- Venue
- The Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim, Ireland.
- Location
- Ireland
Catalogue 297 x 297mm 2024 V4 low res
DRAWING AT THE TIME OF MANY CENTRES AND NO PERIPHERIES
The Covid19 epidemics inspired this second edition of Drawing Box by Diane Henshaw. The first one opened in 2013 and travelled wherever artists found a welcoming venue. This time the welcoming venue is online, courtesy of Facebook.
Diane favours freedom from institutional and financial boundaries, welcoming artists from anywhere with internet connection, and reasonable camera. The optics determine what will appear as a work of art on one remove. The approximation to the original is as good as the technology at hand, without pretending that it can be ever equal. That is the downpayment for the absence of exhibiting places and times and presence.
Lockdown severely curtailed real practical life everywhere. Humanity found some solutions: using the internet to disseminate current art making is one, valuable to both makers and viewers.
The Drawing Box online archive houses 65 videos or slides of visits to studios with added jpegs of single drawings, both offering repeatable intimate aesthetic experience approximating that of viewing art in a gallery.
Not happy with seeing all in the size of your screen? Not seeing the different pressure on the drawing point, material, surface, texture?
The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life (a quote attributed to William Morris). This includes interest in drawing and looking and visibility. Drawing has not only the longest history among the visual arts, it is also the most malleable of disciplines. As visual art, drawing had been presented as conditio sine qua non for being an artist: Leonardo is cited as insisting that an artist must do a drawing every day to renew the connectivity of the eye, hand and brain. Others treat drawing as a quick test of how something may be made visible, e.g. Tiepolo’s drawings of the flying Apollo. And, while filmed, Picasso drew a nude in white on the glass panel just for the fun of it.
The drawing comes halfway to the viewer, and onto the drawing the viewer projects associations, memories, other images. We know that looking is 90 percent prediction and 10 percent reception of impulses from one’s cones and rods in one’s eyes. It shows our need, our wish, our desire, to try to find things that both make sense of the world and offer moments of comfort, which is obviously the terrain of all art makers over the millennia. (William Kentridge, South Africa)
It feels like a kind of invitation.
For the first Drawing Box exhibition in 2012 every participant was invited to submit 5 drawings in prescribed size. It opened in Mumbai and travelled wherever it was invited to go. The emphasis on invitation governs the Drawing Box 2. Diane Henshaw opened the right to invite new participants to those already members. It is a dramatic departure from the norm that gives complete power to a curator. Schiller said that art is the kingdom of freedom, and he meant the making of it. Henshaw extended it to access.
Decades ago, I was allowed by Hugh Mulholland to curate an exhibition for a small gallery in Derry. I called it Invitation. One talented artist was troubled that invitation is not a curatorial concept. It expresses trust.
How a drawing happens in the mind, moment to moment differs. Artists have deliberate techniques including photography, observation, intention, problem solving, mapping, connecting, associating, mixing intensity and absence… but might there be a less conscious way of starting a drawing? Obscure hunch, blind instinct, waiting? The membrane between the intention and impulse and the freedom to draw by any means is porous. It is driven by the need or want to make something visible, by the freedom to make choices. That breeds resistance to habitual thinking. Drawing has multitudes of means to make something visible often resulting in what Dante described as a rain of images…
Moreover, as James Turrel pointed out difficult art triggers emotions and thoughts that seem useless while that uselessness is important as it breeds resistance to habitual thinking. There are at least two equally flawed responses to each invitation: constantly seek “the new”, and confirmation of previous preferences. Covid 19 undermined both the endless justification of a routine and escapes from it. It issues a different hierarchy of values by cutting down mankind to its size (or even diminishing it) …
Drawings survived changes in the status of the species – from cave art until now. Drawn image is much less distorted than paintings or sculptures or performance art when reproduced on my PC screen. Drawing more easily joins lens based art’s ability to travel through space and time, while access to the internet adds the simultaneity of sharing.
Drawing embraces differences with admirable ease and power. It is voracious in the use of means: Drawing Box 2 submissions added sewing, machine and hand embroidery, assemblage, digital imaging, performance drawing, collage in addition to the traditional tools. It is a domain of feverish creativity, often kept private. Freud thinks creativity is a neurosis, Storr opposes it, Vernon calls it a faculty – and all think it is impossible to measure creativity reliably.
However – we measure it, by our personal aesthetic experience and for its power, as any art, to develop inquiring and reflective attitudes. Yes, other human creations do that too. It is easy to perceive the drawings recognisable difference from them, but not easy to measure it. It depends largely on the subjective taste. Differences between drawings match that need by the power to give birth to associative content that is abundant yet relevant to the task at hand. Artists have concern about uniqueness, about associative freedom. So do the viewers, even if it manifests in a smaller measure. The relative uniqueness of every drawing offers an experience of – what Taoists called “letting things happen” -when avoidance does not mean absence…
Drawing is prima facie creative thinking. Its factors include curiosity, delight, ambiguity, reflection, re- arranged information, insight, intuition, emotion, familiarity and surprise. And something new. Denying the obvious. Sometimes the tactics are recalled from memory, sometimes they are invented during the process of drawing. There is a recognised essential tension between tradition and innovation. Drawing Box (ii) treats them with sensitivity that may be missing in a curated exhibition. It became a productive amalgam of partially overlapping materials and methods and subjective preferences. Sharing it online is a low cost, top down subversion of the world art market. Its advantage is sustainability and resilience to precarious economic and social reality. To the viewer it offers enrichments of liberal values, liberal self-reflection. It rehearses skills and strategies for survival. People have unequal access to art, and for the price of a photograph the art made in India, the same image, becomes accessible anywhere with broadband connection, from Valencia to Mumbai.
I introduce India, because of the western hegemony, of eurocentrism, that governs a great deal of art history and art market and large international exhibitions. A dream of a raceless future. I have another reason for singling out that part of the world. Drawing Box invented in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, received sincere and generous support from artists living there, who unearthed a way how to make traditional art making contemporary.
Careful viewing unveils visible notes from western modernism, as if they wished to say, we are here together. Creatively building on the old art. All and any of it. Their fishermen’s village, old family farms, farming tools, old beliefs and aesthetic norms, sound of birds, stand as values connecting now with the past. Re-thinking almost anything. Ours, is the age of imagination, the engine of invention.
Drawing Box 2 does not offer “the original” – so, for example, the tremble of the artist’s hand dragging a mark along is not always visible to the lens that transmits it over the internet. Since the haptic sense has been somewhat secondary in drawings and paintings, that loss is acceptable. I cherish also the diminished aura of the original and the author’s name. I cherish my private encounter with the “naked” image. (It is similar to looking at a cave painting/drawing). Its mode of revealing is akin animism at times.
The Drawing Box 2 is not a site of unchecked falsehood, nor is it a proof of absolute certainty. It offers private scrolling back and forth, over and over while the originals are in the zone that is now not accessible in person. It is a result of a brave engagement of the artists -for free. Imagining new concept of nationalism, of relationship to nature, returning to the question of what constitutes human life and what is needed to overcome ecological collapse.
Hence much of these drawings is rooted in nature, observing it, being in it, remembering it, re-inventing it, celebrating it. Including its power over us. Imitation of the visible is connected to the desire to preserve and activate, and at times it allows irony in. Covid19 is one of the forces that mercilessly confront our habitual thinking, including our concept of mobility. Terrestrial life on the damaged planet creates new patterns of separation, boundaries between people. The internet unites the fragmented world – not all its bodies. Reason is on trial, imagination is invited to invent visceral innovation. Drawing can do both: recall the inventions by Leonardo da Vinci. Life is a luminous autodidact, I hope, even if currently people seem incompatible with making necessary changes, they want to get “back to normal”.
Drawing Box 2 proposes multiple sources: observation, listening to music, recalling childhood (past), patterns, craft skills, collaboration with another, memory and invention, digging anywhere and by chance, and life drawings… diary of observed world, spontaneity, virtuosity of deliberately limited means.
The way from empty surface to a drawing includes adding, subtracting, rubbing, scrapping, gaps, traces, exchanges documenting the visible, whimsical experiment, grower of awareness, merciless story teller, symbiotic eye assistant, spontaneous departure from a norm eg using textile or printed page as the ground.
Lockdown imposed a change of working space, from large studios to rooms or a corner at home. Some artists mentioned feeling watched. They missed the alchemy of a studio. The catastrophic fate of galleries and depression from the loss of habits may point to human nature as incompatible with making necessary changes. Drawing Box 2 survives regardless if it ends in an exhibition or not. It is a shelter for participants’ creativity and for the public’s resonance.
Drawing survives too, as a supreme courageous tool capable of reducing to minimal means and still be a witness. A mute poetry and cognitive tool, whether reflective or resembling.
Slavka Sverakova, PhD,
University lecturer 1956 -2003.
Essays on http://www.blogspot.com
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