Drawing, Writing, Photography
A secondary response;
The eye:
The mind:
The body:
The hand:
The medium:
The time
And place:
The recipient
Operating in accord
Our western tradition – writing and drawing removes ‘us’ maker and viewer from the direct relation with the world. The impossibility of direct utterance – it must be mediated by its carrier – porterage?
The means: paper, the pen, the keyboard, the camera, the experience, memory, education. The moment of encounter, immediate and ongoing – slow development of received knowledge.
How to use these processes within these extreme areas? How to operate within their limits – both as maker and viewer.
The use of tools to understand the world, to engage with the world and to change the world.
To consider the ways of being. To bring into the light a number of significant thoughts, ideas that are distinct – real – but need to be brought into a relationship with the real to allow an opportunity for understanding and sharing, how such actions should impinge upon the fundamental aspects of poetic thought to realise and possibly to change our base-line understanding / perception of the world.
Can only be done though language and there is a great disparity of respective syntaxes, discourse. It is through the relations between words, lines, shades of light and dark, or colour that we intuitively connect with a shared picture of the world and our relationship with it. In so doing, a initial connection is established that will, through reflection, frame and process the distinct impressions a drawing text or photograph triggers. II Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo, , can this been done thorough beauty? Can there be an anti aesthetic?
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. Or does a strong drawing text, photograph necessarily tremble on the edge of understanding and its opposite?
Shakespeare’s use of words: Michelangelo, a decision – rational or otherwise to intervene, to add one more layer to the irretrievable moment of past experience or some other aspect of our shared (as a species) past.
How does one operate? Seeing and making: receiving or fracturing? The necessary optimism in the act of drawing or writing within this context – to bear witness the expectation (?) that someone will have the need/desire/opportunity to read what you have written/drawn/photographed and in doing so – the act of communion, response, reflectiveness, is established. The cry in the wilderness (John the Baptist) is not an empty image. Nietzsche’s Madman, the struggles of Monet and Cézanne, Gorky, Rothko, the insolence of Bacon and Beckett (see his introduction to Avigdor Arikha’s exhibition) and his other writings etc., etc.The desperate fairground booth carnival (carne) of Hirst’s practice etc. The Haiku. The paradoxical fragment – the complete fragment. An end in itself – externalization, release or response or a gift? Or a liminal space between moments of history – the past referenced in the drawing, photographed and the recurrent ‘now’ of its encounter.To believe in the world as is – a bloody place, the entity of our species as a rapacious tribal culture – and to recognise that it is in the moments of grace that our potential is realised as being as much part of our being as the ’other’ –our marks on paper our exhalations, the sounds, images we utter, stutter and murmur are as much part of that savage mix as are the qualities of pity and direct action for the better.
The issue is that this quality, though real is fragile and easily hidden and crushed, the meditated and the instinctive, un-meditated act – The scattering of experience, its visibility/invisibility – our responsibility the cloud that is perceived from the one place and from the other.
Drawing as an act of faith, a leap – There is no road to utopia, only the experience of relative failure. The act of drawing as a laying siege – a liminal place that hovers between, a witness of the attempt, the response rather than the thing itself – Hovering between two (an infinite number) of worlds – Blake’s doors, Nietzsche’s staring into the abyss. The necessary ‘lie’ cushion of visualisation, ‘Worse , there is none worse. Pietà Con-solare – Startled the poet drops his brush . . .’I saw this’ . . . ‘This is worse.’ Etc.
The cathartic effect of such action – but . . .It the very acts being exorcised will occur again tomorrow are happening now – so what is the relationship between such acts of making, seeing or reflecting in the experiential world? The traces. We admit its precariousness. But also its necessity.
Drawing and photographs: signs that can preserve in their
appearance something of the original, perceived shape
of things, whereas words cannot do this: Directly or indirectly
experienced? Directly pronounced, read or spoken?
The spoken word: stones crossing a running river . Step by
step, a means to take us form one place to another – spoken:
a mere vibration of the air – read their distinctive, visible,
abstract shape that connotes discernment, an uncovering of
the most immediate, the most intimate aspect of the evoked
situation.What can remain of that irretrievable moment? Only
the words of our translations, the marks on the page –
necessarily separate from the sentient aspect of their point of origin?
How else can they be denoted except by the fundamentally
arbitrary and abstract nature of alphabetical notation
and mark making? Japanese calligraphy the
poet/philosopher is also a painter: Monet? Michaux? Pollock?
To find or work towards an equivalence in poetic language
expressed in visual or textual terms that will result
from the unifying action/force of the writer’s experience/being
in a place of dynamic human significance.
Its strength, power, effectiveness results from establishing and
working within these discrete pivotal relations and
balancing the forces between different media. Its completion
will be when the points, deployed experimentally,
conjoin to create something distinctive. What might be
revealed, degrees of distinction and equivalence, diversity
and unity. Such moves take place within a piece of work that
is mapped within chosen referential boundaries that are
established by different practices – images and words – the
visual, textual and spatial.