Translations, 2000

(Artist as remote drawing instrument/tool/translator)

Conceived for a group show at Ateliers Nadar in Marseilles, France featuring three french photographers and three LA sculptors.

The subject here is the apprehension and translation of the actual landscape into a pictoral one.  In this case the elemental material is the French landscape or cityscape.  Translating filters include photography, digital scanning and transmitting, language, personality, light and electronic media, and neural transmitters.

Photographs of the environs of Marseilles (taken by Monique Deregibus, Patrick Manez/ Anne Favret, and Olivier Menanteau) were sent to me in Los Angeles.  I never looked at them.  In my studio I built an apparatus which included two studio drawing benches set back to back.  On one is a pad and next to it, a chest of drawers containing standard drawing materials: chalk and oil pastels, pencils, charcoal, conté crayons.  On the other bench is a pair of video monitors and a clipboard.  The left video monitor shows the drawing pad from above,  and the right monitor, a view of the chest of drawers from above.  For each performance, an artist was invited to come sit at the video bench, choose from among the photographs provided and instruct me to create a drawing from it. I sat blindfolded at the drawing pad with my back to the instructor and attempted to do as I was told, asking clarifying questions but making no attempt to guide the drawing process.  The number of drawings, the time it took to make them, all coloristic and compositional choices were decided by the “instructor”.  In several cases, different instructors chose the same photographs, but very different drawings ensued.  There was no audience at any of the performances.  Each performance was video taped and audio taped.