Mathew GREENTREE
Points decision: Greentree vs Gritscher
Collaborative works on paper
15 March - 8 April 2006
Drawing-Game
The rules, mathematics and characters of a chess board make the game a source of ideas and exploitation. It is a metaphor for war with imagined violence. A game where the queen once only moved one square at a time diagonally, but now moves in all directions. In Jakarta chess is played on dusty and polluted footpaths besides herbal medicine stalls; security guards play it throughout the night beneath dim lights. The ability to play chess has been the site for 'technology' to be pitted against a representative of humankind.
The world of Greentree and Gritscher's drawing-game is similar to the one inhabited with waist-coat wearing rabbits, talking playing cards and a young girl who thinks that books without 'pictures or conversations' are useless. Perhaps, if instead of landing with a thud on a pile of branches and leaves, Alice did fall through to the 'antipathies' (the place where 'people walk with their heads downwards') and instead of continuing to chase the rabbit and to discover what a Caucus-race was, she was confronted by the curious meeting of a scientist and a soldier.
'The two stood before each other. Neither spoke. Both were at one end of a pavement, coloured as if it were a chessboard. As they stood in silence a game of chess was played out. Bears, canons, stamps, teacups and furniture moved about dominating, threatening and swallowing their opponents. It was a fantasy; a kind of uncontrollable reality. It was the alternative to their logic of order and action.'
With each move a new element might be brought into play. Unlike 'scissors paper stone', a player could introduce a new object capable of defeating the established objects. In the drawing-game, the player responding to a move knows what he must overcome. 'If I play [draw] a canon aimed towards Andy's pieces, chances are that when I get the board back the canon will be pointing back at my own men. The challenge was how to play a more abstract move, whether it be at a molecular level, or some drawing of flora or fauna. The moves had to become more neutral and more ambiguous, otherwise the player would be actively losing. At least in a drawing sense.'
Andy Gritscher is an artist who works as an acupuncturist at a drug rehabilitation centre and a crisis centre. Working in the social services provides a counter to the introspection of his work as an artist. The work makes it possible for him to meet people from many walks of life and to hear of what led them to the situation they are in. These two types of work form a 'dynamic opposite'.
'If I only worked as an artist I would probably go mad. Too much introspection might not be a good thing. And that might be one of the positive aspects of making art over writing. While painting or drawing, one still retains the ability to interact with those around oneself. Writing is private. Art can be made with others.'
The game involved some misunderstandings and disappointments between the two players (artists). Yet there were benefits too. Gritscher says, 'it normally takes me one year to finish a painting. With these drawings, we made the rule, that the turn around time would only be one week. This forced me to think quickly. To respond while thinking on my feet. Like in a game of chess, the player has the opportunity to think (and play) both at the board and away from it.'
Through collaboration we become different people. The Greentree of 'Points Decision' is not the same as the Greentree of 'Stadium United'. Working with another means attempting to know that other. Communication is the raison d'être of art. Yet, in this case, this process begins before the work reaches the viewer, at a possible cost of status and control. In collaboration one's ideas are subject to the will, whim and intuition of another. Collaboration, perhaps, teaches modesty and detachment from what one creates. That is, what one claims visually, aesthetically.
Andy Fuller
2 March 2006
Stadium United exhibition 2005
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