Black is the Drawing
Richard Serra, Black is the Drawing
From →
Antwerp
Pictures of the exhibition
Richard Serra, Black is the Drawing
From →
Antwerp
Story of the exhibition
Black is the Drawing:
Drawing as experience
In 1972, American artist Richard Serra made his famous Verb List. On two sheets of blank paper, Serra wrote down a number of possible actions (to roll, to fold, to cast…) and possible contexts to act upon (gravity, entropy, nature…). However ordinary at first glance, we can rightly argue that this “linguistic drawing” is a perfect summary of Serra’s artistic practice. The artist himself described Verb List as, “…a series of actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process”.
In line with artistic questions raised by the minimalists, the work of Richard Serra deals with the object-hood and the self-referentiality of an artwork. His works are presences in space, devoid of all external references or meanings, and referring to nothing but themselves as objects.
As one of the most prominent members of the post-minimalist generation, Serra also attaches great importance to the process of making these presences, and to the way this process and the logic of matter itself dictates the outcome of his artistic decisions. Serra explores the possibilities of materials and acts upon them within their natural confines. The results of his acts reveal the true nature of the materials that are processed.
Though the interpretation of Serra’s work goes beyond language, Verb List can, in a way, be considered the conceptual blueprint of his entire artistic production. It’s a linguistic dissection of the process, which he never takes for granted, and which he tries to translate physically in time and space. Every new work is a re-questioning of acts, contexts, materials, and a repositioning of the artist himself in the dialectics between those parametres.
In the same year that he made Verb List, Serra started making his famous paintstick Wall Drawings, on linen. In the process, Serra re-interprets the verb “to draw”, which for him is not necessarily a transitive verb. Serra doesn’t draw something. He just draws—as an act—referring to nothing but itself as a process of seeing and structuring space. The only thing revealed by the material residue of this act is the moment of making the drawing itself.
The ambition to make a non-representational, non-referential, autonomous drawing is not an easy one to realise. How to step away from art historical continuity and avoid a drawing to be an illusion, a window to a fictitious reality? How to avoid metaphors, associations, gestures, and figural interpretations?
First of all, Serra solves this problem by strictly using black. He considers black to be a non-colour, one that refers to anything other than itself. Colour alludes to nature, and thus, would risk a metaphorical interpretation of the drawing. Serra’s use of black not only avoids possible misreading, it also helps the artist structure space in the act of drawing. “Black is a property, not a quality,” he states.
In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field… Since black is the densest colour material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artificial as well as the natural light in a given room. A black shape can hold its space and place in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.
Serra’s black is not on the drawing; it becomes and is the drawing.
Another way of achieving the autonomy of a drawing is to avoid any subjective gestures. Nothing in Serra’s drawings directly refers to the artist in persona. Rather than making gestures, Serra makes marks. Both gestures and marks are the material expressions of an idea. The difference, however, is in how this idea comes into being. A gesture is grounded in, and always biased by, one’s personal history and the emotions linked to it. It’s an idea that reveals a person’s subjectivity.
A mark, on the other hand, reveals how a person really thinks. A mark isn’t an idea that’s filtered by the existing conventions, traditions or frames we use to structure our lives with. It doesn’t follow the logic of language nor of the image. Mark making is a way of thinking out of time, only present in the experience of here and now. It has its own, unstable logic and allows for intuition—the perfect blend between reason and feeling—to enter into the development of ideas and process of making an artistic decision.
A mark is made in a dimension between the conscious and the unconscious. It’s immediate and direct; it’s entirely unpredictable and creates its own, ever-revisable order of things. Marks reveal fragments of the truth hidden in the natural logic of matter and process. And as Richard Serra states:
The vulnerability of not knowing what you are doing is always more rewarding than knowing it.
Due to their directness, and their one-to-one relation to the process and the experience of a given time in a given space, Serra’s marks contain a certain truth that’s not one to be taken for granted. In regard to this point, James Lawrence says:
In Serra’s drawings, where things assert their properties, even as their state changes, the true and the made are also convertible. Line is weight, mass is direction, matter is time. This convertibility, however, is not spontaneous. It arises through the constant process of thinking and rethinking, acting and reacting, which constitutes involvement with the world as we find it from moment to moment. This is true for Serra, and it is true for us as we view his work.
In order to understand Serra’s drawings, and to capture a fragment of the truth that they hide and reveal, one must experience them in a given context. Their autonomic status allows for Serra to use them as destabilising weights in a harmonic space. Their monumentality and blackness provoke a physical reaction. The viewer is prompted to constantly change position, and with every step, to become more and more attentive to his distorted environment.
By unbalancing the viewer, Serra makes them become aware of their corporeality. The viewer is made to physically react to space and retrieve their balance, both physically and conceptually. They become conscious of the process of perception. They’re forced to restructure and rethink what is given, instead of taking things for granted and relying solely on secure knowledge. Serra’s drawings open the gates to a type of knowledge that’s beyond what we already know under a different guise.
With Wall Drawings, Serra encourages the viewer to continue questioning how we perceive ourselves, and our environment, in order to come closer to true, unfiltered meaning. The experience of perceiving Serra’s drawings is in a way analogous to the experience of drawing itself. Both viewer and artist constantly try to retrieve their balance in physical and conceptual space. For Serra, the definition of the verb “to draw” is much more extensive than “the act of putting a line on a piece of paper”. Drawing becomes another way of thinking. It’s is a non-linguistic, experiential way of structuring perceived space.