Line Let Loose

Scribbling, Doodling and Automatic Drawing

David Maclagan

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780231310
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

As forms of drawing go, scribbling is the most basic: it is seen as playing a formative role in the drawings of both children and primates. Doodling, while still being a widespread phenomenon, is largely an adult preoccupation—a nomadic form of drawing typically produced during meetings and phone calls. But even though those who engage in it are not necessarily trained artists, automatic drawing is a more dramatic event, and the results of an absentminded or trancelike state are sometimes astonishing. Because of their amateur and spontaneous character, all three forms of drawing have been adopted by modern artists seeking to escape from the constraints of their professional skills. In Line Let Loose, David Maclagan shows that each of these marginal forms of drawing has its own history in spiritualism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and psychedelic art. Referring to Klee, Pollock, Miro, Twombly, andLeWitt, as well as many lesser-known or anonymous artists, he traces the links between them and a pervasive notion of the spontaneous and 'unconscious' creation of forms in art. He suggests that the original novelty of these unconventional drawing processes has begun to wear off, and he explores their new situation in our modern digital culture.

1

From Innocence to Experience

Scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing can all be seen as forms of ‘drawing’, but this itself is a notoriously elusive concept. A recent book calls drawing ‘the primary art of creativity’.¹ Its most comprehensive description might be something like a set of marks made by human hand that seem to have been deliberately inscribed on a surface of some kind. The range of drawings is seemingly endless: they can be huge or tiny, representational or abstract, exquisite or rough; they may be a means to some other end (a sketch, a study or even an exercise), or else they can be an end in themselves. Drawings are records, observations, discoveries and inventions, sometimes all at once. Some drawings are consciously directed at an audience, while others seem to be more private; we may draw what we know or what we see outside us, or we may draw ‘from within’.

In most of these situations drawing is a fairly conscious process, though there is usually a complex exchange between what is being conveyed – information, feelings or compositional structure, for example – and the drawing process itself, so that one reason drawing is of such interest is that it seems to be so close to an artist’s intentions. With certain exceptions, we call something a drawing because we believe it to have been made deliberately. Sometimes artists use found, accidental lines or marks as ‘drawings’ – a good example is the work of Ingrid Calame, who traces marks left on factory floors or streets and turns them into large drawings. But even drawings that are experiments or ventures into the unknown still have what could be called an envelope of intentionality about them.

But not all marks that give the appearance of intentionality are actually deliberate; or rather, a mark that was made for one reason – erasure or disfigurement, for example – may look like one that was made for another, more ‘artistic’ reason. Not only can all sorts of marks be seen as ‘drawings’ whether or not they were intended as such, but the first inscriptions made by children or primates using a drawing or writing instrument are often perceived as drawings. Here there is an ambiguous territory in which we cannot be sure to what degree intentionality was involved, or in the case of primates, whether human notions of intention are relevant. Whereas drawing is often considered to be the most immediate expression of an artist’s thought, or at least of an observation or idea, scribbling and doodling are forms of drawing where there is no such antecedent. Instead, the ‘drawing’ in them is either accidental, as in the scribble, or something aimless that then starts to feed off itself, as in the doodle. In automatic drawing, on the other hand, the intentionality is displaced: it is not the artist who draws, but something outside their normal responsibility.

The definitions involved in drawing are therefore not just a graphic concern. If we learn to draw in a number of different ways – by instruction, by copying others and by our own experiments – we also learn at the same time what to label ‘drawing’ and why: we learn what a ‘proper’ drawing is under different circumstances, and what is not. But this line, so to speak, is not fixed: there is constant traffic across it. What is accidental or careless sometimes comes to be seen as having a crude expressive energy that is missing in more sophisticated drawing; this may be imported into the world of art in various ways, directly or indirectly, or attempts may be made to imitate its rudimentary force. It is almost a cliché of modernism that work with these characteristics – child art, so-called primitive art or the supposed derangements and regressions of ‘psychotic art’, for example – served as a demonstration of what a spontaneous and uncultivated creativity could achieve; or rather, how something could appear as such, even if its intentional status was unfathomable.

Scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing also come into this category. A ‘scribble’ is, almost by definition, something on the edge of proper drawing, and the term is normally used in a derogatory or self-deprecating way (such as Arthur Sullivan’s ‘idiot who, in railway carriages, scribbles on window-panes’). Similarly, ‘doodling’ is regarded as an absent-minded distraction, an activity that is marginal in every sense. Automatic drawing, while it has many of the same characteristics, also implies a peculiar kind of dislocated intention: a deliberate invitation to something beyond the drawer’s normal consciousness, a form of dictation that may come from the unconscious or some other source, such as the spirit world. All three seemed, at least to begin with, to escape from the restrictions of conventional art, and also to be accessible to people without any professional art training.

However, the novelty and impact of all these idioms on the world of art depended on specific historical conditions. In the early decades of the twentieth century their power was all the greater for them having been excluded from art education and the world of fine art (though we shall see that this exclusion was to some extent a matter of wishful thinking). Once they began to be incorporated into these worlds, their status inevitably became more ambiguous: a deliberate scribble or a conscious doodle risks turning into what the painter Barnett Newman called ‘contrived spontaneity’. The situation is somewhat different with automatic drawing. Whether in the context of spiritualism or of modernist experiment, it usually looks like a drawing; it is more the trance-like circumstances of its creation, or its public display of unconscious dictation, that sets it apart from other forms of artistic invention. But once it comes to be associated with a widespread belief in spontaneity as the key to unconscious form creation, its original characteristics get generalized, so that it is the ‘look’ of a drawing rather than the circumstances of its creation that give it the feel of automatism.

We could situate all three of these modes on a spectrum, ranging from the casual and often aggressive (scribbling), through the more playful and escapist (doodling) to the sustained complexity of much automatic drawing. In a sense this spectrum could be seen as echoing the developmental path of drawing, from the most rudimentary marks, through naive and playful explorations to something that looks like a fully fledged composition, whether it is deliberate or not. Certainly, the scribble has featured as the starting point in various theories of the evolution of drawing.² Development implies progression, yet in art regression to an earlier, simpler and more powerful mode is sometimes a seductive option: the scribbles of primates and children, the supposedly confused and disordered drawings of the insane, the random meandering of doodles and the obsessive permutations of mediumistic drawing, have all inspired modern artists trying to break out of the box they feel trapped in.

Another thread that connects all three of these modes is that of the involvement of bodily gesture. In scribbling the hand movements are often wide and vigorous, in doodling they are smaller in scale, while in automatic drawing they often have a calligraphic fluidity, sometimes involving the whole arm. Recently, in the work of Cy Twombly and Sol LeWitt, the intimate scale of these idioms of mark-making has been expanded on to a monumental format, and the gestures involved correspondingly magnified. Again, the question here is what else besides the muscular and nervous systems might be involved, even if these are what give the immediate impetus to such marks. Perhaps the hand, and behind it the body, has its own ways of articulating what could be called ‘thought’. We shall see later that this kinaesthetic dimension plays an important part in spontaneous form creation.

In the early stages of their modern cultural evolution this link with the involuntary seemed beyond doubt. A scribble is not intended as a drawing; it is made for some other purpose, for example trying out a pen or erasing something, and its artistic interest is an accidental side effect. Doodling takes place in distracted or absent-minded states such as in meetings and during telephone conversations, and is only intermittently attended to, and in general its artistic value is irrelevant. Automatic drawing is produced under dissociated or trance-like conditions, and in its original mediumistic context its artistic interest was secondary to the import of the messages it conveyed.

Scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing also seem like dialects of some common graphic language: whereas the idiom of scribbling is impatient and abstract, that of doodling is restless and a hybrid mixture of abstract, decorative and figurative, while automatic drawing usually has a comparably shifting mixture but in more concentrated and extended forms. Just as verbal language can be produced without any conscious choice or deliberate intervention having to be exercised, so each of these modes can be engaged in with varying degrees of consciousness. But once we become aware of these graphic idioms and it becomes possible to recreate them artificially, they become more self-conscious signals of ‘spontaneous’ creativity, and can soon become stylistic mannerisms.

However, although each of these three forms of inscription seemed, in the early modernist period, to be independent of any acquired artistic skill, they were all actually linked in different ways to conventional communicative modes. Writing is one of the most obvious of these: while the scribble has a negative relation in that it erases messages, the doodle embroiders them, sometimes to the point of illegibility, and automatism often wanders between words and images. In addition, both doodling and automatism draw on established pictorial codes, whether these derive from the tradition of fine art or from more popular stereotypes, but because both are created in a distracted or dissociated state, this connection is rarely considered to be a conscious or deliberate one. In fact, as we shall see, all three types provide evidence of what could be called an unconscious stratum of forms – structures, patterns, figures and faces, for example – that have become something like a subliminal kind of pictorial lingua franca.

If the use of these codes is largely unintentional, what sense can we make of them? The idea that there are significant forms in art that are prompted by processes that are subliminal or unconscious in the broadest sense is, with its secular and psychological perspective, a comparatively modern one.³ Perhaps because of their rudimentary nature, there does not seem to be a semiotics of scribbles, but doodles and automatic drawings are seen as carrying messages which, while they may not always be explicit, are capable of being deciphered. This is only to some extent a matter of literal reading: in doodles especially, a compound of something akin to graphological analysis and a diffuse notion of unconscious symbolism was applied early on.⁴ Interestingly, Russell Arundel’s hugely influential book on doodling, Everybody’s Pixillated (1937), equated doodles with automatic writing, but here it was less what was ‘written’ than the way in which it was written that mattered:

Psychiatrists agree that the designs in a doodle cannot be accurately interpreted, but the character of the design, the manner in which it was made, the depth and harmony of lines, and the manner in which designs, figures and words are co-ordinated with the activity of the person at the time the doodle was made, are highly significant.⁵

Nevertheless, like many subsequent ‘doodle dictionaries’, Arundel’s chart of 120 different patterns gives a generic meaning to each one, independent of the context in which it was originally created. In the end, there is a crucial distinction here, as in any model based on the notion of ‘language’, between the meaning of an individual symbol on its own and its meaning within the specific context in which it is embedded.

If scribbling is associated with making something illegible, then doodling conjures up the fantasy of a private language, and automatic drawing is often in the context of receiving messages from a source outside the subject. Certainly, a scribble is, almost by definition, in some kind of collision with language, or at least with visual articulacy, and we shall see later that this is part of its appeal to artists. A doodle, on the other hand, nearly always has some connection with language, either because it is literally made in the margins of a manuscript or text, or because it can be ‘read’ as if it were some kind of unconscious writing. In its early association with spiritualist communication, automatic drawing was also treated as conveying messages of some kind, although there was seldom a consistent method for reading them.

In the cases of both doodling and automatic drawing the passage of time and the increasing self-consciousness resulting from their cultural dissemination mean that they no longer have the same novelty or innocence they once had. It is more than half a century since doodles first became a popular fad, and there has been a recent spate of ‘how to doodle’ books, but very few attempts to examine their cultural background or their evolving relation to the wider art world. Automatic drawing has an even longer history, and has also been widely disseminated as an accepted art practice. Just as ‘doodle’ is now an umbrella term that covers a wide range of drawings, many of which are made under very different conditions from the original first wave of doodles, so automatism is no longer the pure practice it once was, and it is hard to tell to what extent the many drawings with the hallmarks of spontaneity – jerky, gestural lines or cursory loops – have actually been carried out in a truly automatic process.

Even before these developments there were inherent problems with the supposedly ‘unconscious’ nature of each of these genres. In the early years of the twentieth century the term ‘scribble’ encompassed a considerable range of inscriptions, some of which went far beyond the merely casual, and might well have had a degree of intentionality to them. To a more obvious extent doodling usually includes a fluctuating level of conscious intervention; otherwise we would have no first-hand testimonies as to how they were created. At first sight, automatic drawing seems to be more securely ring-fenced by a deliberately induced dissociation, most obvious in the trance state in which it is supposedly carried out, but the evidence of sleight of hand in some instances of mediumistic performance suggests a grey area in which practised familiarity slides into the deliberate production of the required phenomena. We shall see that this also applies to the use of automatism in modern art.

Faced with this uncertainty, we need to bear in mind that in dealing with what looks like unconscious form creation we are often confronted with the possibility that we are dealing with the image of automatism as much as its literal reality. This image has become so widespread that we take it for granted that spontaneous drawing, in all its various methods, gives access to forms that have an unconscious origin. In the first half of the twentieth century, in contexts far beyond its origins in spiritualism, automatic drawing came to be seen as the most immediate way of accessing unconscious imagery, and this was directly influenced by the contemporary diffusion of the notion of an unconscious, in both its Freudian and Jungian forms. This was a concept that extended far beyond its original clinical context, and into the realm of everyday life.

In classical psychoanalysis, the forces at work in the unconscious were considered to be more powerful and opportunistic than the rational mind: hence their subterranean effects often trumped the moves of conscious intentionality. It was as if the reach of responsibility had been extended, from those acts that were consciously decided upon, to a whole range of acts and thoughts that could be seen retrospectively as having been unconsciously determined. Many of these ideas soon entered popular discourse and the notion of various forms of unconscious intentionality, such as the ‘Freudian slip’, became almost commonplace.

In the context of art, this meant that spontaneous form creation was seen as the doorway to the world of unconscious imagery: first came the automatic drawing, then its unconscious meaning. In fact, as we shall see, for most artists who adopted this technique it was the resulting freedom of invention that mattered, and any unconscious significance was secondary. Certainly, when the Surrealists adopted automatism as a technique for accessing the ‘real functioning of thought’, it was the resulting play of analogy and visual camouflage that attracted them, rather than the sometimes rather predictable interpretation of these phenomena in terms of unconscious symbolism. Nevertheless, in both Surrealism and its artistic successors there remained what might be called a background expectation, that unconscious imagery was likely to have a sexual or aggressive character to it and that its idiom was the slippery one of primary process, in which the rules of logic and causality were ignored.

So here we have various inflections, some suspicious, some more approving, of what amounts to a psychoanalytically inspired mythology of unconscious form creation, evidence for which could be found both inside and beyond the conventional boundaries of art. It is a mythology, not because it is misleading but because it gives dramatic meaning to unknown energies that are manifest in pictorial form. It is now deeply embedded in our culture and is one of the chief motive forces behind the identification of spontaneous modes of mark-making such as scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing with immediate access to unconscious form creation, or at least the nearest we can get to it. I shall now look at each of these modes – scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing – in turn, in order to examine these problems in more detail.

2

The Career of the Scribble

What do scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing have in common? I have suggested that they lie on a spectrum of involuntary or absent-minded mark-making, from the most rudimentary to what is sometimes a remarkable performance. Scribbling is, in many accounts, the most fundamental form of marking. In child art and in primate art, which are both categories we create in order to refer to ‘drawings’ whose authors have little or no idea of ‘art’, it is evidence of the most elementary manipulation of a crayon or brush. The intentionality of such manoeuvres is something we can only guess at, since those who make them have little or no speech: perhaps it owes as much to kinaesthetic sensations (the sound or friction of the pen or pencil on the surface, as well as the enjoyment of muscular movement) as to any preconceived motive. In this sense they could be called ‘unconscious’. Nevertheless, especially in the case of children, they are often seen as the original versions of what later evolved into more deliberate and recognizable forms of drawing.

Scribbling also refers to a phenomenon that is a regression to these primary modes of mark-making: people scribble over something in order to mask or obliterate it. There is something im...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 From Innocence to Experience
• 2 The Career of the Scribble
• 3 The Doodle and Beyond
• 4 Early Automatic Drawing
• 5 Automatism, the Unconscious and Modern Art
• 6 Meta-doodles and Other Elaborations
• Conclusion
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index