Matière: Improvised Typography from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain {Re}HAPPENING 14, Studies Building, Former Campus of Black Mountain College
Performance and installation: found materials, webcam, laptop and projector with improvised browser-based threshold-filter SVG image capture, laser printer, monitor, rolling stand, laser-etched acrylic with excerpts from Black Mountain College Bulletins by Josef Albers and Anni Albers and students’ song about matière exercises
“Don’t throw the garbage away/It’s Mat-iere… Don’t clean the ring in the tub/It’s Mat-iere…”With his matière exercises, Josef Albers challenged students in his preliminary art and design course at Black Mountain College to explore the affordances of mundane and unconventional materials like trash and fallen leaves. Inspired by Albers’s matière exercises and the modular alphabet he created at the Bauhaus, I gathered materials on-site at the former Lake Eden Campus of Black Mountain College to construct a functional font, which was projected live as I work. This combination performance and installation is a bookend to a similar performance I conducted in a reconstructed dorm room at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany last year. This is also related to a presentation and workshop I delivered at the ReVIEWING Black Mountain College Conference last fall.
Last year I set out on a journey to retrace the footsteps of the Bauhaus faculty members who fled Nazi Germany to help start Black Mountain College. As we find ourselves in an echo of that political and technological moment, I wanted to get a sense for these physical places, which to me had only existed as images and texts. This has been a pilgrimage and an analysis of the ways contemporary narratives of place shape our current perception of these short-lived institutions. While I am certainly interested in the history and individual stories of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain, I am focused on the memory and presentation of these places today and how their physical remnants and archives are activated to create new meaning in a time of rapid technological change.
Graphic Designer Denise Gonzales Crisp argues that typography is relational: we depend on each other and our shared histories to encode and decode meaning in visual forms. She uses the portmanteau “typogyroscopic” to propose typographic form as a complex system of codependent moving parts—shared cultures and subcultures, in specific places and time that come together to make meaning. This performance brings my Bauhaus to Black Mountain project full-circle, ascribing the specificity of time and place at the {Re}HAPPENING into material form through actions and live projected documentation of the fonts I create with found materials.
