Current Exhibition

In this project, conceived by curator Martin Rasmussen, the art collaboration AS (Alexander Hidalgo and Monika Oechsler) seek to explore what drawing might be when employing both the imagination and the body, whilst walking and in the studio. Visitors may call in to C4RD during normal opening hours to see the artists at work and watch the work as it develops. AS seeks in this project to examine methods of walking as drawing and drawing together as drawing, and to consider how these processes might change our perceptions and our understanding of drawing; address social art practices through awareness of impulses provoked by drawing collectively; to emphasise that when we draw, we are ‘split’ between body and mind, between the immaterial and the material; and how far these works might convey the experience of subjectivity. 

 

“If we are to consider walking as drawing then we must recognise the rhythm of our body, the surfaces that we move across and the interaction between our muscles and those surfaces. In this way the physical experience is crucial to the process, we can become a tool temporarily marking a route, exploring the notion of drawing through muscle memory.  The walking process will physically gather and memorise the ground’s affects on the body, on returning to the studio this information will be remembered and materialised into marks on paper. While walking slows the drawing down, walking also opens the studio up materially, conceptually and experientially.

 

Drawing together challenges our subjective position as author and our creative moment is disrupted by having to negotiate aesthetic territorial and material decisions. Such power struggles negate collaborative drawing as a common practice.  Individually we are also confronted by a dilemma; the blind spot in the middle of our vision forces us to rely on our memory to complete our picture. The group work will metaphorically and literally emphasise this ‘gap’; and as a recognition of the problematic condition of the blind spot and memory, the group will address this split and in so doing confront this issue.”

- Martin Rasmussen

Centre for Recent Drawing is open during exhibitions 12 - 6pm from Wednesday to Friday at 2 - 4 Highbury Station Road, Highbury Islington, London. Please visit the residency 4 August - 2 September 2010 or review the work at the finish of the residency at the reception 7 - 9pm Thursday 2 September 2010. C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530, and would particularly like to acknowledge of ARTUPDATE.COM/.

Walking, drawing and the social production of city space

by Alan Gillingwater

Curatorial Assistant C4RD

“Body and things correspond to each other as the two halves of an orange”

                                                                                        Merleau-Ponty

The spatial, as object of study for the geographer, has been subject to some thorough re-conceptualisations in the last few decades. Once, space was simply a container, where human activity took place. The scientific geographer peered at it, like the technician peers at a microscope slide in a laboratory, from some unspoken view from nowhere. Space was understood in geometric terms; rationally deduced values ascribed differentiation.

More recently, geographers have liked to understand space in more dynamic, colourful terms. Understandings of social space have been forwarded, whereby the subjective nature of the human experience of space is taken seriously. Here, human activity and its material surroundings become seen as more interlaced and co-constitutive. Space, rather than simply container, is actively produced and given meaning through human activities, and, in turn, in a kind of dialectic or feedback loop, the spaces produced frame further human activities. This is what is meant when geographers talk about the ‘social production of space’.

If google maps are the heir to the throne of a traditional Euclidean geography’s conceptualisation of space, how then can more socially and experientially based conceptualisations be imagined? Bringing the experiment of walking as drawing and the idea of the social production of space into communication with each other may offer some glimpses.

The art collaboration AS, during their residency at C4RD, has explored the practice of drawing as informed by the imagined and embodied experience of walking in the city. The art created can be understood as emerging through the challenging idea of walking as drawing, which I like to think of as a radical yet playful literalization of Paul Klee’s famous aphorism that ‘drawing is taking a line for a walk’. Whilst the objective mapmaker places him/herself outside of the frame of vision to survey the spatial, the artist as walker is subsumed, in amongst the unfolding life of the city, part of the continual processes of humans producing the spaces that they are part of. Rather than envisaging the city as a to-be-known entity ‘out there’, the city is re-examined through the senses, imagination and body as a place that has been, is and will be. Sides to the city usually occluded by mapping – the magical, secret, uncanny, spiritual or occult – are given voice. Seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, the artist here is very much part of the social production of space and as such, perhaps something of the process can be expressed from within it.

The objects, images, writing, artefacts, maps, memories and lists compiled by the AS residency point to drawing as a non-pictorial kind of mapping out of space alive to its social production. As such, certain issues emerge. Whilst the traditional map claims an objectivity exterior to the world it contends to represent, drawing as walking would seem to present its conceptual antonym – an exploration of subjectivity in the social production of space. However, can we ever leave the objective reasoning of the Euclidean mapmaker behind completely? The walker, if he or she is to move through the city in any intentional way, relies on (conscious of it or not) abstracted spatial knowledges whether it be estimations of metrically measured out distances; loci of urban features; codings of transport networks; or locating the places referred to in imaginations or memories. Walking must involve a subtle distribution of objectivities and subjectivities together, where, at once lost and found, we oscillate between experiencing and knowing the city.