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Drawing and the score

At the heart of the chapter is a visual artwork as ‘metascore’, Timebased Roller with Graphic Score, by John Latham 1987, significant because it is neither a musical score nor a drawing though the conventions of both are present and active. The chapter offers a radically different conceptualisation of the ‘score’ and its role in constraining or harnessing artistic freedom: the drawing in this instance is not a representation of what already exists but, like a score, a movement towards an outcome that has the potential to exist. The author argues that common to both visual and musical practice is the graphic element but unlike the musical score, Latham’s ‘score as artwork’ achieves a sense of potential by holding time and space in tension. In this way, the viewer is drawn into placing themselves by determining a temporal, spatial position that is relative, heightening the immediacy of experience.

This conceptualisation emerges out of a careful examination of Latham’s theory on time and space through the artist’s writings, sketches, an interview and a conversation. Latham conceived the individual’s relation to time as ‘scored’ through measurable intervals spanning past, present and future in ways that interconnect and interpolate the real from the imagined. This artwork is pivotal to Latham’s construction of the role of the artist in society as the incidental person, able to work across hierarchies and imagine beyond the contingencies of everyday functionality in the development of the Artist Placement Group (APG) in collaboration with Steveni. The implications for a different perspective on the score inform the analysis of the author’s experimental project, Calendar Variations 2010.

First presented at the Sound and Score seminar, Orpheus Institute December 2010, the paper is informed through a series of 12 interviews with musician researchers, the ORCiM interviews (12) (2009-10) and selected for publication.