The lecture explored very powerfully how, in an age when we are saturated with images and can never escape the Internet, drawing can still be a surprisingly compelling tool. Taking photography or the type of multiple images we view daily on our screens many contemporary artists are using drawing to challenge the way we digest or so lightly view and too often dismiss, images of profound tragedy as they flicker across our screens. 

 

Artists use many different ways   create this challenge for example scale, materiality or making us aware of the artist’s presence or the source image for their work. Looking at such a variety of very powerful work made clear the importance of every decision that the artist makes in terms of the ways in which the work is ultimately interpreted by the public. For instance the scale or Robert Longo’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère a drawing of  an x-ray of Manet’s original painting, means we not only are aware of Longo’s skill as a draughtsperson but also are invited to re-examine Manet’s original painting and think about the original changes he made to the figures and composition. The context for the work – when it was drawn is important too as it was made at the start of #MeToo and therefore also leads us to consider if anything has really changed for women since the nineteenth century to the twenty-first if, as we go about our work as barmaids or actors we are still seen as prey for men. 

 

In a similarly powerful way Catherine Anyango Grünewald’s hand drawn animations of ‘Slow Death of a Woman in Aleppo’ and ‘Live, Moments Ago (The Death of Michael Brown)’ lead us to reconsider the way such traumatic incidents are relayed on the Internet. Through Anyango Grünewald’s simply drawn work she forces us to take a more ethical stance on such incidents by slowing them down adding sound and using the materiality of her work to reinforce her position. For example in the Death of Michael Brown the surface of the paper breaks down and is scratched away as she continues to draw and draw over it and in Slow Death of a Woman in Aleppo the lost pieces of the eraser are left on the page as the woman gradually disappears though the actual rubbing out is not included in the film. 

 

This connected with the conversation we were having in the Sudden Recall and Terror reading group we had on 31stOctober and what Richter’s reinterpretation through paint does to the image of the twin towers on 9/11 or the suicides of the Baader-Meinhof. They cause us to slow down and look, re-examine the images in a way that we don’t when they hit the newspaper front pages or our screens. 

 

In terms of where I am with my work now it made me question again the necessity of figuration or not in relation to the expression of trauma and the importance of gesture and materiality of the work in terms or reinforcing the concept behind the work.