Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings

...visible, legible, illegible: around a limit...

. . . visible, legible, illegible 319 Many of Saul Steinberg’s drawings that play with illegible writings make us laugh or smile. They get our attention; they interrogate us. Funny or surprising, through the angle of the witty and the absurd, they manage to “speak” to us immediately. Paradoxical efficacy ? These scribbles linked to the virtuosity of the stroke lead us to the heart of our subject (figure 18.1). Countless artists have taken up the letter and the sign, creating a myriad of unexpected written forms. This laboratory of visual trials and experiments, as immense as it is impressive, operates at the margins of accepted conventions and regulated practices. Even though this field has been expanding full force since the historic avant-garde movements , and even more so because of “the place that language occupies in contemporary visual arts,” its origin is lost in the mists of time.1 The history of writing reminds us that, “since the beginning, there has been a strange struggle between the utility and the beauty of a letter, between legibility and aesthetics, between the effort to become visible and the desire to remain secret.”2 Thus, one finds thousands of metamorphoses of the signs of writing , discovers all sorts of revisions and transgressions. Revisited by creative imagination, letters and signs transform themselves into variations, deformations, interferences, disorders, and extravagances. By definition, the space in which such research is situated resists clear delimitation. The variety of practices that arise from it can be astounding . Many, indeed, have appropriated the forms of writing: painters, draftsmen, sculptors, poets, writers, typographers, poster designers , graphic designers—protean, anonymous, atypical creators, and assorted other experimenters. Their heterogeneous productions reflect a multifaceted interest in the letter, in the lines of writing or Roxane Jubert . . . visible, legible, illegible : around a limit . . . toward where letters are no longer recognizable —Mohammed Bennis an additional sign in the jumble of the immense Text written without pause, without origin and end —Roland Barthes 320 Roxane Jubert 18.1. Saul Steinberg (American, 1914–99), Untitled, 1958. Ink on paper. First published in Steinberg, The Labyrinth, 1960. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. the gesture that accompanies them. Significantly, some, such as Lajos Kassák, Iliazd, Henri Michaux, and Christian Dotremont, pursue work that is both written and visual. The field of visual arts refers, among many others, to creations as diverse as those by Auguste Herbin, Mira Schendel, León Ferrari, Judit Reigl, Antoni Tàpies, Véra Molnar, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, A. R. Penck, Mirtha Dermisache, Tania Mouraud, and Rémy Zaugg. It also combines key phenomena, such as the Futurist parole in libertà (words in freedom) or lettrisme, and contains typographic experiments, such as the alphabets of Kurt Schwitters, Cassandre, and Wladislaw Strzeminski.3 “The Allusive Field of Writing” All the ways in which we imagine and invest in signs go to the very practice of writing and its history. So many approaches escape, spill over, resist. Taking interest in the limits within which they operate involves taking stock of the risk assumed by these productions. Here, norms and codes seem to be felt as unfit to express certain things. They incite us to look elsewhere in a different manner, to work out other forms of expression. With writings or traces coming from elsewhere , the deficit of legibility leads to other horizons that are fastened to the visual. Michel Thévoz asks, “Shouldn’t we . . . wonder at the autonomization and reciprocal exclusion of writing and drawing in the cultural field, given that these two modes of expression share precisely the same impulse as origin and the same tool as support?”4 A great deal is playing itself out in the interactions of the two, inviting us to “read” between the lines. This intriguing subject remains partially elusive. It is composed of an infinite number of gradations between the legible and the illegible—of intermediary or borderline digressions. Is this a return to the illegible or to the initial deformation , a return made possible by some recall of the first steps in learning to write? Or is this a desire to expand the horizon of the alphabet and to augment its expressive capacities? These explorations of the sign reveal some clearly identifiable tendencies and also bring to light the most unexpected combinations, the most surprising forms and lines. Writing reveals...