Lines and Curves Part 2: Planes and Marks
Saturday, March 21st, 2009…
-Lines and Curves Part 2: Planes and Marks-
by
Phylis Johnson
.
Firstly the picture needs a spatial element - the “picture-plane” (what Wassily Kandinski calls the “basic plane”). (1) This space is most commonly a piece of paper or a canvas. In the beginning this plane is empty - it is “plain” (without marks). Secondly, the picture needs the addition of time - the “making” of “marks” on the picture-plane. For this reason the picture can firstly be analysed into two essential elements - the “plain plane” and the “mark made.” Without these two elements there would be no “pictures.” We might think of the plane as the “face” (surface) of the picture, while the marks are a “mask” (which covers the surface). (2) The plane and mark are the “physical materials” of picturing. In other words - what “matters” to picturing in the first place is planes and marks.
.
Plane…………………..Make
Plain……………………Mark
Face……………………Mask
.
Although the most common form of “plane” and “mark” are paper and pencil (for drawing) or canvas and paint (for painting) these are not the only ways to make a picture. We can draw in the sand, snow or dirt with our finger, for example. We can draw on walls too, or on sidewalks. We can also draw a bath with water. What is essential is not the material itself, but the dual existence of plane and mark in dialogical relationship. It is not the canvas and paint that are essential, nor the paper and pen - it is the conceptual intertwining of Kantian space and time, of external and internal forces which defines the material essence of picturing. (3)
…
..
>>Go to Part 1: Introduction<<
>>Go to Part 3: From Point and Line<<
…
-Foornotes-
(1) Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (Dover Publications, 1977). Wassily Kandinsky writes that it is the “basic material plane” which is called upon to receive the content (marks) of a work of art (a picture, drawing or painting).
(2) Cinema theorist Andre Bazin extends the relationship between the work of art and the mask even further. Bazin writes, “If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex.” (Andre Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image) He goes on say that this embalming of time (particularly in the case of the photograph) is not unlike the creation of a “death mask.” The “mark” of the painting both covers the sur-face (the plane) while simultaneously preserving the face of things (what is represented).
(3) Immanuel Kant defines space and time as the essential building blocks of consciousness. Kant writes that “space and time are… [the] conditions of the existence of things as phenomena” (ie. space and time are the conditions under which things “appear” to us as experience) and that “there are two pure forms of sensuous intuition, as principles of knowledge a priori, namely, space and time.” (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason) For Kant space represents our “external sense” of what exists “without us,” outside the body (a “plane” of perception known through the senses). Time, on the other hand, is the “internal sense” of what exists within us, our “internal state.” Likewise, the “picture-plane” exists “without us” (space) while the “mark-made” transfers our “internal state” (time) to the “picture-plane.”
…