Drawing Machines at Gregor Podnar Gallery Berlin

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione:
or, The Drawing Machines
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin
Through January 8, 2011

Artists: William Anastasi, Anna Barham, Emanuele Becheri, Alighiero Boetti, Ane Mette Hol, Albin Karlsson, Tim Knowles, Nick Laessing, Sol LeWitt, Giovanni Morbin, Marc Nagtzaam, Goran Petercol, Diogo Pimentão, Steve Roden, Jean Tinguely.

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (“Trial of Harmony and Invention”) is the title of a 1969 work by ALIGHIERO BOETTI, a series of drawings in which he traced the lines of sheets of graph paper following a different path each time. A work that opposes established order (“armonia”) and the creation of something new (“invenzione”). The idea of both being at odds with each other is interesting, especially if it is applied to machinery and draughtsmanship.

The exhibition focuses on artists who produce drawings with machines or mechanisms following the path opened by JEAN TINGUELY’s drawing (and painting) machines Méta-Matics, but also by self imposed rules echoing the mathematical basis of mechanical procedures, such as Alighiero Boetti himself, SOL LEWITT, WILLIAM ANASTASI...

In fact, from the mid XXth century on, artistic drawing has been partly predicated upon drawing machines or mechanisms. Even in a broader and historical view, which has certainly influenced this phenomenon, drawing has been associated with mechanics in a combination of recreational and scientific uses. From the Jacquet-Droz automaton, which could draw (1772) to a machine inscribing on a sheet of paper the trajectory of a falling body, invented by Arthur Morin (1864), drawing has been both imitated and used. Etienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography and other breathtaking experimental devices, researched the graphic translation of the body’s movements through the sphygmograph and the cardiograph, for instance, which were able to “draw” the beating of the human heart.

At first, it could seem odd that drawing, a hand-based craft par excellence, was to be included in the domain of machine-made articles. But on closer inspection, automata imitating the skills of the draughtsman upset the standards by which drawing is normally adjudged as such and announce modernity: they demonstrate the mechanic aspect of drawing without destroying its appeal. Rather, they increase it. A triangular relation between the viewer, the artist and the machine, is thus implemented. The act of creation is assumed by others, namely the machine itself, while the artist operates like one. Drawing with, or like, a machine implies an alliance of the hand, the eye, the mind, the device, the artifact, the formula and the rule.

The contemplative and epistemological role of mimesis and utility are at stake here. For from this point on, the extraction of drawn data as well as the graphic transposition of the movement of matter moulds a different and modern beauty, largely based on abstraction and, the moment drawing becomes the result of self-applied rules or exterior factors, chance-based opportunities for the unpredictable emerges. Charles Baudelaire sensed this rather early when he confessed that a fine drawing captivates us beyond what it depicts ( in L’Oeuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix, 1863).

On the other hand, freed from intention and traditional ideas of quality, and fascinated by machines, the artist chooses to work programmatically. Therefore, this abstract beauty is sometimes generated by a hand carefully automated by seriality and a rigorous set of rules.

But to return to Alighiero Boetti, a debate is then established as to what, exactly, one considers “harmony” and “invention” to be: would the mechanical aspect of drawing (i.e., order) be harmony? But aren’t machines, as actual mechanism or as rules and protocols, inventions? Should one consider chance itself to be the source of “invention”, as opposed to a system? Thus does this show aim to reveal the complexity and ambiguity that lurks behind such seemingly definite categories.

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione: or, The Drawing Machines showcases historical and recent works exploring this path of contradictions between the skilled machine and the automated draughtsman, connected by the mesmerizing appeal of their abstract productions, and so much more.

The exhibition is curated by SIMONE MENEGOI and accompanied by a writing of JOANA NEVES, The Drawing Automaton, or the Mechanics of Drawing.

GALERIJA GREGOR PODNAR BERLIN
Lindenstr. 35 - 10969 Berlin - Germany

www.gregorpodnar.com 

13.11.2010 - 08.01.2011

Yuri Leiderman, Galerie Gregor Podnar, Berlin - Visions of Hans Castorp

Yuri Leiderman, Visions of Hans Castorp Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin Through November 6, 2010

YURI LEIDERMAN is a zealot. A kind of unorthodox, conceptual manic. Where the majority of his peers might be happy to establish their modes of conceptual logic and lucidly state their business, Leiderman drives his to its breaking point, and then some. Indeed, in his highly subjective and idiosyncratic universe, allegories go way beyond the call of allegorical duty, systems are deliberately overwrought and therefore unsustainable, taxonomies are meticulously predicated on fits of inspired logic, and failure inevitably flourishes in disarming and rarefied abundance. Consider for instance his determination to teach European history to his cat via cat toy teaching aids, or growing Kefir grains, conceiving a system to individually name them and releasing them into zero gravity with the help of a space training program air plane. Never mind lecturing in a gallery throughout the course of the 1994 world cup about why either Brazil, Germany or Italy should win. 

For his second show at Galerija Gregor Podnar in Berlin, which is entitled Visions of Hans Castorp, and named after the eponymous protagonist of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Leiderman continues his ongoing elaboration of what he calls "Geopoetics." Drawing inspiration from current themes and political situations, geopoetics seeks to transform those themes and situations into abstractions, thereby testing their flexibility, privileging their unexplainable character, and thus restoring to them some measure of irreducible, if ironic dignity.

The starting point for "Visions of Hans Castorp" is an installation from 1992 entitled "The Very Dubious." It belongs to a moment in Leiderman's career when he was particularly interested in the notion of classical illustration, as in the illustrating of novels, and to what degree that was possible. Responding to a widespread craze over The Magic Mountain in Moscow in the late Soviet era of the 1980s, the artist attempted to illustrate a spiritual séance, which takes place in the book. Thus he depicted the participants of the seance as round, white cylinders of plaster, which bear the names of those they would represent, and organized them around a table, itself is surrounded by photos of living animals and dead bodies, meant to symbolize a space between life and death, and the inhuman and human. The extent to which this subjective illustration is successful (or deliberately unsuccessful) can be compared to the geopoetic cogency of a series of works which constitute the second part of the show, and which are meant to be Hans Castorp's visionary hallucinations of our current moment. Combining political pronouncement with superfluous decoration, the content of Castorp's visions, however, seems to be curiously preoccupied with the former Soviet Union. That Castorp should hallucinate Leiderman himself holding a banner that says in Russian, "Down with Putin Oppressor", a depiction of Ukrainian parliament or, a reference to the Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko, seems to be most agreeably farfetched, in the best Yuri Leiderman fashion. Indeed, in Leiderman's universe point A might not have much to do with point B, but he'll always find a way to get there and make it all add up, even if he has to use a form ad hoc logic, whose fabulousness ultimately implicates the soundness of the most rigorous forms of logic. 

– Chris Sharp

YURI LEIDERMAN, Visions of Hans Castorp, September 11 - November 6, 2010

GALERIJA GREGOR PODNAR
Lindenstrasse 35, 10969 Berlin, Germany
www.gregorpodnar.com