Graphology
10 May–30 June 2012
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 12–6pm
Admission free
Drawing Room, London
12 Rich Estate
Crimscott Street
London, SE1 5TE
+ 44 (0)20 7394 5657
mail [at] drawingroom.org.uk
Participating artists
William Anastasi, Carl Andre, Fiona Banner, Anna Barham, Pierre Bismuth, Juliana Borinski, Marcel Broodthaers, Stefan Brüggemann, Tony Conrad, Mekhitar Garabedian, Dean Hughes, Wim Janssen, Peter Kubelka, Antony McCall, László Moholy-Nagy, Brian O’Doherty, Man Ray, Paul Sharits, Thomas Zummer
Curated by Edwin Carels
Private view
Wednesday 9 May, 6–8pm
Performances
Anna Barham, Pierre Bismuth, and Peter Kubelka and film screenings.
Sat 16 June, 2–6pm
Graphology considers the range of graphic devices that artists, working across the disciplines of film, photography, painting, and sculpture, have used to mediate direct experience. The scope of the exhibition reaches back to the beginning of the 20th century and includes artists working today with techniques that translate direct experience into different forms of systematised representation, between the trace and the sign, between writing and drawing.
The exhibition focuses on the human hand as a living seismograph of inner life, but with extra attention to the “mechanical unconscious of the machine” which imposes itself on the human eye. It considers how graphic techniques of reproduction start to live their own lives.
Automatic writing spans a long tradition, with an obvious strong moment during the heyday of Surrealism, as illustrated by the image of the typewriter on the cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste (1924). This is typical of the range of techniques that have been employed by artists and writers to visualise their ideas, allowing for a particular tension between the hand and the medium, between automatism and automation. This exhibition investigates the ways in which drawing intersects with typography, photography, film, and computer-graphics.
Publication
Graphology: drawing from automatism and automation will be published by Drawing Room.
*Image above:
Pierre Bismuth, Following the Right Hand of Sigmund Freud, 2009. 16mm film, 01:30 min, silent.
Courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels
