Linda Karshan Linda Karshan: Constellation and Chance
The recent work by Linda Karshan displayed in the present exhibition is characterized by new concentration and power. There are three main sequences of drawings: A Big Day, Summer Drawings and, most recently, New Forms, all dating from the past year. In each case, the drawings feature the grids that have become associated with the artist's work: tall, sparse structures where the vertical and horizontal lines balance in an intuitive equilibrium, give way to tiny luminous boxes in steep grids that sparkle like stars. At times the grids seem to be compressed at the sides, rendered in a concentrated form that heightens their expressive power. More recently, in the New Form drawings, Linda Karshan has pared down her grids, simplified them to a spare, essential form: two rows of four elongated boxes balanced on a mirror line. The artist likens this dividing line to a waist, a centre of gravity around which the forms of the drawing may bend or flex. The vertical, rectangular format of her grid has always been associated in the artist's mind with a human body standing gracefully upright and alert.
These anthropomorphic associations (the artist contends that she begins her drawings at a point on the upper left of her page, near to its "heart") are one of many aspects that differentiate Linda Karshan's highly individual work from the mainstream of Minimal Art. Far from measuring or calculating her grids according to a depersonalized formula, Linda draws her lines intuitively, relying on an intensely personal method that is similar to a dance. First, she creates for herself the condition of absolute peace and quiet she needs to work, travelling each day from the centre of Knightsbridge where she lives to her studio in Denmark Hill. In the summers she moves to Connecticut, where one of the sequences of drawings in the present exhibition was made. Cutting herself off from all distractions, Linda often sparks off a new drawing by using a discarded work as a template, printed onto a sheet of fresh paper as the starting point for a new series of variations. These preliminary steps help to induce a state of readiness; then Linda begins to tap her foot and count in sequences of 2-4-8 or 16, marking out the beat, or sometimes marching around her studio. When she begins to draw, she continues to count, placing her vertical and horizontal lines intuitively, in time to the rhythm. At the end of each sequence of numbers, she turns her paper counter-clockwise ninety degrees - swish - and then continues - 2-4-8 - maintaining the rhythm and speed, and marking out the beat on the table if she reaches the edge of the paper before the counting is done.
During this strange, dance-like event, the artist suspends her critical judgement about the outcome of the drawing; only afterwards, when a sequence of new works is pinned to the studio wall, does she evaluate them, keeping the drawings that have a certain quality of balance and life, and discarding the rest. "My job," she has stated, "is to hold my concentration, but never to impinge on the work as it comes through." Sometimes, as in A Big Day, a sequence of perfectly balanced drawings flows through in a concentrated burst of creativity. While she is drawing, Linda enters a trance-like state, in which all her senses are on the alert. In recent years she has chosen to work on a glass table because the sound of her graphite stick striking the paper on glass has a particular timbre. The swish of the paper turning, the sound of the graphite on glass, the posture of the artist's body, all play a role in the resulting drawing. She avoids too much conscious control or facility by gripping the graphite stick like a carving tool in her right hand, although she is left-handed by birth. The sculptural quality of her drawings relates to this impulse to carve; indeed, the etchings and woodcuts she has recently made are natural extensions of her carved drawing style.
Linda Karshan came to her drawings by an unconventional route. As a young student in America she studied briefly with Robert Reed, a student of Joseph Albers, who influenced both the mathematical basis of her work and her approach to proportion and form. Later, she studied art history at the Sorbonne and the Slade, where her special interest in Surrealism introduced her to automatic drawing. But her experiences as an adult student of psychology made her into the artist she is today. During this time she was deeply affected by Donald Winnicott's books on child psychology, writing her dissertation about his concept of "transitional space," whereby the child attempts to connect his subjective experiences with the reality of the outside world through play. The focused, unselfconscious state Linda induces through counting and turning when she is drawing relates closely to the psychology of a child seriously at play. The artist attempts to regain the condition of "transitional space" because she believes this open, vulnerable state is the key to all creativity and freedom. "I imagine myself as if suspended on a string," Linda Karshan writes, "hovering over the drawing as it emerges through "transitional space." I never force, but only position each mark "with exactitude winged by intuition."
In her writings, Linda Karshan often refers to philosophy and literature as well as psychology, quoting from figures as diverse as Heinrich von Kleist, Plato, Paul Klee, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett. She is inspired rather than influenced by her widespread reading. Above all, it involves her in the discovery of underlying affinities; most notably, the counting, marching figures in Beckett's teleplay Quad(which the artist first saw performed at the ICA in London in 1994), provided affirmation for her own creative method. Linda often seems intent on combining the more remarkable insights of modernist art and literature with the underlying principles and laws implicit in the culture of the classical world. In the Timaeus of Plato, for example, she finds confirmation for her belief that the universe is ordered by numbers, a law that applies equally to the great constellations of the stars and the tiniest microcosms of nature. Counting and turning according to the binary rhythms of nature is not just a method in Linda Karshan's drawings; it is a means, above all, of getting in touch with the eternal laws of the universe, which are the very source of life.
If Linda Karshan reaches out, on the one hand, for the constellations of eternity, she also heeds the precarious, living pulse of mortality and time. The graphite strokes she intuitively transmits to her page mark out the beat of time, and the length of the lines in her drawings are literally "a measure of the time they took to be made." In this sense, Linda's drawings are more attuned to concepts of time than of space. One of the artist's favourite quotations from Winnicott makes this preoccupation particularly clear: "Playing is doing," she likes to repeat, "and doing takes time." Using the simplest and purest of means - a horizontal and a vertical line - Linda Karshan touches the nerve of our mortality, confronting issues that we would normally associate only with great figurative art.
Jill Lloyd
London, July 2004 |
|