NEW MEASUREMENT GROUP

Artists have been pushing back against ideological cultural imperatives since forever.

An interesting example is three Chinese artists who called themselves the New Measurement Group.  In an attempt to push back against cultural ideological mandates, they worked to create a new understanding so as to foster unfettered creative expression.

The artists, Qian Weikang, Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin, and Chen Shaoping, among others, working in the mid 1980s, spent eight years devising methods to get beyond accepted creative understanding.  They established rules, sequences and mechanisms which then produced a series of drawings.

According to the site Artnet News, the New Measurement Group.

“…gave birth to a new ‘non-art’ language situated between letters, mathematics, and linguistic research; ideological problems were transcended by purely numerical and rational research.”  1

We spoke in these pages recently on what we have dubbed the Drawing Continuum.  We commented on the analogous similarity between writing on one end and drawing on the other;  it’s all simply pencil lines on a piece of paper.  We made the point that the scientific graph, the lingual character, and the 3D transparent shape, all drawn with a pencil on a piece of paper, are all created equally.  And we believe in non art.

Here is an interesting description of one of the Group’s working methods.  This is reported by e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale,

The group “…made another series of drawings, each following the same set of rules designating the tools to be used, the forty-five-degree angle at which lines should be drawn, and so forth. They all departed from one black dot and ended up with six sets of drastically different graphics. This process drove them to further reflect on the nature and workings of individual subjectivity.”  2

One source says that the New Measurement Group disbanded acrimoniously, and that all of their work was subsequently destroyed.  The photo above is from one of their exhibitions.  If you look at the lower right drawing, you can see that there is a dimensional transparency to it.

My sense is that while they were not trying for transparency as any sort of end state, their process inevitably led them toward a more transparent state.  How could it not?

I have not found what the artists thought about transparency, if they even considered it. Yet their mission to devise a method with which to enable unrestrained creative and holistic responses is near and dear to our hearts here at Transparent Drawing.

The Artnet site closes by saying that the New Measurement Group’s lasting contribution is the multitude of opportunities that they created.

1. Ning Lu, (2013, March 11) How Chinese Art Became Contemporary.  Retrieved from https://news.artnet.com/art-world/how-chinese-art-became-contemporary-5046

2.  Liu Ding & Carol Yinghua Lu, (2015, July11) Crimes Without a Scene: Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group.  Retrieved from http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/crimes-without-a-scene-qian-weikang-and-the-new-measurement-group/