Contemporary drawing is one of art's best kept secrets: associated with sound, language and writing, it turns contemporary art into a meditative form of art-making engaging the spectator in a poetic and existential voyage.
Led by Blank's discovery of sound within the daily practice of drawing, this episode is a sonic wandering and a philosophical exploration of the artist's work, engaging with recent technological changes. How can a minimal and poetic practice face such specific issues? What is the role of the artist facing a global net of information which connects us as much as it separates us? And what is the value of communication – and of silence? Irma Blank has taught me that and much more.
The avant-gardes of the 1960s–70s were proliferous in innovative and minimal methods of creativity engaging the breath, the whole body and graphic deconstructions of language. Irma Blank was one of those artists with a subversive take on traditional artistic languages.
Have you ever wondered how artists and curators work together? This episode muses upon the relation between me, a young-ish curator and the artist Irma Blank, who'd reached the age of 80 when we met, along with my co-curator Johana Carrier.
This episode is an excerpt of a lecture given by me on the 3rd of February 2025 at ABK Stuttgart whose title was "The Paper is Impatient", under the invitation of the drawing department, and their teachers Katrin Ströbel and Hanna Hennenkemper.
The « drawing sounds » are excerpts of Irma Blank’s recordings of the sound of each series. For Radical Writings, she recorded herself, breathing in and out, because that was the basis of the image’s structure.
Music by Sarturn.
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For more information about the artist visit her gallery's website: P420, Bologna, Italy.
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If you enjoy Katy Hessel's The Great Women Artists Podcast, this episode is for you. It is centred around the artistic practice of female German artist Irma Blank, who never stopped producing her art, whether it was shown in prestigious events such as the Venice Biennale in 1977, or it wasn't, like when her Radical Writings on canvas were deemed a form of yielding to the 80s trend of the return to painting... whereas Blank was, on the contrary, more militant than ever for her elemental forms of the line and the minimal gesture by deeply engaging with the meditative breath in relation to the line and the colour blue, which for her represented infinity. Blank passed away in 2023, leaving a potent body of work whose incredible energy leaves no spectator or curator indifferent.
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I'm Joanna Pyroneves, your host, and this is exhibitionist this
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I'm an independent writer and curator with a wide-ranging 2
00:00:17
decades career in contemporary art, from commercial galleries
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to art fairs, from research to curating, from Lisbon to London
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through Paris. But when I'm asked what I do
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outside the out world, the inevitable reaction is, oh, I
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don't know anything about contemporary art.
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Ouch. So call it a midlife crisis,
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call it arrogance, but I gave myself the task of trying to
00:00:44
fill that gap with Co host conversation.
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Episodes centered around a genuine exchange of thoughts,
00:00:52
feelings and precious context around solo exhibitions,
00:00:57
interviews and special episodes based on a particular topic to
00:01:03
keep you alert and on your toes. If you want to read further into
00:01:07
some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can
00:01:11
also find me on Sub Stack under my name, Joanna Pyroneves.
00:01:20
Consider this episode as a surprise.
00:01:24
I like to work on smaller episodes when a topic feels
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right, and today is one of those days.
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Recently I was invited to talk about paper in a seminar at ABK
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Stuttgart, a Fine Arts university in Germany.
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It was an inaugural speech, so I wanted to do something
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different, perhaps a bit more performative.
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I've lived with paper for so many years, being married to an
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artist who uses it like a flat body, folding it, bending it,
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dabbing it with cement and graphite, adjusting his strength
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to the fragility of its slightly grainy material.
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Paper is what we write on, but I do prefer to write on a
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keyboard, looking at a screen. This back and forth between
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screens and sheets made me think of the German artist Edema
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Blanc. I Co curated her touring
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exhibition with my friend and colleague Joanna Carier, which
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led us to spend time with the artist in Milan interviewing
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her, finding out more and more about her and the works she had
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hardly shown during her lifetime, as well as those she
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was known for, at least in her hometown.
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Blanc passed away on the 14th of April 2023, so this episode is a
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homage to someone who came close to being a mentor, a notion she
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would have abort as much as I do.
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Imagine in the early 1960s, a German woman struggling to find
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her words in Italian. She's young, she's in Sicily and
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she's starting a new life with her mathematician lover.
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She's an artist who is as well read as she's obsessed with art
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making. Little by little the Italian
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language sinks in. She starts mastering it and
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communication expands beyond the home into the city, the shops,
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the beaches. She becomes bilingual and thus
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bicultural. But it's a two way St.
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She speaks and she's spoken to. There is finally communication.
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She verbalizes her thoughts and others respond.
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She welcomes another world into the world.
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She builds at home, home, city, island, country, language,
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culture, people. Then starts another process,
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much deeper and more unsettling. She finds out that there is a
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world of learnt words that mean things she doesn't know, or
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rather, that simply do not exist in her own language.
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New words in a new language reveal new sensations, new
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opinions, new structures and even new values.
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So slowly and somewhat painfully, she realises that,
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quote, there is no such thing as the right word, UN quote.
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For every language there is a cluster of secret compartments
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leading to unknown territories for those who don't speak it,
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but also, and more strikingly so, for those who learn it.
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So dads in Portuguese, awkward in English, Chun siqua in
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French, so many words that unlock different doors in the
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soul, that can potentially engorge the heart and create new
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ramifications of existence. The artist realized that
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expecting words to be precise, logical, equivalent with another
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word in another language is a futile exercise.
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Those objects she loved so much, books, did not have an exact
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correspondence in their Italian equivalent.
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Her Italian life would be solipsistic and untransmissible.
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There is no such thing as the right word.
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Humans were made to speak different languages so as not to
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come together and be greater than God.
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The Testament says Testament is legacy, but it's also a book
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written in Greek. And what if her children didn't
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learn the German language? If so, she would remain locked
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inside her own heart, a side of her that they would never
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understand. She would not be whole.
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This is the experience of the immigrant.
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There is a past that is dislocated, and its place is no
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longer accessible as life, only as intermittent experience at
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best. That's why books are so
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important. They contain a whole world
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inside them. But the woman discovered they
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could never be wholly transposed on to another place.
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The books were as much place as her home country and her
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language. Their pages carry the past that
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would be only hers and not understood by her new people.
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And what is understanding? Is it dependent upon
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communication? Is it the message, the
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messenger, or the air molecules pushed so as to make a sound,
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which becomes a word, Or the paper gathered in the
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rectangular shape and forming a book where each page forms the
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strange layered object filled with words?
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And what if you don't understand the words?
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Perhaps if the words are released of their function, one
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really starts listening to the page, feeling its gentle touch
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and connecting with its matter as a complex material and as a
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subtle machine, a medium. Meanwhile, in 1964, Marshall
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Mcluhan was publishing a text marking a new turn in the modern
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world by stating that the medium is the message.
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Using the example of electricity, he explained what
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the medium was. He was talking about the
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substratum, the surface, the thing that materializes images
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and texts, that renders visible, audible, constant.
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Even the medium is, he said, what causes the message to
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happen. So messages do not exist in
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limbo, waiting to be caught by a mediator, a device.
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Think of electricity as medium, McClure exemplified.
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Quote. Whether the light is being used
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for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of
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indifference. It could be argued that these
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activities are in some way the content of the electric light,
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since they could not exist without the electric light.
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This fact merely underlines the point that the medium is the
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message, because it is the medium that shapes and controls
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the scale and form of human association and action.
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UN quote. 20 years later, in 1986, Ursula K Le Guin would
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publish a text titled The Carrier Back Theory of Fiction
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where she speculated inspired by the feminist anthropology
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theorist Elizabeth Fisher. The human spent much more time
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carrying things than killing animals and making weapons to do
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so. In prehistory, A vessel might be
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a better characterization of the medium because it nuances the
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relationships within communication, the solidarity
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between the carried, the carrier, the carrying act, the
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sender and the recipient, but also the intentions behind each
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communication and the expectations.
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Perhaps the medium is not the message then.
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This famous saying, as seductive as it is, simplifies a more
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nuanced relationship between the writer, the page, the text and
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the reader. If we think of Le Guin, we can
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imagine prehistoric times like she did in her text, and
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contemplate hands meticulously and masterfully interlacing
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strands of Mulberry tree fibre, having fun with it, creating,
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discovering a material. But woven together these strands
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make a carrier or a bag. Together, these strands allowed
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one to carry things. Once the things were deposited
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in the Hut, apples, for example, no one would think of eating the
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carrier or the bag. One would eat the apples, one
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would eat the message. However, because the apples
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could be carried, ideas of stocking and fermenting
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flourished. Without the carrying, they would
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not have been possible. The medium effects reality
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behaviours. So the medium is a vessel that
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is not neutral. It has a material and a history,
00:10:57
but mostly it bears possibility. The medium is technology in the
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sense that it is a spark of invention through play once used
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to carry things, sign based messages or apples.
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It sparks novelty. But more importantly, Le Guin
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chose to focus on the carrier because it tells a different
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story and points to different characters.
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Rather than the story of violence, it recounts the story
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of patience, caring and invention.
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In a sense, this is what Mcluhan was saying as well, that we
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failed to recognise the carriers, the mediums, the
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vessels, the technologies that shape our messages and therefore
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our worlds. In the words of Donna Harroway,
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it matters what matters we use to think other matters with.
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It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.
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It matters what not, not with thoughts.
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Think thoughts with descriptions.
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Describe descriptions with ties, tie ties.
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It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make
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stories. Going back to the 60s in 1969 on
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Kowara would create a medium message based work.
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The sentence I'm still alive on the telegram.
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Basically, the telegram itself, regardless of text, told all of
00:12:21
on Koara's friends that he was alive there and then in that
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time and place. Marking in time and place with a
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photo or any recorded gesture is an existential proof.
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The sentence I'm still alive is what we call a tautology in
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logic, a pleonasm in rhetoric, and a good or a bad joke,
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depending upon your sense of humor.
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In day-to-day life, it points to the ultimate medium, the living,
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breathing body. In the 60s, bureaucracy still
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involved paper, and paper was thus eloquent.
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Around that time, Irma Blanc, the German artist in Sicily,
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started drawing on her journal or writing in her drawings,
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whatever 1 prefers. She started the series
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Eigenschriften, which she went on to produce until she moved to
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Milan. In the 1970s.
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She developed different acemic calligraphies, that is,
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different calligraphies without words.
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When I asked Rosanna, her daughter, what memories she had
00:13:27
of her mum, then she shared the funny recollection with me.
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One day she was excited to go back home and tell her mother
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something that had happened at school.
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Whatever happened at school, she forgot.
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What she can recall is her mother asking her with a hand
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gesture to wait until she had finished writing.
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Rosanna looked at her mother's paper and it was indeed a
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writing, but without words. There were lines and lines of
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the same calligraphic effort, but there were no words to speak
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of. It was a flow of wordless and
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yet cohesively handwritten lines.
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What might have crossed the child's mind?
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The static snow at the end of TV broadcasting back in the day.
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Listening to the paper is not a given.
00:14:19
One can argue that the drawing, these writings for oneself,
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Eigenschrifton, are the meeting point between the paper, the
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pastels, and the personal memory of writing and reading, of
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shedding the love of words, the love of the beautiful phrase,
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the enchanting sound of verses rhyming, the love for
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literature. Like On Kowara, Blank had gone
00:14:42
through a traumatic war as a child, as an inheritance of a
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generation before her. Like him, she chose another
00:14:49
language to live in. On Kowara was Japanese and moved
00:14:53
to New York in 1965 and focused on the medium, the conventions
00:14:59
of time. For him, the shape of the book,
00:15:01
for her as a tool that had to be deconstructed.
00:15:05
My work is a book whose pages are scattered and cannot come
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back together again, she told us when she moved to Milan, Paper
00:15:13
met information and civilization, the outer world.
00:15:17
She started placing a fine tracing paper on everything she
00:15:20
read and transcribed it painstakingly.
00:15:24
She covered words with the drawing material, which
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extracted, as it were, the shape, the system, the structure
00:15:31
of organized information. The series is called
00:15:35
Rascrezzioni Transcription, but it's more than that.
00:15:41
The paper became a transitional device from a verbal sign to an
00:15:45
index, one of those signs that exist because the material that
00:15:50
reveals them is affected by the sign itself.
00:15:53
A footprint, an analogue photograph.
00:15:55
The shiver. The words became marks, which is
00:15:59
to say an encounter between two bodies.
00:16:02
She also made books with the same calligraphy over the real
00:16:07
books she read. But she also deconstructed
00:16:10
newspapers in an effort of producing real communication.
00:16:15
She plays her trascritzioni works on newspaper kiosks and
00:16:18
other ads in the street. Paradoxically, listening to the
00:16:22
paper was silencing the page. She looked for silence.
00:16:27
The true form of communication, where energy, love,
00:16:31
concentration, focus sits with blank paper, is the language of
00:16:37
audible silence. In the bookshop in Milano, Blank
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read one of her transcricioni books.
00:16:44
Her mouth closed, her lips are moving, humming.
00:16:49
I say this is a paradox because it was at this time that she
00:16:53
realized, while sitting alone in her kitchen, that the paper
00:16:57
being drawn on produced a sound. It seemed to speak its own
00:17:01
language of receptacle or container of medium.
00:17:06
The medium was not hiding anymore.
00:17:08
It became loud so as to celebrate contact rather than
00:17:11
the personal experience of reading this or that book,
00:17:15
rather than personal preference. Edema never said what books she
00:17:20
transcribed. As much as I insisted she
00:17:23
resisted. We never knew she produced her
00:17:27
own books. Spaces of silence where words
00:17:30
disappeared to make space for the cellulose, the ink, the
00:17:34
folds, the pages like little screens.
00:17:37
The book as the first mobile phone, the first metaverse.
00:17:41
The reality of the infinite folds of imagination.
00:17:47
After she'd lost her husband, Blank took to making thick lines
00:17:51
over some of his mathematical books by a process of osmosis,
00:17:56
the magical formula of love, which is a form of loss, The
00:18:00
page was now the absent body, the place of a new form of
00:18:04
silence. Through a process of crossing
00:18:07
out and making thick lines, she journeyed to Deep Blue and to a
00:18:12
correspondence between her soul. There is her breath and the
00:18:16
line. Breathing in, she dipped the
00:18:23
brush in the paint. Breathing out, she produced 1
00:18:27
blue line until there was no more air to exhale.
00:18:32
And again and again and again. From language to writing to book
00:18:41
to drawing to paper to voice to line to breath.
00:18:47
The body as a medium, the paper as body.
00:18:52
At the turn of the century, as many artists from her generation
00:18:56
Blank saw, the information, communication and data were
00:19:00
connected. But her focus was on what
00:19:04
communication would become once the world established itself as
00:19:08
a global net across the world. Thus she started a new series
00:19:12
called Global Writings, Moving Away from Paper.
00:19:16
It seemed that paper, after all, was a personal affair, a diary,
00:19:21
a skin, a body. Not unlike the world around her.
00:19:25
Blank was local, a mixture of local and global.
00:19:28
She was a polyglot. She had several worlds LED in
00:19:32
her through language. So she devised a new one with
00:19:35
eight consonants. CDHJLMR&T and proceeded to
00:19:43
produce works with it. She wanted to create a language
00:19:47
which would sound completely alien.
00:20:17
She worked on this series and another previous one on the
00:20:23
computer, moving away from paper.
00:20:26
She was now using a virtual space that was not mediated by
00:20:30
paper. The hands tapped rather than
00:20:33
dance on the paper. The material was plastic, all
00:20:37
polymer rather than cellulose or any of the surface reacting like
00:20:42
paper to the touch. So, unhappy with the silent and
00:20:47
cold body, Blank vigorously went back to the space of the paper.
00:20:52
This body and skin she had now discovered as an entity with
00:20:56
which to collaborate. So she produced the series
00:20:59
Avantesto. Avantesto were also made in
00:21:02
polyester, which is probably here as a sort of hyper paper,
00:21:07
as she was eager to use her whole body, her two hands
00:21:11
grabbing as many Biro pens as she could to produce a vibration
00:21:15
enacting the sound of its making.
00:21:27
Blank is part of a generation of artists who created the simple
00:21:31
system based on the philosophy of mark making as an existential
00:21:35
collaboration between signifying bodies.
00:21:39
Her path is of a rigorous devotion to silence as
00:21:42
communication and paper as it's ancient technology, perhaps one
00:21:47
of the most minimal of her time. Many moons ago, I was talking to
00:21:54
an artist on the phone. I lived in Paris then, and so
00:21:57
did this artist. Suddenly he interrupted the
00:22:01
conversation and asked me if there was a thunderstorm in my
00:22:05
neighborhood. And how strange that it was so
00:22:08
sunny back where he lived. In fact, this was not a
00:22:11
meteorological phenomenon. It was my husband drawing at the
00:22:16
time. He took thick, white, large
00:22:18
expanses of paper and spent long hours marking it with folds,
00:22:22
closing and opening flaps of paper, then folding it again.
00:22:27
Opening, closing, folding. The paper started to take the
00:22:31
shape of a strange container, then a more geometric form, and
00:22:35
then after a considerable amount of time, it became a perfect
00:22:38
cube of about 80 centimeters. As soon as the paper had taken
00:22:43
this new shape, he placed graphite chunks inside through
00:22:47
one of the edges. As soon as these grey and greasy
00:22:50
bits of matter were trapped inside, he would apply pH
00:22:54
neutral tape on all edges of the cube and proceed to shake it.
00:22:58
The cube would go up and down, left and right, or more
00:23:01
elegantly, in circles. The graphite chunks were
00:23:05
painstakingly moved around so as to touch the paper.
00:23:09
While holding this enormous cube, he imagined the trajectory
00:23:13
of the graphite bits and tried to control the remains of their
00:23:16
bodies, becoming traces on the paper.
00:23:19
The graphite bits were now graphite beads.
00:23:22
The movement of the cubes scrubbed the matter away from
00:23:25
all sides, turning them into spheres.
00:23:27
Little planets moving about in a sort of mark, making Big Bang.
00:23:32
This operation was noisy. First the paper being folded and
00:23:36
unfolded, then after a while, the heavy breathing of his body,
00:23:40
kneeling, crouching, grabbing, folding, trying to collaborate
00:23:46
with the paper, and the paper finally yielding to the extent
00:23:49
of its properties. Then came the sound part of the
00:23:52
process, the shaking and rubbing of the graphite on the internal
00:23:56
side of the paper cube. It was a roaring sound that made
00:24:00
me think of 1000 Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels, but also
00:24:05
of the explosive discharge of heat after lightning in a storm.
00:24:09
No one talks about the sound of drawing, he once told me,
00:24:13
echoing what was going on in my mind and foreshadowing this day,
00:24:18
the 16th of April 2025, in my own house, in my studio, where
00:24:27
we're both around in the house, representing somehow the ancient
00:24:33
avant-garde, objective, symbolic, political,
00:24:37
sustainable, social and literal language of paper.
00:24:46
This episode was recorded on the 16th of April 2025, two years
00:24:51
and two days after EMS passing. For this episode I've had the
00:24:55
assistance of the Artist Gallery in Bologna, Italy.
00:24:59
P420A. Big thanks to Alessandro,
00:25:03
Fabrizio, Chiara and Vanya for their attention to detail, not
00:25:07
only for this episode but also for the exhibitions, the visits
00:25:12
to Edema's house. And finally, a huge thank you to
00:25:16
Irma's children, namely the relentless Rosanna, who unveiled
00:25:20
so many things about her mother's practice and supported
00:25:23
her work at a late stage of her life, managing the visits to the
00:25:27
studio and the work. The music of the episode is by
00:25:31
Satan and the text was written by me.
00:25:33
It's an excerpt of a lecture given on the 3rd of February
00:25:36
2025 at ABK Stuttgart, whose title was The Paper is
00:25:41
Impatient, under the invitation of the drawing department and
00:25:46
their teachers Catherine Trevor and Hannah Henan Kemper.
00:25:50
The sounds were recordings of Edema's works, so the sounds of
00:25:56
the making of Edema Blanc's Eigen, Shifton, Radical
00:25:59
Writings, Avantesto, Hypertext and Hatch Clear.
00:26:10
If you're here, you're probably enjoying the episode, so if you
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think someone else might enjoy it too, by all means, share it.
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Don't forget to rate and follow exhibitionistas.
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It seems trivial, but it can make a difference.
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All kinds of support count and contribute to more investigation
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and better episodes. So of course, donations and
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memberships through our website or on Sub Stack are very
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welcome. All the links are on the show's
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notes as per usual. And thank you to all of those
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who've taken the leap of faith and have become our patrons.
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From a five star review to a substantial donation
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exhibitionist. This considers you one of those
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rare unicorns who support independent journalism.
00:26:55
Now something a bit different. I'd also love to start a
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conversation with you. You can now leave comments on
00:27:01
Spotify, which is a great way to know what you want more of, or
00:27:05
if you'd like to add something to the topic developed, the
00:27:07
artist discussed, or simply if you want to leave a note of
00:27:11
appreciation. It's a sad world when only the
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trolls and the bullies interact with journalists and art
00:27:17
critics. Let's feed the AI beast with
00:27:21
good stuff. Why not bring ositivity ideas
00:27:25
and especially your own perspective to the Digital Art
00:27:30
Village?