Our first Artist’s Edition includes prints of Herbert Pföstl’s nine original Schrift-Landschaften drawings, along with a foreword written by filmmaker David Gatten, titled “Navigation Charts, Compass Points & Ledger Lines: Herbert Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften as Philosophical Instruments.” The drawings are composed of a single text-fragment, written in Pföstl’s distinctly small script, and inscribed upon a page from a nautical traverse table. One is reminded of the particularities of calligraphic expression and the meditative processes required to create needlework samplers, chronological tables, weather diaries, or even telegraphic code. Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften, however, come from a deep reading of and reliance upon literature; these lines are fragments from books gathered over many years and transformed into a landscape of incantations for the artist. What at first appears a wilderness of words on paper soon resolves into a garland of vows concealed within the text. Gatten’s foreword is both a response to Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften as well as a meditation on his abiding interest in the liminal space which often exists between drawing and writing — a place masterfully explored and surveyed in his astonishing films. Pföstl writes of the Schrift-Landschaften: “As incantation in repetition, these landscapes of script are walks in writing on fields of paper. Resurrected fragments, summoned as vows: exercises to gain time.”
The Standard Edition of three hundred copies will include color offset prints of the nine Schrift-Landschaften drawings created by Herbert Pföstl in 2015, as well as a letterpress printed leaflet of David Gatten’s foreword. Everything will be housed in a handmade enclosure with letterpress printing. All printing by Jon Beacham at The Brother in Elysium.
The Special Edition of nine signed and numbered copies will include everything in the Standard Edition plus one original Schrift-Landschaften drawing created by Pföstl in 2016 especially for this publication.
Each drawing in the Special Edition is composed of one of the following nine lines:
we can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind
a consolation even to plants and animals
birds and stars and bells and snowflakes
all we wish for is to be forgotten
and whatever is destroyed is regretted
to do everything possible for that which does not exist
the invisible things will give me strength
and the skies passed on as over nature
to the ships that are no more
