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

  See also these posts: 

Drawing and the archaeologists dig

Process and documentation

Live/Work: Performance into Drawing
Relational practices 

References:

Documentation as Art Practice in the 1960s by Christian Berger and Jessica Santone

Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22. 

Suzanne Briet, What is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text, trans. by Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinent, Lanham 1951.
Amelia Jones, “Presence in Absentia: Performance Art and the Rhetoric of Presence,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 11–18
 

Jean-François Chevrier and Philippe Roussin, “Présentation,” Communications 71 (2001): 5
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Dimensions of Man [1964] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 [1973] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner, ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 94
Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge

Berrebi, S. (2014) The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document Amsterdam: Valiz 

Balsom, E. and Peleq, H. (2016) Documentary Across Disciplines New York: MIT Press

Stallabrass, J. (2013) Documentary (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art) MIT press

Drawing as testimony

There is an area of drawing that is often underrated and as I have remarked before, also made to feel inferior by being regarded as illustration. This is drawing done directly in front of the world, reportage, or direct responses to life as it is experienced. Historically this thread includes Pieter Bruegel, Goya, Rembrandt, Otto Dix, Daumier, Edgar Degas and many more artists that at their core looked at and experienced the world through drawing, and in doing so derived a deep understanding of what it is to be human.

I try to continue in my own small way this tradition by walking my local streets and drawing. My skills are nowhere as good as they need to be but at least I feel that some of the reality of the streets seeps into the work I do.

This post is about artists who have drawn directly from experience, and like Goya, sometimes these artists find themselves in dangerous and difficult places, and yet also like Goya and Otto Dix, they still managed to get down on paper their feelings and observations. Drawing is not like taking photographs, the split second of the photograph means that you only glance in the direction of what is happening, sometimes not even looking, because you can only point the camera and hope for a good shot. But if you draw you need to look hard and long, thus confronting the situation, taking it in at a much deeper level.

The artist Avigdor Arikha was known for working only in natural light and for producing each of his images in one day. Both of these working methods were due to Arikha’s decision to focus on prioritising the act of observation. He would often give himself limitations within which to work, for instance at one time restricting himself to black and white, a restriction that he imposed upon himself for seven years. 

Working within an imposed set of severe conditions was something Arikha would have had to learn from an early age. He survived his early experiences as a boy in a concentration camp during the second world war, because of drawings he made on scraps of paper of images that were direct impressions of the horrors he was experiencing as a camp inmate. On a visit to the camp, delegates of the Red Cross saw some of his drawings and realising the importance of his revelatory images managed to engineer his own and his sister’s escape. 

Avigdor Arikha: drawings done as a boy in Transnistria concentration camp

Because of his Jewish identity, Arikha was only able to escape the concentration camp by taking on the identity of a boy who had just died. To become a dead person in order to live is one of those experiences that must shape one's view of life forever and in Arikha's case I think it was seminal to what he was to eventually develop as a body of work. His art training in Israel introduced him to European abstraction and this was to have a lasting impression on his compositional choices; selection and simplification of forms being vital to his own process of self-reflection. His perceptions needed to be stripped down as they arrived in all their complexity in order for him to understand what it was he was seeing. The critic Robert Hughes described Arikha's process as one suffused with  an "air of scrupulous anxiety", the act of drawing, being never an easy one, especially when you realise that in some ways you only see through someone else's 'dead' eyes. Arikha's work has a nervous, edgy quality, to it, one that reminds you that no matter how hard one might seek to be objective, a point of view is hard to avoid, because it can seep into the image from the way a pen is held or from the confidence with which a mark is drawn. The artist's 'touch' can at times be just that; a touch that transforms by its very nature. 

Lord Home

I well remember Arikha's portrait of Lord Home the Conservative Prime minister, one of those rare portraits that seemed to capture the nature of what the political animal is actually like. Arikha seemed the perfect choice to make a painting of Home, because he was able to see the death in life of the conservative mind. 

Avigdor Arikha: Samuel Beckett

Avigdor Arikha: Knife and bread

Avigdor Arikha made many drawings and paintings of people and landscapes, but of all his images the ones that I feel make the most impact are those of simple basic objects. His image above of a knife and bread being a wonderful example of that confrontation with the play of light passing over a few moments of the day. He makes these moments as solid as a mountain, this rock of bread will break your teeth if you try to eat it, it is not for eating it is for looking. This image is of a few moments preserved in all their richness, a sight made all the more precious because at one point there was to be no more looking for Arikha and he still can only see out of a dead boy's eyes.

Eric Taylor: Images drawn in Belsen

The images above are by Eric Taylor, a former principal of the art college in Leeds where I still work. When I began my teaching career Eric was still working in the college making ceramics. He was a quiet, inwardly focused man, who at that time used to come into the college every day to work. This was his reward for services rendered, after devoting his life to art education he was given free access to the college studios and facilities and used these until he was in his 90s. He was a beacon of sanity around which the department rotated, he didn't have to talk, he just made things and made them with love and care and an eye that relied on the experiences of life to tell him what to do. One of those experiences was in the services of His Majesty's Government as a war artist at the end of the second world war. He was one of the artists that had to record what had happened in Belsen concentration camp and there is no way that his training as an artist could have prepared him for what he was asked to document. The drawings he did at the time are now kept in the Imperial War Museum and act as reminders to us all of what people do to people when they forget that all people are people. 

Restoring Eric Taylor's mural

Set into the side of the Leeds Arts University's new building, you can see a three part ceramic mosaic mural. It is a joyous celebration of rural life, set into a wall facing a busy city road transport link. This is also the work of Eric Taylor, a far cry from the scenes he was forced to contemplate during his time as a war artist. Now fully restored these colourful murals are passed every day by a new generation of students who have hopefully not had to face what both Avigdor Arikha and Eric Taylor had to experience. However both artists at one time or another had to stare life in the face in order to make their drawings and in that process they learnt both about the world and themselves. 

In many ways the artist Pia Linz's practice is the opposite of these older artists' work. But it is perhaps a much closer reflection on how we as people in what we now call the developed world, experience life today. Because she works from behind a transparent shield, she sees the world through a screen and this, it would seem to me, is the everyday situation for many of us, be this the car windscreen, mobile or a computer screen.
Her 'Box Engravings' have developed from ideas of projection. What is interesting here is that these ideas are in fact rooted in the 15th century and if you go back to very old drawing devices such as Durer's perspective frame, the idea of drawing as a record of what passes in front of a flat screen or grid, can be seen as a constant that has lasted since the invention of perspective.

This is what Durer had to say about how to use his drawing apparatus. “Now draw whatever you wish to paint on the pane of glass. This is very suitable for portraiture-especially for those painters who are not sure of themselves. If you wish to use this method to paint a portrait, let the subject rest his head so that he will not move it until all the needful strokes are completed. ”

You can compare Durer's drawing apparatus with drawing aids used at the beginning of the twentieth century, the following text being taken from an advert for Ablett's glass plane above. "The teacher with the position of his eye fixed by the moveable iron ring, traces with brush and Chinese white the outline of the object, (rod, disk, cube or chair etc), which is placed on a table or the floor on the further side of the glass. The pupils, one by one, look through the ring and see for themselves that the lines traced on the Glass by the teacher, coincide with the outline of the model. Pia Linz develops her three dimensional Box Engravings by always using a fixed standpoint and turning around on her own axis. First, she builds a transparent Perspex box construction that is tailor made in response to her chosen location, for instance it might take the shape of a prominent building that can be seen from the location. Then once it is positioned, she sits inside the transparent Perspex construction and draws with a felt marker onto the inside of the construction what she can see. (Obviously she will have to swivel round as she draws in order to do this). After this activity is completed, she makes the drawing permanent by engraving the lines of the drawing into the Perspex.

In contrast to Durer's perspective frame however, in which the observer places themselves in the same position of the artist, here the observer views the world of the Box Engraving from the outside. The world of Linz's perceptions is always therefore contained within her construction. It is as if Linz's perceptions can never really escape the confines of her own head. The older artists had a confidence that their testimony would be something that was communicable to others, they had no need for complex devices. In Linz's case we feel that she has to provide a framework for her experiences, one that has to conceptually reflect on the research behind her ideas. However her work still operates as a drawn testament to the fact that she too sat out in the street and drew what she saw. It is a document and a form of reportage, but contained in a presentation far more suited to present day exhibition demands, the work sitting clearly within the domain of contemporary fine art practice.

Pia Linz: Box Engravings

See also:

Some other observations on observational drawing

Andrew Lister

Drawing and mindfulness 

Drawings on exhibition in the Pallant House Gallery (Includes some observations on William Coldstream and related artists)