employ chance operations and deterministic methods, motivated by the “illusion” that they were nonegoic.18 The Drawing-Asymmetries of 1960 and 1961, also composed according to reading-through methods, figure words “immediately lettered very freely and impulsively” on the page. Mac Low attested that “[i]n many cases the letters of the words are so placed that they are difficult or impossible to read—as words or even as letters.”19 In Drawing-Asymmetry #15 (1961) the phrase “Directions in a cool, dry place,” curving multidirectionally across the page, can be clearly read [PL. 23], and in Drawing-Asymmetry #2 (1961) the words “Clothes Internal Revenue Service” appear snaking through the white ground. Yet Drawing-Asymmetry #12 (1961) presents thick black gestures crossing through one another, such that it feels almost like an act of interpretation to call them letters [PL. 22]. Mac Low specifies that these works often cannot be traced back to their “index word”—the root of their acrostic progression—because, in many cases, this original word is spelled out across multiple drawings. The nonintentional operation itself is therefore doubly obscured by the physicality of the drawings. In contrast to the poetic Asymmetries, where the seed string moves clearly through the writing and performance of the piece, in the Drawing-Asymmetries, the threshold of legibility is continually breached and folded in on itself, casting meaning into question. In an essay from 1986, Mac Low posed an active stance on reading as a form of performance: “Why did I begin at that time [in December 1954] to view performance as central and texts as primarily notations for performance (if only by a silent reader)?”20 Inseparable from the notion of reading as a productive activity, the scope of the concept of performance extends, for Mac Low, from the deepest point of subjective interiority to the most social level of exteriority. While this would seem to suggest that the performability of a piece depends
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Thing of Beauty, xix. Importantly, Mac Low emphasizes that he never renounced any of his early work as his poetics developed over the course of his life. Jackson Mac Low, “A Note on the Drawing-Asymmetries,” in Thing of Beauty, 102. Written on May 18, 1985 in Verona. Representative Works, xvi.