Entries (RSS) Text on Deborah Bell’s collaborations, taken from: TAXI-010 Deborah Bell, pg48.
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31st July 2004 | Other items by Fiona Pender |
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A central aspect of Deborah Bell’s work has been her collaborations with artists Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge on different projects in a range of media and on specific themes. These include the etching series ‘Hogarth in Johannesburg’(19871l988), the ‘Little Morals’ etching series (1990), ‘Easing the Passing (of the Hours) (1992) a composition of computer animations, laser prints and drawings, ‘Memo’ a video with animation (1994), ‘Ubu 101′ a series of etchings, and the animated film, Hotel (1997).[Tristan and Isolde?] What has been the nature of these collaborations? And what has been Bell’s specific contribution to these collaborations? Each artist was invited to write a response to these questions …
Collaboration is a very dodgy word, and whether Deborah Bell and William Kentridge and I really collaborate is perhaps uncertain: the word implies too many kinds of intercourse. What happens, has three times happened now, is that we agree to do work with a common theme, each pursuing his own way into the theme. Of course when we work together, (not always possible), probably watching each other plants something very subterraneanly so deep that when it emerges it is not always recognisable. The same applies to when, usually over sybaritic lunches, we discuss points and projects. So what occurs is not like, say, the collaboration of a composer and a librettist: more a comradely friction that to our delight produces unexpected sparks. I must add that watching Deborah work is a huge delight. With me, if one tap doesn’t flow, tum on another. William seems to come pre-armed. But Deborah digs into the situation. Ink gradually submerges her till she looks like a refugee from a Venetian masque, it gets onto cups and saucers and her surroundings. She scrapes her way into her image -ferociously. Don’t stroke her, she might spit. And something of that ferocity seems to me always present in the finished images. This makes her a special element in our ‘collaborations’, some special radiation from her other work into our joint endeavours. [Bell, in Ballenden, p44, 1993] Hogarth in Johannesburg was the first collaboration between Hodgins, Kentridge and Bell. [STILL TO COMPLETE] THE LITTLE MORALS
Unlike Hodgins and Kentridge’s work on the Little Morals, my series cannot be seen to follow a specific narrative. Each image is its own ‘little moral’, which has to be understood poetically. The images are arrived at rather than designed. Their meaning lies in the layering of the imagery from various sources including Goya, Picasso, and Babylonian relief sculpture, as well as personal references. The titles, except for one, are based on the titles of etchings by Goya. These titles form the final layer. The choice of title was decided on for the poetic resonance between image and word.
Although each image is its own story, a general theme emerged in the process of making, the notion of ‘being witness to’. In ‘A Last Judgement ‘[the one title not derived from Goya] the shadow-play suggests a curate or lay -figure in debate or judgement of the scene behind them. However the shadows are cast by hands whose scale of positioning place them outside and beyond the central scene portrayed, suggesting that the spectators themselves are involved in the shadow play, and thus the judgement. The central scene is one of anxiety and despair as the troubled figures pivot around a man, who by his gesture, emphasized by the additional hand on the left, both arbitrates and separates - extending the notion of the Last Judgement, left and right, heaven and hell. The emotional disquiet of the figures is emphasized by the drypoint technique, whereby a needle is scratched directly onto the metal, forming a line that is uneven and hesitant. Also, the scraping and burnishing of the plate which occurs during the act of establishing and obliterating an image, creates shadows which shift across and behind the figures enhancing the mood.
In this account entitled ‘Watching Deborah Bell at Work’, William Kentridge describes the intaglio processes used in the Hogarth in Johannesburg, Little Morals and Ubu 101 series. Intaglio is a printmaking process in which lines and marks are cut into a metal plate either through acid for etching, or by using a sharp burin in engraving, or by gouging the plate with a variety of instruments in drypoint etching. Ink is forced into these indentations, but cleaned off the smooth surface of the plate. The plate and paper are together sent through a press; the pressure of the press transfers the ink from the plate to the paper. The print stands as a record of the deformations of the smooth surface of the plate.
We work at separate tables, Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins and I, each surrounded by our preliminary notes, images, sketches. But we gather at the press as the blankets are pulled back and the print is lifted from the plate; and then return to our separate workspaces, where the real sense of collaboration spreads through the sounds of needles scratching metal, through the half-felt presence of each other, and awareness of the similarities and differences in how we work. A collaborative process best described as looking over each others’ shoulders, twice.
A print is like a logical syllogism. Not without cause is the sheet of paper that comes of the press called a proof. The plate is a proposition, it undergoes the pressure of the press and a proof emerges. One hopes for a confirmation of the image from the print. If the print feels wrong, the proposition (the plate) is altered, and another proof attempted. There is a way in which the proof, though connected of course to the plate, has an objectivity to itself; and a sense in which the three of us, looking at the proofs, confirm this objectivity. On one side of the press was the individual different working process, on the other was the object which became part of the suite of prints.
Looking over each other’s shoulders happens at this objective proof stage, but also more obliquely, backwards - observing how the plates were made. One of the extraordinary elements of Deborah’s prints is the authority of the final image against the impossible provisionality of the making of the plate.
Engraving is without doubt the most precise and considered of intaglio processes. Pavel Florensky, in his classic work on iconology, describes engraving as being appropriate to northern European Lutheran asceticism and compares this to the sensual oil painting of Catholic Southern Europe. But within printmaking itself there is a range, from the austerity of engraving, to the practicality of etching (a pragmatism and efficiency in Goya’s hardground and aquatint work) to drypoint, the least precise and most sensual of etching techniques. Marks are made not so much by ink left in scraped lines as ink trapped in a burr thrown up at the edge of the line - a drypoint mark scratches the plate but leaves at the edge of the line its detritus as a rough burr (in etching this excess copper is turned into gas or sediment by the acid; in engraving it is a spiral of copper turned up by the burin leaving a completely clean groove).
If engraving demands a certainty of the marks that are to be made in advance, Deborah’s drypoints are about receptivity, an awareness of what the plate offers. Provisionality does not make sense in engraving. A line is cut or not. A line is low and hard to cut and even harder to erase. Each cut of a burin is a clear decision. With etching, lines can be drawn or redrawn through the acid-resistant ground, but before the plate is immersed in acid, unwanted lines must be painted over and others left - again a moment of clear decision. In drypoints, change and openness are structured into the work.
When we have worked on animations or films together, Deborah shares with William, it seems to me, much more ofa sense of pace and rhythm, oftempo and pause, than I have. Even in the early film collaboration, a contemporisation of Tristan and Isolde, while Deborah refused to appear before the camera (as again in Memo) her input was important. In the animation ofthe General in Easing the Passing (of the Hours), the element of somewhat Prussian eroticism is essentially Deborah’s insertion. But I think it is in Hotel that her dusty corridors opening into or flashing with enigmatic incident, often sinister, match William’s mood and drawings so exactly that it is difficult to disentangle each from the other.
Deborah surrounds herself at the work table with drypoint needles, scrapers (for removing lines and marks), burnishers (for polishing parts ofthe plate), roulettes of different marking(for mottling the surface ofthe plate), rags and ink. Her working process is largely under ink - a black mess on the table - through which she scrapes, gouges, scratches, then, every few minutes, wipes the surface clean to see a form as it emerges. Some burnishing, some scraping, new lines made, and a swamp of black ink reapplied. The plate is repeatedly bruised and tended. The process of making the plate seems analogous to the material Deborah is working with. There is a mixture of knowledges, a prior understanding of a body or a leg, something the mind projects before the needle touches the copper; then a knowledge held by the muscles - an unconscious or automatic driving of the needle by back, arm, shoulder and knuckles. Even when the image is obscured in ink, there is purpose to the marks being made. And third and most importantly for Deborah is the capacity for recognition, being alert to what emerges from the plate - which is both what has been anticipated and what has not been expected but which is grasped. As the ink is polished off the plate, the image rises to the surface, initially fragments, then a whole torso, the ghost of a horse. The image is resubmerged in the ink, reworked and pulled out again, each time finding a greater clarity. Traces and hints expand and are followed. The working process feels like an ongoing series of invocations to the plate, a sequence of call and response. Whether these calls are to the unconscious, to ancestral figures, does not seem vital to me. The heart of it is bringing out images which are both from and beyond the artist.
When we began working together in 1985[?], 1 already knew Robert well, he had been my teacher and mentor at Wits, and had become my friend. We had exhibited together and often visited each other’s studios. We both had a love for painting and the human figure. 1 knew William more at a distance. Years before [date], we had learnt etching together at an adult education class run by Guiseppe Cattaneo - we had been the only young students attending amongst a group of much older women. It was only after seeing his work on the Tributaries show [1985], that I became aware of him as a artist. We were both working in charcoal, exploring the themes of lovers and relationships, and I was amazed by the strong links between our work.
We call our working together ‘collaborations’ but most of the time, we worked alongside, rather than with each other. I came to the first project, the Hogarth series [1986], with excitement and nervousness, uncertain that I would be able to ‘perform’. I was not used to working with others, and had always needed a private space in which to work. I was glad that the small scale of the etching plate afforded me some privacy. My first etching was a disaster! It was stiff and uptight, very self-conscious. The decision to abandon it somehow afforded me a new freedom and I relaxed into working with Robert and William - I allowed myself to be absorbed and influenced, to ’steal’ imagery and have imagery ’stolen’ in return. We looked at each other’s plates, making suggestions, criticising, sparking each other off. It was never a competition, there were no jealousies or arguments. We played music, brought each other tea and whiskey, and gave each other the energy and enthusiasm to work long into the night.
Each collaboration has generated new directions in my work. It was wonderful to work in such close proximity to other artists, and to observe our differences in the creative process. This awareness of difference has brought me to a closer awareness of SELF, helping me to understand my own processes better, and how my way of doing things is inextricably linked to their meanings.
I think I brought a presence to these collaborations which enabled them to continue. Together, we formed a cohesive trio. I am not sure that if William and Robert had done the Hogarth series on their own, they would have continued working together. Whether this is because I am female, and mediated their maleness, I am not sure. My femaleness also brought a different kind of response to the subject. When we were working on the Hogarth series, I was very aware that William and Robert were playing with satire in a way that I could not. I did not know how to. My work was far more personal and emotional. However, the last image in that series, Marriage a fa Mode, does display a level of irony which I am sure was influenced by working with them.
Robert Hodgins on Easing the Passing (of the Hours)
Caption/accompanying image: I’ll never forget making Easing the Passing(of the Hours). Before going off on holiday, I sat down with William and Deborah and watched the material we had. I went off from the viewing saying, this is bullshit. It’s not even Shepherd’s Pie or Cottage Pie, it’s just … wet mince. And when I came back, William had made a movie. He’d edited it into a shape. A few interpolations, a few silent movie words, and it all worked. After that, I think Deborah and I felt that, well, you know, it doesn’t matter what happens … William will stitch it together!
(P.58Robert Hodgins, Tafelberg) HOGARTH IN JOHANNESBURG[Pippa Stein] |
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