Drawing urgency: what is important about contemporary drawing
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum
What has always appealed to me about drawing is its reputation for being something provisional. A drawing is often thought of as a thing made to stand in, temporarily, for another thing yet to come. To borrow from Tania Kovats, drawing often arises when we are confronted by something that does not yet have a form, or a language, or a place. We use one thing-- a drawing-- to describe another thing because “a drawing can define both the real and the unreal in visual terms.” What I have pursued in my own drawing practice, and what I find most compelling about our contemporary interest in drawing is the insistence that it is this provisional characteristic of drawing that gives drawing its power. Drawing isn’t only the thing standing in for a more complete thing to come, but in drawing, the thing IS the thing. A drawing is a thing that is always in a state of becoming, to borrow a term from Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘becoming’ to describe the processes of change and transformation we undergo as we pursue our own truth and power as human beings. They identify cycles of various states of becoming-- becoming minor, becoming dangerous, becoming animal, becoming other, and ultimately, becoming radical. It is when a thing is just escaping from one form and not quite being captured in another-- that it is at its most evocative. Both the act of drawing and the outcomes of the act of drawing emerge within a framework of chance, chaos, and other effects of that-which-cannot-yet-be-known. In its best forms, drawing exists in a constantly “yet-to-be-known” state.
Drawing is a medium that prioritizes the unfinished. It is a medium that leaves parts of itself vulnerable and lays bare the secrets of its making. When I think about drawings that have had a lasting impact on me, though these drawings may aesthetically be very different from each other, what is common among them is the way they simultaneously reveal and conceal themselves. A drawing is participatory. It is an invitation from the maker that is then responded to by the viewer who agrees, in some way, to do some of the work of completing the image with their eyes, with their imagination, or even with the simple act of being present to look. It is a performative medium: a medium that inevitably conjures a body. When I draw I feel I am making a contract between my mind, my hand, the tool, the surface, this moment, your eyes, your mind, the world, and ultimately the whole universe. The labour, the intention, and the politics of the body making a drawing becomes inextricable from the drawing itself. In this way, as Kovats beautifully affirms, drawing belongs to everybody. It is a depository for memory, commentary, and possibility.
And what, then, is the importance of drawing today? What a question to ask at a time like this! What a thing to be doing in these heaving, charging, and thunderous days of great reckoning! But I think it is precisely in these times of great change that drawing is a language that makes particular sense. Drawing-- whether as observational or fantastical representation, as diagram, as script or text, as game-plan or other schemata-- often appears at moments of great instability. Moments much like the one we are all standing in together right now. Moments so unstable it is easy to feel that all of our work, our entire legacy can, without warning, become forcibly un-finished. Drawing, with all its provisionalities and temporality, seems a medium most apt. Drawing is a language of urgency. It is a representation of the making of thought and one of our most direct and idiosyncratic methods for communicating, sharing, and archiving human experience.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum. January 2021.
Further reading:
Buchman, Sabeth; Lafer, Ilse; Ruhm, Constanze, eds. Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics. Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Volume 19. 2016
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 2nd edition. 1987.
Kovats, Tania, ed. The Drawing Book: A survey of drawing: the primary means of expression. Black Dog Publishing Limited London. 2005.