Michael Shreier's Asemic Mystery

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Michael Shreier's Asemic Mystery
MIKLOS LEGRADY BLOG
Michael Shreir 01.jpg

Michael Shreier’s asemic art is a brilliant move to advance postmodern concepts into the realm of beauty. Nobel physicist Paul Dirac wrote that when he sees beauty in his equations, he knows he’s on the right track to progress. Shreier’s asemic art asks if the science behind beauty also applies to visual art. And just in time. As a mistaken postmodern trend veers off the path for shock value, Shreier’s reminds us of our deepest values in the mystery of a beautiful unknown. Asemic writing is script that has no given meaning, but as used by Shreier it steers the heart by hints of what it could mean.

Physicists use diagrams and mathematical schemes to clarify intuitive concepts. Written language has a unique property that is rarely taken into account, and that is of freeing the mind without losing one’s thoughts. By writing them down, we remain conscious of them since they’re directly on front of one’s eyes on paper or screen. This leaves the mind free to proceed to further deductions based on what we were thinking while those thoughts remain conscious even as our thinking moves on to the next step. Writing temporarily expands our mindset.

As an artist, Michael Shreier is not a materialist, he’s not concerned as much about the medium, be it photo, paint or digital, typhus he is careful to attain a mastery of skills needed to express complex ideas. For his perspective he’s as much a philosopher, concerned about the mark he makes on the page and equally concerned about the meaning that leaves behind. Because making a mark, drawing a line, implies the next line coming that will cover the first. Life moves forward and change is the only constant. And that attitude comes from being born in postwar Austria. His parents brought him to Canada and wanted him to be a Canadian, they forbade him to speak German, so he lost what he knew of that language, English was the second market that covered the first, as in his recent asemic art.

As a youth he was interested in photography and for his first job in Ottawa applied to a number of government agencies, he was hired by the RCMP to work in the photo lab as there was no opening at the National Gallery, but within a month they called and offered him a summer job. There he met James Borcoman, curator of photography, who became his first mentor. Michael studied at Ryerson then did an MFA in Montreal at Concordia, then started teaching film and photography at Ottawa U. He built a solid career in the Canadian art world, often with radical experiments in photography, such as using large format cameras up to 11”x114”, where he shot not on film but on actual Cibachrome photo paper, producing ready made photograph. Duchamp would have been proud of Michael’s readymades.

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. Asemic means "having no specific semantic content". By freeing words from their meaning, asemic writing allows the imagination free reign, stirs up what may lie deep in the unconscious mind. It brings forth the mystery of a child making it’s first sounds and playing with those sounds and the meanings they can have, something the child learns from the sweet cooing of a mother’s voice, to his own wails when he or she is hungry. Thus we gain knowledge that sounds have meaning, achieve our first non-vernal language. Shreier’s work with asemic writing also tries to recapture the German language he spoke as a young child but was then forced to repress, that mystery always trying to return to consciousness and finding some progress in these asemic images.

This asemic art also studies the vocabulary and syntax of beauty; its role in visual language. Shreier is backed up by a science that says the long expected “death of painting” is also an unrealistic expectation. Images are a visual language; they live alongside literature.

We return to Paul Dirac’s words on finding beauty in his equations is a sign he’s on the right path, something Einstein agreed with, in order to appreciate the beauty in Shreier’s work. For example, a red mark like a letter from Babylon on yellow-beige parchment like surface. Colors properly used are medicine, they make us healthier by making us happier. The mystery of Shreier’s work is the quickening. These images, prompted by a search for lost language like his childhood legacy of German, are also a stirring of the unconscious to awaken future statements such as lie inside all of us. By making it digital Shreier turns traditional methods into 21st century culture