Away with Words: On the Work of Raffaella della Olga
Robert Wiesenberger
2025

Published in
Raffaella della Olga: Typescripts
Clark Art Institute
Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2025

In her studio outside Paris, Raffaella della Olga is surrounded by a motley chorus of machines. There is the Olivetti Lexikon 80, a sleek model in slate green, produced from the 1940s until 1968, the year after the artist was born. When in use, it sounds like it could punch through sheet metal, to say nothing of the delicate papers della Olga feeds it. Beside it is an Olympia, whose robust, triple-wide carriage cantilevers improbably to one side. There is also a Remington, a Triumph, and another Olivetti, each resting on a rolling table or plywood cabinet. In the middle is the maestra, seated on an Aeron office chair and wearing heavy ear protection, as one would at a shooting range.

The earmuffs recall media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s description of the typewriter as a “discursive machine-gun” for the way it accelerated the act of writing, beginning in the late nineteenth century, with powerful implications for bureaucratic efficiency, gender parity, and even literary style [1]. Della Olga’s office chair, meanwhile, which came to represent another moment of technological disruption—the dot-com bubble of the mid-1990s and the internet era of today—is ergonomic and adjustable in a way her typewriters are not. Cradling its sitter in elastic mesh, the Aeron was the physical support for knowledge workers crafting a dematerialized, frictionless future, one whose utopian promises have since curdled.

The artist’s studio is in the town of Haute-Isle, fifty miles northwest of Paris and connected to it by the Seine. This is near where the painter Joan Mitchell once lived, as did Claude Monet, before he moved to Giverny. It is also near a former factory for Singer sewing machines, a related technology with similarly emancipatory effects. The first mass-market typewriter, introduced in 1874 by E. Remington and Sons—best known for its firearms—was built on the chassis of the company’s successful sewing machine. (The Singer fortune, incidentally, also enabled the founding of the Clark Art Institute [2].)

The typewriter, in della Olga’s hands, is a versatile machine. She types using both ink ribbons and carbon papers, each in a range of colors. She inserts textiles into the carriage to transfer the fabric’s grain onto the page. Della Olga also draws, pressing the ribbon with one hand while dragging the paper through the machine with the other. Mainly, however, she thinks of herself as a sculptor, typing on materials ranging from tracing paper to foil paper, sandpaper to silk, carbon paper to photo paper, and embossing them with forceful keystrokes before binding them into books. As often as not, the machine effaces itself in the finished product; it seems inconceivable that della Olga’s rich surfaces were created by a typewriter but also unclear how else they might have been made.

Each of della Olga’s artist’s books, which she has produced for the past decade, is addressed to a different conceptual and technical problem and titled with a sequential number preceded by the letter T. This stands for tapuscrit, French for “typescript,” a now uncommon term for an author’s original, typewritten text. Like the word itself, della Olga’s work joins the mechanical with the manual, expressing gesture through the machine. Here there is script but also scripting: della Olga makes many of her books through a sequence of conceptual instructions, like an algorithm, while others have been the basis of musical scores realized by a collaborator. Her process is a way of studying, embodying, and subverting structures—structures of lexical and numerical language, of the codex book form, and of the page itself, in its formal and material composition. By using a standardized, administrative tool to idiosyncratic, artistic ends, she proposes a hands-on relationship with technology. And while her approach is analog, it is not nostalgic; rather than a narrative of obsolescence or progress, her work reveals the accumulation and interdependence of media, old and new. In using typewriters to make books, della Olga transforms both technologies in the process.

Raffaella Della Olga’s path to art-making is a story of constraint and freedom, a shift from numbers to letters to images. She was born in a village near Bergamo, into a working-class home. Her father ran a hardware store, where della Olga worked as a child, before he became an entrepreneur in the construction industry. As a teenager, della Olga wanted to become an architect or a biologist, but was sent to a strict vocational school, administered by priests, where she was taught typing and accounting. Her father expected her to become an accountant, though della Olga argued successfully for law, which seemed to her more humanistic. While in law school, her father died suddenly and she was forced to take over the construction business. She managed the firm for ten years before returning to law school, where she finished as a criminal defense attorney, work that she practiced for three years. The harsh world of penal codes and colorless language of legalese were never natural for della Olga. She instead needed space, distance, and self-definition:

For me, the Academy of Fine Arts, which I attended in the early 2000s, had been an emergency exit from a dimension that didn’t belong to me—I started a career as a lawyer—as was the decision to call myself Raffaella della Olga, which is not my family name, because I realized—and later understood more fully—that I needed a space of my own, where it was no longer necessary to dialogue with the paternal figure, with my inheritance. So, I realized I was free to have what I wanted, to be able to invent another life for myself [4].

Della Olga’s knowledge of accounting and law is a reminder that the earliest forms of writing were dedicated to transactions and agreements, to loans and debts and witnesses to them. The word script (Latin: scribene), the work of scribes as official clerks, comes from scratching and carving, originally of cuneiform into clay tablets some 4,000 years ago. These were portable documents in which writing was, at its origin, impressed in a surface. Going forward, della Olga would no longer wield letters or numbers strategically, but deconstruct them entirely. From the wordiness of law and chaos of translation (Italian to English to French and back), della Olga also sought distance.

In art school, della Olga studied photography, and her early works were large-format pictures exposed only by moonlight, lending them an uncanny glow. It was in Paris that she first encountered the work of symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and his landmark poem, “Un coup de Dés n’abolira le Hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”), published posthumously in 1914. For the historical avant-garde, as art historian Trevor Stark notes, Mallarmé’s poem offered language “as a material and as a metaphor,” that is, as both typographic substance and preexisting system [5]. Della Olga, who shares these fascinations, encountered Mallarmé through yet another figure working through his legacy: the poet-turned-visual artist Marcel Broodthaers, who regarded Mallarmé’s poem as being “like the manifesto of contemporary art, written in the nineteenth century,” for the way it united word and image [6]. Broodthaers took this text and, in an act of abstraction, a kind of Suprematist redaction, replaced Mallarmé’s lines of verse with black rectangles in the same position and size to create a wordless visual poem. These works borrow the title of Mallarmé’s poem while also adding a subtitle: Image.

Della Olga became fascinated with Mallarmé’s poem and produced homages of her own. The first, in 2009, involved meticulously overwriting a facsimile of the original 1914 publication with phosphorescent powder and glue, so that it could be charged with a light and read in the dark, in keeping with her earlier interest in nocturnal imaging. She used Mallarmé’s title, but now with the subtitle Constellation, a word that appears on its final page. Constellation also reflects a founding conviction of concrete poetry, a tendency that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, with near simultaneous origins in Brazil and Switzerland. Concrete poetry’s aspirations for the written word are captured succinctly by the title of a 1954 manifesto by Eugen Gomringer, one of its founders: “From Line to Constellation” [7]. Poet and scholar Mary Ellen Solt described “a fundamental requirement which the various kinds of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made” [8]. She continued that “what used to be called the reader […] must now perceive the poem as an object and participate in the poet’s act of creating it, for the concrete poem communicates first and foremost its structure” [9].

This emphasis on materiality and structure—the concreteness of concrete poetry—has its origin in abstract art. The 1930 manifesto for Art Concret, authored by Theo van Doesburg and his colleagues, galvanized artists in Europe and Latin America in the decades that followed. It asserted that: “The work of art must be entirely conceived and shaped by the mind prior to its execution [… in order to] to exclude lyricism, drama, symbolism, and so on.” It also insisted that: “The painting must be constructed entirely with purely plastic elements, namely surfaces and colors.” Moreover: “The painting technique must be mechanical, i.e., exact, anti-impressionistic” [10]. Given these aspirationally objective, depersonalizing aims, it is no surprise that typewritten and typeset language have been integral to the look and feel of so much concrete poetry, as opposed to the organicism and subjectivity of handwriting—not just as preconditions for mechanical reproduction, but as a philosophical and aesthetic principle. The monospace lettering that typewriters produce was an essential building block in the geometric compositions of so much concrete poetry.

As if to extend and improve upon van Doesburg’s principles, in the mid-1920s, his colleague Stefi Kiesler published what she called “typo-plastics” in three issues of his De Stijl journal. These Elementarist compositions of typewritten characters showed that one could not just make pictures in a “mechanical way,” as van Doesburg prescribed, but could indeed use a machine to make pictures. That this machine was uniquely gendered, in the modernizing bureaucratic zeitgeist—“typewriter” long referred to both the machines and their invariably female operators—adds another layer of significance to works by an artist who otherwise seems to have produced little work. (Less is known about Stefi Kiesler than about her famous designer and architect partner, Frederick, but she was a bookish polyglot who for three decades directed the German and French divisions of the New York Public Library [11].) Kiesler credited her work to a male pseudonym, Pietro Saga or Pietro de Saga, so that it might be assessed more “objectively” [12].

Under her assumed name, Raffaella della Olga returned to using the typewriter for the first time since her early days running her father’s business, but this time using letters and numbers to create images. Her early works focus on a topic she was following closely, as a southern European fluent in the language of accounting: Around 2011, in the midst of the global financial crisis and recession in Europe, which produced soaring debts and catastrophic defaults, della Olga typed poems composed solely of credit ratings. She presents these cryptic alphanumerics—AA–, Ba1, CCC–, etc., the codes of agencies such as Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch—in various constellations: corresponding to the continental map, mimicking the trend lines of a chart, or in geometric configurations. She understood them as abstractions legible mainly to elites that nevertheless spelled disastrous consequences for ordinary people in Greece and Italy, Spain and Portugal.

In 2012, della Olga sewed together squares of credit ratings, typewritten in black ink on white cotton. She titled the work Aladdin, with reference to the BlackRock financial risk management software responsible for more than $20 trillion in assets globally (the name is an acronym for Asset, Liability, Debt and Derivative Investment Network, and is fitting for the mysterious, quasi-magical predictive powers of a product on which more than a tenth of the global economy relies). Della Olga exhibited her work as a tablecloth, an innocuous piece of decor that underlies domestic rituals and is, in her treatment, imprinted precisely with dark, incantatory codes; moreover, draped on a table, it appears to levitate. Della Olga also published her credit rating poems under the aegis of OuUnPo, a European collective of artists and researchers that stages workshops and performances (their name is short for “Workshops for Potential Universes,” and references the 1960s French group Oulipo, which created new literary forms based on strict constraints). In 2015, she would stage a performance at Centre Pompidou in Paris, with Madeleine Aktypi, in which the two cast wooden poles, pointed on both ends and wrapped with cloth bearing different credit ratings, onto the floor while calling each rating aloud [13]. The poles appear at once playful, like oversize pick-up sticks, and threatening, like javelins, in either case underlining the world-making whims of performers.

In 2016, della Olga began to combine her typescripts into books. “A book,” as artist Ulises Carrión defined it in his 1975 manifesto “The New Art of Making Books,” “is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments” [14]. Indeed, della Olga’s books create visual rhythms and differentiated haptic experiences in three dimensions over time. Her DIY approach also allows her to be responsible for the content, form, and production of her books; as Carrión declared: “In the old art the writer writes texts. In the new art the writer makes books.” Or, in the words of artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, who sent her typewriter prints by mail as a kind of “safety valve” in 1970s East Germany, in lieu of international travel: “Type your own art” [15].

The first three of della Olga’s books expand on her credit rating poems. In T1 and T2 (both 2016), she typed the ratings on various paper stocks, while in T3 (2016), she abstracted these abstractions further, recreating them with existing typewriter symbols: underscore, hyphen, equal sign, slash. In these books, arrows and lines run up, down, and across pages modulated by translucency and superimposition, embossed textures, and colorful paper stocks. Here and elsewhere, repetition and counting of discretized, protodigital keystrokes form the basis of della Olga’s process. In his text “Why Do Typewriters Go ‘Click’?,” media theorist Vilém Flusser suggested that “machines stutter […] because everything there is in the world (and the whole world itself) stutters.” He continues, as if describing della Olga’s own path: “Everything quantizes. Thus numbers, but not letters, correspond to the world. It is open to calculation but not to description” [16].

In 2018, della Olga returned to Mallarmé’s “Un coup de Dés,” but considered it a score for an abstraction of her own. By inserting a swatch of fabric and a sheet of carbon paper into the typewriter carriage and striking them with the flat surface of filed down typebars, she revealed a texture behind the text. She typed the work on unbound sheets of tracing paper; when stacked, their translucency offers a synoptic view, an underlying structure in the poem. Della Olga subtitled the work Trame, a word with multiple senses in Italian, as in French, all suggesting an underlying structure: trame is the weft, or horizontal thread, in weaving; the grain of a material; the screen used in printing; or the frame of a literary work.

Much has been made of the common origin of the words “text,” “texture,” and “textile” in the Latin texere, to weave [17]. Artist Anni Albers dwelled in these connections, observing that “along with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning” [18]. In her pictorial weavings, Albers thematized this relationship, with works like Ancient Writing (1936) and Open Letter (1958), whose abstract text blocks follow a syntactic rhythm, or Haiku (1961) and Code (1962), where a floating weft travels across lines like script. In her teaching, Albers used a typewriter to model with text effects that might be pursued in textiles. She referred to these typewritten studies, which use slashes, periods, and percentage signs, as “tactile-textile illusions” that “are to be understood not as an end in themselves, but merely as a help to us in gaining new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language” [19]. Art historian T’ai Smith observes of Albers’s lucid writing: “Albers indeed relished the correspondences between weaving and writing: different, yet also similar, practices or operations: binding threads, stringing together words into texts. Both are techniques that connect certain materials, processes, and patterns of thought into a texture—a material yet also conceptual rhythm” [20].

The up-down, side-to-side directionality imposed by the typewriter—through its platen (roller) and carriage, respectively—serves della Olga’s enduring fascination with the grid. It also places her work in dialogue with other grid-based technologies, from weaving to electronic screens comprised of pixels (known as raster displays, from the German Raster, a grid or woven screen). In an essential 1979 text on the grid (which nevertheless leaves textiles unmentioned), art historian Rosalind Krauss observed that “the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” Yet Krauss notes that it was not the sober, materialist rigor of the grid that inspired avant-garde artists like Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, but something more ethereal: “They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.” “The grid’s mythic power,” she concludes, “is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)” [21]. Della Olga’s undogmatic exploration of the grid, book by book, embodies and exceeds the both-and oppositions of Krauss’s account. In some of her books we encounter warped grids, the product of loosely woven textiles run through the machine. She has also succeeded in breaking the grid, producing undulating lines on the typewriter which drape like garlands, in T54 (2025). Tied to the affordances of her machines and physical supports, the spiritual satisfaction della Olga achieves with her grids—a quiet inwardness, a shift from her early political work—is never far off from material reality.

An architectural grid is the subject of della Olga’s T40 (2023), which develops variations on a tall, paned window. The book’s clear plastic cover, imbued with silver glitter, is dazzlingly playful and the first sign of the artist’s interest in surfaces that contain depth. With dark lines della Olga constructs a grid on each page and then fills it with pinks, purples, and oranges, blues and greens, typed on tracing paper and copy paper, their precisely registered frames either overlapping or offset. These are not fully transparent windows (a physical impossibility) but ones that buzz at the particle level, their candy-colored lenses producing the kind of ecstasy sought by Gothic and then Expressionist architects, albeit within a rectilinear frame. The texturing marks that fill these windows—some in grids or stripes, others in a pointillist flurry—have the inconstant quality of a chalky line, or airbrush, a function of the ink’s freshness, the paper’s absorbency, and the typist’s force. Some pages show the grain of fabrics della Olga has fed through her machine, their structure making for a regular, visually permeable texture. These rectangles might evoke Leon Battista Alberti’s metaphor of a picture as an open window framing a fixed view, a durable paradigm of artistic representation [22]. Superimposed across pages, they might also suggest virtual windows, like those introduced by Xerox and Apple to the graphical user interface, beginning in the 1980s, a resemblance heightened by what appears to be a field of shimmering pixels. Yet the frame of the window is joined by another convention, in the space of the page: set asymmetrically, with wide margins to either side, and subdivided by a typographic grid, we might see the text block of a book, though one whose linear progression is complicated by superimposition. The rhythms della Olga creates—of shifting color, texture, and position—are punctuated by sheets on which the marks bleed off the edge, as if we’re not looking through a window, or onto a page, but are somehow inside it. These variable viewpoints bring mediation itself to the surface.

Other of della Olga’s books pay homage to the serial grid systems of her predecessors. In T58 (2025), della Olga builds on the Language Series of Los Angeles conceptualist Channa Horwitz. In T57 (2025), she returns to a formative influence, revisiting the work of Sol LeWitt. Here she develops twenty-four permutations of a four-by-four grid, in eight colors, each square composed of tightly spaced numbers (1–4). Typed on Japanese paper, precisely registered front and back, della Olga’s permutations are progressive and run in both directions, their colors and number textures mixing with the turn of each page. For Horwitz and LeWitt, the square and cube offered a ready syntax. For his part, LeWitt claimed, “The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloging the results of the premise” [23]. LeWitt’s evocation of a clerk’s administrative labor resonates with della Olga’s tapping away at her keyboard. For her, typewritten recoding is a way to perform, embody, and extend LeWitt’s systems, making them her own. At the same time, we might take LeWitt’s disavowal of beauty and mystery with a grain of salt. Validating Krauss, his first of thirty-five “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969), reads: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach” [24].

Some of this mysticism is present in della Olga’s homage to another Minimalist, in T32 (2021). Here she reinterprets the fluorescent tube sculptures of Dan Flavin, or, more specifically, she makes a book about a book of them. On black carbon paper and white graph paper, della Olga draws various of Flavin’s sculptures to the scale found in a major catalog of his work [25]. On the black ground, she types using white-and-yellow carbon paper, mimicking the glow of Flavin’s lights on one side of the paper and creating a ghostly embossment on the other. Flavin, who variously cast his work in either literalist or quasi-religious terms, valued the mundane quality of fluorescent tubes, sharing with della Olga an appreciation for an economy of means [26]. For her, Flavin’s fluorescent tubes are, before anything else, lines. Krauss saw them similarly: “As Flavin deploys it, the fluorescent tube is clearly a graphic device. It possesses both the figurative density of a line, and the inherent ambiguity of its position in space” [27]. Della Olga’s flickering lines in T32 are similarly ambiguous, their ink seeming to project off the page while their impressions are deeply embedded in it, reflecting the dual immateriality and physicality of Flavin’s sculpture. Della Olga also uses materials more traditionally associated with divine light, inspired by her encounters with Byzantine and Gothic panels by the likes of Cimabue and Giotto. In T25 (2020), a small book typed, in part, on gold leaf, della Olga again creates a range of subtle grid formations, in one case finding that the typewriter matrix worked as a punch, piercing the dark blue carbon paper to reveal moments of gold leaf behind it, like stars in a night sky.

From office supplies to hardware, della Olga’s materials can present unusual challenges. In T44 (2023), she types on sheets of sandpaper, front and back. The only text here is numbers—80, 120, 40, 150—each referring to the grit level (coarseness) of the sheet’s face. Horizontal bands appear like vibrant textile patterns on smoother surfaces (paper backing and higher-grit sandpaper), while the rough surfaces offer less purchase for the ink and show only faint lines, like an Agnes Martin on a garnet red ground. Della Olga’s experimentation with sandpaper has parallels in the history of artist’s books, both for its industrial availability and its aggressive materiality. In 1959, Guy Debord and Asger Jorn published Mémoires, a book wrapped in fine-grit sandpaper meant to rough up its neighbors on the shelf, consistent with the Situationists’ flouting of bourgeois conventions. (In della Olga’s case, the sandpaper roughs up the machine, slowly sanding down its characters in an auto-destructive act.) There is also a specifically Italian tradition here, from the Futurist movement: Fortunato Depero’s aggressive Depero Futurista (1927) was bound with industrial nuts and bolts, which projected out to either side, making standard shelving impossible [28]. As a manifesto of material possibilities, in 1932, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement’s founder, published a book with artist Tullio d'Albisola that was lithographed directly onto tin plate with the name Futurist Words in Freedom: Olfactory, Tactile, Thermal [29]. Both titles, now known as “the bolted book” and the “metal book,” respectively, reflect Italian Futurism’s fascination with war and industrial technology, in keeping with its fascist politics [30].

Designer and artist Bruno Munari, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and inventive bookmakers, whose early years were shaped by late Futurism, offers a more apt precursor to della Olga’s practice. In 1950, he began making what he called libri illeggibili (illegible books), “without words but full of visual and tactile communication” [31]. These books, which he continued producing over the next three decades, incorporated paper stocks of different colors and transparencies, die-cut and fold-out elements, and threads sewn through multiple pages, literal throughlines in a nonlinguistic narrative. Munari’s use of the word “illegible” to describe these books should be understood as tongue in cheek, given his lifelong commitment to producing and explicating visual language in books intended for both children and adults [32].

Language in della Olga’s work takes on several guises. In T38 (2022), the artist produces sheets of asemic writing, that is, marks with the appearance of language but without defined semantic content [33]. These geometric symbols, suggestive of a kind of machine language, appear on opposite pages filled by a technicolor, pointillist cloud, as if to juxtapose signal and noise. In T47 (2023), della Olga departed from both the codex book and her resistance to conventional language, producing an alphabet book in leporello (accordion) format. Typed on a single sheet, which extends to over twenty-two feet, della Olga uses the space of each page to type out the letters and numerals of a typeface designed in the 1960s and based on a strict, five-by-five grid (incidentally, it resembles the geometric letterforms used by Theo van Doesburg in the 1920s). Titled simply Alphabet, the typeface was intended for cathode ray monitors, with their raster of relatively large pixels, and therefore has no curves or diagonals—features attractive to della Olga given the technical constraints of the typewriter. The typeface was, according to its creators, “specifically designed for machine handling, yet at the same time, recognizable to human beings” [34]. That recognizability, however, depends on a system of difference with other characters that may not be immediately evident in the full-bleed, frame-by-frame sequence of della Olga’s book. The artist therefore manages to again abstract language, even one built on the most rational foundations. Here, for example, the N appears as an arch and the O as a border, while the Q and X, without context, are not immediately identifiable as such. Meanwhile, departing from the language of humans entirely, della Olga’s T50 (2024) is a large, landscape format book with typewritten cork covers and a mix of paper and tracing paper inside. Della Olga, who adores birds and is diligent in providing them food and water, set herself the task of notating the songs she hears outside the studio. For this book, she created all-over, fabric-and-carbon-paper-based impressions in pastel colors that have the appearance of a spectrogram, a visual representation of sound frequency and volume. These softly textured, layered, and polychrome pages, possess a painterly richness and musicality, despite the unsonorous machine that made them.

In parallel with her bookmaking, della Olga has, since 2016, made fabric works, which she calls Stoffe, from the Italian word for textiles. Using found fabrics in tartan, plaid, or gingham patterns—usually wool suiting—she meticulously excises the negative spaces defined by the grid. She displays the fabrics by draping them over a spent fluorescent tube mounted to the wall (an homage to Flavin), precisely registered to align the fabrics and their voids. The effect is of a sheer surface with depth and volume, not unlike her treatment of the book page. These works recall Albers’s memorable description of weaving as “a pliable plane,” related to (and constituting the earliest forms of) architecture, based on a common “process of structural organization” [35]. This structural organization is dramatized by the checkered fabrics della Olga chooses, materials whose patterns graphically articulate their essential structure. As one moves past them, and the grid slides in and out of alignment, dynamic interference patterns develop. The Stoffe are generally square in format when installed; in some, stray threads spill from the cut edges of the voids, reminders of their composition that push the work into other dimensions. The interstices, as della Olga explains, relate to the sprocket holes that advance film strips, whose flat emulsions are made to project from a surface into three-dimensional space. Indeed, Friedrich Kittler described the typewriter as “a technology whose basic action not coincidentally consists of strikes and triggers proceeds in automated and discrete steps, as does ammunitions transport in a revolver and a machine-gun, or celluloid transport in a film projector” [36]. T19 (2019), which fills each page with running columns of abstracted film strips, is an homage to the Frozen Film Frame collages (1966–77) of the structural filmmaker Paul Sharits, grids of colorful film strips encased in plexiglass. Della Olga, who is equally interested in the material and technical bases of her media, might well be considered a structural bookmaker.

Having recently moved from the city to the countryside, della Olga relishes the quiet, the foliage, and the larger population of birds (binoculars sit beside her typewriter). Here she also produces paintings (what she calls her “vertical adventure”), which she types on paper or canvas and stretches on wood. Like pages from her bookworks, these pictures are vibrant and even painterly, if also a world away from the Abstract Expressionism of Joan Mitchell. Nevertheless, as della Olga shows, depersonalizing machines can be made to express gesture; it is still possible to make one’s mark.

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Notes

[1] Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 191.
[2] Edward Clark, grandfather of the museum’s founder, Robert Sterling, was the lawyer and business partner to Isaac Singer, of Singer sewing machines. See Nicholas Fox Weber, The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud (New York: Knopf, 2007).
[3] Della Olga favors the verb “prepare,” with its link to composer John Cage, who placed household objects on or between a piano’s strings, initially to simulate African percussive instruments. See John Cage, “How the Piano Came to Be Prepared,” in Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 7.
[4] Raffaella Della Olga in conversation with Stefano Chiodi, “Nuovi Formati Dell’arte: Intervista All’artista Raffaella Della Olga,” Artribune, October 23, 2018, https://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/arte-contemporanea/2018/10/nuovi-formati-dellarte-intervista-allartista-raffaella-della-olga/ (https://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/arte-contemporanea/2018/10/nuovi-formati-dellarte-intervista-allartista-raffaella-della-olga/); translated by Theresa Davis.
[5] Trevor Stark, Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 4.
[6] Marcel Broodthaers, unpublished note (1969), in Marcel Broodthaers: Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2012), 232.
[7] Eugen Gomringer, “From Line to Constellation” (1954), in Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary Ellen Solt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 67.
[8] Mary Ellen Solt, “A World Look at Concrete Poetry,” in Concrete Poetry, 7.
[9] Solt, “A World Look at Concrete Poetry,” 8.
[10] Theo van Doesburg et. al., “Base de La Peinture Concrète,” Art Concret 1 (April 1930): 1; my translation.
[11] For more on Kiesler, see Jill Meißner, “Stefi Kiesler, eine Bibliothekarin als Zuflucht im New Yorker Exil,” in Exil: Literatur & Gedächtnis: Ein Lesebuch, ed. Alexander Emanuely, Judith Goetz, and Thomas Wallerberger (Vienna: Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft, 2012), 134–37.
[12] See Helke Smet, “Stefi Kiesler’s Typo-Plastics as Fundamental Comments on De Stijl,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2020): 73. Five of Kiesler’s typewriter drawings, the only ones known to survive, are held by the Yale University Art Gallery.
[13] Raffaella della Olga and Madeleine Aktypi, Aladdin Game (Un nouveau festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris, April 4, 2015), https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/media/1zvF2Z5 (https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/media/1zvF2Z5).
[14] Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books” (1975), in Publishing Manifestos: An International Anthology from Artists and Writers, ed. Michalis Pichler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 51.
[15] Quoted in Zanna Gilbert, “Dear Ruth,” in Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt: Signs Fiction, ed. Jennifer Chert (Berlin: Motto Books, 2016), 30. And Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, “Signs Fiction,” in the same volume, 14.
[16] Vilém Flusser, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 62.
[17] See Lynne Cooke, ed., Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2023), 2.
[18] Anni Albers, On Weaving (1965), new expanded edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 50.
[19] Albers, On Weaving, 44.
[20] T’ai Smith, “On Reading on Weaving,” in On Weaving, 240.
[21] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50, 52, 54.
[22] See Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 20.
[23] Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD)” (1966), in Sol LeWitt, ed. Alicia Legg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 170.
[24] LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969), in Sol LeWitt, 168.
[25] Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell, eds., Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961–1996 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
[26] See Hal Foster, “Dan Flavin and the Catastrophe of Minimalism,” in Dan Flavin: New Light, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 142–3.
[27] Rosalind Krauss, “Dan Flavin” (1969), in It Is What It Is: Writings on Dan Flavin since 1964, ed. Paul Feldman and Karsten Schubert (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), 52.
[28] See Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista, 1913–1927 (Milan: Edizione della Dinamo, 1927). See also Giovanni Lista, Le Livre Futuriste. De libération du mot au poème tactile (Modena: Editions Panini, 1982).
[29] Tullio d'Albisola and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Parole in libertà: Futuriste olfattive tattili-termiche (Rome: Edizioni futuriste di poesia, 1932). See also Vincent Giroud, Marinetti’s Metal Book: Parole in Libertà (Berkeley, CA: Codex Foundation, 2012).
[30] For a recent reappraisal of the movement, see Vivien Greene, ed., Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2014).
[31] Bruno Munari quoted in Giorgio Maffei, Munari’s Books (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), 237.
[32] For example, Munari dedicated booklets to the square, circle, and triangle, as forms and cultural signifiers, titles which remain in print through the publisher Corraini Edizioni.
[33] For more on this approach, see Peter Schwenger, Asemic: The Art of Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
[34] Timothy Epps and Christopher Evans, Alphabet (Hilversum: Quadrat-Prints, 1970), np. The typeface has many similarities with Wim Crouwel’s better known New Alphabet, of 1967, made entirely from horizontal and vertical strokes and intended for the screen. Crouwel considered it “over-the-top and never meant to be really used,” though it did appear on the cover of Joy Division’s 1988 album Substance, designed Peter Saville and Brett Wickens.
[35] Anni Albers, “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture” (1957), in On Designing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 19.
[36] Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 191.