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AND THEN THEY WERE

Peter Downsbrough

AND THEN THEY WERE
1985

7 5/8 x 5 inches (19.5 x 12.6 cm)

112 pages / Unpaginated / Stitch bound / Softcover

98 plates, 4 chapters (diagonals, drawings, words)

Offset (black and white)

Publisher: Pietro Sparta and Pascale Petit, Chagny, France, following the exhibition at Au fond de la cour à droite, Chagny, January 15-February 6, 1983

Printer: Jozef Imschoot, Ghent

Print run: not noted (ca. 1,000)

ISBN: none

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ NUMBER: 26

For the first and only time, Peter Downsbrough uses one of the few color photographs he has ever taken, of JFK airport in New York, for the cover of a book. Both the title and the name of the author only appear on the spine. Also for the first time, Downsbrough uses the typographical manipulation of the letters (cut diagonally or vertically) consistently throughout the book, as he had previously done in A SET in 1981. Here, he combines Times Roman and Helvetica, at times even on the same page. Successively, the words AS, IN, IF, and TO are cut in various configurations. Four wedge line drawings, each containing a word (basis, issue, still, split), announce each “chapter.” The book comes to a climax on the last two pages as it refers to (being) manipulate(d) typographically with the word maniupulate and the letter’d’.

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Peter Downsbrough has developed a strongly reduced visual vocabulary, which he uses to investigate the given space in a very personal and precise way. His material consists of letters and lines. He uses adhesive letters, forming conjunctions, prepositions, verbs and/or nouns and applies them to the walls, floors and/or ceilings. Lines, for which he uses cloth tape, emphasize certain architectural elements. Metal pipes, in the space and sometimes on the wall, accentuate the space. Areas defined by lines or painted black sometimes play a role, and, with the lines and the words reveal the architecture of interior or exterior spaces.

This rigorous treatment of the space continues in Peter Downsbrough’s books, maquettes, photographs, videos or prints. They all reveal an extreme coherence, which some situate in the minimal and conceptual art movements. In the course of time, the spatial interventions with the parallel vertical pipes or dowels have been complemented with words, lines and planes. Conjunctions such as AS, IF, BUT, FROM, MAAR, OP, EN, ET, OU, MAIS… have a double function: they work as iconographic signs which underline and reveal the space, and they offer the viewer the possibility to go, in his/her mind, from one thought to the other. For a conjunction is a word that can’t be declined or conjugated; it establishes a connection between sentences or parts of sentences.

Peter Downsbrough: With the word, one takes part in a dialogue, a discourse on its precise meaning. The word for me is an object. It has both a precise and a vague meaning. It is a universe one is confronted with. But there is no obligatory way of reading.

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