Henri Michaux: To Draw the Flow of Time

Notes on the words...

1. The intensity of emotion, of a desire to make art. The speed of the mind, the immediate need for expression, a change in circumstance and a fixation on a thought or desire and need to make it become tangible- whole or occupying a physical space. Essentially, describing the racing of a creative mind and the need to create.

2. Thoughts or feelings that remain indescribable are equal to abstract images that seem visible, seem definable but remain just out of reach, like a blurred vision or a combination of unusually mixed feelings.

As art historian Michael Newman suggests, the meaning of drawing’s specific qualities is conditioned by the field of other visual technologies with which it shares a space at any one time. As verb or as noun, drawing will appear differently when considered in relation to painting or to writing, to sculpture or printmaking, to photography, film, or digital media. Indeed, it is argued here that a richer and more precise conception of drawing’s specific capacities can be arrived at by exploring its alignments with, and differences from, other forms of practice, rather than by attempting to determine the properties supposedly intrinsic to drawing in itself. Because the field of available technologies is constantly shifting, this kind of relational definition of drawing would also need to be acknowledged as historically contingent.

The more precise implication of Newman’s argument is that the impact of digital media has been so dramatic as to force into alignment existing ‘analogue’ technologies, specifically drawing and photography, which have conventionally been considered to operate very differently.2 As is frequently noted, when compared with the digital, analogue photography’s indexicality becomes newly prominent.3 We might add that film’s celluloid support, composed as it is of a linear, discontinuous sequence of internally continuous frames, also gains new visibility in a digital age. This essay explores some ways in which our conception of drawing is reconfigured by the arrival of digital media. One aspect of this is to extend the implications of Newman’s insight, and to consider drawing’s relationship with film: to explore the notion of what the poet and artist Henri Michaux called ‘cinematic drawing’.

A second aim, however, is to exceed the specifically technological dimension of the analogue/digital opposition, and to explore the way in which this binary might also be used to specify a conception of thinking as backgrounded by the body’s liveliness and interference. That is, how concepts and processes associated with the analogue are particularly attuned to articulating the kinds of conversions involved in embodied perception, as well as the intensive or affective register of those processes. This shift in emphasis draws the discussion away somewhat from the issue of medium specificity, and towards more phenomenological questions regarding duration and embodiment, which are nevertheless crucial in thinking about the production and reception of drawings.

Morley, S (2010) The Sublime, London: Whitechapel

https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/cinematic-drawing-in-a-digital-age