The Brooklyn Rail

I AM A PART OF ALL THAT I HAVE MET
These words taken from Ulysses greet the visitor upon entering.

At galleria Artespaziotempo in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo in Cannaregio tucked away from the overwhelming tourist crowds in Venice, American artist Morgan O’Hara is showing a selection of her “Live Transmission” drawings intermingled with hand-printed letterpress works on paper.

Her Live Transmission drawing method, begun in 1982, allows O’Hara to find, hidden in the matrix of space-time, the four-dimensional forms of the body and hand movements of artisans, musicians, orators, day laborers, group actions and rituals, children at play as well as in the natural movements of inanimate objects. Using pencil, or more accurately: pencils in both hands, O’Hara concentrates complete attention on her subjects.

In some of her drawings easily recognizable forms are almost readable as an image; others generate unexpected forms through the process of her observational drawing method. For example, Live Transmission: movement of the hands of the shipwright, Franco Vianello Crea and others while moving and then washing on a barena, and much later Giulio working on a gondola. Squero Crea a Giudecca, Venezia 9 July 2022 records the movements of a crew working with a master boatbuilder. The shape of the prow and above it in plan view, the main body of the boat, derive from the record of their washing motions, which allows for immediate orientation. Around these forms the movements of the artisans around the vast workshop where the gondolas are made create a kind of womb for their vessel.

Next to it in Live Transmission: movement of people passing through the Campo dei Miracoli and children playing after school... a cluster of more or less straight and tangled lines looks like it could be a rendering for an Alan Saret sculpture from the 1970’s but is, in fact, a record of the movements of people through the Campo dei Miracoli across the canal from O’Hara’s studio in Venice. Through the density of the lines one can make out where people enter and exit from either the church or the adjoining street. A less dense web of lines moving diagonally through the drawing notes people going to and from the bridge through the centre of the campo that leads over to O’Hara’s studio. It’s exciting to be able to recreate the space in your mind as you see how the lines record the passage of bodies in time and space, but it’s also not necessary to have this kind of imagination in order to appreciate the deft hand of O’Hara. Her focused interest in revealing the invisible forms that movement yields when recorded with her Live Transmissions is mystery enough.

The forms in these two drawings provide a poignant contrast to the drawing recording a team of film technicians’ repetitive movements during the filming of a scene, which cycle between three positions without much variation. The resulting form resembles a plant or a tree with the stems made from the dark overlay of pencil lines as the technicians move along the same path again and again.

The rocking of a gondola in the water outside O’Hara’s studio doors with its up and down motion generates similar repeating lines drawn again and again; it ends up looking like a horse’s tail or a ponytail on a cartoon girl with a healthy mane!

O’Hara’s work in Venice really started during the pandemic when, trying to cope with the discomfort of isolation, she knocked on the workshop door of a master wood carver near her home and asked him if she could draw while he worked. This brave acknowledgement of human need opened a whole world for O’Hara. Her practiced concentration no doubt helped the wood carver to concentrate as well; so, it followed that one artisan introduced her to another until she had built a whole community around her practice.

In her exhibition O’Hara’s simple letterpress aphorisms handprinted in block letters and set in-between the “Live Transmission” drawings with their panoply of lines gives us to understand that both are languages. The organization of the letters or words following a singular trajectory, with one letter, one word after another, points to their legibility as being of a different order than her transmission drawings of 4 dimensional forms. Together they betray O’Hara’s vibrant capacity to communicate.

Much has been written of O’Hara’s process and method of drawing, so visiting the workshop of Paolo Brandolisio, master woodcarver, with O’Hara to witness her Live Transmission process live allowed me to gain deeper insights into O’Hara’s work. I was curious why I felt her drawings of the hand movements of Venetian artisans seem to have such an important resonance for us today.

Brandolisio’s workshop is filled with wood, oars, and gondola parts that appear unfinished. Passed down from maestro to student over generations, there is a continuity here fashioned for the survival of beauty, thought and purpose over centuries that brings a deep comfort into, if not a striking contrast to, our present day world. After our brief introductions Morgan set up and they began to concentrate. I observed how this artisan worked with a tool consisting of a curved blade with round knobs on either end that was held in both hands. A tool that has been in use for more than thirteen hundred years, it is used to carve the sinuous form fastened to the deck at the back of the gondola that fixes a pivot for the oar’s winding motions. O’Hara also worked with both hands, holding pencils that one could argue have an even older origin. Not really looking at her paper, she recorded the movement of his body and hands with her lines as he shaped his gondola oar lock—forcola—into a form crafted for the specific size and manner of rowing of his gondolier client.

As I am watching them, a rhythm condenses from their silence; slowly a form starts to emerge from O’Hara’s continuous lines, a dynamic form of motion invisible but for the record she is making of what transpires in front of her as he carves. The forcola has a shape in it like the opening between the forefinger and the thumb with all the nuance and ergonomic complexity captured in the drawing emerging out of their respective hands. The opposable thumb, as we all must know, laid the foundation for the evolution of human cognition and language as tool use evolved, but it was the new movements of the hand, some argue, that led the way for the expansion of the brain’s neural networks.

When we reflect on the conditions that over time have allowed for the understanding of gestures as resulting in a kind of non-verbal language, the interaction I witnessed could be seen as a cross disciplinary dialog. Or in other words written by critic Chus Martínez in her recent book, The Complex Answer, “…art is located today in a space uniquely productive for the interrelation of knowledges that would otherwise never intersect.”

O’Hara’s project highlights, among other things, the hierarchy embedded in the western tradition between artisan and artist; a hierarchy that could now be rescinded in view of the considerable knowledge that is held in the hands of anyone today who still knows how to make anything significant with their hands. Whether stemming from a long-standing tradition or of spontaneous invention, the increasing scarcity of anything actually made by hands is slowly transforming what was a hierarchy into a level playing field. O’Hara’s work opens a rich territory to consider where we are and where our hands are taking us.