Drawing : Drawing it all together

There are so many different aspects and approaches to thinking about drawing that sometimes as a student it must feel as if there is no way to get your head around what drawing as a disciple is. It could be all things to all people and I have heard a lot of definitions that support that notion, such as drawing is what you want it to be or if its useful to think about it as drawing it can be drawing. I'm not sure these types of definition help, they are rather like the ones I remember first encountering in the late 60s, such as, "If the artist says it's art it's art" which was known at the time as Judd's dictum or "What you see is what you see", one of Frank Stella's retorts to his critics. Here are the two of them in conversation.
I tend to think about drawing as something operating within life experiences, as something that has a range of uses, just like our other tools, but which if used to try and do something it's not designed to do, it might not work as well as a properly designed tool.
Think about a typical situation whereby drawing might have been useful to two people communicating something to each other. Let's image two people standing on a beach and one of them trying to explain something to the other about where something happened. One of the people begins the conversation, "It was over there, near a tree, next to that stream that runs past the big rock", but the other person seems a little vague about the relationships, so as they are talking one of them begins to draw a map by outlining these relationships in the sand using a long stick. The map makes it easier to communicate exactly where the tree is in relation to the rock, you can make a drawing of a tree very simply, a couple of angles will do, especially with a line passing through them, a stream might be an 'S' shape running past an angular flat shape that represents the rock. In this basic drawing one thing is enough like another to enable the other person to understand that it is a representation, and unlike words, the drawing seems to bare some sort of direct relationship with the world. Drawing of this sort is still used all the time and we call these maps, or in architecture, plans, or in some other disciplines like electronics, diagrams, in every case relative positioning is important and certain recognisable and agreed signs stand for the things that relate to each other within the chosen area of investigation. In this way electricians, architects, hunters and lost car drivers can communicate where one thing is in relation to another.

Hand drawn map

Architectural plan

Circuit diagram

Australian Aboriginal map

The issue here is that there needs to be some sort of agreement as to the conventions used. That agreement may have been a verbal one, but may just as easily been an agreement arrived at by ostensive definitions, (i.e. by pointing to things) Notice the small map to the bottom right which uses European conventions to show the same area of land, it includes a drawing of a tent showing us that this is where we might camp. These uses of drawing as 'where things are in relation to other things' visualisation tools are important to most cultures and I would suggest become one of the first ways that all of us enter into using drawing as a communication tool. I have touched in these issues before, see this post on resemblance, mimesis and communication.

A contemporary artist using drawing to map out relationships such as Jorinde Voigt uses 'where things are in relation to other things' types of drawings to communicate a very complex unpicking of particular situations, but if you boil her work down to its essence she is making maps, diagrams, or plans of what she is experiencing. However she is also doing something else, she is layering on top of her mapping another type of information that drawing can carry, a rhythmic notation, such as when we use drawing to represent sound. it is interesting to compare her drawings with the scores of a musician such as Iannis Xenakis.

Jorinde Voigt

Iannis Xenakis Metastasis

Julie Mehretu’s painted maps partly derive their conviction from the exact plotting of plans and tracings of particular geographical areas onto perspectival grids, i.e. she is adding another point of view into the images.

Julie Mehretu: Detail

That perspectival point of view is a powerful one and it places the participant at one remove from the situation. It makes for two distinct positions, both a subjective and an objective one, because we have to separate ourselves out of this world in order to have a point of view. In the map view everything has an equal status, we can see how it all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. However like perspective we westerners can also take a 'God's eye view' of the situation, which again removes us from it. But not always, I can clearly remember making model layouts of situations when I was a boy and I inhabited these in my mind, just as clearly and in some ways more intensely than the 'real' world. Mehretu's images sit on an edge between two different visualisation systems, and then she adds layers and connections. For instance we can put a diagram of something on top of a map and both can be projected into perspective planes.

The thing about maps, plans and diagrams is that they are all drawn from that God like perspective. You look down on the image and you can see in the case of the architect's drawing where everything is, you can check if the car is in the garage or not, you can see what is behind the mountain or grasp the implications of complex relationships. But most experiences are not like this and therefore other types of drawing are needed in order for us to communicate these other experiences.

One type of experience we need to communicate is "What does it look like?"

Various images of animals found in caves from 20,000 or more years ago

In these very early images we recognise a particular skill in rendering that would have enabled a certain type of communication to be made. Whether these drawings were used to show novice hunters which animals they were supposed to hunt, or whether they were used in some sort of ritual whereby the people were perhaps entering the spirit world of the animals, we will never know, but it must have been necessary for the maker of the images to use a certain level of mimesis in order to effect whatever communication was being made at the time.

Holbein: Lady Mary Guildford

Holbein's drawing of Lady Mary Guildford also required the artist to have certain levels dexterity in rendering what was seen. In this instance it was important for royalty to be able to communicate how beautiful certain family members were to other royal families, so that decisions such as who would marry who, could be made. Whether Holbein made this woman slightly more attractive that she actually was who can tell? But we can easily see the use value of a portrait like this.

If we now go back to our original drawing of a map, we are now moving on from where something is located, to what it looks like in much more detail. In a map of England we could find a castle located in a particular town and in a plan of that castle, we could find Lady Mary Guildford's room and she sits in that room having her portrait drawn by Holbein. Just as in a map of some fields at some point in one particular field there is a clump of turf, that from a human viewpoint could be constructed to look like this...

Durer: Clump of turf

But what if we want to communicate something more complex? What about how relationships illustrate different aspects of a complicated narrative?

It's interesting to compare these two images above in relation to the question asked. One is seen from a central single point perspective and the other from above, the familiar God's eye view. I have looked at Piero's 'Flagellation of Christ' painting before in an earlier post but suffice it to say that every position taken up by the actors in his painting means something. But so do the relative positions in the aboriginal painting, a painting that covers an equally complex narrative; the Australian 'Dreamtime' as opposed to one specific moment from the story of Christ. Piero's image contains representations of what would have been at the time recognisable individuals, their roles in life would have been linked to their positions in the painting and whoever those people were (in this case we are often referred to individuals related to the coming crusades and fate of Byzantium), they would have been embedded into a narrative that the painted image was also locked into. It was part of a much larger communication, in much the same way the aboriginal painting represents a complex conjunction of geography and action, that would again have been part of a much more complex holistic communication involving various narratives and locally understood mythic histories.

The problem for us is that many of these images are taken out of their original contexts and presented to us as works of art that stand alone, as if they were not an integral part of a much more complex communication. It is as if that drawing that was made in the sand was cast in plaster before the sea came in and was then presented to another group of people hundreds of years later in a totally different culture as an artwork.

You could argue that I have once again strayed from my original task, which was to explain why there are such wide perimeters surrounding contemporary drawing practices, but my illustrations do allow me to refer to the Renaissance term 'disegno', a word for drawing or design, that carried a complex meaning involving both the ability to make a drawing and the intellectual capacity to invent the design. I.e. Piero's painting would have had to go through a process of 'disegno' in order to be realised. His final painting being in many ways simply a coloured in drawing. On the other hand the aboriginal image is all about patterns and symbols, it is again a coloured image, but in fact all drawings are coloured, it is just that we have become used to a certain restricted range of colours in drawings. The colours in Aboriginal art were always earth colours, but some earth colours found in Australia are much more intense than the average blacks, whites, ochres and umbers we are used to seeing being used in Western European drawings.The distinction of 'painterly' is a story that goes back to the Renaissance and is linked to the 'disegno' issue. The question as to which was more important, drawing (disegno) or colour (colorito), was answered differently at the time of the Renaissance according to whether you lived in Florence or Venice. This issue has continued within the European tradition and lies behind what I tend to think of as an artificial divide, one that reflects the atomising of the way we think about many things. The reality is that communication is a complex conjunction of several things all happening at once. We use body language as much as verbal language, and in conjunction with each other not as totally separate communication forms. So in order to make this:

Rembrandt: The Prodigal Son

You also need to do this, every drawing is partly a record of a complex set of movements.

Heather Hansen

This allows me to introduce another aspect of contemporary drawing, its performative nature. Every drawing is in some way a record of a performance, but in some cultures and at different historical times there can be an emphasis on this. For instance if we look at the sand drawings of the Vanuatu and some Chinese calligraphic drawings we can see clearly that in the one case the drawing is something that is performed in front of an audience and in the other that the drawing's execution is seen as a performance that can be unraveled or understood by the nature of the marks made as the body went through the movements of its making. Some areas of current art practice also emphasise this performative aspect of drawing, sometimes relating contemporary practice to older traditions.

Sand drawing often incorporates narration, song, signs and gestures alongside the drawing.

Liang Xiao Ping Calligraphy performance

Again if we eliminate a sharp divide between one thing and another and think of all these aspects of drawings as being interconnected, we can see that 'embodied' drawing is always performative simply because we have to use our bodies to make a drawing, any drawing, even if we are writing code on a computer screen we have to use our fingers to type. At one point the sand drawing of the Vanuatu is a map, but at another point it is a timeline, at one point Liang Xiao Ping's work is a performance at another a calligraphic drawing, just as when I'm using my voice to sing and then shout and then tell a story and then whisper, it all depends on the context and purpose of the communication.

So much of what these issues are about depends on our interest in categorisation. But if all these things are actually just aspects of process, then it could be we can dissolve them all into the processes of consciousness. The various ways that we tend to divide one type of approach to drawing from another reminds me of how we have tended to think about consciousness itself. In the 1990s philosophers and scientists of the mind began to debate 'embodied dynamism' as a concept. There had for a long time been a problem with what was termed the mind/body divide. The relationship consciousness had with the world was assumed to be one to do with abstract representation, symbolic representation in the mind/brain, standing for certain selected outside the mind domains of experience. I. e. the mind and the world were separate. Embodied dynamism blew all that away, and showed us how to understand consciousness or the act of cognition as something that is, in the words of Evan Thompson, " the exercise of skilful know-how in situated and embodied action". Which for me is a perfect description of drawing.

You can find Thompson's reasoning in his classic book, 'Mind in Life', and he went on to argue that embodied dynamism itself had certain weaknesses as a theory, favouring eventually what he called an 'enactive approach' to understanding cognition. This is a theory that is directly related to other embodied mind theories, such as those illustrated by Johnson and Lakoff, and which I have already touched upon. In the 'enactive approach', Thompson adds what he calls a relational domain, or something that is brought forth by the experiencer's 'mode of coupling with the environment'. (Thompson, 2007, p.13). Cognition is in effect a product of experiences. His reasoning, helped my own to go off on its own journey. If cognition emerged from things experiencing each other, perhaps there were other types of cognition that were the result of similar things happening everywhere, its just that we only recognise our own type. Could a rock as it experiences erosion, contact with other things or its own formation in some way have a type of cognition? During the time I was reading Thompson's book I was also asked to contribute to an exhibition as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International 'Index' fringe festival, this was '(im)Material Disarray' in Wakefield at the SnapArts gallery. So I decided to see if I could extend my practice into using more materials, in this case all the rubbish and bits and pieces that I don't use normally and just throw out. I wanted to see how by letting whatever forms would arise out of the interaction of myself and the materials, an idea or range of ideas could evolve. But I was also asking myself whether or not any form of cognition or consciousness could be read as belonging to the things made? I wasn't sure, but I liked the idea. The images below are from the exhibition, which is still on if anyone happens to find themselves in Wakefield over the next few days. So these are some of my drawings made with materials in a three dimensional space, placed by Paula Chambers alongside her own and other artists' work and her personal collection of domestic bric a brac. For my own practice, this in effect pushes the boundaries of drawing into the realm of sculpture and installation.

Images extracted from the (im)Material Disarray exhibition, curated by Paula Chambers

I also mentioned in my meandering ramble above that most images were made as part of a much more complex holistic communication involving various narratives and locally understood mythic histories. So in order to test this out I have also written a story to go with my now pretty solid drawings and I will be telling this material tale to an audience at the SnapArts gallery this Sunday at 2pm. This is an experiment for me but one I think is important because it is designed to help me think about those blurred edges between disciplines and to get me to test out some of my thoughts about communication theory.

So if you are interested this is the story Click to find an online version and because this is very much an experiment, it would be great if you have any feedback.