Drawing as idea and process

Football manager's drawing, trying to explain a move to the team

Communicating an idea to people through drawing is not just the province of artists. It's interesting to compare the work of an anonymous football coach above and the work of Janet Cohen below, who has spent many years responding to baseball plays and drawing them. Cohen was one of the artists chosen for the exhibition, 'Drawing as idea and process' and many of the artists in the show used ways of drawing that you might in the past have associated with other professions or which follow rules that can at times appear very non expressive, but which when followed reveal essential things about how we break down experiences in order to make sense of them.

Janet Cohen

Janet Cohen reveals how the diagram can capture meaning just as much as a photograph or an illustrative drawing of a situation can. How many times have we all had to sit and listen as an aficionado of a game has told stories of how a particular move was made or how a sequence of events led up to a goal or clever home run?  The diagram tells it all, where the protagonists stood and how they were related to each other and how events unfolded in space. It tells us who moved and where to and reveals so much more than a simple photographic snapshot would. The drawing by an anonymous football coach is interesting in that it adds into the situation little details that I presume are to make it easier for the players to understand what is demanded of them. The tiny corner flags drawn in the top corners make us aware of what it is we are looking at, and the badly drawn half circle at the bottom of the drawing signals that this is a drawing of only half the pitch. We can only guess what the dashed line represents over on the right of the drawing, but it feels as if something is being excluded or kept to one side. We see these types of drawings now on TV, but usually now rendered using a computer drawing program, and often as demonstrations as to what actually happened, as to how players moved in relation to a significant event in a match.
Games are often thought of as practice for war and diagrams of troop movements in relation to fought over territory are sometimes not dissimilar to those used to visualise moves in a football match.

Diagram of the battle of Waterloo

The artist Tiffany Chung has used her awareness of these issues in her work, several times, from the following of changing boundaries during an actual war, as in her work for the 2015 Venice Biennale to her more sociological investigations into how people cross boundaries as they become more urbanized, which she has been exploring more recently. Once again it is process, in this instance one driven by mapping processes that gives form to her ideas.

Tiffany Chung

Diagrams and maps are not the only formats that artists can use when developing a process with which to drive their work. Hadi Tabatabai has for the last 15 years been cutting and drawing and composing delicate, meticulously executed pattern-based works in mixed media. Many of his images explore the form of the line as a physical space; he states, “I view the ‘line’ as empty space without an agenda or allegiance.”  The materials he uses constantly change but his process of repetition and layering in order to gradually fill or occupy a surface remains constant throughout.

Detail of threads used to draw lines across a canvas

Hadi Tabatabai: Detail of the artist at work

What is interesting about Tabatabai's approach is his attention to detail, look at how the threads are spaced around the edge of his canvas or how meticulous he is when cutting out small squares of card. Sometimes a process is inseparable from the crafting that is needed for its execution.  

Sol Lewitt

The use of seriality as a strategy in art was first seen in the work of artists such as Sol Lewitt and Don Judd but it is not always about tight adherence to mathematical permutations. Martin Noël's work was in many ways an exploration of processes of seriality, but he was able to also introduce a deep emotional engagement into his approach.

Martin Noël

As the coloured backgrounds become more intense, you sense the growing emotional intensity behind Noël's work. His lines are exploratory of the surface area, but not as geometric measuring devices. His lines are emotional feeling indicators, they reach out into the various fields of colour and reveal the uncertainty of Noël's hand. Lines reach across the void, they touch and they tentatively exist, if only for a moment in their chosen field of colour. When you see several of Noël's images in a row you begin to try and predict where the lines should go next. It reminded me of those tests you can take to see whether or not you have approaching dementia or Alzheimer`s, tests that check whether or not you can predict the next pattern after looking at several previous layouts.

I find it interesting that the prediction of seriality is as much a test of I.Q. or the growing loss of it, as it is a strategy for the construction of processes for making art. Drawing of course is operating as a way for both artists and the medical profession to test out certain ways of thinking and I would suggest that it is this issue that lies at the centre of what a serial process is about. If this, then this, if a move is made in this direction, the next move ought to be this... from playing chess to following the rules of logic, such as 'for all propositions p, it is impossible for both p and not p to be true', or thinking of an art idea as an argument, which is itself a sequence of statements.
Robert Ryman is an excellent artist to look at when you want to explore how imposing restrictions on work can help generate ideas.  
As well as working to his own detailed instructions when developing ideas for paintings and drawings, he has also developed instructions for installations. He will even detail whether or not some works are fastened to the wall with nails or screws, or with a particular sort of glue or drawing pin. Ryman is very aware of how the display of a work changes the viewer experience.

Robert Ryman

Imposing restrictions within which to work often pays off because it forces you to become inventive. A process can therefore be seen as a type of restriction within which to work and if so, you can see it as a generative thing, a way of producing something out of nothing. This is something mathematicians are aware of, perhaps the mathematics that can visualise a quantum flux within a vacuum are very similar in intent to the ideas surrounding decisions by an artist who has imposed a rigid system on him or herself. If process is the idea, then what will be seen to be done will be its unravelling, be this an initial quantum flux or a decision to make a mark here rather than there, after that everything will be subject to the laws of entropy.

Try and use the time of the Xmas break to think about the possibilities that process brings into being. Even the process of putting Christmas lists together or thinking about new menus can be reused as art, nothing is ever without interest. Happy holidays x.

See also:

Process and its documentation