Drawing and the Ideology of Industrialization

Abstract

1) Typical titles in these categories include Geometrical and Graphical Essays, by George Adams (1791), The Practice of Isometrical Perspective, by Joshua Jopling (1833), Treatise on Isometrical Drawing, by Peter Sopwith (1834), The Carpenter's Guide: a Complete Book of Lines for Carpenters (8th ed. 1828), Rudiments of Cabinet and Upholstery Furniture, by R. Brown (1822), An Essay in Ornamental Design, by D. R. Hay (1844), A Manual for Teaching Model from Solid Models, by B. Williams (1843), The Science of Simplified, or the Elements of Form Demonstrated by Models, by B. W. Hawkins (1843), The Oxford Book, etc., by N. H. Whittock (1825 several eds.), Elements of Perspective Drawing, by A. O. Deacon (1841), for Young Children, by H. Grant (1833), First Exercises for Children in Light, Shade and Colour, by H. Cole (1840), The Lessons in Art, by J. D. Harding (1835, etc. many eds.). I am indebted in some points to an unpublished thesis by David Jeremiah entitled Drawing and Design: Theory and Practice, 18301870, University of Reading, 1971. Accompanying these texts are many manuals on drawing instruments and their use and a spate of inventions to assist the draftsman, culminating in the camera. Machines were devised for drawing elipses and parabolas, for enlarging or contracting drawings, and so forth. Beam and telescopic compasses came into regular use, as did geometrical pens, complex dividers, proportional compasses, and innumerable forms of rulers. The modern T-square and protractor were first illustrated in 1830. The primary instrument of all, the humble pencil, was also coded for the first time, and by 1830, HH for engineers, H for architects, F for sketching, and B for shading were recorded. The combination of drawing instrument and hard pencil was devised to provide exactly that determinate line that the is an activity fundamental to human action. It belongs with counting and speaking as being a primary form of cognition. A people that did not draw would be as unimaginable as one that did not count or speak, and, if not too pedantic about how drawing is defined, we may assert that the activity of making lines is a mode of thought. A line, as it extends, takes in the world, and because drawing may be both descriptive and prescriptive, lines can model possible worlds. The form used to represent the worlds (the objects) we seek to make is, preeminently, drawing. The first industrial revolution required new graphic conventions to communicate its need for precision, and, therefore, many books and pamphlets on drawing were written in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Some of these were fundamental textbooks in isometric projection; others were useful manuals for tradesmen and apprentices. Still others were for the general education of young people and amateur artists or for the developing profession of designer. (In British usage, this term meant those who drew designs for applied ornament and was distinguished from mechanical drawing.) The majority of these books attempted to treat drawing in a systematic manner, and a smaller number treated it as a science, presenting sets of axioms to use to analyze a drawing problem. The latter now encroach on the territory occupied by teaching machines and computer-driven drafting tables.' Most taught a dry, linear style of drawing. Literature is part of the process of mass education that any newly industrialized society demands; it was the earliest example of the process still under way in Third World countries. The process entails a profound epistemological upheaval, a shift from metaphorical to instrumental thought, and the teaching of drawing at such a juncture is obviously part of an ideological struggle to transform human understandings. Descriptive drawings of machines, mines, and buildings are, of course, very ancient types of drawing; but industrial production at that time demanded a prescriptive clarity that could convey unambiguous instructions in a universally comprehensible code. This was equally true in both decorative and mechanical design. In the preface to his description of the building of the Eddy-