Painted/drawn artist’s book

The form forced me to hande it and to read the writing stuck onto it ie turned a 2D into a 3D surface, bringing about a greater engagement with the work. The words move it from representation to expression, encapsulating something of the object but reflecting it in the abstractions o the mark making.

Site specfic/site responsive – artists not interested in telling story as such but with interrogating the form itself. Process and medium may be of as much interest as the finished work. Stones (eg in Halperin) don’t show the moment in action but have been moving, as evident from close examination. Or they change by process of decay or eg mould/calcification forming (compare cave art).

So – when making an indelible mistake, leave the process on the page. Makes the question of intention manifest – see Bas Jan Ader and ‘failure’. This is the reverse of time based work – it’s about more time being left for the work to evolve or change, maybe to transform. Once made, the mark cannot be changed but it’s the immediacy that makes it so intense. The risk taking is not just about the making of an error or failure but the opposite – it’s about acceptance or living with the consequences.

Site specificity – where media/form/place converge?

Rock art – Miro/Serra continuity. No other possibility but essential/inherent time/space linkage (eg through materials, perception, physical knowledge). Think about qualia and mimesis.

Linking Serra ‘A Matter of Time’ to eg El Castillo. Movement throught the site, the work integral to it, both using iron oxide. Combination of etched line and pigment as in caves illuminates printmaking as an echo of ancient forms – some Cantabrian images rely on both. Think about R Krauss on the expanded field.

Another way of saying this is that even though sculpture may be reduced to what is in the Klein group the neuter term of the not-landscape plus the not-architecture, there is no reason not to imagine an opposite term-one that would be both landscape and architecture-which within this schema is called the complex. But to think the complex is to admit into the realm of art two terms that had formerly been prohibited from it: landscape and archztecture-terms that could function to define the sculptural (as they had begun to do in modernism) only in their negative or neuter condition … Our culture had not before been able to think the complex, although other cultures have thought this term with great ease. Labyrinths and mazes are both landscape and architecture; Japanese gardens are both landlandscape and architecture; the ritual playing fields and processionals of ancient civilizations were all in this sense the unquestioned occupants of the complex.

Krauss, R ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (October 8, Summer 1979 30–44 at 38.

One could add the decorated cave to this definition of the complex – the cave is an instance of landscape which together with its architecture (and maze-like qualities possibly intrinsic to the artists’ intention) becomes sculpture. Is this is to impose binary concepts on a wholly integrated work?

Ideas for installed works – serpentines and dots in red engraved and/or painted onto rough surfaces, maybe shaped into panels. Etched lines on solid aurfaces eg zinc, copper but not actually printed.

With Uncertainty: Drawing and Change | Whitney Museum of American Art