WHEN A LONG ISLAND typewriter-repair shop closed its doors a few years ago, its owner had to decide what to do with all the Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, and Coronas, most of them manual, that had accumulated over several decades. The resale market was nonexistent, for there are few things more obsolete than a manual typewriter (though, to be fair, this column is being typed on a 286 computer, which seems even quainter somehow—like the gray area in between a new car and a classic, when you’re driving a rusty heap of junk). While slightly easier to dispose of than nuclear waste, the old typewriters seemed just as unwanted until they came to the attention of Kevin O’Callaghan of New York City’s School of Visual Arts (SVA).
O’Callaghan, an instructor in SVA’s 3-0 design program, had previously organized a show of abandoned Yugo automobiles that were adapted for such uses as a movie theater (presumably a small one), a piano, a toaster, and a confessional. Now he arranged for the leftover typewriters to be donated to the school and let his students and alumni loose on them. The results were displayed this summer in New York and Washington, D.C., in an exhibit called “The Next Best… Ding!”—a title that shows why SVA students are artists, not writers. (For our younger readers, a typewriter signals its user with a ringing noise when it approaches the end of a line.)
Under O’Callaghan’s direction, the SVA artists recycled the typewriters into such things as barbells, a waffle iron, a table hockey game, and a place setting complete with cutlery made from return levers. Inevitably, there was a mousetrap. One student accomplished the seemingly impossible task of converting a typewriter into something even less useful: a hot-air hand dryer. Shoes were displayed in regular and gangster-style (weighted) varieties, and a plain black dress was decorated with hundreds of shiny, round keys. A “bordello box” was filled with sex toys, whose functions would be almost as hard to explain to children as those of the original typewriters. Objects more on the spiritual side included a Zen-type stone garden, a Christmas snow globe, a tiki statue, and an Elvis shrine.
The exhibit even had a pair of working manual typewriters that visitors could use to record their comments. Youngsters eyed these unfamiliar devices warily, nonplussed perhaps by the lack of a mouse. The messages that were typed ranged from “This exhibit is wonderful” to “Feels great to use one of these again” to exercises of the “quick brown fox” variety to abusive remarks about a woman named Maria. One can expect the same sorts of messages at an exhibit 10 or 20 years from now, when the next generation of art students transforms today’s laptops into baby seats, tombstones, boat anchors, and perhaps even briefcases, to hold all the paper that keeps proliferating despite the successive waves of technology meant to eliminate it.
