SIGN-CHAIN #2: THE HAND-MECHANICAL

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Begin (Vivi)Section 1: Lupton, Ellen, Thinking With Type, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 29.::::::::::::::::::::“In the early 1990s, as digital design tools began supporting the seamless reproduction and integration of media, many designers grew dissatisfied with clean, unsullied surfaces, seeking instead to plunge the letter into the harsh and caustic world of physical processes. Letters, which for centuries had sought perfection in ever more exact technologies, became scratched, bent, bruised, and polluted.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++Barry Deck’s typeface Template Gothic, designed in 1990, is based on letters drawn with a plastic stencil. The typeface thus refers to a process that is at once mechanical and manual. […]” [italics mine]::::::::::::::::::End (Vivi)Section 1&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&Begin (Vivi)Section 2: Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge: MIT Press/October Books, 1996), 63-66&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&“In time, however, seriality could not be avoided, and this recognition led to demonstrations and counter-demonstrations of its logic. Consider, for example, how Rauschenberg tests this logic in Factum I and II (1957), each canvas filled with found images and aleatory gestures that are repeated, imperfectly, in the other. Yet not until minimalism and pop is serial production made consistently integral to the technical production of the work of art. More than any mundane content, this integration makes such art “signify in the same mode as objects in their everydayness, that is, in their latent systematic.” And more than any cool sensibility, this integration severs such art not only from artistic subjectivity (perhaps the last transcendental order of art) but also from representational models. In this way minimalism rids art of the anthropomorphic and the representational not through anti-illusionist ideology so much as through serial production. For abstraction tends only to sublate representation, to preserve it in cancellation, whereas repetition, the (re)production of simulacra, tends to subvert representation, to undercut its referential logic. (In future histories of artistic paradigms, repetition, not abstraction, may be seen to supersede representation—or at least to disrupt it most effectively.)++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++Since the Industrial Revolution a contradiction has existed between the craft basis of visual art and the industrial order of social life. Much sculpture since Rodin seeks to resolve this contradiction between “individual aesthetic creation” and “collective social production,” especially in the turn to processes like welding and paradigms like the readymade. With minimalism and pop this contradiction is at once so attenuated (as in the minimalist concern with nuances of perception) and so collapsed (as in the Warholian motto “I want to be a machine”) that it stands revealed as a principal dynamic of modern art. In this regard, too, the seriality of minimalism and pop is indicative of advanced-capitalist production and consumption, for both register the penetration of industrial modes into spheres (art, leisure, sport) that were once removed from them. […] Both minimalism and pop resist some aspects of this logic, exploit others (like mechanization and standardization), and foretell still others. For in serial production a degree of difference between commodity-signs becomes necessary; this distinguishes it from mass production. Indeed, in our political economy of commodity-signs it is difference that we consume.”::::::::::::::::::::::::End (Vivi)Section 2:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::