Sligo Drawings

That the camera can serve several different roles, positioned ambiguously between document and autonomous art-work, is well demonstrated by Bart Lodewijks’ book Sligo Drawings, recently published by Roma. Invited by the Model Arts centre, the artist created a series of temporary interventions by drawing in chalk on the walls, roads, doors, trees and other surfaces around several different neighbourhoods in Sligo. These are described by the artist as ‘working class’ in the extensive text that accompanies the pictures of these interventions, with not much regard given to what exactly ‘working class’ can or should mean in this context. There isn’t much either about why these neighbourhoods were chosen, except perhaps on the basis of an unspoken assumption that art, like cod-liver oil, is just good for you and no more need be said. Something of this confusion is also to be found in the accounts of Lodewijks’ interactions with the people living in the different neighbourhoods, which in effect function as extended captions for the pictures that document the drawings (if that is, in fact, what they do). It has to be said, however, that as Lodewijks tells it, may of the residents do gamely enter into the spirit of the thing and some of the best, most touching moments come as a result of these encounters.

In many ways, it does seem as if the drawings are a pretext for the opportunity to create such moments, a little poetic diversion in the everyday that realigns our sense of possibility, otherwise stunted by habit. The drawings themselves are complex patterns of lines that respond to the particular site that Lodewijks has chosen to work; they have a largely improvisatory character, with the sense that artist is, as it were, playing by ear – or rather, by eye, and in every way that the term ‘playing’ can be understood. What is perhaps most striking is the extent that the images of each drawing feature a vantage point showing it to distinct advantage. This is more that providing an accurate record of something that is, after all, ephemeral.  Instead, it’s as if the drawing coheres in space according to the perspective of the camera as much, or perhaps even more so, than it might to a person observing it in real time. The flattening effect of the lens pushes the drawing and surrounding space all onto one plane and Lodewijks seems adept at finding just the right spot from which this effect is most precise. It would be going too far, of course, to say that the drawings are ‘made’ for the camera, because plainly they are not.

Instead, the aim seems to be the activation of a sensitivity to the relations that surround us, with the drawings as a focal point; the doing is, if anything, more important than the result, which doesn’t last anyway, except in the form of pictures and Lodewijks’ memories of the encounters his interventions facilitate, some bemused or even hostile, but others that are welcoming of what his seemingly hermetic works appear to promise. By skirting the blurred line between the photograph as plain document, just showing this temporary work as it is, and a completion of that work by virtue of how it is seen photographically, he underscores the fact that the ‘work’ is, in this case, not located in any particular object or material result, but in the process itself. We can productively question where exactly the artwork is located and the kind of ambiguity fundamental to photography is a key element of that openness, precisely because it allows him not to have to answer that question. The work he makes is able to move between different states, which are not exactly equivalent (the pictures often being of more interest than the drawings themselves, for example) but that are all expressions of the same process

The way in which the book is put together, with Lodewijks’ anecdotes preceding images of the finished drawing, creates a difficulty, however, in that it leaves little space to contemplate any of the scenes he is describing. The reader’s attention bounces between these pairings with no space to rest. When two or more images of the same drawing happen to fall together it is a welcome respite – and, more than that, gives a fuller sense of the interventions than can be conveyed by the single images. Perhaps this structure is intended to evoke Lodewijks’ own experience in actually making the work and we’re following in his footsteps, as it were. But, while the book is otherwise cleanly designed and produced, the sheer density of this arrangement is counter-productive. Likewise, when his text touches on the wider issue of community, (beyond the artist’s own playfully disruptive presence, that is), and the social problems of contemporary Ireland, such as the sadly typical case of a motorway being built without consulting local residents, it does feel as if the work is reaching too far beyond its own particular constraints. Much as among the people of the various Sligo estates he visited, then, Lodewijks’ off-kilter poetics might invite some scepticism, but seen from the right point of view it can also be something special. 

Buy the book here