site-specific & expanded drawing: SHAPE

Showing posts with label SHAPE. Show all posts

Tuesday, 13 November 2018

CHRIS FORTESCUE

Untitled wall drawing using faux-brick wallpaper cut-outs . Linden gallery, Melbourne, 1991.

Saturday, 25 June 2016

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)

Monday, 20 June 2016

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.

Friday, 17 June 2016

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

Saturday, 20 February 2016

GEORGES ROUSSE

1985

1998

2006

Ernst Caramelle Site-specific watercolour wall painting

REGINA SILVEIRA

Regina Silveira, A Lição, 2002, wood, vynil and paint, 80 m2, Brito Cimino Gallery,

Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo Collection, SP, Brasil.

TOM FRIEDMAN

Tom Friedman Untitled 1994 masking tape. h 2cm, w 183cm

(Loops of masking tape stuck together)

WOLFGANG LAIB

Wolfgang Laib installing Pollen From Pine, Art Gallery of NSW 2005

Photo: Tamara Dean

images

interview

Monday, 19 March 2012

TONY CRAGG

Tony Cragg Britain Seen from the North 1981 Tate collection

Multiple objects arranged together to make a whole image.

images

interview

Saturday, 17 March 2012

PIET MONDRIAN

Piet Mondrian, Design for the library-study of Ida Bienert, also known as “Salon de Mme B…, in Dresden”, 1926 (source)

PIET MONDRIAN, SALON OF MADAME B., DRESDEN, GERMANY, 1923

(source)

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

NEILE TORONI

Neile Toroni Homage to Rimbaud 2003

Marian Goodman Gallery

Also in THE POETICS OF SPACE, group exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, 2009

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.

site-specific & expanded drawing