Julija Gracin and Nevena Štokić
The Linotype, the Machine behind the Black Art
FOREWORD
The exhibition The Linotype, the Machine behind the Black Art was inspired by the visual appearance of the Linotype machine while it was located ‘out of sight’ in a dislocated depot of the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla in Zagreb. Pulling it out of oblivion at the exhibition, it was placed paradigmatically at the intersection of past and present time.
To start with, it is important to say that the exhibition was ideated in the tradition of art interventions in museum collections of various kinds, a practice that has been present in the world for over fifty years, and in Croatia for the last twenty years or so. Therefore, we invited the artist Viktor Popović to work with collections from the holdings of two museums, the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla and the Art Gallery of the National Museum in Zadar. Approaches of this kind aim to reinterpret museum collections outside great historical narratives, address painful social and economic facts perpetuated by museum collections, and offer different points of view and different potential ways of inhabiting our world.
The first impression of the object itself in the darkness of the depot, seen with a torch that randomly illuminated its keyboard deformed by use and negligence, on which one could barely make out the letters, and over the keyboard key rods resembling the inside of a concert piano and the thousand other mysterious parts entangled in cobwebs and layers of dust, intuitively imposed a different approach to the exhibition.
We approached it in a personification of an object (a Linotype machine), with empathy for the complete absence of any reason why it should exist in the present day, and we tried to ‘revive’ it through descriptions (which partly touches the essence of the museum profession) and enlarged photographs by art photographer Ante Brkan from the Ante Brkan Collection of Negatives in the Art Gallery of the National Museum in Zadar. Also with a dose of reflection on the world we live in, in which technological breakthroughs replace one another quickly and mercilessly, regardless of the consequences for the planet we are turning on and for ourselves.
The object in question – a Linotype machine (inventory number TMNT 6338), is a machine that revolutionised one segment of printing, that which concerns preparing a text for print – typesetting, i.e. assembling letters in lines. Thomas Alva Edison once declared it the eighth wonder of the world.
For several reasons, the invitation to artist Viktor Popović was of key importance for the entire exhibition, considering his previous work and his sensibilities. One of the main reasons is the time and again confirmed importance of the visual thinking of visual artists, through which they create and open up new and different connections and associations, enriching and underlining original ideas. Another reason was that Viktor Popović has been using dust as a material in his recent projects. Six serigraph prints, using as a pigment dust removed from the Linotype machine in the holdings of the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla, which Viktor asked us to preserve before cleaning the object according to the rules of the museum profession, are a punctum of the exhibition. They are its conclusion and something that we will describe in the first part of the catalogue.
Therefore, in the catalogue we will start from the end. There are two different formats, the exhibition catalogue and the exhibition itself, and they require different approaches. The exhibition space dictated the layout of the exhibition, and this cannot be repeated in the catalogue. Therefore, we reverse the order of the following titles present at the exhibition: Introduction, Parentheses, Francesco Petrarca and the shape of letters, The letter and the Linotype typesetting machine, Matrix, Style and size of letters and typographic point, Typographers – people of lead, Keyboard, Spaces between words and lines, Difference between manual and mechanical typesetting, Linotype – a typesetting machine, Letters and lines just before printing, ‘Faces of our time’ in Brkan’s way, Composition of time (instead of a conclusion), and we summarise it in three parts: Composition of times, Composition of letters and Typographers – people of lead, with scans of three articles from the newspaper Narodni list that were present at the exhibition and which concern the composition of letters.
Four visual decisions by Viktor Popović were important for the layout of the entire exhibition content, from idea to realisation. The first was to enlarge Ante Brkan’s photographs taken in the Narodni list printing house in Zadar between 1950 and 1970. The second and third were to place the Linotype machine in the centre of the exhibition hall, but to in a way hide it from view from the main entrance with three large canvases on which three of Brkan’s photographs were printed, measuring 370 by 370 centimetres. The fourth decision was to place it paradigmatically on an axis between past and present and facing a print showing the Linotype machine from a 1930s brochure, which we obtained virtually courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, and which shows the Linotype in its heyday.
An integral part of the exhibition was the photographs by art photographer Ante Brkan from the Ante Brkan Collection of Negatives in the Art Gallery of the National Museum in Zadar, taken between 1950 and 1970 in the printing house of the Narodni list newspaper in Zadar. Because of their number (shortlisted for the exhibition), but also their high quality, they form a cycle documenting work in one publishing house and, as such, are a rare document of national importance. We have not been able to find any such a cycle by any other important Croatian art photographer, but we leave open the possibility that we may have been wrong and that more will be found in some future research. A large number of these photographs came out in Narodni list (that is, in Glas Zadra, which was the name of that newspaper from 1950 to 1958) in the column In pictures and words, a column that did not change over the years and followed the life of the city and its surroundings.
Printing, which was called the black art for centuries, is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind, it is the basis of the progress of civilization and a basic condition for the spreading of knowledge, news, scientific and artistic achievements. It is an activity that deals with the design and production of printed products. However, printing is also an art that in one of its segments, that of composing text for printing, has remained unchanged for centuries. From Gutenberg’s discovery of printing using movable type and a printing press in around the 1450s, preparing a text for printing, that is, composing letters in a galley, was until the end of the 19th century, and in poorer regions until the middle of the 20th century, done by hand, just like in Gutenberg’s time. It is supposed that Gutenberg learned how to melt and process metal in goldsmiths’ workshops and in workshops for making metal stamps in his hometown of Mainz, which was then rapidly developing as a crafts, trading, cultural and political centre in Germany. These artisanal skills mastered by Gutenberg were crucial for him printing the Bible with movable type, and the later unstoppable growth of printing in Europe. Gutenberg crafted individual metal letters in the Gothic script himself, in one size, and he used them to print the Bible in Latin. Work on that book lasted from 1452 to 1455. It was calculated that one printing of two pages of text in two columns, each with forty-two lines (which is why Gutenberg’s Bible was called the 42-line Bible), needed 16,000 individual letters, which were then decomposed in order to be recomposed for the following words, lines and pages.
A big step forward in composing text for printing took place almost four centuries later. This happened in 1886 with the invention of the Linotype typesetting machine by watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler, in America. Manual typesetters could set up to 1,000 letters an hour. Working on a Linotype machine, an operator could set up to 6,000 letters an hour. Six thousand letters an hour is still the average typing speed on a computer keyboard when copying a text from a template; still today this links the past with the present.
At the exhibition the dust used as colour in Viktor’s graphic prints provided connection between times.
Just as things and occurrences fade and disappear, as do our memories and ourselves, we thought it incomplete to present one moment of history without a layer of its fragility.
COMPOSITION OF TIMES
The Faces of Our Time IN in Brkan’s Way
The history of Ante Brkan’s documentary photography goes back to his high-school days when, during his family’s internment in Messina and the Aeolian Islands, he started taking his first photographs and publishing them in Milan and Rome in the 1930s. After the war, in 1951, he opened a photographic workshop in the family home in Zadar’s Varoš, and a happy chance led the photographer Tošo Dabac to notice Bećarina on display in the studio window. He began encouraging Ante and his two-year-younger brother Zvonimir to send their photographs to exhibitions. Ante’s workshop was short-lived because he did not like taking photographs for documents, at weddings and funerals, and the tax policy at that time did not differentiate between a craftsman and a master photographer, so Ante called it a day in 1958 and got a job as a photojournalist for Narodni list. With a binocular Rolleiflex reflex camera, he set off on reporting assignments and spent the next 25 years in that job. The vast photojournalistic oeuvre of more than 30 thousand negatives, which are kept in the holdings of the Art Gallery of the National Museum in Zadar, represents the entire history of post-war Zadar, and continued the rich tradition of reporting and art photography in Zadar from the mid-19th century. Brkan was the contemporary successor of people who, in the long history since the invention of photography, made Zadar the second city, after Zagreb, in the importance and number of permanent and itinerant photojournalists and portraitists. From Brčić, Parčić, Burat, Peručić and Jeričević, and especially Andrović and Goldstein, who were already publishing photographs in the press in the 1890s. Their report about the tour of Emperor Francis Joseph through Dalmatia in 1875 was the first major photo coverage and stands at the foundation of the Croatian reporting tradition. One should also mention Brkan’s more immediate predecessors, such as Biagio Cigliani between the two world wars, who recorded everything important in the life of the city: archaeological research, monuments, political gatherings, private and public events. Earlier than that was Burat, the cornerstone of Dalmatian photography in the 19th century. Just like Ante Brkan, he freed photography from being a mere documentary service and deprovincialised it through his presence on the world stage and by winning awards that confirmed its high level. At the same time, this was a path which increasingly took photography away from artisanal towards art value, from a document to an aesthetic fact.
In his long photographic career, Ante Brkan always emphasised that his documentary photography should be separated from his art photography, so he left the former for newspaper printing and utilitarian purposes and did not bother to show it in exhibitions. As he said in an interview, ‘art photography is created, and journalist photography is found. The former is a work of imagination, and the latter of the nose.’ He also admitted that even against his will the documentary sometimes slipped into the artistic, and that ‘the artistic side slides into the business side’ (A. Brkan), that he obviously cannot keep them separate, and this is true, because many primarily documentary photographs can contain that special frame, singular vision, a detail, which distinguish his photographs made for exhibitions and salons. Abdulah Seferović, a great connoisseur of Zadar photography and of the work of Ante Brkan, called his so-called factual photography ‘true photograph of the community’, whereas art photography is considered to be ‘the photography that expresses beauty (according to old divisions dating back to the 19th century) and is based on the power of isolated facts and their metaphorical potential. The first offers answers, the second asks questions.’ Although paradoxically, claims Seferović, ‘in Brkan’s case, there is no difference between his exhibition and documentary photography. Both are based on the same concept... His creative photography does not deny its mimetic origin, and the journalist reporting does not hide a degree of stylisation...’ This is why it is sometimes difficult to separate Brkan’s photographs taken on a reporter’s assignment from those that resulted from a special consideration of details, some specific points, a singled-out person or a macro plan or micro situation. This is, as Seferović rightly points out, ‘because Ante is not committed either to the artistic or the documentary method, but to their synthesis, he did not move towards the glorification of pure form or towards socially engaged photography.’ This is very true, as a photographer of the street, of everyday life, of ordinary people in their daily preoccupations and occupations, and in his photographs taken in the printing house of Zadar’s Narodni list, Brkan was not a follower of engaged photography, but rather of the 20th-century current of humanistic photography which, especially in Europe, shows empathy, solidarity and at times humour. This is the kind of reporting about everyday human life that Edward Steichen spread worldwide as a kind of humanistic manifesto of photography in the great traveling exhibition The Family of Man in the fifties, that family of the single human race. Brkan must also have been influenced by August Sander’s panopticon of human figures in the Face of Our Time cycle from 1929, where people pose and present themselves as they like, and where the photographer does not disclose his sympathies or his estimate of the people portrayed. For him everyone is equal, rooted in the humanity that unites despite origin, social status, education and the like.
Brkan’s workers in the Narodni list printing house have those Sanderian typological characteristics. Each is individualised, often even separate from the group, and yet belonging to the community of typesetters, typists and rotation operators on their shared task: the production of a newspaper, which is created by the synergy of their joint and dedicated work. Today we look at Brkan’s ‘faces of our time’ with nostalgia for a past time of one technology and a way of producing news and newspapers that disappeared in the tangles of times of privatization. Our Sander from the Narodni list rotation also exemplified that main feature of humanistic photography from the second half of the 20th century, that is, being impartial, non-judgmental, non-categorising. He always finds it more important to capture, like Bresson, that “decisive moment” than to exalt, highlight or ridicule someone.
Dust as a Means of Expression
Dust is visible only when gathered over time. In his book on time, Time and Free Will, Henri-Louis Bergson writes about two types of time, time within us (heterogeneous, qualitative, whose moments permeate and enter each other) and time outside us (homogeneous, in space, with moments that we separated and named using words), but he never writes about time without us. Time is an anthropocentric category. Without us, there would be no one to name it. Nor dust, or anything else.
In a book published in 2023, Dust: A Modern World in a Trillion Particles, Jay Owens asks herself what is dust, ‘something so tiny, that slips beneath the limits of vision’. And she finds it in volcanic ash, fragments of rocks, ash and soot from coal and charcoal heating, which has been used since ancient times, then in mineral dust soil from the desert belt of iron-rich sands from the Sahara in northern Africa, through the Middle East, Central Asia, India to the Gobi desert in China, silt from dried up lakes, right up to, for example, microplastics and uranium nanoparticles in unprotected mining waste in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, or ‘urban dust’, a mixture of small abrasive particles of metal, rubber and asphalt from everyday road traffic and walk in on the soles of our shoes, skin flakes, our hair, textile fibres, disintegrating bits of our particleboard furniture or sofa foam and all the chemicals that can contain. ”Almost everything can become dust given time.”
Jay Owens continues: ‘We should take equal care to see dust not simply as a natural ‘given’, but also as a consequence of specific social relations (often inequitable) and human choices (often bad).’ In the light of that sentence, throughout the book she sees dust as a “shadow of modernity and progress, a consequence of industrial and commercial activities, the material traces of millions of bodies, their labours and their livelihoods”. She also sees it as a transgressor, a boundary-crosser, in other words – dirt, but she says that “for dust to become a type of dirt, widely perceptible as problem, it turns out that the objects on which it lands are just as important as particles themselves”, so a class perspective too becomes part of the story about dust. In the end, of course, as a ”matter at the very limit-point of formlessness, the closest ‘stuff’ gets to nothing”, dust is seen symbolically.
Viktor Popović has for several years been creating his graphic art using colour obtained from dust collected in different places and from various material objects. In that process, for the production of prints in screen printing, he uses archival photographs. At the exhibition, the material object from which dust was collected was a Linotype typesetting machine, and the archival photographs were six of the fourteen photographs by Ante Brkan shown at the exhibition. Visually and semantically, Viktor Popović uses dust in graphic prints as a means of expression of transgressing, boundary-crossing (in the direction of negation, disappearance) and as a symbol. As an art material it has a dose of strangeness, which, however, is not strange for the artist; he has been working with found materials for many years, for example, glowing tubes of argon gas, iron constructions of hospital beds, lead, rubber, etc. If dust as art material is seen as sign then we can say with art historian Klaudio Štefančić that Viktor uses the procedures, signs and codes of high modernism, while freeing them from ideology.
The graphic prints are a vital part of the exhibition, they infiltrate the very essence of our livelihoods and bring an element of contemplation into the spaces of all our labours and efforts. They take us back to frailty, evanescence and even futility, and bring ideas of progress back to a human measure. They correspond to the machine in its impermanence, with the time that surpassed it never to be started up again.
We believe that it was a challenge for Viktor Popović to design the entire exhibition around just one object and fourteen selected photographs by Zadar art photographer Ante Brkan, which he enlarged to 260 x 260 centimetres, and in sublimation printing on the sheets around the Linotype machine to 370 x 370 centimetres, recreating in the exhibition space the meticulous, dedicated atmosphere of a small printing house from the 1950s to the 1970s, visually enriching the original idea and turning the whole exhibition layout into a comprehensive artistic environment. Enlarged photographs alongside graphic prints with the machine as a sculpture are visually intertwined and all together create “total installation”. Ante Brkan’s photographs brilliantly withstood the enlargement and it is incredible to think that, for example, it took just one passing of light through a layer of film in 1955 to capture a newspaper flight as its pages were being stacked into one another, because Brkan’s Rolleiflex camera only had 12 shots and he could not afford to fritter them away mercilessly. In his graphic prints, Viktor Popović reproduces the content of Brkan’s photographs. He repeats his images by other means of expression, not to preserve them forever, but to let us see them anew with different eyes. The process of repetition is at the same time an effort, a reanimation and an absurd act. It is as inexorable as the moment that equals everything. In his book Camera Lucida, Barthes calls the referent of a photograph, the person or thing photographed, the Spectrum of the Photograph, not concealing that any shot or as he writes “any eidolon emitted by the object adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph”. Through the process of repetition, as done by Viktor Popović, Barthes’s that rather terrible thing becomes deeply moving. Just as moving is the dust used as the material to make the pigment for the prints. Besides its symbolic meaning equal for us all, it is this material, as an everyday particle, with which the art graphics were laboriously printed, perhaps with the wish for art also to become an everyday particle, and to make noticeable what today is hardly noticed at all.
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