Overview

This new artist’s book is the most recent in a series by the author exploring the dialectic of mark, word and image. In 1862 Karl Marx took his French colleague Ferdinand Lassalle on a visit to The British Museum, where together they looked at The Rosetta Stone. A few decades earlier in 1822, its tripartite script inscribed in hieroglyphic, demotic & Greek characters had been vital in facilitating Jean Francois Champollion’s revolutionary decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. In ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ in Capital I, published in 1867 soon after his visit, Marx stated that, ‘Value... transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic’. Using a Webdings font enhanced in colour, this artist’s book itself precisely renders his text into configurations of modern hieroglyphics. The font’s singular typeface & wide character spacing thus enables the reader to look at and to investigate his theory of fetishism in a new way. The contemporary translation of Marx’s seminal work into such a form is only made possible by the revolution in digital technology.

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9781805143307

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John McGreal was born in 1945 and lives in South London. His writing has emerged out of his practice as a visual artist, which has always included an interest in use of text. As an artist he has worked as a Visiting Tutor at Camberwell College of Art since gaining a Distinction in MA Book Arts there (2002) and a First in BA Fine Art at Central St Martin's School of Art (2001). Previously John also worked as a freelance translator for Routledge, Kegan Paul and The Harvester Press. He has always retained an interest in the social context of writing since working in the late 60’s and the early 70’s and as an academic sociologist at The London School of Economics, The Open University and Leicester University where he got a First in BA Soc. Sci. (Sociology) in 1967.

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