After I have read Marinetti’s Manifesto, as well as Beatrice Warde’s ‘The Crystal Goblet’ I’d found that Both pieces of text were written between 1900 and 1969 but have completely different views on typography of that era. (http://www.typographia.org/1999/graphion/crystal-goblet.html) Warde talks about how text, like a Crystal Goblet shouldn’t detract from the thing that it is presenting, for example amazing wine shouldn’t have any attention taken away from it by the thing that holds it. That text should be discrete so that the information it holds can read and understood. Text should have structure and order and shouldn’t be distracting in anyway because this takes away value and meaning from the information within the text.
I found Warde to be a very unappealing woman. From reading the text I got the opinion that Warde was a very unimaginative woman, that she was very stuck in her tracks and disliked change. Although I understood that she was opposed to any change to the idea of Typography I didn’t quite understand why. I remember reading a passage that read something along the lines of if you make the text more than a piece of text, then the meaning in the words disappears, and I loosely agree with this statement from Warde. Something which I wasn’t sure would happen since I disagreed with everything else she has said. However I agree that if you alter a piece of text so much so that it is illegible, then there is no meaning to the text, that it is simply shapes on a page. However, contrasting my other opinion, is that I don’t always see this as a bad thing. For example if the piece of text is dull and meaningless, then doing something creative and interesting could be nothing but an improvement.
Marinetti’s manifesto (http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/) wasn’t a very simple thing to read. It was very descriptive and imaginative and although it describes how he intends to change typography he goes about it in a very dreamlike manner. The introduction of this piece of text is, “We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts.” From this small section of the manifesto you can imagine how the rest of the text is written. Although I enjoyed reading the text, I found it very fantasy-like, as if I were reading a fiction novel. Although I enjoyed reading the text, I was slightly worried that I was missing the point of the text, so I went back to read through it again, which didn’t help much.
I understand that before the Italian Revolution everything was very strict that that there were very strict guidelines as to what could be used for and described as a piece of text. So I believe that Marinetti’s Manifesto is the story of his uprising and his rebellion on the Government so introduce change into the country.
We then went away, and using these two pieces of text came to make our own pieces of art in the style of Marinetti.
Some feedback that I had gotten from my tutor was that although I had done something very abstract with the weave of text, I was still in the mind set of needing to read the text from left to right, so I need to get over that need, and not to think of the words as words, but as images that I can use to make abstract images.
——————————————————————————————————————————————–
Link to Beatrice Warde’s ‘The Crystal Goblet’: http://www.typographia.org/1999/graphion/crystal-goblet.html
Link to Marinetti’s manifesto: http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/
stacey2.0 