Redrawing 2005-ongoing.
"Redrawing" is one of the relational propositions of my PhD thesis, Translating Relation (2008). It is a theoretical proposition and an activity of drawing that aligns both practices.
Redrawing reconceptualises the limits of the “original” artwork to embrace the model of the original (the reproduction). For Redrawing these models are the nominative and technological forms of the artwork.
Redrawing is a relation of dependency, a contingent addition to the structure of its model and an intervention into its systemic grammar. Redrawing is a strategy of reproduction, but it is a strategy that is not a development of a field. Redrawing is a distribution of the model as a deferred force of signification. Redrawing is a material translation of its model, not as a carrier of meaning but as a materialisation of its transmissibility, “the translation of what is transmissible about the model drawn through its ability to be transmitted.”
In Translating Relation these terms of mediation are critically investigated through the art-historical reception of the work of Eva Hesse as this reproduces her practice for the field of reception as a “subject-for-art,” and engenders a set of relations around the nominative tropes of her work for a redistributing historicism. This mediation reproduces the work as illustration for its own reception (field of historical analysis etc.). This production of reproduction, stands in place of the work, and operates, not behind the work as its representative, but in advance of the work and its return as model. It produces the work as its own reproduction.
After Right After (first version) 2005, drawn photograph (digital/analogue print), 55.5 x 43.8 cm
The series of redrawings, After Right After,(2005-2008) are redrawn from the reproduction in Eva Hesse, October Files, ed. Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), of Hesse's 1969 drawing "Right After". The actual tools of drawing—the computer mouse and the software that direct the virtual tools of the pencil, brush and eraser—reflect the hand directed labour at an order removed from the actual imprint of the mark, the mark is virtual as both order of operation and as trace of reproduction. The drawings are worked on as layers, repeating Hesse's process as far as it can be discerned from the reproduction; or rather, they follow the mediated process that the reproduction reveals. They are efforts to redraw the image-event that is the reproduction of the image. The final rendering of the work takes place through another technological order—the image is drawn as a laser exposure of RGB light, directed by the digital writing of the image file. This drawn photo-graphic print is then processed using the wet photographic process of analogue reproduction.