︎ scratchingthesurface.fm

Phaidon’s Vitamin series has been running for over twenty years. Its eleven titles have focuses ranging from mediums such as clay, ceramics, thread and textiles to material processes like collage and drawing. The latest title, Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art is a global survey of over one hundred contemporary artists that use text in their works, chosen by a panel of industry nominators—a variable mix of collectors, writers, curators, critics, directors, and historians. There are instances of text used to evoke the slipperiness of language, text pulled from everyday street-level places, text to express the poetically ambiguous, text as a “bombardment of language”, and so on.

It is unusual, though, that design is not considered to have a stake in this project. It wouldn’t be a strain to imagine a sizable readership of Vitamin Txt being graphic designers. Despite this, the nominators of the artworks, for instance, include collectors, writers, curators, critics, historians but not graphic designers or design writers and critics. I am not wanting to revise Rick Poynor’s Art’s Little Brother argument from 2005, but the lack of consideration of typography specifically, or of graphic design more generally, is a peculiar omission. In fact, the way that Moffitt defines an artist is not too dissimilar to how some designers might also think of themselves: “a maker of worlds, an assembler of forms and content, a diviner who writes things—with or without words—into being”.

Read the full review here.