In Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play, Doctor Faustus, the title character is a fabled scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life. He makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.
For his exhibition at the Swiss Church in London, Glasgow-based typographer Edwin Pickstone has taken Marlowe’s play as his subject; deconstructing the text so that each of its 12,247 words is isolated and printed on its own page. Carpeting the floor of the main hall, these pages, or flyers, convert what is a weighty text in both content and historical significance to ephemera. The installation thus explores the value of print — how the choice of printing method, surface and print run effects how an object is read, appreciated and valued.
Mirroring the narrative of the play, the text has been processed through a custom written software that progressively distorts the shape of the words. Pickstone likens this to making a ‘pact’ with the program, as he forsakes his control over the end product to pre-set parameters. (In a similar way Faust surrendered his soul to the Devil with little idea of the consequences.) In essence, Pickstone points out, this is our relationship with modern communication technologies — we readily use smart phones, tablets and laptops without knowing their long term affect on human relationships, behaviours and bodies.
The choice of the play was influenced by the installation’s context: the Swiss Church is spiritually rooted in the Swiss Reformation. The play’s emphasis on independent learning and the sin of pride links it to the Protestant Reformation — the schism from the Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther — that marks its 500th anniversary in 2017. Characterised by the rejection of religious images and icons, the period saw the destruction of thousands of iconographic books and artefacts. In conjunction, the development of the printing press at this time gave rise to the spread of written propaganda throughout Europe that caused new ideas, thoughts, and doctrine to be made available to the public. Pickstone’s installation expands on these two contradictory impulses — one to destroy and the other to disseminate — and takes the title of Biblioclasm, meaning the extreme criticism or destruction of books.
Upstairs, the nod towards iconoclasm continues with a number of prints and artist’s books. 1 gram of black ink squared (2011), is a print that represents the surface area a gram of ink occupies on a page of white paper. Its sister work, the artist’s book 1 kilo of black ink cubed (2017) extends this proposition to a kilogram. Aesthetically, the works are reminiscent of Malevich’s Black Square (1913), arguably the first work to abandon any attempt at pictorial representation (Malevich believed that through abstraction he could represent the “divine in its purest form accessible”). Whilst Pickstone’s works concern mathematics and units of measurement rather than spirituality, they are similar to the Russian Suprematist’s in the demand they place on their viewer/reader. A certain degree of imagination is required to visualise the cube of black ink represented by 1 kilo of black ink cubed — the book’s pages can only take one so far.
In a similar way The Components of War and Peace (2013) quantifies the ingredients required to print Tolstoy’s famous novel. In disassembling the volume to its material components — 671 sheets of paper and 16.3g of ink — Pickstone seeks to question the importance/necessity of the physical object in the context of digital technologies. If one can store seemingly unlimited amounts of information in the ‘cloud’, what are you left with when you look at a printed work?
