A painter friend of mine once told me, “If you can’t make it good, make it big. And if you can’t make it big, make it red.”
Absurd, right? I don’t think he was completely serious, but there are some artists who do pretty well following an approach as simple as this. However if I look beyond the absurdity of my friend’s suggestion, I'm left with a piece of advice that is in fact a strategy for making art. Maybe it’s not the best strategy, but it’s a strategy nevertheless.
Every piece of art is guided by a making-strategy of some sort; an approach or guiding principle that informs the making of the work in a fundamental way. All artists employ a range of making-strategies in the creation of their work (consciously or not). Make it big. Make it small. Make it fast. Take your time. Use authentic traditional materials. Use stuff from the hardware store. Find materials that resonate with personal meaning. Draw on beautiful clean paper. Draw on scraps of paper lying in the studio. And so on.
So what is a making-strategy good for? And why is it important to spend time thinking about the ways different making-strategies are used? Because these strategies hold some of the clues that allow us to understand how to connect the experience of a piece of art to our lives. Making-strategies are a way into a work as both an artist and a viewer, and they provide us with a point of departure to begin a conversation with the work.
To look at making-strategies I think it is helpful to first think about the kinds of questions that art takes on. Painting, drawing and sculpture (and all other forms of visual and performing art) are very good at helping us answer particular kinds of questions. Very often people mistakenly assume that the subject of a painting or drawing are the things represented in the image (the figures, the landscape, the still life objects, etc). This isn’t the case. The subject of a work of art is the question that the piece is seeking to answer. The reason the work exists in the first place is, fundamentally, to try to answer a particular question. Artwork that is generated in the absence of an underlying question remains disconnected from our emotional register, and our response to these works often feels shallow and empty.
Some subjects (i.e. questions) are better addressed through art than through other modes of exploration, research and inquiry. Questions of feeling, relationship, uncertainty, emotion, etc, are better suited to artistic rather than scientific exploration. This is because painting, drawing, sculpture, etc are “technologies” brilliantly suited to answering particular kinds of questions. No other technology is as suited to bringing both intellectual and emotional exploration together in the service of answering particular questions as painting, drawing or sculpture are. Art can go where science cannot.
The strategy for making a work is therefore informed by the question the work is seeking to answer. Different questions will, by their nature, inspire different making-strategies. If the question is purely about creating visual impact in the mind of the viewer, then my friend's simple strategy of “make it big or make it red” is not a bad place to start. But if the question is more nuanced and potentially lasting than mere visual impact, then the making-strategy needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Repetition is one such making-strategy. Perhaps it’s the ex-animator in me, or my degree in printmaking, but I gravitate to work that uses multiple images and repetition as an exploratory approach. Whether the goal is to create thousands of temporally linked animation drawings, a series of fifty nearly identical prints, a triptych of one-off pencil drawings, or a series of sketches all linked by colour or common form, I find the use of multiple images immediately captivating.
There are a number of questions for which repetition is a great strategic jumping-off point. Here are five and a few examples of how artists have used repetition as a making-strategy to try to address them.
1. A question of time. (What’s the difference?)
Noticing change is how we tell time. Recording the effects of change and evolution is a way to track a sense of progression. Growing and dying are transformative conditions that can be spotted and amplified through the use of repetition. The changes can be obvious and act as sort of stills from a time-lapse film. Sometimes the changes being explored through art are subtle and largely undetectable from our normal day-to-day experience because what is changing is not the physical exterior of something or someone, but an interior world. When confronted with a series of (nearly) identical images, a question gets posited in our mind about the difference that is being recorded. The images may look the same, but they aren’t really the same. Equipped with this experience, we can turn to our lives and look at things that look the same as before, but wonder what is different that our eyes can’t detect.
Dryden Goodwin
Sustained Endeavour
(25 drawings of the same photograph of Sir Steve Redgrave - pencil on paper on video) 2006
2. A question of story (What happens next?)
Beginnings, middles, and ends are all part of how we construct our understanding of what is happening in our lives. This is why novels and films are such great mediums for dealing with questions of story. I think we find them easy to relate to because this is fundamentally how we explain the story of our own experience to ourselves. Drawings and paintings struggle a bit with narrative depiction, but comic books and animation of course transcend this limitation by using film or the convention of panels on a printed page as the display mechanism for drawings that operate chronologically.
But repetition can be used as an approach in painting and drawing to depict a story through a series of sequentially associated images held together by temporal logic; this happened first, and then this happened next. This use of repetition can instil a sense of plot progression where things develop through a kind of narrative. But it also assists our reading of images by offering a way into the work that goes beyond the surface image and activates our natural desire to explain things through stories.
Joseph Beuys
Untitled
(Pencil on four sheets of paper on painted wood panel) 1947 and 1970s
3. A question of movement (What’s happening?)
Our concept of space is constructed based on our ability to physically engage with the three-dimensional world around us. Movement through space helps us translate the two dimensional world of colours and shapes into a three dimensional experience. More than early cinematographers, it was Eduard Muybridge who helped us understand how things move through space. His pioneering work in photographing people and animals in motion has been scrutinised by generations of animators and artists. By stopping motion in its tracks, people suddenly had access to a world of information that was taking place in front of them every day but never had access to. The evidence of his influence can be seen in a variety of places from Walt Disney to Francis Bacon.
But today, in a post-Futurist, post-Modern, post-Avatar world, movement is explored not as the serious subject that is was in the 20th century, but very often with humour and a kind of knowing irony. Repetition and sequence today are tools for transforming authentic movement into something magical.
Robin Rhode
He Got Game
(Six in a series of twelve photographs - C-prints) 2001
4. A question of focus (What’s important?)
Every parent (and every successful politician or business leader for that matter) eventually learns a very simple truth about effective communication: if you want to get your point across, you have to say it more than once. Very often, you need to say things again and again. And sometimes again. And if the idea you want to share is in any way subtle, you often need to say things lots of times in order to encourage your audience to come to the idea in a way that goes beyond mere communication and reaches a deeper and more personal level of engagement. Communication managers inside large corporations know this basic rule as well, yet ironically, a common refrain that can be heard in board rooms and management meetings around the world is, “But surely they must know what is going on, I sent them an email!”. And what parent hasn’t said (shouted?) the classic line, “How many times do I have to tell you to...”?
We all know from experience that getting even simple ideas across to other people isn’t so simple. A single image on its own (like the lone corporate email) needs to work very, very hard to bring our attention to a particular detail in the work or the message. Subtle differences or similarities between specific pictorial elements or between our conceptual expectations and what is depicted in the picture will not get into our mind or our heart without help.
But ideas can be amplified through repetition. Repetition is a way to share the curiosity of the artist and can turn a subtle background issue into the main focus of the work. Repetition can help to direct attention to the things that are most important about the work and can break down the natural information barriers that we have built around us. It is a way to turn a mere portrait or landscape into an exploration of preconceptions about notions of beauty, power, oppression, etc.
Marlene Dumas:
From Measuring Your Own Grave exhibition at MOCA
(Black ink on paper) 2009
5. A question of commitment (What’s going on inside?)
Imagine a simple drawing of a flower hanging on a white wall. Then imagine ten drawings of the same flower. Now imagine the wall covered in hundreds or even thousands of drawings of a flower. Our concept of the flower changes as more images are added to the mix. As more flowers are added, each individual flower becomes simultaneously less and more significant. Our sense of the importance of the individual image shifts and we look past the marks of the single image and instead are confronted by the impact created when images work in groups. Sometimes a group of images feels like a chorus singing together, and sometimes a group of images can feel like a gang looking to assault their next victim. But there is strength in numbers.
For some artists, drawing or painting is a kind of mantra or chant to oneself. The act of making is almost musical wherein the artist becomes a drummer repeating a rhythmic beat of meaningful gestures. The mantra can be a repetition of marks, colours, objects, and/or forms. Using repetition in this way means that the individual drawing/painting/sculpture is not significant on its own. Each individual execution is simply one small part of a larger and more significant process of obsessive repetition. Obsessive acts can be both mysterious and frightening, and standing in the presence of the products of a repetitive obsessive act can be powerful. It raises questions of intent as our mind flicks between looking at the work itself and imagining the repetitive process that the artist went through to create it. This kind of mantra, spoken over and over through something as simple as mark making, creates work that is often much greater than the sum of the individual parts.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
From the cycle Corps
(Charcoal on paper) 1996
Crowd
(Standing figures in 22 parts - Burlap and synthetic resin) 1986 - 1987
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