Why bother to create parameters/definitions for vispro?

Two of these treatises, The Stomachion and The Method exist nowhere else in the world. This book is also the unique source for Archimedes' treatise On Floating Bodies in the original Greek. The Archimedes Palimpsest, as this book is called, has true claims to greatness: it is the earliest surviving Archimedes manuscript by about 400 years; it is the most important source for the diagrams that Archimedes drew in the sand in Syracuse, in the third century B.C. It is by far the most important evidence we have for the greatness of Archimedes. And Archimedes was a very great man”. Quoted from http://archimedespalimpsest.org/about/history/index.php

** https://www.jstor.org/stable/40212097 Hyperides lived from 390/389 to 322, and was thus nearly a contemporary with better known figures such as Demosthenes and Aristotle (both lived 384 to 322). He was a rhetor, or orator. Athenian rhetores were the most prominent politicians in the fourth-century democracy making speeches at public meetings of the citizen assembly and also serving as prosecutors and defendants in the courts.

**(See: https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/readingviewing/Pages/litfocusmultimodal.aspx)

Why Bother to Create Parameters/Definitions for vispro?

Primarily, I started to ‘bother’ as I felt my work was not ‘vispo’ – visual poetry*, with all the definitions such a term encompasses. Nico Vassilakis defines it as a clear response to language, whereas I would define vispro as a conceptual combination of prose and visual language :

It tends to enhance the quantum aspects of language by focusing on the elemental design parts of language material. What’s that mean? People like fidgeting with alphabet… Though language is used as the common platform for communication, it’s prone to being creatively finessed in any number of ways. One of these is visually. Vispoets transmogrify, they undo the word, they reveal the potential locked in the word by visually deconstructing it. They replace language with other visual language. (https://bodyliterature.com/2014/02/24/what-is-vispo-an-interview-with-nico-vassilakis/ )

I found I was not ‘fiddling with the alphabet’, transmogrifying (transforming in an unusual way), or ultimately deconstructing. I was just writing prose in a visual manner in order to create an image. Whether the writing was automatic, asemic, large, small, coloured, written right to left, scrobed vertically or horizontally, I was making visual ‘ordinary language’ which follows some regular grammatical conventions and does not contain a formal metrical structure. My prose encompasses areas of human conversation (as defined on page 2) – it was/is not poetic at all. NOT to say that I am not a producer and lover of vispo – for sure I am, but there were different intentions at work in my paintings. For example, look at the differences in the two examples below:

(left): Palimpsest prose writing of different colours in paint. Layer 15 of painting titled Targeting Memories.2m x 2m, paint on canvas. (right): Cheryl Penn. No – None. Vispo.

*You can think of vispo as poetry that focuses on the look of words and letters before, or instead of, their meaning. Or you can think of it as art that uses the components of written language as a means of exploring visual forms and patterns. Many more definitions and distinctions are possible. But most of all it is the work of visual poets itself that gives the fullest picture of what vispo is and can be. From http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~blc35/final/index.html …6

By no stretch of the imagination are the images similar enough to fall under one genre of work, even though both employ the mediums of ‘visual text’. Speaking of visual text, David Stone describes calligraphy as “the first step to enhancing the fundamental written phonetic written language into a visual art” and illustrations of the page as the second step – as in medieval illuminated manuscripts. Such illustrated text is not vispro nor vispo – it is illustrated text, be the text executed in a known or unknown script as clarified below.

Illustrated text from The Chronicles of Lyrehc – Bhubezi Woman Mythology.

These page images are part of an ongoing mythology based on The Women Who Hold up The World (*http://bhubezi.blogspot.com ). The pages are illustrated, occasionally explanatory, all written in asemic prose, even diagrammatical in nature, but they do not translate into vispro units. Here is where the leap happens –HOW/WHY would/could these images (as an example) become categorized as vispro?

Cheryl Penn. Layer 6. The Student. 2.5m X1.5m. 2021.

Firstly, whatever writing system is employed, it must be integrated - BE part of the visual image – not an addition thereto or explanation thereof. Textual prose becomes the medium for and of itself, for its own reasons in order to produce a visual image – the textual image. In this context, I find the work of Italo Carrarini and Enzo Patti quite compelling in argument for the introduction of the term vispro.

Italo Carrarini. 'PREGHIERA DELLA MONTAGNA' dal Diario di Viaggio | 05.10.2017 (archivio | ©amminare ad Arte). Acrylics, inks and pencils on Fabriano 600gm paper.

Italo describes this piece as “a prayer written in an alpine hut…It is the transcription of a long prayer at the end of a busy mountain hike. Writing so fast overlaps as chromatic stage memory”. When engaging with a textual image such as this, one can see it as a page of prose, part of many pages of prose, gathered together in suspended animation. This is private prose intended for public consumption, whilst maintaining its sense of confidentiality. Linear in execution, emotively charged in coloured complexity, the lines of asemic writing guide the reader past the margins and through the gutters of the book page. One reads these palimpsest prayers as a chromatic scale – 12 lines of visual text (11 plus the stamp and signature) ascending and descending in musical half steps over the page. I feel the internal rhythm of Italo as a writer, see the creative stretching of generally monotonous printed prose, and the disciplined yet completely imaginative structure of prose successfully held together as an example of vispro.

Enzo Patti. Una marina di libri Parco villa Filippina a Palermo. 2020/1.

Enzo is constructing images in which drawing and writing are truly inseparable – they do not comment on each other – they belong together – a ship of words on an ocean of prose. These asemic prose landscapes seem to magically summon the image from within the lilting word forms, something like the incantation of coffin texts*. Enzo writes prose from the shadow world of text which lives in a symbiotic relationship with the images emerging from his process.

Further, I submit my own work as vispro having become frustrated with the term ‘vispo’ which seems too encompassing – a generic term to cover a multitude of textual creatures which no longer know why they are even on the textual visual plains. They’re just there, wondering exactly what they are – or not - I’m often surprised by the naming indifference with which their inventors create them.

I am a writer, but I am an artist too. Writing has consumed me since childhood. Whether it was pre-literate scribbles, the distraught pages of a teenage diary, the ravings of an early 20’s lunatic or prayers of despair –I have always written words – legible or illegible, it mattered not. Then a stranger came knocking – except he was not a stranger – he was Animus to my Anima**. I knew it was a ‘he’ because he was haunting and made it very clear - he was called the Nightcrosser. Without going any further into that (and he was no Rrose Sélavy to Marcel Duchamp), he wanted to express himself in visual language and I had to marry the two. The resultant work was NOT vispo – it was most definitely vispro although I knew it not by that name at the time. The commonality was asemic writing – another tool I was not familiar with, but firmly grounded in at that stage.

*”The Coffin Texts, dating from around 2134 – 2040 BC are numbered at 1185 spells, “spells, incantations, and other forms of religious writing inscribed on coffins to help the deceased navigate the afterlife”. The coffin texts include the document known as the Book of Two Ways –believed to be the first exemplar of cosmography in ancient Egypt. The Book of Two Ways provides maps of the afterlife, including instructions on how to avoid perils on one's way to paradise. Egyptologist Geraldine Pinch notes how "these maps, which were usually painted on the floor of the coffins, are the earliest known maps from any culture, and that the Book of Two Ways was nothing less than an illustrated guidebook to the afterlife… The Book of Two Ways was not a separate work, nor even a book, but detailed maps which corresponded to the rest of the text painted inside the coffin” . https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1021/the-coffin-texts/

** an inner masculine part of the female personality in the analytical psychology of Jung, as opposed to the irrational part of what I would consider to be a generally rational mind.

It was a long journey to here, but now I am certain of the animal I am creating. I write prose in a visual manner. I write layers and layers of prose over canvases up to 3m X 3m. Unfortunately they can’t be bigger because no linen is wider, and wooden frames distort, but ten, twenty, thirty layers of writing or making marks that look like writing, I write, and write and write.

Layer 1 : It’s a TERRIBLE THING To say a problem Is problematic.

Layer 2: ESPECIALLY IF Its grey and dark turquoise.

Layer 3: A dark and slanted story I wrote about her –Two jobs AND waiting on the kid. Layer 4: A sadly marooned man.

Eventually the text is so interwoven and layered – a palimpsest of written layers, all heading to one point inspired by the simplicity of Giotto’s circle*. During the last 5-6 layers, aesthetics take over in terms of mopping up the writing in order to bring all the layers of prose to a conclusion - something like the many edits of a book before the final copy is produced. With this method, although it is concealed, as all the sedimentary deposits in a landscape are, the work remains multiwritten, a physically deep, visual meta narrative of my private but revealed thoughts. The vispro eventually suggests a cyclical place of no particular event or solution, just the idea that all texts will eventually be their own ouroboros, no matter how executed - or uttered. Layer by layer, meaning is forged to represent the muli-complexities of my story - a chronological transition, sequential (in thought and making process), sometimes detailing (in excruciatingly close examination) the vicissitudes of my life, but I am ever moving onwards, forwards, towards the Light of the world I pray.

Cheryl Penn. Turquoise Downspiral Writer. 2021. 2mx2m acrylic on canvas.

*As the story goes, Pope Boniface VIII wished prospectives to submit drawings for submission in order to finish work on St. Peter’s church. When the messenger reached the artist Giotto di Bondone, Giotto accepted the offer and submitted a drawing that (Giotto believed), proved his talent. All Giotto submitted was a circle: a red circle drawn freehand: a perfect red circle drawn freehand. This perfect circle (though a joke to the courier), won Pope Boniface VIII’s favour, and Giotto was chosen. The year –who can say? Plus, circles helped create the study of geometry – Euclidian geometry – remember this stuff - an arc is a portion of the circumference of a circle? …11