Drawing with alternative materials

Every material comes with its history, associations and stories. Some materials we are so familiar with that we tend to just accept them, especially the 'normal' drawing materials such as graphite, charcoal and ink, but even these have specific histories, though their associations tend to be closely woven with the history of art. In the 16th century in Cumbria for instance people used graphite for marking sheep.

Because some materials are closely associated with art making, those usually used for other purposes, and then taken up by artists, are often thought of as 'alternative' materials. This means that any 'reading' of the work tends to highlight the issues surrounding the material. Questions are asked such as why the artist may have chosen a specific material, connections the material may have with its primary use are often looked at as being essential to the meaning of the work. This doesn't mean that every artist using a non traditional material is using it to make a point, but many do.

Vic Muniz renders familiar images drawn from pop culture and art history in a variety of materials, and then photographs them. He has fashioned the Mona Lisa from peanut butter and jelly, Elizabeth Taylor from diamonds, Caravaggio’s Narcissus from junk and his self-portrait from dice. As the critics state, ‘He explores the nature of representation in an image-saturated world’.

One of Muniz’s bodies of work is a series of pictures rendered in chocolate sauce, the best known probably being Action Photo, after Hans Namuth (1997). Muniz’s appropriation and translation of this image into chocolate is an interesting conjoining of subject and material, the viscous chocolate syrup being a perfect stand-in for Pollock’s wet, shiny paint drips. However chocolate sauce is used as sweet topping on ice cream or other deserts, it’s the sweetener that goes on top of the sweet. It’s pure decadence, a product that only a very rich society would invent. So how does this affect our reading of Muniz’s work? Is Muniz, an artist that is doing very well thank you, making a comment on the art world itself? Does he see the obsession with artists and their images as in some ways the equivalent of chocolate sauce?

His ‘Pictures of Diamonds’ consists of portraits of iconic Hollywood stars, such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, created entirely of diamonds. Muniz is playing upon associations that we make between glamour and diamonds. The portraits are ephemeral; once captured by the camera, the composition is destroyed to make the next arrangement. The fleeting beauty of the “diamond diva” is immortalized by the permanence of the photograph.

I’m not arguing that these ‘readings’ are correct, simply that we are prone to make these sorts of connections when faced with art made of certain materials.  

Vik Muniz Action Painting

Vic Muniz: Diamond Diva

‘Valentina, The Fastest’ The Sugar Children’:1996

I think the most interesting of Muniz’s photographs are his ‘Sugar Children’. These are the children of St Kitts’ sugar growing and processing workers. He spent a lot of time there and got to know these children, hence the titles of the portraits. Big James Sweat Buckets, Jacynthe Loves Orange Juice or Valentina, The Fastest. It takes Muniz a lot of effort to make these images, a tiny vacuum is used to move sugar grains around, together with cotton swabs, tweezers, and brushes to rearrange and build density, highlight, and shadow. As the image is built, gradually the sugar becomes recognizable as a image, in the words of critic Andy Grundberg, this work operates “in the unstable territory between object and image, material and representation, fact and metaphor.”

Becoming cane-cutters in the sugar fields is the most likely fate for these children, the sweet substance of their portrayal both an image trap and a future foretold. The sugar is we know by now swept away, only the grains of the photographic paper’s silver nitrate now preserving these images and like all photographs, now existing as ghosts of some lost past.

Karla Black uses materials like paper, bath bombs, nail polish, and tape. She uses the forms of a sort of Post-Minimalism to make ethereal work that goes beyond the purely visual. Her work relies on an awareness of touch, smell and the visual texture of the bedroom or the bathroom. She states, “I prioritize the material experience over language or symbolism or metaphor or narrative” The materials are ends in themselves, the work sits on the edge between installation, architecture, drawing, painting and sculpture and in this blurring of boundaries she finds a personal territory. Drawing however lies beneath it all, Includes Use (2016), took about five days to install and began with Black making a quick, spontaneous drawing with chalk on the floor, which her two assistants then filled in, using powders that they had mixed together and shipped over from Glasgow.

Includes Use, 2016, powder paint, plaster powder, toilet paper and glitter

 Or Else It’s Just Surface, 2016, sugar paper, mud, oil and body paint, feathers and ribbon

Black is much more intuitive than Muniz, she says about the way she works, “I work purely out of desire. I love oils and gels and pastes and powders, and I’ve just let myself use them.”

There is no right way to approach materiality, whether you have a clear conceptual reason or whether you just love certain materials, what is central to this sort of approach is that the material 'speaks' with its own tongue.

If you want to begin reading around this approach and use some theory to back up what you are doing a good start could be 'Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things' by Jane Bennett. She reminds us that we are all just made of matter, bone is simply a chemical secretion that allows us to stand up, we are made of the same stuff as everything else and she asks us to look at the world as if on the one hand the things we use are like us and on the other hand that we are like the things we use. In doing so she hopes that we will develop a more sympathetic idea of a world that we usually approach from the human point of view. What are we to a stone? Does the world listen to you as carefully as you listen to it? In the end we are all star stuff, products of deep inner star fusion, spewed out into the void and slowly coalescing into ever changing forms, one moment matter is composed in vegetable forms, at another time it is an inert mineral and occasionally it might come together to form what we call a human being.

See also: 

Drawing with unusual materials
Drawing as material thinking
Material thinking