Page 5 - The 70s - ABC of the material

Maria van Elk
The Seventies

The seventies started for Maria van Elk with a big turn in her work; exuberant
figuration in textile made room for sobriety, introspection and abstraction.
Although in certain works she let the properties of textile play along, as in Two
straight lines of which one is always crooked (1974), whereby the black canvas
hangs in such a way that one white line is straight and the other is curved, she
focussed in this time mainly on the art of drawing. She tested the hardness
of pencil, drew away a pencil line with white chalk or had the drawing be
determined by wrinkling or folding the paper.

In 1975 – 1976 she made a series Five performing arts in those years. So the
Minutes Drawing, some were made in Five Minutes Drawing remind for instance
daylight, others late at night with lamp of a Fluxus – performance as Zen for
light. Ink, pencil, chalk and charcoal Head, in which Nam June Paik dipped
were the materials with which Maria van his head in an inkwell and drew a long
Elk drew always for five minutes. No line with this on a sheet of paper. With
image, no colour, just an act during a this act Paik executed an instruction
predetermined time. The drawing shows from La Monte Young Composition # 10
the imprint of the material on a sheet 1960 to Bob Morris; “draw a straight line
of paper. A small narrow track of thin and follow it” .
strokes was the result of five minutes
drawing with East Indian ink, while with Maria van Elk wanted to put overboard
charcoal in five minutes almost the all stories and references to a world
whole sheet was covered with horizontal outside the work of art. She aspired to
strokes. For her Five Minutes Drawing make work as objectively as possible.
she set the alarm clock beforehand. She said herself: “(...) making art is
She drew for five minutes and noted the according to me nothing more or less
begin- and end time of the work. “As than the objectifying, literally to make
idea, as concept I thought it exciting that an object of or also to put observations
every material has its own time, because at a distance”. She wanted images
that is what it actually comes down to”. without connotation or double bottom.
Yet it was not for nothing that she made
During this time Maria van Elk five minute drawings. There were short
investigated the functioning of materials moments that she, sometimes during the
somewhat comparable to other day, sometimes late at night, could free
fundamental artist like Robert Ryman herself to dedicate to her work. Whereas
and Rob van Koningsbruggen. But she keeping a family with children running
also added a performative element and teaching at an art academy also
to it. For her it was about performing demanded a lot of time.
of a certain simple act during a Five minutes for the experiment, for the
predetermined time. Perhaps this act, research.
the movement of the hand over the
paper, was even more important than In the letters Maria van Elk wrote around
the ultimate result. Body, movement 1980 to Coosje van Bruggen, with whom
and time were important elements in the at that time she got ready an exposition

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