site-specific & expanded drawing: June 2016

Sunday, 26 June 2016

Connie Anthes

Connie Anthes Untitled (Props # 1‐4), 2013 MULTI_GRIP 2013.

An assemblage of paper and cardboard objects were suspended with nothing more than lightweight poles and gravity, which created both a mechanism for viewing and simultaneously obscuring the works.

Saturday, 25 June 2016

Elena Tory-Henderson

Elena Tory-Henderson Big Yellow 2014

http://elenatoryhenderson.com/

TONI WARBURTON

Toni Warburton Groundwater - swale 2011

EVA HESSE

Eva Hesse, Right After, 1969

Fiberglass, polyester resin, wire
548,6 x 121,9 cm 3 sections

Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, WI

Right After is not site-specific to any particular location, but being apparently formed by gravity, it does acknowledge physical space.

from The Estate of Eva Hesse

studio

Addendum 1967

Ennead 1966

FRED SANDBACK

Fred Sandback, Untitled (Four-part Vertical Construction in Two Colours) 1987, acrylic yarn, ceiling height 630cm

(Lawrence Markey Gallery)

See Fred Sandback work live at Jensen Gallery, Paddington, open till 25 March 2012.

Sandback's yarn, elastic cord, and wire sculptures define edges of virtual shapes that ask the viewer's brain to perceive the rest of the form.

AGNSW work

JOHN VON STURMER

JULIET FOWLER SMITH

Juliet Fowler Smith After studying clouds (for Henny Penny*) 2012 (installed in Articulate project space, Leichhardt) Materials-Organza Fabric (approx 50metres). Collage. Dimensions variable.

*“Where are you all going on this fine day” asked Turkey Lurkey? “ It won’t be a fine day for long,” replied Henny Penny...the sky is falling”. (Old English fairy tale)

An auspicious cloud is five coloured, wu se yun, and represents five layers of fortune and happiness.(Five Fold Happiness, Vivien Sung, Chronicle Books ,2002)

Marie Jean Hoffner

http://www.mariejeannehoffner.org/

Thursday, 23 June 2016

BLINKY PALERMO

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/tag/blinky-palermo/

KATHRYN RYAN

The space of Us 2014

more

Wednesday, 22 June 2016

Daisy Knight

Daisy Knight Emulate the Saints 2014 (Silver/gold paper wrapping, found room and objects) SCA grad show 2014

ANKA LESNIAK

Anka Lesniak, "In abandoned houses one often can meet Lilith" 2011. The text is made by cleaning dirty plaster with a wire brush on the wall of an empty building in Pszczyna, a small town in Poland. The text is in polish and jidysz, and relates to forgotten traces of jewish history in this town. The sentence refers to the jewish belief that Lilith - a women demon - lives in old empty houses.

Monday, 20 June 2016

ALEXEI KALLIMA

Alexei Kallima's Rain Theorem was shown in the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Visitors entered through a corridor into a room whose walls were covered in drawings of an energetic cheering crowd. While the 'black light' is on, the drawing is visible, and shortly after it becomes visible a cheer begins with a whistle and builds to a crescendo until it is abruptly cut off when white light comes on. After a brief pause of normal light, the cycle begins again. It is as if the drawing is cheering the arrival of each visitor, and as if the floor of the room is a platform looking onto a football stadium audience.

Picture: AFP/GETTY

Lilly McElroy

Lilly McElroy The Square - After Roberto Lopardo video 2004

watch video here

http://lillymcelroy.com

HELIO OITICICA

Use Helio Oiticia's works to think about how you can use fabric and/or movement to create a relationship with part of the site. Fabric may help you to echo the ways in which wind and sea have formed sandstone into amazing shapes. These works are currently on show at the Centre Pompidou concerned with the relationships between dance and visual art. These forms look more like painting or sculpture here, but their casual and temporary nature also makes them resemble drawing.

Sunday, 19 June 2016

CATHERINE O"DONNELL

A Notion of Home 2014
life-sized drawing in
willow charcoal on paper
National Art School Building 25

more

Saturday, 18 June 2016

COEN VERNOOIJ

http://www.projectprobe.net/probe/16

BILJANA JANCIC

Biljana Jancic Sky Line 2011
Cockatoo Island Underbelly Arts Festival 2011
light

Friday, 17 June 2016

ROBERT SMITHSON - FLOATING ISLAND

Robert Smithson (1938-73) , Floating Island, drawing on paper - plan for a future work, 1970

Floating Island made actual by Minetta Brook (a nonprofit arts organization) and the Whitney Museum and towed around Manhatten Island, during a retrospective of Smithson's work at the Whitney Museum, 2005

GORDON MATTA-CLARK

Don't let practical problems inhibit your imagination - site-specific drawings that you may not have the resources or permission to make yet can still be planned for by drawing their plans on paper. See plans for Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect:

Drawing for Conical Intersect from Spectres of a Plane

and from Works in Progress

Gordon Matta-Clark Conical Intersect (Paris 1975)

looking in - see abstractions for more images

ROBERT SMITHSON - ATLANTIS

Robert Smithson, Map of Clear Broken Glass (Atlantis) pencil on paper

Robert Smithson, Hypothetical Continent - Map of Broken Glass: Atlantis, Loveladies, NJ, July 11-31 1969

Thursday, 16 June 2016

HELENA ALMEIDA

Helena Almeida Inhabited Drawing 1975 - one photograph & one horsehair

EDWARD KRASINSKI

Intervention 27, 1975

Edward Krasinski is famous for his use of the blue line (in masking tape) from 1968 onwards. He used it horizontally and always 130 cm above floor level. He used it to to simultaneously recognise both the illusory space created by drawing, and the actual space in which drawings are located. In doing so, he contradicts the view held by Robert Morris, also in the late 1960s, that illusionism has become so much the default spatial mode in art that actual space can only be acknowledged through the refusal to give any room to illusionism. (see Robert Morris 'Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris' MIT 1993).

Artists have also used Krasinski's blue tape practice as itself a site or context - eg Chris Fortescue's resettings

Liliana Porter

Liliana Porter Installation 1978

Frequently asked questions

How is site-specific and expanded drawing different from other drawing?

Unlike a sheet of paper, the site is usually shared with and owned by others, and the artist needs to negotiate with the owner on how it is used. Unless an other agreement is negotiated with site owners, the basic rules are that the site is returned to how it is found, and that artists only use materials they know can be removed without leaving mark or damage to the site. Any damage made by an artist needs to be restored at their own cost.

What is the site in site-specific art?

A site can be a physical place or a context an artist finds or constructs. Artworks whose site is the physical space that is found in all places on the planet can usually be moved from place to place, depending on how the artwork makes its connection with the site. Artworks whose site is the particular history, shape or other aspect of a particular place will be less mobile.

More recently, the term 'site-specific' has also been used for an artistic representation of a particular place, regardless of whether the site/place is literally part of the artwork or not. This reverses the original use of the term which was for artworks in which the actual physical location is made an essential part of the work. These include installation, situated sculpture, situated media and so on. The physical location was made part of the work to demonstrate the difference between an actual physical place and its pictorial representation, to demonstrate that the artwork values the place in which it is located, to resist commodification, and so on.

This blog uses the term 'site specific in its original meaning. Recently other terms such as site-responsive, site-sensitive and so on have been used as variants of the original term, 'site-specific'. One reason why 'site-specific' was originally chosen may be because even when an artwork uses a part of physical space that can be found almost anywhere in the built environment (eg Carl Andre's floor works), it will always still be a specific site.

Examples of drawing that focuses on a place without necessarily being site-specific in the early sense being used here, are included on drawingandplace.blogspot.com

Why does site-specific art need to be documented?

Documentation of site-specific work is important if the artwork is temporal or immobile and the artist wants it to be more accessible, part of the historical record or be more saleable. Documentation is sometimes constructed to acknowledge the difference between the place and its representation. The artwork is sometimes the sited work and sometimes the documentation.

Why is site-specific art temporal?

It is temporal if the site is owned by others and the artwork needs to be removed so that the place can be used for other purposes. Or it may be temporal if it is made so that it is destroyed by the passage of time (eg by ice melting). Some site-specific work is permanent if that is the wish of the site's owner.

How is site-specific drawing different from site-specific art?

Site-specific art is just a more general term that includes site-specific drawing.

Why do artists make site-specific drawing?

Artists make site-specific drawing for their own reasons. Some use a site as if it is a big sheet of paper. Others use it to explore a place or a context using drawing-related means such as line and shape. It is used when artists want to form different relationships with places or contexts than is usually available through drawing on paper, eg because an artist wants to focus on a drawing's location or context more than on the drawing's internal space.

Why is it called site-specific?

It called site-specific partly for historical reasons and because it is now a commonly understood term. Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another now uses more general terms such as site-related. Edward Casey in The Fate of Place uses place rather than site to mean the physical places people occupy. The term specific was used because site-specific art was intended to not be autonomous or portable like most artwork. There is not always agreement on what artwork should be called site-specific, however. You could use another term that you think is more accurate - eg you could call it spatial drawing if the work focuses on relationships between different spaces - such as the illusory space of drawing and the physical space a drawing occupies. Or it could be called expanded drawing after Rosalind Krauss' discussion of Sculpture in the Expanded Field (like the term expanded painting.)

What is the difference between site-specific drawing and expanded drawing? 'Expanded drawing' is a more recent term and is a term that focuses more on where it has 'expanded' from (ie from the discipline of 'drawing' or from the paper on which drawing is usually made, etc), whereas 'site-specific' is a term that has more emphasis on the site or place that the drawing incorporates in some way.

This blog is made to support drawing practices at the National Art School in Sydney.