'The Peripatetic School' exhibition view
Mateo Lopez, Nowhere Man, drawings installation, 2011
Brigida Baltar, Forest Flora, earth drawings on paper, 2008
Ishmael Randall Weeks, Fragments, installation, 2011
Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Carbon Copy Drawings from the Amazonian Library in Iquitos, 2011
Jorge Macchi, Missing Points, 2007, cut out map of the world
Andre Komatsu, Constructing Worlds, entropic drawings, 2010
Nicolas Paris, Hurry Slowly, 2007-ongoing, found objects which detonate ideas for drawings
Tony Cruz, Building, digital animations, 2007
Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Abstract, 2011, slideshow made of drawings found at the Amazonic Library in Iquitos
Brigida Baltar, drawing
Brigida Baltar, Untitled, brick dust drawing, 2008
Tony Cruz, Distance Drawing San Juan/London, an attempt to draw the distance from San Juan to London, 2011
Brigida Baltar, Tony Cruz
The Drawing Room's new space in Bermondsey
Christian Rattemeyer giving a talk at the Drawing Room
The Peripatetic School [Gr. peripatein – to walk about]
Itinerant drawing practices from Latin America
Curated by Tanya Barson
with Brigida Baltar, Jose Tony Cruz, Andre Komatsu, Mateo Lopez, Jorge Macchi, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Nicolas Paris, Ishmael Randall Weeks
22 September - 12 November 2011
The relationship between exploration and inquiry, or more
simply between walking and reflection, is one we can all appreciate (a common
claim being that our best thinking is done on the move). It has a long pedigree,
going back to the school of philosophy founded by Aristotle in ancient Greece,
which was rooted in the practice of empirical observation and knowledge drawn
from experience. The term ‘Peripatetic’ is derived from the ancient Greek term for
‘of walking’ or ‘given to walking about’, it is used to mean itinerant, wandering, meandering, or walking.
While the school is said to have been named after the peripatoi (colonnades) of
the Lyceum (chosen as a meeting place since – as a non-citizen of Athens –
Aristotle could not own property), it is also claimed that it was because of
Aristotle’s habit of walking while lecturing. Thus, peripatetic is also used to
describe itinerant teachers.
In pre-Columbian South America, the Inca road system, or
Qhapaq Ñan, was the most extensive and highly advanced for its time; 10,000
miles of exceptional, all-weather construction that acted as a system of
communication, a source of stability, a sign of Imperial authority and a method
of delineating internal boundaries. “The roads were not only used to separate
people but ‘for thinking, by helping to conceive of the relationship of one to
another’.” However, as the Incas did
not use the wheel for transportation, and did not have horses, the trails were
used almost exclusively by people walking.
Of course, the history of Latin
America is littered with exemplars of the epic voyages of conquest, exploration
and rites of passage. From the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro who
defeated the Incan empire and began the brutal suppression of indigenous culture,
to the German explorer and scientist Friedrich von Humboldt who travelled in
Central and South America between 1799 and 1804 and who wrote extensively on
its natural history and geography. Similarly, the motorcycle journey taken by
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in the early 1950s, that began as a coming of age, but
became the road to revolutionary politics. In literature and art, there are
equally important examples; the writing of Jorge Luis Borges whose partly
surreal, partly existential literature takes as its central inspiration and
subject the city of Buenos Aires, or the work of pioneering video artist Juan
Downey, whose Video Trans-America project set out to document the continent –
both North and South - during the early 1970s.
This group of artists from across
Latin America share an engagement with the landscape, whether urban or rural. More
specifically, they are concerned with travelling or moving through the
landscape, and frequently with walking, which is combined in their work with
diverse approaches to drawing. Images that are the result of itinerancy or
nomadism, places, scenes and things observed along the way, abound. They journey
out of the studio, into the neighbourhood, the city, the territory or entire
continent beyond, in a manner that evokes by turns Surrealist, Borgesian or
Situationist metropolitan perambulation, or exploration in wilderness spaces
(whether jungle, mountain, desert or pampas). The artist is often seen as a
solitary figure, a strolling flaneur or otherwise a lone traveller who ventures
further afield (predecessors from Casper David Friedrich and Frederick Church
to Richard Long and Francis Alys come to mind). Thus, while these artists share
a sense of the subjective experience of landscape, it results in a diverse range
of concerns and responses. Through their work they raise questions about
ownership and access to territory and its resources, about borders and systems
of control, and the political and economic struggles that stem from these. The poverty
and contingencies of life within some Latin American communities are also
expressed (behind the work are the facts of a continent impacted on by
polarised politics, instability and corruption, the failure of utopian Modernist
developmentalism, a lack of amenities or access to utilities that are elsewhere
taken for granted and where natural disasters such as earthquakes can also
cause chaos and devastation). Some express a fascination with the flora, fauna,
topography and natural riches, while also testifying to the tensions between
nature and culture. Several seem to manifest a sense of ‘topophilia’ and an
obsession with maps and cartographies – but often seeking to undermine their
rationalist purpose. Others look for the bizarre in the everyday, while also
cataloguing aspects of the lived culture of the continent – aspects of life
that are overlooked by guidebooks and don’t conform to the picturesque or
stereotypical. Their work utilizes models and conventions from geographical,
botanical, topographical, political and philosophical or surrealist
investigation. The individual bodies of work destabilise assumptions about the
continent. They present instead individual testaments to the extraordinary
heterogeneity of its people, culture, languages, cities and landscape.
These artists address the actions taken by man in the world,
his passage through the landscape and impact upon it. Often, they themselves
conduct journeys or undertake residencies as a form of aesthetic nomadism. [As
Nicholas Bourriard has argued, nomadism is one of the defining characteristics
of a post-post-modernist era or ‘alter-modernity’.] Symptomatic of this itinerant
tendency is their frequent recourse to drawing. Drawing has always been the
most portable medium, the fundamental exploratory tool to which the artist
returns time and again. However, for these artists, drawing has become a focus
of expanded practices that engage with the landscape and culture as a subject
and source for exploration, as well as philosophical speculation. Not only do
they explore the world at large, but simultaneously the parameters of drawing
itself, often using unconventional materials or strategies. These artists seek
to blur the traditional boundaries between media categorisations; work on paper
becomes sculptural object and simple line drawing becomes video animation.
Drawing travels off the page and into the environment itself.
Tanya Barson, 2011
-----
Co-publication with Ridinghouse. Edited by Tanya Barson and Kate
Macfarlane, it will include essays by Moacir dos Anjos, Tanya Barson,
Pablo Léon de la Barra & Isobel Whitelegg and colour plates of
works in the exhibition.
www.drawingroom.org.uk
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