Three Works in Magazines

    

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3		[i]

 

I found myself with 10 minutes to spare recently, and it's amazing what good use you can serendipitously make of such a short period of time.  Being in the library, I walked across to the recent journals rack and browsed through whatever took my interest.  Looking at the current issue of the journal Master Drawings [ii] I was taken by a couple of images there, and followed this up by scanning the ‘Fluxus After Fluxus’ issue of the journal Visible Language.[iii]  I was instantly captivated by my response to these varied images, and the way that they worked against each other.  I was reminded of a major topic in this final section of my dissertation.  For all my wanderings through different areas of research, the concept of a ‘unified sensory field’ in all of its non-verbal modes is persistently present.

 

I should acknowledge here that this discussion concerns three images from journals (there’s my thumb on the page in the photo), and not the disparate works themselves.  The images on this site have been reduced even further to three homogenised representations of those representations – as with everything digitally viewed).

 

Figure 30 on page 324 of Master Drawings is a work by Francesco Albani entitled ‘study for the head of Europa’ (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland).  My immediate response to it was an emotional appreciation of its aesthetic.  How can one describe this feeling?  Art critics and theorists have been trying to do exactly this for hundreds of years so my attempt can only be a repetition.  What is interesting, referencing Paul Crowther, is the fact that one cannot transcribe this feeling into language.  What is essentially a reading through one's ‘unified sensory field’ can only be referred to distantly through metaphor in language.  The reverberations that occur through one's bodily physique belong to the immediate experience alone.  This, as the word ‘immediate’ implies, includes all aspects of the moment such as one's movement in time, space and mood, including immediately prior thought processes, intentions and expectations, and structural/cultural memories and associations.  No doubt I could inspect this work on another occasion in a different context and fail to respond at all.

 

Despite the above I will try to describe this in words so that I can formulate comparisons.  The immediate response was an emotional agitation; a thousand small jangling preverbal responses of affirmation in the body. The artist’s use of lines, colours, form, subject, composition and ground just did it for me - although the appreciation of these elements must depend upon historical and cultural value systems that position drawings of this type; but I also really like lines. Please excuse the ‘purple prose’ that follows, but I couldn’t think of any other way:  The delicate blush of rouge lines so precisely and casually describing the cheek, the hollows around the eye and the pink of nose and ear lobe.  There is something emotionally moving about the positioning and construction of these pink lines, particularly the earlobe, above the line of the extended neck and against the soft dark folds of the hair; moving as both the human form and also compositionally as abstract shapes.  It reminds me of the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum [iv] (who has modelled his technique on Rembrandt), who often strategically places small shapes such as reddened earlobes, coat buttons or hat details for this same kind of compositional effect.  The contrasting charcoal sweep of the hair flowing out from the face and coiling around the head speaks of fragile softness, and also actively indicates the ‘vector’ of the gaze ‘off left’.  The composition is pleasing as a whole, in the way in which the head almost fills the top two thirds of the page and is supported by the large pale area of the shoulders; a ‘golden section’ perhaps, which is repeated by another at the level of the eye, both horizontally and vertically.

 

I presume there is also a very human response to others of one's own kind, and a response to the charm and vulnerability of youth.  The soft curve of the childish cheek against the hair round the back of the head; the fragility of youth and the dewy, moist nature of childish skin; the pale, smooth forehead and wide-spaced level eyebrows of untroubled innocence; the small pink receding chin and un-developed jawbone; the slightly parted Cupid lips like those of a suckling babe.

 

But enough of the Albani.  I could go on tediously for several more paragraphs, but will instead contrast this with an image in the same journal on page 281.  Figure 5, by Jasper Johns, is entitled ‘Bridge 1997’.  I like the layered line work, the monotone tonality, the dark painted ground, and the orderly geometry.  But apart from this, my response to the drawing was on a completely different level to the Albani.  It was purely visual and cognitive, completely lacking the physical resonance of the other. Yet there was an emotional response, similar to that experienced with minimalist sculpture.  There was an impression of the work severely looking back at me, with its direct frontality, geometry, minimalism and lack of sentimentality.  The dark-painted ground and the layered lines are the only elements that make me feel safe with this work.  And reading retrospectively back to the Albani, one must admit that the figure’s submissive, possibly contrapposto pose, with neck exposed and eyes averted, puts the viewer in a position of power over this representation.  Animals use exactly this body language to avert aggression from others. 

 

The third work that I looked at during this 10 minutes was in the journal Visible Language, in an article titled ‘Keep Walking Intently’ by Lisa Moren and Margaret Re.  There are several pages of text as visual imagery; small excerpts written as instructions for actions, laid out as discrete elements across the page, some vertically, and interspersed with heavy black lines.  I found nothing aesthetic in its appearance but read it politically, as a mode of disrupting normal textual activity, and presenting these short scripts typical of Fluxus, as discrete objects on the page.  I very much enjoyed the politically and semiotically disruptive ideas and concepts of the Fluxus texts, both those for reading and for viewing.  But  I read it cognitively only, with no physical resonance at all.

 

Does this help at all?  It is a demonstration and a performance of understanding rather than a theoretical description of theory; a phenomenological method, yet with elements of scientific analysis through dismemberment in language.  It is about as close as I can get to the actual physical and emotional experience in this alienated and narrow language mode.

 

Perhaps I should take my pencils and represent the same experience in an alternative, yet equally dismembered and narrow mode of drawing?

 

Studio work as ontological reciprocity