SCRIBBLE /by Kim West

The drawing begins with the line. It can seem to mark or traverse a white void, if you choose to draw on an empty paper, but the paper may of course already have begun to get filled, and in that case the first line cuts around or through the elements, the words or images, that have already emerged, that came there earlier. Before the line? Even the first question is far too late: what images and what words came before the drawing?
It is possible to imagine that the first line traces a movement of appropriation and of destruction. Appropriation, since this line puts the mark of the author on an anonymous and common surface, thus claiming it and transforming it into property. Appropriation, further, since the line breaks the non-signifying monochromy of the surface, and creates an element that other elements can define themselves in relation to; in short, it sets the stage where a signifying play of differences can take place. Destruction, because it destroys the purity of the surface and prepares for the extinction of emptiness.

I don’t remember who said it, nor in what context, but I recently heard someone claim that all artists draw. That drawing, scetching, scribbling precedes all genres, that it is an activity that goes on everywhere, almost secretly, at least in the obscure, on scattered sheets of paper, surfaces, in notepads or on the empty pages in the back of a book, and that this is done even by artists who would never imagine showing an exhibition with drawings.
This may be true or not – it does, however, let us understand the temptation of conceiving of the white surface as a sort of fundamental scene for all artistic work. Because concerning the literary arts it is even more obvious: the working area of the writer is the surface of the white paper, there are no other choices, in this respect technology has not changed a thing. So both the artist and the writer depart from the white surface and cover it with their inscriptions. Big surprise that this surface has become a topos for the visual aswell as the literary arts, right?
Jean Genet, of course, does it with style, in his final novel Prisoner of Love: ”The page that was blank to begin with is now crossed from top to bottom with tiny black characters – letters, words, commas, exclamation marks – and it’s because of them the page is said to be legible. [But] the whiteness may […] possess more reality than the signs that mar [it].”
And the monochromes of visual arts do it. Their rhetorics is more abrupt, almost harsh, but in return they speak with another degree of clarity. They show forth what Genet seems to be talking about: the reality of the surface that constitutes their precondition and outer limit, the materiality, the finitude, the mortality that they, through a vertiginous abstraction, can conceive of as the requirement, the constant companion and the final theme of artistic production. A kind of solemnly self-absorbed necrophilia.
But has drawing ever dwelled upon the white surface of the paper? Has it taken an interest in it, if only in the way it would take an interest in a necessary precondition? As something anonymous, non-signifying and pure that you can appropriate and destroy? No. Or, at least I hope you don’t have to believe so.

Because what is the problem, really? The reality, materiality, finitude of the white surface can not make us forget that it is, according to this idea, above all one thing: empty. Empty as the white cube. Blank as the tabula rasa. Immaculate as the virgin. Open as the western frontier. You understand me right if you believe I want to say
that the cast for the drama that is being played on the fundamental scene of the white surface is, quite simply, sad. Sad. White male artificially humble fucking conquerors. We need a new play, and new characters.
that the images of the nature of artistic work that are being projected onto this empty surface are predictable and uncanny. We need new images, and the images need new names.

Scribble. At best without an end. Do all artists draw? They scribble, just as everyone who writes does. Artaud scribbled frenetically.
Before language and drawing begin, they are already going on, in the form of scribble, in the form of jotted down images and words, of signs that appear and await a content, of repetitions that are repeated and thrown around, down, in the form of words and images, in order, then, to give rise to other thoughts, to the thought that, perhaps, this may all be about a kind of general activity, that precedes definition, that shows the arbitrariness of every definition?
Logically, it will never be possible to find a sufficient reason for putting anything whatsoever on paper. There will always be far too many alternatives for anyone ever to be able to reach any kind of decision. I believe the correct term is underdetermination: the distance between the draughtsman or writer and the pure white surface is far too big, the decision must always already have been preceded by a prior decision to become possible. Scribble fills this distance. Scribble is the possible drawings and the possible texts, scribble is what fills the page even before drawing or writing begins. There have never been any empty surfaces.

 

Perhaps not even drawing is a good model. Because not just the first line can be said to appropriate and destroy. Adolf Hitler, for example, did it too, in Poland 1939.
Scribble, on the other hand, is a fantastic model, maybe too good, almost impossible to live up to. Scribble has no dreams of success, knows no ends or purposes, is anything but the shortest path between points a and b; can not be anyone’s property, is a straying, mindless, aimless activity that can leave its marks on a paper, a neck, a wall, but that is always on its way somewhere else, away, in other directions; needs no particular stage, no scene of its own, is always involved in a general play of differences; does not destroy anything, is an ongoing process of creation, the opposite of finitude.

Kim West