While I was looking at the work of Robert Morris today I stumbled across the work of a constructivist artist named Vladimir Tatlin. His work visually shares the aspects and materials that are appealing to me in Morris’s work. His use of industrial materials and his combining of these materials in innovative ways.
Tatlin was a constructivist artist whose sculptural work freed him from painting and its depicted content. Much like my own desires, his work was visually engaging and was based around a simple desire to create from material. In particular Corner Counter-Relief (1914), was the most interesting piece of Tatlin’s work, because it made beautiful use of the rope. Rope is one of the main, and most important materials in my work, as I feel it to be the most beautiful to work with.
Much like the constructivist’s and tatlin I am making visual work, but I have also been thinking about viewer interaction with the work. As part of my concept is using and creating with material, I have considered making work designed for the viewer to interact with, as to allow them to feel the grain of the wood or the texture of the rope. But I have been put off the idea of making work specifically for interaction. But when Tatlin’s counter-reliefs were first exhibited, visitors were allowed to touch them. Tatlin insisted: “Let us place the eye under the control of touch”. His point was to give the materials a role of their own beyond merely their visual reception. This does give the work more depth, and does allow the viewer to engage a lot more with a piece of work, thus giving my work much more support in sustaining itself as art with purely a visual object.
I recently made several drawings before I stumbled across Tutlin’s work, and now I fell more inclined to approach these ideas as a touchable piece of work. Although they are not designed with physical interaction in mind (thus changing their form to suit an ‘interactive’ piece), they can still be suitable in form for touch. After all, rope interests me far more for its feel than its appearance, so the viewer should also be able to appreciate its texture?
