Abstract
What links Thomas More to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti? And how does the creativity of video clips relate to Futurist posters? And yet there is a common thread called lettering, which is variously articulated in the expressiveness of the typographic characters of the artists.
Reflections, comparisons, narrations and experiments on alphabets are proposed, as well as the study of new characters in reference to the cultural and artistic environment in which they develop; graphic and typographic contexts are analyzed which are capable of “exploding” knowledge and imagination from the post-Renaissance utopian context to the Futurist revolution, up to the most innovative trends in the digital world.
Lettering is perhaps the most appropriate area of graphics for experimenting, thinking, inventing, narrating and playing with elementary forms. Letters represent an extreme synthesis of the meanings of nature and of geometry and suggest unusual alphabets, prompting us to invent new stories. There is a bi-planarity present in a letter of the alphabet: that of expression and that of content (signifier and meaning), but there is also an arbitrariness that does not connect, in any way, one to the other.
“Twenty-two letters: God drew them, hewed them, combined them, weighed them, interchanged them, and through them produced the whole creation and everything that is destined to come into being.”
The Sefer Yetzirah
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Notes
- 1.
Arts and Crafts, with John Ruskin and William Morris, was an artistic movement for the reform of the applied arts, a sort of cultured reaction of artists and intellectuals to the increasingly advanced industrialization in the late nineteenth century.
- 2.
«Space no longer exists […] Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensibilities have already grasped the obscure manifestations of mediums? […] You think that we are mad. Instead, we are the Primitives of a new sensibility that has been utterly transformed. Beyond and outside the atmosphere in which we alone live, there is nothing but shadows. We Futurists are ascending to the highest and most radiant summits, and we proclaim ourselves the Lords of Light, for already we are drinking from the quickening sources of the Sun. Milan, 11 April 1910.»
- 3.
From the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture: […] There can be no renewal of an art if at the same time its essence is not renewed, that is the vision and the concept of the line and masses which form its arabesque […] There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation. Consequently, if a sculptural composition needs a special rhythm of movement to augment or contrast the fixed rhythm of the sculptural ensemble (necessity of the work of art), then one could use a little motor which would provide a rhythmic movement adapted to a given plane and a given line.
- 4.
Distruzione della sintassi. Immaginazione senza fili. Parole in libertà. F.T. Marinetti, 11 May 1913. The complete manifesto: https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/I_Manifesti_del_futurismo/Distruzione_della_sintassi,_immaginazione_senza_fili,_parole_in_libertà.
- 5.
Distruzione della sintassi: RIVOLUZIONE TIPOGRAFICA. (op. cit.)
- 6.
Catalog of the exhibition La Russie et les avant-gardes, 2 July, 5 November 2003, Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vance, France.
- 7.
The poem Il Palombaro (The Diver), published in the Futurist collection Rarefazioni e parole in libertà (Rarefactions and Words in Freedom) of 1915, dedicated by Govoni to Marinetti. A rare example of visual poetry that involves reading and sight.
- 8.
The poem tells the story of the immersion of a diver in the lively underwater world. According to the Futurist canons, the entire poem is metaphorical: the jellyfish is defined as “beggar’s umbrella”; the branches of coral are defined as “metallic coral spring”; the holothurian is the “verminous rag merchant’s bag”; the actinia is indicated as the “bloody stump where the decapitated sirens left their serpentine hair”; the diver, armed with an axe, is defined in various ways: first a “scarecrow,” a “puppet for the silent theater of the fish,” a “deep acrobat,” but then becomes a “masked gravedigger who steals the bodies of the drowned,” a “hermetic murderer,” an “underwater executioner.” He is therefore a threatening and hostile presence connected to the world above through what is called a “fishing line,” an “umbilical cord” coming from the surface of the sea.
- 9.
Among the most well-known: La Città Futurista (1928 and 1929). La Città Nuova. Quindicinale di arte-vita (1932 and 1934), La Terra dei Vivi. Turismo arte architettura (1933), Stile Futurista (1934–1935), La Forza. Mensile dei Gruppi Naturisti-Futuristi Italiani (1935) are essentially architecture magazines originating in Turin within the activities of the ArtisticTrade Unions and very similar to each other in graphics. Stile Futurista, the only one with a rotogravure format, in coated paper and color. In each of these modern publications there are announcements, posters, theoretical and programmatic texts aimed at exalting the most recent achievements of the Futurist movement.
- 10.
- 11.
See Gianluca Marziani, Melting Pop. Combinazioni tra l’arte creativa e i nuovi linguaggi creativi, Castelvecchi, 2001.
- 12.
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Acknowledgements
The activity presented in the paper is part of aspect dealt with in the Visual Communication and Design course and in the workshop held in December 2018 for the Master’s Degree Course in Science of Primary Education at the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria. This is an experience conducted on dynamic alphabets and expressive lettering which the author has been dealing with for over fifteen years. A research aimed at favoring a methodological approach that allows students to know how to orient themselves and to know how to choose the most appropriate methodologies to be able to conceive and narrate stories and narratives for children with different techniques and materials.
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Fatta, F. (2020). Lettering and Expressiveness. When Characters Tell a Story. In: Cicalò, E. (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination. IMG 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1140. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41018-6_21
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