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Overview
In 2007, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy curated an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. This book, originally written for that exhibition, explores the interplay between drawing and form—viewing the act of drawing as a formative force. Recalling that the terms ‘drawing’ and ‘design’ were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that drawing designates a design that remains without project, plan, or intention. His argument offers a way of rethinking a number of historical terms (sketch, draft, outline, plan, mark, notation), which includes rethinking drawing in its graphic, filmic, choreographic, poetic, melodic, and rhythmic senses.
For Nancy, drawing resists any kind of closure, and therefore never resolves a tension specific to itself. Drawing allows the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge to come to appearance. Situating drawing in these terms, Nancy engages a number of texts in which Freud addresses the force of desire in the rapport between aesthetic and sexual pleasure, texts that also turn around questions concerning form in its formation.
Between sections of his text, Nancy includes a series of “sketchbooks” on drawing, composed of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823252312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 133 |
| Sales rank: | 1,005,554 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Philip Armstrong is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Form
Drawing is the opening of form. This can be thought in two ways: opening in the sense of a beginning, departure, origin, dispatch, impetus, or sketching out, and opening in the sense of an availability or inherent capacity. According to the first sense, drawing evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure. According to the second, it indicates the figure's essential incompleteness, a non- closure or non-totalizing of form. In one way or another, the word drawing retains a dynamic, energetic, and incipient value that does not exist in words like painting,film, or cinema. By contrast, words like music,dance, and poetry, or words like speech and song, come closer to preserving a dynamic or potential within any actual or static value. Drawing participates in a semantic field where act and force [puissance] are combined, or where the sense of the act, the state, or the being that is in question cannot be detached entirely from a sense of gesture, movement, or becoming. The word drawing draws itself along or draws itself forward before all disposed form, all tracing out [tracé], as if initiating a trace that must always be discovered again — opened up, opened out, initiated, incised.
In the idea of drawing, the word itself can also designate an essential suspension of an achieved reality. "Here is a drawing by Rembrandt" only gives us the impoverished factual and informational meaning of the word, whereas the expression "Rembrandt's drawing" reveals a quite different value. For Rembrandt's drawing is Rembrandt's own manner of drawing. It is the collection of characteristics that distinguish his drawing. Furthermore, it is also the role that drawing plays in his work, the way drawing plays itself out within the work, either within the paintings or as a separate exercise, whether in sketches, studies, or engravings. "Rembrandt's drawing" tends to distinguish itself only from "Rembrandt's color," an expression that designates the proper manner according to which Rembrandt employs color or colors (their hues, nuances, relationships, etc.). (For the moment, we will leave aside the very delicate and undoubtedly inextricable sharing — division, exchange, and combination — between color and drawing).
As a propensity, then, "Rembrandt's drawing/color" is "Rembrandt" himself, or "Rembrandt's art." This singularity or originality is situated beyond style or talent. Irreducible to any form of analysis, it is no doubt best indicated by affirming this singularity or originality as "art," in other words, as a savoir-faire or know-how that exceeds all knowledge and all making. This is not a question of "genius" (a word about which we should remain guarded, and for good reason), but rather the thought of this excess, a thought of the unthinkable and unfeasible (the unspeakable and the unrealizable). Each time that it takes place, this thought as such can only be single and singular, without possible substitution, like all truth.
In the idea of drawing, there is the singularity of the opening — the formation, impetus, or gesture — of form, which is to say, exactly what must not have already been given in a form in order to form itself. Drawing is not a given, available, formed form. On the contrary, it is the gift, invention, uprising [surgissement], or birth of form. "That a form comes" is drawing's formula, and this formula implies at the same time the desire for and the anticipation of form, a way of being exposed to what comes, to an unexpected occurrence, or to a surprise that no prior formality will have been able to precede or preform.
Sketchbook 1
"Think of Cézanne's drawing, which, in a word, aims at what comes into appearance [l'apparaître] beneath appearance"
— Yves Bonnefoy, Remarks on the Gaze
"Composition is the drawing (up) of the work, but the work's drawing is the work itself. The work is drawn (up). Drawing is thus not a secondary art: preliminary or remnant of another art. No more is it an art among others. It is an art quite a-part, and what there is of art in all art."
— Éliane Escoubas, "'The Happy Hand': Kandinsky and Composition"
"The work of drawing — that where there best arises the rapid trajectory of thought and blindness unified."
— Antonio Saura, in Pierre Alechinsky:Excerpts on the (Por)trait
"The omnipresent Line in its spacing from every point to every other in order to institute the Idea."
— Stéphane Mallarmé, Music and Letters
"A round and assured wandering of a curve that enlaces, delicate intertwining like brushwood, or construction made from angles and straights lines — no matter, drawing is always what comes first, what is assumed to spring forth from nothing."
— Jean-Christophe Bailly, The Infinite Studio
CHAPTER 2Idea
But what is it, then, that we call form? It is imperative to take up this problem, since drawing represents par excellence the element of form, or a form — and, as we have suggested, not only within the domain of the visual arts but in all artistic domains, since in all these domains one can discern a register, element, or valence to which the idea of drawing lays claim — without being simply a metaphoric use of the term.
Leonardo da Vinci writes: "These parts [of music] are constrained to arise and to die in one or more harmonic tempos which surround a proportionality by its members; such a harmony is composed not differently from the circumferential line which generates human beauty by its [respective] members."
Form is the "idea," recalling the word chosen by Plato to designate the intelligible models of the real. Idea signifies for Plato, according to the Greek term, nothing other than "visible form" (to which one might add that the "visible" is form's primary register of reference, because that register maintains form in the foreground, distinct, and in this way "formed." By contrast, and according to another distinction, drawing [dessin] opens form to its own formation). In fact, the most recent translations of Plato substitute "Form" for the more traditional "Idea." "Intelligible form" takes nothing away from the field of the visible; it demands only that this visibility adapt, not to the immediate and interested perception of things, but to the judgment and aim [visée] of their sense and truth. Just as the visible form of the table presents us with its use and affordance [disponibilité] as furniture, whether for eating, writing, or climbing up on, so the "idea" of the table (tabula rasa, multiplication table, tablature) carries the sense of a general affordance for ... affordance itself, in other words, the form of a surface on which things are arranged, the way form comes to light [mise en evidence] and presence (to sit down at the table, to put something on the table, the negotiating table, the Holy Altar [la Sainte Table]). This form gives sense or truth to the "table." One must thus understand that "sense or truth" (employed here as equivalents) are far from constituting simply the "intelligibility" of the sensible. At the same time, this intelligibility is nothing other than a more demanding, more intense grasp of sensible propriety itself. Or yet again, in distinguishing these two terms, one could say that the truth is the point or moment of interruption of the movement and opening up of sense. Interrupted, suspended, the drawing/design of sense [le sens en son dess(e)in] reveals at once its tracing out [tracé] (its substance or bearing) and the truth, which is not its completion but, on the contrary, its very interruption.
It is for this reason that early on the word drawing took on, if not exactly the meaning, then the value associated with a sketch or a study. In The Art of Painting, Roger de Piles has a chapter "Of Designs," which begins: "The Designs, of which we intend to speak here, are the Thoughts that Painters commonly express on paper in order to execute the Work they are planning. One should number among Designs the studies made by the Great Masters, in other words, the Parts they have drawn after Nature, such as heads, hands, feet & entire Figures, Draperies, Animals, Trees, Plants, Flowers, and finally everything that enters into the Composition of a Painting [Tableau]. Because whether one considers it a good Design in relation to a Painting for which it is the Idea, or in relation to some Part for which it is a Study, it always deserves the attention of the Curious."
(Matter — to recall a word that remains inseparable from "form" — is the name of form's resistance to its deformation. It is not a formless "content" that form comes to mold or model but rather the thickness, texture, and force of form itself. We will return to this claim later in order to understand how color and drawing are not as exterior to one another as might be thought, even as they remain irreducible and irreplaceable.)
Sketchbook 2
"With charcoal, he marked on the wall the ideas of things as they came to mind; it is customary for sharp and imaginative minds to pile up thought upon thoughts on the same subject."
— Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini'sVisit to France
"DRAWING [DESSEIN], which signifies the goal, objective, end, and aim of action. But it also signifies a project, plan, or portrait of a few figures, the outline of a flat painting surface or relief that one wants to create: a common word amongst Painters, Statue makers, and other such artisans who draw or sketch."
— Antoine de Laval, Drawings of Noble and Public Professions
"On the difference between literature and painting with regard to the effect that can be produced by the rough sketch of a thought; in other words, on the impossibility, in literature, of making a sketch that will convey an idea to the mind, and of the strength with which an idea can be stated in the painter's rough sketch, or in his first draft. Music must be like literature, and I think that this difference between drawing and the other arts comes from the fact that in the latter, ideas are developed in succession, whereas the whole impression of a pictorial composition can be summed up in three or four lines.
... in painting, a fine indication, or a sketch infused with great feeling, can be equal in expression to the most finished production."
— Eugène Delacroix, Journal
"What is called 'good draftsmanship' is where nothing can be altered without destroying this inner life, regardless of whether this draftsmanship contradicts anatomy or botany or any other science."
— Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art
CHAPTER 3Formative Force
Drawing is therefore the Idea — it is the true form of the thing. Or more exactly, it is the gesture that proceeds from the desire to show this form and to trace it so as to show the form — but not to trace in order to reveal it as a form already received. Here, to trace is to find, and in order to find, to seek a form to come (or to let it seek and find itself) — a form to come that should or that can come through drawing.
In the sense of a project or intention, the design [dessein] to form or to show is originally only another word for drawing, which up until the eighteenth century was written in exactly the same way. Both stem from designare (whence the Italian disegno and the today's design), of which we have conserved the term and notion to designate. Drawing designates the form or idea. It is the thought that designates, presents, monstrates, or ostentates. This signifies that it is not "demonstrative" thought — a demonstration does not show; it unfolds through stages, in such a way that it can be followed, accompanied, and even carried throughout its progression. Inversely, monstration puts one, as it were, before the fait accompli. But drawing's "fait accompli" is not simply that of the thing's monstration; it is the monstration of the form, idea, or thought, and thus of the thing as thought or thinkable — of the ideated [idéelle] thing, if one wants to distinguish between this word and ideal, to which it is perhaps too closely related. The ideated thing or the idea of the thing — the form — is not an ethereal image of the thing, nor is it how it appears. It is neither a noumenon nor a phenomenon. It is the thought of the thing, which is to say, its formation, reformation, or transformation into truth. It is neither the generic notion of a "table" nor the real table on which I am writing but this drawing of a table — by Cézanne or Gropius — thanks to which a determinate thought is engendered or forms itself, distinct but not conceptual (although not rigorously perceptual per se and yet still sensible), precise and present but not proffered to any other use than that of thought, of the sensibility of thought.
The same can be understood of industrial drawing, an architect or botanist's drawing as well as that of a painter or draftsman. Like all types of drawing that are assumed to be simply reproductive or imitative, even the first three categories mentioned here do not merely "reproduce" (what would a faithful and complete "reproduction" mean here?) but also always produce an idea, a thought, sense, or truth. The difference between these types of drawing and those qualified as artistic — a distinction that is initially difficult to maintain in any rigorous way — only resides in the mode of truth in play. There is a truth that is thought as conforming to a verifiable (identifiable, recognizable, or measurable) truth, and another that is thought as existing before a verification (in the literal sense of the term — as the production of the true), a truth that is not identifiable, recognizable or, even less, measurable — a truth first of all, and as a principle, unformed (for which, in consequence, a conformity cannot be given).
The thought of a non-conforming and unverifiable form, the thought of a form forming itself, of the self-formative form [forme formatrice] — in consequence, of the formative force of this very form, or again, of the form in its force, of the form or idea as force, in short, what the Greek call dunamis — is what constitutes the drawing of art or the art of drawing, this art, as we have already suggested, that constitutes the element, moment, or dimension not of formalized but formative, ostensive, and dynamic thought across all artistic fields. In fact, this triple qualification is to be understood not according to an additive but according to a synthetic mode: drawing creates this synthesis, and it is nothing other than the force of this ostensive formation. In still other terms, it is the gesture of putting something forth in its evidence. Or again, this is what Degas means when he is reported to have said: "Drawing is not the form, it is the manner of seeing the form." Or again, in quite different terms, what Armenini means when he writes in On the True Precepts of Painting from 1587: "Your drawing will be a pre-disposition which, first imagined in the mind then conceived by the soul and judgment, will finish by coming into existence in various modes on little pieces of paper."
The "manner" or "mode," as a property of the gesture of drawing, refers to nothing other than the singularity of form — and this singularity insofar as a truth, essence, or characteristic comes to light there (however one might want to phrase it), each time singular, unique, and exclusive to the drawn thing. It makes no essential difference whether this thing is reputed to correspond to the representation of a real object or whether it configures itself within itself without figuring anything; as a matter of fact, its essence consists entirely of the manner, mode, and allure of its gesture, the force of its movement, the weight and lightness of its mark [trait].
Sketchbook 3
"To draw is to outline an idea. The drawing is the clarification of thought. Through drawing, the sentiments and soul of the painter pass without difficulty into the mind of the viewer. A work without drawing is a house without a framework."
— Henri Matisse, Writings on Art
"The secret of the art of drawing is to discover within each object the specific manner in which a fluctuating line — which is its generative axis — expands out, like a wave that spreads out in ripples across the surface."
— Félix Ravaisson, On the Teaching of Drawing in Schools
"The line shows first on an intact surface. A mark that carries its appearance to the end and only becomes interrupted after having circumscribed the surface at the precise point where the end cancels itself out in the beginning, it will be immediately a continuous line, the progressive exposure of a freedom, and at the same time the sensual pleasure [jouissance] of this freedom, as well as the desire to confound pleasure and freedom, to delimit their shared substance and their common subversion."
— René Char, "Search for the Base and the Summit"
"In its own way, drawing is the use of signs. Whoever draws with force, whoever inscribes on the unlimited depth of a sheet of paper his impression of a body, a city seen from afar, or a summit surrounded by clouds, only does this in distancing themselves from a line which evokes a head, house, or mountain drawn in a conventional way."
— Yves Bonnefoy, The Wandering Life
"The nascent form is an unspoken reality on the way to becoming manifest for the first time. ... The represented objects serve to manifest their own movement of appearance: their function is to anticipate themselves or to surface before what they appear to be."
— Max Loreau, Of Creation
"Maybe the most important word is the word tension. Lines shouldn't ... even vibrate anymore, be able to anymore."
— Pablo Picasso, Writings on Art
CHAPTER 4The Pleasure of Drawing
Due to its nature, no doubt, drawing is represented, experienced, and experimented with as a compulsion, like the effect of an irresistible impetus. Valéry writes that drawing constitutes "perhaps the strongest temptation of the mind," and a number of painter's lives show a precocious and often overwhelming compulsion to scribble, draft, trace, sketch out, or outline (right up to the "priapism of drawing" to which Greuze refers when speaking of Saint-Aubin).
A phrase by Vasari about the young Michelangelo summarizes what he and other authors of the "lives" of painters repeat about so many other artists, sometimes with abundant detail: "His genius led him to the pleasure of drawing; furtively, he spent as much time at it as he could, for which his father and elders scolded him."
One could certainly ask if this disposition or impulse [pulsion] really can be attributed to the future artist in question, or whether it stems from a well-rehearsed topos, whose initial model is found, no doubt, in the story of the young Giotto, who drew while tending a flock. But the very invention of this topos ought to be questioned: whether originating in reality or not, why should drawing receive this singular treatment that makes it the model of art ingenuously engendered from its own genius?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Pleasure in Drawing"
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Table of Contents
Translator's Note,
Preface to the English-Language Edition,
Form Sketchbook 1,
Idea Sketchbook 2,
Formative Force Sketchbook 3,
The Pleasure of Drawing Sketchbook 4,
Forma Formans Sketchbook 5,
From Self Toward Self Sketchbook 6,
Consenting to Self Sketchbook 7,
Gestural Pleasure Sketchbook 8,
The Form-Pleasure Sketchbook 9,
The Drawing/Design of the Arts Sketchbook 10,
Mimesis Sketchbook 11,
Pleasure of Relation Sketchbook 12,
Death, Sex, Love of the Invisible Sketchbook 13,
Ambiguous Pleasure Sketchbook 14,
Purposiveness Without Purpose Sketchbook 15,
The Line's Desire Sketchbook 16,
Notes,