Position on Drawing in Modern Practice

Gawon Go
While theory and practice coexist in almost all artistic production, drawing is especially
dependent on their concurrence. Drawing is, in fact, an indiscernible superimposition of
techne and episteme, and cannot exist without both. !is utter dependence on their
coexistence is exemplied by the historical undermining of drawings identity as a result
of the overemphasis on techne, and the modern deterioration of its individuality due to an
excessive focus on episteme. More specically, the early overemphasis on the technical
aspect of drawing in the European academies deprived drawing of its theoretical facet.
Such an arduous focus on the mimetic formalized the practice, where drawings sole
function was to replicate an objective nature. But because of photographys superior
ability to capture an objective reality, drawing, in such an instance, became dispensable.
On the other hand, the modern shift from the historical trajectory of drawing, in favour
of natural expression, as dened as uninhibited projection of artistic identity, also makes
modern drawing practice di"cult to identify. In fact, it undermines the technical facet of
drawing, depriving it of rigour, mastery, and ultimately its unique artistic identity. In this
paper, techne and episteme and their interdependence within the practice of drawing will
be explored. Further, the historical undermining of drawing as art owing to the emphasis
on the mechanical aspect of drawing will be examined. Modern reliance on spontaneity
will be discussed and its resulting erosion of drawing as art is paralleled to that of the
aforementioned historical example. !is paper ultimately aims to argue against the
mainstream belief concerning drawing in modern practice, which purposely understates
the draftspersons technical ability in virtue of his or her spontaneity and concept.
Techne, as traditionally used in philosophy, refers to the mechanical and operative
aspect, whereas episteme refers to the theoretical aspect involved in any practice in a given
eld. !e relationship between techne and episteme is in fact contentious since some
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believe that episteme exists in a realm far removed from reality, where techne resides.
1

Accordingly, in the context of this paper, techne refers to the physical act of drawing and
is directly linked to the hand. While artist and professor Deanna Petherbridge contends
that drawing is an autonomous practice, a visual dialogue, or a subordinate,
preliminary blueprint for other art forms such as painting or architecture,
2
the direct
engagement between the artists hand, his utensil, and his medium during the artistic
production is ubiquitous. !e corollary is also accepted: an artistic practice that does not
directly engage the hand with the utensil and the medium, such as photography or
Jackson Pollocks action painting, where the artist is removed from his medium, is not
drawing. !erefore, the direct contact between the hand, the medium, and the surface is
a characteristic of drawing. In fact, because of this dening, inherent characteristic of
drawing, it resides in the realm of techne. !ough it is intuitive that drawing is a
mechanical process, its relationship to episteme is more di"cult to conceive.
Episteme, in the context of this paper, refers to pure theory, a disinterested
understandingthus the conceptual aspect of an artwork. Despite the indirect correlation
between the mind and drawing, it has been historically argued for since the Renaissance,
as seen in Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccaris writings.
3
As Bernice Rose, the former
Senior Curator of Drawings at !e Museum of Modern Art, notes, Vasari described
drawing as originating in the intellect of the artist, and therefore understood drawing to
be the manifestation and materialization of processes of the mind.
4
Continuing this
trajectory of thought, Zuccari further denotes the internal concept of the artist as disegno
interno, and denes disegno externo as the concrete representation of this intellectual
abstracta drawing.
5
!ough the notion that drawing is a conceptual process is
historically contentious, a further examination is required to solidify the relationship
between the mind and drawing. To some extent, this link can be deciphered from the
process of drawing.
For instance, the link between the mind and the process of drawing can be
explained by Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher whose work is inuential in
postmodern philosophy. He asserts that a draftsperson draws from memory, which
supplements sight.
6
An intuitive example used in Derridas argument is when a person is
drawing from ones imagination, without a model. Clearly, the drawing is then a
production of ones mind and the relationship between the intellectual and the manual
becomes clear. Indeed, even when a draftsperson draws with a model, the drawing is still
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1 Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55-57; Richard Parry, Episteme and Techne, Te Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article published April 11, 2003, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/
episteme-techne/.
2 Deanna Petherbridge, Nailing the Liminal: Te Difculties of Defning Drawing (Bristol: Intellect,
2008), 3235 passim.
3 Bernice Rose, Drawing Now (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1975), 9.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: Te Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 7.
the production of the artists intellect because it represents a hypothetical reality, one that
has been processed through the mind of the draftsperson.
A further point of examination of the relationship between the mind and drawing
more specically, the mind and the hand within the paradigm of drawinglies in the
process of the practice. Derrida compares what he calls anticipation with precipitation.
7

Anticipation, associated with the hand, rushes out ahead of precipitation, associated with
the mind. In this passage, he illustrates the rashness of drawing that precariously escapes
onto the surface before a thought is nalized.
8
As is the case with Vasari and Zuccaris
writings, Derridas assertion claims that drawing derives from the mind. However, rather
than the mind being a nalized mental blueprint for drawing, Derrida instead argues that
drawing is capable of extracting ones mental processes. If drawing is indeed an extension
of the artists mind, then the process of drawing can be seen as the physical trace of the
psyche of the artist. Drawing thus occurs simultaneously with the mental process, and this
concurrency ultimately marks the inseparable relationship between the manual and the
intellectual. Drawing, then, is a superimposition of techne and episteme.
!e historical undermining of drawing as a result of the overemphasis on techne
supports the notion of the absolute necessity of the simultaneity of both techne and
episteme for drawings existence. In fact, the strenuous academic focus on the technical
aspect of drawing brings about the politics that overwhelm the artistic pursuit. More
importantly, these academic politics encourage the overemphasis on techne, thereby
depriving drawing of its unique conceptual quality and leading to the public
misconception of the role of drawing.
For example, in the French Academy during the sixteenth century, artistic
education was rigorously controlled and regulated, from classroom lighting to the
selection of models that enhanced artistic education within the life class.
9
!e hyper-
controlled academic environment emphasized and valued mimetic quality in drawing
practice.
10
!e strenuous standard of drawing then set an objective goal for draftsmen to
accomplish, pushing and challenging the students to rene their observational and
manual ability. Within the paradigm of a rigid standard and the elements of control,
artistic education resembled other liberal arts and scientic disciplines in its analytical and
self-critical structure, ultimately developing students virtuosity.
However, despite the mastery achieved by the academy, its structural rigidity
created an environment that prevented free artistic pursuit. !e semicircular classroom
seating plan was arranged such that the youngest and the lowest-ranked draftsmen
occupied the lowest bench with the worst view and vice versa: the competition winners
were entitled to good views with the least foreshortening.
11
Presumably, such a seating
plan bred shame in those who failed to achieve the rather arbitrary standard of excellence
set by the academy, which undoubtedly barred the pursuit of creative, artistic freedom.
Gawon Go
3
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 1516.
9 Deanna Petherbridge, Te Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Teories of Practice (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), 221222.
10 Ibid., 228229.
11 Ibid., 222.
!e prescribed seating arrangement in the life class meant that the least skilled were less
likely to improve, since they occupied the seats with the most di"cult views with the
most hindrance and foreshortening. !e disparity between the most skilled and the least
skilled would then steepen, and the shame-inducing inexibility of the academy made it
more a political mineeld than an educational institution.
Even worse, these academic politics ultimately turned drawing into a replaceable
commodity. !e competition reinforced an objective standard, which consequently
overemphasized the technical aspect of drawing, destabilizing it both internally and
externally. !e internal destabilization occurred because of the arbitrary objectivity based
on mimesis, which removed the conceptual quality that is inherent in drawingthe
simultaneous conception of the thought and the graphic. !e lack of such immediacy was
explained by the reliance on the representational, the external object, rather than the
exercise of mark-making. !e mark-making refers to the spontaneous creation of a visual
mark, such as line, splatter of paint, or other graphic forms on a substrate made by the
artist. !e marks on the surface were formed and erased, as they were revised constantly
to mimic an objective reality. After multiple revisions, the novelty of the initial mark,
which originally captured the spontaneous conception of the artists thought, is lost.
Rather, a pure mimesis of an objective reality remains.
Likewise, the technical overemphasis also caused an external destabilization of
drawing because it led to the publics misunderstanding of the role of representational art.
!e public conceived representational art as solely a mimetic process; this resulted in the
vulgarization of drawing.
12
Drawing-as-art, along with other representational artistic
practices, became either passive picturing of everyday or else the ideal picturing of a
heroic, allegorical world.
13
Needless to say, drawing-as-art, bound by social context, lost
its artistic relevance in face of a public misconception of the purpose of technical rigour.
In other words, the overemphasis on techne, led by academic politics and competition,
resulted in rendering drawing as a commodity, used as a means to an endrather than an
end in itself. !is deprived it of its necessary, dening qualitythe immediacy of thought
and mark-making.
!e stringent focus on the mimetic in the French Academy exemplies an instance
where an overemphasis of techne undermines drawings artistic identity. !e modern
emphasis on episteme, however, produces no better result; it favours the untested notion
that spontaneity makes a quality drawing, a similarly detrimental paradigm. !e strong
reliance on spontaneity is an equally arbitrary standard for drawing as the insistence on
the representational of the past.
14
As a response to the public misconception and
conation of the role of drawing and photography, artists resort to the redenition of
representational art, including drawing.
15
During this artistic rectication, abstraction
from the representational and concentration on the mark itself becomes an important
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12 Rose, 12.
13 Ibid.
14 Petherbridge, Nailing the Liminal, 36.
15 Rose, 12.
question, and in search of the answer, modern drawings become slight, spontaneous . . .
and often deliberately de-skilled.
16
Artist Jean Dubu$et, as an example, attempts to resolve this overemphasis on
techne and the resulting hyper-political environment, albeit unsuccessfully. In his 2001
essay, noted art critic and historian Hal Foster explains how Dubu$et turned to the art of
the mentally ill in an attempt to depoliticize artistic practice. He coined the term art
brut, which refers to a work of art that is free from all cultural, academic conventions.
17
Dubu$et asserts: !ese artists derive everything . . . from their own depths, and not
from the conceptions of classical or fashionable art. We are witness here to a completely
pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by
means of the artists own impulses.
18
Dubu$et also holds that schizophrenics, in their
autistic isolation from society, are able to attain this pure state of art.
19
However, such a
radical attempt to remove all political aspects from artistic practice oversimplies the
issue of drawings artistic identity.
Dubu$et, in hopes of cleansing art of politics and rigid conventions, simplies the
relationship between culture and art by dichotomizing the latter into art-culturel and
art-brut, preferring the latter for its primitive purity.
20
However, the dichotomy only
crudely captures the essence of drawing as it divides the cultural aspect (the academy and
the technical rigours that it reinforces), and the intuitive aspect (the artists own impulses
and intellectual spontaneity), into two separate spheres. In fact, these two spheres are
deeply entwined within the paradigm of drawing. For instance, in their artistic practice,
schizophrenics withdraw themselves from the societal system, which they view to be
broken, by forming their own system of order.
21
However, the irony of their approach is
that their psychological withdrawal itself becomes a form of expression, therefore, an
extension towards society. !e relationship between artistic expression and social context
therefore cannot be as easily broken as Dubu$et makes it out to be. Dubu$ets intention
of cleansing art of politics by relying on spontaneity and by excluding technical rigour is a
conation of techne with the consequence of an overemphasis on techne in drawing. In
other words, the commodication of drawing, which Dubu$et presumably aimed to
eradicate, was the result of an overemphasis and thus a misapplication of the technical
aspect of drawing, rather than an inherent fault in techne itself.
Despite the entwinement of artistic intuition and of the social and academic
trajectory of drawing, attempts similar to Dubu$ets are continuously made to dislodge
drawing from its history of being used as a representational tool of reality. Presumably,
these attempts are guided by the confusion between mimetic utility and technical
prociency; however, the latter signies more than mere manual labour. Technical
prociency, beyond its aesthetic merits, represents artistic rigour and mastery, which is
Gawon Go
5
16 Petherbridge, Nailing the Liminal, 31.
17 Hal Foster, Blinded Insights: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of the Mentally Ill, October
97 (2001): 13.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 8.
20 Ibid., 15.
21 Ibid., 18.
rarely seen in most modern drawing practices due to an untested notion that what comes
naturally is best. !e over-reliance on spontaneity, though assumed from the intention of
a truer revelation of episteme, breaks away from techne, resulting in a crude rendition of
modern drawing practice. !e superimposition of techne and episteme is, in other words,
crucial in drawings artistic identity, and restoration is undoubtedly in demand.
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