TEXT INSTEAD OF LANGUAGE: ASEMIC WRITING IN THE 1990s - 2010s ART

Abstract

The author studied a little-known phenomenon in the art of recent decades, located on the border of literary and visual creativity – “asemic writing”. It belongs to one of those trends that develop on the periphery of artistic life and are often ignored in art studies. The authors who create asemic works seek to “erase” the language and find new ways of non-linguistic communication. Their work must be radically open to interpretation, but at the same time use the form of writing and refer to its rules. The works of representatives of this trend are closest to the experiments of the lettrists – artists of the French avant-garde movement in the mid-20th century. In the 1990s Tim Geyse and Jim Leftwich founded the movement of “asemic writing”, which was joined by authors from different parts of the world: tens or even hundreds of people (it is not possible to calculate their exact number due to the specifics of the phenomenon itself). The focus of the study was on the conceptual foundations of asemic writing and only to a small extent on the formal analysis of works. Asemic writing is regarded as an intermedial art that has made a gradual transition from the verbal realm to the purely pictorial one. The article touches on such features of this trend as openness to the world community, indifference to cultural institutions, orientation towards distribution in the Internet environment, marginality and artistic ambiguity, demonstrative rejection of professionalism, the actionist orientation of the phenomenon itself, and the desire of asemic authors to transform reality towards lesser violence.