The theme for this year long exploration is: Drawing on the Human. It is not drawing the human, as that is a different undertaking, and one that is, in my view, bound by representational limits, however “abstract” the artwork produced (an exploration of representation and abstraction will unfurl alongside us as we travel). I use the naming convention Drawing on because the on leaves room for uncertainty, for aliveness. When we make art with certainty, we make dead things, preserved specimens from a world of known behaviors and listable qualities. Approaching a subject, set of ideas, or project with certainty violently limits the possibilities for creative emergence, of becoming-with a creative process. Drawing on is a practice of queering our human senses so that our perceptions might rearrange themselves into new relations. It is a position of along with, of being in relation rather than becoming an expert. Drawing on the Human therefore takes the human as a positionality rather than a fixed subject. Rather than confirm what we think we know about how a human looks or moves, we will ask questions like: what fails to become human and why? What might happen when we fail at upholding this figure of the human as fixed, as exclusionary, as the ultimate decision on who belongs?
Failure, in its many forms, will be one of the sub themes of this work. I do not offer lessons on skills or techniques; I am more interested in what drawing fails to do than what drawing can reinforce. However disorienting this may be for those who choose to do this kind of exploration with me, there is so much richness that we share in not assuming that perception works a certain way, in questioning what realism means and how we might sense our way into the possibilities beyond these categories of experience. Everyone does learn to draw and acquires capacities needed to do this, but this is done through deep dives into each person’s creative ecology, drawing on intuition, embodied experiences and curiosities. There are no experts in DOTS, just people looking to explore their world through a deep focus on sense perception and the traces that perception might leave as we travel. For those of you who are new to DOTS, you may be concerned that you've been thrown into the proverbial deep end, that there won't be enough of the "basics" for you to find your way through this strange new(ish) terrain. To this I will say that we are all invited to fail together in new ways, and that you will not be left alone.
The conversation surrounding the drawing we will explore together in Drawing on the Human will be more explicitly informed by my work with Bayo Akomolafe as the Dancing with Mountains Artist-in-Residence. As such, I will be including many quotes and readings from Bayo’s work, along with other thinkers, researchers, artists, and others to accompany us on our journey towards the edges of the unknown. I invite you to consider these inclusions in the spirit and tradition of underworld guides; those companions, spirits and psychopompts that accompany the traveler through liminal zones of passage between forms, between realms, zones of contact, and modalities of time. There is no imperitive for you to “get it,” nor does it require that we are all "on the same page." I am not invested in proving or disproving a specific articulation or position nor am I campaigning for a singular approach to considering the ontological human. In fact, I hope for a wild proliferation of interpretations to the questions offered through this journey.
This project that we are undertaking together will have us moving through time, to our deep cellular and interstellar pasts and futures as we explore how genetic material and stardust came to settle into the shapes we experience as human. As we do this, we will touch upon some of the eras and ideas that have deeply shaped contemporary ideas of the human. One such era is the Enlightenment, which was the fertile ground upon which we saw the blossoming of humanism. Humanism emerged in Italy in the 14th century, in an historical moment of re-embracing the secularirty of ancient Greek thought as a counterpoint to deism and Christian cosmology. It is a philosophical stance that places humans at the center of the moral world. During the Enlightenment, the principles of humanism were further developed in relation to the scientific discoveries and intellectualism of the era, eventually coming to form a concept of the modern human that is the basis of western higher education and democratic systems and institutions. Humanism is the womb from which the modern individual, the autonomous human, was born and proliferated through every modality of western society and thought.
The DOTS practice is situated as a posthumanist practice. Posthumanism challenges this human-centered hierarchy, approaching the human as a continuum rather than a fixed point, relational rather than disconnected and discrete. Often, when I use the word posthumanism, it is confused with post-human, conjuring up visions of cyborgs, assemblages of human flesh and muscle enhanced with robotic joints, exoskeletons and technological superpowers. Posthumanism, however, is not after or anti human. It is about coming to understand the human as a field of relations, as habituated perception, as verb rather than noun. As articulated by Bayo, posthumanism “is a field of ideas that rejects anthropocentric universals. The confluences of diverse concepts, tensions, and conversations that characterize this field tries to think about the world in ways that do not privilege human actions over and above other worldly processes. Instead of being a fait accompli, a final product, transcendent and above material processes, the human is a relational and ongoing co-production within ‘assemblages’ (Deleuze). The human is provisional, tentative, always already exposed to the infiltrations of the non-human and the behaviour-modifying instigations of architecture, texture, colour, heat, and other material constraints. Posthumanism rejects the anthropocentrism that is rife in our accounts of ethics, language, and politics – and notices the inadequacies of humanist accounts. It seeks to engender new ways of thinking about might open up new considerations and performances in troubling moments." {1}
These are, of course, ideas that cannot be easily summarized in a few short paragraphs. But they can be sensed. They can be tasted in the groundwater, felt in the histamine response to a spider bite. And this is what we will do. We will draw on our senses and see where they might lead us.
The excerpt below is from Bayo’s essay I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist. {2}
“From the last glacial period eleven thousand years ago when the ice melted long enough to allow the Neolithic revolution and sedentary human settlements to form, and the gastronomical instigations of sugar that motivated the triangular trade across the Atlantic, to the moment Descartes declared ‘cogito ergo sum’ and the telescope peeked at the curtains of the seventh heavens, the “human” stretches over vast swathes of spacetime. In a sense, the human is a very recent invention. In another sense, it is ancient and has been in the works for a long time: enfolded in lithic conspiracies, tied to heat trends, dripping with the wetness of the reflected moon, tumbled into tools and skirmishes with nonhuman species, emerging from the love entanglements between exploding suns in the sky and a hominid’s attempt to stand upright.
What came to be known as the ‘human’ was measured out in craniometrical figures on the tables of 19th century French anthropologist George Vacher de Lapouge, whose insistence that there were different ‘races’ with craniometric correlations of intelligence lives on even today. The ‘human’ (or rather the failure to be one) was burnt into the backs of recently purchased slaves with burning hot steel, marking them as less-than-human or not-quite-human. And today, when the President of the United States calls Nigeria a shithole country, he is inadvertently worshipping the intergenerational notion of the propertied human.
This complex multi-generational project called the ‘human’, or ‘Man’ as I prefer to call it (and will use interchangeably with ‘human’), is a racial-colonial-geological-technological-biological-theological-political project, a web of processes that includes the participation of African chiefs selling their own to European slavers; the racializing bacterial conversations in gut microbiomes; the recurrent themes and concepts of Euro-American supremacy; the narratives of the Judeo-Christian God who made Man in his image; the conversion regimes of neoliberalism and the free market; the struggles for inclusion and equality by proponents of social justice; seismic shifts and the earthquakes that reconfigured landscapes and drove populations into caves and places of hiding; and – among others yet to come – the transhumanist quest for transcendent control over death and our emotional states.
‘Man’ is a cartographical project (a way of finding home again and again), an ecology-building project, an intergenerational intra-species project. A temporality-secreting, terra-forming strategy with a beating heart gifted from the ideas and yearnings of the Enlightenment period. This ‘thing’ wants control, stability, permanence, eternal growth, and separation from the elements that are its conditions. It works by abstraction, denial, repression, displacement, and the ruthless colonization of other earth bodies – a process euphemistically called ‘progress’.”
So, let us begin with a prompt: What is the territory of your body?
Take some time to free draw, to journal, to let this question shadow you through your day and accompany you into this exploration.
links to essays
{1} The Children of the Minotaur: Democracy & Belonging at the End of the World