September Oral Presentation
“Twombly crosses out as a way of making the surface work: his rubbing out is a process of adding as well as subtracting: a build-up of cancellation”
“…what Twombly is working on, and working out, is HOW TO MAKE A PAINTING.”
Tacita Dean, Panegyric,
from Cycles and Seasons,
This quotation is from British visual artist, Tacita Dean’s essay to accompany Cy Twombly’s 2008 exhibition. She has long been a fan of Twombly, as have I, and in the catalogue essay, she makes a comparison between Twombly and the Irish writer James Joyce, having discovered that both men liked to cross out.
She is informed by Joyce’s estate that these crossings out found in his notebooks, are not mistakes but markers, often colour coded and that they represent a transition from one manuscript to another. Joyce writes of everyday life in Dublin in his 1922 novel Ulysses, parodying Homer’s great epic poem, The Odyssey. She imagines Twombly having his own similar way of working with colour ciphers at the ready, as he too re-imagines these classical myths. Each man taking these fantastical tales of gods and men and bringing them into the everyday.
If Twombly was working out how to make a painting, presumably Joyce was working out how to write a novel, through a process of editing and transferring. I like the idea of these colour-coded crossings-out being an integral part of the creative process, and in Twombly’s case, visible for all to see. His mistakes writ large intentionally, and his cancellations, on show. He is working things out on the canvas and inviting us, the audience, into the process. Dean continues:
No one shows their mistakes anymore, the development of their thinking across the page. Everything appears in the world as unconditional and without doubt: no waver here, no lapse of concentration there: no fissure in which to peer through and see the humanity inside.”
Of course, Twombly’s mistakes were intentional, performative even. Both men “erase[d] to make an [intentional] mark”, so it wasn’t the erasure that was important but the build-up of cancellation. Twombly’s critics would argue these were nothing more than vacuous, private-school-boy scribblings, but Dean believes that he was interested in revealing a palimpsest surface on which to work and his writing and crossings out were intimate points of connection. Both Twombly and Joyce were creating fissures in which to reveal a humanity, as well as the uncertainty, the mundanity, and the untidiness of ordinary life.
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In my own work presented in the July seminar, I explored the idea of creating fissures and showcasing mistakes, cancellations and workings out, my process writ large, intentionally. The stitching I used is knotted or unpicked, the seams were irregular and saggy, the machined line is uncontrolled and uneven. Where the colour appears, it is the stain that has soaked through from the back, the marks are scribbled lines made with felt tip and crayons.
The works were made up of unsuccessful artwork on canvases, that I ripped up and put back together in a new arrangement.
I had also bought lots of second-hand tablecloths and collaged intricate hand-embroidered flower details to introduce the language of domestic craft, which historically was mostly carried out by women, and to contrast the neat, ordered and a prescribed pattern, or design. The contrast ironically showcasing the labour and skill involved in the handwork of the embroidered item as opposed to my unskilled use of the machine or my own hand stitching. The everyday nature of tablecloth, which is usually seen on the horizontal plane, showcased vertically, in a fine art setting.
The introduction to the book The Subversive Stitch states that there is a strong relationship between the history of embroidery and changing notions of what constituted feminine behaviour and femineity in art.
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Peter Shand once compared artist Judy Millar’s painting process to Homer’s Penelope and her act of weaving and then unravelling the shroud she is making for her father-in-law, Laertes. Millar’s field of investigation, he remarks, is the “making and unmaking of art objects and both the visual signs and the experiences they can hold”.
‘So, by day she’d weave at her great and growing web – by night, by the light of torches set beside her, she would unravel all she’d done.’
Homer, The Odyssey, 2.98-10
In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, who was left behind when he went to fight in the Trojan war. He didn’t return for twenty years and was therefore presumed dead.
Penelope was weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, weaving by day and unravelling by night. In her action of weaving and unravelling, she was exacting a status quo and rebuking the patriarchal system that required her to hand over the kingdom via marriage to one of her many suitors, once it was complete. Her process of making and unmaking art was in fact a feminist act. She was assuming the role of King and there was an intentionality in her unravelling.
Again, the relationship here between woman and craft, between behaviour and notions of femininity in art, which Penelope was undoing in her unravelling.
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In response, I produced a series of works that played with the idea of the shroud, the weave, and the unravelling.
I also took Penelope as my muse and introduced her into my work.
In this painting by Angelica Kauffman, we see Penelope sleeping while waiting for Odysseus’s return. I decided to hand-stitch this image into the fabric, in a repetitive design as to reference domestic wallpaper or fabric print.
I also stitched words taken from the song King by Florence + the Machine;
“I am no mother, I am no bride, I am King”.
This seemed to convey nicely what I imagined Penelope might have been thinking while unravelling the shroud – her identity not revolving around her domestic situation but around the leadership she had shown during her husband’s twenty-year absence.
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Tacita Dean mentions visiting the Temple of Poseidon and noticing the names of sailors from the nineteenth century carved into the stone, as well as the poet Byron, and other more recent tourists. I imagined Penelope carving her name into the Ithacan stone as a marker of ownership like a graffitied tag.
I stitched Penelope’s name into my work in Greek, like those early sailors.
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I had to question why these classical myths still permeate our lives thousands of years later. I studied English Literature at university and read about these tales of flawed gods and humans in poetry and prose, but I regularly come across them in song lyrics, artworks, literature, logos and branding.
I found his book in the library. The introduction reads:
“Homers Odyssey once more supplies a metaphor for myth itself, in terms of its continual metamorphoses and renewals. This is the tapestry that Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, weaves all day,… This cycle of making and unmaking, weaving and unravelling, captures the nature of myth. It is an assortment of narrative strands that can be formed, deconstructed and remade – whether in words or thread or paint ...”
Myths provide an assortment of narrative strands that can be formed, deconstructed and remade, and in each retelling, they receive added reference. To retell is to metamorphose, and perhaps it is with each retelling that the myth is “reinscribed”, rather than “rubbed out”, each reference a layering and a reinforcement. Myths are stories of mistakes and in referencing them, we introduce the fissures in which we recognise ourselves.
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During the first few months of my MFA, I researched the history of weaving and tapestry. These early tapestries presented me with a fascinating contradiction – the neat design at the front, showing scenes from biblical or classical mythology, and the messier back face that showed areas of repair, hand-stitchingtogether of colour panels, and lots of knots, and loose threads. The grand themes on the front face and evidence of the labour involved on the back. The energy of the stitching, the repairs and the unkempt loose ends were far more engaging.
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My July seminar work last year focused on the back face of those wall hanging tapestries. Showing evidenceof knots and loose threads and repair and incorporating Mull fabric for the first time with a noticeable, open weave to show the grid. I wanted to convey the energy of the labour of those tapestries and of the shroud that held such significance for Penelope.
I had started to put the canvas on the floor, as I was producing larger work and applying free-flow ink and dye. I was reading about Helen Frankenthaler’s way of working. Her process involved a technique called soak-staining and in contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, she was giving up her mark and allowing the painting to make itself.
I liked the idea of allowing dye to flow freely on the floor, unimpeded and uncontrolled. The dye finding its own way, the painting making itself. This has become a constant in my process, often the first layer, free-flow dye on unprimed canvas. I use both natural dyes, which I sourced after reading up on early weaving, and acrylic dyes or calligraphy inks.
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Like Frankenthaler, Judy Millar also works on large canvases on the floor. For both, their artwork is conceived on a horizontal surface, working on the floor as opposed to at an easel. Both have chosen to work “where you put your feet rather than where you hold your head aloft”. A phrase from Leo Steinberg’s 1972 essay, Other Criteria, where he argues that the transition from the vertical plane to the horizontal ‘flatbed’ plane by Robert Rauchenberg in 1960’s, introduced the concept of labour into the artmaking practice.
Millar’s process has been described as painting backwards because it involves applying paint and then wiping it away, which she likened to the domestic duty of cleaning. The labour element of the making is more on show, and the technical skill required has shifted to a more physical act and the use of other items than brushes. In my own practice, I use sticks, screwdrivers and brush-handles to make marks on the canvas and then wipe away the dye with cloths once the marks are made.
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In the book Documents published by Michael Lett, Selina Ershadi wrote a chapter in response to Anoushka Akel’s exhibition, Wet Physics.
Anoushka’s process is a material engagement of layer, line and erasure that is both sensual and arduous; delicate yet crude. Pressing, sanding, scratching, rubbing, smearing, scraping, she applies layer upon layer … to the canvas, sometimes weathering away the surface from the outset or in between applications to faintly reveal what remains beneath, then building back up again.”
The layering process in Akel’s work reads like physical labour, the art content “described in the language of work as opposed to that of art.” Like the pre-mechanised weaving techniques used in early tapestries, it is the backward and forward motion of layers. The sanding, scratching, smearing, and scraping –conjuring up images of a work bench or printing press.
It’s like searching for something present but not visible, something in the past that is necessary to uncover, to move forward. The creative process involving an excavation like an archaeological dig. Removing to reveal what lies beneath but then, interestingly, to cover it up again. To reveal only to obscure, and so the Sisyphean task continues. The process of layering becomes an ongoing, repetitive act, as with Sisyphus who was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll down again, never to complete the task. Is it the process and the labour involved in the layering, that Akel is intentionally showing us.
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My most recent work though has been inspired by Julie Mehretu’s prose poem, Notes on Painting.
Push, scratch, mark, cut, stay.
Find the break, the gap, the fissures, undoing and pulling apart –
Notes on Painting reads like a stream of consciousness as she downloads the thoughts of her creative process. It reads like one of her exploded paintings, her words are pacy, tactile and full of reference. They are a verbal navigation of HOW TO MAKE A PAINTING.
A mark, a scratch, the sound of graphite, on paper, ink gliding out of nib pulled by fibres, in the paper, on the surface of acrylic, like stone, like parchment, never tabula rasa always palimpsest.
The phrase Tabula Rasa translates as “scraped tablet”. It refers to the Philosophical concept that when people are born, they are essentially a blank slate, so life experiences and education form them. In contrast Palimpsest, refers to a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed over earlier writings. Something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
Mehretu was working on commissions for Deutsche Guggenheim and her work Mural, for Goldman Sachs in a studio in Berlin at the time, and in her poem, “never tabula rasa always palimpsest” refers to the myriad architectural and cultural layers in both Berlin and NY that she presents in these works. Artist Siemon Allen describes Mehretu’s method like this:
“Paradoxically, the construction of the paintings like a series of erasures, each stage eradicating the last…. however, history is not rubbed out. Rather it is reinscribed. Erasure operates not as a destructive but as a generative force.”
But more generally, Palimpsest speaks of how we are unable to exist without historical and cultural identity and how the canvas conceals a structure, a physical presence, before we even make a mark. Judy Millar spoke of the painted surface being like a skin, stretched over something, and having a certain tension.
“… a skin hiding a skeleton structure, just like we have. The structure presents a physicality, and the artist carries out a fiction on the surface.”
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When preparing work for this final seminar, I had the words “Never tabula rasa, always Palimpsest”, in my mind. The roll of unprimed canvas may appear to be tabula rasa but it has an historical identity of its ownand I brought a history with me:
I’m a female artist, brought up in Africa until I was 10, adapting to life in the UK, moving to New Zealand at 40, swapping my corporate life for a domestic one, my life before children, my life after children, being a wife, owning pets, the current political and economic climate, growing older….
When I think of the canvas as a palimpsest, then the adding and subtracting, the erasing and cancellation makes sense. The process is not a searching but a revealing, a glimpse of history, or labour, or humanity; or a fissure in which to glimpse all three. The obscuration and erasure becoming a generative force as new work emerged, a reiteration. The marks of tools and physical labour are not hidden but on show and celebrated.
I chose the image of a tablecloth, stencilled onto the work, as reference to the horizontal surface, the domestic environment and the feminine labour involved. Mehretu screen printed directly onto areas of her work, and I used spray paint to achieve a similar added patterned effect, but in a layered approach.
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Tacita Dean intimated that only in the mistakes, the crossings out, do we notice the humanity. On the surface of the canvas, we notice the labour, the decisions, the choices, and the corrections. The fiction that the artist carries out on the surface is only a portion of the artwork, it is the supervision and management of the reveal and obscuration, that makes up the rest.
Is the role of the artist, therefore, to be in a constant state of making and unmaking, of testing and re-evaluating, of revealing and perhaps obscuring again. Is the artwork a reiteration of the labour involved in the process, using the past, present, and future tense.