Drawing and Longing: Proposal for Drawing as Paratext

My practice explores, and seeks a way out of, the potentially solipsistic position of one who draws ‘from life’, as the indexical surface mark (a witness unlike the photograph) unequivocally belies its author.

Martin Buber characterises solipsism by distinguishing between two forms of existential relationship, the I/Thou and the I/It, the latter relation being ‘between oneself and the idea of a thing, an object, and therefore not really a relationship atall, but a kind of monologue’ (Buber 1970: 54).

Solipsism as antagonist in my practice forces its opposite, so I seek out positions of neutrality or tension between subject and object, attempting to break the monologue, the I/It approach, that which drives deconstruction. Taking subject/object I investigate the line between.

A ‘state of drawingness’ is proposed by Hélène Cixous inher essay 'Without End’, no, State of drawingness, no,rather: The Executioner’s taking off', which reflects hernotion that a subject can be drawn out through theinscription of marks and words that evoke the ‘living oflife’ (Cixous 1998:25). She speaks of desiring the‘before and after’ of a book, invoking the frustrationthat, for a subject to be legible and visible, it must beapproached, bound and delimited through writing ordrawing and therefore, paradoxically, taken from life andmovement into stasis. Cixous seeks the event itself, orrather, the improvisational means by which, through anopen-ended and tentative process of mark-making, erasureand placing, a person or event may be drawn out.

This proposal finds its form in the notion of paratext,originally (for me) a means of drawing out subject matterby presenting meta-material through pairings of text andimage. The idea that a subject may be invoked bycomponents beyond and around it is also reflected inliterary theory. Gerard Genette defines paratexts as

components of the paraphernalia surrounding texts inpublication (prefaces, illustrations, titles). ForGenette, the paratext is ‘More than a boundary or asealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold… azone between text and off-text, not only of transitionbut also of transaction ... an influence that ... is atthe service of a better reception for the text and a morepertinent reading of it’ (Genette 1997:1-2).

The following paratext cluster is drawn around the notionof parastasis (Frizot 1998:2), defined as ‘the act or actionof abstracting an image or representation from thecontinuous flow of time, where the original and itsreplicant, for an instant, coexist within the sametemporal and spatial dimension’ (Oxford LatinDictionary1850). The notion of parastasis evokes, as doesCixous through her analysis of drawing ‘from life’, thedesire to capture and thereby defy time. These pieces(Bowen 2006/08) explore drawing’s relationship withphotography, the inscription of the pencil of natureincorporating the idea of paper as a performance space.

1: Punctum

That she moves her leg (the blur) pins the moment.

I pan through Photoshop to Cis’s leg breaking the pose,although moving in is not what brings her closer or whatanimates her. It is a particular movement that animatesthe still, that which draws us. Despite blurring, it ispossible to see under scrutiny of enlargement the textureof machine-spun wool. I view ribbing like anarchaeological find lost in miniature. Moving in, theprocess of blow-up, as if an excavation in reverse,exposes the nearly imperceptible.

As we look, the photograph’s history (fused with herbeing unknown) becomes turbulent (Pearson & Shanks2001:10). Like a small wave it throws up somethingsalvaged, the tiny movement that is a narrative fragment,a real history. Punctuation, exposure, the blur in theframe seems to us now, as perhaps for her, a gesture ofescape.

‘When it’s not entirely clear what’s being felt or beingthought in the body…that’s the moment [on which we] seekto draw… and drawing the ‘living of life’ is…exactly whatnone knows ... but it’s not impossible’ (Cixous:25).

I’m looking for Cis MacLachlan, four years old in Glasgowbeing photographed by Alexander McNab for a calling card.I see her one more time, an undated teenager sitting fora studio portrait in Braintree, composed and still. ThenI lose her.

Still blur draws me to the point, the punctum, the cutthrough space that creates the still (Barthes 1982:27).It is not that movement itself animates, because movementin a photograph emphasises arrest. We cannot see

movement, the moment, but held in tension with now a gapopens between moments, hers and ours. The performance,the exploration, the not knowing becomes a doublesubject. Moment by moment, is this the measure ofdifference? Time is difference. One and one is now.

‘But where does one stand to look at the nature of time?No image can still time. However it is the frame of thestill image that offers us a means to engage with time inits virtuality. The frame frees the image from referenceto an actual time and place and offers us an opening fortime travel – an opening that may well become a portalfor our inner rhizome of experience. We are now changingplaces and admit that we are bound in time … all thestories we might invent are only attempts to look at theimage anew…We are always looking for a place in order tosee’ (Ross with Wegener 2000: 57).

Between the viewer and the still lies an extension ofimages, forward from camera-time to now which runsbackwards. In between, Cis moves out of the frame towardsBraintree and beyond, and we plunge in to meet her,clutching the calling cards (they are the only ones withwhich we have to play, playing around Cis’s leg, all ofus gathering momentum, moving around the point, thepunctum).

Measuring the gap between her time and ours, we tell herstory.

2: Frame

The Munby Box, kept in the Wren Library,Cambridge, contains Arthur Munby’sphotographic archive. With his housemaidHannah Cullwick, whom he eventuallymarried, Munby collaborated on adocumentation of Hannah’s life as adomestic servant in his household. In 1988

Carol Mavor’s excavation of the Munby Box (to preventscandal locked at Munby’s request until 1950) uncovered aframe whose image had faded to invisibility (Mavor1998:187). This exists as surface only, beneath which ahandwritten caption describes the moment of exposure:

Hannah, going to the public house for the kitchen beer as she does daily. Taken in the street about noon on Friday, the 2nd of February 1872.

Taken from (the context of) an excavational essay concerning the contents of the box, this image remains (out of context) a powerful drawing from life. Between the moment, the camera, the first viewer’s text and the movement towards it of others who (after 1950) see also, the event of Hannah herself has faded right away. But in the movement, the gesture of one towards another, that which is seen from a distance becomes something else.

‘Estranged from this itself, which is the image, we … re-call the event’ (Blanchot 1989:88).

3: Street Scene

‘Moving objects leave no impression on the sensitivesurface’, Samuel Morse (Frizot: 28).

Morse observes Daguerre’s slow image, the street seenthrough a camera obscura from the photographer’s Parisstudio on 7 March 1839. Taken through Photoshop a hundredand fifty years on it is possible to detect, in the sameimage, traces of what Samuel Morse could not see, astreet population present at the time but going too fastto show up. These (the ghosts of carriers, carts,pedestrians and dogs) manifest as constellations ofpixels, barely visible galaxies.

4: Drawing and Longing

The Third Person Archive, by the artist John Stezaker, is acollection of background figures found and cut out ofnineteenth-century photographic travelogues andpostcards. The notion of a third person refers primarilyto the camera itself, mediating unseen between viewer andviewed. Re-framed from above, the ground is viewedobliquely. Shadows run from corner to corner so that eachfigure appears set diagonally across the ground as if inan oriental miniature. Here we see, between traceries ofshadow thrown by flights of steps and lamp-posts, theghosts of children moving too fast to be completelycaught. A unilateral edit takes them from the largerground upon which they are incidental figures, a rupturethat (as if introducing another lens) refocuses andbrings them into sight. The photographed figure,appearing as a surface mark, can be said to mark amovement, ecceity, the ‘here is’ (Note 1). This is notchronology, but that which is between ourselves in time,so that the particular in photography, its predication ofa body, a lamp post, a flight of steps, may take themeasure of what is now and who is here. These aresubjects imaged not in memoriam but in anticipation ofbeing noticed, brought to bear upon, tenderly dislocatedin order to be seen again. Exerting pressure, tracingthe contours of that event, we find another present, thetrace of a life reconstituted outside itself.

5: tac

The autonomous image cuts (and is cut from) movement(Bracewell 2005).

In a similar way (to illustrate) an imagined tac operatesin the performance of mime. The inner tac makes thinkingvisible and visibly shifts perception. The palms or solesmake contact - tac - and without a word the surface of aworld appears (a wall, a glass of water, the handle on adoor, a flight of stairs). Tac is a mental sound, a notefor the body, a small explosion creating ‘some form ofenlargement or exaggeration, not necessarily elaborate’(Note 2).

The enlarging gesture (Note 2) can bealmost imperceptibly slight. The act, mime’s embodimentof the world’s surface, can be imagined for all the worldto see, ‘like a small tear in the surface of the world,as though we have been pulled through from our own tosome vaster space’ (Weil cited in Scarry 1999:111),through a sort of death.

Postscript

In her essay on reading and drawing, ‘Without end’,Cixous longs for ‘the beforehand of the book’[Cixous:20]. Then we read, ‘I just wrote this sentence,

but before this sentence I wrote hundreds of others whichI've suppressed, because the moment for cutting short hasarrived. It’s not me, its necessity which has cut thetext we were on our way to writing, because the text andI, we would continue on our way’.

The practice of paratext proposed here in relation todrawing takes Genette’s term as a reference to both thematerial properties of text (the parameters that createvisibility) and also to that ‘endlessness’ pursued byCixous, the stream within which we have to negotiate aposition from which to see. Through her reading ofdrawing, Cixous wants the living of [a] life in all itsparticularity, its very passing. In her reading, forexample, of Picasso’s Woman Ironing she longs for ‘whatpasses between us’, for some can ‘portray passing’. Thedrawing is scrutinised and its contours followed withconcentration. The emotion sought, she says, is ‘born atthe angle of one state with another’ (Cixous: 26, 22).

The book’s binding tilts its text towards us. The covers(with preface, postscript and in-between) draw usin/on/through, as from here we can see.

List of References

Barthes R. (1982) Camera Lucida. London:Vintage Blanchot M. (1989) The Space of Literature (trans. by Smock A. from L’Espace litteraire 1955) Nebraska: UNP Bowen, E. (2008) ‘Where is the Space of Choreography’ inPerformance Research Vol. 13:2, ‘On Choreography’, 30-32, 34(‘Punctum’, ‘Street Scene’, ‘Drawing and Longing’);(2006) Performance Research Vol.11:3, ‘Lexicon’, 69, 71(‘Frame’, ‘Tac’). Versions of these pieces are reproducedhere by kind permission of London: Routledge (Taylor &Francis Group).Bracewell M. (2005 ) ‘Demand the Impossible’, John Stezaker interviewed in Frieze, March Issue 89.Buber M. (1970) I and Thou (trans. by Kaufmann W.) New York: Scribner's Sons from Buber M. (1923) Ich und Du (trans. 1937 by Smith R.G.)

Cixous, H., (1998) 'Without End, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off' (trans. by MacGillivray C.A.F.) in Stigmata, Escaping Texts. London: Routledge Frizot M. (1998) (ed.) A New History of Photography. New York: Konemann Genette, G. (1997) Paratexts, Thresholds of Interpretation (trans.by Lewin J.E.) Cambridge: CUP from Genette, G. (1987)Seuils, Paris: SeuilMavor C. (1998) ‘Touching Netherplaces, Invisibility in the Photographs of Hannah Cullwick’ in Exceptional Spaces, Essays in Performance and History (ed. Pollock G.) North Carolina: NCP Pearson M. & Shanks M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. London :Routledge Scarry E. (1999) On Beauty and Being Just. New Jersey:PrincetonStewart S. (1993) On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. North Carolina: Duke University Press Stezaker J. (2000) 'Redemption & the Irredeemable' in Images of Thought (ed. Lomax Y.) Vol. 2, Salvo 007, Royal College of Art

Notes

1. Ecceity (or haecceity (Lat. haecceitas, ‘thisness’) is posited by Duns Scotus as not a thing but a spatio-temporal relationship, a determination, a predisposition of one towards another. Laura Mulvey suggests that the tense of a photograph might be thought of as the ‘this isthat has been’ (Mulvey L. (2000) ‘The Index and the Uncanny’ in Gill C.B. (ed.) (2000) Time and the Image. Manchester & New York: MUP). 2. Notes transcribed from a talk by the mime artist Geoffrey Stevenson, University of Durham, 2004. 3. In her essay On Longing, Susan Stewart (1993) considers how, from the ‘enlargement of experience’ through language, emerge conventions of description by which the world may be understood. This is an imagistic means through which experience is (more than conveyed) instead

re-made or transformed. Here, longing is an imaginative impulse to collect or re-scale the world.