Bob Law : Online exhibition documentation

On the Road to Nothing and Nowhere
by Douglas Fogle

This is a story about nothing. Or more precisely, about the paradoxical process whereby nothing can in fact become something. It begins with a piece of paper and an eraser. The year is 1953 and a young Robert Rauschenberg has just returned to New York from an eight-month-long-trip to Italy and North Africa with his friend Cy Twombly. Getting back to work in the wake of his White Paintings (1951) and Black Paintings (1951-53), Rauschenberg looked for a way to extend what he called ‘the monochrome no-image’ into the realm of drawing. He came upon the idea of erasure as a continuation of his search for a zero degree of artistic production. After ruling out the idea of erasing one of his own works, Rauschenberg approached the more senior artist, Willem de Kooning, in order to obtain a drawing that he might use in his aesthetic experiment. After extracting a drawing from the reluctant artist, Rauschenberg began the laborious process of using a large number of erasers to remove de Kooning’s crayon markings from the surface of the sheet of paper. 

Famously, John Cage emphasised this aspect of Rauschenberg's work in 1961 by referring to the painter's White Paintings (which he had much admired when Rauschenberg produced them in summer 1951 at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC) as 'airports for lights, shadows, and particles'. In this sense, the matte monochrome uniformity of Rauschenberg's white panels, devoid of any kind of painterly effect, created a kind of receptive nothingness that in Cage's mind allowed them to become landing sites for all kinds of enunciative phenomena.

These mute projection screens would play the same role as Cage's revolutionary score for his work 4' 33'' (1952), in which three completely silent musical movements allow the world to make its own ambient music. In both of these historically pivotalworks, the artists deployed their reductive aesthetic structures in order to frame the plenitude of the world around us. In doing so, they ushered in a revolution of meaningful nothingness that went far beyond the confines of the New York art world.

The irony of Fyfe Robertson's 'everyman' critique of Law's participation in the Hayward Annual: Current British Art at the Hayward Gallery, London, was the populist television critic's inability to see that Law's 'road to nothing and nowhere' was in fact a path marked by the artist's fervent desire to produce something and to get somewhere – albeit with a reductive set of means. Law was a searcher who was not only trying to find his way in the world of contemporary art but was also attempting to orient and ground himself in the world at large. In his earliest extant works such as his Field drawings, for example, the artist threw himself into the countryside around St Ives with the task of locating himself physically and psychically in the world around him, without resorting to the clichéd conventions of traditional figurative representation or the genre of landscape painting.

As Law put it in a conversation with the critic Richard Cork in 1974:

The early Field drawings were about the position of myself on the face of the earth and the environmental conditions around me: the position of the sun, the moon and the stars, the direction of the wind, the way in which the trees grew, an awareness of nature's elements, an awareness of nature itself and my position in nature on earth in a particular position in time. I was finding myself, and the map that went with myself. I was transcribing it graphically into charts.

Having rejected his own earlier and more conventionally figurative landscape drawings, Law set out in 1958 to clear the ground by employing a new economy of representational means that were notational – almost hieroglyphic – markers of his phenomenological position in space and time. In order to situate himself within the landscape of the natural world around him through the practice of drawing, he developed a set of highly reductive and formally coded ideograms that he would use repeatedly to denote the sun, the moon, clouds and trees.

Comparable to the compulsively repetitive and highly personal drawn notations of Conceptual artists of the 1960s – such as Hanne Darboven, whose signature collection of linear constructions of numbers, lines and markings would cover pages of graph paper in an attempt to systematically record the passage of time – Law would execute tens of these Field drawings each day, after which he would ruthlessly edit his output and resolve upon a handful of finished works.

While Darboven called herself a writer rather than an artist or a draughtsman, Law would similarly attempt to trace his movement through space and time with his own idiosyncratic graphic vocabulary.

Some of these drawings included obviously erased and worked-over lines, emphasising a certain ephemeral quality to his observations as if to give a knowing nod to the constantly shifting motion of the natural forces surrounding us. With their seemingly provisional execution and their serial production, Law's Field drawings were both acknowledging the transient nature of the world that we inhabit while also celebrating the profound uncertainty that this transience engendered. 

In this case, the something that is called into being is the direct result of the all too human movements of the artist's hand – or what he refers to as the artist's 'imprint' – which he attributes to the foundational moment of artistic endeavour. ln the case of Law's 'open' drawings, his graphite boundary would become a framing device comparable to the open structure of Cage's score for 4' 33''. 

Within the confines of Law's lines, as with the delineating structure of Cage's three silent movements, worlds full of multiple possibilities would emerge. This is the revolution of nothingness giving birth to a new way of seeing that did not involve representing the world but rather allowing the world to imprint itself on our individual and collective consciousness. What is contained within the boundaries of Law's lines in his 'open' drawings, or within the silent structure of Cage's composition, was not a cynical or ironic rejection of the experience of the viewer but rather a deepening of vision in a call for a new kind of perceptual openness.

Standing in symbiotic relationship to Law's 'open' drawings was another group of simultaneously produced works known as his 'closed' or ‘black’ drawings. In these works, the same irregular linear line following the contours of the inside edge of the paper would define a field that would be completely filled with dense and feverishly rendered cross-hatched pencil marks.

Day after day he would paint his canvases with perfectly flat monochrome coats of violet, blue, indigo, purple and black – letting each one fully dry before moving on to the next. This meticulous reapplication of paint was reminiscent of geological sedimentation. Sitting one on top of the other, these painterly strata would come together to create highly complicated and richly populated versions of the colour black, giving a startlingly evocative texture and multivocal quality to the purported nothingness of the void.

Although Law would go on to produce many other series of works over the course of his nearly five-decade career, it is instructive to note that this play between lightness and darkness, something and nothing, being and the void – that was already at work in his earlier drawings – would find its continuation and culmination in a series of 14 large canvases grouped under the titles Mister Paranoia and Nothing to be Afraid of, that the artist completed between 1969 and 1972. The irregular rhomboidal framing lines that first appeared in his Field Drawings – which went on to define the surfaces of his 'open' and 'closed' drawings – would then migrate onto the surfaces of these paintings, defining the picture frame along with a handwritten date in the lower right-hand corner. Rendered at first with a laundry marker and then subsequently with oil paint on canvas, their scale seems to be monumental: a colossal shift up from the intimacy of his drawings. These are indeed extremely large canvases that dwarf the viewer. What is striking about them though is that there is an endearing humility in their execution that undermines any kind of heroic reading of the works.

In Mister Paranoia IV 20.11.70 (No. 95) (1970), for example, its expansive dimensions (240 x 418 cm) suggest not so much a painting as a portal that could physically engulf the viewer, offering a passage to another space. time or dimension. All the while, however, these works radiate a decidedly human modesty with their assertive celebration of the handmade quality of their rendering.

Biography

Considered amongst the founders of British Minimalism, Bob Law's work defies easy categorisation and ranges across drawing, painting and sculpture that retains a firm yet always uneasy embrace of pure abstraction. As opposed to the New York-based minimalist artists, Law's practice drew on his engagement with the English landscape and his esoteric range of interests.

Championed by the critic Lawrence Alloway, whom he met while in Cornwall, Law exhibited with Peter Hobbs in Two Young British Painters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1960). There followed one-man shows at some of the most prestigious galleries across Europe, including Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf, Germany (1970) and the increasingly influential Lisson Gallery, London, England (1971). Major institutional solo exhibitions include 10 Black Paintings 1965-70, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England (1974); Bob Law: Paintings and Drawings 1959-1978, Whitechapel Gallery, London, England, curated by Nicholas Serota (1978); and Bob Law: Drawings, Sculpture and Paintings, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, UK, which travelled to Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, England (1999). Recent group exhibitions include Assorted Paper, The Sunday Painter, London, England (2017); Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2015); Abstract Drawing, curated by Richard Deacon, Drawing Room, London, England (2014); A House of Leaves, curated by Vincent Honoré, at DRAF, London, England (2013). His work is included in numerous private and public collections throughout the world, including Tate, London, England; the British Museum, London, England; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Neetherlands; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy, amongst others.