Drawing : July 2024

Monday 29 July 2024

Katja Heitmann and Embodied Memory

Notebook page: The movement archivist trying to retrieve someone.

I recently went to a workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by the choreographer Katja Heitmann. Since 2019, she has been building an archive for human movement: Motus Mori. Working with what she calls movement-archivists, people that I would call observational dancers, (similar to observational drawers), she collects and preserves movements from people of all ages, bodies and backgrounds. From these observations Katja creates new artworks.

For instance in her work COMMUNITAS, she states, '16 performers aged between 20 and 75 exchange their personal movements amid everyday reality. They support and follow each other’s movements until a collective body emerges. COMMUNITAS brings together 6 self-taught movers and 10 academic dance students from Fontys Academy of Arts, in a moving theatrical ritual. Accompanied by bubbles of spatial sound, they form ritual islands of focus and devotion'.

I was very impressed with her work on embodied memory, and in the workshop I became very aware of how each and every body is a record of its own history; the way we walk, sit, stand etc. each movement of our bodies telling stories, as well as expressing emotion. The workshop also focused on how memories are triggered by physical movement and during the lecture/performance, Katja Heitmann worked with a German dancer who had been operating as a body archivist. As she shared findings from her research around body memory and dementia, she asked this dancer to illustrate what she was referring to.

The dancer sits in the style of a remembered person

I had taken a sketchbook, so was able to do a little drawing between the sessions where the audience was invited to perform. The drawings didn't amount to much, but the work done with our bodies did. We were for instance introduced to the different ways that certain people walk. The professional archival dancer, was asked by Heitmann to remember particular individuals and then to concentrate on how they walked. He would then physically seem to reshape himself and go into the body form of each remembered person, which was an amazing thing to watch, as his neck lowered or straightened, his torso twisted or lent over and his whole body changed. But then he would walk. We would watch and follow. Some people stride heel first, some are flat footed, others raise their knees, some make short chopped movements, others almost skip, some feet splay outwards, some knees touch, some legs bow, whilst some walkers have toes that point to an invisible line passing underfoot. We also explored how each person sits, how we hold our hands when at rest, and how we rise as we stand. We have all developed unique, bespoke body movements and these movements are the language of our embodied being.

I was gripped by the workshop and wanted it to go on and on, and once it had finished began to ruminate on how all this new information could be processed and brought into the work I have been doing in relation to interoception and the visualisation of embodied thinking. What was so refreshing about Heitmann's work was that it eliminated poor translation technologies. She didn't trust photographs as a body archive technology as they were flat static things, she similarly didn't trust video footage as it was also disembodied and written descriptions were similarly faint echoes of the body's reality. Drawing I felt at least captured traces of a moving hand, but I could see what she was getting at, only another body could truthfully and accurately archive the embodied reality of human beings.

Notebook pages

I felt I was being taught a lesson. She was right in stressing the limitations of other media as body archive technologies, and it made me think about what I was doing. I am I hope still doing something useful, but it is not archiving how we think and experience our lived reality. My work is to open out the imaginative and poetic potential of experience and its visualisation, rather than to capture the outward visual experience of it. I am not an observational documenter of the world, I am a visual explorer who seeks to tap into the possibilities that sit underneath observations of perceived reality.

The imagined interior begins to bleed into an external reality

Wednesday 24 July 2024

The Borromean Knot

I have looked at knots in the past because I like the way that they are both physical objects and powerful metaphors, they tie things together, mentally and physically. But now as I'm trying to get to grips with some alternative approaches to thinking about my own mental life, I have discovered a particular mental knot that is used to try to explain subjectivity or some of the key aspects of our mental life from a psychoanalytic point of view.

In mathematics Borromean rings are three simple closed curves in three-dimensional space that are topologically linked and cannot be separated from each other. They break apart into unknotted and unlinked loops when any one of the three is cut or removed. I. e. the rings are held together only by the presence of all three. If any one of the rings is cut open, the entire structure falls apart. Sometimes this is represented by three overlapping circles, but this takes away the vital three dimensional nature of this idea, it doesn't work in two dimensions, so if you need to draw one you need to give the rings some form of three dimensional indicators, such as the white spaces in the drawing above, that indicate which part of the circle sits on top and which below.

This construction was historically one of the heraldic symbols of the dukes of Borromeo, which is why it is called what it is.

Odin's knot

In Norse mythology, triangles are used to express the same idea, (the Valknut) and topographically it makes no difference to the concept. The knot belongs to a tradition of thinking that is centred around the use of fibres to think with. In this case 'seidr', (Old Norse seiðr, 'cord, string, snare') was a form of shamanistic magic concerned with discerning the course of fate and how to effect change, which was done by symbolically weaving new events into being. Odin's knot, like any other form of weaving, is a structure that only makes sense when it is complete, the individual threads or cords are thin and insubstantial, but when brought together as a weaving or in this case an idea, a powerful concept is realised.

However there is another version of Odin's knot, one that fuses together all three triangles as a continuous band, and this represents the fact that differences are an illusion.

Odin's knot

Borromean Rings also represent the symbol of the Trinity in Christianity, the three interlocking rings signify the divine trinity, which represents the belief that God is of one Being made up of three distinct Persons who exist in co-equal, co-eternal communion as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In fact these interlocking rings can be used as symbols for many sets of interlocked triads such as past, present and future.

It is however the Borromean Knot as used by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that I'm going to try and focus on, as it might help me with some sort of structural support when trying to think through the relationship between the world out there and the inner world of embodied mental processes.

Lacan and the Borromean Knot

The three rings are first of all 'real', in that topology is about solid, three dimensional objects and their surfaces. Therefore when Lacan decides to use it as a symbol, it is a much more solid symbol than a geometric figure, such as a circle or a triangle.

It is a symbol of an inseparable bond, so that whatever is joined together by this bond is seen as a totality, something that might have three components, but no one component can be free of the other two; if it ever is, it would actually cease to exist in the form it takes. Lacan uses the knot to illustrate his structural theory of three registers or orders of what he thinks of as the psychoanalytic experience or categories of the psyche; the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. However, he chooses the Borromean Knot, not just because of its interlocking nature but because of the fact that its loops have to be 'real' or three dimensional to work, they have to be loops of chain or rope. This he states, means that rather than simply representing this structure, topology is that structure.

The knot is not just a way of illustrating the interdependence of the three orders, it is also a structure that helps Lacan to think about what the three orders have in common. Each ring represents one of the orders, and certain elements can be located at intersections of the rings. and these can be used to focus on the relations which bind or link the three aspects of the psychoanalytic experience. He argues that if the knot is broken or unravelled in some way it results in some form of psychosis. There is though a further element in his concept, which he calls the 'sinthome', which he thought of as a fourth ring, a ring that was needed to go beyond the symbolic. I can see why he might need this, and its the problem with theory and representational systems. It's ok to have an idea and to set out a theory, but where is the lived experience, at what point can you get totally lost in the activity and in effect become it? The 'sinthome' it seems to me is not just about a need to have a fourth ring to ensure the three rings hold together, but is a reminder that there is a reality beyond symbolic meaning, and that is for myself a very useful thought. I'm often asked about my work, 'What does it mean?' and by that I gather that people want me to describe its symbolic meaning, but I tend to avoid this, as it can be like a trap, in doing so, it can seem to empty the work of meaning, rather than communicate what its trying to say.

But Lacan's Borromean Knot has letters and the word 'meaning' inscribed into the various overlapping sections and these are where the detail in terms of his thinking is held.

Lacan's Borromean Knot

There is a very neat chess metaphor used by Žižek to explain the differences between Lacan's three orders. Žižek explains them like so:

'For Lacan, the reality of human beings is constituted by three intertangled levels: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. This triad can be nicely illustrated by the game of chess. The rules one has to follow in order to play it are its symbolic dimension: from the purely formal symbolic standpoint, ‘knight’ is defined only by the moves this figure can make. This level is clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way in which different pieces are shaped and characterised by their names (king, queen, knight), and it is easy to envision a game with the same rules, but with a different imaginary, in which this figure would be called ‘messenger’ or ‘runner’ or whatever. Finally, real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances that affect the course of the game: the intelligence of the players, the unpredictable intrusions that may disconcert one player or directly cut the game short.'

(Žižek: How to Read Lacan, pp. 8–9)

Žižek returns to this issue in his book, 'Event: Philosophy in Transit' and if you put the two descriptions together you get a reasonable idea of Lacan's three registers.

'For Lacan, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are the three fundamental dimensions in which a human being dwells. The Imaginary dimension is our direct lived experience of reality, but also of our dreams and nightmares — it is the domain of appearing, of how things appear to us. The Symbolic dimension is what Lacan calls the ‘Big Other,’ the invisible order that structures our experience of reality, the complex network of rules and meanings which makes us see what we see the way we see it (and what we don’t see the way we don’t see it). The Real, however, is not simply external reality; it is rather, as Lacan put it, ‘impossible’: something which can neither be directly experienced nor symbolised — like a traumatic encounter of extreme violence which destabilises our entire universe of meaning. As such, the Real can only be discerned in its traces, effects or aftershocks.'

(Žižek 'Event: Philosophy in transit' pp. 119–20)

My personal interest is in this case the fact that for Lacan, direct lived experience of reality is fixed into the 'imaginary' register.

Right in the centre of Lacan's annotated diagram is the letter 'a'. Small case, and standing as an abbreviation for 'autre', or in English, 'other'. Or is it what Lacan had called 'The Fragile Absolute'

Lacan states that there is a price we all must pay in order to gain access to the social world of other humans. We must undergo a process of finding limits to our natural 'jouissance'.

'Jouissance' as used by Lacan, has been described as: 'The lost plentitude of one's material bodily drives given up by the subject in order to enter the symbolic order and access the symbolic power of the phallus, something that occurs upon the adoption of language and acceptance of the rules of the name-of-the-father'.

I.e. There are laws to follow, the first ones of which you learn from your parents. Lacan for some reason called this process 'symbolic castration'. Which sort of makes me have a mental shiver. You are supposed to have sacrificed an 'enjoyment' that in fact you never really had on the alter of the Symbolic (Law). You sort of 'remember' the prohibition of that enjoyment and resent your Symbolic castration for having had an intuition of something that may not even exist. As far as I can see, this works as a story, a fabrication of the mind, such as the classical Freudian tale of Oedipus, who fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby bringing disaster to his city and family.. The “lost” enjoyment concentrated in the 'objet a' is an impossible enjoyment, hence it is a 'Fragile Absolute'.

But, and this is where Lacan constructs another tale for us to think about, the lost 'jouissance', that primal something that was lost as you become subject to society and its laws, is the thing around which you construct the subjective story of yourself. This is why we are always wondering what we are and why we are. This awareness of some sort of loss, is what makes us into the desiring subjects we are. the 'a' at the centre, is the lost 'other' that causes us to desire in the first place and this is why Lacan also called it the 'object-cause of desire'. It is the only thing that belongs to all three aspects of the psychoanalytic experience.

If we then turn to 'JA' which seems to be translated as 'autre jouissance', this it seems is a sort of pure 'jouissance' of the Real beyond any symbolic contamination. This 'escape' is somewhat problematic though as it seems to rely on a very male centred phallocentric idea, in which for some reason, this other is associated with the feminine, therefore this 'jouissance', I would argue, lies outside the ring of the Symbolic, and as far as I can understand his logic, it would then appear that not being male is a form of psychosis. At another point he mentions a “pure difference” and a “fermenting” Nature, things that stand outside of the sacrificial lack. The important issue in terms of the diagram, is that JA sits outside of the symbolic. Here we can see the problem with words again. When naming things, nouns are either so or not so, they create binary divisions, whilst events are closer to the truth as they are open ended and they evolve.

The section that is made by the overlap of the real and the symbolic is labelled 'Jφ' φ is the lowercase version of the Greek letter phi Φ. In Lacan's terminology Jφ stands for 'phallic jouissance'. This means that this concept stands outside of the 'imaginary', it is outside of the domain concerning how things appear to us. Lacan at one point plays with the similar sounds in French of le nom du père (the name of the father), le non du père (the no of the father), to emphasise the legislative and prohibitive functions of the father, and this lies central to why this is a 'phallic jouissance'. The symbolic world that the father introduces the child into is a construct that we have to come to terms with, even if we resent it. Because it is not a part of the imaginary experience it is a 'castrated' enjoyment.

Meaning is set between the symbolic and the imaginary and sits outside of the real, which is, according to Lacan, inaccessible to psychoanalysis itself. Because of the overlaps between rings, there can be various combinations between the elements. Thus, for example, there can be a symbolic or imaginary hole in the real, for instance a nightmare may leave you with a deeply traumatic aftereffect, a real object may become an icon within the symbolic. Likewise, there can be a consistence or hard core of 'meaning' within the symbolic, or a hole in the imaginary, whereby direct experience is seen as an illusion. The sliding between categories does seem to me to be more akin to how I experience being and when I try to sense my own psyche, its illusiveness and slippery nature is part of its essence, it is something you can't nail down.

I can intuitively grasp what Lacan is saying, but I think he would have been better at setting it down as a form of poetry or a personal fable rather than as a psychoanalytic conundrum. My own day to day anxiety is I'm sure rooted in my relationship with my father, his harsh rule still impinging on my own ability to trust my instincts, as I still feel myself inwardly seeking his approval before I do anything. Something that I have battled with all my life, and that has at times seemed 'mythic', a something to externalise in order to overcome its hold.

If I had to choose my own geometric figure to represent that movement between the outer and inner worlds that I seem to inhabit it would however be the triquetra. The triquetra is a triangular figure composed of three interlaced arcs and as you follow them round you realise they are all part of the same figure. Lacan's struggle to unpick the reality that sits outside of perception, from the world of symbols that humans use to give order to their world, is at the end of the day, as far as I can see, a failure, but an interesting one. I am constantly trying myself to find visual structures that give some sort of meaning to my experiences and I do find that those meanings are very illusive and that they have something to do with my inner psyche and my bumping into a something out there, together with the need to resolve the experience of both.

The triquetra

The representation of three curved forms as a continuous band represents, like Odin's knot, the fact that differences are an illusion.

Sometimes when I'm awake I think I'm asleep and sometimes when I dream I think I am awake. The topology of dreams is perhaps the next thing to explore.

Friday 19 July 2024

The pandemic and the drawing imagination

Ambika Devi

I tend to write posts in those times when I'm ruminating on stuff as opposed to making things. During the time of covid I did a lot of ruminating and this post is left over from then. I still think it is relevant and even though the epidemic now feels as if it has passed, I suspect we have not seen the last of it, or similar outbreaks of infections. The covid pandemic has been a unique phenomena and artists in every part of the world had to respond to it. This was a marvellous opportunity to look at how different societies and the art cultures within them responded and it demonstrated the ubiquity of visual art and its ability to transcend borders and cultural boundaries, as well as it reaffirming for myself its relevance as an art form.

Ambika Devi is an artist from Rashidpur village in the northern Indian state of Bihar. She uses a folk art form called Madhubani, which takes its name from the geographical district she works in. This type of art-form is found on the walls of homes and on handmade paper. It is confined to a compact geographical area where the skills have been passed on over centuries; the style largely remaining the same. Ambika Devi's image shows people wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing at village markets. Traditionally many folk art forms in India were made on large scrolls or as murals to share information with the local community. Artists would hold up scrolls in village squares and combine these images with storytelling. Ambika Devi's images carry this tradition on, her images being used to alert villagers in the area to the continuing need to wear face masks.

Ambika Devi

The fact that electronic media is a world wide phenomena, is clearly illustrated by the fact that the Indian artist Apindra Swain, was commissioned by the BBC to draw the image below.

Apindra Swain

Apindra Swain: Mythological figures wearing face masks

Apindra Swain is a Pattachitra painter from Raghurajpur in the eastern state of Orissa. This art form dates back to the 5th Century and is famous for its bright hues and faces drawn in profile. The paints are hand made and still use natural colours such as ochres and iron oxides (hematite). Her paintings in response to the pandemic show mythological figures wearing face masks; age old entities demonstrate the vital need to combat an invisible threat.

I was reminded of my earlier post on drawing the corona virus, and how different cultures over the years have attempted to respond to the need to visualising invisible threats.

Nujuum Hashi

As I began looking at different parts of the world for artists responding to the corona virus, I also found individual stories of artists, some of which reflected the hard struggle they have had just to be able to have an art practice. Nujuum Hashi overcame traditional prejudice to become a respected artist in Somalia. She had been accused of being un-Islamic, as many Muslims believe that art depicting humans is forbidden. About the image of herself battling the virus, she says, "This shows me fighting the Covid virus. I was incredibly ill and was scared I would die like so many others around me. "After I painted this picture, people started calling me to ask for tips on how I managed to recover." Because Islamic artists are forbidden to make figurative images, unlike Apindra Swain or Ambika Devi, Nujuum Hashi has had no local tradition to draw upon, so her work reflects a wide range of visual sources, that are often experienced via electronic media or cheap print; from cartoons and information graphics to more traditional fine art imagery. Because of this some would argue that her work is superficial but I would suggest that it is as important in its context as any other artwork. The meaning is the use as Wittgenstein would say. This reflection on responses to the pandemic is deliberately not trying to set up a what is good or bad art dialogue. That would seem inappropriate in a post that is an attempt to get a feeling for a globally experienced situation, rather than a survey of the best in international art practice.

At the same time that artists who were still carrying on the folk art traditions of India were responding to the pandemic by creating images designed to make people aware of the need to wear masks, artists in the western hemisphere were attempting to visualise the problem as one of social isolation. Daniel Laredo for example wanted to show how we were all isolated by the virus, he stated, "The buildings represent a home and a boat, and they are upside down because the pandemic situation has the entire world upside down". This image is a hand made drawing which was then edited in PhotoShop.

"Sailing in the sea of uncertainty of a pandemic" by Daniel Laredo

In the Philippines artists responded critically to the heavily controlled flow of information from the government in response to covid, as this had echoes of historic artistic suppression, triggering memories of the violence and oppression of the Marcos era. In particular Neil Doloricon's images were powerful reminders of his long career as a socialist artist, however he sadly died before the pandemic was over.

Neil Doloricon, Lockdown, 2020.

Neil Doloricon, Pila

Neil Doloricon used wood cuts to create his stark images, a tradition that has a long association with socialist resistance to the sophisticated image production processes of capitalism.

Duyi Han: 'The Saints Wear White'

A more designed approach was taken by the Chinese American artist Duyi Han, in his work 'The Saints Wear White' there is a Chapel dedicated to medical workers saving lives during the coronavirus epidemic.

Fred Tomaselli, March 14, 2020

Back in the more traditional 'art world' of contemporary art, Fred Tomaselli a well known artist who has been at the forefront of the contemporary art scene since the 1980s, was also trying to respond to the pandemic. He has an international reputation within the contemporary art scene for meticulously crafted, richly detailed work. His hybrid images could almost be quilts or mosaics; their collaged components from printed sources, are usually suspended in layers of clear, polished, hard resin, that allow flat objects, photographic representations and paint to co-exist on the same surface. As a sort of sketchbook activity he has occasionally been reworking the front pages of the New York Times and in one of his responses to the pandemic he transformed a photograph of a medical worker taking a nasal swab, into a collage of the worker surrounded by suggestive, spiky spheres. “It’s both a refuge from, and a deep dive into, our new collective reality,” Tomaselli said of creating during the pandemic. “The refuge comes when I lose myself in the process.” He also says of these collages, “I think that maybe the Times collages are quietly political, in that I can riff on anything I want, while the horrors of the world become the background buzz. Maybe I’m saying that the world may be going to hell, but I still keep painting.” Tomaselli's reflections are those of a well established artist, who has a good steady income and who lives in a pretty stable environment and his views of what it is to be a responsive art practitioner reflect this.

David Goodsell

A Californian based professor of computational biology and research, David Goodsell is also an artist. An image of this painting of the cross section of the coronavirus was released on Twitter and is now also available in a colouring book version for children.

Some artists work between cultures, Dhruvi Acharya in doing this can channel the anxieties of both Eastern and Western cultures.

Dhruvi Acharya, Painting in the time of Corona

Dhruvi Acharya works between studios based in the USA and India. She describes her work as, a visual diary of thoughts, observations, feelings and experiences and she stated that in relation to her covid focused work, “My current watercolours are in response to a world in the grips of a pandemic, when more apparent than ever are the repercussions of our misplaced priorities and our entitled attitudes towards our earth and all living things.” During lockdown, she made a series of images, designed to document her feelings as she was forced to work in isolation.

Drawing and image making is though limited in its appeal and you have to either seek images out, as I have been doing or you need to belong to a particular locality where an artist is still working within the community or you belong to a sub-group of people, whereby you are a targeted audience for the images. If you want to affect a mass audience, immersive installations are perhaps where the public have encountered responses to the pandemic at their most powerful.

Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, installation view of 'In America, 2021', at the National Mall, Washington, D.C., 2021

Firstenberg and a team of associates for the installation 'In America, 2021' planted masses of small, palm-sized white flags, each representing a life lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. The flags blanketed the north lawn around the Washington Monument. The sheer numbers of victims begins to resonate when we see graphically how much of the ground these small flags cover. Each one has a name on it, each one a personal surrender to the virus. The work was I'm sure inspired by an earlier response to the AIDS epidemic, when quilts were made to remember those who had died from AIDS complications. There is something very moving when people collectively work together to construct images designed to commemorate tragic events. See: The AIDS Memorial Quilt website, to get an idea of how this issue has been visualised on line.

Just one of thousands

Looking at these private and collective responses to the Covid epidemic proves to myself that art is still a powerful and needed form of cathartic communication. This tiny survey of responses is of course the tip of a huge iceberg, but I hope it can operate as a reminder that art has a emotional purpose and that it can fulfil both very personal as well as very public functions.

I also responded as an artist to the pandemic, and the emotional intensity pushed me into using colour again. Looking back at some of these images now, I see an affinity and link to all those thousands of other artists across the world who were also driven to visually externalise their feelings on being locked down.

Below are some of the images I made at the time, as well as responding to the nasty poking about of swabs on sticks that went into your mouth or up your nose, I found myself giving the virus a human head, I dreamt that it could see me and in size it became like a small planet or moon.

In my mind the virus became bigger and bigger, eventually taking over the whole city.

Once the pandemic was over, or at least it felt as it was, I made a stained glass image, a sort of memorial, whereby a mythic figure mentally attempts to bury the virus down a hole. As I made the image, I realised the virus could just as easily be emerging and floating up out of the hole, as being sent down into it. Time will tell.

We are of course now all injected.