Renee Gladman and Mirtha Dermisache, Together at Last

John Vincler considers Renee Gladman's turn to drawing, and in relation to Mirtha Dermisache’s Selected Writings, at the Paris Review Daily. "In my initial attempt to characterize Dermisache’s works, I noted that some more closely resemble waveforms, always advancing." More:

...They reminded me of the graphic representation of sound in audio editing software, and I imagined that her waveforms could be rendered as sound via a sort of nonlinguistic digital translation or as performed by a musician as a visual score. Others more closely resemble Gladman’s drawings in what I began to describe as a knotty mode of writing. In these works, the line progresses only by repeatedly doubling back on itself. I saw this as writing with a different timbre that conveys intensity by the density of these knots. I couldn’t track a single advancing line, rising and falling, curling back and then forward as it proceeds; I couldn’t untangle with my eye the continuous strokes of the forms as possible sonorous units or phonemes, even if they graphically resemble, in length and distribution, written words or sentences. I wondered if I was seeing in this mode of illegible writing a performance of doubt, an author’s hand hovering over and exploring the contours of an idea or feeling, unsure of how to proceed, and when continuing onward, doing so only haltingly.

Dermisache’s writings and Gladman’s drawings remind me of quipu, the Incan proto-writing system, dating from the fifteenth century and comprised of gatherings of various strands of sometimes colored knots. Quipu are generally thought to encode information or language (census data, inventories, and possibly fables, myths, and genealogies), but how they do this remains mostly a mystery, despite numerous code-breaking efforts. Quipu fascinate me as a mode of writing that is tactile, read as much by the hand as by the eye moving across the strands of knots—a more complex version perhaps of how a rosary encodes a cycle of prayers for a devout Catholic.

 

Perhaps Gladman’s and Dermisache’s works can be read as visualizations of the process of writing, and if not constituting linguistic writing itself, then rendering graphically an aspect of writing that dwells somehow underneath the surface of written language...