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Unskilled beauty or ugly truth? A dialogic study of the indexical line
- Source: Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, Volume 6, Issue 1, Apr 2021, p. 15 - 31
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- 01 Apr 2021
Abstract
A skilled drawing elicits an elevated aesthetic pleasure that we tend to call beauty. However, conceptual approaches to art influenced by science in association with technology subverted the discipline of drawing and notions of skill and beauty by focusing on the phenomenal world, including the human mind, in a more abstract and schematic way through an indexical line. The displacement of skill and beauty through the notion of a ‘truthful’ and perhaps even ethical line may pluralize beauty (the eternal regulator) and disable – literally – traditional notions of what the body can or should do. This study follows dialogically a number of indexical lines, from the art historian Pliny the Elder twenty-one centuries ago, to the deaf contemporary artist Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980) whose work explores the notations of sound through drawing, including Etienne-Jules Marey’s (1830–1904) graphic recording machines and Irma Blank’s (b. 1934) conceptual drawn writings.