Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art 9780755603763, 9781784530693

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Preface TRACEY is a ‘space’ that encourages, supports, hosts and disseminates research in the area of drawing and visualisation, including the online peer-reviewed journal of contemporary drawing research. TRACEY is based in the School of the Arts at Loughborough University. TRACEY’s aim is to stimulate and support open-minded and contemporary interest in drawing activity – physically, cognitively and creatively. The space reflects a multi-disciplinary approach to drawing activity and research. It endeavours to question preconceptions and to investigate the potential for what drawing might be. The editors of this book – Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon – are co-editors and members of TRACEY in collaboration with Alastair Adams, Simon Downs, Deborah Harty and Andrew Selby. Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art is the third in a series

of books that began with Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (2007), followed by Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (2012). Drawing Ambiguity progresses a position seeded within Hyperdrawing. Hyperdrawing as an ambiguous practice presents the prospect that a lack of a definition, a position of ambiguity, may be desirable within contemporary fine art drawing practice. Drawing Ambiguity now moves beyond that prospect by proposing that a position of ambiguity (a lack of definition), is desirable and that a lack of definition is not only desirable, it is also a necessity and has the capacity to enable and sustain drawing practices. Drawing Ambiguity invited seven contributions (with an introduction from Derek Horton) to respond to three overarching figurations: the Seven Types of Ambiguity in literary prose (Empson,

1930), the logical fallacies of ambiguity, and grammatical prepositions (e.g. between, beyond, beside, etc.). The contributors were challenged to consider the format of their response, including: text led, image led or a combination of both. Drawing Now and Hyperdrawing form two outcomes from an emerging project and book series that investigate the ambiguity that emerges from the artificial boundaries employed to subdivide contemporary fine art drawing practice. Drawing Ambiguity explores this ambiguity through deliberately not addressing ‘what is drawing’ or ‘what drawing is’. Through the seven contributions, drawn together from multiple perspectives, Drawing Ambiguity investigates the opportunities that arise if we are ambivalent to the answers to these questions, subvert the answers to these questions or challenge the questions themselves.

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Introduction Derek Horton

Derek Horton is an artist, writer and curator. He taught for many years in higher education, most recently as the Head of Research in Contemporary Art at Leeds Metropolitan University, until 2008. He co-founded the online magazines /seconds with Peter Lewis in 2005 and Soanyway with Lisa Stansbie in 2009. Soanyway combines narrative writing, poetry, music and art, including sound and video, and presents work by artists from around the world. His latest project is as a curator and co-director of &Model, bringing work by international contemporary artists to a three-storey gallery in central Leeds. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir maintained that we should not attempt to dispel ambiguity but, ‘on the contrary, accept the task of realising it’.1 This text and the book it introduces take the position that ambiguity (which might provisionally and paradoxically be defined as a lack of definition) is not only desirable for drawing, but rather, for reasons that will be outlined here, a necessary condition of contemporary visual culture. It has the capacity to enable and sustain many cultural practices, not least, and centrally in this context, the practice of drawing. Drawing Ambiguity deliberately does not address the question of what drawing is. Instead, it aims to investigate the opportunities that arise if we are ambivalent to the answers to such a

question, subvert any answers that might be given, or challenge the question itself. Drawing in and of itself has an ambiguous status that derives from its ubiquity. We all draw. It would be virtually impossible at any stage in human history to find a person who had never scratched marks on a convenient nearby surface, or doodled, or made a diagram to explain something, or sketched a map to give someone directions, or idly trailed a stick through the sand. Beyond, though not necessarily above, such activities, the process of drawing has historically been central to the practice of artists. The relationship between apparently instinctual human actions and more deliberate attempts to represent or communicate about the world constitutes an ambiguous space that marks out the terrain over which contributors to this book range. Michael Phillipson in particular has much to say about the centrality of drawing to human experience. The very fact that we all draw opens up another ambiguous space, that between the private and the public; between the intimate actions of reflection and ‘working out’ and the calculated production of images made to be seen. And even when drawings are made to be seen, there can be something about the directness and private nature of the act of drawing that allows artists to give free reign to fantasy, or give vent to unspoken desires, or simply to reveal other more innocent or mundane thought processes, that makes us feel that we are looking over their shoulders, privy to their intimate thoughts. We have been invited in

to another’s world, given room to make our own sense of what is going on in it. Ambiguity is a property of the interpret­ ative relationship between people and things or ideas (or representations of them). Ambiguity is not the same as fuzziness or inconsistency, which are attributes of things or ideas – ambiguity is an attribute of our interpretation of them. In other words, things and ideas are not inherently ambiguous; rather, ambiguity arises in their interpretation. So levels of ambiguity and multiple layers of interpretation can derive on one hand from the degree of precision, consistency or accuracy of things or ideas and the ways they are represented and, on the other, from the sensibilities, motivations and expectations of the person interpreting them. There is a human need to make sense from the random confusion of the world, to process our perceptions as we experience them, and to structure them as best we can. When we are confronted by language, however unfamiliar or disjointed it might seem, we innately strive to make sense of it, even if there is none to be made. In the same way, our impulse is to make meaning out of whatever images we are presented with – vision is an active process in which the brain attempts to make sense of the information it receives from the eyes. Perception then is the construction of a description, and so language is never absent. Ambiguity resides both in our interpretation of the things we see (have we seen what we think we

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Introduction have seen?), and in our articulation of it, both internally as thought and externally as expression. And in another twist of the ambiguous relationship between language and the visual, when the articulation or expression takes place through writing, we are back to drawing again – because, in the form of drawing we call writing, words are never independent of gesture.2 This interpretative relationship and its potential complexities are, I would suggest, the source of ambiguity’s appeal. Ambiguous situations defy easy interpretation and thus require us to participate in making meaning. This might involve projecting meaning onto a particular thing or situation, by identifying a relationship between it and a different and apparently unrelated thing or situation and, in so doing, perhaps, deploying an integration of previously disconnected discourses. The idea or artefact or situation thus sets the scene for meaning making, but it doesn’t predetermine, prescribe or proscribe the meaning made. My focus here is on a viewer’s interpretation of, for example, a drawing, and the meaning that might be made of its relation to the wider world. Another perspective might emphasise the reflexiveness or otherwise of the maker of the drawing in relation to her intention (or lack of one), and the extent to which the making is considered, planned or known. Some models of creativity promote the value of not always knowing what one is doing; of being dependent primarily upon responsiveness to ever-changing surroundings and then on a capacity to act and react spontaneously, improvising strategies based on those responses. This kind of responsiveness to the world needs to recognise its inherent contradictions and uncertainties. The political philosopher

Leszek Kolakowski, in the essay ‘In Praise of Inconsistency’, argued that an acceptance of contradiction does not require a reconciliation of opposites. Inconsistency is a fundamental refusal to choose between values that mutually exclude each other. Kolakowski suggests that inconsistency is ‘an awareness of the contradictions in this world’ and ‘a consciously sustained reserve of uncertainty’.3 Arguably though, inconsistency is more often unconscious. For example, those with a dogmatic world-view rooted in their own certainty about a utopian ideology, whether religious or political, remain often blissfully unaware of the inconsistencies in their philosophy and the realities of the social relations it determines. For some, the notion that not just motives but the actual course of events might be ultimately unknowable is intolerable, even after a century of increasing acceptance of ambiguity, expressed in every medium from the most arcane literature and conceptual art to the most populist elements of popular culture. Whilst some now take all our irresolvable ambiguities for granted, others seem determined to cling to the certitudes of earlier times. Conscious inconsistency, when it can be achieved, actually provides the most hope, through a clear awareness of the eternal and incurable uncertainty in the world of human relations and values. Uncertainty, a constant process of change and a consciously constructed sense of ambiguity thus allow the artist a conceptual and, metaphorically at least, a political strategy, for movement around and through a shifting identity, whether in relation to a person or to the ‘definition’ and delineation of any object in the world. Just as ambiguity’s appeal results from its capacity to generate interpretation and

the making of meaning, ambiguity’s value is determined by the quality of interpretation and the meaning that is derived from it. Ambiguity is not a virtue in itself and it can end up being merely confusing, frustrating or meaningless just as much as it can be engaging, thought-provoking and generative of interactivity. But by impelling us to interpret situations for ourselves, encouraging us to grapple conceptually with ideas, systems and contexts, it can be intriguing and rewarding, allowing us a deeper and more personal relationship with the meanings offered by exactly those ideas and systems and their contexts. Ambiguity’s value is that it allows for the consideration of different perspectives without imposing a single viewpoint solution. Ambiguity of information, whether visual or verbal, requires individuals to question what that information describes or defines. This has the potential not least to encourage a questioning of the technologies and representational media that such description and definition might deploy, allowing them to be expanded, bridged or rejected. Ambiguity thus offers an incentive for creativity in any genre of production, drawing in this case, to push itself beyond the limits of its customary technologies. In a digital design context, for example, inaccurate sensors, inexact mappings and low-resolution displays might be seen to encourage users to supplement them with their own interpretations, values or ideas. Drawing combines the effect of immediacy (in a reciprocal relation of hand and eye) with the fact of its mediation (the use of the hand, or its disembodied digital equivalent, to materialise an image). Any event or thought or visual idea can be configured through drawing, and current technologies allow the drawn image to

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Introduction be reformatted in any medium to suit different modes of presentation and consumption. The ambiguities inherent in drawing may relate to the uncertainty or lack of definition in what is drawn, whether intentional or not, and to open interpretations of what drawing ‘is’; but also they extend to the processes and actions that are required to engage in an activity that might be legitimately described as ‘drawing’. For instance, an increasingly immersive digital environment undoubtedly suggests new attitudes to drawing. What might it mean to draw in the internet age? In our culture, visuality is ubiquitous: the sheer quantity of images seems to be more significant than what they are or what they mean. Multiplicity, disposability, fluidity and re-appropriation encourage a sense that images are constantly mutable. Avant-garde impulses of the last century, such as fragmentation, collage and chance procedures, have been fused with the technologies of the present, resulting in an expanded field for twenty-first-century drawing. Not bound exclusively to the surface of a substrate, it continually morphs from the manual to the digitised, from printed page to web page, from studio and gallery to screen and street, from private to published, and from social space to virtual space. It is in flux, characterised primarily by instability and uncertainty. This radical impetus toward ambiguity is at odds it seems with the conservatism of a culture that still likes to resort to certainties – to black-and-white dichotomies, winners and losers, onedimensional positions, and quantifiable ups and downs. But there is perhaps something neurotic about such a need for certainty. Indeed, Freud maintained that, ‘neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.’

The attempt to define anything is by nature a conservative activity: since conceptual definitions are necessarily exclusive, they focus on particular, selected characteristics at the expense of diversity. They allow us to order our experience simplistically, by grouping certain things together, and leaving others out. Once there is uncertainty about what to leave out, the way is open for a greater complexity that has the potential to challenge the fixity of conservative positions. In reacting, either positively or negatively, with scepticism or belief, to any ambiguity, the fundamental practical and intellectual activity involved requires asking questions whilst renouncing the possibility of dictating answers. Hence, in the cultural domain of representation and meaning making within which drawing resides, ambiguity is a resource for the artist, writer or designer in which a deep respect is inherent for the viewer, reader or user. As Rebecca Solnit has observed: ‘The purpose of art is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world.’4 Of necessity this is an active process, involving the deployment of creative strategies which document actions that in turn invite response, reaction and further action. This emphasises the human activity or performativity involved in a view of drawing as process; a way of being and doing that is not dependent on, or even necessarily aimed at, a fixed product or object. Without ambiguity, art lacks depth, subtlety and richness. Ambiguous artworks, in our case in the field of drawing (recognising of course that the correlation of drawing and art is ambiguous territory in itself), offer a potentially complex cognitive experience in which we have

to navigate multiple meanings and cope with indeterminacy. They allow us to be innovative in our interpretations. The more perspectives we can draw upon (pun intended), or ‘the wider our scope of recollection’, as Phillip Rawson has put it, the more sophisticated these interpretations are likely to be. Ambiguity requires us to actively use our own perceptions, ideas and judgement to find meaning. How we do this, and why the experience can be rewarding, gives some insight into our cognitive processes and the evolution of art in human culture. To consider how we respond to ambiguity is essentially to engage with creativity in action.5 Whether in the digital context referred to already, or in its older and more obviously manual manifestations, drawing exists at an interface: the interface of an idea and its representation; of the hand and the trace of its action; and of the image and its viewer. This interface is a place with its own autonomy, its own ability to generate new results and consequences, essentially an area in which choices are made, not a simple and transparent site, but a fertile nexus, ripe with ambiguities. The window and the door are commonly invoked as metaphors for the interface. Particularly in popular understandings of computer usage both are very familiar, certainly if one thinks of a door as a ‘portal’. But doors and windows represent very different forms of interfacing with digital information. The idea that the window is transparent but passive (you merely need to look through it to see the information contained in the space behind it), whereas the door is opaque and requires you to be active (it conceals the information in the space behind it until you open the door to access it), is really useful for understanding those differences. The

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Introduction idea of the screen adds another dimension to this, perhaps, through its double meaning involving both visibility and invisibility – a screen is a thing behind which something might be concealed, but also a thing that you can project something onto. The relationship between the visual and conceptual interface of the screen (the interface of eye and mind with the visual information projected on it and the digital data hidden behind it) and the physical or manual interface of the keyboard and mouse or the touch-screen (the interface of the body with the mechanical manipulation required to activate and access digital information) demonstrates that the body is always central to the process – however much digital technologies dominate our communication with and understanding of the world, and the means by which we store and access information about the world, ultimately there has to be a point of connection with the human being contained within a physical body. The territory of this intersection and the combination of manual and digital processes, of old and new technologies, of imaginative ideas manifest physically and the new possibilities of virtual worlds (itself another form of interface of course) is an increasingly ambiguous and intriguing one. Whilst I have placed some emphasis here on the impact of digital technologies on the process of drawing, the value of ambiguity and the qualities of openness to interpretation inherent in it are no less significant in much older approaches. For instance, if we look back 500 years, sfumato was one of the four canonical drawing and painting modes of the Renaissance (the other three being cangiante, chiaroscuro and unione). Sfumato comes from the Italian sfumare, ‘to tone down’ or, literally, ‘to evaporate like smoke’. A frequently cited

example of sfumato is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and da Vinci described sfumato as ‘without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke, or beyond the focus plane’.6 Sfumato then avoids harsh outlines, and allows forms and colours to blend together. As a visual technique sfumato carries with it an implication of a way of thinking, an open-mindedness that allows for different perspectives to be conceived simultaneously, opening up new dimensions for problem solving, inspiration seeking, and seeing new patterns and systems arising out of ambiguity and paradoxical ideas. Phillip Rawson described the potential breadth of this open-mindedness when he suggested of any given drawing that, ‘the main bulk of the marks will not just refer to everyday objects but will “qualify” them by investing them with analogous forms from quite other fields of experience.’7 To return to the notion of the interface, further layers of ambiguity are uncovered if we reflect on the relationship between the surface on which these drawn marks are made and the succession of other surfaces that might in turn support it. Georges Perec reflects metaphorically on this in his Species of Spaces when he muses: I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall … The wall is no longer what delimits and defines the place where I live, that which separates it from the other places where other people live. It is nothing more than a support for the picture. But I also forget the picture. I no longer look at it. I no longer know how to look at it. I have put the picture on the wall so as to forget there was a wall, but in forgetting the wall, I forget the picture too. There are pictures because there are walls. We have to be able to forget there are walls, and have found no better way to do that than pictures. Pictures efface walls. But walls kill pictures.8

This book is, unsurprisingly, a combination of words and images, most of the images originally drawn but now re-mediated through various combinations of photographic, digital and printing processes. The juxtaposition of text and image and the disjunctions between the two prompt a number of questions. Are images less ambiguous than words? Does an imageless text allow for greater ambiguity? When words and images are combined, do they disambiguate one another or, on the contrary, set up new and greater ambiguities? Such questions have historically marked a tension between disciplines and the methodologies they employ. They were, for example, at the heart of debates prompted by so-called conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. The most obvious example is perhaps Joseph Kosuth’s direct illustration of the point in works such as One and Three Chairs (1965), consisting of a chair, a photograph of it, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’. Likewise, in cinema, the relationship between the image on the screen, the dialogue or other sounds presented with it and, sometimes, the use of subtitles, can be one of direct correspondence or, more interestingly, can also be one in which disjunction complicates layers of narrative. A good example is the concluding scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), in which the fundamentally bewildered photographer protagonist, after imitating the return of an invisible ball to two mimes who are pretending to play tennis, hears the actual sound of balls hitting rackets as the mimes’ game continues. Challenging any idea we might have that our perceptions are a perfect mirror of outward reality, this scene leaves us in the condition of undecidability that is at the

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Introduction heart of Blow-Up, a film in which clues are swept away as soon as they emerge, leaving only an ambiguous blur from which nothing can be proven. This blur, as a visual metaphor for ambiguity, is also central to the long history of argument about art and science in which, for example, literary language has often been distinguished from scientific discourse in terms of an opposition of ambiguity and clarity: these are the terms within which many debates about the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and the sciences have been framed. From one perspective, the apparent ambiguities of philosophical aesthetics and criticism have been challenged as ‘fuzzy’ thought; whereas from another, the scientific desire for clarity, stability and constancy have been decried as reductionism. In those areas of scientific thought that have come to terms with this critique, chaos theory being an obvious example, traditional concerns for fixed definitions and precision have been superseded by the need to provide rich resources for open experimentation and the interpretation of unexpected or unexplained experience. There are by now many examples of fruitful dialogue and the sharing of paradigms and strategies across a divide that has been present since the Renaissance and was entrenched by Enlightenment rationality as it congealed into Modernism. As all these examples suggest, looking at the role of ambiguity across different disciplines is therefore a way of considering the relationship between them. Meaning is seldom revealed explicitly. The recognition of ambiguity and a focus upon it are critical in order to open up a space for dialogue between the producer and the consumer, the designer and the user, the artist and the

viewer, and, beyond that, between cultures, disciplines and modes of thinking. Ambiguity provides the space that allows for a subjective, personal, interpretative exchange that might generate wonderment or disdain, clarity or obscurity, pleasure or discomfort or, ambiguously, anything in between. It is for these reasons that the ghost of Robert Smithson hovers perceptibly over this book. The polarities in his (literally) groundbreaking work are made meaningful, as Kreider + O’Leary point out, precisely because the tensions that they contain cannot be resolved. Two of the contributions to Drawing Ambiguity reference Smithson directly. Most of the others are at least indirectly related and reflect the legacy of his polymath intelligence, particularly his emphasis on the intangible and the ambiguous in his insistence on breaking down categories of thought and expanding the boundaries of practice. Making extensive use of Smithson’s device of ‘non-site’, Kreider + O’Leary are concerned with the complexities of site from the perspectives of architecture, art and poetry. They blur the boundaries of these disciplines to reflect on how sites are represented, and how they impact on and allow us to represent our ambiguous responses to a specific place. Deborah Harty is concerned with how being and drawing might be analogous. Drawing on phenomenology, she traces the connection between the wandering line of an individual human life, where, as she says, quoting Merleau-Ponty, ‘the self touches the world and leaves its trace upon the surface’, and the physical process of drawing. Making detailed use of this metaphor, through her writing and her own drawings, she suggests that drawing could be said to be

the ambiguity through which we know ourselves. Michael Phillipson engages in a complex linguistic exploration, drawing things out to muse on being drawn out of oneself. Philosophically playful but, of course, with serious intent, he offers us a text riven with the self-conscious awareness of its own ambiguities, leaping back and forth between very different senses of what ‘drawing’ is. Phillipson’s delight in enunciating the multiple semantic origins and linguistic connections of drawing’s meanings inevitably connects it with the recourse to poetry in Kreider + O’Leary’s methodology, and his excavation of the etymological roots of ‘drawing’ in ‘dragging’ is echoed intriguingly in their concern with Land Art. Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon’s ‘digital drawings’ involve a deployment of art and language that is not without echoes of some aspects of the work of Art & Language. In the spirit of the serious playfulness that pervades Phillipson’s contribution, and appropriating the conceptual tools and graphic notations of mathematical logic and the analytical methods of linguistics, they ‘play’ visually and linguistically with William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. First published in 1930 and, along with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s The Intentional Fallacy, a key foundational work in the formation of the New Criticism school, Empson’s book was, incidentally, prominent in Robert Smithson’s personal library.9 Concerned with the ambiguities and unknowns of intention and the speculation that it prompts, Rob Ward’s contribution recognises that intention is always in tension. He delights in the seductive tendency of drawn marks and visual images to become things other than themselves. Deploying art history and art criticism

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Introduction inflected by psychoanalytic theory, he discusses the ambiguities of the overlaying of the pictorial and the textual in the graphic and the autographic dimensions of artworks, and he relates the deliberate and tactical ambiguity of the picture puzzle to the tendentious exploitation of ambiguity in hermeneutic forms of art criticism, history and theory. Ilana Halperin illustrates and describes what one of her exhibitions’ titles has characterised as ‘geologic intimacy’, poetic actions that engage with the relationship between geological phenomena, human embodiment and daily life. Echoing Kreider + O’Leary’s explicit interest in Smithson, she traces a thin and permeable line between geology and biology, culture and nature to reveal the human dimension of rocks and fossils and the geological aspect of the human. Halperin explores the ambiguous overlaps of animal, vegetable and mineral, and her concern with mineral deposits coincides with Phillipson’s reminder that some of the commonest drawing tools consist of compressed dust. Elemental materials and the physics and physicality of his process are, in a more fragmentary way, described by Karl Hyde too. In seventy-two selected images and a stream-of-consciousness text, Karl Hyde articulates his concern with documenting and negotiating everyday life through a drawing practice. In his own words, he is ‘learning how to transform mundane vignettes into magical tableaux, turning little collections of “nothings” along the side of the road into “somethings”, to maintain the will to live’. Returning us to where this text began, Hyde and his compulsive practice are

the embodiment of Simone de Beauvoir’s admonition not to attempt to dispel ambiguity but to accept the task of realising it. When he talks of ‘finding the clues, the fragments, trails of glittering things, precious stones flung in the dirt’, he unintentionally offers us a way of reading this book: ‘Take any one of these elements, separate it from the pack and follow it off in its own direction.’ There might be no better way of Drawing Ambiguity.

Endnotes 1 De Beauvoir, Simone, The Ethics of Ambiguity, New York: Citadel Press, 1986 (first published 1947). 2 At least since Synthetic Cubism introduced fragments of type into the picture plane, it has been commonplace for written language to function as a compositional element in art works. By the 1960s it was not uncommon for language to be the subject matter of art, and indeed its matter – the material from which it might solely be made. Language as art had to wait for the twentieth century, but as drawing it is as old as the earliest writing. To write by hand is, unavoidably, to draw. The conceptual separation between the two grows with our familiarity with any given written language, but we have all experienced ‘drawing’ writing when we first learn to lay down the strokes of an unfamiliar form, whether as a child first writing ‘a, b, c’, or, for example, as an unfamiliar adult learning to write Arabic or Chinese characters. Capturing or reproducing a letter-form with a line is arguably no different to capturing or reproducing any other form with a line. The arbitrary connection between the shape of a line and a vocal sound is culturally defined and becomes fixed only up to a point, leaving room for considerable variations in spelling and pronunciation. Similarly, the meaning we attach to other kinds of line that function for

their makers (the ‘drawers’ of the lines) as approximations of their visual experiences of the world around them (or even as attempts to create new visual experiences in the world) leave an ambiguous space in which new meanings are made. 3 Kolakowski, Leszek, Toward a Marxist Humanism, New York: Grove, 1968, p. 214. 4 Solnit, Rebecca, Hope in the Dark:The Untold History of People Power, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005, p. 148. 5 Rawson, Philip, Drawing, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, p. 26. ‘In the case of all art, including visual art, ambiguity and multiple meanings may be of the essence. It is well known that, in poetry, puns, oblique illusions, metaphorical connections, all enhance the total meaning. So it is with visual art as well. Forms should have the widest possible scope of recollection.’ 6 Earls, Irene, Renaissance Art: A Topical Dictionary, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. p. 263. 7 Rawson, Drawing. p. 26. 8 Perec, Georges, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin, 1997, p. 39. There is an echo of these ideas in another wall: the one described by Ursula LeGuin in the opening lines of her novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, a book that finds hope in uncertainty. ‘There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than the wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended on which side of it you were on.’ (Le Guin, Ursula, The Dispossessed, New York: Harper & Row, 1974.) 9 Robert Smithson’s entire library at the time of his death in 1973 is documented in Ann Reynolds’ critical monograph. (Reynolds, Ann, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 297–345.)

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward Michael Phillipson

Michael Phillipson is an artist and writer who has taught at Goldsmiths College, Central St Martins, and Middlesex University. He exhibits regularly with The London Group and is the author of Painting Language and Modernity (1985) and In Modernity’s Wake (1989) as well as numerous catalogue essays and articles including ‘In Harm’s Way’ in parallax 55 (2010). Many of the issues raised in ‘Drawing Draws Draward’ are discussed further and are free to download in the texts gathered together at: www.artsplight.co.uk.

Drawn to ‘Art’s Body’

Art’s Body’s Last Breathless Speech Water colour on paper

Art’s Body . . . over there . . . still just about in your sights, breathing . . . mouthing . . . drawing . . . breathing . . .You are making-

for-art! You hope that the gest you are creating will be gathered into that expanding–contracting collection that you and others recognise as the repository of Art’s ‘difference’. Irrespective of medium, every would-be-artist fills and shapes this repository differently according to the specific gests that, however briefly, charm and transport them from everyday ‘life’ into ‘Art’. But what and where is this desired destination? Think of it as ‘Art’s Body’: a strange gathering differently constituted by every maker that is never ‘here’ but forever ‘elsewhere’, up ahead in an ungraspable beyond. Though each maker can see, hear, touch, read, enter even, many of its constituents, the gathering as an unboundaried whole remains out of reach and beyond reason. Hoping that the gests they cast off and abandon along the trail will be absorbed into this foreign but seducing ‘Body’, makers remain on its trail. And, once seduced, they will almost certainly stick to its tracks irrespective of the interest (or lack of it) shown by the institutional machinery routinely appropriating and managing art on behalf, supposedly, of us all. This life-turning affinity for both the Body one is forever assembling anew and one’s relation to the material processes through which one traces out a path toward it, act as guarantors of one’s hope and keep one riveted to the path. Thus distracted (by Art’s Body), it seems that ‘to draw’ might itself be naming something that is disclosing one’s fate. Drawn on irresistibly by the Body’s charms (and thus away from the binds of everyday

life), one convinces oneself that one has no option but to keep going along this open track. In the very process of aligning oneself with that distant Body, it begins to feel that one is both performing ‘drawing’ itself and being drawn out of oneself. This aligning movement already enfolds the drive to make-for-Art within ‘to draw’ and ‘drawing’. And, simultaneously, it reveals the emerging trail as the performing of ambiguities: each stuttering move onward passes by way of undecidables. Each thing (gest) abandoned ‘for Art’, a trail-marking residue, is already a more-than-one, an identity-less multiple, reducible to a spurious ‘one’ only in the seeming singularity of its name or title. On the way, in hope alone, toward Art’s Body, ‘to draw’ and ‘ambiguity’ fuse and separate without end.

The Word ‘Drawing’ Yet, if we are following the weight of everyday usage, it is difficult to avoid approaching ‘drawing’ as a noun that seems to be bound primarily to the visual, to an object that is an outcome of the coordination of eye and hand (a mind-feel mine-field) in the service of a specific way of ‘seeing’. So that an exploration of the relation between drawing and Art would, naturally enough, emphasise the ‘visual arts’, perhaps with particular emphasis on a drawing’s relation to the traditional arts of painting and sculpture (rather than, say, to installation and performance projects, photography or multi-media approaches

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward to the moving image – film and digital compositions). Closely tied to this usage would be the same word, but now, as the present participle of the verb ‘to draw’, used to refer to the activity of drawing itself. And even passing familiarity with education in the visual arts, where great emphasis continues to be placed (however differently across the transition from the pre-modern to the post-modern) on the activity of drawing – from both life and imagination – as a necessary foundation for induction into art-making, would seem to confirm such a judgement about drawing. In its ordinary life in relation to ‘the arts’ it doubles as both noun and verb-part, placing itself primarily, though not exclusively, as a key to performance in the specifically visual arts. An affirmation and provocative juxtaposition of this focus can be found in the title of an exhibition showing the intimate relation between drawing and painting in Alex Katz’s oeuvre: ALEX KATZ SEEING DRAWING MAKING.1 In sandwiching ‘drawing’ in bold type between ‘seeing’ and ‘making’, the title gives a visual sense of drawing’s centrality to Katz while simultaneously showing it as a necessary mediator between, while trapped and subordinate to, the two processes on either side of it – seeing and making. This title that both is and is not a sentence opens us to the complexities faced in tracing the path(s) between drawing and Art. Certainly it offers a sense of Katz founding his makingprocess on a ‘seeing’ that has to pass by way of drawing through a sequence of generative transforming stages eventuating in a residual, invariably painted, object. But the word ‘drawing’ in the title is, in spite of its prominent boldness, clearly secondary in the sequence to the ‘seeing’ that we are invited to read as the origin of a process

which is completed in some form of ‘making’. Putting the name ‘Alex Katz’ aside, the play and the tensions between the three words (each doubling as both noun and present participle of a verb) already immerse us in the ambiguous complex of undecidable oscillations through which making-for-Art goes its many ways. My suggestion here is that this moving amalgam of seeing–drawing–making, far from being what differentiates the ‘visual’ from the other arts, is common (along with other processes) to all the arts. Irrespective of medium or media, in making-for-Art one’s making entails seeing and drawing. Leaping between the arts one finds these three processes being engaged in common but also differently. And it is in this play of differences within what is shared that we may find traces of the ambiguity that runs through and across all of them. Drawn on by ‘drawing’s’ bold in the Katz title I treat it as a guide to what its routine use implies in discussions of both the process of making and the gests emerging from this process. Whatever is going on in such making seems to necessitate drawing. But we soon discover the necessity of leaping back and forth between very different senses of what this ‘drawing’ is pointing us toward and relying on in its various contexts of use across the arts. Engaging some of the ways drawing, ambiguity and making-for-Art intersect and are intertwined precipitates one into the multiple that the word – ‘drawing’ – itself spreads out before us. For, confronted by the play of differences it offers, it evades every attempt to contain it within boundaries that would fix it as a ‘field’ with a singular identity. This evasion occurs in spite of the fact that we do not seem

to be able to do without it in trying to formulate our relation to Art. We begin to experience Art and it as somehow inextricably bound to each other without being able to put our finger on the sources of this mutual debt: Art through drawing – drawing and being-drawn into Art – Art’s drawings. As it recedes from our efforts to place the relation of Art and drawing, the ‘drawing’ word discloses itself as inherently ambiguous: it offers simultaneously many possible things and actions that, though overlapping slightly, cannot be reconciled or joined as one. But we can’t just leave the word behind us, as if we could consider what drawing ‘does’ or ‘is’ aside from the routine use and references of the word itself. For it is precisely this word that gathers and spreads before us an unboundaried site of complex choices and possible directions. In the very process of pointing beyond itself, it draws us back endlessly into both its own performance and what it enables us to do as we try to draw out and make sense of our relations with things and others. The implication is inescapable that, in the course of our (extra)ordinary becoming, we are indebted to drawing: we are always already drawn-becomings, drawn on, through and beyond ourselves by something that is ‘drawing’ (us). The word points to our fundamental drawnness as corporealbecomings forever on the move and being moved on – drawing and being drawn. Thus if, as we search for making-for-Art’s possible entanglements with drawing, we follow the word itself we are constantly returned to our own condition, to repetitive autonomous processes constituting our routine activities. Tracking the oscillating play between the word and the processes and things to which it draws our attention, we

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward soon find ourselves adrift in the complex interplay of its origins, references, affinities and ever-extending relations. These recede rapidly into vagueness, slipping through the very fingers that are so used to drawing things towards us. In the subsequent exploration of making-for-Art’s implicit fusion with our corporeal-becoming I return to the word itself in order to point up both its sourcing and the extraordinary diversity of its use. But before confronting this diversity (the word’s extension way beyond its reference to visible mark-making) a detour is necessary to show how it names a process of drawing-together: it gathers something we hold-in-common.

Drawing-in-Common In the context of our relation to the visual world, to ‘seeing’, and specifically to those processes and things that we gather under the ‘visual arts’, the word ‘drawing’ does seem initially to offer us something which we take utterly for granted – the largely hands-on depositing or incising of marks on, into or through a possibly receptive surface (stone, metal, paper, cloth, skin, screen . . .). Such marking activity – always corporeal in entailing partially coordinated and directed embodied movements relating to materials (implements and surfaces) – seems to have been a permanent routine constituent of social life. It responds to an enormous range of human desires, needs and interests by offering a process and a site where a diverse range of activities, from the seemingly simply pleasurably casual (‘just child’s play’) to the most complexly task-bound (knowledge-guided and machine-bound constructive productive work), are forever under way.

This surface-marking seems so necessary and ‘natural’ to our ‘becoming’ that we may take it as a ‘cultural universal’ – something we not only ‘just do’ but also cannot do without: drawing-in-common partially defines us. For wherever material traces of cultures have been found, they reveal markings and material shapings that today we now readily gather as evidence of such universality. As our name for this culturally generalised marking-in-common, ‘drawing’, seems coexistent with our Pleistocene emergence, an activity that has from the ‘beginning’ (forever unlocatable and receding ‘back’ beyond our reach) been intrinsic to our being-here. What we call drawing – this embodied and typically quirky feeling-and-thought-loaded activity – marks a defining ‘moment’ (forever in repetition) of our condition; it partially and endlessly conditions us. As drawing’s partial ‘products’, we draw ourselves on and out. But does a recognition and acceptance of this common conditioning draw us nearer to what drawing is or might be? If we reproduce ourselves together partially through a process that is ‘second nature’ to us, is it possible to trace connections between our common grounding as ‘drawers’ and the obvious and ever open diversity in drawing’s actual appearances? Is it not precisely this diversity, the multiple and irreconcilable differences, in drawing’s sources, desires, interests and appearances, that prevents all attempts to gather them together as essentially the same, as members of a single family of activities? Is it not precisely the difference, the gap between each ‘drawing-event’, that confounds any attempt to make sense of drawing’s ubiquity through a unification? Even if we stay within a restricted sense of drawing as primarily a relation

between seeing and marking, the differences within this cultural universal speak to an intransigent ambiguity. We can gather all ‘marking-events’ as superficially the same: they participate in a common relation between embodiment and materials. But the human significance of each seemingly ‘in-common-event’ – a humanly marked material surface – is tied absolutely to the context of its emergence. Both the maker’s intention and interest at the sites where the mark emerges and others respond to it (how and where they evaluate it and place it) are context-specific. They generate the marking’s differences and dispersal. The appeal, attraction, appearance, ‘use’ and ‘value’ of the ‘same’ kind of mark, and thus the quality of its subsequent real life, are decided at and as the conjunction of what the mark-maker(s) and the mark-responder(s) bring to the site of its emergence and reception. The consequences of this context-specificity for how any maker engages drawing are profound. The absolute gap between ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ confronts us, on every drawing-occasion without exception, with ambiguity. If we want to ‘see what drawing is’, even as we seem to see ‘the same’, we have to pass through and out of this ‘same’ and into that no-space where commonsense falls away behind us and the anticipated identity of what we are looking at dissolves. We are caught up in (and caught out by) a play of differences requiring us to set aside ‘sameness/identity’ and follow not only the marking’s visible tracks but also the invisible tracks that constitute the context’s alwayselusive-because-unspoken relations. As good contemporaries – we who represent ourselves as ‘contemporary’ with everything that ‘has gone, is going,

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward and will go, on’, and who believe that a relation to ‘Art’ (at least in passing . . .) is a necessary constituent of ‘being contemporary’ – we like to bring Art into it. We believe that, like drawing, we can see Art everywhere too! Desperate to extend our control over things and to affirm the rightness and span of our methods and knowledge-categories (one of which is certainly Art), we draw together marking, drawing and Art. Indeed, we now tend, in the wake of our museumising of the past with its dependence on knowledgeproduction (research, scholarship, writing, printing, information-dissemination), to take it for granted that drawing’s traces, no matter how distant temporally and culturally, can be reconciled with and affiliated to our own current and now carefully institutionalised vision of ‘art’. The neat lines inscribed into the 30,000-yearold bone seem to confirm that we have all always been ‘artists’. In spite of their differences the markings goad us to construct connections. Under the sway of technoscience (whose operating mode is precisely the making of methodically produced and ever more complex connections) we develop affiliating threads that, leaping over their extraordinary cultural diversity, stitch the markings into our ‘contemporary’ understandings. We come to recognise a culturally common marking, a kind of ‘drawing-in-general’ dividable into overlapping sub-types (designing, planning, mapping, writing, playing, Art . . .) whose differences are grounded on a common affinity – each can be seen in the other. But, picking our way through this drawing-in-common in order to explore how something we name as Art may be both dependent upon drawing and

simultaneously absolutely different (‘other’), we need to be attuned to the play of difference that Art as we now understand it, seeks to live by. We need to consider if, how and where, making-toward-art might carry out the ‘cut’ through which it seeks to sever itself from ‘drawing-in-general’. For it will be in that same zone of the cut, at the threshold where drawing-as-culture dissolves and drawing-for-Art sets forth, that the question of drawing’s relation to ambiguity emerges. As we begin to make-toward-Art so does the sense of drawing-in-common begin to recede into vagueness . . .

To Draw ‘Drawing’ Out of Itself Drawing – here it is, nothing but the word d r a w i n g itself out on this page right in front of you in a drawn font . . . Drawing – here (just back < there) again, this time drawn forth italically as you, reading, voice it silently in some ‘within’ between here and there as this script draws your eyes on along and across the fractures of this one-track, one-way ‘line’ that is no drawn unbroken line but a notional (as long as you keep to its straight and narrow) aligning of the alphabetic bits (juxtaposed dots and marks (that could be lines and yet are both more and less than lines and dots)) assembling this emergent text . . . Already the ambiguities, obscurities, into which ‘drawing’ casts us begin to pile up . . . and this is before we have considered drawing’s implication in the challenge faced by those making-for-Art now . . . And, if Art is makers’ goal, could it be that the ‘strangeness’ characterising both

what they do and the remnants they leave behind (their offerings to us and to Art), is intimately intertwined with drawing? And, further, could it be that drawing performed under Art’s auspices is a key to the strangeness that Art engenders, to the ways its ‘gests’ set themselves apart, become unhomely, thus turning drawing-toward-Art into an estranging activity? If so, perhaps it is in the ways that the gests offered as ‘for-Art’ seek to estrange themselves from drawing’s uses under drawing-in-common that they reveal their intention and hope to be drawings-in-difference. Drawing seeking to turn itself into a ‘drawing-for-Art’ has to go on its way blindly, leaving its traces, without knowing whether any such withdrawal is occurring or will occur. It proceeds in hopeful failure, drawn toward an ‘elsewhere’ beyond the grasp of all the methodically organised ‘knowledge-projects’ used to hem ‘art’ into carefully patrolled and monitored institutional settings. This elsewheredestination (the ‘not-yet’ towards which it is drawn) is nothing but its own sourcing – the originating compulsion that drives, drags it on, off and away toward Art. Once under way, such making sustains itself within a peculiar tension of irreconcilables. It traps itself between its chosen media-specific resources and the elusive source towards which it is casting itself. Thus caught, it hopes only that these resources (the matters it fuses, conjoins, aligns, collages, in the things it leaves behind for-Art) will come to be taken as fusing markers of the two unsayable extremes driving it on – its origin-before-memory and destination outside history: going forward by turning back. It has to feel that the matters beckoning to it are already

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward implicated with and have been sent to it from the unknowable source. Its search ends up performing the very ‘thing-process’ (whatever it manages to constitute and deposit as drawing when under way in its chosen medium/media) that it seeks to disclose as its destination. Making for its source through this perverse movement, it moves on through a turning back that moves ahead (and thus always away from its origin) by constructing anticipatory traces of what it feels its originating sourcing is all about. It performs a movement akin to Paul Celan’s Meridian2 – a going-forward-and-on-around in order to return to where it began, except that the context of its arrival – the place-time of its abandonment by the maker – is radically other to the pulsed source that drew the maker into making. The movement’s outcome, what it leaves behind and seeks to expose on Art’s behalf, is thus a residue which feels, when we approach it, something like a language.Yet it falls short of a placeable language. The meridian-like process (a self-interrupting syncopation) is never a continuous line like a map’s globe-spanning meridian journeying smoothly and unbroken over every obstacle (snow, ice, cauldron, ocean, forest, city, peak, crevasse . . .). Rather, it moves in and out of the familiars of everyday language. Its journey is characterised by falls and ascents into other experience-zones whose effects it tries to bring into some sort of jagged alignment with the accented codes constituting its quotidian home. Known by heart, these are the languages in which it feels at home. But while it doesn’t need to think beyond them in everyday life, it has no confidence in them as pathways toward Art’s ‘otherwise’. Emerging only within and on the terms of its self-imposed limits (the performance-

specific relations of its fixed terms with their openings, closures, edges, gaps, overlaps and frames that only ever appear ‘just this once in this way’), this languagelike composition appears to have been broken off as a singular fragment of some absolutely unreconstructable language beyond any known use-community. Looking both backwards and forwards, this movement that both partakes of language(s) while simultaneously breaking away from it/them, composes something at the edge of languages (some of whose terms we do indeed vaguely recognise) in which it has sought to fuse its lost origin with its destination-beyond-reach. While seeming to found some kind of language, it leaves merely a shard that, compressing and commingling traces of known languages with multiple elements aside from any known language, obstructs all attempts to draw it back into and contain it within any of our familiar languages. Perhaps it is just this singular combining of familiar language-elements with others irreconcilable with any known language that draws us into its seductive idiosyncratic play. The strangeness of this combining puts the composition-forArt’s singularity unequivocally beyond the reach of any translation into a known or knowable language. Preserved as this one-off event, each composition withdraws itself from any comforting relation in and with the languages of everyday life (our modes of representing – commonsense meaning via information, illustration, communication . . .). Each ends not as a language-member (though it may be dragged in radically transformed terms into the typifications of knowledge-discourses seeking to rule on Art’s relation to ‘life’) but rather as a

‘this-time-only’ syntactic of untranslatable alignings pledged only to Art. And makers ‘know’ (in the form of an unsayable ‘know-how’) that Art’s relation to language is that of a not-yet-and-nothere. Art’s irreconcilability with everything ‘that is’ withdraws its gests from ‘culture’ (representation) and draws them into the promise and struggle of becomingotherwise on Art’s behalf. Makers’ anticipatory compositions, leaping beyond themselves and us towards Art’s not-yet, offer us only the obscurest inklings of what Art’s relation to language may conceal. But, whatever moves such gests make in and out of ordinary language, one thing remains clear: compositions-forArt seduce. Seemingly haunted by and bearers of Art’s ‘spirit’, they can, quite unpredictably, charm us away. Art names some ‘force’ (or ‘weakness’, for there is no right word for the ‘un-forcing’ that fatally and delightfully weakens other holds over us) that withdraws potential makers-forArt from everyday demands. It draws them inexorably beyond the ‘self’ immersed and dispersed in and among those demands. If it is a ‘charge’ participating in the electricity already possessing us and ‘at work’ within us viscerally, then it is not a dialectic of alternation between two poles (magnetic positive and negative attracting– repelling ‘sources/forces’). Rather, the ‘(im) potency’ drawing us on into ‘difference’ is also a weakening that detracts from specific controls and ‘potentials’. It leaves us vulnerable, ‘all at sea’. Isn’t this the state of disembodying embodiment (something like Simone Weil’s ‘decreation’ – her programme for ‘getting the self out of the way’3 and, ‘To undo the creature in us’4) towards which poets point when they touch obliquely on their relation to sourcing and origination?

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward Thus for Tsvetaeva the poet’s speech which begins a ‘great way off’ is also what bears her ‘far away’,5 while Akhmatova ‘hangs by a thread’ waiting for her ‘serene and pitiless’ muse.6 Perhaps, too, Art’s seducing–weakening force, its ‘way’ of making a dramatic cut in the continuities of commonsense, is figured in a more familiar context. Can we read the act of seduction in Robert Browning’s narrative poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin as a figuring of Art’s irrecusable charm, against which the town (the state) is, of course, helpless (especially if it doesn’t keep its side of the bargain . . .)? In describing the piper’s differentiating attribute, the ‘secret charm’ that his piping manifests, as an ameliorator of harms, Browning explicitly invokes the verb ‘to draw’ as the charm’s agent. He endows his music (breathed sound), and perhaps Art’s poiesis generally, with that irresistible grip dragging one out of the everyday and into an unplaceable ‘elsewhere’. In this he withdraws us from the specific sense of ‘drawing’ as the making of visible surface marks and drops us into the multiple play of what ‘to draw’ opens through its tensive affiliations with an expanded range of human activities: And, ‘Please your honours’, said he, ‘I’m able, ‘By means of a secret charm, to draw ‘All creatures living beneath the sun, ‘That creep or swim or fly or run, ‘After me so as you never saw! ‘And I chiefly use my charm ‘On creatures that do people harm, . . . (lines 71–7)

As with the poem itself, it is the piping’s sounds, a combination of breathing– inventing–fingering (playing–writing), that draw the children inexorably out of ‘the

state’ and into the mountain. In rhythmically re-composing the story’s historical– mythical sources, Browning opens onto Art’s resources as radical and inexplicable undoings of the conventions of ‘civil society’. The piper’s ‘pied’ appearance points up the strange conglomeration of differences defeating all attempts to collect gestsfor-Art around some unity. Whether as the ‘red and yellow’ of the piper’s ‘gypsy coat’ (the artist-piper as a no-fixed-abode wanderer), or the magpie’s and wagtail’s two colours, the adjective ‘pied’, like its relative ‘piebald’, gives us the piper-poet with his strange musical outpourings, as a ‘pie’ - an idiosyncratic admixture of differences. Like Art’s gests, on each baking occasion a pie is always a one-off miscellany (recall the ‘four-and-twenty blackbirds’). By figuring a musical out-sounding via his poem’s rhythmed rhymes, Browning shows Art’s gest as an idiosyncratic mixturebeyond-reason whose strange charm can withdraw one from quotidian bonds into destinations unknowable (the mountain that closes up behind the children). Drawing us inexorably away from drawing as primarily vision-dependent, he precipitates us onto a radically expanded site where ‘to draw’ is entangled with embodiment itself.

To Draw – A Specific But Open Site of Embodiment What specific attributes of human embodiment are shown in our routine use of the words ‘to draw’ and ‘drawing’? Could ‘to draw’ be directing us toward something so fundamental to our embodiment (and thus to ‘living’ and making’s source) that makingfor-Art, pursuing its meridian, cannot avoid it? Could it be that this trail-pursuit, forever

‘on the turn’, is constitutively bound and indebted to ‘drawing’? If ‘to draw’ draws us into matters that are intrinsic to ‘living’s’ corporeal becoming then this must become an unavoidable focus in any attempt to make-for-Art. Just to get under way, making-for-Art has to confront the zone-defining ambiguity of ‘drawing/to draw’, a coupling pointing both to its defining resource (what drives its performance on) and to its ‘object’ (the challenging, materialising gest bearing its motif) always ungraspably ahead, towards which it impels itself. If ‘the arts’ are responses to the relation between ‘Art’ and ‘life/living’ then this always entails the maker’s search for where and how to make the cut and leap from life into Art. This is the leaping performance whose resultant gest seeks to embody – to show – the difference between life and Art. Through ‘drawing-in-common’ I noted the expanded field of reference spread out before us by ‘to draw’. The openness of this expanse is what both invites and challenges the maker, irrespective of chosen medium/media. Each performance’s potential for ‘difference’, for aligning itself with Art’s ‘elsewhere’, lies in finding where and how to make the cut-for-Art that leaps beyond everydayness. In order to recognise both the possibilities that ‘to draw’ offers and the ambiguities into which it casts making, we need to try tentatively to establish what it directs us towards in human embodiment’s zone. I have already given some attention to ‘drawing’ as a word whose ‘life’ occurs in speaking–writing–hearing–reading contexts through its relations to what occurs ‘before’ it and ‘after’ it – its syntactic context. Any sense it offers and is given is context-specific and depends on the other

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward language units (including all the material signs of spacing and punctuation) placed around it. The multiple senses onto which it opens are thus bound up with these always particular language relations. But, with a little help from etymology, we can see that its point of reference, what it is drawing us towards, is a particular zone of embodiment, precise forms of movement which are written into the infinite multiple onto which ‘to draw’ opens. As corporeal-becomings we are defined, in part but crucially, by the qualities of our movement, by how we move and are moved. We are always on the move, under way and on our way. Even when seemingly ‘still’ we are in the process of being moved ‘along’ by processes beyond our immediate control and awareness. Permanent change through specific forms of movement (flows, growth, decay, voluntary and involuntary propulsion, rememoration, anticipation . . .) is our living condition. Within this condition-on-the-move ‘to draw’ guides us toward a specific zone that, in part, defines us and on which, through its various forms and articulations, we are utterly dependent. ‘To draw’ names an active and passive movement-process to which our ‘living’ clings through an apparently open range of variations and breadth of reference. Those European languages indebted to both Greek and Latin carry complex residues of words drawn from a specific Latin verb from which the English verb ‘to draw’ is directly (audibly and visually) derived. The infinitive tense of this verb is trahere which, with its past participle tractum, sources multiple derivatives in common use in English. This verb’s referent is a movement directly implicated in our life-beginning and life-preserving processes: in Latin it means ‘to drag’, to draw forth

something with a degree of force. In both its active transitive and passive forms it engages us immediately with the human body’s given creaturely entanglement both with the basic elements and material processes of ‘nature’ and with multiple zones of ‘social relations’. It drags us into that strange conjunctive–disjunctive site where bodying and minding are fused while seeming to move quite independently of each other. ‘To draw’ (to drag and be-dragged) shows us that, as becomings on the move, we are always already in-between – draggers being dragged this way and that. Returning ‘draw’ to a semantic phonetic and graphic source draws attention (revealing attention itself as incessant movement) to its emphasis on our embodiment as an energised pulsed extracting. This ex-tracting (a dragging out of something) then doubles as a form of carrying. It bears something, moves it bodily, from one place to another. The closely related German word tragen explicitly bears this extra load in emphasising the ‘carrying’ that thus appears to be semantically intrinsic to the movement of ‘dragging-drawing’. ‘To drag-draw’ is, then, to transform something by bringing it forcibly forth and bearing it to an elsewhere; it embodies a process of change in some real space–time context. Its references range from the most direct contact with matter and our rooted earth-bound life-processes (to draw breath/ blood/water, to drag something from and across the earth), through the use of tools and machines (tractor, trailer), to seemingly the most figuratively (metaphorically) distant (to draw a conclusion, to draft a letter, to be ‘in drag’, or bedraggled). It can be taken as referring to our originating entry into the air-full atmospheric world of breathing and

socialising in the course of being drawn forth (perhaps dragged ‘kicking and screaming’ . . .) from our mother’s womb (the ‘primal scream’ itself being contingent on drawing one’s first breath). Its semantic field thus marks modes of movement crucial to how and what we become. Situated within this language-site, we characterise, surround, suffuse and mark ourselves by an array of drawingderived figurings. Our moving is under the permanent sway of ‘to drag/draw’. Consider, for example, the expanded field of movement opened by the prefixes attached to a range of ‘-tract-derived’ verbs (at-, con-, de-, dis-, ex-, pro-, re-, sub- and so on); they trace (there it is again) movements spanning the range of human pulsion, desire, need and social demand. The drag-family lexicon opens an unboundaried field of meaning (draught, draft, draggle, drain, drawl, dredge, dray, rack, rake, raw, ray, train, trait, trawl, tray, treat . . .) and other phonetic affiliations through words whose echoing phonemes may point to drawing-related forms of movement (drift, graph, gram . . .). Drifting within this unmappable zone it seems that ‘drawing’ is indeed ‘in common’ but lacking a fixed place. Rather, its ‘in common’ is precisely that which undoes fixity! It exposes all that we do and are as movingbecomings already on our way, as only we can be: us as drawn-drawing-becomings. We are in full spate. Kafka figures the challenge this presents to making-for-Art.

Making-for-Art Draws Draward Writing of this flow-without-end as his (and thus our) ‘journey’, he names its destination (his and our ‘end’) paradoxically

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward as ‘Away-From-Here’.7 By undoing the possibility of our destiny being identifiable as a place or end, Kafka exposes it as a movement that resists all placing work. The end to which we are condemned and forever on the way toward is precisely what, in this movement, we are already performing ceaselessly. We are ‘reaching’ it all the time without it ever being either ‘here’ or ‘there’. For Kafka (and thus for Art?) this being-drawn-on is our fate. This is the very movement that, in taking over would-be-makers-for-Art, becomes making’s all-consuming ‘subject-matter’. To show Art’s promise as its destination its only hope is to make its movement disclose its ‘difference’ to the other ways of moving on that ‘life’ offers. The forward-and-reverse movement (same-difference) enacted in the palindrome ‘draward’ repeats something of making’s ambiguous passage in turning through itself and hopefully toward Art. Drawn into Art’s wake it challenges itself to register the peculiar qualities of the way its movement embodies ‘to draw’ and ‘being drawn’. Out of this broken journeying it describes a stuttering fractured meridian. Returning through itself, it aligns a one-off near-syntax with the materials it engages on the way through. Performing’s oscillating turning movement constitutes itself through aligning its responses to whatever source materials touch it (sounds, images, earthy marking things, words, thinking bodies) with what the gest demands in the singularity of its emerging difference. The gest drags forth from the maker-performer medium-specific ‘marks’ through whose play it begins to surface. Surfacing is what the gest performs and is all that it can do. This surfacing is what appropriates both maker and

potential respondents by moving them to an elsewhere beyond their daily selves. As a depthless surfacing, its only hope of attracting and holding an attentive response (and thus of moving others and remaining lively) depends on the seductive qualities of its and our passing. Whether makingtoward-Art as novel, poem, film, musical performance, drama, installation, sculpture, painting, sketch, digital-image/composition or any inter-media combination of these and others, each gest rivets us (or not) through its specific way of passing away. It and we pass away by way of its surface alignings. Yet these out-linings are groundless. Nothing supports them ‘behind’ the gest’s surfacing except, perhaps, our possible trust in a shared sense of its hoped-for destination. Each gest is no more than the specific smooth-and-broken quality of a sequencing (its ‘pulsed’ driftings, syncopations, colourings, ascents–falls, doldrums, turns, leaps, stops–starts, breaks) the allure of whose compressed alignings may, if we trust ourselves to them, withdraw us to their ‘elsewhere’. This is drawing draward’s pulsed task: to disclose its allure in the idiosyncrasy of its aligning as it presses on towards what draws it out of itself. It is at this threshold, where the gest and its possible respondents meet, that its defining ambiguity becomes apparent. Its unpredictable cultural fate hangs on the outcome of the tension between ‘taste’s’ pre-formed ‘placing’ categories and the difference of its particularity. As we pass along its sequenced alignings, it is right there that we take on and lay ourselves open to the charged particles bearing the drawn-out traces of the maker’s embodiment. Making-for-Art thus transposes, via a transliterating leap, the maker’s embodied

‘felt-thoughts’ as they are dragged forth and shaped into materials’ absolute otherness. These alignings have nothing ‘in common’ materially with what was ‘going on’, the charged felt-thoughts, ‘within’ the maker prior to the moments of transliterating extraction. Making’s drawing, its draggingand-being-dragged-forth, is not a process of ‘expression’, a pressing-out of something inside the maker onto an external deposit-site. It transforms and compresses something touching it but untouchable into the ‘otherness’ of now materialised relations.

Drawing From Life Life’s flowing: within, without and all about, it bears us along as it flows off and away. Ungraspably imperceptible (except ‘virtually’ through the typifying abstractions generated by digital machines), it’s all up in the air! Even as we, along with immeasurable numbers of creatures and plants, act as its bearers, life remains definitively beyond us. While allowing us to become what we are and to reach out towards it, its enabling flows slip away even as we reach for them. We remain minuscule temporary participants, riveted to the ambiguity of life’s chaotic flowing away. Where might this leave making-for-Art? Realising that there isn’t some ground of clarified knowledge (about life’s disappearing flow) to which we can retreat, making-for-Art, perennially under the sway of Art’s distant Body, embodies a quite other performance. Giving itself over to and trusting implicitly in the particularity of its experience of becoming (its debt to and immersion in living’s flows), it sets out to seize this particularity. It knows it

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward can do this only by turning the flows back through and out of themselves. It thus enacts ceaselessly Art’s decreative rule for performing: all that’s airy-and-liquid congeals into solidity! Life’s evanescent airy-liquid flowing disappearance is turned into and fixed in material particulars. Each minute deposited performing-mark exposes an attempt to fix an idiosyncratically salient experience of life’s little nothings’ flowing away. Recognising the necessary challenge with which this tiny flowing particularity confronts the performer, Wallace Stevens calls it ‘the difficult inch’.8 Ever shrinking in the face of our machine probes, this elusive ‘inch’ – passing’s singularity – now seems reduced to nano-proportions. Each performing-event – dancing, enacting, writing, singing, sounding-out instrumentally, sculpting, imaging, alone or in combination – seeking to reveal its affinity with Art, is dragged draward and passes by way of drawing’s aligning linearity in leaving its mark. Laying its hands on whatever its extractions need, it hopes its sequenced out-linings will retain memory-traces of flowing’s quality despite the latter’s mutation (in Art’s name) into something solid. Rooted to the spot right here, performing aligns its elemental material deposits (this is its syn-tactic) as its response to and extraction from the ‘given’ flow. Such flow affirms its (and thus our) terrestrial-bound becoming. As corporealbecomings we are all too familiar with the ways this flow-dependency is sustained across multiple organic ‘tracts’ – respiratory, olfactory, optic . . . Within and across these sites a range of more or less fluid matters – blood, lymph, air, saliva, mucus, tears, perspiration, waste-matters and the multiple

atmosphere-borne electronic waves (light, infra-red and so on) – are drawn-dragged. In passing they reveal our flow-dependency. Giving itself over to these flows making-forArt seeks to extract its little somethings.

Making-for-Art as FlowFixer In the ‘open field site’ constituting the contemporary visual arts, the mutually intertwined flows are revealed as unavoidably ever-present motifs. Indeed the flow-quality of the traditional materials of the visual arts (dyes born through the flows of water, tempera, oil, gum, resin, acrylic; the liquefying processes in casting sculpture; compressed dusts used for drawing flowing lines/zones) show ‘flowing’ itself as their prime motif: their gests disclose a performance-defining indebtedness to these materials’ propensity. They enable the flow of matters across surfaces and sites while simultaneously allowing every flow to be stopped and fixed. Such drawn-out and fixed material flows-for-Art situate themselves within all-permeating ‘atmospherics’. Each gest surfaces ‘atmospherically’ in the ways its material marks set up a specific relation with the enveloping, charging all-flow that is life’s medium. And Art’s media offer their own unique atmosphere-bound properties and propensities. Flow-dependent, performing exposes itself as a response to the atmospherics driving and suffusing its syncopated meridian. Perhaps J.M.W. Turner’s oeuvre shows atmospherics as a limit-scene for the contemporary visual arts. His gests immerse us in a multiple unfolding of the

smallness yet highly charged vitality of a human-becoming absolutely in thrall to atmospherics. This is made explicit in his Rain, Steam, and Speed through the dissolution and mutual coalescence of all the ‘matters’ (earth and iron (supposed solids), sunlight–heat–air, water–steam) which bear us away. The iron steam-engine, a lone figuring of human ‘presence’, losing all definition and edge, barely makes it through the ‘chaos’ to the picture plane that seems to drag it back into the ambiguous coagulation. Turner exposes the givenness of our ‘setting’ (that which presses in on us and defines our possibilities) as the permeating local flows receding to infinity beyond our grasp. As sites of continuous flow-conversion, we know that our perception, our experience of our ‘lot’, is bound to this dependency and that the flows ‘outside’ us are simultaneously at work ‘inside’ us. The multiple modes of human social ‘desiring’ marking how we ‘surface’ are bound to the flows passing back and forth between our insides and outsides. We are flow-drawn-becomings now under the sway of technoscience’s epoch-defining and invasive bottomless probing of the human body and all lifeforms. In the wake of this invasion the flowing human body is itself incorporated into Art’s ‘open site’. What is ‘within’ us (life’s permeating atmospheric flows), allowing us to ‘feel-think’, can be extracted and drawn toward Art. Perhaps the first such assumed ‘extraction’ was Manzoni’s can of ‘artist’s shit’ (1961) which, with its interruption of the relation between ‘touch’ and ‘value’, ambiguated the ‘boundaries’ between Art, Culture, and the Body. And Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flower series (1992), in which casts were taken of the sculptural

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward effects of warm urine falling on snow, allows the waste-flow to become the drawing-event. It re-directs Manzoni’s gest elsewhere. Other addresses of the threshold between the body’s ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ have rendered the matter(ing) of such a boundary. Just as the engineered machinery of ‘health care’ dissolves all traditional senses of the body’s limits by taking the body with its flowdependencies beyond itself (prosthetics, transfusion, dialysis, organ-donation, genetic modification, etc.), so artists are intervening in these flow-processes to transfigure performing’s relation to the body’s (and thus life’s) now ambiguous limits. In Mona Hatoum’s Corps Étranger (1994) the camera that journeyed through her ‘interior’ passageways acted as a drawing instrument, relaying its movement-through to a sculptured audio-visual setting where spectators could follow the journey. In contrasting ways both Orlan and Stelarc make light of their bodies’ apparent boundaries by allowing them to be cut open, pierced, supplemented, attached to external machinery and re-sealed. Each body becomes simultaneously both subject-and-object of performances in which the flows (all the charged liquidsatmospherics) become vectors (of visual and/or electronic ‘signals’) that offer a body-in-difference perhaps on its way to Art’s Body. Both surface appearances and interior processes are re-drawn, shown to be malleable, through additions, attachments and signalling mechanisms that reveal the body as something (but what, now . . .?) in transition to an unknowable elsewhere (Away-From-Here . . .). And what about those weighty material flows – blood/air – whose syncopated, electronically charged and quirkily aligned

diastole–systole pulsing keep us going? Blood, with its emotive charge and symbolism, is a common constituent in the tradition of Western painting. Wherever a painting or drawing offers us warmtinted flesh we are reminded of the blood’s implied pulsing beneath the surface of skin-paint. Mark Quinn, however, takes the implications of the term ‘to draw blood’ to a very different site of sensing-feeling. For his ongoing Self series (1990 et seq.) he draws off his own blood and freezecasts it in a mould of his own head thus fixing (temporarily, given its dependency on electrical refrigeration) the passing-pulsing momentary appearance of his head. This extracted icy head cryogenically inverts (for Art’s sake) the defining indicator of our well-being – blood’s warm pulsing flow. The ‘body’, via its ‘thinking drawing self’, performs its ‘own’ extraction/reduction in order to figure in its ‘opposite’: a frozen impossible ‘moment’ of its passing away. But perhaps it is ‘air’ and ‘drawing breath’ – our atmosphere-defining and life-sustaining material processes – that confront making with its most intractably elusive challenge. Weighty but experienced as almost weightless, full but experienced as almost empty, forever on the move but experienced frequently as ‘still’, multiple but experienced in and as its intangibly singular flowing, air is the most ambiguously ‘spiritual’ of the ‘media-matters’ that provide for our creaturely embodiment. Respiring we draw and expel breath-and-sounds. But we take for granted breath’s apparent invisibility (every cartoon’s speech-balloon is offered as a ‘space’, empty but for its ‘written voicings’). Can Art figure ‘breathing-air’ by drawing us ‘into’ it as drawing drawing breath? Or can it, like Turner, only imply air’s presencing by figuring its perceptible effects (e.g. its

modes of translucence and movement as the bearer of ‘light’ and ‘energy’ (from breeze to tornado))? Our life-defining transformative relation to ‘atmospherics’ (processes of drawing-in, exchanging, expulsion) challenges making-for-Art to respond to its own local permeation by this universal but almost invisible fluxing. In her ongoing audio-visual installation Breath (2003–13)9 Shirazeh Houshiary makes respiration’s pulsion her visual motif. She generates animations of four contrasting prayer chants in which she visualises each’s pulsive motion of inhaling/ exhaling. These are shown on four screens surrounding the audience. The resulting ‘moving’ screen drawings, transliterating sound into sight, are accompanied by the merged sound of the four chants. Here drawing draws drawing-breath analogically while simultaneously audibly revealing its sound sources. In a contrasting video composition, Mouth (2008),10 Heather Phillipson reveals the supposedly ‘invisible’ act of ‘breathing’ as both solidly weighty and always already busy drawing. Her filming is a collaborative drawing project in which the filmed horse is given partial autonomy to become a partner in the drawing process through its muzzle as the active drawing instrument. Filmed very close up we see its breath coming and going as it makes its mark, coating the lens with its microscopic globules of dusty water-vapour. This is heavy breathing made visible – we see the literal material inter-dependence of atmosphere and corporeality. Giuseppe Penone responds ‘tautologically’ to the making-drawing challenge by teasing out forms that repeat, double or ‘echo’ life-processes while simultaneously exposing Art’s ‘otherness’. Breath, breathing and air recur repeatedly in multi-form ways across his oeuvre. In

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward

Heather Phillipson Still from Mouth Video composition 2009

Water Drawing (2003–07) bubbles of air, pumped up from the bottom of a pool through a fingerprint pattern, replicated this pattern at the water’s surface ‘with the rhythm of a deep breath’.11 And in the installation Respirare l’ombra (1999) the gallery walls were packed with wire boxes stuffed with deeply scented bay laurel leaves. A model of a leafy lung was set into one wall. Entering the space one drew in the leaves’ scent and thus breathed with and shared in this doubling of the forest-as-lung.12 In perhaps his most

extreme re-forming, his Soffi (1978), he offered a range of casts of his expelled breath. Seeming to press his standing body into the receiving clay, he breathed out a lungful of air which the cast registered as a heavy-weight, pear- or tear-shaped freestanding ‘drop’. Just as our body converts air before expelling it, so Penone echoed this process externally by inverting air’s ‘lightness’ into the cast’s fixed durability. But this form’s weight contrasts with the delicate lightness of Penone’s drawing in its envisaging of the ‘same’ exhaled breath.

Reminding us of the atmosphere’s real weight, each ‘Soffio’ shows our body as a double-drawer – the act of drawing breath in is followed almost immediately by an act of drawing (expiry) that shapes forth a weighty displacing but shapeless flow; this expulsion takes its place as an immediate disappearance through dispersal into and absorption by the earth-circling atmospheric band. Penone’s cast offers a ponderously ambiguous memorial to the ungraspable lightness of our beingdrawn-forth airily. And breathing’s double-action is differently transmuted into a performance in Jordan McKenzie’s ‘drawing breath’ project. Recognising that ‘this slippery thing called drawing’ is an open site of experimentation, he turns the action of breathing itself into a collaborative ‘instrument’ in the corporeal movement all drawing entails. The infinitely variable energies expended in breathing are explored for their pulsive, plosive marking potential; both the action of marking and the material used are brought closer to their strange intimacy with the visceral sourcing of ‘draw breath’.13 If Penone’s pieces give prominence to each breath’s particularity, every inspiry– expiry bearing distinctive but unnoticed qualities, Susan Skingle’s site-specific installation To the Four Winds (2013)14 draws us toward concomitant complementary aspects of the ‘breath-turn’ (Celan’s atemwende) as our embodiment-defining moment. Sited in the communal space of the ‘breakfast room’ in Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor, her piece figured our relation to atmospherics and drawing breath as essentially social. Each of four chairs, set around a dining table beneath a cloud-painted ceiling, supported a small stand on top of which, at mouth-

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward

Susan Skingle To the Four Winds Installation 2013

height, were differently shaped but closely related plaster ‘exhalations’: breaths/ voices spatialised by being drawn out into solidity. Relating itself to both the stilled cloudy ‘atmosphere’ of the ceiling above and the communal atmospherics of the dining room (supplemented by spectators’ own breathing presence in the space), the installation confronted respondents with specific ambiguities of ‘living’s’ exemplary ‘act’ of drawing – breathing-as-exchange as a challenge to making-for-Art. The four casts, ghostly solid material residues of the chairs’ late incumbents, seemed to fix a moment of ‘in-betweenness’ immediately following the act of exhalation, just when one might imagine each ‘breath’ retaining an impossible distinctive ‘identity’ (form, weight, direction).Yet the casts were ‘there’ in this convivial space of social exchange

(eating and conversing) simultaneously, all-at-once, thus exposing themselves to the question of the kind of breath-act they figured. Did their simultaneity point to an imagined perfect synchrony of four breathacts, all emerging and depositing themselves in the atmosphere at the identical moment? Or could the casts be taken as residues of four speech-acts still hanging in the air and pointing to a tension of all social discourse (speech acts, always saying both more and less than is heard and meant by each participant, necessarily speak past each other)? The casts’ material simultaneity might thus have figured a summary vision of social discourse as ‘all speaking at once’ in which each act, retaining its untranslatable difference, negates all the others: conversation as a self-wounding non-communication.

The proximity of the casts returns us to the founding context of all sociality – that our atmosphere (enclosed in the installation in the room-as-worldmicrocosm) is fundamentally social. It is being shared (by horses and all life forms), exchanged and re-constituted without end as we live-on together and apart. Being apparently unseeable (though not to Art as I hope to have shown) and beyond literal representation, the qualities of this defining social medium can only be pointed to and drawn forth through imagined transformations. Skingle stopped the action in this process of transformation at the non-existent moment just before each voice-breath’s instant disappearance through absorption by our shared atmosphere. But then, again, it could be that the chairs’ incumbents were four committed smokers simultaneously exhaling in perfect silence their distinctive smokeclouds . . . All these gests disclose in idiosyncratic ways the zone of ambiguity where making challenges itself, on Art’s behalf, to draw out felt qualities of its own being drawnforth corporeally under contextually unique conditions. Making submits itself to this un-still zone of emergent tensions knowing full well that it is always a trembling thresholdon-the-move. In taking up the challenge making performs a drawing-forth of drawing-forth itself. Gests performed in response to it seek to draw out, hold and fix the ambiguities necessarily defining making’s ‘life’ as life itself. And it is the predicament of our embodied-becoming (how ‘living’ requires us to sustain some sense of identity-continuity while in the throes of permanent metamorphosis) that challenges making to situate itself at this

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TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward

Susan Skingle Sketch for To the Four Winds Chalk on black paper 2012

tension threshold. Drawing is the generic name for activities seeking to respond to the specificity of each thresholdexperience by depositing untranslatable marks peculiar to that experience. All feeling–thinking subjects who would drawtoward-Art live and lose themselves at the conjunctive–disjunction of drawing and being-drawn-out. The will-to-draw, a charged powerlessness drawing itself across the threshold, is simultaneously drawn out of itself by something beyond it about which it knows nothing.

Endnotes 1 ‘ALEX KATZ SEEING DRAWING MAKING’, (including David Moos’s essay ‘SEEING ALEX KATZ’), Windsor, Florida/Toronto, 2009. 2 See Celan, Paul, Collected Prose, ed. Rosemary Waldrop, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999. 3 Wallace Stevens adapts Simone Weil’s sense of ‘decreation’ to his poetic vision: Stevens, Wallace, The Necessary Angel, New York:Vintage, 1951, p. 174. See also Carson, Ann, Decreation, London: Jonathan Cape, 2006, p. 167; Agamben, G., Cy Twombly: 8 Sculptures, Rome: American Academy, 1998, p. 5. 4 Carson, Decreation, p. 167. 5 Tsvetaeva, Marina, Selected Poems, trans. Elaine Feinstein, Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, p. 50. 6 Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973, p. 79.

7 Kafka, Franz, Parables and Paradoxes, New York: Schocken, 1971, p. 189. 8 Stevens, Wallace, Opus Posthumous, New York: Vintage, 1990, p. 129. 9 See Houshiary, Shirazeh, Breath, MOMA, New York, 2003, and Venice Biennale, 2013. 10 See Phillipson, Heather, Mouth, Glyn Vyvyan Gallery, Swansea, 2009. 11 Penone, quoted by A. Zevi in Giuseppe Penone, Haunch of Venison, London, 2011, p. 78. 12 See Giuseppe Penone Scultura di linfa, Electa, Verona, 2007, pp. 130–1. 13 See Jordan McKenzie’s interview at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=26nSJS2MNDs (accessed 17 October 2014). 14 See Susan Skingle in The London Group Centenary Exhibition, The London Group, London, 2013, p. 20.

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Between Formation Ilana Halperin

Ilana Halperin is an artist, originally from New York and currently based in Glasgow. Her work has been shown in recent solo exhibitions The Library at National Museums Scotland, Steine at Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité and Hand Held Lava at the Schering Stiftung; as well as Estratos: PAC Murcia, Spain and the Sharjah Biennial. She is the Artist-Curator of the geology collection of the Music Hall in Shrewsbury, the birthplace of Charles Darwin. Recent publications include Physical Geology (2010) and Neue Landmasse/New Landmass (2012).

I am a biological organism. I am alive. I am not rock, or earth, though now my father is. Last week my sister was in the hospital for risk of possible gallstones. They found traces of a stone in her body, a process of erosion had taken place and the stone was gone. We expect that we are not made of geology, but our bodies produce mineral evidence that says otherwise. Elephants, snails, horses, dogs all form stones. We are animal and mineral at the same time. We form geology. In ‘Body Geology’ and the ‘Question of the Livingness of Things’, Horst Bredekamp recounts in relation to a body stone: In the catalogue images for the World Knowledge exhibition held in Berlin in 2010, what seemed at first glance to be an unspectacular stone in fact played a major role . . . Of course, the stone initially made one think of the field of geology, but closer research revealed that its archiving and its expensive storage were a product of corporeal mineralogy, not geology . . . The stone is fascinating because, as a mineral, it is a thing;

Physical Geology (cave cast/slow time) 19 x 23 cm Limestone sculpture formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire 2008–09 but in its prehistory, it was part of an organism. In this it represents a mystery that remains to this day. By being produced in an organic body and then being expelled or removed as a foreign body, the stone crosses the boundary between nature’s two realms: the world of mineralogy and the world of life, which remain unreconciled despite numerous attempts to construct a bridge between them.1

In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels asked, ‘at what moment does limestone become

marble?’2 Not long ago we went to a quarry in Ledmore in northern Scotland. Simon explained that around 535 million years ago, the marble here mostly began as stromatolite-bearing limestone. Stromatolites are among the first traces of organic life on earth. The stromatolites died, were crushed, compressed, turned into limestone and cooked by new rock that ground its way through fissures in the dolomite (a near relation of limestone). And

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Between Formation marble occurred. Though stromatolites and coral are found on different branches of the phylogenetic tree, both eventually become stone. We will too, or our bones will. I spoke with a palaeontologist who told me a fossil is the presentation of the moment of death. However, trace fossils record an action – eating or walking, but not the organism itself. Air bubbles imprint someone breathing 300 million years ago onto the surface of what will become sandstone, movement through mud after an ancient tropical storm reveals a moment of contact unearthed, a winding line now in stone.You could say that a drawing is a trace fossil of a moment, an idea, proof of life. We make contact. Movement through space and time, layers of thought (material) accumulate. Strata of activity. Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them. (John McPhee)3

Every object (drawing) is a record (trace fossil) of its own formation. Sometimes these processes slip between animal, vegetable and mineral. Simultaneously formation and result. A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure. (Anne Carson)4

I have been assembling a library of rocks and minerals – composed of books of mica,

limestone volumes laid down in sheets, etched stone surfaces 800 million years old. ‘Between Formation’ is an excerpt from ‘The Library’. A drawing becomes a file, a file becomes a mark made by a robotic arm enacting miniature volcanic eruptions along the surface of a mineral. A series of actions embed into a geological object that began as a paper cut. Peaks and valleys of crystalline formation merge somewhere between a drawing, a sculpture, a gestural performance, a print. One object can be all these things at once and something entirely different at the same time.

Physical Geology While conducting research at the Manchester Museum, in the oddities drawer of the geology department I came across a small stone relief sculpture that appeared to be carved out of pure white alabaster. It was not. In a small thermal town in the mountains of the Auvergne in France, seven generations ago Eric Papon’s family founded the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire to create cave casts – limestone sculptures made via the same process that forms stalactites in a cave. In a normal limestone cave it takes 100 years for a stalactite to grow one centimetre, in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes one centimetre grows in one year. Through an elaborate process, carbonate waterfalls are directed

over 25-metre-high ‘casting ladders’ located inside a volcanic mountain. Eric places objects on the rungs of each ladder. Quickly objects become covered in a new layer of calcium carbonate – limestone. Bones and coral are material cousins, also composed of calcium carbonate. In re-visiting historical geological art processes such as cave casting, I began to develop ideas for physical geological artworks – art objects formed within a geological or deep time context. In 2008 we began to work together in the caves. To date, I have made a new series of cave casts which formed over the course of ten months in the calcifying springs of the Fontaines Pétrifiantes. The last casts were cracked open to coincide with my 36th birthday in September 2009. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few million years. Though ten months is not long in a geological time context, within daily life a lot can happen in almost a year. A person can form, and we can form geology. Ancient and technologically advanced modes of production were employed to arrive at these unique objects of pure geology, including traditional copper plate etching, collage, virtual modelling, rapid prototyping and limestone encrustation. The cave cast can be likened to a drawing, a record of incremental change.

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Between Formation

Physical Geology (cave cast/slow time) 19 x 23 cm Limestone sculpture formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire 2008–09

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Between Formation

Excerpts from The Library We found mica in the forest, way up north in a now disused quarry, first opened during World War II to provide supplies for electrical insulation. For years, the skyscrapers in New York were firmly planted in mid-town and down at the end of the island not by choice, but because there the dense pegmatite-rich rock was exposed at the surface – mica-schist strong enough to hold the weight of towers. This same type of rock inhabits the coast of Maine, vast areas of Scotland and Riverside Park along the Hudson. As a kid growing up, I know mica from streets that glinted in the sun, playgrounds peopled by boulders that seemed made of silver and gold, rocks on the beach with layers you could peel open like pages in a book. Peter told me mineral samples of mica are sometimes termed books. My mother remembers finding books of mica in the alley next to the building where she grew up in Brooklyn. Edgar Allan Poe lived across from Riverside Park when he is rumoured to have written The Raven. If you find a stone in the area and leave it on the granite plaque on West 83rd street, your book of mica becomes part of a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I imagine all these volumes together. A library composed of only rocks and minerals, every layer another narrative.

Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Inverness-shire and Maine mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013

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Between Formation

Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Inverness-shire and Maine mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013

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Between Formation Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Inverness-shire and Maine mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013

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Between Formation To assemble this chapter of The Library each unique book of mica had a drawing laser etched onto its surface. Hand-drawn images were made for every book of mica on a digital drawing tablet, before the etching process took place. Now, drawings have been melted and recrystallised into a mineral context and a new trace fossil has emerged, made in equal part by hand and machine.

Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Inverness-shire and Maine mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013

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Between Formation vv

The Mineral Body Back in the caves, I formed a series of limestone sculptures called The Mineral Body over the course of four months in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire. They began as paper cuts, then laser and wood, now wood encrusted in limestone. New landmass of a cultural nature. Cultural landmass.

The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013

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Between Formation

The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013

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Between Formation

The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013

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Between Formation

The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013

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Between Formation

We Form Geology I had a memory of seeing a cross section of an old pipe in the geology collection of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. It’s about a foot wide, though you can hardly see through it as a thick geothermal mineral deposit formed inside like the start of a clogged geological artery. Building on earlier investigations into the formation of culturally occurring landmass, I began working on a new series of geothermally occurring sculptures. These geological

artworks formed through the deep arctic winter and glowing midnight sun over the course of one year in the 84° Celsius mineral-rich waters of the Blue Lagoon, an active geothermal spring in Iceland. To begin, I made graphite drawings, imagining forms that would allow mineral deposits to cling to every crevice. These drawings were scanned, reformatted and fed into a laser cutter at the Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Studio to prepare a set of wooden stencils for the encrustation process. In Iceland, with the help of Hannes Johannson,

I submerged the wooden stencils into the run-off pool from the geothermal power plant which feeds the Blue Lagoon. There the stencils rapidly encrusted in a new silica mineral deposit over this period of formation – this time made in part by hand, machine and through the by-product of a volcano. The surface of each drawing (object) is akin to gypsum flowers, new snowfall on a cold day, hand crocheted lace, something woven, something found out in the remote world, in another time, in another place and now.

We Form Geology Wood with natural mineral deposit 62 x 45 cm Formed in the Blue Lagoon March 2011–March 2012

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Between Formation

Proof of Life I hold a rock in my hand. I am nervous. Through each pore of my palm microscopic geysers erupt, sweat against stone. I un-flex. A momentary imprint on the surface of this small geology, life and not life, stone and not stone. An apparition of heat, sweat and nerves appear like looking out the window of a moving car, condensation of breath against glass. A trace of contact. Two objects come together and form something new. A drawing as proof of life. A trace fossil of activity manifests in each moment alive.

A Bridge Between the Living and the Dying Colour print 50 x 40 cm 2011

Endnotes 1 Bredekamp, Horst, ‘On the Question of the Livingness of Things’, in S. Barnes and A. Patrizio (eds), New Landmass/Neue Landmasse, Berlin: Shering Stiftung, 2012, p. 38. 2 Michaels, Anne, Fugitive Pieces, New York: Vintage Books, 1998, p. 140. 3 McPhee, John, Annals of the Former World, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, p. 156. 4 Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red, New York: Vintage Books, 1998, p. 105.

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The Idiom of the Mark Rob Ward

Rob Ward is a lecturer at University Centre Doncaster teaching Art History and Printmaking. In his practice and art writing he is interested in how ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’ can be brought together as mutually exclusive responses leading to elusive interpretations of art works. He has exhibited widely and co-produced combinations of visual/textual work with Phil Sawdon for the online journal Stimulus– Respond. He has given papers at Tate Liverpool, Staffordshire University, University of Hull and University Centre Doncaster.

Seven Essays These short essays deal with the aspects of mark making that often get overlooked. After all, marks are usually the things that facilitate the ‘greater picture’. In the first essay there is an extrapolation of the game that Magritte sets going in his famous This is not a Pipe where anything on the surface of this picture must abide by the already set ‘rules’, including the artist’s signature. Other pieces explore how the ambiguity of the mark can elicit perverse readings as well as open up hermeneutical possibilities. Two playful dialogues ponder over issues such as ‘what is a point, what is a line?’ and how a determined interpretation of a drawing overrides ‘original’ intensions. The theme of seeing versus reading appears in the essay on Apollinaire’s Calligrammes and the notion of a pictorial ‘syntax’ is approached in another essay. The last essay concerns bi-stable images and illusions applied to works of art that are

metaphorical and paradoxical conditions that obtain in contemporary readings.

The Vanishing Magritte In the eloquent and humorous essay on the well-known painting by René Magritte, Ceci n’est pas une Pipe (This is not a Pipe)1 Michel Foucault examines, toys with and teases out a myriad of possible interpretations that occur when text and image collide in what would appear to be the same idiomatic space. Idiomatic is here used to connote the sense of two different ‘languages’ that are, however, misrepresented as though they were transparently translatable. These are the realms of words and images. Foucault writes about the image of the pipe and the text beneath it claiming: No longer do they have a common ground nor a place where they can meet, where words are capable of taking shape and images of entering a lexical order. The slender, colourless neutral strip which in Magritte’s drawing separates the text and the figure, must be seen as a crevasse – an uncertain foggy region now dividing the pipe floating in its imagistic heaven from the mundane tramp of words marching in their successive line.

It is this ‘crevasse’ that one is invited to explore here, bearing in mind that it is of a liminal thickness whose location is not as well defined as ‘above’ or ‘below’, but perhaps permeates an undecidable figural/ lexical ‘fog’.

Despite Foucault’s thoroughness in his exposition in this essay there is one aspect of the Magritte painting that he understandably overlooks. Another text hides unobtrusively in the bottom righthand corner of the painting, almost merging into the background in its shaded response depicting –

Magritte The reason that it is overlooked is that Magritte’s signature is what is expected to appear on a painting by Magritte. It is as contingent as the stretched canvas, the pins that hold it to the stretcher and the paint that sits on its surface. It ‘makes up’ the wherewithal that becomes the conceit of a picture. It is a conventional figuration that ought to play no part in the drama occurring on the picture plane and whose duty is to verify the authentication that would have in earlier times be preceded, or followed by the Latin, ‘fecit’. But is it a text? It is a metonymic device that ‘stands for’ the artist insomuch as the painting itself (its style) also contributes to authentication as one of its consequences. A graphologist might attempt to draw out of the squiggly line a ‘temperament’, a personality, a scuttling serpentine trail of animated molten candle wax like the nightmarish forms in his 1936 painting La Meditation. As such it is a presence, but the place it resides in has been violated by the painting’s deliberate self-disruption. Magritte (the man) has confounded himself in the interstices of text and image as the ‘painted’ name belongs to the double realm

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The Idiom of the Mark of seeing/reading and hovers uncertain of its purpose. To what does the line that seems to spell out Magritte’s name belong? It has been signed, not with a flourish associated with completion, but simply sits unassumingly in the bottom righthand corner as one would find in any other painting by the artist – a mark set aside as having nothing to say apart from asserting, ‘This is the sign of one who painted this picture.’ Even in paintings by the same artist that juxtapose incongruous image and text, the signature fulfils its conventional role of authentication. Here Magritte bides its time, remaining as a double presence, beguiling both the spectator and the artist himself, who, perhaps because of adherence to conventions, are blind to its other significance in spite of either of each one’s cognisance of philosophical and psychological implications. Only in this particular painting does it matter more because of the internal dynamics that perpetuate throughout its schema. The painted words in the ‘visual’ field deny ‘reading’ the name simultaneously with ‘looking’ at it, whilst the text to be read foregoes its pictorial sense analogically with the ‘pipe’ and its abjuration. The ‘signature’ has been erased twice! In the first instance by its sublimation at the moment it concedes to ‘paint’. (Could potential forgers wishing to avoid prosecution when copying a signed work of art, claim in their defence that they did not intend to plagiarise the signature [that which changes a ‘copy’ into an intentionally felonious act] but that they merely reproduced brushstroke for brushstroke – only the visual elements that at one

location appeared to be ‘like’ a signature?) In the second instance, as text it is under interrogation in a space where ‘This is not . . .’ may confer upon the signature the status of a pariah. The name has lost its bearings and has mysteriously been unnamed. The denotation has become uncanny in its loss of signifier where would-be repetition is never identical. Signatures are elusive things in that they sit on the surface of pictures, taking no part in their pictorialness. Yet they too have a ‘style’ of their own – essentially so – they are ‘signatures’ of signatures. Albrecht Dürer’s unmistakable monogram stamped his seal of ownership of his craft (it signalled, ‘woe betide anyone who dared to bootleg any of his oeuvre!’), whereas, Van Gogh’s ‘Vincent’ offers a handwritten token of friendship – we are meant to be on first-name terms – despite the artist’s claim that he signed it in that way because the ‘locals’ could not pronounce his family name.2 Artists’ signatures that once occupied a surface vaguely ‘on top of’ the picture plane began to be embedded in the facture. In so doing they elicited a duplicity that may or may not have been intentional. Signatures embedded in the same manner in which the rest of the painting is executed can be read as being ‘on’ the painting or ‘on’ a surface depicted within the painting. In order to explain this it will be necessary to become absurdly literalist in the specific instance of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) where ‘Vincent’ appears to be on the surface of the vase holding the flowers. This may indeed be the case, however unlikely. Thus, in Still Life with Twelve Sunflowers (91 x 72 cm) in the Neue Pinakotek, Munich, Van Gogh’s signature in red is placed on the pale

greenish lower half of the vase. In Still Life with Fifteen Sunflowers (92.1 x 73 cm) in the National Gallery, London, ‘Vincent’ lies above the halfway line in pale blue on ochre. This configuration is repeated on copies that Van Gogh made of these works in 1889. The question that an overzealous researcher might pose is, ‘Did Van Gogh own two vases, each with his name inscribed on them: one below the mid-line and the other above?’ Though these observations are tenuous at best and trivially so, they serve to highlight the potential for the obfuscation of the pictorial and the literal. The full title of Magritte’s painting often assumed to be Ceci n’est pas une Pipe, is not mentioned by Foucault. It is, in fact, La Trahison des Images (translated as The Treason of Images). ‘Trahison’ can also mean ‘betrayal’ – The Betrayal of Images appears to offer even more ambiguity as to who is betraying whom – the images the words or the words the images; the words as fifth-columnist images, or the images as double-agent words.

Magritte

‘on’ the picture and

Magritte

‘in’ the picture not only reside in different ‘places’, they do so as pictures and as text in each location simultaneously. In an interview Magritte was heard to have said that he himself was – in fact, all of us were – a mystery. Like Snarks and Boojums in Lewis Carroll, or hypothetical dead-and-alive cats in quantum theory, the very act of interpretation inverts itself. What should be the definitive act of presence becomes the undefined mark of absence.

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Cryptomorphs – Hermeneutic Terrorists Who has not, on a lazy summer’s day, idly stared at passing cumulus clouds and imagined faces, strange distorted animals, creatures of the imagination? Indeed, Leonardo and many other reputable Renaissance artists advocated stimulating the creative imagination by staring at old decrepit walls where all manner of fantastic landscapes could be deciphered. Of course, the walls themselves were not to be literally copied, but were intended as a kind of distraction from outworn familiar habits and therefore provoked fresh ideas and visions. In the twentieth century Max Ernst took these delirious practices to new heights in his frottages and grattages where the grain on cupboard doors or parquet floors was covered with paper and rubbed through with pencil or chalk, or, where paint was applied and scraped off and printed, combined suggestive forms illustrating dark narratives. In these instances, there is an adoption of an aleatory process in the making of art. The artist intends the use of such serendipity associations, full of metaphorical potential. Certain knots cannot be seen to be other than ‘eyes’; close, undulating wood grain, has to be the ‘sea’ when the context is finally closed by reference to other pictorial components (for instance: ears, mouth, boats, fish). These aleamorphs are what James Elkins3 describes as, ‘collaborative projects between “nature” and the artist’. In chapter seven of his book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?: On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity, he distinguishes between the images that have just been described, and the kind of ambiguous images that are speculatory:

images with marks that suggest hidden intensions. These are cryptomorphs and Elkins suggests that there is a ‘conceptual sequence leading from aleamorphs (which are merely seen) to cryptomorphs (which are imitations of aleamorphs)’.4 Elkins’ chapter is all about hidden images and how over the centuries they have served to allegorise and amuse, offering ways of seeing that range from the mystical to the scatological. A third category – the anamorph – is an image hidden by extreme distortion, either by perspectival distortion or ‘encoded’ in such a way that a device such as a mirrored cylinder placed on top reveals the true picture. Perspective distortions appear most famously in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) where the anamorphic shape in the foreground is revealed as a skull when viewed from the extreme right hand side. Aimed with more satirical irreverence are the skewed pornographic and scatological scenes by Erhard Schön (c. 1537). But it is the cryptomorph that engages Elkins, particularly from the angle of a writer about art. What troubles him is that what one can say about art, what one has gathered over time and experience, what one regards as the interpretive potential of artworks can be corroded by the disruptively promiscuous ‘discovery’ of hidden images – images that, to all intents, should not be there! Examples include faces seen in Dürer’s studies of pillows, a vulture in Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne, and the crosssection of the human brain enclosing the figure of God in Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel. In an extreme case he cites Sidney Geist’s interpretation of Cézanne’s Small Houses at Auvers (1873)5 in which ‘the three

main masses of the landscape comprise the female torso, lying stomach up; the pubis is the slender triangular hill that enters from the right, and the hills above and below are the thighs.’6 Geist’s imagination takes him to further embellish this sexual metaphor by ‘discovering’ in the shapes above the house the female labia being groped by a hand. Whilst it is tempting to dismiss without hesitation the absurdity of such an interpretation, Elkins laments: Since Giorgione, landscapes have been traditional carriers of half-hidden puns on the curves and rhythms of the body. Given Cézanne’s earlier work and the history of eroticized landscape, it may begin to seem as if the only way to argue against Geist is to urge that his psychoanalytic preoccupations are modern, or that they miss the meanings of Cézanne’s enterprise: but those are weak objections, resting as they do on a sense of propriety and a ‘proper’ or conventional interpretation of Cézanne.’7

What makes a cryptomorph dangerous is its capacity to override meaning. Once discovered, or hinted at, it sticks! The image stays and becomes the solution to a puzzle. It is this derogation of the mysterious and the plenitudinous nature of art to the level of legerdemain that so irks Elkins – but which is nevertheless unarguable. Elkins’ thesis is that modern approaches to art-critical writing have opened up a hermeneutical chasm where normative interpretation is destabilised. It is here that the seekers of cryptomorphs take on their terrorist roles. More run-of-the-mill interpretations take time to read, and sometimes also to see, and in that time we can bring our own thoughts to bear and resist the impending conclusion. If careful, slow interpretation is

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The Idiom of the Mark like a garden in its variety and its different sources of pleasure, cryptomorphs are like deforestation: they burn the variegated flora of the picture into charred stubble. In that regard the best-hidden images are the most dangerous, because when they are sprung on us they release a force often greater than the sum total of previous interpretations. The act of revealing fully hidden cryptomorphs is an act of terrorism against pictorial sense.8

The feeling of having something precious spoilt by an invasive association has a parallel when great music is used as a bathetic accompaniment to TV advertisements. Likened to viruses, cryptomorphs elude analysis unless interrogated in detail, to reveal their limitations – the very things that stall the hermeneutic project. If our minds are fixed on finding the hidden image, then, why can we not extrapolate the process to seek out hidden images within the hidden image? Elkins thinks that this has never been achieved when he writes: From a psychoanalytic standpoint it is also significant that no one who finds hidden images finds hidden images within hidden images. Once the cryptomorph is found, the interpretation is finished. It would be very strange, I think, to read about an image hidden in another hidden image, almost as if it were an illness within an illness, or a symptom within a symptom.9

He does, however, come close in his own response to Salvador Dalí’s painting

The Endless Enigma (1938), in which a plethora of hidden images overlap one another to the extent that Dalí produced a ‘key’ to their deciphering. Elkins calls it, ‘a dispiriting image: I tend to get exhausted looking at it, and give up looking for Dalí’s solutions.’10 If a hidden image were to reside inside a hidden image, there would be no reference for it to form against a normative ‘ground’. If a cryptomorph were to be sought within a cryptomorph, it would not only destroy the original cryptomorph by virtue of reconfiguring marks that assembled themselves in a particular way, but would facilitate its own destabilisation by mutual suspicion. The spectator of such a phenomenon would be hard pressed to know what they were looking at, let alone what they were looking for! This is the effect that The Endless Enigma produces. Pictures, it would appear, seem to need explaining. That is the purpose of aesthetic hermeneutics. But there is a difference between the explication offered to a work of art which enriches its appreciation that opens up ever newer considerations, and the puzzle-solving approach that culminates with an answer, as Elkins comments, ‘The pictures would be “solved”, explained in their innermost recesses and therefore essentially put into words.’11This is a kind of anti-ekphrasis, where the verbal assertions serve to impoverish the picture being described.

In the twentieth century the move towards abstraction in painting both encouraged and discouraged this kind of speculation. Kandinsky certainly appears to leave ‘remnants’ of his earlier figurative elements in his later work. One can ‘decipher’ ‘Cossacks’ lances’ and oniondomed ‘buildings’ appearing in what are ostensibly abstract paintings. But then there are ‘purer’ modernist forms such as works by Mondrian,12 Hofmann and Albers in which shapes and colours could not harbour representational cryptomorphs because they do not re-present at all. The immunised paintings of Greenbergian Formalism resist the temptation and offer instead a connoisseurship of the mark in its own right. Given that we are now able to appreciate a ‘blot’ as a blot we can concur with James Elkins when he writes: It is significant that it never occurred to Rorschach to ask his patients what they thought of the abstract blots themselves. Instead, they were encouraged to see something else, to ‘solve’ the ‘meaningless images by creative hallucinations.

Which reminds me of the Emo Philips joke: when he was asked by the psychiatrist what the ink blot looked like he replied: ‘Well, uh, to me, um, it looks like, uh, standard pattern number 3 in the Rorschach series to test obsessive compulsiveness.’

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Pornoplantae ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ (Attributed to Sigmund Freud)

They turned out to be unequivocally very pornographic images. Hardly unequivocally – after all, they were innocent drawings with nothing to do with sex! They were very sexy drawings, I can tell you! Everyone noticed that – apart from the students themselves. You mean they were asked to do drawings of plants and didn’t notice that the results had sexual overtones? More than overtones – how could they mistake the shapes, the qualities – how could they not mistake the shapes, the qualities for sensual body parts? Go on then, what were they asked to do? What were they required to look at, and how did they approach the project? The brief was an exercise in observational drawing, to investigate the qualities of plants, seeds and pods. The drawings were to be scaled up many times larger than life size. Most of the drawings were in charcoal, although some students used charcoal and black ink. All were monochrome. The drawings of the plants as a whole

just looked like representational botanical studies, but then they began to enlarge details – blow them up so that they took on ambiguous properties. But plants, fruit and such, have throughout the history of art been used as metaphors for sensuality. Think of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, or in the twentieth century, Georgia O’Keefe emphasised the sexiness of flowers, as later did Mapplethorpe. ‘A juice rides rich through bluebells!’ Sensuality – yes! But these drawings went further! One could say they were perverse! These were Hans Bellmer plants! Bean pods that had burst open displaying yoni-like openings in whose soft interior finger-like tendrils explored, infusing them with a pulpy ripeness. Inside lay the beans themselves, provoking a prurient arousal, their slippery skins splitting to reveal raw, lush polished corpuscles yielding a milky excretion. Other pods would replicate the lingam forming tumescent rows of depraved siliquae whose lewd exposure revealed licentious intensions. Some were sap filled and ready to explode whilst others were dehiscent and had exhausted their lecherous passions. Where the two came in contact, thrust together in a careless embrace, one could only stare at the orgy of rampaging stems and swollen stigmas. As they were drawn with ever more detailed attention, their prurient behaviour exposed itself more and more. Whole lines of racemes, remnants of floral intercourse found their counterpart of vaginal openings, bellies of swollen fructification offering themselves

to a pulsating tumidity. Unsatisfied with monogamous couplings, they diversified in their arrangements, displaying their promiscuous animalistic wantonness. Juices exuded from each concupiscent receptacle in the sultry heat of the bacchanal. As the pressure rose, seams were split, revealing rows of seeds aligned along trembling septa. Wombs now emptied of their providence would flaunt their lustful eagerness to copulate lasciviously with all and sundry. The drawings were fleshy. Line varied in a moment from soft silky plumpness to tight and wiry sinew. Shading brought out all the voluptuousness of swollen mass. Texture gave the surfaces their convincing touch of corporeality. Hard-edged lines followed sensual curves entering the hollow puckering receptacles softened by the rubbing of the stump, the tortillon or the tender smudging of the finger. These were drawings that should have been given restricted viewing. Instead, they were exhibited for a critique in which everyone who sat in on it only talked about formal qualities. Composition, weight, balance, texture, measurement and quality of line: these were, it appeared, all that could be given consideration. Was this due to their ignorance of visual metaphor, or, were they so focused on the task, the effort of transformation through an objective exercise? But they were just drawings, weren’t they? Were they . . . were they?

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The Idiom of the Mark

Calligrammes Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poèmes de la Paix et de la Guerre published in 1918 were unconventional ‘war poems’, being concerned more with consolidating avant-garde allegiances than expressing outrage at the slaughter then taking place in the trenches. Calligrammes was considered by Apollinaire to be a new way of expressing ideas by combining simultaneously word and image. Playful typographic arrangements have long been an ancillary feature of Western literature occurring, for example, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and more cogently in Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hazard (1897). But it was with the Italian Futurists and Dadaists that the page became a ‘canvas’ expressing the letter form as if it were part of a Cubist collage. In fact, it was Cubism’s bridging of the gap between art and life that introduced text as a legitimate pictorial device – that is, pictorial and textual. Nineteenth-century painters of modern life had casually introduced trade names and café hoardings into their paintings (Sisley’s 1872 and 1876 paintings of Flood at Port Marly, or Manet’s Bar at the FoliesBergère (1882), for example). However, the difference between this use of text in the picture and Cubism’s collage of actual text on its surface is that in the latter case newspaper, for instance, is simultaneously a physical presence and a representation of that presence. It is the idea of simultaneity of ‘reading’ and ‘looking’ that bonds Cubism, and other early modernist practices to the psychological intensions underlying Calligrammes. Michel Foucault takes issue with the capacity to ‘look at’ and read at the same

time in his aforementioned Ceci n’est pas une Pipe. He thought that the two activities were mutually exclusive and that, when approaching a word/picture, the effect was like looking at the well-known illusion,13 the duckrabbit – when one sees a duck, the rabbit disappears, and vice versa– analogically, when one looks at the image made from words one is unable to read them, or, when one reads, one does not register the image. Katherine Shingler’s essay ‘Perceiving Text and Image’ in Apollinaire’s Calligrammes14 opposes Foucault’s claim that essentially ‘viewing the calligramme as a picture involves attention to global features of the poem, whereas reading involves attention to a local level of detail.’15 Foucault argues that the key word ‘attention’ cannot be applied to both. Shingler refers to a number of psychological experiments and tests that have attempted to show what happens when seeing and reading coincide. Among these, she refers to the measurement of the direction of the eyes when confronted with a word-picture but concludes that: [S]canpaths alone do not allow us to say a great deal about the extent to which visual and verbal aspects are dealt with concurrently, or separately. Although it is possible to identify in these images sequences of fixations which are suggestive of reading (because the eye seems to move from word to word within a sequence), and others which are more suggestive of viewing (because the gaze is not tracking a sequence of words), it may be difficult to identify the precise point at which the subject ‘switches’ between the two processes. Moreover, some eye movement records are ambiguous, in that it is not immediately obvious whether a sequence of fixations represents either reading or viewing.16

There is, however, another aspect to the issue that takes into consideration features of our everyday experience that deal with awareness of our immediate environment. Reading, even under normal circumstances is a complex act dealing with global and local switches of attention. We switch from individual letters to patterns that make up phrases, sentences and paragraph and while there is a discrepancy between awareness of the visual and the verbal, It does not follow from this, however, that we retain no awareness whatsoever of the aspect of the poem not attended to. Our attention to one aspect of the poem means that our awareness is biased towards that aspect; and yet that aspect need not be the sole object of our awareness.17

It would appear that most of these experiments lead to the conclusion that ‘global’ aspects associated with seeing shape cannot be overridden: they persist at some level of awareness even when attention is directed at detailed ‘local’ aspects. But, experience tells us that reading does not involve the methodical attention to each individual word in every sentence but is, in fact, based upon a global awareness of shape as Shingler writes: [S]patial coding hypothesis reveals that readers do not focus attention exclusively on one word at a time, or read in a purely linear way opposed to the global awareness required in picture perception; rather, global awareness of the arrangement of text on the page is very much built into the reading process – and this applies even in the case of texts where layout is not a salient feature.18

What all this amounts to is a subtle shift from Foucault’s original thesis and instead claims that in experiencing a calligramme,

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A

A

Much of what has been written here assumes that the ‘global’ aspect refers to the image made from the local elements of text. However, by acknowledging that reading per se is also a searching for shape patterns, it becomes less clear what is considered to be ‘global’. Also, later on in her essay, she cites the now familiar psychological phenomenon called the Stroop effect in which letters that spell out the name of a colour are made of a different colour. When the subject exposed to the image is asked to name the actual colour they find that it takes a great deal of effort to suppress, say, the word ‘red’ in order to recognise in it the colour blue. This would indicate that reading predominates over the attention to undifferentiated visual phenomena. Interesting as these forays into the testing of perception are, there are limitations that hinder resolution of the seeing/reading issue that have, perhaps, a more complex basis. One of the reasons that Apollinaire firmly believed that Calligrammes could be seen and read simultaneously might be simply because he wrote them, that is, he was entirely

Pictograms have undergone considerable changes in shape before they ended up as the letters we recognize today. A began as a pictogram illustrating the head of an ox. It looked like this    . Phoenician scribes wrote right to left and so drew the sideways because it was quicker. The Greeks, who adopted Phoenician letters generally wrote left to right and so turned the around although at one period they used a system called Boustrophedon which translates as ‘the ox ploughs’ and which proceeds from left to right on the first line (so points likewise) right to left on the second (so points that way) back again on the third and so on. Other letters also reversed themselves according to the direction.20 A

[E]xperiments did nevertheless demonstrate that it is possible for readers to attend to global information without interference from the local level. This does not, however, provide support for the second part of Foucault’s argument, which consists in the claim that viewing the calligrammes – attending to their global pictorial structure – excludes awareness of letters and words.19

Boustrophedon. Alan Fletcher, author of The Art of Looking Sideways explains:

A

However, she concludes that,

familiar with each aspect in much the same way that a musician, after numerous rehearsals scans and takes in hundreds of notes and notations synchronizing chords in space and rhythms and melody in time to make the gestalt that is a sonata. All previous speculation, including Foucault’s, takes the position of being confronted for the first time and possibly oversimplifies the problem. Perhaps ‘imagetexts’ can be learned in the way that other codified systems are; for instance, in the pictogram and the ideogram. Pictograms are visual symbols that stand for ‘things’ whilst ideograms are visual symbols that stand for ‘ideas’. A simple example of a pictogram would be a symbol of a knife and fork representing ‘knife and a fork’, whereas, the same symbol as an ideogram (in a standard Western culturally understood stereotype) would represent ‘restaurant’. The key to ideograms, of course, is a presumption based upon cultural inculcation. In the ideogram, the knife and the fork form one symbol, ‘knifeandfork’ = place to eat. If Calligrammes is thought of a series of pictograms then the images created by the words are simple re-constructions of literal meaning, and in Foucault’s terms are tautological. However, Apollinaire wanted both aspects to combine and enhance one another to produce an effect that was greater than the separate effects of text and image. In this sense they would be ideogrammatical, though, unlike simple communication signage, they would retain the complex resonances of language and pictures. A more interesting situation arises if one thinks of written language itself as being essentially calligramatic. In order to secure an angle on this it will be necessary to consider a form of writing called

A

[I]t would be impossible to direct one’s attention exclusively to local word forms and be completely unaware of the calligramme’s global shape.

Although the Greeks standardised the direction of their writing as left to right around 500 BCE, Boustrophedonic writing attests to a human desire to make reading into an action analogically coupled to description, explaining and demonstrating at the same time. Apollinaire’s Calligrammes runs to 200 pages and consists of numerous conventionally laid out poetic formats such as Les Fenêtres, as well as the renowned picture poems, La Cravate et La Montre, for instance, that sits alongside the conventional, Un Fantôme de Nuées showing that the poet did not discriminate between the two approaches, not giving precedence to one or the other form. Indeed, such a mix implies that Calligrammes was conceived as literature. The casual shift from the conventional poem to the image-poem reflects the times and the situation that Apollinaire found himself in. At one stage during the war, he was safely behind the front lines musing on the

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The Idiom of the Mark

Untitled Digital drawing 2013

distant shell bursts as if they were a giant firework display, then, posted to the front, he received the shrapnel wound to his head that all but killed him. The resurgence of word pictures at the beginning of the twentieth century can be seen as a revolt against rationality. Prior to the Futurists’ contempt for the rationality that espoused peace, and Dada’s disdain for the rationality that precipitated war, there was dissatisfaction with an age of reason that was becoming evident through cultural expressions of irrationality. In typography this revolt was aimed at the prison bars of the ‘grid’ that constrained shapes to mechanically replicated forms, as Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller explain:

A committee established by Louis XIV in 1693 further idealized the alphabet. Embracing the current passion for scientific method, the romain du roi imposed an orthogonal grid over the organic forms of traditional lettering. Italic letters were generated by shifting the grid, a procedure divorced from calligraphy and prophetic of the mathematical distortions enabled by nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies.21

Calligrammes is an expression of exuberance (a strange word to use in the context of the war – though it is not uncommon to come across such sentiments). As a review of a 2005 republication testifies,22 the poems are still widely read today. They come into a

time that is variously described as postmodern, yet they continue a version of Modernism that relished experimentation and cross-pollination of different disciplines and genres. Contrary to the purist and formalist versions of art that derive from Lessing’s Laocoon, to the proscriptive declarations of Greenberg’s ‘mediumspecificity’, Calligrammes offers up a playful counterpart, unsullied by over-theorisation. Apollinaire believed in ‘the materiality of words’, and the same could be said for the Cubist works of his friend Picasso. They are present and they re-present themselves at the same time; that is to say, they are both ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ – simultaneously!

All images opposite Untitled Digital drawing 2013

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The Idiom of the Mark

Klee’s Walk around the Block23 RW: Points?

RW: Perhaps we can use a convention to show us where?

PK: There’s a point beyond the point that never can be seen.

PK: Conventions only estimate. Such is the arrow.

RW: Then, what do you call a line that lies between the points?

PK: Here!

RW: Is the arrow’s ‘point’ the true point? PK: It can never be! RW: . . . And the ‘line’?

PK: Two points, here.

PK: They have no dimensions, that’s why.

RW: So we can see it? PK: See this line— RW: Your line! PK: It has width! Magnified larger – magnified, it becomes a ‘block!

RW: Which ones?

RW: I can’t see them. Where?

PK: Indeed! We have to ‘draw’ the line – a line that’s a ‘block’.

PK: —Also! RW: So?

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The Idiom of the Mark RW: And on a larger scale it enters into the world. PK: So, taking a line for a walk – in this case – taking a block for a walk round a line! RW: Possibly taking it outside? PK: Outside of the ‘frame’? RW: Out/in(side). PK: A(side).

PK: The fundamental particle – to the galactic clusters at the edges of space – man, woman, animal, flower. RW: Connected by line! PK: From two points. RW: Just two? PK: Two!

RW: Ends. PK: Two ends. RW: Beginning? PK: Beginning/ending. RW: Beginning and ending the page? PK: Authorized from the beginning – ending off the page.

RW: Borders . . . PK: The edges RW: Coming together— PK: Drawing the line that demarcates. RW: Demarcates things from things and how we are to ‘see’ them. PK: Piero della Francesca had a formula. He said that the best viewing distance from a picture was two and a half times its width. RW: But what is the ‘width’ of the picture of which you speak? PK: It could be on a micro scale – or smaller even—! RW: Nano, pico, femto, atto. PK: Zepto and yocto! RW: A Planck length! PK: Space–time’s smallest scale! RW: Below which, ‘vision’ makes no sense. PK: Or, outside of the frame the line becomes material. It ruptures the boundaries of the aesthetic and enters the world of material things. RW: Although, this ‘material’ world is also in a ‘frame’? PK: Enclosed, bracketed and rule-bound. RW: Give an example.

Untitled Digital drawing 2013

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The Idiom of the Mark

The Syntactic Error The story goes that Roy Lichtenstein, as an unsuccessful artist, was reading to his son a comic book that contained images using the rigid coloured-dot technique to stand for gradations of tone. These Ben-Day 24 dots, as they are called, were to become Lichtenstein’s hallmark and were responsible for his success and unique contribution to American Pop Art. Ben– Day dots are all a uniform size and are a cruder version of halftone dots created by a photographic process that varies their size to give the image smoother transitions between tones and colours. Of course, Lichtenstein saw the graphic potential of emphasising and enlarging the cruder dots to become an essential part of the pictorial facture emulating the effects of ephemeral printed material. Photo-mechanical halftones were once common as a way of reproducing photographs in newspapers and magazines. Depending on the number of dpi (dots per inch), the image produced could have a relatively high resolution (many dots per inch) or could have a very visible dotted surface (few dots per inch). Large billboard posters, seen close up would reveal these halftones in terms of colour separations where rosettes of yellow, blue, magenta and black would combine optically at a distance to give a convincing reproduction of a colour photograph. Photographs of course appear to show a continuous merging of tone and colour. They are, nevertheless, equally bound by a ‘grain’ that is fine enough to deceive the eye into believing it is not present. This level of fine grain can now be achieved with the advent of digital halftones, and commercial printing can now

reproduce relatively cheaply the fine-grain images of true photographic quality. The development of technologies to commercially reproduce images over the last 150 years has been one of refinement. From artisanal wood engravings to photomechanical and digital reproductions, the aim has been to obliterate the thing that gets in the way of ‘seeing’ the image in its ‘pure’ state. Conversely, in the art of the same period, the tendency has been to enshroud the pictorial in a camouflage of mark-making strategies that range from effects of the brush to sophisticated distortions brought about by processes such as photography, cine film and printmaking. Whilst we in the twenty-first century are able to assimilate both ways of seeing images, it would be inconceivable, for instance, for a newspaper to show an image of a tragic event using painterly marks (such as those found on Photoshop). ‘Transparently’ seeing through to the image is associated with ‘reality’ whilst a ‘raster’ consigns an image to the realm of artifice. Our capacity to ‘read’ the halftone as a ‘barrier’ is what makes Warhol’s screenprints of tragic events less poignant in that the technical process is foregrounded, thus diverting the ‘story’ from ‘reality’ to ‘commercial sensationalism’. It is as though we are primed to ignore the dots in images when we accept factuality, but are drawn towards the dots in order to interrogate that factuality. It is an interesting point that we are able to make sense of images at all that are enshrouded in ‘nets’ such as are found in engravings where black-and-white lines intersect and weave across the surface. Andrew Harrison brings up this issue in his chapter ‘A Minimal Syntax for the Pictorial’:

It ought to astonish us more than it does how ready we are to construe the depicting surface in the appropriate way. For example, we very rarely see a portrait in pen and ink, or an engraving, as a picture of a face encased in a net or a landscape similarly constructed as crossed by fissures and paths. But such construals are possible. Often they would be simple mistakes. Sometimes they might be recognized . . . as correct, if disturbing, ways of regarding the picture, sometimes (more interestingly, and I suspect, more often) as uneasy and expressive possibilities lurking in the wings of our pictorial understanding. Quite rarely, I suspect, people very new to a medium may make such a simple mistaken misconstrual: a syntactic mistake. 25

One could, under such circumstances, imagine Lichtenstein Jr asking his father why the women in his pictures all seem to be suffering from measles. Though, even at a very early age we seem to be able to accept a range of configurations of an image constructed from the most diverse elements. As Harrison says, ‘In pictures as in language, syntax is what makes semantics possible.’26 Syntactic ambiguities are most likely to arise in images that are monochromatic, or, restricted to one medium such as pen and ink drawings or engravings. Obviously, the repertoire of marks often means that sometimes a gesture will ‘stand’ for one thing and then be reused for something entirely different. An example might be lines used to describe grass in a landscape could equally be used to describe hair on the head of someone sat in the landscape. The context obviously resolves the issue, even though such a misconstrual could have interesting consequences in a surreal sense. Even in the hands of a master engraver such as Thomas Bewick, texture of bird feathers could be rendered in the same way as

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The Idiom of the Mark tree bark. One has to believe that ‘feather’ and ‘bark’ were intended, as opposed to ‘texture’ as such. The ‘semantics’ of a picture depend upon a tacit understanding of the context of the marks that go into its construction. Harrison gives the example of how the understanding of a late Cézanne painting of Mount St Victoire would have been impossible without Impressionism and what came before it. The hatchings, blobs of colour, clustering of frenetic brush strokes to describe rocks, trees and buildings would have been meaningless 50 years before (and were to some extent in his lifetime, which drew him to compare his fate with that of the fictional painter Frenhofer, the mad, incomprehensible character in Balzac’s 1837 short story, The Unknown Masterpiece). In the construction industry the rendering of materials in black and white follows a certain convention, so that each material has its own codified hatching method. So, finely dispersed dots may stand for plaster or cement whereas the same dots with shards – small triangles or quadrilaterals mixed in – represent concrete. Lead is rendered by cross-hatched diagonal lines and aluminium is similar but more widely spaced apart. Bronze consists of pairs of vertical lines, one continuous and one broken up into dashes and iron and steel, or metal in general, is shown as diagonal lines running from bottom

left to top right. Whilst these codes have the advantage of enabling a construction engineer to select the correct materials for a purpose, they carry information only as information, somewhere ‘between’ intension and a surface that can be appreciated, seen and touched. In other words, such renderings are not syntactical; they (in themselves) make no pictorial sense. Lichtenstein’s droll outlines and mechanical surface patterns speak of antiexpression in their hackneyed appearance. The images may be read, of course, naively as expressions of emotions depicted in the original comic book scenarios. One is invited to participate as a spectator in the drama of the subject and relish the irony of its unveiling. Art like his was intended as a riposte to the excess of Abstract Expressionism, with its insistence on the ‘deep’ significance of the mark. Nonrepresentational mark making such as this claims autonomy where representation always risks ‘error’ in its eidetic formulation. But this is based upon the assumption that the ‘mark’ itself carries direct meaningful expression, and that the spectator is able not only to recognise its ingenuousness, but also feel palpably the resonance it produces. The question arises whether these responses, imbued by the artist and colluded with the spectator are intrinsic to the mark itself, if, as has been asserted before, the semantics of a picture are

governed by what is deemed acceptable in a particular time. Not only does a new recourse to mark making involve a new way of reading, so there can often be a left-over remnant of a previous historical understanding that influences inappropriately ‘the pattern of visual salience’, to use Harrison’s term. We have learned to respond to the gestural mark and go along with what it is supposed to convey. However, there are more complex issues at large that only reveal themselves when we cut through the filter of a received approach. Harrison goes on to say: Briefly, if we think of such qualities as ‘gestural’ qualities, deriving from the emotionally appropriate gesture involved in their making, they are essentially neither causally construable symptoms of the maker’s state of mind nor construable as causally productive of a corresponding state of mind in the beholder. One doesn’t have to be relaxed to be able to draw a relaxed line, nor relaxed to recognize one. Such qualities are ‘detached’ from their ‘original’ symptomatic occurrence by certain cultural capacities we possess. These are related to our ability to act in a manner dissociated from how we may feel (much as an actor performs) and to do so without lying to or misleading one another.27

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The Idiom of the Mark

What is Wrong with These Pictures? In previous sections discussions have centred on mark making as the vehicle that clarifies or obfuscates pictorial sense. These are marks that are made on a surface to be read as text or that conform to a figuration that visually satisfies in its own right. There are, of course, images that deliberately confuse by virtue of their refusal to be understood in a single gestalt. These bi-stable images include familiar illusions such as the duckrabbit, the wife and motherin-law puzzle, and the Necker cube. Picture puzzles have amused people throughout the ages, ranging from optical ‘mind benders’ such as those above, to observation ‘testers’ including those juxtapositions of two almost identical images where one is asked to ‘spot the differences’. Here is an example taken from a children’s encyclopaedia c. 1907. Obviously, this encyclopaedia was intended for very privileged and erudite Edwardian children in that the ‘wrongness’ in the flower, for instance, was in the inconsistency of the number of stamens to the number of petals, or, that ‘Ich Dien’, not ‘Dieu et mon Droit’, is the motto of the Prince of Wales! What is wrong in the pictures is to do with detecting anomalies in comparison with a perceived ‘reality’. It is significant that in the same year that these images were published Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was exhibited, fomenting suspicions about what was wrong with these pictures. Alternatively, it could be construed that something was wrong with ‘reality’ in a phenomenological, as well as socio-political, sense. After all, this was a mere six years before the madness of the Great War.

What is Wrong in These Pictures? The Children’s Encyclopaedia c. 1907

In the eighteenth-century genre of the ‘chap book’, a form of cheaply printed ephemera made available to a wide readership, The World Turned Upside Down featured satirical woodcuts depicting odd reversals of normality. In them children were shown as adults (woefully) caring for their parents; horses rode on the backs of riders, cooks were roasted in front of the fire by cows, pigs and chickens, and oxen worked the plough pulled by two farmers. Goya’s Tú que no Puedes (You who Cannot) in his Los Caprichos series published in 1799 is based on a similar theme. The theme of reversal was underlined by the vogue for

making pictures that reconfigured when they were literally turned upside down. An example might be a portrait of beautiful woman, whose carefully shaped coiffure, when turned around, would become the similarly styled beard of a gnarled old man. At the start of the twentieth century, Gustave Verbeck’s cartoon strip in the New York Herald called The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo,28 featured images in each of the vignettes that changed the story line when turned upside down. Whilst much of what has been discussed can be considered as lighthearted amusement, upside-down-ness is nevertheless a metaphor for madness, for the unnatural perversity that lurks behind normality. In Freud’s terms, it reflects ‘the Uncanny’. In the Tarot, ‘The Upside Down World’ stands for unfulfilled potential, one interpretation of which is the condition that afflicts the allegorical figure in Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514).29 Upside-down figures in Baselitz and Beckmann share an existential anxiety. Anxiety accompanies any picture puzzle, either because one is initially unsure what demands the puzzle makes and also because there is an encounter prescribed with no guarantee of resolution. They are intrinsically pictorial and yet they deny our aesthetic satisfaction. In this way they exert a potential outside of the context of normative pictorial relationships. Jasper Johns included many of them in his paintings and prints. The Seasons (Spring 1987) contains the ‘duckrabbit’ and the ‘Rubin’s Vase’, and an untitled 1998 carborundum etching/engraving includes the nineteenth-century version of the wife and mother-in-law illusion. Johns is the master of the ambiguous mark. In his early work his choices of ‘emblematic’

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The Idiom of the Mark imagery such as targets, flags, maps, numbers and letter forms – images that are indistinguishable from the objects they represent posed problematical readings of what his work was about. Every aspect of Johns’ painting contributes a conscious significance: the physical construction of the support and the way that the surface is manipulated, the choice of media and the way they are applied are indications that nothing that appears in his iconography is simply ‘decorative’. Ambiguity and duality permeate his work in the form of his ‘subject matter’ and its ontological status, and the indexicality of printing – a visual metonym for the presence that made the printed mark, as well as the potential for reproducibility inherent in the process. Bi-stable figures can be thought of as elements in his repertoire that perform what they endeavour to explain and, at the same time, revoke what they have performed. Johns’ paintings can be thought of as anxiously revelatory – supremely autobiographical and at the same time coldly obscure, suggesting disillusionment with art’s inadequacy to express authenticity. Johns absorbed philosophical ideas and was known to have read Wittgenstein who discussed the duckrabbit in his Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein distinguished between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as’, so one could see a figure of the rabbit or the duck quite simply as such. However, when one switches between the two, something else happens that is more difficult to explain: ‘The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged. ’30 Wittgenstein thought that a ‘new’ perception is not merely an ‘interpretation’ of the situation, but that

our experience of the world changes. Johns could be alluding to this ontological anxiety experienced when the spectator is confronted by his paintings. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn describes the worldview changes in scientific thinking (such as the change from the Newtonian to the Relativistic view) as paradigm shifts. When a paradigm shift occurs, observations of the same phenomena are interpreted in old and new ways that partly explain phenomena in their own terms but are incommensurable in each other’s terms. He uses the image of the duckrabbit to illustrate this oscillation of propositions. In physics, as in the visual illusion, a resolution would depend on there being a stabilising meta-world, one that, like a Logos, put things in their proper place. The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit . . . As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn.31

If one looks at ‘marks’ and refuses their seductive beckoning to become things other than themselves, there is a chance

that all this instability will disappear and all will be resolved. This, however, is an incomprehensible hypothesis in that before the mark (‘before’ understood temporally and spatially) there is intension. The maker of the mark, in the time it takes to execute it, has already imbued it with a surplus. Likewise, spectators bring to it their own re-presentation. Ambiguity is the essence, and the incommensurability of pictorial idioms is grace. Thankfully, if it quacks like a duck then it’s probably a rabbit.

Loose Ends Conclusions are an anathema if what we mean by them is that something has been ‘solved’. The very openness to interpretation of the mark can lead down some very odd and weirdly speculative avenues, but it can also be the clue to more revealing interpretations of pictures. Letters, words and text have for over 100 years been part of the legitimate strategy of image making such that they assume an ambiguity of being ‘written’ or ‘drawn’. Ambiguous results would, in many disciplines, be regarded as a failure, yet in pictorial presentation it is the very lack of resolution that drives the interest and creativity of the spectator and the artist.

Endnotes 1 Foucault, M., This is not a Pipe, Berkeley and Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983, p. 28. 2 Van Gogh’s letter to Theo, 24 March 1888. 3 Elkins, J., Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?: On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 180. 4 Ibid., p. 181.

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The Idiom of the Mark 5 Geist, S., Interpreting Cézanne, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 6 Elkins, pp. 213–14. 7 Ibid., pp. 214–15. 8 Ibid., p. 203. 9 Ibid., p. 218. 10 Ibid., p. 223. 11 Ibid., p. 227. 12 It is more difficult to claim for an artist such as Mondrian that he did not ‘hide something’ in the structure of his abstraction, especially when considering the long developmental stage preceding the later work. 13 The psychologist John F. Kihlstrom in an unpublished letter to Trends in the Cognitive Sciences states that the duckrabbit is not strictly speaking an illusion but rather ‘an ambiguous (or reversible, or bistable) figure’ and goes on to explain the difference between the two. From a constructivist point of view, many illusions illustrate the role of unconscious inferences in perception, while the ambiguous figures illustrate the role of expectations, worldknowledge, and the direction of attention. 14 Shingler, K., ‘Perceiving Text and Image in Apollinaire’s Calligrammes’, Paragraph, 34, pp. 66–85, DOI 10.3366/para.2011.0006, ISSN 0264-8334, available online March 2011. 15 Ibid., p. 71 (online version p. 6).

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24

25

Ibid., p. 75 (online version p. 10). Ibid., p. 76 (online version p. 11). Ibid., p. 79 (online version p. 14). Ibid. Fletcher, A., The Art of Looking Sideways, London: Phaedon, 2001, p. 173. Lupton, E. and Miller, J.A., Design Writing Research:Writing on Graphic Design, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. ‘Conflicting Emotions: Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes Reveals a Modernism Unmatched by English Poets of the First World War, says Stephen Romer’, Guardian, 19 March 2005. The fictional dialogue is written in ‘syllabic’ prose where the number of syllables in each complete phrase or sentence complies with the Fibonacci series of numbers (e.g. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.). The rule was chosen such that syllables in alternate sentences could go up or down in number only by one Fibonacci increment, (thus 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 5, 3 etc.). Named after the illustrator Benjamin Henry Day who employed their use in the late nineteenth century as a means to reproduce tone in line engraving. Lichtenstein, of course, enlarged and emphasised them to become essential elements in the pictorial facture. Harrison, A., ‘A Minimal Syntax for the Pictorial’, in S. Kemal and I. Gaskell (eds), The

26 27 28 29

30 31

Language of Art History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 218. Ibid. Ibid., p. 234. Gustave Verbeck [Verbeek] (1867–1937) comic strip in the New York Herald from 11 October 1903 to 15 January 1905. Dürer’s engraving shows a deliberate contrast between the inaction of the Melancholia (sic), and the strenuous efforts of the scribbling putto. And, more important, the Melancholia is idle and the women in the earlier illustrations have abandoned their distaffs for entirely opposite reasons. These lowly creatures have gone to sleep out of sheer laziness. The Melancholia, on the contrary, is what may be called superawake; her fixed stare is one of intent though fruitless searching. She is inactive not because she is too lazy to work but because work has become meaningless to her; her energy is paralysed not by sleep but by thought. Panofsky, E., The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955, p. 160. Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 3rd edn, p. 166. Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 3rd edn, p. 114.

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Trailing Temporal Trace Deborah Harty

Deborah Harty is an artist-researcher and Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. She has been actively involved in TRACEY drawing and visualisation research since 2006, becoming a co-director in 2011. Harty’s current research seeks to investigate the premise ‘drawing is phenomenology’ through practice-led research incorporating: large-scale drawing installations, writings and collaborative moving-image works. She is actively involved in the drawing research community, regularly exhibiting and publishing.

Trailing . . . I know myself only in my inherence in time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in ambiguity.1

The chapter will traverse a wandering line from this moment of departure, marking its trace to consider: if drawing is the most immediate and spontaneous media, capable of recording not only the movement but also the thoughts of the drawer whilst drawing,2 could drawing be said to be the ambiguity through which we know ourselves? When we draw we are situated, a mark inhabiting space and time, an embodied blot. We are inherently embodied in a world, a world that is our environment, an environment as a background, a background with a surface upon which we draw our attention. We are necessarily situated as incarnate beings born into and inhabiting a world within which our perceptual experiences

trail i, ii, iii, iv Compressed charcoal and graphite on paper Dimensions: variable 2006

are grounded. We cannot be but in these confines, in our inherent situatedness, and as such we are grounded beings existing and inhabiting the situation into which we find ourselves thrown.3 The wandering line we traverse will necessarily be a line across, through and within: the marks and movements traced, erased and retraced within this finite inhabited physical space. But before we begin to draw upon the surface, a pause to consider:

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Trailing Temporal Trace

pause i–ix Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2008–12

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Trailing Temporal Trace

lines of existence Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Trailing Temporal Trace With our first attentions we scar the surface of our world, our space of potentiality: energising the background through our interaction with the surface. We leave a trace, a mark of our particular way of being towards the world: the mark of our attention against the background of our world. Background as the world we are inherently in; the surface our individual way of interacting with that world through our own particular attentions and focus of perception, which shape our lived experience. The background, our world, is potentiality; the surface, our particular mode of existing, of attending to our perceptual experience. The background as such is necessarily ambiguous: we conceive of its presence although our attention can never be fully turned towards it, for it too will become the surface we mark through the trace of our attentions. In other words, the background will cease to be background once we objectify it through our attentions. As our focus and attentions are generally absorbed in the matter at hand, we are often unaware of the relationship between the surface and the background; instead we are attentive to, and absorbed in, the matter at hand. We are nevertheless, experiencing and perceiving that which we aren’t necessarily attentive to. Perceiving more than is made explicit to us. In MerleauPontian terms, ‘The system of experience is not arrayed before me as if I were God, it is lived by me from a certain point of view which makes possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon a complete world as a horizon of every perception.’4 Synonymous with a drawn surface, our attentions trace, denote and mark our trail in varying densities: from the heavy

dark mark and score of deep attentive awareness, to the most delicate and barely perceptible trace of our attentiveness drawn in requiescence. The variance in our attentiveness trails our lived experiences, although we are not always consciously aware of the experiences that mark and trace our surface. Within the background potentiality of our lived experiences there are many layers of varying densities. We are often oblivious to the myriad of experiences that we move towards, in and through during waking hours: oblivious in the sense that we are unable to consciously recall every detail, every mark and blot trailed across the surface. We recall significant perceptions of experiences to which we have been attentive: those that leave perceptible surface traces. However, through ongoing everyday experiences we lose consciousness of the background of our world. Although we may not be attentive to our perceptions, we quickly become alerted to the appearance of an unfamiliar mark. For example, during a habitual journey, such as walking to work, we can become oblivious to the perceptions of our surroundings; we are, in essence, inattentive to our state of experiencing. This is not because we do not perceive anything, but, due to the familiarity of the experience of walking the same route, we become inattentive to the experience and unaware of our perceptions. The experience has become a part of our ongoing everyday experiences: the marks on the surface retraced and barely perceptible in difference. We are awakened from this inattentive mode of being and become attentive to our perceptions as the trace deviates from and fails to retrace its trail. This could be due to a slight change in the physical or

psychological self, in the environment, or the addition of any mark not previously perceived and therefore traced upon the surface. To retrace, in the context of the habitual journey, if an unexpected mark suddenly became part of that experience the appearance of such would generate an increased awareness of perceptions. For example, if a part of the trail normally taken is resurfaced or an injury to the leg necessitates negotiating the same journey by means of crutches, the advent of this unfamiliar mark would initiate an arousal from the usual inattentive state. This would result in an attentive or, most probably in the case of an injury, an acute awareness of the environment. Every slight deviation in the surface would become noticeable and require full attention in order to prevent further injury. The presence of the crutches would also create an awareness of the physical self through the increased effort required to be mobile and the discomfort and tension caused in the body. These elements would all serve the purpose of creating awareness of both the self and the environment, as the changing mark exists outside of the normal realm of expected stimuli. However, as with any retraced experience, learned behaviour or skill, after a period of time the crutches would become a familiar part of everyday experience. The negotiation of the trail would once again become habitual, resulting in ignorance to the perceptions of the journey; the trace, through familiarity, would be absorbed into the surface.5 An experience that we can recall through its traces brings with it awareness of the surroundings, of another, of the self as an entity undergoing something out of the ordinary, or a combination of all of these marks.

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Trailing Temporal Trace

passage (detail) Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 1050 x 230 cm 2013

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Trailing Temporal Trace Lives have the potential to be caught up in the everyday, tracing, erasing and retracing habitual marks: layering barely perceivable surface traces through traversing invariable experiences. However, the surface is marked with perceptible, audible deviations and marks as traces of our attentive awareness: our perceptible experiences. These can be drawn upon us: subjecting us to unexpected tones marking attentive awareness to our world. Or intentionally drawn . . . I mark this surface guiding the fingertips to trace the mind’s trail, light and line drawing the trailing text. Momentarily I am here and now, outlining a determined background, a lightly toned and textured surface, outlines of awareness tracing soft tonal edge to the focal attention. Marks appear, are erased. Tonal edges shift in the audible trace. Attentive to the text, necessarily aware of the environment: attentive to bodily discomforts, necessarily aware I am here.

. . . drawn through attentive awareness or engaging in the unfamiliar: necessarily involving becoming acutely aware of our surroundings, ourselves, or both simultaneously. ‘Attention is the movement of perception from indeterminate to the determinate by the creation of contexts that transform what is perceived. This passage from indeterminate to determinate is thought itself.’6 Thought as mark traced across the surface. Passage traces attentive awareness, a capturing of the marks that form everyday experience and perceptions appearing to consciousness. Moments to be aware, to turn the inattentive gaze to the surface in order to make the less than perceptible appear visible, audible in their trace – a conscious effort to capture the momentary.

The charcoal-laden blackened surface is as a background: a delineation of the world within which all traces would be determined. Synonymous with a world, the background has a surface, a blackened surface anticipating the marks and scores that will inevitably trail – some deliberate, made consciously through the movement of graphite in response to attentions; some the trace of the concentrated physical interaction. The linguistic marks upon the surface pursuing, through language, the perceptions experienced during the process of drawing. Each mark drawn without grammatical interruptions, : ? or structure allowing marks to become intertwined, tracing the perceptual experience without distinguishing individual blots, scores or tones. Here the perception is ambiguous in its trace. Thoughts and perceptions are momentary, elusive to capture in their entirety. This is as to experience rather than as to observation. Thoughts and perceptions are fleeting, our awareness often momentary and fluctuating between the inner world of thought and the visible, tactile and audible marks of our situatedness. Until consciously turning attention to these in detail most will pass without notice. Whilst drawing, Passage itself becomes part of attentive awareness; part of the environment drawing is trailing. As the trace of words seek out articulation their presence distracts the attention, as focus centres around the meaning the words form on the surface. They cease to be marks trailing thought, becoming instead the focus of attention, leading the trail in response to their appearance. Retracing, this was potentially due to the familiarity of the linguistic marks leading to a felt

need for coherence in and of themselves. However, as the trail continued, it became clear that the once-focal language receded, leaving the trace of thought through the surface marks. The absence of grammar and punctuation erased attention from linguistic meaning: returning the trace of marks to the trail of thought. The surface marked with more than the sum of the language used to inscribe the trace. Attentive awareness appears in fragments of the interaction of the media on the surface and through the glimpses of coherence in the structure of the marks. We are left with a trace of that which has been present to consciousness. However, it is necessarily ambiguous as traced also is the background of our attentive awareness: marks that leave their barely discernible trace whilst remaining inherently there. Whilst drawing, there are moments of focused attention layered with marks of fusion: where we are no longer aware of ourselves as separate from the world that is our background. A moment when we are so absorbed, we become a part of the mark and trace in and on the surface.7 This shifting from attentiveness to absorption is traced into the surface of the drawing, trailing the shifting of awareness in consciousness. The marks capture essences of what we have been aware of without fully describing them. Through the fragments and corresponding absences, the space in between, we perceive. Synonymous with consciousness of our world we make sense of the trail even though it is presented to us as a fragment. The drawing in this sense is a physical trace of the attentive awareness in the world as our background. However, there is also a trace of duration inscribed in the lines that trail bodily presence and movement.

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Trailing Temporal Trace

outlines of awareness Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Trailing Temporal Trace

Temporal . . . A line is made by the movement of a point . . . the point may be compared to an instant in time, and the line may be likened to the length of a certain quantity of time . . .8

From mark to line, a line that wanders across the surface through time in rhythm with our bodily incarnate. We are necessarily situated in the here and now, physically grounded within our world. The body is our means of interaction with the physical world and a source of all our perceptual experiences; ‘perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception.’9 As such, the body is our mediator, a mediator between the self and the world: where the self touches the world and leaves its trace upon the surface. As MerleauPonty suggests, ‘rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embodied in those things.’10 It is in this sense that we are embodied within a particular environment, the physical space of our perceptual lines. The movement of our physical self: tracing temporal lines across the surface; a physical trace of a portion of time visible in the line. Time that is testament to the bodily presence, which enabled its being. As incarnate beings we are temporal, we exist within a finite temporal line due to our mortality. We are necessarily finite, we come-into-being, our line drawn towards the nothingness that will see our line cease to trace. This is our reality. Within, upon and through that finite line we will retrace, attempt to erase and redraw. We will, at times, perceive that our line is unending; however, the line will inevitably reach its

limits – the limits determined by the reality of our finiteness. Our awareness of the finiteness of the line is essentially time awareness: the line we trace upon the surface moving from coming-into-being drawing across the surface in a continual path. Time in this sense is experienced as a continuum. A continual moving, marking, tracing of our experience as opposed to a series of instants of separate marks and blots on the surface. Our time consciousness is connected and continual.11 We can conceive of a past, present and future; however, we do not perceive of time as a series of joined together moments. As we retrace we can clearly determine a series of blots, blemishes and smudges as distinct memories of the past. Or draw forward to specific instants in anticipation of the wavering of our line. Time consciousness, however, does not draw in series of instants: we experience the continuum. We experience our time awareness as essentially past, present and future but not as distinct points within a line. We are aware of the past at the same time as we are already projecting to the future; the potentiality that we anticipate will come into existence. In this sense the present is not a pause or an instant but rather a surface between the departing past and imminent future. A surface with a temporal line continually moving forwards towards the future. In each moment we are projecting forward, we don’t at any point within lived experience stop or break the line. Even in moments of bodily pause our thoughts continue, the body breathes, heart beats, the line continues. In that sense we are never able to capture a moment in consciousness, time is constantly moving

forward leaving its line across the surface. We are unable, in thought, to capture that moment; any capture of a moment will be a retracing of the line hoping to relive the moment as present. ‘In fact, between myself who have just thought this, and myself who am thinking that I have just thought it, there is interposed already a thickness of duration, so that I may always doubt whether that thought which has already passed was indeed such as I now see it to have been.’12 We are inherently within the here and now, situated through our physical incarnation. We also conversely transcend this time and place through our ability to project our thoughts to the future, or the past or to imaginatively draw a line anywhere within our world. Not all lines on the surface within our world are the lines of direct perceptual experience. Merleau-Ponty suggests that we are both here and now and everywhere in every time.13 Through the mediation of our body we are situated, through the mind’s transcendence we are free within the space of our background. At any given moment the line we traverse may wander between, in and through these opposing points. It is possible to be simultaneously situated whilst transcending: the body still whilst the mind wanders; the body in movement whilst the mind is quiet; the body and mind simultaneously drawing the line. Synonymous with this lived experience drawing traces these opposing positions onto the surface, overlapping, drawing layers over the surface in a myriad of lines. Wonder in the face of the world/world in the face of wonder traces the temporal line through and on the surface. The triptych traces the passage between past, present and future: it is simultaneously all and none.

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Trailing Temporal Trace The child doll abandoned in the corner of a seemingly small room stares blankly at the floor: a frozen moment in time. She awaits the presence of another in order for her being to begin its line. She is present here and now. She is also a past: a doll of childhood waiting in a moment of frozen time. Waiting for the child, who has long since traversed the line, never to be retraced. The moment is fixed, determined, the moment past but conversely ever present in the image that will never change, the line ceased in this moment. The drawn marks documenting a line lived, traced and past: the line of the doll and the line of the drawer. The drawing also traces an imagined future. The line of the mother: watching, waiting for the daughter to traverse the line of childhood never to be retraced. She follows the imagined line to the space on the surface where nurturing no longer creates a trace. The future as a memory of the childhood dolls left in time as she traversed that same line. The space, a desire to prolong the nurtured duration. The drawing: situated here and now, everywhere and everytime. Our lines cross and diverge, briefly draw together before parting. The line of our lived situation, wandering through and in the space of the opposing marks of grounded transcendence is necessarily ambiguous. We are not able to be self-present as we simultaneously are both mind with body embodied in our world through time. We are unable to live in the moment, to experience the present as present, it is always a present caught between two opposing points of past and future. As such our experience is ambiguous. We have the background of

a world that we are unable to turn our attentive awareness to. We are unable to be fully situated or fully transcendent: we are always traversing a line which draws in the tension of these two opposing marks. Synonymous with the child doll, we are a space of tension and contradiction; we are inherently situated in the here and now, whilst simultaneously beyond through our transcendence as spiritual beings.14 Necessarily our conscious existence will be ambiguous: conceiving opposing physical and spiritual marks with which to draw its line. ‘In other words, ambiguity is of the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think has always several meanings.’15 However, as the very essence of our existence, we are mostly unaware of this lived ambiguity. In everyday experience there is a composition to this lived reality: our surface lines and marks interweave, creating a surface of lived coherence. Ambiguity reveals its mark when we retrace and turn our attention to a specific line or mark. In an attempt to determine the line as it is traced we become aware of its ambiguous wandering. A line we are unable to mark or cross with a point of inbetweenness; a dissecting point between opposition. Instead, the complexity of the line is marked with shifting perceptions of attentiveness, marking the tension of a space of combination within the ambiguous line we are traversing. Bodily and spiritual intentions combine without equal or defined appearance. Consequently, we are unable to determine the exact point at which the opposing points meet, join or overlap. Ambiguity is the space of combination of marks, blots, blemishes and lines, which combine to form the

rich surface of lived existence against the background of our world. The temporal nature of our embodied existence draws a further layer over the complexity of our surface through the trace of our temporal existence. To retrace, we have time awareness through the reality of our mortal existence as we are drawn between birth and death. This temporality is experienced through a variety of marks and lines across the surface: the traces of our bodily and spiritual marks as past, present and, as we continue to wander, future projections of anticipated lines. If we begin to unpick this surface to try and decipher its paths, its meanings, we will find a ‘network of relationships’ drawing across, through and in the space of ambiguity.16 Our reality of opposing combinations against the background of our world necessarily creates a complex network: where individual marks are undecipherable and perplexing but when viewed in relation to one another capture our lived reality and as such speak back to us. Were we to attempt to unravel this complex network we would find ourselves wandering a series of interconnected lines without end or distinction, such is the interdependent nature of the marks of our lived experience. We are unable to unravel them, to traverse their individual paths or find meaning in their individuality. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, ‘Man is but a network of relationships . . .’17 The interdependence of the network ‘is what gives humanity its very qualities, and by dissecting it, we risk losing the very thing that enables us as humans.’18 The trace of the interdependent network upon the surface of our world: the trace of what it is to draw.

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Trailing Temporal Trace

wonder in the face of the world/world in the face of wonder part i Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

wonder in the face of the world/world in the face of wonder part ii Graphite on paper 59.4 x 42 cm 2013

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Trailing Temporal Trace

the nursling Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Trailing Temporal Trace

Trace . . . When we look, we enter the intimate space of a work that is as close to the action of an artist’s thought as one can get.19

To draw as a trace: a trace that is said to trail the most immediate and intimate of creative lines, of this most are in agreement – the immediacy of tracing a line, a mark, a smudge, across, through and on the surface, regardless of media/regardless of surface; the intimacy of the confined space, a minimal space between the tool that extends from and is moved by the body and the awaiting corresponding space that will trail the trace. This intimate space captures our physical traces as we pursue lines and compress marks of dust into the awaiting surface, the space of potentiality. The marks energise the surface of the drawing as our experiential marks and lines energise the surface of our world. The body as mediator between the world and self also acts as the means to scar the surface of the drawing, developing traces as a record of the bodily movements in space. As an extension of the body the tool is as the body and as such leaves its trace without interpretation: not a retracing of the movement of the physical being, a direct trace of bodily movement. To draw a trace: a trace that is said to trail the closest line to the thoughts of the drawer, of this most are in agreement. A trace of the thought processes, shifts in perception and consciousness through the traces upon the surface. The inability to erase without trace the marks and lines of the energised surface deemed responsible for this ability of drawing. Synonymous with our situation as incarnate and spiritual beings, drawing traces the opposing marks

of our lived reality; physically we are here and now, grounded within the background that is our world; spiritually we are every­ where at everytime, we transcend. In this trace drawing is ambiguity. Drawing, through its immediacy of means, reduces the space between the drawer and the drawing – leaving marks on the surface regardless of erasure – creating a visible trace of both the process of making and the drawer’s thoughts. ‘. . . the act of drawing makes possible the magical identity between thought and action because to draw is the quickest medium and can therefore protect the intensity of thought.’20 The visible traces of the movement of mind with body create a varied surface from the darkest marks of physical pressure to the barely visible or audible marks, lines and smudges, which have sought out the surface through their traces of the embodied self. Synonymous with the sense of fusion we sometimes have with our world, a sense of being a part of rather than separate to the environment, drawing for duration induces this same mark. Mind, body, world, trace and trail merge in the marks appearing on the surface. Our awareness is inattentive to any perception during fusion: as part of the environment, we mark the background; we are a barely visible or audible trace upon the surface. Whilst we are not attentive we still perceive and experience, we still trace the drawing’s surface although our experience is barely perceptible. The traces of fusion trail the surface of the drawing: they exist as background, perceptible but indistinguishable as individual marks. In this trace drawing is ambiguity. Duration traces the moments of fusion: the movement of the embodied self

absorbed in the surface of its world, rhythmically moving across the blackened background of the drawing. The rhythm traced in and through the temporal flow of linear marks. The process of drawing – the speed of application, pressure applied and distance between marks tracing a rhythmic quality on the surface tracing the trail of its coming-into-being. Moments of fusion, moments of attentive awareness to the environment, spiritual and/or physical self are perceptible through the changing rhythm of the traces upon the surface. To draw as a trace: a trace that is said to record the line of the drawing’s cominginto-being from its inception to conclusion, of this most are in agreement. ‘The selfreflexivity of the drawn mark, alluding to its own making, quite naturally implicates the maker . . . the line recalls the process of its becoming through the act of drawing, the gesture of the draftsman.’21 Within Duration, the presence of the linear marks upon the surface trace the body’s movement during a portion of time spent drawing across the surface; each linear mark a visible record of a track of time retraceable through the trailing of the line. The traces are situated, within the surface of the drawing: the drawing is situated – within the here and now of our world. However, the directional marks traced across the surface suggest the potential of a continuation beyond the limitation of the paper: the potential of extension beyond the paper’s edge. Traces are within the limits of the paper’s edges; the paper creates delineation, an edge, a world in which to exist. Marks on the surface appear limitless: tracing continuation beyond the paper’s edge marking time consciousness as a continuation through the repetition of

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Trailing Temporal Trace

duration (detail) Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 150 x 250 cm 2006

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Trailing Temporal Trace

duration ii, iii, iv Compressed charcoal on paper 100 x 300 cm 2005

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Trailing Temporal Trace marks ad infinitum. The repetitive marks trace limitlessness by retracing the process and continuing it beyond delineation through the imagined repetition of marks. Transcendence of the confines of the here and now: everywhere at everytime. ‘. . . perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception.’22 ‘Drawing records what has been seen and is known, but not after the fact – it is simultaneous with, and, for the draftsman, identical to perception.’23 The body perceives and drawing is perception, as Rosand states, ‘The gesture of drawing is, in essence, a projection of the body . . .’,24 the body that is mediator between mind and world. Synonymous with lived experience, drawing traces the tension between opposing marks. It traces the temporal line of past, present and future: traces transcendence through the retracing of a mark. In this trace drawing is ambiguity: the ambiguity of our lived experience as incarnate and spiritual beings. I know myself only in my inherence in time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in drawing.

Endnotes 1 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Phenomenology of Perception, London, New York: Routledge, 2002 (reprinted), p. 345. 2 Many artists, researchers and artistresearchers attribute these qualities. For example, see: Bailey, G.H., ‘Drawing and the Drawing Activity: A Phenomenological Investigation’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1982; Farthing, S., ‘Dirtying the Paper Delicately’, in University of the Arts, Inaugural Lecture, London, 26 April 2005; Newman, A. and De Zegher, C., ‘Conversation’, in C. De Zegher (ed.), The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, Selected from the Tate Collection, London and New York: Tate Publishing & The Drawing Center, 2003, pp. 67–81, 165–73, 231–7; Taylor, A., ‘Re: Positioning Drawing’, in S. Garner, Writing on Drawing, Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, Bristol, Chicago: Intellect Books, 2008, pp. 9–12. 3 In Being and Time (1962) Heidegger suggests that we are ‘thrown’ into the world into which we are born. That is, we are carried away by the events and situation of the world we are born into; we live without question in the life to which we were ‘thrown’. 4 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 354. 5 For an expanded discussion on attentiveness to particular categories of experience please see: Harty, D., ‘Drawing//Experience: A Process of Translation’, PhD thesis, Loughborough University, 2010. 6 Marshall, G.J., A Guide to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2008, p. 87

7 For an expanded discussion on fusion and states of consciousness whilst drawing please see: Harty, D., ‘Drawing//Phenomenology//Drawing: An Exploration of the Phenomenological Potential of Repetitive Processes’, TRACEY drawing and visualisation research, 2012. Accessible at: www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ sota/tracey/journal/proc/harty.html (accessed 4 November 2013). 8 Da Vinci in Rosand, D., Drawing Acts – Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 111. 9 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 239. 10 Merleau-Ponty, M., The World of Perception, Oxford, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 56. 11 In Being and Time 1962 Heidegger views time in relation to being, he sees all being as temporal: a portion of finite time rather than reduced to a series of instants. The fact of our mortality is what enables us to have time consciousness. 12 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p.402. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 196. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 530. 18 Reynolds, J., Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908–1961, Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, available at: www.iep.utm.edu/merleau/#SH2c (accessed: 4 November 2013). 19 Newman and De Zegher, ‘Conversation’. 20 Fisher, J., ‘On Drawing’, in De Zegher, The Stage of Drawing, pp. 221–2. 21 Rosand, Drawing Acts, p. 13. 22 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 239. 23 Rosand, Drawing Acts, p. 110. 24 Ibid., p. 16.

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds Approaching Ambiguity through Site-Related Creative Practice Kristen Kreider and James O’Leary Kreider + O’Leary collaborate to make performance, installation and timebased media work in relation to sites of architectural and cultural interest. Dr Kristen Kreider is Senior Lecturer in Poetry and Director of the Practicebased PhD Programme at Royal Holloway, University of London. James O’Leary is Lecturer in Innovative Technology and Director of the M. Arch Design Realisation Programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. www.kreider-oleary.net.

Measure & Boundary Between August 1968 and July 1969, the artist Mark Boyle asked a number of randomly chosen persons, blindfolded, to throw a dart at a large map of the world. Through this process, Boyle selected 1,000 places on earth. Repeating the process using maps of an increasingly larger scale, Boyle pinpointed an exact location within these places to which he would then travel. Upon arrival, Boyle would throw a right-angle up into the air: the position in which it landed became one corner of a 6 x 6 ft square demarcating the physical boundaries of a specific site. Each square then became the basis for an artwork.1

Boyle’s 6-ft-square plots suggest site as an arbitrary geometric demarcation of physical space: fixed, finite and awaiting form. According to architectural theorist Andrea Kahn, a similarly limited – and limiting – view of site prevails in architectural design. Kahn takes issue with this in ‘Overlooking: A Look at How we Look at Site’ (1996), where she emphasises the complexity inherent in any site: ‘Always mutable, site is a collection of scales, programmes, actors and ecologies that include past imprints as well as future changes,’ she argues.2 From this, we appreciate site as a system of spatial and material relationships that change over time: imprinted with the trace of past changes; pregnant with the potential for future change. ‘To paraphrase Hélène Cixous,’ continues Kahn, site ‘belongs to the order of “feminine” continuity,’3 by which we understand site as intrinsic to the natural continuum of time and space that is our worldly reality. For Kahn, a number of artists working in relation to site (e.g. Walter de Maria, Richard Long and Robert Smithson) recognise this complexity of site, whereas designers ‘prefer to apprehend sites as finite, or fixed’.4 Through this, Kahn argues, ‘design thinking institutes a forceful myth: the contained and controllable site,’ which she explicitly links to ‘assumptions

that the goal of design is rational order and the purpose of analysis is preparing site through documentation, making way for design’s (supposedly benign) controls.’5 Kahn’s critique of how site is concept­ ualised within design practice raises a number of questions for us: an architect and poet who make creative work in relation to site. Firstly, if the concept of site as a bounded and controllable entity paves the way for a design proposition predicated on the rational ordering of space, and if the purpose of site analysis is conventionally understood to prepare the ground for this kind of proposition, then how does the goal of design proposition as well as the purpose and procedure of site analysis change when site is understood in Kahn’s terms? Furthermore, if the typical function of an architectural drawing is to communicate clearly a design proposition informed by site analysis, then what are the implications for architectural drawing, in particular, if we conceive of site as this complex material, spatial, temporal – and, we would add, cultural – matrix, pursuing methods of site analysis and forwarding design proposition accordingly? We suggest that to conceive of site as a multi-faceted and multi-layered

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds complex presents a particular challenge to architectural drawing practice. The challenge, as we see it, is to engage with and communicate the complexity of any given site, whether this be in the site analysis, design proposition or, importantly, in the relationship between the two. We take up this challenge in the pages that follow. Here we use the form of a series of composite drawings to present the specific narrative of one of our creative projects, Video Shakkei (2011).6 Employing pan-semiotic features of language, these drawings communicate aspects of our original project: performance, installation and video work developed in relation to a number of carefully chosen sites in the Kansai region of Japan.7 They also incorporate elements of our preparation for and reflection on the project. We consider the resulting drawings neither as site study, strictly speaking, nor design proposition, per se, but manifestations of representational form that include aspects of each: close analysis of material, contextual, social and historical aspects of site, on the one hand; imaginings of generative possibility, on the other. Our aim, ultimately, is to devise a drawing method in which the stages of site analysis and design proposition merge, as form emerges, through a subjective response to the complexity of site – or, more accurately, through the record or documentation of such a response. Predicated on an aesthetic of response, we conceive of all of our work relating to site as both a form and act of communication: therefore, and necessarily, clouded by ambiguity. This prompts our critical investigation into the role of ambiguity for creative practices that relate to site, including drawing.8 We undertake this critical investigation in the pages that

follow through a writing sequence: one that is punctuated by seven statements on ambiguity derived from our creative and critical practice. Crucially, we consider the writing and drawing sequences that follow to complement one another, while instigating a turning point in our collaborative practice: from an emphasis on representation and response toward pursuit of architectural proposition. On the one hand(/page), the writing sequence positions and vicariously analyses the methodology and aesthetics of our site-related creative practice to date. On the other hand(/page), the drawing sequence suggests ways that we might employ this methodology and aesthetics for the purposes of architectural proposition. Through this oscillation, writing and drawing, we envision how a creative practice – one situated at a crossover between architecture, art and poetry; one capable of responding to the complexity of a given site(s) – can be employed in the pursuit and communication of a design proposition predicated on one’s subjective relationship to place, with all of its attendant ambiguity.

1. To be human is to encounter complexity, as it is to grapple with ambiguity.

Site & Sign In pursuit of our critical investigation into the role of ambiguity in drawing and other site-related creative practices, we return to Boyle’s work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At first seeming to align with Kahn’s critique of the ‘contained and controllable site’, further examination of Boyle’s work

reveals a more complex notion of site emerging, akin to the ‘mutable’ site of Kahn’s revision above. In Journey to the Surface of the Earth: Mark Boyle’s Atlas and Manual, published as part of an exhibition at the Haags Gemeentemuseum (1970), Boyle writes: ‘Once the actual square [i.e. bounded or measured site] has been selected a multi sensual presentation of the site will be made. This will be done in the medium most suited to the problems posed by the individual site.’9 To make these multi-sensory presentations, Boyle would collect samples, make films, form casts, plant seeds and check his own and others’ physical responses to the site.10 Thus revealing the historical, contextual and experiential qualities intrinsic to each specific site, Boyle’s work exemplifies Kahn’s claim that ‘always mutable, site is a collection of scales, programmes, actors and ecologies that include past imprints as well as future changes.’ Significantly, these site studies were both the means and the end of Boyle’s practice. That is, he did not undertake them for the purposes of design proposition; rather, Boyle’s intent, as an artist, was simply to communicate the inherent complexity of site. How did Boyle communicate this complexity? J.L. Locher explains how, as part of his site study, Boyle would ‘literally lift up the loose upper layer of the square with all its components in place, even the coating of dust’ and then transfer ‘the exact shapes of the immovable elements – the solid base, for instance large rocks or the hard pavement of a road’ onto a piece of fibreglass with wooden supports, fixing the whole thing with a coat of resin.11 Through this procedure, which Boyle developed himself, he made the ‘earthprobes’: objects that could then be transported and exhibited in a gallery context. Below is an

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds example of one of Boyle’s earthprobes. ‘Fixing’ a site through the earthprobes would again seem to align Boyle’s work with design practitioners who, in Kahn’s terms, seek to ‘contain’ and ‘control’ site for the purposes of generating formal construction. However, a continued reading of Locher suggests differently. Locher argues that the earthprobes attempt ‘not to portray a piece of reality, but just to present it to us literally as it appeared to him’.12 Implicitly, Boyle contains the specific site in order to present it to the viewer reality in all of its ‘thereness’: absent of formal proposition; evading (or, more accurately, attempting to evade) formal representation. This situates Boyle’s work, for Locher, more in relation to the realist tradition of the Romantic period, originating around 1800.13 These artists, writes Locher, sought

Mark Boyle World Series, Sardinia Elemental study (red scarp), earth, etc. on fibreglass 183 x 183 cm 1978

‘to experience continuously changing reality itself rather than a “formed” reality’; however, once the aim became communicating that experience – (and, we would ask, is that not the role of all art?) – form was necessary: ‘Without the use of a form with some degree of permanence it is impossible to convey something to others. The use of some kind of form remained, and is always, inevitable,’ writes Locher.14 Boyle’s earthprobes evidence this concomitant mistrust and use of form as a means of communicating. As Boyle himself states: ‘Most of all you suspect the way you formulate. And finally you say there is this, there is this, there is this.’15 Ultimately, Locher’s reading suggests that, like his contemporaries alluded to by Kahn (de Maria, Long, Smithson), Boyle also recognises that ‘we are always in the midst of site’,16 when site is understood as, itself, existing amidst the natural continuum of space and time that is our worldly reality. It is this continually changing material, spatial and temporal continuum that Boyle ‘cuts’ when measuring specific sites for his artistic engagement and ‘cuts out’ when dislocating these specific sites into the gallery context. Through this act of cutting and displacing, Boyle’s work thus becomes a formal means of dividing the natural continuum so that site becomes a sign of the world’s material reality: a sign with which the viewer engages in another context; a context in which it proclaims that the world, in all of its complexity, exists, and that we who exist are situated in and in relation to it. In Boyle’s work, site thus becomes the sign of a relational existence: a sign of our existence in relation to material reality or the world of objects and things; a sign that, upon our reception of it, aims to communicate, ‘there is this, there is this, there is this.’

2. Our relation to the world is semiotic; that is, potentially ambiguous and multivalent.

Documentation & Frame In ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ (1968), the artist Robert Smithson, one of Boyle’s contemporaries, writes that, ‘[t]he strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art.’17 To present this ‘jumbled museum’ of earthly layers, this irrational worldly text, within what he perceived as the confinement of the gallery system, Smithson encountered a similar dilemma to Boyle: how to contain, within artistic form, the complexity of site. Where Boyle resolves his dilemma of how to limit, thereby communicate, material reality in all of its ‘thereness’ through the earthprobes, Smithson resolves this dilemma through ‘non-sites’: ‘Yet if art is art it must have limits. How can one contain this “oceanic” site? I have developed the Non-Site, which in a physical way contains the disruption of the site,’ he writes. What interests us particularly is not Smithson’s ‘non-sites’ so much as the network of signs that arises concomitant with their development: a network of signs emergent through what Smithson calls the dialectic of ‘site’ and ‘non-site’. Smithson theorises this dialectic in a footnote to his essay ‘The Spiral Jetty’ (1972) where, under the heading ‘Dialectic of Site and Nonsite’, he first lists characteristics of site as: ‘open limits’, ‘a series of points’, ‘outer coordinates’, ‘subtraction’, ‘indeterminate certainty’, ‘scattered information’,

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds ‘reflection’, ‘edge’, ‘some place (physical)’, ‘many’. He then lists characteristics of nonsite as: ‘closed limits’, ‘an array of matter’, ‘inner coordinates’, ‘addition’, ‘determinate uncertainty’, ‘contained information’, ‘mirror’, ‘center’, ‘no place (abstract)’, ‘one’.18 Between these two is a ‘range of convergence’ or ‘double path’. Smithson writes: The range of convergence between Site and Nonsite consists of a course of hazards, a double path made up of signs, photographs, and maps that belong to both sides of the dialectic at once . . . Two-dimensional and three-dimensional things trade places with each other in the range of convergence. Large scale becomes small. Small scale becomes large. A point on a map extends to the size of the land mass. A land mass contracts into a point. Is the Site a reflection of the Nonsite (mirror), or is it the other way around? The rules of this network of signs are discovered as you go along uncertain trails both mental and physical.19

In the specific context of Smithson’s argument, neither site nor non-site exist except in their relation: a relation made manifest through the ‘range of convergence’ or ‘double path of signs’ between the two. How do site and non-site manifest as elements in Smithson’s artwork, understood here in terms of a network of signs? It is, we suggest, through Smithson’s act of documentation and framing, as well as the interplay between theory and practice in his work. This is evident in the essay ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ (1968), where, in the course of discussing a number of his site-related artworks, Smithson presents two juxtaposed images. We read these two images in relation to the critique inherent in the artist’s work. Writing in Art and Architecture: A

Crop of page from Robert Smithson’s essay ‘Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ 1968

Place Between (2006), art and architectural theorist Jane Rendell argues that Smithson’s dialectic – and Land Art, more generally – offers a critique of the gallery system by proposing alternative sites for art.20 Within the logic of this institutional critique, ‘site’ is understood to be a material reality that exists, uncontained and unbounded, ‘outside’ of the gallery system. Meanwhile, ‘non-site’ is a material reality existing, contained and objectified, ‘inside’ the gallery. Site thus serves an emancipatory role in relation to the gallery system, whereas nonsite is commodified and institutionalised by this very system. This is evident in the juxtaposition of images above. On the lefthand side is Smithson’s Non-site: physically framed and explicitly titled, the Non-Site is presented as a bounded and commodified art object. In contrast, the caption of the image on the right reads: ‘Buckwheat Mineral Dump. Rock site in an uncontained condition before being contained in NonSite #3 by Robert Smithson. (Photo: Nancy Holt.)’.21 Smithson’s caption suggests that site precedes and exceeds its containment within form, the form being that of the art object Non-Site #3. Yet, this caption is misleading: a ‘containment’ of site is as

evident here in the photographic frame as much as it is in the physically framed Non-Site – also, interestingly, presented here as a photographic image; the Non-Site is a frame within a frame. Paradoxically, it is only through its containment within the photographic sign, itself situated in (i.e. framed by) the context of Smithson’s critical writing, that site can be understood in terms of Smithson’s concept of ‘site’: an uncontainable material reality preceding and exceeding form. All of this leads us to conclude that it is through Smithson’s act of framing and documentation, including his act of writing about his artwork, that ‘site’ and ‘non-site’ emerge as signs: signs within the network of signs that comprise Smithson’s artwork, thus making manifest – and informing – his concepts of site and non-site.

3. An image, itself, may not be ambiguous, as are its meaning and narrative.

/cloud/ We propose that Smithson’s theory and practice of the dialectic between site and non-site can be understood as a semiological system. Within the logic of this system, the photograph on the right-hand side in the ‘Crop of page . . .’ image is a sign that stands for what cannot be bound or contained within this system. Site, or the sign of site, thus serves as the constituent outside of the system of signs that is Smithson’s art. We base our proposition on a model outlined by art and architectural theorist Hubert Damisch in his book Theory of /Cloud/:Toward a History of Painting (1972),

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Kansai Digital image 260 x 260 mm 2013

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds where he draws from semiotic theory to analyse perspectival art in the West. At one point, Damisch refers to an early experiment by Fillippo Brunelleschi, using this as a conceptual model to analyse singlepoint perspective: the most predominant representational system in Western art. In this early experiment, Brunelleschi first depicted the baptistery of San Giovanni on a panel using single-point pespective. He then cut a viewing aperture into the panel at the vanishing point of the composition. A viewer, standing behind the panel and holding up a mirror to the front, could view the pictorial scene, through the mirror, in perfect perspective. From this point of vantage, the buildings were represented as perspectival images; however, ‘Brunelleschi made no attempt to depict [the] sky; he merely showed it (dimostrare),’ writes Damisch, ‘[a]nd in order to do so, he resorted to a subterfuge that introduces into the representational circuit a direct reference to external reality, and at the same time a supplementary reduplication

A reconstruction of Brunelleschi’s first experiment

of the specular structure upon which the experiment was founded.’22 Damisch cites Antonio Manetti’s Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi (c. 1480) where Manetti describes this act of subterfuge, translated here as follows: ‘As he had to show the sky on which the walls shown in perspective were stamped, he put darkened silver so that the natural air and sky would be mirrored there, and also the clouds to be seen in the air, pushed along by wind when it blew.’23 According to Damisch, the mirrored sky in this early experiment testifies to the limits of the perspectival system since one cannot represent within single-point perspective the sky without measure, or the wind blowing the clouds. The mirror, writes Damisch, is thus an ‘epistemological emblem’ that ‘reveals perspective as a structure of exclusion, the coherence of which is founded upon a series of rejections, and yet which has to make room for the very things that it excludes from its order.’24 In Damisch’s analysis, /cloud/ becomes a sign of the constituent outside of this semiotic system. Damisch’s argument becomes relevant to our reading of Smithson’s essay at the point where Damisch writes that, ‘the functions imparted to cloud are . . . essentially semiotic: cloud is a sign, in the triple sense of a symbol (word), an icon, and an index.’25 This ‘triadic relation’, drawn from the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, ‘conditions all discourse on art’, argues Damisch, ‘and on that account is fundamental to the present work. The graph marked as /cloud/ functions as a sign on several levels at once.’26 As a symbol (the word ‘cloud’), it is related to the material reality of clouds through a learned, cultural relationship. As an icon (the image of a cloud in a painting – or, in Brunellschi’s experiment, the image of cloud

in the mirror), it bears a likeness to objects and things in the world. As an index, it represents what eludes objectification (wind, air), but which is nevertheless recognisable through the effect it has on real objects (the blowing clouds in the mirrored image of Brunelleschi’s experiment). Relating this to Smithson’s dialectic, the photographic sign of the uncontained site in Smithson’s dialectic similarly functions as a sign on three levels: as a symbol (part of the network of signs functioning within a differential, oppositional system of the dialectic of site and non-site, where it symbolises the site as an uncontained material reality), as an icon (depicting an image of the reality of a site) and as an index (the material reality of the site is recognisable through a trace of the effect of light on it within the photograph). Smithson’s network or system of signs is thus comprised of inherently complex signs, all of which frame, document and theorise the complexity of site. What are the implications of this for appreciating the importance of ambiguity in drawing and other creative practices relating to site? To answer this, we return to Rendell’s discussion of Smithson. According to Rendell, Smithson’s dialectic suggests a privileging of site and, in keeping with her aim of theorising what she calls ‘critical spatial practice’ at the intersection between art and architecture, Rendell turns this privileged status of site on its head to think through the possibilities inherent in Smithson’s dialectic for a critique of architecture. Drawing specific attention to the fact that Smithson’s non-sites include maps and other forms of documentation, Rendell maintains that an architectural drawing can be considered a non-site. She then argues that, rather than seeing the drawing as being ‘contained’ by the

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Awaji Digital image 260 x 260 mm 2013

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds institution of architecture, as Smithson understands the non-site to be contained in the gallery system, ‘it is also possible to think of things the other way around and to consider the architectural drawing as the site from which the institution of architecture can be critiqued.’27 Like Rendell, we see the potential inherent in Smithson’s dialectic. However, where Rendell emphasises the potential for the architectural drawing, as a non-site, to become a site for architectural critique, we emphasise the creative and critical potential for drawing and other site-related creative practices to emerge as a network of signs between what Smithson would call site and non-site, the former being understood, for Rendell, in terms of the architectural drawing. Alongside this emphasis, we promote the possibility of working with complex signs and drawing from the pan-semiotic field of language – including, but not limited, to the language of architectural drawing – in order to account for that which lies ‘outside’ of conventional forms of representation: what we see as the complexity of site as well as one’s subjective (embodied, affective, cognitive) relation to it. For our part, working as Kreider + O’Leary, we seek to employ combinations and permutations of icon, index and symbol within assemblages of image, object, action and text to generate structures both narrative and poetic in response to a particular site. We consider this a communicative act. Thus nuancing Smithson’s dialectic between site and nonsite with this extended appreciation of a dialogic relation between ourselves and site (and, indeed, between one another – a further complexity . . .), we infuse our work with a sense of responsibility. This belies the ethical imperative behind our work as,

confronted by that which we often do not understand, we nevertheless attempt to respond to and through this ambiguity.

4. Ambiguity is a foundation for ethics, which subsides with authoritative certainty.

Performance & Place How do we engage with site in order to experience, relate and respond to it? To answer this, we turn to an essay entitled ‘Agnes Martin: The /Cloud/’ where Rosalind Krauss draws from Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ in order to discuss the grid paintings of Agnes Martin. Initially, Krauss refers to a phenomenological reading of Martin’s work by fellow art critic, Kasha Linville, who pays particular attention to the space between a close-up viewing of one of Martin’s gridded canvases and a view of the canvas from faraway:

Agnes Martin, close up view of Rose 1965

Agnes Martin, faraway view of Rose 1965

Paraphrasing Linville, Krauss describes how, when shifting between a close-up and faraway view of Martin’s paintings, ‘the ambiguities of illusion take over from the earlier materiality of a surface redoubled by the weave of Martin’s grids or bands; and at this place the paintings go atmospheric.’28 Krauss understands this viewing experience as ‘haptic’ rather than ‘optic’, whereby she relates it to Damisch’s ‘/cloud/’.29 Importantly, Krauss stresses that the phenomenologically ambiguous ‘atmosphere’ arising between close-up and faraway can be experienced only in and through the movement back and forth between the surface of the canvas with its dense fibre and finely gridded lines and the distancing, totalising view of Martin’s matrix. Is it possible, we wonder, to consider an engagement with site along – or, better to say, amidst – these lines? Critical discussion of the term ‘sitespecificity’ in art practice, particularly Nick Kaye’s Site-Specific Art: Performance,

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Osaka Digital image 260 x 260 mm 2013

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds Place and Documentation (2000), becomes a starting point for us to do just this: that is, to consider an engagement with site in terms of an oscillating shift or movement between an encounter with site close-up and consideration of it from faraway. In this account, Kaye stresses the performative nature of contemporary site-specific art practice. This necessitates what he calls a ‘transitive’ rather than fixed notion of site. Kaye bases this definition of the transitive site on anthropologist Michel de Certeau’s spatial theory in The Practice of Everyday Life (1974). Here de Certeau argues that ‘place’ is an ordering of coexisting elements, comparable to Saussure’s linguistic theorisation of langue or language as a system of signs. Place, like language, has ‘proper’ rules of usage that may or may not be abided in any particular enactment of this order. This enactment, which de Certeau likens to parole or the act of speaking, is realised in and through one’s movement through place: that is, through spatial practice. So, the act of walking is a spatial practice that acts out the urban system, just as speaking is a spatial practice that acts out the linguistic system. Similarly, writing is a spatial practice that acts out the spatial order of a written text, while painting is a spatial practice acting out the composition of the finished painting.30 We can extend this to include the reciprocal act of receiving a text or painting: the act of reading is a spatial practice acting out the spatial order of a text; the act of viewing is a spatial practice that acts out the spatial order of a painting. And, by means of a short digression, we can extend de Certeau’s theory even further to account for a reception of Martin’s work, as discussed by Krauss, via Linville.

In line with de Certeau, the act of viewing one of Martin’s paintings acts out the spatial order of its composition. This, in Martin’s case, is the grid: Euclidean basis of a rational spatial order. Krauss’s discussion, however, adds further dimension to this: the movement between a close-up and faraway view of Martin’s paintings is also a spatial practice, but one that extends beyond the enactment of the painting’s spatial order as it is represented on a planar surface and into an enactment of the space between a close-up and faraway view. This extension in space and time gives rise to the atmospheric rendering of /cloud/ that is intrinsic to Krauss’s interpretation of Martin’s work. Returning now to the discussion at hand: de Certeau summarises his theory of spatial practice as follows: ‘space is a practiced place . . . spaces are produced by the practice of a particular place.’31 Kaye, writing about site-specificity in art practice, then uses this dictum as a basis for his concept of an ‘underlying concept of “site”’ that has to do more with the performance of place than with ‘any given or particular kind of place’.32 This transitive definition of site, as Kaye calls it, feeds into his definition of site-specificity as ‘a working over of the production, definition and performance of “place”’.33 Drawing from Kaye, we similarly conceive of an engagement with site through creative practice as a performance of place. However, and in keeping with our digression above, we add to this that this performance of place has a further dimension: specifically, the oscillating shift between close-up and faraway. This can be broken down as follows: engaging with site through a performance of place close-up encompasses one’s movements or spatial practice ‘on the ground’ in a particular

location. Here place is experienced phenomenologically in all of its ‘thereness’ even as it is encountered, and read, in all of its semiotic complexity. Meanwhile, engaging with site through a performance of place faraway encompasses moving through the impressions and conceptions we have of a particular place, both those that we bring to it (e.g. through researching historical narratives, maps, cultural outputs, etc.) and those we take from it (e.g. through documenting remnants of conversations, video footage, photographs, drawings, written documents, etc.). Any engagement with site, we argue, acts out an oscillation between these two relations: an experience of site close-up and faraway. This, in turn, gives rise to one’s reading and interpretation of the site and, ultimately, informs any creative response. To summarise, any engagement with site can be considered in terms of a performance of place that is both a phenomenological experience and a reading of it. This is coupled with an engagement with site through the impressions and conceptions one brings to it, and those one takes away. All of this informs one’s thinking in and through site; that is, one’s interpretation of it. ‘Site’, as we understand the term, thus arises in a middle distance somewhere between one’s close engagement with a worldly reality, in all of its material, spatial, temporal, cultural complexity and ‘thereness’, and one’s conception of that reality from afar. Here, between the specificity of site, inhabited in space and time, and the impressions that we have of it, bring to it, take from it and make of it from faraway, emerges our interpretation and response; here, amidst our movements in, around, back and forth, meaning proliferates.

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Oji Digital image 260 x 260 mm 2013

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds 5. Ambiguity is open to, and opens through, interpretation.

Video & Installation This proliferation of meaning brings us back to a question of form. Recalling our earlier discussion: in order to communicate, form is necessary. Boyle’s form is that of the earthprobe, whereby the site becomes a sign of its own complexity. In Smithson’s site-related work, a network of signs emerges through the dialectic between site and non-site. We aligned our work, as Kreider + O’Leary, with this network of signs; however, by foregrounding our dialogic approach, we suggested that the network of signs we produce communicates our subjective response to the complexity of site. This subjective response, we have just argued, emerges through a spatial practice or performance of place that includes the oscillation between close-up and faraway, whereby meaning proliferates. How, we now ask, can a network of signs account for this subjective and spatiotemporally dynamic approach to site, communicating the proliferation of meaning that results? In her essay ‘I/Eye/Oculus: Performance, Installation and Video’ (2004), art critic Kristine Stiles offers a compelling account of the history and aesthetic specificity of performance, installation and video art. Stiles traces the development of these three forms back to the 1960s, aligning their rise within art practice to cultural and institutional critiques aimed at the rapid rise of commercialisation. These three emergent art forms resisted commodification, argues Stiles, by including time-based aspects into a reception of the work, often by introducing

kinesis (i.e. actual or virtual movement) into the otherwise static art object.34 With this ‘augmentation of the real’, Stiles writes, ‘performance, installation and video could be seen to undermine mimesis (imitation and illusion), the primary communicative means of traditional visual art.’35 How is this so? Stiles explains that mimesis operates through metaphor ‘or the illusion and representation of one thing (for example, a bird) in the form of another (a painting of a bird)’.36 Stiles compares this with metonymy, which ‘specifies something by using the name of another thing with which it is directly connected’.37 Meanings generated through metaphor are thus predicated on likeness, whereas those generated through metonymy are predicated on direct connection.38 Having said this, it must be stressed that metaphor and metonymy are not mutually exclusive. Meanings, especially those cultivated through aesthetic strategies, are complex and arise through combinations and fluctuating degrees of metaphor and metonymy, amongst other elements contributing to the structure and poetics of an artistic message.39 Stiles, for her part, recognises this when she writes: ‘One could say that metonymy signifies both “is connected to” and “is like”.’40 This feeds into her claim that, even if performance, video and installation continue to work with mimesis, the primary communicative vehicle of contemporary art, the aesthetic specificity of these three media means that they necessarily augment metaphor with metonymy in the process ‘by presenting human subjects who were doing real things similar to the actual human subjects viewing them, often in real-time situations and contexts actually linked to viewers’.41 Ultimately, Stiles argues that performance, installation and

video a) are capable of embodying timebased and kinetic aspects within artistic form, requiring both ‘artist and viewers to engage in temporal changes and duration over time’; b) ‘include a wide spectrum of aesthetic practices’ that may generate representation through likeness (or, indeed, its opposite of abstraction), but necessarily entails making meaning through the direct connection that they have to actions and events; c) link artists and viewers directly to these real-time events and experiences, drawing attention to a person or place, thereby ‘enhancing reciprocity between art and viewer as interrelated subjects’.42 All of this suggests that these artistic media are capable of accounting for a subjective and spatio-temporally dynamic approach to site, and communicating the resultant proliferation of meaning. The work of artist Joan Jonas is particularly relevant to this discussion, as she often employs performance, installation and video in a single piece. Jonas has been developing her body of work since the early 1970s – she is a contemporary of the artists Boyle and Smithson, discussed previously. In her early works, Jonas would often record live actions and then edit them, or otherwise work with the display capacity of video, in order to explore a particular subject through the interrelationship between the two; that is, through combined aesthetics strategies drawn from performance and video. As critic Bartomeu Marí notes in the essay ‘Other Times and Other Places: The Art of Joan Jonas’ (2007), the subject explored in Jonas’ early works was primarily ‘herself, the artist’s body, her incarnations, transformation, deformations and reconstructions through her alter ego’.43 Later works, however, show Jonas working more in relation to particular texts,

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds poems or stories and, through this, to the historical events and places to which they refer. As with the early works, these later ones also employ live action and recording, but do so in order to envelop them within the wider framework or context of what Marí terms Jonas’ ‘video installations’. Marí describes this process as follows: Fundamentally, Joan Jonas has done performances and installations in which video is placed at the service of experimental narrative projects. Concurrent with – and, it should be said, from a logical viewpoint, prior to – these installations the artist does performances that expose her to the public in varied situations . . . Her installations ‘translate’ the action into its more theatrical form.44

There is, then, a relationship in Jonas’ work between the performance of a live action, be it in a gallery or other site, and the inclusion of a remnant or fragment of that performance, rendered on video, within one of Jonas’ video installations. Particularly striking is the word ‘translation’ used to describe the relationship between elements of performance, video and installation in Jonas’ work. This implies that the video fragment of a performance is a sign: one that has particular meaning in one context, and whose meaning shifts in the context of Jonas’ installation where it is situated amongst other semiotic elements that make up a work. Equally striking is the fact that the oscillations between performance and its translation into video installations are reiterated. As Roland Barthes points out in Elements of Semiology (1964), ‘it is because signs are repeated in successive discourses and within one and the same discourse . . . that each sign becomes an

element in language.’45 Arguably, in repeating these fragments of video, which themselves repeat Jonas’ performative actions and gestures, within successive iterations of her video installations, Jonas is generating a system of signs that comprise the artwork. Moreover, these video fragments are signs that generate meaning, as Stiles has argued, both mimetically and through the direct connection that they have to places and events. However, the semiotic elements that make up Jonas’ work are not limited to video fragments. Throughout her oeuvre, Jonas has worked with a number

of objects, props and images, using these repeatedly in different works; for example, the mirror, the cone and the line drawing, often of an animal, are familiar elements amongst Jonas’ assemblages. Altogether, we consider the video fragments – through this, Jonas’ performative actions and gestures – alongside the objects, props and images elements within the aesthetic vocabulary or network of signs that is Jonas’ artwork. Meaningful in one context (e.g. as actions situated within a particular space and time, relatively familiar objects in the everyday or recognisable animalistic

Lines in the Sand Installation view 2007

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds Ise Digital image 260 x 260 mm 2013

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds forms), these elements accrue value and proliferate meaning in the specific context, and through the poetics, of Jonas’ creative practice.46 An experimental narrative told through the pan-semiotic features of language and including images, objects, actions and text embodied through performance, installation and time-based media, Jonas’ work can be considered, on the one hand, as a type of poetry and, on the other, a kind of drawing, when both hands extend to meet within an expanded field of creative practice informed by the disciplines of poetry, art and architecture. And, although her’s is not a site-related practice, per se, we consider Jonas’ work to be a complex system of signs capable of accounting for a subjective and spatio-temporally dynamic approach to the complexity of site as well as communicating the resultant proliferation of meaning. We thus consider Jonas’ work, and particularly the video installation, as a formal model for contemporary site-related creative practices, including our own.

6. Ambiguity propagates the proliferation of meaning.

Drawing & Writing In the aforementioned book, The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau argues that the term trajectory suggests a ‘temporal movement through space, that is, the unity of a diachronic succession of points through which it passes, and not the figure that these points form on a space that is supposed to be synchronic or achronic’.47 Such a ‘representation’, as he describes it, is merely ‘a mark in place of acts, a relic

in place of performances: it is only their remainder, the sign of their erasure’.48 Throughout the course of this essay we have written and drawn a trajectory that leads the reader through a critical account of site-related creative practices and, in tandem, guides them through a specific narrative of one of our own creative projects. From topic to topic, place to place, we have moved through spatial practices of writing and drawing.49 The strands of our argument are coextensive and related, but are not the same: each has its specific aim. The result, however, is one text: this text, structured (inter)textually so that the reader, oscillating between paths of writing and drawing, might come away, if not with a full picture, then at least an impression of the importance of ambiguity for contemporary site-related creative practices that include, but are not exclusively, drawing; that include, but are not exclusively, our own.

7. Ambiguity opens onto a process of thought, and is creative.

Endnotes 1 Locher, J.L., Mark Boyle’s Journey to the Surface of the Earth, London: Hansjörg Mayer, 1978, p. 11. 2 Kahn, Andrea, ‘Overlooking: A Look at How we Look at Site or … Site as “discrete object” of desire’, in Duncan McCorquodale, Katerina Rüedi and Sarah Wigglesworth (eds), Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and Interdisciplinarity, London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996, p. 176. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Video Shakkei (2010) draws from the Japanese practice of shakkei, or ‘borrowed landscape’. In this project, we engaged with a number of

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sites in Japan – from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka – to perform a series of sequenced actions or ‘live drawings’. These actions were recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using high-definition video as well as recently developed embedded miniature video camera technology. Edited together in series of filmic composites modelled on the multi-scaled architectural drawing, the recordings relate architectural space to performed event, and this to narrative sequence. The result is a hyperdigitised, absurdly choreographed and poetically rendered image of place. See: www. kreider-oleary.net/_Work/W_Video_Shakkei. htm (accessed 17 October 2014). All drawings relate to the project Video Shakkei (Kreider + O’Leary, 2010). Special thanks to Andrew Walker, who assisted with the production of the drawings. Supported by the Bartlett Architecture Research Fund. For clarification, we consider ‘drawing’ here in an expanded sense, inclusive of multiple semiotics and various modes of enactment. Boyle quoted in Locher, Mark Boyles’ Journey, p. 11. Ibid. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Locher cites in particular the artist Constable and the philosopher John Ruskin as exemplary of the realist tradition’s practice and ethos (p. 17). Ibid., p. 44. Boyle quoted in ibid., p. 15. Kahn, ‘Overlooking’, p. 176. Smithson, Robert, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 110. Smithson, Robert, ‘The Spiral Jetty’ in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 153. Ibid. Rendell, Jane, Art and Architecture: A Place Between, London: I.B.Tauris, 2006, p. 37. Smithson, ‘Sedimentation’, p. 101. Damisch, Hubert, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 123. Ibid., p. 280.

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Particles of Moisture or other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds 24 Ibid., p. 124. 25 Ibid., p. 140. 26 Ibid. Notably, in Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Agnes Martin: The /Cloud/’, in Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, p, 210, Krauss refers to Damisch’s argument and, in a footnote, writes: ‘In the formal notation of semiological analysis, the placement of a word between slashes indicates that it is being considered in its function as signifier – in terms, that is, of its condition within a differential, oppositional system – and thus bracketed off from its “content” or signified’. However, given Damisch’s claim that /cloud/ is a sign functioning on three different levels, /cloud/ is not a ‘signifier’, an element of Saussurian linguistics; rather, /cloud/ is a sign in the Peircian sense – a sign that functions on several levels at once. Its meaning cannot be grasped solely in terms of its ‘condition with a differential, oppositional system’, as Krauss argues: only as a symbol (the word cloud) does it function as such. 27 Rendell: Art and Architecture, p. 40. 28 Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin’, p. 333. 29 ‘Haptic visuality’ is a term drawn from art historian Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry (1927). In the essay ‘Video Haptics and Erotics’ (1988), film theorist Laura Marks draws from Riegl to describe how haptic visuality, in contrast with optic visuality, ‘draws from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinaesthetics’ with the result being ‘the viewer’s body is more obviously involved in the process of seeing than is the case with optic visuality’ (Marks, Laura, ‘Video Haptics and Erotics’, Screen 39/4, 1998, p. 332). See an extended argument by Marks in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment,

30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38

and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 98. Ibid., p. 117. Kaye, Nick, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 3. Ibid. Elsewhere, in Art and Architecture, Rendell likewise draws from de Certeau’s notion of ‘space as a practiced place’ to discuss sitespecific practice, drawing this together with her overall theory of critical spatial practice to argue that ‘in “practicing” specific places certain artworks produce critical spaces’ (Rendell, Art, p. 19). Stiles, Kristine, ‘I/Eye/Oculus: Performance, Installation and Video’, in Gill Perry and Paul Wood (eds), Themes in Contemporary Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, p. 183. Ibid. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid. The terms ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’ are used in poetic theories premised on structuralist linguistics; for example, the work of linguist Roman Jakobson. For this reason, although they loosely correspond with meanings generated through ‘iconic’ and ‘indexical’ relationships, they are by no means coterminous with these relationships, drawn from Peircian semiotics. Given the potential for Peirce’s semiotics to account for visual imagery, it is, ultimately, more productive to think of video, performance and installation in Peircian terms; however, extending Stiles’ argument in this manner is beyond the scope of this current argument.

39 For a full discussion of the poetics of artistic messages, see: Kreider, Kristen, Poetics & Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site, London: I.B.Tauris, 2013. 40 Ibid., p. 185. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 197. 43 Marí, Bartomeu, ‘Other Times and Other Places: The Art of Joan Jonas’, in Joan Jonas, Timelines: Transparencies in a Dark Room, Geneva: Museu d’Art Contemporanie de Barcelona and Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve, 2007, p. 8. 44 Ibid., p. 9. 45 Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill and Wang, 1967, p. 15. 46 For Jonas’ discussion of objects and props as a vocabulary, see ‘An Exchange Between Joan Jonas, Susan Howe and Jeanne Heuving’, How2, available online at www.asu.edu/ pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_ archive/v2_3_2005/current/workbook/joans/ intro.htm (accessed 15 September 2014). 47 De Certeau: Practice of Everyday Life, p. 35. 48 Ibid. 49 In One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2002) Miwon Kwon argues that contemporary site-specific art practice actually consists of a performance of ‘one place after another’. This characteristic nomadism within contemporary site-specific practices demarcates a ‘relational specificity that can hold in dialectical tension the distant poles of spatial experience’. Importantly, the relational specificity that arises is embodied within the resultant artwork that, as Kwon suggests, is structured (inter)textually.

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Karl Hyde

Karl Hyde studied fine art at Stourbridge and Cardiff and is a founder member of the group Underworld and the art collective Tomato. He has exhibited art works internationally since 1978, published two books of street poetry Mmm Skyscraper I love You and In the Belly of St Paul (with John Warwicker) and contributed to all publications by Tomato. In 2006 he formed ArtJam with Warwicker and Rick Smith to perform artworks in front of live audiences, Karl also composes film scores with Underworld partner Rick Smith and records and performs live with Brian Eno. Recent works as Underworld include scoring Frankenstein for the National Theatre and Underworld being commissioned as music directors of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

I see the world as a series of fragments interlocking like the teeth of a zipper to construct linear pathways . . . journeys. I’ve been documenting them since the late 1980s when it began as an act of boredom, a way of killing time, noting images, words, road signs, shop signs, truck insignia and the names of places we passed through on Underworld’s first tour of America. A lazy action, born out of boredom, once a derogatory label of character, now my constant motivator to keep making new work. At the end of the 1980s two friends gave me two things that were to be the catalyst for all my future work – Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles and Lou Reed’s New York. The former is a book of vignettes with

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter no beginnings or ends, just middles, snapshots of moments, glimpsed scenes with no enquiry as to how they were reached or where they’re going, like a drunk waking into consciousness, travellers catching snatches of scenery from a speeding car, the ‘click’ of a random camera shutter held at the hip. The second gift was Lou Reed’s New York, an album of songs describing an intimate relationship with city streets, sung in the language of conversational American – how to do this? I could only imagine sitting in bars and cafes, eavesdropping on chit-chat, documenting it in all it’s angular rhythms – the poetry of streets. This is where I began – on the streets of New York where everything is technicolor, contrast up full. Andy Warhol, The Factory, CBGB’s, the Ramones, Franz Kline and the Abstract Expressionists slugging it out at the Cedar Tavern, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, the Chelsea Hotel – in your face, up close and a smell you’d never forget. This is where the daily discipline to document the fragments of my day began, as I moved through the streets, a process by which I could at the very least gather words to sing with Underworld. Paper trails of sounds, conversations half heard, images glimpsed, flashes of colours, smells evoking memories. ‘How was your day?’

Top images left to right: Black Train #4/ Black Train #3 iPhone drawing 2012

Other images: Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Flick back through the files, book-marked memories, catalogued: ‘Essence of Today’. Re-trace a journey – honks, horns, howls, laughter, traffic noise, door slams, aeroplanes, sirens, music from passing cars, sub-bass, attitude drivers, a haircut, shades, tattoos, mouthing something violent, singing to themselves. The sound of engines, deep, throaty, high like fleas, bus brakes, squeals, exhaust fumes, the sour smell of grease on summer pavements, pizza that’s been under glass all day. The colours of melted cheese, shop signs, road signs, yellow lines, red bus, black taxi, the colour of people’s clothes depending on the season. The hiss of rubber on rain-drenched blacktop, dust (the perfume of decay) blown out of holes in the ground leading down to tube stations, historical stories of sheltering from the Blitz, Henry Moore images of scribble-people made of wire sleeping underground. A snap-shot of a walk in London along Oxford Street. Take any one of these elements, separate it from the pack and follow it off in its own direction. Each component of a walk along a street is the seed of another story.

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter The buildings sing. Look up at them, the dates on their stained faces, hands that built them, carved their facades, where are they now? What were their stories, their lives afterwards? Who were their families? Where are they now? The sound of laughter on Friday nights in working men’s clubs all over the country, dancing and bingo, the history of weekends all over the country, all from a glance at a date on the front of a building. Look down. Manhole covers, drain grills, cast in foundries in towns up North and shipped by road – polished by the feet of millions. Heavy typography designed to last, commemorates the legends of industry for decades – the poetry of street signs, road signs, shop signs, prostitute cards in telephone boxes (we haven’t left the roads that ring Soho yet, or caught a bus or a train out to the suburbs where dormant houses stare blankly back at us waiting for the return of migrant workers). ‘How was your day?’ Flick back through the files to construct a simple description of an unrepeatable slice of life, find the clues, the fragments, trails of glittering things, precious stones flung in the dirt. ‘Oh, it was ok.’

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter I started with a notebook, then added a cheap plastic camera, taking snap-shots at night with flash to imitate those momentary glimpses a drunk gets staggering up alleys. During the day I began to experiment, passing the film through the camera 12 times or more, layering images to imitate the density of information I was documenting in my note books. I was becoming increasingly selective in the things I was attracted to, we joked and called it The Dark Underbelly or The Poetry of Dirt. I was filtering out some things in preference to others and this new camera process was doing something similar as layered images began to obliterate each other or combine to make new shapes. Too much light would burn out chunks of landscape creating milky open areas between dense thickets of intersecting lines. I started exhibiting these photographs as photo ribbons, short stories, real-life comic strips re-telling journeys and contact sheets like tiny 2D cinemas hung on walls. How could I translate these into moving images? A friend invited me to help him move home from LA to New York. A schoolboy fantasy to drive across America, Paris Texas, Motel Chronicles, a drunk’s fantasy of dying alone in a cheap room at the back of a truck stop. The film Van Halen,Van Halen Rock Guitar Band was shot on a domestic handicam, filming road signs, trucks, diners, chain gangs, California palms and East Coast blizzards – the name came from a phone call to a friend, ‘What shall I call it?’ Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Killing Time with a Camera instead of a note book, collecting fragments along a line drawn by a truck pulling an old Mercedes from the West Coast to the East. The photo-strips had been a blueprint for this and together with Jon Hollis from Smoke & Mirrors a road trip document emerged from the layered fragments I was attracted to – a poem made out of road signs and Americana. Four versions of the film were created and in 1997 they were projected in the round for an installation at Die Neue Sammlung in Munich, Germany. Filming the M25 came next – an orbital motorway circling London – the most boring road I could think of. Traffic jams, road works, family holiday car games to stop us screaming with boredom, lying on our backs on the back seat imagining the sky was ocean and the world was buried in a catastrophic flood. Learning how to transform mundane vignettes into magical tableaux, little collections of ‘nothings’ along the side of the road into ‘somethings’ to maintain the will to live. A bus stop, a lay-by, bits of shredded tyre, scraps of paper blown into dancing animals on the winds of passing traffic, monotonous lines of wooden fencing, wires between pylons, concrete posts, iron manhole covers. Who laid the grass on miles of embankment to hem us in, who planted these sad trees, what hope lies beyond such joyless bushes that drive our eyes back to the blacktop and whose tyres drew these beautiful black flourishes on curb stones for miles?

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter What courageous typographer pasted these vast marks along hundreds of miles of blacktop? Who hung these huge paintings at the side of the road to lift our spirits, when did human feet last walk these desolate strips between head-on traffic where sickly weeds cling to stains? J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island on my mind driving the motorways of England. Growing up at the side of a busy road where, every weekend, drunks drove cars into our garden. I collected the trophies of car crashes – snapped-off wing mirrors, crazed chunks of shattered windscreen, the red plastic of tail lights. Growing up with the rhythm of the hiss of rubber, predicting gaps between cars, the unmistakable music of cars and their collisions – brittle, dull and final. Walking Romford Ring-Road because it was there: . . . In a place where ballgames are strictly forbidden luxury two-bedroom apartments overlook the traffic lights next to the rails . . . I see a wall that’s gonna fall down, maybe hurt somebody after its been tagged and fly posted. It’s a rush job, looks good for long enough. Knock ’em out and sell ’em and move on . . . it’s the short term, the long term can look after itself unless you happen to be living here. I found a door I didn’t know where it went, I went through and came out in this shopping mall where boys wear England shirts and West Ham shirts and Arsenal shirts and boys from Dagenham wear jackets called ‘Harlem’ grinning at the door of the Anne Summers sex shop . . . (‘Ring Road’ by Underworld)

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Back on the M25 we drove around it filming with cameras taped to the glass on each side of the car. When these were played back in the round we were motionless going endlessly around the most boring road in England, but each time noticing little fragments to elevate our boredom. Tiny details became landmarks, familiar friends, a car, a number plate, a face at the wheel, a couple arguing, a frequency of trees, road-marking rhythms, brake-light rhythms, flapping-tarpaulin rhythms, bridge rhythms, shadow rhythms, Buddy Rich, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Billy Cobham, boys brigade marching band rhythms beaten out on dashboards in traffic jams, Sam Shepard drumming in the Holy Modal Rounders, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith plucking her guitar strings till they snap and handing them to girls in the audience like violent flowers so gentle it’s frightening – ‘SNAP’ and smile, ‘SNAP’ and smile – Cardiff Top Rank in the 1970s. Back with the M25 – scale it down, walk the ring road of your town. What do you see? Wind-blown papers, branded cans, cups, packages, things jettisoned from cars that never stop. Drivers oblivious to the details of tenacious weeds and grasses, broken glass, cigarette butts that always congregate, finding one another in abandoned corners, driven like sheep by tiny whirlwinds – lie despairing in cul-desacs of random concrete hollows.

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Unfinished business, truncated slip-roads, future by-ways, where paper dances with plastic in the breeze, where the weeds reclaim roads through cracks like lava, like tiny rivulets of bloods that stream from pinholes made by hypodermics. The architecture of underpasses. The way they smell, the way they sound, human-size napkin rings through which all inner-city life must pass to get to the other side – escape and enter, ebb and flow like tides. The rhythm of the motion of traffic, the air stirred up in its wake, energy curving off the painted faces of cars in rust and chrome and coloured bodies – the music of cascading sunlight-rhythms. The Dance of people walking through cities colliding with the dance of the colours of light bouncing off buildings, reflecting off pavements, shop windows, intersecting with the poetry of shop signs, street signs, bus hoardings, billboards, cheap disco traffic lights, car radios like Claes Oldenburg car park happenings, the brutal poetry of multi-story car park architecture. All these things emanating rhythms and I can see them all! Sometimes they are lines of intersecting motion like Duchamp’s nudes descending staircases, like Futurist celebrations of mechanical wonders. Sometimes they’re words as buildings, colours, shapes form sentences and shout them at me as I walk.

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Sometimes in fields of colour mixed from the livery of traffic, reflecting sky in their windscreens like wide-screen movies. The beautiful stains on pavements and dripping down alley walls, combinations of decay and rain and burned-out waste bins, Saturday Night vomiting, kebab technicolor, Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music dancing over hills on the biggest widescreen in 1970s Birmingham and sometimes in the beauty of the marks you leave for me to find as I journey through cities. I find rhythm in all these things. Try to emulate them, imitate them, in charcoal, chalk, graphite, ink, paint. Try to capture all the shapes I see dancing, interlocking, as I pass through the day. They wait for me on stage, revealing themselves as I begin to dance so that I might slip my body in between and let them articulate the limbs in such a way as to appear to be dancing, when actually I’m just stepping through a labyrinth, trying to reach the exit. The curve of a dancer’s hand a split second before moving. Bob Dylan turns a pet shop sign into poetry in 1960s London. The most beautiful music I ever heard was the sound of rush-hour traffic as I lay awake in New York in the early 1990s. Lay still for an hour until it changed and was gone.

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter In 2006 I was wandering the streets of Tokyo at night, photographing the drawings made by trucks as they caught curbstones, passing through town. I was there for a week of press interviews – long days answering the same questions. To keep my thinking fresh I started drawing on hotel note pads without looking, letting my hand dance rhythms whilst imagining the limits of the paper so as not to exceed them. The object was to maintain a conversation and at the same time visualise the pencil describing the marks I saw in my head. What came out of this exercise (apart from a lot of bemused journalists) was a collection of drawings that looked like the marks I was photographing in the streets at night. On further reflection both sets of marks bore a strong resemblance to the shapes I saw in my head when I was dancing on stage with Underworld. This set in motion a process to reproduce not only the images I see in my head when I’m dancing, but also the shapes I see everywhere coming off of people, buildings, cars, sound waves and light as I make journeys. Sometimes these shapes become cacophonous, even violent in their intensity, particularly when they combine with the poetry of street noise and transient conversation. The Poetry of Streets: the fragments combine to form such dense rhythms that the richness of the information they carry becomes physically painful to be around. I have to filter it out, simplify the composition, just to be able to walk down the street or ride a train.

Images left to right: Essex 1 / Essex 2 Moscow 1 / Moscow 2 Hong Kong 1 / Hong Kong 2 Graphite and erasing on hotel note paper 2009

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter The marks I make: Zen Calligraphy, Graffiti, The shapes I see in a sheet of paper as I sit quietly in front of it, The shapes I carry in my head remembering nights on stage, The colours of Japanese lacquer boxes, Samurai armour, The colours of Far Eastern household appliances. The paper dictates the tool and the medium. Fat brushes, loaded, thick and black like calligrapher’s ink. Graphite, four pencils at a time between the fingers, rolling them as you draw, allowing them a life of their own. Charcoal – memories of beach bonfires, crop clearing, the smell of burning newspaper, campfire stories and the tradition of charcoal making in the forest I grew up in. Soft pastel – the texture and colours of deserts as we fly over continents, a fascination with red earth, the sinuous twisting of rivers. Chalk – school, Joseph Beuys, minerals dug up from fields. The conversation between all these elements and the surface of the paper. The way it buckles as it absorbs liquid, staining like the crumbling walls of Italian alleys. The smell and sound of paper, memories of school, stationery shops, Japanese screens, timber mills and the sound of chainsaws way off in the forest. The rhythm of light: intersecting sound waves that collide with the movements of dancers and the energy passing back and forth between musicians and their audiences. The street, architecture, the movement of people and their fragmentary dialogues. Everything singing, electric, perpetually writhing in a dance of interlocking conversations – generating extraordinary melodies of forms and colour – joy!

Untitled Digital photographs 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter All this information, what’s its application and why? The ‘why’ is simple – ‘to meet myself’. Having reflected on the process, studied sketch books and photographs as far back as my collection allows, the creative act remains sometimes pleasurable, often frustrating, yet always the place where subconscious intuition manifests in physical form like a railway line cut through a forest. When I paint, draw, photograph, express myself through artwork I encounter my subconscious self (reward) or my conscious self, noting how it blocks open exploration, closing down possibilities with preconceptions (frustration). I turn up hungry to watch myself, like a film projected onto a wall. Learning to deflect conscious thought before it effects direction, I sidestep to allow myself to play in the sand pit with unlikely things, ‘What’s ugly, what’s beautiful?’ remembering the exhilaration of encountering the extraordinary rhythms of preceding days, I go with the dance, let it manifest the way it wants and uncover another part of me. Photography is crucial to the process. Why is my eye drawn to this and not that? I keep taking pictures, letting the numbers build, repetitive imagery, attracted to the same things, then suddenly not, breaking the rhythm, making ‘ugly’ choices deliberately, returning to them to discover that they’re not. Photography and in particular the selection of found objects allows me to move quickly, make intuitive choices without the encumbrance of ‘technique’ or ability. I build collections, post images on the web daily, making fast selections, attaching them to unrelated text which becomes related because they’re on the same page – fascinated.

Images left to right: Speed of Love #1 / #3 #6 / #4 #7 / #8 iPhone drawings 2012

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Road markings bisect the edge of the photograph, a rhythm I’m attracted to asks to be drawn. Tarmac becomes graphite, bitumen become acrylic or remains bitumen. Goading me to use it on precious acid-free papers, dripping and cracking, revealing rhythms of its own. Electrical appliances, Japanese cars, shrines and temples dictate the colour pallet I choose. Charcoal is the dirt from the cracks in pavements, smells burned and industrial like chimney sweeps. Applied to paper it softens like traffic in the distance, cars concealed in the rush hour of a morning fog. A door slams, a road drill becomes thick black violent brush stokes, Franz Kline an artist whose work I hated questioning why it was ‘ugly’ then fell in love. Black is the confidence of dance moves executed with abandon before a roaring audience. Watered paint is flood river damage, bursting the banks of the River Severn where I was raised, the smell of brown water seepage into rotting foundations, decay as beauty, pristine paper waits with open arms to take the stain. Wallpaper, hung by DIY fathers, bible parchment, shrine prayers hung in trees, whispering

The angles are ugly, the groove stumbles, but keep trying to sing it, speak it, whisper, there’s a voice it wants you to find to sing it alive, integrate it into your music. People’s stories, the fragments of their lives, angular, overheard and documented, more beautiful than perfect prose, slip it in between the beats.

‘Make sculptures that will blow away in the wind.’

‘Why this, not that?’

The precious leaves of hand-bound books, antique manuscript smelling of time tempt me to cover them with the marks I find on alley walls. Conversations become lyrics, just sing them. Can’t remember them? Write them down, collect them like the fragments you photograph, treat them like found objects, a string of pearls of wisdom. Carry them with you, try re-writing them, they lose their rhythm and sit down.

The M25, the king of dull drives, a monotone blacktop ring around the city, a traffic jam never waiting to happen, a life sentence, circle of despair. A giant ‘O’, a beautiful form, a celebration of the mundane on a loop. Take five tiny cameras, attach one to each of the sides of a car and one to the roof, drive the road and film. Re-project onto screens that form a room, a capsule, a cocoon. Score the film with the music of worship, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is the sky as cars acquire tones corresponding to colours. We stand in the room, in the middle of the road, stationary, moving fast, surrounded by sounds and visions from inside of the head of a synaesthetic. Keep photographing, keep asking yourself the same questions,

Keep integrating fragments of the images into your work, the dynamic rhythms of their collisions. Can you include text? Dance your physical presence on the work. Find a small portable structure, a symbol of isolation, meditation, solitude, sanctuary. Take an ordinary shed and erect it indoors, laid out on canvas like a boxing ring, a dance mat. Invite an audience to watch as you stand back to contemplate the surfaces, visualise the marks you photograph projected onto it, vibrating.

You see materials, colours, shapes, dance movements as you paint, everything you found as you walked the streets laid out on the pallet in your head. Now pick up the first brush, plunge it into the pigment you selected intuitively from your paint box of Japanese automobile colours. Dance and keep dancing, striking the surface of the shed with flashes, curls, hooks and splashes. Let it drip, apply it too thick and thin it till it pales to a stain like piss alley morning rush-hour stains, dried from the night before. Listen to the voices in the audience. They are the musical accompaniment to your performance. Put a camera up and broadcast it on the web, it’s not a scripted show, it’s rough, both dull and a buzz, like a walk down any street. Give all these works a name, don’t stop to reason what or why. Open your book of ‘conversations’, make a swift decision, attracted to a rhythm in the words you don’t have to understand. If you understand it, move on and keep moving until something jumps out – ‘that’s’ the one. When everything is beautiful recall how beautiful the marks you found in ugly places were when you saw them for the first time wishing you could paint like that. Seek out ‘ugly’. If all the grooves are perfect remember the squeal of the brakes of city buses that sliced the banging of scaffolding pipes and when the poetry gets conscious of itself one too many times open your notebook and sing the first line that catches your eye, keep articulating the rhythm you find in these beautiful collisions, dance to the fragments you find with camera, note book and hungry eye and celebrate the rhythms of the criss-cross stories in all the collisions you find.

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Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter

Blows Between Buildings Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012 Meet Me North of the Arctic Circle Graphite, pastel, acrylic and erasing on tea-stained 400 g/m water colour 2010

Your Feet Flick Fast with a Mind of their Own (top) Dancing to the Music of Road Drills (middle) Birdlike Woman Runs a Giant Comb Through Her Hair (bottom) Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012

Who’s Curves Dare Pencils to Dream of Dancing Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012 Mr Somebody Graphite, pastel, acrylic and erasing on tea-stained 400 g/m water colour 2010

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Russell Marshall (TRACEY) is Senior Lecturer at Loughborough Design School, Loughborough University. Phil Sawdon (TRACEY) is an artist, writer and sometime academic. He is an Honorary Fellow of Loughborough University School of the Arts.

. . . a position of ambiguity (a lack of definition), is desirable within drawing (and visualisation) practice . . . and that a lack of definition is not only desirable it is also a necessity . . . and has the capacity to enable and sustain drawing practices1 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Retrieval

. . . traditional view and materials definitions, constraints, boundaries ? outside boundaries, query other boundaries, drawing (not ‘other’ things (practice)) drawing a phrase for these ‘other’ spaces Hyperdrawing  ‘verbal tool’ (sub / supra  hypo / hyper)  established categorisation (drawings, called drawings but . . . not called drawings and . . .)  fallacy . . .2 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing S: ‘Drawing is an ambiguous practice.’ Q: ‘Why?’ Q/A: ‘Because drawing can’t be defined?’ Q: ‘Why can’t drawing be defined?’ A: ‘Because the definition would be ambiguous.’ 3 hyperdrawing = drawing?  ambiguity  a necessity (to enable and sustain) Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Line To map the seven ambiguities 4 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,5 drawing emergent prepositions,6 in advancing logical disorder 7 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

First . . .

A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the first of the seven ambiguities 8 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,9 drawing emergent prepositions,10 stage one of advancing logical disorder 11 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Second . . .

A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the second of the seven ambiguities 12 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,13 drawing emergent prepositions,14 stage two of advancing logical disorder 15 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Third . . . A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the third of the seven ambiguities 16 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,17 drawing emergent prepositions,18 stage three of advancing logical disorder 19 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Fourth . . .

A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the fourth of the seven ambiguities 20 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,21 drawing emergent prepositions,22 stage four of advancing logical disorder 23 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Fifth . . .

A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the fifth of the seven ambiguities 24 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,25 drawing emergent prepositions,26 stage five of advancing logical disorder 27 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Sixth . . .

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the sixth of the seven ambiguities 28 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,29 drawing emergent prepositions,30 stage six of advancing logical disorder 31 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Seventh . . . A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the seventh of the seven ambiguities 32 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,33 drawing emergent prepositions,34 final stage of advancing logical disorder 35 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

. . . Seventh A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the seventh of the seven ambiguities 36 overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies,37 drawing emergent prepositions,38 final stage of advancing logical disorder 39 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Beside

Drawing: Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

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Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing

Endnotes 1 Sawdon, P. J. and Marshall, R., Drawing: An Ambiguous Practice, Intersections, 35th Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, 4 April 2009, available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2134/6069 (accessed 15 September 2014). 2 Marshall, R. and Sawdon, P., ‘Hyperdrawing’, in P. Sawdon and R. Marshall (eds), Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012, pp. viii–xii. 3 Ibid., p. xi. 4 Empson, W., Seven Types of Ambiguity, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961. 5 Equivocation – a fallacy committed when the conclusion of the argument depends on the fact that one or more words are used, either explicitly or implicitly, in two different senses in the argument. Amphiboly – this fallacy occurs when the arguer misinterprets a statement that is ambiguous owing to some structural defect and proceeds to draw a conclusion based on this faulty interpretation. An amphiboly can occur even when every term in an argument is univocal, if the grammatical construction of a sentence creates its own ambiguity. Composition – a fallacy committed when the conclusion of an argument depends on the enormous transference of a characteristic from the parts of something onto the whole. In other words, the fallacy occurs when it is argued that because the parts have a certain characteristic, it follows that the whole has the characteristic. The fallacy of composition involves an inference from the attribution of some feature to every individual member of a class (or part of a greater whole) to the possession of the same feature by the entire class (or whole). Division – the fallacy is committed when the conclusion of an argument depends on the erroneous

transference of a characteristic from a whole onto parts. The fallacy of division involves an inference from the attribution of some feature to an entire class (or whole) to the possession of the same feature by each of its individual members (or parts). Accent – a fallacy that arises from the mistaken interpretation of a statement but the mistake is due to the ambiguity in the way the statement is spoken. It occurs when the arguer illegitimately stresses one or more words in the given statement and then proceeds to draw a conclusion based on the resultant interpretation. The fallacy of accent arises from an ambiguity produced by a shift of spoken or written emphasis. In Pius, ‘Correct Thinking’, 2007, available online at http://blogphilosophy.blogspot.co.uk/2007/06/ fallacies-of-ambiguity.html (accessed 15 September 2014). 6 Prepositions usually indicate temporal, spatial or logical relationships (of its object to the rest of the sentence). In MacFadyen, H., ‘What is a Preposition?’, University of Ottowa: The Writing Centre, HyperGrammar, available at www.writingcentre.uottawa.ca/hypergrammar/ preposit.html (accessed 15 September 2014). 7 Empson cites three possible scales of ambiguity: the degree of logical or grammatical disorder, the degree to which the apprehension of the ambiguity must be conscious, and the degree of physiological complexity concerned. 8 First-type ambiguities arise when a detail is effective in several ways at once, e.g. by comparisons with several points of likeness, antitheses with several points of difference, ‘comparative’ adjectives, subdued metaphors and extra meanings suggested by rhythm. In Contents, Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. 9 Supra note 5. 10 Supra note 6. 11 Supra note 7. 12 In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one. In Contents, Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity.

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Supra note 5. Supra note 6. Supra note 7. The condition for third-type ambiguity is that two apparently unconnected meanings are given simultaneously. Generalised form when there is reference to more than one universe of dis­course; allegory, mutual comparison and pastoral. In Contents, Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Supra note 5. Supra note 6. Supra note 7. In the fourth type the alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author. In Contents, Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Supra note 5. Supra note 6. Supra note 7. The fifth type is a fortunate confusion, as when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing or not holding it all in mind at once. In Contents, Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Supra note 5. Supra note 6. Supra note 7. In the sixth type what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced to invent interpretations. In Contents, Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Supra note 5. Supra note 6. Supra note 7. The seventh type is that of full contradiction, marking a division in the author’s mind. In Contents, Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Supra note 5. Supra note 6. Supra note 7. Supra note 28. Supra note 5. Supra note 6. Supra note 7.

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Artwork Details TO DRAW: Drawing Draws Draward

Between Formation

Michael Phillipson

Ilana Halperin

Page 7 Anon. Art’s-Body’s Last Breathless Speech Water colour on paper 6 x 6 cm Undated

Page 21 Ilana Halperin Physical Geology (cave cast/slow time) 19 x 23 cm Limestone sculpture formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire 2008–09 Image credit: Ruth Clark

Page 17 Heather Phillipson Mouth Still from SD video, 2008 Exhibited at Glyn Vyvyan Gallery, Swansea Dimensions: variable 2009 Courtesy Heather Phillipson Page 18 Susan Skingle To the Four Winds Modelling material and metal tripods Installation: The London Group Centenary Exhibition, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, Ealing Dimensions: variable 2013 Photograph by kind permission of Susan Skingle Page 19 Susan Skingle Sketch for To the Four Winds Chalk on black paper 35 x 20 cm 2013 Photograph by kind permission of Susan Skingle

Page 23 Ilana Halperin Physical Geology (cave cast/slow time) 19 x 23 cm Limestone sculpture formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire 2008–09 Image credit: Ruth Clark Page 24 Ilana Halperin Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Invernessshire and Maine Mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland Page 25 Ilana Halperin Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Invernessshire and Maine Mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland

Page 26 Ilana Halperin Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Invernessshire and Maine Mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland Page 27 Ilana Halperin Excerpts from The Library Etched books of 800-million-year-old Invernessshire and Maine Mica Each book approximately 12 x 10 cm 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland Page 28 Ilana Halperin The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland Page 29 Ilana Halperin The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland

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Artwork Details Page 30 Ilana Halperin The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland Page 31 Ilana Halperin The Mineral Body Wood encrusted in limestone 35 x 25 cm Formed in the Fontaines Pétrifiantes de Saint Nectaire December 2012–March 2013 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland Page 32 Ilana Halperin We Form Geology Wood with natural mineral deposit 62 x 45 cm Formed in the Blue Lagoon March 2011–March 2012 Image credit: Neil McLean, National Museums Scotland

The Idiom of the Mark Rob Ward Page 42 Rob Ward Untitled Digital Drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Page 43 All Images: Rob Ward Untitled Digital Drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Page 44 Rob Ward Untitled Digital Drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Page 47 What is Wrong in These Pictures? The Children’s Encyclopaedia Ed. Arthur Mee c. 1907

Trailing Temporal Trace Deborah Harty

Page 33 Ilana Halperin A Bridge Between the Living and the Dying Colour print 50 x 40 cm 2011 Image credit: Ilana Halperin

Page 51 Deborah Harty trail i Compressed charcoal and graphite on paper 100 x 100 cm 2006 Deborah Harty trail ii Compressed charcoal and graphite on paper 100 x 100 cm 2006

Deborah Harty trail iii Compressed charcoal and graphite on paper 100 x 100 cm 2006 Deborah Harty trail iv Compressed charcoal and graphite on paper 100 x 200 cm 2006 Page 52 Deborah Harty pause i Compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2008 Deborah Harty pause ii Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2008 Deborah Harty pause iii Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2008 Deborah Harty pause iv Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2012 Deborah Harty pause v Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2009 Deborah Harty pause vi Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2008

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Artwork Details Deborah Harty pause vii Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2008 Deborah Harty pause viii Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2009 Deborah Harty pause ix Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 25 x 25 cm 2009

Deborah Harty wonder in the face of the world/world in the face of wonder part ii Graphite on paper 59.4 x 42 cm 2013 Page 61 Deborah Harty the nursling Digital Drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

Particles of Moisture Kreider + O’Leary Page 69 Mark Boyle World Series, Sardinia. Elemental Study (red scarp), earth etc. on fibreglass 183 x 183 cm 1978 Page 70 Crop of page from Robert Smithson’s essay ‘Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ 1968

Page 63 Deborah Harty duration (detail) Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 150 x 250 cm 2006

Page 71 Kreider + O’Leary Kansai Digital Image 260 x 260 mm 2013 Courtesy Kristen Kreider + James O’Leary

Page 64 Deborah Harty duration ii Compressed charcoal on paper 100 x 300 cm 2005

Page 72 A reconstruction of Brunelleschi’s first experiment Hubert Damish Théorie du /nuage/ 1972

Page 57 Deborah Harty outlines of awareness Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

Deborah Harty duration iii Compressed charcoal on scored paper 100 x 300 cm 2005

Page 73 Kreider + O’Leary Awaji Digital image 260 x 260 mm 2013 Courtesy Kristen Kreider + James O’Leary

Page 60 Deborah Harty wonder in the face of the world/world in the face of wonder part i Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013

Deborah Harty duration iv Compressed charcoal on paper 100 x 300 cmi

Page 74 Agnes Martin Close up view of Rose 1965

Page 53 Deborah Harty lines of existence Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Page 55 Deborah Harty passage (detail) Graphite and compressed charcoal on paper 1050 x 230 cm 2013

Agnes Martin Faraway view of Rose 1965

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Artwork Details Page 75 Kreider + O’Leary Osaka Digital image 260 x 260 mm 2013 Courtesy Kristen Kreider + James O’Leary Page 77 Kreider + O’Leary Oji Digital Image 260 x 260 mm 2013 Courtesy Kristen Kreider + James O’Leary Page 79 Joan Jonas Lines in the Sand Installation view In: Bartomeu Marí, Other Times and Other Places: The Art of Joan Jonas 2007 Page 80 Kreider + O’Leary Ise Digital Image 260 x 260 mm 2013 Courtesy Kristen Kreider + James O’Leary

Honks, Horns, Howls & Laughter Karl Hyde Page 83 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012

Page 84 Top images left to right: Karl Hyde Black Train #4 / Black Train #3 iPhone drawing Dimensions: variable 2012

Page 90 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012

Other images: Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012

Page 91 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012

Page 85 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012 Page 86 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012 Page 87 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012 Page 88 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012 Page 89 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012

Page 92 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012 Page 93 Images left to right: Karl Hyde Essex 1 / Essex 2 Moscow 1 / Moscow 2 Hong Kong 1 / Hong Kong 2 Graphite and erasing on hotel note paper Dimensions: variable 2009 Page 94 Karl Hyde Untitled Digital photographs Dimensions: variable 2012 Page 95 Images left to right: Karl Hyde Speed of Love #1 / #3 / #6 / #4 / #7 / #8 iPhone drawings Dimensions: variable 2012

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Artwork Details Page 97 Karl Hyde Blows Between Buildings Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012 Karl Hyde Meet Me North of the Arctic Circle Graphite, pastel, acrylic and erasing on teastained 400 g/m water colour 2010 Karl Hyde Your Feet Flick Fast with a Mind of their Own Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012 Karl Hyde Dancing to the Music of Road Drills Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012 Karl Hyde Birdlike Woman Runs a Giant Comb Through Her Hair Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012 Karl Hyde Whos Curves Dare Parncils to Dream of Dancing Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite and erasing on 350gsm acid-free paper 2012 Karl Hyde Mr Somebody Graphite, pastel, acrylic and erasing on teastained 400 g/m water colour 2010

Through Ambiguity . . . Toward [Hyper]Drawing Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Page 99 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon … a position of ambiguity (a lack of definition), is desirable within drawing (and visualisation) practice. … and that a lack of definition is not only desirable it is also a necessity. … and has the capacity to enable and sustain drawing practices Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Page 100 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon … traditional view and materials definitions, constraints, boundaries ? outside boundaries, query other boundaries, drawing (not ‘other’ things (practice)) drawing a phrase for these ‘other’ spaces Hyperdrawing  ‘verbal tool’ (sub / supra  hypo / hyper)  established categorisation (drawings, called drawings but.., not called drawings and..)  fallacy … Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Page 101 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon S: ‘Drawing is an ambiguous practice.’ Q: ‘Why?’ Q/A: ‘Because Drawing can’t be defined?’ Q: ‘Why can’t Drawing be defined?’ A: ‘Because the definition would be ambiguous.’ hyperdrawing = drawing?  ambiguity  a necessity (to enable and sustain) Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon

Page 102 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Mapping of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, in advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Page 103 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the first of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, stage one of advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Page 104 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the second of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, stage two of advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Page 105 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the third of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, stage three of advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon

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Artwork Details Page 106 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the fourth of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, stage four of advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon

Pages 108–109 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the sixth of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, stage six of advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon

Page 107 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the fifth of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, stage five of advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon

Page 110 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the seventh of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, final stage of advancing logical disorder Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon

Page 111 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon A selective (non-exhaustive) mapping of the seventh of the seven ambiguities overlaid and interwoven with five fallacies, drawing emergent prepositions, final stage of advancing logical disorder Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Pages 112–113 Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon Drawing: Digital drawing Dimensions: variable 2013 Courtesy Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon

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