Drawing 4: Bruce Chatwin What am I doing Here, 2010

I phoned David Tremlett to ask for his book and without hesitation he said: “Bruce Chatwin’s What am I doing here?” Tremlett has worked extensively with scores; and maybe, in a way, all his wall-work can be read as notations or scores of a kind. He has made a series of four specifically text-based works. Each of these take a sentence from a book by an author with whom he feels an affinity. In addition to Chatwin are Elmore Leonard (The Complete Western Stories), John Haldane (Faithful Reason) and Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear). By chance Tremlett and Sol LeWitt were reading Elmore Leonard at the same time. The Leonard and Chatwin drawings have two forms: both exist as wall drawings and works on paper. The wall drawings were shown in Tremlett’s exhibition, Drawing Rooms at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg in 2010. Chatwin’s sentence, like the others in the series, becomes a score when the jumble of letters creates a puzzle like a cryptic crossword. These were not constructed to be decoded or even to make sense in a literal way, but obliquely to suggest thoughts and associations. It is fitting to have a third location for the drawing in the Brooklyn Rail.