concept
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
on-going performance and exhibition-based narration, dealing with national identity, typography, surrealism, and divination
Yan Tomaszewski
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
2014-2015
Starting with the recarving of an iconic Czechoslovakian font, the project has expanded to an on-going performance and exhibition-based narration, dealing with national identity, typography, surrealism, and divination.
The Czech typographer Vojtech Preissig was commissioned to design a typeface for the 1925 Czechoslovakian pavilion of the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris. The legend says that the resulting Preissig Antikva font, which was to express the identity of a newly forged state, was cut in wood with a pocketknife – hence its irregular and angular aspect.
The Art & Craft logic of the font is reenacted: using its digital version as a model, the font is manually recarved in wooden blocks.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, the most frequently used pangram (a sentence containing all the let- ters of the alphabet and therefore used by typographers to present their fonts) becomes the backbone of the narration.
A fictitious workshop gathering artists, writers, mediums and politicians is imagined. During one week in June 1924, in a cubist villa located in Prague, games are played, spirit sessions held and collective works produced.
The aim is to determine the identity of the new Czechoslovakian state. All the artefacts supposedly produced during this workshop point out in one direction: the mysterious pattern of a fox jumping over a dog…
Of course, any resemblance with clichés related
to Czech identity (surrealism, magic, humour, etc.) is purely coincidental.
