Last semester the work had really started to open up in the last two pieces I made, and I managed to claw my way out of abstract expressionist tropes. These two were about memory.
For a long time I've played a memory game with myself; if i saw something that struck me for any particular reason, the light on a floor at a particular time of day, or anything really, but usually things of no particular consequence, I would try to remember it exactly. What's funny is I have never been able to remember any of these moments after I was finished trying to remember them. I've been testing myself in this way for 15 years, and I don't remember any of the moments I've tried to.
Catharine Murphy's work reminds me of this game. Her paintings and drawings remind me of the moments I've tried to remember. Her work, in its specificity, is non-objective, its specificity lends itself to some broader experience than the particular moment that has been so carefully and determinedly rendered. Vaguely strange and strangely familiar (Dave Hickey.)
The element of time is another fascinating aspect of this work. The glance at a bus seat before you sit down, or the sight of a pie right before you take it out of the oven, these moments are quickly over. But the process involved in capturing them is painstakingly long. She has to wait for a particular light, or season even, to continue painting an image. How long does it take to remember? Or, how long does it take to remember that you want to remember?
With her work in mind, I'm starting a project this week. I'm going to draw, from a photograph, the same image multiple times, and record the amount of time it takes to draw each. I anticipate it taking a shorter and shorter amount of time the more images I make, because of muscle memory. This will take many hours. Then, I'll take them all, line them up, and erase them, but not completely, all at the same time. I'll record how much time it takes to erase them as a group. I'll then select some of these to show, and some will be discarded.
Some questions I'm thinking about in relation to this:
1. Why draw it if it's already a photograph, if the moment is already captured?
2. Why spend so much time drawing, if only to erase?
3. Each will be titled according to the time it took to draw, and the time it took to erase e.g Attempt #1: Drawn in 15 hours, erased in 1. What does this say about memory in terms of time? in terms of futility?
4. Though some of each drawing will be left in tact, the parts which are erased will never be completely eradicated. So there is the added memory of the materials
5. Hopefully the viewer will be able to see the connection between each drawing, to be able to tell that they were all once identical, or nearly so. So they will look between each, to see their similarities and differences. So the viewer's memory is also engaged.
6. The reason for erasing them all at once, and picking only a few is Robert Ryman's influence, or more specifically, Yves Alain Bois' interpretation of a particular series. An excerpt from "Ryman's Tact":
We know that Ryman sometimes makes prototypes of his paintings, that he discards many of them in the course of his work, that he is selective ("to obtain these thirteen panels Ryman worked on more than fifty," Barbara Reise wrote about the Standard series).4 Does this mean that his choice is a function of the legibility of process in the completed work? Nothing could be less certain. Who would know, for example, looking at series III, IV, V, and VII, whose titles correspond to the number of panels they contain, that the more or less identical panels were actually painted in groups of three?and how could it be known, since except for the major exception of the first series (III), none of them is a multiple of three, nor is the total number of panels (nineteen), whether intended or not, divisible by three. Is this element of process then insignificant because it is concealed? No, because it generates (and thus "explains") the slight breaks in continuity, in the last three series, between the horizontal bands whose gestural rhythms should continue from panel to panel. But couldn't this slight discontinuity have been obtained by painting these panels one by one? No, because the semi- automatic breadth of gesture corresponds to the entire width of the original surface existing as a sort of frieze (the three panels that were initially juxtaposed extended over thirteen feet). Painting the panels separately would, of course, cause excessive discontinuity, or, rather, discontinuity pure and simple, which would signify nothing and be an empty sign, since it would not be in opposition to the continuity it interrupts.
Therefore, since this element of process is not insignificant, why isn't it expressed? Because process doesn't interest Ryman as such. He attempts instead to construct a structure of oppositions: a paradigm. This is what the visual "asceticism" in his paintings is always ready to provide. The structural paradigm- continuous/discontinuous-declined by the full series is clearly legible: the procedural record has nothing more to teach us;
(I tried to find an image of the series that Bois is writing about, to no avail. But the link to the entire article is on my last entry)
So I by erasing them all, and picking only some, this creates the same paradigm as Ryman's. A continuous discontinuity. Does this apply to memory? How does this process add to the overall concept of the work?
7. What effect does repetition have on an image? Doesn't repetition effectively "erase" an image by diluting it?
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