On the moving line and the future subjunctive of drawing in a post-Duchampian age

Abstract

This article proceeds from the position of an in-depth analysis of present visual art practice, in so far as it reflects past histories and contains the germ of a not very enticing future. Beginning with the refusal of contemporary art to define its field (contrary to the evolving skill- and specialist-based practices of other art forms), it is argued that post-modern artists exploit the universalist doctrines of conceptual art to plunder other disciplines in a romantic, laisser-faire, if ironic manner. This colonisation is the result of post-modern theory and the influence of Duchamp and a consequence of the abandonment of drawing in its structural relation to art practice. In arguing for the importance of abstract and conceptual ways of exploring new ideas through drawing (as a complex and rhyzomic set of graphic connections, evolving in time) distinction is made between the rigidly systematic and the broadly systemic infrastructure of drawing in relation to creative acts. Following a notion borrowed from the short-lived Polish writer Bruno Schulz, that ‘time is too narrow for all events’, the second part of the article proposes an alternative post-Duchampian future dependent on the slogan ‘there cannot be a future for art without drawing, and drawing is the future of art’. Within this practice-based scenario, artists will also have to re-invent a culture of philosophical and moral responsibility for representation, specifically in relation to the field of animation, the meeting of drawing and high technology. This field cynically promotes brutality and pornography of all kinds, within negative graphic images of sexist and racist stereotypes, yet falls outside of artistic discourse. The recovery of drawing is linked to questions of artistic agency as well as notions of critique and probity.