- Venue
- MOCA London
- Location
- London
Simon Linington and William Mackrell’s drawing Floor rests uncomfortably wedged into the corner of the MOCA exhibition space. Crumpled and distressed, the paper is suspended monumentally overhead, covering ceiling to floor like a form of architectural drapery. Constructed from smaller leafs of paper, its tessellated surface bears delicate graphite marks, modulating in intensity, which trace the texture of the floor. The recognition of the drawing as a rubbing immediately brings attention back out of the work and into the gallery space in visual loop in which the eye shuttles back and forth, between work and space, in a game of recognition and tracing. Each mark on paper documents the nails, knots, whorls, scratches and drag marks that tell the long history of the room as an exhibition space, and perhaps further back to domestic or commercial occupation. Transposing the floor space to the wall and ceiling plays an odd trick of disorientation, as does the movement of the work from drawing to sculpture, tracing to performance. The latter durational aspect is most present: an agonizing stretch of time on hands and knees, painstakingly applying pencil to paper, manipulating paper to fit the awkward floor plan.
The pair took inspiration for Floor from Alighiero Boetti’s biro drawings, executed from 1971 onwards. These huge expanses of paper are covered in undulating hatchings made by biros, echoing the weaving process of his famous world map textiles. These may be a formal reference point, but the circumstances of their creation could hardly be more different – Boetti assigned the herculean task to studio assistants, whilst Linington and Mackrell’s bodily involvement is present in every inch of mark making. The pair also cites the influence of another duo, Gilbert and George, whose large-scale early pastoral scenes, The Nature of Our Looking (1970), are presented as panels of folded paper, which the pair insisted were not drawings but charcoal-on-paper sculptures: scale here operating to have a sculptural impact on the viewer. One can’t also help but be reminded of Anna Barriball, whose dark and emphatic pencil and graphite rubbings of walls, windows, doors and other architectural features perform a similar ghosting of space to that effected by Floor, with a related emphasis on process and duration.
The link between Linington and Mackrell’s practice and that of their curator, Angela de la Cruz, is another interesting trace to explore. Both create forms that are distressed, damaged or pushed to their physical limits and transcend the medium they originated in. Formal limitations, failures and struggle are pivotal both to de la Cruz’s oeuvre, and to the work of Linington and Mackrell, which examines their working methodology as a duo by stretching metaphorical actions to breaking point. In this sense Floor marks a departure from the work that has typified their output to date. Previous pieces exploring the fact of their collaboration foreground the competitive elements of working with someone else, and question what concessions need to be made in order to practice in this way. Their performances act as exercises developed to physically test the tenets of collaborative practice. These are often stretched to absurd limits, poetically and humorously exploring the tension of the space between cooperation and competition. The video, Band Practice (2011), documents their attempts to keep a piece of card upright between them by blowing constantly. The success of the action demands that they both blow at the same rate, and the resulting piece works beautifully as an exemplification of finding balance between collaborators. More celebratory of the push and pull of working as a duo, SimonWilliam Repeat (2011) is both a video and drawing, in which their arms are tied to each other with a cable tie. Their attempts to write their own name repeatedly down the centre of the paper are thwarted by each movement being impeded by that made by the other. A humorous but painful looking struggle ensues, plastic cuts into flesh and a flurry of scribbles and deep gouges rend the paper. In Floor, their partnership is played down (although the limitations set in other pieces are still present in the considerations of space). Here, they synthesize, acting together to perform a feat of draughtsmanship as endurance, drawing as sculpture or architecture. One feels that they have a new comfort with the duality of their practice, moving forward with a common language, garnered through years of experimentation. The pair are thus at a pivotal stage in their development as a collaborative duo, with subtle shifts in their practice and approach becoming ever more tangible.
