Genesis of a Method

In their book “Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist", Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz (Kris, 1979) give an account of their investigation of the rise of the figure of the artist from lowly medieval craftsman to the Renaissance’s divino artista (one whose inspiration comes from God) and also, as a form of literature, the structure of the myth of the artist as a particular form of hagiographic narrative. The subject of the book is not directly relevant to this project, but the justification of their methodology serves to clarify my position here in connection with this proposed format of Dictionary of Advanced Drawing.

Kris and Kurz used the legends about the childhood of Giotto to explain the social emergence of the figure of the artist and particularly the emergence of the myth of artists’ life. The problem they encountered was that the historical facts surrounding the stories about the childhood of Giotto, the references to his early life with his family were all very difficult to find and many times impossible to prove. Consequently, the German historians found it easier to demonstrate the recurrence of the myth (and also its existence) through the identification of factual coincidences drawn from the history of art rather than try to demonstrate the veracity of the actual historical facts.

The outcome of Kris and Kurz’s work provided a model of hagiographic narrative about the life and work of the artist similar to the one developed years later by Joseph Campbell, who wrote not from a art-historical perspective but from the standpoint of a Freudian monomith of origin (the life journey of the artist-hero, leaving his birthplace in a quest, overcoming difficulties and then returning home to narrate his adventures). He used this model to outine the development of the figure of the artist as hero in his book “The Hero with one thousand faces” (Campbell, 1949). The model developed by these authors applies practically to the letter today’s media stories about the personal background and professional exploits of contemporary artists to the point of constituting a roadmap for the contemporary artist's career.

In their methodology, Kris and Kurz used the following schema or set of key identifying biographical factors: a) Giotto was a shepherd, b) his talent was discovered by a famous artist c) the famous artist takes Giotto away from his family and into his charge d) Giotto rises in society and becomes a famous artist. Kris and Kurz sought these identifying narrative “units” in other author’s narrations about the life of Giotto. In the method I propose here, these concepts are replaced by individual words to be identified in a flow of natural language. Structuralist analysis does precisely this, it looks at the units of a system (words) and the rules (grammar) that make that system work without regard to any specific content. According to Saussure, for example, the linguistic units are words and the rules are the forms of grammar, which arrange the words in an order, a linear sequence or chain, simply because when we speak or write, we inevitably place the words one after the other. Independently of the fact that reality exists and is out there, this order is not inherent in the world but created by our minds to make sense of that complex, multy-layered reality. Consequently, our mental processes function on the basis of systems or “structuring principles to organize and understand cultural phenomena.”(Tyson, 1999).

It is this notion of order, this separation of units of reality from the grammar of everyday life, that I have called here advanced drawing for the simple reason that it goes beyond the visual, which has traditionally been considered the realm of drawing, and also because I believe, like Plato, that drawing is a ghost in the cavern of our mind and, like Peter Brook in theatre, that it is “a felicitous experience” combining the interaction of the gaze of the viewer and the object of that gaze, going beyond it. In the application described here, rather than looking for a full reference or concept such as “Giotto was a shepherd” you look for associated words like “tropism” or “dymaxion” “McDonaldization” or experiment with recurrent collocations with which to scan real-time flows of text in a process of calibration of the list or schema and then its application to the process of Natural Language observation.

As Kris and Kurz found out, the problem for them and also for us today is not that there is no reality out there, but instead that such reality is too complex to be perceived coherently and too vast and changing to be understood comprehensively without some kind of grammar to make sense of it all. Therefore, as Kris and Kurz did before me I have opted for the visual observation of what there is, rather than speculate about what there might be in terms of content or try to explain why things are where they are. Also, in making a difference between drawing and advanced drawing, I am referring to the kind of phenomena that is describable using terms such as “hybridization”, “fractal”, “stenosis” “tropism" “Interpenetrating space", etc., most of which come from the field of architecture or technical drawing. However, the fact that words are occasionally understood and used in the context of some discourse poses additional difficulties given that the terms themselves, outside the discourse, may have a completely different meaning or no meaning at all, least of all one that can be linked to a discussion of drawing.

At this point, I would like to remind the reader that unless otherwise specified, the term “drawing” as it is used here is meant to describe a sense of order that we understand in our surroundings or imaged surroundings a structure that we develop in our minds. I quote here Vicente Gaullart: “We need to recompose the arguments that tie us to things, among things, with ourselves, among ourselves; only then will we have anything new to say. A new culture of interchange recognizes its images, it identifies them, and it deciphers them. It informs us in the same moment as interaction occurs in the intelligent traffic of things and people. Instead of being everywhere at once, let us occupy the centre of this energy in a new digital renaissance--where we stop being "I" in order to become the internet (Italics mine). (Gausa, 2003, p. 12)

Gaulart touches upon the key problem of dictionaries: time. Whether in book format or electronic format a dictionary will inevitably become obsolete. The reality today as he describes it is very similar to what Peter Brook refers to in his book The Empty Space : a felicitous experience between the viewer and the performers, a one-on-one real time relationship between a person and his surroundings, a dramaturgical space.

Further on I will refer to this in connection to the structure of the Metapolis dictionary. For the time being, however, I will advance the fact that in the reality described by Gausa and Gaullart, like in drawing, the key elements are movement (as a form of distancing from the here-now) and direction, the combination of which creates meaning, makes sense. Gaullart’s suggestion that we “become the Internet” should not be taken in its literal sense, however, but in the sense of egofugality or losing your ego: To lose all materiality, to become a story, to flow through the electronic avenues of today, to look around and see the words, to be the words, to recognize them, To remember them, to own them.