Xerolage 47 - iu by John Moore Williams
http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage47/by/john_moore_williams
What we have here are digital talismanic suggestions. In this
series of vispo, design elements construct a place for you and eye to
land. The dotted i returns u see. Letterforms conjure humanity in
their very simplicity. These compositions rework certain concrete
poetic ideas. The letters i and u undergo new permutations. It’s a
satisfying jaunt through renewed verbo-visual possibilities. John
Moore Williams is part of the next wave of visual poet.
- Nico Vassilakis
I didn't know who I am before I saw Xerolage 47. I didn't know
what I was, or the difference between I and U. I was continually
thinking U were I when you were nothing of the kind. But in this book,
in this John Moore Williams book, we discover that I am the mother of
U, who is I bent in the middle and whose feet point up to the sky.
Sometimes, I am a shadow. Sometimes, I is a change. Sometimes, I am in
a pile of U's and cannot get out. Sometimes, I is a whirling of
shapes. Sometimes, I am spare. Because I go on forever, and I end at
the end of each finger, each of which is just another I. I is clean. I
am dirty. And in John Moore Williams' hands of ten small I's, I is
everywhere and everything, the letter is examined as a meaning and a
shape, the I is made into structures of beauty, and if you read the
book you just might know what I am and you are.
- Geof Huth
from the introduction:
We are used to thinking of letters as merely media, as windows through
which some message is conveyed without interference. They are the
superconductors of significance, channels devoid of impedance or
static, through which content is, ideally, passed with crystal
clarity. This is perhaps most obviously true of the letter I, which
has become so concretely associated with individual identity that it
has practically disappeared as its own entity. The shape itself
reinforces this disappearance; of all the letterforms it is perhaps
the sparest, the most Spartan. Compounding this is the fact that it
lends itself so easily to the conflation of form and content—it is,
unlike most single letters, a word, and one that abstractly yet
forcefully resembles its referent. It is the human form in hieroglyph,
a body inscribed.
iu seeks to accept, complicate and reject this conflation, this
crystal-clear union of sign and signifier. In accepting the sparest of
letterforms as its subject, then attempting to create a wide variety
of forms out of this simple cloth, the book embraces the generativity
of restriction. At the same time, it attempts to explore the
multifarious and complex meanings of identity and individuality
through simple, iconic forms. Many of the pieces employ the archetypal
forms and arrangements of the comic book, that most lyric and
identity-obsessed of popular fiction forms, while others work through
more concrete arrangements, attempting to graphically depict the
semantic content in much the same way the letterform itself does. Oh,
and then there’s the letter U, which our shorthand age has rendered
nearly as pictographic as I.
John Moore Williams claims to be a poet and, occasionally, an artist.
He also claims, marginally more lucratively, to be a copywriter and
editor. It’s fairly certain that he lives in Oakland, California, and
that he has authored I discover i is an android (Trainwreck Press,
2008), writ10 (VUGG Books, 2008) and [+!] (Calliope Nerve, 2009)—the
last in collaboration with Matina Stamatakis and Kane X. Faucher. He
also edits the visual poetry journal The Bleed
(avantexte.com/thebleed). His blog is called SinTax
(fissuresofmen.blogspot.com).
The primary investigation of Xerolage is how collage technique of 20th
century art, typography, computer graphics, visual & concrete poetry
movements & the art of the copier have been combined. Each issue is
devoted to the work of one artist.
24 pages, 8.5 x 11, $7 includes postage
Subscriptions: 4 issues/$20
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