For Drawing-Based Art: A Manifesto of Sorts

Drawing is the foundation of art—the basis of painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion, theatrical design, film storyboarding and production design, industrial design, picture storytelling, and so on.

The various Neo-Dada and “new media” practices which comprise Contemporary Art (installation, performance, concept, video, et al), lacking a basis in drawing, are in themselves insufficient to sustain the traditions and historical trajectory of visual art.

Drawing is the direct expression of the mind through the hand; mindful composition is inherent and native to drawing.

Critical theory, expressly antagonistic to the graven image, posits the text as the only valid form of mindful composition, as the only possible expression of thought.[1] Contemporary art practices subserve critical theory by providing a steady stream of novel conversation pieces for verbal exegesis that on their own would provide a feeble aesthetic experience, let alone thoughtful communication. Promised a shortcut to significant form, contemporary artists eschew the difficult burden of providing meaningful content, which the critical theorist is only too happy to retroactively supply through the back door. This is bad art and bad philosophy.

Contemporary art can be exhausted by words; drawing-based art cannot. Contemporary art cannot exist without words; drawing-based art can. Drawing-based art is perceived as being a threat to the word; contemporary art is utterly dependent upon it. And yet the word and image have never been in competition, but along with music, dance, and other creative arts form a holistic expression of communication. Such an imagined or manufactured opposition as dominates contemporary artistic discourse can yield only creative sterility.

Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese, drawn by Don Simpson.

For Katy Siegel, art “is the discipline where one can exercise any other discipline—from cooking to sociology to architecture to biology to theater—free of the normative rules proper to those disciplines, professions, schools.” Art is therefore “useful to individuals who want to engage [in] these other activities without really learning them […], as amateurs who won’t be judged as architects or actors but as artists.”[2] Contemporary art therefore comprises a range of practices best described as amateurish versions of other creative categories, and which those categories at their most accomplished and professional for the most part want no part of.

No one expects performance art to be good in the dramatic sense, and theater history wants no part of it. Likewise, video installation is not a part of cinema history, just as conceptual art is not philosophy. Yet these practices have wound up inhabiting the art world, supplanting drawing-based art, an aberration of history spawned by the rise of photography and related media and a willful corruption of art enabled by historians and intellectuals who either lost sight of this basis or for whatever reason have always been hostile to it to begin with.

Avant-garde posturing and art student experimentation may offer a travestial rebuke of the excesses of handmade illusionism, but to persist in such ironies beyond a certain moment of historical or personal development, and to reduce all possible art to such a sterile strip of creative enquiry, is to wallow in hopeless immaturity. Artlab is over.

Art, pace Raymond Williams, is exceptionally fine, worthwhile, and enduring communication of which all human beings to some degree are capable (dance, music, poetry, and so on). Without this communication, there can be no art. For Williams, art is

the substantial communication of experience from one organism to another. Art cannot exist unless a working communication can be reached [...]. When art communicates, a human experience is actively offered and received. Below this activity threshold there can be no art.[3]

But as Williams warns,

There is great danger in the assumption that art serves only on the frontiers of knowledge. It serves on those frontiers, particularly in disturbed and rapidly changing societies. Yet it serves, also, at the very center of societies. It is often through the art that the society expresses its sense of being a society. The artist, in this case, is not the lonely explorer, but the voice of his community. Even in our own complex society, certain artists seem near the center of common experience while others seem out on the frontiers, and it would be wrong to assume that this difference is the difference between ‘mediocre art’ and ‘great art.’

For Williams, the notion that “ creative’ equals ‘new’ […] is a really disabling idea, in that it forces the exclusion of a large amount of art which it is clearly our business to understand.”[4]

The alliance between the art world and academic art history and its emphasis on the auratic presence of the original work and its verbal interpretation inevitably leads to an emphasis on the museum and gallery space and the irrelevance of the creative work itself. The cultural center, to the extent that it is a modern manifestation of the sacred center, emphasizes the church building over the church, the sermon over the religious experience, the palace of culture over culture itself. Originally built to house drawing-based art, these structures have learned that such works are not essential, making possible art’s substitution by pseudo-artistic conversation pieces. The emphasis on auratic presence is a corruption of art and a hindrance to the historical development now possible especially through means of reproduction.

Drawing-based art has never been dependent on the elitist museum or gallery space for its display and public adortion, and in the age of mechanical reproduction, is certainly not dependent on the auratic presence of the one-of-a-kind object. Like the word, the image can be transmitted and distributed democratically, in reproduction; the product of the hand is no more constrained than the product of the vocal chords, or of the body. The apparent imbalance of these sensory extensions through the uneven development of disparate media now appears simply the accident of a certain technological history, to which McLuhan still offers useful insight. The scholarly display and archival preservation of original art remains desirable and important for research, but the sacralization of original art as an act of public, communal worship can never be anything other than exclusive and exclusionary.

Photography is by its nature a recording medium, not an art. To argue for photography’s status as art on the basis that its technical parameters are set by humans and specific to human perception is specious. If photography is not a recording medium, then there is no such thing as a recording medium, outside of an indexical footprint in the sand. To be well done, photography requires a selective eye, just as sound recording requires a selective ear and cinematography a directorial touch. But these are recordings of artistic compositions, not artistic composition itself. Photographers who are considered artists are artists by virtue of these other considerations, not because of their mastery of the technical aspects of photography. Mindful expression is not native or inherent in recording media.

The insistence that drawing is merely manual photography, and therefore irrelevant to art today, is the most fundamental and willful misunderstanding posited by logocentric critical theorists, that has catastrophically deformed and debased notions of art in the modern period.

Since the inception of photography, the market has steadily replaced the hand of the artist with the camera, and the manually-generated image with the mechanically-recorded image. Ostensibly hostile to market values, critical theory imagines drawing-based art, visual poesis, as superfluous to contemporary art, thus paradoxically furthering market aims. In lockstep with capital in its repudiation of cognitive manual skill, critical theory replicates market values in the realm of art, exiling the draughtsman from Contemporary Art. This double-barreled assault on drawing by capital and critical theory amounts to shooting the wounded.

Larry Marder's Mr. Spook, drawn by Don Simpson.

In contemporary art, drawing, visual composition, is forbidden and only writing, textual composition, is permitted. This alliance between the museum and gallery-based art world and academic art history has only achieved total dominance quite recently, but is only the most recent chapter in a long and hard-fought struggle. For the moment, Talmudic, Puritanical iconoclasm has gained the upper hand over the sensualism of the eye and hand, and the Judao-Christian word appears ascendant over Greco-Roman image, an age-old tension in Western civilization.

The attack on drawing as thoughtful composition is specific and unmistakable, the settling of an old score by grudging writers who jealously claim the text as the only form of thoughtful composition. It is an internecine knife-fight in a prison riot, a shiv between the shoulderblades of the visually adept by the verbally adept, rendered moot in a culture that is completely visual and overwhelmingly dominated by mediated images. To face a deluge of mediated imagery with only words is to fight with one arm tied behind one’s back. Drawing-based art, as vital as language in processing and communicating human experience, is even more crucial to navigating the mediated, virtual world. Writing and drawing must join together if the mind is to survive, and our notion of art must be reconstituted accordingly.
____ 
[1] Max Horkheimer explicitly claims the Second Commandment as the basis of critical theory. See Max Horheimer, letter to Otto O. Herz, September 1, 1969, in Gesammelte Schriften, volume 18, Briefwechsel 1949-1973 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996) p. 743; cited in Sven Lüttken, "Monotheism à la Mode," in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 304, 310, note 11. Frederic Jameson, among others, has made the claim that "thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression," i.e., that communication of the mind by any other means is impossible, a curious stance for one who comments so authoritatively on art. See Frederic Jameson, "Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?" Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2004), p. 403.
[2] Katy Siegel, "Lifelong Learning," in Dumbadze and Hudson, op. cit., pp. 408-419; quote p. 410.
[3] Raymond Williams, “The Creative Mind,” The Long Revolution (Columbia University Press, 1961), p.42.
[4] Ibid, p. 47.

Shakespeare on Allegheny Commons

Here are some shots from the Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks production of Romeo & Juliet, performed on a luscious Saturday afternoon on the North Shore of Pittsburgh. The dappled light through the trees and the light, warm breeze made for a beautiful afternoon of outdoor theater, while screeching trains, barking dogs, and impossibly well-timed church bells added to the ambiance.

See my previous sketches of rehearsals: Part 1 | Part 2

Michael Mykita as Lord Capulet

Andrew William Miller as Romeo

Daniell Powell as Juliet greets a well-wisher

Director Helen M. Meade watches on as Charles Beikert, Andrew William Miller, and Bradford Sadler discuss Romeo's post-break-up blues

Three of my favorite photos of the couple being wed. Andrew, Danielle, and Ronald.

Nice color coordination by production designer Lisa Liebering (lighting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

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Charles Beikert as Mercutio has at Adam Rutledge as Tybalt

Ronald Siebert as Friar Laurence

Andrew and Ronald debate the semantic implications of the word "banish-ed"!

Mike Magliocca as Paris waits in the wings

Gretchen Breslawski as Balthasar

Juliet laid to rest

Romeo enters Juliet's tomb

Jeffrey Chips as the scolding Prince of Verona brings the play to a conclusion

Some of the audience members, having chosen sides between the Capulets and Montagues, had to be kept apart as disagreements broke out after the performance!

Jeffrey Chips raises funds for more Shakespeare in the Park!

The Withering Away of Drawing

A generation ago, one could go to the theater to see acting, a dance recital to see dance, a concert to see music, a comedy club to see comedy, a movie theater to see cinema. Today one can still attend those venues and see those creative expressions, mutatis mutandis, in forms that are approximately recognizable and arguably more sophisticated (the dancers, musicians and directors I know all report that today’s performers are all better trained than ever). But whereas a generation ago one could go to a museum or gallery to see art (drawing, painting, sculpture—I will refer to drawing as the global stand-in for all the traditional forms of handmade imagery), today one can only see emaciated installation, careerist curatorship, and pleonastic critical theory. The marble palaces and temples of art built a century ago no longer showcase the works of the hand, but the utter conquest of logos. In terms of the art world, no one seems to draw anymore.

The question is not whether such vapid contemporary practices as installation, performance, “big photography” and the like are valid forms of creative expression, dependent though they are on a kind of literal-minded, overeducated, flatfooted verbal elaboration (the wall text, the audio tour, the credential-fetishizing CV), but why these synthetic rituals merit our attention at the expense of drawing, painting and sculpture. Why have these “new” practices attached themselves, like a cancer, to the visual arts, and not to the performing arts, or to creative writing? 

One can still read a book on paper, Kindle, or ipad, and still expect proper spelling and punctuation. But hardly any visual artist of any art historical stature (and there is no other kind) since Jackson Pollock has bothered to study perspective or anatomy. Life drawing, that quaint empirical practice of delineating the present nude human figure (to say nothing of the a priori drawing of invention and/or from memory the Old Masters had mastered), has persisted in art schools for the past several decades not with the ambition that students master the tradition so much as to demonstrate how hard, if not impossible, it is to create an image the old fashioned way. Indeed, a semester or two of such inevitable frustration is as much as anyone can be expected to take before retreating permanently into video or the auratic manipulation of space (the kind for which one has to be there), or, to do what art students have always done at art schools since the Beatles: form a band.

Marxian contemporary theorists, impotent to further the Withering Away of the State or to facilitate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, have succeeded at least in one revolutionary project: shooting the wounded in the image wars. The humble draughtsman, the last proletarian, agent of the bourgeoisie, reduced to the slavery of advertising and illustrating children’s story books since the nineteenth century, routed by photography and ethnically cleansed by digital editing software, suffer the final genocide at the hands of superstar curators and Distinguished Professors of Contemporaneity. Herded into the internment camps of Madison Avenue while photography was still monochrome, even that reservation has disappeared as “art directors” have long since lost the ability even to sketch on the back of a napkin. We no longer go to the gallery to see anything as primitive as marks made on surfaces by actual human beings, but to see aesthetic experiences manufactured by expensive machines (“new media”), enabled by the linguistically adept with exegetical texts. Theory furthers the conquest of Capital at the expense of the human, just to prove it can accomplish something. When the revolution comes, one will be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, but no longer be able to draw a straight line (no one has done that anyway since before the Frankfurt School moved out of Germany). O, Brave New World!

Histories of modern art are written as if the public lost its appetite for representation and figuration before 1900. This ignores the fact that illusion has never enjoyed a stronger (long) century. The average eyeball today spends more time than ever looking at pictures than actual reality, but God forbid those illusions should be drawn by hand. Puritanical Christianity, Talmudic Judaism, and aniconic Islam, those warring Ibrahimic religions, at least can agree on one thing: Thou Shalt Make No Graven Images—by hand. Click, cut, and paste –that’s okay. But paper and pencil are the Devil’s implements. Even comic books and “hand-drawn” animation, those last bastions of the analog, are so larded with faux hand-lettered fonts, Photoshop coloring, and vector-based smoothness that all evidence of the hands has been processed out, sanitized, sterilized. Why force a child into a life of cultural disadvantage by giving them a box of crayons and construction paper? Start them off with a digital device right away—this will make them better consumers, further deplete the planet’s fossil fuels, exacerbate the internal contradictions of Late Capitalism, and hasten the Future Communist State.

In 2004, Rosalind Krauss declared that charcoal was dead, while attendees at a contemporaneity conference, with their inert ballpoint pens and legal pads, scribbled down her every word. In 2010, Thom Mayne told an auditorium full of Carnegie Mellon architecture students that drawing was romantic, but completely irrelevant to what was happening in (important) architecture today. (I happened to have witnessed both utterances.) Artists who once illustrated the Painted Word (that cheesy, dated text by Tom Wolfe) now produce conversation pieces for Frederic Jameson. Otherwise, they are effaced by Art History; just ask Arthur C. Danto or Boris Groys. Drawing has been reduced to something a few of us do in our sketchbooks for self-expression, like diarists compelled to transcribe their innermost thoughts, or poets who never expect their poems to be read by other human beings. Drawing by hand has no place in contemporary art, which may be defined as works which have no reason to exist other than for theoretical interpretation: a mixture of bad art and bad philosophy. (Which gives rise to the question: Is it more important for a contemporary artist to be bad at art, or bad at philosophy?)

One has to wonder how humanity, completely devoid of the ability to draw, can be understood as being more human than before. What can account for the utter hostility of the logos to the traditional hand-generated image? Why are we inclined to accept the cold, hard, indifferent document produced by the camera (even when it is blatantly manipulated, edited, processed a dozen different ways) as truth, but regard the illusion produced by the hand of the artist at the ol’ drawing board as apostasy? How is the twenty-first century mind improved by art that sucks (i.e., is not worth looking at)? How did things get so bad? Such a circumstance can only be attributed to the emaciated condition the various illusion-generating technologies of modernity have left the vulnerable craft of drawing, susceptible now to the pernicious bullying of the verbally adept but otherwise politically impotent.

[Another way of stating this is: Why must (visual) art history necessarily end up with a shark in a tank of formaldehyde or the mind-numbing fully automated (and mindless) spectacle of the Visionarium variety, but the histories of music, drama, cinema, literature and other forms of creative expression go on, business as usual, as unmolested outlets of humanism? Why do they get to have all the fun while art historians are saddled with such a depressing, unhappy ending? What is it about drawing that gets under the skin of those who are able only to think in words?

 

Let installation continue. Let theory continue. Let the myriad practices of “new media” continue. And let them go on being celebrated in temporary biennials that take over resort cities and find housing in repurposed, formerly dilapidated urban buildings in rundown neighborhoods. The overeducated are entitled to their art too, and certainly their little occasions for wine and cheese (where else can they all dress in black?). The question, I repeat, is not the validity of these (pseudo-) intellectual enterprises, but why this scourge has been visited upon the quaint, workmanlike picture gallery, apparently sparing other forms of creative expression. After all, one doesn’t get hit over the head with October when one attends a musical comedy, and one certainly doesn’t expect to have Critical Inquiry shoved up their ass when one goes to the movies (even an art film), ordinarily. But it sure as hell is inescapable in public venues for the once-analog visual arts.

Since they’re not really being used, a modest proposition: Surrender the galleries and museums to those to whom they properly belong, artists who draw (and paint and sculpt). Assuming, in our unabated modernity, these can still be found.