Drawing as a Clearing: Sol LeWitt and Phong H. Bui

How did the first human drawing come about? It’s easy to imagine the beginning of music in rhythmic drumming, and the dancing that it provoked, but it’s not so obvious to imagine the first act of drawing. Even the first theater and poetry are fairly easy to imagine. The men come back from the hunt with a tale to tell. They feast, then entertain the women and children by reenacting the pursuit and the kill, one of them playing the role of the saber tooth tiger. A later, even more dramatic hunt of a woolly mammoth, where one or two of the men were killed, gets a more elaborate production, maybe now with a narrator to intone the story. So poetry arises. Maybe that story, or the story of a great battle with another tribe, is repeated down the generations, turning the original brave men into superhuman heroes and ancestral founders.

Was the first drawing a tracing of the hand? Was it a jagged line, imitating mountains, or re-enacting a thunderbolt, something you saw but no one else did? Was it a map, showing how we can skirt the distant mountains to get over there? All these happened at some point, but they seem somehow too advanced for a first drawing. Marks made to accompany counting, maybe? Still too advanced; accounting comes later, probably the first form of writing. Maybe the first drawing was not made by hand but was the pattern of footprints made by a dance, then recognized as a form. Or some markings on a mask in a performance. Probably it’s all much simpler. A human or proto-human child takes a stick and makes marks with it in the sand, probably repetitive ones, a series of slashes. Before long, someone makes a downstroke crossed with a lateral stroke—a plus-sign not seen anywhere in nature and yet easy to make, and once made, clearly powerful, even magnetic. The earliest known works of human art, before the cave paintings and the figurines, are rocks with these kinds of marks on them. What we don’t see are circles, even though the sun and moon were always there—perfectly round, shining and all-powerful, moving more regularly than anything else in the world, rhythmically disappearing under us and coming back up on the other side.

There is little agreement on what a drawing is. Words for it in various languages mean very different things, and yet we feel we’re all talking about the same thing. The English drawing or draughting refers to pulling or dragging, because a marking implement is pulled or drawn across a surface to make a drawing, like an ox draws a plow across a field to make furrows. Drawing here is the trace of an action. The German Zeichen/zeichnen means to mark or sign and, like the Greek graphē, it is a term that joins drawing to writing. Drawing here is a form of meaningful mark-making. And the Italian and French disegno and dessin are drawn from a larger semantic field related to planning and scheming, associating drawing with the projection of a design.

You could say that the extreme isolating and clarifying of σχέδιο fulfils, at the level of method, the literal meaning of the Spanish dibujar, like the Catalan dibuixar, and Portuguese debuxar, based in the old French deboissier. These words refer to the act of clearing out bushes or trees, and by extension carving in wood. This is drawing as a clarifying through removal. LeWitt’s point was not to make better or purer drawings, but to make this purified conception of drawing, this cleared-out version of σχέδιο, a foundation of all art— “to recreate art, to start from square one.” Pictures of all kinds, as well as sculptures and even photographs, all become applications of this conception of drawing. And inside of drawing, the distinction between drawing and sketch falls away. Drawings, such as Geometric Figures Within Geometric Figures, or Three-Part Drawing Using Three Colors In Each Part, are no different in their generative structure from larger works that are painted with a brush or are made of metal in three dimensions.

To say that all these works are now understood as drawing is to say that they are provisional, from the Latin pro-videre, which means to look forward, though here we are looking forward with no end-product. This is drawing as pure provisionality, which is to say imperfection. The three kinds of line in Three-Part Drawing—vertical, horizontal, diagonal—fail to create a perfectly even pattern, even though conceptually that is what they are providing, and the same goes for the straight and regularly-spaced crossing lines in Phong Bui’s Meditation Drawings. Darker gussets crop up and settle down, like wrinkles in a not quite flat tablecloth. These irregularities produce in both a quality of atmospheric depth, inviting us to wander in and out of the grid and the paper. Even a machine, a physical mechanism, would be unable to eliminate such irregularities. But doing things by hand invites them in more obviously and frequently, because, as Kant said and Isaiah Berlin affirmed, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” It’s almost as if the overall aspiration to systemic regularity becomes a stage that sets off the glitches, which become the most evident thing in the drawings, even a central drama, despite the overall intention to use system to eliminate drama. Try doing something even a little glitchy, yet still systemic, like getting to where you’re going by zigzagging or hopping, and the street will quickly become the stage for your non-drama.

The faces of the cube-like form in Cube, like its red background, are each a different field of color, in principle flat and undifferentiated, meant to register no shadow or other environmental incident that would make it look more like a cube seen in space. Rather than one-point perspective, the cube is in axonometric perspective, with lines into depth parallel rather than converging—perspective without the incidental quality of seeing something from a particular viewpoint. And yet these ochre, blue, black, and red fields swim with internal variation, for the simple reason that the pigment has been applied by hand. The fields become pool-like, each of them suggesting more depth than any perspective. The axonometry keeps flattening into shapes, and the shapes have a depth, like vessels filled with liquid that hasn’t fully settled.

Horizontal Brushstrokes takes this internal dialectic to a kind of limit, putting the squiggly brushstroke—the emblem of wandering individual expression—through the system treatment, or at least through a semblance of system. The title prompts the realization that no individual stroke here is horizontal; the horizontal comes through the repetition in the plural. And yet the repetition cannot remain pure, as if they were only brushstrokes of different colors applied repeatedly and regularly to a flat surface. Forms like this, in these colors, irresistibly summon a vision of waves in water with light glinting off them. Then, in a second moment, the recognition that that indeed is what they are, liquid waves of gouache, whose variety of colors arises from the fact that the crystalline structures of different pigments reflect and refract light in different ways. The complete covering of the paper, in principle, an assertion of flatness, only strengthens the effect of a vast sea cut off by a window frame, and then brings forth the realization that that is what it is, a generative structure of waves of colors that is in principle infinite, extended across the surface as far as the arbitrary rectangle of the paper allows. The gouache squiggles do not imitate or invoke water; they apply a principle that is also at work in any patch of sea.

Phong H. Bui finds various ways to make the glitching produced by a staged interference of system and hand the central event of his art. What happens when you take a photo of someone caught in a moment—because a non-AI photo is the capturing of a micro-second’s array of light—and reproduce it using a pencil guided by a brain and a hand, a painstaking process that takes as long as twenty-four hours? Bui’s slow processing has the effect of reducing the individuality that flashes out of each photo. If we were to set up in a grid not of Bui’s drawings but the photos he used to make them, they would explode in different directions—different moments and places, different responses to the camera, different lighting conditions, different emotional tones, different environments of color, differing qualities of photographer and camera equipment, even differing levels of privilege, captured by the lens. Whereas in the drawings all these variations are reduced. Momentary expressions become stilled. Serious faces are lightened, while heightened expressions are quelled. Famous and not-so-famous artists, writers, and cultural advocates come onto level ground, as if they were members of a tribe. The individual remains but a sense of constituency emerges, yielding a working definition of community: difference seen in commonality. And yet—another turn of the screw—a communal effort has not produced this result; all of it happens through the work of a single artist. And yet—once more—the effect results from his commitment to suppressing his own individual expression, as he undertakes the quixotic task of putting portraiture through something like the LeWittian system. And then—a final one—it would not work but for the artist’s failure to suppress his hand entirely. Remove the crooked timber and the whole project dies. To bring these heads together into grids only makes the differences among them more boisterous, not just because every face is different but because the color of the paper changes, the heads shift in the frame, and the frames themselves vary. The pencil grade is inconsistent, some backgrounds are shaded-in and some are not. Some faces flatten more than others. And yet all these differences only reinforce the sense of a shared field—just as there is no sea without waves, and none of them alike.