A road less travelled...There are many ways of looking, many strategic combinations of memory, movement and tracking, with which to engage a work of art.Before and after this, there are other expectations, for instance does one wish for, or recall, a formal or informal relation to the work. It requires considerable time to follow the intricacies of some work to the point of satisfaction. How do placement and context affect its relationship to the viewer? If a painting were displayed hung from a person’s shoulders, would it remain effective as a work of art? In The Strange Quiet of Things Misplaced, the new series by Elisa Markes-Young, her media, grey and brown wool and other yarn on linen canvas, and the process, the manner of their making requires every viewer to consider such questions. It is now clear that there is no such thing as purely passive vision, no standing in front of a work of art waiting for something to happen. Anyone who approaches it in this way will be profoundly disappointed. It can only be enjoyed by tracing the limits and logic of the artist’s work as if one were following a road, remembering what has past, anticipating what is to come. Markes-Young requires that one ‘see’ her strategies in making the work, quilt together touch and vision, so that as one meditates, a model of work, a mantra, grows in the mind. She describes her point of engagement as… "Not necessarily touching things but I like using my hands. I enjoy the feeling of wool although I can’t wear it – it would eat me alive. I enjoy working with it, but it's more the feeling of what my fingers can do, what my hands can do – I have to figure things out. I have an idea of what I want but no prepared set of tools ready to do it. While I’m working I have to figure out how to do it - which can be very frustrating - but it is also satisfying. I think this series has brought me a lot and I have made a lot of progress. What I have in my head, my hands now realise. "I really enjoy doing it by hand. You have to count how many stitches you have all the time. I swear if I make a mistake, I have to take it all apart. I probably wouldn’t have nude photos taken of myself but I can show myself in this work. When it’s finished, I am looking at 200 hours of my life. I need four weeks, 200 hours to be satisfied with the work." - Elisa Markes-Young, January 2008 Much has been written recently about looking at art as a process of quilting or weaving which pulls the image together in ways largely driven by the desires of the viewer. It happens with this series. The artist begins by marking out a design, a strategic plan, in soft pastels – not yet a composition. Then each work is drawn together partly from a mental pattern and partly by the visual contingencies imposed by the initial marks. In The Strange Quiet of Things Misplaced #03 the artist appears to have blocked out a series of rough squares like soft shadows floating in a negative grid of untouched canvas. She has then improvised the main section of the work - a sequence of roughly square, repeated units - five units wide and five high, built outward from the lower right corner of the canvas and built up using a number of techniques from crochet to loosely attached bundles of brown threads. Each unit contains a central square made up of a ‘spiral’ of crochet in blue black yarn and cross pieces from each side of which emerge three crosspieces of loose brown thread which set up a counter-point of open squares. The boundaries of the initial squares are defined by a small number of unsewn white threads pulled taut against white roundels crochet spirals of different diameters, which are attached at every corner of the grid. The loose brown threads are pulled together round the white threads at the boundary of each square. They provide another counter-rhythm - a sense of tension and release - which is taken up across the whole work. Rhythmic tension and release is the primary element in needle work. It is also a key to the mental and visual processes through which this work has grown. The artist has left a row of vacant squares on the left and top of the canvas. Some have loose brown cross threads merging into them so as to invite the viewer to consider the work as a process through time. They do not indicate that the work is unfinished. The entire universe is unfinished. Markes-Young never intended to produce an inaccessible closed system. Instead she is playing a series of artistic games with imperfection and consciousness, universal being worked out in well-timed stitches. She points out that every unit in the grid is different, evidence enough that it has emerged through human action over time. The work appears like a cluster of newly formed crystals, all slightly different but all depending from the same set of possibilities. This is sufficient to demonstrate the complex relationship between the working out of a set of themes, procedures, through the series and its overall effect as a work of art. This mode of working in the visual arts can be found in many contexts. The wall drawings of Sol Lewitt, for instance, finally rely, however precisely they are executed, on the viewer’s awareness that they too have been made by human action through time. This mode of making is equally clear in The Strange Quiet of Things Misplaced #04. A consistent grid in the upper left hand sector of the work breaks down in various ways in the lower and right sections, leaving the viewer to trace its delightfully overlapping variations. In other pieces one can discover sections of the original pastel work unadorned. This is a rich and complex exhibition which will repay anyone who takes the time to look. There only remains the tedious art/craft argument and the consumer politics which constantly re-inspire it. Clumsy categories should not hinder this work. One magnificent poet was clear that in his "sullen craft and art", they were always together. It is sad that ill informed people still assert that art can only be made by spreading coloured mud on cloth. |
david bromfieldDavid Bromfield is a critic, writer and curator based in East Perth. He has written several books on Western Australian artists including his latest CODES on Janis Nedela (2008). He is also director of the KURB gallery, a cooperative space in William Street Northbridge.
The Strange Quiet of Things Misplaced #03
The Strange Quiet of Things Misplaced #04 |
