Category Archives: Drawing

Get it?

Posted on by
4

 

 

David Shrigley, Those who get it

 

David Shrigley, Those who get it

Mentioning venn diagrams in passing brought David Shrigley back to mind. I’ve posted about Shrigley before at the time of his Hayward Gallery in 2012. I really like Shrigley’s work but there was a lot I didn’t like about that exhibition so coming back to it now gives me the chance to simply enjoy the preposterousness of a couple of works. I think for me the ideal way to look at Shrigley’s drawings is to idly browse his books and pick out a few pictures to enjoy in small doses; Shrigley en masse and in the more public sphere of a busy museum scale space just doesn’t do it for me.

What I like about Shrigley’s use of the venn diagram in Those who get it is the brilliant pointlessness of the whole thing. Ultimately with no explanation of what ‘it’ might be, are we all in the ‘those who don’t get it’ circle? Or maybe getting the joke is enough to put us in the ‘those who get it circle’? Before we know it, realising there is nothing to get, we find ourselves firmly at the centre of the diagram in the ‘those who are very confused’ area. Sometimes perhaps that’s exactly the right place to be.

Continue reading →

Leaving tracks

Posted on by
Reply

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, England 1967

Richard Long, A Line Made By Walking, England 1967

I can’t quite decide whether Richard Long’s 1967 work A Line Made by Walking is an example of taking a line for a walk or the exact opposite. Long has effectively made a drawing, of sorts, by walking and certainly – as with Ceal Floyer’s Taking a Line for a Walk – the line is a result of an actual walk but here it’s the act of walking that has brought the line into being, albeit on a temporary basis, rather than a tool used by the artist; the drawing too herel, rather than being a pencil – or a line painting machine or whatever – is the artist himself.

Long’s work, of course, is probably better described as something other than a drawing. Effectively it’s an intervention artwork which has left a temporary trace; the landscape would probably have reasserted itself and obliterated the line before anyone other than Long ever saw it. In this work, as in many interventions, it is the documentation – the photograph – that becomes the exhibited work.

Continue reading →

Walk the Line

Posted on by
1

Ceal Floyer, Taking a Line for a Walk, 2008

Ceal Floyer, Talking a Line for a Walk, 2008

There are lots of drawings that fit neatly under Klee’s description of ‘taking a line for a walk’ but few that do it quite as literally as Ceal Floyer’s Taking a Line for a Walk, in which a line painting machine of the sort normally used to mark out tennis courts and the like is walked through the gallery space leaving a trace that takes the audience on a journey through the space.

Continue reading →

Poetry and Politics: Francis Alÿs’s The Green Line

Posted on by
2

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004

I’ve written about Francis Alÿs going for a walk here before (that time in the form of his Pradox of Praxis for which he pushed a block of ice around the streets of Mexico City until all he had to show for his efforts was a rapidly drying water mark of the pavement) but this week, given the awful news from Gaza, it’s his 2004 work The Green Line: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic that’s worked it’s way back into my mind.

I can’t pretend to have anything more than the most rudimentary understanding of the politics of the middle east but this is a work that at least helps with some basics by taking us back to the division of Jerusalem after the end of the Arab-Isreali war in 1948: the  green line drawn on a map of the city by Moshe Dyan.

Continue reading →

Drawing on the past

Posted on by
Reply

Turk Frottage 2009

Gavin Turk, Frottage, 2009

Though he’s made a pretty wide range of work in between, I was interested to find that my altogether half-arsed research for the previous post threw up an image of a recent work I didn’t know and whose existence surprised me. Frottage, made in 2009, close to two decades after Cave, is a rubbing of that same blue plaque. I’m guessing of course (yes, yes, I know, research is good but sometimes the path of least resistance is just so much more appealing) but I rather suspect this is a work made in order to use the title and the amusement to be gained from using a term that is technically correct in art terms but which also has sexual connotations. And why not?

Continue reading →

Cave painting

Posted on by
Reply

Richard Wright, Untitled, 2009 (Tate Britain, Turner Prize Exhibition)

Richard Wright, Untitled, 2009 (Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Britain)

For all that I’m fascinated by Sol Lewitt’s conceptual approach, his wall drawings also bring the extraordinary beauty of Richard Wright’s wall paintings to mind and bring me back to work that can be enjoyed on a purely aesthetic basis. That’s not to say that there are no ideas in play here but faced with a work like the one Wright made for the 2009 Turner Prize exhibition my first reaction is one of wonder at both the extravagant beauty and the scale of the thing.

Continue reading →

Just following instructions

Posted on by
5


Sol LeWitt wall drawing being made at Dia Beacon

Sol LeWitt wall drawing being made at Dia Beacon

Drawing on a big scale – and some of Sol LeWitt’s larger wall drawings are on a very big scale, more installation than drawing really – can be quite an undertaking. Even if LeWitt had made most of his work himself he could have been forgiven for bringing in a team of assistants to help out. Given his strategy of generating instructions for others to follow though the process of drawing is, by definition, the domain of hired hands.

Continue reading →

Skeletal geometries

Posted on by
1

LeWitt Five Open Geometric Structures 1979

Sol LeWitt, Five Open Geometric Structures, 1979

Thinking about the blurring of the boundary between sculpture and drawing brings Sol LeWitt to mind; add a fascination with geometry into the mix and I find myself looking afresh at LeWitt’s Open Geometric Structures in particular. There’s a beautiful simplicity to the structures – a term LeWitt favoured over sculptures – with the openness lending them a feeling of being drawings in space rather than, or as well as, being objects.

Continue reading →

Drawing in waves

Posted on by
Reply

Gabriel Orozco, Dark Wave, 2006

Gabriel Orozco, Dark Wave, 2006

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a sculpture. Or is it a drawing? It’s so hard to tell sometimes. Gabriel Orozco’s Dark Wave is a replica of a whale skeleton – so, clearly sculpture – on which a pattern has been drawn – a drawing then – it’s all so confusing. Quite apart from the overwhelming scale of the piece, what I like about this work is the ambiguity of the thing. There’s the starting point of it feeling like a readymade that’s been worked – an approach Orozco has used a lot in works like La DS – on but in fact the skeleton is remade resin and calcium carbonate before being draw on in graphite. Then there’s the way the pattern makes it harder to quite figure out the skeleton but still somehow manages to feel like it’s meant to be there, albeit in a way that makes the piece feel like it might be some sort of archaeological find.

Continue reading →

Precisely drawn confusion

Posted on by
2

Susan Collis, Conchi, 2008

Susan Collis, Conchi, 2008

Even knowing about Collis’s transformations of ordinary objects, there’s something surprising about her works that mimic laundry bags. These aren’t readymades subtly transformed by the inlaying of jewels; they’re even less what they seem to be at first glance. Rather than woven plastic, the bags are made of paper – okay for thoroughly dry laundry, but run out of coins in the laundrette and there’s a chance your bag could collapse on the way home – and their woven appearance is just that: an appearance. A very carefully drawn on one.

Continue reading →