Personal Writing Systems
Invented scripts, pseudo-writing and private alphabets that look like language but resist ordinary reading.
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About
Some artists invent scripts that resemble writing but cannot be read in the usual way. The Argentine painter Xul Solar devised whole languages, among them Neocriollo, a blend of Spanish and Portuguese, and inscribed his paintings with signs of his own from the 1920s onward. Mirtha Dermisache filled books and letters with rhythmic, unreadable marks from the late 1960s, and Irma Blank's Eigenschriften ('self-writings'), begun in the same years, reduce text to the rhythm of lines on a page.
Xu Bing's Book from the Sky (1987–91) is among the most elaborate: he carved about 4,000 false Chinese characters as woodblock type and printed them into bound volumes and hanging scrolls that invite reading and refuse it. In Iran, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi built paintings in the 1960s from letters, numerals and talismanic shapes. Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus (1981) pairs an invented script with an illustrated encyclopaedia of an imaginary world.
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References to Art History
