Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing 9781350986138, 9780857727077

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Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at Loughborough University. She is the author of We Weren’t Modern Enough and Breaking the Disciplines (both I.B.Tauris). Phil Sawdon is Honorary Fellow of the School of the Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University, where previously he was a Senior Lecturer. He is co-editor of Drawing Now, Hyperdrawing and Drawing Ambiguity (also I.B.Tauris).

‘Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing offers a fresh perspective on contemporary drawing. In a thoughtprovoking tour de force the authors draw on their highly respected expertise to explore the nexus between gender and drawing and to analyse the prominent role that women artists have played in the development of contemporary fine art drawing since the 1960s. By discussing pivotal works from the 1970s and their connections with contemporary practices they guide the reader through a cogently argued thesis that the conventions of contemporary fine art drawing and the key concerns of feminism are largely coextensive and hence that women working with drawing have shaped the conceptual parameters of the genre. Drawing Difference is a welcome resource for researchers and practitioners alike. It makes a valuable contribution to the literature on drawing and is destined to become a standard work in its field.’ Nancy Sever, Director, Nancy Sever Gallery, Canberra and formerly Director, Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery and Art Collection (1993–2012)

‘Drawing Difference radically reconfigures the terrain of discourse about drawing in fine art. It will be essential reading across disciplinary boundaries for all those concerned with the relations between art practices and their cultural context. Setting aside all dualisms and guided by the affinities between feminist thought and drawing in the contemporary fine arts, Meskimmon and Sawdon approach drawing from an ‘elsewhere’. Through explorations of a diverse array of drawings by contemporary artists they offer drawing as a threshold where the drawing performance, materialising embodied thinking, makes for ‘otherness’ by embracing fluidity, openness, and dialogue. This is an exciting and adventurous text that challenges us to rethink the relations between sexed subjectivity and the practices of art-making.’ Michael Phillipson, artist and writer, previously affiliated with Goldsmiths College (London) and Middlesex University

Drawing Difference Connections Between Gender and Drawing

Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon

Published in 2016 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com The right of Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Copyright © 2016 Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. ISBN: 978 1 78453 026 6 HB 978 1 78453 027 3 PB ePDF: 978 0 85772 707 7 eISBN: 978 0 85772 912 5 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Freerange Book Design & Production Limited l

Contents

Illustrations Approaching: drawing near

vii 1

1 Dialogue

21

2 Matter

51

3 Open

80



Coinciding: drawing to a close without end

113

Notes 119 Selected Bibliography 135 Index 147

Illustrations

Figure 1: L’ombre dessinée sur le mur, Annette 22 Messager, one item from the series Les Pensionnaires, 1971–2. Stuffed bird fastened to a wall with a metal spike together with drawing of a shadow on the wall, variable size. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2015. Photograph © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat. Figure 2: Blind Carousel, Marco Maggi, 2007. Slide carousel and pencil on 80 aluminium foil slide mounts.

30

Figure 3: Braille Wall, Marco Maggi, installation: Josée Bienvenu Gallery, 2009.

32

Figure 4: Blind Slide, from Braille Wall (detail), Marco Maggi, drypoint on aluminium foil.

33

Figure 5: Silent Freeze / Mirrored: I, Siân Bowen, 2009–11, 42 stills from video. Figure 6: Descriptions True and Perfect, Siân Bowen, detail from 25 books incorporating embossing, letterpress, pinpricks, mica, palladium, white gold and watermarks on bespoke hemp paper with semi-limp vellum binding, each 25.5 x 17 centimetres.

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viii

Figure 7: Drawing Which Makes Itself: FPI 16, Dorothea Rockburne, 1973. Folded paper and ink, 76.2 x 101.5 centimetres. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2015. Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund © 2015. Photograph, Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA, Florence.

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Figure 8: Wedding Ring Drawing (the circumference of a living room), Cornelia Parker, 1996. Two 22-carat-gold wedding rings drawn into wire, 61 x 61 centimetres, framed. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Gift of Barbara Lee.

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Figure 9: Self-Portrait (with feathers), Susan Hauptman, 2007. Charcoal, feathers and gold leaf on paper, 104 x 134.5 centimetres. © Susan Hauptman, Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York.

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Figure 10: Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna, Susan Hauptman, 2000. Charcoal, pastel and gold leaf, 137 x 101.5 centimetres. © Susan Hauptman, Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York.

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Figure 11: Engagement Ring Drawing (As Long as it Lasted), Cornelia Parker, 2002. Reclaimed gold engagement ring drawn into wire, scratches on glass made by a diamond. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 63 x 63 centimetres. The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection. © 2015, Photograph, Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA, Florence.

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Figure 12: Up To And Including Her Limits, Carolee Schneemann, 13–14 February 1976, The Kitchen, New York. Performance: Crayon on Paper, Rope & Harness suspended from ceiling. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2015. Photograph: Shelley Farkas Davis.

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Figure 14: Chicago2a, Christoph Fink, 2003, ballpoint ink and pencil on paper 16.4 x 21 centimetres; © Christoph Fink.

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S

Figure 13: Untitled (Walls), Toba Khedoori, 2000, oil and wax on paper 360 x 850 centimetres. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; © Toba Khedoori.

Figure 15: FA21, Atlas of Movements, Movement #52 87 (The Frankfurt Walks), Christoph Fink, 2002, ink and pencil on paper cut-out + printed text on paper (540 x 136.5 centimetres + extension 45 x 237 centimetres), detail exhibition view, Manifesta, Kunstverein Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany © Christoph Fink. Figure 16: Up To And Including Her Limits, 1973–76, Carolee Schneeman. Installation: Crayon on Paper, Rope, Harness, 6 Video Monitors. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2015.

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Figure 17: Untitled (Doors), detail, Toba Khedoori, 1999, oil and wax on paper, 350.5 x 486 centimetres. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Toba Khedoori.

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Approaching: drawing near

To approach implies […] becoming aware of the diversity of our worlds and creating paths which, with respect for this diversity, allow holding dialogues. Luce Irigaray1

This book proceeds from the simple observation, shared by its authors, that women, as artists, curators, scholars and critics, have played a particularly prominent role in the development and establishment of the field of contemporary fine art drawing since the 1960s. In addition, many of the women who have facilitated the emergence of drawing as a significant activity in its own right within the context of international contemporary art practices have also been associated with feminist interventions in the arts as makers, curators, writers and/or activists. Our contention is that this shared observation is more than circumstantial and, indeed, that the historical convergence between feminist interventions in the arts and the institutional establishment of contemporary fine art drawing underpins a more complex interweaving of the two spheres. As we argue throughout this volume, drawing provides unusually rich practical, material and theoretical tools for facilitating the articulation of sexed subjectivity in and through difference. And while this has made drawing important to women artists, critics and curators, it does not make drawing an activity of exclusive significance to women, but of vital importance to exploring the very parameters through which sexed subjectivity emerges in

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and though processes of material inscription. This reconceives and reconfigures the ‘unmarked’ and normative structures of masculinity and male subjectivity as well as enabling the articulation of female subjectivity in its own terms. In this sense, we are aligned with feminist philosophical thinking on the two-fold nature of sexual difference, as eloquently stated by Rebecca Hill: [S]exual difference has at least two senses. First, ‘sexual difference’ is a critical description of the violent sexed hierarchy that covertly inaugurates metaphysics as phallocentrism. Second, ‘sexual difference’ is the opening to thought and to life, which figures man and woman in a non-hierarchical relationship.2

2

In tracing some of the productive interconnections between gender and drawing since the 1960s, this book demonstrates the significance of women’s practices and feminist thought to the field of drawing and to the formation of a number of key conceptual premises within contemporary fine art discourse – and vice versa. In particular, we argue that, to an unusual degree, women working with and within drawing have shaped the conceptual parameters of the field, that the conventions of contemporary fine art drawing frequently overlap with the critical concerns of feminism and, more strongly, that these conventions and concerns can be argued to be mutually constitutive and reinforcing. Drawing is intertwined with feminist interventions into the theories and practices of art historically, materially, conceptually and institutionally. It is our contention that through these mutually constitutive interconnections, drawing has a relationship both to the ‘first’ sense of sexual difference (as per Hill, above), in that it is able to expose, challenge and change the violent, yet often invisible, hierarchies that sustain the binary logic of phallocentrism, and to the ‘second’ sense. In our collaborative exploration of gender and drawing, this ‘second’ sense emerges through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of contemporary drawing practitioners and theorists (men and women) that, we argue, provide the possibility to instantiate non-hierarchical relationships, articulated in and across difference. We invoke ‘difference’ within our work to signal the multiple and interconnected relationships

Our use of allotropy, borrowed from chemistry, is both playful and deliberate. While it is not intended literally to describe, for example, the way carbon materialises in various allotropic forms (e.g. graphite and diamond), its powerful, visceral evocation of non-binary material emergence in simultaneous, yet different, variations of genre, mode and type establishes for us, throughout this volume, a way of thinking and describing the relationships between corporeal feminist thought and the gestures and objects that constitute drawing. Our allotropic approach unfolds in many variations throughout the text and finally draws it to an ‘open’ close. However, before we reach that point, we would like to take an elliptical turn back towards the ostensibly simple observation from which we began our approach, that women, as artists, activists, curators, scholars and critics, have played a particularly prominent role in the development and establishment of the field of contemporary fine art drawing since the 1960s.

APPROACHING: drawing near

between sexed subjects, performed (and performative) gender conventions and feminist articulations of intersectional identity and agency (sexual and other differences). We propose an allotropic figuration for thinking through the connective interval between drawing and difference, so better to describe an unfolding of matter and meaning through manifold, non-binary, non-hierarchical modes.

Women, Feminism and Drawing In 1976, Bernice Rose, curator in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, organized a major survey exhibition of contemporary drawing: Drawing Now: 1955–75.3 To this day, Drawing Now is seen as a pivotal point in the institutional acknowledgement of drawing as a key form of modern and contemporary art-making in its own right, and as more than a preliminary process in support of other media, such as painting, print-making or sculpture.4 Its curator, who would remain a central voice in the field of contemporary drawing for many years, was a woman. 3

DRAWING DIFFERENCE

The chronology of the show is significant; taking the period 1955– 75 as marking a turning point for drawing, this chronology centres on the 1960s as signalling a shift from formalist modernism to process-led, conceptual and socially engaged art practices which were themselves seen to have facilitated the emergence of drawing as an independent contemporary art. As the press release put it: [D]uring the past twenty years a number of artists have, and with increasing intensity since the middle sixties, seriously investigated the nature of drawing, investing major energies in a fundamental reevaluation of the medium, its disciplines and uses. With this process of reevaluation and renewal, drawing has moved from one context, that of a ‘minor’ support medium, an adjunct to painting and sculpture, to another, that of a major and independent medium with distinctive expressive possibilities altogether its own.5

Whether or not we concur with the artworld narrative that underpinned Drawing Now, the show itself helped to establish drawing as an important independent practice, situated primarily within the politically informed conceptual and process-led practices of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and the Americas.6

4

It would be mistaken to think that women curators (or critics, collectors, bureaucrats and politicians) necessarily facilitate institutional access for other women and, of the 45 artists included in Drawing Now in 1976, only five, or 11.1 per cent, were women. However, all those included in this early show subsequently became prominent names within feminist art histories, such as Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley and Dorothea Rockburne. These early cross-overs between women artists, the emergent drawing scene of the 1960s, and feminist, activist and conceptual theories and practices continued to interweave, and indeed, amplify during the next decades in the prominent MoMA drawing shows. So, for example, Bernice Rose’s next exhibition, Allegories of Modernism (1992), increased to 17 per cent its selection of work by women, including Nancy Spero, Jenny Holzer and Rosemary Trockel, all of whom are renowned in feminist scholarship, and by 2002, when Laura Hoptman curated

The significant numbers7 of women involved in the MoMA drawing shows, both as curators and artists, are mirrored internationally within contemporary fine art drawing, from centres and shows to research hubs and publications. A very brief survey here will suffice. Twenty-six per cent of the work shown in the pivotal show Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (University of Texas, 1997) was produced by women. In the UK, the large survey show, The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing (2009) at the Hayward Gallery, contained 27 per cent work by women. The Drawing Room, the first public gallery space in the UK dedicated to the investigation and support of contemporary drawing practice, was founded in 2002 by three women, Mary Doyle, Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout, and the current Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art is Tracey Emin. Over half the shows at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) in London feature the work of women, and TRACEY, the on-line drawing research project space hosted by Loughborough University (founded 1999) can boast 41 per cent of its projects being the work of women. The work of women artists in the Australian Drawing Biennials, inaugurated in 1996 by curator Nancy Sever at the Drill Hall Gallery of the Australian National University, averages over 35 per cent, and 29 per cent of the works in the National Gallery of Victoria’s show Backlash: The Australian Drawing Revival: 1976–1986 were by women. While this volume most certainly does not purport to be a quantitative survey of women’s participation within the institutional structures, practices and publications that have defined the terrain of contemporary fine art drawing since the 1960s, the relative preponderance of women in the field, particularly women

APPROACHING: drawing near

the show Drawing Now: 8 Propositions, 27 per cent of the works selected were produced by women artists, likewise well known in feminist art circles. In the most recent show of drawing at MoMA, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010– 11), co-curated by Cornelia Butler and Catherine de Zegher, 40 per cent of the works selected were produced by women artists, and again, many of these artists are mainstays within feminist art and theory, such as Lygia Clark, Mona Hatoum, Mira Schendel, Carolee Schneemann and Cecilia Vicuna.

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE

aligned variously with feminist art, theory and activism, is striking. Arguably, it is also compelling; and for us, it necessitates an exploration of why, how and to what extent these territories have so intimately interwoven over the past five decades. Why are women prominent in this arena? How have feminist theories and practices mutually engaged with the material and conceptual territories of drawing? What possibilities emerge in the allotropic unfolding of drawing and difference? Women’s location within the field of drawing has neither gone without notice, nor has it had any sustained discussion. A number of scholars exploring the histories of drawing have alluded to connections between women and drawing where drawing was seen as an amateur ‘accomplishment’,8 or as an ‘economical’ form, readily available to women with domestic responsibilities, or as an area of lesser status (than painting, for example) and thus more accessible to women wanting to make art.9 During the 1980s, the first tentative comments concerning links between women artists, feminism and contemporary fine art drawing began to emerge in the literature. These suggested both that more sustained analysis of this relationship was needed and that women in drawing might lead the future directions of the field. For example, in a very brief comment at the end of the survey volume, Drawing Today, Draughtsmen in the Eighties, Tony Godfrey wrote: It is especially in the work of women artists that we see the intimate relationship of the body and the traces that it leaves in drawing. Indeed, perhaps it is most particularly in the work of women artists, as they develop and extend their voices, that we see the future of drawing. Just as the issue of woman’s different body has been brought into cultural politics, so the issue of their different body language becomes a new major element in the dialectic of drawing.10

6

Like Godfrey, Ted Gott, in Backlash: The Australian Drawing Revival, 1976–86, suggested that feminism had made a critical contribution to the ‘revival’ of drawing in the period, both because of its critique of high modernist formalism and because it paved

At the end of the decade, Judy Collischan Van Wagner mounted a show specifically exploring women and drawing, entitled Lines of Vision: Drawings by Contemporary Women, that took a very similar tack to those of Godfrey and Gott by suggesting that drawing, ‘as an active verb’, has an ‘intimate’ relationship with the ‘inner self’ and thus with women artists.12 While the focus on ‘female sensibility’ and assumptions concerning intimacy, immediacy of means, femininity and women artists now seem slightly uncritical or even essentialising (and are not the particular directions we take in the present volume), the fact that feminism and drawing were seen to be intrinsically connected by the mid-1980s is significant to the historiography we are exploring here.

APPROACHING: drawing near

the way for work dealing with personal and intimate themes in immediate and expressive forms. Though Gott did not develop these points any further, ending simply by attributing a ‘female sensibility’ to aspects of contemporary fine art drawing,11 they indicate an emerging awareness that women and feminism were key contributors to the development of the field, practically and conceptually.

During the 1990s and the early years of the present century, both the field of contemporary fine art drawing and feminist interventions into art’s histories, theories and practices (not least, curating), became well established and increasingly transnational in their focus and reach. Again, during this important period, the cusps between the fields are significant – artists, writers, curators and institutions that were responsive to drawing were frequently engaged also with feminist practices. As noted earlier, it was our observation that these cusps not only existed, but had had important ramifications for the development of both fields, that drove our initial decision to write Drawing Difference. It is thus important to make clear how we understand these cross-currents and mutual meeting points, since we take them not only to be historical evidence of the interrelationships between drawing and feminist art practices at an institutional level, but as an indication that the conventions that constitute the fields – material, conceptual, intellectual, corporeal – share

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE

affinities and resonances that enable a more profound level of connection to be unfolded, as we will argue, allotropically. Tracing the link between the historical location of these practices and their theoretical intertwining is central to our allotropic approach to drawing and difference. Looking more closely at a specific set of crossings between contemporary drawing and feminist practices since the 1990s will serve to demonstrate our position. The most recent show of contemporary drawing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century (2010–11), was curated by Cornelia Butler and Catherine de Zegher. As we will argue, their collaboration is both indicative, a mark of the intertwined curatorial historiographies of drawing and feminism in the arts, and performative, productive of the mutual constitution of the fields. To demonstrate our point, we need to trace the lines of Butler and de Zegher’s work back through the mid-1990s. Both curators have substantial links with contemporary drawing; in 1999, Butler curated After-Image: Drawing through Process13 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (and touring) and, from 2006 to 2013, was Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In this role, Butler worked on a number of significant drawing shows, including (with Christian Rattemeyer and Gary Garrels) Compass in Hand (2009–10),14 a major survey of contemporary drawings from the Judith Rothschild Foundation. From 1999 to 2006, de Zegher was the Director of the Drawing Center in New York, and Editor of the Center’s important publication series, Drawing Papers. Founded in 1977, the Drawing Center continues to be an international hub for drawing research. Amongst other projects developed while in this role, de Zegher collaborated with artist Avis Newman on the Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act (2003), an influential project bringing London’s Tate into partnership with the Drawing Center and, in 2006, edited the major survey book Eva Hesse Drawing (Drawing Center and Yale University Press), which included key essays by Briony Fer, Anne M. Wagner, Mignon Nixon and Elizabeth Sussman.15

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APPROACHING: drawing near

Importantly, Butler and de Zegher are equally well known for their feminist curatorial projects and for their contribution to feminist historical and theoretical approaches to the work of women artists. De Zegher’s now-famous 1996 touring exhibition, Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of the Twentieth Century in, of and from the Feminine,16 generated an extraordinary international response from artists, curators, critics and academics eager to address the possibility (and/or necessity) of reinvigorating curating as a feminist praxis. Likewise, Butler’s ‘feminist blockbuster’ show, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 1965–80 (2006), continues to be discussed and debated as one of the markers of a more global approach to the interconnected histories of feminism and art and as part of the legacy of Inside the Visible. If Inside the Visible established de Zegher as a key voice in feminist curating and art criticism, subsequent shows and edited issues of the Drawing Papers, centred on women artists such as Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Ellen Gallagher, Anna Maria Maiolino, Cecilia Vicuna, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse and Gego,17 in addition to the co-edited anthology (with Carol Armstrong) Women Artists at the Millennium (2006), consolidated de Zegher’s feminist focus both in her curatorial and critical practices. The institutional links between drawing, feminism and women artists that the work of Butler and de Zegher epitomises are underpinned by a critical and theoretical interconnection. Within her drawing projects, for example, Butler frequently argued that there were important historical connections between the emergence of conceptual and process-led art practices in the 1960s and the rise of the feminist movement. Others have noted this connection in Butler’s projects; Helen Molesworth, for example, wrote of After-image that [C]urator Cornelia H. Butler’s catalogue essay is explicit in its desire to complicate the standard boys’ club narrative of the period. She does so by suggesting that concerns with time, everyday materials, repetition and what constitutes a legitimate studio practice are all of vital interest to women, both in terms of formal exploration and with regards to then developing concerns with content as an explicitly feminist issue.18

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE

In The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, the dialogue between de Zegher and (Avis) Newman similarly places feminist theory (specifically, psychoanalytic feminist perspectives), at the centre of the analysis of drawing, when de Zegher suggests ‘that the gesture of the hand in drawing seems to parallel the primal gesture of reaching out to the departing mother.’19 De Zegher develops this interpretive position concerning drawing and the feminine in a number of other publications, perhaps most comprehensively in her essay in Women Artists at the Millennium, ‘The inside is the outside: the relational as the (feminine) space’: In the act of drawing, the extending of arm and hand away from the bodily axis seems to correspond to the very gesture involved in the first separation (and exploration) when the child reaches out to the departing mother. […] Informed at once by rupture and reciprocity, drawing constitutes a space of relation in which the thrown-out gesture conjures up a trace seemingly tied to this movement and used to retrieve the thought that has been cast out.20

The links made between drawing and feminism through the curatorial work of Butler and de Zegher are not unidirectional, but mutual, or reciprocal. Indeed, one of the less-discussed elements of Inside the Visible is the central relationship that it implies between drawing and a burgeoning exploration of ‘the feminine’ in art. As de Zegher suggested in her introductory essay: The exhibition favors ‘drawing’ […] Drawing or writing: the tracing of the blank sheet is the beginning act of symbolizing the self and its reality. The exhibition explores the meanings and expressions privileged in drawing as ‘beginnings’. This act is not to be interpreted as the sign of a transcendent subject but as a continuous redefining of existence, open to remappings and negotiations with alterity, seeking the limits of the self and the knowable.21

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Across a wide body of work, both Butler and de Zegher have made connections between women, feminism, sexual difference and drawing – some explicit and others more implied.22 We would argue that, taken as a whole, the curatorial and publication projects

Indeed, what is interesting about their practices is, as we argued earlier, that they are both indicative and performative: Butler and de Zegher have brought the work of women artists into the sphere of contemporary fine art drawing through major exhibitions and critical essays and have argued for the contribution of feminism and women’s practices to drawing theories and vice versa. In addition, by their very prominence as women working in major institutions who have fostered both feminist practices and contemporary drawing, they are themselves part of the historiography that connects drawing with feminism. The curatorial and critical work of Butler and de Zegher perform, in both theory and practice, the connections that have led us to write this book. What has yet to be argued concerning these and many other connections between gender and drawing since the 1960s is what this book sets out to trace.

APPROACHING: drawing near

of Butler and de Zegher form the most distinctive contribution to the literature on women artists, feminism and drawing to date,23 yet this body of work does not develop a sustained or extended argument concerning drawing and difference, nor was such an exploration of these interconnections their primary aim.

Convening to Converse (on Convention and Collaboration) As our brief (and far from definitive) survey demonstrates, feminism, women’s art practices and contemporary fine art drawing have shared a number of significant overlaps over the past five decades and a history of their interconnections can be traced through works, exhibitions, critical writing and institutions over that period. However, it is not our intention to produce a survey of women and drawing or a history of drawing in feminist practice.24 We are more interested in what these historical convergences suggest about the interface between the two fields and the possibility that drawing and (sexual) difference might be intertwined conceptually and materially, as well as historically and institutionally. As described at the start of this approach, this book was initiated by a shared observation, but that shared viewpoint did

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE

not arise from a single perspective. Rather, our observation, and this volume, are the products of a collaborative exploration, a conversation between two different points. Our shared observation was created dialogically at the interval between contemporary fine art drawing and feminist art history and theory and this book is a project of the interval, one we mark as drawing|difference, to suggest the potential for a non-hierarchical relationship between the terms to emerge and be articulated otherwise. We are ourselves positioned differently in relation to the territories we are exploring in this work; as male and female subjects, formed by distinctly different historical, cultural and disciplinary parameters, we cannot take our perspectives on gender, sexual difference, feminism and/or drawing for granted. More strongly, we would argue that our differences from one another, as well as our positions within the fields at whose cusp this project resides, have facilitated productive tensions through continual negotiation in our conversations with and through the material. Our decision to collaborate on this project was deliberate and it underscores, methodologically, our commitment to Drawing Difference as a complex and interwoven composition of connections that do not reduce to a unilateral teleology, but unfold, allotropically, through many marks over a diversified disciplinary ground. Our working methods and the structure of this book are materially connected to our argument. We elaborate conventions by conversing with/ in and through them, drawing near to the other (field, concept, trope) without reducing to the one.25

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From the start, we have pursued the project as a conversation, a term that we use in awareness of its etymology, so neither to exclude the embodied and affective nature of our encounter with the works, nor our visceral responses to particular theories, discourses and debates. Pragmatically, it is easy to ‘forget’ the conventions operating within one’s own field of interest until or unless you contend with, and attend to, another. Convening to converse, collaboratively, thus reawakens self-reflexivity at the same time that it extends the range of the collective project; it is our experience that the outcomes of our conversational collaboration, with/in Drawing Difference, have been greater

Throughout the project, we have brought our different disciplinary and practical conventions into play dialogically in relation to the histories, theories and practices that we address in the chapters. Our chapters reveal our conversations, rather than conceal them, and we have drawn our arguments as surely as we have written them. Conceptually, we envisage our conversation-method as a geometry and a grammar: we draw an eccentric figure, we speak a sometimes silent ‘twice-two’. With our perpetually doubled axis, our conversations describe, geometrically, an ellipsis, a line that bends back upon itself to contend with two, with the irreducibility of the other. And this geometric ellipsis, or eccentric circle, meets the grammatical ellipses […] whereby, in conversation, the unsaid can be as articulate as the word.26 In examining our preconceptions and the conventions of our fields with care, together, we have elected not to smooth over every ripple of contention between them, nor to seek to redress their silence when that is required for their unfolding.

APPROACHING: drawing near

than the sum of the individual elements we have brought to the project.

The starting point for our conversations was the historical convergence between contemporary fine art drawing, women’s art and feminist critical practices, as outlined above. We began with a formal research convention – the literature survey – to delineate a first mapping of these shared territories, but also to begin the process of identifying our preconceptions in regard to the extant literature as an artist–academic (Sawdon) within the field of drawing research and a feminist art historian (Meskimmon) whose work has frequently focused on women’s art practices. These early conversational mappings were revealing, sometimes challenging, hesitant […] but they always marked for each of us a sense that we had come to see our own fields differently for having walked hand-in-hand through and with another. We soon located chronological overlaps – key research moments within each field that converged – and important geographical resonances. The questions posed within the two fields were frequently aligned and their international reach strikingly similar. For example, just as feminist art historians had asked why

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE

there had been no great women artists, then challenged the mechanisms of canon-formation and the dominance of a EuroUS model of art history and its ‘others’, drawing research had sought its key figures, challenged its status in canonical fine art traditions and then moved to become a more globally inclusive field. But disciplines can share parallel histories while never meeting; what made our conversations at the interval between drawing and feminist art/theory more provocative were the shared taxonomies we uncovered in our research, the formal and conceptual concerns that brought drawing near to difference at each and every turn. Conversing with/in these conventions became the central focus of our project. Moving beyond binary thinking towards the simultaneity of object and process, exploring concepts of becoming, emergence and materialisation, emphasising the embodied and experiential formation of subjectivity in connection with others – these preoccupations are central to both the critical explorations of contemporary fine art drawing and feminist theories and practices within and beyond art. And while exploring some of these conceptual overlaps revealed various linguistic false friends, to a significant degree, we found that what exist as shared concerns between drawing and feminist thinking and making are more akin to what Mieke Bal has called ‘travelling concepts’,27 and what we are calling ‘tropes’: multi-layered, multivalent, cross-cutting figures that acquire greater richness as they are developed in varied contexts.

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It is our contention that these tropes are more constitutive than circumstantial and, thus, that they entangle drawing with difference (in our extended sense of the term) at a more elemental, allotropic level. It is not that drawing illustrates a trope, such as ‘becoming’, or that feminist explorations of difference apply it. Rather the very fabric of the trope emerges in its interlaced materialisation through both fields. In our figuration, tropes garner meaning in their allotropic unfolding over multiple genres, modes and means. In this sense, the historical interrelationships between the emergent fields of drawing, women’s art practices and feminist theory since the 1960s can be seen to have been a manifestation, or

The structure of the book seeks to connect the linked histories (and historiographies) of contemporary fine art drawing and feminist curating, criticism and practice with the richly nuanced theoretical tropes that no less certainly run between, across and through drawing and difference. In this way, throughout this volume, drawing and difference approach one another as always already both object and process, material and idea. We have elected to converse with/in our tropes by paying close detailed attention to specific instances of drawing; close reading and detailed observation underscoring attentive listening as we convene to converse with convention.

APPROACHING: drawing near

an unfolding, of shared concerns that crossed the interwoven terrain of aesthetics, politics and ethics.

The specific instances of drawing within the volume were selected by means of a set of mutually agreed criteria. Our first decision was that the works should be understood by others as drawing(s). That is, we did not seek to select works that would test the limits of the category of drawing itself in any substantial sense, but rather looked to ensure that any work included in our shortlist would be pre-defined by its maker or critical context as ‘drawing’. This selection was deliberate; our argument is underpinned by an encounter with a range of shared conventions, customs and practices that constitute contemporary fine art drawing. To enable us to converse with convention, we have selected works that can be demonstrated to adhere in one or more senses with the customs and practices within the field of drawing, rather than to require an argument to be made for them to be included within an expanded field. Yet, while all the works within Drawing Difference have been understood to adhere in some way to the conventional category of drawing(s), they are nonetheless astonishingly varied, a fact which has ultimately underscored the allotropic relationship between drawing and the multifaceted unfolding of difference, that is our central premise. Drawing unfolds in the most extraordinary variations, even within a limited set of conventions. This fact is articulated at many points throughout the three tropic chapters. In addition, we agreed that no drawing included should be understood as merely illustrative of a theory or idea, but be able

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to be brought into the conversation as a participant, a contributor to the formation of ideas and arguments through its history, its material qualities or in its affective address. Again, this had a significant impact on the drawings selected as well as the development of the chapters and it is worth noting here, as we approach the tropes, that our engagement is with the work28 that these drawings do, their agency as modes of articulation, forms of meaning-in-process, and we do not take them to be mute mirrors, simply reflecting an outside reality that precedes or is left untouched by their mediation. The exploration of the interval between drawing and difference occurs through theories, histories and practices, as they allotropically unfold meanings and subjects-in-process. In terms of period and place, the earliest drawing included in the volume dates from 1971 and the latest from 2012; we have included work made by artists hailing from, and/or working in, Britain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, France, Belgium, Iran, Uruguay and Australia, but many of the works have been shown even more extensively throughout the world. The chronologies and cartographies of the selected work are legible and intended to be so, but they do not draw a singular narrative. Three works were drawn from the early 1970s, since that moment marked both the institutional acknowledgement of drawing as a significant contemporary practice in its own right and of the impact of feminist activism and scholarship in the arts. However, we did not look to bring the work of Annette Messager, Dorothea Rockburne and Carolee Schneemann together only in order to demonstrate a historical point of convergence. Rather, within the chapters, we bring pivotal instances of their work together with a small selection of contemporary works by a range of international drawing practitioners (Siân Bowen, Christoph Fink, Susan Hauptman, Toba Khedoori, Marco Maggi and Cornelia Parker) so to trace and articulate the close affinities and resonances between drawing and feminism in the arts that have defined the very contours of the two fields conceptually, materially and practically over the past five decades. While the selection of work within the volume thus demonstrates that contemporary fine art drawing is international in its reach, it does not purport to be an inclusive survey. Our purpose is otherwise.

APPROACHING: drawing near

Significantly, we have included the work of both men and women in this volume. As we explained at the start of this approach, it is our contention that drawing offers an extraordinarily vivid opportunity to facilitate the articulation of sexed subjectivity in and through difference. In this way, it provides a critical space for the unfolding of non-hierarchical relations between the sexes and, indeed, between and across cultural, ‘racial’ and other forms of violent exclusion premised upon an economy of the same. We argue that while this makes drawing an important arena for feminist exploration and for women practitioners, it is equally significant for men who would seek to signify beyond the stultifying limits of conventional, monolithic masculinity. The drawings we have selected to include in Drawing Difference make evident just such potential. The selection of work included in Drawing Difference traces the scope of the interaction between the two fields in terms of geographical range and period focus, but the volume is not intended to provide a linear or sequential narrative of the connections between gender and contemporary fine art drawing since the 1960s. Rather, the drawings that contribute the central visual, material and spatial axis of this volume work within and across times and places as they converse with the dynamic discursive conventions of feminist thought, drawing theories and practices and each other. These conversations between texts, images, objects and ideas, across times and spaces, mindful of their specificity, yet not hidebound by a determinate sense of singular or originary meaning, are what facilitate the articulation of (and in) the interval of drawing and difference. We proceed through tropes to argue for the endless, allotropic unfolding that mutually constitutes drawing|difference. Each of our three chapters begins with a trope, a turn or manner, phrase or image, used frequently and often figuratively, to express a set of allusions and elisions underpinning the conventions of thinking and making across drawing and difference. We arrived at the tropes through a process of distillation from within the conventional languages of our disciplines as manifest through the literature. We began with/in drawing, where this meant a critical exploration of the burgeoning field of contemporary practice-

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led research as well as those earlier sources critical to defining drawing as a conceptual practice such as the early work of Philip Rawson, Edward Hill, Bernice Rose and Marion Milner as well as later interventions by John Berger, Alain Badiou, David Rosand, Deanna Petherbridge, Jean-Luc Nancy and Helene Cixous.29 The persistent uses of certain concepts and terms in explorations of drawing are striking – its unfinished, open-ended quality, its becoming, its non-binary evocation of the simultaneity of material and gestural act, its close association with the emergence of thought in language (drawing/writing/speech) amongst others, persist as a durable armature over time. Turning to converse with the complex directions of feminist art theories and practices, we found a range of immediate similarities in language (becoming, emergence, performativity), some of which were clearly underpinned by resonances and affinities at a sustained level. Intellectually, we found the closest connections with what have come to be called corporeal feminisms30 and the work of feminist art historians and theorists who have so eloquently used psychoanalysis, phenomenology and ‘new’ materialism to explore the articulation of sexed subjectivity in and through visuality and affective, multi-sensorial art.31

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We are aware that tropes, or sedimented conventions, can be over-used and thus remain almost unremarked; their commonplace evocation within theories and practices often goes unspoken. Tropes are frequently that word which awkwardly breaks a silent understanding marked by ellipses […] and seeks to condense complexities within a single note. Our chapters, ‘Dialogue’, ‘Matter’, ‘Open’, explore three particular tropes that mark out affinities at the interval of drawing and difference. We begin with these shared conventions not simply to reinforce them, but to unfold them otherwise: to move from the trope to the allo-trope, the ‘other-manner’. The tropes provided us with a means by which to place the resonant conventions of drawing and difference into an active connection and unpack, unfold, unravel, their too-easy application. In this unfolding, they admit of other manners, other genres, other modes, to suggest an allotropic relation to the production of meaning in mutuality where variations can be sustained simultaneously as productive.

We anticipate that readers will experience a movement through the book as a whole, with subtle changes in tone and timbre, meanings and methods, such that the writing is understood to participate in the conceptual debates of the volume, rather than pretend to carry meaning transparently. Drawing Difference engages with a range of contemporary, theoretically informed

APPROACHING: drawing near

Each tropic chapter unfolds distinctly, as an allotropic manifestation of the argument more generally; each chapter is differently drawn in structure, tone, material and gesture. They are connected by an underlying exploration of the elemental interval that marks drawing|difference, but each exploration is a unique allotropic figuration that connects specific texts and textures, images and ideas in their unfolding. They begin with dialogue, extend to matter, and refuse a final closure with open. ‘Dialogue’ draws discourses of drawing into conversations with instances of drawing, creating a dialogic space across myths, histories, traditions and the material qualities of the works. In its polyvocality, ‘Dialogue’ begins to explore the intersubjective interlocution that constitutes the articulation of sexual (and other) difference. ‘Matter’ explores the both/and of drawing as object and process, noun and verb. Engaging the critical reconception of materialisation as a non-binary and non-representational theory of agency, ‘Matter’ suggests that drawing has a unique role to play in effecting the agential cut through which sexed subjectivity is made manifest in particular instances of the object/process drawing. In an important sense, ‘Matter’ takes an alternative route through that line in post-conceptual art criticism that connects drawing with dematerialisation and de-skilling after the 1960s. ‘Open’ both enacts and argues for (an) opening as critical to both drawing and difference, sexual or otherwise. The writing of this chapter is itself most open, operating in and as text-intervalimage to provide a space that enables differences to coalesce and become. As open as the dialogue may be throughout this volume, it is also material in the strongest sense. In each chapter, the historical and institutional connections between gender and drawing are pivotal to the arguments which seek to materially connect and ground what emerge as critically informed, theoretical propositions for thinking/making at that charged interval where drawing meets difference.

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practices of writing, from the conventional academic argument to parallel texts and art writing. We propose these tonal shifts as both allotropes themselves and ways in which allotropic figurations can be materialised and we offer Drawing Difference as an invitation to further dialogues at the interval, rather than a full-stop, an ellipsis [...]

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Dialogue



From dia- ‘across’ + legein ‘speak’

Casting Shadows, Speaking Across Between 1971 and 1972, French artist Annette Messager produced a series of objects, photographs, drawings and writings that are known, collectively, as Les Pensionnaires, or, in English, The Boarders.1 Described variously as a ‘foundational moment in Messager’s work’ and ‘the matrix for all of her future production’,2 The Boarders can be understood as an intimate exchange between humans and other animals, the living and the dead, the materiality of the work as art and in myth. It is structured through conversations across time and place, in dialogues between word and work. In exploring the dialogic qualities of The Boarders here, we are deploying an open concept of dialogue that admits of a number of participant bodies engaged in the intersubjective and interobjective process of speaking and thinking across.3 Such a process enables the agency of texts, images, objects and ideas to emerge from within dialogic exchange as more than a mute transcription of human conversation. Speaking across difference through drawing, a potential for dialogue is first offered by The Boarders when we attend to the ambiguous shadow(s) it casts. L’ombre dessinée sur le mur (The Shadow Drawing on the Wall) is the final element of The Boarders, and acts as its full stop. The serial work comes to rest in the stuffed dead body of a single,

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE Figure 1: L’ombre dessinée sur le mur, Annette Messager, one item from the series Les Pensionnaires, 1971–2. Stuffed bird fastened to a wall with a metal spike together with drawing of a shadow on the wall, variable size.

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small sparrow, pinned to a wall such that it casts a ‘real’ shadow and, at the same time, is the fictional source of a drawn faux one (once or repeatedly removed). Death casts its metaphorical shadows and the shadow draws. L’ombre dessinée thus literally constructs a dialogue between the material trace of the linear drawing on the wall and the immateriality of the body’s cast shadow-trace, between what might be taken as the ‘original’ and its copy. This dialogue arrests authenticity by conducting an infinite conversation of material transformation that defers an absolute origin, a factual and representable ‘real’. From object to image, from image to shadow, from shadow to drawing and to object again, L’ombre dessinée’s crepuscular path suggests a circular conversation around the origin myth of drawing as the sine qua non of art. In its dialogic configuration, L’ombre dessinée provides a space in which we might materialise drawing differently, not as the primal essence of art, but as a process of

The shadow cast as the last trace of The Boarders physically evokes the materiality of art-making, and the role of drawing within it, while simultaneously invoking the origin myth of art in the famous account of Butades’ daughter by Pliny the Elder. Drawing the outline of her departing lover’s profile cast as a shadow on the wall, the unnamed daughter of the potter Butades in this single gesture of longing fixes drawing as the foundation of image-making in art. Drawing becomes the essence and the origin point from which art is derived.

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unfolding multiple perspectives simultaneously in an ambiguous and enigmatic agreement.

As a shadow of the heart and the pain of love lost, the trace made by the potter’s daughter shadows Messager’s reflection that love ‘is still one of the most essential things in life. It can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds […]’.4 From birth to death, in love and longing, the cyclical nature of time is underscored in the mythical origin of drawing as it traces, shadows and delineates the emergence and passage of the subject. But there is more to the intimate interrelationship between drawing and shadow, love and loss, the dialogue between love and drawing, traced in this myth; not least the agency of female desire in inscribing the surface that would become understood as drawing itself. It is significant that the story by Pliny does not take as its centre the outlining of the shadow by the young, love-struck woman, but rather the fashioning of this outline (closed line) into a relief model by the father, who fires it, thus making the first figurative ceramic sculpture. Moreover, for centuries, invocations of Pliny the Elder’s tale of Butades were understood as myths of the origin of painting, not drawing. This distinction is more than semantic; in both Pliny’s tale of the origins of three-dimensional figurative modelling, and the subsequent uses of the myth to ground the art of painting, the first act of drawing, undertaken by a woman, is relegated to the status of support, or more precisely, to the base matter from which higher forms of art would be created. Within this story as first told and later invoked, drawing and woman are aligned structurally as ‘handmaidens’ in the mythic histories of western art, whether that art is two- or three-dimensional. Such

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an alignment is wholly in keeping with a dualist epistemology in which woman is to man as matter is to form and body to mind. But L’ombre dessinée creeps beyond the limits of such simplistic binary thinking, speaking across the boundaries of object- and image-making, obscuring the borders (The Boarders?) of painting and sculpture – indeed, of art – suggesting a carnivalesque undoing of the gendered cul-de-sac of creative origin myths. Drawing is here a graphic grapheme, an open and vital element of a conversation-in-process that is capable of speaking a subjectin-process. Dialogue should not be confused with ‘duologue’, it does not adhere to duality and is not a temporary bridge between two fixed terms. Rather, dialogue, as with drawing, speaks across, through and with more than one term, and describes a process of exchange whereby every term engaged within the dialogue emerges from it altered.5 In dialogue with L’ombre dessinée, the story of Butades’ daughter unfolds otherwise; the trace of a young woman’s desire is not contained by a masculine-normative artistic tradition that overshadows her spontaneous and visceral mark-making by placing it at the service of the conventions of high art. Both the shadow and its drawn trace remain within Messager’s work, and the loved and lost object is still present, embalmed and shrouded, within the space of a conversation initiated through the agency of a woman. L’ombre dessinée does not only conduct a conversation with Pliny’s story, but with two later tales, told by Messager herself. The first follows the conventions of the creative anecdote, a seemingly inconsequential story told by artists when asked about their work in casual conversation. Asked about The Boarders, Messager frequently repeats a form of the following story: I remember very well, I was walking in a Paris Street, and I stepped on a dead sparrow. I picked up this sparrow and returned home and knit a wool wrap for it.6

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It matters little whether Messager’s memory-tale originates in fact – it is a fiction, in the strong sense of that term,7 a crucible from which the artist is able to forge multiple contexts for her work, in

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dialogue with others, over time. She has told the tale in variations, more than once. In each re-telling, the tale acquires a slightly different emphasis: in some versions, Messager’s story focuses upon the quotidian encounter with death and the ‘indescribable sensation’8 it produced, both ‘normal and strange’.9 In other reiterations, the story becomes more recognisable as an originmyth, the matrix from which Messager’s practice arose: ‘I found my voice as an artist when I stepped on a dead sparrow on a street in Paris in 1971.’10 The story, in its repeated variations across the critical literature, casts a fictional shadow capable of simultaneously obscuring and protecting the work from invasive interpretation – it can say everything and nothing, be both sense and nonsense. For those who invoke it as a monologic explanation of the work, it simply obfuscates; stepping on a sparrow in a Paris street cannot account for the subtle textual and textural plays at work in The Boarders. It is not a definitive explanation, fixed interpretation or singular closed source of meaning. Rather, like a shadow, Messager’s memory-tale changes in tone and direction each time it is cast, and while its contours (open lines) are derived from a particular source, they are fluid and mutable in their extension. The story speaks across, extending the shadow-play intricacies of the work through dialogue. L’ombre dessinée challenges and contradicts the traditional forms of shadow-play puppet storytelling. The sparrow corpse of L’ombre dessinée is a threedimensional figure fixed by a metal spike, its impressions, the shadows, are static and two-dimensional. It is a shadow-tale steeped in irreconcilable difference – the normal and the strange, the everyday and the extraordinary, life and death, the human and the non-human. In Messager’s words: ‘There is as much ignorance between these familiar birds and human beings as between a man and a woman.’11 The ‘indescribable sensation’ of the experience of difference manifests itself in multi-faceted shadows, from the title of the final piece of the work (L’ombre dessinée), to the drawn and cast shadows on the wall, and the shadow traced by the daughter of Butades. Drawing difference materialises here in dialogue with and through shadows.

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One further fictive shadow instigated by Messager attends The Boarders in the form of a hand-written and drawn story in six chapters that accompanies the objects and images as part of the work. Chapter I establishes the work as a dialogue in its first words: ‘To The Reader’.12 Messager’s story begins where the mythic anecdote of the dead sparrow ends, when she has taken the tiny dead creature back to her apartment, knitted his tunic and begun to look after him. She acquires many more dead sparrows for The Boarders and, like orphaned children or long-stay patients, tells her tale in six chapters of wrapping them in knitted tunics, taking them out for walks, caring for them, worrying about them and even punishing them. The hand-written story contains photographs, drawings and diagrams that extend the tale. At the start, a diagram of the artist’s two-room apartment maps her identity in and as her practice: Annette Messager, collector (located within the space of the bedroom) and Annette Messager, artist (located within the space of the studio). Significantly, The Boarders carries on a conversation across this binary divide of space and identity; elements of the work are mapped in both areas, the practices which constitute the project overspill fixed and closed categories, the agency of the woman artist cannot be contained within this binary frame. The diagram of the apartment casts a shadow across the six-part story; elements of the narrative can be located on the diagram, but, while they correspond, they never wholly coincide. They converse – they turn about with one another and are each transformed, converted, in their engagement.

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L’ombre dessinée is paradigmatic of this conversational mode. It is indicated at number 6 in the apartment/identity diagram, where, on the wall of the studio, five tiny, pinned birds casting shadows are noted by small scribbled marks. These drawings correspond in the key with the line: ‘the living shadow attacked by reality’. The final chapter of the story, Chapter VI Some Stories, concludes with reference to a myth that says that sparrows ‘project a human shadow instead of that of their own body when they are in the sun’. In these lines, the shadow becomes a cipher for uncertainty and transformation, its origin point is mutable,

The visceral elements of Messager’s work have invited critics to refer to the ‘carnivalesque’,13 especially where her work seems to confound the distinction between human and non-human animals or touches upon the ‘grotesque’ modulation between attraction and repulsion evoked by delicate animal corpses. But the carnivalesque is apt not only for these immediate and earthy overtones. The insights of Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais and the power of carnival were part of a wider body of thought on the transformative potential of dialogue itself.14 Setting multiple voices into play such that they collide, collude, collect and comingle in dialogue, provides the possibility of transgression that carnival describes. It is dialogue that undoes the rigidity of binary thought and the fixed oppositions dualism upholds so stringently through borders and boundaries. Conversation and dialogue, steeped in bodily contact, desiring agency and the potential for unlimited exchanges between subjects and objects, invite transgressions at the level of both genre and gender.

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and its mark multiple and fluid, subject to change in contact with other objects, images and words.

Messager’s shadow-play engenders a carnivalesque dialogue that speaks across fixed categories of art, literature, representation and sexual difference. Moving freely between the tropes of myth, narrative and biography, the textual elements of The Boarders cannot be contained by fixed categories of secure representation. Visually and materially transgressing the limits of high art with low forms of domestic craft and simple means, complicating the relationship between drawing and writing as well as between drawing, painting and sculpture, and moving freely between twoand three-dimensional object- and image-making, The Boarders is always in dialogue and L’ombre dessinée is not simply its end. Indeed, the shadow is redrawn and elliptically rematerialised in various other Messager works that extend dialogues with difference. In My Little Effigies (1988) there are groups of stuffed animals with photographs of body parts hung around their necks shadowed by a repeated word in dialogue on the wall. Lines of the Hand (1987–8) incorporated framed photographs of body parts above the shadow of repeated words drawn in coloured

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crayon. Messager speaks of the coloured crayon as a weapon; it is pointed, pretty and lethal. She stabs with it.15 Thus, what had appeared to be the visual and material full stop of The Boarders can now be understood as but a pause in the conversation, a moment in which differences are drawn together, configured simultaneously in the vortex of the shadow, and then let loose to reconfigure otherwise. L’ombre dessinée’s full stop is not singular, but repeated … it becomes an ellipsis. Speaking across, by casting shadows, this dialogue with difference, through drawing, proceeds, as Luce Irigaray wrote, ‘in ellipses and eclipses’.16 Pause and shadow correspond in dialogues across difference where they seek to protect the precious time and space of the beloved other. There will be hesitation in our dialogues, marked by silence and opacity, when we can do nothing but acknowledge the presence of the other in the full weight of their difference from us, but these ellipses and eclipses are not an empty abyss, they are the opening onto the new, the future, the realisation of speaking across. It is no surprise that drawing difference emerges in the shadows of dialogue where speech pauses and meaning, temporarily, awaits.

Blind Tongues Unfold Silence

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The drawing practices of Marco Maggi exist in an extended field, where convention converses with concept and the historical traditions of fine art drawing speak with the contemporary conditions of the global artworld. Maggi is literally a ‘global’ artist; born in Uruguay, working between Montevideo and New York, his work regularly traverses the well-developed network of international art fairs and exhibitions that now criss-cross the globe. It is significant that Maggi is an artist with an explicit and primary focus on drawing and that it is through drawing that his work conducts dialogues across the complex terrain of contemporary practice. Maggi’s success at an international level is connected with drawing’s emergence from the shadows; no longer the handmaiden of the ‘greater’ arts, drawing is now an articulate participant, with a unique

Critical accounts of Maggi’s work consistently describe the ways in which it speaks across established genres: drawing, as twodimensional image-making, sculpture, as three-dimensional object-making and installation, as multi-dimensional placemaking. Through material experimentation, the work is seen to open a dialogue between traditional fine art drawing practices, found objects, pairs of opposites,17 digital technologies and writing. Speaking across the material conventions of drawing and the genre conventions of fine art, Maggi’s work has been said to engage with ‘the ontology of drawing’ or, more pointedly, to be signalling the ‘collaps(e) of genres as the ground zero of drawing’.18 Yet again it is drawing’s dialogic activity, its ability to speak with, across and between subjects and objects, that provides the possibility of the carnivalesque ‘collapse’ of established orders and hierarchies. Drawing, always already both noun and verb, emerges with/in dialogue, and its emergence, through shade and pause, fosters the simultaneous becoming of difference-inprocess.

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voice, in the dialogues that define the terrain of contemporary art theory and practice.

In his varied oeuvre, Maggi effects dialogues-in-difference between genres as much through shadow play, where the ‘drawing’ arises from the shadow(s) cast by inscribed surfaces, as by any material traces left through mark-making. This, in turn, enables the dialogic operations of the work to extend to speak across the materiality and immateriality of drawing as both trace and shadow. Locating drawing at the boundary between presence and absence, the visible and invisibility, one particular body of work opens this cross-genre shadow-play to a range of further dialogues that are significant to the argument being made here: namely, the ‘blind slides’ works. This body of Maggi’s work is multiple and varied and includes Blind Carousel (2007), Braille Wall (Josée Bienvenu Gallery, 2009) and the Color – Braille series (2010) amongst other pieces. The works share the formal constant of the framing device (the slide mount) and the conceptual convention of the ‘blind’ slide: a slide mount filled with opaque paper or plastic, used to shade the

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screen between projected images during presentations. The eclipse of the blind slide is also an ellipsis, a strategic visual pause in the dialogue between text and image, speaker and audience. Blind slides were, in the days of carousel projection, a form of optical punctuation that permitted a dialogue to open from within what might otherwise have been a monologue. Blind slides are in themselves mute; they are ‘dumb drawings’. They do not project an image, but rather, in the evacuation of the visible within their shaded ‘blindness’, they point towards the conditions by which the image may appear. Maggi’s blind slide works are of two main types: slide mounts containing finely cut coloured paper and slide mounts containing aluminium foil, embossed with the point of a pencil. Though their visual qualities are quite distinctive from one another, both types rely upon shadow to create the drawings that defy the mute blindness of the slides’ surfaces. Their images are elusive even whilst their framed format within the slide mounts is fixed and conventional.

Figure 2: Blind Carousel, Marco Maggi, 2007. Slide carousel and pencil on 80 aluminium foil slide mounts.

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Blind Carousel and Braille Wall are two very different configurations of Maggi’s embossed foil slide works, yet their differences resonate dialogically, speaking across drawing and writing, the visual and the textual, the optical and the tactile, the static and the dynamic, the dichotomy of two and three dimensions. Blind Carousel literally places 80 embossed foil blind slides into a circular carousel projector tray, such that only one slide is held out of the tray, visible to viewers of the work. The play of shadows in this work is very direct; the slides are visible as articulate drawings through the shadows produced by light on the embossed foil, yet, as blind slides placed within the tray, they are rendered dumb drawings whose substance will eclipse the light of the projector and shade the screen. In the extension of the blind slide format through the notion of the tactile, textual letter system of Braille, this literal play of light and shade, vision and blindness, opens to include dialogues with difference across materiality, myth and metaphor. In these unfolding dialogues, Maggi’s shadows conceptually converse with those of Messager, across time and space, in ellipses and eclipses that foster the emergence of new speaking/writing/ drawing subjects. It is to those dialogues, with and through the Braille Wall, that we turn now. Braille Wall consists of a series of blind slide stacks affixed to the surface of a gallery wall such that viewers are offered a twice-doubled haptic shadow-play of text and texture – once across each stack and again in their configuration across the wall. By invoking the notion of Braille, we are invited to explore the surfaces of the embossed foil blind slides as both shadow drawing and tactile writing; in the wider configuration of the stacks on the wall, this dialogue is extended such that the stacks operate simultaneously as a large-scale raised alphabet, multiple marks on the surface of a drawing, and three-dimensional, inscribed objects, casting shadows on the wall. Writing, drawing, text, image, formal language and open grapheme are mobilised within the work through the complex imbrication of shadow and touch, a multi-sensory conversation with embodied vision through drawing in an extended field.

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Figure 3: Braille Wall, Marco Maggi, installation: Josée Bienvenu Gallery, 2009.

Figure 4: Blind Slide, from Braille Wall (detail), Marco Maggi, drypoint on aluminium foil.

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The genre-crossing dialogue of this work implicates us in our embodiment within the ‘ground zero’ of drawing; drawing’s ontology becomes a question of the drawing subject – multiple, mutable, contingent – rather than a category of being in itself that could be fixed as an essence. In this way, Braille Wall, like Messager’s L’ombre dessinée, opens the possibility of a further dialogue with the meanings and myths surrounding the origin of drawing, but in this case, less Pliny’s tale of the daughter of Butades and more the compelling story woven and drawn through ‘nets of language’, ‘using traits, lines, staffs and letters […] to capture the body of drawing at its very birth’ by Jacques Derrida in Memoirs of the Blind.19 The notion of the ‘story’ is invoked here deliberately to underscore the way in which Memoirs has, in the two decades since its publication, become a form of origin myth in its own right within art theory and practice. In developing the shadow-play of dialogue between myth and meaning, ontology and the ground zero of drawing here, it is not a detailed analysis of the exhibition selection or catalogue essay that Derrida wrote that is at stake. Rather, it is the evocative metaphor of drawing’s ‘blindness’, of the emergence of drawing as a primary form of inscribed and mediated visualisation through the inextricable link between the visible and the invisible, that matters to the dialogue in which we are engaged. Memoirs is steeped in the flesh of the subject, in the embodiment of the eye; the drawing subject (agent) is also always the drawing’s subject (object) – noun and verb are inseparable for both drawing and subjectivity. At the heart of this corporeal shadow-play, the nexus of the ‘both/and’ of drawing and subjectivity, resides difference, or as Derrida wrote: ‘between the two, in their fold, the one repeating the other without being reduced to it, there is the event’.20 And drawing’s difference is steeped in différance, in the endless deferral of any singular origin or meaning.

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Drawing, like dialogue and difference, does not originate in a single point, but always in at least two: between hand and eye, visibility and invisibility, the mark and the abyss. As two authors we, too, are speculating; ‘two scouts, two antennae to orientate our wanderings, to guide as we feel our way’.21 Significantly, by

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speaking with and through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Memoirs, Derrida’s ‘two’ are likewise not opposed, but enfolded, intertwined and in dialogue. Yet, like Pliny’s story of Butades’ daughter, Derrida’s insights into the origins of drawing as the quintessential event of creativity in the visual arts still obscure the question of sexual difference and fail to signify the desiring agency of sexed subjects. Some occlusions are by textual sleight of hand: Since the illustrious blind of our culture are almost always men, the ‘great blind men’, as if women perhaps saw to it to never risk their sight. Indeed, the absence of ‘great blind women’ will not be without consequence for our hypotheses.22

Such disparity between the sexes can be accounted for, in part, by the long history of gender-bias in the collections of major museums (such as the Louvre) and the insubstantial presence of women in many conventional histories of art.23 But there is much more at stake theoretically; feminist philosophers, such as Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, have been quick to identify a common conceit within the work of many prominent male poststructuralist thinkers who, simultaneously, rely upon the concept of ‘woman’ (or ‘becoming-woman’) as the very mark of difference or ‘the other’, while leaving women beyond the frame of their arguments.24 Pointing to the work of Luce Irigaray on the caress, Nicola Foster makes a similar case that the arguments of Memoirs, where these are fashioned through the play of vision and touch, fail to acknowledge the significance of sexual difference and embodied, sexed subjects, underpinning their logic.25 The haptic visuality of Maggi’s Braille Wall thus casts its shadow towards the blindspot of the Derridean myth of drawing and that spot, that occluded trace, that unmarked mark, is sexual difference. The subject for whom sight is compelled through flesh, and drawing engendered through blindness, is, in Memoirs, simply presumed to be masculine by default. But the tale of drawing’s metaphorical origin in blindness, re-read in dialogue with the blind slides of the Braille Wall, re-embodies the subject, reiterating its sexed and situated specificity. Here, drawing unfolds

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the masculine-normative logic of its ontology which ordinarily remains unmarked or invisible, by materialising the ‘always two’ of trace and shadow, tactility and vision, drawing and writing. Through its material dialogues across genres and bodies, the Braille Wall speaks differently with Memoirs, emphasising the productive potential of the fold, the dialogic point of exchange between differences that are neither unmarked nor remain unaltered in their encounter. The dialogue between Maggi’s blind slides and the legacy of Derridean thinking on drawing in and through blindness enables us to bring Messager’s L’ombre dessinée back into the present conversation from another perspective. Messager and Maggi have both used shadows to draw out some of the complicated interactions between and across genres, as these are understood within the traditional conventions and contemporary practices of fine art. Drawing, for both Maggi and Messager, occupies a charged space of uncertainty and ambiguity where genres connect and unravel. The space and agency of drawing is, in this sense, intersubjective and interobjective dialogue – drawing comes into presence where genres are least fixed, where multiplicity and mutability are allowed to arise. Arguably, this is not where genres ‘collapse’, but where they emerge and reconfigure. Just as Messager’s L’ombre dessinée was not a fixed full stop, these shadow-drawings in the intervals of genres are the means by which categories and conventions develop, by which the new comes to be articulated and finds its place.

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And here it is useful to remember the critical translative shadow cast by the term ‘genre’, which in French signifies both categories of literary and artistic output and gender – the typologies through which sexual difference is conventionally articulated socially, culturally and politically. If the new is not ushered in by the collapse of genres, but by their creative unfolding in ever more nuanced forms, neither is subjectivity enhanced by the obliteration of gender in signification. Attempts to neutralise sexual difference, collapse ‘genre’, occlude others in a mythic monolith are not liberating, but reductive. And they participate in one of the most pervasive, and exclusive, origin myths within the arts – the myth of male creative genius.

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Great blind men, like great artists, are not women: Old Masters beget New Masters with a nod from the odd muse, but without any interference from mere mistresses.26 The transcendent subject is masculine by definition, his ascendance into the realm of genius is assured through autogenesis, a creative lineage drawn from man to man. From Pliny’s tale of the daughter of Butades and its subsequent development into a narrative of the origin of painting to Derrida’s story of the emergence of drawing in the blindness of self-portraiture, Western art is replete with myths that are premised upon the transformation of the male artist into the artist. In these mythic tales of creativity, sexed subjectivity remains unmarked, unsignified and thus all the more potent. But, once drawn from and through the shadows, it is marked. Messager articulates her position as a woman artist through every facet of The Boarders; the work’s dialogues across materials, myths and genres are not ungendered, they are differenced. Messager’s shadows and ellipses provide spaces in which to reiterate her sexed subjectivity as she delineates herself as a desiring draughtswoman in dialogue with the elusive categories of ‘the artist’ and ‘the artwork’. Maggi’s shadow-play in Braille Wall also speaks across materials, myths and genres and opens a dialogue on the embodied locus of language and meaning. Like a Bohmian dialogue, Maggi’s proceeds through both careful attention to others’ propositions and an open self-reflexivity, an acknowledgement that dialogues with/in difference change us.27 On considering the differences that emerge through dialogue, a consequence of similar rather than identical material, there is the potential for the unfolding of new and mutual content. Maggi’s drawings are dialogic – open to reconfiguration in different installation environments – the blind slides works are not as much fixed objects, as they are elements able to converse with other elements in varied settings. In describing his working methods, Maggi said: ‘Process is my concept and my purpose, the work’s origin and its goal.’28 Drawing this out, he used two terms that are powerfully resonant here: slow and cover(age). Maggi’s ‘slow politics’ of drawing is a dialogue that moves through the ellipsis … ‘so yes, I am still promoting

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pauses’.29 His determination to produce work that can speak across many different times, places and participants, is critical to the form of slow, attentive engagement that his drawing practice articulates and invites. This slowness is paired compellingly with ‘coverage’, understood not as blanket revelations of information and detail, but as protective shadowing, drawing a veil that shields us against the present tendency towards ‘knowing more and understanding less’.30 Messager’s series Les Voiles (Veils, 1980) comprises small drawings on veils that were covered with several successive veils of colour. She said, ‘I have always worked with things that are covered, half hidden, half revealed.’31 Importantly, Maggi’s work connects the global South with the Euro-American axis of the ‘developed world’ (in his words, ‘pre-Columbian and post-Clintonian’), as surely as it reminds us that ‘nothing is more digital than a hand’.32 Speaking across genres through slow, attentive and nuanced drawing processes that provide multiple and mutable spaces for different subjects to engage dialogically with the work, Maggi’s practice is not unlike Messager’s. Its dialogic intertextuality calls for an embodied and intersubjective response and thus reimagines the male artist as both sexed and permeable, suggesting an alternative to the unmarked masculine-normative artist subject underlying the exclusive myths of creative genius. Not surprisingly, while we are able to bring Maggi and Messager into an imaginative and productive dialogue within this text, Maggi himself has developed some of his ‘coverage’ pieces (cutpaper shadow drawings) in dialogues with the legacies of women artists: Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel. Maggi’s shadow drawings dialogue against the grain of Western artist myths that exclude women’s cultural legacy and invite us to rethink the sexed and situated experience of men as artists.

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Dialogues through difference not only enable female subjectivity to be articulated, but permit male subjects to move beyond the stultifying logic of the unmarked centre. Materialising the many and diverse dimensions of sexed subjectivity does not entail the collapse of genres but inspires the rich multiplicity inherent in ‘speaking across’ to unfold their variations. Sexual difference is as multifaceted as it is mobile; the male artist in dialogue with

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women artists and the masculine myths of drawing’s origins invites us to converse with richly multiple and permeable masculinities/femininities as they unfold dialogues in difference through drawing.

Mirrored Shadows: The Twice-Two of Dialogue In 1596, a team of Dutch navigators, led by Willem Barents and Jacob von Heemskerk, became stranded on the Arctic island of Nova Zembla (‘new land’), a small, uninhabited island located off the coast of Russia. The explorers were seeking a northerly trade route to China when they were trapped in the ice and forced to over-winter in a small hut they built on the island. They christened the hut the Behouden Huys or the ‘safe house’. As Wim Pijbes, the Director of the Rijksmuseum, wrote: ‘The winter that Willem Barents spent on Nova Zembla became one of the evergreens of Dutch history.’33 This ‘evergreen’ tale has been told in many different ways; the only eyewitness account was published by Gerrit De Veer in 1598, entitled The True and Perfect Description of Three Voyages, so strange and wonderful that the like hath never been heard before. ‘Frozen Voices’, a fantastic story telling the tale of sailors over-wintering on an Arctic island whose words literally freeze as they are uttered in the extreme cold, was published by Joseph Addison in The Tatler in 1710. Combining elements from De Veer’s eyewitness account of the Nova Zembla explorers and the English translation of François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,34 Addison’s fable added a further mythical layer to the tale of Barents and his men. Retold for generations, the tale of Nova Zembla continues to fascinate and, in 2011, Reinout Oerlemans turned the story into a feature-length film, Nova Zembla. Interestingly, the contemporary film version introduced a female character, the love interest of Barents, into the tale; her presence in this version serves to remind us that many of our evergreen historical epics are, in fact, tales told of men, by men. Redrawing their lines through dialogues with difference casts new shadows across their welltrodden terrain. 39

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The written, spoken and cinematic tales of Nova Zembla are accompanied by an extraordinary archive of materials housed in the Rijksmuseum. In 1871, the Norwegian Elling Carlsen found the remains of the Behouden Huys at Nova Zembla and brought back a range of objects, including books and prints that had frozen into solid blocks of papier mâché. Further expeditions to Nova Zembla brought more material into the Rijksmuseum collection. These physical remains have long been of interest to scientists, historians and anthropologists seeking to reconstruct the events of that fateful sixteenth-century winter, but archivists and conservators have also been fascinated by the tangible presence of the past, its material trace, residing in these oncefrozen objects. Much research has been undertaken to piece printed books, images and fragile, hand-written diaries back together, yet it is their ephemeral and fragmentary physicality which continues to compel visitors to the collection. The evergreen Nova Zembla thus exists in and as dialogue. It is a multi-layered, historical narrative charting the course of an early modern trading expedition, a fable based on our fear of isolation and death, and a myth of the power of the human spirit, as demonstrated by (masculine) endurance and ingenuity. It is materially present and yet precarious and incomplete. It is word and text and image and object; it speaks across time and place. Its varied elements converse, but never resolve as one. Between 2009 and 2011, Siân Bowen was Guest Artist in Drawing at the Rijksmuseum. During her time as Guest Artist she extended these dialogues by conversing with Nova Zembla through the act and medium of drawing. Bowen’s conversation with Nova Zembla was materialised in an installation of work in the Rijksmuseum in 2012. At the time, the Museum was only partially open (major refurbishment work was still under way) and Bowen’s installation was located in the final opened room. Like L’ombre dessinée from Messager’s The Boarders, Bowen’s drawing installation, Suspending the Ephemeral, acted as an ellipsis, rather than a full stop, signalling a quiet pause between the material artefacts of the past and the contemporary process of both conserving and conversing with them.

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In common with the drawings of Messager and Maggi engaged earlier in this dialogue, the works which comprised Suspending the Ephemeral spoke across material and formal conventions within contemporary fine art, moving easily between two and three dimensions, still and moving image, abstraction and figuration, writing, drawing and object-making. Bowen’s conversation with the material and narrative legacy of Nova Zembla was conducted in the space of the installation through six elements requiring distinct lighting conditions: five bodies of her work and a small selection of material from the Rijksmuseum’s Nova Zembla collection, including painstakingly restored fragments of prints and maps, recovered books and diaries from the site and a fragile ‘farewell note’, The Cedelken, handwritten by Willem Barents and Jacob van Heemskerck. The five bodies of work Bowen produced through her dialogue with Nova Zembla are, as Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge wrote, ‘a conversation with the objects about time’.35 Arguably, this conversation was fostered by silence, shadows and mirrors, such that the timbres and tones of the fragmentary material of the conserved archive were repeated, reiterated and enhanced by the contemporary drawing project to resound in the space of the present, delineating the events of the past in new and surprising ways. The past and the present were thus mutually constituted in this dialogue as fragile, precarious and permeable; as it spoke across history, legend and the evergreen myths of men, Suspending the Ephemeral enabled the agency of a woman, drawing, to mirror and shadow these tales otherwise. The drawing installation opened the Nova Zembla archive to a dialogue with/in difference. One such dialogue within Suspending the Ephemeral emerged in the particular encounter between three bodies of work: Silent Freeze: Barents Sea (2009–10), Silent Freeze/Mirrored: I (2009–11) and Silent Freeze/Mirrored: II (2010–11). The Silent Freeze works are interconnected visually and by title; the dialogue between them further extends to converse, materially, with the archival fragments of the Nova Zembla collection and, conceptually, with our understanding of early modern exploration. Barents Sea consisted of 20 rectangular digital photographs of fractured ice

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floating in the sea whilst Mirrored: I comprised a 15-minute-long video recording the image of the same shoreline, sea and ice floes, but reflected in a small, convex, black mirror attached to the boat in which Bowen travelled to Nova Zembla, ‘a journey edging little by little through the frozen icepack’.36

Figure 5: Silent Freeze / Mirrored: I, Siân Bowen, 2009–11, stills from video.

In Mirrored: I, the video images were framed in black ovals in a series of three, turning the framed piece into a graphic, grammatical ellipsis […], formed by three geometric ellipses. This ‘twice-two’ play of the grammar and geometry of the ellipsis is a striking figuration within the trope of dialogue as it engages drawing and difference and we shall return to it anon … but first, it is useful to cast some further shadows across the mirror to add to the multiplicity of reflections across and through the surface of the museum glass. The reflections simultaneously reveal and conceal presence and absence and circumscribe our relationship with the tactile and visual subtleties of the drawings.37

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The images of Mirrored: I were mirrored for a second time by the extraordinarily delicate drawings of Mirrored: II. Conversation shares a root with conversion, with processes of change, transformation and ‘turning about’, as they occur with and through the agency of others. Mirrored: II transformed the images from Mirrored: I through a form of non-identical reflection, such

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that the video images of the frozen water were turned about, rendered in pinpricks (mirrored in the Braille system of writing) and tarnished silver dust on bespoke hemp paper, watermarked. This mirroring is neither flat reflection, nor clear and distinct vision. Rather, the drawings of Silent Freeze/Mirrored: II trace their images through a (convex) glass darkly, reflecting upon the illegibility of the events of the past through the flat mirror of the present. The twice-two of the mirror invoked by Silent Freeze is reminiscent of Irigaray’s invocation of the speculum, the curved internal mirror capable of reflecting two, as a mechanism by which to confront the self-same philosophical truths flatly reflected by the masculine-normative mirror of history.38 Those histories, myths, legends and evergreen tales that efface difference, sexual or otherwise, reproduce an economy of the same, a flat picture, a one-sided representation of a linear teleology, bound to reproduce itself again and again. But change the shape of the mirror so that difference can be seen and the histories, myths and legends are redrawn against the grain; when the mirrors are redoubled and reshaped, others come into view and teleology gives way to futures, becoming. Through the drawn shadows of The Boarders, the desiring agency of Butades’ daughter traces a line on a wall; in the multidimensional genre-crossing of a Braille Wall, the embodied and situated male artist emerges out of metaphorical blindness; in the pinprick shadow-drawing of ice floes in an Arctic sea, a woman artist curves the flat mirror of a history that rarely accedes to difference. We can but search the photographs of ice and waves and water in vain for meaning; the True and Perfect Description of Three Voyages neither exists in the fragmentary remains of the past nor in the documentary evidence of the present. There is no full recovery, no complete knowledge, only a partial view, through the shadows, twice mirrored and turned about in frozen silence, awaiting its transformative animation in and of the present. As Walter Benjamin wrote so eloquently of the historical dialogue between time and vision, ‘The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’39 It is in the dialogue that develops between the visual and material elements of Silent Freeze and

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the archival traces of the past in the Nova Zembla collection that these flashes of recognition emerge. Bowen’s work suspends ephemeral instants of recognition, holding them, like silent frozen words, still. The precarious material trace of the past lingers for a long instant within the quiet, thoughtful pause of the ellipsis … and then is gone. Bowen’s drawings converse, twice-two, with time: bridging the gap with the past and holding open a moment of the present. In this elliptical conversation, both are transformed. The flash of recognition is literal as well as metaphorical in the case of Bowen’s dialogue with the legend of Nova Zembla. Constantly shifting in and out of focus, within our view and beyond it, Suspending the Ephemeral is drawn in light and shadow, water and dust, words and silence. Particular techniques and motifs recur, dialogically speaking across and within bodies of work. The watermarked writing in Mirrored: II, for example, underlies the pinprick and silver dust drawings of the ice and sea. The shadows and dust describe the ebb and flow of freezing and melting water whilst the watermarks, as Bowen states, inscribe the drawings with words that make reference to ‘a sixteenth century, handwritten translation of Pet and Jackman’s navigational guide found on Nova Zembla’.40 Stable geography and systematic cartography give way to the vicissitudes of fluidity.

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Likewise, in the series of five drawings that comprise Refuge/Site (2010–11), watermarks destabilise any fixed understanding of the legend of Nova Zembla and its safe house. In Refuge/Site, the watermarks trace the lines of a twentieth-century photograph of the Behouden Huys and an etching showing it being built taken from De Veer’s eyewitness account. In the Rijksmuseum, the five drawings of Refuge/Site were displayed on lightboxes; the watermarks on bespoke hemp paper became visible as a play of light and shadow both on and in the paper itself as the traces of drawing reveal and open through light. The site and sense of refuge are ephemeral phenomena, subject to the mirage of the light cast through their support. They become visible in the condition of an eclipse or a metaphorical blindness, of paper placed over a lightbox, like a blind slide. The dialogues drawn with water in the installation thus mirror the precarious fluidity that underwrites the project of ‘history’ itself.

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But there is more. The men who over-wintered on Nova Zembla experienced the extreme hardship of the Arctic climate, but they also recorded extraordinary optical phenomena, ranging from snow-blindness to what has now come to be known as the Novaya Zemlya Effect, a polar mirage that foreshortens the light of the sun as it rises over the horizon and renders it as a series of flattened rectangular shapes. This optical effect was first recorded by De Veer and was not believed for many years. The extreme conditions which Barents and his men experienced were thought to make their scientific insights dubious; their veracity could not be trusted against European traditions of tame experimentation. Yet they were true. The watermark drawings of Refuge/Site play on these interpretations of ‘truth’. The Behouden Huys was both a refuge and an archaeological site; it is a subjective space of legend and an objective site of scientific enquiry. It will not resolve, it defies the binary opposition of either/or and remains both/and. In this, it is the quintessential marker of that which is beyond binary thinking. It could only be rendered through the watermark which is always both on and in the paper, embedded both as and of the matrix of mark-making, visible and invisible, shadowy eclipse and bright light. The optical mirage of Nova Zembla is fact and fiction; there are not two elements here, but one in dialogic becoming, proceeding in ellipses and eclipses. Materially, the most multifaceted works produced as part of Suspending the Ephemeral were a series of ‘unique’41 handmade books entitled Descriptions True and Perfect (2010–11). Twenty-five in total, they are made of bespoke hemp paper, bound in flexible vellum and are variously inscribed, graphically, incorporating embossing, letterpress, pinpricks, mica, palladium, white gold and watermarks. They speak across text, image and object and, as drawings, they converse with the conventions of various bound paper genres, from the diary, notebook and artist’s sketchbook to the print folio, map collection and finished artist’s book. The drawing motifs in the books echo the images from the Nova Zembla archive and the other works in Suspending the Ephemeral;

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE Figure 6: Descriptions True and Perfect, Siân Bowen, detail from 25 books incorporating embossing, letterpress, pinpricks, mica, palladium, white gold and watermarks on bespoke hemp paper with semi-limp vellum binding, each 25.5 x 17 centimetres.

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the outline of the Behouden Huys, images from the ice floes and handwritten text appear across the pages of the books, setting up further dialogues between the varied elements of the narrative and its material legacy. The images variously float, shadow and trace the pages hovering as watermarks and embossed surface, pinpricks and metallic dust marks. Descriptions True and Perfect dissolve as twice-mirrored, twice-shadowed graphics; as Bowen wrote, ‘It doesn’t seem possible to describe anything perfectly when nothing stays still.’42 The book works can thus be understood to speak across other drawings and fragmentary prints, letters, maps and materials, without providing any final resolution to the tale. They are an open dialogue, yet our reading-view of them is fixed and ‘frozen’ through the device of the museum showcase, mirroring the encasement of the original Nova Zembla material in blocks of ice. The glass vitrine of hand-made books is a temporary pause in the narrative, an ellipsis in the conversation

As objects, the books that constitute Descriptions True and Perfect occupy an enfolded space, where drawing and writing coalesce as graphic marks between folio and verso that defy exclusive concepts of genre. The manifold volumes unfold the parallel of drawing|writing on, in, through and across their leaves. Are these marks made by hand or tool and do they reside on the paper, in the shadows cast by its incision or through the translucency of its water-traced matrix? Genres flow across the folds, come into view, are eclipsed, converse with new and different elements and reconfigure. These books are histories, legends, maps, diaries, drawings and more. Their dialogues with difference through drawing constitute and reconstitute their fragments without limit, materialising the open potentiality of the book as, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, ‘a relationship, an axis of endless relationships’.43

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of the installation as a whole, later mirrored by drawing together the installation’s materials in a multi-voiced, dialogic book.

Yet, if the books of Descriptions True and Perfect unfold genre, they do not collapse it. The diaries of the men who over-wintered in 1598, the prints they were carrying with them to trade, their songbooks, their maps, the Behouden Huys, the ice, the cold, the Novaya Zemlya Effect – these are drawn out in the small, handmade books, painstakingly pinpricked, dusted with powders, watermarked, rendered through silent damage and displayed in the present next to the traces of the past. This dialogue cannot be completed; it can only unfold its variations. The agency of Barents’s men is articulated in dialogue with a woman drawing; her desire to converse traces their incomplete and fragile shadow in an open line on the wall. Histories are unbound, drawings emerge, fragments flash up and are recognised for an instant and then are gone. Throughout Descriptions True and Perfect, elliptically framed drawings of ice and water taken from the series Mirrored: II reappear as pages. These oval drawings visually interrupt the rectangular pages of the books (and the images on them) and produce a pause in viewing by disrupting the more standard ‘text and illustration’ narrative format. They are thus elliptical in two senses – geometric and grammatical. In our earlier dialogue with

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the work Silent Freeze/Mirrored: I, we opened the space of the twice-two geometry and grammar of the ellipsis, promising that it would return anon. And so it does. The conversation that emerged between Bowen’s drawings and the Nova Zembla collection in Suspending the Ephemeral was drawn out across the varied elements within the installation space through shadows and silences made fluid and mirrored. Silent Freeze/Mirrored: I echoed the photographs of Barents Sea, but in fluid movement; in turn, it was echoed by the drawings of Mirrored: II, in the pages of Descriptions True and Perfect and, significantly, by the framing device selected to show one of the reconstructed prints from the Nova Zembla collection. Over years of painstaking work, fragile fragments of the thawed paper blocks that once had been stacks of prints for trade in Chinese markets, have been salvaged and reconstructed by conservators. Six copies of Maria Magdalena after Hendrick Goltzius (c. 1590) have been reconstructed in this way; in the installation, three were framed and displayed next to one another in a series. The dark oval outlines of the prints of the Magdalene seated in the woods are clearly visible even through the damage. Their distinctive elliptical shape, thrice repeated, forms a mirror image of the grammatical ellipsis of the black oval-framed video Mirrored I. Two ellipses, twice mirrored over time and space, a grammatical pause, an ephemeral suspension of linear temporality, facilitates a dialogue with/in difference in the space of drawing the histories of men through the agency of a woman. In 1996, Catherine de Zegher drew on the geometric figure of the ellipsis to encapsulate the histories traced by women’s art-making in the highly influential exhibition Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, an exhibition that ‘favors “drawing”.’44

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The elliptical traverse, as invoked by De Zegher, sought to decentre the histories of art as they had been understood from a singular, unmarked-masculine, position. Histories that admit of sexual and other forms of difference cannot be written from a singular centre; they are elliptical by definition. Within the present exploration of dialogue as a trope shared by both drawing and

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sexual difference, the ellipsis is a twice-two convention, both a grammar and a geometry that is doubly ec-centric. Irigaray’s ellipses (and eclipses) converse with the elliptical line drawn by De Zegher to suggest a new figure for a dialogue that is always twice-two, becoming and open to change. At the time Barents and his men travelled to the Arctic, ‘conversation’ still retained one of its primary meanings, the notion of ‘living together’, ‘dwelling’. Dwelling is both a noun and a verb, a place, a ‘safe house’, and a form of habitation, habitual interaction between selves and others. To dwell commits us to an ethics; an ethics of sexual difference commits us further to converse with others, ec-centrically, elliptically, in dialogue rather than monologue. This is a living-with that moves beyond the selfsame logic of the Mitsein toward the Mitseinander.45 The noun and verb of drawing, at the dialogic limits of genre, also unfold difference elliptically rather than tracing it in the flat mirror of representation. This twice-two dialogue creates the potential for new figurations to emerge to articulate the productive and mutual articulation of drawing and sexual difference. Arguably, these figurations describe an allotropic relationship between drawing and difference, where the articulation of subjects-in-process entails an unfolding of many and varied genres (allotropes: ‘other manners’) in and through dialogue. An allotropic approach to the enfolded correspondence between drawing and the dialogic exploration of difference in myths, fictions, histories and the material legacies of the past neither seeks to maintain them as separate, parallel modes, nor reduce either to the terms of the other. The timeless myths of history, the origin myths of drawing and the occluded narratives of many and varied others speak across and together in the shadows, silences and mirrored twice-twos of dialogue.

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2

Matter



From materia – ‘substance’ mater: ‘origin, source, mother’

I. Drawing carries the memories of materials and surfaces and each instance speaks to its origins: what kind of material (medium) is used on what kind of surface (ground or support)? Susan Hauptman, Cornelia Parker and Dorothea Rockburne draw, they make drawings … imbricating material and surface, they demonstrate drawing as simultaneously both noun and verb. The both/and of drawing emerges in and through materialisation. Susan Hauptman’s self is drawn, both life-scale and larger-than-life, through paper with charcoal, pastel and sometimes other material additions, including gold leaf (Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna, 2000, 147 x 101 centimetres) and feathers (Self Portrait (with feathers), 2007, 104 x 134.5 centimetres). The exquisite manipulation and consummate technical control of traditional drawing materials requires months of scrutinised self-study. Hauptman’s body matters. There seems little room for accident. She draws ‘close to a traditional definition of drawing’1 where the drawing fundamentals of value, tone, shading, composition and, to a lesser extent, line, are formal elements within each work, modulations of elemental light and shadow reminiscent of religious icons, Georges Seurat2 and ‘the effect of early daguerreotypes’.3

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Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna and Self Portrait (with feathers) manifest the intensity and presence of their materials; the textures, colour, irradiated light and shade transform matter and challenge an emotional, affective response to the image that would transcend its materiality in and as drawing. Hauptman’s work offers us the noun and verb of drawing, the both/and of object and process; she transforms and renders her materials through drawing until we are presented with seemingly autonomous, illusionistic, imaginative drawings ‘and a moment in an overarching narrative’.4 Cornelia Parker has also drawn on paper, sometimes with gold and sometimes with gold and diamond (an allotrope of carbon) on glass. In 1996, Parker exhibited Wedding Ring Drawing (circumference of a living room), comprising two 22-carat-gold wedding rings melted down and drawn into wire to the length of the circumference of a living room, yet measuring only 61 x 61 centimetres when framed in the tradition of a drawing. In 2002, she produced Engagement Ring Drawing (As Long as it Lasted), a reclaimed gold engagement ring drawn into wire with scratches on the inside of the glass made by a diamond, measuring 62.8 x 62.8 centimetres when framed. Their respective titles are descriptive, drawing the viewer in, whilst the drawings’ materiality suggests allusion and metaphor, prompting various possible narratives. The rings are in the titles, in the drawings and in the materials. Language, material and idea are interwoven in and of drawing.

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Parker’s work demonstrates an obsession with materials, their transformation and their histories and, whilst ‘trying not to make autobiographical work’,5 the artist states that ‘everything has been something else before’.6 The process of making wire is called ‘drawing’: drawing is a rearrangement of matter. Once melted, the metal of the engagement and wedding rings has new possibilities, the archetypal objects in Parker’s works are transformed through drawing, their matter is rearranged and new meanings materialise. Describing drawing ‘as the simplest and most honest no-nonsense part of art’7, Parker draws rings into a line of thin and fragile wire that measures and draws forth spaces and times. She scratches surfaces with diamond, literally drawing, whilst simultaneously challenging a traditional definition of drawing. Parker’s materials are both/and her drawing tools.

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Dorothea Rockburne draws on and with paper, using the traditional drawing materials of graphite, carbon, pen and ink and, between (circa) 1972 and 1974, the collectively titled Drawing Which Makes Itself materialised. In 1973, an installation of a dozen unframed drawings comprising Drawing Which Makes Itself was shown at the Bykert Gallery, New York.8 The works were installed in two separate, white-painted (floor and walls) rooms, distinguished by the works’ material differences. The eight works in one room were made from white paper, attached to the gallery wall and described as ‘floating in immaterial whiteness’.9 The paper was folded, creased, unfolded and marked with lines that were a product of the fold, so that the paper’s folding determined the location and form of the marked and traced lines. The relationship of paper and line is simultaneous. The paper is the line, the line is (in and internal to) the paper, and the paper is the body of the drawing. The drawings’ logic and structure are ambiguous, yet systematic (topological) and self-reflexive. In the other room of the Bykert show the four works of Drawing Which Makes Itself were made with double-faced carbon paper on white paper: ‘one work is on the wall, one is on the wall tangent to the floor, one is nearly equally on wall and floor, and one is on the floor butting the wall.’10 The drawings extended beyond the (carbon) paper as the marks and black lines made using the doublefaced carbon paper were both on the paper and transferred to the gallery walls. The paper acts upon itself, apparently self-generated: drawing, as noun and verb, which makes itself. The room was both a drawing support and a drawing container: ‘[t]he lines of the carbon have been formed by folds and by the making of lines on wall or floor where the folds occur.’11 The lines on the walls and floor both traced the turning, folding, unfolding, covering, uncovering and movement of the paper and the bodily movement of Rockburne and any assistants. Their fingerprints were over the surfaces of the room and, subsequently, visitors added to the drawing as the white painted floor around the works became marked by their engagement with/in the work. The smudges and marks of the medium itself became integrated into the subject matter. The audience (viewer) and the artist are both enacting and re-enacting the drawing(s) gesture(s) through the bodily act of drawing. Drawing Which Makes Itself involved the matter of bodies.

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As Rockburne said: ‘Drawing is as fundamental to my art making as my skeleton is to my body. Drawing is the bones of my thought.’12

II. insideout Drawing for Rockburne, Parker and Hauptman is both noun and verb, a matter of the interconnection between objects and processes. Ever since Richard Serra played the linguistic game of the gerund with the word drawing, the conceptual resonance of its modulation between a corporeal act (understood variously as gestural mark-making, dextrous trace or autographic signification) and an aesthetic object (an ‘artwork’) has been part of the intellectual armature of drawing theory.13 Arguably, the interplay between the verb drawing, as a primary form of bodily inscription, and the noun drawing, as the inscribed bodily surface, is intimate and integral. Drawing describes both objects and processes as interdependent; it’s both/and is more than the activity of a clever wordsmith, it is an essential element of its emergent production of meaning. Significantly, the both/and of drawing in and as noun/verb or object/ process, confounds the logic of binary dualism, suggesting instead the imbrication of matter and form, of material and meaning. That drawing is always already both an act and the outcome of the act in material form, turns the inside out – drawing makes drawings make drawing. The both/and of drawing provides a compelling instance of agency in practice that operates beyond the stultifying logic of binary dualism.

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Rockburne’s Drawing Which Makes Itself is absolutely implicated within the both/and of drawing that undoes binary thinking as an underpinning to the production and critical analysis of art. The paper is the line, the line is (in and internal to) the paper, and the paper is the body of the drawing. There is no simple opposition to be found in the works between mark and support, trace and surface, line and ground. Drawing Which Makes Itself does not adhere to dualist logic in its mode of production or operation and thus, while it utilises the conventional materials of drawing, such as graphite, ink, carbon and paper, it does not replicate the conventions that would pit form against matter.

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Figure 7: Drawing Which Makes Itself: FPI 16, Dorothea Rockburne, 1973. Folded paper and ink, 76.2 x 101.5 centimetres.

In Rockburne’s body of works, drawing makes itself in the folded and unfolding multiplicity of matter manifest simultaneously as surface and trace or line and ground. Interior and exterior are similarly rendered as chiasmic twins, intertwining within the work, as the unfolding extends from paper to wall and back again, and the works turn from two dimensions to three, only to re-turn. The physical and material interchange between line and ground, mark and surface in Drawing Which Makes Itself was noted by contemporary critics writing about Rockburne’s work in the 1970s. In particular, Bruce Boice wrote with extraordinary sensitivity of the ways in which the works counter (or ‘reverse’) conventions and traditions of drawing by means of material exchanges: Paper is the physical material that forms her work, rather than simply receiving the forms of the work as in its traditional usage. […] [C] onventional drawing is reversed, for in this case, the paper ‘activates’ the line. At the same time, the pencil line also ‘activates’ the paper

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by being drawn on it in the usual way, and therefore both paper and pencil line are simultaneously ‘activating’ and ‘being activated’ by each other. Considering the folded crease as a line, the paper is the line, and both ‘activates’ and ‘is activated’ by itself.14

Paper is no longer an empty, receiving ‘ground’, the tabula rasa of base matter awaiting the agency of form, but becomes here an activating force in drawing. The very structure of Boice’s writing as he attempts to find words with which to engage Rockburne’s work folds and unfolds, turns, twists and intertwines: ‘the paper “activates” the line […] the pencil line also “activates” the paper’, and so on, anon. And whilst Boice argues that conventions in drawing are being ‘reversed’, his reconception of the form and matter of drawing as a kind of mutual activation is not simply a reversal of binary logic whereby matter takes the place of form and vice versa. Rather, his close attention to the operations of the work are suggestive of a far more radical reconfiguration of the notion of matter beyond the limits of binary dualism, a reconception Boice may well have not intended, but which unfolds in his writing nonetheless. This more radical reconception of matter was echoed two decades later by Judith Butler when she wrote: What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter.15 (Italics in original)

When Butler proposed this formulation of ‘materialization’, she was not discussing art, but the premise of the irreducibility of ‘sex’ in and as the matter of the body. Like Boice, she was countering conventions within her own field (in this case, philosophy and feminist theory) that were premised upon dualism.

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Unravelling the logic of binary dualism and positing the body’s materiality as meaningful is of critical significance to any project that seeks to enable difference to be voiced and recognised. It is thus not surprising that an extended critique of dualism has been a cornerstone of much feminist philosophy and critical theory over the past three decades.16 Butler is but one of a number of scholars

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who have eloquently argued for the significance of corporeality and the reconception of matter as vital. Whilst this literature is not a homogeneous body of thought, in relation to the deconstruction of ‘the feminine’ and/or ‘woman’ from within a binary system that defines both terms as negative, lacking or ‘other’, its insights are as aligned as they are compelling. Within a dualist framework, the specificity of sexed subjectivity cannot be articulated as it is already co-opted by a logic that renders it beyond the frame, outside the boundaries of intelligibility, legibility and visibility. To come into view is to confront dualism head on and find a means by which to be seen ‘otherwise’. By proposing a notion of matter as materialisation, the body reclaims its agency within the processes of subjectification such that it is no longer the ‘ground’ upon which ‘gender’ is inscribed. The matrix is not mute; neither is it outside the operations of meaning production. Butler’s reconception of the body as matter that matters (instantiated through the process of materialisation) shares an extraordinary resonance with the both/and of ‘activated’ matter in Drawing Which Makes Itself. Arguably, the instances of Drawing Which Makes Itself demonstrate drawing’s potential to unravel the logic of binary dualism through a similarly vital concept of matter, materialised. Drawing Which Makes Itself refuses to resolve in the opposition between ground and mark. Its self-reflexivity – the ‘making of itself’ in and through ‘drawing’ – runs counter to aesthetic conventions premised upon an opposition between the materials of drawing (drawing’s matter) and their transformation through a gestural act (the imposition of form or meaning). How and from what these drawn works are made is intrinsic to their significance and symbolism; the matrix is resistant and agential. Matter matters, matter means. In its unfolding material agency, the instances of Drawing Which Makes Itself move towards a conception of drawing as always [both] object and process, noun and verb. Rockburne’s insistence on using ‘traditional’ drawing materials (paper, pencil, carbon, pen and ink) and deploying, either alone or with help, a limited range of bodily mark-making gestures (folding, unfolding, inscription) in the works only served to make the imbrication of matter and form more

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defined. The physicality and openness of drawing are elementary to its disposition and the concept of mark-making fundamental to the character of the medium. This economy of means reiterated some of drawing’s most entrenched conventions, performing the works as drawing, whilst at the same time calling that very definition into question. This action folds the notion of drawing inside out, like a Möbius strip: ‘showing not [its] fundamental identity or reducibility, but the torsion of the one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside.’17 Our invocation of the Möbius strip here is a playful conceit, coming as it does from the Introduction of Elizabeth Grosz’s 1994 book Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Like Butler, Grosz was not speaking of art, but of sexed subjectivity and the body as they might be thought and figured beyond dualism in a ‘corporeal feminism’. Yet her figure, the Möbius strip, is, like Drawing Which Makes Itself, a mathematically inspired form that hovers between two and three dimensions, gently turning surfaces upon themselves so that they demonstrate their multiplicity and mutability (maths ‘nonorientable’). They turn inside out, they enfold difference between interior and exterior and refuse the dualist logic of mind/body, form/ matter. For Grosz, this figure helped to think embodiment as a process of materialising (sexed) subjects: Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between these two alternatives. The Möbius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another.18

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Grosz’s exploration of the in-between, inside out, of the Möbius strip is important here, as it simultaneously refuses to reverse mind–body dualism (privileging ‘body’, yet maintaining the oppositional logic of the two) and/or solve the problem by resorting to a monolithic monism (a single substance). The Möbius strip is a figuration for the both/and, the integral intertwining of body and mind, matter and meaning that confronts and maintains their difference in intraaction. Even as the insoluble folded surface of the Möbius strip

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offers a way to think beyond the deadlock of binary dualism, it is not a mere representation of a non-dualist system. It brings the conventions of dualism into view (the ‘two’ sides of the strip as seemingly opposed, interior and exterior) only to enfold them one into another without negating their distinction. Likewise, Drawing Which Makes Itself is not an illustration of the both/and of drawing. The instances of the work bring the binary into view and then confound it, fold it (literally and figuratively) back upon itself, materialising drawing outside the limits of dualism. In these works, paper becomes ground becomes mark, carbon (suspended as carbon black or in its allotropic form of graphite) becomes mark becomes ground. In its earliest and most complete installation in the Bykert Gallery, Drawing Which Makes Itself even enfolded the binary back upon itself in architectural space, playing two rooms within and as one work, walls into drawings into ground into mark and back again upon themselves. Sharing this suggestive play with the binary as it enfolds two into one and back again, Parker’s Wedding Ring Drawing (the circumference of a living room) literally twists the drawn wire from two gold wedding bands, the symbolic markers of that social convention which joins two as one, into a visual delineation of the complex and intersubjective entanglement of one with the other through intimacy over time. The drawn wires do not resolve as a single entity, but fold and entwine with/in each other, drawing, touching, in looping, Möbius-like rings. Likewise, Hauptman’s Self-Portrait (with feathers) is simultaneously one and two – materialised in this instance through the conventions of the wedding portrait, the elements of the composition and the invocation of the ring(s).19 The drawing consists of two pieces of equal-sized paper bound at the centre and joined on the leading edge by a ‘band of gold’ to become ‘one’. The imaged heads of Hauptman and her husband are positioned one on each sheet of paper and both figures return the gaze of the viewer with striking directness, rather than looking towards each other. Despite the polarising opposition of the two figures through pose, look and placement, they are, in this work, inextricably joined together at the centre of the image and held in place by a band of gold leaf. In the

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE Figure 8: Wedding Ring Drawing (the circumference of a living room), Cornelia Parker, 1996. Two 22-carat-gold wedding rings drawn into wire, 61 x 61 centimetres, framed.

matter of the drawing, each becomes the mirror of the other. The divide of the two pieces of paper and the consequent visual line within the work is almost excessive in its binary logic – woman the polar opposite of man, the two firmly divided by a two-fold line in the dust whilst joined by traditions and conventions across several disciplines.

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But just as the binary is brought so surely into view by this work, so the work enfolds it otherwise, confounding this stark logic and materialising difference in process in its wake. The imaged heads are an inversion of each other, their hats and single ears allow an imaginative fiction of folding, along the central line of the drawing’s

M AT T E R Figure 9: Self-Portrait (with feathers), Susan Hauptman, 2007. Charcoal, feathers and gold leaf on paper, 104 x 134.5 centimetres.

surface, whereby one head touches the other, is the interior to the other’s exterior, the left to its right and back again. Echoing Merleau-Ponty: which head (hand) touches, which is touched? Both, and … In the materialisation of these two figures in and as the dust of drawing, difference enfolds as an articulate figuration; not an image of the binary, but a move beyond its rigid logic. These works, in their imbrication of matter with meaning, go beyond the binary limitations of conventional epistemology which pits mind against body. That they share this way of materialising difference-in-process enables us to suggest that an allotropic relationship might exist between feminist philosophical thinking on mind–body dualism and feminist conceptual art practices engaged with drawing. An allotropic approach to the enfolded correspondence between these practices neither seeks to maintain them as separate, parallel modes, nor reduce either to the terms of the other. Rather, it sees the interlacing of their histories, their conceptual conventions and

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their articulation of meaningful matter beyond the logic of dualism as an allotropic unfolding of the many and varied ‘other manners’ that can describe emergent phenomena. At the point where drawing explores the simultaneity of object and process, it enfolds and unfolds another manner of materialisation that connects its iteration with the philosophical articulation of sexual difference beyond mind and body. The connection between the two fields is elemental but not rigid, an allotropic figuration turning matter inside out, not a representation of the chemical properties of defined entities. Turning mind–body dualism inside out, materialisation also confounds the limits of representation, where representation is understood as reflective of a pre-given entity or condition. As Karen Barad argued, materialisation is a performative concept, rather than a theory of representation, centred on the processes by which phenomena come into the realm of meaning or intelligibility.20 Drawing upon the insights of theoretical physics on the both/and of matter as object/process, Barad reformulated Butler’s concept of materialisation as: ‘an iteratively intra-active process whereby material-discursive bodies are sedimented out of the intra-action of multiple material-discursive apparatuses through which these phenomena (bodies) become intelligible’ (italics in original).21 Barad’s (re)formulation is compelling for a number of reasons, not least because it brings science (quantum physics) together with the arts and humanities (philosophy, linguistics, political theory) to provide a richer account of knowledge and agency at work in the world. Whilst Barad’s decidedly feminist engagement with epistemology does not address art directly, her exposition of a non-representational theory of materialisation that intrinsically intertwines discourse with matter resonates with the present exploration of drawing’s integral relationship to the articulation of (sexual) difference in profound ways.22

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In the critical literature on art, questions of representation are frequently elided with issues concerning mimesis, likeness and the categorical divisions between figurative art (sometimes: ‘realism’, ‘naturalism’) and abstraction. Representation thus clings to the analysis of the visual arts as a linguistic ‘false friend’ that continually returns binary thinking to the field; the visual arts are dogged by

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definitions of their ‘representational’ or ‘non-representational’ nature: they either depict things outside their frame or they are formal, abstract compositions. Within this logic, Dorothea Rockburne’s Drawing Which Makes Itself is non-representational, abstract, process art. The self-portrait drawings by Susan Hauptman are representational, they are likenesses, demonstrating realism in drawing par excellence.23 And even where a work of art seems to hover at the border between visual representation and its negation, this only serves to reinforce the categorical language of the binary in the resolution of the work within the terms of the opposition. Thus Cornelia Parker’s Ring Drawings are abstract compositions whose titular references betray the representational significance of their material origins (the wires once were rings and can be reconceived as representations of objects outside the frame by viewers who are given this information). But these commonplace conventions of ‘representation’ in the visual arts occlude the more profound challenge to the construction of meaning in and as matter suggested by the performative, non-binary and non-representational concepts of materialisation that we have been engaging here. What twists and turns invert interior and exterior, mind and body, matter and meaning, if we explore these drawings not as representations, but as ‘materialdiscursive bodies’ who have sedimented out of processes of encounter and relation between human and non-human agency? Parker’s Ring Drawings are both explicit and ambiguous in their manipulation and transformation of materials and space, they twist and transform rings to wire to drawn line and are encased/framed, on paper, behind glass, for display. They are easily understood and conveyed as material-discursive bodies through their configuration as text–image–objects; the rings exist as matter (drawn wire) and word (Wedding Rings, Engagement Ring), the drawing exists as image (line on support, framed) and text (Drawing in the titles and ‘drawing’ as a named process for producing metal wire). Any possibility for making meaning in an encounter with the Ring Drawings is thus situated at the nexus of their materiality/visuality and their discursive exegesis in language. The work of this art takes place where meaning emerges as a material-discursive event, demonstrating, simultaneously, the inseparability of matter and

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discourse as well as the impossibility of their conflation as one.24 The Ring Drawings materialise rings and drawing as resistant and vital forms of matter that signify variously in multiple discursive formations. These works are not drawings (representations, illustrations) of wedding or engagement rings; they become drawings as the matter of the rings is transformed through drawing in more than one sense. Moving into visibility and towards intelligibility, materialisation folds representation inside out. Arguably, Hauptman’s self-portrait drawings offer the most complex folds, twists and turns in thinking through the inside out of representation, because it is difficult not to be seduced by the astonishing surfaces of the works into believing the illusion of likeness (both spatially and texturally), or taking for granted the mimetic imaging of the artist beyond the frame. In looking at more than one self-portrait, we are tempted to make judgements concerning the artists’ appearance, even if we have not seen her ourselves … ‘she seems younger here, more relaxed there, happier in that image’, and so on.25 We invest in what we imagine resides beyond the drawing and begin to forget that we are looking at a body, not the body of the artist, but the body that is articulated by the complex materials and conventions (discourses) that sediment as what we understand to be ‘drawing’. We fall easily into the seductive fiction of representation in figurative art when we seamlessly interpret these drawings as pictures of something else, ‘the artist’, which exists beyond the frame. In so doing, we construct the ‘self’ portrayed through the conceit of the ‘self-portrait’ by an act of wilful amnesia that forgets the body of the drawing and occludes the resistant matter of the matrix.

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Drawing is itself a material-discursive body that configures and is configured by multiple intra-iterative encounters between matter and meaning and, in the instances of the self-portraits by Hauptman, it is further articulated by the material-discursive limits of the imaged and imagined body of ‘woman’. The imbrications of this particular encounter are manifold and utterly contingent, they admit of no ‘real’, they perform endlessly, they constitute the limits of sexual difference as it engages the potential of visual and material convention (discourse) to articulate female subjectivity as embodied and located.

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Figure 10: Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna, Susan Hauptman, 2000. Charcoal, pastel and gold leaf, 137 x 101.5 centimetres.

Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna is not a transparent likeness of ‘Susan Hauptman, the prima donna’. The drawing is more than a mute mirror of a ‘reality’ existing, fully formed, outside the borders of the paper. This mercurial subject, the woman/artist, emerges in the complex surface play of light and shade, of charcoal, pastel,

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gold and paper, of drawing as noun and verb encountering subjectivity in the intertwining inside out of mind and body. The matter of this work, its materials and the extraordinary facility through which they have been rendered to become an ‘image’, is always already bound together with the discursive conventions of ‘drawing’, ‘figurative art’ and the repetitive visual and linguistic codes through which we learn to give meaning to bodies: ‘woman’, ‘artist’, ‘self’, ‘prima donna’. Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna is not a representation of the woman artist in drawing, it is a materialisation of the contingent categories of woman, artist and drawing, converging in a particular material-discursive body (this drawing). In Hauptman’s self-portraits, representation yields to materialisation, the body gives way to embodiment and drawings are perpetually becoming drawing.

III. outsidein The various instances of Rockburne’s Drawing Which Makes Itself, both of Parker’s Ring Drawings and Hauptman’s Self-Portrait (with feathers) and Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna, can be described as ‘works on paper’, a highly conventional, materials-based category still in use in many museums, collections and auction houses as a means by which to delimit works as ‘drawings’. Indeed, one of the fascinating connections between these three distinctive bodies of work is their reliance upon a very limited range of materials, many of which are conventionally understood through their association with the histories of drawing: paper, pencil (graphite), pen and ink, charcoal and pastels. Even the use of precious metals as foil or wire is not at a distant remove from the medieval and Renaissance traditions in which the application of gold leaf (or the use of metals in fluid suspension), rendered drawn and written graphic work, such as manuscript illumination, more valuable.26

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It is not merely a coincidence that there is such a remarkable material correspondence between these particular works and the historical conventions of drawing. Arguably, these works are all concerned with the conditions by which drawing becomes, or emerges, as such. This might occur through an unfolding process which makes itself, through a mechanical procedure that draws a material from

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one state into another or through a meticulous hand-rendering of image and object, from dust, in light and shade. But in every case, it occurs through agency, materialised, an agency that is constrained, but never predetermined, by the range of possibilities that matter affords as a vital matrix, a locus of myriad material becomings. The possibilities of such material becomings have been articulated eloquently by Jane Bennett as: ‘the persistent capacity of the natural world to surprise – to produce events not fully determined by their antecedents […] [t]here are always more potential shapes and lines of development […] than become actual.’27 Like the figuration of the Möbius strip deployed by Elizabeth Grosz to think through a non-dualist, embodied subjectivity, Bennett’s invocation of a ‘vital materialist’ conception of agency in relation to the myriad possibilities of materialisation is not directed toward a theory of drawing or aesthetics, but to a nondualist understanding of ‘life’ and matter. We have seen already how non-dualist approaches to matter and the body can forge vital connections between the concepts and practices of contemporary fine art drawing and feminist theoretical work on sexual difference. Questions of material transformation, of the emergent becoming of vital matter, extend the breadth of these connections; if the inside out of mind and body moves beyond dualism and representation, then the outside in that entwines subjects with objects repositions agency as mutual intra-action, affective and embedded within the very matter it makes and measures. Paper, graphite, charcoal, pastel and gold – folded, dusted, traced, rubbed, scratched and spun; ‘the persistent capacity of drawing to surprise’, to actualise an extraordinary range of events through an extreme economy of means, could hardly be more elegantly materialised than by the diversity of the works discussed here. Paper, pencil, pen and ink, with carbon black, folded and unfolded, become two- and three-dimensional objects and images making themselves drawing while resisting any opposition between mark and ground. Substituting pastel for ink and adding a single band of gold leaf, a material-discursive event (drawing, both/and) emerges in playful dialogue with mimesis, realism, sexed subjectivity and arthistorical tradition. Two bands of gold, drawn to wire and entangled on paper, delineate a text–image–object in process, measuring

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the affective economies of intimacy in space, over time. The ‘fact’ of these drawings – that such a limited range of materials and techniques can constitute so many vibrant and spectacular becomings – demonstrates that matter, materialised, is a vital and intrinsic component of the very possibility of meaning, that it is part of the condition of agency, rather than a mute, dull ‘stuff’ in desperate need of an ‘agent’ to form it. The eloquent reconception of matter as vital, posited in experimental physics, theorised in philosophy and demonstrated in aesthetics, folds the outside in, refusing to conceive of the phenomena that make up the world (or universe) as manifesting a primary ontological distinction between matter and its materialisation, either in terms of discursivity or measurability. The observed, the observer and the observation are, at a fundamental level, intertwined in the continual flux of material phenomena which is the world. There is no outside of the phenomena of the measure (as both noun and verb) from which to make the resultant ‘measurement’ meaningful. And this entanglement of the observer with the observed or the subject with the object is not peculiar to science. Parker’s Wedding Ring Drawing is profoundly implicated in this intersubjective/interobjective outside in of measurement. The drawn gold measures the space of a domestic room, the duration of a marriage, the conventions of pictorial art, the constraints of descriptive language and the physical limits of a specific material in transformation. The circumference of a living room is not an objective measurement either within the terms of quantum physics or, more pertinently here, as the symbolic measure of the space of a home, a married couple, a family, whose lives, like the wires of the rings, have been drawn together over time, in space. Marriage vows constitute one of the most famous conventional modes of exemplification of performative speech – ‘I do’ brings into existence that which it names. A marriage does not represent a gesture or an act, it performs a much reiterated convention, folding (and sometimes unfolding) it over time. The title of Parker’s drawing again articulates from within; naming its material-discursive connections even as they are made manifest visually such that language becomes another form of matter, rather than its master.

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Significantly, the production of the work effects an ‘agential cut’28 across these multiple and variable phenomena, such that each measurement can only be taken or read in its connection with the others. The most attenuated of these is the drawing of the rings, into wire, at their physical limits, and into art, becoming-drawing. There is nothing outside the phenomenal entwining of tools and measurement in this work; matter and meaning are contingent and mutually constitutive, sliced through to become the performance of material transformation, an articulation of meaningful matter and an unfolded convention of drawing. The work is so enfolded within the intra-active agency of matter and meaning that it would be difficult to conceive Wedding Ring Drawing as the disembodied, transcendent activity of a subject–artist electing to draw, at a distance, an object from outside the very processes that materialise these manifold connections. Agency (human and otherwise) is not a quality ‘we’ have, nor is it the power to confer meaning upon mute objects, but merely the effect of a temporary cessation, an ‘agential cut’, that severs the flow of undifferentiated phenomena from within, such that the boundaries we call ‘matter’ and the constellations we understand as ‘meaning’ might become intelligible, momentarily. Becoming drawing, becoming matter, becoming meaning, Wedding Ring Drawing signifies in, through and with difference and measures matter in/as time. The notion of the multiple ‘intra-actions’ through which these ‘agential cuts’ are effected neither negates agency, nor the significance of subjects and objects to the production of meaning, but it does reconfigure both radically. As Barad wrote: The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/ relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful. A specific intraaction […] enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut – an inherent distinction – between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object.’ That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy.29

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Agency is not a ‘thing’ (owned by an agent, human or otherwise), but a ‘doing’, a ‘making-from-within’,30 an intra-action, in time, between various material and discursive entities which come into intelligibility as ‘components’ of phenomena. Drawing (‘making art’), therefore, need not be understood as the activity of a fully intentional ‘artist–subject’ expressing pre-formed meanings in and through a selection of mute materials with pre-given properties, but instead as one kind of intra-action through which the ‘drawing’ and the ‘drawer’ both emerge as entities by means of effecting a specific (local) agential cut – by the act or process of ‘drawing’. This reformulation rethinks authorship and intentionality beyond dualism (the Cartesian cut) so that drawing, as a form of material intra-action, acquires agency; the subjects and objects of drawing emerge intra-actively at the point of the agential cut that forms both, over time as well as in space. The subjects and objects of drawing materialise in mutuality. Thus, Parker does not draw a metaphor for engagement and marriage, Hauptman does not draw her ‘self’, Rockburne’s drawings do not ‘make themselves’. Rather, Parker, Hauptman and Rockburne emerge as artists (drawing–subjects) through the self-same intra-action that forges the agential cut that enables the works (drawing–objects) to emerge; the subjects (artists) and the objects (drawings) are not inherently distinct, but become through drawing one another’s outside in … the both/and of drawing through materialisation. The enfolding of agency within the mutuality of subject and object continues the processes of reconfiguring matter beyond dualism and representation that have been the focus of this chapter as it has explored the theoretical connections between contemporary fine art drawing and the insights of feminist thinking on subjectivity beyond mind and body. It is not surprising that both fields might reconceive agency and authorship, given that the premises of neither sit easily within the language of a transcendent (male) genius who bends base matter to his formulary will. Explorations of contemporary fine art drawing are more likely to emphasise the contingency of the meeting of maker, matter and mark and the potential of drawing to incorporate ambiguous and attenuated meanings-in-process than to ‘fix’ them once and for all. Likewise, the emphasis upon embodied subjectivity and situated knowledge (as ‘practices’) within much contemporary feminist theory refutes the logic of the

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disembodied masculine subject who exerts his knowing will over a world of which he is not a part. Therefore, while thinking through agency beyond dualism might unsettle conventional (masculinenormative) theories of subjectivity and knowledge, understanding agency as intra-active relations that can enable multiple, openended compositions of subjects and objects to emerge dynamically is a compelling prospect for drawing difference. Rethinking authorship and intentionality focuses upon the subjects of art and upon conventional understandings of the artist as the underlying human agency given expression through the artwork. Materialisation goes further than saying that agency is not a property solely invested in humans, it suggests that agency is not a property, per se, but an action whose effects yield whatever sense we have of subjects and objects (human and otherwise). In this sense, both subjects and objects are vital and redolent with potential, but to neither can be ascribed a fixed identity or intention (beyond the sense of intentionality as ‘being directed towards’). The mutability of objects is an effect of their vitality. Gold is used in Parker’s Wedding Ring Drawing and Engagement Ring Drawing, as well as in Hauptman’s Self-Portrait (with feathers) and Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna, yet it is never the same object in any of the four drawings. Twice the gold is drawn into wire and twice beaten into leaf, twice it is twisted as a line and twice applied as a gilt motif in the finished work. Twice it harkens to the duration of a marriage, twice to the symbolic status of ‘woman’ (as the ‘betrothed’ or the ‘prima donna’, beatified). At no point, however, does a single or fixed significance adhere to this material; its material-discursive body is mutable, malleable and meaningful. Gold is an object, an image, a medium, a ring, a line, a plane, a sign, a symbol and an allegory in these drawings, each transformation an effect of the agential cut of a particular instance of drawing. The material transformation is more than just a matter of technique (drawn to wire, beaten to leaf) or of representation (picturing a gilt halo, measuring a room); it is the iterative sedimentation of multiple materialisations enacted intra-actively through drawing. The instances of gold in these specific drawings demonstrate the absolute contingency and mutuality of subjects and objects – no fixed meaning is inherent to the object/matter ‘gold’ prior

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DRAWING DIFFERENCE Figure 11: Engagement Ring Drawing (As Long as it Lasted), Cornelia Parker, 2002. Reclaimed gold engagement ring drawn into wire, scratches on glass made by a diamond, 63 x 63 centimetres.

to its materialisation in each work, rather, its manifold emergent meanings are realised (multiply, differently) in the agency of drawing. Gold, here materialised through drawing, reminds us of the vitality of matter, a vitality that engenders meaning through affective relations with embodied subjects and polymorphous discourses, sedimented over time.

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The agency of drawing demonstrates the embodiment of subjects (beyond dualism), the vitality of objects (beyond mute matter) and their mutual constitution at the point of the agential cut that materialises the boundaries by which we recognise both. An

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interesting interpretative corollary of this outside in of subjects, objects and agency is the further unfolding of representation towards allegory and affect. The works that form the central focus of this chapter each develop a significant relationship between drawing and objecthood, yet each does this very differently from the others. In the self-portrait drawings of Hauptman, imaged and imagined objects are placed in playful conjunction with ‘actual’ objects (e.g. feathers) collaged onto the surfaces of the drawings. Arguably, the object status of the drawings themselves moves into and out of focus – noticeable, for instance, in the seam between the two sheets of paper that comprise Self-Portrait (with feathers), but tending to fade out of significance (and signification) elsewhere, becoming the ‘ground’ from which the prominent imaged objects emerge, irradiated into visibility in and as drawn dust. These imaged objects are striking in their visual presence; Hauptman’s skill in rendering objects through the conventional techniques of drawing is exceptional and visually compelling. At every turn in Hauptman’s drawing, objecthood is a paradox – ‘real’ against ‘seeming-real’ (feathers attached to ‘pictured’ hats), three-dimensional against two-dimensional (objects rendered through drawing, an awareness of the drawing). Hence, the birthday cake and glove in Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna exist so strongly in the perspectival field of vision it is as if they might be present and yet we are aware of the conceit of the drawing (as such) even in the strange juxtaposition of the cake and glove with the portrait likeness, fireworks and halo. The objects that emerge through this drawing materialise meaningfully, are suggestive, symbolically, but are not reconcilable with a simple logic of representation. Rather, they return us to allegory, the ambiguous and multivalent power of imaged objects to signify beyond the limits of representation as a reflective mirror of the ‘real’. Drawing’s link with allegory is centuriesold, but, significantly, it was invoked by curator Bernice Rose in relation to contemporary fine art drawing practices that could be both mimetic and process-based – what we have explored here as the both/and unfolded dualism of drawing.31 Hauptman’s works instantiate objects as multivalent effects of the agency of drawing. Their shifting objecthood allegorically positions the ‘self’ in much

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the same way as the attributes of Saints operated in medieval art, enabling many possible readings through varied configurations. Parker’s Ring Drawings rely less upon imaging objects than Hauptman’s allegorical self-portraits, yet their materialisation of the outside in of objecthood is no less marked. For the Ring Drawings to signify, viewers must engage imaginatively with the (de)construction of ‘actual objects’ (wedding and engagement rings), investing their material transformation with an allegorical significance that is drawn out by physical and textual operations to produce meaning. Arguably, this imaginative engagement with the objects is embodied and affective; we understand the rings as touched, as worn on the bodies of others who were bound by their symbolic materialisation of marriage or betrothal.32 The rings are meaningful, signifying objects because they bear the corporeal trace of their owners, and whether that is an imaginative fiction or not is of little consequence. Far from the dematerialisation of the object so commonly ascribed to the processes of conceptual art, the Ring Drawings re-materialise the bodily underpinning of meaning and signification itself, reinstating the body as the locus of drawing’s agency, without objectifying ‘the body’. Drawing Which Makes Itself materialises the agency of drawings as always simultaneously process and object, an effect of the sedimentation of what we understand to be matter’s boundaries over time. It is becoming-drawing, drawing in time and matter. The title thoroughly displaces the conventions of authorial intention – drawing needs no subject, it makes itself. However tempting it is to yield to the self-reflexive potential of this body of work and suggest that its materialisation of process removes subjects and objects from the expanded field of drawing, arguably, it is more productive to explore the outside in of objects and subjects at the point where Drawing Which Makes Itself folds to produce its agential cut. The instances of the work, the drawing-objects, emerge simultaneously with the drawing-subject, who may not, through the premises of this work, be framed as an all-controlling author–artist, but whose embodiment, evidenced in gesture, movement and mark, is nonetheless pivotal to this particular materialisation of drawing. Indeed, we would argue that as the drawing unfolds mind-body dualism in its materialisation of ‘making itself’, it enfolds subjects

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more thoroughly in their embodiment as they engage the work. Rockburne’s bodily gestures, the physical actions of her assistants in making the work and the marks left by viewers in the Bykert Gallery are part of the drawing-as-process, the inside-outside-in of matter as it comes to matter.

IV. Critical accounts of Hauptman’s self-portrait drawings commonly link them to the work of other women artists, in particular Cindy Sherman and Frida Kahlo.33 The multiple photographic ‘selfstylings’ of Sherman’s work share a number of visual qualities with Hauptman’s drawings, not least in the mutability of the roles played by the artists within their works and their use of costume and props. Kahlo’s paintings from the inter-war period can also be argued to share visual strategies in ‘self-imaging’ with Hauptman’s drawings: a direct and returned gaze, the repetitive use of symbolic objects across a number of works, allusions to specifically female experiences or icons (the mater dolorosa, the prima donna). Arguably, however, the invocation of these women artists from very different historical and geographical contexts is more an expression on the part of critics of a sense that Hauptman’s work is women’s art, or is intrinsically gendered feminine, however that might be encoded. The relationship between the sexed subjectivity of the artists and the trace this might (or might not) leave with/in the artworks they make is also called into question in the critical literature on Parker and Rockburne, but with less certitude. For instance, in discussing Parker’s work, Hugh Stoddard wrote: ‘There may or may not be a “gender element” in this difference, but certainly I think it’s crucial to the openness that Parker’s work retains.’34 Parker herself has commented more than once on the relationship between gender and practice, acknowledging its significance to her work yet remaining slightly at a distance from claiming any defining link: ‘I think it’s obvious that my work’s made by a woman, when you look at the form and sensibility of it, but it’s not something I want consciously to mine.’35 In one of the most detailed texts on Rockburne’s early work (including Drawing Which Makes Itself), Anna Lovatt positions

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the practice, strategically, as ‘ungendered’; this is strategic in that it refuses to limit (critically) the impact of these important works within early, post-minimal process art and burgeoning conceptualism.36 The positions taken on the ‘problem’ of the woman artist and her gendered practice in the three instances described here, however different they may be, are nuanced and theoretically informed arguments designed to enable the work to be engaged productively and in multi-faceted ways rather than being limited by the constraints of the negative stereotyping of ‘women’s art’ as the derivative handmaiden of ‘art’ (conventionally, men’s art needs no gendered adjective). Yet each of these positions remains bound in the deadlock of binary thinking, the very constitution of which these three bodies of work, in their articulation of the both/and of drawing in vital connection with the unfolding phenomena of sexual difference beyond mind/body, can be understood to reconceive. This has radical ramifications for rethinking the ‘problem’ of definition in the instance of the woman artist and her gendered drawing; in a final enfolding of the inside-outside-in, this chapter closes by redrawing the lines of this debate such that it vanishes as the embodied subject emerges. The ramifications of embodiment and vital materialism to the articulation of sexed subjectivity in and through drawing are profound. The logic of materialisation as an intra-active and iterative slice in the flow that is the phenomena of the world does not presuppose any inherent difference between subject and objects other than those configured, from within, at the moment of the agential cut that enables them to come into intelligibility. Systems of thought (epistemologies), definitions of being (ontologies) and the distribution of meaning and power that accrue from these, are not eternal, unchanging or, importantly, essential. Thus, while bodies and meanings do sediment from the continual processes of iterative intra-activity over time, and these sedimented materialdiscursive bodies have the effect of producing the parameters through which new bodies come into intelligibility (i.e. they produce normative effects), they can never wholly contain the possibilities of difference to emerge in new intra-actions. Like the allotropes of carbon – charcoal, graphite and diamond – deployed in and as drawing by Rockburne, Parker and Hauptman, the manner of

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matter is mutable and its potential unfolding is the very promise of change and the locus of our responsibility to reconfigure discourse from within. Or, as Barad put it: Agency is about the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production, including the boundary articulations and exclusions that are marked by those practices in the enactment of a causal structure. Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering.37

The ‘woman artist’ had long been excluded from mattering at the same level as the ‘artist’ (unmarked, masculine norm). It is clear why many critics (and many artists) seeking to explore the works of women on the same terms as those of their male contemporaries shy away from articulating them as sexed or gendered, preferring an ‘ungendered’ or ‘androgynous’ language in their critical writing. However, this falls prey to the binary logic which continues to privilege the unmarked centre over its differenced others. We are arguing otherwise. We are arguing that these works materialise ‘the woman artist’ (in addition to many other intersectional subjectpositions) via the sedimented traces of the many agential cuts that went before them, not because the categories they produced in their wake are real, nor because these works are representations of that ‘reality’/’truth’/’essence’, but rather, because the process of sedimentation itself has produced the conventions through which woman and artist can come into intelligibility and ignoring those is not productive to thinking differently. Rather, whilst acknowledging the sedimentary effects of the many material-discursive bodies of the past, we argue for the power of materialisation to enable each new instantiation, in its iterative intra-action, the potential to change those sedimented conventions. Thus, we are arguing that it is imperative to articulate the sex of the artist (for both men and women making art), but only to acknowledge and explore the powerful traces and residues left by normative conventions, while being aware that these are not realities/essences, but merely the legacy of the effects of many agential cuts from the past.

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The logic of materialisation thus describes eloquently how seeking a determinate meaning for ‘woman’ is untenable (despite the long histories of sedimented, normative definitions of ‘woman’), as ‘woman’ is produced as a category only in its contingent relationships with other subjects and objects at the point of an agential cut. The unfolding relationships between vital materialism and embodiment in and through drawing do not yield a single category of object (drawings) or a single form of subject (artist), but a myriad of specific corporeal instances of meaning. As noted earlier in relation to Hauptman’s Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna, it is not possible to say that this is a representation of a ‘woman artist’ in ‘drawing’, as if each category is a pre-formed real. Hauptman’s work is a materialisation of the contingent categories of woman, artist and drawing, converging in a particular material-discursive body (this drawing). Hence drawing difference (as an allotropic figuration) materialises sexed subjects but not through autobiography (to which interestingly Parker was resistant), but through autography. There is no preformed self writing/drawing their life, only a self becoming in and through drawing/writing. Drawing difference unfolds the ‘woman/artist’ autographically, in her articulate embodiment. Of course the drawings explored in this chapter are ‘gendered’, of course they articulate embodied subject-positions and, here, the positions of ‘women’. However, their power and their potential reside in not collapsing these into essence; the contingency of meaning works through embodiment and matter, signifying in and through difference, corporeality and situation, without fixing future possibilities to draw different distinctions, turning subjects and objects inside out.

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Drawing is the opening of form. This can be thought in two ways: opening in the sense of a beginning, departure, origin, dispatch, impetus, or sketching out, and opening in the sense of an availability or inherent capacity. According to the first sense, drawing evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure. According to the second, it indicates the figure’s essential incompleteness, a non-closure or non-totalizing of form. In the idea of drawing, there is the singularity of the opening […] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (translated by Philip Armstrong), pp. 1, 3

Isn’t the act of drawing, as well as the drawing itself, about becoming rather than being? Isn’t drawing the polar opposite of a photo? The latter stops time, arrests it; whereas a drawing flows with it. Could we think of drawings as eddies on the surface of the stream of time? John Berger, Berger on Drawing, pp. 124

Becoming woman/animal/insect is an affect that flows, like writing, it is a composition, a location that needs to be constructed together with, that is to say in the encounter with, others. […] Becoming works on a time sequence that is neither linear nor sequential […] Processes of becoming […] are not predicated on a stable centralized Self who supervises their unfolding. […] They push the subject to his or her limit, in a constant encounter with external, different others. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, pp. 118–19

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Fig. 12: Up To And Including Her Limits, Carolee Schneemann, 13–14 February 1976, The Kitchen, New York. Performance: Crayon on Paper, Rope & Harness suspended from ceiling.

Conversely […] a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing. This confers on the background a specific role that is indispensable for the meaning of the drawing […] The identity of the background of a drawing is quite different from that of the white surface on which it is inscribed. Walter Benjamin, ‘Painting, or signs and marks’ (1917), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913–26, p. 83

That is exactly the problem of drawing. In one sense, the paper exists, as a material support, as a closed totality; and the marks, or the lines, do not exist by themselves; they have to compose something inside the paper. But in another and more crucial sense, the paper as background does not exist, because it is created as such, as an open surface, by the marks […] The question of drawing is very different from the question of Hamlet. It is not ‘to be or not to be’ it is ‘to be and not to be’. And that is the reason for the fundamental fragility (and femininity) of drawing: not a clear alternative […] but an obscure and paradoxical conjunction […] Alain Badiou, ‘Drawing’, p. 44

AN: I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation: both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind. The consciousness of that limitless space is embodied in the reality of the white page, which I would say is a space of fragmentation that has, since modernism, been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness. Avis Newman and Catherine de Zegher in discussion in The Stage of Drawing; Gesture and Act, p. 233

‘[…] spontaneity, creative speculation, experimentation, directness, simplicity, abbreviation, expressiveness, immediacy, personal vision, technical diversity, modesty of means, rawness, fragmentation, discontinuity, unfinishedness and open-endedness.’ Michael Craig Martin, cited by Stephen Farthing in Drawing the Line, p. 25

Drawing is the only language I know where unfinishedness is so deeply ingrained and accepted, not just as a part but as a positive attribute of a language. Stephen Farthing, Dirtying the Paper Delicately, p. 27

There is no end to writing or drawing. Being born doesn’t end. Drawing is a being born. Drawing is born. Drawing, writing, what expeditions, what wanderings, and at the end, no end, we won’t finish, rather time will put an end to it. […] To think there are those who seek the finished. Those who seek to portray cleanly, the most properly! Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no. State of drawingness, no. Rather: the executioner’s taking off’, pp. 92, 93

Figure 13: Untitled (Walls), Toba Khedoori, 2000, oil and wax on paper 360 x 850 centimetres.

Figure 14: Chicago2a, Christoph Fink, 2003, ballpoint ink and pencil on paper 16.4 x 21 centimetres.

Trying to nail down the subject of drawing leads us into liminal territory, the ambiguous if vibrant threshold between states of definition, identity and transition. Perhaps drawing, in all its multifarious manifestations in art and design can never be defined: but as the object and subject of study it is just waiting to be nailed. Deanna Petherbridge, ‘Nailing the liminal: the difficulties of defining drawing’, p. 39

The in-between is what fosters and enables the other’s transition from being the other of the one to its own becoming, to reconstituting another relation, in different terms […] The in-between, formed by juxtapositions and experiments, formed by realignments or new arrangements, threatens to open itself up as new, to facilitate transformations in the identities that constitute it. One could say that the in-between is the locus of futurity, movement, speed; it is thoroughly spatial and temporal, the very essence of space and time and their intrication. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘In-between: the natural in architecture and culture’, in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, pp. 91–108, p. 94

The interval, then, is the opening to thinking and subjectivity […] [a]nd thinking is no longer a solipsistic enquiry conducted by a lone subject, thinking is reconceived as collaborative work articulated by both sexes. […] It cannot be overemphasized that this threshold is not given once and for all. The interval always remains in play, exceeding the sensible relation between woman and man as the very possibility of sexual difference. Rebecca Hill, ‘Interval, sexual difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson’, pp. 119–31, p. 129

Figure 15: FA21, Atlas of Movements, Movement #52 (The Frankfurt Walks), Christoph Fink, 2002, ink and pencil on paper cut-out + printed text on paper (540 x 136.5 centimetres + extension 45 x 237 centimetres), detail exhibition view, Manifesta, Kunstverein Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany.

Figure 16: Up To And Including Her Limits, 1973–76, Carolee Schneeman. Installation: Crayon on Paper, Rope, Harness, 6 Video Monitors.

Figure 17: Untitled (Doors), detail, Toba Khedoori, 1999, oil and wax on paper, 350.5 x 486 centimetres.

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O p e n i n g The essence of drawing is that it has no essence; neither is there an essential, elemental property that constitutes ‘woman’ or ‘man’, once and for all. Rather, drawing and sexual difference become, unfold endlessly in their material and gestural variations, (re)iterating the interval as the possibility of the boundless future. They are, as it were, open.1 But this openness does not infer that drawing and sexual difference are immaterial, insubstantial or inarticulate. Rather, the allotropic interplay that is drawing|difference provides a compelling figuration for the subject- and meaning-in-process, demonstrating the interconnection between space and time, materiality and materialisation, that is the promise of becoming as the possibility of the emergent and unknown future, a future drawn in the flow of the present, through the dust of the past. … Up To And Including Her Limits is the name given to a number of automatic drawing performances (some of which included video recording and playback when installed), developed during the 1970s by Carolee Schneemann – a work whose early manifestations involved an apple tree growing in her front garden. The most usual dates given to the work are 1973–7, though Schneemann has noted the inception of the piece in performances dating back as far as 19712 and the title itself was borrowed for the Schneemann retrospective curated by Dan Cameron at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1996, where a version of the work was also installed. In many ways, the fluidity of the production and installation of the work mirrors its conceptual flux; there is no singular origin point, no fixed ‘original’ work of art, in the case of Up To And Including Her Limits. Rather, the drawing/performance/installation opens through multiple variations over time: Up To And Including Her Limits becomes.

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Working within the logic of becoming, our exploration of Up To And Including Her Limits does not seek to define what the work is

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(or was), but rather to ask how this performed/installed drawing provides the possibility of thinking critically about drawing as an opening of form, a becoming in and through difference. Arguably, the various elements that comprise the work facilitate a fluid engagement across a range of conceptual and aesthetic territories; its agency is deterritorialising, yet profoundly corporeal. In its open conjunction between flow and body, act and mark, the instances of Up To And Including Her Limits are performative iterations of subjects- and thinking-in-process, embedded within the material traces and gestures of the present, yet open to the transformative potential of the future at every quivering turn. Central to the piece is an act of drawing, a performance of the mark-making process, in which Schneemann, suspended in a tree surgeon’s harness at the end of a long ten-centimetrethick manila rope, ‘floats’ and ‘quivers’3 over a large, paper-lined, corner-shaped space and, using coloured chalks and crayons, marks the paper (draws/writes) wherever she is able to reach it – at her body’s limits. In turn the momentum of her drawing fluctuates. There is no intended subject-matter within this act of drawing; it proceeds automatically, over time, in the space. In some manifestations of the work, the act of drawing is captured as moving image and there are instances in which these videos of the action are installed within the frame of the work – with or without a ‘live’ performance/drawing also occurring in the space. Up To And Including Her Limits, then, is a very physical artwork in any of its variable manifestations, requiring hours of endurance and exertion; the body of the artist is central to the spaces it draws. Arguably, however, the corporeal agency of the piece is fluid and open; the artist’s body is both present and absent (eyes open and closed), central and decentred, and the flow of the body/work gestures towards the movement of becoming, an opening of form that dissolves the very conventions through which limits and boundaries would come into being. The work does this literally, as it shifts between drawing, performance, video and installation such that distinctions between these categories begin to unravel, and also conceptually, blurring the boundaries between the act and object of drawing, the seeming opposition between text/image (writing/drawing) and

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the limited notion of art as the bounded outcome of defined authorial intention. Up To And Including Her Limits combines the act of drawing with the drawing itself, bringing writing and drawing4 together through anti-intentional, ‘automatic’ practices, forms of ‘trance drawing’, ‘tracking’ and ‘charting’ that link ground with field and meaning with inscription-in-process. Preconceived notions of the proper territories of drawing and writing, or the artist and the artwork, are undone in the becoming-text/image, becoming-art/ artist of Schneemann’s automatic tracking, up to and including her limits. Resisting closure or totality, the work becomes the idea of drawing/writing without end, or as Cixous would have it: ‘Drawing, writing, what expeditions, what wanderings, and at the end, no end, we won’t finish, rather time will put an end to it.’5 In its opening of form, Up To And Including Her Limits is profoundly temporal, but its time is neither linear nor sequential. Just as the work materialises the both/and of drawing in its simultaneity of gestural act and traced figure, its time is always both past and present, a question of the immediacy of duration that never arrives, never is, but continues to remain open with/in its becoming. Schneemann recognised this aspect of the work as a configuration of time in and through spatial mark-making, and further linked this spatio-temporal opening as the possibility to un-make ‘invisible cultural assumptions’: ‘Suspended on the rope, the “automatic drawing” maps time process and the time process is “charted” (factored) by spatial signs […] (d)ismantling the fixity of museum patterns/cultural sets.’6

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Time is critical to Up To And Including Her Limits, yet is neither contained by the work nor merely passed in viewing. The work is neither a clock nor a metronome, it does not tick-tock the seconds, minutes and hours away as if duration were an even and measurable phenomenon, existing outside subjects as the frame of their longevity, or the gauge of their mortality. The time materialised by the drawing subject taken to her limits is experiential and agential; this is the time of the subject in all its complexity and flux and it does not exist ‘out there’, but within the body/space of its articulation, as duration, indeed in this instance,

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as the endurance of the embodied agency of the maker, making. Time, in becoming, ceases to be reduced (or reducible) to space as a quantity of fixed units and emerges, instead, as a force, the possibility of the subject-in-process, whose unfolding is always in the interval where time and space meet irreducibly in their productive differentiation. The spatio-temporal quality of becoming exists as simultaneous elaboration, open-ended composition, with and through the encounter with external, different others.7 In its open and materialising force of elaboration, it can be argued that the time of drawing meets the time of sexual difference.8 Elaboration describes the excessive spatio-temporal unfolding of difference, or the agency of becoming beyond teleology, where its activity is not a matter of merely instantiating that which is already known, but of opening to the pure possibility of the emergent new. These becomings are genuinely creative, but also potentially destabilising, risky and precarious. Processes of becoming push the subject to his or her limit; in its extended duration, Up To And Including Her Limits did likewise, pushing the body of the artist to her limits, physically, and the subject of the work to its limits, conceptually. Through the endurance of the body in Up To And Including Her Limits, the aesthetic agency of the artist was pushed beyond conventional boundaries – where Schneemann’s body could reach no further and last no longer, the flow of drawing as automatic, beyond the limits of authorial intention as a teleological mode of being, emerged. As the work materialised drawing as opening, the undifferentiated time/space articulated embodiment-in-becoming, locating the mutable and multiple composition of body, affect, time and space in any one of the particular configurations of drawing, performance, installation that comprise Up To And Including Her Limits. The radical potential of Up To And Including Her Limits to reconceive fixed categories such as ‘body art’ or ‘performance practice’ were signalled by Jay Murphy in an essay centred on connections between the works of Schneemann and Antonin Artaud. As Murphy wrote: ‘To see Artaud – or Schneemann – simply as an originator of “body art” may be to miss a larger revelation. […] [that] the boundary between bodily experience and

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its two-dimensional visual expression is erased: “The canvas is the body”.’9 Significantly, Murphy ends his text with the comment: ‘Despite its myriad embodiments in prints, photographs, sculptures and films, Schneemann’s work […] keeps moving just beyond complete grasp or assimilability.’10 In other words, the work becomes in its open corporeality, continually resisting the objectification either of the artist or the artwork, continuing to move them beyond our complete, or totalising, grasp. To reiterate our earlier point, drawing and sexual difference are open and fluid in their becoming but they are neither insubstantial nor inarticulate. And thus, precisely at the point of this non-totalising opening of form, this continual becoming that moves beyond our grasp, we return to the material significance of the sexed subject drawing. The most explicit context for the production of Up To And Including Her Limits was the ‘action painting’ of Jackson Pollock, whose works had assumed an iconic status among European and US modernists by the time Schneemann arrived in New York in the early 1960s to pursue a professional art career. In Schneemann’s own words: ‘Up To And Including Her Limits was the direct result of Pollock’s physicalized painting process.’11 However, we might argue that Schneemann’s rhythmical drawn marks and gestures in Up To And Including Her Limits are dissimilar to those of Pollock, whose painting gestures are/were often rapid and arguably formally more decisive. Schneemann was not the only feminist artist or critic to contend with Pollock’s potent legacy in the period,12 nor was Pollock the only male modernist to be subjected to reiterative critique by Schneemann; in 1965, Schneemann collaborated with Robert Morris on Site, a performance piece centred upon a tableau vivant re-staging of the reclining nude from Edouard Manet’s Olympia of 1863. However ‘automatic’ the drawing processes within Up To And Including Her Limits might have been, Schneemann’s work was not without direction in this wider context. The drawing performances and video installations that comprise Up To And Including Her Limits were informed by the artist’s extensive awareness of feminist art and politics, critical interrogations of the masculine-normative histories of Western fine art and an unflinching exploration of her own experience as a woman artist,

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an exploration replete with celebration, conflict and challenge in equal measure. The body that draws, up to and including her limits, is a female body; there is no un-sexed, gender-neutral, universal artist-subject to be found in Schneemann’s practice. The particularity and visibility of the sexed subject engaged in the act of drawing, at the limits of her body’s endurance, provided a strategic counterpoint to the unmarked, masculine ground upon which Abstract Expressionism rested. Pollock’s work in particular, with its emphasis upon the ‘action’ and ‘gesture’ of the artist, who remained unseen, provided an exemplary instance of modernism’s contradictory iteration of the artist as a universal subject.13 But Schneemann’s exploration of Pollock’s ‘physicalized painting process’ was more than a closed critique of the masculine-normative basis of mid-twentieth-century American modernist painting premised upon a simple riposte to Pollock’s work. Schneemann’s drawing performance in Up To And Including Her Limits engendered a recomposition of the inherited conventions of formalist painting practice; in the work, drawing produced an opening, or as Petra Löffler suggested, an extension or transmutation: [Schneemann] developed the idea of écriture corporelle, in which Pollock’s principle of Action Painting was extended to the movement of the entire body in space. […] Pollock’s gestural painting process was transmuted into a kinetic theatre in which the energies of the female body found direct visual expression.14

This bodily writing/drawing (‘écriture corporelle’) elaborated upon action painting, laying bare its closure in the absence or occlusion of the sexed subject through the totalising myth of universal formalism. Significantly, this critical reworking does not close and dispose of Abstract Expressionism or modernist painting as fixed or finished relics from the past, but rather reanimates their legacy differently. Pushed to its limits in an encounter with different others, action painting becomes; it opens to the articulation of embodiment and location, and what it loses in its fall from the realm of the universal, it gains in its particular address to situated and immanent materiality. The fact of Pollock’s embodied engagement within the frame of his paintings emerges in and

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through Schneemann’s performative becoming-drawing. In an important sense, by locating the active, yet fragile, enduring and particular body of the artist within the work, Up To And Including Her Limits opened Pollock’s legacy to further elaboration through new and different configurations. In the dust of the material past, Up To And Including Her Limits draws out an emergent and manifold future of connections-yet-unseen and compositionsyet-unmade. The opening that is effected by Up To And Including Her Limits goes beyond a specific political tendency or the authorial intention of Schneemann. That is, while the work is centred upon the actions of a legibly female body, floating, quivering, at the end of a rope, drawing ‘automatically’ at the very edge of her limits, there is no/body doing the becoming. The agency of the artist and artwork are mutually engendered in and through their becoming in drawing, as always both gesture and traced figure. Arguably, this is significant in a number of ways, two of which we trace here: the question of the woman artist in feminist theory and the differentiation between drawing and painting as potentially open modes of aesthetic articulation. The former brings us to the now well-trodden territory of Schneemann’s complex relationship with feminist criticism.15 To be blunt, neither Schneemann nor her work have been heralded universally by feminist critics during her long career, despite her determination to instantiate the multifaceted experience of a woman artist at the very centre of her practice. Schneemann’s work has been lauded and damned in equal measure and much of the division of opinion focuses on her use of the sexed (and sexual) body in her art, with negative criticism tending to suggest that Schneemann’s work falsely essentialises ‘woman’ as (nothing but) body or that her explorations of female heterosexual desire merely reinstate the body of woman as an object within a heteronormative specular economy.

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Significantly, Schneemann was not the only feminist artist working with her body during the 1970s to generate such sharply split criticism; the work of Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke and Joan Semmel, for example, received similar critical comment in the

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period. More recently, the work of these artists has come to be seen as a significant exploration of embodiment, sexuality and space beyond dualism, and feminist critical work has expanded to incorporate a more extended feminist theoretical historiography that, in part, accounts for how and why some practices have been more ‘difficult’ – conceptually, materially, historically – to engage. Of critical significance to the ‘difficulty’ of these practices is their instability, their precarious potential to be reappropriated or, in the terms we have been exploring here, their opening, their becoming. To take this argument a step further, it is useful to look again at Up To And Including Her Limits in relation to Schneemann’s earlier intervention into the masculinist economies of modernist painting, the collaborative performance she undertook with Robert Morris, Site (1965). In Site, Morris gradually deconstructed a large crate to reveal Schneemann posed in exactly the same position as the female model in Manet’s Olympia of 1863. The work was read as a critical comment on art and labour, both in terms of the elitism of the art work (as opposed to the manual ‘work’ performed by Morris in making this ‘art’) and the gendering of art’s work (as exemplified by the polarised pairs male artist/female model, client/sex worker). Like Up To And Including Her Limits, Site took the legacy of male modernists and their works as a starting point to exact a politicised critique of the contemporary art scene and, in both works, Schneemann’s body is the central motif through which they seek to intervene in the sexual politics of the histories of European fine art. But in Site, Schneemann is still, inert and passive as Morris moves and makes the space/work. Likewise, the visual tableau is fixed: the central figure of Manet’s painting is representationally replicated and, while made present in body by the living figure of Schneemann, the critique is one-dimensional. Schneemann herself saw Site as Morris’s work more than hers, and was aware that her body’s passivity permitted too easy a reclamation of the self-same representational logic as existed in Manet’s original.16 Her body was too easy to reinstate as the object in this work, the woman-body-object of men’s active art-making. Or, as we might prefer to put it, Site is about closure – it demonstrates the closure

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of the objectification of the body of woman in modernist painting, but it does so in a simple representational reversal which, once seen, suffers the same fate in its own closure. This cannot be said of Up To And Including Her Limits, which, as we have argued, remains open. This work again begins with the dust of the past, the legacy of Pollock’s gestural abstraction, but here the sexed body – the body of the woman artist – counters this masculine-normative tradition in her movement, up to and including her limits. Modernist formalism, fixed by the bodies of (unseen) male artists in and through paint, is unfolded in the agency of the woman drawing, where neither ‘woman’ nor ‘drawing’ has any essential limits or meanings outside their mutual becoming in this materialising gesture. Such a gesture is dangerous, because it extends and refashions the masculine conventions with which it contends, rather than safely labelling and rejecting them. Some critics might miss the critique; arguably, some have, as it flows and changes in spaces, over time, as it opens to new meanings and becomes other than itself. Likewise, this opening is dangerous as it unleashes the subject from certitude and fullknowing intentionality; the outcome is not able to be known or drawn in advance of the action and thus there can be ‘no/body’ doing the becoming, only a subject-in-process whose ends are indeterminate. Schneemann’s work is difficult in its becomingother, up to and including her limits, but this is also the very mark of its compelling relationship to sexual difference in the full weight of its material unfolding and emergence. The risk of unfinished and uncontainable becoming that is the unfolding of sexual difference renders Up To And Including Her Limits open. Its opening enables it, simultaneously, to engage the material legacies of the past, to critique them in the present and to extend them toward the future in new and mutable constellations of meaning. The significance of the body of the woman drawing is key to this extension; the inherent capacity or opportunity afforded by drawing, as it flows with time, rather than arrests it, enables in this work an open encounter with painting, the medium traditionally understood as the very pinnacle of Western fine art. To open this tradition, rather than merely negate or overturn it, remains the greater challenge for those seeking to articulate

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otherwise; drawing|difference unfolds conventions, enabling their endless elaboration to become the possibility of creative change. Up To And Including Her Limits performs drawing-engagingpainting. Schneemann’s notes to the work describe her early ‘failures’ in painting and her desire to extend her work through the ‘obvious implication(s) of abstract expressionism’. She includes in her preparatory inventory for Up To And Including Her Limits ‘aromas: of the canvas – rags soaked in turpentine (old art odours); fresh oil paint, palettes (not used)’, yet she distinctly refers to her work environment as consisting of ‘drawing materials’ and her actions as ‘an entranced period of drawing’.17 There is nothing random in the distinction being made between painting and drawing within Up To And Including Her Limits; the terms are not being used interchangeably or shifting accidentally over and across the conventional limits of the media/genres. The work opens the conceptual and physical fixity of painting, as a historical genre and contemporary medium, in and through drawing, as always both act and traced figure. The opening of painting-becoming-drawing in Up To And Including Her Limits operates at the nexus of space and time, in their mutual emergence, beyond sequential time and bounded space. Traditionally, the temporal relationship between drawing and painting within the conventions of fine art is decidedly linear and teleological: drawing is a starting point that ends, is completed by, painting. Painting succeeds drawing, finishes it, renders it whole and thus is seen to be its logical extension as well as its necessary end. This teleological sensibility traditionally located painting ‘above’ drawing, as the higher or more resolved version of two-dimensional pictorial representation. The temporal movement between drawing and painting in Up To And Including Her Limits undoes this logic, flowing from painting to drawing and back again, resisting both origin point and end; there is no end to writing or drawing, it seeks discontinuity, unfinishedness and open-endedness. Articulated through the temporal logic of drawing, painting begins to open, unfold, recompose – otherwise. The spatial logic of drawing as an opening of form, as a mode of becoming, manifests materially in the activation of the

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‘white page’ or ‘background’ as an open surface, identity or interminable potentiality. As Walter Benjamin remarked, ‘a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing’.18 Within the theoretical literature on drawing, the place – conceptually and physically – of the background or white page plays a critical role. It is the site of drawing’s opening, the locus from which the pure possibility, frightening potentiality and emergent opportunity that are seen to be the idea, act and figure of drawing become. Significantly, it is also understood, itself, to emerge from within the both/and of drawing as act and traced figure, rather than as a precursor or foundation/origin point before or outside drawing. In drawing, the mark and the ground are simultaneous, their emergence is mutual in spatial and temporal terms; they are open. Conversely, and completing Benjamin’s comment above, the drawing that completely covers its background is a painting. Drawing remains an opening in the simultaneity of gesture and object and in the mutual emergence of mark/figure and ground; the opening of drawing materialises the pure potential, boundlessness and becoming of difference. Up To And Including Her Limits created the limitless potential of the white surface through the embodied act of drawing up to and including the conventional limits of the physicalized painting processes it unfolded. Drawing, the work becomes. …

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The large wax-on-paper works of Australian artist Toba Khedoori, with their detailed pictorial rendering of isolated elements from the built environment, might appear at first to have little in common with Up To And Including Her Limits, yet the powerful and particular material presence of these works, in addition to their ability to push conventional interpretative frameworks to their limits, suggests a further elaboration of drawing in and as opening. In this instance, the opening of drawing is enacted as much within the arena of the critical response to Khedoori’s work, as it is within any particular drawing process or drawn image. Here, drawing, as both material and concept, facilitates an opening, engenders an interpretive becoming, that moves quickly beyond the limits of these drawings towards the articulation of drawing as a limitless form of thought, its boundlessness linked

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to pure potentiality. How these drawings implicate drawing in this way brings us first to an exploration of the language used by critics in writing about Khedoori’s practice. The critical literature on Khedoori’s work demonstrates both the difficulty and the promise of drawing as it threatens to open interpretation by moving beyond the fixed and fast logic of being towards the fluid and emergent dynamics of becoming. Taking two themes that appear consistently within the critical literature on Khedoori’s work, manifests this shift in thinking drawing. The first revolves around the ambiguous language deployed by critics engaging with the works as objects – are these drawings, paintings or something else? The second persistent theme centres on describing the visual modulation within the works between precise forms of pictorial representation and their ‘dislocation’, hovering within a kind of boundless space and time. Though these two features of the critical literature might seem conceptually distant from one another, we would suggest that together they enable a dialogue to take place between critical closure and open-ended becoming in and through drawing. As we will argue, the former demonstrates the linguistic problematic of definitional closure in criticism, while the latter suggests the interpretive promise and perpetual opportunity offered by opening thought to becoming drawing|difference. Nearly every discussion of Khedoori’s work rehearses the mantra of its making: large sheets of paper are placed on the studio floor and covered with wax, the surfaces are scraped and images are incised in pencil, colour added through oils. Various bits of studio ‘detritus’ (dust, cat hair, etc.) remain on the surfaces of the works and, when exhibited, the staple joins between sheets of paper are clearly visible. With this information, it is not difficult to discern some of the key relationships between a work such as Untitled (Walls), and the conventions of drawing. Untitled (Walls) is a work on paper, using pencil, wax and oils. The techniques of scraping through wax and incising line to render the form of the walls in this piece are typical of both basic ‘scraperboard’ drawing (sgraffito) and more studied, architectural (or technical) drawing. Finally, the imaged walls are picked out in subtle colour by oil paint. In short, Untitled (Walls) adopts materials and techniques overwhelmingly

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associated with the conventional language of drawing: sgraffito and technical drawing, pencil and wax, detailed motionless and impassive images rendered on paper such that large areas of the surface remain unmarked, merging with the surrounding space. At the same time, the subtle addition of colour in oils and the sheer scale of the works lend a painterly touch and visual frisson to the images. Drawing opens painting becomes drawing; there is no essential departure or fixed point of arrival, rather, the gesture and idea of drawing creates an opening where the material and technical conventions of drawing and painting are chiasmic, interwoven and fluid. This fluid visuality is mirrored in the fluctuating language of critics who seek to describe their encounter with Khedoori’s work in terms belonging to the conventions of drawing and painting. A brief exegesis demonstrates this simply. In the catalogue for the MOMA exhibition Drawing Now: 8 Propositions, Khedoori’s works are argued to exemplify and expand the conventions of drawing (especially architectural drawing), and even ‘perhaps be interpreted as allegories of drawing’.19 In this way, Khedoori’s images are interpreted both as drawings and exemplary of drawing. By contrast, Lane Relyea’s language hovers in a less fixed territory in relation to the genre and medium of Khedoori’s works. On one hand, he consistently describes the works as ‘paintings’, even rhetorically referring to Khedoori as a ‘history painter’. However, we find that he argues this in an essay produced for the catalogue to the show Toba Khedoori: Gezeichnete Bilder (Drawn Pictures) that was held in Basel in 2000 as the companion drawing exhibition to an earlier show of Vija Celmin’s work.20 In the end, Relyea seems to find a critical location for Khedoori’s work between painting and drawing in the traditional form of the ‘cartoon’ (the drawn, preliminary design for a painting), which he argues resides in an ‘interim state’: Like cartoons, Khedoori’s art also seems suspended in an interim state, as if endlessly awaiting transfer to a more durable home, as well as a more stable, coherent identity and role.21

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Other critics too have found themselves balanced between conventional categories, or signalling interim states, in their

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writing on Khedoori’s work. Hans Rudolf Reust, for example, argued that ‘these hybrid works on paper are reminiscent of preliminary drawings’ and ‘produced using painterly means’.22 Fritz Emslander referred to the work as ‘between drawing, painting and installation’,23 and Olga Viso wrote eloquently of Khedoori’s process existing ‘in contradictions, fluctuating between painting and drawing, abstraction and representation, illusionistic depth and utter flatness’.24 Yet even as Viso argued for fluctuation, her elegant conceptual fluidity was linguistically compromised by a consistent use of the term ‘paintings’ for the works. Critics, it would seem, are hamstrung by the language of art’s object-categories, a language through which it is difficult to articulate aesthetic fluidity, opening or becoming and which frequently compels even sophisticated writers to fall into fixed and categorical terminology. Following the line traced by Khedoori’s critics for one more turn is instructive here, since perhaps the most compelling demonstration of the entanglements of language in the categorical delineation of art as object is to be found in the complex linguistic absence enacted by Neville Wakefield’s review of Khedoori’s work for Artforum in 1995.25 Wakefield’s article performed a strategic and determined refusal of fixed terminology, carefully structuring sentences around ‘works’, ‘images’, ’pictures’, ‘outlines’, ‘surfaces’, whilst deftly avoiding direct references to painting or drawing at any point in the text. Reading his review is not easy and one is aware of the active writing process with which Wakefield was engaged in its production; the text worked hard to find ways to speak of these images beyond the fixity of simple categories. His review literally prised open Khedoori’s works through language to suggest the possibility of interpretation-in-becoming, excising the linguistic trappings that oblige the limits between paintings and drawings, as objects, to be (re)performed endlessly. Thus, for many critics, Khedoori’s untitled wax-on-paper works seem to float in an undefined or undefinable territory between fixed categories (painting, drawing, installation …), even though the details of their materials and methods of production are well known. The linguistic slippage between or across drawing and painting in the critical literature is mirrored by the persistent

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attention to the works’ articulation of an indeterminate or boundless spatio-temporal dimension. As we suggested earlier, these two elements within the critical response to Khedoori’s work are linked; indeed, if works such as Untitled (Walls) can be seen to engender a difficult conceptual encounter between drawing and painting, the question of where this encounter takes place and how it might open the critical space of drawing, as an ambiguous, yet productive, space of opportunity and an unbounded locus for emergent becoming, remains pertinent. Critical responses to the work indicate that the materiality of Khedoori’s drawing cannot be ignored in the spectatorial encounter, yet contending with the imposing physical presence of drawing in these singular instances, too often ends in a turn to essence – a debate about the status of the ‘end products’ of drawing as drawings (or paintings or installation, or something between). We are suggesting an alternative by arguing that attending to materials, scale, pictorial conventions and technical processes need not engender a debate about what the work is, but rather can be the impetus through which we impel the opening(s) of drawing as a way of thinking and materialising difference as it becomes. Time and again, critics articulate the boundlessness of their visceral encounter with drawing in and through works such as Untitled (Walls) in spatial language: She [Khedoori] emphatically contrasts the bounded object with unbounded space, and she is drawn to walls and fences as well as to structures that cross boundaries, such as stairs or bridges (which in her pictures lead to and from nowhere). Maybe these laconic images are so affecting because they evoke so well the fragile self and the psychological boundaries it maintains.26 Innocent and beguiling, Khedoori’s images float freely in vast spaces, oneiric plains where fantasy once roamed. […] Paralyzed by the meticulous outlines of details never fully fleshed out, they hang suspended in space and time like incomplete sentences trailing into silence.27

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Rendered as fragments, the places and objects she [Khedoori] paints exist as if suspended in a vacuum. […] As vacant shells signalling larger spatial and psychic realities, Khedoori’s sites offer a conceptual type of architecture in which our own materiality becomes fragile and fleeting.28

This aspect of the critical engagement with Khedoori’s drawing focuses on space and materiality, specifically elaborating conceptual concerns through the visual composition of the images and their existence on the boundless surface of the white page, where representation yields to the always unfinished and openended emergence of subjects- and meanings-in-process. This space, as we have seen, is neither easy to define nor to occupy. Yet, where thinking moves towards the idea of drawing, beyond the fixity of the art object (as a painting or a drawing), the fluid potential of ‘limitless space’ begins to emerge. In encounters with Khedoori’s work, this shift from defining drawings to thinking through drawing occurs at the point of mutual emergence, where the marks/lines and the open surface of the white page are simultaneous and coincident. This is hardly surprising. The point of mutual emergence signals drawing’s opening … becoming drawing, becoming difference: ‘the paper as background does not exist, because it is created as such, as an open surface, by the marks’.29 Or, more directly: ‘a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing.’30 In the mutual emergence of mark and ground, drawing becomes an opening of form, an open figuration for the endless unfolding of difference – in thought, as materialisation. Critical attempts to reinstate closure, to define and fix these works in terms of some form of essential meaning/being, produce an awkward tension within the interpretative frame that is unravelled when the obscure and paradoxical conjunction, which marks the dreadful place of boundlessness, is allowed to emerge. As critics seek to articulate the simultaneity of the open surface of the empty page and the marks that render the image legible, drawing as thinking is made manifest. This precarious point of mutual becoming in space and time opens criticism, such that it moves beyond description, beyond the language of objecthood,

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towards fragile forms of meaning-in-process, ‘suspended in time like incomplete sentences’. By going both somewhere and nowhere, within and beyond the image, works such as Untitled (Walls) materialise the potential of drawing as opening in the ‘obscure and paradoxical conjunction’ between presence and absence, at the boundaries of signification and indecipherability, that are interpellated at the nexus between the mark and the empty surface. Thinking drawing in this encounter compels the articulation of the unfolding emergence of difference as a boundless journey, an always unfinished project. The opening of space and time – those walls going nowhere and everywhere – signals the fragility and pure potentiality that is the empty page, the subject- and meaning-in-process. In articulating their visceral encounters with these works, critics open an interval (however unwittingly) where the emergence of drawing meets the unfolding of difference: ‘As vacant shells signalling larger spatial and psychic realities, Khedoori’s sites offer a conceptual type of architecture in which our own materiality becomes fragile and fleeting.’31 Arguably, the fragility of the both/and of precarious emergence is also the precondition for the emergence of the other, of becoming difference, of language and thought that might (re)draw other(s), beyond the object-fixity of thought held fast within an economy of the same: ‘The question of drawing is very different from the question of Hamlet. It is not “to be or not to be” it is “to be and not to be”. And that is the reason for the fundamental fragility (and femininity) of drawing.’32

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At the point of the simultaneous emergence of the mark and the empty page, Untitled (Walls) materialises the fragile opening of drawing and figures the precarious movement of the subject, becoming. The discontinuity, unfinishedness and openendedness of these processes marks them out as departures towards boundless journeys, as the impetus or sketching-out that is opening. Significantly, this is not a matter of representation or metaphor, but of material articulation. Untitled (Walls) does not represent, or illustrate becoming, however tempting it might be to read the pictorial details in this way: two parallel imaged walls-without-end are visually suspended on the empty page,

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an allegory or symbol of an infinite movement in time, through space. The argument we are making here is drawn differently (elliptically), and thus extends at this stage to include a second focal point between the materiality of drawing and the opening of difference. This second point is Swiss artist Christoph Fink’s Chicago2a (2003). Chicago2a (2003) is recognisable within the conventions of drawing as a sketch, or, more specifically, with its torn top edge, hand-written notation and rendered marks in ballpoint ink and pencil, it reads as a page taken from a sketchbook. When presented as a ‘finished’ work, rather than a study, cartoon or other form of preparatory drawing, it epitomises those qualities argued to be inherent to drawing that have come to signify the pure potential of drawing as the opening of form: ‘spontaneity, creative speculation […] directness, simplicity, abbreviation […] immediacy […] modesty of means, rawness, fragmentation […] unfinishedness and open-endedness.’33 Both Chicago2a and Untitled (Walls) operate within the languages and conventions of drawing, yet they are visually and spatially quite distinct. Fink’s sketch is small (approximately 16.5 x 20 centimetres) and ‘hand-made’: the marks and fragments of notation on the page reveal the signature qualities of Fink’s handwriting and the ‘sketchy’ gestures of a drawing made ‘on the spot’, as a record of a series of private encounters delineated in a particular open space/place and time. At 3.6 x 8.5 metres, Khedoori’s drawing is nearly a thousand times the size of Fink’s34 and her deployment of technical drawing techniques in rendering the images of the walls places the hand of the artist, ordinarily legible in signature forms of gestural mark, at some remove. Khedoori’s image could be anywhere (or nowhere), despite its ‘realism’, while Fink’s sketch is located (and locatable – it is a sketch of the flight between Brussels, London and Chicago) without recourse to pictorial illusionism. As we are arguing here, however, both are open, both become and both contribute to the allotropic figuration that we describe through drawing|difference. The size of Khedoori’s multi-panelled drawings is critical to their opening; standing at a central point in front of Untitled (Walls),

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the top edge of the image, the point at which the represented walls fade away, is over two metres from the bottom of the work and the left and right ‘edges’ are at nearly twice that distance. Movement towards the work to view the detail engulfs, movement away is vertiginous, despite the fact that the scale of the rendered image is less than life-size and thus not overwhelming in itself. The legibility of the image emerges through this bodily encounter with the material presence of the drawing and its complex oscillation between size and scale. Despite the large size of the work, the scale and visual detail of the images render them fragile and fleeting, moving into and out of spectatorial range with every step taken in the space. The work is not engaged merely as a representation of space; the size of the work, the material qualities of its rendering, the paradox of its ‘realism’ in contrast with the ever-present empty page, move beyond the logic of representation, to materialise through drawing the singularity of the opening. Untitled (Walls) opens space and time, such that the consciousness of limitless space is embodied in the reality of the white page. But if the vast, seemingly realistic image of the infinite unfolding of space in boundless time exceeds the logic of representation in Khedoori’s drawings, Fink’s Chicago2a also explodes the immediacy of the here and now into expeditions and wanderings that, in their becoming, are without end. The scale of Chicago2a is neither threatening nor disconcerting; in fact, both the physicality of the marks and the size of the paper lend it a bodily familiarity and easy proximity that belie its extraordinary evocation of pure potentiality. The work is sketchy, economical, simple – it could be held by hand, turned over, examined, read, even discarded in a simple gesture. On taking some time to look at it, it becomes clear that there is a system underlying the sketch, a system by which time and place are mapped, co-ordinates charted and the experience of movement in the world rendered in a complex combination of graphemic (drawing/writing) marks on a page whose potentiality as an endless space emerges with and through the act of this drawing/writing record. In that imbrication of space and time, writing and drawing, mark and empty page, this seemingly quotidian sketch explodes time and space in the hands of the subject. The work provides the possibility of becoming conscious

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of ourselves as becoming-subjects in the materialisation of the opening of space and time through the flow of drawing. Chicago2a is a map, but it does not describe a fixed or bounded location, only space as it is intersected by activity over time; it is an act of Borgesian cartography,35 a map that could expand infinitely at any moment. As a charting of space within time, there is neither an essential origin point nor an end to the mapping process, only an arbitrary line drawn that impels the process in this instance, for a specified and equally arbitrary duration. ‘There is no end to writing or drawing […] Drawing, writing, what expeditions, what wanderings, and at the end, no end, we won’t finish, rather time will put an end to it.’36 Chicago2a is part of a larger drawing project that Fink has developed over a number of years, collectively entitled Atlas of Movements, in which the artist uses drawing – in the expanded sense of graphemic marks, lines, forms of notation, writing – to record his experience of movement in space through time. He journeys by foot, bicycle, car, train and aeroplane subjectively recording and detailing at chronometrically measured times many of the stimuli and experiences he receives along the way. The various movements are ‘started’ and ‘stopped’ by selecting partially arbitrary moments in time (i.e. the start and end of a residency, the duration of a particular journey, etc.) and the spaces are rendered in various systems of drawn description – graphs, charts, diagrams, cartographic notation – but not through ‘realistic’ representation. Each drawing is thus absolutely specific and particular, but the drawings, taken together as elements of the project, are poetic and potentially infinite and unbounded. The Atlas of Movements materialises becoming in the most profound and yet quotidian sense – they ‘record’ the subject as s/he is endlessly drawn out and through over time and space. … From point to line to plane, three points triangulated, drawn out and through, open the empty page to infinite possibility. There is, in this opening, no essence, no fixed origin point, only an availability or inherent capacity. And if drawing provides a way to think the opening, becoming and emergence of form, of material articulation, then difference – sexual and otherwise –

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might be understood as its partner, its emergent collaborator, in and of the interval. The interval, threshold or ‘in-between’ are key concepts deployed by feminist scholars to articulate embodiment, subjectivity and the radical possibility of thinking through difference. The terms are spatial, yet unbounded, temporal, but non-linear and nonteleological. They are dimensional and extensive; in short, part of the conceptual underpinning needed to sustain an exploration of becoming where this materialises the differenced subject-inprocess, endlessly deferred. It is more than a simple coincidence that these concepts underpin both an exploration of sexual difference and drawing, it is yet a further indication of the allotropic relationship figured by drawing|difference. The shared languages of opening, mutual emergence and becoming-other bring into focus again the possibility that an allotropic relationship might exist between feminist philosophical thinking on sexed subjectivity and conceptual art practices engaged with drawing. As we have argued in our explorations of dialogue and matter, an allotropic approach to the enfolded correspondence between these practices neither seeks to maintain them as separate, parallel modes, nor reduce either to the terms of the other. Rather, it sees the interlacing of their histories, their conceptual conventions and their articulation of opening and becoming as an allotropic unfolding of the many and varied ‘other manners’ that can describe emergent phenomena. At the point where drawing explores the simultaneity of mark and ground, it enfolds and unfolds another manner of materialisation that connects its iteration with the endless becoming of sexual difference, the deferral of finitude and closure. The connection between the two fields is elemental but not rigid, an allotropic figuration emerging in the interval at the very limits of subjects and meanings in process, rather than a representation of the chemical properties of defined entities.

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In her critical exploration of the significance of the interval to Irigaray’s articulation of sexed subjectivity, Rebecca Hill argued for an intrinsic connection between ‘opening’, ‘becoming’ and the ‘interval’:

OPEN

The subject’s openness is not something that emerges from her becoming, for this opening, the interval of sexual difference, is the very possibility of her becoming. […] It cannot be overemphasized that this threshold is not given once and for all. The interval always remains in play, exceeding the sensible relation between woman and man as the very possibility of sexual difference.37

Or, as Elizabeth Grosz argued: ‘The in-between is what fosters and enables the other’s transition from being the other of the one to its own becoming, to reconstituting another relation, in different terms.’38 The interval, the in-between, is neither blank nor meaningless; rather, in the emergence of sexual difference, the becoming-other of the sexed subject, the interval acts as drawing’s empty page, the very locus of possibility, that which facilitates the emergence of the both/and of drawing – both noun and verb – both object and process. There are two central insights offered by thinking the interval in this way. The first is that it is infinite, not ‘given once and for all’, but rather an opening, an availability or inherent capacity. Second, and of particular consequence to the present argument, that the interval does not mark the fixed limits of predefined subjects; the in-between is not the hinterland of dualism, where essential subjects temporarily meet only to return to their ‘proper’39 place after their carnivalesque encounter. The interval is a relation, a locus for mutual emergence in the fullness of difference; there are no pre-existent subjects, only the possibility of the subject becoming through the interval. And this has radical ramifications for both subjectivity and thought, or as Hill continues: Subjects do not pre-exist this relation; for Irigaray, each sex is constituted through this interval. And thinking is no longer a solipsistic enquiry conducted by a lone subject, thinking is reconceived as collaborative work articulated by both sexes.40

This radical configuration of the interval as the pure possibility of opening articulate thought in and through difference, through non-hierarchical relations and constant encounters with

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external, different others, is at the heart of feminist explorations of embodied subjectivity beyond binary systems of thinking. And here, the interval, the in-between, is understood, as Grosz eloquently put it, to be ‘formed by juxtapositions and experiments, formed by realignments or new arrangements, threaten[ing] to open itself up as new, to facilitate transformations in the identities that constitute it’.41 Returning to Christoph Fink’s Atlas of Movements is useful at this point, since, as a project, it might be described as itself formed by juxtapositions and experiments, realignments or new arrangements, such that the conventions of drawing, and the subjects interpellated through these drawings, emerge in mutual encounters in the interval. In FA21, Atlas of Movements, Movement #52 (The Frankfurt Walks) produced in 2002 for Manifesta at the Kunstverein Frankfurt, Fink charted his movements through the city in two layers: criss-cross diagonal notation and inscription of key sites (his hotel, the station, the river) and what he called a ‘meandering walk line’,42 perforated by chronologically ordered notation points. There is, in this double layering, a simultaneous map-making of the space of the city and the temporal experience of the artist as he traverses it; neither pre-exist their encounter and the work materialises their mutual becoming. Physically, the notation of Movement #52 is further articulated through cutting; the edges of the paper on which the diagonal notation, the marks that inscribe the river and the meandering walk line are drawn have been cut to indicate speed – they widen when the walker slows or stills, they narrow to show movement or what Fink describes compellingly as ‘opening up’. The result is an extraordinarily sensitive drawing on/of cut paper, in ink, pencil and printed text. It operates at the transformative interval between space and time, movement and stasis, place and subject, drawing as gestural act and drawing as profound object. Movement #52 materialises the opening of drawing and the subject as processes potentially without end, the work merely enacting an agential cut in a moment on the way to becomingother … drawing, writing, what expeditions, what wanderings … no end, we won’t finish. Drawing is always an opportunity.

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In this endless unfolding at the very limits of the subject drawing, Movement #52 engenders a dialogue with the work with which we began this discussion of drawing, difference and opening: Carolee Schneemann’s Up To And Including Her Limits. Up To And Including Her Limits and Movement #52 are both, simultaneously, drawing as gestural act and figure, they both instantiate the embodied agency of the artists, drawing at the limits of their movement in space and time, they both permit no closure, no fixed end either to drawing, as the opening of form and thought, or to subjectivity as it unfolds in endless variation through encounters with others. Significantly, these works speak in their own voices, but we would argue that the resonance of their tones and timbres materialises thinking, reconceived as collaborative work articulated by both sexes. Up To And Including Her Limits and Movement #52 are not the same, nor does one admit of being ‘explained’, ‘analysed’ or ‘interpreted’ in the terms of the other. They are irreducible, but they are not essential; they are the emergent potential of drawing difference as it unfolds subjects- and meanings-in-process, and these subjects are embodied, located, agential, but never completed, never closed. They figure the inbetween as the pure potential of the new, of the future beyond teleology. They are open/ing(s). The interval, or in-between of drawing, was perhaps proposed most directly by Deanna Petherbridge in discussing the difficulty of defining drawing within the field of art and design research: Trying to nail down the subject of drawing leads us into liminal territory, the ambiguous if vibrant threshold between states of definition, identity and transition. Perhaps drawing, in all its multifarious manifestations in art and design can never be defined: but as the object and subject of study it is just waiting to be nailed.43

The desire to ‘nail’ this subject, to define for drawing once and for all, is not one we share here, but Petherbridge’s elegant formulation of drawing’s liminality, of an ambiguous if vibrant threshold between states of definition, identity and transition, has itself become part of the conventional conceptual armature

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underpinning contemporary fine art drawing in both theory and practice and it has important ramifications for our thinking through drawing and difference, allotropically. Her evocation of the liminal territory of drawing is both lyrical and apt. Taking this evocative figure for a walk, we draw our discussion of drawing, difference and opening to an (ever unfinished) end. Sharing etymological roots, the words liminal, limit and limen are descriptive of threshold states, transitions and ambiguous boundaries (liminal sometimes meaning at or on both sides of a boundary). They indicate intervals in time and space and occupy an ambivalent in-between. They also have much more quotidian linguistic extensions, which they share with the words ‘threshold’ and ‘open’: they are associated with doors (limen is the transverse beam of a doorframe). To open the door (to something, someone and/or somewhere) or to push against an open door, describe moments of insight and opportunity. The liminal, as a vibrant threshold, is a space of possibility, the in-between is a locus of futurity. Two doors in the corner of a drawn room, each partially open, are framed by architrave whilst the skirting gently vanishes into, and emerges from, the open surface of the white and empty paper/ page. Within the frame of legible representation, the doors reveal nothing through their apertures but the extension of boundless space, a visual rendering of the logic of deterritorialisation. Toba Khedoori’s Untitled (Doors) is not a drawing that adheres to a simple or unified convention of representational space; while the image can be identified (a picture of doors), the locus of the drawing in and of space does not resolve easily. There are images of frames, but no fixed framing, there are illustrations of doors, but they go everywhere and nowhere at once. The work is a conundrum of scale and size, two-dimensional image and three-dimensional logic, the simultaneous emergence of figure and ground. It is open. It is liminal. It is opening, emergent and in-between. Where is the vanishing point in the liminal space of the interval? At the open becoming of drawing|difference.

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Coinciding: drawing to a close without end

co·in·cide (koh-in-sahyd) v. (used without object), 1. to occupy the same place in space, the same point or period in time, or the same relative position; 2. to agree or concur, as in thought or opinion

Coincidence describes a spatial and temporal correspondence, a resonance between the place and the moment of a physical event, but it also suggests a strong correspondence of ideas, thought or opinion. At the start of this book we described its beginnings in our shared observation that women, frequently women with strong feminist links, had played a particularly prominent role in the development of contemporary fine art drawing since the 1960s. In tracing some of the connections between feminist art theories and practices and the field of contemporary fine art drawing throughout this volume, we have argued that the historical, institutional and conceptual connections between women, feminism and drawing are more constitutive than circumstantial, that drawing and difference (in our extended use of the term) correspond at a more elemental level. That is, they coincide, allotropically, as they articulate intersectionality otherwise. Our chapters turn on coincidental conventions, tropes that enable conversations to take place between drawing (as both noun and verb) and feminist theory. The tropes unfold through dialogue, in and of matter, becoming open to suggest an allotropic figuration

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for the interval that marks drawing|difference. By arguing for the allotropy of drawing and difference (sexual and otherwise) through attention to both their material manifestations and their conceptual conventions, we encounter their coincidence in the stronger sense of the term. Their practices intertwine; their tropes enfold one another because their manifestations are allotropic forms of an elemental proposition, namely, that it is possible to articulate (multiple, intersectional, transversal) difference otherwise. Drawing does not illustrate difference, feminist praxis does not apply it. Rather, the interval between drawing and difference – historically, conceptually and materially – is mutually constituted in and as allotropic unfolding, which materialises in specific and particular instances, yet is never finished. Allotropes and allotropy are terms first coined by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) to describe variations in the manifestations of single elements in differing forms (e.g. carbon can be manifest as both diamond and graphite). Borrowing a term from another discipline will inevitably extend, and potentially distort, its meanings, but we agree that the risks taken by a creative and deliberate extension of this term are worthwhile. Though we are not using allotropy as a chemist might, we are suggesting that allotropy can provide a way of thinking (an allotropic approach) and describing (an allotropic figuration) the multiple, constitutive connections between drawing and difference that move beyond dualism, take material (and ‘matter’) seriously, and enable an infinite range of variation to unfold at their interval. In these three characteristics, our allotropic approach enfolds and encompasses our chapter tropes – each ‘turn’ or ‘manner’ (trope) becomes ‘an other’ (allo). They coincide as allotropic figurations.

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The allotropic lends itself to other modes, to different configurations of subjects and objects, ideas and images, concepts and conversations, and, of course, to differing modes of address. There is not a singular way to unfold an element allotropically, rather, specific conditions and circumstances facilitate the emergence of particular allotropes. Likewise, there is not a singular form of drawing, but always a range of emergent drawing(s), both object and process, and to ask what drawing is misses its most

Our allotropic approach to this volume is a way of thinking and writing in, of and through difference and drawing. Approaching was our starting point, a place in which to delineate the territory of the book and to set its arguments within a historical frame, yet begin to describe our movement beyond a survey text. The three chapters of Drawing Difference then became part of a wider, tropic exploration of the conventions of the fields by bringing pivotal works from the 1970s into connection with more contemporary practices. This was not a rejection of the historical and institutional framework developed in Approaching, but a reconfiguration and extension of its possibilities, otherwise and elsewhere. The drawing(s) that contribute so critically to our arguments are both precisely located within particular times and places – the specific conditions of their production and consumption are key to the meanings they can engender – yet, at the same time, they are able to signify beyond those conditions in new configurations. Demonstrating these varied resonances, conventionally, practically and materially, the tropic chapters explored, through drawing, the second sense of sexual difference described in Approaching: the endless potential of non-hierarchical relationships between subjects, objects, images and ideas to emerge. As the authors of this volume we too, as two, coincide in the drawing/writing of these chapters. We did not begin the project with an endpoint fixed; indeed, our initial plan was to write, as we

COINCIDING: drawing to a close without end

powerful characteristic, its ability to become other at every turn. In the same vein, there is no singular woman or man, feminine or masculine; gender unfolds allotropically as it articulates sexual difference variously, in endless variations across specific times and spaces. The histories, theories, institutions and practices that underpin the compelling connections between gender and drawing since the 1960s that we explore in this book form the material conditions through which the fields mutually emerged. The allotropic figurations we propose in these pages converse with those conditions and yet demonstrate the continuing possibilities of drawing and difference to unfold otherwise, to produce new meanings and facilitate the articulation of everchanging subjects-in-process.

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called it, ‘a little book of theory’. Our little book of theory was first envisaged as a demonstration (a drawing in an extended sense), in words and images, of the allo/tropic relationships between our fields. It would likely have extended from a performed work of artwriting that we had produced on the concept of allotropy,1 and would not have included the historical and institutional frameworks that have proven to be key to this book. But as we convened to converse with convention, the project changed – new ideas and concepts, explorations and explanations, emerged as pivotal to our argument. As we wrote in dialogue with one and other, the lines of thought took material form; tone, timbre, structure emerged in the practices and our conversations developed new dynamics. And, of course, the unspoken dynamic is that we were changed in the conversations; our subject-positions, understandings, points of view were not fixed entities merely awaiting representation in words, but emergent ideas that unfolded dialogically in the practice of the writing. We are thus critically aware of our writing in this volume and of the fact that we are using conventional forms of text to materialise concepts that concern the visual, spatial, material and affective dimensions of subjectivity and aesthetics. These are dimensions that resist both resolution in text and reduction to language. We are engaged in a translative dialogue in our project, as well as a transdisciplinary one, and the insights and positions that we reach within the book are not as much conclusions of the work (in the broad sense), as they are speculative demonstrations of the significance and the potential of this material and of an allotropic approach to it.

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For this reason, we finish the book not with a final statement (of intent or conclusion), but with eight prepositions, a direct and different form of address, that unfolds our allotropic figuration, ‘drawing|difference’ in ‘an other manner/genre’. Many readers will recognise the allusion we are making with our ‘eight prepositions’ to the well-known MoMA catalogue of 2002, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions by Laura Hoptman. As we have argued throughout this volume, we have convened to converse with conventions in this project, so both to ground our ‘little book of theory’ in the material legacies of past practices, discourses and debates,

Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, sought to articulate the stateof-play of contemporary drawing at the start of the twentyfirst century through eight key themes (propositions). It was a mechanism by which to categorise the burgeoning field of contemporary fine art drawing which, as always, was openended and threatening to overspill conventional boundaries. The volume thus charted the state-of-play and created it; to an extent, the power of the publication produced the categories it named. In this way, opening a playful dialogue with the eight propositions of 2002 permits us an opportunity to articulate an/ other theoretical language around drawing and the transversality of difference (sexual and other differences), such the relationships drawn through our allotropic figuration and the varied texts of this volume are described and delineated without by necessity being categorically fixed. Our eight prepositional statements demonstrate contingent, yet material, relationships that can move and transform. In this way, they are coincident parallels to the extraordinary thinking and making with which we have had the privilege to converse in Drawing Difference.

COINCIDING: drawing to a close without end

and to develop those discourses through vital exchanges across and through the conventions of other fields. Prepositions show relationships between subjects and objects in time and space – how something is related to another thing. Here, they offer us the potential to elaborate upon our concluding trope of coincidence in terms of type, manner or genre. They permit us to take it for an allotropic turn.

1. drawing|difference opens a dialogue across the histories, theories, practices and institutions that connect feminist interventions in the arts with the emergence of the field of contemporary fine art drawing; 2. drawing|difference converses with/in convention, considering historical and contemporary drawing practices, discourses and debates as the material through which new ideas can and will be realised; 117

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3. drawing|difference resides between the insights of corporeal feminisms, post-conceptual aesthetics and vital materialist perspectives on politics, ethics and imagination; 4. drawing|difference moves beyond the logic of binary thought, facilitating the materialisation of the both/and of the mutually becoming subject and object; 5. drawing|difference unfolds subjects and meanings in process through interlaced gestures and genres, ideas and images, bodies and objects; 6. drawing|difference is not about drawing and difference, but a means by which to articulate the emergence of both through the diffractive agency of art; 7. drawing|difference is an allotropic operation at the interval; 8. drawing|difference becomes, towards infinity.

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Notes

Approaching: drawing near 1 Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 68. 2 Rebecca Hill, ‘Interval, sexual difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson’, Hypatia 23.1 (Winter 2008), pp. 119–31, p. 119. 3 Bernice Rose, Drawing Now (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976). 4 Subsequent to the initial Drawing Now exhibition (1976) various curators of drawing(s) at the Museum of Modern Art such as Laura Hoptman, Cornelia Butler and Christian Rattemeyer have noted in numerous MoMA publications the significance of the exhibition as an important marker in the institutional development of the importance of drawing as a medium in its own right. However, the importance is also more broadly recognised, for example in Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: An Artists View (exh. cat.) (London: South Bank Centre, 1991), p. 14; Tony Godfrey, Drawing Today, Draughtsmen in the Eighties (Oxford: Phaidon, 1990), p. 13; Tania Kovats, The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005), p. 15, to name but a few. 5 Press release No. 4, The Museum of Modern Art, ‘Drawing Now 1955­–1975, Major winter exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art’ (New York, 1976). 6 There are geographies at stake in the emergent field of contemporary fine art drawing: the USA, UK and Germany were especially prominent early on, quickly followed by South America, India and Australia whose practitioners emerged strongly during the 1980s.

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Later, a more inclusive and global exploration began to showcase Africa, the Middle East and East Asia in drawing. The more global approach is continuing. 7 When we discuss the relative position of women within drawing, we do so in the context of the many surveys done over the past three decades that demonstrate that art produced by women is significantly less likely to be purchased by museum collections, shown in major exhibitions, commissioned by public bodies or sold in international art fairs than the work produced by their male counterparts. In addition, the so-called ‘glass ceiling’ is still in place in relation to art education (i.e. women outnumber men on fine art courses but men significantly outnumber women as lecturers and professors of art) and within the hierarchies of museum and gallery structures. For some of the statistics (historical) see: the Guerrilla Girls website: http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/index. shtml; n.paradoxa website: http://www.ktpress.co.uk/feminist-artstatistics.asp; the National Museum of Women in the Arts data: http://nmwa.org/advocate/get-facts; and for theatre and television: the WomenArts website: http://www.womenarts.org/womensemployment-in-the-arts/. Most recently, in 2013, a massive audit of women’s presence in the arts in the UK was undertaken by the East London Fawcett Society and times have not changed very much: Frieze Art Fair shows only 27% work by women; women represent 14% of public art, and to get to 30% representation in any aspect of the arts was unusual for women. The audit results pamphlet can be downloaded here: http://elf-audit.com/the-results/. 8 Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 9 Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). 10 Godfrey, Drawing Today, p. 124. 11 Ted Gott, Backlash: The Australian Drawing Revival, 1976–86 (exh. cat.) (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1986), p. 21. 12 Judy Collischan Van Wagner, Lines of Vision: Drawings by Contemporary Women (exh. cat.) (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1989), p. 13. 13 Cornelia Butler, Afterimage: Drawing Through Process (exh. cat.) (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999).

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14 Cornelia Butler, Gary Garrels and Christian Rattemeyer, Compass in Hand: Selections From The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). 15 Catherine de Zegher and Avis Newman, The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act (exh. cat.) (London: Tate Publishing, 2003); Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Eva Hesse Drawing (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press and the Drawing Center, 2006). 16 Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible: Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of and from the Feminine (exh. cat.) (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996). 17 Between 1977 and 1999, the publications of the Drawing Center were mainly focused on the work of male artists (often ‘modern masters’). Under de Zegher’s direction, the Drawing Papers became one of the pivotal spaces in which women’s drawing practices (and feminist criticism of the work) emerged. See, for example, Drawing Papers no. 24 (Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger’s Eurydice Series, 2001); no. 43 (Helena Almeida Inhabited Drawings with an essay by Isabel Carlos) and no. 66 (Christine Taylore Patten: micro/macro: 261 drawings with an essay by Griselda Pollock). This trend has continued since de Zegher’s departure. For information about the Drawing Papers, see: http://www.drawingcenter.org/en/drawingcenter/34/bookstore/35/ books-catalogues/. 18 Helen Molesworth, ‘Afterimage: drawing through process’ (review), frieze, issue 49 (November–December 1999). Available at http:// www.frieze.com/issue/review/afterimage_drawing_through_process (accessed 1 November 2011). 19 De Zegher and Newman, The Stage of Drawing, p. 80. 20 Catherine de Zegher, ‘The inside is the outside: the relational as the (feminine) space’, in C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher (eds), Women Artists at the Millennium (Cambridge, MA and London: October Books, MIT Press, 2006) pp. 188–217, p. 215. 21 De Zegher (ed), Inside the Visible, pp. 27–8. 22 In her 2008 review of Women Artists at the Millennium, Anna Lovatt rightly notes that drawing is a key undercurrent within the volume; see ‘Border crossings’, Oxford Art Journal 31/3 (2008), pp. 460–3. 23 An important contribution to the literature which begins to link gender with drawing has also been made by Briony Fer, both through thoughtful publications on key women involved with drawing (such as Vija Celmins, Eva Hesse, Hannah Darboven and

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Anna Barribal, frequently in series or anthologies associated with the Drawing Center) and in her significant critical revisions of 1950s and 1960s abstraction and seriality; see, for example, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003). In addition, the work of Fer’s former graduate students (e.g. Ed Krcma and Stephanie Straine) develops a grounded and historically specific, yet well-theorised view of drawing and often focuses on women’s practices. 24 For an explanation of our reticence to write a ‘survey’, see Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–4. 25 Irigaray’s concept of ‘drawing near’ from The Way of Love has also been useful to us in developing our work collaboratively, since it posits a provocative argument for exploring connections between subjects and ideas without exhausting them by over-familiarity or merely incorporating/assimilating their particularity within homogeneity. 26 We would like to thank Anders Dahlgren, currently completing his PhD at the University of Gothenburg, for making the succinct connection between a ‘grammar’ and a ‘geometry’ in our use of the ellipses. 27 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 28 This notion of the ‘work’ of art has been used in a number of recent texts to indicate the possibility of making meaning between the socio-political, material and affective registers of art (Meskimmon, Hills), the (sometimes obscured) issues of economic labour and political power in the arts (Dimitrakaki, Bryan-Wilson), or the potential of art to address trauma (Pollock). Using it here, we are aware of these valences. See Meskimmon, Women Making Art (2003); Helen Hills, The Matter of Miracles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming); Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, artWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Griselda Pollock, After-Affects | After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 29 Philip Rawson, Drawing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) and Seeing Through Drawing (London: BBC, 1979); Edward Hill,

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The Language of Drawing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966); Bernice Rose, Drawing Now (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976) and Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992); Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977); John Berger, Berger on Drawing (Aghabullogue, Ireland: Occasional Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, ‘Drawing’, Lacanian Ink 28 (2006), pp. 42–9; David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: An Artist’s View (exh. cat.) (London: South Bank Centre, 1991) and The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no. State of drawingness, no. Rather: the executioner’s taking off’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, New Literary History 24/1, Culture and Everyday Life (John Hopkins University Press, 1993). 30 See, for example, Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza Past and Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996); Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference (1st ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Oxford: Polity, 2002). 31 The possibilities of making connections between corporeal feminist art/theory and the ‘new’ materialisms are explored further in Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Art matters: feminist corporeal-materialist aesthetics’, in Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek (eds), The Companion to Feminist Art Practice and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).

Chapter 1: Dialogue 1 The English translation of Les Pensionnaires, as The Boarders, is used frequently in the literature and so, for ease, we are adopting

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The Boarders here. However, L’ombre dessinée sur le mur (The Shadow Drawing on the Wall) is not commonly translated and so we are using the French title in our text, to maintain the ambiguity of ‘dessinée’ as ‘drawing or cartoon/comic’ which further maintains the serial notion of the work within the wider body of the project as part of a narrative/story. 2 Marie-Laure Bernadac (ed.), Annette Messager: Word for Word (Texts, Writings, Interviews), trans. Vivian Rehberg (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2006), p. 9. 3 Our use is akin to the definition of dialogism developed by Michael Holquist in Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 20–1: ‘where bodies may be thought of as ranging from the immediacy of our physical bodies, to political bodies and to bodies of ideas in general (ideologies).’ 4 Natasha Leoff, in conversation with Annette Messager, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. (1995). Available at http://www.jca-online. com/messager.html (accessed 1 November 2013). 5 In this, we are aligned with David Bohm’s definition of dialogue, wherein a number of participants share perspectives and develop new ideas rather than seek to ‘prove’ their point. See David Bohm, On Dialogue (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 6 Messager cited in Carol S. Eliel, ‘“Nourishment you take”: Annette Messager, influence, and the subversion of images’, in Sheryl Conkelton and Carol S. Eliel, Annette Messager (exh. cat.) (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), pp. 51–85, p. 55. 7 In his book Film Fables (New York: Berg, 2006), Jacques Rancière distinguished between the commonplace notion of fiction as ‘feigning’ and the etymologically more nuanced sense of fiction as ‘forging’ (pp. 157–71). 8 Interview with Robert Storr, 1995, in Marie-Laure Bernadac (ed.), Annette Messager: Word for Word, op. cit. p. 414. 9 Messager cited in Penelope Rowlands, ‘Art that annoys’, ARTNews 94/8 (October 1995), pp. 132–5. p. 135. 10 Messager cited in Kristine McKenna, ‘ART: a private world of women: Annette Messager makes art about women’s rituals, the secrets they develop in a world of male privilege. Just don’t call her a feminist’, Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1995. Available at http://articles.latimes. com/1995-06-11/entertainment/ca-19972_1_annette-messager (accessed 1 October 2013).

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 5 – 3 5

11 Messager (2007) cited in Camille Morineau, Women Artists Elles@ centrepompidou (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009), p. 196. 12 The six-chapter story is reproduced in full (with English translations) in Bernadac, Annette Messager: Word for Word, op. cit. 13 Conkelton: ‘Annette Messager’, p. 9. 14 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 15 Natasha Leoff, in conversation with Annette Messager, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. 1995. Available at http://www.jca-online. com/messager.html (accessed 1 November 2013). 16 Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 100. 17 Becky Hunter (Durham, UK), ‘Interview with Marco Maggi’ (New York) via email between November 2008 and February 2009. Available at http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2009-interview-with-marcomaggi/1773 (accessed 1 November 2013). 18 The ‘ontology of drawing’ appears in both Vanessa Adatto, ‘Marco Maggi: NC – Arte’ (review), Art Nexus 2/84 (2001), pp. 100–1 and in Raúl Zamudio, ‘Marco Maggi: between drawing and withdrawing’, Art Nexus 8/75 (2009), pp. 60–4. It is Zamudio who uses the phrase ‘ground zero of drawing’ (p. 62). 19 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 37–9. 20 Ibid., p. 41. 21 Ibid., p. 11. 22 Ibid., p. 14. 23 This is not to say that women have not been major figures in art throughout history … it is to say that a brief trawl through a major collection and traditional literature will not always demonstrate the cultural agency of women very well. 24 See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference (1st ed., particularly ch. 9: ‘The politics of ontological difference’) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). 25 Nicola Foster, ‘Boundaries of sight and touch – memoirs of the blind and the caressed’, TRACEY, Drawing Across Boundaries (conference, September 1998). Available at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ microsites/sota/tracey/journal/dab/1998/foster.html (accessed 1 June 2013).

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26 See, for example: Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1981), Linda Nochlin, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ Art News 69/9 (January 1971), pp. 22–39, 67–71, and Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1994). 27 David Bohm, On Dialogue (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 28 Hunter, white hot magazine. Available at http://whitehotmagazine. com/articles/2009-interview-with-marco-maggi/1773 (accessed 1 March 2012). 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Leoff, in conversation. Available at http://www.jca-online.com/ messager.html (accessed 1 October 2013). 32 Ibid. 33 Wim Pijbes, ‘Introduction’, in Siân Bowen and Nova Zembla: Suspending the Ephemeral, (exh. cat.) (Sheffield: RGAP, 2012), pp. 7–9, p. 8. 34 Chris Dorsett, ‘Safe houses on enchanted ground’, in Siân Bowen and Nova Zembla, pp. 107–13, p. 108. Chris Dorsett makes a compelling case that the Addison’s fable drew on these sources. 35 Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge, ‘The art of recollection and material memory: on Siân Bowen’s drawings’, in Siân Bowen and Nova Zembla, pp. 83–7, p. 84. 36 Siân Bowen, Blog. Available at http://bowenatrijksmuseum.wordpress. com (1 August 2013). 37 Here we are following the line of debate opened by Gill Saunders, in ‘Introduction: reflections on drawing’, Gaze (exh. cat.) (Arts Editions North in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007), p. 9. 38 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (orig. 1974, trans. Gillian C. Gill) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 39 Walter Benjamin, ‘Thesis on the philosophy of history’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (English trans., San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 253–64, p. 255. 40 Bowen, Siân Bowen and Nova Zembla, p. 33. 41 Ibid., p. 60 42 Ibid., p. 59. 43 Jorges Luis Borges, ‘The Book of Sand’, in The Book of Sand, trans. Norman Thomas Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1977), p. 117.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 4 8 – 5 2

44 Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of and from the Feminine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 28. 45 Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s notions of appeal, desire, and ambiguity and their relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre’s notions of appeal and desire’, Hypatia 14.4 (Fall 1999), pp. 83–95; Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

Chapter 2: Matter 1 Burstein J. Hays, ‘Drawing broadly defined’, Artweek (13 October 1984), pp. 7, 81. 2 John Russell, in the chapter ‘Seurat the draughtsman’ in Seurat (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), highlights Robert L. Herbert’s (R. L. Herbert, Seurat’s Drawings, London: Shorewood, 1962) observation that, ‘One of the marvels of such drawings is in the realisation that this light is actually the white paper showing through the strokes of the crayon. We instinctively think of the artist illuminating the darkness with [his] light, because we associate it with a natural light source. We tend to imagine him moving it about as if it were the mobile stuff of his art, whereas in fact it is the dark [italic in the original] which he pushes on to the paper’ (p. 65). In the original (p. 53) Herbert also goes on to say that, ‘In art nothing is natural except the illusion.’ Russell later in the same chapter states (pp. 80–3): ‘The drawing modulates from the deepest, most velvety blacks right through to the natural white of the paper; no longer are we conscious of individual strokes, but merely of a process of uninterrupted becoming.’ (italic in the original) 3 Eleanor Heartney, Looking at Herself: Self-Portraits by Susanna Coffey, Anne Harris & Susan Hauptman (exh. cat.) (Old Lyme, CT: Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, December 2005–March 2006). 4 Suzann Boettger, ‘Face to face’, in Susan Hauptman: Drawn from the Heart (exh. cat.) (Forum Gallery, 2002). 5 Ibid., p. 9. 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 Kerstin Mey (ed.), ‘Metamorphoses Cornelia Parker in conversation with Kerstin Mey (London, 2000)’, in Sculpsit: Contemporary Artists on Sculpture and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 16.

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8 The Bykert Gallery show was an important contemporary articulation of the multiple works that comprised Drawing Which Makes Itself and we are using it here to delineate the broad parameters of DWMI. The Museum of Modern Art (New York) collection contains, among others, two specific works from the ‘series’; they are Drawing Which Makes Itself from 1972 which uses carbon, carbon transfer and pencil on paper (57 x 76 centimetres) and from 1973, Drawing Which Makes Itself: FPI 16, using folded paper and ink (76.2 x 101.5 centimetres). Throughout this text, we will refer to these two works when we refer to specific instances of DWMI. 9 Bruce Boice, ‘Dorothea Rockburne’s new work’, Hartford Art School (23 April–5 May 1973). Available at http://www.artnet.com/usernet/ awc/awc_historyview_details.asp?aid=139842&awc_id=1050&info_ type_id=5 (accessed 1 November 2013). 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Christopher Townsend, ‘On drawing’, Art Monthly (April 2012), pp. 5–8. 13 Richard Serra (1977), cited in Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 11. 14 Bruce Boice, ‘Dorothea Rockburne’s new work’, op. cit. 15 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 9. 16 The use of the term ‘Cartesian dualism’ refers directly to the significance of René Descartes within Western European philosophical conceptions of subjectivity; binary dualism and ‘economies of the same’ are also terms that populate much of the literature. 17 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xii. 18 Ibid. 19 That Hauptman uses her husband as the model for the male figure in a number of her works is well known and, in these works, she frequently plays with conventional, gendered iconography in both pose and placement of the male and female figures. 20 Karen Barad, ‘Getting real: technoscientific practices and the materialisation of reality’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.2 (1998), pp. 87–128. Barad traces the performative line of thinking from linguistics to Jacques Derrida to Judith Butler and reminds us of Donna Haraway preferring ‘articulation’ to ‘representation’. 21 Barad, ‘Getting real’, op. cit., p. 108.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 6 2 – 7 5

22 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, Signs, Gender and Science: New Issues 28.3 (2003), pp. 800–31. In relation to the forms of representationalism against which concepts of materialisation operate: ‘representationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing.’ (p. 804) 23 Hays, ‘Drawing broadly defined’, op. cit. Hays uses ‘realist’ in this way throughout his review. 24 Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 4–6. 25 Janet Koplos reads the images by reference to the age of the artist: ‘the impossibility of that face having that body […]’, as if there were a ‘real’ marker to which the images, as representations should adhere. Janet Koplos, ‘Susan Hauptman at Tatistcheff/Rogers’ (review), Art in America 84 (July 1996), p. 96. 26 Stretching the material links more playfully, the diamond that scratches the inside surface of the glass of the Engagement Ring Drawing is, like graphite, an allotrope of carbon, and the feathers that decorate the hats of Hauptman’s marriage portrait could remind us of the quill. 27 Jane Bennett, ‘A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 47–69, pp. 52, 49. 28 Barad, ‘Posthumanist performativity’, op. cit., pp. 815–16, p. 826. 29 Ibid., pp. 815. 30 It is tempting to reconsider the ancient notion of techne here, where thinking and making were not seen to be so easily opposed as more contemporary notions of theory/practice would often hold. 31 See Bernice Rose, Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992). 32 Mignon Nixon, ‘Dream dust’, October 116 (2006), pp. 61–86. Mignon Nixon discusses the significance of touch in investing objects with meaning in her article on Parker. 33 Re: Kahlo and Hauptman, see Cheryl White, ‘Quality as a common denominator’, Artweek (15 November 1986), p. 1; re: Sherman and Hauptman, see Collette Chattopadhyay, ‘Susan Hauptman at Tatistcheff/ Rogers’ (review) Artweek (May 1996), no page numbers visible. 34 Hugh Stoddard, ‘Reflecting well on Cornelia Parker’, Contemporary Visual Arts, issue 19 (1998), pp. 48–53, p. 51. [bold ‘I’ in original].

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35 Gillian Perry (ed.), ‘A strange alchemy: Cornelia Parker’, in Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). In the same interview, she also said: ‘I very much resisted, in the past, having my work written about under the umbrella of women’s issues or women’s rights, because I really wanted to be part of the mainstream, and also, I’d always ignored the fact that I was a woman, probably because it was ignored when I was a child. I was brought up as a surrogate son.’ 36 Anna Lovatt, ‘Intersection’, October 122 (Fall 2007), p. 31–52. Rockburne is more equivocal than Lovatt: in an interview with Tyler Green for the Modern Art News (MAN) podcast (Episode 97, 2013), when asked about being a woman making art in the early 1970s she says, ‘I feel that women are not mentally different than men but they are psychologically because of our sexuality […] a lot of our emotions and thinking come from our sexuality and it is very different to be entered than to enter […] it is not recognised […]’. Available at http://blogs. artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/09/the-man-podcast-dorothearockburne (accessed 1 November 2013). 37 Barad, ‘Posthumanist performativity’, op. cit, pp. 826–7.

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1 By now, the reader will have noticed our strategic conceit. We are seeking to invoke the opening of drawing (through and to many voices, images, ideas, gestures and practices), by opening (in both senses) this chapter to the voices of others, the interval between text and image and the question posed by the blank page. Our text-intervalimage quotational play thus interweaves a range of suggestive lines (of flight), which decentre drawing and difference and begin a process of delineation, through which, we argue, emerges a structural logic of ‘opening’. The text-interval-image play at, or really as, the start of our argument is an intentional dialogue with others and we trust that this creative strategy (moving along the road towards art-writing) makes readers more aware of the voices coming into connection here and more aware of themselves reading/looking at these images and texts, while doing no disservice to the exceptional work of their authors. 2 The earlier dates are used, for example, in Schneemann’s Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003), p. 165.

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3 Carolee Schneemann, in a letter to Clayton Eshleman, used the terms ‘float’ and ‘quiver’. Reprinted in Kristine Stiles, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 260–1. 4 Kristine Stiles noted the significance of what she called ‘the writing/ drawing visual dyad’ in Schneemann’s work more generally in the introduction to Correspondence Course, p. liv–lv. 5 Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no. State of drawingness, no. Rather: the executioner’s taking off’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, New Literary History 24.1, Culture and Everyday Life (Winter 1993), pp. 91–103. 6 Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 163. 7 The argument is only enhanced by the fact that the work has been shown in various configurations (as a ‘live’ performance drawing in a space, as video footage of ‘live’ performances in multiple spaces, as a combination of both of these elements, etc.). The mutable and multiple unfolding of the work is part of its opening. 8 Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Elaborate marks: gender°|time’|drawing”’, in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012). 9 Jay Murphy, ‘Assimilating the unassimilable: Carolee Schneemann in relation to Antonin Artaud’, Parkett 50–1 (1997), pp. 224–31, p. 230. (Murphy cites Florence de Meredieu, ‘The canvas is the body’, in Antonin Artaud: portraits et gris-gris [Paris: Editions Blusson, 1984], p. 62). 10 Ibid. 11 Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 165. 12 See Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) for a very well-developed account of feminist and queer engagements with what Jones calls ‘the Pollockian performative’. 13 See Penny Florence, Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art (New York: Allworth Press, 2004). 14 Petra Löffler, ‘Carolee Schneemann’, in Uta Grosenick (ed.), Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), pp. 482–7, p. 482. 15 A number of critics have discussed this and Schneemann has been candid in her own accounts of some difficult encounters with feminist critics over her career. See Stiles, Correspondence Course; Magnus Af Petersens, ‘Carolee Schneemann’, info page, Moderna

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Museet, Stockholm. Available at http://www.modernamuseet.se/ en/Moderna-Museet/About/Research/In-the-shadow-of/CaroleeSchneemann/ (accessed 1 November 2014). 16 See Schneemann’s interview with Priscilla Frank, ‘Carolee Schneemann, feminist performance pioneer, talks Olympia, deodorant and selfies’, The Huffington Post, 12 November 2013, Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/11/caroleeschneemann_n_4415261.html (accessed 1 November 2014). 17 Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 164. 18 Walter Benjamin, ‘Painting, or signs and marks’ (1917), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 1913–26, ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 83. 19 Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), pp. 47–9 (p. 48). 20 Lane Relyea uses ‘painting’ consistently in both ‘Toba Khedoori, history painter of modern oblivion’, in Toba Khedoori – Gezeichnete Bilder (exh. cat.) (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2001), pp. 50–5 and ‘Toba Khedoori’, Artforum (Summer 1997). 21 Relyea, ‘Toba Khedoori, history painter of modern oblivion’, op. cit., p. 51. 22 Hans Rudolf Reust, ‘In the space that drawing creates – five approaches to the work of Toba Khedoori’, in Toba Khedoori – Gezeichnete Bilder (exh. cat.) (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2001), pp. 56–9 (p. 58). 23 Fritz Emslander, ‘Raumzeichnungen: von der Entgrenzung der Zeichnung in den Raum. Ein Panorama’ [Space Drawings: from the dissolution of the drawing in the room. A panorama], Kunstforum International 196 (2009), pp. 124–59 (p. 135). 24 Olga Viso, Toba Khedoori (exhibition pamphlet, Hirschorn Museum, 1997), no pages. 25 Neville Wakefield, ‘Toba Khedoori (review)’, Artforum (October 1995), pp. 94–5. 26 Ken Johnson, ‘Toba Khedoori at David Zwirner’, Art in America (1996). 27 Wakefield, ‘Toba Khedoori (review)’, p. 95. 28 Viso, Toba Khedoori, no page numbers. 29 Alain Badiou, ‘Drawing’, Lacanian Ink 28 (Fall 2006), p. 44. 30 Benjamin, ‘Painting, or signs and marks’, p. 83. 31 Viso, Toba Khedoori, no page numbers.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 0 4 – 6

32 Badiou, ‘Drawing’, p. 44. 33 Michael Craig Martin, cited by Stephen Farthing in Drawing the Line: Reappraising Drawing Past and Present (exh. cat.) (London: South Bank Centre), 1995, p. 25. 34 This is not an exaggeration – his work is approximately 132 square centimetres, while hers is approximately 122,930. 35 Jorges Luis Borges, ‘On exactitude in science’, in Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions (trans. and introduced by Andrew Hurley) (London and New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 325. 36 Cixous, ‘Without end, no’, p. 93. 37 Rebecca Hill, ‘Interval, sexual difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson’, Hypatia 23.1 (Winter 2008), pp. 119–31 (p. 129). 38 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘In-between: the natural in architecture and culture’, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 91–108, (p. 94). 39 This term is intended to carry a playful reference to the feminist debates concerning the institution of the (Lacanian) ‘Law of the father’ as instituted in the ‘proper’ name. 40 Hill, ‘Interval, sexual difference’, p. 129. 41 Grosz, ‘In-between’, pp. 94. 42 With many thanks to Christoph Fink for providing this information to us in correspondence. 43 Deanna Petherbridge, ‘Nailing the liminal: the difficulties of defining drawing’, in Steve Garner (ed.), Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008), p. 39.

Coinciding: drawing to a close without end 1 Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon, Unfolding Space: An Allotropic Dance in Three Parts for Two Players (conference paper) (Articulations, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) annual conference, Amsterdam, 22–4 March 2010). Available at https://dspace.lboro. ac.uk/2134/9902. Unfolding Space: An Allotropic Dance in Three Parts for Two Players is a paper/project of fragmentary visions that explore the interactions (in)between articulation and unfolding space, as might be configured through process, fluidity and our resonant, generative awareness of the creative and seductive potential of ambiguous and elusive co-ordinates. In the authors’ original version the paper contained hyperlinks to a series of audio and video files

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to create a multimedia document. However, in this version you are requested to open the audio or video file listed in the Repository ‘files associated with this item’ at the appropriate prompt contained in the body of the pdf text.

Selected Bibliography

Adatto, Vanessa, ‘Marco Maggi: NC – Arte’ (review), Art Nexus 2/84 (2001). Badiou, Alain, ‘Drawing’, Lacanian Ink 28 (2006), pp. 42–9. Barad, Karen, ‘Getting real: technoscientific practices and the materialisation of reality’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10/2 (1998). ———, ‘Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, Signs, Gender and Science: New Issues 28/3 (2003). ———, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt (eds), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2013). Battersby, Christine, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1994). Bauer, Nancy, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Beck, Martha and Marie Keller, New Drawing in America – An Exhibition to Celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of the Drawing Center, 1977 to 1982 (exh. cat.) (New York: Drawing Center, 1982). Benjamin, Walter, ‘Thesis on the philosophy of history’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (English trans., San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968). ———, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1 1913–26, eds M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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Bennett, Jane, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). ———, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010). ———, ‘A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 47–69. Berger, John, Berger on Drawing (Aghabullogue, Ireland: Occasional Press, 2005). Bermingham, Ann, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000). Bernadac, Marie-Laure (ed.), Annette Messager: Word for Word (Texts, Writings, Interviews), trans. Vivian Rehberg (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2006). Boettger, Suzann, ‘Susan Hauptmann’, in Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand, trans. Norman Thomas Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1977). ———, ‘Face to face’, in Susan Hauptman: Drawn from the Heart (exh. cat.) (Forum Gallery, 2002). Bohm, David, On Dialogue (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Boice, Bruce, ‘Dorothea Rockburne’s new work’, Hartford Art School, 23 April–5 May 1973. Available at http://www.artnet.com/usernet/ awc/awc_historyview_details.asp?aid=139842&awc_id=1050&info_ type_id=5 (accessed 1 November 2013). Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘On exactitude in science’, in Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. and introduced by Andrew Hurley (London and New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 325. Bowen, Siân (ed.), Siân Bowen and Nova Zembla: Suspending the Ephemeral (exh. cat.) (Sheffield: Research Group for Artists Publications [RGAP], 2012). Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference (1st ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). ———, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Oxford: Polity, 2002). Bryan-Wilson, Julia, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Butler, Cornelia, Afterimage: Drawing Through Process (exh. cat.) (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

——— and Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010–11). ——— and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (eds), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (exh. cat.) (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art/Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007). Butler, Cornelia, Gary Garrels and Christian Rattemeyer, Compass in Hand: Selections From The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Cain, Patricia, Drawing: The Enactive Evolution of the Practitioner (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2010). Cárdenas, Diana Marcela, ‘Marco Maggi’ (review), Art Nexus 10/80 (2011), p. 107. Cerón, Jaime, ‘Marco Maggi’, Art Nexus 4/59 (2005), p. 52. Chattopadhyay, Collette, ‘Susan Hauptmann at Tatistcheff/Rogers’ (review), Artweek (May 1996), no page numbers visible. Cixous, Hélène, ‘Without end, no. State of drawingness, no. Rather: the executioner’s taking off’, trans. A. F. Catherine MacGillivray, New Literary History 24/1: Culture and Everyday Life (Winter 1993). Cole, Ina, ‘Suspending frictions: a conversation with Cornelia Parker’, Sculpture 28/5 (2009). Collischan Van Wagner, Judy K., Lines of Vision: Drawings by Contemporary Women (exh. cat.) (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1989). Conkelton, Sheryl and Carol S. Eliel, Annette Messager (exh. cat.) (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995). Contemporary Drawing: Existence, Passage, Dream (exh. cat.) (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, Rose Art Museum, 1991). Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010). Derrida, Jacques, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Dexter, Emma, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (New York and London: Phaidon Press, 2005). De Zegher, Catherine (ed.), Inside the Visible: Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of and from the Feminine (exh. cat.) (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996).

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Green, Tyler, ‘Interview with Dorothea Rockburne’, Modern Art News (MAN) Podcast (Episode 97, 2013). Available at http://blogs. artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/09/the-man-podcast-dorothearockburne (accessed 1 November 2013). Grenier, Catherine, Annette Messager (English version, Paris: Flammarion: 2001). Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). ———, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001). Hays, Burstein J., ‘Drawing broadly defined’, Artweek (13 October 1984), pp. 7, 81. Heartney, Eleanor, Looking at Herself: Self-Portraits by Susanna Coffey, Anne Harris & Susan Hauptman (exh. cat.) (Old Lyme, CT: Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, December 2005–March 2006). Hill, Edward, The Language of Drawing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1966). Hill, Rebecca, ‘Interval, sexual difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson’, Hypatia 23/1 (Winter 2008), pp. 119–31. Hills, Helen, The Matter of Miracles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Hoptman, Laura, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002). Hunter, Becky (Durham, UK), interview with Marco Maggi (New York) via email between November 2008 and February 2009. Available at http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2009-interview-with-marcomaggi/1773 (accessed 1 November 2013). Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman (orig. 1974, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). ———, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek (London and New York: Continuum, 2002). Jana, Reena, ‘How it was done: paper cuts’, Art on Paper 9/2 (November/December 2004). Jones, Amelia, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (exh. cat.) (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996). ———, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

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Milner, Marion, On Not Being Able to Paint (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977). Molesworth, Helen, ‘Afterimage: drawing through process’ (review), frieze, issue 49 (November–December 1999). Available at http:// www.frieze.com/issue/review/afterimage_drawing_through_process (accessed 1 November 2011). Morineau, Camille, Women Artists: Elles@centrepompidou (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009). Murphy, Jay, ‘Assimilating the unassimilable: Carolee Schneemann in relation to Antonin Artaud’, Parkett 50–1 (1997). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Nixon, Mignon, ‘Dream dust’, October 116 (2006). Nochlin, Linda, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ Art News 69/9 (January 1971), pp. 22–39, 67–71. Pérez-Oramas, Luis, An Atlas of Drawings (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006). Perry, Gillian (ed.), ‘A strange alchemy: Cornelia Parker’, in Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). Pesenti, Allegra, Rachel Whiteread Drawings (exh. cat.) (UCLA, Hammer Museum, Munich, Berlin, London and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2010). Petersens, Magnus Af, ‘Carolee Schneemann’, info page, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Available at http://www.modernamuseet.se/ en/Moderna-Museet/About/Research/In-the-shadow-of/CaroleeSchneemann (accessed 1 November 2014). Petherbridge, Deanna, The Primacy of Drawing: An Artist’s View (exh. cat.) (London: South Bank Centre, 1991). ———, ‘Nailing the liminal: the difficulties of defining drawing’, in Steve Garner (ed.), Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008). ———, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Pijbes, Wim, ‘Introduction’, in Siân Bowen and Nova Zembla: Suspending the Ephemeral (exh. cat.) (Sheffield: RGAP, 2012). Pollock, Griselda, After-Affects | After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). ——— and Roszika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1981).

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Princenthal, Nancy, ‘Lucy Lippard’, Art in America (December 2012), pp. 130–7. Rancière, Jacques, Film Fables (New York: Berg, 2006). Ratcliff, Carter, ‘Dorothea Rockburne: new prints’, Print Collector’s Newsletter 5/2 (1974), pp. 30–2. ———, ‘Paper remade in 1960s conceptualism’, Art on Paper 5/4 (March– April 2001), pp. 54–61. Rawson, Philip, Drawing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). ———, Seeing Through Drawing (London: BBC, 1979). Reilly, Maura and Linda Nochlin (eds), Global Feminisms, New Directions in Contemporary Art (exh. cat.) (London and New York: Merrell Publishing/Brooklyn Museum, 2007). Relyea, Lane, ‘Toba Khedoori’, Artforum (Summer, 1997). ———, ‘Toba Khedoori, history painter of modern oblivion’, in Toba Khedoori – Gezeichnete Bilder (exh. cat.) (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2001). Reust, Hans Rudolf, ‘In the space that drawing creates – five approaches to the work of Toba Khedoori’, in Toba Khedoori – Gezeichnete Bilder (exh. cat.) (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2001). Rochette, Anne and Wade Saunders, ‘Savage mercies’, Art in America (March 1994), pp. 78–82. Rockburne, Dorothea, ‘Notes to myself on drawing’, Flash Art (April 1974), p. 66. Rogers, Angela, Drawing Encounters: A Practice-Led Investigation into Collaborative Drawing as a Means of Revealing Tacit Elements of One-to-One Social Encounter (PhD thesis, University of the Arts, London, 2008). Rosand, David, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Rose, Bernice, Drawing Now (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976). ———, Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing (exh. cat.) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992). Rowlands, Penelope, ‘Art that annoys’, ARTNews 94/8 (October 1995). Russell, John, Seurat (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965). Sale, Teel and Claudia Betti, Drawing: A Contemporary Approach (Belmont, CA: Thompson Wadsworth, 2004). Saunders, Gill, ‘Introduction: reflections on drawing’, Gaze (exh. cat.) (Arts Editions North in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007).

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Schneemann, Carolee, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003). Sever, Nancy, 2002 Drawing Biennale Latin America (exh. cat.) (Canberra: Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 2002). ———, Sixth Drawing Biennale (exh. cat.) (Canberra: Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 2006). ——— and Morris Low, The Australian Drawing Biennale (exh. cat.) (Canberra: Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 1998). ——— and Tony Oates, 2004 Drawing Biennale (exh. cat.) (Canberra: Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 2004). ——— and Elizabeth Cross, Seventh Drawing Biennale (exh. cat.) (Canberra: Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 2008). Stiles, Kristine (ed.), Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Stoddard, Hugh, ‘Reflecting well on Cornelia Parker’, Contemporary Visual Arts, issue 19 (1998), pp. 48–53. Stoops, Susan L., The Contemporary Drawing: Existence, Passage and the Dream (exh. cat.) (Waltham: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1991). Sultan, Terrie, ‘Contemporary portraiture’s split reference’ (review), Art on Paper 3/4 (March–April 1999). Susan Hauptmann: Drawn from the Heart (exh. cat.) (New York: Forum Gallery, 2002). Susan Hauptmann: Drawings (exh. cat.) (New York: Forum Gallery, 2006-7). Susan Hauptmann (exh. cat.) (New York: Forum Gallery, 2010). Townsend, Christopher, ‘On drawing’, Art Monthly (April 2012), pp. 5–8. TRACEY, Russell Marshall, Phil Sawdon et al. (eds), Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007). TRACEY, Russell Marshall and Phil Sawdon (eds), Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012). Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations (exh. cat.) (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1976). Viso, Olga, Toba Khedoori (exhibition pamphlet, Hirschorn Museum, 1997), no pages. Wakefield, Neville, ‘Toba Khedoori (review)’, Artforum (October 1995). White, Cheryl, ‘Quality as a common denominator’, Artweek (15 November 1986), p. 1.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wittocx, Eva, ‘Christoph Fink: atlas of movements’. Available at http:// bamart.be/pages/detail/en/66 (accessed 1 June 2014). Zamudio, Raúl, ‘Marco Maggi: between drawing and withdrawing’, Art Nexus 8/75 (2009).

145

Index

(Page indicators in italics refer solely to illustrations.) Abstract Expressionism, 92, 93, 97 action painting, 92, 93 Addison, Joseph, 39 After-Image (exhibition), 8, 9 agency, 16, 54, 56, 57, 67–8, 69–71, 72–3, 118 Barad, Karen, 62, 69, 77 Bowen, Siân, 41, 42, 47, 48 Derrida, Jacques, 35 Fink, Christoph, 111 Hauptman, Susan, 71–2, 73 Maggi, Marco, 36 Messager, Annette, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 36 Parker, Cornelia, 63, 67, 69, 71–2, 74 Rockburne, Dorothea, 67, 74 Shneemann, Carolee, 89, 90–1, 94, 96, 111 ‘agential cuts’, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77–8, 110 Allegories of Modernism (exhibition), 4 allegory, objects as: Susan Hauptman, 73–4

allotropy, 3, 7–8, 12, 14–15, 16, 17, 18–19, 20, 49, 88, 111–12, 113–17, 118 art education: women, 120n7 Artaud, Antonin, 91–2 Artforum, 101 Atlas of Movements (Fink), 107, 110; see also Chicago2a (Fink); FA21, Atlas of Movements, Movement #52 (The Frankfurt Walks) (Fink) Australian Drawing Biennials, 5 authorial process, 115–16 authorship: intentionality, 70, 71, 74, 89–90, 91, 94, 96 autography, 78 feminist theory and art practice, 61–2, 108 Fink, Christoph, 105 Hauptman, Susan, 76–7 Khedoori, Toba, 105 Parker, Cornelia, 52, 76–7, 129n26 Rockburne, Dorothea, 59, 76–7 ‘automatic drawing’: Carolee Schneemann, 89, 90, 91, 94

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background: potentiality, 82, 97–8, 98–9, 103, 104, 106, 107 Backlash (exhibition), 5 Backlash (Gott), 6–7 Badiou, Alain, 82 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 27 Barad, Karen, 62, 69, 77, 128n20, 129n22 Barents, Willem, 39, 41, 49 Barents Sea (Bowen), 41 becoming, 14, 18, 77, 78, 80, 86, 88, 97–8, 107–10, 111–12, 114–15, 118, 127n2 Bennett, Jane, 67 Bowen, Siân, 45 elliptical traverse, 49 Fink, Christoph, 105–7, 110–11 Hauptman, Susan, 66, 67, 68 Khedoori, Toba, 98–105, 112 Messager, Annette, 43 Parker, Cornelia, 67, 68, 69 Rockburne, Dorothea, 67, 68, 74 Schneemann, Carolee, 88–94, 95–7, 98 ‘beginnings’, drawing as, 10 Behouden Huys, 39, 40, 44, 46, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 43, 82, 98 Bennett, Jane, 67 Berger, John, 80 Berzelius, Jöns Jacob, 114 binary thinking see dualism Blind Carousel: Marco Maggi, 30–1 blind slides: Marco Maggi, 29–36, 37, 43 Boarders, The (Messager), 21–7, 28, 37, 43, 123n1 body Hauptman, Susan, 51, 64, 66 materiality Barad, Karen, 62

Butler, Judith, 56–7, 58 Parker, Cornelia, 74 Rockburne, Dorothea, 53–4 Schneemann, Carolee, 89, 90–1, 91–4, 95–6, 98 women artists, 6 see also subjectivity, embodied Bohm, David, 124n5 Boice, Bruce, 55–6 book, the: Siân Bowen, 46–7 Borges, Jorge Luis, 47, 107 boundlessness, 82, 88, 98–9, 101–2, 103, 104, 106, 112 Bowen, Siân, 40–8, 49 Braidotti, Rosi, 35, 80 Braille Wall: Marco Maggi, 31–6, 37, 43 Butades’ daughter, 23, 24, 25, 37, 43 Butler, Cornelia, 5, 8–9, 10–11, 119n4 Butler, Judith, 56–7 Bykert Gallery, 53, 59, 75, 128n8 Cameron, Dan, 88 carnivalesque: Annette Messager, 27 cartography: Christoph Fink, 107, 110 cartoons: Toba Khedoori, 100 Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD), 5 Chicago2a (Fink), 85, 105, 106–7 Cixous, Hélène, 84, 90 Clark, Lygia, 38 coincidence, 113–18 collaboration, conversational, 12–20 Compass in Hand (exhibition), 8 conventions, 1, 7–8, 12–18, 20, 59, 61–2, 71, 77, 108, 112–14, 115, 116–17 Bowen, Siân, 41, 45 Fink, Christoph, 105, 110

De Veer, Gerrit, 39, 44, 45 de Zegher, Catherine, 5, 8–11, 48, 49, 121n17 death, encounter with: Annette Messager, 25 Derrida, Jacques, 34–5, 36, 37 Descartes, René, 128n16 Descriptions True and Perfect (Bowen), 45–7, 48 desire female: Annette Messager, 23, 24, 37 sexed subjects, 35 dialogue, 19–49, 113–14, 124n5 Maggi, Marco, 28–36, 37–8, 43 Messager, Annette, 21–8, 31, 36, 37, 38, 43 diamond: Cornelia Parker, 52

drawing conventional categorization of, 15 feminism and see feminism and fine art drawing independent practice, 4 noun and verb, 109 Bowen, Siân, 49 Derrida, Jacques, 34 Hauptman, Susan, 51, 52, 54, 65–6 Maggi, Marco, 29 Parker, Cornelia, 51, 54 Rockburne, Dorothea, 51, 53, 54, 57 Drawing Center (New York), 8, 121n17 drawing near, 12, 14, 122n25 Drawing Now: 1955–75 (exhibition), 3–4, 119n4 Drawing Now: 8 Propositions (exhibition), 4–5, 100, 116, 117 Drawing Papers, 8, 9, 121n17 Drawing Room (London), 5 Drawing Today (Godfrey), 6 Drawing Which Makes Itself (Rockburne), 53–4, 54–6, 57–8, 59, 63, 66, 74–5, 128n8 Drill Hall Gallery, 5 dualism, 23–4, 57, 128n16 agency, 70, 71, 72 allotropy, 61–2, 114 Bennett, Jane, 67 both/and of drawing, 54, 73 Butler, Judith, 56 Grosz, Elizabeth, 58–9 the interval, 109 Rockburne, Dorothea, 54, 56, 57, 59, 74–5 undone by dialogue, 27 dwelling, 49

INDEX

Hauptman, Susan, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 73, 128n19 Khedoori, Toba, 99–100, 100–1, 102, 112 Maggi, Marco, 28, 29–30, 36 Messager, Annette, 24, 36 Parker, Cornelia, 59, 63, 66, 68, 69 Rockburne, Dorothea, 54, 55–6, 57–8, 66, 74 Schneemann, Carolee, 89, 91, 93, 96–7, 98 ‘conversation’, meanings of, 49 conversion: Siân Bowen, 42–3 corporeal feminisms, 18, 56–7, 58, 118 corporeality see body coverage: Marco Maggi, 37–8 crayon as weapon, 27–8 criticism, language of: Toba Khedoori, 99, 100–4 curating: feminist praxis, 9

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eclipses, 28, 30, 31, 49 Bowen, Siân, 44, 45, 47 Maggi, Marco, 30, 31 ‘écriture corporelle’, 93 elaboration: Carolee Schneemann, 91 ellipses, 20, 48–9 Bowen, Siân, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46–7, 47–8 conversations, 13 Irigaray, Luce, 28 Maggi, Marco, 30, 31, 37–8 Messager, Annette, 28, 31, 37 tropes, 18 Emin, Tracey, 5 Emslander, Fritz, 101 End of the Line, The (exhibition), 5 Engagement Ring Drawing (As Long as it Lasted) (Parker), 52, 71–2, 129n26 essence, 88 Eva Hesse Drawing (de Zegher), 8 FA21, Atlas of Movements, Movement #52 (The Frankfurt Walks) (Fink), 87, 110–11 Farthing, Stephen, 84 female desire Messager, Annette, 23, 24, 37 Schneemann, Carolee, 94 feminism and fine art drawing history, 4, 6–11, 113 interface, 2, 11–20, 113–14, 117 mind-body dualism and, 61 feminisms, corporeal, 18, 58, 118 feminist criticism, 56, 94–5 Schneemann, Carolee, 92, 94, 95 feminist theory, 108–10, 113–14 dualism, 56–7, 61

embodied subjectivity, 70–1, 109–10 Fer, Briony, 121n23 fiction, 124n7 Bowen, Siân, 45, 49 Hauptman, Susan, 60–1 Messager, Annette, 21–2, 24–5 Fink, Christoph, 85, 87, 105, 106–7, 110–11 fold, the Bowen, Siân, 47 Derrida, Jacques, 34–5 Hauptman, Susan, 60–1, 64 Maggi, Marco, 36 Rockburne, Dorothea, 53, 55, 56, 57–8, 59 Foster, Nicola, 35 fragility, 82 Bowen, Siân, 41 Khedoori, Toba, 102–3, 103–4, 106 Schneemann, Carolee, 93–4 ‘Frozen Voices’ (Addison), 39 Fruehsorge, Jan-Philipp, 41 gender, articulation of, 77–8 genre, meanings of, 36 genres, speaking across, 118 Bowen, Siân, 44, 47, 49 Maggi, Marco, 29, 34, 36, 37, 38 Messager, Annette, 36, 37 Schneemann, Carolee, 97 global approach: fine art drawing, 119n6 Godfrey, Tony, 6 gold, 66, 67–8 Hauptman, Susan, 51, 59, 71–2 Parker, Cornelia, 52, 59, 68, 71–2 Gott, Ted, 6–7 Grosz, Elizabeth, 35, 58–9, 67, 86, 109, 110

drawing and, 18, 117 meaning and: Marco Maggi, 37 liminality, 86, 111–12 line, the: Dorothea Rockburne, 53 Lines of the Hand (Messager), 27–8 Lines of Vision (exhibition), 7 Löffler, Petra, 93 Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 8 Loughborough University, 5 Lovatt, Anna, 75, 130n36 love, 23

in-between, the, 58, 86, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112; see also interval, the Inside the Visible (exhibition), 9, 10, 48 intentionality, 70, 71, 74, 89–90, 91, 94, 96 interval, the, 3, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 86, 88, 91, 104, 108–10, 111,112, 113–14, 118, 130n1 Fink, Christoph, 110 Maggi, Marco, 36 see also in-between, the intra-action, 62, 67, 69–70, 76, 77 Irigaray, Luce, 28, 35, 43, 49, 108, 109, 122n25

Maggi, Marco, 28–36, 37–8 male creative genius, myth of, 36–7, 38 Manet, Edouard, 92, 95 Manifesta (exhibition), 110 Maria Magdalena (after Goltzius), 48 marks, 34, 54, 67, 70, 82, 98, 103–4, 108 Bowen, Siân, 46, 47; see also watermarking: Bowen, Siân Fink, Christoph, 105, 106, 107, 110 Khedoori, Toba, 104 Maggi, Marco, 29, 31, 35 Messager, Annette, 24, 26–7, 37 Rockburne, Dorothea, 53, 54, 55, 57–8, 59, 74–5 Schneemann, Carolee, 89, 90, 92 marriage: Cornelia Parker, 68, 74 Martin, Michael Craig, 84 masculine-normative tradition, 24, 35–6, 38, 43, 92–3, 96 masculine subject, 37, 38, 70–1

Kahlo, Frida, 75 Khedoori, Toba, 85, 87, 98–105, 105–6, 112 Kunstverein Frankfurt, 110 language criticism: Toba Khedoori, 99, 100–4

INDEX

Hauptman, Susan, 51, 54, 63, 64, 70, 73–4, 75, 76–7, 128n19 Self-Portrait (with feathers), 51, 52, 59–61, 66, 71–2, 75 Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna, 51, 52, 65–6, 71–2, 73, 75, 76, 78 Hayward Gallery, 5 Heemskerck, Jacob van, 39, 41 Herbert, Robert L., 127n2 Hill, Rebecca, 2, 86, 108–9 history, project of: Siân Bowen, 44 Hoptman, Laura, 4–5, 116, 119n4

151

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matter: materials and materialisation, 14, 51–78, 88, 97–8, 107–8, 113–14, 116, 117–18, 129n22; ‘new’ materialism, 18, 123n31 see also Fink, Christoph; Hauptman, Susan; Khedoori, Toba; Parker, Cornelia; Rockburne, Dorothea; Schneemann, Carolee medium and surface, 51 Memoirs of the Blind (Derrida), 34–5, 36, 37 Mendieta, Ana, 94–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 34–5, 61 Meskimmon, Marsha, 133–4 Messager, Annette, 21–8, 31, 36, 37, 38, 43, 124n10 metals, precious, 66 Mirrored: I (Bowen), 42–3, 47–8 Mirrored: II. Conversation (Bowen), 42–3, 47, 48 mirrors: Siân Bowen, 41, 42–3, 44, 46, 48 Möbius strip, 58–9, 67 modernism: objectification, 95–6 Molesworth, Helen, 9 Morris, Robert, 92, 95–6 multi-dimensionality: Marco Maggi, 29 Murphy, Jay, 91–2 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 3–5, 8, 100, 116, 119n4, 128n8 mutability, 36 Grosz, Elizabeth, 58 Maggi, Marco, 34, 38 matter, 71, 76–7 meaning in, 18 Messager, Annette, 25, 26–7 mutuality Schneemann, Carolee, 91, 96

subjects and objects, 67, 70, 71, 72, 118 My Little Effigies (Messager), 27 myth, 26, 27, 31, 43 male creative genius, 36–7, 38 Zembla, Nova, 39, 40, 41 see also origin myths Nancy, Jean-Luc, 18, 80 National Gallery of Victoria, 5 New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), 88 Newman, Avis, 8, 10, 82 non-hierarchical relationships: difference, 2 Nova Zembla, 39–48 Novaya Zemlya Effect, 45, 47 objects Hauptman, Susan, 73–4 Parker, Cornelia, 74 Rockburne, Dorothea, 74 vitality of, 71, 72 observer and observed, 68 Oerlemans, Reinout, 39 Olympia (Manet), 92, 95 Ombre dessinée sur le mur, L’ (Messager), 21–7, 28, 36, 124n1 On Line (exhibition), 5, 8 opening, 19, 80–112, 113–14, 130n1 optical mirage: Novaya Zemlya Effect, 45, 47 origin myths, 22, 25 of art Derrida, Jacques, 34–5, 37 Pliny the Elder, 23–4, 37 of drawing, 38–9, 49 outside in, 58, 67, 68, 70, 72–3, 74–5, 76

process, drawing as, 15, 16, 19, 54, 70, 73, 88 Hauptman, Susan, 52 Maggi, Marco, 37–8 Messager, Annette, 22–3, 24 Parker, Cornelia, 63, 66–7 Rockburne, Dorothea, 57, 63, 66–7, 74–5 Rancière, Jacques, 124n7 Rattemeyer, Christian, 119n4 Re-Aligning Vision (exhibition), 5 reciprocity: drawing and feminism, 10 Refuge/Site (Bowen), 44–5 relationality: the feminine, 10 Relyea, Lane, 100 representation, 49, 62–3, 70, 72–3, 77, 97, 108, 129n22 Fink, Christoph, 107 Hauptman, Susan, 64, 66, 71, 73, 78 Khedoori, Toba, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 112 Messager, Annette, 27 Möbius strip, 58–9 Parker, Cornelia, 63–4, 71 Schneemann, Carolee, 95–6 Reust, Hans Rudolf, 101 Rijksmuseum, 40 Ring Drawings (Parker), 63–4, 66, 74; see also Engagement Ring Drawing (As Long as it Lasted) (Parker); Wedding Ring Drawing (circumference of a living room) (Parker) rings Hauptman, Susan, 59 Parker, Cornelia, 52, 59, 63, 64, 68, 69, 74

INDEX

painting, drawing and, 6, 98 Khedoori, Toba, 99–102 Messager, Annette, 23–4, 27 Schneemann, Carolee, 94, 96, 97 paper Bowen, Siân, 44, 45, 47, 48 Hauptman, Susan, 66 paper: Cornelia Parker, 66 Rockburne, Dorothea, 53, 54, 55–6, 57–8, 66 see also background: potentiality; white page Parker, Cornelia, 51, 54, 75, 78, 130n35 Ring Drawings, 63–4, 66, 70, 74, 76–7 Engagement Ring Drawing (As Long as it Lasted), 52, 71–2, 129n26 Wedding Ring Drawing (circumference of a living room), 52, 59, 60, 68–9, 71–2 past, the, 49, 77, 88 Bowen, Siân, 40, 41, 43–4, 47 Schneemann, Carolee, 93, 96 see also time Pensionnaires, Les (Messager) see Boarders, The (Messager) Perry, Gillian, 130n35 Petheridge, Deanna, 86, 111–12 phallocentrism, challenge to, 2 Pijbes, Wim, 39 place see space Pliny the Elder, 23–4, 37 Pollock, Jackson, 92, 93–4, 96 potentiality: background, 82, 97–8, 98–9, 103, 104, 106, 107 prepositions, 116–17

153

DRAWING DIFFERENCE

Rockburne, Dorothea, 51, 74–5, 76–7, 128n8, 130n36 Drawing Which Makes Itself, 53–4, 54–6, 57–8, 59, 63, 66, 70, 74–5, 128n8 Rose, Bernice, 3, 4, 73 Royal College of Art, 5 Russell, John, 127n2

154

Sawdon, Phil, 133–4 Schendel, Mira, 38 Schneemann, Carolee, 81, 87, 88– 94, 95–7, 98, 111, 131nn3–4 sedimentation materialisation, 62, 63, 64, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77–8 tropes, 18 Self-Portrait (with feathers) (Hauptman), 51, 52, 59–61, 66, 71–2, 73–4, 75 Self-Portrait as a Prima Donna (Hauptman), 51, 52, 65–6, 71–2, 73–4, 75, 78 Semmel, Joan, 94–5 Serra, Richard, 54 Seurat, Georges, 51 sex: matter of the body, 56 sexual difference, 2–3, 38–9, 48, 76, 86, 107–8, 109, 115; see also subjectivity, sexed Derrida, Jacques, 35 Hauptman, Susan, 64 Schneemann, Carolee, 91, 92, 96 sexuality: Dorothea Rockburne, 130n36 shadow, 49, Bowen, Siân, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48 Maggi, Marco, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 38

Messager, Annette, 21–8, 36, 37 Sherman, Cindy, 75 silence, 49 Bowen, Siân, 41, 43, 44, 48 Silent Freeze (Bowen), 41–4; see also Barents Sea (Bowen); Mirrored: I (Bowen); Mirrored: II. Conversation (Bowen) Site (Schneemann and Morris), 92, 95–6 slides, blind: Marco Maggi, 29–36, 37, 43 slowness: Marco Maggi, 37–8 space, 19, 82, 86, 88, 95, 97–8, 108, 113, 115 Bowen, Siân, 41, 45, 47–8 Fink, Christoph, 105, 106–7, 110, 111 Khedoori, Toba, 99, 101–2, 102–3, 104–5, 106, 112 Maggi, Marco, 36, 38 Messager, Annette, 22–3, 24, 26, 28, 31, 36, 37 Parker, Cornelia, 52, 63, 68 Rockburne, Dorothea, 59 Schneemann, Carolee, 89, 90–1, 93, 96, 97, 111 speculum, 43 Stage of Drawing, The (exhibition), 8 Stoddard, Hugh, 75 ‘story’, notion of: Marco Maggi, 34 subjectivity drawing, 34 embodied, 14, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 74–5, 76, 78, 109–10, 111 the interval, 86, 108 sexed, 18, 37, 57, 58, 64, 75, 108 drawing, 1–2, 17, 19, 76, 109 Hauptman, Susan, 64, 65–6, 67

techne, 129n30 thinking, 86, 89, 99, 102, 103–4, 108, 109, 111 binary see dualism threshold, 86, 108, 109, 111–12 time, 70, 76, 80, 86, 88, 108, 113, 115 Bowen, Siân, 41, 43–4, 47 Fink, Christoph, 105, 106–7, 110, 111 Hauptman, Susan, 72 Khedoori, Toba, 99, 101–2, 104–5, 106 Parker, Cornelia, 52, 69, 72 Rockburne, Dorothea, 74 Schneemann, Carolee, 89, 90–1, 94, 96, 97, 111 Toba Khedoori: Gezeichnete Bilder (exhibition), 100 TRACEY, 5 transgressions: dialogue, 27 tropes, 14–15, 17, 18–19, 113–14; see also specific tropes ‘twice-two’, 42, 43, 44, 47–8, 48–9 Unfolding Space (Meskimmon and Sawdon), 133n1

ungendered art, 75–6 University of Texas, 5 Untitled (Doors) (Khedoori), 87, 112 Untitled (Walls) (Khedoori), 85, 99–100, 102–3, 104, 105–6 Up To And Including Her Limits (Schneemann), 81, 87, 88–94, 95, 96–7, 98, 111

INDEX

Maggi, Marco, 35–6, 38 Rockburne, Dorothea, 67 Schneemann, Carolee, 92, 93 see also sexual difference surface and medium, 51 Suspending the Ephemeral (exhibition), 40–8

Van Wagner, Judy Collischan, 7 Viso, Olga, 101 Voiles, Les (Messager), 38 Volatile Bodies (Grosz), 58–9 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 9 Wakefield, Neville, 101 watermarking: Siân Bowen, 42–3, 44, 45, 46, 47 Wedding Ring Drawing (circumference of a living room) (Parker), 52, 59, 60, 68–9, 71–2 white page, 97–8, 127n2 Wilke, Hannah, 94–5 wire: Cornelia Parker, 52, 59, 63, 68, 69 woman artist, the, 75–8, 94, 96 women, drawing and: history, 4–11 women artists: representation at exhibitions, 4–5, 120n7 Women Artists at the Millennium (de Zegher), 9, 10 ‘women’s art’, 75–6, 77–8 ‘work’ of art, 16, 95, 122n28

155

Drawing In

Series Editors Russell Marshall (Loughborough University) Marsha Meskimmon (Loughborough University) Phil Sawdon (Loughborough University) In recent years, ‘thinking though drawing’ has become a ubiquitous trope – not only in the arts, but in the sciences and humanities too. This affords an exciting opportunity for sustained intellectual dialogues to emerge within, between and without traditional disciplinary boundaries. Drawing In provides a space where new perspectives and critical approaches in drawing can be brought together and explored. This innovative series includes books for general readers, scholarly monographs and edited anthologies – which emerge from the diverse fields of art and design history and theory, fine art, design, drawing pedagogy, technology, geography, science, engineering and even medicine. Some are practice-led and driven by creative textual strategies that move beyond the page; all contribute original perspectives on how drawing facilitates and manifests the production, acquisition and understanding of knowledge. Published and Forthcoming Titles: Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon Drawn to Print: Drawing South African Narratives from Print Art Marion Arnold Looking at Life Drawing: Nudity, Spectatorship and Popular Art Practice Margaret Mayhew Sketches: Speculations on Drawing Rob Ward For further information please contact: [email protected]