Project: MACHINE DRAWING (Wall Drawing After Lawrence Weiner)
Medium: Industrial Vacuum Sander
Location: Sydney
Date: 2021
Details: A performative wall drawing, skinning back the wall’s gyprock plaster sheet surface with a machine sander. Both a cathartic process and an intense physical stressor, this intervention threatens the collapse of the structural integrity of the studio walls while producing an anthropomorphic imprint; a precarious attempt to alter the built environment by leaving an indebile mark, or statement: ‘Was I Here’ ?
Machine Drawing employs the working ethos of the Gutai movement from Japan with a brutal incision into the fabric of the substrate. While altering the medium itself through a performance or choreography, it is the armspan of the maker stretching out from the central axis in a circular motion left and then right, that reveals the textured layers of the gyprock panelling.
The imperfect semicircles drawn in pencil to outline the work reflects the imperfection of the human body; differing lengths of the arm, the assymetry of the upper torso, the imbalance of physical dexterity in movement. Imprinting the anthopos is a perfmorative play on the term Anthropocene that coins an era that reflects our own imperfections as a species on this Earth.
[The work references an atypical intervention by Lawrence Weiner at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968 in the ground-breaking group exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information’. Known for his works in TEXT, Weiner in this instance has removed the lathing or outer layer of an internal wall at the Swiss museum, subscribing to a curated thematic that edged the conceptual art practices of the day into new territories that, too, challenged institution and materiality].
__This work produced in the context of the research project STRAND DRAWINGS, ENTANGLEMENT and the INTERIM ECOLOGY, 2021.
Medium: Industrial Vacuum Sander
Location: Sydney
Date: 2021
Details: A performative wall drawing, skinning back the wall’s gyprock plaster sheet surface with a machine sander. Both a cathartic process and an intense physical stressor, this intervention threatens the collapse of the structural integrity of the studio walls while producing an anthropomorphic imprint; a precarious attempt to alter the built environment by leaving an indebile mark, or statement: ‘Was I Here’ ?
Machine Drawing employs the working ethos of the Gutai movement from Japan with a brutal incision into the fabric of the substrate. While altering the medium itself through a performance or choreography, it is the armspan of the maker stretching out from the central axis in a circular motion left and then right, that reveals the textured layers of the gyprock panelling.
The imperfect semicircles drawn in pencil to outline the work reflects the imperfection of the human body; differing lengths of the arm, the assymetry of the upper torso, the imbalance of physical dexterity in movement. Imprinting the anthopos is a perfmorative play on the term Anthropocene that coins an era that reflects our own imperfections as a species on this Earth.
[The work references an atypical intervention by Lawrence Weiner at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968 in the ground-breaking group exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information’. Known for his works in TEXT, Weiner in this instance has removed the lathing or outer layer of an internal wall at the Swiss museum, subscribing to a curated thematic that edged the conceptual art practices of the day into new territories that, too, challenged institution and materiality].
__This work produced in the context of the research project STRAND DRAWINGS, ENTANGLEMENT and the INTERIM ECOLOGY, 2021.
Machine Drawing, 2021
Vacuum sander, plaster walling, steel band. H260cm X W300cm.
Photo by Peter Morgan.
Lawrence Weiner, A 36” X 36” REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL, 1968
Photo by Shunk Kender, courtesy Harald Szeemann Archive, Switzerland.