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Diagrammarians ○ Leila Peacock

D01

Mel Bochner, xerox, from the exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art, School of Visual Arts, New York, 1966 (melbochner.net).

#technicaldrawing #conceptualpoetics #xerox #uncreativeart

D02

Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass, 1967, aquatint

#diagrammatic #mechanicaldiagram
#allegoricalmachine #knightsmovethinking #love #sex #electromagnetism

D03

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sea/ Land Sundial, 1970, etched on glass, steel rod, wooden base. In the collection of the Tate, London (tate.org).

#glasspoem, #sundial #concretepoetry #sail
#figuresofthought

D04

Hanne Darboven, Ein Jahrhundert ABC, 1970, drawing on graph paper.

#minimal #notation #time #numerology
#universalintelligibility
#writingwithoutdescribing

D05

Joseph Beuys, Untitled (sunstate), 1974, chalk and felt-tip pen on blackboard with wood frame, in the collection of the MoMA, New York (moma.org).

#thinkingisform #socialsculpture #myth #alchemy #astrology #anthropology #theidealstate

D07

Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca. 1979-90 (5th version), 1999
From exhibition catalogue Mark Lombardi Global Networks, Robert Hobbs, Independent Curators International, New York, 2004

#conspiracy #narrativestructures #sociograms #networks

D08

Ad Reinhardt, How To Look At Iconography, 1946, part of the ‘How to Look’ series of cartoons published in the daily newspaper P.M.

#satire #cartoonmetaphysics #didacticgraphics #learningbylooking #unlockingart #laugh

D09

Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0/ Historical Diagrams/ From Arpanet to DARWARS via the Internet, 2009-11
suzannetreister.net

#alchemicaldiagram #conspiracytheory
#configurations

D10

Tacita Dean, The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, 1997, chalk on blackboard, in the collection of the Tate, London, tate.org

#stormforce #forecast #cinematicdrawing
#storyboard #directionalnotations #figurations

D11

Matt Mullican, Untitled (5 lecture boards), 2018. Set of five boards, marker on whiteboard, photograph: Roberto Ruiz

#signs #semiotics #ordering #perception
#mysteriousclarity #seeingpatterns

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This is a selection of 20th–21st century artworks that invoke the power of the diagrammatic. You could start this train of thought with many great artists of the diagram. But here we start deliberately with the aesthetic of the unaesthetic, something not produced by an artist at all. A badly xeroxed technical drawing from Mel Bochner’s seminal conceptual exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art that took place at the SVA, New York in 1966. It marked a new way of marvelling at the diagrammatic. This badly copied image is nonetheless a thing of mystery and beauty. Diagrams we cannot decipher hold a fascination for us, they become open oracular figurations, complex portraits of something invitingly unreachable. In the conventional sense diagrams facilitate understanding, but here they are used to uncover conspiracies and forge new ones, satirise knowledge, map visions, mark time and construct new poetic forms.

Leila Peacock, born in the UK, lives and works in Zürich. Her work plunders the space between drawing, writing and editing, between essay and cartoon, poem and diagram.

#leilaleilapeacockpeacock

leilapeacock.com

KEYWORDS
diagrams; conceptual poetry; uncreative arts; drawing

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