TOWARDS AN EXPANDED ILLUSTRATION
Let's say that, as a creative medium, illustration is limited by a set of boundaries, narrowing it to the idea of an image for a product. This is especially true for the editorial product—the book—where its own internal logic (or code) sets a series of standards for composition, rhythm, sequencing, the relation of meaning, etc., all abiding by the rules of format. Although a rigid adherence to these norms is always subject to the imagination of the illustrator, it is nonetheless true that many changes are not possible due to the nature of reproduction.
When I discuss exploring the potential for an expanded illustration, I am referring to something that advances on both a formal and conceptual level, aiming to move beyond merely simplifying formulas that somehow bypass the complexity of contemporary creation. We will start with Rosalind Krauss’s text, in which she introduces the idea of the expanded field to describe the artistic phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The text itself offers us a clue to question the role of illustration today. If we view illustration as a hermetic proposal, we can see a hypothetical parallel with that of a statue. Although a statue’s function is based on the logic of representation and signals, we also recognize the importance of the pedestal in giving it a space to occupy. Now, let’s think of the book as a pedestal: a mediating support between the actual location and the representational sign of illustration. The relation between illustration and book thus becomes a fixed, one-way signal; the logic outlining the chronological and historical development of the language of (editorial) illustration.
We do know, however, that historical events and the development of new materials through industrial production led to a loosening of the idea of art as a monument in the case of the statue or as a document in the case of the illustration. “It is through representation of the material itself or in the process of its construction” that the visual arts came to be charged with subjectivity. In this way, sculpture, as a fusion between statue and pedestal or between abstraction and constant self-referencing, continues to take an autonomous form in its construction.
It becomes defined more by what it excludes—what the sculpture is not; the non-landscape or the non-architecture. Krauss sees the field of action where sculptural creation opens up and expands as emerging from the tension of these exclusions. If we translate this problem into a question about the role of illustration, we might place it in the domain of negation, creating a discourse between design/no design and art/no art. Therefore, we will call expanded illustration any proposals that explore the boundaries of non-places, as Fernando Castro Flórez pointed out when talking about drawing in its expanded field and tracing “a displacement which shows up relative space, without stabilizing around either of the two possibilities.” Expanded illustration, then, refers to work that pushes toward the margins and is situated at the convergence between site and non-site, understood as the complexity inherent in artistic creation. Gene Youngblood, a pioneer in the use of the term “expanded,” suggested that it could leave the pages of a book and migrate to other media, such as the drawings, objects, or installations in my work.
So that an “expanded” illustration will either experience its limits on the formal level or question the space of its own language and its relation with memory subject to displacement and “exteriorising on an intimate scale, with it, problems of the id”[1].
[1] Castro Floréz, Fernando “Robert Smithson. El dibujo en el campo expandido”. In (1999), Juan José Gomez Molina. Madrid, Cátedra.