Hand Delivered: Drawing within a Margin of Error

Taking a view that an independent tolerance allows a ‘margin of error’ as an aesthetic measure and has an innate implication within an objects interventions and effects of its making, and seeing it crossway with certain drawing and its doing, this paper looks at error and an enduring, if divergent, still in play measure of the hand and its indexical relation to the artist. The inquiry begins with a consideration of Katharina Hinsberg’s (1999) Nulla dies sine linea (No Day without a Line), where error and a detached and automated approach to drawing appears to be emphasised yet, contradictorily, all the while motions to a subjective resistance of the hand. Going on the essay brings in to the discussion Warhol’s Blotted line drawings, which prefigures here a notion of a failure of reproduction and the production of its effects. Carrying these thoughts and the technologies of our time together, Hinsberg’s subjective resistance and Warhol’s failure of reproduction is placed alongside Christopher Wool and Wade Guyton. Marked by craft, tools and by decisions about tools Wool’s painting resolutely discriminate the hand encumbering the reasoning of the mind’s judgments and the fidelity of machined methods of reproduction: roller, stamp and stencil. This bringing the mind and the hand back together, segues to Wade Guyton’s skewed use of digital technologies and the operational error and technical failure that result; the blurs, runs, and smudges which perhaps demonstrate that the trace of the artist’s hand — no matter how dispassionate, ironic or evacuated of meaning — stubbornly remains drawings most compelling message.