FORUM+ - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2019

In what way can drawing be a method of reflection? “Drawing Instruments”, an artistic research workshop, was organized in the Research Centre For Arts, Autonomy and the Public Sphere of Hogeschool Zuyd, Maastricht from November 2016 to March 2017. For this interdisciplinary subject we took the artistic practice of Dear Hunter, the studio of Remy Kroese and Marlies Vermeulen as the object of research. Veerle Spronck reports.

The limestone quarry at Rüdersdorf close to Berlin provides the capital with stone that is then transformed in mortar, cement and concrete. In this way the geological landscape forms the basis of the city, with the raw materials being absorbed into cartographies. The stones pass the boundaries of the site and move via structures, ladders and nets to settle into the new grid of the city. The painter Karen Vermeren uses her research to question traditional ideas about landscape art. Her work seeks new representations of the geological landscape in two-dimensional in-situ installations.

Murat Ali Cengiz is an architect as well as a jazz pianist and composer. In this article he traces the artistic development of architectural designs into graphic scores that form the basis for jazz improvisation. Cengiz describes his journey between the disciplines and illuminates concepts such as the grammar of form, timelines versus time and graphic notation. In this way he develops an approach for translating the architectural structures of the city into scores for graphic improvisation.

In a Woody Allen film we see a simple street scene in New York. It looks like a continuity shot, just made to provide a link between the previous and the next scene. The dialogue we hear seems to be taking place off screen. But the camera keeps on filming longer than we expect. The disjunction between image and sound suddenly vanishes when it turns out that the dialogue is between two people who have approached from a considerable distance. They are in the centre of the picture but nonetheless off-screen. Everything that was off-screen now suddenly appears to belong to the film. A series of drawings returns the scene to the storyboard. The location is based on film images of the same place but 42 years later. What if a voice should again pop up, not speaking to the viewer but to somebody who is also off screen? What might happen in the margins of the work, should the work also continue off screen?

In the Ik zie ik zie wat jij niet ziet [I see what you don’t see] project art students draw portraits of people suffering from dementia. The student gets to know these people and the people close to them during this process. Anke Coumans explains why this approach can be articulated as an artistic anthropological research procedure in which the drawing makes a temporal meeting visible. The drawings show the viewer not what dementia is, but what it can be.

Just as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1476 – 1564) worked as a sculptor, painter, architect and poet, Matthew Barney (1967) switches smoothly between various contemporary art forms.

The oeuvre of this US artist includes performance, photography, drawing, design and film. Not coincidentally an art critic, writing in 1989, dubbed him “The Michelangelo of genital art” and this was not just because of the many athletic nudes that people his oeuvre. The parallels between Barney (1967) and Michelangelo (1476–1564) are greater than one might think.

In the article Senne Schrayen makes a comparison between Barney’s current series of performances (started in 1987) called Drawing Restraint and Michelangelo’s drawings of 1532 from a transhistorical perspective and giving close attention to the process of making the drawing.

Traditioneel gezien bedoelt men met onvertaalbaarheid de onmogelijkheid om iets om te zetten van de ene taal naar de andere. Wat als het ook onmogelijk wordt om iets van het ene tekensysteem (bijvoorbeeld tekst of partituur) naar een ander tekensysteem (bijvoorbeeld zegging of uitvoering) om te zetten? Vincent Van Meenen onderzoekt de betekenis van onvertaalbaarheid en maakt tekeningen met waterverf en Chinese inkt telkens wanneer hij op een onvertalbare passage stoot in Shakespeares Macbeth.