JOURNALISM

There was a time, abruptly undone, when an Instagram feed – that stream of exquisitely-curated single images – was the consummate expression of social identity. Then it all shifted and the Zoom video chat – an array of live, grainy, eerily shifting, beloved human faces – became the standard.

I’d like here to plead for physical expression, and more specifically the journal – a catchment for all manner of writing, drawing, recording, collecting, sorting, and salvaging. A friend in Europe, whose sensibilities are fundamentally literary, observed that the one-of-a-kind crisis we’re living through now resembles a war, and that we should all be looking around closely, taking notes, keeping track. A recent piece by Sloane Crossley in the Times, thoughtful and fantastically premature, wonders what kind of novels this period will produce, concerned that a universal experience like this “is poison to actual book writing.” But there are surely millions of perspectives and many millions of stories to tell.

Short of a novel, a journal might be the richest, most supple form. One’s journal can be a book or box in which one leaves things: lists, poems, Post-it notes, receipts, rants, sketches, snack wrappers, lists. It’s a loose, low-tech, capacious form that requires no deep artistic or literary skill. As one’s ideas, feelings and observations build, the journal can take on an infinite number of shapes.

At a moment when looking outward is painful and necessary, looking inward might offer some comfort, distance and, for those privileged to remain in quarantine, a way to mark the strange, stubborn stream of days. One’s journal is private and typically remains unseen, which might trouble some, especially youngsters. But it captures, if only for our future selves, what is happening now, and who we are becoming.

Notebook by Kengo Kuma, 2009. Photograph courtesy the Moleskine Collection.

April 04, 2020 by Nalina Moses

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER

There’s an exhibit, Imalabra, at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan devoted to artist Antonio Martorell and his “amigos.” It’s really a tribute to the stamina and imagination of Martorell himself, whose ouevre spans five decades and a dazzling, almost comical, array of media: installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, illustration, printmaking, film, and set and costume design. Martorell’s work calls to mind that of his contemporary Lucas Samaras, whose lifelong project also seems less concerned with the expression of formal ideas than the act of producing things. Both men do so with such ferocity and velocity that these things, taken as a whole, furnish a kind of autobiography.

Almost all of Martorell’s works in the show, which is organized around large-scale installations, rely on his brilliance as a draftsman. His hand is energetic, authoritative, and playful, and his sensibility is dense, so that his drawings (ink on plastic, charcoal on paper, pen on board) have a powerful emotional charge. Compositionally, figures often collect on one side of the page, as if they are about to burst out of it. Characters are rendered taut with kinetic energy, in tension with one other and their settings.

Martell integrates words with images particularly skillfully. Text, rendered in a large langorous script, is often laid over figures, which are often drawn across pages torn from a book, adding pictorial depth. In other works drawings are rendered on lengths of fabric and draped across frames and furniture, complicating their legibility. The show includes life-size silhouettes of hip street characters stamped on canvas, framed portraits of political figures crafted with shards from aluminum cans, vinyl floor coverings printed with newspaper collages, and, towards the end, a series of simple (and stunning) charcoal drawings of a bookshelf. All of these pieces can be understood as drawings, as surfaces inscribed with story. If the show asks, broadly, How far can drawing take you?, the answer is, Very far indeed.

January 07, 2016 by Nalina Moses