Traces II: Drawing \ Poetry

Drawing | Poetry

The present exhibition is the second event in a biennial series created by the Jerusalem Artist’s House, in collaboration with the Jerusalem Print Workshop, and Ticho House. The previous exhibition was curated by Ilan Wizgan two years ago. The purpose of the bi-annual exhibits is to present a snapshot of contemporary drawing in Israel. But even this preliminary definition raises a problem. As opposed to the concreteness of space, “contemporariness,” a category of time, cannot be defined. There is no definite “now.” In our fast-paced reality, are drawings from the year 2000 still “contemporary”? Is Moshe Kupferman (whose work is featured in the exhibition) “contemporary”? Is Yosl Bergner (also exhibited) “contemporary”? There are no simple answers because there is no definite quantity which can be called “contemporary time.” Even those who reject the validity of the Nietzschean (so called “postmodern”) aphorism – “there are no facts, only interpretations” – in respect to reality in general, can certainly accept it in relation to the amorphous concept of time. There is no “now,” only its interpretations. The word “contemporary” – seemingly value-free, denoting a fact, is no more than a way for people to give a designation to what is important in their eyes. “Contemporary art” is a code, whose goal is always to keep other kinds of art out of bounds.
The adjective “contemporary” attempts to convert a private evaluation into a physical “fact,” anchored in “natural” time. But time works in a much more complicated fashion, than what can be implied in the naïve notion of “contemporary art,” which is tantamount to saying “worthy art,” on the margins of which “anachronistic,” and “conservative” trends can be found. “Historical” processes can be at work “now” as powerfully as phenomena that just recently cropped up on the “contemporary” scene.
Seemingly contemporary trends often contain older elements that have undergone a transformation. Art’s existence in time is unlike that of fashion items: art has a memory. Art accumulates on top of previous things. And if it tries to forget, its temporal existence becomes even more conspicuous. It is thus similar to, or representative of, the way human existence is temporal. Children and grandchildren do not erase their parents. In mysterious ways they contain them, without being their exact copies. Art too works this way.

This exhibition does not pretend to offer a panoramic view of the state of the art of Israeli drawing at the end of 2004. Its purpose is to present one of many possible views of “the Israeli present” in drawing. I will leave to others to attempt and characterize this interpretation of the present, but it clearly is not a reflection of what is considered the mainstream of Israeli art. The exhibition is being shown not in Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem, which is to say, in the “periphery”. The venue lends it a certain character, a certain spirit. If it is difficult to imagine this exhibit in Tel-Aviv, our purpose has been achieved.

A Few Lines about Drawing and Poetry

The Exhibition
What is Drawing?

The Exhibition

Drawing “Now”The present exhibition is the second event in a biennial series created by the Jerusalem Artist’s House, in collaboration with the Jerusalem Print Workshop, and Ticho House. The previous exhibition was curated by Ilan Wizgan two years ago. The purpose of the bi-annual exhibits is to present a snapshot of contemporary drawing in Israel. But even this preliminary definition raises a problem. As opposed to the concreteness of space, “contemporariness,” a category of time, cannot be defined. There is no definite “now.” In our fast-paced reality, are drawings from the year 2000 still “contemporary”? Is Moshe Kupferman (whose work is featured in the exhibition) “contemporary”? Is Yosl Bergner (also exhibited) “contemporary”? There are no simple answers because there is no definite quantity which can be called “contemporary time.” Even those who reject the validity of the Nietzschean (so called “postmodern”) aphorism – “there are no facts, only interpretations” – in respect to reality in general, can certainly accept it in relation to the amorphous concept of time. There is no “now,” only its interpretations. The word “contemporary” – seemingly value-free, denoting a fact, is no more than a way for people to give a designation to what is important in their eyes. “Contemporary art” is a code, whose goal is always to keep other kinds of art out of bounds.
The adjective “contemporary” attempts to convert a private evaluation into a physical “fact,” anchored in “natural” time. But time works in a much more complicated fashion, than what can be implied in the naïve notion of “contemporary art,” which is tantamount to saying “worthy art,” on the margins of which “anachronistic,” and “conservative” trends can be found. “Historical” processes can be at work “now” as powerfully as phenomena that just recently cropped up on the “contemporary” scene.
Seemingly contemporary trends often contain older elements that have undergone a transformation. Art’s existence in time is unlike that of fashion items: art has a memory. Art accumulates on top of previous things. And if it tries to forget, its temporal existence becomes even more conspicuous. It is thus similar to, or representative of, the way human existence is temporal. Children and grandchildren do not erase their parents. In mysterious ways they contain them, without being their exact copies. Art too works this way.This exhibition does not pretend to offer a panoramic view of the state of the art of Israeli drawing at the end of 2004. Its purpose is to present one of many possible views of “the Israeli present” in drawing. I will leave to others to attempt and characterize this interpretation of the present, but it clearly is not a reflection of what is considered the mainstream of Israeli art. The exhibition is being shown not in Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem, which is to say, in the “periphery”. The venue lends it a certain character, a certain spirit. If it is difficult to imagine this exhibit in Tel-Aviv, our purpose has been achieved.One might describe the exhibit as having a “traditional” air, and be content with the definition. But the word “tradition” is also used in a way that requires clarification. In the Israeli art world “traditional” is a euphemism for “benighted,” or “reactionary.” This is true also when the term is used in relation to Israeli society. Someone “traditional” is neither “religious” nor “secular,” i.e. someone who elected to be tepid, rather than cold or hot. “Traditional” is a derogatory word used to describe someone who drives a car to synagogue on the Sabbath (in violation of Orthodox observance) on the way to a soccer match (another violation). Similarly, in the context of the art world the term “traditional” is reserved for an artist who no longer can function like the Old Masters, but who also refuses to play the “contemporary” game, the taken-for-granted fashions of the art world.But, in truth, there is no “untraditional art.” There is the Raphaelite tradition, a Rembrandt tradition, a Cézanne tradition, but also a Duchamp tradition and a Rauschenberg tradition. In Israel today, artists in the tradition of Duchamp (for argument’s sake) are not considered “traditional”, and they tend, derisively for the most part, to label artists from other traditions as “traditional” (when they are in a benign mood). But in fact, what we have here are two different traditions in competition with one another, not a faded “tradition of the past” facing a vibrant “contemporary art.” The hegemonic tradition at a given historical moment will designate its own proximate environment as “contemporary art” and its competitors as producing “traditional” – hence, “backward” art.The reason is simple: the competition is primarily a competition over resources. Competition over collectors and their money, over prestige and honors, over students, over exhibition space, over governmental funding for art schools. The wars are religious wars. And there is no reason to assume that Religion B is more just than Religion A, simply because it came later. Any Jew knows that.
Traces II exhibits the work of many artists that could be called “traditional.” What they have in common is their effort to forge an image, their struggle with an object (be it a landscape, a portrait, an object – imaginary or real), and their hesitation between different artistic choices: what is “the past” in art, and what is “the present”? And, as a result, what is “the future”? When Boris Lekar draws an elephant, transporting us to prehistoric cave drawings, where on the time grid does he belong?

“Drawing answers questions with questions,” writes Joshua Neustein. To be fashionable is to know the answer to the question: “what is the right way to be.” The√ works exhibited here don’t display such confidence.

The EncounterTraces II adds an additional dimension to the model proposed by the first exhibition. Besides being a visual art exhibition, it hosts another art: poetry. The reason for joining the two will be explained below. I merely wish to explain now, briefly, how the encounter was orchestrated. I approached sixteen poets and asked them to choose any works from the exhibit they wished to address. The resulting poems are not an “ekphrasis” (“a verbal representation of a visual representation”). The work of the poets featured here, without exception, was inspired by the visual works they chose, but not as a direct representation of them. The relationship between the visual and the written has been often perceived (since the time of Leonardo da Vinci) as one of competition. The competition often is reflected in the fact that a poet chooses to represent only a tiny portion of a painting, to “distort” the visual, or “add” details that are not visible on the surface, etc. In fact, the mere act of speech about the visual representation is always “competitive,” because it activates an “incommensurate” mode for relating to the object. These poems have chosen to turn their back to “what is seen,” and not to compete with vision – a contest that Leonardo knew would always be won by the visual – in order to say what “is to be said.”Ayana Lekach turns Audrey Bergner’s seashells into humans; Sivan Beskin enters Meir Appelfeld’s houses and perceives events and objects in them which were not drawn; Tomer Lichtash locks Sidon Rothenberg’s figures inside a prison that “is not there”; Yochai Oppenheimer writes a family scenario, and in doing so “steals” the suicide from Kafka’s story “the Judgment” which Yosl Bergner has interpreted, transferring it into a different family context. Asher Schechter places a monologue in the mouth of a self portrait of Uzi Katzav, appropriating the painter’s “self”; Alex Ben-Ari turns Rachel Weinberger’s drawings into private family pictures. We should try to understand the gap, the poet’s anchoring point in the drawing, to see what she or he has taken from it, what he or she has “not seen” in it. The poem remains a poem – the drawing, a drawing. But between them something else is created, something transparent and resonant, an additional crack through which the observer can enter.In addition, we launched a “symmetrical-opposite” project, at the Jerusalem Print Workshop, in collaboration with the Workshop’s director Arik Kilemnik. The poems written for the exhibit at the Jerusalem Artists House were given to Arik, who handed them to four print artists. Here, the artists responded to the poems, not the poets to the artists. The result, at the Jerusalem Print Workshop is a sort of miniaturized mirror images of the central exhibit at the Artists House, creating an additional layer of dialogue where the “distortion” and “competition” can be read in obverse, from the artists’ point of view, this time. In addition Timna Seligman from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem curated an exhibition of Aviva Uri’s drawings at Ticho House.
What is Drawing?

The history of art theory in the West is replete with answers to this question. Charles Le Brun (1672) thought that “design imitates everything that is real, whereas colour represents the accidental.” Vasari (1568) defined drawing as the visible expression and declaration of the concept in the spirit of the artist.” Cennini (1437) made a distinction between “drawing” as an internal idea, and drawing “on paper.” Leonardo thought of drawing as an instrument of scientific investigation. Rawson gave a formal definition: “Drawing I take to mean: that element in a work of art which is independent of colour or actual three-dimensional space, the underlying conceptual structure which may be indicated by tone alone.” Zuccari (1607) identified drawing with the Platonic “idea” of an object; Max Liebermann, some 300 years later, defined drawing as “the art of omission”; Paul Klee saw drawing as an opportunity for “psychic improvisation”. Cézanne, who inaugurates “our” era in art said: “Drawing and painting are no longer different factors. When you paint you draw; the greater the harmony of the colors, the more accurate the drawing becomes…when the color appears in all its richness, the form also reaches fullness.”What, then, is drawing? In an age when it’s hard to tell the difference between “painting” and “drawing in color,” it may be best to speak of the “drawing element,” or the “drawing essence” of an art work. “Drawing progresses from the stable to the chaotic,” Neustein writes. As far as appearances go, this assertion is unfounded. After all, there are many drawings which exhibit an opposite movement, a striving for the stable and disciplined, toward the realist “pictorial” effect. But it seems that Neustein does not mean to describe drawing, but to describe rather what I choose here to term the drawerly (as a neologistic counterpart to “painterly”), which may be defined as the element within an art work that progresses from the stable to the chaotic.”Drawing” according to this approach, does not focus on the materiality of the art work (surface, medium) but rather its spiritual essence. Such a definition, can, metaphorically speak of the “drawerly” element in the novel, the “drawerly” element in a symphony, and the “drawerly” element in a dance. By the same token one can speak of a “non-drawerly” drawing, that is, a painterly drawing.Menashe Kadishman wrote: drawing is the desire to understand the form behind the form. Here too, it is best to take the word “drawing” metaphorically. We may say that the art work which attempts to understand the form behind the form is an art work that has internalized “drawerly” values, or a “drawerly” art work. Thus for example, Kafka’s and Joyce’s novels will be novels, to employ the metaphorical usage, with strong “drawerly” elements, both because of their progress from the stable to the chaotic, and also because of their unresolved preoccupation with their own form. Much of Jazz music could be defined, metaphorically, as “drawerly” music. On the other hand many classic academic drawings are not “drawerly” but rather “photographic” in their intention.
Drawing NowIn speaking of the “drawerly element” in art there is the danger of completely obfuscating the obvious. Indeed, in much of writing about art today, the next step has already been taken. One doesn’t talk about the “drawerly element” in art, but rather different types of artistic activity are spoken of as “drawing” – without the caveat about its metaphorical usage. The word “drawing” currently carries a great many different meanings. The distance between Dürer’s drawings to those of Rembrandt, and later Georges Seurat (great draftsmen of the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries respectively) is, by any account, large. However, a “familial” relation between them can still be discerned. One can speak about Seurat and Rembrandt in the same breath. The tail-end of this breath will still allow one to speak of works from roughly the end of the same era (Seurat’s of course), such as Cy Twombly or Jasper Jones (mid 20th century), who still worked on a two-dimensional surface using traditional drawing techniques, albeit while deconstructing the tradition of drawing.That distance today has manifestly increased. The term “drawing,” at least in its usage within a critical discourse, includes among other things, preparatory stills for video work, blind “drawing” (the artist observes the object and draws without looking at the paper, in what appears to be a theoretical exercise inspired by Derrida), improvisational theater, drawing of musical notes in graphic form, computerized animation for the movies, and more. Almost any art that includes an element of improvisation, according to this line of thought, is “drawing” or a “sketch”, and since art generally today tends to include such “free” elements, “everything is drawing.” Artist Lucy Gunning treats the studio space as paper, and drawing is defined vaguely as something that happens on the way to making something else. A preparatory photo-still developed quickly, is, according to this conception, a “drawing,” or even a drawing “conventionally defined” by virtue of the fact that it produces an immediate result while using limited means, en route to the creation of another more “finished” art work. The movements of the camera are not considered by Gunning very different from the movements of the pencil.” This is how drawing is spoken of today. It seems as though this type of drawing is similar to what in the Renaissance was called “pensiero” or “a sketch” in contemporary terms – the first draft of an idea, and not the other, more studious, investigatory, stages of drawing (“schizzo,” “studio,” and “disegno”). Thus, “drawing” is perceived of as a “free” term, and its metaphorical use is looser still. This current state of affairs forms the background to this exhibit, if certainly not its logos. Traces II presents the “drawerly” aspect of drawing. If everything in art is drawing, even drawing may be called drawing.Apart from the broadening of the term “drawing” today, there is some obscurity about the character of contemporary drawing. In the last few years two books have come out proclaiming the “last word” about drawing, yet presenting opposite descriptions of the present moment. On the one hand Drawing Now (2002) presents contemporary drawing under the title “drawing as a noun,” as opposed to “drawing as a verb” (as Richard Serra suggested). Artists in this collection do not see drawing as a vehicle for expressing processes or action, but rather as a vehicle for presenting a finished thing. Sometimes this kind of drawing is called ‘projective’ (Yve-Alain Bois coined the term), that is, drawing that realizes ideas that were fully formed at the thought stage, and do not seek anything beyond what was already in the mind of the artist. Drawing “as a noun” does not search for form, but rather realizes it.
As opposed to the “drawing as a noun” thesis, another, equally contemporary outlook exists, which was mentioned above. What is Drawing? (2003) presents artists whose interest lies entirely in drawing “as a verb,” as process. The drawings of Claude Heath are a complete testimony to the undisturbed process of the drawing hand. His works are pure process. Lucy Gunning also declares: “the destination is the journey.” These two different outlooks exist synchronously.The noun/verb dichotomy, like many other slogans of this kind, seems artificial and simplistic, a theoretical sound-byte, because every drawing is both verb and noun, as long as the human brain does not output directly to a printer, and as long as there are still objects to observe. At least, any hand-made work of art, even with the most virtuosic finish (say, an oil painting by Jan van Eyck) can be deciphered upon close scrutiny, as a “verb”, no matter how finished its manifestation as a “noun” might be. In fact, the most fascinating thing about many drawings, including those in the current exhibition, is precisely that phase between the process to the final stage of the work, which not always has been achieved. Of course, there are drawings which tend to retain in them the traces of their production process, to a lesser or greater degree, however, every drawing, having been produced in time, cannot be completely “verb-less.” Even a photograph, the “noun”-art par excellence, conceals many verbs: where the photographer stood, how she stood with the camera, how he worked in the darkroom, what camera she chose, etc.I noted at the beginning of this chapter a few of the historical definitions of drawing. What is important to us is to examine how valid these definitions are today. Sometimes it seems as though Klee’s definition is the only one which is pertinent in the eyes of artists who think about drawing. But “drawing” is not only “improvisation,” and not only “pensiero.” Drawing is not Art’s summer-camp, where every one can scribble to their heart’s desire. Moshe Barash writes: “The significance of the establishment of drawing as an independent medium…is one of the central expressions in the formulation of the new image of the artist. This is because the great appreciation accorded to drawing implies the belief that the artist’s vision is the source of the finished work.” Today when the notion of a “preparatory drawing” has almost disappeared, the burden placed on drawing is even heavier. Drawing is not an excuse for chatter, but the baring of the spirit, of the idea, or of the vision, whichever phrase one finds most fitting.
Drawing and TimeThe perfect painting – in fact more than one perfect painting — has already been painted. Perhaps there are no perfect musical compositions; perhaps there are no perfect literary works. But there are perfect paintings. No doubt, it may not be possible to agree over what is worthy of the title “perfect,” but it seems as though agreement can indeed be reached about the possibility of perfection in relation to the art of painting. At one time painting even strove to achieve such perfection. However, in respect to drawing such an ambition seems impossible. In drawing all symphonies are “unfinished,” even after the fixative has been applied to the paper. The medium of drawing will always signify, to a more or lesser degree, something partial, quivering, unrealizable and incomplete. Even “meticulous” realistic drawing always suggests the character of a preliminary draft by virtue of the materials it uses: the pencil, charcoal, or chalk. But this does not by any means entail defeatism or melancholy. On the contrary. There is no perfect drawing, and therefore every drawing can be perfect. Perfection, an impossibility in relation to the art of drawing as a whole, allows every individual drawing – partial, quick, sloppy, or fragmented – to claim full perfection within the “possibilities” of the medium, and its own specific goals. One might say that drawing is precisely the visual genre which permits imperfection and celebrates it. In its prior relinquishing of perfection it allows perfection in a place that is generally considered partial, damaged, or stammering. Therefore, especially today, drawing comfortably finds its place alongside poetry, as I will explain below.Drawing’s forfeiture of perfection is a direct consequence of its openness to time. Drawing, almost always, is an art with a strong “narrative” element. No matter how devoid of narrative the subject of the drawing is (for example: an etude by Dürer of a piece of fabric – is this a cloth, or an elevated mountain range beckoning a traveler?), drawing inevitably sketches a “map” of progress, of tarrying, of obstacles, of alternations of dark and light terrain. Drawings produced by computer graphics software are not included in the exhibit, just as poetry written by computers (and such applications exist today) does not grace these walls. Computerized drawing is perfect drawing and therefore tends to be uninteresting.Drawing leaves traces. In comparison with painting, it is difficult to obscure them, and for the most part drawing doesn’t want them to be obscured. Anywhere one finds a series of traces, in the metaphoric sense, one has a story. A story of labor. And where there is a story, there is time. Drawing can be a vehicle of expression for any subject, inanimate is it may be, but it will almost always say something about the time of the drawing’s creation. I mean time understood in an objective sense (short time, long time, a long time ago, fast, slow) but also something which may be called the psychic rhythm of the artist while at work on a drawing. The drawing does not preserve the order of time of its creation. The beginning is almost always shrouded in mist, like the end. We don’t know from which port of origin the pencil set sail. The drawing is given to us all at once. Yet it preserves the sum total of all the qualities of time that were experienced at the time of its creation, and therefore the sum total of all of the artist’s transient realities while at work. Drawing is a protocol of testimony of human existence as it changes in time, a testimony made visible to the eye. Now we can understand Neustein’s phraseology: for example the notions of investigation, fragility, the question and the progress towards the chaotic all derive from the quality of drawing as a preserver of time. Time engenders questions and investigation, the recognition of imperfection and fragility, separation and chaos. Only a work of art in which time plays such a vibrant part can strive for chaos, as Neustein says, or seek “the form behind the form,” that is the memory of form, as Kadishman says. A work of art that has no time is a “noun,” a finished and frozen form. A work that for some time was one thing, and then became something other, slowly turning into a third something – this is a form that can be examined in the gallery, and its archaeology can be traced. Drawing is the main avenue through which a consciousness which is unfinished, non-uniform, and imperfect, can arrive at a commensurate visual expression.
Drawing and Poetry”What notes, letters, journals, and first drafts are to the poet, drawings are to artists,” writes Joseph Meder in the introduction to his classic book on drawing. This may be so sometimes. But anyone who writes poetry knows that sometimes there are no notes, journals, or drafts “en route” to the poem: in many cases, and perhaps the most significant ones, the poem is the draft, the poem is the “note,” and the note is all there is. A few corrections and revisions may come later, but often a poem is written with one flourish of the pen, in a quiet ecstasy, unselfconsciously. Here one might modify Meder’s assertion and say: “Poems are to the poet what drawings are to artists.”
Poetry is a form of speech, “a kind of saying,” a special dialect of language, “a language within language.” Drawing is a form of visual presentation, “a kind of showing,” or a special dialect of art’s language. The special form of speech is not a mannerism. It flows from a unique vision of the world, and from the limits of quotidian linguistic expression. A poem, wrote Cleanth Brooks some sixty years ago, does not merely lead to a logical conclusion according to the development of its “argument.” A poem is not only “thematics” just as a picture is not only an “image.” The “conclusion” of a poem is the processual reworking of a diverse system of tensions that unfold while the poem is read. Its “bottom line,” “what it is talking about,” “what the poet intended,” – all these have virtually no importance when it comes to poetry, and the same is true of drawing.Let’s take for example Uzi Katzav’s drawing of a glass. A drawing of a glass is not “merely” a drawn glass, but a representation of the “drama” of drawing it; that is to say its coming into being as an image drawn in time. The glass is also a representation of a cheap Israeli glass, familiar to everyone, but it is also a representation of a human existence in the time span which begins with the vessel-less sheet of paper, and which ends with the glass drawn on paper. This glass, despite the fact this it is half empty, contains a great deal. It cannot quench our thirst, but it can feast the eye. Therefore the similarity of the liquid in it to a tear. Without entering into a detailed analysis of this sketch, several qualities of spirit and time are discernable: the light region on the left, which is perhaps the problem the drawing is trying to solve; the background areas where the pencil gropes at different levels of intensity, like someone who takes a detours on side-paths, to avoid the cage of the lion that threatens him, a sort of whistle in the dark; the areas where light and material collide, and the passage of light through the glass’ handle where it falls onto the table with a crash that only the drawing can hear, and the long stain near the cup, where the heart beats wildly, because any false move might bring the entire structure tumbling down; the leg of the table, belonging to the middle realm between light and material, something vague, scarcely real, as though the eye cannot grasp both what is above and what is below the surface of the table, and vision has become clouded or glassy; and of course the entire bottom third of the sheet, of quivering and inscrutable lines, as if drawn with the left hand, a section which stands in a curious equation within this vertical “diptych,” in contrast to the solidity of the upper part, as though negating the entire experiment of trying to grasp something, writing a cancellation stub, or a summary, or a newly balanced structure, facing the upper part, the accomplished and sound part, sunk in thought, trying the pencil, muttering something. The “boring” leg of the table is not incidental: it draws attention to what is above it, the more important part, constructing the gaze from bottom to top, facing the empty half of the mug, as something which contains the emptiness within the material. This quality of the drawing, by the way, is compared explicitly by Ruskin to the rhetoric of poetry. Just as in many poems one may find what appears to be a “weak” line, which is “justified” rhetorically before the climax of a poem. Thus, for example, in Tamar Kroll’s poem (p. 57) “…where paths still bend” depicts a fairly standard landscape, only to allow the following stunning landscape-line to shine forth: “and hidden nature erupts like a fray.” The range of times that a drawing “remembers” always requires a length of time to observe the drawing, even if set on paper with Rembrandtian swiftness, so that one can try and identify the various times it contains. A drawing, like a poem, must be read “out loud,” the hand must trace the movement. A drawing will generally contains several “clocks,” like in Gyula Zilzer’s meta-artistic etching.
Therefore poetry cannot be read quickly, the way finely polished prose can sometimes be read. Only a poem strictly regimented by meter, that is to say, a poem whose music “remembers” only one kind of time, allows fast reading, and this is true only in the case where its semantics are not “struggling” against its mechanistic rhythm. (This will happen only with bad poetry). But a poem which has changing, unstable rhythms, requires slow reading, and in fact many readings, for the very same reason I spoke of in respect to drawing.Common to both of these “forms of speech,” poetry and drawing, is abstemiousness. Speech is limited. As a poet or draughtsman you always limit yourself. At the supply shop they will sell you canvases and tubes of paint, and with the same word processor you could have written a one-thousand page novel. But this self-limitation translates immediately to a potential advantage. The poet can say much less than the novelist. Most of the time she can say only one thing. But the power of this thing can sometimes reverberate so, that it multiplies and becomes an entire world of meaning, like a candle flame placed between two facing mirrors. The draughtsman, if we take up Uzi Katzav’s cup again, can express loneliness and living in a loose equilibrium at the edge of an abyss inside the home. How can one even speak of this? One does not speak. Instead one draws a half empty cup at the edge of the table. Orit Gidali sees here the “great desert near the city.” An entire novel, or a full-length feature film would be necessary to speak this cup, this desert.
Drawing and SpectacleDrawing and poetry are economically marginal art forms. Their market value is at the bottom of the price-list, even when we consider the more expensive artists. A Van Gogh drawing was sold at a tenth of the price of a Van Gogh painting (a tenth being equivalent to eight million U.S. dollars.) Economic value is at the base of the “artistic” hierarchy. How many people will admit that a small etching by Morandi is a hundred times more dear and valuable to them than an entire Correggio ceiling? An oil painting of the traditional kind derives much of its power from the illusion of “touch” that it affords the viewer (its owner, and later, the museum viewer). The illusion of touch enables the illusion of ownership of the painting as property, and what it represents (objects, women, lands) as more property. John Berger writes about the pleasure of gazing at something which expresses the possibility of its being “had,” like a model in an advertisement. Drawing, even when it uses color (that is when it is a “drawerly” painting), negates the illusion of touch, and therefore it “takes the wind out” of the illusion of taking and of proprietorship, whether it is only a sketch or a consummately finished drawing.
Something that contains many different times cannot become eternal property because it casts doubt on the concept of eternity as a “preferred” kind of time. Drawing always says: I will not give you the illusion of power and the pleasure of gazing at something which pleasurably speaks of its similarity to property, to a woman, to the landscape of a conquered land, to a home. I can only be a (serious) parody of all these. It is as though drawing always jokes about the illusion of touch and ownership which Berger places at the center of the cultural attitude toward Western art. Drawing will never allow the eye to touch. Drawing’s distance (irrespective of the subject matter, which may be intimate) is a matter of principle. Meir Appelfeld’s still life drawings, which seem to invite a bowing down and inwards, as in entering a Japanese home, will always remind us of their non-existence as utensils. If you look at them without their glass covering, you will see them crumble, like dust in the wind, a too-strong exhalation and they are almost erased. Such vessels, which can barely hold themselves up, how could they hold anything else?Therefore, our age may be more qualified to admire drawing, if our age were not such an admirer of money and spectacle. I admit that the preparatory sketches for the Sistine Chapel seem to me more digestible than their colorful counterparts on the ceiling, above the hordes of tourist crammed in to the point of suffocation, just as I will prefer many times over Michelangelo’s unfinished slave statues in the Galeria dell’Academia in Florence, over his David, exhibited in the same hall. The reasons are general aesthetic ones, but also trivial ones: David has been reproduced ad nauseum. The statue’s groin has been printed on men’s underwear. Hundreds of thousands of plaster replicas are sold throughout Florence. The ‘slaves’ are not, and never could be, popular or showy items. The “popification” of the statue is not completely unmotivated by the work of art, even if the work of art is not to blame for it. Pop sniffs outs the latent spectacular element in works of art and exploits them for its own ends. The crippled form of the slave statues has inoculated them against spectacle. Capitalism’s imperial forces have no interest in them. Try to imagine them on underwear.This is also true of several drawings. I admit, somewhat shamefacedly, that I cannot bear to gaze at a Rubens painting, while his drawings are dear to my heart. Without hesitation, I would take the drawings of Poussin, Lorrain, Van Dyke, Constable, or Turner any day over their paintings (this list could be extended, however such a swap is not being offered, for the time being at least). One can understand why so many people cannot bear so many paintings which are so far removed from the human scale as our own age has shaped it. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that the imagined addressee of many paintings includes the patron, and money, and the conversion of the painting into merchandise. Not every artist can (as Velasquez and Goya could) undermine the commercialism of the work in a subversive way. The drawings, particularly those which were not intended for exhibition, the travelogues, the sketchbooks of etudes, are innocent of it. When you don’t expect something to be bought, you don’t stick a price tag on it.
When Rubens paints, even if he is painting himself next to his wife, he is thinking of eternity. His addressee too, stands one thousand years down the road. Drawing, in comparison, is the most “mortal’ and most “temporary” of all art forms. It has no need for overstated prettifying or for exaggerated greatness because in any case it cannot proceed more than a few steps along this axis. Drawing does not think one thousand years ahead, but tries with all its might to remember the few minutes in which it came into being. Memory, Derrida notes, is involved in the act of drawing from the outset. Derrida wonders: how can someone claim to be looking at the model and at the drawn lines at the same time? Is it not necessary to be blind either to the object – or to the drawing? This is the precise exchange which drawing “seizes,” the time of the artist at work, the time of human decay which passes “slowly,” at life’s pace, seizing also the time of the construction of the drawing, which passes quickly (always faster than the pace of life), as against the “big” time, and carrying on a struggle against it (of that being built against that being destroyed), but also carrying on a dialogue of likeness and representation. Is not every drawing an abstract map of life, that is, always a metaphor of a journey (which has left traces on the very path it has itself created), just as every journey is the realization of the phrase “a way of life”? (This explains tourists’ regular disappointment after whirlwind tours of spectacular cities, as though they are saying to themselves: “is this really our life, no more?” A good drawing prevents this kind of response.)
Drawing and RevelationJames Elkins writes: “what matters in painting is pushing the mundane toward the instant of transcendence […] just as water heats up and then suddenly disappears.” A work of art has a “boiling point,” writes Elkins, and it must be brought just up to the verge of it. It cannot be allowed to evaporate and be lost, but it must be allowed almost to become something else, within the limits of its materiality (simple paints on a simple canvas). Reaching this boiling point, where the material and the ordinary cross the border into the artistic (some may call this moment a “revelation” or uncovering of the “truth” in a work of art) is much more difficult to do in drawing. It is harder to “boil” something “drawerly” compared to something “painterly.” Something “drawerly” always contains a reminder that it is mundane, earthbound, of this world, ordinary. A painting (its color, its finish) is a material form which submits much more easily to the kind of alchemical distillation that Elkins describes in his book. Drawing, even the most perfect kind, always refuses perfection, because it forfeits having full color. Therefore, when an artist manages to “boil” a drawing, and to transmute it from the realm of the mundane and ordinary, the achievement is even more impressive and heroic.
Drawing, by its nature, seeks a resting point between the empty page and the page which is scribbled to the hilt. Drawing is a compromise between the two. Each drawing is a new compromise. True, the empty page also lies in ambush for color, as does the fully painted surface (as in Rothko’s painting), but this is contrary to the palette’s nature, which is variegated and seeks to realize different hues. Drawing contains within it the dangerous seed of the “one”: the inherent danger of monotony, on the one hand, and on the other, of the void. Drawing tries to find the unfinished resting place between empty and full. Poetry is a stop between silence (a page of poetry usually contains more white than black) and ordinary speech. It is no longer silence, but not quite speech yet. This too is a possible definition of drawing.Heidegger writes: “The essence of art is poetry. The essence of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth.” The essence of art is the revelation of human existence, as it occurred in a particular place, at a particular time. The work of art testifies that this revelation occurred “here”, in this work of art, and for the first time. It is possible to discern two kinds of revelation in art. The first kind emerges from the artistic act itself, while it is occurring. Revelation in this sense is similar to walking through a dense forest, to groping along, without knowing where the road leads, and whether it leads anywhere at all. Suddenly something becomes organized on the canvas, or on the computer screen, or on the theater stage. Something is revealed, but not an angel descending from the clouds seated on a swan, but something which was hidden within simple reality. A bird hopping off a branch, a frog leaping into a pool, a line finds its right posture on the canvas. Something like that. Artists, in any field, if they are artists and not theoreticians trying to visually illustrate an idea, strive for these moments, and fear them, as they fear their absence. These moments may conceal forgery, deceit. The magnitude of understanding may conceal self-deception. But it is impossible to attain meaning in art without arriving at a place where, suddenly, something is understood.This something can be explained by the term “objective correlative,” associated with T.S. Eliot. Eliot claims that poetry (and art in general) converts emotions and sensations into concrete elements which are parallel and matching, which express and stimulate these emotions and sensations in a non-explicit fashion. Every good verbal work of art conjures up objects, gestures, character, etc. which are the visible concrete expression of an abstract feeling or idea. Thus, for example, in Tal Nitzan’s poem (p. 25) water and the ways in which it moves is an objective-correlative for an emotion which is too subtle, too complex, for it to be described with the ordinary emotional lexicon, something which is both suffocating and transparent, both permeable and blocked; thus, in Israel Eliraz’ poem (p.88) the chair becomes an object which contains the way in which the world confronts us, hard and inviting, receiving, yet challenging and frightening like a dog baring its teeth. Poetry tries to express what is impossible to express explicitly in shorthand, with an image, an object, a hand gesture. Drawing is, as Max Liebermann says, “the art of subtraction” because a very little bit is sufficient for it to convey a vast amount of information. A poem sees an idea or a feeling in banal things. This is precisely what distinguishes a poet from someone who writes poetry but is not a poet; the ability to see “within the crevices of the couch” (in Sivan Beskin’s poem, p. 60) an abyss of dark deeds. A poem’s self-limitation forces it to say a great deal with very little. The objective correlative is poetry’s life-breath, because it is the quintessential character of condensed poetic expression allowing it to be communicated to an addressee. We too can sit on Israel Eliraz’ chair, just as we too can drink from Uzi Katzav’s glass. Bridges.Eliot’s term is still useful (although not fashionable in poetry criticism) but few remember that it was not Eliot who conceived of it. Eliot seems to have borrowed it from another person, not a poet, or poetry critic, but a painter – Washington Allston, the American Romantic artist (1779-1843). The artist’s consciousness is in need of an objective correlative for it to be expressed, Allston wrote. This is perhaps the strongest point of contact between poetry and visual art, and the explanation for the fact that a glass of water, or a chair, can be of extreme importance to someone. The ability to see and recognize – the revelation of the concrete which contains the abstract is also the distinguishing mark of someone who is an artist, compared to someone who is not. Thus for example, is the ability to see in a teapot (in Meir Appelfeld’s drawing) a mysterious and threatening pressure, where others only see the imminent cup of tea. The objective correlative is the way in which what cannot be said is said, and what cannot be shown is shown. This is not restricted to poetry or to drawing, but is true of art in general, however, in poetry and drawing especially, there are greater chances of meeting an objective correlative at the moment it is perceived as such by the poet or artist, before it is rationally and meticulously processed (on the canvas or in the pages of a draft).Unlike drawing, it is difficult to see the process of writing behind the words. In this sense writing is more like painting in layers, and the top layer is completely opaque. A printed poem always conceals its layers, its erasures, its revisions. Poets usually do not display drafts of their poems. Nevertheless one can identify in a poem a quality in which one can sense the power of the quick moment, the urgent line, the sudden coming into being. These traces could be found in the poem’s semantics, but they are much more present in the poem’s music. The poem’s music contains the equivalent of the pencil marks of a drawing. The music frays the clean edges of the typeface and takes the poem back to the time of its composition. This music can preserve something of the power of the psychic rhythm of the poet at the time of writing. Especially in free-verse forms of poetry one can feel more powerfully the moment when the music of the poem has reached something it deems important – a climax, or a low point. A moment where the pencil stalled, panicked, or broke. The “drawerly” in art is found in the artist’s willingness to leave traces for its addressees, including the meanderings, the false turns, the delays, and the dead ends – on the way to the truth or truths of her or his work, at the expense of the temptation to present itself to them as “perfect.” Leonardo da Vinci wrote to an artist-addressee; “Have you never observed poets when they are composing their rhymes? They don’t take the trouble to write well-formed letters, and they don’t mind erasing a few verses, to compose better ones.”
There are some poems where it is possible to mark the exact point on the page where the poet understood what he is delivering right now. The poem leads you on a path it has paved itself, and which it continues to pave, a path someone has already walked. You can experience not only its arrival but also its travails. It is the same with drawing. Not necessarily, of course: what was called above “projective” drawing, the kind that realizes previous ideas in a calculated fashion, represents the opposite of any kind of “revelatory” drawings. This kind of drawing is not interested in discovery, perhaps it is not capable of discovery, but only of reconstruction of what is already known. Poetry books, too, are filled with thousands of poems written with the competency necessary for a poem to seem like a real poem. But sometimes something real reveals itself. The body reacts to something; the hand draws or writes sometimes before it has understood what is happening. A small earthquake occurs, the hand responds like a seismograph. Yes: it is possible to draw academically and completely rationally, it is possible to write literate poetry with rhyme and meter. There is room for this is well. But this should not diminish the possibility of poetry or drawing which preserve something of the power of the moment when the world showed something to someone, which prior to that moment had been, to her or him at least, a secret or a veil, a moment where, as in Alex Ben-Ari’s poem,

At once
Some thing is caught and deciphered.

Dror Burstein