Jim Leftwich -- On Marian Zazeela
Jim Leftwich, from an email to John M. Bennett
On Marian Zazeela, THE SOUL OF THE WORD,
On Marian Zazeela, THE SOUL OF THE WORD,
published in Aspen no. 9 (1971)
Her description, poetical (lyrical) as it is, is interesting to me. She is thinking about the relationship of the letter to the word, like Isou, but her disintegration process, or deformation process, seems unique to her (particularly in 1963 -- written in 1963, published in 1971). Her idea that the letters can (should) have a life outside of their confinement in words reminds me a bit of some of the prose that Nico Vassilakis has written.
Words, neologisms, vocables, and other letterstrings and letter-aggregates exist because of the infinitely recombinative nature of the letters. Her handwriting improvisations and quasi-calligraphic drawings make the polysemous word a unit of composition, much as a line or even a stanza has been in the writing of traditional poems.
What is perhaps most interesting about this page of Zazeela (longtime collaborator and partner of La Monte Young, actress and performer in early-60s experimental films and events (Warhol, Jack Smith), creator of the light shows -- light sculptures -- for The Plastic Exploding Inevitable)), is that she begins with the intact word, works backwards to the letter, then to the component parts (lines, shapes, full and partial enclosures...) of the letters, on to a kind of desemantized field of sub-letteral marks and spaces, and then, at least as a proposal, back towards words and word-like letter combinations.
To my way of thinking, this kind of work has a lot to do with how and why any of us might arrive at considerations of something we are willing to call asemic writing.
Her description, poetical (lyrical) as it is, is interesting to me. She is thinking about the relationship of the letter to the word, like Isou, but her disintegration process, or deformation process, seems unique to her (particularly in 1963 -- written in 1963, published in 1971). Her idea that the letters can (should) have a life outside of their confinement in words reminds me a bit of some of the prose that Nico Vassilakis has written.
Words, neologisms, vocables, and other letterstrings and letter-aggregates exist because of the infinitely recombinative nature of the letters. Her handwriting improvisations and quasi-calligraphic drawings make the polysemous word a unit of composition, much as a line or even a stanza has been in the writing of traditional poems.
What is perhaps most interesting about this page of Zazeela (longtime collaborator and partner of La Monte Young, actress and performer in early-60s experimental films and events (Warhol, Jack Smith), creator of the light shows -- light sculptures -- for The Plastic Exploding Inevitable)), is that she begins with the intact word, works backwards to the letter, then to the component parts (lines, shapes, full and partial enclosures...) of the letters, on to a kind of desemantized field of sub-letteral marks and spaces, and then, at least as a proposal, back towards words and word-like letter combinations.
To my way of thinking, this kind of work has a lot to do with how and why any of us might arrive at considerations of something we are willing to call asemic writing.
12.10.2021
posted by jim leftwich at 7:58 PM
<< Home