Acts of Drawing/Derrida : Becomings through immaterial, memory and blindness.

JACQUES DERRIDA THE SCEPTICISM OF DRAWING:

“perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love.

Jacques Derrida in 1993 wrote an extensive text to accompany an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre. This text titled Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins contains within it some particular references to “Pliny’s Origins of Painting." Together with the aid of illustrations of paintings on this theme, he examines and interrogates their philosophical and historical qualities.

Derrida makes particular mention and emphasis of the “state of blindness” in his analysis of the Butades myth. In particular the notion of  “scepticism” which is at the very heart of drawing. This notion of the “difference between believing and seeing”1, and what he remarks as “believing one sees and seeing between” evokes the emergence of a “glimpse” caught in a state in which “doubt ever becomes a system“2. There is a moment of delay between the gaze with its vigilance and attention, and what one reflects upon seeing. These actions will conspire to create the moment of conclusion. So by keeping the thing in sight it is being constantly examined but not reflected on, until the point when the gaze is averted to the drawing .It is a this instant, withdrawn from the sight of the object, that a “blindness” forces the recollection (the moment of conclusion to emerge) to which the drawn mark is visual evidence of that moment Derrida makes the observation that representations substitute memory for perception and that blindness is a constant withdrawal into memory. Derrida is of the view that drawings, paintings are “representations drawn most often from an exemplary narrative." This myth of Butades with its “exemplary narrative” relates directly to the absence or invisibility of (being in) the drawing process whilst in the presence of the object, that the very act of drawing withdrawals and blinds its participant. Butades daughter is “blinded” in the acts of both love and the act of drawing. Through these conditions it can be seen that Butades daughter is blind to the vision of her lover and in drawing around his projection she is forced to recollect and reflect to produce a conclusion of that action by the simple gesture and act of an inscription drawn aided by a flickering silhouette.

Derrida uses the example of the painting by J. B. Suvee “Butades or the Origin of Drawing 1791” or as it is referred in English as “The Daughter of Butades Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover ” to illustrate that it was “as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing.” The drawing in effect becomes a “declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other.”3 Derrida comments that the origin of drawing may have become born from the desire to create some sort of surrogate mark which originates “from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.“4 The important observation Derrida continues to make is that the daughter in “following the traits of a shadow or a silhouette” who is in effect drawing on a blindness which will through recollection, initiates a sense with which she is in effect “already loves in nostalgia.”5

Derrida dwells on the very nature of drawing moving away from “the origin of drawing” to “the thought of drawing” he comments that the thought of a drawing has a “certain pensive pose, a memory of the trait that speculates, as in a dream, about its own possibility.”6 It is as if the potency of drawings is a projected development that occurs as Derrida states “on the brink of blindness.” This notion of the “trait” (a feature to a line, stroke, or mark) a visible presence that accompanies the lines odyssey, a sense of presence that can witness something of the invisible in the visible is touched upon. ’’Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible is cited by Derrida as having already made “Indications” in this respect Derrida footnote from The Visible and the Invisible seems to sum up something of the invisibility and presence of the trait acting on a drawing. This extract taken from the “working notes” section of the book it reads” One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a non visibility.”7

Distilled from the salient points of Derrida’s extensive interrogation Memoirs of the Blind seems to acknowledge the fact that “whether Butades daughter follows the tracts of a shadow or a silhouette or even if she draws on the surface of a wall or in a veil.”8 the resultant inscription in any event “inaugurates an act of blindness.” Derrida’s revelation is that “perception belongs to recollection.” Butades daughter’s act is in blindness, as if she was drawing a declaration of love that simultaneously that also contains her anticipation of a loss, and as a result, a nostalgia that is reflected upon before it is actually perceived.

1  . Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1993),page 1.

2  .Ibid., page 1.

3  .Ibid., page 49.

4  .Ibid., page 49.

5  .Ibid., page 51.

6  .Ibid., page 3.

7   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),257.

8   Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, page 51.

Acts of Inscription : Drawing into Affirmations from a Primal Site.

Outpost 090124

Drawing/Poetry/Images.

Sensing/Drawing Energy.

Water/Clay/Fire.

The mental energy of engagement in drawing and how 'markers' of an action translate the murmurings of the mind.

Empirical evidence carries emotional connections, through a synthesis/reciprocity of reverberations of matter and its mental movement.

Gaston Bachelard illustrates how images bridge the sensate perceived world and the interior affective life.

Bachelard's seminal philosophical and phenomenological interests are always connected to matter. To what he calls the psychology of the familiar, the rapprochement with real objects, and the friendship of things. 

Matter sparks inner images which in turn imbue matter with memory and values. He creates an ever renewing reciprocity of the reverberations between inner and outer qualities, which obliterates any absolute separation between objective and subjective experience, a perspective recognized by modern physics. Bachelard explodes the potential imprisoned in an image. It is the quality of the 'livingness' of the flame that triggers Bachelard's musings of correspondences.

Joanne H. Stroud.

 

The Flame of a Candle.

Student Work.

Charcoal on paper.

Drawing Course, Michael Grimshaw. 

Winchester School of Art. 2003.

 

Drawing The Line.

Affirmations from a Primal Site.

Corollaries between being and becoming.

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invented Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

The Moment/Instants of Engagement.

The conditions of making where the image was not a priori to its making.

The Simultaneity of Effects.

A 'Graphism' In A Corporeal Field.

I am concerned with the movement and process of articulation, of marking and sensing of things across the works surface/duration. I would definitely identify drawing with the infinite space of sensation, both the sensations of the body and the sensations of the mind.

So what is it that one actually makes in such circumstances?

For Newman, it seems to me that the thing made becomes like a temporal spatial/sensate matrix, composed of a continuous repetition and elaboration of individual, but similar inscriptions, and that the series of thoughts and judgements connected to those separate acts, are only subsequently reflected on the image. Marking  the image, these marks suggest an endless repetition and while also existing as a series of relations. The marks suggest the thing could fall apart at any moment. 

Acts Of Inscription.

Drawing on Bodily Impulses.

Images from the mind.

The Psychic Gaps In Drawing.

Primary Forces : Marks of no particular visibility.

Drawing on the sensation of seeing and sensing that always seems to register the endless repetition of remaking, as such drawing constitutes the space of anxieties. 

I understand the page to be a mobile space in the physical presence of its weightless surface and as such it is a place of time and movement. The evokes the consciousness of that limitless space that is embodied in the reality of the white page. Which I would say is a place of fragmentation that has since Modernity been an interminable potentiality, symbolically the dreadful place of boundlessness.

In a drawing the page keeps open the gaps between the marks. It refuses closure and is an active participant in conjunction with the mark. It is part of a negotiated reality of void and presence. The limitlessness white space of the page disperses the notion of its body as substance, its body is phantasmic and intangible space/surface.

The notion of the white page as being boundless, also alludes to that space of our inner reality, where the immaterial world of dreams/imagination and the mental impressions that run through us and evaporate into other thoughts. They dissipate in the fragmented world of our senses and defy any totalizing.

Avis Newman 

Mark Making : On the fascination and the fear of the white page.

For Avis Newman, the paper is an undifferentiated space in that it references the primitive undifferentiated space of the infantile body that has to be claimed by the self.

Drawing is a site in which one enacts differentiation, as soon as a mark or sign is made, it changes the non-ness and establishes a place of action, as soon as that act occurs the paper becomes something, it moves towards, moves with its potentiality into language.

Could we state that one aspect of drawing tends to be more linked to the bodily impulse and the other to the mind?

Catherine de Zegher

The image that Antonin Artaud conjures when he says 'There is a mind in the flesh, a mind as quick as lightning,' situates it well for me. I have the impression that the act of inscribing opens a fissure through which some staged psychic event, operations of consciousness, take existence. They are primary forces with no particular visibility.

Avis Newman.

Marks both coded and uncoded originate in an urge from a space of uncertainty to participate in language. The potentiality of even a blank page is in itself the unbounded space of language. Drawing is both a system and a method of a sensing inquiry. To draw is often a paradoxical act in which two extremes of practice can exist in the same space.

When we come to look at another's markings in the world. We see an extraordinary event. We see attempts at articulating the unbounded space that momentarily binds that aspect of us that is eternally fragmented. Essentially in the very act of drawing we have a wish to externalize thought and communicate existence.

Avis Newman.

From Life : Extending The Speculative Drawing Process.

Bodily Boundaries : Transactions between body-intimate and the social body image.

Organism-Person-Environment.

Body-Fragmented-Memory-Architecture.

Propulsions/Propositions into and through the visual.

In drawing some marks escape their visibility, because there is no dynamism to underpin the possibility of internal cohesion. There is no pressure from the outside inwards;  in drawing, it is all pressure from the inside outwards.

Conduits of perpetual potentiality.

The articulation of marking thoughts, which by definition are open-ended, in a state of flux in which things can pass through and are suggestive of a perpetual potentiality.

Some marks are seeing, some are feeling, some are for thinking, some are from memory, others from a blindness when seeing.

Gestures and Acts.

Conversation/Correspondences.

Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with the infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time. Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

Catherine de Zegher.

The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional to the boundary we project onto the work. When one looks for example at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17' ' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space, this is not part of drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Avis Newman.

In Drawing : One is not so much looking at the thing itself, as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. In that sense, drawing is both fugitive and embodies a lack, it is implying qualities of incompleteness and that which conjures to be only a trace of a thing.

Drawing/Corresponding to a mobile field of properties that only during the process of marking is a cohesion found, a somewhat precarious frame constructed, almost as a byproduct of the articulation of marking thoughts.

Drawings are beyond the conceptual anxiety found in connection to the frame of painting.

In drawing the surface maintains its separate existence. There is an ambivalence of status between the mark and its support, consequently the lack of integration has always been more complex, corresponding as it does to a mobile field of properties. 

Drawing as a site, a meditation of a self regarding consciousness. Where consciousness is understood/expressed as a process that 'figures/thinks' a state of existence. Drawing and the drawn become a site of inquiry, response and invention, and in that sensing space it becomes a philosophical activity.

Drawing, even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation. The fractured, open-ended, and incomplete that are inherent characteristics of drawing practice seem very pertinent as materializations of our present experience of the world.

It is that space of anxiety and fragmentation in contemporary practice that offers a potential of infinite diversity. Drawing is a record of the working of thought, that we see embedded in the drawn.

Conversation, Avis Newman. Catherine de Zegher.

The Stage Of Drawing : Gesture And Act.

Making Statements/Making Things : Hungate/Anglian Potters.

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits . Erin Manning.

Architectural slab built pieces investigate ceramic forms as a dwelling place or a model for a building construction. Some thrown shapes on the theme of crucibles fired by the Raku process. Recent work has been exhibited in historical sites and locations, exploring contexts of ceramics and rituals. Studied Ceramics at Epsom School of Art and Design UCA, Visual Fine Art at Winchester, Teaching at Brockwood Park School.

Anglian Potters

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Water at Hungate.

Hungate Architectural Explorations. 

Air/Place/Breath/Light/Architecture/Ritual/Social Space

Cell-Court-Domain.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.