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A journey in drawing, a journey in thought, a journey of a different kind: Maria Bussmann invites visitors to the exhibition Long Beach, NY in the Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett to take a walk along the beach. On 20 metres from a continuous roll of carbonless telex paper, she sends a graphic greeting from New York to Vienna and transports viewers into her personal cosmos of memory and imagination.
Maria Bussmann, Long Beach, NY, Secession 2010, Photo: Jorit Aust
Maria Bussmann’s drawings often grow out of her readings—she works with the philosophical writings e.g. of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or Ludwig Wittgenstein. The artist transfers the visual ideas that develop as she reads and processes what she reads into two-dimensional space. In her series, which are usually designed to encompass numerous drawings, she shows thought-images and chains of associations that must be understood not so much as illustrations of the source texts but rather as an open-ended commentary on and annotation to philosophical thinking. At the same time, her works represent the insistent attempt to fathom the epistemological quality of her medium, drawing. For Bussmann, drawing is the most direct form of artistic expression, possessing an unmediated connection to thought. “The process of drawing is a way of introducing aspects of thought into the picture,” says the artist: “Though people say we think in pictures, thought is also linked to language – so drawings are also language pictures.”
Maria Bussmann, Long Beach, NY, Secession 2010, Photo: Jorit Aust
For Long Beach, NY Maria Bussmann switches philosophy for drawing as the basis for her drawings, dealing with a stay of several weeks in Long Beach, New York, a city that has become her second home alongside Vienna. In accordance with the method of automatic writing, the artist generates a continuous stream of beach, sea and sky scenarios. “The formula is: water and sand, sand and water – in innumerable variations, theoretically infinite, just like the roll of paper and its impression,” the artist says of her drawing: “Although this time the work is not linked to a philosophical text, it is a work of ideas that transports concepts, wishes and thoughts – a private meditation, so to speak”.
In the work on show in the Grafisches Kabinett, the artist resembles someone lost in thought while running along the beach, trying to fix life as it occurs; but that life seems to continually recede, fading away further still in the paper copy. In her drawing, Maria Bussmann deploys various forms of coding: her technique involves the use of lines, hatching, dots and squiggles, as well as reflections on the two- and three-dimensionality of the scenes portrayed. The beginning of the 20-metre work extends beyond the edge of the table. The telex paper, a largely forgotten medium, whose use further underlines the communicative character of drawing, is presented on a high table: the waves made by the thin paper offer insights, the corners create interference and irritation. The drawing’s content is reduced to a deserted beach, to water and sand, punctuated only by a few common beach objects and elements of infrastructure that testify to the cultivation of the place.
At the same time, viewers walk along the beach and along the drawing – they can advance and retrace their steps, they can compare and contrast, they can perceive and differentiate until they come to the “end” that disappears into the remaining roll of paper, remaining both closed and open in equal measure.
Maria Bussmann, 2010
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
Maria Bussmann was born in 1966 in Würzburg (Germany). Having studied at the Academies of Fine Art in Nuremberg and Vienna, she graduated in philosophy and cultural studies from Vienna University. The artist lives and works in Vienna and New York.
CATALOGUE
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MARIA BUSSMANN, Long Beach, NY 156 pages, dimension: 16,5 x 22,2 cm, Japanese binding, Leporello fold Authors: Johanna Hofleitner, Peter Weiermair and an interview Maria Bussmann and Franz Thalmair, German/English Secession 2010, ISBN 978-3-902592-36-1 Distribution: Revolver Verlag ___________________ available in the shop |
Writing Drawing
(Long Long Beach)
The defining feature of Maria Bussmann’s artistic oeuvre (in which drawing is of central significance) is its semiotic nature. The works, usually organized in cycles, always refer to sources to which they are subordinate in the fashion of a commentary—be it philosophical readings, such as the writings of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Merleau-Ponty; literary models such as Apuleius’s “Golden Ass”; or a reflection on themes and questions the artist has set herself, such as the critical engagement with Japanese culture (with which the artist had previously lacked any familiarity based on personal experience) or with cities where she stayed, including Rome and New York.
To these various references, Maria Bussmann’s drawings relate in the manner of texts. In a transformational process that is typical of her work, the individual pictorial elements appear like encoded signs forming, when taken together, a textual fabric woven in a pictorial language. A method Bussmann has taken to its extreme in her Wittgenstein cycle (1996– 1999), where she tried to find her own tokens for individual terms and concepts that appear in the “Tractatus.” Beyond its poetic power, the drawing thus becomes a medium also of explication and communication, and the artist employs the support medium as a vessel of meaning not only because of its tactile qualities, but also because of its associative potential.
For instance, the black Japanese paper she used for the cycles “Donkey reads Japanese” (2007) and “Japanese exercises” (2008), drawings in white crayon, gestures toward blackboards of the sort used in schools: objects their function designates as sites of learning, practice, and intellectual training. For her “Praying Project 2” (2009), Bussmann went even further: the cycle is executed on rolls of cash register paper tape, three inches wide and up to sixty-five feet long, which serve here as the support medium for graphical meditations on two metropolises—Rome, where the artist had spent some time around a symposium she attended in 2009, and New York, a city Maria Bussmann knows very well, since it is one of her two homes (the other being Vienna). The almost endless-seeming format, suggestive of a filmstrip, lends itself naturally to the reflective and meditative character of such a “praying project”; an earlier stage of the work, the “Praying Project 1,” had been created a few years earlier during a performance in New York. At the same time, the fact that the drawing paper is identifiable as cash register tape conversely also effects an ironic refraction, introducing a mundane element. The drawing itself, in addition to its commentary-like character, consequently also becomes a scroll, and hence a revolving image.
These formats are taken up again in the large drawing “Long Beach, NY” (2010), presented in the Grafisches Kabinett at the Secession on a tall narrow U-shaped table. Almost sixty-five feet long, executed on a double layer of carbon-copy Telex paper, Bussmann’s work invites the visitor to the exhibition to go for a “walk along the beach” “at the Secession in November.” “[I am] sending a sort of vacation greeting to Vienna,” Bussmann describes the concept. The use of the special paper emphasizes the communicative character of the drawing, its being a “vacation greeting.” The letters “Telex,” printed in endless repetition in blue and red stripes running along the margins, on the one hand define the white zone between them as the text field; on the other hand, they frame it as a theoretically endless drawing sheet on which Maria Bussmann executes her seascape, inspired by a two-month stay on a lonely expanse of beach on the American Atlantic coast, in pencils of varying grades.
At first glance, the drawing, rigorously reduced to the beach, the sea, and the sky, arranged around a horizon running slightly above the center of the image on which the occasional ship appears, seems less semiotic than other works by the artist; it also appears to contain little action—not a single human figure is discernible in the entire expanse. Only a few objects one would typically find on beaches as well as elements of infrastructure such as garbage cans, a lamp, sunshades, the guardrail along the boardwalk, a beach volleyball field, benches, buoys, the lifeguards’ high chairs, breakwater rocks, and the like lend structure to the sixty-five feet of drawing, moreover attesting on the level of content as well to the cultivation of the beach as a fringe between the continent and the ocean.
And yet a form of encoding is taking place; Maria Bussmann applies it to the three main elements of the drawing, the sea, the sand, and the sky, gradually generating Morse-like tokens for their individual components (dunes, waves, spray, clouds), using stippling, hatching, dotting, curls, light areas, dark areas, flatness, depth. In analogy to the process of producing the drawing, working rightward from the left edge of the picture, the graphical description, extensible, on endless paper, ad infinitum, of this strip of landscape, as plain as it is imaginably without end, becomes a sort of notation. The presentation of the unrolled paper, encouraging the beholder to read the drawing in analogy to the process of its creation like a text—indeed, as a text—running from left to right, at once represents an invitation to get in on the game of encoding.
Johanna Hofleitner
The Secession is supported by:
Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Wien Kultur
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Friends of the Secession
Cooperation-, Mediapartners, Non-Cash Benefit:
Der Standard
Ö1 Club
Silver Server
Trumer Privatbrauerei
| MANFRED PERNICE TREVOR PAGLEN | EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2010 |
For further information and photographic material please contact:
Tamara Schwarzmayr
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at