American Apparell by Kristine Snodgrass is a significant contribution to the burgeoning asemic writing movement as well as an innovative work of serial visual poetry (vispo). The book is in an attractive edition published by Alien Buddha Press (ABP), which has been issuing daring and inclusive work since 2017, mostly text-based verse.
The publisher of Alien Buddha Press is commended for complementing the powerful visuals in Snodgrass’s vispo with a design and format that showcases the beauty of the compositions: The collection has approximately 50 full-colored plates on large U.S. letter-sized pages (8.5 x 11 inches). The colors are lush making it an art object to which the reader/viewer will return many times.
In recent years Kristine Snodgrass has garnered praise and gained an audience in the international asemic writing community. In the interest of full disclosure, I must report I have written about her work previously and have collaborated with her. While this might permit me unique insights into her art, I admit a positive bias rather than a reviewer’s best efforts at neutrality when approaching her new book.
Her turn to the femmeglitch - a bit of asemic jargon she coined that is the compositional foundation of American Apparell - was a surprise to me. She has chosen an exciting new direction. As a result, I believe the asemic writing community can take a step forward, aided by this book; and American Apparell will likely prove to be a classic of asemic lit.
From American Apparell by Kristine Snodgrass
Glitch art is so ubiquitous in the digital realm – video, music, visual art – that I believe we can forego a gloss of the genre, even though American Apparell is notable for its synthesis of the asemic and glitch genres. The Fluxus artist Nam June Paik is considered a glitch pioneer in his early video work. Of course Fluxus has long been a supportive force in concrete and visual poetry.
Take note that Kristine Snodgrass is hardly the first to use glitches in asemics and vispo. What is special about American Apparell is that she is so successful in her application, whereas glitched asemics by others have proven to be mostly tepid and uninspiring. For instance, GLITCHASEMICS by Marco Giovenale (Post-Asemic Press 2020), despite glowing glitterati endorsements, is a disappointment.
Snodgrass includes an owner’s manual of sorts in American Apparell via a brief message at the beginning of the collection in which she writes, “Down with the patriarchy! Femmeglitch aims to cut out the destructive and false notions of femmes, fashionistas, brilliant girls, and fast women by glitching ads […] featuring women wearing T-shirts with glib […] statements and quick phrases of feminism.”
She recognizes that the random and recombinant forms generated by glitches provide a nearly inexhaustible supply of classic postavant tropes that can be used in new and fascinating ways. One need only have the eyes and heart of an artist-poet to unlock the glitch potential, and Snodgrass makes extraordinary use of the medium.
American Apparell reveals that Snodgrass is a natural glitch artist of the highest order while others exploring the field have not yet fully accessed it possibilities of form and expression in applications to vispo. The femmeglitch provides Snodgrass with methods to “deconstruct” images of women in fashion advertising. Here are some of the most notable compositional and aesthetic achievements of the book:
+ Random disruption of
text and image
+ Fragmentation of
text and image
+ Distortion of text
and image
+ Random synthesis of
text and image
+ Mechanisms similar to those achieved by the cut-up technique and variants
The concept behind American Apparell is likely familiar to most readers. Interrogation of the capitalist colonization of women’s bodies, for instance, has been a lively avant lit topic for decades. In her introduction Snodgrass writes, “The glitch reimagines the language, dissecting it and rearranging it in the spirit of asemics. Or pansemic. Or abstract.”
As a close reader of her work, I find Kristine Snodgrass to be a courageous explorer of gender and sexual identity. She does not hesitate to explore and reveal the recesses of her own identity as part of the effort. She makes remarkable use of the avant garde and the postavant to express new realms of consciousness and awareness.
Yet, in ending, I want to add that I find the true allure (a carefully chosen word) of American Apparell is the shear beauty of the content. Paradoxically, while the book incorporates a strain of anti-bourgeois, anti-art, it is a work of breath-taking beauty. Perhaps the avant garde is evolving. Snodgrass takes us into a world that, I believe, is as mysterious to her as it is to us. It is an organic world, both cryptic and inexplicable, that might take numerous books to fully define. In the meantime we have American Apparell. Do not miss it!
- De Villo Sloan
