Asemic Writing - Influences and Predecessors

Influences and Predecessors

• From the Tim Gaze interview at Commonline Journal: "you could say that nature, since time began, has been manifesting asemic writing. It just needs a human to see the writing, & recognize it".
• In Tang Dynasty China, ca. 800 CE, two men pushed cursive brush calligraphy to the point of illegibility. "Crazy" Zhang Xu (one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup) used to get excited after drinking wine, and write exuberant but illegible cursive. The younger "mad monk" Huai Su also found renown as a writer of loose cursive calligraphy.
• The Voynich manuscript, a 15th century illustrated "herbal" which has so far resisted all attempts at decipherment or explanation.
• Hélène Smith's Martian, although that can also be considered a conlang with a consistent writing system or conscript.
• Austin Osman Spare, Sigilization. Spare published a method by which the words of a statement of intent are reduced into an abstract design, and then charged with the energy of one's will.
• Henri Michaux's Alphabet, Narration (1927), and intuitive ink drawings, such as Stroke by Stroke (2006). Michaux refers to his asemic writing as “interior gestures”.
• JB Murray created a personal spirit writing which he could translate by viewing through a glass of water.
• Cy Twombly, many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. His paintings of the late 1950s, early 1960s might be reminiscent of long term accumulation of bathroom graffiti. One should also see Twombly's series Roman Notes (1970).
• Christian Dotremont and his logograms.

• Lettrisme / Isidore Isou's "idea for the poem of the future was that it should be purely formal, devoid of all semantic content." Lettrisme is an important precursor to asemic writing because the lettristes often invented new symbols instead of using words. They also atomized writing down to the letter and synthesized writing with visual imagery; the term they invented for this type of writing is "hypergraphics". An early example of hypergraphy is Gabriel Pomerand's 1951 painting Sans Titre, where the artist created new symbols and gestures. Later on, In the early 1970s, Alain Satié released his hypergraphic book Écrit en Prose which has almost the entire dialogue written in asemic text.
• Brion Gysin's calligraphic paintings influenced by Japanese and Arabic calligraphy. A prominent example of one of Gysin's calligraphic paintings is Calligraffiti of Fire (1986).
• Morita Shiryu was one of five calligraphers to form the Bokujin-Kai or “Human Ink Society”. The modern rejuvenation of calligraphy, for Morita, lay in the exploration of true form which would enable calligraphy to have a world relevance and accessibility. He encouraged calligraphers to step back from creating pure characters in order to revitalize the form of their expressions through experimentation with abstract art.
• Ulfert Wilke and Abstract Expressionism. Wilke was deeply intrigued by the written language, and much of his work was derived from his abstract interpretation of the shapes, colors and meanings of writing that he found in all languages and forms.
• Jean Degottex, French painter, draughtsman and sculptor. From the early 1950s he showed an interest in mark-making and in the rendering of calligraphic shapes engaging both the surface and the space of the paper or canvas (e.g. Sea Spears, 1954; Paris, Gal. Fournier), an approach similar to the Surrealist method of automatic writing and drawing.
• In 1974 the New York Graphic Society released a very influential work to asemic writers, Max Ernst's book Maximiliana: The Illegal Practice of Astronomy: hommage à Dorothea Tanning.
• Timothy Ely's invented cribriform writing. Ely's work evokes a range of thematic material: arcane knowledge, secrets and cryptography, time and timelessness. He has developed a private written language using 366 individual signs or "idiographic ciphers". Ely writes visual stories, not to be confused with graphic novels. His narratives are anything but linear. “I like the idea of making an art that forces you to confront the mystery,” Ely says. “No matter how you try to deal with it, there is no solution.”
• Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky; "The installation consisted of a set of books, panels and scrolls on which were printed thousands of characters resembling real Chinese ideograms, all devoid of semantic content".
• Roland Barthes, contre-écritures.
• Rachid Koraichi, his work is influenced by an abiding fascination with signs of all kinds, both real and imaginary. Beginning with the intricate beauties of the Arabic calligraphic scripts, his work is composed of symbols, glyphs and ciphers drawn from a wide variety of other languages and cultures.
• Gu Wenda, in the 1980s, he began the first of a series of projects centered on the invention of meaningless, false Chinese ideograms, depicted as if they were truly old and traditional. One exhibition of this type, held in Xi'an in 1986, featured paintings of fake ideograms on a massive scale. In other works he develops various unreadable texts based on language influences in the area in which he is creating an installment. Gu states that the unreadable texts are used to evoke the limitations of human knowledge.
• Indonesia's famed artist Made Wianta, likewise, mostly relies on his brush to move freely and spontaneously across a desired surface to form curved and wavy patterns that remind one of the esthetic riches of East Asia.See his work Caligraphy on the Blue Gate(1995) or Purple Caligraphy (2010).