the inscribed image: a manifesto on materiality

Language - the art of arranging language - insists on thinking, writing, and above all, publishing. Books are assembled. Books are arranged. It hardly matters. What counts is that it is nothing more than its sign. A benign tyranny, for want of any referent. This seems to me significant.


The term signifies a way, that is, the right way par excellance, brooking no further argument, however ephemeral, originating in the fancies of an often corrupt taste that seeks to satisfy vanity and caprices, institutions, ideas, customs of an unfailingly stable kind, superficial, admired almost universally, which turn into a form of suffering, or even torment. Let us take this problem frontally.


The possibility of new systems in writing spurs continual development. Giving words power beyond that of signifiers signified imbues language with poetry that offers no actual meaning, deliberate objects on the page or in the landscape. Name, shape, style, history, form/design, mystical significance as a whole is understood to be a representation of resurgent systems of metaphors, analogues, associations - a methodology of interpretation.


Calculus, Geometry - Analysis - is a very long story that essentially bears out Reason's hegemony whose influence not only survived but also reached new heights with Church-like doctrine/dogma, and part of the dismissal of an abstract view, of things not actually proved, an infinity of points.


Once we're up and about and using our words, it's almost impossible to think about what they really mean.


Granted, this response is, strictly speaking, philosophical rather than mathematical. This analysis dodges representation, continuity, class, or something close to that. Once we're up and about and using our words, it's almost impossible to think about what they mean. Observe, please, that this is really incoherent, composed of instants under which interpretation can be solved with a simple formula, grandly breathtakingly wrong.


Grammatical text and syntax generate works whose language ultimately contain all-too-recognisable poetic lyric procedure, traditional models of oral performance. What other possibilities might one envision for work with language emerging out of poetry, alongside other forms - sculpture, video, architecture - with language as performance, of poetry as art?


Do absolute nonsense poetry - absolute nonsense, non-words, invented words, ersatz words - that make music out of language, the poetic palpability of words themselves, as things palpable, tactile, that we feel when we speak, when we write, when we hear and read them ... that is the real subject of poetry. When there are words printed on bricks, turn them into the floor. Words are different from sentences. To write poetry, the sentence is not the dominant form. The word is the dominant form.


The craftsman distinguishes superior quality at the risk of being taxed with elitism. The crucial words aren't "Do you like it?" but "You must," as in "It's a must."


Craft follows art. Conduct an experiment: investigate how the work would change with varying degrees of freedom. Exciting? Challenging? Naive? Purposely avoid direct reflection, straightforwardness, a closed system requiring no mental participation. Meaning might not be easily recognised - in general, ambiguous - and, much more importantly, it might be more romantic in French, it might be more touching in song, but it should be achievable, as an outcome of this thinking, with the blurring borders between art and the restrictive confrontation of art. Look around. Decide what to do. Create. Art follows craft.


Try to define what comes to mind. The inscribed image formed shall never be that image exactly.


Never repeat a formula/system/manner developed earlier. "Versatility" more than "Trademark." Be arbitrary and nuanced, free from hardly any structure, albeit only symbolically, that define the four horizons of work - the world, history, language, and fiction - work in abstract terms.


Produce work. Discovery proves sometimes reassuring, sometimes uncomfortable, unfinished, unsayable. Follow a tentative itinerary point by point, the "why," the "how."


This modification proved that certain works had no authors, or else had several authors, uniformly bound, classified neither too deep or too far apart, the trace of the road travelled - it lies beyond writing, a "why" to which I can only reply by writing. When I cease from writing, the image becomes visible, inexorably complete. The inscribed image formed shall never be that image exactly.





All words are resultant erasures of various texts: David Foster Wallace's Everything and More, Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Stefan Sagmeister's Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, and the latest volume of Roland.