On Saturday, I travelled by train from Berlin to Amsterdam, a journey of seven hours. I used the time to catch up on some reading. I'd read extracts from Fellow Readers: Notes on Multiplied Language by Robin Kinross before but it was good to read it in its entirety. I wish I'd read the book as part of my research for my essay on Transparency: Kinross touches on many of the themes that I had explored but with a more developed conclusion. Kinross's comments on Otl Aicher and the steely surface of modernism have a particular resonance.
Kinross's description of Aicher as 'a philosopher of cooking and kitchens' got me Googling. I knew that Aicher had designed the graphics for the kitchen manufacturer Bulthaup (with his typeface Rotis used for the logo) but I discovered that, in his capacity as consultant, he had also written, in 1982, a book, The Kitchen is for Cooking in which he described a new kitchen philosophy. Aside from stating that ergonomic working was the most important factor, Aicher also wrote “The kitchen is a function of man’s social nature. Cooking is only a pleasure when others join in eating. And cooking is even more of a pleasure if others join in the cooking.”
Kinross talks about the 'material dimension' of typography, beyond the printed words on the page: the choice of paper, the cover material, the flexibility of the book, the weight and size of the book - elements that I addressed in my introduction to Book Works at the bookstore Motto, in Berlin on Friday. Kinross suggests that, in the processing of texts and images, taste (in the mouth) is the only sense not to be affected - an interesting idea in relation to cook books.
Here are some extracts:
Page 11: A text is produced by writers, editors and printers. With luck, if they keep their heads down, designers might fin a role somewhere here too. The text is composed, proofed, corrected, perhaps read and corrected further. Then it is multiplied and distributed. Finally it is read alone but in common, for shared meanings.
Page 11: Correcting proofs, with its attempt to turn 'arbitrary' into 'intended', can stand as the clearest instance of this defining characteristic of typography.
Page 13: To the list of the non-determinable tendencies in reading, we can add that texts age and travel: or their contexts change both in time and place. Each generation, as well as each person, will find different meanings in a text.
Page 14: 'The truth lies somewhere in between' may be a truism, but one that is also true in this case, or in these particular cases of people reading texts. One only has to think of any reader turning the pages, misunderstanding, turning back to see what was said before, sneaking a look at the last chapter, being distracted by a phone call or the demands of a child, perhaps falling asleep and dreaming around the text, and then returning to this business of turning marks into meaning.
Page 16: If early printing was consciously done, that consciousness was not not articulated and disseminated. So typography is printing made conscious: printing explaining its own secrets with its own means of multiplying texts and images.
Page 19: As well as a designer, Otl Aicher was a kitchen-philosopher (and a philosopher of cooking and kitchens too). ... Over the last years of his life, Aicher was thinking and working around a particular set of themes. Modernist design had developed on from how it had been earlier in the century, even in the 1950s and 1960s. It needed to become more organic. Simple geometry and simple grid design weren't adequate. Yet there needn't and mustn't be any relapse into irrationalism or neo-classicism. The latter, especially, should still be read as a sign of totalitarianism. Centrally arranged texts set in capital letters fail to show meaning clearly enough. But worse: they are authoritarian. Text set in lowercase letters and with fixed word-spaces (i.e. unjustified) embodies principles of equality and informality.
Page 20: Otl Aicher's typography could be compared to the architecture of his friend Norman Foster. Its final products sometimes seem to belie the good thoughts that apparently generated them. Immaculate surfaces - as in the forbiddingly white and smooth paper of Aicher's book Typographie - have an anti-democratic feeling: they repel dialogue. So too Foster's buildings have tried to embody principles of openness and dialogue (for example, a workplace designed without hierarchy in its plan), while elements of the monumental (the huge staircase in Foster Associates' London office) or the impenetrable (reflective materials). Yet in a context of unprincipled shoddiness and inane pretentiousness, such quality of finish and clarity of thought have been refreshing. Aicher's work is an example, but one with dogmatic tendencies that need to be contested.
Page 20: What is enlightenment: 'Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!' An answer to the question: 'What is enlightenment' - Immanuel Kant, 1784
Page 24: The reproduction and distribution of text is part of the life-blood of social-critical dialogue. The argument for openness and clarity in typography is made, most importantly, for this reason. it is not a question of 'legibility' or mere appearance, whether 'traditional', 'classical', 'modern', 'classic modern', or anything else. It is now clear that 'modern' in style came to provide - despite the best professions of the democratic impulses of modernism - an immaculate surface that leaves no room for dialogue. There has to be something - in the text or image, in the way these are configured and made material - that allows a place for dialogue: a foothold, or perhaps an 'eye-and-handhold', in which the reader can grip, and then have a place from which to respond. This refers to the way in which the words are written, to the nature of the images, but also to the qualities of their material embodiments: disposition of information, the visual forms in which it is configured, texture and colour of substrate, the bulk and weight of the object, the way it flexes in your hands, and so on - into innumerable small considerations.
Page 25: This material dimension of typography, received by the reader through the senses of the body, reminds us of a special meaning of the term common sense. This is the 'common sense' of the human body, which joins together the five distinct faculties by which we gain knowledge of the world. The bodily dimension provides a set of limits and of physical possibilities, which are too little observed in the discussion of reading or viewing. Pages can become simply too big for comfort - or too shiny, too noisy, or even too disconcerting in their smell. Taste, in the mouth, is perhaps the one sense that is not deployed in our processing of text and images.
Page 28: Typographic and graphic designers do have skills and knowledge that could be useful. These things can find a place in the processes of creation and publication, not as an unveiling of mysteries, but as an open sharing. The calling of our designer bluffs by cheap computing technology may be embarrassing and uncomfortable, but to get rid of illusions is liberating. Then we can se where we are, attend to real issues.
Kinross, Robin (1994) Fellow Readers: Notes on Multiplied Language, London, Hyphen Press