Tuesday 13 November 2018

Drawing and Philosophy part two

A while ago I wrote in this blog that making or drawing for me opens out an understanding as it is done. It’s not an illustration of a concept about the world, it is a type of knowledge that arrives. I went on to suggest that Heidegger might be a philosopher to look at if you wanted to open this idea out further. Heidegger as a philosopher is often associated with an area of philosophy called 'phenomenology' which is according to wikipedia 'the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness'.

 Heidegger put it this way, ‘…it becomes manifest only through the work, because it lies originally in the work.’ 

 If you want to use Heidegger as a way into thinking about these issues the word that will crop up over and over again is 'dasein', a German word that means "being there" or "presence" (German: da "there"; sein "being"), and is often coupled with the English word "existence". Heidegger would argue that you can't just 'be', to be alive you have to be engaged in the world, and if so this will be a practical engagement with whatever environment you find yourself in, even if this only means breathing, which is in itself a direct engagement of an individual with the air. So if one wants to reveal what that 'being in the world' is, it is a never-ending process of involvement with the world as mediated through the various 'projects of the self', or descriptions of what it is we are doing.

 This approach suggests that all knowledge is experiential, and in the case of drawing, we need to draw in order to become aware of what drawing is, and as we make drawings, (the work) we are then able to think about how as a drawing arrives; it is also 'being in the world'. 

 Heidegger is really into words and if you read Tom McGuirk's paper attached at the bottom of this post you will see how Heidegger uses different readings of the German word for rift and design to open out his understanding. You could do something similar in English. Our verb 'to draw' comes from the same root as 'to drag'. To drag indicates a physical effort, so when I 'draw your attention to something' I am pulling you towards something. Therefore in my own reading of what to use drawing for, I use it to draw attention to something. 

As a philosophical stance phenomenology is very different to those philosophies that suggest that you can stand well away from experience, or put some distance between the world and yourself and contemplate it. For instance Plato's theory of forms argues that there is another reality beyond the one we live in, one that is a more 'accurate' or 'pure' reality. Aristotle refutes Plato's ideas and suggests that we should put observation first and abstract reasoning second. Their original disagreement seems to have led to 2,000 years of chewing these differences over, but as this is a blog about drawing and not philosophy perhaps its more appropriate to demonstrate how these differences in philosophical approach could be realised in making images. 

 In my previous post on Drawing and Philosophy I suggested that if 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, or as Kant would put it; a posteriori. 

 However when I went to the Drawing and Phenomenology conference the keynote speaker suggested that there could be two ways of looking at drawing within a phenomenological context; a drawing as a record of its own making and a drawing as a record of the thoughts of its maker. Immediately in my mind I was confused again. If the focus was to be on art, surely then this would be part of the collective understanding of all those that were involved in this sub-group preoccupation. Then, this would in effect be an investigation into the sub-group rules of the game of drawing. It was as if the world had closed down again and was only as big as the 'art world'. But as Heidegger suggested, 'to be alive you have to be engaged in the world', and the world is much bigger than 'drawing'. Of course the maker is aware of making, as I pointed out before I used to watch my grandfather French polishing furniture, and he was totally focused on and in the process of making, but at the end of the day his polishing was for a purpose, his 'being in the world' told him that he needed something to sit on. But let's look at the types of drawing these various stances apply to.

Deborah Harty


Repetitive actions in Harty's case led to a state very like meditation, and her drawings such as this one above were large immersive experiences that forced the viewer to look at them and 're-live' the experience of making them. You could in effect see it all in front of you, or 'what you see is what you get'. Labour in this type of work is very important, the harder you work the more the work is seen to be at the centre of the meaning. As set out at the beginning of this post, ‘…it becomes manifest only through the work, because it lies originally in the work.’ Is this drawing as a record of its own making therefore an illustration of Heidegger's text? If so, and this is where it gets complicated, although the drawing appears to be about being in the moment of its making, is the maker in fact thinking about a wider set of issues, and is using the drawing to make a point rather than using it as a way to be in the world? I'm perhaps now entering 'how many angels can dance on the point of a needle' territory but metadiscourse is often what philosophers end up making philosophy about. So I would suggest that you could associate this approach to one that suggests that in order to make art we need to investigate how and why art is made. A metadiscourse by its very nature tends to appeal to the practitioners of certain disciplines, because they are thinking about their discipline most of the time, especially if they have to research it.


Ann Barriball's 'Brick Wall'


Ann Barriball's 'Brick Wall' is another drawing that has a lot of labour in it. It is a direct 'one to one' response to working with a brick wall. She develops an intense surface of graphite by taking rubbings directly from the wall and working hard enough to emboss the image into the paper surface. I could of course point to her activity as being an illustration of being engaged in the world, but the point I'm making here is that the labour of building a surface is done not to tell us about how art or the drawing is made, but is done to bring us as directly into contact with Barriball's experience of the brick wall as possible. Both artists are 'being there', and therefore if you were thinking of a philosophical approach to writing about either of them, Heidegger could make a useful starting point. 

I worry about this area of philosophy however because it privileges human experience and as I look around I'm not sure that we ought to be doing that. We seem to have been so concerned to think that it is all about 'me' or 'us', that we have brought the world to an ecological collapse. By not thinking about anything other than ourselves and how we think about our various interests we have predicated the end of an environment that supported all life. So in my next post 'Drawing and Philosophy part three', I will try and get back to why I think that object orientated ontology can be a rewarding area of philosophy to investigate. 

These links below will open the issue out much more comprehensively. 
Essential reading:
    DEWEY, J. 1934, Art as Experience, London: Penguin Books Ltd.
    MERLEAU-PONTY, M. 1964, 1908-1961, The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
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