Published in TRACEY the online journal of
contemporary drawing research:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ac/tracey/
September 2006
Drawing Lines - Ambiguous Surfaces
Adriana Ionascu
School of Art and Design
Loughborough University
“(..) I know myself only in my ambiguity" 1
In practical terms I regard the white surface of paper as being a defined space to be
acted upon; in this sense, drawing on this surface becomes a situated physical
marking, a three-dimensional action or embodiment 2. Any drawing starts with a void
(space) and this state is, in my view, an equivalent of what Merleau-Ponty (1962)
considers an absence of perceptions 3; the untouched surface of the paper acts as
absence and I believe this (absence) to be ambiguous. The perceptions of both doer
and viewer are to be measured from this level.
The first thing I learnt about a white sheet of paper on which I had to commence a
drawing was that I had to ‘control’ its surface and therefore to ‘organize’ or map the
given space. The white paper, usually of large dimensions, was threatening. The
nervousness of making the first mark on the blank surface would repeat itself with
every new, empty page. The idea of abandoning the lines to the ambiguous white
surface meant that none of the marks can be retracted, all evading the purity of a plane
never touched. The mark making was playing the fragile equilibrium Merleau-Ponty 4
(1968) suggests between the visible and invisible. From this perspective it seems that
not drawing - as a directed embodied activity or as conscious gesture - but the
emptiness of the space proceeding or left out by its marks is ambiguous 5. Thus, the
white paper appears as abstract and hypothetical: whilst reading an article 6 on the use
of white in contemporary painting it occurred to me that in fact white is a reestablishment of the empty space of the white paper - therefore of ambiguity.
Another memory on marking a large surface of paper (and so an invisible or empty
space) was a simple exercise we did as students on the Sensorial Design Course at
Universita dell’Immagine in Milan: each one of us had to mark an A0 sheet of paper
in a single gesture or form in one place only, and then justify the chosen place on the
paper. The only way I resolved to make a decision that had meaning in identifying a
certain place within that given perimeter was to imagine that I walked on that surface
as in an empty space and thus I felt I conquered and measured physically the whole
surface of the page: I was drawing, so to speak, with my body. This provided me with
an understanding of the reality of the given space in advance and with seeing its
concrete sides and limits in a sort of state of belonging (to it). Unknowingly, I was
thinking and acting in Merleau-Ponty’s 7 terms: ‘I regard my body, which is my point
of view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world’. The same physical
sensation of conquering the space was felt when walking on a clean, pure, un-marked
surface of white snow (so like paper) on a wide field: in both of these cases my
physical interference on an empty plane marked an un-ambiguous trajectory of
movement; yet what was left unmarked, and divided, remained ambiguous. It appears
that as a marker and an end-product of my having been there (a representation of the
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absent, in Derrida’s terms), line in drawing is an un-denied presence, liberated from
ambiguity.
In the examples above I look, of course, at drawing from the point of view of the doer
and the perception within the ‘doing’ (i.e. when engaged in the doing, which is
different from the state of seeing). When drawing – even on a small surface – I am not
separated from that surface, but I am inside it discovering the space by being in every
marking movement of the charcoal. This action is a kind of accommodating and
immersing within the space and being contained by it. When a figure emerges within
the lines, for example, I become that figure in that empty space, looking at how
everything around is left unmarked. With every line I learn the space, being attached
to it and as such, I contract, becoming the moving point of the charcoal. There is
ambiguity according to Merleau-Ponty 8 (1962) precisely because we are not capable of
disembodied reflection upon our activities, but are involved in an intentional arc that
absorbs both our body and our mind. In this sense, the doer is involved in the
consecutive act of doing and perceiving what he does. Yet, the act of doing eliminates
the ambiguity that prevails both in our perception of things, and in the knowledge we
have of ourselves 9: when drawing, I do not look at the marks as an outsider as (I am
looking ‘in’ 10) in a sense, I am the marks I do. The position of the author as both the
doer and seer questions the position and the interventions of the body, and how this
intervention is ‘viewed’ considers that a point of view is always someone’s 11.
Further on, there is ambiguity in the distance between the mark-making (doing) and
what the viewer perceives as the end product of the doing activity. In this sense,
ambiguity is in what is left out of the marked presence of the doer having been there.
In other words, the drawing contains the absence of the doer’s (body). If the doer is
involved both in the act of doing and inherently perceiving what he is doing, the
viewer is always situated outside the act of the doer – and so excluded from it. What
the seer perceives is the end of the doer’s act: its product. In this sense, from acts of
doing to acts of viewing is the distance between the act and its interpretation: the act
of doing becomes the act of interpretation for the viewer. From being an embodied
activity, a three-dimensional presence, the act of drawing becomes a two-dimensional
surface: ambiguity then is in this lost dimension – it is not in the doing, but in the
result of the doing. It is again, a play on visibility and invisibility – between the doer
being inside of the drawing and the seer being situated outside of it. The viewer
cannot claim the place of the doer, as he is denied the lived experience of the doer’s.
The seer should undergo a kind of reversibility of roles with the doer that echoes
Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) theory of touching and being touched 12 – which can never
fully coincide. Ambiguity becomes thus the impossibility of this reversibility resulted
from the physicality of a lost act. As the doer acts on the surface of the paper, the
drawing acts upon the viewer’s eyes (the viewer is acted upon). In this sense, for
example, Derrida 13 (1998) emphasized the performative aspect of Artaud’s drawings,
stating that “All of Artaud’s works participate in an urge to DO something not just
EXPRESS something. They produce an event in the act of writing and drawing …
they are events directed at an addressee”. As a proof of physical response from the
viewer – who is acted upon - Margit Rowell 14 said that she “felt stripped bare by the
eyes of (Artaud’s 15) portraits”.
As we operate with marks in drawing in the same ways we operate with words in
language, we return to Derrida’s theory of opposition and consecutive ‘mutual
2
embeddedness’ between ‘speech’ (as presence) and writing (as representation of the
absent), and further between ‘writing’ and ‘reading’. The apparent binary opposition
between the act of writing and that of reading, parallel I believe, in a sense, the
relational interdependence between acts of doing and acts of seeing. In considering
the white sheet of paper a space on which the doer’s gestures are marked and
articulated as drawing language, I conclude that, from the point of view of the seer,
what is seen does not necessarily coincide with what is visible (and what is invisible
remains ambiguous).
*
epilogue
As a child, I was always arrested by the brilliancy of an wide, mute, reflective and
expectant white surface of paper. That ambiguous space left between presence and
absence (visible and invisible 16) kept appearing between my definite drawn marks.
1
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962/2002) Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Smith, C. London:
Rutledge Classics. p 345
2
Embodiment is understood here in accord to Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) notion of the capacity of the
body to act.
3
Merleau-Ponty (ibid.) says “In the natural attitude I do not have perceptions’, p 281.
4
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Lingis, A. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
5
The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2003, Cambridge University Press) explains
ambiguous as doubtful or uncertain especially from obscurity or indistinctness or inexplicable; or
capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways. Of course, the etymology of the
word ambiguous comes from the Latin ambiguus, where ambigere is to be undecided, and ambi +
ageree means to drive. Ambii means in my mother tongue two together – inseparable. The dictionary
says that when something is ambiguous it has more than one possible meaning – in fact it should have
two.
6
Hubbard, S. (2005). The White Stuff. Is it all Colours or no Colour? Sue Hubbard ponders on the
meaning of white within art. Arts. The Independent. 19 December. p40.
7
Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception, see above. p 136
8
Merleau Ponty, ibid. p. 136
9
According to Merleau-Ponty, ibid. p 346
10
See Bal, M. (1999) Looking in: The Art of Viewing. tr. Norman Bryson, Amsterdam: G & B Arts
International.
11
It is obvious that our capacity for seeing does depend on our own experiences.
12
Merleau-Ponty, ibid. p 216
13
In Derrida, J. and Thevenin, P. (1998). The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Trans. Caws, M.A.
Cambridge and London: MIT Press.
14
In Rowell, M. (1996). (ed.). Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper. Harry N Abrams Inc.
15
The introduction of Antonin Artaud’s very physical writing and drawing in this text started from the
preoccupation with the presence and enactment of the body. I also see a clear parallel with Artaud’s
view on the distinctions between actor-audience (as for maker-viewer) and so the insider-outsider
relationship between the two.
16
In The Visible and the Invisible (see above), Merleau-Ponty speaks of the invisible as the invisible of
the visible, as its lining: any presence entails a possible absence.
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