Recto Verso: Redefining the Sketchbook

Angela Bartram, Nader El-Bizri, Douglas Gittens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317069997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.

1

By Way of an Overture: Classical Optics and Renaissance Pictorial Arts

Nader El-Bizri

PREAMBLE

The various chapters of this edited volume offer perspectives that affirm the intertwining of the acts of sketching/drawing with the processes of making (or unmaking) the sketchbook. These experiential and conceptual aspects emphasize the practical and philosophical reflection on the status of the sketchbook in art, design and architecture, and its interconnectivity with the acts of sketching/drawing across these disciplines. Such processes have been metamorphosed through the passage of time and in being historically determined, since sketching and the sketchbook constitute respectively an act and an artefact whose uses and values are commonly shared by these creative disciplines. Even though the principal focus in this edited volume is on the theoretical attributes of the acts of sketching/drawing, and of the associated activities that surround them, along with their co-entanglement with the physicality of the phenomenal presence of the sketchbook as a given sensible ‘thing’ or an ‘object’ of sense-perception, this conceptual orientation is not meant to be ahistorical in character and it remains guided by cultural determinants. Whilst it is the case that the standing of sketching/drawing in their traditional sense (namely as what is not directly mediated via cybernetic and digital information processing and communication technologies) is confronting variegated pressures and challenges in our more recent times, it remains to be the case that the activities of sketching/drawing have always been historically and culturally bound, and through them, the production of the sketchbook being itself accordingly tailored and apportioned. Although the theories of phenomenology are dominant in the constellation of studies that are gathered in this edited volume, the historical nuances are not left out, but rather they are assumed within orientations that focus on contemporary predicaments and expectations surrounding the phenomenon of the sketchbook, which solicit the rethinking of its definition and significance. It is in this context that the emphasis is set on recent history in its theoretic and practical angles. Nonetheless, to offer a more rooted historical apercu, this overture acts as an exordium historicum, in view of picturing a framework that better assists in situating the studies that are collected under the covers of this volume. This will be undertaken by way of synoptically picturing one of the most profound ruptures in European sketching/drawing practices, which took place prior to our modern transitional epoch, as exemplified by Renaissance pictorial arts and their adaptive assimilation of the exact sciences of their age. This exordium aims at providing a historical prologue that complements the philosophical reflections on the shifting landscapes of the modern paradigms of sketching/drawing, which may be indicative of the emergence of a new and unprecedented fissure in the pictorial arts. This undertaking is not fused with the organizational and curatorial aspects of the editors’ ‘Introduction’, and its concerns of arranging a singular text out of manifold chapters constituting organic sets of scholarship. Whilst the editors’ ‘Introduction’ explains the themes of this text and their philosophical underpinnings, the present ‘Overture’ serves as an historical prelude that suggests additional directions in research, which are attuned to the works of art historians and theorists such as Hubert Damisch, Martin Kemp, Mario Carpo and Patrick Maynard.¹ This line in thinking does not thusly assume that sketching/drawing constituted activities that were historically fixed or that can be contemplated as being metaphysically stable.

The historical and cultural longstanding Renaissance episodes of the convergences between the arts and the sciences offer us instructive scenes. These hint in particular at the way we can also account for the ameliorations in the artistic and scientific spheres, which witnessed novel expressions and adaptive adjustments at the beginnings of the twentieth century through modern fascinations with technique and machines. A similar state of affairs has been already unfolding and underway, albeit in more sharpened modes of the unlocking of the powers of techno-science, at the turn of our new millennium. The impress of techno-science is thought-provoking in the sense that is calls for thinking about what withdraws from our world and experiential realms, which leads us back unto rethinking our worldly reality and its fields of experience. The theme of this present exordium historicum overture would therefore examine some key aspects of the connections and distinctions between the pictorial arts and the exact sciences, as these were manifested in the context of the theories and practices of perspectiva in the Italian Renaissance, while also taking into account the way they would potentially inform our assessment of modern expressions of the interconnections between art and techno-science.

ARS SINE SCIENTIA NIHIL EST – SCIENTIA SINE ARTE NIHIL EST

The dicta: ‘ars sine scientia nihil est’ (‘art without knowledge [science] is nothing’) and ‘knowledge [science] without art is nothing’ (‘scientia sine arte nihil est’) are best expressive of the co-entanglement of the arts with the sciences, as these found one of their intense expressions through the humanistic theoretical treatises of Renaissance scholarship, and via their diverse architectonic applications in the expansion of material culture. The boundaries that may have separated art from science became at times blurred in the Italian Renaissance, especially as this was set against the epistemic backdrop of a gradual and systemic deconstruction of the antique and millennial Aristotelian physics. One of the main aspects of establishing scientific grounds for the praxis of visual and plastic art, and the associated artistic underpinning of reflections on the applications of the exact cum natural sciences, was modulated through contemplations of the connection and distinction between the perspectiva naturalis of natural visual-perception (as studied in the classical Greco-Arabic science of optics) and the perspectiva artificialis of pictorial representation of the perceptual field of vision (as enacted in Renaissance architectural drawing, painting and selected relief sculpting). The leitmotifs of perspectiva offered an optimal context for investigating the relationships between science and art, in terms of probing the optical and geometric foundations of the pictorial representation of natural phenomena in a painted spatial-depth, while experimenting with the manner projective drawing in geometric perspective contributed to the constitution of knowledge about the visible reality. These endeavours were intermediated via the agency of perfecting the so-called ‘costruzione legittima’ (legitimate construction) in establishing linear and central single-point perspectives within the Italian Renaissance pictorial arts of the Trecento, Quattrocento and Cinquecento.

1.1 Study for an installation at the GSD, Harvard University. Original drawing: Nader El-Bizri

VIRTUAL REPRESENTATIONAL SPACE

The co-entanglement of the elements of the pictorial arts with the scientific taxonomies in the Renaissance may have been animated at its core by ontological-theological motives in establishing metaphorical and symbolic connections between a scriptural-textual exegesis and a presupposition of visual atonement in measuring reality via a visio intellectualis (intellective vision). This was the case despite the fact that the visual illusory depiction of spatial depth, in the geometric constructions and projections of perspective, alluded theologically to higher orders of ‘reality’ that transcended the way the ‘real’ manifested itself empirically and experientially in visual perception. The visualization of reality and the picturing of the world were mediated via the agency of perspective in terms of transforming the natural visual theory into a pictorial theory.²

The epistemic, veridical, and apodictic criteria of scientia, as a source of reliable and sound rational knowledge, when conducted within the parameters of precision in logical reasoning and controlled experimenting, is not dependent on personal choices as it is for instance the case with the spheres of theory and praxis in art, which do not necessitate strict rules of proof and demonstration. This aspect in the explorative horizons of the visual and plastic arts opened up new spheres of inquiry that were imaginatively inventive, and relatively at liberty in not following with stricture the principles of scientific logic. This also assisted in the constitution of imaginary models of empirical reality through pictorial representational spaces and visual narratives, which themselves offered contexts for informing the spatial and architectonic qualities of actualized physical architectural realities, specifically through the agency of design and its approximation of the realization of its formal-material hypotheses.

The rigorous rationality that underpinned the coherence of representational space in modelling an imaginative reality within the spectacle of linear central perspective was based on an inner geometric system of points, angles, axes, converging lines and triangles. The representational space of pictorial perspective is imagined, and depicted afterwards, or in succession, through the structuring order of geometric construction and projection, to be furthermore refined by way of colour and the anatomy of figurative forms of human and living beings, with their gestures and choreographies, which all manifest a virtual new reality that is saturated with communicative visual metaphors, symbolic meanings, and narratives. These became vital in their turn in terms of highlighting the role of imagination in pictorial and figurative representation, and in the un-concealment of the hidden physical and mathematical principles of reality. The science that grounded the pictorial arts became itself served by the unfolding of such applications in founding the role of imagery in the scientific modelling of realities that would remain otherwise imperceptible in the course of lived experiential and empirical ambient settings of our human sensibility and its sensorial conditions.

The designer, the painter-architect, contemplates and imagines certain spatial and architectonic possibilities, which belong to reflections on a given pictorial or architectural context, and are mediated via concepts that set down the theoretical hypotheses of design. Such processes unfold through conjectures and the exploration of the most probable possibilities by testing them through drawing, drafting, tracing, and in terms of scaled models, as physical ‘maquettes’. This also applies to most site-specific expressions of art, such as installations, wherein sketching through drawing and making is integral, or even in practices of depicting spaces irrespective of given disciplines, like painting architectural interiors. These procedures enact calculative, intuitive, and imaginative strategies that attempt to approximate in actualization what can possibly be done in tangible terms within physical reality. The logic of geometry, physics (statics), architectonics, material mechanics, formal and spatial qualities, atmosphere in imagined sensorial experiences, all bring science and art together in design, while also being oriented by the agency of language in articulating thinking and the manner it depicts the gradual emergence of a composite of form and matter in making. Artistic visions are therefore all along entangled with scientific abstractions.

The pictorial representational space that is depicted through artificial linear central perspective makes the seeming sense of infinity manifest in virtual visual terms. The material painting on the surface of the canvas appears as a window that is carefully opened up into a given region of an imagined reality, which is chosen through the agency of the painter, their inherence in history, culture and language, and is offered as a complex web of narratives to the observers, be it contemporaneous patrons, or eventually the anonymous spectators who stretch as the on-looking ghosts of posterity. A human viewpoint on the world is established by seeing reality in perspective. A relationship is set between the finite distance of the painter-observer from the surface of the painted canvas, and the implied sense of infinity within the representational virtual space of the depicted portion of imagined reality in the painting. Similar relationships have, to some extent, been theorized in the form of ‘a contract between artist-artwork-performer-spectator’.

PERSPECTIVA

Two pyramids-cones of visibility intersect in seeing by way of perspective: the finite pyramid-cone of vision of the perspectiva naturalis, as studied in optics in connection with direct visual perception, and the pyramid-cone of the perspectiva artificialis in the pictorial order, which tends towards infinity. The pyramid-cone of vision in the perspectiva naturalis, as entailed by direct visual perception, is finite and determined by the nearness of its vertex (which is at the centre eye of the painter-observer) to its base (as the surface of the contemplated canvas). As for the pyramid-cone in the perspectiva artificialis pictorial order, it gives the semblance of tending towards infinity through the converging geometric lines that meet in the centring-vanishing point, or in the various triangles that form the two-dimensional depiction of a pyramid when meeting in one point. This geometry is embedded in the single-point linear and central construct of pictorial perspective, which is established from the viewpoint of a fixed angle of vision. The perspectiva artificialis is static and marked by fixity, in contrast with the manner the eyes continually move and vibrate in scanning the visual field in the perspectiva naturalis. The representational space that is depicted via the perspectiva artificialis is itself static and fixed, while opening up to a sense of seeming infinitude. The single-point linear and central construct of pictorial perspective, with the fixity and static quality of its representational order, offers an idealized context for abstractness in geometric space, which is unlike what is brought into appearance within the horizons of natural visual perception. Artificial perspective reveals a symbolic order that is modulated by the exact rules of geometry, and it grants an abstractive viewpoint on what remains hidden from natural sight in the concrete fields of empirical and sensible experience. Artificial perspective lets something omnipresent appear, through its geometric order; and yet, there is also the virtual sense by which the painter-observer is also looked at from within the painting when gazing at it. The contemplation of the painting reveals a virtual viewpoint from a seeming infinity, that looks back at the painter-observer and beyond, and is situated at the vertex of the pyramid-cone of the perspectiva artificialis within the pictorial space; namely, as the centring-vanishing point where parallels in pictorial-depth tend towards it as the infinite, while meeting in it when they are simply seen as geometric lines traced on a two-dimensional surface. As if the painter-observer is also supposedly seen from infinity, in a gaze coming from within the painting that remains omnivoyant, given the fixity of the angle of vision in the geometric representational structure of the single-point linear and central pictorial perspective. This phenomenon is attested with portraiture whereby the subject appears to be looking at the painter in destabilizing visual exchanges between viewer-and-viewed, or in the context of sculpture as well, wherein the subject’s gaze is direct. This outlook is densely expressed in Nicolaus Cusanu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 By Way of an Overture: Classical Optics and Renaissance Pictorial Arts
• 2 Parerga – Carnet de Croquis: ‘ni oeuvre, ni hors d’oeuvre’
• 3 Palimpsest
• 4 The Ontological Sketchbook
• 5 Plotting the Centre: Bramante’s Drawings for the New St. Peter’s Basilica
• 6 The Relationship Between Sketching and Painting in Chinese Traditional Aesthetics
• 7 The Design Sketchbook: Between the Virtual and the Actual
• 8 Drawn to Each Other: A Love Affair with Sketches
• 9 One Wound, Two Wounds: The Body as the Site for Writing
• 10 Let’s Draw the Line: The Hidden Pages of Pakistani Artists
• 11 The Destruction of Ideas: Disregarding and Discarding Sketchbooks and Avoiding Prying Eyes
• 12 Curating Sketchbooks: Interpretation, Preservation, Display
• 13 My Arguments with the World
• 14 The Sketchbook as Collection: A Phenomenology of Sketching
• 15 Notebooks and Narratives: The Secret Laboratory of The Architect’s Sketchbook
• 16 Sketchbook or Reflective Journal? Documenting the Practical PhD
• Bibliography
• Index