- Venue
- Elysium Artspace
- Location
- Wales
Visual Delights: On Drawing; an exhibition by Swansea Metropolitan University Foundation staff at Elysium Artspace , Swansea On Drawing, recently presented by Foundation Year staff at the Elysium Gallery was one of two, parallel exhibitions by SMU staff, the other being the School of Photography and Video’s Unreliable Truths at the Glynn Vivian. There are some strong contrasts between the two shows, not least in their presentational rhetorics, Elysium’s being much more modest than the Glynn Vivian’s. But there are also similarities. Both exhibitions address the wider public as well as their own student clientele, and both advocate a named practice – drawing and photography, about which there are a host of preconceptions. The character and aspirations of these practices are historically intertwined. Photography was originally invented to improve on the objectivity of topographical drawing at a time when human subjectivity was felt to be a positive obstacle to objective knowledge. Photography excused drawing from the expectation that it must replicate the appearances of objects, allowing it to embrace its unavoidably dependency on subjective agency. Drawing headed off to become a medium of personality, the ‘sketch’ achieving a new dignity as the romantic expression of unique individuals. The two practices gave practical form to the two sides of a false cultural dualism which conceptualised subject and object as mutually exclusive opposites. Their subsequent history has been about recovering from this separation. Drawing and photography should recognise that they are in fact practices for relating rather than separating, subject and object. The two shows thus complement each other, and Elysium has performed an important function by making it possible to notice and think about the connections, similarities and differences between the practices in a way that can help us consider the potentialities of each. That such an important opportunity is being performed by a space initiated and run on a shoe-string by committed volunteers, speaks for the value of supporting their effort. After nearly two centuries of photography, during which time it has become not just an amateur but a folk practice, SMU’s professional, academic photographers still feel it necessary to distance what they do from everyday uses of cameras. They fear that their cameras, as mechanical recorders of light from objects’ surfaces, are symbols of an outmoded expectation of truth – i.e. that it can be ‘absolute’. To counteract this they play up the significance of the subject (the photographer) and the context-dependent nature (technical and conventional) of the process of photography itself. This seems a slightly care-worn, residually dualist, problematic. Very few people now have the full-on, naïve expectation that a photograph supplies a ‘reliable truth’, though they may be less savvy about the taken-for-granted conventions of everyday ‘folk’ photography. Two things follow. First, since it is now widely recognised that ‘truth claims’ can never be other than contextual, provisional and socially constructed, photographers could be less defensive, self-referring and methodological – in a word, freer. The standard for truth today is much lower than in the heyday of positivism. To announce that photography is ‘unreliable’ implies a commitment to what is actually a positivist standard for truth, which is impossible for any practice, and thus irrelevant as a criterion of criticism. That subjectivity and context are involved are the very conditions of the possibility of truth, not its opposite. As already stated, opposing subject to object is a false dualism. Second, the post-empiricist, post-modern understanding of knowledge makes clear that knowledge of reality cannot be constructed from information about surface appearances or single points of view. Thus a new job of serious photography might be to find ways for the information it can gather with its machines to inform our understanding of the processes and constitutive mechanisms which produce appearances – processes which involve more than mere photographers and their practices, and may occur independently of them. Photography ought then confidently to embrace its being as an important means for effective and knowledgeable relating to the world beyond mere sensation. Photography can thrive in partnership with the best theory of knowledge, (which as far as this reviewer is concerned is a form of realism). In our society, drawing is hardly an everyday folk practice for adults; far fewer of them routinely draw than take photographs. This may contribute to the sense that Elysium’s artists are fairly relaxed about the boundaries around their professional practice. In the gallery’s relatively small space, On Drawing confidently offers a whole range of work exemplifying a broad understanding of drawing as an embodied process of exploration and discovery which has application in most visual arts. Drawing may be pursued more as a means to some other end (Mary Davies; Emma Pearce) or in order to produce ‘a drawing as a work of art’ in its own right (Owen Griffiths; Osi Osmond). What is made clear is its status as necessary, because of the biological givens of human beings, and thus as a historically enduring practice of living people. Its advocates do not have to defend it by making strong distinctions between types of practice or meanings, or pre-empting lay misconceptions, or inflating scale to ensure attention. Rather they can confidently rely on drawing to somehow insinuate itself into almost everything artists do. By not attempting to set up strong impermeable boundaries On Drawing accepts its own immediate and modest self, confidently enough to welcome all comers. Those using 3D (Katherine Clewett; Bella Kerr), cameras (Anthony Arrowsmith; Sheree Murphy), video animation (Tim Stokes) etc., hold no terrors. Whatever one’s personal sympathies, the claims for the importance of drawing are hardly threatened by one or two rather stretched claims to be doing it. Humans’ potential to draw is akin to their capacity for natural language. Photography struggles with its own equipment demands, tending to be ‘kit heavy’, but drawing, being body-dependent, shared by all humans, is a medium of hybridity, deviance and tolerance. It is highly resistant to any attempt to discipline or monopolise it. It doesn’t matter what language/drawing you speak/make, only that you enter the communicative fray, more or less skilfully. Nevertheless, despite this friendliness, there are still real issues of quality – particularly significant in academic contexts where evaluative objectivity and fairness ought to be important. Symptomatic of such concerns is the display of Howard Riley’s conference paper for the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design, about what sort of tests to use when judging individual drawings. This suggests a criterion of quality (need it be the only one?) is the ‘visual delight’ (Wollheim) experienced by the viewer as they oscillate between attending to surface qualities and what might be ‘seen in’ the image’s virtual depth. Contemporary drawing is clearly cross-pressured by a context where, on the one hand, its value is as a means for persons to explore their relations with objects, others and themselves, and on the other, tends to maintain some relationship with traditional representationalism to somehow satisfy the impersonal formal rationality of academic assessment systems. On Drawing was not put on for the sake of the reputations of the exhibitors, but for the sake of something greater than any one of them, namely the practice itself. Elysium’s exhibition provided a sort of microcosm of this understanding, without defensive bombast, supported by a free catalogue equipped with a demystifying introduction (Osi Osmond). Drawing and On Drawing, enable participants (both exhibitors and audience) to ‘go outside themselves’ (Durkheim) and suggests that students on the Foundation Year tend to get a good deal. John ParkerHilary StanworthNovember 2008
