Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019

In this article, we engage resources in Daoist philosophy as a means for critically investigating theories of drawing in contemporary arts practice. The aims of this article are twofold. First, we highlight the problematic metaphysical assumptions that inform contemporary drawing practice and its theorization around ‘performance’. In particular, we criticize the tendency to conceive such performance in terms of transcendent or mystical expression, and relatedly, through notions of unthinking or pre-conceptual bodily practice. We suggest that such practices, and their corresponding theories, problematically bifurcate between ‘thinking’ and ‘unthinking’ action, thereby reinforcing a substance-based metaphysics. Second, in response to this problem, we begin to outline how Daoist philosophies of action might provide a more robust theorization for undertaking such practices. We consider the philosophical implications of what Hans-Georg Moeller has termed ‘the Dao Scenario’, as a model for critical practice that can avoid such problematic mysticism.

In undergraduate education, drawing landscapes or landforms as part of geomorphological field exercises is rarely performed. Drawing is not, for the most part, explored in scientific disciplines despite its significance in textbooks for illustrating complex, three-dimensional, relationships such as mountain systems. Photographs in themselves are only a partial solution to recording and interpretation. Photography does not provide the ‘active’, meta-cognitive, learning opportunities that drawing does. The article explores the way in which visual feature extraction, for example in pattern matching, plays a role in analysis of an image. Not only is the identified shape or form important in revealing a structure but this may help identify an underlying physico-mathematical relationship such as power laws, complexity and emergence. The basic identification of shapes can be used to link geomorphological information with simple techniques that can be used in training undergraduates and use drawing techniques as a matter of course. The importance of metadata in titles and explanatory information is an important part of image interpretation. Examples are presented to show fieldwork sketching and linking to cognitive processes and suggest that drawing should be a part of undergraduate geomorphological education.

Chaos, in the sense used by mathematicians and physicists, contains a beautiful co-mingling of order and disorder. Here, we consider the interplay between periodic order, and disorder, in both space and time. This boundary is considered in both mathematical terms, and in terms of our experiences of order and pattern in our everyday routines. Periodic spatial patterns can exist in two dimensions, and finite sections can be made on paper (drawings, designs). These two-dimensional patterns are described by the seventeen ‘wallpaper groups’, a mathematical classification also used to describe the structure of crystals found in nature. In this article, supported by discussion of disrupted, non-regular and quasiperiodic patterns, we present a series of Lucy’s drawings, showing how one periodic order can deform into another. The drawings attempt to represent experienced patterns (habits and routines) as decorative pattern.

Pattern-making is fundamental to our human consciousness; where it expresses form, place and meaning and is key to learning. Drawing is part of this impulse, as is language, speaking, dancing, movement, music, writing and other modes of gestural figure-making activity. In parallel with this, an increasing specialization and individualization in contemporary society means that one of our major challenges is to rediscover how we can work together and in doing so employ our innate creativity as human beings. This essay, therefore, is propositional in its description of the potential for language, through its patterns and gestures, as a form of drawing and a mode of democratic ‘art-working’ that is held in common. By eroding the distinction between speaking and drawing to form a larger category of embodied and communicative acts, the aim is to widen our current definitions of drawing and creativity in the social realm where speaking, conversing, gesturing and writing are part of our quotidian life and are vitally alive in human discourse from early childhood. The common element is pattern, generated by rules of language and of drawing that create form in their usage. This text will include a discussion of collaborative drawing and speaking works facilitated by the author in 2018 that begin to ‘draw out’ the forms inherent in the life of conversations that occur in moments of commonplace rituals, in this case an artist interview and a neighbourhood dialogue with the communal sharing of food. The essay concludes by raising the radical implications for drawing, the possibilities for extending its agency and that everyday conversation and the patterns of language, redefined as drawing, are democratic, generative acts that contain the potential to widen the terms of art and human creativity.

This paper analyses the instrumentality of drawings in Midwest American architectural practices of the 1950s, by using Bruce Goff as its case study. With consideration for the cultural values characteristic of the post-war period, this article proposes that the architectural drawing provides alternative approaches to mainstream American Modernism. Although the primary role of drawing practice is to represent architectural concepts, the drawing is not merely an analytical and interpretative means of spatial representation. The drawing is also an empirical tool, for visual thinking and the visual imagining of space. In prioritizing visual, sensory and transitory effects, the drawing is aided by spatial experiences and gives particular attention to the viewer. As such, it functions additionally as a tool for testing methodologies of representation, and embodies the effects of natural phenomena to comprise a distinctly perceptive quality in architecture. In this way, the drawing does not merely refer to the visible field of architectural representation. It includes sensory and transitory effects, and mimics the external forms of nature. Through the creativeness of Midwestern architects, the language of composing forms, organization, and structuring was inspired by patterns such as those used in the repetitive compositions of the Beaux-Arts. By connecting organic forms, graphics and artwork, the focus of these architects was to explore how patterns and chaos, from nature, relate to composing space. With consideration for other mid-century architectural, cultural and artistic movements, the aim of this research is to understand how these ideas relate to composing and representing space, towards the possibility of artistic autonomy in architecture.

Ghost Flower 1 (for MM) is a pencil drawing made by tracing through the enlarged flower motif of a cheap mass-produced net curtain. The text reflects on the precise and laborious task of making the drawing and the speculations that the process engendered. Childhood memories of a familiar landscape framed by a net curtain are evoked, alongside ruminations on the unknown designer of the motif. The industrial process that the net curtain has endured during its journey to market is considered, and its long history and shifting relationship to taste. As the drawing progresses the artist contemplates the act as a translation, a doubling that produces a haunting intimacy with the object.

Through the questioning activity of drawing this research offers a visual language exploring woven cloth as printed pattern. Drawing tools develop a dialogue for reflection and evaluation as the hand and eye communicate weave. The processes of observation and interpretation led by the drawing hand establish a challenge in relation to imitation, deception, reproduction and truth. The project confronts the abundance of digitally printed material surfaces (such as printed wood and stone) in the interiors market and develops a new pattern from cloth, for cloth.

This paper extrapolates material from participation in a project titled ‘A line made by walking without marking the earth’ (2011) which fed into ‘Walking through the field’, part of my practice as research (PAR) Ph.D. titled ‘Site-specific performance and the mechanics of becoming social’ (2018). ‘Walking through the field’ is reworked in this text to present an imbricated drawing ontology that is composed from, and understood through, a process of layering materials generated whilst walking, sharing personal histories and being tracked by satellites. A chaotic assemblage of personal thoughts and memories is layered with the ordering capabilities of the satellites which track movements in space to create drawings from the traces, lines and patterns these technologies generate. The methods used to bring together these traces, lines, patterns and memories seek to articulate a sense of what social scientist Doreen Massey refers to as ‘throwntogetherness’ and speak to what Massey might describe as an ‘ever-shifting constellation of trajectories’. An imbrication of micro and macro events of space and place speak to a purposeful disruption of stable definitions of site, connecting a multiplicity of people, events and specificities to create an imbricated drawing ontology.

This studio-led research project describes how office-based digital and analogue techniques can be combined to execute an artistic process that I have termed ‘digital frottage’. The use of digital and analogue techniques allows for a mutual critique. In a re-interpretation of the historical frottage process, I show how the flatbed scanner can be used to take automated ‘rubbings’ of low-relief sculptural drawings created with Blu-Tack. I then show how the resulting scanned images can be cut and recombined using the computer program Photoshop. The total process has components that can be identified as either deterministic (patterned) or chaotic. Each of my digital frottage artworks is the result of object manipulation, digital scanning, digital cutting, digital montage and digital printing. In each of these actions, chance and disruption are present, and it is easy to view the overall process as alchemical. Key elements of alchemy are a mystery and the transformation of the commonplace into something of great value. My artworks are often said to be mysterious in the sense that it is difficult to discern how they are created. They also demonstrate that valuable artworks can be created using commonplace items such as Blu-Tack and office technology. The research demonstrates how the historical frottage process can be expanded by engaging with technology, and how our technological culture can only continue to broaden artistic expression. At a high level of abstraction, the digital frottage process is one of decomposition and recomposition. The overall process can be looked at as a formless procedure where the physical is transformed into the digital using a flatbed scanner and computer code. The writings of Georges Bataille, Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois on the formless are reviewed to make linkages with other artistic endeavours.

Seeking out the patterns of constituent violence, so that these patterns might be understood and reordered, lies at the heart of Ariella Azoulay’s discursive project, the Unshowable Photographs: Different Ways Not to Say Deportation (2012). The photographs in question capture scenes from the mass movement of Palestinians after the establishment of the state of Israel. In response to archival restrictions, she enacts an apparently simple gesture, that of making drawings of these ‘unshowable’ photographs. The resulting works operate to reposition the viewer as an active interpreter, suggesting a practice that is both aesthetic and political. These terms are examined for their ability to cast light on Azoulay’s key concepts of civil imagination and the civic gaze. Her critique of the archive is also considered, particularly archival mechanisms for setting and repeating divisive, diachronic patterns whose impacts are not contained in the past but continue to work on the present. However, the archive can also be a generative source of potential histories, occluded patterns of life and possibilities that were suppressed or overlooked. Azoulay approaches photography as an event that is ongoing and multiple, renewed in each encounter with a viewer. The drawings, as a form of graphic witnessing, intensify the ethical relation to the image. I will argue that the act of drawing seeks to bind rather than separate, bringing us in to a relation with the image that the photograph could not. From here it is possible to glimpse the emergence of a civil imaginary that resists familiar aesthetic and political categories, one that obliges viewers to reconsider their agency as citizens. Recognizing this, new patterns of being-with others may become possible.

On Air, Tomás Saraceno, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 17 October 2018–6 January 2019