ESSAY / Back to the Future: Los Carpinteros’ Watercolors

by: Helen Molesworth

Published in Los Carpinteros. Handwork – Constructing the World. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2010.

 

Despite their moniker, the collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) does at least as much drawing, if not more, as building or woodworking. Despite their self-proclaimed love of a well-made object, one is more often than not confronted with one of their beautiful watercolors. Despite their talk of the functionality of things, one frequently finds in their production a veritable encyclopedia of that which does not quite exist, making questions of function vexed at best. And despite their claim to the daily (and seemingly timeless) labor of the humble carpenter, Los Carpinteros occupy the more ambiguous role of contemporary artist, an identity marked by an internal schism: part manual laborer, part conceptualist. These contradictions are hardly exclusive to Los Carpinteros. Rather, they enumerate the tensions that run through much art of the modern period, during which questions of use and function, problems of object and image, issues of reality and representation, and the dilemma of finish versus process were the antinomies that structured the very enterprise of modernism. Looking at the overall oeuvre of Los Carpinteros, considering their prolific output of drawings in particular, one can also feel, subtending this complicated and fractured field of production, a slight hum of anxiety about the legitimacy of the labor of art. What work is it doing? Who is it for? What aims does it serve? In other words, what legitimacy does it possess? More often then not, as we will see, Los Carpinteros handle this anxiety playfully and through negation. Often the work is clearer about what it is not doing than about what it is doing, turning interpretation into a kind of cat and mouse game in which the writer (well, okay, me) is never quite convinced that she has “trapped” her prey, nor is she really sure that she wants to. So it’s interesting then to assess a decade of their work and to discover that the medium that Los Carpinteros have frequently asked to bear the weight of their investigations has consistently been watercolor, not, it must be said, a medium historically deployed to tackle the larger philosophical dynamics of modern art.

But perhaps Los Carpinteros are on to something at the level of medium specificity? Watercolor has an interesting and deeply polyphonic history, all the more so for having been simultaneously one of the most vaunted and one of the most denigrated forms of drawing. Watercolor emerged during the Renaissance under the guise of naturalism, prized for its ability to add color to mostly monochromatic drawings. Albrecht Dürer was a highly skilled watercolorist, and he used the medium as one of the many arrows in his quiver dedicated to faithfully representing the wonders of the natural world in a manner that rivaled those natural creations. Hare of 1502 is one of the most famous examples of Dürer’s prodigious skills. This watercolor is well prized for its delicate attention to the minute details of the hare’s fur and whiskers, as well as to the overall sensitivity to the posture and shape of the hare’s anatomy. So too, the work is remarkable not only for its visual or physical likeness but also for its ability to capture the animal’s simultaneous qualities of quickness and stillness. Despite (or perhaps because of) this early example of how best to exploit the medium’s potential, watercolor did not emerge in full force until the late eighteenth century with the advent of commercially produced paints (prior to the introduction of these pans or cakes of color, artists made their own paints). In addition to commercially made paints, the paper industry expanded during this period, and by 1775 an English manufacturer was making paper especially designed for artists using watercolor.¹

As the apparatus for watercolor become more readily available, the uses to which it was put expanded demonstrably. In addition to being used by artists, it was also used by naturalists (think James Audubon), largely due to the convenience of making a colored image en plein air (think Winslow Homer), and many printmakers (or their unscrupulous print dealers) used watercolor as a way to embellish the black-and-white matrix of etchings and engravings. Even more interesting was its adoption by “surveyors, mapmakers, military officers and engineers for its usefulness in depicting properties of terrain, fortifications or geology in the field and for illustrating public works or commissioned projects.”² Color, it seems, was thought to offer a kind of visual veracity, conducive to the task of large public works projects. The rise of watercolor’s popularity was marked by a highly heterogeneous sense of its use and its possibilities—from fine art, to commercial interests, to its being subsumed by industry. Given the extreme functionalism of the medium, it is somewhat ironic that its other major defining characteristic was its highly gendered deployment. The ability to make a watercolor was considered part of the requisite skill set of upper-class British and American women in the nineteenth century, so much so that a history of the medium written as late as 1966 could begin: “Water color has always had a special appeal to women, and throughout the nineteenth century hundreds of feminine artists produced their often charming landscapes, flower studies, and sketches of autumn leaves.”³ The paternalism of the language notwithstanding, the citation illuminates the extent to which watercolor covered an extraordinary degree of affective ground, from the “charming” landscapes of bourgeois women to the putatively objective topographies of the military surveyor, a tension that might otherwise be described as a push-pull between the expressive and descriptive functions of the medium.

Given this history, Los Carpinteros’ choice of watercolor as their primary medium hardly seems a matter of mere chance. Rather one can see in their work some aspects of the medium’s polyphonic dimensions. Their watercolors tend to concentrate on images of the built environment: we often see buildings, walls, swimming pools, and parks. If the image is of an object—a bookshelf, a bed, a charcoal grill—it often evokes the spatial configurations of the object in such a way as to imply that it is on the threshold of realizing its fullest potential as a public site meant for dwelling or transit. One of the best examples is a suite of drawings using the image of a slightly melancholic single bed frame, complete with an institutionally colored mattress in a sick pastel blue, pink, or green. In these drawings the single bed (a redolent metaphor for the solitary life of the child and the equally diminished capacity for sociality experienced by the sick and the elderly) metamorphoses into a formal French garden, a roller coaster, a scenic rolling highway, and a ludicrously complicated clover-pattern freeway exchange. Los Carpinteros’ drawings frequently situate an object against an empty background, rooting it spatially through the convention of shadow, which, through a force of visual habit, lends the object a relationship to gravity that it does not otherwise possess. Despite their lack of ancillary detail, the drawings tend to convey a landscape, a projective space to be imaginatively entered by the viewer. In this way, they speak to watercolor’s other prominent use, for the axonometric drawings of architecture.

The discipline of architecture (in the West) has relied on drawing since the introduction of paper in the fourteenth century. According to architectural historian James S. Ackerman, “once an architectural convention is established it maintains an astonishing consistency through time.”⁴ One such long-standing invention is the technique of axonometric drawing, developed in the seventeenth century by military engineers as a means to represent three dimensions in a way that would allow for correct measurement to be retained in receding planes. A beneficial by-product of this device is that axonometric drawings often permit simultaneous interior and exterior views, an attribute enjoyed by many twentieth-century artists who “exploited the axonometric” by adding to them the “spatial possibilities of color.”⁵ Architects used this type of drawing as a way to reveal the shifts of space and time in the proposed structure, and through their rejection of single-point perspective, they could “explore the complexity and incoherence of spatial relations.”⁶ While Los Carpinteros’ drawings are not quite axonometric (one could not accurately fabricate a bed-cum-roller-coaster from one of them), they partake of the genre in interesting ways. Most of their drawings offer a space into which one can projectively enter, simulating an experience of the simultaneity of space and time. This accounts for the highly animate quality of their images of inanimate things. So too because they never exploit the washy chance quality of watercolor or experiment with its impressionistic or expressive qualities, their use of watercolor is quite precise. It is consistently characterized by a clean and straightforward application, with even strokes of relatively unmodulated color applied rigorously within a set of proscribed boundaries. Their synthesis of line and color stems from the axonometric inasmuch as that color is asked to perform the task of conveying the three-dimensionality of the spaces and objects that the drawings imagine. The resulting functionalism of this aesthetic often skirts “as close to illustration as drafting.”⁷ As such, color offers the objects and buildings in Los Carpinteros’ drawings a kind of solidity that they might not otherwise possess; in other words, color appears to move the drawing from the realm of the sketch into the realm of the completed object.

But to say that color operates this definitively is perhaps to solidify the drawings in ways that are not quite right. Drawing has always played a dynamic role in the history of art, “regarded as both foundational and peripheral, central and marginal.” Drawing’s liminal character is derived largely from its complicated relationship to time, for “drawing takes on the status of either trace or leftover—a clue as to its formation or a remainder left behind.”⁸ So what exactly is the status of Los Carpinteros’ drawings? It seems clear they are more than a sketch, more than an idea-as-yet-uncompleted. Certainly they present themselves as what Yve-Alain Bois would call “projective drawing,” meaning that they are a drawing of something that has already been imagined as opposed to something that is “discovered” through the process of drawing. This is why they can be described as being “close” to illustration. But as farcical, or impossible, as the drawings might sometimes appear, they do often have a companion sculptural object; for instance, Dos camas | Two beds (drawing 2007 [p. xx], object 2008 [p. xx]), Montaña Rusa | Rollercoaster (drawing 2007 [p. xx], object 2008 [p. xx], and Patas de rana | Flippers (drawing 2009 [p. xx|, object 2010 [p. xx]) exist as both a drawing and an object. And tellingly, they beg the question of which came first—drawing or object. That being said, some of the drawings feel truly unfeasible: they are not illustrative (they are not made after the fact, a picture of an object already made), nor do they operate like a plan (they are not realizable in the way an architectural plan is meant to be). It would be easy, even romantic, at this juncture to claim these drawings as utopian. There is part of me that would like to situate them in the Soviet tradition of Vladimir Tatlin’s monument or Lyubov Popova’s clothing designs, or to see them as mining the architectural archives of El Lissitzky or Le Corbusier. And yet somehow I can’t quite make the leap, as pleasurable and as art historically pat as such an argument might be. This is largely because I think that Los Carpinteros’ drawings don’t exist purely in relation to the temporality of an idealized futurity that signifies the utopian. Quite the contrary, I think the drawings, for all their seeming simplicity, frequently instantiate disparate and condensed versions of time.

As noted earlier, drawing traditionally signifies either that which is yet to come—the role of the preparatory sketch—or that which exists after the fact—the rendering of the completed object, building, or monument. These two versions of time in drawing were profoundly challenged by artists of the post–World War II period, when the training of artists changed dramatically. Nothing signaled this shift more completely then the decline in the instruction in drawing from the live nude.⁹ Drawing largely abandoned its a priori or a posteriori sense of time and was instead seen to operate primarily in the register of the indexical, in the space-time continuum of the here and now. During this period drawing came to be seen as a form of expression directly related to the artist’s body and as such was involved in the registration of the artistic process itself. In this formulation what is insisted upon in drawing is the presentness of the artist’s hand to the paper. To be a viewer of such a drawing was an exercise in the reading of a palimpsest, as every mark was evidence of a choice made, a decision enacted, or alternatively, each mark was an indication of a force at play larger than the artist—an indication of the chance operations of the materials themselves or of the larger principles of physics, most notably gravity and entropy.

The extent to which this nearly hegemonic form of drawing is utterly absent for Los Carpinteros is remarkable. One can see the illustrative quality of their palette and their almost compulsively clean lines as a kind of deafening refusal of this modality of drawing. For instance, in Acumulación de Materiales – Ladrillos II | Accumulation of materials – bricks II, 2003 [p. xx], we encounter an allover composition of bricks jumbled together in a pile and pressed up against the picture plane. Thus we see a compositional strategy that mimics process drawing, but the precision of the image is such that one humorously wonders whether there was a preparatory sketch for this watercolor, a mise en abyme of prior planning in a medium dedicated to quick studies. The turning away from process situates Los Carpinteros squarely within their generational zeitgeist. But their work furthers this refusal of the presentness or indexicality more than that of some of their peers by being manifestly devoid of people. It is as if all aspects of humanity, from its bodily traces to its physical image, have been resolutely banished from the sphere of representation. (For example, the celebrities in Elizabeth Peyton’s drawings root them to a sense of present time, and the computeresque lines of Julie Mehretu’s paintings and drawings also connote a certain temporal context.) Curiously this lends Los Carpinteros’ drawings a “timeless” quality, a characteristic only heightened by the assiduous manner in which they eschew the current commodity markers of our time. Technology is notably absent; there are no iPhones or televisions, not a single electrical outlet. There is instead a profound quality of emptiness, as if every drawing were modeled on the convention of installation shots of minimalist sculpture or architectural publicity shots—solitary stillness prevails. The question nags: what kind of time is being offered here? A nostalgic moment prior to our wired generation; a postapocalyptic future devoid of people and electricity; or an ironic version of humanist timelessness, in which objects and spaces stand self-contained and self-sustaining?

Even the shadows, typically a means to connote time and space, fail to secure a “proper” spatiotemporal dimension. In almost every drawing, shadows are the singular feature that establishes any solidity to the conventional figure-ground dialectic. Careful looking will establish that the shadows fall in different directions, but despite that seeming specificity, the shadows never indicate the source of light or the time of day; nor do they offer any clues as to the particularity of place. Hence the drawings offer themselves up like a contemporary (with a new and improved design) Sears, Roebuck catalog of commodity goods. (Again, the self-conscious avoidance of the photographic and the digital put into play a kind of nostalgia that garners an allusion to something as outmoded as a Sears, Roebuck catalog, however “updated” one might imagine it to be.)

This confusing version of what we might call “static time” is perhaps best evidenced in the drawing Tres Relojes | Three Clocks, 2003 [p. xx]. Here we see three clocks joined as if subsets in a geometry problem. Blending and blurring into one another, these readymade clocks would seem at first to be a rejoinder to the brutal monotony of our civilization’s organization of time into the requisite eight-hour workdays. But any such utopian or idealistic fantasy is quickly checked by the simple fact that each clock tells the same time. Despite our most radical desires for a world predicated on difference, however infinitesimal, as a way to break through the stranglehold of capitalism (think Deleuze and Guattari), this drawing offers instead an affectless account of the penetration of everyday life by the logic of the commodity. Tres relojes offers seriality without difference and presents the homogenization of time as a matter-of-fact truism.

And yet . . .

And yet the pulse of negation persists, for it is as difficult for me to assign Los Carpinteros’ work the position of cynical pragmatism that such a reading of Tres relojes might imply as it is to say their work traffics in the utopian. So what then is at stake in these modest watercolors? Certainly they are preoccupied with the built environment, with architecture. In this regard their work, again, is very much of our current moment, for we live in what may one day be referred to as the age of architecture. The “starchitect” has supplanted the cachet and romance that once surrounded the role of the artist. Now it is the architect who is a household name. It is the architect who steals the headlines and who is as important as the Olympic athlete. It is the architect whose name will ultimately become equivalent with the memorial for 9/11 and who is synonymous with the buildings that identify the new New York, the new Shanghai, the new Paris, the new Beijing, the new Berlin. The mega-stardom of the architect has made it inevitable that many contemporary artists have taken to dismantling and appropriating the language and concerns of architecture. They have often done so in a critical guise, offering art as an “unmonumental” counterpoint to architecture’s current vogue for the sweeping and seductive scale of monumentality.¹⁰ Late 1960s sculpture offered its own version of antimonumentality, specifically the entropic, that great unstoppable force of time, dedicated to the erasure of man’s intervention, an ethical check on human hubris. Without question, with works like Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed (both 1970), Robert Smithson served as entropy’s leading emissary. Despite the prevalence of entropy as an antimonumental strategy in art of the late 1960s and 1970s, it, no pun intended, has fallen into a state of disrepair and is no longer a “popular” means to counter the monumentalizing tendencies of contemporary architecture. The ruin, it seems, can be too easily fetishized by artists and critics alike. So many contemporary artists have turned to a form of sculpture that is largely additive (one thing on top of another), fashioned from the seemingly infinite array of cast-off consumer goods (and, even more precisely, the cast-off wrapping and shipping materials for commodity objects); the work of Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison is exemplary in this regard. But in its formal precision and beauty, the work of Los Carpinteros rejects this detritus-laden version of antimonumentality and also refrains from making any explicit gesture toward the forces of entropy. But we have seen that Los Carpinteros’ work is shot through with the problem of time—so much so that it has made me realize that all art objects are smuggling in some version of time and that part of the art historical work of interpretation might be to figure out what version of time the object has put into play. If the current antimonumental sculpture imagines the future as a kind of massive garbage heap, remnants of an archaeological dig—a jumble of late capital’s consumerist crap—then Los Carpinteros’ drawings function more like a set of (hilarious) hieroglyphs. It is as if the drawings are intended for a future audience. They are not, in the end, for us, the present audience; they are not, that is, a dictionary of as-yet-unrealized objects. They are a false ledger, a phony Rosetta stone for the future, supposedly showing how objects, spaces, and buildings were once used at the end of the twentieth century. Of course watercolor is a particularly fugitive medium: overexposure to light can irrevocably fade the work, and contemporary paper is notorious for its degradability. Filled with chemicals, it is not nearly as resilient as its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ancestors. And yet perhaps if someone takes good enough care, if some curator protects the work from too much light and air, if some collector keep them covered or stored in a drawer, the drawings may ultimately serve their purpose, acting as a clue or a Baedeker to the life of things in our era, suggesting that perhaps the carpenters and not the architects will have not only the last word but also the last laugh.

 

 

Notes

1. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, History of Water Color Painting in America (New York: Reinhold, 1966), 8.

2. Wikipedia, s.v. “Watercolor,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watercolor_painting.

3. Gardner, History of Water Color, 6.

4. James S. Ackerman, “Introduction: The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing,” in Conventions of Architectural Drawing: Representation and Misrepresentation, ed. James S. Ackerman and Wolfgang Jung (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2000), 11.

5. Ibid., 22.

6. Ibid., 23.

7. Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 49.

8. Pamela M. Lee, “Some Kinds of Duration: The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art” in Afterimage: Drawing through Process, by Cornelia H. Butler (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 31.

9. See Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

10. Unmonumental was the name of the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition in its new building, identifying the current artistic tendency toward sculptural objects that are fashioned largely from the detritus of contemporary life yet that nonetheless mimic the forms of contemporary architecture. See Richard Flood et al., Unmonumental: The Object in the Twenty-first Century (London: Phaidon; New York: New Museum, 2007).