Space, Marks and Erasure

Critique your text as art assignment using the rubric provided.  While linear perspective, color and composition are taken into account (quite heavily) in assessing this project, please elaborate on your word choices.  Do they simply “illustrate” the found image?  Do they change the meaning?  How does the inclusion of them into the found painting alter the role of viewer?  Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and how we use them to make meaning, is very complicated particularly when text becomes image.

Mark-making and Erasure

Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning

You might find that this begs the question, once again, “What IS a drawing?”  Can it be an act of dematerialization or erasure?

Tom Friedman “Eraser Shavings” (1990)

Christian Holdstad “Seed Splitters” (2004)

Christain Holdstad “Grasping for Straws” (2005)

From Saatichi:

“Christian Holstad’s erased newsprint photographs, known collectively as the Erasurehead series, began as a way of killing time. Working as a waiter in a restaurant after graduation from art college, Holstad began to erase the images in newspapers while waiting for customers, finding that the action of rubbing out became a way of probing the complex depths of each image. Erasing is a kind of negative drawing: its marks are gestural, reminiscent of the physical action of the artist’s hand and arm, and yet their residue is a kind of blankness. Photographs in newspapers are used to widen the implications of the stories they accompany through the willful ambiguity of imagery: they say more than they mean.”

Pau Thek “Fleur de Mal” (1985)

 

Paul Thek “Untitled (Butterflies)” (1988)  Follow link for short audio.

Michael Heizer

Jim Denevan 

Richard Long “Dusty Boots Line, Sahara” (1988)

Todd Keyser  “Forest Walk”  Image via artblog.

Big Assignment 4 (proposal due next week, finished project due in two weeks)

NEXT WEEK: We will be experimenting with mark making.  Please bring in tools for experimental mark making (examples: tape, stylus, rag, plastic-wrap (only a small piece), old student ids or credit cards, or the like).