Responses to the fragility of being alive

The lockdown in England is beginning to ease and as we all begin to emerge blinking into the sunlight, it is going to be very interesting to see how artists have used drawing and other practices to think about the situation they have just experienced.  I know that it has been a subject many of the students I have been working with have taken on board and as a subject I suspect it is going to be with us for quite some time yet. 

Szu-Han Ho has been thinking about making devices to help people cope with the fact they are not allowed to touch anyone. By making the drawings out of little scraps of material she is able to heighten the feeling of fragility and unworthiness many of us began to have as time went on and we began to yearn for a time when you could just simply hug someone. My grandchildren live in Scotland and I've not been able to see them in the flesh for a year now, so I found these little fragile images particularly poignant.  

Device for Hugging, COVID19

Device for Bingewatching, COVID19

Device for Spooning (Big Spoon), COVID19

Szu-Han Ho has done some very interesting work and she is a good example of an artist that can respond to life as it emerges from fiction as well as real life situations. I have read far more this last year than for a while and this may be the case for many of us, if we cant go out and have real life experiences we have to get our stories from somewhere. 

In the work above she has responded to a page in Robinson Crusoe and constructed a simple series of platforms for two groups of singers to stand on. When the piece is working, the two groups sing a call and response refrain using Defoe's text. Many people have felt devoid of all hope during this past year but they have pulled through, and solace in books and the sound of choirs has often helped in that process.

Taking something from the past and reimagining it is something I suspect many of us have done this year. 

Dario Robleto | Body as Data

Dario Robleto talks about his work

We have had to look at graphs and listen to statistics about bodies every morning, evening and night this past year and we can forget that amongst masses of data for every point on a graph there is a real human being having a real traumatic reaction to something that is totally and hugely significant to that individual. Dario Robleto tries to remind us of this by returning to images made of heartbeats during the late 19th century. 

Jonathan Borofsky's 'Heartlight' 1991

Robleto's work reminded me of Jonathan Borofsky's 'Heartlights' the first of which I saw in Barcelona in 1992, these sculptures sent out an audio and visual transmission of his heartbeat and as you stood in front of one you felt your own body attune to the constant rhythmic beat and visual flickering. Borofsky's 'Heartlight' is still one of the most powerful self-portraits I have ever come across, somehow you were sucked into his actual body; levels of empathy were raised incredibly high simply by experiencing someone else's heartbeat so intensely. 

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer 'Last Breath'

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's work is always interesting. I remember seeing a wonderful installation of his in Venice, whereby he had the ceiling of a large space covered in light bulbs, an on and off pulse was being carried from one light bulb to another. When you reached the other end of the space you had just walked through, you were directed to climb up to a dais and hold two electronic sensors that were used to calculate the rhythm of your heart beat, this rhythm was then passed on to a light bulb right above your head, gradually the rhythm was passed on to other light bulbs until you lost sight of your own pulse amongst all the others. However the work that for me holds most resonance in relation to our current situation is 'Last Breath'. This is an installation designed to store and circulate the breath of a person forever. A brown paper bag inflates and deflates automatically due to a motorised bellows similar to those found in artificial respirators in hospitals. The apparatus hangs on a wall and is activated 10,000 times a day, the typical respiratory frequency for an adult at rest, and it punctuates this relentless series of breaths with an occasional sigh, 158 of them a day. Each stroke of the machine advances a digital counter that beeps. The breath circulates between the bellows and the paper bag through a ribbed transparent plastic tube that emits a faint and hypnotic low sound, whilst the paper bag makes a rhythmic crushing sound as it inflates and deflates. The first copy of the piece stores the breath of Cuban singer Omara Portuondo; so that after she dies people will be able to still experience her "Last Breath". 

I'm sure that once the pandemic crisis is over we will find that some wonderful pieces of art have been made in response to it, but what the best work does is to transcend the particular situation and to find something of universal significance. 

See also:

Self portrait drawings

Drawing with smoke

Uncertain certainty 

Why make art?

Drawing and mindfulness: part one

Drawing and mindfulness: part two

Drawing and mindfulness: part three

Drawing and mindfulness: part four

Drawing and mindfulness: part five

Unica Zurn

Unica Zurn

Unica Zurn is one of those artists often left out of the story of modern art, because they are thought to be of secondary significance or and this is often the case, left out because they were women, and the people who were controlling the construction of the canon were men.

Unica Zurn and Hans Bellmer 

Zurn was at one point Hans Bellmer's partner and she encouraged him in his erotic sado-masochistic ventures, allowing herself to be bound and photographed in poses very like those taken up by his dolls. 

Image of Unica Zurn tied up by Hans Bellmer 

These images of Bellmer's would be unthinkable without Zurn's participation and they sit very awkwardly in the history of Surrealism, because they are very real and in their reality they make us uncomfortable. In some ways they prefigure the work of Jenny Saville. In the mid 1990s she collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford to produce a series of photographs in which he photographed her from below lying on a sheet of clear Perspex. Her body was pushed, stretched and squashed, Saville transforming herself into a sculptural form that was constantly being moulded and re-made.

Jenny Saville: Closed Contact, 1995-6,

However Saville is in control of the presentation of her images and Zurn was often unacknowledged when Bellmer's photographs were exhibited, her name gradually disappearing from view even as Bellmer's own was being etched into the canon of modernism. 

However Zurn was also an artist in her own right and she had a convoluted relationship not just with Bellmer but with Henri Michaux with who she experimented with hallucinogenics as well as having an intense affair. She was it seemed someone who was vital to both Bellmer and Michaux's ability to function, her intensity and open nature, gradually though slipping into mental illness, especially after her drug taking period when she was first having a relationship with Michaux. In an essay he wrote in 1957 Bellmer had this to say about his relationship with Zurn. 'A man in love with a woman and himself... is in a peculiar hermaphroditic interconnection between the male and female principles in which the female structure predominates. What is always vital is that the image of a woman must have been 'lived' (experienced) by the man in his own body before it can be 'seen' by the man'. Bellmer was in effect lost in her image, an image Zurn was very aware of as being something she had been playing with and constructing for several years; her explorations into repressed desires, nightmares and the subconscious, emerging in both literary form, such as in her novel, 'The man of Jasmin and other texts: impressions from a mental illness' as well as in her visual depictions of other worldly creatures. 

Untitled 1959

Unica Zurn

We seem to have come a long way since the 1950s, the struggle to maintain a separate identity as a creative within a male dominated society must have been not just tough, but destabilising as she was used as a 'muse' and in effect a 'stage prop' for an artist who's career at the time was failing. There is something about the way her drawings of heads inside heads swirl around themselves as if swimming in their own space, that still resonate as images of a human being searching for a connection with the world around her; perhaps intuitively she was more in touch with the world than she or the male artists that surrounded her ever knew. 

I have been looking at her work as an indicator of how to tap into an more intuitive way of visualising the body and in particular I have decided that her drawing 'Untitled 1959' is a possible way for me to visualise Markov blankets, more on which I shall dwell on in a future post. 

See also:

The continuing influence of Surrealism

Pop, Expressionist Surrealism

A line of disjuncture

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Diagrams: Visualising the invisible

Diagrams are powerful things. They have a certain conviction about them that not only helps an idea become clearer, but makes it believable. I'm convinced by Descartes' 'Vortices' below as an image because I've also seen diagrams of how magnets work. Descartes' model of the universe was drawn up in 1644 and was based on his idea that there were invisible whirlpool like forces that moved the planets. These forces, he argued, were composed of some sort of ethereal liquid like matter. His diagram looked at 350 years after it was first drawn, reminded me of those wonderful images made by bubbles as they cling together.  

Vortices: René Descartes

Bubbles have often been used to think about hypercubes, which is another idea that is very difficult to think about without a diagram. 

Bubble visualisation of a hypercube

From one to two to three to four dimensions

The mathematical reality of the hypercube

An alternative view

A hypercube is though at least theoretically justified and as an idea it rests firmly in the realm of a reasonable possibility. But what about those diagrams of things that are the products of a fevered imagination? I find these just as interesting, perhaps even more so, because what they are doing is making the invisible visible. 

Grant Carlin

These diagrams above come from the artist Grant Carlin's website, he is building an imaginary universe, that has its own laws. There are people who have powerful imaginations and a diagram will always help those imaginations actualise themselves. 

Helene Adelaide Shelby: Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions

Helene Adelaide Shelby's diagram is less fantastic than Grant Carlin's but in many ways stranger. The idea was to have criminals interrogated by a skeleton, it would have had glowing red eyes and a spectral voice, its operator hidden behind a wall. I was trying to research 'visualising the invisible' and came across her idea by chance. It reminded me of all those thousands of diagrams in patent offices all over the world, many of them never realised, like some sort of psychic energy banks, all waiting for that moment when they will be released upon the world in their full manic glory. 

I have been back making diagrams myself, trying to visualise how a particular topographic space could be envisioned, a way of thinking about the body and the spaces it occupies at the same time. It is an interesting process, how do you rethink the way the continuous surface of the body, (think of how the skin gradually flows into the mouth or into your anus or down into a nose or ear), can be understood? Could it be like a Klein bottle? If so how does it relate to more extended spaces? 

From a sequence of diagrams illustrating how interoception can morph into exteroception

These diagrams have their roots in René Descartes' Vortices, diagrams that show how to use vectors to visualise changes in a fluid, as well as Faraday's lines of force, but perhaps their real ancestor is Uccello's perspective study of a mazzocchio. Artists and scientists are always trying to re-visualise how to think about bodies in space. 

But I'm also thinking of cages and traps, which is why I think Shelby's diagram interested me. However, could a cage become a hypercube? 

Cage or trap?

The artist Hundertwasser used diagrams to explain both his world view and how particular projects might work to support that view. 

Hundertwasser: The five skins

Hundertwasser's idea of the five skins was another reference I was aware of as I developed my diagrams. The human body and the earth are brought together as if linked by layers, which I was thinking of as topologies. Hundertwasser's diagrams are also womb like, we emerge gradually to embrace the earth and the universe. 

I'm very interested in that time around the end of the 19th century, because it was when so many things were about to change and it was as if new ways of thinking were being literally plucked out of the air, from the post-impressionist movement in art, where artists like Van Gogh, Cezanne and Seurat were emerging, to new visions in science and attempts to rethink what religion was all about. In the middle of all this were visionaries who's work didn't stand the test of time, but who's work nevertheless when revisited can offer many insights into our current times. Thomas Kuhn produced a theory about the structure of scientific revolutions, this was often set out as a diagram.

As you can see in Kuhn's diagram above progress in science is not a smooth curve of gradually built information, it is more like a series of jerky movements, whereby the models of the world science gives us begin to feel a bit shaky, and as they do new ideas as to why this is so proliferate, and the end of the nineteenth century was just such a time. Science was in need of some new ways of thinking and Einstein would provide some, but before the new world of quantum theory and spacetime could begin to have traction, a lot of other possibilities also emerged and as an artist I'm allowed to revisit them in my search for ways to visualise the invisible. For instance C. W. Leadbeater's treatise 'Man visible and invisible' details how etheric substances are seen by clairvoyants in their auratic visions.  

The astral body of the average man: from Man Visible and Invisible 

Brett's work on geometrical psychology fits into a similar category and has helped me to develop a conceptual bridge between the latest work in neuropsychology and the use of diagrams of body image schemas to help demonstrate how intellectual concepts are developed out of a deep body awareness. 

Benjamin Brett: Diagrams from 'Geometrical Psychology'

Rudolf Arnheim's diagrams of underlying structural skeletons and how they explain the dynamic forces at work during the act of perception, are in some way connected to Brett's ideas. For instance Arnheim suggests that a circle or disk if perceived within an image's visual field is affected by hidden structural factors. If seen at the centre of these forces there is a point of balance and rest, and as we move away from the centre, there are other points that are suggested by geometry as also being more in balance or 'right'. 

Balance schema based on Arnheim

These points of balance are only balanced in our acts of perception, Arnheim's hidden structures of 'forces' are psychological not actual unlike gravitational forces. This is where Mark Johnson steps in and demonstrates that we then use body schemas to build conceptual ideas via metaphor. 

In the case of balance, one can easily see a link between visual balance and physical balance. As a young healthy person I stand up straight, but if I am ill or get old I am more likely be become unbalanced and fall over or have to lie down. I can begin to associate certain sorts of real life experience with balance. Gradually I find that I see some things as being 'balanced' and others as 'off balance'. Balance being linked to some form of rightness and off balance as some form of wrongness. Here we begin to see the development of the idea of the scales of justice. 

The scales of justice

Two disks in balance

Mark Johnson in 'The body in the mind', again using diagrams, explains how we then build metaphorical extensions and interconnections of balance schemata. The scales of justice emerge from what he calls a 'twin-pan balance'. 

Types of balance according to Johnson

Johnson then uses these schemata to show how additional senses of balance are used by what he calls 'imaginative schemata'. Finally he explains how these basic schemata lead to concepts such as the balance of logical argument, legal / moral balance and mathematical equality, such as the = sign. It would also seem that there are various ways that schemata can be combined.

A collection

A merge

Ordering or structuring 

You can see these various approaches at work when more complex diagrams are being put together, as in the work of Marc Ngui. 

Marc Ngui: Diagram from 1000 Plateaus

Marc Ngui has made a diagrammatic version of Deleuze and Guattari's '1,000 Plateaus' and has applied his skills to other complex bodies of knowledge such as quantum mechanics. What I find interesting is that the diagrams I have looked at come from every discipline, from mathematics, to psychology, economics via philosophy to art, all these disciplines find diagrams powerful communication vehicles. I suppose what I'm also doing here is checking out my own decision to begin creating diagrams to clarify my thoughts about topographic spaces and somatic awareness, some of these issues will therefore no doubt find their way into the writing I'm now doing in relation to how I might visualise inner body perception. 

See also:

Designing Life Hacks diagrams

Shusaku Arakawa's Diagrams for the imagination

Faraday's lines of force

The diagram as art and spirit guide

Diagram as art form

Between art, geometry, emotion and science. 

Geometrical psychology 

Eye music

Vanessa Baird, Tracy Emin and Munch

Vanessa Baird: The cherry blossom in my neighbour’s garden - Oh it looks really nice, 2019

Vanessa Baird

Vanessa Baird is an artist who has directly confronted her own life as a source of imagery.  As a drawer she is prolific and uses whatever is around her as inspiration, often revealing magical fairytales existing deep down in a daily existence that could easily dissolve into despair. She lives in Norway, but I think she may have also lived in Scotland as her mother is an artist who made her reputation there. In fact her mother appears in her images; a women now well into her 90s who needs looking after, at the same time that Baird's teenage children are also seeking her attention. The continuous distractions of her home life are not the only things she has to contend with, she has a long term illness herself. Somehow in the middle of it all, she keeps making drawings and as she does the chaos of domesticity begins to morph these drawings into something else, something that looks as if it was frightened into being by the ghost of Edvard Munch. 

Munch's work is back on exhibition in England in the Tracy Emin / Edvard Munch exhibition 'The Loneliness of the Soul' at the Royal Academy, which is on until August 1st. 

Tracy Emin

Munch

Emin

Emin

Munch

Munch

Tracy Emin

Both Baird and Emin look back to Munch as an artist that was able to communicate personal tragedy and existential despair using a personal language of nervous markmaking, shallow spaces and acidic colour, a language that can be adapted in several ways, as a comparison between Baird and Emin reveals. 

The other issue of course is the change in society that has taken place since Munch's time. Although he did not die until 1944, Munch had developed his particular approach to image making by the end of the 19th century. Women did not have the right to vote in England until 1918 and although a man could make a career out of a very personal private view of the world, women's views were still on the whole ignored by a male dominated society. The fact that the Royal Academy is hosting such an import survey of Emin's work, reflects how far we have come as a society. 

However the reason I have paired Emin with Baird is to also make a point about art and care. As well as art being used to express the angst of individuals and their ability to make their solitary way in society, it can also tell stories of home life and its messiness and the fact that women are often left literally holding the baby or being the family carer. I have been thinking a lot about the role of art lately and its ability to communicate how people feel and how it can make visible the invisible stuff that we hold inside ourselves and have decided that an idea of 'care' is central to my approach. Without empathy we could not begin to think about how to communicate with other people.

Old men's knees

An old school friend of mine has just had a knee replacement and my own knees are beginning to give out too, so I became interested in whether or not I could visually communicate this. He had sent me a photograph of his recent operation and had written to me about how painful his recovery had been. In order to make an image out of his and my own experience, the visual lineage of expressionist language going back to Munch and all those artists associated with Expressionism, seemed the most appropriate. You might feel that its all a bit old hat in the days of video art and performance, but that search for an image to communicate something is still, it would seem to me, a valid thing to do. I'm also worried about novelty, pictorial form shouldn't have built in obsolescence, the Egyptians used the same visual language over and over again for thousands of years. Marks, colours, shapes and textures can arrive in an infinite variety of combinations, but only certain images seem to stick in your mind, but when they do, they stick like glue. I decided I liked my image of old men's knees. Most of us will get these before we die, its part of the process of entropy, and even if the image only works as a note of sympathy for an old friend, he may well be comforted by the fact that I was thinking about him. 

See also:

Tracy Emin at the White Cube

Leon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy

Drawing and life

Hands, hygiene and hope

Vanessa Baird