Water Drawings: A Tank

A Tank, a video work from the Water Drawings cycle, documents one of Blue Republic’s performances loosely referring to land art. The artistic activities themselves, carried out on the shores of Georgian Bay in Canada, were very simple. In each of the films in which they are recorded, we see, in a static shot, the artist drawing on sun-warmed rocks with a brush dipped in a bucket of water; those drawings are, among others, A Tank, Ladders, Twin Towers, NASDAQ and The Raft of the Medusa. The effect of his work lasts only for a short while, as the process of natural destruction of the work begins immediately. The lines drawn with water evaporate under the influence of the sun and the heat emitted by the rock, and a branch washed white by sea water, which for a moment was the barrel of a tank, becomes a piece of wood again. Soon not a trace remains of the human intervention.

Unlike land art artists, Blue Republic takes possession of space only for a moment, and the effects of the group’s action exist only in video recording. In this context, there return the outdated questions concerning the work of art as such, and the incompatibility of categories and terms developed in art history with contemporary artistic activities. In the case of Water Drawings, what should be considered a work of art: the performance, the ephemeral drawing, or the video recording? Also, while works from the area of land art usually represent a permanent and significant intervention in the landscape, Blue Republic’s water drawings are entirely subordinate to nature and weather phenomena. The final frames of the video depict the vast landscape of Lake Huron, free from human intervention or human presence.

Critics point to one more interesting aspect of Blue Republic’s work, namely, the tradition of prehistoric rock art. Thousands of years ago, in the area of the geological formation known as the Canadian Shield, people drew pictograms and engraved petroglyphs – symbols of various shapes that served non-verbal communication. In this context, Blue Republic’s drawings, which disappear after a while, have the features of a visual palimpsest, a text or image created on a material from which an earlier text or image had been removed. The rock, or nature itself, becomes a repository of history, a silent and illegible document of events from the distant and recent past.

A cropped portion of landscape within a video frame, waves crashing against rocky shores. This is Georgian Bay – the great bay of Lake Huron in North America – a lake is so vast it could be well mistaken for an ocean. A man appears on the rocks. Dipping his brush into a bucket of water, he paints on the sun-warmed rocky surface. Even before he is finished, however, sunshine does its job of destruction, drying his water drawings almost as quickly as they were created. As time passes, they vanish completely. All that remains is the untouched harmonious landscape – space bound by horizon, the lake, rocks, smidgens of green foliage. A holiday in the wild. Peace and quiet, undisturbed.

This is not land art, nor an attempt to harness nature. The artists of Blue Republic do not cut into rocks, nor do they arrange stones into megalithic structures; they have no need for heavy machinery. A bucket of water and a surface of rock suffice. Nature operates in a similar fashion. […] Sometimes the drawing is a simple outlined shape, an attempt to introduce a kind of geometrical order to the chaotic, organic traces of waves crashing against rock. Nonetheless, geometry is an order unknown to nature. On other occasions, drawings of pots or ladders on the vertical rock surfaces appear. In a sun- and saltwater-bleached branch, the artist sees a barrel, and draws a tank to go with it. For a brief moment, the branch stops being a branch; but once the drawing dries, reverts to its original form. […]

These fugitive drawings can be viewed as a distant cousin to the genre of land art. The open spaces of the North American wilderness have long inspired artists to intervene, to leave a permanent mark on stony deserts or on the waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, for example. Blue Republic chooses to work with nature in an entirely different modality – and in a holiday mood, with no major effort discernable to the viewer. Moreover, these drawings do not remain as permanent artworks, they disappear, almost instantaneously. All that is left are the video recordings of the actions of creation. In this work, the appropriation of landscape for art’s sake is but temporary, all traces of physical imposition onto the land is pre-programmed to fade.

The water drawings can also be compared to a practice much older than land art, that of the rock paintings, pictographs and petroglyphs created by many ancient cultures and across all continents – including on the rocky deserts of Arizona and in the well-nigh inaccessible parts of Canada. Traces of human and animal figures inhabiting – through the effort of many generations – the walls and ceilings of the Lascaux Cave, have become a popular contemporary arena for interpretation. Scientists postulate what was going on at the time of their creation, what they show, and in what way they were important to the communities that created them. Who was originally intended to view the giant Nazca Lines in Peru, only visible from aircraft (and discovered by pilots in the 1920’s)? A hundred-metre hummingbird, a fifty-metre spider, zoomorphic figures and plants – one may imagine their purpose was to please the gods looking down from the heavens. One thing is certain, however. They all convey at least one shared message: “We were here.”

The iconography of Blue Republic’s ephemeral pictographs diverges significantly from ancient cave drawings in that they are contemporary, and fully legible. Geometry, ladders, pots, tanks and barcodes. Even when a mountain range appears, it turns out to be a stock market quotations graph: the video is titled, NASDAQ, after the eponymous North American stock exchange. Stock quotations being also transitory in nature, transforming their valuations overnight. […]

The artists seem to be winking ironically at the rush and speed of the modern world: While they draw things we are all very familiar with, they also remain fully aware of the volatility of contemporary commodities, which are always soon to be replaced by new ones, slightly improved, and with new serial numbers and bar codes.

Excerpts from the essay ‘Momentary Drawings’ by Karol Sienkiewicz, published in the exhibitions catalogue BLUE REPUBLIC. Made in Blue Republic, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2018

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In Blue Republic’s Water Drawings (2014–2016) – temporary (or transitory) interventions into nature employing performance, water and time – similar questions of impermanence, mark-making and futility all come to mind. […] the ‘water graffiti’ exists only momentarily before dissipating in the heat (the duration and process captured on film and in photographs). These in one sense pointless actions performed in tranquil natural settings seem to go against our contemporary rapid culture with its uniform patterns of market, constant presentism and (social) media’s complicity and participation in destructive processes such as environmental degradation, accumulation of debt, terrorism, and civic decay. In this way the work is an almost perfect exposure of the risks and complexities of advanced neoliberalism and global crisis. Sisyphean in their efforts, almost meditative in their repetition, and strangely (satirically) akin to Snapchat temporality, Water Drawings nonetheless oppose the techno-utopia and acceleration of today and propose an alternative reality from scratch (ex nihilo), carved out of the most basic means available.

In these organic drawings, Blue Republic equate the artistic effort with futility, whilst alluding to larger urban-ecological concerns. The immateriality and boundlessness of their utopian vision of the world and the contemporaneity epitomise many of these artists’ works. Instability, fragility and fleeting presence of many of their installations poignantly evoke the current state of affairs and create an aura of empathy for the disadvantaged and the overlooked.