transcript/notes (text supporting slide above)
-drawing exercise: the purpose of this is to clarify your instinctual mapping methodology. this is a short talk on what a dérive is and how we can see it within artworks. It’s about space, mapping, psychogeography. and it’s pulling from the collections of prints and drawings at the British museum. the works we’re gonna see is from this limited collection. so I wanted to preface with that. Any work of art really can be talked about in terms of its psychogeographic space, but we need to first define the terms. different examples on how to engage or map the space in quarantine with derive.
-one of the first psychogeographic maps, made by Situationist International (1952-1972) (you can look into them further online) concepts of psychogeography in this group were adapted in art in 1990s, not focusing on that but origins of movement, started as a rebellion against capitalism (France and Europe post ww2) 1950s.
-psychogeogrophy; psychological space that is created by architecture, planning, the pathways they’re made for us not necessarily with us in mind.
-A dérive is a technique to help to understand your psychogeography. derive literally translates from french as drifting. So the technique is to go against the concept of the past that are created for us and to drift without any conscious understanding where we’re headed.
-détournement; to take something that already exists and remove its historical context. take your space and as best you can remove history of that place and see new potential in your space in quarantine. the space in which we exist.
-included many artist, like asger jorn, who wrote a painting manifesto related to this idea of detournement. they didn’t really make drawings for their derives, they made maps. like this image, where they reconstructed and pulled apart Paris and showed different pathways through it, didn’t really draw, more about the physical experience of space. didn’t document in this way. how do we make this valuable exercise. **think of line mark and tone as cartographic, mapping techniques.
-the automatic quality of drawing, not preplanning what you’re going to do. which you may have done in the first exercise sat down and mapped. undo that idea and think about drifting through drawing. and the derive of drawing
-important that the Situanist International movement emerged from the Surrealist movement, and the surrealist placed emphasis on drawing from the unconscious. in doing this they use drawing as their primary tool. just explore with the line, not planning. difficult when you’re thinking about planning something. idea, logic and authority of the map, that doesn’t coincide with drifting in an unplanned way. Psychogeography is very contradictory. But I think a great place for creative exploration. some artworks from the collection of prints and drawings;
-psychogeography: Guy Debord, 1955: ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment (ambiance), consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviours on individuals.’
-in this image by piranesi, it’s not obvious what emotion the people are experiencing. but not hard to imagine that this relationship they have to the monument, church would have impacted them on their behaviours as individuals. so this is our détournement moment where we’re reading this work in terms of psychogeography even though it was created centuries before this concept was articulated. think about emotional impact of your space. you might or might not have grand monuments outside your space, thinking about how this impacts your individual behaviours from day to day.
-Tess Jaray, study for a painting (example of geometry and architecture in terms of psychogeography in a more contemporary artist) graphite drawing that is meticulous and feels organised. What I love about it is this geometric form is breaking out of its organisational framework. and will mention that all of the images I have in this presentation are in a pdf file and zoom in on and drawing from if you’re interested.
what jaray is doing is she’s playing off the structure of Versailles. Louis the fourteenth’s palace that he built in sixteen forties and fifties and many decades to complete it she’s playing off the organisations of gardens in particular. what Louis XIV wanted to do was take what appeared to be a natural environment and really control the architecture and planning and geometry. so that he was drip-feeding the experience of nature to the people that lived under the roof, and thousands of people lived in Versailles at the time trying to control their experiences of nature.
and jaray is playing with that. she explains this idea in a quote, ‘to make sense of the obsessive searching for patterns and repetition in nature and in art that have been so important... [repetitive patterns] may be seen as a meeting point, a coming together of the head and the heart and the external and the internal. It is not a search for the kind of absolute that some people search for in extremes in nature, like the arctic or the desert. Nor is it that solitude, or isolation, or whatever it is, that those who retreat to monasteries or nunneries are seeking. It is rather a need for the merging of inside and outside, distance or closeness, a marriage, a completeness or opposites. Something that can really only exist in its own space, which is imagined, that we borrow from time to time, for our own needs.’ this idea of geometry as being a place of organisation, control, and when in fact there is this natural energy inside, so thinking about the space that you live in, you probably didn’t design it yourself (where windows doorways are) controlled space that does constrict your flow, whether you think it does or not. within it you’re this natural organism that flows and drifts. that’s why this drawing is really great because this geometry is growing and expanding and breaking itself apart. Thinking about space in which we exist in as inside outside, completeness of opposites.
-Lucy brightwell, etching. of a cobbler in his studio, making shoes, stopped his work. If you look at his expression get a sense of this space ins enclosing in on him. what I wanted to talk about is the perception of what a map is, how we draw space, space that we live in. this is a great tiny little etching. Shows us brightwell thinking about relationships of forms created through light organisation of space, thinking of the cobbler to the desk to the shelf to the plant to the curtain in bg. all about these relationships, however there is no concern for concept of space, at least in terms of psychogeography.
-Define these terms to help us understand where our derive is going. Geometry (as mentioned in last artwork) is geometry of a space is not designed for or by us, for the most part, architecturally. we’re in a place, the place that we exist in, is a place that exists because of relationships; where I am sat in relationship to the bookshelf, to the window, that’s the place itself and that’s what we see in brightwell’s image. (Place: relationships of co-existence)
-for a psychogeographer, Space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities and time variables; space is activated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. I will give you an example that I’m going to use again and again - it’s not the fact that there’s a book shelf in front of me, the space happens when I stand up from my chair and I move toward the bookshelf. so it’s these directions of movements. and as Michel de Certeau, who’s my favourite Situationist, wrote in his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) he said: ‘Space is a practiced place’. want you to think about your space, not as just a place, relationships with objects, but that physical movement between them that time variables getting up from the directions that you move from. we can start to apply that to this brightwell image but that’s not what her primary interest is in. although psychogeography is definitely part of it, she’s concerned about these relationships of objects in particular how light hits them.
-Louise Bourgeois, Homely Girl, A Life, 1992; I think a good example of this idea of relationship to space and movement within it is shown here in Bourgeois’ series. on the right hand side the templates that make up the series and a detail on the left. just to say that she is thinking about how the space of the printing plate restricts and controls the flower that’s growing in it. And the whole series is a series of flowers and how they’re growing in this tiny little space. and the flower here is growing up against the space. Although the space is controlling the flower, it is pushing back within it.
and this brought to mind this quite by art historian by David Breslin, he wrote an essay about Picasso’s use of line as an architectural cartographic element. he gives us a great question to think about; ‘Is it the space and the objects that constitute the subject or does the subject conjure the world through her integration into and use of it?’ So is it just the objects that surround us and how they relate within the space that makes us us, or does it happen through our integration through the world? into how we move through it? And what restricts us. so this bourgeois is a beautiful example of that Idea of the subject conjuring her world through integrating herself into that space and filing it up.
-Edda Renouf, etching; now I wanna talk a bit about mapping, we talked about space, psychogeography. now we’re gonna talk about mapping and what does that mean. this work called champs magnétiques (1994) which means magnetic fields, and she’s measuring things that we can’t see. that we can just sense or, maybe something like the northern lights you can see but they’re very impossible to map because they go by so quickly, but we get a sense of movement and energy within this work. and I want to give a quote from her to give a sense of what she’s mapping, she says, ‘My works are thus a record of the days, weeks, months, and seasons when they were created becoming a journal of my working process, while at the same time their structures and signs relate to thoughts and memory; to music and sound, themes that point to the idea of ‘making the invisible visible ’ thereby revealing the movement and hidden presence of wave structures in our universe and again the abstract energy within my materials.’
so mapping what isn’t seen. but mapping what is felt. thinking about a map itself, a map is quite a factual thing so it’s a series of pathways and destinations of you think of google maps it only shows you roads that you can go down, spaces you can move within, a map is a simplification of space and factual optical phenomena, we tend to just think of the visualisational map, maps don’t tend to map sound or touch, or smell, maps are presumed authoritative acts of control, this is the authority of the place this is how we know the place, maps itemise the natural world as well. If you zoom in on google maps you can see all the shops and how they’re organised and labelled and named. so it’s all these really factual ‘accurate’ things that a map is trying to do. on the other hand, a map is a diagram that creates a new reality for a site, it’s all in the way in which you map something. that tells us about the place. So if you’re trying to say that your room looks this way, this is how it actually is, what are you leaving out? and that’s what I love about this Edda Renouf work, she’s talking not just about the sight of magnetic fields but the sounds textures and waves and physical sensations of it. So a map isn’t just this factual poetical phenomenon but it can be a diagram that creates new realities for you. and the plan is to do that by dériving a map, by drifting and making a new kind of sense of a map.
Isabel Bishop, Seven Students, etching and aquatint; in terms of an artwork I feel that art is already a (making a grand generalisation here but) sort of map-making technique where you’re placing coordinates and you’re outlining a pathway for people to look and to move through the space. Isabel Bishop does this beautifully here with different kinds of marks her perception of these different figures these seven students, it’s an etching and aquatint so you can see the straight etched marks in the background coming into the foreground and the washed out aquatint marks that show repetition and pattern and movement and dynamism through the composition so she’s mapping her perceptions with different marks and textures.
I see this type of pattern and texture and mark as a cartographic exercise literally cartography means map drawing or writing and it acknowledges both of the experience of our relationship to objects in space and our understanding of them. so perception comes into play there is not right or wrong. Where objects are placed in relation to our perception. and here we see bishop’s different perceptions of different lights and shades that then assemble themselves into human forms but in reality they are these sections and fragments of mapped moments shown in different marks.
Isabel Bishop, Seven Students, etching and aquatint; in terms of an artwork I feel that art is already a (making a grand generalisation here but) sort of map-making technique where you’re placing coordinates and you’re outlining a pathway for people to look and to move through the space. Isabel Bishop does this beautifully here with different kinds of marks her perception of these different figures these seven students, it’s an etching and aquatint so you can see the straight etched marks in the background coming into the foreground and the washed out aquatint marks that show repetition and pattern and movement and dynamism through the composition so she’s mapping her perceptions with different marks and textures.
I see this type of pattern and texture and mark as a cartographic exercise literally cartography means map drawing or writing and it acknowledges both of the experience of our relationship to objects in space and our understanding of them. so perception comes into play there is not right or wrong. Where objects are placed in relation to our perception. and here we see bishop’s different perceptions of different lights and shades that then assemble themselves into human forms but in reality they are these sections and fragments of mapped moments shown in different marks.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, pen and black ink with graphite; another example of this, where we are seeing different perceptions, illustrated with different kinds of marks you see you have this really precise pen and ink study of the flower, that is so accurate and you can see her carefully observing and documenting, and then in the top right hand side more atmospheric marks, creating haze; and more graphic, clear abstracted forms in the bottoms so we’re almost seeing a dérive, a drifting of her thoughts. and her relationship and perception of these different forms, all on the same sheet of paper. there’s no right or wrong here, it’s the mapping of thought.
so can we start to think about how to understand our space with this new concept of mapping, mark making, rather than just drawing the box or the rectangle that you’re in and placing objects within it. It’s a series of these different relationships whether they be sonic, visual perception, all these different ways in which we can engage with it. How does the space start to lay out in our relationship to it. I wanted to show these two examples of two artists from the school of Rembrandt, meaning we don’t know who they are, their names exactly, but we know that they worked in the manner of Rembrandt. so they’re very Rembrandt like looking drawings. they’re very much about the person within the space. yes they are about the room, but they are about that persons perception and their place within the space. and the ways in which that person would move through that space.
and this brings me to some concepts we can think about in terms of mapping; ‘self-contained ambiance’ as the Situationists called it, so this is getting us to interrogate and think about the space in a way that is other than just us sitting in one fixed position and drawing what is around us. the spatial field depends first of all on the points of departure. as I said earlier, if I get out of this chair, which direction am I gonna go. I can’t go to my right, cause I’ll walk into a wall, I must always go to the left. I can change my chair in the room, and that’s gonna change my point of departure it’s gonna change my whole relationship to the space. if you’re sat on your bed what spaces are you going to move to. So thinking about the map and your spatial field as points of departure, rather than just the place itself. And the exploration of the fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. that’s what I see in this drawing here. Is that we are exploring the spatial field through the different ways in which the artist tends to penetrate it physically, moving through it, and the stoppages and the starts, so for a psychogeographer, considering these points of existence where you stop and start and depart, those are psychogeogrophic pivotal points, this is where energy accumulates, this is where emotion and behaviour are controlled and instinctual. now I’m using their terms here, these are not my words. I am appropriating what they have said for us to think about space in this way. so what I love about this drawing is that the artist have this stops and starts where you can’t go, can go, where you would normally go, that’s how the space is laid out. even though it’s very representational.
Linda Karsban, graphite on Aquarelle Arches paper; so it’s completely legitimate to draw a representational sense of your space, and then to think about how you move within it, remember this is a creative instigation so whatever you’re inclined to do, that’s what you should do, it shouldn’t be too restrictive. But part of the dérive is also undoing your natural inclinations and habits and that’s why I’m showing you this image by Linda Karshan who maps in ‘untraditional ways’, we’ll talk about what counter-mapping is in a bit. what Karshan does is she maps her breath, her physical movements through making lines and marks, she will many times move the paper as she moves, she usually moves it anti-clockwise, and what you get is this play on a traditional rigid grid but within it you see the humanity of it, is that it’s breathing and expanding like her body would so she is very concerned about the physical movements of her body and how they map, how they create space themselves.
Doris Seidler, Japanese sumi watercolour, pen and ink, and watercolour pencil on Halia paper; another beautiful example of a map that’s more about psychogeography then it is about the visual accuracy of site. Seidler drew a series called flying over where it references what she saw out the window when she was flying over England, in a plane she’s coming on. She lived in New York for a lot of her life and she’s from London. so she came back and forth. so you get a sense here of agricultural fields but you also have a sense of a sunrise or a moonrise where you have perhaps the flow of water, there’s all these references to memory, and pathways. it’s not a map that I can read and say oh I know exactly where I am , that’s the whole point, maps are these diagrams for potential of reunderstanding and reinterpreting space rather than trying to hold onto these logical ways of control on our world.
Julie Mehretu, soft ground, dry point and etching with scraper on Hahnemüle paper; perhaps the best example of this idea of psychogeographic mapping is this contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, and I should also mention that this talk/ideas were inspired by a really great student at Wimbledon, she came up with this idea of psychogeography and mapping from some of the works from the collection so I’ve taken some of the works in her selections but I just added in this concept of the dérive and explained a bit more so I’m not completely stealing from her but I’m definitely inspired by her a lot and I wanna thank her for that. and she chose this work from the collection which I’ve included here cause I think it’s a fantastic example of what I wanna talk about now, counter-mapping. so if a map is the authoritative version of a space, a counter map is the more emotional maybe truthful experience of space and that’s what mehretu does, this is a series that if you look them up online from the British museum collection that you wouldn’t be able to see them because they’re under copyright but you can find a lot of her works in the museum of modern art you can find quite easily online. I’ve included a high res image of this in the PDF file so you can expand it and look more closely. Hopefully in this slide you can see that there are several variations of several kinds of marks and coloured lines running through them. the marks don’t correspond one to one to anything but instead mehretu’s perception of different elements of the space, she’s not told us exactly what space this is, but you get this evocation of space and expansion and energies.
she says, ‘I am interested in the potential of ‘psychogeographies’. Which suggests that within an invisible and invented creative space, the individual can gap a resource of self-determination and resistance [...] This impulse is a major generating force in my drawing and my larger conceptual project as a painter.’ This is a way for her to think about how marks translate into emotional perceptions of space and in one of the exercises I suggest at the end of this talk is to mix several different kinds of maps of your space whether it’s visual perception or sensory perception by tracing the edges of your space of your hand or hearing smell, I mean what does smell mark or colour that smell create, and transposing those maps to create a deeper truthful sense of your space, a counter-map. so maps tend to be accurate and factual while counter-maps tend to be more emotional and subjective.
Barbara Delaney, graphite, ballpoint one and black conté on heavy paper; this is another great example of a psychogeographic or counter-map by the artist Barbara Delaney, where she has this really rigid geometric form, I see it as a room, and how we spill out outside of that, although the room contains us it doesn’t contain us completely. She says ‘Contrasts of opposites have always intrigued me. I find it exciting to confront pared-down geometric shapes with spontaneous gestural, sometimes recklessly wilful, marks and to make these work together as part of a precariously balanced visual orchestration: emotion - just - contained in form.’ so I’m showing you these last few works now as just examples of the possibilities and potential of what your map can be I encourage you not to pre-plan it but also not criticise it if it’s not what you think is being an accurate map of your space. that’s not the point, of a dérive. A dérive literally translates as drifting.
and for the psychogeographers where the Situationist International, a dérive is a technique of rapidly passing through very different spaces. it’s hard to do maybe when you only have one room, I’ll get to that in a minute. but there’s a contradiction here, definitely, you have to let go of habitual responses and that’s hard to do at home because you’re always getting up off the sofa primarily one way. or you’re sitting at a particular space in your room. how do you let go of those habitual responses while also using them as the basis of your knowledge of space? this is where the creative fun comes in. to exploring your space. understanding your habits, maybe mapping those habits. and then taking a step back, making another map that goes against them.
Agathe Sorel, etching, aquatint and gold leaf; another example by this artist who is interested in this idea of automatic thinking and not planning ahead of time to map these finished works she says ‘I never have an idea in advance, even now. It’s just wherever it takes me.’ So I know that this idea of a map, and this is why I had you start with drawing a map of your room, this is the first step of your advanced idea of what you think a map is, now hopefully this has undone it and you’ll see that maybe you don’t know what a map is and you just start to make lines you just start to document make sounds make marks. Whatever that maps gonna be there’s no right or wrong.
to unlearn this idea of what a map can be I turn to Delueuze and Guattari, who say a map is a ‘detachable, reversible [and] susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group of social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political act of meditation.’ so it may seem quite rigid at first, make a map of your space, but now hopefully we’re unlocking the potential of what a map can possibly be.
Mary Cassat, etching; and the last work that I’ll leave you with is this work, it is finished, I know it looks really like an unfinished sketch/etching, I leave it here because for me there is a massive density of psychological/psychogeographic space, between the face and the mirror in this work. And I know some of your spaces might be really small that you’re working within but that doesn’t mean they’re dense or important spaces of your emotion and behaviours. so I wrote this from my own memory of this presentation, ‘you may not be able to swiftly drift your physical body through your quarantined space, but your senses can drift - what places are engaged when we think on a smaller scale?’ so instead of sitting in one position and drawing think about where your eye goes, maybe make a blind drawing attempting to trace what your eye lands on, or physically walk through the space or as I said, sounds, or things that encroach upon you and change your perception, what is this perceptual map? and how can a dérive help? how can drifting help you? drifting rather than itemising and thinking about place thinking about how you float through space.
so what now? You’re invited to draw from the selected works in the attached PDF, all the works that are in this presentation, just for inspiration. think about them as suggestions of marks mapping and spatial relations. or you can perform one of the two dérive drawing exercises I have for you as well. These exercises come from Situationist International’s instructions on how to stage a dérive, not sure if they actually did do drawing dérives, as far as I know it was more about walking through spaces, notation, ethnographic charts, using maps and deconstructing them than it was actually making visual art. although as I said Asger Jorn who was the main artist of the movement he was a painter so he was interested in this détournement turning one thing into another but I think this is a long winded way of saying these exercises for you come from there, instructions on how to dérive, rather than how to draw. So they might feel very rigid, my hope is that in their rigidity there’s lots of room for creative interpretation and taking new directions and going where you will with them. so thank you very much for listening. Enjoy.
I'm only ten minutes into sarah's online workshop and I'm surprised at just how in line of what I'm thinking about it was. I was just thinking about the idea of a map/mapping and drawing freely just yesteryday. of course, I've always thought about the concept of psychogeography (and the surrealist movement), but not as explicitly. the last time I really thought about it was in the first unit in first year (?) when it was sort of the theme they gave us at the time - and I completely delved in and was immersed in it, I really resonated with the idea of drifting, and recalled/wrote about the very peculiar melancholic feelings I always had around high-rise buildings. I feel it less now, maybe because I haven't had the time to really drift through the cityscape. London is not the type of city I feel relaxed to just walk by myself in. I think about walking by myself in taipei. it feels bittersweet for some reason. like I know it's all gonna go away soon. hearing the nostalgic (but I don't remember it particularly, so how is it nostalgic?) MRT sound when the train is about to come to the station, I somehow felt like I was in a video game. I remember going out by myself one of these summers and thinking, wow, this is what it feels like to go out by yourself. it is so peculiar, you think about things so much deeper. every time I come home feeling a bit melancholic, but a good melancholy. like there are things I never uncovered before in that path I took. I guess that's why that artist said he'd often take long walks (I forgot who..).
back to first year, in that psychogeography exploration, I did some small paintings. one was an abstract landscape on thin found wood, two watercolours of this pigeon and some bikes in the city (my tutor really liked the bikes), and this poorly painted rendition of the train incident (I took photos that night?).. I guess I was also thinking about the psychological landscape in that 'cy Twombly style' (as my tutor dan called it) painting I did on raw canvas with the text, I enjoyed that. I think I really did enjoy drifting without planning, which is sort of what I do when I'm not collaging, the complete opposite in fact, I plan with my collages. but with the recent drawings I've been freely doing unplanned collages/drawings, and the result is something a lot like Sarah was describing, with the 'dérive'.
I'm adding some new thoughts to my pandemic planet (i don't know why I called it that, but I kind of like it) mind map, the idea that architecture + nature is basically what I'm thinking about, it having an emotional impact, having an impact on my behaviour as an individual. can that explain my utter fascination and disgust with the diorama? maybe it's all the things. I guess you could say the artificiality of nature is part of psychogeography as well.. planned nature, 'drip-feeding their experience of nature in the people living in versailles' as Sarah explained. in my collage with battle royale, the monolith of that image of the trees is sort of like a monument in Piranesi's etching. Sarah said, you can't tell the emotional experiences the people are having in the image but it is not hard to imagine its impact - and I think the 'monolith' here does that as well, even though the battle royale figures is distressed by the sudden reality before them. I suppose in the space odyssey film it had a tremendous impact (I cannot believe I still haven't watched it, I need to).
/// I've finished watching the presentation and it really gave me a lot of inspiration - a new way of looking at my materials. I now feel more comfortable with the ideas of 'mapping' and can't wait to make some more drawings, as more 'finished' work instead of just a doodle.