Movement, Gesture, and the Art of Translation
While our calendar year begins in January, March marks the real renewal of life. The stillness of winter gives way to restless motion—plants awaken and migratory birds return. Across cultures, the arrival of spring has signified new cycles of movement and transformation.
In art, movement is physical and conceptual—a shift between presence and absence, clarity and obscurity, the readable and the unreadable. How do we capture something that is in constant flux? How do we record movement without fixing it in place?
These questions shaped the works of Marcel Duchamp, Cy Twombly, and Xu Bing—three artists who challenged the boundaries between gesture, language, and perception.
The Capture of Motion
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) fractures a moving figure into overlapping planes. The painting is inspired by chronophotography, an early technique for capturing multiple phases of movement in a single image. It does not depict a moment frozen in time but rather time itself in motion.
Duchamp later abandoned painting in favour of conceptual gestures, such as 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14), where he dropped three one-meter-long threads onto a canvas and recorded their curves—allowing chance to dictate the form. The result was a rejection of absolute measurement, showing that even something as objective as a "meter" could be subject to random deviation and movement.
This resonates with the idea that motion cannot be fully captured—it always leaves room for unpredictability, interpretation, and chance.
Movement as Language
Cy Twombly (1928–2011) radically redefined the role of writing in art. His works, often dismissed as “scribbles” at first glance, are not random marks but records of motion, memory, and emotion. His paintings capture the moment before meaning solidifies—the raw, gestural energy of thought as it emerges.
Consider Untitled (Bacchus) (2005), a massive red-looped composition evoking both handwriting and chaotic movement. The repeated gestures mirror the act of trying to remember, to grasp something fleeting. Twombly’s line is not fixed—it moves, repeats, hesitates. As Roland Barthes famously wrote about Twombly, his lines are “traces of bodies in motion, histories in their most fragile form” (Barthes, 1979). Twombly’s gestural writing resists stability, embracing movement as both presence and erasure.
Unreadable Scripts
Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1987–1991) presents an ocean of printed text—except none of the characters are real. The thousands of Chinese-looking characters are entirely invented, making the work an illusion of readability. Visitors instinctively try to decipher the texts, only to realise that the script denies them meaning.
This experiment with unreadable writing challenges our trust in language. We assume that writing carries inherent meaning, yet here it has been stripped of its function—a reminder that language is always shaped by perception and context. The patterns exist not as fixed words but as movement in space, a form of communication beyond conventional linguistic structures.
Mapping the Movements
My project Mapping the Movements follows these artistic legacies of gestural abstraction, unreadable scripts, and motion-based recording. Unlike Twombly’s writing, Xu Bing’s fictional scripts, or Duchamp’s layered motion, my work seeks to record movement through direct physical traces.
During my travels, I place a drawing tool in a suspended position, allowing it to move freely in response to the shaking of a train, the turbulence of a plane, or the vibrations of a car journey. The marks that emerge are not drawn by my hand but by the invisible forces of movement itself.
These marks are patterns of motion that exist only in transition—not a deliberate composition but a visual record of passage through space and time. The result is an evolving collection of gestural notations, where each drawing embodies a journey, a moment of instability made permanent.
Are they maps? Scripts? Random traces? Their meaning depends on the act of looking, on the viewer’s engagement with the shifting, unpredictable patterns of movement. Maybe they are just the documentation of the situations.
What Do We See in Motion?
Like migratory birds returning in spring, movement is one of the most fundamental rhythms of existence. It shapes landscapes, thoughts, and artistic expression. Whether through Duchamp’s fractured time, Twombly’s gestural loops, Xu Bing’s unreadable texts, or my drawings dictated by the rhythm of travel, movement remains a language of its own—one that we are constantly in the process of deciphering.
When you look at a trace of movement, do you see a message or just motion?
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