The performing machine

In this paper, art historian Sanneke Huisman and curator Sven Schlijper-Karssenberg discuss Jorrit Paaijmans’s drawing practice based on his recent performance installation Radical Drawing Device (RDD). Huisman and Schlijper-Karssenberg show the important role notions of physicality and craftsmanship play in Paaijmans’s hyperdrawing practice and demonstrate the ways in which Paaijmans uses these notions to question mechanization and craftsmanship in relation to the artistic practice and discipline of drawing. RDD, the case study of this text, is a tattoo machine made by Paaijmans that can only perform one action: applying a straight line onto the artist’s arm. The authors argue that with RDD, Paaijmans continues his research into physicality, as well as reflects on the status of drawing in relation to technology, time and the passage of time. The paper further shines light on the ways in which the work encourages reflection on being human in a technological society.

Egological meets ecological: Drawing aspects in perspective(s)

Aspects of Edmund Husserl’s egological phenomenology and James J. Gibson’s ecological visual perception theory are construed dialectically for the purpose of informing the teaching of drawing, with an emphasis on understanding relationships between viewer positions and objects in the environment as represented through geometric projection systems. Such a grounding is conducive to a drawing practice capable of insights leading to new knowledge of our relationships with our environment, both egological and ecological, in an art school curriculum currently distorted by neo-liberal trends from the core study of visual perception and communication.

‘We Will Draw with Anyone about Anything’: A homage to Steve Lambert

This paper describes the conceptually democratic drawing project, ‘We Will Draw with Anyone about Anything’. This action research activity explores the communicative value of collaborative drawing while promoting the deskilling of preconceived institutional necessities for rendering expertise. Exploring the interdependency that is entailed in sitting down at a table and having a collaborative face-to-face conversation with another human being can be different from the modes of communication that comprise the digitized sphere. This project aspires to engage participants in collective visual knowing and simultaneously be a critique of the commodified capitalist approach to drawing practice.

Re-reading Merleau-Ponty through the language of drawing

In order to present visual art as a paradigm for philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty investigated the creative processes of artists whose work corresponded closely with his philosophical ideas. His essays on art are widely valued for emphasizing process over product, and for challenging the primacy of the written word in all spheres of human expression. While it is clear that he initially favoured painting, in his late work Merleau-Ponty began to develop a much deeper understanding of the complexities of how art is made in parallel with his advancement of a new ontology. In this article I focus on the materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s work in progress through an examination of his unfinished manuscript and working notes in the Bibliothèque national de France (BnF) in Paris. Through a reflection on the potential of these archive documents to reveal new insights into his working processes, I establish a connection to Merleau-Ponty’s own embodied thought mechanisms to uncover comparative methods of enquiry to those used in drawing practice.

Screened screens screening: Boundaries and boundary-drawing practices during COVID-19

This short piece concerns the figure of the screen as a boundary object and screening as a boundary-drawing practice during COVID-19. The screen is understood of as a surface that filters, shields, protects, conceals, mediates, intrudes and on which images can be projected and made visible. This text links together and thinks through various instantiations of the figure of the screen, such as digital screens and face masks. In so doing, it makes visible the ways in which the digital, affective and embodied screens and screening practices shape the perception of and response to COVID-19 in various contexts, as well as the multiple and often contradictory ways in which boundaries of spaces and bodies are materialized and undone.

Analisis Pemenuhan Standar Sarana dan Prasarana Sekolah

The purpose of this study was to determine the fulfillment of facilities and infrastructure of general learning spaces, supporting spaces and special learning spaces at SMK Almamater Telaga. This type of research is quantitative with the type of descriptive research. Data collection techniques using interviews, observation, data collection instruments and documentation. The results of the study are 1) the facilities and infrastructure of the general learning space are met according to the standards, and not according to the standards namely Biology Lab, Physics Lab, Chemistry Lab, Natural Sciences, Language Lab and technical drawing practice room. Whereas the facilities for 2 classrooms are in accordance with the standard and 13 classrooms, the library, and the computer lab are not yet in accordance with the standard, 2) the supporting facilities and infrastructure are met according to the standard, toilets, counseling rooms, UKS, and circulation rooms not according to standards, 3) facilities and special learning space infrastructure are not yet up to standard. Suggestions in this research are to pay more attention to the development of LAB infrastructure in Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Science, Technical Drawing Practice Room, Counseling Room, UKS Room and circulation room. In addition, the area of special learning space for all majors is adjusted according to the work area of each department.

Pursuing the prepositions of drawing

This article is part of a wider research project exploring connections between ideas of grammar and drawing. Here, prepositions are the focus ‐ tiny, overlooked, undeniably ubiquitous words that articulate crucial relations between their dominant cousins, verbs and nouns. They are dwelt on here for carrying deep metaphorical overtones and having considerable potential for visual engagement. The discussion is situated ‐ in section 1 ‐ via the playfully poetical philosophy of Michel Serres, and ‐ in section 2 ‐ through Barbara Tversky’s thought-provoking analyses of highly integrated verbal-visual patterning within the mechanics of thinking. Section 3 introduces the author’s visual glossary of grammar, currently in development. This aims to present the underpinning energy of grammatical forms which are key to language production, using simple visualizations to communicate the aesthetic drive of syntax in its organization of words. The digital drawings presented hark back to the formalized modernist abstractions considered in the first section, but also to the glyphs and basic visual vocabulary of common diagrams that have been analysed by Tversky. The article ends by suggesting that the crucial qualities of prepositions ‐ being on the edge and in between, rather than obviously central to meaning like nouns and verbs ‐ resonate particularly well with current tendencies in drawing practice and wider cultural debates.

Drawing: Practice and politics

This article focuses on my recent pen and ink drawings, which are multi-panelled works on paper dealing with wars, migration and political themes. They are contextualized in relation to a long career of disruptive themes, as well as the critique and celebration of cities and places through the employment of architectonic, mechanistic and landscape imagery. They are intended to function as visual metaphors for social, cultural and historical narratives. My subject-matter and the deliberate referentiality of drawn detail and semi-recognizable objects, constructions and spaces are discussed in relation to formal issues of texture, manipulation of space and perspectival ambiguity. These relate to some of the ideas about the strategies of making and the special status and properties of drawing that I formulated in my book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Drawing, 2010. I suggest in conclusion that my life-long commitment to the austerity and economy of drawing reflects my early training in South Africa.

Sensing and Presencing Rare Plants through Contemporary Drawing Practice

Navigating through three distinct sites of knowledge ‐ the seventeenth-century treatise on Malabar’s plants, Hortus Malabaricus; historical herbaria; and protected areas of remote forests and coastal regions of Kerala ‐ the project will stimulate innovative modes of drawing through considerations relating to the collection and preservation of rare plants. Generating a distinctive body of artworks at world-leading plant science research facilities and in the bio-diverse South Indian rainforest, the research asks: can drawing represent the vulnerabilities and resilience of rare plants, not through illustration and gathering information by creating marks on a substrate, but as a material phenomenon that can generate new knowledge?