Kawara, originally uploaded by SHSH
My love of typography and letters brings me often to two different, but complementary artists: On Kawara and Jenny Holzer. While both artists use type and form to create beautiful works of art, the comparisons end there. Kawara’s Today series feature a stark hand-lettered date on a solid field; a date with no context. Whereas Holzer’s work (below) is a self-contained phrase or assemblage which can stand alone – almost monadic.

That is why experiments in this realm are so exciting. Especially when you look at work in either a Structuralist or Post-Structuralist manner. In other words, the meaning and the text are do distinct, but rather coupled and viewed through such lenses as culture, education, context, etc.
A few years ago a group called the “Salute the Rough Guys” were plastering signs throughout New York City with witty slogans set in beautiful type. Most of the posters were decrying the current (circa 2006) art scene as shallow and over-hyped.

Another great recent example of typographical art is Jenny Beorkrem’s posters of city neighborhoods from San Francisco to Brooklyn. There is such a great demand of her work that many of the silkscreen versions are sold out. The work captures a snapshot of neighborhood names (which often mutate) on landforms which are often unchanging.

While Beorkrem’s and Kawara’s work are both analogous by connecting their work to specific contexts, only Beorkrem’s is the work which is explicitly connected to place, time, and a discreet context. The dialectic from context to monad could be represented as:

• Beorkrem – Time, place, space
• Salute the Rough Guys – Time & context
• Kawara – Time
• Holzer – Monad