3000 year old sketches and "Lens Drawing"

Ostracon with a portrait of Ramses VI, New Kingdom, 20th Dynasty, 1143 to 1136 B.C.

There is a fascinating exhibition at the Louvre right now called "The Art of Outline: Drawing in Ancient Egypt."  Fascinating because the exhibition presents, amongst finely carved reliefs and superbly preserved papyrus manuscripts, fragments of limestone on which the artists of ancient Egypt had sketched and drawn.  Some of these drawings are finely done, with exquisite modeling, as the portrait of Ramses VI above.  

Ostracon with figure: the gracious musician frontally presented, New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty, 1295-1186 B.C.  From Deir el-Medina

Others, like the Ostracon above showing a musician, do not seem to have been drawn for an official or commissioned purpose.  Strikingly, the dancer is presented frontally rather than in profile.  One imagines the artist simply drawing for his own pleasure on a piece of limestone, his idea of a sinuous and graceful nude musician,  and enjoying the process that all draughtsmen learn to love--the power of capturing with the most simple of utensils, in black and white, or shades of gray, an idea, an image, on a flat surface.  We will call this activity drawing.  

Ostracon with sketches of quail chicks and lion

What is so touching for me about the exhibition is that drawing as such is at times an ephemeral activity, often done on scraps of paper, and often not meant to be preserved nor be seen by others, let alone by people far away three thousand years later.  And here before our eyes, are sketches done over three thousand years ago in the deserts of Egypt.  In the putting down of a line, in the conjuring of a drawn symbol or representation, these drawings time travel to our own time, to the same process that go through our minds each time we ourselves draw and put on paper an idea with our pens and pencils.

So it was with a bit of confusion this afternoon when I stumbled into the Marian Goodman Gallery here in Paris, where a new show of photography, curated by Jens Hoffman, was opening.  The show is called "Lens Drawing"; this title put me in a reflective mood.  There were many fine photographs in the show, and there were many vitrines of antique cameras on view.  The anachronism that I felt was the lingering question of why one would try to equate photography with drawing, however casually.  

Though I would never call myself a "photographer,"I take many photographs and I enjoy looking at photographs, and as all art school graduates, I have taken the requisite courses in photography.  With that said, I must insist that there are very different processes and faculties involved in the two practices, photography is not drawing, nor vice versa, no matter what the final result looks like.  I have the doubtful sense that the equation of photography to drawing, or to painting for that matter, only describes a certain impoverishment in our conception of what photography could or should be.  If we had no uneasiness with the practice of photography, then we would simply call photography photography.  Why would we want to say that it is anything else?  Musicians are musicians and artists are artists, of course, but one would never say that the practice of a pianist is the same as that of a drummer.  This mélange de genre, so common in contemporary art, brings me back to Baudelaire.

In his critique of the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire reviewed two sculptures done by a M. Butté, where he decries the sculpted panoramic environments depicting The Tower of Babel and The Flood.  Baudelaire writes that however imaginative and ingenuous the work, these pieces remind him of window decorations at the patisserie, or of joujoux, 

". . . one of the greatest vices of the spirit . . . is the opinionated disobedience to the constitutive rules of an art.  Even if one would suppose that this work has the most beautiful qualities, what can counter-balance such an enormous fault?  Which healthy mind can conceive without horror a painting done in relief, a sculpture that agitates by mechanics, an ode without rhyme, a novel in verse, etc.? When the natural goals of an art is not understood, it is natural to call in reinforcements from means that are foreign to this art." (My translation and underlining)

The formalist and purist that is Baudelaire seems to have been forgotten by the many who cite him as the scribe of modern art.