permutation & fantasy

A dice thrown unhinges words from a center. They begin to float, as if ignorant of origins and ends. It was an iconic moment. It was as if writing rediscovers pictorial space as a way of decentering language at a time when the pictorial arts are abandoning classical spaces (visual poetry, for instance). First, the linearity of writing is repositioned in a multi-directional space. Next, linguistic elements regain their visual and material weight over plain symbolic or metaphoric functions. Then they shed their classical formal constituents and organizing principles, from semantic associations to generic markers and syntactic orders. Finally, they recover an infinite space of multi-directional distribution and transformation. The liberating movement from an "abstract" or logico-syntactic mode of organization towards a more "concrete" or spatio-material  mode is further extended by the "dynamization" of the notion of the "concrete" as a realm of indeterminacy (the new "abstract").

The disappearance of classical spaces spawned various species of materialism and conceptualism: the object became more formal and material, non-symbolic, and at the same time, conceptualist (cultural and historical fantasy). But we can also say that, with the disappearance of classical spaces. traditional materials found a closer affinity with a decentered language. In an "action" painting, for example, the "content" pointed at is an intersection of event, process, and material, with the randomized production representing a non-pictorial, non-deterministic space. Directional and formal markers have disappeared, leaving us only with the impression of an extensive, non-teleological material process.

The various possibilities of a post-pictorial, permutational space: noise & the open line. The approach has always been a dualist contradiction. Permutational space is everywhere; it forces you to read, however errant your effort may be. But it does not end there: any moment of subjectivity or fantasy is swallowed back by the noisy sea, which reaffirms its inescapable power in the meeting space of subjective and objective chance: the open line.