Responses to the fragility of being alive

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

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

Device for Hugging, COVID19

Device for Bingewatching, COVID19

Device for Spooning (Big Spoon), COVID19

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

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

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

Dario Robleto | Body as Data

Dario Robleto talks about his work

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

Jonathan Borofsky's 'Heartlight' 1991

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

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer 'Last Breath'

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

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

See also:

Self portrait drawings

Drawing with smoke

Uncertain certainty 

Why make art?

Drawing and mindfulness: part one

Drawing and mindfulness: part two

Drawing and mindfulness: part three

Drawing and mindfulness: part four

Drawing and mindfulness: part five

The Uncertain Certainty

Drawings of flowers have a deep connection to what are usually called 'vanitas' or 'memento mori' images. These images were designed to remind the viewer of their own mortality and of the worthlessness of worldly goods and pleasures. However it is not only the subject matter that can operate in this way, the actual approach to making an image can open out a meditation on the fragile relationship between the physicality of the world and the fleeting moment of its perception. 

Leonard McComb

There is a particular approach to drawing that I always warm to, it's what I would call an 'uncertain certainty'. Some of the artists that I go back and look at over and over again have this quality, which is about time and touch, as well as about the interrelationship between mass and space, or if you want to get more religious about it, the spirit and the body. 
The best of Leonard McComb's drawings have it. An almost spiritual radiance emanates from his drawings of flowers. It's as if he is trying to touch the petals with his eyes, each mark a caress of direction and an attempt to feel around the mass. He builds these drawings up with small directional marks, marks that at their inception appear to be looking for the form, but as they build up, they energise the space, eventually space and mass interpenetrate, all now vibration.  

This drawing of a fish seems to capture both its material condition and the moment that it's iridescence makes it become as transient as a soap bubble. It is indeed a 'memento mori'.

Leonard McComb

The historical precedence for these drawings is once again Cezanne, in particular the late watercolours.

Cezanne

David Jones is another artist that developed a body of work using a similar tentative and yet sure touch that feels as if he is delicately searching for the rhythms that lie underneath what we see. 

David Jones

It's interesting to compare artists working in this way to someone using a similar subject matter, Graham Crowley's flowers are a composition of solids, specks of white oil paint dot over the charcoal drawing, giving a superficial appearance of spatial opening, but when you look beneath the surface, each flowerhead is in fact seen as a mass, it's just that there are so many of them that their sheer number activate the surface and create a spatial rhythm.  Mass in action, rather than mass turning into energy. A sort of dark flower power.

Graham Crowley

If you look at Claude Heath's drawings of a head by touch, there is also an uncertain certainty, which also relates to the idea of vision as a sort of feeling or touch. 

Claude Heath

Michelangelo had a wonderful sense of touch, and was also a master of that uncertain certainty. The difference is that this is not a drawing done from observation, it is done by someone searching for an image. The search itself is attempting to carve the image out of the paper, each mark chisel like, the body gradually dissolving into energy, the mass becoming spirit. 

Michelangelo

Adriaen van Ultrecht

The painting above by Adriaen van Ultrecht, exemplifies many of the traditional conventions of 'vanitas' painting. The skull, the flowers, a closed book etc., this still-life (in French: nature morte) is designed in such a way that our gaze is focused on the moment of frozen perception, the glint of light on a glass, the texture of a fallen petal, or the crumple of paper. The artist holds us in the moment, but the surfaces of these objects are what they are about. The interaction of looking, the oscillation of the eyes is not recorded, life is not captured, only the objects' surface appearance. I could argue that the painting is 'without life', hermetically sealed and 'finished'. Whilst the more uncertain images further above are open to life, forever emerging into being, and as such a much deeper metaphor and one that goes beyond a Capitalist fascination with objects and things. When Adriaen van Ultrecht painted his image, the Low Countries were central to the development of world trade as we now know it, and we often see images of things constructed during this time as measures against which metaphors for the condition of our lives could be constructed. People become measured by their possessions. A condition that still in many ways persists, one which I would argue against and suggest that we need to be more aware of the flux and flow of interrelationships between the world and ourselves, and consider how what we do impacts upon the world; which is why I am drawn so strongly to that uncertain certainty; something you can never own, only meditate upon. 

Brass shell-case, with flowers

In my own work I have occasionally needed to reflect on things in such a way that I need use a visual language that supports the struggle to 'see' an idea. In the case of the drawing above, it is of a shell case that my grandfather brought back from the First World War, it is now used as a flower vase. As in Adriaen van Ultrecht's painting flowers are used as a symbol of mortality, their conjunction with the shell-case suggesting the explosive release of the shell from the gun barrel as well as those moments in history when flowers have been used to spike the guns. It is though in the tentative marks used that the real story lies. 

See also:

The uncertainty principle is also an issue that raises its head when thinking about quantum mechanics see these posts:

Drawing and Quantum mechanics part one

Drawing and Quantum mechanics part two

Abstraction and mathematics an attempt to describe a quantum flux as drawing theory

The hard won image

Celia Paul and Cezanne

Thoughts on life drawing

Trench art