SUSAN MORRIS: UNTITLED MOTION CAPTURE DRAWINGS
LONDON GALLERY WEST, UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER
3rd Feb – 4th March, 2012
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SYMPOSIUM
Involuntary Drawing: Time, Motion Capture, the Body
Venue: Symposium at University of Westminster, The Board Room, 109 Upper Regent Street, London
Time: Saturday, February 18, 2012, 1-6 (followed by reception)
This half-day symposium concerns the ‘optical unconscious’ of movement captured by machines from the earliest experiments of chronophotography to the latest motion capture technology as well as by the automatisms of gesture. The artists discussed are interested in making visible motion that would otherwise be invisible – such as sound waves, trajectories of movement over time, or a ‘bodily unconscious.’ They track movement in the form of photographic or graphic traces. Some artists work with devices originally designed for medical observations, such as the cardiogram or electroencephalogram. In all cases, the trace is one involuntarily laid down — a shadow cast by something below the level of consciousness. This event is supported by the AHRC Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies. Attendance is free but bookings must be made in advance via the gallery. To reserve your place please email a.leeman@westminster.ac.uk. For further information visit westminster.ac.uk/london-gallery-west
Papers:
Margaret Iversen (University of Essex), ‘Index, Diagram, Graphic Trace’
The index and the diagram are, on the face of it, incompatible types of sign. The index has a close, causal or tactile, connection with the object it signifies. The diagram is a sign that involves statistical abstraction, such as trends in the stock exchange or weather. In this lecture, I consider a hybrid type of representation that has aspects of both. The graphic trace is an indexical diagram. It takes from the index a registration of something unique – an impress of an individual – while incorporating the diagram’s abstraction from what is immediately given in perception. The graphic trace in art is explored in relation to the index and the diagram, drawing on an essay by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the chronophotography of J.-E. Marey, the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and the work of artists, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gabriel Orozco and Amalia Pica.
Ed Krčma (University College, Cork), ‘Matisse’s Hand: Authorship and Agency in Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis’
In 1946, the wandering movements of Matisse’s working hand were caught on film and replayed in slow motion. The hand’s extended, silent, unruly deliberations were shocking even to the artist himself. Both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan commented on this footage, the latter posing the following question:
[Merleau-Ponty argues that] what occurs as these strokes, which go to make up the miracle of the picture, fall like rain from the painter’s brush is not a choice, but something else. Can we try to formulate what this something else is?
This paper explores the stakes of the tension between phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches to gesture and to Matisse’s practice in particular. In doing so, Matisse’s ‘plastic signs’ (as he called them) will be set in relation to the work of both Mary Kelly and Susan Morris, both of whom dramatize the truant and involuntary in drawing to articulate models of art-making that not only deliver their own intellectual and aesthetic potency, but also serve to re-cast such earlier graphic practices.
David Lomas (University of Manchester), ‘Medium & Message: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary Instances’
The talk will take as a starting-point Andre Breton’s essay “The Automatic Message” which posits a derivation of Surrealist automatic writing and drawing from mediumism. Within this tradition, the writing or drawing subject is understood as a passive conduit – a medium – for the transmission of messages. Surrealism rejected the idea that the automatic message comes from the beyond and implied that its source lay in the unconscious. The Freudian notion of psychical determinism supported this view. Breton’s well-known metaphor of the artist as a ‘simple recording instrument’ further reinforced our conception of the line as a veridical trace of unconscious forces or phenomena. My paper will look at some contemporary instances of automatic drawing by William Anastasi, Jem Finer, and others that engage these themes but that cause us to rethink the Surrealists’ assumptions. These artists are cognisant of information entropy. They tune in to background noise rather than message. What if Surrealist automatism was all along just a machine (dispositif) for generating randomness?
Anna Lovatt (University of Nottingham), ‘Trisha Donnelly: The Body Electric’
In 2002, Trisha Donnelly rode into the opening of her first solo show on a horseback, dressed in the uniform of a Napoleonic soldier. Announcing that she was ‘only a courier,’ she delivered a decree of surrender, concluding: ‘The emperor has fallen and he rests his weight upon your mind and mine and with this I am electric. I am electric.’ Since then, much of Donnelly’s work has been concerned with the ostensible transmission of messages from distant times and places, encrypted or distorted like the word-of-mouth accounts of her unrecorded performances, which she prefers to call ‘demonstrations.’ Her diverse artistic production, which also encompasses drawings, photographs, sculptures, films and audio-works, thus conflates the spiritualist and technological connotations of the term ‘medium.’ In this paper, I will consider Donnelly’s drawings as the visible traces of invisible, but sometimes audible, phenomena. Whether mechanically generated or inscribed by hand, these graphic traces are presented as involuntary signals, passed through electrical or psychic conductors.
Susan Morris (Artist), ‘Drawing in the Dark’
For my presentation, I will discuss and show images of a recently completed body of work: Untitled Motion Capture Drawings. These were produced by recording, with a high-tech motion capture device, the movements I made while engaged in making another, pre-planned, drawing; they trace a kind of bodily unconscious.
While I was making the pieces from which the Motion Capture Drawings were eventually ‘cast,’ I sensed that, during the drawings’ evolution, my body became inhabited by something outside of the work, other to it. Something accompanied the drawing, either from its immediate environment or related to the circumstances of its production.
The motion capture sessions make visible that which occurs simultaneously and as if underneath a set of marks as they are being laid down; they occupy a space parallel to these marks. In this paper, I explore the idea that what echoed in my body whilst I was drawing is perhaps a product of this space — a dark space, akin to that described by the psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski (in Le Temps Vécu, 1935) as a space of groping, hallucination and music.
Speakers:
Margaret Iversen is Professor and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Art History and Theory, University of Essex, England. She is author of Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, 2007, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993) and Mary Kelly (co-authored with Douglas Crimp and Homi Bhabha, 1997). Recent publications include Chance (2010) and Writing Art History (co-authored with Stephen Melville, 2010). From 2008-2011, she was director of the interdisciplinary AHRC-funded research project, “Aesthetics after Photography.” She is currently writing a book on photography, trace and trauma.
Ed Krčma in Lecturer in History of Art at University College Cork, Ireland. His research focuses upon the history and theory of drawing after 1940, with a particular interest in issues of temporality and embodiment. He has written articles, papers and exhibition catalogues on such artists as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Tacita Dean and Susan Morris. He recently contributed to catalogue for Tacita Dean’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, and is working on a book project concerning the relationship between drawing and film.
David Lomas was born and brought up in Australia where he did his first degree leading to a qualification as a medical doctor. He moved into art history with a Master’s degree, and subsequently a PhD, at the Courtauld Institute.
Lomas was Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies until 2007. He co-edits the Centre’s online journal, Papers of Surrealism, and has organised a number of conferences and other events under the auspices of the Centre, including a conference on the theme of experimentalism in science and avant-garde culture. He co-curated Subversive Spaces at the Whitworth Art Gallery in 2009, which explored legacies of surrealism within contemporary art. In 2008, Lomas was awarded AHRC funding for a three year project on surrealism and sexuality, which resulted in Narcissus Reflected, an exhibition earlier this year at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. He is the author of The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (Yale University Press, 2000) and has a new book in press titled Simulating the Marvellous: Psychological Medicine, Surrealism, Postmodernism (Manchester University Press, 2012).
Anna Lovatt is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham and an editor of the Oxford Art Journal. Her current research focuses on drawing in the context of Minimal, post-Minimal and Conceptual Art and she has published widely in this area, including articles and catalogue essays on the work of Bob Law, Sol LeWitt, Dorothea Rockburne, Anne Truitt and Ruth Vollmer. She is currently working on a book, which focuses on New York-based drawing practices of the 1960s and 70s.
Susan Morris is an artist primarily interested in automatic writing or drawing. Her PhD, On the Blank: Photography, Writing and Drawing, was completed in 2007 at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London. Recent exhibitions include Timewarp, 2009, at the Centre Rhénan d’Arts Contemporains d’Alsace, and Sontag Montag, 2009, at Five Years, London. In 2010 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to make new work for the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Large tapestries woven directly from data tracking her sleep/ wake patterns over a period of twelve months will be installed at the hospital later this year. In 2012 she will be exhibiting her Motion Capture Drawings in solo shows in London and Essex. An essay about the Motion Capture work, ‘Drawing a Blank,’ was published in JCFAR, Volume 20, in 2010.