China Marks—Nowhere Everywhere

Thomas More to Raphael Hythloday, Utopia, 1516

 

Thomas More to Raphael Hythloday, Utopia, 1516

 

The first exhibition in the Nowhere Everywhere series, presents a 13-year survey of the fantastic, irresistibly unflinching, fiber-based drawings of China Marks. The Thompson Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition of China Marks’ work in New England and the most extensive examination of her sewn drawings to date. China Marks uses thread, an industrial sewing machine, a computerized embroidery machine, CAD software, and fusible adhesive as drawing tools. Marks collects printed fabrics, cuts them apart for source material, and assembles the fragments into what she calls “process directed” drawings. The work of China Marks opens our yearlong dialog about the questions that arise regarding utopian ideals by challenging us to examine the complex relationship between self and other.

 

2016 marks the 500th anniversary of Utopia by Sir Thomas More, who in 1516 devised the rhetorical conceit that gave rise to a literary genre. Ever since he coined the term "utopia"—a “non-place” and a “nowhere”—writers, artists and philosophers have examined imaginary, unprecedented, impossible and lost versions of society, with the notion of human “perfectibility” at the heart of their work. Nowhere Everywhere takes Utopia’s upcoming quincentennial as the impetus for a three-part exhibition series, examining the genres of utopia and dystopia with regard to human conflict within societal structures. Marks’ work provides rich opportunities to examine our topic through her explorations of human motivation and power relationships.

 

China Marks assembles composite characters and narratives that illuminate the complexity of the human condition with a decidedly inclusive attitude. The artist explores many themes that touch upon the individual in relation to another, along with the myriad emotions that accompany daily trials, tribulations and triumphs. As Marks has pointed out concerning her artistic interests:

 

 

 

Like a compass needle, China Marks has been pulled toward narratives that explore people and their power relationships, and this singular tenet is tangibly visible in all of her work. Marks examines and exposes the use and abuse of power in every corner of the human heart, often with humor, and of course sometimes this aspect of her work can be uncomfortable. As Marks points out:

 

 

 

Donald Kuspit, 1990

 

Because the word “drawing” and the activity of making drawings has greatly expanded during the last hundred-plus years, the definition has evolved into a simple, yet inclusive description: mark making. In a day and age when drawings can be made with any material and substance, using almost any technology—food, lasers, elephant dung, ants—what was once just a process artists used for preparatory studies is now held up as an art form in its own right. Drawing has evolved to such an extent that it is possible to draw without working upon a tangible surface, or even without the hand of the artist. Consider skywriting and fireworks, for instance, and the countless artists who today create in virtual space to make their drawings.

 

However, China Marks’ drawings challenge us to open this expansive definition even further to accommodate her fiber-based works, which are sometimes misidentified as quilts or appliqué textiles. These designations are inaccurate and inappropriate because they fail to understand that the drawing implement is but one of myriad possibilities. A drawing made with a pencil or a sewn line of thread is a drawing no matter what tool was used. It simply does not matter how the line is laid down; what matters is the spontaneous, direct way it is made. Marks’ drawings are collage-based in terms of their physicality, and this aspect too can be challenging for anyone who does not credit the act of placing or affixing found material as an act of drawing. After a century of modern artists’ explorations, all collages are understood as drawings. Marks’ composite drawings are, after all, intimate works that communicate the deepest emotional and conceptual interests of the artist in a spontaneous, direct, and handy way.

 

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, China Marks studied sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute (B.F.A.) and at Washington University in St. Louis (M.F.A.), and can be described as a collage and assemblage artist who has always made drawing a central feature of her studio practice. Marks has been a New York-based artist since 1976, and moved into her Long Island City studio, a small converted factory building, in 1999. Since December 6, 2000,⁵ Marks exclusively draws with thread and fabric (figures 1-3). With textiles as her primary source material, Marks' work effectively expands the traditional definition of drawing to include and celebrate sewn-line, collage strategies as an infinitely variable drawing possibility.
 

Marks’ first sewn drawing to incorporate appropriated text was a 2005 work entitled Hello! (page 24). While text appears in several works after that, such inclusions were incidental until her 2009 work The First Black Book, in which text took on a central role in the formation of her imagery; in turn, that development inspired Marks to emphasize textual information on a regular basis.⁶ By 2010, Marks prominently utilized appropriated text as a central motif in the work (see Beach Head, page 38).⁷ As Marks is fond of saying, “Once I started talking in my drawings, I couldn’t shut up.⁸” 

 

Marks’ use of appropriated text between 2010 and late 2012 has a distinctive “ransom note” quality, but that process of incorporation presents challenges due to the nature of assembling found words and sentences made of cloth into the desired syntax. It is painstaking work that sometimes results in “destroying letters in the process of sewing them down.”⁹ Nevertheless, Marks pushed beyond the challenges and perfected her incorporation of appropriated, fiber-based text.

 

Receiving the Pollack-Krasner grant in early 2013 directly supported Marks’ purchase of a computerized embroidery machine. The machine, and the CAD software that governs its operations, are directly responsible for the proliferation of computerized text in Marks’ work from 2013 forward. It immediately spurred the creation of two ongoing projects, the Broadsides and the Short Subjects series. Though from time to time Marks still cuts out and sews down appropriated text, the CAD driven, computerized sewing machine can generate any text Marks designs, which means she is no longer dependent on found text for her work and is only limited by her imagination for any textual inclusions in her drawings. In her own words, the machine and software had an “utterly seismic effect on my  work and is still reverberating.”¹⁰

The computerized embroidery machine can also translate line art into sewn lines. Marks scans high contrast line drawings and uses CAD software to translate them into digitally sewn formats. In addition to using her own drawings, Marks appropriates a variety of drawn imagery, including but not limited to “microscopic things, images from old plastic surgery books, and images from Chinese coloring books [she] found on the streets of New York.”¹¹ Marks has made use of this particular drawing possibility in many of her recent works, and it is a common feature of her Short Subjects series—for example, the body and dancer’s skirt in Gestural Truth (figure 4 and page 105). Gestural Truth also elucidates Marks’ collage sensibility regarding the way she includes a variety of techniques in a single work. The anatomical imagery in the bottom left corner, for instance, is a 1980s drawing study Marks made by copying an image from an anatomy book and then printing it onto fabric using a photo-emulsion screen-printing process. Marks appropriated that anatomical fabric print and seamlessly incorporated it into Gestural Truth, joining it with the scanned and computer-sewn version of another drawing she made entitled Prancing Girlie No-face—several completely different technologies mashed together into one sewn drawing. Marks’ attitude toward materials is voracious—all raw material is up for grabs when it comes to making her drawings.

 

The work on display in China Marks—Nowhere Everywhere provides numerous examples of Marks’ ongoing, series-based drawing projects, as well as single drawings—see: Speculative One-Offs, (pages 22-57), Books (pages 60-93), Broadsides (small, digitally generated, text-based drawings, pages 96-101), Short Subjects (small drawings with a distinctive linear line quality, usually on white or off-white fields, pages 104-123), and Altered Paintings (a series of drawings on contemporary tapestry copies of classic paintings, pages 126-133). Additionally, after the series work in the catalog, there is a chapter dedicated to showcasing the versos of several of Marks' drawings (pages 136-145). The versos make visible the compositional structure of key elements in a given work, while shedding light on Marks' approach to using thread and the exquisite sense of line that proliferates her work.

 

Marks' most recent body of work, the Altered Paintings series, is a major achievement for Marks and a significant moment in the history of collage—the works in the series are likely the first of their kind. As Marks elucidates, there are two levels of alteration at work in her Altered Paintings series that raises interesting questions about representation, abstraction and appropriation art:

 

While I have been calling them "altered paintings," that does not make clear how profoundly changed they already are—badly copied, re- or de-contextualized, cropped, simplified, edited, decorated, and woven pixelated on digital looms—before I even lay hands on them. Just like the rest of our history, they have already been massively interfered with.¹² 

 

 

 

Alfred DeCredico, 1993

 

Appropriation, interference, subversion and process direction are the cornerstones of Marks’ collage-based drawing aesthetic, but her proclivity is ever expansive in her pursuit of as fluid a drawing process as possible. Marks’ disposition as a visual artist is to submit to “process direction” and to “serve the process.” Intuition is her primary guide. For Marks, drawing is about seeing—not the kind of seeing that happens with open eyes, but the kind that occurs with an open, unassuming, and playful mind that is present in the moment of creation. Marks purges intention in order to become a conduit of process. As she works to guide fabric scraps under the sewing needle, the tug of the machine is also a guide, pulling her attention to unexpected things. And as the composite pieces are stitched into a unified whole, visible for the first time at her fingertips, the reveal is suggestive of the next addition to be sewn. A few key drawings included in China Marks—Nowhere Everywhere shed light on the importance of this aspect of her work—see: About the Book (page 74), Serving the Process (page 75) and My First Text (page 96).

 

Marks likens the zigzag stitch of her industrial sewing machines to “a mechanized artist’s scribble.”¹⁴ With the mechanized scribble, she begins a narrative that is well suited for whatever combinations of materials and characters are at hand. She begins a work without expectations, and she welcomes the intuitive connections and associations that naturally arise as she works. While Marks initially selects fragments, she aims to not over-think her choices and simply “trusts the process.” Being present in the moment and watching the thing unfold as it moves under the fingertips allows for the possibilities of unknowing to guide the outcome. Another Thompson Gallery artist that championed seeing is the late Alfred DeCredico, who described intuition in the following passage from his statement on drawing:

 

For Marks, drawing is an intuitive, responsive, adventurous process of combining and sewing down cut pieces of fabric under the moving sewing machine needle—Marks never sews by hand unless she needs to attach an object or a button to a working drawing.

 

But there is yet another, equally important guide for Marks: the narrative that arises among characters that form throughout her process. As her characters populate the abstracted fields of textiles that surround them, their stories unfold in the act of their being made, as if in a live conversation with the artist. As in any conversation, memory and interest are powerful catalysts, but Marks is careful not to let the strength of such things form the work; instead, she makes room for cognizance to arise without needing to necessarily name what it is that is forming as she engages with the dialog. 

 

There are inherent limitations when the primary materials are appropriated, and Marks is always working hard to alleviate the limits of what she combines. For all collage’s potential and versatility, found materials have a built-in rigidity that is diametrically opposed to the fluidity of drawing, and that is one of the biggest challenges of the medium of collage and specifically Marks’ drawings. Yet Marks has found plasticity in her approach to drawing, despite the limitations of the found textiles that constitute her work. While working intuitively has been made easier by the addition of computerized sewing processes, what Marks makes look easy requires enormous discipline, coupled with abandon, to arrive at the arresting images that proliferate Nowhere Everywhere. Marks’ process rests somewhere between the quotidian and the ecstatic. As she puts it:

 

 

The process of letting go and embracing the unknown occurs not only for Marks as the maker, but also the viewers who happen upon her work and who cannot help but get caught up in the strange, wonderful, and familiar narratives that abound.

 

What Marks calls “process directed” is another way of saying that the “process” of combining and sewing together various textile cuttings “directs” or inspires her to make unexpected choices, always yielding surprising results. If it isn’t surprising, it isn’t worth the muster. The results of her process yield things she could not have possibly imagined, and that keeps Marks, and her audience, coming back for more:

 

I don't understand why all the hundreds of drawings and sculptures I've already made aren't enough, but they aren't. The Books, Broadsides, Short Subjects and drawings I have yet to make circle like airplanes stacked up waiting to land. I can't see them, but I can feel them—all the time. Sleep does not release me. My dreams are richly detailed, complex, and demanding. I stitch them into existence without a sewing machine, by means of pure intention while I am an active participant in them.¹⁷

 

 

Marks’ process is labor-intensive, combining hundreds of fragments from various textile sources—each completed (large) drawing involves the tying-off of thousands of knots. The infinite combinations of invented forms that her collected materials suggest present great technical challenges. Marks, nevertheless, has an insatiable appetite for variety, appropriation and subversion, and this feature of her work manifests both visually and conceptually via the subjects she explores and the ways in which she depicts them. The characters that populate her drawings are all broken up, misshapen and made with ersatz construction, and they interact as though everything is normal. The conversations captured in the work may be everyday and pedestrian, but they also range from the humorous and playful to the absurd and foolish to the observant and critical. Irony, banter, and classical wit abound. But the true subject of Marks’ interest always goes back to the subject of power: “I am always interested in who is in charge and what are the implications of that?”¹⁹ 

 

 

 

Looking at one of Marks’ drawings is a bit like reading More’s Utopia: both use conversation to explore complicated subjects, and both are highly engaging, impossible depictions that raise as many questions as possibilities. Marks is an articulate punster, similar in spirit to More, who modeled Hythloday’s name on a twist of Latin that translates to mean “peddler of nonsense”²⁰ while also giving him the name Raphael (God’s healer).²¹ Such character attributes are resoundingly similar to Marks, who frequently develops characters by combining various human traits, attributes and liabilities: “Magus/Witch,” “Clueless Master,” “Mad Scientist,” “Wise Child,” to name a few.²² As Utopia unfolds, More and Hythloday engage in dialog that is as clever as it is compelling. More asks questions which can never be fully answered,²³ and Hythloday speaks in simple sentences as he describes the Utopians, which causes us to ask, as translator Clarence H Miller puts it: 

 

How do you get everyone always to do the same one thing everywhere, wholly and completely, without anyone anywhere at all deviating significantly in anything, with no exceptions, with no one ever wishing to contravene the universal system, with all in equal conformity, with never a dissenting voice, with nowhere a refusal to comply?²⁴ 

 

The conversations between the principal characters of Thomas More and Raphael Hythloday are playfully and irreverently echoed in Marks’ drawings, and can range from the petty and mundane to the insightful and the profound. Sometimes Marks’ characters ignore or thwart utopian aspirations, while at other times her characters and imagery root humankind on. But where More and Marks differ is in their respective intent. More planned out his clever conceit whereas Marks fancifully finds hers. Albeit through different approaches, both explore the human capacity to imagine complicated situations. And both More and Marks scavenge and collect old ideas to juxtapose with new ones. Utopia after all, was penned by a lawyer well versed in history a mere 24 years after Columbus’ famous voyages in 1492, and More’s exercise in the civic imaginary is a collage of old ideas with the promise of the new world and what that might bring.²⁵ Given that both More and Marks are highly invested in words, syntax and the combining of ideas, the visual aspect of Marks’ work too echoes ideas and methods of creative exploration that are as old as More’s publication and yet as fresh and vital as contemporary trends in today’s visual art. Indeed, as a collage-based artist Marks is “constantly going back and forth between the past and present”²⁶ in her work—dredging up forgotten, lost and obscure ideas and imagery, and combining that with the fresh twist of things seen anew. Marks is a shape shifter and she repurposes everything she touches.

 

In that spirit, Marks’ work bears interesting similarities to the works of several of More’s contemporaries, most notably Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1526-1593), the High Renaissance portrait painter known for his composite still life paintings in which the features of his characters are entirely made up of painted flora, fauna, and objecta—see: Florabundum,²⁷ p. 27. Notwithstanding the obvious differences between paint and fabric, Marks shares Arcimboldo’s selective eclecticism for the formation of pictorial imagery—the self-imposed limitation to use surrogate materials to form a composite whole for their subjects. But, whereas Arcimboldo often created portraits by combining separate objects to from likenesses of specific individuals, Marks fashions portrayals of undisclosed people in the midst of various circumstances. The emphasis in Marks’ work is on what her characters are saying and doing and not how they look. The similarity between their work is thus limited to the artistic drive to respectively reach for a limited set of materials as a potent creative process. Surprisingly, this fanciful activity is rare in the history of fine art, skipping several centuries after Arcimboldo’s initial invention of the process before it shows up again as a viable contemporary artistic strategy. Marks contributes to the revival along with a number of other 20^th and 21^st century artists, but her work pushes well past tradition and trend.

 

In recent history, there are a number of artists, for example, that make use of same-material, ersatz-eclecticism—Hannah Höch (book and magazine cuttings), Romare Bearden (Life and Ebony magazine cuttings), Fred Tomaselli (pharmaceuticals and magazine/book cuttings), Tim Noble & Sue Webster (garbage/taxidermied fauna etc.), Jason Mercier (makeup, 8 track tapes, cereal etc.), and Tom Deininger (plastic toys)—and they are all known for composite images of people. These artists’ works vary widely, but each artist in their own way explores the utopic/dystopic world at large. Marks’ art explores the nowhere/everywhere dichotomy, but she is one of a few artists making fabric collages today, and she may be the only artist that exclusively uses textiles to form her imagery. The shared aesthetic and process relates to a general notion of the “museum as an image of the world”²⁸—an apt description of Arcimboldo’s work, and the same can be said of Marks’ work. But such conglomerate formations are more like the random juxtaposition of a cabinet of curiosities, rather than the systemic, scientific organization and classification of objecta in today’s museums. 

 

One final comparative point needs to be made to appreciate Marks’ unique approach to her limited use of materials. Whereas Arcimboldo, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Jason Mercier and Tom Deininger are known to form likenesses of specific individuals through their corralled collections of stuff, Marks’ work is not about visual likeness at all. Instead, she portrays situations without referencing particular individuals, and in this way shows us the world not for how it looks, but how it feels to live within. 

 

Marks’ drawings are not portraits; they are captured moments among the characters that populate her work. The range of situations she depicts her characters in spans the quotidian and the profane. In this regard, Marks’ work also echoes the moral and allegorical paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1529-1569) and Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516). They guide us as much as they poke fun at us. The art historian Erik Larsen credits Bosch’s “luxuriant imagination, which led him to people a large number of his works with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic creatures, bizarre and frightful at the same time, and thus striking the imagination of the viewer.” ²⁹ In his day, Bosch alone had the “audacity” to not depict “man as he appears on the outside…” but “…as he is on the inside.”³⁰ Similarly, Marks’ characters are turned inside out, and they could easily be compared, for example, to any one of the many composite creatures that litter Bosch’s triptych painting Garden of Earthly Delights between Paradise and Hell. Marks’ examination of the man’s mental states is the real driving force of her art, and her forays into the psyche of people allow her infinite opportunities to intuitively locate the subjects of her drawings. Marks’ frequent portrayal of various aspects of the human need for love, for instance, echoes Bosch’s above mentioned work, but also of interest are her works that play one individual’s desire off of another’s.

 

At the same time, Marks’ narratives remind us of Bruegel’s illustrated parables and proverb paintings, which during their day turned attention away from devotional images of biblical themes toward the themes of man.³¹ Indeed, Marks’ favorite themes—power and power plays—are explored with great ferocity and zeal for pulling the here and now into her work. Fusion in Marks’ work is not merely for the assembling of fabric components. Marks’ work compellingly shows us the status of the current world, the full cacophony of today’s frantic, fractured, multiple realities. But for all the haphazard accumulations, there is great elegance to how Marks renders her cut-up/mashed-up imagery with many recent attitudes in contemporary art.

For example, when considering Marks’ oeuvre, Juan Gris’s elegant arrangements of broken forms in space come to mind, along with expressionist and surrealist overtones and a distinctly appropriationist, Pop Art strategy. Like Gris, who “followed in the footsteps” of Picasso and Braque, Marks is a “disciplined” artist “not overshadowed”³² by allusions to other art. Evocative of many things, but beholden to none, Marks’ work is difficult to categorize, and that, along with her timeless subjects, keeps both the artist and her viewers engaged. Marks’ work holds up on its own independent merits and contributes something more then the sum of associations that it can be linked to. As the artist muses:

 

 

 

A central theme within Utopia exposes the gravitational push and pull between public service and contemplative withdrawal.³⁵ Marks’ work investigates such polarities and many others. Though her work is not intentionally prescriptive, Marks does not shy away from allowing such voices to emerge organically from her processes—for two particularly potent examples, see pages 98 & 99. Marks’ work, in light of the themes examined in this exhibition series, may be considered like a Shakespearian examination of the human spirit. Hamlet teaches us what not to do. Similarly, and because Marks’ work expresses private musings that many would not dare to utter, her audience is afforded important opportunities to reflect, make personal decisions, and shift their thinking. Marks is a visionary creator, and her work can guide us even as we feel uncomfortable in the process of considering it. We don’t have to "beg" China Marks to “show” us the world we live in; she is compelled to reflect our imperfect, complicated world and let us figure out what our responsibilities are.

 

Todd Bartel

Gallery Director, Curator

Thompson Gallery

 

 

 

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1. China Marks, email communication, February 1, 2015

2. Marks, studio visit interview, August 8, 2015

3. Marks, email communication, June 17, 2016

4. Donald Kuspit, Julian Schnabel’s Expressivity, in Julian Schnabel: works on paper 1975-1988, Ed. Jörg Zutter, Prestel, Munich, 1990, p. 23

5. Bill North, Let Me Show You the World—The Sewn Drawings of China Marks, exhibition catalog, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 2007, page 7

6. Ibid

7. Marks, email communication, July 24, 2016. note: Marks describes the moment in which text becomes important: Finding a dead umbrella with white on black fabric printing led to the First and Second Black Book[s] in 2009. But it wasn’t till I cut loose with display type, invented letters and doggerel in my book, Pressing Questions, in the summer of 2010 that it affected the drawings that followed. In fact, the first of them, The Queen of Denial, used display type almost exclusively.

8. Ibid

9. Ibid

10. Marks, phone conversation, May 22, 2016

11. Marks, phone conversation, May 23, 2016

12. Marks, email communication, May 22, 2016

13. Alfred DeCredico, Artist’s Statement, 1993, see: http://www.decredico.com/artist-statements

14. Marks, Thompson Gallery Blog Interview, July 3, 2015 (see: thompsongallery.blog.com)

15. Alfred DeCredico, Artist’s Statement, 1993

16. Marks, phone conversation, June 17, 2016

17. Marks, February 1, 2015

18. Ibid

19. Marks, phone conversation, May 22, 2016

20. Clarence H. Miller, introduction, Utopia, Thomas More, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2001, p. viii

21. Miller, p. x

22. Marks, Characters, Etc. in My Drawings, August 28, 2015

23. Edward Surtz, quoted by Miller, p. x

24. Miller, p. xviii

25. See Miller, p. vii-xxiii (for insight into More’s expertise on history)

26. Marks, phone conversation, June 17, 2016

27. Note: At the time of exhibition, Florabundum was unavailable. The work is included in the catalog to provide an example of how Marks’ work pictorially echoes the work of Arcimboldo.

28. See: Pontus Hulten, Three Different Kinds of Interpretation, in The Arcimboldo Effect—Transformations of the Face from the 16^th to the 20^th Century, Abbeville Press, New York, NY, 1987, pp. 18-34; and, Sven Alfons, The Museum as Image of the World, in The Arcimboldo Effect, pp. 67-87

29. Erik Larsen, quoting Fray José de Sigüenza (1605), in Hieronymus Bosch—The Complete Paintings by the Visionary Master, Smithmark, New York, NY, 1998, p. 17

30. Ibid

31. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, Exploring the World, in The Complete Paintings: Bruegel, Benedikt Taschen, Köln, Germany, 1994, p. 31

32. Rafael Jackson-Martín, Juan Gris, Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, Spain, 2002 p. 5

33. Marks, studio visit interview, August 8, 2015

34. Marks, Thompson Gallery Blog Interview, July 3, 2015 (see: thompsongallery.blog.com)

35. Miller, p. vii