Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)," October (1984); Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Art of not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," History of the Human Sciences (1989), v. II, n. 2, p. 135-69; Georges Didi-Huberman, "Critical Reflections," Artforum (January 1995). See also Norman Bryson, "Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant L'Image: Question posée aux fins de l'histoire de l'art," Art Bulletin (1993), v. LXXV, n. 2, pp. 336-337.
Stanley Allen "Projections: Between Drawing and Building," A+U (April 1992), n. 259, p. 41.
Pliny the Elder's myth of the origin of drawing has recently enjoyed currency amongst accounts of architectural drawing, notably by Robin Evans, Stanley Allen and Werner Oechslin. Pliny tells of Diboutades tracing the shadow of her departing lover. Drawing, at this origin concerns mimesis and memory.
One might also understand such marks as stains in the Lacanian sense, as shadows cast by the screen of signs that constructs visuality - another screen of compromised transparency, one which leaves its mark. Lacan's famous example of this shadow or stain is the anamorphic skull in Holbein's Ambassadors. This is discussed by Norman Bryson, "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988).
Andrea Kahn, "Disclosure: Approaching Architecture," Harvard Architectural Review n. 8.
"The drawing pen then is the knife with which architects cut through building - that is, the tool with which they write the story of their building." Marco Frascari, "The Drafting Knife and the Pen," Implementing Architecture (Atlanta: Nexus Press, undated) unpaginated. Frascari also investigates the idea of drawing as demonstration.
The working drawing functions as a legal document; it is explicitly notational in its attempts to describe the materiality of the building, and in doing so effaces the materiality of drawing. But working drawings are also most liable to be muddied, torn and stained on the building site. Such marks must be looked through; the legal document cannot afford 'noise.'
Bryson talks of "those qualities of the image that stand outside reason, qualities that do not correspond to meaning (the lisible) and cannot be apprended in terms of mimesis (the visible) - the very things, of course, that the author is eager to identify and analyse." Norman Bryson, "Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant L'Image," p. 337.
Norman Bryson, "Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant L'Image," p. 336.
Norman Bryson, "Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant L'Image," p. 336.
Diller + Scofidio, Back to the Front: Tourisms of War (Basse-Normandie: FRAC, 1994).
Diller + Scofidio, "Tourisms, SuitCase Studies, 1991," Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Architecture Space Painting (London: Academy Editions 1992), p. 65; Diller + Scofidio, Back to the Front:Tourisms of War.
This drawing is also published in Diller + Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), p. 214-215. In this version the smudges are less distinct, although still evident.
In "Modern Painters" John Ruskin sets out rules for the drawing of cloud in perspective. After discussing their unknowable and random quality at length, he submits them to a measured geometric field, constructing them as distorted squares spread across the sky. In a later edition he omits this entire section, noting that "[I] have never heard anyone express the slightest interest, nor intimate they have put them to any use." John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905), v. VII, p. 152.
Didi-Huberman investigates the notion of the 'not quite,' suggesting that the status of marks dominated by the 'not quite' is precarious to the image as representation. They present the moment of crisis, they place us in a perilous situation if we want to recognise 'the same thing.' Georges Didi-Huberman "The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," p. 155.
Catherine Ingraham "Lines and Linearity," Drawing/Building/Text (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), p. 73.
Roland Barthes "The Wisdom of Art," Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 168.
Michael Webb, A+U (1991), n. 249, p. 14.
The closest one comes to a discussion of smudging in drawing manuals is in discussions of rendering. But rendering concerns shadow and colour applied after the fact, removed from any association with process.
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 74.
Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," p. 152.
Hélène Cixous, "Without End no State of Drawingness no, rather: The Executioner's Taking Off," New Literary History (1993), v. 24, n. 1, p. 93. This is a translation of an essay for the catalogue of the exhibition Repentirs at the Musee du Louvre. For more regarding pentimento (or repentir in the French) see the translator's preface in the same volume.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'smudge' as: "To smouch, or caress." ed. R. W. Burchfield, (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), v. xv, p. 816.
Roland Barthes, "The Wisdom of Art," p. 168.
"Theory has, as its etymology, visual origins, it is defined as the act of viewing, contemplation, consideration and insight." Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 288.
Didi Huberman uses the term visuel for the category of fragile visual experience in which indexical effects function. This is distinguished from the legible, lisible world of visiblity. See Isabelle Franck, "The Fragile Illusion," Times Literary Supplement (11 January, 1991), p. 14
Marianne Hirsch, "Masking the subject: practising theory," the point of theory: practices of cultural analysis ed. Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994), p. 110.
Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt" p. 282.
The idea of the labour of the representing subject is drawn from Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt."
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting p. 88.
"Drawing is, in fact, the discipline that connects sight and knowledge. The act of seeing ... is the first and foremost means by which we come to possess these things ... It can be said, then, that drawing is knowledge ... through drawing we strive to possess a world that exists outside us, and to make it part of ourselves." Jose Rafael Moneo, "Foreword," M. Scolari, Hypnos (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), p. 2. Jacques Derrida argues that drawing is always blind, that at the moment one draws one is blind. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
George Didi-Huberman, "Art of Not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," p. 163.
Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph of a Stain)," p. 67.
Diller + Scofidio, Back to the Front: Tourisms of War p. 48.
George Teyssot, "Erasure and Disembodiment: Dialogues with Diller + Scofidio," Ottagono (1995).
Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. xii. To consider aspects of drawing as symptom is not to indulge in psychobiography, it is not to search for illness, nor for the repressed motives or desires of the author. Rather it is to think in terms of that which the institution surrounding the architectural drawing represses, it is to think about other ways of looking.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. vii-ix.
Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," p. 159.
Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body p. xi.
Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt" p. 144.
Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," p. 165.
Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," p. 160.
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze p. 164. It should be noted that the gaze to which Bryson refers cannot be conflated with the Lacanian gaze, which is not so easily escaped. Mieke Bal explains that Bryson's terms, gaze and glance, are predicated on varieties of the Lacanian look within the (Lacanian) gaze. The glance presents the possibility of looking with desire but not appropriation. Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt" p. 142-143.
Diller + Scofidio seem to be exploiting the act of publication as a medium itself when they say that they have no original, the original is the reproduced image. (Of course this also refers to the original/copy distinction). The publication of the smudge seems self-conscious; once again authenticity and authorial intention are complex.
Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer - the Detail and the Patch," p. 161.