Axial Drawing

An axial drawing performs itself and I am its audience. This skewed account is one of several ways I find possible to frame the act of drawing so that its particular character might come into view. It requires its own grammar. I could say: An axial drawing is performed into existence. It tells the story it is. Here I could invoke Maurice Blanchot’s special definition of récit (story, a telling) as “not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen.” This corresponds to the notion of performativity¹ as distinct from performance in general, where drawing is language, gesture, and consequential action instantly — irreducibly the thing itself.

To say that the drawing is performance is perhaps less to define the act of drawing by performance than to set up performance for reconception through drawing. The act, at least the axial act, is a singularity. Its existence is news of the possibility of being what it is just this once.

Axial drawing is an intimate act that may or may not be performed before an audience — it happens with and without observers and public performance² — but it is not essentially altered by being done publically; it remains intimate in focus. Paradoxically, in neither instance is it a personal expression — it has little directly to do with me (how I feel, my mood or emotional set), and it is not referential to anything perceptibly exterior (setting, objects, people, things). Its life is its own. My discipline is to serve it by optimizing its action.

Is it performance art (or even art)? I can only say yes, here, because this is an art context, and it affects me in the way I like art to affect me. It alters my sense of world and dimension the way certain art does. But it isn’t modeled on any particular art or influenced by artistic style or method or conditioned by the presumed primacy of art history; and in the beginning it didn’t arise in order to be art, but rather as an intrinsically compelling thing to do on its own terms. I can imagine doing it without an art context or without the possibility of audience. I see the act as a reality-generator, intentional and intense, perhaps even a sub-species of the self-generating primordial, which I take to be the substratum of art itself (emerging as well in contexts lacking the concept “art”). Nevertheless I’m in no way averse to thinking of it as performance art, which allows for the productive liminality of its own category. Yet I wish to register that an axial act does not feel ennobled by calling itself art. Its center of gravity, so to speak, is independent of historical, social, and aesthetic categories.

When I do think of how it’s art I think principle art. That is, it is not conceptual in conceptualizing itself as realized object in advance of the act of its making; its conceptual force is surrendered to a principle, which I am calling axial. The principle in this instance may be stated this way: Any entity upright in gravitational space (in this case a person drawing) has an axis (the spine) which allows one to behave coherently in dynamic balance; if one operates predominantly from that space, freely and with integrity, rather than attempting to control the full outcome on an exterior surface, certain revelatory states of attention and consciousness may inscribe themselves in the resulting action and effects. (This species of drawing is probably closer to certain open-process improvisatory dance approaches than to most art drawing, and in my practice it is influenced by decades of t’ai chi chuan.) I draw with two hands simultaneously, usually with multiple implements in a hand (whether graphite or brushes with ink or paint), disposed by the lower center of the body and leaving arms/wrists/joints energetically released. The bodymind state of intention, integrity, and listening determine the outcome interactively with the materials and the event space. The result is neither chance-determined...