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Palimpsest (2005) is a set of new drawing works by Jordan McKenzie presented at the Studio 1.1 Gallery, London. The exhibition interrogated the relationship of drawing to performance. McKenzie’s practice over the last five years has investigated the notion of drawing as a performative act seeking to explore the ways in which mark making can describe an architectonics of the body and the spaces it occupies: physically, culturally and in terms of gender. Recent work has involved revisiting art history, specifically Minimalism, in order to re-evaluate its relationship to the artist's own body. Palimpsest uses as a starting point Art and Objecthood, an essay written by Michael Fried whereby Fried provides a critique of Minimalism and its ‘theatrical’ and ‘literalist’ tendencies, attacking it for not conforming to the fullness and presence of Modernist art. McKenzie takes Fried’s essay and painstakingly copies it out by hand onto one page, arranging it into formal patterns. This process not only is a way of looking at the relationship between doing, thinking and writing, but also reclaims Fried’s critique, rendering the essay itself theatrical and performative. |
