Outpost 130524
The Primal Scene of Drawing.
Drawing as Gesture.
Coda : Coded Imprints/Mediality
Contemporary drawing tending towards graphism, illegible writing, that can be seen as a regression from image and coded sign to what could be described as states of the 'pre-sign', of moments of inscription and the emergence of the signifier from the gesture or act of making a mark.
Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.
A fusion between the artist's mind, the artist,s hand and the beholder's gaze.
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.
Avis Newman.
The raw drawn line at its emergence into the world.
Line can no more escape the present tense of its entry into the world than it can escape into oil paints secret hiding places of erasure and concealment. This fundamental condition can bring it therefore much closer to the viewer's own situation than can the image in paint.
The drawn line in real time with its own momentum, its own trajectory.
A walk for a walk's sake, the mobile agent is a point shifting its position-forward.
Paul Klee.
The present of viewing and the present of the drawn line, hook onto each other, mesh together like interlocking temporal gears. They co-inhabit an irreversible permanently open and exposed field of becoming, whose moment of closure will never arrive.
Though it is impossible to reconstruct with any real accuracy the precise sequence whereby drawn lines on paper finally come together as a completed image. The permanent visibility of each unit of production, of each individual line on its own, means that there is no escaping the sense of the line as emerging from an initial state, blank paper to the state we eventually see.
The drawn line in a sense always exists bin the present tense, in the time of its own unfolding. The ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.
The blankness of the paper exerts a pressure that cannot be reduced or done away with, relentless its blankness forces everything into the open into a field of exposure without shields or screens, with no hiding places, a radically open zone that always operates in real time.
If painting presents being.
The drawn line presents becoming.
Line gives you the image, together with the whole history of its becoming-image.
However definitive, perfect, unalterable the drawn line may be, each of its lines, even the last line that was drawn is permanently open, to the present of a time that is always unfolding. Even that final line, the line that closed the image is in itself open to a present that bars the act of closure.
A Walk for a Walk's Sake.
Norman Bryson.
Cy Twombly.
Works on Paper. 1979.
Such gestures do not ask to be interpreted.
Making marks that open-up a space where in which the distinction between human and non-human is undecidable. How are we to respond to gestures that do not ask to be interpreted since they are meaningless, or more precisely they are gestures in meaningless.
If drawing is to be taken as just such a gesture, how are we to respond to it?
It it is not directed to meaning or interpretation, what does it demand of us?
Instead of considering what its meaning is, we could place the emphasis on the fact that a gesture has been made, the fact that something has been left for us. A mark inscribed on a piece of paper, perhaps by someone. We would thus receive the gestural mark as the trace of the other without any need for that mark to be meaningful. We may well do so without reverting to the 'what' and interpreting the gesture as an expression.
We need to say nothing more than the other has left this mark.
The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.
Michael Newman.
The gesture is communication of a communicability.
Means Without Ends.
Giorgio Agamben. 2000
The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. What is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself, but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language. It is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term.
For Michael Newman, the drawn mark could be taken as a 'gag' in precisely the way Agamben outlines. Its relation to language lies not in language as a goal, but precisely in its turning back on itself to expose its mediality, which is the condition of language.
Materiality and Mediality
Materiality and Mediality takes as its focus the reciprocal relationship between the facture of objects and the making of meaning. The questions addressed in this focus build upon ongoing research on textility. Material observations of textiles from Gottfried Semper onward have played a special role in the historiography of our field, and the study of textiles demands both new economic, social, and material approaches to the history of art, from canvas painting to tapestry, while also emphasizing global movements of materials, techniques, and makers.
More broadly, the study of materials encompasses both the complex negotiation of human makers with material resistances, and the way materials change physically and in terms of their reception over time. From the extraction and procurement of raw materials to the sensual qualities of finished products, the study of an object’s materiality brings forth histories of labor, trade, technology, and the environment that have been traditionally considered beyond the remit of art history. Concomitantly, media theory is a useful tool to examine how medium shapes the behavior of works of art, which becomes especially pronounced when new media emerge and spread. Both materiality and mediality impact the aesthetic, social, and ritual understanding of works of art. The study of materials and media invite approaches to the history of art that span geographies and chronologies in new and challenging ways. Materiality and Mediality serves as a broad framework to examine visual culture using sets of methodological tools that can shed new light on canonical works of art while simultaneously integrating overlooked objects into larger art historical narratives.
https://www.biblhertz.it/en/dept-weddigen/materiality-mediality
We are thus left with the question of how the mark received as trace of the other relates to the mark as gesture, even if the trace necessarily withdraws from the mark. How does the mark-as-gesture not reduce the trace to its mediation to expression in a medium and thus reduce the other to being a figment of my world, an actor on the stage that I project. The other is reduced to the same if the medium is conceived as a common substance, a kind of thing that joins two entities, communication as exposure breaks with this ontology.
