Drawing and ritual: Leeds City Art Gallery

Roger Ackling: Bird: Sunlight on wood 1974

There is an exhibition of work at the Leeds City Art Gallery as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International, that you might easily walk past and not notice, as it concerns small discrete objects that were used as part of three artists' performative works and personal rituals. This small self contained exhibition looks at the work of artists that made their reputations during the 1970s, and therefore I was very interested in how their various sensibilities overlapped with my own, as they emerged as artists at exactly the same time as myself.
I was particularly interested in the work of Roger Ackling. For much of his career he made work using a magnifying glass to focus bright sunlight onto the surface of found wooden objects, and in the process burning lines and dots, which for him became a sort of meditative mark making. The wood he used was usually found, often on a beach, but it could be from anywhere, and his only tool was the magnifying glass. He in this way was able to re-assert the position of the sun as central to all things seen. His work reminds us of the power of the sun to transmit energy to the Earth and in doing so power vegetable, animal and mineral life. These small drawings on wood, are objects that have a sensibility that could have been arrived at thousands of years ago. I was reminded of constructions like Stonehenge and Newgrange, constructions that were also celebrations of the sun, but on a larger scale. There is a lot of hand eye co-ordination and control in his drawings. Each line positioned very carefully in relation to the others, until a perfectly formed rhythmic surface is developed. 

Roger Ackling

Ackling's friend Richard Long tells of Ackling suggesting driving to Cornwall trailing a pencil on a piece of string on the road, and returning by the same route trailing a rubber. This was back in 1968, a time when Ackling had already developed a minimalist sensibility, one that would find full expression in the use of a magnifying glass and forgotten wooden fragments. It is also worthwhile thinking about the fact that in making work of this sort he was dealing with sustainability issues well before they were seen as essential.

Keir Smith made drawings in an indirect way, as part of a method of investigating his subject matter and developing ideas. In the early 1980s Smith began to start turning process into performance, creating a series of sculptures and installations as a way of documenting his interaction with the landscape.

Keir Smith

Keir Smith

Smith at one point was making drawings by using metal stencils and then scorching or burning images through the stencils onto paper. The stencils were kept in special handmade leather pouches, which were worn by the artist as a sort of tool belt, the perfomative act and associated equipment being just as important as the drawings that emerged from the process.

Every profession has its tool kit, leather belts designed to carry as wide a range of tools as possible have always been excellent aids for performance artists as much as make-up artists.

Probably the most well known image of an artist carrying his kit out of the studio is this one of Courbet, notice the roll of canvas, folded easel and stretcher bars

Martin Rogers was known for his artist's books as well as a wide ranging idiosyncratic practice. The present exhibition presents some of his drawings for objects as well as the objects themselves. These objects are made beautifully as if by a cabinet maker and they suggest that they have emerged from a society that used them for complex rituals, rituals that in particular would involve some sort of rhythmic sound making. The drawings on display show Rogers thinking through the various possibilities and forms that these objects could possibly have, as well as visualising their making process. 

Martin Rogers 

All three artists had a performative aspect to their work and to some extent this exhibition of objects and drawings misses the point that these artists were trying to make. The boundaries between art and life were becoming blurred, artists such as Alan Kaprow were very influential at this time, his "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to what would be called performance art, and his essays set out a series of approaches to understanding the paradoxical relationship between art and life and the nature of meaning. The putting of this type of work behind exhibition glass, if we are not careful, re-introduces the divide between how we think about life and how we experience it. 

The other artist that I remember being of vital importance at this time was Robert Smithson, the detail below of a drawing of stars from one of Keir Smith's drawings in particular reminded me of Smithson's cosmological approach. Smith's drawing of a drawing held down by stones, suggests that the artist should be making drawings out in the landscape and not in the studio, especially as in this case, if the drawing is of star patterns seen at night. 

If we take a typical work by Robert Smithson, such as his ‘St. John in the Desert’, whereby an old engraving of St John is surrounded by collages of electrical diagrams, force-fields and other technical readouts from science manuals and place it next to his essay on Robert Morris; we can think of these two visual/written texts as containing ideas that could flow between each other, intellectual energy at times being converted into electrical flow and vice versa. This perhaps gives an idea of how Smithson's influence worked at the time. 

Robert Smithson: St John in the Desert

This is a short extract from Smithson’s essay on Robert Morris.

'Descartes' cosmology is brought to a standstill. Movement in Morris's work is engulfed by many types of stillness: delayed action, inadequate energy, general slowness, an all over sluggishness. The ready-mades are, in fact, puns on the Bergsonian concept of "creative evolution" with its idea of "ready made categories." Says Bergson, "The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure." But it is just such an "impossibility" that appeals to Duchamp and Morris. With this in mind, Morris's monstrous "ideal" structures are inconsequential or uncertain ready-mades, which are definitely outside of Bergson's concept of creative evolution. If anything, they are uncreative in the manner of a 16th-century alchemist-philosopher-artist. C.G. Jung's writing on "The Materia Prima" offers many clues in this direction. Alchemy, it seems, is a concrete way of dealing with sameness. In this context, Duchamp and Morris may be seen as artificers of the uncreative or decreators of the Real. They are like the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, who "gave up painting to become an alchemist." This might help us to understand both Judd's and Morris's interest in geology. It is also well to remember that Parmigianino and Duchamp both painted "Virgins," when they did paint. Sydney Freedberg observed in the work of Parmigianino, if not in fact, at least in idea'.

There was a sort of ‘hippy’ feeling to all this, and one that for many artists at this time, myself included, seemed a positive and morally uplifting direction to take. That desire for everything to be joined up, for an invisible universe that lay behind this everyday world to be revealed in all its complex glory, was I remember vitally important to the rise of conceptualism. We move in Smithson’s essay from Duchamp, through Descartes, touching on Jung and use a late Renaissance painter as a touchstone that can take us into the world of alchemy. Smithson goes on to examine the nature of thermodynamics and then reflect on the structure of time. Old myths and religious beliefs, as rethought by Joseph Campbell were for our generation as important as the more technological writings of Buckminster Fuller. Fuller invented the term 'ephemeralization' or the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." At the time there was a high degree of optimism that science would soon be fused with some sort of mythic understanding of universal principles and that what used to be called 'magic' was simply some sort of future science. Perhaps we need a dose of that optimism again, and seeing the work of these now all dead artists of my own generation reminded me that art and life always need to be entwined together. 

Every now and again I review an exhibition in the City Art Gallery that I think expands or deepens an idea of what drawing is concerned with, as a reminder to keep going and checking out what is being presented. There will always be a wide range of other approaches to art making represented, at the moment there is an excellent exhibition 'Woodwork' to see, that includes work from various historical periods and from non western cultures. It is easy to ignore something just because it is on your doorstep, make sure you make full use of an excellent local resource. 

Find out what's on here: Leeds Art Gallery  
What's on at the Tetley, where there is another excellent exhibition on at the moment. 

Some earlier posts reflecting on what could be seen in the city art gallery:

Beuys and Cotman
Sculptors' Drawings
Narrative Objects
A gallery presentation of large drawings

Mark-making: Perspectives on Drawing at GoMA

Jonathan Owen

I was in Glasgow last weekend and decided to go and see the exhibition ‘Mark-making’: Perspectives on Drawing at GoMA. If you are in Glasgow it is on until the 20^th of October 2019.

This is a quite small exhibition and it showcases the work of six young contemporary artists - Erica Eyres, Lois Green, Ross Hamilton Frew, Jonathan Owen, Gregor Wright and France-Lise McGurn.

The exhibition curator has organised the work into three pairings, the work being in 3 small spaces that you walk through one after the other. The first pair is of Erica Eyres and Jonathan Owen. I presume they were put together because of their very different responses to photographic imagery. I was particularly interested in Owen’s response to images taken from film stills. As a sculptor he is interested in the possibility of new images arising by the processes of reducing and removing, his Eraser Drawings, made using found book pages, have therefore been described as carvings in two dimensions. Often drawing from cinema history he carefully removes ink from the surface of the page in order to erase the main characters or film stars, reshaping them into new aspects of the scenes they were initially part of.  You could argue that this would be much easier to do in Photoshop, but by doing this by hand, he re-introduces the haptic into the photographic world. This is again something I have posted about before, but his approach is I think unique and well worth looking at in more detail. The ‘ghosts’ of figures left over from the process, remind me of ‘spirit photographs’, which were 19^th century attempts to capture images of ghosts and other spiritual entities. At the time double exposures were not really understood and were often produced by accident in the darkroom and therefore they gave rise to a myth about photography’s ability to capture ghosts. If you want to try Owen's process print your photographs onto sturdy paper using an inkjet printer and then use an electric eraser to work into the print.

Jonathan Owen

The drawings of Erica Eyres are based on images from 1970’s men’s magazines. These drawings have been stripped down to their ‘bare’ essence. The drawing of ‘Mike’, who came from a magazine section called “One for the Ladies” reclines, floppy genitals and all in a pre-selfie time, whereby only the cameraman knew what you were going to look like in print.  Some of the images come from a nudist magazine, including one of middle aged nudes bowling. “They have a distinct awkwardness,” Erica states, “but simultaneously lack the self-conscious, staged quality of the modern selfie.” These ‘stripped down’ drawings have been built up from a minimum of lines, they float in a sea of virgin white; their innocence a strange one as it emerges out of a context of soft porn but also a context of pre-mobile photographic naivety. The drawings feel as if they are slightly distorted, something is not quite right about proportions, perhaps as details from the images were eliminated, the normal reference points disappeared and therefore measurement went slightly off. Whatever it is that has re-shaped these images, the translation of the photographs into drawings is interesting because as always in a translation the translator’s personal interests shape the final form.

Erica Eyres 'Mike'

As I move on through into the next room another set of photographically influenced images, Lois Green’s small monochrome paintings of domestic scenes, line one wall. I was particularly taken with a tiny painting of a clothes horse that could have been painted at any point in the last 50 years. Its tonal range was probably one that a camera would have found very difficult to capture, and above all the surface quality was very seductive, so seductive in fact that I was suffused with a warm almost 1950s glow of familiarity. Green states that ‘her studio practice is currently focused on creating small-scale tonal paintings and drawings from found imagery, photographs and film stills. They are produced by continuously removing and applying (usually) oil or charcoal on a variety of glossed surfaces to describe subtitles and drama in light and tone revealing emotional weight within an image'.

Lois Green

Green goes on to state, 'My work depicts intimate spaces - often domestic settings and the progression of my work is generating more interest in the ambiguities of tone which can bring uncertainty to the reading of an image and question scenes that appear very familiar.’ Her approach is very straightforward and I found very refreshing because of that. Green’s small paintings were presented as drawings, an interesting conundrum that asks questions about where the boundaries are between the two disciplines.

Lois Green

On the opposite wall are the drawings of France-Lise McGurn who often works with painting and drawing to make images that traverse gallery walls, floors and ceilings. She draws on a collected archive of found imagery to create figurative installations which reference notions of sexuality, ecstasy, loss and consciousness. McGurn uses swift brushstrokes, spontaneous lines and repeated marks to create images that feel effortless and have a historical precedent in the work of Henri Matisse.  In this small exhibition of drawings, perhaps the most interesting issue was how by clustering groups of framed drawings together she could suggest that her work was often architecturally focused and designed to evoke mood rather than to analyse culture.

France-Lise McGurn

Ross Hamilton Frew and Gregor Wright were the pair exhibiting in the final room. A room that was kept in low lighting conditions so that Gregor Wright’s computer generated colour drawings could be seen in appropriate lighting conditions. These digital drawings are built up of many layers of different types of digital mark making and a wide palette of colours and suggest that they are in many ways a replacement for painting. Again a question is asked about boundaries between painting and drawing, in this case is it still drawing because it is done on a computer, even though these images are about colour and visual texture? Gregor’s images are suggestive of everything from science fiction landscapes to club interiors and his more conventional uses of drawing materials suggest biomorphic approaches to form making reminiscent of Arshile Gorky.

Gregor Wright

Gregor Wright

Ross Hamilton Frew’s small images were delicate abstractions of line and repeated structures, sometimes opening out into implied variations, all held within a very understated rectilinear format. He seemed to be working with traces of previous printed ephemera, but in the time I was there I found it hard to make the connections I think I was supposed to be making. 

Ross Hamilton Frew

Ross Hamilton Frew

Some of the issues surrounding drawing and photography were opened out in this previous post.

This is what an electric eraser looks like if you have never come across one before.

Climbing as drawing

Climbing and drawing have a lot in common. Both these activities demand very good eye/hand control and looking has to be acute and coupled with a good knowledge of materials if the activity is to be successful. Drawings of climbing routes are particularly interesting because they show us how any particular interest shapes what we see and forms the essential underlying conceptual structure of a drawing. Think of how complex a mountain is. It might be shrouded in mist and only emerge clearly for brief moments. The mist and an appearance that fades out as clouds collect over its peaks may of course be of interest to someone drawing, but except as potential things to beware of, a climber's drawing would be more focused on potential hand and foot holds.

Xia Gui Detail of Remote view of streams and mountains

Xia Gui's Remote view of streams and mountains, is an image made by an artist with an obvious interest and deep knowledge of mountain scenery, which is why it is so beautifully executed, but the interest is more in the visual texture of the experience and not in how to climb the steep crags. However when you read about how Chinese landscape artists approached their work, you often find that before they made their drawings they would walk through the landscape, hike through hard to get to areas and look at the landscape from a variety of distances, both from afar and close to. Getting to know the landscape was a matter of experiencing it and climbing a mountain is of course an extreme experience. However, according to both Zen and Taoism, the attempted control of nature by man is at once absurd and useless, so there is a line that can be crossed between experiencing a place and conquering it. A sensitive climber being one that is climbing to deepen an experience, and a more selfish climber, being one that sees the climb as proof of their own abilities. 

A climber's map

The climber's map above is one that still reveals something of the grandeur of the experience of seeing a mountain but it is also very detailed as to the climbing potential of the various rock faces the mountain is composed of. There are routes such as 'Chinese water torture' or 'Pressure Cooker', each route picked out in a different colour. 

As you get in closer to a climber's map, the rest of the mountain disappears. Only one thing is on the climber's mind, how to use foot and hand holds in order to get to the top. 

Climber's map of a particular route

The focus is precise, the pattern of and distance between hand and foot holes are very important, the drawing below containing very detailed information about a particular climb.

Map of climbing route with X and Y coordinates of the holds

Because of their similarities climbing and art often converge. Lucy Gunning's video 'Climbing around a room' 1993 is a classic work of the time. 

Lucy Gunning: Climbing around my room

The route Gunning takes around her room effectively drawing the space of the room in real time and real space. I have always enjoyed watching this video of her, partly because it defamiliarises a common taken for granted space but also for the fact that she wears a red dress and not special climbing clothing. Somehow this democratises the idea, this could be anybody climbing through these spaces, you too could do this. 

Alex Hartley

Alex Hartley is another artist that climbs, this time over buildings, he often exhibits images of the places he has climbed, with his climbing route mapped out over a photograph or drawing of the building. I first came across his work in Edinburgh at the Fruitmarket Gallery, the image above is of Hartley climbing up the front of the building. in contrast to Gunning I get the feeling that he is putting his mark on the place, in effect conquering it. This more 'male' (or traditionally male associated idea) is certainly an aspect of Matthew Barney's early work.

Alex Hartley: Drawings of climbing routes over buildings

Back in the 1980s Matthew Barney came to our attention with a series of works called 'Drawing Restraints', whereby Barney worked to make drawings within the strictures of self-imposed restraints. In the video Drawing Restraint 2 (1988) Barney is harnessed and pulling against a rope as he attempts to run up a makeshift ramp in order to reach a sheet of drawing paper pinned to a wall. Drawing Restraint 3 (1988) is of Barney in a high-ceilinged exhibition space climbing the wall to reach the ceiling. When he gets there, he makes his drawing and then climbs down. In this case climbing and drawing become combined. However the mountain climbers that make drawings of the climbs they have made also combine the two activities, often making small sketched notes of the hand and foot holes needed in order to attempt the ascent, so that they can develop a detailed map of the climb afterwards. It would be interesting to exhibit the drawings alongside each other. What would they tell us about human beings and their relationship with the rest of the world? 

Matthew Barney talks about Drawing Restraint

Matthew Barney: Climbing and Drawing (Drawing Restraint 3)

There are several other connections between drawing and climbing. The use of ropes and pulleys in particular are common to both practices, plumb lines being used to help artists assess verticality, string gridded surfaces used to help with the transfer and scaling of images. Ropes and pulleys are an essential addition to a sculptor's studio and are used to move heavy weights around, they are of course also used by climbers to help them traverse otherwise impossible surfaces. You can see both sets of tools in combination from the photographic records of the carving of the Mount Rushmore monument overseen by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who both designed the monument and developed the techniques for its construction.

Details of workers carving Mount Rushmore

I was reminded of this link between drawing and climbing when writing my last post on the work of Hew Locke, his use of vertically hanging beads helped to energise the wall spaces around his bead drawings, but in this case the vertical lines are working to facilitate the creation of the huge sculpture itself.
Gutzon Borglum is a fascinating artist, especially in relation to art and politics, so I might devote a further post to him and his work in the future.
Drawing as climbing is closely related to what the 'drawing to perform' community of artists do, and if you are interested in this they advertise up and coming events here. 

Some other posts relating to drawing and dance and other more performative approaches

The Planetary Dance of Anna Halprin
Dancing and working on the floor
Drawing and dance
Performance drawing
Walking and Drawing

Hew Locke and drawing with personal materials

Hew Locke: Nameless

I've long been an admirer of Hew Locke and he has had a marvellous exhibition on at the Icon Gallery in Birmingham, but I'm afraid it closes today. Even so, because the work is so interesting, in particular for those of you thinking of taking your drawing into more installation or site specific directions, I thought it important to put a post up, more as a reminder of how good an artist he is. 

Made of cord and plastic beads this installation really demonstrates how contemporary approaches to drawing can be both spectacular and well crafted. Locke has been 'drawing' with found materials for many years now, I first saw his huge portraits of the queen in a British Art show in Newcastle and have continued to follow his work. He has a very personal way of selecting materials and he has gradually turned what was first of all an interest in certain types of cheap plastic materials, into a personal language. It's interesting in this case to look at how by using black plastic beads he ensures the whole of the wall surface is energised.

An earlier Hew Locke installation at the Hales Gallery

Details

The hanging beads serve to both stabilise the images and by occasionally hanging more beads on the other small 'sun' and 'star' shapes, energise what would have been bare wall surfaces. It is also interesting to see how he copes with architectural features, instead of avoiding them he incorporates them into the images, the vertical fall of the beads again taking the weight in terms of compositional dynamics. 

It is interesting to compare Locke's use of hanging beads with Annette Messager's use of long thin black straight rods or black threads in her installations.

Annette Messager

Both artists are aware that if you want to give structure to something composed of a complex mass of elements, straight linear inserts help to stabilise the image and give points of structure for the viewer to hold on to. If an idea is good enough, use it, ideas belong to everyone. 

More thoughts on the grid

Some thoughts as to how to simplify an image Locke's images must have gone through a process of simplification in order to work with such clear readable profiles. 

Fumage: Drawing with smoke

Because you have to smoke an etching plate so that the drawing shines through clearly as the copper is revealed when a line is scratched through the wax coating, you become very aware of the properties and shapes made by smoke as it drifts around the plate. The wax tapers had to be held close to the plate but not close enough to touch it and you had to keep moving the tapers to ensure an all over even coating. This demanded quite a lot of concentrated control if you were to do it well and it is easy to see how someone doing this could decide to take the technique on further and use it to draw with. Occasionally I used to try out some smoke drawing but I never concentrated enough on it to make anything of value, but some people did. 

A detail of an etching by William Unger of the artist smoking his etching plate. 

Diane Victor's smoke drawings of missing children are made by standing under paper sheets strung out horizontally above her. She then uses a candle flame to draw without scorching or burning the paper. The technique embodies the situation extremely well, missing children becoming ephemeral ghosts, flickering into life and fading back into the soot they are made from. 

Diane Victor: A missing child

Watch this YouTube video below to see how to do this.

The artist Stephen Spazuk demonstrates how to use fumage techniques 

The Surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen is supposed to have been the first person to have used this technique, but from what I have seen he mainly used the technique to stimulate his imagination rather than as a way to make exhibitable images. I'm pretty sure however that the first people to have used this technique would have been cave dwellers over 40,000 years ago, and since then the technique would have been re-discovered time and time again. 

Wolfgang Paalen 1938 Smoke Painting

The important issue is however context and the 'closure' of the idea. In Diane Victor's case the choice of the fumage technique deepens the idea. The drawings are ephemeral, the images float into view on the edge of disappearance and this echoes the subject matter of lost children. If not chosen carefully a technique like this simply becomes a demonstration of skill, a 'look what I can do with smoke' idea, which might be entertaining for 5 minutes but which is not a deep reflection on an issue about loss and the fragility of life, which Diane Victor manages to communicate when she uses the technique. 

The artist Sheila Gallagher at work

The artist Sheila Gallagher uses fumage techniques coupled with sophisticated stencil cutting and you can get a very good idea of how to use fumage from this video of her working. The technique nearly always suggests fragility and ephemeral traces and used with stencils always reminds me of those ghost images of people and other forms of life left on the walls and other surfaces still standing after the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. These images were 'shadows' of people and plants vaporised when the the atomic bomb detonated.

The shadow of plants left after an atomic bomb blast

These smoke and 'nuclear flash' drawings, can be linked to a long sometimes painful history of the shadow, the negative and the silhouette, topics that this blog has already touched upon. However I find that the most poignant of all these types of images is the one below of a shadow of a human being from Hiroshima. When I first saw it I couldn't believe it was real and in many ways I still can't. 

Read this technical manual from page 301 to get an idea of what was unleashed. 

See also

The vignette

Shadows

Articulated collage and shadow play

Further uses of shadow 

Drawing with light