Assignment:
Please observe the models carefully as in a drawing class and memorize everything to the extent that would allow you to recreate their image later on!
Methodology/description/concept:
Life drawing from a live model is one of the historically most established academic formats of art training. One of its methods is the memory drawing in which the students in the first phase are requested to analyze and memorize the life model, and in the second one – later on, in the absence of the model – to create a depiction of it.
We addressed the participants with such an assignment while interrupting the process in the middle, before the second phase, ensuring thus, that only the analysis and memorization takes place, no depictions were made.
The exercise served as a series of metaphors to offer a ground for a moderated informal discussion on how the artistic attention might be shifting in the context of artistic research: departing from the observation of reality, through a structured intellectual and mediated analysis (laboratory) to the status of being a subject of observation – ultimately by our reflective self.
In took place in three phases, observation of:
a. …two models in a tableau vivant-like arrangement. 10 min
b. …two nude models. 10 min
c. …the observer. Splitting the group in two, the participants observing each other in pairs, then taking rounds. 2×10 min
