Asemic Front 2: March 2020

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Asemic Visual Poetry by Alicia Starr Ryan

Asemic vispo by Alicia Starr Ryan (Maplewood, New Jersey, USA)

This is Alicia Starr Ryan's first appearance on Asemic Front 2. As the work you see here testifies, she is a talented artist; her image-text pieces are rooted in an aesthetic, even painterly, visual arts tradition as compared to those who enter the genres explored on AF2 through text: specifically, writers who have become visual poets.

This work has, for me at least, a retro quality - not at all unusual in contemporary vispo - that invokes DaDa collage and specifically Kurt Schwitters. Having the context of a historical continuum is by no means a liability and often, in fact, is useful.

That said, Alicia Starr Ryan has been active in the Eternal Network for the last decade (or at least that is how long I've known her work). Many AF2 readers in the network are, no doubt, familiar with Alicia's art already.

She has been involved in exchanges and projects with visual poets including Eduardo Cardoso, Bruno Neiva, Diane Keys, Cheryl Penn, Kerri Pullo, Nancy Bell Scott, TicTac and others who have become influential and recognized in contemporary image-text via the network.

In fact, Alicia Starr Ryan deserves credit along with those already named for shaping contemporary asemics and vispo.

- De Villo Sloan

By Alicia Starr Ryan

By Alicia Starr

By Alicia Starr Ryan

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Ten Collabs for "Asemous Font Too" by John M. Bennett & Jim Leftwich

By John M. Bennett & Jim Leftwich

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Asemic Front 2 Collabs: Julie VanBortel Matevish & De Villo Sloan

Asemic visual poetry collaboration by Julie VanBortel Matevish

(Rochester, NY, USA) & De Villo Sloan (Auburn, NY, USA)

By Julie VanBortel Matevish & De Villo Sloan

Sunday, March 15, 2020

AF2 Review: Rebecca Resinski's Concrete Gothic Castle

Artist's book by Rebecca Resinski (published by Cukoo Grey, Arkansas, USA)

In a previous Asemic Front 2 review (June 29, 2019), I wrote about reading work by Jay Snodgrass as "asemic gothic." I proposed Snodgrass had effectively synthesized elements of medieval gothic art (calligraphy in particular) with the post-avant conceptualism of asemic writing and visual poetry. Now, I am pleased to share another work - this time by AF2 contributor Rebecca Resinski - that blends contemporary visual poetry with the gothic literary mode (a later strain than Jay Snodgrass's sources but still part of a great gothic tree growing through time and culture).

Rebecca Resinski's Gothic: A Room With Three Windows is another elegantly produced and appropriately minimal artist's book (a total of 10 panels) by Cuckoo Grey editions. Resinski is a visual poet working in the concrete poetry tradition (or "pattern poetry" as Dick Higgins preferred to call it). Her approach is still language-centered even though forms are largely determined by geometry and, by extension, the physical constraints of the book.

Resinski is one of a number of contemporary poets at places around the globe who are basing their work in concrete poetry but also contributing to its evolution. Thus we can apply terms such "neo-concrete" and "new concrete" to their compositions in an era when some visual poets have abandoned text completely in favor of image sequences and associations. A concrete poetry revival is an interesting trend to note. I believe Gothic is a very interesting, even important, addition to contemporary concrete poetry.

Gothic: A Room With Three Windows by Rebecca Resinski

The content of Gothic deserves special attention. Resinski employs the post-avant method of "appropriated" text. Further, the source material is parsed (or "cut-up" as William S. Burroughs called it) and re-combined into new structures with new possibilities for meaning.

Her source text is Ann Radcliffe's novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Unlike much current writing by appropriation that focuses on public and/or media discourse, internet language and literary works connected to the post-avant, Resinski chooses an 18th century literary text by a woman. (Most avant and post-avant art is ahistorical. After several generations this mode can become problematic in terms of the societal function of culture: In other words, a permanent culture of protest denies artists the very mechanisms needed to achieve a healthy cultural evolution.) Gothic offers an alternative to the post-avant dilemma and a new possibility for cultural continuity in a post-literate society.

The Mysteries of Udolpho was popular in its time but was maligned by critics (as was most gothic fiction). Today the narrative has been elevated in literary history and is regarded as a key text in gothic fiction aka Dark Romanticism. Gothic fiction has made huge and ongoing contributions to popular culture. Resinski's close examination of gothic fiction through text appropriation and the formal qualities of concrete poetry brings the reader/viewer insights into the literary gothic as well as the emotional experience of the gothic mode; after all, the gothic is said to be a literature of "feeling" over "reason."

- De Villo Sloan

By Rebecca Resinski

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

New Asemic Visual Poetry by Eduardo Cardoso

Asemic visual poetry by Eduardo Cardoso (Sines, Portugal)

Eduardo Cardoso is a past contributor to Asemic Front as well as many other visual poetry projects in the Eternal Network and beyond. I am thrilled to be able to share this new work on AF2.

These two pieces are excellent examples of Eduardo Cardoso's deconstructive asemics and his material-based visual poetry. The second piece that uses wooden sticks (matches?) is particularly interesting put in haptic and conceptual contexts. From an asemic standpoint, they remind me of constructs made of wood by John M. Bennett (Ohio, USA).

Deepest thanks to Eduardo Cardoso for his continuing contributions to Asemic Front.

- De Villo Sloan