A Body of Relations/On The Drawing Process.

Outpost 051023

The Process of Production

Seeing beyond concepts of looking.

The Dematerializing of the Art Object.

The process rather than art object as the primary site of the artist's creative output.

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of The Art Object from 1966 to 1972.

 

A Body Of Relations:

Reconfiguring The Life Class.

The reconfigured life class provides a performative, discursive, social space to empower the life model to actively engage in the production of his/her own self-image. In addition the research re-frames the life class as a site in which the discourses of contemporary art as 'relational' and 'performative' can reach its apotheosis as a de-materialized performance event, whose trace exists in the dispersed materiality of the artist's body and whose silenced subject, the life model, becomes a full individual subject.

Yuen Fong Ling. 2016

2.5. Black Market, Pawel Althamer. 2007

In the artwork titled Black Market by Pawel Althamer, the exhibition sees participants making an effigy of the artist. The work neither focuses on the reference or the final outcome, but on the process of production. Polish Africans are trained in basic skills of carving and sculpting by the artist; they demonstrate their skills in a workshop environment presented as an installation in the exhibition. 

This active delegation of skills passed on by the artist to his participants, begins to fold traces of the artist in a process of transferral, where participant's subjectivities are merged with that of the artist. 

This framework for open contingent and non-scripted outcomes are rooted in Althamer's education under the tutelage of artist Grzegorz Kowalski, who was in turn influenced by Oskar Hansen's theory of 'open form' a form of architectural practice that encompassed 'collective thought' to dislocate any singular vision or use in the production of building design.

Artworks produced under these conditions meant that artworks were co-authored restrained  by time scale and the given situation. The artist in the role of teacher or tutor, to facilitate participant's ideas inflected in the production of the artwork. Althamer highlights intimate and often emotional inter-subjectivities. Rather than the distanced, silenced, objectified mode of temporary  participation.

The result is a sculpture that is a receptacle of negotiation, a choral self-portrait that depicts Althamer's as much as it captures an image of those who created him. 

Gioni, Massimiliano, The Hero with a Thousand Faces : Pawel Althamer. 2008

For Yuen Fong Ling, Althamer's image, as surrogated in figurative sculpture, through a delegated performance of participants, both united in a personal and political struggle with society and the realms of its reality.

Althamer's use of the open form methodology aims to democratize the formation of authorship in the artwork. Through the inclusion and collaboration of participants, Althamer has gradually developed the participant's active role and position. 

This 'delegated performance' as described by Claire Bishop allows Althamer to exercise his personal politics and his participants right to choose to partake in an art event, furthermore Althamer begins to physically manifest an object containing the participant's innate subjectivity. Bishop comments an agreement with the artist's own intent versus the participant's own inherent being. Participant's as active producers, influenced, even taught by the artist, potentially conditions the participant, in view of a pedagogic project of the artist.

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art  and the Politics of Spectatorship.2012

The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.

John Elderfield.

To reveal what has been discovered.

Subjects enlarged across a surface as a condensation of carnal knowledge.

Thinking In Drawing.

Drawing from life, at the threshold of painting.

When we talk of drawing as spontaneous, we refer not only to the sense of immediacy produced by the finest drawings, but also to how a drawing's very identity presents itself to us, to an extent beyond that of any other work of visual art, as the direct record of the movement of the artist's hand.

A drawing is intrinsically the record of movement in time. Hence, it can indeed be more purely impulsive than any other work of visual art-unless another such work partakes of drawing as its very structure. More often, of course, a drawing comprises a network of recorded movements, which tend usually to slow in their accumulation. And our appreciation of a drawing like this requires that we retrace these movements, their duration and their accumulation, from the evidence they have left behind.

Diebenkorn is always composing his subjects, ordering their shape. Forms are overlapped by other forms to weld everything together in that particular pose. If the model is shown  performing some action, she performs it very slowly indeed. Usually, she is immobile. The eroticism of the body reveals itself simply by holding a pose-in its intermittence: in the intermittence of hands brought together and held for that moment in that  particular pose: in the intermittence of that part of the body suddenly revealed by limbs as they form that particular pose.

We should notice at this point that, by and large, Diebenkorn's best figure drawings are frontally composed. He faces his subjects and enlarges them across the surface, sacrificing proportion if necessary for pattern, thereby discovering a sequence of contours-some arabesque, some geometric, that read almost autonomously as condensations of carnal knowledge. 

We should also notice that while Diebenkorn faces his subjects, they are generally do not have him. His models usually look down or away. They seem self-absorbed. Part of the reason for this is that Diebenkorn does not want to make psychological contact with the face. He wants us to grasp the meaning of the work from the whole composition and not have it filtered through the personality of the model.

This is also why he spreads a sense of corporeality beyond the contours of the model: to give the sheet as a whole living vibrancy. But there is another reason. It can be discovered in the kind of self-absorption his models display. They are not melancholy, or secretive, or brooding, or even bored. They seem quietly contented, self-assured, harmonious, at peace of mind. They may look distorted, altered from what we expect to see. But  they tell of the harmoniousness of their condition.

But drawing, unlike painting, picks out the artist's preferences at once. His means are immediately at hand and therefore his meanings are given immediately, the artist is forced to deal with the model's reality, to emotional reactions to particular things.

The drawings in question include a great series in charcoal, heavily worked and extensively revised until they comprise condensed symbols for the body of the model; some works in pencil and crayon where an almost geometric scaffold of echoing severe lines composes the body of the model and some boldly designed, extremely flattened studies of this drawing studio itself.

Each work on paper is a prolonged meditation on what drawing can accomplish at the threshold of painting. 

The drawing insistently designs or divides the field, which partakes of the density of drawing.

Firstly, something done on paper cannot be worked quite as long as something on canvas. There will be a point beyond which the surface can be bruised no more and will actually collapse in final failure. Some of the works on paper, therefore are extremely spare: the smallest possible number of notations that will suffice to realize their composition. However since the bruises do show more on paper than on canvas, perhaps the work on paper should not dodge them after all but, instead accumulate them, making such work far more explicitly a record of their accumulation than a painting can be. Diebenkorn prefers shiny, coated paper and he also uses masking devices to preserve the sections of a drawing he likes while scrubbing out others. Often this generates new imagery.

Secondarily, something done on paper, however need not be wiped clean if it is not working. Neither does it have to be painted out. It can be patched. This option is not available to painting: not Diebenkorn's painting. Some of his works on paper therefore comprise dense sandwiches of paper. But they are never collages that draw attention to the disparate character of their parts. For the point is always to adjust each fragment until the parts disappear into the whole. In the works of this kind, the artist does physically, materially, what he does more often by adjustment of linear boundaries: amalgamate a corpus of parts. At times, he will thus enlarge a work in its making, something impossible for him in painting.

Thirdly, the different scale of the small size is the scale of things close to hand. It is the scale established by the hand and the wrist and by the arm bent rather than extended. Everything is closer and more enclosed. Everything is therefore more intimate as well. And yet, the intimacy of these small works is that of research done privately but for publication, almost like scientific experiments. They do , in fact, test ideas. And while no painting will duplicate what a work on paper discovers, parts of paintings will remember parts of works on paper. Images discovered in these independent drawings are constantly cross-bred, hybridized and new drawings are grown out of them. Diebenkorn's images on paper are constantly dissected and reassembled from one work to the next, altering in the process.

Clay based inquiry around  practice led/speculative making.

Filling the Red Kiln, re-visiting/re-presentation of 'clay works'.