FIGURING THE WORD
ESSAYS ON BOOKS, WRITING, AND VISUAL POETICS
by Johanna Drucker
every era of human history artists, poets, professional and amateur scribes have been sensitive to the visual properties of written forms. Consequently there is no shortage of material evidence supporting the idea that writing is a visual medium. Maximizing the potential of such qualities as color, composition, design, and style, writing embodies language in an unlimited variety of distinctive forms. History and culture reside in these material means: the chiselled line of the Roman majuscules, the worried hand of a remade will, the bureaucratic regularity of a cuneiform account, the sophisticated inventions of a Renaissance type designer, the least mark of a tentative witness, and the bold sweep of an authoritative pen. In these and an infinitude of other cases, it is clear that significance inheres in the written form of language as much on account of the properties of physical materials as through a text’s linguistic content. Whether incidental or foregrounded, such specific properties of written language are what ensure its unique role within human culture.
It may well be that there is no human urge more fundamental than that of mark making imago and yet performs the signifying operations of the logos.It is an act of individual expression and an instance of that most rule-bound and social of human systems.
The critical apperception of writing has engaged literary critics, art historians, psychologists, and anthropologists.
In the twentieth century, artistic manifestations are many and varied, crossing the disciplines of literature, the fine arts, and graphic de-sign, in a fertile intersection of creative innovation. The striking work of the typographically innovative French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé casts its influence over poetic activity of the early 1900s, inspiring the visual experiments of writers and artists in an era in which commercial typography and mass produced print media were appropriated and absorbed into Futurist, Dada, and Cubist collage. Poets who never worked extensively in images per se were nonetheless often inspired by the permission granted by such modern experiments to expand the visual potential of the page by shaping the form, space, and distribution of written language according to a schematic which intertwined format and meaning in novel ways. Ezra Pound’s apocryphal (but real) fascination with art historian Ernest Fenollosa’s work on the Chinese character is one of the mythic moments in the history of modern poetry’s engagement with the material manifestation of language in written form. Taking literally the age-old misconception of Chinese characters as word-pictures, rather than representations of phonetic signs, Pound used this visual idea to structure his imagistic verse. Meanwhile, in their collaborative essays of 1912 and 1913, “The Word as Such” and “The Letter as Such,” Russian Futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenyk articulated a quasi-mystical belief in the visual power of language which had resonance with centuries’ old traditions of ascribing meaning to letters as signs. And perhaps most renowned of all the revolutionary calls-to-arms is in the work of the Italian major-duomo of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti. Also working in the 1910s, he galvanized visually inventive poetic verse with his texts “Words in Liberty” and “The Wireless Imagination.” These gestures (among others) inaugurate the 20th century era of interactions between visual and verbal arts and are followed in rapid succession by other creative innovations in visual poetics and painted language.
In the 1950s and 1960s the theoretical writings of Concrete poets and Lettrists add to the long list of manifesto-like statements asserting the potential of visual poetics, followed by the work of Pop and Conceptual artists, who became intrigued with language as an artistic form. The transformations of production and reproduction technologies in the course of the 20th century made the means of experimentation increasingly available. Hot type, cold type, press type, photographic manipulation, and finally the phenomenon of desk-top publishing now exist in complementary parallel with the (equally innovative) traditional means of drawing, painting, and graphic design skills. Animated pages, holographic work, and virtual displays of illusionistically dimensional landscapes are now all part of the artistic vocabulary which figures language in visual form.
Writing thus exists along a broad spectrum from the most elemental gestural trace to the standard sign. All writing has the capacity to be both looked at and read, to be present as material and to function as the sign of an absent meaning. It can be structured and shaped.
Between Personal Expression and Social System
The basic binary character of writing is its capacity to function simultaneously as an instance of personal and of social expression. Mira Schor’s painting, Personal Writing (1994), embodies this crucial duality. The work is comprised of thirty small canvases. Each letter in the title appears twice in the complete work
1994, oil on linen,
12” x 16” each panel.
The first set of images has a rational clarity to it: fine blue lines shape each individual letter in a well-made exercise carefully placed within the boundaries of the canvas. The blue paint of these letters suggests chalk, pen, or graphite--observing a decorum of self-discipline and good behavior in the face of the rules of the educational system. Childishly perfect, these letters were painted from blown up xeroxes of exercises in an old schoolbook. In a smaller, almost inconspicuous hand, Schor has added the two letters “im” before the first word in this series, giving it the contradictory double meaning: “personal/impersonal.”
The second set of images are based on Schor’s adult hand. Blowing them up to the same scale as that of the schoolgirl hand, she invested each painted letter with elaborate visual and tactile richness. In a deep, glowing, red which bleeds into the background of soft, pink, fleshlike ground, the letters vibrate with bodily associations. They stretch, cramp, and sweep with conviction.
The concept of the personal in Schor’s work is both romantic and critical. Her idea of individuality clearly takes into account that social training conditions the physical body whose personality eventually comes through the systemic constraints.
The idea of the social construction of individual identity.
But writing is not only an instance of language.
In Schor’s work both the thematic content and execution reinforce the idea that the training of hand and eye in the acquisition of writing are part of a process of socialization. Learning writing as a social system one partially gives up the individual inflection of character or personality, only to acquire it again, as inevitably as one’s body acquires a characteristic walk, posture, and shape over time while functioning according to the norms and expectations of one’s cultural and social world. Writing bears the visible traces of somatic individuation and encodes various functions of the social order and law, the structures and strictures of permission, control, and bounded identity. “Personal writing” is always an inscription of the individual within the symbolic.
In Glenn Ligon’s work, Black Like Me #2,(1992), language, individual identity, and social conventions also converge. Like Schor’s painting, Ligon’s piece embodies its thematics in a method of production as well as in the content of its statement. But the richly individual quality of writing in Schor’s painted work contrasts dramatically with the stencilled marks which comprise the text of Glenn Ligon’s work. The “me” of his textual statement and the letters of the visual stencil are formatted and formulaic, struggling simultaneously to embody and to protest fixed stereotypes of form, shape, color, meaning. Using these stencils and a thick, heavy, greasy black crayon, Ligon creates an increasingly dense field of writing. Following the conventional direction of reading, the single statement of the title is repeated time after time, until it results in a field of layered, overlapped, and finally unreadable text as it moves from the top to the bottom of the canvas. A work in black and white, Ligon’s image encodes questions of racial stereotypes: the term “colored,” with all of its associations of racial slurs and apartheid policies, is rendered only in the monochrome tones of black on white though the “me” of the title, if it identifies the artist, is an African-American man. But like any first person pronoun in English, “me” bears no particular marks of identification with regard to gender, race, or other characteristics. The denial in the statement has to be read both as a personal utterance and a statement the reader experiences and identifies with through his or her own articulation. Written language particularly allows for such slippages since the unvoiced written form reveals few significant clues to the identity of its maker.
Glenn Ligon, Black Like Me #2,1992, oil stick and gesso on canvas, 80” x 30” . /Visually Ligon’s piece is simple and striking.
In their own distinct ways, Schor and Ligon both embody the tension between the individual quality of expression and the constraints of a rule-bound linguistic system. Schor’s painterly lushness invites a romantic reading while coldly refuting it in the same instance and Ligon’s minimal means protest the inadequacies of individual expression as a challenge to the inequities inscribed in the cultural order. In both cases the visual properties of the work are what encode these meanings, not merely as an incidental visual presentation, but through their signification as manifest form.
From Trace to Sign: Gesture, Letterform, and Glyph
Not all written language is gestural or somatic.
Pierre Alechinsky’s Exercise d’écriture provides an exemplary instance of the automatic impulse at its most basic. In Alechinsky’s painting, writing is a productive act rooted in gesture. The painting inscribes the tactile, physical, motor pleasures of mark making. Rhythmic gestures bring signs into being which are almost letters, almost legible, almost elements of some real alphabet. Exercise d’écriture is about scribing, inscribing, bringing into being. It is about the ways in which gesture precedes language as an expressive indication. Gesture is human action outside of the fixed parameters of language, anterior to language historically, independent of it conceptually, and more primal, more fundamental as a human self-assertion in the space of the cosmos, the material world, and the social group. The physical anthropologist, André Leroi-Gourhan, in his 1964 book Gesture and Speech, outlines the evolutionary relation between patterns of brain function, development, gestural activity, and language. Leroi-Gourhan suggests that the specialization of human limbs to isolate aspects of the survival functions of gathering, hunting, eating (as well as climbing, tool-making, self-defense), freed the mouth and lips for language and created crucial oppositions between the hands and the face which permitted a language of gesture to emerge in contradistinction to that of speech. For Leroi-Gourhan, gesture is a rhythmic, somatic, elemental self-expression while speech is social and communicative. The manual production of marks and glyphs is a code in which expressive self-assertion and communicative functions intertwine.
The gestural mark is a trace of the very act of production as dynamic action. The trace makes itself in the dynamic pleasure of material making and as such, remains a sign which has not yet reached the threshold of meaning. But though freed from responsibility to language, Alechinsky’s Exercise still invokes the linguistic as some ultimate authority capable of legitimating the value of those marks as significant rather than gratuitous. By calling these loops and strokes “écriture,” Alechinsky seems to want to allow that the somatic impulse can be brought into the rule of symbolic order, that these marks could be possessed of meaning.
Within cultural anthropology, there is another framework for assessing such uses of writing as significant acts. Claude Levi-Strauss, in his essay “The Writing Lesson,” posits the basic argument that writing colonizes and empowers simultaneously, concentrating power in the act of sign making. Even when those signs don’t represent an actual language, writing acts to hierarchize authority through the mere control of written forms. This is a performative aspect of writing as a ritual act rather than an inscribed form of language. Alechinsky’s work inscribes some of this authority, that of the empowering form which becomes authoritative through its production.
If such traces of somatic gesture remain unreadable because they stop short of participation in the symbolic system, then the glyphic sign which presents itself as the image of an esoteric meaning employs a different kind of resistance to legibility. This fascination with the glyph--that written form which is encoded, encrypted, secretive and complex.
The glyphic motif found in Karen Papachek’s drawings or suggested in the pictographic imagery of Kenneth Patchen’s illuminated poems was elaborately explored in the work of the French Lettrist group founded in the late 1940s by Romanian Isidore Isou. The Lettrists played with such cryptic innovations, challenging the legibility of signs in order to subvert the symbolic order of language through an attack on its basic code. Lettrist marks range from the gestural, somatic, trace signs of the automatic tradition to all manner of invented signs which engage with an alternative tradition of the hieroglyphic character and its mythic visual propensity. This impulse is fabulously fulfilled by those Lettrists who play outtheir variations of the mark into a sublime mode of anarchistic subversion of the normative order of what had once been a systematic language.
In Riff Raff,a work produced by Lettrist Maurice Lemaître in 1950, a series of signs spiral out from a single core image
Riff Raff is typical of Lettrist work, however, in its complex visual formulation of a pseudo or personal language. Lemaître’s inventions here are not arbitrary, merely unorthodox, and thus point out the necessity for convention as a stabilizing framework for meaning production. But in other Lettrist works the glyphs are not recognizable as images. They are condensed, illegible, and yet particular signs: and the power of the glyph.
Conceptual, Temporal, and Material Structures