A few years ago the Jerwood Drawing Prize was won by a verbal description. In 2014 Alison Carlier's sound piece 'Adjectives, lines and marks' described at the time as an 'open-ended audio drawing', a 75 seconds long spoken description of an object, was chosen as being a worthy winner, because as the artist put it, "It exists in your head, rather than in a made or finished way. This open-endedness puts it in a similar place to some drawing conventions." The text's source was a reference book on Roman excavations in south London held by the Museum of London. The extract that Carlier had had recorded was her reading aloud a section describing a "hard, red, brown" Roman pot found in the London borough of Southwark. The exhibition was toured to Leeds and I was able to listen to the work and make my own mind up as to its value.
I listened to it several times. It was an interesting idea, but one I felt had little poetry in it, more a concept about the relationship between the languages of art forms than a new observation about the world. The fact that a description in words of something can be seen as a type of drawing, is fascinating and opens out the territory between the two disciplines as fertile soil within which to plant ideas and when Carlier reads her work aloud, it becomes part of the expanded field of drawing which now includes performance.
I was reminded of this recently because I have just been reading Ali Smith's 'How to be Both', another work from 2014.
Extract from Ali Smith's 'How to be Both'
A boy has just watched a horse pee so much urine that a small pool has formed, as he gazes in fascination at this pool something falls into it creating a small ring like disturbance.
Ali Smith describes the following scene thus:
The thing that fell caused a circle to happen, a ring to appear in the piss: the ring widened and widened until it got to the edges and vanished.
It was a small black ball like the head of an infidel: it had a single wing, a hard and feathery-looking thing stuck straight out of it.
The ring that it made in the pool when it fell, though, was gone.
Where’d it go?
I shouted the words, but she was trampling cloth in the big half barrel: she was making the cloth turn white with the soap, she was singing, didn’t hear me, my mother.
I called again.
Where’d it go?
Still she didn’t hear me: I picked up a stone: I aimed at the side of the barrel, I missed, hit a chicken in its sidefeathers instead: the chicken made a chicken noise, jumped and nearly flew: it ran about in a dance that made me laugh, it panicked all the geese and the ducks and the other chickens: but my mother has seen the stone hit the chicken and she leapt out of the barrel and ran towards me with her hand in the air cause she was a despiser of cruel things.
I wasn’t I said. I didn’t. I was calling you. But you were preoccupied so I threw it to get your attention. I didn’t mean to hit the chicken. The chicken got in the way.
She dropped her hand to her side.
Where did you learn that word? She said.
Which word I said?
Preoccupied, she said. Attention.
From you, I said.
Oh, she said.
She stood in the dust with her wet feet: her ankles were beaded with light.
Where’d it go? I said.
Where’d what go? she said.
The ring, I said.
What ring? She said.
She got straight down and looked in the pool: she saw the winged thing.
That’s not a ring, she said. That’s a seed.
I told her what happened: she laughed.
Oh she said. That sort of ring. I thought you meant a ring for a finger, like a wedding ring or a gold ring.
My eyes filled with tears and she saw.
Why are you crying? She said. Don’t cry. Your sort of ring is much better than those.
It went, I said. It’s gone.
Ah, she said. Is that why you are crying? But it hasn’t gone at all. And that’s why it’s better than gold. It hasn’t gone, it’s just that we can’t see it any more. In fact, it’s still going, still growing. It’ll never stop going, or growing wider and wider, the ring you saw. You were lucky to see it at all. Cause when it got to the edge of the puddle it left the puddle and entered the air instead, it went invisible. A marvel. Didn’t you feel it go through you? No? But it did, you’re inside it now. I am too. We both are. And the yard. And the brickpiles. And the sandpiles. And the firing shed. And the houses. And the horses, and your father, your uncle, and your brothers, and the workmen, and the street. And the other houses. And the walls, and the gardens and houses, the churches, the palace tower, the top of the cathedral, the river, the fields behind us, the fields way over there, see? See how far your eye can go. See the tower and the houses in the distance? It’s passing through them and nothing and nobody will feel a thing but there it is doing it nonetheless. And imagine it circling the fields and the farms we can’t see from here. And the towns beyond those fields and farms all the way down to the sea. And across the sea. The ring you saw in the water’ll never stop travelling till the edge of the world and then when it reaches the edge it’ll go on beyond that too. Nothing can stop it.
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