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Threadwork

Threadwork
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    • Threadwork
    • Fércmu
  • 1979
  • frottage, graphite on carbon paper
  • 61 × 63 cm
Miklós Erdély always investigated the questions of art within a broader political and epistemological framework. Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies, he dealt with the practice of drawing as the most classic and typical case of description and representation. Erdély wrote two significant pseudo-scientific texts on the contradictions of representation: “Studies in the Theory of Identification” and “Thesis on the Theory of Repetition.” In 1977, he explored indigo paper as a medium for the demonstration of his theses, which involved combining the “original” and the “copy” of a thing in the same “space” on the same side of a single sheet of paper. In the “Thread Works” of 1979–1980, he continued the development of his earlier indigo drawings and the complex “Copied Apart Drawings” (1978) by using the painterly technique of frottage. Moreover, in this case, the subject of the drawing, or the depicted matter, was only an irregular line, a thread that quite strongly opposed both the world of science and the world of visual arts. S.H.