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WALL DRAWINGS
Selected site specific wall drawings 2000–2002
Room 35, Kudos Gallery, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Artspace, Sydney,
and
UNSW SOLARCH Solar Research Centre, Little Bay, NSW
Site specific installations of 14 wall drawings.
Between 2000 and 2002 I produced
various large-scale wall drawings for the solo
exhibitions Infinite Nostalgia and The Poetics of Descent,
and for group exhibitions at Kudos Gallery, the Ivan Dougherty Gallery
(College of Fine Arts, UNSW), and UNSW SOLARCH Solar Research Centre,
Little Bay. The drawings were site specific and conceptual. They were also ephemeral, since the closure of each show dictated
their removal; cleaned from the walls and painted over.
As such, the artworks ceased to exist beyond
their documentation. Like much conceptual art, these drawings could
not be seen — despite their creative value, beauty, technique,
etc — as marketable commodities, or as decorative objects
‘for’ walls: the artworks ‘were’ the walls;
an aesthetic and expressive liaison between subject, media, and
gallery; with sensitivity to architectural placement per se, and
the relative positioning of drawings if more than one. Beyond the
linear nature of the drawings, a few individual pieces (Infinite
Nostalgia of a Heartbeat, Floating Webs, The Ballad
Of Vacant Bird-Eyes) incorporated sculptural assemblage sourced
from locomotives, using materials such as steel, aluminium, and
carbon. These functioned as arms, beaks, and styluses seemingly
transmitting, tracing, or engraving the lines and shapes of the
drawings. In these works, there was a prevailing sense that the
artist’s hand was not ‘at work’, rather, that
the machine’s hand was drawing and emitting both form and
meaning.
The drawings were pre-planned; scaled onto large cartoons by hand,
or traced off small studies and enlarged in Illustrator
and then printed. The cartoons were taped onto the gallery walls,
allowing them to be sited by degree and by measure. In the Renaissance
tradition, the cartoons were pricked by pins to make sense of where
lines began, and finished, though unlike Spolvero, no dusting
powder was used; the pin marks were the only guide, and where necessary,
continual visual referral back to the cartoons was made. (During
the Renaissance, Spolvero (or pouncing) technique involved
pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin and dusting powdered
charcoal or lead white through the pinholes onto a light or dark
recipient surface. It was a very labour intensive technique. See
Carmen C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance
Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300-1600.) In some instances,
pins were left lightly sticking into walls to be a guide while drawing.
In other drawings, holes were made and the cartoon removed in its
entirety before work began. It is a truism to say that the process
could be labour intensive: in the case of Infinite Network of
Hidden Stars, approximately 35,000 pin pricks were made, and
the drawing took 2 days to complete with 5 assistants.
In reproducing these wall drawings, the problematic issues are firstly,
one of ‘honest’ documentation, and secondly, the viewer’s
experience of the work in situ, which cannot be conveyed easily
post-exhibition. In the gallery, the viewer continually moves and
refocuses, not just laterally but in and out, that is, towards the
work and away from it, making sense of the detail as well as the
overall quality and visual structure of a particular work, or that
work in relation to others. From a distance, the human eye can make
sense of fine line work, but the camera cannot do service to its
reproduction beyond close to middle range, from which you have a
slice of the picture depending on the scale of the work. It is hard
to stress the difficulty one has in photographically recording a
0.4 mm black ink line — on a drawing that might span 8 metres
length — at a distance that allows for the work to be seen
in its entirety, despite the fact that the human eye can process
it. Even so, Lenny Ann Low (‘Exhibitions: Mars is all right
tonight’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sept 15-16, 2001)
still wrote of my “three dimensional pen drawings of angular
forms and paper aeroplanes [being] hardly visible on the white walls.”
To illuminate my point, Falling Walls effectively comprised
6 lines and the gallery wall’s ground line, and the 2 parallelograms
spanned many metres across a corner of the gallery. When a photograph
was taken of the whole work, the lines were largely invisible, when
‘details’ were taken, the record was but a single black
line on a white wall. The former risked capturing no information
at all, whilst the latter made no sense of the true spatial, formal,
expressive, and instrumental values of the artwork. They were both
misrepresentations of what the viewer saw and experienced. Similarly,
the wave motif that comprised the basic pattern of Infinite
Nostalgia of the Waves could be photographed singularly, but
not in full, repeated over a large wall. Ingrid Z W Van Dyk (To
Be or Not To Be: The Changes and Challenges Facing Tomorrow’s
Conservator of Ephemeral Art, Master of Art Administration
thesis, COFA UNSW, 2000, Sydney, p.14) wrote that even though “the
drawings employ traditional materials and methods, one can only
view them in situ. Any attempt to preserve them on film or video
results in the problem expressed in Antonioni’s movie Blow
Up. Close up or distant focus makes the drawings unintelligible….
For Schranzer’s drawings, one had to be there.”
This brings me to a point that needs to be made: that THE REPRODUCTIONS
YOU SEE HERE ARE ALTERED: that is, most of the images have been
digitally enhanced or ‘pushed’ using Macromedia
Flash and Photoshop to better convey the true essence
and visual impact of a work or series of works as they sat within
gallery spaces. To do less than this would have had you, the viewer,
literally staring at a blank wall.
Concerning the temporal nature of the artworks, although Van Dyk
sees ephemeral art as being largely the result of “heterogeneous,
insubstantial and often unstable” materials being used in
an artwork, underpinned by various philosophical and conceptual
intentions and meanings (performative, temporal, transmutational),
she described my drawings as “deliberate ephemera.”
I take this to mean that despite their archival quality, the fact
they could well have had longevity — a permanent shelf life
— I allowed their existence to be governed by the time frame
of an exhibition, and the need for erasure at a given date. The
built in “time-bomb” had begun “ticking from the
moment the artwork was conceived” (Van Dyk, p.5). The time
bomb was not materially based, but pragmatically determined. The
gallery was artwork, vehicle, mediator, and constraint, and painting
over the images was an inevitable and reconciled outcome. Though
disappointing in some ways (especially if friends or critics failed
to see a show before it closed), there was also a certain poetry
operating: the drawing of Processional Wall was subject
to a ‘destruction’ any architectural wall might experience,
materially and in memory over time; the drawings of Infinite
Nostalgia were, with pathos and nostalgia, scrubbed off the
walls never to be seen again.
Finally, I re-emphasise that the viewer’s general experience
of the works in situ — the physical and emotional responses
that may have been experienced in the presence of the drawings —
cannot be conveyed by these reproductions. Infinite Nostalgia,
for example, was — as I, and others, felt it — a meditative
and soulful exhibition. Yet however meditative, the exhibition was
also a physiological experience: Room 35 was a subtly pulsating
visual environment, for under the gallery’s daylight-based
fluorescents the light bounced off the white walls to produce a
shadowless, ambient environment. Since light was not absorbed by
solid artworks, by intermediary supports punctuating the space,
the effect was mildly blinding, vibratory, if not auric. Fine black
lines would manifest and then dissolve as the eye alighted and then
moved on. The optical nature of Infinite Network of Hidden Stars
added to the effect, as the eye and brain dealt with the afterimage,
with lines and forms being salient or recessive, aspects flat or
dimensional. If not actual, there was the metaphoric suggestion
of movement in works like Infinite Nostalgia of a Heartbeat,
with its flat-liner trailing off into ‘foreverness’.
There was materialization and dematerialization, a flux in the physical
and psychic digestion of the walls and their drawings. Standing
in the white box of the gallery was truly disorientating: it was
a ‘whole-body’ experience; you were within the artwork
— sensing infinite motion, and yet, stillness.
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INFINITE NOSTALGIA
Selected artworks from the exhibition 09 August —
02 September 2000
Room 35 (at Gitte Weise Gallery), Sydney
An exhibition of 5 wall drawings and 3 drawings.
Assisted by Isolde Lennon, Clinton Gay, Ken Patrick, Cherine
Fahd, Evan Brooks.
Tender eternities take root in me.
Jean Arp
This exhibition continues [Schranzer’s] tradition
of creating linear and toneless forms… reflect[ing]
his use of impersonal graphic and technical conventions
that belie the personal. Even Schranzer's drawing 'Infinite
Network of Hidden Stars' — in deference to a tenet
of optical theory and illusion — transcends its scientific
value to become personal and enigmatic, a ‘solitudine
dei segni’ (solitude of signs)… restrained,
abstract, and melancholic. … Heraclitus set forth
in words: “the god of the Oracle does not speak and
does not hide, but indicates through signs.” …
In all but three drawings, Schranzer's use of the white
page is supplanted by drawing directly onto the gallery's
walls. This creates an equation whereby his motifs are freed,
eluding the formality and confining influence of the frame,
isolating yet synchronously connecting each drawing within
the gallery. Paradoxically, they are located within a fixed
architectural space that is simultaneously—by virtue
of the nature of the work and the implied continuity of
the gallery's ‘planes’—infinite and expanding.
These units, taking up the whole or part of a wall, conceptualize
the poetic notion of ‘Infinite Nostalgia’.
The exhibition is an ode to the infinite, the nostalgic,
and the melancholic. The drawings displace the barriers
of time and space while locating their ‘eternity’
in the present/presence of the gallery. Room 35 is a universe
of metaphysical contemplation and quietude—a room
of 'tender eternities' for stars, waves, song, and private
lament.
Excerpted from the Press Release for the exhibition, August
2000
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KURT SCHRANZER
Infinite Network of Hidden Stars (detail)
August 2000, site specific wall drawing, pigment ink
Provenance: Ephemeral/Destroyed
Exhibited: 2000 Infinite Nostalgia, Room 35, Sydney.
Photography: Vanila Netto. Digital Enhancement: Kurt Schranzer
and John Burge.
© Kurt Schranzer 2007
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YOUNG MAN ON STAGE
Artwork from the exhibition Prax-is, January 2001
Kudos Gallery, Sydney
A site specific wall drawing.
Assisted by Isolde Lennon.
No one looked away from Pyrrhus. Some people just stared at
him, open-mouthed. Others glanced intermittently, or sidewise,
as if not deigning to seem too interested. A few had come just
to see him. … Pyrrus got hard, helplessly, with men looking
at him. … He was there to feel their eyes on him. They obliged;
the men in the room were transfixed as he slipped off his shorts.
Mark Merlis, from the novel Pyrrhus
This site-specific wall drawing maintains an interest in themes
of the virile, masculine, performing youth (earlier drawings include
Young Man on Stage, Canadian Stripper, Male
Burlesque Performer in Slow Motion); referencing the male
strip shows of Toronto, Montreal, and London, where “valiant
men sporting vigorous erections is de rigueur!”
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SCHRANZER
Young Man on Stage
January 2001, site specific wall drawing, pigment ink
Provenance: Ephemeral/Destroyed
Exhibited: 2001 Prax-is, Kudos Gallery, Sydney.
Photography: Kurt Schranzer. Digital Enhancement: Kurt Schranzer
and John Burge.
© Kurt Schranzer 2007
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PROCESSIONAL WALL
Artwork from the exhibition Histories in the Making, February–March
2001
Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney
A site specific wall drawing.
Assisted by Isolde Lennon.
We are accustomed to thinking of history
as having some main events and a great many sideshows. … the
great heroes are at the heart of the tapestry, the place where every
thread comes together in one impossibly intricate knot and the gods
themselves condescend to join in the weaving. … you and I
are at the periphery somewhere. Of course, there is no periphery.
Mark Merlis, from the novel Pyrrhus
History — its truths, its myths — its embodiment
in books, art, and architecture — has a grand and public face,
yet there is also a personal and largely unwritten one. As the narrator
in ‘Phyrrus’ suggests, there is no real periphery as
we day-to-day, over a lifetime, construct our own histories within
a larger cultural nexus and time-line, connected to the ‘who’
and to the ‘all’ that there is. It is somewhat in this
context that ‘Processional Wall’ exists: an acknowledgement
of histories, past and present, small and large, private and civic,
and the personal and cultural references (expressions) that are
used to make sense of the ‘who I am’ or the ‘who
we are’: politically, spiritually, socially, sexually. In
its conceptualising, and in its positioning, ‘Processional
Wall’ was framed by images of the Lion Gate of Mycenae —
with its monolithic stones, corbelled arch and slab, fronted by
sculpted lions and column — and of the frieze-like, low relief
designs of much Mesopotamian art. Of the latter, one reflects on
the Persian relief sculpture found on the terrace and stairways
to the Audience Hall in the Palace of Darius at Persepolis, and
logically — as the drawing is located on the brick walls of
the gallery — one looks to Babylonia, for ‘Processional
Wall’ primarily evokes the glazed tiles and brick patterns
of Nebuchadnezzar’s street wall, leading from the inner city
through the Ishtar gate to the Bit Akitu. Of course, in place of
those stately lions and mythic beasts — the dragon of Marduk
and the bull of Adad — there is a horizontal column-cum-cylinder-cum-phallus.
Simply, one mythic character or ‘archetype’ —
with personal as well as psychoanalytic, anthropologic, heraldic,
magical and historical meaning — replaces the others. Beyond
these allusions and archaeological references, the combination of
‘phallus’ and ink on brickwork also aligns the artwork
with graffiti, especially that ‘adorning’ toilet blocks.
Whether illicit, artistic, or well humoured in impulse — created
in mock solicitation or advertising real social or sexual need —
its role, meaning, and value can surely be examined within various
sub-cultural and sub-historical discourses. Graffiti and, though
not mutually inclusive, public toilets have served useful social
and sexual functions for outsiders, subverting the public architectural
spaces of the dominant culture and its institutions.
Quoted from an unpublished Artists Statement, January 2001
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KURT SCHRANZER
Processional Wall (detail). To the right, works by Nicole
Ellis.
February 2001, site specific wall drawing, pigment ink
Provenance: Ephemeral/Destroyed
Exhibited: 2001 Histories in the Making, Ivan Dougherty
Gallery, Sydney.
Photography: Kurt Schranzer. Digital Enhancement: Kurt Schranzer
and John Burge.
© Kurt Schranzer 2007
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THE POETICS OF DESCENT
Artworks from the exhibition 06 — 29 September 2001
Artspace, Sydney
An exhibition of 4 wall drawings.
Assisted by Isolde Lennon, Evan Brooks.
During the month of September 2001, Artspace
presented 3 imaginative exhibitions that occupied and engaged with
the gallery spaces in various visual and metaphoric ways: Simon
Cavanough’s installation 'Today I looked down from on top
of a hill and saw that everything that was fucked was also good',
with its aesthetically controlled yet ad hoc hoses and structures
weaving through space; Han Lims’ monumental, space-filling
'Untitled (2001)'; and, in juxtaposition, the materially empty gallery
space of Kurt Schranzer’s 'The Poetics of Descent'.
Cavanough’s wall and floor installation featured a whirring
machine and connected to it, via plastic hoses, miniature cardboard
factories littering the floor, in turn connected to pink balloons.
The machine gave kinetic life to the arrangement via these balloons:
the effect was one of slow breathing, of the rhythmic inhaling and
exhaling of tiny lungs, as they inflated and deflated.
Han Lim’s fusion of visual art and interior architectural
practices created an architectronic structure trying to defy gravity
or, at least, our expectations of it. 'Untitled (2001)', like other
works in his oeuvre, investigated “instability of form, explorations
of space, physical laws and engineering,” and though a “very
large scale construction occupying the length and height of Artspace’s
largest gallery, the structural supports for the work [were] paradoxically,
almost impossibly, fragile.” The work was constructed of bricks,
suspended off the ground and held in this ‘levitating’
place by fine steel wires: the illusion was that of a massive, masonry
form, floating expectantly, surreally; time having been frozen.
In all its physicality, it said much about the fragility and precariousness
of the world that we construct.
Schranzer’s 'The Poetics of Descent' situated four stark wall
drawings within gallery 3. The project, and individual drawings,
expressed “movement downward, back, across, yet movement that
[was] caught, fixed in time.” This resulted from establishing
a discourse between the finite, defined space of the gallery, and
the illusionist space of the walls, used as they were as the artist’s
canvas. These walls (windows or picture planes) allowed for the
establishment of a boundless, immeasurable visual field, emphasised
by the minimal linear drawings and their ambiguous figure/ground
relationships and positions; the lack of ground planes, fore, middle,
or backgrounds; the manipulation or absence of perspectives, form
and density. Schranzer created “dichotomies between material
space and spiritual space, a space of solids and transparencies,
an expression of forms and forces that [were] physical, atomic,
and gravitational, yet celestial, weightless and inactive.”
Like Lim’s brick wall, there was the expectation and implication
of movement and transition, yet a sense of unearthly poise, of being
in limbo.
This contemplative, even meditative limbo was an interesting feature
of the Artspace exhibitions, opening as they did three days before
the events of September 11, 2001. Observing Han Lim’s untitled
floating wall, and reflecting on Schranzer’s 'Falling Planes',
'Falling Walls,' 'Falling Column', and 'Floating Webs', there was
a sense of freezing and framing the very players of that event:
the aeronautical, and the architectural. Visionary and prophetic,
I would not go so far as to say, but in the context of an unfolding
9/11 and its aftermath, the gallery offered a hymnal respite of
sorts, a calm space (for those not stunned, who were able to wander
out) from which to make sense of the fragments: those exploding
planes, collapsing buildings, falling floors, walls, columns, windows,
and, not to be forgotten, humanity. Watching the coverage of the
towers collapse (during the night I was woken by a friend’s
phone call from Amsterdam: “Have you seen what’s happening
in NY? For Christ’s sake turn on the TV;” the news was
breaking, the events filmed from a distance across the river) there
was, I swear, all of these things: a moment of questioning and realization,
an awkward imbalance, yet poise, suspension, levitation, a ‘quite’
breath, before the ground was pulled. Though Cavanough tied the
rhythms of his balloons and small buildings to sexual “factories
of love, their purpose simple,” he (from my perspective) more
significantly expressed that the machine told “the story of
man’s simplest desires for home, love, and security and how
these desires relate to a world that can seem so less than perfect
as to lead to sadness….” Lenny Ann Low made the melancholic
assessment that those 27 ankle high houses, with their shallow breathing
balloons “swelling and deflating like sad and weary hearts,
is like visiting a hospital intensive-care unit.” Three artists.
One requiem.
Vincent Renner, Sydney, November 2001, unpublished. For quotes,
see Artspace, Issue number 103 September 2001, and Lenny
Ann Low, ‘Exhibitions: Mars is all right tonight’, Sydney
Morning Herald, Metro, Sept 15-16, 2001.
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Falling Walls, Falling Planes, and Falling
Column in situ
September 2001, site specific wall drawings, pigment ink
Provenance: Ephemeral/Destroyed
Exhibited: 2001 The Poetics of Descent, Artspace, Sydney.
Photography: Kurt Schranzer. Digital Enhancement: Kurt Schranzer
and John Burge.
© Kurt Schranzer 2007
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BIRD WATCHER, AIRSTRIP
Artworks from the exhibition Praxis 2002, January 2002
Kudos Gallery, Sydney
A site specific installation of 2 wall drawings.
Assisted by Isolde Lennon.
Voyeur, binoculars, spotting, watching,
birds, planes, strip, display…
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Bird Watcher
January 2002, site specific wall drawing, pigment ink
Provenance: Ephemeral/Destroyed
Exhibited: 2002 Praxis 2002, Kudos Gallery, Sydney.
Photography: Kurt Schranzer. Digital Enhancement: Kurt Schranzer
and John Burge.
© Kurt Schranzer 2007 |
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THE BALLAD OF VACANT BIRD-EYES
Artwork from the exhibition Appliance, April 2002
UNSW SOLARCH Solar Research Centre, Little Bay, NSW
A site specific wall drawing.
Assisted by Isolde Lennon, Evan Brooks.
Group exhibition curated by Alan Giddy and Sophia Kouyoumdjian.
Artists included Ian Howard, Luiza Milewicz, Atanas Djonov, Patricia
Bursell, Allan Giddy, Martin Sims, Vanila Netto, Simon Cooper, Barney
Chambers, Francois Limondin, Che Ritz, Liz Ashburn, and Jamil Yamani.
Of Paul Klee’s 'Twittering Machine', H.W. Janson wrote:
“… he has created a ghostly mechanism that imitates
the sound of birds, simultaneously mocking our faith in the machine
age and our sentimental appreciation of bird-song.” This is,
in one manner, an apt reading of 'The Ballad of Vacant Bird-Eyes',
though 'mock' might less deridingly be supplanted by 'questioning'.
Indeed, there is [the pretence of movement] that queries the function
and operation of these avian-auto components. …
Posited is the score for bird-song, surely, for there are two notes
masquerading as eyes, yet the sound of this melody by-for-of a bird
with a vacant stare is audible where? Hear, perhaps, the twitter
in this dimension, symphonic or solo, sombre or jovial — concert-watchers
teetering on applause — or cup the ear to silence, for the
sound is elsewhere, another strata. Perhaps it is heard only by
the little souls of common grass-finches? Consider too, the energy,
ignition, the mechanisms that precipitate this lyric action for,
if not physically fuelled, then from which esoteric source, running
on the smell of a cosmic mystery?
Quoted from a statement by the artist, Appliance, exhibition
catalogue, 2002, edited Helen Sturgess, College of Fine Arts, Sydney
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KURT SCHRANZER
The Ballad of Vacant Bird-Eyes
April 2002, site specific wall drawing
pigment ink, steel, aluminium, carbon, enamel, brass assemblages
Provenance: Ephemeral, assemblage components Collection of the Artist
Exhibited: 2002 Appliance, UNSW SOLARCH Solar Research
Centre, Little Bay, NSW.
Photography: Kurt Schranzer. Digital Enhancement: Kurt Schranzer
and John Burge.
© Kurt Schranzer 2007 |
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