Klee's Concept Makerspace

Klee is both material and workbench in my concept makerspace, and it looks, feels, and operates like a lab. As with hackerspaces and other hubs, it enables the concepts of remix, mashup, hacking, appropriation, experimentation, posthuman collaborations, aleatory events, and mutations of all kinds.

Although I often describe remixing and sampling technologies using musical terms, here the same terms are used in the production of concepts and images, often using contemporary technologies as part of the machinic production. I focused on lines and vectors, alternating between Klee inspired transfer techniques to those using contemporary tools like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, all in ways that would be instantly familiar to a musician using Apple Logic Pro X.

By making duplications and tracing impressions, I was able to put them into action in different ways. My work was framed by the concepts of mimicry and copying, as well as the very conventional discourse concerning mechanical reproduction and auras. Through the process of etching, impressing, and chemical reactions I attended to the many glitches which became almost choreographic, moving me between tasks and into different conceptual spaces. Coming full circle from Klee’s archives of drawings, I put this project on pause after amassing about 100 prints on regular #10 sized envelopes, that I hope to further activate in abstract experiments as sensory packets awaiting activation.

Klee's Grid Dancer image became central to my curiosities and I used Zhang's descriptions of relay and extension to work with Deleuze and McLuhan’s descriptions of technology.

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Paul Klee’s Prints and Transfer Drawings

In Klee's innovative method, tracing paper was transformed into a type of carbon paper by painting one side with printer's ink or oil paint.

Artist and curator Howardena Pindell explains:

The drawing was placed on top and meticulously traced with a needle.

Simultaneously a piece of drawing paper or lithographic transfer paper was placed under the painted surface to receive the drawing.

The pressure of his hand left an impression of the weave of the paper, making visible the paper's surface qualities (Klee could intentionally rub the surface or accidentally transfer surface texture "monotypically" to the paper).

The Twittering Machine (1922) was drawn by this transfer method and augmented with watercolor and pen and ink. (Klee is said to have invented a mechanical contraption he called a "twittering machine"), The Tightrope Walker (1923), a color lithograph, was also made by this method, in which the image was transferred to lithographic transfer paper and then run through the press to transfer the image to the stone.

The final printed image appears in the same order as the drawing, and not as a mirror image.

The edges and surface area of the tracing-paper transfer image, smaller than the overall size of the stone and sheet, add a simultaneous, "accidental," compositional note.

Working Anarchive

The Online Oxford English Dictionary (Lexico, n.d.), defines the word archive as both a noun and verb. As a noun it is “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people” or a “place where historical documents or records are kept”. As a verb, it is “to place or store (something) in an archive”. The word origin is described as from the “early 17th century (in the sense ‘place where records are kept’): from French archives (plural), from Latin archiva, archia, from Greek arkheia ‘public records’, from arkhē ‘government’. The verb dates from the late 19th century.

The term anarchive is related to the Greek term anarchos. While the archival process seeks to capture and restrain materials to a particular physical or electronic location, the anarchive is related to the chaos that springs forward and out of the archive. Siegfried Zielinski (2015) describes the pairing as a relationship between “archives that collect, select, preserve and restore autonomous, constantly reactivated” anarchives that are tailored toward individual needs and methods (p. 122). Anarchives “must necessarily challenge, even provoke the archive, or they are meaningless” (p. 122).

Open, Book

Based on a copy of Klee's original work Open Book, these six images show Klee's transfer technique and some technological modifications. By using many of the same techniques used in musical production, I experiment with mimetics, imitation, sampling, and adaptation. In Adobe Illustrator, the final scanned paper images are vectorized, which is a type of machine-based tracing. It is then printed, and re-scanned, with a glitchy overlay, before being modified with oil-based lithography inks and watercolor paint. Several of the steps of the process are adapted from those taught as part of the Creaviva education program at Zentrum Paul Klee.

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Umbrella

Paul Klee created the first two images. The first is a pencil drawing, With Umbrella 1939, and the second is oil on canvas, and also from 1939. I created the etching with oil based lithography paint using the pencil drawing. In the fourth figure I vectorized the image. Instead of painting or printing with conventional supplies, I sampled colour and texture from the original from elsewhere and cut and pasted into the image, thus directly painting it into the by electronic means.

Stuff

Klee's process sounds very simple, but it becomes incredibly complex when you play with all the variables. I use oil-based inks, acrylic and watercolor paints, Golden gel, brayer, and every type of paper imaginable. Oil-based inks, normally used in screen printing, are shown in Image One. Because they are water miscible, they can be reduced and applied with a stylus and transferred to the paper. This is illustrated in Figure 10. To properly transfer images, the right paper is needed to receive the transfer, then the carbon-paper like layer needs to be thin enough to transfer details, and again the original must be covered with a thin layer of paper to protect it. In my learning process, I damaged brayers and transfer tools. If this were just a one-off it would be simple, but because I was looking for a process that could become productive over and over it was in fact quite difficult. In the end there was a large secondary archive of printed materials ready to be activated in new projects.

The stammer

In the electronic painting of the drawings, I added glitches as another way to draw the viewer's attention away from the written text towards movement.

In the edited book Minor Photography: Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photography Theory, O’Sullivan’s article “From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Towards a Minor Art Practice?” (2012, p. 249) explains:

“It is these moments of noise – or glitches as we might call them – that free language from itself, at least, from its signifying self, by putting it into contact with other forces. This is an experimentation with, and from within, language. A rupturing of representation. A breaking of the habit of ‘making sense’, of ‘being human’”