why limited...
A few years ago, in part to advertise his gallery exhibition, artist Patrick Mimran put up billboards in strategic positions in New York City; one read 'to express conceptual ideas write a book, don’t paint' another stated 'art is not always where you think you are going to find it' Although we do not claim to be in total accord with the artist's critical intentions these slogans and their occupation of commercial spaces echo our aims.
As we search for a way to engage with visual culture, largely one in which image is read as text, we're aware that the words we write with are images too. Our words and our images have the same systems, same structures, same fetish and commodity value. You can buy and sell words, ideas and criticism as you might a Picasso, a bag of chips or pornography. Sometimes, of course, that's a Citroen Picasso, and other times you'll only get the exchange value of a second hand car...
Some might talk of the possibilities of language as unlimited, of the procession of images, simulacra, as unending but, to us, Language is Limited in two respects. First, the vocabulary of postmodernism; its flattening of critical positions into an atonal mantra of relativism – where high and low culture lose their magnetic North and become one and the same. The second is in the visual realm, where increasingly our worlds are shaped by sound bites, lists made up of top tens, anthologies, page layouts – communication concertinaed into byte size representations via SMS messaging, the looped voice mail, a scrolling message board, or the chat room –where text and image are brought together in an online stream of emoticons and fcuking abuse. Limited Language is an attempt to weave these modes back into a framework – a narrative to be used, reused, utilised and again recycled. Not, we promise, just another rehash of the remix though –a cop out, to fill media space- but here we re-use and recycle as a deliberate technique because to re-visit concepts in different contexts, at different times is to enrich. To us, this is perhaps the difference between the 'been there, done that' traveller and their other -the one who re-visits a city, or a place within it, or a sentiment it evokes, again and again; not just to 'relive' it but to understand anew every time.
Limited Language as a brand will provide, we hope, an arena for both consumption and production. Although a slight conceit, it is a live project and a genuine attempt at providing a generative platform for graphic/design and its 'discourse'. In its first -and current- phase we are developing this website to form a live resource and an archive for research in to general [graphic] design issues. In phase 2 we will run three concurrent web logs, two of which will use our own writing as a starting point and the third will later be instigated by guests, possibly evolving from website contributions. Through these, we feel as if we can open up a reflexive platform for our writing and that of others.
Existing articles may divide and multiply… paragraphs from one topic may be isolated to generate new thinking elsewhere… topics may germinate… ideas from different web logs may intermarry. Ultimately, though, these words won't be organic at all, but –like images- designed - authored. We reserve the right to use your comments, to collage them together with our own imaginings. Just as walking down the street is as much about the mutterings and the conversation that you hear as it is about what you see, we hope to use the messages generated through the website to construct our critique. This critique will focus in particular on the experience of graphic design, visual culture and the everyday…
The outcome will be more than a list of sound bites, for the list documents, makes rational that which is fractured and we don't aim to make rational, so much as try to reignite the meaning, provide a coherent context for these manifold streams of 'world making' In Photoshop you can't save if you haven’t 'flattened' the layers. We don't aim to flatten, but produce a lamination of outputs, a composite for use and resale.
Finished pieces will be posted on the site and then we will seek to publish them formally under the Limited Language name. We will record the names of contributors (if known) to the selected piece.