Đorđe Jandrić: Kodikamo hrpa / Far and Away a Heap
exhibition's introductory text by curator Janka Vukmir
THE HAND, A TOOL FOR THOUGHT
The exhibition Kodikamo hrpa [The Heap, Encoded] which premiered at the gallery of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, consists of 30 artworks in total. To view the entire collection, some kind of a QR code reader is needed – for example, your smartphone and an internet connection – which is also required for viewing the overall contents of this publication.
Twenty graphite drawings on paper await us at the gallery. All of them are black and white, and in uniform size of 51 × 51 cm. Already at first glance, we see that these are two groups of drawings, since they are evidently visually different.
The first group of drawings, a series of ten, represents the numbers from 1 to 9 and 0; the second group, which also consists of ten drawings, are hand-drawn QR codes. As for the third group of drawings, you do not initially know that it exists at all; they are not present in the gallery space, and they are not reproduced in these pages. You can access these drawings only by scanning the codes. They are practically non-existent as physical objects, unless we imagine the pixels as physical material of which they consist.
The almost primary artistic procedure with which the exhibits have been executed, the graphite drawing on paper, does not give away and is not immediately associated with an exhibition that includes digital technology and digital space, and even the dimension of time. Jandrić’s idea of the drawings’ transformation and their digitalisation arises from the collision between handicraft and incessant contemporary digitalisation of all contents, and places the drawings in them into a field of interactivity between the analogue, the audience and the digital, which is rarely inherent in them.
The first series of drawings features heaps of natural numbers and zeros, mathematically written as N0. The first drawing that represents zero and does not belong to natural numbers, the drawing of a black square, is an evenly graphited plane of 48 × 48 size, with an empty border that is 1.5 cm wide. The association with Malevich and Black Square is not accidental, but rather literal; it refers to the autoreferentiality of artistic processes and procedures, and serves as a kind of homage. This is simultaneously an instruction to the drawing’s observer – that this is not a world of actual objects, but rather quite the contrary, that this is a rejection – or already was, when viewed from our time – of the burden of the objective world, the liberation from it, and focusing on the essence of form. Even Malevich himself called his Black Square the zero point of painting; hence, Jandrić uses it analogously as the starting, zero point of this series of works.
Furthermore, the technique of graphite on paper and the very process of the elements’ repetitiveness are, naturally, associated with Knifer and his repetitiveness of the form of meander and the continuity of the process of change. Along the lines of Knifer, who materialises absurdity, Jandrić seeks the materialisation of the idea – albeit not only technically, but also conceptually.
The other nine drawings show heaps, whose abundance in the drawings respectively follows the sequence of natural numbers, and which are arranged in regular geometric squares multiplied by the logic of the mathematical square. Hence, one heap is placed into one square, two heaps into four, three into nine… All the way to nine heaps placed into eighty-one squares.
The heap is frequently featured in art; each carries its own unique meaning, but Jandrić does not rely on the concept or the morphology of heaps known to us from art history.
Out of those closest to us, we should note Kožarić’s Heap from 1976, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, which consisted of a heap of Kožarić’s older works and which addressed with its contents a completely different topic, problematics and concept, just like the other, entirely different heap of Kožarić’s, found in his work I’m Feeling Like the Belly of a Lion That Has Eaten Too Much from 1971. The arte-poverian heaps of Michelangelo Pistoletto from the early 1960s, the heaps of candy by Félix González-Torres, and the heap of sharpening shavings by Predrag Pavić all show that the morphology of the heap is not connected to the meaning it carries.
The QR codes are also a motif that, similarly, frequently appears in numerous artworks of entirely different meanings and nature, although most QR codes represented in art are nevertheless usable and lead an observer to a new content, which is also their function. Again, the QR code in Pistoletto leads to the content referring to the history of his work; in Takashi Murakami, it leads into the world of integration between art and consumerism; in the works by Xu Bing for the Metropolitan Museum, it leads to calligraphy.
But what exactly are these heaps of Jandrić’s? His professional biography states that he studied architecture, which he abandoned in favour of studying sculpture, never once having abandoned the basic principles of spatial thinking in his work. He is interested in numbers, drawing, geometry, space, volume, concept, analysis and context, virtually the basics of planning. When he introduced in his work the idea of the heap 30 years ago, this was actually the reflection of the attitude that a heap of any material is a potential sculpture and that a sculpture can be executed in any material and medium since, alongside its three-dimensionality, it also attains its volume with the accumulation of imagined content, and not merely by the materiality of form. To Jandrić, nearly everything is a heap, and every heap is a sculpture. Everything is a sculpture, Jandrić asserted in conversation during the preparations for his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. These drawings of heaps are also to be understood in this manner, as deconstructed sculptures broken down into sequences of two-dimensional drawings, planes.
The ideal form of a heap is the cone. It is symbolised by a triangle and a circle inscribed into a square, constituting a nearly Euclidian principle of the analysis of structure, space, and changes. A sculpture. Out of this heap, out of the circle and the triangle inscribed into the square, Jandrić made his recognisable sign, the icon of the heap or the avatar of the sculpture.
However, we nevertheless have before us two-dimensional planes of drawings, which do not even seek to form volume. They are executed so that the entire plane of the paper is covered in a thick layer of graphite – hence, it thematises the surface of the plane – while the drawing consists of caesurae in the black surface, white lines. As a drawing, we assume that which has not been touched by the author’s hand and is not covered in graphite, that which is not really a drawing per se, but is rather an untouched piece of paper; therefore, we can say that the drawing has been deconstructed into its own negative.
All drawings have been executed freehand; the thin lines, which were carefully left untouched in their white spaces, were carefully outlined; however, the author’s signature looms nevertheless. Jandrić did not aim at technical anonymity in execution, quite the contrary, he invokes the importance of handiwork, the meanings from the renowned 1934 book In Praise of Hands by Henri Focillon. In it, Focillon interprets the hand as the key factor of creative expression and shaping the world, for he sees the hand as a tool, as a basic means of shaping the material world, which thereby represents the extension to the artistic, creative thought and creative energy; the hand as the medium of the materialisation of the idea, in which the work of the hand and its result also represent a trace left by man in time. Simultaneously, Focillon does not see an artwork as a static object, but rather as a dynamic process that is changing, developing and adapting as a living organism. The life of forms.
Since appropriate paper is required for working with graphite in thick layers, Jandrić chose paper that is coarse, embossed, actually intended for watercolours, Canson Montval Torchon 270 g – which, however, holds best the layers of graphite that must fill out the surface to maximum density; this paper must remain steady in its surface tension so as to remain flat, without traces of treatment on the paper’s surface that would make it corrugated. The graphite itself comes from a 9B pencil and a 9B graphite stick, i.e., the softest possible version of graphite. The drawings which bring us the square pattern of QR codes had to be measured only for the necessary precision so that the code would be scanned correctly; however, save for the mark of measure, they were also drawn freehand. They were executed in a somewhat harder graphite. The marks themselves were drawn with an HB pencil, while the fields were filled out with 5B graphite. The little squares of the QR codes, more than 300 of them in each of the ten drawings, measure 1.9 cm, and had to be measured so that they are proportionate to the paper format. The latter was determined by factory settings; for, in production, there is no packaging in rolls, but rather in sheets with set dimensions, which the author can adapt to his needs only to a certain extent.
Each QR code corresponds to one of the drawings of heaps. The QR codes lead us from the analogue, hand-drawn drawing to the digital sphere, and bridge the way to the third, final series of drawings, the vectorial ones, which open up to us at the link to which the scanning of the QR code led us. The digital, vectorial drawings are identical with their raster and arrangement of lines and heaps to the black and white drawings of heaps; however, their dimensions depend on the device on which one views them, even though the proportions tell us that the digital version of the drawing is ideally equal to the hand-drawn one. The key visible difference is that the digital drawings have coloured, variegated grading backgrounds. Even though Jandrić did not require colour as a means of expression in his works, we concluded in conversation (1) that they may be associated with Rothko’s dynamic limned surfaces, but carry other, opposite, antisymbolic meanings. In the dematerialised digital form, the background contrasts the white lines; however, just like it does not carry a symbolic meaning, it also does not carry a mathematical one. It is a randomly selected, playful spectrum opposite to the original drawing.
The Croatian title of the exhibition Kodikamo hrpa evidently arises from the author’s licence to play with words, thereby adding to the works’ meanings. Kodikamo, this anomaly of the word kudikamo [much more/less], is acoustically associated with code/codes, which are an evident threshold between the analogue and the digital. However, kudikamo (2) is a word used with adjectives to boost their comparative form, e.g., much better or much more beautiful, meaning indeed, quite, certainly, substantially, far… better or more beautiful. Placed next to the noun hrpa [heap], it is also associated with spatial movement that leads the exhibition visitor everywhere, which is exactly what happens at the border between that which we view at the gallery while viewing the analogue, and entering the digital space in which we view a series of works that is not visible at all at the exhibition and in this publication.
The starting point of my work is my awareness of the fact that sculpture is everything, hence, the heap is everything, and therefore it is also possible that a heap, a noun, is also an adjective – again, naturally, with my wordplay and my authorial licence. (3)
In present-day trends in contemporary art, dominated by the direct and literal social activism – and Jandrić had once also presented a couple of works on this subject in his corpus, which also included the icons of heap – such series of works, based on handiwork, will seem anachronous at first glance to a frivolous observer, just like my attempt to technically describe the exhibition and the characteristics it consists of. My argument for this procedure is that the exhibition indeed contrasts the handiwork and the slow-paced, manual production procedure, while around 800 hours of work, not counting the breaks, was required for the execution of all 30 works.
This exhibition, however, proceeds from a different starting point since it is not activist by nature, but does offer with its dedication to the traditional and conventional medium of drawing a social commentary – albeit not resistance – in a discreet, personal and rational manner, which also carries in the sum of its characteristics a poetic play, speculation, suspicion, dilemma, but also a silent critique of contemporary times, while commenting on and adopting the latter’s settings.
This exhibition renders the basic art medium – the drawing – interactive and virtual by animating the audiences of all profiles and generations to use their devices in a manner in which many do not use them typically. Had you witnessed the weeks-long observing and explaining of the instructions for the exhibition’s use, you would have been surprised at the way in which respective demographic groups of audiences react differently from standard expectations and generally accepted prejudices.
This is the beauty of any exhibition, and also of this one – to put observers to the test they do not expect, to provoke thinking, to offer discomfort and comfort, to demand viewing, to demand interaction, to offer a space of the physical and the virtual, whether it be tangible or immaterial, or simply a space in which we live, and differentiates it from the one we think about.
And all of this through a simple encoded heap, but which originated during many months in contemplative work created by hand, the forgotten tool for thought.
Janka Vukmir
Translated by Mirta Jurilj
Notes:
1. Conversation between J. V. and Đ. J. during the preparations for the exhibition, 2 April 2024.
2. https://hjp.znanje.hr/
3. From the conversation between J. V. and Đ. J. during the preparations for the exhibition, 2 April 2024.