On Drawing as language

As I go back through old things I have written, I came across a bunch more references to drawing and language, primal sorts of stuff, that I really should have recorded here before and seems extremely pertinent to some of the stuff I've been thinking about lately.

OK. So thinking about language as a REFERENTIAL system, (see quotes from Savage-Rumbaugh for this)
and then given this:

- P. 9 “Like all language, drawing is an information storage system. In fact, drawing was used to codify and store information for twenty-five thousand years before phonetic symbols came to represent spoken language.”
From that "Drawing From Life" textbook that Patrick uses . . . Drawing From Life – third edition. Clint Brown and Cheryl McLean, Thomson/Wadsworth Learning, Belmont CA

How does drawing itself relate to this language stuff? I think I talk about this elsewhere - the potential for drawing as an "information storage system" . . . but I think at the moment I want to look at some of the ways that LINE specifically has to do with this, with drawing and language and primal sorts of development. Because I was reading in a chapter about line in that Drawing from Life book, and came across the following interesting thoughts.

Talking about line, they point out that line is really an imaginary idea, its not actually a thing. which is kind of great. Like, it doesn’t even really represent a thing, it’s just a surface transcribed to paper. Other artists also say very similar things – that lines don’t exist in nature, that lines are invented to create an illusion. I like that this book talks about line as a powerful “conduit” for information. . .

“Physically, a line is nothing more than a two dimensional mark on a surface. But when that mark stands for something or traces the configuration of an object, it traps within its confines the conceptual essence of that object, holding it through time.” 62

. . . they talk about how line/mark making gave us “the capacity for literacy, the development of language as an information storage system” I LOVE THIS. This primacy of line, or . . . ancientness of line, some other word I can’t think of. . . I think this is an interesting link with the topics I’m interested in right now . . . like the development of language and representation and its relationship to my paintings and animals etc. Because if lines are essentially about boundaries - demarcation, edges, that is also really in a sense what a lot of these studies are about - delineating boundaries between species that may or may not really be there . . . as lines are created by perceptible changes. . . enough of a difference to indicate some kind of distinction . . . to allow for a label . . . that's what happens on our spectrum of species and taxonomy.

It's interesting what role drawing itself may have had in our cognitive development, in as much as we think that language affected our development as a species. Because if language gave us the power for "rational thought" and information transfer in a way that far surpassed prelingual communication, and written language allowed us to store information in unprecedented ways, thus allowing for the building upon on knowledge from generation to generation . . . how much did drawing, which came before "phoenetic" and written language, affect these qualities? How much did drawing itself pave the way for representational or symbolic language? I assume that if we have shown the capacity and tendency to draw for so many thousands of years, that it has had enough time to have had an evolutionary or biological effect on human development? I'm not actually sure about this, but I'd love to ask someone. In the meantime, wouldn't one have to say that the ability to view a drawing of something as a symbolic representation of something else -- a reference -- a symbol, be just as significant a development as the development of a language that does just that? Researchers talk about how significant representational or referential aspects of language are in the defining qualities of language. Wouldn't the ability to do that VISUALLY be a vital precursor? I'm just wondering. I really want to read more research on these ideas and the use of drawings in developmental studies.

Regardless, I think this connection is an important reason for me to return to drawing, rather than more "advanced" or at least recent, painting, for these pieces. That the drawings themselves, and the qualities inherent in the simplicity of lines, relates to his progress and this distinction between humans and non-humans. :\ Hmmm.

I also have the big question of . . . what is thinking like when you DON'T have language to organize your thoughts. I mean, to what extent does our use of language effect the actual structure of our inner lives. ? Is this a Steven Pinker question?

What role does drawing or visual communication have to do with this? I mean, visual communication could of course include gestures and motions, but drawing takes the next step and becomes this REFERENTIAL and representational system

Cute little side note - back in the day when dissection was first allowed for medical purposes by the University of Florence, "both artists and physicians attended" . . . a meeting of interests in science and art that I like and makes me think about all our shared interactions as fields similarly interested in understanding, depicting, and representing the natural world . . . :)

And here are two links that seem to have something to do with this idea of symbolic thought, lanugage, etc. from NPR.

When did we become mentally modern? (a really good one about symbolic thought)

Signing, singing, speaking: how language evolved

And this one: The Evolution of Symbolic Language

And another NPR article, called The The I-Self And Symbolic Language, from which I took the following:

URSULA GOODENOUGH
"Human beings are unusual, and probably unique, in that they carry the sense that they consist of two selves — a bodily self and mind/spirit self. The seemingly non-physical spirit is given various names, like consciousness, I-self, narrative self, soul, and subjective/private/first-person self."

"Most organisms, even many kinds of bacteria, have evolved ways to communicate with one another, but symbolic language is in a class of its own, as expounded in Terry Deacon's classic, The Symbolic Species. Briefly, symbolic language entails relationships between signifiers (e.g. words) and what's signified (e.g. objects or ideas), but what's special is the construction of a system of relationships among the signifiers themselves, generating a seemingly unlimited web of associations, organized by semantic regularities and constraints, that generate endless narratives, stored and retrieved via the collaboration of both procedural memory and episodic memory. It's really fancy — there's nothing like it on the planet and possibly the universe — and while bonobo apes can acquire some of its features with lifelong human interaction and instruction, most toddlers are de facto geniuses, and infants are thought to experiment with its features as they babble."

"Humans are the only animals that draw."

The following quoted passage is from a really lovely little book: The Undressed Art: Why we Draw by Peter Steinhart.

36
“Humans are the only animals that draw. While showmen and hucksters have gotten elephants and chimpanzees to drag paintbrushes across paper and canvas, so far as we know the animals are simply manipulating materials and not making representations of things. As rare as the ability is in other species, drawing is almost universal among humans; it is as human a quality as speech and bipedal locomotion. Practically every human being draws at some point in childhood. As adults, we draw maps to direct people to our houses, diagram schemes for seating guests at a dinner party, sketch plans for the bookshelves we intend to build, make graphs of corporate performance.

The qualities that separate the human mind from the minds of other creatures are those that enable us to make images and symbols. Other animals vocalize, but we develop complex languages. That the ability to symbolize with words is built on brain structures that evolved long before humankind did is suggested by the fact that, under laboratory conditions, chimpanzees and gorillas have acquired human sign language. . . . “

Syracuse University physicist Erich Harth theorizes that the human brain developed the ability to formulate mental images and to place them under the control of other brain functions as a way of extending short-term memory of details, sequences and relationships. Humans who elaborated these abilities could thus see more complex patterns in the world around them and could store information that allowed them to compare and contrast things and to understand causes and consequences. Human with such abilities could manipulate these images in such a way as to solve problems.

Harth suggets that other species have limited abilities to do this. A dog that winds its leash sround a tree may not be able to see that it can free itself by backing up. Our closest primate relatives share some of our imaginative abilities. A chimpanzee, for example, can see that by moving a box judiciously, it can reach a bananna placed on a shelf. Dolphins also seem to have some abilties in this regard. . . .” 37

This whole thing fascinates me – I wonder how this relates to the red dot experiment they did on chmips that demonstrated some sense that they can tell that a chimp in the mirror is THEM. How does this relate to their ability to conceive of an image as a REPRESENTATION or symbol of a real thing, and what is it that prevents them from MAKING such representations, or to what extent CAN they generate representations themselves. Can they make representations in a symbolic, or canonical way? Learn that a circle with two triangle ears means cat, but ony when it it is drawn a certain way? Or are they cognitively limited? Can they recognize images of certain complexity (photos, moving video, etc.) but not abstracted or simplified to lines or symbols (bathroom door man?) . . . and is their ability to create representations limited by dexterity and physical skills, mental acuity, cognition, etc? Are they trapped in 2-year old brain where they can only draw a person with a big circle head and 4 stick limbs or draw a teacup with the handle showing out the left side no matter what view of the teacup is actually in front of them? I really want to know who does primate drawing research! This is fascinating stuff.

Also, I bolded a couple of things because it reminds me of this whole attempting to distinguish ourselves from animals . . . and the idea that drawing itself is one of those distinctions (well, art-making in general, I suppose) is interesting.