Page 16 - Art First: Simon Lewty: Absorption

or reason in these differences of colour we find none for typewriter is largely consigned to history and stenography
which there is a code. Unlike the red letters or rubrics of the outmoded, why does he laboriously inscribe words as if type-
manuscript era, choice of colour is unrelated to meaning: writer keys had struck them, or transcribe a text in Shelton’s
there are no red-letter days here.This decorative deployment shorthand? Could it be that the artist is one who realizes the
of colour fits the strategy of creating a gap between word, complexity of the present by an act of recuperation? Nagel
letter or symbol as mark, and language as bearer of meaning. reminds us that McLuhan‘never tired of saying, the old media
don’t disappear but are internalized in the new media.They
Viewers of Lewty’s recent works may wonder whether his become the content of the new media and in a sense only
return to Shelton’s obsolete system of stenography is any- achieve definition as media when they are taken up by their
thing more than a curious exercise. In thinking about this successors’.Viewed as an ongoing project, Lewty’s doublings,
question I am struck by passages in a recent book by Alexan- and his surfaces that speak, realize and give substantial pres-
der Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time, in which the ence to three modes of consciousness characteristic of three
author reconsiders Marshall McLuhan’s vision of the advent overlapping eras–the scribal era, the era of printing, and the
of the electronic era. The Canadian academic set out his electronic era in which we are now increasingly immersed.
prophecy in TheGutenbergGalaxy as long ago as 1962, when
Lewty was studying at Hornsey College of Art.Nagel summa- Paul Hills
rizes McLuhan’s argument that‘the advent of typography in London, 2013
the fifteenth-century. . . introduced a new organization
of experience . . . as words were dislocated from their oral
context and came to be understood and manipulated as logi-
cal visual arrays’. * The era dominated by printing was also the
era of single-point perspective as the organizing principle
of pictorial space. In the electronic age, by contrast, commu-
nication beams in all directions, creating multiple relations
more akin to an essentially auditory resonance of many
voices and‘simultaneous happening’. Distance is replaced
by a multidinous presence.

Simon Lewty recently said to me,‘I quite like the idea of
a media-saturated atmosphere’. He embraces new technolo-
gies; he uses the Internet. His work has long suggested affini-
ties with interference across radio waves. But now that the

*Alexander Nagel, MedievalModern:ArtOutofTime,Thames & Hudson, London, 2012, Ch. 12‘TheYear 1962: Mosaic Resonance’.