Mechanical drawing machines themselves are not new, however my interest in making this body of work was not in the machine as the artwork, which it seems is usually the case with mechanical drawing machines but rather the validity of such drawings as legitimate works of art. If they are, why; if not, why not? My particular interest is focused not on the machine per se, but in the curatorial intervention of the maker and the audience.

Further, if the machine itself is considered the artwork, then ipso facto, are the drawings it produces also artworks, is their status dependent on the machine? Can an artwork make an artwork?

Is the question itself is a vexed one because the question requires context? Art has evolved or transmuted many times over, and a visit to an art museum might at first appear to confirm that. So, should the question “Yes, but is it art?” only be considered if it is contained within the context of the period, style, or intent in which it was created?

I suggest it is possible, and certainly cannot be discounted, that the life cycle of art as a social system could come to an end. Art would continue to exist historically, but art as we know it might cease to be culturally relevant. Could what has been taken for granted as a never-ending procession of change, come to an end? Yes.

The genesis of the Empty Object drawing machine came from sitting with a two-year-old child and “helping” her draw. This was, it seemed for the child, an act of pure pleasure, unfettered by rules, obligation, and expectation. She was happily scribbling with big bold marks on the paper. As I thought about what we were doing I realised that as well as scribbling and simply celebrating the pleasure of making marks, I was also making drawings of people, dogs and cats, and so on. In other words, I was making drawings that have meaning, that were crude representations of concrete reality. The child’s scribblings were, to me, more interesting. They appeared to be without meaning, although that is, of course, an assumption on my part as the child had no language to tell me otherwise.

This experience drew me to thinking that if I were to find a way to make drawings that have form but are completely empty of content or meaning then I would have the opposite of what I was otherwise working on: the Neo Post-Object Art Manifesto.

To do so, I devised a simple machine for making “drawings” that attempts to ‘empty out’ the intellectual content or the intent of the artwork. This is diametrically opposite to the Neo Post-Object Art Manifesto which instead attempts to reduce a work of art to its intellectual content. The idea then was to construct a simple machine to make marks within a set of controlled parameters thereby producing a drawing without the necessary intervention of an artist. Can an artwork be made without an artist?

Is it possible to make a machine or to contrive any other system such as a computer program to make drawings totally at random? No, because while the machine might prevent us from being in complete control of the stylus, it is working within a set of parameters that out of practical necessity it would always be restricted to.

For example, the machine I constructed is motorised and set to operate smoothly. If the voltage is increased, the machine becomes violent and erratic. The stylus jumps and skips over the paper producing a drawing that is sometimes more visually interesting. This then raises questions about what is the ‘correct’ operational voltage. And are the drawings complete after five minutes or 15 minutes? Should I choose a soft compressed charcoal, making the drawing darker and as a result moodier? And which way is up?

Equally, are all of the works generated by the machine used or are only the ‘best’ ones chosen? If so, how does one assess what’s best in this context? In the 1950s the French artist Yves Klein used sea sponges in his work:

“Klein applied this pigment to sponges, which he attached to canvases as relief elements or positioned on wire stands to create biomorphic or anthropomorphic sculptures. First exhibited in Paris in 1959, the sponge sculptures — all essentially alike, yet ultimately all different — formed a forest of discrete objects surrounding the gallery visitors” (Spector 2018).

It would seem Klein, as an experienced artist, made choices based on a high level of visually literacy. In the same way, curatorial interference in the machine drawings would potentially give them merit or weight as art objects, thus removing their status as an ‘empty object’ and rendering the central question moot. But there has, by necessity, been some degree of curatorial meddling, however as discussed; while I could not escape some level of curatorial decision making, it was judiciously applied so as to honour the spirit and title of the project.

The point of the project was a personal examination of how I think about works of art and use that in my reflective practice in thinking about Neo Post-Object Art. This project has also made me consider how I should interact when drawing with the child. Is my drawing with the child in effect useful encouragement or curatorial interference?

Stephen Richardson 2021