are you propositioning me?

I've started with a photo of Marcus Coates during one of his pieces 'Journey to a Lower World' - summoning animal spirits to aid a situation. I found it because of that photo from Rotherham Marcus' office and the philoshopher dressed as a Wolf spirit guide. Which is interesting as Marcus Coates, Rotherham Marcus and the philosopher are all trying to infiltrate, interpret, find/summon meaning and then perhaps a/effect situations - but only one of them calls it art, the others call it life and research respectively. But does the name matter and if it does, why? Is it because theory and art got made more special, and some of us like that?
This is interesting when you think of our ongoing debate over our practice and the pondering of what to call it. I worry we are seen as shaman, as other, as special when that's what we dont want to be, but instead to be useful, which i suppose is sometimes being special. However I am also bored now of our angst, I am now back to partly not caring, continuing instead to try and be an artist interested in the world. I'm liking the idea as Kate and Steve we collapse specialisms and challenge boundaries opening up spaces for alternatives; that we find whats of use and use it whilst bringing into question givens. Ultimately setting up potentials and propositions encouraging things to happen, to then step back letting those situations be life. Does it mean through this we circumnavigate the problematic 'appropriation' of social space as art - partly because as you say and i hope - [we intend that] the proposition when realised stops being art and becomes life. Which makes the Propositional in Propositional Drawing description, with all its layers and different meanings fit us well.

Off the back of this I have been thinking more about words like art, real life, function and authenticity in the build up to this post. i know i am meant to be talking about drawing [which of course these words can not be seperated from] and i will get to it, but i was reading an article in Art Monthly about Function - it was talking about an artist who had built a chair and what the difference between it and a designers chair was, how one was art and how more and more artists are making things that are functional - lights, chairs etc... It made me wonder if at the heart of this it was artists trying to say something about value and meaning - a question of use and usefulness - trying to be more honest in the world, in fact trying for their work to be part of life? I wondered, perhaps hoped, that they had seen the world beyond the gallery and thought whats the point and started to question their making? But then i woke up, of course this is not true, instead its further appropriation/abuse and in fact its just the urinal all over again. Perhaps even its the 'functional turn'? What would Malinowski say - you can put a canoe in a museum and say its a canoe but its not, its dead... or something like that.

Anyway this idea of work trying to be part of life, of it being alive, of being honest, made me ponder - are we attracted to certain objects/acts/situations because they are useful, liked even, used. Are we suggesting this way, our way, of being in the world, of being in the art world, is somehow more authentic? Aren't we being a little bit special, trying to differentiate ourselves to compete, to say we're different? Or are we trying to understand, to articulate, to be clear. Are we setting up the difference to prove how good we are at being different?

I digress - back to drawing and the words honest and authentic, which alongside primal, idiosyncratic, fresh and its ability to transcend historical postures are often valued as good drawing traits. If drawing is this ... are we? It seems to me if we can somehow find a parallel to drawing, a description we could use then it seems relevant to put it behind propositional. But these words seem to lyrical, too praiseworthy, not pithy enough - and im not sure primal fits [although i know you sucked the marrow and made that film..but]. So how do we find the heart of it, a way of talking of drawing that fits when so much has been written and so much is eulogising?
I like the following description, i found it in this book: Drawing......uncertain, defiantly idiosyncratic, making specific difference rather than aspiring to universal values, stubbornly refusing resolved forms, and incorporating the principle of erasure - the will to unmark. It is unstable, and balanced between absraction and representation, its virtue is its fluidity.
I also like the quote from T Ingold in Lines when he describes drawing as the trace of a manual gesture. When i reread this it resonated with me and the idea of setting up propositions for them to be taken into the world.
Also in the Drawing Now book [referenced above] the authors also talk of Blindness in relation to drawing and in particular a Derrida text and exhibition Memoirs of the Blind. It relates to a discussion about thinking. It uses 'blind' as a metaphor for the phenomenon of vision - in that drawing circulates around vision and seeing, whether it is literal vision or the psychic vision of dreams and the imaginary. Sight is usually understood as an equivalent to understanding and knowing [i see], whereas if we deny sight then drawing can happen at the point of perception, remembering or conception. Drawing then is perhaps the visualisation of thought, in relationship with perception, that depends on an inner vision and reflection - One cannot draw without [hind]sight, memory, or consciousness of resemblance.  The authors of the Drawing Now book go on to borrow some of the terms and questions raised by Derrida and I really like this following thought:  "We pursue the idea of drawing as the 'hypothesis of sight' of intuition and conjecture, and contend that drawing, as a contemporary operation makes propositions and hypothesises. We focus on the 'thought of drawing' which emphasises its potency as residing in ambivalent qualities - its propensity to speculation and its contradictory condition"
So our drawing then perhaps is : drawing what is seen and not seen, with and without seeing?



So to draw this now long entry to an end i wanted to clarify a point in response to your:  Farming is a way of inscribing on the landscape it strikes me that this is very different to drawing on the landscape, it is clearly a practice - it might be useful to talk about how it differs from our practice as well as how it is similar - working the land has clear parameters and controls,  the reasons for decisions are driven by many external factors which are beyond your control. Perhaps the glory and worth of the art of proposition is the internalised worlds and spaces which control decisions. SP.

I think what i was trying to say that farming was linked more to Amanda's "not yets" - it is by its very nature propositional - full of potential, fecund. Yet i did refer to drawing in relation to farming and used words like inscription and mark making in a more traditional linked to drawing way. I suppose i was speaking metaphorically. Your right that perhaps our propositional drawing is conceptually different to farming, driven by flights of fancy and intellectual trickery, less grounded and not about feeding people per se. However i do think like farming we are driven by external factors, things that control decisions - funding, fashion, the market, academics, success, climate...and its this that challenges our way  - however farming knows what it is and we continue to define oursleves.