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"Trickle-down" is an Orange-Colored Phrase: Providence poster art's fight for Olneyville
Alexandra Gutierrez
This magazine issue was produced in varying fits of panic, boredom, and inspiration.
An unusually fickle winter overstayed its welcome, and April once again proved to
be the cruelest month. Geographical and material influences included Brutalist
dorm architecture, aeroplane coquetry, English crockery, and sundry short-
term metabolic pathway failures. Dull roots were revitalized with Garnier
Nutrisse. The whole wasteland of the lower level was evacuated and
excavated, skeletons and all. Somebody went furniture bumming.
Salient aesthetic elements include a humanistic bent, bias-cut
flourishes, signature political alignments, and judicious
sprinklings-in of sizeable points. Writers and fancifiers
featured in this issue pulled their ideas from polluted
air and also occasionally from their imaginations.
They formed their ideas of art and literature early
as library card-holders and schoolyard
delinquents, excelling in the subjects
of letterformation and garnering
“A”s in everything else. The font of
readerly pleasure wrote back
on the third day to say thank
you for the fine lines; it was
a miracle they survived
in the mail.
The
unnoticed
miracle of the
practice of modern
reading is that readers
should be so accommodating
towards the letterforms that
comprise their texts. Thousands of
distinct typefaces exist for the English
language alone, many of which are as dissimilar
in their representation of individual letterforms as
a Van Eyck painting is from a Pollock. Why should a
Gothic blackletter “A” with its grotesquely elongated proportions,
its vertical diamond-tipped strokes, be recognized as the same signifier
as a Century Gothic “A”, a 20th-century streamlined, geometric exercise in
rasterization and digital perfection? Yet, as readers, we assimilate these differences,
only dimly registering their radical divergences; instead, we stitch together the slightest
traces of commonality among them and collectively call the figures on the page, “A.” The
reader’s elasticity makes space for the writer’s (or typesetter’s, or typographer’s) freedom of
expression; the reader’s labor of synthesis allows for the writer’s visual individuation.
back to Spring 2007 Table of Contents
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