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.

 

 

 

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

The three arms of the drawing research group

The Drawing Research group hosts a two day conference every year and there are always interesting papers delivered and workshops to attend. It reminded me of how many different ways of thinking about drawing as a practice there are and the experience of listening to others talk about their practice made me ask questions of my own approach to drawing. This year the theme was ‘Phenomenology’, and was centred on ‘the lived experience’, a phrase I must admit I do find questionable because it suggests that there are some experiences that we can have outside of those we have when alive.

Last year I was asked to give the after-dinner address, a somewhat difficult task as I had to entertain a group of people who had been eating and drinking and who had had a long day listening to papers being delivered. I was reminded of this because the notebook I took to make conference notes was the same one I used last year and I found the roughed out draft of my ‘off the cuff speech’. I’d forgotten about that and might type up those old notes, as several people did ask me if there was a transcript of what I had to say back then.

My notes on the conference presentations are very much translations, ruminations and selections from what people said. These notes reflect my own interests and in no way should they be taken as transcriptions of what was delivered. So if anyone who was there does happen to read this, please forgive my very personal interpretations and idiosyncratic take on the proceedings. I also get tired and at times irritated. I could of course edit out comments that consist of my more subjective interjections, but I have decided not to, as I suspect these are more revealing as to the actual nature of these events. 

Day one

The opening paper was delivered by Deborah Harty, and was titled “Drawing is Phenomenology”.

One of the first issues about conferences is that people mention a lot of sources for their ideas. These I always find interesting, but what you can often find yourself doing is trying to figure out the name that was mentioned and trying to put down enough information so that you can find the cited text later and then as you are doing that the speaker is moving on so you can miss the next point. Younger members of the audience with more fluid minds can perhaps keep up, but I’m afraid I must admit to lapses in concentration.

I simply mention this because at the beginning of her presentation Deborah mentioned a Geoffrey Bailey reference from his PhD thesis, which after research I now presume is; ‘Drawing and the drawing activity: a phenomenological investigation’, but at the time because I was writing ‘check out Geoff Bailey’s PhD thesis’, I might have missed something. However back to what I did record…

There are two essential issues when thinking of drawing as a phenomenological experience. 

A drawing as a record of its own making and a drawing as a record of the thoughts of its maker.

Several of the ideas in this presentation had come from Deborah’s experience of an AHRC cultural exchange project, ‘Drawing Through Touch’. She had worked with people who had lost their sight and they were asked to draw fruit, such as a pineapple, by touching it. Their experiences were recorded by them drawing onto paper designed to raise the black lines of the drawing when heat-treated. This interested me as I had sometime ago looked at ‘swell paper’  as a way of recording information and I had as long ago as 1969 been involved in a collaborative drawing project in Wolverhampton investigating a very similar idea. But we had no ‘swell paper’ or associated technology back then. What I did remember was that most people involved did not really draw what they felt, because they were sighted people who were blindfolded, they drew what they remembered things looked like. Only a few people were able to concentrate totally on the sensations of touch and those that did made much more interesting drawings that re-conceptualised their relationship with the objects being touched. In this case although all the people had lost their sight, some had always been blind and others had in the past been able to see, once again the memory of sight distorted or shaped the invention of drawings made in response to touch.

The drawings were very interesting, especially as they were projected on a screen so they had no actual physical presence, we couldn’t go up to them and touch them, their presence now totally virtual and visual, a paradox I found fascinating and one I thought an interesting analogy about researchers and their subjects.

The central issue for me was communication, what is it to explain to someone who can’t see what something looks like? Do these drawings explain anything? Are they rather indications of reactions to the world, traces of movements made in reaction to sensations received, echoes of actions, re-played; finger contacts of flesh to fruit, re-played as fingers through a drawing marker. From these indications we then read or interpret things, rather like Sherlock Holmes we apply inductive reasoning and move from specific instances of experience to form some sort of generalised conclusion. However all inductive reasoning is questionable and science tends to rely on deductive processes. But here goes some inductive reasoning.

If you look at the drawing of the pineapple below the person that did it has an idea of up and down, the fruit itself forms the base and the leaves of the crown are where you would expect them to be. It might even have been drawn by tracing round the edge of the object. But when you touch there is no up or down, simply a continuous surface.

The next drawing however seems to me to be more to do with touch than remembered sight. There is a continuous surface and a sense that this is what you feel when you grasp the pineapple to pick it up.

Both drawings attempt a direct response to a physical stimulus and when made the drawings themselves become things that can be experienced. This is what I would call the phenomenology of the image. As a perceiver I’m very aware of how in this case I’m limited to the sense of sight, but my conceptual awareness is such that I can try and ‘experience’ in the mind/body what it might be like to touch.

Deborah went on to show her own work. She is very interested in rhythm and how it is created by the interaction of edges and overlaps between structures. Repeated actions and their resultant forms are seen as allowing for a more phenomenological interpretation because these types of structures allow you to see difference easily, (such as one bent line amongst a hundred straight ones) and by presenting their structure as an open framework, you can see both how things were done and work out how long its making would have taken. You can deduce from careful observation what was done first and then second and so forth. These are aspects that I associate with Modernism, issues about truth to materials and ‘what you see is what you get’ which was one of the mantras of Minimalism.

It was stated that in order to access phenomelogical experience you need to cut down on the stimulus. Simple structures allow you to experience changes.

This is something I understand and know how it works, but I would also argue that someone who is very aware of the situation would notice small changes even within a very complex field of experience. A tracker will notice an animal caused broken leaf amongst a forest of leaves and trees and insects and other stuff.

We were finally directed towards the work of Jordan Mckenzie, in particular his exhibition ‘Drawing Breath’. As the public enter the exhibition space, their hands are taken and placed over his heart. They feel his breath go in and out. He then fills a small plastic bag with his breath, coats it in charcoal and explodes it in order to leave a trace of this breath on the wall for the duration of the exhibition. 

Jordan Mckenzie: Drawing Breath

Mckenzie is probably most well known in the media for his exhibition ‘Spent’ which included a visualisation of his cum by sprinkling charcoal dust onto it. I only mention the media coverage because it points out how culturally loaded our body and its functions are. We breathe and no one’s interested unless we have ‘bad breath’ or look as if we might be passing on an infectious disease, we spit, sneeze, sweat and pass urine, defecate every morning and cry when upset, our body is constantly ejecting and injecting in order to stabilise its relationship with the world and because it is so important to us we culturally build on our relationship with it. It is both a site for phenomenological experience and a site of cultural construction. Hartley is attempting to remind us of the elemental physical nature of the situation, but as an image maker and someone who looks for analogical relationships between things, I’m afraid I could not help but make the situation more complex. Her point was though, that breath itself could be a mark maker. If you have never reduced a few sticks of charcoal to dust and then tried drawing with the dust by blowing it around on a sheet of white paper you should. It’s both exhausting and exasperating and is an experience very closely related to what happens every time you try and fix a charcoal drawing. See.

Jane Cook’s presentation ‘Drawing the Domestic’ introduced us to her PhD thesis, which is a practice led investigation of the home through a phenomenological drawing process. She covers her kitchen work surfaces in paper, careful to sandwich carbon transfer paper between different layers. Once set up this paper surface collects all the traces and marks of kitchen life.

Jane was asked the question, ‘How do your drawings start?’ and the answer was the catalyst for the work shown. John Berger’s three categories of drawing, ‘observation, ideas and memory’, were cited as influential, as well as Merleau Ponty’s search for, “a philosophy that accounts for space, time and the world we live in”.  Phenomenology of Perception, 1962 p.7

Jane also cited Rawson’s use of a Bachelard phrase, pointing to the idea that a drawing is a kinaesthetic sign, and that drawing is the union of seeing and making, a term she had taken from Hill. (I presume Jonathan Hill but I would have to research this)

Using charcoal made from over cooked chips and bread as an eraser (an old use for bread), as well as cleaning products she has developed a body of work that references the site of its making and the codes of domesticity. This has included what was called ‘kitchen lithography’, a form a printmaking that echoes traditional processes, by using butter and coke on tin foil. Other ‘kitchen’ processes are also used to make drawings, burning, freezing etc.

Tony Rosenberg’s ‘ New Beginnings and Monstrous Births: Notes towards an appreciation of ideational drawing’ was sited as being useful in the construction of concepts regarding how drawing can carry ideas.

This reminded me of Bill Buxton a design theorist, who stated that these 5 issues are important to think about when sketching out ideas.

1 Transitions (the in-betweens) are more important than the states of a design because they are experiences either in sequence or with variation when there is interaction. This should accommodate time and dynamic.
2 Sketches should leave big enough holes for the imagination.
3 A sketch should communicate the feel rather than look.
4 Sketches should be about ideas, not solutions. Sketches come early, solutions come later.
5 Sketch and prototype is two ends of the design process where different principles work:

Bill Buxton is an interesting speaker and is an example of those people who are working across disciplines and in doing so illuminate each discipline by seeing it from a new perspective.

Sometimes it’s useful to look at design theorists when thinking about how drawing is effective, because designers all use drawing and they have to be very clear as to how they use it to communicate, Fine Art students, should not worry about dipping into a designer’s territory every now and again.

At this point I began to reflect on the importance of documentation when looking at this type of practice. The stains and one to one rubbings or round the edge drawings, together with the carbon paper copies, are all documents of traces. These are then further documented by the videos and photographs taken to record the process. These documents are essential and without them there would be no PhD, no presentations to conferences etc.

Drawing therefore becomes performative, its processes becoming actors on a stage, choreographed by the artist, who becomes a ringmaster, agent for the materials of making and promoter of the show.

Cornelia Parker: Hot Poker

Cook's work did remind me of Cornelia Parker's 'Hot Poker', again using a domestic utensil as a drawing device, but one with a long history of associated domestic violence, the poker. But Parker is a much more sophisticated artist and always combines a focused conceptual concept with a materials choice. Hot Poker is a print made as a laser-cut archival inkjet print, cushion-mounted on archival mount. The original was of course a folded piece of paper burnt through with a poker, but these prints rely on the way a laser cut will slightly burn the edges of what it cuts through. So in this case it is a trompe-l'œil play on appearance. Parker nearly always adds another layer of meaning.

Martin Lewis presented ‘Does Sisyphus ever get bored’, a presentation given whilst he played a video of his latest work, that consisted of him tapping on a wall mounted roll of paper for over an hour.

I had seen Martin present before and knew what to expect as he had over a year ago moved from paper based image production into a more performative practice. This reinforced my growing awareness of how vital documentation was now becoming. I used to teach film theory and one of my classes was devoted to how the selection and use of lenses, together with camera angles, lighting etc. were used to establish certain types of ideas and that these issues were just as important to a documentary film maker as a constructor of fictions. However non of the people presenting seemed to consider this. I must admit here to a personal issue, because I did submit a paper to this conference which was rejected on this very issue, which was about the phenomenological impact of using different lens based recording mechanisms to photograph or film drawings for screen or projected presentations. Oh well perhaps another time.

Martin reminded us of the term ‘disegno’, a word I have drawn attention to several times in this blog, it is taken from the Italian word for both drawing and designing or planning, which carries a complex meaning, involving both the ability to make a drawing and the intellectual capacity to invent a design or concept. Drawing being both a visualisation of a possibility and a rendering of what can be seen. However Martin was using the term to get us to see the link between planning and instruction, as in Sol Lewitt’s work. I posted recently on how ‘disegno’ could be used as a guide to an understanding of Sarah Sze’s work as drawing, it is I see now a problematic word that could be used by anyone to argue that drawing is in effect everything that an artist does that is about making intellectual decisions. If a term gets too widely used it can become meaningless.

Martin asked the question, “is boredom necessary to the making of art?”. I could see the relevance in relation to his practice, but personally, drawing is what I do to get away from boredom, I don’t think I’ve ever been bored when drawing. This reminded me of when I was a boy and lived in Dudley. My friend Tony Roberts was the son of a zoo keeper and this meant that I could use a backdoor into the zoo when I went to see him. We spent hours roaming the grounds of Dudley Zoo and we knew when animals were in a bad mental state because of how they moved. In particular the polar bear would stand and rock from side to side, the lion would sway its body to some sort of inner rhythm and other animals would when in distress, especially the monkeys and apes, rock themselves into some sort of oblivion. You see the same thing on the streets now, homeless people huddled from the cold, rocking with that same inner metronome that takes it all away. In the book Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why by Ellen Dissanayake, she takes us back to our childhood, to the time when we are rocked to sleep by our mothers and how important the early exposure to rhythmic singing and comforting rocking is to us. I looked at Martin’s work and wondered if it was not so much about researching boredom, but about seeking comfort in distress. This of course is not how he would see his work, which he would argue is about intentional judgements made for new expressions, boredom being, “the dark star of creativity”. See examples of him working here.

Marion Arnold’s presentation ‘Sensing the knowing hand: a phenomenological drawing tool’ began with a powerful reminder of how important our hands are by showing photographs of Father Michael Lapsley who has prosthetic hands after losing his in a bomb explosion, Marion was pointing out how we become much more aware of things through their loss.

The core of the presentation was however around printmaking and how it effects the thinking of the maker. Printmaking extends the sensibility of the artist, the tools of printmaking being further extensions of the hands. The trained hand also reflects the intelligence of the maker.

I worked teaching printmaking for many years and my first job at the art college was to set up the print area. Arnold pointed to the issue of reversal, something I remember well, at one time being able to write fluently backwards because of the fact I was making a long series of etchings that had text on them. Your mind does adapt to the situation, rather like that film made by Ivo Kohler and Theodor Erismann about how we quickly adopt to new ways of seeing. We made a rough version of their goggles on the foundation course some years ago and tried the experiment out, it worked.

Marion Arnold’s presentation focused on the artist’s control, the way that every hand has its own unique signature, and sited Fry’s copying of a Klee drawing with a ruler as an example of how ‘la patte’ or the artist’s touch is important.

Printmaking was looked at as a means of developing an autographic signature, rather than using print as a reproductive process. An area that I believe becomes blurred when working with computers and associated digital printers. After many years of making etchings and lithographs including using traditional stone, I have been making digital prints this last two years. I have decided that the technology is good enough to allow for a personal intervention and in the same way that an etching is always first and foremost an etching, I allow the specificity of the digital print process to flow with my ideas, and because of my background in print, can adjust paper type, ink quality, colour, shape size etc. in such a way that when the prints are produced everyone knows they are mine. Perhaps my feeling about this stems from my time working in a drawing office. Even though we were all using technical drawing pens and associated implements such as French curves and the older ruling pens that used the space between two flexible metal jaws to hold the ink for drawing thicker or coloured lines; everyone in the office recognised everyone else’s drawings. We could tell from such tell-tale signs as the ratio of thick to thin lines, whether or not lines stopped on or went over edges, the attention to details, such as whether or not to include isometric inserts or whether to use Letraset or stencil lettering.

I was particularly interested in the idea of printer’s proofs as a type of checking process. This does relate very closely to how drawings evolve. Putting the drawing away so that you can come back to it with fresh eyes is very similar to taking an impression to see what you have got. I wasn’t that sure that drawing for print involves a different working consciousness, I just work with each material as it comes. A pencil is a tool that works in a particular way and an etching although involving a much wider variety of things, (drawing through hard ground, biting metal etc.), is again simply a tool to get to know, likewise a computer with all its attendant software and outputs. I think there is a certain mystique about the handmade, we ought to remember that all the reproduction processes were just that, ways of reproducing things. In etching aquatint was a way to reproduce the qualities of watercolour, soft ground techniques were invented to try and reproduce the effect of chalk drawing.

Rather than emphasising that drawing for print is a different working consciousness, I would say that you never draw for something else, you either make a mistake and try and use a technology in a way that you have used something else, such as trying to make pencil lines like charcoal lines, or you get to know the medium and work with it. There is a very good book on Paula Rego’s prints and in it her printer talks eloquently about how she needed to engage with each print process before she could settle on a drawing style that would suit the process. Drawing with litho ink is so different to drawing with a burin and different again to drawing with a mezzotint rocker. A useful exercise is to take up something very different, such as drawing in silverpoint. Because you have to prepare the ground, it makes you aware that the surface you are going to make a mark on is part of the decision making process, something easy to forget when drawing on untreated paper. However, the paper chosen to make a pencil drawing on, is as vital to the final expression as the type of acid used to etch your lines out in an etching. Nitric etches very differently to ferric chloride, a non feathered line looks totally different to a feathered one, a high concentrate of acid etches very differently to a low concentrated solution. These are all simply things to take into account when making an image and the more you work with the materials the more sensitive you become to them.

Marion knows William Kentridge, something I’m very envious of and quoted him as saying that, “It’s as if done by another hand”. I wonder if he was thinking about the process of working with a printer when editioning. I used to work as an editioner for other artists. Terry Frost for example used to come to the studio and make his brush strokes over several plates and would talk about what he wanted. We would etch these, often using sugar lift, so that he could work directly, i.e. a black brush stroke would etch as a black mark. Once etched we would print samples off and when he came back he would either discard or ask us to adjust tonality or texture etc. each time he came in he was surprised by what we were able to get out of the plates, this including of course the differences made by selective hand wiping. Even if you think you know a process well, a master printmaker will know the process in more depth because he or she will be working not only every day on the process, but with a wide variety of artists, each one demanding a new and different approach to the task. Working with another person can be really rewarding, a symbiotic relationship can build up between you and one person begins to instinctively know what the other wants. This is for me the time when printmaking really does become a space for invention and discovery.

Eleanor Morgan in her presentation ‘Fixing the ephemeral: the materiality of sand drawings’ introduced the concept of drawings as a form of communication that didn’t necessarily need any resultant record. This is very like speaking it would seem to me, when I’ve said something, unless someone has a voice recorder, it’s gone without trace.

Morgan was interested in salvage anthropology and notions of preservation.  The anthropologist ArthurBernard Deacon had during his visit to Malekula and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) recorded the famous sand drawing tradition for which the islands are still renowned. The material he collected from the individuals he interviewed is of great value to the people of the islands of Vanuatu who are eager to retain knowledge of their heritage, and his recording is detailed and unique. Deacon’s portrayal of a culture without an extensive written history is of importance to all of us as it asks questions about humans and their cultures and whether or not we value difference or accept constant change.

A modern day Vanuatu sand drawing

We were asked to try and copy one of the drawings and it was very difficult, but as you did it you were able to grasp its underlying symmetry and I thought that given a few goes the patterns could be mastered. The issue though was about performance and the importance of specialist knowledge. As these drawings were made their maker would be responding to secret knowledge and although this was a common language, the story would include certain private thoughts. This was about the transmission of knowledge and not the preservation of objects. In effect for me, it was about story telling. Deacon’s diagrams of the sand drawings don’t include much information as to what they tell. Snippets of information were available, such as the fact that the direction of the making of the lines formed a ghost pass to the lambi. (Not sure what this means, but it sounded fascinating).

I was interested in how many different things these drawings are supposed to represent; they are “mnemonic devices to record and transmit rituals, mythological lore and oral information about local histories, cosmologies, kinship systems, song cycles, farming techniques, architectural and craft design, and choreographic patterns. Most sand drawings possess several functions and layers of meaning: they can be “read” as artistic works, repositories of information, illustration for stories, signatures, messages or objects of contemplation."

This seemed to me to be a rich set of meanings and opened out much food for thought. How were stories embedded in these patterns, how much was in the telling and how much in the pattern?

I was particularly interested because my own work involves stories and as my drawings evolve different aspects of stories come into focus. I have been working with a 360 degree specialist photographer to think about how I can control the way my images are seen on screen and now realise I have to think more about the performative aspect of my work.

Morgan mentioned Alfred Gell a few times as an anthropologist who had picked up on these issues. I have referred to Gell before because of his work on traps; his book, ‘Art and Agency’ is a classic study and it really helped me to think about what it is that artists do.

The golden orb weaver spider exists on Vanuatu and their webs are collected to make spiritual fabrics that can be made into costumes.  As their webs are made they are stretched between trees, large and strong enough to trap birds, but delicate enough to suggest hard mist. As their wearers disappear under the layers of web fabric, new meanings for their lives are discovered, their spiritual nature emerges as their physical body is erased. The spider’s web and the sand drawings both perform disappearing acts that are central to a story about cultural meaning. In our society we tend to erect monuments to significant meaning, statues, books or long running TV shows, but on Vanuatu significant meaning seems to have been encoded in the ephemeral and perhaps because of that teaches us a lesson about our own hubris and reminds us of the power of suggestion and old stories and to not put our faith in making larger and more physical art objects. An issue that I felt was personally very pertinent, as I had only the month before been over to the Venice Biennale and had had to evaluate my feelings after seeing a lot of grandiose and very expensive artist’s productions

One of Deacon's photographs of a spiderman

Phil Sawdon then followed this by presenting a very personal exposition of his own working process, ‘…feel my way…outline judgements…I made some pictures’.

Sawdon talked about his ambiguous practice that was concerned with the drawing together of aggregates within a conceptual space. This was his way of intertwining theory and practice, the talk itself being a pause which could enable both himself ad us to see the theory that was driving the work. Because his work is serial in nature, this was his methodology, one piece of work always leads to another. This was the central issue for me, both as a practitioner and as an art educator. How does one thing lead to another? Is it that we see a mistake in a piece of work and in the next one try to rectify it? Is it to do with the fact that we become obsessed by collecting together all the possible variations of a theme, those of us that collected trade cards in their youth, now making new sets of images that explore all the variations we can? Is it to do with making a series of experiments, each one perhaps helping us to approach an idea of truth? Whatever it is, one thing leads to another, or as Jasper Johns would say, “It's simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it. Keep doing this, and pretty soon you've got something”.

Deanna Petherbridge’s “finding, refining reformulating and questioning” is cited as one way to think about drawing as a serial process. (If you want to dig deeper into this read Phil’s paper ‘What shall I draw?’ in Drawing the Process edited by Jo Davies and Leo Duff)

Sawdon had also been looking at Rhoda Kellogg’s work on children’s drawings, (search for her archive on children’s drawings, there are some wonderful ones to look at) he asks himself questions as to why and how he is making decisions and interestingly using creative writing techniques to interrogate his practice, rather than the widely accepted more academic writing conventions. Again this was useful to experience, because this more performative presentation was for me welded to the process of creation, closer to the poet Yates’ assertion that “I made it out of a mouthful of air.” Sawden wonders whether we have an inborn preference for balance and regularity and as his images evolve he revisits them and begins to ‘fill them in’, further evolving their forms into more ‘graphic’ poster like representations. He uses new technology to do this, Photoshop rather than Illustrator and states that, “These works are intended for private viewing.” An interesting assertion to make in front of an audience. So is it the performance in front of the projected images of the drawings that is intended for public consumption? Is this another example of sand drawings, their physical existence doesn’t matter, but the stories that they enable do?

Phil is someone that likes a joke, his fictional museum allows him to have his cake and crumble it; he lives in his own world, acts the clown and plays with words and his audience. Or at least it feels like that, the fact he has retired makes me realise I could retire too and would the consequences be that I would revisit myself as a man with his tongue stuck firmly in his own cheek?

Always an interesting speaker, Sawdon's presentation was a good one to end the first day on.

Phil mentioned the fukt magazine during his talk, its well worth a look at it.

Day two

2018 conference notes