Recent performative drawing practices have explored duration as being central to an understanding of the making of drawings. Often pushing duration to exhaustive limits, these artists look at how their bodies can cope with the extremes of drawing conditions. For example Katrina Brown's drawings that are choreographed images resulting from her dance centred preoccupation with movement, or as she puts it, 'Drawing as a durational activity that opens up a time-space'.
Unfolding spine: durational performance drawing score
Duration minimum 30 minutes – 90 minutes or longer
This is how Katrina Brown describes her drawing 'Unfolding spine':
'A performer moves and draws on the ground with her limbs organised around her bowed spinal axis. She works on her knees low to the horizontal surface, breathing and drawing while retreating backwards over the paper sheet. Her eyes resist following the line that she draws whilst still aiming for each line to be parallel to the previous. She co-ordinates breathing line and drawing line – breath follows line and line follows breath including the turn of breath between in and out. As lining and breathing sync in a real-time working, line is breathed and breath is scored. Lines appear and spread over the surface of the paper on either side of an emerging central track and a kind of flat diagram of the body unfolds. Charcoal as a fragile brittle material punctuates the event and continual rhythmic flow of movement.'
Drawing and breathing are closely connected and in some of my posts on drawing and mindfulness this is reflected upon. Breath is central to an understanding of what it is to be alive, our first breath signifies the moment of arrival into this world and our last breath, the moment that we exit it. We are very aware that the rhythm of our breath is an indicator of the relationship between health and ability to control our breathing. The oldest connection I can point you to is the way that blown drawings were made in Palaeolithic times. Charcoal or another pigment like red clay, was crushed into powder and diluted in water. This was then taken up into the mouth and then blown out as a spray, in a very similar way to how spray painting is done today. Each blown breath becoming a directed spray of spittle mixed watery pigment, its image being in effect a frozen breath.
Palaeolithic stencilled hand images using blown pigment
These Palaeolithic images bring two durational issues together. They are of course very old, made approximately 30,000 years ago. They have endured so long that their origins are obscure and their meanings completely open to interpretation, but the very fact that they are so old impresses upon us meanings about what it is to be what we are as a species and it makes us reflect upon what short time spans our lives have. On the other hand these drawings still reveal the freshness of their making. You can see the spray on the wall and connect with the person making these images. In your mind you can 'see' one of your ancestors spitting paint out onto his or her hands. This physical recording of an action can be read as a durational piece very similar to Katrina Brown's drawing, as it records the time taken for a human to interact with some materials in such a way that the activity leaves traces.
Jordan Mckenzie, in his exhibition ‘Drawing Breath’ made the public on entering the exhibition space, place their hands over his heart. They were meant to feel his breath go in and out. He then filled a small plastic bag with his breath, coated it in charcoal and exploded it in order to leave a trace of this breath on the wall for the duration of the exhibition.
The durational aspect of drawing was essential to Robert Morris's 'Blind Time Drawings'. Morris sets out the instructions for making one of his drawings like so:
'‘With eyes closed, graphite on the hands and estimating a lapsed time of 3 minutes, both hands attempt to descend the page with identical touching motions in an effort to keep to an even vertical column of touches."
'‘With eyes closed, graphite on the hands and estimating a lapsed time of 3 minutes, both hands attempt to descend the page with identical touching motions in an effort to keep to an even vertical column of touches."
I have posted on his drawings in much more detail here. Anyone wishing to develop a drawing practice involving duration should look closely at his drawings and then read his instructions, as they are seminal to an understanding of this area of performance drawing. In particular, by removing the drawer's ability to see what they were doing, (most of these drawings were done in total darkness), he was able to reinforce touch as an essential control mechanism in the making of drawings. Time is also very subjective, therefore Morris introduces several ways of thinking about how to measure the duration of actions. For instance by counting. By having a certain number of actions to undertake, the drawing has to be done over an extended amount of time. Also by extension, by having to cover a certain amount of the paper surface, again the drawer is forced to extend the time period in order to achieve the task.
Robert Morris: Blind time XIII 1973
Frank Auerbach
A Frank Auerbach drawing gives us a slightly different insight into drawing and time. This drawing is as much about the long hours of looking at the subject, as about the long hours of making marks and erasing them. The drawing has been erased so many times that it is beginning to fall apart, new sections of paper being added in when the older paper is no longer workable. Just like the Brown and Morris drawings you can see a lot of time has gone into the making of the image, but in this case erasure has covered up previous decisions so it is much harder to ascertain exactly how long this drawing took. But the drawing is also about how to hold on to fleeting perceptions. It is as if Auerbach thinks that if he persists for long enough he will be finally able to capture the un-capturable. Our eyes scan over things, they don't settle on one image, the image we think we see is a product of our mental processing of these fleeting perceptions. Auerbach sets out to see if an image on paper can in effect be arrived at in the same way that our cognitive processes arrive at one. What takes a few thousandths of a second of mental processing is though now taking hour after hour, an exhausting exercise in fruitily, which paradoxically begins to work as it communicates to us about the search for something that is impossible to find. How we as humans deal with this attention to the phenomena of experience is something that many philosophers have engaged with; 'phenomenology' and 'embodied knowledge' being areas of thinking that have made us very aware of how important our physical nature is.
If you are interested in these issues a good start would be to read Merleau-Ponty's essay 'Cezanne's Doubt'.
Cezanne remains central to our understanding of the process of making an image from observation, if only because he was so stubborn and awkward in his nature, and in that particularity of character became a stereotype of the artist struggling to visualise what it is to actually 'see' anything. He is the anti-photographer, the opposite of the quick win and the instigator of 'the hard won image' school. He was the man who dragged out time and embedded it back into his work.
If you are interested in these issues a good start would be to read Merleau-Ponty's essay 'Cezanne's Doubt'.
Cezanne
William Coldstream
William Coldstream taught a certain approach to drawing at the Slade for many years. This method involved searching for points of measurement across the surface and as you did so your search was recorded by a growing grid like structure of points and lines that both contained the image and became part of it. It was as if the clock ticked very slowly, these images feel as if the air was sucked out of the room as the artist held his breath for that moment of exactness. Cezanne's wavering lines becoming converted into something more controlling, more organised and disciplined. I sometimes think of Coldstream's influence as being military like, his drawings and paintings freezing time, as if we could capture it in a tin.
This approach to drawing was at one time heavily criticised. I have reflected on what was called at the time, 'Giron and fesspoint drawing' or post-coldstream drawing when thinking about past approaches to drawing here at Leeds College of Art; it was argued back then that Coldstream forgot to breathe when he drew and that the 'giron and fess point' method allowed for the movement of the body to be reinserted into the process. In this case 'rhythm' being seen as essential to an understanding of time when reading a static image.
When you look at a drawing you see it all at once. (Of course there are huge drawings that are too big for you to do this but most drawings are human sized) The simultaneity of experiencing a drawing is part of the specific nature of it as an art form. Many art forms are durational, like music, dance or theatre, therefore they tend to often have narratives attached to them. However the simultaneity of a drawing's perception privileges experience over narrative. This heightens a particular type of awareness of time. It is also of course why we can walk through an art gallery in 5 minutes, glancing at each image as we pass and like a tourist at the Louvre being happy to simply have 'been there'.
More than one thing is going on at once here and your mind can flit between them. The first is the awareness of one thing being done after another. It is easy to see this if marks are laid on top of each other. You can unpick their order and as you do so, in many ways you are reading the drawing in a similar way to a musician reading a music score. This approach sits theoretically much more easily into the phenomenological or embodied drawing terrain and is closely linked to concepts such as drawings as 'traces' of actions, or recordings of encounters.
However the graphic mark can also be thought about in other ways. As an 'inscription' for instance, whereby it is seen as a type of visual expression of a thought. For example we have all looked at the way handwriting differs and it is very easy to slip into ways of interpreting this as being a reflection of the character of the writer, hence the discipline we now call graphology.
In Schwiedlnd's case it was the angle of handwriting that was the most expressive aspect of the marks made, we have all looked at 'cramped' handwriting and thought that this might reflect something of the character of its maker. This graphic trace when transferred to art making was in French art criticism called 'La Patte' or the artist's signature style. The artist's touch or personal style being something that still resonates through certain corridors of the art world, as the search for the unique individual on which to invest money continues. This aspect of the artist's mark is embedded into the rhythm of an image and it is within this visual rhythm that another type of time is revealed.
This is one linked to our own inner clock, our heartbeat. We intuitively understand the link between physical exertion and our heartbeat. The faster our heart beats the more exertion we have been involved in and therefore as we recognise a fast scribble of a signature as opposed to a carefully and slowly written one, we link into the recognition the excitement associated with fast movement, the flight or flee moment, as opposed to the calmness of contemplation. These changes in awareness are associated with changes in rhythm, the changes in rhythm eventually becoming associated with meanings. It is easy to see how this works in music, a military beat being very different to the rhythm of a dance tune, or the slow beat of a funeral march. But as more refinement is added, such as 'tone' a much more sophisticated set of associations can be constructed. The best example being Christian Schubart's 'Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst'. For example:
B flat major: Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope aspiration for a better world.
B flat minor: A quaint creature, often dressed in the garment of night. It is somewhat surly and very seldom takes on a pleasant countenance. Mocking God and the world; discontented with itself and with everything; preparation for suicide sounds in this key.
B: Strongly coloured, announcing wild passions, composed from the most glaring coulors. Anger, rage, jealousy, fury, despair and every burden of the heart lies in its sphere.
B minor: This is as it were the key of patience, of calm awaiting ones's fate and of submission to divine dispensation.
The communication of excitement via speed of rhythm now being conjoined by mood changes depending on tonality. In a drawing the speed of execution of a mark, being conjoined with other qualities such as changes in pressure, direction, types of materials used etc. will all be used in the reading of 'time'. In this case 'time' no longer being simply to do with awareness of duration but also an awareness of 'feeling tone'. This is also what is read in the simultaneity of experiencing a drawing. In this case we can begin to read a drawing in other ways, one as a type of cardiograph, whereby we can read something about the condition of the maker from the marks and another to do with a more formalist approach.
This is how on one web-site we are told to approach abstract art:
Hanne Darboven's subject matter was often the passage of time. Sometimes she wrote the date over and over again. It's was if she wanted to trap time in the way she used numerals to indicate it. All numerals indicate time in one way or another, from the old childhood game of hide and seek, whereby we count to ten before we start looking, the counting in some way entangling time, so that we don't get to begin looking too quickly, to ideas such as infinity, whereby the implication of a set of numbers is that we could go on generating a sequence for ever.
More than one thing is going on at once here and your mind can flit between them. The first is the awareness of one thing being done after another. It is easy to see this if marks are laid on top of each other. You can unpick their order and as you do so, in many ways you are reading the drawing in a similar way to a musician reading a music score. This approach sits theoretically much more easily into the phenomenological or embodied drawing terrain and is closely linked to concepts such as drawings as 'traces' of actions, or recordings of encounters.
However the graphic mark can also be thought about in other ways. As an 'inscription' for instance, whereby it is seen as a type of visual expression of a thought. For example we have all looked at the way handwriting differs and it is very easy to slip into ways of interpreting this as being a reflection of the character of the writer, hence the discipline we now call graphology.
Eugen Peter Schwiedland: The Graphometer
In Schwiedlnd's case it was the angle of handwriting that was the most expressive aspect of the marks made, we have all looked at 'cramped' handwriting and thought that this might reflect something of the character of its maker. This graphic trace when transferred to art making was in French art criticism called 'La Patte' or the artist's signature style. The artist's touch or personal style being something that still resonates through certain corridors of the art world, as the search for the unique individual on which to invest money continues. This aspect of the artist's mark is embedded into the rhythm of an image and it is within this visual rhythm that another type of time is revealed.
This is one linked to our own inner clock, our heartbeat. We intuitively understand the link between physical exertion and our heartbeat. The faster our heart beats the more exertion we have been involved in and therefore as we recognise a fast scribble of a signature as opposed to a carefully and slowly written one, we link into the recognition the excitement associated with fast movement, the flight or flee moment, as opposed to the calmness of contemplation. These changes in awareness are associated with changes in rhythm, the changes in rhythm eventually becoming associated with meanings. It is easy to see how this works in music, a military beat being very different to the rhythm of a dance tune, or the slow beat of a funeral march. But as more refinement is added, such as 'tone' a much more sophisticated set of associations can be constructed. The best example being Christian Schubart's 'Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst'. For example:
B flat major: Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope aspiration for a better world.
B flat minor: A quaint creature, often dressed in the garment of night. It is somewhat surly and very seldom takes on a pleasant countenance. Mocking God and the world; discontented with itself and with everything; preparation for suicide sounds in this key.
B: Strongly coloured, announcing wild passions, composed from the most glaring coulors. Anger, rage, jealousy, fury, despair and every burden of the heart lies in its sphere.
B minor: This is as it were the key of patience, of calm awaiting ones's fate and of submission to divine dispensation.
Mark Toby
'Rather than trying to figure out what the painting looks like, just allow yourself to be taken in by the painting. See what emotions, sensations or memories emerge. Let your eyes relax and travel around the piece without expectation. Examine the colors, forms, materials, surface, and how they interact with each other. Take your time. Let the painting "speak" to you.
Notice how the various elements like shape, color and form affect you. An intricately detailed, vibrant painting will affect you differently than a calm, cool Malevich.' The writer believes that an abstract painting is something that will 'speak to you', emotions and sensations will also emerge alongside memories. This points to a different experience of time, one about getting lost in looking at the painting. You are meant to travel around the image, follow the movements indicated by form and shape, as if you are moving around some sort of map. You are asked to enter the image as if it was some sort of window through which you could travel in order to begin exploring new unfamiliar landscapes. A fascinating idea and one that would have appalled Clement Greenberg, who argued that one of the values of abstract painting was that it removed the tendency of people to regard paintings as 'windows onto the world'. I suspect what we are looking at here is the time of the daydream or of the reverie, a time where we are not being pressured to make immediate actions. But what happens to time in a photorealist drawing as there are no clues as to how it is made? A conceptual puzzle as to 'how was it done?', fills the mental space where we would normally be looking for a way into a thoughtful recreation of the image by following traces of the artist's hand.
John Baeder White Tower 1974 Graphite
A photorealist drawing or painting like the one above is in fact a very conceptual work. First of all you have to know that the image is made from a photograph. If you think about it, it is pretty obvious that it is, but some people are fooled by appearances and think that it could be possible to create an image like this directly from nature. What they have done is begun to think that we see like a photographic image, because most of the images reproduced in our society are from photographs. Our probing eyes are constantly looking for information, so everything is moving in and out of focus, but there is a certain link between how we see and how images like this are made. A common method of developing a photorealist image was using a grid placed over the image to be copied and another one over the paper or canvas on which the image was to be reproduced. This allowed for the artist to focus on the details of tonal or colour change, without getting distracted by what it was that they were actually drawing. This in may ways brought the world back into a pre-linguistic state, a state whereby we see changes in tonality or colour rather than dogs, cats, trees, humans or other things. We had to be taught how to recognise objects out of the flux of experience and the techniques of gridding and turning the image upside down, often used by photorealist artists are to ensure that no trace of 'knowledge' enters the image. Because of this I find this sort of image outside time, or 'timeless', it's 'experience' is restricted to copying the surface of an already existing image, therefore the experience is very 'thin' and the image often finds itself being a place where our restless minds can fill its emptiness with narrative meaning. For instance think about how easily we invent a narrative to explain what we think is going on in old photographs.
Some of Terry Hammill's drawings of 'Klocks'
The clock can itself become a subject. In Terry Hammill's drawings time division extends on past the circular clock face and becomes a regular rhythmic divide that suggests that clocks, (Klocks) tick away in alternative formats as they enter the logic of two dimensional space. Like the shapes in Abbot's 'Flatland', these 'klocks' live rich lives dependent on an internal logic that makes perfect sense to a flatlander, but perhaps not to a fifth dimensional time traveller.
Hanne Darboven's subject matter was often the passage of time. Sometimes she wrote the date over and over again. It's was if she wanted to trap time in the way she used numerals to indicate it. All numerals indicate time in one way or another, from the old childhood game of hide and seek, whereby we count to ten before we start looking, the counting in some way entangling time, so that we don't get to begin looking too quickly, to ideas such as infinity, whereby the implication of a set of numbers is that we could go on generating a sequence for ever.
Hanne Darboven
I sometimes think of Hanne Darboven's drawings as 'time traps'. You can get stuck in the intricacies of her numerical thinking, especially in her tendency to valorise repetition. Like alien calendars her images appear to make sense but the longer you work with them the more you realise her logic is not as easy to follow as you might think. The time spent trying to understand her drawings being an integral part of the experience.
Most of the recent exhibitions I have seen whereby drawing and time have been interlocked have been performative, therefore I'll leave you with a performance drawing.
Most of the recent exhibitions I have seen whereby drawing and time have been interlocked have been performative, therefore I'll leave you with a performance drawing.
Am Rand: drawing performance by Jaanika Peerna in Berlin
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