More theories about drawing

On page 151 of the book, The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing as a way of Thinking, Shawn Gilmore uses Thierry Groensteen's concept of 'braiding' to show how Ware uses visual simultaneity to effect meaning. I have long been a believer in the power of comic books to deliver complex ideas and theory seems to have now come to terms with this too and has accepted that what was once seen as a low brow or low class art form, can now be regarded as just as important an art form as any other.
So how can you use these theories to open out ideas related to art history as a whole?

I wasn't totally convinced by Scott McCloud's triangle of abstraction but it helps to resolve several issues surrounding levels of reality and can help us to rethink Plato's old 'Theory of Forms' that suggested that the reality we experience is only a shadow of true reality which is in fact a Realm of Forms, which are abstract, time transcending, perfect concepts or ideals. As we move through McCloud's triangle, we get a sense of moving between different levels of realism and this is in itself very interesting.

I'm not sure about the three points of the triangle, having one as reality, another language and a third as the picture plane is awkward because these are very different concepts. Even so it sort of works and I can see clearly what he is getting at. The dotted line that separates the emoji from the word is an interesting one, but if he had been Chinese perhaps a more subtle line could have been drawn. 

The concept in the top left speech balloon stating that, "Things can be themselves" is a philosophically interesting one and one that needs unpicking a little. The fact that artists such as Paul Klee began to explore the various abstract elements used to make drawn images, such as point, line and plane, doesn't automatically make these things in 'themselves' or things in their own right. They can instead be read as categorisations of language, a product of our ability to atomise or break down things into smaller parts. We are looking at a type of process here rather than a set of things. 

This reminds me of how Scott McCloud wrote about the 'gutter' between two images in a comic book sequence. Yes, you can point to the gutter but what you cant point to is how the brain is processing its encounter. Someone has to be able to take two unconnected images and mentally construct them into an idea that in some way 'fills the gap' by projecting an invented narrative into it. 

According to Moszkowicz, who uses Ricoeur's ideas to develop a 'gutter' concept, it’s the observer who “simultaneously takes the story outside itself and yet holds it within himself”. This is about keeping a distance at the same time as inviting closeness, suggesting that sense-making and imagination can take place everywhere: within, between, alongside, on top of, next to, across and in the edges between things, as in Deridda's concept of the parergon. The central idea here being that it is the passage between an inner and outer reality that is more important than any fixed thing. The various stages that we set out between reality and fiction, or the art object and the world are important as they can reflect or mirror what goes on between ourselves and the world. Sometimes we hold within one image several approaches at the same time, which is similar to how when we perceive the world we simultaneously mix inner and outer approaches, imagination and perception fusing. In El Greco's wonderful painting of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, he has constructed the top half of the image as a flight of religious fantasy, whilst the bottom half represents the reality of what was then contemporary Spain. The division between the two halves is occupied by the assumption into heaven of the count's deceased soul in the form of an "ethereal" baby.

El Greco: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

If we now place an image of the El Greco painting on top of Scott McCloud's diagram we can begin to see another idea emerging, one that can relate Plato's ideas of perfect forms to everyday reality and which uses Derrida's idea of the parergon as a form of sliding divide between reality and fiction. In this case the frame as an edge between the artwork and the world, now enters inside the work itself, in El Greco's case it could be argued that the division between heaven and earth occupied by the space above the collected heads of the Spanish grandees being the edge of the frame. The ideal forms that inhabit the picture plane being in this case the ideal forms inhabiting a Catholic vision of heaven.

The two images of my own above are both related in that they are from the same sequence of drawings, but I have put them together missing out several other images from the sequence. What interests me is how I can still develop a narrative simply because of their close relationship to the gutter between them. It might be a bit of a struggle, but I can feel my brain seeking out some sort of story, some sort of imagined series of events that could make the one image become linked to the other. One implication of this is that I could regard a series of images in an exhibition in exactly the same way. The gap or gutter between images can be adjusted and made narrower or wider, which could imply a closer or further relationship between each image. The 'meaning' or 'communication' coming from the images is now though also entangled in how we read an image within a frame and how we read 'between frames'. 

Derrida came up with the term ‘parergon’ when he was writing ‘The Truth in Painting’, using it to explain why when looking at a framed work of art, the frame is part of the wall but when looking at the wall it is part of the work. The frame existing as an idea between the two, as a separate entity. He stated, "neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.”
The function of the parergon being to create a context for the process of framing.
The parergon being both a literal framing and a metaphysical concept.

Such stretches of the theoretical frame, may indeed break the rules of logic, but at times we need to break rules in order to arrive at a new framework of thinking. For many years the comic book world was excluded from consideration by fine art historians, but the reality is that we can use any discipline to give us insights into any other discipline. For instance death doulas exist as a profession to help individuals cross the divide between life and death. Images can exist in order to meditate on exactly the same thing, but perhaps it gets more interesting if we ask a death doula to help us reflect upon an image? Would we in doing so be using shamanic thought processes and if so does this take us back into engaging with pre-historical types of consciousness? 

We only stop perceiving the world when we die. Layers of reality are deeply interconnected and perhaps nowhere near as clearly organised as in McCloud's triangle. If we look at visual perception through the combined lenses of art and neuroscience, it should be possible to explain why the brain/body finds more meaning in incoming data than given by incoming signals alone. This on the one hand I would suggest is the mystery of the gutter and on the other the internalisation/externalisation of image processing. Imagination it would seem is inseparable from perception. 

The idea of externalising thoughts about the body is central to my work at the moment. Working with the ancient concept of votives, I'm exploring how people can be persuaded to take an internal concept, such as a pain in the foot, and transfer it into an external object. Images have a sort of direct feedback mechanism, in that observers 'echo' what they see. In the same way that we begin to reflect the body posture of someone we are talking to, we mimic both internally and externally the shape of an idea as an image. 

A object designed to be both seen and touched, made to reflect both the shape of a hand becoming a fist (to grab), as well as the idea of two humans clinging, (to clove to)

The object above was made in response to someone telling me that they were lonely. As an artist I wanted to both externalise the feeling tone that was at the centre of the inter human communication and to feed back into the making process both image and perceptual instigation. The feedback from the recipient of the small object I made was very encouraging and suggested that a 'real' communication had been effected. At the core of the idea was a visual narrative, a sort of graphic animation in the mind, which brings me back full circle to comic book ideas of how to abstract from reality. 

The image development process behind the making of the loneliness votive

If we return to Thierry Groensteen's concept of 'braiding' a concept that explores how uses of visual simultaneity can effect meaning, we can push it a little further and look at how imagination is inseparable from perception. The image of something and its perception become entangled, and the relationship could be thought of as that between braiding and knotting. When we braid we wrap threads around each other, as we do so we develop patterns based on how we have interconnected the threads. However without a knot tied around their ends the braids will quickly unravel. The image is that knot and the braids various perceptions. An image in effect holds things together, just long enough for the various effects of perceptions to be understood as to their potential for action, be this fight or flight or something much more subtle, such as how we appreciate a tree coming into bud or the flight pattern of a swallow. 

References

Ball, D. and Khlman, M. (2010) The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a way of thinking University Press of Mississippi

McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics. New York: HarperPerennial.

Moszkowicz, J. (n.d.). Time, Narrative and the Gutter in Graphic Novels: how philosophical thinking can make something out of nothing. In: Cultural Expression and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel. Inter-Disciplinary Press, UK, pp. 197-205. ISBN 978-1-84888-199-0  Accessed from http://ssudl.solent.ac.uk/2596/ 10. 09. 2019

The interplay between neuroscience and art

See also:

Richard McGuire's 'Here'

The Beano and Viz

A much more detailed post on Derrida's concept of the parergon related to ideas about edges. 

To use theory or not to use theory

Drawing and philosophy

Visual semiology using the Sherman realism axis. The PDF linked has an example of how this works and can be used in conjunction with Scott McCloud's triangle of abstraction.

Photography as an extension of drawing

Application for a patent for a camera

I had several conversations with first year students this year about the relationship between drawing and photography. Because of the apparent ubiquity of the photographic image, there is a strong belief that drawing is not as relevant as it was. I still beg to differ. 
Before a camera can be made, all its parts will have been drawn, both for the patent office and as technical drawings that can be converted into information for machines to follow so that the individual components can be made. 

When you need to explain how a camera works, diagrams are nearly always used to show how the various components work. 

A pentaprism is often used in SLRs to get light to the eye without inverting the image. An understanding of how this works requires a basic grasp of geometry and geometry is a type of drawing. 

If your camera uses mirrors again it would be geometric drawing that clarified how the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. 

When a camera is put together in a factory an assembly line diagrammatic drawing is made to ensure that everything is put together in the right order. 

When you need to know how all the individual components fit together a drawing is needed. 

The importance of the artist who visualised how all the elements fit together is reflected in the fact that this drawing is signed. 

The drawing above was made in 1976, not long after I had been working in a draftsman's office myself and my job was to produce drawings like this to enable people to understand how things worked. As in all forms of work that involve skill, some people are better than others at what they do, in this case J. la Guernie was one of those people who had a talent for this sort of drawing at that time in France. 

It doesn't matter what sort of camera or aspect of a camera, such as a bellows extension or lens diaphragm, in order for the idea to be realised it would need to have been visualised and therefore drawn. It is usually at the patent office that all the first drawings are kept.  

Patent drawing for the box camera

Patent drawing for the polaroid camera

Patent drawing for a movie camera

This tradition continues and although the drawings are now done using CAD, drawings are still primary information, you can't feed a photographic image of an idea into a machine and get it to be made. All 3D printers need three co-ordinate wire frame constructions to work from, even if the initial information comes from a camera taking multi-viewpoints, these many viewpoints are stitched together into a framework that is geometrically determined and coordinates plotted on a graph. 

The complexity of coordinates in what is actually a very simple drawing of a staircase is resolved if you work your way through them one at a time. You can see how easily the number of reference points builds up, and then if you wanted to twist the drawing through let's say just 5 degrees and then a further 5 degrees, the density of drawn coordinates would quickly become far too difficult to navigate, which is why at a certain level of complexity its best to let a computer handle the maths. However even at its most complex a computer generated drawing is still basically a drawing. A drawing constructed by plotting points along x, y and z axes and then joining them using lines. 

Using x, y and z axes to determine where a point in space is.

Over the years technical drawings have reflected changes in drawing technology, the advent of the computer being just the latest, but on the street and in places where decisions have to be made without new technology, drawing with a pencil or biro by hand is still vital to an understanding of what is happening. 

People thinking about how to link video cameras up

In the two cases above, it is clear that as technology develops, there is still a need for drawing, if only to clarify how to connect the various elements of a complicated wiring system.

In both still and moving image photography it is not just the technical equipment that relies on drawing. Composition and selection for film is often storyboarded and printed storyboard templates for this are still available.  

Film storyboard template

Storyboard for Psycho shower scene 

Saul Bass draw the storyboard for Alfred Hitchcock's famous 'shower scene'. His visualisation would have helped Hitchcock think through what the scene needed to look like. The drawings being there long before the camera was used. 

Ridley Scott did all his own storyboards for Alien and of course decided to use HR Giger's drawings for the alien creature. 

H R Giger: Sketch for alien 

We can sometimes forget that every fantasy movie begins with drawing, the fact that comic book franchises have become so important, further reflecting the role of drawing as central to realising ideas. You cant take a photograph of an image in your head. 

Long before cameras were invented artists realised that the proportions or aspect ratio of a rectangle could be used to help control the way people looked. Most DSLR camera sensors have a 3:2 aspect ratio which is the same as 35 mm film. This aspect ratio was decided when Leica made the first 35mm film cameras. The 3:2 aspect ratio is double an old movie film frame; because Oscar Barnack, the Leica inventor, rotated the film for cinema cameras through 90 degrees and in doing so doubled the width of the frame to create the ‘full frame’ 35mm still camera format. In the early days of the cinema because of a lack of standardisation, films were made using a variety of different film widths and projection speeds, but eventually the 35-mm wide Edison film stock became the standard format. This format would have been decided upon initially as a drawing, using a ruler and set square, because when it comes to deciding on the ratio of a rectangle we use geometry, and because manufactured things have to be first of all understood as technical drawings.

35mm film used in a movie camera

35mm film used in a still camera

Ratio is a geometric idea and geometry is a drawn construction. So when you are trying to compose an image or make a selection using your 35mm SLR, it is worth thinking about all those artists in the years before the invention of the camera, who also used a frame to help them compose. 

Van Gogh, although living at a time when the camera was coming into everyday use, still used an old fashioned perspective frame. Do read his letters if you ever have the chance to, because they are wonderful examples of how an artist thinks. He refers to the use of a perspective frame several times in them. In one of his letters to his brother Theo, he complained about trying to work in the dunes, where the ground is very uneven, "This is why I’m having a new and, I hope, better perspective frame made, which will stand firmly on two legs in uneven ground like the dunes". Then in another letter he complained about expenses, "I had more expenses in connection with the study of perspective and proportion for an instrument described in a work by Albrecht Dürer and used by the Dutchmen of old. It makes it possible to compare the proportions of objects close at hand with those on a plane further away, in cases where construction according to the rules of perspective isn’t feasible. Which, if you do it by eye, will always come out wrong, unless you’re very experienced and skilled. I didn’t manage to make the thing the first time around, but I succeeded in the end after trying for a long time with the aid of the carpenter and the smith. And I think that with more work I can get much better results still." Later once he has got to grips with how to use the frame he states, "Long and continuous practice with it enables one to draw quick as lightning - and, once the drawing is done firmly, to paint quick as lightning too.."  From: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Penguin Classics 1997.  

Van Gogh's perspective frame and above that a drawing he did of him using it

A film on Van Gogh's use of perspective frames

The gridded frame for Van Gogh was something he took from Dürer, an idea that stretches back through hundreds of years of painting and drawing. 
There is a certain back and forth with artists moving between the idea of using camera obscuras and tracing frames but the fact that images had to be made by hand and often transferred from one surface to another and that they often also had to be re-sized, meant that a squared up image became central to many artists' thinking when it came to composition. The squaring up also allowed artists to link the internal divisions within an image with the external dimensions of the frame.  

Study for a portrait of the Artist's wife, Robert Polhill Bevan 1915

When you look through the view finder of a camera, you are using a selection frame, one that you can if you want to, add a grid to. This is again something that as an idea began with drawing. 

Using the grid on a phone camera

When you enable the grid on your mobile phone you are using a Renaissance idea that has been used in drawing studios over and over again for hundreds of years.

The Renaissance grid method

The thing about drawing is that it can be used in so many ways. From technical drawings for engineering, via geometry and measured drawing to rough diagrams on scraps of paper and expressive sketches explaining how someone could frame up a scene in a horror movie. It is this versatility that explains why it is still around and why it is still something to consider when using a camera, after all photography is in its own words, 'drawing with light'.

See also:

Mathematics and rightness (Includes information on the Golden Section) 
Drawing and film
The grid as a cage
The weaving of grids

The frame and the screen

Drawing devices

Touch: Photography and frottage

Drawing with light

Drawing from photographs

Lina Bo Bardi’s architectural presentations of drawings

Every now and again I try to put up a post about presentation techniques. Third year students will have to put proposals in for spaces and outline how they are thinking about final show and module assessment hangs in the next two weeks, so its a good time to remind everyone how important presentation is. There are several links at the bottom of this post that could therefore be useful as they bring together earlier reflections on various other aspects of presentation.

Johanna Unzueta 

Johanna Unzueta has a show of work on at Modern Art Oxford at the moment, her freestanding geometric drawings inspired by natural patterns, are being displayed in a format that echoes the one that Lina Bo Bardi used for her easels display format back in the 1960s.   Lina Bo Bardi's easels consisted of a pane of glass supported by a concrete cube and were an attempt to integrate the display of artworks into the structure of modernist architecture.

Lina Bo Bardi's 'Easels'

The iconic glass panels that Bo Bardi designed and exhibited at the opening of the Sao Paulo museum of Art in 1968, were designed to ‘resurface’ art objects dating from the fourth century B.C. until the 1960s. “Floating” them in glass panels anchored by a concrete block, art objects were positioned in no chronological order, and they revealed their backs. “My intention has been to destroy the aura surrounding museums,” said Bo Bardi at the museum opening. She wanted to disrupt the contemplation of works hanging on white walls, and diffuse the hierarchy between artists and artistic periods, being amongst the first to undo the sacralisation or spiritualisation of the museum experience. By “making walls transparent,” and through the showing of the back of the images, notes, records, and processes were revealed that had previously only been seen by museum staff. 

Lina Bo Bardi exhibition displays

Unzueta says of her work that it is “a body you can walk around, not a flat thing”, a concept that reinforces my own thoughts about both drawing and painting being in reality very thin sculpture. 

Johanna Unzueta 

Lina Bo Bardi's ideas have become fashionable, but not necessarily understood. She wanted to give audiences a view of what went on behind the images presented in museums. 

Johanna Unzueta's use of Lina Bo Bardi's idea is questionable. Why in photographic views of her exhibitions, do we never see the backs of images? Is there nothing to reveal? Has Bo Bardi's concept now become a style of presentation for Unzueta, rather than a way of revealing something about the way the work is displayed?

An exhibition of Lina Bo Bardi's drawings

A recent exhibition of Lina Bo Bardi's own work was presented with her drawings fixed to scaffolding posts. It was obviously curated in this way as a 'nod' to her ideas. However I'm not convinced that the exhibition worked because her intention to destroy the snobbery surrounding museums and wanting to disrupt the contemplation of works hanging on white walls, seems to have been replaced by yet another presentation idea centred on preserving art's 'aura'. 

('Aura' as used by Walter Benjamin in his influential 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

It is important to remember that the aesthetic of the white wall for presenting work was introduced in the early twentieth century in response to modernism. Art groups like De Stijl set off a trend of exhibiting their works against white walls, in contrast if you visit Leeds Art Gallery they have a Victorian room, all the paintings are hung against red or green painted walls. The white walls were also thought of as a type of frame, think of a photograph with a white border. Modernist architectural design was heavily influenced by the need to eliminate decoration, which itself was seen as capable of hiding germs. All those decorative flourishes made things much harder to wipe clean, so decoration became associated with ill health and hidden causes of disease. As an introduction to these types of ideas you could read 'Ornament and Crime', by Adolf Loos. He tells us:

'Because we have stagnated for a long time and we are stagnating still. Over the last decade the whole world of the applied arts has taken great strides under England’s leadership. The distance between us and everyone else is becoming ever greater, and it is high time that we took care not to miss our connection. Even Germany has been catching up at a gallop and will soon be joining the victory procession. Such new life abroad! The painters, the sculptors, the architects are leaving their comfortable studios, hanging ‘high art’ on the peg and taking their place by the anvil, the loom, the potter’s wheel, the kiln and the carpenter’s bench! Away with all drawing, away with all paper-based art! What we need to do now is to wrest new forms and lines from life, habits, comfort and utility! Get to it, journeymen, art is something that must be overcome!'
From the introduction to 'Ornament and Crime'

'High art' is seen by Loos as a crime and we are told that it is in design and craft that true value lies. He points to the problem of art's use value and questions what art is for.

In 1976 Brian O’Doherty wrote a series of essays for Artforum magazine which were collected together in his book 'Inside the white cube'. In these essays O’Doherty highlighted the different types of meanings that the white walls of a gallery implied. In particular he pointed to the new church like aspect that galleries were now imposing on the 'read' of contemporary art. As an architect Lina Bo Bardi would have been very aware of these issues, and her work to expose the myths of the white cube, was an early example of the need to fight back against what had become an unquestioned norm. Art had by the 1970s been clearly separated out from design and craft but an all white aesthetic space for art's appreciation was still accepted as common practice.

The point about this and other posts about presentation is that it is never neutral, when we are told the clean flat white wall is simply to allow us to see the work without distractions, we are actually being subtly inducted into a particular modernist idea.

Whether you are making static images using traditional materials, or working with contemporary media, choices made at the point of exhibition or presentation will determine how your audience receives your work.

See also:

Drawings as exhibition proposals
Trapping and framing
Framing a large drawing
The frame and the banner
Fixings and fittings
Hanging large drawings
More on framing
From drawing to installation
Edges

The Frame and the Banner: Venice 2019 a coda

As always as I walked around the Arsenale I was interested in how work had been hung or presented. In particular I was looking at the way 2D work had been framed or not framed and how this was helping to shape the meaning or audience relationship with it.  So my final post on Venice looks at this and then wanders off away from Venice into more general thoughts about the frame as a type of frame within a frame, or physical Venn diagram. 

Jill Mulleady

When looking at the work of Jill Mulleady I was as much as anything fascinated by how she had had her images presented. I have put up the occasional post on framing and if you read my previous posts you will be aware of how irritating I can sometimes find works framed inappropriately. It is perhaps hard to see from the image of her work above, but she had had every painting she exhibited in the Venice Arsenale sunk back into the wall, so that the images were flush with the wall's surface. The wall was also painted matt black, so that the 'washed out' or watercolour feel to her paintings was emphasised. 

Jill Mulleady 

It's interesting to hear her talk about the narratives that she uses, she is very aware of the changes in emotional intensity between urban and rural subjects. I presume the black was for her a way of heightening the difference between the two moods she was dealing with. By sinking the images into the wall she is also able to get away from the 'objectness' of the paintings and in doing so seeks to gain a narrative unity in a similar way to how a series of wordless graphic novel images might work together. 
The Japanese artist Mari Katayama often uses very elaborate frames for her photographs of herself and her ongoing elaborate scenarios that reflect on her own disabilities. Katayama had both legs amputated when she was a girl and has since had to use a range of ever changing prosthetics. She photographs herself in various elaborate stagings, herself and her prosthetic legs, usually being centre stage. Investigating issues of beauty, frailty, sensuality, femininity, vulnerability and characterisations of her physicality as being less than able bodied. Katayama confronts society's obsession and anxieties about bodily appearance. Her adjusted frames work to support the ideas going on in the images. Elaborate gilt frames, (seen in the past as symbols of classical beauty) have added inserts, sometimes very obviously screwed into them, suggesting that they are somehow made less whole by the additions or in several cases lots of empty shells made into a decorative line. Shells can in some ways be thought of as cast offs, empty forms that the creature that inhabited them no longer needs. Katayama's old prosthetics are also cast off as she grows or as she changes her personal sensibilities. 

Mari Katayama: Framing details 

Martine Gutierrez’s photographs were initially produced for a multi-page spread in Gutierrez’s Indigenous Woman magazine – a glossy magazine with its own beauty advertisements, fashion spreads and a letter from the editor all featuring the very same model, stylist, photographer, writer, and editor. Each of the frames had been painted on so that the frame sat in the same colour range and quality of aesthetic values determined by the image. The exotic nature of the subject matter echoed by the way the frames had themselves been exoticized. 

Martine Gutierrez

Framing is a form of presentation and I would suggest that hanging is a powerful alternative possibility when it comes to presenting flat images. Ricardo Garcia's huge drawings in the Venezuelan Pavilion hang as banners cutting into the space, the red lighting further creating an atmosphere tense with expectation. 

Ricardo Garcia

Banners have a long history, one that evokes belonging to a membership of something or militancy, from miners' banners to those used in Nazi rallies or they can belong to folk traditions, such as the fantastic work of Jonny Meah, who made banners for the circus and travelling freak shows.

Jonny Meah

Jonny Meah

Jonny Meah always works out his images through drawing, the one below being his solution to the problem of a boy/girl. I find his work really powerful and think it would be interesting to see his work alongside that of artists that are seen as part of the high art canon. On the other hand of course the societal attitudes that he was reflecting upon when he was working have changed, what was at one time seen as freakish, is now seen as simply part of the human condition, we are far more prepared to accept difference, his work can now disturb as much as intrigue, but I still feel that if you have not come across artists like him before, it is worthwhile doing some research on how and why they operated in the way they did. 

Jonny Meah

The banner can be a sophisticated tool of the establishment or something used within a people's 'folk' tradition, and artists have responded to both ends of the spectrum.

Does form follow function?

I find it slightly disconcerting that the banner format has more lately been appropriated by my local art gallery, as well as other art galleries throughout the world. The hanging banner within an architectural setting is about the making of public messages and only those powerful enough to have access to and ownership of public buildings can usually use them.

However street protest also uses a banner format, some old formats such as the miners' banners, clearly themselves imitating earlier religious conventions.

The banner tradition continues, in particular it has become associated with feminist protest movements and because of the present political climate in the UK I would suggest that the banner will be making a comeback. 

Contemporary UK street protest

Mark Wallanger has made work about these public displays of protest, his 'State Britain' installation, being a faithful reproduction of Brian Haw's own one man protest placards and banners. 

Mark Wallanger: State Britain: 2007

Brian Haw

The Nordic Pavilion in Venice was hosting an exhibition entitled 'Weather Report: Forecasting futures'. It was an attempt to put together a group of artists that were concerned to work in a territory that used to be called science fiction or speculative fiction, therefore when framing an idea it had to evoke a certain futurity. Ane Graff presented an image of genetically modified wheat framed in such a way that it appeared to be emerging from some sort of isolation tank. The frame in this case now becoming an extension of the idea into the surrounding architecture. 

Ane Graff: Nordic Pavilion Venice

Drawing a frame around something is a basic conceptual idea. It separates one thing from another. 

By drawing a line around something we separate it out, the red circle around a word is in many ways very similar to the frame around an image. In the same way that the circle separates the word from its context within the sentence, a frame separates an image from its context within the wider world. As a concept it is a very powerful one, one that in mathematics is called set theory and as a way of illustrating certain aspects of set theory we have Venn diagrams. I could argue that all frames are in essence physical Venn diagrams and they help us think about how ideas can belong to the world or be a reflection on the world. 

Thinking of frames within frames reminds me of what happened to the Venezuelan Pavilion this year. You could think of each pavilion in Venice as a type of frame, in the terms of the diagrams above each pavilion would be a disjoint set, separate from each other. (In mathematics, two sets are said to be disjoint sets if they have no element in common) Within each pavilion Set (A) there would be framed individual works. These would be subsets (B) of set (A). We normally don't think of the power of the pavilion as a frame, we simply walk through the entrance to get in to see the work on show. But because of economic and political unrest in Venezuela, on the opening of this year's biennale the Venezuelan Pavilion remained closed, the doors padlocked shut. Suddenly the focus of the art world was on the locked doors, in effect the framing (the pavilion) was now operating as the main carrier of meaning. 

An intersection of politics, mathematics and art is something that often occurs, if only because they are three fundamental ways for human beings to make sense of the world. They are glued together within art as metaphor. See this earlier post. 

A rambling post again but hopefully within the ramble there are some points of interest. Don't forget when visiting exhibitions to look at how the work is presented, you will have to present your own work in end of year shows, outside exhibitions and to a wide range of people via on line formats. each time presentation will be an issue, so he more you look at how other people are doing it and the more you consider the contextual implications of the various approaches to it, the better choices you will make. 

Sometimes though framing is simply a physical job to do, this earlier post shows one way to make a frame: Framing a large drawing. The cutting and sawing and the thinking through how all the elements fit together involve a lot of basic geometry, a discipline that would have evolved out of physical actions that demanded a certain amount of precision, like planning for a building or deciding where boundaries are. Doing, always comes before theory. 

A frame can also be part of the conceptual thinking about edge; see this post. 

See also:

The banner
Framing
From drawing to installation