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The Unmarked Font of Metaphysics and Truth: Helvetica
K-vond has an interesting analysis of the font Helvetica, following his viewing of the eponymously titled film, arguing that the metaphysics of the “Marked” and “Un-marked” (Helvetica belonging to the latter) operates at the basis of today’s contemporary ideologico-political fantasy of neutrality.
While I agree that to some extent with this view, especially as it’s found in the film Helvetica, I don’t think we should be so quick to throw (modernist) minimalism away. I think that it has a certain power to strip away baroque, Imaginary “meaning” and to reveal beneath it the pure mathematical formalism underlying design: to this extent, I think there is a certain radical aspect of minimalism, what we might call “militant minimalism” (as opposed to today’s self-contradictory ideology of what I would call “romantic minimalism,” as exemplified by the trite works of Malcolm Gladwell).
As a broader point, I think typography is just as worthy a domain of ideology critique as art and architecture, perhaps much closer to the latter insofar as we spontaneously interact with it, yet nevertheless operates at various levels: political, aesthetic, social, economic, etc. In so far as it materializes at the aesthetic level our unconscious, ideologico-political fantasies, typographic critique can function as an important element in the overall critique of ideology.
And as a side note, I just wanted to compliment the Lenin’s Tomb’s header image.