Drawing Difference

Connections Between Gender and Drawing

Marsha Meskimmon, Phil Sawdon

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857729125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Drawing has been growing in recognition and stature within contemporary fine art since the mid-1970s. Simultaneously, feminist activism has been widespread, leading to the increased prominence of women artists, scholars, critics and curators and the wide acknowledgement of the crucial role played by gender and sexual difference in constituting the subject. Drawing Difference argues that these developments did not occur in parallel simply by coincidence. Rather, the intimate interplay between drawing and feminism is best characterised as allotropic a term originating in chemistry that describes a single pure element which nevertheless assumes varied physical structures, denoting the fundamental affinities which underlie apparently differing material forms. The book takes as its starting point three works from the 1970s by Annette Messager, Dorothea Rockburne and Carolee Schneeman, that are used to exemplify critical developments in feminist art history and key moments for drawing as a means of expression.
Throughout the chapters, these works are further explored in relation to the contemporary drawing practices of Marco Maggi, Sian Bowen, Susan Hauptmann, Cornelia Parker, Christoph Fink and Toba Kheedori. Their works are shown to be (re)iterative sites where mark-making differs with each appearance yet retains certain essential features. Dividing its analysis into the themes Approaching, Tropes and Coinciding, the book analyses how both drawing and feminist discourse emphasise dialogue, matter and openness. It demonstrates how sexual difference, subjectivity and drawing are connected at an elemental level and thus how drawing has played a vital role in the articulation of the material and conceptual dynamics of feminism."

1 Dialogue

From dia- ‘across’ + legein ‘speak’

Casting Shadows, Speaking Across

Between 1971 and 1972, French artist Annette Messager produced a series of objects, photographs, drawings and writings that are known, collectively, as Les Pensionnaires, or, in English, The Boarders.¹ Described variously as a ‘foundational moment in Messager’s work’ and ‘the matrix for all of her future production’,² The Boarders can be understood as an intimate exchange between humans and other animals, the living and the dead, the materiality of the work as art and in myth. It is structured through conversations across time and place, in dialogues between word and work. In exploring the dialogic qualities of The Boarders here, we are deploying an open concept of dialogue that admits of a number of participant bodies engaged in the intersubjective and interobjective process of speaking and thinking across.³ Such a process enables the agency of texts, images, objects and ideas to emerge from within dialogic exchange as more than a mute transcription of human conversation. Speaking across difference through drawing, a potential for dialogue is first offered by The Boarders when we attend to the ambiguous shadow(s) it casts.

L’ombre dessinée sur le mur (The Shadow Drawing on the Wall) is the final element of The Boarders, and acts as its full stop. The serial work comes to rest in the stuffed dead body of a single, small sparrow, pinned to a wall such that it casts a ‘real’ shadow and, at the same time, is the fictional source of a drawn faux one (once or repeatedly removed). Death casts its metaphorical shadows and the shadow draws. L’ombre dessinée thus literally constructs a dialogue between the material trace of the linear drawing on the wall and the immateriality of the body’s cast shadow-trace, between what might be taken as the ‘original’ and its copy. This dialogue arrests authenticity by conducting an infinite conversation of material transformation that defers an absolute origin, a factual and representable ‘real’. From object to image, from image to shadow, from shadow to drawing and to object again, L’ombre dessinée’s crepuscular path suggests a circular conversation around the origin myth of drawing as the sine qua non of art. In its dialogic configuration, L’ombre dessinée provides a space in which we might materialise drawing differently, not as the primal essence of art, but as a process of unfolding multiple perspectives simultaneously in an ambiguous and enigmatic agreement.

Figure 1: L’ombre dessinée sur le mur, Annette Messager, one item from the series Les Pensionnaires, 1971–2. Stuffed bird fastened to a wall with a metal spike together with drawing of a shadow on the wall, variable size.

The shadow cast as the last trace of The Boarders physically evokes the materiality of art-making, and the role of drawing within it, while simultaneously invoking the origin myth of art in the famous account of Butades’ daughter by Pliny the Elder. Drawing the outline of her departing lover’s profile cast as a shadow on the wall, the unnamed daughter of the potter Butades in this single gesture of longing fixes drawing as the foundation of image-making in art. Drawing becomes the essence and the origin point from which art is derived.

As a shadow of the heart and the pain of love lost, the trace made by the potter’s daughter shadows Messager’s reflection that love ‘is still one of the most essential things in life. It can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds […]’.⁴ From birth to death, in love and longing, the cyclical nature of time is underscored in the mythical origin of drawing as it traces, shadows and delineates the emergence and passage of the subject. But there is more to the intimate interrelationship between drawing and shadow, love and loss, the dialogue between love and drawing, traced in this myth; not least the agency of female desire in inscribing the surface that would become understood as drawing itself.

It is significant that the story by Pliny does not take as its centre the outlining of the shadow by the young, love-struck woman, but rather the fashioning of this outline (closed line) into a relief model by the father, who fires it, thus making the first figurative ceramic sculpture. Moreover, for centuries, invocations of Pliny the Elder’s tale of Butades were understood as myths of the origin of painting, not drawing. This distinction is more than semantic; in both Pliny’s tale of the origins of three-dimensional figurative modelling, and the subsequent uses of the myth to ground the art of painting, the first act of drawing, undertaken by a woman, is relegated to the status of support, or more precisely, to the base matter from which higher forms of art would be created. Within this story as first told and later invoked, drawing and woman are aligned structurally as ‘handmaidens’ in the mythic histories of western art, whether that art is two- or three-dimensional. Such an alignment is wholly in keeping with a dualist epistemology in which woman is to man as matter is to form and body to mind. But L’ombre dessinée creeps beyond the limits of such simplistic binary thinking, speaking across the boundaries of object- and image-making, obscuring the borders (The Boarders?) of painting and sculpture – indeed, of art – suggesting a carnivalesque undoing of the gendered cul-de-sac of creative origin myths. Drawing is here a graphic grapheme, an open and vital element of a conversation-in-process that is capable of speaking a subject-in-process. Dialogue should not be confused with ‘duologue’, it does not adhere to duality and is not a temporary bridge between two fixed terms. Rather, dialogue, as with drawing, speaks across, through and with more than one term, and describes a process of exchange whereby every term engaged within the dialogue emerges from it altered.⁵

In dialogue with L’ombre dessinée, the story of Butades’ daughter unfolds otherwise; the trace of a young woman’s desire is not contained by a masculine-normative artistic tradition that overshadows her spontaneous and visceral mark-making by placing it at the service of the conventions of high art. Both the shadow and its drawn trace remain within Messager’s work, and the loved and lost object is still present, embalmed and shrouded, within the space of a conversation initiated through the agency of a woman.

L’ombre dessinée does not only conduct a conversation with Pliny’s story, but with two later tales, told by Messager herself. The first follows the conventions of the creative anecdote, a seemingly inconsequential story told by artists when asked about their work in casual conversation. Asked about The Boarders, Messager frequently repeats a form of the following story:

I remember very well, I was walking in a Paris Street, and I stepped on a dead sparrow. I picked up this sparrow and returned home and knit a wool wrap for it.⁶

It matters little whether Messager’s memory-tale originates in fact – it is a fiction, in the strong sense of that term,⁷ a crucible from which the artist is able to forge multiple contexts for her work, in dialogue with others, over time. She has told the tale in variations, more than once. In each re-telling, the tale acquires a slightly different emphasis: in some versions, Messager’s story focuses upon the quotidian encounter with death and the ‘indescribable sensation’⁸ it produced, both ‘normal and strange’.⁹ In other reiterations, the story becomes more recognisable as an origin-myth, the matrix from which Messager’s practice arose: ‘I found my voice as an artist when I stepped on a dead sparrow on a street in Paris in 1971.’¹⁰

The story, in its repeated variations across the critical literature, casts a fictional shadow capable of simultaneously obscuring and protecting the work from invasive interpretation – it can say everything and nothing, be both sense and nonsense. For those who invoke it as a monologic explanation of the work, it simply obfuscates; stepping on a sparrow in a Paris street cannot account for the subtle textual and textural plays at work in The Boarders. It is not a definitive explanation, fixed interpretation or singular closed source of meaning. Rather, like a shadow, Messager’s memory-tale changes in tone and direction each time it is cast, and while its contours (open lines) are derived from a particular source, they are fluid and mutable in their extension.

The story speaks across, extending the shadow-play intricacies of the work through dialogue. L’ombre dessinée challenges and contradicts the traditional forms of shadow-play puppet storytelling. The sparrow corpse of L’ombre dessinée is a three-dimensional figure fixed by a metal spike, its impressions, the shadows, are static and two-dimensional. It is a shadow-tale steeped in irreconcilable difference – the normal and the strange, the everyday and the extraordinary, life and death, the human and the non-human. In Messager’s words: ‘There is as much ignorance between these familiar birds and human beings as between a man and a woman.’¹¹ The ‘indescribable sensation’ of the experience of difference manifests itself in multi-faceted shadows, from the title of the final piece of the work (L’ombre dessinée), to the drawn and cast shadows on the wall, and the shadow traced by the daughter of Butades. Drawing difference materialises here in dialogue with and through shadows.

One further fictive shadow instigated by Messager attends The Boarders in the form of a hand-written and drawn story in six chapters that accompanies the objects and images as part of the work. Chapter I establishes the work as a dialogue in its first words: ‘To The Reader’.¹² Messager’s story begins where the mythic anecdote of the dead sparrow ends, when she has taken the tiny dead creature back to her apartment, knitted his tunic and begun to look after him. She acquires many more dead sparrows for The Boarders and, like orphaned children or long-stay patients, tells her tale in six chapters of wrapping them in knitted tunics, taking them out for walks, caring for them, worrying about them and even punishing them.

The hand-written story contains photographs, drawings and diagrams that extend the tale. At the start, a diagram of the artist’s two-room apartment maps her identity in and as her practice: Annette Messager, collector (located within the space of the bedroom) and Annette Messager, artist (located within the space of the studio). Significantly, The Boarders carries on a conversation across this binary divide of space and identity; elements of the work are mapped in both areas, the practices which constitute the project overspill fixed and closed categories, the agency of the woman artist cannot be contained within this binary frame. The diagram of the apartment casts a shadow across the six-part story; elements of the narrative can be located on the diagram, but, while they correspond, they never wholly coincide. They converse – they turn about with one another and are each transformed, converted, in their engagement.

L’ombre dessinée is paradigmatic of this conversational mode. It is indicated at number 6 in the apartment/identity diagram, where, on the wall of the studio, five tiny, pinned birds casting shadows are noted by small scribbled marks. These drawings correspond in the key with the line: ‘the living shadow attacked by reality’. The final chapter of the story, Chapter VI Some Stories, concludes with reference to a myth that says that sparrows ‘project a human shadow instead of that of their own body when they are in the sun’. In these lines, the shadow becomes a cipher for uncertainty and transformation, its origin point is mutable, and its mark multiple and fluid, subject to change in contact with other objects, images and words.

The visceral elements of Messager’s work have invited critics to refer to the ‘carnivalesque’,¹³ especially where her work seems to confound the distinction between human and non-human animals or touches upon the ‘grotesque’ modulation between attraction and repulsion evoked by delicate animal corpses. But the carnivalesque is apt not only for these immediate and earthy overtones. The insights of Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais and the power of carnival were part of a wider body of thought on the transformative potential of dialogue itself.¹⁴ Setting multiple voices into play such that they collide, collude, collect and comingle in dialogue, provides the possibility of transgression that carnival describes. It is dialogue that undoes the rigidity of binary thought and the fixed oppositions dualism upholds so stringently through borders and boundaries. Conversation and dialogue, steeped in bodily contact, desiring agency and the potential for unlimited exchanges between subjects and objects, invite transgressions at the level of both genre and gender.

Messager’s shadow-play engenders...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Approaching: drawing near
• 1   Dialogue
• 2   Matter
• 3   Open
• Coinciding: drawing to a close without end
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography