The Hand Runs Hot: On Anastasia Shulman’s Chirography
Anastasia Shulman, Chirography series, 2024. Pencil, oil pastels, 42x59.4.
A rushed scribble on a scrap of paper, a sign from an unfamiliar alphabet. In both scenarios, the recipient’s eye begins to decipher before it knows there is anything legible to read. Much of this happens unconsciously. As humans, our instinct has been hardwired to translate, rationalize, and familiarize the strange, bringing the unknown into the boundaries of our baseline knowledge. London-based artist Anastasia Shulman’s Chirography series, built on layered surfaces of mixed dry media, draws on that impulse. On paper, Shulman’s abstract art resembles an obscure script, except no language system constitutes it. The marks pave attention to the process of writing itself, how it is made and brought into existence. The idea is laid in the term chirography. Taken from the Greek word for handwriting, the title puts the role of the hand before the message. Shulman’s marks track the hand's velocity, weight, and anxiety as it works. These repetitive rows, framed around the margins of the center blocks, create direct physical traces of the artist's body. Without a message attached, the works withhold their meaning from the viewer. Even so, Shulman’s drawings are still fully legible as labor– each stroke records the movement she has poured into the pseudo-script. This encounter leaves us to look at our own urge to extract meaning instead. What, then, compels us to read when there is nothing to decipher?
Just like the marks, Shulman’s preferred medium is not accidental. Oil pastels are easy to exhaust, and their reversibility is key to Shulman’s perspective. Using a technique known as sgraffito, she scratches back the top layer of pastel with fine abrasions in the shape of tightened loops, so the marks she creates can be doubled and undone while concealing the rest. It is a denial staged by hand. Approaching Shulman’s works as a visual embodiment of the stream of consciousness as a process proposes a window into this friction. Similar to the literary mode, her practice unfolds without a particular destination or narrative, following a track that resists rational ordering. Its nearest kin is the vertigo of a text in which ideas spiral freely rather than choosing to settle. Shulman herself rejects the meditative reading of repetition. For her experience, it tends to be hectic, anxiety-inducing, narrowing her train of thought into a single route. This apparent mental overflow, however, takes place within careful visual boundaries. The geometric blocks in the works are also active elements in their own right. They interrupt this disordered movement, exposing the limit from which the apparent spontaneity cannot entirely escape and pulling the viewer back to ground zero. Their flat, uniform surfaces exist in relation to the accumulated marks in proximity. Importantly, Shulman also decides these blocks in advance, before the hand runs hot in the process. Two distinct temporalities therefore subsist without dominating each other: the determined and the progressively produced.
Language entered Shulman’s life long before her artistic practice emerged. Born in Moscow in 2003 and raised in Minsk, she grew up as the daughter of a philologist, an upbringing that influenced her later engagement with philology, semiotics and epistemology. Her interest became increasingly attuned to the mechanics of language. Semiotics, the study of how signs are tied to what they stand for, was an especially natural fit for Shulman. In Notes on the Index (1977), Rosalind Krauss draws on Charles Sanders Peirce’s three kinds of signs. The primary category classifies the word as a symbol, whose meaning derives from a collective agreement. Next, a drawing of a foot, for example, is an icon: it signifies by its visual resemblance. In the third category, a footprint is an index. The imprint the subject leaves behind proves it was previously there. Unlike symbols and icons, indices connect to their referent through an actual relationship or causal trace. Krauss brought this idea into art criticism when she likened Man Ray’s camera-less photographs to “ghostly traces of departed objects”. Shulman's marks operate through a comparable logic. What appears to be writing in her case is, in fact, a record of writing having taken place. Notably, unlike a linguistic sign, these marks do not carry a recoverable message. They merely index the physical labor of their production, registering the hand's pressure, repetition, and fatigue. In the process, the hand becomes both the instrument of inscription and erasure.
Fatigue and anxiety are also no strangers in our contemporary culture. In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han argues that the disciplinary imperative of “you must” has been replaced. Now, we live in an achievement society that promotes “you can”, in which the subject exploits itself while confusing compulsion for freedom. Shulman’s self-imposed, unrelenting rows echo that conditional labor, except that her labor does not culminate in the measurable output achievement culture relies on. Han further holds that such a culture has little tolerance for boredom, and Shulman’s own account runs parallel to his. Today, our spare hours are laden with distractions, leaving little virtual space for the background thinking that used to emerge when attention was not constantly occupied. In the cognitive shield of dopamine and simulated companionship, it seems we have compromised our ability to sit with one’s thoughts. Self-reflection, once an incidental part of everyday life, has begun to resemble a skill we have to relearn. For Shulman, however, boredom is not an absence of thought. It counters a culture where even our attention is organized around productivity. Her practice is still sustained labor, but in the studio, the hours spent are not valued according to what they produce. What matters is the time that goes into making, and the form of attention that does not expect productivity.
There is a residual risk that, without a decipherable message, the marks might slip into decoration, or that the absence of language might be mistaken for an absence of thought. Anastasia Shulman’s technique argues otherwise. The geometric, colored blocks are established first, while the concealments and repetitions of the marks are then added and can be undone in the course of making. Yet our impulse to read persists even when the message does not arrive. Perhaps this compulsion says as much about our own expectations as it does about the works themselves. We are accustomed to treating what we encounter as something to be understood, interpreted, and resolved, and hostile to what cannot be reduced to clarity. In contemporary culture, information is immediately accessible; staying with something that offers no answer can feel almost unnatural, which becomes a discipline in itself. What you end up reading, in the end, isn't a message. It is the hand made legible, shifting our attention from reading what it says towards what it does.
References
Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, 1977.
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Stanford University Press, 2015.
