Post 41: Aluminum Water Bottle, Paper Napkin

As published in The Goose Egg, Issue #10

Surely there are many practical differences between drawings and sculptures. Saying this feels like a reliable and also necessary place to start from. Why distinguish two things that are already clearly different? Pronouncing “the difference between”--as a title, as a phrase--seems to imply that differences not obvious or immediately known that separate one thing from another are about to be exposed by the pronouncer. It seems to imply that the two subjects in question must be pretty similar. Why is this the case? It is as though to call something out, to form a distinction with words is worthwhile only if what is expressed is not as present in sight as it will be once it lands in language. It is true that the two subjects here, drawings and sculptures, do have obvious differences. One takes place on a flat surface, is that flat surface with two-dimensional forms; the other, something three-dimensional, volumetric, constituted of depth and thickness. Still, there are also differences between drawings and sculptures that are not quite as obvious, and, do I say, therefore more interesting? These subtler differences between the two subjects may be interesting because of being rooted in the more obvious distinctions that exist.  What quiet differences do the loud ones contain?

Blankness

I’m interested in what it means for something to be blank. Where can one find blankness? The definition of this word differs based on what methodology it is applied to. Drawing on paper has a large relationship to blankness, though here--maybe many places--blank may not be the same as bare. Here’s Deleuze, fascinatingly, on the blank canvas: 

It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model, but such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. (Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 71) 

And again in unpublished lecture speak: To “think that the canvas is a blank surface […] is so stupid that it just makes you want to cry” (Deleuze, On Painting). Something I take note of is how Deleuze specifies all of the present things as being “in” the canvas. Not on but in it. “In” seems to go against the idea of painting’s flatness entirely. Is there a storage space below the ground level? Regardless, if a piece of paper for drawing is not much different than a canvas, the specificity of an individual drawing, like a painting formed on a canvas, is what gets carved out of the muchness that originates within the paper’s surface. But is there a similar only-deceptively-empty blank for sculptures? What is the surface that a sculpture begins on? If sculpture begins on a nothing there, is this the same as a blank? Is a blank a starting point, and if so, is that starting point a place where something will become empty through an action that leaves only some of it and removes the rest? When I think about making something three-dimensional, the ground is the nothing that is my surface. It is the place where objects get put, cardboard gets painted, and ultimately and importantly where segments of these same items get taken away.

It seems that for sculptures to be created, the surrounding world has to function as this blank. To make a sculpture is to construe the arguably full world as a blankness and from this place, create a fullness of your own. For a drawing, the blankness is given, designated. For a sculpture, the blankness is present but dormant, its scope unknown.

Combination

The divergent ways that drawings and sculptures take on additional forms--get added to or addended--is a difference of insides and outsides. The doorbell on a piece of paper is at the edge--you must ring it to enter a drawing. A sculpture doesn’t have a doorbell–it exists outside, in the sense that it is more naked, less contained. Though I stated as much at the outset, I’m not actually sure if a drawing is, in addition to marks made, also the object it takes place on. (Here, on appears as a literal manifestation of the originally invisible in. A preposition contains much meaning.) This question of the whole (what constitutes the identity of the whole of a drawing?), in presenting itself as a question, allows me to consider that a drawing can include something that may or may not be a part of it. It reminds me of my experience revisiting this writing after some time away; in doing so, I was required also to revisit the paper it took place on. But was the paper actually a part of it?

Here is a diagram (confusingly, a type of drawing in itself) of a sculpture of a snake that has been added to a sculpture of land and of a drawing of a snake that has been added to a drawing of land:

What is seen? Yes, the drawing includes the white space of its paper, while the sculpture doesn’t take place on something already visible. But what if the white space of the drawing were cut away? Does this alteration call attention to the sculptural capabilities of a piece of paper? What would be different between the two forms then? To confront an earlier question: What is a difference that isn’t an obvious difference between a flatness and a volume, a drawing and a sculpture, but which is a subtler difference that stems from this obvious one? A flatness is a piece of foil laid out to wrap up a sandwich. A volume is the foil crumpled into a ball once the sandwich has been eaten.

In the world

When I think of comparing a drawing and a sculpture, all I picture is a paper napkin next to my aluminum water bottle. Somehow, drawings and sculptures are only these items to me--or, these items are as good as any drawing or sculpture, at least good enough for holding the ideas of them in my mind. Credit is likely due to both drawings and sculptures--their physical presences are specific and nontransferrable enough that to try to bring them into my mind, I have to resort to images of napkins and water bottles. Though, a napkin being equivalent to a drawing is only true if it’s just the type of outline of the napkin that’s being considered--the sole question being if it’s contained by two- or three-dimensional boundaries. My idea of drawings and sculptures--partly from my own nature prioritizing outlines, partly from the nature of ideas and what can happen in the invisible land of them--is dimensionally defined.

The world around me is entirely made up of drawings and sculptures if I believe that all two-dimensionalities are drawings and all three-dimensionalities are sculptures. The difference here is that the world is a three-dimensional place; in it, I see two-dimensionalities as perspectives. Sculptures are given in existing objects--fire hydrants, bouncy balls, candlesticks--while drawings are created through points of view–a storefront window from across the street, the surface of a pool from underneath the water, the sun on a tulip through tired eyes. I’m calling sculptures objects as they are objectively existing (if it is even possible to refer to this), and drawings the things that result when, through sight, I attempt to bring objective existences into the realm of my subjective experience. The subject matter is the same in both analogies--there’s one sentence and sculptures are the nouns and drawings are the verbs. 

I think you see something more intently if you can perceive it through the lens of something else--a fire hydrant as a sculpture is a way to really look at a fire hydrant and a storefront window from across the street as a drawing is a way to really think about the viewpoint that creates it. This unliteral lens of perception does not just take away assumptions and therefore blind spots about what you may be seeing, but I find that it actually picks up the assumption bucket, turns it upside down, and shakes it. Drawings and sculptures converge on this fact that they are really just ways to consider objects. Though what to make of consideration turning the considered thing into something else?

Refs:

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles. On Painting: Courses, March–June 1981. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Charles J. Stivale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.