Fieldwork
by Mercedes
Vicente
Curator of Contemporary Art at the
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand
Luminosity and an almost metaphysical purity strike the viewer when
first encountering the white–on-white, pristine minimal drawings
of Marietta Hoferer. Weightless and evanescent, the faint pencil lines
and clear tape that she uses to create her works on paper are imperceptible
at first glance and require the observer to quietly adjust his or
her perception to their subtlety. One must closely examine them, walk
up to them and around the room to experience how they respond to the
light. It is then that one marvels at the vast variety of systems
and patterns and the "voluptuous" qualities of her nominal
materials.
Lucidity, analysis and logic are attributes that characterize this
German-born, New York-based artist. Her systematic approach to drawing,
employing a concise structural framework, determines how the work
is formatted prior to its execution. Yet in Hoferer's devotion to
precision and exactitude, an impulse for the vague and the wandering
emerges. Her predilection for the grid, symmetry and seriality dealing
with concepts of limit and measurement inevitably finds its dichotomy,
revealing infinitude and entropy. Behind the severity imposed by the
rigorous definition of the drawings' structure and deliberate execution,
lies a hedonism that relaxes these restrictions and allows for the
occurrence of chance, movement and mutability, uncertainty and the
undefined in the process.
Unlike the orthodoxy of the minimalist fathers such as Sol LeWitt,
Hoferer imparts a relaxed eclecticism in her drawing that allows for
detours and departures from the severe approach of the earlier generation.
Beneath the apparent crispness and stark order, there is an entropic
sensibility. Hoferer welcomes contingencies and internalizes chance
in the making of the work. Playfulness and sensuality soften the severity
of the cooler, rational sensibility with ingenious games and unexpected
disruptions to the operational logic of the work and the formal qualities
of her materials. The industrial tape and the hand-drawn graphite
lines are foils for one another, which creates cunning paradoxes.
The hard line of the tape may be undermined by its stretchiness and
only approximate applied rows; while pencil lines, though imprinted
with the natural variations produced by the hand (pressure, speed,
stops and starts, tiredness), may achieve exactitude when drawn with
a ruler. Hoferer enjoys exploring and contesting these dichotomies.
Challenging the very systems that she imposes on her drawings as if
"the one that creates the rule creates the tramp," she deliberately
introduces disruptions that have less to do with her lack of endurance
to carry out the self-imposed tasks than with the intellectual quest
of solving how to break out of them. This liberating effect catches
the viewer off guard, inciting a closer look to discover the drawing's
internal logic.
Whereas LeWitt's radical approach had reduced drawing to a set of
instructions no longer requiring the execution by the artist but by
anyone simply following the instructions, Hoferer does make the drawings
herself. Draftsmanship (or craftsmanship) is here clearly intended,
not for reasons of originality as much as to allow for the potential
of chance and to emphasize the idea of process in the making of the
drawings.
Process and the parameters of the physical condition of the piece
determine its eventual form. As in Dorothea Rockburne's seminal 1960s
series titled Drawing Which Makes Itself, Hoferer's drawing is generated
from the qualities inherent in the materials. She chooses materials
for their physical properties such as luminosity, translucency and
invisibility, reflectivity, glossiness, mattness and frosted texture,
or because they age and discolor over time, as in this series, Field
(1998-2006). Her choice of white only proves to offer unconstrained
variations of "whiteness," following in the footsteps of
monochrome painters, most obviously Robert Ryman. She uses a great
variety of tapes -Scotch brand, strapping and masking– that
change in size and texture, translucency and reflectivity.
In applying the tape in vertical and/or horizontal bands and multiple
layers, an interplay of shadow and light is achieved, with incredible
shades of white and gray and dynamic optical shifts--glittering and
shimmering, surfacing or fading away--as one moves around the work.
These advancing and receding rhythms give a kinetic quality to Hoferer's
drawings similar to the 1960s pop-op elements of Bridget Riley. The
relationship of the drawings to the site and to the viewer’s
reception suggests the dynamic and subtle shifts in the environment
and intrinsically the passage of time in space, a sense of transience
and impermanence.
This attention to the physical qualities of the materials and to the
transient phenomenological conditions of light and space external
to the drawing infuses Hoferer's work with a much gentler (even feminine)
touch. Her engagement with sensuality is not a detriment to her commitment
to minimalism but places her closer to a lineage of artists who have
favored process and an interest in materials, and shares a greater
affinity with the likes of "abstract eccentrics" like Eva
Hesse than with structuralist minimalists like LeWitt. The geometric,
algebraic and rational tendencies of the intellect and the world of
the senses are not mutually exclusive in Hoferer's work, on the contrary,
they seem to complement and lead to one another.
Reproductions of Hoferer's work could look like digitally pixelated
images or something more traditional, like petit point. They are hand-rendered,
using the grid to blanket an entire sheet, playing with negative/positive
variations of a theme with results that differ from subtly spare geometric
lines to the more ornamental. Some drawings are quieter and reductive
in their formal means, where merely faint pencil lines and clear tape
stress lightness, requiring acute attention to perceive their nuance.
Others seem baroque by comparison, presenting dense layers of textured
tape that sculpturally build in a constructivist style, borrowing
designs from architecture and/or the decorative arts, which look like
building blocks or lace doilies and snowflakes.
Built in clusters of separate sheets of paper, some series share a
single pattern optically formatted in a grid that runs horizontally
across the panels, reaching the very edge of the paper and being framed
by the wall. In other cases, the singularity of the drawing is stressed
by displaying individual concentric motifs framed in the center of
each sheet with margins around them or around the multiple modular
works, bringing unity within the grid. Joining in multiples alters
the scale and nature of the single drawing. Square sheets build onto
vertical or horizontal grids following a drawing's internal structural
laws or the external conditions as site-specific works that enter
into a dialogue with the architecture of the space in which they are
exhibited. The unframed multiple panels are tightly stretched and
pinned to the wall, bringing to mind a literal association with wall
paper.
Installation in response to the space surrounding them and the favoring
of phenomenological issues of perception in space or, rather, entering
into a dialogue with one another to draw the attention to specific
elements of the patterns, systems and materials intrinsic to the drawing,
prove to be just some of the broad issues at play in Marietta Hoferer’s
work. Thus, albeit their deceptively simple appearance, her minimal
drawings reveal themselves to expand in ways unlimited by the drawing’s
structural possibilities and the physical properties of her materials,
uncannily finding in the limitations infinite permutations.
Link
to Marietta's web site
Review: The Brooklyn Rail
