Editorial: Drawing and knowledge

Abstract

Editorial: Drawing is widely appreciated as a means of knowing, something testified to in a wide range of practices, fine art practices as well as practices such as architectural, botanical and other scientific drawing. This text recounts anxieties regarding the epistemic worth of drawing that persist from early modern art education and before. These relate to the embodied, situated and enactive nature of drawing. The text charts a distrust of the body as aid in the attainment of knowledge, as audible in Plato’s dialogues as it is in the disputes of the first Florentine academy. It delineates the deep-seated apprehension evident in theories of disegno as proposed by 16th century artists/theorists such as Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccaro who sought to elevate the status of drawing to an overarching principle, firmly ensconced within the theoretical domain. That strategy privileged drawing as a paragon while paradoxically distanced it from association with the taint of manual labour. The discussion identifies the same apprehension and distrust in the Duchampian disparagement of skill and retinal art – the retina too is a body part. These phenomena have been diagnosed elsewhere in terms of deskilling the artist, reflecting a wider societal division; the elevation of symbolic labour over productive labour, an all too familiar hierarchy.

The text expounds recent research rooted in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, which offers a perspective that challenges these apprehensions, including Somaesthetics and Situated Cognition theory that assert the essential embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive dimensions of cognition – the 4E model.