Rethinking the graphic trace in performative drawing

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article critically investigates the ‘graphic trace’, commonly perceived in drawings as marks left from physical actions. It is a notion fundamental to current art practices engaging performance and experimental drawing. The graphic trace is investigated through ‘inscription’, which is popularly interpreted as the visual expression of thought through marks or imprints of physical movements, from free-hand sketching to tracing choreographic movements. A critique of this inscriptive ideology shows that the inscribed trace as ‘line’ expresses thought under vitalist schemas exemplified by Bergson’s notion of multiplicity, that life is prompted by a creative event, and Deleuze’s articulation of such an event as ‘lines of thought’. The critique proposed in this article is that a more radically discursive and exceptional event, or ‘multiplicity’, does not really take place. An overview is given of performative, choreographic and process-led practices since the 1970s, while unpacking philosophical concepts of gesture, movement and embodiment. The conclusion lays out the paradox that the graphic trace stultifies thinking, offsetting a more materialist kind of event that affirms discourse in exceptionally different ways.