A Companion to Contemporary Drawing 2019045090, 2019045091, 9781119194545, 9781119194569, 9781119194576

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A Companion to  Contemporary Drawing

WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO ART HISTORY These invigorating reference volumes chart the influence of key ideas, discourses, and theories on art, and the way that it is taught, thought of, and talked about throughout the English‐speaking world. Each volume brings together a team of respected international scholars to debate the state of research within traditional subfields of art history as well as in more innovative, thematic configurations. Representing the best of the scholarship governing the field and pointing toward future trends and across disciplines, the Blackwell Companions to Art History series provides a magisterial, state‐of‐the‐art synthesis of art history. 1  A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 edited by Amelia Jones 2  A Companion to Medieval Art edited by Conrad Rudolph 3  A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture edited by Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton 4  A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art edited by Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow 5  A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett 6  A Companion to Modern African Art edited by Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà 7  A Companion to Chinese Art edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang 8  A Companion to American Art edited by John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill and Jason D. LaFountain 9  A Companion to Digital Art edited by Christiane Paul 10  A Companion to Dada and Surrealism edited by David Hopkins 11  A Companion to Public Art edited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie 12  A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Finbarr Flood and Gulru Necipoglu 13  A Companion to Modern Art edited by Pam Meecham 14  A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 edited by Anne Massey 15  A Companion to Illustration edited by Alan Male 16  A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan 17  A Companion to Feminist Art edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek 18  A Companion to Curation edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos 19  A Companion to Korean Art edited by JP Park, Burglind Jungmann, and Juhyung Rhi 20  A Companion to Contemporary Drawing edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing Edited by

Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum

This edition first published 2020 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office(s) John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Chorpening, Kelly, editor. | Fortnum, Rebecca, editor. Title: A Companion to Contemporary Drawing / edited by Kelly Chorpening &   Rebecca Fortnum. Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. |   Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to art history | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019045090 (print) | LCCN 2019045091 (ebook) | ISBN   9781119194545 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119194569 (adobe pdf) | ISBN   9781119194576 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Drawing–21st century–Themes, motives. Classification: LCC NC96 .C66 2020 (print) | LCC NC96 (ebook) | DDC  741–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045090 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045091 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: Łukasz Surowiec (2015) “Daddy, don’t cry. Zosia”. Painting on the wall and drawing of miner’s daughter transferred onto the wall of family house, Katowice. Photo: Dawid Chalimoniuk, courtesy of Łukasz Surowiec, Davido/Katowice City of Gardens. Emma Talbot (2013) Candlewick. Watercolour on paper, 24 × 30 cm. Reproduced by permission of the artist; Andrea Bowers (2015) Badass Girls (May Day, Los Angeles 2014), detail. Graphite on paper, 62 × 43 cm (24.4 × 16.9 inches). Source: © Andrea Bowers. Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto, Milan/New York. Photo: Andrea Rossetti; Jade Montserrat (2018) Untitled (The Wretched of the Earth, After Frantz Fanon). Drawing Installation, ‘The Last Place They Thought Of’ exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensh. Reproduced by permission of the artist. Set in 10/12pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors

ix xvii

Acknowledgments xxv Introduction 1 Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum Part I  The Power of Drawing

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1  The Black Index Bridget R. Cooks

13

2  A State of Alert: The Politics of Eroticism in South American Drawing Sofia Gotti

29

3  Graphic Witness Kate Macfarlane

55

4  Drawn from Communism: Anti-Capitalist Drawing from Central-Eastern Europe Magdalena Radomska 5  Differencing Drawing: Feminist Perspectives on Line, Surface, and Space Griselda Pollock 6  A Dirty Double Mirror: Drawing, Autobiography, and Feminism Rebecca Fortnum

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7  Between the Sky and the Handle: Shilpa Gupta’s Drawings in the Contemporary 147 Parul Dave Mukherji 8  Drawing as Contagion Jade Montserrat 9  Curating Drawing: Exhibitions and the Centering of Drawing in Contemporary Art João Ribas

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Part II  The Condition of Drawing

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10  Observation and Drawing: From Looking to Seeing Paul Moorhouse

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11  “Drawing’s Impropriety” Lucien Massaert

203

12  Drawing in Atopia: An Exploration of “Drift” as Method Beth Harland

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13  Works on/in/with Paper: Approaching Drawing as Responsive Marking Marina Kassianidou

239

14  Indexical Drawing: On Frottage Margaret Iversen

257

15  Ground as Critical Limit Laura Lisbon

271

16  Drawing’s Finish Stephanie Straine

287

17  Radical Antinomies: Drawing and Conceptual Art Anna Lovatt

309

18  Drawing Desires Sunil Manghani

325

19  Drawing from Life and the Twenty-first Century Art School Kelly Chorpening

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Part III  The Expanse of Drawing

367

20  Marking Time, Moving Images: Drawing and Film Ed Krc ̌ma

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21  Digital Drawing Tamarin Norwood

389

22  The Dot and the Line: Drawing Amongst Computers Jane de Almeida

407

23  Installation/Drawing: Spaces of Drawing Between Art and Architecture Sophia Banou

431

24  Informational Drawing Matthew Ritchie

451

25  Drawing Towards Sound – Notation, Diagram, Drawing David Ryan

471

26  Chinese Calligraphy: A Drawing Ecology Eric Wear

493

27  The Enduring Power of Comic Strips Simon Grennan

513

Index 531

List of Illustrations

0.1 Kelly Chorpening (2019) A Quiet Interior. Pencil and acrylic on paper mounted to steel 77 × 65 × 64 cm. Source: Courtesy of Kelly Chorpening.1 0.2 ‘Phantom Limn’ residency at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 2017, Source: courtesy of Kelly Chorpening. 4 0.3 Frank Auerbach (1990) from Seven Portraits, Michael. Etching on paper Dimensions: image: 178 × 147 mm © Tate, London 2019. 5 0.4 John and Yves Berger drawing at Camberwell College, University of the Arts London, 2007. Source: Courtesy of Craig Dow. 6 0.5 Rebecca Fortnum (2013), Eyes Wide Shut (Billie). Pencil, wax and oil on paper, 2013 Each image 70 × 100 cm. Source: Courtesy Rebecca Fortnum.7 1.1 Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (2016) The Evanesced. India ink and watercolour on recycled paper. Each 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 inches). Source: Courtesy the artist. Photo: Michael Underwood. 16 1.2 Titus Kaphar (2015) The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XV. Chalk on asphalt paper, 124.5 × 91.4 cm (49 × 36 inches). Fund for the Twenty‐First Century. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A. © Titus Kaphar. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Courtesy of the artist. 20 1.3 Whitfield Lovell (2006–2011) The Card Series II: The Rounds. 54 cards, charcoal pencil on paper with attached playing card. Each 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 inches). Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, exhibition: Walter Larrimore/NMAAHC. © Whitfield Lovell. Reproduced with permission. 23 1.4 Whitfield Lovell (2006–2011) The Card Series II: The Rounds (Detail card X). Charcoal pencil on paper with attached playing card. 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 inches). Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture © Whitfield Lovell. Reproduced with permission. 24

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2.1 Anna Bella Geiger (1978) Equações, série De Rerum Artibus (Equations, De Rerum Artibus series). Graphite, frottage and crayons on lined notebook sheet. 24 × 33 cm. © Anna Bella Geiger. 2.2 Teresinha Soares (1970) Corpo a Corpo in Cor‐pus Meus (Body to Body in Colour‐Pus of Mine). Painted wood. Dimensions variable. © Teresinha Soares. 2.3 Nahum B. Zenil (1996) ¡Oh, Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán) (Oh, Saint Flag! – To Enrique Guzmán). Triptych. Mixed media on paper. 238 × 71.5 cm. Colección MUAC, UNAM. 2.4 Miguel Angel Rojas (1975) ATENAS C.C. (Cine Contiguo #1–4) (ATENAS CC – Contiguous Cinema #1–4). Graphite on paper. 90 × 69 cm. © Miguel Angel Rojas. 2.5 José Leonilson Bezerra Dias (1990) Favorite game. Permanent ink on paper. 21 × 13.5 cm. Source: Photo: Rubens Chiri / © Projeto Leonilson. 3.1 Lorna Simpson (2008) Bed Green. Graphite and ink on paper. 27.9 × 21.6 cm (11 × 8.5 inches). Source: © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 3.2 Catherine Anyango Grünewald (2015) Live, Moments ago (The Death of Mike Brown, Ferguson, 9.8.14). Film still. Source: © Catherine Anyango Grünewald. Courtesy the artist. 3.3 Nidhal Chamekh (2017) Calais, studies and fragments of memories. Graphite and transfer on cotton paper. 100 × 140 cm (39.3 × 55.1 inches). Source: © Collection Frac Centre-Val de Loire. Photography: Blaise Adilo. 3.4 Andrea Bowers (2015) Badass Girls (May Day, Los Angeles 2014), detail. Graphite on paper, 62 × 43 cm (24.4 × 16.9 inches). Source: © Andrea Bowers. Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto, Milan / New York. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. 3.5 Mounira Al Solh (2012‐ongoing) I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous. Mixed media on legal paper. Each 30 × 21 cm (11.8 × 8.2 inches). Source: The Art Institute of Chicago. © Mounira Al Solh. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg. 4.1 Tamas St.Turba/Tamás Szentjóby (2012) We’re Not Talented Enough (Banner‐plot). Drawing, India ink on paper, 15.1 × 21.3 cm. Source: Courtesy of Tamás Szentjóby. 4.2 János Sugár (2003) Oneway Design. Ready made (pair of workers gloves with palmistry lines). Source: Courtesy of János Sugár. 4.3 Łukasz Surowiec (2015) “Daddy, don’t cry. Zosia”. Painting on the wall, drawing of miner’s daughter transferred onto the wall of family house, Katowice. Photo: Dawid Chalimoniuk, Courtesy of Łukasz Surowiec, Davido/Katowice City of Gardens. 4.4 GLUKLYA /Natalia Pershina‐Jakimanskaya, formerly: Factory of Found Clothes (2010) Against the commercial shit. Drawing for the Chto Delat newspaper issue Tragedy or Farce. Source: Courtesy of GLUKLYA /Natalia Pershina‐Jakimanskaya. 4.5 Fokus Grupa (2011 - ongoing) I Sing to Pass the Time. Pencil on paper. Source: Courtesy of Fokus Grupa. 4.6 Marina Naprushkina and the Office for Antipropaganda (2012) Self#governing. Page from the Newspaper. Source: Courtesy of Marina Naprushkina and the Office for Antipropaganda.

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Christine Taylor Patten (2007) Imagine5 (to the Fifth Power). Crow quill and ink on paper, 56 × 261.6 cm. (Photograph Daniel Barsotti) with 24/2000 micros, between 1355 AD and 1382 AD. Crow quill and ink on paper, 2.5 × 2.5 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist. 5.2 Eva Hesse No title. (1969) Gouache, watercolor, silver ink and graphite on laid paper, 22 1/8 × 15 inches (56.2 × 38.1 cm). Source: Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz, Los Angeles. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. 5.3 Claudette Johnson (2015) Untitled. Pastel on paper, 154 × 104 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. 5.4 Adrian Piper (1967) The Barbie Doll Drawings. Series of 35 drawings: Indian ink and Rapidograph and/or pencil on paper. Each 8.5 × 5.5 inches (21.5 × 14 cm). Detail: drawing # 7 of 35. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 6.1 Louise Bourgeois (1994) Sculptress. Drypoint on paper, 33.2 × 20.7 cm. Part of the Autobiographical Series. Source: © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2018. 6.2 Nicola Tyson (2015) Pre Non‐Snowstorm Self‐Portrait. Graphite on paper. 19.05 × 19.05 cm (7.5 × 7.5 inches). Source: Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York. 6.3 Frances Stark (2010) Pull After “Push”. Latex, printed matter, linen tape, stickers on panel.175.26 × 226.06 cm (69 × 89 inches). Source: Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist. 6.4 Emma Talbot (2013). Watercolour on paper. 24 × 30 cm. Reproduced by permission of the artist. 7.1 Shilpa Gupta (2014) 100 Hand drawn Maps of Country. Carbon tracings on paper; 30 × 22 in. (17 × 56 cm). Source: Courtesy of The Artist & Galleria Continua / Le Moulin, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana. Photographer: Ela Bialkkowska. 100 people were invited to make a hand drawn map of their country – in Mumbai.  7.2 Shilpa Gupta (2016) Untitled. Tracings: pencil on paper; 8.3 × 11.7 in. (21 × 29.7 cm). Source: Courtesy of The Artist and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photographer: Elad Sarig. 7.3 Shilpa Gupta (2012) Stars in Flags of the World, July 2011. Embroidery on cloth; 82 × 58 × 6 in. (209 × 148 ×15 cm). Source: Courtesy of The Artist & Galleria Continua / Le Moulin, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana. 8.1 Jade Montserrat (2017) No Need for Clothing. Drawing installation at Cooper Gallery/DJCAD. Source: Photo: Jacquetta Clark. 8.2 Jade Montserrat (2019) Instituting Care. Installation view at Bluecoat, Liverpool, United Kingdom. 8.3 Jade Montserrat (2018) Untitled (The Wretched of the Earth, After Frantz Fanon). Drawing Installation, ‘The Last Place They Thought Of’ exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensh. 10.1 Henry Tonks (c. 1900–1925) Henry Tonks. Pencil, 36.6 × 26.2 cm. Given by executors of Henry Tonks, 1937, NPG 3072(7). Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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104 108

111 126 129 132 138

152 153

156 162 164

165 192

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10.2 David Garshen Bomberg (1931) David Bomberg. Charcoal and wash, 49.5 × 32.4 cm. Purchased, 1970, NPG 4821. Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London. 199 11.1 Tal‐Coat (1982–83) Lavis sur papier. Ink wash on paper, 50 × 65 cm. Courtesy, Galerie Clivages, photograph Jean‐Louis Losi. 212 11.2 Tal‐Coat (1977) Crayon sur papier. Pencil on paper, 12 × 37 cm. Source: Courtesy, Galerie Clivages, photograph Jean‐Louis Losi. 213 12.1 Henri Matisse (1906) Small Light Woodcut. Woodcut, 45.8 × 29 cm. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland BMA 1950.12.237. Photography: Mitro Hood. 224 12.2 Roland Barthes (1971) Drawing dated 15 December 1971, labeled no.159, ink on paper, 21 × 26.5 cm. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.  227 12.3 Beth Harland (2016) Methods of Modern Construction, part 1. Mixed media, 205 × 135 cm. Source: © Collection of Artist. 232 12.4 Beth Harland (2016) Methods of Modern Construction, part 3. Oil on canvas, 26 × 21 cm each panel. Source: © Collection of Artist.232 13.1 Dorothea Rockburne (1973) Drawing Which Makes Itself: FPI 16. Folded paper and ink. 76.2 × 101.5 cm. Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Source: © 2018 Dorothea Rockburne / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. 245 13.2 Louise Hopkins (2000) Untitled (0100). Pencil on crumpled paper. 49.5 × 60 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist. © Louise Hopkins. 246 13.3 Lai Chih‐Sheng (2012) Drawing Paper (detail). Pencil, paper. 76 × 103 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist. © Lai Chih‐Sheng. 246 14.1 Do Ho Suh (2015–2016) Rubbing/Loving Project: 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA. Coloured pencil on vellum; 240 × 420 × 670 cm. Source: © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy the Artist, Victoria Miro, and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong (Photography Chris Payne). 265 14.2 Anna Barriball (2008) Sunset/Sunrise. V. Pencil on paper, 85 × 110 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery. 266 14.3 Mona Hatoum (1999) Untitled (passoire de J-L). Japanese wax paper, 43.5 × 54.5 cm (17 1/4 × 19 3/4 in.) © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy Le Creux de l’Enfer (Photo: Joël Damase). 267 15.1 Daniel Buren (2001) Photos‐souvenirs: Who’s afraid of Peter Eisenman?. Work in situ, in “As Painting: Division and Displacement”. Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (Ohio), May 2001. Source: © DB‐ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Daniel Buren (2001). Courtesy the artist. 284 15.2 Daniel Buren (2001) Photos‐souvenirs: Who’s afraid of Peter Eisenman?. Work in situ, in “As Painting: Division and Displacement”. Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (Ohio), May 2001. Source: © DB‐ADAGP Paris. Photo by Daniel Buren (2001). Courtesy the artist. 284



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15.3 Daniel Buren (2001) Photos‐souvenirs: Who’s afraid of Peter Eisenman?, Work in situ, in “As Painting: Division and Displacement”. Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (Ohio), May 2001. Source: © Daniel Buren / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy the artist. 16.1 Ed Ruscha (1965), Thayer Avenue. Graphite and pencil on paper mounted on paper; 14 × 22‐5/8 inches. Source: © Ed Ruscha, reproduced by permission the artist and Gagosian Gallery. 16.2 Vija Celmins (1968) Hiroshima. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper; 34.5 × 45.5 cm. Source: © Vija Celmins, reproduced by permission the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. 16.3 Kate Davis (2008) Who is a Woman now? II. Framed pencil drawing and silkscreen print on paper; 170 × 130 cm. Source: © Kate Davis. Courtesy the artist. 17.1 Robert Rauschenberg (1953) Erased de Kooning Drawing. Traces of ink and crayon on paper, with mat, and hand‐lettered label in ink, in gold‐leafed frame; 25 1/4 × 21 3/4 × 1/2 inches (64.1 × 55.2 × 1.3 cm); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis. Source: © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. 17.2 John Latham (1970) One Second Drawing. Source: © The John Latham Foundation. Courtesy Lisson Gallery. 17.3 Howardena Pindell (1975) Untitled #3. Ink on paper, collage; 16.5 × 17.1cm (6 ½ × 6 ¾ in.), frame: 37.4 × 37.4 × 3.8 cm (14 ¾ × 14 ¾ × 1 ½ in.). Museum purchase, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund, 2015‐6688. Source: Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, NY. 18.1 Henri Michaux (1980) Saisir. Source: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018. 18.2 Jitish Kallat (2015) Wind Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season). Burnt adhesive and graphite on Arches paper, 67 × 45 in./ 170 × 114 cm. Source: © Jitish Kallat. Courtesy of artist. 18.3 Sally Morfill, from Sally Morfill and Ana Č avić (2015). The Naturalness of Strange Things. Pencil drawing on 100 gsm Munken pure rough, 297 × 420 mm. Source: © Sally Morfill. Courtesy the artist.  ̌ ̌ 18.4 Ana Cavić , from Sally Morfill and Ana Cavić (2015) The Naturalness of Strange Things. ‘Take me with you’, sculpture poem. Adhesive vinyl ̌ on paper, 210 × 297 mm. Source: © Ana Cavić . Courtesy the artist.  19.1 Barbara Walker (2018) Backdrop. Graphite on embossed paper, 63 × 46 cm. Source: © Barbara Walker. Courtesy the artist. 19.2 Robert Longo (2017) Untitled (X‐Ray of A Bar at the Folies‐Bergère, 1882, After Manet). Charcoal on mounted paper. Overall Dimensions: 243.8 × 330.8 cm (95.98 × 130.24 in), Framed Dimensions: 261.8 × 348.8 × 10.2 cm (103.07 × 137.32 × 4.02 in). Source: © Robert Longo. Photo: Studio Robert Longo. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg.  19.3 William Kentridge (2015) More Sweetly Play the Dance. 8‐channel HD video installation with 4 megaphones, sound; 15 min. Installation at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2016. Source: Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo credit: Cathy Carver.

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19.4 Tatiana Trouvé (2007) Untitled. Sand, copper, soil, formica, wood, metal, Plexiglas. 310 × 425 × 650 cm. Source: Courtesy of artist and König Galerie. Photo credit: Marc Domage. Image courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE.  20.1 Susan Morris (2009) Plumb Line Drawing No. 10. Black pigment (vine ash) on paper, 158 × 347 cm. Source: © Susan Morris. Courtesy of artist. 20.2 Vivienne Koorland (2006) The Kapo Tallies His Human Losses for the Day. Oil on canvas, 61 × 69 cm. Source: © Vivienne Koorland. Courtesy of artist. 20.3 Oscar Muñoz (2003) Re/Trato (Portrait / I Try Again). Video, 28 minutes (still). Source: © Oscar Muñoz. Courtesy of artist. 21.1 Susan Turcot (2004) British Embassy. One of twelve drawings in the series Self‐Service. Pencil on paper, 30 × 40 cm. Source: © Susan Turcot. Courtesy of the artist. 21.2 Jochem Hendricks (2001) “EYE”. Produced for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and based on the San Jose Mercury News. “EYE” is the second version of “Newspaper” (1994), which was based on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Source: © Jochem Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist.  21.3 Charlotte and Arthur Webb (2015) Flickr Nude (or Noodle) Descending a Staircase. This staircase was created 26 February 2018. Source: © Charlotte Webb. Courtesy of the artist. 22.1 Charles Csuri (1967) Random War. Laminates and lightjet – plotter drawings from a computer programming, 104 × 229 cm. Source: © Charles Csuri. Courtesy of the artist. 22.2 Antoine Schmitt (2000) Avec Détermination, algorithmic material and computer screen. Source: © Antoine Schmitt. Courtesy the artist.  22.3 Antoine Schmitt (2013) Swarm. Generative work. Computer, specific program, video projector. Source: © Antoine Schmitt. Courtesy the artist. 22.4 Zachary Lieberman (2006) Drawn. Drawings, interactive computer program, projector. Source: © Zachary Lieberman. Courtesy the artist. 22.5 Zachary Lieberman (2006) Drawn. Drawings, interactive computer program, projector. Source: © Zachary Lieberman. Courtesy the artist.  23.1 Monika Grzymala (2012) Raumzeichnung/Spatial Drawing. Site‐specific installation presented at Crone Gallery, Berlin. Source: © Monika Grzymala. Courtesy of the artist. 23.2 Sophia Banou (2012) Weaving Lines/Looming Narratives. Tracing paper, laser‐engraved plywood panels and thread. Site‐specific installation, presented at the Newcastle University School of Arts and Cultures. Source: Copyright Sophia Banou. 23.3 Metis: Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker (2014) On the Surface. Exhibition presented at Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark. Source: © Adrian Hawker and Mark Dorrian. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Gert Skærlund Andersen 24.1 Matthew Ritchie (2018) The Temptation of the Diagram. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2018. Source: © J. Paul Getty Trust.

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24.2 Faraday’s magnetic field drawings (1852). Magnetic field drawings. Source: Diagrams by the English physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) of the magnetic fields around various configurations of magnets. Published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Source: Reproduced by permission of Science Photo Library. 24.3 Georgiana Houghton (c. 1868) Glory be to God. Watercolour on paper, 49 × 55 cm. Source: Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia. Reproduced with permission. 24.4 James Clerk Maxwell (1875) Diagram of the lines on Gibb’s thermodynamic surface, 8 July 1875 (Number 564). Source: Courtesy of Special Collections, The McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast. Thomson Collection MS13/M/22/A. 24.5 Jean Perrin (1909) Mouvement brownien et realité moléculaire. Published in Perrin, Jean. 1916. Atoms. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company: 115 (Digitized Archive. Org.). 25.1 John Cage (1957–8) Concert for Piano. Source: Copyright © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. 25.2 Anton Lukoszevieze (2015) Untitled. Acrylic paint, collage, copy paper transfer (the black lines), 29.7 × 21 cm. Source: © Anton Lukoszevieze. Courtesy of artist. 25.3 Anton Lukoszevieze (2014) Braxton. Silver gelatin photogram, 12.7 × 17.8 cm. Source: © Anton Lukoszevieze. Courtesy of artist. 25.4 Hallveig Àgùstdòttir (2013) “21 sound drawings” series 1, nr. 4. Pencil, graphite, ink and acrylic on 250 g/m2 Bristol paper, mounted on wood, 29.7 × 21 cm. Source: © Hallveig Àgùstdòttir. Courtesy of artist. 25.5 Hallveig Àgùstdòttir (2013) “21 sound drawings” series 1, nr. 7. Pencil, graphite, ink and acrylic on 250 g/m2 Bristol paper, mounted on wood. 29.7 × 21 cm. Source: © Hallveig Àgùstdòttir. Courtesy of artist. 26.1 Dong Qichang (1555–1636). The Song of Leshou Hall. 1635. Two pages of album with rubbings of engravings of same pages. Ink on paper. 21 × 11.8 cm. Private collection. Source: Reproduced by permission of Eric Otto Wear. 26.2 Details of four Northern Wei epigraphs, sixth century CE. Ink on paper. Private collection. Source: Reproduced by permission of Eric Otto Wear. 26.3 Yi Bingshou (1754–1815). Potted Chrysanthemums. 1808. Ink on paper. 98.5 × 27.5 cm. Private collection. Source: Reproduced by permission of Eric Otto Wear. 26.4 Qiu Zhijie (1992). Copying the ‘Orchid Pavilion Preface’ One Thousand Times. Ink on paper. 69 × 160 cm. Source: Reproduced by permission of Qiu Zhijie. 27.1 Catherine Anyango (2010) Heart of Darkness. London: SelfMadeHero. 49 and 50. Source: Reproduced by permission of Catherine Anyango. 27.2 R. J. Ivankovic (2017) H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu: (for beginning readers). Hayward: Chaosium. 44 and 45. Source: Reproduced by permission of Chaosium Inc.

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Sophia Banou is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of the West of England. She has studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (Architecture and Engineering Diploma, 2008), and the University of Edinburgh, holding an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design and a PhD in Architecture by Design (2016). Her doctoral research examined architectural representation and the status of architectural drawing conventions through a critical‐historical approach to urban representation. She has previously practiced architecture in Greece and taught architectural design and theory at the Newcastle University (UK) and the University of Edinburgh. She is a co-editor at Drawing On: Journal of Architectural Research by Design and Charrette. Her research is concerned with questions of representation, mediality, and mediation in architecture. Her work has been published and exhibited internationally, and can be found in permanent collections in Europe and the USA. Kelly Chorpening holds a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. In 2016 she was shortlisted for both the Derwent and Jerwood drawing prizes and had a solo exhibition at Horatio Jr., London. Many of her projects are co‐developed as books, published by Studio International (USA), Loughborough University/Marmalade Press, RGAP (UK), Sint‐Lucas Visual Arts and OPAK, FAK, KULeuven (Belgium). She has been an invited speaker for public talks at Borough Road Gallery, ICA London, National Gallery London, Tate Britain, RMIT Melbourne, American University Dubai, Royal Society London and Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Her teaching of drawing extends beyond art to students of archeology (The New School and New York University), engineering (Kings College London), architecture (The AA Schools), and choreography (Trinity Laban). She was the Course Leader for BA (Hons) Drawing from 2006–19 and is now Programme Director Fine Art: Painting, Drawing and Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

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Bridget R. Cooks is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She also serves as core faculty in the PhD Programs in Visual Studies, and Culture and Theory. Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. Cooks authored the book, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). She is currently working on her second manuscript titled, A Dream Deferred: Art of the Civil Rights Movement and the Limits of Liberalism. Parul Dave Mukherji is professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She holds a PhD from Oxford University. She has received fellowships such as the British Academy award, 2011; Baden Württemberg, Heidelberg University, Germany, 2013 and Clark Art Institute fellowship, USA, 2014. Her publications include InFlux‐ Contemporary Art in Asia, (co‐edited) New Delhi, Sage, 2013; ASA volume Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, co‐edited with Ramindar Kaur, London: Bloomsbury, 2014 and “Who is Afraid of Mimesis: Contesting the Common Sense of Indian Aesthetics through the Theory of Mimesis or Anukaran̦a Vāda” in The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Arindam Chakrabarty, London, New York, Bloomsbury, 2016. Jane de Almeida is professor at the Graduate Studies in Education, Art and History of Culture at Mackenzie University (São Paulo, Brazil) and has been visiting professor at University of California, San Diego. She was a visiting fellow at the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University and artist in residency at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (UCSD, 2018). Recently she curated the Programming the Visible exhibition about Harun Farocki’s works (2017) and directed the StereoEssays São Paulo film (2018). Jane is curator of film and art exhibitions and has published articles and books on the relationship between digital and contemporary film art. Rebecca Fortnum is an artist and academic. She has been a Reader in Fine Art at University of the Arts London, Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University and is currently Professor of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, where she leads the research programme in the School of Arts & Humanities. She was Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford in 2019. Her books include, Contemporary British Women Artists; in their own words and On Not Knowing; how artists think, which she co‐edited with Lizzie Fisher and she is the Founding Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Painting published by Intellect. Solo exhibitions include Absurd Impositions, at the V&A’s Museum of Childhood (2011), and Self Contained, at the Freud Museum London (2013). In 2020 a monograph about her painting, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, was published by Slimvolume. She is the co‐editor of A Companion to Contemporary Drawing with Kelly Chorpening. Sofia Gotti is a scholar and curator. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge and was a lecturer at Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti (NABA), Milan. Her research centers on feminist art practices in Latin America and Italy. She completed an AHRC Collaborative PhD with Tate Research and Chelsea College of Art, she worked at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Rivoli‐Torino and The Feminist Institute in New York City. Sofia has previously taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art, at University of the Arts London,

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and in 2015–2016 she was the Hilla Rebay International Curatorial Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Simon Grennan is a scholar of visual narrative and graphic novelist. He is author of A Theory of Narrative Drawing (2017), Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval (2018) and Dispossession, a graphic adaptation of a novel by Anthony Trollope (2015 – one of The Guardian Books of the Year). He is co‐author, with Roger Sabin and Julian Waite, of Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (2020), Marie Duval (2018) and The Marie Duval Archive (www.marieduval.org) and co‐editor, with Laurence Grove, of Transforming Anthony Trollope: ‘Dispossession’, Victorianism and 19th century word and image (2015), among others. Since 1990, he has been half of the international artists’ team Grennan & Sperandio, producer of over 40 comics and books. Dr. Grennan is Leading Research Fellow at the University of Chester and Principal Investigator for the project Marie Duval presents Ally Sloper: the female cartoonist and popular theatre in London 1869–1885, funded by an AHRC Research Grant: Early Career (2014). Beth Harland (1964–2019) artist, Professor of Fine Art, Lancaster University and Associate Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Painting, exhibited and curated widely. She was awarded a number of artist residencies including British School at Rome; Cité des Arts, Paris; Milchof, Berlin and iAIR at RMIT, Melbourne. Recent exhibition projects include “Impermanent Durations; On Painting and Time,” exhibited in Singapore (2016), Australia (2016), UK (2017), and USA (2019). Her publications include a four‐volume co‐edited work, Painting: Critical and Primary Sources, Bloomsbury (2015) and a series of articles linked to the research project Modes of Address in Pictorial Art in collaboration with psychologists at Liverpool Hope and UCLAN Universities, published in Leonardo (2014), Art and Perception (2016) and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (2017). Margaret Iversen is Professor Emerita of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. Her books include Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993), Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan and Barthes (2007), Writing Art History (with Stephen Melville) and Chance (both 2010). She co‐edited two special issues of journals: “Photography after Conceptual Art” for Art History and “Agency and Automatism” for Critical Inquiry. A book called Photography, Trace, and Trauma appeared in 2017. Marina Kassianidou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, University of Colorado Boulder. Her art practice focuses on relationships between mark and surface. She has exhibited work in Europe, the USA, and Australia. Selected awards include fellowships at the Ragdale Foundation and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a recipient of the 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her publications include When Words Enter the Picture (in Greek, Visual Artists Association EI.KA, 2017) and the artist books How to Know: A Space (Thkio Ppalies, 2016) and Exercise Book (P.S. Artist‐Led Projects, 2018). Ed Krčma is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses upon post‐war and contemporary drawing, and has been published in journals such as Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Master Drawings and the Burlington Magazine. His monograph, Rauschenberg/Dante: Drawing a Modern Inferno, was published by Yale University Press in 2017.

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Laura Lisbon is an artist and professor at The Ohio State University. She has exhibited internationally. In 2010, she exhibited works in “Le Paradox du Diaphane et du Mur” in Amilly, France. In 2017, she participated in “Impermanent Durations: On Painting and Time” in Lancaster, UK as well as “Gray Matters” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA. In 2001, Lisbon co‐curated “As Painting: Division and Displacement” at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She has published in La Part de l’Œil and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Contemporary Painting. Anna Lovatt is Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on the art of the 1960s and 1970s and its legacies, particularly drawing in the context of post‐Minimal and Conceptual art. She has published articles on artists including Trisha Donnelly, Janice Kerbel, Sol LeWitt, Michelle Stuart, Dorothea Rockburne, and Anne Truitt. Her book Drawing Degree Zero: The Line from Minimal to Conceptual Art was published by Penn State University Press in 2019. Kate Macfarlane is a curator and writer based in London and is co‐founder and co‐ director of Drawing Room, London. Recent curatorial projects include A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings (Drawing Room and Modern Art Oxford) 2018; Dove Allouche – Mea Culpa of a Sceptic (The Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris) 2016; Line (Lisson Gallery, London) 2016. Recent writing includes: “Intimate Reflections” in Auto Fictions  –  Contemporary Drawing, Wilhelm‐Hack‐Museum, Germany (2018); “Drawing as Thinking through Material Encounter,” in A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings (Modern Art Oxford, 2018). Sunil Manghani is Professor of Theory, Practice and Critique at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK). He teaches and writes on various aspects of critical theory, visual arts, and image studies. He is author of Image Studies: Theory and Practice (2013) and an editor of Seeing Degree Zero (2019) India’s Biennale Effect: A Politics of Contemporary Art (2016), Barthes/Burgin: Notes Towards an Exhibition (2016), Farewell to Visual Studies (2015), Images: A Reader (2006), and Images: Critical and Primary Sources (2013). Lucien Massaert studied drawing and mural painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. He was head of the drawing department in the same institution until 2015. His research and publications mainly concern an attempt to elaborate a structural theory of the visual arts starting from the works of Algirdas Julien Greimas, Jean Petitot and François. Wahl. He is co‐founder with Luc Richir of the journal of aesthetics La Part de l’Œil. Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research, The University of Central Lancashire (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Recent selected screenings, performances and presentations include, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2018–2019 (solo show), SPILL Festival of Performance (2018) SPACE studios (2018), ICA Philadelphia (2018), Arnolfini, and Spike Island, Bristol (2017), Alison Jacques Gallery (2017) and Princeton University (2016).

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Paul Moorhouse is an independent curator, writer and art historian. Currently Chief Executive of The Anthony Caro Studio, he was Senior Curator, Twentieth Century and Head of Displays at the National Portrait Gallery from 2005 to 2017; before that, he was Senior Curator at the Tate. He has organized numerous exhibitions internationally, including major retrospectives devoted to Sherman, Hodgkin, ­ Giacometti, Richter, Warhol, Caro, Riley, Kossoff and Andrews. His extensive ­publications include the recent books Salvador Dali: The Impossible Collection; Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person, John Virtue, Cindy Sherman and Alberto Giacometti: Pure Presence. He is currently curating the exhibition Makers of the Modern, a major ­twentieth-century survey of artists portraying each other, which opens in Moscow in 2021. Tamarin Norwood is an artist and writer. She gained her doctorate (Drawing: the Point of Contact) in 2018 as a Clarendon Scholar at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her artwork has been shown in the UK and abroad including at Tate Britain, ICA Philadelphia and MOCCA Toronto. She has most recently undertaken residencies at Spike Island, Bristol researching movement in drawing through 3D printing and sign language poetry with the support of Arts Council England, and researching doodling, mind wandering and rest as part of Hubbub, the Wellcome Collection’s inaugural interdisciplinary residency. Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CENTRECATH) at the University of Leeds. Committed to creating and extending an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she researches issues of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art and contemporary art under the concept: “the virtual feminist museum” (Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive, 2007; After‐affects/After‐images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Museum, Manchester, 2013; Art in the Time‐Space of Memory and Migration, Freud Museum & Wild Pansy Press, 2013). Since 2007, she has elaborated the concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism, in four publications with Max Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2011) Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (I B Tauris, 2013), Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (I B Tauris, 2015), and Concentrationary Art (2018). In 2018 she published a major monograph on a major modern artwork: Charlotte Salomon: The Nameless in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018). Recent publications include are Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (Verso, 2019), The Case against “Van Gogh”: Memory, Place and Modernist Disillusionment (Thames & Hudson, 2019) and Monroe’s Mov(i)es: Class, Gender and Nation in the work, image‐making and agency of “Marilyn Monroe” (2020). Magdalena Radomska is Post‐Marxist art historian and historian of philosophy, Assistant Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. She holds a PhD in art history, and has received scholarships at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. She was a director and lecturer of the course Writing Humanities after the Fall of Communism in 2009 at Central European University in Budapest. In 2013 her book The Politics of Movements of Hungarian Neoavantgarde

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(1966–1980) was published. Currently Radomska is engaged in research on Post‐ Communist art in Post‐Communist Europe (grant received from the National Science Center) and criticism of capitalism in art (book: he Plural Subject: Art and Crisis after 2008) and – as her second PhD – she is writing a monograph on Post‐Marxism. She is a member of both Polish and Hungarian AICA and editor of magazine Czas Kultury. Radomska is a founder of Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research On East‐ Central European Art. João Ribas is a curator, museum professional, and writer. He was the curator of the 4th Ural Biennial, 2017, the Gjon Mili Biennial, Kovoso, 2019, and of the Portugal Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Previously Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, where he also held the position of Deputy Director and Senior Curator (2014–2018), he was also Curator of the MIT List Visual Arts Center (2009–13) and of the Drawing Center, New York (2007–09). He is the winner of four AICA exhibition awards (2008–2011), and of the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2010). He has organised numerous exhibitions internationally, and his writing on art and culture has been published in numerous publications, monographs, and magazines such as Artforum, Afterall, Artnews, Art in America, Frieze, Mousse, Spike, and The Guardian. His edited volume In the Holocene, on the intersection of art and science, was published by Sternberg Press (2014). He has taught at Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts in New York, Lusófona University, and Catholic University, Porto, among other institutions. Matthew Ritchie is a contemporary visual artist born in the United Kingdom in 1964 and living and working in New York. His practice includes painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, performance, virtual reality, music, text, and projections and has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennial, the São Paulo Biennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seville Biennale and the Havana Biennale. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and numerous other institutions worldwide; including several permanent large‐ scale installations. He has written for Artforum, Flash Art, Art & Text, October, the Contemporary Arts Journal, and Edge. He is currently an Artist‐in‐Residence at MIT and a Mentor Professor at Columbia University. David Ryan is a visual artist and musician. He studied at Liverpool and Coventry Polytechnics, and on a traveling German Scholarship to Hamburg, Lubeck, and Berlin. Ryan has also performed and broadcast for Danish Radio, UNAM Mexico, BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM, Glasgow CCA Radiophrenia, Radio Slovenjia, Sky Italia Classica TV, and numerous Festivals, including Nuova Consonanza, Rome (2009) Sonic Illuminations, British Film Institute, London (2009), and Namusica (2013/2014), Naples, Italy. Recent exhibitions include “Crossing Abstraction,” Berlin and Erfurt, 2009/2012; “Afterimage,” Emerson Gallery 2013, “At the Point of Gesture,” Turps Gallery/Wimbledon Space, (2014/2015); “Drawing towards Sound” (2015) looking at the relationship between drawing, video, musical notation at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich; “Ex Roma,” APT Gallery,

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London (2017), and “In Nomine Luce” at the Museale Complesso Santa Maria Della Scala, Siena (2017). He has also shown work at the Venice Biennale (2015) and Ars Musica Brussels (2018). Stephanie Straine became Senior Curator, Modern & Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2020. Formerly she was Curator, Exhibitions and Projects at Modern Art Oxford, where she recently curated “A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists Drawings” (2018), in collaboration with Drawing Room, London. Previously she was Assistant Curator, Exhibitions and Displays, at Tate Liverpool, and Exhibitions Organizer, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. She holds a joint honors MA Fine Art degree from the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art; a History of Art MLitt from the University of Glasgow, and a PhD from University College London. Eric Wear has lived in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Bangkok since 1988. He taught design culture and theory in the School of Design, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has participated in projects spanning contemporary and historic Chinese art, with a focus on interpretation and moral and social claims for art. With Chuk‐Kwan Ting he has a website on literati approaches to material culture: www. huancuitang.org

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank everyone involved in bringing this book from its conception to its final production in print. There are too many to mention but we wish to s­ pecially acknowledge the contributions made by the following: CCW Graduate School, University of the Arts London Camberwell College of Art Undergraduate Fine Art Programme Royal College of Art Research Office and RCA School of Arts and Humanities RCA & CCW staff: Juan Cruz, Chantal Faust, Johnny Golding, Nick Gorse, Sophia Phoca, Malcolm Quinn, Daniel Sturgis and Emma Wakelin Trish Scott and Murray Anderson for their thoughtful and efficient editorial assistance Mary Malin, Transtype copyeditor, and the editorial team at Wiley Blackwell Christina Riant for assistance with transcription Foster Spragge for making the Berger event happen Anne Massey whose suggestion initiated this book Matt Franks, Theo Franks, Richard Elliott, Eve Fortnum, Marlow and Stella Elliott‐ Fortnum for support during the project All the authors and artists who have contributed to this book for their tenacity and generosity. Ian Heywood for his help with Beth Harland’s chapter The editors would particularly like to acknowledge Beth Harland (1964–2019) as an inspirational artist and writer and pay tribute to her powerful and important ­contribution to this volume.

Introduction Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum

This Companion explores the way drawing is being used by contemporary artists to understand and comment on the world. As several of the book’s contributors have pointed out, the word drawing is embedded in our language as a verb as well as a noun, allowing us to both reflect upon the world and actively engage with it. Drawing can, and does, effect change, often starting with the way artists themselves choose to respond to their experience and environment. Across this volume’s twenty‐seven new essays, drawing is explored as potential and as catalyst. Crucially for us, it is the practitioner’s perspective that is central throughout these contributions and, as that champion of drawing John Ruskin demonstrated, the artist’s viewpoint can also embrace that of the critic, theorist or historian. Rather than seeing art as an activity that takes

Figure 0.1  Kelly Chorpening (2019) A Quiet Interior, Pencil and acrylic on paper mounted to steel 77 x 65 x 64 cm. Source: Courtesy of Kelly Chorpening. A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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place within an ivory tower, the practices explored in this Companion ­demonstrate ways drawing is intimately involved with the world. As artists and educators, our editorial choices emerge from a long‐standing interest in the way drawing is simultaneously at the heart of fine art yet also expands beyond it, running through science, humanities and design as a tool for thinking and communication. This book comments on the importance of drawing as a tool for thought across disciplines, yet focuses primarily on contemporary art practices that utilize drawing as both process and finished artefact. This Companion is not a history of drawing, but instead proceeds from an interest in how shifts in attitudes to the practice of drawing reflect the contingencies of their particular historical moment. In commissioning chapters, we have been concerned with exploring the working conditions of artists, noting how expression develops in relation to context. It has often been pointed out, that even the most subtle moderations in mark‐making enable the viewer to identify the general time period or national context in which a work was produced. The precise way an era stamps itself onto work is a source of fascination; the elasticity of drawing is especially beguiling when social and political concerns make themselves known through extremely limited means, using only a pencil and sheet of paper. In thinking about the current moment, it is also easy to see that technological innovations over the past 150 years, including the development of photographic processes, have utterly transformed drawing’s arena, allowing artists to re‐think its mechanisms or apparatus. Notions of observation, representation and audience have been challenged in the digital era as never before and the essays in this volume trace back the lineages of these concepts in relation to drawing. Key terms that have always defined the discipline, such as line, erasure, positive and negative are now deployed within frameworks where they hold multiple meanings, expanding our understandings of their function across all forms of drawing. Indeed, acknowledging the ease with which drawing today is seen and disseminated via web, print‐based media and international art fairs, there is danger work created with particular intent under a variety of conditions, might be appraised context‐free. And although, as is noted in several of the essays in this volume, drawing has a compelling immediacy, the meaning of techniques and approaches change over time. Therefore, these chapters proceed from the belief that contexualisation remains a crucial and ever‐evolving critical act, as technological change enables the mass‐sharing of (networked) images and allows for new virtual, spatial and cross disciplinary understanding of drawing. With this in mind the collection of essays aims to re‐appraise drawing within place and space as well as history, highlighting the paradigm shifts in attitudes towards practice relevant to the current moment. Seminal drawing exhibitions, along with their accompanying catalogues, have been particularly influential to thinking within this Companion. For example, the Museum of Modern Art has been a leader of debates through the staging of exhibitions such as Bernice Rose’s 1976 Drawing Now and 1992 Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing, Laura Hoptman’s 2002 exhibition Drawing Now: Eight Propositions and Cornelia Butler and Catherine de Zegher’s 2010 On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. A number of publications have helped expand notions of what drawing can be, such as Tania Kovats’ 2006 The Drawing Book, Vitamin D; New Perspectives in Drawing, edited by Emma Dexter of 2005 and its 2013 follow‐up Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing, Deanna Petherbridge’s  The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice, 2010 and Katharine Stout’s Contemporary Drawing: From the 1960s to Now of 2014. Two exhibition spaces dedicated to drawing, Drawing Center New York and Drawing Room London, have also had an important

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role in expanding the discipline’s definition and strengthening its status as a field within contemporary art. In scanning the range of our contributions, with authors and practices from a wide geographical spread, the reader will be able to see that whilst drawing is often spoken of as a ‘universal visual language’, with the potential to navigate the problems of global communication, cultural nuances are in fact vital to a full understanding of drawing’s future. Of course, a volume such as this, risks becoming tokenistic in its inclusions and incomplete through its omissions, but it is our belief that the quality of these wide‐ranging contributions, across such a broad range of situations and cultural contexts opens up the discussion of drawing’s necessary place within contemporary art practice. Chapters examine how drawing emerges from the workings of the mind, eye and hand to represent, question, and reflect on, both the real and the imagined. In relation to drawing’s broad scope the book has been divided into three sections. The first, entitled ‘The Power of Drawing’, deals with the immediacy and relevance we have discussed above, with essays that explore drawing’s ability to comment and reflect on its particular historical moment. It establishes precedents for approaches that have currency within contemporary drawing today, and demonstrates how drawing is a mode of expression with potential to not only articulate urgent concerns such as those around issues of race and gender, but to also effect change. Chapters within this section reveal how artists respond to specific regional histories, how for example drawing is used to make anti‐capitalist statements in former Eastern Bloc countries, or challenge conservative values throughout South America. The relation of drawing’s accessibility to feminist modes of critique is also explored across the urgent practices of several contemporary women artists. In other chapters, drawings by artists from India, Lebanon, Sweden, Tunisia, UK and USA are examined for their ability to express the precarious circumstances of individuals in a world that is increasingly connected by global media, often achieved through the simplest of means: graphite, charcoal or ink on paper. The second section, ‘The Condition of Drawing’, examines what drawing is and does. It focuses on the specific characteristics of drawing to reflect on both the optic and haptic qualities of the medium. There is close analysis of the processes of drawing such as observation, representation and documentation, often in relation to the ways their meaning has changed over time. These essays go some way towards establishing drawing’s philosophical basis and its ability to enact thinking and ideas in particularly effective ways. Through the exploration of drawings made in and of the world, the objectivity of the artist is questioned in relation to phenomenological experience. Drawings are also examined for their ability to somehow reconcile the relationship between the seen and thought. And through these debates, distinctions between figuration and abstraction as well as notions of skill and tradition in drawing are transcended to reveal drawing’s ontology. The final section, ‘The Expanse of Drawing’ explores drawing’s boundaries as a discipline and its cross and inter‐disciplinary nature within contemporary art practice world‐wide. This last collection of essays demonstrates the pliancy of drawing to both absorb and become involved with practices outside art, in order to characterize it as an especially adaptive and innovative discipline within contemporary art. Here, drawing is a pioneer in critically responding to various relationships at play within creative practices today concerning time, space, site and audience. Often, work is made specifically in response to a particular location, performed live, or made collaboratively, and these types of drawing practices offer a valuable means to explore a more intertwined relationship between theory and material processes. It is in this final chapter the field of drawing widens to include Chinese calligraphy, musical notation,

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diagrams, architectural plans and graphic novels, where artists, often incorporating the use of computers, create work that is both visual and ‘informational’. This Companion has also been shaped by experiences we have shared as artists and educators, such as devising residencies and workshops that have helped us to understand the processes and decision‐making of drawing practices1. Drawing alongside others has enabled in depth exploration into the integral relationship technical and material choices have to meaning. These residencies have challenged our own habitual processes of making, as situations where ideas, tools and methods can be observed, where drawing closely traces thought, and where individuals influence each other often at a subconscious level. As educators, in a number of contexts and capacities, we have observed students as they have deliberated over their own choices. If any one thing has shaped our vision for this book, it is the notion of the artist’s ‘thinking hand’2 as it addresses a whole range of factors as to why and how something is drawn.

Figure 0.2  ‘Phantom Limn’ residency at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 2017. Source: courtesy of Kelly Chorpening

In seeking to understand our own attitudes towards drawing and its pedagogy, it is important to acknowledge that an institution, Camberwell College of Arts features prominently in our shared experience.3 Although we have been educated in different disciplines and in different universities, our time contributing to the undergraduate Drawing course at Camberwell has led us to reflect upon the evolution of the teaching of drawing alongside the changing, multifarious landscape that constitutes contemporary art. Camberwell has long been renowned within British education for the teaching of drawing, and for forging new alignments that have influenced the theorisation of art. In particular an Art History department existed there between 1961–2000, where a remarkably vibrant relationship developed between artists and art historians. Michael Podro (b.UK 1931 – d. 2008) joined the teaching staff in 1961, and as the Head of Art History from 1964–67, altered the delivery of the subject with practising artists in mind. Podro’s fundamental interest in the artist’s mind and the close alignment between thinking and making is evident in his critical writing. For example he confidently states in his book Depiction (1998), ‘artists …[do] not set out to show the look of the world as something previously known, but rather to extend the thread of recognition in new and complex

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structures of their own.’4 (Podro, 1998: vii). He had an especially good rapport with artists teaching within the School at the time, such as Frank Auerbach (b. Germany 1931) and R. B. Kitaj, (b. USA 1932 – d. 2007), and their conversations surely would have concerned the teaching of drawing, as their instruction moved students away from the measured technique that had prevailed under Euston Road School artists such as William Coldstream (b.UK 1908 – d. 1987) and later, Euan Uglow (b.UK 1932 – d. 2000), towards a more searching, expressive approach.5 We have closely studied student drawings of this period that reveal this profound shift of influence within education.

Figure 0.3  Frank Auerbach (1990) from Seven Portraits, Michael. Etching on paper Dimensions: image: 178 x 147 mm © Tate, London 2019

Of course, these changes were not simply a matter of technique. As staff and student demographics became more diverse, work began to reflect the critical imperatives of gender, sexual orientation, race and religion that mirrored societal change and thus expanded creative possibilities. For example, the artist Mary Kelly (b. USA 1941) joined the Art History department at Camberwell in the early 1970s and her course ‘Women and Art’ was quite possibly the first of its kind in the UK. (Kelly: 2018, unpaginated) From this time on at Camberwell, the teaching of drawing was increasingly complicated by social dynamics; the life room became a more politicised space. Students expected greater agency over decisions in their work, instead of following a taught example, and this cast doubt over the relevance of many long‐standing methods of teaching. Currently Camberwell maintains its special interest, offering dedicated undergraduate and postgraduate courses in drawing and its expanded forms. Within the University key instigators and collaborators have included The Centre for Drawing, founded by Angela Kingston, and over time run by Avis Newman, Anita Taylor and Tania Kovats, as well as the Rootstein Hopkins Chair

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of Drawing, Stephen Farthing who, during his tenure, explored numerous and inventive forms for his investigation into contemporary drawing practice and its pedagogy. In the mid 2000s, as newly appointed staff, we wanted to reflect on this history and relate it to art practices and research outside of academia. Our goal was to hold an event that would interrogate the perception that drawing was no longer taught in the contemporary art school, and to relate this conversation to the much broader field of drawing emerging within contemporary art. ‘Berger on Drawing’ (2005)6, had recently been published, a book that featured the writer John Berger (b. UK 1926 – d. 2017) in dialogue with his son the artist Yves Berger (France, b. 1976) about drawing. We invited both John and Yves, along with John’s colleague, the artist Miles Richmond (b. UK 1922 – d. 2008), a devoted pupil of the influential artist educator David Bomberg (b.UK 1890 – d. 1957) for a day of drawing and discussion. The day began when John, Yves and Miles joined Drawing course staff and students for an intense few hours of life drawing. In the afternoon, we held an open ‘in conversation’, to a capacity audience, mainly of artists, of all ages. The day ended with a reception and exhibition of drawings by twenty or so artists who had taught or studied at Camberwell from the 1960s to the current course.7

Figure 0.4  John and Yves Berger drawing at Camberwell College, University of the Arts London, 2007. Source: Courtesy of Craig Dow.

Still under the spell of the morning’s activity, we opened the afternoon’s discussion with the same question posed at the start of ‘Berger on Drawing’: ‘Where are we when we draw?’ In his response, John Berger reflected upon the morning of 40–50 people of all ages drawing together, how that ‘in that shared energy, it seems to me that we were all actually equal, despite our different experiences; all equal in the sense that we were all failing and we were all wanting to go on. And I think that’s something very important.’8 The ensuing discussion followed this line, shifting the conversation away from the usual polemics concerning the merits of technical skill vs. ideas, towards a more

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philosophical discussion about the processes of drawing and their potential to form meaning. As Berger’s remark indicates, his perception of drawing was that it is inherently democratic, partially because of the way it proceeds without direction or verbal articulation. The shared positioning of ‘failing’ but still ‘wanting to go on’ creates a dialogue between its practitioners. Yves developed this notion of community by suggesting, ‘one learns from watching others in the practice of drawing. For example, in the life room, you are in the practice of looking at the marks you have put down, but also the marks that others have put down.’ The suggestion was that the life‐room is not just about learning technique, but also the exercising of empathy, or as John phrased it, ‘approaching work from a position of wanting to know more.’ In this it is clear that the Bergers are describing how an ethos of drawing begins to take hold, urging the individual to approach work (and life) from a position of acknowledging both an absence of knowledge and a desire for it. Attempting a fuller definition, John said: ‘I completely understand this category of ‘observational drawing’ because that means that we are there drawing and there’s something there that we are drawing. But there is something also about the term ‘observational’ that seems to me not quite precise. Because actually, as soon as one starts to draw, as soon as the process begins, it’s a process or rather an experience of astonishment, because whatever it is that one is drawing, however ordinary, or exceptional, the more one starts following one’s look the more astonished one is [in terms of the discovery involved]. Astonishment is at the heart of drawing and astonishment is at the heart of living. Here drawing and life are quite close. The word observational doesn’t insist upon this astonishment.’

Figure 0.5  Rebecca Fortnum (2013), Eyes Wide Shut (Billie). Pencil, wax and oil on paper, 2013 Each image 70 x 100cm. Source: Courtesy Rebecca Fortnum.

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Our discussion that day explored drawing as embodied experience, as an artist in the world creating drawings that demand from the whole self, and not just the hand. Richmond remarked that ‘in drawing you have to be in it, in that you can’t think about drawing. It’s difficult to talk without thinking about what to say. You almost have to be beside yourself to draw. The daily practice of drawing – it’s done with the whole body – all our body is involved.’ What Richmond seems to be describing here, is drawing as thinking, that is, a form of thinking that doesn’t necessarily use words. This led him to speculate on drawing’s difficult fit within university frameworks: ‘I suspect drawing was eliminated in quite a few colleges because certain alarm bells started ringing. People started to say that it wasn’t part of the rational discourse. I think it goes back to Plato, the notion that there is something irrational about art that’s hard to defend, and it has to be defended in a rational manner. It’s an inherent contradiction.’

In the current UK educational climate when all forms of creative thinking can appear under siege, Richmond’s reflections seemed to us to have considerable traction. It is thus important within education to define drawing as a meeting point or articulation of a cross‐section of histories, skills and intellectual enquiry. As the theorist Thierry de Duve has said: “I want to plead here for the maintenance of art schools conceived as crucibles in which technical apprenticeship, theoretical instruction and the formation of judgment are brought together to create a unique question of address.” (Madoff, 2009: 24)

As both artists and educators, we might usefully describe teaching drawing as a wish to further the understanding of the relationship between form, materiality and a philosophical quest that is both malleable and elastic enough to suit the purposes of the diverse backgrounds and ever‐shifting ambitions and priorities of artists today. We believe the artist’s ‘thinking hand’ is capable of addressing, in both immediate and protracted ways, any subject the world might care to provide. In thinking through the shifts in attitudes towards the teaching and making of drawing that occurred in the 1960s, our drawing event made clear to us that, whether through the impact of art historical discussions, studio instruction or a dominant value system, drawings produced during the same period cohere. In contemporary art education, few directives exist, and educators seldom seem to overtly prescribe what students should make, often celebrating a diversity of approaches. Nonetheless, drawings always seem to bear an inflection of their moment. This of course gives us cause to question, for future audiences, what will characterize drawings being made today? This Companion to Contemporary Drawing offers contemplation over some of the complex contingencies that revolve around purpose, technique and identity that are integral to drawing’s meaning. By commissioning chapters by artists, curators and art historians from around the globe, with a range of approaches from the scholarly to the performative, we hope to initiate not only what this might be, but more importantly how a reciprocal flow of ideas around drawing can inform how work is made, shown and historicised in future.

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Notes 1 For example, the research project Drawing ‐ in and outside – writing, (2012) which formed a study of the entanglement between drawing and writing conducted by ourselves and the Belgian artists, Peter Morrens and Ans Nys during a year‐long collaboration, or Phantom Limn, which took place in Dovecot studios, Edinburgh (2017) and included eight artists from the UK and Europe producing drawings over a period of one week in a gallery open to the public. 2 Thanks to Robert Storr’s essay ‘Dear Colleague’ in ‘Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) edited by Steven Henry Madoff in 2009. Storr makes reference to French art historian Henri Focillon’s notion of ‘the mind in the hand.’ (Madoff, 2009:64) 3 Now part of University of the Arts London, ‘Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts,’ was founded in 1898 in South‐East London and has a long tradition of excellence in the teaching of drawing. There was a department of Art History between 1961 – 2000 which pioneered an approach with working artists in mind. For further details of the art history department’s ethos please see Beth Williamson, Art history in the art school: the critical historians of Camberwell (2011), Journal of Art Historiography. 4 The artists that Podro discusses in Depiction are Donatello, Rembrandt, Chardin and Hogarth. 5 A group of British painters centred round the ‘School of Drawing and Painting’ that opened in at Fitzroy Street, London, in 1937, and soon transferred to nearby Euston Road. Its founding teachers were William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers. The School closed at the outbreak of World War II but by 1945 Pasmore, Coldstream, Rogers, along with Lawrence Gowing, a former pupil at the School, were all teaching at Camberwell. 6 Savage, J. ed. (2006) Berger on Drawing, Occasional Press, Cork. 7 The exhibition, ‘Here and Elsewhere’, included work by past and present Camberwell staff and students including; Andrew Carter, Kelly Chorpening, Jerry Danziger, Angela Eames, Anthony Eyton RA, Eve Fortnum, Rebecca Fortnum, Graham Giles, Julie Giles, Francis Hoyland, Chris Livesey, Frances Mann, Sargy Mann, James Pearson, Christopher Pemberton, Annette Robinson, Peter Saunders, Philip White and Jeanne Woodcraft. 8 Quotations from John Berger, Yves Berger and Miles Richmond come from the audio recording of the drawing discussion hosted by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum at Camberwell College of Arts on 24 April, 2007.

References Kelly, M. (2018) Women in the Arts: Mary Kelly, Frieze Magazine, 2 October, https:// frieze.com/article/women‐arts‐mary‐kelly, accessed 28 April 2019. Madoff, S. (2009) Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England. Podro, M (1998) Depiction, Yale University Press.

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Further Reading Savage, J. ed. (2005) Berger on Drawing, Occasional Press, Cork. de Duve, T. (1994) When Form Becomes Attitude – and Beyond, in N. de Ville & S. Foster (eds.) The Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural Context. Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, pp. 23–40. Chorpening K, Fortnum R, Morrens P, Nys, A, Drawing ‐ in and outside – writing, (2012) published by Research Group for Artists Publications.

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Part I

The Power of Drawing

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The Black Index Bridget R. Cooks

The ways that America’s leading visual artists have portrayed the African‐ American—as slave or freedman, servant or member of the middle class, minstrel performer or wartime hero, ridiculous stereotype or forceful leader—form an index that reveals how the majority of American society felt about its black neighbors. —Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940. A drawing or painting is no longer simply envisaged at this point as the frozen trace that functions to make the artist’s process of perceiving immediately manifest to the eye of the viewer. It is rather something which draws the viewer into an intensified awareness of how he or she sees things. —Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination (2000). With their deviant movements, carefully defined features, and exquisitely detailed faces, the serial drawings of Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, and Whitfield Lovell offer refreshing approaches to visual indexes of Black bodies. For some artists, the act of drawing is only a preliminary step toward a final artwork yet to be realized. However, these artists create drawings as complete manifestations of transient forms  –  humans in various stages of life and death. Each presents the beauty of Blackness, not to promote its consumerism, but to provide a space for meditation on the invisibility, misrecognition, and complexity of Black people. Since the moment of European contact with Africans, literary and visual representations have been organized through the Western perception of the world. Colonial images of Black people were generated internationally – from the nineteenth‐century watercolors of Sarah Baartman in South Africa, to photographs of enslaved Africans in South Carolina, and to stock images of wanted runaways in newspapers throughout the British colonies and the Danish West Indies. Like the images that art historian, A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Guy C. McElroy (1990) describes in the epigraph above, images of Black people made by racial scientists, artists, and anthropologists formed an index for the purposes of identification, categorization, and containment. Physical differences were categorized as either self or other, a separation that produced a false hierarchy of humanity. The social and psychological impacts of these projects have had a ripple effect across space and time. Their destructive logics are sustained today through the obsessive state management and destruction of Black people in the name of law and order. Powerful in their political intention, yet disguised as scientific objectivity, these images tell the viewer more about the maker than the sitter. In response to the visual fixing of Blacks as subhuman, photographic practices by Black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to fight fire with fire by creating their own index from an insider’s point of view. From the determined daguerreotypes of abolitionist author Frederick Douglass in the mid‐nineteenth century, to the Exhibit of American Negroes at the 1900 Paris Exposition organized by philosopher and historian W.E.B. DuBois, and to New Negro studio photographers such as James VanDerZee, James Latimer Allen, and Richard Samuel Roberts, counter images were carefully constructed to unsettle previous and ongoing photographic projects that upheld the legacy of White supremacy. The artists featured in this essay build upon the tradition of Black self‐representation as counter to colonialist images. Their translations of photography challenge its long‐assumed qualities of objectivity, legibility, and identification – the phenomenological premise of the index. Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, and Whitfield Lovell have changed the terms of the index for visual identification. Their drawing projects create an alternative practice, what I am calling a Black index, that counters the assumptions of photography as the most accurate and transparent form for providing information about Black subjects. If “indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents,” their function as useful signs have failed to establish the recognition of Black people as photographic subjects. (Krauss 1977, p. 70) The Black index is a strategy to contest the overwhelming number of photographs of Black people as victims of violent crimes that are circulated with such regularity and volume that they no longer refer to the persons they depict. Instead, the photographs become a non‐event that marks the monotonous, unremarkable, and numbing condition of the normality of Blackness as death. The Black index creates new synapses, perceptive inroads into conceiving Black death as loss – loss to be mourned and remembered. It argues the loss of something that existed in the full complexity of form and spirit that is not presented in the daily march of photographs of Black death. These artists use drawing to question and transform the reliance on photography as the source for visual objectivity and understanding. In their hands, the index still serves as a finding aid, but the artists challenge their viewers’ desire for classification and, instead, redirect them toward different information outside of the photographic, to communicate and offer insight. I argue that these artists accomplish three things through drawing: (i) make viewers aware of their own expectations of a portrait; (ii) interrupt traditional epistemologies of portraiture through unexpected and unconventional presentations; and (iii) present the Black body through a conceptual lens that acknowledges the legacy of Black containment that is always already present in viewing strategies. Their drawings are not visually similar, nor do they resemble strategies of counter image projects through photography. Their dissimilarity hints at the unexplored approaches to offering new representations of Blackness even in a moment in which contemporary viewers have



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greater access to images of Black bodies than ever before. Their strategies suggest understandings of Blackness and the racial terms of our neo‐liberal condition that are alternatives to legal and popular interpretations. Their art offers a paradigmatic shift within Black visual culture.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: The Evanesced In her ongoing India ink on paper series, The Evanesced (2016) (Figure  1.1), California‐based artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle addresses the alarming numbers of Black women internationally who have been abused, murdered, “disappeared” and trafficked. She intends for the over 100 drawings of women to highlight the subsequent lack of media attention given to their murders. One particular case that prompted her to make the work is that of Los Angeles serial killer, Lonnie D. Franklin, Jr., known as “the Grim Sleeper.” At his arrest in 2010, officers discovered more than 100 photographs of the Black women Franklin targeted as his victims in the 1980s and early 2000s. Many of the women have yet to be identified. Hinkle’s work resists letting the lives, and deaths, of the women disappear. By making them visible through individual drawings, she seeks to redefine their murders as a loss that should not pass unnoticed. Her title for the series emphasizes the false sense of the women’s disposability as objects suitable for violence, whose deaths are treated as unremarkable. The impossible bodies she draws to represent Franklin’s victims and other Black women whose lives have ended tragically, intervene in their dismissal. Hinkle draws in ink rather than pencil, charcoal, or Conté crayon  –  the traditional media expected for works on paper. The permanency of ink forces her to commit to her initial mark making and not overthink her gestures. This practice stems from her belief, materially and conceptually, that “artists don’t make mistakes” (Cooks 2017a). In The Evanesced, Hinkle uses ink on raw paper so that it is impossible to erase her marks, and thus foreclose the erasure of Black women as her subject matter. Her choice of materials, along with the determination to manifest representations of the forgotten, empowers Hinkle to make the women visible, without apologies. Although she has looked at Franklin’s archive of photographs as a starting point for some of the drawings, his images, which she describes as “mementos of power,” proved to be too disturbing (Cooks 2017a). Alternatively, she chose to look at photographs shared by the victims’ family members. These photographs, a combination of professional headshots, graduation pictures, and candid snapshots, show family bonds, friendship, and love. Some were carefully framed and matted with lace doilies indicating their histories as privately possessed photographs taken by the police from bedroom nightstands or domestic “walls of pride” to help locate the women. These photographs provide a glimpse into the women’s lives that inspired Hinkle’s drawings. However, Hinkle prefers to work instinctively, saying that “the images come from a very raw, intuitive, visionary place” (Cooks 2017a). Her final drawings do not visually recall the photographs. The resulting 12 × 9 in. artworks on paper are installed with different dimensions, but always in a grid pattern. The modernist format emphasizes the institutional uniformity that police use to present mugshots and photographs of missing victims. In mugshots, faces are defined in discreet boxes, where it becomes difficult to focus on the uniqueness of each person. The volume and repetition of the same composition makes the faces blur together,

Figure 1.1  Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (2016) The Evanesced. India ink and watercolor on raw paper. Each 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 in.). Source: Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Michael Underwood.



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leaving one’s memory as soon as the next face is in view. To challenge this, Hinkle presents each woman as a fleshy, energized body in motion. Her linear gestures ensure that the women look alive and in the process of doing something of their own will. It’s important for her to show that “the women can’t be contained” (Cooks 2017a). They fight against the numbing monotony of the grid of victims. Hinkle explains, “I’m really embracing permanence through the ink to challenge death. Death is not a permanence. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. It’s the same with a line. Drawing something to you or drawing something out of you. Drawing is performative” (Cooks 2017a). Discussing the dual meanings of the word “draw” speaks at the complexity of her project. Drawing something to you references the power to entice another person – an act of attraction that Hinkle hopes is imbued in The Evanesced. Drawing something out suggests the power to illicit a response from another – in this case, engagement between the viewer and her subject matter. The viscosity of the fluid and the representational purpose of the ink allows it to serve as a life force in her art. In #145, Hinkle presents a woman mid‐cartwheel – feet in the air and knees bent in preparation for landing. Serpentine lines trace the movement of her legs and the curve of her butt. Smudges of ink and thin curved lines mimic her motion. The upper part of her body shows doubling: she has two heads and two pairs of breasts. At first, they appear as multiple positions of her complex movement. However, the heads are distinct: one has a mass of hair pooled beneath it, and the other’s hair is closely cropped. This fantastical body may be just that – a new kind of living being. Alternatively, it may signal the changes in one woman over time, or suggest a close relationship between women who have become a part of each other. In another fantastical moment, the woman in #121 is both conjurer and the materials of her alchemy. Her skirt of fire engulfs the lips of a large bowl. The element heats the object, but does not burn her skin. The flames take on a variety of rich colors as they hug her form. The heat moves through her body making her hair appear as dark clouds of smoke that float above her turquoise and purple head wrap. With a sharp gaze focused on the bowl, she fans the flames, coercing her concoction to obey. Three breasts, each one lower than the next, provide the substance for her work. Otherworldly, magical, and dreamlike, Hinkle gives viewers a glimpse into the power of this woman. She is mythmaker and shape‐shifter. We witness her gifts but need to know more to identify what she is doing. This lack of information is the unfinished story. It parallels the truncated life of a woman who was in the midst of living. Hinkle uses the term “unportraits” as a descriptor of her work. The women she limns are not recognizable as mimetic renderings, proffered in a traditional portrait. Instead, she enlivens the women by imagining how dynamically they lived and incorporates the uniqueness of each individual into the gestures of her depictions. In this way, Hinkle considers other kinds of information that is about the fullness and vitality of the women’s lives in order to resist their codification. In #117, Hinkle shows a modestly dressed woman in the foreground, with two other faces in profile emerging behind her. At the base of the figure, ten feet move under her dress. These unexpected extremities recall a detail from Kara Walker’s Gone: A Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b’tween the Thighs of one Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) in which a woman in a floor length dress stands on tip‐toe to kiss her lover. The romance is troubled by an additional pair of feet behind her own tipped heels. This surprise doubling forces the viewer to ask: Who

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else is present and what is this hidden person doing? The oppression and eroticism of multiplicity suggested by Walker has a different affect in Hinkle’s drawings. Some of the feet in #117 bear weight and others are in motion as if helping the woman shuffle along. The three visible heads are adorned with vibrant wraps that suggest strength in numbers. Their unity brings dimensionality and depth to the women. With her elbows bent to make some room, the front figure dances and bears gifts. The long‐ stemmed flowers in each of her hands are nearly indistinguishable from the floral print of her dress. Hinkle’s lines trace the silhouette of her body with an energy that makes the flowers bounce on the surface of the fabric. A force coming off of the page, this woman accepts any challenge and comes with reinforcements. In Hinkle’s drawings, the women seem oblivious to the possibility of surveillance. Unconcerned with the viewer’s gaze, they are self‐composed and able to be themselves. They are in control of what motivates them and how they move. With the privilege of self‐definition, they have the ability to say no as an act of affirmation. This power of affirmation is mediated through Hinkle’s form – she draws them into a presentation that negates a void. Drawing allows Hinkle to create presence in the absence of the women she depicts. In The Evanesced, drawing has a twinned function. First, drawing is creation through mark making. Second, drawing is an act of extraction and revelation. Hinkle shows something within by drawing it out. Her series addresses the banality of Black death by interrupting its commonplace with unusual representations. Presenting them as human‐like rather than explicitly human, calls for viewers to spend more time looking in order to understand what they are seeing. In particular, The Evanesced compels viewers to study the depiction longer than if it were a “missing person” image. Hinkle uses affirmation as a foil. Her works say, “I see you and I miss you” – an utterance that should accompany the presentation of the dead. The ink medium matches the conceptual purpose of the series. Hinkle explains, The India ink is blood to me. When it flows and you dip that quill it feels so good. It’s unmitigated. It’s there. And then when it dries you have to repeat that gesture and find yourself again. With The Evanesced it was really important to me to not judge whatever came out on the page. It’s like we’re talking about judging different iterations of blackness. This woman is going to be petite, this woman is going to be curvy, this woman is going to have fifty breasts. This woman will have no breasts. This woman is going to have a head and look at you. This woman is not going to have a head at all because that’s what this shit feels like. You know? It’s like just letting it flow. Normally I’m doing this gesture—taking in the photograph and seeing what it wants. But in The Evanesced it’s about getting things out. Drawing it out. (Cooks 2017a)

Drawing out the lives of the murdered in The Evanesced conflates a flow of ink and with a stream of blood. Hinkle utilizes this substance to make a visual and metaphorical stain  –  a blemish and sign of ruin  –  that forms the women’s hair, bodies, and clothes. Allowing the ink to be a life force that flows visually onto the paper imbues the stains with richness and depth. In this series, stains are not negative; instead they serve as evidence of temporality. They are the places where the ink saturated the paper and left an indelible trace. Hinkle’s drawings make room for these individual expressions of personality through her own fantasy and imagination.



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Titus Kaphar: Asphalt and Chalk Faced with the possibility of re‐establishing a relationship with his addicted and estranged father, artist Titus Kaphar began doing research. An Internet search of his father’s name retrieved his arrest mugshot along with those of dozens of other Black men in the criminal justice system with the exact same first and last names. What began for Kaphar as a deeply personal journey grew into The Jerome Project, a large portraiture series that engages, through paintings and drawings, with issues of the criminal justice system and the communities it impacts most. The Jerome Project began with small paintings of these men’s mugshots, each gilded in gold and partially submerged in tar. The combination of materials ranges a spectrum of desirability and preciousness on one end, and disdain and punishment on the other. In a second phase of The Jerome Project, Asphalt and Chalk, Kaphar explores Blackness and criminality through a set of chalk drawings on asphalt paper. Throughout The Jerome Project, Kaphar explores how a name begins and ends one’s life. The popularity of his father’s name with others who shared the same fate indicates a strange set of circumstances  –  both coincidental and structural  –  that implicate common social limitations and expectations. Kaphar explains his interest in the mugshot, Early mugshot photographs were aesthetically considered objects. Because the first mugshot photographers were actual photographers, they brought their technique and their skill set to bear when they photographed their subject. Some of those early mugshots are actually quite beautiful. When we move into more modern times, the mugshot becomes purely a functional thing—it is purely about recording criminality. That’s the unique feature about a mugshot that distinguishes it from any other type of photograph, especially in this time. (Cooks 2017b)

With this reduction in status from subject to object and portrait to mugshot, comes the transformation of the human to non‐human. Kaphar’s formal representations emphasize the effect of this transformation on interpretation. The layers of faces, necks, and shoulders make each man hard to delineate. They do not stand as separate beings, but as symbols of criminality. This mirrors the social practice of racism in the U.S. – the Black man is a spectre, a symbol of fear and object of hatred – that renders the individual invisible. Art viewers have told Kaphar that they get a headache looking at these drawings (Cooks, May 2017b). The effort needed to decipher the image of Black male criminality takes some doing. Kaphar offers this as a project that needs to be done in order to see clearly. In Asphalt and Chalk V (2014), differences in contours of hair and shoulders become starting places for tracing the distinctions between the three men pictured. Line gestures toward delineations of age, weight, and texture. The meditative back and forth of Kaphar’s angled pencil builds form. This repetition creates the reflection of light on the foreheads, brows, and cheekbones – a development of visual presence. In Asphalt and Chalk XV (2015) (Figure 1.2), the profiles of the men’s heads become a concentric arc of haloes. They metaphorically sound an echo of reverence and promise that surrounds a dizzying, distorted cacophony. The eyes of the men that cluster just above the center of the composition perform a similar function, to capture the attention of the viewer. Kaphar allows the men to stare back, with a gaze of the

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Figure 1.2  Titus Kaphar (2015) The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XV. Chalk on asphalt paper, 124.5 × 91.4 cm (49 × 36 in.). Fund for the Twenty‐First Century. Source: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A. © Titus Kaphar. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Courtesy of the artist.

undead, alive and yet memorialized in death. The difficulty of distinguishing one pair of eyes and lips from another is discouraging. The image becomes an abstraction and looking is the challenge of disentanglement. It is the challenge that confounds our moment  –  the loop of surveillance of Blackness through racial profiling, layers of structural and perceptual illusions that make Black men appear as monsters. The maze of lines are symptoms of the knots that constrict Black survival. Like the photographs of the missing that inspired Hinkle’s The Evanesced, the multiplicity and quantity of these mugshots makes it difficult to focus on any one. This leads to the following questions: Why are there so many missing and incarcerated Black people? What is wrong with our criminal justice system and our larger societal confines that make humans disappear? The figures in Kaphar’s drawings and the people they represent become a blur, defeating the purpose of the photographs to identify on one hand, and pointing out the success of the criminal justice system in its dehumanizing function on the other. In both form and content, Kaphar’s visual strategy of tripling up the mugshots reverses what has been defined. He interrupts the misleading and fatal process of seeing what is already known and challenges viewers to look in a way that they have not done before. In effect, Kaphar’s drawings make the subjects



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very hard to see, which mirrors their socially constructed de‐humanized presence. At the same time, he tantalizes viewers with the possibility of seeing and engages them in prolonged looking. During the time when Kaphar was creating The Jerome Project in 2014, the murders of several Black men were reported. While watching and hearing the news of these men’s deaths repeatedly, their names and faces began to blend together for Kaphar. This blending is visualized in his drawings. Although this second set of drawings were created simultaneously with The Jerome Project, they are different conceptually. Kaphar explains, Although they were not martyrs, the men in this second set of drawings have become like martyrs because of their innocence at the hands of police violence. The drawings show the overlapping of individuals whose lives were probably very different, but their deaths ended in a similar way and they get overlapped in that way in our thinking. The Jerome drawings are about individuals with the same name and the difficulty in seeing any single individual clearly. It speaks to the challenge of the justice system itself. (Cooks 2017b)

In Asphalt and Chalk, Kaphar’s choice of materials is relevant to their purpose. The chalk pencil on the asphalt paper references the chalk outlines that police draw around corpses in the street. His use of materials that regularly mark death to create a moment captured in life, gestures toward the potentially grim fate of the Jeromes, and criticizes what has become the school to prison to death pipeline for Black men in America.1 Central to these works are the drawing strategies that highlight the tension between the individual and layers of bodies he entangles. In Brown, Bell, Garner (2015), Kaphar memorializes three Black American men, Michael Brown (1996–2014), Sean Bell (1983–2006), and Eric Garner (1970–2014) all of whom were victims of police sanctioned murders. None of the source photographs are mugshots. All three men were unarmed and none of their killers were convicted of murder.2 The drawing is striking, particularly for viewers who are familiar with the photographs. It is uncanny in its combination of recognizable images presented in an immediately unrecognizable manner. The most discernible features are the graduation cap and gown from the well circulated photograph of Michael Brown, and the bow tie from a popularly cycled photograph of Eric Garner. These details are the punctum that stop the viewer from surveying the network of lines to re‐member the individuals.3 As signs of success, these accessories are empty signifiers for the men whose accomplishments could not protect them from harm. In 2016, Kaphar began a second series of paintings and drawings inspired by the discourse around The Jerome Project. Concerned that the focus on Black men denied the stories of Black women who also live and die at the hands of the criminal justice system, Kaphar began The Destiny Series. This extended exploration of incarceration and criminality defines the problem as a systematic failure that is not only reserved for Black men. The name Destiny is a popular name among young Black women (perhaps inspired by the fierce beauty of the R&B group “Destiny’s Child”) that carries a promise of fulfillment and mature realization. However, Kaphar’s search for the name in databases of the incarcerated revealed the high number of Black Destinies in prison. His series of Destiny paintings present layered portraits of three young women who share the name. Like the Asphalt and Chalk drawings from The Jerome Project, the

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multiplicity of features disorients and challenges the viewer. The Destinies peer out from the canvases larger than life in browns, blacks, and periwinkle blues. They express what Kaphar calls “a kind of tragic poetry” of the hopelessness of young promise trapped in an unjust system of punishment (Keller 2017). In Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, Tanisha Anderson (2016), Kaphar uses the drawing technique from the Asphalt and Chalk series to memorialize three murdered women.4 Their faces fill most of the composition, and their hair and shoulders spill out of the canvas’s bounds. The women lean forward, betraying the flatness of the surface, with smiles and eyes beaming with optimism. The graduation cap, as seen in Brown, Bell, Garner, signifies accomplishment and the hope for new opportunities. The youthful curls, gold bamboo earrings, and sisterlocks attest to the diversity of personalities, styles, and beauty lost in their avoidable deaths. Kaphar’s white lines illuminate the black background giving the women a visible glow and symbolic shine. Each pair of eyes contains spotlights that reminds viewers of the bright lives that were extinguished with and without the finding of wrongdoing on the part of their murderers. Kaphar’s drawings visualize an irreparable system of Black punishment and decomposition.

Whitfield Lovell: Rounds The detail in Whitfield Lovell’s hyper‐realistic likenesses of African American people are startling. Since the 1980s, Lovell has maintained an interest in portraiture through painstakingly drawn figures in charcoal, Conté crayon, and pencil. He presents them in room‐size installations, with singular and group compositions on wood or paper, and often combined with found objects. For The Card Series II: The Rounds (2006– 2011) (Figure  1.3), Lovell created 54 pictures with charcoal and erasers, each combined with a single playing card from a round deck. The images are presented on creamy, tan colored 12 × 9 in. paper mounted in shallow black box frames. The exquisite details of the sitters’ faces hang heavy over simple lines that gesture toward a corpus below. This contrast of the fully rendered faces against the emptiness of the bodies is a visual corollary to the absence of information known about each figure. The people in the drawings remain unidentified even though most of them are inspired by photographs found in family scrapbooks, tintypes, studio portraits, and photo booth pictures, the people in Lovell’s compositions are unidentified (Cooks 2018). Lovell’s translation of photography to drawing provides a loving and honorable treatment of each sitter. His investment in capturing what he calls the “essence” of each person transfers to the viewing experience (McGee 2016, p. 184). Like the impact of Hinkle’s strategy of affirmation, and Kaphar’s layered meditations, the time Lovell spends on each drawing compels viewers to stay and look. Lovell’s decision to forgo embellishing the drawings with interior environments builds interest in the inner lives of each sitter. His combinations of image with object offer promises of insight and narrative. The relationship between the sitter and the card is an endless sign of potential connections, situations, actions, possessions, and refusals. On one hand is the reality of an overwhelming silence of the unknown. The individual memories of the sitters are lost to viewers. On the other hand, viewers can project their ideas onto the artwork to imagine any number of life scenarios. The playing cards connote novelty, luck, chance, fun, solitude, concentration, and leisure. The single person becomes part of a community through coincidence and



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Figure 1.3  Whitfield Lovell (2006–2011) The Card Series II: The Rounds. 54 cards, charcoal pencil on paper with attached playing card. Each 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 in.). Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, exhibition: Walter Larrimore/NMAAHC. © Whitfield Lovell. Reproduced with permission.

imagination placed in relationship to 53 others for a sequence of play. Constructed as a series of drawing‐object pairs, viewers may ask: Who shuffled the deck? Who cut the cards? How many games were played? How many hands were dealt? Who was dealt a bad hand? Who was usually lucky? Who knew all the rules? Who cheated? Who called trump? Who won? Who lost? Who played fair? The cards serve as literal and figurative starting points for thinking about the lives and deaths of the sitters. This potential relationship between the drawing and the object highlights the limitation of visual identification photographs as a complete source for recognition and knowing. Lovell explains, “There is this space between image and object that is active and made active by placement and the relationship between the objects and the drawings… The

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pairing creates both disruption—a break in potential for a literal narrative reading of the work—and solidity. The object completes the composition” (McGee 2016, p. 193). The completion of the composition is the beginning of signification. In The Rounds XXI, the face of the well‐dressed woman hovering over the three of diamonds looks uncertain. With her head slightly tilted, her bright eyes look into the distance and her mouth is gently closed. Small earrings dangle from her ears, and her hair is pulled back loosely above them. Her fashionable pillbox‐shaped “working woman’s” hat casts a narrow shadow that sweeps across her forehead. The three horizontal lines that define its architectural design are softened by clusters of millinery flowers that balance each side. The prime numbered card shows its value in a vertical column. Spaced in regular intervals, the diamonds double as buttons on an imagined bodice of a uniform or garment that would match the style of her hat. The stone they reference signals wealth, luxury, and expensive taste. Their color speaks of love, passion, and blood. In The Rounds X (Figure 1.4), a young man with an upturned, waxy mustache and small round glasses looks slightly left in a formal graduation portrait. The vertical fall of his heavy tassel repeats in the frontal seam of graduation cap, and the break in his collar that exposes his skin beneath. This conventional pose for graduates conjures

Figure 1.4  Whitfield Lovell (2006–2011) The Card Series II: The Rounds (Detail card X). Charcoal pencil on paper with attached playing card. 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 in.). Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture © Whitfield Lovell. Reproduced with permission.



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feelings of optimism and hope as the sitter seems to look ahead into the future. Paired with the ace of spades card beneath, the promise the man embodies appears to be fulfilled. The oversized center spade functions as a directional arrow focusing the viewer on the man’s countenance and importance. The spade points upward as a sign of uplift. However, it also marks the man as a spade – a tool of labor and a derogatory term for Black men – emphasizing the difficult road ahead. A closer look at the spade discloses it as the manufacturer’s mark. Along the inner edge of the spade are the words: Sutherland’s Circular Coon Cards. The central image within the shape is of a smiling Black boy holding a freshly bitten wedge of watermelon. “AS BLACK AS THE ACE OF SPADES” is printed in the curves just beneath the boy’s hands. The visual trope of the smiling Black “darkie” is one of the most popular in the genre of Black Americana. It promotes the stereotype of lazy enslaved people who sit in the fields and eat watermelon instead of laboring. The humor depends upon a pleasure in thinking about the enslaved as happy – with smiles as wide as the watermelon they hold. The deluded thought that Black people were happy slaves, supported the ongoing business of slavery and Black inequality during and after formal emancipation. In contrast, Lovell’s drawing presents a wholly different image of Black pleasure. Serious and thoughtful, this graduate does not perform for anyone, but instead appears self‐composed in his sense of accomplishment. The embossed image of the boy with watermelon shows that the cards are stacked against him. I mean this as pun and metaphor: the standard deck of cards created to allow free play of any number of games is marked by the image of anti‐Black delight. The enjoyment of Black denigration is part of the fun. In The Rounds XIII, a determined woman stares out just above and beyond the camera’s lens. Her narrowed eyes and small tight mouth make her appear resolved and self‐assured. The patchy pattern of light and shadow across her skin reveals a surface that has been textured by age. Highlights on her puffy cheeks emphasize the dark circles below her eyes. The shape of the nine of hearts card below her neck echoes her round shirt collar and accentuates the many curves of her face. Distracting from her face is the thick hair that sits on her head like a hat. It forms a point just above her soft, natural hairline, and falls into two large braids at the sides of her head. The youthful hairstyle of this wig betrays her age and suggests a costumed presentation for the viewer. The central arch of the wig combined with the cups of her cheeks create a heart shape that recurs in the playing card. Likewise, the curves of her brows form a heart when connected down to the dimple in her chin. Although props, like wigs, clothing, and books, were commonly found in photographer studios, this photograph was taken outside suggesting a different purpose for the wig. Lovell extracted this woman’s image from a picture of two women relaxing in a back yard, dressed in lacy lingerie. The other woman wore heavily applied make‐ up and sat with her legs crossed in a wooden chair. This woman’s wig may be read as part of a uniform for someone whose profession depends upon love – or a kind of performance of it. This speculative interpretation connects to the nine of hearts she is paired with. Like the worn symbols of love on the card, the woman with the heart‐ shaped face may play her role as part of a game: she is part of a cycle of exchange and repetition. Throughout The Rounds, Lovell links the aged playing cards with the aged quality of the vintage and antique photographs that inspired the drawings. Their wheel‐like shape, and the patterns that revolve around the central symbol of their suits testify to

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their past. Dirty, faded, and cracked, they have been held by many hands and shuffled about. Their stains are evidence of their cyclical and repetitive use value and objecthood. The playing cards provide additional information to the drawings that break the monotony and objectification of the grid. Together with the drawings, these elements refuse the limited purpose of the identification photographs with the opportunity for action and participation. The game pieces activate the resignation and passivity of the institutional photograph. In Lovell’s words, The fact that those images now have a new life seems predestined and almost magical in a way. They were like time capsules left out there to be rediscovered one day. No one really looked at them back then. No one really saw them for how beautiful and human they were when they were alive. The [possibility] that we would learn from them, muse and mull over these people and who they were, was perhaps always already part of the spiral, part of the plan. (McGee 2016, p. 200)

Double Take The logic of racist thinking has defined the accumulated images of Black bodies to mean and perpetuate a social order that grounds racial Blackness as debased. In this hierarchy, the Black body is always already defined as criminal and deserving of violence. In contrast, Hinkle, Kaphar, and Lovell face the myth of Black pathology with a determination to redefine the Black index through drawing. Against the odds, and within the context of Black death, they imagine a second life – a life after death and a life in death – that sits with the pain of suffering. Through their visual strategies they provide another lens through which to grieve and discover. Through drawing, these artists redress exteriority to disrupt the ritualized reading of Blackness as without inherent value. In the work of all three artists, the Black graduate appears as a symbol of ability and optimism. Each artist shows that the evidence of Black achievement and indictment go hand in hand. They demonstrate a resilience in Black life that recognizes, and operates under, the continual and threat of Black death.

Notes 1 For information on this dismal trajectory see, Nancy A. Heitzeg, The School‐to‐Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016; Catherine Y. Kim and Daniel J. Losen, The School to Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform. New York: NYU, 2012. 2 There are conflicting accounts of the events leading up to Brown’s murder. Some witnesses state that Brown charged the murdering officer and reached for his gun. Others state that Brown was being harassed by the police for walking in the street and had his hands in the air when he was shot. Paula Mejia “Altercation Between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson Unfolded in 90 Seconds: Report” Newsweek, 11/15/14. https:// www.newsweek.com/altercation‐between‐michael‐brown‐and‐officer‐darren‐wilson‐ unfolded‐90‐284728. Sean Bell was murdered by police who shot into his car outside of a nightclub. Bell and his passengers were fleeing undercover police officers who drew their guns on the men. The surviving passengers recall that the officers did not



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identify themselves. Bell’s Fiancee: “They killed Sean all over again.” Garner was murdered for selling single cigarettes. Jenna Worthman, “A life—and a death—that mattered.” The New York Times Magazine, December 28, 2014: 35. 3 Critical theorist, Roland Barthes uses the term punctum to describe the feature of a photograph that “pricks” and “bruises” the viewer. He describes it as the “element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” A detail that makes the photograph remarkable and memorable. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, 26. 4 Sandra Bland (1987–2015) was found hanged in a jail cell after being arrested for a traffic violation three days earlier. Renisha McBride (1994–2013) was shot by a homeowner for knocking on his door to seek help after a car accident. Tanisha Anderson (1977–2014) was killed in police custody moments after officers slammed her onto the pavement outside her home.

References Cooks, B.R. (2017a). Conversation with Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, April 27, 2017. Cooks, B.R. (2017b). Conversation with Titus Kaphar, May 9, 2017. Cooks, B.R. (2018). Correspondence with Whitfield Lovell, August 19, 2018. Keller, B. (2017). “Titus Kaphar on Art, Race and Justice,” The Marshall Project: Nonprofit Journalism about Criminal Justice. Accessed on May 1, 2018. https://www. themarshallproject.org/2017/02/01/titus‐kaphar‐on‐art‐race‐and‐justice. Krauss, R. (1977). Notes on the index: seventies art in America. October 3 (Spring): 70. McElroy, G.C. (1990). Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940. New York: Bedford Arts Publishers. McGee, J. (2016). After an afternoon: Whitfield Lovell in conversation with Julie L. McGee. In: Whitfield Lovell: Kin (eds. I. Sandler, S.E. Lewis and J.L. McGee), 200. New York: Skira Rizzoli and DC Moore Gallery. Potts, A. (2000). The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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A State of Alert The Politics of Eroticism in South American Drawing Sofia Gotti

This chapter focuses on a sample of artists from South America, to examine how drawing helped assert new perspectives on gender and sexual liberation from the 1960s to the present day. Their works use eroticism as a tool in ways that complicated more generally held ideas about South American art being overtly political. This dominant view is part of a wide and consolidated discourse established by numerous artists, scholars and curators, who documented the manifold practices that emerged in opposition to the military dictatorships that swept through the continent up until the 1990s.1 Figures including Marta Traba, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Edith Gibson, Barbara Duncan, and Paulo Herkenhoff recognized how drawing was a vital medium that involved mapping, mark making, and scripture. Their texts all recognize active political engagement in the form of explicit visual messages, protest, or interventions in public space as vital for South American artists at large. The objective of this text is to expand and nuance the existing interpretation of art as political to produce a broader definition of what it means to be political. Following an introduction to the central historiography in the field of drawing in South America that lays out political readings, this chapter is organized around two clusters of artists. With the intent to demonstrate how drawing’s formal boundaries expanded alongside its themes, the discussion will pivot on how eroticism has been used to address socio‐political issues relating to marginalization, oppression, prejudice, and inequality. The first group includes works produced in the 1960s and early 1970s by Teresinha Soares, Anna Bella Geiger, and Wesley Duke Lee who importantly contributed to exposing sexual inhibition, objectification, and the disparities across gender identity. In this group I focus on Brazilian artists because of my wider expertise in art from this country, and for the way they explored eroticism through different approaches to drawing. The second cluster features later work by Mexican Nahum Zenil, Brazilian Leonilson, Colombian Miguel Angel Rojas, and the Bolivian activist

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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group Mujeres Creando, who furthered the discussion on sexual liberation by also engaging with LGBT rights, AIDS, and abortion laws. The writings of Argentine art historian and critic Marta Traba were instrumental in first identifying eroticism as a tangible undercurrent in art in the region – specifically in drawing. Traba (1973) pinned down a “state of alert” (Traba 1973, p. 206) in Latin American art through a return to drawing in the 1960s and 1970s, which she associated with the spread of Pop Art throughout the continent, its nationalization (or appropriation by artists locally) and with an erotic esthetic. Throughout the text, the productive aspects of eroticism as a strategy of dissent are explored in relation to pornography as discussed by Susan Sontag (see Sontag, 1964, 1967) and Branden W. Joseph (2014), who addressed the useful and regenerative aspects of porn for society. Specifically, my analysis of the second group draws upon the notion of counter‐ obscenity. This expression, coined by Joseph, refers to the process by which extremely explicit sexual imagery or text is able to transform obscenity into something closer to a cautionary tale about morality, affording the possibility to renegotiate values. Though art history has more commonly dealt with eroticism as calibrated innuendo, instead of explicit pornography, the line dividing these notions is considered here as the catalyst for constructive debate. This division is oftentimes arbitrary, for something considered pornographic in its time of production, may cease to be so at a later date, highlighting the sense of change that pornography may foster.

Defining South American Drawing When discussing drawing in South America from the second half of the twentieth century, an immediate departure point is the so‐called “Drawing Boom,” which saw the emergence of a multitude of practices centered on this medium (Gibson 1997). These were widely supported for being completely distinct (hence non‐derivative) from North American and Western European works, which, in the mainstream iterations of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and Nouveau Realisme were predominantly large‐scale paintings and objects. Edith Gibson, co‐curator of the exhibition Re‐Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (co‐organized by El Museo de Barrio, New York, and the Archer Huntington Art Gallery, Houston, in 1997), located the aforementioned Boom between 1961 and 1981. The first date is marked by the inauguration of an exhibition of the Argentine figurative group Otra Figuración (Luis Felipe Noé, Romulo Maccio, and Ernesto Deira) at the Galeria Bonino in Buenos Aires. These artists, keen to represent the social angst that plagued Argentine society in the aftermath of the Peronist era, used drawing to create contorted figures, whose black lines over white paper heightened the dramatic flair of the compositions. With this first exhibition, the group re‐introduced a new kind of figuration to the Argentine art scene, where Informalismo (after Art Informél) was becoming most common amongst the avant‐garde. Noé was the most prolific writer of the group and he wrote several texts on drawing and its value within new Argentine and South American art, which provided an important framework for scholarly writing about drawing (Noé 1978). The latter date, 1981, marked the American Biennial of Graphic Arts in Cali, Colombia, which featured the work of many of the artists who had a distinguished and consolidated drawing, graphic art and design practice. The many biennials that



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were organized across South America in the Post‐war period, emerged under the aegis of Pan‐Americanism, a political stance that characterized the period of the “Drawing Boom” during which most of the military dictatorships in place across the continent were supported by the United States. The political alliances necessary to ensure successful economic relationships were frequently consolidated through cultural initiatives, such as Biennials, which were sponsored by companies including Esso, Kaiser Industries, Standard Oil, to name a few (Canclini 1996). Among the first to celebrate South America’s Drawing Boom, though not defining it as such, was Marta Traba (1973). In the conclusion to her important volume Dos Decadas Vulnerables en las Artes Plasticas Latinoamericanas (Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin American Art), Traba explained that to draw in Latin America meant to reject North American and Western European trends and the subsequent market recognition that came with becoming aligned with these. She wrote: Drawing represents an explicit rejection to producing painting, sculpture, objects, “happenings,” environments, proposals, reconstructions, to giving clues, and to accepting juggling acts. This means, then, a rejection of “impact” as a system, of “spectacle” as a result, and of the subsequent gratification on the part of the vanguardist society that hires the circus. […New artists working with this aggressive and nonconformist medium] feel good in the contempt that drawing implies for the ostentatious exploration of new materials; it feels good by returning to human sizes after the apocalyptic sizes of North American op‐artists, signalists, and minimalists. (Traba 1973, pp. 225–226)

Though Traba had a highly critical view of many practices in Latin America, which she often deemed derivative and unfaithful to local contexts, she saw a return to drawing as non‐conformist and original (Traba 1973, p. 205). Because it reflected an immediate gesture and connection between the artist’s subconscious and the paper, she saw drawing as a means to transcend individuality instead of affirming it (according to her its most non‐conformist attribute). Theorizing drawing as a practice in its own right, instead of an academic exercise, she identified it as the symbol of a “state of alert” in Latin American art, paired with the nationalization of Pop and eroticism. I borrowed the expression “state of alert” for the title of this text to signal how the notions of politics and eroticism can be linked. Traba pointed out how in the US, eroticism was more connected to the free representation of sexuality and the tolerance of pornography. Meanwhile, in Latin America, it signified a modus vivendi that inherently asserted difference from the US. Traba was highly influenced by philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), and she observed how the use of eroticism in art was a “metonym” that could reflect alternate meanings and enable a challenge to what she describes as an “underdevelopment‐repression” of civilization (Traba 1973, p. 220). The impact of Marcuse’s work worldwide, with significant emphasis in South America, cannot be overemphasized. Becoming the subject of lectures and seminars by key thinkers in the region (from Traba herself, to Jorge Romero Brest in Buenos Aires, to Juan Acha in Lima), the claim made in Eros and Civilization that a sexually liberated society was a fundamental prerequisite for the establishment of an egalitarian and free political system was radical, and it inspired a generation of artists. With this cultural backdrop Traba’s work frames drawing locally within a condition of vulnerability and revolutionary ethos in South America.

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Traba’s criticism was a fundamental trigger for the first exhibitions dedicated to South American drawing, which soon became established as a genre. The landmark show, Recent Latin American drawings (1969–1976) Lines of Vision, (International Exhibitions Foundation, Washington D.C., 1977) curated by Barbara Duncan and Damián Bayón, sought to exhibit the work of artists who addressed the existentialist concerns that many North American and European artists were no longer invested in, affirming Traba’s view that drawing in South America reflected an authentic state of alert. Duncan explained that drawing became increasingly important in light of a general “reluctance to give up the subject of the human condition in order to be the ultimate expression of a commercialized, materialistic world” (Ramírez and Gibson 1997, p. 35). This statement adds substance to Traba’s views regarding the relationship between drawing’s increased prominence and the proliferation of a Pop esthetic with certain erotic characteristics. Duncan’s and Bayón’s 1977 investigation was the precursor of Re‐Aligning Vision (1997). A partial survey, the sequel to Lines of Vision was curated by Ramírez and Gibson. The exhibition highlighted the importance of the medium within artists’ broader practices, spanning the entire post‐war period. Works from the 1980s and 1990s by Oscar Muñoz, Santiago Cardenas, and Liliana Porter (among others) were representative of the expanding range of materials used, beyond the most traditional ink/pencil/gouache on paper. The exhibition also selected works that stretched the boundaries of the medium by gradually removing the line from the two‐dimensional plane and resituating it into three‐dimensional structures. In the introductory catalogue essay, the curators paralleled the histories of drawing and writing, claiming that the latter is “as much as an autographic as a diagrammatic activity, […which] refers on one hand to the most authentic imprint of the artist’s self, and on the other, to the unmediated projection of his/her intellect.” Because drawing’s instruments are lines, marks, and space, they claimed that it is not “bound to the confines of the paper, nor is it restricted to a particular media, style, or support,” therefore functioning in an “intermediate space bound only by the depth of the human imagination” (Ramírez and Gibson 1997, pp. 20–22). This opening statement expands Traba’s more restrictive definition of drawing as something that “represents an explicit rejection to producing painting, sculpture, objects, ‘happenings’, environments…” Nevertheless, it offers an updated and more comprehensive view of the multi‐layered practices of artists engaging with this medium who were indeed only bound by the depth of their imaginations, instead of being aligned with international trends that championed painting, objects, and happenings. Traba’s study together with Duncan’s and Ramírez’s exhibitions define drawing as reflecting a willingness to display vulnerability, introspection, and an investment into personal histories alongside collective humanist concerns. In a similar way to its enabling of self‐discovery, it was also unbound by a specific support; extending beyond pencil and paper and capturing the “human imagination” referred to by Ramírez. The freedom inherent in expanded drawing practices catalyzed innovation and experimentation.

The Politics of Drawing Maps Though a preliminary definition of drawing has been established, its overtly social and political dimensions have yet to be determined. One of the principal narratives that allows access into this theme is the making of maps, which first outlines one of the



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ways in which drawing was politically engaged. Curator Paulo Herkenhoff examined mapping as providing a crucial critical tool for “replacing the current failure of rational knowledge by adjusting the metaphor to reality.” He described drawing as a “probe, an instrument for exploring the regions of knowledge” (Herkenhoff 1997, p. 72) referring to the need to articulate, albeit with an internationalist lexicon, the very complex local realities that distinguished the South American context at the time. Redrawing maps is crucial to figuring out the political nuances of drawing because they become a medium for the assertion of difference and uniqueness – whether from an exclusive Global North, or from a patriarchal and heterosexual society. Some of the most important works of the drawing tradition in South America sought to challenge the North–South geopolitical divide by placing South America in a subaltern relationship to North America. América Invertída (1943) by Uruguayan Joaquin Torres‐García (1874–1949) reproduces an inverted map of South America to confront the power of the United States over South America, where the equatorial line and its coordinates are traced below Montevideo, while the South Pole is repositioned at the top of the page. By capsizing the map, Torres‐García pointed to the arbitrariness of established and hegemonic geopolitical divides, he overturns the colonialist condition, thus asserting the autonomous and independent development of the avant‐garde in South America (Ramírez 2015). With this aim, Torres‐García had founded La Escuela del Sur (The School of the South), an open studio and publication for young artists across the continent. In regards to his objectives, Torres‐García wrote: I have said School of the South; because in reality, our North is the South. There should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South. … From now on, the elongated tip of South America will point insistently to the South, our North. Our compass as well; it will incline irremediably and forever toward the South, toward our pole. When ships sail from here traveling North, they will be traveling down, not up as before. Because the North is now below … This is a necessary rectification; so that now we know where we are. (Torres‐García 1935, p. 7)

Following Torres‐García, a multitude of artists were inspired to use South America’s map as a platform to critique their current geopolitical situation, and to re‐assert their own identities. Torres‐García first harnessed the map’s power to turn the gaze toward local history and heritage for inspiration. Before World War II, Indigenismo and Muralism both shared this priority and they drew subject matter from their indigenous heritage, iconography, and local social realities. A most poignant example of an artist who used maps is Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933) who, starting in the mid‐seventies, used the maps of South and North America as abstract elements in imaginary equations. Her simple pencil outline drawings of America (whole and divided) questioned relationships between continents and regions by suggesting arithmetic equivalences that revealed mismatches and unbalances. In 1978, building on the symbolic meanings of maps, she conducted a performance, O Pão Nosso de Cada Día (Our Daily Bread), in which she would walk around Rio distributing bread and six postcards she had made from black and white photographs. The first postcard showed the artist holding a slice of bread in front of her mouth and chin. The following images show one, then another, then both slices with a hole in the middle in the shape of South America. The final two show the two slices in a bread basket, and finally the empty basket with only two outlines of the

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South American continent drawn within it. Her work used bread to comment on the poverty in Brazil, while commenting on consumption patterns stimulated by foreign investment and economic alliances – echoes in her appropriation of the voided map. Throughout Geiger’s multimedia oeuvre, drawing is a vital component of her works, better described as research projects made up of multiple elements (Gilbert 2014). Examples of artists using the map are ample. Four key contributors that must be mentioned are Chilean Juan Downey (b. 1940), Horacio Zabala (b. 1943), Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), and Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937). Downey repeatedly drew the map of South America using perspective and color to comment on themes ranging from the downfall of local economies at the hands of foreign investors, to the disappearance and purging of indigenous populations in the amazon; Zabala was a key member of the Group of Thirteen (later CAyC Group) in Buenos Aires in the late sixties and seventies; Camnitzer, whose drawing practice is among the most remarkable, also as part of the New York Graphic Workshop in the late 1960s and 1970s with Liliana Porter (b. 1941) and Guillermo Castillo (1938–1999). Finally, in 1987 Jaar appropriated a billboard in Times Square in New York, to screen A Logo for America. The looped video showed a linear drawing of the map of the United States with the phrase “This is Not America” This still image was followed by another more dynamic version where the map of the American continent appeared with the words “This is America.” Jaar’s work builds on Torres‐García’s proposition, though uses a public billboard usually hired by advertisers, in one of the most densely populated areas of the world, as its platform. His choice indicates his awareness of the power of advertising, commerce, and how established orders are the product of imperialistic campaigns that consolidated South America as the USA’s subaltern, through economic domination. Re‐drawing maps proved to be a unique exercise of self‐assertion and discovery that demonstrates a shared sense of political engagement and resistance toward established geopolitical orders. It is in this need to assert oneself that sexuality and politics intertwine. It is therefore important to trace where and how this desire was born, and, ultimately how it led to drawing becoming a vital medium to exercise political will. Torres‐García’s School of the South or Geiger’s distribution of her work to people on the street, show how both artists felt compelled to complement and expand their drawings with social actions that connected their work to wider audiences. Dominant interpretations of maps placed these artists within the political narratives of South American Art‐as‐political. The relation between introspection, vulnerability, and socio‐political engagement is key in understanding the radical nature of the drawing practices discussed within this chapter. The following section begins to place emphasis on the role of eroticism as an aspect of drawing that exacerbates its introspective transformative characteristics, adding specificity to art’s wide‐ranging relationship to society and politics. Eroticism and sexualized imagery are examined as strategies that infiltrate the art system with personal politics, with the aim of contesting prejudice, inequality, repression, and marginalization.

Away with These Ancient Disabilities: Erotic Drawing in Brazil The first group of artists I want to look at include lesser‐known Brazilians, Soares, Geiger, Dias, and Lee. Their works, produced between 1963 and 1971, demonstrate



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a conspicuous drawing practice (reliant on the most traditional medium of pencil/ink/ gouache on paper), which was widely informed by an important tradition of Brazilian printmaking, passed down by key figures such as woodcut printmakers Iberê Camargo, Oswaldo Goeldi, and Ivan Serpa. Dias and Lee led open studios at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, which influenced a generation of younger artists. A common aspect of the works is how they address the religious puritanism ubiquitous in Brazil. Inspired by 1960s sexual liberation movements, these artists sought to attack such repression. The books that were circulating both in Brazil and Peru thanks to key intellectuals such as Mario Pedrosa in Rio and Juan Acha in Lima, would have included Marcuse (as previously mentioned) as well as Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, to name a few.2 The Tropicalist movement that blossomed in Rio promoted a new vision of Brazilian culture that would sublimate certain stereotypes of tropical exoticism with forward thinking youth culture. Tropicalism was one of the many cultural phenomena that is seen to have emerged in response to the intensification of military repression during the dictatorship in place in Brazil since 1964. This was crucially marked by the extra constitutional Institutional Act no. 5, which legitimized torture, abolished the habeas corpus and systematized censorship in 1968 (see Figure 2.1). In this shared context of radical redefinition and imagination, the artists considered in this cluster focus on the body, whether male or female, as well as on the value and

Figure 2.1  Anna Bella Geiger (1978) Equações, série De Rerum Artibus (Equations, De Rerum Artibus series). Graphite, frottage and crayons on lined notebook sheet. 24 × 33 cm. © Anna Bella Geiger.

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place of eroticism on the cultural stigmas attached to these. After Geiger redrew the map of South America, another earlier series of drawings and watercolors built upon the authentic sense of self‐exploration and vulnerability unlocked by the practice of drawing. This untitled body of work from the early 1960s, presents figures (most often female) with their insides exposed. In some drawings, the internal organs are depicted, in others it is the womb, the fetus, and sexual organs that are drawn outside of the skin. The pencil outlines filled in with watercolor are close to anatomical studies with an expressionist flair that render the body’s insides with graphic accuracy and with a carnal palette that plays on the idea of exposure, both emotional and physical. Pairing this body of work with her studies on maps invites associations with an intimate exploration into personal cartographies, or a research into locating the body within a subjective map. In addition, the reference to eating, consuming, and ingesting, present in both her projects, nodded to the widely popular Brazilian avant‐garde notion of anthropophagy, which explained Brazilian tradition and society through cultural cannibalism. The imagery of consumption and cannibalizing present in O Pão Nosso de Cada Día, combined with the viscerality and eroticism of her earlier work, highlight ways her ideas were informed and transformed by her practice of drawing. Paulo Herkenhoff observed how a commitment to “viscerality” indicated the body’s “expressive intensity, as well as the organic production of meaning. […] Through viscerality one sought to give an account of individuals from the perspective of their psychological experience as a way of encouraging political resistance and nonconformity.” (Herkenhoff 2002, p. 328) In other words, making explicit references to eating, nourishment and to cannibalism leads the viewer to think about flesh, blood, food, digestion – all images that may elicit unpredictable reactions. Another widely celebrated and well‐known artist who engaged with this motif is Dias, native of North Eastern Brazil, but based in Rio de Janeiro during the same period. Dias’s early works were mostly drawings and textured canvases that captured the textures of urban walls, covered in layers of peeling paint, the remnants of posters, and graffiti. Inspired by cordels, typical poems printed on paper and illustrated by woodblock prints, usually sold in marketplaces, Dias developed a vernacular esthetic. He incorporated the structure and palette of mass media images, making critical and evocative works, that reflected upon society’s grime, on the dirt and blood that lay below the clean-cut glamor of advertising and consumer culture. Dias’ works are harmoniously positioned among the others examined here, for sharing bodily, sexual, and often visceral imagery. Through this esthetic, the works discussed are able to communicate with the viewer emotionally, instinctively, and physically. The entire oeuvre of Teresinha Soares (b. 1927) reveals an acute sensitivity toward the objectification of bodies and objects, to celebrity culture, and to the inequality between men and women. Though she worked across painting, sculpture, installation, and what in Brazil were known as non‐objects (the definition of “non‐object” was consolidated by poet and critic Ferreira Gullar in the seminal text, “Theory of the Non‐Object.,” 1959). A work relevant to this discussion in how it reflects such themes, entitled Eurotica (1971), an album of silkscreens that represented a crescendo of single line drawings (voluptuous, clearly defined lines are a recurrent motif throughout her practice), which depicted in a stylized yet explicit manner the curves of female bodies. The title is a wordplay of eu and erotica, in Portuguese I and erotic, suggesting an ownership of eroticism. Page by page, the drawings begin to feature male bodies too, at first separate then intertwined with feminine imagery in a



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multitude of encounters and interconnections, until animal and natural forms emerge, climaxing into a phallic tree growing out of a mountainous landscape that also resembles a woman’s open legs. The album was printed on green and yellow sugar paper and presented with a preface by critic and historian Frederico Morais, with whom Soares had a professional association dating back to her training at the University in Belo Horizonte in the mid‐sixties. His script, largely indebted to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and to sexologists/counselors Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen’s international exhibition of erotic art from 1968, was an integral part of the artwork, and it discussed the importance of a free sexual mind and body for a free political system. Equating the ease and joy of being oneself in the most natural settings – as evoked in the album by the incorporation of trees, soil, stags, and horses – with political freedom and prosperity, was crucial to the overarching pursuit of engendering the participation of greater numbers not only in artistic circles, but in public life at large (see Figure 2.2). Eurotica also inspired the production of an installation and a performance, which translated the concepts expressed on paper into three dimensions. The curved lines of the drawings reappear in a series of interlocking wooden platforms of different heights and shapes that constructed a dynamic stage onto which performers could dance: an abstract choreography envisioned to evoke romantic and erotic encounters between the actors (two women and a man), and the platforms themselves. The first time the two works were exhibited together (at the Galeria Petite in Rio de Janeiro in 1971),

Figure 2.2  Teresinha Soares (1970) Corpo a Corpo in Cor‐pus Meus (Body to Body in Colour‐Pus of Mine). Painted wood. Dimensions variable. © Teresinha Soares.

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the installation of platforms, titled Corpo á Corpo em Cor‐pus Meus (Body to Body in Color‐Pus of Mine, 1970), was used as a stage for the performance. Meanwhile, a projection of scientific footage of cells dividing (effectively reproducing), was projected onto the performers, while Soares read aloud a mash‐up of two texts: a poem she had written and a scientific text about the life cycle of sperm (Gotti 2015). It reads: I’m soiled flesh dry‐contorted exposed‐exhausted suffered I’m a bare island enclosed by people silent, frozen I am what I am a toy playful anything taking up space finished void lost I’m shadow at night light at day I’m what I was not before to then become that which happened after.

One of the many possible interpretations of this poem draws our attention to the use of the first person to suggest an intimate confession, or a one to one confrontation, brought about by a moment of difficulty, of being “soiled,” or “exhausted.” The voice of the female author reading aloud while bodies ahead of her are enacting a symbolic erotic ritual, and cells are multiplying, evokes the sexual act from a female perspective. The voice tells us she is “a toy,” “void,” signaling a commonplace objectification. It concludes with a temporal process of becoming something else – perhaps an open ending, or a warning to take ownership of the process of becoming which may entail sexual relations between individuals. The dialogue between the drawings, the installation, and the performance also reflects a process of germination in the work of art, from a two‐dimensional surface into an active and mutable structure, which viewers were invited to inhabit and interact with. The way Soares produced a work that dealt with sex and repression, but was simultaneously erotic, denunciatory and ludic, reveals her ability to approach certain taboos within traditional Brazilian society, first and foremost through the medium of drawing. In a distinctly patriarchal society like Brazil in 1971, the simplicity of line in Eurotica offered a key for the viewers who had to interact within



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the structure in order to read, becoming lost in its (phallic) meandering, or listening to a woman talking about sperm and reproduction. Soares’ works speak to her desire to discover and exploit her own body and sexuality, which she achieves by disrobing herself of formalities, and traditionalism – in other words making herself more vulnerable. Committed to educating and liberating herself and others, she disregards the norms of society, risking her position within it. Another series of pen and Indian ink drawings that inspired performances and environments, was Ligas (Garters 1960–1964), by São Paulo artist Wesley Duke Lee (1931–2010). In a style that bordered between figuration and abstraction, the works depicted women’s pelvic area and thighs wearing garters, stockings, and other kinds of underwear. Though the subject matter and nudity involved sought to be provocative, Lee explained that he treated the body as one would landscape drawing. The composition, and purity of line, in fact, can fool the viewer at first glance to think that the work was in fact representing a distant hillside, or forest (Anonymous 1963). The apparent innocence of the drawings heightened the sense of shock that came upon realizing their actual subject matter. The artist had spent most of the second half of the fifties traveling in the US and Europe, and in 1963 he had successfully exhibited Ligas at the Galleria Sistina in Milan. Back home in São Paulo, his works were seen as pornographic, and were denied exhibition in any gallery (Teixeira da Costa 1980). Cacilda Teixeira da Costa, among the first to write about this series, and upon the resistance they encountered in São Paulo, highlighted how Lee’s intention was to expound on the relationship between male and female sexuality through his drawings, seeking to highlight the beauty in feminine eroticism: a catalyst for the creative act. Lee’s drawings also place women in the role of the voyeur by adopting quintessential male subjects. The drawings prior to Ligas were in fact a series inspired by the figure of the Templar (a proverbial knight in shining armor), an obsolete though ever‐present archetype of masculinity also intrinsically connected to Catholicism because of the link to the crusades. These works are distinguished by their pared down simplicity in contrast to the passionate style in Ligas. Lee’s choice to use images of knights and then ones of garters tells of how he tested gender stereotypes, perhaps seeking to distance himself from them. His art in this sense is a balancing act of expectations in relation to masculinity and femininity. To vindicate his drawings’ rejection from official exhibition spaces, Lee organized an independent show, known as El Grande Espetaculo das Artes (The Great Spectacle of the Art), held at the João Sebastião Bar in 1963. His drawings were exhibited as part of a wider choreography of environments (immersive spaces envisioned to surround the spectator with an alternate reality) and performances. Ligas were exhibited in a darkened room where visitors, equipped with flashlights, were invited to explore the exhibition space. While searching for the works one could catch another visitor looking at one of the drawings hung in the space. Lee’s exploration of the gaze sought to expose voyeurism and to eliminate any prejudice attached to it. In Lee’s display, each visitor was simultaneously at risk of being discovered and of discovering another with the use of a flashlight. A subsequent room housed the projection of a film by Otto Stupakoff, a well‐known photographer whom Oscar Niemeyer had invited to document the construction of Brasilia, Brazil’s new capital inaugurated in 1960. The piece, now lost and only briefly documented, showed actress Maria Cecilia walking in downtown São Paulo (near high end stores and art galleries) wearing couture gowns. In another area of the bar, Lydia Chamis (later Lee’s wife) performed a false

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strip‐tease, during which, instead of taking off clothes, she would only hint at doing so, heightening the viewer’s frustration. All the works on display sought to exorcize notions of vulgarity. For example, Chamis’ strip‐tease was a form of erotic provocation, which Lee had staged to protest the dismissal of his work as pornographic. As in Soares’ case, Lee’s drawings were most subversive when they could not be merely contemplated in their contemporaneous context, but had to be exhibited in an unofficial space with a multitude of stratagems to clarify (through channels that were not only visual), their intention and essence. Both works and installations, though in different ways, challenged what was considered acceptable by the Brazilian “society” (a term used in Portuguese to describe the high society or the elite), and what was before considered pornographic, was recast in a new light. The writer, Susan Sontag is one of the most highly regarded advocates for an intellectual and historical reconsideration of the value and transformative potential of pornography, placed in relation to eroticism, and comedy. In the essay “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967) she provided three definitions of pornography, first as an “item in social history” that emerged in the twentieth century in North America and Western Europe; second, as a psychological phenomenon symptomatic of sexual deficiency; third, as a “minor but interesting modality within the arts.” (Sontag 1967, p. 205) Sontag’s intellectual discussion on the value of pornography as art – a term, which extends to both literature and the plastic arts – reaches several junctions, which are of particular relevance in the context of Geiger’s, Lee’s and Soares’ drawing practices. She observed how pornography can be a form of knowledge, which does not have to be necessarily linked to the “festering legacy of Christian sexual repression and to sheer psychological ignorance.” She continues: …these ancient disabilities being now compounded by more proximate historical events, the impact of drastic dislocations in traditional modes of family and political order and unsettling change in the roles of sexes (the problem of pornography is one of the “dilemmas of a society in transition” [Paul] Goodman said in an essay several years ago). (Sontag 1967, p. 207)

She sought to uproot the “tenacious clichés” surrounding pornography in order to reveal its potency as a form of exploration and understanding, which only becomes dangerous or unethical when used by psychologically unprepared individuals, like most forms of knowledge available. Sontag’s theorization of pornography runs parallel to my interpretation of certain drawing practices that engage the naked body, sexuality, and liberation in ways that were deemed erotic, or pornographic by their contemporaries. Drawings produced with this ethos were powerfully transformative, and offered the possibility to explore areas of knowledge and consciousness that had been suppressed by traditionalism, closed‐mindedness, prejudice, and repression. Within this frame, drawing was used to explore the boundaries of what was acceptable on a personal level by the artists. In Soares’ and Lee’s case, drawing led to poetry, performance, and the creation of environments: each one an avenue to make their works understandable to a wider public, or what Sontag would describe as people “without subtle and extensive psychic preparation.”(Sontag 1967, p. 233) Their use of the medium casts it far from the preparatory study, and closer to a sophisticated tool used to explore those obscured “regions of knowledge” described by Herkenhoff (2002, p. 72).



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Outside the Boundaries of the Normal: Drawing and Pornography Toward Greater Freedom The second group of works examined in this section reflect a different (yet parallel) socio‐political context – one defined by the collapse of dictatorial regimes, and by a newly found freedom that was in complete contrast to the traumatic past marked by conservatism. The works reflect the concerns of the first post‐war generation who were influenced by sexual liberation and an anti‐establishment sentiment against totalitarianism. Building on a desire to spotlight taboos, to sexually liberate, and to build a more egalitarian society, the prevalent themes that drawings confront in this new grouping are marginalization and the assertion of individuality. Also in this context, Sontag’s particular definition of pornography aids in unpacking the transformative power of many works outlined here that hover over shifting meaning of porn, obscene, erotic, and sexual. An often overlooked yet unique contributor to the cause of promoting tolerance and gay rights in Mexico is Nahum Zenil (b. 1947). Zenil was one of the founders of the Semana Cultural Gay (Gay Cultural Week), which encourages young artists to speak openly about their sexuality and to confront issues around sexual identity. Working predominantly on paper, Zenil depicts religious scenes, martyrdoms, angels, stereotypical family or countryside compositions, where each character’s face is his own. Only on few occasions he includes the portraits of his partner Gerardo Vilchis, his mother, his students from his time as a school teacher, or Frida Kahlo, an important inspiration throughout his practice (Figure 2.3). Expressing an extremely personal and affective view, Zenil explains: I have always felt the need for self‐analysis in my work in order to accept myself and the way I live. I have always felt marginalized in my life and have experienced a great sense of solitude. In my art, I’ve tried to affect a communication between the members of society and myself. I think that the key to this integration is love ‐ toward all people and all things that exist, and I want my art to function as a representation of this emotion. (Zenil n.d., see Sullivan et al.)

Zenil’s art is concerned with establishing loving channels of communication with others, to counter the solitude that his homosexuality has brought him. The use of his naked self‐portrait in most works intimates a questioning of individuality or a search for identity, found (yet misplaced) in a multitude of cultural inheritances, whether related to family values, Catholicism, or more directly to sexuality. Zenil’s enquiry also extends to ideas of nationalism and the role of the state in protecting citizens who are marginalised. In the powerful untitled three‐part drawing ¡Oh, Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán) (Oh, Saint Flag!  –  To Enrique Guzmán, 1996), Zenil portrays himself from behind, completely naked, bent in half, with the Mexican flag inserted in his rectum. The lower part of the triptych had to be temporarily removed from exhibition for fear of censorship during Mexico City’s Semana Cultural Lésbica‐Gay (Lesbian Gay Cultural Week) hosted by the Museo Universitario del Chopo (Zenil was one of the founders of this yearly event). Though the image is overwhelmingly iconoclastic, the artist’s intention to “affect a communication,” can be interpreted here as a call for empathy, a denunciation of injustice, prejudice, and discrimination. Such aspects of his message are enforced by the intimacy of the medium, almost a

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Figure 2.3  Nahum B. Zenil (1996) ¡Oh, Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán) (Oh, Saint Flag! – To Enrique Guzmán). Triptych. Mixed media on paper. 238 × 71.5 cm. Colección MUAC, UNAM.



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private invitation into his life’s struggles and fragilities, as poignantly put by Eduardo de Jesús Douglas “to miss is to lose, but for Zenil, a mestizo gay male, to hit the target—to be himself in contemporary Mexico—is to suffer.” (de Jesús Douglas 1998, p. 15). Zenil’s works have often been interpreted through the key of self‐immolation and masochism (Segre 2013). In the volume Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art, 1810‐today, historian Rudi Beys speaks of Zenil as “[undoubtedly] the most explicitly ‘gay’, certainly ‘homosexual’ of all.” (Bleys 2000, p. 128). Bleys examined his self‐portraits as narcissistic visualizations and rituals of sexual sado‐ masochism as “deeply rooted in a sense of isolation and uncertainty.” He continues: His recurrent representation of psychic invalidity, of fear and frustration, is attached to a parody of Catholic and bourgeois morality each time the artist portrays himself embodying familiar images and icons of religion, faith, morality, marriage, procreation. (Bleys 2000, p. 128)

Though such interpretations are pertinent, it is also interesting to observe how the persistent repetition of similar imagery in almost all his output  –  naked men with exposed genitalia, his self‐portrait, scenes of martyrdom and immolation – ultimately convey more than “fear and frustration.” Instead, I would argue the repetition of the same theme combined with the meticulousness of his process of drawing, aims to put his vulnerability on display, and this tempers the interpretations of Zenil’s anger. The soft, non‐aggressive tone of his drawings, the neutral expression of his characters and the spare imagery of his compositions, enforce a sense of peace and tranquility and moderate their explicit and potentially disturbing subject matter. Zenil also organized a happening, or collective action, in 2000, which involved 69 artists (a sexually symbolic number), which sought to stretch the boundaries of his drawing practice. The event held at his home was titled Tras‐eros: homenaje a las nalgas. Todas contra la censura translateable as Rear: homage to the butt. All against censorship. Tras‐eros is a wordplay between the words Trasero (behind), and Eros. One of the happenings that took place was by Rocìo Boliver, known as La Congelada de Uva (The Grape Flavored Icicle, after an erotic piece she performed using a grape‐flavored icicle). Reading a script reminiscent of a litany or an invocation honoring the buttocks, Boliver was leaning over a prie‐dieu, wearing a white leotard and she invited the audience to spank and hit her as hard as possible, while being photographed by photographers and journalists. The performance ended when her leotard was trimmed to reveal her sore glutei, and spectators were invited to sign her outfit. The event coordinated by Zenil approached immolation, self‐harm, sadism, and pornography from multiple angles, using a performance that deliberately sought to politicize the naked body. By inviting participants to hit the woman, any form of fear, bigotry or righteousness was called out, hence transforming the performance into a confession, or an act of confrontation. Erica Segre has marked this episode as key for assessing “whether the current figurative turn in contemporary mixed and multimedia art‐making (manifesting representation through its ordinary processes and materials such as drawing and doodling) can be regarded as an eloquent form of elective marginalization and dissent or indeed as an act of ‘reputational sabotage’” (Segre 2013). Segre points out how in a contemporary art scene where media are constantly updated (as in the performance by La Congelada de Uva), a technique as traditional as drawing is

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also deployed by marginalized artists as a form of resistance. La Congelada de Uva’s piece draws significant parallels with Zenil’s drawings, for her action’s intent was not merely to scandalize, but to elicit forms of empathy – one step beyond disdain, judgement or even pornographic enjoyment (see Figure 2.4). A further perspective that pinpoints how drawing was used to expose and denounce marginalization, though in a less empathic way than Zenil, is the work of Colombian Miguel Angel Rojas (1946),. After leaving his studies in architecture, Rojas began experimenting with photography. Of particular relevance is a series of photographs taken secretly in the Faenza cinema theater in central Bogota (a landmark for its impressive Art Deco architecture in decay), which had become a homosexual meeting spot. On one hand, he exposed the lamentable necessity to meet illicitly and away from the public gaze. On the other, he constructed openly sexual black and white images, which were blurred and unobtrusive, yet clearly discernible. Though Rojas wouldn’t systematically use these photographs, the Faenza experience greatly impacted his oeuvre. His earliest (always hyperrealist) drawings from this period (1968–1973) borrowed imagery from the martial arts films he would see at the cinema. Incredibly

Figure 2.4  Miguel Angel Rojas (1975) ATENAS C.C. (Cine Contiguo #1–4) (ATENAS CC – Contiguous Cinema #1–4). Graphite on paper. 90 × 69 cm. © Miguel Angel Rojas.



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meticulous and laborious, these works foreground a series of investigations in multiple media that reflect all the impressions he gathered while sat in that theater, observing and absorbing his surroundings, in a moment of great intellectual and creative development. On his pioneering role in Colombia in reflecting on the taboo of homosexuality and redefining notions of masculinity, the artist himself explains: Already at that moment I knew that I didn’t fit in and that I would find no opportunities for growth within the boundaries of the normal. That’s why I became an artist. Because the essence of what an artist is, is to go against what is established. I used art as my strength, and this strength helped me find myself, recognize myself, and acknowledge my sexual orientation. My work has run parallel to my life and is fully connected to experience, to my experience. (ArtNexus 2008)

As this citation suggests, the urge to go against the establishment in order to discover himself is central to Rojas’ dialectic. His drawings capture a commitment to self‐exploration paired with one to protest and repeal the status quo. Visually, the pencil or charcoal drawings originating in this period repeat the stark chiaroscuro of the photographs, resulting in elegant and classically executed compositions. Rojas first used the photographs taken in Faenza in the mid‐seventies in a work titled Atenas CC (1975), consisting of two two‐part large‐scale drawings that depicted the same man, dressed in leather and denim, masturbating. On the floor below the drawings were a series of photographs of tiles (scaled 1 : 1), recreating a floor surface, covered by a sheet of glass. The final “organic” element (as it is captioned) that comprised the installation was a small bowl each day containing a new dose of sperm from his partner (Ramírez and Gibson 1997, p. 200). The tiled floor, and its rendition in different media (whether drawing or photography) is a leitmotif in his work. Many of the tile patterns he recreated evoked the ones used by Spanish households in colonial buildings, which were increasingly disappearing in Bogotá, such as in his work Grano (Grain 1981), where he redrew an entire floor pattern with dirt taken from his hometown. Combining hyperrealist drawing with a multimedia practice, Rojas’ work expands the restrictions of the medium, immersing the viewer in a debate around appearance and truth. The floor trompe l’oeil, and the meticulous depiction of the man’s legs, fool the viewer’s gaze, while the bowl of sperm disrupts the illusion, as an intrusion of bare, biological truth. The juxtaposition of such artifice with bodily matter, heightens the tension between fiction and reality. The spectator is forced to acknowledge the crudeness of reality in dialogue with a carefully constructed fiction. Reality here is the fact of homosexuality that contrasts with its common public denial or concealment from the public eye as, for example, inside the dark auditorium of the Faenza. His works reflect the imperative to recognize other social realities and to tear down society’s facades. The concept of counter‐obscenity, further unpacks Zenil’s and Rojas’ propositions. Counter‐obscenity was explored by Branden W. Joseph (2014) in a conference paper delivered on the lesser known films by Claes Oldenburg, interpreted in relation to a large body of “sexually suggestive writings, drawings and collages” (Joseph 2014) from the mid‐1960s. Oldenburg’s imagery within this series of drawings included large penises, cartoon‐like prepubescent girls, women with enlarged breasts and vulvas, and violent sexual scenes, which were brarely shown at the time of their production. Joseph argued that Oldenburg’s heavily sexualized and pornographic

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drawings emerged from a similar matrix to Pop’s critique of objectification, fetishization and desire, by which the resulting imagery was not a celebration of pornography, but rather a détournement of its very premises. In other words, by depicting what was considered illicit, taboo or obscene, Oldenburg sought to allow the opportunity to reframe these adjectives within a new social order that would distance sexuality from immorality. A determination to reframe social orders is a shared objective of the artists considered in this chapter. When social structures do not accommodate the social groups many of these artists felt they belonged to, they sought to push the boundaries of the existing groups to create a space for themselves and the groups their art advocated, whether for women, homosexuals, or ethnic minorities. Combining Joseph’s perspective with Sontag’s theorization of pornography as a vital ingredient in processes of cultural progress and in the exploration of knowledge, reveals some of the dynamics that the works described responding to, in order to activate social transformation and political engagement. By succeeding in scandalizing their viewers by exposing their own bodies or engaging in sadomasochistic acts, these works unveiled the hypocrisies of society. The extremity of Zenil’s iconography of self‐immolation and sexuality sought to capitulate obscenity into a change in perspective: greater empathy and openness to homosexuality. Concurrently, Rojas’ use of sperm together with his drawing of a man masturbating seeks to normalize what was considered obscene or fetishistic, toward something organic, natural, and honest. Zenil’s repetition of themes, refined technique, and Rojas’ engagement with masculinity, truth and fiction, can also be found in the work of Brazilian artist José Leonilson Bezerra Dias (1957–1993). Leonilson’s oeuvre is far less explicit or confrontational in comparison to the other two artists. Yet, his works offer a subtler eroticism that builds further on the legacies of Soares, Lee, or Geiger. Working mostly with drawing, but also painting and embroidery, Leonilson’s oeuvre is a moving collection of slight gestures that capture the fragility of human existence. Like the two artists previously discussed in this section, Leonilson began to explore homosexuality in his work from 1983, the year he was first propositioned by another man in Milan. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, tragically succumbing to AIDS In 1993. His works from 1989 onwards (considered by curator Adriano Pedrosa to mark his mature phase) materialize a vivid sense of existential introspection, and a fear of death. He considered many of his drawings from this period as entries to an autobiographical diary, recording his emotional states, thoughts, and his struggle to reconcile his own identity with the Catholic religion. Each work is made using a symbolic lexicon that he developed over time, which references his interpretation of a personal and shared human condition. Pebbles, fire, knives, scars, stitches, are all compositional elements of an intimate vocabulary that speaks to friendships, spirituality, illness, and recovery (see Figure 2.5). Contemporaneous artist Leda Catunda remembered how his “drawings were made in his free time, spare moments during the day or night and often while travelling” and that “drawing occurred in his life as an instrument to clarify events,” or as a “sort of filter” (Catunda 2014).3 Recurrent in his work from the late 1980s onwards are also images of naked men together, of masturbation and erections, always delicately rendered in small scale. One of the most poignant pieces from this period Favourite Game (1990), inspired the name for an important retrospective of Leonilson’s work at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2015. It reproduces the typical composition of a slightly off‐centered naked male figure, rendered in watered down ink.



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Figure 2.5  José Leonilson Bezerra Dias (1990) Favorite game. Permanent ink on paper. 21 × 13.5 cm. Source: Photo: Rubens Chiri / © Projeto Leonilson.

Leonilson often positioned his drawings slightly to the top left of the paper, a gesture symbolic of an a‐symmetry, of an ambiguity, according to Pedrosa. Most of the paper’s surface is left blank, leaving the figure alone and isolated on the page. From the figure’s calves, two banners, or signposts emerge with the words “Truth” and “Fiction.” Combined with the title marked at the top of the page alongside the place and date of its making, the words on this work encapsulate Leonilson’s vision of existence, torn between the ideals of truth and fiction, between sincerity and façade. Although such a tension might seem to reflect on the tragic existential dilemma, Leonilson (Pedrosa 2015, p. 23) viewed it as his “favourite game,” a dynamic that is also the site of entertainment, and meaning if one considers the importance he attributed to symbology in all his works. Speaking of his works, the artist stated that “the thing that inspires me is the map.”4 Many of his works depict the body as a map, a crossroads, in between a chart of organs and a map of rivers and countries. The dismemberment of his slight figures, the parallelism between geography and subjectivity, where all sentiments or states of being are signaled like road signs, immediately establishes a link with works by the artists of the first group, and in particular with Dias, who had been his close

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mentor and friend since 1981. Dias’ drawings, in fact, used urban signage and iconography to evoke the violence of urban life, together with an introspective reflection on its effects on subjectivity and identity. Curator Ivo Mesquita observed how his works, which were deeply engaged in dealing with homosexuality and AIDS became akin to “scar‐collecting‐skin, in a comment on the human body as a place for identity discourse as a means by which (our) fears are revealed and (our) desires recorded in the flesh” (Mesquita 1998, p. 194). Drawing occupied a seminal role in Leonilson’s incredible oeuvre. His practice synthesizes the struggle to locate the body within contemporary society, to accept sexuality and to redefine gender, sensitizing the viewer to the Cartesian philosophical dilemmas of existence related to identity, belonging, and purpose. The artist, speaking of his works’ premise, succinctly explains: “I perceive that segregation exists. And I, it is obvious, am part of one of these minorities, or more than one” (Pedrosa 2015, p. 253).5 As such he sought to build a space of understanding for the viewer to communicate with himself and with the minorities that the artist represented. Like many of his predecessors accounted for in this chapter, drawing for Leonilson became the matrix of his output in other media, evident in the uncanny similarity between his embroideries and his works on paper. His final work – that further built on the totality of his practice ‐ was also an installation titled Instalação Sobre Duas Figuras at the Cathedral of Morumbi in São Paulo. After 1991, once Leonilson discovered he had contracted HIV, he focused more on embroidering linen, velvet, felt among many other materials, something he had first learned to do from his mother. The exhibition consisted of several objects, chairs and clothes racks, displayed in the cathedral. The main focus centered upon two chairs that were covered (almost upholstered) with handmade shirts, embroidered with words on the chest “of false morality” and “of a good heart.” A tension between fiction and truth, was heightened by the clothing items that absently populated the space, and which were never made to be worn. The spirituality of the location, combined with the artist’s deteriorating health, further pointed to a fragility of being and to the futility of fiction. Because embroidery is an activity traditionally associated with women and craft as opposed to art, his works heightened a sense of femininity in his practice, which once again sought to challenge gender stereotypes. The works discussed, constitute practices that delve into self‐exploration to confront the hypocrisy of modern society by appealing to the viewer’s sensitivity around being exposed to explicit erotic, pornographic or emotionally charged imagery, whether voluptuous silhouettes, garters, genitalia, or suggestive figures. A final group of artists I would like to examine in this chapter is Mujeres Creando (Women Building – their official translation), the Bolivian anarchist‐feminist collective, founded by Maria Galindo, Julieta Paredes, Monica Mendoza. Having examined how male homosexual artists confronted the necessity to call out audiences and society at large in the name of equality, respect, and against prejudice, Mujeres Creando’s work provides a counterpoint from a feminist perspective. In addition, their work forms the apex of a juncture between political activism in the form of protest, and the narratives of eroticism, marginalization, and liberation that I have confronted so far. The group’s use of drawing engages with notions of self‐exploration and self‐determination through eroticism, while heightening further the sense of drawing as an expanding medium that sees its most traditional execution on paper as the keystone of a wider multimedia practice.



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Paralleling the discourse of LGBT rights across South America, this collective aims to denounce social inequality. Advocating for women’s rights, and with an overarching anti‐capitalist sentiment, the group has run an independent newspaper, a cafe, a public broadcast Radio Deseo, among other initiatives in La Paz and Santa Cruz. Their manifesto published online, sums up their ethos: Crazy, agitators, rebels, disobedient, subversive, witches, vagabonds, graffiti artists, anarchists, feminists. Lesbians and heterosexuals; married and single; students and employees; Indian, chotas, cholas, birlochas and señoritas; old and young; white and dark, we are a fabric of solidarity; of identities, of compromises, we are women, Women Building.6

At first, their artistic practice was manifested through a series of graffiti of inflammatory sentences such as “Pimp State; I do not want prostitution, I want work,” or “You can’t decolonise without depatriarchising!” or “There is nothing more like a right‐wing sexist than a left‐wing sexist!.”7 These slogans are elegantly spray‐painted in cursive on public walls, and while their message seeks to destabilize, they appear almost innocent by replicating primary school lettering. Building on the legacies of artists as Ivens Machado, Gego, Mira Schendel, and León Ferrari (who all worked with calligraphy, often evocative of the Surrealists’ experiments with automatism), the written graffiti of Mujeres Creando plays with the narrative of scripture prevalent in South America (Hauptman 2005, p. 22; Oramas et al. 2009). Ramírez and Gibson described writing as “the authentic imprint of the artist’s self,” (Ramírez and Gibson 1997, pp. 20–22) which links to Mujeres Creandos’ mission to assert their proud sense of identity. Resonating with the esthetics of Soares’ and Leonilson’s single‐line drawings, Mujeres Creando’s output seeks to subvert the sacralized symbols of traditional patriarchal chauvinism. In the recent drawing El Eterno Kamasutra Histórico del Patriarcado (The Eternal Historic Kamasutra of the Patriarchy, 2014), their iconic graffiti is paired with erotic, yet humorous cartoonish drawings that caricature the Indian Hindu text. Each vignette depicts naked men speaking (in speech boxes) to women during what at first might seem to be sexual encounters, but instead speak to commonly submissive roles for women within heterosexual relationships. One of the drawings shows a woman reaching for her “objectives,” while a man is clinging in a crouching position to her exclaiming, “stay with me, I promise that you will be better off by my side.” Another presents a woman on her knees holding up a bookstand over her shoulders for an older man who is lecturing: “this is how we shall resolve all the issues related to inequality in the world.” Though with a playful and irreverent tone, this work takes on monumental issues at stake for women worldwide, but even more so in South America, where for example abortion is still illegal and women can be prosecuted in many countries on religious grounds. Bringing the esthetic of their drawings and graffiti into sculpture‐form, Mujeres Creando built a work on the theme of abortion. Titled Espacio Para Abortar (Space to Abort), it was originally conceived as a portable structure and a banner to be used during street marches. At the XXXI São Paulo Biennial in 2014, it was included as an artwork and placed on the floor in the main atrium of the building where visitors could roam freely without paying a ticket. The structure was made of thick wire, bent in the shape of gigantic wide open legs that looked like a three‐dimensional

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drawing suspended in space. While being sexually evocative, the open legs of a woman signal the group’s satirical take on the female body. At the center of the structure, a vagina‐like crevice from which a round red post emerged reading the sentence in Portuguese: “nem boca fechada nem útero aberto,” (neither a shut mouth nor an open uterus). Dotted in and around the thighs and feet of the structure were cylindrical booths enclosed by red veil with the word “uterus” embroidered on them: safe spaces that visitors could occupy one at a time to listen to recordings of women speaking about their abortion experiences. Just like the structure itself, the embroidered slogans on the red veils protecting the uterine cabins also gave the impression of floating sketches. The materials, colors, and fonts used to create the work are stereotypical of domestic, sometimes saccharine, feminine esthetics; connected to craftsmanship rather than high art. By giving prominence to embroidery, rose veils, gold thread, and cursive handwriting, Mujeres Creando turn the stereotype of femininity into a caricature. They both neutralize the erotic charge of their imagery (the wide open legs of a woman with no torso or head), and destabilize the cliché of feminine craft. In addition, the structure invited debate and dialogue amongst viewers about what they termed the “colonization of the female body,” most symbolized by abortion. In a document describing the project on their website, Mujeres Creando explain: The criminalization of abortion is a form of colonization of the bodies of women by the patriarchal State. Motherhood as cultural imposition and as tyrannical mandate of reproduction is a form of unacceptable submission and does not matter if the demand is coming from capitalism, socialism or from the indigenous community. (Mujeres Creando n.d.)

As with their graffiti and cartoons, Mujeres Creando use art and satire to denounce the status quo and to educate or sensitize audiences to controversial themes such as abortion and the colonization of the female body. What could be erotic, or for some obscene, is transformed with a comical vein and a notably feminine esthetic into social commentary. Space to Abort is an innovative approach to contemporary art‐making (using materials and subject‐matters not canonically deemed as high art), interpreted through the group’s satirical vein of political activism.

Epilogue This chapter has focused on the practices of artists whose political engagement has rested upon countering marginalization, the repression of sexuality, women’s inequality, and prejudice against homosexuality and AIDS. Histories written by Traba, among others, have bestowed upon drawing in South America the “alert” status that marks it out within an international panorama. Traba’s interpretation of drawing as an important current in the continent helped individuate the concerns that drove the diffusion of this medium and the employment of eroticism as a form of rebellion. This narrative combined with those constructed by Duncan’s, Ramírez’s, and Herkenhoff’s curatorial selections, proved drawing to be the ideal battleground to complicate the all‐too‐frequent generalization that art from South America is characterized by political overtones.



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Departing from the most directly politically engaged works featuring the map of South America by Torres‐García, Geiger and Jaar among others, the text examined one of the most common narratives that connected drawing from the region with politics. A deeper analysis into Geiger’s, Soares’, and Lee’s oeuvres revealed that a crucial element for them was to adopt an erotic, sexual, visceral overtone to express their investment in addressing relationships between men and women in Brazil. Their drawings, springboards for their multimedia practices, launch an exploration of self‐ knowledge with the shared objective to transcend the confines of the medium. Using erotic imagery to confront what would’ve been perceived as extreme, indecent, at times obscene, they sought to shake the societal structures that weighed on their liberation. Within this framework, works were often considered both erotic and pornographic, which blurred the boundary between these categories. Sontag’s analyses of pornography that explained its productive potential was instrumental in further exploring how drawing prompted social transformation. Within the second group of artists studied, Zenil and Rojas used realistic renditions of naked bodies, masturbation and secretive homosexual encounters to highlight their marginalization from society. Because much of their subject matter was – and often still is – considered taboo, an overview of their work extended the pornography/eroticism paradigm, giving continuity to the narrative presented in the first section. With the objective to confront the viewer with some of the same issues they dealt with daily as homosexual men, they employed explicit, realistic, and shocking imagery to ultimately elicit empathy. Their strategies resonated with the influence of Oldenburg’s drawings and Joseph’s theory of counter‐obscenity, which also recognizes the regenerative possibilities of taboo sexual images. Though from a different angle, Leonilson’s intimate drawings revealed a concurrent effort to resist marginalization, while yearning for empathy. Instead of shocking us, the way his works are sensitively made invites contemplation. Leonilson provides another facet of how exposed, erotic or taboo images could be used to invoke intimacy. Like Rojas and Zenil, Leonilson’s drawing practice was complemented by works in other media suggesting great fluidity and inclusivity – characteristics to be found within all their oeuvres. Mujeres Creando’s satire of porn and the sexualization of their bodies in their cartoons, slogans and installations, highlight how explicit, traumatic or paradoxical images could help create a zone of productive debate and peaceful encounter. Also in this case, the use of naked body images built on the narratives of eroticism and pornography in art, particularly in the pursuit of destabilizing patriarchy. The work of these artists encapsulates the most vibrant state of alert in South America – one that seeks to engage, sexualize, and liberate culture. Their contribution builds on and exceeds Marta Traba’s definition, which dwelled on the distinctiveness of one medium to speak about the sensibility of a whole continent. The way these artists developed such drawing practices, which they channeled into broader and more experimental multimedia oeuvres, helps us see how drawing evolved in contemporary art history. The new social orders artists initiated were founded on freedom and empathy, straying from conventional tropes of political art in the region, adding complexity and nuance to existing narratives. The intimacy of drawings containing or referencing erotic and pornographic imagery, satire and counter‐obscenity, contributes to a new definition of social engagement. By bringing our attention to this phenomenon we see the transformative quality of this medium, and how it helped

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supersede the limits imposed by society. This is why analyzing drawing practices helps us begin to reframe the very definition of politically engaged art in Latin America. In a continent where many artists felt compelled to react to ubiquitous political oscillations in order to protect cultural growth and self‐reflexive debate, we see political discourse materialized in a much broader field, revealing a wealth of materials, perspectives, and strategies to imagine new futures for a society in the process of change.

Notes 1 See the X São Paulo biennial, the proliferation of Anti‐biennials across the continent, New York’s MoMA’s 1970 exhibition Information. More recently, in the 1999 exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1960–1980, Subversive Practices Art under Conditions of Political Repression 60s–80s/South America/Europe (Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart 2009), and Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 (MoMA 2015). 2 See Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non‐Object,” in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms, (London, New York: InIVA/MIT press, 2005) and Miguel A. López and Emilio Tarazona, Temas de Arte Peruano 3: Juan Acha y la Guerrilla Cultural, 1969–1970, (Lima: Centro estudios de la Universidad de San Marcos, 2007). 3 Original: “Os desenhos eram feitos no tempo que sobrava, num tempinho que surgia em alguma hora do dia ou de noite e muitas vezes nas viagens.” 4 Original: “A coisa que me inspira é o mapa.” 5 Original: “Eu percebo a segregação que existe. E eu, é obvio, faço parte de uma dessas minorias, ou de mais de uma.” 6 Original: “Locas, agitadoras, rebeldes, desobedientes, subversivas, brujas, callejeras, grafiteras, anarquistas, feministas. Lesbianas y heterosexuales; casadas y solteras; estudiantes y oficinistas; indias, chotas, cholas, birlochas y señoritas; viejas y jóvenes; blancas y morenas, somos un tejido de solidaridades; de identidades, de compromisos, somos mujeres, Mujeres Creando.” 7 Other phrases include: “Ave María llena eres de rebeldía”/“Soberanía en mi país y en mi cuerpo”/“Si Evo se embarazara, el aborto sería nacionalizado y constitucionalizado”/“MUJER: ni sumisa, ni devota. Te quiero LIBRE, LINDA Y LOCA!.”

References Anonymous. (1963), “Mulher e Paisagem Confundem‐se na Pintura de Wesley Duke Lee,” A Nação, November 6. Anonymous. (2000). “Celebran el glúteo 69 artistas; se manifiestan contra la censura * La exposición, muestra de la tolerancia que esperan los creadores,” La Jornada, August 29. Accessed October 15, 2018. www.jornada.com.mx/2000/08/29/05an1clt.html ArtNexus. (Mar‐May 2008). “Exhibition: Miguel Ángel Rojas.” https://www.artnexus. com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=19100 Bleys, R. (2000). Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art, 1810‐ Today. London: Continuum.



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Catunda, L. (July 1, 2014). “Verdades e mentiras.” Accessed April 9, 2017. www. ledacatunda.com.br/portu/depo2a.asp?flg_Lingua=1&cod_Depoimento=41 Gilbert, Z. (2014). INTERVIEWS “I Didn’t Invent the Map,” A Conversation with Anna Bella Geiger by Anna Bella Geiger. Post at MoMA. Accessed December 10, 2016. http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/518‐i‐didn‐t‐invent‐the‐map‐a‐conversation‐ with‐anna‐bella‐geiger. Gotti, S. (2015). A Pantagruelian Pop: Teresinha Soares’s “Erotic Art of Contestation.”. Tate Papers, no. 24. Accessed December 14, 2016. www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/tate‐papers/24/a‐pantagruelian‐pop‐teresinha‐soares‐erotic‐art‐of‐ contestation. Gullar, F. (1959). “Teoría do Não Objeto,” Suplemento Dominical, Jornal do Brasil, December 19–20, 1959. Hauptman, J. (2005). Calligraphy. In: Drawing from the Modern (eds. J. Hauptman, G. Garrels and J. Kantor). New York: Museum of Modern Art. Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York (n.d.). Anna Bella Geiger: On Paper and in “Reel Time,” by Marek Bartelik. Accessed August 2019. http://www.henriquefaria.com/ exhibition‐about?id=65 Herkenhoff, P. (1997). Autonomous doodles, verbal scrawl and erasers on drawing in South America. In: Re‐Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (eds. M.C. Ramírez and E.A. Gibson). Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin. Herkenhoff, P. (2002). Maiolino’s trajectory: a negotiation of differences. In: Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora (eds. S. Rolnik, M. Doctors, S. Salzstein, et al.). New York: The Drawing Center. de Jesús Douglas, E. (1998). The colonial self: homosexuality and mestizaje in the art of Nahum B. Zenil. Art Journal 57 (3): 14–21. Joseph, B.W. (2014). “Object Worshipping: Notes on Claes Oldenburg’s Films, or the Ballad of the Turning Woman.” Paper presented in Symposium: Art in Transfer: Curatorial practices and Transnational Strategies in the Era of Pop, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, November 6–8, 2014. Mesquita, I. (1998). Afterward: Para o meu vizonho de Sonhos. In: Leonilson: São Tantas as Verdades = So Many Are the Truths (ed. L. Lagnado). São Paulo: DBA Artes Graf́icas. Mujeres Creando (n.d.). “Manifesto.” Accessed December 14, 2016. http://www. mujerescreando.org Noé, L.F. (1978). My approaches to drawing.” Reprinted in. In: Re‐Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (eds. M.C. Ramírez and E.A. Gibson). Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, 1997. Oramas, P., Giunta, L.A., and Naves, R. (2009). León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Pedrosa, A. (2015). Leonilson: Truth, Fiction. São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Queer Arts (n.d.). “Nahum B. Zenil.” Accessed July 19, 2017. http://www.queer‐arts. org/archive/show4/zenil/zenil.html Ramírez, M.C. (2015). “Mari Carmen Ramírez on Joaquín Torres‐García.” Art in America Magazine, July 28, 2015. Accessed December 14, 2016. http://www. artinamericamagazine.com/news‐features/magazine/mari‐carmen‐ramrez‐on‐ joaqun‐torres‐garca Segre, E. (2013). “Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems and Self‐Immolation in Mexico: Dissensus in the Work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil.” Paper presented in

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Sabotage: (Self‐) Destructive Practices in Latin American Contemporary Art Symposium, Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre UCL, London, April 26, 2013. Sontag, S. (1967). The pornographic imagination. Reprinted in A Susan Sontag Reader (ed. E. Hardwick), 205–233. New York: Random House, 1983. Sontag, S. (1976). The pornographic imagination Story of the Eye (ed. G. Bataille). London: Marion Boyars. Sullivan, E.J., Zenil, N.B., and Kirking, C. (1996). Witness to the Self = Testigo Del Ser. San Francisco: Mexican Museum Accessed October 15, 2018. https://greyartgallery.nyu. edu/2015/12/nahum‐b‐zenil‐witness‐to‐self. Teixeira da Costa, C. (1980). Wesley Duke Lee. Rio de Janeiro: MEC/FUNARTE. Torres‐García, J. (1935). “School of the South.” Cited in “The Map as Political Agent: Destabilising the North‐South Model and Redefining Identity in Twentieth‐Century Latin American Art,” by Nicole De Armendi, in St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies, Vol. 13, 2009. Traba, M. (1973). Dos décadas vulnerable en las artes plásticas lationamericanas, 1950– 1970. Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno Editores.

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Graphic Witness Kate Macfarlane

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) American writer, film maker and political activist Susan Sontag returns to questions first raised in her seminal title On Photography (1977). On Photography considered the ethics of photography in bearing witness to war and suffering. Sontag interrogated a range of images of conflict and injustice, both documentary and fictional, to ask whether imagery might incite further violence, numb our senses to a state of apathy and helplessness, or trigger dissent that might avert future bloodshed. In Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag uses Goya’s The Disasters of War as an example of an artwork that can give us agency to consider war in its complexity, rather than as spectacle. Over a five‐year period, Goya made 900 drawings and 300 prints in response to the cruelty and violence wreaked by Napoleon’s war on Spain, the famine and disease that erupted in its wake, and the repressive rule of King Ferdinand VII that ensued. Goya witnessed first‐hand the atrocities committed by Napoleon’s soldiers in Spain, and the suffering of civilians during and as a result of the war, and combined these scenes with imagery from emblem books1 and other traditional iconography. The variation in the sizes of printing plates and the range in quality of paper indicate Goya’s commitment to The Disasters of War project, despite scarcity of means. For Sontag, Goya’s drawings for The Disasters of War “move the viewer close to the horror. All the trappings of the spectacular have been eliminated: the landscape is an atmosphere, a darkness, barely sketched in. War is not a spectacle” (Sontag 2003, p. 39). As Sontag describes, Goya’s images are a synthesis of what he witnessed; they capture the long‐term effect of war on the psyche of a population and are almost cinematic in their use of caption to link imagery, as in plates 9–11: “They don’t like it,” “nor do these,” “or these either.” These captions and Goya’s exploitation of the white ground of the paper to increase the sense of drama (this is less marked in the prints than in the original drawings) invest the series with timeless emotive force. The formal choices of the contemporary artists discussed in this chapter similarly produce a material index of the causes and effects of prejudice, injustice and conflict. A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Sontag suggests, “for the photography of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance. But each photograph is authored, however artlessly or casually” (Sontag 2003, p. 23). Might drawing’s “taint of artistry” bear witness to atrocity and violence in more meaningful and productive ways than photography? As the writer and curator Hannah Ellul reminds us, drawings are the product of the machinations of cognition in conjunction with the motor movement of the hand, along with the intervention of all sensory capacities, Why, after the rise and reign of photography do people yet understand a pen and paper to be among the best instruments of witness? The role of the body in drawing, uniting the haptic and the visual, has something to do with it. (Ellul 2017, n.p.)

Drawing entered the field of fine art in Italy in the fifteenth century as disegno, a term which combines the act of design and drawing. Disegno was used by Renaissance artists to work out a composition that could be transferred into a painting, a relief or three dimensions. The artists featured in this chapter use drawing to make autonomous rather than preparatory works, yet the same cognitive processes of problem‐ solving and reasoning remain evident in the final outcome. The distinguishing materials and styles of the artworks discussed make explicit the reflexive nature of each artist’s project. These are not impulsive responses to contemporary issues nor do they provide solutions or conclusions. Rather, the drawings constitute propositions, a set of questions or problems. We are not caught up in the spectacle of the moment but are made aware of the connections between past and future, of cause and effect, through strategies such as the labored manipulation of graphite, anti‐illusionistic forms of representation and drawings in series. The artists I discuss – Mounira Al Solh, Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Andrea Bowers, Nidhal Chamekh and Lorna Simpson – use drawing to re‐present contemporary events, removing them from the real‐time of mass‐shared media and other photographic forms, to document situations that might otherwise be overlooked, misunderstood, or forgotten. Simpson and Anyango Grünewald examine images of individual human suffering circulating in social media to challenge apathy, whilst Chamekh, Bowers, and Al Solh are often on the ground to bear witness to the effects of war and governmental regulations on individuals. Where Al Solh draws individuals from direct observation, Bowers and Chamekh work from their own photographs of demonstrations or refugee camps. Additional sources of images for these artists include the media  –  newspaper clippings and content streaming on the internet; archives of political activism; family photographs; antiquity and art history. The African‐American artist Lorna Simpson (born 1960) has been known since the 1980s for photographic tableaux that interrogate the “truths” of language and image, and the way society categorizes individuals. In 2007 Simpson began to work from mass‐produced news media images and Interrogation Drawings (2008) were made in response to images of Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the Iraq war. Simpson says: “The series is about people who were ‘detained’ for interrogation and the way that information is conveyed in the media and how certain rights that we have as individuals are suspended” (Simpson 2008, p. 2). Images from Abu Ghraib prison were first shown in the media in April 2004. The most iconic image, freely available to view on the internet, is the hooded, naked prisoner standing on a box, with electrodes attached to his fingers. Other photographs show the celebratory gestures of the soldiers in the



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act of torturing and humiliating prisoners. In contrast to the emotional overload of these photographic images, which “… develops a kind of apathy, an unquestioned acceptance after a certain point” (Simpson 2008, p. 3) in her pared down drawings Simpson has focused on concrete details of the settings; the architecture and furniture particular to sites of incarceration and torture: For the prisoner, these environments are constructed to maintain a constant state of disorientation. Minimal and architecturally stark – with generic prison architecture – they could be anywhere and everywhere…the furniture or apparatus needed is easily put together and dismantled. (Simpson 2008, p. 70)

Simpson has made the drawings on graph or log paper and used graphite and ink as a tool to deconstruct the photographic images. The grid of the paper forms a readymade, habitable space, allowing for greater economy in her drawn lines. The palette too is a readymade, as graph paper is color coded, and the institutional pastel colors move us yet further from the homogeneity of her source photographs, making each one specific and yet highly ambiguous. For 3 Chairs Orange Simpson has turned the log paper on its side, rendering the numbering senseless. The artificial color sets the scene and the grid gives a slightly skewed sense of depth, creating the impression that we are looking down onto the scene. Two empty reclining office chairs, articulated with fine and sinuous pencil lines, are handcuffed to an angular folding chair, respectively standing in for the callous persecutors and the prisoner. Delicately delineated, the comfy chairs stray beyond the parameters of the grid, whilst the folding chair is held firm within it, pinioned by a small table in the receding perspectival space. Bed Green (see Figure  3.1) shows the top half of a double bed, stripped of its mattress to expose a lattice base. Simpson’s drawn lines compete with the concentric circles of the polar graph paper to create a vortex that appears to have swallowed the subject of constraint, and the shackles, attached to the headboard, lie slack. In relation to her Interrogation Drawings Simpson has said, “I [find]… the junction of memory with regard to political contexts of silence, erasure, and revision compelling. It is the moment those things collide that I find to be visceral” (Simpson 2014, p. 3). This moment of collision is expressed in the syntax of the graph paper and minimal line drawings; the graph paper functions as both ground and figure, with one ebbing into the other, removing any assurance of an anchored and coherent architectural setting. Her stark drawings of these sites of torture provide a chilling graphic armature to contemplate and, as a series, they remind us how horrific stories soon become normalized through repetition in the media. Drawing provides the perfect tool to remove elements such as the individual human beings involved in these acts and so to lend particular focus on torture as a commonplace method of interrogation and punishment. In shunning ‘art’ paper and selecting a substrate that represents bureaucratic systems, Simpson deftly encodes her suite of drawings; the graph paper becomes a ready‐made, more symbolic of the injustices metered out by governmental regimes, than a direct representation of them. Later in the chapter we find the same motivation in Al Solh’s use of yellow lined legal paper for her portraits of individuals displaced by the Syrian war and other conflicts. Such methodologies facilitate a more objective treatment of highly emotive subject matter. It also prompts a different reading, the business‐like substrates encoding them as documents that stand as testimonies to real people and events.

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Figure 3.1  Lorna Simpson (2008) Bed Green. Graphite and ink on paper. 27.9 × 21.6 cm (11 × 8.5 in.). Source: © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

The Kenyan Swedish artist Catherine Anyango Grünewald (born 1982) addresses the human cost of police corruption and the callousness of the media in her Last Seen series of drawings (2012 and ongoing). Her source imagery is CCTV footage and police photography that is the last known recorded image of a person before or at their disappearance or death. To the artist the ceaseless reproduction and availability of these images renders them banal and suppresses a humane response to the wrongful killings of innocent civilians. She adopts a labor‐intensive process, drawing the scene in high contrast negative using a 6B pencil. To avoid the inflection of the artist’s hand, the image is built onto this negative using a ruler and darker, 8B pencil. The regularity of the lines connotes a consciously mechanical procedure, a device to ensure the artist treats the subject with a degree of objectivity. Accumulated lines of graphite build a shiny surface that constantly shifts with the movement of the viewer, that ultimately defy the clarity of the image.



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Anyango Grünewald seeks images of unspeakable violence and has said: I am paying homage to a scene that is so horrific in its reality. Selfishly, what I’m trying to do, because I can’t understand this morally, is try and find meaning through the act of drawing; and because they take so long and I have to keep looking at these photographs  –  it’s a way for me to try to uncover something in these events. (Grünewald 2017, n.p.)

Anyango Grünewald’s short animation, Live, moments ago (2015) (see Figure 3.2) is based on mobile phone footage of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. The body of the black man was left on the pavement in baking sun for hours after the murder. Racial prejudice was the root cause of this inhumane treatment and Anyango Grünewald sought a form that would express the intolerable duration of the victim’s humiliation. The artist drew each frame of the mobile phone footage, a total of 50 drawings. Each drawing was worked into a further five times, with photographs taken at each stage, to produce the two‐minute film. The accretions of graphite and scarring of the surface of the paper evoke the death of the subject in a highly visceral way, with the composition becoming degraded and indecipherable in the process. This short, looping film suggests unbearable duration, as

Figure 3.2  Catherine Anyango Grünewald (2015) Live, Moments ago (The Death of Mike Brown, Ferguson, 9.8.14). Film still. Source: © Catherine Anyango Grünewald. Courtesy the artist.

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Michael Brown, who was shot by the police, lay dead in the unrelenting summer sun for four hours. The blackness of the animation signifies the black skin of the victim, and the erosion of the paper the body breaking down after death. Whilst the footage available on line conveys a fleeting event, Anyango Grünewald’s treatment of the imagery is a material index of institutional racism that makes palpable the finality of death and the long‐term effect on the victim’s family and wider community. In her more recent short animation, Slow Death of a Woman in Aleppo (2017), the subject, confined to a wheelchair, struggles, and ultimately fails to survive crossfire in the war‐torn Syrian city of Aleppo. Anyango Grünewald drew the stricken woman and architectural structures and then erased them, with the blackened shreds of eraser and pentimento creating the effect of a vacuum or vortex, as though the woman’s life is being sucked out of her before our eyes. The erasure of the drawing sharpens our attention to the destruction occurring in a much wider sense. Whilst accumulated graphite in Live, moments ago suggests unbearable duration, in Slow Death of a Woman in Aleppo, the effacement of the image and erased detritus suggest that a life has been more dramatically curtailed. Drawing is the principle medium employed by the Tunisian artist Nidhal Chamekh (b. 1985), who also works with sculpture, installation, and film. The compositional arrangement of his suite of small‐scale drawings, De quoi revent les martyrs (What do martyrs dream about?) (2012) was informed by the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci and other artists of the Renaissance where pragmatic reasoning brings all manner of subjects and treatments onto the same page. Chamekh was also influenced by the ideas that drove the art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg to produce his Mnemosyne Atlas, an assemblage of images created between 1924 and 1929 that considers how antiquity continues to live in the present ‐ that is, if and how culturally significant artifacts of the past have contemporary meaning. When the Arab Spring of 2011 triggered tumultuous events across the region, Chamekh found that images circulating in the media reminded him of those of the past that he had studied and encountered. He collected visual material from all manner of sources: images from the media as well as from art history, antiquity, and technical engineering manuals, to create new drawings. Some images were created through a transfer technique where a printed image is coated with ethanol and transferred to paper. In this process Chamekh eschews control over his composition, positively inviting accidental and unexpected juxtapositions: classical studies of body parts appear alongside vignettes of aspirational young people rendered in colored pencil, whilst news images of the victims of conflict – the dead, disfigured, or dying – punctuate the montage. Chamekh has employed a similar compositional device in Calais, studies and fragments of memories (2017) (see Figure 3.3), one of a suite of drawings, sculptures, and a film that comprise an installation made in response to his visits to “The Jungle,” the refugee camp in Calais. Chamekh has said: My response to visiting Calais was one of shock – it is hard to comprehend and speak about what we have seen – in this condition drawing seems an alternative to speaking but it is also about what one remembers – how you use memory when you draw – and also the imagination – one feeds into the other – it is natural that fantasy, dream and imagination feeds into memory. (Chamekh 2017, n.p.)

Over days spent in “The Jungle,” and through analyzing photographs taken there, Chamekh began to see correspondences between what he had witnessed and images



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Figure 3.3  Nidhal Chamekh (2017) Calais, studies and fragments of memories. Graphite and transfer on cotton paper. 100 × 140 cm (39.3 × 55.1 in.). Source: © Collection FRAC Centre‐Val de Loire. Photo: Blaise Adilon.

lodged in his mind. He was most struck by the artfulness of the shelters, and how the network of ropes and the stones that secured them to the ground reminded him of ancient astrological charts. He has drawn tents, and other images to represent migration, such as boats, harnesses, and a dromedary saddle used by Touareg tribes in Mali, Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia. This drawing eschews linguistic models of communication and introduces systems that have their origin in a different order of signs, such as early Islamic astrology. Chamekh also quotes Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), placing the wanderer alongside a refugee looking into an abyss, an expanse of white paper. Friedrich’s wanderer is often referred to as representing Kantian self‐reflection, and Chamekh’s juxtaposition illustrates shared human instincts that exist beyond the reality of the objective world. To the right is a plan of London’s infamous Grenfell Tower, the block of flats that caught fire in summer 2017, killing over 70 of its mainly poor and ethnic minority inhabitants. Chamekh’s diagrammatic treatment of the high‐rise building constitutes an analysis of foundational human instincts and rights in an era of deep social division and inadequate investment in housing for the poor. Overall, Chamekh’s compositions reflect contemporary ways of encountering and absorbing information. At times his work resembles the outcome of an online search, with images filling the computer screen. This rejection of a receding perspectival space creates a more fragmented pictorial field, meaning the relationship between components is in flux in terms of their importance or political significance. Chamekh juxtaposes images from disparate sources and employs a range of different drawing styles so that each element must be appraised as a distinct shard of evidence. His pursuit

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might be compared with that of Herodotus, as described by the German philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt: Herodotus wanted “to say what is”… because saying and writing stabilize the futile and perishable, “fabricate a memory” for it …[yet] … The flux of his narrative is sufficiently loose to leave room for many stories, but there is nothing in this flux indicative that the general bestows meaning and significance on the particular. (Arendt [1954] 2006, p. 64)

What Chamekh leaves out, that is, the blank areas of paper, are as important as the drawn elements, as we see in the drawings of Bowers discussed below. Chamekh’s technical and pictorial methods challenge dominant historical accounts by conjuring complex layers of information about “The Jungle,” the poor, or the war in Syria. American artist Andrea Bowers (born 1965) synthesizes imagery derived from photographic sources and exploits the neutral space of the white ground of drawing. In reference to Bowers’s work, Hannah Ellul has said, “The odd spatial syntax of drawings – figures float in pictorial limbo of blank page – emphasizes what [Hillary] Chute identifies as drawing’s capacity to place pressure on traditional notions of chronology, linearity and causality” (Ellul 2017, n.p.). We have seen this strategy employed by Chamekh but Bowers presents singular images that are isolated on sheets of paper. Alone, her drawings are enigmatic, but in series they build a narrative and cast of characters. Each figure occupies a small portion of her composition, such that the white expanse of paper invests her drawn figures with powerful agency. Bowers has said, “I don’t have any interest in the modernist pursuit of formal invention but I believe in the communicative potential of materials and the physical and perceptual experiences of an artwork” (2006, p. 51). Bowers’s exhibition “Self Determination” (Kaufmann Repetto, Milan, 2015) examined the continuing persecution and injustice suffered by individuals of Mexican origin in the USA. As an activist, Bowers took part in a demonstration to fight this cause in the Los Angeles area and documented it with photography. For years, the artist has been collecting archive imagery of protests and has observed how rarely these images feature women. Bowers’s photographs contrast significantly in her focus on women, but for the artist, it is not enough to simply document the demonstrations using photography. Her interest is in honoring the commitment of the individual activists she has got to know on a personal level, and she does this through photorealist drawing. The attitudes and behavior of female activists has informed Bowers’s drawing practice, as she describes: There were two positions constantly presented to me, which the activists saw as crucial to their work and which had a major effect on my artistic practice. First, regardless of whether they were successful in their actions, the activists felt it was essential that they bear witness to the event. To bear witness is not only to observe but also to provide proof and testify. The second principle is that dissent is patriotic and essential to maintaining democracy… because of this experience, I have a lot of faith in individual power and voice and I believe more strongly in political agency. (Bowers 2006, p. 50)

Discarding the camera’s framing, she crops the image to focus on one of the campaigning women to produce a memorable record of an event in which an individual



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demonstrates her agency to protest. Badass Girls (May Day, Los Angeles 2014) (2015) (See Figure  3.4) is of a woman wearing angel wings, where Bowers has carefully drawn her curls of hair to echo the stitching on the wings. Migration Is Beautiful I (May Day, Los Angeles 2013) (2015) is a drawing of a woman holding a placard depicting a butterfly and the slogan “migration is beautiful.” In 22% of Deportations Involve Parents of U.S. Citizens (2014), the drawing’s title is a slogan drawn onto the butterfly wings of the female demonstrator. In the exhibition in Milan of 2015 these images of peaceful protest were juxtaposed with Bowers’s drawn copies of violent imagery produced for La Causa and La Raza, periodicals published by the Chicano Brown Beret movement between 1968 and 1970 and held in Bowers’ own archive of expressions of activism. The original images were woodcut prints, a democratic and utilitarian visual form often used for its direct and expressive potential. Bowers has copied these woodcuts, grain by grain, in graphite pencil to create dense, labored versions of the original prints. This is a highly physical act, in keeping with Bowers’s multifarious artistic practice, and aptly reflecting the incipient anger that drove the Chicano Brown Beret’s to chisel chunks of wood to mass produce and circulate emotive images, something that in turn becomes another act of committed labor. The expressionistic

Figure 3.4  Andrea Bowers (2015) Badass Girls (May Day, Los Angeles 2014), detail. Graphite on paper, 62 × 43 cm (24.4 × 16.9 in.). Source: © Andrea Bowers. Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto, Milan / New York. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

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imagery and captions threaten vicious reprisals and make clear the violent motivations of the individuals involved in this protest movement, to give a sense of their anger and frustration. Bowers’s work fits into the historical tradition of agitprop as a means to directly engage with earlier forms of protest. The use of graphite to make photorealist drawings involves the honing of skill and a considerable time commitment, that for Bowers not only becomes analogous to the labor migrants undertake, but to their skills as effective activists. Her subjects appear in the foreground, at one with the paper surface, yet almost ready to transgress the frame to enter the viewer’s space. Bowers employs a soft‐focus photorealism, something that lends the subject more warmth and feeling. Up close we can see the individuals’ features in detail and appreciate them as fellow human beings, counter to the anonymity of a mass demonstration. The portrayal, situated at the bottom of the picture with the expanse of white paper hovering all around, creates a sense of isolation and vulnerability of the individual. Bowers has said: I was looking for a way to be more respectful of the people I was drawing… I decided that my labor and care in rendering might elicit a more empathetic reading as well as reveal my personal involvement with the subject. (Bowers 2006, p. 51)

Rosalind Krauss has suggested that with photorealism we are confronted with the overwhelming existence of a segment of reality (Krauss 2002, p. 208). Bowers’s skillful drawing means that she does not alter the gestures that are made during demonstrations and actions in order to become a mouthpiece to her subjects. Using photorealist drawing allows her subjects to be represented accurately as individuals, yet at the same time, Bowers’s editing adds emphasis to particular details of their experiences. Her mimetic treatment of the woodcuts of the Chicano Brown Beret reminds people of the history of the battle for equality, using drawing to bring the past into the present. The work of Mounira Al Solh (born 1978) is informed by her Lebanese Syrian heritage, her childhood experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1999) and the socio‐political conflict of today. She employs a range of media but in particular drawing, stitching, and video, each developed in defiance of the dominance of painting at the Lebanese University in Beirut where she studied from 1998 to 2001. When the artist moved to the Netherlands to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam she encountered the etched portraits of Rembrandt which inspired her approach to portraiture. Particularly striking to the young artist was the small scale of these portraits, their intimacy, the vulnerability of Rembrandt’s subjects and his tender treatment of them. They inspired her series I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2012 and ongoing) (Figure  3.5) drawings that represent people who have been forced to relocate as a result of the humanitarian and political crises in Syria and the Middle East. The series will be complete once she has made a total of 1000 portraits. The start of the Syrian War in 2012, which followed the popular uprising in 2011, triggered the project. She began by inviting the numerous artists, writers and filmmakers who were fleeing Syria into her studio in Beirut as an act of friendship. Al Solh was herself a victim of forced relocation during childhood, and this informed her decision to use listening and drawing to welcome these exiled individuals and engage with them individually. She has described the project as oral history and the titular word “frivolous” indicates that her drawings are a frank record of views and recollections that she may not agree with herself. The title could also be read as a provocation



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Figure 3.5  Mounira Al Solh (2012‐ongoing) I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous. Mixed media on legal paper. Each 30 × 21 cm (11.8 × 8.2 in.). Source: The Art Institute of Chicago. © Mounira Al Solh. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg.

to audiences to consider what views and issues are ascribed value within a culture. The conversations are depicted through drawings and written text on yellow lined paper. As in Simpson’s Interrogation Drawings the paper is integral to the syntax of her drawings. It is manufactured in Beirut and commonly used by lawyers, signifying the complex legal process in which these individuals have become unwittingly entangled as they struggle to gain citizenship in their adopted country. Al Solh becomes absorbed in the stories her sitters relate, and this means that her drawings are done almost subconsciously: “the result is not at all a copy of the face, but a magic that transcends in the drawing… I have discovered deeper and meaningful stories about each person, because of the medium of drawing” (Al Solh 2016,

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n.p.). In a display of 131 of these drawings in Kassel as part of Documenta 14, the dizzying panoply of characters is bound only by the standard format of the legal paper, with drawing style, materials, composition and viewpoint altered to convey individual characteristics, state of mind and personal story. Al Solh has suggested that this equalizes the relationship between artist and subject; as the individual exposes themselves through the telling of their story, the artist struggles to capture their appearance and personality in the drawing, demonstrating her own fallibility within the artistic process. As the artist describes it: “My drawing is more sensitive and more ‘in danger’, just like the people’s fates in this region. A drawing requires an intimate encounter” (Al Solh 2016, n.p.). She continues: What drawing offers is the immediacy … also, the possibility to observe humans more deeply, and give them the chance to observe you in return of course. Our meeting is longer than if I only photograph them. Besides for me photographing is obscene. And people get photographed always, but it’s not every day that someone draws you. So it will be unforgettable for both of us. (Al Solh 2016, n.p.)

Al Solh’s choice of medium is dictated by the nature of the encounter, and its duration. It is rare for the artist to completely fill the page and almost obscure the yellow lined paper, as she does in Figure 3.5. The face is carefully modeled, with shading suggesting a sense of volume and exposed areas of paper the fall of light. The lines of the paper run counter to the naturalistic depiction of the figure. To the right lines of Arabic text that support the narrative translate as follows: “My dialect in speaking is the dialect of the prison, because I spent 16 years in jails, I’ve picked various dialects from there, it is a special language, it does not belong to a certain area in Syria, but to the country of jails that we have there.” As in this drawing, Al Solh selects salient quotations from hours of listening. Arguably Al Solh’s entire project approaches the condition of written communication, given her absorption in her sitter’s stories and hence her semi‐automatic mode of drawing. It is hard to believe that a photographic mugshot of these individuals, even if captioned, could convey the complexity and resilience of her subjects as powerfully as her drawings. Al Solh’s very particular mode of operation is one of exchange, even to the extent that she makes gifts of her drawings. Her investment of time in listening, and drawing, places value on the experience of individuals displaced by war, and might even be thought of as assisting in their rehabilitation. This dynamic could be compared to Bowers’s personal and active commitment to the cause of individuals of Mexican origin in Los Angeles. In an era of abundant recording devices, drawing is not relied upon to copy or remake the world. When the artists under discussion do utilize representational and mimetic modes of drawing, their motivation is not the display of technical prowess but a desire to bear witness to contemporary events. Arguably, drawing has always been the most radical medium, facilitating, with minimal means, ideas around the physical, social and political condition of the world. Unlike photography and film, graphite on paper is not implicated in the instrumentation of global politics and throughout history artists have used it to observe and ask questions about political and social conditions. In the following passage, Sontag seems to suggest that photographs of wars are captured and disseminated to build a plausible version of events for a mass audience:



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Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account – which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership – a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. (Sontag 2003, p. 17)

As quickly as photographic footage is available and circulated, Sontag suggests, it is superseded by another “new” catastrophe, and is relegated to history as undigested documentation. In contrast, a written or drawn account of an event is more likely to be motivated by the author’s desire to make sense of a situation, which involves slow analysis as opposed to impulsive capture. The events are mediated by the author and are not therefore subject to immediate circulation and mass consumption. As in a passage of writing, drawings can contain multiple reference points and levels of signification. Each artist discussed above uses a specific mode of drawing to record, analyze or deconstruct live or mass‐shared subjects. For example, the substrates chosen by Simpson and by Al Solh signify bureaucratic systems that have had a direct effect on the lives of the people they depict, whilst creating work in series suggests the enormity of the problem. Both adopt anti‐illusionistic modes of drawing, with Simpson utilizing diagrammatic forms and Al Solh intuitive responses to a live situation. Al Solh includes fragments of Arabic text to convey stories too complex to convert into images. As she describes: “this work has become very rich archival material, inscribing those fleeting stories and emotions on the fragile yellow paper”.2 Drawings are necessarily abstractions – notated forms of live events – and in that sense are transparent in their partiality. Artistic subjectivity – personal experiences and imagination – is intrinsic to each of the works I have discussed, revealing empathy for their subject, as we see most obviously in the portraits by Bowers and Al Solh. Drawing is the most efficient and economical way to deconstruct appropriated imagery, as demonstrated by Chamekh and Simpson. At the same time the labor and craft of drawing, evidenced in works by Bowers and Anyango Grünewald, confers dignity on the individuals depicted, whilst reinvesting in disturbing scenes that might otherwise be dulled through repetition. As an index of direct material contact these drawings transform photographic imagery to resist its immediate consumption, forcing the viewer into a more visceral relationship with the issues, and perhaps prompting a causal link with their own beliefs and actions. Through opposing approaches Simpson, Anyango Grünewald and Chamekh tackle head‐on Sontag’s critique of media photographs of victims of violence which are “themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus” (Sontag 2003, p. 5). Instead these artists re‐interpret accepted “evidence” in order to encourage the viewer to re‐engage with horrific images and experience, perhaps in the hope that a new‐ found empathy might change attitudes and behavior toward these events by stealth. This chapter has discussed two strategies to mobilize action and affect future socio‐ political trajectories that include the artists not only in contact, but also in collaboration, with their subjects. Bowers draws portraits of fellow activists, thereby reinforcing their individual agency to prompt change for the better. Al Solh’s project separates individuals from conventional narratives through the time‐consuming process of conversing and drawing, encouraging the viewer to consider the importance of their own actions and experiences.

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We might ask if drawing can really effect change. Raised in a politically active family, and spending many hours gathering evidence of the lives of refugees living in “The Jungle,” Chamekh does not believe that art can change the course of politics today – he sees drawing “not as a means to explain the world but to understand it” (Chamekh 2017, n.p.). Whilst Al Solh and Bowers adopt strategies to bring themselves into direct contact with their subjects, who not only see the creative outcome, but in some cases, participate in its production, Chamekh keeps his art practice and his political activism quite separate. He draws with the assumption that his subjects are unlikely to encounter his work but hopes to prompt the viewer into questioning the mediation of images and the official version of events. Artworks that make evident the hand and labor of the artist, that reveal, rather than disguise, the subjective artistic processes of appropriation and editing and that make transparent their partiality, stand in stark contrast to ever proliferating images in the media. Converting photographic imagery into pencil drawings triggers a change in the subject, altering the viewer’s relationship with it, removing it from the normality of mass‐shared imagery and making it strange. For the artists discussed in this chapter, the act of drawing is the hand working with ideas, and with images lodged in the mind or culled from all available sources. The manual dexterity of drawing triggers acts of reasoning and paper becomes the site for the physical processing of information. The resulting drawings constitute new visual forms that are a material index of contemporary events and conditions, ethical in their modesty of means and depth of analysis.

Notes 1 The book of allegories and related symbolic images most consulted by visual artists in the Baroque age and succeeding centuries was Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, first published in Rome in 1593. 2 Information panel at Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, 2017.

References Al Solh, M. (2016). email to author, October 1, 2016 Anyango‐Grünewald, C. (2017). “Orientations, Locate & Reshape”. Lecture. Royal College of Art, London. May 16, 2017. Accessed January 10, 2017. https://drawingroom.org. uk/events/graphic‐witness‐panel‐discussion‐RCA1 Arendt, H. and Jerome, K. (1954) 2006.). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. London: Penguin Classics. Bowers, A. and Joo, E. (2006). DIY SCHOOL Andrea Bowers and Eungie Joo in Conversation. In: Nothing is Neutral: Andrea Bowers (eds. C. Butler, E. Joo and M. Leclere), 50–51. Los Angeles: CalArts/REDCAT. Chamekh, N. (2017). “Drawing as Graphic Witness: Nidhal Chamekh in conversation with Kate Macfarlane.” Lecture, Drawing Room, London, June 20, 2017. Accessed January 10, 2017.https://drawingroom.org.uk/events/drawing‐as‐graphic‐witness Ellul, H. (2017). “On the Drawings of Andrea Bowers”. Lecture, Artists in Protest: Researching Artistic Engagement with Conflict and Injustice, Drawing Room, London,



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June 15, 2017. Accessed January 10, 2017. https://drawingroom.org.uk/events/ outset‐study‐event Krauss, R.E. (2002). The Originality of the Avant‐Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Simpson, L. (2008). Lorna Simpson: Ink. New York: Salon 94. Simpson, L. and Green, A. (2014). Lorna Simpson interviewed by Alison Green. Art Monthly 377: 3–4. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin.

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Drawn from Communism Anti‐Capitalist Drawing from  Central‐Eastern Europe Magdalena Radomska

In the new, democratic Central‐Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, drawing did not constitute a major narrative in the way that categories such as Polish Feminist Art, Estonian Computer Art or Russian Performance did. It appeared, however, in the work of diverse artists who, both because of the historical caesura of communism and their intellectual Marxist background and interest in post‐Marxist philosophy, may be described as post‐communist. Dissatisfied with the false equation of freedom, democracy and capitalism, artists from Central‐Eastern, post‐communist Europe, actuated their Marxist intellectual background as an artistic tool to oppose capitalism and question its dictatorship. After the financial crisis of 2007/2008, which I claim, should also be understood as a crisis of capitalism and its semantic structure, this mechanism has grown stronger. Disappointed with the discredited socialist realism, post‐communist artists created numerous works, which can be perceived through their peculiar variation, as a contemporary form of socialist realism. Contrary to its predecessor, the new socialist realism is not entangled within the symbolic register of its means of expression, but rather emphasizes its materiality. Drawing is more than just a technique within this new socialist realism; it is predisposed to both dialectical analysis, because of its usual black pencil and white page form, and an egalitarian discourse, due to its cheapness and fragility. Therefore, it may serve as a tool, which not only stresses the status of the work of art as labor, but equally makes it possible to avoid the division of the labor and thereby class division. Practiced mainly in the form of collective work, drawing in post‐communist Europe appears moreover as an important tool of criticism of capitalism and its semantic structure, that further, through its self‐evident form, escapes the appropriation of its meaning by the discourse of art history. This is so because its meaning cannot be reduced to a theoretically framed form and instead it takes the shape of the Marxist, anti‐capitalist deed. The Marxist background of these artists is particularly visible in their proclivity for dialectics. As Marx introduces his concept of dialectics: A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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But once [the reason] has managed to pose itself as a thesis, this thesis, this thought, opposed to itself, splits up into two contradictory thoughts – the positive and the negative, the yes and no. The struggle between these two antagonistic elements comprised in the antithesis constitutes the dialectical movement. The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralize, paralyze each other. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts constitutes a new thought, which is the synthesis of them. This thought splits up once again into two contradictory thoughts, which in turn fuse into a new synthesis. Of this travail is born a group of thoughts. This group of thoughts follows the same dialectic movement as the simple category, and has a contradictory group as antithesis. Of these two groups of thoughts is born a new group of thoughts, which is the antithesis of them. (Marx 2014, p. 1730)

Therefore, the dialectical method seems in this case not only an adequate tool for the analysis of the  –  often  –  black and white drawing, but also the most pertinent methodological approach, which enables invalidation of diverse notional binary oppositions – such as totalitarian communism and liberal democracy – and legitimizes the perception of capitalism as totalitarian. In her widely acclaimed book The Communist Horizon (2012), Jodie Dean ruminates upon the communist desire. Contrary to Wendy Brown (b.1955), Dean no longer acknowledges the desire to be entangled in the structure of melancholy, but – after Žižek (b.1949) – she claims the present desire is collective, “a new, shifted desire …one that recognized the impossibility of reaching or achieving its object and holds on, refusing to cede it” (Dean 2012, p. 187). Discussing the text of the French post‐Marxist philosopher, Alain Badiou’s Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State (2009), Dean reflects upon the construction of the subject of the communist desire, indicating that the “we” discussed by the French post‐Marxist withstands “an individual determined in and by his singular self‐possession [that is] capitalism’s cult of individualism” (Dean 2012, pp. 192–195). Condemning Badiou for his subordination of the communist desire to the individual subject, Dean advocates for a subject of the desire that is articulated by the collective subject (Dean 2012, pp. 193–195). Although Dean does not use the notion of dialectics, she conceptualizes the communist desire referring to a dialectical relationship between its object and subject. As she puts it, “Collectivity is the form of desire in two senses: our desire and our desire for us; or, communist desire is the collective desire for the collective desiring” (Dean 2012, p. 199). Thus, both the subject and object of the communist desire seem linked to the problematic notion of the post‐communist identity. Whereas authors such as Croatian philosopher Boris Buden appeared to advocate for the historization of the notion of the post‐communist identity, arguing that post‐ communism is definite in terms of time and a subject characterized by immaturity (Buden 2012, pp. 37–41), others such as Bruno Bosteels or Alain Badiou accentuate the actuality of communism (Bosteels 2011) and contemporaneity of the communist hypothesis (Badiou 2010). Post‐communism that confirms the validity of Marxism as a tool of criticism, is related to post‐Marxism and is tangible as both the intellectual background of post‐communist artists as well as an adequate methodological approach, capable of seizing the visuality evolved as a result of a particular kind of resistance. The reluctance toward both a visual and notional register of capitalism



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after 1989 (in the context of economic transformation) and the crisis of 2008 has regained special relevance. Artists equipped with a certain awareness structured by their past experience of totalitarian appropriation of signification, along with the Marxist tools at their disposal, tended to perceive capitalism as a totalitarian regime of meanings. This awareness resulted in different modes of artistic activity, which provokes a question regarding the possibility of the contemporary appearance of socialist realism. As aptly stated by Badiou, the difference between procedures such as politics and art, as well as politics and philosophy, lies in the diverse character of their matter.1 Therefore, it is necessary to define peculiar artistic tools stemming from the implementation of Marxist and post‐Marxist criticism of capitalism. In this context, I claim that drawing should be recognized as a crucial medium due to its cheapness, fragility and preliminary nature, which ensures it is responsive to notions of utopia and desire. While socialist realism positioned drawing as subsidiary to other forms of depiction, in its emergent contemporary form it has become an essential pictorial strategy. Rather than a medium for a finished artwork, drawing in socialist realism connotes a proposition. For this movement, entangled in the Lacanian symbolic, such a proposition establishes an inexcusable precedence. In 1970 the statue of Lenin, which welcomed workers at the entrance to the factory of Budapest Csepel Iron and Metal Works, started to rust and corrode, appearing to be ominously hollow. This fact frightened the authorities so much that the statue was restored overnight. Because – as art critic Boris Groys argues  –  socialist realist mimesis was not reminiscent of nineteenth‐ century realism, it attempted “to focus rather on the hidden essence” (Groys 2011, p. 850). Thus, according to Groys, “what is subject to artistic mimesis is not external, visible reality” (Groys 2011, p. 869). He continues, “socialist realism is [rather] oriented towards that which has not yet come into being but which should be created” (Groys 2011, p. 850) and notes that the Soviet artist is “a creator of the new reality” (Groys 2011, p. 868). For this reason, the form of an artwork became arbitrary in relation to its meaning, so that there was no possibility of utilizing a defective form or one that would suggest transience as this might reveal the true utopian character of this new reality. The contemporary form of what can be perceived as socialist realism rehabilitates drawing, particularly in a form which appears unfinished, neglectful, maladroit, inexpert. Not only does it become deprived of the elitist discourse surrounding a unique ability, it indicates a form that is unstable and emerging. Although Joseph Stalin sought to establish the supremacy of this emergent form over other established forms of art, it is only within its present form that socialist realist drawing ceases to simply serve as a figure of propaganda. Groys claims in his statement: What is most important to dialectical method is (…) that which is emerging and developing, even if at present it does not appear stable, since for the dialectical method only that which is emerging and developing cannot be overcome…[Stalin ensures that] ..what is regarded as dialectically emerging and developing under socialism is that which corresponds to the latest party policies. (Groys 2011, p. 858)

The form of socialist realist work, especially from the Stalinist period, opposed the ephemeral and changeable qualities of drawing, which in its contemporary manifestation appears appropriate. This new form ostensibly eludes the issue of reflection of the

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primacy of the external word as mimesis, as discussed by Pauline Johnson as being present within Lenin’s “theory of reflection” and the later philosophical conceptualizations by the Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukács in Art and Objective Truth (Johnson 2011, p. 534). Lukács’ doubts tended to invalidate the duality of the (proletarian) consciousness and its object (Lukács 1971, p. 20). Similarly, contemporary anti‐capitalist drawing is characterized by the dialectical invalidation of the binary opposition between matter and an external reality. This new formulation of socialist realism is demonstrative in its use of matter – revealing its tools rather than hiding them under the illusion of finish. Thus, they are works par excellence – revealing work as both their object and subject, as a work of art inseparable from the labor of its execution. In Central‐Eastern Europe after 1989, drawing was not favored by artists who introduced democratic artistic discourse. They were instead inclined toward new means of expression in search of the artistic caesura between the totalitarian and democratic culture, using drawing only occasionally. Nevertheless, amongst those who have elaborated the artistic criticism of capitalism, from post‐Marxist perspective, drawing was customarily used due to the cheapness of the technique. The typical black pencil and white page form of the drawing appears to be predisposed for a dialectical analysis. As the page is usually white, and assumed not to have a visual existence, this non‐existence of the page is the condition of the existence of the representation, which in turn, is conditioned by the non‐existence  –  the absorption – of light. Thus the light needs to be negated in order to legitimize the formation of the drawing. This susceptibility to dialectics was undertaken by post‐ communist artists, equipped with a Marxist background, especially well‐educated in the doctrine of György Lukács, who references the orthodox method of Marxism, that is the dialectic (Lukács 1971, p. 1). Thus dialectics, which underlie the structure of these works created after 1989, appears to be an apt methodology for enabling the analysis of these drawings and prevents their subjection to the mythical language of transformation, operating according to binary oppositions.

Dialectics of Black and White The Bulgarian artist, Nedko Solakov, is one of the most important artists whose practice is predisposed to be interpreted within the dialectical method. Solakov has been practicing drawing since his graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia in 1981. Although he completed his diploma in mural painting, he is widely recognized as the author of installations, which are often complemented by small‐scale drawings inscribed and subjugated into the body of the work. However, drawing is additionally practiced by Solakov as an autonomous medium, that can be seen to authorize the interpretation of his major works, serving as a sketch of their notional structure. This runs contrary to drawing’s role within his installations where it appears overburdened with meaning. The oeuvre of the Bulgarian artist is characterized by a beguiling facility in the construction of his work that draws on the basis of his Marxist intellectual background. The essential figure for Solakov is one of dialectics, evident in A Life (Black &White), originally created as drawing (1999) and later (from 2001), realized as a series of performative actions. It represents two house painters together painting one space from two different sides. One painter is covering walls in black paint, while



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the other in white. A circular arrow indicates the direction of their movement, clockwise, from left to right and a text underneath reads their work is “constant … in such fashion (…) white replaces black, black replaces white, a bit grayish at the end of the day (…) but the contrast will be great again the next morning.” Hence it is the artist’s predilection for drawing which focuses the essence of this dialectical process. It could be said that artists, with minor exceptions, use black and white in a struggle against each other. This is emphasized by the very simplistic forms in Solakov’s drawing and the frequent use of the inkblot‐like shapes that both essentialize and condense the process of the drawing. These marks appear as a cessation or lapse, which appear to invalidate rather than create representation. The very structure of dialectics constitutes the core of the series Good News, Bad News (1998–2009) that combine objects and drawings, telling stories based on facts/ news, which turn out to be the opposite. Another work, his art book 99 fears, lists and pictures Solakov’s fears after the fall of communism. One of these drawings, which explores the notion of democracy, seems constitutive for the whole series, with the accompanying text reading: “During socialism (when I was young) I had less fears than now (when I am older) living in a DEMOCRACY” (Boettger 2008). When coupled with another drawing representing an old man sitting en face with his head down, with the caption: “An old university professor from a poor Eastern‐European country has no more fears. He is only starving,” it is clear it refers directly to the fall of communism. In psychoanalytic terms, this failure appears as thwarted cathexis. In terms of collective desire, the social libido investment during communism was for the regime to fall. After 1989 this object no longer existed, and so left a great void. According to Freud, frustrated cathexis leads to anxiety. In contrast to fear, anxiety is defined by the founder of psychoanalysis as having no object  –  similar to an uninvested libido (Freud 2013, p. 148). Thus, the absence of fears appears in Solakov’s drawing as concurrent with the uninvested libido, which falls into a trap of desire dictated by capitalism. This desire, according to Slovenian psychoanalytic and post‐ Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, functions and is entangled in the Lacanian chain of signifiers which lack a specified object (Žižek 2001, pp. 22–26). The title of the series, 99 fears, may be interpreted as alluding to the 99 percent of the population, which – according to the popular belief – own 1% of goods, whereas the richest 1% accumulates 99% of them. In Solakov’s drawing fear itself is represented – as in the whole series – by the black blotch, here in the body of the elderly man. Smaller than the outline of the figure – the blotch appears to be shrinking, and the figure melting, potentially emptying the silhouette, thus implying the starvation Solakov alludes to. The disappearance of fear is consequently associated with the surfacing of starvation and the reappearance of the white surface of the page with no object of representation. Therefore, starvation can be interpreted as connected to the lack of both the object of fear and the object of desire. In his book The Fragile Absolute, Žižek argues that capitalism produces desire comparable to the one of an anorexic subject, whose object functions as the Lacanian object petit a – the Nothingness (Žižek 2001, p. 23). Thus, the starvation represented in the drawing as the annihilation of the totalitarian “something” – the blotch of fear – results not only from the lack of resources but from the very nature of capitalism, which constitutes “nothing” rather than “something” as the object of capitalist thirst, propelling the idle consumption rather than quenching the thirst. This is symptomatic of the way that most of Solakov’s drawings operate. The inkblot‐like black form evokes childhood and the education of

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the artist under the communist system, and paradoxically both ceases and constitutes representation. The placement of his little drawings proposes a similar connotation, performed at the edges of the proper object of his work.

(Not‐So) White Cube A particularly interesting case of a critical attitude toward capitalism can be found in the artistic practice of Romanian artist, Dan Perjovschi. He combines an anti‐capitalist stance alongside criticism of the oppressive nature of the “white cube” gallery, using the walls as the ground for his drawings. The drawings appear subject to the gallery walls by the contrast of their blackness and the whiteness of its space, seeming to respect paradigms of the white cube. However, in line with Brian O’Doherty’s criticism of the gallery space as exclusive and isolated (O’Doherty 1999, p. 76), the drawings introduce the socio‐political context into the gallery space, disclosing what the critic names as “the ideology” of the space and what Marx describes as false ­consciousness (Marx and Engels 2010a, p. 164). Perjovschi’s drawings are often critical of the European Union, perceived by the artist as the carrier of capitalism and neoliberal economy. In a 2006 drawing representing the EU logo, the artist extracts a single star, which turns out to be five‐pointed, bearing a resemblance to the symbol of communism. The drawing may be interpreted as a semantic equation of totalitarian communism and capitalism perceived as equally totalitarian. An analogous operation is performed by the artist on the graphic representation of hammer and sickle which – with some minor interventions – is converted by him into the euro sign. This equation serves as an alternative to the false one of democracy and capitalism proposed by Boris Buden, distinctive of post‐communist and post socialist societies (Buden 2012, pp. 28–31). Perjovschi’s drawings seem to repeal such an equation and, moreover, the artist interprets the freedom associated with the fall of the totalitarian regime as freedom from capitalism. In one of his wall drawings, representing a person celebrating the moment of freedom, Perjovschi crosses the letter R out of the word FREE, thus producing the word “fee.” Consequently, the drawing questions the association of democracy with freedom, pointing at its price. Perjovschi’s oeuvre is informed by his intellectual Marxist background and some of his works would make an apt illustration of Marx’s Capital. For instance, an untitled drawing representing two pairs of trousers, one of which is damaged and the other labeled as more expensive (which look fine), serves as an adequate illustration of the Marxist law of value. It functions as an ironic remark reflecting on capitalism and the Marxist theory of labor value, according to which the value of the product is determined by the total amount of necessary labor it contains (Marx 2011, pp. 43–47). Another drawing by Perjovschi – Capital‐ism – may be interpreted as a simple illustration of the notion of accumulation of capital. A single person captioned with capital and a group with ism illustrates the idea of 1% succinctly and serves as a visualization of the process of the accumulation of capital. It undermines the usual role of art, which functions rather as a visual representation of accumulated capital and its legitimization, than a visual disclosure of its mechanism. The deficiency of the symbolic register, when compared to the socio‐political reality, manifests itself in another untitled drawing which depicts a man dressed in a suit, telling a beggar that less is more. This dictum, used by the American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, constitutes a bitter reflection on the



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inadequacy of art paradigms and their execution, and which result in the preservation of established economic structures. Ironically, the drawing discloses the hypocrisy of its proposal because the reduction of artistic means often signals the increase of its capital. The composition of the drawing, constructed along a declining diagonal, imposes the  capitalist hierarchy between the relationship of the superstructure privileged over the base, which is the reversal of the hierarchy projected by Marx (Marx 1993). Similar criticism seems to be employed by Perjovschi, when he creates drawings representing the notion of Europe, written with euro signs. These drawings reveal a striking resemblance to the critical writings by Slavoj Žižek, who argues that the European Union operates as an exclusively financial community, lacking all cultural foundations (Žižek 2012, pp. 37–46). Both Žižek, and Badiou point at the tradition of 1968 as constitutive for European identity (Badiou 2010, pp. 43–67) and a drawing by Perjovschi representing two raised arms – one holding a Molotov cocktail and the other a bottle of Coca‐Cola seems to be in line with their thinking. This image is juxtaposed with a prototypical image of the arm of the Statute of Liberty, one undersigned with 1968, the other 2008, constitute two different figures of freedom – one dictated by the people and the other imposed by the capitalist regime.

Working as Drawing Work, as both an object and a subject of drawing, appears in the critical work of many Central‐Eastern Europe artists. In 2004, during an outburst of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, the Revolutionary Experimental Space (R.E.P) group was created and has since remained active. Initiated as a collective of 20, R.E.P now consists of six members; Lada Nakonechna, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, and Leshia Khomenko. Lada Nakonechna has practiced drawing as a technique and it constitutes one of the most interesting cases of the criticism of capitalism in post‐communist Europe. In her drawing performance One more day, Nakonechna entered the Art Museum of Ukraine to undertake a workday of eight hours spent drawing vertical marks on the surface of a sheet of paper for three consecutive days in April of 2011. Through her presence in the museum building, Nakonechna emphasized how the absence of political contemporary art within the museum could be comprehended as a discourse. This performance engaged a significant dialogue with that realized by Serbian artist Marina Abramović in New York’s MoMA just a year before in March 2010. In this performance entitled The artist is present, Abramović intended to emphasize the physical presence of the artist, but instead appeared primarily as a well‐ established figure within Western discourse. Her presence lacked the context of the political condition, the entire scope of her political identity was absent, and thus she was apparent rather than present. In contrast, the Serbian artist, Nakonechna enters the museum as an art worker. The drawing she created only had status within the art institution as material evidence of that role. Therefore, the presence of Nakonechna was of a dialectical nature, interrelated with her absence in the art historical canon and discourse, as well as within the art market. One more day was related to a series of pencil drawings titled Cards made by Nakonechna from 2010, considered by the artist as kitsch representations of different landscapes. Although created in numerous countries, they do not vary in terms of the national character of depicted sceneries (in fact they are quite similar, denying the

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viewer’s bias). Their differences lie in their titles – all of them were created by the artist during a typical work day and are valued on the basis of the average hourly rate of pay established in each country that they were drawn. Hence, Nakonechna’s works become legible once they are interpreted in terms of the Marxist notion of alienation, which it relies on for meaning. Originally, as intended by Marx, alienation does not refer to the detachment of the individual from society, but to the estrangement of labor, which turns against the worker. According to Marx: The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever‐cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. (Marx and Engels 2010b, pp. 271–272)

In this context, the gesture of Nakonechna seems both contrary and literal. On the one hand the artist implements the labor theory of value of Marxist origin, pointing to the debatable fact that “socially necessary labor‐time” does not dictate the value of an art object, but rather serves – as Marx aptly noticed in Estranged Labour – as a tool of the worker’s oppression and accumulation of capital. Objectification of labor confronts the worker with something alien to him (Marx and Engels 2010b, p. 272). The matter of the drawing becomes infused with meaning, as long as it takes the processual, emerging shape of labor that Nakonechna imbues it with. However, as the final object the matter becomes negligible, as, deprived of such meaning, the work is reduced to its price. Cards is properly interpreted within the context of the financial crisis and the restitution of the egalitarian discourse of art, emphasizing proletarian awareness of the artist and their labor power, as discussed rightly after Marx by Julia Bryan‐Wilson who argues that Marxism may potentially serve as a tool of reclamation of work, when considering the work of artistic production as unalienated (Bryan‐ Wilson 2009, p. 27).

Baddrawing2 Drawing is also a crucial medium in the oeuvre of the Hungarian fluxus artist Tamás Szentjóby, who has been active in the Hungarian art scene since the sixties. Szentjóby belongs to the generation of Hungarian neo‐avant‐garde artists, who contributed to the fall of communism.3 They used their Marxist intellectual background as a tool, which equipped them with a fundamental distrust toward omnipotent, seemingly universal discourses. Notions originating in Western discourse such as the ready‐ made, when applied by Hungarian art historians, doomed the Hungarian art scene to apparent imitativeness and constant delay (Radomska 2013). Szentjóby, extreme in his views, even in the context of the exceptionally politically oriented artistic environment of Central‐Eastern Europe, has been using Marxism against the totalitarian communism, and  –  after 1989  –  also against capitalism, which he perceives as an equally totalitarian system. Various forms (drawings, actions, installations) of the strategy of a strike, practiced by the artist since the 1960s, function as clear examples of a dialectical exploitation of Marxism, invalidating the Cold War era binary opposition of communism and capitalism. Early on in 1968 the artist created a comic drawing The Future Full of Doubt, where he elaborated on the consequences of the strike. For Szentjóby, as with Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović, the notion of



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refraining from work served as a form of resistance, pointing to the appropriation of the notion of labor by the totalitarian semantic field and the presence of censorship. After 1989 the notion of strike appeared in Szentjóby’s work as a criticism of capitalism and alienation of labor. A drawing from 2012 depicting the banner that reads, “the subsistence minimum makes one happy,” is rooted in the idea of using the military budget to support the livelihood of an unemployed artist. Uninvited to the Vienna Art Fair in 2011, Szentjóby organized an action, which may be interpreted as a parallel to 1855 “Pavilion of Realism” erected by Courbet near the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and thus seen as a proposition of a new form of realism. The Hungarian artist designed a prototype card resembling both a credit card and food stamps. It was supposed to be used by unemployed artists on a daily basis in order to withdraw the subsistence minimum from the ATM (the money would come from the military budget). Another drawing, part of a series, depicts a banner situated on a row of buildings, which reads, “We are not talented enough to / pay our rents. It is our fault / that we are not.” See Figure  4.1. The drawing is autotelic as it both describes and establishes the form which is in principle unprofitable. In his text about the practice of drawing Szentjóby introduces the notion of Baddrawing – a subversive category, which he describes as a self‐liberating act of taking the responsibility for producing works that are depreciated (Szentjóby 2006). The artist revokes the notion of talent, which is disparaged by him for its imprint of capitalism. As he argues, “talent is nothing but a circumscribed quality of a person deemed capable of serving the status quo. To proclaim someone to be talented is equal to branding them” (Szentjóby

Figure 4.1  Tamas St.Turba/Tamás Szentjóby (2012) We’re Not Talented Enough (Banner‐ plot). Drawing, India ink on paper, 15.1 × 21.3 cm. Source: Courtesy of Tamás Szentjóby.

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2006). Thus, the practice of Baddrawing implicates a change of the paradigm – from esthetics to ethics and the act of anti‐capitalist rebellion. The artist argues that “Beauty is on Strike here,” proving that Baddrawing is an egalitarian practice (Szentjóby 2006). In the context of the artist’s oeuvre then, Baddrawing is closely related to the idea and practice of striking – it is the form of strike – a refusal to perform work that could be recognized as such by the capitalist regime. In Marxist terms, the Baddrawing can be interpreted as a form of resistance to the selling of labor power because it cannot be used for the purpose of the accumulation of capital. At the same time the artist works, escaping the alienation of the labor. Szentjóby’s text is of the utmost importance to the notion of anti‐capitalist drawing when discussed in the context of the political and historical situation of Central‐Eastern Europe.

Sistine Chapel of Egalitarian Art The most persuasive example of drawing engaged in the issue of an artistic work as labor was created in 2012 by the Hungarian artist János Sugar. It is a ready‐made object – a work glove (see Figure 4.2) – with a slight intervention by the artist in the form of a drawing onto the glove depicting the hand’s palm lines. The intervention turns the object into what seems a variation of the Sistine Chapel motif with near‐ touching fingers of Adam and God. The structure of creation is disrupted – the artist as the individual subject touches the object through the activity of drawing, which

Figure 4.2  János Sugár (2003) Oneway Design. Ready‐made (pair of workers gloves with palmistry lines). Source: Courtesy of János Sugár.



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thereby becomes a representation of a proletarian subject, including the artist himself. Thus, the structure of the work is dialectical: it establishes the artist as a worker, as both its subject and object. Thereby the very gesture of drawing functions as the Marxist deed, defined as an act which changes the Marxist base (Marx 1998, p. 574). This does not simply relate to the superstructure of elitist art but establishes an important case for a new form of socialist realism which points not at the illusion of reality, but at its matter – the work and the physical existence of the tools of production.

Interpretation as Practice Drawing understood as a contemporary form of socialist realism equally resists the art market (as demonstrated in the work of Nakonechna), as well as interpretation. Its very literal form often holds back the discourse of art history and precludes its ­theoretical – or simply visual – reception. Instead, it forces another mode of interpretation: a practical and social one. This mechanism is particularly visible in works of collectives, whose members combine their artistic practice with a certain way of life – especially the Hungarian collective of Ex artist and the Russian – Chto Delat. The Hungarian artist Tamás Kaszás is one of few artists in Central‐Eastern Europe who identify themselves with the anarchist tradition. Working in the collective Ex artists with Anikó Loránt, Kaszás uses drawing as a sketch of a semi‐utopian life, withdrawn from ­capitalism’s forces of attraction. Both artists chose to retreat from the art market – hence the “ex” in the name of the group. In order to produce independent art, Kaszás and Loránt decided to practice a self‐reliant lifestyle that would become reflected in their works of art. A series of works Exercises in Autonomy, created from 2009, projects a utopian collective future after the ultimate collapse of capitalism caused by both financial and ecological crises. A simple, untitled drawing from 2010 of a clenched fist carrying a bunch of seeds refers to the symbol of 1917 Industrial Workers of the World, an image appropriated by the Occupy movement during the financial crisis, and during the Arab Spring4. The symbol, rooted in the tradition of 1848, has inspired Kaszás since 2006. The artist built a portable Museum of Fist Collection gathering images of this peculiar image, to form an almost Warburgian atlas of pathos formula. Drawn in a rough and sketchy manner, the fist created by the artist couple appears both raised as well as positioned horizontally. The very image of the raised fist – reducing individual fingers into one form may be interpreted as the figure of a collective subject  –  draws its force from the concentration of communal, ­revolutionary energy. However, when perceived as orientated horizontally, the fist alludes to the motif of the sower, iconographically associated with the 1848 People’s Spring, recently rediscovered in the visual language of the Arab Spring. Despite its cultural burden, the image created by the Ex artist is egalitarian due to its fundamental instructive charge which seems always evident, regardless of one’s awareness of its historical context. Conceived as part of the Famine Food project (on‐going since 2011), this drawing depicts a handful of seeds bearing an unavoidable visual resemblance to bullets. The image appears as a variant of the logo of the “Food not Bombs” group of anti‐capitalist collectives. Thus, the grassroots, collective initiative of growing food functions as a weapon in times of crisis and a “seed of the revolutionary deed” capable of establishing the new, collective society based on solidarity. Not only is the deed illustrated by the work of art, it also becomes essential to its interpretation which is

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not to be seen as an intellectual game, but rather a practical action. This abrogation of the crucial difference between theory and practice, discussed by Marx and elaborated by Louis Althusser, is typical of images created as a remedy for financial crisis. They function similarly to the language of the Left as defined by Roland Barthes as the language “which remains political” (Barthes 1991, p. 146). It is the variant of the Marxist deed, taking the form of the language of a woodcutter, who “speaks the tree,” not about it (Barthes 1991, p. 146). A similar meaning can be ascribed to the ink drawing of Kaszás picturing a man carrying a scythe, realized as a bilingual diptych – in English and Hungarian. With the inscription, “we don’t ask nor demand/ But we take and occupy” the drawing escapes any interpretation, apart from the ostensibly practical one given to the viewer. In the Famine Food series the artist created more metaphorical drawings. One, an image of two eyes shedding tears and lips swallowing them, may be interpreted as a project of feeding on one’s own sadness, leading to self‐sufficiency. However, it further refers to the Marxist theory of exploitation, according to which, the proletariat is defined both by its ability to reproduce its labor power and inability to possess the means of production (Marx 2011, pp. 185–96). The image created by the artists seems to illustrate the vicious circle of such exploitation; the proletariat consumes only its own tears, which leads to its further entanglement in exploitation.

Drawing as a Tool I claim that the crisis of 2007/2008, which was a symptom of capitalism in crisis, triggered a change of paradigm resulting in the recovery of the plural subject. Although rooted in his previous writings, the plural subject appeared forcibly in Badiou’s book, In Praise of Love, which, according to the philosopher, is typical of love and revolution (Badiou 2012). As a consequence, the importance of the collective subject was enhanced, both as the receiver of the artistic practice and as its author. In this way, communal drawing has been practised by the collective Chto Delat translated as, “What is to be done?”) founded in 2003 in St Petersburg. An important point of reference for the collective was the Radek Community, active already in the 1990s. Inspired by the figure of Marxist, Karl Radek, the Radek Community practiced both political and artistic performances in the post‐totalitarian space of Moscow. The Radek community operated radical means, such as organizing marches, hunger strikes, building barricades, urging votes against all politicians, however the Chto Delat Collective radicalized these methods even further. The change of tools seems significant; the collective developed ephemeral tools such as zines, small drawings and discussions. Their provocativeness comes from the fact they effectively escaped appropriation, not only by capitalist structures but also by the instruments of the discipline of art history. The zine entitled, A chronicle of the ‘long’ month of May 2009 was created as a result of the police raid of the 24‐hour experimental seminar, Leftist Art, Leftist Philosophy, Leftist History, Leftist Poetry, organized by Chto Delat and the Vpered Socialist Movement. The raid resulted in numerous arrests of the anarchists and artists following their involvement in the May Day celebrations. Both the collectively produced zine drawings and the artists’ engagement in the celebration of the International Worker’s Day, evidenced their identification with the proletariat. Drawings included in the zine used channels of global capitalism, such as advertising,



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to confront it. The seemingly insignificant drawing depicting two hammers captioned in cyrillic “молотки” arrests meaning in two different registers – the language of communist symbols and the discourse of art history. The work references Joseph Kosuth’s famous series, One and Three Hammers from 1965 that serves a demonstration of Kosuth’s artistic apparatus. In this gesture by Chto Delat, the very status of these tools, belonging to the Lacanian symbolic register, is questioned and they are delegated to the domain of the Real. The effect is not however a realistic picture in the manner of socialist realism, on the contrary, Chto Delat, operating within this new form, discloses the materiality of their tools of creation – that is a felt‐tip pen. In doing this they obliterate the difference between an artist’s and a worker’s tool. Thus, the collective authorship is established as a proletarian one and manifests itself in the form of the art worker figure. This identity invalidates art as an elitist discourse that prevents artists from achieving solidarity, which facilitates the negotiation of collective rights and the struggle against the power of the market. The drawing used in the zines may therefore be perceived as a legitimate response to the call of Herbert Marcuse in his Essay on Liberation from 1969, when, while discussing the new modes of emergence of the contemporary art, he argued: The new object of art is not yet ‘given’, but the familiar object has become impossible, false. From illusion, imitation, harmony to reality – but the reality is not yet ‘given’; it is not the one which is the object of ‘realism.’ Reality has to be discovered and projected. (Marcuse, 1971, p. 31)

As Julia Bryan‐Wilson, the author of the important text Art versus Work, noted, “he [Marcuse] saw the merging of art and work as the ultimate aim of any revolution” (Bryan‐Wilson 2009, p. 31). It is precisely the tension between the two hammers created collectively by Chto Delat and the communist symbol of a hammer and a sickle that creates the meaning. The doubling of the hammer allows us to understand the symbol both as an object of representation, and also as a tool of revolution in the artists’ hands. Most of the drawings in the zine function as coupons for revolutionary “goods” such as the balaclava, loudspeaker, or short‐wave radio. The revolution is advertised in the capitalist manner. Hence capitalism reveals itself as a totalitarian system – appropriating tools and channels of communication. Artists of the collective, couple the criticism both toward capitalism and the established disciplinary practices of the artistic canon, forcing the viewer to abandon any other interpretation of the work other than a practical one.

Drawing’s Pedagogical Turn Drawing seems appropriate for an anti‐capitalist approach because, as a relatively cheap and ephemeral technique, it connotes a vulnerability of medium. It is particularly visible in the case of works that raise the issue of social costs of the economic and political transformation, as well as workers’ movements. Although the filmic language Jeremy Deller uses to illustrate the 1984 UK miner’s strike appears a very persuasive inspiration, in contrast, the Central‐Eastern European artistic reaction to the coal miners’ strikes used drawing. In 2000, one year before Deller’s reenactment of The Battle of Orgreave, the Croatian artist Igor Grubić created a photo series, Angels with

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Dirty Faces. It portrays miners from the Serbian coal mine of Kolubara, who initiated a strike, which contributed to the fall of the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Grubić photographed miners sitting against the wall in their workplace, thereby reinstating the well‐established visual convention of realism. Although the artist was openly relating to the social realist tradition by representing workers, he depicts them quite differently, in poses suggesting a degree of self‐awareness or an objectivity about their plight and with gestures implying estrangement or resignation. At the same time, it is crucial to notice that the strike incited by the workers was successful. The general overtone, which suggests failure rather than victory, emerges from the drawn additions to the series – pairs of angel‐like wings drawn on the wall, which appear to be stemming from the workers’ bodies. The images are both elusive and elementary in nature, a form that problematizes the utopian character of the proletarian revolution. The wings, though inspired by Wim Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire (1987), do not connote the works of mercy performed by workers on society, but rather the Marxist revolutionary deed, done by the collective subject of the proletariat for itself. Therefore, the utopia indicated by the transitory medium of subtle drawing appears both as a mode of childhood education and the longing to enact a collective social gesture. In a similar vein, a graffiti work by the Polish socially engaged artist Łukasz Surowiec, titled Daddy, Don’t Cry (2015) (see Figure  4.3), relates to the protest against the government project to shut down mines. He uses the drawing of

Figure 4.3  Łukasz Surowiec (2015) “Daddy, don’t cry. Zosia.” Source: Painting on the wall, drawing of miner’s daughter transferred onto the wall of family house, Katowice. Photo: Dawid Chalimoniuk, Courtesy of Łukasz Surowiec, Davido/Katowice City of Gardens.



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six‐year‐old Zosia, a kindergartener, whose work was spotted by Surowiec in a street show. The artist transferred and recreated the drawing by a coal‐miner’s daughter onto the wall of a multifamily house built for miners. Such practices of drawing correspond well with the “pedagogical turn in art” as defined by Kristina Lee Podesva (Lee Podesva 2007). The author gives the example of Joseph Beuys who used blackboard drawings, thus appropriating education as a form of art. After Irit Rogoff, Lee Podesva recognizes the “academy as a space for speculation and experimentation rather than the manufacture of knowledge products” (Lee Podesva 2007, unpaginated) that sanction the logic of the market. Drawing appears to be a technique which best corresponds with such a theoretical approach, demonstrating its vulnerability to time and resisting definite meaning. The reusability of the surface of a blackboard suggests the experimental character of the work and processual meaning, which is open to collective authorship and egalitarian practice, dissociating itself from the elitist discourse of talent and division of labor.

Drawing Surplus Population Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan, famous from his video Choose (2005) picturing a little boy seated at a table between two cans of Coca‐Cola and Pepsi – is the author of drawings that aptly illustrate the paradoxes of a consumerist society, as well as the problems of political transformation. In a series titled Pioneers, realized between 2006 and 2008, Muresan created images of children inflating plastic bags. Although images vary in size and frame, they are all meticulously elaborated with very subtle and precise lines. Their form is rooted in the language of communist visual propaganda, although their delicate technique seems to suggest faded propaganda images. They allude to the presence of about twenty thousand street children in Romania, who, after the fall of communism, lost their places in state orphanages. Therefore the plastic bag, the recurrent motif of the series, may be interpreted both as a bubble of the totalitarian propaganda as well as a more direct reference to the children sniffing glue. The delicate, ephemeral drawing corresponds well with the fragility of a communist utopia, as the blueprint nature of communism is one of the artist’s central interests. This is also visible in a photographic work Leap into the Void, After 3 Seconds (2004), a Central‐Eastern European interpretation of the work by Yves Klein. Instead of expressing artistic utopia, Muresan’s work pictures a collision with the “Real” represented by a dead body lying on the street, a substitution for the person who takes the leap in Klein’s “original” version. Similarly, in the series Pioneers, the disbanded project of communist utopia is visualized by images of plastic bags, inflated by “pioneers” like propaganda but about to explode. The artist’s drawing technique means that the illusion of the spatiality of bags is both established and invalidated at the same time; the bag’s interiors are as much created as destroyed by their simple presentation on the white blank page. The emptiness of the totalitarian ideology bearing the seed of its destruction corresponds with the emptiness of the paper, thus communism appears as both represented and unrepresented. In Pioneers, some of the children wearing red scarves hold inflated bags, while others have deflated bags, thus the dialectics of exhaling and inhaling are ascribed to communism and capitalism respectively. These “utopias” appear to be exploded, but not for the good. It is worth noticing that the group of “communist pioneers” are mostly, if not exclusively, girls.

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Consequently, the expanded bags could connote pregnancy and may refer to the 1966 “Decree 770,” introduced by Nicolae Ceaușescu that made abortion illegal to increase the fertility rate, resulting in an increase in unwanted and uncared‐for children in the Romanian population.5 The multiplication of the motif of a child blowing air into a bag is also poignant. While the propaganda established by Ceaușescu conceived of children as a “work force,” after the transformation their status changed into what Thomas Malthus named as “overpopulation” – the natural discrepancy between the “population [which] when unchecked, increases at a geometrical ratio [and] subsistence [which] ‐ increases only in an arithmetical ratio” (Malthus 2007, p. 5). In his famous argument with Malthus, Marx proved that what he called “surplus population” is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis (Marx 2011, p. 693), a necessary byproduct of the accumulation of surplus value. By drawing numerous images of the “pioneer” motif  –  Muresan repeats both the gesture of the communist propaganda of multiplication and capitalist mechanism of accumulation, which leads to the dissolution of meaning. This practice is dialectical in nature and is mirrored by the dialectics of exhaling and inhaling because the form of the drawing does not allow the viewer to tell the difference between these two actions. Moreover, in this context, the choice of the pencil appears significant as its grayness may also be perceived as a dialectical negotiation between the black and white logic of the Cold War. Muresean’s series of drawings entitled Garbage from 2007 seem structured by the same logic. Animated by the artist as a looped film, the sequence shows a man leaning over a garbage bin. One cannot see the content of the bin and this leads to the conclusion that the title refers to the man, who appears as another variation on the theme of surplus population. The dialectical thinking provides Muresan with tools capable of invalidating binary opposition of the past and the present, totalitarian communism and democratic capitalism, leading to the critique of capitalism as a totalitarian system.

Drawing as the Brechtian Actor In the book In Praise of Love (2012), Badiou elaborated on the concept of love, which is one of the most persuasive responses to the financial crisis of 2007/8, recognized as the crisis of both capitalism and its constitutive structures. According to Badiou there is a striking parallel between love and revolution, since both involve the plural subject (Badiou 2012, p. 17). This is not the result of a quasi‐mathematical process of the adding up primary singularities, but is the plural subject’s essential, elemental nature. Badiou describes the possibility of experiencing the world from the perspective of difference, indicating that both communism and fraternity are comparable on the formal level to the dialectics present in love (Badiou 2012, pp. 62–63). One might draw a parallel between the study of the French philosopher and the eruption of the artistic works concentrated on the correlation of love and revolution after 2008, where only a few examples use drawing. One remarkable work brings together drawing and performative actions was created by Natalya Pershina‐Yakimanskaya and Olga Egorova who form the artists collective, Factory of Found Clothes (FFC) from St Petersburg. In a series entitled For the Tragedy Issue, (2011) Pershina‐Yakimanskaya created drawings demonstrating the notion of love as appropriate to the capitalist



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regime  –  commercials for Gucci and Coffeeshop. Figures inscribed in these empty spaces, appropriated from advertising images, strike the viewer as alienated both from the product of their labor and each other. In the drawing, Against the commercial shit (see Figure 4.4) the Gucci commercial’s estrangement of labor is visualized through the disparity between the isolated surface of the commercials and the desolated space of the city. Although the viewer has a direct visual access to the representation of the commercial, the passer‐by, who is the proper subject of the representation has neither corporeal nor visual contact with it. The series bears a strong resemblance to works created by American artists as a reaction to the Great Depression, photographers hired by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program such as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Margaret Bourke‐White. The tension with works by FSA artists means that the change of medium – from photography to drawing – becomes crucial to the series’ meaning. The Gucci commercial drawings are structured to reference specific images such as American Way by Bourke‐ White (1939) and Toward Los Angeles by Lange (1937). However, the surface of the commercial – a representation within a representation – is paralleled to the surface of the paper which holds the drawing and which serves as a factor attracting the sight of the receiver. The unity thus appears as a function of the alliance between the people and so is doubly mediated; by the drawing and commercial and the viewer. The passers‐ by appear as excluded and alienated, both from the loving relationship (appropriated by the notional regime of capitalism which has been redefined as the alliance of the

Figure 4.4  GLUKLYA /Natalia Pershina‐Jakimanskaya, formerly: Factory of Found Clothes (2010) Against the commercial shit. Source: Drawing for the Chto Delat newspaper issue Tragedy or Farce, Courtesy of GLUKLYA /Natalia Pershina‐Jakimanskaya.

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capital) and the receiver who is also a potential client and alienated from the accumulation of the capital. The passer‐by is thus marginalized but simultaneously escapes the symbolic order of the representation – the vicious circle of the only possible relationship in the form of alliance, which enters the domain of the real and is excluded from the notional system of capitalism. Hence the drawing does not represent commodity fetishism but it does practice it, captivating the viewer in the exchange it induces – the exchange of a human relationship of a social nature for a relationship with capital. In this sense, drawing constitutes its ascendancy over the medium of photography. In Bourke‐White’s photograph the observer is challenged by two competitive foci – the commercial which faces him and constitutes a potential threat, and the horizontal line of the queue with people turning their eyes to the viewer. A similar structure seems to be the funding principle of the Coffeeshop drawing. There, however, the girl passing by, fails to establish eye contact with the receiver, whose alliance with characters from the commercial maintain her alienation. The perspective significantly differs from the photograph by Lange. Here passers‐by are not captured by the explicit perspective of propaganda, but rather pushed to margins of the composition, as if the very notion of perspective belonged to the capitalist discursive regime. Numerous drawings in this series also resemble a composition in Wolcott’s photograph Negro going in colored entrance of movie house on Saturday afternoon (1939), for example the tight frame, flatness and close‐up of the vast surface of the wall. Some of the drawings show couples in an absorbed, loving embrace, which excludes the spectator, in contrast to socialist realist works where the spectator is inscribed or addressed in the composition or perspective. The series simply illustrates the issue of the Chto Delat collective newspaper – Tragedy or Farce? (2010), the theoretical framing of which relates to Bertolt Brecht’s reflection on tragedy with his notion of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect). Artemy Magun describes this effect in the following way: Brecht (…) goes on to ascribe to classical tragedy (…) the task of ‘inciting emotions’ and transmitting them from actor to spectator, as well as a timeless, ‘perennial’ character. In contrast to this tradition, Brecht proposes rejecting empathy and creating a critically oriented ‘epic’ theater in which the actor would distance himself from his character and (…) force the spectator to notice, understand, and feel what he [was] not doing (…) He describes it just as Shklovsky describes it: art must emphasize its own conventionality and accidental nature, (…), and, in particular, the historicity of the events it portrays. However, Brecht adds a moral‐didactic element (…) that is missing in the original: alienation helps the individual realize the limitedness of depicted reality and look for alternative modes of action. It therefore leads to paradoxical, contrasting affects. (Magun 2010, p. 3)

Drawings by the Factory of Found Clothes seem to authorize such a structure. They implicate a reception determined by class affiliation because they operate by alliance instead of community or solidarity, which is a crucial precondition for Brecht. A noteworthy example of such a mechanism is established in an FFC’s sketch for an important performance that involved hiring ballerinas to teach a group of men to dance. These men had lost their jobs as a result of political transformation, crisis, and aggressive capitalism. The actions entitled Utopian Unemployment Union equipped participants with alternative means of expression to those recognized by the capitalist regime. The video performance presents men wearing the ostentatious costumes of



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ballerinas. They copy the movements of ballerinas, which although they appear smooth and fluent are in fact extremely hard to follow, the result of the ballerinas’ arduous training over many years. However, in the drawing, the men are not represented in these costumes, emphasizing a Brechtian escape from illusion. Instead the men are drawn wearing valenki (felt) shoes and aviator hats. Their clothes reflect the utopia that shaped their identity before it was appropriated by the capitalist regime and its precarious economic basis, which seemingly protects this subject (valenki) and preserves the utopian future (aviator hat). The very form of the drawing accentuates the instability of the subject with the elongated figure forms and compositions overloaded with details. Thus, the work of the artists of the Factory of Found Clothes and Chto Delat share similar practices of alternative narration about the financial crisis, which they understand as a crisis of capitalism and as such, enable the reclamation of notions appropriated by this totalitarian, discursive regime. The crisis has resulted in a crucial paradigm shift; from the primacy of an individual to a collective, often anonymous in identity and involving the abrogation of copyrights.6 It has led Chto Delat’s rejection of footnotes or references in their publications as a refusal of the notion of copyright or the declaration of the Factory of Found Clothes that artists should offer their own strategies and experience, openly letting others use them as a counterbalance to a capitalist idea of “know how,” which  –  according to the Collective consists in accumulation of capital (Factory of Found Clothes 2009). In 2012 in Rijeka several artists founded Fokus Grupa, which established its collectivity: As the only operating paradigm (….) attempted to eliminate (…) the biographical, individual connotations of its members, thus freeing up the space for involvement (…) without the use of first person singular. (Fokus Grupa 2016)

Since 2011 the Group has been creating a series of drawings entitled I Sing to Pass the Time (see Figure 4.5) inspired by the theme from the song of the same name by Croatian singer Arsen Dedić, expressing, as Focus Grupa claims, a “disbelief towards the effectiveness of political music” (Fokus Grupa, https://fokusgrupa.net). The collection of drawings, rooted in found images, explores the interdependence of art and politics, particularly the history of workers’ struggle associated with artistic endeavors. A prominent role in the series is given to a drawing, after the painting by Peter Paul Rubens’ Bathsheba in the Zwinger Gallery, Dresden. The work includes a text recalling the events of 1920, when during a street struggle: a stray bullet pierced a hole in [the] painting (…). Oskar Kokoschka wrote a text inviting those involved in political conflict to preserve cultural heritage, thus provoking the reaction that would grow into the famous Kunstlump diatribe.

As a response to Kokoschka’s text George Grosz and John Heartfield published a reproval, indicating the abyss separating the culture and poverty of the worker’s district (Kaes et al. 1994, pp. 483–487). The responsive text revealed the class struggle behind the question of art and disclosed the elitist nature of artistic discourse. The Rubens inspired drawing by Grupa Fokus questions the role of the work of art as the method of capital accumulation, exploring the status of the sketch as a recognized and valuable artwork. The change of tools appears as a complication of the relationship

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Figure 4.5  Fokus Grupa (2011 - ongoing) I Sing to Pass the Time. Source: Pencil on paper, Courtesy of Fokus Grupa.

between an original and a copy, described by Giorgio Saviano in Gomorrah as dictated by the capitalist regime (Saviano 2008). The identification of the primal and final stage of the transformation of the “original” work, questions the hierarchy of the original and copy, a hierarchy that supports the art as a tool of sustaining social stratification leading to a permanent class division. The picture by Rubens re‐appears as fragile in its very substance, authorizing the intervention of the spectator and opening the structure of the work to collective authorship. Another important drawing within the series depicts the protest of the Artists’ Union of New York in November and December of 1936, where over two hundred artists were arrested. The convention of the drawing resembles that of a “courtroom sketch,” used in order to protect the privacy of the prosecuted and witnesses. The drawing derives from a famous picture from the sit‐down strike of the Artists’ Union members, who demanded better conditions in Works Progress Administration‐Federal Art Project. The change from photography to drawing leads to a change in tone. Protesters appear to confront the spectator, raising the question of their own and the viewer’s identity. The court sketch plays out a set of fixed roles. Sketch characters appear as such, demonstrating not only their own political nature, but also contrary to the medium of photography – their own right to conventional representation via drawing. Similar to the Brechtian actor, who ‘does not allow himself to be completely transformed (…) into the character’ (Brecht 2015, p. 185), the drawing reveals its own conventions. Characters do not bear witness to history – the drawing may fade, may be erased or changed. They materialize,



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however, the collective work in the form of Marx’s incorporated labor (Marx 2011, p. 115) offering therefore an alternative value to the one dictated by Capitalism. One of the most interesting cases of such an approach is the art of Belarusan artist Marina Naprushkina – the founder of the artists’ collective, Office for Anti‐Propaganda and the newspaper Self‐governing (2011), which includes numerous drawings by the artist. The December 2011 issue illustrates what was named by Žižek in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously the “revival of the radical emancipatory politics all around the world” (Žižek 2012, p. 127). The second page of the paper (see Figure 4.6) illustrates the main government building in Minsk in the background, while the principle object of the image, a pile of sludge, establishes a common background for individual characters. The viewer’s attention is attracted by a seemingly trivial object in the foreground: a paper boat drifting on the surface of the wastewater, which becomes a visual carrier of the utopia. The discursive frame of the page is constituted with text explaining the political and economic context. Thus, the work is quite literally framed with

Figure 4.6  Marina Naprushkina and the Office for Antipropaganda (2012) Self#governing. Source: Page from the Newspaper, Courtesy of Marina Naprushkina and the Office for Antipropaganda.

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the context, which offers direct instructions to the viewer. This ostensible meaning is mitigated, however, by the paper boat, which constitutes a pars pro toto by alluding to the physical presence of the sheet of paper (the page) which contains both the text and drawing. The relationship of the page, and what is represented on it, is of dialectical nature because the drawing represents the boat, which potentially may be made of the very page which contains it. Artists, working in post‐communist Europe, who also may be described as post‐ communist, have created numerous works of art whose structure opens up the potential to discuss them as a new form of socialist realism. In contrast to its old manifestation, the present socialist realism tends to stress the reality of drawing’s tools, and its matter is evident, taking the form of the labor put into the act of drawing. Once established as a basic tool of drawing, labor secures both its interpretation, which appears as necessarily linked to the very process of labor, and its potential fate. Even when purchased as an object of the capital’s accumulation, drawing in the form of contemporary socialist realism problematizes this mechanism, thus escaping appropriation. Whereas the original socialist realism functioned within the domain of the Marxist superstructure, its contemporary variation strongly relates to the base that forms the relations of production. Due to the relative cheapness of its means of production and direct, egalitarian access to its subject of labor, drawing appears as an essential tool of criticism of capitalism. Therefore anticapitalist drawing, especially created after the financial crisis of 2007/2008 can be aptly framed with texts of post‐Marxist thinkers and critics of capitalism such as Alain Badiou, Jodie Dean, or Bruno Bosteels. Anti‐capitalist drawing, often practised in a “slacker,” inexpert form, questions the division of labor by supporting the identification of the artist as proletariat. Additionally, when it takes the form of a sketch, drawing connotes notions of both utopia and desire, constitutive for the new socialist realism. Moreover,  its rough and immediate quality contributes to its resilience toward the exclusionary nature of art historical discourse. It is an art that refuses the equation of democracy and capitalism. In this way, these works of art function similarly to the figure of the Brechtian actor, who identifies himself with the political and economic context of his performance rather than with his role.7

Notes 1 That was stated by Badiou during the master seminar within The Event. Symposium: Event in artistic and political practices in 26–28 March of 2013 in ASCA, Amsterdam. 2 The notion of baddrawing was coined by Tamás Szentjóby in 2006. 3 As I suggested in my book The Politics of Movement of the Hungarian Neo‐­avantgarde (1966–80) ‐ Warszawa: Universitas, 2013. 4 That is further discussed by me in the book The Plural Subject. Art and the crisis of 2007/2008 (Mnogi Podmiot. Stuka i kryzys 2007/2008), accepted for publication by Czas Kultury Press. 5 And represented in the film documentary Children Underground by Edet Belzberg. 6 Ibidem. 7 The text has been written as a result of a research conducted during the research project: “Transformacja w sztuce w postkomunistycznej Europie” (Transformation in Art in Post‐communist Europe)(UMO2014/15/B/HS2/01171) founded by Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Centre).



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References Badiou, A. (2010). The Communist Hypothesis. London and New York: Verso. Badiou, A. (2012). In Praise of Love. London: Serpent’s Tail. Barthes, R. (1991). Mythologies. New York: The Noonday Press. Boettger, S. (2008). 99 Fears. New York: Phaidon. Bosteels, B. (2011). The Actuality of Communism. London and New York: Verso. Brecht, B. (2015). Brecht on Theatre. London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury. Bryan‐Wilson, J. (2009). Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Buden, B. (2012). Strefa przejścia: O końcu postkomunizmu. Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna. Dean, J. (2012). The Communist Horizon. London and New York: Verso. Factory of Found Clothes. (2009). “Utopian Unemployment Union N1”. Accessed February 2nd. http://factoryoffoundclothes.org/?p=43 Freud, S. (2013). Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety. Worcestershire: Read Books Limited, Kindle Edition. Groys, B. (2011). The Total Art of Stalinism:Avant‐Garde, Aesthetic, Dictatorship and Beyond. London and New York: Verso, Kindle Edition. Grupa, F. (2016). “Artist Statement”. Accessed February 2nd. http://fokusgrupa.net/ downloads/statement.pdf Johnson, P. (2011). Marxist Aesthetics (Routledge Revivals): The Foundations within Everyday Life for an Emancipated Consciousness. New York: Routledge, Kindle Edition. Kaes, M., Jay, M., and Dimendberg, E. (eds.) (1994). The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. San Francisco: University of California Press. Lee Podesva, K. (2007). “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art.” Filip, Vol. 06, Summer 2007. Lukács, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Magun, A. (2010). “Tragedy as the Self‐Critique of Spectacle.” Что делать?, Vol. 07: 31, December. Malthuse, T.R. (2007). Essay on the Principle of Population. Mineola, New York: Dover Publication Inc. Marcuse, H. (1971). An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, K. (1993). A Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyPreface, online  ­version: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critiquepol-economy/preface.htm Marx, K. (1998). The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books. Marx, K. (2011). Capital: Volume One. Mineola, New York: Dover Publication Inc. Marx, K. (2014). The Poverty of Philosophy. Eastford: Martino Publishing, Electric Book. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2010a). Collected Works (Vol.50): Letters 1892–1895. Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2010b). Collected Works (Vol.3): Karl Marx March1843‐ August1844. Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book. O’Doherty, B. (1999). Inside the White Cube, The Ideology of the Gallery Space. San Francisco: University of California Press. Radomska, M. (2013). Polityka kierunków Neoawangardy Węgierskiej (1966–80). Warszawa: Universitas. Saviano, R. (2008). Gomorra. Podróż po imperium kamorry. Warszawa: Czytelnik.

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Szentjóby, T. (2006). FIKA – BOGEY, an Interview with Tamás St.Turba. trans. Katalin Orbán. Budapest: Ludwig Museum. Žižek, S. (2001). The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For. London and New York: Verso. Žižek, S. (2012). The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London and New York: Verso.

5

Differencing Drawing Feminist Perspectives on Line, Surface, and Space Griselda Pollock

Conceivably, drawing may be the most haunting obsession the mind can experience…But is it, after all, a question of mind?… A few drops of ink, a sheet of paper as material for the accumulation and co‐ordination of moments and acts, are all that is required. Paul Valéry Degas, Danse, Dessin 1937 For me real drawing speaks of consciousness. Christine Taylor Patten Artist’s Notebooks 1995 Difference is far more entangled and complex than we like to admit. Catherine de Zegher Inside the Visible 1996 The gestural record on the page stages a moment of existence which is no other moment…It allows one to imaginatively rethink that moment of action even though it is past, and in that sense, it marks time. Avis Newman in de Zegher & Newman The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act 2003 The challenge for this chapter is to engage with two terms: difference and drawing in order to explain the active work of differencing (Pollock 1999) that displaces fixed opposition by arguing for the transformative effects of artistic practice itself. Yet I am also suggesting a specific, feminist reading of both drawing and difference, linking the two not through content or even the superficially gendered position of the artist. Through four “encounters” with four drawing practices, each exploring a psycho‐ material facet of drawing (line, surface, field/support) and demanding an engagement with the world as time and space, as history and trauma, as desire and critique, I lay the ground for a theoretical elaboration of the feminist concept of differencing in the A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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context of a history of exhibitions around drawing in 1976, 1996, and 2016 that redefined the place of drawing in modern and contemporary art practice. The feminist encounter with drawing holds specific interest precisely because we are increasingly appreciating, if not defining, drawing as itself a kind of practice of difference, that is to say, a virtuality to be constantly explored. If, conventionally, drawing in the premodern era in Western art was understood to be disegno, design, preparation, study, education, delineation, preliminary composition (Petherbridge 2010) and (even if the originating drawing is the founding conceptualization of the later work), the modern – recognized increasingly by the later twentieth century with exhibitions such as that curated by Bernice Rose, Drawing Now, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1976 – presents drawing in and for itself as a mode of knowing the world that is about discovery and difference (Rose 1976). This new discourse is characterized by its recognition of drawing not only as a medium in its own right (Rose 1976), but as an act of thought (Avis Newman in de Zegher & Newman 2003), as “the space of mental possibility” and the “space of transience” (de Zegher in de Zegher & Newman 2003), and as gesture and stage (de Zegher in de Zegher & Newman 2003). It involves also thinking of the different dimensions: line, ground, surface, materiality, space, blankness, rhythm, scale, etc. This discourse is, therefore, not interested in what is drawn in the sense that drawing is an act of representation, although it may be that too. It follows what we can call the modernist investigation into the elements that constitute the distinctive character of a field of practice. For drawing to come into its own in modernist terms, all aspects of its processes become subject to inquiry, and that inquiry into its possibilities becomes the subject of drawing itself. This is a formal exercise. The unique direction of feminist inquiry into drawing, takes us, however, to the relations between bodies and signs and this raises the question of sexual difference as one of those possibilities.

Encounter I: The Line of Christine Taylor Patten (USA, b.1940) I first became challenged to think about drawing, as a feminist, through my encounter with drawings by American artist Christine Taylor Patten. Having studied in Los Angeles, Patten now lives and works in New Mexico. Over more than 30 years, working on many scales, Patten has created 12 series of drawings: Free Radicals (consisting of 11 works, 1970–1978); Vietnam (5 works, 1983–1986), one of which is titled In Memory of Someone who was Killed in Vietnam; Life As We Know It (19 works, 1985–1990) including such works as There is No Such Thing as a Little Plutonium; Vietnam Afterimages (19 works, 1990–1994) including Imagine, Unity is Minimum of Two, What If War Were Not An Option?; QED (16 works, 1989–1990) including What is the Sound of the Speed of Light? and Ode to Pollock and Krasner; Bears (10 works, 1987–1988), Gracetime (6 works, 1993–1998); Peaces (12 works ongoing, 1993–); Peace Preliminaries (18 works, 1993–1995); and New Light (4 works, ongoing 1995–), micro (2000 drawings and additional tangents, 1998–2015) and macro/imagine (7 works, 1998–2017). This list tells me two important things. Firstly, for Patten drawing is an extended imaginative and technical process generating, and thus only realized across, related but individual drawings. Secondly, if the series is formed by the several or the many that share a problematic or develop a formal question, her drawing clearly requires the many spaces of these related encounters



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between the artist and her materials in order to make visible through their forms the concerns indicated by evocative or even startling titles. Patten’s drawing practice situates itself, therefore, in the world through its self‐naming for both her series’ and individual works’ titles speak to and of the world as historical and political. Yet what is named by the titles of each series is a process that above all signifies time. Time has been devoted to engagement with the realization of the question through a practice of drawing. Each unique drawing, therefore, becomes a singular instanciation of a larger whole that needs each component to become its distinctive event “as drawing” which is, for the artist, itself a practice of living in the world as an ethical subject, taking responsibility for the world and for being in the world. All Patten’s drawings are produced with the back of a crow quill pen, ink, and paper. Whatever scale, all drawings are produced with a mark created by the movement of the wrist. All take time, some up to a year, the larger one several years, and the largest to date Imagine7 (7.3 m) took 12 years to complete on a scale that meant the artist only saw the whole at the end of that period. The artist affirms that she has no Gestalt already present in her head before beginning a drawing, so the material genesis of Imagine7 followed its internal dynamic of evolving from the accumulating of strokes, spaces, densities, and possibilities chosen or ignored; this becomes the source of its effect as a completed work (Figure 5.1). Patten’s titles already suggest both engagement with the historical events of war and resistance to violence, but never through any kind of figuration or indicative reference. Titles point us toward an ethical worldliness on the part of the artist without necessarily indicating how drawing performs such a commitment to the world. That is performed by her process. One of the major discoveries of what we might generically name modernist artmaking is not that the medium is the message. Rather it is process that produces effects and affects, once attended to by close study of what we are looking at when confronted with a materially made “artwork.” Christine Taylor Patten’s process is visible and is composed of three elements: ink, a crow quill pen and the material surface of paper creating a field of events. Her process is mark‐making but as a creative process it also makes space and light become

Figure 5.1  Christine Taylor Patten Imagine5 (to the Fifth Power), (2007) Crow quill and ink on paper, 56 × 261.6 cm. (Source: Photograph Daniel Barsotti) with 24/2000 micros, between 1355 AD and 1382 AD. Crow quill and ink on paper, 2.5 × 2.5 cm. Source: Courtesy of the Artist.

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visible. Each drawing emerges from, and is built by, the gestures of her drawing hand, the swing of a wrist inscribing the arc of a line whose multiplication builds by repetition to plot out the movement of vast planes turning in space. Like chaos theory, the small gestures of a hand held close to a piece of paper accumulate to convey the grandeur of space and the movement of planes. Not seeing structure but genesis, Patten’s drawings pursue an enquiry, therefore, into change itself. Instead of marking horizon lines, or lines of division of space, each drawing in key series seeks to approach, to find, the invisible pivot that is change (the turn of the plane), while the change the drawing inscribes is but the effect of a multitude of smaller movements. Her protocol is thus material, formal, abstract and one might call it experimental in the same way that mathematicians and astrophysicists are experimental explorers of the universe that is beyond understanding (See also Rockburne, 2014). They seek to match our limited modes of writing or describing to forces we imagine but cannot comprehend. Can drawing also be one of those pathways for exploring this meeting between what we might name our sense‐knowing and a form of more cognitive understanding of physical processes? It is interesting to note that physicists and mathematicians at the wilder ends of their respective speculations on time, space and the universe’s logic and process recognize their own ways of seeing and thinking in the drawings of Christine Taylor Patten. For instance, mathematician Mary Lupa has written: How did this celestial series enter the artist’s mind? The artist might easily have drawn people, animals or landscapes. She might have made a single work representing her take on the universe. But she wanted to leave us with the notion of time and change. Unknowable, incremental, unending, irreversible, unstoppable time and change. The fourth dimension delivered as three-dimensional figures on two‐ dimensional paper all of which can be said to make a single point. (Cited in Pollock 2015, p. 37)

Christine Taylor Patten starts a drawing with an establishing pencil stroke. Then she begins to work with ink applied with a small stroke of a crow quill pen to set up the lower level darks and to begin to seek out the density, and imagine the weight of the overall distribution of marks. Working along an initiating axis in space, the Ur‐ mark (Ur = original) of drawing creates the primary dialectic of event and ground while also creating space in terms of planes that pivot inside the virtual space of the paper/drawing. The marks then build up the overall under‐drawing, extending the initiating event with all its accidents (ink blots, hairs on the pen, changes of pen nib, exhaustion of the ink) and unexpected becomings that emerge to reveal/realize what will arrive and be considered its resolved form. During that journey, there is the push and pull of artist and drawing, her decision‐making responding to chance effects that are accumulating as a result of the inherent potential of the dark force of her mark‐ making against what now becomes its partner and emerging opposite, light. In the process, what was the other of the artist and the ground for her mark ceases to be ground and becomes a partner in the dialectic of the straight mark and the curved form it can produce, the contrary quality of a fabricated depth of darkness of the accumulated lines and the fragility of the single, visible stroke of a hand‐held pen. In the last days of the year 1997, Christine Taylor Patten conceived a monumental series, micro/macro that would enable her to “see more of what drawing could do” by making 2000 micro drawings, each drawing is 1 inch by 1 inch ie (2.5 × 2.5 cm). The drawings that form the micros (completed over the period 1997–2015) are titled with



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numbers and letters starting with 1 A.D. running through to 2000 A.D. These refer to the double millennia, Anno Domini (also cast in global form as the Common Era: ce). The micro series was initiated with a single dot that then split to generate over 2000 drawings – with a supplementary potential for tangents taking off from any one of them. Each drawing is suggested, prompted, incited by events within the preceding drawing, so that over the entire 2000 the infinite possibilities of ink, mark, and paper are elaborated following the internal and unforeseen prompting of each drawing as it opens pathways to what follows. From organic to geometric form, from playful to heavily worked, from cosmic to erotic, forms, and effects emerge as the realization of the infinite possibilities of genesis itself even when defined by such minimal protocol as starting with splitting one dot and following what happens, drawing by drawing. This radical adventure becomes, therefore, an inquiry into the deepest dimensions of drawing by means of a relation between mark, surface, tone, hand. The 2000 micros are paired with one macro drawing measuring 24 ft (7.3 m) bearing the title Imagine. The title is both an incitement: Imagine! and an evocation of John Lennon’s invitation to let a dream of peace come true. This majestic drawing evolved alongside a series of several “studies” (each 9 ft; 2.75 m wide) of which all six have now been completed. Each is titled Imagine to the power of … represented by the title and a superscript numeral. It took 12 years of work to complete the final Imagine7 (to the power of seven) that was selected by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev to be exhibited at the 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015 for the first time, in the company of 1000 micros from the “second millennium,” the sequence of drawings numbered 1001–2000 (Pollock 2015, fig. 1). Historical time is invoked by the chronological titling while the scale of the creation makes visible the literal time it took the artist to make the drawings. There is also the time it takes to see the whole work, soliciting both the movement of the body of the viewer and the time of her/his attentiveness. We have words for painting and painter, sculpture and sculptor and then… there is drawing and what? There is no word for an artist who draws, or rather for whom the mark, the space, the time, the plane, the surface, and the making body are their field. Can we speak of a draw‐artist? Or is this artist without name the Ur‐artist: the artist in the most complete terms? Thus Patten’s stratagem of beginning with a dot – the mark instituting a field on a tiny piece of paper, creating the pull of mark and surface, of gesture and infinite possibility while following faithfully the potential infinitude of outcomes from any one of the drawings that emerge from with each creation of a world in the squared space of 2.5 cm (1 in.) × 2.5 cm (1 in.) – is not an exploration of chosen formal issues. It is an inquiry into time, space and being by means of an act of drawing, drawing as the action of inquiry, and an exploration, therefore, of consciousness (See chapter on Taylor Patten in these terms in Pollock, 2007). For Patten drawing is a process of emergence at the intersection of her artworking and the virtualities of the effects of line (darkness and distinction) and ground (support and light). Her line is not inscription but sculpture. It sculpts the negative space from the blank paper so as to find and explore an “image” which is what happens in the areas that become, and make us see, light in the process of drawing. Her gestures block out some of the infinite, hence invisible, light of the paper/world as the radical material and physical other of the gesture that turns it into ground in a way that has resonances with the discoveries of artists such as Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock during the 1950s in paintings. Dark and light are not tones used to shape an image from the world; their tension becomes the event of drawing in the dialectic of its materiality, liquid, mark, paper, and human movement in time.

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Patten draws with the back of a crow quill pen that produces slightly curving vertical strokes. These can be left as a casual scatter of cross‐hatching gestures or they can build up an area of density by her going into it to work at it, that is, to suppress some of the forms that spontaneously appear or have emerged such as hollows, curves, bulges, and swells as the inevitable and always fascinating effects of chance angles and changing distribution. In each completed drawing, the artist alone knows the layers of its own history, the archeology of its becoming, some of whose moments have to be overworked and are lost in the process. In her notebooks for 1995, the artist writes to herself: This drawing can be lost with the slightest error. This is always the hardest stage. I could leave it now— no one would care, or know— it is fine now—but I know that this drawing is not yet itself. That is my job, to free it into itself….This drawing exhausts me not because it is so much work—and it is that—but because of the changes, the risks, the major changes that are inevitable when the balance between power and simplicity dominates the movement. I have nothing left for anyone—the courage mustered to obliterate something in the drawing that is beautiful agonizes me—now, it is buried within the simplicity, as experience is in any human, invisible but the source of one’s strength. (Unpublished ARTIST’S NOTEBOOKS, 1995)

Time is thus inscribed into the resolved balance of density and surface that the viewer finally sees, encountering only the final resolution of these struggles over the time of making  –  “the balancing act of play and terror” (Unpublished ARTIST’S NOTEBOOKS, 1995). Looking at the resolved drawing the viewer cannot see all the moments of shift during this becoming. But through the final “image” the viewer experiences change visually. Time is translated into a spatialized movement that does not produce an end: an image, but a sense of movement at once bodily that echoes scientific forms of knowledge of our physical universe at the level of the cosmic. The events that occur in the drawings as the fundamental battle of light and dark pursued by the marks of the crow quill pen with a thin arc of black ink against the textured surface of the paper open up even on their tiny scale to a cosmic sense of time, of worlds coming into being, evolving, and transforming. Without any intention to create references or images, the drawing produces space, forms, cavities, and, above all, light. Invisible when you look at the burning white sheet of paper, light has to be produced by the counterforce of darkness, which is the drawing’s work. Itself an accumulation of tiny lines that bring you to see the light, drawing as darkness creates this generative opposition light/dark as the experience of creative difference. In a statement written about her work, Christine Taylor Patten records a story about her student days at Otis Art Institute (later Otis Parsons, now Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, a time full of new vitality amongst creative women who would reshape our sense of art and its possibilities (Broude and Garrard, 1996). Her teacher asked the students to bring a drawing to the class; in fact, to bring a single line. One of her classmates created a mechanical contraption that traveled across a piece of paper, leaving a pencil line that traced its movements in front of the class. For her own contribution, Taylor Patten brought a live worm on a pile of sand. I liked the multi‐levelled aspect of that  –  the worm was a line in itself, and as it moved in the sand it drew all through class time. Its aliveness brought time into the equation. We got to see lines being made, some locked into time, some not. (Taylor Patten, personal communication April, 1995)



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Taylor Patten’s worm embodies both movement and trace, an organic form and a cultural inscription, and an impression of living energy on the world. Organic and elastic, always moving itself and moving somewhere, the wriggling creature constantly draws but also effaces the lines its body forms, and the line that is its body. It has been taken from its dark, dank home in the earth whose vitality it nourishes through its endless excavations and enriching defecations. The worm aerates and fertilizes the earth, biochemically altering its composition to create compost for new life. The worm thus animates the ground, unseen, but alongside a multitude of other creatures and other processes too small for our eyes to perceive. The worm as inspiration to thinking, even as a kind of thought‐form, is part of the vital exchange between language and what is rendered thinkable or transformed through language. Thus for me, the story of the drawing (with) worm holds something more. Art making is a necessary yet always impossible form of attention to the life of the world. What we call abstraction emerged, I would argue, at the moment when modern artists concluded that art, as they inherited it from the Western tradition, could no longer represent the world figuratively without inflicting upon its complexity and instability the reifying mortality of mimetic representation. In this was a reaction of the new social opacity of urban industrial and capitalist society. Thus various withdrawals from the struggle to find forms adequate to modernity’s social and subjective experiences led to new idealism, symbolism and a borrowing from science notions of forces and planes, physical processes as well as borrowing from ideas of occult knowledge. The impact on artists of Einstein’s theory of relativity is evident on the one hand and, on the other, Annie Besant’s theosophist “Thought-forms” (1901). Abstraction is not so much a withdrawal from the phenomenal world, as a sense that its reality is not to be found in naturalist description. Of course, abstraction still a representation, however oblique, of the world that includes the mind and imagination of the artist. It is a translation of something sensed or known, believed or learnt, imagined and explored at levels of knowing that correspond in part with the changed perceptions of physical forces and other processes associated with the revolutions in optics, chemistry, neurology, psychology and above all mathematics and physics. Abstraction is not figuration in the classic sense that post‐Renaissance Western art understood the act of representation by means of its central tropes: the gesturing and expressive body and composition of space. The moment the Impressionist painters attempted to find a correspondence between momentary sensations and immediate sights by approximating their painterly gestures, touches, points of color on their canvases to their sense of pulsing sunlight, flickering shade, or ceaseless meteorological contingency, they pushed the bond between the world and a painted image of it to an extremity of coincidence. In doing so, however, they tipped painting, in their case, into a material autonomy no longer bound to the illusion of visual appearance. What holds the paintings thereafter together is not bound by the law of similitude, but by the internal coherence and relation of its parts be that forms or colors. Although Duchamp denounced the Impressionist artists and those that followed them for what he called “retinal” painting, for privileging optical vision over conceptual understanding of invisible structures, the very possibility of proposing such indeterminate relations between art and the world other than appearance opened the way to a more semiotically equivocal, materially, and formally defined rapport, in which the resulting image that appeared not to be an image of anything outside itself might still be defined as a kind of deep, non‐optical realism. This is not to track art back to essence. It is still beholden to some theory of the structure of the world. But whatever

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that structure is was becoming sociologically opaque and scientifically marvelous, challenging existing models of knowledge and understanding. No wonder physicists borrow from literature to name the particles of this new universe. Withdrawing completely from the former protocols of observation‐led representation, abstraction was, in fact, a relatively short‐lived period of self‐consciously autonomous form‐ and mark‐making, often inspired by a turn to the occult and the magical (that is, something that could be revealed to senses and perceptions other than rational cognition) and suggesting that art functioned as a parallel and distinctive mode of understanding answerable to the laws of its own creation. Because of its abstract moments, modernism has left us both valuable legacies and unharvested esthetic possibilities for thought as well as for art today. Abstraction was and is not a turning away from the world, but a drawing away from the immediate perceptual environment, to explore the join of form and sense, of sign and meaning, of materiality and affect, that holds in suspension the priorities of form and mark and the commitment to a depth of meaning drawn from an expanded conceptualization of the “world” – what Paul Klee (1879–1940) named the cosmos (Goldsmith 2016). Taking a worm to a drawing class made visible the worm’s own work as a form of energy in the world. By being chosen as a model, however, the worm also prompted Taylor Patten’s lifetime work as an artist drawing and thinking about line, time, and change. It also led to thinking about light, the very force from which the worm cringes. Line became Patten’s esthetic language; not as delineation, but as a movement and a ceaseless adventure to be followed into the depths, hollows, and surfaces of its own habitat – the always‐becoming‐drawing – where it revealed something so different from the blind worm’s dark world: light. Taylor Patten writes: I kept wanting to go swimming in those lines, into the crevices and pockets, into the vastness of the empty spaces. I loved seeing the light that got trapped and the idea that my little scratches seemed to me more a way of manipulating the light, blocking it out to see what was there hidden in the paper, covered up by all that light, all that white space. (Taylor Patten, personal communication to the author, April, 1995)

According to Avis Newman and Catherine de Zegher, a drawing is an act, a gesture, a mark made according to an instrument, a hand working on a support and through a medium (de Zegher & Newman 2003). Yet following the movement of the worm, these human gestures do not mark boundary, delineation, edge, definition, distinction, and separation. They are movement that itself, in its own and other worlds, may make space and time – the coordinates of our physical universe – momentarily, and esthetically, both visible and sensible. Like music, there is no verisimilitude in this attentive witnessing because there has to be an equally profound commitment to watching the autonomous liveliness of the poietic process itself, being with it, utterly, in its emergence, its process condensing the time of that becoming into a single drawing or a series of drawings that we encounter. As Taylor Patten writes: In the illusion of complexity, in the illusion of repetition of little movements, the universe is what it is, changing forms, changing illusions, changing metaphors, changing change; and by using such a simple tool, a tiny pen tip, a tiny bit of ink at a time, a tiny space on any size paper, I get to see more than when I try to look at it all at the same time … [W]hen a human being moves a hand, and leaves a trace of



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that movement, part of the universe is being exposed; the second generation movement, the ink on the paper, mimics all other movement in the universe, irregular, baffling, metaphysical, abstract as well as concrete movement. (Artist’s correspondence with the author 2002)

Taylor Patten’s formal process and its gestures set in motion a phenomenally limitless but directed process of other marks, all bonded in an unpredictable creative relativity that brings forth no fixed form but creates its effect of space, there on the paper or canvas. It also produces effects of time – time lived in the making, remembered in the psychically affected body and memory of the maker, who is working away from a remembered history and toward what is in fact the (re)discovery of memory, now in the new form that the making of the art work has created. Drawing is an event that we are invited to witness on paper or canvas, and imaginatively/projectively to enter. What is happening in the drawing is not, therefore, a drawing of something, but drawing as moments, moments in time and moments of becoming as drawing by means of its work with line as the Ur‐stroke of art making and not as the beginning of delineation. Neither a representation of the world nor an abstraction from it, the drawing is world. It is also, in its physical reality an engagement with living in the world. These worlds bridge an enlivened materiality with a political sociality. The artwork comes forth from the inhabited but also historically material world, and returns it to itself, differenced, through the astounding particularity of a singular art‐making that seamlessly joins consciousness and thought, materiality and creativity, sensation and affect, esthetics and embodiment. Differencing encountered through the simplest of graphic materials and processes – ink, paper, mark – signals an ethical engagement with the world and the effect of the inscription of a singularity – an artistic imagination like no other.

Encounter II: Eva Hesse (b.1936) and Surface I want now to move to a practice that approaches drawing through the reverse of what I have just explored, namely a drawing practice that dares to work with, or use drawing to produce opacity (as opposed to light) and delimited space (as opposed to movement). Born in Hamburg, Germany and forced into exile at the age of three as a result of Nazi persecution, Hesse grew up in New York and studied design at the Pratt Institute, art at Cooper Union and then specialized in painting and drawing at Yale in the late 1950s with Josef Albers. During her first traumatic trip back to Germany in 1964–1965, she began to work in three dimensions and was becoming known for her sculptural use of new, often toxic industrial materials in provocative forms when she died tragically young in 1970 aged 34. Having worked initially in ink and wash at the beginning of the 1960s, Hesse returned to drawing in several series in 1966, 1968, and 1969. Some of these focus on circular forms, while others are often referred to as her “window” motifs. In the first and still irreplaceable monograph on Hesse, published in 1976, American feminist art critic Lucy Lippard wrote: Some of the ‘windows’ are dark, opaque, offering little respite from the surface, the present, reality. Others are delicate and light‐filled, with pastel colors, grayed, but not muddied, floating the rectangular structure into another, fantasy, space, while the scratched and nervous borders insist on this, the ‘realer’ space… When she used

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a grid in the ‘window’ series, it too quivered with life, each square different from the next… sometimes the borders themselves seem like haloes of light; sometime the heavy rhythmic scratching at the surface betrays tension and inevitable content behind the images. (Lippard 1976, p. 58)

To challenge, however, this suggestion of a “window” motif, sometimes linked with psycho‐biographical references to the windows in the artist’s New York studio or even associating the motif with the death of her mother by suicide (mistakenly thought to have been related to a window), I want focus on one drawing, No Title (1969) (Figure 5.2) that belongs to a series of drawings involving multiplying inner frames. There are eight “frame” elements in this one drawing forming frames within frames within frames. Repetitiously, these rectilinear compartments compose the “image” on its vertical axis. These elements are produced by the opaque washes of gouache energetically applied with a brush over colorless washes through which pencil marks are visible in a kind decorative border motif while the wet gouache has been scored with the end of the brush. The resulting work is dense, complex, full of events and traces

Figure 5.2  Eva Hesse No title. (1969) Gouache, watercolor, silver ink, and graphite on laid paper, 22 1/8 × 15 in. (56.2 × 38.1 cm). Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz, Los Angeles. Source: © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser and Wirth.



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of the energy of its making. It is contradictory in the pull between its surface geometry and its implied depth of layers. In their conversation about the drawing collection of the Tate, London, curator Catherine de Zegher and artist Avis Newman (2003) concluded that a defining characteristic of drawing itself is the refusal of limits. Unlike painting (up to a certain moment in its history) drawing is not defined in relation to a real or imaginary frame, boundary or edge. Newman suggests that “traditionally the surface of painting is integrated, its space totalized through the demarcation of an edge…whereas in drawing the surface maintains its separate existence.” The question then is what holds a drawing, to which Newman replies, in ways that relate closely to Taylor Patten’s account of her work, “the rhythm of the marks…gives internal coherence to an image” (de Zegher & Newman 2003, pp. 169–170). Newman draws on Paul Klee to elaborate rhythm as what we hear, what we see and also what we feel in our muscles: “I experience myself in space, rhythmically” (de Zegher & Newman 2003, p. 171). Despite the rectangles evoking minimalist gridding as much as architectonic framing (such as a window), I would argue that, in the drawing I am discussing, Hesse refutes the classic condition of the window. Window is both an opening onto and a closing off of the world. It can also function as a luminous transparency defining the invisible borderspace between inside and outside. Avoiding both, Hesse’s drawing is much more about touch, mark, and above all materially‐induced opacity. The drawing enacts a negotiation of the core tensions so variously resolved by drawing artists during the 1960s when they questioned: what is the limit of the space of the artwork? Does it have any? Could the limitlessness of space, the world, otherness, with all its possibilities and its menace, be exposed by playing with the very sign of limitation – a frame? It would be surprising if Eva Hesse, who had studied Fine Art at Yale University in the later 1950s with painter Josef Albers (1888–1976), was not aware of the unresolved tension between the American painters’ attempted destruction of the frame – going beyond the frame, implying infinite expansion was one major reading of the legacy of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) with his performative gesturality and materiality – and the European discipline offered by the Bauhaus master, Albers, himself. Albers purposively staged the frame inside his paintings in order to float and reveal color in its subtle gradations, creatively positing colore against the rectilinear disegno. By contrast, Hesse appears to be repeatedly, purposively, quoting the Albers frame but for a very different purpose. Her evocation of grids painted in her colorless colore, namely gouache in its reduced tonal scale, serve not to oppose colore and disegno, but to make light visible on the paper her marks and washes completely cover. Some of her contemporaries, and at times Hesse herself, tried to float forms across an unbordered surface. Others famously denied the frame by taking it inside the work in the form we know as the grid. That, it appears, was not Hesse’s methodology, even while her drawings play with repetition, duplication, and multiplication notably with her use of circular forms. I suggest that the rectangle, singly or repeated, functions in this drawing as a multivalent, hence differencing device rather than a referential one. By its means, the artist could keep in suspension esthetically crafted evocation of real (and undesired) space with its boundaries of inside and outside, edge and limit – such oppositions would be difference in the Derridian sense, namely, making things distinct, rather than différance, recognizing that everything defers to something else, what is present depends for meaning on what is absent, and thus undermining difference as clear‐cut division; I shall discuss this fully later in this chapter – and the

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fact that the delimited space of the paper itself can become a virtual space – Lippard named it fantasy space – only through layering, repeated framing or leaving blank, through the act of making it what Lippard describes: floated color, incised marking, mixed media, scratching, scoring, washing, overlaying. All these are acts of drawing and act as differencing (différance) because we cannot see the slash (/) that divides or grounds. Both and neither insideness, outsideness, surface, ground, mark, support are at “play.” Hesse also participated in the other big question of her decade: the support. Digging oneself out of painting in the late 1950s as an artist meant dealing with a surface that had to negate its function as support: it had instead to create a field co‐existent with the marks it carried. If the artist had to escape the frame that bound painting (and drawing) to the delimited image, might the route be through insistence on surface, an effect that can only be paradoxically achieved by marking the surface as support in order to disappear it as such, to make surface and mark so entangled as to become one and both? Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) had borrowed effects from drawing practices such as watercolor when she devised her oil painting method of soaking and staining pigment into unprimed cotton duck to accomplish this bonding of field and support, image and place (Parker and Pollock, pp. 145–151). What of draw‐artists? In her drawing, Hesse is not blocking out the light the “window” might let in. I am arguing that her dark‐toned drawing paradoxically produces the light all over, even though rendering her surface opaquely material and gesturally marked. By leaving few areas untouched or “uncovered,” Hesse discovered or created the possibility of light as her key, an expressive, but oblique and guarded object and this forms my bridge back to Christine Taylor Patten whose work reveals that light by the opposite method: light is what is unseen on the paper until some of the paper is marked. Until the coming of some darkness that allows light to co‐ emerge, paper makes light invisible. In Hesse’s work, however, drawing almost ceases to be a graphic art. Here we are not confronted with the issue of the mark on the paper, or line as the sign of the artist’s initiating intervention. Nor are her works a kind of painterly extension of drawing. I want to link drawing to the other modes of Hesse’s work. The dominant interpretation of Hesse’s development into maturity traces a rapid evolution over the decade of the 1960s from early drawings, gouaches, and oil paintings, into the making of three‐dimensional objects via the intermediate stage of the colored reliefs. Countering this pro‐sculptural view of her evolution as an artist, I propose that we might find the center of Eva Hesse’s investigations emerging from and remaining in the domain of what we can call drawing (not drawings) even when working with sculptural materials: so often composed from and using materializations of line in the form of chords, strings, ropes that fall freely from a source or hang in space. When Hesse “resumes” and produces her two key cycles of drawings in 1966 and 1969, the method of her work in the early 1960s is different. In the early 1960s she created areas of darkness on the paper with her ink and wash. Where the ink/wash was not, the effect of the untouched paper was read as light breaking through darkness, opening up space as well. That almost Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro gave way in the later 1960s to a much more challenging set of protocols for drawing as the making of light when the entire surface is rendered opaque, material and marked. Thus, I suggest we rethink Hesse’s engagement with industrial materials such as resin and fiberglass (initially luminous and transparent when first used while gradually



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turning opaque with time). We can also reconsider the forms that often repeat the rectangularity I have suggested was so structural to her deconstructive work as an artist. Both use of luminous fluid material and the battle against the frame became creative elements of her later artistic thinking. This is how she made drawing the site of a complementary engagement between light and opacity rather than the conventional opposition of light versus darkness. In doing so opacity spread light over the entire drawing defeating the immanent danger of creating windows or frames.

Encounter III: Claudette Johnson (b.1959) with Adrian Piper (b.1948) The politics of light and dark lead to my third encounter where issues of visibility and inflicted darkness forge a relationship between the politics of racialization and resistance to racism and the materials and conceptual potentialities of the materials of the graphic art of drawing. What of color when it is both too visible a sign of power and violence and invisible as a locus of subjectivity? What of color when it is both an esthetic device and a political affiliation, an affirmation of meaning and historical subjectivity in the face of the use of color as a term of violence? As white artists, even if from different social or cultural backgrounds one of whom belonged to a genocidally persecuted minority, both Taylor Patten and Hesse would be placed by art writing simply in the sphere of abstract drawing, and their work discussed in terms of materiality, process, and elements from a vocabulary of exploration that produces effects such as time, space, light. The fact they work in black and white would typically not be a source of comment. In this third encounter where the non‐ color of all colors (in terms of the prismatic theory of physical light‐based color), black, is, however, charged politically in colonial, enslavement, post‐enslavement and postcolonial history with meanings at play in its esthetic deployment by artists of color, I shall explore the engagement with the world that underpins the work of both the British artist Claudette Johnson and the artist Adrian Piper, formerly known as African American (Piper 2003, 2012), in relation to a form of figuration for a lived and a political sense of a Black body caught in the webs of historical racialization and political‐creative resistance and transformation that demands figuration in the spaces of representation. Between 1983 and 1985 a series of exhibitions took place in London, England: Five Black Women Artists and Black Women, Time Now – both 1983 – and in 1985: The Thin Black Line, the latter at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The above shows were curated by the Turner prize winner (2017), the artist Lubaina Himid (b.1954, Zanzibar). The exhibitions aimed to make visible in the London art world, a group of British artists of African Caribbean and Asian backgrounds emerging in, and creating art to contest, the sexist and racist artworld that was being challenged by the energies and critiques created by the Black Art Movement (Chambers 2014), within which, however, women had to struggle for their own singularities, difference, and sexualities (Himid 2005). In 2011–2012 Lubaina Himid revisited this moment in an installation in the Tate Britain in London titled Thin Black Line(s). Here Lubaina Himid re‐curated an exhibition that questioned how far – or rather, how little – key British cultural institutions had acknowledged the multiple dimensions of difference in British art in relation to both gendered ethnicity and culturally‐historically specific

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experiences of gender and sexuality in dominant white heteronormative patriarchal culture. What was revealed was a rather dismal picture. Claudette Johnson was one of the artists exhibited in all these shows. Johnson works in pastel, acrylic, ink, and on a large scale. Her drawing might be classified superficially as “figurative” because the work addresses the issue of presence and the Black subject and/in her or his body (Figure 5.3). In the formal decisions about the placement of her figure on the paper, Claudette Johnson often presses the bodies she creates up against the limits or edges of her large sheets of paper. The effect is to challenge the edge as frame in a different manner from that discussed so far. The paper is white. Thus, the analytical question cannot refer simply to the formalities of light and dark alone. The bodies she represents are black women and men. The formal issues of frame, line, light and dark and the phenomenological dimensions of body (making and represented) and consciousness (making and suggested), are articulated in distinctive esthetic and cultural ways that “difference” (a performative verb) in yet another register to all I have said so far.

Figure 5.3  Claudette Johnson Untitled. (2015) Pastel on paper, 154 × 104 cm. Source: Courtesy of the Artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.



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In a statement for the catalogue of her exhibition at the Rochdale Art Gallery, England in 1990, Claudette Johnson stated: “I am a Blackwoman.” She thus uses a formulation that makes an already race‐ and gender‐infused language re‐articulate a political conjunction of art with aspects of subjectivities rendered invisible, in white culture, by the unmarked word “woman.” If the adjective black is simply added to the noun woman, a woman of color is by definition excluded from the term woman, the noun becoming, by default of a qualifying adjective, the normalizing term for a white person of the female sex. But, on its own, Blackness – identified by Frantz Fanon as a self‐recreating repudiation of “the racist epidermal schema,” the politics created by European racism that uses melanin as a criteria for domination and exploitation of an inhuman kind – falls into the default category of masculinity (Fanon [1952] 1967). The negations of both gender and race systems of power have to be actively negotiated. Thus, the affirmation that follows in the words of Claudette Johnson performs transformative work at the level of language as much as at the level of the space in visual representation her art seeks to invent. I am a Blackwoman and my work is concerned with making images of Blackwomen. Sounds simple enough—but I am not interested in portraiture or its tradition. I’m interested in giving space to Blackwomen presence…. It is almost ten years since I set my focus on affirming the existence of Blackwomen. But now, as then, I work with the tension of a society committed to distorting, controlling and mis‐defining Blackwomen. Yet I continue to find expression in images, of black pastel women, chaotic and austere, pushing against the boundaries of white paper. (Johnson 1990, p. 2)

The subtle but deliberate charge of the relay between the subject—whose presence the drawings will assert—and the language of “monochrome” drawing invest the whiteness of paper as a ground the blackness of the pastel. That blackness carries social and historical depth without allowing it to overwhelm the esthetic space as the place of a contestation of racism so indelibly ingrained in its own binary terms, black and white. Within the multifarious esthetic traditions of the African continent and the African diaspora, abstract form making and figuration occur equally and diversely from the most ancient of monuments, surfaces and objects to the contemporary modes of art making (Enwezor and Okeke‐Agulu 2009). Claudette Johnson studied fine art in Manchester and Wolverhampton in the late 1970s and early 1980s at a period when the teaching in British art schools pressed students toward modernist (American‐led) abstraction just beginning to be touched by the minimalism and conceptual art, the latter playing so vital a role in the emergence of feminist practices of key figures such as Adrian Piper (b. 1948) and Mary Kelly (b.1940). At the same time, feminist critique of the canonized white masculine (as well as the ambivalent support for and critique of non‐canonized black masculine) art of the twentieth century consistently pointed out the attachment of modernist artists to the body, typically a female body, and so often the body of a woman of color, treated to varying degrees of esthetic violence (Duncan 1973/1993). This is also what I have identified as the avant‐garde gambit of “reference, deference and difference,” a gambit in which the battle for artistic pre‐eminence between men was fought out on canvas over the figured and othered bodies of women – both actual models and imaginary monsters and fantasies (Pollock 1993). Far from disappearing along with the other traditions of the Academy,

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the female nude has been the consistent artistic ground for modernist masculine competition from Manet and Gauguin to Matisse, Picasso, Wesselmann, de Souza, and Freud to name but a few. I see in Claudette Johnson’s work a double strategy of creative resistance. Creating the visual space for Blackwomen’s embodiment, her work can be read as speaking back to the entire white Western art tradition in which she was schooled as a British artist c. 1980 because so little was taught about art outside it. She creates a reconfiguration of its unharvested possibilities informed by the modernist transformations of artistic consciousness about process, materiality, form, and support in order to inscribe and impress into contemporary art a presence. This required not just the marks made from the space of difference – being marked as a category of the other as woman and a woman of African‐Caribbean descent – but a figuration on the paper of absented and dehumanized presence in the form of an image of a self‐possessed and reflexive personhood that she named Blackwoman. This means that the seemingly abstract esthetic polarities of white/black, light/ dark which I have discussed in terms of the work of the white American artist Christine Taylor Patten and Jewish American artist Eva Hesse have themselves to be differenced, that is, to be de‐normalized in order to become a language countering the deep structures of what we must call out as “the colour of art history” (Pollock 1993). Art history or writing about art is not color neutral. Its own language and syntax is “coloured,” that is to say raced, precisely through the political and ideological deployment of terms that do not designate color, but its presence/absence hierarchy: black and white. White is the absorption of all colors on the spectrum and black the non‐absorption of color. It is under specific political‐economic systems of exploitation that the variation of melanin in human skin became a signifier and arbiter of humanness, life and death in racializing discourse and politics, working like gender difference in sexist terms, to suspend a right to life, to safety, and to humanity. I want now to introduce a series of drawings by conceptual artist Adrian Piper made in 1967 in Rapidograph pen, ink, and/or pencil on paper on notebook paper when the artist was 18 (Figure 5.4). Known by the collective title The Barbie Doll Drawings, but untitled when the artist created them, these drawings form a suite of 35 works, each 21.5 × 14 cm on notebook paper. Only acquired in 2016 by MoMA in New York following a show, Drawing Then: Innovation and Influence in American Drawing of the Sixties at the Dominique Lévy Gallery, the drawings form surreal exquisite‐corpse chimeras that I first read as evoking and formally reconfiguring elements from white American popular culture. Yet to focus only on such possible associations is to miss the work being done by and as drawing. Art historian David Platzker notes that the titling of the works was made by an assistant to the artist when the work was catalogued and that no direct reference was intended in the making to the Barbie Doll itself (Platzker 2016, p. 48). Yet being known now under this title invites some reflection on the idealizing vision of that toy‐image of a pink or bronzed, developed but impossibly thin Caucasian adult woman’s body, with blonde hair and a blue‐eyed smiling face that was paradoxically created by a Polish‐Jewish immigrant toy designer, Ruth Mosko Handler (1916–2002) when she developed the Barbie Doll in 1959 for Mattel (although the first dolls were manufactured both blonde and brunette) that was inspired by a German model of an exclusively blonde doll titled Bild Lilli., created in 1952. This “toy story” serves an important function. It does not supply a source but introduces an element of a cultural history



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Figure 5.4  Adrian Piper The Barbie Doll Drawings. (1967) Series of 35 drawings: Indian ink and Rapidograph and/or pencil on paper. Each 8.5 × 5.5 in. (21.5 × 14 cm). Detail: drawing # 7 of 35. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

of the iconic representation offered to little American girls and adolescents of a race typology of beauty, successfully commercialized during the 1950s. This was the decade in which the civil rights movement would take form and, at its end, an immigrant film director, Douglas Sirk would use a white doll in his film, Imitation of Life (Universal, 1959) to signify the Fanonian alienation of a black girl who seeks acceptance in the white entertainment industry through disavowing her Black mother and her own Blackness (Sirk 1959; hooks 1992). There are two elements in Piper’s suite of drawings on which I want to comment in the context of this discussion of drawing in black ink on white paper in relation to the urgency of naming and contesting racism. Platzker argues that critical overemphasis on the evident concerns with race, gender and xenophobia in Piper’s oeuvre have

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overshadowed attention to her equally deep engagement with “artistic strategies, graphic sensibility and root precepts of production” which are closely connected with her being “a first generation conceptual artist who came of age in the mid‐1960s” (Platzker 2016, p. 31). His analysis proposes that what appear as assemblages of doll parts with puppet heads and disassembled limbs morphing into balloons in the The Barbie Doll Drawings (1967) (Figure 5.4) equally claim our attention as “discrete, finely tuned compositional structures” that tip us toward later sculptural forms (Platzker 2016, p. 31). I want to try and hold together, as I have throughout this essay, two forces. On the one hand, there is the necessity for address to the fundamental work of formal processes, graphic materials, and creative gestures in generating the significance of both drawing and the drawings that embody these processes. On the other we can attend to the evocation, precisely by means of the conceptual premise of all art, of the social world, pierced by deformations we name, race, class, gender, which also form the bases of resistance. Race specifically impinges on the questions of drawing in ink or charcoal on white paper, because it appears to forego color even as, in political discourse, the term “color” is one of the languages of race based on white supremacy. Thus I am suggesting a reading of Piper’s drawings of created figurations of toy body elements in which the foreswearing of color as pigment, might make color in its political sense become visible. The figure, face, and feature of her drawn figures can only in effect be black, since the line that forges the image is India ink on white paper. Yet the doll forms do not read as such because we think “This is drawing and black and white is mere medium.” Is it possible to suggest furthermore, that this can prompt, without any intended relation existing for the artist in the making, the haunting shadow of fantasy of the all‐American white other created by the designer, Ruth Handler, a child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants? Existing in a culture with this iconic testimony of a politicized color schema, the conceptual drawings of Adrian Piper both pose the question of the iconography of racialized gender and suspend the fixing power of figuration in a serial project, frame by frame over 35 pages, that thereby asserts the conceptual generativity of drawing as thought and action. In a text of 1974, Piper recalls her artistic shift while a student from being committed to figurative art to becoming “interested in problems which had little to do with the content of particular work: problems which I later learned… to describe as e.g. illusionistic by non‐perspectival space, colors versus form, the displacement of environmental space” (Piper [1974] 1996, pp. 29–30; cited Platzker 2016, p. 31). As an alternative strategy of interruption of white light that blinds us to Black presences and as an active process of the making present the Black subject in her richness of form and color, Claudette Johnson uses pastel and not a more classic drawing material such as ink. (Pastel has its own rich, gendered and world art history as an art material I cannot go into here). This means that the drawings do not focus on the mark so much as on the effect of gesture in forming the image as a play of volumes through highlights and depth of color. In Untitled (2015, pastel on paper, 154 × 104 cm. London Private Collection) a figure is set off‐center to the right of the large sheet (Figure 5.3). Dressed in a sleeveless top created from a rich mottling of blues and greens, yellows and whites, a figure of a woman stands before us. The viewer encounters a presence on paper that is represented by the modeling of her head, face, and neck. Against the white ground of the paper, how can drawing model the Blackwoman’s unique features and the quality of her skin that radiates light? Color afforded by pastel



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becomes the means of this artist’s push‐pull that enables her to create luminosity that is not “whiteness” but is claimed as the quality of the beautiful skin of the Blackwoman, whose affirmed presence as a subject is furthermore created through endowing this image with her steady gaze. In another drawing, Untitled (2015, pastel on paper 91 × 66 cm), there is no color but that used to model the subject’s head and neck as they emerge from the sleeveless top. Here, there is no gaze to confront, but a gaze that conveys the inwardness of a subject for herself, withheld from the other in quietude and rest. The power of the figures as presences evoked in the worked play of pastel and paper results from scale in relation to the proportions of the page. The drawings need an edge, a limit, to enable the viewer to meet the form as presence that exceeds these tender lines and smudged pools of pastel. The presence is just suggested without being defined, delimited, captured within that, or any, frame. Yet the work is there to reclaim the body. As the late African‐Scottish artist Maud Sulter (1960–2008) has written: The body in art. Her body in art. My body in art. Our body. Our art. There is a complex politic surrounding the representation of black women in art… If my skin is the site of my struggle does its disrobement empower or alienate me? If my skin is the outer shell of the body I live within is its representation a burden or a liberation to me? If my skin is fickle in its desires, struggles, its embodiment of my identity, indeed identities should I further recognize its private domain and prioritize its bodyscape over the external terrain in which my body signifies my race, my gender, my class, by sexuality? It is not easy for a Blackwoman to ask these questions. (Sulter in Johnson, 1990, p. 10)

In this section, my language has become heavy as a white woman art historian seeks to record her impressions of these powerfully tender and subtly defiant drawings by Claudette Johnson within an exploration of line and light, gesture and mark, in a discourse on drawing inflected by feminist questions addressed to the color of art history. It becomes clogged because I am contending not only with racialized positionings in a racist society which have meant that, while I am attuned to the sexual difference of gendered subjectivities, I do not daily have to think about my skin as a mark of imposed – versus proudly claimed – identity. It is stilted also because of the racialized syntax that underpins our discourse on drawing as line and form in the face of the politics of color. Yet I am seeking to enable these terms to embrace the singularity, and uniqueness of each artist and their distinctive projects while creating a shared field where artists are artists, yet all artists are entangled with the politics of the social world whose formations of races, classes, genders menace us while race, class and gender are the creative and generative agents of difference as change, transformation and contestation by means of a pen and few drops of ink, some oily crayons or watery gouache and a piece of paper. Feminist studies of/with/through drawing involve various theoretical resources that extend the predominant formalist or materialist paradigms, which we all acknowledge are at the forefront of the mind of the artist when at work, in order to layer our understanding of the resulting art works with additional dimensions arising from the analysis of the formation of subjectivity at this interface of psychically infused bodies,

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emergent subjectivities and their gestures. This is how we might then ask if we can “read” artworks made by women in difference for inscriptions in, of and from the multiple and even at times agonistically disparate feminines. Feminist analysis does not merely re‐evaluate what is negatively stereotyped as feminine in art criticism. It is exploring the uncharted territories of what artists who are women are introducing into culture from the incredible diversity of their singular experiences in a racist‐sexist‐heteronormative‐able‐bodied world (Parker & Pollock, 1981/2013). Difference is very complex and entangled. We know this because in the case of artists who are men we acknowledge their singularities. This is what we call art. Each one is distinctive and valued for their individual addition to art. So too must artists who are women be valued for singularity. At the same time, however, in whatever diverse ways, the question of sex‐race‐gender‐sexual desire has its own richness that remains to be explored, acknowledged, learned from. Far from imposing a new set of regulatory norms, feminist studies challenge the existing ones for their indifference to difference, and in the name of respect for the singularity of each artist. At the same time, feminism is posing the question of difference and differencing back to society and art (Parker & Pollock, 1987).

Encounter V Differencing: Some Theoretical Reflections I started with line in order to deconstruct its role in the gendered and hierarchical Western myth of the origin of art in a line. The story is told by the Roman writer Pliny of a Greek potter, Butades, whose unnamed daughter draws on a wall the outline of the shadow cast by her departing lover in order to remember him. Her line is then transformed by her potter‐father who casts it as a shape in clay to make a sculptured form. Her hand‐drawn line – reduced to being a mere initiating record – becomes the first form in art only through the work of paternal hands. The story commemorates in effect only his imaginative transformation—into a self‐contained esthetic object— her feeling of loss and longing for contact with the real. By refusing this narrative that excludes the feminine subject from art, even while her gesture initiates its possibility, I want to think about drawing and world‐making inflected by feminist difference(s). Instead of imagining an origin for drawing as a preliminary gesture anticipating the proper arts of sculptural form and later painting, figured by Pliny’s legend, I am proposing drawing as a moment of origin that is, therefore, both the moment of difference and what I claim for feminism as differencing (Pollock 1999). My neologism differencing borrows from French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s work on language (Derrida 1982). Working on language and more specifically on writing as opposed to speech (rejecting the mere idea that writing is the inscription of the more originary speech so as to stress that meaning is produced in signifiers) Derrida demonstrated that meaning is secured by the illusion that there are positive differences (indicated by a slash between terms such as nature/culture, man/woman) while in fact the very structure of language as a system of signifiers destabilizes any such certainty. Derrida used a French word différance (because, in French, the difference between différence and différance cannot be heard when spoken; it can only be perceived through its graphic, written signs) to explain how any meaning is linguistically produced by the endless oscillation between two senses that coincide in the words différence/difference. These are differing – seeming to separate, divide and



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thus reflect difference – and deferring – linking the two terms in co‐dependence which makes each term endlessly refer/defer to its other. Thus, while pairs such as man/ woman appears to signify a given difference, in Derridian terms, the meaning of man arises only in its deferral to, hence dependence for meaning upon, what it is not. Meaning defers between the two rather than being fixed in either one. Moreover, the secondary term, woman, cannot then be a meaning in itself. It functions as a negative signifier, signifying not‐man, without its own positive significance (Derrida 1982; Pollock 1999). The concept I have created for art analysis, differencing, allows us to see this active play that deconstructs fixed oppositions in search of new possibilities, even suggesting that “the feminine,” in its role as the negated but structurally necessary other of the dominant “masculine,” is the very site of a resistance to domination itself, and to the fixing of hierarchies of meaning. Similar forms of deconstruction disturb racist and sexually normative hierarchies. The “feminine,” or the “other” in any of such hierarchical pairs, becomes a creative force not for difference but as a potentiality for the new or other, identified with a kind of negativity that becomes creativity (Kristeva [1974] 1984). In the introduction to her exhibition, Inside the Visible: an elliptical traverse of twentieth century art in, of and from the feminine (1996), Catherine de Zegher declared, however: “Difference is far more entangled and complex than we like to admit” (1996, p. 20). While differencing is a major theoretical approach, in application, it has to confront the entanglement of social, cultural, political, and psychological complexities of any one person/artist. This exhibition presented the work of 37 artists, all women but all different, coming from Europe, Asia, Latin and North America, diverse in their sexualities, experience of forced migration and exile, histories of enslavement or privilege, geopolitical positions. Her scheme for understanding the historical ground of these artists redrew the chronological map of the twentieth century by identifying three time‐zones: the 1920s–1930s, 1960s–1970s, and 1990s, each significant in the history of women as it was shaped by the major political events twentieth century – the rise and spread of fascism, world and civil wars, racist genocide, forced migration, revolution, globalization, decolonization, mass civil rights and women’s movements. At the same time, de Zegher discerned consistencies or recurrences in artistic concerns or even procedures that played across these temporal divisions to form four fields of issues that traversed the twentieth century to recur in the work of women at different times and in different situations. The four areas were: Parts of/for (bodies fragmented, fetishized, and explored), The Blank in the Page, Weaving of Water and Words, Enjambment: La donna e mobile (referring to the breaking of syntax). These engaged with the play of line, transgression, and the interface of word, image and paper and the breaking and creating of new forms (de Zegher 1996). The artists worked with marginalized materials and processes that might all be considered “drawing” in the expanded sense of both resistance to the current hierarchies of art and in alliance with transgressive play of the avant‐garde. The art de Zegher selected was both critically historical and exemplary in its double work of destruction and transformation. As a manifestation of culture, art both reflects changing sociopolitical and economic circumstances and expresses a singular thought; yet it is not reducible to either. Despite the recurrence of similar crises throughout the twentieth century, such as the periodic rise of state repression, nationalism, and xenophobia, different times

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demand different resolutions. None the less at times of crisis, there seems to be an urge to deconstruct existing representational codes and search for ‘new beginnings’ in order to imagine the world anew. (de Zegher 1996, p. 20)

Drawing on my own phrasing from an essay in her catalogue, de Zegher defined “the feminine” as a complex of positionality and transgressive energy that invigorates change in response to crises that might also be understood as crises of difference given that feminist, anti‐ and post‐colonial and anti‐racist struggles emerged across the twentieth century to insist on complex specificity of gender and sexual difference in addition to the existing awareness of the structural inequities and violence of class and racism (Pollock 1996a). In the reception of such “new beginnings,” however, a difference of power unevenly distributes visibility and invisibility so that some realities and their new forms have been repressed, effaced, unremembered by the art histories conserved in museums, shown in galleries and taught in art schools and universities, impoverishing us all by this selective cultural memory. At any time there exists different perceptions of the same reality, or material expressions of coexisting or conflicting realities. That which does not seem to fit has too often been dismissed, delayed, or rendered invisible by the privileged terms of hegemonic elites whose existence is nevertheless predicated on this eclipse of difference. (de Zegher 1996, p. 21)

Neither a women’s show, nor a show of women’s art, this exhibition was a differencing demonstration of multiple differences between artists of many countries, conditions, practices who, nonetheless, shared the common condition of engaging creatively with the marginal “in, of and from the feminine” in times of historical and personal crisis (Pollock 1996b). Marginality might have been imposed by dominant hierarchies of value of materials, processes, themes, techniques, or supports such as the Chilean exile Cecelia Vicuña whose work with thread and with knotting was drawn from traditions of the peoples of Andes, or Carrie Mae Weems using leather dyed in several colors to evoke the politics of skin in histories of race and resistance, or German Jewish and Venezuelan artist Gego “weaving” in space with knotted steel rods. Marginality also might have been politically enforced through exile or through hierarchies of gender and race at home. De Zegher used her assembly of artists to make us see each work and each practice not as the badge of the artist’s difference from…the white masculine, Euro‐American norm, but as the creative negotiation of difference as radical beginning in the face of multiple crises on both socio‐political and psycho‐personal dimensions of individual existence grounded in the traumatic histories of the twentieth century. Not all the artists in that exhibition were concerned with drawing if understood in terms of its traditional materials or processes. The show, however, presented drawing as a position, a posture, an artistic disposition, on the side of the “ambiguous, the permuting, the composite, the flexible, the ephemeral” (de Zegher). Through an expanded feminist understanding of drawing we can thus embrace dimensions in twentieth century and contemporary art that exceed the museal classifications by medium, date, period, style, and master, and resist the hierarchies that place painting and sculpture in more valued or more monumental positions than works on paper and beyond any kind of support or form while being created outside the limiting specification of any one



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medium or practice. De Zegher assembled works that were deeply engaged with the key questions typically understood to define the modernist project. Yet they were concerned with elements of modern experience that are repressed by those who selectively police what works of art are chosen to represent, in art historical narratives and museum collections and displays, that modernist project. This leads to a distortion of historical knowledge of our shared but diverse modernities and their varied esthetic inscriptions (Pollock 2013). Dominant accounts of modern art have also made feminist questions seem alien to, rather than profoundly aligned with, the modernist esthetic project itself. Just as women of color struggle to make the artworld recognize their work as integral to multi‐gendered, multi‐sited world art, so too do white and black feminist inflections need to be integrated into discussions of the art of our modern and contemporary condition. Neither are sub‐categories of an indifferent norm. The condition of social being and of our esthetic creations is difference, but neither as division or categorical distinction nor as mere creative diversity. Différance is a creative principle of transformation and creative exploration because it is working always toward the not yet known, the virtuality of transformation. We thus grasp difference – be that of gender, sex, ethnicity, class, geo‐political position, ability, or socio‐historical experience  –  as irreducible to any one of the single categories I have just listed, it being always entangled and complex as we live it. If we acknowledge, on the other hand, that, as division, difference can become an axis of power expressed as the power to select or efface, research into the relations of art and difference becomes very challenging. Thus de Zegher asks “if it is possible to think difference without naming it…Is it possible to deracialize and degender difference and think of it in positive not reifying terms?” (de Zegher 1996, p. 21). Difference then becomes a principle of creativity that already works through the singularity of each gesture and voice, each practice and project, knowing that singularity is not to be confused with the ideology of individualism. In political theorist Hannah Arendt’s terms, singularity stands for who we are as opposed to what we are, the what referring to categories such as race, class, gender, or sexuality that we might share with others. Our singularity  –  always infused with and reconfiguring many different aspects of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, geo‐political situation and so forth – arises from a unique voice when it is heard amongst the plurality that, according to Arendt, forms the specificity of the human condition. Plurality (again not the same as diversity) arises, according to Arendt, because each new human being is a new beginning to an unpredictable life for all of humanity. Plurality is the realization of the possibilities created by our human capacities for the renovation of our condition through speech and action by which we create the new and the unexpected (Arendt 1958). Feminism can then be understood, in the realm of art making and its reception, as a form of speech and action, challenging the use of containing categories of what‐ness that exclude on the grounds of race, class, gender, sexuality and geopolitical place and inviting us to think outside the given forms of existing art histories and writing. Finally, let me underline the challenge through a return to the debates about drawing. In the press release for a landmark exhibition in 1976, Drawing Now 1955– 1975 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (21 January–7 March, 1976), MoMA Curator of Drawing, Bernice Rose mounted the argument that it was time to re‐evaluate drawing and to recognize its changing status as a result of recent developments in Western art over the mid‐later twentieth century. Stating that: “Given the radical history of modernist art, drawing has until recently been regarded as a

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conservative medium, resistant to ideas of innovation or extension,” Rose claimed drawing had remained effectively within the parameters set for the practice in the seventeenth century. She noted, however, that, within the two decades since the mid‐ 1950s, a radical “re‐evaluation of the medium, its discipline and its uses” had occurred in the work of a range of artists who were repositioning what had been a “minor support medium, an adjunct to painting and sculpture” as an independent and expressive artistic space (Rose 1976, p. 1). Yet out of the 46 artists exhibited in Rose’s show only 5 were women: Hanne Darboven (1941–2009; the only one named in the press release), Eva Hesse (1936–1970), Agnes Martin (1912–2004), Bridget Riley (b. 1931), and Dorothea Rockburne (b. 1932). None were women of color and all were North American or British. An exhibition curated by Kate Ganz for gallerist Dominique Lévy at her New York Gallery in 2016, DRAWING THEN, commemorated and revisited Rose’s 1976 show. In this show, 11 out of the 40 artists were women (still only 25%). This show included Hesse, Martin, and Rockburne, but had added Lee Lozano (1930–1999), Agnes Denes (b. 1931), Michelle Stuart (b. 1933), Anne Truitt (1921–2004), Vija Celmins (b. 1938), Lee Bontecou (b. 1931), Jo Baer (b. 1929), and Adrian Piper (b. 1948). Thus, there was only one woman of color, and none came from outside the Euro‐North American sphere, and only Adrian Piper, might be said to belong to the generation of women who created the distinctively critical, feminist‐inflected‐Black consciousness‐informed interventions in art that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not my purpose, however, to make statistics the issue. Any exploration of feminist and anti‐racist issues in the contemporary field of drawing has nevertheless firstly to address the history of egregious erasure through such institutionally inflicted oblivion. In their book, Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing, also published in 2016, Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon review the statistics of not only Drawing Now (MoMA, Rose 1976), but also of Laura Hoptman’s subsequent Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (MoMA, Hoptman 2002) through to the major survey, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (Butler and de Zegher 2010 –11) curated at Museum of Modern Art, New York already mentioned. Meskimmon and Sawdon note the increase of representation by women from 11% in 1976 to 40% in 2010–2011. More importantly, they note that the artists included in 1976 right through to those in de Zegher and Butler’s blockbuster on drawing in New York had all become important figures in feminist studies of art history and in feminist art theory (Meskimmon and Sawdon 2016, pp. 4–5). Many more of those included in the more recent shows are formally associated with, but never defined by, engagements with feminist questions posed to art. I use this rather heavy‐handed formulation to make sure that the epithet “feminist” is not applied to artist or artwork as if it contained either a stylistic or an iconographic meaning. Like Meskimmon and Sawden, I argue that the issue is neither quantitative  –  how many women are involved – nor qualitative – “is their work feminist in content?” The challenge is to understand what thinking with expanded (international, post‐ colonial, queer, anti‐racist) feminist questions in mind brings to the analysis of drawing, and from drawing to art itself. In 1977 the artist Mary Kelly named this thinking as “the feminist problematic” (Kelly [1977] 1987). The concept of a feminist problematic focuses our attention on practices. Each practice produces contingent, if always ideological and political, effects as artistic interventions into the specific context of the moment and the institutional site (Kelly [1977] 1987). This



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problematic avoids the issue of the gender of the artist, because that focus alone would simplify gender as the designation of the sexed identity of the creator rather than as a nexus of social relations of power in which gender is a determining axis. A feminist problematic addresses racist, class-structured and patriarchal structures in the institutions and practices of the art world (museums, curators, art historians, art educators, artists, dealers, collectors, art history, and critical discourse), and, focusing on situational politics, reads each practice for the effects of deconstruction and transformation it may produce. Feminist thus qualifies a produced effect not an identitarian or iconographical source. I am arguing that feminist questioning of, and through, creative practice such as drawing seeks to hold in tension plurality (more than the norm) and singularity (outside the stereotypes) as it takes shape in artistic practices. What I have explained as the feminist problematic avoids labeling and categorizing so that we can pose this question: how does the specificity of each artist – which includes a range of aspects of lived experience and social situatedness, as much as esthetic choices and favored procedures – impress itself upon the formal processes of the art each artist makes in ways that are both significant for its analysis and important for us to recognize as part of learning the world through what each artwork reveals to us? The four examples of drawing practices I have encountered (Taylor Patten, Hesse, Johnson, and Piper) have been framed by a theoretical discussion of differencing. This bring me back to the starting point of Christine Taylor Patten’s micro/macro. Her work makes clear how there is something of the world (in both cosmic and socio‐ political terms) in the smallest detail of a form, a line, space or gestural movement, abstractly evoked in a 1‐in/2.5 cm. square drawing made by ink on paper, while we equally come to see the world of others and of their political realities in the complexity of the monumentally abstract planes and fields of the macro. In one sense, I am advancing the argument made by artist and drawing theorist Deanne Petherbridge in her book, The Primacy of Drawing (Petherbridge 2010) and by artist Avis Newman in her conversations with Catherine de Zegher on gesture, act and stage in the Tate’s drawing collection (Newman in de Zegher and Newman, 2003). Both assert that drawing is a form for the materialization of thought and that drawing can be the initiating formulation from which thought may arise through what the artwork prompts by means of its material and visible effects. It is thus that drawingness becomes a site of creative thinking and transformative knowing. If these claims are valid, the challenge lies in our skills in reading the acts, gestures, marks, spaces, and surfaces of drawing as the signifiers of the esthetic work of differencing. I am naming this process feminist precisely because the term feminist refers beyond the known world, challenging fixed categories both of social identities or typologies of people and of typologies of artistic practice and formalist protocols of analysis. It functions in discussion of esthetic processes and experiences as an invocation of virtuality: becoming and discovering.

References Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Broude, N. and Garrard, M. (1996). The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s: History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Butler, C. and de Zegher, C. (2010). On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

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Chambers, E. (2014). Black Artists in British Art: A History from 1950 to the Present. London: I.B. Tauris. Derrida, J. (1982). Différance. In: Margins of Philosophy (trans. A. Bass), 3–27. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. Duncan, C. (1973/1993). ‘Virility and Male Domination in Early Twentieth Century Vanguard Art’, Art Forum (December) 3039; Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Power. New York. Cambridge University Press. 81–108. Enwezor, O. and Okeke‐Agulu, C. (2009). Contemporary African Art Since 1980. Richmond, VA: Damiani. Fanon, F. ([1952] 1967). Peau Noir, Masques Blancs. Paris: Editions de Seuil translated as Black Skin White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London. Grove Press. Goldsmith, M.T. (2016). Paul Klee’s unbound creativity. In: The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. CXIX (eds. A.T. Tymieniecka and P. Trutty‐Goodhill), 93–102. Zurich: Springer International Publishing. Himid, L. (2005). Inside the invisible: for/getting strategy. In: Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (eds. I. Baucom, S. Boyce, L. Wainwright and D.A. Bailey), 41–48. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. hooks, b. (1992). The oppositional gaze. In: Black Looks: Race and Representation, 115– 332. London: Turnaround. Hoptman, L. (2002). Drawing Now: 8 Propositions. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Johnson, C. (1990). Claudette Johnson. With essays by Lubaina Himid, Frederica Brooks and Maud Sulter. Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press. Kelly, M. [1977] 1987. ‘Art and sexual politics’. Reprinted in. In: Framing Feminism; Art and the Women’s Movement (eds. R. Parker and G. Pollock), 303–310. London: Pandora Books. Kristeva, J. [1974] 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language (trans. L.S. Roudiez). New York: Columbia University Press. Lévy, D. (2016). Drawing Then: Innovation and Influence in American Drawings of the Sixties. Texts by Mei‐mei Berssenbrugge, Roni Feinstein, Suzanne Hudson, Anna Lovatt, Griselda Pollock, Richard Shiff, Robert Storr. New York: Dominque Lévy. Lippard, L. (1976). Eva Hesse. New York: Da Capo Press Inc. Meskimmon, M. and Sawdon, P. (2016). Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing. London: I.B.Tauris. Parker, R. and Pollock, G. (1987). Framing Feminism; Art and the Women’s Movement. London: Pandora Books. Parker, R. and Pollock, G. [1981] 2013. Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology. London: Routledge; (new edition London: I B Tauris, 2013). Petherbridge, D. (2010). The Primacy of Drawing; Histories and Theories of Practice. London and New Haven: Yale University Press. Piper, A. [1974] 1996. ‘Talking to myself: the autobiography of an art object’. In: Out of Order, Out of Sight: Vol. 1 Selected Writings in Meta‐At 1968–1992 (ed. A. Piper). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piper, A. (2003). Dear Editor. http://www.adrianpiper.com/dear_editor.shtml. Piper, A. (2012). News, September 2012. http://www.adrianpiper.com/news_sep_2012. shtml Platzker, D. (2016). ‘Adrian Piper: unities’. In: Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions (eds. C. Cherix, C. Butler and D. Platzker), 31–49. New York: Museum of Modern Art.



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Pollock, G. (1993). Avant‐Garde Gambits; Gender and the Colour of Art History. London: Thames and Hudson. Pollock, Griselda. (1996a). http://www.bridgemanimages.com/fr/asset/742528//an‐ introduction‐to‐inside‐the‐visible‐by‐griselda‐pollock Pollock, G. (1996b). ‘Inscriptions in the feminine’. In: Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century in, of, From the Feminine (ed. C.M. de Zegher), 67–88. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Pollock, G. (1999). Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge. Pollock, G. (2007). Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. London and New York: Routledge. Pollock, G. (2013). After‐Affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pollock, G. (2015). Christine Taylor Patten Micro/Macro 1001 Drawings (at the 14th Istanbul Biennial). Leeds: Wild Pansy Press. Rockburne, D. (2014) Drawing Which Makes Itself: MoMA Interview 2014 https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN2DJxMLFOw. Accessed last 12 August 2017. Rose, B. (1976). Drawing Now 1955–1975. New York: Museum of Modern Art https:// w w w. m o m a . o r g / d / c / p r e s s _ r e l e a s e s / W 1 s i Z i I s I j M y N j k 3 N C J d X Q . pdf?sha=50062a4dcae054de. Sirk, D. (1959). Imitation of Life (Universal). Valéry, P. (1937). Degas, Danse, Dessin. Paris: Editions Vollard. de Zegher, C.M. (1996). Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the feminine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. de Zegher, C. and Newman, A. (2003). The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act. London: Tate Gallery and New York, Drawing Centre.

6

A Dirty Double Mirror Drawing, Autobiography and Feminism1 Rebecca Fortnum

Paul De Man’s essay “Autobiography as Defacement,” establishes autobiography as a somewhat illegitimate literary genre. He describes its distance from established forms and traditions as an art that is “slightly disreputable and self‐indulgent” (de Man 1979, p. 919). Positioned thus outside, or at least on the edge of the canon, embedded in the personal and experiential, its usefulness for feminism becomes apparent. The recent enthusiasm for women’s autofiction (Kraus, Nelson, Cusk, and others) has a vast lineage through ground breaking autobiographical writing by women (Didion, Plath, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Alice James, et al.) that, importantly, not only articulates women’s lives but also their critical reflections. Drawing’s reputation on the other hand is a little less seedy, but until relatively recently it has been viewed as the lesser medium within the fine arts, often in the service of painting or sculpture.2 Its immediacy and ubiquity, its physical closeness to its author, also removes it from the mainstream and into an alignment with the personal and the everyday. My aim for this chapter is to explore how certain drawing can function as a narrative of self that both articulates and exceeds the individual, aiding the feminist project by granting women not only interiority but also agency. My suggestion is that drawing can be particularly useful, not only in articulating women’s subjectivity but also because it is able to bring into play a highly productive ambivalence within autobiographical accounts that can shape and contribute to feminist thought.3 Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon, surveying the “relative preponderance” of women engaged with drawing as both makers and curators since the 1960s, assert; “women’s location within the field of drawing has neither gone without notice, nor has it had any sustained discussion” (Meskimmon and Sawdon 2016, pp. 5–6). The significance of drawing as an emerging field within feminist art is only just becoming evident.

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Autobiography and Drawing Before I discuss a more evolved understanding of visual autobiography, I would briefly like to consider some of the more prominent examples of women’s self‐narration within drawing. The immediacy of drawing’s process, at least in its traditional sense, coupled with the modest nature of its means, often positions it as a natural partner of the confessional. For example, Tracey Emin and Bobby Baker’s self‐depictions appear to utilize the directness of drawing to confide intimate episodes of their lives. In Baker’s “diary drawings” we view a process which is, as Marina Warner says, “the result not of long deliberations but spontaneous response to [the] moment” (Warner in Baker 2010, p. 3) but which are simultaneously skillfully constructed images, and, for all their childlike qualities, are remarkably visually eloquent. Whilst Warner’s assessment positions them as “unmediated,” unfolding chronologically, a story in the making – these works were produced during a long period of severe mental illness and subsequent recovery – their craft, both the visual conception and material execution, evidences an artist in command of her powers. Not only does Baker use the work as a way of taking control of her life but she is also able to communicate her experience to an audience.4 Like the earlier extraordinary model of Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theater?5 from 1940–1942, drawing for Baker not only records the life lived, it intercedes into that life, facilitating some kind of breathing space, pause, or alternative path, if not full‐blown therapeutic reflection. This chimes with Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon’s notion of “autography” which differs from autobiography in that, “there is no preformed self‐writing/drawing [of] their life, only a self‐becoming in and through drawing/writing” (Meskimmon and Sawdon 2016, p. 78). However, for de Man autobiography is also and equally unstable. Rather than straightforwardly telling the author’s life, like all art it requires interpretation and this emerges through attention to its form, “whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self‐portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of the medium” (de Man 1979, p. 920). Crucially, he describes the particular form of reading that autobiography engenders: Autobiography is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution. (de Man 1979, p. 921)

He suggests that it is in fact this swapping of author and reader identities that is the most interesting aspect of self‐storytelling, not because “it reveals reliable self‐ knowledge…but [because] it demonstrates, in a striking way, the impossibility of closure and of totalisation” (de Man 1979, p. 929). The openness of self‐narration, that holds true for both visual and textual forms, manifests as ambivalence; both anticipating and rejecting a spectator, simultaneously addressing an audience and glorying in solipsism. The mutuality of this experience is interesting because it allows the author to explicitly anticipate the reader and temper the tale accordingly before the reader reads the author through the lens of their own interiority.6 Louise Bourgeois’ AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SERIES (1994) of drypoint drawings is fascinating precisely because it concerns the delineation of the artist’s very particular personal history through references to recognizable psychic states. For her there is a direct relation

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between visual stories of self and the psychoanalytic encounter. Juliet Mitchell discusses how this series makes explicit Bourgeois’ suggestion of, An equation between the two practices: what the psychoanalyst and clinical patient try to understand, Bourgeois makes. Because of this equation, Bourgeois, embedded as she was within psychoanalysis, did not want us to interpret her work as one expertise addressing another. Instead we should see that there is an “elective affinity” between the process of psychoanalysis and the work of art. (Mitchell 2016, p. 16, Mitchell’s italics)

This sense of drawing and autobiography as a becoming, as a visualization and articulation that happens both at the point of production and consumption, is a crucial quality of the declaredly auto(bio)graphical work I wish to discuss. However, it should also be remembered that Baker, Bourgeois, and others are professional artists, whose work is made to be seen, even if initially, like Baker’s, it was meant for a more private purpose. The immediacy of their work belies its skillful construction which, whilst appearing beguilingly direct, in fact demonstrates a considerable command of its means. This is particularly important to remember when exploring women’s work dealing with the autobiographical and experiential which is quite often discussed as if it arrives from the subconscious complete, without any form of authorial deliberation.

Portraits and Self‐Portraits De Man makes an analogy between autobiography and self‐portraiture that, as art historian Anne Wagner has pointed out, is useful to explore further in relation to women artists. The dynamics of both the portrait and self‐portrait entail the autobiographical of de Man’s terms, that is a “mutually reflexive substitution” between artist and audience. As has been well documented, traditionally portraiture has been designated of “lesser” status than other genres (for example, history painting or allegory) and, as such, has been more open to women artists, albeit under certain conditions. Angela Rosenthal’s essay on eighteenth‐century female portrait painters points out that although the “ideal women could not direct a prolonged, searching look at a man without impropriety” paradoxically portraiture was seen as a particularly feminine skill (Rosenthal 1997, p. 147). She quotes August von Kotzebue in 1805 praising Angelica Kauffman: The female artist entirely lacks the power for heroic subjects…in portraiture she possesses her greatest strength since [females] have received from nature a fine instinct to read physiognomy and to convey and to interpret the mobile gestural language of men (Rosenthal 1997, p. 148)

This view attributes highly developed powers of discrimination to women as “readers” of people and it is interesting to speculate how much of this reliance on women as decoders of the social or “gestural language” still persists in contemporary cultural production. Rosenthal’s discussion of eighteenth‐century painters makes a case that the portrait artist’s particular relation with his subject is, to use Peter Bollas’

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Figure 6.1  Louise Bourgeois (1994) Sculptress. Drypoint on paper, 33.2 × 20.7 cm. Part of the Autobiographical Series. Source: © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2018.

words, “a construction of his own selfhood, through the resistance to, and articulation of, his desires” (Rosenthal 1997, p. 151) and thus initiates the exchange between artists with the subject of their depiction, in what she describes as an “intersubjective” relation that spirals around “ocular power.” Within graphic portraiture, the reciprocity of look between the artist who originates the depiction, the subject depicted and the viewer for whom the work is made, constitutes much of the dynamic of the work, as John Berger has pointed out (Berger 1972). Portraiture thus spells out the power relations of looking within the graphic arts, explicitly suggesting that the artwork becomes allied to a human subject. In self‐portraiture, the roles of artist, subject, and viewer become further entangled in a complex form of self‐narration. Looking at Rembrandt’s late self‐portrait in Kenwood House, London recently, the person with me, an art student who was new

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to the painting, turned to me and asked, “was Rembrandt a nice person?” His remark, though utterly unanswerable, was a telling response to the image of a man surveying himself in the act of depicting but also us, the beholders, thus truly conflating viewer and artist (or reader and author). Rembrandt’s expression, a peculiarly steady gaze emerging from a manner that is simultaneously kindly and steely, acts as an enquiry into the human condition. TJ Clark analyses his late self‐portraits thus: A face, [Rembrandt] will demonstrate, is a machine for exteriorizing – exchanging, universalizing – subjectivity. This is what the arrangement of the nose, eyes, cheeks, mouth and chin…was evolved to do; to make the ‘features’ into signs; to have eye and mind focus only on those vectors of another’s facial appearance that matter semantically. The face is the form of a brain in the world. … A face that encounters itself as an object, be it exhausted or immaculate, is always an ego luxuriating – fully and wonderfully entrenched – in its being‐in‐the‐world. (TJ Clark 2014, p. 17)

In this image the painter’s self is “othered” as the face becomes object. The viewer’s sense of the person that is Rembrandt chimes with the notion of the “ego luxuriating” because, as Clark points out, the portrait “exteriorizes and exchanges subjectivity” between artist and viewer. Going further, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “face,” as “something [that] reaches the level of exposition and tries to grasp its own being exposed” can be applied quite literally, as well as more broadly, here (Agamben 2000, p. 91). His notion of the “face’s revelation” as the revelations of “language itself,” as “only opening, only communicability” (Agamben 2000, p. 92) places the space of criticality, agency or “politics” in the encounter with face. One might then look at the Rembrandt self‐portrait and see in it his description of the worn but “uninjured face” that is, “capable of taking the abyss of its own communicability upon itself and of expanding it without fear or complacency” (Agamben 2000, p. 95). Thus, the artist might be seen as living profoundly in this space of communicability – demonstrated by this exchanged subjectivity – a place that is only ever and always in process. Rather than a mode of introspection then, the self‐portrait might signal the active going forth with, and beyond, one’s own “properties or faculties” that Agamben urges. However, I believe that Clark’s assured “always” requires some temperance. I would like to suggest that this exchange between maker and viewer becomes compromised, or at the least takes a different turn, when the artist is female. Angela Rosenthal’s description of the need for female portrait painters such as Vigée Le Brun or Kauffman to “bring [their] gaze into harmony with contemporary ideals” (Rosenthal 1997, p. 152) brings an additional quality into play, one that might be termed ambivalence toward the demonstration of self as a fully owned and acknowledged “other,” and one that indicates the complications of women’s self‐representation. Thinking about the more than one hundred powerful graphic self‐portraits of Käthe Kollwitz for example, the word “luxuriating” may not come to mind. Self‐portraits by women are rarely straightforward, rather they are almost always overlaid with additional iconographic references, infiltrating the encounter between image and viewer.7 One might also hazard that a certain lack of confidence in the male spectator’s ability to “exchange” with female “subjectivity” is likely to betray itself in the image.8 Nevertheless, I’d like to return to this notion of a self‐conscious “being in the world” that emerges from an artist imaging themselves and explore it further in the

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drawings of three British and American contemporary artists, Frances Stark, Nicola Tyson, and Emma Talbot, all of whom could be described as employing self‐portraiture and autobiography in both explicit and less direct forms. Stark’s practice (which includes work across a wide range of media but, in some senses that I will return to, is predicated on drawing) often includes images of herself in large scale drawings of “collaged” elements. The large headed protagonist who inhabits Talbot’s drawings is often assumed to be the artist herself, who by extension may also be the author of the fragmentary diaristic texts that are often included in the images. Tyson’s “exquisite corpse” type drawings, produced large and small, have over the years included a subsection of self‐portraits, and one cannot but have a sneaky suspicion that her other strange figures may also represent the artist in different guises. In many of their works these artists’ self‐images might be said to demonstrate the fully present ego that Clark detects in self‐portraits. These drawings evidence a display of self, a “here I am, take it or leave it” bravado, a pleasure in the conscious externalizing of an interior state, even, on occasion, a reveling in self‐revelation. This pleasure is conveyed to the viewer (perhaps especially the female viewer?) through a delight in the primacy of drawing, its malleability and graphic clarity. Interestingly, both Tyson and Talbot relate their experience of a kind of year zero, when their painting ground to a halt, unable to fully respond to the programmatic demands they found themselves making of their work.9 For both artists drawing emerged as the purer medium of thought and feeling, unencumbered by a history or evolved planning in its production. For Stark too, drawing becomes a point of return, offering a way to assemble disparate but essential images without a need for overdetermined commentary. For these artists drawing can be seen as providing a form of documentation of their direct encounters with their own minds and a pleasure and playfulness in how that sense of imperative is conveyed to the viewer. Yet, whilst emerging through seemingly unfettered revelation, these artists’ works also unfold to present much more complex versions of a sensual and intellectual self than may be immediately apparent. The generation these artists represent are the inheritors of the “new art history” that included the early feminist writings of Griselda Pollock, Linda Nochlin and others. Tyson was born in 1960, Stark and Talbot born 1967 and 1969 respectfully, and their discussions reveal an awareness of the intricacies and pitfalls of feminist art history. As artists they have negotiated a certain amount of critical and commercial success and are alert to the role that gender plays in the public perception of their work and status within the artworld. For Clark it is the “face encountering a face as object” that indicates the “luxuriating ego,” but as Stark, Tyson, and Talbot well know, any form of objectifying comes at a price. Whilst drawing’s immediacy beckons an intimate encounter for the viewer, one may also detect a paradoxical distancing in these practices that indicates a certain sprightly thinking around gender positioning and identity politics. Intriguingly, in relation to Clark and Agamben, this is often played out in relation to the depiction of the face. In their graphic versions of themselves Stark and Talbot often appear as avatars – schematized and seen from behind or with their face averted or obscured, as in the Stark’s work If Conceited Girls Want to Show They Already Have a Seat (after Goya), (2008) or Talbot’s Interior Reading (2013). Indeed, the faces of Talbot’s figures never possess features, allowing the spectator to project themselves into the scene, rather in the way that the viewer’s vista collides with the solitary figure’s in a Caspar David Friedrich landscape. The figure in Tyson’s early self‐portraits is also

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Figure 6.2  Nicola Tyson (2015) Pre Non-Snowstorm Self‐Portrait. Graphite on paper. 19.05 × 19.05 cm (7.5 × 7.5 in.). Source: Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

sometimes seen from behind, or with a free‐floating detached face. In later drawings she depicts herself returning the viewer’s gaze blankly, from unpupiled eyes or ones that appear to be holes or pieces of coal, such as in Pre Non‐Snowstorm Self‐Portrait (2015). In the midst of these intense, often intimate, encounters between viewer and artist, there is a coolness, an approach at work which acknowledges the continued complexity of representation, particularly a sexualized representation, in a context still overlaid with objectifying images of women. Indeed, all three artists depict an overt libidinal self, navigated with precision, which refuses the “resignation” sometimes associated with women’s move from the private to public realm.10 Talbot speaks admiringly of the French feminist Helen Cixous’ writing where “there is no hierarchy in her account between major events and personal events” and her own work proposes a similar leveling of events and values (Talbot 2017, p. 133). Tyson’s approach to writing is also eclectic, “weaving together autobiographical anecdotes, sexual politics and art history” (Tyson 2016, p. 78). In “The Architect and the Housewife” Stark allows Oscar Wilde to counsel her, quoting his advice, “If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism” (Stark 1999, p. 6). All three artists finely tune the sphere in which they operate and their display of “luxuriating ego” is as seductive as it is ambivalent. Historically, creative ambition by women is often recorded as problematic for the way it undermines ascribed gender positions.

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The reaction to the posthumous publication of painter Marie Bashkirtseff’s diaries in 1890, demonstrated that her extensive ambition (part one of the diaries has the title, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All) disqualified her from being a “natural woman,” earning her, and other women artists, an ironic category of her own, the “third of Bashkirtseff sex” by the admiring George Bernard Shaw and the continuing difficulty of acknowledging ambition pervades much contemporary autobiographical writing by women (Shaw 1994, p. 21). The drawings of Stark, Talbot, and Tyson image an active, thinking self that is simultaneously owned and disowned by the artist, quite literally faced and defaced. De Man concludes that the form of reading that autobiography encourages leads to an open‐ended experience, a reading that is never quite complete. These figures intrigue the viewer by offering an authenticity that can never be fully verified. The  autobiographical mode’s demand to the viewer of “substitution” invites the spectator to inhabit an imagined self/other, an offer which is both narcissistic and philanthropic, emerging from what might be termed a solipsistic form of empathy suggesting perhaps, as Pleshette DeArmitt has pointed out via Rousseau, a rehabilitation of worldly narcissism (amore propre) within a healthy self‐love (amour de soi) through an increased capacity for “pity” or “identifying with the suffering being” (DeArmitt 2013, p. 38). As DeArmitt also makes clear, Julia Kristeva’s reading of Freud in her work Tales of Love (1983) proposes narcissism as the model on which all future love is based. If narcissism is a structural “defence” against the “abyss where our identities, images and words run the risk of being engulfed” then it is perhaps of particular importance to the female artist, who history repeatedly places teetering on the edge of such oblivion (Moi 1990, p. 257).

Autobiographical Fictions In her compelling reading of the work of Lee Krasner, Anne Wagner establishes a relation between self‐portraiture and autobiography, emerging from de Man’s analysis of the autobiographical, which then develops into a further complex understanding of how abstract painting might be understood as a narrative of self. For her the “autobiographical pact,” the collision of author’s and reader’s “I” finds an analogy in the artist’s and viewer’s “eye” through “the twinning of gazes that self‐portraiture allows” (Wagner 1996, p. 170). And, by a further extension, the self‐portrait can be aligned to abstract painting within the self‐disclosing direct address to the viewer of first generation Abstract Expressionism.11 Thus Krasner, a painter of self‐portraits early on in her career, is able to replace her self‐image with a form of autobiography in abstract painting that aligns more fully with her mode of thought, a type of “autobiography that rarely, if ever, says I” (Wagner 1996, p. 156). Taking up this notion of the productive process of exchange between author and reader, here aligned with “maker and viewer” who understand each other by “mutual reflexive substitution,” Wagner explores what she terms the autobiographical “fictions” implicit across several bodies of Krasner’s work. She detects in Krasner’s work a story of her identity, available to discerning viewers as a “conversation” with her powerfully authoritative, but now dead, painter partner Jackson Pollock. If the viewer is able to attend to the subtle ways Krasner responds, rejects, questions, asserts, agrees, and disagrees with the presence

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of Pollock within the form of the painting, they will note Krasner adopting a number of “fictions of the self,” through which she projects versions of her own artistic identity and enquiry. She writes: Autobiography emerges from her practice with the pretence of a possible mutual alignment between two subjects, maker and viewer significantly impaired, and for good reason. Krasner’s painting offers fictions of the self at the very place where the truth is ‘supposed’ to be laid bare. Yet in these same misleading and contradictory claims, her work is most like autobiography. (Wagner 1996, p. 170)

To prevent the eclipse of Lee Krasner by Mrs Jackson Pollock, Krasner allows ­ erself to become a third person, to develop an estrangement toward her own voice, h thus the closest one can get to a sense of her “self” is found in between and amongst the positions she adopts, within a multiplicity rather than a singularity of expression. One might suggest that in this she stands for all women artists, who to some extent, find themselves outside their own cultural legacies.12 The “mutual substitution” of the male artist/spectator (or spectator‐owner to use Berger’s terminology), is a direct transaction, however the female artist and viewer, familiar and adept in performing identifications across a range of material, as Laura Mulvey’s notion of the “transvestitism” (Mulvey 1981) performed by the female viewer of narrative cinema established, can be seen as developing a far more complicated set of constructions. For example, José Esteban Muñoz’s development of Judith Butler’s idea of identity as performance, explores “disidentification,” which he defines as: …about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (Muñoz 1999, p. 31)

Returning to Agamben, the earlier notion of “identifying with” is also replaced by a “de‐identification,” where the face or “outside” becomes an assemblage of properties, a threshold of communication, which claims critical potential by never controlling or concluding its operations.13 The face is simultaneously the exterior to other and self and their meeting place.14 De Man’s notion of de‐facement is thus particularly pertinent for women, as this  line of thinking proposes a sense of both the doing and undoing of artistic ­identity. Indeed, the self‐portrait/autobiography as both face and de‐face, is the paradox implied at the heart of the de Man text. I would suggest that the complication  of  “natural” authorship that de Man and Wagner see as intrinsic to the autobiographical endeavor has always been evident to women artists and leads, as we see with Krasner, to an unpacking of their work as proliferating, complex, and sometimes contradictory narratives, of fluctuating subjectivities and allegiances. Susan Stanford Friedman’s essay, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves,” explores

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Sheila Rowbottom’s metaphor of the “great and resplendent hall of mirrors” of the “prevailing social order” which “owns and occupies the world as it is and the world as it is seen and heard.” As with Mulvey, she suggests that women, without “the privilege of power,” are unable to recognize themselves in these mirrors and so develop a “double consciousness.” (She goes on to point out the “fundamental inapplicability of individualistic models of self” and suggests that, by virtue of their group repression, women’s autobiographical writings are able to exceed the individual and contribute collectively (Friedman in Benstock 1988, p. 34). By introducing the notion of fiction, acting here to facilitate a “trying out” of a range of positions, Wagner suggests the potential of going beyond fixed identity politics, yet remaining critical. In other words, she suggests a fleet‐footed ambivalence toward gender, indeed toward any firm positioning, might release a new form of power for women artists. As already noted, double “identification” or “consciousness” has particular resonance for the woman artist engaged in self‐representation, as both artist and subject, her dual roles appearing to stand in contradiction. Large‐scale drawings such as Stark’s Pull After “Push” (2010) or Behold Man! (2013) that depict the artist reclined, odalisque style, on her studio couch make explicit her self‐positioning as her own muse, brought home in the latter by the reference to Sylvia Sleigh’s role reversals.15 Linda

Figure 6.3  Frances Stark (2010) Pull After “Push”. Latex, printed matter, linen tape, stickers on panel. 175.26 × 226.06 cm (69 × 89 in.). Source: Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of The Artist.

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Nochlin’s description of “the familiar shifty” as “being invited into and shut out of, the house of meaning,” is the natural premise for this work (Nochlin 2007, p. 180). However, their approaches to (circum)navigating “the ‘house of meaning,’ mostly represented by male artists” production, are very different. Tyson’s hilarious and profound “Dead Letter Men” (2015), a book of letters to dead male artists from the Western canon, and to some extent her drawing as well, uses a surreal black humor to discuss the bitter truths of women’s cultural disenfranchisement. Stark takes a different tack, a long roll call of artists and writers, living and dead, are to be charmed with the intensity of her engagement, both with them and their work. In Talbot’s account of “Coming to Painting” she devises a way to switch off oppressive judgements connected to painting’s “value in the world,” allowing her work to be “what I say to myself,” its premise “as simple as opening a diary” (Talbot 2017, pp. 130–131). In the case of portraiture, the dynamic of “mutual substitution” is explicit: the intertwining of artist, subject, viewer, medium, and process spins out stories that, like autobiographical writing, draws on an unstable mix of these elements in unequal measures. The decision to portray a woman, those who are often the blank screen onto which society’s desires and preoccupations are projected, is particularly appropriate for eliciting subtexts of dominance and power alongside, other more overt and benign narratives. A female originator, whose gender marks a deviation from the norm, often brings with her a burden of an inescapable autobiographical filter, not least to explain how this deviation has come about. This can be equally true for both traditional and feminist art histories, for example Germaine Greer’s readings of Artemesia Gentileschi’s paintings in “The Obstacle Race” (Greer 1979) exemplify this double bind: her claim of an original and enlightened female perspective turns ultimately to an explanation via an imagining of the artist’s sense of embodiment.16 On the one hand this is emancipatory, allowing later generations of women into a process of identifying with the artist and her life, on the other it has the potential to anchor the work rather literally to events and experiences, rather than critically analyze the artist’s ideas and their articulation. Wagner’s notion of the work as autobiographical fiction then becomes extremely productive for women, not only does it give agency to the artist but it also opens the work up to multiple readings that enter the territory of the artist’s biography and context but are not bound by it. Both Wagner and de Man are clear about the role of construction in the autobiographical. It is a practice where meaning is contingent on the form and context, rather than a self‐narration that is “exposed,” finite and complete. In Wagner and de Man’s account the artist does not only make the work, the work also makes the artist. In my view, a form of reading, that carefully explores the politics and poetics of how experience finds creative form, characterizes the most exciting recent feminist critique from Helen Molesworth, whose notion of ambivalence within women’s art practices I have expanded on here, as well as Amy Sillman, Nadia Hebson, and others.17 In these interpretations the artist’s biography is legitimately drawn on, but it is the artist’s production that is ultimately the focus of the account.

Fool, of Thyself Speak Well: Fool, Do Not Flatter18 As I have already suggested, in making overtly autobiographical drawings Stark, Talbot, and Tyson allow an interior dialogue to emerge and we witness these internal conversations. In doing this a range of voices come in to play, at different times

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poetic, absurd, demanding, petulant, reflective, pronounced, sly, faltering, self‐deprecating, jokey, and whimsical, but whatever their tone, the conversational stream is experienced as continuous. When Frances Stark writes of seeking solace from a migraine, leading to her attempt “to distract myself from myself” by watching re‐runs of the TV show “I Love Lucy,” it is hard not to think of this attempt at self‐diversion as an effort to turn off this conversation, as well as the headache (Stark 1999, p. 37). Indeed, one is left with the impression that her covert ambition in making her work might be halting the incessant flow of internal debate, diverting it outwards, rather than into a solipsistic loop. Perhaps the formal consequence of these ever‐present soliloquies, is that works by Stark, Talbot, and Tyson often adopt the serial as a feature of their production. This repetition might be contained within the work, as in Talbot’s comic strip format or in a repeated format of discrete works, as in Tyson’s sequence of self‐portraits, or in the recurrence of imagery that can be found in Stark’s drawings (girls, chairs, birds, etc). When this interior dialogue is made public, the viewer is ushered into an intimacy with the material. Tyson actually interviews herself for her 2016 “Works on Paper” catalogue, it appears as much for her own amusement, as to ensure she gets asked the right questions. And whilst this sense of an ongoing “talking to oneself” is not unique to women or women artists, when we begin to reflect on the gendering of representation, Berger’s “surveyor” and “surveyed,” or what Hilary Robinson describes as “the two constituent yet always distinct elements of [a woman’s] identity,” we face a split that is deeply inscribed and that continues to present an emotional and intellectual truth (Robinson 2006, p. 294). When Talbot is able to picture herself alone, often in anguish, in a room seen from a perspective that positions the viewer near the rafters, one is strongly reminded of Berger’s famous passage from Ways of Seeing, A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. (Berger 1973, p. 46)

A woman set to continually watch herself must surely find ways to entertain herself as she watches, if she is not to go mad. This critical distancing allows the introduction of a playfulness into the process, so that the conversation she conjures with herself can amuse, surprise, or inform her in some way. Critic Terry R. Myers discusses how in Tyson’s self‐portraits the artist “takes great liberties with herself” and terms the figures she produces “extreme stand ins.” (Tyson 1997, n.p.) This notion of a “stand in” is useful and chimes interestingly with Wagner’s concept of fiction; a way for the artist to construct a self from a facet or element of a whole that is only ever partially inhabited. A self fully, yet only temporarily, committed to, is a self which is founded on ambivalence.

Self‐Made In Wagner’s formulation, Krasner’s material conversations with the long‐gone Pollock offer fictions of an artistic identity that approach an autobiographical truthfulness when they are read as a whole across a lifetime’s production. Unlike Krasner, drawings

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by Stark, Talbot, and Tyson explicitly draw on autobiographical narratives, but following Wagner, I would suggest that it is also the way these works are constructed that tells stories about their lives as women, and as artists. This is important to note because, as Jane Marcus explains in her essay on the private selves of public women, often the study of female subjectivity in narratives reduces the author’s agency, “we retell their tales so that they are the told and not the tellers” (Benstock 1988, p. 115). In the first instance it might be useful to outline what is at stake in the discipline of drawing for these artists and why it forms the core of their practices. It has become something of a cliché to say that contemporary art production is more interested in the process than the outcome. However as has been well noted, drawing is still associated with the first visualization of an idea, an initial jotting‐down and a remnant of this ephemerality and immediacy still lurks in even the large‐scale and ambitious works discussed here. Drawing can be slight in its means, easy to erase or move about, close to the making activity. Interestingly, as Marcus points out, this sense of a “live” medium chimes with “the excitement of material production” that Virginia Woolf detects in the autobiographical memoirs of those she terms the “obscure,” that is ordinary men and women recording life stories that often remain hidden, outside the major historical narratives of “great men.”19 Marcus notes how Woolf sees their vitality as crucial to prepare readers for great works of art: She suggests that the canon of great books by men is dead, that the patriarchy, by keeping its heroes in a ‘sublime and precipitous’ position – that is, away from the common readers – kills its own culture. (Benstock 1988, p. 118)

For Woolf “autobiography is liquid literature as opposed to solid drama” and for these artists drawing is the corollary of this autobiographical impulse; when Talbot “give[s] up painting” and instead makes “a mark at least,” then it is a drawing that emerges and when Stark provides images for “The Architect and the Housewife” they are pleasingly tenuous drawings, rather than photographs (Benstock 1988, p. 118; Talbot 2017, p. 128). Drawing is the least one can do, but also the most. For them drawing is assimilated into life in the manner that Woolf delights in, as she asks, “Who can say where life ends and literature begins? And then who can guide us? And then how delicious to ramble and explore!” (Benstock 1988, p. 118). In Tyson’s interview with herself she confides, “my first “works on paper” were surreal drawings and collages I made for the girls I had crushes on at school” (Tyson 2016, p. 78). Marcus points out that for Woolf “the relationship between life, autobiography, and the reader is a sexual one” and so it is for Stark, Talbot, and Tyson – anything less would require a self‐ censorship that is antithetical to their projects (Benstock 1988, p. 118). Indeed, a hallmark of all three artists’ work is the way sexual desire is embedded within the everyday, as an essential ingredient of their autobiographical narratives, that sometimes might require explicit depiction and on other occasions takes on a more coy or flirtatious form. I have suggested that Stark’s output – installed films, paintings, objects, books, events, etc – is predicated on her approach to drawing. By this I mean Stark’s core processes of assembling and juxtaposing demonstrate a perfunctory relation to ground. As has been noted by Marina Kassianidou in this volume,20 in drawing, the paper or other surface often operates as a given, rather than say a canvas where edge of the support becomes an important compositional element. In drawing the concern is with line, mark, images, and the ground recedes, a fact implicitly acknowledged

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by Stark in her use of green screen in My Best Thing (2011). Stark’s relation with surface is complex, she appears to insist on its two dimensionality, what Richard Hawkins has called a “deliberate flatness” (Stark and Subotnick 2015, p. 116). In the large works already mentioned or a work such as In‐box (2014) a range of materials are homogenized, using the graphic clarity of her drawing to coerce different elements into a relationship. This continues even when installing a series of discrete drawings, allowing the same design sense to prevail across a wall of a gallery, drawing with the drawings. This approach works as an inclusive device, a way of gathering disparate sources and co‐opting them into her own world. As Howard Singerman has noted, “Everything in Stark’s work seems to touch on something else  –  another sheet of paper, another artist, another writer” (Singerman 2015, p. 87). I would also suggest that this method of assemblage corresponds with the impurities of the autobiographical mode where one thing simply leads to another, the narrative absorbing the different material that comes its way. However, in another sense, as her one‐point perspective receding tiled floors demonstrate, she is also enthralled by the way the surface can open up to other dimensions, particularly the shallow space associated with trompe l’oeil. The concretizing of poetry in her text drawings, where the script becomes an image, or her predilection for the optical play within the collages, or the spatial simplicity of her projections that are then made spectacle by sound and lighting effects, all suggest a desire to create worlds for herself and others to enter imaginatively, a twilight zone simulation. This double pull, to the surface and away from it, sets up a condition of thwarted escapism, drawing attention to the inherent problematics of romanticizing the everyday that she explores so eloquently in her writing. Stark’s drawings are often filtered through a mechanical process, such as carbon transfers or print. This introduces the hand, but at the same time mitigates the intimacy of its touch. This is typical of her text too, a confessional that flows in and out of intellectually rigorous reflections on culture. As Olivian Cha asked of “Uh‐Oh,” the Hammer Museum retrospective, “What happens to interiority when it is filtered through nostalgia and graphic design?” (Cha 2016, n.p.). The graphic clarity of her production, the predominance of black and white for example, hints at the reproducibility of even the most personal of contributions, leading critics such as Martin Herbert to speculate on the difference between her “needy‐greedy” self‐doubting public persona and her possibly more resilient private self; “underneath, though, both writer and artist are likely tough as old boots.” (Herbert 2010, n.p.).21 Tyson’s method of drawing emerges from the prohibitions and permissions of her college years. They signal a rejection of a grand vision, the neo expressionist, overtly macho “new spirit” of the 1980s and an embrace of Cindy Sherman’s ability to do “what she liked with her own image” (Tyson 2016, p. 79). She describes how the early influence of Monique Wittig and Luce Irigarary’s writing fostered a desire to use “nonlinear, performative, and autobiographical language to describe the truth of a new kind of body.” From this a modus operandi takes shape, that refuses overdetermination. As she describes it, When I begin to draw, I have no idea what’s going to appear. I work swiftly, to stay just ahead of the cage of language, the linear mind, and rational decision‐making. I just let the forms grow themselves—self‐organize—with me making necessary adjustments toward a kind of dynamic equilibrium within the constant information flow that is sentience… (Tyson 2016, p. 81)

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This approach is conveyed in the drawing, the viewer imagines their making, mentally picturing the “sentient” mark as it moves across the page assembling an image, developing attributes and character as it goes. Tyson merges with the pencil, becoming the medium that brings forth the spirit on the page. As with Stark’s graphic approach, the form of fabrication introduces a masking or tempering of the ego at work  –  with a self‐amusing yo‐yo‐ing subtext, “it’s not about me, it’s all about me.” As has been pointed out in this volume by Tamarin Norwood via Berger, for the viewer drawing is particularly able to convey this sense of the artist’s presence – we are able to quite accurately imagine the movements of the body and hand that makes these marks. In this sense drawing articulates the “bodily truth” that marks Tyson’s early ambition and, despite her verbal eloquence, her practice is squarely housed in the material world.22 Tyson’s method is particularly useful when imaging the self. In the performance of self‐scrutiny she likes to catch herself unaware, perhaps seeking something like the visceral shock one experiences when unexpectedly glimpsing, and belatedly recognizing, a reflection of yourself in a shop window. Of course, this introduces an obvious logistical difficulty into her process, which Tyson solves by introducing another distancing layer into her mark‐making. A series of self‐portraits from 2002, are drawn in reverse with acrylic paint on glass and then monoprinted onto paper. By using rollers on the back of the paper Tyson is able to draw by varying the spread of paint using shifts in the amount of pressure she deploys. To some extent she is drawing blind as she is unable to see the effect of her movements on the hidden image. One imagines that the final reveal, where the paper is peeled from the glass, is designed to keep intact the sense of revelation she has developed in the pencil works. The drawings that emerge from this process are curious. In some ways they appear to be waiting for their features to assemble, as if they are to be pulled into focus, yet they also have the direct, painful honesty of a child’s drawing, alighting on a prominent trait as the key to a character. In this paradox of both full and no disclosure, they appear to signal a truculence around looking and being looked at, described so well in her “Dear Man on the Street” letter, (Tyson 2013) that with sardonic wit, takes issue with the stranger’s injunction, “Smile, it may never happen!.” The eyes in these portraits are absent, as if to demonstrate the impossibility of the dual surveyor/surveyed role. For all their corporeal insistence, Tyson’s beings are full of holes, they open up to vortexes, they tread lightly, float, and fall. In a small drawing called The Gaze (2015) a bespectacled figure stares out benignly, her look caught in the middle distance, an enigmatic “Mona Lisa” smile on her lips. Like writing to the dead, the desire to engage others only goes so far. Talbot’s solipsism is similarly ambivalent, her drawings appear to want to communicate, but only on her own terms. This manifests as a drive to pare down her images to only the components essential to tell the story but also to fill the images up with time‐consuming decorative activity, as if her solitude is endless. As Roger Malbert suggests, Talbot’s featureless characters are grounded in their psychological relation to the scene and, as the viewer comes to insert themselves into the narrative, there is no “necessity to fill in every detail” (Malbert 2015, p. 102). Yet the pleasure of pattern making in the frames, borders, and predellas is palpable. Like Stark and Tyson, Talbot’s protagonist is both her and not her, a fluid relation, that like the moment depicted, is ephemeral, a memory, a projection. Also, like Stark and Tyson, there is a

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Figure 6.4  Emma Talbot (2013). Watercolor on paper. 24 × 30 cm. Source: Reproduced by permission of the artist.

determined lightness of touch with weighty concerns, the arc of her brush transforms trauma and pain to sinuous elegance. Talbot herself likens the drawings to “unselfconscious” speech which, whilst making itself known (something said cannot be unsaid) soon gives way to what happens next. A moment passes and another image appears. This leads to a process of piling up observations and memories, which bundled together may make the kind of autobiographical effusion that Woolf would approve of. As already discussed, the origin of Talbot’s current practice is built on a need to begin again.23 Her edit is ruthless, she removes anything with little emotional connection and eradicates processes whose raison d’etre had lost significance. Drawing with black paint emerges as the most straightforward way of establishing a mark, working on paper whose virtue is that it is “an unassuming support” (Talbot 2017, p. 128) and paintings only appear when drawings are placed side by side in sequence. The logic of drawing allows for lateral thought to hold sway. As Talbot has said: Drawing is really important. I have no fixed plan of what I’m going to do, so it’s a really open way of working. Something comes about which is a different mode of thinking. It’s like when you’re doing something and you might think of something else completely random and you don’t know why you’re thinking of that, but you are. (Sharma 2010, n.p.)

Talbot’s drawings record narratives, observations and sensations and their entanglement. The spatial conceit of each drawing is often a key to the work’s priorities. In the images that abstractly reference an energy flow of bodies and nature, where the sensual and spiritual meet there is often a low center of gravity, a grounded frontality,

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that directly addresses the viewer, in a form that brings to mind the appeal to a gravitational surface in the work of Hilma af Klint. In works where narrative dominates, a recessional floor, path, or dynamic line often draws the spectator into the space of the drama, which is frequently depicted from an angle, demanding a longer, sequential viewing experience. In another category of work that observes and records everyday minutiae (buttons, cracks, mistakes) images are held within the shallow space of the picture plane, encouraging a type of haptic looking, as if the viewer might reach out to touch the object or surface before them.

The Graphic Arts Stark, Talbot, and Tyson are visual artists that write. For them, drawing and writing appear to share the same impulse, as well as etymology. All three have produced critical and creative texts and Stark and Talbot actually make drawings with their writing. Whilst they all have very different relationships to language and literature, for them the linguistic potential of self‐inscription expands the possibilities of the autobiographical mode. Like their magnificent forerunner Lee Lozano, who configured her life as art as a “revolutionary” act, writing and drawing are intertwined as a way to document thought and experience24 (Bradley 2018, p. 24). As Richard Hawkins and Laura Owen have pointed out, for Stark paper becomes page, treating “paper as a place of writing and a place of drawing” (Stark and Subotnick 2015, p. 117). Further, Stark’s process of drawing with text, as well as originating it, operates similarly to her drawing from photographs; allowing her to make manifest her deep‐rooted affinities and allegiances. Her reading, a crucial part of her artistic identity, becomes a living relation, part homage, part challenge. Talbot’s script works also sit squarely between modes usually kept apart, and as her words’ meaning and visuality begin to merge they challenge each other for ascendency. She records her initial sense of audacity in muddying these forms, “The first time I painted a word, I held my breath” but their collision enables a form of intimacy with the viewer (Talbot 2017, p. 131). As words shout large, whisper small, assert their message or trail away as an unconfident afterthought, there is a direct address to the audience in the moment of looking. Whilst Tyson’s writing does not seep directly into her drawing, she too loves the performative quality of words. Her epistolary resurrections of interlocutors from art history, allow her to test her autobiography against the canon of great male artists, a statement of ambition that is kept in check by her chatty prose and, in her publication, by the domesticity or absurdity of each letter’s accompanying photographic (self) portrait.

Through a Glass, Darkly In Wagner’s account, Krasner’s fictions do not present a self that is fragmented or fractured but rather one that is faceted and multiple. In work that more explicitly addresses the autobiographical, Stark, Talbot, and Tyson similarly do not attempt to provide coherent narratives, not least because their stories have temporary resting places rather than conclusions. Their practices go to the very heart of the problematics of the ‘personal as political’  –  female narcissism and solipsism make uneasy bedfellows of

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feminism. These artists, whilst committed to some forms of female emancipation, have given themselves permission to roam their lives in art practice unpoliced, even if that means, as Tyson has said, confronting areas that may be “off limits” for feminist orthodoxy (Tyson and Searle 2017, video). In this configuration, autobiography provides a form of encounter that is not overtly critical, yet its demands for “mutual reflexive substitution” as its form of engagement, speaks directly to the viewer’s ethical core. And when the boundary between the fictive and the experiential becomes blurred, the audience must retune to a new form of criticality, one that shows rather than tells. Marcus describes how early twentieth century women memoirists and diarists “anticipating erasure…re/sign[ed] themselves from public discourse into private discourse,” writing primarily for other women (Benstock 1988, p. 114). For these contemporary artists the graphic autobiographical mode allows them an assertion without resignation, a productive ambivalence. They’ll meet you, like they meet themselves, halfway.

Notes 1 The phrase “Dirty Double Mirror” is taken from Kendrick Lamarr’s lyrics to “I” (2014) whose refrain “I love myself,” rather than evidence narcissism, marks the culmination of the difficult introspection that takes place in the album “To Pimp A Butterfly” (2015). According to Jane Marcus “I love myself” is also a phrase found in the journal of painter, Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884) published in 1887 and I discuss later its misogynistic reception (Benstock 1988, p. 122). 2 Until drawing’s change in fortunes in the modern period its uneasy categorization within Museum collections makes its lack of status evident. For discussion of this see John Elderfield, The Modern Drawing (1983). 3 Helen Molesworth’s essay, “Painting with Ambivalence” (2007) has been crucial to my thinking within this essay. As I have developed elsewhere, Molesworth’s notion of ambivalence “about artistic activity, feminism, and modernism” within the work of North American abstract women painters of the 1970s that “seep[s] into the very groundwater of painting itself” can be seen as resurfacing as a critical position within contemporary painting by women (Fortnum 2017, pp. 209–232). 4 Baker explains how drawing an image of her body with cuts actually abates her self‐ harming for a period (Baker 2010, p. 27). 5 Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) was a German‐Jewish artist, whose 769 autobiographical gouaches were posthumously published under the title Leben? oder Theater?: and were produced while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. 6 This can be aligned with Julia Kristeva’s notion of ambivalence in the “polyphonic novel.” As she describes it, expanding on Bakhtin, “the term ambivalence implies the insertion of history (society) into a text and of this text into history; for the writer they are one and same. When he speaks of ‘two paths merging within the narrative’ Bakhtin considers writing as a reading of the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of and a reply to another text” (Moi 1990, p. 39). 7 Kollwitz’s self‐portraits are a good example of this, symbolizing aging, grief and eventually humanity itself, in her 1937 Death series of lithographic drawings. 8 For further discussion of these themes see Marsha Meskimmon’s The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self‐Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (1996).

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9 Talbot describes: One evening, after long hours in the studio (and paying a babysitter for the pleasure), I was left with a huge, dark canvas with a surface so rubbed and wiped back it was shiny, like an old tarpaulin. No image was left. I could not paint. All the doubts had overwhelmed me. Painting seemed so pointless and wasteful. I did not believe in anything I made, I felt it did not matter. It did not relate to any of the preoccupations that concerned me in my life. It was almost a year since my husband had died. All I could think of was death. How could I, after seeing him die, invest any meaning in the superficial? (Talbot 2017, p. 126)

Whilst Tyson also experiences disillusionment with her means: However, where it had been empowering initially to spot and call out the subtlest of sexist strategies working against me, using theory as a creative framework led to a kind of paralyzing self‐censorship and self‐consciousness regarding content and decision‐making, and I began to feel repressed. I needed to work more intuitively…. Meanwhile, I’d had to abandon my own work, ‘cause I couldn’t concentrate, but when I began drawing again, I realized I’d finally found my voice. I then avoided talking about my work directly, for years, fearing this might spoil the intriguing special connection I’d developed with myself. (Tyson 2016, p. 79)

10 See Jane Marcus (1988). 11 As Wagner explains it: Autobiographical painting should not be thought of simply as an artistic genre – its main lines are by no means so neatly drawn…. Perhaps the formulation of ‘painting in the first person’ will suffice as an initial description of the necessary autobiographical effect. For such painting to occur, the particular conventions of depiction must be laced with the means to convey the directness and immediacy and idiosyncrasy that have come to be associated with the self. There is a range of such devices, certainly – the revealing symbol, the gesture that looks speedy or impassioned or indecisive or manically repeated. The whole rhetoric of spontaneity can be said – indeed has been said – to be a vehicle for the self…. (Wagner 1996, p. 155)

12 Wagner quotes Krasner: “I’m a product of this civilization, and, you might say that the whole civilization and culture is macho” (Wagner 1996, p. 189). 13 Agamben describes it thus: In the face I exist with all of my properties, (my being brown, tall, pale, proud, emotional….); but this happens without any of these properties essentially identifying or belonging to me. The face is the threshold of de‐propriation and of de‐identification of all manners and of all qualities – a threshold in which only the latter become purely communicable. And only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me. 14 Interestingly, Agamben also notes that the current pornographic image has shifted from that configured by Berger, so that often nowadays,

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the portrayed subjects, by a calculated stratagem, look into the camera, thereby exhibiting the awareness of being exposed to the gaze. This unexpected gesture violently belies the fiction that is implicit in the consumption of such images, according to which the one who looks surprises the actors while remaining unseen by them: the latter, rather, knowingly, challenge the voyeur’s gaze and force him to look into the eyes. …The fact that the actors look into the camera means that they show that they are simulating; nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more real precisely to the extent to which they exhibit this falsification.

The ambivalence of the actress whose gaze, directed to the camera/viewer, signals her sense of herself as both within and outside the pornographic “fiction”, unpacks into a complicated and shifting set of relations, that are neither simply augur empowerment nor purely subjugation. 15 Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010) was a UK born American realist painter associated with the US feminist art movement and the AIR gallery, whose compositions often reverse the art historical positioning of women by incorporating the male nude. 16 For example, writing in support of Artemesia Gentileschi’s claim to be the author of Susannah and the Elders (1610), a work most often ascribed to her father, Greer states: Only she could paint female figures which had a skeleton as well as flesh and skin texture. Susannah’s pelvis is not the invention of voluptuous fantasy, but something observed and understood. Her body is not displayed in Susannah’s conventional posture of self‐caressing, to excite the observer: she sits heavily, crumpled against the cruel stone of coping, turning her face away from the implication in the tangled drama of two men conspiring to destroy her. (Greer 1980, p. 191)

17 For example, as already noted, Helen Molesworth (2007); Amy Sillman. “AbEx and Disco Balls: In defence of Abstract Expressionism II,” in H. Robinson (ed.), Feminism‐Art‐Theory: An Anthology 1968–2014, (London: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 250–254, ([2011] 2015)) and Nadia Hebson (2016). 18 Shakespeare’s Richard III’s soliloquy at the beginning of Act 5 Scene 3 vacillates ­between self‐loathing and self‐love. 19 Virginia Woolf, “The Lives of the Obscure” in the Common Reader, 1925. 20 Marina Kassianidou, “Works on/in/with Paper: Approaching Drawing as Responsive Marking”, in Chorpening and Fortnum (ed.), A Companion to Contemporary Drawing (London Wiley Blackwell 2020) pp. 239–255. 21 I’m borrowing the term ‘needy‐greedy’, from the British sculptor Laura Ford, who has developed Needy‐Greedy as a long‐standing character in her work. 22 Tamarin Norwood, Digital Drawing, in Chorpening and Fortnum (ed.), A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, (London Wiley Blackwell 2020) pp. 289–405. 23 Starting over recurs as trope in women’s art practices, voluntarily or not. “Begin Again” is the title of British artist Flick Allen’s 2015 series of portraits, when she reclaimed her art practice, after a long period employed in developing and managing museum and gallery education. Importantly this work is linked to her concept of the “Disoeuvre,” a neologism which she explains by contrast, “If an artist’s oeuvre suggests something monographic, a disoeuvre suggests deviation, or possibly deviance. The artist, trained by virtue of gender to be adaptable …respond[s] to contingency, producing art through many different roles and guises.” https://www.facebook.com/events/

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179971882640773. A fuller discussion can be found in The Disoeuvre: An Argument in 4 Voices (WASL Table); 6:27 (2019). 24 I’m thinking here of Lozano’s conceptual works such as Dialogue Piece begun in 1969. Fiona Bradley, in her essay, “Lee Lozano: slip, slide, splice” describes how, “in August 1971 Lozano, believing that women were powerless in the art world, began boycotting them, refusing to speak with them for the rest of her life. It was a comment on, rather than a rejection of, women and was intended as a revolutionary rather than reductive act” (Bradley 2018, p. 24).

References Agamben, G. (2000). The face. In: Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 91–99. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Baker, B. (2010). Bobby Baker, Diary Drawings, Mental Illness and Me. London: Profile Books. Benstock, S. (ed.) (1988). The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin/BBC. Bradley, F. (2018). Lee Lozano: slip, slide, slice. In: Lee Lozano, 20–25. Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery. Cha, O. (2016). Frances Stark at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA. https:// frieze.com/article/frances‐stark‐2 Clark, T.J. (2014). World of Faces, Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery. In: London Review of Books, 4th December, 16–18. DeArmitt, P. (2013). The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im‐possible Self‐love. New York: Fordham University Press. Friedman, S.S. (1988). Women’s autobiographical selves. In: The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (ed. S. Benstock). Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press. Greer, G. (1979, 1980). The Obstacle Race; the Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. London: Secker and Warburg. Hawkins, R. (2014) in Kandel S et  al Frances Stark Collected Writing 1993–2003, London, Bookworks. Hebson, N. (2016). Still visible? www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue‐index/issue‐2/ still‐invisible Herbert, M. (2010). David Hockney & Frances Stark at Nottingham Contemporary. accessed 15th August 2018. https://frieze.com/article/david‐hockney‐frances‐stark Kassianidou, M. (2019). Companions to Contemporary Drawing. London: Wiley Blackwell. Malbert, R. (2015). Drawing People: The Human Figure in Contemporary Art. London: Thames and Hudson. de Man, P. (1979). Autobiography as de‐facement. Modern Language Notes 94 (5, Comparative Literature): 919–930. Marcus, J. (1988). Invincible mediocrity; the private selves of public women. In: In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (ed. S. Benstock). Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press. Meskimmon, M. and Sawdon, P. (2016). Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing. London/New York: I B Tauris.

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Mitchell, J. (2016). Bourgeois’ prints: a Psychoanalyst’s view. In: Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical Prints, 13–27. London: Hayward. Moi, T. (ed.) (1990). The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Molesworth, H. (2007). Painting with ambivalence. In: Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (ed. L.G. Mark), 428–439. Los Angeles/Cambridge: Museum of Contemporary Art/MIT Press. Mulvey, L. (1981). ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)’, Framework Muñoz, J.E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nochlin, L. (2007). Courbet. London/New York: Thames and Hudson. Robinson, H. (2006). Reading Art, Reading Irigaray. London/New York: IB Tauris. Rosenthal, A. (1997). She’s got the look! Eighteenth‐century female portrait painters and the psychology of a potentially ‘dangerous employment’. In: Portraiture, Facing the Subject (ed. J. Woodall), 147–166. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sharma, A. (2010). Emma Talbot talking to Alli Sharma at her studio, Walthamstow E17, April 2010. https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/emma_talbot_articles.htm Shaw, B. (1994). The womanly woman. In: The Quintessence of Ibsenism. New York: Dover. Singerman, H. (2015). Frances Stark at the rim. In: Uh Oh: Frances Stark 1991–2015 (eds. A. Subotnick and F. Stark). Los Angeles: Hammer Museum. Stark, F. (1999). The Architect and the Housewife. London: Book Works. Subotnick, A. and Stark, F. (eds.) (2015). Uh Oh: Frances Stark 1991–2015. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum. Talbot, E. (2017). Coming to painting. Journal of Contemporary Painting 3 (1+2): 119–136. Tyson, N. (1997). Nicola Tyson. New York: Petzel Gallery. Tyson, N. (2013). Dead Letter Men. London/New York: Sadie Coles HQ/Petzel Gallery. Tyson, N. (2016). Nicola Tyson: Works on Paper. New York: Petzel Gallery. Wagner, A. (1996). Krasner’s fictions. In: Three Artists (Three Women); Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O’Keeffe, 105–190. Berkeley, Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Warner, M. (2010). Chronicle of a life repaired. In: Bobby Baker, Diary Drawings, Mental Illness and Me, 3–16. London: Profile Books.

Video Tyson, N. (2017). in conversation with Adrian Searle to launch the exhibition ’Beyond the Trace’ at Drawing Room – Wednesday 27 September 2017 https://drawingroom. org.uk/resources/nicola‐tyson‐in‐conversation‐with‐adrian‐searle

Artworks cited Bourgeois, L. (1994). Autobiographical Series, drypoints, published in Malbert, R and Mitchell J (2016), Autobiographical Prints, London, Hayward Publishing. Kollwitz, K. (1937). Death Series illustrated in Frances Carey and Max Egremont. 2017). Portrait of the Artist: Kathe Kollwitz. London: The British Museum and the Ikon Gallery.

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Lamar, K. (2014). track ‘I’ on the album To Pimp a Butterfly, 2015. Aftermath Entertainment: Interscope Records and Top Dawg Entertainment. Gentileschi, A. (c1610). Susannah and the Elders, oil on canvas, 170 cm × 119 cm, collection of Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden, Germany. Stark, F., (2008). If Conceited Girls Want to Show They Already Have a Seat (after Goya), Mixed media on paper, 1448 × 762 mm. Stark, F. (2011). My Best Thing, Video, projection, colour and sound, duration 1 hr and 39 mins, in collection of Tate Gallery, London. Stark, F. (2010). Pull After Push, Paint, printed matter, linen tape, stickers on panel 1753 x 2261 mm, published in Ali Subotnick and Stark Frances. Eds. 2015. Uh Oh: Frances Stark 1991–2015. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum. Stark, F. (2013). Behold Man! Graphite on paper, printed papers and acrylic paint on canvas 1918 x 2442 mm, in collection of Tate Gallery, London. Stark, F. (2004). In‐box, Printed matter, Chinese paper and linen tape, 1791 × 794 cm. Talbot, E. (2012). Candlewick. Watercolor on paper, 240 × 300 mm. Talbot, E. (2013). Interior Reading, Watercolor on paper, 240 × 300 mm. Tyson, N. (2015). The Gaze, Graphite on paper, 191 x 191 mm.

Further Reading Allen, F. (2019). The Disoeuvre: An Argument in 4 Voices (WASL Table); 6:27: ma Bibliotheque. Carey, F. and Egremont, M. (2017). Portrait of the Artist: Kathe Kollwitz. London: The British Museum and the Ikon Gallery. Elderfield, J. (1983). The Modern Drawing. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Fortnum, R. (2017). Baggage reclaim: some thoughts on feminism and painting. Journal of Contemporary Painting 3 (1+2): 209–232. Kristeva, J. (1983, 1987). Tales of Love. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press. Meskimmon, M. (1996). The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self‐Portraiture in the Twentieth Century. Scarlet Press. Stark, F. (2007). Frances Stark: Collected Works. Köln: Walther König. Woolf, V. (1925, 1984). The lives of the obscure. In: The Common Reader, 106–133. New York: Harcourt.

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Between the Sky and the Handle Shilpa Gupta’s Drawings in the Contemporary Parul Dave Mukherji

“Drawing” has reinvented itself in contemporary art globally (Butler and de Zegher 2010). Its return in the age of technological dominance is riddled with irony. No longer merely an index of artist’s skill, drawing has expanded its fields of operation in numerous ways. The term “drawing” in its new avatar lends itself to wide ranging definitions from three dimensional form, wire assemblage, performance, photography, collage, print making, to conceptual line drawings. The latter in its classical function of figure‐ground demarcation, has shown its capacity to carry out most rigorous theoretical functions — to reflect back on representation itself, and show its limits as well as to suggest unthought of possibilities. Drawing in this sense has powerfully informed the practice of many Indian artists recently and has acquired a critical edge‐ Shilpa Gupta, Tejal Shah, Praneet Soi, N. S. Harsha, Mithu Sen, Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, to name a few. Each one of them has shown a strong inclination to conceptual art in varying degrees. In this paper, I will draw a connection between drawing and the turn to conceptual art in India with a focus on Shilpa Gupta’s work. In my interview with her, it is this conjunction of drawing with conceptual art that comes to the foreground. A line for Shilpa Gupta (born 1976‐) is many things: a matter of edges, a meeting point between moving matter, a trace of displaced bodies. A line is also that which collapses axes, so that a ball of string is a length of a nation’s border rolled into a tight globe. It traces desire and memory, traverses many languages. It performs when a diagonal line turns into a three dimensional barrier obstructing a spectator’s movement in a gallery. It resonates with the here and now — with the very contemporariness of the border police, whether at the Indo‐Bangladesh border or at the Mediterranean or within the heart of Europe or the US Mexican border. With the sky literally as the limit, Gupta’s works travel across the world and across languages and publics.

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Drawing and Conceptual Art in Contemporary Indian art In common parlance in Hindi, to make a drawing literally means pulling a line (rekha kheechna) and the Sanskrit (root language for most of north Indian modern languages) term for a line (rekha) is interchangeable with the word for writing or lekhā. Language has been central to critical thinking in traditional philosophy and metaphysics in India.1 Conceptual art, in its modern usage, can be said to have some applicability in classical Sanskrit poetry, especially in the genre of citra kavya (literally, painting‐ poetry) where words are arranged in a witty visual order but the pre‐modern critics subordinated this genre to verbal play and frivolous virtuosity (Jha 1975). Critical thinking that we associate with conceptual art belonged more to the realm of dialectics, logic, epistemology and esthetics (Bronner et al. 2011). However, the modern art that arose in India with its links with colonial modernity and the disjunction with pre‐modern esthetics has not been very hospitable to language‐based conceptual art, perhaps for the same reason that abstract art has not been part of the mainstream.2 During the heydays of cultural nationalism, artists like Abanindranath Tagore who founded Bengal School in the early twentieth century, privileged the figurative mode in creating an Indian style of art, perhaps in response to the colonial denigration of ‘monstrous’ Hindu art of multi‐headed and multi armed gods and goddesses (Mitter 1977). And in the debates around modern art and its relevance to India, the abstract mode was considered fraught, often seen as an export from the West, even if an attempt was made to indigenize it during the 1960s, as for example, by the artists who were part of the Neo Tantric style.3 The centrality of the figurative persisted even in the postcolonial art discourse framed by Geeta Kapur, India’s most influential art critic and cultural theorist (Kapur 2000). She had made a strong case for figurative art as a postcolonial strategy for resisting Euro‐American hegemony4 since the 1980s. As a result of a persuasive discourse created around narrative figuration in the landmark exhibition, “Place for People” in 1981, the very basis of the national modern was supplied by the figurative and it came to be identified with the Baroda Narrative School (Sheikh and Dhanoa 1997). Conceptual art arose almost as a counter discourse in the drawing based work by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) in Baroda, the very place where the narrative school was dominant. Today, it is only retrospectively that Mohamedi can be recognized as a pioneer in conceptual art in India.5 Her work was less to do with the use of verbal language and more with abstract linear drawings, partly inspired by black white photography of architecture. Her legacy was taken forward by many of her students like Gargi Raina and Manisha Parekh who have experimented conceptually with linear drawings and new materials. There is yet another trajectory through which conceptual art arrived in India. It was tied up with the embrace of installation art around the early 1990s. This decade inaugurated a new phase of Indian history that saw a gradual erosion of secular‐modern, the two key concepts around which the art historical framework of the national modern was built. In a country as diverse as India with multiple religions and cultural diversity, secularism was seen as a common thread to create a larger Indian identity. With the unleashing of violence and civic unrest triggered by the destruction of the Babri Masjid by the right wing Hindu fundamentalists in 1991, a new, deeply polarized social reality stared in the face of the Indian artists. Until then, they had



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considered themselves as aligned with the state, participating in cultural decolonization on the one hand and nation building on the other. What had got overlooked during the 5 decades of postcolonialism since 1947 was an invisible, internal colonization and mounting class and caste disparities. This unprecedented political crisis not only shook the foundation of Nehruvian modernity built upon secularism on the one hand and western modernization on the other but it also betrayed deep fractures within the public sphere; it exposed almost irreconcilable division between an elite, modern, secular, Anglicized India and a vaster, traditional, religious Bharat (the name that had currency within the traditional knowledge system). The very definition of the citizen subject was at stake and for the artists, it seemed to have thrown up a crisis of visual representation itself; the conventional media of art such as painting and sculpture could not grasp the contemporary conditions. This “post‐colonial/post‐secular” moment was far more fraught than the one that coincided with the gain of political sovereignty post 1947; sections of people from the lower class and caste felt betrayed by the Indian bourgeoisie and the promise of silent revolution.6 This was also the time when Subaltern Studies emerged as a new discipline in social sciences that challenged the prevailing nationalist, top down study of politics and culture; it also paved the way for the emergence of postcolonial studies in academia and later in the art school curriculum.7 The 1990s was not only the decade of identity politics, inadvertently unleashed by globalization with the withering of the Nehruvian definition of a citizen subject8; it was also the time of advanced global capitalism and unprecedented advancement in information technology that connected India to the rest of the world. The overarching definition of the citizen as “Indian” began to develop cracks as caste and gender inequalities started to fracture the public sphere. In these politically charged times, many ethically aware artists were certain that the esthetic and political representations could no longer be kept apart. Into this merging of the esthetic and the political, I would locate the coming of age of conceptual art in India during this decade. It was this representational paradox that led artists toward installation and new media; no longer could the medium be separated from the message and even the materiality of the medium spoke eloquently.9 Installation offered this possibility to urban, metropolitan artists like Vivan Sundaram and Nalini Malani even if this was not a viable art form from the perspective of the art market. These new art forms seemed to address the very crisis of representation itself‐ a new attention to materiality, a heterogeneous gathering of sculpture, assemblage, photography and drawing and the invocation of an immersive space where the spectator could be pulled in as a citizen subject. The volatile situation also compelled socially radical artists like Navjot Altaf to shift her studio from Mumbai to Bastar located in the tribal belt of central India (Adajania 2016). The very schism mentioned above between India and Bharat and the fact that most urban artists identified themselves with the former, underpinned the refashioning of their identities as urban ethnographers; they aspired to address the gap by initiating a dialogue with the local artists in undeveloped regions ignored by the state, who had been overlooked in the master narratives of modernization and art history. Shilpa Gupta neither adopted installation art as these pioneers had, nor did she opt for a relocation of her studio outside Mumbai. But the trope of artist as ethnographer shaped her practice as well, not only in her dealings with the reality of the subcontinent as part of South Asia but also with other nation states around the globe. The

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issues that she identified as crucial, like surveillance, censorship and migration, had a trans‐regional and transnational applicability. Though based in Mumbai, through her participation in residency projects, she traveled all over the world with an ease of a global ethnographer. At a time of economic liberalization, when state art institutions like the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and Delhi and the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi were becoming almost defunct, an alternative art circuit was offered by new art institutions like Khoj in Delhi (Sood 2010). It was at Khoj that she found a space for conceptual experimentation and interaction with artists from different parts of the globe at an early stage of her career (Sood 2010). When these new contemporary art forms and community based art practice were emerging in Mumbai and Delhi, Gupta was still a student at the J. J. School of Art in Mumbai, a somewhat old fashioned institution, not known for progressive ideas on art. Dissatisfied with certain hackneyed oppositions between abstract and figurative art taught here, as between tradition and modernity prominent in the art discourse, Gupta’s encounter with conceptual art was momentous. She chanced upon a book on conceptual art in the library of her art school and came face to face with works by Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth and other artists. Still not part of the curriculum, Conceptual art spoke to her at once, showing a way out of these facile oppositions, and creating an urgency to be contemporary. Almost an autodidact, Gupta turned to conceptual art before it had gained a currency in the art discourse of India, its late entry explaining India’s absence from the current global historiography of conceptual art.10 Gupta catapulted into prominence internationally with her participation in the Century City show in Tate Modern in London curated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha in 2001. In her work Sentiment‐Express, she mediated the writing of love letters to her audience, via the Internet. By way of parody, she not only captured the intermingling of desire and technology, which she mapped on to the private, and the public but also grasped interactivity as central to her technology oriented “new media” practice. This was unlike an earlier generation of installation artists who failed to break out of the painterly paradigm and used photography and video screening as the visual amplification. In fact, if we focus our attention on drawing in Gupta’s practice, the shift in the representation register is evident, which she shared with some leading contemporary artists in India like Jitish Kallat, Tejal Shah, Raqs Media Collective, Camp, Dream Machine Collective, etc. This involved a radical rethinking of modes of public address, as well as materiality (or immateriality) of the medium.

Drawings by Shilpa Gupta What do walking, weaving, observing, singing, story telling, drawing, and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines of one kind or another. (Tim Ingold 2007, p. 1)

How does drawing register contemporary experience? For Gupta, line is both literal and metaphorical and this parallel comes out clearly in her long‐term preoccupation with national maps and political borders between nation states. It is through an experiment with drawing in the Maps of India [2007–8] project that Gupta demonstrates the contrast between the sharp and firm contours of the official political maps



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and the fuzzy mental maps that people carry in their heads in everyday life. Arbitrariness of political boundaries are further underlined by contrasting the ground that bears the lines drawn by culture in the form of political boundaries with the sky above. Just as the sky with its moving clouds resists any cartography, so do national borders that have to weave their way through uneven land, water and even people’s homes; these drawn lines are at once both real and fictions of state control and forever open to being trespassed by illegal migrants, smugglers and traders. Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational esthetics gets grafted on to relational geography leading her to claim “My East is Your West” inspiring her travels to the Indo‐Bangladesh border. Embarking on her journey almost like an anthropologist, she carries out her “field work” located in the gray zone between two nations. Her fieldwork notes containing diagrams of her movement across the disputed territories translate into art works in the form of line drawings. Substituting ink with banned drugs and cough syrup, such as marijuana or Phensedyl, (Untitled, 2013–2014, drawing made with, codeine based syrup, 38 × 56 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua). The drawings are not about illegal transactions across the border but rather the substances themselves constitute the very medium of drawings. In this work she closes the gap between the means and the object of representation.

100 Hand Drawn Maps of My Country 2008–2014 In this work, drawing in its conventional form takes on a pedagogic function as 100 people from Mumbai, Cuenca, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Montreal, among other countries are invited to draw maps of their country based on their memory, which are then placed one on top of the other to form a web of fuzzy contours (Figure 7.1). A simple experiment that can be repeated in any nation state to artistically demonstrate the gap between the private and the public, between the official state‐sanctioned map and the informal image of one’s country that is carried in the mind. The real medium of these line drawings is memory that gets externalized and when the 100 maps are collated, collective imagination surfaces on the paper. These drawings hold a mirror to the public and subtly reveal the corporality of memory mapped as part of lived experience as opposed to the singular state sponsored cartography.

“My East is Your West” 2015, Palazzo Benzon, Venice If maps are defined by drawn lines, they also set up spatial coordinates in terms of East or West or North or South. In the region of South Asia that Gupta focuses on, East and West take on political resonance. My East is Your West alludes generally to relational geography but also specifically to the political history of South Asia. Bangladesh, formerly known as East Pakistan, separated from Pakistan in 1971 after a bloody war of liberation. It now has an extensive border with India, which is heavily patrolled by both sides.11 If Maps of My Country concluded as an installation — drawing from interaction with the public — this work can be placed between performance and installation. As shown at Venice Biennale in 2015, the installation consists of a performer from South Asia who sits at a table drawing long parallel and often intersecting lines on a long hand-spun cloth that measures the Indo Bangladesh border of 3360 kms to the ratio of 1:998.9. Significantly, the drawing is mediated by a carbon paper which is quintessentially a symbol of state bureaucracy and its copying procedure.

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Figure 7.1  Shilpa Gupta (2014) 100 Hand drawn Maps of Country. Carbon tracings on paper; 30 × 22 in. (17 × 56 cm). Source: Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Continua/ Le Moulin, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Habana. Photographer: Ela Bialkkowska. 100 people were invited to make a hand drawn map of their country in Mumbai.

Every object in the installation, including the act of drawing and the scale of material used are saturated with meaning converging on the arbitrariness of national borders.

Untitled (Forced Exit) Pencil Tracings on Paper, 2016 Drawing as an interplay of presence and absence forms the main theme of pencil tracings on paper. Although it was inspired by censorship by an authoritarian regime, in this case triggered by the forced exit of some members at the Knesset or Israel’s unicameral parliament, Gupta once again lets the medium speak its language (Figure 7.2). Unaccompanied by any verbal text, the line drawing of people at a meeting dramatically vanishes along the contour of a figure to signal a body about to be expelled. The absence is as much shown by minimal contours as by its juxtaposition with the present bodies, which have the power to remove the dissenting body. Amidst the tussle of these bodies is the eloquent presence of the microphone, that symbol of democracy, which is present but out of reach of the expelled bodies. This event of the suppression of freedom of speech may have arisen within the Israeli context but the stark line drawings of figures are able to be translated across the many transnational settings where civic liberties are at stake.



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Figure 7.2  Shilpa Gupta (2016) Untitled. Tracings: pencil on paper; 8.3 × 11.7 in. (21 × 29.7 cm). Source: Courtesy of the Artist and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photographer: Elad Sarig.

Drawing in the Dark, Centre d’Art Contemporain – la Synagogue de Delme, France, 2017 Drawing as a means of expressing contemporary experience shot to the foreground in the wake of the post-structuralist critique of language (Derrida 1987).12 It was no longer simply a means of segregating figure from ground with an autographic connection between thought and the line. Drawing acquired a materiality, a new ontology that opened space for the performative. Rather than the artist taking a line for a walk, as Paul Klee famously put it, it was as if the line was going to take the artists for a walk, but in place of apolitical modernist space, the postcolonial artist ventures into a precarious territory between nation states. Let us turn to Gupta’s most recent solo exhibition “Drawing in the Dark” at Centre d’Art Contemporain  —  la Synagogue de Delme in northeastern France.13 Titled 1:384943 (2017), the work is an imposing expression of Gupta’s survey of the India‐ Bangladesh border but also engages with drawing in the most contemporary sense, as evoked by the title. In one of the works, drawing follows the verbal instructions about walking into the spaces of surveillance. Go straight. Turn right at the tea stall and carry on to the main road. Then after the church, you will see a Border Post pillar on your left. Walk across the field, past another pillar, belonging to the other side and you will see a shop selling wood. It’s the third house from the junction there.

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The line drawing maps the artist’s movement into contested territories. Drawing becomes map‐like, charting the phenomenological trail of the artist’s walk. The artist is not a flâneur in a sense implied by Walter Benjamin – the one who is visible, yet could get lost in a crowd. On the other hand, rather than letting a performer draw out its symbolic traversal, as in My East is Your West, the artist performs the border crossing herself. As she walks, she is part‐anthropologist, part‐geographer, part‐detective, part‐ interloper; someone who observes and experiences the border under varying conditions of visibility and permeability. The gap that she made visible in 100 Hand Drawn Maps of My Country (Figure 7.1) between the official cartography of single line and the fuzzy borders of remembered maps, is also where she locates the transgressions. At certain times at night, the border gets annulled allowing movement of banned goods, people, and cattle and keeping alive a gray zone of parallel economy and even sociability (Rogoff 2000). Using marijuana juice and Phensedyl, an Indian drug banned in Bangladesh, she creates drawings, not of figures but of dots and spots as indexical marks, as a bid to re‐territorialize the no man’s land for the furtive trader, smuggler, or the cattle seller. It is in the set of C‐prints titled Unnoticed (2017), that the artist shifts the axis from the ground to the sky or rather juxtaposes them on the same plane. These prints show vivid skies, studded with pieces of floating motor parts, forbidden objects of merchandize that could only travel to the other side as smuggled goods. In this poetic meeting of the car handle with the sky, or the banal with the sublime, lies the critique of the nation state. The sky with its clouds in perpetual motion resists any framing and comes across as an allegory of globalization itself. Clouds from a distance mimic nations on the ground — they too have shapes and boundaries that are as provisional as they are protean. Whether land can ever mimic the sky is a riddle that Gupta throws open as bewildered wires, handles and motor spare parts float in suspended animation. In conversation with Parul Dave Mukherji, Shilpa Gupta critically examines her own practice, along with her experiences and encounters with ideas and individuals that have shaped her views on art. PDM: The very phrase contemporary drawing brings your works to my mind. SG: Really! Which ones? PDM: The work that deals with the theme of forced exit and is called Untitled [2016] In this work, which consists of linear drawings, you trace the void and conjure up the missing bodies. SG: That was about a court case where bodies were forcefully removed from the court and prevented from giving testimony. It may seem to have a geographical location but it really exists on the edge of every system. It is true of Palestine, of Kashmir, of Bangladesh… For me, a line is a tracing, a border. This conflation of a line with a political border is partly inspired by a Dutch anthropologist, Willem Van Schendel’s book on The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. The border is part of a larger zone or the borderland that at once constructs and subverts the nation. What looks like a border in a political map evaporates when you visit it, almost like a bystander in your own practice. PDM: This sounds like fieldwork to me! Do you see yourself as an anthropologist or an ethnographer who seeks first‐hand knowledge before creating an artwork?



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SG: One can’t just depend on archives. In politically contentious issues, nothing will go on record in, as for example, illegal trade across the border. PDM: How did you first arrive at the Maps of India concept? SG: Ironically, I arrived at it elsewhere. In Tel Aviv. In contested territories, microphones have a symbolic agency. The question of who has access to this instrument takes on political connotations. In fact, the mike eloquently speaks of exclusion and experience of being expunged from public discourse if we consider those who are either denied access or forcibly pushed away from it – the Arabs in this case or those on the side of the liberal left. PDM: What do you think of nationalism, a concept that is almost becoming a catch phrase of our times? SG: Nationalism seems to be about the father of the house feeling burdened! PDM: How does a ‘ball of thread’ which is really made out of shredded saris become a quintessential object in your work on nationalism? SG: To me, a ball of thread is a means of puncturing the space. It simultaneously carries measurements of national borders generated through computers and yet remains an art object. A line formed by the thread can as much outlines a national boundary of a country as much as it indicates in‐between spaces. Neat boundaries only exist on globes and maps but in real life, there are too many seepages – a bit of India within Bangladesh or a bit of Bangladesh wedged into India. Line as in a ball of string can capture these ruptures. A ball of string is a product of repetition, of constantly winding the thread around a presumed centre, almost an act of hysterical repetition. It is this anxious desire to get the facts right that finds expression in the mathematical ratio and proportion of the scale: that of 1:444559 used on a brass plate. Even the most technologised form of information hub depends on regular data updates. The very claim of precision is arbitrary, as not only is the orientation in geographical navigation imprecise but also its claim of truth. East, West, North and South are never abstract points in space but relational ‘facts’. If you recall my earlier work‐ Your East in My West 14 addresses this ambivalence. PDM: You often use vitrine boxes to place objects. What kind of framing does it serve? SG: To answer this, I have to go back to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a book which has profoundly shaped me as a young art student at the J. J. School of Art, here in Mumbai. Through the very opening lines, Berger plants suspicion in the act of seeing. Seeing an object through the vitrine box or even a plastic container alerts you to the fact that you are viewing an object that is meant to be seen. Take as for instance, the boxes used in museums to encase objects to indicate their ­special status as collectibles. Vitrines can work as a framing device and add extra visibility to objects that we either go past without noticing but even shun in our day to day life. My earlier work on menstrual blood in 2001 displayed strips of cloth stained with blood in such a transparent box to create hyper visibility for such tabooed objects. PDM: Going back to your interest in void or absence, tell me more about your earlier work of 2006 on Wives of the Disappeared. SG: Wives of the Disappeared was a multi‐channel work about Kashmiri women whose husbands went missing and yet could not be officially declared as dead by the Indian state. Among the disappeared, I had considered using missing names of the people. The act of naming is so ambivalent as the very marking that offers identity to people are also what makes them vulnerable. Hence, the disappeared refers to 100 people who have had to change their names to escape prosecution.

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PDM: Returning to your recent work‐ Drawing in the Dark, how do Marijuana leaves and its juice work as a drawing medium? SG: While working on this project which centres around life near the border between India and Bangladesh, I noticed fields of marijuana plantations near Koochbehar, the border town. So while these plantations were meant to be destroyed by the Border Security Force, they were in fact patrolled by them on either side. Quite disconcerting were the figures of illegal trade that were three times as much as official transactions. The state may have banned marijuana plantations but on the ground the reality is quite the opposite. This made me realize the huge gap that exists between a state archive, legal documents and official maps on one side, and the actual topography, on the other. Quite different is the human reality of survival in extreme situations where people and goods have to move across these forbidden borders. PDM: Most artists hate to be labeled but your work has a strong conceptual thrust. SG:  I shy away from being called a conceptual artist. Many Japanese artists would deserve this designation better than me. I am too much of an ethnographer or have invested far too much in the embedded context of living. Perhaps, the question of method most preoccupies me rather than that of a conceptual framework. It is from this lens of method that I question the definition of “estness”. What or where is the West? Europe as West is not the same as the UK or the US as West. In fact, geographical fixity cannot translate feelings of cultural affiliation. Take as for instance, the manner in which my Flag series (Figure 7.3) evoked a far more emotional response from spectators in Cuba than in Mumbai. Internet contracts distances and creates another geography of emotions or elective affinities.

Figure 7.3  Shilpa Gupta (2012) Stars in Flags of the World, July 2011. Embroidery on cloth; 82 × 58 × 6 in. (209 × 148 ×15cm). Source: Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Continua/Le Moulin, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Habana.



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PDM: Tell me something about your training at the J. J. School of Art that was established when Mumbai was Bombay. SG: In the first year, much stress was put on the performative that included dancing. I remember carrying ghonghroos to the School. It was in the 3rd year that I chanced upon a slim volume on Conceptual Art and came to see works by Jenny Holzer and Joseph Kosuth. This was the time in the context of a void left behind when one of our revered teachers, Prabhakar Kolte, a leading abstractionist, had just retired. In the early 1990s, there was a surge of internationalism in which critical art or art based on language was becoming cool. We also were introduced to Indian aesthetics, specially the Rasa theory. What struck me about this theory was that it as much addressed art making as art reception. The qualities that defined an artist were also the ones that a Rasika or connoisseur shared. This made me aware of not only the critical role played by a spectator but that he or she too has work to do to arrive at the meaning. To me, the question of border also exists between an artist and a spectator, but one that has to be traversed as in WheredoIendandyoubegin (2012).15 PDM: Your works travel globally encountering different audiences. We come back to the question of borders in yet another sense. How do you factor these different viewers in your work? SG: My work I Live under Your Sky of 2011 may be taken as a case in point. An open‐air light installation was originally made in a park in Poona in India but it has travelled to many cities including Dallas. Work of this kind once made acquires a life of its own when it travels across many contexts in the Anglophone world. However, all I need is to change the language and translate the text into Turkish, French etc. to reach out to many other people. Sky here is perhaps paradigmatic of this translatability. How do you border the sky? Where does it end and where does it begin? This occurred to me while watching the landscape from a window of a moving train. So a wide infinite sky on one side, and the locatedness of the spectator on the other side. Sky once more becomes a metaphor that connects the artist to the spectator PDM: I have followed your interview with Peter Weibel who had raised the question of Indianness in the way you see the world around you. Is that an inescapable question even in today’s increasingly globalizing world? SG: It is a question that brings along its essentialist baggage. Although at that time I did question its problematic underpinnings in my answer by insisting on universalism of vision. Whether you are from the East or the West, the sense of vision is one’s primary access to the world. Having said that, I often recall a visual encounter with a Geeta poster that my grandmother once gave to me when I was a little girl: apart from the standard image of Arjuna, the warrior beseeching Lord Krishna to release him from a moral dilemma, the poster had Krishna advising Arjuna with the words that somehow have remained with me: what have you brought to this world and what will you take back from it?16 If not the image, the words spoke to me about my own state of being an artist and continue to resonate meaning for my practice. These lines of traditional wisdom may have stemmed from a religious context but to me, they seem to allude to my own practice and the way I relate with the world. I draw from this very world of finitude that is populated with things and objects which I place back in the same world under a common sky; nothing added or taken away…

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The metaphor of sky continues to resonate for Gupta as the universal through which she navigates across cultural and political differences with the surefootedness of a global ethnographer.

Acknowledgment I am grateful to the UPE grant from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, that funded a part of my research for this article.

Notes 1 Language forms a core concern in traditional Indian philosophy like Mimamsa, Samkhya, Madhyamika and so on. B.K. Matilal, Logic, Language and Reality, An Introduction to Indian Philosophical Studies, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985. Perhaps, on the account of association of the dominance of the figurative in traditional art practices, as for example, on the walls of temples, abstraction or concept‐ based art is seen as alien to India. 2 The discourse and practice of art under colonial modernity was centered on the figurative, which may be traced to colonial distaste for ‘monstrous’ iconography of temple sculptures. 3 Neo‐Tantric art was embraced by artists like K. C. S. Paniker and G. R. Santosh. 4 American art critic, Clement Greenberg, received somewhat hostile reception from Indian artists, especially J. Swaminathan during his Delhi visit in 1967. 5 Mohamedi, overlooked in the earlier art historiography on the account of her refusal to embrace the narrative trend in Baroda, has been recently ‘discovered’ as one of India’s foremost abstract artist but a pioneer of conceptual art. Facile comparisons with Agnes Martin are made but Mohamedi drew upon a variety of cultural sources that included the Islamic calligraphy (Altaf 1995). 6 Post colonial India’s silent revolution has been associated with the implementation of the report by the Mandal Commission, or the Socially Backward Classes Commission (SEBC). The Commission was established in 1979 to identify the socially or educationally backward classes of India and was implemented as a state endorsed affirmative policy in 1992 (Jaffrelot 2002). 7 A conference followed by a publication on Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, eds. Shivaji Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji and Deeptha Achar, New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 2003 is an example of this move in the department of Art History and Aesthetics, M. S. University, Baroda. 8 Jawaharlal Nehru, post colonial India’s first prime minister envisioned citizenship in terms of an Indian identity under which all other markers of difference due to caste and religion would be subsumed. 9 Rather than Marshal McLuhan’s usage of the terms ‘medium; and ‘message’, I intend to use it in the Post Structuralist sense of problematizing the distinction between form and content, between the subject and object of representation. 10 Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Project Directors: Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss) an exhibition catalogue based on a show at Queen’s Museum overlooks India even as it attempts to break out of a Eurocentric history of



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Conceptual art. It includes Japan, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia and New Zealand. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999. The Aar‐Paar project was an artists’ initiative to set up a conversation between artists from India and Pakistan and was coordinated by Shilpa Gupta in Bombay and Huma Mulji in Karachi in 2002. As an example of philosophical discourse around drawing that resonates with conceptual art is Jacques Derrida’s, The Truth in Painting ([1987] 2017, 10). He discusses drawings by contemporary artists such as Adami and Titus‐Carmel, turning traditional notions about representation on their head and thereby bringing drawing within the purview of deconstruction and contemporary concerns. “My East is Your West” was an extension of the 56th Venice Biennale project and co‐presented with Pakistani artist Rashid Rana. Gupta’s 2015 collaboration with the Pakistani artist Rashid Rana “My East is Your West”, created for the 56th Venice Biennale. A text‐based, LED light installation, 2012. What have you brought into the world that you have lost; whatever you have created in this world that has been destroyed. Whatever you have taken, it is from this world alone. Whatever you have given back, it goes back to this world alone.

References Adajania, N. (2016). Navjot Altaf: The Thirteenth Place. Mumbai: The Guild Gallery. Altaf (ed.) (1995). Nasreen in Retrospect. Bombay: Ashraf Mohamedi Trust. Bronner, Y., Cox, W., and McCrea, L.J. (eds.) (2011). South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock. Ann Arbor, Mich: Association of Asian Studies. Butler, C.H. and de Zegher, C. (2010). On Line; Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Derrida, J. (1987) 2017. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Ian Mcleod. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A Brief History. London, New York: Routledge. Jaffrelot, C. (2002). India’s Silent Revolution. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Jha, K. (1975). Figurative Poetry in Sanskrit Literature. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Kapur, G. (2000). When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Mitter, P. (1977). Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Receptions to Indian Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rogoff, I. (2000). Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Sheikh, G.M. and Dhanoa, B. (1997). Contemporary Art in Baroda. New Delhi: Tulika. Sood, P. (2010). The Khōj Book. New Delhi: Harper Collins.

Further Reading Adajania, N. (2010). Shilpa Gupta. Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel.

8

Drawing as Contagion Jade Montserrat

Charcoal has always been a dominant material in my life; my mum emphasized the importance of life drawing and loves charcoal. I grew up in the countryside without any neighbors, no terrestrial television, no mains electric, only gas lights, and I’m an only child so I took deep solace in the landscape, which I always felt had nurtured and sustained me. My mum had been using the charcoal made by our neighbors in the next valley. The charcoal is expensive, but I can speak with the charcoal maker about the fundamentals of charcoal and he is very knowledgeable about it. I was also thinking about nanotechnology and carbon being a really tough substance and, of course, that we’re made of carbon. So, when I came to make the work, “No Need for Clothing” at the Cooper Gallery in Dundee in 2017, I asked for them to buy the charcoal. It’s willow and birch and has amazing thicknesses – it’s like velvet. “No Need for Clothing” is a performance drawing installation with various iterations. I draw on the walls, floor to ceiling, with charcoal and accompany this with a performance where I stand with my body centered and in contrapposto, akin to how we see a figure depicted in classical statues, and I read from a book. The book’s sentences are made into watercolors and it’s those sentences that are blown up and expanded in charcoal on the walls. Initially, I used a group of texts that I then read aloud, so they mirror each other, but “No Need for Clothing” has expanded, so I’ve been open to develop the texts, which originated from my note taking and research. An early iteration was “untitled, [after] Frantz Fanon” (2018) that I made at Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, after having read “The Wretched of the Earth” and I’ve also used Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place” and writing by Ntozake Shange. The texts use a combination of notes, my ideas and the writers’ words, a bit like how William Burroughs or David Bowie would combine texts (see Figure 8.1). Initially the piece emerged as an event in response to Lubaina Himid’s exhibition at Spike Island in Bristol (2017) and, at that time, I had no idea that it would develop into a combined wall drawing and performance. Lubaina Himid’s work “http:// A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Figure 8.1  Jade Montserrat (2017) No Need for Clothing. Drawing installation at Cooper Gallery/DJCAD. Source: Photo: Jacquetta Clark.

Cotton.com” (2002) explores labor, the economy of bodies and the transatlantic slave trade and what it means to wear cotton and it set me thinking about how to make work as sustainably as possible. In the past, when people have asked me what I do for a living and I’ve said I’m an artist, often the response was “are you selling?” So instead I used to call myself an “odd job person.” Later, when I felt I owned the word artist, they might ask “do you paint?” I say “yes, but my primary focus is to make my ideas happen by the most economical means possible.” Now I’ve realized that it doesn’t really matter how much of a budget I have, that wouldn’t alter my concern with sustainability and ethics and how we’re living in the world. I got into making performance, live work, because I realized that my body was free; I didn’t have to buy any materials, but of course the cost is hidden and it’s taken a toll on my body and my mental health. However, the great thing about using your body is the immediacy – it’s urgent and you’re mirroring your audience. After the performance at Spike Island curators Sophia Yadong Hao and Lynda Morris from the Cooper Gallery commissioned a performance from me. What I really wanted to do, having seen the space which is extraordinary, was draw and think about a cacophony. Sophia had alerted me to Hannah Arendt’s notions around words and deeds becoming an event and it had made me interested in developing a plurality of voices within the space. I wanted the making of the work to be a provocation in a way, for the people to see the labor that goes into the drawing. So, the gallery audience were speaking to me, we were in conversation, whilst I was making the work. I didn’t want it to be a performance that was just consumed, there was an emphasis on intimacy and vulnerability. The original text reads something like “she saw no need for clothing other



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than comfort,” and this takes us back to sustainability. I’m troubled by hyper ­consumption that is to do with status or fashion. I went to the Cooper Gallery pretty exhausted for all sorts of reasons but became totally energized by the way Sophia and Lynda facilitated me, in an amazing space and with the legacy of the gallery. I only had two days to cover these huge walls – the space is incredibly high, so the ladders were incredibly long! This method allowed for freedom, for creativity. I could really enjoy the mark‐making with these beautiful materials, without fearing that I was wasting anything. I was able to take a risk, there wasn’t room to fear making a wrong mark but, when I was high up, there was c­ ertainly a fear of making a wrong movement. I had to be really aware of my body and be ­careful about every step I took or every reach I’d make. I had to move my body in a certain way that kind of embodied grace, restraint, patience, and a certain amount of pleasure and desire I think. I asked for a towel, I asked for water, and I asked for music, speakers. I listened to either Late Junction or Giles Peterson, sort of catching up with what’s current but both those programmes return to music from previous decades, so there’s this constant to‐ing and fro‐ing in time that I really enjoy. What happens with the texts is that I’m able to remove myself personally, knowing that the texts apply to, and have been partially written by, other people. There’s an implication that I’m asking the audience to become this drawing with me, because the drawing material itself will leave a trace on the audience, so they’re implicated. If they’ve come to see the work they become part of the work quite naturally because the carbon is already in the air, they’re going to be absorbing it. I struggle to find the boundary between writing or drawing which perhaps is to do with language. So many people talk about drawing figuratively – “drawing out,” “drawing from,” “drawing with,” and I think as an idea that that’s really what my performance is about, because it’s not conventional drawing but it’s using the tools of traditional conventional drawing. And because the drawing also becomes part of anyone who enters that space, it becomes relational. Taking that further introduces the notion of life drawing; people are observing my body in a traditional way of life drawing, so it means that also the observations that are made could become drawing, that is drawing without a material process but with the perceptual process. The drawing is also located in the choreography of the body around the space, so there are layers kinds of drawing; some will leave material traces, some will leave traces of memory. It becomes useful to think of drawing as a mode of being or a mode of operating, because I think it’s kind of forgiving. The reason I have been able to arrive at an idea of drawing as an expanded process is because I’ve gone through a certain type of education and my mum emphasized the importance of life drawing, observational drawing, drawing with charcoal. Although I’m saying drawing is democratic and generative and has these possibilities, in practice it doesn’t work unless we’re all up to speed with the idea that creativity can happen at any point. I think that the potentials of drawing are opened up through language and the way most people think about “drawing out,” as a way of thinking through something, an actioning or a movement. I’m arriving at this formulation that drawing is more like performance, we’re leaving a trace and that trace can be a conversation. I find it difficult to divorce writing from drawing, because they both demonstrate how we interact with one another. I’m seeing that there’s a connection between us all, through dialoguing there is a line, there’s a thread. The beauty of charcoal is that it has this contagious aspect. It’s fundamental to our life on the planet, just like how our

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interactivity is, we can only really strengthen if we are working together. If your thinking is informed by an ethics focused on human rights or sustainability it allows a certain freedom  –  all the things that maybe could be embarrassing or risky can be overcome, because I see drawing almost as a formal way of approaching my art practice. Thinking of drawing in that way allows me to feel creative and take every experience as a valuable experience and be quite present in each situation (see Figure 8.2). When thinking about human rights, sustainability, that’s essentially care. I think we’re equipped with the tools to work through ideas of safer space, what safer spaces could be, and how we care for one another and that’s somehow entwined with my drawing on the wall. Maybe it’s a metaphor, if I’m using charcoal and thinking about the roots of creativity or the roots of existence. So rather than be a spectacle of labor, the work presents someone negotiating the boundaries of what they need. I really want to step back from centering my body as a spectacle, but it served to make a point where I think it was needed at that time and that’s now developed into reflections around care. At my installation at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool (2018–2019) more recently there’s still the text drawings on the walls but there’s also this space that we fabricated that houses my library, my books, and there are blankets – it’s a bit like a tardis! On the wall are words like racism, Nazism, colonialism, maritime criminals, these things that are kind of scary and stop conversation. But I’ve left space for other performers or performativities; hopefully, it’s a safe place to be yourself and feel comfortable enough to have difficult conversations. I like that contagion is considered a negative word but that I can use this. We think of the spaces that we occupy as utopian when they deal with sterility and architecture,

Figure 8.2  Jade Montserrat (2019) Instituting Care. Installation view at Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2019 United Kingdom.



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but coming back to the charcoal again, entering a space can be risky. Once you’ve entered a space, you have no control over what material will land on you, even if the trace is invisible. I think if my purpose is to try and work out how I can contribute to transformative justice in this world, the work asks me to center strategies of decolonization, to try and unpack and absorb writing theory around blackness and anti‐ racism, and what the charcoal does is implicate everyone in that blackness – like the idea of contagion. In a perverse way I like the thought of people being troubled with the material. I like that you might be unaware that when you’re washing your hands, you’re taking the blackness off. One can ignore that quite easily and it might make no impact but for some people it might be the germ of the conversation with which they’ll say, “Isn’t that annoying? It’s dirty to me, I’m dirty, my clothes are covered in this.” I like that because you can’t escape, you can’t shed that skin, you’re viewed as almost contagious just bringing up racism or decolonization. Thinking how we have pathologized blackness, both in the US and here in the UK, one thinks of these big pharmaceutical companies that take over everyone’s lives (see Figure 8.3). I’m interested in the way artists like Monica Ross or Clifford Owens, who in my view have also expanded drawing practices, implicate their audience in working through an ethics of space, as this relates back to “No Need for Clothing.” They both don’t just ask that we take away from the scenarios that their work sets up, the experience of it, but that we actually go back into the world galvanized or changed in some way. And I think that’s where I’m locating this possibility of drawing through performance. I’m also really interested in the way that Owens uses scores for his

Figure 8.3  Jade Montserrat (2018) Untitled (The Wretched of the Earth, After Frantz Fanon). Drawing Installation, “The Last Place They Thought Of” exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensh.

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performances, which I also see as drawings. Not divorcing writing from drawing allows me to frame a world of creativity and possibility. Drawing is something that we’re taught to do in school, it’s something that we do as a child, it’s accessible, so it allows me to be thinking about democracy and speak on layman’s terms – it doesn’t need to be art. Through drawing you’re mapping, you’re editing, or tracing something. I’m also making an appeal that no drawing is wrong. Because I think that sense of doing things wrong is what limits everyone’s access, not just to the spaces for creativity, but also to our own potential for creativity. It’s like we’ve unlearnt creativity. When I perform “No Need for Clothing,” there are pauses, I breathe in and out for three ­seconds, it isn’t showy, but I just pause and breathe, so that I can keep going for the remaining time. I sometimes think about how we unlearn how to breathe fully, it wasn’t until I went to yoga, that I was taught again how to breathe in to my tummy so that it expands and then to breathe out again. I think we put limits on our imagination similarly, because we’re breathing in this constant state of suspense or anxiety, that this world creates around us.

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Curating Drawing Exhibitions and the Centering of Drawing in Contemporary Art João Ribas

Introduction Drawing is a primary mode of artistic expression, the gesture of making a graphic mark on a surface considered one of the most direct and immediate forms of representation. The act of drawing – a line in the dirt, on paper, or on a touchscreen – has been a method for the production of images since pre‐history, predating writing and nearly all other artistic media (Hoptman 2002, p. 11).1 Beyond the history of art, drawing has also been generative within a variety of other disciplines, from fashion and architecture, to musical composition and the physical sciences (The Drawing Center 2002, p. 3). The immediacy of drawing, in shorting the distance between thought and expression, can capture the creative process as it unfolds (Hoptman 2002, p. 11). Within the field of contemporary art, in particular, drawing constitutes a medium of significant critical, curatorial, and commercial interest. Drawing‐specific exhibitions are presented in museums worldwide, with curatorial departments and institutions dedicated to the study, presentation, and preservation of the medium. Drawing has “never been so omnipresent,” asserts one recent publication, becoming “one of the most often‐displayed mediums in contemporary art spaces.” There are drawing specific art prizes, publications, and art fairs focused exclusively on works on paper (Drawing Room 2015). Yet this was not always the case. Despite the marked interest in the medium of drawing within contemporary art – and its recognized place throughout the history of art since the Renaissance  –  drawing was given considerably less attention than painting or sculpture until the postwar period. Whatever the medium’s function as “the probity of art,” to use Ingres’ phrase, drawings maintained a particular status as a preparatory, study, or secondary medium until well into the twentieth century.

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Of particular importance to the change in this perception of drawing as an important artistic medium in its own right were a series of exhibitions organized during over more than three decades at the Museum of Modern Art. These exhibitions can be seen as reactions to, as well as generative of, wider global tendencies and forces that have shaped the place of drawing since the 1950s. Largely interrelated and with overlapping focus (and often, selection of artists) these exhibitions all surveyed drawing’s status as a medium even while situating, with varying historiographic emphasis, its eventual expansion and resurgence. These were exhibitions functioning to define as well as chart the increasing relevance of the medium of drawing to contemporary art practices, and providing a kind of reflective focus through which to map the effect of exhibition practices on the centering of drawing within contemporary art history. Drawing, for instance, does not factor in Hegel’s classic hierarchy of the five fine arts – comprised of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry – as mapped onto particular historical forms of symbolic, classical, and romantic art (Hegel and Knox 1975, p. 87). Hegel’s ordering, contra Schelling, makes drawing secondary to color, and therefore painting, as “what makes the whole thing complete, what enables the painting on the canvas to completely stand out” (Maker 2000, p. 66). Dominant art historical narratives and critical assessments tended to keep to such distinctions and hierarchies, no matter how fundamental drawing may have been to visual culture or expression. As John Elderfield writes in The Modern Drawing, his seminal 1983 reflection on the medium: Drawings have not, by and large, been subjected to as keen and rigorous art‐historical scrutiny as they deserve. At times they have been treated solely as subsidiary works, and only their functions have been examined. At others, they have been treated as craft objects, and only their technical properties have been examined…. With certain notable exceptions, the critical methodology for drawing, and especially for modern drawing, lags seriously behind that for painting. (1983, p. 11)

Museological practices tended to reflect this valuation of the medium as secondary or subsidiary. This status, for instance, is reflected in William Blake’s decision to organize an exhibition of his works on paper in a rented room in London in 1809 (Brown and Myrone 2010). The impetus, as Konstantinos Stefanis explains, was the fact that Blake’s work was rejected by “two most important exhibition venues of the time, the Royal Academy and the British Institution, because they were in the form of watercolors (rather than oil paintings)” (Stefanis 2010). Even in the 1950s, on the occasion of his exhibition of recent British drawings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the critic David Sylvester could assert “that drawings could never ‘acquire the status of pictures’ however elaborated.” As Blake and Sylvester’s examples suggest, the shift from secondary status to important medium involve a distinct alteration of the perception of drawing in both museological and critical terms. If “drawing is now displayed, valued, and collected as a legitimate medium in its own right,” exhibition practices have played a fundamental role in this, particularly within the recent history of contemporary art (Fay et al. 2013, p. 8). Over the past several decades, exhibitions have been influential in altering the perception of drawing while also influencing the modes of presentation and engagement of the medium. This revision of art historical valuation – the centering of drawing within the field of the contemporary – has involved the assessment and assertion of



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drawing as a pivotal activity in thinking and making. Through a rhetoric of continuous resurgence and renewed importance, exhibitions have effected this discursive shift toward drawing as a primary modality of artistic expression and cultural production. What follows is an attempt at a historiography of such centering exhibition practices, periodically re‐assessing and re‐affirming the status and importance of drawing in contemporary art.

Drawing, Now and Then The acquisition of a drawing by George Grosz marked one of the first artworks to enter the collection of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art in 1929. Yet the first large scale presentation of drawings at the museum occurred only in 1947, with Drawings in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition selected from a collection of then 227 objects. A separate Department of Drawing at the museum was established in 1971 (Garrels and Hauptman 2005, pp. 6–83). That department’s founding curator, Bernice Rose, was to organize an international survey of contemporary drawing, Drawing Now: 1955–1975, five years after the department was established (Steeds 2015, p. 56). Rose’s seminal 1976 exhibition documented the emergence of drawing as an important medium within postwar art. Drawing, she argued, had “until recently been regarded as a conservative medium, resistant to ideas of innovation or extension,” given the supposed “radical history of modernist art.” The parameters of drawing, as a result, remained those “basically defined at the end of the seventeenth century” (Rose 1976, p. 9). Since the middle sixties, however, artists had “seriously investigated the nature of drawing,” and with it, initiated a “process of reevaluation and renewal” (Rose 1976, p. 9). The effect, Rose argued, was that of moving drawing “from one context, that of a “minor” support medium, an adjunct to painting and sculpture, to another, that of a major and independent medium with distinctive expressive possibilities altogether its own,” yet without relinquishing any of its traditional functions (Rose 1976, p. 9). Rose’s corresponding selection was aimed at demonstrating this “emergence [of drawing] as a major and independent means of expression” taking into account its role in the (then) current art practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, the exegetical essay for the publication outlines the perception of drawing since the Renaissance and onward through the radical tendencies of modernism. Sustained throughout is a tension between the traditional notion of disegno  –  “a term that embraces both design and drawing,” and so that of idea and plan – and the notion of drawing as “autographic revelation, presenting the artist’s first and most intimate and confessional marks,” suggesting a literal and conceptual directness that is closely aligned with the medium (Rose 1976, pp. 9–10). Drawing, Rose maintained, shifted between such polarities through its history. “In its most general sense,”: drawing is simply marking on a back ground surface with any implement to create an image. As such it is fundamental to all the visual arts, but in Western art drawing is usually discussed in terms of a split between the idea and the execution of a finished work. Drawing has thus come to be associated with particular techniques and modes of expression, even particular tools and mediums, although these have been considerably expanded in the twentieth century. (1976, p. 10)

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This expansion occurred within a series of historical, cultural, and thematic axes, such as automatic writing and collage (inflected in the work of Beuys and Twombly), illusionism and the literal object, and “the gradual disengagement of drawing from autography or graphological confession and an emotive cooling of the basic mark, the line itself ” (Rose 1976, p. 10). This was effectively a shift of focus toward the material and conceptual aspects of drawing – in keeping with Richard Serra’s often repeated declaration that “drawing is a noun,” – as evinced by the most recent work included of the conceptual and postminimal variety (Mel Bochner, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Lawrence Weiner) (Trainor 2003). In this teleology2, Rauschenberg (with over 30 works, including Erased DeKooning, 1953, the first image reproduced in the catalog) and Jasper Johns (with 10 works) comprise the chronological beginning of the survey’s thematic orientation. Johns’ Diver (1963), for instance, was deemed in the press release for the exhibition as “perhaps the most ambitious drawing of the past twenty years” (The Museum of Modern Art 1976). Yet the exhibition’s actual beginning, LeWitt’s Lines from the Center, the Corners and the Sides (1976), executed on site by the artist and two assistants, sets out a different set of propositions that went on to structure the show’s visual order: the use of the wall or other surfaces of inscription, rather than traditional drawing supports. This was case with works in the exhibition by LeWitt, Morris, and Tuttle, and enforced by Smithson’s incised slate drawings from 1973 nearby; shifts in scale and tonality; tension between the presence and absence of the artist’s “autographic” hand; and the function and method of line and mark in drawing. These themes were presented within a rhetorical installation that skirted the conventions of academic drawing exhibitions and study galleries of time. Instead, juxtaposed works at varying heights mixed in contrasting areas of dense and sparse arrangements. Formal and historical connections of grid and line, figuration and abstraction, gesture (e.g. Morris) and description (e.g. Panamarenko), graphic mark and written sign connected the monumental density of Serra’s Abstract Slavery (Trapezoidal Series), 1974, with the subtlety of Martin’s pen and ink grids, on through Carl Andre’s collages of typed words on cardboard and Oyvind Falhstrom’s cartoon inflected ink and watercolor drawings from 1962, these from the collection of Jasper Johns. Rose’s narrative of a shift from study or supporting role to ideally suited to the process‐based practices of conceptual and postminimal art was itself already inflected by a series of drawing‐centered exhibitions in the 1960 and 1970s. Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, for instance, organized by Mel Bochner at the School of Visual Arts, New York, in December 1966, was a pivotal exhibition within the genealogy of conceptual art (Steeds 2015, pp. 73–74). For the exhibition, Bochner presented four photocopied sets of drawings by artists and other cultural producers, gathered in four identical black binders displayed on individual pedestals (Bochner 2015, p. 87). The exhibition playfully affirmed the non‐art status of both the content of the work (in the inclusion of work from a variety of disciplines, in reproduction) and the nature of the medium employed. Drawing was itself “not necessarily” viewed as a modality merely for the production of art, but nonetheless positioned as central to conceptual art practices in ideational terms through Bochner’s exhibition (Fay 2008, p. 4): For Bochner, the medium offered “a directness of means with an ease of revision.”2Drawings could function as “the site of private speculations,” providing “a snapshot of the mind at work.”3 Acting, in his words, as “the residue of thought,



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the place where the artist formulates, contrives, and discards his ideas,” they “frequently contain the artist’s false starts, meanderings, errors, and incorrect arithmetic, as well as possibilities which might not have occurred to him in any other language.” (Bailey 2012)

Several other exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe positioned drawing as “the archetypal medium of conceptual art,” as a precedent to Rose’s exhibition. Drawing played a significant part in Arnold Bode’s Documenta 3, in 1964, as well as Harald Szeemann’s celebrated When Attitudes Become Form, in 1969. The former exhibition featured a distinct section devoted entirely to drawings (Julliard 2015, p. 35). This provided “an in‐comparable view of this intimate artistic medium since Cézanne,” writes Dirk Schwarze, becoming “the cornerstone” of that Documenta. “The around 500 sheets spanning a period of 80 years, shown in what was then the Alte Galerie (today’s Neue Galerie) were not just a selection of master‐pieces, but reflected the transformation of art from Vincent van Gogh to Joseph Beuys.” This selection evinced an argument deployed within the context of the large‐scale exhibition that in essence narrativized a link between the history of prewar and postwar art, and as such, a continuity of art historical development against the grain of European history through a single medium. This historiography was proposed precisely through the medium of drawing, and sustained by a self‐declared conception of it as a distinct area of production, as the “most intimate and personal form of artistic expression (Schwarze 2014).” Four years before Rose’s exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art in Oxford presented an international group exhibition of forty‐two artists billed as “an exhibition in which drawing is more of an end than a means to another medium” (Steeds 2015, pp. 73–75). [Drawing], curated by the museum’s director Peter Ibsen in 1972, featured the work of Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, Derek Jarman, John Latham, Agnes Martin, Mario Merz, Lawrence Weiner, and Richard Wentworth among others, though no installation images of the exhibition are known to exist (Steeds 2015, p. 75). Notably, all the US artists had participated in Documenta 5, as Lucy Steeds has pointed out (2015, p. 75). “The square brackets of the show’s title,” Steeds writes in her detailed study, “and the reference to ends over means in the information given on the invitation to the private view might suggest that the medium of drawing was in fact more circumstantial than definitive. Indeed the square brackets themselves start to blur the line between mediums, specifically between image and text, constituting decorative frames as well as linguistic punctuation” (2015, pp. 73–74). Ibsen’s focus for the exhibition was on, “a plural show that would provide a rich variety of recent work by young artists in which drawing has a particularly distinctive value”, including conceptual and wall based work (Sol LeWitt would have his first “Wall Drawing” solo show in the UK in 1973) (Steeds 2015, p. 76). Ibsen’s exhibition, international in scope and expanded in definition, was a direct address of the current artist practices “stretching of what drawing is supposed to be,” as one contemporaneous critic put it (Steeds 2015, p. 75). Rose’s exhibition four years later would reflect, and attempt to historicize, these same practices in their expanded form.3 Rose’s Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing, opening at MoMA in February of 1992, followed thematically and chronologically from her exhibition 16 years earlier. Featuring nearly 200 works surveying developments in drawing from 1976 onward, this ranged from “traditional drawings, some in the form of notebooks and study drawings,” to room installations by over 40 American and European artists

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over several galleries (Rose 1992, p. 6). As an “extension and re‐evaluation” of her earlier exhibition, the works in Allegories both extended and opposed its premises: addressing the limits of the definition of drawing, as well its intersection with other disciplines (Rose 1992, p. 6). Here drawing was seen as both asserting a tradition while also serving a destabilizing purpose within new modes of artistic practice. The new status of the medium meant an assertion of its “linear autonomy” as well “its conceptual control over” a variety of other disciplines. “Although increasingly an independent mode,” Rose writes in the accompanying publication, “[drawing] has also become inextricably mixed with other mediums, with painting and painterly devices, with color, and with paint itself.” The exhibition’s focus was then on the “impurity” of the medium “in the expanded field,” once again providing a survey of a medium subject to continued reevaluation and reassessment, in perpetual reexamination and whose relevance is continuously reiterated. Rose’s attempt, in particular, was to place the emergence of drawing “as a major and independent medium,” whose “basic grounds and implications were not entirely clear” at the time of the 1976 exhibition, within a historical and interpretive horizon. “It is now apparent,” she explains, “that the shift from the narrow confines of a traditional medium into an expanded field, of which the change in drawing was both symptom and a cause, was part of the transition from modernism to what is now characterized as postmodernism.” The exhibition thus marked “an important point in the re‐recognition of drawing toward the end of the twentieth century,” while “highlighting a resurgence of gestural drawing, large‐scale work, and approaches to collage and montage” (Downs 2007, p. 9). Drawing, in Rose’s terms, is positioned “as a primary vehicle” for postmodern allegory, its lexicon defined as the “abstraction and reworking of modernist style itself” through, quotation, iconography, appropriation, and a concern with the ethical nature of representation” (Downs 2007, pp. 11–12). The postmodern, of which the ­allegorical and the fragment are an extension, is thus emblematic of this shift, in which a formalist distinction between the particular character of each artistic media is overcome by drawing’s interdisciplinary nature. As Rose notes, “the support no longer invariably serves as a dividing line between disciplines,” with the (then) “new language of the arts…based on an expanded field of operations for each of its disciplines, on new relationships among then” (Downs 2007, p. 11). Drawing in this sense, was seen as assimilating a variety of esthetic agendas and practices. ­ Split over three separate spaces of the museum, the spatial arrangement of the installation itself reinforced this orientation. Works were hung around the escalators, but also within spaces outside the rooms customarily devoted to drawing exhibitions. Rose included new commissions and site specific works, notably larger scale works by artists such as Polke, Kounellis, and Clemente, when compared with the relative size of the works in Drawing Now, as well as a mural by Keith Haring, a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, a room of Allan McCollum’s iterative drawings, and a variety of approaches evident in the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman, Pat Seir, Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, Glenn Ligon, Richard Prince, and Stephen Prina, among others. A roving and descriptive line joined seriality and multiple element works at vastly different scales in the exhibition, with the figure now also emphasized. Following Craig Owen’s definition of allegory (itself cited from Northrop Frye) as a device “in which one text is read through another,” Rose’s selection seems underscored by a relation to painting, mechanical reproduction, and sculpture, which she



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deems “catalytic” to the realignment of drawing (Rose 1992, pp. 11–14). Despite the orientation toward postmodernity, the exhibition made little of postmodernisms historicist strains, staying somewhat within the horizon of canonical modernism  –  its reworking and pastiche  –  as opposed to earlier Beaux Arts traditions that defined MoMA’s particular relation to postmodern architecture, for instance. Twenty years later, Drawing Now’s central premises were echoed in Drawing Now: Eight Propositions curated by Laura Hauptman in 2002. Evoking Rose’s title, Hauptman’s exhibition functioned in critical inversion. The impetus, as she related, was the conception of drawing “as in a perpetual state of becoming,” with renewed relevance in the field of (then) recent art given an “efflorescence of contemporary drawing in the 1980s” (Rose 1992, p. 12). As Hoptman writes: Freed from the confines of the page, drawing seemed to be everywhere – in scarifications of the landscape, in site‐specific installations, in performance. The actions that went into these works – actions like scratching, scattering, walking – manifested a kind of drawing, but even as artists engaged in these metaphoric and ephemeral acts of draftmanship, many of them also continued to use the more conventional medium of pencil and paper as a means of transcription. By diagramming their performances and recording their installations, artists made visible and concrete what could not be considered material. This idea of drawing as an analogue to activity became essential to the development of conceptual art, and it continues today among post‐1980s conceptualists as the preferred method of translating artful actions into art objects. (2002, p. 11)

Featuring over 200 works by 26 “relatively young and emerging artists,” from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the exhibition was structured around the titular eight propositions, mobilized to “affirm the renewed importance of drawing, and ranging from “Science and Artifice” to “Mental Maps,” and “Fashion and Likeness” in their taxonomical focus (Trainor 2003).4 These structuring “propositions” varied from dense clustering to sparsely hung spaces with large scale works, relying on a line far removed from Rose’s “cooling,” with a varied installation afforded by the smaller number of invited artists. The exhibition reflected direct affinities with conventions of illustration, comics, and the decorative, as well as a noted shift in emphasis from process to narrative (and by extension, “finished” work) (McKenszie 2008). This distanced the curatorial perspective from Rose’s own “now‐ness,” and proposed, rather, drawing as both “noun and verb,” as Brian Fay argues. In effect, Hauptman’s exhibition suggested a historical short‐circuit to the medium in contrast: qualities of narrative, such as “evoking scenarios that are real or imagined and to tell stories,” as Janet McKenszie describes, recalling romantic or academic traditions, rather than the qualities associated with art of the 1960s (McKenszie 2008). Effectively, this meant a “reclaiming” of drawing’s “narrative imagination and historical memory,” in the words of James Trainor, functioning as “self‐enclosed, finished thing.” Widely discussed and visited, the exhibition, and its accompanying publication affirmed the importance of drawing‐based practices within the artistic generation of the 1990s and 2000s. Its full relevance was perhaps not felt until several years later, as we will shall see. Garry Garrels’s 2005 Drawing from the Modern marked the 75th anniversary of the museum’s founding by surveying its holdings since the nineteenth century in a

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three‐part, year long exhibition divided into chronological blocks: 1880–1945, 1945–1975, and 1975–2005 (Garrels and Hauptman 2005, p. 10). The exhibition’s focus was on “major developments in drawing from the perspective of the Museum’s collection, and some arguments about the role of drawing within postwar art.” The corresponding selection not only affirmed the centrality of drawing within the museum’s collection (given the inclusion of Kandinsky, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock) and so by extension the institutions history, but also drawing as a significant heuristic for understanding developments in postwar art overall. It thus echoed Rose’s and Bode’s historical analysis of drawing positioned at the center of several axis of art historical and formal development. The importance of drawing for art within this is period is “recognized as indisputable,” as Garrel’s writes: Drawing, in an unexpected way, provides an astonishingly powerful and vigorous device for reexamining the art of this period…Despite being among the most traditional of mediums and the radical departures and shifts of art during this time, drawing continued to play a crucial role in the work of almost all of the most significant artists…Drawing by its very nature provided a means for accepted understandings to be pried open, values to be reappraised, knowledge and even truth itself to be reconsidered. (Garrels and Hauptman 2005, pp. 14–15)

Beginning with Seurat, Rodin, Alfred Kubin, and turn of the century modernism, and drawing both forward and backward from the previous exhibitions (as in Bode’s Documenta), the selection followed the importance of drawing through its tri‐partite chronological division and its corresponding shifts of scale, technique, medium, and line quality, toward an expanded role in recent art. These shifts were partly evinced by the marked difference in density between the first and third iteration of the exhibition, suggesting both an expansion of means as well as methods. “Any material that may make a mark or leave a trace can be used,” Garrels asserted. “Any support, from manifold varieties of paper to the wall of a room, may sustain the act of drawing” (Garrels and Hauptman 2005, p. 50). The year of Garrel’s exhibition also saw the publication of an important survey of contemporary drawing, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, published by Phaidon, featuring the work of 109 artists. A “global, up‐to‐the‐minute survey of drawing today,” it purported to be the “most comprehensive book to document the current art‐historical moment when artists are redefining and pushing the boundaries of drawing in fresh directions.” As Emma Dexter writes in the preface, “[T]he current resurgence of drawing in recent years is perhaps the first moment in history when artists can opt for drawing as their principle medium, confident in the knowledge that their work will not suffer in status as a result (2005, p. 8).” Along with critical and esthetic shifts, such a perspective marks a correlative change in the valuation of drawing, in term of collecting practices that served to place drawing into a role of principle medium by the mid‐2000s. If artists could indeed “opt for drawing,” confident that their work would not “suffer in status,” this entailed valuation in market, as well as in the museological terms. If these exhibitions featured artists working primarily in drawing, this was correlative with a change in production conditions and the increased presence of the medium within the global art market following the 1990s. On the one hand, the production conditions that allowed particular forms of post‐minimal or installation art – such as inexpensive real estate



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and postindustrial modes of production, affording particular scale  –  gave away to forces of gentrification, precarity, and neo‐liberal economic models that directly influenced the material conditions for the production of art. Drawing, as small scale and relatively low cost, made for a primary and accessible mode of artistic production for young artists working under these conditions, as digital production would make the moving image increasingly accessible through the late 2000s. On the other, several “market factors”, as Brian Fay has argued, contributed to “an awakened interest in drawing,” including changes in the market circulation of works: Drawing is relatively inexpensive when compared to other artforms, making it attractive to new and existing collectors. With for example, the rise of the international Art Fair in 1990s, drawing (in its low‐tech works on paper format) has proven itself popular in adapting to the format of the stereotypical small modular display booths, which can inhibit the presentation of larger more elaborate works. (Fay 2008, p. 19)

The exhibition Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection presented at MoMA in 2009 evinced these changes as a significant extension of the holdings of the MoMA collection as presented in Garrel’s exhibition. Organized by Christian Rattemeyer (with Cornelia H. Butler) the exhibition presented over 300 works from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, a collection of over 2500 works by 650 artists gifted to the museum in 2005. The collection had been put together in just two years by the Foundation’s sole trustee, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, also a trustee of MoMA, in consultation with Garrels, then The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the museum, and Andre Schlechtriem, Curator, Contemporary Drawings Collection for the Foundation. The acquisition began, notably, two months after the closing date of Hauptman’s exhibition in 2003, itself already affirming the importance of the medium to younger artists. (Rattemeyer 2009). Described as attempt at a “cross‐section of a moment in time,” the collection constituted the largest gift to the department of drawings, with nearly 350 artists introduced into the museum’s collection through the gift (Rattemeyer 2009, pp. 7–15). This reflects a significant change in the practices of collecting and exhibiting drawing, brought out by presentation precisely in exhibition form. As a survey of drawing at the beginning of the twenty‐first century,” the resulting exhibition was “the largest of drawings ever mounted at the Museum of Modern Art, and perhaps one of the largest in the history of the medium” (Rattemeyer 2009, 10). The exhibition was conceived as “speaking first and foremost to the vitally of drawing today, documenting a resurgence of the medium’s importance to contemporary art practice over the past two decades” (Rattemeyer 2009, p. 17). The collection Rattemeyer drew from for the exhibition was put together in a protracted period of time and admittedly with no necessary thematic, conceptual, or esthetic criteria. As Rattemeyer writes in the accompanying publication, what the collection provided for, instead, was, “a selection of the most relevant current tendencies of works on paper and represents the broadest possible overview of the different ways a drawing is conceived, made, used, and organized” (2009, p. 16)5. As a result, the curatorial premise brought to collection was set on two orientations, spatializing a coherence to an otherwise dispersed collection of objects in time: “the

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notion of drawing as a conceptual exploration of mark making, and as representational image making” (Rattemeyer 2009, p. 8). These could encompass a variety of practices, with conceptual and outsider artists as observe of the other. In particular, Rattemeyer identified “a change of direction in the most recent works,” suggesting a expansion of “new approaches to working on paper, or rather with paper as a reconfigured material,” with collage and assemblage assuming “a major role in art across all disciplines” since the early 2000s (Rattemeyer 2009, p. 24). Rattemeyer’s resulting selection engaged the precedent of both Rose’s and Hoptman’s “now’s”, including 30 of the 40 artists presented in Rose’s 1976 exhibition (Rattemeyer 2009, p. 19)6. To this historical basis, he added a selection of drawing‐based work by recent artists such as Guyton/Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Lucy Makenzie. Marked by the presence of color and strongly graphic work, the exhibition included drawing‐based practices that incorporated photography and collage, with the arrangement of the walls allowing for literal “cross‐sections” across rooms and segments, and so a relation of works against and between each other. The exhibition thus precisely spatialized connections across space not readily visible in the collection’s conception across time. The introduction of so many new artists into the collection marked an important facet of the exhibition. The collection’s incorporation into MoMA represented the inclusion of virtually an entire generation of artists by means of a single medium, that is, in terms of the criteria of working precisely within that medium. The collection effectively reversed the hierarchy, in collecting terms, of drawing’s status, offering inclusion by the fact of medium‐specificity to many artists who would not otherwise, or until then, be considered for inclusion in the museum’s collection, or whose work would not be immediately associated with drawing‐based concerns. This was true in generational terms as it was in terms of medium: as in the case of photographer Christopher Williams, who entered the MoMA collection through this significant gift to the drawing department, rather than an acquisition by the Department of Photography. The result was to redraw the balance of historical and contemporary material in the collection. “The presence of so many young artists,” Rattemeyer wrote, “not only attests to a significantly changed attitude toward risk and experimental spirit but also shifts the balance of the Museum’s collection of drawings, so that it is now almost evenly distributed among modern, postwar, and contemporary art” (2009, p. 17). The resulting display, notable for being a cohesive exhibition of basically pre‐selected and largely uncontextualized material, was structured by correspondences, formal and technical connections, and intergenerational affinities and antecedents, constructing a spatial narrative of recent (and until then largely unwritten) art history precisely within drawing and through the exhibition form.

Drawing as Center7 It was a former assistant curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, Martha Beck, who in the year of Rose’s seminal exhibition founded an institution devoted entirely to the history and presentation of drawing. The Drawing Center (where I was Curator from 2007–2009) was founded in 1976 to address what Beck saw as a “longstanding neglect of drawings” on the part of institutions, with the aim of



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“encouraging work on paper, and the visibility and appreciation” of the medium of drawing (Ault 2003, p. 49). “If paintings and sculptures represented the grand narratives of fine art, she said, drawings were often the original flashes of insight that led to them  –  the intimate, direct and experimental state of an artist’s creative process” (Vitello 2014). With this impetus as founding principle, the Drawing Center quickly became an “unlikely setting for rarely seen drawings by the likes of Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Cézanne,” with 125,000 visitors its first year (Vitello 2014). Since its inception, the institution followed a particular methodology in its “public work of analyzing and presenting drawing.” The program presented both historical and contemporary exhibitions, shifting between old master drawings and group exhibitions by emerging contemporary artists, and thematic surveys and solo exhibitions by artists such as Lewitt and Serra. Various exhibition typologies, including surveys, retrospectives, and commissions where applied to the practice and history of a single artistic medium. In addition, the institution originated, true to its origins within the context of alternative arts institutions in 1970s New York, “a curated registry for emerging artists,” that was “dedicated to aiding the development of and providing visibility for the work of emerging artists,” and from which it curated regular group exhibitions (Ault 2003, p. 49). This evinced drawing’s significance within the practice of younger artists, as the historical exhibitions (usually the purview of non‐contemporary museums) created a genealogy and context for these same practices (The Drawing Center n.d.). This approach to drawing placed the medium both at the center of art historical knowledge as well as of contemporary production simultaneously. The founding of the Center reflects the role of drawing exhibitions beyond merely responding to particular moments or developments in contemporary art. The institution’s founding in fact coincides with a shift in the esthetic, economic, and social dynamics of drawing practices themselves, in which, along with its increased presence in the contemporary art market, its transversal status conferred onto it a role in a variety of disciplines and ascendant concerns through the 1970s and 1980s. A desirable and active area of collecting interest, drawing became a medium through which the production of many contemporary practitioners who would otherwise be inaccessible  –  such as large‐scale sculpture, installation, or the higher‐end painting market – could circulate in market terms. At the same time, curatorial and discursive production around drawing now began to intervene directly into discussions around its validity and visibility directly, through its constitution as an institutional object. Notable, for instance, is the increase in large‐scale monographic exhibitions of drawing‐based artists beginning in the late 1980s, and that would come to represent a significant part of the Drawing Center’s programming throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Along with particularly notable exhibitions such as 3X Abstraction (2005), The Stage of Drawing, (2003), Creative Copies (1988), and Sculptors’ Drawings over Six Centuries (1981) the Center has presented (in some cases early) solo exhibitions of the likes of James Castle, Ellsworth Kelly, Mira Schendel, William Kentridge, Trisha Brown, Tacita Dean, and Eva Hesse. As importantly, the Center’s exhibition practices also asserted drawing’s important and constitutive role within other disciplines beside the visual arts, including choreography, film, architecture, literature and beyond. The Center’s earliest exhibitions included a presentation of drawings of Antonio Gaudi (1977), and the history of animation in America (The Drawing Center 1978). From tattoos, to the drawings of Victor Hugo and the “Plains Indians”, drawing was conceived as connecting across

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historical spans and cultural practices (The Drawing Center 1995–1996). The medium was thus conceived as both a distinct art historical object  –  until then subject to neglect, but with rising prominence in the 1960 and 1970s, as noted by Rose’s exhibition  –  and a cultural practice that provided a distinct area of wider investigation beyond art history. Such a transhistorical and transdisiplinary perspective, within an institution which addressed and constituted drawing as an object of research and presentation, made it influential in asserting the relevance of the drawing throughout the 1980s and 1990s. While particular exhibitions in the Center’s history have played an important role in this “centering” during the tenure of its directors Ann Philbin, Catherine de Zegher, and Brett Littman, it has been the approach to drawing as a topoi of investigation in general, presented in the exhibition format, that has perhaps been most significant. What this effected was an expansion of discourse around drawing beyond traditional ideas of perception, primacy, and academic rigor, and instead, affirming varied historical, thematic, and connections within and between historical periods and modes of practice (Brown and Myrone 2010). In particular, a reading of the act of drawing around the drawn mark, and centered on immediacy, gesture, and the relation between the tactile and the visual. As former director Catherine de Zegher writes in the publication accompanying the 25th anniversary exhibition, precisely titled “Drawing (as) Center:” Drawing is a primary response to the world: an outward gesture that links our inner impulses and thoughts to the Other through the touching of an inscriptive surface with repeated graphic marks…….A primal mode of image production, the drawn mark thus stages not only a separation but also a binding in the discovery of the trace...The drawing “speaks” more through its tracing than in its trace, more through its process than as a product. At the moment of its invention and creation, drawing seems to exceed what subsequently passes for drawing itself… (The Drawing Center 2002, p. 3)

Such a perspective serves to both underscore and overmine drawing’s importance. The medium, in this conception, is seen as both “autonomous and non‐teleological,” and “hybrid and transitive,” that is, both constituted as an object of inquiry, and constitutive of other practices, “standing between different forms of expression,” as it does between “idea and plasticity of form” (The Drawing Center 2002, p. 3). While a medium with its own history and discourse, in intersecting with other disciplines, drawing is thus positioned as “the core medium of exploration,” given its critical and reflexive quality as act, gesture, and process. Drawing intersects here with the very act of thinking and doing beyond that of the history of art. This positioning of drawing as center drew on strains of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist thought, and in particular, the writings of Lacan, Klein, and Derrida. Derrida’s own curated exhibition of drawings at the Louvre in 1990, Memoirs of the Blind, was of particular importance in this shift. Consisting of forty‐four works drawn from the Louvre’s collection (along with four paintings, two of them on loan) it was accompanied by a notable, largely stand‐alone publication that expanded on the exhibition’s premise, what Derrida called the “hypothesis of sight” (Ancell 2014). The Drawing Center’s important influence on the perception of drawing since its inception was evident in the 2010 MoMA exhibition, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century curated by De Zegher and Butler. The exhibition, in essence,



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brought the institutions founding mission full circle. The premise of the exhibition, “the radical transformation of the medium of drawing throughout the twentieth century,” was marked by an examination and expansion of the medium’s role in modern and contemporary art (The Museum of Modern Art 2011). Instead of focusing on paper as fundamental support, the exhibition proposed it was the line that was pushed “across the plane into real space, thus questioning the relation between the object of art and the world”. As an “expanded history of drawing that moves off the page into space and time,” the exhibition presented over three hundred works, connecting drawing with a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography, film, and dance – from the Serpentine Dance, to Cubist collage, and postminimal sculpture, effectively a morphological history of modern and contemporary art through the structuring element of a “line that is always unfolding, always becoming” (Butler and Zegher 2010, p. 23). Recently, the founding of two other institutions following the precedent of the Drawing Center have reflected and enforced the continuing relevance of drawing. The Drawing Room, co‐founded by Mary Doyle, Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout, was established in 2000 “to provide the European resource for the investigation of drawing – its practice, methodology and theory” (Drawing Room n.d.). The institution’s framework was to, “formulate a programme that investigates contemporary forms of art‐making and that makes a significant contribution to its scholarship,” through exhibitions and publications focused on “increasing depth of research and understanding” of the medium (Drawing Room n.d.). Through this program, the institution “continues to confirm that drawing plays a key role for contemporary practitioners, through featuring artists who engage with and indeed redefine the material and conceptual properties of the medium, as well as those who use it as an essential springboard to make other forms of art” (Drawing Room n.d.). The Menil Drawing Institute was established in 2008 with the aim of becoming “a leading international venue for thinking about the centrality of drawing in modern and contemporary artistic culture” (Menil Drawing Institute n.d.). The Institute has organized traveling exhibitions of Richard Serra and Lee Bonticou, and is responsible for the multiple‐volume catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Jasper Johns. A freestanding building, “the first solely dedicated to the exhibition, study, conservation, and storage of modern and contemporary drawing,” is scheduled to be completed in 2017. “With spaces for exhibition, study, research, conservation, and reflection,” the building will feature, “exhibition and research programs [that] will reveal the multiple places that drawing inhabits – as a form of inquiry, a medium of experimentation and communication, and an end in its own right” (Menil Drawing Institute n.d.). It is apt to ask what it might mean for a supposed marginal medium to have become central through such exhibition practices in this manner, such as to now become the focus of several institutions of its own. Part of the rhetoric around drawing has been how it was remained “outside, or at least beside,” the narrative of art history, and thus subject to emphasis of critical “renewal”: If it is seen as separate from art’s history, drawing can therefore be viewed into ways: either as another means to participate in an art in crisis, or as a means to escape the boundaries of current aesthetic trends. Being bracketed off from the mainstream has facilitated the current popularity that reiterates its particular ­properties. (Downs 2007, p. 10)

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Can drawing as a practice maintain the criticality once afforded by its secondary status, one that might have made the medium relevant to artists in the first place? What of the narrative of reassessment and resurgence that has sustained the inquiry into drawing, as reflected by this historiography of exhibitions? The centering of drawing within contemporary art, effected by exhibition practices, suggests these questions will remain pressing as the medium continues, as always, to engage new modalities of making, seeing, and doing.

Notes 1 “Barnett Newman swore that the first man, who happened to be an artist, made the line in the dirt with a stick, creating the first drawing and simultaneously the first art work” (Hoptman 2002, p. 11). 2 Rose’s reading perhaps indebted to an earlier exhibition. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 1964. “American Drawings.” Accessed February 7. https://www. guggenheim.org/publication/american‐drawings 3 As indeed would Cornelia H. Bulter’s important 1999 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Afterimage: Drawing Through Process. 4 The oldest artist, Russell Crotty, was 46 (Trainor 2003). 5 The only declared organizing principle was that of the geographic centers of focus, namely, NY, Los Angeles, London, Glasgow, Berlin, Cologne, and Dusseldorf (Rattemeyer 2009, p. 16). 6 Both exhibitions are astutely discussed in the accompanying publication as exhibitions which have had a “direct and palpable impact on the shape of the conversation about drawing.”(Rattemeyer 2009, p. 17) 7 (The Drawing Center 2002).

References Ancell, M. (2014). Credo ergo sum: faith, blindness, and pictorial logic in Derrida’s memoirs of the blind. Oxford Art Journal 37 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcu007. Ault, J. (2003). Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bailey, M. (2012). “Mel Bochner.” Notations: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process. Accessed on February 7. http://notations.aboutdrawing.org/category/mel‐bochner Bochner, M. (2015). Exhibitions [of drawings] in Britain, 1964–80. In: Towards Visibility: Exhibiting Contemporary Drawing 1964–80 (ed. J.E. Julliard). Switzerland: Roven Editions. Brown, D.B. and Myrone, M. (2010). “William Blake’s 1809 Exhibition”, Tate Papers, Number: 14. Accessed July 10. www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate‐papers/ william‐blakes‐1809‐exhibition#footnote12_ep9xtun Butler, C.H. and de Zegher, C. (2010). On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Dexter, E. (2005). Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. London: Phaidon Press. Downs, S. (2007). Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art. London/New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.



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Drawing Room (2015). “Towards Visibility ‐ Exhibiting Contemporary Drawing 1964‐1980”. Accessed February 07. https://drawingroom.org.uk/shop/towards‐visibility‐exhibiting‐ contemporary‐drawing‐1964‐1980 Drawing Room (n.d.) “Drawing Room: About us.” Accessed February 09. https://drawingroom.org.uk/about‐us Elderfield, J. (1983). The Modern Drawing ‐ 100 Works on Paper from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Fay, B. (2008). Casting a Net: Contemporary Drawing Practices and Strategies. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology. Fay, B., Moran, L., and Byrne, S. (2013). What Is Drawing? Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art. Garrels, G. and Hauptman, J. (2005). Drawing from the Modern: 1945–1975. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Hegel, G.W.F. and Knox, T.M. (eds.) (1975). Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1e, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hoptman, L.J. (ed.) (2002). Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, 1e. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Julliard, J.E. (2015). Opting for drawings. A short history of the visible presence of drawing in Switzerland at the time when the figure of the exhibition curator arrived on the scene. In: Towards Visibility: Exhibiting Contemporary Drawing 1964–80 (ed. J.E. Julliard). Roven Editions: Switzerland. Maker, W. (2000). Heguel and Aesthetics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. McKenszie, J. (2008). “Contemporary Drawing: Recent Studies.” Studio International. Accessed February 07. http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/contemporary‐ drawing‐recent‐studies Menil Drawing Institute (n.d.) “Menil Drawing Institute: Mission.” Accessed February 09. https://www.menil.org/drawing‐institute/mission Rattemeyer, C. (2009). Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection. New York: The Modern Museum of Art. Rose, B. (1976). Drawing Now. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Rose, B. (1992). Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Schwarze, D. (2014). “The Allure of Drawings”. Accessed February 7. http:// dirkschwarze.net/2014/07/03/the‐allure‐of‐drawings Steeds, L. (2015). Exhibitions [of drawings] in Britain, 1964–80. In: Towards Visibility: Exhibiting Contemporary Drawing 1964–80 (ed. J.E. Julliard). Switzerland: Roven Editions. Stefanis, K. (2010). “Reasoned Exhibitions: Blake in 1809 and Reynolds in 1813”, Tate Papers, Number: 14. Accessed July 07. www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate‐ papers/14/reasoned‐exhibitions‐blake‐in‐1809‐and‐reynolds‐in‐1813#footnote3_ktqblnh The Drawing Center (1977). “Antonio Gaudi” Accessed February 09 http://www.drawingcenter.org/en/drawingcenter/5/exhibitions/14/past/301/the‐drawings‐of‐ antonio‐gaudi/ The Drawing Center (1978). “Drawings for Animated Films 1914–1978.” Accessed February 09. http://www.drawingcenter.org/en/drawingcenter/5/exhibitions/14/past The Drawing Center (2002). 25th anniversary benefit selections exhibition. Drawing (as) Center. In: Drawing Papers, vol. 31. New York: Drawing Center Publications.

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The Drawing Center (n.d.) “Submissions Guidelines.” Accessed February 09. http:// www.drawingcenter.org/viewingprogram/submissions_guidelines.cfm The Museum of Modern Art (1976). “DRAWING NOW: 1955‐1975” Accessed February 08. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/5345/ releases/MOMA_1976_0004_4.pdf?2010 The Museum of Modern Art (2011). “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.” Accessed February 09. http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/970?locale=en Trainor, J. (2003). “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions.” Frieze, 73. Accessed February 7. https://frieze.com/article/drawing‐now‐eight‐propositions Vitello, P. (2014). “Martha Beck, a Curator of Fine Sketches, Dies at 75.” The New York Times. January 22, 2014. Accessed February 09. http://www.nytimes. com/2014/01/23/arts/design/martha‐beck‐founder‐of‐the‐drawing‐center‐dies‐ at‐75.html?_r=0

Part II

The Condition of Drawing

10

Observation and Drawing From Looking to Seeing Paul Moorhouse

According to one of the characters in George Eliot’s celebrated nineteenth century novel The Mill on the Floss, drawing is “very easy” ([1860] 1994, p. 163). In the ­episode in question, the youthful Philip Wakem is discussing his accomplishments as a draughtsman with Tom Tulliver, who is evidently deeply impressed by his schoolfellow’s gifts. The two boys speculate about the connection between observation and drawing, and their respective views are revealing. Tom is astounded by Philip’s ability to represent the appearance of things so accurately: “Why, that’s a donkey with panniers  –  and a spaniel, and partridges in the corn!” For Philip, this fidelity to the observed subject is simply a question of close inspection, repetition, and adjustment. By way of explanation, he adds, “You’ve only to look well at things and draw them over and over again. What you do wrong once, you can alter next time.” From a twentieth century perspective, this exchange has a charming naivety. Philip makes his ability to “look well” sound simple, and his command of drawing appears correspondingly straightforward: “I never learned drawing.” Like Philip, Tom associates drawing with an ability to replicate the appearance of things. Within the context of this fictional situation observation precedes drawing, and the relation of the two activities is uncomplicated: the drawn image is simply a copy of whatever the artist was looking at. In reality, however, the relation of observation and drawing raises profound questions: both from a philosophical perspective and in practical terms. First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty’s magisterial study Phenomenology of Perception contains a detailed exposition of the difficulties surrounding observation. His probing analysis presents a formidable contrast to the earlier, down‐to‐earth views advanced by Eliot’s characters. The French philosopher’s account is encapsulated in his comment that “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see” (Merleau‐Ponty [1945] 2002, p. 67). Merleau‐Ponty was writing from a phenomenological perspective, which dissolved the distinction between object and observer implicit in Eliot’s scenario. The perceived world and the perceiving mind are A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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mutual constituents of what Merleau‐Ponty described as “the phenomenal field.” The world is constituted in perception. However, as he acknowledged, it is difficult to know “what we see” because this experience is itself a perceptual mechanism. We cannot stand aside and examine the connection between an observed object and a perceived image. For Merleau‐Ponty, that distinction makes no sense. The world is a field of experience, whose nature is indistinguishable from the things manifest in perception. Merleau‐Ponty explained this in the following way: Experience of phenomena is not…that of a reality of which we are ignorant and leading to which there is a methodological bridge – it is the making explicit or bringing to light of the prescientific life of consciousness… (Merleau‐Ponty [1945] 2002, p. 68)

The viewpoint taken by Merleau‐Ponty presents a particular issue for drawing, which has a long history as a means of responding to an observed subject. How would this practical activity function if “what we see” is uncertain? According to Merleau‐Ponty, the seer is caught up in the field of their own perceptions, an indeterminate world located in the body. There is no bridge leading to an external reality. Without a verifiable subject, what precisely is being observed in the act of drawing? Indeed, does the concept of observation continue to have meaning in the context of a “phenomenal field”? By contrast, Eliot posits a world outside, with the observer looking outwards and “well” at things. Drawing is based on observation and forms a record of the seer’s judgments. The contrasting models presented by Eliot and Merleau‐Ponty would seem to represent nothing less than a sea‐change in the way we understand our place in the world, and our relationship with it. During the twentieth century the world that Eliot regarded as an external objective phenomenon yielded to an alternative view of existence, which Merleau‐Ponty describes in terms of the way it is experienced. But if Merleau‐Ponty is correct, and the nature of what we see is forever in doubt, the act of looking is itself open to question and needs to be reformulated: what exactly are we looking at? This in turn raises a related question. If drawing is regarded as a record of observation, and indeed as a primary vehicle for exploring the evidence of sight, what implications do these seemingly radical changes in philosophical outlook have for that eminently practical graphic activity? What, indeed, is the nature and purpose of drawing if the phenomenological model advanced by Merleau‐Ponty has continuing relevance to contemporary thought? In order to address these questions it is necessary firstly to consider the wider intellectual framework for Eliot’s and Merleau‐Ponty’s respective positions, and then to locate drawing within the philosophical context that has developed.

A Line of Thought The view of existence shared by Eliot’s young characters is a common‐sense one, but its philosophical roots run long and deep. The idea that we experience an external universe through the way it is represented to us through the senses can be traced to Plato. In the myth of the cave, which appears in the Republic, the prisoners confront a constantly changing pageant of shadows cast on the wall in front of them. Being unaware of the source of these images, they take these representations as constituting reality. With that analogy, Plato identified a crucial dichotomy, which exists between



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the world as it is and the way we see it. As Ernst Gombrich reminds us in Art and Illusion, his influential study of the psychology of pictorial representation written in 1960, in classical antiquity Pliny evinced a position similar to that of Plato when he observed that “the mind is the real instrument of sight and observation, the eyes act as a sort of vessel receiving and transmitting the visible portion of the consciousness” (in Gombrich 1960, p. 15). Here in embryo is a theory of perception, with observation acting as a bridge between the physical world and its mental counterpart. Pliny’s model proposed the mind as a mechanism that interprets the visual data emanating from the physical world. While that theory continues to command support to the present day, the uncertain nature of the dichotomous relationship between the observer and the observed subject was outlined with compelling force by Descartes, writing in the seven teenth century. His First Meditation contains the comment, “Now I have sometimes caught the senses deceiving me; and a wise man never entirely trusts those who have once cheated him.” (Descartes 1971, pp. 62–63). In the same essay, Descartes compounded the potentially illusory nature of the images presented by the senses with a related argument concerning dreams, in which we see things that appear real, even though such images have no basis in the external world. The far‐reaching significance of these insights is that, while maintaining a dualistic connection between mind and matter, the veracity of observation is contested. Through being rooted in visual experience and other sensory evidence, our relationship with the world is doubtful, and our ability to relate to it – not least as observers – indeterminate. Proceeding from that position of doubt, the philosophical view that the world was not only indeterminate but unknowable gathered ground during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Immanuel Kant took the dualistic model of reality a momentous step further by conceiving of existence in terms of the noumenal and the phenomenal. The noumenal referred to reality as it actually is, and the phenomenal to the world as it is presented to us via the senses. Because the noumenal exists independent of the senses, its nature is forever incomprehensible. Kant’s intellectual successor Arthur Schopenhauer identified the noumenal (or ‘will’, as he called it) and the phenomenal as different aspects of the same reality, while maintaining that the world accessed via the senses is an interior construct – a representation – shaped by subjective experience. This was again a vital insight, the implication of which was that observation could not be a verifiable record of external reality, but rather an engagement with the subjective appearances generated by each individual. The perceptual basis of reality is implicit in Kant and Schopenhauer’s work, a model that both elevates the role of observation and ties it to interior experience. It received a further impetus in the twentieth century through the philosophical ideas of the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. In his important book Adventures of Ideas (1933), Whitehead adumbrated a system that attempted to explain how ideas and images come into being having been inspired, via the senses, by an unknowable exterior source. He explained that the “recipient” or observer is constantly interacting with the world and being affected by it. As a result of that sensory interaction, the individual experiences formless sensations, which are “starkly, barely present and immediate” (Whitehead 1933, p. 232). At an unconscious level, the observer interprets that inchoate material, making judgments based on previous knowledge. As a result, bare sensations acquire subjective form and mental significance, a process that Whitehead describes as “concrescence,” meaning “growing together” (1933, p. 303). The interior world of represented appearances referred to by Schopenhauer takes

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shape as a result of the integration of the physical world within the mental domain. Whitehead defines such critical moments of cognition, when a visual image is formed in the mind, as the point when “appearance merges into reality” (1933, p. 272). Necessarily concise, this philosophical trajectory returns us to the phenomenological account of reality presented by Merleau‐Ponty, in which the individual’s experience of the world is firmly located within the domain of perception. The purpose of this outline has been to trace the way ideas connected with observing the world have developed. Beginning with Plato’s dialectical conception of a transcendent reality which is responsible for the appearance of things, the pendulum has swung away from an attempt to explain an external, timeless, objective, and absolute world that we experience indirectly and imperfectly. Instead, there has been an increasing emphasis on that which can be pursued with greater immediacy, namely the flux of our perceptions as described by Merleau‐Ponty. These intellectual developments are significant because they define the subject to which observation – and drawing, insofar as it is connected with observation – must be addressed. By the mid‐twentieth century, the phenomenologist’s field of experience had emerged as a potential subject for observational drawing. Indeed, as we shall see, it is possible to view the drawings made by Merleau‐Ponty’s contemporary, Alberto Giacometti, in the light of those philosophical ideas. However, before turning to such individual cases, it is necessary to conclude this discussion of the philosophical background to observation with some remarks about more recent intellectual developments, which relate the question of perception specifically to art. For Ernst Gombrich, as for his nineteenth century art historian predecessors, any discussion of art proceeds from recognition of the central importance played by the sense of sight. Through “looking at nature” (1960, p. 12), as Gombrich calls it, we interact with the world, gather information about it, and come to a deeper understanding of our place within it. In that respect, Gombrich cites a much earlier authority, Cicero, whose argument “turns on the status of sense perceptions as a source of knowledge” (1960, p. 10). Being rooted in observation, art provides a vehicle and a context for that process and, as Gombrich makes clear in the introduction to Art and Illusion, “the history of representation in art became increasingly mixed up with the psychology of perception” (1960, p. 9). In exploring that connection, Gombrich’s book has been undoubtedly influential for a modern readership although, as the author readily acknowledged, the work of such earlier theorists as Konrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Alois Reigl paved the way. Nor has Gombrich’s work been without its critics subsequently. Even so, his book has enduring significance in foregrounding the role of perception in an artistic context. Indeed, one of Gombrich’s comments has cautionary value for the present discussion of the relation of observation and drawing: “Psychology has become alive to the immense complexity of the processes of perception, and no one claims to understand them completely” (1960, p. 25). This, however, has not prevented compelling attempts made both by theorists and artists. A central plank of Gombrich’s discussion is the subjective, and therefore indeterminate, nature of perception. If observation may be considered as the process by which “looking at nature” yields a mental representation, then, as Gombrich makes clear, that transaction is by no means automatic. Taking John Ruskin’s idea of “the innocent eye” in his sights, Gombrich draws on a range of authorities to attack the earlier writer’s notion of observation as a purely optical view of the world. In his book



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The Elements of Drawing (1857) Ruskin argued that “The whole technical power of painting depends on what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify…” ([1857] 1859, p. 6). Against that view, Gombrich protested that “it is so hard for us all to disentangle what we really see from what we merely know and thus to recover the innocent eye, a term to which Ruskin gave currency” (1960, p. 14). For the later writer, observation was inescapably a question of actively mediating individual contact with the external world, a learnt process that involved reconstituting sensory information according to knowledge, interpretation, and inference. In arriving at that standpoint, Gombrich adduced that making art based on observation was therefore never simply a question of absorbing and recording sense impressions. Rather, the “whole idea of the ‘imitation of nature’ of ‘idealization,’ or of ‘abstraction’ rests on the assumption that what comes first are ‘sense impressions’ that are subsequently elaborated, distorted, or generalized” (Gombrich 1960, p. 28). In considering the nature of observation, one of the most valuable principles arising from Gombrich’s discussion is his conclusion that we do not learn to have sense data; but, rather, we acquire an ability to interpret and differentiate them. That activity rests on judgment. According to Gombrich, when we “look well” at the world – as Eliot’s young draughtsman would have it – we erect “hypotheses” (1960, p. 29) in response to the visual sensations that are experienced. Gombrich characterized this perceptual operation as one of “trial and error” (1960, p. 29). That is to say, we form mental images in response to sensory impressions by setting up hypothetical models for what we are experiencing. This mechanism involves comparing provisional cognitive ideas with our memories in order finally to arrive at a form of representation – a visualization – that we identify with the world. Based on Gombrich’s account, observation may therefore be understood as the active means by which we make personal visual sense of our contact with external circumstances. Through the exercise of judgment we arrive at perceptual schemata, which constitute our subjective experience of reality. At the core of this process there is the implication that the observer comes into relation with the world through an ongoing “trial and error” – based visual involvement with their surroundings. The implications that this way of thinking about observation has for drawing may now be apparent. Drawing is a dynamic process during which we give visual hypotheses tangible form: we try out and shape our responses to what we see. However, before examining the way various artists’ approaches to drawing manifest such ideas, this brief survey of the philosophical background to observation concludes with a consideration of recent work of John Shotter, writing in 2013 in the context of social theory and organizational studies. Shotter’s ideas form a parallel with the theoretical insights provided both by Merleau‐Ponty and Gombrich. The way that we form meaning through participating in a flow of indeterminate experience is the basis of Shotter’s thinking, and, although not addressed to artistic issues per se, his insights are especially valuable when considering the role of drawing as an observational tool. In common with Merleau‐Ponty and Gombrich, Shotter’s ideas manifest a movement away from the notion of an immutable external world waiting to be discovered. Replacing the model of concern with the hidden properties of a world “out there,”1 as Shotter puts it, there is a focus instead on our ongoing bodily involvement with ever‐changing surroundings. It is as participants in a “still developing, indeterminate

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fluid world” that we create “living” meanings, which enable us to understand the situations we encounter. Shotter begins by characterizing the way we experience much of our everyday activity as a “sense of an indeterminate lack of something or other, but nothing in particular.” From that feeling of being, as it were, adrift in each new situation, there is a need to “get oriented.” Shotter explains that rather than attempting to discover the underlying formal nature of an essentially mysterious external world, we should endeavor instead to work with the uncertainties we encounter: “we live immersed in an oceanic world of ceaseless, intra‐mingling currents of activity – many quite invisible – currents of activity which in fact influence us much more than we can influence them.” Citing Wittgenstein, he concludes that the task is to find our “way about.” In an echo both of Merleau‐Ponty and Gombrich, Shotter describes the nature of such exploratory activity as “a co‐emergent, back and forth, essentially hermeneutic process – in which ‘I’ as a Subject experiencing a certain kind of ‘thing’ in the world, and an Object experienced as that thing arise together in the act of experience.” Furthermore, in developing a notion of how that “back and forth” hermeneutic process is enacted, Shotter echoes Gombrich’s notion of “trial and error,” and he emphasizes the need to “learn to make judgments.” In so doing, the individual organizes unmerged fragments of experience by seeing connections between different phenomena. Shotter’s conclusion, namely that the subjects of such attention “combine only in us,” is reminiscent of Merleau‐Ponty’s views. However, in describing the fruit of this endeavor, Shotter quotes Wittgenstein, the outcome being “to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.” Beyond the context of social theory, Shotter’s entire exposition could be taken as providing a blueprint for the interaction of observation and drawing, the purpose of these activities being to orient the observer in relation to the observed subject. As Shotter makes clear in a telling analogy, the situations we confront daily are no more immediately apprehensible than, say, arriving in a new city. We come to know that complex three‐dimensional entity by adopting an insider’s approach and moving about within it. Similarly, through drawing and the judgments exercised as part of that activity, the observed subject’s unconnected aspects become organized. In the image that is formed by the observer – both cognitively and on a two dimensional surface – the subject acquires meaning. The imperative to comprehend that which is “already in plain view” echoes Eliot’s advice to “look well” as the basis for drawing; but the failure to understand that which is immediately before us is the shared message sent by all the authorities cited above, and one well encapsulated by Wittgenstein. It now remains to consider how these at once simple and yet complex questions relating to observation have been addressed by four exponents of drawing in the twentieth century.

The Looking Encounter George Eliot’s description of the exchange between Philip Wakem and Tom Tulliver brings to light a vital aspect of drawing from observation, an experience that may now be characterized as the looking encounter. The novelist’s evocation of this situation suggests that an individual’s visual engagement with an observed subject is apparently no more complicated than the act of looking itself. The boys’ discussion turns on the



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idea that looking involves paying attention to some aspect of a present situation and, through that active engagement, the person looking encounters the object in view. The nature of that encounter is the familiar layman’s version. The implication is that the observer views the world with eyes that form a window on the world, and that whatever is “out there” is directly apprehensible. The difficulties arise when the observer attempts to replicate that which is seen in the form of a drawing. Tom admits, “Why, when I make dogs and horses and those things, the heads and legs won’t come right, though I can see how they ought to be very well” (Eliot [1860] 1994, p. 163). For this young draughtsman, the evident disjunction between what is  being seen and the drawn image that results is a source of frustration and disappointment. Tom’s feelings of failure are in part due to a realization that what should be plain‐ sailing is, in practice, clearly not so. Looking and copying what is seen in the form of a drawing should be a simple matter, but, as we have noted, the components of that operation are more complex than they seem. If looking may be described as paying attention – and, to use Philip’s injunction, involves attending “well” or closely – then subsequent to looking there is a stage which may not have been immediately obvious to this youthful artist. As the preceding discussion suggests, observation may be characterized at that process by which looking becomes seeing. Through observation, visual awareness acquires significance: the observer interprets and “understands” what is in plain view, as Wittgenstein described it. For the various authorities previously cited, this is significant in different ways. Descartes was wary of the veracity of subjectively formed mental images; Whitehead sought the elusive moment when sensations come together as perceptions; for Merleau‐Ponty, the world is immediately grasped as a phenomenal field. Common to all, however, is the recognition that the looking encounter is not simply a question of passively registering an external object. Rather, observation is inherently a matter of active experience. In whatever way this is conceived – whether as Merleau‐Ponty’s “field” or as Shotter’s immersion in an “oceanic world of ceaseless, intermingling currents”  –  it is this dynamic bodily involvement that must be embraced and explored in the looking encounter, through the act of drawing. Even though the nature of the observed subject may be identified in this way, other difficulties lurk. While young Philip Wakem aspired to make drawings after having looked well at his subjects, for Gombrich the sequence was the other way round. In his renowned dictum “making precedes matching” (1960), he proposed that making a picture went before observation. In his view, the artist first resorts to a knowledge‐ base of images created by previous artists, and these conventional responses govern the way the picture is made. In effect, the individual making an image sees the world through the lens of previous art. It is only subsequently that the same artist then refers to his or her own present looking encounter and adjusts their pictorial response accordingly, that is to say in the light of their visual experience. For Gombrich, the looking encounter was necessarily a question not only of what is seen, but involves what is known. In taking up his pencil, Philip was connecting with a tradition and practice of image‐making characterized by great diversity of means, method and intention. His drawing from observation could be a fully developed image or a spontaneous sketch, and made either as an end in itself or as a study for further development. Whatever his approach or motive, copying was his aim. This, however, is the very field that practitioners and writers such as Gombrich have in the twentieth

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century made such a fertile and contested area. At its threshold lies the question: in engaging with the experience of an observed subject what exactly is to be copied and how is it to be expressed? (Figure 10.1). During the twentieth century, drawing from observation in Britain was closely identified with the Slade School of Fine Art. The teaching ethos and practice that took root there, and which exercised a pervasive effect on several generations of students, was due largely to the presence of Henry Tonks. Having trained in medicine, Tonks became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1888, and in 1892 was appointed Demonstrator in Anatomy at the London Hospital Medical School. In the meantime he had begun to study with Fred Brown at Westminster Art School. Brown introduced Tonks to working from the life model, and in 1892 the younger man took up a concurrent role as Assistant Professor to Brown at the Slade. An intimidating but highly respected figure, Tonks taught at the Slade from 1892 to 1930, and occupied the position of Slade Professor from 1919 to 1930. As one of his students, Helen

Figure 10.1  Henry Tonks (c. 1900–1925) Henry Tonks. Pencil, 36.6 × 26.2 cm. Given by executors of Henry Tonks 1937, NPG 3072(7). Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London.



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Lessore, recalled in 1985, “My personal memories of him nearly all refer to the four years 1924–1928. But even while a schoolgirl I knew that the Slade was reputed to be the best art school in the country and I think this was largely due to his influence” (in Morris 1985, p. 8). Speaking in 1982, another former student, William Coldstream remembered being interviewed for a place at the Slade by Tonks: “He always asked all prospective students ‘Why do you want to come to the Slade?,’ and the answer you were supposed to give was ‘because I want to learn to draw’” (in Morris 1985, p. 11). Informed by the twin disciplines of anatomy and the life‐class, Tonks made drawing from the model the single‐minded focus of his teaching, and objectivity the touchstone of the practice he espoused. Comments made by Tonks in 1909 confirm the down‐to‐earth, matter of fact nature of his approach to drawing, a way of looking and representing that echoes the common‐sense approach encountered in Eliot’s fictional situation: “The first thing that strikes me is the extraordinary complication that is made of teaching a simple thing like drawing. No one seems to have pointed out what drawing is and exactly what it can do. Drawing is the expression on a flat surface [i.e. on a sheet of paper or other support] of a solid object, and when we draw we wish to let another person know what the shape of that object is” (Tonks in Morris 1985, p. 29). As this insight suggests, for Tonks the primary concern of drawing is the description of “form alone” (Morris 1985, p. 30). In a report made in 1910, he went on to compile a sequence of 28 “Elementary Propositions in Drawing and Painting,” 12 of which relate to drawing only. These principles are striking for the way they set out a practical method for evoking the appearance of a physical object, a way of documenting appearance rooted in the description of contour, the observation of light and shadow, variation and gradation, and the careful calibration of distance. Tonks’s modus operandi concludes with typically precise advice for achieving “sight size”: “The nearer the drawing to the eye and the farther from its object, the smaller it should be: the farther it is from the eye, and the nearer to its object, the larger it should be” (Morris 1985, p. 32). These imperatives have a literal quality that leaves the recipient in no doubt about the relation of observation to drawing. Looking precedes image‐making, and the relation of the two is predicated on replicating the appearance of the object beheld. Nor were Tonks’s students trusted immediately with the task of drawing from life. As Helen Lessore recalled, “We started by drawing casts from the Antique all day, until we were promoted to drawing from Life – i.e. the nude model – and for this the men and women students were separated” (in Morris 1985, p. 8). Throughout this rigorous regime, the process of learning to draw was underpinned by a single overriding aim, impressed with a force that Lessore never forgot: “In his preaching of ‘Truth to Nature’ Tonks managed to convey a moral quality, a conviction that Beauty was somehow incidental, a side product of the pursuit of Truth” (in Morris 1985, p. 8). It is evident that for Tonks the looking encounter was a highly charged situation. It was the context in which the observer not only confronted a physical object, but in which there was responsibility to respond with absolute fidelity to the thing observed in the form of a drawing made in its presence. Afterwards, for those who wished it, the students would bring their work to Tonks for criticism, a system of appraisal that involved queuing outside the Professor’s room “as at a doctor’s surgery” (Morris 1985, p. 9), as Lessore recalled. Tonks’s approach to teaching drawing has a disciplined, even forensic quality, but in other ways his methods were less clear‐cut. His dictum that “an object can be represented by drawing its contour correctly” (Morris 1985, p. 30),

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was apparently contradicted when, according to Lessore, he would say, “there is no such thing in Nature as a contour” (in Morris 1985, p. 9). In other respects, too, Tonks seemed not always to follow his own principles. For example, the British Museum’s collection of Prints and Drawings contains a wonderful undated drawing by Tonks depicting the head of a young woman. Executed in brown chalk, the image is, in accordance with the artist’s requirements, “sight size,” and replicates the proportions of a head seen in proximity. Indeed, as a whole the drawing conveys an impression of a living presence observed close‐up, such is the precision with which even the girl’s individual eyelashes are captured. The sitter’s skin has a translucent quality, partly suffused by the light falling from above, and partly enlivened by the play of shadow and reflection falling on her cheek. Those features which are closest are rendered with delicate precision, while others are adumbrated more simply. In all these respects, the drawing fulfills its creator’s propositions for objectivity in drawing. In another way, however, this sublime study seems almost to override the principle of “Truth to Nature” that Tonks held so dear. The impression it conveys is one of idealized beauty, its perfection closer perhaps to the expressive achievements of certain Old Master drawings, which it resembles. The question it raises is indeed one of truth: is this the sitter as she appeared – or as the artist imagined her? A clue lies in Helen Lessore’s recollection that objectivity was only one of two roots from which Tonks’s approach to drawing derived. The other was “his faith in the great European traditions as seen in the Italian Renaissance” (Morris 1985, p. 8). Here there is an intimation of Gombrich’s conviction that preceding artistic models influence the way an artist fashions an image. In confronting his model and recording his observations, was Tonks being as “objective” as he insisted, or was the drawing he made adjusted according to other imperatives, namely the artistic models he revered? This question illuminates a central issue for drawing from observation. While fidelity to what is seen may be a driving motivation, there is always the attendant challenge of judging how to render something that is essentially insubstantial in an entirely different, physical form. Experience must be given expression by making marks on a flat surface. Here Tonks’s translation of his sense impressions into a drawing would seem to have been shaped, at least in part, by stylistic precedents. Other drawings made by Tonks suggest that he knew this, and perhaps sensed the need to free himself from overt esthetic considerations in order to focus more single‐ mindedly on the objective vision he sought. In 1916, he joined the army and served as a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After resigning his commission, subsequently he worked in a civilian capacity with the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies at the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup. It was there, while still teaching at the Slade, that he produced a harrowing series of drawings of soldiers with catastrophic facial injuries. Confronting this dreadful subject matter, Tonks confided to a friend that “I feel as if I could get interested in painting and drawing again” (Morris 1985, p. 40). The images he made are a world away from the idealized beauty that he admired in Old Master drawings. They are evidence perhaps that, freed from such artistic models, Tonks was able to record his experiences with the dispassionate clarity – the truth to nature – that he sought. If so, this episode illuminates the way that a primary requirement of drawing from observation is a stripping away of preconceptions. The endeavor to eliminate what is “known” about the subject, and to concentrate exclusively on what is experienced during the looking encounter, was the life‐long preoccupation of Alberto Giacometti. In 1962, toward the end of his life, Giacometti



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encapsulated his principal aim still as being “to copy exactly, as in 1914, appearance. Exactly the same concern” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 146).2 In common with Tonks, drawing was for Giacometti the ideal instrument for achieving this end, and the one to which he resorted constantly. While drawing was pursued alongside his paintings and sculpture, there is a sense that for Giacometti the spontaneity and flexibility afforded by drawing made it particularly suited to his engagement with a subject whose evanescent nature was only too evident. Echoing Merleau‐Ponty, in the same 1962 interview Giacometti confided: “No matter what I look at, it all surprises and eludes me, and I am not too sure of what I see. It is all too complex” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 151). As this comment makes clear, the act of looking was itself a formidable problem, to the extent that copying the appearance of a subject became almost the pretext for understanding what was going on during the process of observation: “we must copy simply in order to realize what we are seeing” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 151). For Giacometti, as for Tonks, drawing was therefore linked with the attainment of truth, and in Giacometti’s case the act of depicting his visual experience was, he said, a way “to understand the world” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 152). However, as Giacometti discovered early on, the looking encounter was not only highly charged but impossibly complex. At the outset there were few problems. As a child living with his family in Stampa, near Switzerland’s south‐eastern border with Italy, his first subjects were his parents, his sister and younger brothers, of whom he made portraits. This was a felicitous time, when he “had the feeling that there was no obstruction between seeing and doing…it was paradise” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 136).3 Giacometti seems to have experienced no difficulty in recording his visual experiences. However, as he later recalled, around 1920 this changed: “suddenly it becomes foreign. You are you and there’s a universe outside, which becomes very literally obscure…I tried to make my portrait from life and was aware of what I was seeing, yet it was totally impossible…” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 139). This ominous development was rooted in the chasm that he sensed was opening up between what he was experiencing and his ability to form a pictorial equivalent. Even making a line seemed beyond him: “the line that leads from the ear to the chin, I realized that I would never be able to copy it just as I saw it” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 139). These difficulties proliferated after he began attending art classes with Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1921. Expected to attend regular life classes, when confronting the nude model Giacometti found himself overwhelmed by individual details and unable to reproduce the subject as a unified whole. Conversely, if the model was placed further away he “saw the figure as a blob” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 147). Struggling to resolve these contradictions, confusingly he found that his “vision changed daily” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 147). Giacometti’s account of these difficulties highlights the problems involved in representing experience. At first confident about what he was seeing, the difficulty was that of reproducing his visual impressions in graphic form. This conundrum was compounded when he became increasingly aware that his experience of the subject constantly changed, and indeed was entirely nebulous. That quality is a conspicuous feature of Giacometti’s mature drawings of his main models Diego and Annette, which evoke the sitters’ presence in a web of interwoven lines and erasures. As film footage of the artist drawing makes clear, however, there is nothing imprecise or tentative about Giacometti’s practice. On the contrary, the artist stalks his quarry, making quick firm gestures which, just as swiftly, are removed with an eraser, only to be

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restated repeatedly. Reflecting on that process, Giacometti explained his approach to drawing a glass, an apparently simple subject: “Each time I look at the glass, it has an air of remaking itself, that is, its reality becomes doubtful because its projection in my brain is doubtful, or partial. I see it as if it disappeared…reappeared…disappeared… In other words, it really always is between being and not being. And this is what we want to copy…” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 150). Given these complexities, Giacometti’s instinct was to restrict the range of his subject matter and curtail the scope of what could feasibly be achieved in making an image. Working with few sitters, his later work demonstrates a desire to focus on what he described as “the sensation I get during the process [of working from observation]” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 151). In 1945, he had experienced a revelatory moment when, while standing in the Boulevard Montparnasse, he became aware of “a complete change in reality” in which the familiar appearance of things seemed “altogether unknown” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 141). This epiphany seems to have been a kind of experience that Gombrich and Merleau‐Ponty did not acknowledge. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich argued that visual experience cannot be disentangled from knowledge: “to see the shape apart from its interpretation…is not really possible” (1960). In similar vein, Merleau‐Ponty claimed that “Once the prejudice of sensation is banished, a face, a signature, a form of behaviour cease to be mere ‘visual data’ …” ([1945] 2002, p. 67). Being constituted in perception, the world cannot be experienced as pure sensation, independent of its interpretation. Yet, this pre‐perceptual state is what Giacometti claimed to have seen and, in the images he made, to be seeking: “even if the picture doesn’t make sense or is ruined, in any event I have won. I have won a new sensation, a sensation I had never experienced before” (Gonzalez 2006, p. 151). Viewed in that way, Giacometti’s drawings manifest a conglomeration of individual fleeting sensations, which in being combined attain visual significance. Giacometti’s approach to drawing has an intense reductive quality. The process of observation is laid bare, taken back to its primary components of sensation, and represented with extreme economy. Eschewing tonal gradation, shading, modeling, or any other conventional devices, each image comprises essential elements. The act of looking is their rationale, and their point of departure. However, looking is not the only starting point for drawing. Before she attained distinction in the 1960s for paintings that generate complex perceptual experiences, Bridget Riley served a long visual apprenticeship in drawing. The instruction she received, however, did not assume looking as a fully formed ability capable of serving as the basis for drawing. Rather, Riley was introduced to a teaching regime which went back to the very beginning, and was concerned with the sense of sight itself. The purpose of this tuition was to use drawing to nurture the process of looking. Through drawing, students would learn to look. Riley’s enlightened teacher was Sam Rabin, who was a former pupil of Henry Tonks, having attended the Slade from 1921. Subsequently Rabin had spent time in Paris, where he completed his art education through contact with Charles Despiau, a former pupil of Rodin. Rabin worked initially as a sculptor, and was responsible for a number of public commissions, notably for the Underground Electric Railways Company at their London headquarters. He commenced teaching at Goldsmiths School of Art in 1949, around the same time that Riley started there as a student. She began attending Rabin’s drawing classes only after completing her first term, an unhappy period during which she came to feel that the art education she was receiving lacked a firm basis. Rabin’s arresting presence had impressed her, as had his teaching



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methods. Having attended a couple of his classes, she became a regular and eventually decided to abandon all her other courses in order to attend his drawing classes ­exclusively. In terms of her later preoccupation with the perceptual aspects of art, this sustained focus on drawing was formative. The looking encounter was a fundamental tenet of Rabin’s teaching, and his clear, highly focused approach attracted well‐attended classes, usually as many as 25 students at a time. Riley has recalled that he would begin by positioning the subject, and his first question was always the same, “what is the model doing?” 4 From the outset, this was a way of intensifying the process of looking, leading to observation rooted in analysis. Before even commencing a drawing, it was vital to acknowledge the pose, and to assess and judge issues relating to balance, the distribution of weight and the role of gravity. Significantly, Rabin emphasized the need to use observation in conjunction with memory and an awareness of one’s own body. The impression formed by the model’s anatomy was not only visual, but informed by empathy: a visual situation was felt as well as seen. Alerted to the subject in these ways, the students were directed toward drawing, but the objective was not to create a work of art. Rabin’s guidance was intended to sharpen and deepen visual experience. Drawing was the vehicle for looking, not its necessary goal. By paying careful attention to the subject and patiently analyzing the fund of observation, there evolved a trajectory whose intended outcome was understanding. At the heart of Rabin’s approach is the ethos that through drawing the observer negotiates a path. The “phenomenal field,” to use Merleau‐Ponty’s terminology, is subjected to analysis, and as a result perception acquires a structure. In this crucial respect, Rabin’s teaching moved beyond drawing as the creation of a definitive resemblance. Instead, it emphasized drawing as the means by which the observer actively engaged with each new visual situation, and with the unfamiliar information yielded in each encounter. Through making an image, the students would immerse themselves in, what Shotter described as, “ceaseless intra‐mingling currents of activity”. Arising from an engagement with the flow of changing impressions, each drawing would evolve as a way of probing and ordering unmingled data in order to achieve understanding of the thing observed. Echoing the “trial and error” process outlined by Gombrich, each drawing is in that sense a record of the observer’s analytical experience. However, this is not to imply that drawings made in this way are the meandering and disordered evidence of the observer finding their way. On the contrary, Rabin stressed that each drawing must have its own identity, logic, and integrity. In the eventual absence of the observed object, the drawing must explain itself. This advice recalls Tonks’s principle that “when we draw we wish to let another person know what the shape of that [observed] object is” (Morris 1985, p. 29). It also echoes Gombrich’s notion, encountered earlier, that in making images based on the imitation of nature, judgment is essential. “Sense impressions” are, as Gombrich put it, “subsequently elaborated, distorted, or generalized.” Rabin’s teaching emphasized this very point. A balance must be sustained between the formation of a response to experience and the concomitant need to represent that response in a way that has credibility as a visual statement. A drawing must not only analyze the model. It must relate in a rational way to whatever is being observed and make sense in pictorial terms. It must describe, but also function as a logical and recognizable image. As Riley’s drawing progressed, it embraced these twin imperatives whole‐heartedly, engaging fully with the rigors of observation while proceeding toward the creation of images that declare their status as pictorial equivalents for experience.

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The drawings made by Riley during her time at Goldsmiths demonstrate a p ­ rofound sensitivity to tonal relations in the rendering of form. While responding to the life model, she constructed each image in terms of light and dark, exploring the ways that these essentially abstract components fit together. The amount of black added or subtracted was a question of constant judgment: a dialogue with the observed figure and with the white sheet on which she expressed her responses. Through an engagement with tone, these early images show a deepening grasp of the role of abstraction, which is a vital ordering principle. The essence of abstraction is to withdraw from an original source, but also to encapsulate that source in abbreviated form. A drawing abstracted from observation does not provide an exhaustive account of its model’s innumerable details, but specifies the observed subject in a summary way. Though an incomplete specification of whatever is observed, the resulting image must nevertheless be comprehensible and complete as a thing in itself. In committing a flux of impressions into graphic form in two dimensions, the creation of a drawing therefore involved the formation of an equivalent pictorial structure that has independent visual authority. In this way, Riley’s figurative drawings contain the seeds of her mature abstract paintings. The idea that a drawing must be a thing in itself is not a denial of Tonks’s principle of truth to nature. Rather it manifests a recognition that the creation of an objective resemblance alone cannot convey the full spectrum of subjective experience. The artist must find ways of informing an image with a sense of the vital process responsible for its creation. As this involves forming pictorial equivalents for visual experience, but also for other kinds of subjective activity, the resulting image must inevitably transcend the literal depiction of appearance. This conviction was fundamental to the work and teaching of David Bomberg, one of the twentieth century’s greatest draughtsmen, whose focus was that of finding a pictorial equivalent for the structure  –  the independent materiality  –  that he sensed in his observed model. The presence of that subjective experience was vital if a drawing was to convey an impression of life. He noted: “When the door has been closed on the completion of an academic rendering, no matter how rendered to the resemblance of the anatomic stress and strain, it is still only saying the things you already know, it may be excellent in its representation of the form of Man in its finest, it can be a highly skilled rendering, contain and show care [?] – it is still a lifeless drawing in the light of modern art…” (Bomberg 1960, p. 184).5 In other words, a drawing must express the process of looking in the fullest empirical sense (Figure 10.2). Bomberg was himself a pupil of Tonks, and as a student at the Slade he absorbed his teacher’s principles to the full. Having attended Sickert’s classes at Westminster School of Art between 1908 and 1910, in 1911 he joined the Slade when the example of Tonks, Brown, and Wilson was at its height. Thrown into a strict regime of working from the plaster cast before progressing to life drawing, Bomberg absorbed his tutors’ precepts and in 1911 won the Tonks prize for his drawing of Isaac Rosenberg, who was a fellow student. Within a couple of years, however, a growing dissatisfaction with the Slade’s conventional approach and a desire to experiment with more radical forms of representation led to his expulsion. In taking that direction, he was influenced by the ideas of John Fothergill, the editor of the Slade magazine, whose essay titled “Drawing” was published in Encyclopedia Britannica and was widely read by Slade Students. Fothergill’s essay concludes with the comment, “It is, then, by the combination of the ideas derived from pure vision and the ideas derived from touch that we know the



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Figure 10.2  David Garshen Bomberg (1931) David Bomberg. Charcoal and wash, 49.5 × 32.4 cm. Purchased, 1970, NPG 4821. Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London.

length, breadth, and depth of a solid form” (in Lipke 1967). Our understanding of depth, space, and the three dimensional nature of objects is not only visual, but involves the memory of physical contact with these phenomena. The dichotomy identified by Fothergill encapsulates the duality that Bomberg would thereafter seek to resolve in his art. Committed to responding to nature, for Bomberg drawing took on a particular significance: “I approach drawing solely for structure” (1960, p. 184). The bedrock of the things he observed was their form. However, even while still a student with Tonks, he realized that drawing from nature meant creating an image that represented visual and haptic experience. It must convey the look of the thing observed, but also express a sense of his observed subject’s physical nature and objectivity: characteristics that are experienced through touch. Again, a drawing must therefore possess an independent reality. Bomberg summarized his approach in the

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following way: “the hand works at high tension and organizes as it simplifies, reducing to barest essentials, stripping all irrelevant matter obstructing the rapidly forming organization which reveals the design. This is the drawing” (1960, p. 187). Self portraiture is a constant theme of Bomberg’s drawings, his own appearance the site for the kind of close, repeated interrogation that his ethos required. Two drawings from different periods held in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection show the development of his distinctive vision. The first, from 1913–1914, has an angular asymmetry that demonstrates the artist’s sensitivity to formal qualities of shape, plane, length, breadth, and texture. Rough cross‐hatching evinces responsiveness to texture and tactility. The second drawing was made in 1931 and reveals the artist’s mature ability to grasp the entire image in a seamless, expressive flow of shading, mark‐making, and erasure. These pictorial elements have a descriptive function, but one that reveals an intense process of decision‐making in which visual data are fused with visceral energy: “drawing flows from beginning to end with one sustained impulse – as the drawing shapes, so does its mood reveal the character in form combinations, all else is subordinated to this end on impulse” (Bomberg 1960, p. 187). That flow or impulse is the essence of Bomberg’s celebrated aim of capturing “the spirit in the mass.” His rendering of form is rooted in observation, but, as his drawings make clear, that faculty is at once visual and also, in his words, a product of “the nervous system” (Bomberg 1960, p. 187). His response to structure is, at a profound level, felt – and it is this that must also be expressed. By revealing the deeper subjective nature of the observer’s response to the thing beheld, the drawing intimates “the essence of life” (Bomberg 1960, p. 184), as he called it. This ethos was in turn powerfully communicated to two of Bomberg’s most celebrated students, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, who attended his classes at Borough Polytechnic from 1948 to 1954 and 1950 to 1952 respectively. Both men found Bomberg an intense and inspiring teacher. Kossoff later recalled seeing Bomberg in action: “Once I watched him draw over a student’s drawing. I saw the flow of form, saw the likeness to the sitter appear. It seemed an encounter with what was already there and I’ll never forget it” (in Cork 1995, p. 27). Kossoff’s words pinpoint the essence of the relation between observation and drawing. In life and art, the individual is involved in an encounter, an unfamiliar situation that calls for a response. In both contexts it is possible to look and yet not see. This is Wittgenstein’s scenario in which the observer fails to understand what is already in plain sight. One alternative is the advice given by George Eliot’s young character to “look well.” Despite its apparent naivety, this principle contains an essential truth by implying that engagement with the external world is not passive but active. The observer must go toward the object of attention, forming a relation with it by moving within the situation that encloses them both. Drawing is the means by which that involvement is deepened, a process of trial and error in which the object of attention is tested for meaning. However, the process is not simply, or only, visual. As Bomberg tells us, “The eye is a stupid organ” (in Hughes 1990, p. 31). Beyond the visual, observation calls for engagement with a host of other faculties, notably memory, intuition, feeling, and a range of unconscious experience. These cognitive capacities may deceive and elude, but they nevertheless sustain our relationship with the world. Drawing is the visual evidence of looking, an encounter that, as seen in the preceding discussion, is informed by all these things. But drawing is not only a record of that encounter. At a profound level, drawing deepens the experience of seeing so that, in Bomberg’s words, it “reveals the unknown things.”



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Notes 1 This and all subsequent observations by John Shotter are from Shotter 2013. 2 “Why Am I a Sculptor? An Interview by André Parinaud,” first published in Arts, no 873, 13–19 June 1962, p 1, reprinted in Gonzalez 2006. 3 “My Long March: An Interview with Pierre Schneider,” originally published in L’Express, no 521, 8 June 1961, p 48, reprinted in Gonzalez 2006. 4 This and all subsequent quotations connected with Bridget Riley and Sam Rabin are from conversations between Bridget Riley and Paul Moorhouse held in 2015–2016. 5 This is a verbatim record of Bomberg’s note, the partial illegibility of which is represented by “[?]”.

References Bomberg, D. (1960). The Bomberg papers. X, A Quarterly Review 1 (3). Cork, R. (1995). “City of the Heart”, Times magazine, 27 May 1995. Descartes, R. (1971). Descartes: Philosophical Writings (trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach). London: Nelson’s University Paperbacks/The Open University. Eliot, G. ([1860] 1994). The mill on the floss. Reprint, London: Penguin Popular Classics. Gombrich, E. (1960). Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York: Pantheon Books. Gonzalez, Á. (2006). Alberto Giacometti: Works Writings, Interviews. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa. Hughes, R. (1990). Frank Auerbach. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. Lipke, W. (1967). David Bomberg: A Critical Study of his Life and Work. London: Evelyn, Adams & Mackay. Merleau‐Ponty, M. ([1945] 2002). Phenomenology of Perception. Reprint,. London: Routledge Classics. Morris, L. (ed.) (1985). Henry Tonks and the Art of Pure Drawing. Norwich: Norwich School of Art Gallery. Ruskin, J. ([1857] 1859). The Elements of Drawing in Three Letters to Beginners. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Shotter, J. (2013). “On “Relational Things:” A New Realm of Inquiry–Pre‐Understandings and Performative Understandings of People’s Meanings.” Paper presented at 5th PROS (Process Organization Studies) Symposium, The Emergence of Novelty, Crete, June 2013. http://www.process‐symposium.com/5th.html. Whitehead, A.N. (1933). Adventures of Ideas. London: Cambridge University Press.

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“Drawing’s Impropriety” Lucien Massaert

… breaking with an empty resource of what persists of signs … carried to the extreme limit of self, it may appear acceptable that it is reduced to nothing, almost … —André du Bouchet (1972, p. 101) It might seem surprising to see contemporary art exhibitions over the past few years announcing the presence of installations, digital art, performances, and drawing, while the terms painting and sculpture appear considerably less often. Does drawing share certain common characteristics with these new media while painting and sculpture have become things of the past, except when they are transformed, expanded, or merged in an installation? Does drawing resist as an autonomous medium, or does it subsist thanks to its resistance to the conceptual logic of the medium? This is the question that I would like to raise and think through in the following essay. It should be possible to distance ourselves from everything that lays claim to the unique or an essence – even the essence of a medium – without having to fall back onto the current and widely held ideology of hybridity, the mixing of disciplines, and the effacement of differences. In order to clarify the relation of the multiplicity of the arts to the multiplicity of the senses, it is not necessary to pass through the Gesamtkunstwerk or multi‐ (or inter‐) media practices since, as Jean‐Luc Nancy explains, “each work is in its own fashion a synesthesia” (Nancy 1996a, p. 31). Rather, it is a question here of thinking these differences and non‐identities according to a dynamic of proximity and distancing, of closeness and extension. Is it possible to maintain that drawing escapes as much the assumed essentialist definition of the medium as the widely held tendency today to think of it as an extended field, colonizing forms and surfaces as much as concrete or virtual spaces? If it is no more a question of reducing drawing to nothing but a line [trait] than it is of borrowing a totalizing or expansionist logic through which drawing can only A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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disappear, can we then imagine a logic of the margin, a place at once inside and outside the field of the plasticity of the visual arts, a kind of degree zero which only owes its existence to being what evades [déjoue] the various logics of the medium? This is what I would like to try to think through.

The Subjectile No doubt it would be possible to place the least drawn painting at one extremity of a line or continuum on the one hand, and on the other a drawing that is the least painted. The area between these two extremes would be filled by works in which drawing is foregrounded by painting, or in which painting is strongly dependent on drawing. But all this would have little interest, with drawing and painting doing nothing more than mutually defining themselves, one as non‐painting and the other as non‐drawing. Françoise Viatte and Lizzie Boubli’s important work approaches drawing in terms of reserve, empty resource [épargne], and blankness. For drawing, the blankness of the sheet of paper comes first. Line and touch slowly conceal and then hollow out this surface. The white is held in suspense, preserved throughout the operation. Drawing begins in the blankness of the support while painting is concluded or achieved in radiance, in the luminous accent of the highlight’s finishing touch of white. It should be noted that in thinking of drawing as a practice that functions in an opposite way to painting – setting up the whites, the initial blankness of the sheet as an empty resource, as much for cutting out a silhouette as allowing space to breath – a logic of representation is nevertheless maintained. In a text from 1978 published in the art theory journal Macula – a text that has since been cited and commented on with some frequency – Jean Clay takes a step further when he draws our attention to the moment when the empty spaces in Cézanne’s late works produce a rupture in modes of representation, a transitioning “to the side of lack” (Clay 1981, p. 51). Beyond the economy of representation, Clay writes that the reserve creates “both mark [tache] and hole”; it opens a “place of aporia” (67) from which it derives its Medusa effect. In the end, the reserve never simply plays the role that the luminous emphasis of white does in painting. It never comes to achieving this addition of light [ce plus de lumière] since it is a “nothing.” The medium of drawing is not pigment and its cosmetic dilution but paper and its manner of receiving and transforming material [plastique] deposit. We are led to thinking that the apparatus [appareil] of drawing is situated in its support, its subjectile, which is not stable but transformable, contrary to a panel, wall, or a stretched canvas – in other words, pliable, open to being scratched or torn, or quick to wrinkle when it is not evenly moistened.1 This is what must be thought, and its implications must be taken into account. It is not a question of reducing drawing to its support, as Clement Greenberg would do for painting. The subjectile is not an “ideal space of … appropriation” (Rancière 2007, p. 71). As Jean‐Louis Déotte has written, paper escapes “its condition as simple material” (Déotte 2007, p. 17). Jean Clay proposes to rewrite the history of twentieth century art by showing that, “from Cézanne to Ryman,” modernity is announced as “the art of transposing the properties of drawing onto the field of painting” (51). Modernity leaves the projective surface of painting for the inductive surface if drawing. The projective can be



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interpreted as implicated by the image and the inductive as raising the support’s indices and effects of “contexture.”2 Drawing can thus be understood as “the critical questioning of the inscribed and the scriptor that the field of inscription … causes” (51) or, in other words, as the return of the subjectile’s virtualities onto the delineation of figures. In this way, we see the reversal of the convention of drawing as a preparatory and so marginal tool and we see it becoming the very impetus for change in artistic practice. How can we account for the logic of Seurat’s drawings, which are not the depiction or rendering of light and shade created from the Conté crayon on the sheet of paper but the foregrounding of the paper’s excess of grain which, through its over‐emphasis, comes to undo the representation? Jean Clay highlights evidence [indices] of the “raising [soulèvement] of the ‘ground’” (50) in the work of Degas and Manet since the latter part of the nineteenth century, and in the work of Vuillard or Matisse at the turn of the century. He speaks of drawing as “the critical questioning of the inscribed and the scriptor” in “the field of inscription” (51). These effects on the inscribed must be followed through (what is inscribed is no longer of the same tenor), without losing sight of their implications on our conception of the painter (and/or spectator) as subject, who themselves do not remain untouched by this. Since the work of Minimalism, nothing can be taken for granted, whether the support, the nature of the instruments used, format or pigment. Whatever might have seemed accepted or set up [appareillé] is from then on seen as the artist’s decision and part of the project, of the work’s program, of what refers back or returns to an array of later gestures. It is an unexamined body, something below [en‐deçà] the work which “is put to the test of an excorporation” (Clay 1981, p. 49) – an uncovering, application, testing. The work’s order is to be approached from the different elements [les formants] of the work, up to what lies beyond it, including its “cultural, economic, institutional and political instances” (62). Clay does not seek “an original layer, the humus that would contain the substantial truth of art, of an art whose ground, the gesso, had been finally reached” (53) but proposes to construct an alternative to the “modernist” analysis, to Clement Greenberg’s deductive model as much as to the artists and sycophants of Supports/ Surfaces. It is thus not a question of substituting one essentialism for another or of proposing a teleology of replacement. One can conceive of this approach to drawing through the subjectile as an approach concerning technique, on the condition of seeing that the work’s operation or its technicity is, as Nancy writes, just as much the “‘out‐of‐workness’ of the work [‘désœuvrement’ de l’œuvre]” (Nancy 1996a, p. 37), and that “technology” should be understood as “the different ways in which there is recourse to language as ‘outline’ [dessin] … everything that shows that language is not one particular technique but technicity itself as such, or the symbolic technicity” (Nancy 2006, p. 18).3 As Jean Clay notes, the passage from the parallel or extensive placement of forms side by side to a perpendicular, intensive movement or thickness means that it is not a question of an opposition between activity or passivity – the support itself is also active and the painter–subject is transformed in turn, no longer only the subject of and for vision but equally taken up in the subjectile’s lability. Today it would be essential not to think of this only in terms of our current moment. Here our approach comes closer to Foucault in The Order of Things when he seeks to define long periods of time, the “great discontinuities” in the “epistemological fields”

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that he calls “epistemes” (Foucault, 1970, p. xxiv). The rupture addressed by Jean Clay thus still concerns us today. It defines the “threshold” of a period that “we have not left” and which, as Foucault indicates in relation to Borges, “does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed” (Foucault, 1970, p. xviii). If this appears as our heritage – to phrase it in Nancy’s terms, “the chance to recognize … that we are already in the world in an unheard of sense,” of being exposed to “the abandonment of sense” (Nancy 1997a, p. 2) – this absence of support and of any origin that grounds meaning is also what we also quickly tend to forget. This is why the false novelty of what is current should not conceal the horizon in which we find ourselves, and no doubt will continue to do so for some time. The question of the subjectile raised by Clay is thus not a uniquely material or concrete question  –  even though it is also a question of materiality  –  but the undermining (ébranlement) of any foundational guarantees, of any ground for art, not only for any thought of art but also for all thought and for any subjective condition. If the canvas, like the screen, is the site of projection and assurance for the subject, the paper’s fragility on the other hand becomes the exemplary site of the aleatory, the site of “a faltering [ébranlement] of the painting subject, who loses his position of mastery in the process in which he is invested” (Clay 1981, p. 70). From the Renaissance to the seventeenth century on, the paradigm of the self‐centered subject based on an imaginary identification was constructed, in which the image of painting played a role (as seen in the logic of the Port‐Royal (Marin 1975, 1995)). Once acquired, this assurance wavered. The “interstitial appearance of the blank space” (51) undid the confidence and certainties offered by the image, “in which the subjectile is made the instance of the full subject’s detaching itself and piercing itself open [se déprend et s’ajoure]” (50).4 The canvas’s neutral status for painting does not apply to paper for drawing. The drawing’s support is not a surface of inscription. In the “subjectile’s rise [assomption]” and the emergence of the work’s underneaths, this underneath certainly constitutes an entirely different ground than that which gives consistence to perspective. The event comes from the other, the inappropriable other inasmuch as it surprises me [me surprend] from underneath.

The Ground Derrida argues that the drawing [le tracé]5 seeks to assume the status of contour, between the inside and outside of a figure; it relates to itself in dividing itself. If the mark [trait] distinguishes the figure from the ground or from another figure, it belongs to neither one nor the other, or to one and the other in order to make appear “what it spaces” and which “does not belong” to the mark, interrupting all identification. Drawing gestures toward this limit or threshold. “Nothing belongs to the mark, and thus to drawing and the thought of drawing, not even its own ‘trace’” (Derrida 1993, p. 58). Reading Derrida’s Memoires of the Blind in relation to Speech and Phenomena, Eliane Escoubas notes: “the blind is he who advances and makes us advance into the critique of the philosophy of presence” (Escoubas 2007, pp. 52, 49). According to Nancy, our interest in art must focus on its operation, in other words, its technique. Technicity “is not first of all the processes, instruments, and calculations” but, as recalled above, it “is also out‐of‐workness [désœuvrement] of the work, which puts it outside itself.” As Nancy remarks of technique itself, drawing



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demonstrates “the abandonment [déshérence] of the origin … the exposition to a lack of ground and foundation” (Nancy 1996a, pp. 37, 26). But it is not enough to note the doubling of the line – the contour of the object or limit with space, spacing, or again the line included or absorbed in what makes the ground  –  the with‐ and re‐drawing of the mark [le retrait du trait], or again the effacement of the trace. As in the logic of reserve mentioned earlier, if drawing does not operate in the same movement both an undermining of entities [instances] that are otherwise governed by the support and of the ground, nothing guarantees that a certain economy of representation is not left in place. No more than the trace, the subjectile is neither given nor originary. As Philippe‐ Alain Michaud writes, drawing “always carries the trace of the construction of its surface”; it “constructs a place” (Michaud 2005, p. 12). There is no pre‐existing space for drawing. Its surface does not pre‐exist but remains to be constructed. The materiality of the sheet of paper tells us nothing of this surface, of this space or of this place, except outside the framework of Euclidean presuppositions that govern our modes of thinking, within the coordinates and measurements of space that seem to us to constitute “natural” space. Interrogating the question of trace within the context of a larger theoretical elaboration, Didier Vaudène allows us to see the question of the trace/ground relation other than in terms of a simple Gestalt (Vaudène 2006). He introduces a doubling [dédoublement] through what he calls the “ground/ground slippage,” in close proximity to Derrida’s elaboration of the trace. Interrogating the question of the trace demands simultaneously that one interrogates the ground. According to our most immediate perception, a trace is “that which perturbs, modifies, transforms, or more or less completely conceals a ground” (Vaudène 2006, p. 80; see also Vaudène 1994, Vaudène 1997, Vaudène 2017b)  –  it is what detaches itself on a ground. The ground is identifiable through its regularity, texture, and so on, which the trace comes to break apart. More specifically, the ground can be considered as the “trace’s edge [alentour],” but “equally as the ground that would have been at the same place if the trace hadn’t taken place” (81). Normally these two meanings overlap – there is confusion “between the ground as edge and the ground without trace.” Whether the ground under the trace, or whether as ground if the trace doesn’t take place, these are by definition not visible, but also never interrogated. Logically, “ground” and “trace” are assumed, given, simply perceptible in their regularity, self‐present in their identities and differences, each identifiable as such, and it is in this way that the ground is conceived as support and, in the end, that the concepts of ground and support remain confused. The support would thus be the “supplementary difference” (Derrida 1973, p. 88), which comes to have a vicarious function [vicarier] or stands in for [suppléer] the presence of the representation inasmuch as this is always elaborated through an absence, by a lack of support, or by the support as lack or as absent. One could then say that there is no drawing when the outline [tracé] detaches itself as a sign on the blank of the page, just as there is no consistency/inconsistency of drawing when their complementarity is played out in order to produce a wholeness that is empty/full or black/white. In relation to its status as neither ground nor blankness, only this moment in the support’s undecidability can indicate that the drawing takes place. Medusa is not representation but fear in ungrounding [éfondement].6

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For Derrida, the subjectile “would not be able to let itself be represented”; “it remains a stranger to the space of representation” (Derrida 1998, p. 146), and it “has no consistency apart from that of the between” (71). Given that there is “always one more layer to a birth [une couche de plus]” the subjectile will be conceived as layer upon layer that “do not let themselves be wholly summed up in the systematic unity of a terrain, they have no final support upon which to rest in an orderly fashion. They form no sense.” (146). This same philosophical tenor can be found in the poetry of André du Bouchet when for example, just like Derrida, he emphasizes the différance which elaborates the support: the support which does not let itself be represented … twice for this support translated by the void … a spacing. discovering the naked support, is able to fill in. spacing as paper. … a doubling of the support figures in the expectation of the interval [dans l’attente de l’intervalle figure] (du Bouchet 1988, pp. 68, 84, 87)

To sense “the incompossibility of the ‘ground with the trace’ and the [phenomenally inaccessible] ‘ground without trace’,” as Didier Vaudène does, means that the trace, like the ground, is no longer “perceptible as such.” Only one of the terms is perceptible at a time – the other has to be reconstructed. The trace and the ground thus become objects of thought and not only objects of perception. It would also be possible to deduce this for drawing, as in Leonardo’s demonstration of “l’arte è una cosa mentale.” In order for there to be a “phenomenal trace,” there must be “always already trace of the non‐phenomenal trace” (Vaudène 2006, p. 84). The trace is thus conceived as difference, a non‐phenomenal difference. There is no longer any presence of the trace, direct access, manifestation, unary trace taken in the play of presence/ absence, spontaneous donation, completion. One thus sees that the common definition of drawing in terms of observing the incomplete covering over of the support is called into question, since what is played out here is no longer the ground’s reserve but its doubling [dédoublement]. And just as Didier Vaudène has highlighted the “ground/ground slippage,” we must now think the “trace/trace slippage” as gap [béance], as scar of the inscription (85). Instead of the binary opposition trace/ground, one can then attempt to think of “composite objects” (85), a drawing of withdrawal or re‐drawing [retrait], of effacement, of the mark’s nothing, of blankness, of a sign that is the “‘poorest’ possible” (80), of a stain, a mark, a scratch, insofar as these are not conceived as ends in themselves or self‐justifying. Their simplicity constitutes the marked assurance (gage) of their opening and plurality.7 How are we to think of the mark following the hypothesis that it is applied at the same time as its outline, withdrawal, effacement? Drawing thus refuses what art today seems unable to: celebration, commemoration, funerary object, monumentality, assurance. Derrida adds that this mark, “in its capacity as subtracted



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or as withdrawn [soustrait ou en retrait],” not only resists public space and political publicity but constitutes and produces a “displacement of politics” (Derrida 2013, p. 78). In a recent text, Vaudène takes up what he calls “having regard for blankness” by acknowledging his debt to Edmond Jabès, specifically his book L’ineffaçable, l’inaperçu (Jabès 1980). Following on from this work, Vaudène reopens these problematics of the trace and ground, a questioning “that no response should close off,” “a movement through the white desert sands.” Elsewhere, I have sought to extract a “threefold reserve” (Massaert 2014–2015) in order to characterize the different aspects of drawing’s whites. Vaudène recalls the triple aspects of the ground evoked by Heidegger: It remains an open question whether the ground is a truly grounding, foundation‐ effecting, originary ground (Ur‐grund); whether the ground refuses to provide a foundation, and so is an abyss (Ab‐grund); or whether the ground is neither one nor the other, but merely offers the perhaps necessary illusion of a foundation and is thus an unground (Un‐grund). (Heidegger 2000, p. 2)

Today one can add that refusal, the undoing of the support, the ground, the foundation, and origin have as their corollary their rising up from layer to layer, their insistence on standing out as moments of displacement in the process. Drawing as process draws attention both to fine‐tuning the series of these different moments of thought and the elaboration of a logic [instance] of an ungrounded ground. As to the mark, one recalls that Derrida indicates that it at once joins, attracts, “relates (bezieht),” borders on, approaches, is “the drawing [traction] of a gesture” (Bezug) and like “Riss, a tracing‐out that breaks a path [tracement de frayage] that incises, tears, marks the divergence [écart] … a cut,” it “broaches [entame],” “traces while opening” (Derrida 2007, pp. 73–75). The mark’s double disposition means that it cuts and separates in the same movement as it draws close and assembles. Every identity to that which exists above, below, or “between” finds itself subverted. We no longer distinguish “a trait that attracts them [les contraires] toward the provenance of their unified ground … fundamental plan, project, design, sketch, outline” (78), or again, “essential profile, schema, projection,” the trait of the breaching (its inscription) “succeeds only in/by being effaced” (75). Paraphrasing Jean‐François Courtine, who speaks of what is unique [propre] to man, we could say that what is unique to drawing would be its “irreducible and radical impropriety that always relates it to what it is not” (Courtine 1990, p. 101), this impropriety of drawing that refers to the impropriety of its author and viewer. Conceiving drawing as a place that is without its own [propre] place, as what does not identify itself or what escapes identification, ought to lead us to see what drawing implies for a thought of medium and for a thought of apparatuses or dispositifs. Can one separate the question of medium from that of the sign, from translation, from a mediatized [médiatisé] or transitive character? The medium would necessarily be second, the support of something, a channel of transmission. This is the same for the medium understood as a surrounding milieu and manner of perceiving. If drawing is then only the ground that rises back up, which rises back up for itself in itself, it can only be the medium of nothing, the medium for nothing. This is why drawing as such is not ascribable. The operations of artistic plasticity in the service of a cause – of the image, representation, or even in the service of an inherent formalism when, for

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example, the outline seeks to justify its own operation – thus do not enter into the domain of drawing. Is it a question of expanding the thought of medium, or does drawing from its marginal position come to question the very possibility of thinking about medium? No beyond or prior condition, drawing has no privileged place, only another place from which one is always able to interrogate every system of place‐making. Nancy’s detour through a phenomenological analysis of touch [du toucher] in order to rethink touch [la touche] and interruption seems to me especially fertile. This touch “feeling itself touching” has to resort to interruption and the interval in order to “sense what makes one sense” (Nancy 1996a, p. 17) just as the subjectile must interrupt its touch with the mark, the trace, and the imprint in order to produce what Nancy calls “the singular difference of a touch” (19).

Blank Silence As we suggested above, one can only regret that what claims to be new and current invariably fails to take into consideration critical movements and ruptures in the episteme which would seem to have definitively transformed the field of thinking, constituting progress without any possible step backwards. The return of thematic concerns in thinking about art avoids questions of the “fold” and “blankness” – whose effects Derrida has measured in his text on Mallarmé – avoids this “excess of syntax over meaning” that Derrida has demonstrated as escaping seizure and mastery “as themes or as meanings” (Derrida 1981, pp. 231, 245). Likewise, the absence of ground and origin stems from the order of syntax. From a purportedly postmodern position, a step backwards would be rendered possible in affirming that all things being said, one can turn the page. The modernist position demands that one attempts to progress, in spite of the difficulties this poses. This position implies the necessity of continuing to investigate and drawing out the consequences. Originating as a new paradigm at the end of the nineteenth century, the perspectival grid [le géométral] that unfolds there, demands that one does not slip in a substitute theatrical stage set [un praticable] into the dispositif. Strictly speaking, nothing comes to replace the perspectivist foundation. We must work on a ground that is definitively lacking: The first lesson that Kracauer retains from his lucid and passionate observation of the modern world is that we live in disconnection [déliaison], and that the initial gesture of a true perception of this world consists in accepting this henceforth ineluctable state of affairs. (Payot 2000, p. 121)

In order to push this reflection further, one should note that the creation [procédure] of reserve in drawing is not limited to the technical operation of the hollow resource of the whites. It is drawing itself that reserves itself through the reserve of its support/ground. The approach that Pierre Fédida has proposed takes its point of departure from the analysis “of the image as it is given in the dream,” “elements of content that behave like images,” which are considered by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams as alone “characteristics of the dream” (cited in Fédida 1993, p. 29).8 This is the same approach taken by Philippe‐Alain Michaud in the catalogue for the Comme



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le rêve le dessin exhibition. Reflection on the “drawing‐work” and its “power of transformation” responds to the “dream‐work” (Michaud 2005, p. 10): Drawing is witness to the act of drawing like the dream is to the act of dreaming – the acting subject who comes into view in this witnessing resembles the irritated subject that Descartes had experienced at night, a subject who is subjected to the omnipotence of other places and of the Other, and to whom, in the forming of representations, negative counter‐values of obscurity and confusion are imposed in place of ideals of clarity and distinction. (p. 15)9

In the essay by Pierre Fédida and the work and catalogue by Philippe‐Alain Michaud published 12 years later, should one see here more than a variation among others on the possibilities of addressing the arts through psychoanalytic means? Is there more than a circumstantial affinity between addressing the logics of drawing and understanding the status of dream‐images?10 Can we hope to find the possibility of a more or less consistent, if not decisive explanation in this exchange? For Michaud, it should be noted this is precisely a question of drawing in the conjunction with the dream‐ work, not painting. Since Freud, we have known that the unconscious does not recognize principles of identity and non‐contradiction. This would even be the most noted characteristic of its workings. As Freud writes: “Dreams are quite incapable of expressing the alternative ‘either‐or’; it is their custom to take both members of this alternative into the same context, as though they had an equal right to be there.” Stemming from this displacement of logical relations, Fédida writes that the “a‐logical and a‐grammatical perceptual figurability” allows the image to “make a surface of the ground” (Fédida 1993, p. 30). As Michaud writes, opposed to the form image or Gestalt which is imputed to painting, “a state” is located “where the images are still not fixed – a field of generalized transformations” (Michaud 2005, p. 16) that should begin by being related to the field in which the process of drawing is played out. The “figuration of the dream‐work” (Fédida 1993, p. 30) proposes a theory of the image, not a preconstituted theory but a process of formation (Bildung), a process “in as much as it engenders its ‘conceptual’ objects” (33). The “condensation undergone by material thoughts during the dream‐work” intersects with “the dream image’s plasticity” [which in turn obeys] phonological laws” (31). The chiasmus can be written like this: Condensation

Thought Material Dream-work

Phonological Laws

The Plasticity of Images

If the dream opens access to a theory of the image, it is to the extent that there is an “artistic plasticity of the dream’s image” and an “a‐grammatical” (31) equivocation of the language of images. The dream can thus be supported from the ground of images in the way that the image is traversed by the dream’s a‐logic. We owe this chiasmus to this moving, evanescent “genre image” that “forbids all attribution” (36), all identification, translatability, or transparency. At first sight, this is an indecipherable

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image, “like an indistinct breath of wind” that comes to “disturb the representable” (30), which does not stem from an obscure hermeticism but an equivocation, a strangeness, an excess of “evident clarity” (31). We might choose the drawings of Tal‐Coat as offering us the value of a paradigm, just as Derrida does with his “drawings of the blind.” This paradigmatic value is inseparable from what we would like to attribute to the writings of André du Bouchet.11 The inseparability of these works plays out in their complicity and companionship. If Tal‐Coat’s drawings can play this role, then this stems, we suggest, from their restraint, from the exigency they demonstrate12, which allows us to situate them as the point of convergence for a range of other practices, leading toward more systematicity in the work of Pierrette Bloch and minimalist derivations, or toward Degottex and Marfaing and their orientalist or gestural borrowings, or again toward Wols and surrealist frenzies. This way of declining drawing’s range of possibilities could thus be opened out, the drawings of Tal‐Coat always maintaining a singularity that makes it difficult to see what might follow on after their irreducibility (Figures 11.1 and 11.2). One might have concluded a little too quickly that the articulation of vision to language is made in such a manner that words would take charge of what the image could not exhibit, and inversely, that the image would present what words could not formulate. Keeping hold of this simple opposition or complementarity would let the very matter of art escape, producing as it were the image’s autistic or tautological foreclosure. Nor is it suitable to simply hold “speech to be integral to the image” (Fédida 1993, p. 36). Fédida proposes that silence is not understood as the image’s muteness (32). The mutual exclusion of image and language, “the obscurity of the image’s shade cast over speech, [can] only be resolved by the silence of white” (34). In the intersection of regions of seeing and saying, one might propose that emptiness

Figure 11.1  Tal‐Coat (1982–1983), Lavis sur papier. Ink wash on paper, 50 × 65 cm., Courtesy, Galerie Clivages, photograph Jean‐Louis Losi. Source: © SABAM Belgium 2018.



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Figure 11.2  Tal‐Coat (1977) Crayon sur papier. Pencil on paper, 12 × 37 cm. Source: Courtesy, Galerie Clivages, photograph Jean‐Louis Losi © SABAM Belgium 2018.

is to spatialization as a breath of air is to speech, but equally that emptiness welcomes speech just as silence allows something to take place. As analyzed by Fédida, isn’t drawing’s poetic being a specific case of what Nancy presents as “the permanent subsumption of the arts under ‘poetry’” (Nancy 1996a, p. 29)? The concept of this dependency is itself dependent on a philosophical interpretation of art, while drawing (the doubling of mark and subjectile) where the mark emerges [s’enlève] from a non‐ground constitutes for Fédida the sign of poetry itself, just as, inversely, the poetic configuration enunciates and materializes itself [se dessine]. Poetry is language carried to the limit. “There is no poetry that does not bear upon the extremity of its own interruption … in which sense demands from itself its own condition of production … tensed toward its own activity” (Nancy 1996a, pp.  28, 29). “‘Poetry’ resists” (philosophical, discursive, Rational) form, which makes it as if it is unaware of itself, resists a form that denies itself – “this refusal itself [this gesture] is poetry” (Nancy 2006, p. 17). Poetry does not rest content with presenting a Sense to sense [un Sens aux sens] or in offering a sense of the world. Rather, it disarticulates language as our means for accessing the world in order to arrange a different access (see Nancy 1996b, pp. 75–97; Hegel 1998, p. 968). It is what resists as “articulation” understood as “‘rhythm’, ‘cadence’, ‘caesura’, or ‘syncope’ (‘spacing’, ‘pulsating’)” or, as Nancy writes, “an outline [dessin]: sense as outline,” “of folding13 rather than syntax” or than sense as “information” – a “thickening, densification, or hardening that affect the ‘sign’ as such – and not its status as ‘sign‐of’ something” (Nancy 2006, pp. 17–18). And just as there is poetic resistance for Nancy, or a definition of poetry as resistance, I would argue that today for us there is equally drawing’s resistance, or drawing as resistance. Reducing the poetic becoming of art to the historical moment of romanticism tends to reduce the significance of this moment, or tends to make it something of the past while romanticism bequeaths us a task whose ethical dimension forbids us to think of it as a simple thing acquired and achieved once and for all. If, in The Literary Absolute, Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe and Jean‐Luc Nancy affirm that what remains decisive is the fact that romanticism “opens the critical age to which we still belong” (quoted xxii) (Lacoue‐Labarthe, Nancy 1988) – in other words, the romanticism of the Schlegel brothers in Jena, of the authors of the Atheanaeum review (1798–1800), as well as of Schelling and Novalis – Nancy pursues this questioning of the romantic “fragment” in his chapter “Art, a Fragment” in The Sense of the World by clarifying the objective of thinking about contemporary art. The bare mark and support thus

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respond to “the nudity of existing,” to “nude existence” and absence which “defines the very sense of sense” (Nancy 1997b, p. 128). If Nancy writes that “it is not certain that any philosophy of art has yet sufficiently realized what is at stake in fragmentation” (131), then, as we have seen, this is because fragmentation henceforth is no longer to be thought laterally or in its extension but in terms of its intensity, or inductively to take up Jean Clay’s term – fragmentation, an opening into the thickness of the layers. ** With Hegel, the “concept” of art would “henceforth be autonomous, exposed as the very detachment” – “Hegel delivers art for itself” (Nancy 1997a, p. 130). And yet, contrary to its concept, shouldn’t it be stated that art today finds itself more and more tied to becoming manifesto, archival, witness, document, if not also simply of financial value? Only drawing – a certain drawing – detaches and unties itself. The minute is always threatened by the grandiloquent, the tenuous has only a small chance of being heard faced with the monumental – however, the “brush’s unique trait” must resist the Gesamtkunstwerk. Hölderlin writes: “For everything primal … does not in fact manifest itself in its primal strength, but actually in its weakness” (Hölderlin 2009, p. 90). At a time when all kinds of special effects are present all over the Internet, at a time where everything must pass through the digital, what is the status of a fragile subjectile touched [effleuré] as if by accident by a brush mark haunted by doubt? Has the practice of drawing become anachronistic, if not simply without object or obsolete? Can one still give a certain value to this mark through delegation, to a singular hand‐stroke today, identical to that which disturbs us when it reaches us as testimony of prehistoric times on the walls of a cave? The blankness that Fédida interrogates is not about the prosaic fact of the support’s white ground but the “backdrop of the silence of the indistinct” (Fédida 1993, p. 36), that which is held “at the edge of speech inasmuch as it is unpronounceable” (31), or as Nancy writes: “detachment – on a background of nothing” (Nancy 2006, p. 17). This poverty does not wish to be sublime. It does not transgress what might be most prosaic in painting. Its persistence in refusing grandeur has nothing heroic about it. Quite simply, it is ready to suffer the consequences of its destitution [dénuement]. This is its ethical or – if one prefers – political dimension. The resistance created by its reticence [de son peu à dire] and restraint allows it to hope to escape the necessity of occupying a place, a terrain which is not its own. With drawing already defined as other to itself, there is, as one knows, nothing to hope from summoning the other of the other.14 In his preface to the critical writings of André du Bouchet, Clément Layet writes: “in looking at painting, it is the image he traverses; it is the image he perceives, transposes, and destroys in his poems” (Layet 2011, p. 16). It is a question of subtracting poetry – drawing – from the image, of traversing it, of leaving this image behind and making do with its remains or, as Jean‐Luc Nancy has analyzed, its vestiges (Nancy 1996a, pp. 81–100). In order to have access to drawing as reserve “in its white ground,” its closure in the image – its capture or its hypnotic effect (Fédida 1993, p. 47) – must be avoided. In order for the ground to show itself, the sign must be insignificant.15 Drawing demands to be addressed “as in a dream” in order that it might be granted its logic of transposition, its fantasmatic quality, its figurability. Jean Clay’s “assumption [assomption] of the subjectile” or its “insurrection” in Fédida’s work constitutes the possibility of drawing’s “power of figuration” and its “essential alterity.” The support is “the support of the other” (Fédida 1993, p. 44). No longer



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a question of an intentional activity projected on a neutral support but, as Philippe‐ Alain Michaud writes, a return to an “indistinct zone,” drawing “does not refer back to a constituted subject which would be openly expressed in drawing, leading toward a moment of realization that was assigned in advance” (Michaud 2005, p. 16). My action no longer reveals a mark or a figure facing us but allows a “geology of the surface” (46) to rise up, a tectonic of layers that comes from a support of alterity. Drawing’s inductive surface brings to light potentialities of figuration of the support itself. At the crossroads of the subjectile’s insurrection, of the ground’s ascent and the white’s silence, would drawing be this site of the system of the arts, disciplines, and the thought of medium that results in their opening, like an empty space [case vide] that comes to introduce some play in the system, in which the system at once dismantles itself but simultaneously reconstitutes itself, allowing for its evolution? Didier Vaudène writes that we are witnessing the “constitutive rupture [éclatement] of the intermediary field  –  hypokeimenon  –  where each apparently specific object is like a sort of shard [éclat] of this “ultimate referent that there isn’t one” (Vaudène 2006, p. 80).16 Translation Philip Armstrong

Appendix In the wake of Rosalind Krauss’s essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (Krauss 1985), Dirk Dehouck constructed the below schema (Figure 11.A.1) for his review of Volume 29 of Le Part de l’Œil and its dossier on “Le dessin dans un champ élargi” (“Drawing in an Expanded Field”) (Dehouck 2014–2015), specifically in light of my preliminary remarks to the volume, titled “Le triple d’une réserve” (“The Three‐fold Reserve”) (see Massaert 2014–2015). He thus sought “to elaborate … the logical structure that could perhaps situate drawing today in an expanded field.” The journal Painting (White highlight)

Trace

Ground (canvas)

Doubling

(forme-figure)

Effacement

(D. Vaudène)

Phenomenal

Ungrounding

Theoretical/Logical Through an excess of the mark

(Non-)trace mark (J. Derrida) (retrait)

(Non-)ground (support) through the hollowing subjectile (J. Clay) out and invagination of (subject) the support Drawing

(Ground) the indistinct blankness (of the image) (P. Fédida) neither (form, completeness ...) nor (ground, emptiness)

Drawing takes place in undecidability

Figure 11.A.1  Source: © Dirk Dehouck.

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L’Art Même published the review without the schema as “L’espacement du dessin” (“The Spacing of Drawing”) (Dehouck 2015). If I am reproducing the schema here, it is because it appears to clarify my essay in useful ways. I would like to thank Dirk Dehouck for permission to reprint the schema.

Notes 1 For everything that came before the end of the nineteenth century, we follow Jean‐ Louis Déotte when he affirms: “drawing had been equipped [appareillé] by the fateful imposition of perspective” (Déotte 2007, p. 15). 2 As in English, “contexture” in French suggests at once a complex, organizational, or compositional structure in which the material effects of interweaving or the material fabric is also implied in the binding of elements into a whole. Translator’s note. 3 See also “Blank Silence” below for the relation of drawing to language and poetry. 4 For further discussion of the subjectile, see (Massaert 2004–2005). 5 Le tracé – at once outline, delimitation, and trace, in the sense of imprint, print, trace, mark, inscription. The reference here is both to what is produced and the act or process of drawing or tracing out. Translator’s note. 6 We recall the well‐known passage from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: “It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground. There is cruelty, even monstrosity, on both sides of this struggle … It is a poor recipe for producing monsters to accumulate heteroclite determinations or to overdetermine the animal. It is better to raise up the ground and dissolve the form” (See Deleuze 1994, pp. 28–29). 7 This does not exclusively concern the thought of drawing’s “extreme contemporaneity.” Françoise Viatte draws our attention to the curves that have been incised onto the paper by a metal point that constitute, apart from minute figures, the essential aspect of Botticelli’s illustration for the Empyrean in Song XXXII of the “Paradise” section of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (See Viatte and Boubli 1995, pp. 26–27). Viatte notes that the work in question is reproduced in (de Tolnay 1972, plate 54). 8 See (Marukawa 2007) for a further example of Fédida’s approach. 9 For these comparisons between the history of art and psychoanalysis, Philippe‐ Alain Michaud takes up an approach previously addressed in the work of Daniel Arasse and Louis Marin, among others. See (Michaud 2005, pp. 16 (n. 24), 18 (n. 34)). On Descartes and dreams, see (Richir 1989). 10 “A dream‐thought is unusable so long as it is expressed in an abstract form; but once it has been transformed into pictorial language, contrasts, and identifications of the kind which the dream‐work requires, and which it creates if they are not already present, can be established more easily than before between the new form of expression and the remainder of the material underlying the dream” (Freud 2010, p. 375). 11 Pierre Fédida cites du Bouchet at length concerning “this reciprocal support between blankness, support, area, figure” (Fédida 1993, p. 40. See André du Bouchet 1972, 1983). It should be noted how much Fédida’s text owes to du Bouchet’s work. 12  In his text “Présence et absence dans l’art de Tal‐Coat” [“Presence and Absence in the Work of Tal Coat”], Henry Maldiney writes: “The style of his drawings has no equivalent. It is time to realize that Tal Coat counts among the few great drawers in history” (Maldiney 1976, p. 10, reprinted in Maldiney 1996, p. 117). In order to



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give Tal Coat’s work its just worth, one should recall the essential role played by his intellectual complicity with Georges Duthuit, the great specialist of Byzantine art, Fauvism, and Matisse (See Labrusse 1997). See the definition of the Figure as curvature or flexion in (Guérin 2008, pp. 11, 57). The reference is to Jacques Lacan “there is no Other of the Other” in (Lacan 2013, p. 353). Translator’s note. “Insofar as the sign in itself is postulated as insignificant = 0, the primal, the hidden ground of every nature, can represent itself” (Hölderlin 2009, p. 90). Many thanks to Philip Armstrong for having accepted the task of translating this difficult text.

References du Bouchet, A. (1972). “Tournant au plus vite le dos au fatras de l’art.” In: Qui n’est pas tourné vers nous, 35–72. Paris: Mercure de France. du Bouchet, A. (1983). Peinture. Fontfroide‐le‐Haut: Fata Morgana. du Bouchet, A. (1988). “Aveuglément peinture.” In: Une Tache. Fontfroide le Haut: Fata Morgana first published in 1987 as “Matière de l’interlocuteur.” La Part de l’Œil 3: 65–89 (dossier “Arts plastiques: questions au langage”). Clay, J. (1981). “Painting in shreds.” (trans. D. Brewer). SubStance 10 (2): 49–74. Courtine, J.‐F. (1990). “Relève et répétition.” In: Heidegger et la phénoménologie, 89–106. Paris: Vrin. Dehouck, D. (2015). “L’espacement du dessin.” L’Art Même 67: 48–50. available at: http://www2.cfwb.be/lartmeme/no067/documents/AM67.pdf. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition (trans. P. Patton). London: The Althone Press. Déotte, J.‐L. (2007). Qu’est‐ce qu’un appareil ? Benjamin, Lyotard, Rancière. Paris: L’Harmattan. Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (trans. D.B. Allison). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1981). “The double session.” (trans. B. Johnson). In: Dissemination, 173– 286. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs of the Blind: The Self‐Portrait and Other Ruins. (trans. P.‐A. Brault and M. Naas). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1998). “To unsense the subjectile.” (trans. M.A. Caws). In: The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, 59–157. Cambridge: MIT Press. Derrida, J. (2007). “The retrait of metaphor,” (trans. P. Kamuf). In: Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, 48–80. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2013). “Penser à ne pas voir.” In: Penser à ne pas voir: Écrits sur les arts du visible 1979–2004, 56–78. Paris: La Différence. Escoubas, E. (2007). Césure Derrida et la vérité du dessin: Césure une autre révolution copernicienne. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 53: 47–59. Fédida, P. (1993). “Le souffle indistinct de l’image.” La Part de l’Œil 9: 29–50. (reprinted 1995. In Le site de l’étranger. Paris: PUF). Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Freud, S. (2010). The Interpretation of Dreams, (trans. James Strachey). New York: Basic Books.

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Guérin, M. (2008). Pour saluer Rilke. Belval: Circé. Hegel, G.W.F. (1998). Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, (trans. T.M. Knox). Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Heidegger, M. (2000). Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hölderlin, F. (2009). “The meaning of tragedy.” (trans. J. Adler and C. Louth). In: Essays and Lectures, 316. London: Penguin. Jabès, E. (1980). L’ineffaçable, l’inaperçu. Paris: Gallimard. Krauss, R. (1985). “Sculpture in the expanded field.” In: The Originality of the Avant‐ Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Labrusse, R. (1997). Hivers 1949. Tal‐Coat entre Georges Duthuit et Samuel Beckett. In: Tal‐Coat devant l’image, 99–112. Geneva/Colmar/Antibes/Winterthur: Musées d’art et d’histoire/Musée d’Unterlinden/Musée Picasso/Kunstmuseum. Lacan, J. (2013). Le Séminaire, Livre VI, Le désir et son interprétation. Paris: Éditions de la Martinière/Le Champ freudien. Lacoue‐Labarthe, P. and Nancy, J.‐L. (1988). The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Layet, C. (2011). Préface. In: André du Bouchet, Aveuglante ou banale. Essais sur la poésie, 1949–1959 (eds. C. Layet and F. Tison). Paris: Le Bruit du Temps. Maldiney, H. (1976). “Présence et absence dans l’art de Tal‐Coat.” In: Tal Coat, 6–8. Paris: Grand Palais. Maldiney, H. (1996). Aux déserts que l’histoire accable. Montolieu: Deyrolle. Marin, L. (1975). La critique du discours. Sur la “Logique de Port‐Royal” et les “Pensées” de Pascal. Paris: Minuit. Marin, L. (1995). Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée. Paris: Hazan. Marukawa, S. (2007). Philippe Jaccottet: le souffle et le chant de l’absence. Etudes françaises 43 (3): 91–109. Massaert, L. (ed.) (2004–2005). La Part de l’Œil, vol. 20 (“Ouvrir le support”). Brussels: La Part de l’OEil. Massaert, L. (2014–2015). Liminaire: Le triple d’une réserve. La Part de l’Œil 29: 7–15. Michaud, P.‐A. (2005). Comme le rêve le dessin. Paris: Musée du Louvre and Centre Pompidou. Nancy, J.‐L. (1996a). “Why are there several arts.” (trans. P. Kamuf). In: The Muses, 1–39. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nancy, J.‐L. (1996b). “The girl who succeeds the muses.” (trans. P. Kamuf). In: The Muses, 41–55. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nancy, J.‐L. (1997a). The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.‐L. (1997b). “Art, a fragment.” (trans. J.S. Librett). In: The Sense of the World, 123–139. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.‐L. (2006). “Taking account of poetry.” (trans. L. Hill). In: Multiple Arts: Muses II (ed. S. Sparks). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Payot, D. (2000). Césure Construction et vérité: les raisons du montage. Césure In: Le collage et après (ed. J.‐L. Flecniakoska). Paris: L’Harmattan. Rancière, J. (2007). The Future of the Image. (trans. G. Elliott). London: Verso. Richir, L. (1989). Lire Descartes comme un cauchemar…. La Part de l’Œil 5: 201–216. de Tolnay, C. (1972). History and Technique of Old Master Drawings: A Handbook. New York: Hacker Art Books. Vaudène, D. (1994). La tache blanche. Césure 7 (“L’impensé, la trace”), Paris, Revue de La Convention psychanalytique, available at http://perso.numericable.fr/vaudene/ articles/Vaudene_1994_LaTacheBlanche.pdf.



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Vaudène, D. (1997). Césure Ineffa[ça]ble, in[aper]çu. Césure In: Psychanalyse et réforme de l’entendement, 281–299. Paris: Lysimaque. Vaudène, D. (2006). Césure L’œil de la structure. Césure In: La lettre et le lieu. Présence du modèle et action de la structure en psychanalyse (Freud et Lacan) (ed. J.‐P. Marcos). Paris: Kimé. Vaudène, D. (2017a). “L’écriture au lieu de l’écriture: Un acheminement vers la question de l’écriture.” Intentio 1 (forthcoming). Vaudène, D. (2017b). http://perso.numericable.fr/vaudene (last accessed 10/5/17). Viatte, F. and Boubli, L. (1995). Réserves, les suspens du dessin. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées nationaux.

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Drawing in Atopia An Exploration of “Drift” as Method Beth Harland

When thinking about possibilities for contemporary drawing, it is helpful to pay attention to previous discussions of drawing’s relationship to painting, not only in terms of the difference between them but equally the dissolution of difference, and how and when this might have taken place. Here, I will discuss the work of Matisse as the emergence of an important shift in the relationship between drawing and painting. The “Matisse system” as Yve‐Alain Bois describes Matisse’s method, characterized by the overcoming of the traditional division between drawing and color, referred to as “arche‐drawing,” marks the evolution of a particular way of looking at practice. It is a way of seeing practice that has resonance in current debate, following notions of a post-medium condition.1 I will describe this change in relationship between drawing and painting, how it appears for Matisse and how its “method” and “ethics” link with Barthes’ work on the Neutral to offer a particular way of thinking about the space of contemporary making. What I mean by “space” here is the setting or condition for practice. Arche‐drawing is a concept that opens up new possibilities for this setting, both for making, and for the perception of an artwork. After arche‐drawing, it is not possible to identify drawing with line in the absence of color. This does not mean the importance of features such as line and color disappear, but rather their significance and potential change, as we will see. In “Matisse and ‘Arche‐drawing” (1993), Bois presents the notion of arche‐drawing as both a method and a breakthrough moment in the radical rethinking of the opposition between drawing and color that was always at stake in Matisse’s practice. This breakthrough can be viewed in a number of different ways: as a complete stepping outside the dominant tradition of French painting; as an opening into the modern painting tradition; and as Matisse’s own specific way forward (the moment at which Matisse becomes Matisse). The profound invention involved in arche‐drawing takes us back to first principles. Definitions of “arché” include terms such as primary senses, beginning, origin and source of action. Specifically, with arche‐drawing, the originary A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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source comes before the binary oppositions of drawing and color. Here Bois uses the analogy of Derrida’s notion of “arche‐writing,” the originary principle that stands prior to the division between speech and writing, for Derrida the division that forms the basis of Western metaphysics. The notion that speech is privileged as the essence of language while writing is mere reproduction is mirrored in the conventional hierarchy of drawing over color: “colour comes after the fact ‘a la Puvis’, for example; it is coloring in…” (ibid, p. 20). For Matisse the technique of Divisionism2 in painting, which he briefly explored then rejected, was problematic as it reinforced the gap between drawing and color, elements that he came to understand through knowledge gained from his practice as essentially inseparable. It was the search for an expression of this integration that led to what Bois calls “the Matisse system” in which arche‐ drawing is shown directly at work, and to the artist’s most remarkable achievements. We could say that arche‐drawing names a point at which Matisse discovered that drawing (line) and color (a defining concern for painting) can be the same thing. I would also propose that we think about this as a breakthrough for subsequent visual art and not just the inception of Matisse’s “style.” Within Fauvism, Matisse begins to synthesize his approaches to drawing and color noting: “I was able to compose my paintings by drawing in such a way that I united arabesque and colour” (Elderfield 1984, pp. 39–40). This demanded a break with rendering tonal distinctions to allow black and white to read coloristically. It also required a way of seeing the surface as “…virtually a medium of existence (like air, space, light and freedom) within which objects grow and gain their life” (Elderfield 1984, ibid, p. 40). This might be taken to suggest that arche‐drawing also has implications for pictorial space; a new conception of what the surface can be. In these early works, the image and the surface are as one and the functions of line and shading are conflated. Matisse observed in Cézanne’s paintings that, for the first time, construction comes through color and not line. Like Matisse’s arche‐drawing, Cézanne’s method of construction produced a new relation between drawing and color in which the numerous strokes that built up an object, for example the outline of an apple, overlap and move into and outside of the apple motif. Cezanne’s marking of color sensations both escapes from a simplistic delineation process and, at the same time, the dominant tradition within Western painting in which the substratum of the painting is obliterated by the painting. In the process of this twofold escape, Matisse finds “the dialectical conjunction of colour and surface” (Damisch 2002, p. 228) that is so vital to him. There is a small painting that Matisse made in 1905 called La Japonaise which retains an intimation of the influence of Signac’s Divisionism in the patches of color that hover in pictorial space, but equally the painting pushes beyond unified marks and we see those marks beginning to form patches and lines of color. The figure of a woman in a Japanese robe is all but absorbed into the simplified landscape ground, and together figure and ground form a patterned surface and it takes time for the viewer to uncover the figure. This is an early example of Matisse’s shift toward an “all overness,” or equality in color and compositional value for all parts of the painting. As Matisse said of Divisionism in this period of transition away from it: …the breaking up of colour led to the breaking up of form, of contour…There is only a retinal sensation, but it destroys the calm of the surface…there is only a tactile vitality…[I] started painting in planes, seeking the quality of the picture by an accord of all the flat colour…” (Matisse in Flam 1995, p. 84)

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Bois explores the relationship between elements of Matisse’s practice and the way arche‐drawing operates within and across them. Both drawing “as a practice” and drawing in what he calls “a larger sense, as a generative category” (Bois 1993, p. 22) within painting, operate in Matisse’s practice. He produced a body of work through a clearly defined drawing practice, mostly black and white ink, pencil and charcoal line drawings and prints, the results of which he himself considered largely superior to his paintings. The discovery he made through this aspect of his practice was that “…a drawing can be intensely coloured without there being any need for actual colour” (Matisse in Flam 1995, p. 155). What he means by this is that the blank space between two strokes in a drawing will have a different “colour” to a larger blank space between two strokes within the same work. Thus the color will vary according to the dimension of the space. Matisse’s invention is radically different from the classical system of highlight in which the white line or surface appears more luminous when less extensive against a dark zone. What operates in the “compartments” of Matisse’s drawing is an array of degrees of saturation of white, and this, coupled with the abandonment of relief and perspective, means that “the whole spatial construction of the picture will be taken on by the organization of colour” (Bois 1993, p. 28). According to Bois, Matisse had this revelation in 1906 and referred to it in a number of essays and interviews, which can be summed up in the statement: “One square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue” (Bois 2001, p. 28). Thus, the crux of the Matisse system is the equation “quality = quantity,” coined by Matisse himself (ibid, p. 28). The idea that quality relations are basically quantity relations in a pictorial work was a discovery that Matisse made through black and white line drawing (e.g. Figure 12.1), but he went on to see that this modulation through quantity played an equally central role in the behavior of all color in painting. The development of arche‐drawing occurs both within his drawing practice and, as a generative force, within painting. In Matisse’s view, what enabled him to find this space in painting through drawing was the economy of means. The originary structure referred to as arche‐drawing depends upon the impossibility of a gap between drawing and color. He discovers his system’s quantity–quality equation through the reduction of color parameters, rather than the absence of color in drawing, by simplifying his means. Bois points out that a second equation in the Matisse system arises from the quality = quantity equation: “circulation + tension  =  expansion” (Bois 2001, p. 28). This describes the sense of expansive scale, whatever the size of the work, and the fact that the use of traditions of perspective and modeling are precluded as they “would hollow out the picture in depth and thereby tone down the lateral extension of scale” (ibid, p. 29). Once you have accepted the quality = quantity equation it becomes impossible to enlarge a composition – by projection or squaring up – rather each picture needs to be realized individually at its own particular size. This point is key in understanding why Matisse marks a fundamental shift in thinking within practice, a shift away from what we might term the Renaissance conception. The Renaissance model is one in which the artist has an idea, a fully formed conception of what they want to produce, one that exists in the mind prior to realization. They make plans to bring this into being, including drawings, and use techniques of scaling up in order to execute the idea, an idea that remains the same whatever the size. Color in this model is certainly secondary to drawing; it is filling in. For Matisse the idea emerges in the work, it cannot precede it  –  the work itself finds the idea. In “Notes of a Painter,” 1908,

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Figure 12.1  Henri Matisse (1906) Small Light Woodcut, Woodcut, 45.8 × 29 cm. Source: © The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland BMA 1950.12.237. Photography: Mitro Hood.

Matisse’s first published essay, he produces a lucid statement of the basis of his method which shows that from the start each picture must be worked on as a whole, and as an expression of the artist’s thought that “must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means…” (Flam 1995, p. 38). He clearly states that color needs to “serve expression…I put down my tones without a preconceived plan,” such that the areas of color closely interact and are worked and reworked until the whole appears. The significance of this whole is to be sensed by the spectator even before any recognition of subject matter. It is the form and color relationship that constitutes the work, and for Matisse they must balance and produce a “harmony analogous to that of a musical composition” (ibid, p. 40). We might say at this point that arche‐drawing, once revealed in Matisse’s work, is capable of forming the core principle of a new kind of productive practice. I want to

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develop this idea to describe a shift in thinking about drawing’s relation to painting in order to define a particular type of space emerging from within practice, configured through the reworkings of both the traditionally separate spheres of idea and production and the drawing/color hierarchy that are at work in Matisse’s method. The space I have in mind is shaped by the fact that the idea appears in the work, within the process. I will borrow a term for this space from Barthes: “Atopia” from his work The Neutral (2005), a further example of out‐maneuvering fixed positions to place alongside that of Matisse. It is a term that needs to be distanced from utopia. Here utopia is thought of as a desired socio‐political condition that must be conceived, planned for, and then realized, perhaps a quintessentially modern notion of political practice. Barthes seems to want to distance himself from a lot of traditional activist politics, including that of the then‐dominant Left. As Barthes (1977, p. 49) describes it, his sense of being pigeonholed within “an (intellectual) site” is countered through drift. In opposing an allotted position, he suggests there is “only one internal doctrine: that of atopia (of a drifting habituation).” Atopia is, for Barthes, an escape from the topic and the continual demand to make sense and act according to preconceived classifications. Atopia, from the Greek atopos, meaning “no‐place” or “without place,” is an open space of emergence. Barthes delivered his lecture course The Neutral at the Collège de France in 1977– 1978 and the complexity of his thinking on the subject unfolded across myriad points of reference over several months of weekly sessions. The network of asides and reflective supplements in response to the audience’s questions is carefully documented in the published version. The Neutral is addressed through the exploration of 23 figures, which he also calls “traits” or “twinklings” that correspond to embodiments of both the Neutral and the anti‐Neutral. These are presented in no particular order, as to suggest a pre‐established meaning would itself be contradictory to the Neutral. Barthes identifies the object of the course at the outset: I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm…The paradigm, what is that? It’s the opposition of two virtual terms from which, in speaking, I actualize one to produce meaning. (Barthes 2005, pp. 6–7)

Krauss and Hollier note, as the book’s English translators, that Barthes’ term “déjouer” relates to the play of power in language and that its translation as “baffle” emphasizes the idea of a field of play. Elsewhere, Krauss (2014) discusses the roots of the Neutral in Barthes’ response to the binaries of one or other of opposing values, observing that: “Barthes suffered at the hands of this demand for choice.” She traces the development of the Neutral through Barthes’ counter‐narrative “obscure meaning,” or “third‐meaning” in Image, Music, Text and also to the “punctum” in Camera Lucida. But we can also find an early fragmentary introduction to his thinking on it in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977) in which his list of figures of the Neutral, includes “displacement” and “drifting.” Both terms suggest an escape, a form of aside. These are developed in The Neutral in traits such as “weariness,” which is, uncoded: “a sign without referent (cf chimera) that is part of the domain of the artist…unclassifiable: without premise, without place…” (Barthes 2005 ,  p. 17). He evokes the difficulty of floating, being free from the demand to always take a position and expresses a longing for a space that is not fixed. This ‘drift’ however, is not a

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passive state. It is not indifference. “In fact, weariness = an intensity: society doesn’t recognize intensities” (Barthes 2005, p. 18). The Neutral is not grayness, on the contrary it is an intense state as “‘To outplay the paradigm’ is an ardent, burning activity” (Barthes 2005, p. 6). This is reminiscent of Matisse and the world that his art evokes – world as an ongoing sense of what is and what matters – the intensity of a sensorially rich embodied life. Also, in relation to what might at times appear to be contradictions between the accounts of the sheer difficulty of producing Matisse’s work, the discipline and effort involved in its realization, and the seemingly easy, flowing nature of the work itself. I want to suggest that Barthes’ conception of “drift” in particular might offer a link between the Neutral and the operation of drawing as a generative space within other practices, including Barthes’ own writing practice. Barthes made several hundred drawings, something that is little known even among seasoned readers of his texts. This notion of drifting might be described as a stepping aside, a deliberate move – again using the language of the field of play – to find a space that differs from the one that seems to have been assigned. In the Neutral, the distance he desires to establish from the authority of language and the paradigm highlights quality over object. He thus sets up a distance that “allows us to conceive of a time before something is apprehended as an object, a time when that thing already participated in a common (or neutral) dimension as an indeterminate or non‐specified subject…” (Millet 2013). We might be reminded, here, of arche‐drawing as well as being prompted to think about the term atopia as potentially liberating in relation to contemporary practice. Barthes clearly prefers atopia to utopia as utopia “proceeds from meaning and governs it” (Barthes 1977, p. 49). As Millet (2013) points out, utopia offers an alternative model in critical opposition to existing society, whereas atopia is not itself a model and might be more usefully employed as a “positive perspective on our present world.” This no‐place can be seen to open‐up poetic possibilities, differences, intensities, and to condition the nuance that is so vital to the Neutral. In some of the photographs and video clips of Barthes at his desk, we can glimpse an orderly array of tools for writing and for drawing, including bottles of ink and brushes. Very occasionally he refers in his writings to his involvement in the praxis of drawing. Here he positions the activity as something that is linked to drift, in a detailed account of his day while on vacation. Following a morning of work: …At one, we have lunch; I nap from one‐thirty to two‐thirty. Then comes the moment when I drift: no will to work; sometimes I paint a little, or I go for some aspirin at the druggist’s, or I burn papers at the back of the garden…by this time it is four, and I go back to work… (Barthes 1977, p. 82)

Other references point to the pleasure he took in drawing, materiality and color, but can this relationship of a writer to a visual making practice tell us anything about the notion of drawing as a generative space? Can we see drawing as operative both within and across different practices as an atopic “spirit” and is this a useful way to think about the way in which Barthes drew? In my visits to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to study their collection of several hundred of Barthes’ drawings, I found his approach and handling connects to the notion of emergence that I have been referring to, and to the active engagement of drift as a key component of the Neutral. Many of the drawings might seem little more than doodles and Barthes

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himself did not think of them as serious artworks, resolutely describing himself as an amateur in these matters. The importance of the amateur for Barthes is in doing something for the love of it, for pleasure, without a wish to master or compete. He enters into music and drawing in this spirit, and positions his praxis as that of the “counter‐bourgeois artist” (Barthes 1977, p. 52). These drawings are not easily accessible other than through a selection included in one or two catalogues of exhibitions staged after his death, a major one being at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2003. I will try to describe them, in particular the type of drawing that forms the majority, abstract pieces that incorporate three or four colors in a series of lyrical marks that fill the sheet, except for a “frame” of untouched paper around all sides. There are other types of drawings that depict something, a plant, a costumed figure, etc. or that experiment with paint in slightly different ways, but there are fewer of these (Figure 12.2). Most of the drawings are modest in scale and the marks form a kind of graceful order. He likes grids, blocks, careful placement. The drawings have an abiding sense of “testing” a material, just seeing how it will appear on the sheet if applied in a particular way. This feeling of discovery and pleasure is particularly strong in the drawings made with felt‐pens (of which there are many) and he did make a note about acquiring new pens: “Nouvelle Markers” or first tries: “Premiere Gouache.” The “first gouache” seems to be the only piece that reveals light pencil marks prior to the painting, as if there is some anxiety in having to simultaneously handle a new material and construct an image. The lack of preparatory markings is one of the distinguishing features of the rest of the drawings, whether they are executed in paint or marker pen,

Figure 12.2  Roland Barthes (1971) Drawing dated 15 December 1971, labeled no.159, ink on paper, 21 × 26.5 cm. Source: © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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the marks are made from the first, with no alteration. The often‐preferred choice of felt‐pen in itself reinforces the possibility of a single attempt. The viewer’s experience of these drawings is one of recognition, the feeling of trying out this material is relayed, the pressure and angle of the mark, the presence of the body. His texts on Twombly (Barthes 1986) evoke the sense that looking at art is an act of more than just vision – it is rather a haptic visuality. He tells us that he is looking through a book of reproductions of Twombly’s work while frequently interrupting himself to make quick scribbles on slips of paper: “I am not directly imitating TW (what would be the use of that?), I am imitating his gesture…putting myself so to speak, in the hand’s footsteps” (Barthes 1986, p. 163). In Empire of Signs (Barthes 1982, p. 12) he writes: From painting, Japanese food also takes the least immediately visual quality, the quality most deeply engaged in the body (attached to the weight and the labour of the hand which draws or covers) and which is not colour but touch.

Mostly the drawings are on off‐white paper. Quite thick paper is preferred, with some absorbency, though sometimes he uses thin white drafting paper. Occasionally he draws on surfaces such as wood veneer and black scraperboard, the marks etched into the surface. He sometimes uses the paper itself to form a “ground” for the marks, especially where the paper is significantly colored, but often he also draws the ground using the pale colored wedge‐nib marker pens to block in areas. The marking of a ground does not come prior to the linear marks. In this way the ground is not underneath, all marks operate on the same plane. There is a diversity of marks, and at the same time an equality of marks. The drawings are usually very flat, the materials used tend to favor that, but occasionally he explores textured marks, produces with a palette knife, which he uses to drag thick acrylic paint over the surface. As he says of Twombly, the marks seem made very much “to enjoy the movement which has ended up here”(Barthes 1986, p. 164). In Buchloh’s mapping of the epistemes of drawing, for Twombly “the pure indexicality of the grapheme as subjective inscription…” is foregrounded (Buchloh 2000, p. 44). Barthes enjoys vibrant color and makes strong use of complementary colors, sometimes producing an optical movement, for example ultramarine with sienna or alizarin crimson with emerald green and black. He admires Twombly’s production of color “like a pinprick in the corner of the eye” and sees the relation between marks and surface in Twombly’s works as evocative of the delicate action of memory, recalling Proust in the thought that between the colored pencil and the idea, “the reminiscence becomes a total sign” (Barthes 1986, p. 165). As I have mentioned, his preferred approach is to contain the marks within a central block on the sheet with a “frame” of blank paper on all sides.3 In looking at these, I can’t help thinking of Derrida’s writing on the Parergon – the importance of the distance achieved by the framer’s passe‐ partout – “it lets something appear, it does not form a frame in the strict sense, rather a frame within the frame” (Derrida 1987, p. 12). He says that without it, the work is too present. In the Eastern tradition there is a strong link between the concept of writing and that of picture‐making and the relationship between calligraphy and painting is one of many things that engaged Barthes in Eastern cultures. Damisch (2002) compares the delimitation of the pictorial field in two traditions. Alberti’s account forms the model

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of the Western tradition in which the first step is to mark out the enclosure that ­contains the painting: “an open window through which I see what I want to paint” (Damisch 2002, p. 210). This is reversed in notions of limit and field of the Eastern tradition, so that here it is the order of strokes that establishes the scene. It is essential that “the delimitation or closure be established only at the last moment…the space must not be closed until all the strokes within it have been traced”(ibid). In Barthes’ drawings the “frame,” in the same way, evolves out of and along with the strokes. The work’s emergence as opposed to an executed idea is again evoked. Barthes begins to draw and paint by extending the action of writing in an automatic way. His drawings seem to indicate almost a “slippage” from writing into drawing: “doodling…or the signifier without the signified” reads the caption attached to one spidery drawing; and “squandering” – some drawings were done on pieces of headed paper from his place of work. An aspect of his interest in Twombly’s work perhaps resides in his desire to throw into question distinctions between drawing and writing, as well as drawing and painting. As a form of writing, he calls Twombly’s practice “the allusive field of writing” reminding us that “allusion, a rhetorical figure, consists in saying one thing with the intention of making another understood” (Barthes 1986, p. 158). Barthes’ process of drawing seemed to be a form of stepping to the side, of finding a different space or action for the body to inhabit, which enables him to drift and enter into a contemplative duration. The “work space” he wants to establish is “the same everywhere, patiently adapted to the pleasures of painting, writing, sorting” and it is only there that his body is “free of its image‐repertoire” (Barthes 1977, p. 38). The “aside” represented by drawing seems to be an active part of the construction of “ease” he describes as a state that he seeks, “being a hedonist (since he regards himself as one)” (ibid, p. 43). Along with his interest in Twombly, the drawings perhaps show Barthes’ playful exploration of the relationship between drawing and writing, an exploration which results not in discovering a border but of possibilities that lie between them, in their atopic borderland. Three of these drawings are reproduced in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the autobiographical reflection, both personal and theoretical, that has come to be seen as one of his key works. This suggests that, while he elsewhere plays down the drawings, he sees them as having a part to play in his work. He clearly wanted to show that this was an aspect of his production, at least of his process, and as such the drawings have a significance for him. They appear in amongst the sections of text without direct comment and sometimes without caption. This interesting and unusual use of image within text reminds me of W.G. Sebald’s placing of rather elusive photographs within texts that already defy standard categories of fiction and documentary writing. Sebald used collected images and his own photographs as a research tool but included them in his books. Their source and relationship to the text remains ambiguous, and he said that their role was in part to reveal something of the material sources that usually remain hidden: “It’s one way of making obvious that you don’t begin with a white page” (to Lubow in Schwartz, 2007, p. 162). The issue of the blank page was something that Barthes found interesting – in Cy Twombly: Works on Paper he wrote about the sense that the paper is already somehow colored and that the artist has access to graffiti, to the background of “an object which has already lived” (Barthes 1986, p. 167). This access to graffiti is linked to excess, and actions that are outside of the order of things (one of which is art), again reminiscent of an idea of atopia.

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We might call Barthes’ works on paper drawing as enactment. In an essay on Henri Michaux, Catherine de Zegher (2000, p. 170) extrapolates from the artist’s discussion about writing and drawing that he “considers drawing as a discourse of enactment and writing as a discourse of knowledge.” Michaux certainly describes his discovery of drawing as an alternative space to that of writing, a form of escape. He draws “…so as to leave words behind, to put an end to the irritating question of how and why? Could it really be that I draw because I see so clearly this thing or that thing? Not at all. Quite the contrary. I do it to be perplexed again” (Michaux in de Zegher 2000, p. 105). The physical enactment of drawing for Michaux is equivalent to a process of clearing: “Strange decongestion, putting to sleep one part of the mind, the speaking, writing part (part, no, rather a system of connections)” (ibid, p. 17). There are echoes here of the notion of drift as a counterpoint to the expectations set up for writers or artists, both in a general sense and as shaped by their previous production. The desire to evade such a position might then suggest alternative means of production, but certainly a conscious action of repositioning. For Barthes drifting is intractable, a state of resistance. The action of staying still for a moment is a willful one. This is not easy to achieve when all around is both demanding and in flux. A familiar sentiment for many no doubt from within the 24/7 culture, described by Jonathan Crary (2013) in a scathing account of the impact of the “open all hours” culture we currently inhabit. His argument is essentially that contemporary culture increasingly exhibits a loss of differentiation, of subjective identity and singularity. For Crary what is eroded by 24/7 culture is the “co‐presence of difference and otherness [that] could be the basis for provisional publics or communities.” The importance of the singularity of experience echoes Barthes’s emphasis on nuance in The Neutral (and his other lecture series How to Live Together) as he puts it, a “guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance” (Barthes 2005, p. 11). Finding this space through art practice might be a goal, and art may be claimed as a means of countering such pressures, but this is not a simple matter, a situation that is well put by Amy Sillman (2016, p. 110) when she writes: Making a painting is so hard it makes you crazy. You have to negotiate surface, tone, silhouette, line, space, zone, layer, scale, speed, and mass, while interacting with a meta‐surface of meaning, text, sign, language, intention, concept and history. You have to simultaneously diagnose the present, predict the future, and ignore the past…

I recognize this situation when in the studio, though without subscribing to the notion that you have to ignore the past. There is a way in which a painting can seem to become closed to development, perhaps because of these numerous demands. In the face of this tendency toward closure, I would like to return to my initial question: how might the change in relationship between drawing and painting signaled by Matisse’s arche‐drawing continue to inform contemporary practice, and to think about this in relation to a series of recent works of my own. I take this approach in order to try to say something about what I see as common conditions related to visual practice in the wake of modernism, how current modes of attention impinge upon and shape the way we think about artworks. In order to do this, I need to go through some aspects of my work, though the point is not the individuality of my practice but how it applies to commonalities in the post‐medium condition. The series I will explore as an example is entitled Methods of Modern Construction, from a phrase used

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by Matisse in a statement to Tériade about his practice. I borrowed this phrase as a point of origin and dialogue for the work in order to deliberately reference early modernist painting, and Matisse’s project in particular, which proposed painting as a way of looking. Why Matisse? Because his radical discoveries, which are well described in Bois’s essay and in his own writings, are a clear example of the very particular knowledge that can be produced through practice. As Bridget Riley notes: “Matisse’s legacy is not one of style nor of the particularity of his sensations but lies in his way of setting about painting. His work lays bare the situation of the modern painter” (Riley 1999, p. 203). His reinvention of painting for himself, and the attitudes and methods that led to this way of looking, offer something to contemporary artists and, as Riley says, such reinvention is possible still if built “in terms of the realities of painting itself…” (ibid, pp. 203–204). In pursuing this, her own methods have involved close study of particular pictorial systems, for example through copying from Seurat (Riley 2015) to learn how the paintings work, from the inside. I will highlight two aspects of my series in order to explore how Matisse’s method and understanding of drawing/color have been influential. The first aspect is what Bois (2001, p. 29) has called “an aesthetic of distraction,” by which he means the disturbance of categories of center and periphery. Matisse’s drawings and paintings refuse centering and demand a continually active scanning with the eye. For Bois, he does this by rendering “the diffusion of his gaze…making it impossible for our eye to come to rest” (ibid, p. 29). I have worked with this idea through building large wall collages from small, diverse elements, using color, image, and pattern in an unruly assemblage that challenges a settled orderly visual scanning of the work. This interest is in part a response to the sensation that in our digital culture it can be difficult to make center and periphery distinctions given the 24/7 access that we have to indescribable amounts of visual and other material online. This proliferation of imagery and information can lead to a double‐edged experience of euphoria and discomfort (Figure 12.3). The collages are largely hand‐made, often loosely constructed and portable –collapsible into a stack of A4 sized elements (see Figure 12.4). They were intended as generative forms, an archive of sorts, from which the act of remaking could take place to produce paintings. That remained only part of their function as they became something more like a series; open, transferable forms of making which could be reconfigured, exhibited as a block of elements as they first existed in the studio, or presented in a more scattered configuration. Again, my process has been informed by Matisse, his complex use of series in his “themes and variations” drawings and his radical practice of showing stages of the working process. Matisse began his “themes and variations” drawings in 1942. The initial drawing of a set‐up (figure or still life/interior) was worked over and over, drawn, erased, redrawn in the malleable medium of charcoal. This was followed by a series of quick line drawings in ink of the same motif – variations – once it had been thoroughly investigated in the theme drawing. As Rippner (Rippner in Aagesen and Rabinow 2012, p. 165) points out, the method “captures the ‘multiple truths’ inherent in a subject,” as Matisse saw it, while also evoking the passage of time. Matisse used the terms “conscious” and “unconscious” to describe the initial taking control and then letting go that the series represented. As Bois (2001, p. 149) points out, they “cannot be read in strictly Freudian terms” as the ‘unconscious’ refers to an “emptying out of the self” rather than a liberation of “repressed desires.” Returning to this approach in paintings

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Figure 12.3  Beth Harland (2016) Methods of Modern Construction, part 1. Mixed media, 205 × 135 cm. Source: © Collection of Artist.

Figure 12.4  Beth Harland (2016) Methods of Modern Construction, part 3. Oil on canvas, 26 × 21 cm each panel. Source: © Collection of Artist.

known as the “Vence interiors” of 1947–1948, Matisse found an equivalent method. He worked on the canvas, making repeated corrections (pentimenti), as in the “theme” drawings, until he had secured the motif and, having asked his assistant to erase the work, returned to the blank canvas to produce an apparently in‐the‐moment version. The paintings then have the feel of the “variation” drawings, though “the spontaneous look of these canvases is thus the result of an elaborate, slow method” (Bois 2001, ibid, p. 204). The complexity of his process was something that Matisse had earlier been at pains to have recognized, leading him to present a series of photographs of stages of a painting as it evolved, both to collectors and even to the public. He showed such a series in an exhibition at Galerie Maeght, Paris in 1945, to “dispel the notion that he was a facile painter who worked spontaneously” (Aagesen and Rabinow 2012, p. 12).

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The themes and variations drawings, and other uses of series including this form of time‐lapse photography, are aspects of Matisse’s work that highlight the importance of development during the process as opposed to the realization of a definite formulated outcome. They show that experimentation and a drive to push beyond previous pictorial solutions are continually at work and have, for me as an artist, provided an example of just the kind of atopian working space I want to inhabit. As Giorgio Agamben (2009, p. 40) observes, to see the contemporary requires a certain distance, an “out‐of‐ jointness” that comes from being able to put it in relation to other times. He characterizes the contemporary as marked by the signatures of the archaic which “means close to the arkhé, that is to say, the origin,” that is not just situated in the past but “does not cease to operate” in the most recent (ibid, p. 50). Perhaps there is a way to conceive drawing within practice as a means to gain a certain distance, in my own example, a distance from what might have become my own repertoire, through stepping to and from different sources: Matisse’s works and other modernist artists; my built wall collages and other painted responses? The exercise of distance is again Barthes’ point about drift, it affords the “off centre, lateral, indirect…the essential is in the indirect” (Barthes 2005, p. 68). The wall collage Methods of Modern Construction, Part 1, was built up piece by piece through small, varied components. These elements are exuberant in their use of color, eclectic materials and motifs. Many of them are loose re‐workings of some of Matisse’s interior and studio paintings, which I flattened by removing color and tracing the images as a series of diagrammatic forms. I could then see at first hand that the entire spatial construction of these pictures operated through the organization of color, as Bois had described. Matisse’s radical construction offered a sort of anti‐perspectival space that hung together tentatively – a space that collapsed in my schematic versions to highlight other aspects of the image: tone, pattern, and marks. Here the operation of a selective form of re‐drawing initiated an inversion of values, pulling the rug out from under the scene as it was originally built and providing a new point of entry into the work. The selective re‐use of elements of the originals at times highlighted aspects of Matisse’s pictures that are not always so apparent when taken as a whole, for example, the somehow surprisingly coarse abstraction that surfaces in the cloth wall‐hanging behind Greta Moll in his portrait of her in the National Gallery, London. Various reworkings of this collage followed: Part 2 of the work took the form of a digital image of the wall collage presented on a small screen, similar in scale to the individual collage elements. The re‐presentation of it as a screen image is again an action of removal from the origin and also introduces another form of attention and temporality, that of the digital realm. Part 3 rephrased passages from the collage back into small, precise easel paintings (see Figure  12.4). They each focus on separate aspects of the original: one painting takes up only the color information and distills it into a grid of the most dominant chromas and tones; others are rendered first as pencil drawings, removing the color and surface variations, distilled and painted in monochrome. The method of the wall collage opens up the closed space of the easel picture, while the process of distillation returns to that space to think about it again. In this comparison of formats, I wanted to pose questions about the temporality of the work and of spectatorship: How is the viewer’s experience of looking and of the passing of time altered in the shift from the complexity of the unruly collage to the distilled

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precision of the small monochromes? The large scale and teeming detail of the collage makes it difficult for the viewer to take it in as a whole, it is rather disorienting, deliberately “too much,” which may, as Lucy Skaer says of her large drawings, “prolong and interrogate the act of looking” (in Stout 2014, p. 133). Might both formats provide a rhythmic structure for viewing, affecting the pace of the act of looking? The remaking of small details is a kind of digression from the main story – of life, of history and their forceful narratives – that can perhaps only be dealt with as small steps, negotiations that relate to individual moments of sensation and perception, of touch, color and time. The parts of the work take different positions. Part 1 enters the energy, imagery, inventive spirit of early modernism, of particular iconic figures and works, and plays there, responding directly and intuitively. Part 2 begins to acknowledge the conditions of contemporary access, digital space and its impact on our relation to the origin of other works, of painting’s history. In a sense the screen version is a provocation, as well as an alternative origin. Part 3 takes an analytical position, requiring distance. These paintings have a documentary feel, a different presence, contained, and concise. The three parts together propose a multiple viewpoint and the idea of looking in different ways at the “arche” that is the modernist canon. These positions show traces of fascination, homage, skepticism, reassessment, enquiry, but not, I think, irony, as has colored some previous responses to modernist tropes. For me the generative, gradual building of the collage represented a new way of drawing, entry into an idea or territory. It led to questions of whether what it produced  –  the re‐visioned paintings  –  might displace the original collage, become a “stand in”, or whether it was important to retain the relationship by presenting both together. Might the presentation of the oscillation between these positions serve to question the origin and our relation to it? Could the inclusion of the collage alongside the works it generated operate to bring to attention the material sources and the surplus of inscription that Sebald and Barthes in their own ways describe? Or could it indicate that all aspects of the process constitute the work? Interestingly Matisse often made pairs of paintings, treating the same subject to a comparable level of finish (rather than sketch and final work) but in different styles. His search was not for the perfect pictorial language but what he called “the truer, more essential character” of the subjects he painted (D’Allessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 25). In my action of revision there is movement from loose, intuitive making processes through to studied reworkings that are concise, mysterious to read, withheld as signifying objects. The modernist origin becomes a kind of screen/layer over the present. It is here that drawing as a generative category reveals a particular form of attention, what I might call a state of consciousness. This could provide a way of approaching the elusive idea of drawing in the context of the post‐medium, as mentioned earlier. If so, it would be through offering a different kind of positioning, something more like a peripheral awareness than the concentrated, directed way of looking that has traditionally been linked to drawing. Through the loose, corner of the eye referencing of other paintings – a kind of sideways glance – a form of attention opens up and can move toward and away from the origin. Taking things aside, attention is paid to what gets amplified and lost and to the sense of a residue – in the case of my own practice, that of modernist structures in the contemporary: pictorial elements, pattern, grids, and the gestural/mechanical aspects of modernism. The notion of residue is also evoked by Jasper Johns when talking about how he revisits works through drawing (often for him painting comes first, drawing after) and how a process of reworking can

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function “…one might say that it is a way of bypassing ideas in order to concentrate on the activity of making” (Rosenthal and Fine 1990, p. 72). What I want to propose is a space to digress and test, won through a form of drawing that can take on a “drifting” orientation, a type of wandering that might counter the tendency for the work to close itself and its dialogue with other works too quickly or completely. What do I mean to designate by “drawing” in the process of making this work? It is not an issue of medium, nor a diagram that stages itself as part of the process. The remaking and reusing of motifs here rely on opening a space through an inclusive array of gestures and materials. Returning to Barthes’s idea that artists are working on an already “coloured” surface seems appropriate – I deliberately work with the archive of modernist painting but not always in a direct and identifiable way. This sideways glance at the sources seems to me to make up a meaningful originary structure – a necessarily loose structure – for a current practice. Perhaps this is my equivalent to the way in which the economy of means of a drawing practice enabled Matisse to find his “method of modern construction” in painting? The “originary principle” of what Bois (1993) calls arche‐drawing involves the invention of method as a generative process and provides the conditions for the work’s structural articulation. A further example of the inseparability of technique as a structural principle and the creation of concept is Simon Hantaï’s approach, perhaps summed up in the phrase “folding as method” that he first used in the 1967 catalogue of his show at Galerie Jean Fournier. This phrase raises the question of, as Agnes Berecz puts it, “what makes a pictorial process a method, rather than a technique.” She goes on to answer that while a technique aims at results, the production of something, “a method implies an extended praxis and is part of an ongoing activity without envisaging a definite outcome” (Berecz 2013, p. 236). In this sense the conception of method seems close to Bois’ “Matisse system.” To conclude, I have discussed the evolving relationship between drawing and painting and the relevance of the concept of arche‐drawing to contemporary practice. This has involved using the term “drawing” as a generative category within an artist’s project, and as a productive aside in a practice such as writing. The traditionally designated qualities often still ascribed to drawing tend to link it to directness, of thought and response, the intuitive and the unmediated. Drawing is also regularly linked to close observation and focused moments of perception. Perhaps to add to those, drawing as I have described it could be a placeholder term for something else within a practice such as painting, not so much a technical stage, more a state of mind. It is here rather a mode of intentionality, determined to leave things open, to be experimental. This resonates with the stepping aside of Barthes’s drawing praxis as displacement and the space of atopia, which might be conceived as the right to wander off the point as a creative move within a process. There are aspects of contextual and historical awareness that can bring with them the sense of the closing down of options. The expectations of a clearly focused artistic project at times seem incompatible with the desire to stray into a no‐place, to admit to Barthes’s weariness with taking a position. In order to find something out we cannot always look for it directly. As Agamben (2009) reminds us, not only is an understanding of our relationship with the past central to being contemporary, it is equally dependent on indirectly seeing the obscurity, not in the bright lights of our own time but glimpsed in its shadows. This might be the value of drawing as a form of thinking aside – both within and between differently defined practices – of drawing as an act of drifting in the no‐place of atopia.

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Notes 1 See “A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post‐Medium Condition,” Rosalind Krauss (2000) and “Painting beyond Itself; The Medium in the Post‐medium Condition,” Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer‐Burcharth (2016). 2 An approach to painting that developed out of Impressionism, in particular as championed by Paul Signac. 3 A colleague who has researched Barthes’ drawings, Celine Flecheaux, suggested to me that the frame indicates Barthes sees the paper as a page, taking the position of a writer not an artist. This may be so.

References Aagesen, D. and Rabinow, R. (2012). Matisse In Search of True Painting. London: Yale University Press. Agamben, G. (2009). What is the contemporary? In: What Is an Apparatus? California: Stanford University Press. Barthes, R. (1977). Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (trans. R. Howard). Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press. Barthes, R. (1982). Empire of Signs (trans. R. Howard). New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (1986). The Responsibility of Forms. NJ, USA: Blackwell. Barthes, R. (2005). The Neutral (trans. R.E. Krauss and D. Hollier). New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Berecz, A. (2013). Time to knot. In: Simon Hantaï (eds. D. Fourcade, I. Monad‐Fontaine and A. Pacquement), 235–243. Paris: Centre Pompidou. Bois, Y.‐A. (1993). Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press. Bois, Y.‐A. (2001). Matisse and Picasso. Paris: Flammarion. Buchloh, B. (2000). Raymond Pettibon: return to disorder and disfiguration. October 92 (Spring) https://doi.org/10.2307/779232. Accessed 18 September 2019. Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London and New York: Verso. D’Allessandro, S. and Elderfield, J. (2010). Matisse: Radical Invention. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Damisch, H. (2002). A Theory of /Cloud/. California: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (1987). The Truth in Painting. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Elderfield, J. (1984). The Drawings of Henri Matisse. London: Thames and Hudson. Flam, J. (1995). Matisse on Art. Berkely, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Graw, I. and Lajer‐Burcharth, E. (2016). Painting Beyond Itself; The Medium in the Post‐ Medium Condition. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Krauss, R. (2000). A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post‐Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson. Krauss, R. (2014). The “Charm” of Roland Barthes. The Conversant, September 2014. Lubow, A. (2007). Crossing boundaries. In: The Emergence of Memory, Conversations with W.G. Sebald (ed. L.S. Schwartz), 159–173. New York, London, Melbourne, Toronto: Seven Stories Press.

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Millet, Y. (2013). Atopia & aesthetics. A modal perspective. In: Contemporary Aesthetics. https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=671 Accessed 18 September 2019. Riley, B. (1999). The Eye’s Mind. London: Thames and Hudson. Riley, B. (2015). Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat. London: Ridinghouse and The Courtauld Gallery. Rippner, S. (2012). Themes and variations. In: Matisse: In Search of True Painting (eds. D. Aagesen and R. Rabinow), 164–169. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rosenthal, N. and Fine, R.E. (1990). The Drawings of Jasper Johns, National Gallery of Art. Washington: Thames and Hudson. Sillman, A. (2016). On colour. In: Painting Beyond Itself; the Medium in the Post‐Medium Condition (eds. I. Graw and E. Lajer‐Burcharth). Berlin: Sternberg Press. Stout, K. (2014). Contemporary Drawing from the 1960s to Now. London: Tate Publishing. de Zegher, C. (2000). Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux. New York: Merrell, the Drawing Centre.

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Works on/in/with Paper Approaching Drawing as Responsive Marking Marina Kassianidou

In his book Drawing, Philip Rawson identifies the components of “straightforward drawing” as the ground on which marks are made and the materials and implements through which marks are made; that is, a surface and a marking tool (Rawson 1987, pp. 38, 59). Where the marking tool touches the surface, a mark is formed. That mark, thereby, “represents an encounter between the shaping hand and a given surface” (Rawson 1987, p. 59). My focus here is on the relationship between the artist’s mark and the surface. On one level, this is a formal consideration, relating to the visual outcome of the marking process, but on another level, it has crucial conceptual implications. As psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron argues, drawing is a way of enacting subjectivity and relationships between self and other, that is, a way of constructing and reflecting on who we are and how we interact with others and our surroundings. Tisseron’s texts suggest an almost antithetical relationship between mark and surface. Here, I focus on works in which the drawn mark is a direct response to features of the surface on which the artist draws. I specifically discuss works by Dorothea Rockburne, Louise Hopkins, and Lai Chih‐Sheng. By engaging with these drawings and by juxtaposing them with Bracha L. Ettinger’s Matrixial theory – which proposes subjectivity‐ as‐encounter – I explore whether they might enact different relationships to otherness that move beyond clear oppositions. Ultimately, I propose approaching drawing through the mark/surface, and, thus, self/other, relationship. I further propose approaching that relationship not as something that depends on and becomes legible solely through a priori oppositions and hierarchies but as something constructed anew whenever marks and surfaces encounter each other and whenever an artist or viewer encounters them both, together, as drawing.

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The First Drawings, or Appropriating the Surface I first turn to Tisseron’s psychoanalytical account which brings together several aspects of drawing as a practice: the process of marking, embodiment, psychic and conceptual considerations, and processes of subjectivization and meaning production. The curator Catherine de Zegher has referred to Tisseron’s work in her own writings, focusing on the relationship between drawing and a primordial need to touch something other. She deems Tisseron’s work valuable due to the potential it assigns to drawing as a relational practice (de Zegher 2006, 2011). While I agree with de Zegher, as an artist working within drawing, I find Tisseron’s approach problematic in terms of the kinds of relationships it suggests between mark and surface, and, consequently, between self and other. In the essay “All Writing is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript” (1994), Tisseron relates the first markings of children, which he conceptualizes as a spatial play staged by the hand, with the game of fort/da.1 In the game, as described by Sigmund Freud, the child (Freud’s grandson) holds a string with a wooden reel attached to it and repeatedly throws the reel into a curtained cot and then pulls it back. Thus, the object is present – that is, seen – then absent, then present, and so on (Freud 1961, pp. 8–9). Freud provided three interpretations for the game. One interpretation is that the game related to a “cultural achievement” that had to do with the child allowing his mother to leave without protesting. The child compensated by staging the disappearance and reappearance of objects, thus, experiencing repeatedly their “joyful return” (Freud 1961, p. 9). A second interpretation relates to the instinct for mastery. By intentionally repeating the experience of temporarily losing something, the child actively controls the situation. Yet a third interpretation involves the child avenging the mother for leaving. The throwing away of objects could be interpreted as sending the mother away, declaring his lack of need for her (Freud 1961, p. 10). In all cases, the game allows the child to deal with his separation from his mother and shift from dependence to autonomy. Drawing on the works of Freud, Pierre Fédida, Martha Harris, Liliane Lurçat, Marion Milner, and Donald Winnicott, among others, Tisseron discusses the first markings of children in terms of the fort/da game. Both activities involve a muscular action, whether it be throwing or marking. Both involve two phases: a “giving out” – throwing an object or depositing a mark – followed by a retrieving – pulling back the object or seeing the mark. In both cases, the greatest pleasure is found in the second phase, the retrieval of the object or the discovery of the mark (Tisseron 1994, p. 34). The parallel between marking and fort/da continues in their interpretation. Marking, like fort/da, can be seen as a way of dealing with the separation from the mother or surrogate adult (Tisseron 1994, p. 33). While marking, the child may identify with the mother leaving the child behind (leaving a trace on the page). Afterwards, when looking at the page, the child may identify with the leftover trace. At the same time, the child may associate the trace with the mother who is being rejected. Thus, the process of marking stages the separation from both sides: the mother pushing the child away and/or the child pushing the mother away (Tisseron 1994, p. 34). The crucial aspect in both cases is the structural relationship between the various elements – this is “a structure which is organized around separation” (Tisseron 1994, p. 34). According to Tisseron, this structure accompanies and is paralleled by the mental separation that the child is experiencing.



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The structure of separation continues, and is complicated by, the discovery/seeing of the drawn trace, “the reified symbol of separation” (Tisseron 1994, p. 34). The trace enacts a simultaneous separating and binding of “the pieces of space which it delimits, much like the leaden line which separates and binds the stained‐glass pieces on a latticed window” (Tisseron 1994, p. 34). That is, the “distance opened by the tracing gesture,” which is seen as a pushing away, is “simultaneously opened and closed by the trace” (Tisseron 1994, p. 37). Marking converts the physical separation from the mother into a “bridging space” across the continuous area of the page (Tisseron 1994, p. 35). Thus, marking, because of its ability to separate and join and because it results in a visible outcome “controlled by the eye,” enables the gradual acceptance and symbolization of the separation between child and mother (Tisseron 1994, p. 35). Moreover, Tisseron discusses the “deep and original relationship” of the child with the page (Tisseron 1994, p. 35). Whenever the child makes a gesture, the page “answers back” in the form of a mark that returns to the child’s eyes “his” hand movements (Tisseron 1994, p. 35). The page answers “in a religiously exact manner,” like an “ideal mother” that always answers back in a reassuring way (Tisseron 1994, p. 35). By containing the trace and allowing its subsequent retrieval, the page/mother mirrors the child back to itself. The relationship with the mother – apparently imagined as blissful fusion – is, thus, somehow retained through the relationship with the page (Tisseron 1994, p. 35).2 According to Tisseron, a similar process of throwing and retrieving and of separating and binding recurs with the adult mark‐maker.3 Any kind of marking, including writing and drawing, is modeled after the child’s earliest markings and is involved “in the symbolization of a containing form potentially capable of receiving the thought contents” (Tisseron 1994, p. 37). The page, which acts as a metaphoric container of the mother’s body, can take in thoughts and contain their traces (Tisseron 1994, p. 40).4 These traces acquire meaning through “the early symbolization of ‘casting‐out’ and ‘pulling‐up’” in the inscriptive gesture, which involves the appropriation of the psychic and physical space between child and mother (Tisseron 1994, p. 37). Marking‐ as‐thinking then “corresponds to processes of appropriating space,” that is, the exploration and organization of the page through marks (Tisseron 1994, p. 41). Tisseron’s account relates to a specific model of subjectivity, a model he implicitly takes to be the only one. As Griselda Pollock notes, his discussion rests on “classical psychoanalytical conceptions of the founding gesture of subjectivity and indeed even humanity as that of separation from the mother” (Pollock 2013, p. 158). According to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, the pre‐birth and early post‐birth phases are conceptualized as fusion, with the fetus/newborn unable to distinguish itself from the mother and the world (Freud 2002, pp. 4–5; Brennan 1992, pp. 67–70). When the child recognizes the concepts of absence and lack, it realizes that it is not one with the world and the mother. This leads to a separation between inside and outside, subject and object, and self and other (Freud 2002, pp. 5–6; Grosz 1990, pp. 34–35). Subjectivization, thus, involves a separation of the child from the assumed fusion with the mother through a series of splits: birth, weaning, learning to walk and talk (and make marks), becoming independent. Since the child’s subjectivity is constituted as a splitting from the mother, the maternal‐feminine is reduced to “just ground for the emergence of a figure/ subject  cut out from her amorphous cloth” (Pollock 2009, p. 15). The mother/

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maternal‐feminine is placed in the position of the object/other – a radical alterity with which identification is impossible and against whom the subject is defined. Moreover, the m/Other – a term proposed by Bracha Ettinger to describe the archaic mother who is also the primordial Other – must be rejected as part of subjectivization (Ettinger 2006a, p. 66). In fact, the inability to completely separate from the m/Other may result in psychosis (Ettinger 2006a, p. 54). As such, fusion and repulsion, and, related to that, sameness and opposition, are seen as the first and primary psychic activities and possible attitudes toward the other – the child is either one with the m/Other or rejects the m/Other. Ettinger qualifies this model of subjectivity, in which the other is approached through fusion or rejection, as phallic (Ettinger 1996, p. 127). It is a model based on and perpetuating a logic of hierarchical binary oppositions that can only recognize distinct subjects and objects. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, following Nancy Jay and Anthony Wilden, this logic creates dichotomous distinctions or oppositions rather than differences. Difference can allow for continuous and non‐hierarchical relations between terms whereas dichotomous distinction relies on discontinuity, with one privileged term defining the other as its negative (Grosz 1990, p. 124). As Pollock explains, phallic logic “is premised on absence/presence, on/off, self/other” and privileges “the one/man/on/presence over its distinguished and consolidating other/woman/off/absence” (Pollock 2004, p. 39). Tisseron’s discussion of marking is based on this structure of separation and distinction on multiple levels. Here, I focus on the separation between mark and page. At the simplest level, this is a visual figure/ground differentiation, with the mark forming the figure on the page/ground. Indeed, as Tisseron writes, the second phase of marking involves the pleasure of seeing the mark. Identifying the figure/mark as distinct from the ground/surface, enables us to attribute meaning (Zerubavel 1991). At the psychic level, the mark, “the reified symbol of separation” (Tisseron 1994, p. 34), signifies and performs the separation of the self from the m/Other. If the mark comes from the self, from “inside,” then the page exists “outside” as the space of the other against whom the self is constituted. When the mark hits the page, the surface is turned into the other against whom the mark stands. Thus, the distinction between mark and surface symbolizes a distinction between self and other. This distinction is accompanied and reaffirmed by a series of other distinctions suggested throughout Tisseron’s account. One such distinction is that between presence and absence. Griselda Pollock and Alison Rowley explore this point further. Rowley links the artistic game of fort/da with “the binary mark/unmarked‐ground relation” (Rowley 2007, p. 37). She, thus, draws attention to the fact that usually the marks cover the surface. If seen through the lens of fort/da, this covering sets up a structure of “presence as absence of unmarked ground/maternal body” (Rowley 2007, p. 44). The fort/da game and the early markings of children depend on the absence of the mother. Marking/covering a surface, which psychoanalytically is associated with the space/body of the mother, performs an absenting of parts of that surface and, thus, an absenting of the m/ Other – it becomes a way of negotiating meaning through absence and through the repetitive alternation of presence and absence (Pollock 1996, pp. 260–261). As Pollock points out, when the surface is seen as the field of the m/Other, the marks can be seen as mastering her absence and separating the self from her “engulfing presence” (Pollock 1996, p. 257).



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It is important to recall that Tisseron works with a model that takes rejection and assimilation to be the only possible attitudes toward the other. As such, he interprets the mark as simultaneously separating and joining. In actuality, these actions place the mark in an ambiguous position, where it is attempting two opposing things at once. This paradox may suggest different relationships between mark and surface, an issue I consider later. The two endpoints, however, separating and binding, suggest absolute and extreme positions. Moreover, by conceptualizing marking as a “process of appropriating space” (Tisseron 1994, p. 32), Tisseron implicitly sets up an active/passive opposition between the gesture of marking – and, thus, the marking body – and the surface being marked. The surface is presented as passive and obedient, echoing the child’s actions “in a religiously exact manner” (Tisseron 1994, p. 35). Furthermore, the page is seen as part of the container of the inscriber’s thoughts. As container, again it is assumed to be passive and empty, filled in by the inscriber. The fact that the page is only described by Tisseron as “blank” or “white” reinforces its assumed emptiness. Of course, the page one is marking may, in fact, be a white sheet of paper. Characterizing the page as blank, however, presents it as an empty space waiting to be appropriated. As José Rabasa points out, the “fiction of a ‘blank page’,” which may refer to anything from an actual page to the earth’s surface, allows the inscriber to claim “ownership” of both marks/traces and territory (Rabasa 1993, p. 56). Rabasa draws on Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the “blank page” as an essential component of writing. The “blank page” “delimits a place of production for the subject,” an autonomous space freed from the “ambiguities of the world” (de Certeau 1984, p. 134). According to de Certeau, this separation is a Cartesian move which involves “making a distinction that initiates, along with a place of writing, the mastery (and isolation) of a subject confronted by an object.” The page forms a distinct space that is the subject’s own and “in which he can exercise his own will” (de Certeau 1984, p. 134). Of course, de Certeau is focusing on writing, which he describes as “a series of articulated operations (gestural or mental)” (de Certeau 1984, p. 134). This acknowledgement of the gestural aspect of writing and the characterization of the page as a space make his discussion relevant to any marking activity.5 Tisseron’s account of marking conforms with what de Certeau describes as the “conquering” character of the scriptural enterprise (de Certeau 1984, p. 135). The distinction between active hand and passive surface accedes to phallic logic and reinforces the separation between self and other. In most texts discussing drawing and painting, it is precisely the artist’s mark that has traditionally and historically commanded attention as the privileged element. For example, as Mary Kelly argues, modernist criticism treated the “authenticating” mark/gesture as signifying the artistic subject. The privileged mark/gesture is imagined as a celebration of unmediated expression and self‐affirming presence, or “presentified absence” (Kelly 1981, pp. 44–45). The surface, on the other hand, falls on the side of mere absence. Norman Bryson writes, for example, that the surface in drawing is “technically part of the image (since we certainly see it), but in a neutral sense  –  an area without qualities, perceptually present but conceptually absent” (Bryson 2003, p. 151). The conceptual absence of the surface is sometimes manifested in literal ways. Mark Wigley, for example, criticizes the tendency to ignore paper when discussing or exhibiting works on paper: “The standard museological labels that so fetishistically detail all the media in any drawing almost never specify the characteristics of the paper” (Wigley 2001, p. 28). Wigley argues that treating the

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surface as neutral leads to its disappearance (Wigley 2001, pp. 28–29, 40–41). This disappearance “allows physical marks to assume the status of immaterial ideas,” to be treated as internal thoughts floating from artist to viewer without depending on a material support (Wigley 2001, p. 29). This fits in with the logic of “expression,” which Rosalind Krauss describes as the need to see every mark on an artwork “as asking to be read in the context of a private self from which the intention to make that mark has been directed” (Krauss 1973, p. 46). Such approaches agree with Tisseron’s account of a distinction between mark and surface. The mark is the figure, the surface is the ground; the mark signifies presence and has meaning whereas the surface is absent; the mark comes from an active subject, a private self, while the surface exists out there, a passive container waiting to receive the mark, an object forming the other to the self that appropriates it. Everything is clear and legible, much like those first drawings Tisseron describes.

Working with What Is in the Surface Reading Tisseron as an artist, I am both fascinated and troubled by his account of drawing. I am fascinated by the potential he assigns to drawing as a gesture toward an other. Within the psychoanalytic scenario, the child’s relationship with the mother inaugurates the act of marking, which, in turn, becomes a way of negotiating that relationship. Tisseron’s account suggests that this negotiation is not only a perceptual or formal concern, relating to the visual relationship between mark and surface, but rather a process of understanding and structuring subjectivity and the self’s relation to an other. Drawing then is presented as both structured by a process of subjectivization and as structuring of that process. It is not an illustration of the process but participates in the process. This understanding demonstrates what might be at stake when thinking about drawing. At the same time, I am troubled by the fact that Tisseron’s account offers limited ways of relating to an other – separation and binding. His interpretation, as Pollock points out, is linked with a phallic stratum of subjectivization and, thus, does not allow for other kinds of relationships. This perhaps leads to his implicit assumption that all drawing processes proceed in the same way and that the surface is approached as a blank ground to be appropriated. Of course, he is not addressing artworks specifically. He does, however, suggest that any inscriptive process, including drawing, is modeled after the processes and relationships involved in the early markings of children (Tisseron 1994, p. 37). Yet how can all drawings produce the same kinds of relationships? Even if the activity of marking follows the logic of fort/da, it does not necessarily result in an unproblematic separation between mark and surface – not all drawings look the same. Marks can be applied on any surface, using various materials and tools, in any number of ways, resulting in a variety of outcomes. As such, the relationship between mark and surface cannot be predetermined nor generalized. Moreover, most artists pay a lot of attention to the surface. A surface’s characteristics, such as type, texture, color, and size, affect both how the marks are made and how they are perceived. The surface, thus, is not always approached as blank but rather forms an integral part of a drawing.6 Thus, my ambivalence toward Tisseron’s account relates to the fact that while he argues for drawing’s potential as a process through which relations are structured,



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performed, and understood, that process remains limited in scope – it can only result in assimilation or rejection. This limited scope leads to him treating marking as a rather homogeneous activity that repeatedly produces the same relationships between mark and surface and between self and other. I propose opening up this scope in order to see what other relationships to otherness may emerge through drawing and how those may be understood and articulated. In this section, I explore both the limitations and potential of Tisseron’s theorization by placing it next to artistic practice and by considering the nuances of specific drawings. I focus on works that use conventional drawing materials and processes – depositing graphite or ink on paper  –  but in which the deposited mark is a direct response to features of the surface. These works include Dorothea Rockburne’s Drawing Which Makes Itself series, Louise Hopkins’s series of drawings on crumpled paper, and Lai Chih‐Sheng’s Drawing Paper series. I examine the challenges these works pose to Tisseron’s account and consider what kinds of relationships between mark and surface and self and other they perform (Figures 13.1–13.3). Some of Rockburne’s Drawing Which Makes Itself (c. 1972–1974) works involved folding a sheet of paper, drawing lines along the folded sides using graphite, ink, or charcoal, unfolding it, and then, sometimes, drawing lines along the resulting creases.

Figure 13.1  Dorothea Rockburne (1973) Drawing Which Makes Itself: FPI 16. Folded paper and ink. 76.2 × 101.5 cm. Source: Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. © 2018 Dorothea Rockburne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 13.2  Louise Hopkins, Untitled (0100), 2000. Pencil on crumpled paper. 49.5 × 60 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist. © Louise Hopkins.

Figure 13.3  Lai Chih‐Sheng, Drawing Paper (detail), 2012. Pencil, paper. 76 × 103 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist. © Lai Chih‐Sheng.



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The making of the works, as Rosalind Krauss writes, depends on the “qualities inherent in the materials used: the dimensions of the edges of the paper and its diagonal folds; the double‐sidedness natural to paper that makes flipping or reversing it possible; etc.” (Krauss 1973, p. 48). Rockburne was specifically interested in this dependence on the surface, as revealed by a note she wrote: “Construct an investigation of drawing which is based on information contained within the paper and not on any other information” (Stoops 1996, p. 72). A similar situation occurs in an ongoing series of drawings by Hopkins. Hopkins crumples sheets of white paper, like the ones used in photocopiers, and then draws pencil marks of varying density and speed over the shadows created on the surface. This process, according to Greg Hilty, allows “the paper’s once latent complexity [to be] unleashed” (Hilty 2005, p. 39). The creases left on the surface are a result of the specific properties of paper – it can be crumpled or folded, and it can retain the traces of those actions. Hopkins describes her process as an attempt to get “inside the ­surface” and to make a mark that “becomes enmeshed within the surface” (Hopkins, personal communication). Lai’s series Drawing Paper (2012–present) involves using graphite to trace around features of various sheets of watercolor paper: their outer edges, the watermark denoting the brand, the holes along the edge (in the case of sheets found in spiral sketchbooks), and so on. Unlike Rockburne and Hopkins, he does not fold or crumple the paper, but treats it as a found object that he carefully studies through drawing. The artist describes these works as made in the simplest yet most extreme way (Lai, personal communication). Indeed, the premise is simple: trace around features of the paper. Yet the commitment and care with which Lai proceeds and the seriality of the work, point toward something extreme, obsessive even. It is difficult to argue that these artists approach the surface as a passive or empty container. On the contrary, the artists respond to the paper’s materiality and characteristics. Rockburne and Hopkins begin by folding or crumpling the paper. The resulting visual differentiations on the surface – what we call marks – are literally of the surface. They are paper creases, both mark and surface. Thus, any clear mark/surface distinction is problematized. The marks the artists subsequently deposit onto the surface depend on these first marks. In the case of Rockburne’s work, the folds guide her drawn lines. The paper, thus, becomes “an activating force” on multiple levels (Meskimmon and Sawdon 2016, p. 56). As a result, paper and marks remain indissociable: “The paper is the line, the line is (in and internal to) the paper, and the paper is the body of the drawing” (Meskimmon and Sawdon 2016, p. 53). Similarly, in Hopkins’ work, it is the crumpled paper that suggests the type and placement of her deposited marks, which, in turn, record and highlight the paper’s texture. In Lai’s case, it is the characteristics of the unchanged paper that determine where he will place his pencil and what lines he will draw, lines that record and repeat the paper’s features. Some of those features, such as the embossed watermark, are already marks internal to the surface. Thus, again, the distinction between marks and surface falters as the two coincide. In all three cases, the paper is not approached as something blank to be filled or covered but rather as something to observe, respond, and relate to. Moreover, the paper is not treated as an autonomous clean space in which the artists can create their own world. Rather, the paper is the world and the artists’ task is to focus on that reality and work with it – work with what is already contained within the surface, as Rockburne writes, or get inside the surface as Hopkins states. Likewise, for

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Lai, his drawings “depict reality itself” and not an imaginary world (Lai, personal communication). It is also difficult to see how the artists simply master or appropriate the surface since they actually follow the surface. There is no isolation of the artistic subject from a foreign object but rather collaboration, with agency shared between them. The artists’ decisions do not come solely from within but rather arise by engaging with the paper/world, which is no longer simply passive. I am drawn to another of Rockburne’s notes: “It seems reasonable that paper acting upon itself through subject imposed translations could become a subject–object” (Stoops 1996, p. 72). The term “ ­ subject– object” captures the paper’s active role in the making of the works – it is no longer simply an object placed opposite the artist/subject. As a result of this mode of making, the artists’ deposited marks – these other materials touching the paper – partially recede into the surface, becoming confused with its features and internal marks. In some of Rockburne’s drawings, it is difficult to immediately differentiate between her drawn lines and the paper’s creases. Hopkins’ drawings from afar appear to be crumpled sheets of paper, her graphite marks enmeshed with the shadows formed on the uneven surface. Lai’s works appear to be framed unmarked sheets of paper, the drawn marks almost sinking into the features they demarcate. In all cases, there is no clear mark/surface or figure/ground separation, at least not initially. This challenges associations of presence and absence with mark and surface respectively. Here, it is the artists’ deposited marks that recede, to varying degrees in each work, allowing the surface to appear by itself, as a folded, crumpled or flat sheet of paper. Indeed, it is the paper itself that the viewers of these works first encounter. The works do not immediately present themselves as legible drawings – legible, that is, within a framework that privileges (and expects to clearly identify) the artist’s mark. Instead, it is the presence of the surface – its materiality and otherness – that these drawings engage with and bring to the fore. Ignoring the paper would be missing the works entirely. The viewers of these works are asked to practice an attentive viewing that unfolds over space and time. They are asked to approach and engage in a prolonged study of each surface, unearthing marks. Moreover, viewers are never presented with the marks themselves as distinct from the surface – that is an impossibility. Even when the deposited graphite and ink marks emerge, they do so in relation to the surface and its internal marks/features. They become visible just as their connection to the surface becomes visible. Some of Rockburne’s lines begin to appear as different from, yet dependent on, the paper’s folds, which are simultaneously mark and surface. The marks on Hopkins’ works transform from creases and shadows to graphite and back again, intermingling with actual shadows and highlighting the paper’s uneven texture. Lai’s graphite marks, which up until that point have probably gone unseen, may emerge just as the viewer observes the edges of the paper, its holes, and its watermark. In fact, some of his marks may never fully differentiate themselves from the pre‐existing features of the surface that they intently demarcate. While writing about these works, it is becoming challenging for me to address the terms “mark” and “surface” separately, as distinct and oppositional, or to clearly differentiate between kinds of marks. The works resist binary logic both through their process of making, where marking is guided by the surface, and through the kind of viewing they request, which cannot exactly center around a privileged mark, at least not initially. I am not suggesting a reversal of the hierarchy, making the surface the



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privileged half. Rather, in these works mark and surface are destabilized. They are not fixed positions (Were they ever?) but a shifting continuum.7 Near one end of this continuum, mark and surface may coincide in folds, creases, and watermarks. Somewhere along the way, pencil marks may coincide with shadows, holes, or edges. And nearing the other end, ink and graphite lines may begin to appear as different from the paper. I would also argue that these works generate meaning not only through a differentiation between mark and surface but primarily through their inextricability – mark and surface mean together. This is not a structure strictly organized around separation but one organized around varying degrees of connection, both in the making of the works and in their viewing. In terms of subjectivity, is the turning toward the surface an evacuation of subjectivity? Are the artists being mastered by the surface? Do these works realize the binding that the mark can enact according to Tisseron? In other words, are we witnessing the other extreme of separation: the inability to separate from the other and assert one’s self as an autonomous subject? Indeed, other drawing practices that involve the abdication of control in some way – the taking of some decision‐making away from the artist and assigning it to external elements  –  have sometimes been described as impersonal, asubjective, or non‐subjective (Buchloh 2006, p. 120; Schwarz 1997). It seems to me that arguing for the collapse of subjectivity is another phallic position  –  from complete separation we move to complete joining with the other. Moreover, it ignores the work and decisions of the artists. Rockburne and Hopkins intentionally fold or crumple the surface. Hilty suggests that Hopkins’ crumpling of the paper actually entails violence, with the resulting crumpled sheet carrying “the dynamic tension of its violent collapse” (Hilty 2005, p. 39). In addition, the works require manual precision and care during making, whether this involves drawing fine straight lines, marking over all perceived shadows, or tracing around the paper’s edge. This kind of making cannot be described as simply passive. Rather, as mentioned earlier, a kind of collaboration is at play with activity and agency shared between artists and materials – marks and surfaces mutually affect each other. This sharing becomes possible through the artists’ focus on the surfaces they are working with – their commitment to creating a connection with each surface. Furthermore, the challenges these works pose to viewing have implications for how the viewer’s subjectivity is constructed or understood. Thus, taking the making and viewing processes into account, we return to the question of what kind of subjectivity these works might inscribe.

The First Drawings Revisited, or Being Beside the Surface In trying to determine what models for the construction of meaning are proposed by the work of Rockburne and other artists of the late 60s, Rosalind Krauss provides a way to begin thinking about subjectivity and signification in relation to exteriority. Drawing on phenomenology, she argues that these works challenge the notion that “meaning [is] tied to the private confines of a mental space” or that the self exists prior to experience and contact with the world (Krauss 1973, p. 45). Instead, works like Rockburne’s explore the externality of meaning and selfhood by positing both as a function of external space (Krauss 1973, pp. 49–50).

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I continue along this path, trying to determine what models for the construction of meaning and subjectivity are proposed in the works of Rockburne, Hopkins, and Lai in relation to this notion of externality – that is, responding to the surface. I began by turning toward a psychoanalytic discussion of drawing. Before concluding, I turn to another psychoanalytic theorization, Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial theory. This theory, which emerged through Ettinger’s artistic practice, allows us to articulate nuanced relationships that eschew an either/or model. Ettinger draws on Freud’s theory of the uncanny and Jacques Lacan’s late theories to conceptualize a feminine stratum of subjectivization  –  the Matrix  –  that exists beside the phallic stratum.8 She models the Matrix on the late prenatal stages of pregnancy, which she views as highly structured rather than undifferentiated (Ettinger 1992, p. 176).9 According to Ettinger, mother and fetus – an I and a non‐I – transform together yet differently via reciprocal and non‐symmetrical operations of co‐ emergence and co‐fading. Co‐emergence or borderlinking involves “relative approaching,” which is not incorporation. Co‐fading or borderspacing involves “relative separating,” which is not expulsion but the opening of a space between I and non‐I (Ettinger 1996, p. 132). As such, I and non‐I are not completely separated nor fused  –  they experience “jointness‐in‐separateness” (Ettinger 2006a, p. 85). This leads to distance‐in‐proximity, a continuously re‐adjusted relative distance, or minimal difference, which does not arise through loss but is there from the start (Ettinger 1996, p. 133). Within this conceptualization, pregnancy is not understood as containing but as resonating together through a shared borderspace. Ettinger calls the processes of transformation that occur in the Matrix metramorphosis. Instead of transforming one entity into another, metramorphosis allows several entities to transgress their borderlines and transform asymmetrically, without dominating or eliminating each other (Huhn 1993, p. 8). I and non‐I are both transforming and transformed, active and passive. Moreover, it is the shared borderspaces between elements rather than each element in itself that act as “sources of creation and transformation” (Ettinger 1996, p. 128). As such, Matrix and metramorphosis convey a state of in-betweenness and severality. The in-between that is excluded from binary logic here rises to borderline appearance. In the Matrix, there is no I without an unknown non‐I and the two cannot be seen as whole and separate subjects or as one another’s object. Rather, self and other become partial‐subjects and partial‐objects that coexist without abolishing differences to assimilate the other and without expelling the other from the physical/mental territory (Lichtenberg‐Ettinger 1994, p. 44). Subjectivity becomes an encounter “in which partial subjects co‐emerge and co‐fade through continual retunings and transformations” (Lichtenberg‐Ettinger 1994, p. 41). This is a very different model of subjectivity to the one Tisseron uses. Here, there are no oppositional or hierarchical relations between self and other. Subjectivization is not structured around separation but rather arises through the encounter between partial‐others that are in a state of distance‐in‐proximity  –  negotiating degrees of closeness and remoteness. Moreover, the possible attitudes toward the other are not rejection or assimilation – two extreme positions – but rather simultaneous borderlinking and borderspacing. These Matrixial relations do not replace the phallic model but rather occur alongside it (Ettinger 1996, p. 127). Moreover, the Matrixial model extends beyond psychoanalysis and can address relationships on several levels, including those between humans and non‐humans (materials, artworks, and so on) (Ettinger 2005, p. 201; Horsfield and Ettinger 2001, p. 40).



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What of marking then? Griselda Pollock argues that the simultaneous separation and binding enacted by the mark in Tisseron’s account makes no sense within Matrixial logic, where the subject is not formed only by being separated from fusion with the mother. She asks how Matrixial theory might lead to “a different understanding of hand, gesture, space, line and mark” (Pollock 2013, p. 158).10 Can we talk about the mark as something other than a paradoxical attempt to both separate from and join with the surface/other? Even if the gesture of marking enacts a mark/ no‐mark move that falls within phallic order, is it possible for another order of being, relating, and meaning to emerge through the specific nuances of the process and resulting drawing? In the works by Rockburne, Hopkins, and Lai, mark and surface coexist as inextricable parts. The marks depend on features of the surface, which partially determines the artists’ actions. Thus, the artists emerge as artistic subjects, or partial‐subjects, through and with the surface. The surface is no longer simply a container receiving the marks but rather a partial‐object/partial‐subject resonating with the marks. The ink and graphite marks create a material and visual difference on the surface but, at the same time, partially recede into it, becoming continuous with its features and internal marks, which, in turn, are both mark and surface. The difference between mark and surface is, thus, continually negotiated through oscillations of distance‐in‐proximity. The viewers themselves participate in this negotiation through their movement and close observation. Marks and surface shift and transform in relation to each other and in relation to the viewers. Rockburne’s lines gradually differentiate themselves from the folds. Hopkins’ marks oscillate between graphite marks, creases, and shadows, depending on the viewers’ changing distance from the work. At times, Lai’s marks may appear. At other times, they may remain submerged in the surface, almost becoming the paper. All marks and surfaces co‐emerge and co‐fade. The viewers themselves shift between partially not seeing/identifying and partially seeing/identifying. They, thus, emerge as viewing subjects (or partial‐subjects) through their prolonged engagement with the works  –  an engagement through which the works themselves also emerge. I turn to another term from Ettinger to discuss these works: copoiesis. Copoiesis – co‐ making – is joint and mutual production with an other or several others. The participants of copoiesis are not in oppositional or hierarchical relations with each other but exist in besidedness, “an unconditional side‐by‐side‐ness” (Ettinger 2006b, p. 109). This requires a degree of withdrawal on the part of each participant, “an actively‐ passive surrender to the world” through which elements “get attuned and reattuned” with each other (Ettinger 2007, p. 30). It is not a demolition but a “contraction and gradual disappearance” of the I, allowing space for the other/non‐I to appear (Ettinger 1995, p. 75). Ettinger draws on Francisco Varela’s discussion of connectivity as a dynamic network of interactions in which “meaning is not carried inside symbols” but occurs through connections (Ettinger 1996, p. 134). Meaning does not arise through alternations between presence and absence, as in the phallic structure, but “in the slight movements in‐between closeness and remoteness” that occur along links between elements (Ettinger 2006a, p. 82). Thus, a “matrixial ‘making sense’ in which subject is not opposed to object becomes possible” as all participants contribute differently to the creation of meaning (Ettinger 2006a, p. 71). As discussed earlier, the artists place limits on their actions by responding to the surface – a process of partial authorial restraint. This is accompanied by attuning to the other/surface during the marking process, following its features. As a result, the

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marks do not create clear lines of separation on the surface but rather participate in partial continuities and shared borderspaces with it. As marks and surface emerge during viewing, attention is drawn to the relationships between them. Meaning does not only arise through the distinction between mark and surface but through their copoietic encounter, their shifting closeness and remoteness. Activity and passivity, presence and absence, originality and readymade‐ness, subject‐ness and object‐ness, self‐ness and other‐ness are distributed, partialized, and shared among all participants. This copoietic encounter may allow for something akin to a matrixial web of ­subjectivity to unfold. Rather than only performing a self/other distinction, with ­separation from and binding to an other being the only options, these drawings may enact a way of being that involves emerging with and relating to an other via oscillations of closeness and remoteness. They may perform an engagement with the world that arises through besidedness rather than appropriation, through “an actively‐ passive surrender” rather than mastery. Perhaps what unfolds through the drawings, all of which exist as series, is just this: an impulse to repeatedly search for “connectivity with‐in the world and the Other” (Ettinger 2005, p. 225).

Following the Mark, Following the Surface In this chapter, I have examined works that engage with the materials and processes of conventional drawing – ink and graphite leaving traces on paper. These are also works where the marking tool literally follows features of the surface. I have argued that this responsive process of marking subverts accounts that link drawing solely with a binary structure of relations. I have framed my discussion within two psychoanalytic accounts: Tisseron’s account of drawing, which follows classical psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity and signification, and Ettinger’s Matrixial theory, which proposes a model of subjectivity‐as‐encounter that exists beside the phallic model. I am not suggesting that one conception is somehow correct and the other wrong when discussing drawings. That would be falling into the trap of flattening out differences between drawing practices. Rather, I am approaching the two theorizations as permeable frames that create a space for drawing to move within (and potentially transgress). On one level, marking may be seen as a binary operation of mark/no‐mark and self/other. On another level, Matrixial theory offers a lens that reveals the nuances of the drawings considered, especially with regards to relationships between mark/surface and self/ other. Encircled by these two frameworks, the drawings delineate a range of possibilities. Perhaps when the deposited marks become visible  –  something that occurs at different points with each work – a mark/surface distinction momentarily emerges that allows us to acknowledge the split and view ourselves as separate subjects standing before an object – an object which both holds and returns the trace of the artist/subject. Perhaps when marks and surface almost merge, absolute othering is challenged, and we come close to participating in the sharing with something other. Ultimately, my discussion here suggests an approach to drawing that does not begin with the artist’s mark placed firmly at the center of attention nor with the mark/­ surface hierarchical opposition as a given. Rather, drawing is approached as a space of potentiality, a space through which relationships between mark and surface, and ­between self and other, can be negotiated and re‐negotiated anew. Even though



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I have focused on post‐conceptual drawing practices in which the drawn mark is a direct response to the surface, it would be possible to use this approach when considering earlier or other types of drawings. Indeed, how might our encounter with a drawing change if the mark is not the sole focus, if the surface – potentially half the material comprising a drawing – is not simply ignored, and if the specific relationship between them becomes another way into the work? Might this enable us to articulate more fully the role surface plays in most drawings? Might it allow us to rethink the roles of the mark and, thus, experience differently the relational character of drawing? What is crucial in all cases is devoting time to the drawings we encounter. The ones I have discussed here do not reproduce well. They require a physical encounter, time, and attentiveness. They invite the viewer on an uncertain journey into the in‐between of mark and surface, wherever that might lead.

Notes 1 Other texts by Tisseron that address children’s markings include “Questions Préalables à une Recherche Psychanalytique sur le Trait” (1986), Psychanalyse de la Bande Dessinée (1987), and “Fonctions du Corps et du Geste dans le Travail d’Écriture” (1995). 2 In addition to associating the page with the mother, Tisseron associates it with the child’s body. Marking is an attempt to organize that body into coherent functions and sensations (Tisseron 1994, pp. 38–40). Here, I am looking at drawing as a way of relating to an other, thus, I focus on the relationship between the page and the mother. 3 Tisseron focuses on writers but much of his discussion on the act of marking applies to drawing. 4 This conforms to a long tradition of viewing the mother’s body as a container. See, for example, Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993) and her critique of Aristotle’s concept of place, a concept linked to the function of a container, which, in turn, is associated with the female body. 5 This is not to suggest an equivalence between writing and drawing but rather to point out that, at a fundamental level, they both involve marking a surface. An in‐ depth discussion of the relationship between writing and drawing is beyond the scope of this chapter. 6 See, for example, Rawson (1987) and Meskimmon and Sawdon (2016) for discussions on the importance of the surface in drawing. 7 For more on the instability of marks and surfaces, see James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (1998), especially chapter 1, as well as Michael Newman, “The Marks, Traces, and Gestures of Drawing” (2003). 8 For Freudian and Lacanian theories’ relation to Matrixial theory, see Ettinger 1992 and 2006a. 9 Ettinger emphasizes that she is dealing with the late stages of pregnancy, when the fetus is at a post‐mature stage. As such, Matrixial theory does not interfere with women’s rights to make decisions about their bodies. 10 Both Pollock and Rowley have drawn on Ettinger’s theory when analyzing Helen Frankenthaler’s staining technique (Pollock 1996; Rowley 2007). Pollock has also discussed Ettinger’s own artworks through the lens of Matrixial theory (Pollock 2013).

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References Brennan, T. (1992). The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity. London: Routledge. Bryson, N. (2003). A walk for a walk’s sake. In: The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act; Selected from the Tate Collection (ed. C. de Zegher), 149–158. London: Tate Publishing. Buchloh, B.H.D. (2006). Hesse’s endgame: facing the diagram. In: Eva Hesse Drawing (ed. C. de Zegher), 117–150. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ettinger, B.L. (1992). Matrix and metramorphosis. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4 (3): 176–208. Ettinger, B.L. (1995). Woman as objet a between phantasy and art. Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts 6: 56–77. Ettinger, B.L. (1996). Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace. In: Rethinking Borders (ed. J.C. Welchman), 125–159. Hampshire: Macmillan. Ettinger, B.L. (2005). The art‐and‐healing oeuvre: metramorphic relinquishment of the soul‐spirit to the spirit of the cosmos. In: 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing; Hilma Af Klint, Emma Kunz, Agnes Martin (eds. C. de Zegher and H. Teicher), 199– 231. New York, NY: The Drawing Center. Ettinger, B.L. (2006a). The matrixial gaze. In: The Matrixial Borderspace (ed. B. Massumi), 41–90. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ettinger, B.L. (2006b). From proto‐ethical compassion to responsibility: besideness and the three primal mother‐phantasies of not‐enoughness, devouring and abandonment. Athena: Philosophical Studies (2): 100–135. Ettinger, B.L. (2007). Com‐passionate co‐response‐ability, initiation in jointness and the Link X of matrixial virtuality. In: Gorge(L). Oppression and Relief in Art (ed. S. Van Loo), 11–32. Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen. Freud, S. (1961). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company. Freud, S. (2002). Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin Books. Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge. Hilty, G. (2005). Adjustment. In: Louise Hopkins: Freedom of Information; Paintings, Drawings 1996–2005 (ed. F. Bradley), 38–44. Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery. Horsfield, C. and Ettinger, B.L. (2001). Working‐through. In: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: The Eurydice Series (eds. C. de Zegher and B. Massumi), 37–62. New York, NY: The Drawing Center. Huhn, R. (1993). Moving omissions and hollow spots into the field of vision. In: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Matrix‐Borderlines, 5–10. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art. Kelly, M. (1981). Re‐viewing modernist criticism. Screen 22 (3): 41–62. Krauss, R. (1973). Sense and sensibility: reflection on post ‘60s sculpture. Artforum 12 (3): 43–53. Lichtenberg‐Ettinger, B. (1994). The becoming threshold of matrixial borderlines. In: Travelers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (eds. G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, et al.), 38–62. London: Routledge. Meskimmon, M. and Sawdon, P. (2016). Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing. London: I. B. Tauris.



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Pollock, G. (1996). Killing men and dying women: a Woman’s touch in the cold zone of American painting in the 1950s. In: Avant‐Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, by Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, 219–294. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pollock, G. (2004). Thinking the feminine: aesthetic practice as introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the concepts of matrix and metramorphosis. Theory, Culture and Society 21 (1): 5–65. Pollock, G. (2009). Mother trouble: the maternal‐feminine in phallic and feminist theory in relation to Bracha Ettinger’s elaboration of matrixial ethics/aesthetics. Studies in the Maternal 1 (1): 1–31. Pollock, G. (2013). Art in the time‐space of memory and migration: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Bracha L. Ettinger in the Freud Museum; Artwriting after the Event. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press. Rabasa, J. (1993). Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Rawson, P. (1987). Drawing, 2e. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rowley, A. (2007). Helen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing Painting. London: I. B. Tauris. Schwarz, D. (1997). ‘Not a drawing’: some thoughts about recent drawing. In: Drawing Is another Kind of Language: Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection (eds. P. Lee and C. Mehring), 11–21. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums. Stoops, S.L. (ed.) (1996). More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70s. Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum/ Brandeis University. Tisseron, S. (1994). All writing is drawing: the spatial development of the manuscript. Yale French Studies (84): 29–42. Wigley, M. (2001). Paper, scissors, blur. In: The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (eds. C. de Zegher and M. Wigley), 27–56. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. de Zegher, C. (2006). The inside is the outside: the relational as the (feminine) space of the radical. In: Women Artists at the Millennium (eds. C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher), 189–218. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. de Zegher, C. (2011). Drawing out voice and Webwork. In: Art as Compassion: Bracha L. Ettinger (eds. C. de Zegher and G. Pollock), 115–139. Brussels: ASA Publishers. Zerubavel, E. (1991). The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Indexical Drawing On Frottage Margaret Iversen

Frottage is to drawing as casting is to sculpture. If that is so, then everything that Georges Didi‐Huberman wrote about direct casting and other forms of “resemblance by contact” should apply equally to frottage. He argued that casting does away with the traditional criteria of something being a work of art, including idea, design, invention, style, and even imitation. In casting it is enough to duplicate the referent by contact without making the optical effort of imitation. It is thus indifferent to any notion of style. There is no artistic work, no craft; it’s a simple mold, a mechanically reproducible impress of the world. Frottage throws into confusion notions of originality and authorship (Didi‐Huberman 2008, p. 20). Didi‐Huberman also raised the question of why, in the electronic or digital age, so many artists are interested in casting domestic objects or using frottage to register the texture of a wooden plank. Isn’t frottage a hopelessly archaic technique involving nothing more than rubbing a pencil over a piece of paper placed on a textured surface? Of course, it is precisely its automaticity and quasi‐extra‐artistic status that recommended the technique to early avant‐garde and contemporary artists. The French term “frottage” was coined by the German surrealist artist Max Ernst. As we shall see, although his work with frottage was ground‐breaking, a later generation of artists rejected his strategy of combining it with collage‐like manipulation in order to create pictorial images. In her “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” (1977), Rosalind Krauss indirectly explained this rejection, arguing that it was the precedent set by Marcel Duchamp that was decisive for Seventies artists who employed indexical procedures, including frottage, to collapse the pictorial paradigm and challenge the dominance of modernist painting. The index, according to Krauss, is the hallmark of post‐modern art. By considering the nature of the indexical sign and reviewing the way frottage is used by a range of artists, this chapter aims to enrich our understanding of the process.

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Indexicality The founder of semiotics as a discipline, Charles Sanders Peirce, was unusually ­attentive to what might be called the affective impact of signs, that is, how the interpreter or viewer reacts to them. Contrasting the index with the two other major types, the icon and symbol, he described it as the most “forceful” type of sign: it signifies by establishing an existential or causal link to its referent, either by directing our attention to something or by being physically impressed or affected by it (Peirce 1960, pp. 161–165). A pointing finger and the demonstrative pronoun “this” are indices of the first kind, while a fingerprint is an example of the index as trace. The crucial difference between the two types is that pointing fingers and demonstrative pronouns must be simultaneous with and adjacent to their objects, unlike the other sort of index which is a mark or trace of some past contact. In “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Mary Anne Doane discusses this underlying tension in Peirce’s account of the index (Doane 2007b, pp. 128–152). The distinction bears on a difference in temporality. Directing attention to an object, what Doane calls “deixis,” happens in the present moment and in the presence of the object or its effects; a weathervane, for example, immediately shifts with changes in the direction of the wind. The trace, such as a footprint in the sand, is produced or caused by contact with an object and indicates past presence. As Doane observes, unlike pure deixis, “the trace does not evaporate in the moment of its production, but remains a witness to an anteriority” (Doane 2007b, pp. 133–136). Doane explores other aspects of the difference between these two types of index, which I will refer to as deixis and trace. She notes that the index as deixis “implies an emptiness, or hollowness that can only be filled in specific contingent, always mutating situations” (Doane 2007a, p. 2). The trace marks the past presence of a particular thing and often, as in the photograph, displays an excess of detail. In this “dialectic of the empty and the full,” the present and the past, there is a curious echo of the operation of Sigmund Freud’s famous mystic writing pad, invoked by him to illustrate the difference between consciousness and memory or the unconscious: while the top celluloid layer is easily erased and ready to receive new inscriptions, the bottom waxy one permanently retains past traces (Freud 1974). For Peirce, the index is the sign most closely associated with shock, reality, contingency, and chance. It is the one type of sign that is actually affected by its object. As Mary Ann Doane put it, “the concept of the index… seems to acknowledge the invasion of the semiotic system by the real” (Doane 2002, p. 70).1

Max Ernst In “Index and Counterfeit,” Richard Shiff points out that all drawing is to some extent indexical. Artists often have a distinctive manner of mark‐making that “indexes the mentality or feeling of the person who draws” (Shiff 2004, p. 340). This mode of drawing as a “self‐oriented index,” is the counterpart of the technique of rubbing or frottage which produces an externally generated drawing or, to coin a phrase, “an other‐oriented index.” Frottage seems aimed at suppressing indicators of subjectivity with anonymous repetitive marks in the service of reproducing the contours and textures of something in the world. The irony is that the inventor of the term and most celebrated exponent of the technique, Max Ernst, used it as a way of stimulating his



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projective imagination producing visions of strange worlds. His use of frottage should be seen in the context of a range of surrealist automatist experiments in writing, drawing, grattage, and decalcomania. In “Beyond Painting,” he recounted the mythic moment in 1925 when, gazing at floorboards in a way that prompted his “meditative and hallucinatory faculties,” he “discovered” frottage. He subsequently took rubbings from diverse materials, combining them in a collage‐like fashion to make pictures of imaginary landscapes, plants and animals with, as he said, “unhoped‐for precision.” As he later explained, frottage “rests upon nothing more than the intensification of the irritability of the mind’s faculties by appropriate technical means, excluding all conscious mental guidance” (Ernst 1948, p. 8). It is a form of pure psychic automatism which, as André Breton declared in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” is “dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” ([1924] 1972, p. 26). Given Ernst’s evident careful preparation of materials to be rubbed and their collage‐like combination in highly articulated pictures, his claim that frottage radically reduced his agency as an artist seems exaggerated. Ernst called the portfolio reproducing 34 of his frottages Histoire naturelle (1926), acknowledging both the amateur scientist’s use of rubbing to register the patterns of leaves or insects and the surrealists’ fascination with illustrations in outmoded books devoted to natural history. The title also anticipates the vaguely biblical and evolutionary narrative arrangement of the plates from the first, amorphous, Sea and Rain, to the last, Eve, the only one left to us. Yet, most of the frottages in Histoire naturelle, despite their fantastical content, are quite conventional in terms of pictorial composition. A typical Ernst frottage is of normal tableau size and format and displays clearly delineated figures in a landscape that gives the impression of steep recession in depth leading to a horizon. There are a few exceptions to this pictorial mode. For example, Earthquake, plate no. 5, looks like an aerial view of a crack opening in a desert landscape with seismic shocks spreading outward in concentric rings. Surprisingly, there is not a very strong post‐surrealist tradition of frottage in France, although Belgium‐born poet and artist Henri Michaux made use of it in the 1940s. Better known for his spontaneous calligraphic drawings in ink, Michaux first published his frottages in a book of texts and images called Apparitions, and in Peintures et Dessins, both published in 1946. Michaux cites as influences Ernst, and Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Tobey, as well as Classic Chinese painting. Given these precedents, it is not surprising that his frottages are quite abstract, sketchy, and indecipherable. They are automatist in spirit and loosely figurative. Commenting on his approach to drawing, he remarked: “Draw with no particular intention, scribble mechanically, nearly always there appear faces on the paper” (Michaux 1978, p. 49). A few stokes with a broad piece of graphite suffice to pick up traces of ghostly personages or creatures – his “apparitions” (Pesanti 2015).

Rosalind Krauss on the Index Ernst’s practice of inserting the indexical trace into a pictorial space was rejected by a later generation of artists who adopted frottage. Rosalind Krauss’s important two‐ part article “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” (1977) suggests why. On her account, frottage in the 1970s must be seen in the context of a range of practices

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which follow the logic of index, or, more precisely, which take photography as a model if not a medium. Significant implications follow from Krauss’s stress on the index as shifter, because it is an index of the purely deictic kind as opposed to a trace. The shifter is a term introduced by Roman Jakobson to designate a group of linguistic signs, such the personal pronoun “I,” which are empty until filled with the existential presence of the speaker; the shifter is a case of linguistic diexis which Krauss extends to visual art. “Notes on the Index: Part 1” concerns the pre‐history of contemporary artists’ interest in indexicality, including a discussion of Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918), a work Krauss describes as a virtual “panorama of the index.” Even the title consists of two verbal shifters, you and me. Duchamp, she claimed, took photography as the model for his work, noting that he called The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923) a “delay in glass” and that he referred to the readymade’s “snapshot effect.” She also discusses the work of Duchamp’s friend and frequent collaborator, the American photographer Man Ray. Man Ray’s attraction to the index was most clearly manifested in his experiments with cameraless photography. While all photography is indexical, the Rayograph, as Krauss observes, “forces the issue of the photograph’s existence as an index” (Krauss 1986a, pp. 198, 203). The images that result from putting objects directly onto light sensitive paper were described by Man Ray as “a residue of an experience… recalling the event more or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames” (Man Ray 1980, p. 167). Although Krauss refers to Man Ray’s photograms as “ghostly traces of departed objects,” the temporality of the trace is not the aspect of them that really concerns her. Rather, what is crucial is the way photography’s physical genesis short‐circuits symbolic intervention: like other indexical signs, it “could be called sub‐ or pre‐symbolic, ceding the language of art back to the imposition of things” (Krauss 1986a, p. 203). Photography, as mobilized here, clearly does not concern its documentary or pictorial capacity, or its temporality as past presence; rather, it is the readymade “snapshot effect” that is made salient (Duchamp 1975a, p. 32). For Krauss, the index as both deixis and trace is adopted as a strategy of deliberate regression aimed at undoing the traditional conventions of pictorial representation and modernist painting. Krauss opposes the earlier, gestural, deployment of the index, as in Abstract Expressionism, with the later use. This change constitutes “a break that has to do with the role played by the photographic, rather than the pictorial, as model” (Krauss 1986b, p. 212, n. 3). In “Notes on the Index: Part 2,” Krauss turns her attention to the 1976 inaugural exhibition of the exhibition space, P.S. 1, in Long Island City, Queens, New York. The show, called Rooms, consisted of interventions in the fabric of the dilapidated former public school building. Alanna Heiss, director of the Institute that organized the exhibition, noted in her forward to the catalogue that the work in the show “includes the space it’s in; embraces it, uses it. Viewing space becomes not frame but material” (Heiss 1977, p. 3). Krauss aimed to show that even abstract artists of the period took photography as their model and sought to evade “the more highly articulated language of aesthetic conventions” (Krauss 1986a, p. 209). Krauss’s emphasis on the deictic function of the index in her analysis of the exhibits at P.S.1 means that the here‐and‐nowness of the work, its sheer physical presence, is foregrounded. As shifters, the interventions were site‐dependent; they were inseparable from and pointed back to the fabric of the building. This dependence is well exemplified by Lucio Pozzi’s P.S. 1 Paint 1976 which consisted of two‐color painted panels affixed onto walls where they coincided with an abrupt change of the paint color on the wall.



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It is as though the panels had absorbed the given configuration of colors on the wall behind them, negating the autonomy of the work. In this exhibition, Krauss ­concluded, “paintings are understood … as shifters, empty signs (like the word this) that are filled with meaning only when physically juxtaposed with an external referent, or object” (Krauss 1986a, pp. 212–217, 216). Krauss did make brief reference to Barthes’s sense of the temporality of the photograph as a “presence seen as past.” Yet her reference to this phrase in “The Rhetoric of the Image” (1964) sits uneasily with her stress on the shifter’s dependence on “sheer objectivity” and here‐and‐nowness (Krauss 1986b, p. 217). Because Krauss did not distinguish clearly between trace and deixis, the ambivalence of the index is lost. The index as trace itself has the paradoxical quality of being a trace of (past) presence, that is, a presence invaded by absence and loss. This is precisely why in Camera Lucida (1981) Barthes found the shadowy ­figures in old photographs disturbing; looking at them one is suspended between a present tense deictic “that” conjoined with the past tense “has been.”

Michelle Stuart One of the 78 artists represented at P.S.1, Michelle Stuart, made floor to ceiling graphite rubbings of two sections of wall on opposite sides of a crumbling corridor and then swapped the positions of the resulting large sheets of paper. The title of her piece, East/West Wall Memory Relocated (1976), suggests that Stuart intended her rubbing to evoke the complex temporality of the trace and the unreliable space of memory. In her statement for the catalogue, she commented that “the work deals with the connection between temporal relations of precedence and simultaneity and distinctions between past, present, and future” (Stuart 1976). Anna Lovatt has commented on Stuart’s practice of thematizing, not only the temporality of the trace, but also its ambivalent play on location/dislocation, plenitude/loss (Lovatt 2013, p. 9). Stuart began her career employed as a cartographic draughtsperson using aerial photographs to draw detailed maps for a firm that provided information for mining engineers and for the U.S. military during the Korean War. In 1969, she made a gridded drawing after the first photograph of the surface of the moon. Although, as a feminist, she deplored the world’s violent history of conquest and colonialism, she was inspired by the idea of travel to unknown places (Filippone 2011). Many of her subsequent works incorporated rocks and dirt from far‐flung sites. Her best‐known pieces are large rubbings of earth, rock, and debris on long scrolls of paper which are hung so that they spread down the wall and on to the floor. #1 Woodstock, NY, 1973, one such rubbing done on site with graphite on paper, shows the overall irregular pattern of the terrain. Stuart also made another sort of rubbing, seen in #28 Moray Hill, (1974, Whitney Museum of American Art), which involved working a scroll of muslin‐backed paper with rocks and earth from a particular site and burnishing the earth and graphite mixture to a dark luster. Stuart moved between photographically mediated mappings and works that insisted upon tactile presence, sampling, and imprinting. Stuart and a number of other artists of the period play on the ambivalence of the index caught up in the dialectics of plenitude and loss, presence and absence, location and dislocation. This dialectic offers a very different way of thinking about frottage from Krauss’s account of indexical procedures aimed solely at evading pictorial conventions. Indexical strategies partially bypass the agency of the author, opening up the

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work to contingency – they are caught up in the accidental, unintentional, traumatic. While Krauss’s appeal to the site‐dependence of the shifter gestured in that direction, she effectively confined the significance of indexicality to a formal means of subverting pictorial conventions and artistic autonomy. In what follows, we see how other artists have engaged with rubbing as a technique capable of bringing out the ambivalence at the heart of our desire for the authentic trace. Like photography, rubbing involves a moment of proximity, intimate tactile contact with something, but at the same time, it is a technique of reproduction and dissemination.

Masao Okabe Krauss restricted her enquiry to Seventies art in America, but the art of the index was, and still is, a global phenomenon, and has been particularly prevalent in Asia. This may be owing to the technique’s economy of means and openness to chance. It may also relate to the ancient and ongoing Eastern practice of rubbing stone stele incised with calligraphy. Writing of Ernst’s work in 1945, Duchamp referred to his use of the “old Chinese” frottage or rubbing technique (Duchamp 1975b, p. 149). However, he does not mention that Ernst spent three months in Indo‐China the year before he embarked on his exploration of frottage. For centuries, the Chinese have used a very specific rubbing technique to transfer carving, particularly calligraphy, from stone onto paper. This involves soaking a sheet of paper to loosen the fibers and then pressing it into the incised pattern on a stone stele so that it is molded to the shape of the patterns or letters. Then ink is applied to the surface with an inked pad resulting in a configuration of white script against a black ground. Although this is a simple reproductive printing technique used in the dissemination of Chinese writing, the rubbings are esthetically prized in themselves. One artist who has devoted his entire career to the technique of frottage is the Japanese artist, Masao Okabe (b.1942). Okabe began making graphite rubbings in 1977, often on his hands and knees in the street. In 1979, he spent six months in Paris during which time he made Membrane of the City, a work consisting of 169 large‐scale frottages of his local environment. Okabe compared his activity to recording ambient sound, an analogy which suggests his receptiveness to accident or contingency, but which does not convey his feeling, evident in the following artist’s statement, for the traces of the past embedded in the urban fabric. The road has absorbed the sweat and voices of the people, their blood, and today lies silent. People have passed by, carved their history on the spot, the countless stains and vestiges washed away over time, all remains there silently. The smells etched into the stone are human smells. The streets of Paris taught me these things. For the first time I had the major realization that the ‘city is a gigantic printing plate.’ (Minato 2007, p. 187)

Etched into the surfaces of the city are indelible traces of the past which are revealed through the intimate process of frottage. In 1989, Okabe exhibited a piece commissioned by the newly opened Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. The commission was to commemorate



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Hiroshima’s near total destruction and the population’s mass annihilation by nuclear bomb, 6 September 1945. It instigated a series of projects which culminated in his 2007 project for the Japanese Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. This installation, Is there a future for our past? The Dark Face of the Light, displayed some 1200 frottages that Okabe and volunteers made in the Ujina Station district of Hiroshima. The work is concerned with traces of violence, trauma, amnesia, and collective memory. As Okabe wrote, “time left its traces on the lives of these stones” (Okabe 2007, p. 4). The project involved the participation of many people which, at the Biennale, was extended to visitors who were offered materials to make their own rubbings of curb stones brought from the site. The work as a whole involved an active collaborative process of rubbing the traces left by the past on the streets and walls of the urban environment. On the walls were displayed framed rubbings and pressed wildflower specimens, suggesting rebirth, each labeled with the words “The Platform of the Old Ujina Station, Hiroshima, 1894/1945/2001.” The three dates record the completion of the building of the station and track intended to carry military material and soldiers to Ujina Harbor, the date of the bomb, and the date of the rubbing (Minato 2007, pp. 188–189). Okabe chose the site because it was not associated with the civilian population, but rather with the prosecution of the war; as he noted, what remains “is the boundary line between Hiroshima as the victim of the atom bomb and Hiroshima as a military facility” (Okabe 2007, p. 4). Located some distance from ground zero, the station survived the bomb, but at the time of the rubbings it was undergoing demolition and redevelopment. In his Biennale catalogue essay, Chihiro Minato raised the issue of the trace as the physical externalization of memory. Computerization, he observed, vastly increases the capacity of externalized memory but at the same time puts it in danger, for the digital code cuts memory free from a material base as it flows through space. This means that “we live in an age fraught with uncertainty about the future of memory – hence the title of the Venice installation: Is there a future for our past?” (Minato 2007, p. 183). In Venice, some of the rubbings were photographically transferred to acetate and displayed in lightboxes. Since the rubbings were made across the gaps between paving stones, they look like chest x‐ rays, an allusion perhaps to the lethal radiation released by the bomb  –  its “dark light.” The installation preserves a shadow of a structure, dismantled to make way for a freeway, which once served as “a mute physical testimony of the past vanished” (Okabe 2007, p. 4). Distortions of history and threats to memory are also what motivated the use of frottage by the Thai artist Sutee Kunavichayanont (b. 1965). First shown in a group show called Democracy from the Perspective of Beauty, 2000, his installation History Class, was a mock classroom with 14 wooden desks set up in front of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok. The desks were engraved with different scenes and narratives from modern Thailand’s traumatic political history including the democratic struggles in 1885 during Rama V’s reign, the democratic revolution of 24 June 1932, the years under military dictatorship of General Phibunsongkhram’s government, the political events of October 1976 when protesting students at Thammasat University were massacred by Thai military police, and the horrors of Black May in 1992 when a popular uprising against the military dictatorship was violently crushed. Visitors and passers‐by were invited to spread pieces of paper on the desks and, with pencil, charcoal, or oil pastel colors, to make rubbings from the engraved desktops. Suttee’s use

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of frottage revives the ancient process of disseminating writing on stone stelae. Most importantly, however, the work involved participants in this task of reproducing and disseminating information about missing episodes from Thailand’s official history (Musikawong 2010).2

Do Ho Suh Another East Asian artist who deserves mention in this context is the Korean, Do Ho Suh (b. 1962). He is widely known for his full‐scale models of houses and flats made of translucent and vividly colored silky fabric. Like tents crossed with parachutes, these light structures have a fragile, floating presence – like something suspended in memory or a dream. Suh’s floating houses and flats are modeled on places where he once lived, including the traditional style Korean house of his childhood. His work alludes to his own condition as a nomadic contemporary artist who carries around a sense of home as a memory, but it is more generally an investigation into the meaning of home in our globalized times. Suh’s rubbings are also concerned with geographical dislocation and the memory of place. He refers to this series of works as his “rubbing/ loving project.” As there is no distinction between r and l sounds in Korean, rubbing is pronounced as loving – an accident of pronunciation that Suh embraces: “Rubbing is a different interpretation of space. It’s quite sensuous—very physical and quite sexual. You have to very carefully caress the surface and try to understand what’s there” (Belcove 2016). In 2014, years after he had left the city, Suh made large rubbings of parts of his New York apartment. Rubbing/Loving Project, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011 featured a blue pencil rubbing of the interior of his former apartment (Figure 14.1). He covered with vellum every surface, including kitchen appliances and toilet fixtures, before rubbing them. The resulting drawings were either unfolded and exhibited flat or displayed as three‐dimensional sculptural installations inside freestanding room structures. One of Suh’s most ambitious frottage projects was an overtly political intervention. Commissioned to contribute to the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, he created rubbings as a memorial to the 1980 “Gwangju Uprising,” an event that led to a violent crackdown. The province has since been the beneficiary of government‐funded developments which, as one critic observed “enact renewal through a process of erasure” (Kim 2014, p. 30). Suh chose spaces once inhabited by ordinary people who had lived through the uprising – a theater, dormitory room, and a market square. For Rubbing/ Loving Project: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater and Rubbing/Loving Project: Gwangju Catholic University Lifelong Institute, he covered the sites with tracing paper and rubbed the surfaces with graphite, in the first case, and colored pencils, in the second. Unusually, Suh and his studio team made the rubbings in the Gwangju Theater while blindfolded in order to heighten the tactile, exploratory nature of rubbing. Suh has mentioned the relevance of Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind in which the philosopher argued that the draughtsman is blind to his own drawing; the hand is a “finger‐eye” which “feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes” (Derrida 1993, p. 3). The blindfolds also conveyed Suh’s sense of his own historical “blindness” due to press censorship at the time of the uprising. The final site, a wall adjacent to the market was hung with sheets of paper for the public to make rubbings.



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Figure 14.1  Do Ho Suh (2015–2016) Rubbing/Loving Project: 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA. Colored pencil on vellum; 240 × 420 × 670 cm. Source: © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy the Artist, Victoria Miro, London, and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong (Photography Chris Payne).

Anna Barriball Suh’s distinctive approach to frottage is quasi‐sculptural as it often involves, as a first stage, molding paper around three‐dimensional objects. The final case I want to consider is also sculptural, but the work could hardly be more different from Suh’s. Anna Barriball (b.1972) is a British artist who has made rubbing her signature, though not exclusive, technique. Typically, she puts a thin sheet of paper on a surface and, using an ordinary, well‐sharpened 2B pencil, painstakingly covers the entire sheet. The unusually hard pencil lead she uses makes her process a test of endurance, but it also registers the slightest detail. Her first rubbing, like Ernst’s, was of a wooden floorboard, One Square Foot V, 2001. She later judged the piece too “pictorial,” by which she meant that it has a contrived esthetic effect and also that it is not large enough to become a thing in space rather than a representation of something (Barriball and Spira 2011, pp. 88–89). Barriball later avoided a pictorial effect by fitting her paper to cover a whole, large, delimited surface, like a bricked‐up doorway (Untitled, 2009); also, she installs the pieces in a gallery where one would expect to find windows and doors. The things she chooses to rub tend to be architectural apertures or thresholds; they are mostly closed or blocked and her treatment of them makes them even more impenetrable. For instance, her rubbing of textured glass, such as Window, 2002,

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turns what had been a transparent aperture into a solid barrier of what looks like ­polished leather. The view from a window is a standard metaphor for the space of representation; Barriball’s close and tactile process blocks that view and, with it, the optical space of vision (see Figure 14.2). Although Barriball’s rubbings are technically drawings, they are also shallow reliefs, formed by pressing the paper into patterns and groves. As she noted in an interview: “It’s the point of the pencil that pushes the paper almost like a carving process” (Barriball and Spira 2011, p. 89). This is particularly evident in the case of a remarkable piece which consists of rubbings of two large shutters, Shutters, 2011. On close inspection, one can see that the paper was put under extreme pressure as the sharp pencil poked and scratched the surface. It looks like the obduracy of the object with its awkward slats has provoked a sort of intense and sustained struggle with the medium. The dark opacity of Barriball’s graphite rubbings were soon joined by the blank mirroring of rubbings made by layering silver ink on paper and then pressing the paper with a brush into the textured surface of the object. These were given an added dimension when she made rubbings of, for example, a door in silver ink with the reverse side sprayed using florescent “fire red” acrylic paint. Her Silver Door with Red Fire, 2011, for example, is crinkly and rigid with layers of metallic ink and, raised against a white ground, is surrounded by an ominous halo of reflected red light.

Figure 14.2  Anna Barriball (2008) Sunset/Sunrise. V. Pencil on paper, 85 × 110 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery.



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These strange pieces prompt one to reflect on the uncanniness of Barriball’s work in general. It bears comparison with Jasper Johns’s early painting. Johns treated a flag motif, for instance, in such a way that the picture’s shape and dimensions are automatically predetermined by the motif. In addition, his thick wax encaustic medium gives the flag a rigid, uncanny otherness.3 Like Barriball, he shut down the traditional optical space of representation, most obviously with Shade, 1959, a window shade pulled down and covered in paint. The celebrated critic Leo Steinberg observed that Johns’s early paintings and sculptures suggest “the possibility of an object’s lone self‐ existence” and consequently also “intimate our own absence” (Steinberg 1972a, pp. 29–30, 54). Describing his anxious encounter with Johns’s paintings, Steinberg wrote that the pictures “come to impress me as a dead city might – but a dead city of terrible familiarity. Only objects are left – man‐made signs which, in the absence of men, have become objects. And Johns has anticipated their dereliction.” Struggling to find criteria to evaluate the work, he confides, “I am alone with this thing” (Steinberg 1972b, pp. 14, 15). Barriball’s rubbings share the uncanny thingness described by Steinberg. Another artist who renders ordinary domestic items uncanny is the Palestinian‐ born, London‐based artist, Mona Hatoum. Her unusual series of rubbings were made without graphite or any other drawing medium. Rather, she used Japanese wax paper which she wrapped around and rubbed against small culinary utensils such as a grater or colander (Figure 14.3). This results in delicate rubbings of white lines on translucent paper, such as Large Shaker Colander, 1996. Hatoum speaks of the warm domesticity of the dwindling Shaker community where she was artist in residence, yet these pieces form part of a series of threatening or uncanny objects (Hatoum 1997, p. 29). No Way III 1996, is a stainless steel colander fitted with nuts and bolts; Pin Rug, 1998– 1999, is a rug made of stainless steel pins which turns a warm and welcoming mat into

Figure 14.3  Mona Hatoum (1999) Untitled (passoire de J-L). Japanese wax paper, 43.5 × 54.5 cm (17 1/4 × 19 3/4 in.) © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy Le Creux de l’Enfer (Photo: Joël Damase).

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something cold and threatening. Divan Bed, 1996, is a bed constructed of industrial flooring material. Hatoum said of this piece: “The distinctive raised pattern of the tread‐plate is a cold unyielding equivalent to the soft quilted material that usually covers a divan bed…. I was originally going to call the piece Sarcophagus” (Hatoum 1998). Her work evokes the latent violence of the domestic every day. The semi‐ transparent paper of her frottages suggests a delicate membrane or skin marked by an insistent domestic pressure. * Didi‐Huberman claimed that techniques of casting, imprinting, and rubbing evade style, yet this brief enquiry has discovered a striking range of rubbing styles: Ernst’s collage–frottage practice aimed at stimulating projective imagination is completely at odds with Okabe’s methodical, rhythmic scanning of surfaces for information, which itself differs from Suh’s suggestion of rubbing as a blind caress, which in turn is remote from Barriball’s intense, incisive use of a sharp graphite pencil. The diversity of frottage mark‐making was explored in a series made by Gabriel Orozco and some assistants. Havre‐Caumartin, 1999, involved making rubbings of the regular pattern of ceramic wall tiles lining a Paris Metro platform. One of the meanings of the word frottage is the act of rubbing up against another person in a sexual way and Orozco’s large metro frottages, which require considerable bodily exertion, jokingly allude to that connotation. What is striking about them, as Briony Fer comments, is how different each one turns out (Fer 2009, p. 132). The distinctive character of each maker’s marks is thrown into relief against the uniform pattern of the geometric mosaic and demonstrated by the works’ display in a series. Surrealist automatist experiments, like Ernst’s frottage, seem poised between projective and receptive aims which, on the one hand, stir the unconscious imagery of artist and viewer, and, on the other, painstakingly register an otherwise unseen or remembered reality. When these strategies are revived in the Seventies, it is the latter, non‐pictorial tendency that predominates. The representational image is definitively replaced by the indexical trace and pictorial space is flattened. Yet if frottage since the Seventies can fairly be considered an “other‐oriented index,” the distinctiveness of the gestural act can equally be seen as a sort of seismographic registration of the subject. The distinctiveness of the gestural marks and the diversity of conceptual approaches reviewed here make it difficult to generalize about frottage, but one conspicuous feature of contemporary rubbing, as opposed to surrealist frottage, is the strict maintenance of a literal one to one scale; it is in this respect more like a replication than a pictorial representation. Krauss was right, then, to regard the model of the readymade as the decisive precedent for indexical procedures. However, this model ignores the, often extreme, labor‐intensiveness of the process. From a distance, Barriball’s shutters may look like readymades or large photographs, but a closer view reveals the almost obsessive process of repeatedly pressing a sharpened pencil onto paper over an extended period of time. Nor does the model of the readymade prepare one for the kind of issues that arise in connection with the contemporary practice of rubbing: trauma, love, loss, memory, and the uncanny. Frottage should be considered alongside a number of other indexical procedures, such as casting, imprinting, sampling, and photography, which take advantage of the index’s ambivalent relation to the object involving both contact and loss, intimacy and dissemination. Frottage shares with photography the complex temporality summed up by Barthes as “that has been.”



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Notes 1 For an extended study of art and indexicality, see my Photography, Trace and Trauma, Iversen (2017). 2 My thanks are owing to Chayanoot Silpasart whose PhD thesis, Contemporary Thai Art: Globalization and Cultural Identity (2014), I supervised at the University of Essex. 3 In conversation, Barriball told me that Jasper Johns is an artist she admires, 21 April 2016.

References Barriball, A. and Spira, A. (2011). “In Conversation.” Anna Barriball, exhib. cat. Milton Keynes: MK Gallery and Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 88–92. Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Belcove, J.L. (2016). “Artist Do Ho Suh Explores the Meaning of Home.” The Wall Street Journal Nov. 6. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303376904579137672335638830 Breton, A. (1972). Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). In: Manifestoes of Surrealism (trans. R. Seaver and H.R. Lane), 1–48. Michigan: Ann Arbor Paperbacks. Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs of the Blind: The Self‐Portrait and Other Ruins. Paris/ Chicago: Musée du Louvre/University of Chicago Press. Didi‐Huberman, G. (2008). La Ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Doane, M.A. (2002). The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Doane, M.A. (2007a). “Introduction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Special issue on Indexicality: Trace and Sign) 18 (1): 1–6. Doane, M.A. (2007b). “The indexical and the concept of medium specificity.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Special issue on Indexicality: Trace and Sign) 18 (1): 128–152. Duchamp, M. (1975a). “Specifications for ‘Readymades’.” In: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (eds. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson), 32. London: Thames and Hudson. Duchamp, M. (1975b). “Max Ernst: painter, sculptor, author” (1945). In: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (eds. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson), 149. London: Thames and Hudson. Ernst, M. (1926). “Histoire naturelle.” In: Introduction by Jean (Hans) Arp. Paris: Galerie Jean Boucher. Ernst, M. (1948). “Beyond painting.” In: Max Ernst, Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends (ed. R. Motherwell). New York: Wittenborn, Schulz. Fer, B. (2009). “Spirograph: the circular ruins of drawing.” In: Gabriel Orozco, October Files 9 (ed. Y.‐A. Bois), 121–138. Cambridge: MIT Press. Filippone, C. (2011). “Cosmology and the transformation of the work of Michelle Stuart.” Woman’s Art Journal 32 (1 (Spring/Summer)): 3–12. Freud, S. (1974). “A note upon the ‘Mystic writing pad’” (1925). In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19 (1923–1925) (ed. J. Strachey), 226–232. London: The Hogarth Press.

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Hatoum, M. (1997). “Michael Archer in conversation with Mona Hatoum.” In: Mona Hatoum (eds. M. Archer, G. Brett and C. de Zegher), 6–30. London: Phaidon. Hatoum, M. (1998). Mona Hatoum interviewed by Janine Antoni. April: Bomb https:// bombmagazine.org/articles/mona‐hatoum/. Heiss, A. (1977). Rooms, P.S. 1, exhib. cat., June 9–26, 1976, The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc. Iversen, M. (2017). Photography, Trace and Trauma. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kim, C. (2014). “Rubbing is loving: Do Ho Suh’s archaeology of memory.” In: Do Ho Suh Drawings (ed. R. Steiner). Munich, London, New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel. Krauss, R. (1986). The Originality of the Avant‐Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press First published as: Krauss, Rosalind. 1977. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America.” (Parts 1 and 2), October 3 and 4 (Spring and Autumn, 1977), pp. 68–81, pp. 58–67. Lovatt, A. (2013). “Palimpsests: inscription and memory in the work of Michelle Stuart.” In: Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature (ed. A. Lovatt). exhib. cat. Berlin: Hatje Cantz and the Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham. Michaux, H. (1978). “En pensant au phénomène de la peinture,” Passages, 1963. Reprinted in Henri Michaux, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne. Minato, C. (2007). “Is there a future for our past?” In: Masao Okabe: Is there a Future for our Past? The Dark Face of the Light (ed. C. Minato), 180–197. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Musikawong, S. (2010). “Art for October: Thai cold war state violence in trauma art.” Positions: East Asia Critique 18 (1): 19–50. Okabe, M. (2007). “Question’s form vanishes: the loss of physical testimony.” In: Masao Okabe: Is There a Future for Our Past? The Dark Face of the Light (ed. C. Minato), 4. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Peirce, C.S. (1960). “Icon, index, symbol.” In: Collected Papers: Vol. II: Elements of Logic (eds. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss), 161–165. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pesanti, A. (2015). Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1980 to Now. exhib. cat. Los Angeles/Houston: Hammer Museum/The Menil Collection. Ray, M. (1980). “The age of light.” In: Classic Essays on Photography (ed. A. Trachtenberg), 167–168. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books. Shiff, R. (2004). “Index and counterfeit.” In: Traces: Body and Idea in Contemporary Art (ed. C. Osaki), 337–343. Kyoto: The National Museum of Modern Art. Steinberg, L. (1972a). “Jasper Johns: the first seven years of his art.” In: Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth‐Century Art, 3–16. New York: Oxford University Press. Steinberg, L. (1972b). “Contemporary art and the plight of its public.” In: Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth‐Century Art, 17–54. New York: Oxford University Press.

15

Ground as Critical Limit1 Laura Lisbon

What can drawing discover from painting when situated in terms of the ground? In his essay from 2001, “L’Inventeur de la Peinture” (“The Inventor of Painting”), Hubert Damisch points out that painting not only discovers representation in the origin myth of Narcissus; it also claims the surface. But what does it mean for painting to claim the surface? Is the demand to claim a surface interchangeable with the demand to produce a ground in painting? And would it be the same thing for drawing to then claim the surface or ground? How might we think this relation between painting and drawing, surface and ground? We might recall that etymologically, surface refers to an “outermost boundary” or “outside part.” Technically, it is “above” (sur) the face. Additionally, surface as a verb reminds us that there is the potential for “coming to the surface” as part of our conceptualization of the term, which suggests a transitive movement toward the surface rather than an emphasis on any given surface, rising upward rather than accepting the surface as such. Damisch’s development of the surface as a concept of and for painting counts on a problematic of the “underneath,” as elaborated in his essay “The Underneaths of Painting” and translated in Word & Image in 1985. Here, Damisch develops the concept of the “underneath” through his reading of Balzac’s novella, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” a story about three painters – Frenhofer, Pourbus, and Poussin – who exchange studio visits, female models, and critical feedback about each other’s ambitions to achieve a completed figurative painting. Damisch draws out elements of the story that focus on the subject versus the painting. In particular, figurative painting is the subject that is simultaneously concealed and revealed by painting, evident through the fragment of the foot in Frenhofer’s painting and the overly delineated figure in Pourbus’ painting, which Frenhofer covers and completes with three “daubs” of paint. In this sense, Balzac’s narrative serves as an allegory for modern painting.

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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As  Damisch elaborates: “… if the painting is not to begin by drawing the figures, demarcating them, and delimiting them with a line before colouring them in, and if the contour itself, as again Delacroix will say (but much later), must come last, ‘contrary to custom’, then the work of painting no longer effectively has any fixed goal, except to veer, as history has shown, to abstraction” (p. 207). Damisch clearly brings our attention to the role drawing and painting play in mutually affecting each other in terms of questions of composition, structure, legibility, name, and subject. In the essay’s final paragraph, Damisch reiterates the significance of the displacement of the role of drawing in painting from the traditional way to begin a painting by delimiting figures before filling them in, to an emergence of painting itself, operating under a surface of paintings’ marks. He refers to the “object of desire” as another way of describing the subject of painting, and the search for the subject throughout the narrative, which is the figure that is lost and found in the ground of the painting. Damisch concludes: But in the suspense which is henceforth that of painting, how can we understand that the object of desire should be so hard at work that we believe we can recognize it beneath the accumulation of touches from the first to the last; and that Balzac had to invent it in order to give literature matter to describe over and against painting, and this at the very moment when paint has finally surfaced in the picture at the expense of what we call the subject, but only to (obstinately and underhandedly) throw back the question once again? (Damisch 2001, p. 208)

The tension Damisch describes between the subject and painting is analogous to the tension between the convention of drawing that delineates and describes the subject before being painted and another sense of drawing in relation to painting in which this priority is displaced. When conventions of drawing and subject are upended, painting can surface differently. In short, the origin stories of painting  –  whether through the myth of Narcissus and other myths, or through the conventional structuring of painting by drawing first, then adding color – invite a critical rethinking of the surface in both painting and drawing. Surface and ground are nearly synonymous terms in painting. The ground often is the surface of a painting. If we shift terminology for a moment, and place the term surface in relation to ground as another fundamental term for painting, we can bring both terms into relief. However, etymologically, ground reflects the bottom or foundation. As a verb, it is also the opposite of surface, which describes something rising upward or surfacing. To ground as opposed to surface is a movement downward. In a certain way, surface and ground describe opposing spaces and actions, even if they are often used interchangeably. When we use the terms in relation to painting, we find painting comfortable with each term, surface and ground, while drawing is comfortable with surface but less so with ground. It is rare to speak of a drawing’s ground. However, what kind of demands might drawing make regarding both the surface and ground? Tracing a concern for the ground by addressing the disciplines of painting and drawing together necessarily becomes entangled in terminology and conventions, as we are suggesting, but it also has the potential to displace or open up each discipline. Indeed, the shared conceptualization and practice of the surface and ground help define a provocative and productive distinction between painting and drawing as disciplines.



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One might contend that this preoccupation with the surface and ground in painting is what distinguishes it as a discipline from drawing. Drawing seems to accept its ground more readily as given; a line, for example, works across the page (ground or, more aptly, surface) like script. Drawing does not traditionally concern itself with producing or discovering its surface or ground to the same degree as painting, which never seems to free itself from a concern for its ground. What kind of limit then, if any, is the ground for drawing? What if the ground for drawing is taken seriously as a critical limit – a limit or edge around which a significant disciplinary discovery can be located? As we will see, these questions pass by way of three primary references in addition to Damisch’s “The Inventor of Painting,” and “The Underneaths of Painting.” The first is Jean Clay’s essay “Painting in Shreds” (Clay 1981) in which he addresses Robert Ryman’s exploration of multiple substrata as opening a way to think about drawing “in” painting since Cézanne. The second is the work and texts of Daniel Buren, in particular his essay “Critical Limits” (Buren 1973) in which he analyzes the discipline of painting as a set of concealments in which papiers collés become a central conceptual and formal revelation, as well as “Terminology” (Buren 1987) in which he proposes that all of his works “in situ” since 1967 should be characterized and defined as “drawings.” And the third is Michael Fried’s essay “The Achievement of Morris Louis” (Fried 1998) in which he addresses the essential role drawing plays in displacing painting’s ground. In addition to these three references, I want to argue that specific works of art are central to thinking the interlacing of ground and surface across the disciplines of drawing and painting. These include Edouard Manet’s The Fifer for the way in which the ground and figure are negotiated along a particularly painterly condition of the edge; Sherrie Levine’s presidential cut‐outs for the efficiency with which the image and ground are drawn together through cutting; as well as Braque and Picasso’s papiers collés for the revolutionary hinge collage becomes between drawing and painting in light of concerns for the adhesion of paper to a surface or ground. Additionally, nearly any of Buren’s works are critical, but perhaps especially his works in situ.

Claiming the Surface Shreds, “Slice” As Jean Clay proclaims in his essay, “Painting in Shreds” (Clay 1981), the emergence of drawing as a problematic of the surface is what places painting “in shreds” from Cézanne on. It is a “victory of drawing over painting, or of drawing in painting, a victory not of the delineated over the colored but of thickness over flatness, of the slice over the surface” (p. 53). The ground or surface in drawing plays a central role in a critical rethinking of painting up to and including Ryman. Drawing productively shreds painting in order for painting to rethink itself. Clay points to the “passages” in works on paper by Cézanne, the line drawings of Matisse, and the use of line in Martin Barré’s paintings to foreground a concept of thickness rather than flatness, something he terms the “slice” (tranche). The “slice” is discovered in the surface of drawing into which scratching, the impregnation of water based material, or operations of transparency allow for an “interweaving” indicative of the thickness of the

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ground. For Clay, Robert Ryman is the primary example of a contemporary artist for whom the explorations of substrata constitute a kind of drawing activity and “slice” that opens a critical rethinking of surface and ground in painting. That Clay conceptualizes the surface of drawing as having a thickness is linked to Damisch’s conceptualization of a painting surface necessitating an underneath. Both Clay and Damisch are identifying a surface condition as constituting a thickness, an underneath, or an interweaving, terms (following the late writings of Merleau‐Ponty) which are all critical for rethinking painting. Both also identify drawing as a key component in this rethinking of painting. If we then extend their analysis of the relation between painting and drawing by bringing together a problematic of the surface with a problematic of the ground, then the question remains: how might an investigation of the problematic of ground in painting illuminate ground as a limit condition for drawing, and vice versa? One place painting’s self‐criticality leads us to is a “degree zero” of its surface or support. The support in question here is not the many efforts to reveal the stretcher bars as part of a limit condition for painting. Rather, surface is complicated by the problematic of the preparation of the support or the ground as it is applied to the surface. In fact, “ground” is the conventional term used for the gesso or whitening agent, either acrylic or oil, or the traditional gesso composed of chalk and hide glue, which are applied on top of the surface to be painted upon. Taking gesso into account, the surface of a painting is, technically speaking, a prepared surface with an applied ground. While this is not the meaning of ground that is most productive for a discovery of its role in thinking through the critical limits of painting and drawing, it is relevant as an example of the entanglements between concepts of surface and ground as they relate to painting. Additionally, when the traditional linkage of mimesis and painting is displaced by abstraction, as Damisch suggests, the degree zero gesso layer of painting becomes a significant ground to navigate in the claiming of a surface. We might think here of the number of works by painters for whom the critical engagement of painting is enacted through a baring of the painting to its ground as a surface, whether gessoed or not. In an American context, the work of Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin immediately comes to mind, as well as Daniel Buren and Michel Parmentier in the French context, not to mention Simon Hantaï. Furthermore, the introduction of acrylics changed the discipline of painting precisely in relation to the ground and surface. Gesso or coating the surface were no longer necessary, so the canvas could be painted upon directly, as in the works of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler as early examples, as well as a number of artists in France related to Supports/Surfaces.

Subjectile, Subject In relation to the question of the surface character of drawing, Jean Clay elaborates: At stake is not the origin, the original truth, but interweaving. The question ­concerns not the revealing of the coating, the unveiling of the rough canvas, but rather the interrelation of layers worked by meanings one on top of another where the illusionist scene is undone in order to begin, corroded by its textual substrata and finding in the weakening of the reality‐effect its dimension of symbolic inscription. This is an interweaving that also baffles the mastery of the operator working against a



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“support” that repeatedly resists, insists and takes over the painter’s movements, constraining him, twisting his arm, stiffening shoulders no longer guaranteeing him the security of any neutral, standardized area where the painting could be executed. Things take shape in their own production with Ryman, who like an ingenious play‐actor creates a surface from the deliberate multiplicity of subjectiles he invents (mylar, Bristol‐board, crinkled or waxed paper, wood, linen, aluminum, etc.) where the self‐assurance of movement is lost in motions and positions that challenge customary practices. (Clay 1981, p. 53)

Surface, understood as interweaving, as a “slice” with depth or thickness, allows ground in its fullest sense to be understood as synonymous with the concept of the “subjectile.” Written in light of the work of Ryman, Clay addresses drawing’s intervention into the field of painting as a condition of modern art, defining the “subjectile” as that which “supports” the painting. In Ryman’s work “the subject and the subjectile (that which supports the painting) merge; the worked and working are incorporated” (p. 49). However, an important destabilization occurs when the subject is worked by the surface. One might rephrase this as a destabilization of the figure and ground, which extends both to the destabilization of the artist or “inscriptor” as well as to the place or space of inscription. While Clay finds and describes the subjectile in Cézanne as the gaps and “abrupt breaches in the surface texture”  –  sometimes at the service of representation and sometimes as a “lack” or “catastrophe” – or in Matisse, who displays and produces “an explicit economy of the under‐layer,” in both cases, “the accents and high points emerge from beneath the work.” In “To Unsense the Subjectile” (Derrida 1998), an essay on the drawings of Antonin Artaud, Jacques Derrida refers to Clay’s reference to the subjectile (see also Didi‐Huberman 1985; Reid 1994). The essay describes an Artaud drawing in which Artaud apparently tore off a section of the drawing that was originally part of a letter to André Rolland de Renéville. Artaud concludes the letter: “Herewith a bad drawing in which what is called the subjectile betrayed me.” Derrida then spends most of the essay working through the implications of this statement – the question of what the subjectile is, that it is something or someone who could “betray” – as well as the history of the word in the dictionaries of the time, which did not acknowledge the use of the term dating from earlier centuries: The notion belongs to the code of painting and designates what is in some way lying below (sub‐jectum) as a substance, a subject or a succubus. Between the beneath and the above, that is at once a support and a surface, sometimes also the matter of a painting or a sculpture, everything distinct from form, as well as from meaning and representation, not representable. Its presumed depth or thickness can only be seen as a surface, that of the wall or of wood, but already also that of paper, of textiles and of the panel. A sort of skin with holes for pores. (Derrida 1998, p. 64)

Derrida ends the essay on Artaud with a reflection on the way Artaud’s response – the drawing that is at once attached to and detached from his letter as subjectile – acts to destabilize the historical relation between the subject, object, and subjectile. Similarly, for Clay, a destabilization is produced in Ryman’s work between the subject and the place or space of the work, a destabilization that occurs when it is precisely drawing that is introduced into the field of painting. A network or interwoven ground has

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appeared here, one which implicates the subject and the object in the production of a ground which is predicated on suspension, breaches of surface, gaps, all demonstrative of what Derrida phrases as the motion or “the scene of the subjectile.”

Concealment Daniel Buren, “Critical Limits” In his essay, “Critical Limits,” Buren discusses painting in relation to the elements that painting “reveals” as the processes, “contradictions,” or limits at the heart of the practice. His complex diagrams in the essay reflect some of painting’s key “limits,” including stretcher, support, museum, cultural limits/knowledge, painting (“in the sense of what one paints”), and object. These elements or limits are transformed in relation to three frames of reference, which Buren defines as: (i) “Canceling Discourses (Art as it is perceived)”; (ii) “What Really Goes On (Art where it takes place)”; and (iii) “Critical Work (The limits of our work—the points of view—what is attempted).” Beginning with his terminology of elements that “reveal” themselves, it is clear that Buren understands painting to be a discipline that fundamentally hides or conceals its limit conditions. Even the relationship of the support to the stretched canvas is one of covering and concealing. The process of applying paint is a further covering of a support. Additionally, the limit of the stretcher provides a back or underneath of painting, indicating that there is always something kept from view. Covering and concealing as a condition of painting encourages an understanding of the ground as a space or surface that has an inside, underneath, or reserve. Work is critical if it reveals its contradictions and the shifting positions of its components. While Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni all worked to some degree with the critical limits of painting when they exhibited together in the various “Manifestations” during the late 1960s, we might think of the work of Buren’s intellectual collaborator and friend, Michel Parmentier, as particularly revelatory in this context. Parmentier folds his canvases or paper in horizontal bands of a particular width, paints the folded surface as if a monochrome, then unfolds it to reveal the unpainted reserve bands or stripes. The paintings reveal a surface with an underneath or inside. Attached to the wall, the limit condition of the surface becomes displaced from its apparent flatness. With Parmentier’s work, we can mark a critical transition from the terminology of the surface to ground, specifically as the surface reveals the reserve material space concealed in its “underneaths.” The surface produces itself as it produces a ground. Significantly, Parmentier’s later work is on paper rather than on canvas. He uses the same method of folding, then marking  –  in this case, hatching in an off‐handed, absent‐minded way – then unfolding. What changes from the paintings to the drawings? Is the ground produced in the surface of the paper through the reserve pockets as it was in the surface of the canvas? If the premise that drawing assumes and accepts its ground more uncritically than painting, given that painting always starts with the problem of producing a ground, then Parmentier’s last paper works might be characterized as paintings in drawings. Not only have they produced a ground; they have also negotiated edges, the edges of the folded paper, not in the sense of drawing something or anything but rather in the sense of marking the limits between surface and an “underneath.”



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In his essay “Critical Limits,” Buren strives to underscore the necessity of art to unveil its limits (cultural and formal). As we work through Buren’s three frames of reference that divide the essay into three parts with correlating diagrams, in the third  –  “Critical Work (The limits of our work—the points of view—what is attempted)” – we find that painting has revealed itself to be capable of exposing the frame or “limit” of and for the work. Surprisingly, the reference to papiers collés or “pasted papers” appears in this third section of Buren’s diagrams, where he claims they play the role of painting. A papier collé is characterized by its unique ability to acknowledge its support, which is traditionally paper, but which in the work of Buren also refers to the wall on the street, the wall in the museum, the metro, the billboard, etc. This acknowledgment of the support thereby “shatters” or intrudes upon the single viewpoint or unique framework of the museum or gallery as institutions. The pasted papers are revealed as a critical limit of painting because they shatter the limits of the museum as a viewing space. However, even with the pasted papers moved to the street, billboard, or metro, the framework that these sites become “reveals nothing.” Buren cautions against taking any one of the limits in isolation from all limits. If the pasted papers frame or reveal “nothing” when they are placed outside, it is because they must always be considered equally as affected by and affecting the ground. The ground or “framework” is equally a formal and cultural limit for the pasted papers, an argument which derives from understanding painting in terms of its “critical limits.” Indeed, as Buren states: “Art whatever it may be is exclusively political,” which suggests for him the need for “the analysis of formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which art exists and struggles” (p. 52). While Buren’s essay offers a useful framework for analyzing painting in terms of its own frames and limits, it also offers a framework for analyzing drawing in terms of the “formal” limits of drawing in two ways: first, through the relationship between painting and its discovery of papier collés; and secondly through the proximity of papier collés to drawing. Both avenues intersect through papier collés and point toward finding a ground for drawing, where ground is understood as an initial measure of locating drawing’s own critical limits.

Production of the Ground Ground/“Fifer”/Figure If Buren’s work reveals the ground as a constitutive aspect of the papiers collés, where the “visual tool” and ground support (wall, subway, billboard, etc.) coexist as one, another reading of the ground can be offered in relation to a more conventional approach to painting’s figure/ground negotiation. Ground is a term that incorporates a sense of architecture or foundation as well as its counterpoint in the figure, as in the figure/ground relation. “Picture plane” or “visual field” might also replace ground as a term, while foreground, middle ground, and background are all sections of a ground. When I speak of ground here, I mean something more negotiable, less known, yet to be discovered, or yet to be produced or created, like a place or lieu (in the sense of Mallarmé’s “Nothing will have taken place but the place”). As a ground or place to be produced, Manet’s The Fifer (1866) is a painting in which the relation of edges to the figure and non‐figure “negotiate” the ground in this precise sense. Indeed, the negotiation also occurs where the figure detaches itself on the ground.

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In the catalogue for the 1883 Manet retrospective, Françoise Cachin cites a review from 1866 in which Emile Zola describes Manet’s painting in the following way: “On a luminous gray background, the young musician is detached [se détache] … [Manet] delineates his figures sharply, not shrinking from the abruptness of nature; he passes from black to white without hesitation, presenting objects in all their vigor, detached on one another [se détachant les uns sur les autres]” (cited in Cachin and Moffett 1983, p. 244). In 1884, the art critic Paul Mantz also writes of the figure of the fifer in the painting: “He is applied on a ground [il est appliqué sur un fond] of monochrome gray—nothing underfoot, no air, no perspective; the poor unfortunate person is plastered [collé] to an invisible wall. The notion that there really is an atmosphere behind bodies and surrounding them never occurs to Manet; he remains true to the system of the cut‐out [découpure]” (cited in Cachin and Moffett 1983, p. 246). This unusual phrasing of a detachment “on” the ground and the invocation of “the system of the cut‐out” in painting articulates a certain limit condition of the ground as a place where something like the production or creation of the ground does not necessarily happen as a continuity of figure and ground. In this way, engaged in a dialogue of edges that Manet’s painting opens up, “the system of the cut‐out” both challenges the limit of the ground while simultaneously situating itself at the threshold of its creation or production.

Papier collés and Ground Related to this sense of a “detachment on” in Manet’s The Fifer  –  a phrasing that further evokes the concept and technique of the “cut‐out” – the first papiers collés by Picasso and Braque in 1913 offer much to think about, especially for addressing the ground of drawing. For what does the act of sticking a paper onto another piece of paper produce? It is a strange, abrupt, and “brusque” act. Or as Jean Paulhan also suggests in his book, La peinture cubiste, it is “a curious encounter between insistence and inachievement [inachèvement]” (Paulhan 1990, p. 131). The “inachievement” of the work is thus not a form of closure like a fully achieved tableau but motivated by an “insistence.” Above all, the papiers collés are what Paulhan terms “machines à voir” or “machines for seeing,” much in the same way as Brunelleschi’s perspective apparatus or the chamber claire are said to be “machines for seeing.” That the papiers collés have the status of a “machine for seeing” is a quite extraordinary claim, begging the question: a machine for seeing what? Completion? Coherence and adhesion? The ground? Or, perhaps another kind of ground for painting, which seems to be the answer from a more art historical perspective? And if papiers collés challenge painting’s structuring of space, what in turn does it offer to drawing? Phrased another way, we know that papiers collés were produced initially from paper or cardboard “set‐ups” constructed in different ways by both Braque and Picasso. We might also understand these paper or cardboard dispositifs as “machines for seeing.” In this way, we can argue that they constitute a dispositif, a term which we are translating here as “set‐up” or “apparatus.” We also know that there are questions about the chronological ordering of certain papiers collés in the work of Picasso and Braque  –  whether they preceded the painting or the painting preceded the papiers collés. In the latter case, the painting becomes the dispositif or “set up” for the papiers collés. But in the former, how might the papiers collés function as the dispositif for drawing instead of painting? Indeed, if we are concerned with the ordering or



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chronology, it is in order to establish the sense that the papiers collés could pivot toward a rethinking of the exact relation between drawing and painting, thus displacing the convention of drawing coming first, after or from which painting is produced. In both cases, an opening of space and chronology is initiated through these “machines for seeing.” In a letter to Braque, Paulhan offers a compelling if awkward reading of the space that the papiers collés open, as if Paulhan is struggling to find a language that comes to articulate both what appears in this space and how it appears: This space is double. Of our own will, it creates itself out of the base paper (papier de base) towards us: or, originating from the papier collé on the base paper, far from  us. Thus, it comes closer or distances itself according to our liking. Of this moving space that we arrange, it would be easy to move toward a turning space. (Paulhan 1990, p. 167)

The “ground” of a papier collé is displaced by the paper adhered on top. It is distanced and rediscovered as a place, created from a dislocation, and opposed to any continuity. The movement of to and fro that Paulhan notes here opens a ground in which a turn or return articulates a ruptured, folded interiority of the ground, all the while bounded by the limits of the support. The concept of the “turn” evoked by Paulhan has been extended in Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay, “The Motivation of the Sign” (Krauss 1992), which was published from a symposium on Picasso and Braque. Not only is her reading of Picasso’s Violin (1912) as a papier collé pivotal for any discussion of the linguistic in the structuring of the visual; she also raises the question of the “turn” in the visual field that is ushered into the image by Picasso’s literal turning over of the piece of newspaper in the papier collés. This would work against Mallarmé’s bias for situating the “book” as the primary site of the turning of pages. For Picasso’s cut and turn of the newspaper pasted on top of a “base paper” produces a ground. Drawing from Krauss’s reading of Picasso’s painting, one could then ask: what kind of ground does a turning of the newspaper or pasting of cut paper open for drawing? And the response is, perhaps: nothing, or nothing given in advance or assured. Perhaps a stable ground is never achievable in drawing, hence Paulhan’s initial appeal to an “inachievement.”

Ground/Image As a contemporary counterpoint to Paulhan’s understanding of “machines for seeing,” Sherrie Levine’s collage, Untitled (President 5) (1979) offers an extremely efficient combination of two images created through the cut. The edges of the cut‐out pose an intertwining of the two images to such a degree that we do not know what is the figure and what is ground. Both come and go, further complicated by the form of a projection onto the museum wall that this work has also taken (as in Presidential Profile from 1978). The cut out work offers a way of understanding a cutting together of two images, resulting in a joining of figure to ground and ground to figure. In this context, we might recall Buren’s use of striped papers which he adheres to billboards, the doors of moving trains, the windows of galleries (to cite the most well known) in order to grasp how the ground becomes coterminous with the figure, and vice versa. Buren’s “visual tool”  –  which demarcates and is demarcated by the

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wall – implies an extension beyond its space, whereas the Levine collapses figure and ground through a cutting together; figure demarcates ground while ground demarcates figure. However, when Levine projects the work in the gallery space, the work is offered to an experience of scale and subject that exceeds its frame. As its ground becomes more contingent, and as Buren’s work onto the wall and into space suggests, the projection becomes a drawing. This problematic relationship of the image to the limit of the ground  –  or the ground’s relationship to the limit of the image  –  is also the subject of many of the essays included in Jean‐Luc Nancy’s The Ground of the Image (Nancy 2005). In the following passages from Nancy’s opening essay, we hear a number of terms we have addressed so far, from the language of papiers collés or collage as cutting to the ­separation of the image detached “on” or “from” the ground, which also includes the connotation in French of fond as offering a different kind of “depth”: The image is separated in two ways simultaneously. It is detached from a ground [fond] and it is cut out within a ground. It is pulled away and clipped or cut out. The pulling away raises it and brings it forward: makes it a “fore,” a separate frontal surface, whereas the ground itself had no face or surface. The cutout or clipping creates edges in which the image is framed. (Nancy 2005, p. 7)

Furthermore, the complexity of the ground as a depth that both figures and is figured by the image is restated later in the essay through the recurring motif of the sky: The image does not stand before the ground like a net or a screen. We do not sink; rather, the ground rises to us in the image. The double separation of the image; its pulling away and its cutting out, form both a protection against the ground and an opening onto it. In reality, the ground is not distinct as ground except in the image: without the image, there would only be indistinct adherence. (Nancy 2005, p. 13)

What we want to remark in these quotations is how the rapport between the image and the ground is very close here to the language that Paulhan uses in relation to the ground in the first papiers collés in terms of its movement to and fro, of turning or returning.

Drawing/Ground/Painting Afield “The Achievement of Morris Louis” is the original title of an essay published in Artforum in 1967 by Michael Fried. Fried lays out several “achievements” of the artist in the essay, the central of which is Louis’ recognition of the importance of Jackson Pollock in relation to “the role, function and status of drawing in their respective oeuvres” (p. 105). Fried writes: … line is no longer contour, no longer the edge of anything. It does not, by and large, give rise to positive and negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representation against another part of the canvas read as ground. This is tantamount to the claim that, in Pollock’s allover drip painting of 1947–50, line has been freed from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes – that it has been purged of its figurative character. And this amounts to the claim that, in these paintings, traditional



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drawing is revoked, or dissolved, at any rate drastically undermined. Not that in Pollock’s work of this period there is nothing to be called drawing. But starting with this work, the determination of what, in a given instance, constitutes drawing is a problem without a general answer: we no longer know beforehand what drawing is, though we may find ourselves recognizing something as drawing, often to our surprise. (Fried 1967, p. 106)

My interest in Fried’s commentary lies in the way drawing is freed from both describing contours and bounding shapes, as well as from demanding a figuration that defines itself as opposed to ground. Drawing is found in painting instead as a kind of undefined and indefinable edge that comes from staining, as in a Louis painting. All of these aspects combine in the Unfurleds to “open up the picture plane more radically than ever before, as though seeing the first marking we are for the first time shown the void” (p. 119). While painting for Clay is changed significantly by a recognition it makes of “drawing”  –  here gaps and fissures are opened in the surface of the painting – for Fried, emphasis is on the nature of the marking that is neither a line, nor a cut edge, nor form producing area. If collage for Fried is problematic because of its tactility and spatial ambiguity, for Clay this constitutes precisely its critical (in) achievement. Additionally, Fried offers an example of one of the places where we find ourselves recognizing drawing, “often to our surprise.” The place is at the periphery or edge of the stretched canvas itself. In a footnote, he refers to Clement Greenberg from a 1966 catalogue on the painter Jules Olitski, republished in Greenberg’s collected essays in 1993, whose sprayed paintings displace drawing from the inside of the painting to the outside edge. Greenberg describes Olitski’s “urge to escape from incisive drawing” materialized in his spray paintings he began in 1965 in which linear drawing disappeared. “In the first sprayed paintings linear drawing is displaced completely from the inside of the picture to its outside, that is, to its inclosing shape, the shape of the stretched piece of canvas. Olitski’s art begins to call attention at this point, as no art before it has, to how very much this shape is a matter of linear drawing and, as such, an integral determinant of the picture’s effect rather than an imposed and external limit” (Greenberg 1993, p. 229). In the case of Olitski, whose work with sprayed color fields is distinctive for its dimension or spread of the colored field, the peripheral edge marks the work and cuts it out from the visual field. Drawing migrates to the edge and delimits it from the wall, providing a critical limit around which discussions of margin, inside and outside, installation, frame, and institution are created.

Terminology Here we might return to Buren’s written work, where he proclaims that all of his work since October 1967 is, among other things, drawing. As part of his “Metamorphosis—Works in Situ” exhibition, which was configured then reconfigured in four locations between 1987 and 1989, Buren also exhibited 30 of his graphic sketches. His essay for the exhibition catalogue, “Terminology” (1987), illuminates the distinction he makes between drawing and graphic sketches. Buren speaks of the striped and glued paper works that were begun in 1967 and which function for him precisely as drawings, remarking: “Painting at degree zero, the ultimate limit of experience and maximal critique of painting, overflowed its own framework, to pass from

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its status as finished critical object to that of interrogating visual tool. In other words, all the shows without exception … from October 1967 are among other things DRAWINGS, as well” (1987, pp. 5–6). At this point, Buren’s work incorporates what he calls a “visual tool” (8.7 cm stripes of alternating color and white) that “once positioned in its site, will define it, demarcate it, DRAW it (and also color it, emphasize it, illuminate it, decorate it, critique it, politicize it, etc.), just as much as the place (space) in question will give it its form, its DRAWING” (6). If Buren acknowledges that the papiers collés operate here as drawing, just as they exist at the heart of the “Critical Limits” essay in relation to the core of painting, then the turn from the critical limits of painting to drawing is subtly revealed. Or rather, the physical cohesion of the figure or striped papers to the wall or ground liberates the figure/ground negotiation so decisively that the “visual tool” moves as a unit out of the framework of painting to intersect with drawing. The “interrogating visual tool” now becomes a figure that searches for its ground. Furthermore, for Buren, drawing is the boundary or periphery of the object in the place that both demarcates it and is demarcated by it: “Curiously, as decisive as it is, the peripheral drawing is nevertheless seldom taken into account, even though this un‐made drawing (that is, already made), inherent in all works, confines them, is their destiny” (p. 8). Buren ends the essay by stating: “Thus, each work in situ is a drawing, and to draw is to decide to draw.” The emphasis he places on decision is contrasted with the characterizations of graphic sketches as fantasies or reflections or utopias. Instead, the work in situ is “very real, concrete, the result of a choice.” The ground for the works in situ is comprised of the floor, the dimension for the space, the walls, the ceiling, the condition of the lighting, etc. In other words, through the work of Buren and his writing, we have discovered that pasted papers ground painting in some way. They act as a critical limit. They also act as drawing, where drawing is understood to be a decision to cut out or delimit a space in concrete terms just as the periphery of a painting marks the wall as a drawing. And yet, this is not to say that to draw on the wall is the answer to the problematic of a ground that exceeds the perimeter of a painting; drawing on the wall simply accepts the wall as a given rather than places the ground in question as a limit. Paradoxically, while Buren finds drawing as a critical limit of painting through his analysis of the state of painting as a set of camouflaged limits – limits which in turn lead painting to its perimeter and beyond – Clay finds drawing as a critical limit that places painting “in shreds” through a conception of the “slice” or as a set of interweavings, in such a way that drawing is “in” painting as a negotiation of the ground, displacing the inscriptor in the act of inscription. One might describe the difference between the two approaches to the limit of the ground through drawing understood as “extensive” or “intensive.” However this argument plays out, Buren and Clay’s concern for the critical limits of the disciplines of painting and drawing in light of each other illuminate the role that ground and surface play in thinking through the continued significance of the disciplines in their exposure to one another. Ultimately, the ground shifts, discovered and rediscovered at that edge or limit in each discipline. For Buren, drawing is uncovered as a critical limit that becomes the periphery which, read back across painting, might be considered a negotiation of the cut. In turn, the cut or “slice” returns us to a question of the surface, which holds the ground differently for painting and drawing. Drawing that conceptualizes a slice or space in which to cut the surface produces concepts of the ground that are shared with painting (as Clay, for example, articulates in relation to Ryman).



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If we are to understand all of Buren’s work as drawing, and his sketches as graphic sketches, then to understand his practice as painting takes on a particularly intricate intersection between these disciplines. While Buren clearly calls his own work drawing, “among other things,” most of the critical writing calls it institutional critique, work in situ, and installation. However, the emphasis Buren places on “decision” as a component of drawing reflects the conviction and clarity of distinctions between his choice of forms, a decision that shapes any manner of thinking the distinction between painting and drawing. While Buren’s terminological distinctions never include “ground” per se, it is synonymous with a number of other terms he uses for thinking about frames or limits, including the museum, gallery, and canvas. For the pasted papers, the ground becomes locked, as it were, within the “visual tool.” The visual tool then acts as figure seeking a ground that draws on, and is drawn by, another more contingent ground. The drawing becomes a peripheral demarcation of the “visual tool,” whether it be a wall edge or cut boundary, inside or outside of the museum. An analysis of the formal and cultural limits of Buren’s pasted paper works reveal their contingency as drawing in situ. What might Buren have to say about the distinction between the ground in drawing as opposed to painting? My conjecture is that drawing offers a certain release from a problematic of the ground understood in relation to painting; that the surface and extension of the cut into space composed of many surfaces is offered more readily through drawing that extends beyond its perimeter. In recalling the papiers collés at the heart of the concealment that is painting, we see the ground/surface that the pasted papers search for acting as a hinge Buren activates between painting and drawing. Structural and conceptual overlaps between the disciplines appear and produce reinterpretations. Drawing occupies a relationship with painting through its ground that is never far afield, a term whose grammar suggests at once to be at a distance, separated, while simultaneously being on or in the field (as in a day spent afield).

Postscript Looking back on “Whose afraid of Peter Eisenman,” the work commissioned in 2001 for the exhibition As Painting: Division and Displacement (Figures 15.1–15.3) (See Armstrong et al. 2001, pp. 85–89), Buren’s visual tool marked or drew the outside scaffolding of the Wexner Center for the Arts, as if it was itself marked or drawn. Lumber was placed at 8.7 cm intervals in such a way as to create a striping of multiple planes inside the scaffolding. The existing scaffolding was designed to amplify and confound the sense of the recessional perspective in the walkway. The striped planes act to slow, articulate, and confound the planes or slices of the recessional walkway space. The color of the existing scaffold is white, which Buren matches with his own piece so that the striped planes act as extensions of the existing framework and restrain color in terms of the drawing the visual tool produces. The color occurs between the stripes in the given color given of the sky, environment, and surrounding brick buildings. The color also shifts with the time of day and weather. One might call the landscape or “field” between the stripes the ground which shifts and appears again as one passes through and under the scaffolding, or views it from afar. Buren’s practice of creating “photo souvenirs” operates to still and demarcate this point of view, especially given the condition of this particular piece in which the ground constantly

Figure 15.1  Daniel Buren (2001) Photos‐souvenirs: Who’s afraid of Peter Eisenman?, work in situ, in “As Painting: Division and Displacement”. Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (Ohio), May 2001. Source: © DB‐ADAGP Paris. Photo by Daniel Buren (2001). Courtesy the artist.

Figure 15.2  Daniel Buren (2001) Photos‐souvenirs: Who’s afraid of Peter Eisenman?, work in situ, in “As Painting: Division and Displacement”. Wexner Center for thet Arts, Columbus (Ohio), May 2001. Source: © DB‐ADAGP Paris. Photo by Daniel Buren (2001). Courtesy the artist.



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Figure 15.3  Daniel Buren (2001) Photos‐souvenirs: Who’s afraid of Peter Eisenman?, work in situ, in “As Painting: Division and Displacement”. Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (Ohio), May 2001. Source: © DB‐ADAGP Paris. Photo by Daniel Buren (2001). Courtesy the artist.

fluctuates, appearing and disappearing amidst the vertical white bands. The ground rises and turns relative to the bands, appearing at once to weave in, through, around, and underneath.

Note 1  Earlier versions of the following essay were first published in (Lisbon 2014, 2014–2015).

References Armstrong, P., Lisbon, L., and Melville, S. (2001). As Painting: Division and Displacement. Columbus/Cambridge: Wexner Center for the Arts/MIT Press. Buren, D. (1973). Critical limits. In: Five Texts, 43–52. New York: John Weber Gallery. Buren, D. (1987). Terminology. In: Metamorphosis: Works In Situ. University of Massachusetts at Amherst: University Gallery. Cachin, F. and Moffett, C.S. (eds.) (1983). Manet 1832–1883. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Clay, J. (1981). Painting in shreds. SubStance 31: 49–74. Damisch, H. (1985). The underneaths of painting. Word & Image 1 (2): 197–209. Damisch, H. (2001). L’Inventeur de la Peinture. Albertiana IV: 165–187. Derrida, J. (1998). To unsense the subjectile. In: The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, 59– 148. Cambridge: MIT Press. Didi‐Huberman, G. (1985). La peinture incarnée. Paris: Minuit. Fried, M. (1998). The achievement of Morris Louis. Reprinted as “Morris Louis”. In: Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 100–131. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Greenberg, C. (1993). Introduction to Jules Olitski at the Venice Biennale. In: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays, vol. 4 (ed. J. O’Brian), 228–230. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Krauss, R. (1992). The motivation of the sign. In: Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (ed. W. Rubin), 261–305. New York: Museum of Modern. Lisbon, L. (2014). Critical limits: drawing’s ground. In: Drawing in the University Today (eds. P.L. Almeida, M. Duarte and J.M. Barbosa), 351–356. Porto: FBAUP/I2ADS. Lisbon, L. (2014–2015). Les limites du dessin. La Part de l’Œil 29: 100–107. Nancy, J.‐L. (2005). The Ground of the Image (trans. J. Fort). New York: Fordham University Press. Paulhan, J. (1990). Le peinture cubiste. Paris: Gallimard (Folio). Reid, M. (ed.) (1994). Boundaries: writing & drawing. In: Yale French Studies, vol. 84.

16

Drawing’s Finish Stephanie Straine

This chapter offers an exploration of some of the more obsessive and meticulous approaches to drawing that result in an extremity of finish. Weighted with time, complex working methods and illusionism, the discussion touches upon the hidden difficulties of conveying an effortless finish, and the influence of working from photographic media. It looks at certain practices that have operated against prevailing trends within conceptual art, specifically the work of Vija Celmins (born 1938, Latvia) and Ed Ruscha (born 1937, United States), who rearticulated drawing’s terms for deskilling and dematerialization in the 1960s. This chapter asks, via Ruscha and Celmins, if it is possible to find something productive in the relatively unexamined encounter between illusionism and conceptualism. Their concerns have an urgency and relevancy for artists working with photo‐mimetic forms of drawing in the present moment, a diverse field from which I will focus on the Glasgow‐based artist Kate Davis (born 1977, New Zealand).1 I want to think about whether an engagement with finish as a material factor can extend into the conceptualization of a new, post‐photographic ground for drawing, involving questions of temporality and skillfulness. My definition and use of “finish” as a term is specific to those occasions where the artist’s touch is so skilled in its photographic verisimilitude as to be a barely perceptible intervention in the image. In positioning Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins’s work of the mid‐1960s as a productive confrontation between drawing and photography, this chapter will articulate how their focus on finish enables drawing to operate both as a medium and as media within these artists’ complex responses to the apparently deskilled, data‐focused trajectory of conceptual art. The shifting of the image, from visibility to invisibility and back again, which unfolds across the wider currents of 1960s art production, offers a productive model for the shifting place of the image within drawing itself. Often it is only the bare bones of a solipsistic enactment of “process” that is rendered as content, whereas I

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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am concerned with those instances where the “image” is an insistent presence, actually withholding an overt exemplification of process in search of a different enactment of temporality, often in the service of what I term illusionistic drawing. Even a figure such as Sol LeWitt “confessed” in 1969 that: “It’s impossible, I think, to do anything to avoid illusion. Illusion is a function of perception. Everyone has their own perception” (Alberro and Norvell 2001, p. 115). This is to say that I am concerned with the hand’s near‐invisible exertions, operating via a mode of intense, all‐over visuality that underscores the hidden difficulties of conveying an effortless finish. These drawings are worked up as opposed to working. Demanding a different type of looking from that which we often associate with the 1960s, this drawing is not immediately definable as deadpan or entropic, rather it is involved, prolonged and engaged: a differentiated state that seeks to destabilize the opposition of detachment and intimacy. Ed Ruscha’s labor‐intensive finished drawings of the 1960s paradoxically capture the look of the advertising instant. His encounter with the medium of drawing in this decade is knowingly staged, suggesting the content, at first glance, to operate as near throwaway one‐liners. This can be understood as the manifestation of a localized and capricious kind of fiction within drawing, securely tied to the Los Angeles milieu of the artist and his work. Ruscha’s work of the early 1960s represents a constitutive moment in the breaking down of boundaries between abstraction and figuration. The scholarship on Ruscha’s early pop‐pigeonholed works from the first half of the 1960s already exists and is extensive, as is true for his career as a whole.2 Being an established and visible figure during the 1960s, he created in his wake an environment in which artists like Vija Celmins were able to flourish in the Los Angeles art scene, reconfiguring and expanding the plurality of west coast pop through their alternative iterations. As the 1960s progressed, Ruscha began to produce work across a range of mediums, most emblematically his important series of photo‐books begun in 1963, resulting in an artistic multifariousness that continues to the present day. Given the primary role that the photo‐books play in Ruscha’s practice, not to mention their dominance within the critical reception of the artist’s work, we should not underestimate the extent to which photography governs his paper surfaces. Bearing this in mind, it is perhaps helpful to begin from the premise that his drawing learns from these distanced and detached photographic productions. Such crosscurrents should be thought of as the non‐drawing modality of the artist’s practice: that which enables his drawing to be both polluted and precise within the media landscape. It is also important to remember that while temporally and technically very different, the drawings and photo‐books are nevertheless linked by what Ruscha described as “a professional polish, a clear‐cut machine finish” (Coplans 1965; Schwartz 2004, p. 27). Taking on board this explicitly machinic quality, I want to push further the “professional” aspect he mentions. The architectural critic Reyner Banham made the following observation after a studio visit with Ruscha in the 1970s: In his studio  –  where the only thing set up on an easel is an enormous mirror, reflecting the contents of the room with fanatical exactitude – he is a real, hundred‐ per‐cent professional [my emphasis]. … Whatever Ed fanatically scrutinizes and fastidiously selects is delivered, visually, with fetching exactitude and impeccable technical quality. Los Angeles is a city of unplumbed proficiency, and Ed is in deep. (Banham 1975, unpaginated [2,4])



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Banham deliberately twins Ruscha’s professional, almost slick, conduct with the proficiency he sees as native to Los Angeles, a discipline grounded in place that runs counter to the city’s “slack soft” stereotype (Meyer 2004, p. 33).3 While Banham’s love of LA was famously extreme, this doesn’t undermine his careful reading of Ruscha’s role as an artist in the city. By focusing on his ability to deliver a certain level of “technical quality” and professionalism, Banham reminds us that the private space of the studio is in constant dialogue with the public realm, toward which the work is oriented (much like the commercial spheres of advertising design and Hollywood filmmaking). It is worthwhile thinking about the wider context for this technical dialogue between drawing and photography: the renegotiation of conceptualism’s terms for drawing.4 Ruscha’s drawing represents an aberrant, disobedient conceptual strand, where in concord with LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969), idea is prioritized over object, except that in this case the idea is a trickier proposition, absolutely reliant on its physical execution, its exposition made distanced and strange, while being rendered at a high resolution.5 Consider Philip Guston’s reason for his departure from abstraction in 1968: “I got sick and tired of all that Purity! Wanted to tell Stories” (Berkson 1970, p. 44). This type of drive can be linked to the various media inflections of both Ruscha and Celmins’s drawing practices. Avoiding inward‐ looking subjectivism or automatic gestures, their drawings retool pop or minimalist removals of the artist’s hand. Drawing as sited in the media world is caught between the slow processes and fast dynamics of production – its convoluted temporality can be seen from both angles. This tension foreshadows Kate Davis’s selection of cheap, mass‐produced postcards (rather than the priceless artworks they depict) as the subject matter for her monumental, photo‐uncanny still life drawings. Ed Ruscha produced a great concentration of drawing in the short period between 1965 and 1968. In setting out the stakes of this analysis, I want to synthesize some questions that arise from the proposal that drawing can equally and simultaneously be considered as a medium and as media. Acknowledging the huge amount of non‐ drawing in Ruscha’s practice only helps to underscore the intermedia framework on which this reading of finish relies. Ruscha’s works on paper of the mid‐ to late‐1960s speak to the question of what drawing can continue to mean in a media culture saturated with photographic and cinematic images. What happens when drawing as a medium would seem to have had the very ground pulled from under it? I claim that Ruscha’s response to this screen image proliferation is to develop his drawing practice based upon paper’s capacity for imaginative experimentation, its mirroring and modeling of other media and materials, and that by doing so he recognizes the limits of representation and communication. His work of the 1960s is inclined to self‐reflexivity in the matter of mediality and materiality: drawing’s place in the world is interrogated, and subsequently strengthened. Ruscha’s studio is equally graphic, photographic and reprographic in nature, and this intrinsically intermedia alignment of his practice means that drawing is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in this artist’s work. This acute ambivalence in turns reflects the everyday artifice of a specifically cinematic urban space – Los Angeles. As Charles Desmarais incisively notes: The art of photography as we now understand it was, to all intents and purposes, invented during the late 1960s in California… The 1960s was, famously, a decade that put trust in institutions, even experience, under extreme stress… In Southern

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California, where the local “industry” is a structure for manufacturing and trading in images – the illusion of reality promoted by the photograph came under particular scrutiny. (Desmarais 2011, p. 81)

This establishes some of the ground for my own argument, which builds upon this base of illusions and constructs in order to articulate Ruscha’s renegotiation of drawing as a response to an image‐saturated mediascape and its industries of masking and manufacture. It is interesting to observe, after noting this condition of image saturation, the corresponding lack of color in Ruscha’s graphite and later gunpowder drawings, beginning in the mid‐1960s (mirroring Celmins’s achromatic palette of the same period), which represent such a major shift from the block primary colors of his earlier paintings like Actual Size (1962). This leeching of chroma leaves a drawing landscape populated by so many ghostly shadows; a dramatic use of light and dark being a long‐term preoccupation of his painting practice, too.6 The works on paper appear like after‐effects, again raising the specter of photography and its integration within the equivalent flat and papery plane of drawing. As Margit Rowell observes: “Light sculpts and defines Ruscha’s silhouettes (curiously, there is little linear incident in his drawings)” (Rowell 2004, p. 19). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Michael Auping reveals, “Ruscha drove around Southern California with a notebook and camera. ‘I would give myself assignments,’ he recalls. ‘At first, I think it was partially about just learning the city, and then they just became independent projects’” (Auping 2011, p. 24). One result was a series of 10 graphite drawings based on a selection of photographs from Ruscha’s third published book, Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965). The images record specific locations, despite the fact that these places seem inherently interchangeable and passively generic. In spite of the careful listing of their addresses or building names as the works’ titles, this placelessness is a seeping presence, disrupting any attempts at geographic usefulness. Ruscha’s “assignment” was a meandering, fairly random drive across town that led him to photograph and then produce drawings of these particular apartment complexes: they are not suffused with personalized meaning, but neither are they the empty beacons of an ironic, posturing stance. These drawings affirm the artifice of the everyday, or the artificiality contained by banality: a duality in collapse that structures my reading of Ruscha’s drawing. The startling quality of replication achieved by these works is not driven by representing reality or creating a direct equivalent of it. They are the most significant precursors to the artist’s more sustained series of “ribbon word” drawings in gunpowder begun two years later, by which I mean that they most rigorously explore the problematic of drawing not as sketch but as ultra‐finished depictive ground. It is important to stress that Ruscha’s relationship to photography, unlike Celmins’, is not wholly based on the taking of personal snapshots and the collecting of clippings, but rather is intimately linked to photography’s functional integration within graphic design, magazine layouts and the world of commercial publishing. Indeed, we should take seriously Ruscha’s claim, made in a 1965 interview with John Coplans, that “photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes” (Coplans 1965, p. 23). The media inflection of Ruscha’s drawing c.1965 can potentially be understood as a response to photography’s exhaustion as a fine art medium. “Post‐photographic” drawing in this context could therefore mean drawing that comes after and responds to the repositioning of photography at the culmination



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of its fine art credibility, to become an integral component in the articulation of conceptual art. If photography’s only place is in the commercial world, as Ruscha insisted in 1965, then his drawing seems to act as its distorted mirror image, absorbing its technical properties and deathly stillness. In 1965 Ruscha also began doing layouts for Artforum magazine, at that time still based in Los Angeles. Their offices were on La Cienega Boulevard directly above the Ferus Gallery, who represented Ruscha and had given him three solo shows since 1962. The October 1965 issue of Artforum is the first to list Ruscha’s pseudonym “Eddie Russia” under the masthead’s production credits. The physical proximity of Ruscha’s two careers as fine artist and graphic designer should not be underestimated when considering the place of drawing (and the conceptual‐material role of its finish) within his larger oeuvre.7 The precepts of graphic design unquestionably shaped the role drawing was to play in his work, with the vernaculars of advertising and magazine publishing assimilated into the cool finish effects of his near‐invisible drawing touch. In the catalogue for the Whitney Museum’s 2004 exhibition of the artist’s photography, Sylvia Wolf writes: When Ruscha uses a photograph as a source material, the picture is a point of departure and the final product is often thoroughly transformed [my emphasis]. This is particularly true of a suite of graphite drawings he made in 1965 from photographs in the book Some Los Angeles Apartments. Ruscha did not intend to draw the photographs. “No, I think that was just nervous energy.” With the aid of an opaque projector, Ruscha traced the photographs, removing information and softening details in the final drawings. (Wolf 2004, p. 233)

Ruscha’s use of an opaque projector is a technical process similar to the enlargement of photographic negatives. It is an enlarging tool that relies on a bright lamp to display opaque materials (a photographic print in this case), by shining the lamp onto the object from above and projecting its reflected light. Indeed, the removal of information that occurs in this act of drawing by transfer recalls the pivotal processing scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow‐Up, where instead of revealing the “truth” of Thomas’s photographic encounter (i.e. the presence of a dead body in the park), the multiple enlargements performed on the photograph singularly fail to provide concrete confirmation. The visual information the protagonist so deeply desires to see only dissipates further, during what he hopes will be a gradual, and unequivocal, process of revelation. Matilde Nardelli has perceptively analyzed this complex interplay between photographic reality and fiction/abstraction that lies at the heart of Blow‐Up, pointing to the serial layout of the prints in the processing scene, which is marked by “temporal ellipsis,” suggesting that the film highlights photography’s: … inherent opacity and indeterminacy. As critics have often noted, the motif of the progressive enlargements draws attention to how photography may ultimately obscure or even “lose” the real, rather than help its capture and disclosure. As image yields to grain, the reality in photography “disappear[s] into a general atomic welter,” delivering not “truth” but “the diffusion of truth into surface” … (Nardelli 2011, p. 187)

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This foregrounding of granularity is key: with the inherent materiality of the analogue film print acting as a barrier to “objective reality,” its granular space of abstracted particles indulges in a surface obfuscation not normally associated with photography’s supposedly direct and instantaneous equivalency, which is to say, its indexicality. In Ruscha’s Thayer Avenue drawing (1965, Figure 16.1), the basic features of the building are depicted carefully and evenly, and yet everything is smoothed out so rigorously as to seem otherworldly: as if the combination of microscopic attention and information drop‐out (drawing as subtracting and abstracting, via the opaque projector) produces a kind of facsimile visual field. Even the modest landscaping in front of the apartment complex looks under the searing Californian sun less like a group of plants and more like fossilized specimens, desiccated and archaic, or indeed silhouettes, paper‐thin cut outs, registering no mass or volume. Wolf uses the word “transformed” when talking about the apartment drawings as the “final product” of a shift in media; phrasing that suggests a linear continuum from photograph to artist’s book to graphite work on paper. In certain cases, the drawing is not a direct and faithful trace of the entire photographic image but rather seems to take on the job of cropping from photography itself, moving that task into the realm of drawing: a technical shift. Thayer Avenue’s receding side elevation is exaggeratedly elongated in comparison to its slightly stubby quality in the source photograph, 1850 S.Thayer Ave. from Some Los Angeles Apartments. This is possibly a direct result of his working method, projecting the photographic image at an angle onto the paper (a technique which is also explored in later paintings by Ruscha). This elongation contrasts with the curtailed front façade in the new, or rather “redrawn” version of the building. It seems as if the drawings’ viewpoints are given room to be slightly yet

Figure 16.1  Ed Ruscha (1965), Thayer Avenue. Graphite and pencil on paper mounted on paper; 14 × 22–5/8 in. Source: © Ed Ruscha. Reproduced by permission of the Artist and Gagosian Gallery.



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intrinsically different to the photographs’. In her analysis of Blow‐Up Nardelli does indeed stress that the sequential enlargements so frantically produced by Thomas are a confirmation that, in photography, “the very processes which should produce a copy, yield difference: reproduction does not suspend or sidestep, but rather generates and sponsors, difference” (Nardelli 2011, p. 202). Adhering to Nardelli’s replica‐differential, then, the apartment drawings are equivalents and they are also alternatives, rather than the final products of a linear process of pure and direct translation. On the apartment series Ruscha has commented: “I’ve always done things that are soft and powdery. These drawings helped me in the direction of completing finished drawings” (Schwartz 2004, p. 292). This clearly indicates that, for Ruscha, the achievement of a drawing considered “finished” was a highly desirable goal during this period. In contrast to the diagrammatic, installation, and working drawings of the 1960s and 1970s that have received much critical attention, the idea of the finished drawing (together with its attendant “questionable notion of manual dexterity,” as Mel Bochner put it) has been routinely overlooked (Bochner 2008, p. 61).8 By complicating the well‐established theorization of drawing as prototype (in the 1960s, the guise “the preparatory” took), and overstepping the dividing lines between pop, minimalism, and the beginnings of conceptual art, the field opens up to works that fail to “fit,” considering those instances in which difficulty, skill, and discipline structure drawing; in which depiction (rather than abstraction) presents a tightly layered structure that both facilitates and resists straightforward illusionism. What does it mean to be dexterous in drawing, at this apparent moment of deskilling? It could be a kind of “efficient” dexterity, focused on the diagrammatic language of industry and design, or it could represent an almost esoteric turn away from dominant modalities of deskilling. For some context, we can look to the critic Peter Plagens, writing in 1969 on “The Possibilities of Drawing,” where he claimed that drawing “as exhibition material, and as a subject for art writing” lagged behind sculpture and painting, and that “drawing has been looked upon by even progressive critics and museum people as a skill” (Plagens 1969, p. 50). Plagens’s assessment gives a good impression of drawing’s status at this time: even in the putatively advanced criticism of Artforum the lingering taint of “skill” has to be addressed and maneuvered around. He is in all likelihood referring to a certain kind of drawing that would have been associated with “the academy,” that is to say, technically adept procedurals such as life drawing and other forms of art school training, which were seen as dry husks of preparatory artistic practice with no relation to the claimed radicalism of America’s neo‐avant‐gardes. This suggests that, as late as 1969, the notion of skill as a troubling and potentially self‐canceling aspect of drawing remained embedded in the understanding of it as a medium. I would argue that Ruscha retrieves skill from such a fate by offering it an aspect of mechanical design: a media‐inflected quality of information dropout that is machine‐ tooled in its editorial precision. Ruscha’s emphasis on his drawings’ finish, not in a gestural, painterly sense but via the “soft and powdery” state specified by the artist, results in the effacement of all human trace (aided by the tools of masking tape, ruler, cotton buds and the opaque projector). All effort, all technical difficulties, are made to vanish, seamlessly, from this meticulous finish. I would suggest that this embrace of finish in part accounts for the drawings’ sensation of oppressive strangeness. There is a confusing interdependency

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of reality and artifice at the core of these photographically assisted representations, as captured by the medium of drawing. Ruscha’s apartments and their environs have the stiff, artificial appearance of stage sets, as if somewhere along the path from photograph to drawing the buildings’ material reality was waylaid and a strange mock‐up put in place, brightly lit as if reflecting the glow of some artificial light source. The luminous, light‐creating finish of the drawings relies on the materials used. Graphite can be a pearlescent, often reflective substance, especially when built up in layers on a hot press paper stock as done here. Ruscha himself has discussed the relative qualities of graphite and gunpowder, which he was soon to move to, declaring graphite to be a “shinier” and more “time‐consuming” material (Schwartz 2004, p. 156). This feature links Ruscha’s graphite drawing to one of the prominent artistic currents of mid‐1960s Los Angeles. As Cécile Whiting writes: Reflective surfaces characterized the work of a group of artists alternatively labeled Finish Fetish, Hard‐Edge, or L.A. Cool. Beginning around 1965 a slew of major exhibitions and significant articles shone a bright spotlight on these artists for exploiting new materials  –  fiberglass, Plexiglas, polyester resin, acrylics  –  to form sleek, gleaming surfaces with radiant optical effects… (Whiting 2006, pp. 57–58)

This grouping of artists, including Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Gerowitz (later Chicago), Craig Kauffman and Kenneth Price, coalesced around Venice, California. The critic John Coplans coined the phrase “fetish finish” in 1964 (later inverted to become “finish fetish”) to designate their closeness to the esthetics of LA’s custom car design merchants, the “hot rod” phenomenon, as well as their interest in working with new plastics such as polyester resin, and the smooth, ultra‐lacquered finish of their painting and sculpture, often achieved using industrial spray paints and guns (Coplans 1964, p. 40). This was an art, as the British artist Edward Allington wrote, based on “phenomenological and perceptual issues,” the allure of surface finish and the play of light upon it, and it has until recently been viewed pejoratively in comparison to the east coast’s concurrent minimalism (Allington 1998). As Andrew Perchuk commented in a roundtable dedicated to re‐examining art in LA: “I think that … LA artists saw a lot of idealism in New York Minimalism, and that the supposedly perfect surfaces of LA art were necessary if you wanted people to attend to the actual conditions they were experiencing” (Perchuk 2011, p. 247). This foregrounding of surface, and the fundamental role Perchuk assigns it in the realization of an experiential and phenomenological materiality, is worth highlighting as an important context for the development of Ruscha’s drawing finish, while also helping to differentiate his work from Finish Fetish. In comparison to the slow release of Ruscha’s distanced and self‐contained greyscale grounds of paper precision, the perfect veneers of Finish Fetish were in a sense emblematic of the works’ immediacy of affect and effect. Ruscha’s approach to smooth, traceless drawing eschews the indexing of touch for a kind of industrialized impermeability I am keen to delineate. An industrial typology of drawing internalizes a processual rhythm that is more machinic than led by the hand. Here drawing in its intermedia plurality mimics the material processes of heavy industry: it is tested, perfected, repeated. Why would drawing in a state of perfected industrial finish be of critical interest at this point in time? It recognizes the shifting (yet nonetheless assertive) place of drawing within a larger matrix of production and



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consumption in 1960s America – the vapors of late capitalism that Ruscha so effortlessly absorbs and reconstitutes. Working from this late‐capitalist subject position, even the most unique and self‐determined of objects (a drawing), fails to escape the machinations of product perfection. While there is obviously also a basic friction at the core of any comparison between graphite powder and the kind of cutting‐edge industrial materials deployed by the Finish Fetish artists, I want to propose that the roots of this shared “reflective” and “radiant” esthetic can be situated, post‐photographically, in Hollywood cinematography. In Ruscha’s case, the space of drawing becomes a stage set, or a well‐lit photography studio, twisting traditional medium and genre categories to produce uncertain and unreal effects. Utilizing this post‐photographic esthetic grounded in the paper ephemera of the studio, Ruscha’s drawing of the 1960s looks to paper as a base for both structure and content; its status as a site of experimentation paradoxically reveals the process‐led materiality of these sealed and distant works. The ground of drawing is once again the subject of drawing: a circular reinforcement in which the aspects of hyper‐finish, skill, temporality, and pictographic iconicity perch drawing precariously on the edge of dissolution: the endless “becoming” of “drawing through process” is here transformed into a series of potential “ends” (Butler 1999). These drawings are as precise and planned as those of contemporaneous east coast artists such as Bochner, LeWitt, and Smithson, who likewise spoke the language of graphic design and manufacturing industries. It is important to recognize, beneath the obvious differences, their shared embrace of rigorous planning and precise execution; nevertheless, as Cornelia Butler has emphasized, Ruscha is fundamental to the establishment of an alternative framework for drawing at this time. The interplay of design functionality, the tropes of photorealism, and his lush visual style confidently undercuts the severity and expediency of much east coast drawing. Ruscha’s (and equally Celmins’) drawing practice engages with the medium’s traditions and histories, which are played upon, subverted, and teased out into an ambiguously conceptual realm. The central role that ambiguity plays within a conceptual articulation of drawing’s finish leads us to Vija Celmins’s paper ephemera series. It includes the work Hiroshima (1968, Figure 16.2), which meticulously renders a small photographic image of the Japanese city devastated by the atomic bomb of 6 August 1945. Celmins cultivates the associations between drawing, photography, and the printed papers common to historical representations of trompe l’oeil. In her concentration on the tiny minutiae of her paper sources’ dog‐eared qualities, she amplifies the small‐scale geographies of drawing using apparently touchless illusionism. This drawing  –  and the series as whole – emphatically does not represent a regressive return to figurative content at the moment of post‐minimal and process art’s emergence. It instead offers up drawing’s newly conceptual relationship to a papery mode of trompe l’oeil, wherein this illusory world serves not to reinforce drawing’s relationship to reality but rather to undermine it. I am interested in how certain artists of the 1960s – and within our contemporary moment – latched onto this potentially destabilizing schema. Indeed, Susan Siegfried writes of trompe l’oeil that “it remains an unusually closed and self‐ referential system of representation” (Siegfried 1992, p. 28). For Celmins, photography is the catalyst that generates a profound shift in her drawing, but it is trompe l’oeil’s historically prominent category of paper ephemera that focuses Celmins’s attention on the ground of drawing, and the possibilities contained by its finish.

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Figure 16.2  Vija Celmins (1968) Hiroshima. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper; 34.5 × 45.5 cm. Source: © Vija Celmins, reproduced by permission the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Realism is a term that sits uneasily with Celmins’s work, so many times has her subject matter been removed from any sort of reality and distorted through lenses and reproductions. Nevertheless, hers is fundamentally an image‐based, photographically assisted practice. In Hiroshima and related drawings, Celmins cites the trope of trompe l’oeil to a degree not seen in any of her works either before or after this particularly pivotal group. In their careful articulation of paper‐photo fragments these works recall the late nineteenth‐century American trompe l’oeil subject matter of the artist’s noticeboard and its arrangements of clipped paper ephemera. William Harnett’s Artist’s Card Rack (1879) is a key example, and a painting that Celmins may have had some awareness of.9 It is certainly true that in Celmins’s clippings series trompe l’oeil is registered by the smallest of intervals, recording flatness upon flatness, only the barest hint of three dimensions. Once again, this represents the disobedient side of drawing in the 1960s: the unstable ground of ambiguously overdeveloped draughtsmanship that cannot be solely reduced to descriptive, duplicative, or explanatory impulses. In this manifestation, visual deception is not so much a straightforward “trick of the eye” as it is a disruption or deception that takes place upon the very ground of drawing itself. In this split, the always‐unstable relationship between drawing and photography is here made schismatic. What are the consequences for the medium of drawing when, as witnessed in Hiroshima, it stands so carefully in the cast shadow of photography? In this paper landscape we witness a graphic photo‐replication: Celmins’s entry into the terrain of post‐photographic drawing. It is equally an



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affirmation that drawing’s unstable temporality is as stratified as the layered time of archeology. The slow time of archeology creates ground through a process of stratification: this is a useful analogy for the labored and polished ground of drawing – heavy with time slowly accrued, and heavy with a materiality both invested in the body and constantly breaking away from it. Heavy lines indicating pressure wrought by the artist’s hand over and on top of the sheet of paper are absent here; nevertheless, the paper has been subject to a great deal of looking, examination, time, and effort – it has possibly even absorbed these things. There is a smooth, gliding‐over of paper, not a marking of the surface, nor a disruption of it, but rather the creation of tightly compacted secondary and even tertiary grounds, as inaugurated by Celmins’ use of preparatory acrylic grounds. It is an excess of detail (in contrast to Ruscha’s editing out of specific detail) that keeps the artist crawling over the surface of the image, despite the preparative depth of her grounds.10 The paper ephemera drawings recreate the image of the thing, rather than the thing itself (like Magritte’s pipe/not‐pipe, and in full adherence of the code of trompe l’oeil). The critical terminology for Hiroshima’s shadowy realm of illusionism needs careful thought. My take on Celmins’ tentative illusion reads it more as a quasi‐mimetic cloaking device than a desire to inform an image persuasively with depth, verisimilitude, or any other hallmark of “reality,” which is manifestly not the goal of her work. Rather than embodying any one definition of illusionism, or any specific derivative of it, the late 1960s drawings of Celmins are more aligned with a kind of self‐effacing and self‐renewing palimpsest model (taking cues from the example of Jasper Johns’s encaustics). In such a model, the slow time of still life overlays trompe l’oeil, which in turn overlays paper‐processed illusion. Together with undefined depth and flattened perspective, we can discern references to photographic tropes and the suggestion of cinematic space. These are all conjured up while at the same time the drawings themselves remain enigmatic. As Norman Bryson has claimed, the “veiled threat of trompe l’oeil is always the annihilation of the individual viewing subject as universal center” (Bryson 1990, p. 144). This is a radical reorientation of subject/object relations, proposing a model of fractured facture and plurality that helps to recast the often over‐ simplified viewing subject of and for drawing. And if it is a confusion and conjunction of flatness and space that is of paramount concern to Celmins’ drawing at this point, then we are in fact contending with an illusionism entirely without intention; an achromatic version of trompe l’oeil that carefully inhabits the greyscale of the print culture it mimics, while referring back to the historical trompe l’oeil tradition of providing “grisaille models for engravers” (Siegfried 1992, p. 27). In Susan Siegfried’s important essay on the subject she notes that: “As a rule, trompe l’oeil paintings depict still, dead things, and shy away from people and events, since representing the movement and temporality of living things threatens to compromise the illusion” (Siegfried 1992, p. 27). This chimes with Celmins’ revealing observation that the “photograph always seemed to me kind of dead” (Sollins 2003, p. 162). It is worthwhile recalling here something written by Gerhard Richter around 1964, just a few years before Celmins embarked on her clippings series: “When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know what I’m doing. […] The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through” (Richter 1995, p. 30). This important reminder of the abstraction inbuilt in the putatively representational photographic object helps to illuminate Celmins’ own interest in photography, not as a separate category, but rather as a method to unlock a mode

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of seeing that disrupts conventional observation (and overrides conscious strategy, in favor of skillful mechanization). It almost goes without saying that Celmins’ intentions are not wholly analogous to historical trompe l’oeil; nevertheless, what this history can offer our understanding of her drawing work should not be dismissed. Hanneke Grootenboer’s examination of seventeenth‐century easel trompe l’oeils contains a suggestion to consider “the trompe l’oeil as an emblem of blindness within the act of looking” (Grootenboer 2006, p. 48). Such a reminder of this physiological aspect is important, in that it reconnects the distanced and “dead” sphere of trompe l’oeil with the body, while echoing Richter’s claim that the “abstraction” of the photograph is “not easy to see through.” Trompe l’oeil’s struggle for duplication surpasses mere resemblance to aim for a level of fidelity that actually begins to appear unreal: delusion segues into doubt, as once more subjective analysis fails to delineate the contours of reality. And so, although the technical category of trompe l’oeil is perhaps only partially at stake in Celmins’ Hiroshima and her other works in this series, that initial glimpse, of a photographic image torn from a magazine or newspaper, so convincingly rendered, is persuasive enough to provoke a double take, to prompt a desire to look closer, to study the construction of a drawing that appears as an “image not made by human hands” (Newman 2003, p. 105). There is a moment where you suspend belief, not quite believing the drawn reality of the image as it appears. Jean Baudrillard’s revelatory essay on trompe l’oeil further unravels this problematic knot: In trompe l’oeil it is never a matter of confusion with the real: what is important is the production of a simulacrum in full consciousness of the game and of the artifice by miming the third dimension … throwing radical doubt on the principle of reality. (Baudrillard 1988, p. 58)

Baudrillard’s idea of “radical doubt” is surely useful here, lending weight to the notion that trompe l’oeil’s doubt erodes the contours of any analytically verifiable “reality.” It is simply no longer a fully assured “principle,” as Baudrillard insists. Celmins’ drawings produce a sliver of space in which it becomes possible to consider representational drawing that breaks free of reality‐depiction. “Radical doubt,” understood as a product of duplication at the point of artifice and disintegration, initially seems a concept ill‐suited to the assurance of these works. Yet, this unfolding of uncertainty allows for greater consideration of the drawings’ relationship to the objects they so convincingly depict using the greyscale of graphite and the ground of paper. This reveals the point at which finish begins to undermine its own commitment to perfection or completion, one consequence of drawing standing so utterly in the shadow of photography. The emphasis here is on the specifics of drawing while acknowledging the results of its ingrained hybridity  –  in this case a photographic hybridity. “Radical doubt” is where drawing’s illusionism does matter, where it connects to the wider idea of drawing as thinking: a deconstructive operation that speaks to and within different aspects of the medium, in order to push at the very edges of what drawing is able to do. In this context the importance of Celmins’ skill and traceless finish is not related to mastery; rather, they produce an undoing of subject/ object relations that emerges from a small space of compression and difficulty. The insistence on the image in Celmins’ practice counters the 1960s narrative of drawing’s flight into despecification and immateriality, and it is this insistence, together with her



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ability to explore finish as a material factor, that leads her work to such a space of productive uncertainty. Whether the drawing presents us with a city scene of post‐nuclear devastation, mushroom cloud, or a falling fighter plane, Celmins’ images throughout this series are almost uniformly violent or devastating, using media representations of real events as deeply resonant source material, but never commenting on the subject matter explicitly. Cécile Whiting has observed that “the nuclear disarmament project of the 1960s linked the destruction of the past [of WWII] with the potential nuclear threat of the future” (Whiting 2009). This temporal elision, collapsing the distance between two moments in time so that their echoes and replays are foregrounded, underscores the shifting temporality of drawing’s finish itself. Even more pointedly, Whiting recognizes that in these universally “violent” subject matters: Celmins stills not only the moment of violence, but also the flow of information about the violent event. The [clippings] drawings refer to the print media that circulated images, referring also to the contemporary Vietnam War being brought into the American living room, via the television. Celmins interrupts the flow of images of war/horror from the daily news cycle with her hand – slowly, carefully, even obsessively she recreates the snapshot. To draw or to paint is to stop the circulation of images, to memorialize the instant, to say “look” and “remember.” (Whiting 2009)

By highlighting this idea of freezing time (and stopping image circulation), Whiting interprets the recreation of the photographic clipping as an act of remembrance, using drawing’s potential for extended mediation to rethink a past event. As a way of reconciling their initially overbearing subject matters with the distended temporality of this highly technical and concentrated manner of drawing, perhaps one could say that these powerful images (significant for Celmins and her personal history, but also for the world at large) demand a type of attention which can never be accommodated in a fleeting glance, but must always incorporate something more sustained. Bryson’s thesis is again useful here for its consideration of a still life trait most pertinent to Celmins and equally, looking forward, to the drawing work of Kate Davis: “When driven to extremes, hyper‐attention not only produces an interval between the perceiving self and objects; it separates the self from other selves. The subject stares or glares at the world” (Bryson 1990, pp. 88–89). This idea of hyper‐attention as a distancing strategy has much to offer our understanding of Celmins’ deployment of photographic material within the progressive arc of her drawing in the 1960s and 1970s. At this point in the trajectory of Celmins’ practice – the paper ephemera series – the photograph retains the status of a problem, a knot to be untangled, or an object to be conquered. Drawing a secondary print media photograph (including the creases, borders, and roughly torn edges of its support) in this clinical, concentrated manner creates the kind of subject/object separation Bryson is talking about. No one is about to mistake Celmins’ drawing for a collage incorporating an actual clipping, and this is manifestly not the artist’s intention: we are never really deceived as such, but instead placed in a state of uncertainty that operates to concentrate our attentions on the drawing’s finish. The viewer is asked to interrogate that gap between the two representational variants, photograph, and drawing: a gap that is made viable through the artist’s willingness to explore and present a form of trompe l’oeil paper precision.

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The relationship between these two material states for drawing reinforces its striated internal structure, enclosing the photographic image (as an indexical and intrinsically graphic formulation) within drawing, even as it stands in its shadow. Such a viewpoint is given credibility by the artist herself, whose explanation that “I decided the clippings were this wonderful range of grays for me to explore with graphite,” eschews the language and problems of photography altogether (Friedrich 2011, p. 19). What Celmins articulates here is not a spatial expansion for drawing, but rather a focusing down, into the compressed space of a single, standard sheet of paper. It is as a result of this approach that the artist’s practice directly confronts what Stuart Morgan has called “that vague word finish: not a description of surface but rather a measure of the degree of closure, completeness, and apparent potential for independence an image has achieved” (Morgan 1996, p. 77). This drawing finish is of course only the final, veneered layer of Celmins’ construction, the lengthy processes of preparation and making sealed in and obscured from view. Admitting it to be a “vague” concept, Morgan’s expansive definition of finish as a qualitative yet mutable entity conforms to what has been a meandering but persistent thread of doubt throughout this text. Operating in a state of doubt sharpens perceptions out of necessity; our uncertainty causes us to pay closer attention. Perhaps this is what drawing needs to do for Celmins, to an extent: to orchestrate a situation in which she is forced to pay attention, to look and not to unravel that looking, but to underscore its isolation and finish.11 Celmins represents a counterpoint to repeated art‐historical interpretations of drawing as a radically incomplete process. Her drawing is instead smoothed over and finished as a medium and as an idea, disavowing haphazard or random interventions in a zone of work that is subject to the strictures of control and watchfulness. The work of Glasgow‐based contemporary artist Kate Davis ranges across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, text, and film. Her complex installations and research practices combine art‐historical references, a self‐reflexive consideration of the artist’s subjectivity and its wider political contexts, and a careful material acknowledgment of the physical pressures and pleasures inextricably bound to the act of object making. Within Davis’s intermedial practice, there is an ongoing commitment to the medium of drawing and, at certain moments, to the seemingly flawless monochromatic re‐drawing, in pencil, of various photographic media. The final part of this essay concentrates on a three‐part drawing series by Davis, Who is a Woman now? (2008), which takes as its subject reproductions of Willem de Kooning’s pivotal and controversial oil paintings Woman I (1950–52) and Woman III (1953). In Davis’ large‐scale Who is a Woman now? II (Figure 16.3), the MoMA postcard of Woman I has been folded along its vertical axis, enabling it to stand upright as a three‐dimensional object on a flat, empty surface. It appears, in its composition and styling, as if posed for a still life in a photographer’s studio, complete with neutral black backdrop, strong directional lighting, and carefully delineated tabletop shadow that reinforces the postcard’s objecthood, and the drawing’s immaculate representational finish. In this work, the artist’s aim was to capture the image “as sensitively, as slowly, and as realistically as possible.”12 Davis describes this as her interest in the tenderness and care that arises from the slow, meditative process of transcribing a staged photographic object into a monumental pencil drawing. Of this intensive private drawing process, and its desired public outcome, she comments: “The manifestation and



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Figure 16.3  Kate Davis (2008) Who is a Woman now? II. Framed pencil drawing and silkscreen print on paper; 170 × 130 cm. Source: © Kate Davis. Courtesy the artist.

investment of time needs to be an implication in the viewing experience.” And yet, the fallibility of the hand is crucial in all of this. While always thinking about the works in relation to a longer history of photorealism, Davis had no particular desire for the final drawings to look like photographic images. Despite this intention, there is undoubtedly a moment of uncertainty for first‐time viewers as to their material reality. The work performs a mimetic transformation several spatial and temporal layers removed from the photographic referent (even further from the “original” artwork), with the flatness of the postcard reproduction distorted by its treatment at the hands of the artist, as a slight physical object capable of being manipulated and even destroyed. De Kooning’s painting remains, however, instantly recognizable, despite being drained of its acidic color palette and forced to follow the anamorphic

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curve of its humble paper home. Victoria Horne observes of this series’ postcard re‐drawings that: Through this deceptively minor act, Davis returns to these female models a sense of corporeality and contests a flattening art historical vision… Davis’ quasi‐sculptural intervention … encourages her audience to look anew at these famous works that they think they might know. The uncanny materiality of the redrawn postcard figures also confronts viewers with the vagaries of vision and concealment, provoking reflection on the complicated pleasure derived from looking and the displeasure when this is prevented. (Horne 2015, pp. 40–41)

Horne emphasizes the subtle defiance embodied by Davis’s act, facing down the patriarchal currents of abstract expressionism and its still potent political narratives. The artist’s drawing gesture inverts the painterly violence performed on the bodies of de Kooning’s women, by submitting its “second life” as a printed reproduction to an echo of that original bodily rupture. Horne’s description of the work’s “uncanny materiality” is apt: like our encounter with Celmins’s print media clippings, the viewer of Davis’s drawings is liable to experience a destabilizing split‐second of material ambiguity, provoked by their unsettlingly flawless finish. The overlaying of multiple art‐historical moments inflames this sensation of schism. Enjoying the exaggeration required to push drawing toward its extreme limits of finish, the artist is able, through such an emphasis, to question certain assumptions about the medium, particularly its supposed directness and provisional nature. Davis takes pleasure in the intrinsic perversity of a photorealist drawing finish: a finish that makes invisible certain key aspects of its making (the labor of drawing, the time invested). Another interpretation of the physical difficulty and effort (even pain) required to produce these precisely rendered drawings dialectically relates this effaced labor to the aggressive male presence of de Kooning as an art‐historical figure often defined by his grotesquely painful depiction of women.13 To execute these drawings required a prolonged daily effort of crouching and concentration (of mind, hand, and body): an exhausting sedentary activity whose repetitive physical stresses are a familiar part of many jobs, skilled activities, and unskilled labors. The adjective frequently deployed to describe her drawings – “painstaking” – is pertinent here, in its invocation of the physical suffering willingly undertaken in the pursuit of perfection.14 This willing embrace of painstaking activity can be ascertained within various contemporary manifestations of labor‐intensive drawing. Who is a Woman now? II makes abundantly clear that its subject is the artwork‐as‐ postcard reproduction, by delineating the folded card as carefully as the image itself. These folded reproductions embody a pathetic quality, the painting re‐historicized as a delicate object in its contorted postcard form. Davis endeavored to treat the reproductions like women: the folds weren’t contrived; they were practical actions to make the postcards stand up in her studio during the observation and drawing process. This nearly ridiculous performance purposefully undercuts the source painting’s grandeur and forbidding menace. Their crumpled stature and grand staging together impart ideas of sensitivity and handling: the Who is a Woman now? drawings were made on an impressive scale both to retain their monumentality and to underscore their feebleness. As works they simultaneously contain anger and impeccable control. Control is



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a live, urgent thing for Davis; it supplies the energy that palpably crackles beneath the images’ eerily still traceless surfaces. In an artistic practice that is multifarious by its very nature, why did Davis make use of drawing for her rejoinder to de Kooning and his legacy? The artist argues that it is partly to do with the accessibility of drawing’s material knowledge, which doesn’t always follow with other visual means. Most people, regardless of their occupation or circumstances, have held a pencil; know what it means to make a mark; how to erase the drawn line. Painting does not offer that openness and possibility of erasure in such an accessible way, and yet her response to the propositional character of drawing is to offer a détournement, away from universality and toward the heightened sense of particularity and peculiarity in ultra‐finished drawing. Davis concedes that when she works in series, it is normally the last work that she is most happy with: across every sequential attempt, the body and eye take a long time to reach a place of habitual, trained ability. There is a slow accrual of skill and technique within not just the making of one work, but also the entire group. This notion has links to the temporal gymnastics that the drawings’ timeline performs. As Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith notes of the title Who is a Woman now?: “The closing adverb ’now’ adds a crucial temporal inflection, telling in its implication that currently pressing questions of identity, subjectivity, and self‐representation might best be considered in a historical light” (Mac Giolla Léith 2010, p. 3). In these slippery photo‐mimetic works the body of the artist is effaced, is made invisible, just like her labor and her time. Effectively reversing process art’s direct visualization of the activity and action of the drawing hand as it happens, these drawings give almost no indication of the artist’s trace or presence. The “hand” in this drawing leaves so imperceptible a trace that one can only discern its drawn state through a close examination of the graphite tone and surface. Davis’s visual and temporal disruption of the incomplete and transitional nature of drawing‐as‐process can most clearly be seen in this withdrawal of bodily presence, this disappearance beneath the photo‐finish. The artist insists that the viewers of her work do not wish to be reminded of the labor behind the drawing, and she likens this conjuror’s act of concealment to the way in which people rarely discuss the labor implicit in domestic chores, in the day‐to‐day household drudgery that often falls on the shoulders of women. Paramount here is Davis’s interest in “the situation in which you’re making the work being part of the work.” Cultural, social and practical contexts and concerns are folded into the work of this avowedly feminist artist; there is a political imperative to do so. Instinct plays a role equal to research, planning, and skill in her practice. The pencil becomes a quasi‐mechanized extension of the body, the body becomes a drawing machine of the utmost precision and perfection, and yet we are not left to face rote automation. Finding something reparative in this skilled labor, the sensitive handling inherent in this slow act of re‐drawing becomes imbued with something that is to do with the speed of the artist’s mind. This reparative impulse also implies a sense of laborious penance in the making of the image, and its recoupment. What do we do with great works of art that perform violence against women? The doppelgänger potential of the relationship between photography and drawing that I have sketched throughout this essay features strongly in the realization and durational encounter of Who is a Woman now? This site of paired mimicry creates an encounter that enables longer durations of looking. Pressure and time together

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produce a space of almost uncomfortable looking. It is this space that we begin to see manifested in the de Kooning postcard drawings: a space demanding to be interrogated by both the viewer and the artist herself, a finished scene that belongs to a continuum of still‐unanswered questions, including the very title of the work. Rather than drawing that is active and doing, whether that action is explanatory and clarifying, an expulsion of energy, or repetitive movement tending toward solipsism, this drawing appears almost entirely passive and still, masking the process used to make it. Its origins reside in, or are wholly dependent upon, photography  –  a foreign element contaminating unmediated expression and preventing decisive linear action. When there is an agent like photography involved, all notions of schematic clarity, preparation, or autographic function in drawing are discarded summarily. If the working drawing exists, as Mel Bochner insists, as the “residue of thought,” what Celmins, Ruscha, and Davis do with the finished drawing is to produce within it and from it a different kind of residue, with a different sort of temporality in play: a more distanced, mediated residue or trace (Bochner 2008, p. 61). The broader question of what finish can mean in this moment has been central to this essay’s repositioning of drawing, always with the issues of temporality and skill in mind. Competency here is manifested by two technical facets: a high‐resolution finish enabled by the category of the post‐photographic drawing, which in the case of all three artists translates an excess of time spent into the gloss of instantaneity. At a moment when any display of skill would apparently cancel out the relevancy of drawing (to recall Peter Plagens’s 1969 account of the medium), Ed Ruscha’s assertive competency produces a shadow space of invisible exertion and intense, all‐over visuality that compresses the extended temporality of drawing into neat, readymade media units. Between Ruscha and Celmins, we can view two distinct approaches to drawing’s finish: strategic information drop‐out versus hyper‐attention – an excess of detail remaining on the drawing surface. They both share an excessive level of control over the image’s finish. Here we confront the implication that Ruscha was less faithful to his photographic source material than Celmins, and certainly, Ruscha’s commitment to ‘editing out’ specific details returns these Los Angeles apartments to the drawing board as concepts, to be shifted and mutated into different contexts and uses. Exploring drawing’s wide‐ranging role in conceptual practices enables alternative and under‐examined examples of the medium to come to the fore, including modes of illusionistic drawing that demonstrate an engagement with the historical category of trompe l’oeil, such as Celmins and Davis. In probing the re‐emergence of trompe l’oeil after artistic practice was so radically reconfigured by the diagrammatic tendencies of 1960s conceptualism, I have argued that its illusionism constitutes an equally valid response to the theories of deskilling and dematerialization that privileged idea over object. The “finish focus” of Vija Celmins’s 1968 clipping series was trompe l’oeil and its historical lineage that undermines, through extreme illusion, direct ties to reality. Hanneke Grootenboer’s assessment of trompe l’oeil as “an emblem of blindness within the act of looking” points to the ambiguities of its ultra‐finished state, both in terms of the temporal processes of fabrication and the viewer’s encounter with the trompe l’oeil construct itself, which can short circuit any bodily aspect to the encounter (being still or “dead”), replacing it with the distance of fiction and uncertainty. Crucially, as Kate Davis’s commitment to the ongoing work of drawing proves, finish doesn’t guarantee stability or permanence. Displacing physicality and objecthood for



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something less secure, more distanced and artificial, these extreme modalities of finish operate in a fugitive space that is but one manifestation of the conceptual ground of drawing. Finish for these artists is a means to unite disparate modes of imaging, in drawing that is caught between medium and media.

Acknowledgments The sections on Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins were adapted from the author’s unpublished PhD thesis (University College London, 2013). The author would like to thank her supervisors Briony Fer and Mark Godfrey, and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for supporting her doctoral research with a Collaborative Doctoral Award.

Notes 1 A recent joint exhibition examined this terrain in contemporary art, Double Take: Drawing and Photography, The Photographers’ Gallery and Drawing Room, London, 2016. 2 An in‐depth analysis of early‐career Ruscha’s complex relationship to pop can be found in Hal Foster’s account, “Ed Ruscha, or the Deadpan Image,” in his The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha, Princeton/Oxford (2012, pp. 210–248). 3 James Meyer has explored this in his essay “Another Minimalism,” citing Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s black and white video East Coast, West Coast (1969) as a parodic example of the clichéd split between “slack soft” California (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words) and the overly intellectualized east coast. Smithson plays the LA sculptor, Holt the staunch New York conceptualist, with Smithson emphatically stating at one point: “I don’t care about all this ‘Systems’ stuff. I’m out here doing it.” 4 As Liz Kotz has noted, the conceptual turn to photography “was part of an overarching tendency to use mechanical recording and reproduction technologies – tape recorders, video, Xerox machines, and so on – to make art. Such technologies promised a machinelike impersonality and distance from conventional modes of self‐expression.” L. Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art, Cambridge, MA/London, (2007, p. 213). 5 S. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” first published in 0–9, New York, 1969, and Art–Language, England, May 1969: “Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.” 6 On this subject see B. Fer, “Moth‐man: Ruscha’s Light and Dark” in R. Dean and L. Turvey (eds.) Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume 4: 1988– 1992, New York/Göttingen, 2009, pp. 5–12). Fer writes on p. 5: “I think one of the reasons he has deployed black and white so effectively is because it offers him he most schematic means of registering light and dark in painting and, for all the much‐vaunted deadpan tone of his work, dramatizes the almost extravagant projections as well as the everyday visual habits at stake in the mechanics of viewing itself. Ruscha paints not only a set of iconographical motifs, but the visual habits that saturate contemporary image‐culture.”

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7 On this point, see A. Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, Cambridge, MA/London, 2010, pp. 34–35 and pp. 194–195. 8 M. Bochner, “Anyone Can Learn to Draw” (1969) in M. Bochner (ed.) Solar System and Rest Rooms: writings and interviews, 1965–2007, (Cambridge, MA/London, 2008, p. 61). Bochner declares that “in much recent art, drawing has been held in disrepute,” particularly because of its “autographic nature.” Bochner attempts here to reposition drawing as a viable medium by retooling it slightly. He lists three categories of drawing: working, diagrammatic, and finished. Bochner claims the working drawing as “the residue of thought,” “the place where the artist formulates, contrives and discards his ideas.” This differentiates them from the more functional “diagrammatic drawings” (executed to aid the professional fabrication of a work, for example). The least interesting category for Bochner is that of “finished drawings,” which are equivalent to works made by that artist in other mediums and are self‐enclosed entities. Drawing here veers too far away from the direct registration of an idea, or at least it compromises that raw ideation with an uncomfortable amount of sensuality or polish. 9 In 1965, two years before Celmins began her paper ephemera series, The Art Center in La Jolla, San Diego had a three‐person show of nineteenth century trompe l’oeil works. See A. Frankenstein’s review, “Harnett, Peto, Haberle: The three 19th century still life artists make a striking show at La Jolla,” in Artforum, (Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 1965), pp. 27–33), in which the author compares the artists’ work to Surrealism and pop art. 10 Celmins stresses that the “photograph always seemed to me kind of dead … I crawl over the photograph like an ant. And I document my crawling on another surface.” V. Celmins in S. Sollins, Art: 21: Art in the Twenty‐First Century, Volume 2 (New York, 2003, p.162). 11 Deanna Petherbridge has framed finish more historically, covering Renaissance presentation drawings to Celmins’s own work, writing that: “A discussion of finish in drawing is essentially about temporality, contextualisation, and discontinuities. Even when finished drawings are based on copies or appropriated from others, they are embedded in the period of making by their exacting technique and elaboration of strategies of appropriation…” (Petherbridge 2010, p. 85). 12 All direct quotations from the artist are taken from a conversation with the author, 8 April 2016, Kate Davis studio, Glasgow. 13 For an illuminating reading of this particular painting, see Fionna Barber, “The politics of feminist spectatorship and the disruptive body: de Kooning’s Woman I reconsidered,” in A. Jones and A. Stephenson (eds.) Performing the Body/Performing the Text, (Abingdon, 2005, pp. 127–137). 14 See Dominic Paterson, exhibition essay, Not Just the Perfect Moments (exh. cat., Drawing Room), London, 2013, unpaginated.

References Alberro, A. and Norvell, P. (eds.) (2001). Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson and Weiner by Patricia Norvell. Berkeley, Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Allington, E. (1998). “Buddha Built my Hot Rod,” in Frieze, Issue 38 (January – February 1998), accessed 6 December 2011: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/buddha_built_my_hot_rod.



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Auping, M. (2011). Ed Ruscha: Road Tested. Fort Worth/Ostfildern: Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth. Banham, R. (1975). “Under the Hollywood sun”. In: Edward Ruscha: Prints and Publications 1962–74 (ed. J. Drew), unpaginated. London: Arts Council of Great Britain Touring Exhibitions. Baudrillard, J. (1988). “The trompe‐l’Oeil.” In: Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (ed. N. Bryson), 53–62. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Berkson, B. (1970). “The new Gustons.” In: ARTnews, vol. 69, 44–47. Bochner, M. (2008). “Anyone can learn to draw” (1969). In: Solar System and Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965–2007 (ed. M. Bochner). Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Bryson, N. (1990). Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion Books. Butler, C. (ed.) (1999). Afterimage: Drawing through Process. Cambridge, MA/London: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Coplans, J. (1964). “Circles of style on the west coast.” In: Art in America, vol. 52, No. 3, 40–43. Coplans, J. (1965). “Concerning “various small fires”: Edward Ruscha discusses his perplexing publications”. Reprinted in: Ed Ruscha – Leave any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (ed. A. Schwartz), 2004. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Desmarais, C. (2011). “A kind of truth.” In: Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 (eds. L.G. Mark and P. Schimmel), 81–89. Munich, London/New York: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles/Prestel. Friedrich, J. (ed.) (2011). Vija Celmins: Wüste, Meer und Sterne/Desert, Sea and Stars. Cologne: Museum Ludwig/Louisiana Museum of Modern Art/Walter König. Grootenboer, H. (2006). The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth‐ Century Dutch Still‐Life Painting. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Horne, V. (2015). “Kate Davis: re‐visioning art history after modernism and postmodernism.” In: Feminist Review 110 (2015): 34–54. Mac Giolla Léith, C. (2010). “Personal effects.” In: Kate Davis: Role Forward, 3–6. Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts. Meyer, J. (2004). “Another minimalism.” In: A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958– 1968 (ed. A. Goldstein), 33–49. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Morgan, S. (1996). “The hard way.” In: Vija Celmins: Works 1964–1996 (ed. J. Lingwood). London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts. Nardelli, M. (2011). “Blow‐Up and the plurality of photography.” In: Antonioni: Centenary Essays (eds. L. Rascaroli and J.D. Rhodes), 185–205. London: Palgrave BFI. Newman, M. (2003). “The marks, traces and gestures of drawing.” In: The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, Selected from the Tate Collection by Avis Newman (ed. C. de Zegher), 93–108. London/New York: Tate/The Drawing Center. Perchuk, A. (2011). “L.A. Stories: a roundtable.” Artforum 50 (2): 247. Petherbridge, D. (2010). The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Plagens, P. (1969). “The possibilities of drawing.” Artforum 8 (2): 50–55. Richter, G. (1995). “Notes, 1964–1965.” In: Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings and Interviews 1962–1993 (ed. H.‐U. Obrist), 30–34. London: Anthony d’Offay Gallery.

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Rowell, M. (2004). Cotton Puffs, Q‐Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Schwartz, A. (2004). Ruscha: Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writing, Interviews, Bits, Pages. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Siegfried, S.L. (1992). “Boilly and the frame‐up of ‘trompe l’oeil’.” In: Oxford Art Journal, vol. 15, No. 2, 27–37. Sollins, S. (2003). Art: 21: Art in the Twenty‐First Century, vol. 2. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Whiting, C. (2006). Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Whiting, C. (2009). “California War Babies: Picturing WWII in the 1960s.” In The Charles C. Eldredge Prize lecture 2009, The Smithsonian Art Museum, video recording, accessed online 14 March 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk1hW4SvdaQ. Wolf, S. (2004). Ed Ruscha and Photography. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.

17

Radical Antinomies Drawing and Conceptual Art Anna Lovatt

Conceptual art was born of the “ineluctable obsolescence” of drawing. So claimed Leo Steinberg in his analysis of Robert Rauschenberg’s notorious Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 (Steinberg 2000, p. 22). In eradicating a drawing by the Abstract Expressionist painter and celebrated draftsman Willem de Kooning, Rauschenberg was seen by many critics to have performed an act of art historical patricide (Tompkins 1980, p. 87). But Steinberg went further, suggesting that in obliterating the drawing, “Rauschenberg was killing off more than de Kooning.” In the dawning age of computer graphics, he proposed, “dexterous draftsmanship [had become] passé” (2000, p. 22). Rauschenberg’s act of erasure sounded the death‐knell for disegno, which since the Renaissance had been understood as the indispensable ground of all the arts (Steinberg 2000, p. 20). For Steinberg, Rauschenberg had paved the way for a younger generation of Conceptual artists with “no talent for drawing” and no interest in furthering a venerable tradition that he traced, melancholically, from the graphic genius of Michelangelo to de Kooning the Modernist master (2000, pp. 21–22). As Steinberg suggests, several aspects of Conceptual art now appear incompatible with – and antagonistic toward – the practice of drawing as it had traditionally been understood. Conceptual art is said to have ushered in a “post‐medium condition,” in which conventional artistic mediums were jettisoned in favor of multimedia installations, time‐based media, textual strategies and ephemeral events (Krauss 2000). Manual execution was often delegated or circumvented in Conceptual art, and with it questions of technique and style traditionally central to the production and analysis of drawings. Connoisseurship’s emphasis on “close looking” was obviated by Conceptual art’s rejection of the intrinsic significance of visual form (Osborne 2002, p. 18). And despite their small scale and economy of means, drawings were still art objects – and thus objectionable to those in pursuit of the total “dematerialization” of art (Lippard and Chandler 1968).

A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Yet in contrast to Steinberg, several commentators noticed a resurgence of interest in drawing within Conceptual art practice of the 1960s and 1970s. For curator Rudi Fuchs, drawing’s notational capacity and economy of means made it uniquely suited to recording conceptual processes without distracting from them – it was, Fuchs wrote, “less arrogant or pretentious” than other methods of presentation (Fuchs 1975). Fuchs argued that drawing could be understood as a cognitive process – evoking, like Steinberg, the Renaissance concept of disegno. Early theorists of drawing conceived disegno as bipartite in structure – disegno interno referring to the conception formed in the artist’s mind, while disegno esterno described its manual execution (Barzman 2000, p. 149; Rosand 2002, p. 59). In its valorization of the “idea,” Conceptual art was seen to retrieve some of the fundamental principles of drawing established during the Renaissance, when it was first theorized as an independent discipline. We are therefore presented with an antinomy, in the form of two ostensibly reasonable yet mutually incompatible accounts of Conceptual art’s relationship with drawing. On the one hand, Conceptual art is seen to mark the end of drawing, on the other, to return to its beginnings. This paradox is embedded in Rauschenberg’s proto‐ Conceptual Erased de Kooning Drawing. As the smudged and pock marked sheet attests, Rauschenberg’s work is not a straightforward “voiding” of drawing. Recent accounts have emphasized the collaborative nature of the project, emphasizing Rauschenberg’s admiration for de Kooning as a draftsman (Joseph 2003, p. 22). De Kooning selected the drawing himself, choosing one that he felt would not be too easy or too difficult to erase. The task of erasure was laborious, taking several different erasers and a period of one or two months, in a narrative that shifted as it was re‐told (Roberts 2013). Most importantly, the process of erasure was integral to de Kooning’s own work and one of the defining features of the practice of drawing as opposed to other mediums. In a recent discussion of the Erased de Kooning Drawing, Paul Ricco has argued that rather than negating drawing, erasure is integral to its functioning. Although Rauschenberg “effectively announced the deprivileging of draftsmanship within the art historical and esthetic criteria of judgment,” Ricco contends that he simultaneously revealed: “the most fundamental aspects, one might go so far as to say the ontology, of drawing” (Ricco 2014, p. 34). In this chapter I will argue that rather than rendering drawing obsolescent or irrelevant, Conceptual art engaged critically with its conventions, and its history. These conventions included the material components of drawing, such as the instrument of inscription and the two‐dimensional support, along with techniques such as erasure, rubbing, tracing, delineating, and shading. But they also encompassed the interpretative conventions established for drawing during the Renaissance, when the graphic trace came to be seen as a barometer of divine inspiration, artistic sensibility and technical skill. By challenging these entrenched presumptions – foundational to the practice of connoisseurship and drawing’s role in the art market – Conceptual artists problematized not just the production of drawings but also their appreciation and interpretation.

Drawing as Thinking Fuchs was not the only critic to invoke disegno with reference to Conceptual art. One of the first writers to use the term in this context was Lawrence Alloway, in his important early discussion of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. Alloway argued that LeWitt had



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inherited the Renaissance conception of drawing as “the projection of the artist’s intelligence in its least discursive form,” going so far as to liken his wall drawings to sinopie, the preparatory drawings that underlie late medieval and early Renaissance frescoes (Alloway 1975, p. 39). In her catalogue essay for “Drawing Now”  –  the major survey of contemporary drawing held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976 – Bernice Rose modified Alloway’s reference to sinopie by suggesting that LeWitt’s drawings were in fact closer to netto, the grid upon which those drawings were composed (Rose 1976, p. 76). She invoked one of the earliest theorists of drawing, Federico Zuccaro, whose 1607 treatise L’Idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architteti described disegno interno as a Platonic Idea in the artist’s mind, which mediates between the universal and the particular. By emphasizing the cognitive aspects of drawing, Rose proposed that Conceptual art had: “returned to the classical roots of drawing as a means of rethinking its prerogatives” (Rose 1976, p. 9). I would like to argue that Conceptual art’s engagement with drawing was more antagonistic than a benign “rethinking.” Indeed, drawing embodied concepts of artistic subjectivity, technical skill and connoisseurial appreciation that Conceptual art set out to attack. By dismantling and scrutinizing the practice of drawing, Conceptual artists sought to problematize notions of authorship, materiality and visuality at their root. Although the practice of drawing began to be theorized in the fifteenth century, David Rosand credits Giorgio Vasari with elevating graphic production “to the level of Platonic inspiration” (Rosand 2002, p. 53). This shift coincided with the new concept of the artist as a divinely inspired genius rather than a skilled artisan. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari suggests that the most immediate evidence of this genius can be found in “rough sketches, which are created in an instant of artistic frenzy” (Vasari [1550] 1991, p. 68). As Rosand demonstrates, this association of drawing with divine inspiration and creative fury became firmly embedded by the seventeenth century. Writing in 1607, Zuccaro claimed that Disegno was, literally, the sign [segno] of God [Dio] in man: DI, SEGNO, O. (Zuccaro 1607, p. 83 in Rosand 2002, p. 59). The casual rapidity of the sketch was seen to offer unfettered access to the creative mind – a presumption Rosand describes as “axiomatic” in the critical appreciation of drawing and the emergent practice of connoisseurship. (Rosand 2002, p. 54). It is my contention that Conceptual artists critically interrogated these supposedly “axiomatic” presumptions about drawing. While some Conceptual artists turned to drawing as a means of mapping cognitive processes, they were deeply skeptical of the extent to which those processes could reveal the unique subjectivity of the work’s maker. This refusal to reveal posed particular problems for the practice of connoisseurship, which had been central to the appreciation of drawings since the Renaissance. The autographic, stylistic and technical cues traditionally taken up by the connoisseur in the appreciation and attribution of drawings were strategically withheld in Conceptual art. Moreover, Conceptual art embraced the “anti‐esthetic,” problematizing formal analysis and visual pleasure. Robert Morris’s 1969 statement “On Drawing” is a satirical commentary on the fetishization of the sketch as the authentic trace of divine genius: “Scratches made while on the train, in a plane, a hangover from the High Renaissance where every telephone number and coffee stain (by the right person) revealed the inner or under or deeper or less disguised and more naked creative nerve” (Morris 1969, p. 94). Morris implies that the “immediacy” and “authenticity” of the graphic trace can be consciously constructed – wryly advising artists to “cultivate a certain awkwardness;”

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to consider the type of paper most suggestive of an “involuntary fit of creative ­seizure;” and to aim for “that effect of the cloudy idea becoming clear but not too clear” (Morris 1969, p. 95). Morris also exposes the unspoken relationship between drawing, artistic subjectivity and the market, suggesting that artists should always date or even pre‐date their work, since “in this way one can invent one’s entire youth as one goes along” (Morris 1969, p. 94). Morris’s drawings of the early 1960s extend this critique while offering an alternative model of drawing as thinking. His Self‐Portrait (EEG) of 1963 is an electroencephalogram produced by a machine recording Morris’s brain activity as he imagined the machine’s needle traveling the length of his body. In bypassing the hand in favor of a graphic trace generated by the brain, Morris’s work could be called a truly “Conceptual” drawing. It literalizes the Renaissance belief in drawing as a cognitive process, but presents that process as bluntly physiological, rather than psychological or metaphysical. Divorced from manual facility and esthetic decision‐making, the electroencephalogram’s line presents the “involuntary fit of creative seizure” as a series of voltage fluctuations resulting from the ionic current within the neurons of the brain. In the series of Memory Drawings he produced the same year, Morris engaged in what Benjamin Buchloh has described as a strategy of a “perceptual withdrawal” (Buchloh 1990, p. 116). Despite their designation as “drawings” these works are all versions of a handwritten text reflecting on various theories of memory. The full text appears in Initial Memory Drawing, while the four subsequent works were Morris’s attempts to re‐write the initial text from memory at intervals of two, four, eight, and sixteen days. The text describes how “the storing of visual images can be… easily ascribed to protein molecule alterations,” reducing the artist’s perceptual faculties to physiology. By describing these hand‐written texts as “drawings,” Morris plays on the word’s associations with pulling or dragging in order to analogize mnemonic processes. Yet he also prompts the viewer to conceptualize perceptual processes linguistically, while limiting visual pleasure and esthetic appreciation. The Memory Drawings exemplify Buchloh’s account of Conceptual art “In the absence of any specifically visual qualities and due to the manifest lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criterion of distinction, all the traditional criteria of esthetic judgment – of taste and connoisseurship – have been programmatically voided” (Buchloh 1990, p. 118). They also indicate Conceptual art’s inquiry into the nature of drawing and how it is defined in relation to other cultural practices, in this case writing.

The Mediated Mark Conceptual drawing gathered pace in the mid‐1960s, with Mel Bochner’s 1966 exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. Now described as “the first truly conceptual exhibition” (Buchloh 1990, p. 109) the project began as an exhibition of working drawings that Bochner proposed for the gallery of the School of Visual Arts, where he was an instructor. Most of these drawings were not intended for exhibition and the director of the gallery refused to frame them, dismissing them as “nothing” (Lovatt 2002). But these sketches, notations, calculations and diagrams held interest for Bochner as “the residue of thought” emphasizing their proximity to the mind of the artist (Bochner 1969). Bochner’s recuperation of these discarded jottings echoes the Renaissance



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valorization of the sketch as the authentic trace of an artist’s cognitive processes. But unlike the connoisseur, Bochner questioned the degree to which these drawings could reveal the artist’s hand and mind. Working Drawings responded in part to the first of Elayne Varian’s “Art in Process” exhibitions, staged at the Finch College Art Museum earlier in 1966. Bochner reviewed Varian’s exhibition for Arts Magazine, praising her decision to display artworks by Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd and others alongside the models and working drawings that had contributed to their production (Bochner 1966). Yet he has since noted that Varian’s “amazing exhibition” had an “odd, moralistic spin,” emphasizing the labor involved in artistic production even when objects were fabricated (Lovatt 2002). By situating art objects as the outcome of a lengthy process of production, Varian sought to elucidate that process for students at the College and the wider public. Working Drawings countered this didactic impulse by extracting the assembled documents from the context of individual practices – privileging anonymity over individuality, illegibility over legibility and obfuscation over explanation. Bochner was attracted to the anonymous and interchangeable appearance of the diagrammatic drawings and notations he collected, which, he felt: “did not have any style… The Sol LeWitt drawings could have been done by Jo Baer and the Robert Mangold drawings could have been done by Donald Judd” (Lovatt 2010). By amassing these notational jottings, Bochner sought to subvert the questions of graphic style, technique and attribution upon which the practice of connoisseurship was predicated. When the director of the gallery refused to frame them, Bochner turned to the Xerox machine, photocopying the documents and displaying the copies in four identical Xerox books. The celebrated “immediacy” of the graphic trace was voided by this strategy, with the photo‐mechanically mediated copies replacing the original drawings in Bochner’s exhibition. The uniformity of the assembled documents, now identical in size, texture and tone, reinforced Bochner’s interest in the “generic” appearance of the working drawings themselves. Upon deciding to display the work in book form, Bochner sought more pages, acquiring notations and diagrams by composers, architects, mathematicians, editors and scientists which he felt “looked just like the drawings the artists were doing” (Lovatt 2010). By inter‐splicing artist’s drawings with drawings produced by people working across a range of fields, and by supplementing these documents with pages photocopied from Scientific American, Bochner presented the act of inscription as ubiquitous and interdisciplinary. Diagrams and notations produced by artists were accorded no more value than the rest of the documents Bochner collated, copied and organized alphabetically to form his Xerox book. Four identical copies of the book were presented, without any interpretation, on pedestals in the whitewashed gallery – creating what James Meyer has characterized as an uncomfortable and alienating spectatorial encounter (Field 1996). Whereas Varian’s “Art in Process” exhibitions sought to elucidate artistic production, Bochner’s exhibition only served to render it more obscure. Other Conceptual artists used mechanical devices or computers to further distance their work from the hand. John Latham’s One Second Drawings (1970–72, see Figure 17.2) were produced with a spray gun, which was filled with black acrylic paint and discharged for one second at a predetermined distance from a piece of board coated with a white ground. One drawing was to be produced per day and the “operator” of the spray gun could be Latham, or someone else. This highly controlled

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Figure 17.1  Robert Rauschenberg (1953) Erased de Kooning Drawing. Traces of ink and crayon on paper, with mat, and hand‐lettered label in ink, in gold‐leafed frame; 25 1/4 × 21 3/4 × 1/2 in. (64.1 × 55.2 × 1.3 cm); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis. Source: © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

situation was intended to demonstrate Latham’s concept of the “least event,” the shortest departure from a state of nothingness. In conceiving the white ground as “nothing” and the black paint as “not nothing,” Latham adhered to a longstanding conception of the act of inscription as a primal, generative event (Tate 1979). But by using strategies of automation, delegation, and temporal restriction, he divorced this event from the creative spark and its virtuosic translation into the graphic trace. Each of Latham’s One Second Drawings is stamped on the recto or verso with a table in which the “operator” would record the precise time and date of the work’s production and their own initials. For instance, the stamp on the reverse of One Second Drawing 17″ 2002 (Time Signature 5 : 1), 1972 indicates that the work was produced on the seventeenth second of the twentieth minute of the second hour on the fourteenth of December 1972. Latham would also assign each drawing with a



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Figure 17.2  John Latham (1970) One Second Drawing. Source: © The John Latham Foundation; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

numerical code, a process he referred to as “minting” in the manner of the mark of governmental authority applied to currency, or the collector’s stamp used to authenticate and classify drawings. The code consisted of a series of numbers, “1” signifying that the making of the work is significant, “2” that showing the work, rather than making it is significant, “3” emphasizing color and texture, “4” specifying movement and “5” referring beyond the work to the temporal “event.” “5  :  1” prompts the viewer to focus on the “event” and the making of the work when studying this particular One Second Drawing. But given that all the drawings in the series are made using a spray gun released for one second, it is impossible for the viewer to determine why certain aspects of one work are being highlighted over others. Instead of offering an interpretative key with the potential to “unlock” his drawings, Latham’s code makes a mockery of close formal analysis. His One Second Drawings question the significance of visual form – extending the critique of formalist authority launched six

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years earlier, when he invited a group of students to chew and spit pages of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture, distilling the macerated pulp and returning it to the library of St. Martin’s School of Art, upon which his contract as an instructor was abruptly terminated.

Paperwork The reams of paper filed in Bochner’s Working Drawings exhibition conjure what Benjamin Buchloh described almost 30 years ago as Conceptual art’s “esthetic of administration” (Buchloh 1990). Although Bochner and LeWitt were central to Buchloh’s formative account of Conceptual art, he neglected to mention the prominence of drawing in each of their practices. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the processing and retention of data could still be conceived as an inscriptive process rather than a digital one. The plastic sleeves, lever‐arch folders card files and filing systems utilized by Conceptual artists foreground the material of paper as the shared ground of drawing and administrative work at a moment when use of the material was diminishing beyond the sphere of art. Although the 1970s dream of the “paperless office” has not been fully realized, the designers, architects, and engineers featured in Bochner’s Working Drawings show would soon abandon pencil and paper in favor of computer aided design software. And though drawing would not be rendered obsolete in the manner envisaged by Steinberg, it would never recover the foundational role it had previously held in art education. Interestingly, this interrogation of paper as a material harks back to a pivotal moment in the history of drawing and particularly its relationship to connoisseurship and the art market. Mary Vaccaro points out that few drawings pre‐dating the fifteenth century survive, because most were executed on reusable or disposable surfaces or destroyed in the working process (Vaccaro 2013, p. 194). The increasing availability of paper from the mid fifteenth century coupled with a rise in the status of the artist as inventor led to the celebration and preservation of the sketch, and an emergent market for drawings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is significant then, that Conceptual artists turned their attention to the materiality of paper as they questioned long‐established traditions of the production, preservation, commodification, and consumption of drawings. Bochner explored the standardization of paper in the 8″ Measurement series, in which marked the measurement on a sheet of Letter‐sized graph paper on which the printed area is 8×10″. Here the inscribed measurement or “drawing” refers to the materiality of the paper itself, focusing attention to the “ground” of drawing just as Bochner’s contemporaneous Measurement: Room, 1969 underscored the invisible support of the museum as an institution. With his 48″Standards, 1970, Bochner applied Letraset measurements on and around standard sheets of brown paper, which, he found “comes not only in standard sizes but in standard weights, sixty pound papers, eighty pound papers, ninety pound papers” (Varian 1969, p. 4). Paper, which had facilitated the preservation and commodification of drawings from the fifteenth century onwards, is here subject to defamiliarizing, quasi‐ scientific scrutiny. Adrian Piper’s Drawings About Paper, 1967, have something in common with Bochner’s 48″ Standards in that they engage with the material properties of paper. Piper has described these works as a “great leap intellectually,” moving away from the



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three dimensional objects she had produced previously in the realization that “Concrete pieces of paper – typing paper, graph paper, maps, and photographs, and audio tapes, would do just as well.” (Piper 1987, p. 21). Drawings About Paper #46 incorporates a strip of brown paper with a serrated edge that appears to have been cut from a paper bag. It is affixed to a sheet of notebook paper, the holes punched for the spiral binding still visible on the left‐hand side. Piper traces the right‐hand side of the brown paper with vignette shading – an illusionistic technique here used to indicate the literal intersection of two planes of paper. Another shaded line is drawn toward the right‐hand side of the white sheet, which appears to have been determined by the dimensions of the brown paper. In Drawings About Paper #48, a sheet of paper inscribed with a horizontal axis in red and a vertical axis in black is displayed in plastic sleeve of the type used to collate documents in a binder. Like the brown paper bag in the previous work, this drawing directs us to the multifarious uses of paper beyond the visual arts, in domestic labor or administration. LeWitt famously compared the Conceptual artist to “a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise,” emphasizing the mundane and programmatic nature of his working process (LeWitt 1967a, n.p.). By foregrounding the quotidian aspects of drawing, Bochner, Piper, and LeWitt emphasized its proximity to calculation, notation and the processing of information. For Buchloh, Conceptual devices such as Bochner’s use of Xerox copies and LeWitt’s conception of the artist‐as‐clerk mimic the increasing systematization of everyday life in late capitalist society (Buchloh 1990). Buchloh uses the term “administration” in an Adornian sense, indicating processes of rationalization that encompass and exceed the mundane realities of administrative work. But it is nevertheless worth noting that during the post‐war period, low‐level clerical jobs were increasingly occupied by women and people of color. Although Bochner and LeWitt worked briefly as security guards in the early 1960s, they soon began to support themselves financially by teaching or writing art criticism. As an African American woman, Howardena Pindell found that such opportunities were closed to her when she graduated from Yale with an MFA in the late 1960s. She began working as a curatorial assistant at MoMA, later remarking that “the museum world attracted women, but they were very low‐paying jobs” (Hershman‐Leeson 2006). Pindell worked at MoMA from 1967–79, first in variety of assistant positions and eventually as the associate curator of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. In 1973 she began a series of drawings using the paper detritus collected by a hole‐punch, having previously used that tool to create stencils through which she would spray paint onto canvas. For these untitled drawings, Pindell numbered circles of paper cut by a hole punch and arranged them on graph paper; or in a more aleatory manner so that they appear like confetti, strewn across the surface of the page (see Figure 17.3). This randomness infiltrates the gridded drawings, in which no obvious logic governs the meticulously numbered circles. On exhibiting Pindell’s work in 1976, curator Corinne Robins noted the hole punch’s associations with administrative “paperwork,” a form of labor often delegated to women (Robins 1976, n.p.). These bureaucratic connotations are heightened by the thousands of laboriously numbered dots and their methodical placement within the predetermined structure of the grid. Pindell’s punched holes, covering the page in drifts, might be read both as a poeticization and a parody of the invisible, monotonous paperwork carried out behind the scenes at the museum.

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Figure 17.3  Howardena Pindell (1975) Untitled #3. Ink on paper, collage; 16.5 × 17.1 cm (6½ × 6¾ in.), frame: 37.4 × 37.4 × 3.8 cm (14¾ × 14¾ × 1½ in.). Museum purchase, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund, 2015‐6688, Princeton University Art Museum. Source: © Howardena Pindell, Photo credit: Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, NY.

Although she did not recount it publicly until some years later, Pindell has also ascribed more political connotations to the circle. As a child growing up in Philadelphia, she visited a root beer stand in the South with her father, where they were given mugs marked with red circles to indicate that they were to be used by people of color (Siegel 2006, p. 105). She has described her subsequent use of the circle as a positive deployment of this negative experience, but the obsessive, almost delirious use of numbering in her drawings of the mid 1970s implies a more critical attitude to structures of classification and control. In a 1976 statement Pindell equated numbers with “distance, size and mass, quantity and identification” (Robins 1976, n.p.). Although she does not relate these qualities to political concerns – and was, in fact, criticized for making work that did not explicitly reference her experience as an African American woman – Pindell’s recently disclosed memory of the root beer stand links identification with violent processes of labeling and segregation. Here the repetitive processes of administrative work evoke, more forcefully than in the work of most of Pindell’s contemporaries, the connection between bureaucracy and totalitarianism theorized by Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1973).



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Wall Drawings If the late 1960s and early 70s saw the material components of drawing scrutinized, this process led some artists to bypass paper in order to draw directly on the wall. The possibilities offered by the wall as a support for drawing were demonstrated by the seminal exhibition “The Great Age of Fresco: From Giotto to Pontormo,” held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from September to November 1968. Bochner has described the exhibition as a revelation for young American artists like himself and LeWitt, who installed his first wall drawing at the Paula Cooper Gallery during the two month period when the Italian frescoes – detached from their original sites for preservation purposes – were on view uptown at the Met. Bochner remembers being struck by the “freshness and directness” of the sinopie and the negligible thickness of the frescoes, which “cannot be held, they can only be seen” (Bochner 2009, pp. 137–138). For Bochner, these works offered an “exit strategy” for Conceptual art, which had reached a dead‐end in its attempts to “dematerialize the art object.” The sinopie mitigated the “obstinate chunkiness of the third dimension” (Bochner 2009, p. 135) and circumvented the production of portable commodities, without sacrificing perceptual or phenomenological experience. But Conceptual art also offered an escape route for drawing, which by the 1960s had become mired in what Alloway described as a “literature of enraptured connoisseurship” (Alloway 1964). Via strategies of delegation, systematization, and site‐specificity, Conceptual artists redefined drawing’s relationship with the author and the viewer. While acknowledging the impact of “The Great Age of Fresco,” it is important to point out that significant differences exist between Renaissance sinopie and the wall drawings executed by Bochner, LeWitt, and others in the context of Conceptual art. Primarily, the sinopie and netto were not intended to be viewed as autonomous artworks, but were instead the unseen scaffolding of perspectival images. As such, they enable the artist to conjure an illusionistic space beyond the plane of the wall – a space Conceptual artists either rejected or deconstructed. In 1967 Bochner executed a series of grids in black tape on his studio wall, initially conceiving the works as a kind of drawing (Cummings 1998, p. 10). But rather than using these structures to organize representational imagery, he had them professionally photographed, observing the distortions that occurred in the photographic image. These photographs were printed in positive and in negative, cut, reconfigured, deformed, and re‐photographed. The perspectival grid is subject to a kind of violence and ultimately, turns against itself, its lines disrupting the illusion of depth that they conventionally create. In LeWitt’s early wall drawings, the grid serves as a matrix across which differential elements could be arranged and reconfigured. The grid facilitates the lateral unfolding of these permutations across the surface of the wall, rather than conjuring an illusory space behind that surface. Although the “idea” was elevated in Renaissance theories of disegno, this did not equate to LeWitt’s later suggestion that in Conceptual art “what the work looks like isn’t too important”(LeWitt 1967b, 80) As Karen‐edis Barzman has demonstrated, the discourse surrounding disegno led to the formation of the Florentine Academy and a model of drawing education that emphasized technical proficiency as a means of acquiring universal knowledge. Within the academy, drawing became associated with perceptual acuity, manual facility, and artistic sensibility. By contrast, Conceptual art participated in a counter‐narrative of deskilling that emerged during the early

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twentieth century in the drawings of Marcel Duchamp and others. Buchloh has described “deskilling” as a “persistent effort to eliminate artisanal competence and other forms of manual virtuosity from the horizon of both artist competence and esthetic valuation” (Bois, Buchloh, Foster and Krauss 2005, p. 531). For Buchloh, LeWitt’s deskilling of drawing reached its climatic conclusion in his decision to delegate the execution of his wall drawings to others, negating the conception of the graphic trace as the authentic expression of artistic subjectivity. By withholding the revelatory gratification one might expect from the hand‐drawn line, Buchloh argues that LeWitt’s wall drawings demand a higher degree of “agency and competence” on the part of the viewer (Buchloh 2006, p. 140). This implies that the viewer of drawings traditionally had less agency or competence, which is not necessarily the case. Instead, I would argue that LeWitt’s wall drawings strategically thwart the “competence” that is more conventionally associated with the study of drawings, which is embodied in the figure of the connoisseur. Rosand credits the theorization of disegno during the Renaissance with the birth of connoisseurship, in which questions of artistic subjectivity and graphic style were paramount. Through objective research, close looking and a “good eye,” the connoisseur sought to establish a privileged rapport with the artist, “a meeting of two correspondingly fine and mutually confirming sensibilities” (Rosand 2002, p. 19). Analyzing the role of disegno in the formation of the Florentine Academy, Barzman deploys the Foucauldian concept of a “fellowship of discourse” to describe the reproduction of forms of knowledge and the rehearsal of particular practices, “which are nonetheless preserved as the discursive domain of a limited collective because of their restricted disclosure” (Barzman 2000). As the theory and practice of connoisseurship developed, the connoisseur was understood to be part of an elite audience with the experience and perceptual acuity to unlock the revelatory potential of the graphic trace. Connoisseurship’s processes of attribution, authentication and qualitative evaluation became vital to the secondary art market that developed in the sixteenth century, in tandem with the discourse on disegno. LeWitt’s wall drawings strenuously resist the connoisseurial gaze, problematizing the act of looking and refusing to be interpreted in conventional stylistic or autographic terms. Early reviewers of the wall drawings complained that they were “difficult to see” the graphite lines disrupted by the texture of the wall and optically dispersed by the lighting in the gallery (Nemser 1969, p. 63). The unusually large size of the drawings added to the “unsatisfactory” nature of the viewing experience – when analyzing the lines in close up the viewer could not see the drawing in its entirety, but upon stepping back the lines themselves slipped out of focus (Chandler 1970). Although early reviewers concluded that LeWitt’s wall drawings were “not terribly successful” (Nemser 1969, p. 63), I would argue that they deliberately frustrate the “close looking” associated with the practice of connoisseurship. Even when individual lines are scrutinized it is difficult to determine whether their minute idiosyncracies can be attributed to the hand of the draftsperson or the uneven surface of the wall. And even if we conclude with the former, the draftsperson is someone other than the artist, voiding issues of graphic style and attribution. Finally, LeWitt’s wall drawings resisted the production of portable, exchangeable commodities  –  problematizing the art market that had developed in tandem with connoisseurship. Like Latham’s One Second Drawings, LeWitt’s wall drawings appeal to perceptual experience while resisting analysis in conventional formal or autographic terms. They



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also challenge the temporality of drawing in different ways – Latham isolating “the least event,” while LeWitt embraces multiple instantiations of the same idea, executed in different places and at various points in time. The artists I have discussed so far scrutinized the basic components of drawing – the support, the instrument of inscription  –  while challenging some of the fundamental principles of disegno established during the Renaissance. “Divinely inspired artistic subjectivity” met its antithesis in the “clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.” Manual virtuosity was contrasted with the deskilling, delegation and automation of the graphic trace. Questions of style and attribution central to the practice of connoisseurship were rendered meaningless. And the visual pleasure associated with the study of drawing was compromised by works that frustrated easy viewing and consumption. Other Conceptual artists evidenced a retreat from drawing, prioritizing strategies of withdrawal, blankness, and disappearance.

Withdrawing Despite her work’s resemblance to drawing and writing, Hanne Darboven characterized it as both and neither. “I both write and draw,” she proposed, “because ‘no more words’ is a writing process, it’s not a drawing process” (Van Bruggen 1988, p. 72). Darboven’s contention that her work has “no more words” and is “not a drawing process” negates her previous suggestion that she both writes and draws. This statement performs the self‐canceling logic evident in much of Darboven’s work. While her early “Construction Drawings” deploy ruled lines in gridded structures reminiscent of the work of LeWitt, by the late 1960s her inscriptions take the form of numbers, words or a looping, cursive script that resembles writing but remains below the threshold of legibility. Often this script appears to have been struck through with a horizontal line that negates its communicative potential. In Untitled, 1972, Darboven’s oscillating lines – described by Lucy Lippard as “brain waves” – unravel across 10 sheets of paper, neatly contained within two squares on each sheet, reminiscent of blocks of text (Lippard 1973, p. 36). Darboven attributed her use of paper and pencil or pen to “the most simple means for putting down ideas, for ideas do not depend on materials.” (Lippard 1973, p. 39). But as in Bochner’s Working Drawings exhibition, the “ideas” put down are not accessible to the spectator. Despite their visual proximity to writing, Darboven’s “brain waves” are unintelligible, and the horizontal line running through each one cancels out any further attempt at linguistic signification. Reflecting on the relationship between writing and drawing, Martine Reid and Nigel P. Turner posit that illegible writing “is accused of trying to hide something, of being a disguise. It is “read” (by graphologists and others) as a gesture of refusal, as antisocial.” Illegible writing, Reid and Turner suggest, “resort[s] back to its status as mere drawing.” (Reid and Turner 1994, p. 6). Yet Darboven’s lines retreat from drawing too – moving from left to right and top to bottom in a systematic cancelation of the pictorial field, which is replaced with the format, if not the content, of a written text. Her work simultaneously resists the interpretation of writing and drawing as a kind of “graphological confession” (Rose 1976, p. 14). Rather than an encrypted message accessible to the enlightened few, Darboven’s work refutes the notion that there is any message at all: “my secret,” the artist once said, “is that I have none” (Lippard 1973, p. 35).

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Christine Kozlov’s 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected, 1968, moves beyond illegibility to a total refusal of the drawing or writing. The work is a one‐inch stack of typing paper – blank except for the top page, which bears the work’s typewritten title. While the title of Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing referred to the physical act of erasure – a drawing technique Rauschenberg described as laborious and time consuming – Kozlov’s work stops short of the inscriptive act. As Peter Osborne has noted, the work employs “typing paper, emblematic of a text‐based communication in an office environment, rather than a traditional artist’s type of paper” (Osborne 2002, p. 102). Unlike the paper of the Erased de Kooning Drawing, Kozlov’s sheets refuse to be read as a palimpsest upon which marks have been drawn and withdrawn. Instead, they point to writing as the site of potentiality for Conceptual art, rendering the practice of drawing conspicuous by its absence. John Baldessari’s The Pencil Story, 1972–73, likewise avoids the act of drawing in favor of a handwritten text accompanying two photographic images of the same pencil, blunt on the left and sharpened on the right. In typically deadpan fashion, Baldessari relates the story of the pencil languishing on the dashboard of his car and inciting guilt in the artist on account of its lack of maintenance and use. Three years earlier, Baldessari had publicly cremated most of his paintings and launched his “Post‐ Studio Art Class,” the very title of which points toward the obsolescence of traditional artistic techniques. The pencil here is an anachronistic tool, subject to a quasi‐anthropological gaze in Baldessari’s photographs. “I’m not sure,” he writes, as if trying to remember, “but I think this has something to do with art.” Baldessari’s treatment of the pencil as a relic returns us to Steinberg’s assertion at the beginning of this chapter that the emergence of Conceptual art was bound up with the “ineluctable obsolescence” of drawing. Yet, as I hope to have shown, drawing was far from obsolete for many other Conceptual artists. Instead, the status of drawing in art of the late 1960s and early 70s came closer to what Lazlo Moholy‐Nagy once described as the “euphoric efflorescence” of old technologies “under pressure from the new as it takes shape” (Benjamin [1931] 1999, p. 523). Raushenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing marked the beginning of a sustained engagement with drawing on the part of Conceptual artists, as it was pressurized by emergent technologies and new conceptions of authorship and subjectivity.

Academy of the Erased de Kooning Reviewing “Drawing Now” at MoMA in 1976, Harold Rosenberg suggested that Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing had become “the cornerstone of a new academy” (Rosenberg 1976). Not only did the work prefigure certain strategies in Conceptual art, it also inaugurated a new attitude to drawing that Rosenberg saw evidenced in Rose’s exhibition. Rosenberg was critical of this new trajectory, which he saw played out in Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art. His use of the word “academy” implies that Rauschenberg’s once‐radical gesture had calcified into orthodoxy. But he did acknowledge the significance of Rauschenberg’s work as a generative act, rather than a solely destructive one. In this chapter I have argued that the Erased de Kooning marked the beginning of a critical interrogation of drawing in the context of Conceptual art. If drawing became important for Conceptual artists, it was because it was historically and theoretically intertwined with conceptions of artistic creativity,



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technical skill, connoisseurial appreciation, and commodification that Conceptual ­artists set out to critique. Conceptual artists returned to material and theoretical bases of drawing not in order to retrieve its essence, but to hold its fundamental principles up to scrutiny.

References Alloway, L. (1964). American Drawings. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Alloway, L. (1975). Sol LeWitt: modules, walls books. Artforum 13: 38–43. Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). New York: Harcourt. Barzman, K.‐e. (2000). The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, W. ([1931] 1999). Little history of photography. In: Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934 (eds. M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G.S. Cambridge). Massachusetts/London: England. Bochner, M. (1966). Art in process: structures. Arts Magazine 40 (9). Bochner, M. (1969). Anyone Can Learn How to Draw. New York. Bochner, M. (2009). Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall? October 130 https:// doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.130.1.135. Bois, Buchloh, Foster, and Krauss (eds.) (2005). Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism. London: Thames and Hudson. Buchloh, B. (1990). Conceptual Art 1962–1969: from an aesthetic of Administration to the critique of institutions. October 55 https://doi.org/10.2307/778941. Buchloh, B. (2006). Hesse’s Endgame: facing the diagram. In: Eva Hesse: Drawing (ed. C. de Zegher). New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Chandler, J. (1970). Drawing reconsidered. Arts Canada 27 (5). Chandler, J. and Lippard, L. (1968). The dematerialization of art. Art International 2 (2). Cummings, P. (1998). Interview: Mel Bochner talks with Paul Cummings. Drawing 10: 9–13. Fuchs, R. (1975). Funktiesvantekenen/Functions of Drawing. Otterlo: Rijksmuseum Kröller‐Muller. Gallery, T. (1979). The Tate Gallery 1976–8: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions. London: Tate. Hershman‐Leeson, L. (2011). “Interview with Howardena Pindell, May 9, 2006” Women Art Revolution Collection, Stanford University. Joseph, B. (2003). Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo‐Avant Garde. Cambridge, MA/London, England: MIT Press. Krauss, R. (2000). A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post‐Medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson. LeWitt, S. (1967a). Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Artforum 5 (10): 79–83. LeWitt, S. (1967b). Serial Project #1. In: Aspen, vol. 5 and 6 (ed. B. O’Doherty). Lippard, L. (1973). Hanne Darboven: deep in numbers. Artforum 12 (2): 35–37. Lovatt, A. (2002). “Interview with Mel Bochner.” Unpublished. Lovatt, A. (2010). “Interview with Mel Bochner.” Unpublished. Meyer, J. (1996). The Second Degree: working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art. In: Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966– 73 (ed. R. Field), 95–106. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

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Morris, R. (1969). On drawing. In: Pop Art Redefined (eds. S. Gablik and J. Russell). London: Thames and Hudson. Nemser, C. (1969). Sol LeWitt. Arts Magazine 44 (2): 63. Osborne, P. (2002). Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon. Piper, A. (1987). Flying. In: Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967–1987 (ed. J. Farver), 1987. New York: Alternative Museum. Reid, M. and Turner, N.P. (1994). Editors Preface: Legible/Visible. Yale French Studies. (84) https://doi.org/10.2307/2930175. Ricco, P. (2014). The Decision Between Us: Art an Ethics in the Time of Scenes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roberts, S. 2013. “Erased de Kooning Drawing.” Rauschenberg Research Project, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.298/ essay/erased‐de‐kooning‐drawing. Robins, C. (1976). Drawing Now: Ten Artists. New York: Soho Center of Visual Arts. Rosand, D. (2002). Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, B. (1976). Drawing Now. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Rosenberg, H. (1976). American Drawing and the Academy of the Erased de Kooning. The New Yorker. March 22. Siegel, K. (2006). High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975. New York: Independent Curators International/D.A.P. Steinberg, L. (2000). Encounters with Robert Rauschenberg (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture). Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Tompkins, C. (1980). Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg. New York: Picador. Vaccaro, M. (2013). Drawing in renaissance Italy. In: A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art (eds. B. Bohn and J. Saslow). Oxford: Wiley. Van Bruggen, C. (1988). Today crossed out, a Project by Hanne Darboven. Artforum 24 (5): 70–73. Varian, E. (1969). Interview with Mel Bochner. Documents 20 (Spring 2001): 4–8. Vasari, G. ([1550] 1991). Lives of the Artists (trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Drawing Desires Sunil Manghani

Figure 18.1  Henri Michaux (1980) Saisir. Source: Courtesy the artist. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.

And so I begin, letting myself be led by a line, a single line, which without lifting pencil from paper I allow to run until, having restlessly wandered within this restricted space, things necessarily come to a stop. And then, what one sees is an entanglement, a drawing as it were desiring to withdraw into itself. (Michaux 2000, p. 10) A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, First Edition. Edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Drawing as it were desiring. In a single line from Henri Michaux’s Saisir (1979) a figure appears to emerge from the ascending line in a bid to scramble to the top; each step diminishing from view to finally appear as little more than an ant upon a hill. Eventually the figure is lost to the line again, which itself stutters to its end. And as the line peters out so our eye is inevitably drawn back to the most salient figure at the start of the sequence, and it all begins again. There is something in Michaux’s phrase, “a drawing as it were desiring,” that makes us believe this drawing has a will of its own (“withdrawing” into itself), and which recurs – as a form of animation, or afterlife – each time we follow its course. It is the “event” of drawing, or “drawing desires” that are traced in this chapter. It is about the power of drawing, meant not as the power to command or to put under pressure, but rather power as capacity. With specific reference to contemporary artists, engaging in different modes of drawing (citing prominent artists Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Jitish Kallat, Jenny Saville, as well as pertinent work by Joy Gerrard, Sally Morfill, and Ana Čavicʹ), the chapter seeks to stay attuned to the figural; to make sense of what we might readily term the drawerly. Of particular influence is W.J.T. Mitchell’s (2005, pp. 57–75) essay “Drawing Desire,” which is brought into dialogue with Lyotard’s (2011) Discourse, Figure. Mitchell reminds us of the double meaning of drawing, “as an act of tracing or inscribing lines, on the one hand, and an act of pulling, dragging, or attracting, on the other.” Keeping in mind this oscillating meaning, “drawing desire” is not to be understood as the depiction of desire, but rather “to indicate the way drawing itself, the dragging or pulling of the drawing instrument, is the performance of desire.” In other words, “drawing draws us on. Desire just is, quite literally, drawing, or a drawing – a pulling or attracting force, and the trace of this force is a picture” (Mitchell 2005, p. 59). Michaux’s remarks on “letting [himself] be led by a line” resonates with this performance of desire, and in this case follow his discovery of Paul Klee, echoing Klee’s much cited line: “A line goes for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly, for the sake of the walk.” Notice how “the line goes for a walk of its own accord, not as is often misquoted, being taken for a walk” (Maclagan 2014, p. 131). We are reminded of an inherent oscillation that drawing is witness to. There is an intention to draw something, yet that process itself becomes a with‐drawing. All too often, the uncertainties of drawing allow for the confidence of language to override; the dominance of discourse over figure. Yet, as Lyotard (2011) considers, discourse falls short. It is a closed system of meaning, limited to what can be read. As Carroll (1989, p. 30) explains: “What can and will be said has, in some sense, already been anticipated or programmed by the system itself, which negates and appropriates into itself all oppositions, all breaks, all alterity of any kind.” In this sense, the realm of discourse is uneventful. By contrast: In the figural realm, things happen that have never happened before and whose occurrence could not have been anticipated. Here meaning is not produced and communicated, but intensities are felt. The figural continually displaces the viewer and leaves him without a fixed identity rather than situating him in the position of addressee. It is the realm of movement, difference, reversal, transgression, and



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affirmation, that is to say, it is everything the discursive is not. (Carroll 1989, pp. 30–31)

It is important to note that while Lyotard privileges the figural over discourse, and primarily references painting and drawing when introducing the term, there is nonetheless a relationship to language. Indeed, “one can get to the figure without leaving language behind because the figure is embedded in it … The figure is both without and within” (Lyotard 2011, p. 7). It is difficult to define the figural, not least as Lyotard maintains it as an elusive term, to suggest of the ambiguity and uncertainty that he considers important to all critical discourse. “As long as critical discourse disrupts the established system of meaning,” Carroll (1989, p. 33) notes, “and keeps open the possibility of unforeseen relations and connections, it is fulfilling its function of linking up with, without negating, the sensible. In this sense, the function of critical discourse is to be more than discursive.” However, to give a pithy definition, Lyotard describes the figural as carrying within it “an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification” (2011, p. 7), which might read as “to signify the other of signification” (13). Importantly there is no map of signification, just its own exteriority; it is its own map. Similarly, when Michaux refers to a drawing “desiring to withdraw into itself” we can think of this formulation: of an exteriority, or an other of signification, which in turn, as this chapter explores, stands as a “figure” that runs through much of contemporary drawing. Importantly, in order to relate to this figure, we must turn to drawing as practice, as making. The line taken from Saisir, for example, is both fluent and complex. Its “beginning,” like a split hair, is cracked, and the first figure above it betrays its own internal meandering marks. This “line,” then, while it appears to run in one breath, is of differing temporalities that hang in precarious harmony. Of course, Michaux is not only concerned with individual drawn marks, but with the scene of drawing, the on‐going entanglement we find ourselves in. He was all too aware of the push and pull of both discourse and figure: I would gladly make signs, but a sign is also a stop sign. And at this juncture there is still something I desire above all else. A continuum. A murmur without end, like life itself – which continues us, above and beyond quality. Impossible to draw as if this continuum did not exist. This is what needs to be bodied forth. Failures. Failures. Attempts. Failures. (Michaux 2000, p. 11)

Reference to a “continuum,” to what “needs to be bodied forth,” is an expansion of Mitchell’s formulation of “drawing desire.” It is easy to think of drawing as thwarted desire, as “failures,” as Michaux repeats. But, equally, we are reminded of his use of the word “attempts.” At stake is an ontology of drawing that is both “attempts” and “failures.” In following this “logic,” this chapter is placed in supplement to Mitchell’s essay “Drawing Desire.” All is in the plural of its title. The shift from “desire” to “desires” immediately suggests of more, of attempts. It conjures an image of the supplement in the sense of additional, complementary elements. But it also

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over‐writes. As Mitchell suggests, drawing might not be the symptom of desire but the other way around. The plural is already the desire that leads one to produce this text, this “image” of drawing; as if all in the “s” itself – that serpentine figure that as a mere mark (not a letter) offers a flourish at the end of one line, becoming the beginning of the next… An Image Problem. Drawing has long had a contested status. Dating back to the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of Artists (1890–1892 [1568]) places the Tuscan’s art of disegno above that of the Venetians’ colore. Vasari’s claim that the Venetians ­concealed their lack of knowledge of drawing through their use of color has long dominated our historical view (Faietti 2016). Drawing is considered – almost ­simultaneously – as both a reified skilled and as being effaced by the more “engaging” spectacle of color and light. Drawing’s subservience to painting is evident with modernist accounts of medium specificity. Walter Benjamin (2004, p. 85), for example, is unwilling to refer to drawing as a medium, only painting is a medium: its colored surfaces are not based on graphic lines but that forms appear through the layering and interplay of paint. It is a view that persists in many contemporary accounts. The art historian and theorist, James Elkins (2000), for example, refers to drawing as a “matter of touch,” whereas painting represents a vast “alchemy.” Nonetheless, by the second half of the twentieth century, drawing is argued to “play an instrumental role in rethinking some of the basic tenets of art practice, and in the process was itself radically redefined” (Stout 2014, p. 9). The decline of medium specificity at the end of the 1960s led to the rise of installation art and new media, which also coincides with the time in which drawing sees a resurgence of interest. As Benjamin Buchloh (2000, p. 44) notes, the impact of automatism and surrealism dismantled traditional assumptions about drawing (as being illustrative, preparatory, or wedded to representation), leading to a whole variety of definitions. Significantly, regardless of diverse and incompatible models, the underlying claim is that “drawing could be defined at the most by a seemingly endless iterability, as an open and interminable activity, untimely unqualifiable in aesthetic terms” (44). It is drawing, then, in this sense as mode (not medium or genre) that is the subject of this chapter, and crucially it is not about representations through drawing. This is to work against a persistent view of drawing as a response to things in the world. Kantor’s (2005) Drawing from the Modern, 1975–2005, for example, makes various assumptions about the work of Marlene Dumas, whose drawings relate to gender, sexuality, and the body. Working from photographs, Dumas’ work would typically be described as externalist, dealing with “the body as a battleground of representation and a site of the projection of desire in today’s media‐driven image culture” (Kantor 2005, p. 40). However, there is a disconnect with the description of Dumas’ “bodily” technique, in which she “works on the floor, pouring pools of watery ink onto her heavy‐weight watercolor paper,” before then tilting the paper “back and forth – using gravity … ‘drawing’ the outlines of the form to create texture that Dumas has called ‘skin like’” (40). The framing of how Dumas’ work “deals with” representation takes us away from the strange and unruly imagery that stares out at us. The problem with such accounts is to treat drawing (and artworks more generally) as a symptom. The implication is that desire is fulfilled or reconciled in some regard. There is also an assumption made that the desires of Dumas’ work are somehow different to that of media imagery. Certainly, there are qualitative differences across all kinds of



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image‐making, but the desires underlying any pursuit to make meaning in such ways need not be so different. The fact we keep desiring/drawing is the perpetuating of difference. In this respect, Lyotard (2011) is interested in how a work does not fulfill desire but unfulfils it. The temptation is to place art in some way, when in fact we might be better to let it take our place, to unseat us. In short, drawing can be considered much more than a viable means of absorbing and processing change. It is change, or rather, it is a means of accessing a space of difference through which only change occurs. Mitchell’s (2005, pp. 28–56) essay “What do Pictures Really Want?,” presents us with a heuristic device to challenge the various interpretative and rhetorical habits we betray when examining pictures. In effect, he sets out to change the picture we hold of pictures. His approach, then, is to “shift the question from what pictures do to what they want, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak” (33). As a corollary to this, Mitchell suggests we may actually want pictures to be stronger than they are “in order to give ourselves a sense of power in opposing, exposing, or praising them” (34). Instead, we might suspend disbelief and ask point blank: what do pictures actually want? (As Mitchell notes in conclusion, it might be they want nothing at all, which itself raises interesting new problems). “What pictures want from us, what we have failed to give them, is an idea of visuality adequate to their ontology […] They want a hermeneutic that would return to the opening gesture of Panofsky’s iconology, before Panofsky elaborates his method of interpretation and compares the initial encounter with a picture to a meeting with ‘an acquaintance’ who ‘greets me on the street by removing his hat’” (Mitchell 2005, p. 48). In thinking again of Marlene Dumas, we can ponder the very desires of her imagery, which can speak to us (emerging from within) before we speak over them (placing them in terms of defined categories or debates). Asking what pictures want is a contemporary gesture of Barthes’ (1973) The Pleasure of the Text from the early 1970s, in that Mitchell similarly unsettles the dominant Left discourse about the power (and pleasures) of the image. Barthes’ account of the “writerly” text is not purely attributable to avant‐garde work, but to any text that gives rise to reading as writing. In focusing here on drawing, we can argue perhaps for the drawerly image – a form of picturing that leads us to think with and through the act of drawing itself. Joy Gerrard’s Protest Crowds is a case in point. Exhibited in Peer Gallery in London (2015), her large‐scale works of Japanese ink on linen derive imagery from media photographs depicting protest crowds a­ssociated with places such as Ukraine, Egypt, and Yemen. From afar the use of black ink on white appears as simply photographic remediation. Yet, Gerrard’s p ­ rocess of drawing is one that populates the works, pushing through its own desires or protests: To begin with, the ink is applied with a tiny delicate brush to make intense, highly figurative drawings of crowds on paper: mourning crowds, audience crowds, commuting crowds. They are representations of photographic images archived from media photography. Over time, the archive is refined. By the end, the images are solely composed of protest crowds. There is something about them alone – some other kind of energy  –  that keeps the brush in motion, which makes the marks. (Gerrard 2016, p. 190)

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While the works frame a single moment (of a view taken from above, of a crowd flanked by the urban environment) there is more at stake; there is (a) movement. “After protest,” Gerrard writes, “the crowd dissipates. What is left except the image?” In recreating these images there is an attempt at “slow looking,” she suggests; adding how in the studio, “time is both fast and slow. There are procedures, durations. Thought, testing, processing, and action. Nothing happens. There is a void, then speed” (2016, p. 193). Through their figural composition the works go beyond representation, exteriorization. As Gerrard puts it: “You can photograph a mirage, but as you get closer, it disappears” (194). These ink‐works are closer to mirage: The black ink on linen is transformative. It sits lightly on the surface of the material, mercurial, almost alchemical. On the washes of gray, a pure black form can be added, soft at the edges, always moving. Vertiginous marks intensify the jointure of process and subject. And there is a shift in scale. The small intense drawings give way to large paintings, almost three meters long. The linen can be stretched to greater frame sizes, further disrupting the photographic schema of the smaller drawings, greater freedom from the original mediation of the archival images, from the scopic arrest of their moment. (Gerrard 2016, p. 194)

The play of black ink on white linen lead to a jostling of vision. It is hard to know what these pictures mean, yet before them we are aware of their own mark‐making, out of which “there is motion toward a new representative schema. Images find composition in the infinity between black and white. In the absence of color, there is possibility” (Gerrard 2016, p. 191). We are reminded that the significance of these works lies in their form and process, more than their content. Despite being about protest, their “oppositional,” drawerly quality is in their figural form, which takes us beyond image and composition to what Lyotard defines as matrix‐figure, an invisible field that drawing can draw together: Not only does it remain unseen, but it is no more visible than it is legible. It belongs to neither plastic nor textual space. It is difference itself, and as such does not suffer that minimum of oppositionality that its spoken expression requires … Discourse, image, and form: all equally pass over the figure‐matrix, for it resides in all three of the spaces. The artist’s works are only ever the offshoot of this matrix. One may be able to catch a glimpse of it through their superimposition. (Lyotard 2011, pp. 275–276)

Bounding Lines. An immediate problem is that we cannot actually see desire, it is “invisible and unrepresentable, a dimension of the Real” (Mitchell 2005, p. 57). We typically turn to the discourses of psychoanalysis or biology to “at least talk around” the subject, but we never get to see desire. Nevertheless, “art refuses to accept this prohibition, and insists on depicting desire – not just the desirable object, the beautiful, shapely, attractive form, but the force field and face of desire itself, its scenes and figures, its forms and flows” (57). The most well‐known depiction of desire is the figure Eros, “the infantile cupid, the baby archer drawing back his bow and unleashing what Blake called ‘the arrows of desires’” (57). Desire in this case is embodied in the figure of the boy (an agent of mischief and wanting) and also in the arrow itself, which, as both index and instrument, points the way to (and pierces) the scene of desire. Eros



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offers an allegory of drawing. Eros, for example, “draws” into space with his arrow, and draws our eye toward the desire’s subject. The whole operation is a sign or indication (a symptom) of something else: in this case, the inevitable desires of love. Yet, equally, Mitchell wonders if it might be the other way around: Is desire a symptom (or at least a result) of image‐making, and the tendency of images, once made, to acquire desires of their own, and provoke them in others? […] It seems … the question of desire is inseparable from the problem of the image, as if the two concepts were caught in a mutually generative circuit, desire generating images and images generating desire. (Mitchell 2005, pp. 57–58)

A further example can be made of the Corinthian maid who traces around the shadow of her departing lover, as told in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (ca. CE 77). Image is a projection, an index of desire; it is “a symptom of desire, a phantasmatic, spectral trace of the desire to hold onto the loved one, to keep some trace of his life during his absence” (Mitchell 2005, p. 66). However, it is equally the “desire” of this image to proliferate, to endure, that is significant. At any moment the young man will move, the shadow will disperse, and well before he even departs the scene. From its inception, the image moves and travels. “The ‘want’ or lack in the natural image (the shadow) is its impermanence” (66). Is the maid’s act of drawing the wish to deny death, to forestall the man’s departure? This is typically how the story is told. Yet, the picture “could equally well be read as the symptom of a wish for the young man’s death, a (disavowed) desire to substitute a dead image of the living being. The picture is as much about ‘unbinding’ the bonds of love, letting the young man depart, disintegrating the imaginary unity of his existence into the separable parts of shadow, trace, and substance” (67). For Mitchell, the myth of the Corinthian maid presents in a single (meta) picture two pictures of desire: the psychological and ontological. The contrast evoked is between “the Freudian picture of desire as lack and longing for an object, and the Deleuzian picture of desire as a constructed ‘assemblage’ of concrete elements, a ‘desiring machine’ characterised by a joy founded in (but not disciplined by) ascesis … interrupted by pleasure, not driven by it” (61). Thus, desire, in the first case, is one based upon “lack,” and in the second, “plenitude,” or possession that surpasses the object: “Desire as longing produces fantasies, evanescent specular images that continually tease and elude the beholder; desire as possession produces (or is produced by) Deleuzian ‘assemblages’” (66). However, rather than dwell within the theoretical writings of Freud or Deleuze (indeed purposefully wanting to approach without this baggage), Mitchell shapes his account through reference to the drawings of William Blake. He considers, for example, Blake’s well‐known plate in For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (ca. 1820), which shows a figure climbing a ladder to reach the moon, with the simple caption “I want! I want!.” It is the explicit portrayal of longing and lack; “Blake depicts the ‘mistaken’ picture of desire (the one that leads to despair, or neurosis, psychosis, and the ‘plague of fantasies,’ in Freudian terms)” (61). Yet, from a Deleuzian perspective, the mistake is not, as Mitchell explains, the desire for the moon (nor the moral lesson to be “satisfied with less”). “The mistake lies,” he suggests, “in the fetishistic fixation on a single signifier or part object, the failure to demand totality: not just the moon but the sun and the stars – the whole assemblage – as well. And the ‘moral’ is to insist on

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the infinity of desire” (61). An installation at Tate Liverpool of drawings by William Blake, a Romantic artist and poet, and Tracy Emin, one of the “young British artists” of the 1990s, might seem at first strange bedfellows, yet their shared interests in birth, death and spirituality are drawn out with similar sensibilities of plenitude and “assemblage.” In Emin’s case, the interplay of fluid, diluted and “drier,” dragged lines of her reclining figures offers both a familiar, domestic body, yet one we rarely witness. Her assemblage of lines takes us beyond the usual categories of the body. Added to which, Emin’s iconic “My Bed” (1998), which stands at the center of the works, is literally an assemblage of the artist, but which in her inherent absence (and as a bed forever unmade) continually evokes an infinite production, a dialogue with others, with the future (and the drawings that surround). The idea, then, of drawing “as desire” outplays the rigidities of sign and signification. It has access to the Real that falls about and between signs, between the marks that bear determinate meaning. However, it is not as simple as to say drawing escapes the problem of lack and of the unobtainable image. Blake (as with Deleuze) associates desire not with “more” (I want, I want), but in fact to ascesis, “to the dialectic of binding and unbinding” (Mitchell 2005, p. 63). Infinite desire, Mitchell notes, “does not mean the quantitative infinity of ‘indefinite’ extension and expansion but the ‘definite & determinate Identity’ figured by the ‘bounding line’ – the drawn line that leaps across a boundary at the same time that it defines it, producing a ‘living form’” (63). Blake provides a number of vivid examples of this (a)bounding line, but perhaps one of the most memorable images is the god Urizen reaching down with compasses: This image captures the moment when desire merges with the drive, when the “binding” and “unbinding” of desire are fused in a single image. Urizen has already inscribed himself inside a circle, and is caught in the act of breaking out of that circle only to inscribe another one. One could hardly ask for a more vivid depiction of what Blake calls the “bounding line”, the line that binds, confines, and determines a boundary, and the line that leaps over a boundary, like a gazelle “bounding” over a fence. (Mitchell 2005, p. 63)

At the heart of this account is a perpetuating dialectic, of the bounding line that cannot stay within its own bounds; a dialectic even of life and death, “the fundamental ontology of the image” (68). Drawing is ever a drive (to repeat, to make, to break) and a desire (to fix, to hold, to have, to outline). Drawing can seek order, as well as its undoing (just as we find in Emin’s flighty inks and unmade bed and Gerrard’s re‐ marking and overlaying of protests crowds). At this point, we might usefully draw‐out from Mitchell’s essay “Drawing Desire” (which follows a similar trajectory to “What do Pictures Really Want?”). The opening premise is liberating, not least of the tyranny of language. Yet, it folds back into the anchorage of language and theory. Mitchell is all too aware that his “opening gesture” to break with previous lines of enquiry is soon found to have “circled back to the procedures of semiotics, hermeneutics, and rhetoric” (46). The examples of Blake, in the end, serve as illustrations of an idea. We need further opportunity to dwell upon their lines and drawing, their disegno. In order to get back to drawing itself (the desire that underlines Mitchell’s essay) we need to keep closer to the practice of drawing; to that which (a)bounds…



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Not Through Lack of Trying. A common refrain of those who draw (those who know intimately what it means to draw) is not that they draw, but that they attempt to draw. It is as if there is no such thing as being able to draw, or at least the (a)bounding line that Mitchell draws our attention to is not something that needs to be overcome, it is not the problem of drawing, it is what is constitutive of drawing. John Berger (2011), for example, recounts a scene in which he attempts to draw seven irises, describing the process as an accumulation of “corrections.” Drawing is a form of discovery, through which, “if you are lucky,” he writes, “the accumulation becomes an image – that’s to say it stops being a heap of signs and becomes a presence” (Berger 2011, pp. 7–8). The need to correct and retrace lines is also made explicit in Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint (1986). Finding no satisfaction in reading a plethora of books on “how to paint,” Milner realizes she needs to undo much of what she first thought about drawing. A key finding is the instability of the line and outline when looking at objects in the world: “When really looked at in relation to each other their outlines were not clear and compact, as I have always supposed them to be, they continually become lost in shadow” (15). This leads Milner to question why such “a great mental effect [was] necessary in order to see the edges of objects as they actually show themselves rather than as [she] had always thought of them” (15). Her reference to a “great mental effect” could be framed in terms of the interpretative and hermeneutic strategies that Mitchell seeks to avoid. General discourse allows for the “edges” or distinctions of objects to be delineated. It is only when we come to the “language” of painting and drawing (as with literature and other art forms) that things start to unravel. Milner refers to her experience of looking upon two jugs on a table, seeing the “play” of their edges, which she describes as rippling (“now that they were freed from this grimly practical business of enclosing an object and keeping it in its place”). After making brief sketches she writes how it became “easier to understand what painters meant by the phrase ‘freedom of line’ because here surely was a reason for its opposition; that is, the emotional need to imprison objects rigidly within themselves” (Milner 1986, p. 16). Milner’s attempts to allow for the play of edges and to outplay her subjective reasoning (when looking) in part echoes Francis Bacon’s account of painting, to allow for the “force of the image” (cited in Sylvester 1981, p. 126). Bacon refers to painting touching our nerves as a “fact,” as an objective not subjective sensation, which is to convey directly, not through a system of meaning or as illustration. In discussing the making of Painting (1946), Bacon recounts of an attempt to “make a bird alighting on a field,” but “suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture. […] It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another” (cited in Sylvester 1981, p. 11). The various references here to luck (Berger), play (Milner) and accidents (Bacon) give some insight into what these individuals are experiencing at the point of making a painting or drawing. We can place these accounts within Mitchell’s framing of lack (Freud) and plenitude (Deleuze) – of the play of lines being on the one hand about loss (so needing correcting) or on the other about an opening up, an unfolding (such as a “continuous accident” or a rippling). However, a more structural account can be made in reference to Lyotard’s (2011) Discourse, Figure. As noted in the opening to this chapter, Lyotard positions “figure” against language or discourse. He distinguishes between “a dimension of signification, involving linguistic signs with one another, and a dimension of designation, a gestural dimension

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in which language points to a world outside itself and thereby opens to the visual” (Bogue 2003, p. 113). In the first instance, Lyotard’s account draws upon Merleau‐ Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of vision and space. He begins, for example, with reference to the writing of Paul Claude, and in particular a description while traveling through a landscape, watching two trees in the distance come to accord in a single line of vision: “here we move, searching for composition, constituting the space of the picture, relying on that plastic space where the eye, the head, the body move or swim, buoyed as if in a bath of mercury. It is the juxtaposition by the eye that guarantees the agreement of the pine and the maple, agreement fulfilled because total, a harmony of silhouette, tone, value, and position: desire momentarily satiated” (Lyotard 2011, p. 3). Lyotard’s concern is that once the visual is “read” or placed within a rational order (recognized, comprehended) we lose its “truth.” By “truth” Lyotard refers to the idea of “the event,” which “presents itself like a fall, like a slippage and an error, exactly the meaning of lapsus in Latin. The event clears a vertiginous space and time; untethered from its context or perceptual environment” (129–130). Roland Barthes’ observations on the artist Cy Twombly gives a practical example of what might be meant here by event. He refers to the pleasure of a gesture through using a coloring pencil that, “at the verge of vision,” gives us something that is “both expected (I know that this crayon I am holding is blue) and unexpected (not only do I not know which blue is going to come out, but even if I knew, I would still be surprised, because colour, like the event, is new each time: it is precisely the stroke which makes the color…” (Barthes 1985, p. 166). Similarly, Lyotard’s account of the figural as event discloses a dimension of visibility that comes before we see, before we make sense of things. “The goal of attention,” he argues, “is to recognize; and recognizing does not go without comparing. The eye darts here and there, weaving its familiar web” (2011, p. 152). The basic Gestaltist distinction between figure and ground, for example, he argues, is itself the outcome of secondary rationalization (153). The eye and mind constructs “recognisable” space. It is only in stopping its movement “that the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual field can be approached”, whereby: “Learning how to see is unlearning how to recognise” (153). Echoing the idea that to draw is to “attempt” to draw, we can understand drawing as an unlearning of seeing. It is a fragile tactility that is attempted, and which (echoing Michaux) will most likely need to fail, since the “visual event” comes before even the sketch: With the sketch, one imagines oneself in possession of a more radical moment in the constitution of what is perceived, a pre‐subjective and pre‐objective moment, when in fact all one is doing is taking from the constituted object fragments one assumes were perceived before it gave itself as a totality (however open), and projecting the object in the “past” of perceiving activity. But in so doing one is erasing difference … one is blotting out the heterogeneity of the field according to which what appears in the field is not first “seen” in the sense of foveal vision, and what is seen there ceases to appear as event. (Lyotard 2011, p. 154)

A particular guide to the figural for Lyotard is Paul Klee, whose dictum “art does not render the visible but renders visible” neatly encapsulates what Lyotards expounds in terms of the “visual event.” Importantly, for Klee, “Werk ist weg”  –  work is the way – the pursuit of the visible is through making. Klee’s wish to create a Zwischenwelt or inbetween world, between an objective, external world, and a subject, internal



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realm allows for deformations of the familiar, which appeals to Lyotard, as it allows or forces us into the “field of sensibility, indeed of sensuality” (Lyotard 2011, p. 232). As Bogue (2003, p. 115) explains “there exists two ontologically distinct spaces: a textual space of recognizable, coded entities, and a figural space of metamorphosing unconscious forces … Figural space is unmarked by the coordinates of a regular dimensionality, of a fixed up and down, left and right, foreground and background; its objects defy ‘good form’, ready categorization, or denomination; and its time is that of the event.” However, while the figural can be disclosed (such as in deformations) it remains itself unrepresentable. “Only the trace of its action appears, and the function of the artwork is to reveal its effects and thereby open up an interworld between an objective, codified world and a subjective fantasy world” (115). It is in being between such states  –  internal and external  –  that defines drawing as figural, or we might say drawerly. As a corollary to Lyotard’s spatial account of the figural (which has no defined dimensions), Bogue references Erwin Straus’ The Primary World of Senses (1963). Straus similarly marks a fundamental distinction between perception and sensation, “arguing that perception is a secondary, rational organization of a primary, nonrational dimension of sense experience” (Bogue 2003, p. 116). Straus defines the time of sensation to be the becoming of a perpetual present, akin to Lyotard’s interest in the eventfulness of the figural. Straus provides an interesting analogy of the distinction between perception (that which is coded) and sensation (that which is experienced) as the space of geography and the space of landscape respectively. This distinction (or rather their combination) can be understood in reference to the work of Jenny Saville. Her self‐portrait, Plan (1993), a signature work, exhibited as part of Saatchi’s Young British Artists III in 1994, presents us with a “landscape” of the female body in which we might confess to being lost. This is painting as sensation, which overwhelms our sense of perception. Nonetheless, the neat contour lines scratched into the figure evoke a geography, “the space of the map, with its system of coordinates and unspecified perspective” (Bogue, 117). On the face of it, Plan equates to Benjamin’s distinction between drawing and painting, which he defines as a difference between signs and marks respectively. The sign, Benajmin suggests, “is presented on something, whereas the mark emerges from it” (2004, p. 84). In this schema, drawing (as sign) is intentional, whereas painting (as mark) emerges through its medium. Such an account is too rigid. There are numerous ways in which drawing comes through complex layers of mark‐making, so being closer to the mark as medium. Putting aside its duality, Benjamin’s account does help bring out subtle differences in how one physically handles pencil and paint. Importantly, the mark as medium reveals what Benjamin refers to as the “problem of painting” (which we can state also as the problem of drawing), whereby we acknowledge “a picture can have a composition even though this cannot be reduced to a graphic design” (2004, p. 85). In interview, in discussing a new body of work of drawings, Saville remarks that it is “a bit annoying” to be described as a “female artist,” adding: “Only when that goes away will women truly be part of the culture” (cited in Saner 2016). We could argue it is the contour lines of the early, well‐known portraits that force the sensorial bodies into their gendered reading, into a system of signification. In Lyotard’s terms, these lines limit our perception. He asks: “is it a text, that which speaks only when the eye has located ‘the point of view’, when my gaze has become the gaze to which things are ‘owed’? A text is not deep sensorially, you do not move in front or inside of it so

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that its agreement may be fullfilled” (2011, p. 3). By contrast, if we let ourselves into the “landscape” (or the emergence of marks) of Saville’s paintings what we see is “sensory”; it is “a perspectival world enclosed by a horizon that constantly moves with us as we move” (Bogue 2003, p. 117). In the more recent work, Saville has taken the movement and emergence of line more readily as her medium. As a parallel exhibition at the Ashmolean, formulated as a response to the large exhibition “Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice” (2016), Saville produced her collection of works on paper and canvas. There is a very deliberate evoking of the “signs” of art history, yet equally an intense engagement with mark‐making, responding directly to the material qualities of drawings by Venetian artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, or Palma Giovane. Contrary to Benjamin’s account, drawing provides Saville with a fluid “medium” to study movement and time. Although, interestingly, just as Benjamin considered watercolors as both drawing and painting, since “pencil outlines are visible and the paint is put on transparently” (2004, p. 85), there is a hybridity to Saville’s approach. Significantly, she describes this as a “massive” freedom; “Just because of the transparency of drawing, you’ve got the possibility of multiple bodies. It’s an attempt to make multiple realities exist together rather than one sealed image” (cited in Saner 2016). The works show bodies together, such as an infant wrestling in a mother’s arms, couples embracing, a fight, and children playing in the sand. Bodies with defined outlines equally merge and emerge in amongst an energetic play of lines (and lines made through erasure). Unlike the spectacle of the body in her early work, these drawerly portraits echo Michaux’s suggestion of “a drawing as it were desiring to withdraw into itself.” They are private, domestic “landscapes” made up of no single definite lines, like the contorno, whereby, as James Elkins describes (in writing on the drawings by Michelangelo), we get “a serpentinate braiding of marks that is at once a mark in itself and many marks supporting a single mark. The part does not exist without the whole and vice versa” (Elkins 1995, p. 858). In Saville’s case the lines blend in an energetic, even chaotic manner, befitting Lyotard’s view of the figural as revealed through deformation. Underlying Lyotard’s account of the figural is a different conception of desire. It is not the misplaced, or decentering of the subject that we take from Lacan’s revisiting of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” In this story an apartment is turned upside down by police in order to locate a compromising letter. What they fail to account for, however, is that the letter has not been stashed in a secret place, but rather “hidden” in plain sight, mixed within items on a cheap card rack. Lacan takes the letter (being literally a form of “signification”) as a metaphor for a structuralist, yet de‐centered subject (i.e. that the subject lacks a clear view of themselves despite always being on show). Alternatively, Lyotard draws upon another of Poe’s stories, “The Gold‐Bug.” The story is about the cracking of a code that will lead to buried treasure. The process of decipherment is convoluted giving rise to “a sort of heterogeneity of signifiers” (Mowitt in Lyotard 2011, p. xviii), and what is of particular interest is the protagonist’s desire (bordering on madness) to get to the gold: He is a man bitten by a bug. Gold‐Bug man. Significantly, this characterological element finds its semiological reiteration in the means by which Legrand [the protagonist] discovers the code he then proceeds to crack, which is through fire. As Legrand explains, he discovers the syntagma of the cipher by accidently waving the strange surface on which it is written near a fire, a fire made necessary by “chance”



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meteorological conditions on the island. This evocation of the “tongues of flame” would hardly rise above the status of cliché, except that … what Legrand insists on is that he had to risk burning, thus destroying, the material substrate of the code in order to render it legible. One might say, then, that this theory of the sign is one that stresses not its “destination” or destiny (a watchword in Lacan’s reading) but its derivation, its drift out of a force field that persistently threatens to consume it. (Mowitt in Lyotard 2011, pp. xviii–xix)

This account of desire, which we can take as a reprise of the aforementioned distinction between lack and plentitude, is not about lack (or decentering), but the lengths – the derivations – to which we go to be legible. It is about the production of meaning as itself a gesture or action, which draws upon the available material means (even to the point of destruction). Saville’s drawings are made of many “tongues of lines” and indeed she risks destroying them, using a domestic hoover to erase lines (Saner 2016). A more explicit example of the “gold‐bug” can be seen with Jitish Kallat’s “wind studies,” a collection of drawings he titles “Wind Study, The Hour of

Figure 18.2  Jitish Kallat (2015) Wind Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season). Burnt adhesive and graphite on Arches paper, 67 × 45 in./170 × 114 cm. Source: Courtesy the artist.

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Figure 18.3  Sally Morfill, from Sally Morfill and Ana Č avicʹ (2015) The Naturalness of Strange Things. Pencil drawing on 100 gsm Munken pure rough, 297 × 420 mm. Source: © Sally Morfill. Courtesy the artist.

the Day of the Month of the Season” (2015), originally exhibited as part of “The Infinite Episode” at Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris. Produced on large format paper, the wind studies begin as simple, abstract graphite lines, made inside the studio. These are then taken outside. Each pencil line is laced with a flammable fluid, and one by one set aflame. As each line burns down it is the movement of the wind that directs the fire and so the re‐rendering of the line. Kallat has described this process of “drawing” as a means to realize how little he actually knows of the environment around him. We hold a basic account of the world in which we inhabit, but our sensorial perception is not necessarily able to register precision. In watching the flames of each line, it is possible to know exactly the direction and “play” of the wind, something the body is unable to do to any similar degree. Kallat’s choice of which line to set alight would be dictated by how the wind re‐worked the line as it burned. In this case, literally risking the burning, or destroying of each line, the artwork is allowed to “drift” into being (a recording of its own derivations). In conversation with Homi Bhabha, Kallat is asked about the tension between his own agency and that of the wind. The drawn lines are very orderly, straight, precise, while the wind of course disrupts all of this – nonetheless, there is control over their composition, not least being made to conform to the format of the paper (Bhabha and Kallat 2015, p. 25). For Kallat, however, once the lines are drawn (and taken outside) there comes a “repeated submission of one’s free will,” which significantly takes place “at the moment of incineration, the moment when the line is set aflame and begins its conversation with the wind” (22). The wind studies provide us with yet another composite of geography and landscape, of coordinates set against a lived, “natural” space of drawing. Drawing, then, as desire, as figural: a “recording” of what it is to see before we see (“…to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination”). This is the art of the drawerly image that is set apart from just any kind of drawing.



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Figure 18.4  Ana Č avicʹ , from Sally Morfill and Ana Č avicʹ (2015) The Naturalness of Strange Things. ‘Take me with you’, sculpture poem. Adhesive vinyl on paper, 210 × 297 mm. Source: © Ana Čavić. Courtesy the artist.

Coda. Time and again we see that we cannot finally grasp drawing. It is not a simple genre or technique. It is an underlying principle. Beyond art, drawing is our sense of scale, position, and proximity in all manner of circumstances. A sense of reaching, or “grasping” to echo Michaux. Drawing is searching. Is desire. “Desire just is … drawing, or a drawing” (Mitchell 2005, p. 59). Yet, of course, we might ask: what desire, or rather which desires (plural)? It is not clear, whether in Blake or more contemporary work, what desire it is we are referring to, or even if it is not indeed multiple. What the figural allows us to consider is not an individual, specific desire (I want the moon, or even the stars!), but – just as in looking there is no absolute up, down, left, right  –  that desires are multiple. Drawing, in keeping the figural open – extended – keeps open our desires, our desire to draw (closer), and which like the obsession to find the treasure in Poe’s story, is a desire not based on lack (a need to complete something) but rather a process of derivations (of attempts and failures).

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As a coda to this chapter, such desires of drawing are ably set forth in Sally Morfill and Ana Č avicʹ’s The Naturalness of Strange Things (2016). Leading to a collaborative series of drawings and poems borne of the re‐markings of Henri Michaux’s Alphabet (1927), a set of marks from Michaux’s Alphabet were redrawn by Morfill using a Wacom Inkling pen, so recording gestures and strokes as digital vectors. These were then printed on sheets of adhesive vinyl, from which Č avicʹ made five different sculpture poems. Working in an intuitive way, Č avicʹ tasked herself with using every last piece of weeded vinyl, painstakingly sticking one piece at a time onto a sheet of paper to form letters, words, and lines of poetry. Working within these restrictions and without the possibility of unsticking, unpicking, or undoing what had been done, the sculpture poems became a process of cause and effect with each decision affecting the next. The accumulative effect of lines on the page reveals the ebb and flow of the making process whereby legible areas at the beginning of the poems deteriorate into illegibility towards the end as vinyl pieces become more scarce, and ever more creative uses of leftover vinyl pieces are applied. (Barnet and Morfill 2016, np)

Morfill and Č avicʹ’s “recovery” of Michaux’s “writing” offers a new lease of life (a new set of desires). It is through the drawerly approach we gain a meta‐exploration, a drawing of drawing, a writing of writing, a drawing of writing, and a writing of drawing. As with Joy Gerrard, we witness a slowing down of drawing, a glimpse of underlying desires or forces of action. Furthermore, we are reminded the figural is not only of the visual, but also of language. The overly repeated divides of drawing/ writing, theory/practice, artist/writer, begin to unravel. Just as Barthes reminded us the Text does not stop at Literature (and is not the preserve of the avant‐garde), so the figural, the drawerly, does not stop at the visual arts; a point that would be made viscerally were this chapter handwritten not typed. We do not need to remark upon “contemporary drawing” as a special category or genre. In every attempt to draw – as we mark and re‐mark, overlaying lines, or just maneuvering in and out of lines – there is an attentiveness to the here and now, to the contemporary. Drawing, as with desire, is inherently contemporary and always plural: …always a beginning. We begin (again), letting ourselves be led by a line, by a desiring line…

References Barnet, S.E. and Morfill, S. (2016). Drawing and Other Writing. London: The Everyday Press. Barthes, R. (1973) ‘Le Plaisir du texte’ [Interview], 12′57″, Institut national de l’audiovisuel archives. Available online: http://www.ina.fr/video/CPF10005880/ roland‐barthes‐le‐plaisir‐du‐texte‐video.html [Accessed 12 June 2016]. Barthes, R. (1985). The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation (trans. R. Howard). New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, W. (2004). Painting, or signs and marks. In: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913– 1926 (eds. M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings), 83–86. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Berger, J. (2011). Bento’s Sketchbook. London: Verso.



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