Tuesday, 26 January 2016
Thursday, 7 January 2016
Reflections: Doris Rohr on Presence, Absence, Derrida, Drawing, Blindness and Snow: Christmas Day 25th December 2015
Christmas Day 2015
A wintery twiglight scene from the end of John Huston's film The Dead (1987)
Although
it should snow, it rains. Over the last year my thoughts have frequently
returned to weather. Prompted by John Ruskin's lecture "The Storm-cloud of the
19th Century" (1884) clouds became one of my subjects. Filmmaker Peter Greenaway
organised an exhibition in 1992 entitled “Le bruit des nuages [The Sound of
Clouds]: Flying out of this World.” Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas,
translators of Derrida’s Memoirs of the
Blind draw the reader's attention to this coincidence:
Now
it just so happens that Greenaway is the writer and director of the film The Draughtsman's Contract, a film about
the differences between drawing, painting, and sculpture, about allegory and
ruin, about masks and funeral monuments, about strategies and debts, optics and
blinds, about living statues and sounds represented in drawing. But above all
it is about witnessing and testimony, about legacies and inheritances. And
these, is just so happens, are the very themes of Memoirs of the Blind. (Brault and Naas in Derrida 1993 pp viii-ix)
They
further quote one of the characters in the film, Mrs Tallman: "I have
grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter,
for painting requires a certain blindness - a partial refusal to be aware of
all the options" (1993; p ix).
Why
does one require blindness in order to be an artist? We talk about tunnel
vision, needing shutters (horses in the time of advancing industrial revolution
and mechanisation of road traffic). Being someone who draws or paints on paper
in an era of mass communication, instant messaging and virtual vision invites
thoughts of kinship with those horses, anachronistic in their being, needing
partial vision to keep them on track. If Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum
has prompted to question any sense of truth, then being blind, the old metaphor
for not knowing or refusing truth, is perhaps more forgivable than anticipated.
Blindness features as theme in numerous drawings in the history of art, depicting
events in mythology (Plato's Cave; Oedipus, Narcissus) and biblical scripture
(Tobit; Jesus healing the blind). The blind seer is also acting as visionary,
or prophet who presents insight rather than appearance (the "phenomenal
prison of the visible world"). Plato, scared that his soul would be
blinded if he “looked at things with [his] eyes” (Plato in Derrida 1993; p 15)
resorted to logos as his saving grace. Logoi - so Derrida expands - are "ideas, words, discourses,
reasons, calculations" (1993; p 15). This old problem of truth and
representation returns to haunt those who draw or paint or film, because art
making is about revealing what one believes in. Even if agnostic, or
mistrustful of truth, we still want to air our belief in disbelief.
Editing
– the blotting out of superfluous marks, signs, words - is an act of
constant re-vising (a form of altering the truth of the
initial version). Such also
involves a reflexive relationship to a sense of self (auto-bio-graphy) as
presence and absence in the artwork. The great Irish writer and co-inventor of
stream of consciousness narration technique, James Joyce, closes the short
story “The Dead” (in his collection of stories Dubliners the ultimate story): "His
own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world
itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and
dwindling." (Joyce, 1968
[1914] Dubliners Harmondsworth: Penguin, p 220).
John Huston's film The
Dead (1987) is a matching masterpiece translating
a scene of twilight in the closing scene, where grainy greying marks draw across the camera’s
eye, blinded yet freed to reveal another vision, a scene of draining colour,
reduced to saturated blacks and nightblues, snow erasing the memory of shapes,
the drawing (or writing) of the snow as editorial process with the amorph
underpainting of clouds.
Doris Rohr
Final clip accessible via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6FGIaWaQxAChristmas Day 2015 Although it should snow, it rains.
Wednesday, 6 January 2016
Visiting Professor Brian Bishop
PrG is delighted to welcome painter Brian Bishop this semester. Professor Bishop is visiting from Framingham State University, Framingham MA, to conduct his own research from the end of January through to the summer. Link above in research group's names to see further information on his practice.
Gerry Devlin Exhibition
Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast
Click on above link for information on Gerry Devlin's forthcoming exhibition of new paintings.
Click on above link for information on Gerry Devlin's forthcoming exhibition of new paintings.
Monday, 4 January 2016
The Age of Procktor at the Arts University Bournemouth
Panel Discussion
I will be discussing my interest in the work of Patrick Procktor at an exhibition curated by Dr. Ian Massey, who has written widely on the artist's work. Details of the event can be accessed above.
My initial interest came about a few years ago after a chance encounter with Procktor's work in an old edition of Studio International- documented here:
Notes on Colour Mixing and here:
Notes on Colour Mixing
Dr. Ian Massey also talked about Procktor's work at the symposium I convened at The MAC, Belfast, in 2014:
The Place of Painting
I will be discussing my interest in the work of Patrick Procktor at an exhibition curated by Dr. Ian Massey, who has written widely on the artist's work. Details of the event can be accessed above.
My initial interest came about a few years ago after a chance encounter with Procktor's work in an old edition of Studio International- documented here:
Notes on Colour Mixing and here:
Notes on Colour Mixing
Dr. Ian Massey also talked about Procktor's work at the symposium I convened at The MAC, Belfast, in 2014:
The Place of Painting
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