Drawing and Philosophy: Part one

Keith Arnatt: eating his own words 1971

A long time ago in a tutorial when I was studying for my DipAD in Newport, Keith Arnatt asked us a question. Were the artworks we were producing 'a priori' or 'a posteriori' statements? He had already sort of taken me under his wing and had decided that as a lad from the Black Country, with an accompanying Dudley accent, I needed educating and although I had a pretty good grasp of art history I didn't have any real understanding of contemporary art and associated philosophical theory and it was this that interested him at the time. So he made me read. British analytic philosophy, A. J. Ayer, early Wittgenstein, Russell etc. was linked to having to read Kant. Richard Wollheim's 'Art and its Objects' was critiqued via Strawson and W. V. O. Quine, John Austin was used as an example of how language games could be used and late Wittgenstein as to its use value. Chomsky was at the time seen more as a language theorist and we debated such issues as 'can there be a private language?' via the writings of Rush Rhees. Semiotics was brought in via the Whorf Sapir hypothesis that language determines thought. It was a hard learning curve and one you only had to take on if you wanted to attend his tutorials, as he would put it, don't bother to come if you haven't prepared yourself. This early exposure was in fact really useful, it was rare when undertaking a DipAD to have to read so extensively into philosophy and because the then complementary studies department ran a series of other programs alongside the traditional art history lectures, such as the history of philosophy, classical music history and interpretation as well as understanding Egyptian poetry, as a young artist I began to get a grip on the fact that conceptual art was a fascinating and rewarding area to be involved in because it could embrace all forms of knowledge, not just art.
I have been through many different periods of both practical work and theoretical frameworks since then and see the business of art making in a very different way to the one that Keith was trying to expose me to at the time. However that initial exposure means that occasionally I do still turn my mind to the relationship between making art and philosophy and in particular the way that drawing can be understood from different philosophical standpoints.
So bare with me as I ramble around what is for me an issue I have had to in many ways argue internally against, because I'm not sure that making art is anything to do with establishing meaning.
So back to Keith Arnatt's original question. I would if in his tutorial now suggest that this was a question about knowledge. Does art give you 'a priori' or 'a posteriori' knowledge? For instance, if all art was determined by what Dickie would call the 'institutional theory of art', art would be a sort of game or set of rules and behaviours set out by the collective understanding of all those that were involved in this sub-group preoccupation. Then, if this was the case, the art produced would be known prior to experience, because it was the result of the rules set out beforehand, i. e. a priori. But if these works of art were to be regarded as particular types of responses to experience, or perceptions, then these works of art would have to be known empirically, i. e. a posteriori. This distinction could if you wanted it to, be used to divide artists into two categories, those that explore and test out the boundaries and possibilities of art and those that use art to reflect upon issues that they have come across in their various experiences of living in the world. Of course, being an artist also means that your experiences are often those that belong to the art world, (art education, other art, the gallery system, art magazines, books on art etc etc) and this world overlaps with and is part of reality or whatever else you might want to call the world of our collective experiences.
If you look at different critical stances you can again divide them in a similar way, for instance Greenberg's insistence on formalist, media specific thinking in relation to art, suggests that what he sees as art is a gradual re-testing or re-thinking of the elements that comprise of a work of art, art's abstracted elements can be formally investigated and no outside of art elements are needed for this investigation. However Rosenberg who invented the term, 'action painting' begins a process that allows us to see making art as a performance, and as we begin to take on board the implications of this, we begin to be able to define art as being 'experiential'. A 'happening' (a type of early performance art event) was by its very nature embedded in the world.
So what about drawing? If I follow the rules of perspective or technical drawing systems I ought to be able to produce a drawing by following the rules, 'a priori'. But if I was making a drawing from direct observation it would require me to have direct experience and to rely on my sense impressions to give me new knowledge, 'a posteriori'. I can already hear the arguments, such as, "What if I'm making a technical drawing of an object that I have to take measurements from?" or, "What if I'm working from observation, such as in the life room, but applying to my observations classical ways of rendering forms as taught by the academy?" I would say these are what Kant calls 'synthetic a priori' forms of knowledge, a sort of state in between. I would also point to the fact that I have often made technical drawings of forms that were not based on anything I have seen, but which were products of my exploring of possibilities of formal invention brought forth by following the rules of a particular perspective or isometric projection.
It is Cézanne's doubt that perhaps opens this area out for artists. Cézanne asks questions such as what is it to see anything? His drawings are not about capturing the solidity of things, but are more about recording the process of looking. Earlier art set out the rules for how the world should be depicted, but Cézanne moves our attention away from learning how to depict, towards something else, more akin to 'being aware of and questioning the processes of experiencing'.
This is an image from a how to draw an apple tutorial. The tutorial has some good tips. It suggests making marks that feel for the changes in surface direction, it asks you to consider the shadow as much as the apple and asks you to think about how the apple is lit and how you might indicate the space that the apple sits in.

From a 'How to' drawing book

Below is an apple as drawn by Cézanne At first sight in comparison to the drawing above it looks unfinished. There is an uncertainty about where the edge of the apple is, it seems to waver uncertainly and have no real solidity. You can see why so many people when looking at Cézanne's images derided them as being clumsy and unfinished.

Cézanne

You could argue that we get the art that we deserve, or another way of putting it is we get the art that epitomises the problems that face the society that we find ourselves in. In the case of Cézanne he sits very neatly alongside the rise of Existentialism as a philosophy of choice for the 20th century. This is a philosophy of doubt, one that tries to accept the bleak reality of a Godless universe. Plato's ideal forms seem a long way from here, a theory of forms that suggested that ideas of things in some way were the true reality. For instance the mathematical perfection of a triangle in Plato's ideal view, in some way lies behind all triangular forms, there being some sort of ideal of triangularity. This is rather like the position of the academy in relation to art. The academy's standardisation of how art was taught and its determining of classifications that not only told us what art was, but also which aspects of it were the most important, such as History painting being of most value, was a set of ideals that lay behind the everyday reality of an artist's job. The 'grand style' of 'high art' being the ideal, the perfection that lay behind art's reality.
But what this meant was artists working to set patterns and those patterns very quickly began to get more and more out of step with what was happening in society. However, there are several art schools that still follow certain aspects of the old academy training. Those of you reading this blog who are attending a British art school might not be aware that there are still art school traditions in existence that follow many of the rules of academic training. There are two main sorts, those that base their teaching on construction and those that use observational or 'realist' techniques. Here are some art schools with an emphasis on realism...

Angel academy of art (Florence)
Florence academy (Florence)
Charles Cecil (Florence)
Academy of realist art (Toronto)

and some art schools with an emphasis on construction...

Ashland academy of art (Ashland, USA)
Repin institute (St. Petersburg)
The drawing academy (Viborg, Denmark)
National Art school (Bulgaria)

These small art academies are very different to the British art school tradition which is founded on a position of the radical questioning of everything and which accepts Modernism as an essential even though now 'past' tradition. The Bauhaus and its forerunners such as the British arts and craft movement, are still important, but waining influences on British art and design education systems and a continuing link between the old concept of academic art training and what is provided today has gone. What has replaced the older tradition is one that is based on communication theories. Basically, if as human beings we use something, we will be capable of also using it for communication. The art school then becomes a sort of laboratory whereby things are played with in order to see what can be communicated with them. There is less of a divide between visual art, sound, smell, taste or touch in what people experiment with, many students working with immersive environments that can include all the senses. I think we have returned to a much older tradition, one whereby humans simply used what was available to communicate, and from what we know of communication from 30,000 years ago, sound, vision, touch, smell and taste were seen as a totality when our ancestors were creating cave visions. Eat the drugs, see the visions on the cave walls and dance to the sounds of drumming. However within that totality, there would have always been some people that just loved drumming and were better at it than others, and some that could make images much more convincingly than others.
Thinking about convincing images, it is interesting to see how many of the institutions offering constructional or observational training still call themselves 'academies' and of course Arnatt's question would still apply to their different training programs. Do they provide a model to work from or do they guide you towards being able to 'realise' your visual perceptions?
The schools that emphasise realism often use the Charles Bargue Drawing Course, which was devised in the 19th century and which guides students on how to copy from plaster casts, how to study and work from great master drawings and which finally gives instruction on how to draw from the life model. These three areas of study are usually blended in with other methods taken directly from French Academy teaching materials. There is an emphasis on training how to see. (Note not questioning it, but giving ways to shape what you see, for instance you are taught that by copying shadows you can arrive at a much more satisfactory observation of a figure, than by filling in outlines.) These courses emphasise technical mastery of traditional art materials and aim for success in 'realism', i.e. skin tone should be accurate, proportion correct etc. Most of the drawing is taught sight size, i.e. one to one size correspondence which leads to accuracy in measurement.
The schools that emphasise constructional methods use more sculptural drawing techniques. There is an emphasis on three dimensional awareness and how to use this to construct figure drawings. For instance tonal analysis using cross hatch techniques, planar construction or the simplification of continuously moving organic forms, so that they can be rendered more clearly within various perspectives. This system often works in layers. For instance in the first stage you make perspective boxes of say the pelvic girdle and trunk of the body, then on top of that you place drawings of bone structure and musculature, and then on top of that the formal distribution of human body shapes as understood from models.
Lots of guides exist which you can use if you want to take on board these systems.


Artists that use these techniques still have a role to play within our society. For instance because these techniques in many ways stand for 'tradition' and 'classical ideals' they are perfect for portraits of important people. These are not the skills of doubt or Existentialism, they are about certainty, mastery and ideal form. I have met artists trained in this way and all of the ones I have come across were from rich backgrounds, whereby they had the means to study in places like Florence for several years in order to acquire the skills and a ready made market for their work because their contacts could both afford and wanted to have on their walls art of this sort. (I am an unreconstructed socialist and therefore I will read these things as part of an ongoing class divide, I'm sure many people would have a counter argument) In some ways I envy the certainty and confidence these skill sets give and I realise that some students that arrive on the courses I teach on, find the constant questioning difficult and would much prefer a course that concentrated on the acquisition of a particular set of traditional skills. It may be that our society will at some time return to these 'traditional' values, but the only models we have for when this has happened are when the state has wished to exercise total control, such as under Nazi rule in Germany or the Stalinist regime in Russia. I personally would rather live with doubt and constant questioning than be part of a fascist regime. However I do realise there is a problem in relation to what is seen or understood as art. If a large number of people don't understand what something is, it may be that that something isn't functioning as well as it should do. For instance the Turner Prize rarely showcases any artists that make paintings, but the majority of people outside of the art establishment think of painting as what art is. The paradox here being that the majority of people don't look at paintings and use moving image media such as film, video and TV broadcast to get information and entertainment, which is exactly what todays media artists are using, all four of this year's shortlisted Turner prize artists being video makers. Steve McQueen as an artist has used video for a long time and his '12 Years a slave' cinematic production saw him cross over from a fine art audience to a cinema audience. But what is happening here? He makes art videos about his experiences of life and films that go on general release in cinemas. Both formats express ideas and communicate complex emotional engagements with life. Cinema audiences are not worried that his work can also be seen as art, but some art audiences question that his work might not be art. A writer such as Michelle Marder Kamhi in 'Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts', questions the whole edifice of contemporary art and suggests that it is only in traditional formats that we will find an art that communicates to 'ordinary people'. Craft and skill are allied closely to an emotional engagement in Kamhi's writings, but it is presumed that the necessary crafts are older ones such as those associated with painting, not those associated with the making of films. TV programs that follow artists with traditional skills are for myself interesting, in that they provide a new way of thinking about painting, one totally immersed in lens based media. These programs provide a storyline, often based on individual's back stories, a time based opening out of the process of making, (not unlike the British Bake Off), and of course there are winners and losers. Of the millions that watch these shows, how many people actually then go and buy paintings is questionable, but what these programs do is reinforce in the mind of the general public an idea of what art is. But if we think about certain theoretical stances, such as 'the medium is the message' a Marshall Mcluhan concept, he would argue that because the information is carried by broadcast media, what has happened here is that people are getting hooked on a TV program and that the paintings are incidental, they might as well be cakes or pots or any other products that require a set of skills to make them, it is the structure and nature of the broadcast medium that is controlling what is communicated.
People love to watch other people who have skills. There is something heartwarming and central to the human condition of being able to use hand/eye/brain coordination to make things, whether these be paintings, cakes, pots, sand castles or ice sculptures. I am really happy to watch those sandcastle makers that arrive when the tide is out on the shores of the Thames in London, they can quickly make sculptures that are good representations and people cast money into their buckets in payment for being entertained. I used to watch my grandfather French polish furniture, the process of stripping the wood down, preparing the surface and gradually layering the stains and polishes as he worked his rags into and across the woodgrain was a fascinating one and just as entertaining was the man next door who used to take his motorbike apart, repair it very carefully and rebuild it or my grandmother showing me how to bake a cake. I think what we have here is a reminder of 'embodied' thinking and that what certain types of paintings represent are repositories of old hand skills. There is something about developing a craft skill that is completely fulfilling and perhaps this is central to our conceptual view of how we need to operate as human beings. Collingwood when laying out his aesthetic theories thinks long and hard about crafts, and realised that for many people art and craft are inseparable, so he looks at how craft or technique needs to be used to bring about certain psychological states in an audience, however he finally decides that this is to restrict art to 'mere means'. In a time of post-Duchamp we are very aware that craft doesn't have to be involved in the making of an art statement, but and I think this is a big but, the celebration of hand/eye/brain coordination and the products this produces could be a very important thing to do if we are to help people attain a state of well being.
In the middle of this is a problem with breaking things down into different areas of thinking. The old art/science, art/craft divides are based on a sort of atomisation of thinking, ways of thinking whereby things have their proper place. Lots of academics spend many hours teasing out differences between things in order to determine their location within certain frameworks of thinking, music fans spend hours arguing that Classical music is much better than the Beatles and too many articles are written about whether or not painting is dead. In our real world everything is connected and we use all the things we come across in lots of different ways, to communicate what we think. I might drive a certain make of car to communicate status, hold my cigarette in a certain way to show I'm an intellectual, wear trainers to tell my friends I'm not longer in their gang, write sentences to declare war, make a film to tell a loss, sing a song to explain how England has changed. In moments of importance, such as births and deaths, we still need rituals and if you think about the complexity of these you get an idea of how art works. At a funeral place is significant, we chose one with heightened meaning, churches, particular spots in the landscape, the sea. We dress in a particular way, polished black shoes, no trainers. We sing, we use certain songs to explain our loss, we even sit in certain cars that communicate to everyone as they pass down the road what is happening. We read poetry, we arrange flowers, we carve monuments or small marble plaques, we leave toys or other objects as reminders of someone's age. The complexity of these things is what is important, even down to the tone of voice we use on these occasions; all things have the possibility of being used to communicate. It is therefore, I believe, forms of philosophy that acknowledge the interconnected of everything, that are the most useful.

It is interesting how quickly a reflection on art and philosophy can lead to political positioning and how quickly an implied role for art can be questioned. There are several earlier posts whereby I have tried to explore the role of drawing as a type of questioning of the process of looking and to save time I'll just put in some links.

The Hard Won Image
Andrew Lister drawings
Reflections on Andrew Marr's book on drawing
From perception to concept
That uncertain certainty
A few thoughts on the art science divide

Part two will look at the rise of phenomenology as the go to area of philosophy when it comes to theorising about drawing and my own personal interest in object orientated ontology.

Drawing and philosophy part two

Some thoughts on object orientated ontology