Drawing as a Veinous System
- Drawing as a Veinous System
Drawings are the physical embrace for images in space, the extension of my musculature onto the page. The drawings are the visual embodiment of gestures, momentum, the illusive motions that carry the parameters for shaping actions.
The initial version of Water Light/Water Needle was conceived for a gallery or store-front window; the scale of rigging ropes was easily accomplished on a little cardboard mockup; cut up cardboard figures were stained with color. I sewed little thread loops around their hands so that they could be moved manually up and down the string ropes. This very simple iteration was never formally presented.
All my performances and installation works begin with drawings. Water Light/Water Needle was conceived as an aerial network of 3/4" manila ropes to be layered over the canal at San Marco during a Venice Biennale. The drawings had to describe an open rigging of interdependent layers of ropes. The space between the ropes corresponded to the transparencies, the interpenetrations of sky and water bisected by the canals of Venice. The drawings inspired a physical paradox of “effortless” movement on ropes, which was actually exhausting and painful. Effortless as drawings, but demanding physical rehearsals to build muscle memory, calluses on our hands, as well as improvisatory coordinations between our actions. We rehearsed intensive stretching, reaching, climbing, dropping between ropes, hanging suspended. The drawings anticipated physical interactions between performers as they reached to each other on the ropes, collided, swung, overlapped, embraced. As they shifted levels from lower ropes to higher ropes; dropping from higher ropes to lower lines.
The drawings also had to envision steel supports anchored to a supporting pillar or bridge; steel pulleys and fittings that would stabilize the 3/4" manila ropes. The drawings had to design the hardware of rigging translated from my dreams into an actual physical function.
To sustain the delicacy and rigor of these movements I painted with watercolor brushes in diluted inks and with pen and ink. I often drew with my eyes closed to [End Page 30] concentrate on the sensations of anti-gravitational motion. It’s impossible to state whether the idea of the movement became the drawings, or if it was the drawings that initiated the movements. Among the drawings there are some that consist only of dense splotches, and these represent some enigmatic energy cluster.
It’s so much about a weight: how you support your weight, the indescribable drift as you shift your position on the ropes . . . there is a certain invisible, watery, gravitational vacancy as you pull yourself up or lower yourself. There is a moment of muscular consolidation and abandon. The shift. The grasp. Gripping. Between your hands and your feet—step out into space, locate the rope, hanging between ropes. Teaching the potential movement on the ropes becomes another modality so that once the structures are built I have to translate the envisioned physical experience from the drawings, from my own musculature, to the participants.
Another environment for Water Light/Water Needle was proposed to L’Opera de Lyon. The son of the director of the theatre was enthusiastic about this potential presentation. Of course, the rigging was daunting where another set of drawings visualized the network of extended ropes with performers moving hand-over-hand on them from the stage to the balconies of the opera house. These drawing lines had to conceptually bisect a large open space with uncertain structural supports.
The work was realized at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in March 1966. The performers were Mark Gabor, Tony Holder, Meredith Month, Yvette Nachmias, Phoebe Neville, Tom O’Donnell, Dorothea Rockburne, Joe Schlichter, Larry Siegel, and myself. The rigging was accomplished by William Meyer and Bernard Kirschenbaum. There was no requirement for insurance, even though the audience was seated precariously beneath and around the rope actions.
The references to Venice continued with an organist at St. Mark’s performing Bach and Vivaldi, which echoed into the performance space. The name of the church, St. Mark’s, had an extended connection to the central plaza in Venice. I was desperate to move the entire rigging and performance to...
