„Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.“ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

To become a master of visual languages, we have to combine three parts:
1. the knowledge about perception
2. the knowledge about our already existing ability to draw (i.e. to paint, to design and so on)
3. to draw (i.e. to paint, design, and so on)

If we have succeeded, to combine these three parts to one drawing, we have created a space of shared intentionality.

At the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt we started the research on The Intentional Space of Drawing in February 2011 with a project named „knotunknot“, a social choreography by Dana Casperson and William Forsythe.
Dana and William had defined the conditions for the conversations, i.e. the conditions of the social choreography: „25 tables with a size of 70 by 70 cm, four persons per table, a list of questions, a limited period of time to respond and a request for no interruption.“
Our interest was focused on the space between the participants, especially the space between their hands which moved on the surface of the table. How will the space between those who are speaking, be changed while they are speaking? How could we capture the shape of the interaction? How could we make visible the space of language and with it the interwoven intentionalities of the participating persons which defines the structure of every language in recursive determination?
The two most important questions which are underlying our artistic research are: How to come from the movement of the body to language? How can this process be shown in drawings (in the respective current moving, traced by the act of drawing), as the fundamental basis of every kind of message?

Drawing is to be understood as the groundwork for every cultural development. To draw, in its concrete manner, means to connect one point within a system of co-ordinates with another point. The question of, where to find and how to define the system of coordinates is one of the earliest questions of mankind, obviously caused by observing the constellations. The primary answer which the stars gave was the definition of where we are and in which way we could reach the point of our destination, to understand in a graphical manner, from which the technique of navigation arose.
With the question of, how to describe our own position, involuntarily arose the question about Identification and Transformation; how to identify who we are, why we are and what is our goal in life and how we have to transform ourselves to reach this goal.
To answer all these questions, we use drawing as our primary tool. Drawing is not only a technique to copy something from the visible world (this kind of drawing first had its meaning within the Renaissance) but is a use of lines (from point to point) which is the equal groundwork for the signs of letters and the signs of pictures.

Like Michael Tomasello describes in his book „The Origin of Human Communication“ (MIT Press, Cambridge/London, 2008), every kind of communication, the speaking as well as the drawing or writing, is based on the movements of the human body: to show and ensure our common intentionality what means to ensure the social relations of our positions, identifications and transformations. Tomasello calls this "shared intentionality".

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims that there are two distinct ways in which we can understand the place (therewith his relation to our intentionality) of an object (that could be an natural object or an object of use, a human figure as well as an animal or a room like a cave, the inside of a house or a cathedral) when we are visually apprehending it. The first involves an intentional relation to the object that is essentially cognitive or can serve as the input to cognitive processes; the second irreducibly involves a bodily set or preparation to deal with the object. Because of its essential bodily component, Merleau-Ponty calls this second kind of understanding ‘motor intentionality’.

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Odoardo Fialetti, per disegnare tutte le parti 01

Odoardo Fialetti (1573 - 1638) was an Italian painter and printmaker during the late Renaissance. The Bolognese artist is a fascinating figure upon which curiously little work has been done. Though he is a rarely discussed pupil of Tintoretto, Fialetti’s oeuvre is vast (some 55 known paintings and approximately 450 prints) and incredibly diverse.

Odoardo Fialetti, per disegnare tutte le parti 02

His work encompasses religious subjects, portraits, books on drawing and sport, maps, and illustration for treatises on city defences, literary texts, and anatomy.
His work was influential for several hundred years after his death, not only in Venice and northern Italy, but also in France where his designs were used as decoration on faïence produced at Nevers, and England, where his paintings were much admired at court.

Odoardo Fialetti, per disegnare tutte le parti 03

In the realm of science, Fialetti’s influence can be deduced from his drawings of curiously animated cadavers in detailed landscapes to those of future generations of anatomists and illustrators throughout Europe.

Odoardo Fialetti, per disegnare tutte le parti 04

Fialetti’s close association with Sir Henry Wotton, and the careful copy of his drawing book made by Alexander Browne in the mid-seventeenth century, attest to his impact on the formation of an Italianate sensibility in the appreciation of the visual arts in Early Modern England.

In this semester we try to find out how the "motor intentionality" creates the "intentional space of drawing“, which refers to Tomasello’s "shared intentionality“.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
(Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945,trans., Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge, 1962)

1.1 What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered.

1.2 Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example.

1.3 But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’.

1.5 It is the search for a philosophy which shall be a ‘rigorous science’, but it also offers an account of space, time and the world as we ‘live’ them. It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide. Yet Husserl in his last works mentions a ‘genetic phenomenology’ (Méditations cartésiennes, pp. 120 ff.), and even a ‘constructive phenomenology’ (See the unpublished 6th Méditation cartésienne, edited by Eugen Fink, to which G. Berger has kindly referred us).

1.6 One may try to do away with these contradictions by making a distinction between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies; yet the whole of ‘Sein und Zeit’ springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account of the ‘natürlicher Weltbegriff’ or the ‘Lebenswelt’ which Husserl, towards the end of his life, identified as the central theme of phenomenology, with the result that the contradiction reappears in Husserl’s own philosophy.

1.7 The reader pressed for time will be inclined to give up the idea of covering a doctrine which says everything, and will wonder whether a philosophy which cannot define its scope deserves all the discussion which has gone on around it, and whether he is not faced rather by a myth or a fashion.

1.8 Even if this were the case, there would still be a need to understand the prestige of the myth and the origin of the fashion, and the opinion of the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be practised and identified as a manner or style of thinking, that it existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy.

Our method is to confront text passages of Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" with text passages of Cennino Cennini's "The Book of Arts".
In addition to the text passages we will examine some drawings, which were used for textbooks of drawing and painting. We start with the Bolognese artist Odoardo Fialetti (1573 - 1638).

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1.1 Made and composed by Cennino da Colle, in the reverence of God, and of the Virgin Mary, and of St. Eustachius, and of St. Francis, and of St. John the Baptist, and of St. Anthony of Padua, and generally of all the saints of God, and in the reverence of Giotto, of Taddeo, and of Agnolo the master of Cennino, and for the utility and good and advantage of those who would attain perfection in the art.

1.2 CHAP. 1–In the beginning, when the omnipotent God created the heaven and the earth, above all living creatures and plants for food, he created man and woman after his own image, endowing them with all virtues.
Afterwards came misfortune, through the envy of Lucifer towards Adam; who with malice and subtlety induced him to sin against the commandment of God, that is, first Eve, and then Eve deceived Adam; and God was angered against Adam, and caused him and his companion to be driven by an angel out of Paradise, saying to them, "Because you have dis-obeyed the commandment which God gave to you, by your labour and exertions shall you support your selves."

1.3 Then Adam, knowing the sin he had committed, and being nobly endowed by God, as the root and origin and father of us all, discovered by his wisdom that it was necessary to find a way to live by his own manual exertions, and thus he began by digging and Eve by spinning. Afterwards be carried on many necessary arts, different each from the other, and each more scientific than the other; for they could not be all equally so.

1.5 And well does it deserve to be placed in the rank next to science, and to be crowned by Poetry: and for this reason, that the poet, by the help of science, becomes worthy, and free, and able to compose and bind together, or not, at pleasure. So to the painter liberty is given to compose a figure, either upright or sitting, or half man, half horse, as he pleases, according to his fancy.

1.6 Therefore, whether through great reverence or love, let all those persons who feel in themselves any kind or manner of knowledge, or power to help and adorn these principal sciences with some jewel, put themselves forward without any bashfulness, offering to the above-named sciences this little knowledge which God has given them.

1.7 A humble working member then of the art of painting, I, Cennino, born of Drea Cennino of the Colle de Valdelsa, was instructed in these arts for twelve years by Agnolo, son of Taddeo of Florence, my master, who learned the art from Taddeo his father, who was the godson of Giotto, and was his disciple for twenty-four years.
This Giotto changed the art of painting from the Greek to the Latin (manner), and brought it to the modern (style); and he possessed more perfect art than ever any one else had had.

1.8 In order to assist all those who would approach this art, I shall take note of all that was taught me by my master Agnolo, and of that which I have proved with my own hand; invoking first the high omnipotent God,-that is to say, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; secondly, that most delightful advocate of all sinners the Virgin Mary, and St. Luke the Evangelist, the first Christian painter, and my advocate St. Eustachius, and generally all the saints, male and female, of Paradise.

1st Lecture 2016 »The Intentional Space of Drawing«

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