Introduction Chris Sharp, Paris 2010

One of Marc Nagtzaam's unrealized projects is to one day put together a catalog that consists entirely of textual descriptions of his work. There would be no images in this catalog, and none of the descriptions would be written by the artist himself. When the artist shared with me this intimate piece of information, I felt a certain sense of privilege, as if I had been vouchsafed the secret or the key to his practice. This feeling was then succeeded by one of fascination, and then by a kind of sadness (never mind the theoretical or literary precedent this is bound to conjure up in the mind of almost any art professional: Walter Benjamin's well known dream of one day putting together a text composed of nothing but citations) (1). The fascination was linked to the admiration I always feel when faced with self-effacement, especially self-effacement in what is generally perceived to be the arch-egotistical context of art making. However, examined a little more closely, it becomes apparent that this self-effacement is only apparent-- given the fact that, the suppression of the visual component notwithstanding, these texts are still about Nagtzaam's drawings. And yet if one examines the artist's work even more closely, this last observation in turn caves in, because it turns out that the self-effacement, the removal of the self, and the process through which that removal is arrived at, is operating on a much deeper level, and thoroughly permeates Nagtzaam's practice. For what he does involves a process of most rigorous, if paradoxical self-effacement, which leads me to believe that the above-mentioned project is indeed quite key to gaining a clearer understanding of his work. But I must confess that I am not entirely sure why this unrealized project saddens me-- maybe that too will become clearer throughout the course of this text.

Nagtzaam makes drawings. Using graphite and the occasional colored pencil, he works primarily in black and white and in varying formats of paper, from small to middling, which are never smaller than a magazine page and rarely, if ever exceed the format of the human body (except for in the rare cases of wall drawings). The visual repertoire of the drawings ranges from a kind of hard-edge all-over abstraction to the reproduction of the written word. Seemingly idiosyncratic grids of differing modes and sizes abound, while exploded lattices of linear markings stream across surfaces of paper with an apparent randomness, and circular, all-over doodles are apotheosized into meticulous labors of graphic splendor. The language pieces generally consist of two types: one of which features the title of the work or a group of potential titles collaged together at random and drawn out on paper, and the other which features language culled from art magazines, copied and written on the paper in seemingly coherent columns. The art magazine language drawings are marked with all the imperfect and uneven personality of gesture which one normally expects from pencil on paper, and which is almost entirely absent from the much more controlled geometric drawings that comprised the rest of the artist's practice. This makes for a paradox, and consequently, the kind of tension that essentially animates Nagtzaam's output. Proceeding as such, he manages to render the highly impersonal language of art journalism manifestly personal-- a language moreover that could hardly be more codified; as codified, in fact, and therefore as ineluctably borrowed as abstraction-- while he to all intents and purposes, submits a rather personal process of abstraction to the alienating anonymity of the grid.

A word, however, about certain of his grids, and how they are made, seems to be necessary here in order to understand the so-called personal process to which I allude. Nagtzaam's grids of the asymmetrical, frame-by-frame variety-- think an impossibly over-loaded or disorganized comic book page-- are actually based on collages of images collected by the artist from magazines. Exactly what kind of images they are is, as Nagtzaam insists, devoid of significance (2); their significance lies elsewhere, in the mere fact that for whatever unknowable reason, they caught and retained his attention long enough to be provisionally, or rather marginally preserved. Once selected, they are arranged in an irregular puzzle-like grid, photocopied, and then traced over, such that only the abutting, rectilinear contours of the images remain, effectively effacing the content of the erstwhile images (to describe the process as "bracketing content" could not be meant more literally). Whereupon the resultant grids would seem to submit to the specious, all-encompassing anonymity of the grid. But even a cursory inspection of the Nagtzaam's essentially wonky grids will reveal a pattern heterogenous enough to suggest some obscure organizing principle, some ineffably personal touch, thus saving the grids, at the eleventh hour, so to speak, from being absorbed into the aforementioned anonymity of the originary Grid. As much they as they initially court it, they ultimately resist it. (3)

Much of Nagtzaam's practice could be said to proceed along the same positive/negative lines-- a binary that, incidentally, often characterizes his black-and-white palette-- in the sense that a step forward is almost always preceded by a step back, or any investiture of the self is invariably countered by a preponderant removal of that same self. Drawings often issue from a personal source, such as a photo or a process, which is subsequently effaced, or perverted to such a degree as to become unidentifiable, yet they rarely, if ever entirely forfeit their obscure origins. Consider, for instance, 'The Original Voice of America' (2004). Of the exploded lattice variety, or motif, this dynamic image taken at a glance, could be read as a bird's eye portrayal of so many pick up sticks on the floor, or a depiction of rain storming across a window pane, as if in a Ukioy-e print or a single frame of a Japanese comic book (Indeed, this austere form of abstraction often feels somehow Asian, perhaps by virtue of simultaneous semblance of spontaneity and strictness, like calligraphy). But on closer examination (ah, again that 'closer examination': it does seem to crop up with a suspicious regularity, as if each of Nagtzaam's drawings contained two drawings, the first of which is a potentially generic abstraction, which is actually an allegory of abstraction in the age of, well, thoroughly codified abstraction, in that the drawing seems to consummately participate in a way of creating, processing and classifying abstract images. But then upon that repeated 'closer examination' it turns out that much more is at stake), these lattices are not quite what they purport to be; they don't quite add up. That's because before becoming a drawing, the image upon which the drawing is based was cut up and reorganized into a kind of montage, in which syncopated horizontal shifts have been introduced, like pixelated glitches, into the otherwise sound, bramble-like cascade of positive, white markings. The eye uneasily skips around the surface, at once negotiating the all-over skein as it has been trained to do while registering and straining to compensate for its many non-linear incongruities. As such, it complements Nagtzaam's tendency toward push and pull by resisting the closure its (fraudulent) codification seems to proffer. No surprise then that the artist has expressed (4) a preference for drawing by virtue of its incompletion, of its sense of always being unfinished, or but a stage, like an architectural drawing, in a larger, possibly on-going process. Clearly, the content of this preference is expressed not only at the level of the medium, but also on a conceptual and formal level, transfiguring such a proclivity for incompletion into a strikingly coherent project.

If I have said nothing until now about the fact that these are drawings, it is because they have a way of largely eluding the logic of drawing. But what is the logic of drawing? Is there even a logic? I think so, and I think that logic is evocatively embodied in the English designation of the act: drawing. Flowing uncertainly forth, the word seems to meander out of the mouth (dra-ahhhhh-ing), as if searching for something, not quite sure what it will find. It seems to born of a logic of no logic, unbounded by any principle but a hesitating openness to discovery. And while Nagtzaam's drawings are far from devoid of any sense of discovery, they are extremely programatic, composed of tight, deliberate gestures (Indeed, raising the stakes of impersonality significantly, Nagtzaam told me how for him the drawings could potentially be outsourced, executed by another hand, as in Moholy-Nagy's Telephone Paintings or Sol Lewitt's wall drawings). If his mode of drawing conforms in any way to what one normally expects of the practice of drawing, it is largely in terms of time. Filling in all the negative fields in his drawings with graphite himself, the works are saturated, to the point of hyperbole, with time. For all their seductive systematic severity, they abundantly testify to a human presence, paradoxically conveying that despite the artist's methodically engineered absence, he was nevertheless there, doing, as it were, his due diligence, he was there, drawing.

Maybe, in the end, perhaps that is precisely what saddens about this work: what it indicates through its elaborate and continual evocation and obstruction of the self, and its systematic withdrawal of narrative from such a narrative art form. Ever since the avant garde, it could be said that all art production has been implicitly governed by a dialectic of taboos. (5) On one side, art cleaves ahead against social and formal taboos, violating them, and as such, claiming new ground, new territory for discourse. Meanwhile, a creative taboo forms in its wake, making it such that certain forms or kinds of expression become tacitly prohibited (it could even be argued that the taboo issues out of exhaustion of the discourse associated with it). Although never explicit, the creative t aboo can be seen surreptitiously operating in a given practice through that which it seeks to repress or deny, which in the case of Nagtzaam would be the self and narrative. Of course, it would be categorically wrong to attribute any kind of sentimentality to Nagtzaam's work, for it is clearly anything but that, but it cannot be denied that there is a certain pathos in its insistence to continually evoke the ghosts that haunt it, that which inevitably invests work with a certain elegiac character.

And yet when all is said and done, it cannot be said that all narrative content (and self) has been completely evacuated from these works. A margin of unaccountable and irrepressible self, born of mistake, of "drawing outside the lines," as it were, still remains. Try as he might to conform to the subjective, premise-based rules he has generated and imposed upon himself, any adherence to a system will inevitably be imperfect. Thus does another paradox emerge from Nagtzaam's drawings, for what I have defined as a source of sadness, as it were, can also be read as a source of optimism, by virtue of what it implies about agency and, again, paradoxically, narrative. In a consumer, hyper-capitalist world that continually seeks to speciously expand the illusion of agency while reducing it with an even greater rigor, choices are nevertheless made, and even more importantly, stories-- for which there would seem to no longer be any more place-- can be told, even if through accident, which, it turns out, like a wrong turn, is often where they begin.


1.
This comparison, though productive, is weak: There is a prodigious difference between the agency of selecting quotes and accepting descriptions of one's work, even if one selects the writers of those descriptions. In the case of latter, creative agency is largely outsourced, while Benjamin's fantasy, many would argue, is merely an overt replication of the perpetuation of language. Perhaps a more apt parallel would be the charming and spuriously Borgesian impossibility of replacing a novel with a collection of reviews of that novel (I say spuriously, because Borges' substitution of a novel with a pseudo-review was meant to circumvent as concisely as possible the writing of the novel, not proliferate it).
2.
The artist would also argue that the disclosure of his process is likewise not necessary to understanding or appreciating the work. And while that may well be the case, an awareness of that process can but enrich the work, revealing not only the many processual strata that go into it, but also the complex progression of withdrawal that leads out of it.
3.
Alas, the temptation to liken such an abysmal gaze into the grid, such a push-and-pull feint, to a kind of death drive is irresistible.
4.
During a studio visit with Nagtzaam in June 2010.
5.
This dialectic of taboos is obviously a consequence of the destruction/creation dialectic, which essentially animated the classical avant garde.