is the ultimate challenge. He embraced it as both a partner and a friend,
garnering techniques from his own investigations and experiments. He
pioneered sandwiching and juxtaposing film positives in the darkroom to
form a seamless union between imagery,typography, and technology, a
technique that prefigured the computer. He acknowledged the computer has
“speeded things up,” but with an ironically peevish attitude for an alleged
technophile. He still maintains that basically “there’s nothing it can do that
can’t be done by hand or film montage. It hasn’t produced a new visual
language.”
As a teacher, Weingart’s influence radiates beyond his own oeuvre.
In 1972 he organized a lecture tour through Switzerland, Germany, and the
United States, illustrating his threefold manifesto to expand typographic
alternatives through syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic considerations.
Prophetically, he concluded his remarks by confessing his program
completely neglected the study of texts, which would find full flower in the
next decade’s passion for semiotics, the study of signs and sign function.
Early students like April Greiman, Willi Kunz, and Dan Friedman, after
studying with Weingart in Basel, returned to the United States to teach
and practice. This extended spirit of aggressive exploration eventually
coalesced as the new wave in America.
Weingart’s style was appropriated during the late 1980 s and early
1990 s. At first he said imitation was a stimulant, an incentive to keep one
step ahead. Now he says, “My work is a quarry. People see a stone they like,
appropriate it and work it until there’s nothing left.” He still teaches but no
longer designs. He is far from distraught, though. “No, I had to stop, in
order to let the things that I produced sink in, and wait until the next, real
explosion comes, so that designers in the new decade can copy me again.”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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