Making (Drawings and Detritus)

It’s the representation in its material aspect that I want to bring out, but not at the expense of a represented, re-imagined world, because there’s no ultimate fact involved (it never becomes ‘just’ graphite on paper, which is another sort of fantasy). I don’t think there’s an alternative to essentially faulty images – they’re how we build the world we inhabit. What I do is a way to try to live critically with that, but also find pleasure in it. (David Musgrave, email to Kate Macfarlane, May 2010)

It's an exhibition I never saw, but encountering the name of David Musgrave's 2004 Norwich exhibition, 'Living Dust', sent me looking for his work and his thinking, part of the project of find-another-artist-who-draws-with-my-mentality. And Musgrave is someone I 'get' like that.

Transparent Head

2003

David Musgrave

Graphite on Paper

Extracts from Kate Macfarlaine, 'David Musgrave: Faulty Images' (Tate Papers 2011)

‘In making something’, Musgrave has said, ‘I think I’m always trying to embody the conditions that enabled that making to happen.’7 Musgrave feels ideas of immediacy and spontaneity in art are suspect. ‘You never make the first mark; there is always an archaeology or a history you can open up to a greater or lesser extent – sometimes a very specific history and sometimes a more general one.’2 .... Musgrave believes that artworks that are completely abstract struggle to communicate with the viewer at an emotional level. Our capacity to read the most rudimentary marks as representative of ourselves exists as a fundamental human trait. Musgrave’s oeuvre is characterised by an exploitation of this capacity and by an exploration of its limits: ‘His work is not, as some have suggested, predominantly an inquiry into anthropomorphism,’ Martin Herbert has observed, ‘except insofar as it spotlights a tendency to grab anthropocentric lifebelts while negotiating the rushing stream of an apparent abstraction’.8

Musgrave has widened the scope of his enquiry through curating exhibitions. Living Dust (2004), for example, was a show that featured works on paper from the sixteenth century to the present day.9 Works were chosen to demonstrate the transformative material capacity of the medium of drawing. Musgrave’s catalogue essay makes clear his frustration with the predominant conception of drawing as an expression of the artist’s intentions, thoughts and feelings.‘It’s rather the narrow but infinite gap between immaterial perception and its material recording that is their enduring content,’ he wrote.10 ‘Sometimes an image drifts so far from its referent that only its immediate context allows it to be identified […] what is significant [in such cases] is that the representation doesn’t become an abstract sign we subsequently use to communicate with others who recognise it, but something to be treated as having a particular, substantial reality of its own.’11

Drawing can be a slow, contemplative activity, something that happens quietly and that involves an interactive process. A mark is made, reflection ensues; more marks follow, with erasures, and slowly an image builds, is teased out of the paper. It is possible to create an illusion through drawing with graphite on paper but the medium’s monochromatic nature and the paper’s surface (something that Musgrave likes to work with rather than against) impose particular limitations. Musgrave employs trompe l’œil to create an illusion – but the uncertain status of the image draws attention to the methodology of production. Recourse to simple decoding tools, such as nameable things or a story line, are out of the question. Nonetheless, we somehow know what these things are, even if we cannot name them or attach labels to them. ‘I’d prefer the work to be seen to be about fiction rather than illusion’, Musgrave has said, ‘because I’m not trying to fool anybody. You can see how it’s done – if the fact that something isn’t what it appears to be doesn’t become part of the experience, then the work has failed.’12

• 2. David Musgrave, email to the author, 8 June 2010.
• 8. Herbert 2003.
• 9. ‘Living Dust’, Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, September–October 2004.
• 10. David Musgrave, Living Dust, exhibition catalogue, Norwich Gallery 2004, p.11.
• 11. Ibid., p.12.
• 12. Musgrave, quoted in Arnolfini 2003, p.21.

'Living Dust' - it's a good name, a Janus-label that looks two ways at once, to both the materiality of graphite on paper and to evoking (not mimetically representing) the resonance and life contained even in the most unremarked detritus in the world, or perhaps especially in that. The unconsidered ordinariness of things, their tactility, the memory of them has a vividness that grand concepts lack. The stone in the shoe or the smell of damp or a flickering floresecent light conjure a place and a time sensorily, sensually, where words do not, for words are slippery things, thuggish things, while our body memories are ultimately our most personal possessions.

But for my purposes of finding someone who might better articulate my own garbled intent, this sentence is important:

It’s rather the narrow but infinite gap between immaterial perception and its material recording that is their enduring content.

The drawing has, in and of itself, a material existence which is not explicable by or reducible to the artist's quotable declarations. It's a drawing, not a text, and must be experienced as such, looked at, not 'read' or 'decoded' as if it were a string of signs or words. The concept of 'immaterial perception' is valuable here, to me, since it describes much about the origins of a drawing and the process of producing one as a material object. In a curious concatenation between mind's eye and finger ends, the drawing is a felt thing, felt out in its rendering.