REWRITING: LAYOUT AS A SECOND INSTANCE OF WRITING. A CONCEPT BY RONALD KAY TO UNDERSTAND THE PUBLISHING SITUATION OF ART IN CHILE DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTIES

Abstract

For a brief period of time, the late 1970s, a small flux of singular art publications were printed and spread among a reduced community of artists in Santiago. From a historiographic perspective, this is today considered a whole editorial juncture: Chilean artists got involved in designing publications in an unparalleled manner. The year 1975 was the consensual point of departure, a date which has been determined to the only published number of the magazine Manuscritos. The ideas there published meant an experience of reflexive production where new ways of doing were essayed, as well as new concepts for naming editorial processes, which were later adopted by different artists linked to the project, —whether as collaborators or as readers— to design their task in other projects made generally at the eaves of the exhibition of their own works. The following paper seeks to analyze the historical frame and the intellectual references which were fundamental in the formulation of the concept of rewriting —a concept formulated by Manuscritos’ chief editor Ronald Kay— as well as the background which configures the singular notion of editorial design, as a conception by which written information acquires new meaning at printing, as a product of graphical decisions, and to establish their mode of implementation in an editorial project.