Friday, June 20, 2014

In plane sight

Can you draw something that's invisible? Hard. The moment you draw the invisible it becomes…er…visible. That was the conceit Ronnie van Hout played with in his work The Invisible Man a small model of the invisible man (made visible via clothing and bandages) being videoed. Double visible.

In Istanbul we saw part of what looked like an outline drawing on the pavement. Stepping back we could see that even though part of it was covered by parked cars, it looked like the outline of an aircraft of some kind. And it was. It was part of a project for the Istanbul Biennale in 2012 by James Bridle and it is still there. Under the rubric of the new aesthetic Bridle and his colleagues visualise the invisible and often invisibly menacing presences in our world. The Istanbul drawing was a full-scale outline of an unmanned Predator drone and it was titled Drone shadow 002. You can see the complete Istanbul drawing and other examples here and read more about Bridle’s work. His post about his failure to make a drone drawing in Brisbane is particularly interesting.