Interview with Achal Prabhala for the Believer, part of an ongoing series of Wikipedia related interviews.
“The presumption of translation is a way of saying “look, the world is one thing. We’ve written it down. Why would you bother to rewrite it?””
The Confidence Man, Herman Melville’s farewell to fiction, is made up of a series of meetings on a steamboat heading down the Mississippi. Actors and professional speakers will deliver speeches adapted from the text as a theatrical performance.
This is a 28 x 21 x 3cm compilation put together by Hunter Kennedy – who not only edited all 434 pages but also typeset the whole thing manually on a typewriter. I have some drawings with text in here alongside work by David Berman, Dave Eggers, Brad Neely and Wells Tower.
3rd-24th March, 2012
Henryk Tomaszewski made very funny cartoons in the 40s and 50s. They were occasionally banned by censors and often he just printed them as postcards and mailed them to his readers. Speedy pictograms became a popular language of non-censorable public dialogue, cheap posters, graffiti, whatever surface you could write on.
In 1947 he was asked to make posters advertising imported films. Helped by budget and printing restrictions – he was able to convince the govt and distributors to use his drawings instead of pictures of the actors. These images often had a very indirect relation the films themselves.
Later in his career he taught design at the WAFA, to students from all over Europe including the French designers who later created posters for the 68 protests and after that started the Grapus design group, where Thomas Hirschhorn once worked – another artist who appears to be influenced by HT’s ideas.
Henryk Tomaszewski is well recognised today but only in the design community as a sort of witty hand craftsmen, which is a shame because it’s the least interesting thing about him.
Some translations:
1. Tea / Wallpaper / Chair / Tablecloth / Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. INTEGRATE! INTEGRATE!
4. CATCH: Potato Peel / Seaweed / Blood Sausage
6. Tomb of a Pharaoh / Tomb of Mr Kowalski, Polish Service Troops.
7. The battle of the old and the new / The battle with alcohol
A drawing exhibition in Amsterdam that I’m putting some old works into. It’s a show on funny drawings features many artists including Saul Steinberg and Lily Van Der Stokker. It takes places 10-24 Feb at the Westergasfabriek. More here.
Thanks to everyone who wrote and drank. We photographed the bottles where they were left.