Johanna Drucker:

1. Johanna Drucker: The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923

2. From “Visual and Literary Materiality in Modern Art” “An assertion of the self-sufficiency of both visual arts and literature as non-referential, replete, and autonomous was dependent on the concept of materiality: the relations between form and expression, between matter and content, were assumed to depend largely on the capacity of the image, the poem, the word, or the mark to be, to exist in its own right on an equal stature with the tangible, dimensional objects of the real world.” (49)

3. Some examples: • Wassily Kandinsky: http://images.google.com/images?q=kandinsky&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title • Jean Metzinger: http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22Jean+Metzinger%22&btnG=Search+Images • Filippo Marinetti: http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22Filippo+Marinetti%22&btnG=Search+Images

4. From “Visual and Literary Materiality in Modern Art” cont. “But there is a single common central theme of attention to materiality as the basis of autonomous, self-sufficient repleteness so that artistic forms are considered to be and not to represent.” (50)

5. The Legacy of Mallarmé “The late work of Stéphane Mallarmé can be considered the demarcating point from which modernity, as a radical rethinking of representational strategy within the field of poetics, comes into being and comes before a literary audience…Many aspects of Mallarmé’s work bear directly upon the creation of later avant-garde experiments in typography…” (51)

6. “Un Coup de Dés” / “A throw of the dice” • How and why does this text emphasize the materiality of the word? • What difference does it make to the content or to the meaning of the poem when it is compressed and properly punctuated?

7. Some tenets of Modernism: • an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing. • a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. • a blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary and prose seems more poetic • an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials. • a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways. • a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation. • A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.

8. On modernism: • in a review of Ulysses, TS Eliot wrote in 1923 that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order, could not accord with “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”

9. On World War I: • Herman Hess: “To be torn out of a dull capitalistic peace was good for many Germans and it seems to me that a genuine artist would find greater value in a nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of camp life.” • Franz Marc: “Today art is moving in a direction toward which our fathers never even have dreamed. One stands before the new works as in a dream and hears the horsemen of the Apocalypse in the air. An artistic tension is felt all over Europe . . .Everywhere in Europe new forms are sprouting like a beautiful anomalous seed, and all the places where new things are occurring must be pointed out.”