DRTP 1 (1) pp. 59–78 Intellect Limited 2016 Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice Volume 1 Number 1 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/drtp.1.1.59_1 Joe Graham Loughborough University Time taken and time told: Serial drawing as the becoming of now Keywords abstract variational practice lived experience serial practice Husserlian method drawing mechanism rhythmanalysis This article presents a brief report of a first-person investigation through drawing, discussing how serially developed drawing can be understood to express the becoming of now – the present moment in time. By employing a phenomenological approach, the notion that drawing expresses the becoming of now is treated as an assumption, meaning a hypothesis to be tested through practice and theory combined. This occurs as part of my developing research practice, where I look to ‘perform philosophy in a non-philosophical way’ (Emoe 2014). Rather than treat art as an object for philosophy, I use philosophy to question a thought that I, as a practitioner, believe is immanent to drawing as form of art – that drawing itself is a form of becoming, based on the intentionality underpinning the temporal experience of drawing. I employ a largely Husserlian ([1931] 2012) approach to my research, using the methods of variational practice and ‘bracketing’ to actively suspend my assumptions for the duration of each test. Deploying it here means I stand back from my uncritical ‘lived experience’ of time to establish how phenomenological theory 59 Joe Graham renders the now an aporia, or puzzle, difficult to express in conventional terms. I then use this theory to develop an alternative mode of expression through drawing, developing the now as a rhythm with a fixed temporal duration, which then ‘becomes’ a spatial extension through drawing serially developed lines. In my analysis I seek the invariant understanding – meaning I ask the series what it expresses beyond the individual variation each drawing presents. I emerge from this process better able to articulate how drawing operates, but also with some reservations, leading towards some suggestions for potential development of the research. Introduction As an artist who draws, I develop serial drawing as a means to draw out my ideas from the process as it unfolds. In thinking about drawing I take a similar line to Berger (2005: 109), describing drawing as, ‘a way of addressing the absent, of making the absent appear’. The concepts which emerge from my serially developed practice may be considered coherent in the sense that they arise in dual combination – from within and without the act of drawing. Elements within the act of drawing relate to the physical process used to draw. Elements outside the act of drawing relate to concepts introduced from other disciplines, such as philosophy, as a means to structure the work and direct the process of drawing towards addressing whatever questions I have posed. I produce work in this manner to see how thought may be developed via the making of work, basing my approach on what the artist Clodagh Emoe recently described as, ‘performing philosophy in a nonphilosophical way’ (Emoe 2014: 14). I consider this seemingly counterintuitive statement particularly useful for my practice, for it suggests that instead of turning art into an object for philosophy, the artist, ‘uses philosophy to reveal the specific form of thought that is immanent to art’ (Emoe 2014: 15). As a practitioner, the thought I entertain as being immanent to drawing as a form of art is the idea that drawing is a ‘perpetual state of becoming’ (Hoptman 2002: 11) based on the intentionality underpinning the temporal experience of drawing. As a drawing researcher with a current interest in the philosophy of phenomenology, I locate the idea of becoming within a Husserlian ([1931] 2012; [1950] 1999) notion of a foundational, operative temporality. The concept of time underpins the subject who draws, the act of drawing (verb), and the ceaseless reinterpretation of drawing (noun) by the viewer. I also suggest it motivates an expectant and resolutely hopeful space of pure potentiality for those who draw – one that extends from the active presence of drawings made towards the passive absence of drawings not yet made. From these beginnings the focus of this article emerges, namely to present a compact report on my current practice, detailing the main points of a first-person, practice-led investigation examining the idea that serially developed drawing can express the becoming of now. To do so I treat the claim that drawing is a form of becoming as an assumption, or hypothesis to be questioned. In practical terms, this means I set out to question it by exploring how it might be understood to express the 60 Time taken and time told Figure 1: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 1, 2 and 3. Figure 2: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 4, 5 and 6. 61 Joe Graham form of the now – the present moment in time, understood in phenomenological terms as ‘intuited becoming’ (Heidegger [1953] 2010: 409). My hunch is that drawing can express the peculiar manner in which we experience the now very differently from other forms of inscription, such as writing. Investigating this in a first-person, practice-led phenomenological manner is my way of questioning how it can be understood to do so, whereupon I seek to make what is absent – a rigorous understanding of drawing as becoming – appear. A selection of the serially developed drawings I produced is presented here in a rhythmical, evenly spaced fashion throughout the article. The aim is to give the reader a clearer sense of the manner in which the investigation was conducted as a rhythm of thinking and drawing combined. The theoretical material coalesced around them at regular intervals during their production, and I am keen to try and reflect that in the presentation of my work. methodology In practical terms I employ a method of serially developed drawing to test my ideas, utilizing the structure and process associated with seriality to facilitate this occurring. Although the mechanism of drawing and the materials to draw with alter with each series I develop (according to the varying demands of the research), I understand the concept of serial drawing as indicating a ‘single indivisible process that links the internal structure of a work to that of other works within a differentiated whole’ (Copland in Chavez 2004: ix). In structural terms, the effort of repeating a succession of similar forms allows for small amounts of variation between individual drawings in a single series to be generated. As each series is underpinned by both the same practical process and theoretical concerns, this means the individual variation between drawings can be sensibly compared and contrasted, allowing the invariant element between them to emerge as a form of analysis. Variational practice is a resolutely phenomenological method of reflective analysis, used by post-phenomenologists such as Don Ihde (in Selinger 2006: 270) but based on the Husserlian method of eidetic variation (Moran and Cohen 2012: 160), the workings of which I will outline shortly. According to de Warren (2004) the notion of structure is central to understanding serial imagery, for it is often the structure which provides the meaning of the work, given across a number of individual instances. On this basis each part of a series can be considered a ‘local structure’ based upon a simple arrangement of forms that facilitates, ‘the integrity of the serial work as a whole’ (Warren 2004: 11). This also means that the seriality of a given work exists across a series of instances rather than found within the singular – the ‘singular plurality’ rather than the plurality of the singular. On this basis, seriality must be sharply distinguished from ‘a series of works on a unifying theme or image’ (Warren 2004: 11). The question of what constitutes a ‘local structure’ of an individual work in relation to the parent series is open to a degree of interpretation. I understand the series of drawings presented here to be a singular 62 Time taken and time told plurality, given that the production of only one single drawing would not have led me to draw out any kind of meaningful results via the use of a variational method. As this is a phenomenological investigation underpinned by the topic of temporality, I employ a largely Husserlian approach to conducting my research. This revolves around the use of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reduction used as praxis (Depraz 1999; Husserl [1931] 2012). It is not my role here to defend the use of the reduction on a purely philosophical level, except to say that I find it a practically useful procedure given the material I investigate – the phenomenon of drawing – and the manner in which I investigate it – via serially developed drawing. Treated as a form of concrete praxis rather than a theoretical endeavour, the two parts of the reduction can usefully bookend an investigation such as mine. In the first instance there is the procedure of bracketing. This means to suspend or ‘put out of play’ any assumptions that the practitioner finds themselves to have or hold upon commencing their research. In my case this is the hypothesis that drawing definitely expresses the becoming of now. Bracketing it for the duration of my investigation means I first recognize it as an assumption, which is useful in itself. I then actively suspend my thoughts towards it while I draw. This enables me to investigate my hypothesis in a methodical manner – I do not stop and question what has/has not been expressed by the drawings as I produce them, I just carry out the task of producing a series according to the constraints laid out. Only once the series is produced do I engage the second stage of the procedure – the search for invariant, described as either ‘variational practice’ (Ihde 1995) or eidetic ‘free variation’ by Husserl ([1950] 1999: 70). This is the process of validating the gesture of bracketing, and can only be enacted from within a presented series (Depraz 1999: 101). In short, the results of the investigation are placed ‘on parade’ and the universal feature that ties them together is looked for. To clarify, this means that within my practice each series is interpreted as a singular plurality (Warren 2004), whereupon the individual drawings within each series are treated as a form of test results. This allows them to be coherently compared and contrasted with each other in order to seek an invariant understanding of the series overall, one that will hold despite changes to the form of each individual drawing. With this short summary of how I conduct my investigation(s) in place, I move towards outlining the development of the theoretical material as it progressed into a practical experiment involving drawing. The now Although time can be described as either cyclical or linear in respect of its rhythms, time as we experience it is very different from the movement of the hands of a clock. We look ahead into the future, and back into the past, but in doing so we seem to dwell within the present to a degree that, 63 Joe Graham Figure 3: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 7, 8 and 9. Figure 4: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 10, 11 and 12. 64 Time taken and time told ontologically speaking, suggests neither past nor future seems to exist for us in quite the same way. Barry Dainton (2004) describes the phenomenon of now as part of our dynamic conception of time, where although there are different ways to conceptualise it, the central contention, that we inhabit a moving, privileged present, has enormous appeal. After all, as we go about our business, we do seem to be locked into a present of brief duration, a present which is advancing steadily into the future. (Dainton 2004: 42) Yet, when we stop to consider this dynamic now in further detail the puzzle or aporia of time in experience starts to emerge. For in considering the now in phenomenological terms as a period of felt duration within which we endure, or persist, we also consider it part of a flow – a stream of nows that pass by, one after the other. This paradoxical notion of a ‘passing present’ raises a deceptively straightforward question – when is ‘now’ if now is always (and already) passing away in this manner? For although we colloquially refer to the flow of time, it has been suggested that time in experience is not simply a matter of explaining it in terms of continuity. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962: 420) indicates Henri Bergson ([1913] 2001) to have erred with his account of duration on this point: consciousness of succession is not the same as a succession of consciousness – the apprehension of duration would itself require a duration of apprehension to make any viable sense. To explain time in terms of continuity would be to confuse past, present and future on the excuse that we pass from one to another through imperceptible transitions. This runs the risk of denying time altogether, because on this account, time presupposes time. Instead it appears that we are caught within a web of time, where we can neither voluntarily exit our now, nor choose to remain fully within it – for something of us is always already passing away, ‘I am always already late for subjective presence’ (Lawlor 2002: 232, original emphasis). Although this experience of time is simply lived through by all of us, the task of trying to coherently explain it in conventional terms leads one into all sorts of difficulties. As MerleauPonty (1962: 418) describes it, ‘my present outruns itself in the direction of an immediate future and an immediate past and impinges upon them where they actually are, namely in the past and in the future themselves’. As an adjunct to this somewhat gnomic description we can turn to Martin Heidegger ([1953] 2010: 334), for how the now, understood as an as ek-stase, is to be interpreted as a unity of past, present and future. Temporalizing does not mean a ‘succession’ of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future that makes present, in the process of having-been. 65 Joe Graham Despite the evident fluidity of thought within these written descriptions, it might be stated that they simply bring us back to the aporia as it stands. Temporality ‘temporalizing itself’, or the present ‘outrunning itself’ shows us something of the form of the problem, rather than its actual content. For an understanding of that, we have to go back to our lived experience of time as ‘intuited becoming’ (Heidegger [1953] 2010: 409) to see if we can make it fit. With that in mind a question is raised – whether the manner in which the now is re-presented through a grammatical form of expression might not itself be a part of the problem? After all, we have no difficulty living and being within the present in our everyday experience of it – it is only when we try and explain it through philosophical reflection that we come unstuck. If this is so, then perhaps an attempt to express it via some other form of inscription might be made – such as drawing. The rhythm of now In order to formulate a coherent way to express the becoming of now through drawing there is an important question to address – how to draw the now ‘now’ if it is always and already passing away in the manner just described? Time described as passing means now is always replaced by another now, and this by another now and so on, whenever we look for it. Yet rather than treat this line of reasoning as presenting an insurmountable difficulty it appears, if one follows the logic, to suggest the need to just keep on looking for it ‘now’. At which point a rather simple solution begins to emerge: by counting out a sequence of nows, the now is presented as the rhythm of time, given as that which, ‘immediately and intuitively appears’ (Heidegger [1953] 2010: 409). Looking to find the now as a form of rhythm indicates a subjective, temporally perceived experience within consciousness, rather than anything externally or objectively given. Nicolas Abraham (1995: 65) describes this subjective process as ‘rhythmizing consciousness’. For Abraham, the phenomenological present (now) is a constantly reoccurring feature of consciousness – the stream of consciousness described as a sequence of nows that pass. This suggests that consciousness itself is a form of rhythm, always engaged in the expectation of a returning now: ‘rhythmizing consciousness, as we know, is rhythmizing from the start. From the first emergence, it is the expectation of a return’ (Abraham 1995: 79). Abraham’s account indicates that one should introduce the expectation of return into a practical investigation that seeks to find the now ‘now’. But the now is nothing independent – it is only the form through which we describe things to have been experienced ‘now’. So although Abraham has identified consciousness as a rhythm (and with it, the rhythm of now) the practical question for how to draw this rhythm remains outstanding. In short, I still need something to draw. To help rectify this I look for a less abstruse understanding of rhythm, one that can assist me to translate the temporal understanding of the now into a spatially described drawing. To do so I turn 66 Time taken and time told Figure 5: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 13, 14 and 15. Figure 6: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 16, 17 and 18. 67 Joe Graham to Henri Lefebvre’s ([2004] 2013) criteria for defining rhythm as part of his rhythmanalysis.1 Rather than discuss the topics of time and space separately, Lefebvre felt they should be brought together in order to reflect the manner in which they are experienced, and rhythm – found across both – is the key. For Lefebvre, the concept of rhythm is bound up with the concept of movement, but in such a way that the two are often conflated with regards to what is attributed as a result. For example, the movement connected to rhythm requires a further element to make it rhythmical – repetition. No rhythm without repetition, in space and time. Yet this repetition must return – meaning it must have measure. And within the ‘lived experience’ of rhythm there is no identical repetition, indefinitely. There is always difference (Lefebvre [2004] 2013: 16). In relation to the now we could say – every now is repeated whenever we ask the question ‘when is now?’ yet it will always be different in regards the content it contains. In relation to drawing we could say something similar: drawing lines in serial fashion means each line is repeated, yet in drawing each new line via the movement of the hand it would always be different in its (spatial) form … for no two hand-drawn lines will ever be drawn exactly the same. Despite providing only a short overview of the theoretical problems underpinning this investigation, it would seem I have outlined a suitable means to structure my drawing exercise via the topic of rhythm. This indicates the only thing remaining is to establish an actual process by which to draw, and the opportunity to sensibly express the now differently from writing can perhaps be met. Yet although Abraham states that rhythmizing consciousness is rhythmizing from the start, does this mean that the rhythm of now is simply given? No – because for there to be rhythm there must be measure. As Lefebvre ([2004] 2013: 18) states, ‘everywhere there is rhythm there is measure’. This suggests that far from resisting quantity, ‘time (duration) is quantified by measure’ (Lefebvre [2004] 2013: 18). Indeed, if we look at it in practical terms then drawing the now as a period of duration immediately raises the issue of spatial extension. This means I need to ask: for how far do I extend each line? Which is related to the question: for how long do I draw each line? Remaining within the philosophical mode I have been promoting, this seemingly straightforward question becomes even more perplexing – how long is now? The duration of now The question ‘how long is now?’ is, in many ways, a counterintuitive and possibly even nonsensical notion. Yet within the phenomenological framework of my argument the concept of now as a nonextensive ‘blink of an eye’ boundary between past and future does not hold up to scrutiny – this zero sum mathematical view, ‘fails to fit with our experience’ (Pöppel 1988: 53). Instead, the feeling of nowness is an experiential reality, a duration within which we live, and upon which basis an attempt can perhaps be made to measure it. One such useful example of this approach is the work of the 68 1. I further emphasize Lefebvre’s understanding of rhythm in relation to this same investigation within a paper titled ‘Rhythmanalysis: Line as a record of the moving present’ (2015), published recently in the Journal of Visual Art Practice 14: 1. Both this and the JVAP article are linked to my larger practice-led Ph.D. investigation focused on how serial drawing records the stream of consciousness. The JVAP article emphasizes the notion of ‘recording’ through drawing, and how rhythm can be used to bring the topics of time and space together within practice, rather than emphasize how drawing expresses the ‘becoming’ of now. Taken together however, both articles overlap, and give the reader a better overview of my current drawing research interests than each manages individually. Time taken and time told psychologist and neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel (1988). Pöppel and his team worked to try and gauge the duration of now for a number of subjects across a range of senses: auditory, haptic and visual. Within this investigation I focus only upon the auditory results, which express only the temporal extension of now. Should I choose to develop this research into a post-phenomenological sphere with a focus on touch (Derrida 2005; Nancy 2013), or post-phenomenological with a focus on Ihde’s (1995) study of technological experience (Selinger 2006), then the question of extension could be interpreted differently. Pöppel’s auditory experiments are made using a metronome, and revealed that the present has an extension (duration) of only a few seconds, in which the now depends on an integrative mechanism that fuses sequential events into perceptual units (Pöppel 1988: 52). Taking a commercially available metronome and setting it to 120, we hear a beat at intervals of half a second. Onto this uniform sequence of beats we can impose a rhythm, by giving every other beat an added subjective weight. Through this process we give the uniformity of the beats a configuration, one that can be increased by widening the number of beats. At the tempo of 120 we continue to give subjective emphasis to every third, fourth or even fifth beat, and thus provide a rhythm that is not objectively present. However, beyond a certain point Pöppel (1988: 54) claims it is no longer possible via ‘subjective accentuation’ to hear a temporal pattern – the temporal structure breaks apart. This leads to the idea that for most people, the duration of now within the context of the experiment has an upper temporal limit of only 2.5 to 3 seconds (Pöppel 1988: 54). According to Pöppel, this ‘temporal form boundary’ can be even more clearly delineated if we fuse as many beats as possible into a single pattern by fixing an accent (Pöppel 1988: 54). This means fusing two successive beats into a single unit – where the subjectively louder one is related to the subjectively softer one – and then increasing the time-interval between them. If a commercial metronome is set at 40, so the interval measures 1.5 seconds, then the formation of units becomes more difficult to manage, even impossible for some. Again, this suggests that the upper limit for integrating these strokes of sound into one single unit (now) is 3 seconds. For Pöppel, the key to interpreting these findings is based upon understanding consciousness as a form of integration, a synthesis, much like Husserl ([1950] 1999) suggested. This synthesis composes an integrated rhythm of time that suggests, in Abraham’s (1995) words, a rhythmizing consciousness That which is integrated is the unique content of consciousness that seems to us present. This integration, which itself objectively extends over time, is thus the basis of our experiencing a thing as present. The now has a temporal extension of maximally three seconds. (Pöppel 1988: 62, original emphasis) 69 Joe Graham Figure 7: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 19, 20 and 21. Figure 8: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 22, 23 and 24. 70 Time taken and time told The extension of now With the outline of Pöppel’s experiment to guide my own investigation, I acquired a commercial metronome – a Wittner Taktell model – with settings from 40 to 200. My aim was to bring the duration of now and the extension of line together as a combined spatio-temporal understanding within the practice of drawing. Following Pöppel’s instructions I set the metronome to the slowest setting of 40 in order to provide an interval measure of 1.5 seconds. This measure would be half the duration of the now set at 3 seconds, meaning the metronome tick would need to be repeated whilst drawing each line. Prior to beginning the test, I thought I would complete each line within a 3 second duration by giving a subjective emphasis to each second tick (‘one … two’) but this proved incorrect. I selected a pad of smooth, square cartridge paper to draw upon, 25 × 25 cm in size. I chose square paper to try and frame these drawings as equally as possible, and avoid providing emphasis where it was not required – as an artist I decided the portrait or landscape format had an unnecessary connection with trying to depict something in a purely representational sense. My objective was to draw lines as time passed, and leave the (bracketed) question of what was expressed until after they were produced. I set the overall duration of each individual drawing at 20 minutes, which previous drawing experience indicated would be sufficient to produce a useful number of lines. In repeatedly drawing a number of individual lines in time with the metronome rhythm – rather than producing a continuous line drawing – I was seeking to introduce Lefebvre’s criteria of difference in a more concrete sense. Instrument-wise I sought to develop a very simple, demonstrational style of drawing, produced via a ‘point that moves‘ (Rawson [1969] 1987: 15). I selected a digital Wacom Inkling pen to draw with, which used a 0.5mm ballpoint nib. This would enable the movement of my hand to be as fluid as possible across the surface of the paper, whilst the pen would simultaneously record each drawing as a digital file for presentation in other arenas, such as this one. My aim was to propel the ballpoint nib across the surface of the paper in one up/down movement of my hand, meaning the spatial extension (of the line) would reflect the temporal duration (of each now). With the cartridge paper laid down flat I set the metronome ticking at 40. The rhythm was noticeably slower than one might expect to use – indeed, it was the slowest setting there was. I used a stopwatch to time 3 seconds and found this included three ticks of the metronome, not two as I had originally thought. The double interval of each now began on one tick, crossed over the second tick and ended on the third. To begin drawing I waited until the metronome arm had made a number of passes and then, in time with the tick, I set the pen into motion and drew a line. After completing the first drawing I reflected that I had encountered a degree of difficulty placing subjective emphasis on every second beat, while counting to myself … and focusing on drawing the line inside three ticks. The fixed duration of each now appeared too short for trying to think through 71 Joe Graham it, yet slightly too long for simply reacting to it. I discovered that the optimum method for staying within the duration of 3 seconds was a rhythm, which focused only on the action of drawing lines – each line was drawn slower from the first tick to the second, and then returned more quickly in time for the third. Across the majority of the drawings I found I stayed towards the middle of the page, where the build-up of marks produced a blacker mass than at the edges. There were also many times when I became restless with following what was, in effect, a monotonous rhythm. The result was that I moved the pen in a more erratic fashion, yet still completing the line within the set duration of each now. The becoming of now I produced a series of over one hundred drawings as a result of this approach, a selection of which are presented here. Summarizing my assessment of them as test results I look to draw out from within the structural variation of the series that which is invariant, as a means to help me decide what it is they might express. However, I do not enter into this process as a means to search for a philosophically apodictic, secure or incontestable ‘truth’ in the Husserlian manner. Instead I look to interpret my drawings in order to discern what I might learn in relation to my hypothesis – the assumption that drawing expresses the becoming of now. ‘Removing’ the brackets I had earlier placed around this hypothesis means I now look to question it in a more active fashion, placing it before my entire series of drawings and asking them – what is it that you express in relation to the now which continually passed for me in time? I can see numerous variations between the form of each line, both within each drawing and across all the drawings in the series. All this variation occurred as a result of their hand-drawn method of production, where the variation of (and within) each line extends across the page for as far as the set duration would allow – so far, so expected. Putting these differences to one side however, that which is invariant appears to be the statement each line makes about the frame of its existence. Each line describes itself as a trajectory that simply took a set amount of time to produce, and the spatial path described by each reflects that fact alone. Yet if time is the space between two beats of a rhythm (Lefebvre 2013 [2004]: 8) then the point that draws between is telling this time as ‘taken’. The time that is told in these drawings is the manner in which each now I experienced seamlessly became the next now while the point of the pen was still in motion: in phenomenological terms, the self-temporalization of my consciousness was in operation at all points along each line. Reflecting upon the manner in which the strange synthesis of temporality is retold graphically, I can see in each drawing that the history of nows which passed for me in linear temporal succession are collapsed upon another, expressing the time taken ‘up’ as a spatial extension that manifests itself as a three-dimensional depth. 72 Time taken and time told Figure 9: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 25, 26 and 27. Figure 10: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 28, 29 and 30. 73 Joe Graham I would like to end this report by suggesting this tells the lived experience of time in a way that words arranged in a non-overlapping linear order from left to right across a page can never do. As Rawson (1979: 56) carefully states: What every draughtsman does is to enact a positive proposition, amounting to a statement without words: ‘This’, he says, ‘is how it is’. His acts in drawing define the terms in that proposition: ‘this’, ‘how’, ‘it’ and ‘is’. He opens up by these creative acts fundamental questions about our perception of form, about the meaning of what we perceive, and about what we mean by the reality we assume we know. (Rawson 1979: 56) evaluation Although I have provided only a very compact overview of this particular investigation, Rawson’s words can already be seen to ring rather differently – is this really ‘how it is’? Not at all. Just as there are an abundance of ways in which someone might choose to draw the passing of time, there are many philosophical approaches one might usefully employ to think about what that means in relation to how we understand drawing, and phenomenology is but one. This first-person investigation has been deliberately selective, underpinned and interpreted through the lens of a Husserlian approach, which, by virtue of its focus on time as the foundational axis to all forms of philosophical enquiry, does not (here) engage in any direct sense with the subject’s extension in space. This means I have not dealt with the topic of touch in relation to drawing, including the presumed necessity of a certain ‘heterogeneous exteriority’ (Derrida 2005: 174), which sensing myself as the embodied subject who draws should require. Even staying within the discipline of phenomenology I could have turned to Merleau-Ponty’s (1962; 1968) early work on the body, or his later discussion of chiasm, the folding of the flesh, to interpret how the world permeates me as I reach out, pen in hand, to express the time which ‘I’ become. Nor have I moved to examine the intersubjective question – dealt with by Husserl in his discussion of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld) – for how these drawings might be interpreted by anyone other than me. As such a discussion is vital to understanding how drawing functions as a means of communicative expression then this omission can be seen as a shortcoming of an investigation involving such a resolutely lived experience as drawing, despite the subject-orientated focus on the now. Finally there is the larger question of whether to move such philosophical discussions on drawing beyond phenomenology, into some form of post-phenomenology – after all, the project of thinking inaugurated by Husserl is now over a hundred years old, and much work has been done since then to either try and overturn (‘deconstruct’) its foundationalist pretentions (Derrida 1973) or incorporate the findings into an analytic, non-foundationalist post-phenomenology (Ihde 1995; Rosenberger 74 Time taken and time told and Verbeek 2015) in which the human–technology relationship comes to the fore, but variational practice remains the key method. As I am keen to keep on producing serially developed drawings I feel the variational method will continue to serve, but the question of what I look for within each series remains open. I could for example, investigate the digital form of drawing used here, questioning the space such technology opens up by making not one, but two versions of the ‘same’ drawing each time one draws – a feature space which Husserl could not even have imagined. This post-phenomenological approach could suggest new ways to make drawings using new thoughts, offering the chance to ‘perform philosophy in a non-philosophical way’ (Emoe 2014) and ask: not what drawing is, but what is drawing doing? 75 Joe Graham Figure 11: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 31, 32 and 33. Figure 12: Joe Graham, The Specious Line (2013), nos. 34, 35 and 36. 76 Time taken and time told references Abraham, N. (1995), Rhythms: On the Work, Translation and Psychoanalysis (trans. B. Thigpen and N. T. Rand), Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Berger, J. (2005), Berger on Drawing, Aghabullogue, Co. Cork: Occasional Press. Bergson, H. ([1913] 2001), Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, New York: Dover Publications. Chavez, A. (2004), ‘Introduction’, in A. Chavez (ed.), Infinite Possibilities: Serial Imagery in 20th-Century Drawing, Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum and Cultural Centre, pp. viii–xi. Dainton, B. (2004), ‘Line and reality’, in G. Shrigley, Spatula: How Drawing Changed The World, London: Marmalade, pp. 27–50. de Warren, N. (2004), ‘Ad Infinitum: Boredom and the Play of Imagination’, in A.Chavez (ed.), Infinite Possibilities: Serial Imagery in 20th-Century Drawing, Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum and Cultural Centre, pp. 1–14. Depraz, N. (1999), ‘The phenomenological reduction as praxis’, in F. Varela and J. Shear, The View From Within: First-person Approahes to the Study of Consciousness, Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 95–110. Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —— (2005), On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy (trans. C. Irizarry), Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Emoe, C. (2014), ‘Perfoming philosophy in a non-philolosophical way’, in H. Slager (ed.), Experimental Aesthetics, Utrecht: Metropolis M. Books, pp. 14–17. Heidegger, M. ([1953] 2010), Being and Time (trans. J. Stambaugh), New York: State University of New York Press. Hoptman, L. (2002), Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Husserl, E. ([1931] 2012), Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson), Oxon: Routledge Classics. —— ([1950] 1999), Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (trans. D. Cairns), Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ihde, D. (1995), Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Irigaray, L. (1991), The Irigaray Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lawlor, L. (2002), Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lefebvre, H. ([2004] 2013), Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (trans. S. Elden and G. Moore), London: Bloomsbury Academic. 77 Joe Graham Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith), London and New York: Routledge. —— (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Moran, D. and Cohen, J. (2012), The Husserl Dictionary, London: Continuum Philsophical Dictionaries. Nancy, J.-L. (2013), The Pleasure in Drawing (trans. P. Armstrong), New York: Fordham University Press. Pöppel, E. (1988), Mindworks: Time and Conscious Experience (trans. T. Artin), San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Rawson, P. ([1969] 1987), Drawing, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —— (1979), Seeing Through Drawing, London: BBC Books. Rosenberger, R. and Verbeek, P. (2015), Postphenomenological Relations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations, Maryland: Lexington Books. Selinger, E. (2006), Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde, State University of New York. Varela, F. J. and Shear, J. (1999), ‘First person methodologies: What, why, how?’, in F. Varela and J. Shear (eds), The View From Within: First-person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness, Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 1–14. Suggested citation Graham, J. (2016), ‘Time taken and time told: Serial drawing as the becoming of now’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 1: 1, pp. 59–78, doi: 10.1386/drtp.1.1.59_1 Contributor details Joe Graham is an artist currently completing his practice-led Ph.D. in Drawing Research at Loughborough University School of the Arts. An MFA graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, he is the recipient of the Henry Tonks Prize for Drawing (2010) and the author of an artist monograph, Flea, published by the Centre for Recent Drawing in 2012. Current research projects include an artist bookwork, Anchor, published by Marmalade Publishers of Visual Theory, London (2015). This project invited a range of contributors with an interest in drawing to outline their thoughts, in practical terms, on the phenomenon of: the Outline. Contact: School of the Arts, English and Drama, Loughborough University, LE11 1ER, UK. E-mail: j.graham@lboro.ac.uk Website: www.joegraham.eu Joe Graham has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 78