Rethinking the graphic trace in performative drawing

ABSTRACT

This article critically investigates the ‘graphic trace’, commonly perceived in drawings as marks left from physical actions. It is a notion fundamental to current art practices engaging performance and experimental drawing. The graphic trace is investigated through ‘inscription’, which is popularly interpreted as the visual expression of thought through marks or imprints of physical movements, from free-hand sketching to tracing choreographic movements. A critique of this inscriptive ideology shows that the inscribed trace as ‘line’ expresses thought under vitalist schemas exemplified by Bergson’s notion of multiplicity, that life is prompted by a creative event, and Deleuze’s articulation of such an event as ‘lines of thought’. The critique proposed in this article is that a more radically discursive and exceptional event, or ‘multiplicity’, does not really take place. An overview is given of performative, choreographic and process-led practices since the 1970s, while unpacking philosophical concepts of gesture, movement and embodiment. The conclusion lays out the paradox that the graphic trace stultifies thinking, offsetting a more materialist kind of event that affirms discourse in exceptionally different ways.

Acknowledgements

For their generous assistance with this article, the author thanks Anne Tallentire, Chris Kul-Want and Martin Crowley.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Robert Luzar is an artist, researcher and educator. He gained his PhD at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, with a dissertation on drawing through performance in relation to thinking as an event of multiplicity. His artworks are exhibited mainly in Canada, Europe and England, and his research interests engage visual culture and philosophy, specializing in drawing through performance, new media and continental traditions of thought.

Notes

1 Inscription also refers to displays of a ‘visual scrawl’ (Brody 2008, 29). This can be examined in two ways: a semiotic process that produces a series of signs (chains of signifiers that collect and designate a signified meaning); and a scrawl of graphic strokes, lines viewable but indecipherable, that is a figure that elides signification and depicts a form of expressive, abstract desire.

2 Incarnation also entails metamorphosis: ‘This capacity to disappear, to be able to be absorbed in each exfoliation, defines the metamorphosis of the body. Metamorphosis is the condition of the activity of code translation: each exfoliation is the metamorphosis of (Spinoza 1992) all the other forms in a spatial one’ (Gil 1998, 143).

3 ‘Desiring machines, on the contrary, continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly’, write Deleuze and Guattari (2000, 31).

4 Embodiment and endurance in vital multiplicity derive from philosopher Baruch Spinoza's injunction, that thought or intellect can only be expressed by a question of bodily capacities to undergo this expression of speculation – ‘what can a body do?’ See Part IV, ‘Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions’ in The Ethics (1992); and for Deleuze's articulation of endurance, see Chapter 14, ‘What Can a Body Do?’ in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (2005).

5 Subsequent exhibitions have continued to address the process of making marks, and to this I note their focus on the line as the mark and figure: Drawing from the Modern (1975–2005) (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005), The Intertwining Line (Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2008–2009), The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing (The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2009–2010), On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011), Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design and Activism in Post-War Los Angeles (Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, 2011–2012), Lines of Thought (Parasol Unit, London, 2012).

6 Process-art is largely referred to in Lucy Lippard's infamous document, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (1997), which surveys conceptual experimentations by American and European artists. ‘Conceptual’, ‘performance’ and ‘process’ are some of an array of terms that Lippard's book notes, terms which express qualities of art making in general. These qualities emphasize expansion rather than defining parameters of a venerable art form. Process-art per se would, in this case, not be a genre but rather an attitude towards making conceptually and materially.

7 See Cornelia H. Butler, ‘Ends and Means', in Butler 1999.

8 Avis Newman addresses the aspect of expansion as a fundamental process of ontological transformation: ‘that nevertheless proposes a process of becoming more than being, analogous to the practice of drawing in which one may see not the thing itself but its possibility, its suggestion, (and) the uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming … ’ (Newman, in Newman et al. 2007, 20).

9 Patricia Cain also associates processes of moving with conceptual invention when she writes, ‘ideas often appear to emerge as the activity progresses’ (Cain 2010, 29).

10 W. Benjamin Myers similarly argues that performance discourses conflate vitalism with spiritual notions of force, such that ‘the body becomes subservient to mysticism’ (2012, 169).

11 For an impressive study of the shadow presented in the myth of Butades, see ‘Around the Uncanny’ in Stoichita 2011. Here the tracing of the lover's shadow expresses ‘an affirmation of body, volume and flesh’ (127). And the collaborative delivery of this activity will have ‘authenticated the incarnation’ and ‘the presence of the author’ (ibid.).

12 See Books XXXIII–XXXV in Pliny 2 004.

13 In his essay ‘The Trace of Trauma’, Newman explores, albeit with some difficulty, Maurice Blanchot's radical claim that there is no ‘origin of the trace’ – a claim that fundamentally informs Derrida's notion of the trace. As Newman writes, ‘the marks are effaced because there is no present in which they can be present’ and the traces are ‘forever cut off from that of which they would be the traces’ (in Gill 1996, 165).

14 José Gil similarly contextualizes the re-mark of trace within anthropology, describing affection and movement apropos of a multiple, differential force of doubling: ‘The operator's [force] role seems to be a double one. First determining what the force is, then transforming it’, which in turn means that ‘force doesn’t exist: when it is the movement from one sign to another. But as movement, with its characteristic feature of energy, it is final and irreducible’ (1998, 11).

15 Writer Ian James identifies the Christian characteristic of Merleau-Ponty's chiasmus, whereby embodying the inscription-of-touching-in-the-visible associates with the statement made in the Gospel of St. John: ‘And the word was made flesh’ (2006, 114–151).

16 Terry Eagleton (1990, 161) comments on ‘this grandly generalizing gesture’ by writing: ‘What makes me what I am, the will of which I am simply a materialization, is utterly indifferent to my individual identity, which it uses merely for its own pointless self-reproduction. At the very root of the human subject lies that which is implacably alien to it, so that in a devastating irony this will which is the very pith of my being, which I can feel from the inside of my body with incomparably greater immediacy than can know anything else, is absolutely unlike me at all, without conscious motive, as blankly unfeeling and anonymous as the force which stirs the waves'.