BIBLIOFILE

For the Greek born, London based artist Christina Mitrentse, the activity of drawing is far more than a means of illusory representation. It serves her heterotopic practice as a tool for critical enquiry, for mapping space and ultimately the construction of discrete worlds. In this multiverse fashioned from draughtsmanship, ‘vintage’ artists’ bookmaking, silk-screen prints, sculpture and site-specific installation, drawing functions as a supermetaphor twisting its way through her work, constantly opening up visual possibilities.

This privileging of drawing fits into its wider resurgence, that since the San Francisco punk phenomenon of the 80s, and recent Goldsmithian endorsement, has seen it get a facelift, no longer a mere preparation for something bigger, but in Mitrentse’s case an autonomous art form, hand-held, a powerfully inclusive technique.

The new series of large scale works showcased at Art Work Space in Add To My Library Volume II e.g. ‘Stonehenge’, ‘WWW’, ‘New Tate’, ‘Emblem’ and ‘Ruins I’ all confirm Joseph Beuys’s proposition that drawing is “a special kind of thought”, and in this instance one where historicity is compressed, and its iconic edifices are left hanging. Mitrentse begins and ends with neo-Gothic images of a ruin. a highly charged species of conceptual drawing that avoids visceral gesture, being primarily intended to make the viewer ponder their ‘text’ of civilisation in crisis.

She has also stressed an Interest in how “time can be captured/or represented by just the use of grey scale that comes from pencil and graphite” and reconstructing time through “the imagery of blocks- i.e. heritage, monuments, institutions” etc. What Mitrentse calls “shifting touch” is facilitated through smashing colour pastel into powder, smudginess itself becoming a symbolic overlay of the new, or in this context bibliographic input from international contributors, i.e. artists, writers, curators, museologists, each adding to the construction of an infinite library.

Thus in ‘Stonehenge’ (2010), the iconic example of architectural heritage in the UK, the site is rendered in a non-empirical way, and a manner that causes both nostalgia and alienation. The temenos glows with accumulated knowledge embodied in the book as a source of wisdom. In ‘WWW’ (2010) the űber logo is built up from novels and cutting-edge journalism, a paradoxical statement about the lingering power of the book in the Internet age, while the bibliographic chimney in ‘New Tate’ (2011) is dialectically related to the Skoob towers of renowned British artist John Latham. Mitrentse informs us that “in an attempt to visually interrogate the expressionistic concrete edifice of the new Tate Modern”, after Walter Benjamin she shows that the “picture becomes now a metaphor of digital reproduction over the mechanical, in the repeated form of the Penguin book”.

The reading matter in ‘Ruin I’ (2011) is shown at the point of disintegration. Loosely based on James D. Griffion’s photographs of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, among other reference points, this decaying information dump signals one possible ‘end’ for the institution. High and low culture cease to differ. Rot rules. History becomes a list of legendary titles, a delirium.

So, for Mitrentse as new data from contributors is gathered, the exercise of adding to and activating her library intensifies, the paper surface a locus not only to remix the ‘catalogue’ but also alter the pictorial space of the library. In this way monumentality is micromanaged. Each drawing might function as domestic ‘shelving’, the traces of an attempted re-drawing of the cultural institution, Tate Modern’s smokeless chimney become a ziggurat of ISBNs.

'Add to My Library: Vol II' , Art Work Space, Lower Ground, The Hempel Hotel, 31-35 Craven Hill Gdns., London W2 3EA; 29 Aug- 25 Sept 2011.