Jorrit Paajmans
Drawing Between Man and Machine
Drawing is the discipline of
refinement, handwriting and frailty. A wobbly line, a stroke, a scratch on
paper: a drawing contains the tangible traces of human presence. A drawing
shows the movement of the hand of the maker, including little hesitancies and
corrections. Drawing is also the invisible force behind many new developments,
both inside the realm of art and beyond. The medium lies at the root of
knowledge transfer and research, and is the fundament of magnificent paintings,
buildings and technological inventions. Over the past century, drawing has
emancipated, it has grown into an autonomous medium. In his artistic practice,
Jorrit Paaijmans conducts research into the confines of drawing – in order to
explore and cross these boundaries and eventually return to where he came from.
What happens when you let a machine do the drawing? What happens when the
handwriting is no longer that of the artist, but that of an apparatus?
Paaijmans does not use the medium as an instrument, rather, he puts his
artistic practice at the service of the discipline. Paradoxically, it seems as
though this quest leads him ever farther adrift from drawing.
Draughtsmanship serves as the
springboard for all of Paaijmans’s
works: whether it concerns a drawing, a performance or a kinetic installation.
He regularly outsources the production of drawings to machines that he himself
has developed and built manually. Usually
they’re capable of repeatedly performing one particular action, most of the
time that comes down to depicting a line. Although Paaijmans was in search of
lines he would not be able to produce manually, his machines, in performing
their task, ultimately seem to offer less precision and possibilities than a
human hand, or more specifically, the human hand that has created them. The
handwriting of the maker shifts from drawing to machine.
Polished, handcrafted cogwheels are
a sight to behold – much the
same way that similar, shiny technological objects left the Futurists in awe at
the start of the twentieth century. Shiny steel seems to take the
observer back to a supposedly lost faith in technology. However, Paaijmans does
not proclaim a new technological utopia: his objects do not symbolise progress. He feels a
closer affinity with the artists of the ZERO movement from the 1950s, who deployed instruments,
movement and light in inquisitive ways and brought about a shift in focus in
art, which moved from final result to creative process. The essence of
Paaijmans’s work lies in the way in which the machines have been manufactured
and in the status he awards to them. They show a love for the craft and
demonstrate both the study of and the struggle for drawing. The impressive
handmade machines as objects in an open space provide greater visibility to the
art of drawing, they literally and figuratively aggrandise it. And yet, however
beautiful, the technological object is not significant because of its aesthetic
qualities, but because of what it represents: it illustrates what the machine
is and is not capable of, and it highlights the complex relationship between
man and machine; and between draughtsman and drawing. If the craftsmanship is
manifested in the construction of the machine, what role is left to play for
the drawing? Paaijmans erodes the very foundation upon which these relations
are built.
These tensions clearly come to the
fore in the performance installation called Radical Drawing Device, a
tattoo machine which is capable of drawing a single, straight line and is
applicable in one place only: the arm of the artist. Paaijmans built the machine around an epoxy moulded model
of his own lower arm. The arm of the drawer becomes the paper, the machine
replaces his hand. Contrary to the line of a pencil, the
line of the machine is indelible: the first (test) execution is at once the
definitive one. Hesitation, doubt and little errors cannot be remedied and
become part of the final result. Paaijmans had the line tattooed on his arm
during a two-hour public performance at the Verbeke Foundation (Kemzeke,
Belgium), whereby the dimension
of time was introduced into the exhibition space as an important element. The
drawing was produced in front of the viewers’ eyes and there was a shift in focus from
the final result to the creative process. The final drawing is nothing more
than proof of the act that transpired within a certain amount of time; it shows
the traces of the collaboration between the artist and the drawing machine. It
is the former who, during the performance, ‘surrenders’ to the latter as if he
were a blank sheet of paper. After having created all elements manually, Paaijmans
subsequently gives away control to a piece of engineering which is enabled to
move freely within a strict framework. The work is a balancing act at the
intersection of the controllable and the uncontrollable, and provides insight
into this area of tension.
Transparency and openness are
characteristic of Paaijmans’s work and expose the way he relates to drawing.
Pencil lines are not erased, materials
used for the build-up of the exhibition remain visible in the
presentation and the functionality of the machines is evidenced before the
public. By means of traces in time and space, the functioning systems of the
discipline of drawing become visible, and simultaneously are being disintegrated. In his quest, Paaijmans
is not tied down by anything or anyone: within a conceptual framework he
intuitively makes all intermediate steps and allows himself a considerable
amount of freedom. Paaijmans is no stranger to classical works, such
as Point and Line to Plane (1926), the book in which Wassily Kandinsky
sets out the fundamental principles of drawing and painting. This text
is of great importance to him. However, whereas Kandinsky’s work and writings
are based on methodological research, Paaijmans’s working method is rather
associative. Whereas the Russian avant-gardist artist writes down all possible
variations of a point in Point and Line
to Plane, Paaijmans easily adds a few more to the mix. He does so for
example in an installation called Body #1, where all the points and
lines from Kandinsky’s text are being translated into wooden circles and
tightly stretched blue ropes:
the result is a constructivist-looking structure which at first sight eradicates
all connotations of drawing. The structure is a machine without any
functionalities, a hand without a pencil.
Body #1, an
installation composed of ‘points and lines’, hangs above a steel construction.
This frame supported the build-up of the installation, after which it lost its
purpose but was left untouched as an expressive element. The traces of the
build-up become part of the installation – tacit evidence of both a process
that has come to pass over a certain period of time, as well as that of the
humanity which is always present in Paaijmans’s oeuvre. Here, it is not the arm
of the maker, but his exhibition space that has become the drawing sheet; the
objects in space are the result of a search for the right composition. Owing to
its abstract visual language and theoretical references, the work may be
categorised as conceptual art. Nonetheless, the abstract installation does
appeal to the imagination; it resembles a reclining body which leans on the
frame of a ship. Inside the ‘body’ there is the heart in the shape of spinning
fluorescent tubes. The reclining body is a motif in art history and in this
case it is also, or above all, a personal confession that inadvertently entered
Paaijmans’s artwork. Only afterwards did he notice the resemblance to a body
that was so dear to him. Unintentionally, the work then also carries
this meaning. Paaijmans artistic practice exists between the poles of
formalistic and personal research. By means of abstract machines and
installations, he renders visible the man behind drawing; the man who serves
the discipline with full commitment.
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