A and B are friends. They meet to talk about Philip Rawson, the historian of Indian art who had, alongside a pioneering engagement with tantric philosophy and aesthetics, a life-long interest in teaching drawing. What follows is an edited transcript of one discussion. A speaks first, then B.
[…]
You’ll remember that my most recent lecture on Philip began with the letter of acceptance he wrote following the Arts Council’s invitation to curate the Tantra exhibition. The show was due to take place at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 and his letter, dated two years earlier, predicts the timeliness of this project.
Is being ‘timely’ our starting point?
Yes, the exhibition was just that. The counterculture was at its peak and art students everywhere were abandoning Western traditions. Tantra was bound to be a success.
It’s interesting that he accepted the invitation in 1969, the same year he published his wonderful book on drawing. As with the maze-like layout of the Tantra exhibition, the drawings he wrote about traced the journey of their making. They made time visible.
He must have been thinking deeply about temporality in everything he was doing.
I think so.
[…]
I want to document our discussions and wondered if I should draw us as we speak. Portrait drawings?
Not exactly. I’d like to draw the speaking we do. I’ll create voice shapes, then work out how to represent the talking heads later.
When you make decisions as you go along, that’s called time taken to do. It was the first of the four categories with which Philip theorised the role of time in art. Will these ‘voice shapes’ look like writing?
Possibly. But speaking can have a shadowy presence. Cartoonists draw speech bubbles, but real words spread across tables in meetings, fill seminar rooms, make cafes buzz, echo around city streets.
The sound is as pervasive as light and shade and, it follows, this quality is only captured by a pictorial art form, a predominantly tonal mode of expression.
Hasn’t Roberto Calasso written about shadows being cast over language?
Apparently it’s in his book on Vedic myths. The ancient Vedas recounted everything in ritual-based stories and one of these says that only a quarter of all possible languages are intelligible to human beings. The rest, a much greater number, were hidden from us because the gods threw shadows permanently over most of what could be articulated. We are not permitted to understand what stones, insects, or even birds, say. I guess the Vedic ritualists were drawing attention to the sacred mysteries of the natural world.
This makes me wonder if your ‘voice shapes’ will be intelligible?
No, that’s the point. Philip’s second category, time taken to read, extends our gaze beyond the linguistic. What words cannot grasp seems to fascinate us. The imagination is roused and we sense numinosity.
Philip would have loved that.
He would have approved of Calasso’s Indian sources.
And his approach to mythology.
Also his willingness to look beyond present-day sensibilities.
OK, but I’m a contemporary artist, I live in a secular world.
This is true, but of all the things I learnt from Philip, I wouldn’t want to leave out what he taught me about the numinous potential of drawing. These ideas transformed my art school career.
I suppose learning to draw, as traditionally taught, was an activity reliant on what was being drawn. Art students had to draw objects, people, places.
Philip didn’t think like this. He tied the teaching of drawing to our differing experiences of chronological succession, not our observational prowess. To show how right this was, he made endless comparisons in museums. Not everything he compared was considered a drawing when it was made but, when studied as part of an archive, graphic activity does look more like drawing than any other kind of process.
So he made drawing more visible, which is an odd thing to say about a visual art form, but if you only see what is drawn, you don’t see the drawing itself.
Exactly, he looked for what was definitively graphic on the surfaces of ancient pots, within patterns on woven Indian cloth, on the blades of Samurai swords, and so on.
Was this formalism?
In some ways it was. But Philip was most interested in how far graphic imagery can extend and evolve the human sensorium. That was tantra’s influence. However, very different things happen in different cultures and, although he couldn’t impose an overall pattern, he did try to be comprehensive.
He generalised.
He invented comparative terms. For example, glyph for any kind of mark that has a stand-alone value, enclosure for the outline around an identifiable thing, ovoid for the suggestion of a rounded mass between the edges of a body, shadow path for the way the eye is drawn across the darker parts of an image. The book on drawing is full of terminology like this.
And within the structural framework created by these terms, traces of time are revealed in the hesitations and changes of mind that occurred as the artist proceeded.
There is a great example in the BBC film Seeing Through Drawing. When Philip appears he talks about a Rembrandt sketch. Pointing to the obvious traces of the image being invented step by step, he then turns to a contemporary 17th century copy. It’s a rather bald version of the original. Only the final marks have been reproduced, the exploratory mark-making is missing. I wonder how Philip would have updated this idea.
What about Lee Lonzano’s text works? Written in biro, each one is like a private note-to-self. Her crossings- out in Drop-out Piece haunt the reader because she was about to give up being an artist.
That would fit. Philip liked to talk about graphic expressions of time wherever they occurred – musical scores, graffiti scratched on a wall, Chinese calligraphy. Each has a uniquely temporal feel.
But he also said that drawings have tenors – his term for the representational element on which temporal feelings are ‘hung’ like a tent on a framework of poles. This brings us to Philip’s third category – time implied by the subject matter. Modernism tried to bury such things. Iconography and storytelling were said to be stale concepts.
Given that we’re now postmodern, it shouldn’t be difficult to take seriously the temporality of a tenor.
It’s a unique form of picturing particular to the visual arts. You can do so many things. It covers everything we can possibly encounter, imagine, or remember.
Yes, that’s right. You can use tenors to keep significant moments of time alive. I think artists gave up on grand narratives too quickly after the 19th century. A powerful picture like Goya’s El tres de mayo still places the horrors of war firmly in front of us.
R. B. Kitaj comes to mind here. The notion of iconography wasn’t stale for him.
[…]
True. But Kitaj’s problem was that other representations of history had become dominant. Take Dadaism. The exceptional situation in Germany after the Great War reduced Kurt Schwitters to, as he put it, ‘glueing and nailing’. He decided that cultural life could only be put back together again from broken fragments – grand narratives were, for him, unrecoverable.
An interesting corollary is that, to achieve art at this time, to make something that was as historically significant as that famous Goya, Dada had to position itself as ‘anti-art’.
Philip would certainly have been able to tell you how a Schwitters collage achieved the status of a high- quality artwork. But he would have had nothing to say about how these qualities were simultaneously subversive.
Contemporary art accepts this contradiction.
Without a doubt. Creative action has been revolutionised because artists must now unmake as well as make. You could say that the first category has been redefined as time taken to ‘undo’.
Indeed. The all-important concept is ‘criticality’. It requires us to continually undermine accepted values, and this is what distinguishes contemporary practices from traditional ones. We end up aspiring to an unconditional sense of newness.
That is certainly what comes across when emerging media technologies override older ones. Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, for example, became Zen for TV. Since then new versions have been made using other media, not all of them by Paik.
Such works only exist as a succession of instantiations in time, each reoccurrence involving the latest available equipment. The results look different. A television screen doesn’t look like a film projection but both versions are obviously Paik’s idea.
[…]
I was at an anthropology seminar about iPhones. The guest speaker emphasised the unprecedented forms of cultural life these devices have initiated. But, thinking of Paik, I suggested that the discussion ignored the existing media formats that are re-instantiated by this technology. For example, if I use an app on my phone to watch, or indeed ‘make’, a movie, nothing takes me beyond Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? The device is really an unprecedented piece of packaging that compresses well-established forms of cultural consumption into the space of a trouser pocket.
You were being provocative.
I was speculating about novelty and newness.
I suppose Benjamin’s Angelus Novus does sever the time-honoured flow between past and future. His angel hurtles backwards through time, alarmed by the debris of history and ignorant of what is to come.
Exactly. We’d certainly end up with a mythical ’now’ if that was the case.
With this thought we’re in the domain of metaphysical time, Philip’s fourth and final category. The big philosophical questions are negotiated at this level. Inevitably, all ambitious cultural practices have to engage with some form of mythology, even if it’s the flattened out time of ‘realism’.
So we’ve covered all four categories in Philip’s theory of art and time.
Not fully. There is a lot more to discuss. I’m particularly interested in how the Tantra exhibition embodied these temporal ideas. Walking through the maze of rooms was like following a beautiful Rajput drawing line by line and enclosure by enclosure. Philip clearly thought exhibition-making was the same as drawing.
We should talk about this soon.
[to be continued]