BEHIND THE SCENES:
MANIFEST OF THE TRUE

A studio visit, filmmaker and poet Ishmael Annobil and artist Linda Karshan, August 2020.

In late December 2019, I visited Linda Karshan in New York for a long exploration of her work, and what we might do together. I could see her practice clearly as performative, though her reputation in most circles has been as an artist who works with drawing. What over the years has slipped through the cracks is the very unique and body generated way that she produces works that come from physical movements of her body at the drawing table, and also from performances that she does in any number of architectural places, indoors or out.

This discussion together gave us a moment to look at the future, where she could take her work, into what arena, exhibitions, publications and more art making in general. I planned to go back and see her again in early March, but this was like all travel plans for the spring, cancelled.

We started talking as the pandemic worsened. I said that she should imagine making a specific body of new work during this period considering these weeks in March as the beginning, and whenever it was possible to travel again, would be the end. She worked at first in New York City and then went up to her studio in Connecticut, and you have seen this studio here.

I had an instinct her body would take in the emotional subterfuge of these dire weeks in March and April, going on into May like a dousing fork and find the core of this period, which could then be processed onto paper. She sent photographs. Then returning to London in early June, brought the works.

These weeks of Covid-19 produced a rare and engaged body of prints and drawings; in this new film project Karshan talks with her collaborator Ishmael Annobil about how the works emerged. You can have a sneak preview of their shooting last week in London. I will share some of the jottings that came during this time as background.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

20 March 2020

In silverpoint—a new technique for me. I was just getting the hang of it, by virtue of the squeaky sound produced by silver on clay, and by it’s similarity to etching.

It took several trials to create the good-enough matrix; I also needed to find a way to re-use that grid-like form.

Pouncing, a la Renaissance, served me pretty well. It was ‘inelegant, assuredly. But sound; sound, like Malloy’s method with his sucking stones, turn and turn about.

I now had my ‘way’; I had my grid. Then Eva Hesse’s small drawings of disc-like circles came to mind, held in perfect balance within her grid:

‘Hesse used the grid as both a prison and a safeguard against letting an obsessive process or excessive sensitivity run away with her… The first of my ‘Hessian’ silverpoints looked too much like hers. It was stunning; it was not mine: I had simply, and reductively, circled round.’

Then I found my ‘way’, turn and turn about. With a faint, silver grid as my ‘safeguard’, I carved half, or three-quarter circles with speed: up and down the grid, across and back, always with rhythm and speed. THIS way, the circles added up/knit together.

Time went on; the drawings developed. SOME of the time—often—the curved, triangular intersections between the circles asked to be ‘hit’: they called for an intense, quick ‘two-step’ to better define and hold the form.

As intense as I my lines could be, the drawings are delicate. They are in silver, after all.

On cue, or so it appears, the Greek Cross, or the ‘simple’ grid asserted/inserted itself into the process.

Then, to my surprise—this IS new—that ‘circling’ made its way within the diamond forms of the extended grids.

A ‘cover up’; I was NOT ‘filling in’! The cover-up lines were drawn with speed; they NATURALLY CURVED as I turned the sheet to fill in the triangular forms. And what a loud, squeaky sound they made! Astonishing; it held me in pace, and in place. One sees speed; sound; and shimmering lines.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

1 April 2020

Human conduct matters

With social distancing the name of the game; with all non-essential businesses closed; where do we stand with art?

How must conduct our lives?

‘Upright and alert’; human conduct matters.

Now more than ever, art seems essential… as does love, walking in the park, and domestic jokes. But this period is not a laughing matter; family dynamics have never been more strained.

What solace, then, to step inside the studio, where my body finds its natural reach. I mark my measure, as I enact time, itself. Poise and grace are all.

And breath. What an irony, then, that my art is made of the very breath at risk to millions of lives, worldwide.

This is familiar, familial territory. In 1951, my young father, Roger Joseph, was stricken with polio during the deadly epidemic that year. Confined to an iron lung, he returned home after two years in hospital. Breathing for him was not involuntary: during sleep, he was aided by a rocking bed. He conducted his law practice from a wheelchair, upright and alert in mind, reminding himself to breathe.

I have often thought that the sound of my graphite pencil moving through paper, marking my breath, was very like a ‘breathing machine’. This I noted in my jotting dated 27/08/04.

That thought haunts me now. I breath easily, because I can; I remain upright and alert because I am able.

I am ‘two feet walking’ because I must.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

2 April 2020

Day one in the new studio: one drawing. clean and clear. I have written a brief jotting addressing art in the time of Covid 19, from my point of view, taking into account my personal experience of the polio epidemic of 1951.

It is unsentimental, but to the point: the sound of my graphite on paper, on a new drawing table—a wooden door—sounded to me like a ‘breathing machine.’ This I noted in an August, 2004 jotting.

I had in mind an iron lung; I did not say so then. But as breathing, or its loss, is at the heart of the current pandemic, the point can be made now.

I send you the new jotted thoughts. Dated yesterday, it is a spare picture of where I find myself now, and how I intend to move forward, upright and alert.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

16 May 2020

I am struck by how often I make mention of cuneiform, and the clay-ness of the tablets, themselves.

They are ‘fragments’, we learn, again and again. Holding them—the small ones that fit into the palm—a most powerful compression of time.

The fragments of an ancient poem, originally in several languages from around the ancient world, have given rise to many modern versions. The fragments we study, in ‘a confusion of languages’, were copied more than 1000 years after the times of their origins. King Ashurbanipal, in the seventh century BC, aspiring to complete knowledge, and wishing to collect this knowledge within his Library, commissioned copies of the ancients. Most of the later fragments were discovered in the mid-19th century, within the remains of his great Library.

In the BM, I spotted in the early Babylonian galleries a striking pair of clay tablets, picturing ideal, geometric forms. These forms unfolded in a logical order, just as do my series of drawings. And they could be read horizontally OR vertically—turn and turn about—anticipating the moving figure assigned to me.

These tablets, too, were used for measuring, as their cuneiform inscriptions note. They prove that within the Fertile Crescent, where trade was highly developed by 2000-1800 BC, the theories of Pythagorus were known, and used, for commercial purposes, a century before the master. Like cuneiform, they mark a logical frame of mind.

If ‘the Euclidean constructions were an attempt to prove, in motion, the logical power of mind’, these early Mesopotamian tablets are proof positive. That they so closely resemble my drawings is less astonishing than inevitable, I suggest: to count thus; to mark one-self vertically and turn the sheet/tablet; to think and move rhythmically in concert with the universe; all this is an example of ‘THE TRUE’. ‘The true:’ this is a term used by a scientist-friend, describing my work. She spoke it so unequivocally I have never forgotten it.

7 August 2020

Manifest the True

Part II

Karshan:

To manifest ‘the TRUE’; I shall continue to ‘go on and get on’, for as long as, and with as much energy as, I can muster.

To be sure, I have the ‘true figure’ in my being. To picture it does take time, effort, concentration and daily practice.

Linda Karshan

JSVCprojects:

The conclusion is not in any way surprising, it is why we recognise this already present aspect in your practice; as if you are a channel for bringing this lost information back into our world.

The oddity is to learn that The True is not personal it is a state of being, awareness, balance, in relationship to other forces; how culture or man/woman kind have found it and tried to notate it, or form it into pictograms, writings, images, later photographs, paintings, etc, poems, books, spiritual tracts varies from place to place and culture to culture but the wisdom is there for the tapping if we are able to get centered and let it in somehow. We are each one a vessel for something that we can bring into the world in a way that no one else can. Your practice is as i said earlier like a tuning fork and you have located this perfect pitch and called it the TRUE. Identifying its aspects is one thing to be sure, but manifesting is the hard part. This is what you work is talking to us about. To make manifest is the alchemical transformation of one substance into another or one kind of knowledge into another form. This is why your work holds the eye and is so compelling to our spirits.

JSVCprojects

Cinematographer: Max Mallen

All photographs by Ishmael Annobil