwn escapes the category of the conceptual artist and incites us to measure the contemporary echoes of his radicality.
n°28 — The conference: a format. Authors: Manon Bruet, Area of Work
Author: Manon Bruet
3D: Area Of Work
28 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
13th January 2021
ISBN: 979-10-95991-18-2
ISSN: 2558-2062
Author: Manon Bruet
3D: Area Of Work
28 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
13th January 2021
ISBN: 979-10-95991-18-2
ISSN: 2558-2062
There are an increasing number of spaces in the field of Graphic Design where work can be promoted. Intermediary platforms between practitioners and the public can come in the form of specific tools (Instagram, for example) or even events that are organized for that purpose (festivals and exhibitions). The conference is one of these platforms. A true ephemeral editorial object, it is highly suited to the explanation and extension of the practices and methodologies of designers. It is, for certain designers, the opportunity to take stock of an approach, an inventory of finished forms, and for others, on the contrary, a pretext for the production of new, sometimes more performative, even experimental forms.
n°29 — Girls, the Troopers of Dance. Aesthetization of Politics and Manipulation of Entertainment. Author: Alexandra Midal
The British origins of synchronized dancing—invented in 1880 by John Tiller in a cotton mill—were quickly forgotten in Berlin, where periodicals established themselves as the expression of standardization and American capitalism. The famous Tiller Girls had become the modern figure of the “New Woman”, performing in shows attracting more than four million spectators each year. A seduced Hitler asked for his own troupe: the Hiller Girls. Face to face, both periodicals look like strictly indistinguishable replicas, apart from their opposite messages.
Synchronized dancing revealed the democratic and fascist forms given to the political discourse of the Weimar Republic when the NSDAP seized power. Between the power of forms and forms of power, amid the destruction of cities, decrees banishing the use of Fraktur, and the destruction of degenerate art, those dance shows, undoubtedly because of their popularity, showed that National Socialism was using insidious and invisible strategies to empty forms of their content only to maintain their appearance intact, thus revealing a shadow practice that, in the end, turned out to be just as barbaric as world-wide destruction or the burning of books.