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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
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Graphetics: When mark-making becomes writing
More LessAbstractGraphetics is the study of how one recognizes text, and how one differentiates it from other marks and drawings, for example when one views a manuscript and has to decide ‘is this writing or just scribble?’. This article focuses on the pragmatics of graphetics and on the (philosophical) complexity of differentiating graphs into linguistic and non-linguistic content, i.e. the difference between seeing and reading. Deciding the identity of marks when interpreting manuscript sources is sometimes problematic, and this article takes some examples from the project to digitize Wittgenstein’s manuscripts, which are especially relevant because he conducts thought-experiments with imaginary letterforms and other ciphers. The method used in this article is a reductive graphological or pragmatic graphetic analysis of the manuscript source. The results of the enquiry are threefold: that all manuscripts should be assumed to be graphical until textual content is discovered (which is the opposite of the normal assumptions about manuscripts by philologists); that ‘being graphical’ is a property not of appearance but of structure; and that a clear differentiation between text and graphics is not always possible. The author believes that the conclusions are fundamental to our interpretation of two-dimensional media, i.e. the differentiation of modes of communication. However, when looking so closely at a problem (letter by letter, mark by mark) it is sometimes difficult to maintain the reader’s awareness of the broader context in which the problem has significance. The latter is an intrinsic problem of the so-called ‘close-reading’ approach in hermeneutics and is relevant to most doctoral/postdoctoral researchers.
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Drawing the city – writing the city: Analogue as linguistic form
More LessAbstractThis article, and the accompanying montages, approaches the theme of drawing on text through Aldo Rossi’s linguistic concept of the analogical city. I argue the analogue is a linguistic form that assimilates architecture’s history, transforms its language and develops the material into singular forms for combination and recombination, substitution and displacement, structured by formal syntax and association. The aim is to test the possibility of Rossi’s analogical city as a critical project to reassert the city as an architectural discourse and to develop the analogue as a theoretical and methodological device. The argument is developed through a suite of montages and by constructing a genealogy of the analogical city. The montages speculate about textual processes (seriality, syntax, association, substitution, displacement, combination, recombination) using visual means. They visualize an analogical chain of association between elements of the theory and projects of the city of Piranesi, Le Corbusier and Aldo Rossi. The argument is staged in three sections to put forward a genealogy. The first section situates Rossi’s concept of the analogical city and links the formal syntax of Rossi’s collage project, the Analogical City: Panel, with Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Campo Marzio. The second section connects the analytical view with which Le Corbusier and Piranesi study Rome in their respective projects, ‘The Lesson of Rome’ and the ‘Views of Rome’, to elucidate linguistic operations including identification, abstraction, distillation and transformation. The last section puts forward the Ville Contemporaine as an Analogical City by closely reading the Piranesian and classical elements of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine plan. The conclusion is subtitled ‘The Linguistic Form of the City’ and I end with the need to reassert a linguistic approach to architecture and the city with its attendant critical, representational and collective ethos against current instrumental and individualistic discourse.
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The magnified glass of liberation: A review of fictional drawings
More LessAbstractThe article uses an inactive creative period to consider drawing as a type of fiction. The writing style adheres to academic conventions; however, the author’s autobiographical experiences and wonderings are critical in exploring drawings fictions. It revisits making and thinking to explore drawing and philosophizing as speculative commutable passages of exploration and inquiry. The article chronicles the preparation of fictional drawings for a ‘Fictional museum of drawing’ created by Phil Sawdon. This article reworks Sawdon’s site of fictional drawing, advocating drawings fictions as twofold, as rooted in foresight where predisposed thinking is navigated and anticipation reigns. The other recognition of fiction focuses upon the material illusions of thought. It plays on the autobiographical disposition of drawing/writing redrafting spatial origination of words to become diverse and contradictory graphics of language that displace the blank page. The fictions of the drawings/writings reviewed in the paper reappraise syntactical devices and worded conventions, where the works reorganize conventions from both drawing and writing using illusion and paradox to unsteady their material.
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Drawing and the street texts of Chapeltown
By Garry BarkerAbstractThis paper is a meditation on a field text that explores the concept of the sentient street. The graffitied walls of Chapeltown, a multi-cultural area of Leeds, a Northern English city, talk to an artist embedded within its community and these street texts give rise to drawings that embody that experience. Chapeltown has been a home to various and shifting populations over the last 100 years and during this time its walls have often been a support for the words of street poets, especially those that have messages that go beyond the traditional graffiti tag. Walking through these streets as he draws, an artist meets people and talks to them and their stories become additional texts that can be used to provide narratives to support the development of post-situ drawings. The streets themselves have their own voice and it is this voice that gives the artist’s post-situ drawings their charge, a voice that gives poetic shape to the drawn image. This article seeks to follow these street texts and their affect. Nancy’s concept that a drawing does not become information, but a sense, is used as a guide and as a series of interjections as to the way textual information becomes embedded into the feeling tone of a drawing.
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Making/drawing with words: Form as text, text as form (un-writing and re-writing form)
More LessAbstractDigital making in ceramics can be approximated to a form of drawing.This project considered the possibility of forming clay using the Rhino programme as a drawing tool by way of adopting drawing into a craft-based process. This paper reflects on the nature of digital drawing as a word-led rather than bodily-led process in generating three-dimensional form – a method of hand-making or hand-writing in ceramic craft. It therefore explores form-finding by means of a drawing process of composing and crafting with words. The article examines the physicality and meaning of words derived from actions related to hand-making and the sensorial nature of a written, embodied language. It considers the translation of three-dimensional form from performative word-acts of hand-making (rolling, folding, bending, twisting, splitting, wrapping, binding, joining, bonding, stretching, etc.) into a digital vocabulary of drawing commands (rotate, curve, arrange, expand, cut, multiply, etc.). The exercise signals the difference between sensorial renderings and digital readings in craft and drawing practice, contemplating the role of the language in-between. In doing so, it questions the significance of digital drawing in the context of ceramic craft as an approach to generating three-dimensional physical form.
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The importance of medium specificity in writing and drawing
More LessAbstractThe intent of this essay is to consider the relationship between writing and drawing. The article will take a critical look at a set of propositions from the discourse on drawing which discuss the common ground shared by the two mediums. It will begin by considering how the modes were interlaced within Mel Bochner’s 1966 Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, and then turn its attention to ideas from such figures as Hélène Cixous and Taro Amano. By addressing questions such as both mediums’ allegiances in thought, form and the making of meaning, the hope is to suggest that within similarity there is still room for difference. The article will conclude by touching upon the work of Hanne Darboven to propose that the awareness of difference creates distinct ways to use both mediums to powerful effect.
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Diagramming in the margins of philosophy
More LessAbstractThis critical reflection emerges at a tangent from a concurrent creative practice-led research project into the diagram at the intersection of art praxis and post-continental philosophy. It was provoked by a realization that the diagrammatic was in operation at all levels of the project and core to its methodology as well as its content. The following is the consequence of a resistance to the assumed ‘transparency’ of the academic procedure of a literature review, wherein the process of reading is understood to be an instrumental form of information mining. It is a meta-inquiry into how drawing diagrams in the process of reading may open a new register for thought. The analysis takes an auto-ethnographic form, with my own experience of reading and autographic marking-up on paper-based texts – as forms of ‘drawing on text’ – offered as case-study for reflection.
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Reviews
Authors: Bruce Mutard and Barbara TverskyAbstractA Theory of Narrative Drawing, Simon Grennan (2017) Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 280 pp., ISBN 978-1-13752-165-1, h/bk, £56.09
Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science, Gemma Anderson (2017) Bristol: Intellect, 275 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78320-810-4, h/bk, £74/$98.50
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