Natural Artifice

Paola Catizone

a study of the relationships and discordances between drawing, performance and video art

Kirstin Simpson

The recent exhibition by Paola Catizone at the SOMA gallery in

Waterford is part of a continuum of work by the artist deploying

durational performance, movement and dance together with trance

music to create abstract drawings. The work also includes

sculptural and video elements. Collaboration plays an ongoing and

central role in Catizone’s work, particularly in performance,

where a dialogue with dancers and DJ’s underlies her practice.

Some of the earlier works included in the exhibition are large

circular drawings composed of energetic lines and strokes,

developed performatively over a number of hours, during which the

artist stands very close to wall-mounted paper clutching a number

of mark-making implements in each hand. The physical limits of

the drawings, therefore, are controlled by the natural circular

span of the artist with two arms outstretched.

The compelling effect of the resulting drawings seems to

reflect hidden impulses and energies in the subconscious –

strange bipartite fields of marks with intensities in certain

areas that might be interpreted as areas of the brain lighting

up in involuntary response to the music or, perhaps, the parts

of the brain activated in trance or even, more simply, the

capacities and limits of the body engaged in an exhausting

activity of a repetitive nature. Reference to the brain may be

incidental, or it may demonstrate as elaborated later, the

extension of ‘thinking’ into the body, that is, the embodied

nature of thought.

In these pieces, the

tangible result emerges

and evolves through a set

of parameters – the paper,

its vertical positioning,

the music, the duration,

the artist’s chosen limits

in terms of permissible

movement and drawing

implements.

Comparing one spontaneous drawing with another, an aspect of

mood and temperament enter the frame – moments in time

expressed in gesture – the translation into drawing of a body-

language that is pre-linguistic. Catizone speaks about drawing

from the body, not the eye and ‘seeking to go beyond our tired

everyday perceptions.’ In these terms, one brings to mind the

endeavors of Paul Cezanne to strip himself of inherited or

learned ways of seeing. Seeking to revert to a pre-linguistic,

untutored self in order to achieve a more complete vision – an

embodied vision. Merleau-Ponty explores and dissects embodied

vision in his essay ‘Eye and Mind’ (1964). Since we are ‘in the

world’ we do not regard the world from the outside, as

suggested by geometric perspective - our body is implicated in

all we see.

For Merleau-Ponty, the body is interface between perceiving

mind and physical world. He contests, in this way, the

inheritance from the Renaissance of the constructed perspective

which creates forever a viewer external to the scene in

question and he sees in the work of Cezanne an attempt to

overcome this exteriority. The constructed perspective, he

says, is just another convention, as flawed as any other; there

is no such thing as ‘depth,’ but only another width. We are not

static – even the eye has to move to see and in any case, we

move to negotiate and understand the world.

Catizone’s methods are, of course, very different from those of

Cezanne. She is very specific about the role of drawing, as

opposed to painting in her work. Drawing creates marks of a

vulnerable, always contingent nature, maintaining an important

transparency between the inhabited, physical world and the

realm of the drawing, never seeking to create an ‘alternate’

world. Catizone does not produce representations in her

drawings but something more akin to the experience, albeit a

heightened one, of being embodied in the world. Through

durational performance, moreover, we have the possibility of

accompanying her into the realm of altered consciousness – into

the place of ‘flow’ or complete absorption where we, too, might

experience a shift in the tired everyday assumptions. In

reference to the experience of performance art, Catizone says:

‘According to Coogan and to Milhalyi, flow is a state of deep

absorption akin to ecstasy and to the buddhist Jana, during

which the sense of time is lost and only the task at hand is

held in mind.’

Catizone speaks about ‘breaking through’ our usual ways of

seeing ‘if it is only a set of marks that have escaped the

habitual tyranny of thinking and seeing….seek[ing] to shatter

and fragment the habitual perception of reality.’ The practice

is durational as it is only through extended time we can defeat

our usual ways of thinking. Also, over time, there is something

of the shamanistic spanning between two worlds. We might say,

alternatively, it is an opening up of receptiveness to the

reality of this world, to which we are more generally closed.

The vantage point for her drawings, Catizone says is ‘inside

the image’ and only partially visible in the making. This seems

an apt metaphor for Merleau-Ponty’s ‘intertwining’ in which we,

in any case, never see from outside. Merleau-Ponty says we do

not just act upon the world but the world makes demands of us.

These durational pieces are reciprocal – as the work on paper

emerges, the body too becomes marked, internally and

externally, bearing traces of effort and exertion.

The drawings work on different levels. Up close, we see in the

scrapings, scribbles and smudges, vigorous movements,

pressures, footprints, handprints, frailty of endeavor. From

further away, we see the very extents of limbs in creating

action – a transference of three-dimensional movement in space

onto a two-dimensional surface.

Other drawings in the

exhibition have been

created in a more

conscious way, with

circumspection and an

eye to composition,

albeit remaining

anchored in a sense of body and movement. The artist speaks

about an interplay between the conscious and subconscious and

certain of these pieces bring to mind the work of Kandinsky –

where the gestural stroke is imbued with an emotion and

contains a sense of coded meaning. In places, there are lines

that repeatedly follow the same path, yet here the embodied

becomes less dominant and rather seems to spill over into

obsessive thought or emotion.

A number of much smaller pieces also punctuate the exhibition.

Compositionally, they provide contrast within the gallery, as

well as areas of open space that offer a reprieve from the

large, immersive drawings. Once again, the body of the viewer

is implicated by the compunction to move towards or away from

the works. ‘Scale can allow for immersion or objective

detachment,’ says Catizone. She plays with these perceptual

qualities, she says, ‘using the gallery space to create an

environment within which disparity of scale, media and

materials (plastic/paper/natural objects/video/performance),

vie for the viewer’s attention. The title Natural Artifice derives

from this juxtaposition of the natural and direct with the

synthetic and mediated.’

‘Organic and plastic,

slowly crafted work and

quick gestural pieces

create tension. I

refuse to attempt to

create a forced harmony

or consistency of what

is in fact a practice

based on a fractured awareness.’

As with all performance art, Catizone must grapple with the

documentation of her live work and its status within her

practice. In her recent work, there is always some tangible

record of the performances – mostly in the form of the

resultant drawings as well as video documentation. Catizone

integrates this video documentation into the body of her work,

presenting it in the gallery space alongside finished drawn

pieces. She regards it as offering another mode of reception

and points out that her work is enriched in this way, where a

more detailed or repeated viewing of a performance is possible.

‘Video recording of live performance can result in image making

that can hold its own potency. While witnessing a performance

in real time can allow for an empathy with the performer,

viewing it again on video offers a detailed and total view of

the event.’

A huge drawing on plastic (7x2 metres)

is one of the more consciously created

piece and this, in turn, becomes

sculptural as its relative robustness

as well as sheer size and its

flexibility allow it to be mounted in a

three-dimensional manner, requiring the

visitor, once again, to move in and

around it and to engage physically. It can assume various forms

and each of these is documented by the artist and assimilated

into her body of work.

The performance piece, which took place on the opening night of

the SOMA exhibition appears to have evolved more directly, in a

number of ways, from the earlier ‘circular’ drawings. Here, the

parameters were a choreographed movement piece, developed in

collaboration with Fiona Quilligan and performed by Catizone

and Quilligan, music selected and provided by Nigel Woods and a

drawing surface which was a strip of paper on the floor along

which the two performers moved, often in a supine manner with a

combination of improvised and pre-determined gestures, each

making marks with both hands. This time, the bodily movements

are more elaborate, flowing and developed,

yet the resulting drawing emerges, once

again, as a product of pre-determined

parameters and without conscious

‘deliberation’. If the early circular

pieces are ‘evidence’ of a durational

event, this time we have more the feeling

of a ‘mapping,’ of movements that are more

planned, choreographed and chronological.

A sculptural element returns as a conclusion to the performance

piece as the large resulting drawing is folded and becomes a

three-dimensional object. In a wonderfully cyclical act, the

spatiality of bodily movement, which has been traced or

‘mapped’ 2-dimensionally becomes spatial once again – acquiring

a presence as a 3-dimensional object. The mapped gestures thus

become distorted, suggesting the bending of space - the

physically impossible.

The performance of this work – the

languorous, seductive and compelling

movements of the performers

interspersed with frenetic ‘drawing

motions’ brings to mind one of

Catizone’s stated influences, Rebecca Horn. Here, however,

instead of machines producing human-type actions that create

marks, humans perform machinic actions with similarly seeming

‘arbitrary’ or incidental results.

The drawings resulting from these processes appear to tap into

some unseen mystery that is both personal and universal. There

is an audience and there is a performance, yet in the

exploration of the body, its capacities and limits – we join in

the ‘universal.’

Catizone speaks about becoming ‘the conduit for this non-

personal truth.’ In Zen terms, says Catizone, ‘the small mind

seeks to expand into larger mind.’

Whilst it is useful, in Catizone’s work, to refer to Merleau-

Ponty and his commitment to pre-linguistic body and mind

integration, Merleau-Ponty insists upon the attachment of every

perception to an intention. Consciousness, for Merleau-Ponty,

is always consciousness of something and that something will

always be a tangible entity. Since perception is intertwined

with movement, all movement becomes purposeful. Alfonso Lingis,

a proponent as well as a critic of Merleau-Ponty, points out

that most of our movements are without specific purpose –

pacing, fidgeting and so on. Excessive energy and movement,

then, is an extension of what we are as embodied entities and

perhaps reflects our resonance with multiplicities and rhythms

in the world around us. In this way, he also embraces the

concept of ‘raw sensation,’ which is not attached to an object.

Alphonso Lingis, by contrast with Merleau-Ponty, celebrates

sensory perception as providing the possibility of the

indiscernible - an openness to that which is not pre-

determined, where we find the possibility of a deeper access to

the world.

In terms of Catizone, then, we might regard the seemingly

meaningless (in her words) movement and drawing, as an

expression, once again, of our universal embodied nature

and therefore - albeit elegant or agile – universal and

identifiable for all.

Catizone talks about this large-scale body drawing as being

perhaps more akin to touching than seeing and indeed pushing

out to the extents of the body – the body pushes against a

mark-making surface and the surface responds. As Merleau-Ponty

says, it is not only the body that acts upon the world but the

world responds, makes demands. This acting of environment upon

us is evident, as we have seen, in the different scales of

works in the exhibition – the small drawings bring one close –

the large ones are viewable from a distance – although the

intensity of line draws one close again – moving towards and

away from the walls as we do from a source of sound.

‘Large scale places the imaginative realm around us rather than

inside the body, where Christianity would have the soul reside.

This surrounding Anima Mundi includes us and connects us to all

things’ says Catizone. In this way Catizone’s work also topples

the hierarchical structure from the divine to human to animal

and inanimate in favour of a heterogeneous world of which we

are a part rather than over which we preside.

...‘Not as a window into the world but a device for

understanding our place in the universe’ (Dexter.E.2005.p5).

Catizone’s work elicits an empathic and embodied response both

in its performative creation and in the resultant works. As

stated by Arnold Berleant, aesthetic experience is embodied –

meaning the deployment of body and mind together. He speaks of

this experience both in the creation and reception of art.

More recently, the idea of empathic response has been

scientifically verified - we re-enact in our bodies that which

we witness – and if inured somewhat by overexposure to

electronic media, we are arguably heightened in our response to

the presence of a live acting body - its frailty and

vulnerability.

The sight of the body in motion, the hand at work is powerful

and so in Catizone’s work we have resonances not just with the

embodied but the very moment of engendering of the work. These

drawings are about the gesture itself – the act of movement –

essentially staying in that moment. Furthermore, where

performances are durational, we become more immersed over time.

It takes time to slough off everyday ways of perceiving, as

Catizone says, and this applies to the viewer as well as the

performer.

The existential and transcendent in Catizone’s work becomes

culturally and mythically embedded when she begins to speak

about weaving and making - pursuits that require patience and

are associated with traditional feminine activities. Waiting

and endurance also have connotations of healing and repairing

as well as maintaining or remaking universal connections – a

reference to the interconnection of everything, to networks

rather than hierarchies:

‘All of these actions share a repetitive insistence aimed not

at building in the daylight realm of reason but in the darkness

of the somatic and unconscious, in an effort that runs contrary

to common practical sense, working ‘contro natura.’’ Catizone.

Catizone taps into the realm of shadows - the place of

imagination and mystery disregarded by Cartesian dualism and in

modernism’s attachment to light, transparency and the rational.

This approach links to a political attitude underlying her

work. Catizone speaks of taking a stance against the all-

pervasive attitude of productive work and consumption,

stepping, instead, towards ritual and magic. Her work

represents ‘small actions of resistance against global

catastrophe.’ This is echoed in the writings of Jane Bennett

about ‘sensibility formation’ as a means of altering human

behavior, in the belief that coercion is ineffective. She too,

seeks to topple hierarchies, in her case of animate and

inanimate, instead speaking of the interconnectedness of

everything. When writing about the ethical and aesthetic turn

in political theory over the past twenty years, Bennett cites

feminist studies of the body and Foucault’s work on ‘care of

the self’ as highly influential. The understanding emerged that

knowledge or legislation alone would not modify behavior.

Theorists began to affirm, says Bennett, that which ‘Romantic

thinkers had long noted: if a set of moral principles is

actually to be lived out, the right mood or landscape of effect

has to be in place.’

‘There will be no greening of the economy, no redistribution of

wealth, no enforcement or extension of rights without human

dispositions, moods and cultural ensembles hospitable to these

effects.’

Appealing to the feminine principals mentioned above as well as

ideas of embodiment becomes more explicit in Catizone’s

forthcoming work.

In her performance as part

of her NCAD MFA final show,

(opening to the public on

the 13th of June at 7pm),

Catizone, in her own words

‘will enter the space of

performance as a solo

artist …[pushing]… her

practice of embodied

drawing further, with an ‘all body’ drawing process. Here she

will eschew not only the central role of the eye in art-making,

but also that of the painting/drawing hand; the hands and arms

and body become smeared and marked with the act and endeavor of

making. As with Natural Artifice, the relationship between

performance, drawing and video will once more be examined

through this new work. The performance will be repeated, and

developed nightly until the 20th of June.

Please note, the times of performances are as follows:

13th June – 7pm

16th June – 6pm

17th June – 6pm

18th June – 1.30 pm

19th June – 6pm

20th June – 6pm

The show will continue until the 22nd of June and Catizone’s

video and installation will be on display until then, together

with the work of 25 emerging Dublin-based artists.

MFA Exhibition, 13th to 22nd of June, 2014, Emmet House (Across

from Arthur’s Pub), Thomas Street, Dublin 8

References:

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. DukeUniversity Press

Berleant, A. (2003) Aesthetic Embodiment paper given at the meeting ofthe American Philosophical Association Boston MA December 2003 accessed at www.autograff.com

Carman, T. (1999) The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. PhilosophicalTopics Vol. 27. No.2. Fall 1999

Catizone, P. Questions on the Present Moment in Performance and Video

Art (2014)

Catizone, P. Drawing Limits (2014)

Lingis, A. (2009) The Inner Experience of our Body. Discussion notes on Merleau-Ponty. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol.40, No.1, January 2009

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) Cezanne’s Doubt in Toadvine, T., Lawlor, L.,(Ed.)(2007) The Merleau- Ponty Reader. Northwestern University Press accessed at www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. Originally published as Phenomenologie de la perception (1945) Gallimard, Paris

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Eye and Mind in Toadvine, T., Lawlor, L.,(Ed.)(2007) The Merleau- Ponty Reader. Northwestern University Press accessed at www.nupress.northwestern.edu (original 1961)

F.David Peat (n.d.) speaking on ‘youtube’ video David Peat 1 uploaded by arcomanu (n.d.) accessed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiAz8MICUj0&feature=related on 25-9-11

Note: All photographs are courtesy of the artist.