Laying it Down - Plane as Possible,  (post avant garde gesture and fantasy).

Gesture, especially painterly gesture, became a different problem when the self confident artistic programmes of the sixties and seventies vanished in smoke and mirrors. This is not the simple issue of macho excess versus minimalist economy, currently touted around Perth by dealers and journalists who think the public too thick to think any further. The ecstatically sensual use of painterly gesture by the earlier Jasper Johns was neither abstract nor expressionist, just overwhelmingly present to the eye and to other senses.

Gesture on canvas or paper is always linked to presence - here are the marks of the artist traces of the eye and hand, hardwired to the world they felt and saw, or so we long to  believe. Sometimes the eye was elsewhere and the hand was busy with a kind of monotonous polishing, a routine comforting substitute for sensual epiphany . Despite critical  disenchantment, however, the need, the longing for gestural art persists everywhere. Neither formal problematics à la Greenberg, nor an ideology of expressive excess, drives this need.

To the contrary it is the gradual thinning out, the diffusion of our presence in our own lives,  of our sense of ‘being there’ that  leads to a longing for presence in art. Because of this, gesture as art can now operate in ways that would once have seemed irretrievably suspect.

It can recover its old relation to what Bernard Berenson compensatory called tactile values, the pre-scripted link between touch and vision, as part of an attempt to graph the external world by means of gesture. After all most of our gestures are  the gropings of one blinded by a precipitous desire that always gets there first. We see and feel our way round unfamiliar rooms, in terms of the pleasant/unleasant sensations they contain.  

Put simply, gesture as art can return to a complex, overt dialogue with the image, in which the very presence of artist and viewer is ultimately at stake. Gesture can regain its former role as the avatar of the relation of phenomena and consciousness, as a dialectic of desires.

Gesture can become identical with desire and thereby restructure our sense of presence.

Gesture can reduce the viewer's sense of selfhood to a bundle of dissociated events.

For reasons which are self evident, in painting or drawing, gesture must always operate in planes, parallel to the picture surface. Even the most extreme perspectival image still exists    on a plane or planes bound there by the quality of its line and gestures, which float over and across each other. The inevitable planar archaeology, the production through time of all gestural images, can also become part of the new possibilities of gesture as art. The logic of overlapping planes and traces can be deliberately constructed in ways contrary to the apparent order of observation and experience. Gesture can promote an unveiling of long hidden desires as elements as embedded in the external world.

 Some exciting current Perth exhibitions confront these issues.

At Gallery East, Gosia Wlodarczak-Sarnecka’s “Drawing Continuous” explores ways to engage one’s immediate environment. Wlodarsczak has chosen the various views towards walls inside her North Perth town house as the motif for a sustained simultaneous encounter with acts of looking and marking, thus adding the complexities of familiarity and memory to her formidable task. She works on small canvases which assemble into large grid like panels, graphing the phenomena of the particular view, the persistent urgency of vision, in immaculate, overwhelming detail. 

Two immediate difficulties are to be encountered with the three large panels, one per wall, on show at Gallery East. Wlodarsczak works with the finely graded but relatively thin graphic lines produced by fibre tip pens and the Rotring pen, an architect’s’ drawing tool. This has become an almost illegitimate way to encounter gesture, which sometimes seems superglued to the notion of the painterly. It follows from this markedly alien sensation and from Wlodarsczak’s interest in gesture as phenomena, that the individual panels in each work will not function as elements in an avant garde grid or ironically in a post avant garde grid.

When gesture struggles to invoke an absolute presence in infinite layers of being, the grid loses its avant  garde function as a straight jacket for eyes and fingers. It is now a sign for excess forever exceeding, the more you look the more there is to see. We no longer look through it at the world, like children penned up in Plato’s cave. Presence is now about keeping on top of a reciprocal dialectic of gesture. We are already absolutely at home with the phenomena all around us and with their limits - however hard they may be to pin down.

Once these issues are resolved through persistent looking, it is clear that Wlodarsczak has come a long way towards success in her extraordinarily difficult project. She long ago faced up to the implications of her work. There is no final outcome, just phenomena -

 . . . I carry my space it is not an image but life space which "imprints" itself on new places I currently occupy. I rework the space by constant drawing process - that is drawing as present continuous stage of making marks after marks on something. I get up every day to the same but changed from "yesterday" space and draw. The "differa'nce …the word / visual experience which is repeated is already different from the same word said a second ago…. I do not think about final outcome of process of drawing. My hand and circumstances somehow accidentally form it. I enter, with my space, different spaces and work over . . .

 Best to begin by contemplating North Wall - Present Continuous, the image of her bathroom on the right hand wall. It’s all black lines and dots on white which makes it a slightly simpler proposition. Wlodarsczak spent sixty days in the bathroom letting it happen.  There are details everywhere taps  heads, bath curves, soap shelves – furniture, architecture. It explodes outwards overwhelming one’s vision,

.The bathroom is named Present Continuous 60/2.5 = 24 to name the process of "imprisonment" in my bathroom for 60 days (only during the day) and constant drawing. With drawing I use all the time the same tool - the Rotring pen, because it gives line even width. For East wall I have introduced a new tool - pigmented marker, which has been used for Wallpaper series. I want to give marks the chance to coexist with each other on equal bases. There are no emphases on any mark any line, no overpowering, and no authority. The equality of line/mark is one of principles in my drawing.

Any human gesture can carry a high tension presence. Wlodarsczak invented a wide range of strategies to engage the widest possible range. She has experimented with simultaneous left and right hand drawing of the same motif on two canvases, so that side by side, the differences between the traces of the phenomena before her, point, hologram like, to their originary moment. She also developed a multiple A5  digital print of a drawing her living room and invited friends and gallery visitors to write or draw on them to mark them with their  presence. The results  are exhibited in huge panels, accumulations of being caught by an image.

Her approach to gesture as presence can lead to some odd moments in consciousness. On  the left hand wall is a multicoloured, multi-panelled piece that began with a notion of democracy in drawing. Wlodarsczak gave equal drawing time to each colour, so that the domestic interior appears in a series of overlapping layers of rainbow lines that form an instant archaeology of its making. Black, however, not being a colour, was awarded as much time as it took to finish the work so that  the entire image is shrouded in shadowy  scribble - every society needs structure, even a society of coloured marks.

Wlodarsczaka’s humorous democracy of marks raises some remarkably profound questions. If her marks are to be read as signs for a human presence that can function equally for the artist and her viewers, then the piece can be seen as a serious if light hearted investigation of the limits imposed on the social by the phenomena of being and perception. Like society, Wlodarsczak’s work is made and exists through time. She  always make this apparent.

On opening night at Gallery East, she took the artist/work/audience relationship to a logical conclusion, with an edible work  She reproduced a small section of the work on the East Wall using the patterns in liquorice allsorts – black, white and coloured lines. Symbolic consumption of food has always been a magical way to recover memory, evoke presence and  restore social bonds -  the famous “do this in remembrance of me”  was about the eternal presence of Christ in the immediate moment. Wlodarsczak conflated symbolic consumption (by her audience), with the function of her gestures as traces that make the immediate moments of being of the work  available to them.

At Galerie Dusseldorf, John Teschendorf’s recent work continues his investigation of the archaeology of gesture and word. His work is less disciplined, more rhetorical, than Wlodarsczak’s. His large dark canvases, the History of Science series for instance, pose questions about surfaces and containment. The inclusion of close toned words, often capitals that mark the surface with a ponderous monumentality. Sometimes, as in Shaft,  Teschendorf reveals a very literal desire for  depth as the ultimate gesture of presence. Shaft might be a design for a probe down to the magma. It is a meditation on layering and presence, gesture as art.

Teschendorf’s most succesful works are his small drawings. In them, he comes to grips with the immediacy of desire in his gesture – scrolls, whirls and script-like hieroglyphics. Like Wlodarsczak he uses dramatic layering and sequenced, even, in his case patterned colours laid down in layers. His work, however, does not engage with phenomena external to the act of mark making making.he finds the resistance which define his desires in his media. Graphite wax and acrylic colours can all be accumulated in depth so that every gesture can be pushed through them, inscribed, embedded to leave troughs and rippling wakes like the footprints of extinct dinosaur frozen in fossilised mud.  

This method is not new. It has been relocated by the crisis of the informal in contemporary art. Teschendorf’s Drawing II can no longer exist  as a  set of balanced acts of assertion. His gestures have the quality of a panicky  attempt to blind the eye to the vast emptiness of desire They are temporary informal props to patch over an empty universe. Think of Tippi Hedren beating off the birds, ultimate blind bearers of darkness, or the skin of a murder victim lacerated with cuts and blows. Drawing VII glows red beneath the black  marks.

The long repressed need to incarnate desire in gesture has returned big time. An increasing number of younger artists will return to the problem. Most, unfortunately, will see it simply as an issue of design  or the resolution of contradictory theoretical rhetoric. They will have neither the confidence nor the knowledge to deal with its psychic underpinnings.

For this we must blame the art schools and their banal industrial propaganda.

In her Plantworks, at Perth Galleries, Lilian Hankel used dried plants to make images on superimposed layers of translucent material in pursuit of the Baudrilardian  formula noted in her catalogue essay  as “ . . .the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself .To escape the crisis of representation reality loops around itself in pure repetition . . . (italics in original; quotes from Selected Writings 1988)”.

This is hard to do on a flat surface but one can overlay repetitions, as a neurotic form of gesture as art. Moreover Hankel has difficulties with grasping the reason for the Baudrillardian experience that “reality is always already reproduced”. This is because desire always gets there first.  Now we have the means to project desire directly on the external world - faster than any thought. All reproduction can be can gathered into the category of this new gesture as art, even relocation of found material becomes reproduction, the difference between representation and reproduction in art collapses utterly. Since there is no longer a resistant real only phenomena, Baudrillard’s simulacrum becomes a convenient delusion, a decorative chimera.

Hence the uneven  show. Hankel’s’ small works are often brilliant intuitions of the layerings of desire,the large ones extended exercises in decorative pedantry.Wilit matterinthelong run. Probably not, Hankel will learn to notice what “works”. The  theoretical baggage will disappear and she will make good art,but in the meantime, what a waste.