Interview: Linda Karshan

Linda Karshan: Movement and their Images, 2010. Installation view.

At first glance one could easily mistake your latest works for minimal art. As the result of a reductive process, with the aim of minimizing the role of the artist as the enunciator. But further investigations show a certain investment of the artist body in the production. Can you tell me more about this investment?

'At first glance', yes, but there the connection to Minimalism ends. I often refer to each drawing as a 'self-portrait' and insist on the organic nature and origin of the work. So, contrary to Minimalism, my presence is what the viewer experiences; a presence of mind, body, and even heart, brought together within the same moments in time. Mine is a practice based on repetition, concentration, and balance, whereas the form results from the movements of my body. 'The changes of form are nothing but shifts of choreography', as I've insisted in my jottings.

I see. In that way, your endeavor in the now is united with aspiration for the future. A shift from being to becoming is expressed. In that sense your work points back to the body passing trough time and space. But as the viewer meets the artwork, time has gone. You are no longer present. A self-determined progression towards an unspecified future. Is that what you suggest?

Your question, or suggestion, brings to mind Plato's passage from the Timaeus on the creation of time: “while Eternity rests in unity, and is everlasting, Time - the 'image of eternity'- IS the process of becoming.” So, too, is my work. It might rightfully be called Time, Being (and has been, in my artists' book with Anca Vasilieu). And within that time, all changes within my 'organism' are recorded on the sheet. While the time, those minutes of concentrated movements, required for the making of each drawing has passed, I believe that the viewer can 'catch onto', or even re-experience my time, if she looks carefully at the lines and their 'punctuation'. As every start and stop of a line is so precise and directed from within, this can be felt in all those 'un-straight' lines, and in the plasticity of the drawing, resulting from the rhythm of its making. The future? All I can say about that is that it is my intention 'to go on, and get on, as ever'. And as Merce Cunningham, aged 84, said, 'the rhythms keep on coming. They just do'.

The connection between art and movement is commonly associated with expressive art. In your production this is obviously not the case. Could you please explain how you actually work? And how it differentiates itself from ab-ex strategies?

I would say, even insist, that my 'un-straight lines' are very expressive, but in a way that requires the viewer to look carefully and spend time in front of the work. Contrary to the ab-ex big gesture, on a giant format, my format is one of human scale, whereupon the movement of my body through the sheet describes all the discipline and concentration that characterizes the work. The resulting images are expressive in a much subtler way; expressing directly, with no impingement, the numbers and rhythms which generate my motion and thought.

Linda Karshan: Equilibrium 9, 2009. Black and white photo by Tom Fecht, ed. of 7+2.

As our reader does not necessarily know how you create your works, could you explain? What goes on in your studio?

I'd like to answer it briefly first, enumerating the 'steps' of the process through which the drawings are made. Then I'll elaborate a bit for those who wish to know more.

1) Foot-tapping

2) Jotting down the numbers: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8

3) Judgment of the drawings already pinned to the wall

4) Getting into position, into alignment, at the drawing table

5) Re-performing, on the back of an old sheet, so as to leave traces with

  which to begin again i.e., draw the new work

6) DRAWING THE WORK, in obedience to the numbers and rhythms that direct me. 'Attention must be paid' and 'listening to the sounds'.

7) Pinning the new work to the wall, so that it may be judged.

Once in the studio, the 'foot-tapping' establishes the rhythms; these are always the same. The sound of this is what puts me in place, and in pace. I often jot these numbers down. I'll judge the drawings pinned to the wall from the day, or days, before. Those not 'up to it', those that do not make me stand up tall and pull my shoulders back, will be destroyed, or used in order to begin again.

With a clean sheet of paper on my table, I'll then place one of these rejects, turned back to front, on the clean sheet, and-following the traces that I can just make out, re-performing the work. This will leave graphite traces on the clean sheet, which I'll use as a point of departure. I may follow them, or not: 'There is always room for chance to enter in my scheme.' And while the traces will lean one way (coming out of the body, there is always a lean), the drawing will lean the other way. Thus traces often remain; if they are evocative, they can stay; if they interfere, they'll be eliminated.

Now, standing upright and alert (lifting myself into the 'right' position), and listening carefully to my internal directions, I will draw out the drawing. 'It is as if nothing is by chance, and yet everything is by chance.' As practiced as I am, this is a process of precariousness, to the extreme. And so it must be; my commitment is precisely to this creative space, the 'transitional space' defined by D.W. Winnicott. Once the drawing is complete, or the 'dance', or performance, my attention can relax, and I'll pin the work to the wall, to be judged. I'll know in a glance if the work is good enough, although I'll probably leave the final judgment until the next day.

So, numbers and rhythms are at the heart of my practice. They generate the work, while my body intuitively knows the position it needs to be in in order to mark these directions out. This is then 'the Figure Assigned to me'; a moving figure, to be sure.

Linda Karshan: Without title, 1996/1997. 76,5 x 57 cm. Graphite on paper.		Linda Karshan: Without title, 17/9 1998. 76,5 x 57 cm. Graphite on paper.		Linda Karshan: Without title, 19/12 2000. 76,5 x 57 cm. Graphite on paper.
Linda Karshan: Without title, 19/8 2010. 76,5 x 57 cm. Graphite on paper.		Linda Karshan: Without title, 28/9 2007. 76,5 x 57 cm. Graphite on paper.		Linda Karshan: Without title, 28/9 2007. 76,5 x 57 cm. Graphite on paper.

In a way your unfolding of art in time, the recording of experienced time, makes me think of literature or stage acting. Is this something with which you feel connected?

The artist with whom I feel the greatest affinity is Samuel Beckett, for the numbers, rhythms, and classical structures that underpin all his writing, and for his attention to sound. His teleplay, QUAD, provides a clear analogy for my work: four actors, hooded, with heads down, march round the stage in obedience to Beckett's precise stage directions. They approach, but never quite reach, the centre. Like them, and like his novel 'Unnamable', “I think I occupy the centre, but nothing could be less certain.”

In this way your drawings are portraits of specific situation at a specific time. They are also referring to specific moments at your studio. Am I also supposed to understand the drawing as vessels of these moments? As containers of time passed?

Yes, you could say that. The drawings do capture and fix in time those specific moments in the studio. But as time is always 'becoming', as Plato says, and as my organism, the whole of it, is always changing (and I very much welcome this change), the drawings directly mark not only movement, but changes, over time. I have emphasized the word mark. I prefer that idea, rather than vessel, or container, when describing the work; marks, and moves do the job.

Linda Karshan: Equilibrium 1, 2009. Black and white photo by Tom Fecht, ed. 7+2.

As you describe what goes on when you make your drawings, the Merce Cunningham quote comes back to me. "The rhythms keep on coming. They just do". I see your point in the reference. But how, and how much, do you feel connected to dance and the dance scene?

More and more, as the work develops, a real connection can be seen. Above all, and at first glance, the postures and positions that my body takes on show this connection to dance. There is clearly the connection to classical ballet, the lift into arabesque, as seen in the film Movements, and their Images, which proves this. Also, the film I made in collaboration with the great classical dancer, Viviana Durante (this was filmed by The Ballet Boyz), was made precisely to show the connection between my art, and the art of classical ballet. But as early as 2002, Frances Carey, in her text for my exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, wrote of the connection between the way I 'read space' in my studio practice, and the early work of the Judson Street choreographers. They created dances based on ordinary movements in the Church in Judson Street, free from music, costume, etc. I move around my studio this way...as if by necessity. As I've said, all my movements are generated by my inner numbers and rhythms. The dance, which is the work, follows naturally.

Thank you.