literature

The Schrift-Landschaften drawings by Herbert Pföstl

| Paul Greer

“The Schrift-Landschaften drawings are composed of a single text-fragment, written in Herbert Pföstl’s distinctly small script, inscribed upon a page from a nautical traverse table. One is reminded of the particularities of calligraphic expression and the meditative processes required to create needlework samplers, chronological tables, weather diaries, or even telegraphic code. Pföstl’s landscapes of script, however, come from a deep reading of and reliance upon literature; these lines are fragments from books gathered over many years and transformed into a landscape of incantations for the artist. What at first appears a wilderness of words on paper soon resolves into a garland of vows concealed within the text. These works are a meditation on the artist’s abiding interest in the liminal space which often exists between drawing and writing.”

— Epidote Press

More in Codex:

“What was the comics scene like in Argentina…”

Quote | | Paul Greer

“..in this period in the 1950s and early ’60s? You were there with all these people I’ve already mentioned along with Oscar Zàrate and so many others. From reading about it, it feels like this was a really creative and dynamic time.”

munoz

– “Yes, it was a paradise. There were different languages, backgrounds, cultural viewpoints that were circulating around and trading funny and/or tragic stories with each other. The stories mixed together fluidly, spontaneously, through films, historietas, literature, and radio. There, reality and imaginative fiction and other fantastical stories came together to produce an intimate mix that, it seems to me, encouraged us greatly. We lived near, and in, the wide open spaces of the Argentine pampa lowlands, something that needed us to fill it with stories. I and others believed that everything that we read, watched, and listened to was happening to us, was happening there. Parallel realities leapt out from the pages and the screens into our surroundings, into our souls. Argentina tried, but did not fully succeed, in making immigrants forget their pasts. And Buenos Aires was infused with a cosmopolitan atmosphere; we were and we could be, anywhere. Calé, Arlt, Ferro, Borges, Solano López, Hudson, Dickens, Bradbury, Monicelli, Bergman, Bioy Casares, Oesterheld, Breccia, Pratt, Roume, Chandler – they all spoke to us of Buenos Aires, of Argentina, and of the world that surrounded us from the pampa to Irkutsk, being everywhere all at once. I suppose it was the same in New York. I imagine it that way as well, feverish.”

José Antonio Muñoz

Musemathematics

Quote | | Paul Greer

“Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn’t see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is.”
– James Joyce from Ulysses

Frightened Control Freaks

Quote | | Paul Greer

    “Whenever I’ve had to write prose I always find writing the description is really frustrating, because I think I could just draw this. And also there’s always so much more content to a drawing than to a prose description. I feel like there’s always so much more to be done with that. Plus when you’re writing prose you’re competing against Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and it’s very difficult to do anything that would be ultimately satisfying in terms of really differentiating yourself. At best I could write a halfway decent novel. That’s all I could ever hope for and that would be quite an accomplishment.”

 

    “It sometimes seems like that’s the overriding trend in comics right now, beautiful drawings and empty stories.
I can’t tell if that’s just the result of a generation of kids who are raised with this different form of receiving media. Is it that or is it just that they’re coming out of the art world more than they used to? I don’t know, but there is something very strange about that. It doesn’t seem to be attracting people who just want to create stories and aren’t that visually oriented. You would sort of think that would be a part of the comics world that was opening up. At least I haven’t really seen that. Or they could just be doing stories I’m not very interested in.”

– Daniel Clowes