An excerpt from my initial 3,000 words:
In a small passport photo booth, a woman tilts her chin down and allows her side-swept bangs to fall in front of her nose, covering her face almost entirely. With a quick flash, her photo is taken. Captured in this faceless photo, the wave in her hair reveals a letter S.
This photo contributes to a poster designed by Paul Elliman for Fuse 5: Virtual Fuse in 1992. Twenty-six of his friends were asked to visit a passport photo booth and each act out letters of the alphabet with their bodies, from the shoulders up. Sitting still in a confined space, participants were limited in their props and positions. Using long hair hanging over the right shoulder to represent the descender of a P, a loosened tie to form the diagonal stems of a Y or a mouth opened wide to imitate an O–each letter required its designer to think carefully about how their body could resemble and express a character in the alphabet.
“Elliman’s unwillingness to ‘separate the body from the writing’ is a reflection on contemporary uses of technology and the idea that ‘every mark and image and human act, in a very cybernetic sense, is more or less understood as an extended writing’,” writes Teal Triggs, a graphic design historian fascinated with typographic experimentation. She traces Elliman’s inspiration to use the body to form letters, back to early medieval manuscripts which were adorned with painted images of humans to give the alphabetic writing a living presence.
We had two full days of intensive Work-in-Progress presentations with visiting critic Peter Hall and other faculty members last month, and I was (and kind of still am) overwhelmed with the feedback. While most of it was positive and helpful, I had to open myself up to new themes and readings that have restructured my thesis narrative almost entirely. And I’m still working on that elevator pitch.
Research for this thesis has been so intriguing so far that I just wish I had more time. I thought I would be sick of the topic by now, but it continues to evolve and connects me to new things all the time. Though I’ve interviewed at least a dozen designers and critics, there are still so many people I want to talk to. I feel like I’ve just started to write and won’t be able to conclude anytime soon.
Deciphering the Doodle is to become familiarized with Graham’s most iconic poses, beginning with her signature solo from Lamentation in 1930. Grounded with a wide stance, the first dancer who is drawn shrouded in a stretchy tube of fabric pulls tensely from the torso to the arms to represent the feeling of grief trapped under one’s skin. In Eilber’s choreography, the motion of pulling the upper body over the head slowly traces the top curve of the lowercase E. The dancer freezes once the character is performed. Quickly sweeping into a different figure like a phantom and leaving the static E behind, Woodward’s next dancer springs upwards with wrists flexed out, to capture the blissful energy of Graham’s performance in Satyric Festival Song. The figure even wears the same striped maxi dress as Graham did in 1932, and accentuates the long ascending lowercase L shape by flipping her long hair up in the air. The next character is more complex: to draw two parts of the double-storey lowercase G in a single swish, the dancer ducks low and spins on the spot while swinging her flexed limb upwards to draw the top circle, also known in type design as the bowl. This dancer mimics the gracious ballet style of the Bride in Appalachian Spring closely. Following the Bride, the double O’s in the wordmark Google are constructed with a ferocious leap. The dancer draws two circles in mid-air with both legs in a split, inspired by Night Journey, which premiered in 1947. This leaping move is especially significant as it exemplifies Graham’s technique to contract and release in dancing. Finally, the animation concludes with a high kick and the sweep of a long skirt forming the largest arc yet to construct the uppercase G. This move, derived from the performance Frontier ends the sequence with a fierce stomp of the leg on the baseline, revealing the Graham-inspired identity in its entirety.
With only 48 days left until my entire 10,000 word thesis is due, I’m really going to have to extend my writing beyond descriptions and be much more critical about the subject matter. Hence, I will be locking myself in at the NYPL tomorrow, filling my head with thoughts about performativity, cyborgs and typography. Along with my findings from Occupy with Type, I have a lot of material I need to work through.
Chin up, Cheryl.
