Glossing Calligrammes in a letter to a friend, Apollinaire wrote that they were "typographic precision made in a period when typography is winding up its career brilliantly, at the dawn of the new means of representation, cinema and the phonograph." If Apollinaire was correct that typography was witnessing a brilliant period, he was wrong that it was winding up its career. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Il Pleut" (Published in Calligramme s, 1918). In "Il Pleut," Apollinaire rendered the rain as cascading letters, suggesting the interplay of natural phenomena with his beloved billboards and street signs. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Salut monde dont je suis la langue éloquente que sa bouche Ô Paris tire et tirera toujours aux allemands" (Published in Calligramme s, 1918). In this one, the Eiffel Tower addresses the reader:
Guillaume Apollinaire, Extrait du "Poème de 9 fevrier" (1915). For obvious reasons, the calligrammes are notoriously hard to translate, but to give you some idea: the following picture of a woman wearing a hat is made up of a text about a woman wearing a hat:
Line art text emoticons full#
Sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories,īiographies of big shots, a thousand differentĭoorplates and posters squawk like parrots.Īpollinaire’s 1918 book Calligrammes delved further into its source material, imitating its typographic forms to create pictograms in which the text echoes the image. Here’s this morning’s poetry, and for prose you’ve You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud: Take this representative passage from 1909’s "Zone": A poet by calling and a publicist by trade, Apollinaire seized on the outrageous whether he found it in the avant-garde (he coined the term "Cubism" in praise of early paintings by Braque and Picasso) or mass culture (he called the serialized tales of fictional super-villain Fantômas "one of the richest works that exist.") Apollinaire’s poetry fed on the chaos of Paris in the early 1900s. The final installment (forthcoming) will explore the history of the emoji.įollowing in the footsteps of Baudelaire-and paving the way for the Surrealists and the French New Wave-early 20th-century artist Guillaume Apollinaire cultivated a cerebral taste for the most sensational elements of modern life.
The first part, exploring the history of the emoticon, can be found here.
Line art text emoticons series#
This is the second in a three-part series to be published on Rhizome. Artwork from ASCII Art Dictionary (possibly 1999).
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