The Climbing Body: Verticality and the Gallery

The climbing body: verticality and the gallery

Elle van Uden

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Fine Arts by Research

The University of New South Wales

School of Art and Design Faculty of Art

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This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) ☐ incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter and the details are presented below

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION I declare that: • I have complied with the Thesis Examination Procedure • where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis. Name Signature Date (dd/mm/yy) Ellyse van Uden 12/09/19

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iv Abstract

Embodied knowledge amassed through the act of climbing has the potential to generate alternate ways of understanding vertical planes. Verticality in the gallery refers to flat, blank walls that are traditionally disembodied, decontextualised and used for modes of display contributing to a conventional stature that ensures its institutional power. My practice, which comprises sculptural installations and drawings, interrogates the relationship between the vertical and the climbing body to extend notions of understanding verticality with the potential for ‘bodily’, proximal engagement in an operable zone. My practice is informed by my experience as a climber, which over years of training has produced embodied knowledge of movement that allows me to make sculptural works that interrogate verticality as they ‘climb’ the institutional wall. Verticality has been embodied and operated with in the works of contemporary artists such as Trisha Brown and Matthew Barney. As Brown promotes illusory spatial experiences that extend possibilities of inhabiting the vertical, Barney disrupts the gallery’s conventional way of understanding the vertical. This is extended in the work of Gideonsson/Londré (Lisa Gideonsson and Gustaf Londré) as they test the limits of human verticality and examine the significance of flatness to our understanding of the vertical. Climbing enters the gallery environment in the works of Erin Coates and Dan Shipsides as they engage with bodies that climb and constructions or drawings of climbs. Considering the translation of three-dimensional movement into two-dimensional forms in my drawings, I examine a history of dance notation to establish its diagrammatic and artistic applications. Distinguished from the pedagogic, interactive and representational works of Coates and Shipsides, my practice further abstracts the climbing body to explore verticality as a proximal, liminal zone. The project results in a body of artworks that creatively and critically exercise my embodied knowledge to reveal the speculative and diagrammatic ways of seeing and sensing verticality, disrupting the authoritative status of the gallery wall.

v Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors Doctor Tim Gregory and Doctor Rochelle Haley, it has been an invaluable experience to work with them in the development of this project. Their insight, guidance and support facilitated this body of work and has taught me many things that will continue to inform my practice as an artist and researcher.

I would also like to thank my family for their ongoing support; friends that have carried me through with their generosity and enthusiasm; and my partner Cory for his tireless support, patience and care.

This project has been made possible by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

vi Table of Contents

Abstract v

Acknowledgements vi

Table of Contents vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Bodies on the Vertical Plane 11

Chapter 2: Climbing in the Gallery 27

Chapter 3: Climbing Experiments, a Studio Practice 43

Conclusion 66

Reference List 68

List of Figures 72

Appendix 74

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viii Introduction

This project interrogates the relationship between the vertical plane and the climbing body to explore alternate ways of seeing and understanding verticality. Verticality in the gallery refers to the lateral surface of walls and their inhabitable zone, traditionally dominating the gallery as a sanitised, blank and flat space for display. My practice challenges the way this space is considered and begins to open up ways for verticality in the gallery to be reconceived. This is predominantly conducted through sculptural installation and drawings that have been selected for the exhibition duel/duet. This paper explores aspects of my practice-led research to examine the intersection of verticality, the body and the gallery, where climbing has the potential to extend notions of understanding the vertical as a proximal and liminal zone. My practice is informed by my years of experience as a climber, which through training has produced an embodied knowledge of movement on the vertical that allows me to make works that interrogate and ‘climb’ the gallery, challenging the conventional, authoritative stature of the gallery wall.

Throughout the 20th century, artists and curators worked with the gallery space itself to develop social and political critiques. Exhibitions including Yves Klein’s ‘Le Vide’ (1958), Martha Rosler’s ‘If You Lived Here…’ (1989) and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ‘do it’ (1993-ongoing) exemplify the potential for the exhibition to challenge conventions of art-viewing and institutional space itself. In this period there was a significant shift away from traditional art objects and modes of display to dislocation and dematerialisation. This blurred the lines between curator and artist as experiential modes of making combined with new modes of exhibition and display.

Conventional vertical features of the gallery space are challenged in exhibitions such as the first ‘Documenta’ in Kassel (1955), and Goshka Macuga’s ‘Cave,’ (1999). Curated by Arnold Bode, works in ‘Documenta 1’ were displayed on curtains, disrupting the hardness and flatness of the gallery wall and relating to domesticity and

1 imagery of the home. Macuga’s curated exhibition transformed the gallery space into a sculptural environment, reflecting the trend outlined by Niklas Maak, Charlotte Klonk and Thomas Demand for artistic intervention within the typical gallery space to produce environments that alter the conditions of perception (2011, para 24). The disruption of the gallery’s conventional walls as neutral flat planes for display engages with a history of intervening with the traditions and structures of exhibiting. My work continues a critique of verticality in the gallery by presenting sculptural installations that occupy floor, wall and ceiling, interrogating the space and operation with the vertical. This promotes the vertical as a zone—a space that has the potential to be embodied in a proximal and liminal capacity—as opposed to the flat plane that has dominated conceptions of verticality within the gallery. This bodily engagement is divorced from traditional ideals belonging to ‘white cube’ gallery environments detailing works that are typically hung suspended from distraction, neatly exhibited surrounded by white empty space with fixtures that are hidden or disguised. 1 This detached and distal way of experiencing verticality overlooks the potential for the gallery as a physical structure to offer extended ways of seeing and sensing this zone.

Recent academic interest in the practice of climbing has led to a still modest but increasing number of texts theorising the practice from different fields. These include contemporary texts such as Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Andrea Pavoni’s examination of urban verticality and analysis of the climber’s relationship to the vertical (2017); Penelope Rossiter’s sociological work on rock climbing and human- nonhuman relationships (2007); and Stephen E. Schmid’s edited collection on the philosophy of climbing (2010). Within contemporary art practice, climbing is most notably foregrounded in the work of Coates and Shipsides; otherwise it has received limited attention throughout art history. Coates and Shipsides’ exploration of climbing focusses on the politics of public and private land, urban climbing or ‘buildering’, and the translation of climbing knowledge and experience to two-dimensional media. My

1 The term ‘white cube’ comes from Brian O’Doherty’s essays later turned into the book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space critiquing the modernist ideals for gallery environments (1976).

2 research also explores processes of translation between practices of climbing and art- making, and it is concerned with ways of expressing the unique relationship between the body and verticality developed through climbing.

Verticality and flatness have been theorised across multiple fields and establish ideas surrounding how flatness can orientate verticality and alter dimensionality and perspectives. Alicia Imperiale explores flatness and virtual design in New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture (2000); Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information2 examines the collapse of information onto flat surfaces over time including dance and its notation as a translation that goes beyond taxonomical purpose (2001); and filmmaker, artist and writer Hito Steyerl’s article ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,’ describes collapses in our perspectives and understanding of verticality. Steyerl examines areas such as surveillance, spatial hierarchies and space exploration as changes in technology and urban development have altered our dimensionality (2011).

My project borrows key concepts defined by Brighenti and Pavoni (2017, p. 65- 67) in order to construct a basis for the theorisation of climbing. Firstly, the idea of a ‘zone of operation’ or a ‘liminal zone’ is used to refer to the relationship and/or space between (and perhaps including) the climber and the wall. Secondly, the notion of a ‘plane of contingency’ is used to describe the potentiality of movement on the vertical plane. In my work these ‘zones and planes’, which galleries have minimised, are interposed into or ‘made visible in’ the gallery space, in order to extend notions of verticality in the gallery from flat modes of display to embodied and operable spaces.

The thesis also uses terminology and language related to my personal experience as a climber. One of the key climbing terms used in this project is ‘bouldering’, which refers to low-level rock climbing without a rope, usually not

2 The concept of the book and its reference to ‘flatlands’ are based on Edwin A. Abbott’s book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 1884, later made into several films.

3 exceeding a height of six metres and involving the use of a safety crash mat to protect the climber in the event of a fall. Bouldering is typically characterised by a few difficult moves rather than endurance. In contrast, ‘sport climbing’ describes climbing with rope, typically upwards of ten metres, usually requiring a ‘belayer’ to feed rope as a person climbs and to catch the climber if they fall using a ‘belay device’. A climber and belayer will wear harnesses to attach to the rope, along with other equipment that secures them in the rock or indoor gym. ‘Route setting’ refers to the commercial process of designing and installing indoor climbing routes or boulders. Over the last two years I have worked as a route setter in several gyms, and this has had a significant influence on my climbing and artistic practices.

Other specific language is used in climbing to describe movements of the body, and this is often used in the titles of my works (see Appendix). For example, a ‘palm- press’ describes a move where you push with your palm, extend your arm and are able to step higher and extend your leg to bridge into the next hold or position. ‘Step- through’ refers to a foot movement where you cross your body centre with the opposite foot; similarly, ‘cross’ refers to moving one hand across your body centre. ‘Drop-knee’ describes a toe-to-hip movement where the toes on one foothold turn from facing outward to inward, and in doing so the knee turns downward and hips become more perpendicular to the wall. ‘Undercling’ is used to describe a hold or way of holding in which your palm is turned to the sky as if cupping water. ‘Gaston’ refers to the angle of holding a handhold that turns the thumb downward and pushes the elbow outward from the body. ‘Layback’ refers to your arms and/or legs being extended and straightened, creating room between the body and the wall. ‘Rockover’ means to transfer bodyweight over a foothold, whereas to ‘mantle’ is to use hands and feet to press and transfer bodyweight over a surface and end up standing on top. This paper alternates between describing the human body climbing, and describing the material bodies in my sculptural installations as things that climb. I refer to aluminium and fibreglass screening materials as kinds of bodies, ones that are flat, malleable and able to be sculpted. I combine my embodied knowledge from climbing and route

4 setting with sculptural processes in order to create the conditions for these material bodies to climb through the gallery.

In my climbing and artistic practice, I draw connections between verticality, embodiment and flatness. The body navigates the surface of a wall or rock face when climbing, moving on a lateral plane that generally I refer to as ‘the vertical’. Indoor climbing takes place on sheer flat walls, fitted with holds3 and volumes that are designed as specific sequences. Walls in gallery spaces are also typically sheer and flat, where artworks are displayed or installed on and in front of the wall. These two different spaces operate with verticality in contrasting ways. As climbers embody and visualise vertical spaces, galleries usually present disembodied, blank walls to enhance the audience’s experience of artworks on the wall. In this project I employ my experience as a climber and material investigation in order to produce works that operate with verticality in the gallery and challenge the assumptions of verticality as a space that is not touched, experienced or traversed. The project will reveal that the proximal vertical and body relation developed through climbing has the potential to offer alternative perspectives on vertical space and its operation. When verticality in the gallery is ‘re-embodied’ in this way, it challenges the authoritative boundaries maintained by gallery environments, a dynamic between viewer-artwork-artist- institution. Opening up the space for alternate understandings of verticality starts to reconceive the gallery space itself. This is realised through sculptural installations and drawings presented in the solo exhibition duel/duet.

In contextualising my research, I have explored five contemporary artistic practices that deal with bodies on the vertical plane and engage with an analysis of the gallery wall. The first works I will examine are seminal pieces by Trisha Brown, including Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), Walking on the Wall (1971)

3 ‘Holds’ refer to the points of contact with the wall that indoors are usually made from polyurethane or polyester resins. They can also refer to features in rock that are used when climbing outdoors.

5 and Planes (1968). 4 Each of these works emerged at a significant time in the history of performance art and dance. With the use of specific equipment, these works shift the dancer/performer’s relationship to the ground and notions of verticality. Works from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint (1988-ongoing) series explore the relationship between the artist, the gallery and the practice of drawing, testing their limits by exploring the spatial and vertical capacities of the body. Gideonsson/Londré (Lisa Gideonsson and Gustaf Londré) also explore verticality and the limits of the body in their exhibition ‘I Am Vertical’ (2018), which considers liminal zones and relates these to bodily states, the landscape and the gallery. Finally, Dan Shipsides and Erin Coates use multidisciplinary approaches to the shared subject of rock climbing, exploring ideas surrounding the body, notation, mapping and relationships to landscape through climbing.

Ways of experiencing verticality and flatness are not historically stable or static: they are culturally specific, and they change over the course of history, just as the American and European traditions of exhibition concept and gallery design change over time. In the Paris Salon of the mid-18th century, framed paintings would fill tall walls, tessellating to maximise the amount of work on the wall. These were typically hung on a red upholstered fabric to contrast with the gold frames that were popular at the time (Maak et al., 2011, para 26). As Maak et al. discuss, before the 1930s artworks were displayed on walls painted a colour that provided the greatest contrast with the dominant colours in the paintings (2011, para 9). In the 1920s, discussions of white as a representation of infinite space emerged amongst Constructivist artists and architects, and following the Second World War, white became the dominant wall colour in Germany, England and France (Maak et al., 2011, para 11). In the mid 20th century, the space surrounding works on the wall became important, and as Brian O’Doherty points out, this brought the viewer’s perceptual field into consideration

4 Several of Brown’s works have been re-staged over time in different cities. Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, for example, has been performed at the Tate Modern, London (2006), Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (2008) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010).

6 (1976, p. 34). As O’Doherty’s pivotal book demonstrates, in the post-war era the American and European gallery begins to be considered a historical construct rather than a neutral container, reflexively shifting between context and content (1976, p. 14- 15). Ten years earlier, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s essay ‘The Dematerialisation of Art’ analysed the ways in which art practice had shifted to become focused on the conceptual and intellectual (1968). 5 Anna Lovatt examines how conceptual art, Minimalism and installation art in the 1960s and 70s were commonly concerned with materiality and site specificity both within and outside the gallery, often exhibiting directly on the gallery floor or with drawing-based installations on the wall (2010, para 3-4). With an increased focus on interdisciplinary artistic experimentation and performance, art was becoming increasingly immaterial. Whilst there was a general movement away from the gallery wall in this period to create social and performative works, the wall became central to critiques in installation art that aimed to—as Lovatt puts it—“disengage aesthetic experience from the autonomous object,” and emphasise the “constitutive framework” of the institutional space (2010, para 3). The gallery wall was becoming a site for further critique and a way of interacting directly with the institutional space and its rigid composition.

In a contemporary gallery context this critique has continued to reflect on its own context and the institutional framework embedded within its structure, yet the ‘white cube’ aesthetic still pervades a contemporary understanding of exhibition and gallery environments. Climbing in the gallery brings a layer of interrogation, challenging the gallery wall as a space that is not to be touched or traversed. Through climbing, the physical structure of the gallery is exaggerated, introducing a bodily engagement that destabilises its authority.

This paper is composed of three chapters and will analyse artistic and theoretical histories related to the project. The first chapter, ‘Bodies on the Vertical

5 This was based on Joseph Schillinger “post-aesthetic” final phase of art periods outlined in his book The Mathematical basis of Art (1948).

7 Plane,’ establishes contextual artistic practices relevant to the discussion of my own practice. It begins by examining the shift from modern to postmodern dance, discussing the implications of this shift with respect to the body, and by introducing Trisha Brown as a pioneer in the changing landscape of dance, performance and art. I analyse Brown’s works as they present bodies on the vertical plane, altering the body’s relationship to ground and gravity and expressing verticality as a proximal, liminal zone. Where Brown uses illusion to reframe the body and its relationship to the vertical, materials become ‘bodies’ in my work to reframe verticality in the gallery. Works by Matthew Barney also involve bodies on vertical planes—this time in the space of the gallery—and explore the limits of control within these spaces. As Barney climbs the institutional wall above his own framed photographs as part of his performance in Drawing Restraint 11 (2010), vertical space in the gallery becomes an embodied ‘zone of operation’. The gallery is altered by multiple levels of framing that disrupt the stature and authority of the institutional environment. Similarly, Gideonsson/Londré’s works analyse verticality and the body’s operation in gallery spaces, to explore the limits and capacities of the spaces and body. The artists use horizontality and flatness to explore verticality of landscapes and the body, charting edges of limit zones and using flat planes of the gallery to redistribute senses of verticality. By examining Brown, Barney and Gideonsson/Londré I establish a foundation for how my practice navigates these concepts of the vertical, body, flatness and dimensionality.

The second chapter, ‘Climbing in the Gallery,’ makes a direct link between the way notation has been used throughout the history of Western dance for translating movement into two-dimensional forms, and the diagrammatic processes that are an essential aspect of the art, design and practice of climbing. In order to look more closely at notation in artistic practices, I examine drawing works by Dan Shipsides and Erin Coates, that explore the translation of movement on vertical planes into two- dimensional forms. Where Shipsides and Coates vary in their concentration of description, instruction and graphics I relate these to my own use of notation and

8 drawing as further abstracted and speculative. The subsequent part of the chapter examines sculptural installation and performative work by Shipsides and Coates in relation to climbing, and how the gallery becomes integrated or involved in the space. The artists’ bodies and bodies of participants climb within gallery environments and contrast the ways in which I use materiality to climb as a way of understanding verticality. In my works, the absence of a human body reveals tensions between abstraction and specificity that interact with the structures of the gallery.

The third and final chapter, ‘Climbing Experiments, a Studio Practice,’ analyses selected works from my exhibition duel/duet, and discusses my processes and methodologies throughout the project. This chapter recounts how the works changed and developed over time, and how my experiments with specific materials, their capabilities and limitations, functioned to give form and solidity to the project’s conceptual infrastructure. In sculptural installations I develop from flat and draping materials to more rigid and industrious materials that demand gestural actions and a physical sculpting process that connected the behaviour of the material to the behaviour of a climbing body. Drawing with rope and using other climbing equipment as fixtures, the materials climb and embody the space through expressions of pulling, pushing, compressing and extending. These actions and displays of tension instil qualities that are intrinsic to climbing and emphasise the vertical potential of the gallery. This is further explored in drawing and notation works that challenge flatness and encourage a diagrammatic yet embodied perspective of verticality. Removing the presence of the body, my works present spatial and relational information of an embodied operation that navigate between speculation and specificity.

Adopting this bodily and proximal relationship challenges the gallery and its limitations. Extending the vertical from a flat, blank surface to a liminal zone offers the potential for more human dimensionality and speculation. Verticality as a dynamic zone, loaded with potential for embodiment allows bodies to operate, see and sense across multiple planes. This begins to reconceive the institutionalised gallery wall as a

9 physical structure that has the potential to be embodied by human and material bodies.

10 Chapter 1: Bodies on the Vertical Plane

This chapter explores bodies operating with the vertical plane in contemporary art practices that reorientates concepts of ground, dimensionality and flatness. By examining ways in which postmodern dance and performance shifted dominant assumptions about embodiment and its spatial orientations, this chapter demonstrates the way in which verticality begins to be used and challenged by artists to critique the space of the gallery. The artists that engage in these performative critiques explore the potential of bodily engagements with verticality that is continued through my own contemporary art practice. My sculptural installations, digital prints and drawings present the climbing body operating with the vertical and offer alternative ways of embodying and seeing verticality, in order to interrogate the way gallery spaces are encountered and traversed.

The shift from modern to postmodern conceptions and forms of dance had significant implications for understandings of the body in, and in relation to, institutional space. Modern dance is characterised by stylistic, structured choreography that employed elements of theatre such as props and costume. 6 It emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century in response to classical ballet, as dance historian Sally Banes emphasises its focus on the personal and rejection of the strict and limited principles of ballet (1987, p. 5). Modern dance is centred around dramatic, literary and emotional significance, with an emphasis on producing content in search of a more ‘natural’ dance, stripping away ballet traditions that attempt to defy the force of gravity and conceal the strain of dancing, and embracing the effects of gravity and basic actions (Copeland, 2004, p. 3). 7 Roger Copeland attributes the ‘modernisation’ of modern dance to choreographer and performer Merce Cunningham

6 Some key figures of modern dance include Francois Delsarte an early ideological founder; dancer, choreographer and dance theoretician Rudolf Laban (also called Rudolf von Laban); and dancer Isadora Duncan. 7 Examples of this can be found in the work of dancers Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey.

11 in the 1940s who rejected this Expressionist school of thought and created a dance that was about itself, reconciling ballet traditions whilst emphasising rhythm, structure and often collaborating with musicians, composers and artists (2004, p. 2-3). 8 Postmodern choreographers extended Cunningham’s ideas on everyday actions and ordinary movement but rejected his ideas on the virtuosity of the dance, preferring to focus on the basic principles of dance: space, time, weight and energy (Copeland, 2004, p. 210-211). Sally Banes claims, “the postmodern choreographers found new ways to foreground the medium of dance rather than its meaning” (1987, p. 44). The medium itself became a way of producing meaning. Altering the traditional components of time in dance, space and the body, postmodern choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon and Simone Forti reformed space as place, inserting works into art galleries and festivals. The emphasis on context rather than content reflects the shift to the body itself becoming the subject of dance, rather than an instrument for expressive metaphors (Banes, 1987, p. 46). By the late 1960s, Chandler and Lippard discuss similar shifts occurring in the visual arts, away from commodity forms and towards conceptual and dematerialised artforms such as dance, performance and installation works (1968, p. 1). These forms of work revealed and critiqued the institutional spaces they were presented in. The framing of performances in galleries dissolved borders of dance and art, exploring limits of time, space and the body through activities such as the simple act of walking. 9 Considering the regal verticality of the body in balletic dance tradition, postmodern choreographers approached dance in varied ways, but often played on the body’s orientation to gravity, surface, stage and site to invert and critique this tradition. Trisha Brown’s Equipment Cycles (1968-1972) explore this notion and are pivotal works in the discussion of how my practice is contextualised.

8 These collaborations included the works of artists Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg and composer John Cage integrating chance procedures and indeterminacy to choreographic processes. 9 Postmodern performance collapsed boundaries between popular culture, art and everyday life, hence the return to basic actions such as walking.

12 Emerging from Robert Dunn’s choreographic composition workshop (1961-63) and being a pioneering member of the Judson Dance Theatre (1962-64), Trisha Brown was heavily influenced by the developing and overlapping ideas surrounding body, performance, choreography, art and dance. Brown produced works that challenged spatial experience of verticality and the body’s operation and movement in an environment that destabilises our perception of gravity. In her Equipment Cycles works, bodies engage with acts that involve mechanisms for suspending and moving the body in ways that reorientate it to gravity. 10 In these works, there is a focus on the body and its attachment to vertical surface as an alternate ground. This begins to promote verticality as an inhabitable, operative zone rather than a flat plane and presents a significant turning point in postmodern art. 11

Maurice Berger outlines a broader ‘cultural zeitgeist’ in the field of dance and visual arts that contributed to artists looking at gravity and shifting between the vertical and horizontal (2002, p. 18). Action painter Jackson Pollock’s first drip painting in 1947 signified a reorientation of the art object and its production. Moving from the vertical axis to the horizontal, Pollock used gesture and the effects of gravity to produce paintings that emphasised physicality and process as an essential part of the work. 12 Pollock worked from above the canvas on the floor, bringing the production of art ‘down’ and raising the mundane and popular ‘up’. Robert Rauschenberg’s uselessly vertical Bed (1955) and Andy Warhol’s Oxidation series (made by people urinating on the floor) 13 altered expectations regarding the verticality and horizontality of the art

10 Brown’s Equipment Cycles emerge at a time of significant change in the conception of the body as 1970s feminist rejected ideals placed on women’s bodies. Whilst Brown uses bodies of other performers not her own, the wave for liberation and expression framed her practice. 11 Brown’s engagement with equipment to propel bodies into the vertical inspired choreographers and artists such as Terry Sendgraff, Jo Kreiter and the company Project Bandaloop in the 1970s and 1980s to work in this vertical field. Brown’s early experimental practice has had lasting effect on the exploration of dance and performance today, as seen in the choreography of William Forsythe and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (Bither, 2013). 12 Pollock is renowned for his macho identity in 20th century art history and whilst it is not the focus of this paper, gender politics plays a larger role in the discussion of Pollock, Brown, (and in the following pages) Klein and Ader. 13 Also known as “Piss paintings” in which Warhol laid copper painted canvases out on the floor and invited assistants or visitors to urinate on them while the paint was still wet.

13 object and its production (Berger, 2002). These shifts reveal how verticality implicates power, agency and control. Minimalist, installation and earthwork art also shifted orientations with a focus on the floor and ground. This reveals an experimental climate for Brown’s works, which reorientate the body to gravity through performances and further depart from traditional modes of understanding verticality.

Developed less than one year after Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon in 1969, Brown’s performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (Figure 1) builds upon the cultural emergence of imagery depicting foreign relationships to gravity. Susan Rosenberg outlines how this reveals the body’s experience of weight, space, ground and its physical capabilities as “contingent” (2012, p. 30). The work was initially performed as part of a site-specific series titled, ‘Dances in and Around 80 Wooster Street,’ during a recession in Manhattan, USA. The performance extended a legacy of the Fluxus “street events” that emerged in the mid-1960s in SoHo, New York (Rosenberg, 2012, p. 32). 14 Bridging between art, choreography and dance, Brown’s work is a significant entry point into a discussion of art that uses the body to demonstrate alternative ways of experiencing verticality.

14 The Fluxus movement originated in the mid to late 20th century reflected the social climate of the time with an irreverence for “high art”, institutions and the “value” placed on art by these institutions. The movement followed Futurism and Dadaism, similarly interested in dismantling the power and structure of the museum and was significantly inspired by the teachings of John Cage.

Figure 1. Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970. Photograph by Carol Goodden.

In Man Walking Down the Side of a Building a solo performer appears to be walking perpendicular to the building until they reach the ground. As the body ‘walks’ in a different relationship to gravity, one of the human body’s most ‘natural’ or fundamental actions is transformed into a complex operation. Rosenberg refers to this as the “strenuous act of illusion,” where ‘walking’ departs from its conventional ordinariness and deceives the viewer. In this work, the relationship between body and gravity, or body and alternate ground (wall) is mediated by equipment. Two belayers on the roof control the descent of the performer down the building, enabled through harnesses, rope, belay devices and logistical equipment. This allows the body to perform in a reachable space that extends from the vertical, ‘the liminal zone’, between itself and a vertical surface, producing the illusion of walking. Brown’s performance can be contrasted with Yves Klein’s photographed action Leap Into the

15 Void (1960), and Bas Jan Ader’s “falling” films such as Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970). Leap Into the Void shows a man mid-jump from the roof of a building and depicts the artist’s relationship to gravity as a force to be transcended by the artist, often violently.15 Similarly, in remarks about his work Ader has referred to gravity as a force to which he was subject, and which “made itself [his] master” (1971, p. 3). This also suggests the need for a sort of transcendence, despite the fact that the artist seems to be adopting a submissive attitude towards fated actions. Brown, in contrast, analyses and celebrates the “strength, logic and endurance of the body in its own right and in relationship to the natural forces around it,” (Berger, 2002, p. 18). This focus on the forces around the body engages with verticality as a proximal, liminal space that allows for unique spatial experience.

Figure 2. Trisha Brown, Walking on the Wall, 1971. Performance documentation. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy; Trisha Brown Company. Photograph by Carol Goodden.

Brown’s other walking work, Walking on the Wall (Figure 2), sees a group of performers suspended and perpendicular to the gallery wall at different heights,

15 Some of the photographs are created with two negatives combined, one taken during the jump where a tarpaulin is held on the ground, and one of the same streetscapes empty.

16 walking between and around each other. Reminiscent of a ‘bird’s-eye-view’ of pedestrians walking in dense cities, the performance reframes this common experience of verticality on the walls of the gallery. The performers work with or against each other in their own spatial hierarchy in order to navigate the wall by stepping over or under ropes to pass each other. They move as if dancing on a vertical stage—the institutional white gallery wall. The gallery wall becomes a relocated ground for the action, transforming perspective and possibilities of movement. At the time, the use of galleries as sites for performance or dance was new, as was the postmodern critique of the horizontal stage of the theatre. In Brown’s performance, this critique collides with the vertical authority of the gallery wall.

Figure 3. Trisha Brown, Planes, 1968. Performance documentation.

Another work from Brown’s Equipment Cycles is Planes (first performed in 1968) (Figure 3), where three performers dressed in uniform jumpsuits traverse and slowly climb a wall that resembles a pegboard. In most performances of Planes a film by Jud Yalkut¾consisting of mostly aerial shots and music by Simon Forti—is projected

17 onto the wall over the performers. 16 This work emphasises the artist’s fascination with bodies moving on the vertical plane and changing the relationship between body, ground, gravity and perspective. In Planes, there is direct use of aerial and celestial imagery that when combined with the performers’ slowed motion, gives the illusion of falling and weightlessness. In other words, the performers’ climb across the wall and through this imagery, results in an overall illusion of flatness, and within this illusion the three-dimensional space occupied by the climbers on the wall is altered. The wall- space is compressed into a liminal zone, further flattened by the projection over top, and this illusion opens up a perspective onto movement and weightlessness. Yalkut invites the audience to consider the performance as a ‘vertical tunnel’, emphasising the multiple perspectives working to produce the illusion of bodies falling like skydivers (n.d., para. 1).

In Brown’s works Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Walking on the Wall and Planes, bodies are reorientated to gravity and ground, testing their capacities for movement and offering different perspectives on these components and their dimensionality. The bodies’ relationships to vertical surfaces as ground reframe actions and promote verticality as a zone that can be proximal, embodied and a ‘plane of contingency’ in its potential for lateral movement and interaction with gravity. This contrasts the way verticality is usually understood in everyday life and in the gallery, as flat planes that are not to be traversed. The reorientation of these bodies to gravity and ground is ‘illusory’ in the sense that the performers conceal their strain, moving in slow and controlled ways. Illusion was a significant aspect of performance, photography and body art in the 1960s and 70s. Artists such as Yves Klein, Joan Jonas and Cindy Sherman used forms of illusion in works that orchestrated a collision of body and image in order to disrupt the viewers’ expectations and alter their sensory perceptions. My work does not use illusion to promote alternate ways of seeing, but instead is concerned with the trace of the body and its abstracted, subtle presence.

16 Unlike other works from the Equipment Cycles, Brown works with representations visual elements in Planes emphasising illusion and staging.

18 Rather than opposing body and image, my work treats materials as “bodies”. In place of an intention to deceive the viewer, my work explores experiences of verticality in my climbing practice and extends this materially and conceptually to consider the nature of verticality and the body. As with Brown’s work, the body and verticality are presented as ‘zones of operation’ in my practice and the potential for movement and expression in this space is explored.

In his Drawing Restraint series, contemporary artist Matthew Barney conducts physical experiments that allow him to operate, train and extend the limits of the body in gallery spaces. 17 These works often challenge his own body on the vertical plane, and like Brown, Barney employs equipment and controlled environments to reorientate the body to gravity. Barney’s early works emerge in the broader context of 1970s endurance art with an emphasis on physicality and process. 18 With a background in high school football and modelling, the conception of the male body and its role as a commodity and cultural playground is consistently returned to in his practice (Terranova, 2010, p. 23). Barney extends his ideas on physical training to artistic production, suggesting that bodies—of flesh and art—must be strengthened in order to grow. This positions the work between two fields where Christopher Bedford draws connections between the visual language of both art and athletics as they reveal sculptural aspects and limits of the body (2006, p. 797). The gallery becomes a site for implemented structures, rules and objectives that work with the limits of control on the body (Figure 4). As Barbara Gladstone explains in the film No Restraint, Barney’s use of restraint and impediments achieves something of itself, and it becomes the process of this activity that predominates rather than the resulting drawings (2007).

17 See especially experiments 1 — 6, 10, and 11. 18 Early examples of endurance art include Chris Burden’s Five-Day Locker Piece (1971) and Bed Piece (1972).

Figure 4. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 2, 1988. Documentary Photograph. Courtesy: the artist. Photograph by Michael Rees.

Figure 5. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 11, 2005, Documentation Photograph. Copyright Matthew Barney, Photograph by Reggie Shiobara.

Barney engages with the body on the vertical plane in his works Drawing Restraint 10 (2005) and Drawing Restraint 11 (2005), continuing his training regime whilst presenting an embodiment of verticality in the gallery. In Drawing Restraint 10, Barney draws on the ceiling one jump at a time, running and jumping onto an angled trampoline, or climbing up the gallery infrastructure itself using the support pylons. In Drawing Restraint 11 for the same exhibition, Barney climbs the gallery wall dressed in

21 dark clothing appearing flattened against the white wall (Figure 5). As Barney climbs, there is a focus on the spatiality of his performance and the height of the gallery in relation to his own framed photographs exhibited below. This makes a direct connection between the gallery wall for display of art and the wall as something to be climbed. The nature of this connection is unsettling and unexpected as our perception of the wall and its surrounding space doubles. Whilst the work continues his investigation into the athletic male body and its limits, it also examines the body on the vertical, offering an embodied activation of the space. Climbing around and above his own framed photographs, the typical sheer blankness of the institutional gallery wall and its formal attributes are interrupted. The gallery space becomes a space for training, where the limits of the body and its capabilities are extended.

As Barney climbs, he presents an alternate articulation of the space, one that is comprehended by bodily capacities for movement, stretching and compressing as he navigates the gallery wall. 19 In this way, Barney’s body appears as an object that is framed by the context of the gallery wall, at the same time as it gives that space— which is usually flat, subdued, and ‘unseen’—an alternative physical, embodied dimensionality. There are several layers of framing in this instance that contribute to the different ways the gallery wall is culturally understood. The photographs exhibited on the wall are conventionally framed, Barney as a performer is framed against the wall, and the performance is framed through photography and video documentation. The photographs framed on the wall elicit a familiar way of experiencing work in a gallery, whilst Barney’s body moves through space usually designated to the display of artworks, foregrounding its potential for proximal and embodied engagement. By combining these ways of framing, modes of viewing verticality in the gallery space collide. The dual experience of the gallery as a physical structure and institutional space defies assumptions of how to embody a gallery environment and creates tension between two modes of seeing and sensing.

19 I am interpreting the performance from photo documentation and selected video footage from the film No Restraint (2007).

This relates to his performance in Drawing Restraint 10 where the architecture and structure of the gallery becomes articulated in a bodily way as Barney climbs the pylons in order to draw on the ceiling. The relationship between the climbing body and the gallery in Barney’s works is performative, strenuous and leaves only a residual drawing at the edges of these actions. The relationship between the climbing body and the gallery in my work also uses the spatiality of the gallery space; however, mine is a much more material investigation. In my sculptural installations I use a material “body” and equipment to emphasise the ways that climbing has the potential to present a unique spatial experience of verticality. This is distinguished from the act of climbing in the gallery, where materiality can present different, nuanced ideas through an abstracted embodiment that removes the spectacle of the feat of the athletic body. By eliminating the human body of a performer, my works promote ways understanding verticality that are not bound to a singular physicality. This will be further explored in Chapter 3.

Swedish artist duo Gideonsson/Londré explore a human verticality without climbing in the gallery, employing flatness and horizontality to reorientate bodies and landscapes. Their 2018 exhibition ‘I Am Vertical’, curated by Alexandra Laudo, presents a video installation that examines the body under physical tests at the limits of verticality. Through sculptural and installation works, the artists explore how embodiment in vertical zones can induce physical symptoms that express its liminality. The works also examine how horizontality and flatness can orientate and facilitate ways of traditionally understanding spaces and how this can be disrupted to offer alternate ways of seeing zones and planes.

Figure 6. Gideonsson/Londré, I Am Vertical (installation shot), 2018, Espai 13, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain. Photograph by Elle van Uden.

In their installation I Am Vertical (which shares the same title as the exhibition), video documentation of physical experiments explores what climbers call the ‘death zone’ as a state of being (Figure 6). Referring to high-altitude zones where the body cannot sustain itself, the ‘death zone’ articulates the tangible limit of a human verticality. Simulated in a gymnasium, the performer hangs upside down with their legs around a beam and attempts to read a text until failure. This recreates what Laudo calls “effects of spending time in limit zones”: fatigue, loss of circulation, and vertigo or disrupted vision (2018, para. 3). The work possesses similarities to Barney’s early Drawing Restraint works where the body undergoes physical tests and feats as training. This emphasises the fragile physicality of the human body and its limits of control within vertical zones. The aspect of training also suggests that verticality is not something to be overcome, but rather reaching its limits and most extreme symptoms can reveal more about the capabilities within this zone. I Am Vertical assures that the edges of the liminality exist and—without leaving the confines of a gymnasium— present how delicate and limited a human experience of verticality is.

Figure 7. Gideonsson/Londré, I Am Vertical (detail), 2018, Espai 13, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain. Photograph by Elle van Uden.

Other works by Gideonsson/Londré are more concerned with horizontality, and the cross sectioning of landscapes and bodies. One of these presents a horizontal cross section of the world at 26,247 feet, representative of the ‘death zone’ as areas that exceed this height are depicted as pin pricks on a page. In another part of the installation, the artists take horizontal cross sections of the crowns of their heads and cast them in plaster, displayed at their head height opposite each other down a corridor (Figure 7). The process of using cut-through cross sections or slicing creates a flat plane that has the potential to sit flush with a vertical wall or horizontal ground. As Laudo writes, “the artists suggest that the horizontality of the sea leads us to see

25 mountains as mountains, and islands as islands.” (2018, para. 2). Gideonsson/Londré draw our attention to the nature of what we might consider ‘stable’ horizons (such as the sea), their potential to change and how this implicates our understanding of verticality. The imagery of horizontality and its capacity for recontextualising information extends to the crown of the artists’ heads, presented as if mountain peaks emerging from flatness. Strangely, horizontality becomes central to how Gideonsson/Londré explore verticality, in the sense that they use flatness as a kind of gauge for orientation and distinction. If we consider the significance of flatness in the gallery, flatness of walls is usually crucial to facilitate the presentation of artworks and a tool in the control of institutional space. In climbing, the vertical must be distinguishably not flat in order to be traversed. Gideonsson/Londré invite us to consider the fluidity of planes and zones, how horizons can change and our experiences of zones, landscape and bodies with it. Uniquely for climbing, the unevenness or ‘un-flatness’ of the vertical makes for spatial experiences that are uncommon and offer a way to consider the vertical as a potential ‘ground’ that can be traversed.

Brown, Barney and Gideonsson/Londré explore relationships between the body and verticality through performance, installation and sculpture and offer this relationship as a proximal, liminal zone. These artists investigate concepts of dimensionality, flatness and limits of control, operating with the force of gravity. Brown explores concepts of dimensionality through illusion and presents the vertical as an alternate ground. Barney performs feats of the body where he operates with and frames verticality as a zone within the gallery. Gideonsson/Londré experiment with failure and the limits of a human verticality whilst also exploring the significance of flatness to orientation and grounding. I will continue by exploring artists more directly concerned with the significance of climbing and introduce my own practice.

26 Chapter 2: Climbing in the Gallery

In this chapter I will examine the works of artists who combine the seemingly disparate fields of art and climbing that inform my practice. This chapter investigates projects by contemporary artists Dan Shipsides and Erin Coates, who explore climbing through aesthetic practices of drawing, installation and performance. I will first introduce some of my own works and explain their use of notation as a means by which to analyse climbing processes. I then present a brief history of notation practices that deal with the ‘translation’ of three-dimensional movement onto two-dimensional surface to contextualise its artistic applications. This will be followed by analysis of Shipsides and Coates’ drawing, sculptural installation and performance works to discuss their experimentation with concepts related to the body, verticality and the gallery.

Drawing is a significant and constant part of my practice because of its connections with path-making through lines and points. The practice of drawing has been linked to ideation and thinking-looking by Deanna Petherbridge, who claims that it is a tool for reflection, analysis, deconstruction and more (2010). When climbing, there are parallels to the process of drawing in terms of how you physically climb or see a sequence of moves as separate points that are to be connected in some chronology through movement. 20 My series ‘Beta maps’ demonstrates this approach using codified language to depict movements and points. The works involve the drawing and notating of proposed body movement through specific boulders in Fontainebleau, France, made during a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. The title includes the use of the colloquial term ‘beta’ from climbing culture, referring to information about a climb. The series maps this information, which can be either speculative, or actually produced from my physical climbing. The drawings often

20 Drawing and notational processes have been used in climbing culture to create personal topographical maps or ‘topos’ that are usually made to remember particular and personal sequences of movement on outdoor rock.

27 also present an inscription detailing the given route name (Figure 8). These names were assigned when the area was being developed and can be found on guidebooks in print and online (Figure 9). 21 The subsequent number and letter system refer to a grade assigned to the climb, also referenced from guides. The series uses drawing and notating processes to express a way of sensing and understanding vertical movement that includes, but is not restricted to, climbing taxonomies. It is simultaneously site specific and speculative, abstract and instructional.

21 See bleau.info for detailed online guidebook or print guides such as Jingo Wobbly Fun Bloc. Equivalencies usually exist for other areas around the world.

Figure 8. Elle van Uden, Force G, 6a+ from the series ‘Beta maps’, 2018, digital print, 210 x 297 mm.

Figure 9. Sample page of ‘Fontainebleau Fun Bloc Photo-Guide’ Jingo Wobbly. Photograph by Elle van Uden.

The ‘Beta maps’ series presents systems of lines, symbols and shaded regions that distinguish an abstracted path and notes for movement. The information presented does not give a clear indication of what is moving or the sequence of actions, instead offering a diagrammatic and relational way of seeing a flat plane. The movements depicted are either speculative or from my experience when climbing a specific route. They are formulated based on climbing-specific, embodied knowledge

30 that I have gained from training and practicing climbing. An audience with similar experience with climbing might read these sequences differently from an audience with no climbing experience, yet the drawings do not follow a structured system to be deciphered. Instead, the series suggests a way of seeing and sensing through vertical landscapes, collapsing the body and its movement as a flat plane without prescribing specific movements.

Working with this process of translation from three-dimensional movement to two-dimensional mark making has significant links to notation and diagrammatic ways of interpreting movement. Notation refers to the systematic use of signs and symbols in representing information and is used in order to translate complex information onto a surface for analysis. In the context of dance, notation is used as a graphic tool for codifying the body’s movement through line and symbols for educational, research and archival purposes. It is not synonymous with choreography or scoring, and is distinguished as a system that translates or pre-exists the dance as something scripted that can be ‘read’ (Franko, 2011, p. 321-322). Of primary concern to my project is notation used in artistic practice that rejects mimetic replication of information and focusses on the process of using two-dimensional means for understanding a three- dimensional world. Using symbolic representation, notation mediates a linguistic, semantic interpretation of motion that allows artists to employ notation as a tool for working between dimensions and surfaces. With origins in the late 16th century, dance notation strives to depict complex movement in simplified forms using systems of reference. As an early example, French Baroque dance and court theatre in the 17th century and its notation invented by Raoul-Auger Feuillet and Pierre Beauchamp, exemplifies how notation may be also diagrammatic (Franko, 2011, p. 323) (Figure 10). The Feuillet Beauchamp notational system considers dance from an aerial viewpoint, presenting a plan or map of the dancer’s movement. 22 In this system, the page mimics

22 Other significant dance notation systems include Labanotation, Eshkol-Wachman movement notation (EWMN) and Benesh movement notation (BMN).

31 the stage through the spatial relationship of the body’s path whilst swirling lines depict turns of the figures, reflexive of the dance itself.

Figure 10. Raoul-Auger Feuillet, The Art of Dancing, demonstrated by Characters and Figures, translated by P. Siris. London: for the author, 1706.

What dance notation systems reveal about the two-dimensional articulation of body movement is that it aims to code, simplify, structure and organise complex information in order to compose it in such a way that communicates it clearly and graphically. Forms of graphic notation can also be diagrammatic, providing an abstract spatial view of points that maps relationships without being explicitly localisable. In comparison to a map, Sher Doruff’s concept of diagrammatic praxis outlines that through diagramming, one is able to think and perceive in diagrammatic forms,

32 become relational and see the relational take form (2011). The ‘relational’ in this context refers to the imperceptible connections between things and by ‘becoming relational’, one has the potential to examine this virtual dimension as a new type of reality. This relates to Kenneth Knoespel’s premise that “while a diagram may visually present or reinforce an idea one moment, the next it may provide a means for seeing something never seen before” (2001, p. 147, as cited in Rodda, 2014, p. 225). 23 Diagramming, in other words, has the potential to exceed immediate representative purposes and present new information through its own form. In my practice, I use a diagrammatic approach to notation, with non-localisable yet spatial, relational and abstracted forms of representation. On diagramming, Brian Massumi writes, “if we take the abstraction one step further and look at the interface itself—what happens between the form of expression and the form of content—we get a set of abstract relations between abstract points, the ‘diagram’ of a vectorial field” (1992, p. 14). In other words, if the ‘form of expression’ refers to organisation and function, ‘form of content’ refers to material, states and conditions. In any given meeting of these two forms, a formation of an ‘encounter’ occurs, or an ‘interrelation of relations’ either physical or in thought (Massumi, 1992, p. 13-14). This interface, whilst not static, establishes an interconnected web of possible realities, ones that do not exist in ‘real’ space and time. Using this diagrammatic framework, I examine the climbing body’s movement on the vertical as an interface in which forms of expression (methods of climbing) and forms of content (the holds, wall and surfaces) are considered through drawing and diagramming processes. Equipment may be categorised as both forms of expression and forms of content as it is part of the procedures of climbing and its materiality, adding to its significance as a sculptural material in my work. This includes rope and is further discussed as a form in my work in chapter 3.

23 There is widespread theoretical discourse surrounding the diagram; significant theorists include Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi with texts dating from 1984. For the purposes of this paper I focus on the diagrammatic in relation to my drawing and climbing practices.

33 Using diagrammatic drawing processes in her work, Australian artist Erin Coates translates climbing sequences into notational studies that reveal spatial yet pedagogic ways of seeing the vertical. Coates’ solo exhibition titled ‘Kinesphere’ explores rock climbing and verticality through drawing, sculpture, installation and participative performance. The term ‘kinesphere’ originates with Rudolf Laban, a key dance theorist in the first half of the 20th century and the developer of the dance notation and analysis system ‘Labanotation’. ‘Kinesphere’ refers to the surrounding reachable space of the stationary figure (Laban & Ullmann, 2011, p. 10). Coates uses this dance term to offer a way of thinking about the body’s capabilities and how these change in relation to vertical and horizontal planes. In her work, Coates creates notational drawings that express movement of a body through abstracted forms that resemble natural rock. The Boulder presents an inkpainted boulder loosely defined, with pencil markings made indicating a general path (Figure 11). This work is part of her drawing series dealing with path-making in climbing. Codified language depicts a sequence of points or events through a vertical path. Diagrammatic and instructional, her drawings refer to a body moving in a prescribed sequence, without directly revealing the meaning of the symbology used or any reference to site. By loosely defining the vertical surface on which the sequence takes place, Coates’ proposition for movement operates on the flat and floating space of the two-dimensional page. Specific symbols suggest the body’s departure and return to the ground and a sequence that the body enacts in between these points. The symbols that relate to movements are scattered through the path of the climber and provide a logical chronology in order that this trajectory can be read and interpreted. My drawing practice insists that the climbing body possesses complex and experiential knowledge of moving through vertical planes. In my work, drawing extends beyond indexical reference of movement and investigates how my embodied knowledge can be expressed to further sense and understand verticality in the gallery. Similar to Coates’ drawings, my series ‘Beta maps’ uses codified language and indicators to notate the movement of the body in an abstract way; however, unlike Coates I use the photographic to suspend sequences in their environment and use drawing and

34 notation in a diagrammatic way. This creates a tension between speculation and site specificity, the abstract and instructional.

Figure 11. Erin Coates, The Boulder, 2014, ink and pencil on paper, 43 x 34 cm.

Figure 12. Dan Shipsides, Sloth (Don Whillans 1954), 2007, lambda prints with acrylic mounts, 50 x 40cm.

Dan Shipsides’ print works such as Sloth (Dan Whillans 1954) from his project Radical Architecture (2007), are more descriptive of the action of climbing and use drawing and photographic processes to reveal path-making as opposed to diagrammatics (Figure 12). The drawings present a lightened photograph of the landscape with a darker path weaving through the rock and depict specific routes from the Peak District National Park, United Kingdom. Shipsides comments that he “wanted to emphasise the route as an embodiment of the rock and climber’s interaction. As if the heat of the climber’s moving body has evaporated a line of mist” (2007, para 6). This approach considers embodiment as more than just a directional line that indicates the route, often found in guidebooks or written material about climbing. Instead, Shipsides presents regions of the climb that have been ‘warmed’ by a climber’s presence. This spatial description of the climb focusses more on the body than the

36 route itself. I am similarly interested in the body’s movement through the vertical plane and how this can offer ways of seeing embodiment. Whereas Shipsides highlights the climb as a region standing out from the otherwise masked landscape, my ‘Beta maps’ series uses a lightened region to highlight the speculative path and sequence of the climber. Both draw attention to the selective way of seeing a vertical landscape and the applied knowledge of climbing in this space. Shipsides’ drawings of routes in the Peak District are tied directly to the path of the body; in contrast, my drawings (and those of Coates) are more abstract in their relationship to the body. This allows the zone of operation between the body and verticality to be more complex, not flattened to a singular path, but rather opening a spatial dimension for capacities of movement.

By working with routes that are upwards of 20 metres and depicting the region that the climber occupies, Shipsides’ drawings present a longer but narrower zone of operation than my drawings, which depict shorter boulder sequences. In these drawings I am able to focus more on specific movements within these 3 to 5 metre sequences. The moving ‘kinesphere’ of the climber becomes more legible in this space and allows for complex movements to be delineated.

The process and practice of climbing has potential artistic outcomes that propose alternate ways of seeing and understanding the vertical. Coates uses notation and drawing to suggest a way of moving through the vertical plane, providing a methodical order and reference to specific movements. Shipsides’ drawings depict a line through the vertical landscape as a depiction of the climber’s path-making. My works incorporate aspects of path-making and notated movement; however, I further abstract the body and the process of notating. This allows me to consider the speculative nature of my own embodied knowledge from climbing and how diagrammatic drawing can be used to suggest ways of seeing and sensing rather than reporting on it.

37 Alongside drawing processes, Coates and Shipsides work in sculptural installation and performance to occupy the physical vertical zones between a body and the wall in the gallery. With an emphasis on using human bodies—the artist’s or the audiences—Coates and Shipsides explore the relationship between the climber and verticality.

Figure 14. Still from Under a frogs arse @ the bottom of a coal mine, 1999, Dan Shipsides, SD video, 12 min duration.

In Shipsides’ performance work Under a frogs arse @ the bottom of a coal mine (1997) (Figure 14) the gallery becomes a space for training as the artist climbs its walls in a routine over the period of the exhibition. 24 Shipsides alternates between using features of the room itself and using installed holds on the wall to navigate its perimeter. As with Barney’s Drawing Restraint works discussed in Chapter 1, the gallery and studio become sites for training the artists’ physicality, likening artistic

24 For the purposes of this paper the work has been viewed through video documentation.

38 production to a muscle that can be exercised. In contrast to Barney’s works, in Under a frogs arse… the climber traverses the walls of the space as a kind of bouldering, rather than climbing to the top of the wall with aid of equipment. 25 The four walls of the gallery are traversed, expressing the vertical zone as a lateral space that can be activated by climbing across and not necessarily up. Observing Shipsides traverse the walls of the gallery using window sills and skirting boards as hand and foot holds defies expectations of how a gallery environment should be treated. The features of the space are used in aiding movement whilst the white wall frames the body as object. Shipsides activates the space in a particular way that expresses an embodiment, offering a new way of understanding the space and its features.

Figure 15. Erin Coates, Space Invaders, 2014, functional bouldering installation: polyurethane resin, iron powder, aluminium powder, pigment, steel anchors, ply, pine, PVC, foam, paint.

In comparison to Shipside’s work, Coates’ Space Invaders involves participants climbing within the gallery space and interrogates the conventional and authoritative

25 Lucy Gunning’s Climbing around my room (2003) also presents video documentation of a body traversing indoor walls where the climber traverses the intimate space of a bedroom barefoot wearing a red dress.

39 stature of the gallery (Figure 15). Cast sculptural holds are organised into sequences and connected with tape, all following a bright colour scheme with red upper walls and crash mat. The title refers to the renowned 8-bit arcade game in which small aliens descend the screen and the aim is to defeat waves of them with a laser to earn points. Referencing the playfulness of climbing, reinforced with the brightly coloured room, the title evokes images of flatness and verticality, a typical arcade screen orientated vertically and small alien cartoons moving laterally across its surface. The work invites the viewers to ‘invade’ the space of the gallery and act in a way that conventionally is not expected in a gallery environment. Participants are transported to a small bouldering room within the gallery for this work, as institutional space is disguised.

Coates’ works alternate between involving her own body, the bodies of other climbers (as in her 2014 video work Thigmotaxis), and the bodies of the audience. Shipsides also uses his own body in several climbing video works and performances. The act of physically climbing is not the only way to understand verticality and vertical space in the gallery. Space Invaders places emphasis on the audience members abilities and capacities, becoming a site for play and interaction. A visitor with no climbing experience cannot learn embodied knowledge from climbing with one instance of participation by climbing in Space Invaders. This is why the aim of my project is not to get others to climb, but rather to express how climbing can offer different ways of understanding vertical space. Using materiality and embodied knowledge, I produce installations and drawings within the gallery space that enable this to be seen without recognising an explicit body climbing or setting a hierarchy of physical aptitude as levels of access to work. The materials themselves and their sculpted, drawn and installed forms express an embodied verticality that an audience can view and experience without physically climbing or comparing their physicality to the artist/performer.

There is an absence of the human body in Shipsides’ sculptural installation Dans un chaos, promoting abstract and diagrammatic ways of seeing verticality and

40 the potential for movement (Figure 13). Shipsides translates an outdoor existing sequence into the gallery through the use of scaffolding, panels and holds. The freestanding sculpture imitates a sequence including its height, spatiality, angles and features. By translating the holds from outdoors, the sequence of holds becomes coloured and clearer along with the path, where points are easily distinguished. The holds act as points that enable the viewer to see their interrelations and its whole. This promotes a diagrammatic way of looking at the sculptural object as a sort of drawing, where the distinguished points on the flat planes of the construction connect in a multifaceted composition. As a climber, I read Shipsides’ construction as a bouldering sequence and speculate as to how someone might climb it. Shipsides invites non- climbers to speculate and examine this climbing art object and its potential activation through movement.

Figure 13. Dan Shipsides, Dans un chaos from Rochers à Fontainebleau, 2003/4, sculptural construction.

41 Translating the tangible part of the climb indoors to a gallery, Shipsides does not present a physical body climbing. Instead, the one-to-one notation of a specific sequence is produced. Similarly, my work produces sculptural installations of climbing sequences without a human body climbing or visible. Shipsides emphasises the nodes of these sequences, which are also important to me; however, I am also concerned with what happens in-between these points of contact. A non-climbing audience will have a different interpretation of reading Dans un chaos as a ‘sequence,’ where the visualisation of specific moves and embodiment is perhaps lost without the experience of being a climber. This is why I promote speculative ways of seeing vertical movement through sculptural forms that operate with the vertical zone, abstracted from the direct physicality of climbing whilst maintaining its language.

Coates and Shipsides present various works concerned with the climbing body and verticality. Coates investigates pedagogical and interactive ways of expressing climbing through notation and performance, exploring physical aspects of climbing and inviting participants to climb. Shipsides presents abstracted ways of expressing the body and climbing processes whilst engaging with language and forms related intrinsically to climbing. My project uses further abstraction to explore embodiment and absence of the body in seeing and sensing vertical zones. The tension between binaries including speculation and specificity, the abstract and instructional, blur boundaries and suspend the works between these modes of operating.

42 Chapter 3: Climbing Experiments, a Studio Practice

The exhibition duel/duet is the culmination of my two-year project exploring embodied knowledge derived from the practice of climbing. This final chapter examines the processes and methodologies employed in selected works, and demonstrates how they have developed. Developments with respect to materiality, mediums and location have shaped my works gradually, abstracting and ultimately removing the human body as the sole measure of vertical space. duel/duet exhibits selected works that examine verticality and the climbing body as simultaneously abstracted, demonstrative and diagrammatic, and explores alternative ways to engage with vertical zones in the gallery.

In my sculptural installations I use aluminium screening, eyelets, rope, carabiners, bolt plates, washers and screws to sculpt a material body, which I construct in such a way that it is given agency, capable of ‘climbing’ in gallery spaces. The works are site-specific and respond to the dimensions and capacities of the space through climbing. I also produce drawings that present diagrammatic forms, combining photographic elements with line and notation to describe an abstracted climbing body. This chapter will examine how I arrived at the sculptural installation and drawing works for exhibition in duel/duet.

Figure 16. Elle van Uden, Calico tests (detail), 2017, PVA stiffened calico, dimensions variable.

My first experiments with a three-dimensional, planar material were with calico—a readily available, desaturated fabric. Calico tests (Figure 16) was produced by imagining sequences of climbing movement on studio walls and cutting individual shapes of abstracted body positions as frames. When sculpted and arranged, they represented an abstracted sequence of body movement. The cut material is dipped in a PVA and water mixture, wrung out and stretched into position by pulling edges away from each other in different configurations. The ends are nailed into the wall and opposite ends were attached with rope and pulled tight against furniture in the studio. This allows the fabric to dry in tensed configurations, giving some rigidity and body to an otherwise flat and flexible fabric. Working with the fabric to stretch and pull engaged some of the same muscles I use when climbing and opened up a muscle memory pathway, connecting the two processes. This was something I wanted to continue to explore; however, the calico evokes imagery related to dress-making and textile-based practice that was not conceptually or materially relevant to my project. In Calico tests I explored the zone of operation between the wall and the climbing body, how to present abstracted climbing movement and how the material becomes a

44 body climbing the wall through sculpting. I then experimented with different materials and their capacities for ‘climbing’.

Figure 17. Studio experimentation (from left to right: shade cloth, clear plastic, fiberglass screening), January 2018.

Instead of looking at fabrics I started looking at industrial materials to move away from textile-based practices and connections. The materials selected came in flat sheets, were malleable, and included fiberglass screening, clear plastic, shade cloth and insulation film (Figures 17 & 18). I continued by testing their capacities for undergoing physical processing like pulling, compressing and stretching. To do this I secured eyelets into the materials at several points, attached rope to the work and used knots to attach to nails in the wall as a temporary, adjustable fixture. The black shade cloth omitted details like folds and tension in its appearance as the dark colour made it difficult to see anything other than a silhouette against a white wall. This had an effect similar to Barney’s Drawing Restraint 11, where the body appears flattened against the wall. The framing of the white wall was significant as the material would eventually be climbing in a conventional gallery space. The clear plastic sheet did not retain much body when compressed in parts, usually sagging under its own weight. The transparency of this material also made it difficult to express all the workings of its

45 composition when sculpted; similarly, with the shade cloth, where details and tension became difficult to see. The insulation film responded to sculpting by showing details of pushing and pulling, creating textual changes in crinkling and sharp lines where it had been pulled. Whilst the high contrast detail of compressed insulation film is striking, it forms rigid, sharp peaks and lines, reminiscent of foil. The nature of the film and its inability to stretch also meant that its capacity to express climbing was limited and it did not create the compression and expansion that is fundamental to my body movements when climbing.

Figure 18. Studio experimentation (insulation film), January 2018.

Ultimately, I found that the fiberglass screening—commonly used for fly screens—had a unique capacity to express density, layering and changing opacities (Figure 19). When used sculpturally on the wall, the material creates shapes and lines within its silhouette that are soft and undulating, as opposed to the rigid peaks produced by insulation film. Denser shapes are created by overlaps with other parts of the material, which evokes visual connections with drawing as one perceives their tonal range on a flat white background. The grid form generates cross hatching, a common drawing technique used to represent form and volume.

Figure 19. Process photograph of High left foot, palm-press, February 2018.

Using the same process as that with which I was able to ‘sculpt’ the calico, I experimented further with the fiberglass screening, cutting individual, abstracted shapes, that replicated the movements made with the body when climbing a specific imagined route. With the exhibition Unbounded, 2018, at Stacks Projects, Potts Point, I was able to test the installation of the work using carabiners, cord, bolt plates, washers and screws (Figure 20). Equipment ‘repurposed’ from the practice of climbing enables the material to climb the gallery wall. The functionality of this equipment— conventionally used for humans climbing routes—is re-applied in the gallery space, and is transferred into this new, sculptural material, which becomes a ‘climbing body’. The fixtures I use visually relate to typical hanging systems used by galleries (D-rings,

47 for example) and this creates a continuity, through the material fastenings, across the fields of climbing and gallery installing. As when climbing, the equipment has the potential to bear force and weight whilst attaching to flat surfaces. The bolt plates have the capacity to slide over carrot bolts or be fixed into the wall and can then bear weight securely. Fitted with a washer, a screw into the wall fixes them in place for my use in a gallery space and can then be attached to cord with a carabiner that pulls the screening into place (Figure 21).

Figure 20. Elle van Uden, High left foot, palm-press, 2018, fiberglass screening, eyelets, cord, carabiners, bolt plates, screws, 175 x 200 x 15cm. Photograph by Document Photography.

Figure 21. Elle van Uden, High left foot, palm-press (detail), 2018, fiberglass screening, eyelets, cord, carabiners, bolt plates, screws, 175 x 200 x 15cm. Photograph by Document Photography.

High left foot, palm-press exemplifies the use of these materials and whilst expresses some qualities related to climbing is limited in its composition and structure to engage with more ideas drawn from climbing. The work expresses moments of tension and draping relating to movement of the body climbing through a sequence.

49 The tonal range through overlapped sections of screening alludes to a drawing, whilst the scale suggests it is a one-to-one notation of a body climbing. The work draws upon an existing indoor climbing sequence that I climbed, considering the translation of the body’s movement, as opposed to the representation of its holds in the wall. The anchored points do not correspond with the location of holds. The tonal range of the screening pieces, their overlaps, lines and corners suggest how the sequence would be climbed. The work is limited in certain respects, as it does not express a number of important aspects of my experience of climbing. The rope and fixtures attach at points on the work’s perimeter and pull the piece outward; but movement on the vertical plane is much more complex than just pulling and I wanted my works to express this. The work does not engage with the space between the climber and the wall as fiberglass screening is not rigid enough to maintain space and volume between itself and the wall. This meant that it would drape in areas without tension. To supplement this shortcoming, I initially explored and articulated the space between a climber and the wall using video.

Figure 22. Still from Step-through, cross, unwind, 2018, video, 2:04 duration.

Figure 23. Elle van Uden, Step-through, cross, unwind, 2018, video installation. Photograph by Campbell Henderson.

51 Step-through, cross, unwind is a slowed video with a stationary viewpoint that presents a person climbing (Figure 22). The work—a video installation on a portrait- orientated single-channel screen—was exhibited in a group exhibition titled Life, Happiness and Hardship, 2018, at Balmain Watch House (Figure 23). Perspective and orientation are distorted as it is initially unclear at what angle the camera or climber are in relation to the perceived ground. The space between the climber and the wall becomes more visible from this viewpoint, undulating as the body alternates between extending and compressing, further abstracted by being displayed perpendicular with the floor. The yellow ground in the video is matting underneath the climber, streaked with creases in its surface and marks of rubber from climbing shoes. The foreshortened climbing wall appears as a rolling landscape of coloured holds. Illusions of ground, horizontality and verticality are presented in an unusual landscape that the climbing body navigates. Documenting the action of the body climbing from the top of the wall realised the zone of verticality in a way that is visible to an observer where previously I had only been considering it through my own experience climbing. The video work allowed me to further understand the undulating space between a climber and the wall. The operable space between the climber and the wall was more tangible in the video and was significant to my experience of verticality as a proximal and liminal engagement with space. The movement of the climber’s shoulders, hips and limbs produce a dynamic drawing that changes throughout the sequence. I wanted to translate this zone into the sculptural installation works with screening. Rather than sitting relatively flat on the wall as in High left foot, palm-press, it was significant that the material body express this sense of undulation, exploring the zone between body and wall and the limits of this space from a different perspective.

Figure 24. Studio experimentation (aluminium screening and rope), March 2018.

I began working with aluminium screening, a material similar with structural similarities to the fibreglass screening. However, being metal instead of plastic, the mesh holds very rigid shape, and requires more physicality in the process of sculpting (Figure 24). When working with this material I found I was back to more gestural processes like those employed when stretching the calico tests. I would need to forcibly push parts of the material to slide against the wall in order to create a compression, sometimes holding another part stationary in my other hand whilst pulling the cord through eyelets in order to maintain this tension and either tie a knot or continue feeding the cord through. This also meant rather than just using rope to extend exterior points to fix into the wall, the rope becomes structural and part of its

53 internal composition. Working with one continuous piece as opposed to individually cut shapes allowed the work to follow a continuous path, relating to a climber moving through vertical space.

The process of sculpting and installing the screening works draws upon my experience as a climber and a route setter. In climbing and route setting, there is a constant evaluation of body dimensions, mobility, movement, sequences and potential solutions. When climbing, this mostly relates to my own capabilities and movement, however, commercial route setting requires the consideration of bodies other than my own. This can involve setting routes that are designed for children, movements I cannot physically perform or styles of movement that are more suited to particular bodies. This speculative and physical process requires creative thinking and the application of knowledge from climbing and watching others climb. This means that in my work I consider how bodies other than my own can move through the vertical and apply this knowledge to the non-human bodies that I create. I sculpt and route set the material I am using to climb in the gallery. This proposes a path and sequence for movement as the material body climbs.

Before installing the screening on the wall, I lie a large piece down and plan out where to insert the eyelets. I propose a sequence of points that start from the bottom of the material and travel upwards. Selecting a rope as brightly coloured as climbing ropes, I begin to ‘flake’ it out, which involves passing short lengths through both hands and letting the rope fall into a pile so as not to be tangled. I repeat this process after threading rope through each eyelet. Fixing the screening at one point at the top of the wall I am able to start threading the rope through the points in my desired sequence. This process involves spanning my arms to reach between points, behind the screen or in front, holding or squeezing parts of the material to enable the rope to go through. This sculpting process, like route setting, requires the visualisation of movement on the vertical plane and diagrammatic thinking about points, space, dimensions and sequences. In the material works, I am able to draw with the rope and construct a

54 sequence of movement for the screening to climb. The industrial nature of the material means that its dimensions are familiar, relating to its domestic architectural applications and therefore a human scale. As I climb with the material it is also articulated with my own dimensions, using my muscles and arm span in the physical sculpting process. This means the work’s dimensionality relates to an abstracted body in familiar proportions to a human climbing body. As the work is installed in and responds to the gallery, wall heights and widths become measured in relation to the human proportions of the industrial material.

In further tests I considered how works such as High left foot, palm-press present an isolated and floating sequence that starts when all four points (hands and feet) are off the ground. I started including the departure from the ground in tests with the aluminium screening and examined how the material could move through the ceiling. This led me to produce Right drop-knee into undercling, few moves through the roof (Figure 25), where the screening occupies a depth that closely resembles the liminal zone of a human body climbing on the wall. The material body moves from the ground, through the wall and into the ceiling as the rope manipulates its form and returns to the ground from the end of the piece in the ceiling.

Figure 25. Elle van Uden, Right drop-knee into undercling, few moves through the roof, 2018, aluminium screening, carabiners, rope, eyelets, bolt plates, washers, screws. Dimensions variable.

This work resolved many of the concerns I felt regarding the previous works and tests, which had problems with respect to volume, a sense of body, internal structure and fixtures. The process of sculpting screening became more physical and involved gestural actions that had connections with actions in climbing. The strong nature of the aluminium screening meant when manipulated it created large organic shaped folds and creases, rather than crumpling, crinkling or draping. Visually and

56 spatially, this behaviour connected the material to the behaviour of a climbing body in an abstracted form. The screening could retain and maintain form when sculpted and allowed me to create various shapes. The material could then climb the gallery wall with the aid of equipment and fixtures. The rope running through the screening becomes the main component manipulating its internal and external structure as well as forming the visual structure of the sculpture. The regions signify to me a general path and imply the weight of the climber; the lines created by the rope relate more to limbs, anchoring and pulling. The combination of these components enables the material body to climb and demonstrate various qualities such as pulling, pushing, compressing and extending. These qualities are present at different localities in the work but relate to each other in a diagrammatic way, relationally and spatially. This is representative of my experiences and processes climbing and route setting, where I look at verticality as a space comprehensible through body movement either physically and/or speculatively.

The next part of developing my project came from my three-month residency in the University of New South Wales studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris from July to September 2018. This allowed me to engage with climbing practice in the forest of Fontainebleau, a significant site in the developing history of climbing, with a tandem history of en plein air and European Impressionist painting. This opportunity enabled me to immerse myself in both climbing and artistic practices, exploring more ways of engaging with the project and ultimately testing ideas with an open studio. This took form through sculptural installation with new materials, exploring drawing practices and the presentation of climbing related objects.

Figure 26. (left) Elle van Uden, studio experimentation, July 2018. Figure 27. (right) Elle van Uden, studio experimentation, January 2019.

As discussed in chapter 2, rope is used as both a form of expression and a form of content in climbing as it is part of its methods and materiality. I use rope with screening in several works as a structural and drawing tool yet return to rope in other studio experiments as another way to consider the interface between a climber and verticality.

In an early experiment, the rope overlays a sketched notation based on a 17- metre outdoor route in Freÿr, Belgium, I had completed a few days before (Figure 26). I unsheathed half of the rope and worked with the mess that it created in contrast with the untampered rope falling on the other side of the pulley. This promotes the sequencing of vertical zones as a complex procedure that is followed by a return to

58 ground. In this case, the unsheathed rope reflected a complexity that is not often made visible.

As my digital drawing works became more abstract and minimal, I similarly removed language and symbols to explore the capacity for the rope to climb and hold itself. I removed the site-specificity of the notation opening up the rope to relate more directly to the gallery structure and immediate environment. In later experiments, I used fisherman’s knots to connect two ropes on either side of a pulley that is secured to the top of the studio wall (Figure 27). Fisherman’s knots are used typically to join two ropes together as they utilise the resistance against each other when pulled to get tighter. The knots suggest tension, support and a secureness. Displayed at a level height on either side of the pulley, the knots allude to a balance and sense of ‘holding’ as they bind and wrap like fingers.

The duality of the rope, in its two parallel lines created by threading through a pulley, is a duality of push and pull, up and down. This relates to a rise and fall with the inevitable return to ground. In the sculpture, it is held at an equilibrium point, neither up nor down, the rope secures itself and it held in stasis by its own weight. My rope works demonstrate my broader interest in how materials can climb and support themselves, this can also be seen in how I install prints, which are left to curl from the wall, pushing themselves off it and further engaging with the liminal zone of the vertical (Figure 28).

Figure 28. Elle van Uden, studio experimentation, January 2019.

A major part of my residency in Paris was to spend time in the forest of Fontainebleau, a region one hour south of Paris renowned for its dual history and cultural significance for painting and bouldering. In my field research I followed a print guidebook and engaged with the landscape through climbing and drawing. This involved navigating the forest and arriving at specific boulders, referring to the guidebook to distinguish the line or intended path and then applying my own knowledge and skills to first visualise the movement and then attempt to climb. Sometimes this process results in completing the boulder, other times it means attempting multiple methods of movement and walking away without completing it. The process is speculative, inquisitive, playful, often social (encountering other climbers), and challenging or frustrating. The simultaneous mental and physical

60 feedback loop created by viewing, thinking, trying and failing is testing and rewarding. The connections between this process and artistic processes have been drawn by Dan Shipsides in his project Rochers a Fontainebleau, (2003-2004) with specific reference to the same site for its history of the two practices.

Originating in the 1830s, en plein air refers to painting that takes place directly from nature and includes the work of painters such as Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Théodore Rousseau and Claude Monet who visited Fontainebleau forest and a number of these artists went on to develop the Barbizon School (Auricchio, 2004, para 2-3). It is clear that the forest of Fontainebleau was a striking landscape for its attraction in both aesthetic and athletic fields. Bouldering is reported by John Gill to have occurred in Fontainebleau as early as 1874 and was traditionally undertaken to train for alpine mountaineering (2008, p. 4). Shipsides has argued that the practice of climbing—in Fontainebleau especially—recalls the practice of en plein air painters, in that it involves a creative relationship with landscape that reflects on connection and personal expression (2003, para 6). I found my own relationship to the landscape between both practices constantly informing each other. I started to draw as a way of expressing the speculative processes I generally engage in before, during or after climbing. In this case, ‘during’ refers to times between attempts when, for example, a climber might have tested one method and having failed that need to reconsider how the body is positioned or moves. This could mean minor adjustments like turning the angle of a knee or mental fortitude weighting or ‘trusting’26 a foothold. The drawing usually takes place in the studio after the event, as I reflect on specific sequences. In the forest I would take photographs of the boulders just before leaving, so that I could work from them later in the studio.

26 Colloquially used in climbing referring to stepping on and using a foothold that induces fear of slipping or falling.

Figure 29. (left) Elle van Uden, charcoal sketch, June 2018. Figure 30. (right) Elle van Uden, digital sketch, October 2018.

The drawings began as graphite or charcoal line drawings on paper, outlining body positions, movement and tension in specific sequences that I had climbed (Figure 29). Whilst being in the forest it was difficult to take the time to process and develop drawings. I found that being in the studio and working from photographs allowed me to reflect and analyse on specific sequences that I had tried. Wanting to draw on top of the photographs to more accurately consider relations between points, I started working digitally and drawing using software, layering on top of photographed boulders (Figure 30). I found that I could work from more specific dimensions of the space, remembering how the holds felt, the micro details of specific sequences and how I was moving. The digital process allowed me to create shaded regions—similar to those I had conceived in my sculptural installations using the screening—that expressed the body’s centre or path through a route, with directional lines indicating other aspects of climbing and add selected symbols related to specific movements. Works such as La voie Michaud, 6c (Figure 31) demonstrate how a combination of photographic reference and drawing can produce depth and suspend the notion of movement between site specificity and abstraction. A speculative path through the vertical suggests movement or the visualisation of movement in an abstract yet

62 described landscape. The digital drawings are diagrammatic, which for me means they present spatial and relational information in the way they are composed, rather than a simple pictorial representation. The points, lines and regions work in relation to each other as an operational depiction of movement. Codification and drawing allow me to translate movement and its visualisation into simplified forms. The resulting drawings do not follow a formulaic explanation of instructed movement, but rather remove the presence of the body and suggest a diagrammatic view of specific movement.

Figure 31. Elle van Uden, La voie Michaud, 6c, 2018, photographic print, 841 x 1189 mm.

The works presented in duel/duet offer abstracted and diagrammatic ways of seeing verticality as an embodied zone in the gallery. The notational drawing works present simultaneously speculative, site specific, abstract and directive images of movement. Sculptural materials and climbing-related equipment comprise installations that operate with and climb vertical spaces in the gallery presenting

64 materials as bodies. My work departs from the work of Coates or Shipsides as I navigate between binaries of speculation and specificity, and abstraction and instruction. When we sense and see material and embodiment in this way it reveals verticality as an operable zone, it imagines movement and activates space that is not usually activated. It broadens our concept of what bodies are and are capable of, resulting in an extension of corporeal sensibility, that challenges notions of bodies as containers that we own and possess. Embodying and moving through the vertical defies expectations that the vertical is a sheer and untraversable plane, dismantling notions of control and authority in our everyday life and in gallery environments. This begins to reconceive the vertical as a space for proximal engagement and promotes alternate ways of seeing and sensing.

65 Conclusion

This paper explores the interdisciplinary fields of research that address the climbing body and art histories related to verticality and the gallery. Beginning with choreographer and performance artist Trisha Brown, the 1970s marks a significant turn in considering dimensionality and the body. As body and image collide in Brown’s Equipment Cycles, the illusory performance establishes verticality as a zone of operation. Matthew Barney and Gideonsson/Londré explore human verticality in the gallery, promoting the vertical as a proximal, liminal zone and draw attention to the contradictory function of the gallery wall as a sanitized space for display and as a physical structure. Coates and Shipsides’ works concerned with the climbing body explore notation, performance and sculptural constructions as representations or abstractions of the activity and relocate it within the gallery. Often involving their own bodies or bodies of participants, Coates and Shipsides’ works are embedded in a human physicality that begins to abstract movement and express the potential for embodiment in the vertical.

My practice further abstracts the climbing body and its movement into diagrammatic forms, exploring its relationship to the vertical in ways that are simultaneously demonstrative and speculative. Specialised embodied knowledge from climbing produces ways of seeing and sensing verticality that apply human dimensionality to typically disembodied zones. Combining this with material investigation in my practice, the exhibition duel/duet interrogates the vertical plane in the gallery and invites viewers to consider verticality as a proximal zone that has the potential to be embodied by human and material bodies.

Verticality is a dynamic and complex zone that is operable and has the potential to be reconceived in traditional gallery environments. Through this ‘re-embodiment’, authoritative boundaries and codes of the gallery are reframed, spaces traditionally for display and not to be touched are traversed and inhabited by material bodies. This

66 perspective generates a way of seeing and sensing verticality that makes its potential visible. Operating with verticality as a zone for embodiment begins to break down the maintained power of institutional gallery spaces and offers alternate ways of understanding and interpreting the space that are diagrammatic and embodied. This creates a space for further discussion and invites critique of the gallery wall that is historical, conceptual and physical.

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71 List of Figures

Figure 1. Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970. 15 Photograph by Carol Goodden. 15 Figure 2. Trisha Brown, Walking on the Wall, 1971. Performance documentation. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy; Trisha Brown Company. Photograph by Carol Goodden. 16 Figure 3. Trisha Brown, Planes, 1968. Performance documentation. 17 Figure 4. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 2, 1988. Documentary Photograph. Courtesy: the artist. Photograph by Michael Rees. 20 Figure 5. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 11, 2005, Documentation Photograph. 21 Figure 6. Gideonsson/Londré, I Am Vertical (installation shot), 2018, Espai 13, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain. Photograph by Elle van Uden. 24 Figure 7. Gideonsson/Londré, I Am Vertical (detail), 2018, Espai 13, 25 Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain. Photograph by Elle van Uden. 25 Figure 8. Elle van Uden, Force G, 6a+ from the series ‘Beta maps’, 2018, digital print, 29 210 x 297 mm. 29 Figure 9. Sample page of ‘Fontainebleau Fun Bloc Photo-Guide’ Jingo Wobbly. 30 Figure 10. Raoul-Auger Feuillet, The Art of Dancing, demonstrated by 32 Characters and Figures, translated by P. Siris. London: for the author, 1706. 32 Figure 11. Erin Coates, The Boulder, 2014, ink and pencil on paper, 43 x 34 cm. 35 Figure 12. Dan Shipsides, Sloth (Don Whillans 1954), 2007, lambda 36 prints with acrylic mounts, 50 x 40cm. 36 Figure 14. Still from Under a frogs arse @ the bottom of a coal mine, 1999, Dan Shipsides, SD video, 12 min duration. 38 Figure 15. Erin Coates, Space Invaders, 2014, functional bouldering installation: polyurethane resin, iron powder, aluminium powder, pigment, steel anchors, ply, pine, PVC, foam, paint. 39 Figure 13. Dan Shipsides, Dans un chaos from Rochers à Fontainebleau, 2003/4, sculptural construction. 41 Figure 16. Elle van Uden, Calico tests (detail), 2017, PVA stiffened calico, dimensions variable. 44 Figure 17. Studio experimentation (from left to right: shade cloth, clear plastic, fiberglass screening). 45 Figure 18. Studio experimentation (insulation film). 46 Figure 19. Process shot of High left foot, palm-press, 2018. 47 Figure 20. Elle van Uden, High left foot, palm-press, 2018, fiberglass screening, eyelets, cord, carabiners, bolt plates, screws, 175 x 200 x 15cm. Photograph by Document Photography. 48 Figure 21. Elle van Uden, High left foot, palm-press (detail), 2018, fiberglass screening, eyelets, cord, carabiners, bolt plates, screws, 175 x 200 x 15cm. Photograph by Document Photography. 49 Figure 22. Still from Step-through, cross, unwind, 2018, video, 2:04 duration. 50

72 Figure 23. Elle van Uden, Step-through, cross, unwind, 2018, video installation. Photograph by Campbell Henderson. 51 Figure 24. Studio experimentation, January 2018. 53 Figure 25. Elle van Uden, Right drop-knee into undercling, few moves through the roof, 56 Figure 26. (left) Elle van Uden, studio experimentation, July 2018. 58 Figure 27. (right) Elle van Uden, studio experimentation, January 2019. 58 Figure 28. Elle van Uden, studio experimentation, January 2019. 60 Figure 29. (left) Elle van Uden, Charcoal sketch. 62 Figure 30. (right) Elle van Uden, Digital sketch. 62 Figure 31. Elle van Uden, La voie Michaud, 6c, 2018, photographic print, 841 x 1189 mm. 64

73 Appendix

As a guide for selected climbing holds and movement, climber and coach Danaan Markey provides illustrations to distinguish and teach techniques (n.d.). These have been collated into a table for the purposes of this paper to offer a visual reference for understanding climbing terminology.

Name Description Image Crimp Type of hold – small edge

Jug Type of hold – large, deep hold for the entire hand

Sloper Type of hold – open hand

Side pull Type of hold – sideways

74 Undercling Type of hold – positive part of the hold faces downwards

Gaston Type of hold – positive part of the hold faces towards you

Pinch Type of hold – squeezing action engaging the thumb

Pocket Type of hold – internal part of the hold is positive, usually only fitting a couple fingers

Wrap or Guppy Type of hold – wrapping hand sideways

Flag Movement – point a leg out to blank part of the wall, for balance and twisting with hips

75 Rockover Movement – moving your weight over a foothold

Drop knee Movement – twisting your knee down and in towards your centre

Cross Movement – reaching across your body centre

Match Type of hold – using a hold with both hands

Layback Movement – leaning away from holds requiring balance

Heel hook Type of hold – using the heel to pull and create tension

76 Toe hook Type of hold – using the toe to pull towards you and create tension

Bicycle Type of hold –pushing with one toe and pulling with the other to create tension

Bridge or stem Movement – Using hands or feet to push on two opposing faces to balance between

Mantle Movement – moving from underneath a hold to above it

Dyno Movement – short for ‘dynamic move’ usually a leap