Imprint
When text meets art
A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art highlights the meaning and mess of language
In the exhibition “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language,” which opened on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, words are treated as tools and as totems. Gathering text-based work by artists from Marcel Duchamp to Tauba Auerbach alongside contemporary designers like Paul Elliman and Dexter Sinister, the show offers varied takes on how to make meaning out of language, and also how to make a beautiful mess of it—sometimes at the same time.

A portion of Paul Elliman's Found Fount, at the Museum of Modern Art's "Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language"
The typographic theme runs through work by pillars of midcentury art (Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson) and contemporary design upstarts (like Experimental Jetset and Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt, who collaborate as Dexter Sinister and produced the exhibition catalog—$5 in the MoMA gift shop and downloadable for free—as an issue of their magazine, Bulletins of the Serving Library). There’s also a bright thread of humor. Pick up one of three black telephones sitting on a shelf, and you’ll suddenly be on the line with Frank O’Hara or John Giorno or Robert Creeley, who generously recite a poem just for you (or in Allen Ginsberg’s case, chant incoherently in your ear).
Auerbach has some cheeky little ditties on display, including The Whole Alphabet (lowercase), a single piece of paper with all 26 letters typed one on top of the other in a formalist blur. Her other works are literal-minded jokes that use the expected physical form of the book as their punchlines: a 3,200-page RGB color test, for instance.
But the conceptual heart of the show, and the highlight, is Found Fount, by the London-based designer Paul Elliman. Elliman has long been experimenting with deconstructions of language and objects—creating alphabets from photobooth portraits, for example. Whereas some artists in the show disassemble language into its physical forms or turn it into sculptures drained of immediate linguistic meanings, Elliman conjures words from ordinary objects. “Dead Scissors,” for example, collects broken-off scissor handles that look like the letter P.
Although Elliman has been gathering the pieces of Found Fount for 23 years, this is the first time the physical forms have been publicly on display. The show collects just a small sampling of the work, which still takes up a vast vitrine: cracked pieces of plastic, rusted metal U-rings, rhinestone-encrusted broaches, plastic beads, and cardboard cast-offs. The cardboard, mind you, has been not purposefully cut out into letterforms. Rather, they’re the random bits that are sometimes glued into folded boxes—the corners, wedges, and other pieces normally destined for the recycling bin. Here, however, they’re lovingly arranged and displayed on a black background under Plexiglas alongside Elliman’s other everyday wonders.
“Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language” runs through August 27. Paul Elliman will discuss his work on Wednesday, May 9, at 6 p.m.
America’s road sign legends
Burma-Shave's rhyming ads turned highway billboards into poetry, and changed advertising -- and America
In a simpler time, when automobiles went slower and the pre-Eisenhower highway system in the United States was less developed, there was a popular advertising campaign that ran from 1927 until 1963. It consisted of rhymed messages sequentially staked on the right side of the road, all ending with the advertiser’s name, “Burma-Shave.”
Secrets of the New Yorker cover
The venerable magazine's art editor talks about her choices -- and which cartoons were too provocative for print
Françoise Mouly, the New Yorker’s art editor since 1993, doesn’t have normal relationships with the artists who draw the magazine’s covers. “Think of me as your priest,” she told one of them. Mouly, who co-founded the avant-garde comics anthology RAW with her husband, Art Spiegelman, asks the artists she works with—Barry Blitt, Christoph Niemann, Ana Juan, R. Crumb—not to hold back anything in their cover sketches. If that means the occasional pedophilia gag or Holocaust joke finds its way to her desk, she’s fine with that. Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. “Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist,” Mouly says, “but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.”
7Up’s branding revolution
How "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda" became one of America's most popular soft drinks
I became interested in pop bottles (I grew up in the Chicago area where we all said “pop”) and related stuff when I was about 12 years old. I had gone inside an old garage that was attached to a neighborhood house that was being torn down and inside was a cache of un-returned pop bottles that must have dated from the 1940-’50s period. I took one of each type home (about 20 of ‘em) and yes, still have them to this day. I really got off on all the different labels and colors of glass and because I used to like to read old magazines I actually recognized most of the brands that were no longer around or had changed their design. I’ll go into this more in a future post, but wanted to lay some sort of a foundation for this piece, which is exclusively on 7Up, with a special focus on their branding efforts of the 1950s.
Wet, revisited
In the late '70s, one magazine had an unparalleled artistic influence on L.A.'s bohemians
(Credit: Photo: Raul Vega. Design: April Greiman and Tom Ingalls. Art direction: Leonard Koren.)
In the late 1970s, bohemian hipsters on L.A.’s west side were getting Wet. At the time, it was highly influential among local artists, designers and architects, despite its small circulation. And now, “Making Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing,” provides a sampling of its spirit.
From superheroes to doughboys
Why a generation of gifted comic book artists transitioned from cartooning to advertising
In the early part of the 20th century the first American cartoonists were the superstars of their times. Their work was received by an adoring audience, they earned lucrative contracts and toured the country to give chalk talks to a welcoming public. Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid,” Bud Fisher’s “Mutt and Jeff,” Rudolph Dirks’s “Katzenjammer Kids,” Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo,” George McManus’ “Jiggs and Maggie,” Sidney Smith’s “The Gumps” were all extremely popular entertainment, earning some of their creators upwards of $1 million annually.
Steven Brower is a graphic designer, writer and educator and the former Creative Director/ Art Director of Print. He is the author/designer of books on Louis Armstrong, Mort Meskin, Woody Guthrie and the history of mass-market paperbacks. He is Director of the “Get Your Masters with the Masters” low residency MFA program for educators and working professionals at Marywood University in Scranton, Pa. @stevenianbrower More Steven Brower.
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