Drawing and street games

My granddaughters live in Glasgow and one time when I was up there we went for a walk and they took a few fat chalks with them. We had stopped for a rest and they began to make chalk drawings on a road that went through the local park. It seemed to be such an obvious and natural thing to do and it took my mind back to the 1950s when as children we used to draw in the road using any broken bits of stone that would make a mark. Most of the drawing was done in my day to aid the playing of games. This might be hopscotch if there were girls involved or football and cricket if it was boys. But we also drew people and things including roads and other places for our toys to inhabit, tiny towns like those play-mats you can now buy from the shops. There were far less cars about in those days and streets were as much for children to play in, as for ease of automobile transport. 

Hopscotch was always a favourite game and like so many games its origins lie in warfare. It was originally a way for Roman soldiers to train in full uniform and with heavy equipment on their back, hopping was a way that they could learn to keep their balance and dexterity when laden down. If you can't remember the rules, they go like this: each player needs a marker of some kind either a rock, stick, or some other object like a glove or hat to pickup when they return. The first player throws the marker into the first square without it touching any of the lines. If it touches the lines or goes out of bounds they are out and it’s the next players turn.

Once a player has successfully thrown the marker, they hop on one leg (often through squares 1, 2, 3) or two, (when two squares are side by side as above, 4/5) until the course is complete, always avoiding touching the lines. The game can be made more challenging by hopping on one foot throughout the course to the end of the first leg. Players must only make one jump into the last double foot square. Therefore in order to be set up for the return, players must jump from the second to last square and spin 180 degrees to land in the top (in the case above the 7/8) squares facing the starting point. From what I remember, the game got faster and faster as it went on and this was how the best players were finally eliminated.

Tony Luciani: Elia Luciani plays hopscotch

The artist Tony Luciani was still working with his mother, when she was 93 and had dementia. By engaging with her around the game of hopscotch, his mother could get both physical and mental exercise. Tony was also able to make an image that contracts time, the game being one his mother remembered playing as a girl and as he worked with her to make his images, she was brought into his world, rather than being excluded because of her condition. Hopscotch allows Luciani's mother to return to the innocence of play, her dementia allowing her access to an inner child, her adult life being gradually erased. What we tend to see as a terrible illness perhaps in some cases is a journey back into a time of innocence, a time before the cares of life have weighed us down. 

Frances Alys has for years been filming children playing games. He filmed 'Hopscotch' in the Sharya Refugee Camp in Iraq. Children are forever inventive and able to construct imaginative worlds out of whatever and wherever they find themselves. In amongst a situation that could drive them to the edges of despair, these children remind us that we are all born with the ability to play games and that the simple ability to mark out ground can lead to a communal idea, perhaps even more easily than lines scratched into the earth to demarcate ownership.

Frances Alys: Hopscotch 2016

Hopscotch somewhere sandy   

Just as children will draw in the sand, so will artists. 

Picasso

The artist Andres Amador also makes drawings on the beach, drawings that he is happy to see being washed away by the tide. Using a drone, he takes a picture of the work from above once completed, his geometric structures in many ways resembling lines of giant hop scotch squares. Perhaps he is reliving his childhood, being an artist gives you the licence to be a child, or as Picasso put it, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Andres Amador

When boys we often made makeshift goals by roughly drawing an outline on a wall. These outlines are everywhere if you keep a lookout for them, I pass some on my way into the university every time I walk in and sometimes scratched lines in regular use become traced over with chalks or even painted, to form a slightly more permanent idea. 

Sometimes I am reminded of the history of art by things you can see in the street. In the case of the image below the painted football goal is on a plaster skimmed wall and we are very aware of this because the plaster is breaking away and the image is already incomplete. So much of our historical reference to painting is on similar surfaces. 

From photographer Michael Kirkham's 'Football Goals'

A damaged fresco

Just as the painting of a football goal is now revealed to have been done on plaster that was itself laid on to cover a brick wall, the damage to the fresco above has revealed the layers of its making. The football goal it could be argued is rather like a minimalist abstract painting, the construction of it being very similar to that of fresco painting. 

Cricket stumps

Cricket stumps used to be as common an urban image as football goals, but recently I have noticed a decline, I suspect this means that the game is in decline too, but not invention. In the case of the wheeled bin, a rupture has occurred between an object and its intended function; object and meaning are destabilised and the cricket bat leaning against the bin, reinforces this, the bin is no longer primarily for waste disposal, it is now operating as an adjunct to the game of cricket. 

The streets are where we used to play and where play begins so does art. Perhaps we need to reclaim our streets from the car. In the late1990s Methley Terrace in Leeds was greened to see what would happen if the cars were taken out. So it is possible. 

Turfing the Methley's

Kolams, an art using rice flour laid down as drawings on the ground in front of homes by women gives sanctity to the spot where they are drawn. These drawings are a welcoming sign to the Goddess Lakshmi who is believed to bring wealth and prosperity. 

What was a daily morning ritual has recently spun off as a Chennai kolam competition. However this tourist trade development, has not destroyed the core motivation for ritual, reminding us that it is possible to inventively engage with the streets of our cities.  

Murmurations: Lou Sheppard

During the time of Covid19, artists found that they were still needed, in particular as they were able to quickly and inventively rethink how people could interact with the surrounding environment, especially if there was a sense of some sort of ritual engagement. Lou Sheppard was one such artist. Murmurations: Scores for Social Distancing were a series of dance works based on bird flocking behaviour. The choreography required seven dancers to perform an interconnected set of movements while never coming within two meters of each other. As a public art work Murmurations consisted of the notation-directional markings that formed a choreographic score painted onto the road surface. The markings referenced the social distancing directions that began to be seen everywhere in public spaces. The work was in effect a visual score for the choreography of social distancing and it highlighted an awareness of the new collective public rituals that were being developed.
I remembered Lou Sheppard's work because it was very similar to hopscotch, a game that I participated in when I was a boy. The ritual chanting of the girls, which if I remember was something like, "Wibbly-wobbly turn around. Wibbly-wobbly touch the ground. Wibbly-wobbly tie your shoe. Wibbly-wobbly that will do", set alongside the queuing up to wait your turn and the sound of the hopping feet, rasping breath, all set around the chalk drawn diagram for hopping. It was a ritual that I can still feel the excitement of, it continues to sit inside my body; the waiting for your turn, envisioning how to do the game faster and without mistakes and how this as an achievement would make me appear, even if only for a moment, a winner amongst my peers. I look back on those moments as being some of the best times of my life. Out of such games were being made social bonds, physical tests of skill and dexterity and group dynamics that were ritually being encoded. To paraphrase Bob Dylan:

! wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could play simply in that street again
Ten-thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

Perhaps I'm thinking of hopscotch in these terms as a way of reflecting on my own loss of innocence. The photographer  Andy Wright recorded the image below of a hopscotch layout in Barcelona. When I first saw it I was reminded of the fact that the shape of the drawn elements are very similar to the basic layout of the human body, the head in this case having being cut off by the drop. Whoever drew it was very aware of making an image to represent the end of innocence. 

Andy Wright: Hopscotch to oblivion 

See also:

Lines in the road

Walking and drawing

Graffiti was always a serious art form

Asemic writing

Drawing as the trace of.a touch The Mohs hardness test: Something every child will have done instinctively. 

A history of drawing as thinking The line as a territory marker

Magic

Title slide of the Magic in Art lecture

I am not teaching any more, but when I was, one of the lectures I gave was on magic and art. I proposed that magic was at the core of the process we now call art and that the boundary between the real and the unreal is what is played with in both the performance of magic and art. As key examples I used images from ancient Egypt, Rome, India and Greece, and suggested that often there was no distinction between art and magic. 

What I wanted to do was to question the passivity of objects and to highlight how objects affect our experience of perception and effect change in our minds and bodies. Hopefully this way of thinking would lead to the construction of a different, more animist relationship with objects. 

A few slides from the presentation

When discussing theatrical props in relation to stage magic, Robinson argues that there is a process of transformation occurring as the trick is enacted; the ‘illusory enactment’ (Robinson, 2014, p. 136). I see this as being very similar to the need for rituals in the energising of the inanimate, and the making of magical reality. When I make votives for people, I also need to develop a private ritual for when the votive is 'put into operation' or made 'live'. This might seem to be illusionary but it is as 'real' an experience as any other. This is the driving force behind ritual objects. But they must all have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning. This is often called the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. In my own work this might be rather obtuse or hard to see, but I can track the connection, and this gives it, if only to myself, the object's spiritual energy.

For instance recent images that are like crabs, scorpions or insects, began with someone talking to me about a somatic experience of pain that felt like they were being stung on their insides. In my mind I saw the shape of this 'stinger', which was initially like a scorpion and drew an image for the person involved of a man riding a scorpion, like a horse; in effect getting on top of the pain, being in control of it. This became a print and as I thought about this 'creature' from the insides, it began to have offspring, other pain inflicting creatures, such as crabs that could pinch and snip you, or insects that could sting. We tend to believe that these sorts of creatures have no sentience, so in our minds they do not themselves feel pain, but this is probably myth too and they probably do feel pain. 

Getting on top of the pain

Visualising a somatic experience of pain that felt like being stung on the inside

By bringing humans and invertebrates together in a visual narrative, it gives honorific value to both and some sort of equality as agents, even if the scorpion was initially only an analogy in someone's mind. 

Eventually the drawings engendered solid ritualistic objects, as these seem to have more potency. Objects offer possibilities of actual 'exchange', they externalise ideas, and as they do they make them 'real'. In his paper, 'Becoming Real: The Fluidity of Objects in Magic', Fan-chen Huang explains how boundaries between the real and the imaginary become unpicked during the enactment of magic acts. He states, 'Since time immemorial, magic has been an art that, by manipulating human perception and simulating the real, alternates the passivity of objects and disturbs the stable relationship between man and things. As magic creates a real that surpasses the realm of common knowledge and becomes more real than the real, our recognition of objects undergoes a distortion.'  He goes on to state that '...objects seem to be able to deviate from their normal course of thing-for-us in magical illusions, shattering our affirmation of perception and the scientific absolute.' 

This unpicking of the 'scientific absolute' is a useful thought as far as I am concerned, as I'm always trying to find a place for my practice as an artist, and I sometimes need to work in those gaps between a logical, supposedly 'objective' view of the world and a scientific understanding of things. There still seems to myself something missing, whether this is 'spirit', the vital spark of life, Bergson's élan vital, invisible energy forces, that something or whatever it is that I can never quite touch or put my finger on, but which I intuitively feel is there. 

I was in the Ashmolean museum recently making drawings of objects that made sense to me in relation to where I am in my own work, and one vitrine related to work from an ancient Egyptian civilisation going back to the Palaeolithic period, was full of significant objects. It was as if they could still talk to me, especially as I was already making images of scorpions and the ones in the vitrine were used in magical rituals.

From sketchbook pages drawn in the Ashmolian Museum

On returning to Leeds I went back into image making and began looking for that form that was both magical and real. 

Drawing for ceramics

Of course I then had to do some research into ancient Egyptian culture and realised once again how powerfully these themes had already been dealt with, but instead of being put off, I am even more fascinated by the possibilities this approach to image making offers. 

Serket

Serket, “She Who Causes the Throat to Breathe”

In ancient Egypt images, like the one above that was used as part of a spell to protect you from stepping on a scorpion, were used to put into effect sympathetic magic. Scorpions were also often pictured without stings or claws or they had knives stuck in them, to magically render then harmless. The protective scorpion goddess Selket used to guard coffins of the dead, and in order to effect this, statuettes of scorpions were often pierced, so that they could be be mounted on poles that had been pushed into the ground. As I read about this I was reminded of the work I made for the Patching Sculpture trail in Nottingham, where I had done something similar, this time using flower forms as a memorial to those drowned in the Mediterranean sea as they tried to get to safety in Europe.

From the YSG Patching exhibition: Breaking Ground

The objects I'm thinking about are only just emerging, several are waiting to be fired, others waiting to be glazed and I've as yet to come up with the right way to position them on poles and how to do this both indoors and outdoors, but I shall get there.

In the meantime I have a couple already made.

Crab/scorpions

Magic fetishes emerging

References:

Robinson, A. (2014). All Transparent: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation. In M. Schweitzer & J. Zerdy (Eds.), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (pp. 135–148). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lynne U. Sneddon (2015) Pain in aquatic animals Journal of Experimental Biology Volume 218 Issue 7 April p. 967–976.

See also:

The evolution of an idea A post that shows in more detail how I evolve a sculptural idea 

The iconography of the invisible 

Drawing feet

Why I'm making animist images

Magic Slideshow

The mark of ritual

14th century carved crosses on the walls of the Chapel of St. Helena

Thousands of tiny, "medieval" crosses are carved into the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Masons or artisans carved these crosses, probably on behalf of pilgrims, who it is argued, kept the dust from each carving as a relic or sacred souvenir. What interested me in this work was the importance of the dust removal. When carving any dust is usually regarded as waste, but in this instance it is the carvings that are the remainder, the dust being central to an important ritual. This ritual gives the dust honorific value partly by it coming from a very holy place, (inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the hill of Golgotha, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, as well as the Tomb of Jesus, where he was buried and from which he arose from the dead) and partly by it being generated by the activity of carving a cross. The making of a cross was a vital sign of not just being a Christian, but of the 'truth' or 'veracity' of one's actions. In this case each pilgrim was engaging in a ritual that resulted in their being able to take away a physical memory or talisman of their experience. I'm interested in these ritual actions because I have been making small ceramic 'votive' type objects and looking at the moment of 'transaction' between myself as a maker and the individuals that have a vested interest in thinking of these objects as externalised feelings or concerns. 

Foot votives

The ceramic foot votives above were eventually turned into candles, their insides filled with wax and wicks inserted, so that a nighttime ritual could be developed around the idea of lighting someone's way. These feet were made for someone feeling 'lost', the foot candles giving that someone an excuse to punctuate their day with a moment's reflection, the feet representing both themselves and others, and being a reminder that in many ways we are all lost and seeking the 'right' path. 

A votive made for someone with bad eczema 

Sometimes votives were made in direct response to a physical pain or affliction, as in the one above. The important issue was however how an individual used their relationship with the votive to 'solve' their particular need. For instance they might bury it, smash it, give it to someone else or put it on display. Once the thought, idea or feeling is externalised, it can be 'done to' as you would any other thing out in the world. 

A kintsugi repair

Kintsugi, relates to another type of ritual action that can be embedded into life. In its original form pieces of broken ceramic are put back together and repaired using golden lacquer, these repaired ceramic bowls becoming a reminder that what might have been an accident or flaw, could now be even more meaningful, as kintsugi converts what was a weakness into a strength and like the Kula exchange, as an object is given to another or has another action embedded into its history, it becomes more and more valuable, not in monetary terms but in emotional significance. This idea is reflected in the bowls chosen for Japanese tea ceremonies; bowls with imperfections are revered for their beauty and may be chosen over and above a bowl that is aesthetically beautiful, but without a lived experience. 

Mizuko kuyo: A ritual figure 

There is a Japanese Buddhist ritual that is designed to help people mourn miscarriage or an abortion. The ceremonies begin with the making of a token, like a bib or a necklace, which you then put onto a Jizo or child saint representation. Jizo statues in Japan often look childlike and as you make an offering to the statue, you're also making an offering to the child's spirit that the statue in a way represents.  A monastery garden may be filled with hundreds of often moss-covered Jizo statues, each one wearing a bib or bonnet token. The gardens represent the enormity of loss that these events have meant to people. These rituals are not available to everyone and I'm very aware that when faced with a similar situation many years ago I wish I had had an outlet for my grief, but there wasn't any.

One of the roles of art has always been to help with a coming to terms with the bigger picture. We have however in a secular society perhaps forgotten how to embed ritual into our daily life. We all used to have to say a simple prayer, 'For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful' before every meal, as a reminder of how lucky we were to have food on the table, but this was in a time just after the war when food had been scarce and rationing was still in place. If we don't stop and have those moments of reflection, we begin to take everything for granted, and this has led to a difficult present whereby we have many luxuries but very few reasons to feel connected to a deeper vision of the world, one whereby we feel inextricably part of the natural order of things. 

Historically the arts functioned to provide an emotionally felt and transcendent means of establishing contact with things beyond human understanding, often by creating an externalised visualisation of inner feelings or concepts, visualisations that could then be used during communal ceremonial rituals. Artists are still making externalised visualisations of inner feelings, but our very individualistic society has somehow lost its way and the communal ties of agreed communication are hard to see. But ritual does still happen, if we look at roadside temporary memorials or shrines, or the outpouring of grief that was written on the walls in relation to the Grenfell Tower fire, we see the need for ritual events and how some form of physical object needs to be used as a focus for them. 

Roadside memorial

Grenfell memorial wall

There are though small rituals that are perhaps just as important in relation to our individual engagement with life. Roger Ackling's meditative mark making, whereby he used a magnifying glass to focus sunlight and make scorch marks on found pieces of wood, celebrates the central power of the sun in all our lives, his small controlled gestures still resonate and when we look at his work, especially if you are allowed to hold them in your hands as you do so, we are reminded that small repeated gestures can be very meaningful. (Think of how we use rosary beads).

Roger Ackling: Sun histories: sunburnt wood

Mudrā

Small rituals come in many guises and perhaps the simplest and most effective are those gestures that we make with our hands. For instance the hand gestures or mudrās in tantric rituals can be used to construct a complete symbolic world. In Buddhist and Hindu traditions rosary beads are called mala. They consist of 108 beads that represent the 108 human passions or sins that must be overcome in order to reach enlightenment. Touching the beads reminds the user of each different passion and the ways you might confront that passion and go beyond it. The beads are another way to externalise an idea and you could theorise this use as an extended mind concept, the beads becoming a substitute memory organ. 

Many of us perform private rituals without realising that we are performing them. Perhaps metaphorically touching a piece of wood to ensure good luck, keeping our fingers crossed or not stepping on cracks in paving stones, these very basic ritual activities give meaning to daily activities and in their repetition these simple acts gradually acquire more forcefulness. However, what begins as a basic response, can over time become obsessive. People can find themselves silently repeating special words, repeatedly touching certain things or images, or counting and re-counting numbers. Obsessive compulsive disorders are perhaps not far away from private rituals, but all these things are part and parcel of being who we are and how we operate and as such they can be an entry into the way we think about how the making of art can have meaning. In this case I am suggesting that all art objects may work in a similar way to these objects of ritual, they are externalised ideas, ideas made concrete or materialised and as such they become extensions of our minds, extensions that allow us to see what we are doing a little more clearly or perhaps allow us to re-embody, hold on to or digest ideas by making body metaphors into realities.  

See also:

Hands and ritual

Drawing and ritual 

Drawing and ritual: Leeds City Art Gallery

Roger Ackling: Bird: Sunlight on wood 1974

There is an exhibition of work at the Leeds City Art Gallery as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International, that you might easily walk past and not notice, as it concerns small discrete objects that were used as part of three artists' performative works and personal rituals. This small self contained exhibition looks at the work of artists that made their reputations during the 1970s, and therefore I was very interested in how their various sensibilities overlapped with my own, as they emerged as artists at exactly the same time as myself.
I was particularly interested in the work of Roger Ackling. For much of his career he made work using a magnifying glass to focus bright sunlight onto the surface of found wooden objects, and in the process burning lines and dots, which for him became a sort of meditative mark making. The wood he used was usually found, often on a beach, but it could be from anywhere, and his only tool was the magnifying glass. He in this way was able to re-assert the position of the sun as central to all things seen. His work reminds us of the power of the sun to transmit energy to the Earth and in doing so power vegetable, animal and mineral life. These small drawings on wood, are objects that have a sensibility that could have been arrived at thousands of years ago. I was reminded of constructions like Stonehenge and Newgrange, constructions that were also celebrations of the sun, but on a larger scale. There is a lot of hand eye co-ordination and control in his drawings. Each line positioned very carefully in relation to the others, until a perfectly formed rhythmic surface is developed. 

Roger Ackling

Ackling's friend Richard Long tells of Ackling suggesting driving to Cornwall trailing a pencil on a piece of string on the road, and returning by the same route trailing a rubber. This was back in 1968, a time when Ackling had already developed a minimalist sensibility, one that would find full expression in the use of a magnifying glass and forgotten wooden fragments. It is also worthwhile thinking about the fact that in making work of this sort he was dealing with sustainability issues well before they were seen as essential.

Keir Smith made drawings in an indirect way, as part of a method of investigating his subject matter and developing ideas. In the early 1980s Smith began to start turning process into performance, creating a series of sculptures and installations as a way of documenting his interaction with the landscape.

Keir Smith

Keir Smith

Smith at one point was making drawings by using metal stencils and then scorching or burning images through the stencils onto paper. The stencils were kept in special handmade leather pouches, which were worn by the artist as a sort of tool belt, the perfomative act and associated equipment being just as important as the drawings that emerged from the process.

Every profession has its tool kit, leather belts designed to carry as wide a range of tools as possible have always been excellent aids for performance artists as much as make-up artists.

Probably the most well known image of an artist carrying his kit out of the studio is this one of Courbet, notice the roll of canvas, folded easel and stretcher bars

Martin Rogers was known for his artist's books as well as a wide ranging idiosyncratic practice. The present exhibition presents some of his drawings for objects as well as the objects themselves. These objects are made beautifully as if by a cabinet maker and they suggest that they have emerged from a society that used them for complex rituals, rituals that in particular would involve some sort of rhythmic sound making. The drawings on display show Rogers thinking through the various possibilities and forms that these objects could possibly have, as well as visualising their making process. 

Martin Rogers 

All three artists had a performative aspect to their work and to some extent this exhibition of objects and drawings misses the point that these artists were trying to make. The boundaries between art and life were becoming blurred, artists such as Alan Kaprow were very influential at this time, his "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to what would be called performance art, and his essays set out a series of approaches to understanding the paradoxical relationship between art and life and the nature of meaning. The putting of this type of work behind exhibition glass, if we are not careful, re-introduces the divide between how we think about life and how we experience it. 

The other artist that I remember being of vital importance at this time was Robert Smithson, the detail below of a drawing of stars from one of Keir Smith's drawings in particular reminded me of Smithson's cosmological approach. Smith's drawing of a drawing held down by stones, suggests that the artist should be making drawings out in the landscape and not in the studio, especially as in this case, if the drawing is of star patterns seen at night. 

If we take a typical work by Robert Smithson, such as his ‘St. John in the Desert’, whereby an old engraving of St John is surrounded by collages of electrical diagrams, force-fields and other technical readouts from science manuals and place it next to his essay on Robert Morris; we can think of these two visual/written texts as containing ideas that could flow between each other, intellectual energy at times being converted into electrical flow and vice versa. This perhaps gives an idea of how Smithson's influence worked at the time. 

Robert Smithson: St John in the Desert

This is a short extract from Smithson’s essay on Robert Morris.

'Descartes' cosmology is brought to a standstill. Movement in Morris's work is engulfed by many types of stillness: delayed action, inadequate energy, general slowness, an all over sluggishness. The ready-mades are, in fact, puns on the Bergsonian concept of "creative evolution" with its idea of "ready made categories." Says Bergson, "The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure." But it is just such an "impossibility" that appeals to Duchamp and Morris. With this in mind, Morris's monstrous "ideal" structures are inconsequential or uncertain ready-mades, which are definitely outside of Bergson's concept of creative evolution. If anything, they are uncreative in the manner of a 16th-century alchemist-philosopher-artist. C.G. Jung's writing on "The Materia Prima" offers many clues in this direction. Alchemy, it seems, is a concrete way of dealing with sameness. In this context, Duchamp and Morris may be seen as artificers of the uncreative or decreators of the Real. They are like the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, who "gave up painting to become an alchemist." This might help us to understand both Judd's and Morris's interest in geology. It is also well to remember that Parmigianino and Duchamp both painted "Virgins," when they did paint. Sydney Freedberg observed in the work of Parmigianino, if not in fact, at least in idea'.

There was a sort of ‘hippy’ feeling to all this, and one that for many artists at this time, myself included, seemed a positive and morally uplifting direction to take. That desire for everything to be joined up, for an invisible universe that lay behind this everyday world to be revealed in all its complex glory, was I remember vitally important to the rise of conceptualism. We move in Smithson’s essay from Duchamp, through Descartes, touching on Jung and use a late Renaissance painter as a touchstone that can take us into the world of alchemy. Smithson goes on to examine the nature of thermodynamics and then reflect on the structure of time. Old myths and religious beliefs, as rethought by Joseph Campbell were for our generation as important as the more technological writings of Buckminster Fuller. Fuller invented the term 'ephemeralization' or the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." At the time there was a high degree of optimism that science would soon be fused with some sort of mythic understanding of universal principles and that what used to be called 'magic' was simply some sort of future science. Perhaps we need a dose of that optimism again, and seeing the work of these now all dead artists of my own generation reminded me that art and life always need to be entwined together. 

Every now and again I review an exhibition in the City Art Gallery that I think expands or deepens an idea of what drawing is concerned with, as a reminder to keep going and checking out what is being presented. There will always be a wide range of other approaches to art making represented, at the moment there is an excellent exhibition 'Woodwork' to see, that includes work from various historical periods and from non western cultures. It is easy to ignore something just because it is on your doorstep, make sure you make full use of an excellent local resource. 

Find out what's on here: Leeds Art Gallery  
What's on at the Tetley, where there is another excellent exhibition on at the moment. 

Some earlier posts reflecting on what could be seen in the city art gallery:

Beuys and Cotman
Sculptors' Drawings
Narrative Objects
A gallery presentation of large drawings