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ABSTRACT LINES222 Writing Time
SINCE THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, abstract artists and composers unique, abstract, music manuscript requiring instrumentalists
have striven to break down old pictorial and musical to improvise, interpret, and participate in the composition.
structures to explore new and unfettered modes of expression. The scores are also exhibited in galleries as visual art.
Both abstract drawing and composition involve the perfect
sequencing of sounds and marks against space and silence. Hugo, below, said, "There is nothing like dream to create
the future." An innovator who never fails to surprise, here he
Bussotti, opposite, broke new ground in the 1950s with anticipates abstract expressionism by 100 years. His drawing
graphic scores now considered among the most extreme, writes the time of its own physical process by expressing the
beautiful, and inventive of his time. A graphic score is a extreme concentration of the moment in which it was made.
VICTOR H U G O
French novelist w h o made many drawings in
m i x e d m e d i a ( s e e also p.28). H u g o ' s a b s t r a c t
drawing here can b e described in terms o f
Gestalt, a G e r m a n p h i l o s o p h i c a l i d e a a b o u t
the p o w e r o f m o m e n t , often expressed in
v i s u a l t e r m s . Gestalt is t h e i n s t a n t r e c o g n i t i o n
of an unnameable thing, a configuration, o ra
pattern o f elements so unified asa whole
they cannot b e explained asa sum o f parts.
Ink impressions When drawing nightscapes Hugo often laid
paper disks in place of the moon, brushed night skies over
them with ink then lifted the disks to reveal white moons.
Here he appears t o have saturated the cut-out moon disks
with gritty pigment, pressed them face down, and lifted them
away to leave impressions of watery planets and seas.
Texture Compare this drawing to Hugo's octopus on p.28.
Similarity in gritty texture suggests that here, too, he mixed
graphite into ink, and let the drying meniscus deposit
granules in linear drifts such as we would see in the satellite
photographic mapping of rivers. Marks across the center
appear to be made with his fingers.
Two Impressions from a Cut-Out
Paper Disk
1853-55
VICTOR H U G O
