Vestiges of the "textual"

Unlike in drawing where any squiggle can be admitted as part of a world of artistic procedures, the closed set of forms that have been lemmatized as letters or words or punctuation or symbols are more difficult to employ willy-nilly. The impact is more destructive of sense. I can draw anything, drip paint all over, or simply slash the canvas, and this can still be appropriated because a semiotic system remains to decode it. In other words, we can still "talk" about it.

However, when such a master Decoder in itself becomes the object of decomposition, what interpretative system is there left to decode it? We are suddenly left with nothing to go on, the burden of meaning is not carried over onto another reading medium. You are simply faced with "textual artifacts" that don't add up lexically, syntactically or semantically.

Even in a piece like 2_   +, some vestiges of textuality remain: title, some spacing, borders, etc. The writing space itself can only be navigated with these constraints in real dimensions. lemmatized forms can only be rendered in so many font types barring "hand-written" swirls and slashes. In short, the departure from the standardized formats can only go so far in their renderings. This is where alphabetical or lexical departures like Bob Beamer's come in, with all the formats and colors that he uses. Beyond this, abstract typographies like Touchon's would already fall outside the perceptually readable formats of actual languages, even if this is the direction we want to pursue with "textual" forms.

We can employ this plastic freedom to conjure precisely the abstracted nature of signs. the impact is an immediate perception of senselessness because here, it is the Decoder itself that is affected. Another way to do it would be by delaying the appearance of the sign by a metasign, a purely conceptual formation that conjures a sign. Everything I do is a metasign, an improbable signage, or new ways to spell, or new dimensions for an abstract wordage.

Conceptual signage or wordage: who knows how a "sign" looks like? Has anyone seen any of Plato's "ideas"?

Some vestiges of the decoder are deployed, but these are now just haunted forms. Some measure of clarity, indeed, would be needed in the development of techniques along these lines, especially if one of the premises is the absence or weakened presence of agents of meaning. "Chance" is a weak alibi to relay a hard-to-realize non-teleological condition because Chance is too abstract to do in any case. At any rate: everything is too abstract anyway to be done in any way. How can I make "signs," "words," "sense," or "texts" when even the terms "concrete" and "material" are abstract? This is where the improbable comes in, which is also improbable to do. Any idea that tries to establish its own solidity becomes a ritual, an obsession, or a suspicion. It becomes highly symptomatic, and leaves a trail of repetitive signatures or rhythms.