ROSE DENEAU

Rose Deneau is a designer and educator investigating the implications of emerging design technologies and computation in contemporary culture and pedagogy. Working with material, spatial, and procedural methods, she positions architectural, typographic, and computational systems as epistemic infrastructures that structure perception and institutional authority.

Her work has been recognized by numerous publications and organizations, including Ad Age, Adweek, the Society of Typographic Arts, the International Institute for Information Design (IIID), and Transform Magazine, and is included in the permanent collection of the Cultural & Scientific Association Poster Collection in Dubai.

She has held professional roles in design practice with places like VSA Partners, Campbell Ewald, Fifty Thousand Feet, Kohler’s in-house agency, and Pivot Design, and is engaged in ongoing studio-based and research-driven inquiry, exhibiting her work nationally and internationally.

For inquiries or collaborations, reach out to:

rosedeneau@gmail.com

On the Aesthetics of Safe Radicalism

A Review of Sydney Howell’s Detourn
February 2026

It’s Monday morning after a weekend in Chicago. Howell had messaged me a few links that already clued me into what I was about to see. A link to the history of Fraktur, a recent ICE video that used it, and, most importantly, that this would be a typeface. It wasn’t until today, though, that I was given its name. Detourn.

I walk into the room and am greeted by a triptych. For a work called Detourn, presumably a derivative of detournément, I’m expecting a bit more of a “hijacking” in the vein of the Situationists. A turning of a system’s own images against itself to create a rupture; a confrontation. Instead, I find a work that is formally beautiful. Behind Plexiglas, and with gallery lighting placed just right on it, it’s sumptuously consumable. I’d buy it if I hadn’t sat there and interrogated it more. “Looks sick,” I think.

What is causing the disconnect here?

The title presumes typographic reappropriation—hardly the stuff of effortless consumption. Yet in this pristine gallery, the work’s presentation dominates over any supposed subversion. I notice the space, not the provocation.

In his book, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Brian O’Doherty explains that this feeling within the white cube is intentional. “The Eye can be directed but with less confidence than the Spectator…The Eye is the only inhabitant of the sanitized installation shot. The Spectator is not present.” (41-42) He defines the Eye here as being our ability to read formal cues, recognize “good” design, etc.; our bodies (read: our histories, emotions, and illogic) being an “intrusion.” In the White Cube, “… the spectator, oneself, is eliminated.” (15) We are here without really being here. To function properly, the White Cube requires the Spectator’s absence.

However, we are asked to sustain an interrogation against the work presented in this space, here in the department. So, let us once again become spectators with histories and political stakes. The issue I will address is not that Detourn references Fraktur, but rather that the conditions of its transformation and presentation render it semiotically frictionless.

A quick perusal of blackletter typefaces and a Google Reverse Image Search of Howell’s work reveals that it uses Fraktur. Not too hard, given that Howell had shared it. The use of this as the basis for a new typeface, itself a typeface with a complex and contested history, is a bold choice, though.

Commissioned by Emperor Maximilian I in the 16th Century, Fraktur was intended for court use; it was a “noble” font. During the Reformation, Martin Luther used blackletter, including Fraktur, later, as the schism took hold, to distinguish his writings from those of the Catholic Church.

In 1871, when modern-day Germany formed, Fraktur became the official government typeface. It came to represent a sort of “national” or “cultural” identity for Germans as it united the various nation-states that became modern Germany.

Later, once in power, the Nazis embraced Fraktur as a symbol of their German heritage and Aryan “purity,” that is, until Hitler banned it in 1941, calling it "Jewish Schwabacher." You see, the occupied territories couldn’t read blackletter, so rather than risk embarrassment, they scapegoated. Despite this, its link to “tradition” persists, with its present use by Neo Nazi groups and our own government.

Fast-forward to 2026. Fraktur has become Detourn. Looking past the glare of the spotlights and the impeccable presentation, the aggressive structure of Fraktur remains, albeit deconstructed. This deconstruction is where the work attempts what I call a “theft” — but the sign does not resist. Instead, its authority is stylized rather than destabilized.

I previously noted that the work is semiotically frictionless. In the semiotic sense, friction is the resistance a sign offers when you try to change its meaning. In its presentation, Detourn reduces that resistance rather than turning up the dial.

What does successful friction look like? We can actually look back to Martin Luther, who recognized the power of blackletter; he used the type to physically distinguish his revolution from the Catholic Church. But by the time the Nazis claimed Fraktur as the true German script, this friction had become especially volatile. It was no longer resistance; it was the branding of Aryan “purity.”

So when I walked into the critique room preparing to confront real friction, I found instead an environment that numbed rather than provoked, something closer to an anesthetic—an inoculation. In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes describes inoculation as a process in which a dominant institution admits a “smaller, concealed evil” to protect the larger system from critique. By admitting a minor fault, the institution preserves its structure.

This glitch aesthetic acts as that inoculation: it admits a trace of fascist form while shielding the viewer from the burden of its fascist history. It gives the Eye of the gallery space a safe, small dose of a symbol of White Supremacy to contend with. Following O’Doherty’s logic, though, this is not real labor. It gives us the feeling of being radical without confronting the typeface’s unmanaged infection of society, historically and presently. We are left questioning whether it was a detournement to begin with.

For this work to be a detournement, it would need to risk disorder — to invite misuse, damage, or collective rewriting. Howell’s work appears particularly interested in viewers' participation, but its presentation in the gallery space suggests it's only interested in them as potential consumers. Rather than intensifying the sign’s resistance, this installation contains it: placed within a critique room, precise spotlights, a Plexiglas barrier, and wall-mounted perfection. The piece elicits passive admiration rather than engagement. If the distorted type claims to signal broken fascism, it still shields us from genuine involvement. The work excludes us from a real deconstruction; contention is held at arm’s length.

As Audre Lorde famously pointed out, “…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Lorde’s warning about the master’s tools is not a prohibition against reuse. It is a warning about control. If the tool remains structurally intact and authorially contained, it does not dismantle — it simply decorates, resulting in the typeface functioning more as a formal decision than as a genuine critique.

As Steven Heller notes in Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State, even when deployed critically, the visual vocabulary of totalitarianism retains its ideological charge. The letters remain tied to Nazism. Fraktur’s skeletal structure remains; its ghost and authority remain.

Is this glitch aesthetic just the master’s tool redeployed—signifying struggle but never undermining the power within Fraktur? Probable. The gesture feels accidental—a misstep disguised as intervention.

While I acknowledge that it’s a significant and difficult undertaking to reappropriate a typeface that has been used to signal "national identity" and “purity” for centuries, you have to wonder if it's even possible.

Paul Shaw similarly questions this. He argues that the use of typefaces intended as visual shorthand for the groups they harm is not necessarily reclamation when used by those groups. Discussing fonts that play on cultural stereotypes in the context of the restaurant industry, he suggests that this is not reclamation; rather, marginalized groups are also trapped in the signification applied to these typefaces. Their use often signals to potential customers that they sell what they are looking for.

So how do we reappropriate? We have already discussed that it requires friction, that its sign resists, and its history pushes back against reinterpretation. What happens in Detourn is that resistance ends up being contained, and the transformation of Fraktur does not undermine its authority but rather aesthetizes it.

That containment becomes its Achilles' heel, allowing a historically violent sign to become texture—formally compelling, politically dulled. What remains is not confrontation, but consumption.