Art I Like - Marcia Hafif

I came across Marcia Hafif's "daily drawings" at the Daimler Collection, but these don't appear on her website (almost as if drawing is something artists do in secret!). OK, they were done about 35 years ago - old stuff....

[Addendum: looking at the website in October 2016, I find the works on paper: http://www.marciahafif.com/inventory/pp.html ... and much else!]

Here you can see a couple of her drawings held by MoMA, including "January 1972" - an example of the mark-making on large sheets of paper that she did regularly - process art - "Marcia Hafif obsessionally recorded pencil marks during a given day and time (evoking the most treacherous of prison walls)"; for the exhibition under review, "curator Cornelia H. Butler’s catalogue essay is explicit in its desire to complicate the standard boy’s club narrative of the period. She does so by suggesting that concerns with time, everyday materials, repetition and what constitutes a legitimate studio practice are all of vital interest to women, both in terms of formal exploration and with regards to then developing concerns with content as an explicitly feminist issue." But I digress - we're looking at the work of this artist, and how drawing fits into that work.Here is an essay from the catalogue of her 2003 exhibition. Here we learn that in 1972 "Marcia was drawing vertical pencil marks, as a kind of meditative exercise into standard black drawing books. She started at the upper left corner and worked systematically down the paper. Then she began to use words instead of lines, but words semantically unrelated to each other. She tried not to make sentences or phrases, used no punctuation, left no margin, line breaks were contingent on reaching the right hand edge of the page. You saw a wall of penciled words." At this time, conceptualists and minimalists had the idea that painting was no longer valid.

What led her to painting then? Looking for ways “to begin again,” in her phrase. Toward that end, Hafif belonged for a time in the early 80’s to a loose group of radical artists who advocated a certain fundamentalism in painting.

In 2004 she showed the “Glaze paintings” series (2003), each annotated by the names of the colors involved in its making, such as Flesh Tint/Alizarin Crimson, Manganese Violet/Phthalocyanine Blue, Vermilion/Phthalocyanine Blue and Light Green/Indian Yellow; all are monochrome paintings constructed from two colors, made with the apparent precision of a dispassionate scientist. Hafif’s project, which is ongoing, involves every aspect of making a painting, from grinding the pigment into oil to determining the scale, proportion and mark. She uses different mediums, such as oil, encaustic, egg tempera, casein and glazes, working with colors tonally so as to establish a scale of flesh tones, grays and so on, looking for straightforward ways to make paintings without complicated crafting, based in part on the nonhierarchical, nonauthorial methodologies of the 1960s and ‘70s. They are illusions: "One painting is a gorgeous shimmering violet when viewed from a distance, but shifts to green when viewed close-up. Another is black, but made without black pigment." (info found here)
An essay from Artforum, Sept 1978, on the current state of painting, can be found here. It says that Marcia Hafif: "keeps work whole and within the vision of one author, rarely using an assistant, ordering work form a factory or working in a group. Painting has been able to gather new energy by throwing things out and starting afresh. Although much of it has seemed to continue reduction, it has been, more precisely, involved in a deconstruction, an analysis of painting itself. With belief remaining in the potentialities of abstraction, and in reaction to the apparent exhaustion of painting, the artists cited above, and others, began the inventory - the cataloguing, the examination - of the parts I have spoken of. Painting became demonstrative, conceptual, a thing to be examined, more passive that it had been. The artist was making personal work. Thus certain changes came about. The format became generally smaller. Color became opaque, seen for itself rather than being used t create an illusion or to express. Line was used for itself rather than to delineate shape or form. Personal touch was readmitted as the sign of the brush and the artist's hand was again visible. These are elements of painting. "

But to get back to the drawings - she described the immediacy of the act of drawing as “a quite direct path [that] runs from the hand to the brain, to the feelings, to the need and the desire to locate an image, a thought, a design in the visual world.”

A review of a 1999 exhibition said that she gives the idea that artistic manipulation itself can be the true art object a "surprisingly visceral form in "One Hour Twenty Minutes,'' in which hundreds of tiny pencil marks represent the seconds ticking off Hafif's life on Nov. 20, 1972. Despite its seemingly detached measuring of a random block of time, the work inevitably inspires thoughts of how we mete out our existence."