A while ago I had a badge made, it was a very simple idea but for myself at the time it represented something fundamental. It was an artwork that could work as a portal for people who wore it, to enter into an alternative way of thinking, in this case the idea was to help people to think about time in a different way. Time appears to flow from the known past, to the present and onwards to an unknown future. But not all cultures have seen time in this way. For instance, the indigenous Māori concept of time known as wā, is non-linear. Their experience of time is of a continuous unfolding whereby the living exist alongside their ancestors, making history and the present contiguous. This has been described as spiralling time, which is in constant, expansive motion. Whilst in the Amazon rainforest, the Pirahã tribe live with an unbroken sense of the immediate present. Their language lacks a past tense entirely and they do not have a sense of history or future-past constructs. For them, time is not a sequence of past, present, future, but an immediate condition of things as they are.
In quantum physics the past, present, and future also exist at the same time. The block universe theory, as supported by Einstein's theory of relativity, describes a four-dimensional block, whereby space and time combine into the single four-dimensional structure of spacetime. The feeling of time moving is just how humans experience it; yesterday, today and tomorrow are all equally real, much like different locations exist even if you cannot see them.
The Block Universe
There is also a cyclical view of time. Cyclical patterns of change are often embedded into mythologies, especially because we live on a planet that revolves, thus setting up an idea of constant return. Day follows night, autumn follows summer, spring follows winter. However, some cultures have much longer or more cosmic ideas of time than others, such as the Taoist idea of "the blue sea becomes mulberry fields".
In the ancient Taoist text 'Shenxian Zhuan', compiled by the Eastern Jin dynasty scholar Ge Hong in the 4th century, a story is told by the immortals that illustrates how immense the passage of time can be. When the immortal Wang Fangping asks another immortal, Magu to visit, she notes that since they last met, the celestial eastern sea has already turned into mulberry fields. In the story Magu explains that she looked down and saw that the sea had dried up and transformed into farmland and she suspects it will soon turn back into an ocean again. This idea of vast cyclical change is used to describe massive, sweeping and irreversible transformations that happen over far longer spans of time than human lives.
I also had to think about colour. The combination of blue, green and purple is an analogous colour scheme, i. e. the colours are adjacent to each other within a colour wheel. The tonality of each colour is adjusted so that each value is similar, a series of choices which I hoped would create a calm, harmonious feeling.
I was at the same time aware of colour symbology, but I did not try to fix anything, except to be cognisant of blue in my mind standing for calm, peace and spirituality, green for nature, growth, and renewal and purple for wisdom, and creativity, but I did not want to label these, as each culture has its own colour symbology.
The spiral form is one often used to represent spiritual transformation; it represents a cycling closer to higher consciousness over time, as well as mimicking natural patterns found in galaxies, shells, whirlwinds, and whirlpools.
My badge is small, my attempt in as compact a form as possible, to form a doorway into thinking about these things. I still have some left and give them away as a reminder that art does not have to be massive or grand in order to be effective. If you would like one e mail me on garry.barker@leeds-art.ac.uk
I have posted a copy of Kate Raworth's diagram before, it is a diagram that can be read as a lever for change. It recognises that we need to change the way we operate if we are to survive. Kate Raworth points to Donella Meadows (1941-2001) as her guide. Meadows was the lead author of insightful book The Limits to Growth, in 1972, she helped to highlight the fact that exponential population increase that doesn’t reduce consumption levels will eventually lead to a sudden and uncontrollable decline in resources.
Diagrams are forms of drawing that help us to see how things fit together and any system that embraces collaboration, recognises interdependencies, and helps us to understand how everything is interconnected can benefit from being visualised in diagrammatic form.
I can still remember the first diagrams I used in relation to systems thinking. I was undertaking a training course for Further Education managers back in around the mid 1990s. As part of the course I was given a challenge to think about how as managers we could think about the future needs of our sector and implement changes within the institutions that we worked in. I had to come up with a way to convince other managers that my ideas would work, so as a visual thinker, I decided to use diagrammatic drawing as my main rhetorical device. I had seen some systems diagrams based on grids, whereby information came in from one side and was enmeshed into a complex of factors that became entangled, but then reconciled and actions then emerged from the other side. In particular the contextual studies area of my college, (Leeds College of Art was not a university at the time) had for sometime been advocating the ideas expressed in E. F. Schumacher's book 'Small is Beautiful' and students had been introduced via Schumacher's ideas to systems thinking. I was also becoming more interested in the idea of 'flow' and staff on the Foundation course at Leeds where I taught had come up with various 'flow' diagrams, illustrating how real world experience and visual language could become fused together to create new ideas.
Design for a better art college 1990s
I presented my idea of the educational process as a series of flowing wave like movements to the then new principal. It was heavily criticised as being unworkable and naive and I realised I was seen as a typical arty type by him. I was soon gone from the management team, the then principal criticising me for my constant need to understand why we might be doing things, rather than me just telling people what needed to be done, which is what he wanted managers for. Even so, my early experience of systems thinking did stick and I have remained convinced that diagrams can be used as levers for change.
Systems thinking has moved on considerably since then. The diagrams below offering a few tools that might help someone setting out to think about how to choose an approach.
Systems thinking
A diagram can be used as a collaborative tool for regenerative and transformative change. For instance when looking for an ecosocial equilibrium that a society might try to establish, diagrams were used to help people think about how to collaborate. By seeing yourself as part of an overall plan, it gets easier to both have belief in what you are doing and to feel supported in your beliefs by others who have agreed that the diagram works for them too.
My worry with diagrams is how much annotation they need in order to be understandable. The ecosocial diagram above that uses the triple infinity symbol, needs a vast amount of text to anchor it and give any meaning to it. Even when I read the text several times, I still am not sure what it means. Balance and flow are obviously good things, but the text that is used to show how these are achieved feels too like a hopeful wish-list.
Diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank should operate
I drew a diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank operated for the Proto-Publics research project. At the time I was part of the management group of the Timebank and I firmly believed that this could be a way of developing a non cash economy. Looking back on those days, we were perhaps naive but the diagram still feels as if it has some sort of dynamic agency and that it represents possibilities of how people could support each other by offering their particular skills. However it is not annotated and therefore it is very hard for someone from outside the organisation to get an idea of what is going on.
Mark Lombardi
Diagrams have also been used by artists to reveal hidden structures and to give people the information needed to effect change. For instance Mark Lombardi's drawings of relationships that illustrated the connections that people in power had and the resultant networks that enabled them to exercise their power. His drawings often reminded me of organic life forms. The patternings of connections between people, were also not unlike the interconnections we make using our own neural pathways. Hans Haacke's, 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971', was a diagrammatic illustration of ownership. In this instance the New York properties of a single slumlord, were investigated through charts, maps and photographs. Both artists allowing the diagrammatic form to reveal the hidden interconnections that shape people's lives, rather than dealing directly with the emotional messiness of lives themselves. In this case information set out in a clear, easy to grasp, visual way, became the lever for change.
Hans Haacke: 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings'
Diagrams can also help us confront ourselves and how as we gather new knowledge we need to change in order to be able to deal with it. For instance if we are to change we need to grasp the fact that this is an emotional journey and that it isn't always straightforward.
All change is an emotional ride, one that I'm beginning to understand as something to either experience as exciting and exhilarating or something to fear and hide away from. Hopefully I can embrace the former and move beyond my fears and worries about what might happen. There are always other people out there who also think in similar ways, other artists that have taken similar paths. In 2023 the Marlborough Gallery in new York put on an exhibition entitled, 'Schema: World as Diagram'. It was an exhibition designed to highlight how artists had often been drawn to the diagrammatic in order to express their ideas.
Loren Munk: The Ontology of Art: 2016
Thomas Hirschhorn: Schema art and public space: 2016-22
Some diagrams seemed overly simplistic and others almost as confusing as the mess that they were trying to understand, but running throughout the exhibition was a sense that diagrams allow us to render visible what would otherwise remain unseen.
I can see an interesting issue in relation to my recent thinking. When I was looking at how to visualise issues related to getting older, I came up with a diagram that allowed me to communicate ideas about the various stages of ageing. I wanted to at the same time find an overall image that gave the diagram shape and a more mythic context.
Diagram of the ageing process
In order to get to the final image, I had looked at images based on simplifications of a scarab beetle form. In particular scarab beetle were symbols of rebirth, resurrection, transformation, and growth and I wanted to implant within the diagram an idea that old age can still be a time of transformation, and growth.
As you can see from the image below, at one point the diagram was very scarab beetle shaped, but I wanted a less obvious image and perhaps looking back the scarab design would have been better, as it communicated the idea more clearly.
The struggle to find an image as well as at the same time to make a diagram, reminded me of Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a literary genre. The image was driving the diagram into another territory of visual thinking, it was becoming an ambiguous image. For Todorov, the fantastic occurs when in the course of reading a narrative one hesitates about how to interpret a seemingly supernatural event. If the event turns out to have a rational explanation, the tale becomes an example of the uncanny. If, however, the narrative explains it in terms of some supernatural occurrence, then we are in the realm of the marvellous. I wasn't sure where I wanted my images to lie and I think they fell between two stools, not quite clear enough as diagrams and not quite strong enough as images. But the idea that I could bring my interoceptual imagery into a format that included more diagrammatic ways of working, still I think holds water.
Perception, reality and the cosmos
The mash-up between diagram and image, can be sometimes confusing, but also intriguing, well at least for myself. In the image above I was attempting to bring together several strands of my thinking together and place them within a more cosmic context. In comparison though, Pablo Carlos Budassi's diagrams are far more cosmic.
The observable universe: A logarithmic illustration: Pablo Carlos Budassi
Pablo Carlos Budassi is a musician as well as an illustrator, he is probably rarely thought of as a fine artist, more an infographic designer, but his work has made me think a lot about how different scales can be found to mesh together and although it could be argued that he often deals with clichéd imagery, the beauty of his constructions has convinced me that he is an authentic artist, very worth looking at, especially if you want to get a feeling for how everything might possibly fit together. I still do like my own idea though, perhaps simply because it includes my coffee cup, masquerading as a devil, as well as that spiral, that keeps reoccurring over and over again.
The various ways we think about time are central to an appreciation of portraiture. Several different temporal measures overlap and are read simultaneously. The first is a recognition of time as a factor in human lives. We are very used to looking at other people and are able to judge their age and social status at a glance. We might not be able to judge a cat's age so quickly, but we are very adept at checking out other human beings. So the first measure is probably from 0 to 100, broken down by us into baby, child, youngster, teenager, young man/woman, mature, old, ancient etc. Our particular empathy being probably with those that we judge to be of similar age to ourselves.
Picasso: Claude writing
The next measure is one that is dependent on the way a medium works and how it has been used. If the medium is one that operates in such a way that it leaves traces of its contact with a surface, we can analyse the traces and look for how many points of contact have been recorded on the surface we are examining. Looked at carefully a drawing or painting can reveal a story of its own making and as we follow this story we get a sense of how long the maker was engaged in the work's making. A typical example would be the drawings of Frank Auerbach, and I'm sure that one of the reasons these drawings are appreciated so much is that we can see the story of their making.
Auerback
Ginny Grayson is an artist that records the times of her work in progress. In her case it is all about the different times she made her observations. You can see the framed series of photographs taken as the work progressed in the image below.
Ginny Grayson
Luboš Plný is another artist that dates his drawings as they progress, but in his case he is documenting the gradual growth of an idea that comes from imaginative interpretation, rather than observation. See the dates written down the bottom right of the image below.
Luboš Plný
A historical time of making is read in relation to our own time period on earth, and the further away from us historically an image was made, the more this resonates.
Hans Holbein 1527
Roman period Egypt portrait from approximately 100 BC
26,000 year old portrait carved in ivory: Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute.
There is also the time associated with the materials of the making. The Roman period Egyptian portrait of a woman above was made in wax encaustic on a wooden panel. Beeswax is a wonderful preservative and keeps colours fresh and alive over long periods of time. An ivory carving will last for thousands of years without deterioration if buried in the dust of a cave floor. The images above can startle us by their apparent freshness or make us thoughtful as we contemplate the time distance from our contemporary society.
A faded photograph
The materials that go to make a photograph are all notoriously ephemeral. Paper tends to be very vulnerable to both chemical and physical deterioration and many photographic processes are liable to fade when exposed to light. This can mean that although photography is a relatively modern technology, it can still be used to represent time passing.
The recent advent of the video portrait has added a further dimension to how we read time in relation to portraiture, moving images question many of our previous assumptions.
Andy Warhol: Film portrait of Edie Sedgwick
The video portraits trace their format back to the film portraits of Andy Warhol. An awareness of the historical time of making is still important to their reading as well as of the materials of their making, (all of Warhol's film portraits have been transferred to video because of the deterioration of old film stock) but added into the way they are understood is the durational aspect of the work. All drawings and paintings are static and seen by the viewer as a simultaneity. As an observer you need to put in considerable effort over a period of time to engage with an understanding of what you have in front of you. Stillness is very unlike life, therefore instead of automatically responding to an event, as you do when something happens, (i.e. moves), you have to intellectually engage and think about what the image might mean. Film and video seem to play out a period of real life, even if they do it over and over again, in effect the person appears as if they 'live again' in front of your eyes. The addition of movement suggests life. Conversely, when we stop moving, we are dead. Therefore our engagement with a video portrait is complex. It both operates as a recoding and we are aware of it as something that captures a past period of time, and as a reality, as it can move in 'real' time. Some video portraitists slow down the speed of their videos in order to further play with this ambiguity.
Bo Gehring: Portrait of Esperanza Spalding
James Nare: Video portrait of Jim Jarmusch
Most video portraits still refer to the long tradition of portrait painting and concentrate on the head, James Nare's portrait of Jim Jarmusch being typical, but there are exceptions such as Bo Gehring's portrait of Esperanza Spalding, which tracks over her whole body.
Some artists such as Dryden Goodwin, attempt to build an awareness of moving time into their drawings in a way that suggests they have been influenced by video portraits, especially those that use time-lapse techniques.
Dryden Goodwin: Red studies 2004/6
Time and people come together in Dryden Goodwin's work, he has an ability to both capture how someone looks as well as suggest the fragile nature of life within the liquid modernity of urban spaces.
Dryden Goodwin
Goodwin is happy to mix video with drawing and installation practices, his work celebrating those brief moments of encounter whereby we become momentarily aware of the presence of others. His ability to capture those short encounters in the way he allows his drawing hand to follow his eye tracking movements, is very refined and for those of us that draw, they become readable palimpsests, as his points and marks of looking build over the white paper and then over each other to create a layered but open and readable experience for the trained observer. Another issue is what happens when the same person has portraits made of them over time. When the artist William Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he decided to confront the situation and carry on making portraits of himself. Before his death in 2007, he created a final series of self-portraits that record the stages of Alzheimer’s that he went through. Over a period of roughly five years he documented the gradual decay of his mind.
William Utermohlen
It is interesting to compare what Utermohlen did with Picasso's lifelong interest in his own image. The sophisticated 15 year old eventually becomes the 92 year old on the threshold of death.
Picasso: First and last self portraits
Even in his very last self portrait Picasso was still working through the implications of Cubism. His face pushes and pulls itself as it moves first one way and then another, its as if all his energy was fused into this one last attempt to hold time in motion.
Jackson Pollock: No: 7
Jackson Pollock is not usually thought of as a portrait artist but the image, 'No: 7' would have been recognised by Picasso as being one that took on the Cubist mantle and carried its next stage into America. The fast pace and dynamic rhythm of the New World are entangled with a moment of remembrance, a fleeting glance of what could be another human being fished out of the slipstream of time or as in the case of the image below, from a dream.
Jackson Pollock: Portrait and a dream
Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) attempt to freeze time, so that they can help their audience think about the dignity of old age. This Cuban artist collective is best known for merging architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing.
Los Carpinteros: Portraits on buildings
They visited old people’s homes, nursing homes and asylums, looking for facial expressions of older people that could lend themselves to an architectural translation. Then they alternated between hand-drawn and digital processes in order to simplify the photographic image. What was an image taken by a camera in a brief moment, is gradually converted into an essence of itself, in a way that slows down the read.
Los Carpinteros: the design process
Finished portrait installed in a gallery
LED light cables were placed behind the frameworks to achieve these glowing portraits designed to function like domestic monuments; being both personal and commemorative, humble and heroic. The scaffolding and the portrait become one, the need for a carrying structural framework for both the drawing and the LEDs being another example of things coming together to make a new fusion or hybrid.
Tony Bevan
It is interesting to compare these pieces with the work of Tony Bevan. His portraits also attempt to reveal a structural framework, but this time in a much more emotionally intense manner, he attempts to also 'freeze' time in order to monumentalise the head.
Finally the busy post-modern time of now, with its streaming images of multifaceted information channels has seen a return to collage as a way to squeeze together competing image strands into the same portrait. Artists such as Nathaniel Mary Quinn demonstrating that there is always something new about time to think about when making a portrait. His images suggesting a type of liquid modernity that was documented by Zygmunt Bauman.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Time in Quinn's case being a flickering one that never quite stands still. It is interesting to compare his approach with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's. Her portraits are always of imaginary figures that coalesce out of her mind as she paints. Her images seem as if they are of reality but are in fact realisations of her dreams and all dreams aspire to a state of being timeless.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Tam Joseph: School report
Tam Joseph's 'School report reflects the reality of young male black lives and how they are shaped over time by society's stereotypes.
Charles Howard Hodges: Master Adolf Johan Bernard Wattendorff
Time has always been central to how we engage with drawing. Whether this is to do with the amount of time it takes to make a drawing, the period of time a drawing is a reflection upon, the difference in how time is perceived in looking at a drawing or how historical time impacts on the way we read drawings from different periods of history. Recent performative drawing practices have explored duration as being central to an understanding of the making of drawings. Often pushing duration to exhaustive limits, these artists look at how their bodies can cope with the extremes of drawing conditions. For example Katrina Brown's drawings that are choreographed images resulting from her dance centred preoccupation with movement, or as she puts it, 'Drawing as a durational activity that opens up a time-space'.
Duration minimum 30 minutes – 90 minutes or longer
This is how Katrina Brown describes her drawing 'Unfolding spine':
'A performer moves and draws on the ground with her limbs organised around her bowed spinal axis. She works on her knees low to the horizontal surface, breathing and drawing while retreating backwards over the paper sheet. Her eyes resist following the line that she draws whilst still aiming for each line to be parallel to the previous. She co-ordinates breathing line and drawing line – breath follows line and line follows breath including the turn of breath between in and out. As lining and breathing sync in a real-time working, line is breathed and breath is scored. Lines appear and spread over the surface of the paper on either side of an emerging central track and a kind of flat diagram of the body unfolds. Charcoal as a fragile brittle material punctuates the event and continual rhythmic flow of movement.'
Drawing and breathing are closely connected and in some of my posts on drawing and mindfulness this is reflected upon. Breath is central to an understanding of what it is to be alive, our first breath signifies the moment of arrival into this world and our last breath, the moment that we exit it. We are very aware that the rhythm of our breath is an indicator of the relationship between health and ability to control our breathing. The oldest connection I can point you to is the way that blown drawings were made in Palaeolithic times. Charcoal or another pigment like red clay, was crushed into powder and diluted in water. This was then taken up into the mouth and then blown out as a spray, in a very similar way to how spray painting is done today. Each blown breath becoming a directed spray of spittle mixed watery pigment, its image being in effect a frozen breath.
Palaeolithic stencilled hand images using blown pigment
These Palaeolithic images bring two durational issues together. They are of course very old, made approximately 30,000 years ago. They have endured so long that their origins are obscure and their meanings completely open to interpretation, but the very fact that they are so old impresses upon us meanings about what it is to be what we are as a species and it makes us reflect upon what short time spans our lives have. On the other hand these drawings still reveal the freshness of their making. You can see the spray on the wall and connect with the person making these images. In your mind you can 'see' one of your ancestors spitting paint out onto his or her hands. This physical recording of an action can be read as a durational piece very similar to Katrina Brown's drawing, as it records the time taken for a human to interact with some materials in such a way that the activity leaves traces.
Jordan Mckenzie, in his exhibition ‘Drawing Breath’ made the public on entering the exhibition space, place their hands over his heart. They were meant to feel his breath go in and out. He then filled a small plastic bag with his breath, coated it in charcoal and exploded it in order to leave a trace of this breath on the wall for the duration of the exhibition.
The durational aspect of drawing was essential to Robert Morris's 'Blind Time Drawings'. Morris sets out the instructions for making one of his drawings like so: '‘With eyes closed, graphite on the hands and estimating a lapsed time of 3 minutes, both hands attempt to descend the page with identical touching motions in an effort to keep to an even vertical column of touches."
I have posted on his drawings in much more detail here. Anyone wishing to develop a drawing practice involving duration should look closely at his drawings and then read his instructions, as they are seminal to an understanding of this area of performance drawing. In particular, by removing the drawer's ability to see what they were doing, (most of these drawings were done in total darkness), he was able to reinforce touch as an essential control mechanism in the making of drawings. Time is also very subjective, therefore Morris introduces several ways of thinking about how to measure the duration of actions. For instance by counting. By having a certain number of actions to undertake, the drawing has to be done over an extended amount of time. Also by extension, by having to cover a certain amount of the paper surface, again the drawer is forced to extend the time period in order to achieve the task.
Robert Morris: Blind time XIII 1973
Frank Auerbach
A Frank Auerbach drawing gives us a slightly different insight into drawing and time. This drawing is as much about the long hours of looking at the subject, as about the long hours of making marks and erasing them. The drawing has been erased so many times that it is beginning to fall apart, new sections of paper being added in when the older paper is no longer workable. Just like the Brown and Morris drawings you can see a lot of time has gone into the making of the image, but in this case erasure has covered up previous decisions so it is much harder to ascertain exactly how long this drawing took. But the drawing is also about how to hold on to fleeting perceptions. It is as if Auerbach thinks that if he persists for long enough he will be finally able to capture the un-capturable. Our eyes scan over things, they don't settle on one image, the image we think we see is a product of our mental processing of these fleeting perceptions. Auerbach sets out to see if an image on paper can in effect be arrived at in the same way that our cognitive processes arrive at one. What takes a few thousandths of a second of mental processing is though now taking hour after hour, an exhausting exercise in fruitily, which paradoxically begins to work as it communicates to us about the search for something that is impossible to find. How we as humans deal with this attention to the phenomena of experience is something that many philosophers have engaged with; 'phenomenology' and 'embodied knowledge' being areas of thinking that have made us very aware of how important our physical nature is. If you are interested in these issues a good start would be to read Merleau-Ponty's essay 'Cezanne's Doubt'.
Cezanne
Cezanne remains central to our understanding of the process of making an image from observation, if only because he was so stubborn and awkward in his nature, and in that particularity of character became a stereotype of the artist struggling to visualise what it is to actually 'see' anything. He is the anti-photographer, the opposite of the quick win and the instigator of 'the hard won image' school. He was the man who dragged out time and embedded it back into his work.
William Coldstream
William Coldstream taught a certain approach to drawing at the Slade for many years. This method involved searching for points of measurement across the surface and as you did so your search was recorded by a growing grid like structure of points and lines that both contained the image and became part of it. It was as if the clock ticked very slowly, these images feel as if the air was sucked out of the room as the artist held his breath for that moment of exactness. Cezanne's wavering lines becoming converted into something more controlling, more organised and disciplined. I sometimes think of Coldstream's influence as being military like, his drawings and paintings freezing time, as if we could capture it in a tin.
This approach to drawing was at one time heavily criticised. I have reflected on what was called at the time, 'Giron and fesspoint drawing' or post-coldstream drawing when thinking about past approaches to drawing here at Leeds College of Art; it was argued back then that Coldstream forgot to breathe when he drew and that the 'giron and fess point' method allowed for the movement of the body to be reinserted into the process. In this case 'rhythm' being seen as essential to an understanding of time when reading a static image.
When you look at a drawing you see it all at once. (Of course there are huge drawings that are too big for you to do this but most drawings are human sized) The simultaneity of experiencing a drawing is part of the specific nature of it as an art form. Many art forms are durational, like music, dance or theatre, therefore they tend to often have narratives attached to them. However the simultaneity of a drawing's perception privileges experience over narrative. This heightens a particular type of awareness of time. It is also of course why we can walk through an art gallery in 5 minutes, glancing at each image as we pass and like a tourist at the Louvre being happy to simply have 'been there'. More than one thing is going on at once here and your mind can flit between them. The first is the awareness of one thing being done after another. It is easy to see this if marks are laid on top of each other. You can unpick their order and as you do so, in many ways you are reading the drawing in a similar way to a musician reading a music score. This approach sits theoretically much more easily into the phenomenological or embodied drawing terrain and is closely linked to concepts such as drawings as 'traces' of actions, or recordings of encounters. However the graphic mark can also be thought about in other ways. As an 'inscription' for instance, whereby it is seen as a type of visual expression of a thought. For example we have all looked at the way handwriting differs and it is very easy to slip into ways of interpreting this as being a reflection of the character of the writer, hence the discipline we now call graphology.
Eugen Peter Schwiedland: The Graphometer
In Schwiedlnd's case it was the angle of handwriting that was the most expressive aspect of the marks made, we have all looked at 'cramped' handwriting and thought that this might reflect something of the character of its maker. This graphic trace when transferred to art making was in French art criticism called 'La Patte' or the artist's signature style. The artist's touch or personal style being something that still resonates through certain corridors of the art world, as the search for the unique individual on which to invest money continues. This aspect of the artist's mark is embedded into the rhythm of an image and it is within this visual rhythm that another type of time is revealed. This is one linked to our own inner clock, our heartbeat. We intuitively understand the link between physical exertion and our heartbeat. The faster our heart beats the more exertion we have been involved in and therefore as we recognise a fast scribble of a signature as opposed to a carefully and slowly written one, we link into the recognition the excitement associated with fast movement, the flight or flee moment, as opposed to the calmness of contemplation. These changes in awareness are associated with changes in rhythm, the changes in rhythm eventually becoming associated with meanings. It is easy to see how this works in music, a military beat being very different to the rhythm of a dance tune, or the slow beat of a funeral march. But as more refinement is added, such as 'tone' a much more sophisticated set of associations can be constructed. The best example being Christian Schubart's 'Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst'. For example: B flat major: Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope aspiration for a better world. B flat minor: A quaint creature, often dressed in the garment of night. It is somewhat surly and very seldom takes on a pleasant countenance. Mocking God and the world; discontented with itself and with everything; preparation for suicide sounds in this key. B: Strongly coloured, announcing wild passions, composed from the most glaring coulors. Anger, rage, jealousy, fury, despair and every burden of the heart lies in its sphere. B minor: This is as it were the key of patience, of calm awaiting ones's fate and of submission to divine dispensation.
The communication of excitement via speed of rhythm now being conjoined by mood changes depending on tonality. In a drawing the speed of execution of a mark, being conjoined with other qualities such as changes in pressure, direction, types of materials used etc. will all be used in the reading of 'time'. In this case 'time' no longer being simply to do with awareness of duration but also an awareness of 'feeling tone'. This is also what is read in the simultaneity of experiencing a drawing. In this case we can begin to read a drawing in other ways, one as a type of cardiograph, whereby we can read something about the condition of the maker from the marks and another to do with a more formalist approach.
Mark Toby
This is how on one web-site we are told to approach abstract art:
'Rather than trying to figure out what the painting looks like, just allow yourself to be taken in by the painting. See what emotions, sensations or memories emerge. Let your eyes relax and travel around the piece without expectation. Examine the colors, forms, materials, surface, and how they interact with each other. Take your time. Let the painting "speak" to you.
Notice how the various elements like shape, color and form affect you. An intricately detailed, vibrant painting will affect you differently than a calm, cool Malevich.' The writer believes that an abstract painting is something that will 'speak to you', emotions and sensations will also emerge alongside memories. This points to a different experience of time, one about getting lost in looking at the painting. You are meant to travel around the image, follow the movements indicated by form and shape, as if you are moving around some sort of map. You are asked to enter the image as if it was some sort of window through which you could travel in order to begin exploring new unfamiliar landscapes. A fascinating idea and one that would have appalled Clement Greenberg, who argued that one of the values of abstract painting was that it removed the tendency of people to regard paintings as 'windows onto the world'. I suspect what we are looking at here is the time of the daydream or of the reverie, a time where we are not being pressured to make immediate actions. But what happens to time in a photorealist drawing as there are no clues as to how it is made? A conceptual puzzle as to 'how was it done?', fills the mental space where we would normally be looking for a way into a thoughtful recreation of the image by following traces of the artist's hand.
John Baeder White Tower 1974 Graphite
A photorealist drawing or painting like the one above is in fact a very conceptual work. First of all you have to know that the image is made from a photograph. If you think about it, it is pretty obvious that it is, but some people are fooled by appearances and think that it could be possible to create an image like this directly from nature. What they have done is begun to think that we see like a photographic image, because most of the images reproduced in our society are from photographs. Our probing eyes are constantly looking for information, so everything is moving in and out of focus, but there is a certain link between how we see and how images like this are made. A common method of developing a photorealist image was using a grid placed over the image to be copied and another one over the paper or canvas on which the image was to be reproduced. This allowed for the artist to focus on the details of tonal or colour change, without getting distracted by what it was that they were actually drawing. This in may ways brought the world back into a pre-linguistic state, a state whereby we see changes in tonality or colour rather than dogs, cats, trees, humans or other things. We had to be taught how to recognise objects out of the flux of experience and the techniques of gridding and turning the image upside down, often used by photorealist artists are to ensure that no trace of 'knowledge' enters the image. Because of this I find this sort of image outside time, or 'timeless', it's 'experience' is restricted to copying the surface of an already existing image, therefore the experience is very 'thin' and the image often finds itself being a place where our restless minds can fill its emptiness with narrative meaning. For instance think about how easily we invent a narrative to explain what we think is going on in old photographs.
Some of Terry Hammill's drawings of 'Klocks'
The clock can itself become a subject. In Terry Hammill's drawings time division extends on past the circular clock face and becomes a regular rhythmic divide that suggests that clocks, (Klocks) tick away in alternative formats as they enter the logic of two dimensional space. Like the shapes in Abbot's 'Flatland', these 'klocks' live rich lives dependent on an internal logic that makes perfect sense to a flatlander, but perhaps not to a fifth dimensional time traveller.
Hanne Darboven's subject matter was often the passage of time. Sometimes she wrote the date over and over again. It's was if she wanted to trap time in the way she used numerals to indicate it. All numerals indicate time in one way or another, from the old childhood game of hide and seek, whereby we count to ten before we start looking, the counting in some way entangling time, so that we don't get to begin looking too quickly, to ideas such as infinity, whereby the implication of a set of numbers is that we could go on generating a sequence for ever.
Hanne Darboven
I sometimes think of Hanne Darboven's drawings as 'time traps'. You can get stuck in the intricacies of her numerical thinking, especially in her tendency to valorise repetition. Like alien calendars her images appear to make sense but the longer you work with them the more you realise her logic is not as easy to follow as you might think. The time spent trying to understand her drawings being an integral part of the experience.
Nadine Redlich
Of course the comic book page format is also about repetition, and Nadine Redlich is an expert at holding on to those small moments that hover on the edge of experience. Most of the recent exhibitions I have seen whereby drawing and time have been interlocked have been performative, therefore I'll leave you with a performance drawing.
Am Rand: drawing performance by Jaanika Peerna in Berlin
