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The glyphic and pictorial
works in Michael Basinski's
"UAT-UR" ask one to see the time of writing and read the space of images.
Hand-drawn signs in three primary colors and in a variety of scripts, alphabetic
and otherwise, move the written mark into a layered space that is at the
same time evidence of inscription's time / time's inscription. The hand
puts down the red marker and then picks up the yellow, or so one is given
to think. As with any such archaeology, the abiding sense is one of depth
— here the lamination of discrete time-streams into a contiguous space
allows writing amplitude in three dimensions. This deep space, however,
will not align with the contours of the pictorialism which is the other
compositional center of the work. The perspectives generated by the found
anatomical and botanical drawings on which Basinski's text is marked are
not those present in the color-strata of the script. Any three dimensions
in this work will always be inflected by the partially articulated presence
of another. The form of reading is thus a twist or kink in legible and
visible spacetime. At a different level of scale, magic twists into epistemology,
icon into letter, picture into poem. Of course, facing its difficult arrangements
of perceptual geometry with such terms as supports, one still hardly begins
to account for the basic and stunning beauty of this work . . .
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