Anders Reventlov: Writing as action

Friday, March 6, 2020

Writing as action

I started with writing and letters.As writing my self made identity everywhere i went. Writing and signature is something that has meant everything to the human identity. Being able to write was tantamount to being. Writing was an important status symbol, a symbol of having an expanded worldview - one could read the Holy Scriptures. Drawing and writing, in our development as human beings, are equated with being an individual. To have and feel that you can express something, you can act and you can communicate. In tandem with the digitalisation of society, handwriting and writing and experiencing one’s own unique handwriting as an expression is a threatened human practice.

In my own work, I have gone from more figurative drawings to having developed a fragmentation of the previously clearly figurative motifs into an expression in which

I directly base the idea that writing is drawing and drawing is writing. Since 2014, I have worked with the juxtaposition between writing and drawing and putting aside characters as action. Writing is akin to acting. Acting freely in our part of the world is simply threat- ened if we do not experience having a voice and a way of communicating. Today, our identity and signature has been greatly reduced to a number issued by the state. In Den- mark a NemID. I see it as a possible write-off that by virtue of the reduction to a number, the individual does not have the experience of being and thus does not have the expe- rience of being able to create. You design a design with a dash and this design of your signature supports the identity of the individual. The act of writing is for each letter that is written a unique creation and a gesture that can be refined and requires a lot of practice. Eg. Form writing, oblique writing and calligraphic expressions have been seen as an elevated art form.

The problem is the following; If the writing disappears, whether it is the automatic script, the fiction or the everyday writing that disappears from our everyday life, then in the long run the art will get cramped conditions and the free human and the free action will slowly disappear. Since 2014, through drawing and writing, I have collected what I see as traces of action (drawings on paper that are fragments of larger works).

I see a passivity and a huge lack of understanding that it is possible to act independently in our society.

. Throughout my practice, I will continue to work with writing as a form of expression, not as a written word, but as an action.

Stay tuned for more.

-Anders Reventlov 2020