Asemic Image - Texts by Jay Snodgrass (Florida, USA)

Asemic visual poetry by Jay Snodgrass (Tallahassee, Florida, USA)

 

 

I am thrilled to share new work by Jay Snodgrass in this, his second appearance on Asemic Front 2. His distinctive calligraphy is already well-known and immediately recognizable in the asemic and visual poetry communities. Not surprisingly then, the pieces in his first AF2 feature accented his calligraphic contributions.

 

The work in this post is more expansive. It not only reveals Snodgrass's symbol constructs more but also larger structures that contain them. This work presents forms and explorations of linearity bringing us more fully into his vision.
 

 

 

In my own "reading" of these particular pieces, I find brilliance in the way Jay Snodgrass overlays his asemics on pages from what appear to be an airplane manual or related form of technical publication. Thus the asemic writing is contextualized in the Age of Print with its rote design formulas, text blocks and - I think most important - play of image and text.

These design and reading conventions found in mass publications are so commonplace that ordinarily we barely note them consciously. By creating a new asemic text that both follows and contradicts the airplane manual (socially mediated meaning), our experience of "reading" takes place on completely different terms. (This is one of the magical results of engaging with the asemic text.) While this new experience is highly subjective and individualized, I would guess that most viewers have an increased awareness of the nature of language and image. I believe this work by Snodgrass provides a fine example. 

For instance, the pages themselves - free of the Jay Snodgrass asemics - suggest science, rationality and technology. The aircraft pics, beyond the mundane, do have aesthetics, grace, even classical elegance. Snodgrass unifies the text and image into a new asemic text that encompasses both the repetition and beauty in the images. The experience of his asemic text is entirely different from coming upon the pages of an old technical journal by themselves.
 

As I stated, previously these pages hold many interpretive possibilities. The reader/viewer who spends time with them will be rewarded. Jay Snodgrass in this work achieves the much sought-after synthesis of image and text, which is a Holy Grail of visual poets. This alone is an important achievement.

- DVS