Micha Ullman: First Watch

This book unfolds an early chapter in Micha Ullman’s oeuvre – drawings from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and at their center the series Camp Drawings, which Ullman created intermittently while on military watch duty during episodes of reserve service. The drawings depict structures whose shape may be identified as a house, but they are in fact military structures that cover bunkers and underground shelters surrounded by fences and trenches. The shapes of the house, the bunker, and the shelter, like the action of digging in the ground, are the fundamentals of Ullman’s art in general and of these early and unmediated drawings in particular.

These modest drawings can shed light on the history of the Ullmanesque thought, a moment before it ventures into archetypical abstraction, structural elaboration, conceptual encoding, and ideal transcendence – a warm moment when it is still close to the appearance of reality (drawing from observation), emotional expression (operational alertness), an intimate experience (notebook drawing), and a private testimony (recording the time and place).