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A Hand Writing
- University of Michigan Press
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A Hand Writing The word “line” presents a world of ambiguity: is it the “line” of verse, with its specific metrical or syllabic st ucture, or perhaps something written quickly, as in “I’ll drop you a line,” or is it, on the other hand, a line drawn as all or par t of a visual image? Though often unnoticed, there’ s a point where these two converge , a slipper y instance at which writing actually becomes visual art and visual art becomes language. And though it manifests in writing/drawing, it impinges equally upon seeing/ reading, raising the question of whether or not reading is a specialized form of seeing, one achieved, ironically , only by sublimating seeing in the nor mal sense, for when we read, we need to look right through the material aspects of the word in order to access referential meaning more immediately . Other modes of seeing, such as viewing visual art, emphasize the opposite. In learning to view visual art, we are trained to remain attentive to that very materiality. What, then, happens in the brain when we view ar t that demands both reading and seeing? And why did the instances of such ar t increase dramatically throughout the twentieth century ? In his book Inner Vision,1 the neurologist Semir Zeki argues that ar t is purposeful, that it has developed to train the brain, to sharpen its abilities to better meet the tasks of daily living . And, obviously, as our environment changes, so must our brains. In the past fifty years, we’ve seen more and more work by writers and visual ar tists both, that incorporates language in ways that constitute a visual element and a linguistic one simultaneously . Do we read such things, or do we see them? And does art that rides this line between reading and seeing cause the brain to per form two tasks simultaneously that it would normally perform separately? And does this, in tur n, prepare our 82 brains to more ef fectively deal with the changes in technology , as well as the speed and insistence of visual stimuli (advertising, television, video games, flashing signs, etc.), that have becom increasingly prevalent in the past several decades? As children grow into adults, they get encultured into a reading that denies or sublimates the seeing, thus narrowing the written object to only one of its aspects. The aspect that we privilege is the more complex, in that it requires additional levels of interpretation and more highly trained engagement to render it meaningful. In other words, it takes more training to lear n to read than to lear n to see, and that fact alone elevates it on the scale of prestige and contributes to its precedence to the point that most literate adults read without seeing what they’re reading . This dichotomy can also be considered as one between product and process: reading has a clear , definable, and trans ferable goal; it has exchange-value in that after a text has been consumed, it can be exchanged as “marketable” infor mation or added to a store of enabling knowledge. Seeing, on the other hand, is an end in itself, consuming no object and resulting in nothing that can be passed on. The purpose in making this distinction is not to ar gue their relative values, but rather to explore the possibility of dissolving their dichotomy and striking a balance between—or opening up the field between—reading and seeing to create a di ferent zone of perception. Handwriting, as opposed to printing, offers an approach to this, as it allows us to both read and see at the same time. Imagine a continuum of perception whose extremes are pure reading—looking right through the marks to their meaning— and pure seeing—regarding the marks with an attention that remains within them, not translating them into something else. Throughout recent art, there are extremely charged works that fall very close to the middle, suggesting a growing delight with playing with this line. Par ticularly striking examples include Henri Michaux’s “faux” ideograms, drawings that he executed with var ying relationships to written language. If you do an Internet image search using the key words “Henri Michaux Narration,” you’ll find one from 1927 influenced by his rece travels in China and Japan and his fascination with the radically 83 [3.141.24.134] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:56 GMT) different way that ideograms constr uct their meanings...