C. Mehrl Bennett: Asemic Fence

Following invite of Cheryl Penn's for Vispro group, I am sharing an asemic writing piece from 2019.      

It began with a photo of slats on a bench in Paris France. 

The color contrasts in the background are a way of grounding the composed asemic writing into an artform, which may tell the reader that I am from a visual art background. I used to dream that I was reading words in a book, and would not be able to read the word, of course, until I could visualize it in my dream. That process is directly connected to 'automatic writing' which, in my case, might be described as 'asemic scribblings'.  The vertical format (used often in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian) could just as well be horizontal, I've used both; but the linear act of writing is represented and so grounds my scribbles into a literary con-text (tongue-in-cheek). When I 'write' with a line on top of a visual piece, it         sometimes follows contours found in the base layer. 

But as often as not, I will visualize a contour and just let my line follow that visualization, like when I used to dream-read. 2019 was also the start of a kind of 'obsessive drawing' I found myself doing (with micron pens, mostly) over my scanned abstract colorful paintings... in which I visualize animals, faces, figures, nature, etc. that connect with forms or contours I see in the painted details, and often these critters make eye contact with each other, or share a contoured shape, because they flow so freely from one to the next. So I think what  I'm trying to say is that my art process & my asemic writing both come from the same place -- an opening up to an unconscious connection to the 'whole' of creation.



Comment: Vispro? Perhaps. In discussions, the term visual-prose-poetry was applied – vispropo – but that is not an animal I am seeking within the confines of this discussion. In illegible text, one cannot define the text by a particular meter, except through representational mark making, therefore perhaps the distinction is unnecessary? In attempting to find parameters to vispro, issues such as semantics etc (which apply to asemic writing) are not relevant right now - the medium (asemic writing) is not the form, but rather the means. If pressed for an answer I would classify this vibrant image as vispo rather than vispro, remembering sometimes one defines something by what it is not. BUT, the addition of prose poetry to the discussion did allow for the existence of a bridge between visual poetry and visual prose.


Formal elements:Features:

1)    Printed page.

2)    Altered photograph of bench slats

3)    Overlaid asemic writing

4)    Palimpsest effect

5)    WHY: an opening up to an unconscious connection to the 'whole' of creation.

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