image source: edition fink

Notes

10 illustrations, saddle stitching / Awarded as one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 1998

Publisher Note

The publication “Inhalt und Form (ID 5 to 28)” is a catalogue of works and artist's booklet in one. On various levels, the booklet itself becomes a work of art in form and content. The publication thus also becomes an integral part of the exhibition of the same name at the Art Museum of the Canton of Thurgau in Ittingen Charterhouse, for which it was published.
What Thomas Feuerstein writes about the work, especially about the performances by Rutishauser/Kuhn, is equally valid for the present publication: The text thus loses its calculable effect, becomes multidimensional and makes the reader the author. The polylogue replaces the monologue, with which a liberated, but also heretical speaking with a forked and frayed tongue breaks loose. One no longer has the impression that individual subjects are speaking, but that language itself begins to speak and becomes an autogeneratively reproducing algorithm. Language mutates into a virus that takes possession of us and constitutes both our perception of the world and our self, and consequently constructs our thinking.
They do not write and speak linearly from one meaning to the next, from A to B, line by line; they rather fold the writing from the surface into space. They design a new topology of language and writing that spells out its signs and symbols in a multi-dimensional rather than one-dimensional way and whose meanings are not subject to an irreversible successiveness and order of a temporality of speaking, writing or reading. The decomposition of language into its elements, which at first glance is followed by a chaotic recombination, proves to be an attempt at a topological reordering in which signs point beyond their linear fidelity to holographic horizons of meaning.

Artists’ Book

Inhalt und Form (ID 5 bis 28)

— Farben Buchstaben Schriften – Arbeiten 1987 bis 1997

by Rutishauser/Kuhn

Publisher
Release Place Zurich, Switzerland
Release Date 1998
Credits
Printrun 1200
Identifiers
ISBN-13: 978-3-906086-24-8
Format softcover
Dimensions 19.5 × 24.5 cm
Pages 36
Technique Offset Printing