jenny smith

At first glance, Jenny Smith’s recent work will appeal because of her art’s ostensible decorative minimalism, its deceptive ‘tastefulness’. Yet, the viewer could easily miss the conceptual and manual skill that is entailed in making such apparently ‘simple’ objects and what it is that Smith’s work ‘does’.

Smith’s art takes its cue from the real world. Previously, in the work that followed her visit to Japan, she drew on natural forms such as the movement of bamboo, or man-made patterns as seen in the raked lines of Zen temple gardens. In the globalised and thoroughly mediated culture we inhabit today, these references are easily recognisable as signs of ‘Japan’. But instead of a merely superficial cross-cultural quotation, Smith’s abstracted forms serve the purpose of calling into play the larger concepts that these signs allude to, especially the impermanence of all that we take for real.

In the current work, references to the real world are limited to the barest minimum: fragments of the circle instead of a complete orb; straight lines instead of calligraphic splashes. Materials, colours and process are equally deployed in the most modest manner. They are, however, crucial to an understanding of Smith’s art.

Throughout, her media and the process of their application both follow and playfully subvert their conventional use. Smith stretches paper – instead of the traditional canvas – over a deep frame. Her ‘paint’ is acrylic gesso, the medium that conventionally serves as a primer, a preparatory ground for oils or acrylics. Her colours are the most basic as well as the most versatile: white and shades of graphite grey. Her drawing tools are the pencil and the brush. Historically, the pencil is lower in the hierarchy of artistic means compared to the brush. The latter is affiliated with painting, the grandest of artistic disciplines.

Smith’s working method wittily confuses such affiliations of the tools and the value attributed to them: onto a masked off area of the panel, gesso is painted in horizontal or vertical brushstrokes with a coarse brush. These brush marks result in a densely linear field into which additional lines are drawn by dragging a pencil through the wet paint. Once dry, silvery grey paint is applied across the area. The result is the appearance of a set of horizontal or vertical lines of different width, depth, subtlety and strength, all apparently pencil-drawn.

Other aspects of Smith’s method further belie the assumption of a matter-of-fact process and demonstrate the extent to which these images are redolent with meaning. Although Smith adheres to the traditional format of the painting as a rectangular object on the wall, her work oscillates between different genres: the depth of her frames turn the familiar painting-on-the-wall into a quasi sculptural object; the paper which is partly left blank calls to mind the notion of drawing; functioning at the same time as the white image space, it evokes painting. This confounding of associations is further emphasized if one remembers that the bare canvas/white ground is conventionally a mere support, not a crucial part of the image. The interruption of convention also applies to the ‘fabricated’ portion of the image. Here, the usually invisible backdrop, gesso, is the vital image-creating matrix. In this way, the work questions the culturally coded parameters of its own coming-into-being. For the viewer this mobility between different artistic practices and possibilities, or intertextuality, implies a questioning of accepted certainties.

Another important feature of Smith’s process and imagery is her deliberate avoidance of overt self-expression. Instead, her tracing of lines resembles incising. The marks – together with the surprisingly ‘hard’ edge of the paper/canvas – not only possess an anti-illusional quality, they also acquire a direct presence. They are nothing but themselves, traces left by the movement of the hand. Carl Olson paraphrases poststructuralist philosopher Derrida in saying that: Drawing, as tracing, separates one thing from another and divides itself by starting from itself and leaving itself, and it also retraces the nonideal borderlines or unintelligible limits. In this sense Smith’s lines can be considered an apposite reflection of drawing.

There is another aspect to Smith’s ‘drawing’. The corporeality of her lines foregrounds the notion of ‘imprinting’. In semiotic terms they assume the character of an indexical sign. Here, the image and its meaning have a physical, causal connection, as in the footprint in the sand which is the result of the impression or mark that the foot makes. Like a footprint, Smith’s lines signal both presence and absence, or in the words of art-historian Georges Didi-Huberman, they suggest: touch (the foot which impresses itself into the sand) as well as the loss (the absence of the foot in its imprint), indicating the touch of the loss as well as the loss of the touch.

Ever present for the viewer is a temporal element which is already apparent in the parameters of the marks’ making. Because of the gesso’s quick drying, the lines have to be executed swiftly, in a ‘given’ time. Finality as well as contingency are evoked. These notions are also brought into play in another way. The sharp edges of the canvas/paper separate the art object from its surrounding wall, mark it out as different. Yet at the same time, the similarity of the bare white image space with the wall and the continuation of the lines along the side of the art object paradoxically embed the work within its environment. It might also initially appear as if the white textured watercolour paper functions as the ‘ground’ or mere backdrop to the form which is seemingly superimposed on it as is the case in conventional painting. But this is not so. There is no hierarchy or opposition here, the white ‘non-space’ and the space of the linear configuration both define and balance each other.

Smith’s approach can be linked to the Zen concept of ma: … Zen artistic theory recognizes the prominence of ma, the ground of all existence. It is ma, an interval between two or more spatial or temporal things, that makes possible the coexistence of opposites, … and unites such opposites as being and nonbeing. Given Smith’s interest in Zen Buddhism and meditation it does not seem presumptive to suggest that her art exposes the viewer to glimpses of ma through her exquisite forms.

ruth pelzer-montada 2003