From the publication: Away a lone a last a loved a long the
Dorothy Cross
Rita Duffy
Katrina Maguire,
Paul Seawright
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
17.12.2000 – 21.01. 2001
Essay in the publication: Katrina Maguire, draw’ing-room by Leonida Kovač
Museum of Contemporary Art, Project Room, Zagreb
17.12.2000 – 21.01. 2001
Pages 9-12
In the text This is not pipe, motivated by the reading of Magritte’s painting, Foucault wrote: “A calligram is therefore tautology. But contrary to the rhetoric which plays with the redundancy of language. It makes use of the possibility to say the same thing twice but with different words; it uses the redundancy of wealth which allows one to express two different things with one and the same word; the essence of rhetoric is in allegory. Calligram itself uses that special capacity of letters to simultaneously function as linear elements which can be arranged in space, and as signs which have to be released according to a singular chain of sound substance. The sign, a letter, enables solidification of words; a line enables representation of things. Does not a calligram, by that, demand for the elimination of the oldest conflicts of our alphabetic civilization: to show and to name; to represent and to say; to demonstrate and to speak out; to imitate and to mean; to look and to read. 1
I do not wish to observe the recent work by Katrina Maguire, installed for the first time this spring in her Dublin studio, within the framework of a calligram, although calligraphy as a procedure cannot be excluded. The chain of associations which lead me to Foucault’s reflection on the calligram began in the phonetic print-out of the title of the work (which undoubtedly is an integral part of the work). The title, drawing-room, has been written in just that way. Instead of a Drawing room. Although the fact of locating the work in the sense of a “site-specific installation” within the space of one’s own studio, in other words opening a private (working) space to public, is not significant in itself, indeed it indicates that the concept of a room for drawing is what has been denoted by the title of the work, the phonetic print-out of the title leads me to conclude that “this is not a drawing-room”.
Katrina Maguire uses a pigment to cover walls, doors and windowpanes of the room in which she works with drawings of ornament typical of wall papers. To be more precise, it is a pattern copied from the magazine Dessin pour Ètoffe known as Renaissance allemande. Her execution, however, does not respect the basic principle of an ornament: endless repetition of the identical in the same rhythm. In some place the surfaces enclosing the working area, and defining it as a room, have remained clear, unwritten, devoid of ornament. Visible whitenesses have been left on them, and it is this concept of whiteness, in its metaphorical sense, that I recognise as one of the bearers of meaning in the work entitled draw’ing-room.
The English-English dictionary specifies meanings for which the word, pronounced draw’ing-room, is used. It is a room for reception of company, to which ladies retire after dinner. It also denotes a formal reception, at court, for instance. In earlier times the meanings of the noun drawing-room were denoted by the word withdrawing-room, which in fact points to retiring or rescindment.
draw’ing-room by Katrina Maguire, although not a calligram, does make use of the calligram strategy. It makes use of the possibility to say several different things by way of one and the same word, demanding at the same time the elimination of the oldest conflicts of our alphabetic civilisation: to show and to name; to represent and to say; to demonstrate and to speak out; to imitate and to mean; to look and to read.
As a structural visual element, whiteness in the ambience entitled draw’ing-room, revokes the possibility of a single meaning. Among other things, it is wall. As a concept in the structural function, whiteness is a metaphor. In a figurative sense it can, for instance, be interpreted as a place unknown, or erased memory, as a cut in the editing of a particular story, or as something that is unspeakable or unrepresentable.
The cloth, connoted by the pattern drawn, is in a totally different relation to the wall it covers than is a painter’s canvass which, according to the conventions of exhibiting, should be hanging on that very wall exposed to a gaze. A canvass on which something should be represented. In the case of drawing-room I wonder, what is the exhibit? Or perhaps, who is the exhibit? There is, of course, a difference in the significance of exhibiting in the space of one’s own studio and exhibiting in a gallery which institutionalises the exhibited, attributing to it the terms of reference of a work of art. In the process of institutional reception, works of art are subjected to categorizations and classifications. What would the draw’ing-room be according to them? An ambiance? Furthermore, who, or what, is being exposed to a gaze? And is this a case of being exposed to a gaze at all? I would sooner be inclined to consider it a case of recalling the gaze in its function of a “medium of all media” or a “molecular code of an object” (Baudrillard). Within the discursive space of work called drawing-room, a mnemonic dimension is being established, and it is across this that boundaries between the fundamental binary oppositions, which culturologically define our existential positions, crumble like the pigment on the walls which tie it to a specific place. The boundaries between the internal and external, the visible and the invisible, the palpable and the impalpable and, of course, the existing and the non-existing.
Leonida Kovač
Note:
1. Michel Foucault. This is not a Pipe, in The Plastic Signs, Publishing Centre Rijeka, 1981. p. 294