Art I like - Robert Grenier

Robert Grenier is a visual poet - his work consists of language, but in his later work you may not realise it at first glance.  He set out in the 1970s to see what kinds of immediate, instantaneous effects he could achieve with a few words at a time http://jacketmagazine.com/34/faville-saroyan-grenier.shtml. His masterpiece is probably Sentences, a series of micropoems written - or rather, typed - on index cards; see a digital version here. 500 poems are presented in a fold-down box and can be read at random.

These poems are "about" how we actually “feel” language at the point of impulse. They are pointers to the psychological qualities of the mind that perceived them. they explore the "sixth sense" - wherein the imagination discovers mysterious connections between reality and “saved” referents, connections that were not apparent under normal syntactical practice, as the mind worked at organising data from ongoing reality. They become "no longer “poems” as such, but a coded short-hand for the cognitive verbal processes underneath the layers of habitual practice and daily presumption"http://jacketmagazine.com/34/faville-saroyan-grenier.shtml

His "scrawl poems" are also referred to as "illuminated poems" (in the sense of illuminated manuscript) or "holographs" (handwritten documents). In the past two decades Grenier rejected type in favour of "drawn" poems, moving on to exploring a new formality: colored-line designs of three and four word poems, in notebooks. They need to be drawings - the heavy layering of textures, via colour, helps reading (and communication); their richness comes from this reduction.

The sense of any of these poems is not its significance - hence they cannot be "translated" into typeface, or deciphered quickly enough (even by Grenier himself at times) to be read out loud, even though the limited space of the page limits the amount of linear elements. Each letter is expressed through the effort of its formation, and reading requires minute attention to form - the reader, in seeking to comprehend these unknown glyphs, must re-compose the words, the poem with almost as much effort as the author used.

These poems take understandable written language towards an extreme - the syntax makes deriving an exact meaning difficult (though this may be desirable in a poem), and the "drawn" nature of the originals conceals the letter forms, making any "reading" into an obstacle course. There comes an instant when the word in the scrawl poem pops into consciousness - and it's interesting how the graphic format of these poems plays with making that moment explicit. Reading reveals a secret. The poems also play with the notion of the private and the public, with admission into a select circle. (They may even have a certain smugness.) Certainly their fragmentary nature works as a metaphor for the fragmentation of our vision and perception, as James Davies says here, and the form of the poem is part of its content.

Of the scrawl poem above, Grenier says: "Whether drawing poem texts like 'the one about crickets' (no. 39) accomplish (or help accomplish) whatever it is they are otherwise 'saying'—so that seeing/reading "crickets" a reader may hear 'crickets themselves' (& even be able to literally go ('by ear') "across/the/road"?)—remains an animating question."

Visual encyclopedia of an unknown world

Strange and wonderful - the Codex Seraphinianus shows non-existent things, described in a language that can't be read. It was written in 1976-8 by Luigi Serafini - see more pix here. You could buy a facsimile - but it's pricey!

Last week at college

On Tuesday, a tutorial. I should be trying to stick with one concept - making a series of "pages" rather than different little books - pushing one concept along, developing it.

On Wednesday, pure pleasure - a bookbinding workshop - 

sewing over tapes -

In the finished book, the tapes are visible under the endpapers - a possible site for other inclusions and shadowy effects -

At the last moment something went awry with endpaper gluing, and one end of my book's spine ... has "character" -

In the afternoon's Research Methods lecture, Johanna Love talked about her PhD work - starting with the notion of drawing on the surface of digital prints, she then scanned in prints at different distances from the scanner, resulting in fuzzier and darker images with increasing distance. The surprise was the intrusion of dust particles disrupting the surface, and it is this dust effect that is at the centre of her research.

Another "narrative of the surface" was given by Jim Threapleton, whose PhD work is also on the degradation of the surface, this time in removal of paint from the surface, like these which are oil on steel -

An albatross, of sorts

These are some sources for my essay. I've read them and marked passages (faintly with pencil or - mostly - with post-it notes) and sometimes typed out the notes. Unfortunately, on coming back to the book (or print-out), I've almost completely forgotten what I'd read a few days before! But somehow it will all come together.

The research is the best bit - coming across something interesting and looking deeper into it. Of course you risk losing your grip on where the essay itself is going. Structure, structure, structure...

My case studies may consist of a painter, a calligrapher, a visual poet, a sculptor - though it's hard to choose! There are many others whose work is fascinating (Chris Drury, Tom Phillips, Hanne Darboven, Robert Grenier, Henri Michaux, Christian Dotremont, Brion Gysin - not to mention the drawings-on-writing here, ) but one must be ruthless.... I also have some theoretical underpinnings, and, most important,  the glimmer of a conclusion. Every critical/analytical essay needs a conclusion. After all, "the learning outcomes will be evidenced in the following way:

- Ability to formulate a specific research question. 

- Ability to contextualise that question within a critical framework. 

- Ability to form an independent conclusion.

- Professional presentation of the research paper adhering to the academic structure and the Harvard convention."

My research question goes something like this:

"If writing and drawing inhabit a continuum, when a painting or drawing contains marks that look like letters, are we  reading it or perceiving it?" (The difficulty of formulating this question exactly gives rise to a suspicion that we could be heading for stormy waters....) Maybe it's the wrong question; probably the way forward is to write  the essay and reformulate the question to reflect what's been written. As it stands, does it help structure the rest of the work? What issues does it raise that need to be clarified?

"If..." first catch your rabbit - do drawing and writing inhabit a continuum? I think so: look at how children start by drawing letters, before using letters for writing words.

How do marks come to look like letters? Can we be "fooled" by marks that look like letters in non-roman alphabets?

What do we mean by reading - what sort of information, and what sort of knowledge on the part of the reader, is needed? How does looking (and seeing) work? Are there forms of perception other than the visual that come into play? (Maybe not, but you can't overlook that possibility.)

I'll be using social anthropologist Tim Ingold's conception of writing - what might be called his theory of linearity - to examine this question, and will be considering asemic writing; visual poetry; "life writing"; and gestural painting [though this list might change...]. The analysis will incorporate various theoretical views of drawing and/or writing (Derrida, Barthes, Krauss, Benjamin) and (might) include a short discussion of reading as a cognitive process for deriving meaning. The conclusion involves the role of reading and of "understanding art" in a historical and contemporary context, and draws on Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital.

That precis is a long way from the mind map I drew some weeks ago. Many things on that map won't go into the essay - this topic could be enormous. I'll be keeping away from non-alphabetic writing (though it's tempting to look at work by Xu Bing or Gu Wenda) and from pictograms in general. The interrelation of illustration and text - eg captions to photos - is off the list. As are calligrams and modern musical scores, shorthand and codes. Ditto typography used in a pictorial way (eg in concrete poetry), and "words as art" (eg Laurence Weiner). Perhaps there will be a little section with exact reasons for excluding these - if so, that section will be added right at the end, once I've figured out exactly why...

Bibliography, 300 word abstract, 5 keywords, Harvard style references - such are the hoops we jump through! But we can rejoice that the technical aspects of producing the final copy have come a long way since the pre-tippex, cut-and-paste (literally) days of typewriters, carbon paper, and midnight oil. (I used to type theses before the days of word processing - with footnotes at the bottom of the page, and many pages retyped because the footnotes didn't fit.) Hurrah for the automatic footnote and for Track Changes. Start by getting the bibliography ready, and you're well away.

But the words, the words; oh, the words ....4,000 are needed. I'm using blog posts to trick myself into getting some of them down in sequence. The bare bones at least. (Editing is easier than writing...) Also, writing the posts (succinctly) does rather focus one's thinking ...and reveals gaps in it. 

For many of the full-timers on my course, English is not their first language. Later in the year they too must jump through the essay hoop. Hats off to them. 

Birds live on in art

A deceptively leafy corner of E2 is the setting for the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition - and very satisfying it is! Much diverse work ... papercuts by Ian Penney -

 knitted wire by Anita Bruce -

 this "lesser akioloa" by Abigail Brown -

 pastel ducks by Dafila Scott -

Bachman's warbler stitched on bark by Cally Higginbottom -

and printed feathers by Rebecca Jewell -

Ralph Steadman had an entire roomful, including some automata (by Keith Newstead) -

If you can't get to the show in its remaining day or two, another review, with more and different photos, is here, and links to many of the artists' websites are here.

Found in books (Fiona Banner)

Fiona Banner's "Performance Nude" with

probably the perfect bookmark -

This is a ploy to trick myself into writing about Banner's performance nudes, which may be one of the case studies in my "when does writing become drawing" essay.

She has written about the on-screen action of various films, most notably The Nam (1997), describing the scenes that were being enacted, as though she was running alongside the action. It starts: "Trees, like palm trees in the distance, fill the foreground. They hardly move, maybe the tops are swaying a bit, the sky behind is dull and pale blue" and goes on for 1000 pages.  "It is a compilation of total descriptions of well known Vietnam films, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now!, Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill and Platoon. The films apparently never begin or end, but are described in their entirety, spliced together to make a gutting 11 hour supermovie." These arose from a collision between her fascination with the image, and the impossibility of the image, she says.

How, though, did this descriptive writing ("you see what you see") become Performance Nude? The link from the descriptions of war and pornography films - in which she became increasingly involved in what she describes as "the intimate space between the characters, and the odd moments and mistakes that you don't necessarily see in mainstream films" was to work with a striptease artist, describing her actions - which segued into a riff on traditional life drawing (given that life drawing is the interaction of the artist's eye, mind, gesture with the surface of the paper), the result of which was a writing, rather than a drawing, describing the model. The "performance" aspect is that she's done this life-drawing in front of an audience, for instance in "Performance Nude, Toronto" (2007).

The series began in 2006 and ended in 2009 with the book above, recording over 20 sittings and related works. Banner sees the solitary figure as "very much like a character dropping out of one of those [pornographic] films but losing all context and narrative space. They are a bit like one of my full stop sculptures, a person standing in the room, stripped back and bereft not only of costume but of any kind of context."

Full Stop sculptures, table version; some full-scale stops can be seen near Tower Bridge

She's called these subjective observational encounters as "life writings" and regards them not so much as the depiction of an individual person as a portrait of a complex and multi-layered encounter: "I was trying to represent that moment and all the failures and false starts of that moment," she says. "Then there's the space between me and the model, and in the public performances the space between the audience and me and the audience and the model. The layers of voyeurism and both the mystique and the mechanics of the creative act get exposed and we all feel a bit vulnerable."

Her ISBN works, which are part of a series about how works are represented and circulated - and can be read as publishing as a performative act - are another part of her practice that resonates in a "bookish" sort of way, subverting the idea behind ISBNs - assigning one number for a uniform work, incorporating the mechanism of legal deposit to record and archive that work. In response to a request for the required legal deposit copies of these (unique) works, she offered to compile a work incorporating all the individual ISBN works; presumably this work would be given its own ISBN - and cause headaches for the legal deposit librarians, who are merely trying to compile a national archive of "books".

Banner's  Harrier and Jaguar at Tate Britain last year was very popular with the public - two big fighter planes in the grand central space - and the little film that went with them (which you can watch here) got me interested in her work. "For Banner these objects represent the 'opposite of language', used when communication fails. In bringing body and machine into close proximity she explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk. A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy," says the Tate website.

Is it a map?

One of many fascinating "drawings on geology" at jandlbooks.org

Birds (extinct)

Last few days of this exhibition - I hope to get there, having heard about it on the radio. "Art vs extinction" - 200 or so artists and writers highlighting the birds we have already lost, among them the Black Mamo, Atitlan Grebe, Bonin Grosbeak, and Bishop's O'o'. Margaret Atwood has knit a Great Auk -

Can't remember where I picked up the "newspaper" of the show - my favourite image in it is this feathery print by Kai and Sunny -

Art I like - Hanne Darboven

Most of  Hanne Darboven's work consists of numbers - calculated through complicated additions or multiplications with calendar dates, hours and days of the week. The abstract principle of pure quantification replaces traditional principles of pictorial or sculptural organization and/or compositional relational order. The Konstruktion, a mathematical operation involving the addition of the numbers that specify a date (day/month/year), is the basis for Darboven's aesthetic project. The system was developed as early as 1968 and served to introduce time into Darboven's graph paper drawings.

The sheer volume of her work, the obsessiveness, is impressive. (Her practices have been described as allegorical by Craig Owens, one of postmodernism's central theorists.) Her concern is with history, the daily passage of time and the larger cycles of years and centuries. Some of her work has been translated into musical scores. 

"I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing" said Darboven. "I choose numbers because they are so steady, limited, artificial. The only thing that has ever been created is the number. A number of something (two chairs or whatever) is something else. It's not pure number, and has other meanings." Later she said, "I use no forms of expression."

Quartett 1988, 1988...is an imposing grid of 745 drawings/writings which chronicle the days of the year 1988 within the context of a historical examination of four great women: Madame Curie, Virginia Woolf, Rosa Luxembourg and Gertrude Stein.

She uses other durational spreads: Existenz 66-88 (Existence 66-88), 1989, draws on 22 years of Darboven's personal datebooks beginning in 1966 and concluding in 1988. 2,261 panels photographically reproduce the artist's leatherbound appointment book one two-page spread per photo.

But it is this quieter work that most interests me - it looks like an example of asemic writing - a place where writing and drawing merge - but this writing is a spatial measure of temporal duration; the blank rows of script are carefully counted to mark time just as the numbers do.

Darboven speaks of her procedure as "writing":  "I both write and draw...because 'no more words' is a writing process, it's not a drawing process. The writing fills the space as a drawing would." In addition to numerical forms, Darboven marks time with a handwritten, lower case "l" which appears as a regularized yet cursive loop repeated over and over and called "daily writing."  In replacing words with abstract rows of up-and-down strokes, Darboven invokes text but eliminates meaning, description, and narrative.

"The word Gedankenstrich(-e) ("dash(es)"), repeatedly inscribed in Darboven's volumes, serves as a pause, as a transition from one form of writing to another (e.g., from the printed to the handwritten), or as a coda to a filled page. The rhyme with Pinselstrich(-e) ("brushstroke(s)") brings to mind Conceptual Art's transposition of perceptual phenomena and linguistic morphemes: a painterly mark tranformed into a written signifier" (so it says here).

The numerical drawings and daily writing of blank script use language-based signifiers in a way that is different from ordinary communication. "Her effort to present material signifiers as figural and visual marks in themselves is a rejection of their function as mere symbols encasing or designating an object or concept. In this way, Darboven's writing aligns itself with "poetic language" as it was defined by the Russian Formalists and later [1975] elaborated by Julia Kristeva". As I understand it, Kristeva said that in poetic language significations and meaning can be out of synch; in radical poetic experiments, this can destroy syntax and lead to a "semiotic disposition" - a distinctive mark, sign, imprint. Rather than being set adrift  (as with insane jibberings), the semiotic processes "set up a new formal construct: a so-called new formal or ideological "writer's universe," the never-finished, undefined productions of a new space of significance." Poetic language "posits its own process as an undecidable process between sense and nonsense, between language and rhythm..., between the symbolic and the semiotic."

Darboven lived in New York 1966-68, the time of Minimalism and Conceptualism, then returned to Hamburg; she died in 2009. Her work was not confined to numbers and writing. In the late 70s she started to use objects and photographs to reference history and society - a synthesis of private record and social memory. In Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (1980-83), Darboven's numerical indices are part of a stream of ready-made imagery taken from published material. The piece has 1590 pages of visual montage and text in identical frames, covering exhibition walls in a floor to ceiling grid. Nineteen objects tied to everyday life, art and to German history complete the installation.

Book du jour - Route

After my limp presentation of the evolving "Route" books, I reworked their innards somewhat, changed the font, and gave them some faux-old covers -

 The covers consist of a printout of a scanned "vintage" book cover, to get the book-cloth effect, with the title page of the pamphlet laid on top. A bit of jiggling of colour values resulted in the variations. Then I stapled the section onto the endpapers, covered the staples with a strip of book-cloth to make the spine, and sandwiched the whole thing between boards covered with the printed covers.

The greyish version uses cover paper folded round corrugated plastic and is very light. Its pages are wrinkled because in my haste I forgot to put newsprint between the endpaper and the pages - so the moisture from the glue went into the pages. Live and learn...

Shredded paper

I'm amazed by this work by Christian Faur. It's made of 12,000 strips of paper, cut from the American constitution printed out in various fonts and sizes and "kernings" to get the gradations of tone. Here's a detail -

See more of Christian Faur's work - including crayons used as pixels - at christianfaur.com

Pesky

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Mysterious medieval book

A fold-out page from the Voynich manuscript - written, probably in the 15th century, in a cipher that no-one has yet decoded. Nor do the plants match known species. It's named after the book dealer who acquired it in 1912. It consists of six "sections" (including astronomy and recipes), and the overall impression  is that it was meant to serve in medieval or early modern medicine. The puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.

The bizarre features of the manuscript text (such as doubled and tripled words in the text), the suspicious contents of its illustrations, and a lack of historical reference support the idea that the manuscript is a hoax. No-one has been able to construct any meaning from it - so, did it contain any meaning in the first place?

Its authorship has been subject to as many theories as has the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, and further theories about the manuscript's language abound. Perhaps it's an example of "outsider art" from another era?

A facsimile edition, albeit with heavy image cropping, was published in 2005. You can see the separate pages online here.

Book du jour

The pages of my Sketchbook Project book are running out, and I've only got as far as "writing" the Jubilee Line - so another section has to be added. Currently the book is stapled, so I tried out sewing-to-replace-staples with the tall book on the left. When you sew through the same holes on the cover again and again, the sections crowd together at the spine and open out in clumps of pages - so I made the smaller maquette with fewer pages in a section, and more sections, to make better use of this phenomenon. 

For the Sketchbook Project I'm aiming to travel on all parts of London Underground (and possibly Overground), drawing a long line as I go. So far I've done the Bakerloo, Central, Circle, District, and Hammersmith & City lines - half of the Jubilee line and all of the Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, Waterloo & City lines, and DLR, and the Overground, are yet to be done. One a week?

Small steps in the studio

The idea is to have the "things most used" most easily to hand. So "hooking" and "dyeing" materials will live in their own containers on the capacious shelves in the "new" cupboard -

Those bins are now full and some space has been gained, but eek what to do with the rest of that stuff, the bits and bobs?

And --- will the sewing machine ever re-emerge? (It's under there somewhere...) -

Paradoxically, it's the desire to have it sorted that keeps me at the computer - fear of starting can keep a person "usefully busy" doing something else.

Art I like - Emily Barletta

Thread on paper - seeing her work makes me want to stitch, stitch, stitch....! (And these kind of marks fit quite nicely into the category of "asemic writing" that I'm looking at in my essay.)

Emily's most recent exhibition was Art/Sewn: Tradition, Innovation, Expression in Brooklyn, NY, earlier this year. She blogs at http://emilybarletta.blogspot.com/ and a recent interview is here.

More renovation

Looking ahead to a complete revamp of the bathroom, once the dust from the current spate of home dec has settled. The bathroom is only small, but is likely to be another major upheaval. I'd love to do the walls in this fabulous mosaic! (Brand names have been removed....)

Bite sized textiles

One of several unblogged-about exhibitions I've seen in the past wee while is Bite Sized at the Daiwa Foundation. Small textiles, on plinths, around the edges of two rooms. Olga has done a thoughtful and extensive blog post here, and the show's web page has links to many of the artists.

My favourite pieces were Sue Lawty's lead weaving (she's been doing a project at Kilhope Lead Mining Museum)

Koji Takake's polypropylene cube (his work is concerned with 'oppositional' elements) -

Philippa Lawrence's parchment and monofilament construction -

and Yoshiko Tanabe's silk "snowball" -

- each of which reveal something new-to-me about the materials, and the possibilities of working with them.

Gilding

Many shades, from White Gold through Lemon Gold, Yellow Gold, Moon Gold, Red Gold, to  Victorian Gold and even Genuine Palladium. Luscious.

Plenty of videos online about gilding - just look up "gold leaf gilding". You need a "glue" and the leaf, which usually comes in books of 25 sheets, and perhaps some varnish to protect your item when it's finished. It's addictive....