University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

"Hairballs" and other drawings

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"Hairballs" and other drawings

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HAIRBALLS AND OTHER DRAWINGS
Copyright 1996
by
Stanislav Orlovski
A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty Of The Graduate School
University Of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(Painting)
August 1996
Stanislav Orlovski
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UNIVERSITY O F SO U TH ER N CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOO L
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CA LIFO RN IA S0007
This thesis, written by
under the direction of hj£~ Thesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Date.
SIS COMM!
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On Drawing
I came to Los Angeles with the intention of making large narrative figurative
paintings; the type of work that could participate in a dialogue with heroic western
painting. By heroic western painting, I am referring to a tradition beginning with the large
canvases of the Italian Renaissance, through nineteenth century French Academic and
Romantic painting, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalist painting, 1980's Neo-
Expressionism, and twentieth century artists such as Francis Bacon and Leon Golub.
Although these art historical periods, movements and schools produced very diverse
paintings, they all had a sense of unabashed theatricality, physicality and ambition. I was
attracted to particular movements or styles for their use of monumental scale, laborious
working processes, inflected brushwork, or grand subject matter. Inspired by these
qualities, I spent my first month developing ideas for multi-panel paintings based on
autobiography and family history. Within two months, I was paralyzed by the thought of
painting a small panel. Rather than conversing with the tradition of heroic western
painting, I was being consumed by it. It seemed that every brushstroke and composition I
made was somehow not really my own. One moment I was Max Beckman and the next
Chuck Close. I could not escape contextualizing my marks and designs within the history
of western painting. I was more concerned with how to paint, than what to paint. It was at
this time that I turned to drawing as a viable alternative for representing my ideas. In
taking up charcoal and paper, my relationship to heroic western painting was not one of
critique, or homage, but rather an attempt to combine its theatricality, physicality and
ambition with the tactility, intimacy and esoteric quality of drawing.
My MFA exhibition entitled, Hairballs and Other Drawings, was the culmination
of two years worth of drawing. Mounted at the Brewery Arts Complex in downtown Los
Angeles, the show was composed of seven drawings installed throughout two levels. The
first level contained Hairballs, Tongues, Diseased Hands and Diseased Feet, while the
loft area was devoted to Study fo r the Nose Job, Boston Noses and Nasal Arrangement. I
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cannot deny that the work in this exhibition was, in part, a result of ray paralyses with
painting. Whether or not I bought into the dogma of postmodernism, or internalized some
traditional hierarchy in which painting reigns supreme, is a separate and perhaps less
interesting discussion. Most importantly when drawing, I did not have to reconcile the
nature of ray mark-making because there was never a question that those lines, smudges
and erasures were inherently mine. Similarly, I felt less pressure to compose and instead
focused my energies on representing the object itself. Quite simply, drawing offered me a
sense of relief from the burden of making a historicized mark. Abolishing paint, color,
composition, or any other frivolity in favor of a more immediate approach presented a
logical and productive solution to this dilemma. Having said this, it would be completely
inaccurate to claim that these works arose out of a compensation for my inability to paint.
When doing the earlier drawings I did search for a way back into painting. However, it
became increasingly apparent that a significant part of my resistance to painting was
rooted in the ideas generating the drawings. I simply could not imagine any of the things
I had done, or desired to do, as anything other than drawings. What follows is a
chronological account of each work exhibited in Hairballs and Other Drawings.
Hairballs
According to Michel Foucault, the body’s relationship to the world is at the center
of all knowledge. My interest in the human body resides in the peculiarities of this
relationship. Working with portraiture led me to research the various ways in which the
human body has been represented. In particular, I became fascinated with eighteenth and
nineteenth century Physiognomy as a system for looking at the body. More so than any
other part of the body, the face received intense scrutiny in the belief that it embodied
some form of larger truth. Beginning with the ancient Physiognomies of Pseudo-
Aristotle, Polemon, Adamantios and Pseudo-Apuleius, the study of the face and head
fragmented into a multiplicity of intellectual efforts culminating with the birth of
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psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, anthropology and statistics. In each century,
physiognomy, studied the surface of the body in search of various truths. Configurations
of individual features, angles of foreheads, spatial relationships between strategic points
on the body, geometric comparisons to lost Greco-Roman ideals and comparisons to
animal forms were used to determine various characteristics ranging from intellect,
emotional state and moral character to delinquency, degeneration and criminality.
Texts on physiognomy were often accompanied by a profusion of illustrations,
tables and flowcharts. It is no wonder that the drawings I produced refer to the printed
page, or more specifically the diagram. The primary purpose of a diagram is to explicate,
however my intentions were quite the opposite. I was interested in using the syntax of a
diagram, such as grouping, repetition, metamorphosis, comparison, evolution, and
seriality to present images and relationships that were consciously esoteric. In
otherwords, I wanted to present the body in a structure that suggested a proposition, but
never quite presented one. The formal properties of the diagram offered a way of
considering the body without resorting to art historical conventions. Historically, heroic
painting used the body as a narrative device, metaphor, symbol, or factual record. Even
when the body appeared to be the artist's real interest, it was often tempered by the
inclusion of elements suggesting an allegorical or historical reading. Conversely,
representations of the body as the subject matter became part of the tradition of figure
painting. As a result, it became important for me to devise a way of representing the body
without slipping into any sort of narrative structure.
Hairballs is the first work in the exhibition to address the problem of narrative.
Hairballs is an installation composed of two dozen, thirty by forty-four inch, charcoal
drawings arranged within a grid. The Hairball evolved out of my interest in portraiture as
a representation of the back of the head. The first few Hairballs were clearly head-like.
As I continued to make more of them, the hair separated from the head to become an
autonomous object. Despite their various forms, some resembling micro-organisms,
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plant-life, or images of water, the Hairballs never lost their reference to the human body.
After making ten of them, it occurred to me that what I enjoyed most about these
drawings was their ambiguity. By ambiguity, I am referring not so much to what the
thing is, but rather why it is. This notion was confirmed by a brief exploration into the
iconography of East Indian Buddhist and Hindu hairstyles. Those particular Hairballs
were much more hairstyle-like in their depiction of knots, buns, twists and braids.
Although they were equally strange, the Indian Hairballs moved towards a more explicit
form of story-telling.
The issue of labor was significant in developing the Hairballs. It was essential for
each Hairball to be drawn one strand at a time. The physical action associated with this
process insured that my hand was inextricably woven into the coiffure of each Hairball.
Drawing hair offered me the opportunity to accurately depict an object with a single
gesture. Since each strand of hair is also the mark itself, I did have to concern myself
with rendering. Each hair was a record of my hand moving across the paper. In
retrospect, I wonder how much of this concern for a distinct graphology arose out my
difficulties in establishing my own brushstroke. Clearly, making my mark in first person,
so to speak, invested the Hairballs with both a sense of intimacy and theatricality.
The presentation of the Hairballs was based on evoking a sense of drama without
resorting to a narrative structure. In past exhibitions, I arranged the Hairballs in a number
of ways: sometimes as individual works hung at eye-level along a wall, and other times in
small groupings of various sizes and configurations. Of all the possible formats, the grid
seemed to be most appropriate. My rationale for using the grid, without digressing into a
historical analysis of the implications associated with adopting this format, was based on
referencing diagrams, tables and charts, as opposed to commenting on, or ascribing to
any sort of art historical conventions. Furthermore, the grid resolved my problem of
composition. Despite its popularity in Modernist painting, the grid (when viewed as a
structure rather than an aesthetic device) transcends all art historical conventions. Placing
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the Hairballs within the grid afforded me the opportunity to present these otherwise
intimate representational drawings on a monumental scale without them being pictorial,
or resorting to narrative. The grid provides a structure in which individual objects may
relate to one another while maintaining their singularity. The single object isolated in
space is then experienced through association rather than narrative.
Tongues
I began the Tongues with the intention of making a large drawing that used
repetition and seriality in way that was similar to the Hairballs, but addressed issues of
body fragmentation from a more pathological perspective. The potential of the tongues
not being immediately recognizable, or even being mistaken for other forms, was an
important element in this drawing. Defamiliarizing the body appealed to me because it
tended to disturb a narrative reading and force the viewer to confront the object being
represented. References for this work came from a twentieth century medical book
entitled, Color Atlas o f the Tongue. This book presented detailed color photographs
illustrating various diseases affecting the structure and surface of the tongue. My interest
in these tongues did not, at that point, have much to do with the notion of disease per say;
but rather in using affliction as a way to differentiate and meticulously observe each
tongue with all its peculiarities in both form and character. The format of the book
dictated the method I used to construct the drawing. I began the drawing on roll of white
paper measuring eighty inches in width. Starting with page one, I proceeded to make the
tongues from the center out. For instance, if a page had four tongues, I would complete
all four tongues before resting. Page layouts ranged anywhere from two to six tongues.
The logic behind organizing the work in this manner was that it would be completed only
when I ran out of tongues. The roll emerged as a function of the work by contextualizing
the drawing as an incomplete object and suggesting the physical unrolling of a tongue. As
with the Hairballs, the issue of labor is a central element in the Tongues. Whereas the
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repetitive mark-making in the Hairballs was motivated by establishing a distinct
graphology, the accumulation of hundreds of carefully drawn tongues was based on a
relentless observation of each crease, ripple and blemish. The act of looking, cataloging
and describing, which is so apparent in this work, establishes a relationship with the
viewer by presenting the drawing as a record of my obsessive activity.
Study for the Nose Job
In contrast to the Hairballs and Tongues, Study fo r the Nose Job begins to suggest
a narrative structure. Subtle changes in size, length, texture, and angle speak of the
various histories in the representation and consequently understanding of the human
body. Study fo r the Nose Job grew out of a variety of drawings focusing on the
disembodied nose. The casual outline of the head emerged when it became apparent that
the profile needed to be present in order to locate the noses in the histories of caricature,
physiognomic diagrams and medical illustration. At the same time, I wanted the noses to
resist the conventions of these genres by residing on the cusp of clearly defined
categories, but never quite satisfying the viewer with a recognizable character, type, or
condition.
Caricature operates on the shared knowledge of a multitude of complex cultural
assumptions. More so than any other physical feature, the nose was looked upon as an
essential element for determining human character. The drawings of Hogarth, Daumier
and Grandville have provided a vast archive of characters who continue to reappear in
contemporary mass media images: the upturned nose of a snob, the hooked nose of a
wicked wretch and the swollen proboscis of an alcoholic, to name just a few. Often
imbedded within such characters are racial stereotypes that help maintain an idealized
anglo-saxon physiognomy as the norm. Thus, the Mongolian nose becomes a model for
snobbery, or being closed-minded; the Semitic nose is synonymous with the insidious
wicked wretch, or villain; and the Negroid nose symbolizes the alcoholic, or addict who
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cannot control his animal urges. The absurdity and humor of Study fo r the Nose Job
suggest a number of possible characters without ever becoming any one of them. The
success or failure of Study fo r the Nose Job, is then dependent on the viewer's ability to
draw upon a series of associations that are rooted in a cultural tradition of determining
interior make-up on the basis of external characteristics.
What began as connoisseurship, the study of physiognomy developed into a
highly codified system of reading the face. Throughout history, physiognomy as a
discipline embodied the values, norms and pathologies of a given culture's moment in
time. In The Order o f Things, Michel Foucault maintains that during the Renaissance,
systems of representation were rooted in experience. The fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, he argues, were concerned with notions of resemblance, emulation, similitude
and analogy:
The human face, from afar, emulates the sky, and just as man's
intellect is an imperfect reflection of God's wisdom, so his two
eyes with their limited brightness, are a reflection of the vast
illumination spread across the sky by the sun and moon; the
mouth is Venus, since it gives passage to kisses and words of
love; the nose provides an image in miniature of Jove's scepter
and Mercury's staff. 1.
The notions of similitude and analogy really became apparent to me after the noses were
completed and I was able to look at these drawings within the context of my other work. I
realized that the animal-like, grotesque quality of the noses was informed by a series of
zoomorphic sketches I had done a few months earlier. The sketches were derived from a
number of sources, but most prominently influenced by Giambattista della Porta's, De
Humana Physiognomia. Porta's bestiary, such as the Man-Steer and Politician-
Rhinoceros, present a highly detailed system of looking at the face that is premised on a
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, Inc. 1973), pp. 19
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belief that there is a divine truth which manifests itself in all forms throughout the
universe. As a result, the human face is analyzed through similitude and may be read like
a book: the man whose face resembles that of a lion is characterized as powerful, brave
and strong; a small ostrich-like head represents madness; an oversized head like that of an
owl denotes a vacant mind; poor morals are associated with lamb's eyes; and, tiny
serpent-like pupils indicate an evil nature.
By virtue of their grotesque quality, the noses in Study for a Nose Job also tend to
suggest a certain physical and social degeneracy. Their variations on disproportionate
size, deformed structure and distressed surface reference an obsession with the abnormal.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physiognomy ceased to concern itself
with resemblance, similitude and analogy in favor of penetrating the facade to locate
tendencies, forces and social pathologies. Physiognomy, as a taxonomy, was replaced by
a typology that promised to make visible what was before invisible. It is at this time that
the study of physiognomy develops an instrumental potential to address the shift towards
identification, regulation and surveillance. Out of the profusion of physiognomic studies
published throughout the nineteenth century, there emerges an exhaustive array of
criminal, deviant, delinquent, degenerative, aberrant and pathological types. The
diagrams used to illustrate such manifestations of the Abnormal inform the manner in
which Study fo r the Nose Job is presented. Physiognomic diagrams often took the form of
grids, tables, flow-charts and serial groupings. For instance, in his Physiognomische
Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Love o f M ankind). Johann
Caspar Lavater presents a diagram entitled, From Frog to Apollo , in which a frog
undergoes twenty-four transformations on route to becoming the Apollo Belvedere. This
pre-Darwinian theory of evolution was designed to show that the perfect European head
has a facial line (what Petrus Camper termed the “line of animality”) of eighty degrees.
The frog, like Apollo, (whose facial angle exceeds ninety degrees) are transgressions of
the norm. The assertion being that as the angle deviated from this ideal of eighty degrees,
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so did the individual’s character.
At the time Lavater was composing his From Frog to Apollo, medical illustration
had already defined a highly sophisticated way of visualizing the body in which
fragmentation and the grotesque were used to depersonalize human forms. The variety of
rampant diseases in eighteenth and nineteenth century cities created a spectacle of
decaying flesh that one had to confront on a daily basis. In most cases, infectious diseases
could not be detected until they emerged as disfiguring sores, welts, marks and tumors.
Once the afflictions became visible on the surface of the body, the care employed to
document them produced an enormous archive of beautifully drawn oddities. So every
portrait of the pristine, porcelain-like face hanging in galleries and museums had its
inverse in the medical illustrations of spectacular deformities. To a large extent, the
obsessive attention with which I executed each one of these grotesque noses was directly
influenced by the nineteenth century engravings of the French physician Jean-Louis
Alibert, as well as a variety of other more anonymous medical illustration. Similarly,
isolating the nose as a singular point of interest reflects a sensibility usually associated
with medical imagery. Although Study fo r the Nose Job suggests various disorders, it
offer little in the way of illustrating a particular medical condition.
Diseased Hands and Feet
My interest in medical illustration and the grotesque resulted in a series of
drawings that investigate the implications of a diseased, marked and blemished body.
Like the Tongues, Diseased Hands and Diseased Feet each measure eighty inches wide
and ten feet high. Diseased Hands is composed of three rows of four hands severed at the
wrist, while Diseased Feet is a smaller grouping of four legs disembodied at the hip. In
contrast to the Tongues, the welts, blemishes and sores on the hands and feet are not
rendered with charcoal, but depicted by marking the paper with incense bums. As a result
the hands and feet are covered with brown marks of varying sizes, shapes and values.
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Whereas Study fo r the Nose Job is suggestive of medical illustration, Diseased Hands and
Diseased Feet are more obviously rooted in nineteenth century drawings of Syphilis,
Vitilgo, Small-Pox, Leucoderma and Lepra Nigricans, as well as numerous unidentified
spots, lesions, lumps, galls, taches and tumors. Medical illustration in the nineteenth
century presented a highly systematized way of visualizing the body by isolating the
affected body part, organ, or area, and depicting it with the least possible inflection. The
result is a clinical body divested of any narrative associations that may interfere with
more rational judgment.
The psychology behind distancing oneself from a diseased body part, even when
it is our own, was my initial impetus for developing these drawings. I had intended to use
disease as a way to defamiliarize the hands and feet. Whereas the disembodied tongue is
easily made unfamiliar by virtue of its ambiguous form, hands and feet were much more
of a problem. I realized that regardless of how grotesque a hand or foot may be, it is still
a hand or foot. So instead of attempting to resist a narrative reading by making the hands
less hand-like, I decided to pursue the possibility of story-telling. Although virtually
every part of the body has the potential of offering a narrative reading, historically hands
and feet have been privileged with an expressive power to communicate highly
sophisticated ideas and emotions. In Diseased Hands, each gesture cannot help but allude
to some sort of sign, or expression. Certain hands explicitly reference a particular
tradition, while others suggest a number of possible interpretations. For example, the
second hand from the right in the top row is so obviously mannered that it is easily
identified as an art historical reference. Similarly, the size, shape, value and location of
the bum marks affect the way in which each hand is perceived. The hand in the upper
right comer affected by the stigmata-like mark, clearly resides in a tradition of Christian
imagery. However, when a mark of the same size and shape is relocated on the backside
of the hand it infers an entirely different condition. Like the hands, Diseased Feet
operate within the tradition of nineteenth century medical illustration by virtue of their
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arrangement, fragmentation and reference to some undetermined affliction. However, the
hyper-inflection of the foot in the upper right hand comer disturbs a purely clinical
reading.
The idea of burning the surface of the paper came about from my desire to
literally make, rather than depict a mark. By burning the paper, it forces the drawing to be
considered as both a representation and an object. Furthermore, the distinction between
marking and mark-making was important in terms of reducing my investment in a
distinct graphology. In Hairballs, I wanted to emphasize a highly personalized mark by
having a single gestural line accurately represent a complete object - the strand of the
hair. This was important to me because my frustration with painting was, in part, a result
of not being able to locate a personal brushmark. The incense bums are not concerned
with developing a signature; they are about making a literal mark. Just as the number of
hairs or tongues present a clear record of my labor, the bums refer to a very laborious and
theatrical process. The use of incense as a source for marking tempers the allusion to
decay by investing the drawings with a sense of ecstatic spirituality. Even those hands
and feet which appear most afflicted may be viewed in terms of ritual rather than disease.
In part, this tension between disease and ritual is due to the control with which I burned
the paper. Although the marks indicate rotting or burning flesh, their deliberate and
almost decorative quality makes the image somewhat less ominous. There is a certain
refinement and patterning in the incense bums that is at odds with what they are supposed
to represent. The nature of the bums make it quite clear that neither the paper nor the
body is really in any danger of being destroyed.
Boston Noses
Boston Noses is the most recent work in the exhibition. The title refers to the
location where the work was conceived. On a visit to Boston, I came across a nineteenth
century volume entitled, The National Portrait Gallery. This book contained forty, eight
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by ten inch, color lithographs of important personages associated with the Gallery. The
lithographs were carefully executed in the tradition of formal portraiture. Some of the
portraits were presented in profile, others from the front, but the majority in three-quarter
view. All the portraits were of men dressed in a various Victorian garb including
wonderful wigs, large hats and wire-spectacles. Some of the men wore stem expressions,
while other faces hinted at a more jovial nature. The accompanying text described the
history of each man and his involvement with the gallery. After reading the book and
carefully examining each portrait, I disembodied the noses of all forty men by
obliterating their face and shoulders with cream-colored corrective fluid so as to best
match the color of the page. The result is a grid of forty noses hovering in cream-colored
clouds.
Although Boston Noses differ in many ways from the other drawings, I see this
work more as a tangent than a departure. Clearly this drawing is significant in a number
of ways. Most obviously, it marks the first instance in which I employ the printed page by
literally tearing it out of the book. Although the corrective fluid seems to be applied in a
very painterly fashion suggesting a concern for a gestural mark-making, this drawing is
important in that it resolved my concern for a distinct graphology. Clearly, my hand,
although present, is not as evident. The gestural application was a product of the
corrective fluid's consistency. My intention was to cover the image in the most efficient
manner possible, as opposed to presenting a record of my process. Instead of
reassembling the drawings and displaying them as a book, I chose to present them in the
form of a wall work. Since the printed page is already inherent in the work, the grid, in
this case, functions more as a strategy of display than a device referencing diagrams.
The act of destroying something in order to create something else has many
precedents in art history; Rauschenberg's erasure of De Kooning's drawing, Enrico Baj's
alterations of thrift-store paintings and Keith Haring's early Graffiti work are a few of the
better known examples. Tearing apart a book and defacing portraits may have certain
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historical and psychological implications. Such actions are usually perceived as being
mischievous and at times dangerous. It is often tempting to approach the content of such
work in terms of the artist's action, rather than the examining the object itself. In my case,
the Boston Noses were based on taking an object (the book) and an image(the portrait)
and deconstructing them. As in the other drawings, I was interested how parts generate
meaning. With the Boston Noses, I was working with parts of the body as well as
fragments from a book.
Conclusion
In discussing the work in Hairballs and Other Drawings, I often referred to the
drawings in terms of what I did not want them to be. I was interested in employing
physiognomy, caricature and medical illustration, but at the same time resisted getting too
close to any of these. As I mentioned earlier, this approach was based on a desire to
problematize rather than clarify my imagery. There is a typological sensibility to the
work, as each drawing is limited to depicting subtle variations on the same object.
Whether it is hair, tongues, noses, hands or feet, the scale of each fragment does not vary
within an individual drawing. Similarly, the manner in which the body is drawn remains
consistent within each work. In the future, I am interested in creating work that disturbs
this sense of order by mixing various images of the body together with a greater diversity
of mark-making and scale within a single work. I envision a canvas, or panel, covered
with a plethora of body imagery, some drawn with scratchy lines and others with dense
values; and still others carefully painted, or sketched with a sense of urgency. I plan to
exploit the narrative and psychological readings associated with juxtaposing different
systems of representing the human body. Most of all, I would like to accomplish this by
trying my hand at painting once again.
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Bibliography
Baltrusaitis, Jurgis. Aberrations: An Essay on the Legend o f Forms
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).
Foucault, Michel. The Order o f Things (New York: Random House, Inc., 1973).
Lavater, Johann Caspar. Physiognomische Fragmente Essays on Physiognomy Designed
to Promote the Love o f Mankind ( translated by Henry Hunter, London: John
Murray, 1792).
Sekula, Allen. "The Body and the Archive", October, no. 39 ( Winter 1986), pp. 3-64
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and
Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
Wells, Samuel R. The Illustrated Annuals o f Phrenology and Physiognomy fo r the Years
1865-72 (New York: Samuel R. Wells, 1872).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Orlovski, Stanislav (author)

Core Title "Hairballs" and other drawings

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Painting

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Fine Arts,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Weisberg, Ruth (committee chair), Alderette, Robert (committee member), Rizk, Ron (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-5978

Unique identifier UC11337728

Identifier 1381601.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-5978 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1381601.pdf

Dmrecord 5978

Document Type Thesis

Rights Orlovski, Stanislav

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA