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| Emma Kunz: Work No. 020, n.d. pencil, colored pencil, and oil pastel on paper, 79 x 79cm Emma Kunz Center, Switzerland; Courtesy The Drawing Center/ Irish Museum of Modern Art |
Drawing is, before anything else, diagrammatic and nonmimetic. It is pattern construction and mark making. These two exhibitions beautifully illustrate this point. They provide the opportunity for a re-assessment of what drawing means from both historical and contemporary perspectives.
The strength of 3 x abstraction, new methods of drawing lies in showing the relevance of all the artists’ work to the developmental history of modernist abstraction. Despite the fact that the artists are not historically directly linked, specific formal and stylistic similarities arise from their collective pursuit of similar ends. In particular af Klint, Kunz and Martin’s drawings all display basic forms and simple, abstract geometric shapes. These are articulated through the use of the grids which order their work.
Whilst it’s all too easy to see this work as the consequence of formal experimentation, it is also underpinned by particular spiritual beliefs. In the beautifully presented exhibition catalogue (which includes several excellent academic essays), Catherine de Zegher (co-curator with Hendel Teicher) explains this connection in the following terms: “not as a kind of formalism, but as a means of structuring philosophical, linguistic, scientific and transcendental ideas.” Thus, whilst artists shared a desire to bring structure and pattern to their media, this was part of a wider spiritual quest to bring meaning to experience in general.
Such strange occultism perhaps makes the work a little obscure for the contemporary viewer. However, the connection between abstraction and spirituality is the alternative history of the avantgarde. This is found in William Blake’s mysticism; the influence of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy on Kandinsky and Mondrian; Malevich’s Suprematism; the continued influence of Rudolf Steiner (on Beuys for example); Zen and the Black Mountain College; and even Duchamp’s pre-occupation with occultism and alchemy. Both af Klint and Kunz were influenced by their involvement with spiritualism and Theosophy. Later af Klint drew upon Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. She prefigured surrealist automatist strategies by producing a series of drawings based upon séances with her group The Five (in 1896). Likewise Kunz attempted to draw a balance between spiritualism and formal experimentation in her use of pendulum dowsing to create geometric patterns on graph paper. Eastern spiritual traditions of the elimination of ego (in Taoism and Zen) make their way into Martin’s work through pattern-making, subordinating personal desires to the grids which underpin her work.
Af Klint’s works use simple geometric forms and colours to investigate, by drawing and watercolour, how abstraction can facilitate new forms of perception, gesturing to a higher reality. Such exploration of the symbolic connotations of abstraction invites obvious comparisons between af Klint’s work and Mondrian and Malevich’s experiments with Neo-Plasticism and Suprematism; both of which laid claim to a higher ‘truth’.
For Emma Kunz, not only was drawing a medium, but the artist was a medium too, in the sense of a spiritual mediator of transcendent truths. Her obsessive repetition of patterns on graph paper contains the seductive hint of a meaning beyond themselves, whilst remaining rigidly geometric in a manner that recalls Victor Vasarely’s Op-Art.
Of the three artists, Agnes Martin presents the strongest work in the exhibition and is the most well known. This is possibly because her work has often been approached without the baggage of arcane occultism and from within the history of formalist modernism. This work is probably as simple as art can be whilst still remaining recognisable as art. Even when it is there, it appears to be only half so. For example, in Starlight a sky-blue field is overlaid with grid suggesting the beginning of a process of creation rather than its completion. Conversely, her untitled grids from the 1960s suggest the end of a process of erasure rather than any concrete beginning. Martin’s work strives for simplicity and perfection; yet these are, tragically, states that can never be achieved because drawing will always confuse that simplicity and compromise that perfection by its very making of marks.
Ultimately all three artists use the tabula rasa of the blank page as an allegory for both the universe and our own subjective experience. We must impose some structure upon both in order to drawn sense from their inchoate and suggestive blankness.
Jim Savage’s From Landscape addresses similar themes. It’s a collection of twenty-nine artists investigating the joint theme of landscape and drawing that follows from Savage’s earlier projects including, in 2001, the anthology of writings Drawing texts and the exhibition Focus on drawing.
For this show the artists were left to their own devices yet had to work with a few limited parameters. Their drawings were to be finished pieces in their own right, use landscape as a theme and be of a relatively large scale. The scale and ‘finished’ quality of the pieces challenges the intimacy we usually associate with drawing. Yet intimacy returns in the details of the surfaces, where the works often appear as the skeletons of works to be finished; or the ghosts of works now gone.
The real strength of the show is that it leaves wide open what a drawing actually is. This creates a collection that, through its diversity, not only celebrates the process of drawing but also provides an opportunity for a re-assessment of how drawing works and what it means in a contemporary context. That said, within this pleasing diversity one undoubtedly finds pockets of similarity. For example, the stark monochrome landscapes of Nick Miller, Bernadette Kiely, Joe Wilson and Jim Sheehy are notably similar. Barrie Cooke, John Shinnors, Margaret Corcoran, Gwen O’Dowd, Cóilín Murray and Maria Simmonds Gooding all explore the abstract hinterland between landscape and form whilst Arno Kramer and Gwen O’Dowd suggest connections between the body and the drawn landscape as an environment in which we might get lost in a network of marks. Elsewhere, Jill Dennis and Michael Canning pay attention to micro-details on their surfaces, whilst David Lilburn presents his work as a parchment or a map for a lost land. Geraldine O’Reilly, Brian Bourke, Stephen McKenna, Jim Savage and Martin Gale, on the other hand, demonstrate drawing as a forum for technical dexterity.
What both exhibitions show is that all drawing promises immediacy in the full sense of the word, meaning a lack of intervention. In this case it is the lack of an intervening and historically configured medium, with its own protocols, styles and pre-occupations. Drawing is a technologically simple activity in which only the drawn lines mediate between the artist and the viewer. This immediacy suggests that we experience drawings not only as things seen, but as things to be touched; that is, that we might also touch the very place that the artist touched the picture surface before us.
Perhaps, then, drawing is the lingua franca of art. It is a more basic medium, an ur-medium and a potentially transhistorical one. All drawings, from the cave images at Lascaux to Michelangelo’s cartoons, from Steve Bell’s caricatures to the graffiti artist, are engaged in precisely the same thing. What drawing promises is the potential to unite different historical periods and subject matters under the rubric of a singular process and a singular medium. Despite their diversity, both exhibitions are linked by the use of drawing to research the creation of pattern and form. And if the most basic difference between form and nonform is a line, then the most basic form of a line is the drawn one, be it drawn in graphite, in paint, or in the sand.
Francis Halsall is a lecturer in Art History at Limerick School of Art and Design.
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| Philippa Sutherland: Reservoir ink on gesso on canvas 160 x 240cm photo Denis Mortel; courtesy Mermaid Arts Centre |
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