Notes on the Drawing Phenomenology conference Loughborough September 19 – 20th Day Two

The first presentation on day two was by Anne Douglas; Drawing. Ideas. Society.

Anne is based in Aberdeen, home of Tim Ingold and is therefore very aware of how important his anthropological contributions have been to drawing theory.
She posits two related concepts:
The arts sensitise us to ideas and artists sensitise us to the world.
However the role of the artist changes.
So as an anthropologist she asks how does drawing hold an idea and how might drawing help society recognise ideas? She cited The Pleasure in Drawing by Jean-Luc Nancy as instrumental in her thinking about this.
Douglas had worked with someone else to develop a response to making drawings in public places. This other person had developed what she called a score, but what I would have called an instruction sheet, this laid out a series of tasks for Douglas to perform.
E.g. On day one find something and then….On day two hear something and draw it. Etc. etc.
This took me back to the time I co-operated in a post card exchange with the Fluxus artist George Brecht in the mid 1970s. He was also into music and so his instructions often involved you having to do something musical. I’ve lost all the cards as it was so long ago, but I clearly remember he sending me a set of instructions to travel from Leeds to Dublin, to get myself a violin and to play it, no matter how badly, whilst walking backwards over the Ha’penny Bridge. 
Douglas showed us drawings she had done of the sound of cars passing, pointing out how you begin to notice things when you are asked to undertake such tasks. She became attuned to sound differences and the problems of re-creating them as drawings.
Her work had moved from straightforward drawings on paper to documented drawings on video. The path taken by a line being repeated, until its ritual possibilities emerged. Movement eventually led to place, place became space, the particularity of a particular space in a place became the road.
I was reminded of the way new paths emerge. A building is perhaps knocked down, an individual sees the possibility of using the now open space as a short cut to somewhere and they pick their way across the new waste ground. Someone else notices their footprints and decides to take the same route, until eventually after many others have followed, a path is trodden through the rubble and smoothed out by many feet.

This is what my understanding of her idea of ‘repetition leads to path-finding’ meant.

However Douglas was perhaps more interested in the idea that when things are repeated the sameness reveals difference. I.e. there will always be variations, no matter how slight.

This led her to look at pattern and its importance.

Her initial two questions, how do the arts sensitise us to ideas and how can artists sensitise us to the world? Still needed answering. She began to suggest that an idea could be seen as a concept or a perspective on something. This led to issues about formal possibilities and the idea that in drawing, movement conjoins with the leaving of traces and it is these traces that give rise to form.

Therefore to have an idea is to make something visible, it is the process of showing.

This she relates to Jean-Luc Nancy’s connection between drawing and desire, desire being centred on what might be possible.

This was interesting in that it raised for me that awkward relationship between drawing as illustration and drawing as realisation. Is Douglas taking us back to a time when drawing was always seen as giving form to an existing idea? This is how Christ would have looked on the cross, this is how a good workers’ co-operative should look, this is how a man should look, this is how a city of the future will look etc. However many drawings simply arrive from their being made, (see Sawdon’s presentation) the maker is stumbling around trying to catch the drawing as it happens. So what sort of desire is this? Is this a form of sexual coupling? A desire to be at one with the arriving drawing and a faint reminder of that myth whereby the first human was both male and female, a personification that was split asunder to form our existing genders. This myth was once used to explain why men and women have desires for each other; what they are subconsciously looking for is to return to their primordial state of oneness. Alfred Gell had been referenced several times during these conference presentations and he used the term, 'necessary misconceptions' to describe how different cultures had dealt with the magic of similarity. He pointed to the fact that "shadows, reflections in a mirror, visions and even mental representations of distant objects, are all caused by thin membranes, which continually detach themselves from the surface of all bodies and move onwards in all directions through space". I like to think that it is this still prevalent intuition that enables artists to go on capturing these emissions and operating in that space between perception and desire. Once again I'm thinking about the phenomenology of the image, something that at some point I need to clarify, if only for myself.

Ross Clark and Keith Crome presented ‘Merleau-Ponty: The space of drawing’.

They were interested in tracing the thread of drawing in Ponty’s work. In particular they were revisiting his text Eye and Mind.

This presentation was about lived experience, information it was stated, travels through the body. We were taken back to Descartes’ mind/body divide and asked why modern man distrusts experience?

However as someone who has done a lot of work with perspective and who has played around with shifting eye points, horizon lines, vanishing points and measuring points, I don’t think its as easy as that. You can look at perspective as hinge between the observer and the world, the observer being an integral part of a world that reveals itself as a continually unfolding set of relationships. Ponty was not an artist and Ross Clark and Keith Crome I felt gave him too much credit for getting us to realise that we were forgetting how vital lived experience was. It was pointed out that classical drawing privileges the outline and that form is privileged as a network of relationships understood by geometry, Descartes in turn being seduced by how perspective can be used to show how these relationships work.

Probably the most interesting part of the presentation for me was the tracing back of how Descartes arrived at his ideas by looking at perspective diagrams. Perspective works by having an eye point or viewing point that is set outside of what is being looked at. This eye point directs all the depiction towards itself, it is in effect God like. However by standing outside of what is depicted we cannot really experience it, we are not part of it and in reality we are inseparable from our experiences of the world. (I'm reminded again of Gell's description of emission theory as elaborated in Lucretius' 'On the Nature of Things', this together with other really interesting ideas about looking can be found in 'A Natural History of Vision' by Nicholas J. Wade and Nicholas Wade)

Cezanne was used as the prime example of how to build a set of principles that undermine Descartes mind body dualism.

Cezanne was in effect sensitising us to ideas, (see Anne Douglas presentation) his work holds up a way of thinking, bringing into our awareness the ambiguous world of perception. This being another example of art as a sort of truth. Art not being about fidelity but about illumination. Truth being a judgement on ourselves.

I wasn’t sure about all this, and as much as I like Cezanne and have many times cited his ‘petit sensations’ as key to an understanding of how we might look at the world, I think that Ponty’s work is too driven by its own rhetoric and he forgets the nature of writing. Writing leads towards concepts but painting doesn’t. Painting is not about philosophy, concepts about the impossibility of distinguishing between shape and colour are meaningless outside of the act of painting, because on paper they become black and white facts and not simply an integral part of a process.

Note to self, remember this when writing about own work.

There were some good lies spoken, “Cezanne’s work is a representation of lived experience”, and “Art is the primordial power that reveals how the world comes into presence,” being the best.  I’m afraid I’m too old and cynical, I would like to believe these things but I live in the wrong time and place. I would like to have been around when ‘rt’ was still a useful word, the Indo-Aryan noun adjective that meant the dynamic process by which the world creates itself, which is I think what Clark and Crome were getting at. We (the world and ourselves) are always going to be an inseparable aggregate, self awareness is just a useful (to ourselves) fiction.

Juliet MacDonald’ ‘Retracing the drawings of a chimpanzee’ was something I had seen before when she presented at York and it raised similar questions for me. Yes it does ask us to probe the idea of what human interiority means but more importantly it raises questions as to how even a historical unpicking of an experiment that must have caused the continuation of an animal’s captivity to be extended, by the introduction of meaningless extra drawing activities, could be justified. I was reminded of how interesting Desmond Morris used to seem, but found the imagery too disturbing and the underlying narrative too difficult to be able to concentrate on how gestalt psychology could be used to analyse the chimpanzee’s responses to the situation. I was reminded of the important distinction between a state of wonder and the state of knowing, but the spiritual recognition that is implied by the distinction was not followed through, perhaps this is the nature of PhD thinking, it's about knowledge but not necessarily wisdom. At some point I will read Surface Encounters, Thinking with Animals and Art by Ron Broglio, but perhaps at a time when my cat once again forces me to question where I am in the species pecking order.

As it says on the tin, “Broglio considers contemporary artists who take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms, developing languages of interspecies expression that challenge philosophy and fashion new concepts for animal studies”.  But, I ask myself, what does it do for the animals? I would love to have access to a language of inter species expression, so I'm sure would my cat, but beyond open the door and feed me, we have never managed a proper conversation.

Clive Caseaux’s presentation ‘A phenomenology of indexical drawing’ reminded us of the semiotic distinctions, icon, symbol and index, An Icon has a physical resemblance to the signified, the thing being represented. A photograph is a good example as it resembles what it depicts, so is a painting of an apple. A Symbol has no resemblance between the signifier and the signified. The connection between them must be culturally learned. Numbers and alphabets being examples. An Index shows evidence of what’s being represented. A good example is using an image of smoke to indicate fire or a cardiograph to indicate a heart condition.

Caseaux was interested in the fact that objects leave traces on one another. (The marks of contact). The artists he was looking at included Neha Choksi who makes rubbings and frottage, Cai Guo-Qiang, who works with gunpowder, (see this earlier post on his work) and Daro Montag whose Bioglyphs, are made by placing fruit on film and allowing the film's chemical surface to be consumed by microorganisms before producing prints from the now partly degraded film-stock.

Daro Montag

Caseaux believes that indexical drawings are central to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas. They are an expression of the embodied condition, one thing always being embodied in another. These works are about the articulacy of materials and the embodied nature of that articulacy. This means that artists will chose materials heavily pregnant with effect. Marks therefore will have a significance that goes beyond the simple transfer of the physical effect. I.e. the effect leads to affect.

This reminded me of the way Duchampian aesthetics was originally introduced to me when I first entered art college. What was important was the act of choosing an object to be art, because the activity of art was significant, the acts taken under its name were as well, the artist was therefore giving a raised significance to the chosen object. If the artist said it was art it was art. I couldn’t really see any difference in Caseaux’s presentation, except that he was presenting this as part of the ‘material turn’.

Ponty’s interest in synaesthesia was then cited and his use of the term autofiguration, i.e. that something could be about itself. (I think this is further opened out and interrogated in ‘Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty: Excursions in Hyper-Dialectic’ By Rajiv Kaushik)

Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is not a thing but a set of relationships. An argument that I recognise from several other sources including Fritjof Capra’s work on autopoiesis, which refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. Capra’s work sought to make us more aware of the interconnectedness of things and the systems that they were embedded within, whilst Ponty was trying to make us aware of the interconnecting network of sensations, (synaesthesia) (see post on synaesthesia)

Caseaux is though more interested in what he called the double nature of these types of events. An artwork could be a depiction of a scene and of itself. About the world and in the world. If we return to Cai Guo-Qiang’s work in the Whitworth, we can see that on the one hand it is a traditional depiction of a landscape, but on the other hand it is a record of the effects of gunpowder as a markmaking tool. Caseaux used the term “a coming to itself of the visible”. The art object and the world entwine.

Caseaux wants to know how can a phenomenology of drawing be abstracted from this? He believes that the communication between the senses, is much clearer if we see the body as a schema for inter-sensory communication. The hand that touches is part of the world it touches. (This goes back to the counter-Descartes argument, we cant stand outside of what we experience, we are always part of the experience).

Caseaux then goes on to argue that the technologies of art become part of this synaesthesia as they interlock with the body schema. (By this I decided he meant that just as the hand that touches is part of the world it touches, the materials used by the artist become part of that same complex. However the choice issue now re-emerges, because each material’s capacity to operate, (whether it has the capacity to be lumpen, watery, globular etc. etc.) will be partly as the result its potential to do things and an artist's awareness of these things, the artist will have chosen materials specifically. Autofiguration in placing an emphasis on the materials and their possibilities, I would argue misses out the issue of crafting, which relies on a growing empathy between a maker and the materials used.

Caseaux thus asks two questions:

What materials do we use? and what is the articulacy of materials?

In order to answer this, Caseaux states that “a material’s articulacy is dependent on the relation between ourselves and the material”. I.e. we can make good and bad choices in the materials we use. Materials should be seen as agents in the production of art and we should be more attuned to the effects materials are capable of producing.

At this point I must admit I was getting a bit irritated as this was becoming one of those reductio ad absurdum type of arguments, whereby all other issues are left out and the new post Bennett/Barad materials dialogue becomes the basis for a new materials led phenomenology, but what the hell I have to follow his argument to the end.

We are asked to think about choosing materials, new ones or old traditional ones. The traces left by materials working we are asked to think of now as a type of coming into being, a cause and effect, which is seen as a type of experience and all experience can be theorised a being phenomenological.

I felt that I had been levered into a position by a very crude lever, one that did not seem to acknowledge that all things used to make a mark, whether this be gunpowder or graphite, have always been chosen by the artist and there has always been a reciprocal relationship between the artist and the chosen material. This has been written about by many people and I couldn’t see why so much effort had been made to argue that this was a specifically Merleau-Ponty thing. I had sat through a lot of presentations by now and was starting to get tired. Yes its about cause and effect and yes it is all a type of experience. However what I was beginning to miss was the poetry of the experience. Such as when David Rosand in 'Drawing Acts' talks about Michelangelo's chalk drawings, he states; "There is a tactile and therefore somatic dimension in stroking the chalk, that keeps the artist in constant, responsible and responsive touch with the emerging creation."

Lisa Munelly had come all the way from New Zealand to deliver her paper, ‘Being in-between’.

Munelly cited Henri Bergson’s ‘Matter and Memory’ as being of importance to her own concept of place and its relation to movement. She was particularly interested in the notion of the body as a hyphen. Drawing was seen as in the body and well as done by the body. She had used charcoal for many years and began by showing us an old image of a typical life-room charcoal drawing. However she had had an epiphany one day when she had decided to rub out half an image she had made, at one point it became simply charcoal and erased charcoal, it was now an image about itself. Charcoal could now be the focus for her and not charcoal’s ability to help her render images of things.

Bergson was very interested in time and time was now becoming central to Munelly’s work. Once the figure was abandoned new details began to emerge. How much dust was generated? How was the dust spreading out across the floor as the drawing developed? These types of things cold be documented and documentation now became central to the process. Munelly showed us a very interesting film of one of her drawing performances. She was drawing with charcoal around the edge of a piece of A1 paper. As she progressed we realised she was using symmetry to develop a compositional structure to the piece she was making. She spoke about the harmony between the tool and the hand, the tool becoming what the hand makes it. (This was an interesting take on what Caseaux had introduced us to previously). The drawing shown was about theatre, it was a performance that was filmed that was staged so that intimations of the theatre were unavoidable. The surface that was drawn upon became part of the set and the paper she was drawing around was a prop. I found this fascinating especially because of earlier presentations which had also been filmed, but which did not refer to the issues of performance within documentation. Just as Robert J. Flaherty developed a type of docudrama when shooting Nanook of the North back in 1922, I feel that many of these documents are in fact fictions. So Mumelly by emphasising the theatrical nature of the actions, was I thought being true to her idea of drawing as a type of unfolding. She also mentioned The ontological sketchbook by Robert Clarke an essay that can be found in the book ‘Recto Verso: Redefining the Sketchbook’, whereby Clarke talks about a drawing being a dialogue or conversation. As she began folding her sheet of paper I was immediately reminded of my recent posts on folding and of how central folding is to revealing the geometry of a sheet of paper. As the drawing developed there became a dialogue between clarity and obscurity, the fact that the decisions were mirrored reflected a play on opposites, one side always seeking to develop more significance than another, the artist then having to work on eliminating the becoming off balance. Munelly pointed to the binary pairing of other things such as past and future and x and y co-ordinates and moved on to develop an idea of more triadic relationships with the body itself as the third part. She stated that the body was also a measure as well as another co-ordinate, but that because of these issues drawing was itself in this type of work an act of measurement. She went on to site Jean Fisher’s’ Drawing between the map and the territory’, it is what is measured as well as the way we measure, or as Fisher put it, “a journey performing self world relations”. (2011)

The performative aspects of a drawing's self world relations continue well after the artist has gone, this video of the de-installation of one of Munelly's drawings being a case in point.  

Lisa Munelly: drawing performance

Duncan Bullen gave the final presentation before the afternoon’s workshops, ‘Drawing Presence’. This was about making drawings as a way of exploring place as a catalyst for lived experiences. How can place be a catalyst for lived experiences? My reading was that we experience places as a series of textures and Bullen sets out to collect those textures and organise them in such a way that they can be re-experienced in the context of exhibited drawings. 

Systematic collection of textures by making rubbings

He is also interested in drawing as mindfulness. By gathering one mark after another in a very systematic way, his drawings “hover on the edge of perception”. (I think by this what is meant is that when a field of marks is made the eyes find it impossible to focus and what becomes generated by the brain is an impression of movement, and this illusion caused by an over stimulation of the optic nerve means that what is perceived is problematic, it being not the record of an external stimuli but a record of eye/brain function) This is similar to many optical illusions and some of the effects made by Bridget Riley’s early work. 

Two examples of Duncan Bullen's work

Basically, Bullen’s drawings set out to explore how our spatial understanding works when it tries to interpret flat images.

Richard Gregory standing outside the shop that give him an idea

One of the key researcher’s texts covering this area is Richard Gregory’s ‘Eye and Brain’ and if you are at all interested in these issues it is a key read. Bullen cites Gregory’s statement that pictures are paradoxes; something of reality and something of the self.  Another key theorist he mentioned is Dewey, who’s ‘Art and Experience’ is another text no one who is serious about art education can do without.
We were asked to consider the phrase “the lived body”, and how it often lies in the background of our thinking or awareness. In order to fully appreciate these experiences Bullen suggests that meditation can help. His use of reductive systems and geometric based art allowing him to think of his practice as a form of mindfulness. His images could be thought of as visualisations of mindfulness. Buddhist practices and associated discipline are central to this understanding. The discipline of mindfulness therefore becomes the discipline of drawing. Practice becomes a ritual of life, ritual becomes a type of attention.
Bullen asks the question, “What is it to be attentive to your own experience?” and cites Francisco J. Varela’s writings on the embodied mind as central to his thinking.
Bullen suggests that we need to think about the fact that, “the world is not about me” and that our aim is to be “the best possible nobody”. He goes on to cite Mark Epstein, who’s text ‘The Trauma of everyday life’ looks at how Buddhist practices can be used to help heal and more importantly accept the trauma of everyday life as part of our lived awareness. Art therefore becomes a form of meditation and its practitioners are often meditating on art. (I wasn’t so sure about this, my wife is a practicing Buddhist and we have often talked about how my drawing is for me a type of meditative practice, my own feeling being that the key issue is ‘being lost in the moment’.)
Bullen then introduced the work of Alva Noë  a writer I had not come across before, but who I will now look at closely. In his book ‘Action in Perception’, he states, "Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us, it is something we do."
To perceive, is not just to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. Looking at what he is saying he seems very close to Dewey and I have used Dewey over and over again in my thoughts about both my own work and teaching. Bullen then states, “the world shows up for us but not for free”.
We are touched by the world through all our senses, but we also need to “come to our senses”, something that Bullen took from Jon Kabat-Zinn the teacher of mindfulness.
There were also workshops to attend, but by their very nature you cant really take notes when attending them. I attended the Phenomenology and Imagination Research Group collaborative drawing project and a British Museum project looking at translation, both of which were interesting.

As you can see from some of my comments sometimes a conference is hard going, but they are always worth it. No matter what you might think individually of a presentation, there will always be some point of interest and for myself, usually another pile of books to read.

Notes from lastyear’s conference.