The lecture transcribed on the following pages critical political – Hans-Rudolf Lutz (1939-1998): Swiss typographer, author, designer, publisher, collector, visual director and teacher took place during the Leipzig Book Fair, for which Switzerland was the guest country. Mirjam Fischer and Eveline Wüthrich organized the lecturing programme Rules & Schools on the 15th of March 2014 at the Hochschule for Graphic Design and Book Art of Leipzig.

Sebastian Cremers & Tania Prill

Hans-Rudolf Lutz began his apprenticeship as typesetter in the long-standing company of Orell Füssli in Zürich in 1955. This professional orientation was coincidental and he considered his working days as being monotonous.

Lutz writes the following about this period: “I was cheeky and was almost thrown out a few times. At that time though, you didn’t need much to get into a clinch with the boss. But they actually wanted to forbid me wearing jeans and my trendy Elvis hairdo!”

In search of models in design he soon discovered the representatives of “Swiss Graphic Design”, the overheard term of “functionality” means “total reduction of the design means” to him.

Before that, Lutz had cut his way through a four-year apprenticeship in typesetting and only survived all this time because he knew that afterwards, he would be able to go on “a long trip”. He hitchhiked towards the North Cape. The three months he had planned turned into more than two years. He earned his living by doing cleaning in Stockholm, fine-drawing in Helsinki, typesetting in Tunis, and as a sailor and cook assistant on different freight ships. This journey “broke down my creative dogmatism. I realized that intuition and systematization do not necessarily exclude each other.”

In 1963 Lutz began his one-year course on typographic design with Emil Ruder and Robert Büchler at the vocational school in Basel. In fact, this course did not really exist, everything was improvised – very unswissly. Emil Ruder and Robert Büchler sacrificed their breaks in order to discuss the works and this was the first time that Lutz could concern himself with typographic design on a full time basis. In spite of all the criticism to Emil Ruder, Lutz appreciated his implacable eye for design inconsistency.

In 1964, Lutz became the leader of the group “expression typographique” in the studio Hollenstein in Paris in order to explore and propagate the potentials of filmsetting. In 1966 he accepts a position as teacher of typography and interdisciplinary design in Lucerne. He participated at the creation of the F&F: School for experimental design in Zürich. As of 1966, Lutz led his own studio in Zürich. In the same year, he created the publishing house Hans-Rudolf Lutz.

With a book series 3 years later, Lutz breached the 15-year boycott against the Marxist art theorist, Konrad Farner.

He became member of the music group UnknownMiX as their visual director in 1983.

Hans-Rudolf Lutz died in February 1998.

Hello,

Tania Prill and I will introduce to you the Swiss typographer, designer, author, publisher, visual director and teacher Hans-Rudolf Lutz.

Together with Alberto Vieceli, we work in Hans-Rudolf Lutz’s former workshop in the Lessingstrasse in Zürich.

Tania was married to Hans-Rudolf Lutz. She administrates his bequeath and manages the publishing house Hans-Rudolf Lutz.

I am also here as a publisher.

Half a year ago I initiated “everyedition” and would like to present this new edition of the publication “The Miami Herald” by Hans-Rudolf Lutz, revised by Tania and myself, as well as the book “336 pages 336 books” by Tania, Alberto and me which reveals ties with Hans-Rudolf Lutz’s work, as well as to books as such.

On the basis of several projects, we will show you how Hans-Rudolf Lutz worked. We especially focus on the manifold interconnections between word and picture in his work. Furthermore we would like to confront some of his works with projects that emerged independently from Lutz and created a contentual tie that can widen the angle of view.

These correlations will also play a role in the exhibition on Hans-Rudolf Lutz that we are currently working on.

“Today’s Hieroglyphs”

Hans-Rudolf Lutz describes the project as follows:

“For 15 years I have been digging in trash piles of this world and end up promoting 15,000 of these visual treasures to be seen.”

Here you see a part of his collection that Lutz transformed in the repro-machine of the school in Lucerne SW.

5,000 of these signs were included in this book.

The signs on the corrugated cardboard packaging for transport are signs made by workers for workers.

Workmen and workwomen with only little design education allow these signs to keep a great pictorial value. Hans-Rudolf Lutz dedicated his book to them.

In spite of the reduction to the essentials, they are capable of introducing sensitivity, surprise and also a high informational value in their signs.

“YOU – 405 (406)”, Ann Noël

As a first correlation to “Today’s Hieroglyphs”, we will show you the artists book “YOU – 405(406)” by Ann Noël, published in 1982 in an edition of 130 copies. The artist lives and works in Berlin and was active in the Fluxus movement.

The book refers to the Me-Generation in the 70’s in the USA. Ann Noël lived in the States at the time.

Whereas Hans-Rudolf Lutz shows the design diversity of “unprofessional” workmen and workwomen in his book “Today’s Hieroglyphs”, the exciting thing about this correlation is

that Ann Noël’s concern in her book is the expressive diversity of one artist, namely of her own person.

For this purpose she limited herself to one letter that also mutates to an image or rather a hieroglyph through its 405 variants.

 “Die Fixierung auf einen Zustand ist immer nur vorläufig”

With the following series, Hans-Rudolf Lutz wanted to show that the designing process is not completed, when for example a poster has gone through the printing machine.

Quotation:

“Fixation on one state is always just temporary. This knowledge relativises the meaning of our work, without making it insignificant or arbitrary.

Typographic design unifies just as much the permanent ‘creation of order’ as the ‘liking of disorderliness’. What is fascinating is that this is not contradictory.

Exposure e.g. to nature (sun, rain, wind, decay) and to people by scratching, scribbling, tearing off, drawing over and commenting transforms a series of the same to a series of changing ones.”

 Writing > grid > picture > portrait of Karl Marx

In the 1960s Lutz was inspired by Wittgenstein to use language as a virtual material and thus open it to meanings. A continuation of this idea is the work “Writing > grid > picture > portrait of Karl Marx”. Lutz comments it: “Even if we have got used to the separation of text and pictorial information, we could make the border between them more permeable.”

With the statement following a short introduction, “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels begin the first chapter of the Manifesto of the communist party.

Johannes Gachnang, artist, curator and publisher comments this in an interview with Jean Widmer in 2000: “‘Typography is political’ – somehow that was already true. We too, were once young communists and this or that. At some point in time, we were always excluded, because of Trotzkist activities, Maoist activities, we were simply anarchists. Lutz’s poster revealing Marx through the type face of the communist manifesto is an attempt to visualize something. The text and the person are blended together in a very naive way. When you take into account the countless copies of this: a master stroke.”

Socialist graphic design is one of Lutz’s sources of inspiration. (…) He endeavoured to keep his own strict canon in movement through imports and departures.

How can Protestantism be loosened in visual communication and saved over time? Not just any good form can save mankind, but rather renewal. It is not a concern about style, but about coordinates. When Lutz wanted to cooperate with advertisers, he was branded as a traitor.

I think Lutz was very serious in his attempt to deal with the given material. (…) He constantly researched on how you can bring a text or a context or an idea into the picture.

1979

1979 by Hans-Rudolf Lutz is an experimental proposal in this direction.

Fritz Billeter says to this project: “No other media reports just as well the great and the petty world history all mixed as the daily newspaper. History books? They separate history from the here and now of our everyday life. More sensitive and instructive forms of history writing would induce much more of an active discussion about it, and this on rational and an emotional level. (…)”

The idea behind 1979 is simple: for every workday of the year, one page of a daily Swiss newspaper has been reproduced, showing events of local and international political significance. That makes up the first volume, here on the left.

Volume 2: A 10 x 15 mm section has been cut out of each of these pages and enlarged to fill the book format of 208 x 294 mm, as you can see on the right hand side.

We will first of all show you spreads from Volume 1:

Volume 2: The clippings have not been selected at random. They  are meant to offer a visual commentary on the largely verbal news in the first volume. The outcome is volume two and also a history of the year 1979: “a story in signs and pictures.”

By isolating and enlarging, what is missing in Volume 1 takes on a substantially different appearance and other formal characteristics.

It tends to be more vivid

provokes associations,

completes,

emphasizes

or changes, what in Volume 1 still seemed to be understood as a logical meaning.

“While we tend to have a better grasp of visual and textual relations in volume 1, volume 2 gives us more insight into structures and pictorial signs that signalize something, that appeal to or even assault the emotions.” Fritz Billeter

Peter Rautmann, Professor for theory and history of aesthetic practices and former dean of the Hochschule of Arts Bremen, wrote to Lutz in 1986:

“This is in my mind a quality of your history book, that it constantly leads us to think about the basic aesthetic-philosophical problems of our existence.

How can a current event be qualified, how can we find our way around in the world of events, in this original chaos, how does the small, seemingly peripheral detail relate to the whole, what criteria can we accept for ourselves, how can we assert ourselves as subjects in this ‘ocean’ of happenings.”

“The Miami Herald, Wednesday, October 1, 1980”

We will now present the project “The Miami Herald” by Hans-Rudolf Lutz.

The model Hans-Rudolf Lutz used for this project was the 1 October 1980 issue of “The Miami Herald”, out of which he cut a text with a contentually associated picture and then assembled them behind each other. The order of the printed pairs of text and picture corresponds to their order in the newspaper.

We reissued “The Miami Herald” this year, which has just been published by everyedition.

This new edition shows the only to our knowledge existing and quite battered original as a book in the book.

Lutz’s first edition consisted of 8 copies, we have limited the new edition to 80 copies.

The “Miami Herald“ represents to us one of his most radical projects.

Lutz brings the concept to the point with this short and concise statement: “Using a verbal message to announce a visual one.”

“The Girl Chewing Gum”, John Smith

By the following correlation, the film “The Girl Chewing Gum”, which was created at about the same period as “The Miami Herald”, the artist John Smith also addresses the temporal relation between verbal and visual messages.

Unfortunately, we cannot show you this 12-minute avant –garde film in its full length.

In “The Girl Chewing Gum”, a commanding voice seems to be directing the happenings of a busy London street. As the film goes along, the orders become more and more absurd and we realize, that the alleged film director is merely a fictitious film director. The scenes do not comply with the voice, but the opposite.

“Smith embraced the ‘spectre of narrative’ […] to play word against picture and chance against order.”

A. L. Rees, 1995

“TM”

Another very well known work by Hans-Rudolf Lutz concerning the relation between word and picture are the covers for the Swiss magazine “Die typografischen Monatsblätter”.

By the covers for the TM–Magazine, Lutz wanted to show that the visual message of plagiarized design concepts momentarily usurps the verbal message of the text.

In 1977, 12 plagiarizations are published of Schweizer Illustrierte, the Tages-Anzeiger-Magazin, Gelbes Heft, Pop, Fix und Foxi, Beobachter, Phantom, Neue Post, Elle, Der Spiegel, Time and Playboy.

Looking back at his apprenticeship as a typesetter, Lutz writes: “the Typografischen Monatsblätter have a good reputation and regularly provide food for controversy. Especially the special issues on ‘Swiss design’ are very controversial among the typesetters. The bosses are quite generous when it comes to participation in TM-competitions and authorize the use of the setting equipment beyond working hours.”

Albert Kapr, typographer and calligrapher, author and up until the 80’s professor for writing and book design here at the Hochschule for design and book art comments:

“The rule seems to be that you can ignore the figurative aspect of writing when you are reading, that only the ideas that we read sink in; yet the shape of the letters and their typographic arrangement operate unconsciously upon the reception of the ideas that are loaded onto the visual shapes, they can weaken or strengthen their effect.”

At the beginning of the work on the TM covers Lutz writes to numerous magazine publishers asking them to support him in this project. He requested past issues, in order to examine the application of the design concept.

With computers, word and image are produced by the same machine for the first time. The crossovers between the media have thus become much more fluent.

“That could also mean: ranking the ‘verbal legibility’ after the ‘visual legibility’ and as such building upon the expressiveness of the form and not the content of the signs.”

Hans-Rudolf Lutz, 1991

This information, as well as figures and facts about the number of copies, diffusion, etc. and also the comparison to competing products are shown by him on a spread in each respective TM-Magazine.

For this TM-Cover concept, Lutz had to ask several publishing houses for permission to plagiarize their design concept. This was most certainly a difficult undertaking knowing that all the major and successful publishers dispose of legal departments, who are schooled to ward off plagiarizing attempts.

The publishing director of the Spiegel, for instance, started off by refusing the permission with the reasoning that it is legally not defendable to authorize some to plagiarize and forbid it to others.

“Espion, lève-toi”, 1982

 “336 pages 336 books”, Tania Prill, Alberto Vieceli, Sebastian Cremers, everyedition, 2013

The last project that we are presenting today is not by Hans-Rudolf Lutz, but a book by Alberto, Tania and myself, that has just been edited by everyedition.

Tania, Alberto and I work together for our commissioned work as well as for our self-initiated projects.

For this 336-page book we have sighted thousands of books of all different periods, on different topics and focuses, in search of 336 headstrong, incorruptible and humoristic page numbers.

On one spread, 2 pagings face each other, they relate to each other by their setting. The entirety of the pages reflects the visual diversity of the world of books.

The inspiration for this project comes from all sorts of directions.

The dramatic composition and the structure of our book refer to the wonderful book by George Brecht: “book”, which addresses the phenotype of books in a self-referring approach.

The title is inspired by the artist books by Ed Ruscha. His book titles often describe the content.

The underlying idea to “336 pages 336 books” originated when reading page 243 of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, (1967).

A leaflet with the index of the source references is enclosed in the book.

With this project, the reissue of “The Miami Herald” and this lecture, we would like to open and revive the Hans-Rudolf Lutz archive. Even if we work under different circumstances with our own studio, our teaching and publishing activities, Hans-Rudolf Lutz influences our practice by his work and his posture.

Thank you.

 

everyedition.ch

verlag-lutz.ch

Copyright for the images

© Tania Prill, Verlag Hans-Rudolf Lutz