Contemporary drawing is one of art's best kept secrets: associated with sound, language and writing, it turns contemporary art into a meditative form of art-making engaging the spectator in a poetic and existential voyage.
Led by Blank's discovery of sound within the daily practice of drawing, this episode is a sonic wandering and a philosophical exploration of the artist's work, engaging with recent technological changes. How can a minimal and poetic practice face such specific issues? What is the role of the artist facing a global net of information which connects us as much as it separates us? And what is the value of communication – and of silence? Irma Blank has taught me that and much more.
The avant-gardes of the 1960s–70s were proliferous in innovative and minimal methods of creativity engaging the breath, the whole body and graphic deconstructions of language. Irma Blank was one of those artists with a subversive take on traditional artistic languages.
Have you ever wondered how artists and curators work together? This episode muses upon the relation between me, a young-ish curator and the artist Irma Blank, who'd reached the age of 80 when we met, along with my co-curator Johana Carrier.
This episode is an excerpt of a lecture given by me on the 3rd of February 2025 at ABK Stuttgart whose title was "The Paper is Impatient", under the invitation of the drawing department, and their teachers Katrin Ströbel and Hanna Hennenkemper.
The « drawing sounds » are excerpts of Irma Blank’s recordings of the sound of each series. For Radical Writings, she recorded herself, breathing in and out, because that was the basis of the image’s structure.
Music by Sarturn.
>>>>>>>
For more information about the artist visit her gallery's website: P420, Bologna, Italy.
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If you enjoy Katy Hessel's The Great Women Artists Podcast, this episode is for you. It is centred around the artistic practice of female German artist Irma Blank, who never stopped producing her art, whether it was shown in prestigious events such as the Venice Biennale in 1977, or it wasn't, like when her Radical Writings on canvas were deemed a form of yielding to the 80s trend of the return to painting... whereas Blank was, on the contrary, more militant than ever for her elemental forms of the line and the minimal gesture by deeply engaging with the meditative breath in relation to the line and the colour blue, which for her represented infinity. Blank passed away in 2023, leaving a potent body of work whose incredible energy leaves no spectator or curator indifferent.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
I'm Joanna Pyroneves, your host,and this is exhibitionist this
I'm an independent writer and curator with a wide-ranging 2
decades career in contemporary art, from commercial galleries
to art fairs, from research to curating, from Lisbon to London
(00:26):
through Paris. But when I'm asked what I do
outside the out world, the inevitable reaction is, oh, I
don't know anything about contemporary art.
Ouch. So call it a midlife crisis,
call it arrogance, but I gave myself the task of trying to
fill that gap with Co host conversation.
(00:47):
Episodes centered around a genuine exchange of thoughts,
feelings and precious context around solo exhibitions,
interviews and special episodes based on a particular topic to
keep you alert and on your toes.If you want to read further into
some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can
(01:11):
also find me on Sub Stack under my name, Joanna Pyroneves.
Consider this episode as a surprise.
I like to work on smaller episodes when a topic feels
right, and today is one of thosedays.
Recently I was invited to talk about paper in a seminar at ABK
(01:35):
Stuttgart, a Fine Arts university in Germany.
It was an inaugural speech, so Iwanted to do something
different, perhaps a bit more performative.
I've lived with paper for so many years, being married to an
artist who uses it like a flat body, folding it, bending it,
dabbing it with cement and graphite, adjusting his strength
(01:58):
to the fragility of its slightlygrainy material.
Paper is what we write on, but Ido prefer to write on a
keyboard, looking at a screen. This back and forth between
screens and sheets made me thinkof the German artist Edema
Blanc. I Co curated her touring
exhibition with my friend and colleague Joanna Carier, which
(02:20):
led us to spend time with the artist in Milan interviewing
her, finding out more and more about her and the works she had
hardly shown during her lifetime, as well as those she
was known for, at least in her hometown.
Blanc passed away on the 14th ofApril 2023, so this episode is a
homage to someone who came closeto being a mentor, a notion she
(02:45):
would have abort as much as I do.
Imagine in the early 1960s, a German woman struggling to find
her words in Italian. She's young, she's in Sicily and
(03:08):
she's starting a new life with her mathematician lover.
She's an artist who is as well read as she's obsessed with art
making. Little by little the Italian
language sinks in. She starts mastering it and
communication expands beyond thehome into the city, the shops,
(03:30):
the beaches. She becomes bilingual and thus
bicultural. But it's a two way St.
She speaks and she's spoken to. There is finally communication.
She verbalizes her thoughts and others respond.
She welcomes another world into the world.
(03:50):
She builds at home, home, city, island, country, language,
culture, people. Then starts another process,
much deeper and more unsettling.She finds out that there is a
world of learnt words that mean things she doesn't know, or
(04:14):
rather, that simply do not existin her own language.
New words in a new language reveal new sensations, new
opinions, new structures and even new values.
So slowly and somewhat painfully, she realises that,
(04:35):
quote, there is no such thing asthe right word, UN quote.
For every language there is a cluster of secret compartments
leading to unknown territories for those who don't speak it,
but also, and more strikingly so, for those who learn it.
So dads in Portuguese, awkward in English, Chun siqua in
(04:59):
French, so many words that unlock different doors in the
soul, that can potentially engorge the heart and create new
ramifications of existence. The artist realized that
expecting words to be precise, logical, equivalent with another
word in another language is a futile exercise.
(05:21):
Those objects she loved so much,books, did not have an exact
correspondence in their Italian equivalent.
Her Italian life would be solipsistic and untransmissible.
There is no such thing as the right word.
Humans were made to speak different languages so as not to
(05:41):
come together and be greater than God.
The Testament says Testament is legacy, but it's also a book
written in Greek. And what if her children didn't
learn the German language? If so, she would remain locked
inside her own heart, a side of her that they would never
understand. She would not be whole.
(06:04):
This is the experience of the immigrant.
There is a past that is dislocated, and its place is no
longer accessible as life, only as intermittent experience at
best. That's why books are so
important. They contain a whole world
inside them. But the woman discovered they
(06:25):
could never be wholly transposedon to another place.
The books were as much place as her home country and her
language. Their pages carry the past that
would be only hers and not understood by her new people.
And what is understanding? Is it dependent upon
communication? Is it the message, the
(06:47):
messenger, or the air molecules pushed so as to make a sound,
which becomes a word, Or the paper gathered in the
rectangular shape and forming a book where each page forms the
strange layered object filled with words?
And what if you don't understandthe words?
Perhaps if the words are released of their function, one
(07:09):
really starts listening to the page, feeling its gentle touch
and connecting with its matter as a complex material and as a
subtle machine, a medium. Meanwhile, in 1964, Marshall
(07:47):
Mcluhan was publishing a text marking a new turn in the modern
world by stating that the mediumis the message.
Using the example of electricity, he explained what
the medium was. He was talking about the
substratum, the surface, the thing that materializes images
and texts, that renders visible,audible, constant.
(08:10):
Even the medium is, he said, what causes the message to
happen. So messages do not exist in
limbo, waiting to be caught by amediator, a device.
Think of electricity as medium, McClure exemplified.
Quote. Whether the light is being used
(08:30):
for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of
indifference. It could be argued that these
activities are in some way the content of the electric light,
since they could not exist without the electric light.
This fact merely underlines the point that the medium is the
message, because it is the medium that shapes and controls
(08:53):
the scale and form of human association and action.
UN quote. 20 years later, in 1986, Ursula K Le Guin would
publish a text titled The Carrier Back Theory of Fiction
where she speculated inspired bythe feminist anthropology
theorist Elizabeth Fisher. The human spent much more time
(09:17):
carrying things than killing animals and making weapons to do
so. In prehistory, A vessel might be
a better characterization of themedium because it nuances the
relationships within communication, the solidarity
between the carried, the carrier, the carrying act, the
(09:38):
sender and the recipient, but also the intentions behind each
communication and the expectations.
Perhaps the medium is not the message then.
This famous saying, as seductiveas it is, simplifies a more
nuanced relationship between thewriter, the page, the text and
(09:59):
the reader. If we think of Le Guin, we can
imagine prehistoric times like she did in her text, and
contemplate hands meticulously and masterfully interlacing
strands of Mulberry tree fibre, having fun with it, creating,
discovering a material. But woven together these strands
(10:20):
make a carrier or a bag. Together, these strands allowed
one to carry things. Once the things were deposited
in the Hut, apples, for example,no one would think of eating the
carrier or the bag. One would eat the apples, one
would eat the message. However, because the apples
(10:41):
could be carried, ideas of stocking and fermenting
flourished. Without the carrying, they would
not have been possible. The medium effects reality
behaviours. So the medium is a vessel that
is not neutral. It has a material and a history,
but mostly it bears possibility.The medium is technology in the
(11:01):
sense that it is a spark of invention through play once used
to carry things, sign based messages or apples.
It sparks novelty. But more importantly, Le Guin
chose to focus on the carrier because it tells a different
story and points to different characters.
Rather than the story of violence, it recounts the story
(11:23):
of patience, caring and invention.
In a sense, this is what Mcluhanwas saying as well, that we
failed to recognise the carriers, the mediums, the
vessels, the technologies that shape our messages and therefore
our worlds. In the words of Donna Harroway,
it matters what matters we use to think other matters with.
(11:45):
It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.
It matters what not, not with thoughts.
Think thoughts with descriptions.
Describe descriptions with ties,tie ties.
It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make
stories. Going back to the 60s in 1969 on
(12:08):
Kowara would create a medium message based work.
The sentence I'm still alive on the telegram.
Basically, the telegram itself, regardless of text, told all of
on Koara's friends that he was alive there and then in that
time and place. Marking in time and place with a
(12:29):
photo or any recorded gesture isan existential proof.
The sentence I'm still alive is what we call a tautology in
logic, a pleonasm in rhetoric, and a good or a bad joke,
depending upon your sense of humor.
In day-to-day life, it points tothe ultimate medium, the living,
breathing body. In the 60s, bureaucracy still
(12:52):
involved paper, and paper was thus eloquent.
Around that time, Irma Blanc, the German artist in Sicily,
started drawing on her journal or writing in her drawings,
whatever 1 prefers. She started the series
Eigenschriften, which she went on to produce until she moved to
(13:14):
Milan. In the 1970s.
She developed different acemic calligraphies, that is,
different calligraphies without words.
When I asked Rosanna, her daughter, what memories she had
of her mum, then she shared the funny recollection with me.
One day she was excited to go back home and tell her mother
(13:34):
something that had happened at school.
Whatever happened at school, sheforgot.
What she can recall is her mother asking her with a hand
gesture to wait until she had finished writing.
Rosanna looked at her mother's paper and it was indeed a
writing, but without words. There were lines and lines of
(13:56):
the same calligraphic effort, but there were no words to speak
of. It was a flow of wordless and
yet cohesively handwritten lines.
What might have crossed the child's mind?
The static snow at the end of TVbroadcasting back in the day.
Listening to the paper is not a given.
(14:19):
One can argue that the drawing, these writings for oneself,
Eigenschrifton, are the meeting point between the paper, the
pastels, and the personal memoryof writing and reading, of
shedding the love of words, the love of the beautiful phrase,
the enchanting sound of verses rhyming, the love for
literature. Like On Kowara, Blank had gone
(14:42):
through a traumatic war as a child, as an inheritance of a
generation before her. Like him, she chose another
language to live in. On Kowara was Japanese and moved
to New York in 1965 and focused on the medium, the conventions
of time. For him, the shape of the book,
for her as a tool that had to bedeconstructed.
(15:05):
My work is a book whose pages are scattered and cannot come
back together again, she told uswhen she moved to Milan, Paper
met information and civilization, the outer world.
She started placing a fine tracing paper on everything she
read and transcribed it painstakingly.
She covered words with the drawing material, which
(15:26):
extracted, as it were, the shape, the system, the structure
of organized information. The series is called
Rascrezzioni Transcription, but it's more than that.
The paper became a transitional device from a verbal sign to an
index, one of those signs that exist because the material that
(15:50):
reveals them is affected by the sign itself.
A footprint, an analogue photograph.
The shiver. The words became marks, which is
to say an encounter between two bodies.
She also made books with the same calligraphy over the real
books she read. But she also deconstructed
(16:10):
newspapers in an effort of producing real communication.
She plays her trascritzioni works on newspaper kiosks and
other ads in the street. Paradoxically, listening to the
paper was silencing the page. She looked for silence.
The true form of communication, where energy, love,
(16:31):
concentration, focus sits with blank paper, is the language of
audible silence. In the bookshop in Milano, Blank
read one of her transcricioni books.
Her mouth closed, her lips are moving, humming.
I say this is a paradox because it was at this time that she
(16:53):
realized, while sitting alone inher kitchen, that the paper
being drawn on produced a sound.It seemed to speak its own
language of receptacle or container of medium.
The medium was not hiding anymore.
It became loud so as to celebrate contact rather than
the personal experience of reading this or that book,
(17:15):
rather than personal preference.Edema never said what books she
transcribed. As much as I insisted she
resisted. We never knew she produced her
own books. Spaces of silence where words
disappeared to make space for the cellulose, the ink, the
folds, the pages like little screens.
(17:37):
The book as the first mobile phone, the first metaverse.
The reality of the infinite folds of imagination.
After she'd lost her husband, Blank took to making thick lines
over some of his mathematical books by a process of osmosis,
the magical formula of love, which is a form of loss, The
(18:00):
page was now the absent body, the place of a new form of
silence. Through a process of crossing
out and making thick lines, she journeyed to Deep Blue and to a
correspondence between her soul.There is her breath and the
line. Breathing in, she dipped the
(18:23):
brush in the paint. Breathing out, she produced 1
blue line until there was no more air to exhale.
And again and again and again. From language to writing to book
to drawing to paper to voice to line to breath.
(18:47):
The body as a medium, the paper as body.
At the turn of the century, as many artists from her generation
Blank saw, the information, communication and data were
connected. But her focus was on what
communication would become once the world established itself as
(19:08):
a global net across the world. Thus she started a new series
called Global Writings, Moving Away from Paper.
It seemed that paper, after all,was a personal affair, a diary,
a skin, a body. Not unlike the world around her.
Blank was local, a mixture of local and global.
(19:28):
She was a polyglot. She had several worlds LED in
her through language. So she devised a new one with
eight consonants. CDHJLMR&T and proceeded to
produce works with it. She wanted to create a language
which would sound completely alien.
(20:17):
She worked on this series and another previous one on the
computer, moving away from paper.
She was now using a virtual space that was not mediated by
paper. The hands tapped rather than
dance on the paper. The material was plastic, all
(20:37):
polymer rather than cellulose orany of the surface reacting like
paper to the touch. So, unhappy with the silent and
cold body, Blank vigorously wentback to the space of the paper.
This body and skin she had now discovered as an entity with
which to collaborate. So she produced the series
(20:59):
Avantesto. Avantesto were also made in
polyester, which is probably here as a sort of hyper paper,
as she was eager to use her whole body, her two hands
grabbing as many Biro pens as she could to produce a vibration
enacting the sound of its making.
(21:27):
Blank is part of a generation ofartists who created the simple
system based on the philosophy of mark making as an existential
collaboration between signifyingbodies.
Her path is of a rigorous devotion to silence as
communication and paper as it's ancient technology, perhaps one
of the most minimal of her time.Many moons ago, I was talking to
(21:54):
an artist on the phone. I lived in Paris then, and so
did this artist. Suddenly he interrupted the
conversation and asked me if there was a thunderstorm in my
neighborhood. And how strange that it was so
sunny back where he lived. In fact, this was not a
meteorological phenomenon. It was my husband drawing at the
(22:16):
time. He took thick, white, large
expanses of paper and spent longhours marking it with folds,
closing and opening flaps of paper, then folding it again.
Opening, closing, folding. The paper started to take the
shape of a strange container, then a more geometric form, and
then after a considerable amountof time, it became a perfect
(22:38):
cube of about 80 centimeters. As soon as the paper had taken
this new shape, he placed graphite chunks inside through
one of the edges. As soon as these grey and greasy
bits of matter were trapped inside, he would apply pH
neutral tape on all edges of thecube and proceed to shake it.
(22:58):
The cube would go up and down, left and right, or more
elegantly, in circles. The graphite chunks were
painstakingly moved around so asto touch the paper.
While holding this enormous cube, he imagined the trajectory
of the graphite bits and tried to control the remains of their
bodies, becoming traces on the paper.
(23:19):
The graphite bits were now graphite beads.
The movement of the cubes scrubbed the matter away from
all sides, turning them into spheres.
Little planets moving about in asort of mark, making Big Bang.
This operation was noisy. First the paper being folded and
unfolded, then after a while, the heavy breathing of his body,
(23:40):
kneeling, crouching, grabbing, folding, trying to collaborate
with the paper, and the paper finally yielding to the extent
of its properties. Then came the sound part of the
process, the shaking and rubbingof the graphite on the internal
side of the paper cube. It was a roaring sound that made
me think of 1000 Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels, but also
(24:05):
of the explosive discharge of heat after lightning in a storm.
No one talks about the sound of drawing, he once told me,
echoing what was going on in my mind and foreshadowing this day,
the 16th of April 2025, in my own house, in my studio, where
(24:27):
we're both around in the house, representing somehow the ancient
avant-garde, objective, symbolic, political,
sustainable, social and literal language of paper.
This episode was recorded on the16th of April 2025, two years
(24:51):
and two days after EMS passing. For this episode I've had the
assistance of the Artist Galleryin Bologna, Italy.
P420A. Big thanks to Alessandro,
Fabrizio, Chiara and Vanya for their attention to detail, not
only for this episode but also for the exhibitions, the visits
(25:12):
to Edema's house. And finally, a huge thank you to
Irma's children, namely the relentless Rosanna, who unveiled
so many things about her mother's practice and supported
her work at a late stage of her life, managing the visits to the
studio and the work. The music of the episode is by
Satan and the text was written by me.
(25:33):
It's an excerpt of a lecture given on the 3rd of February
2025 at ABK Stuttgart, whose title was The Paper is
Impatient, under the invitation of the drawing department and
their teachers Catherine Trevor and Hannah Henan Kemper.
The sounds were recordings of Edema's works, so the sounds of
(25:56):
the making of Edema Blanc's Eigen, Shifton, Radical
Writings, Avantesto, Hypertext and Hatch Clear.
If you're here, you're probably enjoying the episode, so if you
think someone else might enjoy it too, by all means, share it.
(26:18):
Don't forget to rate and follow exhibitionistas.
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(26:42):
who've taken the leap of faith and have become our patrons.
From a five star review to a substantial donation
exhibitionist. This considers you one of those
rare unicorns who support independent journalism.
Now something a bit different. I'd also love to start a
conversation with you. You can now leave comments on
Spotify, which is a great way toknow what you want more of, or
(27:05):
if you'd like to add something to the topic developed, the
artist discussed, or simply if you want to leave a note of
appreciation. It's a sad world when only the
trolls and the bullies interact with journalists and art
critics. Let's feed the AI beast with
good stuff. Why not bring ositivity ideas
(27:25):
and especially your own perspective to the Digital Art
Village?
I'm Joanna Pyroneves, your host,and this is exhibitionist this
I'm an independent writer and curator with a wide-ranging 2
decades career in contemporary art, from commercial galleries
to art fairs, from research to curating, from Lisbon to London
(00:26):
through Paris. But when I'm asked what I do
outside the out world, the inevitable reaction is, oh, I
don't know anything about contemporary art.
Ouch. So call it a midlife crisis,
call it arrogance, but I gave myself the task of trying to
fill that gap with Co host conversation.
(00:47):
Episodes centered around a genuine exchange of thoughts,
feelings and precious context around solo exhibitions,
interviews and special episodes based on a particular topic to
keep you alert and on your toes.If you want to read further into
some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can
(01:11):
also find me on Sub Stack under my name, Joanna Pyroneves.
Consider this episode as a surprise.
I like to work on smaller episodes when a topic feels
right, and today is one of thosedays.
Recently I was invited to talk about paper in a seminar at ABK
(01:35):
Stuttgart, a Fine Arts university in Germany.
It was an inaugural speech, so Iwanted to do something
different, perhaps a bit more performative.
I've lived with paper for so many years, being married to an
artist who uses it like a flat body, folding it, bending it,
dabbing it with cement and graphite, adjusting his strength
(01:58):
to the fragility of its slightlygrainy material.
Paper is what we write on, but Ido prefer to write on a
keyboard, looking at a screen. This back and forth between
screens and sheets made me thinkof the German artist Edema
Blanc. I Co curated her touring
exhibition with my friend and colleague Joanna Carier, which
(02:20):
led us to spend time with the artist in Milan interviewing
her, finding out more and more about her and the works she had
hardly shown during her lifetime, as well as those she
was known for, at least in her hometown.
Blanc passed away on the 14th ofApril 2023, so this episode is a
homage to someone who came closeto being a mentor, a notion she
(02:45):
would have abort as much as I do.
Imagine in the early 1960s, a German woman struggling to find
her words in Italian. She's young, she's in Sicily and
(03:08):
she's starting a new life with her mathematician lover.
She's an artist who is as well read as she's obsessed with art
making. Little by little the Italian
language sinks in. She starts mastering it and
communication expands beyond thehome into the city, the shops,
(03:30):
the beaches. She becomes bilingual and thus
bicultural. But it's a two way St.
She speaks and she's spoken to. There is finally communication.
She verbalizes her thoughts and others respond.
She welcomes another world into the world.
(03:50):
She builds at home, home, city, island, country, language,
culture, people. Then starts another process,
much deeper and more unsettling.She finds out that there is a
world of learnt words that mean things she doesn't know, or
(04:14):
rather, that simply do not existin her own language.
New words in a new language reveal new sensations, new
opinions, new structures and even new values.
So slowly and somewhat painfully, she realises that,
(04:35):
quote, there is no such thing asthe right word, UN quote.
For every language there is a cluster of secret compartments
leading to unknown territories for those who don't speak it,
but also, and more strikingly so, for those who learn it.
So dads in Portuguese, awkward in English, Chun siqua in
(04:59):
French, so many words that unlock different doors in the
soul, that can potentially engorge the heart and create new
ramifications of existence. The artist realized that
expecting words to be precise, logical, equivalent with another
word in another language is a futile exercise.
(05:21):
Those objects she loved so much,books, did not have an exact
correspondence in their Italian equivalent.
Her Italian life would be solipsistic and untransmissible.
There is no such thing as the right word.
Humans were made to speak different languages so as not to
(05:41):
come together and be greater than God.
The Testament says Testament is legacy, but it's also a book
written in Greek. And what if her children didn't
learn the German language? If so, she would remain locked
inside her own heart, a side of her that they would never
understand. She would not be whole.
(06:04):
This is the experience of the immigrant.
There is a past that is dislocated, and its place is no
longer accessible as life, only as intermittent experience at
best. That's why books are so
important. They contain a whole world
inside them. But the woman discovered they
(06:25):
could never be wholly transposedon to another place.
The books were as much place as her home country and her
language. Their pages carry the past that
would be only hers and not understood by her new people.
And what is understanding? Is it dependent upon
communication? Is it the message, the
(06:47):
messenger, or the air molecules pushed so as to make a sound,
which becomes a word, Or the paper gathered in the
rectangular shape and forming a book where each page forms the
strange layered object filled with words?
And what if you don't understandthe words?
Perhaps if the words are released of their function, one
(07:09):
really starts listening to the page, feeling its gentle touch
and connecting with its matter as a complex material and as a
subtle machine, a medium. Meanwhile, in 1964, Marshall
(07:47):
Mcluhan was publishing a text marking a new turn in the modern
world by stating that the mediumis the message.
Using the example of electricity, he explained what
the medium was. He was talking about the
substratum, the surface, the thing that materializes images
and texts, that renders visible,audible, constant.
(08:10):
Even the medium is, he said, what causes the message to
happen. So messages do not exist in
limbo, waiting to be caught by amediator, a device.
Think of electricity as medium, McClure exemplified.
Quote. Whether the light is being used
(08:30):
for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of
indifference. It could be argued that these
activities are in some way the content of the electric light,
since they could not exist without the electric light.
This fact merely underlines the point that the medium is the
message, because it is the medium that shapes and controls
(08:53):
the scale and form of human association and action.
UN quote. 20 years later, in 1986, Ursula K Le Guin would
publish a text titled The Carrier Back Theory of Fiction
where she speculated inspired bythe feminist anthropology
theorist Elizabeth Fisher. The human spent much more time
(09:17):
carrying things than killing animals and making weapons to do
so. In prehistory, A vessel might be
a better characterization of themedium because it nuances the
relationships within communication, the solidarity
between the carried, the carrier, the carrying act, the
(09:38):
sender and the recipient, but also the intentions behind each
communication and the expectations.
Perhaps the medium is not the message then.
This famous saying, as seductiveas it is, simplifies a more
nuanced relationship between thewriter, the page, the text and
(09:59):
the reader. If we think of Le Guin, we can
imagine prehistoric times like she did in her text, and
contemplate hands meticulously and masterfully interlacing
strands of Mulberry tree fibre, having fun with it, creating,
discovering a material. But woven together these strands
(10:20):
make a carrier or a bag. Together, these strands allowed
one to carry things. Once the things were deposited
in the Hut, apples, for example,no one would think of eating the
carrier or the bag. One would eat the apples, one
would eat the message. However, because the apples
(10:41):
could be carried, ideas of stocking and fermenting
flourished. Without the carrying, they would
not have been possible. The medium effects reality
behaviours. So the medium is a vessel that
is not neutral. It has a material and a history,
but mostly it bears possibility.The medium is technology in the
(11:01):
sense that it is a spark of invention through play once used
to carry things, sign based messages or apples.
It sparks novelty. But more importantly, Le Guin
chose to focus on the carrier because it tells a different
story and points to different characters.
Rather than the story of violence, it recounts the story
(11:23):
of patience, caring and invention.
In a sense, this is what Mcluhanwas saying as well, that we
failed to recognise the carriers, the mediums, the
vessels, the technologies that shape our messages and therefore
our worlds. In the words of Donna Harroway,
it matters what matters we use to think other matters with.
(11:45):
It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.
It matters what not, not with thoughts.
Think thoughts with descriptions.
Describe descriptions with ties,tie ties.
It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make
stories. Going back to the 60s in 1969 on
(12:08):
Kowara would create a medium message based work.
The sentence I'm still alive on the telegram.
Basically, the telegram itself, regardless of text, told all of
on Koara's friends that he was alive there and then in that
time and place. Marking in time and place with a
(12:29):
photo or any recorded gesture isan existential proof.
The sentence I'm still alive is what we call a tautology in
logic, a pleonasm in rhetoric, and a good or a bad joke,
depending upon your sense of humor.
In day-to-day life, it points tothe ultimate medium, the living,
breathing body. In the 60s, bureaucracy still
(12:52):
involved paper, and paper was thus eloquent.
Around that time, Irma Blanc, the German artist in Sicily,
started drawing on her journal or writing in her drawings,
whatever 1 prefers. She started the series
Eigenschriften, which she went on to produce until she moved to
(13:14):
Milan. In the 1970s.
She developed different acemic calligraphies, that is,
different calligraphies without words.
When I asked Rosanna, her daughter, what memories she had
of her mum, then she shared the funny recollection with me.
One day she was excited to go back home and tell her mother
(13:34):
something that had happened at school.
Whatever happened at school, sheforgot.
What she can recall is her mother asking her with a hand
gesture to wait until she had finished writing.
Rosanna looked at her mother's paper and it was indeed a
writing, but without words. There were lines and lines of
(13:56):
the same calligraphic effort, but there were no words to speak
of. It was a flow of wordless and
yet cohesively handwritten lines.
What might have crossed the child's mind?
The static snow at the end of TVbroadcasting back in the day.
Listening to the paper is not a given.
(14:19):
One can argue that the drawing, these writings for oneself,
Eigenschrifton, are the meeting point between the paper, the
pastels, and the personal memoryof writing and reading, of
shedding the love of words, the love of the beautiful phrase,
the enchanting sound of verses rhyming, the love for
literature. Like On Kowara, Blank had gone
(14:42):
through a traumatic war as a child, as an inheritance of a
generation before her. Like him, she chose another
language to live in. On Kowara was Japanese and moved
to New York in 1965 and focused on the medium, the conventions
of time. For him, the shape of the book,
for her as a tool that had to bedeconstructed.
(15:05):
My work is a book whose pages are scattered and cannot come
back together again, she told uswhen she moved to Milan, Paper
met information and civilization, the outer world.
She started placing a fine tracing paper on everything she
read and transcribed it painstakingly.
She covered words with the drawing material, which
(15:26):
extracted, as it were, the shape, the system, the structure
of organized information. The series is called
Rascrezzioni Transcription, but it's more than that.
The paper became a transitional device from a verbal sign to an
index, one of those signs that exist because the material that
(15:50):
reveals them is affected by the sign itself.
A footprint, an analogue photograph.
The shiver. The words became marks, which is
to say an encounter between two bodies.
She also made books with the same calligraphy over the real
books she read. But she also deconstructed
(16:10):
newspapers in an effort of producing real communication.
She plays her trascritzioni works on newspaper kiosks and
other ads in the street. Paradoxically, listening to the
paper was silencing the page. She looked for silence.
The true form of communication, where energy, love,
(16:31):
concentration, focus sits with blank paper, is the language of
audible silence. In the bookshop in Milano, Blank
read one of her transcricioni books.
Her mouth closed, her lips are moving, humming.
I say this is a paradox because it was at this time that she
(16:53):
realized, while sitting alone inher kitchen, that the paper
being drawn on produced a sound.It seemed to speak its own
language of receptacle or container of medium.
The medium was not hiding anymore.
It became loud so as to celebrate contact rather than
the personal experience of reading this or that book,
(17:15):
rather than personal preference.Edema never said what books she
transcribed. As much as I insisted she
resisted. We never knew she produced her
own books. Spaces of silence where words
disappeared to make space for the cellulose, the ink, the
folds, the pages like little screens.
(17:37):
The book as the first mobile phone, the first metaverse.
The reality of the infinite folds of imagination.
After she'd lost her husband, Blank took to making thick lines
over some of his mathematical books by a process of osmosis,
the magical formula of love, which is a form of loss, The
(18:00):
page was now the absent body, the place of a new form of
silence. Through a process of crossing
out and making thick lines, she journeyed to Deep Blue and to a
correspondence between her soul.There is her breath and the
line. Breathing in, she dipped the
(18:23):
brush in the paint. Breathing out, she produced 1
blue line until there was no more air to exhale.
And again and again and again. From language to writing to book
to drawing to paper to voice to line to breath.
(18:47):
The body as a medium, the paper as body.
At the turn of the century, as many artists from her generation
Blank saw, the information, communication and data were
connected. But her focus was on what
communication would become once the world established itself as
(19:08):
a global net across the world. Thus she started a new series
called Global Writings, Moving Away from Paper.
It seemed that paper, after all,was a personal affair, a diary,
a skin, a body. Not unlike the world around her.
Blank was local, a mixture of local and global.
(19:28):
She was a polyglot. She had several worlds LED in
her through language. So she devised a new one with
eight consonants. CDHJLMR&T and proceeded to
produce works with it. She wanted to create a language
which would sound completely alien.
(20:17):
She worked on this series and another previous one on the
computer, moving away from paper.
She was now using a virtual space that was not mediated by
paper. The hands tapped rather than
dance on the paper. The material was plastic, all
(20:37):
polymer rather than cellulose orany of the surface reacting like
paper to the touch. So, unhappy with the silent and
cold body, Blank vigorously wentback to the space of the paper.
This body and skin she had now discovered as an entity with
which to collaborate. So she produced the series
(20:59):
Avantesto. Avantesto were also made in
polyester, which is probably here as a sort of hyper paper,
as she was eager to use her whole body, her two hands
grabbing as many Biro pens as she could to produce a vibration
enacting the sound of its making.
(21:27):
Blank is part of a generation ofartists who created the simple
system based on the philosophy of mark making as an existential
collaboration between signifyingbodies.
Her path is of a rigorous devotion to silence as
communication and paper as it's ancient technology, perhaps one
of the most minimal of her time.Many moons ago, I was talking to
(21:54):
an artist on the phone. I lived in Paris then, and so
did this artist. Suddenly he interrupted the
conversation and asked me if there was a thunderstorm in my
neighborhood. And how strange that it was so
sunny back where he lived. In fact, this was not a
meteorological phenomenon. It was my husband drawing at the
(22:16):
time. He took thick, white, large
expanses of paper and spent longhours marking it with folds,
closing and opening flaps of paper, then folding it again.
Opening, closing, folding. The paper started to take the
shape of a strange container, then a more geometric form, and
then after a considerable amountof time, it became a perfect
(22:38):
cube of about 80 centimeters. As soon as the paper had taken
this new shape, he placed graphite chunks inside through
one of the edges. As soon as these grey and greasy
bits of matter were trapped inside, he would apply pH
neutral tape on all edges of thecube and proceed to shake it.
(22:58):
The cube would go up and down, left and right, or more
elegantly, in circles. The graphite chunks were
painstakingly moved around so asto touch the paper.
While holding this enormous cube, he imagined the trajectory
of the graphite bits and tried to control the remains of their
bodies, becoming traces on the paper.
(23:19):
The graphite bits were now graphite beads.
The movement of the cubes scrubbed the matter away from
all sides, turning them into spheres.
Little planets moving about in asort of mark, making Big Bang.
This operation was noisy. First the paper being folded and
unfolded, then after a while, the heavy breathing of his body,
(23:40):
kneeling, crouching, grabbing, folding, trying to collaborate
with the paper, and the paper finally yielding to the extent
of its properties. Then came the sound part of the
process, the shaking and rubbingof the graphite on the internal
side of the paper cube. It was a roaring sound that made
me think of 1000 Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels, but also
(24:05):
of the explosive discharge of heat after lightning in a storm.
No one talks about the sound of drawing, he once told me,
echoing what was going on in my mind and foreshadowing this day,
the 16th of April 2025, in my own house, in my studio, where
(24:27):
we're both around in the house, representing somehow the ancient
avant-garde, objective, symbolic, political,
sustainable, social and literal language of paper.
This episode was recorded on the16th of April 2025, two years
(24:51):
and two days after EMS passing. For this episode I've had the
assistance of the Artist Galleryin Bologna, Italy.
P420A. Big thanks to Alessandro,
Fabrizio, Chiara and Vanya for their attention to detail, not
only for this episode but also for the exhibitions, the visits
(25:12):
to Edema's house. And finally, a huge thank you to
Irma's children, namely the relentless Rosanna, who unveiled
so many things about her mother's practice and supported
her work at a late stage of her life, managing the visits to the
studio and the work. The music of the episode is by
Satan and the text was written by me.
(25:33):
It's an excerpt of a lecture given on the 3rd of February
2025 at ABK Stuttgart, whose title was The Paper is
Impatient, under the invitation of the drawing department and
their teachers Catherine Trevor and Hannah Henan Kemper.
The sounds were recordings of Edema's works, so the sounds of
(25:56):
the making of Edema Blanc's Eigen, Shifton, Radical
Writings, Avantesto, Hypertext and Hatch Clear.
If you're here, you're probably enjoying the episode, so if you
think someone else might enjoy it too, by all means, share it.
(26:18):
Don't forget to rate and follow exhibitionistas.
It seems trivial, but it can make a difference.
All kinds of support count and contribute to more investigation
and better episodes. So of course, donations and
memberships through our website or on Sub Stack are very
welcome. All the links are on the show's
notes as per usual. And thank you to all of those
(26:42):
who've taken the leap of faith and have become our patrons.
From a five star review to a substantial donation
exhibitionist. This considers you one of those
rare unicorns who support independent journalism.
Now something a bit different. I'd also love to start a
conversation with you. You can now leave comments on
Spotify, which is a great way toknow what you want more of, or
(27:05):
if you'd like to add something to the topic developed, the
artist discussed, or simply if you want to leave a note of
appreciation. It's a sad world when only the
trolls and the bullies interact with journalists and art
critics. Let's feed the AI beast with
good stuff. Why not bring ositivity ideas
(27:25):
and especially your own perspective to the Digital Art
Village?
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