To use theory or not to use theory

Theory can help you to conceptualise your subject matter and clarify why you might use certain materials, working processes and decision making strategies.

All theories are, as Foss, Foss, & Griffin state, “a way of framing an experience or event, as well as an effort to understand and account for something and the way it functions in the world” (2006, P. 8). One of the most useful aspects of theory is that it can raise your own awareness of possible moves to make, as well as deepening your knowledge base and helping you develop an understanding of your own work. It can help you think through this key question, “How can you explain to yourself what you are already doing?”

Different theoretical stances will of course drive work in different directions; they are also vital to your ability to write about your work when developing your COP3 rationale. As Boris Groys (2012) states “The true goal of every theory is to define the field of action we are called to undertake.” I.e. critical theory should not just be informative it should also be transformative.

The way theory works is to help you ask questions such as, “What does a new bit of knowledge mean to me and how can I include it in my practice?" (This can be your subject matter, your working material's properties, your processes of working or the tacit knowledge you develop as you evolve as an artist.) You can use theory to help you think about how a new piece of knowledge or information could possibly transform your thinking and of course then transform your practice.

However the choice of theoretical ‘lens’ is a complex one because you need to have at least a basic idea of what stances are available. Semiotics, anthropology, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, performance studies, art history, philosophy, museology, queer theory, communication theory, post-colonialism, material thinking, cultural studies and many other frameworks of thinking are all available to you. I shall therefore try and slowly drip-feed these positions into occasional posts when I have the energy to unpick them, however if there are particular approaches you would like me to focus on, remember you can always contact me via the comments box and put in suggestions for posts.

One way of starting is to conduct a basic visual analysis of your own work or other artists that you believe are working in a similar area, once this is done you can apply a chosen theory to help explore how and why the various elements of your analysis might be put together to make various meanings. 

When setting out on a visual analysis I would usually recommend undertaking a detailed compare and contrast of paired images dealing with a similar topic; this is a lot easier than trying to analyse a single image, in doing this you can hopefully develop a sense of what possible meanings a work might have. 

However as always there is a complex issue in relation to seeking meaning in this way. So I shall digress again.

One way to make a detailed analysis of an image is to use a semiotic breakdown. I have demonstrated how to do this in a previous post. See 

Semiotics is a powerful tool and one that can help you ask questions about what your work means and it is often used as a structural framework for conducting a visual analysis of objects and situations. However it presumes that what is being analysed 'signifies' something. That what you are doing actually relates to a wider body of meaning out there in the world. This is though not always as clear as it would appear to be.

In order to explain, I shall diverge again into another story.

After the Second World War the old Gold Standard was dropped. This meant that no longer did the pound in your pocket actually relate to something real. The war had reduced the Western economies to their lowest levels and gold stocks had been severely depleted, so it was decided to uncouple the pound and the dollar from their previous link with actual gold deposited in the Governments' vaults. From this moment onwards the money in people's pockets was only worth what was agreed by the banks and associated systems of exchange. What was at one time related to something of real value out in the world was now only significant as a system of agreed exchange. People had to grow to accept that money was part of a virtual reality and that it only existed as part of a process or system of agreed exchange. The previous link between money and a particular reality was now gone, the sign system now becoming 'free floating'.

As people became accustomed to this they also became used to other systems operating in the same way. Instead of always expecting art to relate to something outside of itself, (religion, politics, etc.) people became aware that art was also an agreed process and artists began to make work that reflected upon how this process might work. For instance Greenberg's ideas about media specificity only begin to make sense once the link between art and 'reality' has been broken.

The theorist Rosalind Krauss explains all this in her book 'The Picasso Papers'. (Don't forget this is Krauss speculating, developing an idea of how things might have been, it doesn't mean it is true, we could I'm sure find another theorist that would argue the opposite) 

Arthur Danto and Georges Dickie would in the 1960s and 70s formalise an understanding of how the processes of art world thinking could be understood by developing Institutional Theories of Art.

For many artists the critical break with rationality was of course Dada. Dada set out to undermine the logical framework of referents that had been built up as part of the Enlightenment Project. The experience of the First World War signifying for many, that all a reliance on logic and technological advancement would bring, was death and horror in the trenches.

The key to this if you are writing for COP3 is to outline the complexity of the situation before heading off into any particular theoretical direction. Writing about these issues is not about stating it's one thing or another, it is more about demonstrating that you are aware of the complex issues that surround your subject. COP3 is marked in such a way that higher marks are awarded to students that can navigate complex arguments and make sense of sometimes conflicting opinions, rather than producing writing that sets out to prove that something is like this or like that.

Therefore we have two questions that could be asked even before we set about making an analysis. One is whether or not the work references an 'out in the world reality' or whether it is more concerned with meanings associated with processes and systems. As Krauss (1998, p.18) states, "meaning itself becomes a function of the system rather than of the world". The other is a question related to the process of logic itself, is it appropriate to use objective analysis in relation to something that might itself be constructed in direct opposition to logic and rationality? It may be that a narrative or story that belongs to your life or others you have met will help you develop a lens with which to understand some aspect of practice, even though this is bound to be somewhat subjective, if approached carefully you can construct a framework of meaning that can be of value.  

The problem is that no one theory is true, however a good theory can give a useful insight into why you might make certain decisions. In art theory we are dealing with speculation and whether we like it or not, sometimes matters of opinion, therefore you might question why art theory is not more like scientific theory. Scientific theories are though subject to testing and at times proven to not always be accurate. Even so, they tend to hold water for a while. I've been around long enough to see art theories become fashionable and then fade away again. Certain styles of Marxist influenced writing were in vogue during the 1960s, these were then seen as too Romantic, semiotics becoming very fashionable in the 1970s and deconstruction in the 1980s, critical theory took over all the art schools by the 1990s and then anthropology held sway for a while and following that systems theory, more recently performance theory has been fashionable. Nowadays I tend to use theory when it can provide a helpful narrative. My somewhat rambling introduction to this might make it seem that theory is something to avoid, on the contrary I have always found it useful, in order to help make sense of my own allegorical drawings I have often used Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory, it just takes a while to get used to picking your way through sometimes quite complex specialist language. Once you start to write using a theoretical standpoint, even though some books you may well read will use complex terminology, my advice is to try and avoid jargon and always see if it is possible to say what you mean using plain English. 

References

Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners available at: http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

Foss, K. A. Foss, S. K. & Griffin C. L. (1999) Feminist Rhetorical Theories Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA

Hodge, R and Kress, G. (1988) Social Semiotics  Cambridge: Polity

Narrative theory available at:  https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20PDFs/Herman%20Narrative.pdf

Walter Benjamin's Theory of allegory available at: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/487866?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21104572531081

Boris Groys (2012) e-flux (search for theory Groys) Under the gaze of theory

Chicago school of media theory http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/drawing/

Architectural Drawing theory: an introduction Link

What is drawing? Catalogue essay 

For Institutional theories of art see:

Danto, A (October 1964). "The Artworld". Journal of Philosophy 61 (19): 571–584.

Dickie, G (1971). Aesthetics, An Introduction. Pegasus. p. 101.

https://www.theedit.site

Drawing and Politics

Easily the most powerful political drawing I have ever encountered is Francis Alys' The Green Line, subtitled 'sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic'. Jerusalem 2004. Find a video link here. 

One of the most basic actions when drawing is to make a line and a line has two sides. Lines are used to mark boundaries and boundaries are used to define territory; which means that drawing a line can lie directly at the centre of political decision making. Perhaps one of the most contentious areas of boundary making is related to the marking of boundaries within areas of open water, no landmarks or other visible indicators are available, therefore a complex series of equations are used. Maritime boundaries are calculated using a range of different kinds of baselines. The most basic is simply distance from the shore, from ‘the low-water line along the coast, including reefs, bays and river mouths. On the landward side of this baseline, we have internal waters and on the other side of the baseline territorial waters. However you then have to add in other factors, for instance negotiated treaties from the United Nations Law of the Sea, and the normally accepted 200 nautical mile buffer around any country's shoreline, which is the exclusive economic zone. However the political issues are those surrounding how these agreements are reached and how and why they are broken, the old principle of "mare librum" (or the free seas) being one that at one time or another most sea faring nations have used to allow them access to areas of the sea that have not yet been 'claimed'. The book, Lines in the Sea, is a great reference for these imaginary lines.

Finding the median line between France and England.

I have an imaginary network of lines in my head, a network of lines set out by the extent of each nation’s mythic value. The old Arthurian myths of England and France, finding a border between themselves and the Nordic tales of old Scandinavia; Thor’s day and Woden’s day rising again and erecting a line between themselves and a lost Camelot beneath Glastonbury Tor. The line of the Great Wall now entirely mythic as Chinese dragons battle for supremacy with the Russian Baba Yaga, a creature emerging from deep within dark forests, screaming spells from the window of her hut that stands tall upon giant chicken legs. Shiva protects the flank of India, his third eye radiating fire, his bow flexed, arrows poised, all ready to defend his lines, whilst the Jade Emperor attempts to control all Heavenly airspace by arming flying monkeys in the sky. A line is drawn between China and Japan as the Watatsumi sea dragon fights with the Jade Emperor’s monkey over a shifting boundary between the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea. Across the world North America’s Spider Grandmother and Mute Girl descend on South America as borders are drawn across the land that lies beneath her web and the burning forests of Jaguar, the Mexican Master of Fire. Giant kangaroos emerge from the deserts of Australia and fight with Godzilla in the South Asian seas, Hercules re-emerges on the Greek mainland and disputes Turkish boundaries with Gilgamesh, whilst Easter Island heads stride out into the sea to make war with the Atlantians. New borders are drawn up everywhere as old myths dissolve and new ones emerge, Hollywood rises to push the borders of America over the Atlantic Ridge, Japanese manga fighting back over the Philippines, Doctor Who finally emerging as the British dark horse.

These imaginary lines between cultural influences are as real as the mathematical medians that are drawn on maps between nations. They are all ideas, England is simply an idea that is not Scotland.

Art and Language produced a drawing back in the 1960s 'Map to not indicate' which pointed to the power of maps to assert control over the world. 

Art and Language 'Map to not indicate' 1967

"The extensive title (below the map rectangle) lists all the geographic areas that the artists have removed from the map. Only Iowa and Kentucky are outlined and labelled but, floating like islands, they lose geographical relevance, metaphorically cast adrift from their cartographic moorings". Tate Gallery July 2006. In this case what is not on the map, is more important than what is, a strategy that echoes the way Government tax and other codes work to ensure we are all 'controlled' by being numbered, and yet disempowered by not being registered as voters or as citizens. The grid of information can control but also isolate those elements outside of its panoptican gaze. 

Lewis Carroll in The Hunting of the Snark, laid out the rules of this game with maps. He understood the arbitrary nature of all maps and that they are always the result of someone's decision to control something. 

Only the blank map can set us free from ownership, and this is perhaps Carroll's most succinct political statement.

The grid of the map is of course a power structure. The first thing that happens to a new territory is that it is mapped and once mapped it can be owned. Deleuze has this to say when writing about Foucault's understanding of maps and diagrams, he sees the diagram as an extension of the map, diagrams being able to penetrate all fields of human activity, in effect 'mapping' our thoughts. "The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine… What is a diagram? It is a display of the relations between forces which constitute power in the above conditions” See Link here to The Funambulist for more of Deleuze's text and more thoughts surrounding these issues.  

However artists will always seek to subvert these debates, Thomas Hirschhorn has often used diagrams to illustrate social and political dynamics. He often works to raise awareness of social and political issues and will host debates and small conferences with local people as a piece of work is developed. 

Thomas Hirschhorn / Marcus Steinweg

Joseph Beuys often used diagrams on blackboards to illustrate his ideas, a technique he shared with Rudolf Steiner, his socialist ideas influencing his teaching as well as his art practice. Because he strongly believed in art's power to influence political change he would not differentiate a lecture and its accompanying blackboard drawings from the rest of his work. Everything the artist did was art.  (His lecturing job was withdrawn because he wanted to accept any student onto the courses he was teaching on, because as he stated; "everyone is an artist"). 

 Beuys lecturing

Joseph Beuys

Rudolf Steiner

Artist and activist Burak Arikan has been making maps of the art world. His artists politics network map for the 7th Berlin biennale 2012, demonstrating that all artists can be seen as political, as well as of course illustrating that networks of information are themselves aesthetically beautiful. 

Burak Arikan

Agnes Denes is not just politically motivated, she is also concerned to make her responses realities. She is fascinated by systems and patterns, making detailed and delicate drawings, using visual mathematics. In Tree Mountain -- A Living Time Capsule, conceived in 1982 and planted in Finland in 1992-96, Denes created a mountain and planted it with eleven thousand pine trees. The trees were planted in an intricate spiralling mathematical pattern as a land reclamation project. In this case drawings, initially operating as plans for ideas, were actually realised. 

Agnes Denes

My earlier post on grids looked at them as structures, structures that related to weaving and networks and like so many structures they can be used to both empower us and disempower us. Artists when making images have choices and one of those choices is whether or not to take a political stance in relation to their practice. Maps and diagrams are very powerful drawing tools and the marking of a boundary line is perhaps the first indication of what we now think of as private property. Where do you as an artist 'draw the line'?

An alternative approach to politics is that taken by artists such as Hogarth or more recently Sue Coe, artists who use their image making skills to highlight aspects of society's ills, rather than making direct political interventions. I shall be posting on this other position in the near future and asking questions as to whether or not political art can ever be effective. In the meantime I'll leave you with Chad McCall, he designs political images using computer drawing tools and prints them off as very large scale images.

Chad McCail: 'Robots run Zombies for Wealthy Parasites', 2002

See also:

Drawing and politics part two

Drawing and politics: part three

Drawing and politics part four

Chad McCall

Politics of sex

Social sculpture

The rise of contemporary drawing

Contemporary drawing practices have become much more visible over the last few years. A discipline once seen as an adjunct to painting and sculpture has emerged in its own right as a powerful discipline. The range of extended drawing practice covers the development of expressive personal worlds, includes performance, hard edged abstraction, computer generated imagery, installation and collage. 
As this development has gained pace writers and theorists have begun to articulate why and how this has happened.   
I have just been asked to provide a statement for the new drawing publication that is being put together by undergraduate students and the graduate fellow. As I begin to write this I am aware that others have already written a considerable amount around the same topic, here are some links to what is being said.

Drawing conclusions: the rise of contemporary drawing By Mike Brennan

Contemporary drawing as idea and process

Jutta Voorhoeve: DRAWING IN CONTEMPORARY ART: NOTATION, EXPRESSION, AND EXPERIMENT

What is contemporary drawing?

The LCA publication on drawing is getting closer to production. My draft text (below) will be used as an introduction.

Drawing as an extended practice

You could argue that drawing was vital to the birth of something we now call art; the marks and lines that were left by our ancestors on cave walls reminders of the fact that drawing is one of the elements that marks us out as a species. We have of course continued to draw and contemporary practices have now opened out into wide and varied territories. No longer is drawing seen as a preparation for something else, it is accepted as an art activity in its own right and has established powerful claims as a discipline relevant and responsive to the needs of contemporary society.

Drawing within a fine art context offers an expansive field for imaginative elaboration; concepts and ideas can emerge and develop off-shoots and alternative dialogues with relative ease, because as a discipline it is uninhibited by an obligation to make finished objects, its informality readily allowing it to develop both theoretical and experimental stances. Contemporary practices are complex and sometimes apparently contradictory, in some artists’ work automatic drawing may be used in an attempt to allow chance to influence the outcome of a work and this may be done to enable these artists to escape from subjective compositional strategies, while other artists seek to rely on drawing’s ability to represent the world and interpret complex realities.  However it could be argued that what lies behind both these approaches is the fact that drawing enables artists to reflect on the processes that lay behind both art itself and our experiences of life.

Drawing practices can be involved with the construction of intimate personal, alternative worlds, they can be highly conceptual, the planning and decisions of the artist taking precedence over the execution of the drawings themselves, they can be resolutely abstract or highly expressive. The materials and processes of construction can range from the traditional pencil and charcoal, to the latest new media technologies; drawings occupying walls and opening out into installations, being made for computer screens or for projection and yet drawing is still able to refresh and renew its long running association with marks on paper.

This student led publication seeks to showcase the range of drawing practices being followed by Fine Art students today. The drawings reproduced are seen as statements of material fact, traces of ideas embedded within various drawing materials and their supports, surfaces of desire and lines of thought that hopefully touch a contemporary zeitgeist. As well as supporting drawing as a contemporary discipline, the Fine Art course at Leeds College of Art also acknowledges a long historical commitment to the primal importance of drawing not only in the twenty-first century, but throughout the cultural history of humankind, and in supporting this publication celebrates the continuation of a vital tradition.

Garry Barker 2014

The final magazine

Drawing devices

Drawings as a record of action and process often include various drawing devices as part of the experience.
My earlier post on camera-less drawing reminded me of an area of drawing which uses a variety of strange and complex devices that can enable an artist to record information. One of the earliest examples we have of artists using devices to help them record the world is this image by Durer.

A complex arrangement has been set up to draw a lute in perspective. One person uses a pointer with string attached to indicate specific parts of the object and another person holds a marker so that when the door is shut a record can be made of where the point goes. This would have involved some complex moves. For instance before the door can be shut the stringing has to be moved out of the way. The string is kept taut by having a lead plumb attached to the ‘eye point’ which in this case is a hook set into the wall. It would be interesting to recreate this situation. How accurate would a drawing be? Looking at the situation more closely, Durer has made the drawing of the lute a lot larger than it would actually have been. Obviously he is trying to illustrate the process in detail, but if you look at the distance between the frame that holds the drawing and the ‘eye point’ on the wall you can tell that the frame should be a lot closer to the lute, if the drawing was to be the size it appears to be. At some point someone should try and build one of these devices, I'm sure  we would then have a method of making some quite fascinating drawings.

Another strange drawing device is one introduced already, the camera obscura. But what would this be like to work with? How would you make a device like the one in the image below?

The camera obscura above seems to work almost as an extension of the artist’s body. It operates as a sort of performative piece; if you ever encountered an artist actually working like this, you would probably accept the activity as a cutting edge example of contemporary drawing practice. Imagine walking round town making drawings in this way.

Could you create a 'costume' or 'outfit' that worked as a portable camera obscura? The sedan chair camera obscura (below) is another similar device, but you need a couple of willing helpers to get you around. 

These devices can be seen as sculptural objects in their own right, but they have much potential as objects that could be part of a much more environmental or performative approach to drawing practice.

One of the simplest tracing devices is a pantograph.

This too can be extended to make a more performative event. The very ungainliness and difficulty that begins to stand in the way of making a drawing begins to be interesting in its own right.

There are lots of different jointings that pantograph type machines can have, this is called the Watts connection.

There is a long history of these devices, artists have been also drawing them being used and they make for quite fantastic images in their own right.

An artist at work with an assistant.

Pablo Garcia has made twelve drawings of historical drawing machines, by using a computer numerical controlled machine, thus using a drawing machine to make images of drawing machines.

Pablo Garcia's drawings of drawing devices 

These devices can of course be reconfigured to accommodate more modern materials, look at the work of Trevor and Ryan Oakes here

 Trevor and Ryan Oakes: The concave easel

If you are inventive enough anything can become a drawing device.

Tim Knowles

Tim Knowles turns a tree into a drawing machine, the artist John Stell (a former LCA Fine Art student) attached spot lights to his legs and photographed the linear light traces of himself walking at night.



John Stell

Alan Storey: Handle With Care

Storey's shipping crates when folded out are seen to be surfaces for specially prepared pen carriages that translate the movements of the container as it is shipped.

Alan Storey: Handle With Care: Montreal to Vancouver

Trans-Canadian highway

It's interesting to compare Story's work with Walead Beshty's. His Fed-ex pieces are made of glass and sent out by post in carefully packaged containers. However they always break. Beshty is interested in rule governed behaviours, but there are always other associations that creep into a work's meaning, for myself it was the connection with Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, which was itself broken in transit and then resurrected, with the break preserved.

Walead Beshty: Fed-ex: 2007

Many things can be done to record traces of events. Just leaving things out in the world will usually result in a drawing of some sort or other.

Images of surfaces that have been scratched, simply by heavy contact with the world.

Nikolaus Gansterer is an artist that works in this territory; for example he uses: "a writing tool suspended inside hardware that inscribes on a paper the wave movement of a canal, drawing instruments held on stretched ropes that are pressed onto paper by birds sitting on the ropes, 
papers attached to street cars that brush through the city or even plain papers get buried in the park becoming a test field for microbial activities". See his work here link 

Nikolaus Gansterer: Traces of Spaces

Modern computer technology has of course enabled artists to go much further with these types of ideas. Andrew Kudless has produced some fascinating drawings using programmed robotic machines. Find a link to these here.

 "Untitled #13," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless



See also:

More drawing devices

Natasha Kidd: Painting devices

Mike Croft: The observation of perception

Viewfinders

Bridges and mahlsticks

Louise Despont: Drawing with templates

The spirograph