This paper is concerned with the adventitious aspects of drawing which mark and mar the surface - traces one might consider as accessories to architectural drawing. These marks both decorate and deface, they adorn and subvert the surface of drawing. Apparently superfluous these stains are impossible to be rid of. They are the incidents which create the surface: a maculated surface which draws attention to itself. To consider these traces is to problematise standard assumptions about architectural drawing and, more widely, representation in general. In a similar vein Georges Didi-Huberman has explored art history's exclusions of the "effects of uttering," exclusions which he suggests are in part based in the humanist conception of art or representation as a mimetic project.[1] One might suggest smudges are the "effects of uttering" in the architectural drawing. However here the question of mimesis is more complicated: "the imitated object is not prior but immanent."[2] Nevertheless most approaches to architectural drawing are predicated on the assumption that drawing is a mimetic activity vis à vis building, albeit a complex one.[3]
Smudges and smears lie outside this mimetic role. Operating as indexical signs, they refer not to the building represented/projected, but to the actions and efforts of making, of process. Smudges are excessive and superfluous to the expectation of drawing as a transparent transcription of a putative reality. They cloud Alberti's window, smearing the glass. We should remember, however, that the window's transparency is always compromised - streaks, reflections, refractions, dust and impurities.[4]
The object of architectural mimesis is also the idea. In this sense drawing functions as a demonstration: an architectural object configuring architectural knowledge.[5] What are omitted here are the aspects of drawing (and of architecture) which stand outside reason. In figuring architecture (both building and idea) drawings are notations and demonstrations - legible structures in which one might read stories of architecture.[6] Drawing consists of representational codes to be deciphered and interpreted.[7]
Within the representational structures of drawing are voids - gaps in the representational logic - these are the points where lisibility and visibility are disrupted,[8] "where depiction fails or is blocked as a collection of legible signs, where depiction mounts a measure of resistance to the whole mimetic project."[9] Smudges and stains suggest the accidental, they disrupt figurative representation, they have no descriptive pertinence and little demonstrative logic. They interrupt the representational continuity of the image. These marks might be, to the architectural drawing, what Norman Bryson has described as the "'underside' of visual representation ... a type of visual experience in which clarity and legible form are shipwrecked."[10]
Attending to these accidental marks and the suggested 'visual underside' is felicitous - it draws attention to aspects of drawing which pass unnoticed within a mimetic or figurative economy - the surface, materiality, the hand and the body - qualities which remain unseen as the viewer peers through the drawing to the putative building beyond. Smudges intimate the fabricated nature of drawing, the substantial surface and the work of representation.
I will explore these themes further through a number of specific drawings. The first was published by Diller + Scofidio in Back to the Front: Tourisms of War.[11] This is an analytic drawing for the SuitCase Studies project (fig 1). It describes and interprets a postcard of Mark Twain's bedroom (case study 12): an 'irreducible representation' of a well known tourist attraction. The drawing projects the plan of the space which appears through the door frame, described by Diller + Scofidio as "the sanitised field of vision."[12]
However the drawing itself is anything but sanitised; spread across this projection is a large smudge, staining the image. This smudge is emphasised and smeared further by marks of erasure (fig 2). This image is unusual for a published drawing in that both the smudge and its erasure are overt. Images are never immaculate, however the published stain is usually a more subtle presence than this.[13]
Smudging here constitutes an 'indecipherable counter-image,' one that is no longer representative, one that makes no deference to mimesis. The materiality of the image is immediately seen - the graphite gathering lightly on drawing sheet and the smearing pressure of erasure. However in this case the materiality is not only graphite, it is also the 'matter' of reprographic technology, the pixel, the abstract materiality of publication.
The blur of graphite lies outside the purview of the line (fig 3). Like clouds it cannot be submitted to geometric analysis, it disrupts mathematical descriptions of reality.[14] The limits of the smudge(s) are ill-defined, they spread as graphite moves across the page with the sweep of the arm (fig 4). One begins to notice smaller marks and blurred lines, the smudge appears everywhere, invading the drawing (fig 5).
These blurred lines and the marks of erasure imitate the sharper projective lines, but they are 'not quite' the same. In the end nothing is there completely, everything is 'almost,' but 'not quite' there.[15] The marks are not stable, the image begins to undermine its own coherence, visually unravelling, blurring (fig 6). These ambiguous marks shift and slip between line, blur and erasure. They suggest that the distinction between line and smudge cannot be so simply maintained. As Catherine Ingraham has shown, lines are themselves material, they have a fleshiness and thickness which is usually suppressed through architecture's general dependence on the abstract line.
Architecture has maintained its dedication to linearity in the face of what seems like astounding counter-evidence, the drift and turbulence of forces that can barely be resolved ... the tenuousness of graphite on paper or ink on mylar; the loss of resolution in repetition and reproduction; the interior mess of the wall.[16]
An acknowledgement and exploration of this fleshiness and thickness is partly what is at stake when we focus (perhaps bleary-eyed) on the smudge. Here the clouded image directs one's attention to the materiality of the drawing, to its surface fabrication. This drawing concerns projection and description, but it makes no pretence at transparency. The drawing and the project are concerned with the fabrication of the authentic, not merely with its presentation.
These effects constitute and construct the drawing surface, they are also the substance of the modified and marred surface (fig 7). They draw attention to the matter of drawing, to drawing as a material construction/practice; "matter as fact," to use Roland Barthes's term.[17]
This is even more evident when looking closely at a drawing by Michael Webb, published, without commentary, in A+U (fig 8).[18] Here the substance of the drawn surface is more complex, more explicitly worked. Matter is added, subtracted, scratched, scumbled, smirched and layered (fig 9). Scratchings, rubbings and scribbles overlay the surface, knitting figure and ground together. The surface texture consumes any concern with form; one discerns nothing but materiality.
Drawing is a material practice, an architectural object as well as the representation of an object. These marks confirm drawing as a site of production. The worried worked surface exhibits the remains of actions - rubbing, scumbling, frottage (fig 10).
Such actions are not, however, recognised as 'proper' architectural drawing techniques.[19] Indeed technique is itself the reduction of process to a 'proper' role within a representational system which seeks to efface or conceal its status as a site of production.[20] (The 'proper' is the province of the line and clarity, the demarcation of property and the act of mimetic recognition). Didi-Huberman refers to this propriety when he writes "the act of drawing a line ... [is] the act that constitutes stable differences, the act of making graphic decisions and distinctions."[21] (But as I have already noted the distinction between line and smudge is not so clear). Illegitimate, these marks are the accidental smears and rubbings which the draftsperson often tries to eliminate and avoid, lest they upset the mimetic project of drawing (fig 2).
However, as both drawings clearly show, the attempt to eliminate leaves further traces: further indices of absent activity and the tenuous process of making. Erasure points to the accidental and mistake, but also to the attempt to remedy (fig 11). The art historical/painterly term for such traces is pentimento, from the Italian for repentance. Repentance suggests the error, but also uncertainty and changing one's mind. Hélène Cixous suggests these marks concern work and wanderings rather than remorse or failure:
No repentance. We who draw are innocent. Our mistakes are our leaps in the night. Error is not lie: it is approximation. Sign that we are on track.[22]
Drawing is intimated as an active engagement, hesitation, the struggle to represent and the impulse to correct - the work or labour of representation. This work always implicates the engagement of the body.
In its obscure sense the smudge is a kiss, a caress of matter, but the pressure of erasure bruises (fig 12).[23] These various traces, whether caresses or bruises, rouge or scars, invoke the manual pleasure of drawing, of manipulating and manoeuvring matter, of getting one's hands dirty. As Barthes writes: "these gestures, which aim to establish matter as fact, are all associated with making something dirty."[24] Smudges, smears and rubbings are less mediated, they refer explicitly to the hand, to the contiguity of body and drawing surface. (Or to other 'bodies' which mark - the drawing machine, the coffee cup, etc.) In the substantial surface of representation there is a coincidence of touch and visuality, material and theory.
Mieke Bal points out that theory has, at its etymological origins, the notion of insight.[25] (Which is not to be conflated with vision per se, nor with the readable, identifiable world of the visible).[26] Marianne Hirsch takes this up, suggesting that
Stepping into the visual is not to engage in theory as systematic explanation of a set of facts but to practice theory, to make theory, just as [one] ... makes an image ... [T]heory as a form of reflection and contemplation emphasizes mutual implication over domination, affiliation over separation, interconnection over distance, tentativeness over certainty. In relation to the visual such a practice can, perhaps, enable us to envision how we might replace the regime of the gaze with the field of the look.[27]
I will return to the question of the gaze and the look later on; what interests me now is the sense here that theory itself may be improper when considered as a practice (tentative, changing, murky) rather than as a systematic explanation (static, concerned with clarity). A theory, which defines itself in terms of abstract explanation is similar to the image defined in terms of projection and clarity, both elide subjectivity and the body. Theory as practice, as tentative work, implies the body:
Work as process makes dirty hands and those dirty hands, contiguous with the image or text, put the self on the spot. In contrast the kind of representation which shuts out the representer's self - artist and critic alike - present work as a neat product, effacing the traces of process.[28]
Smudges and smears are the residue of the body, the deictic traces of the subject that labours to represent.[29] "Deixis is utterance in carnal form and points back directly (deiknonei) to the body of the speaker."[30] These marks refer to making and touch as well as being visual markers of this touch. The substantial surface of the drawing might be a place where the practice and making of theory could happen. One might begin to think about the blurs, smudges and scars that result from making/fabricating theory (fig 13).
These obscure marks are not so much about optics and the visible, (seeing and imitating), as about touching, making and the blur of visuality. Classically one draws in order to see, to know, but these marks are blind (fig 14).[31] The smudge that spreads over the drawing sheet suggests another approach to drawing, "another 'state' of [drawing] within the representational system of the picture: a precarious, partial, accidental state,"[32] - one which does not write out the carnal, indexical qualities of drawing/making, one which is not predicated on the numbness of the body. The smudged lines slide between their material qualities and their representational/analytic roles, between the visual and the tactile, between numbness and blindness.
The presence of the body is transgressive. But it is also what institutes the authentic. "The effacement of all figuration in the trace is itself a guarantee of authenticity, if there is no figuration it is because contact has taken place."[33] The authentic is one of the concerns of the SuitCase Studies project and it is precisely the possibility of previous bodily contact which satisfies the tourist's desire for authenticity. Diller + Scofidio write: "The bed is the most private site of the body's inscription onto the domestic field."[34] Mark Twain's body is now absent from the bed (fig 1), but the idea or possibility of bodily imprint is crucial to the construction of the tourist 'sight/site.' Diller + Scofidio have elsewhere written of wear and tear (fig 2), the unconscious traces of inhabiting building, as drawing. Architecture is understood as itself a drawing apparatus - unconscious everyday traces function as memories and indices of inhabitation.[35] On becoming a tourist site/sight the everyday is valorised, but the dirt is eliminated. The room is viewed from the distance of the door - 'a sanitised image,' all dust removed. Erasure and the desire for a clear view apparently wins over trace; however the concept of trace continues to underwrite the tourist sight/site. Diller + Scofidio chart this shift from 'site' to 'sight,' from the material to the visual (fig 1). But in the process of their analysis, in the process of drawing this room as defined by the optical shadow, matter and the tactile return in a dislocated manner. Dirt, cleansed from the official postcard view reappears as 'matter out of place' on the drawing sheet, the dust removed from the room has settled on the drawing. (This dirt has theoretical pertinence; Diller + Scofidio's work transgress many architectural boundaries; the publication of smudged drawings is not accidental).
This displaced matter can be understood in terms of the symptom, as articulating "unconscious knowledge and unconscious desires in a displaced, recoded and translated manner."[36] The surface of the drawing is the site of involuntary traces, just as the surface of the body is the scene of involuntary muscular motions - blushing, tics, twitches - the play of internal effects across the surface of the body. If we follow Elizabeth Grosz's contention that "all effects of depth and interiority can be explained in terms of the inscriptions and transformation of the subject's corporeal surface ... that the body can be understood as the very 'stuff' of subjectivity,"[37] then this surface of bruises and blushes, tingles and scars is crucial (fig 15). If drawing is a surface of architecture, then what effects can we read there? The symptom occurs in "a body [that] no longer resembles itself, or anything else for that matter."[38] In the drawing, the symptom is the place where the resemblance of the image breaks down, betraying the resistance of the medium. It is where the surface is no longer smooth or transparent, but records bunches, folds, and swellings, confusions and puckers in the representational field.
Smears and stains hint slyly at materiality and the body, at the work necessary for representation - work that is then effaced in the representation itself. The architectural drawing is complex with regard to work and making. Drawing might be acknowledged as a site of work, but this is the work of designing and of developing ideas (drawing as tool), not the physicality and effort of drawing itself. We could then read representation as a repression which is never quite complete. Elizabeth Bronfen observes that symptoms are failed repressions:
they conceal what is too dangerous to articulate openly, but too fascinating to repress successfully ... They repress what they purport to reveal and articulate what they hope to conceal.[39]
These repressions and fascinations are complex. Traces are indexical, referring to body and work, but they also exceed this, these traces are symptomatic of the desire not to be seen. Mieke Bal explains:
the traces of representational effort are not the pen or brush work so much as the collusion between that work and the work of representation it is doing. In other words the drawing does not represent by means of the brushwork; instead the brushwork is a representation of the unwillingness to be seen.[40]
Bronfen suggests that symptoms in representational work, by being so excessively obvious, remain unseen, and this is precisely the fate of the adventitious in a mimetic economy. But to notice the smudge is not to contain it. Didi-Huberman, writing of painting:
the patch stares you in the face, mostly in the foreground of the picture, frontally, indiscreetly; but for all that it does not let itself be identified or enclosed: once uncovered it remains problematic.[41]
To see these marks is not to define or understand them, they have no fixed meaning, slipping and moving between possibilities - these marks are neither/nor.
The symptom brings forth events "in partial and contradictory ways, however, so that meaning emerges only as an enigma or phenomenon-cum-clue, not as a stable ensemble of meanings."[42] Michael Webb's drawing remains enigmatic and elusive, even as we attempt to examine it.
Symptoms are clues, and these marks might be clues to the blind, illegible, carnal qualities of drawing - dirty hands leave fingerprints (and all hands are dirty to some degree). The metaphors of symptom and clue suggest corresponding activities of diagnosis and detection, but these activities have no answer, no definitive end. The marks are enigmatic, they cannot be read transparently. The maculated surface promotes an active and involved viewer, one who constructs and is constructed and stained by the image. The 'reading' or interpretation of architectural drawings becomes an active occupation, an architectural making. The viewer is both detective and accessory in the production of drawing.
Maker and producer, the viewer produces meaning according to his or her viewing attitude. Once again practice and process implies and engages the body. For the body of the maker is not the only body excluded through the denial of the diectic reference, the body of the viewer and the sensual aspects of looking are also repressed. Norman Bryson describes this: "the Gaze takes the body and returns it in an altered form, as a product but never as production of work; it posits the body only as content, never as source."[43]
(Considering the bodily presence and subjectivity of the viewer raises questions concerning the specificity of the body - whose body, which body?)
The smudges and smears which move across the page (fig 12) promote an involved look, in which the viewer is aware of and bodily participates in viewing. Adventitious marks encourage (rather than bracket) viewing as process. The smudges do not limit interpretation or possible readings, rather they are so open as to appear meaningless. One might consider these marks to be 'unreadable,' they conform to neither the economy of the visible, nor that of the lisible. Reading within a representational context demands that these marks either be looked through or that they be ascribed meaning, that they be 'read as something.' Like clouds, smudges may be read capriciously, one might see images - faces, ships, animals - in the blurred edges and vague marks which appear accidentally on the drawing surface. But if we put this whimsy aside it seems the only meaning we have available is as if they were totally indexical. Smudges are unstable, partial, coincidental, one cannot read them within structures of intentionality.
Intentionality is problematised, both surpassed and undercut, when we contemplate the smudge.
Such marks might reiterate the singularity of provenance, they may be used as a means of attributing authorship and establishing authenticity. More reliable than a signature, touch lends authenticity to the drawing. However the various marks which collect on a drawing cannot be read as signs of intention. One cannot refer to them in search of authoritative meaning. They are accidental and ambiguous in terms of provenance - more than one hand may have made them and the hand is not the only agent of the adventitious. Rubbings, the debris of erasure, themselves leave further marks as they are smeared against the drawing sheet (fig 2). The building site also adds to the drawing, it becomes muddied, torn, ripped, stained with coffee.
The attribution of authorship and the valorizing of the touch of the artist is only possible through the denial of the communal. Accidental marks might indicate authenticity but besmirched drawings also betray the collective nature of architecture and confound intention as the primary location of meaning. The question of intentionality is complicated further through the act of publication. The published image incorporates all marks, regardless of intent or provenance. Publication and reproduction modify these marks and also leave other marks and stains.[44] Smudges lose their textural qualities, they become visual effects. The tactile qualities are those of the publication, waxy or smooth, shiny or rough.
Smudges and stains remind us that drawing happens at the surface - between intention and accident, between numbness and blindness. They are symptomatic of the drawing as fabrication. As Didi-Huberman observes the symptom "bind[s] together, paradoxically but intimately, the mimetic and the non-mimetic."[45] To attend to such marks is not entirely to disregard the mimetic, but it is to consider also different ways of looking, different approaches to drawing, and by extension, to architecture.
Drawing is excessive, it slips and slides, evading classification and oscillating between roles which it always exceeds. One could speculate that the relationship of smudges to drawing might figure that of drawing to architecture, but is this perhaps to besmear architecture?