Dame Elizabeth Blackadder has died. She was one of those very underrated artists that simply do things very well. Blackadder's work celebrated her love of flowers, cats and everyday things, as well as investigating the way forms could pattern their way across a surface. She was a very sensitive user of watercolour, allowing it to be what it needed to be, whilst at the same time being able to pick out the salient details and particular aspects of plant life, that would ensure that whatever she was recreating still retained a life of its own.
Elizabeth Blackadder
As an artist she would not talk about why she did the things she did other than to say she liked stuff, but if you follow her work you can see that she has a sharp visual intelligence that enables her to make compositional images appear as if they are simply 'there' or 'right'. Composition was her forte, and she loved the work of Piero Della Francesca, somehow translating his mathematical grasp of composition into a much more informal methodology, one that totally suited her everyday subject matter.
I shall miss her, even in the days when I was making purely conceptual pieces, I remember seeing her work and gazing at it in relief, it didn't need anything to be taken on board to be understood beyond, 'I looked at this and it was wonderful'.
I'm often asked questions about artist's research. What is it? Why is it important? How do you do it? I suppose the answers to these questions are many and varied but when you see it in practice then you begin to understand it. For myself a variety of approaches to research are important, I can then bring them together in such a way that the process of an artefact's construction emerges from the various aspects of the research activity, without being compromised by the research itself. I need to do this to avoid the work becoming sterile or a series of moves in a logical sequence, rather than a process which is for myself more like sympathetic magic. What is important to me is that research prepares the ground for a moment of poetry, that sudden something that seems to arrive out of nowhere after a period of gestation, when ideas begin to flow out of the air and the materials of making.
Research can consist of several different approaches and aspects and it doesn't necessarily have to all be undertaken at once. In fact sometimes an old interest that at the time led nowhere, re-emerges, so never worry about an interest not leading directly to ideas, sometimes the unconscious has to take information on a journey before its ready for use.
In support of my own work, a couple of weeks ago the implications for two dimensional material metamorphosis and transformation were being explored. In particular I was looking at the way that watercolour type washes could be made, exploring how their granularity could be changed by adding various substances into the mix. As I did this I was also exploring the way that different paper surfaces buckle and warp as they were wetted, so that the liquids and their granular deposits I was making could be seen at their most effective. I was also finding metaphoric relationships between landscape and bodies. The flow of liquids being at one time suggestive of rivers and streams and at another time suggestive of blood flow or the scum of dirty water left on a body as it emerged from a dirty pool of water. I was also thinking of the body as a type of amoeba or jellyfish, therefore some of the research involved looking at how these creatures look and how they thrive in liquid environments. I was also reading geological texts, looking at microscopic views of tiny creatures, as well as manipulating fluids and drawing shapes and forms that were suggested by the intermingling of all the information coming in. In particular I was beginning to look at edges between forms and how they could be suggestive of permeability, this included drawing lines of various types of dots and dashes, as well as using felt tip pens to draw edges and then wetting one side, so that the 'bleed' could be explored and used as a way of suggesting diffusion of one form into another.
Because of the implications of what I was doing, I began thinking more about inner body sensations and so last week I was doing a lot of reading about interoception and how scientists are now thinking about consciousness. In order to assimilate this new information I had to write about it and begin to draw simple diagrams, which help me 'own' or assimilate something that can eventually be integrated into a growing image base. I'm also thinking more about the political consequences of 'sustainability' and as I do so, I become more aware that sustainability is not just about the physical environment, it is about how we treat each other as human beings. Therefore I've found it important to look at how other more clearly political artists have dealt with this issue. (I think what's important here is that when I begin to look at and research other artists it is rarely because I think their work 'looks like' mine, it is usually because an approach or underlying philosophy is of interest).
I decided to look back at an artist that I have posted about before; Kara Walker, but this time to look at her work in more depth, in particular by exploring the gestation of one of her works, 'Katastwóf Karavan'.
Perhaps the most important thing about Kara Walker's approach for myself was that she has a long history of practice and 'owns' a body of work that is clearly recognisable as hers. So how does she continue to open out her approach and add new things?
The 'Katastwóf Karavan' body of work began with Walker hearing a sound and being inquisitive about it. This was for me the most important thing, this piece had its initial gestation by her simply listening and asking, "what was that?" This is where research often needs to begin, somewhere unexpected and sensed as something magical or that evokes a sense of wonder. I suppose it is also about spotting potential, that sound of a steam driven organ/whistle is very evocative of old steam driven river boats and she was experienced enough to realise that it could be used as a focal point. However she then had to do the 'grunt' work. She had to academically find out about the history of these things and then to locate people who could 'realise' her idea of reconstructing a steam organ that could play the sounds she wanted. But without that initial moment of intuition, the journey wouldn't have been so interesting and wouldn't have tapped into what were for Walker new territories of sound exploration.
The construction of the wagon also of course demanded research but of a more straightforward kind and her long history of image making allowing her to tap into a strong existing image bank, but she would still have to test the figures out as to their ability to structurally work in relation to the shape of the wagon.
Finally there is research in relation to the siting of the work. What has happened there, what associations does it have with history and how is it used now? Also she would need to research how its arrival would effect the site. How would people be able to see it/ hear it? How far would a sound travel, how safe would it be?
The final form of a steam-powered calliope housed in a parade wagon, was installed and activated outside the Whitney Museum of American Art for a one-day-only presentation. Walker had collaborated with Jason Moran on the playing and composition of sounds on the steam powered calliope. Her choice of collaboration with a musician would also have involved research and she would no doubt have been aware of Moran's work for some time as he is a well known musician and he had worked with artists before. His 'Artist in Residence' release included a number of selections taken from different works commissioned by art museums, such as "Milestone" a reflection on a visual work by Adrian Piper and "The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things" which was incorporated into an art installation by Joan Jonas.
The custom-fabricated calliope was programmed by Walker with a compilation of jazz, gospel, and songs that represented Black protest and celebration. During the activation, the calliope played at set times throughout the afternoon, whilst Moran himself played the calliope live at six o'clock in the evening.
Calliopes are associated with nineteenth-century New Orleans riverboats and their construction evolved from the technologies of the steam engine and other Industrial Revolution-era inventions such as the cotton gin, the work’s layered references revealing connections between the history of the area's cultural landscape and slavery in the American South. Algiers Point, where the work was presented, was a former holding site where enslaved Africans were abused and quarantined before transportation to slave markets across the river. The more Walker found out about these things the more the siting of the work was confirmed. Titled to incorporate the Haitian Creole word that in English translates to “catastrophe,” Walker's Katastwóf Karavan weaves together text, image and sound, Walker and Moran stating that the “music is a bearer of our emotional history.” Walker would have had to research Mississippi river boats, the history of slave trading, as well as the types of wagons that would evoke the time period referred to. Each aspect of the research has to somehow be capable of proper focus and then eventually all being capable of being brought back together into some sort of coherent and also poetic whole.
The constant changing of focus as you research is an important issue, as this very process ensures that a degree of serendipity enters into the situation, i.e. this 'browsing' around feeds thoughts without necessarily detailing how they can be finally realised. Scientists work in a similar way, and I have pointed out before (here) how Bruno Latour's detailed examination of a process of soil analysis in his book ‘Pandora’s Hope’ helped me understand how thoughts can be generated about possible ideas and forms that connect or link or illustrate different aspects of my own research, without feeling that I have to prove how my thinking links up. Each bit of research I do can be seen as autonomous and something I can focus on until I’m satisfied I have found something interesting. I'm also very aware that my idea of research is also not at all like the idea of research as recommended by academic research theorists. I don't begin by setting out my methodology, I don't define a research question, I don't conduct any quantitative or statistical analysis, I just do stuff and follow my intuition, but I still see this as 'research', an activity that feeds the soil out of which things grow.
However research as an experience is different to the artwork as an experience. Of course you can make an artwork that is all about the process of research, but the bigger issue is for myself the fact that worldly experience is so much bigger than the tiny amount that I can grasp with my limited perceptual tools. But I can intuit the bigger picture and it can be in looking for ways of bringing together these bits of research that I get a glimpse of something else; that something else you could call a sense of magical order or enchantment. Put something together in one way and it can look ok but just that, the same elements put together in another way can surprise and give a sense of wonder to something that was previously hardly noticed. You can fertilise the soil to promote plant growth, but if you don't water growing seedlings they will fail to flourish.
This small drawing by Linnaeus, the father of plant classification, is a wonderful example of hybrid thinking. The text reads, "Andromeda, Fiction that is true, Mysticism that is genuine, Forms that are depicted". Linnaeus in his drawing echoes my own thoughts, between a wanting to understand, a longing for enchantment and a need to just experience wonder as I walk through the woods and draw. He also, I hope, speaks across the centuries to all of us, at least those of us that daydream. My recent post on Gerard E Cheshire and his translations of old biological manuscripts, hopefully highlighted a particular way of thinking that I believe we should be revisiting, especially if we are to re-discover ourselves and our relation to the world.
My wife likes to swim in wild places, something she started to do once swimming baths were closed due to covid. She was swimming the other day and an empty vodka bottle landed very close to her. It had been hurled into the water from a small party of people who had decided that the lakeside was just right for a get together. She shouted at them to be careful and to not treat the place with such disrespect, but they simply denied that they had thrown it. When I walk down my street I see the same disrespect, people have too much stuff and they dump it, I have even seen plastic cartons of half-eaten takeaway food thrown out of car windows as people drive past. Something has been broken, the connection between doing things and their consequences has shattered and it needs mending. Old belief systems no longer seem to work in our society and we need to develop a willingness to change a culture of consumption, waste, and an everyday acceptance of environmental degradation. There was a very interesting article in the April 2011 issue of 'Anthropology Now' about the culture of repair that had grown up in Cuba after the revolution; 'Recycling History and the Never-Ending Life of Cuban Things' by Sarah Hill. After many years of trade blockades Cuban people had become adept in the repair and recycling of all sorts of products, the socialist regime they have lived under for many years, being a tiny beacon of light for those who never really believed in the triumph of capitalism. This repair culture is for me about caring. It might be enforced because the endless supply of goods was cut off by the trade embargo, but by having to return and look again at something when it is broken, people were forced to see new potential or a future for things that we would just throw away. In this case working objects become more like events that have relationships with us, relationships that mean we treat them more like old friends and because of that we begin to give them due care and attention. Our world of science dominated capitalist structures is in Federico Campagna's terminology a 'technic' society, a culture that attempts to understand the world through an 'absolute language', a language of measurement and of the precise allocation of words to things. He contrasts this with an idea of 'magic' that centres a reconstruction of the world around the notion of the 'ineffable'. In his book 'Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality', Campagna states that 'under technic, the foundations of reality begin to crumble, shrinking the field of the possible and freezing our lives in an anguished state of paralysis'. In our present society when we are faced with a broken object we rarely see a possibility of reconstruction, but the success of 'the Repair Shop' as a TV program, perhaps reflects the fact that we are all aware of the need to rethink our relationship with objects that come into our lives. In fact the care that goes into a repair can become part of a personal philosophy, the Japanese art of kintsugi being about embracing flaws and celebrating the time spent repairing things. If we believe that all things hold within them a certain 'magical' something, a type of vitalism, then perhaps we might offer them a longer and more cherished existence and see them as 'creatures' that exist alongside ourselves, rather than just objects to be used. I am beginning to think that we really do need to develop contemporary forms of animism or an equivalent belief system, if we as a species are to survive the next hundred years.
Everything is interconnected, but science our main source of knowledge atomises the world in order to understand it. By pulling everything apart I think we have in effect begun to dismember the very world we were trying to understand. In being objective we have pulled ourselves apart from the world. This has led to a situation whereby we are finding it much harder to be in touch with our environmentally rooted feelings anymore, because we have lost meaningful connections, and sympathy with the non human world has eroded away. Objectivity, the standing aside from the mess of interconnectedness that is the world, has unfortunately led us down a dark, blind alley. We have begun to focus more and more on our feelings for ourselves and are trying all the time to feed those feelings and enhance them, but our existence depends on us being interconnected with everything else around us. As we think about ourselves and our needs, we need to be equally able to feel for the rest of the world and its needs as well. This requires a connection with and a real sympathy to others and other things. Frazer in the Goldern Bough stated 'like produces like'; and in many cultural traditions the concept of sympathetic magic plays a crucial role, especially when a person can be affected magically by actions performed in conjunction with objects interacting with themselves or aspects of their lives. I have seen elements of this when I have been working with votives and although there is no logical explanation, have seen people overcome pain, by passing it on and into an inanimate object.
The roots of plants are like the legs of an octopus, so why cant a plant think like an octopus? A yellow flower looks like the sun, so why cant it shine and light up the world in the same way? The earth beneath my feet is also soil, so why cant I think of myself as a plant nurtured in the soil of my birth? These are poetic ideas, visions whereby the unconscious streams of intuited connections are given birth and allowed to be seen. In the company of poetry, logic can at times be barbaric.
I have just been reading Pablo Neruda's 'Memoirs' and he reminds us all of how the poetic imagination can also be a political one. The desire to seek what is true and right can also be driven by an inspirational poetics. In fact I get the feeling that without poetry politics is cruel and a sensitivity to the plight of others is lost within the setting of revolutionary aims and objectives and the desire for power. Perhaps poets will always be in the end disappointed by reality, but during those moments when they are truly lost in the finding of words, sometimes I do believe that they can touch the future.
From: The Stones of the Sky
It is impossible to translate poetry accurately, but if you read a translation of 'Stones in the Sky', a small chapbook written by Neruda at a time when he realised he had cancer, you get a sense of how his mind made connections between things and how he sees himself and by extension ourselves, as being contiguous with the rocks of the earth. In poetry we are both what we are and what we are thought to be and as the two merge a very different truth to that of the scientific emerges.
Mary Midgley wrote a whole book on the problem, 'Science and Poetry', which I found a bit of a struggle to get through, I felt she had replaced the poetry by academic learning. The humanities are so in thrall to science that they often try too hard to 'prove' their point, when what should be happening is a new non linear approach explored. However the book is still a useful read and she reminds us that in previous times 'the idea of explaining natural phenomena in terms of sympathies and attractions between various substances within a wider natural system was prevalent among perfectly serious students as well as sorcerers.' (2006, p.57) I.e. 'magic' as an idea was central to science at one point, not in a supernatural sense, but rather in the sense that things and their workings were mysterious and that they could not be fully understood. Science for all its bravado, has to every now and again be faced with stuff like dark matter, and when it is, we are all reminded of how little anyone really knows.
Material conglomeration
Just over a year ago I was asked to contribute to an exhibition reflecting on our personal understanding of domestic objects. I made a range of things out of stuff that would have been thrown away; the 'sculptures' were exhibited and at the end of the exhibition pulled apart and recycled. The interesting thing for myself was that as I made them they began 'talking' to me. They took on a life of their own. They had become 'creatures' beyond logic, now operating within the bounds of poetry. After I cut them up and we put all the components into recycling bins, I felt both a sense of release and sadness. Release because they had begun to occupy some part of myself that I didn't want them to, and sadness because in many ways they were now 'familiars'; supernatural entities that had assisted me in visualising my ideas about sustainability. Without science I would not be aware of the need for sustainable action, but without the poetics of art making, I would not have found these totemic forms. They were in my mind vitalist entities and I know other people were intrigued by them, recognising that the objects had some sort of presence. I'm about to embark on a similar way of working so I shall see if the same thing happens once I begin bringing found materials together again.
The search for the mythic in relation to science is not just about artists being more attuned into the concerns and interests of scientists, it is also about scientists being more in touch with the techniques and procedures of the arts.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of neuroscience, was also an artist. If you look at his drawing of a cut nerve outside the spinal cord, you can see his high levels of ability to look and invent from the looking.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal: A cut nerve outside the spinal cord, 1913
He has extrapolated what he was beginning to see and allowed the drawing to become a vision that then allowed him to think about what he was seeing.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal: Glial cells of the mouse spinal cord, 1899.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Glial cells of the cerebral cortex of a child, 1904
Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Calyces of Held in the nucleus of the trapezoid body, 1934
All of these images have helped with the science community's visual grasp of the physical nuts and bolts of neuroscience, and all of these drawings I would contend are also imaginary inventions based on what he thought he saw. Remember how a line works when you use it to draw from life, it abstracts and simplifies by its very nature and as you draw you need to decide what is rendered and what is left out. I see these images as being as magical and as inventive as those of Paul Klee.
Quantum field theory has become a widely discussed topic in both the philosophy of science and in philosophy informed by scientific discovery. It has had an impact on philosophical and scientific research methodology, has begun to change the way we view semantics and most importantly has re-opened out studies into ontology. In its metaphysical implications it sometimes seems to give a picture of the world which is totally at variance with the central classical conceptions of quantum mechanics and they way we imagine particles and fields. Perhaps even more importantly, much of this has been achieved without many people actually being able to grasp what quantum field theory actually is.
The idea of the shaman appears to follow certain principles that reflect underlying neurological processes. An idea of evolutionary theology has emerged from this awareness, i.e. that we are hard wired to produce such concepts as animism, totemic spirits, death and re-birth experiences, because they help provide a platform for the construction of consciousness, a facility that has evolved out of biological survival needs. It has been argued elsewhere that consciousness isn't about reality, but is more a device to allow us to make decisions, especially about things we cant perceptually know, but which intuitively we grasp as being important to the preservation of our wellbeing. (See 'Shamanism as the original neurotheology' by Michael Winkleman) Perhaps once the complex cultural constructions that surround us begin to fall away, these pre-historic responses to an understanding of the world, will be seen to not only still be in place but still operating.
The artist Emery Blagdon was very interested in electronic fields and he believed that these had healing powers if properly channelled. This was not a new idea and it has been proposed by many eastern religions as well as more modernpsycho-aesthetics (The study of the psychological aspects of aesthetic perception). Blagdon's 'healing machines' are made of wire as well as any found bits and pieces of electrical machinery that he thought could be used to trap or re-direct magnetic energy. They operate as three dimension spiritual circuit diagrams. In my mind I linked his sculptures to the diagrams that the monks lavished so many hours illuminating in Walter M Miller's classic science fiction novel of a post nuclear war future, 'A Canticle for Liebowitz'. Like the complex illuminated technical drawings that the monks produced in Miller's novel, the twisted wires become elaborations that are impossible to follow, but which have an implied authority that suggests it all must mean something.
Emery Blagdon: Wire energy traps
We are asked by physicists to accept that all sorts of energy fields are in fact underlying our material world. Blagdon however believed in these fields intuitively. In fact many non western cultures seem to have some sort of belief systems that contain ideas similar to energy fields, ideas that in Blagdon's world you might call techno/magical speculations. Jean Perdrizet, another outsider artist, was also a man interested in speculating about the universe and how it operated.
Jean Perdrizet: speculative engineering
Jean Perdrizet's diagrams are what you might call designs for symbolic devices or speculative engineering. Each drawing is in effect an invitation to reconsider the possibilities of physics and he embeds into his diagrams his self devised mathematical code as 'proof' that what he is revealing to us is based on some sort of reality. But are these 'Outsiders' really so far outside the norms of everyday reality? What if they were conceptually positioned alongside those scientists telling us that visible light can hold vast amounts of information and that data can be quantum entangled with photons from anywhere else in the Universe? Ideas such as those exploring how information can be exchanged between any two parties no matter how far apart in the universe they happen to be are emerging from a current understanding of quantum entanglement and possible future means of communication might be developed from this understanding. All this makes what were science fiction ideas, appear to be on the one hand more and more realistic and on the other hand more and more fantastic. It is in these frayed edges between science and intuition that myth may well emerge again, it may cloak itself in the magic of the mysterious and perhaps lead to a re-enchantment of the world we live in.
Paul Feyerabend, in his book 'Against Method' had this to say, 'For is it not possible that science as we know it today, or a "search for the truth" in the style of traditional philosophy, will create a monster? Is it not possible that an objective approach that frowns upon personal connections between the entities examined will harm people, turn them into miserable, unfriendly, self-righteous mechanisms without charm or humour? "Is it not possible," asks Kierkegaard, "that my activity as an objective observer of nature will weaken my strength as a human being?" I suspect the answer to many of these questions is affirmative and I believe that a reform of the sciences that makes them more anarchic and more subjective is urgently needed. (1993, p.154)
Feyerabend invented the term 'epistemological anarchism',which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge. Feyerabend states that the idea of the operation of science by fixed, universal rules is unrealistic, pernicious, and detrimental to science itself. He at one time described himself as a Dadaist and had a reliance on Dada as an approach to any form of pomposity or rigidity in thinking. Deep down I think he just thought if it wasn't in the end open to being funny, it wasn't worth bothering with. All of which helps when looking at that bigger problem of humans and the way they have brought to world to its knees.
I watched news footage last night of the Taliban riding through dust blown Afghanistan streets on long columns of motorbikes, and was reminded that religion can be even more fascist and doctrinaire than science and that although many atrocities were committed in the name of the 'scientific' principle of eugenics, there have been even more atrocities committed in the name of all the different religions of the world. Knowing what is right is perhaps the worst thing to know. It breeds intolerance and eradicates wonder and mystery. In my confused way, perhaps I'm arguing for a celebration of confusion, for an allowance of crazy ideas and for the cessation of constant measurement and data collecting, which seem to be at the centre of so much present day anxiety.
Trying not to take it all seriously is a serious issue. I'm in the middle of reading about Charles Henry and the formation of a psycho-physical aesthetic. This sounds serious stuff and it sort of is, but Henry in some ways also became the model for Alfred Jarry's 'Doctor Faustroll', who was in Jarry's terminology a 'pataphysician'. Jarry describes pataphysics as an examination of 'the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one, since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue or originality'. Henry in his own way was trying to describe the universe supplementary to this one. His systems of thinking about colour and symbolic form follow the rigour of mathematics and 'scientific' data assemblage and he did invent the aesthetic protractor which is a device all of us ought know how to use. If I could, I would use it myself to find the angle of naked pain, but I have in my dotage even forgotten how to use a slide rule, only remembering that paradoxically the slide rule was not meant to be used for measuring length or drawing straight lines, but was an sort of analogical computer. The aesthetic protractor allows for the systematic evaluation of colours and the forms they take, in order to clarify their aesthetic qualities. These qualities are themselves derived from Henry's self devised psychophysiological principles of dynamogeny and inhibition in relation to a theory of rhythm related to prime numbers or their reciprocal fractions. He also devised his own colour circle, so you could use the protractor to find out exactly where a particular colour might sit and its occurrence could then be related to amount and position. Somehow Seurat was able to use these theories to devise compositional structures for paintings. (Read all about this in Seurat and the Science of Painting, by William Innes. Homer)
Charles Henry's Aesthetic Protractor
I have for a while now been following artists and others who have been able to use diagrams to visualise their world view, and as I struggle to think through what it is I'm really trying to understand, here is another artist to look at who has used diagrams as some form of visionary architecture, Paul Laffoley.
Paul Laffoley
Paul Laffoley attempts to fuse science with Eastern religion and philosophy. He is also using info-graphic processes which help give his work more 'conviction' than those outsider artists that use hand drawn diagrams. However as he does so his work becomes not that dissimilar to the work produced by professional graphic designers who are employed to draw up visualisations to help physicists try and communicate their concepts to lay audiences.
A graphic representation of the Lie group E8
For example, mathematicians have mapped out perhaps the most complex abstract structure ever conceived, a 248-dimensional representation called the Lie group E8, which was first predicted in 1887 by the Norwegian Sophus Lie. In fact the result may hold the key to a unified theory of physics. Which as far as I can see is also a myth. The full E8 map includes almost 100 times as much data as the Human Genome Project. A “group” is a set of objects, together with an operation, that exhibit certain symmetries. Lie groups are fundamental to physics. All the particles and forces in the standard model, the dominant schema of modern physics, are represented by Lie groups, and their study has become an essential tool for understanding, and attempting to unify, the laws of nature.
Damián Ortega Cosmogonia domestica
Damián Ortega's 'Cosmogonia domestica' is a good example of what Paul Feyerabend would term 'epistemological anarchism'. His is an art that attempts to make the quotidian or everyday world mythic. He replaces models of the planets with objects found in our day to day life, thus elevating them into a cosmic dance. The engineering and structural mechanics that are needed to do this are both of course significant and the construction of the piece reveals a form that humans have turned to many times as they have contemplated that need for a bigger deeper understanding of what's out there.
Damián Ortega 'Cosmogonia domestica
According to the Hindu religion there is one ultimate reality—Brahman. That ultimate reality in relation to the world is Isvara. He has the three functions of creation, maintenance and destruction of the universe and then He is represented by Brahma, Vishnu and Siva.
Two types of symbology may be noticed in Hinduism. First, the sound symbols found in the mantras and secondly, the form symbols of different types of figures, revealed by conceptions of deities, the anthropomorphic forms which are often worshipped. The images are built according to the dhyana-slokas (meditation verses) of the particular deities. The images of the deities as well as the mantras referring to them are embodiments of consciousness itself. They are based upon the idea of the Mantra Sastra, which points out that every form has a corresponding sound at the back of it and every sound must have a form.
Tibetan mandala in the OM form
The sound Om is made up of three Sanskrit letters, aa, au and ma which, when combined, make the sound Aum or Om. This most important symbol in Hinduism, is chanted in every prayer and invocation to deities. Om is not a word it is an intonation, and is believed to be the primeval sound of the world and to contain all other sounds. It is a mantra or prayer by itself. If repeated with the correct intonation, it can resonate throughout the body so that the sound penetrates to the centre of one’s being, the atman or soul. When Om is chanted a vibration is created that synchronises with the cosmic vibration.
It is perhaps this idea that we are all looking for. An idea that is thousands of years old, but which still resonates.
Visualisation of OM
This particular 'OM' intonation is meant to be able to repair DNA sequences. Somewhere around here is one of the frayed edges I'm grasping at, a thread that I need to hold on to if I am to finally weave my own cloth.
We are yet to return to university and it is still unknown as to how we will be hosting the fine art course, online or back physically in the studios. However if you are reading this post as part of your preparation for next year, I would hope that it helps in that realisation that as an artist you will need to forge your own understanding of what is happening around you, and that any understanding can still root itself in meaning structures thousands of years old. The search for meaning is an ever present aspect of the human condition, perhaps an over rated one, but never the less it is a process that people from all cultures and times would recognise as being vital to finding your position within the universe. As a student you are also, like everyone else, a student of life.
Because I have been involved in teaching art for so many years, every now and again I like to look at how other art teachers have framed up the process, especially when it comes to the traditional elements of drawing, such as working from the figure. Kimon Nicolaïdes is someone who still has a lasting legacy and if you have attended evening classes in life drawing, or have attended some sort of preparatory course such as a foundation or access program, I'm pretty sure you will have been asked to do at least one of the exercises he introduced.
The 'natural' way to draw is an interesting phrase in itself, it suggests that there is an unnatural way to draw. As we are all creatures of nature, I find it impossible to imagine a way of drawing that wasn't natural. I suspect he really means 'more in tune with' or 'working with and alongside your materials' or 'allowing your feelings to direct your actions'.
Gesture drawing and contour drawing are seen as the two main planks on which Nicolaïdes' reputation as a teacher rests. He also felt that drawing well had nothing to do with technique or an understanding of aesthetics. It was he said all to do with: "a right observation of the world".
He insisted that students had to discover what right observation was by themselves, and that the art teacher’s job was to teach them not how to draw...but how to learn to draw.
If you break Nicoliades' approach to drawing down there are three basic areas and as you work your way through his exercises, what I'm sure he was aiming for was to enable his students to gradually synthesise these three approaches. Contour, gesture and weight are the three elements that he uses to enable a student of life drawing to tackle energy, mass and surface. But it has been pointed out that the weight drawing exercise is often under used, this of course leaves the contour and gesture drawings without gravity and mass, people going for the excitement of surface energy, without coming to terms with the need for presence, solidity and gravitas. Like everything else, a proper approach to an understanding of the figure requires an awareness of the entanglement of approaches available. You will always find contour in gesture drawings, gesture in drawings exploring weight, and weight in the development of drawings about gesture. I have touched upon some of these issues in my post on cross contour drawings, but mass is also something you can deal with tonally as well as by using certain very low points of view.
Set out below is Nicoliades' first exercise: You can work your way though all of the exercises by using this link.
EXERCISE 1: CONTOUR DRAWING
Materials: Use a 3B (medium soft) drawing pencil with a very fine point (sharpened on sandpaper) and a piece of cream-colored manila wrapping paper about fifteen by twenty inches in size. Manila paper usually comes in large sheets which may be cut into four pieces of that size. You may use, also, the kind sold as ‘shelf paper’ provided it is not glazed. Fasten the paper with large paper clips to a piece of prestwood or a stiff piece of cardboard. Wear an eyeshade. Do not use an eraser until you come to Exercise 28.
Sit close to the model or object which you intend to draw and lean forward in your chair. Focus your eyes on some point — any point will do — along the contour of the model. (The contour approximates what is usually spoken of as the outline or edge.) Place the point of your pencil on the paper. Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.
Then move your eye slowly along the contour of the model and move the pencil slowly along the paper. As you do this, keep the conviction that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight. This means that you must draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model. Exactly coordinate the pencil with the eye. Your eye may be tempted at first to move faster than your pencil, but do not let it get ahead. Consider only the point that you are working on at the moment with no regard for any other part of the figure.
Often you will find that the contour you are drawing will leave the edge of the figure and turn inside, coming eventually to an apparent end. When this happens, glance down at the paper in order to locate a new starting point. This new starting point should pick up at that point on the edge where the contour turned inward.
Thus, you will glance down at the paper several times during the course of one study, but do not draw while you are looking at the paper. As in the beginning, place the pencil point on the paper, fix your eyes on the model, and wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching the model before you draw. Not all of the contours lie along the outer edge of the figure. For example, if you have a front view of the face, you will see definite contours along the nose and the mouth which have no apparent connection with the contours at the edge. As far as the time for your study permits, draw these ‘inside contours’ exactly as you draw the outside ones.
Draw anything that your pencil can rest on and be guided along. Develop the absolute conviction thatyou are touching the model.
Student Contour Drawing: Let the lines sprawl all over the paper
This exercise should be done slowly, searchingly, sensitively. Take your time. Do not be too impatient or too quick. There is no point in finishing any one contour study. In fact, a contour study is not a thing that can be ‘finished.’ It is having a particular type of experience, which can continue as long as you have the patience to look. If in the time allowed you get only halfway around the figure, it doesn’t matter. So much the better! But if you finish long before the time is up, the chances are that you are not approaching the study in the right way. A contour drawing is like climbing a mountain as contrasted with flying over it in an airplane. It is not a quick glance at the mountain from far away, but a slow, painstaking climb over it, step by step.
Student Contour Drawing Draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model
Do not worry about the ‘proportions’ of the figure. That problem will take care of itself in time. And do not be misled by shadows. When you touch the figure, it will feel the same to your hand whether the part you touch happens at the moment to be light or in shadow. Your pencil moves, not on the edge of a shadow, but on the edge of the actual form. At first, no matter how hard you try, you may find it difficult to break the habit of looking at the paper while you draw. You may even look down without knowing it. Ask a friend to check up on you for a few minutes by calling out to you every time you look at the paper. Then you will find out whether you looked too often and whether you made the mistake of drawing while you were looking.
There are lots of interesting issues that emerge from Nicoliades' approach, for instance the relationship between touch and sight. As he points out, "When you touch the figure, it will feel the same to your hand whether the part you touch happens at the moment to be light or in shadow". However I might argue that we only begin to realise what we see when we can verify perception by linking touch to sight. Also where is that edge of the actual form? The surface of a human body is one continuous topology and it has no edges. Lots of interesting questions about how we perceive arise as soon as you try to unpick what he is trying to do. However what he provides is a framework within which you can work and this is perhaps the most important thing. I personally find his way of working far more engaging and life affirming than the realism or constructional approaches to life drawing.
The approaches to life drawing that emphasise realism often use the Charles Bargue Drawing Course, which was devised in the 19th century and which guides students on how to copy from plaster casts, how to study and work from great master drawings and which finally gives instruction on how to draw from the life model. These three areas of study are usually blended in with other methods taken directly from French Academy teaching materials. There is an emphasis on training how to see. (Note not questioning it, but giving ways to shape what you see, for instance you are taught that by copying shadows you can arrive at a much more satisfactory observation of a figure, than by filling in outlines.) These courses emphasise technical mastery of traditional art materials and aim for success in 'realism', i.e. skin tone should be accurate, proportion correct etc. Most of the drawing is taught sight size, i.e. one to one size correspondence which leads to accuracy in measurement.
The approaches that emphasise constructional methods use more sculptural drawing techniques. There is an emphasis on three dimensional awareness and how to use this to construct figure drawings. For instance tonal analysis using cross hatch techniques, planar construction or the simplification of continuously moving organic forms, so that they can be rendered more clearly within various perspectives. This system often works in layers. For instance in the first stage you make perspective boxes of say the pelvic girdle and trunk of the body, then on top of that you place drawings of bone structure and musculature, and then on top of that the formal distribution of human body shapes as understood from models. The classic textbook that sets out the constructional method is George Bridgman's 'Constructive Anatomy'. It is still available, try the Dover Anatomy for Artists' paperback.
Lots of guides exist which you can use if you want to take on board these systems. My own approach is very post-Cezanne, which is basically to become lost in the puzzle of looking, but of course when I was a student I used several of the approaches set out above, each one helping to gradually build up a series of philosophical positions which for myself became intriguing entries into image making.
See also
Life drawing Some reflections on what was to be the last of the life drawing sessions I was ever to teach at the Leeds College of Art.
Two related ideas have become central to my own art practice and they are both formal and political in their implications. They are 'Hybridity' and 'Permeability'. Both these concepts suggest that a clearly defined, sharp edged, entity with boundaries is a problem and that rather than looking at the world as a collection of things, or atomising experience so that you can break it down into smaller components, you instead look at interrelationships, entanglements and processes that show how systems depend on their different parts working together. This means that for instance an image of a human being is something that needs to acknowledge the fact that it is in reality a hybrid form that is over 50% bacteria and that it is always in a process of becoming, which is an event rather than a thing and that it can never in reality separate itself out from its entanglements with everything else.
Hybridity has in contemporary theory several readings, and I have also had to take on board the fact that certain writers claim 'hybridity' as being of a particular importance to themselves too. I would therefore like to acknowledge all their contributions to various readings of the term as further evidence of 'hybridity' as a fertile term, out of which a more sensitive understanding of life emerges.
Hybridity can be seen as a cross between things, as a formal mixture of elements. This could be biological, for example a cross between a male lion and a female tiger is a 'liger', a hybrid plant emerges from the seed that is the result of a cross pollination between different plant varieties, in order to achieve this the female (pistil) of one plant variety receives pollen taken from the male (stamen) of a different plant variety. Hybridity can also be about human cultures. A hybrid is simply something that is a mixture between one thing and another. Hybridity has been a feature of virtually all civilizations and is created by trade, conquest and the fact that at certain times different people rub up against each other. Cultures borrow ideas that they find useful, this includes religions, philosophies, and science, but also art and languages. Our word 'hybrid' is derived from the Latin 'hybrida' or 'ibrida', which meant the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. In music Edward II is a wonderful example of a hybrid fusion between English folk music and Jamaican reggae.
Edward II 'Miles away'
In cultural theory hybridity has been re-appropriated by social and cultural critics as a challenge to fixed or essentialist accounts of identity and culture. Radicalised claims of purity of origins, such as those advocated by nazi theorists are refuted by ideas of hybridity that understand the breaking down of racial and cultural boundaries is a normative feature of societal development. Hybridity as a sociological concept recognises that identity is formed through encounters with difference. In particular, the condition of cultural hybridity has been explored by examining the post-colonial cultures of migrants which are based on fusions and translations between and of different peoples, cultures and places. If you are interested in reading more about this idea, one of the most developed theorisations of hybridity is by Homi K. Bhabha (See: The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994) which does not consider it as merely the fusing of existing cultural elements. For Bhabha, hybridity refers to the process of the emergence of a culture, in which its elements are being continually transformed or translated through continuous encounters.
My own interest in the term also embraces how it was thought about by Mikhail Bakhtin, who used notions of hybridity to celebrate the idea of multi-vocal stories. This polyphony of voices was part of his idea of the 'carnivalesque' as (Clark and Holquist in Mikhail Bakhtin,1984: p. 4) put it, ‘a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture’. So yes, a hybrid can also be transgressive and funny and in being funny it helps to break down the rigid boundaries between things. Bhabha's ‘Third Space of enunciation’ (1994:37), is also a space for jokes, for freudian slips and a bit of daftness.
Permeability has traditionally been a term more related to science than art. It is defined as the ability of a substance to allow another substance to pass through it, especially the ability of a porous rock, sediment, or soil to transmit fluid through pores and cracks. However I have been rethinking it as a term that is essential to all life and its ability to maintain independence whilst at the same time acknowledging that interdependence is the only possible condition if that life form is to survive. If I look at myself, I am very permeable. I have a skin that surrounds me that is permeable, I intake solids, liquids and gases through the various mechanisms that my body has evolved to ensure that I am being constantly interpenetrated by the environment around me. I am designed to be very permeable. The science of Markov blankets suggests that all life forms or self-organising systems rely on an ability to interact with their surroundings in order to survive. It is argued that this ability to self organise is in fact an emergent property of random dynamical systems, which means that at some point order will not just emerge, but a type of order that likes to keep itself in that very order, as well as being able to interact with all the other chaos around it, will come into being. It has been argued that in order to maintain themselves, these orderly systems need to possess Markov Blankets, permeable surrounding areas that allow for interchange between various states of order and disorder. Therefore a human being's Markov blanket touches and interacts with the Markov blankets of other things and becomes part of a system that both includes it and these other things, in order to help itself self-regulate, whilst also forming necessary parts of other regulation systems that in turn help in the process of maintaining a state of homeostasis.
The formal consequence of this for my own thinking is that hard sharp edges between and around things are suggestive of organisms that are cut off from each other and therefore liable to die off and softer more open or vibrating edges that allow for things to pass through them are more likely to suggest permeability and states of entanglement with other systems and events.
Amoeba
The amoeba has a flexible permeable membrane, this allows it to exchange and interact with its surrounding environment, sometimes extending itself to surround 'food' whilst at the same time being able to allow waste products to pass back out into the surrounding waters. In order to visualise this it is better to use a dotted or dashed line to represent its edge or boundary rather than a hard continuous line.
Body as flux and spatial movement
One way of thinking about larger organic forms is to treat them in a similar way to how you might draw an amoeba, however very quickly the independence of the body begins to dissolve into its interdependence with the surrounding environment. This has created for myself a conundrum, and this is how far do I take the visual implications of my thinking? Hybridity might mean that I bring together different ways of visually representing an idea and this is where I am at the moment, making a series of images whereby I explore how hybrid visual methodologies can be used to create what I see as perceived images, or perceptions of the imagination. My current project is an attempt to set out an idea that suggests that images that arrive from or come from imaginative play, have exactly the same status for our decision making processes as images that arrive as direct perceptions.
An amoeba human hybrid
Hybrids meet
Our skin is not only porous it is a surface with embedded hair follicles and these are organised in such a way that the hairs take patterns or directions over the body. These patterns have evolved over millions of years as the best way to quickly direct rain water off a moving mammal's body.
Hair direction, front and back
We rarely think of this pattern when making representations of humans, but it is a reminder of our animal nature as well as visually a way of thinking about the dynamics of movement over and around a body. As an image it is both an imaginative interpretation of empirical research and a representation of perceived experience. I was very interested in how by keeping the two halves apart, this allowed the space surrounding the body to dramatically enter it from above and below as both invisible penis/anal hole and extension of the head's crown chakra down into the body. The previous idea I had of the body as a form of Klein Bottle would only work in four dimensional space but I still like the idea of it, perhaps though it needs to be animated so that time is more clearly present.
From worm to human Klein bottle to walking amoeba
As thoughts about forms evolve, so do thoughts about life itself, the one allowing the other to become what it becomes. This is a sort of evolutionary philosophy, a way of developing a reason for formal invention that is also a way of developing an attitude towards the world. It is not though a fixed idea, more a process that perhaps we all go through at some point, some people going through similar thought processes at a very early stage in their life and others much later on. In this case I'm reflecting on my own process at quite a late stage in life, and I am aware that it is a way of working that is idiosyncratic and which is no more 'right' than the millions of other similar processes other humans are also engaged with at this very moment. Perhaps by comparing and contrasting with your own approaches to these things it may help you become more aware of your own working methods, what it is unlikely to do is advance your analytical thinking and be useful as a 'proper' research methodology; this is art and not science and one of my personal guides in this process is whether or not it could also be funny.
