SUSAN MORRIS: UNTITLED MOTION CAPTURE DRAWINGS

London Gallery West, University of Westminster, London
3rd Feb - 4th March, 2012

Susan Morris: Untitled Motion Capture Drawings

LONDON GALLERY WEST, UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER

The pictures in this exhibition resemble the graphic traces produced by the nineteenth-century French chronophotographer, J.E. Marey, who developed machines able to track the involuntary actions of the body, such as heart beat, respiration rate and so on. These sensitive recording instruments could pick up minute vibrations and transmit them to a stylus that would make white wavy lines on a blackened rotating cylinder. He hailed these machines because they are more sensitive than human perception and because the graphic trace is a direct language for communicating the information recorded. It was a fundamentally new kind of automatic writing or involuntary drawing that could pick-up, as Fredrick Kittler wrote, ‘the murmuring and whispering of the unconscious oracles.’

For her Motion Capture Drawings, Morris performed repetitive movements wearing sensors in a high-tech motion capture studio. The activity was captured as data files, transcoded into line and printed like a photograph onto archive inkjet paper. They show, in plan, elevation and side views, the complex bodily unconscious that accompanies our deliberate movements.  The MCD is therefore something between a creaturely scribble and a diagram bearing scientific data -- a kind of notation, trace or shadow of the source action from which it was generated.

Margaret Iversen, 2012.

PRESS RELEASE January 2012

SUSAN MORRIS

MOTION CAPTURE DRAWINGS

03 FEBRUARY – 04 MARCH 2012

London Gallery West is delighted to present a new series of large-scale prints by Susan Morris: Untitled Motion Capture Drawings. These works reveal the rhythm and habitual gestures of the body, or what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls a kind of ‘bodily unconscious’. The idea for these works emerged when the artist was working on another set of drawings in her studio – she felt that there was something happening in the body while she worked that must have its own logic, that if recorded would leave its own kind of trace.

The possibility to record this movement arose soon after. Newcastle University had recently installed a motion capture studio, so Morris took her work there. During the motion capture sessions, two drawings were being made simultaneously; one unfolding in the light of day, the other – a latent image – drawing itself, invisibly, as an accumulation of numerical data subsequently converted into line using an algorithmic code.

Although the motion capture studio sessions capture movement in 3D, Morris has chosen to print just the plan, elevation and side views, which show the movement from each of the reflectors worn on various parts of the body during the session. The resulting cloud-like images are counterpointed by 1:1 life-size details that isolate the motion of a single sensor, whether attached to hand, knee or the back of her head.

The Motion Capture Drawing is therefore something between a creaturely scribble and a diagram bearing scientific data; a kind of notation or shadow of the source drawing from which it was generated. The process has a kinship with photography as it is an indexical trace. Yet, like the chronophotographic processes invented by J.-E. Marey, it is done with a camera blind to everything but the light reflected off the sensors. The resulting image is a hybrid form — both index and diagram.

Normally, users of motion capture technology are interested in the most readable generic movement and so they iron out idiosyncrasies of motion. In this work, however, it is precisely these irruptions in the line that make it interesting as a document of what goes on below the level of consciousness. The work aims to make the viewer aware of the complexity and almost dance-like rhythm of bodily movement involved in even the most mundane activities.

Susan Morris is an artist primarily interested in automatic writing or drawing. Her PhD, On the Blank: Photography, Writing and Drawing, was completed in 2007 at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Recent exhibitions include Timewarp (Centre Rhénan d’Arts Contemporains d’Alsace, 2009) and Sontag Montag (Five Years, London, 2009). In 2010 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to make new work for the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Large tapestries woven directly from data tracking her sleep/wake patterns over a period of two years are on permanent display at the hospital. Work related to this project has also been acquired by the UBS Art Collection, Switzerland.

This exhibition is co-curated by Professor Margaret Iverson in association with the University of Essex. It will tour to Art Exchange, Colchester in Autumn 2012.

SYMPOSIUM
Involuntary Drawing: Time, Motion Capture, the Body
Venue: Symposium at University of Westminster, The Board Room, 109 Upper Regent Street, London
Time: Saturday, February 18, 2012, 1-6 (followed by reception)

For further details on the motion capture work, please see ‘Drawing in the Dark’, Tate Papers #18, 2012

This half-day symposium concerns the ‘optical unconscious’ of movement captured by machines from the earliest experiments of chronophotography to the latest motion capture technology as well as by the automatisms of gesture.  The artists discussed are interested in making visible motion that would otherwise be invisible – such as sound waves, trajectories of movement over time, or a ‘bodily unconscious.’  They track movement in the form of photographic or graphic traces. Some artists work with devices originally designed for medical observations, such as the cardiogram or electroencephalogram. In all cases, the trace is one involuntarily laid down — a shadow cast by something below the level of consciousness. This event is supported by the AHRC Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies.  Attendance is free but bookings must be made in advance via the gallery.

Papers:
Margaret Iversen (University of Essex), ‘Index, Diagram, Graphic Trace’
The index and the diagram are, on the face of it, incompatible types of sign.  The index has a close, causal or tactile, connection with the object it signifies. The diagram is a sign that involves statistical abstraction, such as trends in the stock exchange or weather. In this lecture, I consider a hybrid type of representation that has aspects of both. The graphic trace is an indexical diagram. It takes from the index a registration of something unique – an impress of an individual –  while incorporating the diagram’s abstraction from what is immediately given in perception.  The graphic trace in art is explored in relation to the index and the diagram, drawing on an essay by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the chronophotography of J.-E. Marey, the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and the work of artists, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gabriel Orozco and Amalia Pica.

Ed Krčma (University College, Cork), ‘Matisse’s Hand: Authorship and Agency in Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis’
In 1946, the wandering movements of Matisse’s working hand were caught on film and replayed in slow motion. The hand’s extended, silent, unruly deliberations were shocking even to the artist himself. Both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan commented on this footage, the latter posing the following question:

[Merleau-Ponty argues that] what occurs as these strokes, which go to make up the miracle of the picture, fall like rain from the painter’s brush is not a choice, but something else. Can we try to formulate what this something else is?

This paper explores the stakes of the tension between phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches to gesture and to Matisse’s practice in particular. In doing so, Matisse’s ‘plastic signs’ (as he called them) will be set in relation to the work of both Mary Kelly and Susan Morris, both of whom dramatize the truant and involuntary in drawing to articulate models of art-making that not only deliver their own intellectual and aesthetic potency, but also serve to re-cast such earlier graphic practices.

David Lomas (University of Manchester), ‘Medium & Message: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary Instances’
The talk will take as a starting-point Andre Breton’s essay “The Automatic Message” which posits a derivation of Surrealist automatic writing and drawing from mediumism. Within this tradition, the writing or drawing subject is understood as a passive conduit – a medium – for the transmission of messages. Surrealism rejected the idea that the automatic message comes from the beyond and implied that its source lay in the unconscious. The Freudian notion of psychical determinism supported this view. Breton’s well-known metaphor of the artist as a ‘simple recording instrument’ further reinforced our conception of the line as a veridical trace of unconscious forces or phenomena. My paper will look at some contemporary instances of automatic drawing by William Anastasi, Jem Finer, and others that engage these themes but that cause us to rethink the Surrealists’ assumptions. These artists are cognisant of information entropy. They tune in to background noise rather than message. What if Surrealist automatism was all along just a machine (dispositif) for generating randomness?

Anna Lovatt (University of Nottingham), ‘Trisha Donnelly: The Body Electric’
In 2002, Trisha Donnelly rode into the opening of her first solo show on a horseback, dressed in the uniform of a Napoleonic soldier.  Announcing that she was ‘only a courier,’ she delivered a decree of surrender, concluding: ‘The emperor has fallen and he rests his weight upon your mind and mine and with this I am electric. I am electric.’  Since then, much of Donnelly’s work has been concerned with the ostensible transmission of messages from distant times and places, encrypted or distorted like the word-of-mouth accounts of her unrecorded performances, which she prefers to call ‘demonstrations.’ Her diverse artistic production, which also encompasses drawings, photographs, sculptures, films and audio-works, thus conflates the spiritualist and technological connotations of the term ‘medium.’  In this paper, I will consider Donnelly’s drawings as the visible traces of invisible, but sometimes audible, phenomena.  Whether mechanically generated or inscribed by hand, these graphic traces are presented as involuntary signals, passed through electrical or psychic conductors.

Susan Morris (Artist), ‘Drawing in the Dark’
For my presentation, I will discuss and show images of a recently completed body of work: Untitled Motion Capture Drawings. These were produced by recording, with a high-tech motion capture device, the movements I made while engaged in making another,  pre-planned, drawing; they trace a kind of bodily unconscious.

While I was making the pieces from which the Motion Capture Drawings were eventually ‘cast,’ I sensed that, during the drawings’ evolution, my body became inhabited by something outside of the work, other to it. Something accompanied  the drawing, either from its immediate environment or related to the circumstances of its production.

The motion capture sessions make visible that which occurs simultaneously and as if underneath a set of marks as they are being laid down; they occupy a space parallel to these marks. In this paper, I explore the idea that what echoed in my body whilst I was drawing is perhaps a product of this space — a dark space, akin to that described by the psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski (in Le Temps Vécu, 1935) as a space of groping, hallucination and music.

Speakers:
Margaret Iversen is Professor and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Art History and Theory, University of Essex, England.  She is author of Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, 2007, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993) and Mary Kelly (co-authored with Douglas Crimp and Homi Bhabha, 1997). Recent publications include Chance (2010) and Writing Art History (co-authored with Stephen Melville, 2010).  From 2008-2011, she was director of the interdisciplinary AHRC-funded research project, “Aesthetics after Photography.”  She is currently writing a book on photography, trace and trauma.

Ed Krčma in Lecturer in History of Art at University College Cork, Ireland. His research focuses upon the history and theory of drawing after 1940, with a particular interest in issues of temporality and embodiment. He has written articles, papers and exhibition catalogues on such artists as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Tacita Dean and Susan Morris. He recently contributed to catalogue for Tacita Dean’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, and is working on a book project concerning the relationship between drawing and film.

David Lomas was born and brought up in Australia where he did his first degree leading to a qualification as a medical doctor. He moved into art history with a Master’s degree, and subsequently a PhD, at the Courtauld Institute.

Lomas was Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies until 2007. He co-edits the Centre’s online journal, Papers of Surrealism, and has organised a number of conferences and other events under the auspices of the Centre, including a conference on the theme of experimentalism in science and avant-garde culture. He co-curated Subversive Spaces at the Whitworth Art Gallery in 2009, which explored legacies of surrealism within contemporary art. In 2008, Lomas was awarded AHRC funding for a three year project on surrealism and sexuality, which resulted in Narcissus Reflected, an exhibition earlier this year at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. He is the author of The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (Yale University Press, 2000) and has a new book in press titled Simulating the Marvellous: Psychological Medicine, Surrealism, Postmodernism (Manchester University Press, 2012).

Anna Lovatt is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham and an editor of the Oxford Art Journal.  Her current research focuses on drawing in the context of Minimal, post-Minimal and Conceptual Art and she has published widely in this area, including articles and catalogue essays on the work of Bob Law, Sol LeWitt, Dorothea Rockburne, Anne Truitt and Ruth Vollmer.  She is currently working on a book, which focuses on New York-based drawing practices of the 1960s and 70s.

Susan Morris is an artist primarily interested in automatic writing or drawing. Her PhD, On the Blank: Photography, Writing and Drawing, was completed in 2007 at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London. Recent exhibitions include Timewarp, 2009, at the Centre Rhénan d’Arts Contemporains d’Alsace, and Sontag Montag, 2009, at Five Years, London. In 2010 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to make new work for the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Large tapestries woven directly from data tracking her sleep/ wake patterns over a period of twelve months will be installed at the hospital later this year. In 2012 she will be exhibiting her Motion Capture Drawings in solo shows in London and Essex.  An essay about the Motion Capture work, ‘Drawing a Blank,’ was published in JCFAR, Volume 20, in 2010.

 Art Rabbit

Watford Observer