adventures in nonism: asemic art

our name, the nonist, was originally (for our purposes) coined as a half joking, half serious, (all drunk no doubt) reaction to the chain rattling ghost of art past and the verbose zombie of art present. i for one had gotten tired of all the manifestos and texts i was expected to care about, all the explanations i was obliged to stay awake through, not to mention the boundaries which a knowledge of art history sneakily laid down. “been done.” “reminds me of so-and-so.” “that’s so passe!” simply put “isms” were a drag. who needed em? nonism was a way of saying fuck you politely. we were young and full of wine so what else would you expect?


Well, I just wanna say I liked looking at the pictures in this entry.

posted by Pauly D  on  11/21  at  03:44 AM



Thanks for that interesting essay and all those great images. I wonder if there is a form of art without any context, message or semantics. Already it’s creation and existance alreadys says something.

posted by orangeguru  on  11/21  at  10:55 AM



There’s some quality in unreadable writing that has a powerful fascination to me, too, which I suppose could have some analogue in the historical reverence for egyptian hieroglyphs as singularly stuffed with occult meaning, & the like. I daresay that the appeal of the voynich manuscript, say, would be lessened for many should it ever be decoded.

I wonder how much of a part semantic content actually plays in ones enjoyment of an image, ones fascination with it. Even with something as semantically rigid as a 19th century history painting, the viewer can always end up superimposing a meaning of his or her own, via some kind of semantic pareidolia… the intentional communication of specific semantics through pictures is often hazardous… an artist’s intention in so doing can be overlooked, or misconstrued (semantic content transmitted but not received); or, as here, the artist can intend not to ‘encode’ semantic content, but yet such may yet be apparent to the works’ viewer (semantic content received, though not transmitted). what, then, is being communicated here, supposing the artist still intends to communicate something? is it some kind of emotional ‘metadata’?

blimey, this has got me thinking, which can’t be good, & is why I’m not probably not making any sense. Anyway, many thanks for all this!

posted by misteraitch  on  11/21  at  03:38 PM



@aitch: as per the voynich manuscript-  as you say, a good portion of curious people would lose interest but the vacuum they left behind would be filled instantly with people with a vested interest in whatever subject the manuscript was found to cover. it would become less interesting as an object and more interesting as a document.

as for the semantic content of art it’s an interesting question. works which very obviously offer a message, works with a unmistakably concrete point of view are often times less interesting than those which offer some shade of mystery or allow interpretation. the mona lisa might be an o.k. example. were it not for that little tinge of a smile, which obviously clouds the “meaning” a bit, it’s far less likely it would have become an icon.

there is a weird balancing act in figurative art. i don’t think obvious semantic content is very popular with artists (when they have a choice) there has always been a trend toward allegory, symbolism, metaphor, etc. even when artists were expected to “tell a story” because they were working for a patron (or because the church would cut their head off otherwise) they very often snuck something in there to spice it up for themselves.

seems to me it’s exactly this issue which separates graphic design and “fine art.” then again, in a way, graphic design is often the act of ever so slightly clouding semantic content in ornament and style. trying to instill a naked message with just a touch of the unnecessary in order to differentiate and make desirable… i don’t know.

@orange: perhaps there is an inability on the part of a creator, even one who wishes for pure abstraction, to completely avoid encoding some information? and perhaps that in conjunction with the human mind’s tendency to look for meaning creates a situation where true, total lack of encoded meaning is impossible?

posted by jmorrison  on  11/22  at  12:43 AM



i’ve done doodles like that, and seen ‘asemic speech bubbles’ in underground comix. over brushing my teeth, i was wondering if any such art is truly asemic, i.e. signifying nothing at all. once in some psych text i saw a sidebar with two simple line shapes, one curving about, the other jagged and pointy; in the survey, people were asked which shape was ‘maluma’ and which was ‘tuckatee.’ invariably, maluma was the curvy one, tuckatee the angular one. likewise in these examples, there’s a wealth of ‘body language,’ you might say.

posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/22  at  01:39 AM



Again, reading your “manifesto” (i see you hate the word and what it represents, but in a way, you have made your own, load and clear)  :)
reading it, was like “metre les point sur les e - which means in french -to put the light or the focus right on the spot!)

i’m in a stage where art that involves letters and symbols “attracts” me, the movements, the pictograpic like -expression of emotion, so along my night walks, while surfing, i came across some interesting art and the Letersit among it:

here is a beautiful example.

and Ed Ruska’s work as well.

and Israeli Artist: Yoram Kupermintz, that works a lot with Arab letters, as well as Hebrew.

I am also very interested in the manifestation of letters and writing as a form of art. true, for us western, any foreign calligraphic expression can evoke an “artist experience” and our interpretation of it lies in different states of mind, then perhaps for those who know the language. does that mean, that our perception of art vary and depends where we come from? and for one a piece will be considered as art piece and for his fellow man from the other country, it will be considered as a simply a writing? where does the line separate those conceptions?

i came across EdRuska art pieces, and fell in love with it, but i wonder if this would be considered art by someone who doesn’t know english at all? and what about this image of “adoration and grief”? notes of adoration for the assassinated ex-president Rafik Hariri.

i am writing and writing, and finaly what i mostly wanted to say is that your place is one of the most refined, mind opening, interesting, funny and so on…places on the web for me, and i keep on coming and learning of you!

posted by Moon  on  11/22  at  05:54 PM



one looks particularly talmudic. a nice metaphor for my religious and philosophical devolution.

maluma and tuckatee. I’m vacillating between eyerolling and the full-on beavis. As tb said, much of it is figurative, if you look at it that way. is there ever content, or just my junior high projection?

jaime, your archeography work is stunning. In a good way.

posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/22  at  10:27 PM



@moon: thanks for the links and the compliments. Ed Ruscha’s work does indeed fit into this discussion though he approaches it in an almost opposite way. he includes words, complete with their semantic payload, but shifts their impact through context. in some cases the juxtaposition with an image does the shifting. in others (and i hate to say this) the words are really being set against your own expectations. you look at a piece which is really nothing more than a word or short phrase applied to a surface, and because you as the viewer respect art and expect it to have some deeper meaning the word or phrase becomes packed with potential energy. it’s ruscha using your own exultation of art to infuse a banal piece with weight beyond itself. imho. inexplicably i am quite fond of his mountain scene paintings which look more than anything else like coors advertisements.

@deb: thanks.

@tom: reminds me of the “art tests” you sometimes see which offer up sets of graphics to choose between to test your understanding of design concepts…

example.

graphic a shows three circles arranged haphazardly, none touching.

graphic b shows three circles, intersecting one another equally in the center of the field.

which one illustrates “unity?”

i think the only thing this example could test is your ability to understand english. if you can read the word unity there is no possible way you’d answer incorrectly. other than that not sure what it proves.

posted by jmorrison  on  11/24  at  03:32 PM



Thanks. This post and thread is the best thing I’ve seen for a while.

Of minor tangential interest, I was reading about this guy’s strong desire to find a manuscript of considerable importance at his local library. After some troubles he got to the microfilm and described how he reacted to the arabic script….reminded me of some of the talk here.

(Oh, the dbqp URL is wonky - http://dbqp.blogspot.com/ I presume )

posted by peacay  on  11/29  at  10:38 AM



@peacay: thanks for the link (and the heads up, fixed the dbqp thing) shame he didn’t take some digital pics.

his reaction to the islamic calligraphy is not surprising. that feeling of awe is the whole point. in islam the arabic language, as it occurs in the Qur’an, (because the prophet muhammad said it was revealed to him by allah in “pure arabic”) is itself considered to be a miracle. transcribing what is considered a miraculous language is considered a sublime task. as such there are many strict rules which govern serious islamic calligraphy. it is not a “cursive” as a victorian lady might have jotted down in love letters, willy nilly. even stylistic changes over time are shaped by these rules.

at least that’s my understanding of it. i’m no expert by any stretch of the imagination. just a fan with a couple books on the subject.

an interesting bit by way of illustration:-

ibn ‘askari has written: the language of adam in the garden of eden was arabic. after his disobedience he was deprived of it and spoke syriac. then, after adam’s repentance, god restored arabic to him once more. thus arabic is seen as the prelapsarian language, which human sin has caused to become latent in all other tongues.

‘course the prohibition on the representations of human or “divine” forms does not hurt does it?

actually now that i’ve cracked open one of my islamic calligraphy books i think i’ll have to post some of the plates this weekend. they are truly gorgeous.

anyhow thanks for the kind words peacay. i’ve enjoyed this thread as well. always hoped this is the kind of thing the site would foster. best.

posted by jmorrison  on  11/30  at  12:01 AM



Hi, I am editor of the Handstand, I would like to put up your essay and the photographs on the January issue. Handstand is a monthly magazine, Dec. issue has just gone up. Please contact me with permission if so ? Many thanks, Jocelyn

posted by jocelyn braddell  on  12/03  at  02:24 AM



Hi

I found your article really interesting.  I’ve been making work with fragments of hand-written and found text on and off for years.  You might be interested in some examples on this site:

http://www.behance.net/simonmsmith

Thanks, too, for the pointers to other sites.  It’s always interesting to see what other people are up to

Best wishes

Simon

posted by simon m smith  on  04/07  at  07:55 AM



Thanks for the pics and text!

posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/02  at  06:08 PM


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