Thursday 24 November 2016

Part 4 - Project 3 - Installation

The text supplies this link, to look at artists doing installative drawings, specifically;

Robert Rauschenberg, The Automobile tyre print in the exhibition is a different way to create a drawn line with something from the everyday. It also breaks out of the confines of a conventional artwork because it takes up so much space it will demand attention on a wall.

Cy Twombly also here There is an energy about his drawings and he used colour brilliantly. His flower pictures are like tattoos, they move beyond the merely decorative to become expressive statements about the beauty of the flower. 

Ellsworth Kelly, The drawings in the exhibition are experimental, their importance is in the originality of the ideas and his willingness to experiment with the medium of drawing. Whilst following links I came across his "Pine Branch and Shadow " photo which links into the found drawings of this section of the course.  Although they aren't installative I have always admired the simplicity of his plant drawings which are so economically line yet so clearly convey the essence of the plant they represent. They draw your attention to the beauty of the shape.

Karel Malich, His drawings are free and simple like doodles but somehow more considered. I like the way that the lines follow each other partly overlapping as though he is struggling to find the right line that conveys the idea but also they gain something in being not just a line but one of many lines. Uccurance on the Circle in the Flow of Energy, 1973, is a good example of this, and for me a better drawing than the one in the exhibition. Fascinating to wonder how he managed to link the lines and keep them together . How much was planned and how much was happenstance?

 Edward Krasinski How do you make all your work have a house style? link them all with blue tape. The tape is like a installation highlighter pen making the ordinary and overlooked stand out. Then how do you deal with failures in transport? Krasinski dealt with adversity by seeing new opportunity. He obviously delighted in the technology that allowed information be transmitted instantly. With modern technology it is easy to overlook the miracles of communication so in a way his work was ahead of its time and predicted modern apathy.

Pierrette Bloch  better appreciated in this video Her work moves gently with the passing breeze which animates it. This is a sort of living drawing rather than static marks on paper. She uses unusual drawing materials such as hair and repeated marks which gain more significance when they are grouped together. 
 A few days later I saw this vapour trail which reminded me of her work.


I started by doodling some ideas in my sketchbook.

Then started drawing in the walls......
 There was a crack above the light switch Which grew leaves and a flower. 
 I Googled owls and found one in flight which looked a bit like this.

 I think that it's better without the added eyes.
 Back to the sketchbook ideas.
The spider didn't work very well partly because it was drawn in crayon because I didn't fancy being stuck with a failed spider drawn in sharpie which I couldn't rub out. 
The other idea was mice which I drew in ink on brown paper and cut out.
 I then got completely carried away sticking them around my house with Blu Tac...
























The influence here is definitely the work of Slinkachu and Isaac Cordal I like the idea of installing work that only the observant will appreciate. 
Randomly Kurt Pertl came up on my Facebook feed, the figure looks so at home, so natural in the landscape. 
I had never heard of anamorphosis although I have seen Holbein’s The Ambassadors  It's a really great idea but I think Holbein was just so excited with the innovation he overlooked that viewed from the front the picture appears to have a large smear running across it. I looked up Edgar Mueller and Kurt Wenner who make some mind bending drawings. I know that they want to keep their methods to themselves but it would have been great to see some photos from a less favourable angle, I would have been even more impressed.

Pierette Bloch here and here. The video with the horsehair gently wafting in the breeze helped me to understand better than the photos. Many pieces of art are better appreciated in isolation but her splodgy black blobs of paint improve when you scroll through Google images looking at lots of them. Her materials are described as poor because they are readily available to anyone. It's what she does with them that is important. Using cheap readily available materials to make art must help the artist to be less precious about what is created. If it all goes "wrong" however that is defined, the only thing that is wasted or lost is the time it took to create the piece. I also feel that her work is more accessible because it isn't fancy expensive things, and the simplicity of the shapes and lack of colours makes looking at them a more calming meditative experience.

Before I did this course I saw Louise Bourgeois sculpture in Washington.
It's not a great photo but it gives you a flavour. I found the sculpture fascinating, maybe, in retrospect, that has something to do with an association with drawing. The legs appear to have been drawn out in metal from the solid body. The sculpture is delicate in design but looks so strong and powerful. Maybe that is an association with spiders which we imbue with greater power that their small size and fragility should command. I do see this sculpture as a three dimensional drawing very much in the same vein as Pierette Bloch's horsehair drawings.

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