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.

Define, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which motion is to be prevented, and you have one of the key themes of history. With a closed line and the prevention of motion from outside the line to its inside, you derive the idea of property. With the same line, and the prevention of motion from inside to outside, you derive the idea of prison. With an open line (ie. A curve that does not enclose a figure) and the prevention of motion in either direction, you derive the idea of border. Properties, Prisons, borders: it is through the prevention of motion that space enters history.

The Maori targeted Surveyor’s pegs and other marking mechanisms as a resistance to colonialism. They understood how the indexical line of the western gaze indentures the spaces and bodies of those gazed upon.

This ‘line’ remains etched over our landscape and bodies, demarcating capital and worth, success and failure. We move (or are forced into removal) from one designated boundary to another, measuring our capacities and desires through fences and roads, lens and data.

The practices of Dillon and Craig investigate this colonized lens and how it propagates particular ways of seeing. They target the indentured ‘scape’ of the Surveyor’s lens – with material and chemical slippages to consider representational culture itself – as an extractive network meme that constructs our notion of the ‘real’. They do this using the trace –harvesting, distorting, copying, and chemically altering residues of the colonized land/lens and body to try to understand its operational protocols and to voice the deep affect that resonates under the surface of Australian culture.

For Dillon the remnant values of colonialism remain present in the value economy of suburbia where the square land dream of desire continues to scorch the landscape with fresh impetus. Within this space he also recognizes an uncanny scent of failure and death. Dillon reflects upon this Cartesian demise in his dual investigation of arterial roads and the landscapes that inhabit their edges. He sees us living on land that is both settled (as colonized space) but innately ‘unsettling’, where the Ikea dream decays within its own compromised habitationv. His practice captures the cultural affect in these uncanny spaces – ones tethered to a Lynchian dystopia of failed desire. Deconstructed homes are appropriated (via the lens) and dissected into scopic processes of knowing as property/capital. He understands that without imaging practices the western gaze is impotent in its desire to ‘own’ . Maps, surveyor marks, fences, real estate ads and the portrait format that defines our way of viewing each other – each of these function within a network economy of visual practices that inform our idea of the ‘real’ . We flounder when boundaries dissolve – and seek shelter against affect and its residual confusion. Dillon takes apart these elements, using chemical and digital processes to dissolve the abject boundary between object and subject, to confuse both the colonised subject, and the implicated viewer. This unfolds the home and its boundary (and sublime opposite) the landscape into a rhizome of new potentials: ruinous, fleeting, historical, speculative. Eroded and reconstructed it builds itself into a trace residue from the temporal occupation of man.

Craig’s practice uses similar processes of repetition with differencevi to unravel the cultural screen of normalcy – within a broader practice of cultural/ biographic query into how power operates. Where Dillon’s work dissolves the boundary between property/space and self, Craig’s work is more deeply embedded in the inside of that perimeter – in how we enclose bodies and spatial economies. Her focus is within the demarcation of what constitutes value and how we extract from both the land and the body and how these forces are inextricably linked.

In works such as Mining the sublime she uses open cut mining sites as a pivot through which to investigate colonial extraction economies over both the landscape and the subject’s body. The project started through an obsession with mining images on the Internet that replicate the sublime landscape. These images use the western metaphoric trope to enact a sequence of ideological power relations over processes of viewing and consuming place. These images are appropriated and intervened with using copy-based processes to bring back bodily desire into the landscape of extraction and to slow her own consumption and distribution of images of desire. These images are returned to the materiality of mining by printing onto extracted metals such as aluminium with ink mixed with coal dust (embedding residues of man’s capital desire into the material process itself).

Her work Left behind in Lithgow extends her investigation into power and extraction more directly towards the subject – rather than the viewer. It emerged from a shared site visit with Dillon in late 2019. He was returning to a particular spot where he has photographed the same view over a number of years. Craig accompanied him to continue research in the nearby town of Lithgow – where she had been site collecting material in relation to two forms of colonised extraction (mining and a prison on site). Their research trip coincided with the bushfires of late 2019, during which Lithgow was evacuated – all except the prison population. Instead, the inmates were placed into lockdown, and issued with entry-level dust masks. This disturbed Craig and led her to consider how society devalues the bodies of the incarcerated as the detritus of society. The inmate represents what repels us. Institutionalised capital (the mainframe of society) and its fear of the Other excludes complications of deviancy, dirt, and confusion. The body of the inmate represents pure spectral terror – one outside of the fences of our protection. But the boundary lines of incarceration determine the limits of our care for those of difference in contemporary society.

This dismissal of the bodies of those within the perimeter of social exclusion deeply affected the artist as a previously incarcerated person. This led her to collect film footage as they drove out of Lithgow in the deep smoke of the fire. The camera is framed through the windscreen as a viewpoint of desire – of motion un-arrested. The smoke holds itself over the car and the bodies within – like a slow suffocation. This brings to mind the boundary between pollution and cleanliness –and as access to clean air. In a world divided into capital divisions – the right to take in air – is a contingency denied to these inmates and a lesson to all lesser classes in a growing era of climate change. The second component of this work is a charcoal dust print made from ground remains from the Lithgow area fires collected during the site trip. This image is a homage to the captive nature of the lens and its historical devices to impose normalcy and deviancy over the body.

These two artists navigate the resonant historical narratives that define and inform representation and desire and give presence to the affectual residue of colonizing forces. The traces they manipulate leave a reversed shadow of their matrix as remnant as a question to what remains.

Carolyn Craig & Damian Dillon

iv Reviel Netz Barbed Wire: an ecology of modernity v Ross Gibson Seven Stories of an Australian Badland vi These ideas reference concepts taken from Jacques Derrida

Carolyn

Subjectivities: Navigating Confusion