This Page 2 of the project concerns the development of a second main piece of drawing-based work, the first being Ne- an- der- thal- / Out- of- Af- ri- ca- as shown and discussed on Page 1 of the project.
The second drawing is comprised of single-line maps of geographical regions obtained from an ancestral DNA test, coffee-staining, index cards with quotes from the matrixial theory of Bracha Ettinger, six images from the fictional character M.'s adopted family, and the superposition of two matrices, one relating to Ettinger's quotes and the other to how the family members interrelate.
Ettinger, B. (2020) Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics Volume 1 1990-2000. (Ed. Griselda Pollock) SSBN 978-1-137-34516 (eBook) Palgrave Macmillan
Fig 27a/b: Five regional map sketches attached to corrugated cardboard + detail.Coffee stain, pencil on five sheets of paper, each sheet 29.5 x 20.5cm,
overall 71 x 57.5cm © Michael Croft
Why the configuration shown most clearly in the detail, Figure 27b, is relevant is that in relation to the mapping of the regions and countries – Scandinavia, Germany, the southern Caucasus, the ancient Near East and South Asia – it can suggest pockets of multitudinal migration, when what's needed is a visual semblance of the spread of mtDNA throughout those regions.
Beginnings of work, 'Expanded She/Her', showing maps of Scandinavian, Germany, Southern Caucasus, Ancient Near East, and South Asia, copied onto handmade paper with compressed charcoal and impregnated with liquid coffee, Figure 23
Fig 23: Line regional maps. Coffee stain, compressed charcoal, on five sheets of handmade paper, each sheet 77 x 55cm © Michael Croft
Fig 24: Line regional maps, further developed. Coffee stain, compressed charcoal, white gesso, index cards, on five sheets of handmade paper, each sheet 77 x 55cm
© Michael Croft
Fig 26: Detail of Line regional maps, to show index crads bearing hand-written notes, and acrylic-painted index cards, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 21: Sketch of Africa and migratory routes of Homo sapiens. Coffee stain, ink, biro, on paper, 29.5 x 20.5 © Michael Croft
Fig 25: Line regional maps, still further developed. Coffee stain, coffee stain tinged with black ink, black and white acrylic on index cards, compressed charcoal, white gesso, index cards, on five sheets of handmade paper, each sheet 77 x 55cm © Michael Croft
The sketch, Figure 27a, of the above work shown as Figure 26, by chance offered a relevant configuration of the molecular interaction of the coffee staining with the paper, assumed to be due to its interaction with the corrugated cardboard supporting ground, Figure 27b.
Precedent image of remains of posters torn from a window, seen against an offices backdrop and reflecting hands of photographer
Index cards bearing the title 'Region of Likelihood' strewn onto the first layout of the handmade paper sheets as shown in Figure 23
Index cards attached to the drawing wherever they fell at random on the contour drawings of maps
Handmade paper sheets rearranged in best combination to form a square
The new arrangement of the maps accepted, delineated in compressed charcoal and paint in with white acrylic primer where the oceons occur
Centres of likelihood of growth of mtDNA lineage, determined by chance
Index cards in state shown in Figure 24 smeared with glue and sprinkle grit onto them
Compressed charcoal rubbed over tracing paper to the size of the index cards to gain impression of grit, the tracing paper glued to the index cards, and impressions with white primer emphasised
Flooded with liquid coffee with black ink admixed
Floated index cards bearing references to Bracha Ettinger on being/becoming glued into their chance positions, and flooded again with liquid coffee (see detail below, Figure 26)
By chance, the detail, Figure 26, shows two Ettinger references and quotes, themselves having been placed by chance, interacting with three rubbed and emphasised grit surfaces and one index card that reads: Region of likelihood '1'.
The two Ettinger referenced cards read, top right then lower left partly covered:
While Lacan defined the process of movement from the pre-symbolic Imaginary to the Symbolic proper, as symbolic castration, Ettinger prefers to name this more neutrally as a 'passage': 'the passage of the Symbolic' (2020, p.113)
'Matrix made from the unkno... I(s) and non-I (s), neither re... nor assimilated' (2020, p. [119]). Useful quote in relation to the movement through ancestry of mt(DNA) (more-than-one but not everything and 'or less-than-one but not nothing') (2020, p.121)
The idea of ranging a Petri dish over what had been conceived as cell clusters in the project, (see Ancestry – before DNA test – considered through Drawing) has by now become a key motif. Under this cell cluster in particular is the name mother, the phrase looks like mitochondrion, and the word organism.
The emphasis on this page of the project, Ancestry – after DNA test – considered through Drawing, will be on the distribution of mtDNA relating to a DNA ancestry test result across Scandinavia, Germany, the southern Caucasus, the ancient Near East and South Asia.
Sketch diagram to show considered definite and alternative routes of Homo sapiens out of Africa around 70,000 years ago
M. still inhabits the research, albeit tenuously, where the dedicated font conveys reports on the progress of his activity. His presence, however, is awkward, a textual version of loose or thwarted directions of the visual-material experimentation. The present initiative to have led the reader/viewer away from the adjacent section's sketch experiment to this next new section, is not so much a case in point of how initiatives are thwarted as how they dynamically persuade a change of direction. The change in question are the pockets of molecular activity that have occurred in some regions of the coffee stain. This may be considered metonymic rather than metaphorical, in analogous visual-material terms, of how early humans might have clustered and multiplied in geographical terrain. What is really the question of this Page 2 visual-material work is how to make manifest in geographic visual-material terms the idea of proliferation and spread of mtDNA in the setting of many millennia in the past. This is a tall order, and in the meantime migration takes place through and because of the very attempt/s to answer the question. Answering the question is in the approach; in itself a kind of migration. The reader/viewer will have either manually migrated up in a movement that scrolls through the work-in-progress of the adjacent section, or will in a manner that subverts such a journey, clicked on the hyperlinks.
Apart from M., who might at some stage be again pertinent to the project, there are the mapping of regions and countries, the coffee staining, the Petri dish motif, the index cards and their potential for conveying information and knowledge, and now this visual-material molecular quality that is frustratingly near – because only in the sketch – to the presence of migrating groups, if not clusters of mt(DNA), by association within the overall context of the project.
Fig 28: Five regional map sketches attached to corrugated cardboard. Coffee stain, pencil, white gesso, on five sheets of paper, overall 71 x 57.5cm © Michael Croft
Fig 29: Six family characters on regional maps. Coffee stain, coffee stain, black ink, compressed charcoal, black and white acrylic, index cards, compressed charcoal, on five sheets of handmade paper, 133.5 x 139.5cm © Michael Croft
Fig 31a/b: Family members on regional maps. Ink, green biro, white acrylic on paper, 27 x 35.5cm © Michael Croft
1a: The womb as non-gendered
1b: While the pre-natal experience is the same for both genders, it relates to the experience of the female's body only, via the conduit of the mother
2a: AHIH ASHER AHIH in Hebrew means I will be or I will become – which suggests the potential to be, in the sense of formed, and the sense of to become formed, where the emphasis is on the process of becoming formed
3a: The indaequacy of obejct/s a, the Lacanian psychic surplus that one unconsciously finds invested in certain objects, that is nonetheless a 'blind spot' in the object/s and in that sense special, although it's never the source of the orginary desire, and is therefore inadequate
4a: Ettinger replaces Lacan's origin of the Symbolic, of the three psychic registers, Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, in the missing and ever-searched-for Phallus with the idea of the Symbolic as a 'passage', a movement towards..., which starts in the womb.
5a: The replacement of the Phallic perspective of the Symbolic to that of the latter as involving a movement towards... constitutes a slight shift, by Ettinger, in Lacan's theory.
6a: Such a transformation has a subjective focus; that this is all within the domain of the psychodynamic unconscious
7a: missing
8a: missing
8b: Three modes of migration: towards an unknown desired destination; return migration towards an already known destination; expulsion from where one desires to be
9a: missing
9b: missing
10a: AHIH, Hebrew for One, means being and becoming combined in one concept.
11a: AHIH ASHER AHIH as a movement of desire with no objective or destination, where each fantasy is expelled by the next new fantasy (i.e., object/s a, as surrogate objects of desire, emerge temporarily and replace themselves
11b: repetition as traces of future distances; getting rid of fantasy objects as one goes along
Two sketches to begin to work out how the six family images may integrate with the map shapes in the manner of the anthropomorphic imagery shown as Figure 30, above, Figure 31a/b
Fig 34: Matrix, second state. Coffee stains, blue Dermatograph pencil, index cards, compressed charcoal, handmade paper, on underside of clear plastic sheet, blue dermatograph- and black dermatograph pencil, oil paint on overside of clear plastic sheet 133.5 x 139.5cm © Michael Croft
The set of six references to what started as M.'s adopted family (see Page 1), and some eleven index cards bearing numbered references to Ettinger's theory of 'matrixiality' (see section 'Gender and Matrix', Page 1), each involve the idea of matrix. The ranging of each of the family members with either a country or a region suggests a compounding of the familial domestic/personal with global, for the matrix. The Ettinger references' random placement accumulating around the family members and what underlies them as an implied map infers that this subjective personal dimension, the psychic, can move across generations, time, and space. Equally, some of the Ettinger references have disappeared through the formal and conceptual process, such as index cards 7a, 8a, 9a, 9b. The paraphrasing of what remains readable of the content pulls the Ettinger references towards a more local and understandable domain concerned with making the drawing seem to work, Figure 32.
Fig 32: Family members on regional maps, further developed. Ink, green and red biro, handwritten notes in black biro, white acrylic on paper, 54 x 35.5cm © Michael Croft
Figure 32: Details of Fig 33, below. Coffee stains on underside of clear plastic sheet, blue Dermatograph- and black Dermatograph pencil on overside of clear plastic sheet, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 33: Matrix, first state. Coffee stains, blue Dermatograph pencil, index cards, compressed charcoal, handmade paper, on underside of clear plastic sheet, blue dermatograph- and black Dermatograph pencil, oil paint on overside of clear plastic sheet 133.5 x 139.5cm © Michael Croft
Distressed wall reference, Porto, Portugal, mainly due to the associative anthropomorphic imagery that emerges out of the extractions of the bitumen cladding
Sketches combined that show maps of Scandinavia, Southern Caucasus, Germany, ancient Near East, and South Asia, subjected to coffee staining and differentiation with surrounding white gesso
The placement of the maps is not geographical, but simply conforms to the idea of one map to each paper sheet
This arrangement forms the plan for the maps in the larger drawing, below
Characters from M.'s adopted family established on the ground of five regional maps
Maps drawn in line, one-each onto five sheets of handmade paper – see Figure 20, above
Stained with liquid coffee
Some indications of oceons approximately placed geographically in white gesso
Quotes from Bracha Ettinger on 'matrixiality' written onto index cards, strewn at random, attached to surface, and further stained with coffee
Six adopted family members drawn symmetrically onto combined sheets
Further staining with coffee tinted with black ink
Figure 33: Details of Fig 33, below. Coffee stains, blue Dermatograph pencil, on underside of clear plastic sheet, blue dermatograph- and black Dermatograph pencil, oil paint on overside of clear plastic sheet, variable dimensions
© Michael Croft
Digital photo-collage of clear plastic overlay to drawing shown as figure 29, above
White oil paint, directional axes in black Dermatograph pencil, on clear plastic
Handwritten oil-painted summaries of contents of index cards on reverse side of plastic, conforming to locations of original cards
Coffee stains on reverse side of plastic
Upper side of plastic variously affected by reflections
In a previous section to this Part 2 of the project, I state that 'migration takes place through and because of the very attempt to answer the question'. The attempt to answer is transmuted by the medium of its transportation. This is an important point, especially if one's medium is painting, or tends to oscillate between drawing and painting. Inasmuch as a visual-material medium is a language, then the latter has a degree of opacity: in terms more concomittent with language proper, it obfuscates. There is no way around this if one's interests and motifs orientate around the non-visible, or not ordinarily visible, where what appears to be abstraction, with the latter's attendant aesthetics, is more concerned with how something non-visual starts to be made visible.
The project has involved establishing and visualising a few family members suggested as fictional in a fictional context, working with assumptions before and after the results of a DNA ancestry test, the proximity to and leaverage away from the latter via a range of theoretical reading, and the movement from assumptions relatng to the before of the project to the limitations of knowledge available in the after of the project. At all times, however, the sustainer has been the opacity of the medium, due to which it imposes its own visual-material conditions on the inquiry within one's subjective relationship to it as the artist.
More specifically in terms of the inquiry, there has been the idea of geographical migration over millennia of time, the factor of biological mutation involved with migration, and the practice and phenomenon of archaeology, which in the genetic ancestral context often literally involves digging below the earth's surface. This is interesting; that in order to generate investigation at the micro-cellular level, there has at first to be this whole cumbersome level of corporeal manual skimming of the earth's surface for traces of evidence of bones, fossils and artefacts. In terms of artistic activity that may be construed as itself investigative, one has ideas and conceptualisation on the one hand, and the interaction of one's known and familiar working methods with a degree of autonomous behaviour of materials on the other, the latter of which give visual-material results.
Something had happened with the Matrix piece of work shown in Figure 34, above, that's now associated with only a second state. The handmade paper had buckled, causing too much space between it and the plastic overlay. This contingency, leading to a contingent solution, was to bring summary prompts to the underlying index cards, themselves handwritten on index cards, to the front, and in so doing literally screw them to small wooden blocks on the underside of the work's corrugated backing card. The screws pulled the plastic tighter to the handmade paper, reducing the gap, and caused the index cards to pucker.
The regional maps were re-drawn from their sketch versions, Figure 28, above, involving re-gridding the work, and their shapes further emphasised with areas of surrounding white oil paint.
Finally, the index cards were integrated with the colour and textures behind the overlay by being tracked with poured coffee. The excess non-absorbed coffee has dried in rivulets: details Figure 35a/b; completed work Figure 36.
Fig 35a/b: Details of Fig 36, below, to show how index cards are attached by screws to the clear plastic overlay, stained by coffee, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 36: Matrix, finished piece. Coffee stains, blue Dermatograph pencil, index cards, compressed charcoal, handmade paper, on underside of clear plastic sheet, blue Dermatograph- and black dermatograph pencil, oil paint, index cards, screws, on overside of clear plastic sheet 133.5 x 139.5cm © Michael Croft
Fig 37: Great-grandmother, father's side, Scandinavia, detail from Matrix, Fig 36, above, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 39: Baby with landlady (woman's lineage unknown), detail from Matrix, Fig 36, above, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 41: Great-aunt, father's side, Germany, detail from Matrix, Fig 36, above, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 40: Mother, ancient Near East, detail from Matrix, Fig 36, above, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 38: Father, southern Caucasus, detail from Matrix, Fig 36, above, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 42: Grandfather, mother's side, South Asia, detail from Matrix, Fig 36, above, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
Fig 45: I will be... Coffee stain, white gesso, screws, index cards, acrylic paint, ink, on corrugated cardboard, 71 x 58cm © Michael Croft
Video clip to show the reworking of the first state of a drawing to explain its rationale in the context of the project