For a large print version please contact the engage office: info@engage.org
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Uses of Drawing
• Issue 10 – Autumn 2001
• 70 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Uses of Drawing Issue 10 – Autumn 2001
Editorial
Rose Montgomery-Whicher Unframing Vision: drawing in a technological age
Angela Kingston The Centre for Drawing at Wimbledon School of Art
Gavin Maughfling The Pulverising Machine: works on paper by Francis Bacon
Eileen Adams Drawing Power
Catherine Orbach The Role of Drawing in Galleries
Karen Raney Half-Life: sketching with a Palm Pilot
Adela Zeleznik What can we learn from the line?
Jem Main Drawing on Ideas: interview with Christopher Naylor
Christophe Egret, Richard Horden, Hani Rashid Architects on drawing
Reviews: Veronica Sekules Developing Cross-curricular Learning in Museums and Galleries A Shared Experience - analysis of family activities at three Tate sites
Editorial, Uses of Drawing
Karen Raney
As the editorship changes hands, we have taken the opportunity to reflect on the aims of engage review, and to think about how the magazine might best be developed. For a long time the visual arts have been moving out of the gallery and into the street, the internet, the book, the public space. Gallery education has had to evolve to accommodate these changing contexts in which art is made and seen. And yet museums and galleries continue to be important cultural centres. In them visual art is informally enjoyed, studied and argued about, and more organised debates can take place. The overarching mission of engage is to ‘promote greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts’. We intend to keep the magazine with its centre of gravity in museums and galleries, while acknowledging the changing nature of art practice, and attending to the wider theoretical questions on which visual education is based.
My approach will be to keep the magazine themed as far as possible, to build around a central question or idea. The theme will be looked at through the lenses of theory, art practice and education. This issue, for example, has a piece which is primarily theoretical, articles by artists or primarily about art practice, and articles by educators, primarily about education. I anticipate that each theme will re-surface in later issues, having picked up new interpretations and areas to explore.
Though the format of the magazine is much the same, you will find a few new features. One is the box on the inside front cover announcing the topic of subsequent issues and soliciting views and articles. In this way we hope to jump-start the discussion about a particular area. Future issues will have a Reader’s Page for dialogue with readers. And you will find contributors’ details at the back of the magazine, so that they may be contacted directly. The aim is for the magazine to be a hub for networking as well as a place where ideas can be aired and research assembled.
It is with pleasure that I launch my first issue of engage review, with many thanks to Christopher Naylor, the engage office, and to the newly constituted Advisory Board, for their stimulating discussions and support.
Issue 10: The uses of drawing Drawing once held a privileged position in art practice and education. In the ‘postmodern’ age its status is uncertain. Drawing has been tainted by the gender politics of the Life Room and by romantic ideas about self-expression and the authentic mark. It has been marginalised by ways of working which are concept-driven or issue-led. It has been branded Eurocentric, or called into question by digital technology. Yet drawing remains central to visual education, and to the practice of many artists, even if their final work takes other forms. The UK’s Campaign for Drawing, now in its second year, the establishment of drawing professorships, and a spate of recent conferences suggest that drawing is enjoying, if not a comeback, at least a lively reappraisal. Drawing needs to be prised away from its unwelcome associations and studied in terms of its functions, rather than having pride of place in a hierarchy of representation.
My own interest in drawing began in my former life as a painter. I used line to search out spatial relationships, to set up a field where incompatible forms could coexist, to understand something I had already made. I found drawing to be capable of both precision and ambiguity. I have as well a more philosophical interest in the constraints and possibilities a particular activity offers. What constitutes drawing? Does it have to use line? Can a boat’s hull slicing through water, a defaced photograph, a body’s arc in space, or an erasure be called drawing? How far can the concept of drawing be stretched and still be meaningful as a category? What can drawing do?
Contributors to this issue do not confront the definition question head-on, and most of the time drawing is taken to mean making visible lines - whether they are made with tape, a wheel, a foot in the sand, or the more conventional pencil or pen on paper. But what drawing is remains in the background as an important question, and a future issue might want to look at different drawing cultures and subcultures. The digital age puts drawing in an intriguing light, as computers can simulate more and more of what used to be done by hand. Only one article in this issue (‘Half-Life’) is about computer drawing per se. However, technology hovers over these discussions, as people can’t help appraising hand drawing against the computer’s faster and more automatic ways of making images.
In the opening piece, Rose Montgomery-Whicher writes that the enduring significance of drawing lies in its difference from dominant practices and media in contemporary culture. She introduces the notion of ‘marginal’ or ‘non-rationalised’ practices and ‘focal’ practices. A marginal practice is something that people do spontaneously, rather than in the interests of productivity or efficiency. Focal practices are the skilled, cultured forms of such activities - focal because they require effort, time and focused attention. Drawing can be both marginal and focal and this, it is argued, accounts for its power and appeal. Such a model might be useful in thinking about the range of activities described in this volume. For instance, many events of the National Campaign for Drawing’s ‘Big Draw’ seem to encourage the spirit of spontaneity and playfulness of marginal practices; others set the scene for the sustained concentration of a focal practice. The Wimbledon Centre’s artist, Vong Phaophanit, said he strove to be relatively ‘purposeless’, as a marginal activity is; and yet his practice is certainly a focal one. The notion that drawing involves conflict and struggle as well as pleasure arises often in these pages and is consistent with the idea of a focal practice as described here.
So how do people in different parts of the art and education community think through the uses of drawing? Two essays are concerned with ways drawing operates in the work of artists. Angela Kingston describes the different approaches of three artists in residence at the Wimbledon School of Art’s Centre for Drawing. One worked very rapidly, hoping to free himself of ‘explicit purpose’, one used drawing to court a change in her work from the corporeal to the ethereal, the third makes drawings and assembles them into narratives. The Centre is unusual in that it is at the same time an artist’s studio, a gallery and an education establishment. Eric Ziegeweid, an MA student at Wimbledon, writes about the Centre as an alien or unassimilable phenomenon within the institution; this, he says, is part of its value.
Gavin Maughfling writes about the works on paper attributed to Francis Bacon, which were exhibited at the Barbican Gallery in London this year. It seems that these working documents served a variety of functions in Bacon’s work, from subversion, to triggering unconscious response, to bringing the chaos of daily visual experience into the studio and the hand and mind of the artist so that it could be turned into something else.
Is drawing as an educational tool more directed or transparent than the uses to which it is put by artists? Eileen Adams, who is concerned with art and design education in schools, galleries and other contexts, identifies three functions of drawing. Drawing as ‘perception’ is mostly for personal pleasure or insight. Drawing as ‘communication’ aims to share visual ideas with others. Drawing as ‘manipulation’ develops ideas toward an end - be it for design or fine art, an individual or collaborative effort. Catherine Orbach slices the cake differently. She focuses on the uses of drawing specifically in galleries, where the aim would be not to germinate and develop a body of work, but rather to ‘promote greater understanding of and enjoyment of the visual arts’. In this case drawing can be used as a record and aide- memoire, as a tool for analysing form, and as a way of exploring concepts. Adela Zeleznik describes gallery projects in Warsaw which are geared toward personal insight. Jem Main talks about drawing in terms of ‘notation’, an act which assimilates a stimulus and one’s response to it. My own piece is an account of the Whitechapel’s palm pilot project in schools; I suggest ways that such a project could be developed into a broader progamme of study about the nature of drawing, the function of images and the intentions of artists. All educators refer to a widespread fear of, or inhibition about drawing and suggest ways of getting around this - ‘I Can’t Draw’ therapy being one!
Moving out of the frame of Fine Art, we have the statements of three architects on the importance of drawing in their work. Richard Horden and Christophe Egret speak rhapsodically of the sketch as the capturing of a vision; architecture is the ‘built sketch’. Hani Rashid, on the other hand, is sceptical of the power attributed to the ‘masterful’ hand drawing. He believes that the architects of tomorrow will generate their ideas through the video camera, the audio recording and the computer, rather than the sketchbook.
In a short space, a great array of capacities have been claimed for drawing: critical reflection, communication, unconscious scanning, spontaneous pleasure and play, assimilation, subversion, notation, harnessing of instinct, analysis of form, problem-solving, concept development and confrontation of the mass media. One recurring theme is that drawing acts as a form of external and internal communication - sharing ideas with others and revealing ideas to oneself. Within this, the notion of translation seems to be central. Almost everyone says something about drawing’s ability to translate - between the inner and outer world, between idea and physical form, between art object and recuperated meanings.
Can drawing really do all this? Or perhaps the question is better asked the other way around: what concept of drawing do we need to have if it is to be capable of such diverse and complex purposes?
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email info@engage.org
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Uses of Drawing
• Issue 10 – Autumn 2001
• 70 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Uses of Drawing Issue 10 – Autumn 2001
Editorial
Rose Montgomery-Whicher Unframing Vision: drawing in a technological age
Angela Kingston The Centre for Drawing at Wimbledon School of Art
Gavin Maughfling The Pulverising Machine: works on paper by Francis Bacon
Eileen Adams Drawing Power
Catherine Orbach The Role of Drawing in Galleries
Karen Raney Half-Life: sketching with a Palm Pilot
Adela Zeleznik What can we learn from the line?
Jem Main Drawing on Ideas: interview with Christopher Naylor
Christophe Egret, Richard Horden, Hani Rashid Architects on drawing
Reviews: Veronica Sekules Developing Cross-curricular Learning in Museums and Galleries A Shared Experience - analysis of family activities at three Tate sites
Editorial, Uses of Drawing
Karen Raney
As the editorship changes hands, we have taken the opportunity to reflect on the aims of engage review, and to think about how the magazine might best be developed. For a long time the visual arts have been moving out of the gallery and into the street, the internet, the book, the public space. Gallery education has had to evolve to accommodate these changing contexts in which art is made and seen. And yet museums and galleries continue to be important cultural centres. In them visual art is informally enjoyed, studied and argued about, and more organised debates can take place. The overarching mission of engage is to ‘promote greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts’. We intend to keep the magazine with its centre of gravity in museums and galleries, while acknowledging the changing nature of art practice, and attending to the wider theoretical questions on which visual education is based.
My approach will be to keep the magazine themed as far as possible, to build around a central question or idea. The theme will be looked at through the lenses of theory, art practice and education. This issue, for example, has a piece which is primarily theoretical, articles by artists or primarily about art practice, and articles by educators, primarily about education. I anticipate that each theme will re-surface in later issues, having picked up new interpretations and areas to explore.
Though the format of the magazine is much the same, you will find a few new features. One is the box on the inside front cover announcing the topic of subsequent issues and soliciting views and articles. In this way we hope to jump-start the discussion about a particular area. Future issues will have a Reader’s Page for dialogue with readers. And you will find contributors’ details at the back of the magazine, so that they may be contacted directly. The aim is for the magazine to be a hub for networking as well as a place where ideas can be aired and research assembled.
It is with pleasure that I launch my first issue of engage review, with many thanks to Christopher Naylor, the engage office, and to the newly constituted Advisory Board, for their stimulating discussions and support.
Issue 10: The uses of drawing Drawing once held a privileged position in art practice and education. In the ‘postmodern’ age its status is uncertain. Drawing has been tainted by the gender politics of the Life Room and by romantic ideas about self-expression and the authentic mark. It has been marginalised by ways of working which are concept-driven or issue-led. It has been branded Eurocentric, or called into question by digital technology. Yet drawing remains central to visual education, and to the practice of many artists, even if their final work takes other forms. The UK’s Campaign for Drawing, now in its second year, the establishment of drawing professorships, and a spate of recent conferences suggest that drawing is enjoying, if not a comeback, at least a lively reappraisal. Drawing needs to be prised away from its unwelcome associations and studied in terms of its functions, rather than having pride of place in a hierarchy of representation.
My own interest in drawing began in my former life as a painter. I used line to search out spatial relationships, to set up a field where incompatible forms could coexist, to understand something I had already made. I found drawing to be capable of both precision and ambiguity. I have as well a more philosophical interest in the constraints and possibilities a particular activity offers. What constitutes drawing? Does it have to use line? Can a boat’s hull slicing through water, a defaced photograph, a body’s arc in space, or an erasure be called drawing? How far can the concept of drawing be stretched and still be meaningful as a category? What can drawing do?
Contributors to this issue do not confront the definition question head-on, and most of the time drawing is taken to mean making visible lines - whether they are made with tape, a wheel, a foot in the sand, or the more conventional pencil or pen on paper. But what drawing is remains in the background as an important question, and a future issue might want to look at different drawing cultures and subcultures. The digital age puts drawing in an intriguing light, as computers can simulate more and more of what used to be done by hand. Only one article in this issue (‘Half-Life’) is about computer drawing per se. However, technology hovers over these discussions, as people can’t help appraising hand drawing against the computer’s faster and more automatic ways of making images.
In the opening piece, Rose Montgomery-Whicher writes that the enduring significance of drawing lies in its difference from dominant practices and media in contemporary culture. She introduces the notion of ‘marginal’ or ‘non-rationalised’ practices and ‘focal’ practices. A marginal practice is something that people do spontaneously, rather than in the interests of productivity or efficiency. Focal practices are the skilled, cultured forms of such activities - focal because they require effort, time and focused attention. Drawing can be both marginal and focal and this, it is argued, accounts for its power and appeal. Such a model might be useful in thinking about the range of activities described in this volume. For instance, many events of the National Campaign for Drawing’s ‘Big Draw’ seem to encourage the spirit of spontaneity and playfulness of marginal practices; others set the scene for the sustained concentration of a focal practice. The Wimbledon Centre’s artist, Vong Phaophanit, said he strove to be relatively ‘purposeless’, as a marginal activity is; and yet his practice is certainly a focal one. The notion that drawing involves conflict and struggle as well as pleasure arises often in these pages and is consistent with the idea of a focal practice as described here.
So how do people in different parts of the art and education community think through the uses of drawing? Two essays are concerned with ways drawing operates in the work of artists. Angela Kingston describes the different approaches of three artists in residence at the Wimbledon School of Art’s Centre for Drawing. One worked very rapidly, hoping to free himself of ‘explicit purpose’, one used drawing to court a change in her work from the corporeal to the ethereal, the third makes drawings and assembles them into narratives. The Centre is unusual in that it is at the same time an artist’s studio, a gallery and an education establishment. Eric Ziegeweid, an MA student at Wimbledon, writes about the Centre as an alien or unassimilable phenomenon within the institution; this, he says, is part of its value.
Gavin Maughfling writes about the works on paper attributed to Francis Bacon, which were exhibited at the Barbican Gallery in London this year. It seems that these working documents served a variety of functions in Bacon’s work, from subversion, to triggering unconscious response, to bringing the chaos of daily visual experience into the studio and the hand and mind of the artist so that it could be turned into something else.
Is drawing as an educational tool more directed or transparent than the uses to which it is put by artists? Eileen Adams, who is concerned with art and design education in schools, galleries and other contexts, identifies three functions of drawing. Drawing as ‘perception’ is mostly for personal pleasure or insight. Drawing as ‘communication’ aims to share visual ideas with others. Drawing as ‘manipulation’ develops ideas toward an end - be it for design or fine art, an individual or collaborative effort. Catherine Orbach slices the cake differently. She focuses on the uses of drawing specifically in galleries, where the aim would be not to germinate and develop a body of work, but rather to ‘promote greater understanding of and enjoyment of the visual arts’. In this case drawing can be used as a record and aide- memoire, as a tool for analysing form, and as a way of exploring concepts. Adela Zeleznik describes gallery projects in Warsaw which are geared toward personal insight. Jem Main talks about drawing in terms of ‘notation’, an act which assimilates a stimulus and one’s response to it. My own piece is an account of the Whitechapel’s palm pilot project in schools; I suggest ways that such a project could be developed into a broader progamme of study about the nature of drawing, the function of images and the intentions of artists. All educators refer to a widespread fear of, or inhibition about drawing and suggest ways of getting around this - ‘I Can’t Draw’ therapy being one!
Moving out of the frame of Fine Art, we have the statements of three architects on the importance of drawing in their work. Richard Horden and Christophe Egret speak rhapsodically of the sketch as the capturing of a vision; architecture is the ‘built sketch’. Hani Rashid, on the other hand, is sceptical of the power attributed to the ‘masterful’ hand drawing. He believes that the architects of tomorrow will generate their ideas through the video camera, the audio recording and the computer, rather than the sketchbook.
In a short space, a great array of capacities have been claimed for drawing: critical reflection, communication, unconscious scanning, spontaneous pleasure and play, assimilation, subversion, notation, harnessing of instinct, analysis of form, problem-solving, concept development and confrontation of the mass media. One recurring theme is that drawing acts as a form of external and internal communication - sharing ideas with others and revealing ideas to oneself. Within this, the notion of translation seems to be central. Almost everyone says something about drawing’s ability to translate - between the inner and outer world, between idea and physical form, between art object and recuperated meanings.
Can drawing really do all this? Or perhaps the question is better asked the other way around: what concept of drawing do we need to have if it is to be capable of such diverse and complex purposes?
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email info@engage.org
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.