FORMAL STRATEGIES IN MY WORK
I give a talk about exhibiting artworks to students, and in his introductory remarks, my host lecturer tells students that what they are seeing is a small part of my output, all of which holds together as a complex bundle (those are my words, I can't remember how he said it).
I am aware of this but only in a dim way, so I begin to wonder if there are formal qualities that hold the works together. I have done surveys of my work before but mainly on thematic grounds. What constitutes my way of composing, of inventing, of making things, is only implied by such an approach, and analysis and interpretation is then left to others. The questions, then, are: how does someone recognize one of my works? Do the works share stylistic qualities? How do I go about organizing an idea?
I think there might be four formal strategies I use:
MINIMAL
This is probably the underlying strategy, in which a single action or gesture is made so that it relates directly to its context. The context and gesture become the composition. Works include:
- taped, cut, liquid-papered, soaked, torn books (action + book = the work)
- concrete poems (letter in a word, word on a page, so that letter + word = the work, or word + page = the work)
- objects made by the one process, repeated (stick + rotated stick + rotated stick etc = the work)
- drawings where the sheet generates the image, from blemishes or shape.
The context materiality is generally taken as found, the gesture is often related but in opposition to it: the book is nearly cut to shreds, or totally taped up, the letter/word patterns are optically dense and so on.
A typical work is 201 versions of the Southern Cross, where the SC constellation is silkscreened onto black A4 cards, and the five stars joined up in all possible straight-line configurations, one constellation per sheet. The work is nx(SC + taped lines) and can make a stack of sheets like a folio, or a large mural-like wall-piece of dancing figures. (In which case, VECTORIAL tendencies emerge.)
VECTORS
This comes from reading and writing, from the left to right direction of our visual language.
Firstly, on any page, the flow of data is left to right, and the page sequence goes from left to right also. The movement is along lines, or from area to area, and at a constant rhythm, letter by letter, word by word, page by page. This implies a rhythmic approach to charting duration. Secondly, there is symmetry, clearly shown by an open book, or the two hands in front of you. Consequently, there are works which oppose LH and RH parts, but nearly always do so to be read from left to right. There are also works which are structured by sequence, also going from left to right, page by page.
Sometimes found sequences are used to structure a composition: numbers, the alphabet, Newton’s spectrum of ROYGBIV, the consecutive letters of a word. Sometimes there is a constant change from page to page, or word to word, or constellation to constellation.
A typical work is The Hanuman Shelf, which uses an incomplete found sequence of published books, and inserts a ROYGBIV sequence of coloured slats to occupy the spaces of books missing in the sequence, thereby combining consecutive numbers and the colour spectrum.
Other typical works are lightning (rivers of light #4) and lightning monotones (rivers of light #5), where the host word fills each consecutive page, letter by letter in the same sequence that the letter appears in the word, and different white lines are placed into each page of the typed texture.
COMGLOMERATES
This comes from the clutter of everyday life, the complexity of heritage and history, and the complications of materiality. Similar to collage or assemblage, this is a method whereby discrete and heterogeneous parts are combined and their individual qualities are magnified, rather than combined or hybridized or blended.
This is rare in my work for individual works, but is often the effect of collating various manifestations of the same idea in different materials, at different scales and in different genres or disciplines.
A typical project is the 1 to 9 project, where a structural grid of numbers, reading from the centre to the corners is used to compose poems, colour paper works, drawings, sculptures and architectural projects. The subject, size and materials of each manifestation are very different, but the work is intended to be seen as a whole and the differences noted as much as the constant underlying structure of the pieces. Another example is how angels are seen by us, in which five objects suggest the five vowels, but are discrete, found things without consistent form – except they are all common industrially produced things, which have all had one gesture inflicted on them (see MINIMAL & VECTOR, above).
FIELDS
This comes from combining the geometry of natural flocking patterns, with the philosophical ideal of a balance between liberty and responsibility. In these works, a similar if not identical element is repeated to produce constant eye movement, and to constantly direct attention to local element-to-element relationship.
In all of these, an arena is established, or in the case of the sculptures, an armature, and elements which are identical but biased in shape so that they can be rotated to show difference, are distributed so that the whole arena or volume is filled more or less equally but with no central focus.
Typical works are found in the Whurlie Groups drawings and collages, and in the flotsamandjetsam drawings and sculptures. In the Whurlie Groups (orange series), the paper arena is filled with three elements, each of which are placed in response to different properties of the paper (oblique line edge to opposite edge; in the centres of the sheet; at blemishes in the paper). In the flotsamandjetsam drawings, a ‘little house’ shape, plus ovals and other found shapes occupy a frottaged area. In one of the drawings, just in pencil line, the elements are nearly all different, but all roughly of the same size to give a field effect.
Coda: THE PRESENCE OF GEOMETRY
Much of my work uses Euclidean geometry, appears to exude precision and accuracy, and avoids personal expression and evidence of hand marks.
This relates it to classic minimalist practice which linked art-making to fabrication in high-end small batch industrial workshops. It links the works to design, because design uses a similar aesthetic of geometry, measure, precision and machine finish. As well, there are similarities to the ordinary world of building, fabrication and do-it-yourself. Materials are now mostly available as processed sticks and sheets, along with proprietary fastening systems. A wide range of personal power tools is associated with this aspect of suburban life: large supermarkets are full of materials and tools bursting with latent precision, accuracy and absent human touch.
This makes for a kind of industrialised lingua franca of materials and manufacture. It allows work like mine to be equally viewed as art, design or craft. The same work would then engage with different discourses depending on how it is classified – and this is the role of the audience or consumer. To work in this way with materials has not been an explicit aim of mine, but is a condition of making things in this culture without recourse to traditional materials and techniques.
Alex Selenitsch
8 September, 2015