Narratives and Spaces

While making my cine frame pieces, I have been thinking about an essay I wrote earlier in my degree about Cornelia Parker. I love her work, and my essay looked at several pieces, including one series that connects strongly with my cine project. Parker made her Pornographic Drawings, 1996 from damaged celluloid film: they were Rorschach blots made with dissolved video porn films that had been confiscated and shredded by Customs and Excise (Brett, G. and Watkins, J. (1996) Cornelia Parker: Avoided Object. Cardiff: Chapter.)

These stains were the residue of many acts: performance recorded on the tapes, video recording, the decisions to make the films, and decisions to confiscate them, their removal, shredding, mixing with ferric oxide, chemical dissolution… Parker refined these to small, elegant images which appear to condense lots of processes, and be more about those processes than meaning. At the same time Parker used Rorschach blots that are icons of subconscious visual association with personal meanings and narratives. She added the explanatory words “suspended in solvent” to her 1996 work’s title, while her blots record her own gentle action that is innocent compared to the pornographic activity that was recorded and suspended in the original videos. Although her Drawings look dry and elegant and starkly simple, they fill our heads with sweaty action, bodily fluids, different characters, moral judgements, ideas about individual freedoms and society’s rules. Lots of different narratives, in fact.

So last weekend, when I visited my daughter in Manchester, I was very excited indeed to go and see Cornelia Parker’s work at the Whitworth. I didn’t expect to find any, because I’d heard the exhibition included very recent work but yes, she had included some Pornographic Drawings, 2005!

The drawings are on a bigger scale than I imagined, but just as clean and elegant, which is at odds with what they send through your mind as you consider them. Parker is a genius with her own editing. She chooses objects and words that are evocative in particularly specific ways. My cine frames evoke a cluttered range of narratives. Is this bad? I think people’s heads are generally cluttered with narratives that operate in a very organic UN-elegant way. All the same, I wish I had Parker’s clarity of thought. I think it is her method that is personal to Parker, not her subject matter. The works in this show are examples of her ideas and process, and I think the most personal thing about them are that they illustrate her sense of fun and the ridiculous.

The Whitworth has reopened this February after a huge refurbishment and this was Saturday, so the gallery was heaving. It was wonderful to see so much of Parker’s work in one place, and discover new pieces.

I had never come across her installation, Jerusalem, 2015, which, together with her earlier related piece, Black Path (Bunhill Fields) 2013, as the catalogue says, “carry within… form and material the echo of the Jerusalem street and place it wherever and whenever, making those places reverberate with its peripatetic context.” (Balshaw, M., Tóibin, C., Griffiths, M. (2015) Cornelia Parker, The Whitworth, The University of Manchester.) Blake wrote the Poem Jerusalem about the myth that Christ visited Britain, and Parker had cast the path in Blake’s burial ground. Our mental vision of a burial ground is a deeply peaceful place. In the gallery’s Watercolours room in a neighbouring room, I found several Blake watercolours. We use Blake’s poem to symbolise a nostalgic comfortable feeling of national identity and place. And of course I was in the city of his Dark Satanic Mills… I’ve been to Jerusalem, the centre of so much conflict, and its paths are teeming with people, so it was stirring to see Parker’s casts hovering just off the floor, ready to trip the crowds rushing round this exhibition. These pieces were all about reverberation!

I think I have to include some sort of installation with my cine film project, but what?! More thinking needed.

One of the things that underlies my interest in the cine films I’m using in my project is that they evoke lots of narrators who are unlikely to be remembered over time. Parker is a female artist who manages to give life to perspectives and narratives that would otherwise be lost. Damp grimy Manchester was unusually resonant that Saturday!

I have been looking again at Francis Alÿs’ tracing paper drawings. I considered these at some time ago when I was busy with the drawing module of my degree. Then I was struck by the naïve style of his drawings, and the way many seem to be drawn on patched fragments of paper. I was drawing on lots of different surfaces at the time.

I may have read Midori Matsui’s editorial in my copy of Vitamin D (Dexter, E. (2006) Vitamin D; New perspectives in drawing. London: Phaidon Press.) back then, but re-reading it, and looking at how Alÿs uses tracing paper drawings and paintings in the library books I borrowed (Godfrey, M., et al. (2010) Francis Alys; A story of deception. New York: Museum of Modern Art. and Medina, C. et al. (2007) Francis Alys. London: Phaidon.), I can see lots of connections with my project.

* ‘a state of anonymity’ – Matsui says Alÿs uses this as an ‘escape from ‘historically determined cultural identities and prescribed social behaviours’. I hadn’t analysed this before, but it is very important to me that the people in the images I use keep their anonymity, and that I keep my own knowledge of the history, culture and social elements of them detached from the work I am making. I think that Alÿs does this for political reasons. He seems to be driven by a need to place an anonymous individual into existing history/culture/social behaviour in order to evaluate the meaning of self and location. I am doing it because I want to look at the human impulse to construct meaning by imposing ideas about history/culture/social behaviour. By keeping things anonymous, it seems to me that the human experience of instinctively imposing those concepts of ‘sense’ on an image can become apparent.

* Fragments – Matsui connects Alÿs’ use of fragments with Walter Benjamin’s definition of modern allegory. I shall look at what Benjamin says another time. But I can identify with Matsui’s conclusions about Alÿs’ use of recurrent postures in his characters, that they ‘together compile an index…that the imagined nature of a memory… increases its certainty in one’s mind…’ Although it is actual physical postures that Alÿs repeats, I think Matsui’s observation sums up my reason for repeating the same lost film frames. I’m repeating them to invoke the human need to make sense from them, and by doing so, to ‘increase (their) certainty in one’s mind.’

* ‘simulation of remembered personal myths – Matsui says Alÿs drawings are ’empty vessels to be filled with meaning’ to create this simulation. Alÿs’ repetitive fragments form a kind of narrative. I can see that I’ve been doing something similar with my repeated reworks of the lost film frames.

Alÿs’ techniques are interesting. The patching of his fragments makes you imagine an important significance for his bare sketch of the falling dog, or pacing ‘prophet’. The man half-shrouded by what looks like a giant newspaper seems to be engaged in a purposeful struggle.
I could try that with my images, but so far the organic uncontrolled tearing of wetted paper in my paintings seems more relevant to the uncontrolled instinctive human need to make meaning where it is lost.

Alÿs painted this image on tracing paper:

This is an image full of suggestive repetitions. The pacing people are all posed slightly differently, hinting at different motives and moods. The artist’s lined marks from their feet towards the bottom of the drawing emphasise his characters’ repeated movements, but also make it look like Alÿs has painted lines, adding his own repetitions to the image, and underlining the effect he wants. I haven’t tried these sorts of repetitions in my work so far, but may incorporate them in future.

Alÿs’ paper painting is magically Un-torn! He has used oils, which could account for it. Or maybe his ‘tracing paper’ is actually ‘greaseproof’? I know he started using tracing paper because of his origins as an architect. Maybe there is a higher-grade paper I haven’t found yet?! I will try to find out.

I stretched the tracing paper, and it was surprisingly absorbent, and VERY fragile. Then, when it had dried, I tried painting on it again. The same image, which is interesting to me, but might be getting a bit dull for anyone reading this – sorry!

I very gently used sticks of watercolour ink after re-wetting the paper for this image. You can’t smudge them like pastels, as the sticks are very hard, but they did crumble a little. The sticks also dragged the paper and it split. This looks stiffer than the pastel version. I’ll put it against the light.

It is far more translucent than I thought it would be, and than it is on a solid back. It is also looser and more abstract than the pastel. But because I couldn’t smudge the inks together, there is no subtlety to the colours. I’m not sure about the split paper though. I like the fact you can see through it, but it is looks too straight and deliberate.

I made one in watercolour. The wetness seemed to dissolve the paper! But I wanted to see how it would work once the paper dried, so I kept going. Here it is drying out on its board:

Once it dried, the breaks in the paper remained. I rather like these, as they echo the damaged celluloid in the original film frame. I didn’t make them by pulling the paper – the paper sprang the gaps because of the way its own fibres lay, I think. They make the paper almost lacy. Here it is against the light:

I’m more pleased with this one. The colours are a bit sober. I also wonder whether my handling of the paper made it more likely to dissolve, so I paint another more solid looking stretched sheet, then wait to see what it does.

The paper behaves almost the same way. I love these colours, but the tears aren’t as wilful-seeming. Against the light, they really do seem to relate to the damaged cine frame and its lost narrative by being so fragile and wafer-ey (if that makes sense?)

Watercolour on tracing paper didn’t go well. I hadn’t stretched the paper, because I was in a rush, and it buckled horribly as I got it wet. The paper is far less absorbent than watercolour paper, or any paper really, apart from greaseproof paper – so it was very difficult to judge how the paint would behave as I applied it. So I made a sketch of the same image I’d done in the soft pastels, and waited for it to dry.

Then I held it up to a sunny window, as I’d done with the soft pastel version.

Yuk! Maybe stretching the paper and wetting it before painting might have helped, but this sketch is far from what I wanted to make. Every brushstroke is a blob, and there is little variety to the density of colours or texture, and not much contrast between light and dark – the paint is too translucent. I’m feeling an idiot – but should really get a grip and try this again. I have a vague idea that something interesting will develop from this, but re-making the same image again and again, when this has turned out such a mess, does seem futile.

I’ll have another go, but will stretch and wet… (see above!) and if it’s still rubbish, I will move on to another medium.

I looked at the dried fixed pastel image against a white wall, trying to decide whether it changed the drawing’s effect.

The wall isn’t reflective enough. I can’t really see much light coming through. So I try it taped to a window.

Then the sun came out:

I really like the grainy uneven quality that comes out when light is behind this image. Without the light it is much flatter. On a wall, or my drawing board, all you can see is the pastel powder, so the drawing is dense and velvety, but flat.

Then I tried the same image, but in watercolour paint on the tracing paper.