Mimesis and the Death of Difference in the Graphic Arts

THE PENCIL IS A MARGINAL TECHNOLOGY in the pantheon of art technologies and in the history of modernism. To this day, it is associated with the world of the artisan, and with antiquarian practices of the hand.' To draw, as its semantic field suggests, includes such actions as to pull or haul, to carry along and to change the shape of as well as to represent in line. Its roots can be traced to the Old English word dragan (akin to) and to the Greek word trekhein (to run). The sensuality of a practice-a certain primitive know-how (de Certeau, 72)--that unites eye, hand and pencil in a common activity is a personal, private and tactile experience: the contact and pressure between graphite and paper whereby friction and texture engender the quality and status of a particular mark. In exceptional circumstances (one thinks of Michelangelo's drawings of the crucifixion) these marks can become grainy with a certain materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue (Barthes, 270). Since the second quarter of the nineteenth century this practice has existed in the shadows of a powerful new mode of pictorial reproduction: photography. Within fifty years of its first public appearance in 1839, photography had democratized the production of mimetic images through the introduction of simple, easy-to-use cameras and efficient manufacturing processes.2 However, this democratization was not achieved without a price, for a new relationship between the senses, a new way of making the world emerged in its wake. In Walter Benjamin's incomparable phrase

Art · The arts · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Art, Technology, and Culture

• Reinventing the Family

  Open Access•Meredith Mckittrick•Social Science History•1997

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