Drawing: Fissure and Strife

This text addresses characteristics of drawing that are commonly overlooked, qualities of fissure and strife. The point of departure centres on Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Dürer’s drawing process in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. Heidegger focuses on the German word Riss, a term that can mean either a sketch, design or outline, but paradoxically also a fissure, tear or breach. Using this idea of a fissure, Heidegger teases out a deep-seated ambiguity embodied in the term Riss, which incorporates a profound complexity regarding the concomitant destructive and constructive nature of the act of drawing. Drawing, has long been understood as a route to knowledge, and the dualities outlined above are considered here in the context of understandings of drawing from a variety of philosophical standpoints, principally Phenomenology. In discussing the relationship of drawing to ideas, associated with the Heidegger's Riss, the text references lines from Samuel Beckett’s poem describing the drawing practice of Avigdor Arikha. Beckett describes the artist stubbornly besieging his subject; “Back and forth the gaze beating against unseeable and unmakeable,” followed by “Truce” and the emergence of, “Those deep marks to show."

Citation

McGuirk, T. (2026). Drawing: Fissure and strife. In M. Bratchie & M. Velez (Eds.), The Experiential in Artistic Research. Proceedings of the Nordic Summer University Symposia, 2022–2025 (pp. 23-31). Nordic Summer University.

Publisher

Nordic Summer University

URI

https://chesterrep.openrepository.com/handle/10034/629966

Type

Book chapter