Pavel Büchler’s formal training, first as a print student at the School of Graphic Arts (1970-72) and later as a typography student at the Institute of Applied Arts (1973-76), and the circumstances in then-communist Prague where his craft learning was undertaken, have indelibly marked his artistic life ever since. They return time and again as an inseverable mix of the learned and the unlearned. Coming from a country ‘that no longer exists’, Czechoslovakia, to Cambridge, England, via Paris in 1981, he found a West he knew less about than he expected. The immigrant experience of living with the real and false antinomies between communism and capitalism during the collapse of History anchors a common perspective in much of his work. It is the lived – in the sense of the everyday – slippages and imperfections in the various forms of cultural unity promised by translation, assimilation, democratization and collective action that seem to preoccupy his attention.
This talk presents a series of close readings of recent artworks by Büchler that depend upon the aesthetic imprint of letterpress printing as both a technological referent and a means of production. Through his learned, post-conceptual misuse of the medium, these works pose a radically untimely counter-voice to the bland obsession with the now-ness and homogeneity of digital media that dominates much text-led artistic practice today. I propose that Büchler’s counter-voice is one strong example of how the language arts can re-situate contemporary writing in a much longer history of inscriptive, publishing and reading technologies by putting into practice what I call an inmediate mode of writing. In doing so, this talk connects Büchler’s biography to a nuanced conception of nostalgia and analyses the unique qualities of letterpress in a post-digital mediascape.
The idea of inmediate writing was first proposed in my feature essay 'The Mediatisation of Contemporary Writing', commissioned by The White Review in 2014, and extended and re-published in Publishing As Artistic Practice in 2016.
This talk presented a synopsis of my chapter-length arguments about inmediate writing, forthcoming in Letterpress Printing: Past, Present, Future.
