For our exhibition, The Serving Library v David Osbaldeston, we have highlighting just a few of the 100+ framed objects that make up The Serving Library (TSL) collection, along with the accompanying text from TSL’s website.
The exhibition will feature the collection its entirety, with items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, woodcuts, polaroids, drawings, screen-prints, airbrush paintings, a car number plate, and a Ouija board. Together, these varied objects decorate the walls of the library to serve as a toolbox for teaching.
“The sleeve was one of those lovely gifts. We wanted a neutral image and I’d done a rough of a big flagpole and a flag and nothing else. We’d done a gig in Plymouth and were walking along the Hoe and there it was. We all dropped to the ground and looked at it. When you lay on the ground there was nothing else to see, apart from the pole against the sky.”
“Equation for a Composite Design (2): Best Of,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #8, 2004
Dear Paul,
I am the daughter of Richard T. Ganyon. Inventor of all Votrax voice synthesizers in the 1970s and 1980s. He was very much a part of your “Detroit as Refrain” lecture given in Detroit in 2010. I would have loved to have been there to listen to what you had to say about Votrax and Detroit music. You are the only person I’ve found to make the connections that you have in the brief description that I read about it, and I don’t know how to thank you for trying. If you want additional information about the Votrax and things you might not know about regarding its use, please email me. I might surprise you with a story or two.
“I am the Daughter of Richard T. Ganyon,” Paul Elliman, Bulletins of The Serving Library #8, 2014
Dear Philomene, As you know, I’d like to reproduce that deceptively modest painting of yours — the one whose primary colors combine to spell out their composite and form their own frame—on the cover of this last Dot Dot Dot.
“A Word on the Cover,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010
This is a RECORD COVER. This writing is the DESIGN upon the record cover. The design is to help SELL the record. We hope to draw your attention to it and encourage you to pick it up. When you have done that maybe you’ll be persuaded to listen to the music — in this case XTC’s Go 2 album. Then we want you to BUY it.
“On Graphic Design, 1979,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #2, 2001
A few years ago a friend of mine said she had just been introduced to Josef Albers. The idea that he was still around was compelling — artists have always tried to keep in historical contact through works from the past. Why not make contact with Albers directly? Adding the words YES and NO to an Albers-designed stencil typeface turned it into a kind of Ouija board, and it’s also an Albers material — his square paintings were made on this board, in 16, 24 and 40 inch sizes.
“A–Z, 0–9, YES/NO,” Paul Elliman, Dot Dot Dot #13, 2006
Is it good enough? Is it even art? I don’t know. It might look like art, it might even look like contemporary art, but I really don’t know if it will be. And to be frank, I don’t mind if it isn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that to me it needs to be done.
“Another Shadow Fight,” Andrew Hunt & David Osbaldeston, Dot Dot Dot #16, 2006
So we were already cutting up our mutual identities and, as we did that, we started to think about why it was so appealing to us. And one of the things that we decided was that we were both at war with binary culture, the idea of male and female, black and white, Christian/Muslim, good/bad — all these different either/ors that you mentioned, which are embedded in most cultures. Again, as Burroughs would say, “Look for the vested interest …”. To control people, to make people behave as stereotypes in order for things to be simple and easy to control. Anarchy and confusion are not necessarily friendly towards control! So, we began to look at that aspect of it. Why be male or female?
“Vested Interest: Mark Beasley in conversation with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,” Dot Dot Dot #16, 2008 / Cover of Dot Dot Dot #17, 2009
Born awkwardly between eras — drawn by hand in order to be better read by machines — the fälschungserschwerende Schrift bears the marks of both 19th-century guild-enshrined handcraft and 20th-century anonymous automation. And like any technology, it is bound by the political determinants of its design: while its original “tamper-proof ” premise may have proved a Macguffin, these weird-looking letters are an early product of our contemporary surveillance state. What reads to us as a clumsy lack of formal continuity is exactly what makes it legible to a computer. It is an alphabet whose defining characteristic is precisely that it has no defining characteristic, other than having no defining characteristic.
“Fälschungserschwerende Schrift,” Benjamin Tiven, Bulletins of The Serving Library #3, 2012
January 17, 2006. As it turns out, today is Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday. Writer, typographer, printer-publisher-politician, inventor, statesman, gentleman, scientist, lover, linguist, librarian and the first Postmaster General of the United States, Franklin was the consummate networker — distributing his ideas far and wide through a dizzying range of practices.
“Post-Master,” David Reinfurt, Dot Dot Dot #12, 2006
For over a decade police forces across the world have been hunting a criminal cartel with a licence to print money. They’ve been distributing the highest quality counterfeit notes ever produced. The forgeries are so realistic that even the experts can’t tell the difference. They’re known as superdollars.
“Superdollars,” David Reinfurt, Dot Dot Dot #14, 2007