A Glossary of Possible Gestures is an on-going collection of gestures seen in images in public space; a kind of drawn response to these mediated imagery sources. The gestures are isolated into simple close-ups of human body-parts, and are simply made on the spot on ordinary A4-paper and then posted up using scotch tape – a kind of "instant-image-interventions" that have subsequently been documented through photography. The drawings exist in the city as long as they last, and the resulting snap shots can be exhibited as a number of videos.
Together the drawings on top of each their image form an inventory or a ‘glossary of possible gestures’ demonstrated for the public. Gestures in advertising are obviously made for a public, as part of an address, as well as an ideal to strive for; as a kind of choreography of acceptable and desirable bodily movements and poses. They must be seen as not only descriptive of behaviour, but also as instructive – inspirational as well as aspirational.
My interest in drawing is closely related to drawing as diagram, manual or script; a sort of idealized situation, description or model, that both instructs or projects, as well as depicts. One of the aspects that I am interested in is the gap when the 'non-specific ideal' of the diagram or manual meets a very concrete context to which it is supposed to relate: The generality of the drawing meeting a singular instance of what it depicts or refers to. I am interested in the presence of advertizing-images in the city in the same way – the general ideal they present, and the very concrete singular bodies that pass by and see them.
My strategy consists of isolating these gestures from their context – the advertising image – and doubling them onto themselves in the form of fast hand-drawings, that transforms the gesture into something that can be called typical. This action of reading an image with a very specific purpose, dissecting it and categorizing it’s parts, is here not a matter of empirical science as it might seem at first glance, but ephemeral and temporal, itself a gesture.
The glossary was first shown in Best Laid Plans at The Drawingroom, London, 2010. Curated by Cylena Simonds.
Special thanks to Nina Sander and Misja Thirslund Krenchel.
Video example with 2 channels.
Context: Drawings on top of their motifs as seen around the city.
Context: Drawings on top of their motifs as seen around the city.
