Wednesday, 22 November 2017

The Underground Drawings











The Underground Drawings

Conventional technical drawing assumes that the drawing is rational, functional and objective; drawings are produced to communicate an intention, an instruction, or a clarification. These drawings question those conventions and protocols, these drawings are not rational or functional they are gestural and playful and what they communicate is expressive rather than pragmatic. The starting point of the drawings were the five chapter titles of Marko Jobst's text; Object; Space; Interior; Image; Movement, mapping out the themes that the text evoked selecting the station layouts and references that resonated with the ideas that that the text alludes to. The drawings were principally made by overdrawing axonometric projections from London Underground that show the organisation and layout of individual stations, the stations. It should be stressed that the original drawings made by London Underground are themselves a fiction edited to show only principal circulation and abstracted to avoid the complexities of the subterranean system they are part of.  The overdrawing is performed in a loose gestural manner rather than an exact tracing, the ‘inaccuracies’ are further distorted be stretching and rescaling to fit the drawing frame. Different pairs of drawings were then juxtaposed against one another. Against the main drawings other elements are composited within the picture, some taken directly from the text or from my own readings and interests. Specific framing devices are set within the composition as are notational elements from the original LU drawings. The underground drawings clearly refer to a number of other works particularly Guy Debord’s ‘The Naked City’ as well obvious references to Bernard Tschumi’s “Manhattan Transcripts” and Daniel Liebeskind’s ‘Micro-megas”.

The Underground Drawings were produced for Marko Jobst's book 'A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground', published by AADR, http://www.anagrambooks.com/a-ficto-historical-theory