Drawing

Wednesday, 9 May 2018

Drawing with light 3: Anthony McCall at the Hepworth

Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall’s ‘Solid Light Works’ is on at the Hepworth until 3 June 2018, and is a must see for any of you wanting to work with light as a drawing material. I have mentioned his work before, so I won't elaborate except to suggest that you go along mid-week when there are less people in the gallery, then you can get a much better idea of how each piece operates. The relationship between his projections and his other work is laid out very clearly in the exhibition and some of you might find the drawings about sequences and how to visualise things changing over time, as interesting as the more spectacular projected works.

In particular the sketchbooks he used are exhibited in long showcases; I always find these interesting as you can see what is going on in the mind of the artist. If only you could browse through them, seeing an open sketchbook page makes you really want to turn the page and see where a thought went to next. I would have thought it would not have been too difficult to have scanned the pages and to have made the rest of the notebooks available as an interactive database, such as has been done with Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks.

Anthony McCall: Sketchbook

The exhibition also provides a more rounded context for McCall's practice and we can see him working as a performance artist as well as an installation and series artist. The work below only really comes alive when you see it in conjunction with the video of its making.

Anthony McCall: 5 minute drawing: Charcoal on paper 6 sheets 1974

A video of the 5 minute drawing performance

How far an artist needs to go with the documentation of work and where the boundaries of the artwork lie are always interesting questions. Did this work only really exist during the 5 minutes of its original performance, is the work contained in the 'finished' drawing that is presented to us on the wall and which is in the collection of MOMA? Is the work only realised when the audience watches the video and then re-looks at the drawing on the wall or is it really all of these things as well as a reading of the text that is used to describe the work and which is placed next to the drawing on the same wall?

Light works straddle genres and may be seen as drawing, sculpture, installation, projection, or performance. they are often immersive and have a long history (again see drawing with light part one)

David Spriggs

Some light artists make direct references to the history of using light as a powerful sign; David Spriggs being an artist that has been linking an awareness of Stonehenge as a sun calendar with his own light objects. He is fascinated by the symbolic, cultural and historical significance of light. Spriggs forces you to engage with the work by making the viewer keep moving in relation to the installations. He constructs his images in layers, so that they constantly change in relation to each other as you walk around them.

David Spriggs

You don't have to use projections to control the way you use light. Nobuhiro Nakanishi plays with perspective by chronologically stacking landscape photos he has transferred to glass and making sure that his pieces are placed next to an appropriate light source. His images work both as sequential images and as coloured light constructions.

Nobuhiro Nakanishi

Projections can of course be very powerful and at night can be used to project on a wide variety of surfaces.

Tony Oursler: Vampiric Mirror

Tony Oursler is always worth looking at if you are thinking about how a moving image can be presented. The very first exhibition of his work I came across was hosted in old suitcases. You had to look inside them and in each one there was a tiny image on a cathode ray tube that formed the heads of a series of dolls, all of which were talking. It was designed to be like a collection of ventriloquists' suitcases.
Javier Riera has used his interest in outdoors projection to develop a practice that explores the conjunction between the organic forms of nature and geometric forms.

Javier Riera

Javier Riera's light projections make us rethink our relationship with nature and perhaps they also cause us to ask ourselves what right we have to impose our ideas and formal concepts onto the rest of the world. Nature usually gets there first and our first experiences of light entering dark spaces would have been nature made not manmade.

Nate Boyce

Nate Boyce is perhaps more interested in solid light, his 3D printed realisations being then re-embedded into videos of 'reality' or cast as solid objects. However the film above sees him working to compose light.

Sunlight breaking through clouds

We are still thrilled by the sight of nature making its own light drawings, when clouds obscure the sun and then allow a shaft of light to pass through to the earth, our hearts lift. As light shafts down between the gaps in a tree canopy, it can feel as if we are in a cathedral.

The use of stained glass in churches is another example of the spiritual enmeshing of light and religious ideas, a concept that goes back to the entering of a shaft of sunlight into a cave, being still used to create the ambiance lighting for nightclubs, so that as people dance they are helped to enter into a trace state, little different to the way things would have been thousands of years ago.

Cirque du Soleil: nightclub lighting display Las Vegas.

Coda

Tomopteris

Humans are not the only creatures that have found ways to be able to light up the dark. Tomopteris are segmented worms that are cousins to earthworms, but belong to a separate group called polychaetes. They are usually transparent, except when they take on the colour of the prey they’ve just eaten (like the one shown here with a red gut). Their bodies are mostly water, which means damage to their outer surface causes the immediate loss of the water pressure inside, resulting in a dramatic change in size and shape. They still retain a basic similarity to ourselves, a bilateral symmetry and a segmented body that appears to have a head and a tail is not too far away from the forms many fish take and we have like all other mammals evolved from fish.

Friday, 4 May 2018

Touch: Photography and frottage as indexical forms of drawing

Max Ernst Frottage

Adam Fuss: Photogram

frottage

noun

the technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art.

the practice of touching or rubbing against the clothed body of another person in a crowd as a means of obtaining sexual gratification.

photogram

noun

the technique or process of making a photographic image without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material and then exposing it to light.

archaic: a photograph.

Both these techniques above rely on the direct contact between two surfaces, or 'things coming together'. Some of my recent posts have suggested that if we used object orientated ontology as a lens with which to explore how the materiality of drawing could lead to a less human centric way of thinking about theory, we could create a better balance between meaning as something that only applies to human lives and meaning as something that is applicable to the totality of all experiences, be these animal, vegetable or mineral. It is though very hard to avoid putting human feelings at the centre of the struggle for meaning. The fact that psychology is now such an important theoretical driver, makes it impossible for me to avoid seeing the relevance of the second definition of 'frottage', to the sexual associations we have with touch. A photograph is usually associated with theories of the gaze, the 'male gaze' being one that treats female subjects as objects and this is at its clearest perhaps within the realm of amateur photography, where I am amazed to see that photographing the female nude is still seen as an important genre, one that often comes under the heading of *'tasteful nudes'. Sight and touch in these cases become conjoined. The 'distance' that light has to travel to get from the subject via the camera lens to the light sensitive surface is in effect diminished by the need to touch the surface of the model's skin.

Newspaper ad

The drawing above from an old newspaper ad for x ray specs sums up the psychology of the situation, "Is that really his body you "see" under his clothes", the text works as an attempt to divert attention from the reality behind the drawing.

The feminist artist Nancy Davidson in her early works dealt with the recorded gestures of her body. In one such piece she used frottage by having her bodily weight transfer the patterns of the wooden floor underneath her to strips of paper. The resulting work was a record of touch formed by her body and the floor’s surface. These processes allowed her to touch another object without having to be touched by the 'male' other, she in effect was taking control over how touch could be conceptualised. Her images becoming both traces and signs. (Compare with the Anthropometry work of Yves Klein)

Nancy Davidson: Frottage

Alan Sonfist’s Earth Mapping of New York City is a charcoal drawing that is also both a trace and sign. A trace is something inscribed by the artist’s direct physical presence, while a mark is a sign placed with deliberate intention. The drawing is a rubbing of pine needles and dirt that suggests the composition of the New York City landscape long before it was inhabited. The drawing as you spend time looking at it transforms into a landscape with its suggestion of depth, mountains, and even animals or figures in action.

Alan Sonfist: Earth Mapping of New York City Charcoal frottage

Adam Fuss's photogram's are also traces and signs. However they also suggest a relationship with spirit photography. His ghost images of clothes suggest a similarity with those early photographs which were often in reality double exposures. Because of photography's newness and because unsophisticated audiences had no awareness of how these images were made, these photographs had seemed like strange magical records of the spirit world. The direct touch of the photogram as a technique being read as something from beyond the grave, a process that was supposed to be about an indexical relationship with reality, was read as a type of doorway into the fantastic.

Spirit photography

I'm rambling again, but only to search for a series of connections about how traces and direct contacts with other surfaces can lead to a variety of readings, which can on the one hand make us more aware of the material nature of image making but on the other of how other humans will read into anything narratives of their own experiences, a direct touch being associated with being alive and by extension an awareness of sex and death.

Bruno Latour suggests that 'resistance' is the first mark of the real. In the case of a drawing the paper resists the attack of the charcoal. This is the material aspect of every situation. "Availability' is seen as the second mark of the real. 'Reality' according to Latour is itself defined by an oscillation between 'resistance' and 'availability'. 'Availability' is a tangled series of interconnections that sets out the framework within which the real comes to be. As Miller puts it each object comes to be what it is "through the difference it creates in resisting others". The trials of strength and weakness between 'availability' and 'resistance' are finally resolved by "how the multitude of links that an object has passing through it are stacked in relation to one another." (Miller, 2013, p.52) In the case of a charcoal drawing, the passivity of the charcoal allows it to be shaped into forms that can be linked into a complex series of links with metaphorical and other meanings. As things come together one will always be more resistant than another, (a sort of philosophical Mohs scale of hardness) and whatever is more malleable is then capable of taking the form of or allowing an infusion into other things, ideas or whatevers.

For a detailed discussion of Latour's ideas see: Miller, A (2013) Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and object-orientated theology New York: Fordham University Press

For an introduction to the idea of the male gaze see:

Mulvey, L (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema available at http://theslideprojector.com/pdffiles/art6/visualpleasureandnarrativecinema.pdf

Charles Peirce's term 'indexicality' refers to the physical relationship between the object photographed and the resulting image. Paul Levinson emphasises the ability of photography to capture or reflect "a literal energy configuration from the real world" through a chemical process.

*If we look at the etymology of the word 'taste' we can see that it is intimately associated with 'touch'. Our present English use of the word "taste" evolved from the Old French "taster," which originally meant "to examine by touch or test". The modern sense of "flavour" didn't emerge until the 16th century. This historical connection highlights how the sense of taste was initially understood through the physical act of touching, which was also about 'testing' out experiences before committing yourself to them.

Tuesday, 1 May 2018

Lines in the road

Traditional roadlining technique

I have mentioned the lines we come across painted on our road surfaces a few times. In particular I have flagged up the role that George Musgrave had in developing our visual landscape. In 1947 Musgrave came up with the idea for yellow lines, he also advocated pedestrian refuges in the centre of wide, busy roads, railings at dangerous corners and school exits, one way traffic for towns with narrow streets, speed limits and no parking within 20 yards of pedestrian crossings. You could argue that Musgrave was behind the 'disegno' of our streets.

Road lining techniques have a huge impact on our urban landscape

However the other people behind the lines on our street are the roadliners, skilled craftspeople that have spent years learning their trade and how to operate very specialised drawing tools. This film on the craft of roadlining is a beautiful reminder of how important eye / hand control is to any form of drawing. The traditional form of road lining drawing involved two people; one to drag* the hot box along the ground and the other to keep it topped up with white paint so that a smooth line can be maintained by keeping the hot box in constant movement. Every city has its roadliners and they are rarely celebrated as the skilled artisans they are. The Video linked in above by 'O Street' took a look at a day in the life of Thomas Lilley, a roadliner in Glasgow.

In China it's done differently

The complex coming together of idea, (disegno) often in this case drafted in the offices of city planners and execution by skilled roadliners, is I would again argue a way of thinking about drawing as a coming together of things. A complex amalgam of physical processes, (including the chemistry of fast drying thick paint), inorganic materials, (the road, the machinery) and organic beings (the various people), as well as processes, (town planning, traffic movement), all have to be working in harmony in order to produce a meaningful set of marks.
Like all drawing processes erasure is a very important aspect of the work, but in this case it is very hard to do, so a specialist burner is required.

Burning off an old arrow

The material processes associated with the Earth / Sun interrelationship continue outside of the activities of humans as soon as the road markings are made. The reflectivity of the white paint markings creates a difference between the road surface’s solar heating below the paint and the unpainted surrounding areas. The associated differences in thermal expansion create strains between the areas with and without markings. Small flaws caused by differential strains eventually combine to form longitudinal cracks along the edges of markings, which allow water to enter, which as it freezes and expands opens the surface cracks further and these are then subject to everyday water erosion as it rains. The Earth in effect continues the drawing itself.

Road damage linked to painted road markings

In 2012 the artist Richard Long, used watering cans to paint his white lines along the road on Box Hill, obviously influenced by the long history of white line drawing on roads, he created a 328 foot long drawing for the start of an important bike race.

Richard Long: Box Hill drawing

The Swiss town of Vercorin allows artists to use its public spaces, and the roads, houses etc. become sites that can be transformed; the simple line that we find on the road often being used in affecting these transformations.

Vercorin

As the line escapes its context as a sign it is perhaps useful to be reminded that when first encountered as a driver it is in the learning stage. The meanings that have been encoded into the directions for road users are meant to be easy to learn, and it might be interesting to think about how as an artist you could devise various keys for the symbolic use of lines that include emotional and cultural readings that go far beyond the everyday language of the Highway Code.

From the Highway Code

Line has always been central to drawing practice and it is in many ways the most conceptual of our drawing languages. It can express direction, and at the same time a boundary, it can be continuous or broken, it can be a trace of an activity, as in a skid mark or a simplification of complexity as in an outline. Ogham, the ancient British and Irish alphabet, consisted of twenty characters formed by lines made of parallel strokes on either side of or across a continuous line and straight and zig zag lines are entoptic forms created in our brains when we have no outside the body visual stimulus to interest us. By exploring how we as a species use line in its broadest sense, we can open doors to a further exploration as to how line is found and used in an even wider field of activities, gradually blurring the distinction between what we construct and what we find, between what we control and what we are embedded into.

Ogham

*The fact that you have to drag the hot box across the floor in order to draw a mark points to the old English etymology of the verb 'to draw': c. 1200, spelling alteration of Old English dragan "to drag, to draw, protract" (class VI strong verb; past tense drog, past participle dragen), from Proto-Germanic *dragan "to draw, pull" (source also of Old Norse draga "to draw," Old Saxon dragan, Old Frisian draga, Middle Dutch draghen, Old High German tragen, German tragen "to carry, bear"), from PIE root *dhragh-
This definition suggests to me that the lines drawn by a plough as it cuts through a field were the sort of lines 'dragan' was initially used to describe. These would have been very hard to make lines, dragging the plow through dense, compacted and stony soil would have been a central factor of life in the thirteenth century.

More recently artists have used road marking techniques to define new boundaries. In particular those boundaries that we will need to respond to as global warming creates massive changes to our urban environments. In her work HighWaterLine, Manhattan Beach, New York, 2007 – Eve Mosher marked a 70-mile line in chalk around New York at 10 feet above sea level, showing how dire the potential flooding from global warming could be.

Eve Mosher: HighWaterLine

The technology is still being developed, in particular in relation to fast drying times

*Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a linguistic reconstruction of a hypothetical common ancestor for Indo-Europe languages. PIE is estimated to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE. Over time linguistic divergence has led to the evolution of their current descendants, such as; Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, German, Persian, French, Italian, Marathi, Russian, Ukrainian, Kurdish, Yiddish etc. A poignant reminder of how we are all interconnected and of why the Tower of Babel is such a powerful image. The diagrammatic drawing below of how these languages are linked can itself be read as a metaphor.

Tree of Indo European languages