Desemiotize
January 4th, 2007Kaveri has been visiting for the past couple of weeks. For those of you who have not been keeping track of my girlfriend of seven years, she’s in her last year of graduate school at RISD.
We were invited yesterday to the studio of one of her teachers, a very terrific guy.
He used the word desemiotize. I had never heard the word but I now plan to use it regularly. It may be borrowed from the French by way of Deleuze. I love desemiotize. I’m not sure exactly what it means. My guess is that it means the act of “de-signing”—removing the signifying function from an image or object. So, for instance, Jasper John’s Cézanne-esque brushwork was an attempt to “desemiotize” the American Flag. Something like that.
This teacher had been “desemiotizing” stuffed animals by covering them with a sculpting compound.
January 4th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
You’ve desemiotized your blog by not writing…. and covering it with a sculpting compound.
January 5th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
I desemiotized my underpant by straight-up taking a dump in them. I don’t repect underpants the way others do. Let that be a lesson to my underpants.
January 6th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Hey Mitch,
On an unrelated note, did you see the little review of the new Lisa Owens show in the NYer this week. Yoiks, what a hatchet job. Felt to me like maybe Scheldahl wrote it. In any event, whoever wrote it actually used the word inisipid. Curious to get your thoughts.