CASCADE by Tim Gaze, Hesterglock Press 2022

How poetry looks on the page matters. Conventionally, line and verse breaks indicate form, rhythm, and, perhaps, rhyme pattern. And then we have visual clues for phrasing: commas, parentheses, full stops and other punctuation marks that attempt to signpost at least some of the cadences of speech. Typography also matters, not just for ease of reading and layout on the page, but also for indicating emphasis via italics or bold or ALL CAPS.

By the late 19th Century, new generations of poets, such as Stéphane Mallarmé with his Un Coup de Dés (A Throw of the Dice,1897¹), began to take advantage of improved printing technology to dramatically alter the way text looks on the page. In the early 20th Century, the DADA poets in particular used print and collage techniques to radically extend the ways in text could look on the page. Indeed, in some of these works, the arrangement of text on page took pre-eminence over the spoken word, as the DADAists pushed past the limits of intelligibility and speech alike (eg Hugo Ball’s KARAWANE, 1917²; Kurt Schwitters’ Ur Sonata, 1922-1932³). Meanwhile, visual artists such as Cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began using text elements in their paintings and collages.

Jump forward to the 1950s and what is now generally known as concrete poetry had emerged in various locations around the world⁴. Depending on one’s definition and affiliation, concrete poetry also includes visual poetry⁵ and typewriter art⁶. The key feature of this broad and eclectic genre is that the visual layout of text takes precedence over formal grammar, syntax, and sometimes, even conventional spelling. Words may morph from one to another. Text may form patterns that reinforce or contradict its intrinsic meaning. Puns and ambiguities, both visual and textual, may evoke humour or surprise. Messages may be obvious or may emerge only after careful consideration.

Alongside the emergence of concrete poetry, stylised visual text became more prominent in two other domains that increasingly fed off each other during the 1960s: POP Art and advertising, especially on television, where animation provided an added time-based dimension to text. Now it is commonplace for visual art works to incorporate text in all manner of ways. And in screen-based modern advertising, text morphs with imagery and messages in ways that would have stunned the pioneers of the 20th Century.

But what happens when the visual qualities of text become totally dissociated from any pre-learned way of reading? What can we infer from a script that has no recognisable form? And what should we make of the intent of an author/artist who deliberately creates marks structurally akin to writing but with no discernible underlying meaning? How can unintelligibility be construed as a positive feature of a piece of visually displayed text?

This is the domain of asemic writing. Coined by Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze around 1997, asemic is literally writing “without semantic content; lacking meaning⁷“. Indeed, patients with the medical condition, asemia, are unable to understand or express signs or symbols⁸.

Just because we cannot understand a script, it does not mean it is without meaning. It may use an alphabet we are familiar with, but arranged in a way to communicate a language we do not know. A script may use a completely different set of characters and layouts compared to what we (readers of English) are used to, such Arabic or Chinese. Yet these are not without meaning. And within both those cultures, as in many others, there are centuries-long calligraphic traditions that embellish, reduce or otherwise visually stylise text on the page.

In 2013, Tim Gaze and Michael Jacobson edited An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting⁹ which remains one of the most eclectic collections of asemic writing, bridging a diverse range of styles and cultures. In 2022, Tim Gaze published a collection of his own asemic work CASCADE. It contains 57 pieces by Gaze that were published or exhibited between 1999 and 2022. In addition there are two collaborative remix works and one by Su Mwamba.

As befits the decades-long practice by Gaze, the style of the works in CASCADE varies immensely. All are in monochrome, mostly high-contrast black on white. Some nearly fill the page, whilst others interact to varying degrees with fields of white space. Many of the pieces allude, at least at some formal level, to other modes of visual poetry. For example, #10, a series of overlays of typographical elements from different languages, and #41, a series of crosses variously distorted and overlaid, bring to mind typewriter art. Others, eg #18 and #29, contain strangely morphed non-alphabetic print characters and icons reminiscent of workplace warning signs or, as in #37, an abstracted scientific graphical code. While these pieces employ what appear to be machine-generated print elements, others, such as #46 and #49, apparently rely on the flourishes of the human hand, albeit perhaps via a digital implementation.

Whilst many pieces, in the absence of any obvious textual content, rely heavily on their visual impact, some intrigue by hinting at possibly alternative ways of reading. So #1 and #53, for example, remind me of sonograms (visual plots of sound frequency, amplitude and duration) that could be reverse engineered to generate an audio interpretation of the image. In some cases, such as #54, the process of text distortion is obvious in the final product, with recognisable traces of typography amongst the mix. Moreover, #30 has clearly legible text.

The over-riding impression of this collection of work is that they look really good on the page. They generally follow more or less clean modern design principles that draw the viewer in to invite further scrutiny. What elements are making up this image? Where do they come from? What do I recognise? Is it possible that there is some meaning embedded in there? Perhaps #30 with its overt text is a clue that messages can indeed exist in the midst of asemia. Modern neuroscience tells us that our brain is continuously searching for and creating meaning out of our lived experience. Regardless of the intent of a ground-breaking and masterful practitioner such as Tim Gaze, we cannot help but add our own meaning to his work. If that search makes us look again and again and wonder why, then his work is a success.

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1. Collected Poems: A bilingual edition by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated with commentary by Henry Weinfield. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994. ↩︎
2. The DADA Almanac edited by Richard Huelsenbeck, Berlin 1920, English edition presented by Malcolm Green, Atlas Press, London 1993. ↩︎
3. pppppp: poems performances pieces proses plays poetics by Kurt Schwitters, edited and translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. Exact Change, Cambridge, 2002. ↩︎
4. An Anthology of Concrete Poetry edited by Emmett Williams. Something Else Press, West Glover 1967 / Primary Information, New York 2013. ↩︎
5. The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 edited by Craig Hill and Nico Vassilakis. Fantagraphics Books, Seattle 2012. ↩︎
6. Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology edited by Barrie Tullett. Laurence King Publishing, London 2014. ↩︎
7. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asemic ↩︎
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemia ↩︎
9. An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting edited by Tim Gaze and Michael Jacobson. Uitgeverij / Punctum Books, New York 2013. ↩︎

– Ian Gibbins

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CASCADE by Tim Gaze is available from https://hesterglock.org/cascade-tim-gaze

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