Back to the drawing board

Kelly Chorpening  

Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London

 

In ‘Back to the drawing board’ I will discuss the role contemporary drawing could have in today’s Middle East through a discussion informed by my own experience as an artist and researcher, and as a lecturer of drawing to artists and non-artists alike.

Background

Since 2006 I have run the BA Drawing course at Camberwell College of Arts. The course sits within the fine art programme of subjects, and as you might expect, involves life drawing, observational perspective and orthographic projection, but also provides forays into the ways disciplines such as dance, choreography, medicine, architecture, history and philosophy use and identify with drawing. Drawing does not belong to art— it’s a fundamentally human act— so its exemption from the struggle more archetypal subjects such as painting have with their own histories, enables a distinctly outward-looking approach to creativity. Drawing effectively provides a passport to explore its uses across a range of professions. Skills of analysis are developed as much through the translation of the real world into line, as the questioning of how the stakes of such activities have changed over time.

Back to the Drawing Board

‘Back to the drawing board’ is a phrase used when it’s time to start again. In this lecture I would like to free the drawing board from its associative endgame of failed achievement in order to describe its location at the edges of discipline— one could even describe it as a pre-disciplinary place— in order to celebrate it as a place for innovation, where thoughts and ideas are brought into existence. The drawing board is a set of conditions that enable practitioners from across cultures and professions alike to work together and share ideas.

In this context, the drawing board becomes a destination that enables the speculation of an idea, where the speculation is made valid through the inherent directness, accuracy and precision of the medium. Ideas are given substance, and are able to suggest convincing possibilities without the limiting preoccupation with their use-value. In a time when the primacy of vocational disciplinarity has had a negative impact on innovation, could drawing invigorate, and possibly create new modes of practice?

In fine art, a refreshing characteristic of contemporary drawing exhibitions is how they tend to disrupt art historical categories.

link: Kelly Chorpening

Beyond Visual

Brian Dougan

Associate Professor of Architecture at
The American University of Sharjah College of Architecture, Art, and Design

 

Once upon a time I was a prolific drawer. I drew for many reasons, but I drew mostly because time invested in drawing revealed something about the world that I did not know. Drawing is a dependable tool to decipher enigma. I have not misplaced the curiosity that persuaded me to be prolific. I am still a drawer. Drawing is my way to investigate, to scrutinize, and to simply think about those things of the world and those things not yet born to the world. I rely on drawing instruction when I am in need of information.

Despite conventional wisdom and excessive antidotal discourse, drawing is not a visual phenomenon. Drawing beyond the visual cliché is best understood in its relations to other activities. I will take this opportunity to draw a comparison between making pottery and making drawings. I will unwrap the following three ideas to illustrate the rapport.

centering

"Centering: that act which precedes all others on the potter's wheel. The bringing of the clay into a spinning, un-wobbling pivot, which will then be free to take innumerable shapes as potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts. It is like a handclasp between two living hands, receiving the greeting at the very moment that they give it..."

from "Centering - In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person" by M.C. Richards

adventure

"I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened

awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience."

from "I and Thou" by Martin Buber

focus/seeing

I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen... from "Zen Seeing Zen Drawing" by Frederick Franck 

This world in which we reside is among other things, distracting. Its pace is not conducive to the sort of focus or temporal surrender that is necessary to see. Such an investment, especially among the youth is an exception to the way we usually manage our time. 

Franck loved to quote Zen master Hui Neng, "The meaning of life is to see."

 

artworks by Brian Dougan

link: Brian Dougan

Crossing the line by drawing the line out of the sphere of imagination

Aisan Kianmehr

Abstract 

    "From this detached imagination attached imagination derives."

Ibn Arabi, who has introduced imagination as the creative source of manifestation, the very cause of our existence and keeping in contact with the Infinite and the Absolute, explains that our power of imagining things, that is, our ability to conceive of their forms abstracted from their sensible bodies, belongs to "Attached imagination" (Khayal Muttasil). It is the imagining faculty functioning within a human psychological framework. It is referred to as "Attached" because it is an imagination conjoined to the imagining subject and inseparable from him.

"Detached imagination" (Khayal Munfasil) is Divine Imagination, God imagining the world and is the presence of the world in the divine Mind whereas "attached imagination' is human imagination and the forms conceived by it are extracted by the senses from natural forms which are part of the cosmic forms, which embody cosmic realities, man imagining the forms of existents brought into existence by the creative power of Divine imagination. Since human imagination has the power of participating in the world of potential existence, it is capable of composing an infinite number of various types of images.

That brings us to a question that is overwhelming the imagination of most artists and architects, Is it possible for us to think and form images of objects which in principle are impossible to construct?

The concept of impossible in the world of Architecture is specifically derived from the forces of gravity, an essential limit for architecture that rises up in a relationship of tension with the earth. This fact has always been motivating the architects to seek for approaches to be freed from this limitation and have repeatedly dreamed of flying buildings; the tendency which was commonly popular in the era of the French and Russian revolutions. Now architects who claim to be designers of Cyber-Architecture proclaim their freedom to design in a digital network space of zero gravity free from the constraints of gravity.

As cyber-space evolves to replace the actual space as a target for capital investment, it appears to be heading the direction where the meaning of the word Architecture is expanding to include the conformation of virtual space in computer displays and the architecture in practice has crossed the boundaries of Art and Science.

Interview with Stephen Farthing

Stephen Farthing RA, Rootstein Hopkins Professor of Drawing at the University of the Arts London, will be one of the keynote speakers at the Crossing The Line Conference in Dubai, UAE, at the American University in Dubai, in early November, 2011. The Conference is a joint project of AUD and RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. In this brief interview, the artist gives us some initial thoughts on drawing and on his participation in Crossing The Line: Drawing in the Middle East - intersections of transdisciplinary practice and understanding

What is the role of drawing in your own art practice?
.

Stephen Farthing - I use drawing in two quite different ways, first to record, then to unravel problems, plan and strategize.

How do you see the role of drawing in your experience as an educator?

Stephen Farthing - In western culture the drawing class has I suspect been considered by most of its users part church, part gymnasium. During the latter half of the twentieth century most progressive western art schools replaced drawing with two new subjects , one was Art Theory and the other a craft related subject based on familiarizing students with the use of Lens/Scanner Based Technologies. Over time this shift in direction within the curriculum lead to a substantial decline in interest in things hand-made and personal, and it seems a surge in interest in Technological Interfaces and what I can best describe as Detached Randomness’s.

read the complete interview in the Panoptikon (click)

Crossing the Line Conference: Interview with Irene Barberis

Irene Barberis with one of her artworks
at Langford120 in Melbourne, Australia, 2011

How was the idea of the conference Crossing the Line conceived?

IRENE BARBERIS - I have been working in a global context with Drawing for many years – over the last four, my conversations have been, amongst others, with Professor Stephen Farthing from the University of the Arts London. In 2009 I brought Stephen to Australia through the Metasenta, to exhibit at its Gallery – The DrawingSpace, Melbourne which was situated in RMIT University, while I exhibited performative and more sculptural drawings in the UK, at the University of the Arts London and the Bury Museum and Art Gallery. In April 2010 RMIT hosted an international Drawing Conference ‘Drawing Out’ at which Stephen was one of the Keynotes and I was involved through the Steering Committee. When in Dubai in January of this year for an exhibition at Tashkeel Bastakia, it occurred to me/us through a dialogue with Dr Marcelo Lima and Associate Professor Julia Townsend, that a conference on Drawing in the Middle East would be of enormous benefit to the extended community, and would be a pivot for dialogue on the specificities of ‘Drawing’ – its transdisciplinary nature, the porosity of its context, its marvelous span of materiality, and the multi layered nature of its linage and character. Drawing is a continuum of idea and thought, process and manifestation; it has the capacity to ‘capture’ and be a doorway to most everything and is to my mind all-inclusive. This conference will stimulate and hopefully galvanize Drawing as a presence in the Middle East.


read the complete interview here: PANOPTIKON

Crossing The Line: Call for Papers

Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East - intersections of transdisciplinary practice and understanding will bring together specialists from various fields of research and practices to examine the role of drawing in the contemporary Middle East. Drawing as medium, as a tool, as notation, performance, and as a specific mode of thinking and imagining in the processes of invention, production, reproduction and communication within and across fields and disciplines: from art to science, from technology to ideology and cultural practices.  

Conference themes:

Drawing as a transdisciplinary practice
Drawing as an intersection
Crossing the Line: hand and technology in a changing world
Drawing: a portrait and landscape-notations of our time.


This conference is a collaboration between The American
University in Dubai and RMIT University, Australia.


The deadline for abstracts/proposals is 15 August 2011.

Enquiries: irene.barberis@rmit.edu.au

 Submit Abstract here

OCPMS: Conference List - click on CTL2011 and on Submit Abstract (left. below Welcome)

http://crossingthelineconference.blogspot.com/

Sponsored by:

American University in Dubai

RMIT University, Melbourne

Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East - intersections of transdisciplinary practice and understanding :1st November – 3rd November 2011

Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East - intersections of transdisciplinary practice and understanding will bring together specialists from various fields of research and practices to examine the role of drawing in the contemporary Middle East. Drawing as medium, as a tool, as notation, performance, and as a specific mode of thinking and imagining in the processes of invention, production, reproduction and communication within and across fields and disciplines: from art to science, from technology to ideology and cultural practices.  

The trans-disciplinary approach of the conference will highlight the specificities, as well as the commonalities of the various dimensions, fields, forms and uses of drawing, broadly defined as the production and extension of lines in space, as the creation of meaning by marking surfaces, as the creation and fixation of visible paths that record and communicate patterns of temporal-spatial experiences.

In this sense, drawing is the activity and product that makes explicit the interrelationships of flow and form in mental life. It mediates the flux of internal processes and allows the objectification of mental constructs and operations into practical-material as well as perceptual-symbolic entities.

The central notion of Crossing the Line emphasizes the act and the idea of drawing as, on one hand, the setting of clear boundaries defining symbolic and material entities within a representational field and representational practices, while at the same time stressing the relational nature of all formalizing processes and constructs, of meaning making and communicative processes in general.

In this sense, to draw is at the same time to establish a limit and to surpass it, it is to define the interrelated positive and negative components of any configuration. To draw is to create a boundary that is also an interface between domains, territories, modes of thinking and corresponding modes of being. To create a line is to produce a vector of thought and action, and in this sense, to mark a boundary is already to cross it, that is: drawing is a trans-formative process; it is the creation of new paths, new relationships, new configurations of knowledge.

Dr Marcelo Guimarães Lima

Venue:

American University in Dubai, Dubai, UAE.

Dates: 1st November – 3rd November 2011

Steering Committee:

International Chair: Dr. Irene Barberis
Middle East Co-Chair: Dr. Marcelo Guimarães Lima
Middle East Co-Chair: Associate Professor Julia Townsend

Affiliated Organisations:

Tashkeel, Dubai

Keynote Speakers

Professor Stephen Farthing, University of the Arts London
Mr. Nja Mahdaoui, Tunisia
Dr. Marcelo Guimarães Lima, AUD
Dr Irene Barberis, RMIT University, Melbourne

Metasenta Publications will print a small format book on the full conference papers to be distributed internationally.

There will be three exhibitions to accompany the ‘Crossing the Line’ Conference:

A major exhibition on Drawing in the Middle East. Opening November 3rd

AUD will host an exhibition of A4 drawings collected from across the Middle Eastern region, these will be shown at the conference and later exhibited in Melbourne at Gallery Langford 120. They will become part thereof of the Global Drawing Project  by Dr. Irene Barberis and Stephen Farthing to be published in 2012.