Time taken and time told: Serial drawing as the becoming of now

This article presents a brief report of a first-person investigation through drawing, discussing how serially developed drawing can be understood to express the becoming of now – the present moment in time. By employing a phenomenological approach, the notion that drawing expresses the becoming of now is treated as an assumption, meaning a hypothesis to be tested through practice and theory combined. This occurs as part of my developing research practice, where I look to ‘perform philosophy in a non-philosophical way’ (Emoe 2014). Rather than treat art as an object for philosophy, I use philosophy to question a thought that I, as a practitioner, believe is immanent to drawing as form of art – that drawing itself is a form of becoming, based on the intentionality underpinning the temporal experience of drawing.

I employ a largely Husserlian ([1931] 2012) approach to my research, using the methods of variational practice and ‘bracketing’ to actively suspend my assumptions for the duration of each test. Deploying it here means I stand back from my uncritical ‘lived experience’ of time to establish how phenomenological theory renders the now an aporia, or puzzle, difficult to express in conventional terms. I then use this theory to develop an alternative mode of expression through drawing, developing the now as a rhythm with a fixed temporal duration, which then ‘becomes’ a spatial extension through drawing serially developed lines. In my analysis I seek the invariant understanding – meaning I ask the series what it expresses beyond the individual variation each drawing presents. I emerge from this process better able to articulate how drawing operates, but also with some reservations, leading towards some suggestions for potential development of the research.