Bookish

graphite/20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' G2, 12/03/08

The source image of this transcription is a ‘photograph’ – convincingly real enough in appearance - of something that doesn’t actually exist, at least yet, the subject being, rather, a proposal by the Chinese architect Zhang Ke for the ‘Book Tower’, two blocks of urban dwellings. The appeal of such a subject, such an architectural idea, at least aesthetically, should be obvious to a bibliophile, although I entertain serious reservations as to whether you’d ever get me up in one of those things, were it ever to be realised. There’s something obviously Cubist about the look of such structures, the forms, planes, appearing fractured, suggesting perhaps the shifting of plates over each other, as though one occupies the privileged position of being able to view the towers from a variety of angles at once - viewing them in the round, in motion, when one considers how architecture is usually experienced, especially in pictorial form, from a fixed perspective - which is at the same time unsettling, somehow potentially vertigo-inducing, through unfamiliarity & the sense of movement, of slippage, of the whole(s) being on the point of collapsing over, into each other. As indeed a stack of books might do, something I’m constantly aware of, given the stacks of books existing on the floor here due to limited proper storage space…

On the subject of books, I’m currently consulting ‘Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing’ a great deal. A broad survey of contemporary drawing practice in all its many guises, the book contains a fine introductory essay by Emma Dexter, locating the place of drawing as a fundamental human activity, how it communicates, an overview of its history, its development & the variety of roles it occupies in contemporary creative practice, all most informative & thought-provoking. I’m particularly interested in the distinctive nature of drawing as an artistic activity & the process of doing so – I love the notion proposed within the essay of the incomplete nature of drawing(s), how it/they are always in a state of becoming & remain so, as opposed to painting which might be expected to strive for & arrive at some sense of completion, although I do subscribe to the idea of Andrew Benjamin of ‘the work of art’, something along the lines where any artwork remains in a constant & enduring state of ‘becoming’, its sense of closure forever deferred due to art’s dependence on the viewer to complete the circle of the work it performs.

Of the featured artists, I’m engaged in aesthetic terms not least by the work of D-L Alvarez, producing ‘pixellated’, grid-format drawings based on archive media photographs of, for instance, aspects of the history of such culturally familiar & significant subjects as the so-called ‘Manson family’ that of course formally reference Modernist pictorial concerns through the explicit statement of the grid, thus recalling the failure of the project of artistic Modernism, occurring at around the same time many of the romantic cultural ideals of the period were turning sour, embodied by such events as those surrounding the Manson clan.


D-L Alvarez '\\\' 2003
graphite/38.75x27.5"


D-L Alvarez 'Mary Mary' 2004
graphite/(in two parts) 21.5x15.375" each


D-L Alvarez 'Rise' 2005
graphite/20.625x28.25"

In a related manner, an artist such as Paul Noble has long been engaged with similar subject matter through his construction of his intricately-detailed, meticulously drawn ‘Nobson Newtown’, an idealistic, utopian social project that has become instead something of a doomed, dystopian nightmare as such are wont to do. Through this, we might link back to the drawing of Zhang Ke’s proposed ‘Book Tower’ if considering the trend in the UK in the 1960s & 70s to replace whole streets, networks of dwellings, communities, with high-rise developments that ultimately seemed to create more social problems than they solved.


Paul Noble 'Nobson Central' 2000
graphite

Again, it’s interesting, in such a context, that Emma Dexter’s essay foregrounds the romantic, subjective nature of a significant amount of drawing practice & how such are regaining a degree of currency in artists’ practice, an aspect particularly facilitated by drawing, & not least the immediacy of its nature, as a means of communication & expression, & its ability to explore & propose any manner of alternative, imaginative realities, how, following Paul Klee’s lead, ‘taking a line for a walk’ can lead just about anywhere one wishes or dreams.


Also, for some fictional relief, but nonetheless requiring equally close reading & concentration, Georges Perec’s ‘Life a User’s Manual’, coincidentally discovered in Oxfam shortly after having encountered a mention, recommendation, of it, ‘somewhere’. Although only a short way in thus far, it has engaged my attention from the beginning, itself describing the nature & form of a jigsaw puzzle which the subsequent narrative then takes, being divided into sections containing a series of short chapters, short stories each, which overlap, interlace & interlock in the manner of a jigsaw. The story is set in a building, divided into apartments (pieces of the whole), which, in a grid form (wouldn’t you just know it - note also the cover design of the edition in question, of grids within a grid...there's no escape!), the narrative describes in a seemingly random fashion, cataloguing the contents of these rooms which in their turn tell stories of the lives of their owners, the inhabitants, which overlap each other in the service of a grander, related narrative: for example, one of the (apparently major) characters is a watercolour artist who, over a period of many years, has sent a series of paintings made on his global travels (in the company of his factotum, another of the building’s residents) to another of the building’s residents assigned the task of converting these into jigsaw puzzles for, upon his return, the artist to reassemble.

Soundtrack:


Rachel Unthank & the Winterset ‘The Bairns’
Belle & Sebastian ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ & ‘The Life Pursuit’