Patrick Durgin Unlocks Mirtha Dermisache's Diarios at Jacket 2

It's always a welcome surprise to learn the name of another artist whose written work demands both visual literacy and reading comprehension. Mirtha Dermisache (1927-2012) was an Argentinian artist who wrote her first book in 1967: a 500-page epic without a single word. Patrick Durgin's reading report, recently published at Jacket 2 considers the importance of her art work:

The Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache (1940-2012) wrote her first book in 1967, 500 pages in length and not a single word. “I started writing,” she said in a 2011 interview, “and the result was something unreadable.” This sounds to me overly modest. Her skill is for distracting the onlooker’s impulse to read.

Standing or sitting (the difference matters, as we shall see) before her work, from a certain distance, one would swear they are looking at a text, possibly a page of a newspaper. Pay anything like close attention and you see it is neither print nor script, but free strokes, a sort of drawing that imitates a “communication format” and exhaustively limns alphabetic templates. Carefully and incongruously, this tendency toward letterforms leads away from communicable data; “the act of writing,” she claims, is what “provides the unstable dimension. Maybe it’s like saying that for me the liberation of the sign takes place within culture and history, and not on their margins.” Dermisache’s work is, on this point, easily distinguishable from asemic writing that bears surface similarities, like the “stylizations” of Mallarme’s Un Coup de dés by Ernest Fraenkel (which diagram typographic space by a drawing-through method) or the “Martian” texts by Hélène Smith (dictated in seance, forming characters that comprise, on the advice of Saussure himself, an otherwise alien linguistic system, when not lapsing entirely back into French). I wouldn’t call Dermisache neo-Taschist, either. The gestural strokes of Henri Michaux and Andre Masson rely on a sort of hermit’s paradox: when free marks refers to a norm they in impute in turn. The negative capability of the ideogram or hieroglyph wasn’t just a Poundian conceit. Dermisache’s work is a literary practice, or at least it is for the literate, at the center of a reader’s experience, not on the peripheries or “margins.” It’s the historicity of experience that matters.

“I started writing…” But how can this be? The effect of a Diario, for example, is to trompe l’oiel (see Martha Wilson's contribution to MOMA's "reading list"). What you perceive to be the raw materials of writing batched into columns and other “documental structures” reveals itself to be illustrative, a stupefying proliferation of pure signifiers. The raw materials of illustration are used as exposition, but what is exposed is rather a place for linguistic reference. Nothing (else) is referred to by it. Her writing is illocutionary: it does the deed. [...]

Learn more at Jacket 2.