Marking the Contemporary

In the last 3 years I've spent a good deal of time drawing and painting.

Though I had been making drawings for a number of years, I was in my art work, work I was exhibiting, collaging, arranging, performing, curating. leaving the drawings aside while using design and code, photography, film, video and found objects for my online, computational films, installation, print and video.

Many of these works started with the idea of art as event, what I called the event of art, as that moment that the art work comes to consciousness, the act is configured and apprehended as that which is art, art as a way, a way to engage and see the world, make the world.


These simple early works, where actions, some times private, sometimes public. For example, stepping quickly under a large bouncing balloon,  myself and the balloon becoming one, or standing in an art fair with a sign as a sculpture, going into rooms and setting up a camera and letting others interact with it, rearranging objects in department stores, in apartments, seeing this next to that, interacting with the passerbys, others in online chats, each was an event of art, when thought of and constituted as such.

These interventions, inventions, conspirings, breakings of the fourth wall and everyday reality and habit, often whimsical and momentary, alone and communal, where the carrying forth of a belief in the power of art to make and remake the world. It was a way to inhabit the world. To retake life. It was the practice of art as the practice of life. Life could be art. Life was art. We had only to enact it as such.

These works, these actions started from the place of embodiment, my body, my breadth, how it moves, why it moves, noting what moves it. How does my body move about, physically and psychically, in what spaces, through what protocols, through what customs. What has marked my body, my person so that it goes in the world this way and not that. I am a body in space. I am a body all-too known to myself wanting to unknow myself. I am a body not knowing myself well enough wanting to know myself knowing. I am a social body, a body formed by the social. My body has the habits of its social contouring, my body which is all of me, my mind, feelings and heart, my body, me has its limits. I have been made by others. I have made myself. I make myself. I make my body. (Stars make my body. Time.) My body is made my others. My body is mine and not mine. I can't see the making of me. I want to see me made. I want to unmake me to be me.  There is no me. What is this body that is all bodies. What is this body that traces back to all things.

The event of art, the site of art, must be my body. Art itself is always a social body. A body of objects and knowledge, cultural and material. My body touched by art. Art touching my body.

The event of art, the site of art, must be the signs and systems from the bottom up to the top down that have made me. That have made everything. Everything is made and can be made again. I can make me. I can unmake the me that has been made. I can see me being made. I can see these letters forming on this page. I can see the words are in english. I know they are english. I speak english. I know that. These words are of a certain type face, Times, normal. My fingers work about this keyboard as I type. This keyboard shapes my fingers. The letters and words are so clear and consistent in type. Each 'e' is like every other 'e'. Each letter that I type comes out perfectly like all the other Times, normal, lower case 'e's'.

E. E. Cummings was the poet of the typewriter. All art is a poetry. Of materials, sense and being. I thought myself a poet of the digital camera. I don't make poetic pictures. Not at all. Well I do, but I am not after poetic pictures. Poetic pictures may be a register of picture taking for me. But like E.E. Cummings, I take pictures of the camera as he did of the typewriter.

 I know how this typewriter works. You can see its type. Its a type of writing the typewriter. It's peculiar, the things it can do.  Digital cameras are peculiar too. I wrote about this in my book Image Photograph. The camera is like my body. It's not simply an extension of my body. Rather I extend myself through its body. Its body, like a simple organism, can do certain things. I am interested in the things it can do.  Its does peculiar things.

So what is it about drawing and painting. What's peculiar about it? It's not newfangled like computation, social practice, participatory art, digital media, environmental art, the archive, performance and so on. Its much-much older than the popular return today of slide projectors, super 8 film, 16m film, over head projectors, micro film and other recently obsolesced media.

Drawing and painting have been have been around forever.  Certainly drawing forever. Both for the last fifty years have been pronounced dead again and again. Dead in the sense that there is no more they can show us. So how to approach drawing or a painting.  No doubt painting is alive as ever and the most highly priced art object on the global market today. But what can I do with it.

When I see a photograph I see the picture taken. Not the photograph but the apparatus of the picture taking. I see the form factor, I read the software, the filter, the situation in front of the camera. I see the camera seeing. Unless its a picture taken like E.E. Cummings used his typewriter I see it as a picture which has a tenuous connection to what it depicts.

I may like its sense of picture taking but I can't read it in its depictions and it startles me that others do. I don't want to see it as a depiction but as an event of picture taking. This is why I can not accept a certain line of contemporary photography and its thinking as it turns on the idea of the camera as an instrument of depiction rather than an event of an instrument of recording the world. The camera does not record it makes a world.

Unlike the typewriter and the camera, drawing turns inward. It does look out onto the world, yes, of course, but its instrument is different. Perhaps the pencil is more like the violin or a wind instrument you play it in time. One note or chord followed by another and another, building up certain patterns.

Drawing is a recording of time, the pressure of the hand, speed, line, paper, surface, attack It is the recording of one's hand, one's body, one's nervous system. It's a signature of the body. Of a temperament. It's not all at once as in taking a picture, releasing the shutter and light exposing the sensor all over, instantly. When I draw, I am taken up in a very different way.  I am distributed over time. I don't arrest an instant of seeing akin to sight, I am recording an optical seeing, a lens seeing. In drawing I make things appear with my hand. It shows me things I could not see, it suggest things. It can follow itself.

Of course an algorithm can make drawings. Only look at the program Processing.  And of course the naturalist would notate, observe and record those things in the world they wanted to make record of, they wanted to record. They wanted to catalog the world, measure it, index it.  We can clearly see that drawing and counting were once the same thing until counting became its own kind of drawing.

Now I don't want to say the camera can't make a line, because it can. Nor that a line can't do the work of depiction. Depiction as in to make a picture, a picture we recognize. Is the camera inherently more naturalistic or empirical than a pencil. More neutral. I am not sure. If we were to compare courtroom sketches of witnesses with courtroom photographs of these same people what would be the difference?

I am a body. My body is a line moving through space. My body is a mass moving. I am a painting.  I am mass and volume. Francis Bacon does not paint faces he paints heads. Lines and masses. Shapes and colors. His is not the event of 'art' but of painting. He has confronted painting. He has found his way in painting.


The event of art concerns the complex of art. The institution of art-reception is its medium. Arts history, its objects, reception and discourse frame the frisson that gives forth the event. That this is art because I say it's art. That I can say it's art is the open and permissive framework of art. Opening a space of art is the event of art. Art with a capital A. How to open art. How to open up to art.

Collaging and arranging. The subject arranged, re-arranged. The subject of Art arranged and re-arranged. How then to stage the situation of drawing or painting. Not to draw but to stage it.  To see drawing. To draw to see inside me. To draw to see the temperament of me. To stage me in drawing. Not the biography of me. Not to illustrate me. To ask drawing what it might find in me.

Perhaps the event of art, is the event of ourselves becoming present to the world, coming into being with it.  The con/temporary might be that somewhere in the nowhere of utopia, that is without innocence. As much as we long and admire the creativity and innocence of children, art remains out of their reach, (we don't want to believe this, I know) as it does not yet with children know itself as such. The event of art then, must both be a knowing event while at the same time not happened yet. We know the event only as it happens.

Drawing, painting, photography, installation, films, it does not matter: each is a way of knowing, becoming, what matters is what we bring to them and what they reveal and how they converse with us.