Edwin Pickstone’s Biblioclasm at the Swiss Church of London
I have a particular fondness for art installations that encourage you to touch and feel and fully interact with it, and this is one that I happened upon by accident the other night online. This piece is a part of Being and Appearing, a programme of contemporary art curated for the Swiss Church in London by Kristy White, and this is what she had to say about the piece:
In Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play, Doctor Faustus, the title character is a fabled scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life. He makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.
For his exhibition at the Swiss Church in London, Glasgow-based typographer Edwin Pickstone has taken Marlowe’s play as his subject; deconstructing the text so that each of its 12,247 words is isolated and printed on its own page. Carpeting the floor of the main hall, these pages transform what is a weighty text in both content and historical significance to ephemera. The installation thus explores the value of print — how the choice of printing method, surface, and print run effects how an object is read, appreciated, and valued.
Mirroring the narrative of the play, the text has been processed through a custom written software that progressively distorts the shape of the words. Pickstone likens this to making a ‘pact’ with the program, as he forsakes his control over the end product to pre-set parameters. (In a similar way Faustus surrendered his soul to the Devil with little idea of the consequences.) In essence, Pickstone points out, this is our relationship with modern communication technologies — we readily use smart phones, tablets and laptops without knowing their longterm affect on human relationships, behaviors and bodies.
Biblioclasm crossed over the London Design Festival and Art Licks Weekend, coming to a close yesterday.
