Marking the Contemporary

In the last 3 years I've spent a good deal of time drawing and painting.

Though I had been making drawings for a number of years, I was in my art work, work I was exhibiting, collaging, arranging, performing, curating. leaving the drawings aside while using design and code, photography, film, video and found objects for my online, computational films, installation, print and video.

Many of these works started with the idea of art as event, what I called the event of art, as that moment that the art work comes to consciousness, the act is configured and apprehended as that which is art, art as a way, a way to engage and see the world, make the world.


These simple early works, where actions, some times private, sometimes public. For example, stepping quickly under a large bouncing balloon,  myself and the balloon becoming one, or standing in an art fair with a sign as a sculpture, going into rooms and setting up a camera and letting others interact with it, rearranging objects in department stores, in apartments, seeing this next to that, interacting with the passerbys, others in online chats, each was an event of art, when thought of and constituted as such.

These interventions, inventions, conspirings, breakings of the fourth wall and everyday reality and habit, often whimsical and momentary, alone and communal, where the carrying forth of a belief in the power of art to make and remake the world. It was a way to inhabit the world. To retake life. It was the practice of art as the practice of life. Life could be art. Life was art. We had only to enact it as such.

These works, these actions started from the place of embodiment, my body, my breadth, how it moves, why it moves, noting what moves it. How does my body move about, physically and psychically, in what spaces, through what protocols, through what customs. What has marked my body, my person so that it goes in the world this way and not that. I am a body in space. I am a body all-too known to myself wanting to unknow myself. I am a body not knowing myself well enough wanting to know myself knowing. I am a social body, a body formed by the social. My body has the habits of its social contouring, my body which is all of me, my mind, feelings and heart, my body, me has its limits. I have been made by others. I have made myself. I make myself. I make my body. (Stars make my body. Time.) My body is made my others. My body is mine and not mine. I can't see the making of me. I want to see me made. I want to unmake me to be me.  There is no me. What is this body that is all bodies. What is this body that traces back to all things.

The event of art, the site of art, must be my body. Art itself is always a social body. A body of objects and knowledge, cultural and material. My body touched by art. Art touching my body.

The event of art, the site of art, must be the signs and systems from the bottom up to the top down that have made me. That have made everything. Everything is made and can be made again. I can make me. I can unmake the me that has been made. I can see me being made. I can see these letters forming on this page. I can see the words are in english. I know they are english. I speak english. I know that. These words are of a certain type face, Times, normal. My fingers work about this keyboard as I type. This keyboard shapes my fingers. The letters and words are so clear and consistent in type. Each 'e' is like every other 'e'. Each letter that I type comes out perfectly like all the other Times, normal, lower case 'e's'.

E. E. Cummings was the poet of the typewriter. All art is a poetry. Of materials, sense and being. I thought myself a poet of the digital camera. I don't make poetic pictures. Not at all. Well I do, but I am not after poetic pictures. Poetic pictures may be a register of picture taking for me. But like E.E. Cummings, I take pictures of the camera as he did of the typewriter.

 I know how this typewriter works. You can see its type. Its a type of writing the typewriter. It's peculiar, the things it can do.  Digital cameras are peculiar too. I wrote about this in my book Image Photograph. The camera is like my body. It's not simply an extension of my body. Rather I extend myself through its body. Its body, like a simple organism, can do certain things. I am interested in the things it can do.  Its does peculiar things.

So what is it about drawing and painting. What's peculiar about it? It's not newfangled like computation, social practice, participatory art, digital media, environmental art, the archive, performance and so on. Its much-much older than the popular return today of slide projectors, super 8 film, 16m film, over head projectors, micro film and other recently obsolesced media.

Drawing and painting have been have been around forever.  Certainly drawing forever. Both for the last fifty years have been pronounced dead again and again. Dead in the sense that there is no more they can show us. So how to approach drawing or a painting.  No doubt painting is alive as ever and the most highly priced art object on the global market today. But what can I do with it.

When I see a photograph I see the picture taken. Not the photograph but the apparatus of the picture taking. I see the form factor, I read the software, the filter, the situation in front of the camera. I see the camera seeing. Unless its a picture taken like E.E. Cummings used his typewriter I see it as a picture which has a tenuous connection to what it depicts.

I may like its sense of picture taking but I can't read it in its depictions and it startles me that others do. I don't want to see it as a depiction but as an event of picture taking. This is why I can not accept a certain line of contemporary photography and its thinking as it turns on the idea of the camera as an instrument of depiction rather than an event of an instrument of recording the world. The camera does not record it makes a world.

Unlike the typewriter and the camera, drawing turns inward. It does look out onto the world, yes, of course, but its instrument is different. Perhaps the pencil is more like the violin or a wind instrument you play it in time. One note or chord followed by another and another, building up certain patterns.

Drawing is a recording of time, the pressure of the hand, speed, line, paper, surface, attack It is the recording of one's hand, one's body, one's nervous system. It's a signature of the body. Of a temperament. It's not all at once as in taking a picture, releasing the shutter and light exposing the sensor all over, instantly. When I draw, I am taken up in a very different way.  I am distributed over time. I don't arrest an instant of seeing akin to sight, I am recording an optical seeing, a lens seeing. In drawing I make things appear with my hand. It shows me things I could not see, it suggest things. It can follow itself.

Of course an algorithm can make drawings. Only look at the program Processing.  And of course the naturalist would notate, observe and record those things in the world they wanted to make record of, they wanted to record. They wanted to catalog the world, measure it, index it.  We can clearly see that drawing and counting were once the same thing until counting became its own kind of drawing.

Now I don't want to say the camera can't make a line, because it can. Nor that a line can't do the work of depiction. Depiction as in to make a picture, a picture we recognize. Is the camera inherently more naturalistic or empirical than a pencil. More neutral. I am not sure. If we were to compare courtroom sketches of witnesses with courtroom photographs of these same people what would be the difference?

I am a body. My body is a line moving through space. My body is a mass moving. I am a painting.  I am mass and volume. Francis Bacon does not paint faces he paints heads. Lines and masses. Shapes and colors. His is not the event of 'art' but of painting. He has confronted painting. He has found his way in painting.


The event of art concerns the complex of art. The institution of art-reception is its medium. Arts history, its objects, reception and discourse frame the frisson that gives forth the event. That this is art because I say it's art. That I can say it's art is the open and permissive framework of art. Opening a space of art is the event of art. Art with a capital A. How to open art. How to open up to art.

Collaging and arranging. The subject arranged, re-arranged. The subject of Art arranged and re-arranged. How then to stage the situation of drawing or painting. Not to draw but to stage it.  To see drawing. To draw to see inside me. To draw to see the temperament of me. To stage me in drawing. Not the biography of me. Not to illustrate me. To ask drawing what it might find in me.

Perhaps the event of art, is the event of ourselves becoming present to the world, coming into being with it.  The con/temporary might be that somewhere in the nowhere of utopia, that is without innocence. As much as we long and admire the creativity and innocence of children, art remains out of their reach, (we don't want to believe this, I know) as it does not yet with children know itself as such. The event of art then, must both be a knowing event while at the same time not happened yet. We know the event only as it happens.

Drawing, painting, photography, installation, films, it does not matter: each is a way of knowing, becoming, what matters is what we bring to them and what they reveal and how they converse with us.

Go Figure or Wise up to the Marks

To figure is to give shape.  To shape is to create an event.  To figure is an event unto itself. The figure as event. 

This word figure we use for many things, to describe bodies, numbers, shapes of things, outlines, as in shapely figures, dashing and abject figures. In the realm of pictures, to figure is an extraordinary pictorial calculus. A space forever permutable. More calculus than geometry, it's not simply giving shape or form to an image of the human body but to figure bodies as events of figuration. 

How does a line suggest a figure, at times familiar and strange, familiar and impossible and sometimes  both at the same time.  There are a great many pictures that present to us figures that don't accord with anything we've seen, yet we recognize ourselves in them. We recognize us. It's these kinds of things that don't make sense to machine-reading, that is computers scanning images for color, shapes and forms. Such algorithms don't know what they are seeing. As it turns out our images are not only confusing for machines but us humans as well. 

There was a collector who bought an Andre Masson painting, one with his brilliant line that looked to the collector like a exotic flower. A year later a friend visiting had him look more carefully and the next day he took it back to the dealer having not realized the works unmistakable sexual content. Consider a Francis Bacon, have we seen such figures with their warps, smears and distortions. Yet we recognize them as readily as his contemporary's Lucien Freud whose work is high realism.  

What is this space between the recognizable and what we might call the poetic, between the clearly legibly and the suggestive, between the ritual and symbolic, between what is there and what we see there and what we think we see there, what we think we are hearing or reading.

Painting, drawing, novels, music, all have different devices and tools for figuration. Painting makes the figure more elastic,  unstable, mutable, polymorphic. Photography has its own repertoire of distortions with blurring, obscuring, collaging, layering. The novel has its own way to suggest figures, relations, places, events.

In each of them we suspend out critical awareness of the mechanics and submit to the illusion that something is depicted. Think of William Burroughs through his cut up techniques presenting gaps in time, in place. We feel we are between here and there between dream and reality, at two or more places at once, but all of it figures, all of it figuring something.

I suppose we as human being are always looking to figure ourselves in the picture. Big picture or small, we want to know where we fit in. Where we are, spliced into what narrative. That is to say we are always seeing ourselves in the picture. I suppose it's the same for seals and bees and Ibises, dogs and cats. It's always about them and what's around them.  This is how we may come to art and images, asking what is this and what is it to me and then we may how has come to be.

Look at the two images next to this paragraph. One a black and white photo taken in Milan, the other, a line drawing. The photographic image in this case is made all at once, by light being exposed to a digital sensor.  The drawing on the other hand is made line by line and by a series of marks.

Painting in its absorption of photography has taken up some of the strategies of photography but never the less for the most part it is built up by marks of the brush, pencil, ink, chalk, spray paint and more. Of course more and more painting includes a combination of digital printing and mark making and digital photography numerous layers of varied images and manipulations. In this sense painting and photography and what was once unique to each's repertoire, the building up of marks in painting and drawing and the all at once exposed image, is collapsing. Never the less for the most part this rhetorical figure of marks is what dominates the teaching and discussion of painting today.

Before we look at this concept of marks closer let's consider images and pictures as they moved from pictorial events in the age of representation to perceptual events in the age of the aesthetic regime. 

Let's start with Jeff Walls article Marks of Indifference a term he gets from Adorno. In the essay he states 'under the regime of depiction, that is in the history of Western art before 1910, a work of art was an object whose validity, was constituted by its being or bearing a depiction. In the process of developing alternative proposals, for art "beyond' depiction, art had to reply to this suspicion that, with out their depictive or representational function, art objects were art in name only, not in body form or function.'


Depiction had for a long time involved the long and grueling process of observation, comparison and rationalization of what was before us. The foregrounding of marks elides discussion of depiction, if not form as the once models, dead or alive, nudes, draperies and chairs, have disappeared. And with out depiction, what have we are marks, markings of admittedly an extraordinary variety.

The marking of the hand with brush or pencil, the gesture revealed in the mark, be it expressive, gestural, mechanical, controlled, if nothing else, is assuredly what see in pictures. What ever is there certainly there are marks in front of us. Cy Twombly is all marks, no.  In this term, then, there is the thought that in the hand or gesture, in its mark making, we will find the key to seeing and reading the modality of the artist. It is the hand's signature that is the thought. The marks built up is not only the artist style but the artist's art. In time for some marks and mark making is that term, that comes to designate the work of art itself.

But let's suppose painting, drawing, installation is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters. Replace painting, drawing and installation with the word, novel, and this is how Milan Kundera describes what for him is novel writing, a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

What could be meant in abstraction by imaginary characters. Abstraction whose intent was to rid color and line from character, for line and color themselves to be character. Marks. Yes. But from where do they come. Why does Twombly gorge himself on so many epic texts but to mark them out. To write them in paint, pencil, scribble, smears, drips and gobs.

Starting with the impressionist, (perhaps as early as Turner) with this turn away from depiction, the relation of figure to ground changes. Prior to perspective the space of painting was an all over space, or a frontal or flat painting as with the Egyptians and Mayans and numerous other cultures. Brunelleschi's one point perspective changes this which leads to supposed naturalism or realism so much so when with the invention of the camera (lens and recording media) we came to and continue to believe cameras gave us a picture of the 'real'. 

In his interview book, A Bigger Message, David Hockney describes how the photographic image gives an uncanny sense of the 'real', of the supposed phenomenological.  But the photographic image doesn't in any way give a sense of our sense of seeing as humans. We don't see in photographs. We don't experience the world or know or remember it as images in the sense of photographic images. Of course we remember images and images become our memory of ....  perhaps images themselves,  but that's not how we experience things. Photographs are these strange unreal things that have taken up the world and had us belief them as an image of the real just as Brunelleschi did. And it turns on this relation of figure to ground and the constitution of phenomenological space.

This relation of figure to ground extends not only to pictorial space but the spaces of the novel and music as well. If figure to ground in realism or verisimilitude can be thought of as a unilinear space then polyphonic space in the visual arts, music and language opens rifts in unilinear or continuous space to create all kinds of spaces. Spaces that might be perfectly bound together but keep relative independence like thinking one thing while being in a place that has nothing to do with your thoughts. What is that space of both/and. 

In ones life lines are bound by you.

Each line has a different rhythm, a varying internal time horizon, some as fleeting as a burst, others stretching out like a long taffy, they meet with the world when they want to, when they have to, as they do, as things happen.

Now all lines need not intersect nor know of each other, but if we are alert, attuned to things, more and more lines seem to play through, echo, reverberate, digress, return, amplify, lighting up numerous counterpoints to the polyphony of our lines and lives. And soon strange, beautiful and dark things happen. All kinds of synchronies happen. Patterns begin to occur, motifs course through us, time becomes space, and everything is happening all at once.

In pictorial space, in the spaces of music and books, these lines also take flight, eddying and swirling about, in parallel, in meshes, in whirlwinds and whirpools, in scherzo, fugues, sonatas, in all sorts of speed and tempos, prestissimo, adagio, allegro and adagio. How these bounded infinities, take on lines of life, how they are composed, their architectonics, their unity or disunity, these all become strategies of form.


In painting or drawing with the starting point thought of as marks which  I suspect emerges more and more as with the movement away from depiction, away from narrative forms, with out which what what we are left with is the character of the brush mark, or the line.

 As we moved away from depiction from the pictorial we move to the perceptual still with recognition. The movement from Manet to Cezanne. There is something still to perceive in Cezanne depiction of his perception. His seeing accords to sight. A particular kind of sight, the perception of sight.

Drawing is of course the opening of a form. and a series of marks, the tip of a point when moved  across a picture plane will describe a line.  And Rembrandt's drawing is Rembrandt's own manner of drawing. And his manner of drawing affirms his singularity, his originality, his know how, his savior faire.

Now, what must not have been given in a form in order to form itself?  For those marks to form. In The Pleasure of Drawing As Jean Luc Nancy lucidly says, "Drawing is not a given, available, form formed. On the contrary it is the gift, invention, uprising, or birth of form. That a form comes is drawings formula, and this formula implies at the same time a desire, for and 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 proceed or perform."

From marks to forms, to motifs and themes...

With cubism the perceptual plays with the perspectival. After this narrative space or depictive space becomes for want of a better word psychological or interior as in Bacon, Magritte or surrealism then color and shapes and swirls and the pure affect of color follow. This all over affective space of color solves the figure ground problem. Think only of Pollack or Ellesworth Kelly.

Until the return of figurative painting with the Germans in the 1970's (many of whom never left figurative painting like Ricther trained in social realism) the problem of figure and ground was solved simply again with background foreground just by putting something in the background, something as simple as a tint or color wash. 

Planes of color, fields of color, ground/figure, space of depiction these problems can taken up in a number of ways.

So what is it that the privileging of marks does not allow us to see that maybe form or figures could. Let's think of Spinoza for a moment. For Spinoza there is only one, infinite substance that expresses itself through an infinity of modes, or affections of the substance (E I, D1, D5). This idea grounds Spinoza’s radical monism, which lies at the heart of the issue we are concerned with here.  Within this radical monism, thought and extension are therefore simply two attributes of the substance, that is, two different ways in which the substance is perceived by the intellect (E 1, D4). As a consequence, a single body is just a mode of the unique substance in the attribute of extension, while a single mind is a mode of the very same substance in the attribute of thinking. There is therefore no body-mind dualism: or in our case marks-form dualism, although thought and extension or marks and forms or figures are the two attributes that we, as finite modes, have access to, the substance is itself characterised by an infinite number of attributes. (C.Bottici)

It's these infinite number of attributes that interest me. Not simply seeing marks, making marks in drawings and painting, but in constructing modes of going, imaginary characters, who take the marks where they go. In the works of a mark-maker par excellence, more than a painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat notates, accounts and tallies with great directness and urgency histories of race, colonialism, power, class, bringing such characters as the negro policeman, ivory tusk hunters, salt traders, subjects of Jim Crow laws, Egyptian gods, baseball players, voodoo priests and many more  into consciousness. Take away all these pressing figures and concerns, this panoply of characters, situations and complexes and reduce them to marks and you get Fiona Rae a painter heralded for her facility at mark making. And what do you see there. 

Perhaps mark marking is a way to turn away from the more complex reading of just what's behind the marks. Perhaps more generously it is an opening to much more.

Every painting, every image is a question. A network of varied relations. A network of questions, including marks, forms, narratives, propensities, cultural leanings, personal biography, other drawings and so on.

But perhaps all this is moot as the contemporary artist does not make marks, nor forms, but curates and collects the traversing of objects and texts that have marked them, that have spoken and taken possession of them.  It is these marks she or he will selectively cultivate for pedigree while at the same time insist that they do not mark them and if they do they are to be undone.

Exceeding the object itself or becoming the very object and subject is the artist. The artist is the mark.
putting forward a position in the world, accounting for the world from their perspective, their joys and traumas, arranging re-arranging the representations that marked them, the tools that shape them, the networks they circulate in and through. So often lost, mangled, overwhelmed, all bodies seems vulnerable and fragmented, a disparate set of marks, not cohering in and body and so from this ground stepping out of anonymity is a subject with history and a trauma. Such is the work of vietnamese artist Danh Vo.

Go figure. That's what we do. We want to mark ourselves with brands, experiences, invented memories, be it Yves Saint Laurent ( a copy will do) or the au courant philosopher, an artist or two (better hedge your bet) But perhaps it's time to wise up to the marks, and release our selves from the physiological, linguistic, and social control of these market networks, wait a minute,  now the liberation mark, the blessed mark, there is no escaping the time/word control systems, even to be agent is to be caught.

So what is it about marks that is so compelling, is it an agitation, a testament, archive, remnant, trace of the authentic, the signature of someone behind the machine. Oz. The you that leaves traces every day on social media networks. More than this, it is the trace of the hand. Unmediated, that beautiful hand that connects to the heart and the mind and a singular person's nervous system. If EE Cummings was the poet of the typewriter who played the text machine, and Burroughs cut it up, the marks of the hand seduces us to think we are in the presence of the human. In a time of trolls, bots, Siri and big data we are all suckers, the gulls as in gullible marks, but perhaps we should look at the machine selling the marks.

*Text cited
David Hockney, Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message Conversations with David Hockney
Jean Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing
Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image, 2007
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel,  1986
Jeff Wall, "Marks of Indifference": Aspects of Photography, in, or as, Conceptual Art (1995)
Spinoza lectures, Chiara Bottici
Claire Bishop, History Depletes Itself (Danh Vo at the Danish Pavillon) Art Forum 2015
All photographs, paintings, drawings marc lafia