Listening With The Eye An Asemic Notebook

The writings presented here were composed specifically for existing in a book environment as unified text. These works might be called automatic writing or visual writing or asemic writing. There is no intention to tell a story or to use any recognizable language or symbols. Rather the works function in free flow with intuition rather than thought, allowing the hand to just do what the hand does; make marks. Touchon uses improvisational approach to mark making as if playing an instrument that records in marks what might otherwise be heard as notes of music and this might be a way to approach the work - to look as if listening; spending time studying the nature of the work; its flow, its progression, its repetitions, etc. just as we might have an aesthetic experience from looking at pages of text in a foreign language that we are not conversant in. In such a case we get to enjoy the work on a purely visual level without the conversion of the characters into linguistic meanings.

This work is intended to be purely visual with no reference to literary content or convey any sort of symbols. There is an interest however in musicality, of moving the focal point of the eye along during the reading through repetition, cadence, movement, etc. It is a form of listening with the eye as the title of the book suggests. The idea behind asemic writing is to create artworks that are based on the act of mark making similar to handwriting but without reference to semantic content or literary meaning. Hence each 'writer' has a unique way of writing or making marks. When we look at handwriting, even if we are unable to decipher it, we are getting some sort of visual content out of it from looking at the marks and rhythms or distributions of the markings on the page. You might say this is the body language of the writing beyond the message conveyed. This body language is the part that is of interest in this work.

These works might be called automatic writing or visual writing or asemic writing. There is no intention to tell a story or to use any recognizable language or symbols. Rather the works function freely with intuition rather than thought, allowing the hand to just do what the hand does; make marks. There is a kind of visual vocabulary however, such as letter-like marks, punctuation-like marks such as chevrons, commas, accents, dashes and dots, the organization for the most part is in lines of markings to suggest a reading of progression. Some are lyrical and look almost like what a visual music score might look like. I experimented with different rhythmic motions, different ways of holding the tool, sometimes in silence and at other times while listening to music. Sometimes I would watch closely as the work unfolded and at other times allowing my hand to move along the page unobserved in order to see what would happen.

The idea behind asemic writing is to create artworks that are based on the act of mark making similar to handwriting but without reference to semantic content or literary meaning. I suppose you could call it a form of literary abstraction or perhaps non-objective literature. Hence each �asemic writer� has a unique way of writing or making marks. When we look at handwriting, even if we are unable to decipher it, we are getting some sort of visual content out of it from looking at the marks and rhythms or distributions of the markings on the page. We can get a feeling of order or discipline or perhaps a frenetic energy, or playful or sloppy or it might seem confused or muddled. You might say this is the body language of the handwriting beyond the message conveyed. This body language is the part that is of interest in this work and to asemic writers in general.

This is volume three in a set of asemic notebooks. Like volume one, these poems or texts or drawings depending on how you think about them were all made with an ink marker on 6x4 inch smooth, glossy photographic paper. My idea was to have the works function as if they were plates of texts in a book so that the image would appear without a visible background. In this way the writing or text uses the page itself as background in the typical way that print functions in a book. These works might be called automatic writing or visual writing or asemic writing. There is no intention to tell a story or to use any recognizable language or symbols. Rather the works function in free flow with intuition rather than thought, allowing the hand to just do what the hand does; make marks. I prefer a more improvisational approach as if I am playing an instrument that records in marks what might otherwise be heard as notes of music. This is the natural realm of the arts; to work in a state of mindfulness or meditation.

The current permutation of The Reader, originally envisioned as a black and white book, expanded in size and breadth to its current full color version to take into account the range of expression in Touchon's asemic explorations spanning forty years of works on paper including images from Touchon's unpublished sketchbooks. The first section of the book primarily contains palimpsest based asemic writing originally intended for mail art correspondence in which Touchon overwrites texts as found in 19th and early 20th century antique poetry books, a book of sermons, farm journal pages, a postcard, a grade school autograph book page, a sheet of music, a page from a vintage high school chemistry workbook and old invoices. Using these found papers collected for possible collage material, Touchon retains and uses the structure on the page and the patinated paper as inspiration for these asemic works often overwritten with india ink and quill pen. Following these are selected typographic abstraction works from the Fusion Series, Touchon diary-like ongoing series of collage works begun in 1983 and continuing to the present. In these works Touchon uses a wide ranging body of materials, approaches and techniques to produce these poetic works that explore figure and ground relationships and a variety of compositional strategies. These collages become studies for Touchon's paintings. In the midst of this group are a series of asemic 'songs' on torn brown paper using colored pens, pencil shading and white pencil highlighting that express the idea of visual musicality. At the end of the typographic collage works there is the image of a labyrinthian network of overlapping white lines over a black void that seem to float on multiple levels. This opens the way to a set of works of brush and ink from 2009 on the pages of a single antique journal where the markings are painted onto the leaves of paper and after a few moments the pages were held under running water in the kitchen sink. Whatever ink had dried remained on the page leaving gray ghost marks where the ink had been washed away. The book concludes with a variety of works from the late 1970's examining Touchon's early mark making based on language or visual musicality. Taken as a whole, this sampling of works across forty years of Touchon's oeuvre reminds one of a quote from the 1949 'Lecture on Nothing' by John Cage: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it..." but in Touchon's case he possibly is saying nothing about Something; perhaps a something so transcendent that common words cannot speak of it, something so vast that words crumble into gibberish and collapse into an unutterable silence. Some of the titles of previous exhibitions of Touchon's work suggest this such as: 'Beyond Words', 'Reduced to Silence' or 'The Unspoken Remains'. Yet Touchon's works are not nihilistic in nature. They could be said to be meaningless though clearly not purposeless. Touchon has said that his interest is in expressing 'the underlying universal harmony of all things'. One has the impression when studying these works that literary meaning has been removed or obfuscated but in Touchon's view he sees his work as liberating language from its work as bearer of meaning and by extension liberating the reader from the work of deciphering meaning and from the obligation of being literate when enjoying the works purely for their aesthetic value. In a world whose population is engulfed in a deluge of information that we must continually navigate, these works offer a small oasis in which one might be refreshed along the seemingly endless journey over the shifting sands of data on the horizons of which can only be seen mirage and simulacrum.

These poems are created using vernacular sources for materials such as restaurant receipts, poetic structures Touchon made with spam email, pages of lists from magazines as palimpsests to then overwrite the texts on the pages using the existing texts as prompts for his asemic writing. Touchon also used various authorsÕ poems whose structures he liked in the same way by printing out the poems on white sheets and then overwriting the texts. Some of the poets included e. e. commings, David Drew, Vito Acconti, documents from Sigmund Freud, some pages from Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, etc. In short, any sort of page composition that Touchon could exploit with the use of asemic writing.

Dog Ear explores dog-eared pages of mass-market paperbacks which are photographed to isolate the small diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text.