Four's (part of) a Crowd...(3)

graphite, putty eraser & watercolour/30x20cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 16/06/08

Continuing 'the project within The Project', the 3rd drawing 'sectioned' from the football crowd original newspaper photo, reading to the immediate right of the previous entry, the cellular nature of the grid format helping the part serve for the whole, featuring as it & each does the same essential components of a person-framed-in-a-box although each face & expression is of course individual: the variety within the basic limitations serving to provide continued inspiration & freedom of expression.

This particular work (part & whole) enables me on this occasion to mention & cite as influential the work, & particularly the drawings, of Zak Smith, an artist discovered through his inclusion in the compendious survey of contemporary practice 'Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing' as previously mentioned.


Subsequently, suitably impressed, especially by the archive of work available to view on Zak Smith's own website, I invested in his book 'Pictures of Girls', which features a fine representative selection of the artist's work in various projects & allows access to a suitable study of his technique - labour-intensive, highly-detailed ink drawings with acrylic washes on plastic-coated paper which gives them a very distinctive, wonderfully fluid appearance - & equally individual style, what one might term essentially punkish & contemporary - peopled by characters very much of 'the now' - yet suffused with & quoting all manner of art & other visual references such as Klimt, Art Nouveau, Japanese graphics (contemporary & historical) & the western comic tradition, resulting in a densely-patterned, exuberantly Baroque aesthetic. Similarly, the form that many of the drawings take as individual, discrete parts of series references again graphic novels & both cinematic & literary narrative, works teeming, overflowing, with life.


The particular project of Zak Smith's to which I'd like to draw attention with which to contextualize the football crowd drawing(s) is his illustrative interpretation of Thomas Pynchon's vast, ornate novel 'Gravity's Rainbow'.
As may be observed below, this work, with a drawing produced to refer to some aspect of the text of each single page of the novel's total of 760, has, in addition to being presented in book form, like the novel it illustrates, been exhibited in its entirety, as a whole entity, where one might choose to view it for itself in such a form, & narratively, page by page, drawing by drawing, cell by cell of its grid format, or otherwise free-associate between various separate drawings, up, down, backwards, forwards, diagonally, jumping across at will, reading them in a very postmodern, non-linear, rhizomic fashion.


Also included is an example of a couple of the separate pages of the project, again illustrating the artist's general technique & the method - which has directly informed the football crowd drawings - of applying local colour to certain areas of the otherwise starkly monochrome drawings.
With the football crowd drawing, it seemed an obvious choice to primary-colour the various headgear & replica shirts of the supporters.



Soundtrack:


White Stripes 'Elephant' & 'De Stijl'
Elliott Smith 'From a Basement on the Hill'
Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man 'Out of Season'

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’