Drawing

First, three sheets of premium tissue paper are removed from the roll. They are folded into a thick single square sheet. The square sheet of soft tissue paper is carefully pulled across the exposed, soiled anus. They are placed carefully, shit down, into a wooden frame with a glass panel front. And the thick cardboard back is carefully fitted keeping the tissue pressed in good condition within the frame. Gordon had been painting (by himself) since he was five.

He was first aware of the primitive drawings, that he had been making throughout his life, when he was twenty six years old. When asked to present works in the exhibition “Defeatist art symposium.” He had been building frames for a series of pencil drawings of paintings by the Suprematist artist Malevich. He had made drawings of ‘Red square’, ‘Black square’ and ‘white on white’ in graphite pencil on paper. The frames for the drawings were four foot square boards with completely clean blank surfaces. The space for the image being just 8 inches square. The image hole would be decentred and in different places on the four foot square boards. The boards would then be leant against a wall in a gallery rather than being hung. He had nearly finished the third frame when his call of nature became too distracting. He walks across his studio to a small grotty toilet, damp and draughty. Alone in his studio, he leaves the door open propped with a pile of small wooden picture frames he had acquired from a friend. He hums along to some music he had playing in the studio stopping only for the final push. The clump of dirt drops into the water with a quiet splash and sits in the porcelain mouth to the sewer system (flowing below the civilised city). Gordon takes three sheets of tissue paper and wipes the brown residue from his anus. He looks (eyes open) at the simple brown marks on the tissue.

Text from the exhibition catalogue:

The Anus is the natural moment of conversation between the inside and outside. Object and Gap. Morality and Immorality. Care and Embarrassment. What is there and what is not there. It is my ‘Black square’, my living moment of Malevich.
Anus has its Latin root in the word for ring or cycle . Cycles of life – death – birth - growth – decay – abject - object… spiral into some dreadful and eternally engrossing chasm. Anus anus. The drawings in the exhibition make reference to the daily rituals and relationships with our Rings and cycles. The moment of death we daily endure and our secret sexual fascination with reliving, reviving and remoulding our symbolic (para-symbolic) relationship with the body and its absences. A tremour falls its way through our systems and delivers the lump of by-product into the clinical clean pan. A flush of safe water, the system we rely upon to remove our ephemeral shit. We remove every trace of the event onto soft paper. Every trace and remark that’s left by the processes at hand (those uncontrollable, strangely enjoyable processes). The paper picks up and records the hand (mind) to anus (body) relationship. The sweeping movement down the valley crack. The soft firm flood of pure paper. An unplanned aesthetic event happens upon the paper surface and a drawing that is not quite art sits delicately in your fingers. The work is fragile and unsure of its self, aware of the irrational shame attached to it. The drawing fails as an aesthetic representation of anything but its self (it is both realism and abstraction at once). It simply evokes the tale of the event that brings with it an experience that is complete and inclusive. The tale of a natural life cycle and the tale of a symbolic metaphysical focus. Shit.