ON YOUR MARKS: Embodied Post-Performative Collaborative Drawing Practice-as-Research since 2011
Tim Etchells in Certain Fragments (1999) asserts ‘collaboration [is not] about perfect unity but about difference, collisions, incompatibilities’ (1999: 56). Since 2011, I have produced a body of practice-as-research that explores these ideas and examines the relationship between collaborative drawing (or more broadly ‘marking’) and self-relationality to ‘others’ and ‘place’. This work has been guided by a series of questions including: ‘What is understood as a ‘mark’ and ‘marking’? ‘How can marks convey or represent something? Is marking ‘embodied’?, What is ‘located’ in a mark?’, How are ‘marks’ understood as communication? ‘Can ‘marking’ be understood as dialogic and ‘How marks become indexical of their producer?’
Micro-Residency with Lucy O’Donnell at Parfitt Gallery, June 2011
To watch the full length version (approx. 1hour), click here: https://filmfreeway.com/onyourmarkswithlucydonnell
From a shared interest in the location of the ‘Mark’, these above questions On your Marks at the Parfitt Gallery, London in June 2011 evaluated through a series of conversations between two artists (myself and Lucy O’Donnell) . Throughout the three-day micro-residency (Tuesday 28th ~ Thursday 30th June 2011), Lucy and I generated a whole range of different ‘marks’, which we vocabularised as sound utterances, visual marks on a surface and bodily gestures. During the five day residency, we transformed the traditional white cube into a stage to perform in, play in and have fun in by utilising its physicality. Audiences could watch myself and Lucy marking through the windows or enter the space as the door was open. We prepared the gallery with sketchbooks and coloured sticky post-it notes and suspended a roll of white paper along the length of the gallery, all to be to marked with charcoal, black biro pen, or lead pencil.
As the performances/conversations took place, communication between me and Lucy alternated between using the various paper mediums which all became obliterated and eventually destroyed by the end of the project. Leftover objects from a previous exhibition including text left on the wall and plinths that had not yet been removed were utilised as props. Each mark we made was an invitation for the other person to respond or in other words, we use ‘marking’ as a process in which to generate dialogue. ‘Marking’ was described as a means for a person to ‘mark’ and accentuate one’s presence by using their body as well as a means to mark one’s own boundaries and to demarcate in various ways power relations. ‘On your marks’ denotes competition. We were asked by an audience member in a discussion at the end of the project ‘Who came out on top?’
The ‘performative’ is a key concern for many contemporary artists. The
body can be considered not just in terms of how the marks made by myself and
Lucy embody ideas of collaboration but the act of making those marks are often
in a very physical, super bodily manner. Informing these ideas, are how Maurice
Merleau-Ponty envisages the body with the ‘embodied’ act of painting (which me
and Lucy extend to ‘marking’ more broadly):
The painter ‘takes his body with him’ says Valery. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement (Merleau-Ponty writing in “Eye and Mind” Paris: Gallimard, 1964.)
It is tempting to look at paintings as static objects. Merleau-Ponty, however, reminds us of something we perhaps always knew, at some level at least; that painting (and by association, marking) and the body are intimately connected. This is interesting because, as he says, the body is itself not just one amongst other objects, or one chunk of space amongst others but is an ‘intertwining of vision and movement’. During On your Marks, Lucy and I examined the extent to which the residue (i.e. the drawings) of acts of drawing and marking can be viewed not as a collection of static objects but as records of the intertwining of vision and movement. Furthermore, how these records can be a source or component of a new type of ‘post-performative drawing/marking’.
During our residency, we constituted drawing and marking as performative and used the act of marking to remark on the phenomenological relationship we had with each other. Through an extended vocabulary of what constitutes ‘drawing’ by naming it as ‘marking’ with marks made require a response, we produced an energy which played itself out in the live physical moment that could be broken down into two simple considerations. Firstly, the moment where one of us were going to make a mark and how were we going to indicate this and secondly, the repercussions of having made such a mark. It was our intention to test friendly reciprocity, evaluate how physical presence and absence could be marked and begin to understand how marks become indexical of their producer as we began working in the gallery space treating it as a contingent testing ground; everything in constant flux. In this way, we interrogated how physical space could be punctuated with our bodies in a communicative and expressive way. Marks were signs of hospitality, reflective of the reciprocity between a host and a guest. The offering of a mark to the other person was an invitation. Accepting the mark displayed conviviality, rejecting it produced antagonism. This constant action of accepting and rejecting marks determined how the dialogue between myself and Lucy would proceed. The act of marking made visible the politics between us as we marked personal boundaries.
Collaborative Marking: Marker Pen Performances (2019 – now)
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Since 2019, I have focused the above questions to explore, ‘Can acts of group drawing or marking embody the tensions and complexities of collaborative working?’ and ‘How can drawings/marks made during these acts be indexical of not just the actions of the group but enable a questioning of the self in relation to others?’ These questions have formed the foundation for an audience participative activitywhere participants experience the tensions of collaboration through an embodied collaborative drawing activity entitled Collaborative Marking: Marker Pen Performances which I have previously set-up in various contexts and settings that have an art gallery, a lecture theatre and also within the pedagogic setting of the university workshop/seminar room.
Participants first gather around a table with a sheet of paper and a marker pen and are then invited to hold the pen together at the same time and move the pen together across the page to mark the paper. Everyone needs to find a space on the pen. They are instructed to respond to certain things that catch their attention as they draw together and listen to a piece of text being spoken out aloud (most recently, at Radical Repetition which I curated for London Critical Thought Conference 2023, I invited performance poet Nick Eisen to read aloud his poems which contain multiple forms of linguistic repetition read at different speeds and tempos, often changing in gear rapidly). Alternatively, participants are asked to choose a word and not to tell others what the word is. A previous participant commented that ‘If we do not know what another’s person’s choice of word is, you’ve got to trust that everybody else in the group is going to do the word you have personally chosen. We assume somehow we are all on the same wavelength but we’ve all got different words. I feel I am in a space of trust here’. Participants then try to draw that word (not using letters) and at the end of the activity is the big reveal as to what word each participant had chosen. One some iterations, alternatively, participants have all held the same word. Participants knowing the word is the object, not a concrete tangible object but is still a common point of reference. The drawing process, marking the paper with the same pen, everybody touching the same pen at the same time, often produces so much (uneasy ) laughter. Participants are then instructed to complexify the process at different stages, e.g. with one person instructing and the others with their eyes closed, swapping hands (to the hand participants normally write with), kneeling on one foot, engaging in a balancing act, do the activity in silence etc.
The resulting drawings are about the dynamics of a group and who controls the pen - who leads? In Archive or Memory? (2003), Matthew Reason describes Forced Entertainment’s performance space as, ‘[l]ittered with traces of what has gone before, traces of the performance which were present but now has gone’ (Reason, 2003: 88). These marks are embodied visible traces of the complexities that underpin collaboration, ‘leftover’ (ibid.) embodiments / embodied debris of the tension participants felt throughout the activity. Participants have previously expressed that engaging in the collaborative pen holding and feel it move across the paper felt akin to that those they experienced when using a Ouija board and also taking part in a séance. Moreover, in terms of seeing the dynamics of collaboration visibly on a page, one participant commented ‘this activity perfectly embodies collaboration. Collaboration is about being in the world unless you want to be alone in the woods somewhere’. What happens when the drawing/marking goes in directions that a group member may not like? ‘There’s a limit to politeness to get the job done!’, one participant has previously remarked. The marks made on the paper are indexical of "who's in charge" in collaboration, even in just holding something together, is there equity in how it (the pen) is held? ‘I wonder who is leading and who is following’ another participant has previously remarked. This idea of 'equitable holding' could be applied to many different contexts. Another participant usefully remarked,
Where you hold the pen influences the movements and decisions, and energies. Does the person at the bottom have more power? We always think of a top down hierarchy but maybe the person at the bottom is the grounding one who provides the stability, the leadership might come from the top but are not actually the ones controlling it… or maybe the middle one is the mediator between top and bottom. Quite a lot happens in the middle - if directives come from here it gets converted and then gets stabilised. Is the person holding the pen at the bottom holding the power at the base? Are they grounding the process so everyone else feels safe and secure? Is the person in the middle playing quite an important role mediating between the one who’s directing from the top and the one holding at the base?
Whilst the activity clearly stimulates discussion about collaboration and working/relating with/to others, it also encourages deep self-awareness and elevating participants’ consciousness of themselves in terms of their own subjectivity in relation to others and in relation to the space(s) they are in. A further participant commented in relation to these ideas that:
The activity opens up a lot for you to discover about yourself working in a team. The beauty of the work’s playfulfulness is the easy access point for doing work which is actually quite deep. Participants are asked to embody something, there’s a lot of trust involved in this process and dealing with things that are quite abstracted, delving into that inner abstract space of thoughts and feelings so to do so in a playful manner is a really useful access point. The push and pull against each other - similar to the experience of learning to question, taking feedback, trusting in a process rather than the outcome, more important to being present in the moment as the pen progressed meaning that I had to surrender whatever I was holding on to so that I could be part of a larger process. The activity has the potential to go very deep … Really lean into this work’s meditative quality
The finished drawings also point to how time can be understood beyond that of a durational work in this, as time can also be considered as being an aggregate of thought. The drawings create an aggregation of time coming through in the sense that you can still feel the tension of the marks being made on the paper even if you can’t see it or hear it. Whilst the drawings open up an opportunity to discuss the complexities of collaborative working, the drawings speak to how time and duration within a static image and ideas and thoughts and even processes of their production may be 'revealed' over time. In other words, how the form and content within supposedly ‘flat’ static surfaces can, through looking, reveal themselves over time.
Whilst on most occasions of enacting the artwork in various spaces, the resulting drawings depicts lines and abstract forms, in a previous iteration at Wimbledon College of Arts, the drawings depicted more figurative elements e.g. peoples, objects and things. Upon seeing those figurative elements, a viewer remarked ‘How did they do those drawings? They must have communicated with each other in some way, a ‘hive’ mentality (when you enter a space of shared consciousness that you are not necessarily aware of because of the situation you’re tuning in) - a pre-meditated consensus before about what they are going to draw. An example of building trust with people’.
MEDIATING THE DRAWINGS
The resulting drawings from the collaborative pen holding drawing activity above are then documented and filmed with the camera moving across the drawn paper. Now digital, the drawings are layered over one another and green screen processes were applied to create arresting tensions between the lines and imagery.
DISSONANT LINES (2023)
To watch, click here:
https://filmfreeway.com/DISSONANTLINES2023
DISSONANT LINES (2023) is a hypnotic, painterly and poetic animation, concrete poetry in film. It is the follow up to Lee Campbell's last silent animated film On Your Marks: Tension Lines (2020) which previously screened in a range of festivals and events including as part of a two-person exhibition at Sidewalk Video Gallery in Boston, USA in 2021 and recently at Global Fest 2022, Helsinki, Finland. Extending its predecessor, Dissonant Lines shows where lines and, this time, imagery come together and clash producing a creative disruption that leads to new images and lines being produced, borders dissolving and then reappearing. Clashing lines create new possibilities for redefinition. Similar to On Your Marks, Dissonant Lines removes the author;an interesting change as my work is often about identity and my own autobiography.
In Dissonant Lines, the viewer gets to see the drawn pages being turned over, sparking intrigue as to what is over the page, underneath the page and on the flipside to the page being turned. A disembodied hand appears in the film turning the pages. The original drawings have a link to cave paintings. The viewers try to build a narrative from the drawings. There is something really primal about the mark making; the marking seems to come from a really internal place. The viewer senses a real essence of trying to get things down and express. The imagery of Dissonant Lines, like On your Marks, was made by students at Wimbledon College of Arts, London as part of a workshop Lee delivered. In groups of 8/9, students were invited to draw images conjuring up their ideas around the term 'collaboration'. They only had one pen per group. 'I instructed them to hold the pen together at the same time and move the pen together across the page to make the drawings.The resulting drawings from the activity above were then documented and filmed with the camera moving across the drawn paper. Now digital, the drawings were layered over one another and green screen processes were applied to create arresting tensions between the lines. The marks without sound makes you stop from thinking about the moment it was drawn and now, put into a different space, the viewer concentrates on the layers – all these tensions in the lines being made.
Like
'On your Marks', this film employs digital green screen to create
fleshy layers seeping underneath and being revealed, and other sets of
imagery coming through. The lines that you can see were made in the
physical world using marker pens and paper.
Images below show when the work installed at Pride is an Abstraction curated by Michael Petry, Clifford Chance, London.
June -September 2023
Pride is an Abstraction curator Michael Petry on the opening night at Clifford Chance (patched together from my memory and notes):
‘Normally when you say ‘Pride exhibition’ a lot of things come into mind but normally that’s figurative which is fine but I really wanted to focus on artists within our community who are making abstract work. Not something you would normally see in a Pride show. When you are a kid, you start off being an abstract artist. Children draw in a very abstract way. Then someone slapped your hand and says ‘NO you make a flower this THIS … this is how you should make art’ Starting out with colour and form which everyone does naturally you are told to be something else. And within the art world there is a whole new line of thought about queer abstraction’Speaking about my film ‘Dissonant Lines’ on show
‘I believe Lee had groups of people make the drawings together and they had one pen, and they had to hold onto the pen at the same time altogether and make the drawings, very abstract and very conceptual which Lee has then made into a very layered and complex video with no sound or music. Very beautiful. Lee has had quite a bit of success with this - it’s been in quite a few international film festivals.’ #abstraction #queerabstraction #contemporarypainting #prideisanabstraction
ON YOUR MARKS: TENSION LINES (2020)
To watch, click here:
https://filmfreeway.com/ONYOURMARKSTENSIONLNES
'Imagine you fell into Picasso’s mind, this is what you would see … the inside of a Surrealist brain ….’
Lines come together and clash producing a creative disruption that leads to new lines being produced, borders dissolving and then reappearing. Clashing lines create new possibilities for redefinition. This short silent film employs digital green screen to create fleshy layers seeping underneath and being revealed, and other sets of imagery coming through. The lines that you can see were made in the physical world using marker pens and paper. The resulting line drawings were then documented and filmed where the camera moved across the drawn paper. Now existing digitally, the drawings were then layered over one another and green screen processes were applied to create arresting tensions between the lines. The marks without sound makes you stop from thinking about the moment it was drawn and now put into a different space the viewer concentrates on the layers – all these tensions in the lines being made.
TWO PERSON EXHIBITION, SIDEWALK VIDEO GALLERY,
BOSTON, U.S.A 2021
Finland December 14, 2022
References
BILLING, J., LIND, M., and NILSSON, L., 2007.Taking the matter into common hands: on contemporary art and collaborative practices. London: Black Dog
BISHOP, C., 2004. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October, Fall 2004, No. 110, 51-79
BROADHURST, S., 1999. Liminal Acts ‘A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory’. London: Cassell
ETCHELLS, T.1999 ‘On Performance Writing' in Tim Etchells (ed.) Certain Fragments. London: Routledge
FRIELING, R., 2008.The Art of Participation 1950 to Now. San Francisco; London: Thames & Hudson
HEATHFIELD, A., 1997. Shattered Anatomies-Traces of the Body in Performance. Bristol: Arnolfini Live
--- 2012. Perform, repeat, record: live art in history. Edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield. Bristol; Chicago: Intellect
KENNING, D., 2009. Art Relations and the Presence of Absence, Third Text 23: 44 435-446
MARTIN, S., 2007. Critique of Relational Aesthetics, Third Text, Vol. 21, Issue 4, 369-386
MERLEAU-PONTY, M., 1964a. Eye and Mind in The Primacy of Perception. ed. James E. Edie. trans. Carleton Dallery. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP
REASON, M, 2003. 'Archive or Memory' New Theatre Quarterly 19:1.
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