Textfield
Jonathan Maghen
Located in Los Angeles, Textfield is an independent publisher and distributor of art, design and fashion books and periodicals. LA is a city of dispersal and mobility, and Textfield has responded to this condition with a diverse range of activities that involve, on the one hand, a far-flung network of friends and collaborators and, on the other, a set of more immediate, local projects and concerns. These include an ongoing graphic design practice specialising in print and book design with a special emphasis on typography, as well as a publishing and distribution catalogue with over 100 titles including artist’s books, monographs and periodicals. Since 2004 Textfield has also distributed TAGBANGER, a boutique line of t-shirts and apparel created in collaboration with Amsterdam-based artist Rafael Rafaël. Finally, Textfield hosts a local Fútbol Club whose membership includes an assortment of LA artists, curators, designers, scholars and players from nearby Lafayette Park.
Textfield’s contributions to the Forms of Inquiry Reading Room reflect this range of activity: a kind of everywhere-and-nowhere sensibility that connects us with like-minds in places like Amsterdam, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin and New York, offset by work both by and with local Los Angeles artists and galleries in nearby Chinatown. As the name Textfield might suggest, the connections to architecture in this material arise largely by way of typography and space, both in the books themselves and as subject matter. This is perhaps best seen in SIGNATURE, a small saddle-stitched monograph designed by Textfield for the LA-based photographer Shannon Ebner and commissioned by Wallspace Gallery in New York. Much of Ebner’s work involves photographs of site-specific installations of large, hand-made letterforms set in the Southern California landscape, a meditation on space and language that reacts directly with the ecologies in and around the city. As the title indicates, the monograph is itself a signature, and a limited edition of signed press-sheets were left unfolded, relating the ‘flat’ space of the printed sheet to the ‘folded’ space of the book object.
The way this easy-to-miss piece incorporates photography, typography, space and the materiality of the book form involves strands that almost all of the contributions to the Reading Room take up in one way or another. Sometimes this involves the work of particular artists who use typography and elements of graphic design, like Ebner, Eduardo Sarabia, General Idea, Simon Lewis and Lawrence Weiner, whose Bent & Broken Shafts of Light is included here. In other instances the approach is almost entirely photographic, as in William Jones’ Is It Really So Strange, which documents LA- based Smiths’ fans, or magazines like Capricious and Daddy. Graphic design itself also has an important place, represented by printed matter/drukwerk, the soft-bound, french-folded survey of the work of Dutch designer Karel Martens, and the typographic experiments of Peter Gisi’s Stadtplan, hard-bound and beautifully designed by Christoph Stahli and Sandra Hoffmann.
Since 2003 Textfield has published its own eponymous ‘magazine’ in a variety of material formats, including one-colour, offset-printed publications (Textfield I and II), a newsprint broadsheet (III), and printed and bound journals (Textfield IV and V). The issues range from early, mostly visual contributions from designers and artists, to more recent work that balances essays, interviews and other writings on art and design with portfolios of work by young fashion designers. The connection with fashion and its overlap with art and design has become increasingly important, and so alongside a full run of Textfield we have included two examples of publications we consider our peers: Bless, from Berlin, and Fairy Tale, from Paris. Textfield’s contributions to the Forms of Inquiry Reading Room thus might be seen to chart or map out a set of local, material and textual practices set against the boundless space of contemporary Los Angeles.
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Capricious #5
edited and published by Sophie Mörner, art directed by Karen Heuter, ISSN 1573-3076
www.becapricious.com
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Daddy No. 2
Peres Projects, edited by Javier Peres, 2007
www.daddythemagazine.com
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Eduardo Sabaria, Reflecion de un Interes
1–20 Gallery, designed by Peter Kim, ISBN 0-9725-244-2-8, 2004
www.1-20.com
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Fairytale Foto Winter 2006/07
Viers, edited by Achim Reichart and Marco Fiedler, ISBN 0-907259-17-0, 2002
www.fairytale-magazine.com
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General Idea: Editions 1967–1995
Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto, edited by Barbara Fischer, ISBN 0-7727-8206-7, 2003
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Lawrence Wiener, Bent & Broken Shafts of Light
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, edited by Holger Broeker, designed by Andreas Tetzlaff and Gerard Hadders, ISBN 3-7757-1025-6, 2000
www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de
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Shannon Ebner, Signature
Wallspace, designed by Jonathan Maghen, 2007
www.wallspacegallery.com
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Simon Lewis, The Book of Soundings/Observances
GAK Bremen and Passenger Books, edited by Simon Lewis and Gabriele Mackert, designed by Gary Hincks ISBN 978-3-00-020662-7, 2007
www.passengerbooks.com
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Stadtplan: Dreiundvierzig Typographische Bauprojekte
HoffmannStähli, ISBN 3-9520805-0-0 1995
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Textfield Vol 1 Issue 1
Textfield Press, edited by Jonathan Maghen, 2003
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Textfield Vol 1 Issue 2
Textfield Press, edited by Jonathan Maghen and Rafaël Rozendaal, art directed by Rafaël Rozendaal, 2003
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Textfield Vol 1 Issue 3
Textfield, edited and art directed by Jonathan Maghen, 2005
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Textfield Vol 1 Issue 4
Textfield, edited and art directed by Jonathan Maghen, 2006
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Textfield Vol 1 Issue 5
Textfield, edited and art directed by Jonathan Maghen, ISSN 1934-2446, 2007
www.textfield.org
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William Jones, Is It Really So Strange
David Kordansky Gallery, designed by Brian Roettinger ISBN 0-9772347-1-1, 2006
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