'Praise this world to the Angel'*

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.*

Rilke's elegy calls on the reader to pay attention to the here and now, not just the glories of the great hereafter, and is a trembling (as in Kierkergaardian fear and trembling) meditation of the evanescence of being, a source of wonder and awe deserving of tribute and reverence, and not merely a shoddy and contingent waiting room to be endured until God calls.

To look, not just with eye and brain, but with sense-memory as well, elevates the most mundane thing, and makes experience - all those overlooked, unconsidered, unremarkable and unremarked experiences, which otherwise count for little or nothing - into a long moment that no other may dictate or define.

I think that one of the things that people tend to look for too much in art is meaning. And they tend to project meaning much faster than I would like them to. If I was a dictator, an art dictator, I would tie them up and say: ‘Here, look at this. And look at it again, and look at it again’. (Vija Celmins in conversation with Robert Gober, 2004

* Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegy No. 9

Anthropomorphism

It is regarded not as the creation of a benevolent being, but the device of evil spirits - spirits enemies to man - conceived and fabricated in the dark, and the very shining of its eyes is thought to represent the fiery element whence it is supposed to have proceeded. Flying into their apartments in the evening at times it extinguishes the light; foretelling war, pestilence, hunger, death to man and beast. (Moses Harris, 1840)

 Acherontia atropos
Acherontia Genus
Acherontia derives from Acheron, the River of Pain in the underworld
Atropos is the Fate who cuts the thread of life
(The other 2 species of Acherontia are named in like style:

• Acherontia lachesis, after the Fate who measures the thread of life and determines destiny
• Acherontia styx, named after the principal and boundary river of Hades)

Common Names
English - death’s-head hawkmoth
German - Totenkopfschwärmer
French - le sphinx à tête de mort
Spanish - Esfinge de la muerte


So while one can be a little sneery about humanity's tendency to read everything in existence in relation to individual human destiny, markings which ought to be dismissed as purely arbitrary and meaningless in spiritual terms have attracted the attention of the populace of every nation where this moth has appeared - none has read it neutrally. And while the entymologists might claim to be naming it in a knowing joking manner, one does just wonder if they were hedging their bets with superstition.

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.

Progressive Porn

How the Do-Gooding Know-Besting Take-Control Progressive Elitists salivate at the prospect at having humankind on their knees on a chain.

The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, published in 2007, relished the prospect of the authoritarian form of government they deemed necessary, 'but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power', oh those self-sacrificing souls, putting their knowledge and their lives at the service of the masses they would dominate.

Their masterplan is clearest in its real intent when they are describing the universities of this authoritarian, liberty-impoverished future:

“The freedom to pursue knowledge as the individual sees fit is a mistake, for freedom must be considered in the context of the needs of society as a whole.... The Real University will have an agenda, which includes priorities for those tasks to be pursued that are essential to the future well-being of humanity.”

Why have I picked on this? Simply because this is a prize example of the new montrousness. Where once such a book would have been have regarded as the product of fascistic thinking, and as inimical to the true purpose of academic study, post-modernity has arrived at a place where these ideas are the property of the liberal, the left, the progressive - the world has turned upside down at the behest of those who would control our every action and thought up to and including what we are permitted to learn and speak of.

And in that mindset, book-burning becomes amusing, as seen in this now-deleted image from the San Jose State University Meteorology Department web page. The caption from the SJSU website read:

This week we received a deluge of free books from the Heartland Institute. The book is entitled “The Mad, Mad, Made World of Climatism”. Shown above, Drs. Bridger and Clements test the flammability of the book.

Government by expert, technocracy, or progressive tyranny, or an attempt to bring into being Plato's philosopher-king, the dispassionate, clever and principled autocrat, every single one of these leave the ruled mass waiting for the knock on the door, denouncement as a dissident, or holding mumbled conversations with like-minded folk in the shadows, perpetually looking over the shoulder for the righteous thought police. Denormalisation will soon be the general rule and it seems that it is only those who have long had a tenuous grasp on social acceptance, who are accustomed to be lectured and hectored by the man-from-the-council and the woman-from-the-social before shrugging and turning away, who have noticed the ramping up of efforts to police the minutiae of behaviour, preparing the ground for some imagined utopia of order, cleanliness, ponies and rainbows.

No, no, no. These people think we are their pets. The trouble is, when a pet turns vicious or 'sick', a one-way trip to the vet is perfectly legitimate.

Who are the monsters?

Mining Graphite

From 'Gangue Minerals and Pigment Earths' by Michael Shaw

Graphite is an allotrope of carbon, a black semi metal also known as plumbago or black-lead. The mineral was known of by the monks of Furness Abbey who are reported to have used it to mark their sheep (Lax & Maxwell 1998) and to rule guide lines in documents[4]. By the late 16th century it was certainly in use as a drawing material and probably for rust proofing iron (grate polish etc) (Camden 1610). The mine passed through many hands including in the early 17th century the Hechsetter brothers, as a private venture rather than as part of their Mines Royal activity. The most significant uses during the 18th century were for moulds for cannon balls and other iron munitions, crucibles and lubrication for ship’s rigging. These uses gave the material immense value, £3,500 a ton being noted c.1800 [4]. The material led to the development of the Keswick pencil industry in the late 18th century with locally mined graphite being used for the best quality pencils until stocks were exhausted before the First World war, mining having ceased c.1891. Graphite occurs as pipes, lumps, nodules, sops or bellies up to 1m by 3m, often following quartz strings.

         [4] http://www.conistonlocal.co.uk/striking-black-gold-in-the-lakeland-fell-tops-1.692082?referrerPath=home

Seathwaite graphite was 98 per cent pure carbon and had a melting point of 3,927C. This made it wonderful for blacking fire grates but even better for greasing the blocks and pulleys on Royal Navy ships and for making rifles and canons fire faster and more accurately.

So important was this national resource that an Act of Parliament was introduced in 1752 to prevent the stealing of graphite. Among the punishments was transportation.

By 1800 graphite was worth £3,500 a ton and a time when lead was worth just £15 a ton and the average miner was earning a £1 a week.

Armed guards patrolled the mine site and miners were searched at the end of work to try and prevent pilfering – with limited success.

The pieces missed by the guards were sold at local pubs and possibly gave rise to the expression black market and to a wad of money.

Paper and Light

Almost everything now is drawn on translucent paper. The heavier and more transparent the paper, the better. It's a fragile surface, hates liquid, is unforgiving of creases or dents, but equally will take endless erasure and a very thick build-up of graphite. But that isn't the most important thing about it. It's about what's left free and empty and open.

In effect, I want the paper not to be a consideration, not to have tooth, or colour or presence, and transparent or translucent slick paper provides that 'thought-free' quality as well as giving a liquid, opalescent luminescence to the finished drawing, hovering behind the element doing all the work, the graphite.

"Milton", SWOON, 2009
Linoleum cut, on tracing paper on found door, hand-colored, signed, 221 x 93 cm
Exhibition: "SQUINCHES AND PENDENTIVES" 

I can't find any working artists using this paper for drawing as a finished piece. Plenty use it to make paper sculptures. A few use it for collage or assemblages, and it's cropping up in contemporary darkroom photography, but not simple drawing.

Updated...
So a few hours later the postman delivers my first tin of the Derwent XL graphite blocks whose novelty appealed and whose reality is simply, as my friend in the North would say, 'lush'. And on the tin is a graphite drawing by Ian Hodgson, a new name to me.

And I think, looking at this, here's someone who has really mastered graphite as a medium, in and of itself, soft and hard, shiny and dark, luminous and shaded. And that fingerprint? Apart from any other meaning, it's a frank statement of the hand-madeness of a drawing, the physical work that goes into real drawing like this, no short cuts, no technology. And his artist's statement contains a paragraph which is genuinely interesting:

 The drawing techniques that I use expose other, seemingly invisible layers, and here the drawing process acts as a metaphor for the physical and psychological experience of my journey, as fragments of what went before are revealed on the paper.

Translucent paper tends to leave behind the traces of what was there, even with erasure, since the drawing always has two sides. And the 'wrong' side can tell a more 'authentic' story about how the drawing came to be, through mistakes, changes and adjustments.

What monsters may come?

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Teaching Hamlet used to make me tired and bored. No effort seemed enough to prevent it becoming a seminar-by-numbers, about angst and revenge, procrastination and action, melancholia and sanguine heroism, fighting the tendency of teenagers to over-identify with Hamlet, his unloving mother and his unpleasant stepfather. It seemed a play of callowness, of tedious self-absorption, until Fortinbras arrives, deus ex machina, to tidy all that muddy psychodrama away with civic order.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is a story that could just have easily been told by Kafka, of the individual cut adrift, by virtue of education, geography, institutional drift and arbitrary power, left to stumble their way through half-lit corridors and shadowy motivations cloaked in obfuscating legalistic verbiage, unable to recognise landmarks, signs, the orientation of what once seemed transparent and right side up. Hamlet is Gregor Samsa or Josef K, cockroach or man on trial, awakening to a strangely changed reality. He sees differently. And is seen differently. That's all it takes to end up being killed by the regime.

Dwelling on the understanding of this process, that is what conjures up the monsters. 'Monster' is the name the regime gives to those who see differently. 'Monster' is a name for the nightmares that come when the regime turns its eye on you and finds you monstrous.