Comments on: Kate Scott: Organizing the World – Charts, Graphs, and Tables

By: About Drawing

About Drawing — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:13:30 +0000

Kate Scott says: Yes, exactly, the embedding of time! This applies well to all the works and artists we’ve been discussing—Johnson, Baroff, Weiner. When I look at the Baroff work, or other chart-based images, it feels like a collapse of time, because I am so used to conceiving of time as a linear trajectory through space and experience, not as anything cyclical or two-dimensional. But the drawing is not actually a collapse of time; it still shows the “movement” of time, and its data could just as easily be represented on a linear chart. The difference is how conceptions of time and of the world motivate the choice of how to represent the data.

A Tralfamadorian, on the other hand, would probably read these charts very differently. He/she/etc. would see a representation of tidal movement not as an image of linear change, as we do, but as a comprehensive picture of where the ocean and tides are *at all times, always.* Charts, then, can allow us to see the world as Tralfamadorians do, if we choose.

By: Miriam Kienle

Miriam Kienle — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:41:40 +0000

I too am interested in how artists’ charts and drawings imbed time in their works. Ray Johnson’s collages engage issues of time, and more specifically time delays, because they were sent through the postal system. While communication systems like the post (and later, telecoms and internet providers) try stress the smooth, precise, and immediate nature of exchange in which information can be monitored, controlled, and marketed, Johnson’s collages—with their layers of visual and textual information—make tangible the gaps and connection implicit in communication. His game of correspondence speaks to the intermixed and intermediated nature of modern exchange in which we experience greater interconnection but also more distance. Through the collaboratively made collages circulated among the members of his New York Correspondance [sic] School, Johnson’s practice spoke to the decentralization subjectivity implicit in modern communication. Ultimately, I think that Johnson’s practice of connecting people with and through collaged mailers emphasized the multiple exchanges enabled by postal networks—skewing the trajectory of communication as it revealed how askew communication always is.

By: Donna Gustafson

Donna Gustafson — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:56:06 +0000

What intrigues me about artists using charts, diagrams, and organizational systems as a structure for drawing is how they bring all systems back to subjectivity, no matter how scientific they seem. What is organization to one is chaos to another, what is clear to one, is unclear to another. All charts and systems are subjective to some degree, is it simply a matter of accepting systems as objective or subjective and does that depend on how widespread and well-known the system is? Ray Johnson is another example of an artist whose system seems chaotic to the uninitiated, but must have made sense to him and his closest friends. Johnson’s correspondence and his drawings are also in the exhibition as another example of art=text=art.

Another thought occurs to me, charts and diagrams are a means of not simply marking time but of embedding it within the drawing. That is also of interest to me.

By: Steve Grossi

Steve Grossi — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 16:13:29 +0000

For the uninitiated, “So it goes” is Vonnegut’s refrain in “Slaughterhouse-Five” whenever someone or something dies. He borrows the phrase from the Tralfamadorians, an alien race who experience time in the same way that we experience space, and thus they believe that “all moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” So their apparent nonchalance about death flows from the recognition that death is a local thing: you’re only ever dead in some regions of space-time, and always alive in others. I see a tie-in here with “Polaris” in that death, like the North Star, is something we mortals see as a fixed, absolute. But with a shift in perspective–of the Tralfamadorian or Weinerian variety–it need not be.

By: About Drawing

About Drawing — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 06:35:04 +0000

Kate Scott says: In addition to the works I mentioned already, I’ve also been thinking a lot about Lawrence Weiner’s Polaris, which reveals the extreme subjectivity behind human systems of organizing information. The phrase “STARS DON’T STAND STILL IN THE SKY” can be taken as an echo of pre-Copernican geocentric models of the universe, in which the sun, stars, and planets orbit around an immobile Earth. The arrows suggest motion to and fro, and the cutouts take the form of rudimentary charting (of Polaris?); however, we have no evidence confirming or denying whether the artist tracked the star’s position relative to him, or if he moved the piece of paper in relation to the star—or if he merely cut the holes at random. Whichever is the case, the work sets our thoughts in motion by suggesting the collection of data. In addition to all of this, I’m wondering if any readers have thoughts on the presence of the Kurt Vonnegut quote “So it goes,” from the book Slaughterhouse-Five. How does it affect your reading of Polaris?

By: About Drawing

About Drawing — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 06:11:10 +0000

Kate Scott says: Keith, the Jill Baroff work is one of my favorites, because it so cleverly illustrates how much more is shared between art and science than most people assume. The forms of abstract art so often have a basis in the patterns and shapes of mathematics, the laboratory, or the natural world. One might think of the beauty of pi, the repetition of fractals, or the patterning of animal camouflage. It also provokes thought about the amazing variety of systems of communication and how they are understood by various individuals or cultures. Though a traditional table or line graph would be more easily read by most people seeking to learn about the tides, one might learn something different about tidal patterns from Baroff’s mode of communication, and some (perhaps the artist herself) might find it easy to decipher, even though most of us wouldn’t know what we were looking at. Similarly, an English-speaking computer programmer might adeptly read a short sentence written in binary code, but might not understand the same phrase written concisely in a standard alphabet in French.

By: Keith Bolek

Keith Bolek — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 01:26:47 +0000

The creativity and thought that underlies these works amazes me. The one that fascinates me the most is Jill Baroff’s work. If just the word “Untitled” accompanied the piece, someone like me who looks at the piece would think that it was perhaps a drawing of a piece of pottery. Add the phrase “tidal change,” and a whole new meaning emerges. Like the rings of a tree record the climate, Baroff does an amazing job recording the tidal waves in circular form. Who knows, in a few years or decades, someone could create a piece based upon the rings of a planet like Saturn or Neptune. Who knows, after all Russell Crotty’s piece “Hale Bopp over Acid Canyon” shows that some artists are looking up at the skies.