The Independent Medium of Drawing

Discussions about the autonomy of drawing as a medium range from a critical revision of its traditionally subordinate position in the visual arts to attempts at explaining new practices in the arts as a form of drawing. The teaching of drawing, for its part, has traditionally been based on the observation and imitation of nature.

Without going into the broader issue of figurative representation versus abstraction, the ubiquity of new media today and an increasingly intangible reality raises the basic question: what is it that we are observing?

Beyond metaphysical discussions about being and not being and the nature of reality, is the gaze of the artist today determined by the fluid and changing nature of what he sees? Does this media-based landscape affect the role and function of observation in drawing today?

Finally, also, in connection with the above, is there such a thing as a new medium of multimedia, for example, or are such hybrid practices best served by explaining them according to a broader notion of drawing?

Today, technology and the new media change at a speed that seems to suggest that the latter is the most appropriate course of action.

The use of a broader, open-ended notion of drawing to explain the mutations of recent hybrid art practices allows us to separate the cultural currency of the images or works from the increasingly rapid obsolescence of the technologies used to produce them.

A good example is the quaintness of some (not all) Dada productions today. They seem so naive, so eager in their idealism and so out of touch with the techno-cynicism of today. And yet, in their time, they were groundbreaking and radical forms of expressions.

To do this is to separate the inevitable aging of the image from the material condition of the drawing as an object or to the technologies of its production linking its obsolescence to the fortunes of the ideas underlying the image, and these ideas, I argue, are best understood as a form of order, as drawing.

In the preface to the catalogue What is drawing?(1)Michael Ginsborg from the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon University, raises the issue of whether “practices that have left the page altogether, that are performed, physically or electronically in the spaces of architecture, installation, live art, the screen or the landscape” are really drawing, also raising the key question of “what is at drawing’s centre?”(2)

Today, reality, the object of the artist’s contemplation, is a multidimensional, rhizome-like system that cannot be seen all at once, but which can be partially understood through the examination of the relationship between its parts.
In such a systemic understanding of reality, the physical is embedded into an interconnected, intangible and highly functional reality that is self-aware (Debord) and where both visibility and emergence are determined by the readability of the different mobilities and meaningful interactions that are taking place, in a dramaturgical sense, as forms of expression.(3)

In such a space it is more accurate to speak of experience rather than understanding, as we are bombarded by stimuli of different nature at different levels and also at different times. This perception is not like snapshot, but like a movie, it is time-based. Our experience of reality does not remain pleasurable or disagreeable forever; the pleasurable can turn to tedious, the agreeable to disagreeable, interest can become indifference.

Another aspect to consider is that this multidimensional system includes the artist himself and his work. Not only what he sees, but what he remembers and what he imagines. From the point of view of the career of the contemporary artist, also, there is also how he or she are seen and more importantly, how they want to be seen, both personally and in terms of their work their “readability” as the term is used my Mary Louise Pratt.(4) Defined by the mobility and interrelationship of projected personal images, this reality can be best explained by the notion of theatre proposed by Peter Brook in The Empty Space.(5)

In drawing today, mimesis or the imitation of nature is now less a question of imitating and describing nature than one of enacting or performing—in the dramaturgical sense—the functional mobilities and links there is between units of reality, physical or otherwise, actual or imagined in the observed environment.
To link drawing—as I do here— to a notion of order independently of any medium or function is, as Ginsborg observes, to open up the language of drawing to include object-based works, two-dimensional representations, live art and even photography and time-based media.

Because it is based on perception, the broader view of drawing proposed here takes into consideration both observations as a primary element of drawing as well as the intersected reality described by Anne Bermingham in Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a polite and useful art.(6)

Drawing usually occurs at some point between the initial conception and final realization of an idea in the form of a project, sketch or study, and also—I argue—remains by its tentative, searching nature in a half-way state of permanent un-realization and potential that defies classification and postpones its inevitable obsolescence.

Art in general but drawing in particular relies on its capacity to embody and reflect the visions and desires society projects onto it—a quality I will call here its reflectivity. Focusing on the communicational aspect of drawing Ginsborg, quoting Angela Kinston, uses the term “inclusivity” to refer to drawing’s versatility as “the range of content it [drawing] can deal with.”

Unlike other mediums such as painting, drawing is endowed with a mirror-like quality derived precisely of its austere physicality. This streamlined quality of drawing is the reason for its unparalleled communicational efficacy and content-bearing potential, reflecting what is in viewers’ mind with a minimum of material and formal interference. As a result, even “finished” drawings tend to remain caught up in a “half-uttered” unstable condition, like an incomplete sentence or idea, evading (for the time being at least) rational explanation and categorizing logic. This is not because the lines are not all there. It is simply because the words (and the concepts that they describe) to refer to such lines have not yet arrived.(7)

This permanently "open-ended" or provisional state is the basis for the perception of drawing as a pivotal moment or transitional state (non-place) of some concrete dimension of reality or imagined reality that is completed or ‘assembled’ in the mind of the viewer through a process of closure.

Although historically aware, human beings tend to view things in terms of the present, in specific of their own present, which is determined by their personal history and life experiences. Consequently, without excluding the interpretative role of prior knowledge and the human sense of history in general, it is primarily through the eyes of the present that the viewer completes the drawing in his mind.

As a result, drawing is something that emerges when you see it with your mind; a uniquely personal and present experience similar to what Peter Brook described as ‘living theatre’ or the actual and felicitous interaction of audience and performer. Granted that this can be said of most encounters with reality and, for that matter, about most artistic mediums, as it is a phenomenon falling within the broader realm of human perception. Yet, no other medium offers such a seamless and fluid embodiment of matter-form-content and none—also—is as unfettered by the suggestiveness and attraction of its physical presence, the history of its production or the decline of its material condition as drawing. Perhaps only certain forms of sculpture come as close to drawing in terms of its economy of means.

The question raised by Ginsborg as to whether or not “mediums that purport to be or are construed as drawings” are really drawing reflects the growing tendency today to ‘read’ things in terms of their role within a broader system rather than as self-contained and individually significant.

If, as Ginsborg proposes, and I agree, such new mediums and practices are drawing in the extended sense of the term, drawing then becomes the ideal expression of a post-medium condition. Lucy Gunning’s mode of inhabiting the residency space at Wimbledon as a total space with her assertion that “placing things is drawing” and her “treating the room like a page” is but one example of a performance-based view of drawing that plays on the notions of place and space, of physical location and habitation. In the same exhibition, Claude Heath links drawing to the restriction of human movements and the definition of form in a kind of prosthetic mimesis. Rae Smith, for her part, uses drawing to “inhabit but also depict previous experience.” In her work, a broader notion of space includes the space of memory as well as prior habitations of place (the memory of the space).

These are but a couple of examples of the infinitely varied and multidimensional field of drawing today. As stated, Gunning’s basic principle: “placing objects is drawing” applies regardless of scale, time or material condition and is similar to saying—as I do: “drawing is order.” As such, she links drawing and the definition of coherent form to the active and purposeful deployment of physical materiality in the sculptural sense.

In my view, such order is a pre-existing given, which emerges in our mind and we identify in a multidimensional reality through the combined physical-intellectual operation of seeing and restated in works reflecting that reality, but not necessarily in a material or even visual sense.

As a form of order, independently of any particular medium or representational or mimetic function and independently—also—of whether the reality subjected to that order actually exists or is imagined, drawing precedes the “object-drawing” that reflects or embodies that order. In this sense, drawing could also be defined as:

A socially relevant, multiform, immaterial and intelligible structure comprising a series of sequential spaces and functions identifiable and explainable primarily in linear terms.

Because drawing has traditionally been taught through observation, imitation and the development of manual skills, this “neo-mimetic” view of drawing challenges established notions about the teaching and exhibition of drawing with respect to the identity of the medium and the changing nature of the artist’s gaze.

In terms of learning how to draw it also raises questions about the role and validity of, for example, the Life Class as one model of teaching and the notion of a new Academy in the form of the recent proliferation of research by practice programs in postgraduate visual arts education.

The life class constitutes a form of regulated scaffolding conceived to observe and learn from the examination of the human body in response to classic Greco-Roman ideals. Its origins can be traced back to the academy of the Carracci brothers in Italy. Its political maturity and development into a model of education came with the French Academy, philosophical positivism and their influence over all other aspects of French culture. Together with Napoleon’s codification of the law, the model of the academy was exported and influenced art education and cultural systems practically all over the world in the XIX Century.

The rules governing the teaching of drawing at the Academy defined a hierarchy in which the Life Class occupied the highest level. Artists began by copying plaster reproductions of Greek and Roman sculpture, followed by the master’s own drawings and culminated with access to the life class, where all would be revealed. In this sense, the life class was invested with a very special authority in terms of the knowledge of drawing and occupied a clear hierarchical position, with the teacher at the head.

In contemporary art education, questions arise about the validity of the role of the Life Class as a model of education. These issues have to do with the role of observation in today’s increasingly intangible and invisible reality. Such questions also point at a possible central role for drawing in an art education curriculum. A curriculum fed not by the output of individual disciplines—drawing included—but instead by the intensity of interdisciplinary communication.

This is not an attempt to give drawing a new role, however, but simply to acknowledge and express what has always been there in a new academic curriculum. To put drawing back at the centre of art education is to acknowledge the dimension of drawing that underlies the majority of man-made elements in our everyday reality. Practically everything that is man-made, including our urban environment, involves at some stage some form of drawing or design, whether as a sketch or an architectural plan as a diagram or engineering drawing.

The Royal College of Art provides an example of such an attempt at interdisciplinary crossovers in an academic environment, but one that has been inserted at postgraduate level rather than being the natural progression of a broader art education system based on an understanding of drawing as a primary form of visual thinking.

Whether it is viewed as an object, as a visual language or as an artistic practice with specific roots, drawing today cannot be examined in isolation from the reality that conditions the event of its production. Such reality includes the ways in which drawing is taught usually—still—through observation, imitation and the development of manual skills.

In order to continue to be a valid and useful regulated model of teaching and observation, the Life Class and drawing in general must provide for the observation and imitation of this new reality, opening up to manual and other skills from other disciplines. These include the new media, technology and other mediums in use today, including the terminology to discuss such new media and technology, combined with a solid grounding in classic drawing.

As used here, the concept of reflectivity differs from the term inclusivity proposed by Michael Ginsborg in that he refers to the representation of subject matter in connection with the medium’s versatility.

This versatility of drawing is not based on its potential for visual representation, or any material, mimetic skill or property but instead on the capacity that even a single, deliberately rendered line has to embody and reflect the complex visions of others (the viewers), which may well be abstract or linked to abstract notions.

I use the term reflect because I believe that the sense or meaning of the drawn image is not to be found exclusively in the drawing or in the reality it reflects. Instead, I believe it derives of a relationship of mutual collaboration where a drawn image is meaningless without some connection with reality—even if only to mirror the maker’s intentions.

Reality, our experience of it, is articulated by drawing as a sense-making device. Therefore, reflection is not understood here in an optical sense only, but as an intellectual process of combined identification and self-identification, a multidimensional experience.

Together with the actuality that the viewer's gaze affords the “unfinished” drawing, this two-sided relationship would account for the historical fluidity and chameleon-like nature of the medium, given that the drawing’s context of production as well as its subject matter is a reality in permanent flux, in a perception of movement fuelled by our own questions and our own experiences.

To recognize the independent dimension of drawing there is in contemporary reality one must look at how rather than what is deployed in a material or functional sense.

Adorno points out that “any concrete image of utopia falsifies the utopian project by setting definite limits to its subject.”

Similarly, I argue, any attempt to define drawing or “what is at the centre of drawing” from the specificity of a technique or material, for example, rather than from the fluidity of its links to the reality it reflects will place unbearable constraints on the medium.

In connection with the expression of the inner vision of the artist, this extended notion of drawing is ideally suited not to “represent Utopia” but to “perform Utopia.”

When Adorno and McDonough discuss the impossibility or impracticability of envisioning Utopia, they refer to the problem of representing it visually, not to the gesture of enacting it of carrying it out.

They see the depiction of Utopia from the point of view of the need to recourse to recognizable form in order to provide it with a formally intelligible description and the use of what they consider “necessary visible references to pre-existing reality”.

The nature of Man’s Utopia is linked to his capacity to separate the existing from the imagined.

In this sense, by providing a living bridge between the real and the imagined and by carrying out his vision, the artist can create a here-now unreality.

But the resulting work of art, the drawing as an object, the painting or the sculpture is in fact only the debris of its own conception. Therefore, due to its spare and polysemic nature, the intangible actuality of the creative act is best represented by the deeply human gesture of drawing.

Mostly, because before drawing there is nothing

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(1) Kingston, Angela (ed.), What is Drawing? Three practices explored Lucy Gunning, Claude Heath, Rae Smith, Black Dog Publishing Limited, London and New York, 2003
(2) Ginsborg, Michael, op. cit. p11 “What is at drawing’s centre? Not one thing for certain. Its inclusivity is too great for that to be true—what cannot be represented by a drawing? But its inexhaustible capacity for invention and change must, I feel, be attributable to its two-dimensional format and narrow range of materials. Put another way: drawing’s value has a lot to do with this inclusivity, with the range of content that it can deal with, and not so much with material experimentation.”
(3)See Gardner, William L. “The Charismatic Relationship: a dramaturgical perspective”, Academy of Management Review, January 1998. Gardner’s point of view that “the meaning of people’s doings is to be found in the manner in which to express themselves with similarly expressive others” is coherent with other authors who have discussed the practicalities involved in the artist’s need to communicate his vision.
(4)The notion of “readability” as used here is also mentioned by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, New York, Routledge, 1992. In a world of stories, the strategic deployment of such stories, serves to create the myth of the artist or, alternatively, to dehumanize. She gives the example of what she calls “Europeanizing” literature, citing the depiction of the inhabitants of the Argentine Pampa in the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
(5)Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, Hart-Davis MacGibbon, Granada Publishing, London, Toronto, Sydney, New York, 1977 “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty stage whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”(page 9)
(6) Bermingham, Anne, Learning To Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000. Preface.
(7) Brook, Peter, op. cit p. 12 “Again, with Shakespeare, we hear or read the same advice ‘play what is written’. But what is written? Certain cyphers on paper. Shakespeare’s words are records of the words that he wanted spoken, words issuing as sounds from people’s mouths, with pitch, pause, rhythm and gesture as part of their meaning. A word does not start as a word—it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictate the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist, it is repeated inside the actor. Both may only be conscious of the words, but both for the author and then for the actor, the word is a small visible portion of a gigantic unseen formation. A similar idea is expressed by Phillip Rawson in Rawson, Phillip, Drawing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969 when he compares drawing and painting: “drawing is the moment, painting is the revisiting of that moment.”