GERTRUDE GOLDSCHMIDT

She called herself Gego. And she worked at the borderline of the limits of drawing and what a drawing is. She did a series of pieces titled Drawings Without Paper. The photograph of her work that first captured my eye was this construction, shown below. It is a wire assembly held some inches off of a white wall. With the projection of light on it, shadows are cast onto the wall.

She was Venezuelean and lived from 1912 to 1994. Here is a link to her Wikipedia entry. She first studied architecture in Germany before departing to South America in 1939. This is a link to a Google Image amalgamation of her work. There was a traveling exhibit of her work in 2007 titled “Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible.” Her principal medium was wire, which then made a three dimensional “line.” Thus her moniker Drawing Without Paper. She used these wire sculptures to create room filling installations.

So are these drawings? This is not the first application of the word drawing to what are, to me at least, sculptures. For another example, the Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland constructed flat steel panels which were figurative: the human form is depicted via three dimensional “lines” cast into the panel. This is a photo that I took of these panels in Oslo. And at the museum of his work, also in Oslo, there were more examples of his metalwork, and the associated text referred to these as Drawing In Iron.

I’m not the first to question Gego’s use of the word “line” when applied to her sculptures. In a review by Anna McNay at the site studio international of the Gego show at the Henry Moore Institute:

“The line as a human means to express relation between points,” writes the artist. “Something that is entirely abstract in the sense: not existing materially in nature.” And yet it does – hence the ambiguity regarding the labeling of her work as sculpture. 

McNay, Anna. 2014, August 18. Gego, Line as Object.

As you might guess, given the definition of drawing that has been established in these pages, these are not drawings. They are excellent works. The artists were visionaries. There simply should be another word for sculptures that employ principally material thinly shaped and spaced. And I find it amazing that all of the discussions of Gego’s work seems to be content to operate within this ambiguity around the words “line” and “draw”. They are not lines. And they are not drawings. Can we please work to decrease ambiguity by coming up with new words so a meaningful discussion can take place?

A few pages ago, we looked at the famous “drawings” of Dorothea Rockburne. And we saw how she folded, bent and creased the paper. Any of these actions bring the work into the realm of sculpture, as most of her “drawings” have a three dimensionality; they have a resolved form. Yet, everyone continues to call them drawings.

We speak of holistic and resolved forms. Certainly, when a sculpture simply exists, it is resolved. A form cannot exist within our current spacetime if it is not resolved. The argument might be made, well, what’s the difference between the lines cast onto the wall as shadows and lines that we draw? And I would hope that the answer to this is obvious: cast shadows as lines are not knowledge. The cast lines might as well be on a TV screen: we did not analogue them, we did not internalize the knowledge. Thus, they are not drawings.

For my drawing, I used the photo of Gego’s piece as a form generator. In a more or less Automatic Form mode, I first knowledged the sculpture. I then used the line geometry as a basis for form generation.

And in case you missed it, a few pages ago we contemplated when a drawn line does, or does not, become a form.