Texts and notes

2011-03-20T03:28:00.000-07:00

A portal is a gateway or access route to a physical space or information network. The idea of the portal also infers an absence, perhaps like a chimera it resembles nothing in particular but can infiltrate various forms. It is shaped by the expectation of what it might lead to, in space, time or knowledge. The image of the time machine in fiction, the materiality of the object, is a possible exception to this rule. In his 19th Century scientific romance HG Wells illustrates the 'line of time' (a fourth dimension) by conjuring the object of the time machine to conceptually enable controlled movement along and through times' axis (forward and back). In the closing decades of the 19th Century, the age of machines and Freudian psychoanalysis, the imaginings of human exploration were of special interest to social writers like Wells. The portal in the novel is a vehicle for temporal speculation translated into an actual object, a beautifully constructed hand crafted but scientifically sophisticated piece of technology, a hybrid of victorian domestic design(1). A mechanistic amalgamation of natural and industrial materials and an unspecified substance of crystalline qualities(2). Material elements that once connected enable movement, the animation of the object, through time and space.

The space of the diagram, according to Deleuze, is one that deals primarily with movement, transition and future states of being; 'The essential point about the diagram is that it is made in order for something to emerge from it, and if nothing emerges, it fails'(3). A coincidence perhaps between the behaviour of the line, as it moves through a diagram, and the behaviour of a portal. These drawings embody a kind of functional failure.

Notes
1. Marx uses the example of the table as a comodity to describe the relationship between the worker and the means of production, the machine. The Time machine may be a parody of this relationship with technology. This image of a time machine is contemporaneous with the optical machineries and Zoetropes of the mid 19th Century (devices made possible by the development of photographic equipment and shortly overwhelmed by early film technologies) that played with the still image to study time, duration and the representation of movement. Emile Reynaud presented his 'theatre optique' for the first time in 1892, the same year he produced one of the first moving film spectacles consisting of 500 individual drawings. Duchamp colonised these ideas about how to imagine movement on a 2D plane. He also made use of the diagram to disrupt time and sequence (see notes 3), 'A Network of Stoppages' in 1914.

2.For Frederic Jameson the amalgam is perhaps a Utopian methodology, in that the Utopian design (as a fictional representation or space) is an amalgamation of what is already known, a collage of exisiting forms. A 19th century avant garde tendency of amassing, collaging existing disciplines, styles and objects to make a new world out of fragments of the old.

3. Delueze writing about the 'chaos' of the diagram in relation to Francis Bacons' painting. (Deleuze, G (1981), Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation, Trans D W Smith, London Continuum 2003)

Notes for a paper:
Title: The Diagram as a strategy for transformation

Abstract:
'Whatever Utopia is, whatever can be imagined as Utopia, this is the transformation of the (social) totality. And the imagination of such a transformation is very different in all (so called) Utopian accomplishments'(1)

During the early decades of the 16th Century the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published a drawing (a series of diagrams), which augmented the proposition that the sun, and not the earth, resides at the centre of the universe. This simple renaissance drawing formed the basis for the first published heliocentric theory(2), which famously unsettled the teachings of the church and displaced the ancient world view that was informed by an Aristotelian philosophy. One that had prevailed over Western thought for the previous 2000 years and that placed the earth at its centre. If the visual plane of a diagram has the potential (and the history) of changing the shape of a known world, of inviting such potent social disruption, how might this be harnessed as a strategy of conceptual drawing in the field of contemporary art?

This paper proposes that a history of problem solving through the diagrammatic sketch, across all disciplines from social science to art, and the diagrams' seminal relationship to 'world building'(3) has had a profound effect on the development and the shape of drawing in a contemporary art context. Questioning Deleuze' notion of failure(4) I would like to suggest that an alignment exists between the crisis facing the idea of Utopia as a functional form (what constitutes its failure or success?) and the problem of defining contemporary drawings which employ the functionality and reasoning of the diagram as a deliberate conceptual strategy. A strategy by which nothing 'emerges' from the drawing except the drawing itself is ruptured, its 'being' is transported elsewhere and it is transformed into a space of conceptual engagement. In the opening quote Adorno, the Frankfurt school theorist, warns against designing and imagining Utopia as a set of seemingly fixed perspectives, forms and programs. Instead he argues that any imagining of Utopia must consist of many interconnected categories and disciplines. The diagram by Copernicus may not have resulted in 'the transformation of a social totality' but it did cause a revolution.

Notes
1) Adorno and Bloch, extracts from 'Somethings missing: A discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W Adorno on the contradictions of Utopian longing' (1964), Quoted from Noble, R, Utopias, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel, 2009, p 54

2) 'On the Revolutions of the heavenly spheres' was published in 1543. The Heliocentric theory of the universe was to trigger the scientific revolution of the Renaissance (later called the Copernican Revolution) 150 years before Issac Newton.

3) In relation to architectural planning, engineering and scientific innovation as described in this text.

4) See quote in earlier text, note 3 of that section: Deleuze, G (1981), Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation, Translated by D W Smith, London Continuum, 2003, p102

Note 2) Copernicus, 1543

It begins with a piece of carbon copy paper pasted into a flat surface, a 2D space. The copy material functions as it was designed to, its ink is used to construct the form around it. The copy paper is also re-formed materially in the space of the animation, the A4 black ink page, as an object, informs the imagery and the narrative. The rectangle begins to assume the role of an advertising space and projection screen, collaged into the fiction of the drawing. This image is frozen while the form around it evolves through time as each frame is replaced by the next. Photography reproduces the fragments of narrative and duplicates them so the original drawing is erased gradually and replaced by a copy. The relationship between the parts of the whole sequence (the gaps between the frames) is formed, interrupted and broken in succession by another set of images. The construction of new micro-spaces (the parts of the whole, the frames) results in the obliteration of the old ones, this could be called the pentimenti of the animation. The Dadaists described this process as 'corrective ptactice' whereby a copy of an orginal object or image is vandalized. In this case the copy comes from a previous state of the works' being, rather than an external source.

Evaluating a piece of work (as the author of it) so that it functions effectively as art and as research, introduces a kind of ruptured engagement with the making of it. An estranged engagement that mindful connectedness alone doesn’t achieve. In other words the sort of cognitive reasoning that ordinarily finds its way through the process of making meaning (by rupturing something that exists or producing something that previously did not) is not enough in itself; The shape a research 'drawing' might take is then determined by how effective it is at 'being' a drawing (in this case) so the imagery is concentrated by the method used to generate it (might it be more or less effective if the method were painting or film or both?). Two identities are working simultaneously; the first is unselfconscious, in that its 'being' is determined by the existing social, political or aesthetic conditions in which it is produced and it finds itself responding to (conditions that crucially determine the behaviour and function of any art object or situation). The second identity is inherently self aware, mindful of its own discrepancies and its effectiveness in performing this other, primary function (an awareness that must also, by definition, determine its form?).

Carbon drawings

2010-11-16T13:57:00.000-08:00

Sketches

Animated

Collage

2010-08-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

Notebook

2010-04-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

2009

2010-03-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

Animation stills

2009-04-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

The Shipwreck

2009-04-16T03:37:00.000-07:00

Called Home

2009-04-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

Traders

2009-03-30T03:03:00.001-07:00

The Shipwreck (animation stills / Book project)

2009-03-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

Photographs

2009-03-29T14:19:00.000-07:00