Paper Video

Reproduced above is a page from Frida Kahlo’s so called diary (fig.1). The facsimile publication has been subtitled ‘An Intimate Self Portrait’. Although the autobiographical and archival possibilities of the sketchbook diary are well known, this first page of Kahlo’s book has painted on it in broad capitals ‘PAINTED 1916’. This is not a ‘true’ date for either the page or the book, which was begun in 1944. However, rational facts are not important for Kahlo.

The aim of this paper is to point out properties of sketchbooks which contribute to their current status and function, and show how this status has partly come about by an interaction with a changing critical environment. For that reason this is neither a history[1] nor a survey of ‘the sketchbook’, and therefore many important artists who use sketchbooks have not been referred to.

The hope is to contribute to a growing awareness of the potential for the medium of the notebook itself, its uses for artists, curators and cultural commentators within the visual arts. Also there is an aim to link and bring to bear theorists whose ideas and philosophies relate well to the fuller potential for using and interpreting such books.

A workable definition of the objects which are central to this paper, and my practice, is ‘originally empty pocket books which have gone on to be used by artists’. This paper uses the terms notebook and sketchbook synonymously[2]. Although these books are the focus, the semiotics[3] relating to that narrower set of objects can be transferred to other items with doodles or notes upon them such as blackboards[4], beer mats, post-it-notes etc. Some parallels with the properties of a domestic mantelpiece or shelf have also been noted, i.e. a place for display which is functional, personal and changeable, whilst usually viewable only to those invited inside. The scope for digital cameras to be part of both the larger set (a place for notes) and the narrower subset (my working definition of sketchbook) is substantial. As these cameras become commonplace, the images they produce can fit into that subset more aptly. The relatively inexpensive, portable nature of an object to record what is around you cannot be over emphasised. Transitory events are captured onto an affordable media, which does not raise the value of the visuals recorded onto it. What can be signified is spontaneity, reality or truth, the investigative, the personal or private, the unfiltered or raw.

‘The Seven Sketchbooks of Vincent Van Gogh’ (fig 2) is a book by Johannes van der Wolk published in 1987, which reconstructs previously dismantled sketchbooks. Wolk has been a director at the Rijksmuseum and Kroller Muller Museum in the Netherlands. This is his re-evaluation of the notebook as an ordered whole, over the earlier higher value of the individual drawings.

Wolks struggles with the definitions for ‘a sketchbook’ acknowledging the lack of clear borders between scrapbooks and albums, medium or large size sketchbook pads, letter sketches, loose sheets of paper and pocket-size sketchbooks. He also refers to Claude Marks’ 1972 book ‘The Sketchbooks of the Great Artists’ where Marks had set out to clarify these terms and also spoken of a broad class of items he labelled ‘sketchbook material’. He extended this class to objects such as single drawings on the backs of menus, or scribbles on the covers of magazines etc. Taking up this thread, Wolk considers the famous correspondence of Van Gogh to be:

This is reminiscent of the lines that Gerald Wilkinson wrote in 1972 about Turner’s ‘Wilson Sketchbook’[5], (fig 3):

‘It is a three dimensional masterpiece and a muddle, a collage, of all that deeply interested Turner for a year or more of his life.’

Wilkinson’s statement combining ‘muddle and masterpiece’ was indicative of his environment in the late 20^th century. It is doubtful that critics would have combined ‘muddle’ with ‘masterpiece’ to describe a work in 1796 when the book was filled.

3. Turner’s Wilson Sketchbook Photograph from the book ‘Turner’s Early Sketchbooks’

Both critics, Wilkinson and Wolk, make the assumption that the sketchbook is a compilation of all that deeply interests, or occupies an artist. This subjective comment is traceable to that which has been powerfully signified by the artists’ sketchbooks: that is ‘the personal’.

4. Signatures (a book binding term for the eight folded groups of pages along the spine).

Photograph from the book ‘The Seven Sketchbooks of Vincent Van Gogh’ (sketchbook number 1).

Wolk conducts a painstaking investigation of Van Gogh’s pages scattered throughout the worlds collections, examining binding marks (fig 4), torn edges, and mirrored imprints of facing sides to reconstruct the original order and orientation of these pages.

The sleuth like way in which tell tale indicators of the previous positions within the books is researched, gives an impression similar to that of a valuable altarpiece whose panels have been broken off and separated. The analogy also holds, in that it requires us to realise that the images in relation to each other claim a different value than as discrete pictures.

Wolk contradicts himself by firstly making the point that these books were meant for Van Gogh’s eyes only, secondly that many of the pages were torn out by the artist himself and posted with letters to his brother Theo, and survive as part of that correspondence. A co-relative but different signification to ‘the personal’ has occurred here: that is ‘the private’.

The assessment of sketchbooks as private, secret and sometimes too intimate and revealing, threatening or monstrous[6], is not uncommon.

There is only one surviving sketchbook by Samuel Palmer (fig 5), out of the twenty that existed when he died. Palmer’s son Herbert burnt all the others. Herbert gives reasons for this act:

‘…because they were never intended to be seen, and because they show an uninviting ‘mental condition’ full of danger, neither sufficiently masculine nor reticent.’

He also envisages the dealers making individual works from the books and destroying that which his father valued.

‘… sooner than that multitude of slight sketches, blots, designs etc. which my father valued so much … should be scattered to the winds, I burnt them.[7]’

One book survived, having been given to a friend by Palmer some years earlier. This is now reproduced in full as a facsimile. The commentary by Geoffrey Keynes sees it as a tool for biographical insight but expresses disappointment that it does not contain visual references to, as he puts it, ‘major works’. This revealing opinion, is exactly one type of reception Herbert claims to have sought to avoid by burning the other books.

Critical and cultural environments range from ‘dogmatic’ to ‘sceptical’[8]. Here are two early views from different parts of the spectrum to expand these philosophical terms:

‘The beginning of philosophy, is a recognition of the conflict between people’s opinions, and a search for the origin of that conflict, and a condemnation of mere opinion, coupled with scepticism regarding it…’

Although Epictetus obviously values scepticism as a tool, his Stoicism is classed as ‘dogmatic’, because it holds that things can be known, and Stoic logic, ethics and physics develop from there.

As a Pyrrhonist and therefore as sceptical as you can get, Sextus believes that things cannot be known.

The phrase ‘sceptical environment’ in the subtitle of this paper refers to the recent and current developments in critical theory and cultural studies. These intellectual, academic activities form the criteria that evaluate contemporary art practice. We are indeed at the sceptical end of the spectrum where all statements are viewed through a multitude of cultural and critical lenses so that meaning is by its nature always moving, never fixed. Always becoming and never being[9]. Dogmatic statements often dissemble under such scrutiny.

As with film and video, installation and performance, does the sketchbook by its nature avoid falling into dogma? Is it therefore a particularly appropriate media for now?

Many traditional art forms like painting may be suffering from ‘visual deadlock’ to borrow a phrase from Gombrich[10]. Perhaps the sketchbook is not. It is still a place to retreat to when deadlock occurs, as well as a place to work when one is ‘in the flow’.

‘The procedure is a marvellous release when one is so often butting ones head against the stone wall of painting’.

Motherwell sounds like he is referring to a retreat here, but he also goes on to publish the whole book in facsimile, having signed every page (fig 6).

The ability to open pages at random, flick through pausing at will, turn upside-down, touch, read, move and close are some of the many ways to interact with a book. Unlike the relative singularity of a traditional painting or sculpture, the sketchbook shifts its ground before dogma can form. The viewer of an open book in a museum case understands these properties despite being faced with one selected page.

The properties of the page are not the same as those of the sheet of paper. Exhibiting and framing also impact ‘the page’ in different ways to ‘the picture’. Although a book may end up in a case, it is appreciated as a hand-held object, which can be resurrected from the display to have another page turned, unlike the picture in its coffin like frame. Although the single page may hold a self-contained finished drawing, it stands in relation to the pages before and after it, which may contain material which is contradictory and yet held within the same object[11].

Mike Nelson’s sketchbooks were reproduced in the magazine ‘Modern Painters’ in 2001(fig 7). In the accompanying article Charles Darwent wrote:

‘You get nearer to what Mike Nelson is really about by watching him flick through his sketchbooks outside a hackney pub.’

Darwent assigns ‘Honest’ or ‘Unfiltered’ to the sketchbook in the hands of his artist.

That Nelson chooses to reproduce six double page spreads from his book in this one article, early in his career, alongside photos from his installations, speaks volumes about how he and other contemporary artists, (Tracey Emin and Susan Hiller for example), are recognising and exploiting the properties of the sketchbook. By doing this they change its function. No longer an object of curiosity to be found in the artist’s studio after their death. Notably, a search for ‘sketchbook’ on the internet will lead to websites, (including many contemporary artists), where every page is reproduced, even the empty ones. The boundaries between the private, the personal and the public are being shifted.

In Nelson’s March 2000 publication ‘Extinction Beckons’, a blurred blue image is shown in an open notebook (fig 8). Nelson has said to me in conversation soon after publication that this notebook had been put through the washing machine inside a denim jacket by his mother, which had caused the ink to run. The jacket is being worn by nelson in a photograph by Jakob Carlsen reproduced on the page before, however no reference is made to the story.

8. Mike Nelson’s own photograph of his sketchbook as it appeared in ‘Extinction Beckons’.

The story may be apocryphal. Deception, particularly spatial, is after all a key feature of Nelson’s work.

Despite attempts from quarters seeking a development to a more homogenous, empirical critique, Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards grand narratives’ still has potency 25 years on. The methods of discursive analysis developed by Barthes, Derrida and others have been taken in diverse directions for diverse purposes, always on the basis that those discourses are themselves open to analysis on the same terms. Opportunities for subtle re-readings of works are available to all from Marxist feminist intellectuals (like Kristeva), to anti globalisation writers (like Muzaffar), all of whose own works are also subject to re-reading.

A ‘sketchbook’ moves between the written text and the pictorial. The chronological, numbered ordering of the novel is lost to a potentially random sequence of a scrapbook, (Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ being one of the exceptions[12]. One could begin this novel anywhere and move about at will). A sketchbook inherently moves on from one depiction to another and can well be described as a ‘dialectical device’ in its own right. Contrasted with those more dogmatic forms such as traditional painting and sculpture, the notebook’s interplay with the deconstructive methods of contemporary critical analysis allows a playful deconstruction of deconstruction itself. In other words the sketchbook is an object which can participate in analysis as much as undergo it.

The dictionary definition of Mimesis is ‘imitation or representation in art'. In his book, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, Steven Halliwell ends up discussing Derrida’s ‘shrewd’ remark that:

‘mimesis is a concept one should not hurry to translate, especially by imitation’[13].

This is a very subtle and characteristically amusing side-step, but one which also helps to show up the unfathomable nature of the problem. Derrida’s attack on simple interpretations of Platonic questions about representation, is aimed at the simplification of meaning of the term mimesis. The idea of the mimetic being somehow ’better’ when close to a definite ‘reality’ is a sitting duck for deconstruction, (on both fronts), exposing a naïve grasp of perception. The more complex discussion that stems from Plato and Aristotle through two and a half millennia up to today are hinted at in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s necessarily contradictory stance (in his Berlin Lectures 1801). Here he delineates a mimesis able to throw questions back upon itself like the nature it imitates.

Is mimesis an imitation of what a thing looks like or what it is like and how can we know what something is like? We ask questions, and the world seems to pose questions many of which can not be answered, so it would seem that a representation of the world might also ask or pose such questions and answer them in a ‘nonpropositional’[14] way. Bearing this in mind a notebook can be seen as a synecdoche[15] of the environment through which it has traveled as much as of the artist who made it.

The front of a Picasso sketchbook, catalogued as number 40 was used on the dust jacket of the book published to coincide with the exhibition in 1986 (fig 9). The writing translates ‘I am the sketchbook belonging to Mr Picasso’. In the Preface of this book Arnold Glimcher writes:

‘Je suis le cahier’. That assertion of identity is crucial to an understanding of the sketchbooks as vital and independent parts of the development of Picasso’s work. Conversely we might say the sketchbooks are Picasso.’

Corresponding to Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ sketchbook no. 40 could be seen to be making the claim that it can think.

Many of Picasso’s books were dismantled for this exhibition and the six essays not by Glimcher beyond the preface trawl through each book looking for links to the best known oil paintings. Glimcher has written that we might say, ‘the sketchbooks are Picasso’, in which case what has been done to him here?

The artist interested in how their own work is read can begin to manipulate uncovered significance in order to more actively engage with possible or probable readings. This may subvert more straight-forward Freudian, Marxist, Feminist or other ‘standpoint’ readings which might assume a basic spontaneity, or honesty in the work. To subvert a discursive object like a sketchbook allows an ongoing fluid, perhaps deceptive, interplay with any incoming discursive analysis.

The debates around representation, and how the single image differs to the non-sequential multiple, (a quantity of images available to look at without order), parallel and relate to debates around dialectic. Richter’s ongoing enormous project ‘Atlas’ is a good example (fig 10). Another is Duchamp’s Green Box (fig 11) about which Avis Newman said[16]:

‘The viewer can explore at will the ideas rather than the fait accompli of the static image.’

What are the ‘semiotics of the sketchbook’ or ‘significance of a discourse’? Umberto Eco’s semiotic theories of the net or labyrinth are relevant here. In one of his novels [17] a character makes the point that ‘a book is made up of signs that speak of other signs’. The almost infinite combinations and juxtapositions possible in books, are described by him as an ‘endless semiosis’. Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality backgrounds this, in that every text referred to by a text brings exponential complexity. The resulting nonpropositional effect of this complexity, and our increased exposure to and familiarity[18] with ‘the nonpropositional’ is furnishing the sketchbook with its new functions.

More prosaically, even simple formal properties of books give surprising possibilities. A display case containing three books each with a hundred pages allows for one million possible page combinations (fig 12).

In our critically sceptical environment where meaning is never fixed, the undogmatic nature of the sketchbook propels it to a new status within the developing hierarchy of the collection. It can become the subject of facsimile reproduction, perhaps having been re-assembled from previously separated pages. It can also be included as a work in exhibitions by living artists.

The function of a sketchbook has altered to become an object which communicates to an audience in it’s own particularly discursive way, engaging with the sharpened tools of the cultural commentator rather than undergoing dissection by them. Visual artists who are aware of the potency of signs, are therefore provided with an almost ‘new media’ which has evolved from an old studio tool.

Butlin, M. Samuel Palmer’s Sketchbook 1824. (Vols 1& 2). Trianon Press, 1962.

Césaire, A. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1995.

Darwent, C. Real Space Fictions, Mike Nelson. Modern Painters V14 No.3 Autumn 2001.

De Zegher, C. ed. The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act. London and New York: Tate Publishing and The Drawing Centre, New York. 2003.

Epictetus. The Discourse as Reported by Arrian, The Manuel and Fragments. 2 vols. Trans. By W. A. Oldfather. (Loeb Classical Library), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956.

Fuentes, C. and Lowe S. M. The Diary of Frida Kahlo. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

Glimcher, A. and Glimcher, M. Je Suis Le Cahier. The Sketchbooks of Picasso. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

Gonzalez, F. J. Dialectic and Dialogue. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

Halliwell, S. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Inwood, B. and Gerson, L. P. Hellenistic Philosophy. Introductory Readings, 2^nd edn. Indianapolis: Hackett 1997. 1^st edn., 1988.

Lyotard, J. F. The Post Modern Condition. Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Marks, C. From The Sketchbooks of the Great Artists. New York: Thomas Y Crowell Company 1972.

Nelson, R. S. and Shiff, R. eds. Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Sardar, Z. and Loon, B.V. Introducing Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Icon, 1999.

West, R. The Intimate Sketchbooks of G Braque. Verve Vol. III No 31/32 dir Teriade.

Wolk, J. van der. The Seven Sketchbooks of Vincent van Gogh. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987.

[1] A chronological history is attempted by Claude Marks beginning with the sketchbook of Adémar de Chabannes who died in 1034.

[2] As does Claude Marks in ‘Sketchbooks of the Great Artists’.

[3] I use the semiotic terms ‘sign’, ‘signifier’, ‘signification’ and ‘signified’ etc in accordance with Charles Sanders Pierce, (rather than that of Ferdinand de Saussure), as delineated in Alex Potts’s Chapter ‘The Sign’ in ‘Critical Terms for Art History’. (i.e. The book is the sign which can signify when the viewer assigns significance so that signification can occur). In this paper I keep sign theory distinct from mimetic theory which will be approached later.

[4] See ‘Chère petite soeur’, and other works on blackboards by Tacita Dean

[5] In Wilkinson’s book entitled ‘Turner’s Early Sketchbooks’.

[6] As Alex Potts writes on works which provoke semiotic breakdown, ‘a monster of vulgarity subverting “bourgeois” respectability, or a monstrosity of nonsensicalness…’. From his chapter ‘Sign’ in ‘Critical Terms for Art History’.

[7] This story about Palmer’s books is reminiscent of Ruskin’s confession that he had burnt a large number of Turner’s erotic sketchbooks. In a letter to the National Gallery keeper Ralph Wornum he said the drawings were ‘grossly obscene’ and could not ‘lawfully be in anyone's possession.’

[8] As scepticism becomes extreme it circles back towards dogma, raising Heraclitean theories of ‘unity in opposites’, which can also be explored using a sketchbook, but are not pursued here.

[9] See bibliography for the overviews ‘Cultural Studies’ and ‘Critical Theory’ under Sardar and Sim.

[10] Gombrich’s essay ‘Illusion and Visual Deadlock’ deals with differences between pictures which have multiple or single viewpoints within them, and compares this to poetry and prose respectively. I borrow part of his title for different purposes, however these comparisons parallel the discussion here of the multiple image in comparison to the single.

[11] This applies less to a constructed album of drawings, than to a book which is then drawn into. The peculiar properties of albums are not discussed here.

[12] Another exception pertinent here is Aimé Césaire’s ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land’ where the title word ‘Notebook’ allows the disjointed presentation of prose and poetry to become the structure which helps to undermine the dominant colonial cultural norm.

[13] Derrida 1972, 208

[14] A very thorough and convincing exploration of the ‘nonpropositional’, and the purposes and methods of dialectic, particularly in the inconclusive aporetic Platonic dialogues, can be found in Gonzalez’s ‘Dialectic and Dialogue’. However, his chapter on mimesis (‘Philosophical Imitation’) is not as subtle as the book ‘Mimesis’ by Halliwell, who also goes further in relation to the visual arts than Auerbach’s book of the same title, where the main subject is mimesis in literature. (See bibliography).

[15] That ‘the part’ can represent ‘the whole’ is also relevant in how the sketch can represent the so called ‘major work’ but this point is not pursued further here.

[16] This statement is to be found in a conversation with Catherine de Zegher printed in the Tate catalogue ‘The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act’

[17] ‘The Name of the Rose’

[18] Familiarity through exposure to multimedia, film, video and performance, multidisciplinary activity etc.

[19] See the Getty Foundation’s website for a treatment of a Theodore Géricault sketchbook and similarly The Tate Gallery’s Website for Turner’s sketchbooks.

Abstract

Contents

1. Introduction

2. What is a Sketchbook?

3. The Sceptical Environment

4. Changing Status and New Functions

5. Summary

6. Bibliography

The Status and Function of the Sketchbook in a Sceptical Environment