F.R. David - Iditorial

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Flurry” is the 15th issue (a best-of, of sorts) edited by Will Holder. “I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”

Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriam... Curated and edited by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

“With Love,” takes correspondence and calligraphy—or letter-writing—as model for information theory, and adaptive, cybernetic relations.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. 

The 21st issue, “Take, Eat” is edited by Will Holder, with Andrea di Serego Alighieri. Andrea’s image-heavy talk on word spacing and vocalisation runs all the way through, on the right-hand pages: the opposite pages contain responses from Will. The issue almost stifles the triangulated space of image, context and commentary; and speaks of the moment between words, things, people, images, perception, past, present and future, between Andrea’s pages and Will’s, as where meaning might breathe.

“I must explain to you first that the novel is not intended as a work of art—at least, not as it stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle. Well, I do not put my personal self into my poems. But my personal self [Hilda Doolittle] has got between me and my real self, my real artist personality [H.D.]. And in order to clear the ground, I have tried to write things down––in order to think straight, I have endeavored to write straight. But I hope to come clear and then turn to my real work again. You must remember that writing poetry requires a clarity, a clairvoyance almost. I have been too weak to dare to be clairvoyant. I have tried instead to be merely sensible. I mean in the common sense of that word. In the long run, the clairvoyance is the only sanity for me. But in the novel I am working through a wood, a tangle of bushes and bracken out to a clearing, where I may see clear again.”

H.D., letter to John Cournos, July 9th 1918 (?), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSSA24, Box 17, Folder 582 (emphases added). The penultimate word was crossed out by H.D. herself.

This edition of H.D.’s Palimpsest was produced for THE GREEN MAN (Lucy Skaer with Fiona Connor, H.D., Will Holder, Nashashibi/Skaer, Hanneline Visnes); with a sole distribution point – in direct relation to the work of Lucy Skaer – of 500 free* copies, at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, from 26 July to 6 October 2018.

Typeset by Will Holder, using Apple’s Enhanced Dictation, reading Palimpsest, Houghton Miflin, 1926. (Letterpress by Henri Darantiere, Paris, for Contact Editions)

Copy-edited by Rosa Aiello reading Palimpsest, Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. (Linotype)

This third edition reproduces the punctuation of the 1926 French typesetting of English text. Certain spellings are maintained with due consideration for an American writer living in 1920s London. Additional suggestions to spelling are inserted between square brackets.

The cover uses a stencil with parts taken from the geometric construction of Roman capitalis quadrata, inherited from the classical Greek alphabet.

This production would not have been realised without Rosa Aiello, Stuart Fallon, Tessa Giblin, Bitsy Knox, Emmie McLuskey, Tiina Poldaru, Lucy Skaer and Christopher Wait.

Palimpsest: Copyright © 1926 by H.D.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

We begin with the image of an idea in ruin. A small field of assumptions disassembled. A question no longer in need of its mark. A thought not sure where it began. It starts from the body and language. The debris of these three words, crumbling already at and, did not break apart but congealed the separations once made. We start from a research (project) undone and just beginning. 

Typesetting and design: Will Holder
Produced by: A.pass

Chloe Chignell works across choreography and publication taking the body as the central problem, question and location of the research. She invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

This issue, "Spin Cycle", is concerned with captioning, commentary and description. Edited with Mike Sperlinger.

Do we always have to be nice, kind and communicate respectfully? Wouldn't it sometimes be better to change our tone, to use force or even violence? We often want to act in a spirit of “care” and benevolence, but how do we know if we're really being altruistic and sympathetic? Vol.5 asks the question: Nice?

With contributions from :
Muf architecture/art, Mélanie Mazet, Bui Quy Son, Paul-Antoine Lucas, Armelle Breuil, Annabelle Vaillant, Napsugár Trömböczky, Alessandro Di Egidio,
Elsa Muller, Clara Lenoir, Léo Jacqmin, Clem Koren, Pola Noury, Grève cœur and Cassiane C. Pfund

This publication is edited by the Woman Cave collective founded by Leticia Chanliau and Chloé Macary-Carney.

318 black & white pages, brown cover
Micro edition of 700, printed in Aubervilliers by Isiprint.