BETWEEN THE LINES AND AT THE FRONTIER
Anne Karin Jortveit, artist and writer
“That is
the beauty of the drawing. Drawing opens our eyes and the eyes lead to our
soul. What comes out is not at all what one had planned.”
Louise Bourgeois
Grasping drawing
The Greek word graphé means
both to write and to draw. Graphé is
like a nodal point in which various forms of narration come together in a way
that explains the fascinating tension between form and content in drawing as
such. Compared with the “written word”, even when it has nothing to do with a
specific narrative but is instead a reflection of a more open, poetic
perception, drawing, with its intimate immediacy, can provide a basis for
dialogue and expressive action. Drawing has an ability to communicate
alternative perspectives and to touch us in other ways than the statements of
purely spoken language, thus allowing us to see drawing as a practice that can
give meaning to aspects of human life that remain elusive in other contexts.
Drawing is an activity that most of us originally encountered as children.
By means of marks on paper we articulate our early unqualified experiences of
the world. Children do not just draw with the hand, they immerse themselves
entirely in the work. Neither do children let themselves be limited by the
paper; they often get the idea of continuing across the table, over onto a
wall, and even outside the house. One sure sign of spring is chalk scribbles
out on the road. Indeed, the urge to leave one’s mark runs like a common thread
through human life. Despite our increasing engagement with digital media and
other forms of technology, we still leave physical traces on the world. We are the
producers of signs on many levels, from the diary to graffiti.
In one way or another, drawing accompanies us throughout the cycle of life.
In this respect, drawing seems like more than just an art form. Drawing can
also be a matter of a search or a form of play of a universally human kind; it
can be about demonstrating one’s understanding of what it means to exist and to
take part in the world.
From the first stroke onwards, there is an interweaving of fantasy and
reality. As we grow older, it is no longer
possible to reach back to those very earliest impressions, once we have learnt to be critical
and to evaluate what we sense and undertake. But in some strange way, we still manage to carry
the experience with us into later life, and it may be that artists are
particularly able to remain receptive to these often indefinable perceptions. Within
the artistic process there lies both an aesthetic and an existential potential
that can bring to life the “gaps” in consciousness and language, particularly
where these tend to resist translation into words. This is a quality which I
sense to be present in the “Extended Drawing” project.
The desire to try
At first glance, the title “Extended Drawing” seems straightforward. But
on further reflection, it can be read in a variety of ways. First and foremost,
these two words raise expectations of new and challenging perspectives on the
art of drawing. The adjective extended
can be understood as qualifying either the concept or the physical aspects of
drawing as an exploratory medium of contemporary art. The title also suggests
associations to a rhythm of displacements, thereby providing a metaphor for
reflections on the actual nature of drawing.
The nine artists participating in “Extended Drawing” reveal how
multifarious and unpredictable drawing has now become. Extended drawing is a
medium that moves with great freedom and legerity between its own historic background
and the horizon of expectations. Although the works on display employ the most
typical characteristic of drawing in general, namely the line, here the line expands into a broader visual language that
takes these artists in unforeseen directions. Each and every one of them
explores the frontiers associated with tools, materials, locality and context. In
“Extended Drawing” the line is just as likely to be cut out, or to consist of
something embroidered, modelled, taped, pinned or ironed on, as it is of pencil
graphite. In these works, the line is a platform for potential strategies, but
regardless of the artist’s preferred approach, all still classify their work as
drawing. It is a stance that has both aesthetic and political implications, and
which amounts to the declaration of an artistic attitude. Neither is it a
collection of “finished” lines that we find here, but rather an assortment of
investigative processes. The drawing is not fixed, but constantly in flux.
Although the methods the artists use are highly individual, they can
nevertheless be seen as closely interrelated. This is due not least to a kind
of common “temperature”, which all the works in “Extended Drawing” share. They
are distinguished by a refined lack of presumption pitched somewhere between a sensitive
delicacy and discreet insistence. It is an idiom that gives rise to something
paradoxically vibrant, consistent and thoroughly present. The more reduced and
minimal the works seem on the formal level, the more intense and full of energy
they are in their impact. They reinforce one another, yet give one another
space. They strike us as having a subtle pulse, in their use of elaboration, multiplication,
omission and subtraction, in an ever more finely calibrated effort to attain
new insights into and broader experience of the language of drawing.
Opening up the frontier
Drawing has conventionally been seen as a route via which the artist approaches
the work as such, as if it were a kind of glue between the idea and the
finished statement. Although drawing has long since become an artistic field in
its own right, where artists explore the possibilities of the medium, the act
of working at an experimental frontier, and thereby circumventing or straddling
“either-or” distinctions, is very much in the spirit of drawing’s ethos. In other words, it is as if the works in “Extended
Drawing” form a central field capable of activating exciting new connections
and states of affairs – within each work itself, between the works, and within
the encounter between the work and the attentive and sensitive viewer.
“Extended Drawing” demonstrates the tension between what is drawn – the
sign – and the drawing, between communicated meaning and the potential for
meaning that resides in frontier spaces. In this sense the artists work with
alternative ways of conveying a message in public space. They investigate what insights
sensitivity and subtlety can contribute. Indirectly, the project raises an
important question: does such a practice help one to find alternatives to the
overly blatant and assertive, where language amounts to power and struggle?
Here we are invited and challenged to cultivate a slow and thoughtful
approach. For nothing happens here of its own accord, but depends instead on
the encounter with the viewer. These traces, markings and signs are clues to be
pursued, and if we open our minds to them, they can add up to an entire map. We
are given time to search for what is not immediately obvious and to reflect on
how such artistic strategies can contribute to a wider dialogue.
“Extended Drawing” takes seriously a type of drawing that tests the
boundaries between itself as object and the context in which it occurs. It is drawing
that has broken free of the autonomous surface to participate in a three-dimensional,
site-specific situation, and which seems to define a space rather than confine
itself to the framework of a specific form and format. And it is this unbroken
continuity between the drawings and their surroundings that strikes us as the most
defining characteristic here. Where do the drawings end and the room begin? Or
conversely, it seems reasonable to ask, at what point does the viewer engage in
the interaction and begin to feel and listen to the energy surging through the
space? It requires a sensitive ear and a certain musicality. Because we know
that even in places where there is no communal noise, even out on a desolate
mountain, we will begin to hear sounds if only we remain open to them. “Extended
Drawing” presents a similar experience, with tiny impulses eventually giving
rise major fluctuations. Silence is never silent.
“Extended Drawing” builds freely on “Apparently Invisible”, an
initiative of the Drawing Center, New York, which formed their Spring
Selections Show in 2009. “Extended Drawing” features the same artists as that
earlier event;
Susan Collis (UK), Michaela Frühwirth (AT/NL), Elana Herzog (USA),
Marietta Hoferer (USA), Sarah Kabot (USA), Anne Lindberg (USA), Janine
Magelssen (NO), Chris Nau (USA), Janet Passehl (USA).
