(Why should you look at me; why should you put a face to me, if I didn’t ask you to? Why ought things be linear? A to B, your experience happens in THIS body, HERE, right NOW!)
so that you cannot eat me; so that you cannot draw a ring around me and designate a place, a face; something to mark me with and then to snack on.
I want to propose a means of existence; an expression of self that is both fluid and ephemeral. One that communicates itself through the medium of ‘line’ – my definition of which I have expressed above. For clarity, when I refer to my methodology of line throughout this exposition, I refer to this definition.
Line as a concept knows innumerable forms, but for the purposes of this exposition, I refer specifically to the artistic processes of drawing and writing. I personally understand these as a coupled and mimetic force with a directly narrative purpose to communicate selfhood, existence, and experience through poetic and playful means.
Line: The gestural and abstracting tandem force of drawing-and-writing as a narrative means to express selfhood.
The following is an exercise in becoming.
In his introduction to The Pleasure in Drawing, Jean-Luc Nancy invokes a gestural process of discovery or demonstration. ‘One draws – one traces or extracts – in order to show. One shows by extending or spreading out in front of oneself.’ (Nancy 2013:xii).
This analogy illuminates drawing as a process of extending out; the verb drawing itself is harnessed, indicating a dynamic procedure of extraction; of pulling forth; of showing, with the purpose of bringing something to light. Nancy goes on to state that ‘The gesture of showing by extending […] extracting the lineament and incision of a form, contour, sense, or idea from the shadow or a compact mass – such is the gesture of existing.’ (Nancy 2013:xiii).
I want to propose line – a mode of extracting, of showing and hiding, of speaking – as a playful alternate mode of artistic expression for feminine selfhood.
It feels a grandiose understatement to point out that, historically, the representation of women has been troubled, problematic, and violent in its incarnations within the visual arts.
The resultingly voyeuristic cultural consciousness has historically conflated women and women’s experience with an image of a corporeal body that exists as spectacle (and is, correspondingly, valued according to its alignment with racist, ableist and cis-normative ideas of desirability). As Legacy Russell states, ‘We use “body” to give material form to an idea that has no form, an assemblage that is abstract. The concept of a body houses within it social, political, and cultural discourses, which change based on where the body is situated and how it is read.' (2020:8).
Artistically speaking, I want to explore a severance of feeling, and being, from the corporeal. Line, I will suggest, is one alternate methodology to creatively articulate feminine selfhood, whilst evading full depiction of the body. Line, as a playful and perpetually incomplete force, provides visual and linguistic alternatives to The Body as endpoint. I will not suggest that line could be universally representative of all women’s experience (nor should it ever attempt to be). The male gaze (Mulvey 1975) is not monolithic; there is no universal form of resistance to it. For this reason, I propose the methodology of line as just one alternative space for thought on how feminine experience and selfhood could be expressed creatively.
What happens when we use art to visualise experience, without simply drawing the body? When we actively sever ourselves from the body? What does that visual information look; feel; sound like? Questions...questions...questions…
I see line as one potential answer to that question of how to express oneself – one means to sketch, to write, to dream,
an unfixed, free-floating sense of selfhood that works to resist categorisation and whole consumption.
I want to propose a means of existence; an expression of self that is both fluid and ephemeral. One that communicates itself through the medium of ‘line’ – my definition of which I have expressed above. For clarity, when I refer to my methodology of line throughout this exposition, I refer to this definition.
Line as a concept knows innumerable forms, but for the purposes of this exposition, I refer specifically to the artistic processes of drawing and writing. I personally understand these as a coupled and mimetic force with a directly narrative purpose to communicate selfhood, existence, and experience through poetic and playful means.
located suddenly to legs and arms and skin skin skin; what sumptuous sentences you gave me to take in. A being to snatch and masticate…your life tastes
Again, Russell's Glitch Feminism is a salient point of reference here. She states: 'The glitch aims to make abstract again that which has been forced into an uncomfortable and ill-defined material: the body.' (Russell 2020:8).