Re-Reading & Re-Viewing Joseph Mosconi

Over at The Volta: a graphic (no really!) review from J. Fossenbell of Joseph Mosconi's Demon Miso/Fashion in Child (Make Now Books, 2014), the book-length poem that also serves as a "game of Mad Libs meets connotative bumper cars."

The review is more than mere playful; it also delves into a conversation Mosconi has had with his partners from the L.A.-based Poetic Research Bureau, Andrew Maxwell and Ara Shirinyan, and references Brian Kim Stefans' take on Mosconi's font largeness, which "represents an interesting crossover from private reading into public viewing on, say, a bus or train, where unsuspecting people could accidentally read the text from across the aisle as you flip or scroll through the pages."

Mosconi himself has said, quotes Fossenbell, that his "books Fright Catalog and Demon Miso/Fashion In Child 'deliberately invoke the legacy of minimalist poetry and text-based visual art of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s” and that he doesn’t think of the books as 'strictly conceptual.'"

Unstrictly:

This particular text could be read as digestible fetish object. The design (by Affect Studio) is the text. There is no excerpt except a screenshot. Quote equals thumbnail. The use of trendy, pop- and ad-friendly colors and the Insaniburger font, are central to the experience. Readers today know what a font signifies almost as instinctively as we know how English® tastes when it’s been jammed through the Google translate machine, or deformed by untranslatable nuances. In fact, Demon Miso/Fashion in Child is a text as much about translation as anything else: from language to language, from plate to alphabet, from word to meme, from color to emotion, from form to sensation. If we can assume that a certain portion of the lines/pages result from bad translations, we have to marvel at just how delightfully wrong things can go when people translate cultural products into a language outside their own system. Suddenly body parts and religious references. Suddenly euphemisms rife with meaning in some pidgin that exists only in between linguistic borders that never actually touch.

I find my verbal brain, too, spending a portion of reading time attempting to translate the evocative colors that pass before my eyes into words: Is that apocalypso drab? Oh, what a lovely shade of mudsucker nigiri. Hm, what is that—bloated whorehouse pox? I almost start to believe Mosconi has coded this naming diversion into the pages themselves. We translate what we eat into nourishment or waste; growth or shit are the natural and only consequences of consumption.

And as for that movement between the private and the public, Fossenbell writes:

So then, is the potential to be accidentally consumed a power move? When we read without meaning to (as when the language of billboards and other ads is forced upon us), who’s in control? [I’m currently reading Demon Miso on my laptop in a café, and I notice a few people standing behind me in line are peering curiously at my screen as I scroll up and down. Whose power is at play here? Whose privacy is being compromised?]

Read "read" read all here. And for kicks, check out the MOVIE they made of Mosconi's other recent book-object, Fright Catalog, below.

Fright Catalog from Mathew Timmons on Vimeo.