Bafflement and Recognition by Maria Speyer

Maria Speyer

Bafflement and recognition

On drawing the figure with uncertainty and conviction

Bafflement and recognition On drawing the figure with uncertainty and conviction by Maria Speyer

Master of Fine Arts thesis 2011

...how can it be the case that one of the people in the world is me? Thomas Nagel (1989)

Whether it is a question of anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body or my own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it... Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2002)

Preface To me, the purpose of the following Master of Fine Arts thesis (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) has been to examine and, in a sense, become conscious of my own intuitive approach to drawing the human figure. It is therefore not a catalogue of the individual works in my exhibition, nor an interpretation of these works. Rather, it is an attempt at untangling a process which feels to me at once coherent and fraught with contradiction. I have tried to order the chapters along a single line of enquiry, which has meant that my literary review and references do not occur in a distinct chapter, but rather are interspersed throughout the document. Although my work is exclusively drawing based, or perhaps because of this self-imposed limitation of technique, I have wanted to include references beyond the world of drawing. I believe a cross-disciplinary approach to art is not only warranted but necessary if it is to be relevant, and this is why I have tried to let the following chapters be informed not only by other visual art forms, but also by dance, by cognitive science and by philosophy. For their advice and support I would like to thank Michael Kempson, Rew Hanks, Elizabeth Pozega and Jesse McNicoll.

Table of contents Introduction: Anyone in particular? What is it I draw when I draw the figure?

1. Associating with the body

2. This object called my body

3. Mute meaning

4. Capturing forces

I begin by examining the problem of the body in Western philosophy and art. On one hand we seem to have an obsession with the body as an artistic motif, and an on the other a traditional philosophical attitude of contempt for the body. I would like to examine this apparent conflict because of my own ambivalent feelings about the subject of my drawings.

I consider whether a resolution of this conflict might be found in the interpretation of “body”. I ask if our focus on the object of the body perhaps ignores the body that we experience - our own, phenomenal body. I feel that this phenomenal body is inherently meaning ful and it is this body that I base my figure drawings on.

To me my figure drawings are purely figural explorations of bodily meaning and I investigate the notion of the meaning ful body.

I suggest that we might talk about artworks in terms of bodily rather than narrative meaning and consider the works of three artists, Bill Viola, Käthe Kollwitz and Nicola Hicks, in turn as immanent, rather than spiritual, as empathetic, rather than political, and as physical, rather than mythological.

5. Through the body

6. The inextricable tangle

7. Standard bodies

Conclusion: Bafflement and recognition

I believe that Kollwitz and Hicks in particular have a deep physical understanding of living forms and this brings me to consider figure drawing as a process that depends on my own bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recognition, simulation and incorporation of what I see. I would like to suggest that drawing the figure has more to do with using the body than with making figurative representations.

Does that mean that the drawing process is an entirely internal exercise? I argue that it is not and suggest that the experience of the phenomenal body, explored in chapter 2, is not limited to the experience of my own body, but includes the encountered body of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;otherâ&#x20AC;?. What I hope to show is that my internal, bodily focus is essentially an attempt at coming to terms with the world of others.

Having so far talked about my figure drawings in general terms, in this last chapter I give an overview of the individual works included in my Master of Fine Arts exhibition.

Finally, I conclude by summing up an answer to my initial question: what is it I draw when I draw the figure?

Endnotes 68 Bibliography 71 List of illustrations

Figure 1. 2010, Conversation 1 (1), etching, 25x25cm 10

Introduction: Anyone in particular? ...how it is possible to be anyone in particular, expresses in purest form the difficulty of finding room in the world for oneself. How can it be? Am I, or are you, really the sort of thing that could be one of the particular creatures in the world? Thomas Nagel ([1986] 1989, p.13)

The following is an investigation into a personal approach to drawing the figure. I will examine what the purpose of a figure drawing is to me, and where its momentum comes from. I will also examine what it is about the human figure that is so compelling. In its most concentrated form my question is this: what is it I draw when I draw the figure? The title Bafflement and Recognition refers to two sensations which are not mutually exclusive, but nonetheless in conflict. One implies bewilderment - a feeling of being lost and of doubt, the other suggests familiarity - a sense of belonging and of certainty. To me, drawing the figure feels like a vacillation between the two, between uncertainty and conviction. I have never wanted to draw anything besides the figure or felt that my research extends beyond, or transcends, the body. At the same time, I am not particularly fond of the body - my own or the bodies of others - and often find the fleshy object of the body rather repulsive. Yet, figures are all I ever draw. I draw them without distinctive features, without hair, clothes or a narrative setting. In this exclusive focus on the body you could say that my interest is rather narrow, but to me very little makes sense if it doesn't make sense through my body and

Figure 2. 2010, Conversation 1 (2), etching, 25x25cm 12

meaning, to me, has more to do with sensation than with semantics. However, to argue, as I will in the following chapters, that drawing the figure should rely on some intuitive, physical impulse may come across as an excuse to dodge concerted, theoretical investigation. This is not my intention. On the contrary, I think that conscious investigation ought to plunge into the wordless pool of bodily meaning whose surface it rarely even touches. When I call my drawing process “intuitive” it is because I believe that bodily sensation and bodily meaning are precisely what we talk about when we use the word “intuition”. To me, working intuitively simply means that I draw, or at least try to draw, without intellectual reflection acting as a barrier. In my experience a figure drawing is a pre-verbal reflection, with lines and marks, on a meaning that my body seems to sense before my intellect interprets it. My drawings are therefore not a presentation of an idea or a narrative, but rather a process of resolving something, which is to me at once baffling and recognisable. My drawings always try to do the same thing, and whether I am working on a charcoal drawing, an etching or a lithograph I really only use one technique: the line. To me, the attraction of the line has to do with its kinship with pointing. There is no pretence in the line that it will render anything with optical correctness. Rather a line allows me to closely examine something. I tend to use the line almost like a sculptural modelling tool, and when I draw, I feel like I am running my fingers across the landscapes of figures and faces. It is probably a need for directness that makes me think of the line basically as a way of pointing or touching, and I think this need is also what has made me draw increasingly bigger, life-sized drawings. When I began my Master of Fine Arts I mostly drew “scenes”, so to speak, that is, smaller images where the figures were necessarily once removed from me in their scale, often simply in order to fit on the paper. I worked for a while with stone 13

lithography, which restricted the size of the images to the size of the stones. As a reaction to this restriction, I began drawing on large sheets of paper, and suddenly scale became pivotal, because the approximation of the paper to life-size meant that my drawings related more directly to the body. In fact, for a long time after I started on the large sheets, I insisted on drawing life-sized figures only, because I wanted to explore this direct â&#x20AC;&#x153;conversationâ&#x20AC;? with the drawn figure. Almost all of the drawings included in an exhibition I had at the time were life-sized. However, in the end, restricting myself to life-size was no liberation. This was partly because a life-sized figure on two-dimensional paper is never really life-sized, because, although a figure may be drawn at a scale of 1:1, the figures on the paper are never experienced in the round and therefore necessarily appear less substantial. Partly it was because it made me focus on conjuring up the figure, rather than exploring the figure and relationships between figures. Scale, of course, remains significant in a hierarchical sense. Most important, though, is the physically emotive implications of configurations of figures. Sometimes these configurations are a group of people, occasionally there's only one figure, however, mostly the drawings involve two figures, sometimes in a hierarchically loaded relationship, but mostly the two figures are equal in strength and have the same claim over the space. Perhaps then the first obvious questions to ask are: who are these figures? Are they group portraits? Are they self-portraits? Are they group self-portraits? Are they anyone in particular? Perhaps they are, in particular, no one. I am not interested in the specifics of my own body or face (even if I am completely at the mercy of them), nor in the specifics of anyone else's. What I am interested in is a common denominator. A general body perhaps. My figures are therefore not portraits or protagonists in a narrative. They 14

are nameless and have no histories and are, as far as I am concerned, firstly outcomes of a process of investigation. In this sense, the figures and faces in my drawings are generalisations and complete when I feel they have become standard, unspecific or resolved. In the following chapters I try to work out what it is that needs resolving. In chapter 1 I consider the body in Western philosophy and art. This is, of course, a vast topic, but one which it has been important for me to research because of my own ambivalent feelings about the subject of my drawings. On one hand the figure is all I ever draw, on the other hand I can't escape a certain feeling of contempt for the body. What I examine here is a similar conflict between the Western focus on (even obsession with) the body as an artistic motif on one hand and a predominant attitude of contempt for the body in Western philosophy on the other. In chapter 2 I ask if a possible resolution of this conflict lies in a particular definition of the term â&#x20AC;&#x153;bodyâ&#x20AC;?. Is the object of the body perhaps not my own body? Despite a relentless cultural focus on the body as object, is not the body that we experience as our own largely absent from our cultural consciousness? Is this own body not so removed even from our personal consciousness that we struggle to recognize its importance and its meaning intellectually? In chapter 3 I ask whether meaning necessarily relies exclusively on intellectual judgement or whether, in fact, the body is inherently meaningful and central to meaning-making. In chapter 4 I consider three artists in terms of bodily meaning, because although the video artist Bill Viola, the graphic artist KĂ¤the Kollwitz and the sculptor Nicola Hicks are all artists whose works are commonly described in either transcendental, political or even in mythological terms, I personally experience their works primarily as explorations of bodily meaning. 15

Figure 3. 2010, Conversation 2 (1), etching, 25x25cm 16

I believe that Kollwitz and Hicks in particular engage their own bodies in their works, and this brings me in chapter 5 to consider figure drawing as a process that depends on my own body’s recognition and, in quite a literal sense, incorporation of what I see. I would like to suggest that drawing the figure has more to do with using the body than with making figurative representations. Having described the drawing process as an internal exercise, I go on in chapter 6 to suggest that the experience of the own body, explored in chapter 2, is perhaps not limited to the experience of my body, but includes the encountered body – the “other”. What I hope to show is that my internal bodily focus is essentially an attempt at coming to terms with the world of others and with relationships between people. In Chapter 6 I give an overview of the works that will be included in my Master of Fine Arts exhibition. And finally, in my conclusion, I try to sum up an answer my initial question: what is it I draw when I draw the figure? Firstly, however, I would like to examine what seems to me a conflict between our Western philosophical dismissal of the body and our obsession with the body as an artistic motif.

Figure 4. 2010, Conversation 2 (2), etching, 25x25cm 18

Associating with the body

…so long as we are alive, we shall keep as close as possible to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when they are absolutely necessary; and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it… Phaedo 67a (Plato 2003, p.128)

In the human body I have no doubt chosen the most classic motif in Western art. Yet at the same time one of the central concerns in Western philosophy and aesthetics has been to transcend our bodies in a quest for pure spirit and for truth.1 For Plato, Socrates’ dismissal for the body was, in fact, integral to any philosophical quest. According to him “… the philosopher’s occupation consists precisely in the freeing and separation of soul from body” Phaedo 67d (Plato 2003, p.128). In this chapter I would like to look more closely at these two seemingly conflicting views of the body, in an attempt to understand why I struggle to come to terms with my own subject matter, the human figure. I begin this chapter by quoting Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo in order to illustrate how entrenched contempt for the body is in our Western philosophical tradition. Ever since pre-Socratic philosophers drove a wedge between mind and matter our association with the body has been an agonizing one.2 The body has been synonymous with shame, sin and corruption. It has been our prison, it has held us ransom and it has been to blame for our errors and our deviations. Worst of all it has grown old and died. Put simply the Platonic problem of the body might be described as follows: we imagine ourselves to be constant and immortal because it is impossible to imagine 19

not to imagine. Yet we know ourselves to be temporal and mortal because of our body’s impermanence. In other words, the body is the constant reminder of our own inconstancy. Is it any wonder that the solution to this problem traditionally has been to disassociate our selves from the body? Yet at the same time we seem to have had an unrelenting obsession with the physical body as an artistic motif - in ancient Greece as much as at any other time. The body, and in particular the naked body, male and female, has been depicted either as an emblem of physical perfection (think of the bronze sculptures of a young man - known as the Antikythera Ephebe - created around the time Plato was born, or of the Artemision Zeus from the time of Plato’s death), or as a hellish reminder of our mortality (as in Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante in which Dante and Virgil, with covered bodies and intellectual command, stand in stark contrast to the fleshy damned). Sometimes it has been portrayed a magnificent beast to be tamed (in François Salle’s The Anatomy Class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts from 1888, for example, the teacher and students appear as disembodied heads studying and marvelling at the human animal), or, most commonly, as a female object of male desire. However, until the advent of modernism the body was almost invariably portrayed as the body of another, studied, celebrated and judged from the outside. Is it perhaps precisely through this objectification of the body that we might understand how we have at once regarded it as the epitome of beauty and at the same time felt “… contaminated with its imperfection...” Phaedo 66b (Plato 2003, p.127)? Socrates’ feeling of contamination seems to come from the inside, from his own body. For Socrates “…the corporeal is heavy, oppressive… the soul… tainted by its presence is weighed down…” Phaedo 81c (Plato 2003, p.150). In other words, the body that is so despised in the Platonic tradition is the body that we carry around – the personal body, which

is often frustratingly beyond our conscious control. The revered, idolized body has inevitably been the body as an object, or as an “other” over which we have passed intellectual judgement, and this, it seems to me, is very much in accordance with Plato’s philosophical project to assert the intellect’s superiority and dominion over the physical world. At best the personal body, in a Western philosophical context, has been regarded as nothing more than the receptor of impressions, to be interpreted by the intellect with idealistic disinterestedness, but the body has not been valued as the location of meaningful experience. Of course, Plato was a dualist and accordingly had good reason to regard the body with some suspicion, as did René Descartes, the arch villain of substance dualism, whose “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes 1997, p.92) became the war cry in our battle against our own physical impermanence. But even as dualistic views of spirit versus matter became increasingly unfashionable I think our association with the body has remained problematic. During the 20th century a growing cross-pollination between science and philosophy, together with philosophy’s break with religion, began to advocate a more bodyinclusive view of the self.3 However, for the artist perhaps a more significant move towards a physicalist mind/body approach came as a reaction to a century of war, where man had to come to terms with his destructiveness. Increasingly, the self came to be regarded as embodied, but this new marriage of mind and body was an unhappy one in which the self somehow lost its nobleness and the body its beauty. Michel Foucault is one philosopher whose view of the embodied self has been particularly influential. In his essay Nietzsche, Genealog y, History from 1971 Foucault wrote:

Figure 5. 2010, Conversation 3 (1), etching, 25x25cm 22

The body is the surface of the inscription of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of the dissociation of the Me (to which it tries to impart the chimera of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. ([1971] 1999, p.375)

It seems to me, that the Foucauldian embodied self is a strange, wounded beast, helplessly and violently moulded by society. At the mercy of history, religion and politics it grapples with its existence, and I believe it is this beast that we often meet in political art, performance art and in transgressive body art, particularly of the late 1900’s. As attention shifted from the objective body of another to the personal subject, artists threw themselves, along with their art, into the furnace of blazing social criticism. Through the artist’s body society was exposed as oppressive, and the body became a canvas onto which artists expressed social and physical claustrophobia (Carolee Schneemann and Rebecca Horn are two examples of artists whose works exhibit this kind of bodily frustration). The body was used sometimes as a weapon in the revolt against culture as oppressor (Jana Sterbak’s Remote Control, for example, attacks female stereotyping), sometimes as a tool for self-modification (think of Stelarc’s The Third Hand) and sometimes as a political prop (as in Marina Abramović’s performance Lips of Thomas which has strong political, religious and ritualistic connotations). Naturally, all of the artists I reference here deserve much deeper consideration than I give them. However, I would like to suggest that broadly, the body art of the late 20th century, although it may have reminded us of our embodiment, somehow did not manage to bring us closer to an appreciation or even acceptance of our bodies. As artists wallowed in skin, flesh and bodily excretions, their view of the body largely remained bleak. Is it, perhaps, that political and transgressive body art reminded us, 23

Figure 6. 2010, Conversation 3 (2), etching, 25x25cm 24

not so much that we are embodied, but rather that we are made of flesh? That I am made of flesh is, in fact, something I am reminded of every day. I am reminded by the flawless bodies I see on billboards and in ads for products that might make my skin look smoother. I am reminded to such an extent that it is something of a challenge not to resent my body as impermanent meat, as imperfect skin or as victim of cultural stereotyping. And yet, privately, I am not in conflict with my body. In fact, when I encounter the objective body in advertising or in performance art I mostly feel no connection to it, as if none of these very deliberate or frustrated bodily expressions really have anything whatsoever to do with my own body. Similarly, when I draw the figure I feel no resentment towards the body. Why? Could it be that my own body, to me, is, in fact, not an object at all?

This object called my body

Everybody calls this object my body; but we do not give it a name in ourselves: We speak of it to others as a thing which belong to us; but for us it is not altogether a thing; and belongs to us less than we belong to it. Paul Valéry (1964, p.231)

Judging by the barrage of images of the body that meets us every moment of the day one might think that there is nothing left of the body to explore. However, despite the relentless focus on the object of the body, whether represented as flawless and beautiful, as a beast or as a political prop, the body that we experience as our own seems to me largely absent from our cultural, if not personal consciousness. According to the French poet Paul Valéry, we don’t even give this body a name, and this is ironic, since nothing is more immediate to us and nothing should be more evident. Yet somehow we struggle to recognise the own body in our accounts of the self. The body’s inscrutable workings – its mysterious powers and unaccountable talents, its innate knowledge of physics, the way it magically knows that you will reach the kerb on the other side of the street with your left foot – all of this is beyond our control and our comprehension and logically what is beyond us cannot be at our very core, so goes the argument. For my drawing process the distinction between the object of the body and the own body is important. I draw bodies and faces, but they are not objects as my own body is not an object. In fact, my body as a thing is hardly even visible to me. To me my body is an attitude, a situation, a living experience. Essentially, it is a question of viewpoint. Are the figures I draw bodies that I observe from a disembodied distance? I feel very strongly that they are not: the bodies 26

I draw rely on my own, experiencing body. As experienced my body is not a thing supervised by my intellect. Rather my body accounts for my engagement with the world and it has a grasp on the world and an understanding of others that my poor intellect can only dream of. Accordingly, I have never felt that the figures I draw are made of flesh, or have bones or blood in them, but rather that drawing the figure is quite simply a process of wondering at the way we negotiate the world and engage with each other. If this comes across as somewhat dualistic then I simply have to acknowledge that I am a dualist. Somewhat ironically, my intellect really wants to embrace a physicalist inclusion of the self in the body, but my gut feeling tells me that my mind is somehow independent of my body. However, in my personal mind/body dichotomy it is my body, not my mind, which is superior when it comes to making sense of the world. The philosopher and dancer Maxine Sheets-Johnstone puts it like this: “We are not sorcerers but apprentices of the body’s mysteries” (2009, p.21). Sheets-Johnstone, for whom the body is pivotal in any account of human experience, describes the own body as the ‘first-person’ body. She writes: …the first-person body, the body that we know directly… the body that we cannot take apart or put back together again, the body whose mysterious possibilities lie within our immediate grasp. That body is the one in which we came to the world… prior to science or technology telling us what we are made of… (2009, p.20)

Gilles Deleuze is another philosopher who has described the own body. In his account of the figures in Francis Bacon’s painting, Deleuze called this body the “body 27

Figure 7. 2010, Conversation 4 (1), etching, 25x25cm 28

Figure 8. 2010, Conversation 4 (2), etching, 25x25cm 29

Figure 9. 2010, Conversation 4 (3), etching, 25x25cm 30

beneath the organism” ([1981] 2003, p.160) and rather than describing the own body as a thing, he talked about “…the intensive fact of the body” ([1981] 2003, p.45). Both of these accounts of the own body are indebted to the French phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty who asked: “Is my body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of… things” ([1964] 1968, p.152). For Merleau-Ponty it was “…necessary to re-examine the definition of body as pure object in order to understand how it can be our living bond with nature…” ([1964] 1968, p.27). In this re-examination of the body Merleau-Ponty arrived at the notion of the “phenomenal” body and substituted “for consciousness, as the subject of perception, existence, or being in the world through a body” ([1945] 2002,p.360, note 22, my italics). For Merleau-Ponty, the objective body that medical and scientific progress along with a predominantly dualist Western philosophy turned into the true body, is in fact only the phenomenal body’s “impoverished image” and one, which exists only conceptually ([1945] 2002, p.501). Valéry, Sheet-Johnstone, Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty are all trying to describe something so close to us that it seems almost impossible to describe. In the end whatever name I choose to give it (I’ll borrow Merleau-Ponty’s term and call it the “phenomenal body”), this is the body that I base a drawing on – not the tissue, blood and bone a surgeon would find in operating on me, but the “meaningful core”, (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002, p.170) that constitutes my experience of the world and of others. Contrary to Socrates’ claim, I don’t feel weighed down by the phenomenal body. I don’t even notice it much, and yet this is the body, which subtly guides me through the day, which gives meaning to my existence and informs me of people around me. In fact, it does a better job of this than my intellect could ever hope to do and accordingly I have no reason whatsoever to regard it with contempt. As repulsive or as beautiful as I may find the body as an object, my concern 31

Figure 10. Conversation series 1 to 4, and 2011, Conviction 1, charcoal on paper, 150x220cm (life-size)

with the human figure has to do firstly with genuine awe of the phenomenal body and with the meaning this body, in my view, inevitably carries. Is it unreasonable to claim that you can find meaning in the body? The answer depends, of course, on how you define â&#x20AC;&#x153;meaningâ&#x20AC;?. 32

Mute meaning

The feeling that one feels, the seeing one sees, is not a thought of seeing or of feeling, but vision, feeling, [a] mute experience of a mute meaning… Merleau-Ponty ([1964] 1968, p.249)

For Merleau-Ponty to talk about a “mute meaning” was radical because it implied a meaning without, or perhaps before, words, that is, a meaning which the intellect did not control or even understand. This idea might have been one that a philosopher would consider something of a threat to his profession - not so Merleau-Ponty, and I think this is part of the reason why he continues to be influential: Merleau-Ponty’s account of meaning was one filled with veneration for the phenomenal body and I believe a similar attitude is increasingly evident in contemporary philosophical writing - particularly within the philosophical, aesthetic and neuroscientific cross-over discipline known as cognitive science which speaks with deference and even enthusiasm about our phenomenal body.4 One contemporary philosopher who regards the body – our physical situation – as inherently meaningful is the cognitive scientist Mark Johnson. His research into embodied perception and aesthetics investigates how our thoughts and ideas, concepts and language are inextricably linked to our bodily, sensory-motor experience. In his book The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Johnson writes that “… meaning grows from our visceral connections to life and the bodily conditions of life” (2007, p. ix). Johnson, like Merleau-Ponty, challenges a common attitude that meaning is immaterially conceptual and that meaning necessarily refers to statements that are either true or false. According to Johnson meaning arises from embodied experience, 33

Figure 11. 2010, Conversation 5 (1 to 4), etchings, 25x25cm each 34

Figure 12. 2010, Conversation 6 (1 and 2), lithographs, 70x70cm each

in which the question of truth and falsity has little relevance. In Johnson’s view we tend to “separate experiences and judgement” and the Western philosophical tradition dictates that meaning by default belongs in the realm of the latter. As a consequence

we all too often mistake conceptual expression of meaning for meaning itself (Johnson 2007, p.270). In the same vein Sheets-Johnstone writes that “…to have meaning is not necessarily to refer and neither is it necessarily to have a verbal label” (2009, p.35). Sheets-Johnstone has the philosophical advantage of being a dancer and writes about dance that “the process of creating is not the means of realizing a dance; it is the dance itself” (2009, p.30). This notion that a dance is not translatable, but that its meaning is to be found in its own expression, is perhaps precisely why dance – perhaps the oldest, most basic form of artistic expression – has traditionally provoked relatively little philosophical or academic enquiry. Is it perhaps that dance, because its meaning is so irreducibly bodily, has been deemed unworthy in the human philosophical project of finding meaning in conscious judgement? I bring up dance because I often think of drawing as dance. As I roll out the paper, wrestle it into position (the sheets are usually large) and mount it on the wall, as best as I can without creases, I feel that I am getting ready for an exercise that is more like a dance than a depiction of a figure or a translatable idea. That is not to say that my drawing process involves excessive movement; in fact, I spend a good deal of time just staring at the paper, and when I do draw it is not at all in a dance-like, sweeping or gestural manner but rather slowly and even awkwardly. However, I would like the body’s significance in my drawings to be comparable to its significance in dance: I would like the figures I draw to have the same irreducible meaning that the body has in a dance, and as the meaning in a dance is expressed in time, so would I like my figure drawings to be meaningful through the process of drawing them. I may have planned my drawing, in the same way a choreographer plans a dance, but the process itself, of drawing or of dancing, still relies on a continuum of meaningful movements. 37

Figure 13. 2011, Conviction 1, charcoal on paper, 150x220cm (life-size)

In this way, my drawings may develop through feelings of leaning against of stretching for or of pulling towards. In my experience, ordinary movements like these are heaped with inter-personal significance and potential on a fundamental and pre38

verbal level. To me meaning is not a verdict delivered by an immaterial intellect. Meaning may not even have a strong intellectual defence, but encompasses a broad variety of experiences and may even be illogical, but is always anchored firmly in the phenomenal body. I believe that this phenomenal body, because it is continually present, has an emotional and meaningful charge, which, perhaps because it is continually present, we easily overlook in our search for a representational meaning, for statement, storyline, truth and falsity. I don’t believe the body needs narrative or even context to radiate meaning, and this is why the figures I draw are isolated, lifted from any background and without a narrative setting. I know that a narrative and metaphors can be read into the figures I draw, but I try my best not to give any indication of storyline, because to me meaning does not depend on it. In other words, I want my drawings to be purely figural and therefore try to avoid the figurative. This idea of the “figural” as opposed to the “figurative” is one that I have borrowed from Deleuze’s account of the figures in Francis Bacon’s paintings. According to Deleuze, Bacon wanted to avoid the figurative – i.e. a meaning that stems from narrative, in favour of the figural – i.e. a meaning that is irreducibly bodily. Deleuze writes about painting (and I would apply it to drawing as well): Painting has neither a model to represent nor a story to narrate. It thus has two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation. (Deleuze [1981] 2003, p.2)

In the following chapter I will look at three artists, who in my view explore the figural, or, again in Deleuze’s words, explore not what is “representative” but what is quite simply “real” ([1981] 2003, p.45). 39

Capturing forces

In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces (Deleuze [1981] 2003, p.56)

I don’t think there is anything more real than the phenomenal body and its mute meaning. However, isn’t the problem with the body’s mute meaning that we can’t talk about it and share the experience of it, precisely because it is mute? We have words for so many immaterial things and concepts, but we don’t really have words for the experiencing, meaningful body. However, just because something is difficult to put into words doesn’t mean that it is without meaning. In fact, to me the body is the most basic source of meaning there is. Perhaps this is what MerleauPonty was saying when he wrote that “... every philosophy is language and nonetheless consists in rediscovering silence” ([1964] 1968, p.213). Nevertheless, I would like to consider the works of three visual artists in terms of mute, bodily meaning: the first, the video artist Bill Viola (1951-), is someone whose work I don’t necessarily always like, but who seems not to be afraid of letting go of the control over intellectual meaning. Viola’s work is often described as dealing with collective memory, as religious or spiritual. However, in my experience Viola’s works are not about transcendence or spirituality, but rather immanence and physicality. I don’t find terms like “transcendental” and “spiritual” quite right here, because they fail to capture in Viola’s work something that, in my view, is far from ethereal and immaterial, but rather immediately understandable by anyone – the physicality of existence and emotion. Perhaps the mystery to our habitually conceptual thinking is precisely that 40

Figure 14. 2011, Conviction 1, charcoal on paper, 150x220cm (life-size)

we understand Violaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work so well, yet find it difficult to defend our understanding with words in a way that is intellectually acceptable. We recognise it, yet are somehow baffled at this recognition. 41

Figure 15. Conviction 1 (detail)

The Passions, a series of 12 video installations from 2003, show different configurations and dynamics of people: a close group of five in The Astonished, or two people filmed separately in Surrender, sometimes focussing on whole bodies, as in

Emergence, sometimes scrutinizing a single face, as in Six Heads. The works were filmed on high speed film to allow them to be projected in extreme slow-motion, where 1 minute of real time lasts approximately 16 minutes. This dramatic deceleration of time magnifies the emotions, not in the sense that they necessarily appear grandiose (although at times they do), but in the sense that you are compelled to look at them very closely to the point where you feel caught up in a continuum of expression. This protracted evolution of facial and bodily forces seems to me to be an exploration into the fractals of bodily expression, which, like a dance, needs no conceptual context or storyline for us to be grabbed by it.5 Viola himself put it like this: “… human emotions have infinite resolution – the more you magnify them the more they keep unfolding…” (2003). In my view, what Viola’s works demonstrate is that we never really tire of looking at faces and bodies and that staring at a face is not necessarily a suspiciously voyeuristic act, but rather a primal human necessity. In some ways this is exactly what figure drawing is to me: staring at the figure and pointing at it with the tip of the pencil in order to capture some of its forces, and I don’t think anyone has done that with more evocative precision than the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). Kollwitz is primarily considered an artist of the people in a political sense.6 Through her drawings, prints and posters she gave a voice to the victims of poverty and of war, and her political and social significance is immense. In this context, however, I would like to approach her work not from a narrative or political angle, but rather as tender explorations of bodily meaning. I am not suggesting that Kollwitz’s political agenda is not essential to her work, however I think it impoverishes her drawings if we approach them firstly as ideological statements. I am not disregarding Kollwitz’s powerful political conviction, rather what I see in Kollwitz’s drawings are 43

convictions so strong that she lets them possess her body. About her role as a political artist, Kollwitz herself said: My work has doubtlessly followed a social trend… The true reason, however, why I began to depict only workers’ lives lies in the fact that the subjects drawn from this sphere simply and unreservedly gave me all that I considered beautiful (Baskin 1959, p.102)

By “beautiful” Kollwitz clearly did not mean flawless, elegant or pretty. Rather, I believe the beauty she saw was in humanity stripped of any pretence – in a sense, the figurative stripped down to the figural. What I see in her work is not firstly politics but empathy, tenderness and a deeply physical way of engaging with human situations. Perhaps this remarkable empathy is what has categorized her as a female artist and her qualities as particularly feminine, but I think this unnecessarily associates her with gender politics when in fact her sensibility and empathy, although heightened, are universal human traits. One etching, Woman with Dead Child from 1903 (Prelinger 1992, p.46) is one of the most powerful images I know. The image of course has strong narrative, political and social implications, however to me it is firstly something like a punch in the stomach. This is not even an image of sorrow or despair; this is an image that is more primal than what any verbal classification can cover. I keep looking at the mother’s right foot and wondering at the rightness of it: the grip of the toes, the clenching of the whole body, as if she is trying to swallow up or merge with the child. The face is relatively expressionless as she breathes out and into the dead body. The lines are so strong, so certain and at the same time both tender and questioning. The sculptor Nicola Hicks (1960-) is someone in whose work I also see this 44

tenderness. In some ways, Hicks’ work is similar to Kollwitz’s: you can speak of her work in terms of narrative or commentary, even mythology, and her titles tend to suggest a strong narrative emphasis (Death Comes a Creeping, Dressed for the Woods, Show Me a Man and I’ll Show you a Boy). However, I think that the powerfulness of her work doesn’t come from storylines but from a particular understanding she shares with Kollwitz. Hicks’ method is unique as far as I know. She sculpts using straw and plaster, which is what gives her sculptures their sketchy and almost drawing-like quality. For the sake of permanency the works are sometimes cast in bronze. All of her work is life-sized and invariably she is concerned with animal and human forms. The first work of hers that I saw was Sorry, sorry Sarajevo7 – a title that undeniably implies political commentary. However, it was the corporeality of the work that grabbed me of one figure carrying and being weighed down by another. To me, this work was not about a particular conflict or a political statement. Rather, it seemed to examine, without judgement, our vulnerability and strength. I have seen her work in subsequent exhibitions and always evident is her extraordinary grasp on living forms. A casually sketched line along a prowling tiger’s back shows more precision than any anatomically correct representation or any meticulously traced visual projection (as in Muscle and Blood (Read 1999, p.24)). According to Hicks a work begins with a sense like “…the feeling of the twist in a dance” (Read, Elliott et al. 1999, p.26) and it is this musical, emotive sense of living forces that seems to me to guide her process. Hicks says: There is a tug where something is catching something in its mouth. I have to work out exactly where those limbs are going to go to get that feeling of battle… (Read, Elliott et al. 1999, p.26)

What is evident to me in this quote is that Hicks’ work is about understanding, through the dynamic logic of one living creature, something about the way the whole world works on a physical and emotional level, and I believe it is this figural understanding Hicks shares with Kollwitz. This is an understanding through the body, which depends ultimately on a feeling of recognition within the phenomenal body (that ubiquitous, unavoidable “measurant” of things). Would it perhaps be more apt to call the works of Viola, Kollwitz and Hicks physical or phenomenal art rather than visual art? It seems to me that Kollwitz and Hicks, in particular, let what they see engage them physically, and it is this physical engagement that I think figure drawing is all about.

Through the body

… I do not understand the gestures of others by some act of intellectual interpretation… The act by which I lend myself to the spectacle must be recognized as irreducible to anything else. I join it in a kind of blind recognition which precedes the intellectual working out and clarification of meaning… It is through my body that I understand other people… Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2002, p. 216)

I don’t believe we really have a choice but to let what we see engage us physically. However, in our Cartesian pursuit of an immaterial self and a matterindependent truth, we have tried our best to sever sight from the body, and despite a century of efforts to acknowledge vision’s subjective and highly suggestible nature,8 we still tend to rely on vision for an account of reality – it is difficult not to in our increasingly ocularcentric society. Only relatively recently, and only, it seems, gently persuaded by cognitive science (Clark 2002) (Noë 2004) (Gallese and Freedberg 2007) have we begun to accept philosophically that vision is not isolated from the other senses, and that what we see is not an image of objective reality projected onto our retina. In 2005 Vittorio Gallese, a cognitive neuro-scientist, and George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, suggested that …typical human cognitive activities such as visual and motor imagery, far from being of a disembodied… and symbolic nature, make use of the activation of sensory-motor brain regions. (Gallese and Lakoff 2005, p.464)

And that our imagination, perception and actions are … embodied, that is, structured by our constant encounter and interaction with the world via our bodies and brains. (Gallese and Lakoff 2005, p.456)

To me, drawing draws precisely on this constant interaction, and vision therefore has to be accompanied by understanding – not firstly an intellectual understanding, which on its own is quite useless in figure drawing – but an understanding through the body. In fact, I think the idea of vision as a flat projection of reality onto a passively receiving eye ignores precisely what is precious about our visual sense: in my experience, my eyes allow me to incorporate what I see into me in quite a literal sense. My eyes are at once what opens me to a sort of invasion by the world, but also lets me feel as if I am reaching towards it. This constant bodily inclusion of what I see, and have seen, is what I rely on in drawing the figure. I am therefore not trying to commit to paper any kind of trace of a projected image, but rather I want to become aware, through drawing, of what my eyes allow me to understand through my body. This is why I draw without a model in front of me and try not to make too much use of the mirror. It is not that I think I don’t need a model, far from it, but simply that I want to force myself to be physically aware of what I draw. My “model”, then, is something partially within me. That is not to say that I draw from some sort of mental image stored in my memory bank or from anything I see in my mind’s eye (in fact, my mind has no eye). Rather, my drawing has less to do with my eyes than it has with what Robert Hughes has called a ‘manually vivid relation’, a sort of continual exchange between me and the world. In an article from 2004 Robert Hughes wrote about drawing:

Figure 16. 2011, Inclusion 1 to 4, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm each (life-size)

â&#x20AC;Ś drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is apparently immortal. (2004) 49

Figure 17. 2010, Inclusion 1, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (life-size) 50

Figure 18. 2010, Inclusion 2, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (life-size) 51

Figure 19. 2010, Inclusion 3, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (life-size) 52

Figure 20. 2010, Inclusion 4, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (over-size) 53

Hughes’ description of drawing as a sort of yearning investigation is pertinent I think, and the part that vision plays in this investigation is less as an agent of truth than a means of pointing at or reaching out and touching what I want to know about. Figure drawing, to me, therefore has more to do with using the body in the drawing process than making a visual representation of the figure. In a conversation between the sculptor Antony Gormley (1950-) and Ernst Gombrich, Gormley said about his figural work: I simply use my body as a starting point... On one level it is not dissimilar to choreography and the dancer’s body. It is using the body as a medium. (Gombrich and Gormley 1995)

In a similar vein I regard the figure in figure drawing (much like the dancer in a dance) as the means as well as the meaning of the drawing process, and the finished drawing in a sense merely the evidence of a process. In my experience, the most useful tools in figure drawing are my own somatic senses: the proprioceptive and kinaesthetic senses of my body. Proprioception and kinaesthesia are usually defined as the internal knowledge (conscious or not) of the placement and movement of the body, but this definition somehow does not quite evoke the depth of field of somatic experience. As any dancer will tell you this experience is spatial, visceral, emotional and constantly evolving. In fact, these are senses which we can never turn off in the way that we can shut our eyes or hold our ears. They are ubiquitous: they are there when we think about them and there when we don’t, and this is precisely what I think makes them so important – and all too easy to discount. In fact, I find it extremely difficult to reflect on what exists and affects me 54

before, during and after reflection takes place and it doesn’t come naturally to me (as I am sure it did for Kollwitz and does for Hicks). When I begin a new drawing I often start by tracing a shoulder or an arm, as if trying to extract something of the body as directly as possible. That these lines often seem oddly lifeless shouldn’t really surprise me, and I soon realise that tracing my body is hopelessly misguided.9 Rather my understanding of a posture needs to be something I recognize from my own body. As Gallese and Lakoff write: “…understanding requires simulation” (Gallese and Lakoff 2005, p.468).10 The balance of a figure, the weight distributed in the body, the tenseness of a particular turn of the head – this is all something which my intellect has no real grasp on, yet something which my body can quite easily simulate and thus understand through recognition. In other words, my body understands bodies, their physical and emotional states, by making their postures its own. If it didn’t then I would stand no chance of grasping something of the body’s continuous rush of emotive information.11 Any particular line is meaningful to me when I can feel where its meaning resonates in my body, that is, when it makes me realize something about the world that my body already had a pretty good grip on. This is not a constant grip and certainly not an infallible one either, but whether my body is right or not, the grip is always there. But does that mean that figure drawing to me is an entirely internal exercise? Are my drawings simply renditions of my own flawed but ubiquitous somatic sensations? If that were the case, if my drawings were somehow an expression of a private, internal sense then I would perhaps be more concerned with the free flow of expressing this sensation and less with the observation and scrutiny of the bodies around me. My drawings would probably be more gestural and my figures more abstracted (and probably not recognizable to anyone but me). However, as I see it, drawing is only an internal exercise to the extent that any action or experience is 55

internal, but figure drawing is not about expressing my body or my internal sensation. On the contrary: I draw figures because I want to come to terms with and understand what is outside me, because I want to reach out and touch what I see. In a sense, the aim of drawing is to give my baffled mind a chance to learn from what my body seems to continually recognize in others â&#x20AC;&#x201C; rightly or wrongly. The compulsion to draw the figure then stems from my own isolation from others, but equally from a strange feeling of being somehow tangled up with others.

The inextricable tangle

We are involved in the world and with others in an inextricable tangle Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2002, p.528)

I don’t think we have ever before been so focussed on the power of the individual. Yet at the same time, there is a move within cognitive science to question the very notion of self-determination and I find this compelling: are we perhaps not completely separate from one another? Is there perhaps no such a thing as an isolated self after all? In an article on human interaction and intersubjectivity, in which he addresses questions like these, Vittorio Gallese writes: We should perhaps abandon the Cartesian view of the primacy of the Ego, and adopt a perspective emphasizing the fact that the Other is co-originally given as the Self. Both Self and Other appear to be intertwined because of the intercorporeity linking them. Self-individuation is a process originating from the necessity of disentangling the Self from the we-centric dimension, in which it is originally and constitutively embedded. (2009, p.494)

Usually intersubjectivity is studied within the restricted area of the brain – either through the philosophy of mind or through neuroscience. However, here Gallese exchanges ‘intersubjectivity’ for the word ‘intercorporeity’, a term invented by Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty [1964] 1968), and thus challenges a common notion that intersubjectivity is something that involves only mechanisms inside our distinct 57

brains. Gallese portrays us, as did Merleau-Ponty, as far more involved, even physically connected, through the body’s responses to other bodies. Merleau-Ponty writes: The experience of my own body and the experience of the other are themselves the two sides of one same Being… ([1964] 1968, p.225)

To me, this experience of others as another side of me is something that is at once bewildering and reassuring. When I look at another’s face and posture an impression of the physical/emotional state of this person is immediately and unavoidably made on me. This impression is not necessarily one that tells me much about the state of mind of the other, but rather one that seems to suck me into the riddle of the other. To me, an encounter with another tends to feel more like an invasion than a meeting and is something that engages my body regardless of what my intellect thinks it knows about the other. On knowing the minds and bodies of others Gallese writes: … Before and below mind reading is intercorporeity - the mutual resonance of intentionally meaningful motor behaviours - as the main source of knowledge, we directly gather about others. (2009, p.493)

When I come face to face with someone I feel like this other body takes hold of me, and momentarily shares my body. Merleau-Ponty writes, with poignant confusion, about the meeting with the other: …somewhere behind those eyes, behind those gestures, or rather before them, or again about them, coming from I know not what double ground of space,

another private world shows through, through the fabric of my own, and for a moment I live in it… ([1964] 1968, p.11)

What I am getting at is that I believe we naturally experience not only our own bodies as the phenomenal body, but also the bodies of others. I believe we understand others from the inside, as it were, and this to me, this is precisely what makes the figure so compelling. In fact, even when we try, I don’t think we are entirely capable of perceiving either our own body or other bodies as disconnected objects, or that we are ever really able to observe the human body from a “disembodied distance”. I imagine Socrates looking down over his body in disbelief and exclaiming: “Every seeker of wisdom knows that up to the time when philosophy takes it over, his soul is a helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot in the body…” Phaedo 83a (Plato 2003, p.152). The irony here, of course, is that Socrates endows the soul with hands and feet and in doing so goes to the heart of the problem: however much we try there really is no escaping our bodies, and this is very much what my figure drawing hinges on: my body is my only point of contact with the world. I am not interested in its objective appearance, but rather how my body is what makes me at once isolated from and tangled up with others.

7. Standard bodies Antony Gormley: “I like that idea of a ‘standard’ body, but what I hope I’ve done is to completely remove the problem of the subject. I have a subject, which is life, within my own body…” Ernst Gombrich: “Because for you, your body is standard. It cannot be otherwise.” (Gombrich and Gormley 1995)

The figures in my drawings are neither me, nor someone else. They are a generalised body that has come about through a sort of negotiation between my sense of me and my experience of others. This figure is of course not general in a universal sense, but in a personal sense; it is a personal, standard body, because my experience, to me, is standard. Sometimes I think of the process of drawing the figure as a negotiation, or as a persuasion, a deliberation or some other shared situation where an interaction takes place, and this is reflected in the titles of the series of drawings and prints that make up my Master of Fine Arts exhibition. Central to all of the drawings is the question so precisely put by Thomas Nagel: “...how can it be the case that one of the people in the world is me?” (Nagel 1989) The drawings included in the exhibition are for the most part serial – sometimes showing a series of figures on a single drawing and sometimes exploring a process, or development of figural interactions over a series of drawings. I think this tendency to work serially is something that has to do with what I regard as the questioning purpose of a figure drawing. To me, my drawings are essentially a sort of testing of and learning about figural relations. 62

The Conversations (fig. 1 to 13) are five series of etchings where single plates are printed multiple times, but rotated each time, so that one figure, in a sense, is confronted by, or forced to engage, with itself. In these series I have tried to test the conversation as a sort of turning about another or perhaps essentially about oneself. I wanted the figure, static once the plate was drawn and etched, to relate to itself, and in doing so to question how much is really exchanged between poeple in a conversation. Conviction 1 (fig. 13 to 15) is a life-sized drawing showing a group of mostly heads, some shoulders and arms. I think the notion of â&#x20AC;&#x153;convictionâ&#x20AC;? is a gripping one, being at once a strong belief or faith as well as a judgement passed. I have tried to make the faces look neither identical nor different, but to draw them all in the same way, that is, as coming from the same physical/emotional state, and in doing so explore conviction essentially as a sentence to an isolating state of mind, regardless of the proximity of others. Inclusion 1 to 4 (fig. 16 to 20) is a series of four drawings, where two figures are tangled up with one another. I wanted to see how close I could really get two figures to one another, and I think I have ended up with interactions that are as much embraces as they are wrestling matches. Finally, Persuasion 1 and 2 (fig. 21 to 23) is a pair of tall drawings, part life-sized, part over-sized. They are a sort of dialogue, where a life-sized figure and an oversized head engage with each other. This time, however, there is real inequality and hierarchy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perhaps a reflection on how the self can feel at once inferior and insignificant and at the same time be experienced as grotesquely large. As with all of the drawings neither figure is representative of me in the sense that I am not taking sides in this hierarchy. Rather they are both explorations of what I feel as deep confusion in the meeting with an other.

Figure 21. 2010, Persuasion 1 and 2, charcoal on paper, 280x150cm each

What all of the works in the exhibition have in common is this confusion. How can it be that we yearn to be close to one another in spite of our isolation, yet at the same time strive for individuality in spite of our sameness. To me, drawing the figure is a process of trying to come to terms with what seems at once an uncomfortable closeness and an aching isolation. 64

Conclusion: Bafflement and recognition Is it not profoundly puzzling that we can be isolated from one another and at the same time somehow tangled up with one another? This puzzle is what I have wanted the words “bafflement” and “recognition” to evoke: one moment I am baffled at the impenetrable riddle of the other, the next I recognize - possibly wrongly, but always strongly – the physical and emotional state of another person. To me, this oscillation between certainty and uncertainty is a precious part of drawing the human figure. In the previous chapters I have tried to work out what it is I draw when I draw the figure. I began by considering the body in the context of Western philosophy and art in order to understand my own ambivalent feelings towards the body: on one hand I feel a degree of contempt for my body, and yet, at the same time, I feel no contempt when I draw the figure. In my view, this is because the figures in my drawings are not drawn from objects, but rather from a phenomenal sensation of the body. So even though I find the fleshy object of the body at times repulsive, my concern with the human figure has to do firstly with genuine awe of the human body as experienced. I think we tend to overlook this experiencing body, its abilities and its meaningfulness and that in our Platonic struggle to sever our selves from the body we only managed, unfairly, to come to despise it. I believe the phenomenal body deserves more attention, and that attention to one’s own experiencing body does not necessarily entail narcissitic self-absorption, but rather can inspire awe at the body’s physical, emotional and intersubjective capabilities. I think our intellect ought to feel humbleness for the phenomenal body rather than contempt for the objective body, and I believe that it might be useful to consider some artists in phenomenal or bodily, rather than purely conceptual terms. In fact, personally I experience works of art in 65

this way, through my body, and I think this is why I find the works of Käthe Kollwitz and Nicola Hicks so powerful. I feel very strongly that their drawings and sculptures are reflections on what takes place in a phenomenal, emotional and intersubjective world at a bodily and pre-reflective level, and the bodily meaning I see in their works is there, palpable and real, even if it doesn’t translate into a narrative or a concept. It is a similar bodily meaning that I try to explore in my own figure drawings. In my experience, what I see inevitably engages my body, and to me this is why vision is such a precious sense. Drawing, to me, relies on vision as a way of incorporating what is outside me, almost as if I reach out and touch it. Through a process of simulation and recognition I use my own phenomenal body in my drawing process, perhaps as a way of giving my baffled mind a chance to learn from what my body grasps directly. That is not to say that my drawings try to render my own bodily experience, but rather that my body is the only means I have of understanding what is outside me. In Merleau-Ponty’s words: “Whether it is a question of another’s body or my own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it...” ([1945] 2002, p.231) My body then is at once my disconnection from and my connection to others. I experience others almost as an extension of myself, and although I don’t understand others perfectly I am always affected by them and this is what I want to explore and, I guess, come to terms with in my drawings. All of the topics that I have touched on in the previous chapters warrant further study. The body in philosophy and aesthetics is a huge field, as is the study of our visual sense, not just scientifically but also philosophically. It would also be interesting to explore more artists’ work in bodily rather than purely conceptual terms to see whether sometimes that might bring us closer to the point of creation of an artwork and even the intuitive intentions of the artist. I also think it would be interesting to 66

look into our kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses and to examine what I believe is an aesthetically proprioceptive experience of the arts (not just visual art but also music, dance etc) and how these senses inform our experience of what an artwork means. However, to conclude I would like to return to my initial question: what is it I draw when I draw the figure? I draw figures that I feel are closest to a resolution between me and the other. They are at once an approximation to the other, as well as a disentanglement from the other. To me, then, drawing the figure is an intuitive process of coming to terms with a sense of bafflement and recognition, with uncertainty and conviction.

Figure 22. 2010, Persuasion 1, charcoal on paper, 280x150cm 68

Figure 23. 2010, Persuasion 2, charcoal on paper, 280x150cm 69

Endnotes 1 In his treatise Aesthetica (1750/58) Alexander Baumgarten coined the term and defined aesthetics as “the science of how things are to be cognized by means of the senses,” (Guyer 2010). Baumgarten interestingly went beyond a narrow artistic realm to regard aesthetics as a broader science of sensory knowledge. According to Baumgarten this was to be complemented by the science of logic in a comprehensive theory of knowledge. Baumgarten’s aesthetics did therefore take the body into account, since the senses are bodily. However, he still regarded the senses as the lower faculties to be governed by “the higher faculties of understanding and reason” (Shusterman 1999, p.300). Subsequent ideas about aesthetics have generally continued to insist on the dominion of the mind and reduced bodily perception to a primitive side effect or a necessary evil in our soul’s pursuit of artistic value. Hegel, for example, declared that “…an art-product is only there in so far as it has taken its passage through the spirit...” (Hegel 1975, p.38) and accordingly, it would be contradictory for any aesthetic pursuit not to aim for truth and the absolute because of man’s “…higher vocation to be spirit…” (Hegel 1975, p.742). In short, our Western philosophical tradition dictates that art can only be valued by the immaterial mind. 2 Plotinus for example was ashamed to be in his body, Kant warned that somatic introspection might lead to self-absorption and hypochondria and Berkeley went so far as to reject the very notion of materiality, to mention a few. 3 In Germany Gestalt psychology was one discipline that wanted to be both science and philosophy, and in American pragmatism both William James and later John Dewey argued for a more integrated view of mind and body. In phenomenology a focus on subjective experience led naturally to an enquiry into the body and I will return to the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the following chapter.

4 When cognitive science first emerged as a discipline with neuroscience as its scientific base, the focus was on the isolated organ of the brain excluding the body, and perhaps ironically in a science that saw itself as basically physicalist, a dualism remained between mind (i.e. brain) and body. The embodied account of the self, and more radically the culturally and socially dependent account of the self, first emerged in the last couple of decades of the 20th century, e.g. (Varela, Thomson, Rosch 1992) (Clark 1997 and 1998) ( Johnson and Lakoff 1998). 5 This emotional outpouring without context or agenda is precisely what critics of Viola deplore. Louis Nowra is one such critic who calls Viola’s work “...excursion into the mawkish” (Nowra 2006, p.512). Although Nowra concedes that Viola may be attempting to break through a certain postmodernist irony and detachment, to Nowra the lack of context in his works only manages to make human expression look “unintentionally comic” (Nowra 2006, p.512) 6 The French writer and art historian Romain Rolland said about Kollwitz: “This woman, with her great heart, has taken the people into her mothering arms with sombre and tender pity. She is the voice of the silence of the sacrificed” (Crane 1973). In a similar vein the artist Leonard Baskin said of Kollwitz that “..the diseased and the despaired, thrust themselves at her, enveloped her vision and ennobled her” (1959, p.96). 7 I first saw Sorry, sorry Sarajevo when it was exhibited in Salisbury Cathedral in 1999 as part of the touring exhibition Shape of the Century. 8 During the 20th century the art theorists and educators John Dewey (1934 [2005]), Victor Lowenfeld (Arnheim 1983), Rudolph Arnheim ([1974] 2004) and others began to talk about vision, not as a disembodied agent of objectivity and reality, but far more as a subjective, highly susceptible and embodied part of a complex sensorium.

9 Similarly, if I lay a piece of tracing paper over a photograph of a face and trace it with a pencil, this drawing will almost certainly look unnatural and somehow ‘wrong’. It will have no meaning, no life, no evidence of any understanding of the subject – in other words, it will not be a drawing of anything that I understand and experience as a living body. 10 Gallese is one of the discoverers of the so-called “mirror neurons”, a discovery which is a good example of a neuroscientific break-through with significant philosophical consequences. The mirror neuron is essentially a neuron which fires not only when we carry out an action but also when we observe the action performed by another. In a sense, acting and observing this act produces the same activity in the brain. The scientific knowledge of mirror neurons is still limited but philosophically this idea of direct simulation means that we are suddenly faced with the human being as “fundamentally social, as an evolved organ not of solipsistic individual cognizing, but of social and communal co-cognizing” (Clark and Kiverstein 2008, p.52). At a roundtable discussion in 2007, which included neuroscientists, art historians, psychologists as well as artists, the American art historian David Freedberg said: “…mirror neurons are not going to provide the solution to every aesthetic problem out there. It reinstates a dimension of aesthetic response, which has been absent largely from Western thinking about the arts” (Freedberg, Stafford et al. 2007). What I find interesting about the mirror idea is that we now have an account of the self, which suggests that we are far more intersubjectively involved and dependent than even phenomenological philosophers, such as Merleau-Ponty, ever proposed. 11 This is why, in my view, it will not necessarily be helpful to study anatomy, i.e. the dead body in parts, in order to learn about the body. In my view, studying the body as a foreign object – as the fleshy body of an ‘other’ – will not automatically deepen my understanding of it because it is counter-intuitive to recognise myself in dead body.

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List of illustrations Cover and pages 6-7 and 58-9 MFA exhibition, February 2011, Depot II Gallery Fig. 1 2010, Conversation 1 (1), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 2 2010, Conversation 1 (2), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 3 2010, Conversation 2 (1), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 4 2010, Conversation 2 (2), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 5 2010, Conversation 3 (1), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 6 2010, Conversation 3 (2), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 7 2010, Conversation 4 (1), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 8 2010, Conversation 4 (2), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 9 2010, Conversation 4 (3), etching, 25x25cm Fig. 10 Conversation series 1 to 4, and 2011, Conviction 1, charcoal on paper, 150x220cm (life-size) Fig. 11 2010, Conversation 5 (1 to 4), etchings, 25x25cm each Fig. 12 2010, Conversation 6 (1 and 2), lithographs, 70x70cm each Fig. 13 2011, Conviction 1, charcoal on paper, 150x220cm (life-size) Fig. 14 2011, Conviction 1, charcoal on paper, 150x220cm (life-size) Fig. 15 Conviction 1 (detail) Fig. 16 2011, Inclusion 1 to 4, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm each (life size) Fig. 17 2010, Inclusion 1, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (life-size) Fig. 18 2010, Inclusion 2, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (life-size) Fig. 19 2010, Inclusion 3, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (life-size)

Fig. 20 2010, Inclusion 4, charcoal on paper, 150x150cm (over-size) Fig. 21 2010, Persuasion 1 and 2, charcoal on paper, 280x150cm each Fig. 22 2010, Persuasion 1, charcoal on paper, 280x150cm Fig. 23 2010, Persuasion 2, charcoal on paper, 280x150cm

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