Schrift in Berlin, pt. 2: Im Kiez

From what I gather, "Kiez" is a Berlin slang term for neighborhood. In my attempt to sound cool, I named this section "In the neighborhood." This may or may not be a misuse, but I'm over it. These specimens come from my walk between the Humboldt library and my apartment on Tucholskystrasse. The dog at the end was just sitting in the window of a super fancy boutique!! They really took "how much is that doggy in the window" to heart! I think he deserves better than Helvetica, though!

History of typography vs. typography as history

As I've been reading about the history of typography, I see that the history of type fits into the history of Germany (and everywhere else) as evidence cultural and political trends. Like any other aspect of aesthetic culture, especially those that are so closely tied with perception bzw. consumerism bzw. politics, etc, typography has changed with various movements like Modernism, Expressionism, and Punk (yes, Punk is included in encyclopedias of typeface, CS). So, why is typeface just as or more important to history than art, music, photography, etc (in my opinion)? It might not be, but for the sake of argument, here's mine:

Type, as a subset of graphic design, is both art and communication. A lot of things are art and communication, but, in our society (I'm going to go ahead and be ethnocentric for a moment), almost everyone can read. Definitely everyone who has power can read. So, our perceptions of information like personal messages, advertisements, laws, etc. are all conveyed through type.

If you read the link I posted yesterday about the Eszet, or even some of it, you know that Germans take spelling very seriously. I think typography is particularly significant here because of the cultural meaning type and spelling have taken on throughout history. In the United States type has similar effects as far as how we perceive information, but I would argue that the historical/aesthetic significance is less. The fact that Germans still argue about the Rechtschreibreform (which stems from a debate over the extent to which Fraktur should still be a part of the German Roman alphabet!) is testament to the importance of type here in Germany. This is not to say it's not important other places; I always think back to the designer on the film Helvetica who said that she always equated the font Helvetica with the Vietnam War.

This is getting repetitive with my previous posts, but I'm working on how to fit all this into my academic life, so the repetition is helpful, please bear with me.

Even though I somewhat take issue with some of Weidemann's ideas, his book has a long section on "Schrift und Geschichte" that I need to revisit. Also, I think I'm going to try to set up some interviews. I need to pose some questions before people who know what they are talking about.

I checked out the Mauerpark today. Very cool, but I still don't really know what to say about graffiti. It's a subculture I find mysterious and daunted by. On the agenda for tomorrow: more Weidemann, Berlinische Galerie (maybe) and a trip back to the Buchstabenmuseum.

Also, I saw this on Schönhauser Allee and I found it interesting:

P.S. Double post day! Exciting!

The epic linkage of the blogosphere!

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Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

I think I might have opened a can of worms I totally can't handle by bringing up graffiti, but, alas, it's still something to think about. Re: Cyrus questions about Die Dame I think I will work on tomorrow, hopefully in conjunction with a post about the results of the contest on Miss Mia.

I'm not going to attempt to say anything about what graffiti is or is not in general terms anymore, because there is so much that ranges every bit of any spectrum that can ever exist. But, I think it is safe to say that graffiti IS typography, just as much as any other written word is. At the same time, it seems to be self-conscious (or rather, the artist is self-conscious) about the medium, and therefore the Schrift itself tends to fall into categories just as much as mass advertisements, books, etc. I'm going to stop writing and starting quoting, because what other people say is probably more useful at this point. First, Dittmar on typography/graffiti:

"Nicht nur die Bedeutung der Worte selbst wird also mitgeteilt, sondern durch die Angestaltung der Schriftzeichen wird auch auf weitere Bedeutungen reflektiert. Die Schrift spiegelt dabei den Sinn, der abhängig vom jeweiligen zeitlichen, dringlichen oder personalen Kontext ist."

To this I respond by saying that the same is true for all typeface. Graffiti might resemble pictures more closely than a book's typeface, but any type is chosen for a certain purpose. Part of what makes graffiti so interesting is the interplay between images and words. I suppose the same is true for any visual media.

In his book Wo der Buchstabe das Wort Führt, typographer Kurt Weidemann addresses graffiti in a different way, in the context of a discussion on "Das nachalphabetische Zeitalter," or, the post-alphabet age. On graffiti:

"Graffiti-Sprayer erfinden Zeichnen. Aber die besagen keine Wort mehr. Das Nachalphabet, das auf Zügen und Bahnhöfen, Wänden und Mauern, Über- und Unterführungen manchen Ärger und manche Schönheit offenbart, demonstriert den Ausdrucksbedarf der Wortlosen."

I'm not sure if I buy that graffiti-ers are "wortlos," but I like a point he makes about pictures vs. words later in the chapter in a caption to a picture of one of those emergency escape directionals in the seat-back pocket of an airplane:

"Mit der Weltweite des Verkehrs und des Handels in großem Umfang haben Schrift und Sprache ihre nationalen Grenzen und Kommunikationsschwierigkeiten aufgezeigt. Die Sprache der Bilder verschafft unmittelbares Verständnis und is auch für eine Gefahrensituation- harmloser als Worte es sein können. Das Bild hat nicht die Autorität des Wortes. [my italics]"

I can't decide how I feel about this! I definitely agree that a word can express something concrete, but how concrete is it? More so than pictures? In the context of the card in the seat-back pocket, pictures definitely serve to soften a potentially alarming idea, but does that idea apply to all things?

I've also noticed that in Germany road signs and things use pictures a lot more than in the US, z.B. road work signs here are all graphic instead of our huge orange ones that just say ROAD WORK. Maybe this is just another example of the Weltweite des Verkehrs Weidemann is talking about.

I think I need to think more about all this graffiti stuff (and read Herr Dr. Prof. Shahan's article) before trying to say any more. I seem to be winding myself into a confused knot.

Speaking of typography (when do I speak of anything else?), check out this clip of an interview with Erik Spiekermann. I keep hoping to run into him somewhere in Berlin, but this is unlikely.

I also went to the Deutsche Kinemathek museum today. It was pretty fun, especially the several-room shrine to Marlene Dietrich. The Germans wouldn't have it any other way.

Graffiti als Typographie?

First off, an answer to Herr Dr. Prof. Shahan's question about objectivity: no. As Spiekermann would tell you, even typeface can't be objective. Even those designers that attempt to achieve objectivity lose that goal in the process of trying to achieve it. But, a lot of people say that the best typeface is one you don't notice. Maybe that is the achievement of objectivity in visual representation? I still take issue with that because then you have to define "noticing." What do we notice without knowing we're noticing it? We read things graphically, so we must be noticing the typeface on some level.

Today I went down to look at the East Side Gallery. I liked it, but I sort of think that the art is predictably peace-loving and almost cheery in its post-unification-ness. It made me wish there were large sections of the wall still preserved with the original graffiti.

Which got me to thinking. I took a few pictures of graffiti in my little photo study of Alexanderplatz, because it seemed natural to include it. But, there isn't much talk of graffiti in the big books on Typographic eras, styles, and methods that I've been skimming through. This is mostly because graffiti artists aren't designers--at least in the traditional sense--who create images to sell products. But, graffiti is presumably trying to achieve something, whatever it may be, and it uses words--Schrift--to depict that whatever message. Typography doesn't seem like the right word because it implies the use of print, but in any case, graffiti is a definite form of Schrift with definite implications. I'm not sure what, yet, but I might start by taking more pictures, and reading this book:

Im Vorbeigehen: Graffiti, Tattoo, Tragetaschen: En-Passant-Medien von Jakob Dittmar.

I went back to Die Dame today as well, and found that the switch away from Fraktur happened in 1921, whereas for BIZ it never happened. Both were from the Ullstein publishing company. Clearly, design choices had to do with the audience (Berliner illustrierte Zeitung=everybody's magazine aka traditional German, Die Dame=high culture for the New Woman aka Modern, although still not in sans serif).

Tomorrow I think I'll go to the Museum for Film und Fernsehen, for fun, and read the Dittmar. Hopefully the sun comes out at some point!

Answers, Kollwitz, Spiekermann

When I went to the library today, Die neue Typographie was absent from the shelf. I hope it reappears. In any case, I will attempt to answer some questions my professor posed to my post from a couple of days ago, though without any Tschichold quotations to back me up.

1. Tschichold wrote an entire section about photography, but I'm at a loss as to specifics of his argument. But, I think a good response to your question is the general view that photography is objective (which it isn't) compared to say, expressionist painting. Jan has a problem with accompanying a Modern medium like photography with Schnörkel, etc. And, I think that as a man of the Neue Sachlichkeit, he not only has faith in technological wonders, but views them as superior and more beautiful than human creation. As he wrote, order=beauty.

2. To answer the question of "Beamtenschrift," going back to the woodcut commissioned by Maximilian I is useful. You're right! Fraktur in its original form had everything to do with pictures. It was created to accompany images that the public/visitors/admirers/whoever could appreciate, while historians were probably the only ones the Kaiser expected to read the actual text. Tschichold seems to reject Fraktur precisely because of its inaccessibility, both aesthetically and historically. He believed that basic functionality was the first priority of any typeface. In that sense, Fraktur could be connected with elitism, old structures of social order, despotism, etc. Ironically, several designers interviewed in the documentary Helvetica equated the ultimate modernist sans serif, Helvetica, with war, consumerism, uniformity, oppression, etc. Functionality, by the late 20th century, came full circle to become a typographic oppressor instead of liberator. At least that's what some post-modernists said. Don't quote me on this.

3. Tschichold thought EVERYTHING should be in Grotesk. Everything.

And, finally, I think the answer to the Grotesk vs. Law question, the only answer, from the Tschichold perspective, is that words themselves are not objective, but rather their graphic representation should be (hence the sans serifs). So, I think that posing Grotesk and Law against each other is invalid because one is a typeface and the other is something the typeface represents. Feel free to shoot me down on this one.

On to my ever-exciting activities of the day:

I went to the library to see if the Berliner illustrierte Zeitung ever switched out of Fraktur during the Weimar Republic. It didn't. While I was looking, I came across an interesting tidbit that goes back to my original topic: representations of the New Woman. In an October issue of the BIZ, 1927, the cover featured an image of a woman and a man, dressed and styled almost identically with fitted sport coats, ties, slick hair, and cigarettes, walking together with figures in the background looking on and evidently making snide remarks about the woman's androgynous appearance. Inside the front cover, the Zeitung posed a question with a competition for who could come up with the wittiest answer. It was similar to the New Yorker caption contest, but mean. Here is what it said:

"Das Bild auf der Titelseite zeigt eine Zeitgestalt "Fräulein Mia," einen neuen Mädchentyp, der sich in Arbeit, Lebensführung, und Erscheinung den Mann zum Vorbild genommen hat...Was sagen Sie bloß zu Fräulein Mia? 3.000 M für die witzigsten Lösungen."

Hilarious. (Not.) Coming into this topic, I was sort of expecting to have to interpret a lot of complex imagery with many meanings reflecting different views of women, but this is pretty blatant and straightforward. It will be interesting to compare this view with images from Die Dame in 1927 and 28.

I went to the Käthe Kollwitz museum in the afternoon. I have to say, of all the art I've seen so far, hers is easily the most beautiful, in my opinion. Even her political posters feature handwritten script, which is refreshing after thinking really hard about Modernist typeface lately.

I also started reading a book by a designer named Erik Spiekermann called Ursache & Wirkung: ein typographische Roman. To be honest, I don't really understand it. But, his basic thing is that modernists are bad because they make everything uniform, which is not the way things are. He is also just awesome, as demonstrated in this news clip.

Even though I find Spiekermann fascinating, his super precise and technical discussion of typeface in his book sort of made me realize that I am completely unequipped to actually study typography, mostly because of my lack of background in graphic design. So, I think I might change gears a bit and try to ground my investigations in history a bit more. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, I guess the only Richtung to head at this point is forward, which I will do by looking more at Die Dame, maybe checking out the DDR museum (the Buchstabenmuseum has gotten me super interested in relics/material implications of the fall of the DDR), and attempting to get access to the poster archive of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. That would be truly epic, as kids these days would say. In any case, stay tuned.

Schrift in Berlin, pt. 1: Alexanderplatz

I went to the Bauhaus Archive museum today. It was very cool. I saw some more drawings, models and things by all the famous Bauhaus greats: Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, etc. I liked (of course) one quotation of Herbert Bayer the exhibit had up on the wall: "wir schreiben alles klein, denn wir sparen damit zeit." Bayer wanted to reject was he perceived as German over-use of capitals. Turns out a typeface has been developed based on his drawings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ABayer.png

When I emerged from the U Bahn at Alex afterward, I decided to start a bit of a photo project to go along with my wanderings. There isn't much point, except to take pictures of Schrift in Berlin because I like it. Unfortunately, the photography is not good thanks to my low-level camera and perpetually bad light in Berlin. Alas, life goes on. So, for today, here is Schrift in Berlin, pt. 1: Alexanderplatz.

Tomorrow I will go back to the library (for real this time), then probably check out the Käthe Kollwitz museum. I might even take a break from talking about type/lettering. Maybe.