Page 43 - Studio International - December 1970

drawn can add structural purpose to the applying forms carried over from his sculpture tainly occupied most of his attention since
white area, especially in the drawings of to the white plane, he now contents himself 1965: the problem of the function and charac-
around 1960. In earlier drawings the paper with dividing up the paper. The most impres- ter of the line. Before 1965 his work consisted
even acts like a stage for a little play. A sive and radical drawings to date are, I think, of white reliefs with a certain amount of
single colour, in the form of red or blue dots two complementary pieces of paper, one plasticity, built up out of layers of flat geo-
or lines, has a function completely different coloured black in pencil and the other left metric shapes. In these the line was not very
from the use of colour in drawings where it is white: one the hand-made and the other the important, that is to say was not independent.
used as a matter of course. In the drawings ready-made part of the work, in a Ducham- It was just the outline of the form. But in 1965
under consideration the colour is not there to pian sense. there appeared for the first time some reliefs
add tonality, but as a dramatis persona. Arman- Gilbert and George showed another kind of in which plasticity was reduced to a minimum
do is at his best in the new drawings on exhibi- sculptors' drawings in their ten-day exhibi- and the linear element was given the major
tion this year. The line, which Armando once tion called Art Notes and Thoughts at Art and role. The word 'line' occurs in the descriptive
more draws exclusively with pencil instead of Project in Amsterdam, during May. At the titles of these works: Relief with Middle
with the less responsive pen and ink; is perhaps opening they appeared as sculptures, a per- Lines, Relief with Middle Lines and Diagonal.
even more subtle than before. A cycle of formance to which one has become accus- These reliefs were made of a single wooden
nuances is repeated in two, or at most three, tomed since they began to tour their acts. The slab in which grooves were cut with a circular
lines which stretch out in a horizontal or exhibition itself contained eight sculptures saw. Ever since then Dekkers has continued
diagonal direction. The tendency of the which were mostly placed on tables and con- to produce this kind of relief, which he calls
drawings dating from 1967 to 1969 to sisted of audio-visual recordings of the life and `saw-cuts', as well as reliefs built up out of
arouse strong (and intended) associations works of the sculptor-sculptures. Besides the several layers.
with mountain landscapes has been largely works in which they had used photographs, The saw-cuts have been, in retrospect, of very
suppressed in favour of the autonomy of the tapes and records for this purpose, there were great importance for his recent development.
drawn line. Similarly, the relation of line to also several which consisted mainly of draw- His recent saw-cuts have an internal cohesion
surface, the intervention and attack on a ings. They themselves, in the title of a booklet, and seem to have been made with a greater
clean sheet of paper, is in an even purer form called them The Pencil on Paper Descriptive degree of decision and confidence.
than in his earlier work. Armando has two Works of Gilbert & George the sculptors; the His earlier saw-cuts, considered as a group,
sheets of paper side by side in the same frame, drawings are made from photographs in were still, I think, at a more or less experi-
so that the drawings together measure 75 by which they stand in some situation recognized mental stage. Dekkers was trying out different
200 centimetres. This is not just a matter of as a sculpture, for example on the South Bank technical possibilities, mostly concerned with
increasing the scale (in which case a single of the Thames, admiring the view or 'walking the fall of light on the grooves, and giving
sheet of paper of this size would have been along a new road they left their little studio with its thought to different points of view. In some
more logical) ; it gives the impression of tools and brushes taking with them only a little music saw-cuts, like the relief with middle-lines and
doubling, and one's attention is drawn to the gentle smiles on their faces and the most serious diagonal, the saw-cut served to divide the
meaning of the oblong format, the size of the intentions in the world'. Sometimes the drawings surface in the most natural and obvious
field and the intervention of the line on it. are portraits they have made of one another, manner by lines of shadow. In other saw-cuts
One can hardly imagine a greater contrast to in one case accompanied by a detailed taped the depth and volume of the wooden slab was
the drawings of Armando than those of the commentary, given from the other side of the affected : the cut began deep and became
sculptor Carel Visser. Whereas Armando's paper, as it were, by the one who has been progressively shallower till it disappeared in
work is freely drawn, influenced partly by drawn (the portraits referred to were pub- the surface. The basis of the work was
chance, Visser's drawings, like his woodcuts lished in the April 1970 issue of Studio Inter- regarded in the first instance as a two-
and robust iron sculptures, can be looked at national and separately as a bulletin by Art and dimensional form visually affected by the cut
as studies of certain formal concepts such as Project) . and in the second instance as a three-
symmetry, repetition and scale, although he Their drawings are in a pseudo-naive style, dimensional form materially affected by the
shows a growing interest in small irregulari- drawn with exquisite feeling for the subtleties cut.
ties and deviations that can be made to appear of the drawing-materials and especially for I regard the saw-cuts as indicating that
in the execution of his works. the surfaces being drawn on; at Konrad Dekkers has made a definite choice over the
There is almost nothing of the line in Visser's Fischer's in Düsseldorf, also in May, there last year. He has made genuine 'drawings in
recent drawings. They consist simply of white were enormous drawings on parchment, some wood' of them, giving maximal meaning to
planes (the white of the paper) and black of them measuring more than eight by sixteen the line and a subordinate function to the
planes (where the paper has been completely feet. wooden slab, which is seen no longer as a
covered with a layer of shining graphite Compared with their personal appearances definite flat shape, subdivided, nor as a
applied by a fairly soft pencil). The uneven and their sculptures in the form of texts and spatial volume, cut through, but as a neutral
`handmade' quality familiar to drawing is photographs, the drawings of Gilbert & area on which the line comes into its own.
largely suppressed. What Visser does in three George are made in a medium that, art- Dekkers's recent 'drawings in wood' and draw-
dimensions in his sculptures he does also in historically speaking, has a taint of heredity; ings on paper are not only of the same value
two dimensions in his drawings : he enlarges or they are also executed in an antique style. as works of art but also of the same kind. In
reduces forms, breaks them and re-joins them. What makes them so arresting, however, is both Dekkers practises a personal kind of
In April and May of this year Visser had that they succeed in giving a direct and drawing in which certain factors that have
some 'weak sculptures' on exhibition at the authentic idea of sculpture through their very traditionally played an important part, such
Galerie Espace, Amsterdam. These, which existence in time and space. as the sensibility of the material used and the
broke with his former massive iron sculptures, There was a small exhibition in August at the personal signature of the draughtsman, are
were made of square and rectangular sheets Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and another eliminated. The line is at its most elementary
of iron connected by pieces of leather from in September at Galerie Swart in Amsterdam and pure.
old school-bags; when touched they began to in which Ad Dekkers showed recent drawings Dekkers is now one step nearer to the con-
wobble and give. In the same exhibition were and works that could be called drawings made cretization of an idea that has long obsessed
recent drawings which showed the same in wood. They could well be regarded as the him: how to make the beginnings of a shape
general change of direction. Instead of re-formulation of a problem which has cer- perceptible. q