Eulogy to the Blank Page

Artist Gavin Murphy (b. Dublin 1973)

Date2010

MediumLaser-cut plexiglass, hardwood; typeface Personal (Stencil) designed by Oran Day, commissioned by the artist

Dimensions170 × 201 cm

ClassificationsSculpture

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 2013. © Gavin Murphy.

Object number2036

DescriptionGavin Murphy, Eulogy to the Blank Page – Abstract

Eulogy to the Blank Page is a sculptural rendering of a section of dialogue from Fellini’s 8 1/2, in which the director (Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni) and an
unnamed writer, walk through the set of his abandoned film revealing through their discussion the profound weight of responsibility inherent in the act of creation. The long passage of dialogue, which comes at the end of a film seemingly devoted to the self indulgent breakdown of the director, thus becomes an acutely self-reflexive text, and includes the lines:

We suffocate under words, images, and sounds, which have no reason to exist, they come from the void and go towards the void. A truly worthy artist should
be asked for nothing but this act of sincerity: to educate himself to silence.
Writer (to Guido) in 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)

The work features a specially commissioned typeface – Personal (stencil) – based on Proposal for a Universal Typeface, created by Herbert Bayer between 1925–1930, while director of printing and advertising at the Bauhaus. Designed along reductive–utopian lines, and consisting of only one combined upper and lower case, the geometric, sans–serif Universal existed only as a design and was never actually cast into real type. The new typeface retains Bayer’s reductivist–geometric design principles, yet recasts these into a specific and singular use.

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