Page 8 - Michael Ginsborg: Field Notes

to look at them one at a time, even though as a series, their pace, the
movement between them, is compelling. They project into the future,
whilst receding into the past. Do they offer us a diary? Of a year (there
are 52, after all)? A lifetime? In truth I want to own one and live with it,
to pass it daily, to continually return to it. The gallery encounter, where
the eye circles the paper engaged with deciphering and figuring,
seems only half the story. I’d prefer to inhabit the drawing over time.
Only by returning time and again to a full exploration of its surfaces
and its vagaries might it be possible to understand the fine, but crucial,
distinctions that Michael makes, expertly and economically. In the
encounter with every mark, shape, surface, there is a sense of a very
particular mind at work, that the viewer begins to recognise in the way
a habitual crossworder gets insight into the mind of the puzzle’s setter.
Michael knows, and the viewer senses, which type of juxtaposition
or connection on the paper’s surface is deemed acceptable and which
is not. (Those that are not can be cut away by the artist’s skilful surgical
blade and the surface reinstated). The rules of engagement are delicate
yet powerful, because it is in these precise decisions the intellect, hand
and eye inculcate us into a philosophy of dimensional relation.
Duchamp, an artist I see evoked in this work, explains it thus,
‘. . . So, we have the three dimensions of space and one of time.
But in one dimension, a line, there is also time . . . So, my conten -
tion is that the fourth dimension is not the temporal one. Meaning
that you can consider objects having four dimen sions. But what
sense have we got to feel it? Because with our eyes we only see
two dimen sions. We have three dimensions with a sense of touch.
So, I thought that the only sense we have that could help get
a physical notion of a four-dimensional object would be touch
again. Because to understand something in four dimensions,
concep tually speaking, would amount to seeing around an object
without having to move: to feel around it.
(Tompkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews, 2013)

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