Angus Galloway and Paul Rodecker, Journal Entries
Rebecca Lossin
Angus Galloway and Paul Rodecker have been working on a collaborative drawing project via mail since they moved away from each other after school. The result is a selection from two books worth of drawings displayed at the Clegg Fine Art Gallery in Blainsville Georgia.
Angus and I met for coffee and then picked Paul up via speakerphone to speak about the process of collaboration and what it means to keep a journal.
Rebecca Lossin: A journal is a document of process and can never really be a final product.
Angus Galloway: Carrying a journal with you all the time connects it to your life in a way that is different from art produced in a studio. It isn’t like we’re approaching this in a studio context like, here I am entering the studio to make art. It’s on you so it just becomes a record of your days, of things you’re hearing. What you’re listening to affects your mark-making, what you are feeling, the textures. I think what’s really interesting is that he’ll send me his journal and what I see is really just this document of all the experiences he’s had.
RL: I know that you have worked with sound before. Is drawing a preferred medium?
AG: I think that we all start with drawing. It’s how we all get introduced to art. If I think of this as a wheel, I think of painting and sculpture and sound–which I love to do–as offshoots or cogs but I think the center is drawing. It supports and keeps all of those things in balance. It is something that I come back to in order to ground myself. Even when I am working with sound, it is still visual–you can see the sound waves and you kind of mold them and construct them like you would a drawing.
RL: That idea of always coming back to and then departing from drawing is very journalistic. You can look at drawing like note-taking in that way, this constant genesis of ideas that eventually return in your notes in different forms in order to be sent off again.
AG: I think it’s a primary source. No other medium reveals as much evidence of me. When I put marks on paper I see myself existing in a way that I don’t in other mediums. It isn’t the same.
RL: I want to ask you about your relationship to each other, I know you went to school together but how did you meet?
AG: We were originally sort of on two sides of a fence–in different artistic circles but always looking and admiring and then we started talking to each other and became interested in each other’s work. I think that we have both grown as artists because we have had to exist within each other’s marks. It’s challenging, it’s frustrating but it is never a hindrance.
RL: Does it make you nervous to mail this back and forth? I know I have never lost anything through the post office but I worry about it all the time.
Paul Rodecker: It’s nerve-racking and that is one of the things that we had a huge debate about. Should we mail unfinished pieces or the whole book? It’s certainly a risk but that is also what it is all about. It was a correspondence between two people at a great distance from one another. We eventually decided that we just have to take that risk and there is a lot of risk going on in these drawings as well.
RL: It would obviously be impossible to accomplish something like this via email. What do think the implications of using this arguably outdated form of communication are? They aren’t letters in the strictest sense but it is still a form of communication that I think people no longer use.
PR: A lot of things that happen on a computer are instant and streamlined, and a lot is lost. When someone writes on a computer, all we see is a finished product, we don’t see the process. But when we write letters, we get to see the revisions, traces of the writer’s thoughts at the moment, the work that wasn’t chosen. That has always been the most interesting thing. And I think because it is kind of outdated, it is interesting in that it is something we don’t see anymore but that still speaks a language that is both recognizable and prevalent today.
AG: There are also limitations within the notebooks, within the grids and these sheets of paper. Yet it is more organic in terms of the directions you can take.
PR: That is a very good point. I need limitations, I thrive under limitations. I am almost limited by limitlessness so this format and its limited correctability, its limited editability, helps me because it gives me that barrier, that boundary. It is these boundaries that shape us and develop us and I think the limitations placed on the project by the fact that it is a journal, have in fact allowed us to transcend that it is a journal. But it had to be a journal first to be what it is now and I find that very inspiring.
RL: Can you tell which marks are yours? When you haven’t seen a drawing for months does it become difficult to distinguish between each other’s marks?
AG: We were talking about that last night actually. At first it was easier to tell. When there wasn’t as much on the pages, when it was a more open playing field, it was easier to see the shirt I had left in the living room and the coffee that he had spilled in the kitchen. But now, as I look at these drawings as they build up through time and experience, what is really exciting is it is really difficult to tell them apart. It is those square inches of the drawings that become, for me, the most interesting parts. This total fusion of our consciousness, and if the project is about communication and correspondence, it’s those areas that really speak to that connection.
PR: I don’t think it’s just because it builds up so much that you can’t differentiate between the marks. This is also a process that I am taking advantage of and learning from. I am learning about drawing from Angus. I am learning about my drawings by seeing what someone else does with my marks. And when I get them back and think, "I never would have seen that or done that, and then that makes me react to what I was doing in a way that I never would have had to. I am learning more about these marks from someone else’s interpretation of them and so eventually my marks change. Sometimes I look at his marks, which are clearly his, that look like something I would have done and I feel the same about some of the one’s that I am making.
