Archivi tag: essay
kim dhillon: “counter-texts. language in contemporary art”
Sandro Ricaldone
Kim Dhillon
Counter-Texts
Language in Contemporary Art
University of Chicago Press, 2022
In Counter-Texts, Kim Dhillon provides a much-needed critical reassessment of written language in contemporary art. Considering the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of language, Dhillon explores artworks that use inscribed language, with a particular focus on works that challenge dominant narratives or that reveal, in visual form, the varied systems of oppression contained within words.
Featuring more than forty artists from diverse backgrounds, including newer artists such as Serena Lee, Abbas Akhavan, and Joi T. Arcand alongside established figures such as Glenn Ligon, Brian Jungen, and Susan Hiller, Dhillon rewrites the understanding of text in contemporary visual art. Counter-Texts explores how and why visual artists use written language, and it interrogates the power held in words.
steffen haug: “une collecte d’images. benjamin à la bibliothèque nationale”
Sandro Ricaldone
STEFFEN HAUG
Une collecte d’images
Walter Benjamin à la Bibliothèque nationale
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Entre 1927 et 1930 à Berlin, puis de 1934 à 1940 à Paris, Walter Benjamin travaille à accumuler des matériaux pour un projet de vaste envergure : retracer, à partir de l’étude des passages parisiens, une « préhistoire du XIXe siècle ». La rédaction du texte est sans cesse différée, tandis que l’immense corpus préparatoire semble voué à croître indéfiniment, devenant une somme composite de citations que double parfois, à la manière d’une note de régie, une réflexion ou une remarque énigmatique.
Au fil de ses recherches, Benjamin se rend à l’évidence : il faudra que son Livre des passages soit enrichi par des images. Une « documentation visuelle » se constitue bientôt, écrit-il, glanée pour l’essentiel dans les recueils du Cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale où il travaille pendant son exil parisien. Une centaine de notes témoignent de cette collecte et conservent, enfermée dans leurs plis, la mention d’une ou de plusieurs images qui sont restées pour la plupart inconnues jusqu’ici.
Steffen Haug a voulu retrouver cette réserve enfouie. Gravures et dessins de presse, tracts, réclames, affiches et photographies, de Meryon et Grandville à Daumier, en passant par l’infinie cohorte anonyme et le tout-venant de la production visuelle à grand tirage du XIXe siècle : la moisson rapportée ici est surprenante. Elle invite à lire ou relire les Passages en faisant à l’image toute la place qu’elle occupe dans la pensée du dernier Benjamin, à l’heure où s’élaborent, sous la menace de temps assombris, son essai « L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique », le projet de livre sur Baudelaire ou ses « Thèses sur le concept d’histoire ».
asemic writing and pareidolia / jim leftwich. 2022
For practitioners and theorists of asemic writing, the perceptual deviation known as pareidolia is an acquired taste and a developed skill. We train ourselves to see alphabetical shapes where there are none, and then we celebrate our inability to read them. This phenomenon could occupy an entire chapter in the Magickal Absurdities Training Manual: The Ecstasy of Asemic Reading.
Personal Perception Management (PPM) is but one of a great many Existential Self-Help (ESH) methods reinsinuated transmutably in The Training Manual. It is known colloquially among The Asemic AntiMasters as PPMESH — Personal Perception Mesh. The tradition, or parade of asemic saints, involved in transmigrating this alchemy of perception from prehistory into the present, includes William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Aldous Huxley, Diane di Prima and Jim Morrison. Cleanse the doors of perception to Illuminate the arrangement of the senses.
Or the arrangement of the world(s) by the senses.
Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles…
I sound them aloud, slowly singing their shapes…
Through the processes of transcription, transliteration, and apophenia, I arrive at a deliberate mishearing of a segment from a song sung by Jim Morrison:
meatza pocca hero, Esau funk, awe yeh
The world is a poem. Some of us know that. Know it whether we want to or not. The world snuck up on us when we were young, and planted the cosmic poem-seed at the base of our tender brains.
Asemic writing works as a kind of pagan missionary for The Poem.
Asemic writing is a mutagen.
Pareidolia is one of its tools, one of its schools, a side effect, mutual aid, elective affinities, the ace of hearts up its sleeve, one foot on the other side of the grave still kicking at the pricks, reinsinuated and impoxximate.
We see what we want to see. No. That’s not right. Read what Thou Wilt. We see what we need to see. Some realities are more real than others. Asemic writing is useful, as a kind of anti-linguistic self-medication for the perpetually seeking psyche. Pareidolia is a method of ongoing research. It allows us to discover, investigate and explore provisional realities. The worlds of pareidolia are experientially real, and as such are causal agents — in our thinking, and in our actions as they emerge from that thinking.
As an entanglement with the processes of pareidolia, asemic writing functions for the perennially seeking psyche as a way of practicing reality.
is asemic writing true? / jim leftwich. 2022
The most important and interesting characteristic of asemic writing is its absolute resistance to interpretation.
The value of asemic writing lies in its semantic emptiness, and relies on the genuine frustration experienced during a failed attempt at interpretation, meaning-building, the collaborative construction of meanings.
Success in reading asemic writing implies an inauthenticity, either of the writing and it’s author, or of the reading and its perpetrator.
Authentic asemic writing denies all access to success.
The complete and utter, total failure of an attempted reading is the only acceptable measure of success for any particular instance of asemic writing.
So, to iterate — and reiterate:
1. asemic writing lies?
2. asemic writing re-lies?
3. asemic writing imp-lies?
Please refer to your copy of The Magickal Absurdities Training Manual for answers and/or elucidations.
Asemic writing has a dirty secret, hidden, as usual, in plain sight: it is all a pack of lies, and always has been.
Asemic writing is not a dispensary for recreational truths.
Asemic writing is not a dispensary for medicinal truths.
Asemic writing does not participate in the language game of dispensing truths.
We have a choice where the existential ground of asemic writing is concerned: either we admit it’s non-existence, and celebrate it for not existing, or we lie to ourselves and each other about it’s existence, and through the persistence of our collective effort, bring it — lie it — into being, no matter how provisional, damaged, and ephemeral that being may be.
Today, in the summer of 2022, there is no denying the fact that a great many things in our world are identified by one variety or another of the term asemic writing.
That in itself is good.
The concept of asemic is generative and tolerant. Let’s frolic in its wonderland! With our first mind celebrating it’s ludic absurdity, and our second mind practicing the pleasures it offers in opportunities for critical thinking.
emanuela patti: “opera aperta. italian electronic literature from the 1960s to the present”
Sandro Ricaldone
EMANUELA PATTI
Opera aperta
Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present
Peter Lang, 2022
This book reconstructs the history of Italian electronic literature, looking at creative practices across literature, electronic and digital media from the early days of computers to the social media age. Topics include criticism of mass media, globalisation, information society and late capitalism as well as the enhancement of language itself.
either both, or and + everything but a shortcut / jim leftwich. 2021
EITHER BOTH, OR AND
and
Everything But A Shortcut
https://jimleftwichtextimagepoem.blogspot.com/2021_12_26_archive.html
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le cut-up & ses corollaires (anysia troin-guis)
Le XXe siècle déchiffré grâce à une paire de ciseaux : le cut‑up & ses corollaires
by Anysia Troin-Guis:
https://www.fabula.org/revue/document11001.php
&
https://www.academia.edu/36679629/_Le_XXe_si%C3%A8cle_d%C3%A9chiffr%C3%A9_gr%C3%A2ce_%C3%A0_une_paire_de_ciseaux_le_cut_up_and_ses_corollaires_
“words mean everything: the poetry of edwin schlossberg”, by john baker @ interfaces
new at sibila: scappettone on rosselli, corbett on eigner
from Charles Bernstein’s blog @ jacket2
http://jacket2.org/commentary/new-sibila-scappettone-rosselli-corbett-eigner
- Poems from Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli plus an expcerpt from Jennifer Scappettone’s introduction.
- “Larry Eigner, An Advertisement”: Bill Corbett on the Larry Eigner collected poems edited by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville.
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