Pre-Occupied
In 2018 I had the pleasure of viewing New York artist Jeanne Heifetz’s exhibition titled A Brief Encampment at the Lobby Gallery located in the 14th Street Y in New York. Unfortunately I was not accompanied by the artist, as I’m sure I would’ve plied her with endless questions. On the other hand, as a free-floating flâneur unburdened by conversation, I was readily able to ricochet back and forth across the space of the gallery like a pinball—all the better to compare and contrast one work to another, and to savor and maybe even to crack the code.

Certainly an enormous benefit of viewing these works in real space was the opportunity to experience their stunning and highly unusual surfaces. All the drawings were from her Pre-Occupied series, made of graphite applied to handmade paper—a common one being flax paper tinted with iron oxide. This idiosyncratic mix of materials set up intriguing contrasts between the highly textured, light absorbent surfaces of the paper and the arrays of dense graphite forms. These mostly rectangular shapes seemed simultaneously embedded in and floating out from the wine-dark substrates. Although not technically metallic, the light refracting qualities of the graphite were similarly protean in their effects, as their tones shifted dramatically depending on one’s angle of view relative to the light sources. Step over a couple of feet, and any given rectangle might shift from sullen to brilliant as if suddenly becoming the very light source itself.

Viewing these pieces reminded me of similar visual poetics I have experienced with numerous Byzantine and Western Medieval religious paintings. In their original settings, often unevenly lit, fragments of silver or gold leaf appear otherworldly (as intended) and seem to hover above and beyond the painted surfaces.

As with all my blog postings for the Expanded Diagram project, this is an extended argument for the manifestation of diagrammatic thinking in particular artists’ practices. As we shall see, mapping is a significant factor in Heifetz’s thinking about this body of work, and certainly mapping holds a prominent place in the ongoing history of both conventional and “expanded” diagrammatic practices. But having addressed mapping in previous writings and posts, I feel less compelled to rehearse a similar analytic approach with her work. Ultimately the power of these pieces derives less from their putative influences to mapping [and I would add, architectural plans] and more from their aesthetic and emotional impact, which happens to be facilitated by a highly nuanced mapping sensibility. Or to put it another way, these drawings display Heifetz’s unique gift at embedding feeling into the armature of spatial information.

In Heifetz’s artist statement she unambiguously signals this work’s connection to mapping: “Each drawing in this series is based on the map of a different Jewish cemetery…” Upon closer viewing one sees these geometric forms are distributed in space in a very purposeful manner, which is to say with little inclination to pure randomness. But what caught my eye, seeing the exhibition were the varied and innovative ways she arranged the graphite forms. Indeed, there were an exceptionally wide range of compositions, but I’ll limit myself here to just one set of distinctions that applied to many of the works. With some of these drawings, the gleaming rectangles seemed to span the space of the paper (see Pre-Occupied 135 ), whereas in others, (see Pre-Occupied 76) the distribution of the forms congealed into more compact and discrete design-like configurations—not so much spanning as being surrounded by the space of the paper.

Beyond the inventive compositions, I keep returning to the last paragraph of Heifetz’s statement where she expands on her “preoccupations” with these maps: “I can’t claim that drawing the maps allays my panic. Death remains entirely unknowable terrain: the map can never be the territory. And yet, stripped of identifying text, the cemeteries’ abstract forms are mysteriously compelling, grounding me in the universal human drive to create beauty, order, and ritual in the face of our own mortality.”

I am fairly certain that Heifetz did not and would not entertain what I’m about to suggest, but in the context of her statement and the feeling I got from the artworks themselves, I immediately thought of apotropaic objects and designs. These have been deployed throughout history in numerous cultures to ward off harmful forces or influences. Often they are placed inside or at the entrances to homes. One common type of apotropaic design consists of some kind of maze-like pattern meant to lure, confuse, and/or trap the threatening force or spirit. Certainly Heifetz’s drawings do not function in this way and there is never a suggestion of any “outside” forces in need of warding off. But I wonder if these drawings, in some measure, function for the artist to ward off or at least sooth that most ubiquitous of modern devils—anxiety. As I suspect that death is the mother of all anxieties, I can only hope that this prolific body of drawings helped her to mollify it—if only during the process of their making.

There is No Road
Heifetz is one of those artists who, rather than pursuing a continuous and more or less singular line of exploration over many years, mines a distinctive series for a while and then moves on to another. I find it illuminating, in the context of this blog, to compare at least one more of these to the Pre-Occupied pieces, which leads me to her There is No Road drawings. Although the two groups are quite different, I feel they both manifest diagrammatic thinking, along with other factors, that contribute to their overall appeal.

I sense in this work a similar dynamic that I discussed in a recent post on the artwork of Daniel Hill. In both case, their drawings register and thematize the very process of their making, thus pointing beyond their apparent status as static/spatial representations. Stated another way, these drawings are not simply “depictions” of these notional structures but also a visual record of the temporal process of their enactment.

I cannot emphasize enough that I’m not making an argument for the presence of diagrams in Heifetz’s artworks (or for any artist’s work I feature in this project), but rather for the manifestation of diagrammatic thinking. Thus, I need to summon the artists’ stated intentions, which in Heifetz’s case, are expressed so eloquently in her artist statements. Intentions are especially important here, as these drawings do not initially present as ready candidates for diagrammatic-influenced artworks. Just to look at them, one (at least speaking for myself) would immediately take note of the implicit “algorithm” governing the repetitions of a variously scaled, single motif. Among other possible reactions, you would likely admire the sheer range and inventiveness of their various compositions. And so on. But without being privy to the thinking that fueled them in the first place, you would miss out on the most critical feature of their existence—that each of these drawings are records of an enactment (my word, not the artist’s) of the often agonizing and always uncertain process of decision-making. Again, from her artist statement: “Each drawing grows by slow accretion as I allow myself (or force myself) to make hundreds of tiny sequential decisions.”

I could go on for many more paragraphs, but I want simply to point out what I see as an instructive difference in her approach to these two bodies of work. Whereas Pre-Occupied is modeled on the spatial logic of the map, this second group is structured according to the more temporal logic of the itinerary. Adhering exclusively to the simultaneity of the spatial, the map affords the possibility of endless backtracking; whereas the itinerary, like time itself, is uncompromisingly “unidirectional” (or so it seems for your average terrestrial like myself). This consequential shift underpinned for Heifetz a much different way of working, and for the keenly observant viewer, a much different experience of the work.

Partially inspired by the diagrammatics of biological growth structures, each drawing displays what Heifetz describes as a sequential “accretion of irreversible decisions.” Her process here is full-on improvisational—no preparatory sketches; no pre-structured, pre-imagined compositions, but rather a minute-by-minute experience of the drawings’ unfolding. And certainly this is not so different from the ongoing experience of living a life. Giving Heifetz the last word as she reflects about this series, “There is no road: we make the road by walking, and learn by going where to go.”

For a more extensive view of Heifetz’s work, go to: https://www.jeanneheifetz.com/