Micro-Commuting: Being Home as an Architecture of Personal Time

A Drawing Project by Paul Beuchat for the Exhibition “Home”
Curated by Martin Rasmussen, London, 2009




As an artist and translator, I live and work at home and therefore the centre of my living space is my computer and my desk, which are in my room.

In our daily lives commuting, or the time we spend going to and from our workplace, determines to a large extent our priorities and the way we build our schedule, it defines our personal architectures of time so to speak.

Because I live and work at home, this commuting time disappears or is radically different proportionally to that of the average person, moving between public or physical geographies to personal geographies and micro-commuting.

Given, also, that in such circumstances landscape itself does not change (it is still primarily my home and surroundings), how we allocate our time, the itineraries of our everyday life become the most relevant aspect of our sense of home in terms of our identity.

If something is altered or goes wrong in our “feeding” routine, for example, this will have a short term impact on a major “beam” in the construct our life and identity, if on the other hand, such change occurs in our sleeping or social patterns of behaviour, the effect could be in the longer term, etc.

Micro-Commuting: Being Home as an Architecture of Personal Time – remits to the fact that not moving from home reduces my movements quantitatively and qualitatively from longer commuting times to brief, clearly identifiable and short distance displacements from my "real" centre (the desktop and my computer to various points and within the computer).

My relationship with that centre is expressed in a time-based drawing in the form of a slideshow that distinguishes between the "physical lines" and "digital lines” identifiable in my everyday life behaviour and reflecting the itinerary of such patterns of behaviour.

Micro-Commuting: Being Home as an Architecture of Personal Time is also a direct reference to George Perec’s The Apartment.

In the foreword for his book “Species of Spaces and other Places” (Penguin Books, Revised Edition, London 1999), Georges Perec points out that “the subject of this book is not the void exactly but rather what there is round or inside of it [...] To start with, then, there isn’t very much: nothingness, the impalpable, the virtually immaterial, extension, the external, what is external to us, what we move about in the midst of, our ambient milieu, the space around us.”

Distinguishing between physical and digital space, interior and exterior (outside my house, but still within its sphere of influence, such as going to the corner shop, launderette, etc.) and digital or communicational space (online), this project offers one possible visual representation of the surrounding space described by Perec in his book.

On this occasion, however, the space of Home has been organized around the void left by the absence of commuting time in my personal everyday life, represented according to my proximity or distance from the centre of my combined home and work life, which is the computer. This, however, is not a permanent state of affairs and must be viewed as a segment, a section of my life.

Conceptually, the immediate context of the project also engages notions such as that of the Cyborg (the extension of the capabilities of the human body through technology) and the notion of Space as Bandwidth as they are used William J.Mitchell in City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (MIT Press, 1999).

I have included Mitchell’s view of telephonic conversation as an asynchronous extension of personal space (as opposed to synchronous or direct face-to-face interaction) and the automobile as a historical extensions of the home in a mediated world for contextual reasons only.

Time is a void that MUST be filled (or shaped).

Time must be used, or wasted, but it will inevitably pass and there is no surplus and no interest to be gained by trying to hoard it. At our time of reckoning, like in double entry accounting, any time spent in our affairs will necessarily equal the time we had available to do them: our lifetime.

In the course of our daily affairs, we usually schedule our time according to a hierarchy, an order of precedence that is defined by need and availability. This arrangement of our lifetime, I argue, is a form of personal architecture that can be represented visually as a diary, schedule or as a graph.

The visual representation of these needs through lines is descriptive of personal space understood as how we use our time, a time-based cartography where habitation or the way we use a place (its regularity and/or intensity of use) provides an element of form (space) whose identity is defined by (our) allocation of time and also our frequency or intensity of circulation (personal habits or routine).

The computer at my desk is at the same time the focal point of my daily routine and also the boundary between physical and digital spaces (a kind of “black hole”).

Similarly, my mobile phone provides incoming and outgoing communications which could initiate the branching off of a secondary itinerary, for example, if I am on my way to the shop in the corner and I receive a call or send off a message.

My personal sense of “Home” revolves around the familiarity and centralness to my day of the office desk and specifically the computer, complemented by the multiple interactions of my personal relations. In this drawing, each line is allocated specific information value, to identify and explain movements and their relationship.

This value can be expressed in colour, form or other linear qualities, as in CAD (feeding lines, WC lines, sleeping lines) each one corresponding to a different sub-architecture and timeframe which combined with the others reflect the reality of my life in terms of my routine displacements and the aggregate time devoted to each type of movement within the space I have defined here as “home.”

The general outline of the flat space is only present in the introductory slide(s) and may or may not reflect the actual shape (as cartographic shape itself could be defined according to intensity of use in a way similar to a world map based on PGB or population figures) and the drawings will look like this more or less (except they will be made by hand and scanned), with all lines adding up to 24 hours (unless time is expressed in terms of unit-days, in which case a colour could be assigned to each segment of the line representing one day or one hour (within a day), as applicable).

© Paul Beuchat













Each block shape will provide statistical data (time devoted to shopping, WC, cooking, TV, sleeping, etc., over a period of one week (5 working) days.

Secret Gardens

Elaine's Secret Garden: Drawing Utopia

© Paul Beuchat

Last summer, like every summer since 2003, like I will do again in a few weeks, I was house-sitting and watering the plants in Elaine Kowalski and Elton Bash’s East London garden.

Looking around I noticed an old wooden birdhouse hanging from one of the lower branches of a tree. I gazed at it for a moment and as I did I realized that I was looking at—literally—the unlikely event of a house hanging from a piece of string. In a sense, I saw it as if for the first time.

I was savouring the poetry of this vision when I noticed the dog. Half-hidden among the bushes under the birdhouse, the statue of a dog stared out, alert, as if protecting the memory of a long gone tenant. I thought to myself, “a stone dog guards a derelict birdhouse hanging from a tree in an English garden.”

Then I began to draw.

Is there anything as futile, expensive, ephemeral and frustrating and yet as exciting and rewarding on a personal level as making art today?

Probably not.

In spite of the many times fruitless struggle against materials and the seldom successful quest for the spiritual, many thousands of artists live and work all over the world today.

An entire economy of galleries, museums, dealers, collectors, journalists, critics and curators revolves around the figure of a human being gazing at the world around him, attempting to make sense of what he sees.

Contemporary society places a premium on the artist’s role in proposing reality, on his ability to define, envision and connect landmarks in a geography of the mind, to navigate through this invisible reality and tell the mythical story of this journey.

Independently of the economic and other interests surrounding each individual artist, the very existence of today’s art world is determined by society’s deep-rooted belief in the uniqueness and value of the artist’s inventiveness as well as his capacity to give concrete form to his vision.

This vision combines here - now reality with the artist’s view of how things might be or should be—his Utopia.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines Utopia as “an imaginary island depicted by Sir Thomas More as enjoying a perfect social, legal and political system” also as “a place, state or condition ideally perfect in respect to politics, laws, customs and conditions.”

Other authors add that “utopias are about how people should live, about human nature, and the meaning and purpose of life, dealing with perennial problems, happiness, good and evil, authority, the state, religion, knowledge, work, sex, equality, liberty.”

By introducing a distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, Marx and Engels marked a decline in the influence of utopian thinking in social reform. After them, utopian projects and real-life manifestations of utopianism retreated into a “practical utopia” role as models of reference rather than functional realities.

Utopianism viewed as the capacity to envision a reality beyond what is immediately perceivable by our senses is crucial in the sense-making attempts of the artist. Whether it is used as a strategic weapon or to conceive and visualize an imaginary reality, its purpose is to break down the brick wall of ‘here-now’ logic and see beyond.

In the study of utopianism there are three basic positions: those who believe utopian thought is a significant expression of man, those who condemn it as wrong, stupid or perverse and those who remain ambivalent about it.

Among the first, Paul Tillich argues that it is impossible to understand history without utopia, which he sees as the motor for human progress and an opening up to the new. Similarly, Frederick L. Polak, discusses the key cultural role of utopianism in people’s definition of the future, linking man’s yearning for utopia to his nature.Man’s desire to overcome the negative in life makes Utopia necessary as a form of mental space providing a functional gap between elements of reality.

Polak further explains that society’s images of the future at a given time emerge from what he calls “the split man” in reference to mankind’s capacity to split reality into the existing and the imaginary, freeing itself from “the oppressive grip of the here-now.” As a result, he says, “the human mind spiritually emancipates itself from spatial-temporal limits of existing reality and tries to cross the borders of the unknown.”

For Polak, the course of history is determined “by its preceding and prevailing images of the future interacting with all social forces.”

Linking past imaginings of the future with the emergence of present-day reality and, I would add, with the notion of the avant garde, Polak points out that “if we understood better where to look and what to ask, we would see that part of the future is being recorded now in images already operative or in process of creation.”

In this sense, when a group of artists reacts to the early stages of decline of the social projection of a given world view, the collective force of their shared vision displaces the images of the pre-existing cultural order. But even art produced by the avant-garde of a period will inevitably fail to embody the spirit of another, as if ideas whose internal coherence is a reflection of specific historical circumstances must necessarily fade away in time along with such circumstances.

In his book "The Empty Space", Peter Brook describes this aging process in connection to theatre, but his views are applicable to the arts in general:

“All the different elements of staging—the shorthands of behaviour that stand for certain emotions; gestures, gesticulations and tones of voice—are all fluctuating on an invisible stock exchange all the time. Life is moving, influences are playing on actor and audience and other plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events, join in the rewriting of history and the amending of daily truth […] In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived and its conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it. In this sense, the theatre is relativity.”

In real life, the unseen, the unexplained, the un-formed and the un-built rush forward as a formless flow, always in the process of becoming but never fully settling into the specifics of here-now reality, momentarily evading historical demise, a quality reflected in the traditional understanding of drawing as a tentative medium.

Bertrand De Jouvenel has said that the lack of clear images of these utopian visions causes mankind anxiety. This anxiety fuels a burning desire in the artist to create such images and thus remedy the absence of a visual or material counterpart for an inner vision of almost overwhelming force. In doing this, to paraphrase Tillich, the artist seeks to make visible “the telos of his own existence, what he is essentially. ”

Therefore, the artist’s burning desire, his utopia, is to join these two realities through his work. This includes himself and his physical, personal, social and historical surroundings. In other words, his essence as an artist is not detached from his surroundings or his work but includes them.

Theodor Adorno has said that “any attempted representation of Utopia places unbearable constraints on its very nature,” which is that of the unformed and the ineffable. Therefore, the envisioning or enactment of the artist’s utopia requires a medium offering the least possible material and formal resistance. This medium, I propose, is drawing.

Tom McDonough refers to the broader issue of representing Utopia stating that “one may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner.” He points out the paradox that even though utopia is a “determined negation of that which is” it is not possible to depict such visions without reference to familiar aspects of the reality to be transformed.

He adds: “Every representation of utopia is simultaneously its undermining. We only know the truth of utopia, the strength of its negativity, to the extent that it is not represented. Essentially, any concrete image of utopia falsifies the utopian project by setting definite limits to its subject.” Representing utopia involves the paradox of having to use pre-existing visible reality to make an invisible imaginary both visible and intelligible and to find organic place for visions of utopia within the broader context of physical reality.

In doing this, an essentially intangible and mobile flow is anchored to the specificity of indexical references, limiting the scope of a language that is closer to oral tradition at the same time that it undermines its potential to express a complex and mobile reality.

Examining the social history of drawing through the process of learning how to draw, Ann Bermingham describes the reality in which the medium emerges as one “intersected with social, political and practical needs,” a reality characterized by“the aesthetization of the self and the things of everyday life.”

In such a context, she says, drawing becomes a social practice with a dual representational and also aesthetic role, aiming to represent an environment made up primarily of interacting elements of information, a form of translation, I would add.

Last summer a door, or perhaps a window opened for me in my mind, and I could see the vastness and wealth of Elaine's small East End garden. There was magic in every corner, if only you could see it. In retrospect, I realize now the closeness and similarities there is between Elaine as a woman-artist and her garden. Wild and unkept, but so alive, struggling against encroaching urbanism and darkness, flawed, busy, productive...

I completed a series of 100 drawings last summer.

Lanudo: The Strangeness of a Drawing

Lanudo: The Strangeness of a Drawing
© Paul Beuchat

I

A few days ago I looked at some of the drawings that the Chilean artist Dominique Serrano included in a group exhibition currently on show at Animal Gallery, Santiago, Chile. Discussing the work with her on the basis of what I saw on the website, I became aware of a “distance” between what I thought I was looking at on my computer screen and what was actually on show.

I was amused by her description of the piece “Lanudo” as being “somewhat strange.”

It amused me because it seems to me that using Freudian terminology such as “the unhomely” or the “strangeness of the familiar” is no longer the exception but more like the rule and a quality eagerly sought after by art practitioners today.

Another question that came to my mind was why did she feel it was strange?

Strangeness (that is, systematic and coherent strangeness) distances you from your surroundings and permits you to develop an independent identity, a profile, if you like.

The artist today needs this profile, not to feel personally special and interesting but as an essential tool to circulate through the media and the web creating and exploiting a personal myth. Artists today need to be readable and above all communicable in order to exist in a media-dominated reality.

But strangeness, like humour, is also a momentary, in-between condition that will inevitably be absorbed into established categories and concepts.

Therefore, for me, the strangeness of Lanudo comes not from its current or possible form, or from what Dominique might do to it to change it, but from my incomplete, fragmented understanding of it as an event, an incompleteness that in this particular case derives of distance and mediation.

In the past you would look at a painting and rather than wonder about its thematic coherence, unless you were a scholar, in which case you would examine its symbols and hidden meanings.

You would tend to carefully observe the brushstrokes, the lines, the stains, the volumes and forms, trying to engage with the artist’s physical process and infer from it his or her intentions.

Today, you are more liable to observe with the same degree of attention the theoretical underpinnings and other conceptual aspects of the work in an attempt to link them to a broader theoretical context.

This because these days we know that the work is not all there before you, that it includes contextual and other information and besides, most of the times, as occurred in this case, you are not face to face with the actual object but with some media reference.

I saw Dominique’s early work for the first time a few years ago, shortly after her return to Chile from Spain and I was pleasantly surprised to make the connection with these recent pieces.

In her early drawings large sheets of paper provided a dominant, white space inhabited by thin pencil lines and colour marks that seemed to delicately drift together to form depictions of the female body of a vaguely pubescent sexual nature.

The relationship between foreground and background was clearly in favour of the background, which seemed to invade the foreground through the open treatment of the female form.

In her current installation for “Animal” Gallery, the pencil lines have grown to become physical constructions and objects floating on the white walls of the gallery, like a 3D version of her earlier drawings.

There has been a “thickening of the line” both in terms of density of content and of physical form: lines have become objects

(then again perhaps lines have always been objects, and it is just that we have become accustomed to reading them as signs, based on their content value rather than their usually spare physical presence).

Examining her work on the gallery website, I was unable to identify certain materials as being form (foreground) or background and as a result, my reading of them was tentative and open-ended, based primarily on a quality of black that I identified in the works.

As a result, I established provisional connections that made sense only if my assessment of the materials had been correct according to what I could see in the photo. As it turned out, it was not.

Evidently a photo or other image of the work will never replace the experience of actually being in front of an art work, and with the new digital imaging possibilities, it is no longer a reliable record either. But the truth is that, nowadays at least, it does replace this experience. I

In what could almost be an application of Gresham’s law, the “bad money” or media image has completely replaced the “good money” of the real experience of the work of art in viewers’ awareness and also in the specialist media, simply because it is not possible to see most if not all of the works that we read about. It is physically impossible and we simply do not have the time to do it.

As a result, we find ourselves in a situation best illustrated by the example of a poem by the French member of OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) Raymond Queneau: “Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes” (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems).

This is an experimental work proposing a combinatory of possibilities such that if we took one minute to read each resulting sonnet, and we did this for eight hours every day, two hundred days per year, it would take a million centuries to finish the poem.

The reality today, is that we cannot deal with the amount of information available.

Queneau’s poem, like Dominique’s piece titled “Lanudo,” lies in a potential state linked to a minimal materiality (a few words and an algorithm). In the case of the poem life is too short for you to ever fully experience the real thing.

It is a performance that conceivably could happen, but never will. In the case of Lanudo its potentiality, and the source of its strangeness is not in the artist’s availability of choice, or her desire to “cut off some parts” but in the fact of her hesitation, which immediately locates the piece in a place in time rather than physical space, even cultural space.

The event of her work, as reflected by the physical object, is suspended in between potential choices that have not been made (yet) and this existential condition also reflects a struggle that is currently taking place in the world of technology, the effects of which could be described as “being in the eye of the storm.”


II

Recent technological and commercial developments suggest that our awareness of personal finitude, our physical and material limitations will not change, only intensify.

The production of information today is such that we will never catch up. In such a space, terminology, in the form of “key terms” together with Boolean search techniques are called to define (temporary) “form” that will identify and “name” selected data or areas of information from the remaining universe of the web.

Given this, we should really ask ourselves about the nature of the real, about the nature of reality in our time and perhaps, also, acknowledge that, in the arts at least, physicality and permanence or the recording of the transitional increasingly seem to act as validating referents in a role much like that of gold in gold-based economies.

As I mentioned above, most of the art work we see these days is mediated in some form of publication, website, photo, blog, etc. On the face of it, as I have explained in connection with the work of Dominique Serrano, this would seem to involve a distancing from the real, from the “original.”

But, even allowing for this referential role, does it really? Hasn’t the computer screen become the face-to-face of our time? Is Google not real? Is Yahoo not real? The proliferation of web-based dating services, spaces for personal interaction as YouTube and Face Book and now, also, virtual spaces like Second Life certainly seems to suggest so.

Perhaps then, what has happened is that the narrative dimension of things, the myth, the story about the object has finally replaced the real thing in our experience, with beauty now not a quality inherent to the object but something to be found in the poetic resonance created by the choice of words used to describe it, the story of it, as defined by the nature of the relationship between the viewer and the object: a moment.

Or perhaps our experiences are increasingly less physical and more intellectual. If that is the case, what I saw on the web, with all my mistakes and omissions was actually the “real” work of Dominique Serrano, real for me that is, thousands of miles away in London, unable to fully experience the physical object, and real, also, for potentially millions of others.

The question is, are we as artists producing work for the web, for the story, for the complex narrative system through which 99% of viewers interact with the work and where the work actually occurs rather than for the increasingly rare experience of its original?

Or are we artists trying to convey our experience of the work as we see it when we make it and touch it, through a prototype and, in fact, the “real” work is the interface-determined “semi-experience” replicated and circulated millions of times in the vast avenues of the Internet “cloud,” where only Ariadne’s thread (or the tracks left behind by our own footsteps) can lead us in and out?


III

If you follow the ongoing media coverage about the battle of the giants, Google and Microsoft, and the latter’s efforts to acquire the company Yahoo, you will have probably read the term “cloud computing.” Cloud Computing or Internet-based computing implies, among other things that, in the future, software, for example, might not be resident in your computer.

Instead, you will access it through the Internet via consolidated providers that take advantage of dropping connectivity costs. This represents an evolution from software to “software services.” One can only imagine the structural consequences of this in the corporate world.

Will the local office and local representative disappear entirely, or will their function be redefined as a localized website, “hub” or Data Centre-type location catering exclusively to local users? How will the “local” be defined and controlled? Who will be in charge of oversight? How will market territories be defined? Will the entire concept of software “ownership” disappear and be replaced by a broader form of long distance licensing?

In the story so far, the Founder and CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates has voluntarily stepped down from his executive position and resigned from the day-to-day management of his company. In doing so, he has removed the symbolic obstacle of an aging view of the role of the company from the equation.

For his part, the new Chief Executive of the company has declared that the currently defunct negotiations with Yahoo could be resumed only if the entire board of Yahoo resigns, particularly Jerry Yang, its CEO, who is seen by many market analysts as a major stumbling block in the failed negotiations, blaming his personal views on Microsoft and its founder.

One might be forgiven for believing that this kind of issue has little or no relevance in the art world, but the truth is that what is happening with Microsoft today is highly relevant to the art world and artists. It is very likely to revolutionize the basic tectonics of the art world, challenging established assumptions about what is art and even the value of art and the art object, with potentially massive structural and economic consequences.

The world is at a technological crossroads, one that is reflected by the question underlying Dominique’s drawing-wall piece: do I “remain material” or do I “go meaning”, still analog...or waiting to go digital? (The actual object depicted is, I firmly believe, a dog).

The astronomical figures paid for “safe” forms of art investment, such as paintings by certain artists reveals that, as far as the art market is concerned at least, the value of “new” web-based art and other non-physical , temporary and experimental forms of art has not yet consolidated.

Also the growing unavailability of a certain kind of “blue chip” work is forcing changes of attitude and perception with respect to other less physical and even temporary or time-based kinds of works, a process begun many years ago with the French Impressionists, the post-impressionists and a very short list of living artists.

The fact that a painting by Lucian Freud was recently sold to a Russian billionaire in London for 37 million pounds sterling, the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist is but one example of such inflationary trends in the price of art.

Just like the emergence of the personal computer and Sony’s Portapak portable video camera did in the 70’s, the technology that allows for “cloud computing” will change the context in which we communicate art and also how we make it, to such an extent that unforeseeable new forms of art will emerge, a totally different aesthetics, complete with its own grammar, medium-specific terminology and audience.

This will undoubtedly be followed by some new form of art market or a mutation of the existing art system. Perhaps present-day web-based art and artist collectives as well as virtual environments can give us clues as to their possible form and function, but the best is always yet to come.

So far, however, the art market seems not to have a clear, dominant vision of its future development and therefore the smart money is assigning a high premium to safer forms of art rather than embracing whole heartedly the new practices.

The fact that none of the new forms of galleries and exhibition spaces and organizations has become predominant reflects, like Lanudo the fact that here too, the matter is yet to be resolved and that the issues at stake in the Microsoft-Yahoo saga concern us all.


IV

Surveying the artistic practices and phenomena of her time in the book “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972...” Lucy Lippard documents a period of flux in the arts scene in NY in particular.

She also heralds a process of dematerialization of the work of art at a time when the authority of the museum (and the art world) was being questioned by galleries and institutional exhibition spaces, progressing to the mobility and dynamism of the so-called “independent spaces” and “artist run spaces” of the 90s and including the emerging figure of the independent curator.

This was followed by the emergence of the artist curator, artist collectives all the way up to the loose, globally dispersed associations of today. This has involved a technologically determined breakdown and atomization of structures, an ongoing process of liquefaction of the production of content in the art world.

By putting out all the information and minimizing her conclusions Lippard allows us to observe more or less freely what was happening at that time, allowing us as readers to identify the roots of work done years later, trends, failed trends, etc.

It is through this birds-eye vantage point that we can make the connections between the reality of the 70s and the emerging technologies of today, with its own emerging technologies.

Microsoft’s strategy clearly reflects the fact that today’s technology and market conditions do not allow for the ready emergence of a new Google or a new Yahoo and that these companies will most likely consolidate and “rule the cloud” defining and imposing the way we will interact in these spaces in the foreseeable future.

Microsoft is a producer of objects (software) and Yahoo (like Google) is a venue through which such objects will be distributed. In cloud computing what is at stake is not the sale of technology and goods on the Internet, however, but a vast market of online users of computing resources, perhaps the biggest market ever created, for many years to come. What really is at stake is no more and no less a completely new global reality.

To describe this phenomenon in pictorial terms, what is happening is that the foreground (form, structure, Microsoft) has entered into conflict with the background (The Internet, Yahoo, Google) for pre-eminence in response to the changing conditions of a fluid picture plane.

Action is no longer dictated and described by form whilst background space, in turn, is no longer the passive, formless host of form it used to be.

It has become active and now seeks its own form, something that it will never achieve, for in the Internet, form is defined by the query, by our movements in that space and therefore spatial perception on the Internet is a one-to-one, personal experience (hence the emergence of MySpace, for example, or Ad-Sense, the new means to track our journeys through the Internet that Google uses to define the type of advertisements we get on the web ).

In seeking to assert its own form, the background or space enters into conflict with the foreground in terms of the basic Aristotelian principle of identity: two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time; also, two things cannot be the same thing at the same time.

So far, however, neither can do without the other. Will form and structure (Microsoft) prevail? Will space (Yahoo, Google) prevail?

In a painting, such a conflict, the stage it is currently at, is best represented by flat space, a side by side division of the pictorial plane that does not help the viewer in identifying what he/she sees, creating ambiguity and hesitation and with it a feeling of unsettling strangeness.

At this point, we are all waiting for something to happen, for the dust to settle so to speak. This existential hesitation is reflected in the piece titled Lanudo by the Chilean artist Dominique Serrano.

Because of her hesitation, the aesthetic element in her work no longer resides exclusively in the specific information, physical object or context of installation, but on the event of the staging of that information in a fluid meaningful space, a moment, as I explained.

Rather than art objects we are now looking at art-events whose independent elements (physical or otherwise) “come together” in space and time when the maker or artist publishes them, when we see them.

The root of the “strangeness” of the piece titled “Lanudo” by Dominique Serrano and also the work exhibited at Animal Gallery (as I saw it on the web) is that it has not yet found its valid counterpart, its true referents and peers.

It is simply in a nameless state prior to “being.” Put simply, such works, just like the corporate battle I have referred to here, reflect a process of gradual social fluidization that affects everything, but because the battle is not over, as I said, we are all waiting for something to happen.

When the penny finally drops (and it must) we will decide, name, classify, conceptualize and move on, until then, all we can do is gaze in wonder and speechless amazement as the process unfolds before our eyes.

The Life Class: Arguments for a Collective Teaching Methodology in the Fine Arts

As it is currently taught in most higher education art programs, the life class no longer satisfies the requirements of today’s art students. Also, it doesn’t reflect the context of artistic education today, the new drawing practices or even the resources that are now generally available to the art student. Because of this, it is increasingly rare to find it in art school curricula and also, it cannot reverse a perceptible decline in the teaching of drawing in art education in general, much less realize the medium’s full potential.

In the past, the Life Class was the cusp of a hierarchical process of learning that, literally, began on the ground floor, by copying plaster models of Greek ideals and continued with the student working his/her way upstairs, copying the teacher’s drawings and collections of old master drawings until reaching the top floor, the Life Class, where all would be revealed. This was a model born in times of philosophical positivism, empiricism, empire and nation building, a time of emerging institutions and also one of codification and regulation of knowledge and laws. [1] This was a time in which where the order of the visible, the written in particular, was of great importance, with the emergence of encyclopaedias and dictionaries, the written and illustrated press, with languages viewed as a form of territory to be defended through the recording of correct usage, in short, a machine de guerre[2].

The hierarchical institution of the Academy was born not only to protect the quality of national fine arts production through teaching and artistic practice but also to establish a reward system whereby a nation’s artists strove to achieve the highest ranking position, that of President of the Royal Academy.

To some extent, the rite of passage dimension of the life class still applies in those increasingly rare college art education programs where life drawing is still being taught, but the decline and almost disappearance of the Academy as an institution should already tell us that things have changed. The fact that the hierarchy of the life class persists some extent until today in art education curricula is due among other factors, to the persistence of certain attitudes in connection with nudity (primarily female) together with narrow views on student age in COED college programs.

But today’s art students bring with them new information, information about a new reality that is invisible, digital, immaterial and yet highly functional, and this information implies or should imply both new resources and new goals as well as the need to teach artists new ways of engaging with this reality, feed from it and represent it. In this sense, the ancient stairs of Academia no longer lead to work or ways of seeing and representing things that are relevant to the students of today. As a result, the new students are finding their own ways, short cuts and provisional goals and aims, guided and assisted by their tutors and teachers in self-directed collaborative research processes.

Colleges have reacted to the new circumstances by developing self-directed art research programs offering dissertation-based research or practice-base research courses combining a written component and studio work. Among other consequences this has led to a devaluation of the MA degree and the emergence of interdisciplinary research in the arts.

Besides looking at the roles of the site, teacher, model and student, an assessment of the life class as a learning environment with a view to the development a more dynamic learning structure must also take into account a dimension that has so far been crucially overlooked: language.
The terminology used in studio discussions and course-related research comprises a form of space, the structural underpinnings and true “walls” of the classroom, for it is inside this space that the learning actually occurs. Words provide the scaffolding to understand the concepts at play and also define the boundaries of one might expect from the life class.

A model of Life Class for these times should be responsive to today’s fluid, changing reality. It should also replicate as far as possible a personal experience of that reality rather than provide the context for a passive observation and imitation in a restricted and regulated context. Today, academic programs that include the life class reflect up to a point the ideology and (past) needs of the educational institution but not necessarily those of the individual student. The strong emphasis on place with its associated ideas of hierarchy and access that have dominated perceptions of the life class so far should be de-emphasized, giving way to more flexible views of the experience of the life class as a personal, fluid space in permanent transition tending to what the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has called invisibility.[3]

Also, a revision of the roles of teacher, model and student as participant observers would serve to reposition the human body in the context of the life class no longer as an a object but as an anti-object and of the life class as a personal experience of a regulated moment in time not necessarily linked to a physical place at all but as part of a broader system (Foucault).
Language, that is the terminology used to discuss the work and the words used between practitioners in their interactions and in an educational context, artistic or otherwise, defines the boundaries of a discipline (Archispeak, Metapolis) and, in this case, the boundaries of the life class as a purpose-built environment for the (socially acceptable) observation of the human body.

The space of the classroom—the life class or any other— is in fact primarily a linguistic space, where concepts are shared and learnt. The role of language in the theoretical discussion and teaching of drawing has never been properly assessed for unlike classical dance, for example, where movements of the body have names that serve to explain in words the choreography, in drawing, bodily movements makes no sense, only the outcome. The study of drawing has been based mostly on the outcome of such movements: the drawing as an object. Because of its potential importance however, terminology should probably be examined as a tool for the creation of linguistic and metaphorical spaces, a new semantic “life room” where this dynamic experience of the life class might develop and (over)flow into new and emerging fields and disciplines through the porosity of language, through the borrowing, incorporation and metaphorical use of language.

Existing web resources allow today’s student to gain the experience of the pose (albeit a mediated one) via specialist websites and drawing software, challenging the historical role of the life class as sole and exclusive source for the observation and artistic representation of the human body. Supported by countless “how to” books and sources, these and other similar web resources challenge not only the accepted timeframe of the class but also, and unfortunately in my opinion, the mystery, the sense of gathering around in a joint journey of discovery and knowledge under the guidance and leadership of the teacher-shaman. In a sense, the new reality tends to destroy the sense of class community and diminishes the importance of the role of the individual teacher with respect to the introduction of the students into the mysteries of the (mostly female) human body. This may come across as paradoxical, given that many people view crowded classrooms as one of the causes of the poor performance of some students and therefore such people might consider the one-on-one relationship that is possible today as positive. Even accepting that there is a certain merit in that view, I believe that the role of a horizontal dialogue between students should not be underestimated and also, it is not the authority of the teacher that is currently challenged but his capacity as a human being to provide or guide the students to all the information that is available.

On the up side, the new reality affords the opportunity and also the means to extend the experience of the life class way beyond a pedagogical timeframe and place. This new flexibility allows for the introduction of new possible elements and variables into the experience of the life class allowing for the student’s insertion into his or her social context through part-time employment or personal research in connection with their academic project, adding yet another layer or dimension of information to the work.

It would be particularly interesting, for example, to examine the role of the model as active collaborator with his or her own agenda, rather than a passive, malleable biological (and overtly sexual) object under the direction of the teacher; a teacher who, in turn, is guided by the exploration of accepted formal poses drawn from Greek and Roman antiquity and their more recent expression through the classicist teaching programs of the Academy.

A model-performer would introduce a new direction into the group’s exploration of the human form through drawing, new roles, new forms. Also, it could possibly lead to a new exploration of performance that would feed back to and broaden the context of the life class. Visual and choreographic grammars such as the Laban Notation System would provide the linguistic means to write down and discuss and even propose the pose in different terms, examining it s potentialities and limitations. Laban’s notion of Kinesphere, for instance, would allow for a dynamic and focused observation of the negative space surrounding the human figure in a new understanding of the pose and its development in time and space. It would also allow for the choreographing of instances of expression through the human body that are not necessarily linked to Greek and Roman ideals (although Vitruvius is an inescapable reference).

Instead, the new options afforded by the possibility of naming and describing in specific terms a dynamic space in flux give rise to new perceptions of the historical dimension of the pose (e.g. the recent history of the pose) and also of the experience of the life class as the meeting and interaction of personal spaces in an academic context and for a specific purpose, whilst at the same time learning how to translate the three-dimensional living human form into a two-dimensional visual narrative as part of a broader narrative and expressive reality.

A pedagogical structure that depends on a single source of information for a class with many students who passively absorb this information will inevitably limit the experience of the exploration of the human body that the life class should provide limiting, also, the flow of information towards the students. Therefore, it is necessary to examine closely all aspects of this model of drawing tutoring in the fine arts to identify those areas in which research might lead to new forms, new models of observation, new exercises and activities that can push the life class beyond the constraints of its current form and boundaries.

[1] School of Genius A History of the Royal Academy of Arts, James Fenton; Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, Albert Boime; French Academy, Vincent LeonH, The King's Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760-1840 (Oxford Historical Monographs), Holger Hoock.
[2] Hitchings, Henry R.Johnson’s Dictionary. The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World, John Murray, London, 2005, p.2 Other major works included the massive Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.
[3] Kuma, Kengo Anti-Object, Architectural Association, London 2009.

The Independent Medium of Drawing

Discussions about the autonomy of drawing as a medium range from a critical revision of its traditionally subordinate position in the visual arts to attempts at explaining new practices in the arts as a form of drawing. The teaching of drawing, for its part, has traditionally been based on the observation and imitation of nature.

Without going into the broader issue of figurative representation versus abstraction, the ubiquity of new media today and an increasingly intangible reality raises the basic question: what is it that we are observing?

Beyond metaphysical discussions about being and not being and the nature of reality, is the gaze of the artist today determined by the fluid and changing nature of what he sees? Does this media-based landscape affect the role and function of observation in drawing today?

Finally, also, in connection with the above, is there such a thing as a new medium of multimedia, for example, or are such hybrid practices best served by explaining them according to a broader notion of drawing?

Today, technology and the new media change at a speed that seems to suggest that the latter is the most appropriate course of action.

The use of a broader, open-ended notion of drawing to explain the mutations of recent hybrid art practices allows us to separate the cultural currency of the images or works from the increasingly rapid obsolescence of the technologies used to produce them.

A good example is the quaintness of some (not all) Dada productions today. They seem so naive, so eager in their idealism and so out of touch with the techno-cynicism of today. And yet, in their time, they were groundbreaking and radical forms of expressions.

To do this is to separate the inevitable aging of the image from the material condition of the drawing as an object or to the technologies of its production linking its obsolescence to the fortunes of the ideas underlying the image, and these ideas, I argue, are best understood as a form of order, as drawing.

In the preface to the catalogue What is drawing?(1)Michael Ginsborg from the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon University, raises the issue of whether “practices that have left the page altogether, that are performed, physically or electronically in the spaces of architecture, installation, live art, the screen or the landscape” are really drawing, also raising the key question of “what is at drawing’s centre?”(2)

Today, reality, the object of the artist’s contemplation, is a multidimensional, rhizome-like system that cannot be seen all at once, but which can be partially understood through the examination of the relationship between its parts.
In such a systemic understanding of reality, the physical is embedded into an interconnected, intangible and highly functional reality that is self-aware (Debord) and where both visibility and emergence are determined by the readability of the different mobilities and meaningful interactions that are taking place, in a dramaturgical sense, as forms of expression.(3)

In such a space it is more accurate to speak of experience rather than understanding, as we are bombarded by stimuli of different nature at different levels and also at different times. This perception is not like snapshot, but like a movie, it is time-based. Our experience of reality does not remain pleasurable or disagreeable forever; the pleasurable can turn to tedious, the agreeable to disagreeable, interest can become indifference.

Another aspect to consider is that this multidimensional system includes the artist himself and his work. Not only what he sees, but what he remembers and what he imagines. From the point of view of the career of the contemporary artist, also, there is also how he or she are seen and more importantly, how they want to be seen, both personally and in terms of their work their “readability” as the term is used my Mary Louise Pratt.(4) Defined by the mobility and interrelationship of projected personal images, this reality can be best explained by the notion of theatre proposed by Peter Brook in The Empty Space.(5)

In drawing today, mimesis or the imitation of nature is now less a question of imitating and describing nature than one of enacting or performing—in the dramaturgical sense—the functional mobilities and links there is between units of reality, physical or otherwise, actual or imagined in the observed environment.
To link drawing—as I do here— to a notion of order independently of any medium or function is, as Ginsborg observes, to open up the language of drawing to include object-based works, two-dimensional representations, live art and even photography and time-based media.

Because it is based on perception, the broader view of drawing proposed here takes into consideration both observations as a primary element of drawing as well as the intersected reality described by Anne Bermingham in Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a polite and useful art.(6)

Drawing usually occurs at some point between the initial conception and final realization of an idea in the form of a project, sketch or study, and also—I argue—remains by its tentative, searching nature in a half-way state of permanent un-realization and potential that defies classification and postpones its inevitable obsolescence.

Art in general but drawing in particular relies on its capacity to embody and reflect the visions and desires society projects onto it—a quality I will call here its reflectivity. Focusing on the communicational aspect of drawing Ginsborg, quoting Angela Kinston, uses the term “inclusivity” to refer to drawing’s versatility as “the range of content it [drawing] can deal with.”

Unlike other mediums such as painting, drawing is endowed with a mirror-like quality derived precisely of its austere physicality. This streamlined quality of drawing is the reason for its unparalleled communicational efficacy and content-bearing potential, reflecting what is in viewers’ mind with a minimum of material and formal interference. As a result, even “finished” drawings tend to remain caught up in a “half-uttered” unstable condition, like an incomplete sentence or idea, evading (for the time being at least) rational explanation and categorizing logic. This is not because the lines are not all there. It is simply because the words (and the concepts that they describe) to refer to such lines have not yet arrived.(7)

This permanently "open-ended" or provisional state is the basis for the perception of drawing as a pivotal moment or transitional state (non-place) of some concrete dimension of reality or imagined reality that is completed or ‘assembled’ in the mind of the viewer through a process of closure.

Although historically aware, human beings tend to view things in terms of the present, in specific of their own present, which is determined by their personal history and life experiences. Consequently, without excluding the interpretative role of prior knowledge and the human sense of history in general, it is primarily through the eyes of the present that the viewer completes the drawing in his mind.

As a result, drawing is something that emerges when you see it with your mind; a uniquely personal and present experience similar to what Peter Brook described as ‘living theatre’ or the actual and felicitous interaction of audience and performer. Granted that this can be said of most encounters with reality and, for that matter, about most artistic mediums, as it is a phenomenon falling within the broader realm of human perception. Yet, no other medium offers such a seamless and fluid embodiment of matter-form-content and none—also—is as unfettered by the suggestiveness and attraction of its physical presence, the history of its production or the decline of its material condition as drawing. Perhaps only certain forms of sculpture come as close to drawing in terms of its economy of means.

The question raised by Ginsborg as to whether or not “mediums that purport to be or are construed as drawings” are really drawing reflects the growing tendency today to ‘read’ things in terms of their role within a broader system rather than as self-contained and individually significant.

If, as Ginsborg proposes, and I agree, such new mediums and practices are drawing in the extended sense of the term, drawing then becomes the ideal expression of a post-medium condition. Lucy Gunning’s mode of inhabiting the residency space at Wimbledon as a total space with her assertion that “placing things is drawing” and her “treating the room like a page” is but one example of a performance-based view of drawing that plays on the notions of place and space, of physical location and habitation. In the same exhibition, Claude Heath links drawing to the restriction of human movements and the definition of form in a kind of prosthetic mimesis. Rae Smith, for her part, uses drawing to “inhabit but also depict previous experience.” In her work, a broader notion of space includes the space of memory as well as prior habitations of place (the memory of the space).

These are but a couple of examples of the infinitely varied and multidimensional field of drawing today. As stated, Gunning’s basic principle: “placing objects is drawing” applies regardless of scale, time or material condition and is similar to saying—as I do: “drawing is order.” As such, she links drawing and the definition of coherent form to the active and purposeful deployment of physical materiality in the sculptural sense.

In my view, such order is a pre-existing given, which emerges in our mind and we identify in a multidimensional reality through the combined physical-intellectual operation of seeing and restated in works reflecting that reality, but not necessarily in a material or even visual sense.

As a form of order, independently of any particular medium or representational or mimetic function and independently—also—of whether the reality subjected to that order actually exists or is imagined, drawing precedes the “object-drawing” that reflects or embodies that order. In this sense, drawing could also be defined as:

A socially relevant, multiform, immaterial and intelligible structure comprising a series of sequential spaces and functions identifiable and explainable primarily in linear terms.

Because drawing has traditionally been taught through observation, imitation and the development of manual skills, this “neo-mimetic” view of drawing challenges established notions about the teaching and exhibition of drawing with respect to the identity of the medium and the changing nature of the artist’s gaze.

In terms of learning how to draw it also raises questions about the role and validity of, for example, the Life Class as one model of teaching and the notion of a new Academy in the form of the recent proliferation of research by practice programs in postgraduate visual arts education.

The life class constitutes a form of regulated scaffolding conceived to observe and learn from the examination of the human body in response to classic Greco-Roman ideals. Its origins can be traced back to the academy of the Carracci brothers in Italy. Its political maturity and development into a model of education came with the French Academy, philosophical positivism and their influence over all other aspects of French culture. Together with Napoleon’s codification of the law, the model of the academy was exported and influenced art education and cultural systems practically all over the world in the XIX Century.

The rules governing the teaching of drawing at the Academy defined a hierarchy in which the Life Class occupied the highest level. Artists began by copying plaster reproductions of Greek and Roman sculpture, followed by the master’s own drawings and culminated with access to the life class, where all would be revealed. In this sense, the life class was invested with a very special authority in terms of the knowledge of drawing and occupied a clear hierarchical position, with the teacher at the head.

In contemporary art education, questions arise about the validity of the role of the Life Class as a model of education. These issues have to do with the role of observation in today’s increasingly intangible and invisible reality. Such questions also point at a possible central role for drawing in an art education curriculum. A curriculum fed not by the output of individual disciplines—drawing included—but instead by the intensity of interdisciplinary communication.

This is not an attempt to give drawing a new role, however, but simply to acknowledge and express what has always been there in a new academic curriculum. To put drawing back at the centre of art education is to acknowledge the dimension of drawing that underlies the majority of man-made elements in our everyday reality. Practically everything that is man-made, including our urban environment, involves at some stage some form of drawing or design, whether as a sketch or an architectural plan as a diagram or engineering drawing.

The Royal College of Art provides an example of such an attempt at interdisciplinary crossovers in an academic environment, but one that has been inserted at postgraduate level rather than being the natural progression of a broader art education system based on an understanding of drawing as a primary form of visual thinking.

Whether it is viewed as an object, as a visual language or as an artistic practice with specific roots, drawing today cannot be examined in isolation from the reality that conditions the event of its production. Such reality includes the ways in which drawing is taught usually—still—through observation, imitation and the development of manual skills.

In order to continue to be a valid and useful regulated model of teaching and observation, the Life Class and drawing in general must provide for the observation and imitation of this new reality, opening up to manual and other skills from other disciplines. These include the new media, technology and other mediums in use today, including the terminology to discuss such new media and technology, combined with a solid grounding in classic drawing.

As used here, the concept of reflectivity differs from the term inclusivity proposed by Michael Ginsborg in that he refers to the representation of subject matter in connection with the medium’s versatility.

This versatility of drawing is not based on its potential for visual representation, or any material, mimetic skill or property but instead on the capacity that even a single, deliberately rendered line has to embody and reflect the complex visions of others (the viewers), which may well be abstract or linked to abstract notions.

I use the term reflect because I believe that the sense or meaning of the drawn image is not to be found exclusively in the drawing or in the reality it reflects. Instead, I believe it derives of a relationship of mutual collaboration where a drawn image is meaningless without some connection with reality—even if only to mirror the maker’s intentions.

Reality, our experience of it, is articulated by drawing as a sense-making device. Therefore, reflection is not understood here in an optical sense only, but as an intellectual process of combined identification and self-identification, a multidimensional experience.

Together with the actuality that the viewer's gaze affords the “unfinished” drawing, this two-sided relationship would account for the historical fluidity and chameleon-like nature of the medium, given that the drawing’s context of production as well as its subject matter is a reality in permanent flux, in a perception of movement fuelled by our own questions and our own experiences.

To recognize the independent dimension of drawing there is in contemporary reality one must look at how rather than what is deployed in a material or functional sense.

Adorno points out that “any concrete image of utopia falsifies the utopian project by setting definite limits to its subject.”

Similarly, I argue, any attempt to define drawing or “what is at the centre of drawing” from the specificity of a technique or material, for example, rather than from the fluidity of its links to the reality it reflects will place unbearable constraints on the medium.

In connection with the expression of the inner vision of the artist, this extended notion of drawing is ideally suited not to “represent Utopia” but to “perform Utopia.”

When Adorno and McDonough discuss the impossibility or impracticability of envisioning Utopia, they refer to the problem of representing it visually, not to the gesture of enacting it of carrying it out.

They see the depiction of Utopia from the point of view of the need to recourse to recognizable form in order to provide it with a formally intelligible description and the use of what they consider “necessary visible references to pre-existing reality”.

The nature of Man’s Utopia is linked to his capacity to separate the existing from the imagined.

In this sense, by providing a living bridge between the real and the imagined and by carrying out his vision, the artist can create a here-now unreality.

But the resulting work of art, the drawing as an object, the painting or the sculpture is in fact only the debris of its own conception. Therefore, due to its spare and polysemic nature, the intangible actuality of the creative act is best represented by the deeply human gesture of drawing.

Mostly, because before drawing there is nothing

******

(1) Kingston, Angela (ed.), What is Drawing? Three practices explored Lucy Gunning, Claude Heath, Rae Smith, Black Dog Publishing Limited, London and New York, 2003
(2) Ginsborg, Michael, op. cit. p11 “What is at drawing’s centre? Not one thing for certain. Its inclusivity is too great for that to be true—what cannot be represented by a drawing? But its inexhaustible capacity for invention and change must, I feel, be attributable to its two-dimensional format and narrow range of materials. Put another way: drawing’s value has a lot to do with this inclusivity, with the range of content that it can deal with, and not so much with material experimentation.”
(3)See Gardner, William L. “The Charismatic Relationship: a dramaturgical perspective”, Academy of Management Review, January 1998. Gardner’s point of view that “the meaning of people’s doings is to be found in the manner in which to express themselves with similarly expressive others” is coherent with other authors who have discussed the practicalities involved in the artist’s need to communicate his vision.
(4)The notion of “readability” as used here is also mentioned by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, New York, Routledge, 1992. In a world of stories, the strategic deployment of such stories, serves to create the myth of the artist or, alternatively, to dehumanize. She gives the example of what she calls “Europeanizing” literature, citing the depiction of the inhabitants of the Argentine Pampa in the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
(5)Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, Hart-Davis MacGibbon, Granada Publishing, London, Toronto, Sydney, New York, 1977 “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty stage whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”(page 9)
(6) Bermingham, Anne, Learning To Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000. Preface.
(7) Brook, Peter, op. cit p. 12 “Again, with Shakespeare, we hear or read the same advice ‘play what is written’. But what is written? Certain cyphers on paper. Shakespeare’s words are records of the words that he wanted spoken, words issuing as sounds from people’s mouths, with pitch, pause, rhythm and gesture as part of their meaning. A word does not start as a word—it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictate the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist, it is repeated inside the actor. Both may only be conscious of the words, but both for the author and then for the actor, the word is a small visible portion of a gigantic unseen formation. A similar idea is expressed by Phillip Rawson in Rawson, Phillip, Drawing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969 when he compares drawing and painting: “drawing is the moment, painting is the revisiting of that moment.”

Limb Identity

The emergence of form and content in drawing


A drawn line is possibly the most simple and economical means of primary visual expression. Even if it consists of a single purposefully drawn line, a drawing is a conscious economic decision and a voluntary act, whether constructive—as the visible traces of a manual gesture—or conceptual, as an act of interpretation and definition of reality (schema). As the latter, a drawing is also a construction of meaning, independently of any medium used or the nature of the reality observed. Whether it is made on any given surface or space with our body or using some other form of line producing instrument or whether it is the result of the deployment or identification of arrangements of objects in space, for example, drawing is an action that develops over time—even in the briefest of instants—and therefore is a process, a sequence of graphic events that has a beginning and an end and one that involves the notion of emergence.

In connection with images, the concept of emergence is defined as follows: “An image displays emergence when its parts or features are combined such that additional and unexpected features result, making it possible to determine new patterns and relations in the image that were not intentionally created.”(1) Whether these parts are drawings, printed images or photos, other materials or previously finished works, their arrangement in space or in time involves a process of drawing in which traditional collage techniques, literally, provide the glue that physically and materially holds together what the mind has already brought together through a process of closure. Through this process our mind achieves an understanding of unity in the observed, bridging the gap there is between the visual and the material, between our mental image and our imperfect attempts to render or give physical form to that mental image, at the same time that it opens up new possible interpretations.

If a drawing is an orderly and sequential deployment of such 'units of information' or graphic events, what is the nature of the relationship between line and information, between form and content, in the process whereby such a drawing comes into being? In other words, how do form and content manifest themselves, if at all, before a linear construction achieves—and maintains over a period of time—the coherence of form and expression that permits it to be read as 'a drawing' or—also—in the transitional phase there is between one form of the drawing and another? Are the lines that lead to a finished drawing totally meaningless or only partially meaningful until that drawing is complete? If so, for how long do they remain in that condition? At what point do they “become drawings”(or a drawing other than the one originally intended)? Also, from the point of view of content, what is the nature of visual information before this coherence is achieved? Does it have some kind of disperse factual existence prior to the condition of 'information', as data for example, with the potential to become information through line and therefore through drawing? These questions define the context of development of the work presented here, which focuses on the physical and material manifestation of such a development process through collage.

In the visual operation that is collage the original meaning of images or fragments of images is less relevant than the evidence of the formative process itself and our understanding of the development of form (but not entirely meaningless, however). In its non-digital form, collage is an intervention into both the physical and contextual dimensions of an image. It is also a crude attempt to regain the fluidity of observed reality, whether physical, social or political, an attempt to achieve the formless ductility and timelessness of such reality, a doomed attempt to inhabit and develop the moment that precedes the image.

What matters in these works is not seamless superficial perfection, digitally or otherwise enhanced, or a fluid transition from one source image to another, but instead the Frankenstein-like romantic beauty of the scars, the openness and layer-by-layer construction of a sensitive paper skin.

Two types of surgical operations have been performed on the physical body of these drawings: cosmetic surgery, or surgery to conceal and correct visible defects and reconstructive surgery which involves not only the redefinition of form and space within the images but, also, an intervention into the narrative underpinnings of the emergent images.

P.B.


(1) R. Finke, T. Ward and S. Smith Creative Cognition, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992
I am not concerned with digital images in these works, however, I would like to point out that, as processes that depend on external inputs (e.g. electricity, software, etc.) the notion of collage in my opinion has to do with the diversion and linking of similar flows of visual data rather than the juxtaposition of elements of a diverse nature. In the realm of the digital, everything is of the same digital and representational nature. You deal with objects, with the physical in order to construct object-images. Digital images, however complex, rarely possess a relevant physical being other than the technological device used to generate or convey it.

Semantic Space

Drawing terminology is, as Emma Dexter (Dexter, 2005, p.006) points out, "sewn into the wrap and weft of our lives" it is everywhere and yet it is nowhere. A drawing-specific term can describe with a certain degree of specificity some aspect of the discipline of drawing, whether it is a technique (“pencil” “silverpoint”, “chalk”), a kind of mark you leave on the paper (“line”, "stippling", "hatching" "cross-hatching"); an instrument that is used in drawing(“grid,” “stylus”, “pencil”, “rubber") or a type of drawing (“floor plan”, “elevation”, “under drawing”, “master drawing”, “sketch”, “study”) or it can be a term from another field, used analogically. Consequently, a term that can be applied to a discussion of drawing can be abstract, pivotal and open-ended and not necessarily a technical term or a term coming from the field of the arts, being applicable directly or by analogy to a discussion of drawing.

Visually, a confusing aspect of drawing is that it is constantly rising and sinking below the horizon of our perception, mutating and morphing from one visual role to another. In his discussion of the nature of information at the turn of the XX Century, Albert Borgmann (Borgmann, 1999) describes a similar phenomenon with respect to information, using the example of Native American cartography to point out that just like in such cartographic practices, in everyday reality, meaning seems to emerge and recede into the flow of things, the background of our awareness. In the example, the traveler identifies meaningful landmarks along the way and carries the map in his mind.

This map renders significant key elements of the landscape, a rock, a river bend, a mountain or a tree in connection to the traveler’s planned trajectory or route. It is our memory that holds the entire map, the traveler who passes recognizes the landmarks as indicative of a direction to be taken or as a marker of distance traveled. The information is acknowledged, after which the elements of physical reality recede into the background mental “landscape” once more. In drawing as I mention earlier, the problem is not having words to describe the landmarks and therefore the journey (of our gaze) goes largely unrecorded to the advantage of our final perception and recollection.

In drawing, the ambiguous relationship between foreground (drawn form) and background (paper, context) can also determine our "reading" of the image. Dexter (Dexter, 2005) cites Norman Bryson as saying that in a drawing, the white background acts as a reserve, a blank space from which the figure emerges, a space which he called "perceptually present, but conceptually absent" (Bryson, 2003) and one that serves to "keep at bay the desire for obvious structure, composition and totality"(ibid.) which he associates with other mediums such as painting.
The ambiguity of this relationship with negative space keeps us on our toes, never allowing the image to “settle down” as this or that, the coming and going of our gaze from foreground to background, which occurs in time, provides a sense of continuing journey, a trajectory that leaves behind residues that enrich and feed into our experience of the drawing, adding depth and opening up further spaces for interpretation.

When Bryson calls “a blank space from which space emerges” he is of course referring to the white of the blank sheet of paper as opposed to the sign that is the drawn image, but I propose here that that white sheet of paper, that blank piece of paper is in fact the perfect mirror, a mirror of our mind and because of this, a mirror of our perception of reality a perception that is paradoxically full and empty. It is full because there are things out there, but it is empty inasmuch as 99% of what there is makes no sense and is of no interest to us because we are not generally aware of such things. Consequently our perception of such things is very limited.

By viewing fullness and emptiness as opposing forces, Bryson also touches upon the idea of “horror vacui,” the fear of emptiness, assigning the white sheet of paper a vigilant role in controlling our desire to cover everything with signs, comparing drawing in its traditional view as “unfinished” as opposed to painting and other mediums.

The idea underlying this project is that our perception of reality is a one-to-one real time, changing perception where blank space and the drawn line are not alternative views as suggested by but simply datum to be considered in the context of the flow of reality and the journey of our gaze over such flow. In linguistic terms, the blank space is not a different sentence, but the space between words in that sentence, but what kind of space is this?

The introduction to Archispeak mentions the fact that the terminology used by the practitioners of any given discipline may seem at times obscure and perplexing to others, and often incomprehensible, added to the fact that architects, for example, enjoy engaging and articulating such terminology and often modify and adapt their meanings, occasionally inventing words at a very local and specific level. From a terminological point of view, therefore, it is necessary to pay particular attention to how widespread or local is the use of any given term in a broader context where the local is increasingly replaced by the global and where disciplinary boundaries provide an element of recognizable form.

Any discipline-specific language is a work in progress that is in constant evolution, a factor that also plays against the book format of traditional dictionaries. In the case of Archispeak, with collaborators that included Foster and Partners, Alsop Architects, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Gehry Partners and institutions such as RIBA in London and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States, the declared purpose was: "[to] respond to the need to translate architectural design concepts into spoken and written commentary—each word in use embodying a precise and universally accepted architectural meaning. If we explore the vocabulary of this language we gain insight to good design practice and to a collaborative understanding of what constitutes a refined architecture."(Porter et al, 2004).

In the fine arts, so far there has been no collective experience in the definition of medium-specific terminology, perhaps because notions of individual authorship still prevail and also possibly because artists’ collectives and partnerships are still rare enough to be considered the exception rather than the rule. Having said this, one would have to consider the impact on drawing and other mediums of the recent trend in research-based Ph.D. programs in postgraduate art education given that the expected outcome of such programs is to produce "communicable information" and that therefore the academic model of these programs is bound to produce a form of art that is "explainable" in a given theoretical context and therefore would incorporate the terminology for its discussion and explanation. Without completely ruling them out, this kind of work would tend towards the elimination of the random occurrences that are characteristic in the fine arts as well as any non-systemic flashes of inspiration.

A preliminary search through Archispeak, The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture and the Penguin Reference Dictionary of Architecture reveals the different focus of the various sources revised. The Penguin Reference Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, for example, yielded a total of 31 terms that could be associated with the medium of drawing. This dictionary has over 3,000 entries in total covering primarily a survey of architecture by country, biographies of architects, ancient and modern as well as structural and technical aspects and innovations. In this sense, the author’s desire for breadth, historical and cultural comprehensiveness conspired against its content of discipline-specific terminology in a theoretical sense.

The heading for the introduction of the Archispeak dictionary states "the 330 most used terms in architectural debate" (Porter, 2004, P.1); of these 109, were initially selected as terms that might be used in a discussion of drawing or which could contribute to such discussion. My search of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture identified 147 terms usable in a theoretical discussion of drawing or of any other aspect of reality as drawing. The Penguin Dictionary is closer to a pocket encyclopedia as its contents are not necessarily focused on the word, its origin, pronunciation and meaning, providing instead narrative and contextual descriptions, as well as having a sizeable number of biographical entries. Archispeak on the other hand, is based on usage and provides a complete list of contributors and their backgrounds. Metapolis, finally is what you might define as an ideological dictionary and has incorporated into its structure an ideological dictionary-within-a-dictionary. Of the three sources cited, this is formally the most interesting. With a total of 688 pages, it incorporates two independent sections within the dictionary: an ideological dictionary and also a list of aphorisms.

Manuel Gausa explains the structure of the Metapolis Dictionary in the following terms: “If, in fact the emergence of the new is almost invariably a cause of uncertainty (precisely because we do not know how to label it, and thus the difficulty of isolating the signs that are its expression and identifying the relationship of those signs with the existing ones) this necessary conceptual reactivation (and redefinition) of language is indispensable for a prospective action that does not stop at establishing a collection of fixed (and all encompassing) labels. This dictionary is aimed at constructing a hypothetical “basic” web (a matrix of terms, a mesh of codes) open to crossing and combination: aimed at favoring, in the last instance, the acknowledgement of that other network of forces and mechanisms that, in turn, comprises contemporary reality today.” (Gausa, et al. 2003).

This “basic” web or matrix of terms, the “mesh of codes” to which Gausa refers, is at the core of the method proposed here. On the one hand it reveals the vision of the authors of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture and at the same time it reveals its shortcomings, which, I believe, have to do primarily with the fact that, at the end of the day, its physical form and structure anchors the project in the past. The optimum expression of their vision is not the Dictionary but the Dictionary in use, the one-to-one moment one uses it. This project is an attempt to illustrate how this might happen.

Two sharp curves: a drawing in mid-air

Southwark Park, London 2007

I

When I was a kid I was intrigued by the kind of fly that seems to fly forever, hovering around in circles, ascending and descending for hours, but always out of reach, taking advantage of the slightest air current. At that age, also, like all kids, I was a hunter. In the long summer afternoons I experimented with countless strategies and weapons in my desire to shoot down these master pilots; my weapon of choice became a flat rubber band, of the kind used to hold together packets of mail and important papers. Cut open and handled properly, only this device seemed to possess the speed and accuracy to achieve the desired purpose; without destroying the room in my efforts, that is.

Very soon, my child-hunter's mind realized a few things about my prey. First of all, that its flight patterns were predictable. The ascending and descending spirals seemed to create a shaft in mid air, a cylindrical territory whose outer boundaries were quite precise, so that even if I could not see the fly all of the time, I could predict more or less accurately where it would be, eventually. Failed attempts taught me something else: every time I tried and failed to kill the fly, it seemed to ricochet anywhere and everywhere at the same time at lightning speed, becoming invisible to the human eye; the slow lazy curves of the fly's territorial spiral instantly replaced by evasive maneuvering and sharp curves of blind panic. It was only after lying on my bed for a long time, frustrated, observing my prey that I realized that if unmolested, the fly would eventually return to its familiar and secure flight pattern. Another useful realization was that the fly would be more visible, and therefore more vulnerable, if seen against the flat colour of the ceiling than if I tried to pinpoint its location against the background of my books, or the normally busy environment of my juvenile room. After that, it was only a matter of time.


II

Years later, in my first studio, an old house I shared with other artists in the Borough of Bellavista, the problem of the visibility of the fly came to my attention again. In that building there was a long corridor that led towards the bathroom. Being an old house, the ceiling was quite high and this particular section had glazing high along the left (north) side. During the summer, sunlight poured through the open windows, broken by the regular shadows projected by the adobe wall. During the summer, also, the corridor and the studio, were populated by an indeterminate number of flies and other insects that flew in from the garden outside. Sitting in the lounge area of the studio I watched the flies as they appeared under the ray of light and then disappeared under the projected shadows. No longer a youthful hunter of flies, I was by then more concerned with drawing and therefore for me, the problem of visibility vs. invisibility now involved specific problems of construction and form. At the time, also, my thoughts were mostly about the emergence of form, line and, in general, the kind of idle but productive theorizing one has over a good cup of coffee shared with interesting friends.

In retrospect, I realize now that what I was looking at in my studio so many years ago was the fragmented trajectory of the flight of the flies, broken traces of light and shadow that created form in mid air; the very same cylindrical territory I had seen in my room as a kid, only this time broken down by shadow that cut across the path of the flies. Given time and sufficient paper and ink, perhaps I could argue with some success that it was precisely at this point that the flight of the fly, the space it inhabited and modeled, became a sculpture, a mobile, whose meaningful form was revealed to me through the combined effect of light falling on a material surface and the recurrence of movement on my memory; or perhaps I could find some connection with the scanner that creates the image on tube-TV sets, dashing across the curved glass screen at a speed of 1/36 of a second. I could probably do that, but I am not going to.


III

Instead I will refer to two aspects of this reverie that directly concern my project for the exhibition "Rights of Way" at Southwark Park, London. The first is the question of virtual form and the flight pattern of the fly, in specific, a possible reason for that pattern. You see, already as a child-hunter I instinctively knew that through its flight pattern the fly was keeping out of my reach, that at a certain height, the centre of the room was the safest place for it to be in. Knowing this, the cylinder created by the flight pattern of the fly could be seen as a safe haven, a secure place, a home, so to speak. The second aspect has to do with light's fragmentation of the trajectory of the fly in connection with my choice of site and form for my work: two wooden garden protections defining two sharp curves in a pathway there is in London's Southwark Park.


IV

In his essay for the exhibition "Rights of Way," Alexander Garcia-Duttman discusses the relationship there is between art and nature. One point he makes is how nature "touches" the beholder, causing some form of pleasure in him/her, some kind of relief, feelings, he argues, that are very similar to those generated by the contemplation of certain forms of art. But is this relationship always pleasurable, do we always feel relief when we find ourselves out in the open? Are we, as he says, "drawn to the openness for which nature (...) stands?" Like the fly, like most of us I would say, I am apprehensive in empty open spaces (otherwise why do we feel a longing for home, why do we persist in building refuges, walls, a secure life for ourselves?) Confronted by this fear of the void, I instinctively seek security in my own work, in my own interpretations of nature, executing familiar choreographies, recurrent bodily movements and territorial gestures. In the vast space of Southwark Park, with the same blind panic of the fly, I instinctively sought, and found form, graphic elements defining a space of relief, perhaps not one of pleasure, but at the very least one offering me the comfort of an old, almost forgotten memory of time and place.

Most of the work I do is on paper in a relatively conventional shape and scale. When I was invited to participate in the project "Rights of Way" I was pushed out of my comfort zone, forced to engage with the "outside" and because of this, like the fly, I instinctively created for myself a conceptual cylinder of safety, a territory within the vast space of nature as it was revealed to me in Southwark Park.

Clearly cut against the flat green playing fields, the garden protections comprise two sharp curves of alarm, material residues of memories, elements of drawing, avenues through which to retreat into the comfort of the lazy curves and perceived safety of the cylindrical space in flight that is my work.

The piece I proposed for the exhibition "Rights of Way" was the three-dimensional materialization of a fragmented trajectory, a visual accelerator that instinctively defines form, content and flow through the illuminating light of my consciousness as it plays on the dark matter of forgotten memories.

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