"Dot, line, trace blossoming into drawing, map, art"
Rod’s drawn out some thoughts and questions about maps and traces and art from Matt Ward’s annoyance with GPS drawings.
“Which kind of GPS drawing is he thinking of? Does it matter what the GPS trace looks like? (or: does intentionality matter in this?)
Matt immediately turns (left at the sign, then past the lights etc) to Deleuze and Guattari to get directions … and asks ‘what “sameness” do GPS drawings return to?’. Those plateaux of context and meaning (of presence) are flattened into mere linework. Paul Klee’s line, taken for a walk. Doodles. Scribble…
But perhaps it’s no bad thing to decouple the representation from its performance, to lose the meaning. When they’re “no longer about the movement of the people they traced” [Anne Galloway, in the comments], they are freed to go in new directions. Loose meaning. Those randomesque marks seen in the manner of automatic writing, say. It’s what allows you to start again, building out with Alexander Cozens‘ blots. Traversed by swift GPS nudes at high speed. Tracings, outlines, figments, apparitions (ghostmarks slipping?). Botticelli’s sponge, thrown at a wall. Returning to the seim anew.
And if those traces of the process, that flat automobiline raw material, are grafted to one another, composited into drawings, do they start to become something else? A timid-powered blossoming into representations? Into maps? Back into landscape? Or art?
Why collage the traces? An attempt to cut the images free of the need to explain the supporting process. So that people can just look if they want without forcing the explanation - which itself tends to constrain the field of response. Though without completely relegating the method (oh, the logic of the supplement, having/eating the cake). Aesthetics as well as the familiar logico-conceptualism, strict process being somewhat uninteresting. (What do you think?) To write the authorial hand back into the scene - yes, even though it has always been there - in the decision, the hand masquerading as “neutral”-tool, and so on. Beginning to blossom.