Ilse Aichinger, Schlechte Wörter
Aichinger’s prose text, which first appeared in 1976, deals with language – its possibilities and its limitations. I made a series of 16 letterpress graphics for this text, inspired by
Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale
The
Emperor’s New Clothes. They are not intended as illustrations for Aichinger’s text. Nonetheless, I think there is a relationship between Andersen’s fairy tale and Aichinger’s text that is not apparent at first glance. The fearful acceptance of an exaggerated description of non-existent finery in Andersen, and Aichinger’s refusal to use better words, could be seen as two sides of the same coin. In the graphics, I reversed the conditions of the fairy tale. There is no naked Emperor, but figures who consist only of fabric/clothing. I made the collages on my computer, using materials from 15th and 16th-century paintings. When printing the book later on from polymer plates, I used the four-color printing method for the first time. In other words, I used my computer data to create color separations that allowed me to produce the four necessary printing plates. Offset and digital printing have long since made four-color printing commonplace; the printer feeds blank paper into one end of the machine, and gets the finished result in his hands at the other end. But when you print each color individually on an old letterpress printing machine, the whole process becomes more concrete. The result is different, turning back the wheel of technology, because of course letterpress four-color image printing has long been obsolete. For my purposes, though, the anachronistic technique was what I wanted. The rich color application and the possibility of manipulating the individual colors interested me. The result has much more to do with printmaking than with a precise reproduction of an image, which is usually the goal of offset printing.
60 pages, uncoated paper, hand-set, letterpress printed, paper-over-board, 16.5 x 24 cm,
50 numbered and signed copies. Flörsheim 2009.