THE WEIGHT OF SOULS I
Interview with Avis Newman at Maureen Paley, Studio M, 2021 Avis Newman is represented by Maureen Paley Gallery, London
The Weight of Souls I, 2017 /2018; © Avis Newman, courtesy Maureen Paley, London. Studio M, Rochelle School. E2 7FA. @maureen_paley
CONFIGURATIONS
A reminder of things..., 2013, 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; photo credit Yackov Yackov Petchenin
A reminder of things ………. Of journeys made, of works recalled and of things described, relations shifting and changing. Dreams given to be remembered. Objects strange. Of dots and dots and rows of dots.
The delineations of half obscured things - of surfaces rendered and edges traced. Rhythms sought-after, tracking a route. Rotation seeking direction, gravity dispelled. The vestige of marks recalling gestures of retrieval and the loss of something that never was…. of no-thing.
These ideas are connected to earlier works, which resonate closely to the open-ended non-totalizing space of drawing. It is a sphere where boundary and the event of the edge evoke notions of discontinuity between the tangible, nameable and the partial. Here the working process is akin to a sequence of ‘configurations’; operations of unstable connections evoking models of thought which propose a space of fluctuations, paradox and inconsistency and allows for an uncertainty between the play of parts.
The works are not intended to suggest a condition of tumult, but rather one that by its nature, exceeds fixed boundaries in a mobile set of relations, which can change in space and time. Where the minds eye floats between reading and perceiving and ‘vision functions as an operation of thought’
Exhibition Catalogue ‘More Light’ 5th Moscow Biennale, 2013 - Artist statement
Iniquitous Symmetries, 2014, photo credit Avis Newman Studio
…………The temptation of geometry is the intellectual temptation par excellence. It is the temptation of intellectual Caesars. We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality and irregularity – life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society of capitalism…………As a forgotten Spanish poet, Jose Moreno Villa put it with melancholy wit: “I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity”
Octavia Paz 1979
Like other works of the last five years this three part canvas work of 2014 relates to a number of Newman’s longstanding (eternal) preoccupations that explore notions whereby boundary, edge, framing the limits of the unframed becomes a series of operations that interferes with any anticipation we might have of completion. And in so doing proposes that the elements exist as a series of mobile relationships in space and time. The works suggest a space of fluctuations where the assemblage of parts and imaginative constructions exists as a collection of relations with the potential for reconfiguration.
The tropes of painting – stretched and unstretched canvas, hanging, stacked, leaning or overlapping partially conceal surfaces that are in themselves layered traces that could (might) suggest al manner of encodes signs, diagrammatic representations or an array of symbolic forms – a lexicon of historic images that calls into question description and assumptions of context and meaning………
The suggestion here is that any arrangement is provisional and potentially available to perpetual reconfiguration. Newman has described the working process as a series of ‘configurations’ allowing the work to resist absolute fixity.
Newman has referred to the open ended, potentially limitless space of the modernist white page and the inscriptive nature of drawing ‘before drawing and writing go their separate ways’ as inspirational to these ideas.
The title of this work harks back to another - ‘An Awful Symmetry’ 1990 One of a series of small boxes that Newman made in the 80’s and 90’s - the freestanding or wall hung containers housed all manner of organic substances. She likened the sense of these works to the intimate experience and structure of poetic form (poetry) the titles, generally phrases from poems or associations to particular poets. Particular among these references is to the work of Paul Celan and contemplation on the limits of language and of how it is possible or not possible to speak the world in a traumatic age. This idea carries through the canvas works in respect to Newman’s use of limited colour with reference to qualities of colourlessness that are associated with drawing and to Kandinsky’s notion of black and white as ‘silent colour’.
Mummery + Schnelle, Press release, Iniquitous Symmetries 2014 exhibition Louise Hopkins; Avis Newman
Configuration of no-thing, 2007-09, photo credit Peter White, FXP Photography, Private collection
Artists today thrive on the interdependency of drawing, printing, painting, sculpture, and performance, of surface and space, and mostly of line and support, whether paper, floor, or wall. Drawing indeed goes beyond the sheet of the paper, a process that continues to be materialized by extrapolating lines into space. Postmodernism, multiculturalism, and feminism affected this development. The contemporary conception of drawing, however, emphatically stresses reciprocity and empowerment, acknowledging that single line can challenge and change the understanding of the ground itself. Line and ground, in fact, may now become interchangeable and confluent. The work of many contemporary artists situates itself in a generative in-between, connecting wall and paper, vertical and horizontal, abstract and concrete, imaginary and real, in a peripatetic set of lines and relations.
Avis Newman, for example, has described the working process of her painted drawings as neither a “construction” nor a “composition’ (as in the Constructivist debate) but ‘a configuration of no-thing (2007-9; plate 114), part of a cycle of works, suggests an ambivalent body of relations with the perpetual potential for reconfiguration. As Newman states, The assemblage of elements proposes a series of mobile relations in which images do not suggest a correspondence to things in the world but are things in themselves. I am attracted to ideas of paradox and inconsistency where a plurality of form, which promises ceaseless elaboration, is contained by the “rational” of its elements or parts. These thoughts are grounded in my fascination with the conceptual space of drawing which I understand to be in essence an encounter with “the materialization of the continually mutable process, the movements, rhythms and partially comprehended ruminations of the mind: ‘the operations of thought.” In that domain the work becomes a process of enunciation. The edge, layered, extended, unframed, becomes a series of operations which “interferes with any anticipation we might have of completion.” The line manifests a division that conjures the “this” and the “that” and in so doing is symbolically the mark of language. And (the) surface alludes to what Kandinsky referred to when defining Black and White as “silent color” and underscores an uncertainty of definition.
Speaking of exceeding boundaries in “a mobile set of relations that can thus change in space and time,” Newman seems to address new possibilities for the condition of the unstable subject in the present world. Instead of continuing to insist on common fragmentation, such mobility proposes a series of variables. If in the real conditions of life it may refer to paradox, change, even chaos, it is embedded in the work through interleaving, layering, and suspension.’
PLANE/SPACE/LINE: A MOBILE SET OF RELATIONS (1990-2010), Online Drawing Through The Twentieth Century MoMA, NY, Pg 108-109. 2010 Text by Catherine de Zegher
WEBS
After the invention of the monochrome there can be no tabula rasa. There is no pure beginning to a painting. The raw, untreated, unstretched canvas is already a work. The artist must therefore take responsibility even for laying a ground or the first brush marks, which alter something already there, covering and conceding as much as offering something to be seen.
The canvases of Avis Newman’s Webs (Backlight) series (1993-) involve either dark marks on a light ground or light marks on a dark ground. No colours other than white and black are used. The artist makes a set of marks on a canvas covered with a wash, then covers these with a further wash of paint, whereby the marks may be lost to the eye, to be retrieved by a further mark on top of the obscured one. The superimposed mark indicates, without occluding, the mark beneath, which shows around the edges of the new mark. The restriction to black and white has at least two effects: first, it implies a relation to the “absolute” monochrome that begins with Malevich’s Black Square -although not an identity, since Newman introduces difference and repetition ; second, the palette alludes to writing, the black and white of the page, which comes to the fore in the spacing of Stéphane Mallard’s poem ‘Un coup de dés.” Both effects feature in works of the early 1990s, which reached the “zero degree'“ from which the Webs series departs in a group of works exhibited in 1993 under the collective title Vicious Circle. In A Book of Numbers, before a dark gray graphite-covered monochrome canvas, stands a closed white-linen bound book inaccessible in a perspex box on a graphite-covered base. Seen from the front, the book appears like a white image in the dark field. The box contains ten sets of ten lithographs printed with the numbers 0 to 9 in Wolpe’s sloping Alberts typeface: in the book a rational numerical system from which the viewer is excluded, on the canvas somber, brooding dark field.
Marking Time: Memory and Matter in the Work of Avis Newman, Michael Newman - Inside The Visible an elliptical traverse of 20th century art in, of and from the feminine. 1996 Edited by Catherine de Zegher,
Study for Webs, 1994
CdZ: … you have spoken with me about this previously, how the mark is not anchored, not pre-conceived, and how in the accumulation of marks the image comes about almost like a spider web through doing, through the repetitive act.
AN: I used the act of the spider weaving a web as a metaphor for the moment of engagement, where the image was not a priori to its making – in as much as it did not exist before the work, but happened in the time of making. And consequently, my concern in those works of mine to which you refer was not that anything in particular should be recognized, but that the act of making be described; I was concerned with the movement and process of articulation across the works’ surface. In some respects I could have made the things blindfolded. That is not to suggest randomness – the spider knows the language of web making. So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstance? It seemed to me that the thing made became like a temporal matrix composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual but similar inscriptions, that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts only subsequent reflected on the image. The result would be nothing really unified. The marks in a drawing are always discrete and sufficient to themselves and, however densely layered, suggest an endless repetition. And while also existing as a series of relations, the arrangement of the marks suggests the thing could fall apart at any moment.
CdZ: The mark is the same and always different. (How would you articulate now the effect of the continuous elaboration of individual gestures in the world, of the body in space?)
Conversation between Catherine De Zegher and Avis Newman, The Drawing Center’s DRAWING PAPERS 36. 2003 The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act Selected from the Tate Collection by Avis Newman and Curated by Catherine de Zegher
IMAGINARY BODIES
All drawings are made from memory. The translation from volume to line occurs in the brief instant that the eye flits back and forth from object to image. Avis Newman’s oeuvre centres around the practice of painting, but one associated around drawing whereby line and contour, signs, or the suggestion of inscription weaves in and out of a space of thinly glazed pigment. The paintings themselves, often unstretched raw canvas, or stretched across curved edge supports, intimate issues of boundary and limit and can be understood as essays when grouped as complete installations incorporating other objects. The mark, either charcoal line or brushed paint, appears tentative and fractional, vestiges of memory. The paintings utilize a minimal palette, registering temperature, at the margins of warm and cool silvers and greys. They exist between light and darkness in which light appears to emanate from within the canvas, rather than bouncing off its surface.
Many of the objects are similarly monochrome and refer to an almost alchemical use of materials. Charcoal, graphite and lead summon up images of a primordial darkness. White pigment, gesso and silver evoke absence and loss. The objects themselves often consist of, or are contained within, boxes or frames. The frames, always integral part of the work, are guilded or burnished with materials which similarly evoke alchemy; white, copper or brasso gesso, graphite or other pigment.
Meridians VIII, 1998, Tate Collection
The objects sealed within are sometimes the melancholic fragments from the natural world; a feather or a bird’s wing, wood and stone or a snail’s shell. Most recently she has made a series of photographs of spiders’ webs in which the web, sparkling in its clarity, on the one hand stands out as the figure upon the surface of the vague and indistinct silvery background, on the other hand its fearless brilliance appears like a scratch on the surface of the paper, creating a space on the surface of the paper, creating a space or a nothingness that cuts through the image, evoking, like much of her work, a sense of absence and loss. In the most recent series of paintings, Meridians, a vague image appears from beneath the surface of brushstrokes. The image evoked is of a bat, but too indistinct to be recognized as such it is more accurately a shadow, which has the quality of flight. Bats have a strange presence in our consciousness, with their alchemical connotations; long associated with fear and magic they flourish in darkness and night-time. Like the similarly nocturnal but aquatic toad that is part of the lexicon of images that frequents the paintings, they appear to exist within a different state of being; they have the presence of a half forgotten dream or reverie. The image flies, almost imperceptibly, through our mind like a thought at the very edge of consciousness.
La casa, il corpo, il cuore Konstruktion der Identitaten. 1999 Text by Stephen Foster
FIGURE
Nests there are…
The title of this work is taken from Antoine Bourdelle’s lines ‘Nests there are where love trembles in soft laughter, and in the deep, dark forks of the branches are harpies whose arms end in terrible fingers’, which he wrote in response to Rodin’s watercolour drawings of The embrace (Metrolipolitan Museum of Art, New York). The work, with its complex combination of natural objects (bird’s feathers and honeycomb), industrial material (steel) and painting refers at once, to nature, craft and art, reflecting the same layering of meaning and experience as Bourdelle’s lines. It also focuses on the intangibility of the imagination, as real objects fuse with the artist’s drawn image, and symbols of freedom and nature are tightly contained in its glazed and boxed frame.
Breaking the Mould British Art of the 1980s and 1990s. 1997 Essays by Richard Cork and Penelope Curtis
Nests there are, 1986-87, Tate Collection
Figure Who No One is (East wall), 1983-84, Private collection
Her art is not to be seen as a revival of primitive forms, but rather an engagement with what Rosalind Krauss, referring to Bataille, has called the informe, a transgression of exclusive distinctions and the boundaries of the ego and the either-or fixities of coded meaning. Pg 29
These drawings stage the very emergence of figuration as a mode of ‘writing’. We tend to understand this writing, which emerges from the gesture as mark, as prior to alphabetic writing and hence as primitive and in phonocentric terms as more authentic, closer to the heart of being before the fall into coded meaning. This is both right and wrong; wrong in supposing that this Other of meaning can be present in itself as pure being (the error of expressionism); right because this is a desire for the Other figured metaphorically, theatrically as it were. The drawings are thus a figuration, a metaphor, of Origin as a convulsive encounter with Nothing, with the Other, the unrepresentable Thantos as the very condition of inscription and representation. The resemblance to Paleolithic art metaphorizes this encounter as an archaelogy – an ever repeated (desired) return to the Origin which, as presence, is perpetually deferred: the mark is always already trace. The trace is like an archaeological shard, a fragment left behind: Origin is always prior to anything that remains and so cannot be present as such, just as Thanatos is figured in the repetition of Eros.
Avis Newman’s drawings rehearse the becoming- trace of the mark. The title Figure Who No One Is… is a translation of a phrase from “Richard Wagner’ by Mallarme, Figure qui nul n’est. The role of the space between the marks in Avis Neman’s drawing could be taken as analogous to the white of the pace which Mallarme emphasized I his poetry as a constitutive, spatial dimensions of its meaning, what Derrida has called the ‘spacing’ in writing, the spatio-temporal deferral of desire.
The Analytical Theatre: New Art From Britain, 1987. Text by Michael Newman
Compass, 1992-93, Tate Collection, presented in memory of Adrian Ward-Jackson by Weltkunst Foundation 2013
Avis Newman - Compass by Avis Newman belongs to a body of work begun in 1990 which breaks with her earlier reliance on natural forms. It is a four-part installation which comprises a canvas diptych, two sets of boxed and numbered lithographs, and two tables which rest on pairs of compasses – like steel legs.
The canvases are covered in graphite which has been overlaid with semi-opaque washes of zinc –white. This process involves time, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ or ‘then’ and ‘now’ state, and also a progression from darkness to light. The two identical graphite tables are placed symmetrically in front of these canvases but here the symmetry is subtly disturbed. Four sets of prints are laid open on the table on the left while that on the right has six. The four books correspond to the four elements of the Book of Creationfrom the Jewish Kabbalah while the remaining six refer to the six dimensions of space. All ten are considered by the artist as generative points or points of renewal.
The ‘books’ in Compass have the numbers 0-IIIIIIIII in letter form printed on them in black, a variation on the similar prints numbered 0-9 in the companion work Book of Numbers, 1991.
The piece encompasses a range of positive and negative, open and closed, light and dark contrasting positions, all held in equilibrium.
The use of letters to represent numbers, which require the mathematical process of counting, draws on literary, mathematical and visual languages. The actual numbers 0-9 represented in letters on the printed pages imply the possibility of infinite permutations, but the boxes which house the prints may represent a need to contain this openness.
Edmund Jabës, who has been acknowledged as an important influence by Newman, declared that true knowledge is the recognition that in the end we know nothing. For him however, the Nothing is also knowledge, ‘being the reversal of All, as the air is the reverse of the wing’.
Breaking the Mold British Art of the 1980s and 1990s. 1997 Essays by Richard Cork and Penelope Curtis
Can we perhaps now locate the strangeness, the place where the person was able to set himself free as an – estranged – I? Can we locate this place, this step?
‘…only, it sometimes, bothered him that he could not walk on his head.’ A man who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, a man who walks on his head sees the sky below, as an abyss.
Paul Celan Collected Prose
A man who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, a man who walks on his head sees the sky below, as an abyss, 1998
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