Intentionality and the Internet

I’m sure a fair few of my Canadian readers are familiar with Akimbo - and quite possibly, like myself, enjoy their daily deluge of email notices clogging up their inboxes with show invites and calls for submission in far too great a number to be truly useful. I think it’s a true show of my patience that I do actually open each one for a quick skim before the inevitable delete, but it’s an action that does pay out once in a while.

In the midst of my recent three-day epic transfer of data from my old G4 Powerbook to a shiny new MacBook Pro, I received one of those typical show announcements, this one for Kristen Peterson’s new drawing installation at the Stantec Window Gallery in Toronto. That’s all delightful, of course, but what really drew my eye was a URL in the exhibition blurb, www.drawingresearch.com, which promised to tickle all sorts of lovely things close to my own heart and mind yet proved to be something a bit less broad but equally intriguing.

What the website offers, in a somewhat blog-like fashion yet strangely not, is a record of the artist’s thought processes and practical decision-making over the course of two drawing installations - the present work at the Stantec Window Gallery as well as an earlier work at the Convenience Gallery. Peterson’s accounts of her working life are highly readable, merely hinting at the conceptual concerns of her minimalist-inflected practice while devoting a great deal of attention to the grit that often goes undiscussed in contemporary art discourses - up to and including her frustration with Akimbo for distributing the wrong draft of her invite. The reader can easily follow the particular path that led to a choice of yellow or green vinyl and the motivation, conscious or otherwise, behind her various spatial interactions. And this fragment of thought in particular is both confounding and reassuringly familiar to any working artist:

OK. So, what do I do here? I’m feeling the pressure of time, of knowing that I have to produce something in a week, and I really don’t like deadlines of any sort. I should probably go outside soon, and once again look at the window from the street. This will be the vantage point for the work, and here I am inside (where it’s warm) wondering about the work. Really, if I were a committed artist, I would be out there, across the street, being with the building and the site from where the work will be viewed. Like Farley Mowat. Or Tom Thompson. That’s commitment. I’m a weenie. So then, now I will make my way outside (brr). OK. Just came back inside after having spent about two minutes out there. Took three pictures from across the street. And it occurred to me: how am I going to cause people to pause and reflect when all they’re probably thinking about it getting home. Or, getting to their destination wherever it may be. Out of the cold. Out of the chill. Ooh, my laptop is nice and warm on my legs, like a little campfire. I did take some nice photos inside this space of the checkerboard floor. I could create a checkerboard pattern in the window, an homage to Piero della Francesca. There would be precedence. Or, making a deep painting that extends perspectivally outwards from eye level on the street. That means it would angle upwards and into the space. I could create the idea of warmth. A roaring fire. It’s so unpleasantly cold out there. A warm Piero della Francesca. It’s too bad that I need architectural forms, linearity to show perspective. Oh, but wait! Palm trees grown in a row would be just fine. They would recede. Still, a lone palm is more romantic. This is insane.

As a demonstration of the practical panic and strange internal logic that dictates so much artistic practice, it’s utterly fabulous. Especially when there’s still so much bullshit out there about ‘inspiration’ and other grand narratives of just where art comes from - no one really knows for sure, but it definitely wasn’t the stork winging it in - it’s good to see artists writing about process in a way that demystifies the experience for the viewer and places an emphasis on the legitimate work involved.

What Peterson and others like her are also doing here is opening the door on one of those outdated modes of criticism that James Elkins mentioned in his January lecture at Western. Intentionality, as it worked in the past, was a silly and vain effort to discuss a work of art by somehow reading the artist’s intent via that physical object - in practical terms, this really means that the art historian’s ego would interpret according to whatever minute details of biography and method happened to float his or her particular boat. While interesting from a narrative point of view, it was hardly an accurate projection of the artist’s true intentions, which typically remain unrecorded and invisible.

On the other hand, a modern-day or future art historian, with access to these instantaneous online records of an artist’s working life, could suddenly make something of intentionality as an optic for criticism. The idea certainly appeals to a postmodern taste for all things retro, and would also transform the method from one of stuffy musings into a legitimate investigation. Provided that more artists adopt this type of recording as a part of their practice, of course.

During the Christmas/New Year’s season, when I was up to my eyeballs in studio work, I had threatened as much as promised to turn this blog’s purpose to one of studio recording on account of my lack of attention span at that time for anything that wasn’t drawing. A brief hiatus proved an easier solution, but thinking on it now, the occasional break to record that half of my visual practice seems suddenly worthwhile.

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