I need to do something about my work.  It feels impossible to critique.  It's certainly not perfect.  It has tons of compositional and conceptual problems, but I'm afraid no one ever says anything about those.   Is it because I come across as an ass-kicker?  Are you all afraid of me?  I just talk a lot, but I'm really soft on the inside.  I swear.  For god's sake, there's a lot of bad stuff in these drawings I pin up.  Please tell me what you really think!

pictures

I really hate this drawing.  It's unbalanced, weird, ill-assembled and fussed with to death.  But I kind of like the photograph of it, mostly because of the push pins.

I try hard to make drawings that are perfectly spontaneous.  No unified composition, just a series of apparently random moments, but calibrated to what I would consider "perfect."  I failed in this drawing, but the pin holes in the homosote, the push pins themselves and the shadows they produce, the incidental shadows produced by wee distance between the drawing and the wall.  The only success I can really find here is incidental.  So, really, it proves Tuttle's point with the wire pinned to the wall, the pencil line tracing its shadow, and the shadow itself.  Sometimes the temporal artifacts of displaying the work is the work itself.  Tuttle did it perfectly.  I bumbled through it.

This week, I got messy.  I scribbled with my left hand, cut out shapes free hand from old sketches and glued them on to the drawing, allowing the glue to leak off to the side, and allowed (with a great amount of restraint on my part) the edge of my paper not to be straight. 

It was tough, but I like it.  It's a different kind of impulsivity. 

In a lot of ways, the way we draw is similar to proofs in many areas of math.  In geometric topology, for instance, a proof depends entirely on the formal definitions you assign to your initial assumption.  that assumption may or may not be true in other "real" worlds, but if you can make a disciplinary argument for it (i.e., describe it in the logic of the discipline), then the proof that follows, if rigorous, must be true.  This, of course, is the trouble with all Euclidean Geometry, since Euclid was never able to describe his Fifth Postulate infallibly in the vocabulary of the math with which he tried to argue for it.  That's why we're lucky enough to have spherical, elliptical and hyperbolic geometry as well as all fields of topology today.

But I digress.  The point I'm making is that art, in this way, is math.  The vocabulary of the artist is different from that of the mathematician since we don't rely on logic, but our decision tree is similar to that of the mathematician.  Start with a truth that you, in your own disciplinary terms, have decided to be a truth, and move on with that same vocabulary.  That's what separates math and art from science.

So, in a lot of ways, my "messy" drawing is not unlike my clean drawings of previous weeks.   The impulse to lead with my left hand is the initial truth that I assigned to the proof, or the produced work, and all that followed was the logical growth of that initial impulse.

I don't think I will ever, ever be able to diverge from this way of thinking, mostly because I'm perfectly convinced by the logic of both discrete and continuous math.

I work impulsively.  The word of the week leads me to my first pencil stroke, and every move or stroke that follows builds upon that last one.  It's a sort of data tree, if you will, rather than a recursive process.  Never go back to the beginning after you've hit "go," or you're delving into the world of information rather than the world of creation. 

So, how do I differentiate creation from information and analysis?  If course, you can't create anything without information.  That's what we mean by "referencing."  But what separates the fine arts from the applied arts, I think, is the way in which we treat that information.  The applied arts, like design or engineering, must account for information every step of the way, as straying from the path of practicality amounts to a faulty design whose habitability is compromised.  I think that's precisely what makes architecture fantastic.  Create with respect to reality. 

The fine arts (annoying an antiquated as that term is...hasn't anyone come up with anything better yet?) place that impetus on design.  What art are designers bringing to the masses?  In the mid-twentieth century, it was a consciousness of all the banal: ubiquitous grids, quotidian lighting schemes, basic materials, the shape of things we see, all boiled down to their reductive selves.  There would have been no Michael Graves or Peter Eisenman in the seventies and eighties without Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt in the fifties and sixties.  There would be no dumbass obsession with holes and voids without Gordon Matta-Clark, and no consciousness of composed earth without Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer.  Design owes much of its conceptual framework to the work of fine art that precede it by decades.  And that fine art can come about only when the artist, while painfully aware of his deBordian situation, can remove himself from reality far enough to create a new world from it.

I think that only happens when reality informs the initial impulse and immediately disappears thereafter.

Maybe one of the reasons why I love a delicate drawing so much is the difficulty with which we try to reproduce it.  The thing is created on an impulse.  The execution might be laborious and time consuming, but the drawing, or set of drawings, is a single or set of impulses, like a sequence of mini electric shocks.  I think the composition is then objectively disjointed in a sort of Faulknerian stream of consciousness sense, but unified by the source of the impulses. 
That just can't be reproduced, no matter how nice a photograph of the work is made.  The labor involved in the process of tweaking a reproduction to the point of reflecting the reality of the material object is in polar opposition to the impulse of creation.  That's why, after an hour or trying to get my scans to look just like the original drawings, I decided to leave them as is.  People don't watch videos of Marina Abramovic's performances because it's antithetical to the theoretical underpinning of the work itself.  I also believe that the drawings I make for this class exist only in the context of the pin-ups and the memory of those pin-ups as you, Tony, look over this blog.  And, perhaps, the scans themselves become an entirely new work....no?  Why try to reconcile the digital with the analog when we can, instead, allow them to live in harmony?

I'm always interested in drawing as a rhythmic performance.  Not a performance of the scripted or spectated sort, but one in which the product, or end result, is intrinsically linked to the action that produces the object.  The hand is apparent not only by mere virtue of the fact that it produces pen strokes, but in the muscularity of a series of repetitive strokes that follow an apparently stochastic rhythmic and scalar modulation.  I don't know, that's just what I think.