Drawing, a place of exchange : Social Mappings : Traces and Indexical Wanderings, containing the anticipation of loss

 ART AS A CUSTODIAN WITHIN ARCHITECTURAL SPACE.

INTERLOCUTOR between ART and ARCHITECTURE

AS AN “OBSERVER” AS IN CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORY

The evidence of this correspondence is fabricated in the situation and its attendant traces and material residues, the “indexical” knowledge and its familiarity are encountered in this fabrication of the observer, as “being of human sensibilities”.

Phenomenological traces begin this process of observational identity as a condition of being human, we see as we know ourselves to be seen, we comprehend ourselves in the knowledge and existence of others.

The anticipation of an appointment, situation grants a sense of autonomy in as much as the potential of expectation is still fluid, unfixed in the location of others.

Espace-Milieu : Painting as Environment

Aerial

Social Mappings : Winchester Cathedral 

Space for Peace 2011

Drawings more than ever have become the site of investigations and correspondences in the search of an authenticity, fidelity and truth; they indorse the activity. comment and energy of the artist.

The trace seems to emit a contaminating sense of communication based around proximities and their anarchical sensibilities, it attempts to develop a language brought from a contaminating communication in as much as it is not based on a subject as such, rather the trace of an occurrence now dislocated by that very action. 

Cyanotype as a method of passing a “blueprint” a proposal to others, a working set of ideas for the transposition into a reality framed by a situation of realisation and construction.

Cyanotypes originally concerned with the production of things, not images rather working documents of both evidence and possibilities.

In the role of transposing scientific observations into the practical application of the everyday.

The theatre of experimentation, scripted between a proposal and its practical application in and amongst the spatial relations it is presented with.

The blueprint is presented as something proposed against an already present arbitrary and temporal reality.

Contemporary' drawings are all about “thinking” to paraphrase Joseph Beuys. They are an intimate language, in fact the first visual language visible to both the artist and to others. Drawing is the beginning of the synthesis of internal thoughts being tentatively externalized in the search of a form they can inhabit. Drawing uniquely brings together a complexity of gesture attitude sensation and creative invention simultaneously into the light of the moment. Drawing could even be said to present a possibility as a fact, praesentia the fact in the light of its time. These values conspire to engender a presence, a semblance of some physicality that the artist is trying to form, a form that may be forever absent the drawing acting as a gesture of remembrance, or as an emergence, a premonition of an evolution of a per formative response to situation.

Drawing has always been a verb, and in the contemporarily of art it is the activity or performance that is of interest, a being in the intension of drawing. This sense of performance and the spatiality of both space and time have given rise to the notion of mapping with its direct correlation to the body. Drawing attempts to map the relationship of the body as a locus in its surroundings. We are now much more interested in the situation and immediate proximities that the artists body and its gestures being traced in spacetime. Drawings map dynamics and velocities, they interact with the fluidity of liquids and contingency. Materials are also bought into the arena, to act as indexical witnesses, to record and echo the gesture and act of drawing. The artist Monika Weiss writes with regard to drawing in her own practice, "Weiss makes marks, videos and objects, but she does not pour, drip or fling, she inhabits, smudges and draws. This is a distinctly female approach. Drawings more than ever have become the site of investigations and correspondences in the search of an authenticity, fidelity and truth; they indorse the activity. comment and energy of the artist.

Drawings by sculptors that place the relationship of the line derived from the body.- on the same field as material/media residues. These configurations give rise to conceptual associations and meanings. This contemporary ’approach is in evidence in  a  number of artists work where the per formative aspects of drawing are the key issue. To put it simply there is a growing awareness of the gesture of drawing as the work, and not just simply the representational merit of recognition that has previous acquainted skill and draughtsmanship. I am talking about the authentic gesture of inscription, the combination of both the trait and trace that the trait has circumscribed. This almost primal visual rendering from a sensation of blindness. 

Life "drawing" trace on paper with water and field chalk. 

Work submitted to Interfaith Group Show at the Link Gallery, Winchester 2010.

"This particular event invokes for me the notion of simple material relations and collaborative gestures that underpin human agency. Art space/practice can promote these working intimations that enter into  the realm of beliefs."          

Artist's Statement (archive)  07.12.2009.

The human trace, a continuous line traced around the presence of a living body. Within its boundaries their emanates, a curious absent presence with its uncanny silence. These attributes give the trace its force of absence its haunting manifestation on the present. The human trace surrounded by indexical residues echoes an act of archiving within the materiality of the world. The work embodies both action and trace, it contains a drawing as a trace of an activity and beneath this its conceptual language with its associations to the proximity of the viewer. The performative ritual that the trace has undergone is now a meditation, a site of lament this confirmed signification endorses the fact of the performance having passed leaving a sense of the moment that is still resonating yet irretrievable. A moment suffused by the proximity of residues. The trace is not only an activity but it is simultaneously a phenomenological proposition .The physicality of the artists movement articulate an echo, a reverberation within the vacant zone of the absent body. This reverberation induces a compression of time and space between trace as act and trace as loss. This site of slippage is held by indexical residues that indorse its authenticity via its intimate proximities drawn on its surface. The relationship between an activity and its trace promotes a trajectory with a velocity that articulates and implicates the past in present. The very nature of the relationship between action and trace allows the past to manifest itself through traces which both act as records of the past, but also suggest future actions. The radical nature of the human trace amongst indexical residues conspire to create not only a comment of the time, but questions what other residues may the human trace be conceptually associated with in the future.

The notion of trace brings with it a sense of the traces embodiment in the particularities of a given time and place. This empowering which gathers into latency is marked by the traces occurrence its event of becoming. In the story of the maid of Corinth in which she seeks to trace the shadow of her lover, the trace literally underlines and implicates her proximity to her lover. The trace catches and snares them both in witnessing praesentia of candle light. They are forever bonded conceptually by this simple action; the fact of this action is brought into the eternal light of day. The almost mythic quality of the story its concise exactitudes that can be deduced from its very lightness evokes much said by Italo Calvino in his book “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” when he elaborates in the chapter centred around the values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature. The notion of lightness of fleetingness and a temporality of presence adheres to the veiy periphery of the trace as it viewed disconnected and dislodged from the encounter of its origin. The love of daughter is transcribed by the inscription around her lovers head into a conceptual truth enclosing a poetic proximity. This poetic notion of a semblance of a human body traced by the action of another’s activity is used by Tony Harrison in his short film Hiroshima. 

The ritualistic repetition of this motif throughout the film adds to the sense of pathos that like the trace it emanates from seems to conjure up a Promeneathen Tragedy, reinstalled daily as if it can continually exist before history can grasp it. That the human trace replicates through our proximities to loss, a colossal conceptual depth of presence that reverberates in the mind, a sublime lightness of terror. For the daughter the trace is something more than mere representation it colludes in its very action to form a relationship with the moment that contains her fidelity to the performance of what will eventually site her loss. The trace has the ability to encapsulate and contextualize these actions and their possible propositions. The trace remains framed by indexical signs that emit residues from the activity of the drawing .Is the trace really just an action of drawing, a marked presence with that presence confirmed by the inscription of the moving point following a shadow. In the instant of its activity and in intimate proximity to its phenomenological origin ,the trace because as yet there is no absence, only a proposition of absence, cannot exist as such. The trace awaits in a state of expected latency, almost pregnant with loss. The marking and its referent hold the trace moribund inoperative, language seems to wait on events. The slippage that occurs will be in the instant of recognition when the physical separation of the lovers body is removed from the situation and leaving with him the gesture of the drawing, their collective mark as a perfomative entity without substance, yet still withheld within residues contained in the emergence of the trace. The trace may well be the conceptualization of a mark, its ability to give via proximities a deeper significance and connectivity, a site that conceptually has a latent quality that disrupts superficial perceptions. Something within the human trace radically assaults the primacy of language; it attempts to arrest the connectivity of the existing historical system, as if the trace is always in advance of existing language, or rather it proposes changes.

I propose to utilize the story of Plinys shadow to illustrate and elaborate the particularities of the human trace in its situation , activity ,action and proposition .I further wish to investigate the inherent intimacy of the human trace its sensuality brought by the sensibilities of proximity which become gathered and tethered by the trace of another. The story is about the maid of Corinth, this extract comes courtesy of Michael Newman, contained in his essay “The Marks, Traces, and Gestures of Drawing” this essay is included in Tate Moderns publication “The Stage of Drawing."

“...all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a mans shadow..”

It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; And she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the Shadow of his face, thrown by a lamp .Her father pressed clay on this And made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest Of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine Of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.

The trace by the maid of Corinth, that of tracing her lovers shadow on a wall is essential a love story, it possesses a human quality that is felt by a feeling of a shared proximity. Emmanuel Levinas describes proximity as a communication of an anarchic sensibility that occurs before the subject can gather itself into a position in relation this otherness which cannot be assembled in a representational present. He comments further that rather than being apprehended by the subject, proximity is a signifying of an expositional, there is that is alien to but suspended in presence. The human trace has the ability to solicit this notion of proximity, signaling a sensibility which is different than that which occurs in experience and knowledge. The trace seems to emit a contaminating sense of communication based around proximities and their anarchical sensibilities, it attempts to develop a language brought from a contaminating communication in as much as it is not based on a subject as such, rather the trace of an occurrence now dislocated by that very action. 

The human trace with its inherent sense of presence seems strangely unmarked except in the fact that it acts as a kind of residue of the indexical memory of its absent host. This unmarked quality allows proximity to dislodge ,knowledge and experience and induce a sense of the uncanny ,a familiarity without fore knowledge or experience. There is imprinted by the action of circumscribing an outline destined to become a trace an intimate betrayal, a boundary marked, a territory claimed whilst in a state of passitivity. The daughter due to the sensibility of her proximity to her lover may be to close to objectify this betrayal of intimacies. The fathers work which will hide all trace of authentic sensuality of the act, and render a mere likeness a representation culled from an action whose very performance was an expression containing the anticipation of loss, an anticipation now made permanent.

The trace through its indexical sign and its conceptual space latently awaiting a return of the sensuality of the act, like ”the Sirens with their elusive and forbidden form of the alluring voice. They are nothing but song.” Maurice Blanchot, Eurydice and the sirens. and Indexical  The human trace of another intimately marked in the proximity of a shared intimacy, now vacant, void by withdrawal, only the visible intimacy of a residue remains into which to harbour our sensibilities.

“They are nothing but song, no presence shimmers in their immortal words, they are pure appeal, an invitation to pause, a seduction.”