Abstract: Glove and Hand: Autofiction discussed through reference to drawings that concern the observation of perception
The article introduces the literary genre of autofiction as a means of self-debating drawings, and suggests the efficacy of this kind of writing as a means of articulating the ‘I’ of the drawing-based artist as subject within their work. After a brief introduction to autofiction’s history and theory, the body of the article concerns an example of autofiction written by the author to discuss the subjective basis of his drawing practice that concerns the observation of perception. This is followed by some indication of autofiction’s possible usefulness to other drawing-based artists. The autofictional narrative involves a conversation of a fictional character and his interlocutor friend concerning two drawings, with some academic reference embedded in the conversation. The main formal and conceptual component of the drawings, generated by factors of perception and particularly relating to the second of them, is a space left open between its first and second layer, which is interpreted according to Lacan’s theory of the Thing. Besides Lacanian theory, the article makes reference to Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of distanciation, and ends at a point of revelation, to the author, of distanciation in practice through a chance encounter with another artist’s own use of writing. It is suggested that this encounter is similar to how autofiction, if written by the drawing-based artists, may help them in relation to their visual work.
* 2017: The author collated the Inside Time writing eight projects as chapters, and began to write interventions into them by a third-person fictional character. Hence, the idea of a parallel fictional narrative gradually emerged, titled as capitlaised DRAWING - FICTIONS - TIME
* 2012: Submitted and had published several articles relating to the project; importantly to the question of fiction, an article called Glove and Hand (TRACEY Journal, Vol. X, Issue Y, 2021), which includes a discussion of the genre of autofiction – usually written in the first-person – and providing a third-person example of it through a fictional character named Morry (later to be renamed Em):
"What glove is to perception, hand is to consciousness,” Morry mumbled, as he turned his mind to a new drawing idea and donned older age for the purpose.” This was and would increasingly be a question of observing perception in and through observational drawing. “Is it possible,” Morry would ask himself, “to isolate, articulate, or even just to point to perception as itself driver and motivator of observation?”
(Reference to observing perception through drawing relates to what by now, 2019, was a new artistic research project hosted by i2ADS (Research Institute in Art, Design and Society, Porto University), Observation of perception, considered through drawing)
* 2020: First inclusion in : PRACTICE SHARING, Language-based Artistic Research Special Interest group
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/1021562
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/1019928/11437
From PRACTICE-SHARING artist's statement:
[....] When I speak while drawing, each as a medium cajoles for my attention [....] The first example involves inserting two other layers of more reflective speech into the enunciated reflexive speech as pauses, which happens to talk about erasure as a form of pausing in the drawing. The second example gives some indication of how one can speak to oneself on levels of spontaneous thinking and then apply analytical critique, while keeping within the artistic premises, as it were, of the practice [....]
Abstract: DRAWING - FICTIONS - TIME
The word fictions in the manuscript’s title, DRAWING - FICTIONS - TIME, can be read as both a plural noun and a verb that suggests an impact of the word drawing––the latter of which can also be both noun and verb––on time. The manuscript is comprised of twenty-one chapters dividing between two narratives that begin separately and increasingly interrelate. The first of the narratives is a reflective-academic consideration of the question of time explored through drawing, where seven drawing-based projects are presented in order of their occurrence. These chapters include a literature review chapter, a working explanation of reflexivity, and a concluding chapter that proposes some key connections that occur throughout the manuscript. The drawings’ rationale and interconnection are discussed by the author in the drawings’ dedicated chapters through reference to his on-going reading, mainly the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur, and the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan. The author’s particular interest is in the visual-material work as its own entity and as both generative and illustrative of written dialogue. The second narrative, which is fictional, concerns a male character called Morry. The reader will understand this character to be the creation of another in-text fictional author who is portrayed in five dedicated chapters as the friend of the manuscript’s author. One of Morry’s fictional roles is to have been invited to read the reflective-academic narrative and comment on its concerns. Such comment is inserted into the reflective-academic narrative in the form of interventions that run throughout, amounting to 167 in all. At the end of the second narrative, in effect at the end of the manuscript, Morry re-visits the manuscript at the beginning with a set of second-cycle interventions, this time in a context of interest mainly in the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. While this folded-in extension of the second narrative of course begins at the beginning of the manuscript, and its being a later addition in time is not explained as such, the reader should gradually sense that these are a second-cycle interventions are of Morry as an older version of himself. The two sets of interventions therefore represent simultaneously the character’s younger and older age in time. (A third set of interventions, dated with their time of occurance by the author in the manuscript, are several in number but do also convey synopses of each of the chapters.) Parallels and similarities are developed in the fictional narrative between Morry and the manuscript’s author, while Morry is also pursuing his own creative and written interests, among which concerns his transcriptions of observed spoken monologues by an old man whom he names the source. Concurrent with such interests, Morry starts a relationship with a woman older than him who is a painter and the estranged wife of a writer who turns out to be the author-friend of the manuscript’s author. Morry is gradually introduced to the manuscript’s author through circumstances of his own story, and increasingly replaces the author as the artist of the author’s drawings. While the conclusion to the reflective academic narrative is contained in the penultimate discursive chapter, the final chapter provides a resolution to how the fictional narrative is built into that of the reflective academic. The entire work should suggest the oscillation and variability of a single identity; that of the manuscript’s author through his creative interests in the context of time.