Nicholas Gansterer: Choreo-graphic embodied diagam
I'm always looking for artists that help me to validate my own practice, not so much trying to find artists that do work that looks like mine, but to find artists that think or operate in ways that confirm to me that the path I am on is worthwhile and also that the issues I'm trying to communicate are communicable. Nicholas Gansterer is one of those artists. I have pointed out his work before when looking at that space that drawing can occupy between art, geometry, emotion and science, but as I have for a while now been looking at ways to visualise interoceptual sensations and the awareness of somatic events, his work has seemed even more relevant to me recently.
I have been fascinated by diagrams for many years and have put up several blog posts about how I think they can be considered as art practice. The examples above demonstrate how his thinking embraces both the annotated diagram and what I am beginning to think of as a type of image schema. Gansterer is also like myself very interested in how we record and document the perceived world around us and has made work both in relation to external perception and interoception. For instance he travels a lot by train and has attempted to draw the fragments of fleeting images that slip past as you gaze out of the train window. He has this to say about 'Training':
A series of drawings depicting "minutes of in-between-ness" – fleeting moments of fragmentary memory when travelling by train. The state of moving fast through the landscape triggers constantly the imagination. The continuous (and impossible) attempt to draw and get hold of some details of situations or objects flashing by – that which is seen but gone already.
The changing velocity and the permanent micro movements, the wiggle and waggle of the cars or almost falling asleep while drawing have an effect also on the scribbling and unfinished character of the drawings.
From 'Training'
You begin to realise that he doesn't waste time, even a train journey becomes an idea bank. He is constantly interrogating what it is to be in this world and to be perceiving it. As students you are always told keep a small sketchbook with you and be constantly recording scraps of information as you travel through the world but how many times does it remain in our pockets because we don't think there is anything worth drawing? The reality is that there is always something worth drawing, but it is our job as artists to pick out what that is.
The most interesting aspect of Gansterer's work for myself was the 4 year research project he undertook Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line*. In particular his drawings entitled, 'Choreo-graphic figures: Embodied diagrams' helped me to understand how my own collaborative work looking at interoception could be mapped out or understood in a more embodied format. His web-page that presents the work done points to 'shared figures of thought, speech, and movement'.
In his work drawing is conceived as a translational bodily process. My understanding of this being that as an extension of the body, a pencil extends my fingers, instead of my fingers just being able to leave marks by scratching lines in the sand, a pencil or charcoal stick or any other drawing implement, allows me to leave a wider variety of traces of my body's movement, especially those movements controlled by my embodied thoughts. He uses the term embodied diagrams to extend the notion of scoring, which I have interpreted as a sort of musical score, something that can be looked at by others and 'played' or followed as an idea or imaginative prompt. The central issue is how to translate and visualise thought processes, both conscious and subconscious, Gansterer describing the resultant drawings as epistemic objects for the reader.
Gansterer has developed a cartography for the diagrammatic (re-)presentation of embodied knowledge(s) and in doing so he demonstrates how it is possible to visualise the interrelationship of ourselves and the world. In a similar way to myself he has tried to depict both interoceptive and perceptual experiences, but he has been much happier to annotate the resultant images, whilst I have always steered away from using words because I have always felt that they control the understanding in a way that removes a drawing's ability to be open to interpretation. Gansterer’s diagrams however are conceived in such a way that the annotations and the drawing are both part of the analysis of the situation, the one cannot exist without the other, and some recent drawings of my own have suggested to myself that perhaps I should not be so wary of words; after all I use them all the time to write this blog.
Nicholas Gansterer: Choreo-graphic embodied diagams
My own recent images in comparison feel I think too 'arty' or too aware of fine art conventions, but as I'm so entangled into the process I shall have to ask some of my own collaborators whether or not this is the case. You can make decisions yourself, these are two drawings trying to communicate the interoceptual sensations of stomach pain and a breathing restriction.
stomach pain
breathing restriction
Both the drawings above are images derived directly from my own personal experiences of inside the body happenings and they are attempts to visualise the feelings that I had at the time. These can be compared with the two drawings below of things seen, or perceptual experiences, one of a wheatfield drawn during the summer when walking in West Wittering and the other drawn recently of some barriers that were erected to keep the public away from a building site that I often walk past on my way to work.
Wheatfield West Wittering
Barriers on the edge of a building site
I have begun to understand 'feelings' as being central to the issue of how the body 'talks' to us, I have therefore begun to use emotive colour as an indicator of the feeling tone that I am trying to communicate. Because I am more and more aware of interconnecting 'fields' of action and the nature of vibration as an underlying force behind all things experienced, my perceptual drawings have become much more about rhythmic encounters than records of facts and my next series of images are going to be about how the two processes of internal and external awareness are brought together. In order to do that I'm carefully making my way through 'The Strange Order Of Things' by Antonio Damasio, a book that is helping me think about how image schema have evolved in different ways at different times and how the nervous system has evolved to cope with the body's evolutionary path. As I read I am beginning to see my interoceptual experiences as belonging to a much older evolutionary root and therefore being subject to being understood much more intuitively than perceptual experiences.
*Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014-2018) was a collaborative artistic research project by artist Nikolaus Gansterer , writer Emma Cocker, dancer Mariella Greil and other guest collaborators.
See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment