The fictive space in the gaps

Today I had a visit from Özlem Altin, an artist from Berlin. She works with sculpture, photographs, drawings and paintings, preferably in installational set ups. There is a constant bodily focus in her practice . Her images come from her intuitive archive that include ethnographic and medical images and her own iPhone photos. She is interested in the ambivalent moment where the body becomes object or the other way around. Her abstract sculptures are like performers in her installations and sometimes mimic gestures from her photographs when placed next to each other. 

After a presentation in the morning we talked about my video work 45 degrees and my two latest drawing researches, Hatterman's Hand, after Arbeider Neger 1939 and oudekerksplein op ooghoogte. 



This is what I wrote down in the studio

OA: Different than Erik van Lieshout, who wears the camera close to his body, you are more distant from the camera in that bedroom. I as viewer am part of the triangle artist-model-viewer in a kind of  imaginary way. The story happens in my head, not really in what I see, it is another kind of perceiving. The bodily relation is more between you two. You show how close you can get to a person, how is this contact possible? and why are we never really in a conversation? Where do we hit the distance?

There are different frames in your video 45 degrees and there is a sequence in your drawings series Oudekerksplein op Ooghoogte, but in the gaps you (and I) make the real story. This is the fictive space, the sexual tension, the contact, your relation to the other, the bodily presence. 
The drawing series both have a cinematic presence through the way you don't show the actual story. This is where the confrontation lies. And you question what falls out of the frame when looking at that. 

MZ: My work is constantly revolving around a kind of surface and my inability to get through it. Whether it is a body, an image, a wall, the paper or the other, I try to see how a real contact or understanding is possible through positioning the drawing somewhere between the surface and me. My drawing paper is therefore preferably prepared with a few layers of transparent paint. The paper is then no longer only a hard surface but more like a space with depth or thickness, like skin for example, where I can question this contact on a tactile level.

Talking about this eager for proximity, I wonder what will happen when I zoom out instead. Yesterday I joined in on a Q and A with Saskia Sassen, a super interesting researcher and writer on political economy and sociology. She published her book Expulsions last year, in which she explaines how different structures or things are alike when seen from a distance, zoomed out. (For example a prison in the USA is on a practical level much like a refugee camp in Africa, although on a political and geological level they are in a profoundly different 'category'. She proposes that we put effort in  a new analysis and articulation of the global world so that we don't expulse so many parts of the world: people, but also land and water.) 

OA: Look at these artists: Jumana Manna (conversations), Kenneth Anger ( man and motorcycles), Aida Ruilova (especially older videos) and Neil Beloufa (video installations and fictions).

Arbeider, Neger 1939 by Nola Hatterman

OA: When i see this painting of Nola Hatterman i find that the man is distancing himself from hatterman. As if he says no twice: by his crossed arms and his eyes that are faced in another direction. Hatterman failed in that respect to really come close.

Drawing, Untitled 1967

Untitled 1967

In a book on her drawings, Louise Bourgeois comments on several drawings in a very straight forward and personal manner. The words she accompanies with the drawing above are as follows: 

This refers to a line that is not there. It has to do with the horizon. If you stand in front of a lake, you have shapes above and you have shapes reflected in the water. If the area below the horizon is just reality reflected in the water, this drawing implies that the fantasy life of the reflection is richer and more beautiful than reality. The reflection in the water is darker, more dramatic. It doesn't have the serenity of the landscape above the water. See, as you go deeper and deeper into the reflection it is not that pretty, it is not that peaceful.

Louise Bourgeois with Lawrence Rinder, Drawings and observations, pag 127, 1995

I have always liked this drawing. I got familiar with Bourgeois work at the Rietveld Academy in 2007. The image makes me think of the moment when an idea appears in my head for a great new work. But when I imagine this to be a real figure in space, I realize that it can never stand. 

At first this drawing inspired me to draw installations that only exist in the space of a drawing. I made several attempts to build big sculptures, but they were only as exiting in my drawings as they were in my head. 

Later, April 2014 to be precise, the drawing appeared in the work of a man I met in an Art therapy group in Curacao. The man painted big colorful balls on wood with black lines around them. I showed him the drawing above and he immediately liked it. He made me a drawing of this drawing.

There is something in the act of drawing that I want to adress. The point where the pencil touches the paper, the conglomeration of thoughts and images….

John Berger divides drawings in three categories in his essay 'Drawing' from 1987: the ones drawn from perception, the ones that communicate an idea and the ones drawn from memory. I consider bourgeois' drawing to be in the second category. Is the copy drawing by the man then from catagory 1, perception?