The Mechanism of New Art
Drawing has always produced inflating surfaces in arts, because drawing is about vision and visuality, about pleasure, definition and out-of-space structures. Interpreting a drawing is like interpreting a dream – creating confusion, allowing mistakes, fragmentizing and displacing – though, always remaining positive and hiding the boring immediate reality. A drawing is never sheer drawing, a drawing is the after-math of a definite life-style. One can contemplate, destroy, interpret or pre-construct drawings, but can never posses them.
We hide wishes and discontents in drawings, for we are afraid of darkness and sometimes, just of waking up. We enjoy feeling incomplete and out of order as much as we enjoy creating fine and tactile constructions.
Each artist bears the responsibility of discovering strategies of seeing and of feeling, but it would be so sad to try to re-make the history of arts. Art manifestos are back in fashion, artists exchange rock star-behaviours, Roswell-type of happenings occur every day and the quest for land is stronger than ever.
The new wave of drawing re-establishes methods used in psycho-analysis, fashion-design, exploration, landscape theory and computer imagery. The new drawing generates satisfaction and compulsory peripheral reactions – tenderness, aggressiveness, trust, humour, obsessions, love, purity. Due to this, we’ve discovered different channels of feeling and of possessing what we see and what we refuse to see.
Anca Mihulet
The Madness of Seeing
Drawing anticipates what the other techniques discover bravely. Starting with the methods of drawing from the history of arts and going up to the absent and free drawing from nowadays, the confrontation appears in content and in positioning. Drawing is privileged. Drawing can function with the elements thought and determined before, depending on the effect they really create. But in the same time, drawing can deliver immaterial feeling, ambiguous volume.
There is a certain aggressiveness in the subversion of the drawing, but in the same time, there is protest and explanation.
Drawing has the privilege of the model conceived as a game. From the projects of modernity so dear to the 18th century, drawing provokes philosophical discussions in fascinating gardens, while sitting on tables covered with white damask and silver glasses. There is a severe tranquility and a madness of seeing that surrounds drawing. Drawing is always freely associated with analysis, with accuracy, with solitude. Disposing of an enormous time reserve, drawing can create almost trenchant tensions. Each detail includes a deal of complete power.
In the today confused world, drawing can make use of a risky visual vocabulary. A visual irrationality, that changes intuition and delivers melancholy. But in the frames of our own rationality, drawing must be perceived not like a putting up-to-date, but like a re-thinking.
Liviana Dan
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Monday, August 6, 2007
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Friday, August 3, 2007
ARTWORKSHOP 2007, CATCHING PASSAGES
ARTWORKSHOP 2007
CATCHING PASSAGES
“A sketch is generally more spirited than a picture”, Diderot
For this edition of the Artworkshop the choice of topic and debate was “Catching Passages”.
Initially the idea came from the statement that the artist today has become increasingly nomadic.
For some artists it seems there is no further need for studios. More and more artists give up the studio to carry out artistic projects, to make installations "in situ" or projections, and so to show immaterial artwork.
With the emergence of mixed and new media the typical studio based practice is often abandoned. But drawing is a constant presence. In all that interdisciplinary stuff it remains a basic means. It follows any project and it makes it possible to outline, to fix quickly decisive as well as personal moments.
In the “Renaissance” the idea of "Disegno" (or drawing) was a means of communicating a possible idea or artwork, (in particular the reflections of Giotto in Boccacios’ Decameron who questions the need to realize our thoughts or ideas). Today, this idea still remains. “Drawings” have become a way to translate visually (through the most diversified media) the constant mutation of the real and the virtual world.
Drawing intervenes in photography through its graphic sets, or in video in the form of animation or even in three-dimensional spaces. Drawing today is a direct step towards demonstrating both reasoning and feeling, and is not always limited to conceptualization.
Drawing is entirely part of the realization and the production of artwork; it is autonomous.
The French word for drawing, ‘dessiner’, is a term that expresses "a graphic approach, chromatic and “fine art related” and suggests representation and design. The pun "Dessins/Dessein” (drawing/intention) plays with the notions of intention and gesture, reflection and expression.
What is implied in this pun is that drawing is a process of experimentation between perception, abstraction and interpretation. That drawing is constructed and improvised. In the process of drawing the interior and exterior cannot be separated, even when we use cultural references or place our glance on ourselves.
The English word "draw" highlights the passage, the influence, the movement, the action of something; one can withdraw or draw something out ... one extracts from an object a subject, a reality or an imagination.
In German "zeichnen" as in French "dessiner" has to do with the sign. Both words “Zeichen”, “signe” reinforces the idea of direct communication, of a trace of a symbolic system, a construction or a spontaneous course of thought.
Both the action of drawing and the etymology of drawing (the medium and the message) are inherent in this workshop, which from the first hour was build around decentralization, dislocation, exchange and process.
In the title "Catching Passages" there is a consideration of the ephemeral, the unfixed and the action, e.g. "catching, sketching, etching..." which emphasizes this notion of the nomadic.
In all workshops there is a process of deconstructing and rebuilding ideas and representations, in this years workshop however this becomes the main subject.
Quoting the application form: “The art workshop 2007 deals with notions of “hereness” and “thereness”. Between Luxembourg, Sibiu and the artists’ place of residence, the workshop aims at triggering interplay between the known and the unknown, the local and the universal, between inside and outside, absence and presence.
Focusing on the art practices of drawing, cartoon and graphic design, the art workshop questions the relationships between objects, activities and spaces in the context of displacement. For many artists, art today is less a question of appropriating identities than a process of documenting the act of passing from local to global (and vice versa). This entails and requires a dynamic and interactive debate, which is reflected in the artwork itself.”
An international jury selected the twelve young artists and art students from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Romania and Luxembourg on file.
After a two-week stay in Luxembourg, the participants continued their work in Sibiu for another two weeks. The work realized during the Kufa (Kulturfabrik) end of season closing party was the first opportunity “to create a context where pluralism and cultural differences melt, and reflections and experiences of art in progress ripen and emerge.”
The artists had to react on local contexts and to comment on situations by making graphic statements.
The expressive drawings of Casper Pauli, inspired by the evocative architecture of the industrial city of Esch were interfered by the imaginary displacement of Marco Colombaioni’s cinematic icons. Like a revisited “automatic writing”, elffriede’s work could be inspired by Foucault’s’ concept of heterotopias. The act of spontaneous drawing becomes a sort of simultaneously mythical and real contestation of the space in which we live. This complex statement is enhanced by the ironic tautological effect of the light bulbs of Sebastian Moldovan.
The drawings of Stina Fisch, sewn directly on to the leaves of a plant, are a voluntary act to recall metaphorically the wounds of the past. In another register, Mike Lamy presents a very conceptual and minimalist work using dots to point at the space, where as Polly Read draws subtly the arches of the Bridge Adolph and explores the interaction between construction and nature. It is through a common research around the centaur that Paola Müller and Carol Radziszewski organize their large fresco, which shows to some extent the passage of the myth in the personal reality of the artists. The draftsmanship of Adrien Tirtiaux as a re-appropriation of a place that in turn becomes mythical. With small drawn tents, like the sketches of children, Raffaella Crispino expresses with poetry the artistic and cultural nomadism. Always by keeping the subtlety of the feature, Karo Szmit draws up an interesting typology of water towers and other architectural elements, like observations on the passing of time they refer to her displacement to Luxembourg.
In Sibiu, the participants had to prove their curatorial and editorial skills by producing together an exhibition and a publication that retraced the “caught” passages. As I speak now, this is still in process.
As a coordinator of the workshop I hope that all these reflections and experiences, nourished by the guest artists Chad Mc Cail, Koo Jeong-A, Dan Perjovschi and Jonathan Meese, will help them as much as possible to face new situations in their artistic lives.
Paul di Felice
CATCHING PASSAGES
“A sketch is generally more spirited than a picture”, Diderot
For this edition of the Artworkshop the choice of topic and debate was “Catching Passages”.
Initially the idea came from the statement that the artist today has become increasingly nomadic.
For some artists it seems there is no further need for studios. More and more artists give up the studio to carry out artistic projects, to make installations "in situ" or projections, and so to show immaterial artwork.
With the emergence of mixed and new media the typical studio based practice is often abandoned. But drawing is a constant presence. In all that interdisciplinary stuff it remains a basic means. It follows any project and it makes it possible to outline, to fix quickly decisive as well as personal moments.
In the “Renaissance” the idea of "Disegno" (or drawing) was a means of communicating a possible idea or artwork, (in particular the reflections of Giotto in Boccacios’ Decameron who questions the need to realize our thoughts or ideas). Today, this idea still remains. “Drawings” have become a way to translate visually (through the most diversified media) the constant mutation of the real and the virtual world.
Drawing intervenes in photography through its graphic sets, or in video in the form of animation or even in three-dimensional spaces. Drawing today is a direct step towards demonstrating both reasoning and feeling, and is not always limited to conceptualization.
Drawing is entirely part of the realization and the production of artwork; it is autonomous.
The French word for drawing, ‘dessiner’, is a term that expresses "a graphic approach, chromatic and “fine art related” and suggests representation and design. The pun "Dessins/Dessein” (drawing/intention) plays with the notions of intention and gesture, reflection and expression.
What is implied in this pun is that drawing is a process of experimentation between perception, abstraction and interpretation. That drawing is constructed and improvised. In the process of drawing the interior and exterior cannot be separated, even when we use cultural references or place our glance on ourselves.
The English word "draw" highlights the passage, the influence, the movement, the action of something; one can withdraw or draw something out ... one extracts from an object a subject, a reality or an imagination.
In German "zeichnen" as in French "dessiner" has to do with the sign. Both words “Zeichen”, “signe” reinforces the idea of direct communication, of a trace of a symbolic system, a construction or a spontaneous course of thought.
Both the action of drawing and the etymology of drawing (the medium and the message) are inherent in this workshop, which from the first hour was build around decentralization, dislocation, exchange and process.
In the title "Catching Passages" there is a consideration of the ephemeral, the unfixed and the action, e.g. "catching, sketching, etching..." which emphasizes this notion of the nomadic.
In all workshops there is a process of deconstructing and rebuilding ideas and representations, in this years workshop however this becomes the main subject.
Quoting the application form: “The art workshop 2007 deals with notions of “hereness” and “thereness”. Between Luxembourg, Sibiu and the artists’ place of residence, the workshop aims at triggering interplay between the known and the unknown, the local and the universal, between inside and outside, absence and presence.
Focusing on the art practices of drawing, cartoon and graphic design, the art workshop questions the relationships between objects, activities and spaces in the context of displacement. For many artists, art today is less a question of appropriating identities than a process of documenting the act of passing from local to global (and vice versa). This entails and requires a dynamic and interactive debate, which is reflected in the artwork itself.”
An international jury selected the twelve young artists and art students from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Romania and Luxembourg on file.
After a two-week stay in Luxembourg, the participants continued their work in Sibiu for another two weeks. The work realized during the Kufa (Kulturfabrik) end of season closing party was the first opportunity “to create a context where pluralism and cultural differences melt, and reflections and experiences of art in progress ripen and emerge.”
The artists had to react on local contexts and to comment on situations by making graphic statements.
The expressive drawings of Casper Pauli, inspired by the evocative architecture of the industrial city of Esch were interfered by the imaginary displacement of Marco Colombaioni’s cinematic icons. Like a revisited “automatic writing”, elffriede’s work could be inspired by Foucault’s’ concept of heterotopias. The act of spontaneous drawing becomes a sort of simultaneously mythical and real contestation of the space in which we live. This complex statement is enhanced by the ironic tautological effect of the light bulbs of Sebastian Moldovan.
The drawings of Stina Fisch, sewn directly on to the leaves of a plant, are a voluntary act to recall metaphorically the wounds of the past. In another register, Mike Lamy presents a very conceptual and minimalist work using dots to point at the space, where as Polly Read draws subtly the arches of the Bridge Adolph and explores the interaction between construction and nature. It is through a common research around the centaur that Paola Müller and Carol Radziszewski organize their large fresco, which shows to some extent the passage of the myth in the personal reality of the artists. The draftsmanship of Adrien Tirtiaux as a re-appropriation of a place that in turn becomes mythical. With small drawn tents, like the sketches of children, Raffaella Crispino expresses with poetry the artistic and cultural nomadism. Always by keeping the subtlety of the feature, Karo Szmit draws up an interesting typology of water towers and other architectural elements, like observations on the passing of time they refer to her displacement to Luxembourg.
In Sibiu, the participants had to prove their curatorial and editorial skills by producing together an exhibition and a publication that retraced the “caught” passages. As I speak now, this is still in process.
As a coordinator of the workshop I hope that all these reflections and experiences, nourished by the guest artists Chad Mc Cail, Koo Jeong-A, Dan Perjovschi and Jonathan Meese, will help them as much as possible to face new situations in their artistic lives.
Paul di Felice
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