June 2009
The principal impulse to organize the exhibition was the discovery of sign writing created in the Czech lands in the 1920s. The graphic designer Robert V. Novák puts the artificially-created sign system in the context of the contemporary world of information and its artistic scene. The installation represents an open confrontation of the First Republic Batěk and his picture writing /Neoglyphs/ with the "illegible" fonts by the conceptual artist Jiří Skála /Helvetica Concentrate/, graphic designer Petr Bosák /Abulafia/ and the "semi-legible" font created for this occasion /Hagel/ by Robert V. Novák. While Batěk attempted (unsuccessfully) to create an entirely original and globally understandable new sign writing in the manner of the then-extremely popular Esperanto, Skála and Bosák by no means cared for either intelligibility or legibility. These are experiments – typographical plays – for Bosák it is the fascination with the relationship of sound and individual letters and notation; for Skála it is the attempt to transform the surface of individual letters into a concentrated diagram – a full circle. Robert V. Novák closes the confrontation with a generational testimony of a font (barely legible), turning to the visual qualities of the 1990's and attaching a text by a famous Czech philosopher.
Markéta Vinglerová, 2009
From its beginnings and through most of the course of its history, the alphabet remained a privilege of the elite. It was a secret code, and only the consecrated ones could deal with historical knowledge. For the greater part of society, hard objects, mainly images and spoken language, continued to serve as their means of orientation in the world. This means that the greater part of society lived in magical and mystical consciousness. But between the elite and the masses (between texts for the elite and popular images and sagas) emerged a more vivid feedback that endowed the historical thinking with continuous magical and mystical features, and this made the magical-mystical thinking more historical at the same time. In this feedback, this "inner dialectic", Western societies could recognize the very dynamic that was the motor of history. Briefly: while the texts gradually "explained" images (transliterated them into the letters of the alphabet ), the images continuously penetrated these texts to "illustrate" them, and thus the alphabetic conceptual thinking became more and more imaginative, and the pictorial thinking became more and more conceptual.
Vilém Flusser / Alphanumerical Society
installation as homage to the energy dedicated to the naïve attempt of creating a general legibility
we initiate the beginning of our research of illegibility (do not confuse with unintelligibility)
"reading" just beyond the point of legibility
the limitation of writing, and a conceptual approach to it
writing signs in non-textual expression
research of the "new legibility" of subcultures
Neoglyphs (The World's type) / Alexandr Sommer Batěk / 1932 (1936)
Helvetica Concentrate / Jiří Skála, Angela Detanico, Rafael Lain / 2003
Abulafia / Petr Bosák / 2008
Hagel / Robert V. Novák / 2009
Robert V. Novák, 2009
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