One of the ideas I am constantly fascinated with is the twin concepts of boundary and continuity. Where do we draw separations between two things? Two ideas? Two objects? Two numbers? Dividing lines which seem perfectly straightforward can, on closer examination, be surprisingly porous. Where, exactly, does a country begin and end? Sure, you can point to the border on the map – but for each of the countless grains of soil that lie under that line drawn in ink, which country does it belong to? Where does a person begin and end? At the furthest edges of their skin? Does the dead skin husk around them count? Is food they’ve eaten part of them? When blood and sweat spills, is it a projection of their body or a subtraction from it?
And so on.
The answer, of course, is that these divisions lie wherever is useful to us. Boundaries, divisions between me and you, here and there, these are all just language, just concepts we’ve developed to describe the world around us and to make it easier to manipulate. They are extremely useful concepts to be sure, necessary to our (approximate, functional) understanding of the world around us – but these divisions are, nevertheless, imaginary.
Visual art, particularly line art, is a fascinating crystallization of this process. When we draw shapes with lines, what are we drawing? Say we’re drawing a vase: Where are the lines on the vase? Nowhere, of course: The lines are a representation of the boundary we perceive between vase and not-vase – and, as the old vase-or-face visual illusion demonstrates, these lines are mere suggestions, and what is being silhouetted against what is open to interpretation. It is actually quite odd and interesting that we can mentally translate a visual representation of boundaries into an object. I don’t know if other animals are capable of recognizing line art as a visual representation of something else: It seems to me that this skill is quite different from recognizing a photo or a photo-realistic painting, something which closely replicates the values as the eye perceives them, and I’d be curious if any other creatures have the knack. Perhaps that question is no different than the question of whether an animal can understand any other human language – probably not well, certainly not without training.
This raises further questions. If animals do not readily recognize lines, divisions, boundaries, then what is their understanding of their own individuality? Is there any conception of the “self” in there, of the counterpart “other”? Are these conceptions naturally occurring, or something we’ve invented? It is possible to act in the world and affect change, it is possible to have desire and preference and act upon them, with no conception of a unique and differentiated being, a self, to house these sensations. Where did this story of the “self” begin?
The role of the artist is, generally speaking, to draw divisions and connections. We decide how to frame the picture, what boundaries are necessary to contain it, what elements to include, what their relationship is. When we write stories, we find the beginning and end, we find the character, the motivation, the meaning and method. These ideas could go on indefinitely, improvised further and further out, finding connections – because our brains are very good with lines, both lines that divide and lines that connect. Part of generating meaning with a story is finding many meaningful connections – and this is why many of us love stories, because they allow us to do this, to build meaning through lines and then present what we find. However, to actually finish a story one must be willing to cut lines off, to draw a box around the story, trim its edges away and frame it.
The core of the artist’s work, then, is figuring out where we wish these divisions to lie, and what we wish these divisions to communicate. It’s a strange sort of challenge: So much of what is exciting and powerful in art is in eroding these boundaries and divisions, revealing unexpected connections, unveiling new meaning from everyday occurrence – but boundary must be drawn or the work be inexorably pulled into schizophrenic conflagration, undivided and undifferentiated, a noise of complicated meaning from which nothing can be learned because all is equally important.