Claude Heath

Perspicuous by their absence: the Wimbledon drawings of Claude Heath

First published in “What is Drawing?” by Black Dog Publishing (www.blackdogonline.com)

 My interest in Claude Heath’s work was originated, idiosyncratically enough, at a time when I was writing about the strange phenomenon of phantom limbs. I juxtaposed substantial elements of research into this medical enigma with discussion of a select group of contemporary artists, including Heath. Each of the artists demonstrated, to my mind at least, a concern with trauma, absence, touch, and distortion although the ways they manipulated these issues or expressed their ideas bore little correlation to each other. Heath was interesting (still is interesting!) firstly because his employed the tactile sense in draughtsmanship and painting, and secondly he used a blindfold whilst making drawings (a technique since superceded). Heath’s working method was to feel an object with one hand, exploring its surfaces carefully, whilst simultaneously drawing what he felt with the other hand. The process never at any time involved the artist looking at the objects until the work was complete. [1] Heath reflected thus: ‘There is often a disjunction between the images being shaped on the paper, the way I visualise them and the physical reality of the object itself. The disparity is healthy because it does not confine me to what I imagine, expect or desire to see. There is a need for me to keep my mind open and to frame questions in ways that do not close any doors.’ [2] Over the last few years, Heath has, as he anticipated himself in 1999, kept his mind open, framed new questions and gone through open doors. Indeed the drawing residency at Wimbledon School of Art is proof of new and distinct developments, which we will come to. What, however, has remained central is ‘disjunction’, as he called it, between images on paper, his visual perception and the physical appearance of the object drawn. Despite some carefully considered shifts in process, Heath remains an artist fascinated by a magical idea, which we might characterise as ‘the performance of disjuncture’. This idea, which will be developed here, is philosophically resonant but it is just as equally perspicuous, resulting in drawings threaded through with energy and delight which lay themselves open to enjoy by anyone with an inquiring eye and mind.

The Wimbledon residency reiterated Heath’s move from drawing static or solid objects such as sculptures and masks, to ones which, whilst hardly being moving, at least contained elements of organic growth and complexity. Collections of pot plants (money, succulent, orange-blossom, etc.) populated Heath’s studio and are the subject of all the drawings he made there. Instead of blindfolding himself, as before, and using touch as the means of gathering first-level information about these plants, the artist instead removed the drawing surface or surfaces from his direct sight, though not, of course, out of reach. One method was to put the sheet of paper beneath a table surface; another was to put the drawing surface to the right or left of the object being drawn, again with the paper out of sight. A third method was to set up two intersecting freestanding drawing surfaces (which he calls a two-fold drawing), in which the four resulting quadrants housed a plant each. Heath would then draw each object using right and left hands, sometimes simultaneously, but on the outermost (and therefore unseen) drawing surfaces. [3] The drawings were never looked at throughout their creation. By using pen, highly concentrated information could be put into the drawing without overloading. As he says ‘Before you’ve looked at the drawing it feels as if there might be everything in the world possible to say about this object in the drawing.’ [4]

It is hard not to think of these methods as highly specific strategies or tactics where the aim is less to express or embody an artist’s emotional response to a subject but rather as a poetic attempt to extract different kinds of information about a perceived form. We see automatist swirls and sweeps that intricately criss-cross and fold back on themselves, and disjunctured colour-coded layers of lines that echo scientific visualisation techniques such as PET (positron emission tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans. [5] Heath also references architectural tropes – the elevation, plan, and three-quarter view. Each strategy has produced drawings of immense delicacy and distinction, perhaps, one might even venture, not quite like any one has seen before. Heath has the ability (or has created a structure that delivers the ability) to collapse multiple visual impressions into a fibrous ball of intertwined energies. Yet they remain phantoms of the forms they ostensibly represent; firstly in the sense that they have a ghostly yet still recognisable relationship with the object they are based on, and secondly they are born from an absence (the artist’s gaze onto the page on which he is drawing). There is, as a result, a purposely unresolved and awkward fusion between that which is real and that which is phantasmagoric.

There is a famous passage in Descartes’ Optics where the sense of sight is described as analogous to the touch of a blind-man’s stick. The implication is that we use sight to steer our way in the world and that our optical range projects linearly from our bodies (with all the Enlightenment associations of corporeal constraints and the limits of empirical truths that the parallel implies). [6] It is powerful too, in presenting the senses of sight and touch in fluid neighbourliness – our eyes become tools for feeling the tactile textures of the world. Despite Heath’s move from blindfolding himself to removing the drawing paper from his sight, (a change which, as he says, means him ‘using the eyes instead of the fingers to trace the contours of this very complex shape.’  He is still concerned with substituting sight for touch and re-arranging the relationship between the two for himself in the process of working. There is an interesting distinction, however, between the kind of explanation of the world that Descartes was trying to make, and Heath’s method, around the location of sensory deprivation. It is as if the stick of Descartes’ blind man has been turned behind his back, where it blindly draws unseen representations of the seen world. More precisely, Heath puts blindness not in his eyes but in his hands.

In another part of the Optics, Descartes writes of the ‘two dimensions’ of vision, namely a first grouping of location, distance, size and shape, and a second of light and colour. [7] The first group can be confirmed or verified by supplementing sight with touch, but of course touch is useless for judging light or colour. On one level, this is familiar neural fact but it also highlights some of the mini-amputations Heath makes in his art, such as between the two dimensions of vision, or between the role of his eyes and his hands.

Heath is explicit here that, with some qualifications, there is an orthodox practice of experimentation going on - ‘It’s setting up a physical experiment about where to drop the paper in relation to these objects,’ and ‘it’s almost like a spatial problem that one sets.’ In order to demonstrate or express an idea one must neutralise, sever or isolate the object of experimentation. It is only through isolation can distinctions be made. [8] Perhaps one of the lasting contributions of Heath’s drawing method is to reference quite orthodox or established means of acquiring knowledge but perform them in a way that dissolves any certainty that real information or demonstrably utilitarian knowledge is being formed or imparted. Imparting information might be, and often is, a role for drawing, but not Heath’s drawing.

Heath has described the act of drawing, when he looks hard, moves his eyes around the object, in and out, or even feels detail in the plant surfaces and structures, as a ‘foreshortening of all these experiences into one flat image.’ It is Heath’s ‘performance of disjuncture’ with which I started, the very act of drawing in time and space, that allows experience to become foreshortened into images. Perspective, form, detail are each folded into a filmic moment embodied in the drawing. This is not something that can be done in painting, photography or sculpture, and certainly not in text. [9] Consequently, Heath’s drawings are surely better considered as performances and not merely as information gathering. For a start, the durational aspect is vital – the extended moment between starting those first strokes on the paper to deciding that the time is ready to look at the results. Henri Bergson realised, right from his early Time and Free Will (1889) that we order sensations in space through the fourth dimension of time. Experience is a fluid state of being where moments cannot be frozen; they melt instead into each other in a private reality of duration. ‘Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefinable, just because we are free. For we can analyse a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration.’ [10]

Heath, like Bergson, underlines the importance of ‘not knowing during’ – what the artist calls ‘an artificially constructed encounter with an object where I made myself forget as much as possible about it’. The amputations and procedural strategies help to forestall foresight and create the potential of a space of genuine discovery. It is no accident that Heath’s drawings do have a quality of automatism, like Andre Masson, but the rationale is different. Heath’s automatism is not a release of unconscious motives but a self-consciously unself-conscious fusion of perceptual sensations (a paradox, of course). Even an unobtrusive orange-blossom plant is made, at Heath’s invitation, to pass through a dynamic vortex of new possibilities. Contained in the drawing, therefore, is just one more way of performing the world.

Andrew Patrizio

 

Footnotes:
1 Two publications on this body of work are Drawing From Sculpture, Henry Moore Institute / Leeds City Art Gallery, 1999 and Atopia: Made Space, issue 0.99, 2000, eds. Gavin Morrison and Fraser Stables, which features an essay by Chris Noraika.

2 From Drawing From Sculpture, ibid., unpaginated

3 Such techniques of either removing objects from sight and attempting to draw them, or removing the drawing itself from sight as you work is actually quite an established educational technique often used on students to free up and challenge their early perceptual habits. Established artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Morris and Giuseppe Penone have also made drawings involving self-imposed blindness or a downcast gaze away from the subject. Without the space to elucidate here, it should be taken that Heath’s aims are somewhat different and specific to his own intentions.

4 Claude Heath, talk at Wimbledon School of Art, 2002. All subsequent quotes by the artist are taken from transcripts of this talk

5 For comparisons between fine art and contemporary medical visualisation see Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking. Essays on the  Virtue of Images, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996, esp. Chap.9, ‘Medical Ethics as Postmodern Aesthetics’, p130-145

6 Although Descartes is famed for the analogy, it originates in Simplicius Cilicius’ commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Venice, 1564. Cited in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993, p.74

7 Clearly modern neurology and perceptual psychology has advanced the detailed knowledge we now have about how different parts of the brain deal with incoming information, and more interestingly ways in which the translations between senses goes wrong. See V S Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain. Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind, London: Fourth Estate, 1998.

8 The problem of the intrusion of the observer in scientific experimentation, and its effect on any claim for objectivity is discussed in numerous revisionist versions of scientific method, most provocatively P K Feyerabend’s Problems of Empiricism, Cambridge University Press, 1981, esp. chap.5, ‘Philosophy of science versus scientific practice’, p80-88

9 We might compare this point with Henri Bergson’s: ‘The mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind,’ in Creative Evolution, 1907, cited in Martin Jay, op. cit., p.197

10 Ibid., p.197

 

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