Mira Schendel (b. 1919, Switzerland – d. 1988, Brazil)
Dactiloscrito, 1976

As a kid I thought that typewriters were the most amazing invention. They made so beautiful marks. I still wish I owned one. So, yes, I am biased in an irrational way here.

But I can produce a reasonably rational excuse for having this piece in my dossier nevertheless. One of the things I am experimenting with – in various media, including painting and sound – is repetition and persistence. I guess, I am testing my theory/hunch that if you keep repeating something – no matter how stupid, banal or unskilled – long enough, chances are that with time it would become more and more art-like. Schendel’s piece above can be viewed from that perspective, even if it is a bit more advanced. A fairly banal gesture of typing the same symbol, row after row after row, eventually produces something that invites consideration as “candidate for appreciation”. And, surely, there is more at play here – the clear outline of the typed area and small breaches against its border, more and less repetitive changes of the symbol typed along the way. The piece essentially showcases its structure as its artistic content – the repetition, establishment of the pattern, breaching that pattern, returning to repetition again, breaching it in different way, and coming back once more… That makes it similar to musical progression and comparable to Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” that largely deals with its own structure.

My conceptual works are often dealing with structure, its persistence and its variations, as their subject matter and method. It’s quite particular experience of beauty when it reveals itself not as visual, sonic or tactile information but rather as emerging recognition of a pattern triggered by any of those senses or combinations thereof.