Why drawing is like phenomenology (and why I cant do it)

I’m not very good at drawing and any of my efforts to date have been pretty clumsy. The main reason as to why I can’t draw well is that I haven’t learned to look in the appropriate style. David Hockney calls this particular style of looking to draw “eyeballing” which he says is,

The way an artist sits down in front of a sitter and draws or paints a portrait by using his hand and eye alone and nothing else, looking at the figure and then trying to recreate the likeness on the paper or canvas. By doing this he ‘gropes’ for the form he sees before him. (Hockney 2006, p. 23)

Also, I can’t seem to make my hands do what I’d like them to in order to make a satisfactory drawing. I don’t have the technical facility to use the drawing materials effectively. In short, I don’t have what Ernst Gombrich calls a “schema” for drawing.

A colleague once gave me a drawing lesson and I, apparently, made the classic mistake when trying to draw an object. In this case it was a beer glass. I first imagined the immediate experience of the glass as a conceptual object, which in this case was a transparent, open cylinder. I then attempted to rotate that cylinder in my mind’s eye to bring it parallel with the picture surface in order to represent it through drawing lines. The reason that this does not work as a strategy for drawing is that it is the wrong style of looking. This style of looking takes first hand expe­rience and attempts to mediate it conceptually according to a pre-existent shape (such as a cylinder) before attempting to re-present that shape according to the material of the drawing (pencil, paper and so on) and parallel to a picture plane.

The successful drawer, on the other hand, must attend to the specific experience of the object as it is experienced. In short, they have to become a phenomenologist (even if they didn't know it.) They learn to attend to the gaps between things and treat the spaces between elements as something rather than nothing. They must then match their observations with a set of learned procedures and physical actions. The good drawer uses their arms and hands and thumbs and other parts of the body to relate the proportions of the viewed object to their own body. They must bracket (put out of action) a conceptual consideration of the object in favour of grasping its concrete particularity. The drawer must then translate this experience into the medium they have to hand according to the techniques they know.

I find such a style of “eyeballing” and close looking – what I call the drawing style – actually very difficult to do. It is certainly the case that this is not how I experience the world on a day to day basis whereby my natural attitude to things is as something ready to hand to be used or understood. I rarely attend to door frames or tables as significant aesthetic experiences or perceptual conundrums. Even many works of art do not present themselves in such a way too. Recently, for example, I spent a considerable time looking at the Ghent Altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by van Eyck and marvelling at its complex ico­nography of saints, patrons, angels and so on. I was absorbed by the lustrous surfaces of oil paint. And puzzled by its weirdness. But I did not imagine myself drawing it. I was not in the drawing style of looking. There seemed to be too much going on, a surfeit of richness perhaps, to allow for this.

Spiral Jetty, Fade to Pink

[Text from a spoken introduction to the first of a two part programme curated by Aoife Desmond at Irish Film Institute organised by the Experimental Film Club. Ruins and Entropy Part I shows Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty 1970 and Mono Lake 1968-2004 ( made with his partner Nancy Holt).]

The first time I saw Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was in a lecture theatre at Glasgow University where I was studying history of art. It was a faded slide of the famous photograph of the work taken by Gianfranco Giorgoni in 1970, the year the earthwork was completed.

Old analogue photographic slides on transparency have a tendency to become pinker as they get older. I have a theory that  progressive viewings by bored students in darkened rooms slowly leeches them of their colour and life. That each slide has a limited amount of views that it can yield, and it will degrade with each gaze directed at it. In the case of the slide of Spiral Jetty it was particularly faded, and indistinct. And especially pink.

This seems appropriate for two reasons.

Firstly, the pinkness – the salt lake itself, at Rozel Point, beyond the Golden Spike monument, in Utah is bright pink. In part this is why Smithson chose this place for his piece having aborted attempts to work at sites in Bolivia and Mono-Lake, California. As the slide was becoming pinker it edged toward the conditions of the landscape it pictured and began to mimic.

Second, it’s also appropriate for the photographic slide to be faded because it points to something of the object Spiral Jetty in general – that is that it alludes perception and resists representation.

I witnessed this allusiveness first hand in 2001 when I visited the piece as a PhD student to find that it had, again, gone beneath the water.

[Spiral Jetty, 2002, Photo: Francis Halsall]

 My own art safari to the site revealed further dimensions to the work. It stank, for example. A sulphurous fug hung about the landscape. It’s also, despite what is often claimed for it, not monumental. In actuality the 1500ft coil is somewhat quaint. Spiral Jetty is somewhat dwarfed by the industrial causeway one first encounters that was built as part of an aborted attempt to run an oil extraction business there. We spent some time walking up and down this before realizing that we weren’t on the Spiral Jetty.

 [2002, Photo: Francis Halsall]

All of which suggests that the film of Spiral Jetty which we are about to watch is an equally deficient form of representation. And in part it is a deficient form.

But this is, of course, part of the point. The film is just part of a complex system of cross references which include an earthwork in Utah, a film and an essay.

Craig Owens likens this conceptual structure of self-reference to a spiral.

“The Jetty is not a discreet work, but one link in a chain of signifiers which summon and refer to one another in a dizzying spiral. For where else does the Jetty exist except in the film which Smithson made, the narrative he published, the photographs which accompany that narrative, and the various maps, diagrams, drawings, etc. , he made about it?”

These are a 35 minute film with sound on 16mm color stock (1970) and, 2 years later, the essay Spiral Jetty.

The film and the essay have comparable structures. They weave together at least three key themes:

(i)  A documentary account of the creation of the work

(ii) An, at times, hallucinatory account of how Spiral Jetty is an allegory for Smithson’s ideas of time and space and entropy

 (iii) A self-reflexive meditation on the relationships between the different media of the work (sculpture, film and written word.)

It thus emerges that there is no single, unchanging thing that we might call Spiral Jetty. There is no discrete art item; and no singular work of art. Instead, it transpires that the Spiral Jetty, has an unstable identity that is manifested across and between a variety of media.

The essay itself spirals around itself with repetitions and false starts bringing the reader back around upon themselves.  And it too begins to disintegrate into something formless – just as the earthwork frequently disappears.

Thus, the physicality of language – elsewhere Smithson talks about Strata in language, and heaps of words – relishing its brute physicality - means that whilst it may be mapped directly onto a landscape, it can never full represent it. Just like the photographs and the film.

This, then, is the point at which nature re-enters Smithson’s work.

This seems, at first glance, odd, to talk of nature in relation to an artist who uses broken glass, mirrors, collapsed wood-sheds, glue and asphalt in his work. In one sense his work is anti-environmental.

But, by nature I don’t mean that fluffy nature of moss and dew, but something far more threatening. The nature of entropy.

All of Smithsons work is concerned with entropy.

One of his famous examples is the sandpit from A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Smithson imagines a child’s sandpit split in half with black sand on one side and white on the other. When a child runs clockwise in the pit the sand turns grey, but if they run anti clockwise the sand doesn’t revert back to black and white. It becomes ever greyer.

Like the sandpit Smithson’s work is in collapse. But collapsing not only materially; it collapses theoretically too.

Spiral Jetty is not represented by any of its different iterations. It is rather a complex object comprised of those iterations.

It is the sculpture, the essay, the film, the photographs, the drawings, the conversations, the arguments.

His work is also in a process of collapsing in on itself, of moving towards entropy. In the Spiral Jetty essay, Smithson writes: ‘No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence.’

Smithson writes and makes films not to valorise literature and film-making; but to bear witness to their failures. He claims that language ‘covers’ rather than ‘discovers’ its situations. Its dumb materiality, the thud of its words and the rustle of its language will always bring into view the gap between words and the world.

Language, like other forms of representation, such as cinema, and faded slides in art history departments

must always fail;

must always break down.

And fade to Pink.

Carburetor Dung

In 1894 the Times of London ran a story about horse manure on the capital’s streets. If horse numbers continued to rise, it warned, then as soon as 1950 the streets would be submerged in 9ft of dung. The very thing which made the city function, its horse power, threatened it from within. If left unchecked, unstoppable waves of fecal matter from the city’s horses – so necessary for transportation– would choke and constipate its commercial systems. A new form of urban transport was required to save cities from the swelling, steaming heaps of excrement.

There are two readings of this failed prediction.

The first is optimistic. It’s underwritten by a comforting faith that humans will always be able to come up with technological advances to engineer themselves out of the predicaments they find themselves in. Or, in other words, we needn’t worry too much about our carbon footprints or air-miles because new technologies will emerge soon enough and render our petro-chemical age redundant. Just like the internal-combustion engine replaced horse power so too this will be superseded in due course. Any current anxieties about global warming will seem as quaint in 50 years time as worries about horse manure do now.

The other reading is to recognize the truth: all technology produces shit.

Both horses and motor cars generate by-products relentlessly. These are the redundant but necessary productions of their operations. Their dung. Dead bits of stuff are always left-over, and left behind. All processes of production produce surplus. From the whittlings of working in wood to the chaff of threshing and all the sawdust, stubble, and sump-oil in between; every technology will produce its own surfeits and pass its own stools. These excesses are the non-signifying elements of its processes. They are without meaning because they don’t sit obviously within a system of objects. They are rather the dross which rises to the surface. The swarf.

Making and Matching paper published

I’ve been working on a piece for ages which has now seen the light of day in one form here at the Journal of Art Historiography. It’s about aesthetic judgment in art historical writing. My claim is that a tacit aesthetic judgment is at play in choosing what theoretical model is applied to art – in so far as the model is made to “match” the object.

My feeling is that this has wider implications than art history (although that is an excellent place to test this theory out). Not least, I will argue, in thinking about a tacit aesthetics in systems-theory and the will-to-system. More on this to follow...

Geology and Flat Ontology: Bryant and De Landa

The first of the new systems seminars at Gradcam began last week with a fascinating discussion on De Landa’ s ‘Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form’ [South Atlantic Quarterly, 96:3]and parts of Bryant's The Democarcy of Objects.

Alan has already posted some initial thoughts here which I'm responding to..

There were 2 elements I found particularly exciting about the reading and discussion; both of which are helpful in thinking through the idea of system as an absolute metaphor; that is a basic form of organization.

1 – Metaphor. De Landa gives the following description of his use of ‘Strata’ and ‘Meshworks’ as forms of organization: “This raises the question of whether some (or most) applications of these terms are purely metaphoric. There is undoubtedly some element of metaphor in such applications, but, the appearance of linguistic analogy notwithstanding, I believe that a deep, objective isomorphism underlies the different instantiations of strata and meshworks.” He invokes a “deeper, objective level” at which isomorphic connections occur.

Alan’s question in regard to this is a pertinent one – does this lead to a circularity of thought in which a deep structure is presupposed in advance of its revelation; ‘can De Landa move from metaphor to real isomorphic systems without too much concern?’ I’m not sure. It seems telling that he claims to ‘believe’ in the deep, objective isomorphisms yet without moving toward providing proof.

The move from metaphor to (ultimately un-provable) isomorphism reminds me of Blumenberg’s talk of Absolute Metaphor (something I’ve mentioned a few times here already) as ‘unable to satisfy the requirement that truth, by definition, be the result of a methodologically secure proceedure of verification.’ (Paradigms for a Metaphorology)  This is also how Don Ihde reads Heidegger’s account of technology (“Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing” – The Question Concerning Technology):

“I have called what Heidegger sometimes calls ‘Epochs of Being’ civilizational givens. These are something like deeply held, dynamic but enduring traditions, historical but nor more easily thrown over than one’s own deepest character or personality.” [Don Ihde, Technis and Praxis, pg. 104ff.]

2 – Geological Organisation. De Landa’s discussion proposes forms of organization which can on the one hand accommodate non-linear, non-predictable complexity and on the other transfer across different orders (psychic, social, “natural”) without relying on (i) consciousness/ volition or (ii) ‘life’ as organizing principles.

As Alan mentions the model of Hierarchies and Networks seems them as organizational forms which emerge from geological processes. This proposal for a geological mode of organization suggests a 3^rd alternative to the 2 classical modes:

(i) Social/ Intentional. From this volition/ will emerges as consciousness in the humanist tradition. The best example of this is forms of communicative rationality as theorized by Habermas and intersubjectivity as an intentional horizon in the phenomenological tradition. This is an anthropomorphic model of organization. It is, arguably, unsatisfactory in that it anthropomorphizes organizational process (as volitional, intentional etc.).

(ii) Biological/ Life. From this organization is attributed to an animating life-force. This is what Habermas recognized in Luhmann’s systems theory (which emerges in his later work and comes from Maturana/ Varela et al)– namely that it is meta-biological in its attribution of forms of auto-poetic organization to an animating (and irrational) life force. This is a biological model of organization. It is, arguably, unsatisfactory in that it makes organizational process “alive.”

Both Norbert Weiner (from a Cybernetic perspective) and, more recently, Ray Brassier (from a eliminative materialist perspective) have warned against such neo-vitalism as a first principle:

Weiner: “It will not do to state categorically that the processes of reproduction in the machine and in the living being have nothing in common.” [Norbert Weiner: God and Golem Inc. pg. 47]

Brassier:  “I’m not interested in proposing a philosophy of life or anti-life, but in querying the inflation of “life” into a master-category in contemporary philosophy, not just by overt vitalists, but also by phenomenologists, critical theorists, and enactivists.” [Interview at After Nature blog]

Hence:

(iii) Geological – whereby complexity is understood through the organization of “unformed and unstructured matter-energy flows.” (pg. 510). The attractiveness of the organization of  matter-energy flows as an isomorphic process is that (unlike Luhmann) it offers a model of non-linear complexity, organization and emergence which is both compatible with material and which doesn’t prioritize either consciousness or forms of life. In other words, this gives us what Bryant calls a ‘flat ontology.’ It allows us to talk about lava flows, storm clouds, oil prices, rioting crowds, ants, ice-floes, viruses and nervous-systems in exactly the same terms.

Latour interview available

Delighted to say that the Latour interview is now available (and getting a bit of attention):

http://societyandspace.com/2012/10/11/bruno-latour-and-francis-halsall-on-art-and-inquiry/

I went into the conversation from the position of thinking of Latour's work in relation to aesthetics and how his ideas may be applicable to art practices. It was, alas, too brief a conversation to unpack a lot of what is mentioned.
I was especially fascinated by the idea of "metaphor as an aesthetics of proof" which resonates with both Hans Blumenberg's claim for absolute metaphors that are "unable to satisfy the requirement that truth, by definition, be the result of a methodologically secure proceedure of verification" (Paradigms for a Metaphorology) and one of Ian Bogost's opening claims in Alien Phenomenology that some elements of metaphysical speculation are unverifiable.

Little Trapdoors

This is a text I was invited to write to accompany the show: a yellow rose by the artists
Owen Boss // Colin Martin // Tom O’Dea
 

Its on at: Freemasons’ Hall 

17 Molesworth Street Dublin 2
August 9th – August 24th, 2012

(opening 9th August at 6pm)

There are more details here.

The artists have used a short story by Borges as their starting point and I was responding in part to this and in part to the spaces of the Freemasons' Hall as well as their own works.

 

Little Trapdoors

 I’m generally reticent about the over-use of metaphor in aesthetics; particularly when it comes to talking about art. I’d not go so far as to call it a conspiracy but I do resent its hegemony on meaning. Let a yellow rose be a yellow rose. We have a responsibility to not always take out the spray can and stencil unwelcome associations over it. Objects can get left behind in the search for further correspondences and meanings. Oftentimes things don’t have any meaning beyond their particular place and time. Sometimes they are not a proxy and they don’t delegate for anything but themselves. The metaphorical risk is the temptation to move over the object and miss what’s important. But we shouldn’t only look beyond things but into them too. Beautiful things are not merely metaphors that point to their position in chains of meaning but little trapdoors that can be opened up to reveal hermetic dimensions lying within.

We live by metaphors, however. They are always convenient and ready to hand which is what makes them so hard to avoid. They are part of the very system by which our world is made not only meaningful but liveable. For the philosophers Lakoff and Johnson experience is an intricately constructed architecture of associative meanings. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another,” they argue in Metaphors We Live By. This means that thought itself is metaphorical. Time is like money, it can be wasted or borrowed; words are like conduits or containers, they carry meaning or can be without sense. Consciousness has orientation, we can feel depressed, sink into a coma or be in low or high spirits.

But whilst thinking seems impossible without such associations the networks of metaphor are also inherently hierarchical constructions of sedimented tradition and authority. They thrum with power.

Metaphors produce meanings but they also lock them up. Metaphors work by taking a characteristic of an object as a stand in for its totality. A rose becomes another thing: a jewel, a “gem of the spring, April’s eye.” An act of ventriloquism takes place and the object is dubbed over with another voice. It starts speaking for something other than itself. What, then, happens if one takes a step beyond the threshold of this system once in a while? What would it mean to absent oneself from metaphor for a moment and rub up against the rough hewn surfaces of reality; to luxuriate in the grain of the masonry of the world?

Objects are not secret entities, more often than not they sit there dumbly and unembarrassed in plain view. But, whilst they are not secret they contain secrets; weird little esoteric elements which are concealed to all but those initiates who know how to look in the right places. When meeting an object we can use all our senses to rove its exterior searching for that flange or lip which anticipates a way inside. It’s the edge of a door. A wrinkle in the buckled surface of a thing can suggest a hinge upon which this door pivots and opens.

The classical philosopher-poet Lucretius also believed that the true nature of things (De rerum natura) lay hidden inside them. For him objects have to be opened up for use to peer into their turbid interiors. So:

“And when we knock a stone with a toe, we touch

Just the outer surface of it and the surface colour,

But we do not feel this by our touch, but rather

The hardness of the stone deep down inside.”

(Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, Bk. 4, 265ff.)

The poetry of philosophy crafts these thresholds which open up the unyielding and opaque surfaces of the world. It promises esoteric wisdom and occult knowledge of things as they really are. It offers up invitations to private gatherings of objects behaving in their own way as they are wont to do when we’re not paying particular attention to them.

Poetics (in all its multi-sensory forms) is the magickal art of finding and making these little trapdoors.  No one said this better than Wallace Stevens the poet laureate of “things as they are.” He realised that it is not the world that is alien to us, but us that are aliens in the world: 

“It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.”

Wallace Stevens, Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

Poetics, then, is about discovering how we as aliens might recognise and grasp the concrete beauty of normal reality by probing beneath its surfaces:

“Beauty is momentary in the mind -

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.”

Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier

However, if we are an interloper into what Bruno Latour calls the parliament of things then we shouldn’t be alarmed and treat this as a conspiracy or secret society that we’ve stumbled upon. It is, instead, an opportunity for us to rethink our place in the world. It means we should rise to the challenge in trying to work out the rites and rituals these things perform.

What I’m proposing then, is that there is an aesthetic attitude which is also a poetical-philosophical one. It recognises the significance of Borges’ insight that some things are not, “a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.” In other words, it is often unhelpful to think that we are looking at the world as through a glass darkly. Sometimes the metaphor that art (and science for that matter) is a mirror of reality can obscure as much as illuminate. Truth is not limited to sight; it is not something reflected back at us through our own lenses. Instead it is revealed in parts, in different orders, as we move with our whole body through different thresholds into other spaces. The world becomes, then, not a shiny reflection of ourselves, but a tessellated surface composed of an intricate matrix of an infinite number of little trapdoors waiting to be discovered and opened up.