Introduction

Since 1990, Angela Bulloch has constructed eleven drawing machines, or rather ten machines in eleven incarnations, as the first drawing machine Blue Horizons (1990) was transformed into the second drawing machine Blue Horizons II (1990).

Although all drawing machines share certain characteristics, each one differs in crucial details. As the name of the series suggests, each work automates a drawing process through the construction of an armature that is able to move a drawing implement across a flat surface.

All drawing machines are wall-mounted and usually determine their size according to the wall they were originally conceived for. Their basic design follows a square or rectangular field either directly on the wall or on a wall-mounted support, and the drawing is usually a grid-based line drawing with predominantly vertical and horizontal straight lines. Deviations are usually caused by shifts in direction, although some drawing machines follow different individual patterns and drawing forms. For all drawing machines the act of drawing is largely pre-determined but each machine allows for interference either through audience participation, other forms of outside stimulation such as a sound source, or shifting variants entered at certain moments (through reset, at switch-on, etc.).

Besides issues of interactivity and participation, which have traditionally been attributed to much of the work of Bulloch’s generation under the label “Relational Aesthetics” it has to be asked how these drawing machines relate to the histories and traditions of the discipline they carry in the generic title of the series, drawing. Drawing, as an art form, an activity, and a tradition, is an elementary force, and has over time, and in different contexts, been subjected to different definitions and applications. First and foremost, we might consider drawing a line-based practice, the process by which forms originate from the gentle contact of pen or pencil on a sheet of paper. Drawing, it is often said, provides the most direct connection between the mind and the hand, between the expressive body and an expressed idea. (...) Drawing is the first art, the first mark. But drawing is also design, imagination, invention. Bernice Rose traced the development of drawing in this duality; on the one hand, disegno is an activity of ideation, that is, of bringing into the world an image of an intellectually conceived design. This resolutely intellectual understanding of the medium is countered on the other hand by an equally historic concept of drawing as “an autographic (indeed biographical) revelation, presenting the artist’s first and most intimate and confessional marks.” (...)

But drawing also has a tradition in emphasizing the act of making, of "drawing as process". “I don’t make drawings, I draw”, Richard Serra famously said, further distilling his point into the dictum that “drawing is a verb.” (...) There is yet another tradition of drawing, with possibly larger implications than the narrow confines of drawing as an artform. This is the tradition of industry, of drawing as a technical medium, a common language of rationality, intimately intertwined with the emergent industrial culture of the late nineteenth century. (...) This tradition, lead directly to Picabia’s machine drawings and Duchamp’s provocations of the Large Glass, his Roto-Reliefs and other works that are ‘not art.’ (...) Drawing here is a series of principles and formal rules, a language of art and industry.

All three aspects of drawings—the intimate line, the procedures of material experimentation, and the technical precision of the language of industry—have in one way or another found their expression in the art of the avantgardes, each at times taking the lead depending on the shifting fashions of time and place. Each of them can be grounded back into aspects of the physical, of the hand and spirit of the maker, into the resolute matter of the raw materials used to create it, and into the concrete stuff of reality that it helps to produce. And each of these traditions—most obviously the technical and procedural, but even the intimate and diaristic—come to bear in Bulloch’s drawing machines; in different measures, and with different consequences, but operative nonetheless.

Christian Rattemeyer