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Redrawing6 June - 27 June 2008Curated by Fiona Macdonald Bronwyn Clark-Coolee Between renovation and negation, Redrawing is a practice-in-progress. Using contingency as both structure and technology, each artist working in Redrawing produces change in the meaning of the system in which their model originates, by the addition of their own dependency. Redrawing asks whether there can be any sustainable meaning for the artwork. |
images
Thérèse Mastroiacovo |
Thérèse Mastroiacovo |
Thérèse Mastroiacovo |
Thérèse Mastroiacovo |
Ben. Harper |
Ben. Harper |
Fiona Macdonald |
Fiona Macdonald |
Spiros Panigirakis |
Spiros Panigirakis |
Spiros Panigirakis |
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Bronwyn Clark-Coolee |
Bronwyn Clark-Coolee |
Bronwyn Clark-Coolee |
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Essay
Redrawing as of May 2008
Redrawing brings together five artists who construct forms of repetition in their practices. These repetitions are variously acts of reclassification, reiteration, translation, mediation and amplification. Drawing on a relation to an existing work, these re-productions use this relation to re-propose the model on which they draw.
This essay begins with NOW. This word, that can properly only be used under erasure, is the model [100 book covers with the words ART and NOW] for Thérèse Mastroiacovo's project. She draws the word - NOW - literally, investing the sign of the always already past with the sign of duration of drawing, investing duration through the labour of drawing. NOW becomes both an act and an economy of now. The extension of time granted to NOW through this durational sign of drawing depends for its possibility on the time of the project itself - as each of these drawings are completed they are reclassified under the sign of their own impossibility. In the "art now" series, Now is not only under erasure, it is reiterated as such. Moreover, it is reiterated through its particular alliances with the historicizing classifications and curatorial assignations of the sign of Art. Mastroiacovo reclassifies this historical Now drawing by drawing, repetition by repetition, durational act by durational act, as the hysterical Now - the truly now Now of history.
What all the practices in Redrawing have in common is an idea of a now in progress, that is not drawn around discrete moments of originality or historical representational models, but that conceives of the work of art as an event - occurring, recurring, and open in various forms to a discourse as a model and therefore a form of relation. For these redrawings therefore, the artwork is conceived as mediated by technologies of meaning and reception as well as of production.
The works in Redrawing are ultra-mediated. This mediation is conceived as a continuation of the work of transmission that is also the work of reception. This ultra-mediation does not strive for transparency; on the contrary it is excessive in its aim.
MORE SILENCE is constructed within the mediated experience of reception. It is drawn from the Mathew Jones project, silence = death, the life-cycle of the contemporary homosexual, a project that critically positioned itself within a context of extreme mediation, [that being the gay male 'identity'/body in the early 1990's period of AIDS activism]. Spiros Panigirakis draws from his reception of this project, itself mediated by both the project's contemporary context and Panigirakis's own contemporary context within the activist debate, and by the discourse/s of Jones within and surrounding the project itself. Panigirakis takes this expanded field of the work and redraws it, using the discursive elements Jones included in his project - texts, statements, writings, theory and art references - as his model and technology. He constructs a stage/platform for these elements to be displayed in an elaboration and mediation of their 'original' referential signage. The back and front of the platform/stage offer two modes of address, one formal and art referential, the other, which includes the theoretical references, decorative and instrumental. MORE SILENCE, by its redrawing of the field of Jones' project, situates the critical context of that work into the present and both represents and reconfigures its grammatical technologies.
Redrawing highlights technology. There are several ideas of technology that operate here. One of these is a technology of practice as an 'account' - being therefore a description, a report, a version. Another is a grammatical one - being a systematic treatment of an art process. There is a logic operating in the technologies of all the works in Redrawing that is developed from the grammar/s of the work that they redraw. These grammatical technologies are as systematic of meaning and reception as they are of production. Each of these technologies are synthesized in the grammar of each artist's redrawing, the particular means of production being both a carrier of meaning and an intervention into that meaning that delivers an account of the processes at work.
After Right After is the work that most directly addresses the residual notion of aura in the artwork. The series reproduces a group of drawings by Eva Hesse through a manual process of drawing into a software imaging program and then outputting these drawings as photographic prints. This technological grammar is a reflection and magnification of the means of access to the original work and therefore to its reception. It is also a reduction of the auratic language of drawing to the series of averages available in the program, and to what can be imaged by the clumsy technique of the drawing itself. These works are not resemblances, although they attempt that as a start. At a certain point they are abandoned as failures and classified as 'finished'. The After Right After drawings exist as a procedure. They attempt to model a speculative process-based relation to another practice. That Hesse's work is selected as a model is significant to the project of the diminishing auratic presence.
Redrawing as an act of simulation falls somewhere between renovation and negation. The contingency that is activated as process in these works, in turn introduces and produces change in the system of the model. It is added to. A relation of dependency is begun.
Ben. Harper locates his practice in this space of dependency. As a practice it is imitative. Harper uses technology itself as a form of imitative contingency that generates mobilizations and distortions of existing models, distortions that for Harper constitute a structural fact of creativity. String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) is a work produced to simulate the compositional approach described in discussions of the music of Phill Niblock - work that Harper has never heard. Niblock's microtonal, layered and apparently static durations have been famously inaccessible beyond a live and extremely loud performance environment. Even this has been elusive for Harper. As a substitute he created his own Niblock composition. Using a program that allows him to diagrammatically imitate the compositional grammar as well the described experience, Harper has drawn another model for the 'Niblock' composition that now exists in several variations and as both a predetermined performance piece and an installation work of indefinite length. Access is no longer denied.
The mutations, negations, inhabitations and distortions that take place in Redrawing exist already as modalities in the works that are being redrawn. Redrawing proposes drawing as a condition. It is through this identification of a condition, and through a conditioning process, that these modalities are drawn. Simultaneously, the limits of the works are redrawn. These redrawings therefore are also corrections, in the sense that they adjust the levels of visibilities within the work that is redrawn. They draw what was unseen in the margins of the original. They draw the exclusions of the 'original' work. Bronwyn Clark-Coolee redraws Bruce Nauman's work. She translates his casts and signs into a new sign of drawing. She performs an act of drawing on his performance/film Art Make-Up. She remakes it. The performance model becomes the adaption model. Her work describes an anxiety of muteness that is indicated in the bracketed statements of her titles - "Trying to describe something"; "It isn't easy"; "I'm talking about how it felt to me". She points to reiteration: as with Nauman her grammar is repetition, and her repetition is a reiteration, but not a reiteration that repeats the order. It is a reiteration that amplifies. The boundaries of the work resonate in such a way that what has been lying in the margins of the work becomes evidenced, the exclusions [and here they are grammatical, in the neuter of the original] are made visible. What is limited in the possibility of the original becomes adapted to a possibility of reception, and this possibility is gendered. The volume is increased.
This exhibition is the first in the series of the Redrawing project, which will continue through 2008-09 and will be documented in a catalogue of the project in 2009. This catalogue will be a collation of the projects and events of Redrawing, as well as a site of Redrawing itself, where the project as a whole will be available as a model for a redrawing of the project to take place. This will include findings on the Project Space exhibition, on the discussions by the artists, and will also include a series of annotations and amendments to the propositional statements on the work and practice/s in this text.
Fiona Macdonald
May 2008
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