Three approaches to Disegno

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1st approach - The body in its dimensions

The images that we are suggesting as typical for the understanding of drawing as the basis of everything can be found in Jehan Cousin's book "Livre de Perspective", printed and published in 1560.

Jean Copusin the Elder was born around 1490 in Souci, France and died in 1560 in Paris.

The book shows in detail how the human body is to be deconstructed and reconstructed within its natural and urban environment, both of which are also based on geometric forms, on the basis of mathematical coordinates. The idea of drawing as a universal basis, a methodological concept called Disegno, was first formulated by Michelangelo.

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"Disegno, in other words design, is the source and epitome of painting, sculpture, architecture and every other kind of creation. It is the basis of all science. Whoever masters this great art can realize that an incomparable power is at his disposal. With nothing more than pen and parchment, he will create things greater than all the towers of the world.

Michelangelo: Four Conversations on Painting, Rome, 1538

Giorgio Vasari - painter and the first art historian in history - continues: "Disegno corresponds to the primordial form or image of every natural phenomenon. It is: the father of our three arts, painting, sculpture and architecture, springs from the spirit and draws from all things a universal spiritual element, like a form or idea of all things in nature".

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The idea behind is that mathematics, especially in its geometrical form of appearance,  even more precise in the drawn connection from one point to another, tell us something fundamentally about how it happened that something arose out of nothing. So, Disegno was not only a systematic proceeding which leads the artist from his draft to the final result but also concrete philosophical considerations about Man and the conditions of creation from which he was brought forth.

If we are taking an average between 0,6 and 0,7 for the multiplication of the respective upper value then we will get the proportions of a normal face as well as the measures of a sheet A4. 

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In the same way (always related to the human body) we define measures and values for every object within the whole universe, however unimaginably small or large they may be.

Every object has two dimensions, the material one, which can be touched and the structural one, which can be measured. The eye recognises both. By looking at a thing we can see how it would feel by touching it and we perceive the measurable extensions by involuntarily dissecting the object in its basic shapes. Seeing and identifying is nothing else but dissecting and to put the object together again, nearly at the same time.

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Disegno was to intervene in creation by putting together what we have dismantled in a new way - in a way thought of as a restoration of perfect creation that after the fall of man, who was controlled by satan now, was falling prey to robbery and murder.

Restoring the perfection of creation was only possible by restoring the perfection of man - as originally intended by God.

The plan was to recover the old rotten Adam by a new powerful Adam (incorporated as an ideal image by Michelangelo’s David), who will rule the world according to the power of the Man itself. 

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Greek philosophy and art had done excellent preparatory work for this. 

So, it was about to restore the view on the potential of Man, especially to create an optimised life by our own forces, to excel these greek view it in art and to realise it in everyday life.

But then, as we started to fulfil the project, something unexpected happened. Brought to sight by the arts, step by step we discovered the beauty of the already given, the beauty of the nature as it is, the beauty of the imperfect, of the fragments, of the inner and outer tornness (Zerrissenheit), even the beauty of decay.

Now we called this beauty "aesthetic", aesthetics as that which grips us sensually, the aesthetics of the sublime, the dignity, the fate. 

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Although we still believe in the idea that there must be a way of leading an optimal life, this belief got a fundamental crack. Also the sublime, dignity, fate will not restore the loss; that we lost the idea of being everything as humans but in fact we are a thing between things – whether they are living things or dead ones – in fact, we are both; a kind of living entities produced by dead material which was taken from the stardust.

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In our times this fact became more and more obvious. So, our current question is, how to deal with it. We claim that an answer, which must be necessarily an answer beyond right or wrong, good or bad, can only be given by the arts.

Outgoing from this claim we will have a closer look at the programmatic conditions within which art can be produced only. 

With this pre-sign in our mind we return to the mathematically defined proportions of the human body.

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2nd Approach – The Dimension of Differences

“I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.”, Henri Matisse.

We do not have to deal with the thing itself but its programmatic structure from which the thing (we name it object) arises. This structure is not to be seen in the object itself. What we see is the fulfilment of the structural activity, i.e. the result but not how the structure works.

Disegno means to work according to the structure of the objects, of the objectivity (i.e. how it can be described in a common valid way), of the objectivisation (which means becoming an object of observation of ourselves by our interaction with the object). So we have to understand how the structure is working. 

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As those who are working in the field of the arts we have to learn how to to let grow an object (so to speak in a natural evolutionary way) and how we can be sure that it will stay in a temporarily stable state.

We see, the structure belongs not only to the single object. The structure belongs to the interaction between the objects. What we are doing by creating something is to objectivise the difference as a separate entity.

One of the most complex objects is the human head or face. We could assume, by observing the structural conditions of its arising, that the manifestation of a face is always based on the same programmatic law.

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If we are not only talking about, drawing up a copy of what is to be seen in a photographical sense, then the answer is: by the fact that the structural law of a manifestation includes the movement of the active observer, the apparition of an object (of a face) is always anew. 

So, what we face is not only the other object for itself. Much more we face the results of our movements (of seeing, of the neurophysical reactions of our body caused by what we see, of the thereby changed movements on a quantum physical level) in relation to what we actively observe, i.e. what we appropriate by drawing it. 

By creating something, we are inevitably an inseparable part of the object we face.  In a very concrete sense we face the other's face as part of our own.

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The still most important question to me is about how to detect, to describe and to follow the programmatic structure, which involuntarily leads to the objectivisation of the difference. Difference in this understandig of the term is, that  "difference" is to be understood as a happening between the programmatic instruction and its realisation.

This understanding is very close to the definition of "Différance", as given by Jaques Derrida:

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"Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the "a" of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.“

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One important difference has to be emphasised, however; Derrida primarily refers to the signs of language, we refer to the elementary forms, i.e. signs of perception that precede language and which have being arbitrarily transformed by the manifestation of the linguistic letters.

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3rd Approach – The Programmatic Truth 

In Renaissance the artists where highly engaged to unveil the programmatic law in order to use it systematically and to develop there own methodology from it.

As those who are working in the field of arts bevor, we are doing the same but under the circumstances of our times. In some way our times are leading us back to a border which was drawn around 500 years ago. The more-dimensional border between knowledge, faith and the self-determination of the individual. 

Starting in Renaissance, fully unfolded in a philosophical sense in the Age of Enlightenment, the thought was formulated that in order to gain self-determination we need knowledge to overcome the shackles of faith.

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In this idea, self-determination was absolutely needed to optimise the world according to the idea of Man. Optimising meant, to escape the deadly claws of illness, poverty and especially of the senselessness of the individual being.

Without the work of the artists which strove for unveiling the programmatic truth of self-determination by manifesting the dimension of differences in their drawings and paintings, the ideas of Enlightenment and Humanism never would have become a powerful ideal which the whole world (especially the so called old and new world, i.e. Europe, its colonies and America) would have striven for as a truth, seemingly based on a natural law.

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Until today, sense seems to be found on two levels, fighting for the good (i.e. against illness and poverty, what meant to fight for social rights and today also for preserving our environment). One the other level it is about enjoying life as unrestricted as possible. Precondition for this is to climb up the social ladder as high as possible. The reward for social success is the participation on all the  blessings of consumption, i.e. the unrestricted possibility to consume everything that promises fully satisfaction.

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Very quickly, both levels came into an indissoluble conflict. However, as two sides of the same medal they will stay inseparable connected until eternity unless we throw this medal on the trash of history and try to start something new, something, as Nietzsche says,  beyond good and bad, right oder wrong...

The fact is that all the hoarded knowledge could not save us and that by jumping back into faith the whole thing got much more worse. So we have thrown away the idea of self-determination in order to be lulled in by pure hedonism (what meanwhile promises immediate satisfaction for everyone). 

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What is left now, is nothing but to examine the once drawn border again. We do so to define and describe what we may name the "programatic structure of producing sense". 

With this insight we are back at the end of the 15th century, back to our considerations about Jehan Cousin’s “Livre de Perspective” and what to learn from it today. Back to the difference from the other's face to yours which we call "the programmatic truth of the face“.

To measure an object (in this case a face) like Jehan Cousin has done it, according to its proportions, means to read it within the horizontal line of time. 

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„Object“ is generally to be understood in the sense of a human figuration or its mental or material extensions; the figuration of a truth within which the human was shifted to the centre. 

The border, which we have to face again, divides the centre in horizontal and vertical direction. It is the border between history and the idea of tomorrow. For the artists in Renaissance it was the horizon of a self determined mankind which could only be achieved by defining the Man anew. To become a new human, the old one had to be measured according to the ideal proportions anew as given by God.

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By stepping back to the border, what is the measure of our measuring today?  The measure of the movement and the measure of intensity. 

Today, artistically we are working in the very concrete sense according to the programmatic structure of movements and intensities instead of proportions. Nevertheless it is crucial for us to understand how the measuring of proportions became the most important argument in defining what Man is as such.

How can be defined, what Man is, if the identity is not given by the proportional values? Until the end of the 20th century we where convinced that in terms of right oder wrong, good or bad there must be a proportional distinction to divide Man from animals, artificial intelligence or things.

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By defining the human existence in terms of movement und intensity such a distinction is not possible anymore.

In the artistic work, proportion is nothing but a hint on the interrelation or the space between one and another object.

In conclusion, there are two traces along the described border we have to follow. First, the trace of movement and intensity, which includes the question of how to define their specific programmatic structure. Second, the trace of the proportions in relation to movement and intensity. The tools which we need in order to follow these traces are to be derived individually from the artistic systematic, we name Designo.