FIGURE 17

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Oil bar and linseed oil on paper

THE RACE

LAUREN ZUCKER

Within the confines of ten furlongs, there are metacorporeal aspects of the horse race never experienced by the spectator. I first experienced the horse race through the medium of literature. Each moment of the race was decompressed, and the experience was unfolded. Drawn out in detail were the visceral relationships between horse and jockey, the operations and politics implicit in a racing farm, the strategies and traditions of breeding and training, the excitement of race-day mornings, and the intent behind every move during the course of the race. The race compresses the life experience of each racer—horse or jockey—into two minutes.

Through drawing I fold the life narrative of the racer into gesture; then, as in the race, montage the narratives of different racers. I found inspiration for expressing this agony of entanglement in Picasso’s Guernica (1937).The narrative gesture of war is not unlike that of the horse race.

There is a dichotomy in horse racing that at once evokes both nobility and grit. I found this to exist even at the scale of the horse’s eye, loaded with noble courage and animalistic fear—and in the relationship between the fear in the horse’s eye and the focused determination of the jockey’s eye.

The process of these drawings was subtractive, many beginning as a coat of black oil bar. The slow drying time of oil bar and linseed oil gave me the time to carve the horses’ bodies into the blackness. I reworked portions of the drawing repeatedly, conveying motion and time lapse through the multiplicity of elements, such as the doubling of the jockey’s hand in different positions.