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editorial contributions
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Performing a drawing moves the process of drawing beyond two dimensions. In the early 70s Rebecca Horn invented drawing tools exploring the process of mark making. Her Pencil mask, 1972 now exists in documentations, film, texts and still images that record the event of her head repeatedly swinging back and forth, dragging the pencils (secured in a head mask), across the paper. The documentation is an important part of the artwork catching sound and movement, otherwise lost to the moment. Rachel Lowe's work A letter to an unknown person number 5 explores the issue of loss; Lowe is sitting in a moving car drawing on the window, the landscape as it flies past. "…the piece is fundamentally concerned with our need or desire to capture a particular moment in time, the impossibility of ever adequately doing so and the resultant sense of loss… "1.Some Performance artists have made works exploring the interaction of practitioner and environment by using their environment as material, drawing on and with the land; such as Anna Mendieta (the Silueta series 1982), in which she used mud and gunpowder to make traces of her body, or Richard Long A Line made by walking where the line he drew was made by his feet flattening the grass, treading a temporary track as he walked up and down. At the ICA's Becks futures exhibition of 2003, Cary Young showed her Lines made by walking (after Richard Long) 2001. Continuing her interest with the behaviour and strategies of the corporate world; Young dressed in a business suit, walked a short path through commuters on Waterloo Bridge. Pacing back and forth against the flow, the crowd had to make way for her; their avoidance drawing a temporary line captured in the visual documentation. Belgian artist Francis Al˙s's walks sometimes perform drawing. Al˙s says "I try to make the long walks simple so the action can be retold as a story…". In The Green Line (June 2004), Al˙s walked the Jerusalem Green Line, a 70 meters wide no mans land created by lines drawn on a map at the 1948 Armistice talks, when Israel and Jordan agreed a provisional border. Holding a can of green paint, he drips a thin line as he walks. Mapping his path, leaving a trace of his presence. He will not have been present but he will have made a gift by not disappearing without leaving a trace. But leaving a trace is also to leave it to abandon it not to insist upon it in a sign. 2Since seeing a photograph of paint spat hands on a South American rock, I have been fascinated with the notion of trace, and must include here an extraordinary story concerning an unintentional performance drawing and evidence of presence. In 1986, remains of the Franklin expedition (John Franklin was searching for a trade route to the Orient, through the North West Passage) were found in Canada's North West Territories. Although the Franklin expedition had been lost in the 1840s, the bodies of the expedition members had nourished the ground where they had lain so that the plants still grew richer, showing silhouette traces of their bodies in bright green against the barren Arctic tundra; a body shape of plants, echoing a presence long past.
On New years Eve 2004, I dragged a lump of raw English chalk tied to a rope, down the length of Manhattan. Beginning at Broadway Bridge (Northern Manhattan), I walked, drawing a temporary white line, 16 miles down Broadway to Battery Park. The practice of contemporary performance (technology and documentation) is new to me, but in retrospect I think I've been performing without documentation of myself, other than the drawings I made on site, for over twenty years. What I did at College in the 80s was called Location drawing. I saw it as an opportunity to go out and be in the elements, to be in the landscape and put that experience of physicality into my work- thereby endeavouring to fill my drawings with a sense of place and my exhilaration of that process. In the Arctic I stood on a plank overhanging the ships side and painted the bow cracking through pack ice. In Papua New Guinea I wore a grass skirt and looked like an elephant gone bush on a coral rock island. My location drawing experiences read now as anecdotal performances 20 years away and without documentation.
December 31st 2003 (the day I walked Broadway) was a mild bright day. The cultural and financial differences of the neighbourhoods were startlingly diverse in the 16 or so miles I traced. I became acutely aware of ambient sounds - vehicles, voices, footsteps, trailing chalk, animals, children, shoes, mobile phones, sirens, horns, engines, exhausts, rattling subway trains, and the different types of sidewalks. My drawing on Manhattan was a trace of my presence, an exploration of the possibility of drawing of a static surface, and a curtsey to William Pope L. (American multidisciplinary artist currently making a work called The great white way, a five-year crawl up Broadway 22 miles from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx.) 3 Later in January 2003, during a performance workshop at Tate Modern (taught by performer and writer Joshua Sofaer4), I made six short works intending to bring drawing into performance, while also addressing my concern with the difficulty of being an artist today amongst the Fine Art Icons at the Tate. In one, I laid a roll of paper across the gallery floor, passing Rodin's Kiss, crawled on my hands and knees, tracing my path in pencil, from one end to the other. In another, I held up a sheet of paper next to a Picasso portrait of a lady and traced around my outline. While doing research for my Masters paper (Fine Art Dept Central Saint Martins 2004), I found reference to a walk that Hamish Fulton and Richard Long had made as students on the vocational sculpture course at C.S.M. in the 60s. I contacted Fulton and Long and asked them what their route had been. They told me they had walked north along the roman road until sunset, by which time they'd reached Radlett. I built a harness to hold my video camera, so that it could film both the view ahead of me, and my hand making a drawing of the view ahead, as I walked. I was documenting the documentation. Remembering Rachel Lowe's work, which tried to capture the moving landscape, it was my own continual movement that brought the impossibility of capturing a view into the work. Yet it was all captured in the form of documentation, and I had left no Trace. Last November I watched Joan Jonas perform her work Lines in the Sand; the shape the scent, the feel of things (Tate Modern 2004). This is her multimedia dialogue based on the poet Hilda Doolittle's Helen in Egypt (Doolittle's reworking of the story of Helen of Troy). Jonas combined projection, narration and performative drawing, into an extraordinarily rich and satisfying experience. Images from a live camera on stage merged into projected moving footage of a mountain landscape, then back to the stage imagery, and again off to images of a Casino in Vegas. All the while Jonas, with long stick, drew white lines onto black paper in images of Egypt and directional map patterns to step around. Lines in the sand wove together the ordinarily separated aspects of performance practise (projection, narration and performative drawing), while responding to her environment. Jonas teetered on the brink of theatre without actually falling into the confines of formulaic staging. Jonas's use of mark making materials, woven so finely together with moving imagery, was an inspiring example of performance drawing. From Location drawing to Performance drawing, exploring the process of drawing in my own work, has broadened the possibilities at each turn. My methodology now involves movement of place, duration of time and selection of sound and imagery. The documentation of the performance trace becomes a selection of serendipitous vignettes, and by tracing my own presence, I also trace the presence of others. In the action of performance the practitioner and subject positioning is released, the dialogue becomes interactive; a response between practitioner and subject, one impacting, the other replying and sometimes visa versa.
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