Page 5 - Michael Ginsborg: Field Notes

The Subtle Knife

Michael Ginsborg’s Field Notes

In conversation Michael Ginsborg says that his recently produced Field
Note drawings aren’t intellectual. By this I take him to mean two things.
Firstly, that they primarily evoke visual-haptic sensations and secondly
that he is not, as such, requiring them to convey a ‘message’ or finite
‘meaning’. Of course, I imagine that Michael knows very well they act
as intellectual propositions and also that, in many ways, this is their very
basis. He may be choosing a particular account for a purpose. He would
hate to overclaim. Michael is a modest man and his drawings are too.
Modest as in unassuming, not modest as in limited. It is true however,
that Michael’s drawings employ limited means, a rather beguiling
straightforwardness of process−two pieces of collage, snatched from
ubiquitous diagrams (Argos catalogues, 1970s manuals, etc, collected
over many years), joined through black lines and shapes, all on the same
21 x 12.5 cm paper. By starting with the kind of drawing we encounter
daily but rarely regard within an aesthetic context, Michael sets the ‘notes’
in the service of conveying information. However, if these are ‘working’
drawings, it might be worthwhile investigating what that work is and
where it resides. My hunch is that it is in the operations of the intellect.

Although small, the works have a grand spatial sweep, an implied multi-
dimensional construction, far beyond the discreet, pocket-sized note -
book from which they emerge. The relation between diagrams and
logic is established and complex (and, in truth, beyond my scope) but
interestingly, in axiomatic thinking, the visual properties of a diagram

Field Notes !, 4545, ink & collage on paper, 46 x 64.7 cm