Images of the city part 2

There are many ways of responding to the city in drawing and more contemporary practices have included animation, mapping, performance and installation. Francis Alÿs, is always interesting, he can paint, draw, make films and construct installations.  Pacing, 2001 is a very simple work that records the way he walks.

Francis Alys: Pacing

 

Shoe Shine Blues is a much more complex piece that evokes the tedium and class differences that lie at the core of much manual labor. 366 animation cells break the act of polishing a shoe down into individual motions and the resultant accompanying ten-minute animation shows the same act repeated over and over, to the sound of clarinet notes and a voice singing lines such as "nothing to see." The result is complex and poetic. The cell drawings as they sprawl across the walls reflect the idea that art making can be as monotonous as other forms of labour.

 

Francis Alys: Shoe Shine Blues

Interesting responses to the city are not always found under the umbrella of fine art practice, this Map quilt of Providence, R.I. (below) by Robin Camille Davis is a personal response to making something for a partner, however it points to an alternative possibility when making images of the city.

Han Feng: Floating City

 

Han Feng’s Floating City is neither sculpture nor drawing, it is composed of hundreds of tracing paper buildings of various sizes, their laser-printed details deriving from images of city architecture, which are grouped in dense clusters and hung from the ceiling with transparent thread. The city becomes weightless, semi-transparent and fragile; something imagined, impossible to realise in reality.

Kathy Prendergast: City Drawing

 

Kathy Prendergast’s ‘City Drawings’ and ‘Black Maps’ explore the potential of the city map. She obsessively draws penciled connections between significant points of the city, her hand tracing the journeys that the mind takes as it mentally inhabits a map. Her more current series ‘Black Maps’, is produced by a laborious process of inking-out areas of road maps from countries around the world, leaving visible small white dots that denote areas of habitation. On closer inspection, roads, place names and geographical details can still be discerned underneath the densely hatched black marker surface and viewed from a distance, they have the appearance of a star charts.

 

Kathy Prendergast: Black Map

 

plan b are the artists Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers. They perform together and collaborate on each other's solo works. In particular they are interested in the city as a place to walk through and they often use GPS messaging systems to record their activities. There is a lot of information about this on plan b’s website

plan b

Whether making drawings from direct observation or constructing drawings in order to create a dialogue with the city and its processes and activities, there is an unending stream of information to be unpicked and responded to if you live in a dense urban environment. In particular new technologies are opening out fascinating potential areas for artists to explore and make new work within.

See also:

Images of the city Part one

Images of the city part three

Images of the city part four Collage

Composition drawing and landscape