Archivi categoria: vispo & gif

asemic writing and the tragedy of the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

Jim Leftwich

Asemic Writing and The Tragedy of the Absurd
Summer 2022 / Utah

When I say absurd, I don’t mean quirky.
I don’t think absurdity is a variety of comedy.
Finding comedic relief in inconsequential weirdness does not qualify as an experience of the absurd.

Certain styles of comedy monetize a surrealist juxtaposition of clangorous items and/or ideas to elicit Spasms of Guffaw from a naptive audience. As such, they serve a purpose: to disguise the osmotic suffering of those immersed in the petroleus ooze of The Capitalist Ongoing.

The absurd does not organize itself in order to acclimate our minds around any of the currently available varieties of unbearable realities.

The absurd is: a variety of that which is incomprehensible within the human universe.

A mystery is: that which is uplifting because it is experienced as being incomprehensible within the human universe. We celebrate an encounter with mystery.

The absurd is experientially devastating, annihilating, a psychological sparagmos. We may, after a fashion, celebrate the fact that we experienced it and lived to tell the tale.

Asemic writing is capable of embodying, and conveying, the tragedy of the absurd. But only for the those who want that, who want that kind of thing. For those who do not want that kind of thing, asemic writing is also fully capable of being abstract art school dorm room wallpaper and glamping picnic tablecloth design. I know, I am not being very nice, I’m sorry. Did you by chance see Sun Ra and The Arkestra 40 or 50 years ago? They had The Look. Sparkling robes down to the floor, Egyptian Spaceman Hats 3-feet high. Marching around the stage, chanting, gesturing with their instruments towards the ceiling. I saw them with a few hundred other people in 1982 and not a soul was laughing. We’re they absurd? Absolutely. Sublime? Yes.

The Tragedy of the Absurd is experienced as a Magickal Absurdity. Asemic writing is capable of existing along that spectrum of experiences. I learned that in the late 1990’s as part of my introduction to the idea and the execution of asemic writing. I have never been able to want anything else from it.

‘asemica’: diffusione ad oggi

<Asemica> è stata archiviata presso la Bayerische Staatsbibliothek di Monaco, una delle più importanti biblioteche d’Europa.

<Asemica> è un aperiodico dedicato alla scrittura e all’arte asemantica in veste di assembling magazine. Nel primo numero il testo critico “Verso la scrittura asemica” di Cecilia Bello Minciacchi e opere di Francesco Aprile, Julien Blaine, Antonino Bove, Cristiano Caggiula, Giuseppe Calandriello, Federico Federici, Giovanni Fontana, Marco Giovenale, Lamberto Pignotti e William Xerra.

<Asemica> è archiviato anche presso Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, FONDAZIONE BONOTTO di Colceresa, Vicenza, Biblioteca della Collezione Maramotti di Reggio Emilia, Fondazione Berardelli di Brescia e Biblioteca d’Arte del Castello Sforzesco di Milano.

https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/BV048321946

è online utsanga #32

www.utsanga.it online il numero 32, giugno 2022, con opere di:
Anna Boschi Cermasi, Francesco Aprile, Gianluca Garrapa, Andrea Astolfi, Antonio Francesco Perozzi, Almandrade Andrade, Silvio De Gracia, Alejandro Thornton, Belén Gache, Claudio Mangifesta, Débora Daich, Fabio Doctorovich, Luis Pazos, Norberto José Martínez, Michael Betancourt , Terri Witek, Jim Leftwich, Ilyas Kassam, Ronald Lubega, Hannah Mitchell, Yuri Bruscky, Andrea Alzati, Stefano Lanuzza, Giuseppe Calandriello, San Giorgio Cibernetico, Carlo Bugli, Cecelia Chapman, Francesco Cane Barca, Volodymyr Bilyk, Baiwei, Paolo Allegrezza, Carmine Lubrano, Julia Rende, Mark Young, Richard Kostelanetz, Dawn Nelson Wardrope, Stephen Nelson, Antonio Devicienti, Texas Fontanella, John M. Bennett, Mario José Cervantes Mendoza, Vincenzo Lagalla

‘engaged visuality’: rome, 7-8 july, 2022

Academia Belgica, Rome. July 7, 2022 / Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”. July 8, 2022, Jul 7–08, 2022

International Symposium: “Engaged Visuality. The Italian and Belgian Poesia Visiva Phenomenon in the 60s and 70s.” Organized by Maria Elena Minuto (Université de Liège; KU Leuven) and Jan De Vree (M HKA Museum, Antwerp) fifty-one years after “Lotta Poetica” foundation.

July 7, 2022, 09:00 am – 6:00 pm (Academia Belgica, Rome. Sala Conferenze)

July 8, 2022, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm (Università degli Studi “La Sapienza”, Rome. Aula Odeion, Museo dell’Arte Classica)

Conference language: English, French, and Italian. Open to the public.

description + panels here: https://arthist.net/archive/36872

emilio villa, tra labirinto e sibilla. incontro con gian paolo renello @ catap, macerata, 20 giugno 2022

Incontro di presentazione di Presentimenti del mondo senza tempo. Scritti su Emilio Villa, di Aldo Tagliaferri

via negativa and asemic writing / jim leftwich. 2022


Mysticism, whether atheistic or otherwise, has always welcomed a spectrum of experiences valued primarily for their absurdity and futility. The experience of asemic writing, whether one is attempting to write it or attempting to read it, is fundamentally a mystical experience. It is The Face That Is No Face, the Via Negativa.

Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles, with baggy loops here, jagged-edged bulges there, poncruated with curatorial punctuation marks in the form of randomly tilted ascenders and descenders, moving suggestively from left to right on the foundation of an imaginary baseline. It looks like writing, but we can’t read it, says the entry at Wikipedia. It must be asemic writing, says a contextualized leap of faith.

What if it is, in theory and in practice, experientially, a kind of quasi-calligraphic drawing?

This is not the Via Negativa. It is direct experience of the mystery. Direct Experience of The Mystery. There is no wrong reading, judged and condemned by official authorities on the matter. There are no Official Authorities on the matter. And there is no range of acceptable interpretations of the experience, no spectrum of permitted discourse about the acceptable interpretations.
There is no attempt at reading, not of any variety, and therefore there is no writing, of any variety, asemic or otherwise.

Asemic writing, in its absolute failure to exist, can function in our lives as a kind of pagan spiritual discipline, one designed to give us greater access to the experience of experience.

asemic writing and the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

To the extent that The Absurd is a characteristic, or even at times a category of the historical avant garde, it can be asserted that asemic writing functions as a continuation of the theory and practice of the avant gardes (plural, at least since the end of WWII) in the form of a self-actualizing multitude of willful absurdities.

If the absurd is the incongruous, as Albert Camus asserted in The Myth of Sisyphus, then the simultaneous presence of the written and the unreadable is a classic example of absurdity, in its most uncontestable, experiential form.

Whereas absurdity under normal conditions requires a clash of juxtaposed items or ideas, asemic writing only requires itself, as a self-contained absurdity.

A self-contained absurdity is a Magickal Absurdity. It offers itself as a reality, of a type that should not exist. It troubles the stability of the psyche, as if for a fleeting moment there is no distinction between Sisyphus and Icarus, as if both are merely variations on the theme of Tantalus.

Desire, as often as not frustrated, thwarted, derailed, detoured, imbricate and futilitarian, anachronistic, impoxximate, inverted — invertebrate — involuntary, and/or joylessly reinsinuated,

stands,

sits,

lies

at the unsettled center of all considerations concerning the function of absurdity in everyday life.

In the case of asemic writing, we desire for that which is certainly not asemic to nonetheless function in our everyday lives as if it clearly is asemic and nothing else.

Absurdity is a very particular and peculiar variety of desire.

We want the world to be not only other than what it is — we want it to be precisely that which it can never be.

That variety of desire is precisely the allure of asemic writing. It is the distilled quintessence of its magickal absurdity.

That is not only why, but how, the practice of asemic writing reinvents itself, over and over, across centuries and cultures, one generation after another into the present.

diacono — mallarmé — broodthaers — 1969

MARIO DIACONO
a METRICA n’aboolira
JCT, San Francisco, 1969

Libro d’artista costituito da tre pagine introduttive con un fumetto detournato a cui segue il frontespizio stampato in nero e arancio. Le altre pagine sono percorse da strisce variamente disposte orizzontalmente, di diversa larghezza e lunghezza e di colore arancio e bleu: chiara ripresa in termini esclusivamente visuali dell’opera di Stéphane Mallarmé «Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hazard» nell’edizione Gallimard pubblicata postuma (1914), in cui le parole sono disposte variamente sulla pagina bianca secondo le disposizioni del poeta.

La stessa operazione artistica viene compiuta nello stesso anno da Marcel Broodthaers con il suo: «Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard. Image»: le parole del testo di Mallarmé sono sostituite da strisce nere corrispondenti esattamente al layout tipografico usato per articolare il testo originale: i versi vengono resi illeggibili e le pagine trasformate in immagini. E’ da notare che l’anno di pubblicazione del libro di Diacono è il 1969 come dichiarato al colophon e non il 1968 come dichiarato in varie bibliografie. “1968” è semplicemente l’anno di redazione, indicato al frontespizio e nel copyright: “S. Mallarmé – M. Diacono 1897-1968”.



“Quando costruivo JCT 1 [A metrica n’aboolira], non avevo idea di cosa Broodthaers stesse facendo. Certamente qualcosa “era nell’aria”. La devoluzione della scrittura poetica in direzione astratta iniziata dalla poesia concreta doveva in qualche modo arrivare a una forma di cancellazione come affermazione. Mallarmé era l’archetipo che doveva essere confrontato” (Mario Diacono, testo tratto da una e-mail inviata il 20.04.2019 da Mario Diacono a Paolo Tonini).

http://www.arengario.it/opera/a-metrica-naboolira/

(da un post di Sandro Ricaldone)