Shaun Gladwell Blue & White Linework Composition

Blue & White Linework Composition continues Shaun Gladwell’s ongoing series of conceptual drawings rendered in video.

Beginning with the video entitled Double Linework (2000) and most recently Blue & White Linework Composition (2008), each Linework documents the artist tracing various road lines within urban environments. Using the camera’s viewfinder as his eye, Gladwell elaborates upon Baudelaire’s notion of the flâneur and the Situationist strategy of derive. One of Gladwell’s contributions to these two theories of strolling and drifting (respectively) is to experiment with the process of creative movement through the urban environment with his chosen vehicle, be it bicycle, motorcycle or skateboard.

The Linework series presents a minimal and simple aesthetic whilst engaging complex notions of time, speed and function. Gladwell offers his projects as a form of experimental drawing that is also equally a process of tracing. This performance playfully establishes Gladwell as the drawer, whilst also relinquishing it to the great pre-existing drawings – that extend and connect roadway systems throughout the world. Gladwell states:“The Linework series attempts to perform an experimental drawing or tracing in which I was both drawing and being drawn by road markings.” (“Intentionality and Interpretation”, Ihor Holubizky with Shaun Gladwell, in Blair French, ed., Shaun Gladwell: Videowork, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Australia, 2007, pp. 42.) A key reference for Gladwell is the notion of drawing offerd by Paul Klee in his Pedagogical Sketchbook: “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.”

Another ongoing concern for Gladwell is that of function, especially the notion ‘parafunction’ – which, for Gladwell involves the creative mis-use of forms to create new critical experience and understanding. Gladwell’s Linework videos play with the signification and authority associated with traffic lines, a symbol of order that is re-inscribed with irreverence by Gladwell’s tracings. The issue of signification shifts between the blue and white line for Sydney locals who can identify the blue line as the line marking the course of the marathon for the Sydney Olympic Games. This knowledge brings another layer of meaning to Gladwell’s project, where not all lines are of equal function or significance. The act of skateboading along the blue Olympic Marathon line sparks a discussion of an Olympic sport being stalked and followed by skateboarding, a sport not included in the Olympic competition.

The Lineworks engage a range of painting references, from the early attempts at perspective seen in Byzantine painting, to reading the vertical composition of the line as a conversation that make Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’ (huge vertical lines, as seen in his famous series of paintings Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966).

In Blue & White Linework Composition Gladwell creates a conceptual collage. Two separate lines are collaged together in three sequences. Different moments in time and space are layered and conflated into one wandering line.