A few days ago, I was unfamiliar with the work of Susan Schwalb (born in 1944), and, like hundreds of other artists, I ‘discovered’ her via the Internet. The internet – I don’t think we’ve fully understood it yet (we’d need a McLuhan for that)… Anyway. Very quickly, Schwalb’s works caught my eye (looking ≠ ‘scrolling’). I felt the same pleasure I’d experienced when I had ‘discovered’ Jonathan Delafield Cook’s drawings. Drawing is very difficult. Look:  

At first glance, I thought it was a feather — a bird’s feather. Then, as I read the title — ‘Winter Solstice’ — once more, I wondered: What’s the connection between a bird’s feather and the winter solstice? And then suddenly it occurred to me: what if it had nothing to do with it at all, what if it were, for example, tall grass blowing in the wind? And after all, why should it have to refer to stark reality? Be that as it may, to me, this drawing is ‘alive’. Just as it is in the works of J. Delafield Cook. But what does ‘living drawing’ mean? Many artists have used this term, and the art historian Henri Focillon chose this magnificent title for his book in 1934: Vie des formes (The Life of Forms). And to honour him, shall we not quote an extract? Indeed:

We shall borrow from the language of painters the term that best describes it and which instantly conveys the energy of the harmony: the ‘touch’. It seems to us that this concept can be extended to the graphic arts and to sculpture as well. The ‘touch’ is a moment — the moment when the tool brings form to life within the material. It is permanence, since it is through it that form is constructed and made enduring. It may sometimes conceal its work, become obscured or freeze in place, but we must and can always rediscover it beneath the harshest continuity. Then the work of art regains its precious quality of life: undoubtedly it is a whole, well-integrated in all its parts, solid, forever distinct; undoubtedly, in Whistler’s words, it does not ‘hum’ — yet it bears within it the indestructible (albeit hidden) traces of a vibrant life. The brushstroke is the true point of contact between inertia and action.

I do not know what it comes down to: a particular artist finds themselves at the very heart of mimēsis. That is what I really like about the two artists mentioned; the fact that it is not pure mimēsis, in the sense of ‘realism’ or even ‘hyperrealism’. Of course it looks like the real thing, but there are different kinds of resemblance; as I understand it, this means that while the drawing evokes something very real — through technique, through talent (yes), through texture — it stands apart from it; it is as if it were placed alongside the real. I am not sure if I am making myself clear.

 

Drawing is the life of a line, or of lines, for — if you will excuse me, Mr Focillon — there is no such thing as ‘touch’ in drawing; ‘touch’ is the preserve of painting. Drawing, in the purest sense, is characterised by the line. Of course, a drawing may consist of things other than lines, but ‘touch’ is not one of them. Indeed, for a drawing to be alive, a single line may suffice.

It is alive because every line exists. Existence is not contingent on being alive. The centaur exists in ‘my’ imagination, but it is not alive. The stone exists as a stone, but it does not live. The work of art exists as such, but the fact that it is alive reveals yet another ‘higher’ state. There is nothing mystical about this. That is why we sense when a work speaks to us: it is because ‘something’ emanates from it, and that something, once again, we can call ‘life’. And this life can manifest itself in various ways: emotion, sensation, impression, intellect, and so on. When faced with this drawing — or rather, its image, of course — I feel the pleasure of what I call the ‘gap in mimēsis’. Allow me to quote myself: ‘And so it is here that we find the origin of the gap in mimēsis: the artist imitates nature, nature imitates the work, but since exact reproduction is impossible, there is a dissonance between artistic mimēsis and natural mimēsis’

This is where the difference lies, though it is barely perceptible. Let us put it this way: there are three types of artists when it comes to mimēsis. The first believes that by reproducing a flower, his flower resembles a ‘real’ flower. But this is an illusion, and that is why hyperrealists are so tedious (in his own way, Monory must surely have known this, he who so often covered everything in blue). Then there is the artist who completely fails to achieve resemblance or evocation, and thus, at the very least, the asymptote. And this is what the third type of artist does not fail to achieve; she inhabits the asymptote (here, then, Schwalb, as we have understood). The asymptote, as we know, is a mathematical term. In layman’s terms, it expresses the idea that two straight lines, or curves, or whatever, can approach one another to infinity without ever touching. In the real world of mathematics, it seems that this assumption is false. But that is of no concern to us, for we are not operating within the realm of mathematics, but within layman’s understanding of the concept. And that is precisely what appeals to us because, in any case, that is how we see it: the best mimēsis is asymptotic: ‘it’ resembles and ‘it’ does not resemble.

We read that, in its history, drawing is concerned with the line (grammon) and shadow, the latter falling under the category of skiagraphy, σκιά (skia) ‘shadow’, and γράφω (grapho) ‘to write, to draw’. The daughter of Dibutades of Sicyon, as we know, invented drawing. Her lover — in the literal sense, the young man she loves — has just set off on a long journey. As he moves, his shadow, cast on the wall by the light of a lamp, appears. As Pliny writes, she then ‘outlined with lines [lineis circumscripsit] the shadow [umbram] of the projected face’ (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XXXV). Antiquity knew nothing of prehistory, of course; consequently, since everything must have an origin, there had to be a person who invented drawing, which makes for a magnificent legend. If we follow the legend, drawing therefore has its origin in the line. In Classical Greece, drawing was the λεπτότης (“leptotes”) — delicate, fine – and γραμμον (“grammon”) — line.

About skiagraphy:

It seems quite clear that here Schwalb is concerned with the body — often, presumably, a female one — but in the piece above, it is ambiguous. And that, too, is what makes it interesting. We note the tradition (a copper point, dating from the Renaissance), and the contemporary element — the use of elements outside the ‘tradition’: fire, smoke, wax. The whole thing is strange. One might be tempted to say more, but sometimes, to say anything at all is already to say too much. One need only enlarge the image to feel a sense of unease:

We could, once again, put a name to what we ‘feel’, but what ‘purpose’ would art serve if it could be summed up in words?

Another one:

The image does not convey the impression of a headdress (need we even point this out?). Unless… unless the artist had reasons for choosing this title. But we do not know the artist. We could imagine a story, but we prefer to leave that to the reader’s imagination. Let us turn to the drawing. Here again, we see elements that lie outside tradition, though not outside the tradition of contemporary art. Since its emergence in the 1960s, contemporary art has set new standards. One might think that Schwalb, with his drawing in the 1970s and 1980s, established some of these standards in this field

It is delicate, beautiful, powerful. I like it very much. One naturally thinks of a body — in this case, a female one — and notices the diversity of the poïesis at work, poïesis being both the process and the result of ‘artistic creation’, which here takes the form of tears, streaks, drips, and even cattail (Typha), with its long bristles.

Here again, in this drawing — which seems to be part of a series — ambiguity reigns. Is it a flower, or a part of the body? 

The years 1979–82 seem to have represented a feminist expression, whilst, years later, one gets the impression that the artist has adopted a more objective approach, as seen here:

 

The formal elements of graphic art are dot, line, plane, and space […] The dead centre being the point, our first dynamic act will be the line. [Paul Klee, Creative Confession and other writings, Tate Publishing, 2013]  

 

The line has become more geometric, though this is not systematic either. The lines seem to have become vectors; can you not sense the force at work? But is there a point of convergence? A distinct sense of volume (two in the lower section) and of speed. For Schwalb, the line is a vector. 

In his famous Elements, Euclid writes: ‘A line is a length without width.’ By definition, it is in fact impossible to represent a line, since any drawn line necessarily has a width. Much has changed since Euclid’s time, however, and in Hermann Grassmann’s work (1844) we read that ‘lines may also be regarded as intensive magnitudes’ [Hermann Grassmann, A New Branch of Mathematics. The Ausdehnungslehre of 1844 and Other Works, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 1995].

For 30 years, Grassmann’s research — which was, after all, to pave the way for the innovation of vector calculus — was completely ignored, and no one in the field of mathematics recognised that a point could potentially ‘contain’ a line, and thus that the point possessed a potential for becoming. This idea was taken up, however, in the field of philosophy by Whitehead, who was (also) a physicist and mathematician by training, gradually evolving into a philosopher, and who went on to theorize ‘feeling’ as vectorial in 1929. But that is another story.