Drawing : documentation

Showing posts with label documentation. Show all posts

Tuesday, 2 April 2019

Documentation and drawing practices

Sometimes drawing revolves around the process of documentation. At a basic level most drawings are documents of what has been seen, but within the expanded field of drawing documentation allows for hybrid practices to be exhibited or presented. In particular activities that are performative can be recorded and presented in ways that on the one hand respect the need for drawings to be viewed by an audience and on the other can present work in such a way that the actual cataloguing and recording is as much a part of its reception as the drawings themselves.

I have mentioned the work of John Wolseley before as belonging to a contemporary landscape tradition, however he has also been curated as a performance artist, in particular in one essay he is seen as an artist working in a tradition where the art gallery meets experimental theatre. However it is the fact that he goes out into the wilds of Australia and documents what he experiences that allows us to see what he does.

John Wolseley

In the image above we see Wolseley standing in front of various things brought back from one of his expeditions. His documents of practice are varied. Sometimes they are direct contacts with other things, unmediated transfers of physical actions, such as rubbings, collections of dust, rain water slops or the droppings of animals. At other times they are maps or much more traditional drawings whereby he seeks to capture the 'look' of an object or creature.

John Wolseley

Wolseley's practice involves a sort of 'wooly' documentation, not a fully cross referenced documented practice, more of a hybrid.

There is however a more fully realised documentation practice, one that is understood as both the creation of documents and the techniques of their management, such as collection, archiving, arrangement, contextualization, or manipulation. In many cases documentation formed an essential component of the piece, so that the distinction between documentation and the work itself was impossible to draw.

The grid is still an essential element in this type of art because it allows for ordering and cross referencing and many of the artists working in this tradition cite Hanne Darboven as an influence.

Hanne Darboven

Darboven's imagery stems from her various interests in maths, music notation and very personal interpretations of time and relationships. It is however her obsessive ordering and collecting together of her interests that leads to a potent combination of ordered repetition and a feeling that as every possible move is documented and preserved in her grid of relationships, we are entering a post Kafka world of undecipherable bureaucracy.

Emily Prince: American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan

Emily Prince's work, 'American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghans)' was made in tribute to every American serviceman and woman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2004.

Her pencil portraits appear on small cards corresponding to skin colour, her collective drawings also forming a study of the racial demographics of soldiers sent to war.

Each image is accompanied by the fallen soldier's name, age and place of origin. Empty frames indicate that there was no image available of the dead soldier.

The form of the installation of the drawings has been varied, sometimes in the shape of a map, showing where each person came from and at other times in structures relating to these soldiers' date of birth. By making these small individualised portraits, Prince restores each fallen solider from a statistic back into a person, challenging the public to confront a reality it has grown desensitised to.

Emily Prince

Prince had to work from photographs and it is of course the photograph that has come to be seen as the 'real' document of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But some photographers are more adept than others about dealing with that. Christopher Williams is someone you should look at if you are wanting to unpick the elements that make up exhibition and documentation. His exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery a few years ago being a typical example of how he deconstructs a situation in order to both question it and to resurrect it as a new space.

As this blog is about drawing I'm not going to open out the photographic issue but if you want to study this in more detail I would recommend the books set out in the reference section at the end of this post.

herman de vries using his fingers to create a soil colour square

herman de vries (he does not capitalise his name) makes drawings using his fingers from soil samples and collects them together in the form of framed squares, that are when exhibited put into grids that are used to reinforce the 'scientific' nature of his study. His earth museum holds over seven thousand samples of earth, gathered by de vries or sent to him from all over the world. Begun in 1983 it is a compendium of earth types, making the viewer aware of the subtle differences that the world's soils exhibit. I first came across his work in Venice at the Dutch pavilion and it's powerful simplicity and respect for the earth had a profound effect on me.

It is the care he takes in collecting his soil samples that makes all the difference. Each specimen is dried into a powder-like consistency, securely bagged, boxed and labelled with its date of collection and its place of origin; each is then represented in his earth catalogue by a rubbing made by hand on paper and carefully kept in identical Solander boxes.

A Solander Box

The Solander box is something that those of you that are thinking of working in this area need to know about. It is the classic archival box, proven to be acid free and therefore safe for storing manuscripts, maps, prints, documents, old and precious books as well as unique items, such as the herman de vries soil samples. The point about the Solander box (sometimes called a clamshell case) is that it has a book like structure and it looks as if it belongs in a library/museum. It is named after the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander who worked in the Natural History Museum during the 18th century.

'The case has a hinged lid connected to its base. Both lid and bottom sections of the box have three fixed side sections or "lips"; the lid is slightly larger so that the side pieces "nest" when the case is closed. The fourth "spine" side has flexible joints where it joins the main top and bottom pieces and so goes flat onto the surface where the box is opened. The front-edge of the case often contains a clasp for closure. The exterior is covered with heavy paper, fabric or leather, and its interior may be lined with padded paper or felt.' Wiki

The depth of the box is normally about five inches and the boxes are still made using traditional sizes, such as: "royal", "imperial" and "elephant", although you can have them made to measure.

Solander had his boxes made at a time when archiving was something restricted to things, but as time has moved on, it would seem that every aspect of our lives is now documented and these documents have to be appropriately archived.

We are now surrounded by the production of bureaucratic records. In my own job I have seen a transition from the need for one secretory who had a typewriter, and a registrar who had a ledger, to a whole building dedicated to the administration of the art college (or university as it is now), each person with their own computers and all staff constantly being asked to produce more and more documentary evidence about everything that is done, from health and safety checks to tutorials, there is now a huge output of records, creating in turn new demands for the collecting and archival of all this material. These are the repositories of modern truths, and they are consulted by professionals such as lawyers and human resource experts who use them to make sure we are all doing what we are supposed to be doing.

Back in 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted the Live/Work exhibition. This was an attempt to present drawings as both documentation and physical process. As an exhibition it was therefore seminal in creating a theoretical framework that could encompass both the recording of practice and practice itself as artworks. It was a timely exhibition, as it reflected the state that we all seemed to be in, if our lives were now being documented all the time, then art itself should suffer the same fate. In my mind (mainly because one of the critical studies staff at the college, Kit Bamford was undertaking his PhD on Lyotard at the time) this seemed to relate to some current ideas about the sublime, ideas that seemed to suggest that because so much of our experience was filtered through documentation or recording, that this distancing was itself a type of sublime experience, similar in form but not perhaps in degree, to Burke's awareness of a marching army on the other side of the hill. Both are experiences that are never actually encountered, we become aware of experience via another medium, in the case of Burke's army via sound and in the case of a performance via a record or document of the performance. This distancing, it has been argued is essential to creative thought as it allows us to speculate on what could be. For instance in the case of performances, some have become legendary, not because people actually saw what went on, but because their documentation began to suggest that the performance was seminal. (Check some of these out)

We are now very used to the idea of performative practices, indeed our whole life can be regarded as simply that, a performance. But this has been something that has taken several years to become the norm and in the 1970s when I was first practicing in Leeds, it was Mary Kelly's work that made me aware that every aspect of our lives could be seen as subject matter for art.

Mary Kelly: Post Partum Document

Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document was a six year long documentation of a mother child relationship and as an art work it highlighted the growing importance of documentation as a way of giving verification to a practice. Coming not long after Art and Language had made us aware of their filing cabinet archive, Kelly's work opened the art world door to the inclusion of something that because of its tacitly accepted male dominance, it had never before taken seriously; 'motherhood'. Perhaps it was only because Kelly used bureaucratic like processes of recording and documenting her relationship with a growing boy, that she was taken seriously, the scientific method lending its power to Kelly's personal desire to communicate the facts of motherhood life.

As you can see by the examples chosen, gradually the documentation aspect is becoming more and more important, until in some examples of art practice the documentation itself takes over. Artists becoming involved in the creation of documents as well as their management, so they also have to organise their collections of information, archive them, arrange them, as well as operating to contextualise them.
Hal Foster pointed to “an archival impulse” that was he thought symptomatic of a postmodernism that had run its course. Drawing as a documentary practice is a rarity within this context because photography is regarded as a way of recording ‘truth’, and whether in reality this is the case or not, the photograph has taken centre stage as the document of society. The camera as ‘objective lens’, has also meant that documentary film makers began to see themselves as much as artists as documentary film makers. On the one hand as the makers of these films they realised that all documentary is in fact fiction, but on the other hand art curators were becoming more and more insistent that they take centre stage in international biennales and events such as Documenta, where in particular documentary film was often being shown alongside other art forms, as a now legitimised form of fine art practice. This has led to the hybridization of art and film, and what has been termed the “documentary turn” of contemporary art.
This documentary turn, has now been questioned by the rise of newer technologies whereby CGI techniques are so sophisticated that there is a blurred line between what is real and what is simulated, and the old concept of the camera as an objective technology is now receding. The document now includes invisible data as well as visible evidence; archiving is now often linked to surveillance and biometric control. All forms of documentation come with what has been called “informatic opacity” and democratic societies are all seeking transparency in the use of collected data. This has led to what could be called a digital / analogue split in the documentary concept. On the one hand you have the more tangible documents as defined by Suzanne Briet; ‘any physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon’. This tends to cover all physical manifestations of documentary practice, including of course drawings. On the other hand we have data and data is now collected by very sophisticated algorithms that sift through the data as it is collected and manipulate it towards whatever outcomes the algorithms are looking for. Therefore in a similar way to CGI developments loosening photography’s hold on objectivity, data gathering in relation to algorithmic manipulation, has loosened the relationship between facts and interpretation. Facts can now be used to explain whatever the owner of the data wants them to explain. Thus we find ourselves in a post-truth situation.
This situation may lead to a return to drawing as a more physical and therefore ‘authentic’ document of reality. It is hard to say because we are in the middle of this revolution, but what is clear, is that the idea of the document as authentic record is now becoming outdated or is seen as a much older way of asserting authenticity. It feels as if Christian Boltanski’s installations, whereby identity, local and international narratives as well as individual biography are all historicised and contexualised using methodologies of inventory, presentation, and display are now outdated. His seemingly objective archives of the artifacts of everyday life (a family snapshot; an article of clothing) feel too like the willing creation of historical myths.

Christian Boltanski: The Storehouse

Of course documentation can be very physical and photography and installation tend to be the main methods used by contemporary artists. For instance both Burtynsky and Mark Dion document the processes that occur in the world that highlight the relationship between humans and the environment. Burtynsky through photography and Dion using installation. However Dion does make drawings and prints that he uses to reinforce the ideas that emerge from his working processes.

Mark Dion

Tuesday, 12 September 2017

Process and its documentation

Dóra Maurer: Seven Foldings 1975 Drypoint

My last post about paper reminded me of how important process and its documentation are as ways of developing practice.

When writing the previous post about Sipho Mabona's origami folding, I was reminded of Dóra Maurer's 'Seven Foldings', a print that became, as she stated, "the object of actions in continuous change".

Maurer began this series of works by dropping acid onto an etching plate and documenting the process with a series of photographs. She called these performances ‘vehement actions' and began to use systematic photographic documentation of what happened. 'Seven foldings' was an attempt to record the process of change that a plate could go through in a more ‘geometric way'. She cut into the plate, folded it and took ‘phase-prints' of each of the stages. The work becomes a record or documentation of the process and as such its meaning becomes less about issues such as composition or media specificity and more about how as a document it can reveal the processes that lay behind its making.

Maurer then began to use 16mm film to document her work, for instance the film ‘Timing', shows a canvas being folded.

Folding was something that fascinated several artists during the late 60s and early 70s, because it was an activity that both revealed the physical structure of what was being folded, and was an activity that could be easily recorded and presented. For instance in relation to her project, 'Drawing Which Makes Itself', Dorothea Rockburne stated, “I came to realise that a piece of paper is a metaphysical object. You write on it, you draw on it, you fold it.” She was interested in paper not just as the ground for a drawing but as an active material, its inherent qualities determining the form of the artwork. The folds when exhibited in series reveal the process of exploration, this type of presentation being very important when process becomes dominant. Work that presents process as an essential aspect of its reason d'etre, has to often be presented very systematically, so that an audience can follow the moves that were made.

Dorothea Rockburne, Untitled from Locus, 1972

Without the example of artists such as Maurer and Rockburne, Sipho Mabona's practice, (see last post) that relies heavily on its documentation, would not have been possible.

However, I suspect this older generation of artists associated with process would have criticised Mabona's practice as being not rigorous enough. The fact that he decided to make an elephant, they would have argued, took the audience's attention away from the process of folding itself.

I think this debate is important because it highlights the post-modern divide. Modernism tended to valorise media specificity and abstraction was a way of getting audiences to focus on the process of making art, such as the quality of the paint marks or surface. The introduction of imagery was often thought of as bringing in a narrative that came from outside art. Artist were advised to stay away from illustrating stories. But theories have moved on and in a post-post-modern world of practice, we are now in a situation where all earlier approaches to and theories about art making are available as on-line resources. However with so much choice, it becomes much harder to make decisions, my advice is therefore to focus on researching whatever it is that is interesting to you and as the research develops hopefully it will reveal an approach and imagery that is unique to your personal vision; not by you trying to make work that is 'different or stylish' but by the force of the inner logic of your process, by the depth of your research and the sharpness of your perception. Whatever you do, you will eventually have to present it to an audience.

Presentation is very important when systematic processes becomes dominant. Work that presents a timed process has to be presented very systematically, so that an audience can follow the moves that were made.

Eleanor Antin, 'CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture' 1972

A typical example is Eleanor Antin's 'Carving', every day she reduced her food intake and then each morning, she was photographed naked in the same four stances. She was effectively 'carving' her own body into shape.

The grid of looking, which historically is located within the domain of drawing or geometry can also work as a grid of classification, its structure allowing the observer to clearly examine visual difference. This is a structure borrowed from science; for instance the image below allows various gradients to be compared.

Slopegraphs for comparing gradients

Eadweard Muybridge

The gridded systematic approach used by scientists and analytic researchers such as Muybridge allows us to easily see the results of an investigation and this was to have a powerful influence on art. It is of course important to remind ourselves that drawing as a means to explain things is an essential tool for all disciplines. During the Renaissance when the disciplines of art and science were not so rigidly separated it was easier to see the grid as part of the process of looking and systematically checking relationships.

Durer: gridded perspective device

As a tool for measurement a grid could be both laid over a plot of land or established as a screen through which to look at the world.

In the late twentieth century Rosalind Krauss wrote an important theoretical text on the relationship between the grid and modern art. The grid as a formal device to use when stabilising visual relationships was during the last century embedded as a central component of design thinking. In the last fifty years, any artist with even a small amount of training in graphics or visual design would therefore have been introduced to the importance of the modular grid as an organising structure.

In the 13th century, the architect Villard de Honnecourt produced a diagram used for producing page layouts with margins of fixed ratios.

Use of fixed ratios to stabilise layout in design

Although gridded page layout had been used since the invention of printing, the profession of graphic designer did not get established until the early 20th century, but with the rise of industrialisation, print in particular became vital to the dissemination of information and although fixed ratios were still useful, geometry and in particular the grid, were organising systems that could be used much more flexibly. There was a move away from centered text to “asymmetric” design as in a newspaper page, and designers began to use a Modular grid, which was an especially flexible model for text and image arrangement.

Compare the modular grid above with typical gridded modular presentations used by artists who use systematic processes.

Bernd & Hilla Becher

Andy Warhol

herman de vries

Sol Lewitt

The compositional logic of the grid as a template for aesthetic investigation was central to the development of the work of several artists interested in process. The serialised exploration of formal variation, was guided and limited by the geometric configuration of the grid and was an aspect of fine art I clearly remember being promoted from my time at college in the late 60s and early 70s. Perhaps the most sensitive of the artists working in this way was Agnus Martin. She often held a delicate balance between following the logic of the grid and allowing her own aesthetic sensibility to determine the final result.

Agnus Martin

In the mid twentieth century the design grid was incorporated into the grid of the computer screen and early users of the computer to create art relied on this to generate their work. Frederick Hammersley was one of the first artists to use computer coding to generate imagery and the way numbers are used to identify the points on a screen relies on Cartesian coordinates which are themselves essential to the development of analytic geometry.

Frederick Hammersley

Looking at the grid in relation to 'documentation', it also becomes clear how what was initially used as a device to stabilise design, is now becoming a format to emphasise rigor and authenticity. Tehching Hsieh's 'Doing Time' which was the Taiwan pavilion's presentation at this year's Venice Biennale, relied heavily on systematic documentation.

Tehching Hsieh's 'Doing Time'

The geometric grid that was used for the serialised exploration of formal variation is in this case being used to establish the authenticity of the action. Once more I'm reminded of how important 'disegno' is as a principle and or method that underlies fine art practice. Disegno constitutes the intellectual component of the visual arts, which in the Renaissance justified their elevation from craft to fine art. The use of a grid in this case is not simply about the clear visualisation of the process, it also asks questions about the human capacity to systematically organise the world. From the way we are clocked in, given a number and registered from the moment we are born, to the way that the collection of statistics becomes the driving force behind government decision making. Disegno, 'drawing' in this case being the way that an underlying concept shapes the final presentation.

Geometry itself began as a way of developing a particular understanding of the world, when it was first used there would have been no separation between what we now call art and science, it was simply a useful way of drawing. Documentation has long been an essential tool for the understanding of scientific investigation and has now become central to contemporary art practice. Perhaps we are at last beginning to respond to C. P. Snow's problem of two cultures. He argued that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into two cultures; the sciences and the humanities, and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.

Social media relies on documented imagery to function, many artists have extended their practices into filmmaking via the process of documenting their actions and processes. Technological advances now mean that we all have a mobile device in our pockets that we can use to make films that are of better quality than those made with movie cameras used to be. I began this post reflecting on the film that was done to document Sipho Mabona's origami folding. Why not consider making a series of short videos about your own practice? Which aspects would you focus on? Would these videos focus on the sound of your drawing's making? On the way marks change a surface? or on the more performative aspects of your work? Perhaps a video could be made of the processes 'off camera'. Is there a filmic story in the history of the elements that you are working with? I have posted several times about the stories that come with various papers or substances such as charcoal or graphite, is there a way of making these histories into videos?

See also some other related posts on the grid and disegno:

The weaving of grids

The grid as a trap

Mathematical shapes

From perception to concept: why draw?

Sarah Sze (a further reflection on the concept of drawing as disegno)

Notations: Contemporary drawing as idea and process