Le Plaisir au Dessin
Literally, line is the trace of a moving point. What does this mean? And why would we want to make it move at all? Why would we gesture? How do we gesture? Line is a dot in motion, its trajectory, its arc and its journey. Paul Klee once described drawing as taking a line for a walk. This walk can be conscious or unconscious, planned or unplanned, continuous or broken, straight or articulated, quick or slow, ponderous or urgent. John Berger says that for the artist ‘drawing is discovery’; For Louise Bourgeois,‘drawing suppresses the unspeakable’, whilst Richard Serra says that drawing is ‘ideas, metaphors, emotions, language structures’, emphasizing that drawing comes from ‘the act of doing’… that ‘drawing is a verb’. A verb of course being a ‘doing’ word.
Gaston Bachelard the writer and philosopher said in The Poetics of Space that … ‘we cover the universe with drawings we have lived’ a personal way of responding to the world; Drawing is the most direct conduit [between brain and hand] through which we are able to represent or express ideas and feelings – and in so doing we make visual the traces of our thought processes before they become formalised. We sketch, preamble, scamp, muse, scribble and stretch our thoughts from vapor to liquid, a fluid with a malleable trace. Yet formed.
According to Jean-Luc Nancy, “Drawing is the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge”. Meaning perhaps that at best it is a response to an instinct, a stimulus that is outside of our conscious and predetermined world. Only becoming tangible once it is formed. Here the reckoning begins, the subjectivity. In his book The Pleasure of Drawing [Originally written for an exhibition Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007], he addresses the drawing medium in relation to form, [of constructs] form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. [of something that necessarily exists] In this way, drawing becomes less about achievement, intention, and accomplishment and instead becomes “a finality without end and the infinite renewal of ends”, lines of sense, “tracings, suspensions, and permanent interruptions”.
In his book Being Alive Tim Ingold examines several key questions and how drawing relates to questions of anthropology; the study of what it is to be human. One of the essays in the book questions The Textility of Making and looks specifically at how art practice connects to the conditions and potentiality of human life. Here Ingold argues how practitioners are “wanderers, wayfarers, whose skill lies in their ability to find the grain of the world’s becoming and to follow its course while bending it to their evolving purpose”. (Ingold 2011: p211) Ingold is here expressing the views originally expressed by the artist Paul Klee who wrote that ‘Form-giving is life’ (Klee 1973: p269). In other words the processes of drawing, making and inventing are more crucial than the made object itself. The process and the intention comes before the object. It is the energy and the action of the ‘doing’ that is privileged.
Think Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly. Drawing is the opening of a form.
Again in Nancy’s The Pleasure of Drawing (Le Plaisir au dessin) he starts with an ontological claim: [ontology referring to the study of existence itself] “Drawing is an opening. The opening is the beginning, the origin, [the impulse]. Drawing thereby is initially defined as an inchoative concept, [in other words is a beginning and primal] and part of a semantic order, which combines act and potency”. [This is pertaining to meaning.] So drawing has traditionally been seen as the precursor of greater things, the prelude, the “birth of form,” rather than its final resting place or the ‘thing’ itself. The statement, the building, the monument, Guernica or The Birth of Venus perhaps.
There can be a naïve quality to drawing and this perhaps is what makes it pleasurable. It is “an art quite a-part". A quotation from Elaine Escoubas, included again in Nancy’s The Pleasure in Drawing. “The energy that emanates from a drawing is a result of the pleasure the artist takes in drawing it…a pleasure that the public then takes in and recognises when viewing it” Pleasure for the artist, Nancy argues, is “not the pleasure of completion but the pleasure of tension.” And this pleasure doesn’t come from the outside from anything external to ourselves… ‘it isn’t a stunning view or vista or some beautiful music but it emanates from the tensions within the artist themselves, and exists further between the artist and the paper or the surface in the sketching, scratching, erasing and refining of the drawing which to push it and them, closer and closer to truth. It is this contemplation of truth that defines the act of drawing. A haptic, sensual act, touch, relying on a marker, a gesture and a surface. Drawing as a verb remember, that expresses action and existence