I recall quite well this period of experimentation which I passed through in a
special way, thanks to a personal creative method: "doubts," "partial certainties,"
"perplexities," "disenchantments," "discoveries," "assurances;" in
summary all those states of mind defined by an outmoded vocabulary and run
over in a quick new way now come to mind.
I had been wondering how a letter could be just as beautiful as a figurative
or non-figurative object in art, and how a work composed of Roman letters
could touch or even overwhelm an ordinary viewer as much as the mass of
works based on real "things" or qualities conventionally accepted in the minds
of the refined.
For months at the beginning my whole concrete system consisted of the
most banal alphabetic writing. This could naturally be raised up easily in
theory - as was the case later with my first manifesto - by deep, provocative
considerations or by metaphors, but in practice it was nevertheless limited to
being a printer'S specimen book or just pages filled with words - bound together
by some theme, critical or poetic or whatever, which ignored my artistic
efto rt.
No concern for the composition of the line of vowels and consonants, no
care for the arrangement of sentences on the page, and naturally no interest in
color - an easy and underhanded secondary value in my definition of painting
- were present to disrupt my limited task as scribe, my arid research on the
emotive powers of letters, pure letters, letters ripped out of all context, unimproved
by extrinsic values .
For a certain period of time the only innovation came from my poetry, because
instead of transcribing word-texts, I copied phonetic verses, which allowed
me to put my arrangement in the middle of the page instead of filling up
the whole page, isolating certain phonemes or clusters of phonemes according
to the oral impulse, then adding some new signs from the Greek alphabet
or my imagination, which corresponded to sounds that did not exist in the
Roman alphabet.
Naturally when I exhibited these pages and called them "works of art" alii
got was disdainful or knowing smiles, as if I had pulled off a good joke. Not
only in Bucharest, but even in Paris the defenders of "figurative" and "abstract"
modern art always assured me that these creations "were not paintings."
...
Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic,
lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on
sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible
and escapes oral labelling ....
Even from my first metagraphic efforts - because examples can be found in
The Diaries of the Gods and then more conclusively in the self-portrait and
painted photos of Amos - I had noticed that when held up among former
"objective" or "non-objective" forms my original form was stronger, since it
assimilates all the others.
Experiments on "the test of forms" demonstrate that the particles of the
Letterist domain are stronger and more important than the particles of the
figurative and non-figurative domains.
If one places an abstract composition - which is simply a fragmentary
purification of the former object - in (or alongside) a figurative structure, this
second composition digests the first one - transformed into a decorative
motif - and then the whole work becomes figurative. However if one places a
letterist notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one which assimilates
the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or
super-writing.
Pursuing the experiments on the "test of the force of elements" one can
affirm that "a little bit," or "a few drops" of figuration placed anywhere on a
canvas can transform an entire abstract mass into a figurative work and that a
little bit," or "a few drops" of Letterism placed anywhere on any canvas
metamorphose a whole figurative or abstract composition into a Letterist work.
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