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拍品专文
How to grow a dead town?
How to grow a dead town? The quick answer would be: by secretly, cunningly operating its quarry, its pit of language, the arena —the womb and tomb— of its imagery.
Paul Noble's Quarry is at the edge of his epic drawing project of "Nobson Newtown" and yet at the very core of its chthonic existence.
Founded in 1996 Nobson is an imaginary new town built on an old town, on and of the artist's experiences, memories, premonitions and predictions, his thoughts, hopes and fears; it extends in a series of very large drawings and the overwhelming period of almost twenty years. Based on a particular, peculiar font, devised by the artist to help him construct images out of text and language, Nobson has spread (by graphite pencil and paper) to include a vertiginous list of things to see and a plethora of mythographic inventions or allusions to consider: the artist's own palace -of -a house, a shopping mall, playgrounds, industries, ruins, wastelands, villas, archaeological sites and slums, public monuments, graffited walls and statues of Hermes, labyrinths and uncanny creatures-as-inhabitants. The Quarry is the representation of the town's founding principle and developing process.
According to the legend, the town has actually grown out of the igneous rock bed, the plutonic hyle shooting out of the cracks in the ground or pulled up from the bowels of the earth; it has thrived because of the labor invested in it, the skill of the hewers who slaved over the stone and the cult protecting its treasures exactly as in the case of ancient Greek quarries, the majestic temples guarding access to them and the city-states which fed their structure and consolidated their power through them.
"A true living city because primitive and archaic", Nobson (like Michel Serres's Paris) "is rooted in crowds of the multiple". Its stone-flesh came from those quarry holes, its people slaved, worshipped and feared the lumpy, brainy rock-substance, before devouring it into buildings, structures, economy, assets, power, language, metaphysics, history.
So, the Quarry is the root and the nexus of the radically political character of the Nobson project. The artist has gone deep into its tunnels in order to unearth the dubious text-image, time-place, individual-collective relationship and expose it, test it with a grand act of polis making.
Nobrock, the prima materia of Nobson, the lava-born, multi-morphed, primal matter, is currently displayed in the now-exhausted original quarry pit in the form of a canonized alphabet.
This organic letter body, monumental albeit elusive, elaborately hewn yet hardly legible, majestic but incomplete (with an Alpha but not an Omega), has formed the non-sense architecture of Nobson, its quirky extravaganza and carnivalesque ambivalence. It spells the forms and constitutes this town's very etymology. Nobson is possessed by it.
The quarry "remains a monument to the industry of the local townspeople", the source and testimony of "the shared delight that the bulk of Nobson's residents have for all things natural and from the earth": so writes Paul Noble in his dubious 1998 love note titled "guide to Nobson". And keeps on sneaking into both the map and the territory. The quarry is thus kept operative, becomes a site of interface, a distant outpost, inhabited by their delight and his curiosity.
Paul Noble's drawings of the Quarry (A-F and G-M) were made in 1997, and are precious as part of Nobson's birth certificate (1996). They loom large, and in their uncanny use of cavalier oblique projection they map the innards of the pit with a serpentine eye-view: like a book page stretched into multiverse through its illumination or a byzantine floor mosaic where there is no direction or obvious mastery. One is lured deep into them while fully embracing the paradox of their lack of depth and being confronted by the mean Lovecraftian rock wall in the back.
A strange, caged cave mouth, a tunnel or a stoa hides at the end of the M rock block, tottering on the edge of the drawing paper Quarry (G-M), nursing potential.
Time fulfilled by human intervention, Paul-the reluctant conjuror, a mistake perhaps or better an ananke (necessity of the material world) will tell, will show if it leads somewhere, anywhere...
Nobson is a seriocomic suburbia, a field that keeps opposites linked together in a strange harmony and an even stranger, stronger drawing grasp.
Nadja Argyropoulou
July 2015
How to grow a dead town? The quick answer would be: by secretly, cunningly operating its quarry, its pit of language, the arena —the womb and tomb— of its imagery.
Paul Noble's Quarry is at the edge of his epic drawing project of "Nobson Newtown" and yet at the very core of its chthonic existence.
Founded in 1996 Nobson is an imaginary new town built on an old town, on and of the artist's experiences, memories, premonitions and predictions, his thoughts, hopes and fears; it extends in a series of very large drawings and the overwhelming period of almost twenty years. Based on a particular, peculiar font, devised by the artist to help him construct images out of text and language, Nobson has spread (by graphite pencil and paper) to include a vertiginous list of things to see and a plethora of mythographic inventions or allusions to consider: the artist's own palace -of -a house, a shopping mall, playgrounds, industries, ruins, wastelands, villas, archaeological sites and slums, public monuments, graffited walls and statues of Hermes, labyrinths and uncanny creatures-as-inhabitants. The Quarry is the representation of the town's founding principle and developing process.
According to the legend, the town has actually grown out of the igneous rock bed, the plutonic hyle shooting out of the cracks in the ground or pulled up from the bowels of the earth; it has thrived because of the labor invested in it, the skill of the hewers who slaved over the stone and the cult protecting its treasures exactly as in the case of ancient Greek quarries, the majestic temples guarding access to them and the city-states which fed their structure and consolidated their power through them.
"A true living city because primitive and archaic", Nobson (like Michel Serres's Paris) "is rooted in crowds of the multiple". Its stone-flesh came from those quarry holes, its people slaved, worshipped and feared the lumpy, brainy rock-substance, before devouring it into buildings, structures, economy, assets, power, language, metaphysics, history.
So, the Quarry is the root and the nexus of the radically political character of the Nobson project. The artist has gone deep into its tunnels in order to unearth the dubious text-image, time-place, individual-collective relationship and expose it, test it with a grand act of polis making.
Nobrock, the prima materia of Nobson, the lava-born, multi-morphed, primal matter, is currently displayed in the now-exhausted original quarry pit in the form of a canonized alphabet.
This organic letter body, monumental albeit elusive, elaborately hewn yet hardly legible, majestic but incomplete (with an Alpha but not an Omega), has formed the non-sense architecture of Nobson, its quirky extravaganza and carnivalesque ambivalence. It spells the forms and constitutes this town's very etymology. Nobson is possessed by it.
The quarry "remains a monument to the industry of the local townspeople", the source and testimony of "the shared delight that the bulk of Nobson's residents have for all things natural and from the earth": so writes Paul Noble in his dubious 1998 love note titled "guide to Nobson". And keeps on sneaking into both the map and the territory. The quarry is thus kept operative, becomes a site of interface, a distant outpost, inhabited by their delight and his curiosity.
Paul Noble's drawings of the Quarry (A-F and G-M) were made in 1997, and are precious as part of Nobson's birth certificate (1996). They loom large, and in their uncanny use of cavalier oblique projection they map the innards of the pit with a serpentine eye-view: like a book page stretched into multiverse through its illumination or a byzantine floor mosaic where there is no direction or obvious mastery. One is lured deep into them while fully embracing the paradox of their lack of depth and being confronted by the mean Lovecraftian rock wall in the back.
A strange, caged cave mouth, a tunnel or a stoa hides at the end of the M rock block, tottering on the edge of the drawing paper Quarry (G-M), nursing potential.
Time fulfilled by human intervention, Paul-the reluctant conjuror, a mistake perhaps or better an ananke (necessity of the material world) will tell, will show if it leads somewhere, anywhere...
Nobson is a seriocomic suburbia, a field that keeps opposites linked together in a strange harmony and an even stranger, stronger drawing grasp.
Nadja Argyropoulou
July 2015