Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors, Even
Perhaps the most important
individual piece of work in relation to drawing with non-traditional art
materials is Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors,
Even). The materials used are chosen very carefully as part of a complex set of meanings pre-thought through by Duchamp and detailed in his comprehensive notes which were themselves published as 94 separate documents in what was called ‘The Green Box’.
‘The first step was to make a full-size perspective drawing from the
given dimensions in the plan and elevation and other Green Box notes for the lower part of the Glass, in the hope of
producing a drawing similar to the one which once existed on the plaster wall of Duchamp's studio in Paris, but which has since been destroyed.
To produce this he found it necessary to do dozens of other perspective studies
and to work with threads, using the vanishing points to establish the perspective
construction. References were made to the original Glass more to gain knowledge
of the construction of subject matter than to copy delineations on the surface
of the original. Slight differences in perspective were accepted to maintain an
integrity in the reconstruction equalling that of the original. Tracings were
made, from the new perspective, of each of the elements with key lines added to
relate them to each other. These tracings, reversed, were attached to the front
of the glass to give the positioning of lead wire, formed to the drawing, then
cemented to the back of the glass with mastic varnish.
Some of Duchamp’s materials carry with them an
almost ‘mythic’ story, such as the dust used as a means of filling in between
the lines of his lead lined shapes.
Dust Breeding: Man Ray
This photograph by
Man Ray of what looks like a landscape is in fact a layer of dust that had
gathered on the surface of the Large Glass when it had been left for a while in
Duchamp’s studio. Duchamp eventually wiped the dust from the surface of the
work except for certain areas where it was fixed with glue, thus preserving it
as an embodiment of the passage of time.
While the dust was left to settle Duchamp had to hang a sign nearby to
prevent cleaning attempts by well-meaning visitors: “Dust breeding: To be
respected” It took several months for a thick film of dust to settle on the
surface. Dust, a sign of
neglect, becomes the product of purposeful inactivity.
To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye...
It’s interesting to
examine the links between the last two posts on illusion and materials in relation to Duchamp’s work because it shows how they could be combined. He was
fascinated by perspective and the idea of viewpoint, having already done work such as ‘To
Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for
Almost an Hour’ and his final painting called Tu m’.
The cast shadows in Tu m’ refer to three existing
ready-mades, the bicycle wheel, corkscrew, and hat rack. Rendered
illusionistically is a pointing painted hand and rip and alongside these trompe l’oeil elements are
real objects: a bottle brush, a bolt, and safety pins. He uses both
perspective and axonometric representational systems to depict coloured rays
extending out from lines that represent an earlier work ‘3 Standard Stoppages’ and
the whole image is meant to be read as an anamorphic projection which ‘rights’
itself if you look at it from the right hand side. Also included are actual
objects such as a brush which itself emerges from the tromp l’oeil painted rip in the canvas which is “repaired” with a real
safety pin.
Tu m'
Duchamp in putting all these various elements
together is in effect pointing to the various ways art can engage with illusions
of reality: as technical drawing, perspective projection, shadow, trompe l’oeil,
or as a re-reading of real objects designed to destabilise
the way we think of reality itself.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that as an
artist you can move your attention between different approaches, at one time
developing a specific approach to materials and their choice, and then perhaps
refocusing on the private story behind these choices and developing strategies
for how the various elements are composed or brought together. You need to
decide how an approach to visualisation will affect the viewer. Is the work
going to be illusionistic, image based, abstract or non-figurative? If illusionistic
to what level will illusion be taken, is it going to ‘fool the eye’ or are you
going to give the viewer a way into seeing the illusion for what it is? Point
of view is essential here, be this a physical one, as in the case of
perspectives that can only be seen accurately from one place, or whether it is
in the choice of a material because of a very private
association, or a material chosen to reflect a scientific notion in relation to its
importance to the way the world works (perhaps how certain gases cause global
warming), or a chosen alternative logic, such as alchemy or economic value. Decisions like this both establish the artist's point of view and become the visual entry points for an audience eager to establish their own point of view.
As soon as you begin the most humble drawing,
perhaps a small pencil sketch, possibilities open out. You can take a point of view on the subject
to be drawn, the way its drawn, the type of paper its drawn on, the nature of
the pencil, the proclivities and interests of the drawer, all open out avenues
for an artist's investigation.
I’ll leave you with one final thought about
material. How do pencil marks ‘adhere’ to the paper?
The graphite itself adheres to paper fibres
using what are called London forces (click to read the full
scientific description) it's not a strong adhesion because as
you know the marks can be erased easily with a rubber or smudged with a finger and of course some of the graphite is
just mechanically stuck between the paper fibres. We tend to forget that at an
atomic level everything is in flux, there is no such thing as a fixed entity,
so all the time we are ourselves exchanging molecules atoms and electrons with
our immediate environment and as we perform actions, such as making a drawing,
we are simply taking part in a continuous exchange of energy/matter flow. There
is enough graphite deposited in a line drawn by your pencil to conduct electricity
and the only reason you are able to firmly hold that pencil is that at some
point calcium-binding phosphoproteins came into being following
the violent moves of tectonic plates about 1.5 billion years ago which saw huge
amounts of minerals, including CaCO3 being washed into the oceans. Unicellular
organisms had to find ways to cope with these excessive amounts of minerals and
one way was to process this new influx by creating what we now know as bone, first
of all by making protective outer shells and much later by developing the same
process inside of organisms, thus making the first skeletons. Without this
skeleton you would not be able to hold the pencil… “and so it goes”, as Kurt
Vonnegut would say. All materials are of course unusual and fascinating, it's the artist's job to communicate that to everyone else.
The Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K in his video and sculpture installation 'The Bell Project' calls this process of re-thinking materials, 'possibilities of transformation'. In order to make this work he followed and filmed the activities of a Kurdish scrap yard owner, who collected military waste left over from the various conflicts that had taken place in the area. The scrap dealer then had the metals melted down into ingots which could then be sold to various manufacturing centres as raw material for new products. Hiwa K, aware of the old European tradition of having church bells melted down to make weapons in time of war, decided to reverse the process and had ingots from the Kurdish scrap yard sent to a bell boundary in Italy and made into a bell, decorated with designs taken from Assyrian relief sculptures.
By developing a new narrative for these materials Hiwa K makes us aware of the economic complexities of conflict and the need to at times reverse the processes at work if we are ever to heal the wounds of continuous warfare.
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