do the write thing 2
read between the lines
What, then, occurs “in the interval between the legible and the visible” – as Michel Thevoz calls it – or in what Dubuffet called “implicit languages”?
What, then, occurs “in the interval between the legible and the visible” – as Michel Thevoz calls it – or in what Dubuffet called “implicit languages”?
What happens when meaning hides under a profusion of signs? When, in writing a drawing or drawing writing, it is no longer a matter of speaking, by any means available. With the risk, surely, that this metalanguage will traverse the sky without reaching any target. Making it more obvious than anything else that its author was surely the target. Unless, unless one of us crosses that path, ready to be moved by this soliloquy, ready to understand, to literally incorporate this semantic surge that resembles the “Babelian drive” that Eric Dussert discusses in our exhibit catalogue. And that person would de facto become the providential recipient of this sibylline surge, not as an exceptional cryptographer, but as someone who could find all of the possibilities for expression within himself. Equally capable of feeling the evocative power of the ideogram, image inseparable from text, like in time immemorial, or of taking joy in the ramblings in which science and poetry saunter. Or even of experiencing the graphorrhea’s little melodies that unfold like mantras.
Rhythm and composition, constantly in tension, seem to want to reveal a new meaning, something primal, like a cry. Besides, since we’re discussing outbursts of voices, shouldn’t we also discuss outbursts of signs? In this way, all glossography would appear not as an inability to master linguistic codes, but rather as the profound manifestation of an urgency, paired with the need to escape reductive conventions. This major divergence allowing whomever carries it out to cut across unexplored paths capable of providing new responses to unresolved questions. When it is not only a question of shielding the mystery or the sacred things that could appear there against profane incursions.
What is deafening then, in these palimpsests, these magical cyphers, these vehement imprecations, these sedimented words, these hypnotic iterations, these secret terms, is the formidable plasticity of a primordial language that seems to contain them all.
Preface : Eric Dussert
Foreword : Christian Berst
Catalog published to mark the exhibition Do the write thing : read between the lines #2, from April 26th to June 2nd, 2018.