Note 1: ‘Most Europeans, including artists, have a tendency, which they carry over from their handwriting habits, to rest both their elbow and their hand on the surface of the support.’
Additional note: A label in the Pitt Rivers Museum reads ‘Silvered and stoppered bottle said to contain a witch, obtained about 1915 from an old lady living in a village near Hove, Sussex. She remarked ‘and they do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out, it be a peck o’ trouble’.
Reference: Rawson, P. (1969) Drawing: the appreciation of the arts 3, London: Oxford University Press, p. 87.
Note 2: I suppose my exhibitions in the Pitt Rivers operated as if the witch should go free. However, the bottle remains resolutely ‘stoppered’, and its contents (to which there can be no ‘good’ response) have to endure every kind of exhibition-making.
Additional note: Christopher Ricks, in an essay about The Ancient Mariner, says a curious thing. Referencing the possibility that this poem is really ‘about’ the slave trade, he speculates that the contemporary presence of something utterly criminal (slavery, death camps) is not manifest as content, nor is it a contextual frame. The ‘aboutness’ he describes is more like an atmospheric pressure in which art is ‘obliged by indirections to find directions out’. I suppose I do routinely leave the Museum believing fewer things about our contemporary condition.
Reference:
Ricks, C. (1996) ‘Doctor Faustus and hell on earth’, Essays in Appreciation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 17.
Note 3: So, artists have a tendency to carry over drawing habits from their handwriting. I’m looking at the drawing with a red rectangle that bookmarks page 87 of Rawson’s 1969 publication. See more here.
Additional note: Put together first thing Tuesday, 14 March 2023
08:03 – Rawson’s exhibition was not a transparent guide to tantra:
Think of the bright red border of a Basohli miniature painting. Think how much is taken in indirectly, or seen using averted vision.
08:22 – Reading Rawson on Twombly.
08:34 – Notes on Rawson’s notes on Twombly:
It is like reading handwriting. There is an unspoken sense of the writer, their character, perhaps even their mood as they wrote this. The start is emphatic start (large and clear), then confusion and indetermination with fresh starts building into layers of work, but finally, it is the simple basic versions that close off the work in hand. And then there is the additional work it takes to appreciate this, the ability we have to read barely visible movements of the hand that scarcely leave a record, is a lesson in the concept of indexicality.
Max Blecher, the Romanian writer, wrote this in his sanatorium journal: ‘The air absorbs all of our actions and they disappear without a trace – I lift up my arm and the air swallows up the gesture and closes again, clear and indifferent, as if nothing had disturbed it’.
09:03 – The Pitt Rivers is not a transparent guide to anything. My angel intervened in the capacity that this museum has to distract attention. Imagine a fly embedded in amber – the small sculpture arrived hesitantly and provisionally. And if noticed at all, it was noted indirectly, a matter of averted vision.
Reference:
Rawson, P. 1979. Seeing Through Drawing, London: BBC Publications, p. 62.