De Nieuwe Courant Possibly 1909

This newspaper, De Nieuwe Courant, was made in 1909. The texture is fascinating, because it is all texture, isn't it? From a distance it's a uniform field of small marks. But up close, you can pick out all the individual letterforms. It's just this sea of information. I'm drawn to the way the various texts are organized and structured on the page. It's almost like a map, with different sections dedicated to different topics or regions. If you think about it, newspapers are all about trying to make sense of the world, to impose some kind of order on the chaos of events. Like some later works by Kurt Schwitters, this newspaper combines the immediacy of daily life with a sense of formal composition. Just like painting, it's a record of how we try to see, think, and experience the world. And just like painting, it embraces ambiguity, because there's never just one way to interpret what's going on.