Drawing a Blank: Harvard GSD's Recent Exhibition, Inscriptions, Asks Visitors to Imagine Architecture Before Speech

2018-09-26T09:30:00-04:00

Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech, the inaugural exhibition of the Drucker Design Gallery at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, prompted visitors to “read” the works on display as blank pages might be read.

In an essay on artworks that take the form of blank pages, the media theorist Craig Dworkin catalogs many different ways artists have done something significant while ostensibly doing almost nothing. For example, in the movie Orpheus, a Parisian poet published a book of poetry consisting of nothing but blank pages, titled Nudisme. What this book did in the context of the movie’s fictional poetry scene was very different from a similar blank book, also titled Nudisme and styled in a similar way, that was recently on sale in fashionable Brooklyn shops. Another of Dworkin’s examples, a poet bought 1,500 reams of blank paper and stamped his name on the cover, aiming to sell them as poetry. The patron who funded the project threw “the wretched little thing” into the garbage (...

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Drawing a Blank: Harvard GSD's Recent Exhibition, Inscriptions, Asks Visitors to Imagine Architecture Before Speech