Drawing and isolation

Carlo Giambarresi

We are all being forced to spend a large amount of time isolated from each other and this means that all activities, not just art and drawing are being seen in a different light and there is an undercurrent of debate as to whether or not things will ever return to 'normal'.  However this situation isn't new and it has been coming, almost inevitably for a while. Therefore it seems an appropriate moment to both contextualise the situation and to provide some links to places where as students you can get help to think about the on-line presentation or archival of your work, as well as links to sites that can help you with on line software tutorials and interesting art. 

During the early 1980s New York was a thriving centre for culture, it had a large number of artists and other creatives that had been attracted to the city because of the policies of Ed Koch the then mayor, who used a combination of arts grants and low rents to attract artists to a then crumbling inner city with a large amount of vacant buildings. The cultural mix was eclectic and exciting and many of the iconic artists we now see as seminal (Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring) emerged from the city of New York during this time. However then AIDS emerged and as it did it changed the way that people thought about creativity and human relationships. Close sexual contact, first of all between same sex partners, (it was quickly realised this wasn't a 'gay plague' as the media would have liked to call it), and then simply between people, became fraught with worry and the idea of social distancing came into being, especially because at the same time the use of mobile phones was rising and so was the use of the internet, which meant there was an alternative technological space to mentally live in. In 1984, William Gibson uses the term 'cyberspace' for the first time in his science fiction novel Neuromancer, a book that set out an idea of a future whereby humans would interact more with technology than other humans.  For the first time in human history a plague had coincided with a way of isolating that still allowed people to carry on with their lives. But we have had to live with the consequences. As Franco Berardi put it, "AIDS was mainly a psycho-media epidemic. It was based on the communication of a retro virus, but it resulted in the communication of fear." (2018, p. 71) 
See: Berardi, F (2018) Breathing South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)

Mark Lombardi

If there was any one artist that I would suggest exemplifies the issues arising at the time, I would suggest it would be Mark Lombardi. Lombardi's drawings were of relationships, relationships that illustrated the connections that people in power had and how their networks made things happen. Power, privilege and money were seen to be the result of often hidden relationships and Lombardi's images demonstrated the strange diagrammatic beauty of these things, with drawings that at times could look like forms of cellular life. Although he began making his diagrams in the late 1980s Lombardi didn't become well known for this type of work until the mid 1990s, but essentially his work is rooted in 1980s political culture. If there is a historical precedent for Lombardi's work it is probably Hans Haacke's, 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971', which traces the New York properties of a single slumlord through charts, maps and photographs. What both these types of work have in common is the fact that the real messy lives of people are no longer central to the work, what the artist does is stand back and reveal the systems that destroy or shape people's lives, rather than the emotional messiness of lives themselves. Physical contact between humans was beginning to become inessential. 

Hans Haacke

Theoretically if you were to look back in history for a book that began to lay out the arguments in relation to human beings and technology it would have to be Lewis Mumford's 'Technics and Civilisation' first published in 1934. (Mumford, L. (2010) Technics and Civilisation Chicago: University of Chicago Press) The book looks at the history of technology and its role in shaping and being shaped by civilisation. He argues that it is in the moral, economic, and political choices we make, not the technology we use, that we shape our destinies. So what choices will we make as to how we want society to develop after we come out of enforced isolation? As artists we will have to engage with these questions and as educators those of us with teaching roles will have to ensure that the implications of choices made are both understood and clarified. These are interesting times indeed. 

So what resources should you be looking at in order to temporarily present work using online resources? 
My old friend Terry Hammill sent me a link to an online drawing exhibition recently and it reminded me that we will all need to be able to show work online in future. Philippa Nikulinsky is an interesting artist that takes one category of art, the depiction of nature, and by developing the implications of format begins to transcend the category and make work that stands on its own as 'art'. However I don't want to get into the old is it art or illustration debate, as far as I'm concerned it just comes down to 'is it interesting or not' and in this case I'm interested. In particular its interesting how this work sits within an online gallery. You can look at Nikulinsky's work here and the website has a virtual gallery walk through to try. Compare the way the work looks with the Subsidiary Projects online Gallery. I have tried to use 360 degree camera technology myself as a way to show drawings, mainly because my drawings tend to include too much detail for single on screen images to work, but I never quite resolved it. Anyway thanks to Adam who took the images and developed the process of knitting the images together, without him I would never have started the process. You can get an idea of where we got to by clicking on the two links below.

Garry Barker 360 degree exhibition 
Garry Barker 360 degree studio drawing 


However if you just want to draw up a more convincing space within which to exhibit artwork, for instance if wanting to demonstrate where paintings might be hung in an exhibition, you could use SketchUp to model the space or use an on line gallery template.

From this week I begin doing on line tutorials and we will be using Google Hangouts. I'm sure things will be fine but as its the first time I've used the technology I'm a little worried, especially because my bandwidth here is not very good and when I tried before I managed to get a lot of frozen faces on small screens and very occasional voices emerging from a very slow time delay, I might as well have been using a telegraph system. 

However new resources are becoming available, try this new blog https://laufineart.wordpress.com/

and here are more links to online information for students

On line resources 

Personally I like to see what's going on in the art world by looking at Art 21

For those of you thinking about how to put portfolios together for assessment you will be getting e mails about changes from your heads of years. 

For those of you getting stressed try some of the techniques suggested in the 5 blog posts on Drawing and Mindfulness  

See also:

Drawing as exhibition proposals

Exhibitions on line