WRITING AS DRAWING

Ever since stumbling across the work of Paul Klee, I have had an interest in semiotics (the study of signs as a means to communication.) A major influence on my thinking has been the book ‘Legends of the Sign (INTERPRETATIONS IN ART)’ 1991 by Crone and Koerner[1]  in which they discuss Klee’s ‘Signs in Yellow’(fig1). In this work Klee references the creation myth of the Torah. The Torah was said to be formed from a combination of white fire and black fire on vellum. The black fire being what the text says and forming the dark squiggles we read. The white fire surrounded the dark squiggles and was the negative space that we generally ignore when reading. This white fire held the meaning of the text. Like a hyper or meta super text. This I have come to understand is a linking thread that runs through all my work.  

Just before starting the MA my work was focused on my mental health. Trying to make sense of the jumble of ideas and chaotic thoughts in my head. It’s only by completing this focused research that I see the thread running through my work is the search for meaning or ultimate truth.

It was in P Mc Carthy’s drawing from the archive module that I rediscovered my fascination with semiotics. We were tasked with recording the class as an illustrated doodle. Picking out the essences of the class as key phrases and words. I felt frustrated with the division between image and text. But I felt inspired to use this technique to record the lectures and my thoughts on them.

 At first my research for artists that also dealt with language as art and explored the space where writing and drawing overlap turned up the obvious references, the art and language collective and my knowledge of Paul Klee. I looked at Joseph Beuys’ blackboard works and notes.(fig2,3) When exploring work of Cy Twombly I discovered the term asemic writing. Asemic writing which is commonly defined as a “kind of wordless open semantic form of writing.”[2] On the face of it a text without any specific content, it bridges the gap between abstract expressionism and writing. This led me to the work of Mirtha Dermisache(fig 4) and the work of John Court, (fig 5) who explores language through the lens of dyslexia. The work of calligraphy artists, such as Xu Bing and Che Guangwu, who transform elements of traditional writing, until meaning is lost.  I am still exploring this asemic aspect having only recently discovered it.

In my reading I discovered the writings of Nicholas Davey’s thoughts on ‘Art and Theoria’[3] in and its focus on art research as experiential practice. A practice promotes a more subjective method to research. It encourages the value of research by doing, by practicing.  This really clicked with me. And allowed me to focus my research on the exploring the idea of mark making for meaning and the fine line between writing and drawing. As my practice progressed this remit expanded to include, the semiotic nature of mark-making

  In his work Davey talks about how an art work is influenced by two main features .
1) How all art is created with an inescapable weight of historical context.

2) How an artwork is just one facet of a subject and can never say all that can be said about the subject.

•       With the understanding that art is created with a weight of historical context, I chose to think more about the history of my surfaces. A blank page comes weight of history from the Mesopotamians pre cuneiform scratchings into soft clay bricks(fig 6) to Tom Friedman’s ‘1000 hours of staring’.(fig 4)

•       I wanted my surfaces to not only carry this history, but to encourage viewers to think about the history of the paper as an object itself. So, I began to carry my notes with me, making them more of a living document than a treasured artwork.

 In other readings I found the work of Vilem Flusser and his essay on ‘The Gesture of Writing’[4] and Theodor W. Adorno’s work ‘Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible’[5]. Where in Adorno speaks of Klee’s work and its similarity to writing “all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content”

Flusser’s work seems to echo this explaining how the Mesopotamian’s scratching in to clay was a process of removal (fig 5). That writing or mark making for communication was not an additive, constructive process, but a deconstructive one. A creation of voids by removal, and in these voids, these absences we find meaning.

I looked again at my Transmission and Gravity lectures notes and began to consider how to explore the hidden meta meaning within them. I wanted to see or reveal the scaffold of meaning that our marks are built on. How through loss and removal I could reveal something hidden. There is a weird feeling in me that by doing this I might uncover universal truth.

The text in semantics acts as a sign post to intention. The idea of the white and black fire of the Torah says that meaning or intent is found in the voids or negative spaces around the text.[6] The notational marks I made, the underscoring, loops, circles and arrows, (fig 6) isolate and accentuate the space the text occupied. The removal of the text exposes the void, that the text occupied and presents for me an unfiltered view of the universal meaning contained in the text inspired by the lectures. The translucency of the tracing paper adds to this aesthetic. Allowing light and sight to pass through, but with the hint of a membrane of meaning. A trace of the elusive intent obfuscated by the written text.

By removing the text and keeping the notations the tracings became asemic text commonly like the work of Mirtha Dermisache (fig 7) or Cy Twombly (fig 8). I feel my work has more in common with Dermisache’s work, that refuses to be treated as wall art or sculpture than Twombly’s much more painterly interpretation. My work like Dermisache’s feels more like a search for meaning, rather than using the formal graphemes of the written word as compositional and expressive medium, like Twombly’s work.

I came to realise over time that the creation of the lecture notes had a very performative aspect that I had not really considered before. Working within the lecture theatres required me to work with the restrictions of the spaces enforced on me. This recalls for me the performative aspects of John Courts work(fig 9). The way in which he uses objects to restrict and hamper his endurance-based mark making performances. I had to work with the spaces provided, they dictated how I began to use my materials. The paper had to be folded, rotated and flipped over. All of this restricting the size and range of gestures I could make. I was made much more aware of the physicality of my method. How I sat, how I arranged my pencils and pens. These restrictions influenced my marks and the gestures I used to make them. This also added to the history of the paper.

To investigate this further I chose to work on a larger scale. I used the reach of my dominant writing arm to dictate the dimensions of the paper I worked on. I also decided to work on this one sheet, for all the lectures I attended. This decision unfortunately came very near the end of the lectures, so this aspect of the work is not yet fully developed.

Recalling that the some of the original Torah[6] manuscripts lacked vowels, meaning that different vowels could be placed into the text and there by change the interpretation of the text. This special significance to allowed to these vowels intrigued me. They seemed to be key to understanding the Torah, and therefore a key to meaning. I began analysing and plotting the position of the each of the vowels on my large-scale lecture notes. These were again recorded on tracing paper.

I’m still trying to work out a method to represent my analysis, that feels true to the intent. At first, I did this with coloured chalk pens, trying to get a feel for how to document the positions and relationships of the vowels. Each vowel was assigned a colour. ‘A’ was Red, ‘E’ was Yellow, ‘I’ was blue, ‘O’ was green, and ‘U’ was black. (Fig 10)

I played around with making the circles the same size as the letters recorded, keeping the circles as out lines and uniform of size.  I explored ways of connecting the various positions of the vowels. The tracing paper I allowed me to experiment with composition. Using overlapping and the opacity of the tracing paper to create layering and depth. This investigation of how to present the vowels is still ongoing. I am aware that I have not fully explored this aspect in terms of materials. I would like to screen print these, and to see how they look on the laser cutter.  I had to buy bigger rolls of tracing paper as the small sheets I was using were very piecemeal. I bought a roll that was much wider meaning I only had to use two sheets to cover the large lecture notes. (Figs11-15)

Reviewing my larger scale work, and the performative aspect of my practice, I don’t want to follow a traditional performance-based route with the work. It is not about how I activate the space, more a desire to see how I physically use the space around the surfaces I work on. To reveal this gestures that are not recorded on the surface of a page. Flusser in ‘writing as gesture’ lists what he calls the ‘Bricks’ of writing, the essential elements for written communication. The surface, the stain, the tool that makes the stain and so on. In that vein I have started to conceptualise my own ‘bricks’ A surface as a thing we stain with our mark-making. Our mark-makings are our actions. Writing, drawing is not just the marks we make on the page, but also the gestures we perform in space to make the marks.

To begin exploring this idea I attached a camera to a pen I was using to retrace an earlier tracing. This was to try and capture the movements of the pen that are not recorded. Where the pen lifts off the surface and moves through space to descend and mark again.  Like the story of the white and black fire inscribing or ‘onscribing’ as Flusser would have it meaning on the Torah, and the hidden text in the white fire. These motions are never seen performed when we read a text or look at a drawing, yet these movements are essential for communicating meaning.  And contain yet another level of semiotic significance for me to explore. Upon watching the video, I became aware of the audio qualities of the pen ‘hissing’ across the surface of the tracing paper. This is something that I want to more consciously record and experiment with. It also has started me thinking about the sound of the words I recorded, their wave forms and how these occupy space. It is an area that I need to investigate more fully.

In summary I am now at the point where I need to review my work and pinpoint seams of inquiry to explore and more fully develop. To this end I have found this research module both very helpful and frustrating. In that it has helped focus my mind and thrown up lots of artistic distractions. I feel that the way forward for me is to follow the asemic writing aspect of my work, utilising a more intimate performance angle where I record the gestures of the pen on a micro scale and the gestures of my body on a macro scale, somehow combining this with and as of yet undeveloped concept of aural facets of the work.

[1] Rainer Crone; Joseph Leo Koerner, Paul Klee : legends of the sign,  New York : Columbia University Press, ©1991.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing accessed 30th April 2019

[3] Edited By Katy Macleod, Thinking Through Art Reflections on Art as Research, Publisher: Routledge, 2005 Art and Theoria, Nicholas Davies, p20 .

[4] Vilém Flusser The Gesture of Writing (PDF), http://www.flusserstudies.net/node/207

[5] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthic theory, https://www.pdfdrive.com/aesthetic-theory-e18927250.html

[6] Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Kindling The Midrashic Imagination May 16, 2009, https://bethaverim.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/black-fire-on-white-fire.pdf

BIBLOGRAPHY

1 Rainer Crone; Joseph Leo Koerner, Paul Klee : legends of the sign,  New York : Columbia University Press, ©1991

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing accessed 30th April 2019

3 Edited By Katy Macleod, Thinking Through Art Reflections on Art as Research, Publisher: Routledge, 2005 Art and Theoria, Nicholas Davies, p20.

4Vilém Flusser The Gesture of Writing (PDF), http://www.flusserstudies.net/node/207

5 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthic theory, https://www.pdfdrive.com/aesthetic-theory-e18927250.html

6 Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Kindling The Midrashic Imagination May 16, 2009, https://bethaverim.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/black-fire-on-white-fire.pdf