DRAW: We haven’t made anything yet, lets destroy it.
Performance and seminar
Join artist Zoë Mendelson and Tania Kovats (Course Leader, MA Drawing) for an afternoon discussion about exquisite acts of destruction, drawing and waste and the connections between drawing and reading.
Provocations:
Reading: Zoë Mendelson will read/perform a chapter from her novel-in-progress ‘The Detroit Project’. The novel deploys collagist techniques in its construction. It takes place across two real cities, London and Detroit. However each location is increasingly fictitious, dominated by the pursuits of two principal characters whose relationships to space, collections and memory influence the cities they seem to inhabit. This chapter focuses on the temporal as it relates to meticulous drawing – and how something invested in, meticulous and laboured can be got rid of or disappeared. These ideas are integral to relationships between site-specificity and drawing, and are, of course, also pertinent economic factors in thinking about storage, permanence, resilience, residency and commodity.
Text: ‘La Poubelle Agréee’ (1974-6) by Italo Calvino: an autobiographical and socio-political look at systems for and attitudes to taking out the rubbish. The text was included in Mendelson’s edited book, This Mess is a Place (2013) and became an animated waste product of the publishing process itself – as she will discuss. The text will be emailed to participants prior to the event