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‘No muscles, no tattoos’ [EXTRACT]
Jop van Bennekom chose American Typewriter for the text face of Butt because he thought it was a really gay typeface. It enables the Q&A (Question and Answer) sections to evoke the immediacy of typewritten transcripts, while being rounder (and according to Van Bennekom ‘faggier’) than Courier. But, as if to modify its perceived effeminacy, he uses a ‘scruffy’ version of the typeface that has bad spacing and kerning. He is less equivocal about using Compacta for the headlines: ‘It’s very leather. Rough, buff and masculine.’ But this is qualified by the fact that the interviews and soft-core gay porn are printed on paper the colour of a strawberry milkshake.
I meet Van Bennekom in Amsterdam. The studio from where he and journalist Gert Jonkers, his partner in Top Publishers, produce Butt and style journal Fantastic Man is spartan. The wall above Van Bennekom’s desk is almost bare save for a note and two black-and-white images tacked into the plaster with pins. In his hand is a to-do list at least 40 items long, typed and with some annotations in blue biro.
Butt was established in 2001, around the time Van Bennekom was beginning to attract critical attention for Re-Magazine, a series of self-referential explorations of the marginalia of existence. The first eight issues of Re- each used a different thematic lens (the home, boredom, sex, or re-connecting with one’s past) to look at daily experience. In 2002, with issue nine, it changed direction. Since then, each issue has been devoted to one person. Marcel delivers three monologues on his relationship to food and dieting in an issue called ‘Food Coma’; Hester, a failed screenwriter from London, was interviewed and photographed extensively as a way to examine some of the issues surrounding depression.
Andrew Blauvelt, design director at the Walker Art Center, mentioned Re- in an article in Eye (no. 35 vol. 9) and included the first eight issues in a show he curated at the Walker called ‘Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life’. He says: ‘Aesthetically and conceptually it was very much in tune with ideas about everyday life and culture at the time.’ Others concurred. It was written about in v Magazine, Frieze and The Independent on Sunday and included in the Design Museum’s ‘European Design Show’ and in Phaidon’s 2004 compendium of Dutch design, False Flat. […] |
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