Rosalie Gascoigne and typography

Rosalie Gascoigne. Magpie, 1998. sawn wood on wood, 55 × 54cmIt is summer, nothing is urgent, I feel a great need to stick with Rosalie Gascoigne this week.  I think about type a lot.  I wasn't trained as a graphic designer, rather I was trained as an architect in a time and at a school when graphic design was part of the tools of the trade.  Stencils, hand lettering, Letraset, those bars with the attachments for the Rapidographs that traced perfect sans-serif letters with rounded ends – pre-computers one was very busy with one's hands, one's pens and inks. 

Graphically, Kurt Schwitters said it all: subversive, obsessive, beautiful work from scraps of paper, fragments of words and letters and then he built his merzbau – subversive, obsessive, beautiful rooms full of scraps of wood painted white.  It was always about assemblage for someone trained as I was, and that is still how I see much of the world, from cities to buildings. 

However, I have just re-read an article in Eye 64 from 2007 by Jason Grant about Rosalie Gascoigne and her use of type.  Assemblage is almost incidental for him: he calls her work 'stammering concrete poetry' and asks 'Why, when typography is the assertive visual feature in Gascoigne's most emblematic work, it is never really paid much attention?  It is like discussing Picasso without African art'.   This is a typographer speaking clearly. 
What Grant does do is present Gascoigne's assemblages of pieces of signage, printed wooden crates and scraps of wood as something beyond the concrete material surface of the works. They respond to what he calls the 'fallout' of post-structuralist literary theory of the 1980s: dislocation and disruption, migration and fragmentation.  Because of this, her work is at home with the 'diffused hierarchy of interactivity where the linear conventions of written language are undermined by internet, email, hypertext and SMS'.

Well, perhaps.  They are this, and they are assemblage.  They are graphic, and they are visual fields.  They are found materials, and they are intentionally crafted.  They speak of an era when pop bottles came in wood crates stencilled with red 7-UP letters – Grant says that when Gascoigne died in 1999 her favourite materials were disappearing in favour of printed plastics.  Her work uses the materials of the mid-20th century, and she rejects the inherent nostalgia of the discarded object.