Mythic Worlds

Jordan Belson, Brain Drawing, 1952. Ink on paper

The Drawing Centre in New York has just held an exhibition entitled 'Mythic Worlds: Works from the distant past through to the present'. I wish I had been there to see it, however they have put together an on-line catalogue, so we can get a good idea of the exhibition's content and this review is therefore based on what I could find available on line, rather than what was actually on exhibition, but we must all cut our cloth accordingly. 

Jordan Belson, Brain Drawing, 1952. Ink on paper

After reading through the catalogue and looking at the images of work on display, there were certain artists that for me, stood out as having practices that in one way or another, were helpful in understanding what I have been doing recently myself. Selfish perhaps, but when you visit exhibitions it is always useful to have a focus, or you can find yourself wondering what you are doing there and become overloaded with too much information to process. This doesn't mean you avoid new things, it's simply that you need a way into the new. I'm always keen to find artists that I have never encountered before, especially if they have been making work that seems to overlap with my own interests and Jordan Belson in particular interested me because of his attempts to fuse both scientific and mystical understandings of the universe. He developed what some people have labeled “cosmic cinema”, his animated films exploring the dynamic relationships between form, movement, colour and sound. Using basic animation techniques, mirrors, kaleidoscopes, and a variety of low-tech equipment he creates films that operate very like early types of microbial life. I'm making a new animation at the moment and by looking at Belson's work, I was reassured that the low technology approach I have been making is still viable. 

Making an old school animation

Exhibitions with a theme are often useful as they help you to think about the wider context for work and good curators find unexpected relationships between artists that you might not have thought about before. 

Jordan Belson: Samadhi (1967)

The animated film Samadhi explores the relationship between spiritual perception and scientific theory, drawing from Oriental philosophy and religion as well as Johannes Kepler’s astronomical theories and is accompanied by Belson’s ambient score. 

Jordan Belson, Brain Drawing, 1952. Ink on paper

His images reminded me that human beings are over 50 percent bacterial life and they helped me to visualise an idea that if God was of any species, it would be that of a higher form of bacterial entity. These images could therefore be seen as aspects of the religious art of microbial life forms, and now that I think about it, I would be quite happy to have people consider my own recent work in a similar way. 

Mel Chin: Tantric Dream diagram: 1991

Mel Chin: Degrees of paradise: Drawing for gallery layout

Mel Chin's 'Degrees of Paradise' was a study for a proposed State of Heaven, where an immense, floating, hand-knotted carpet, would serve as a symbolic and sacrificial sky. In 1991 we were faced with the actual destruction of the ozone layer and eventually the world's governments did act to ban ozone depleting chemicals. Chin's work was part of a global movement to raise consciousness of the need for action in relation to the use of ozone layer destroying chemicals. Looking at it from a 30 year distance, it reminded myself of the fact that art can help raise awareness of the need for action to be taken. Chin in tapping into Tantric ideas, also reminds us of the centrality of our physical bodies to a wider spiritual understanding of the interconnections between ourselves and all the other events and things that happen in this world. 
Displayed in the adjacent gallery, (see gallery layout drawing above) through a “sky” of video monitors was 'the State of Heaven', a multidimensional fractal program developed by McGill University physicists S. Lovejoy and F. Begin. Their interpretation of meteorological dynamics had advanced understanding in the fields of climatology and plate tectonics, Chin acknowledging that connectivity and collaboration with other disciplines are vital if deep communication is to be achieved. The resulting final images generated were to be given to weavers to be reinterpreted in wool, but I'm not sure whether or not this final aspect of the piece was ever completed. 

Ilka Gedő is another artist that I somehow had not looked at before. Her self-portraits are very powerful, and her image in the exhibition of a table immediately communicated the fact that she was able to draw objects and turn them into events, a rare skill, but one I'm beginning to think is essential in a time when Capitalism is beginning to loosen its grip, and if we are to collectively get it to remove its dead hands from our tiller, we will need more and more examples of how to experience the world as interconnected events and not as a collection of atomised or itemised things. I was particularly interested in her drawings and pastels of the Ganz Factory. She was able to take a momentary experience and bring to it an intense spiritual concentration and expressive power. These are drawings of industrial work, drawings that reminded myself of my time working at Round Oak Steel Works in the West Midlands. Her drawings are both realistic and at the same time, more importantly, expressive and moving. The objects that appear in these industrial spaces, just as they did for myself in the 1960s, seem to devour the human beings that are brought in to service them. 

Ilka Gedő

I have been thinking about drawings as types of batteries recently and Gedő's in particular seem to be full of that energetic potential that marks can create, especially as their collective energies flow across the surface of the paper. Her work taps into that 'uncertain certainty' that so many artists exhibit when they come to terms with both the fragility of life and its underlying dynamism. 

Ilka Gedő

Ilka Gedő: Table 1949

Hu Zhengyan was the first artist to develop colour woodblock printing and he worked in 17th century China, however it was his images devoted to the depiction of strange distorted wooden forms that had been selected for this exhibition and they intrigued me. They reminded me of traditional Japanese suiseki stones, small naturally occurring rocks which are appreciated for their aesthetic value because they look like full sized landscape forms. 

Hu Zhengyan: Woodblock prints

A suiseki stone

The idea of seeing vastness in small things is a wonderful one and is something all of us can understand, as we have had to pass through childhood to get where we are. It has always seemed to me that if you can keep that childlike wonder that you had when as a child you made models, you would have far more chance of being a good artist. I now believe that this is a type of animism, a way of sending your thoughts out to inhabit other things, but also a way for objects to hold thoughts within themselves, so that they in turn can go on to inhabit the people that then encounter them. 

This is how the drawing centre introduces the exhibition: 

Tracing commonalities, both formal and conceptual, Of Mythic Worlds draws surprising connections between artists that might otherwise go unnoticed. Rarely exhibited drawings by Morris Graves, Jack Whitten, Georgia O'Keeffe, and theorist and writer Roland Barthes are presented alongside nineteenth-century Shaker Gift Drawings, as well as major works from artists such as Mel Chin and Jordan Belson. Historical block prints from the Qing dynasty are juxtaposed with works made by contemporary artists including Cici Wu, Bernadette Van-Huy, Julia Phillips, Steffani Jemison, and Robert Bittenbender. Of Mythic Worlds also includes new work made on the occasion of the exhibition by Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Ininiwak artist based in North Bay, Ontario.

Together, the works of these artists investigate personal belief systems, spirituality, and consciousness; explore the metaphysical and the sublime; recall myths passed down from ancient cultures; and expand our understanding of mysticism and immateriality.

The exhibition it is argued in the introduction covers a lot of ground and I suppose it is the job of the marketing people to find a comprehensive net within to present it. I wonder how if given the money and access to various collections myself or someone else might have put an exhibition together. As students you can organise exhibitions of old postcards (heck you can tell my age in thinking people may still collect these) or cut out images printed off from your computer and organise them on a wall, it's always an interesting thing to do, as you begin to see connections that you had never noticed before. I also realise that with the 3D software we have access to you could design and put up a whole exhibition on line, see. 

You can find an on-line catalogue of the exhibition here

 See also:

Drawing together science and myth

The Uncertain Certainty 

Visualising the invisible

The diagram as art and spirit guide

Animism and drawing lines: a reflection on another exhibition

Irma Blank and the drawing of essence

 

Irma Blank, Radical Writings, Exercitium, 1990, acrylic on card

Irma Blank wanted to investigate the 'Urzeichen', or what she regarded as "the primordial, undifferentiated sign that precedes the word". She decided to return to the 'Ursprun', or pure act of writing, a primeval communicative force that denuded writing of sense in order to charge it, like a battery, with pure latent energy, or at least this was my own reading of what she was trying to do. It was an idea that allowed me to drop the concept of 'sense' in terms of words and replace it with sense in terms of energy potential.
She put it like this; 'I save writing from its enslavement to sense, by performing writing purified of sense. I return to the zero point, the semantic zero, the semantic void: silence as a germinating source'. She also stated that, 'Writing is not linked to knowing, but to being'. Irma Blank, Milan, 2001 (Accessed from: http://www.p420.it/en/artisti/blank-irma)

As she drew she would make sounds. She often worked at night, the sounds made by moving mark making materials across and on to various paper surfaces were vital to her understanding of what she was doing. Her breathing creating a rhythm that worked alongside the sounds of moving markers, a situation that would then trigger more sounds that began to float into the spaces between the mark signs and the breath rhythm, sounds that would become 'songs' of praise hymned to the silence of the night.

She would make transcriptions of writings. Trying to reduce existing texts back into the mark sounds that they emerged from. For instance she might take a philosophical text, lay over it transparent paper so that she could see the typographic layout of the original as well as be able to read it through the translucent surface of her drawing paper. Then she would read the text silently, gradually beginning to murmur or hum the sound rhythm that began to inhabit her mind/throat/mouth, and with her hand begin making hatching marks that set themselves off against the sound rhythm now developing as she read the text in her head. The cycle Trascrizioni, (1973-1979), being transcriptions of black ink on transparent paper of printed materials such as newspapers, philosophical treatises and poetry. She has also recorded herself at work, which is why we know how she operates. Her practice is a sensory cycle; sight, hearing and touch interact with each other. Since 1979 she has been undertaking actions and reading performances.

Irma Blank talks about her work

I have posted on aesmic writing before. Asemic means "having no semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning", therefore it has become a definition of writing without words. What interested to me about this definition was the tight association between the concept of words and meaning. In effect, as a definition it suggested that if a language had no words it had no meaning. But Blank's work sets up a very different understanding of writing without words. She points to a layer beneath the words, one that still recognises them but which has become detached, in a similar way that her practice of laying a transparency over a text, means that the new marks are detached as they are moved away from the original writing once the new marks are made. 

Osmotic Drawings D-7, 1996

There are always new or alternative ways to think about something. I have always hummed and made noises as I draw. Students have in the past been surprised that I might begin making humming or even barking sounds in order to 'explain' the communicative effect of a particular drawing or set of marks within a drawing. Blank has helped me to think more deeply about this and I have perhaps not thought through the implications as far as I should have done. As I rethink this aspect of drawing I'm more aware of energy conversion, transformation and translation because of my recent work on the visualisation of invisible perceptual experiences, therefore the keeping separate visual from aural, olfactory or tactile experiences would appear to be a more and more foolish exercise. Trying to record the spectrum and flow of perceptual experience is more like attempting to draw the sea. At one moment it is a giant beast of a thing that can shape continents and at another it is home to the most fragile swimming creature. 

Germinazioni n.6, 1982

See also:

Drawing with words

Drawing as writing

Asemic Writing

Eye music

Is drawing a language? Part three Includes a diagram of synesthesia

Nina Simone's Gum

The hair clippings of St Clare of Assisi, the Basilica of Saint Clare: Assisi.

'Nina Simone's Gum' is a book by Warren Ellis. Entitled after the fact that Ellis had pulled the gum off the leg of a piano Nina Simone had played back in 1999, in what was to be Simone's last performance in England. It was twenty years later put on display as a relic; an object of great spiritual value; the book being about how something so small can form such powerful connections between people, it is, as the blurb says, 'a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality'. 

Nina Simone's Gum

I went to see Nina Simone at Birmingham Town Hall in 1969, she was astonishing. Memories of the event still move me, and when she sang 'Young Gifted and Black', I remember hairs standing up on the back of my neck as the mainly black audience rose to her words. It was my first real experience of what it meant to have a very different identity to that of a white, male anglo-saxon. I had just accepted things as they were, but on going to art college, I was finally beginning to wake up and discover that the world out there was a conflicted place and that what I took for granted, was a situation many others would see as a position of privilege.  Simone's performance was an unforgettable experience and I could easily see why something as humble as her discarded chewing gum could be so important to someone who had attended one of her concerts. 

This is how relics work. Objects become the repositories of the spirit of the person who was associated with them. This could be, as in the image that opens this post, a saint like Clare of Assisi, who's still golden shorn hair is kept to remind us of her piety or Jesus Christ; the nails from his crucifixion being energised with some sort of spiritual essence of his being. 

A Holy nail relic: Trier Cathedral 

But you don't have to be that special or saintly, anyone's spiritual essence can be passed on using a relic, the most common situation being when you are given an urn full of ashes after a cremation. I know of several families that keep their grandad's ashes in an urn sitting in a cupboard and every now and again they turn to those ashes and ask for grandad's help in supporting them through life's difficulties. The objects that become relics can also be very mundane, a tooth, a nail, a used discarded chewing gum, but in their very banality, they tell us a story about life, about how the most humble, overlooked object, has the potential to give physical form to spiritual things. 

The artist Alina Szapocznikow, used to use chewing gum to make sculptural ideas, and then photograph the results. 

Alina Szapocznikow, “Photosculpture” (1971)

These images also tap into the concept of the relic. The artist's traces becoming very like those of a lost saint, Szapocznikow's chewed and hand pulled tiny sculptures, now venerated as high art, become relics not unlike the ones we find preserved in glass vitrines in many Catholic churches. A relic works as some sort of externalised mind. Without their physical presence we would find it very difficult to think about the ideas associated with what relics stand for. The reason we need to make physical objects to carry our ideas, is because of the same reason, each art object in effect operating as an externalised thought, a concept made real, rather than remaining as a thought trapped inside a head.

You can also think about a drawing once it is completed as a type of relic. Its very materiality is a crystallised idea. We are intrigued by an original drawing and as we look closely at its hand made marks, we recreate in our minds the artist's touch and in turn we are touched by the idea of a certain combination of materials holding within itself an idea. When I am dead my drawings will have to talk for me. Mute like all relics, people will bring their own stories to them, therefore I hope my works on paper will have enough substance to them to allow for many possible stories to emerge and flourish, the drawings' very muteness hopefully offering others a silence within which to make their own sounds. 

A drawing from an old sketchbook

Whatever idea I had when making this drawing I have forgotten, but the specific combination of materials remain, the drawing holds its form, only slightly distorted by time, perhaps a little faded and the paper slightly flattened due to compression and dampness. It now operates as a relic, a frozen thought preserved in paper and ink, a type of fossil. If now framed behind glass and put on display, the framing begins to remove it even further from the world and heightens its iconic possibilities and begins the journey towards becoming a reliquary.

The frame within a frame

An empty reliquary frame 

The empty reliquary frame above is just waiting for a saint's toe or tooth to be mounted within its ornate surrounds. It is designed to give honorific value to whatever is placed within it. It needs something like Nina Simone's gum to complete it. In fact the gum was cast in silver by Hannah Upritchard, a London jeweller and the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester produced an intricately carved silver ring in its image. 

Hannah Upritchard: Silver casts of Nina Simone's Gum

I suppose this sequence of ideas has come to me because I'm about to retire and the library at Leeds Arts University is thinking of archiving some of my old sketchbooks. If they do and as I would hope, they keep them safe, one day they will seem to some future researcher as strange old relics of the past and my life will be a distant memory. It is unlikely I will have ever changed anyone's life in the way Nina Simone did, but on a more modest scale, perhaps some of my teaching or my drawings did help some people enrich their own lives and if anything of mine could be regarded as repositories of my spirit, it would be my sketchbooks.

Sketchbook idea evolving in relation to how my varicose veins feel

Glass leg votive in progress

See also: 

Bill Viola and Michelangelo

Drawing and spirituality

Drawing and life

Alina Szapocznikow

SKETCH

Sketchbooks

False starts Exhibition: An aspect of my work that reaches into the tradition of the votive

The votives project

A Tall Order: Touchstones Gallery Rochdale

Claudette Johnson: Woman with earring Collection of Lubaina Himid

I went over to Rochdale recently to see the Touchstones gallery exhibition, 'A Tall Order'. This was one of the best exhibitions I have seen recently and it reminded me of how important and vital a gallery's curatorial policy can be to the continuing purpose and belief of both art practitioners and the various publics that follow contemporary art. Rochdale Art Gallery under the curatorial steerage of Jill Morgan in the 1980s held some seminal exhibitions and was showcasing the work of artists whose work still resonates today. In fact many of the problems that were raising their heads in society then have continued to confront us and I thought the exhibitions revisited could have been held this year and would still be pertinent. In a letter dated 16th of March 1987 Jill Morgan the then Exhibition Officer stated; “Our policy is to encourage new audiences for art, particularly women, black communities, young people, those with disabilities, and to encourage cultural activity for working class communities. Broadly, to change the domination of art by a white middle class male audience and producer. A tall order!”

The focus on exhibiting artists engaged in critical and socio-political practice both gave a platform to those who were not being offered the opportunity to show their work in other high profile publicly funded institutions and provided a focus around which local issues could be reframed within wider national debates. 

The recent attempt by many of our art galleries to readdress their holdings and former curatorial stances in recognition of previous bias seems so tardy in relation to what was going on in Rochdale in the 1980s. Forty years ago a public art gallery was addressing these issues and the then curatorial team were proving that if you have vision and commitment you can make a difference. 

I was particularly fascinated to see how the exhibition had been curated because I was very aware that Dr Derek Horton, a Leeds based curator had been involved. Back in the 1990s Jill Morgan came to Leeds and it was also the time I was studying for my MA in art and design, something I did at Leeds Metropolitan University which was where both Jill Morgan and Derek Horton were then teaching. I have mentioned Jill in a past post, citing the time when she asked the question, 'why is a painting seen as more important than a jar of home made jam?'  It was those sorts of questions that opened people's eyes to the snobbery and elitism of the art world. People have always been happy to put their cakes and jams into local competitions whereby their efforts are judged and compared by other local people who have been entrusted to be fair and robust in their judgements of taste and structure, as well as of colour, texture and smell. Are these not aesthetic qualities and yet these types of activities are excluded from art galleries. Just as the best marrow, onions and potatoes are exhibited and judged in gardening competitions in church halls and local community centres up and down the country, but never in art galleries. Jill's question has still not been answered. Instead the elitist art world has maintained its grip and it could be argued that what it has done is to teach those who were outsiders how to make art that now makes them insiders. Where are all the tattoo artists, the flower arrangers, the finger nail painters, the henna artists, the graffiti writers, the cake decorators, the knitters, the wood veneer artists and all the other people who make aesthetic judgements and use high levels of craft skill in the making of their work? 

I also picked up a Harry Meadley brochure while I was there. Harry is another Leeds based artist and who has both Leeds College of Art and Leeds Metropolitan University associations. At one point he managed to negotiate the turning of the gallery spaces of Touchstones over to the people of Rochdale. Following a public call-out to schools, community groups, artists and everybody else, a programme of family events, crafts, film, wellbeing and art was devised where the boundaries between audience, artist, participant or performer were purposefully broken down, so that people could rethink what a gallery space was for. He had previously managed to get the gallery to try and show all their normally hidden holdings. His work 'But what if we tried?' being a provocation that only a gallery like Touchstones would respond to, and they took up his challenge to show everything in their archives. What is of course interesting about both Jill's question and Harry's provocations is that both of them I firmly believe, still advocate 'art' as something purposeful and life enhancing but question its formulation as an elitist occupation. The process of indoctrination into art thinking is still one I remember well. As someone who used to make small images of the steelworks while on night shifts, images that were appreciated by my fellow workers, as someone who then got into an art school in order to undertake a pre-diploma and found his whole summer's hard work of drawing as accurately as he could was held up to ridicule as being devoid of any 'proper' understanding of what drawing was about. As someone that on entering the next level of art education which was the DipAD, went out and found a disused open air lido, with much potential for image making, and then working hard to make those images, was told his work was old fashioned and that it was of no consequence and that what he should be doing was reading Clement Greenberg and making flatness an issue. Gradually I learnt the rules of the game and by my third year I was making work that pre-figured Sherrie Levine's appropriation games by several years; remaking Duchamp's 'Bottlerack' by hand, an art gesture that finally allowed me to make something hand crafted that was also seen as 'clever' and therefore worthy of praise. On leaving art college it took me several years to reboot as someone who loved drawing and who still wanted to make images that related to everyday life. But I now knew the 'tricks of the trade' and could position my work in ways that the art business found acceptable. But in that positioning I knew I was excluding my old steelwork admirers, my family and many of my oldest friends. The ideas I was being introduced to were of course also wonderful, but they could have been introduced in a very different way. Instead of dismissing my previous experiences and ways of understanding the world, they could have been introduced as also being of significance. The fact that as a young man I was prepared to spend a lot of time crafting something was ignored, but that crafting was both a celebration of labour and a love of materials. Perhaps looking back that love was suffocating the material rather than releasing it to be what it could be, but even so the making began with love and care, attributes that I still think are central to how we build our relationships with the wider world. 

So what am I saying here? I'm not saying that art has no value. I'm also not saying art cant be evaluated. What I am questioning is who controls the value system, who decides what is good and what is unworthy of attention? These are questions the exhibition in Rochdale asks and which have obviously caused me to reflect on them too. The fact that so much of the work is good is a tribute to the curatorial skills of Dr Derek Horton and his fellow curator Dr Alice Correia. Carefully threaded around a developing narrative, the curatorial team obviously knew their subject very well and were able to source images that both exemplified what was happening and that still had traction for today. 

There are several drawings in this exhibition, but also painting, photography, video and three dimensional work. In terms of drawing, I was reminded of how powerful the work of Sonia Boyce, Sutapa Biswas and Lubaina Himid was at the time, but I was also reminded that Steve Bell's drawings for the Guardian were an essential other voice and that Paul Butler was making drawings using traditional techniques that seemed to be at the same time very pertinent to what it felt like to be alive in the 1980s. 

The exhibition closes on Saturday, and if you have a chance to get there, do go.

I have a few images taken on my mobile while I was there. Every image behind glass also therefore reflects its environment. As this exhibition was as much about the gallery and its history as the work, perhaps for once these reflective images were appropriate. So bear with some of the crazy reflective images and try to look behind the glass. 

Sonia Boyce, She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On (Some English Rose), 1986

Sonia Boyce

Sarah-Joy Ford

Stephen Willats

Paul Butler

Sutapa Biswas

Glenys Johnson

Lesley Sanderson

Chila Kumari Burman

Benjamin Slinger

Lubaina Himid

Coda

When returning to Leeds I had to wait a while on the platform at Rochdale station. As usual when left to my own devices, I made a drawing to pass the time. What took my eye was the juxtaposition of very different architectural styles, in particular I became fascinated with how the domed building, which I later found out was a Catholic Church dedicated to John the Baptist, was set against a typical example of contemporary modernism. I could see another metaphor emerging, but perhaps a far too easy one. Inside the church there are some beautiful mosaics, and you can look at them on line. See

View from the platform Rochdale station

See also:

Feldman's model of art criticism 

Drawing and politics

Drawing as a vehicle for sexual politics 

Drawings on show at Leeds City Art Gallery