Introduction: Drawing, Printmaking, Photography, What Is and Isn’t, and Does it Actually Matter?

In 2019, I was a finalist in the respected and long running drawing prize, the Dobell, at Sydney’s beautiful National Art School Gallery. I have long grappled with the very concept of the art prize, and most of my sporadic participation with prizes has been somewhat excruciating, with the supposed role of art butting up against the undeniable mechanics of the art industry and its gatekeepers. However, the Dobell has a reputation for excellence, and I thought if ever there was a prize I may feel somewhat comfortable to be a part, this must surely be it. I was not wrong; it was a humbling and encouraging experience to be exhibited shoulder to shoulder with some friends, colleagues, and many who I consider to be greats, artists who inspired a near-obsessive reverence for, particularly during my years at art school. The exhibition was of a very high standard, and if I did not love every work, I could appreciate some aspect of it, whether technical, conceptual, or otherwise. One work, however, I could not quite accept.

A Melbourne-based artist with a rapidly growing reptation, Justine Varga, had entered a photograph. It was a smallish, gestural affair, quite graphic, printed matte in black and white. Referred to as a ‘photogenic drawing’, I could see the argument for its being a drawing in the context of expanded drawing. My own PhD thesis examined the very nature of drawing as a discipline, and its many and varied applications that extend far outside of what we would typically refer to as a drawing, into other media, particularly digital media, which I characterised as Metadrawing. Perhaps a little pretentious, but it summed up what I was banging on about quite neatly, which is that technologies can extend a discipline to terrain far from our usual associations, beyond the traditions and conventions that usually define them.

I do not accept Varga’s Dobell entry as a drawing- not because it sits outside of any particular definition of what drawing can be, but because it ruled itself out as one, by virtue of being an editioned work (an edition of five, from memory). The definition of drawing is incredibly broad, amorphous and negotiable, but is frequently conceptualised in connection to the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the sketch, indexical and inseparable from the artist’s hand. Jaques Derrida's essay 'Signature Event Context' is directly applicable to drawing’s unrepeatability. Derrida's definition of writing is not necessarily tethered to text as such, but, citing Condillac, including pictographic, hieroglyphic and ideographic writing within this definitioni. Here Derrida asserts the unrepeatability of the signature, which is an index of the event as well as being an identifier of the signer. So there’s that.

While Derrida’s essay is not written in the context of drawing, Derrida's notion of signature has numerous parallels to the act of drawing, and implications for both photography and printmaking, which I will come back to. Varga ended up winning the Dobell, selected by Judge Ben Quilty. Perhaps it was the work’s clear separation from the rest of the exhibition (it certainly did stand alone, maybe deliberately so), or perhaps the artist’s insistence of the work’s legitimacy as a drawing appealed to the judge. Whatever the case, it put more than a few artistic noses out of joint, and signalled a sort of crisis within both contemporary printmaking and photography: here was a successful contemporary artist making photographic prints, paradoxically denying their formal efficacy as by virtue of the insistence that they were actually drawings. And there’s the rub: at what point was the cultural cachet of printmaking and photography perceived to have lagged behind drawing, the perennial runt of the (commercial) art world litter? At a guess, I would think sometime between the birth of the smartphone and the censorship of Tumblr. The disappointing part of Varga’s win was not, however, some sort of exasperated ‘betrayal’ of the prize itself (god forbid), or that the work was not technically a drawing (‘we raw with light, darling’, a deliciously bitchy artist friend, who shall stay unnamed, said to me on the night). No. It was the complete lack of rigorous critical discussion or debate of the artistic context of this win. Despite the grumblings, have a google and be awed by the uniform congratulation over the win. I cannot help but feel that this was a lost opportunity for a good conceptual shake-up of what drawing, painting and photography are (or could be) all about. Perhaps this is too much to expect from an art prize result, but a close examination (at least in the Australian context) has been needed for quite some time. And let’s not forget that oftentimes, the best work comes from disciplines that are not being closely watched; look at textile-based work today, or ceramics five years ago, or drawing five years before that. Now, everybody is making wobbly, overglazed ceramic figures, and coloured pencil drawings of wistful girls in the forest. Will everybody, in another five, be making photographic prints-no-actually-drawings? I suppose time will tell.

While I could appreciate the spirit of Varga’s insistence (subversion and trend-bucking is an aspect of the drawing discipline that I am extremely fond of), it did make me realise how rigid the principles of printmaking and photography could be, and so often are, and how much I appreciate artists who feel the same way (if I were a printmaker, I would probably frame it with some other context too). Making such deliberate, thoughtful and occasionally provocative steps are very much more in line with drawing’s subversive streak. I see Carolyn Craig and Damian Dillon as operating very comfortably within this framework. While Varga gestures toward the radicalism of contemporary drawing but stops short of making the leap beyond print and photography, Craig and Dillon have long since taken the interdisciplinary plunge. Their work is unhampered by conventions of media, rather taking whatever tools are needed to best deliver their idea, which in this case is remarkably powerful, and near-universal to the complexities of the contemporary Australian experience, particularly in terms of the uneasy and epoch-defining trinity of sovereignty, colonisation, and the exploitation of natural resources.

In his seminal essay Brief History of Photography (1931), Walter Benjamin outlines the evolution of photography, as well as various responses to these developments within painting and throughout the visual and commercial arts. The transposition of Benjamin's method of analysis to contemporary art is easily applied to the era’s preponderance of digital technologies, to which the contemporary artist must now respond, if not by embracing such technologies then by ignoring, subverting, or resisting them. In his essay Benjamin outlines the challenge that painting, particularly plein-air and the portrait miniature, faced in the representational possibilities of the daguerreotype and then the photographii . Such technological advances dramatically alter the possibilities of art through technical, philosophical and even perceptual challenges to tradition, alterations I see at work in (Dis)Location. Craig and Dillon challenge our perceptions, urging us to think beyond what we can see in front of us, and consider the circumstances that brought us here to the mechanised, networked-yet-disconnected urban and suburban experience. Like photography the history of printmaking is a history of technical innovations and shifts in practice, and as we see in Craig and Dillon’s work, the two disciplines have really stemmed from the same conceptual taproot. It is a commonplace to state that digital interfaces offer new, innovative avenues for artistic expression, including the challenge of potential technological obsolescence of the discipline altogether, however Craig and Dillon make no such grand statements, instead adding the digital into their considerable collective toolbox, deployed only when necessary, as often as the press, the chemical, the screwdriver. This understated embrace of photographic and printmaking processes is not intended to reflect ignorance of digital possibilities, but rather offering a holistically interdisciplinary approach, a hands-on divergence from the disembodied digital experienceiii. This disciplinary and conceptual overlap, characterised by responses to technological advancement, is necessary in order to understand Craig and Dillon’s contemporary position. Rather than examining jagged edges of popular culture, (Dis)Location explores the broader context which popular culture is so often designed to draw attention from. Drawing remains an important investigative tool for the conceptualisation and execution of visual ideas, as an act that is deeply ingrained in many image-making processes, but it is in Craig and Dillon’s engagement with the historical relationships drawing has enjoyed with other disciplines that enriches and complicates their (Dis) Location project, and adds a new and meaningful register to both contemporary printmaking and particularly photography, two disciplines that seem to have stagnated in recent years, crowded out by the democratisation of hand-held digital technologies.

The history of drawing is positioned within contemporary art as interdisciplinary, and historically subject to the preparatory and educational requirements of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. In this way it is somewhat ironic that (Dis)Location ends up charting territory filtered through the framework of photography and printmaking, as the fluidity of drawing is clearly evident in some works. Craig’s Mining Subjectivities works and Dillon’s Straya videos incorporate hallmarks of contemporary drawing practice such as rapid, gestural linework and a puckish, subversive humour respectively, finding balance in an aesthetic very nearly beautiful, in that specific way that bleakness can be beautiful, a sort of cosmic Spenglarian despair, tempered with a Schopenhauer’s more localised and specific sardony. Am I making sense? No? Good.

Craig and Dillon are traversing some tough, dense artistic territory, engaging heartily and sincerely with theory but not at the expense of vision, personal obsessions or, occasionally, humour. Perhaps history will reflect that this is the time where print- and photomedia reasserts itself as an innovative and nuanced discipline, engaging with thought and community and passion, and leaving behind the fussy trappings of tradition to fully commit to the unique and exciting potential of its own graphic and theoretical sensibilities.

Jonathan McBurnie

i Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, Translated by Alan Bass. In Margins of Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 312. ii Walter Benjamin, ‘Brief History of Photography.’ Translated by J. A. Underwood. In One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2008), 179. iii Miles Hall, The Anatomy of an Image: Painting in the Digital Age. (Brisbane: Griffith University, 2010), 7.

Damian Dillon, (Dis)Integration #1a, 2020 Unique C-type print from B&W negative on alupanel, 100 x 100 cm (framed) Courtesy of the Artist