Karoline Schreiber draws...
Karoline Schreiber draws. She draws what she cannot draw and until
she can draw no more; she draws simultaneously, with blindfolded
eyes, and when it is dark. She draws what experts talk about; draws
while her husband reads the most important news to her from the
newspaper and takes care of the children at home.1 The following
reflections on the work of the Zurich-based artist deal with the act
of drawing (even prior to the actual drawing)—starting
from the claim that the act of drawing drives all her artistic activity, no matter
whether the result is presented as a painting, object, performance,
or drawing, whether large- or small-format, abstract-gestural or
figurative-hyperrealistic.
Drawing as a State of Mind
People have drawn since time immemorial. Neolithic cave drawings
are associated with the beginning of the history of human culture,
which is why a “mythic status” is attributed to drawings as the
“earliest and most immediate form of image making.”2 In the Renaissance,
the drawing as a medium of design obtained an artistic
status that was still concomitant but nevertheless independent. In
sketchbooks, a fleeting idea is captured, picture studies are practiced,
and surroundings recorded. While the drawing works with line and
stroke, painting develops its motif from the surface. In modernism,
precisely this dichotomy was largely dissolved, color finally found its
way into drawings, and the line forfeited its primacy. The drawing
experienced a temporary highpoint in the late 1960s and 1970s, when
young artists in particular turned to it. Free of pathos and close
to artistic thinking, the medium was suitable for both the emerging
conceptual art and for that new “inwardness” that was in great
demand in the positions presented as “individual mythologies” at the
documenta 5 under the influence of Harald Szeemann. The demarcations
of boundaries between mediums already seem to have blurred at
this point in time, and the drawing represented a form for rebelling
against the hierarchies in the classical writing of history. The
increased turning toward figuration is also striking. In Switzerland
in 1976, Jean-Christoph Ammann organized the trailblazing exhibition
Mentalität: Zeichnung (Mentality: Drawing) at the Kunstmuseum
Luzern; with it as well as other projects, he made a significant contribution
to promoting the genre here in Switzerland. Drawing became a
state of mind.
The drawing has a Janus-faced nature. It is regarded as a per se intimate medium, direct, sensitive, emotional, intuitive, somewhat strange, and generally quite solitary—but this picture alone falls short. The drawing also involves the other side, the rational and the intellectual. It is a means for homing in on ideas, for organizing and forming them, as the term “disegno” coined in the Renaissance implies. It means not only the manual design technique, but also the “causal, intellectual activity of describing, planning, imagining, and designing.”3 While this twofold meaning provided the Renaissance artists with the necessary conceptual and scientific basis to defend drawing against other branches of art, “disegno” stands today for the antipodal system in which the medium is active—from the objective to the autobiographical, from the intellect to intuition, from concept to feeling, from science to poetry.
The Extended Concept of Drawing
The history of the drawing and its various forms is central to understanding
Karoline Schreiber’s practice. She juggles different drawing
positions, explores their essence, and extends the concept in all
possible directions—to comic art, caricature, the scientific illustration,
and abstraction—or puts them in synthesis with performance, painting,
and installation. Conversely, from nearly every work, it is possible
to follow a trace back to drawing as an initial trigger, be it in the
sense of disegno as a concept and state of mind, or, in terms of motif,
as a result of an already mapped out idea for a picture. In particular
the works of recent years attest to the significance of the medium.
While she was previously associated above all with hyperrealistic
paintings, in 2015 Schreiber published excerpts from her huge collection
of drawings worked on daily in sketchbooks.4 At the same time,
the artist also began to “present” the act of drawing in the form
of public performances. The process is predefined in each case and
generally anticipated ironically in the title. Schreiber either draws at
a table while a camera simultaneously projects the creation of the
motif on the wall, or she works in a larger scale directly on a wall or
on paper. While certain performances target drawing under difficult
circumstances—Schreiber draws with her left hand or with her eyes
blindfolded—in others the script envisions a translation from language
or music into a drawing. She makes her own drawing practice, which
invokes the subconscious, the subject when she receives “clients,” in a
setting faithful to Freud, who tell her their dreams, which she then
interprets in drawings. The ongoing series Drawing Account and
Zeichnugnen draw on the wealth of motifs in the sketchbooks. The
first are medium- to large-format works on paper, executed in pencil,
oil pen, and colored pencil with the precision of the old masters. Her
fantastical, dreamlike picture contents are taken to an extreme by
means of painstaking illusionism. The Zeichnugnen are created with
India ink and fineliners and bring together, as the misspelling in
the title suggests, illogical, crude pictorial inventions. Since 2016, the
artist has also been working on the series Karoline Schreiber muss
schneller werden (Karoline Schreiber Must Speed up). While the
creation of most of Schreiber’s drawings is clearly time-intensive, here
she reverses the conditions—not least as a commentary on tempo,
the art world, life, and day-to-day activities. Speed is created through
the use of spray paint, which she concentrates on large-format,
semi-transparent sheets of paper to create masterful conglomerations
of whirls. In addition to the ongoing series, there are also closed,
conceptually strictly framed groups of drawings, for instance, the
thirty-part series Decent Shit (2015–16), in which the artist documents
her own excrement in drawings, or the, literally speaking, similar
Quelques trous du cul (2016), which is dedicated to this less attractive
bodily orifice with the precision of scientific illustrations.
This quite abbreviated tour d’horizon through Schreiber’s drawing prac-
tice makes one thing above all clear: the distinct heterogeneity of
the work. In her work, Schreiber, if one follows Christian Rattemeyer’s
stocktaking of drawing today, combines several tendencies in the
graphic art of the past decades at the same time: on the one hand,
abstraction as an ironic, postmodern citation of the unassailable
Abstract Expressionists, on the other, figuration in the form of so-
called “radical figuration,” which makes the unforeseeable and the
mythical the topic of the picture, as well as a reference back to
the academic-historical traditions of botanical or anatomical drawings.
5 Nevertheless, an invisible bracket seems to hold the various
skeins in Schreiber’s work together, a primal drawing, if you will. To
penetrate it, an in-depth look at the daily drawing practice in the
sketchbooks is worthwhile.
The Automatic Drawing
We all draw at some point in time. In day-to-day life, drawing is one
of those activities that frequently go unnoticed—telephone doodles
when lost in thought, to-do lists, and sketches of routes. Children’s
drawings hang in bedrooms or on refrigerator doors, and are exemplary
for how the drawing produces meaning based on pure non-intentionality.
As an elongated arm of our thoughts and feelings, Helmut Federle
described them “as a spiral toward the inside.”6 I can envision how
Karoline Schreiber’s drawings are peeled away from inner layers of
consciousness toward the outside on opposite paths along this spiral.
Schreiber has meanwhile filled 53 sketchbooks with drawings, each
day at least one drawing, altogether several thousand, put on paper
with fineliner, each of them a small, separate world. The pictures
almost always contain figures and bodies, misshapen, disabled, full of
caricaturing elements that regularly make our laughter stick in our
throats. The beautiful and the ugly shake hands in the absurd. The
drawings “happen” to her, the artist says, they come to her, incidentally,
at random, and simultaneously befall her, occur to her, as if she
could not do otherwise than put them on paper. In reference to the
Surrealist technique of “écriture automatique,” Schreiber calls them
Automatische Zeichnungen (Automatic Drawings).
“Écriture automatique” is a literary practice that André Breton, its
inventor, describes as a “dictation of thought in the absence of all
control exercised by reason.” It is supposed to work well particularly
in the early morning hours, when sitting still half asleep at one’s desk
and writing down everything that goes through one’s head, regardless
of whether it makes sense or not.7 Schreiber does not simply translate
“écriture automatique” into a “dessin automatique,” which was also by
all means practiced by the Surrealists, for instance, by André Masson.
For this, the individual motifs then seem too readable and intentional,
as if the planning disegno wanted to make itself felt. Instead, Schreiber
borrows from another Surrealist imaging technique, the “cadavre
exquis,” in which a picture (or text) is created by means of additions
by various participants, while what already exists on the paper is
concealed from the next person drawing by folding the paper.
Schreiber plays the game to a certain extent with herself. Who and
what is encountered in her drawings—person, animal, mythical
creature, plants, objects, and text fragments—seem so alien, their
coming together so surprising that it definitely seems plausible that
the one knew nothing about the others. Schreiber thus combines
the Surrealist method of “écriture automatique” for activating her
subconscious with the practical artistic magical formula of “de-contextualization,”
but without relinquishing the critically observing distance
to her actions that is associated with our era in the process,
as the further handling of the motifs in new drawings or performances
shows. The essence of her drawing thus does not consist of turning
the inside outward in an unfiltered way, but instead of searchingly
exploring the process in which a thought becomes a picture.
Yasmin Afschar