West, London
Group Exhibition
Situational Attempts
The Artist RoomOluwatobiloba Ajayi, Archie Fooks-Smith, Hugo Hagger, Richard Maguire, Arthur Poujois, Katie Shannon, Mia Vallance, Joel Wyllie The Artist Room presents Situational Attempts, a group exhibition that challenges the traditional role and methodologies of drawing. "These drawings, are not the representation or figuration of an object, of a state of mind or heart, of an element or an event of a psychological kind, they are purely and simply the reproduction on the paper of a magical action that I have performed in true space with the breath of my lungs." —Antonin Artaud, ‘50 Drawings to Murder Magic’, 1948. Antonin Artaud was a dramatist, poet, philosopher and artist who became a major influence within the French avant-garde. He spent the final years of his life in psychiatric hospitals where he produced a series of 12 exercise books containing writings and drawings. Two months before his death in 1948, art dealer Pierre Loeb initiated a project to collate select works from the exercise books. This became Artaud’s final work – 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. Throughout, scrawled writings and drawings have been intentionally punctured and stabbed through with nails. Drawings of disfigured bodies, dying flowers and machinery have nails and screws drawn through them. Artaud recognised the fleeting nature of an entity presenting itself on the page and the strength and power required to keep it there. It is already a brave act to draw; translating an image or a symbol to paper to reveal some inner workings of the mind and declare a personal perspective. It is even braver an act to forfeit a mimetic description of reality. Situational Attempts brings together a body of works that are not necessarily concerned with description or expression. They engage in the alchemical archeology of rendering something unknown, fossilising a conscious form as it attempts to stabilise itself on a surface. "You put some marks down on the paper, and at the moment that you're putting those marks down they're not just marks. I don't know what they are, but they're not just marks. Because when you put down a mark and you put down another mark, something is happening in the spaces between those several marks or movements. What are you asking me? Whether I put down the marks first and then see, or whether I see first and put down the marks? Is that what you mean? Huh? Both. Is that what you're asking?" —Philip Guston, ‘On Drawing’, 1974, transcription of a talk given at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art.