Text about the exhibiton "Extended Drawing", Oslo Norway

2011-09-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

BETWEEN THE LINES AND AT THE FRONTIER

Anne Karin Jortveit, artist and writer

“That isthe beauty of the drawing. Drawing opens our eyes and the eyes lead to oursoul. What comes out is not at all what one had planned.”

Louise Bourgeois

Grasping drawing

The Greek word graphé meansboth to write and to draw. Graphé islike a nodal point in which various forms of narration come together in a waythat explains the fascinating tension between form and content in drawing assuch. Compared with the “written word”, even when it has nothing to do with aspecific narrative but is instead a reflection of a more open, poeticperception, drawing, with its intimate immediacy, can provide a basis fordialogue and expressive action. Drawing has an ability to communicatealternative perspectives and to touch us in other ways than the statements ofpurely spoken language, thus allowing us to see drawing as a practice that cangive 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 ofthe world. Children do not just draw with the hand, they immerse themselvesentirely in the work. Neither do children let themselves be limited by thepaper; they often get the idea of continuing across the table, over onto awall, and even outside the house. One sure sign of spring is chalk scribblesout on the road. Indeed, the urge to leave one’s mark runs like a common threadthrough human life. Despite our increasing engagement with digital media andother forms of technology, we still leave physical traces on the world. We are theproducers 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 canalso be a matter of a search or a form of play of a universally human kind; itcan be about demonstrating one’s understanding of what it means to exist and totake part in the world.

From the first stroke onwards, there is an interweaving of fantasy andreality. As we grow older, it is no longerpossible to reach back to those very earliest impressions, once we have learnt to be criticaland to evaluate what we sense and undertake. But in some strange way, we still manage to carrythe experience with us into later life, and it may be that artists areparticularly able to remain receptive to these often indefinable perceptions. Withinthe artistic process there lies both an aesthetic and an existential potentialthat can bring to life the “gaps” in consciousness and language, particularlywhere these tend to resist translation into words. This is a quality which Isense to be present in the “Extended Drawing” project.

The desire to try

At first glance, the title “Extended Drawing” seems straightforward. Buton 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 theart of drawing. The adjective extendedcan be understood as qualifying either the concept or the physical aspects ofdrawing as an exploratory medium of contemporary art. The title also suggestsassociations to a rhythm of displacements, thereby providing a metaphor forreflections on the actual nature of drawing.

The nine artists participating in “Extended Drawing” reveal howmultifarious and unpredictable drawing has now become. Extended drawing is amedium that moves with great freedom and legerity between its own historic backgroundand the horizon of expectations. Although the works on display employ the mosttypical characteristic of drawing in general, namely the line, here the line expands into a broader visual language thattakes these artists in unforeseen directions. Each and every one of themexplores 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 ofsomething embroidered, modelled, taped, pinned or ironed on, as it is of pencilgraphite. In these works, the line is a platform for potential strategies, butregardless of the artist’s preferred approach, all still classify their work asdrawing. It is a stance that has both aesthetic and political implications, andwhich amounts to the declaration of an artistic attitude. Neither is it acollection of “finished” lines that we find here, but rather an assortment ofinvestigative processes. The drawing is not fixed, but constantly in flux.

Although the methods the artists use are highly individual, they cannevertheless be seen as closely interrelated. This is due not least to a kindof common “temperature”, which all the works in “Extended Drawing” share. Theyare distinguished by a refined lack of presumption pitched somewhere between a sensitivedelicacy and discreet insistence. It is an idiom that gives rise to somethingparadoxically vibrant, consistent and thoroughly present. The more reduced andminimal the works seem on the formal level, the more intense and full of energythey are in their impact. They reinforce one another, yet give one anotherspace. 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 attainnew 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 approachesthe work as such, as if it were a kind of glue between the idea and thefinished statement. Although drawing has long since become an artistic field inits own right, where artists explore the possibilities of the medium, the actof 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 “ExtendedDrawing” form a central field capable of activating exciting new connectionsand states of affairs – within each work itself, between the works, and withinthe encounter between the work and the attentive and sensitive viewer.

“Extended Drawing” demonstrates the tension between what is drawn – thesign – and the drawing, between communicated meaning and the potential formeaning that resides in frontier spaces. In this sense the artists work withalternative ways of conveying a message in public space. They investigate what insightssensitivity and subtlety can contribute. Indirectly, the project raises animportant question: does such a practice help one to find alternatives to theoverly blatant and assertive, where language amounts to power and struggle?

Here we are invited and challenged to cultivate a slow and thoughtfulapproach. For nothing happens here of its own accord, but depends instead onthe encounter with the viewer. These traces, markings and signs are clues to bepursued, and if we open our minds to them, they can add up to an entire map. Weare given time to search for what is not immediately obvious and to reflect onhow such artistic strategies can contribute to a wider dialogue.

“Extended Drawing” takes seriously a type of drawing that tests theboundaries between itself as object and the context in which it occurs. It is drawingthat 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 confineitself to the framework of a specific form and format. And it is this unbrokencontinuity between the drawings and their surroundings that strikes us as the mostdefining characteristic here. Where do the drawings end and the room begin? Orconversely, it seems reasonable to ask, at what point does the viewer engage inthe interaction and begin to feel and listen to the energy surging through thespace? It requires a sensitive ear and a certain musicality. Because we knowthat even in places where there is no communal noise, even out on a desolatemountain, we will begin to hear sounds if only we remain open to them. “ExtendedDrawing” presents a similar experience, with tiny impulses eventually givingrise major fluctuations. Silence is never silent.

“Extended Drawing” builds freely on “Apparently Invisible”, aninitiative of the Drawing Center, New York, which formed their SpringSelections Show in 2009. “Extended Drawing” features the same artists as thatearlier event;

Susan Collis (UK), Michaela Frühwirth (AT/NL), Elana Herzog (USA),Marietta Hoferer (USA), Sarah Kabot (USA), Anne Lindberg (USA), JanineMagelssen (NO), Chris Nau (USA), Janet Passehl (USA).