Mara Goldberg 3 questions eng

A: For me, the consumption of time was the burn-up of the process, materialized by the drawing strata. This “épaisseur” was liberatory. The work was about doing, more than about achieving a graspable object-image. The task of copying generated a vertigo of ‘hyper’ involvement and a liberating feeling of dispossession. My intention was to produce in a detached way. To copy without thinking – automatic page covering – like filling disjointed forms in a coloring book. The eye-hand tool ingredients to feed the machine, the structure/frame, the stem diagrams, the syntax of chain repetition, all those things were planned. But the producing act went beyond the intentional and conceptual structure. It became an experience, a wandering. Repeating the same forms was similar to walking through a same place with different eyes. A switch from mental space to ‘real’ space. The Optic Nerve and Ruffini Ending close-ups were these objects, turned around into subjects with my own eye and hand, crystallizing the contradiction between detachment and over- involvement.

Q: What is the relation between this process and the result, and of perceiving the result?

A: There are multiple results: the visible matter which is the vehicle for what is not ‘traceable’, the experience – mine – as artist who processed the work and that of the person re-processing it visually and mentally.

The visual matter has two forms: the raw drawings and the book.

- the drawings (x 60) are result in sheer accumulated matter, in a pile, a stack or as wall block in a quantity measurable by number or thickness. The drawings are the result of the process, as a body, a whole corpus, but also as generator.

- the book “Optic Nerve and Ruffini Ending” as a printed object, a re-production in fluid linear form unifies the work into a new body. It’s a new form created by Studio Luc Derycke that erases the physical “matter” of the drawings and transforms the work, puts it into circulation and public visibility. My project does not identify with the book. It remains autonomous within the space 'Book' as it would in a ‘real’ space of rooms and corridors, but of course the two structures – the space 'Book' and the copy structure of the drawings – mingle to produce a new work.

The relation between process and result is not the objectified visual forms, not what is given to see, but the space, gap or delay from one drawing to the next. This delay took place in the act of doing the drawings. It has no form, it can happen now in viewing, I hope.

Q: Why are the 'later' loosing organic fluency with straighter and more crooked lines?

A: All drawings of the four series were done the same way, no detail left out, following an intuitive mechanical visual sweeping. No sketching but a repeated path from A to B, one same path throughout both Optic Nerve series and another same path through both Ruffini Ending series. Despite this identical frame, the copies developed into blacker, denser concentration of matter. The brain-machine obviously schematizes and separates, differentiating and re-connecting the known within the chaos of forms. There was re-cognition and adoption. Through this mental digestion the forms became subjectivized structures and sub-structures. So perhaps, the loss of ‘organic quality’ has to do with more ‘knowledge’. This mental logic is unplanned, uncontrolled and endless. It has the power to produce new forms, expanded into space and planes. It’s a tool for making art.

eng / fr