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.
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)
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.
