Gående figur samt diagrammer og notater om pendulsvingninger 1855 - 1933

Curator: Let's consider this compelling pencil sketch by Poul S. Christiansen, "Going Figure and Diagrams and Notes on Pendulum Oscillations", dating from 1855 to 1933, currently held at the SMK. My initial interest rests on the interplay between technical notations and this freely rendered landscape. Editor: It strikes me immediately as wonderfully transient, like a half-remembered dream of a forest. It's there, but also dissolving. Curator: I am interested in the labour involved, given its time of production. This piece embodies the confluence of scientific recording and artistic expression, but was it purely a commercial product to pay wages? This question becomes especially interesting when we look closely at how the drawing manifests ideas on paper using readily accessible materials like paper and pencil, items that may have had varied availability and value at the time. Editor: Exactly. I find myself wondering what preoccupied Christianen at the time. Was he truly equally involved with science and with landscape and artistic representation? Look at the casual yet somehow meticulous rendering of the foliage against this kind of ghostly scientific framework in the composition’s design, almost a double exposure in his mind. Did he perceive it as some kind of creative, and somewhat rebellious whole, with equal devotion? Curator: Yes, but think about this. It makes me wonder about the kind of labor Christiansen was trying to document as it considers ideas regarding oscillations in motion as part of nature, or scientific attempts at analyzing this environment. Editor: Maybe that's what draws me in; It's a liminal, barely there world. It captures that fragile moment between observation and knowing, a fleeting truth glimpsed behind what's being scientifically observed, or understood in its material reality, which it seems also reflects in an era or period where, economically, artistic pursuits were intertwined with industrial and consumer progress, at its bare minimums of the basic products for sale. Curator: Well, it has been a pleasure reconsidering this drawing with you, and recontextualizing my own notions concerning its implications in materiality and labor. Editor: And for me too! To think more closely of what the image suggests by a type of labor expressed through the artists experience. Thank you.