Experimental Jetset Online Archive Lost Formats Links News About this site Contact	No Poetry To Recite Public Address System, 2003 Page 1 of 1				'Public Address System' was the name of a group exhibition that took place between 9 January and 14 February 2004, at the Henry Peacock Gallery (London). For this exhibition,the curator (Angharad Lewis) asked 40 graphic designers to create a typographic A2 poster. There was one catch: the poster had to be an interpretation of a speech. When thinking about what we should do for our poster, we remembered that a few months earlier we were at a screening of an old Dutch television documentary from the seventies, entitled 'Stefan Themerson en de Taal' (Stefan Themerson on Language). In one of the scenes, the Polish-born writer, film maker, publisher and poet Stefan Themerson (1910-1988) is shown reciting a paragraph from his novel 'Bayamus and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry' (1949): "My lord archbishop; your excellencies, your graces; my lords, ladies and gentlemen, men and women, children; embryos, if any; spermatozoa reclining at the edge of your chairs; all living cells; bacteria; viruses; molecules of air, and dust, and water... I feel much honoured in being asked to address you all, and to recite poetry - but I have no poetry to recite." A beautiful, anticlimactic speech. And also a speech that could serve as a sort of introduction to all the other speeches in the exhibition.		For our poster, we treated this speech in a somewhat analytical manner; by listing the addressees in a vertical way, we tried to emphasise the strong hierarchical logic behind the text. The poster was published in a limited edition of 50 copies, signed and numbered. We sold most of the posters through the gallery, but we still have some left in our archive. In the near future we hope to include a section on this website from which items such as these prints can be purchased. Note: although we designed the poster towards the end of 2003, the actual exhibition took place in the beginning of 2004. That's why we decided to include this poster in the 2004 section.
(c) Experimental Jetset 97-06	Previous / Back to Archive / Next		A2 poster		Related link: Henry Peacock Gallery		Screenprinted by Henderson/Wyber, Amsterdam.