Telegram aan Philip Zilcken Possibly 1909

This telegram to Philip Zilcken, from the Amsterdammer, is a strange, sad little object. There's an attention to detail here, in the layout and typography, but it’s all so… bureaucratic. You can imagine a whole system of people, machines, and protocols involved in its making. Look at the texture of the paper, thin and brittle, almost like skin. The folds and creases speak to its history of being handled and transported. And the typewriter text, so rigid and impersonal, contrasts with the handwritten annotations scrawled across the top. That looping, cursive script is trying to inject some humanity into this otherwise sterile form. It reminds me of some of Hanne Darboven's work, especially her obsessive, repetitive transcriptions of texts. There's a similar sense of trying to make sense of the world through systems and structures, but ultimately finding only emptiness and repetition. Both artists seem to suggest that language and communication can be just as much about what's left unsaid, as what's actually spoken.