BASES FOR A THEORETICAL FORMAL ANALYSIS OF THE ACT OF DRAWING
Synopsis
This thesis intends to contribute to the analysis of the conditions in the field of drawing in the artistic concert of the last three decades.
The main problem where this research begins is the rupture of the systemic bond that linked drawing to the arts for over 500 years, to the moment of formalist and Greenbergian modernity, Post-pictoric Abstraction, and late modernity aesthetics, in the face of the practices and strategies of Post-modern art, the Cite, the Appropriation, the Allegory, the Signic-syntactic Strategy, and others.
We work under the hypothesis that the supposed autonomy of drawing was more of a general rupture of the post-modern condition with the paradigms of modern art. Yet, in this work, we hold that that rupture does not necessarily imply the loss of the sense of drawing as a defined field of art, or as the main promoter of Gestaltic processes of shape representation, of image, and the project of art.
This is all analyzed in the first chapter, as a part of the problem statement. In the second chapter, as part of the analytical strategy, we develop a vision of drawing and its Prefigurative Projective character. This, because we propose that it’s necessary to explicitly mention the theoretical sense that will explain the historic and formal link between drawing and the other arts.
We review from the historic and theoretic condition that envelopes the category of project in the arts, to end with the analysis of drawing as a strategic and methodological practice. We have analyzed the lineal vision of method in the face of the relaxing of strategies sustained on a vision of constructivist complexity, as well as the theory of projective thinking in the birth of modernity, and its turn to post-modernity.
In the course of this research, it was always thought that an analysis of the theoretical condition of drawing must come from within its own field, as an endogenous theory; this was, in fact, part of the hypothetical proposal. Thus, in the third chapter, we develop a first section dedicated to the formulation of models as a theoretical and strategic category in the artistic field: models as fiction, as paradigms, as technical foundations, the historic model, the relational model, the strategic model, the perceptive model, the self-referenced model, among others. The second part of this chapter is developed on a model-based division of drawing, constructed on its formal systems of representation throughout history. We believe that that division of drawing systems is the material on which a critical analysis of the discipline should be made. This is how we substantivate a possible analytical interiority.
In the final chapter, we review a theoretical vision of the “act of drawing”. It’s our particular review of the process and the phenomenology that the act of drawing implies.
We explain the act of drawing as a Gestaltic act of representation, of formal opening and generator of first generation images. This segment is based on a categorical pair of analysis: the experience, and experiential thought, both as inescapable stretches in the act of drawing.
We present the act of drawing displayed on a mechanism that is developed on a substantive triad: space as location, time as a flowing of experiences, and the materiality that substantivates the act and work. On these three we return to the postulate of dead time, the psychic imprint and elemental materialism.
It’s a thesis that goes from the given in history and theory, to the formulated as our answer, and parts from a theoretical proposal.
Aureliano Sánchez Tejeda.