Zoo Award - Essay on Art on Paper
Image by Eugenia Ivanissevich courtesy of Elad Lassry
Essay on Art on Paper
The John Jones Art on Paper Award concentrates on highlighting an essential medium fundamentally employed by all artists.
To mark the fourth year of the John Jones Art on Paper Award we invited Kate Macfarlane, Co Director of the Drawing Room, London, to respond to the winning works placing the artists and their pratice in relation to their contemporaries and the international art scene.
Paper is perhaps used more widely and ambitiously by artists today than at any other time in the history of art. Paper has been the conduit of visual knowledge and information since the advent of commercially viable production processes in the fifteenth century. Time will tell if the world wide net or its successor will replace it. What is inconceivable is that it will be replaced as the artists’ most fundamental material.
Access to paper represented to artists of the 15th century freedom to experiment and take risks in the form of drawings and then print on paper. The sketch or plan is then the oldest and most widely used form of drawing. Although always highly valued, drawing of this nature long held a somewhat subsidiary position relative to other media. This is no longer the case and a current exhibition at Tate Britain, ‘Drawn from the Collection: 400 Years of British Drawing’ is a testament to drawing’s upwardly mobile status. There are many exquisite drawings in this exhibition but it is striking that works by contemporary artists such as Paul Noble, Keith Tyson and Richard Wilson are conceived as highly finished works often on a dauntingly large scale. A huge amount of labour is involved in creating works using such lowly materials as graphite, acrylic, ink, marker pen or collage on such a vast scale. At the other end of the spectrum are the small diaristic drawings of New York based Danica Phelps (2005 winner of the Art on Paper Award) and Tracey Emin’s monoprints, both of which typify a contemporary subjective approach to art-making. The humble nature of paper chimes with a renewed interest in the integrity of low-tech materials that convey honesty rather than deception.
A relationship with particular materials is key to the practice of most artists and that with paper is perhaps the most enduring of all. Marlene Dumas treats paper as a skin, creating a visceral effect through washes of ink. There is a renewed interest in the special skill of watercolour painting, demonstrated in the work of David Lock, (2006 winner of the Art on Paper Award) and London-based artists Bonnie Camplin, Paulina Olowska and Suzanne Treister. Paper in some ways offers a much less complex, more straightforward surface than canvas for the Dutch artist Rezi Van Lankveld. The paint can be pushed around and leaves this process in evidence. Thomas Scheibitz often chooses to paint on rag paper – the drips and false starts that cannot be erased a clue to his interest in the pictorial surface itself.
Printing was a Renaissance invention which went hand in hand with the commercial production of paper. Initially developed to duplicate drawings and increase the distribution of visual knowledge, prints soon became models to learn the skill of draughtsmanship. It is interesting that there is a renewed interest in the craft of print-making in an age when such a medium appears completely superfluous. The Manchester-based artist David Osbaldeston uses a process which inverts the original use of printmaking. His vast bill-board sized etching starts as a collage, which he draws and then photocopies and lastly commits to the etching plate. Charles Avery has created a woodcut of Conscienza, a character from his ‘Islanders’ project; Scott Myles, Mark Leckey and Michael Fullerton have used silkscreen printing.
The Cubists challenged the sacred confines of the rectangular surface with their use of collage, a form of production much loved by artists since this time, particularly today, as the popularity of works by John Stezaker testifies. In the 1950s Matisse made a series of cut-outs, a term the artist used to describe his drawings made with scissors, the most famous being ‘The Snail’. Later in that decade members of Japan’s Guitai group punctured holes in thick screens of printed paper or tore through a series of paper panels in performative actions. In the 1970s Gordon Matta Clark made a series of floor-based ‘cut drawings’ - stacks of paper held together with nails and screws, incised deeply with overlapping, geometric forms. Today Simon Periton creates intricate paper cut-outs on a huge scale and Jim Hodges has produced cut C-prints. Paper has been used increasingly as a sculptural material and as a means to explore architectural spaces. The Belgian artist Joelle Tuerlinckx ‘table of floating lines’ 2003-06 uses rolls of paper unfurling on a tabletop. Berlin-based Monika Grzymala uses many kilometres of tape to create immense line drawings in space.
The 60s and 70s saw a boom in the production of works on paper as art moved out of the studio and entered an expanded field. Committing actions and transient works to paper in the form of photographs, collages or drawings became crucial to the recording these events as works of art. An art based on ideas is an enduring legacy of this period and what better medium for the transmission of these ideas than paper? Martin Creed, perhaps the most infamous contemporary conceptual artist, has an enduring love affair with the A4 sheet of paper which he variously scrunches and sets upon a plinth or decorates with highlighter, marker or biro pen.
Photographic prints perhaps constitute the highest proportion and most collected works on paper. Photography has remained at the centre of artistic production since its reintroduction in the 1960s. The photographic print provided the perfect medium of appropriation for the ‘Picture’ artists of the 1970s and their influence is felt strongly today in a new generation of artists. .Elad Lassry, (2007 winner of the Art on Paper Award) combines the use of collage with his own photography in works which explore traditional pictorial conventions. The American artist Sara VanDerBeek represents a contemporary approach which marries a multidisciplinary practice of sculpture, photography, painting and drawing. In her studio she creates complex tableaus out of a range of found and engineered materials. It is the photographic documentation of these constructions that she exhibits. The young Swiss artist Fabian Marti revokes the clean-cut imagery of photography by using borrowed imagery, traditional photography and scanning in works that celebrate underground culture and question technological advances.
Art works on paper can present particular problems for the collector and conservator. Many contemporary artists drawing on paper choose not to frame the work which means that it is very vulnerable to damage. Advances in the production of glazing and framing have meant that the longer term exhibition of works on paper in museums and public galleries is now more feasible than it was twenty years ago. Gratifyingly, a visit to Tate Modern tomorrow can provide access to a room full of Cubist drawings, Fluxus newspapers of the 1970s, posters produced by the Bolshevik’s during the Russian Revolution, Sophie Calle’s ‘The Hotel Room’ of 1981 together with contemporary works on paper be they drawn, painted or photographic.
Kate Macfarlane
Curator and Co-Director of The Drawing Room, London
