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Robert Luzar

Bristol
By working through drawing, live-art, social situations, video and technology I present works that 'trace' different forms of event. Tracing where and how a work may – or may not – have taken place.
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I am an artist, writer and educator living in Bristol, UK.

Born in Slovenia, raised in Canada, and having lived in the UK for over a decade, my life has been shaped by experiences of change in identity, place, and ideology.

The works I present use unconventional drawings, painting, live-art, performance, video, telematic works, the Web, and projection technology. Crossing these disciplines come from an interest in ‘change’ as an event, an event that involves 'tracing' structural change, politically and existentially.

Drawing as 'point', a spirit of refusal, of withdrawing, is one of the present ways I approach the event.

I hold a PhD from Central Saint Martins. I exhibit globally in live-art events, Web-based projects, museums and galleries, such as Palazzo Loredan Venice (IT), Torrance Art Museum (USA), Talbot Rice Gallery (UK), DRAWinternational (FR), Katzman Contemporary (CA), Künstlerhaus Dortmund (DE), and CUMT Institute (China). His writings on art, culture and philosophy are published in books and journals such as Nancy and Visual Culture (Edinburgh University Press 2016), Theatre and Performance Design (Routledge 2017), and Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (Intellect 2019).

I am interested in how works work ‘trace’ different conditions of change as an 'event'. Put plainly, this means tracing where, when, and how persons, subjects and things can come together, live, insist, pass away––and still persist.

With viewers I try to trace ‘conditions’ that reflect elements and behaviours of the world as both economically abstract and socially concrete. The abstractions appear as points, lines, planes, and shadows; the concretions posed by the body as both subjective and of assembly, space, the present, gravity, action, decision. The abstractions reflect the logic of a worldview, or ideology, that infects and implicates someone in concrete experiences.

My writings are used to keep working through ideologies of work, labour and truth. Writing is used not to theoretically explain but, rather, ‘think’ in the spirit of drawing: the Primi Penseri, or ‘first thoughts’ of the artist, claimed since the Renaissance. The psychoanalytic method of working through is employed to write as a way of analysing preconditions that cut across aesthetics, politics, ethics and existence.

A few comments.

I prefer to think of the works as events that go beyond the I, of the liberal-economic ‘me first’ position. Instead, the works take place ‘in you more than you alone’. Works invite everyone to work through drives that exceed the author.

Moreover, the works do come out of conditions and ideas deeply lived. For me ‘change’ has meant living through social and economic struggle, work, debt, trauma and dispossession… and, above all, making ‘existence’ a work of risk, joyful and incalculable surprise. Immigration, two lost homes, displacement from family and community, a single-parent upbringing: these are some personal examples of the experiences genealogically shaping the practice.

 

 

 

Infinitely Pointing While Seated & Thinking of Greater Things

By  Robert Luzar

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