ABSTRACT
I have fixed the xeroxed copies of the Bonnard drawings (several of which I am already familiar with and close to from catalogue reproductions) to the wall around my desk; they constitute an intimate exhibition within which I can move and be moved without moving. In spite of the losses and the accentuations of the copying process, they retain their ability to amaze, seduce, and undo. I am sure that through this little collection we can explore together the differing and converging qualities of our relations to them, of how we are rivetted by and to them…
Notts, June 1996 I’m glad the copies of the drawings arrived safely. At this time of year, it is
just before harvest and the air is full of tiny insects. Clouds of them come out as the corn is about to be cut and hang around in the air. They have the irritating habit of crawling behind the glass of any surface they can find, and dying. I look at the drawings on my way down stairs, and discover that they are pockmarked with tiny bodies from the night before. Black dots appear overnight on drawings whose surface is already a haze of marks. It is maddening. The drawings are put away from all this now. I have always liked the idea the Japanese have of removing special things from sight at certain times of the year; then setting up selected objects in particular places where they can be viewed without visual interruption.1I have taken the Bonnard drawings down now, and pinned up a number of xerox copies in the studio. I think that I prefer these poor reproductions to facsimiles that strain so hard to be something they can never be. I find too that there is more room in the fog of the Xerox for the memory of the originals and I can let my imagination make up for what I no longer have in front of me. I do miss the drawings however now that they are not around. I get used to seeing them everyday, even if I just scan them as I walk by. Bonnard would not have been surprised about the way his drawings are now so cherished. He clearly valued them as much as his pictures, and, from what I can discover, he
kept them by him all his working life.2 When I think of the drawings now, I am confused by the fact that although I have lived with them for so many years, they are still images of ‘nothing’ to me. Nothing occurs in them. Many of them have no subject centre at all, as everything is expanding in a temporal field that stretches across the paper-space and out beyond its edges. Nothing stands long enough in the front of this white screen of the paper to secure the title of subject, and all the relationships are constantly being re-absorbed into a mush of the here and now. They are ‘evidence’ of non-events that I would not notice had they not been noticed for me. I could not make these drawings because I could not notice these particular moments of ‘nothing’ before they were turned into art for me by Bonnard…
Withdrawn from a familiar but ungraspable corpus (‘Bonnard’), the drawings ensnare both of us, but necessarily differently. Starting in the midst of our different relations to Bonnard’s work we are constituted as two libidinal involvements which provoke several ‘voices’ as our response. It will not be possible to either unite on a single analytic site or finally separate these intertwined overlapping but different ‘voices’. They speak to the drawings’ demand of us, to the ways they draw us out of ourselves, out of the ‘I’s’ that know. Representing nothing but themselves-as-art’s-work the drawings withdraw from knowledge’s grasp, a withdrawal within which we are caught up and scattered: two ‘I’s’ becoming multiple. Perhaps art is the other of analysis. Perhaps the unifying tendencies of analysis, of theorising, cannot be reconciled with the personal, the situated, the sensuous, the indexical qualities of the relation to works of art of human ‘subjects’, a relation which is a becomingplural (the subject’s undoing).
