Lutz Becker, the curator of ‘Modern Times’ talks about drawing in terms of time and motion and this of course is the link with film. I am thinking of drawing as a meeting place of intuition and thought. Thinking is intuitive. Intuition involves feeling. Thinking and intuition both involve language, some of which is verbal.
Choose a picture and spend some time with it. Let it speak to you. What does it say? Would you be able to tell in words what it is saying to you? Would you be able to communicate that to others? Or would it be best to make another drawing in order to let it speak through you?
A vital link between the two exhibitions, ‘Modern Times’ and Tony Bevan is F. X. Messerchmidt, the early 19th century German sculptor whose busts of people with extreme facial expressions look so contemporary and fresh to us still. German Romanticism re-asserted the importance of feeling after the Enlightenment’s mistrust of it.
When I spent an hour or so in ‘Modern Times’ on Saturday looking at the drawings with a group of people we noticed details, gestures, simple devices that created the illusion of depth, marks that looked like writing and words that looked like shapes, movement and vitality . . . barely scratching the surface of all those surface scratchings.
Susan Diab
