Schemes Of Assemblage Poem by Denis Mair

(after looking at a group of images by Nico Vassilakis)

Maybe the alphabet makes its readers, instead of the other way around. Nico's grouping in EMPTY MIRROR (Nov.2014) invites all kinds of visual readings and visual-hermeneutic styles. I've been thinking of letters recently as a set of contrastive variations in graphic form, just like phonemes in sound. Being a serially contrastive set, letters keep the habit of analysis subliminally present in the mind of a reader. Analysis was the pre-condition of their existence as forms. But having attained to form, the letters suddenly are available for far-flung visual engagements that explode out and away from the mechanistic feature analysis. The possibility space of visual form serves as a waiting abyss. Complete rejection of mechanistically deployed rule-sets is the rocket fuel. But there is a large mass of material, so styles of assemblage kick in to organize it: nesting accretion and iterative adjustment and scrim-surfing or what have you... and with each manipulation, new masses of material arrive, ready to be organized, even though only part of them can be fully incorporated... The schemes of assemblage are active sites for a time, like explosive aggregations or fountains of surprise, maybe allowed to declare their moment of flowering in a freeze frame, but at some point they will coagulate and subside... and at some point you can imagine the rocket fuel seeping in again... If this were a moralistically defined space, aggregations would be clotted excrescences on the body politic, with little hope of showing elegance like these visual flowerings... these protean constructs which suggest the release of restricted forms into an exploratory zone.