Common Currency

Common Currency: Samira Schneuwly in Conversation with Julia Born and Adam Szymczyk

10 December 2021, Zurich

‘Choice is authorship. Legitimate authorship.’¹

The following conversation examines parallels between editorial and exhibition design, and contemporary art curation. Designer Julia Born and curator Adam Szymczyk regularly collaborate on book and exhibition projects, and here they discuss the roles, methods and overlaps in their work.

Samira Schneuwly
If we look to the period when books were first printed and distributed, the people involved in book production took on several roles, working simultaneously as designers, authors, printers and binders. In more recent times we’ve seen a move towards specialisation, where people with specific skills work together. I’m interested to hear more about this approach to publishing, where the book involves complex interrelationships between practices. This is also a reason why I thought it would be nice to have a conversation with you, about how you understand your roles in making books.

Julia Born
It’s funny you formulate it this way, because lately designers have taken on a variety of roles; not just designing but also publishing, and sometimes printing as well, with tools like risograph printers and other sorts of homemade processes.

SS
Yes, it’s true that as designers we sometimes take on multiple overlapping tasks. Curators and graphic designers tend to have similar intentions, which is to make content accessible to a specific audience. As you have both collaborated on various projects, have you found equivalences between your practices?

JB
I think there are similarities. It also relates back to the talk that Adam gave during his ECAL visit. You were talking about curating, remember Adam? We were talking about storytelling, and in my practice I see a similarity to that. Last year we collaborated on a book for an exhibition that took place at Karma International, just on the other side of the street from where we are now, for the artist Elisabeth Wild. So, there was a kind of parallel process happening in what Adam was doing ‘in space’ and how that was translated into the book. It didn’t happen in sequence, but at about the same time.

SS
During this process, did you Julia participate in the making of the exhibition and Adam in the book?

JB
We worked closely together, over several sessions at my studio, trying to get a grip on the artist’s work and possible ways of ordering it, giving it a structure. I think I made a proposal for a sequence and then we worked on that together, creating several edits.

Adam Szymczyk
An exhibition can provide a pretext for a publication – but sometimes it can also be the other way round. It’s interesting to make an exhibition out of a book or to at least imagine that the book could eventually provoke an exhibition. The spatial experience of an exhibition is different to the space of a book, the latter being a rather metaphorical concept. Although a book is an object in space too, you don’t physically walk through a book.

SS
Regarding the spatial aspect of an exhibition, what expertise should a curator possess to design such a space?

AS
I am not sure, which specific skills I have as a curator, or even if I want to represent this profession. I like to think that I don’t have any. I try to use different abilities that I acquired during my life and education. I don’t follow one method or philosophy. I don’t really know what it means to be a curator, except for that, in my case, I work mostly with contemporary or twentieth century art and occasionally older works, trying to connect them in configurations that allow meanings to emerge and new readings to follow. It’s a process of assembling and disassembling. For instance, right now, probably because I’m identified as a curator, somebody asked me to do a show. But I have no idea what the show should be about and why I should make it at all.

JB
Is there a topic?

AS
Not yet.

JB
But there is a place and a context?

AS
The context is a university gallery. The invitation, as is unfortunately often the case these days, is completely open. I hate being given a carte blanche, a lazy commission. In graphic design I suppose as much as in curating, it’s always good to have some guidelines or at least a sense of direction at the start, a reason for doing something.

SS
Do you see parallels between an exhibition visitor and the reader of a book?

AS
Both go through a physical and intellectual experience extending in time, sure.

SS
Do you see differences in how you approach a new project? How was it with the Elisabeth Wild book Fantasías?²

JB
In a way, working on that book was an organic process, so it’s hard to say anything precise about the beginning, because there was initially the idea to make the show. And then with the show, there was the idea to make a small book and then this book grew with more components being added over time. I find it hard to define the beginning, because there is the work of a person, and in this case, it was a very specific body of work, Elisabeth Wild’s collages. Then there were works by other artists added to the exhibition, such as by Raúl Itamar Lima and Sophie Thun. There was also the possibility to speak about Elisabeth’s life or parts of her life and we added poems in the Guatemalan Kaqchikel language. All these elements were there to be assembled in the book, with the ideas being dropped in conversation. Adam is familiar with Elisabeth’s life and work. As a designer I’m finding a form, like a vessel, which in this case is the book. I like to establish which part is where and how you perceive it. So, for instance, with the poems, they bracket the book. They’re at the very beginning and very end of the book on the end papers, as well as in the middle of the book. The poems are in three languages, Spanish, Kaqchikel and English. The material, the content is not assembled by myself, but I work with it and give it a form.

SS
Do you think your collaboration on projects widens your horizons, discovering new ways of approaching projects?

AS
Yes. It has to do with good books. They’re my preferred company. And therefore, working with Julia is enriching, because she makes good books. When making exhibitions, the hanging or the placing of things in space, is not the most interesting part for me. For instance, here [pointing into the room] we have seven works hanging at an equal 1.4m distance from each other, measured to the middle of each drawing. So, you can write it down on a piece of paper and then you can make an exhibition. 1.4m and equal distance, as if we are in a sort of mental grid.

JB
I have one anecdote which I was quite struck by. When Adam did the hanging over there [pointing to the space of Karma International across the street], the book was already in print or being printed. And then I came by when they were hanging the work, and I was really struck by the grid you made. There was no grid. There was everything sort of by eye and slightly off grid. So, either you do it like this [pointing into the room], you know, regular and exact, same height, same distance – or like you did it in Elisabeth Wild exhibition, with works grouped in differently sized clusters, with irregular spacing between the collages, slightly off the grid, kind of irritating. I was quite struck by it.

SS
You also placed the images in the book by eye. Was this a deliberate decision and a connection to the exhibition hang?

JB
Exactly, I placed it by eye, because there are no perfect rectangles. I was not able to work with X and Y coordinates. You can say, if you take an X value, is it then the highest point that reaches up? But then it can look strange, so you have to place it by eye. So, there was no grid. And I recently made a book for Elisabeth Wild’s daughter, Vivian Suter, where I did the same thing. Again, I had no grid, I placed normal rectangular photos by eye. In a way, I thought that there was a very clear analogy between what was happening in space and the nature of the work.

AS
Yes, you can hang it either like a line, but not quite in line, a bit up or down here and there, with feeling. But the problem is that the grid is in your head. Even if you eliminate the grid in the hanging or in design, I always have a feeling that the grid is so ingrained in our thinking. I’ve been trying to teach a seminar at the ETH architecture faculty called ‘Life Without Buildings’. Both the title that I chose and what I had in mind was not far from what we were just talking about, which is the of idea of working off the grid. Buildings obviously create frames, for living, for working, for being in motion. You turn around the corner and you are at the tram stop. But you must make this turn. You can’t just cross through a wall. Or you must imagine crossing through, although there are always walls. And I think this is the embodiment of something that I was very struck by many years ago, when I read a book by Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture and her essay ‘Grids’.³ She writes about that ‘rectilinear frame of reference’ as a formatting device in twentieth century art. Seeing things through this geometric frame, which dates back to the Renaissance, was a way of transferring the unmediated visual experience onto a two-dimensional picture, with a kind of optical apparatus that structures the picture as an accumulation of smaller frames receding to the perspectival centre, a vanishing point. We can see it, too, in how the designer arranges material on a page. And in how the curator is expected to hang the work. You’re supposed to install the work on the wall, because the wall is another flat surface onto which to project images and text. Four walls make a white cube. Inside the white cube, you can have a debate about the white cube and how to escape it. But the cube is not the real problem. The problem is the white surface that is asking for an inscription, for something that must be placed on that white surface. That’s kind of inescapable, which I think some exhibition makers were very much aware of, in trying to design other types of spaces. For instance, the exhibition in the shape of a female body that you enter and sort of move around the inner space.

JB
What are you referring to?

AS
In 1966, Niki de Saint Phalle staged this labyrinthine exhibition Hon (She) in Stockholm.⁴ But there are many other examples, such as the idea of emotional architecture proposed by Roberto Matta, a surrealist architect and painter who had visions for architecture that were totally unlike his peers. Modern architecture showed a predilection for modular, perpendicular, parallel, geometric arrangements. Matta proposed another way of thinking about geometry, driven by emotion, by other senses, by the subconscious – an obscurity, and not the full transparency and complete awareness of all parameters of the space. It’s interesting to think of space, in an exhibition or in a book, beyond this dictatorship of the lines intersecting, the Xs and the Ys.

SS
Do you think the medium of books and exhibitions are interchangeable?

AS
They share some interests and qualities, but I don’t think that they’re interchangeable.

JB
I think you can do an exhibition as a book. There were several attempts, The Xerox Book by Seth Siegelaub,⁵ or Lucy R. Lippard’s ‘number shows’.⁶ There were attempts where there is no physical exhibition, where the exhibition is the book. But I think attempts to replicate the book in an exhibition is another story. The work I did called Title of The Show was very much an attempt to undermine this whole idea.⁷ In a way, it’s an impossible thing. The museum became the model for making the book. But if you talk about a direct translation of an exhibition to a catalogue, I think it’s rarely successful. A page is not a wall.

I want to add something to this idea of the grid. I think the grid is often about efficiency. It’s an assumption that it is efficient to know exactly what you have to do and to not think, so you can always put it in the same place. The interesting thing about the work of Elisabeth Wild or Vivian Suter is that there are no ideas about efficiency. There is a totally different logic. And for me, it was interesting to notice that if I didn’t have a grid, there were people who said: ‘Yeah, but isn’t it then that you think you could sort of reinvent the wheel on every page? So it actually doesn’t save time.’ The funny thing is that it was extremely efficient in terms of time. It was very organic, and it was not that I was sitting there and thinking: ‘oh, how could I do this page?’ I just did it intuitively, which is completely inspired by the way Vivian works. In that respect, it was a method that translated some of the way she produces work. And this idea of reasonable rationalisation, the grid, especially in Switzerland, was or still is considered to be a time-saving economy, aiding structure in design. We are trained to live in the grid, to work with it, almost like a regime. It was interesting and liberating to not follow that.

SS
documenta 14⁸ was a big project for you, Adam, but also a collaboration with Julia and Laurenz Brunner. How would you describe the project?

JB
We worked on several things. Various publications as well as the general identity.

SS
How did you collaborate on the different parts?

AS
We talked first and then we had a meeting with all the invited designers, because something that I really wanted to stress was the idea of having multiple visual identities for different parts of the project. Even regarding fundamental elements, such as how to style the word documenta. The project was about multiple viewpoints and in general about multiplicity, like a kind of conflicting and diverse way of looking at things.

JB
Laurenz and I worked specifically on the Daybook. Now, I refer to this as the Daybook, but that name did not exist when we started. It was meant to be something in the direction of an exhibition guide. So, what is needed is something that people will use to navigate through this mass of names and locations. Usually, it’s about artists arranged in some order, venues arranged chronologically and so on. We introduced a different structure for this group of 150 or so artists. With the realisation that there are fewer artists than days of documenta, this gave us the possibility to organise the artists on a timeline.

SS
Did you come up with this concept of how to organise the Daybook together?

AS
Yes. We had quite a few conversations, also with Quinn Latimer, the editor-in-chief of documenta 14 publications. The direct inspiration was a book by the artist Anne Truitt who wrote a journal called Daybook, on several locations between June 1974 and September 1980.⁹ The plainness of this title was appealing, to relate to the exhibition unraveling day by day with visitors coming to see it for one, two or three days, and to then leave.

JB
The general identity was developed based on keywords or topics that were part of the proposal. That happened through conversations or reading accompanying texts that needed to be translated and brought into a form. In this case, it was a question of how do we write documenta? What typeface are we using, are there any additional elements? We were working with this idea of inversion, black on white, white on black. With the idea of flipping it 90 degrees, and sort of doubling it, referring to one exhibition happening in one place and another happening simultaneously elsewhere. So, you always kind of miss one part, not being able to have the entire experience. And there were two alphabets, two scripts.

AS
Which doesn’t happen that often. The book embodied the exhibition’s divided self. Two locations, two durations partly overlapping between Athens and Kassel, two languages and scripts and so on.

JB
Yes. So, these were all elements that we tried to find an expression for or put into a form and that’s how the identity developed. We didn’t plan everything together at the beginning; we started with the business cards, and from there we developed on and on, and it was not just our design or identity but a set of different visual languages from several designers that started to merge and coexist. It became an un-corporate identity.

To return to my initial question, how would you define your roles and responsibilities in your collaborations as a graphic designer and curator?

JB
My role is to give access to other people’s thinking, and work through different media, like a book or an exhibition design or a poster. I’m a mediator – I’m not the medium, but I orchestrate. It’s important when finding an appropriate form for someone’s voice that it speaks in the right volume and in a certain language. So, in that way I’m also a translator. You could say that the translator bears a lot of responsibility, because there are many ways of translating and there is also a level of interpretation and subjectivity happening. That’s a big responsibility that I like to take on. In some cases, it can make a point clearer or even manifest a new kind of voice for someone’s work through a book that may not have been possible with an exhibition.

AS
Julia was talking about giving access and about translation. I think interpretation has to do with operating between different subjectivities. So, it’s a kind of inter-subjective process, where you find a way to speak. You take a thing and carry it from one place to another, to show it to someone or to make someone hear it or read it or whatever. The intention is always communication or making fault lines in communication palpable. It’s a process that involves the other side that is responding to what you do. Ross Birrell for instance, threw books into water – he threw Thomas More’s Utopia into the water at Piraeus port, or he threw a book into the Grand Canyon, and other places. He chose meaningful locations to throw these important books, imbuing them with a certain added energy. He didn’t mean to throw them away, but literally launch them, energetically. Of course they disappeared, but it’s also about the movement of throwing forth, like in pro-jicere, throwing a spear, which is etymologically related to the word ‘project’.

JB
… to another orbit.

AS
Yes. Giving books another trajectory, using them performatively, assuming that the content is known, because everybody read Thomas More’s Utopia or has at least heard about it. Why are we throwing these books somewhere in Greece? Perhaps because Greece at that point is in economic dire straits and in need of a utopia that will show the way out of this crisis.

SS
To round things off, is there anything else you’d like to share or any final thoughts you’d like to add?

AS
I’d like to see the reactions of people in the moment when they discover new meaning or connection between things, when they are puzzled or moved. This is similar to making books and exhibitions. It’s just that I don’t have the design skills. To make a book, I go to Julia.

JB
… and the other way around. There is a quote from Willem Sandberg about graphic design and communication being ‘a message from one to many’. The idea of what you do and how it reaches, how it gets distributed. It’s very simply put, but it ultimately comes down to the dissemination of thoughts.