Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) was never a
typographer, so the title of this book looks, at first glance, like a deliberate
provocation. While Dubuffet's work is now canonized and its critical power of
evocation seems to have been put to one side, for Pierre Leguillon that
evocativeness literally represents a pretext:
a pretext for a consideration of the outlook for writing as the digital age
increasingly delegitimizes writing by hand. Delving into various public and
private archives, including those at the Dubuffet Foundation in Paris, the
Kandinsky Library at the Pompidou Centre and the IMEC in Caen, Leguillon collected
and photographed a wide variety of ephemera, ranging from catalogs, artists'
books, notebooks and language notebooks to posters, invitations and even record
sleeves. He then rearranged the resulting images to produce a kind of
anti-manual of typography, in which various subjects, vocabularies, styles and codes
are grouped together into ad hoc “families”
following one after another. The constellation of typographic frolics in
Dubuffet's work might amount to a form of deliberate "marketing strategy" – his signature or brand, as it were. But that
strategy turns out to be duplicitous. Making use of the gamut of possibilities
offered by reproduction techniques (linocut, lithography, offset printing
etc.), Dubuffet does not appear here as a calligrapher (a technique that
presupposes the uniqueness of the signs produced), for the writing almost invariably
involves duplication. And, in Dubuffet's struggle, from the 1950s on, against
culture, or for "anti-culture", his efforts to undermine typographic
type and standardized principles of layout can be regarded as the culmination,
on the visual level, of his painstaking enterprise to sabotage language.
This publication formed part of Pierre
Leguillon's project for the 2013 Carnegie International on Jean Dubuffet
Graphic design by Stéphane De Groef and Pierre
Leguillon
Published in 2013
In French and English
15.2 x 21 cm
364 pages
ISBN: 978-2-930667-05-8
EAN: 9782930667058
