A Consideration of Drawing

About a month ago, Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center ("the only fine arts institution in the United States to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings"), gave a talk here on campus as the kick-off event for a collaboration between Parsons and The Drawing Center. The talk was titled "Is This A Drawing? From Lascaux Caves to Autocad." In it, he gave an overview of drawing or mark-making history, including cave art, earth art (e.g., Walter DeMaria), tattoos, handmade films (e.g., Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, Harry Smith), and a number of contemporary art works and experiments, such as Roxy Paine’s ‘drawing machine.’

Littman spent much of the lecture defining what a drawing is, or what is characteristic of drawing, distinctive from the other arts. The words that came up repeatedly were “immediacy” and “thought.” According to Littman, drawing is a generative activity related to object-making in no specific medium. It allows for new spatial thinking and serves as an intermediary between thinking and doing – a visual manifestation of what’s only in the mind. (Richard Serra: “Drawing is always an indication of how artists think.”)

This definition of drawing as an intermediary between thinking and doing has ready applications to Deleuzian theory in terms of his assertion that art-making is a process by which something is brought into the world through the germinating forces of percepts and affects. [From Sam's lecture on March 24: "The work of art is a record of a process or event through which the artist is becoming artist—using materials (i.e., "supports") that "fix" the percepts and affects in time."]

As such, drawing is an intermediary with a very low technical profile—i.e., it requires no mixing of paints to obtain the right color, no adjusting apertures and lenses to obtain the right exposure and depth of field. Drag one's finger across a sandy surface and you've made a drawing. Roll a ball across a water puddle, leaving a wet streak on the ground, and you've made a drawing [Gabriel Orozco, "Extension of Reflection" 1992]. It thus entails a kind of tracing of events, relatively unfiltered and unmediated, with a greatly reduced interval of time between thought and the virtual image of what unveils itself within the drawing. It is the proto-artistic act – the body leaving its imprint on/in the world.

The act of drawing can be viewed as one of the simplest instances of Deleuze's 'immanent becomings' – his assertion that images manifest themselves on the plane of immanence, not as representations of pre-existing ideas, but as events or things-in-themselves that come about through a movement in space and time. From Cinema 1: "This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement." The hand touches a surface, simultaneously producing an image – the physical record of that collision between mind/hand/world.

Littman posed open-ended questions concerning the relevance and future of drawing in contemporary artistic practice, especially as it loses its traditional role as a measure of artistic ability and becomes increasingly relegated to preparatory or training exercises in support of other artistic/design disciplines. Even then it exists primarily in digital applications such as Autocad for architectural drawing.

Though Littman never directly answered his own question, “Where does drawing go from here?”, based on the range of exhibits planned for The Drawing Center, it seems the implicit answer is that drawing is going into other artistic realms for inspiration. Upcoming exhibitions at The Drawing Center include works involving printmaking, performance, painting, musical interpretations of drawing – i.e., everything but drawing/mark-making itself. At the same time, in the gallery world, so-called naïve drawing/illustration (e.g., Marcel Dzama) and ‘hyperrealistic’ drawing are currently in vogue, and a number of contemporary artists are playing with the folk appeal of graphite-on-paper as a kind of return-to-roots statement.

In the second part of this post, I'll discuss one of the exhibitions that I attended at the Drawing Center. It was a collection of drawings by 'relational-art' superstar Rirkrit Tiravanija, which subverts the Deleuzian concept of art-making as pure becoming, and shreds expectations of what pared-down, minimalist drawing-acts can or should be.

--Noelia

Demonstration Drawings

A consideration of Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings. Viewed in November 2008 at The Drawing Center, New York.

Obviously, this field report is not very timely (among the reasons I never made a great journalist), but I was reminded of my experience of these drawings – and I have a different perspective on them now, given the material we're reading in this class – after attending a lecture by Brett Littman, director of the The Drawing Center, a few weeks ago.

In the "Relational Aesthetics" article from earlier this semester, Bourriard states that relational art is "an observation of the present and about the fate of artistic activity." Rirkrit Tiravanija's 'Demonstration Drawings' is such a project that both identifies currents in artistic practice and poses possibilities for future art-making activities.

The exhibition featured 224 small graphite drawings that reproduced photojournalists' images of political protests, marches, police barricades, and other dramatic clashes between opposing ideological camps around the world. The exhibit was controversial for the fact that Tiravanija had not in fact drawn any of the drawings himself; he commissioned student artists in Thailand to draw them in a uniform, photorealistic style. The method of production making obvious allusions to sweatshop labor and the uniformity of mass production, Tiravanija thus created a record of a process, though not in the Deleuzian sense of pure thought-action-image, or the poetic idea of leaving one's mark on the world.

The exhibition of course led to a flurry of discussions on ethics and authorship in art. As Littman said in his lecture, discussing the Tiravanija show in regards to the production of drawings, "When you remove the artist's hand, people get anxious."

When I saw the drawings, I had no context or knowledge of Tiravanija's work. I simply looked at them, was confused by them, and consulted the exhibition brochure for explanation. What struck me was the profound cynicism of the project – not because the drawings were done by a cadre of assistants, but because the act of drawing itself was seemingly being mocked, the 'photorealism' of the drawing style appearing as naïve and pitifully in earnest. As if the attempts of the individuals in the images (real people who risked their livelihoods, if not their lives, to change something in their world/society) were hopelessly inadequate because their struggles were being "depicted" through two or three repackaging processes (photograph, drawing, gallery). By having the drawings identical in size and displayed side-by-side in a grid pattern, the images were too numerous, too interchangeable to elicit empathetic response. And the medium? Too quaint, too dependent upon dead ideals of craft and technique.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, "untitled (demonstration no. 145)," 2007. Graphite on paper, 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches. Collection of Craig Robins, Miami, FL.

Yet now when I look at scans of these drawings on the web, and think about them in the context of what we've read, I can't help but see them in a new light. In crafting the project, Tiravanija perhaps sees a way to highlight the individual relationship to mark-making. The incidendiary content of the images, the controversial story behind their production, the audacity of the project – all cloud the fact that these are objects made by hand, the result of simple markings made with graphite on paper. After stripping away the surface glamour, each of the drawings, upon close inspection, bears indications of the presence of the craftsperson who wielded the pencil, despite the relative uniformity of the drawing style. [As one reviewer noted, none are particularly talented, but some of the artists are better at cross-hatching than others.] The exhibition is indeed the result of 'sweatshop'-inspired production techniques – but the product is a series of handmade markings of images derived from the world.

There is something radical in that, which perhaps circles back to the content (radical actions, bodies clashing in space and time – the drama of human society). It seems Tiravanija has used the medium of drawing to focus attention upon the contact between hand and surface as an intrinsically self-affirming act. I mark, therefore I am.

In terms of Deleuzian philosophy, this work is clearly not about bringing something glistening and new into the world through pure artistic exploration. Yet it somehow resonates with his project of unmasking and identifying the true nature of the artistic act –and with the idea that images are formed in their relations with other images. Each of these drawings bears subtle individual characteristics; they are self-consciously handmade when they don't need to be. (Tiravanija could have more easily copied or reprinted the photos if multiplying their impact were his goal.)

So in a sense, they do reveal the generative force of art-making, even if they do so by way of vacant reproduction, socio-economic-political statement, and flashy marketing. Perhaps future artworks will have to do similar conceptual acrobatics in order to bring attention back to the creative act itself.

--Noelia

Rirkrit Tiravanija, "untitled (demonstration no. 16)," 2007. Graphite on paper, 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches. Collection of Craig Robins, Miami, FL.