Lauterwasser
Context
Jorge Luis Borges
Fictions, 1944
In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges describes a land in a fictional world. The people of this land that speak a language that descibes their world not as an amalgam of objects in space, but as a series of independent interlinked acts.The language is focused on experience, with the emphasis on connected verbs and almost entirely without nouns. For example, instead of using the word moon, they would describe the ambience and experience of the moon, using words such as ‘moonate’ or ‘enmoon’. For example, instead of saying ‘the Moon rose above the river’, they could say ‘Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned’.
What interested me about this was the focus on describing the experience and relationship between the ‘things; the objects and the environment’. The more experiential nature of this language felt more reflective of the way we create and hold memories. By describing things in relation to other things Borges creates point of view that is less focussed on a single perspective, less about how we relate to the things and more about how they relate to each other.
In emphasising the connectivity of things in this way a parity is created between them. Through creating a visual description of these connections we can create a record of the experience of objects and environment. These descriptions are a series of mental process that have taken place in relation to an environment and its experience over time.
Additionally, Borges describes a belief held by the people of his fictional world, that objects and spaces remain in existence only as long as they are experienced. When they are no longer experienced they are lost to existence. This emphasises the importance of experiencing a space. If an object or a space is not experienced physically then, as a memory, it can fade away and become both figuratively and physically lost.
Anna Barriball
Barriball is interested in the values that contribute to make a thing what it is and in our experience of these values. For example, in Bag Drawing, she covered a white carrier bag with red marker pen, inside and out. In doing so she gained an intimate knowledge of the object through looking and touch and through the contact between the pen nib and the polythene bag. The work is evidence of time spent with the object, and an attempt to bridge the translation process between looking and interpreting. Barribal talks about using these kinds of transfer methods as a way to locate the viewer within an object or a space, moving away from a pictoral representation towards a more direct experience of an object or a space.
"There's a frustration about not being able to fully bridge the gap but if it moves any further apart it doesn't ring true for me.
Anna Barriball
I am interested in documenting environments that describe a space inbetween two worlds, the physical and the experienced. I am interested in the artwork as a record of a physical and emotional experience and that the work holds an energy that is evidence of the process of making. I am influenced by the notion that a thing must be broken down in order to interpret it, and by doing so you are creating a description of your experience of that thing.
Bag Drawing, 2000, marker pen on carrier bag
One Square Foot V, 2001, pencil on paper
Draw (fireplace), 2005, video projection
Christiane Baumgartner
From a distance A Stairway to Heaven, 2019, a series of five large woodcuts look like dense, monochrome photographic works. As you get closer they begin to seperate and dissolve into clear composite parts. The images are constructed from black linear marks that run horizontally across the white of the paper.
Baumgartner builds her work in layers. They originate from a photographic image, captured using photography or video, she then begins a process of interpretation and downsampling. The opportunity to capture a scene with technology allows us to see more than we are naturally able and presents the artist with a large amount of information to choose from, to select, discard and interpret. Baumgartner's conceptual practice is hardcoded to the themes she is concerded with; the elusive nature of memory and how we experience the world.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Stairway to Heaven, 2019, from set of five woodcuts on Kozo paper
I am interested in the traces and hints contained in Baumgartner's images. The interplay between opposing factors; black and white, digital and traditonal, scale and detail. The relationship between the two as one thing becomes something else,
"What became interesting was the point when the line becomes a drawing or when the lines becomes a letters."
Christiane Baumgartner
Baumgartner scrutinises a single moment, or series of moments. These moments contract and expand thoughout her process and leave us with an image that contains an inherent sense of dissonance, this sense of dissonance is something I am trying to build into my work. I am looking to create a descriptive language in which enough remains hidden to challenge the viewers understanding of what they think they see.
I am interested in where techniques meet and the exchange between the two. Baumgartner's work holds both natural and artificial, traditional and digital. The physical spaces she observes are coded with technical and digital language.
Phillipe Guston
Guston was interested in the importance of creating a work that can lead its own life and no longer needs the artist. He makes reference, in his late abstract works, to the legend of the golem, a historical metaphor that represents the reinactment of the creation of Adam. I am interested in the idea that the artist can create a space from which life emerges. I try to do this in my work by creating environments that require resolution on the part of the viewer. Images that can be read figuratively but retain enough that is hidden, or that contain elements working both with and against each other.
Moon, 1979, Oil on canvas
I am interested in the placement and construction of environment in Guston's work. By pressing elements forward against the picture plane and creating an artifical perspective the objects encroach the viewers space and create a weight. I am interested in these techniques in regard to themes of experience and memory and how they can be used to create a closer more immediate relationshop with the viewer.
In removing distinctions between external and internal space Guston is looking at themes of anonymity, collective and timelessness. Forms are enlarged or isolated to an extent that they lose a recognisable identity. I am interested in creating spaces that are both identifyable and mysterious; that subvert the viewers experience of space and everyday objects through placement and architecture.
Red Sky, 1978, Oil on canvas
Painters Table, 1973, Oil on canvas
Peter Schwenger
The Tears of Things
"Since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on"
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Schwenger is interested in the notion of a disjuncture between the physical world and language, the tool we use to describe our experience of the world. CIting Georg Hegel, he proposes that there is an irreconciable difference between the two.
‘The first act, by which Adam established his lordship over the animals, is this, that he gave them a name, i.e. he nullified them as beings on their own account.
Georg Hegel, First Philiosophy of Spirit
Schwanger percieves a fatalistic power in language to reduce things to something other than their previous existence. That, for 'man' a thing does not have an importance until it is named and through this the thing is lessened.
I am interested in the idea that by hiding or changing something you can reinterduce a previous or other existence, something can be created that in itself exists. Through concealing a thing you are actually revealing a part of the thing that was not evident before.
