SUSAN MORRIS: UNTITLED MOTION CAPTURE DRAWINGS
Art Exchange, University of Essex
9 November - 8 December, 2012
Susan Morris: Untitled Motion Capture Drawings, Arts Exchange, University of Essex
GALLERY INFORMATION
For her Motion Capture Drawings, Morris recorded herself making a pre-planned large drawing in a high-tech motion capture studio. This involved wearing reflectors attached to various parts of her body such as the hands, feet, elbows, knees, head and between the shoulder blades. The data collected during these sessions was converted into line, using algorithms, and printed onto inkjet paper with black ink. The thin, white, spidery line in these drawings actually does not exist; it is simply where the ink is not. The build-up of black ink, solidifying like accumulated soot, makes visible that which would otherwise remain unseen, that which occurs simultaneously and as if underneath a set of marks as they are being laid down: one in the light of day, one unfolding in the darkness of a digital recording. The resulting picture reveals the complex bodily unconscious that accompanies our deliberate actions. A Motion Capture Drawing 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.
On the three high gallery walls, surrounding the viewer, are displayed ‘life-size’ traces of the movement of the left hand, the back of the head and neck and the right hand. On the back wall, a trace of the low-level dance of the knees is shown. While standing in the empty space in the centre of the room, the viewer is prompted to project his or her body into the scattered components of the absent body in motion.
Although the process is digital, the mark nonetheless has the character of an index; a shadow of the movement falls on the paper mediated via computer files of data. The lines laid down are traces of body’s involuntary arcs and convulsive curlicues making them similar to a mechanical graphic trace. In fact, the pictures in this exhibition resemble the chronophotography produced by the nineteenth-century scientist, Etienne-Jules Marey. Marey wanted to capture the trajectory of the moving body on a single field using a camera. To remedy the blurring effect of overlapping photographic exposures, he devised ways of blinding the camera to all but the most essential movements: he dressed his model in black velvet cloth, attached silver buttons and metallic strips to the joints and limbs, and positioned his subject in front of a black wall. He referred to this figure as a ‘skeleton man.’ By filtering out excess information, Marey was able to picture graphically the unanticipated trajectories of action. The result, something between an index and a diagram, was a fundamentally new kind of involuntary drawing. Both Susan Morris’s Motion Capture Drawings and Marey’s chronophotographs convert movement into line, compress the temporality of the body in motion onto a single spatial field, and make visible something invisible.
SYMPOSIUM: Involuntary Drawing: Art and Automatism
Friday 16th November, 2012
Art Exchange, University of Essex
This symposium considers issues raised by Susan Morris: Motion Capture Drawings and the previous exhibition at Art Exchange, Graphology. It will explore the interaction of automatism, abstraction and the unconscious in avant-garde and contemporary art. Contributions will be by Professor Michael Newman (Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College and the Art Institute of Chicago), Ed Krčma (University College Cork), Margaret Iversen (University of Essex) and artist Susan Morris.
TIMETABLE:
2:00 – Greeting from Jess Kenny, Curator, Art Exchange Gallery
2:00 – 3:00 – Ed Krčma (University College Cork), Action/Abstraction
3:00 – 3:45 – Michael Newman (Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College) Compulsory Drawing
3:45 – 4:00 – Tea break
4:00 – 4:30 – Susan Morris (Artist), Drawing in the Dark
4:30 – 5:00 – Margaret Iversen (University of Essex), Desire and the Diagrammatic
5:00 – 5:30 – General Discussion
BIOGRAPHIES OF SPEAKERS:
Margaret Iversen is Professor in the School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex. She is author of Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes and Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. Recent publications include Chance and Writing Art History (with Stephen Melville). From 2008-2011, she was Director (with Diarmuid Costello) of the AHRC-funded research project, “Aesthetics after Photography.” Her essay, ‘Index, Diagram, Graphic Trace’ will soon appear in a special issue of Tate Papers devoted to Involuntary Drawing. She is currently writing a book on photography, trace and trauma.
Ed Krčma is 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 the catalogue for Tacita Dean’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, and is working on a book project concerning the relationship between drawing and thinking. He co-curated the exhibition ‘Motion Capture: Drawing and the Moving Image’ at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, and is author of ‘Lightning and Rain: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis and Matisse’s Hand’ which will soon appear in a special issue Tate Papers, ‘Involuntary Drawing’, edited by Margaret Iversen.
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. Recent papers include a presentation of her work in July 2010 at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research’s 25th Anniversary Conference (Lacan in the UK: Art, Clinic, Feminism, Literature), and for the Making in Two Modes conference, University of Cork, Ireland, September 2010. An essay about the Motion Capture work, ‘Drawing a Blank,’ was published in JCFAR, Volume 20, in 2010 and her paper ‘Drawing in the Dark’, will soon appear in a special issue Tate Papers, ‘Involuntary Drawing’, edited by Margaret Iversen.
Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing and 2012-13 program leader in critical studies at Goldsmiths. He also teaches in the Art History Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His publications include books on Jeff Wall, Richard Prince and Seth Price, and numerous essays on contemporary artists including Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen, Tacita Dean, Alfred Jensen, Agnes Martin, Hanne Darboven, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Dara Birnbaum, Jaki Irvine, Uriel Orlow, and Hilary Lloyd, as well as essays on blindness, the wound, the horizon, primitivism, contingency, materiality, memory, and nonsense. He has published two essays on drawing: “Giuseppe Penone: Sticking to the World—Drawing as Contact, “ in Giuseppe Penone, New York, The Drawing Center, 2004; and “The Traces and Marks of Drawing” in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, ed. Avis Newman and Catherine de Zegher, London: Tate Publishing and New York: The Drawing Center, 2003; and ‘Derrida and the Scene of Drawing,’ Research in Phenomenology, vol.24, fall 1994, p.218-34. The first volume of his selected essays, on the still and moving image, will be published by Ridinghouse in 2013.