A ›certain hand‹ and its margin of error

Abstract 

Suppose we consider an independent artist tolerance allows for a ›margin of error‹ as an aesthetic measure, it follows that its innate implication must impact on any, and all artworks, its intervention and the effects of its making. Seeing this independent tolerance, strangely, intersecting with a certain drawing and its erring in doing, this writing considers the link between error and an enduring measure of the artist’s hand and reconsiders its indexical relation to the artist. The inquiry begins with a reflection on Katharina Hinsberg’s (1999) Nulla dies sine linea (No Day without a Line), where error and a detached automated approach to drawing is emphasized. Going on, brings into the discussion Warhol’s ›blotted line‹, which prefigures a notion of a ›failure of reproduction‹ and the production of its effects. Elaborating , on Hinsberg’s subjective resistance and Warhol’s failure of reproduction, the discussion brings on board Christopher Wool’s, and Wade Guyton’s technical execution and erring. Marked by craft, tools and by decisions about tools, Wool’s and Guyton’s work resolutely embraces the hand encumbering the reasoning of the mind’s judgements and the use and fidelity of machined methods of reproduction. Wool’s roller, stamp, stencil, and Guyton’s skewed digital technologies, their operational error and technical failure take the mind and the hand back together, and demonstrate that perhaps the trace of the artist’s hand, no matter how dispassionate, ironic or vacuous of meaning stubbornly remains a drawing’s most compelling message.

Introduction

I cannot help being the self-aware kind of artist who rallies herself against what she sees as a wrongheaded valuing idea of some unmediated true self or naturalism of the artist and belief of creativity as a magical act. I let the paint take me where it wants to go or »my hand breaks the spell to free the figures already slumbering in the stone« (Buonarroti cited in Funaro 2010: 1). These pronouncements, a cosy ontology motioning blindness to that what appears naturally in art is constructed from a less comfortable sequence of hidden postures, decisions and influences. However, even an artist with a propensity for emphasizing the process of making art, the acts through which it comes into being over the end product, can grow weary of the self-aware artist writings validating drawing and its making at the level of thought over aesthetic artefact over time. As such, these thoughts fall into the category of things I cannot help thinking, despite having sometimes tried not to.
    I begin my thoughts by assuming that there are liabilities inherent within any product, and that any intervention in the making carries out a ›margin of error‹, which crossway with an enduring if divergent measure of a skilful hand and its indexical relation to the artist.(1) Yet, looking around, I see a present standing of drawing that shifts its idea away from skill and self-expression towards that of material actions and a generative space of thought (Boukla 2013: 24–25).

»Touch and manual dexterity had lost their place as markers of artistic taste and authority. As such, the artist no longer seen as a self-confirming ›creator‹, but as a synthesizer and manipulator of extant signs and objects.« (Roberts 2007: 9)

In The Intangibilities of Form (2007), Roberts quizzes an idea of skilling, deskilling, following the sublimation of the aesthetics of genius into a model of democratic authorship after Duchamp’s ready-made and highlights a position suggesting that artistic production may not require an autonomous author or technical ability. This shift away from authorship, craftsmanship and the expressive unity of hand and eye, Robert sees does not represent a complete loss of artistic sensuousness, and »[o]n the contrary, art’s emancipatory possibilities lie in how the hand is put to work […]« (2007: 4). Sharing a similar view and rethinking drawing’s emancipatory shifts alongside a seemingly set aside measure of the authorial gesture and a practised hand, I see a sign of the erring hand whose presence does not merely affect to absent traditional skills but indicates ›aesthetic thinking‹. That is, the moment that artistic subjectivity released into programmed labour with a transformative effect, thereby restoring the critical agency of the artist, and shifts a sense of the skilful hand towards that of a certain hand resembled to its risk in performance, its risk in failure.
    In the philosophy of science, the argument of ›pessimistic meta-induction‹ suggests that even the most indisputable of timeworn theories have refuted, so we should accept that today’s opinions will be disproved too. Logically, if we expect that this is true for science, then we can assume it is right in general for all human social and cultural activity. Likewise, what goes for our collective actions is also true for our efforts. After all, we all do change our minds. In Being Wrong: Adventures in the ›Margin of Error‹ (2010), Kathryn Schulz asks, what if I’m wrong? Schulz’s self-styled discipline of ›wrongology‹ argues the significance and value of error. She especially illuminates how the experience of being wrong is a necessary and essential part of human activity that allows us to develop more productive and more creative lives (Schulz 2010: 320–39). For instance, the pessimistic idea that art is inherently an inaccurate representation of reality comes down to us from Plato’s Republic, where he argues that an ideal society would expel all artists on the basis that they are in the service of falsifying the truth. Plato implies that at the core of an objective reality there is an originating divine ideal, with everything existing in the mind of the creator and whose ›truth‹ arts imitation can never reach, and worse masquerade as fact is misleading us by presenting representation as reality. This representation, an increasing succession of an imitation of an imitation inherently erring further from truth, acts as a sign of remoteness from the divine; a product of our natural marginal limits rather than question for a reason (Schulz 2010: 326–29). However, many minds have argued in counter to Plato’s philosophical objections to art and its erring that if we could »enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless« (Bergson 2005: 74). In other words, without the individual productive result or effect that arises from this erring between objective reality and its encounter with sense and consciousness, art would be to no purpose.
    Schulz unravelling Plato’s objection, explains that art like error »comes about because we cannot grasp things directly as they are« (2010: 326). However, in distinction to Plato’s pessimistic idea of error, she offers a contrasting optimistic view. And focusing this counter posit on the relationship between art and error, she argues that »our capacity to err is inseparable from our imagination« (Schulz 2010: 328) and to be wrong in the end, is necessary to let us stray from the facts into creativity. In other words, Schulz explains that in our getting things wrong, we essentially self-create, and self-re-create. Yet, Schulz does not advocate that we should wilfully choose to be wrong, that would be a contradiction. Instead, she points out that once we find ourselves in the wrong, we should not be discouraged but encouraged.

»we err because we believe, above all, in ourselves: no matter how often we have gotten things wrong in the past, we evidence an abiding and touching faith in our own stories and theories […] We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own mind and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right next time. (Schulz 2010: 338)

›Margin of error‹, an aesthetic measure 

Bringing together artists and works that entangle drawing, within a complex whereabouts of getting it wrong, I am especially curious to examine our capacity to err hinged around a certain artistic measure of the hand and its deliberate and contradicted erring in execution. To be more precise, considering here works that knowingly founded on an operative error and productive failure, I sense they inexorably connected at the level of a singular aesthetic tolerance. They curiously mark out for me an erring as a staged metaphorical shift that paradoxically explores the transition space in which errors develop and the actions they offer. »All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it« (Locke 1836: 547).
    Borrowing this assumption, one could point to the fact that all art productions necessarily involve decision-making under some conditions of uncertainty, and as a result, cannot always produce open-and-shut interpretations or outcomes. Hence, because of the subjectivity of interpretation, artists must use their sole judgement in the choice of what method to use, what norms to invoke from their own visual experience and what material outcomes to take account of in their acts of creative imaginings and doings. In other words, even in work emphasizing automated predisposition of artistic production that uses a no need for ›fine-tuning‹ to ensure the best response or specified result as a criterion for method selection, ultimately an individual judgement is always involved. To explain further, regardless of how detached, utilitarian or overdetermined a drawing action is, it relies on subjective qualities determined by »what the artist will or will not do. Vis-à-vis what the artist can or cannot allow – depending as much on acceptance by the artist as on any cognitive interventions of her means« (Boukla 2013: 107).
    This dichotomy sets a subjective trust, which I sense depends primarily on ›believing in what we see‹ and in ›seeing what we believe‹ alongside a narrative of error. Since this approval is given by feelings belonging to the artist rather than to the object of thought, it makes sense any determining ground is not just an empirical judgement, but an aesthetic ruling made based on an emotional response. Or to put it another way, a sense of taste. For a better description, let us call this emotional response or taste a self-contained and self-perpetuating flow of thought and feeling that set one apart from the others. Indicating in its referring not merely to a way of working, but to a quality taste always signals to a subjective judgement made (Locke 1836). Subsequently, any empirical decisions made during performance depend on the execution of individual technical skill and a particular aesthetic awareness (Dutton 1994).
    Illuminating these thoughts persuasively, Katharina Hinsberg’s (1999) Nulla dies sine linea (No Day without a Line) usefully can reveal how a perfunctory approach to drawing connects a subjective resistance of the hand and its productive error as an insistent aesthetic measure. Taking up abstract qualities that originate from a reflection rather than an observation, Hinsberg assigns herself to a simple task and a determinate limit in the production of the work. Suggesting that drawing can be thought of as an act rather than an object, Hinsberg’s Nulla dies sine linea, a paper-stack cube made up of multiple registrations of a single line, appears to explore drawing from a position devoid of normative considerations of aesthetic composition, subjective expression and technical skill. Instead, a modest act of duplication provides a sequence of instances weighing the appearance of an interrupted and discontinuous performance. To this extent, a complicated sleight of hand directs attention towards unfolding time on a moment-to-moment bases. As an orientation and an attachment, Hinsberg with a ruler carefully draws in ink a vertical centre line to divide the first sheet of paper. On top of which she lays a second sheet of paper and retraces the line freehand. This gets repeated over and over again. Implying that failing is an implicit agent in the creative process, Hinsberg’s free hand registration entropy increases as the number of messages increase. And shifts the reiterated line far from its original path while simultaneously creating a single line visible on the front and back of the growing paper-stack.(2) Swinging back and forth between signification and subjectification, an act of touch and feeling and an erring measure and judgement of the eye, deftly shifts attention from the line’s given frontal setting towards its perpendicular virtual edge. Muddling the established figure/ground relationship and its gestalt principle further obscures drawing’s cognition and graphic representational capacities.
    Nulla dies sine linea, in attributing an erring between perception and action and where a failure of reproduction dislodges a standard view of a practised hand, usually associated with the medium of drawing, appears to refute any notion of its revelatory artist’s sensibility. Dramatized between a conceptual system and its material execution, Hinsberg’s abstract construal seems to shift drawing and its romanticized idea away from one of practice dexterity and singular expression. Yet, in labouring to make visual what escapes or exceeds a deliberate action or conscious intention, Nulla dies sine linea to my mind, ultimately hinges around an insistent hand whose pending approval, as an innate quality control depends on the acceptance of its action in progress outcomes. Thereby, I suggest that a ›margin of error‹ in Hinsberg’s, Nulla dies sine linea, is equal to any preset directives and interventions, and in its necessary appearance critically reasserts an issue of the presence of the artist’s hand and the shadow of its venerated idea.
    Thinking how Hinsberg’s misregistration and failure of reproduction connect to others, my mind settles on Warhol’s early blotted line drawings, where an individual hand and its operating ›margin of error‹ brings to the mechanical and the prosaic, an idea of the surprising, the uncertain and the unfinished. While a student, Warhol developed a simple, yet distinctive, graphic transfer process to produce illustrations by pressing wet ink drawings onto another sheet of paper. This blotting technique was the first of many that Warhol used to explore the creative possibilities of repeating images. It is clear to me that in this combining of drawing with basic printmaking, Warhol from the very beginning needed the figure and signal of printedness. When asked in the late 1970s how he got the idea for his blot drawing technique, he answered:

»Well, it was just that I didn’t like the way I drew. I guess we had to do an inkblot or something, and then I realised you can do an inkblot and do that kind of look, and then it would look printed somehow.« (Comenas 2006: 1)

Warhol’s process began by drawing or tracing an image in pencil on tracing paper. Next, he aligned this tracing to the second sheet of more absorbent paper by taping their edges together on one side. He then would lift up the top layer and restate the trace with ink on the reverse side in several small segments, and then laying the sheet back down he would transfer his ink drawing by lightly pressing or ›blotting‹ the two papers together. The finicky hand labour of retracing, inking and blotting resulted in a stippled, interrupted and tenuous outline subverting an assumed quality of exactness ascribed to a mechanical reproduction that individualized the inked line in its very failure of reproduction.
    Warhol’s use of repetition and off-registered results arising from this blotting technique would become his trademark (Goldsmith 2006: 14). It is recalled by friends and contemporaries that Warhol liked to maintain the chance imperfections often caused by his methods. Robert Fleisher, a buyer for Bergdorf Goodman, who commissioned Warhol to design stationery for the department store, explains that Warhol regularly submitted off-registered artwork »[a]ccidental mistakes became part of his style«. Later regarding the silk-screening process, which Warhol started employing in the early 1960s, Gerard Malanga his studio assistant recall: »There were always mistakes, maybe there was something that was off register […] it was all part of the art, part of the process« (Comeras 2006: 4).
    From this, what it is clear to me is that in Warhol’s automated and detached method of drawing, any erring in doing complicated an attitude of production that conspired to a not seeing the artist’s singular and dexterous engagement. In other words, Warhol’s assumed effort to erase the trace of the artistic subject is at direct odds with a circumstantial metanarrative where we see an independent tolerance that looks for and allows an operating ›margin of error‹. Thus allowing (in both intention and in reception) a notion of a skilful, expressive self-determining subject that is still significant to the conditions of meaningful deliberation proper and essential to value the artwork and importantly still link to an idea of the artist’s hand.
    Enveloped by the subjective possibility of error, Warhol’s automated misfiring and resulting failure of reproduction, heralded as an aesthetic measure in his early blotted line drawings and later silkscreen paintings, clearly mobilize the contextual and technical means employed by Christopher Wool. Shifting between abstraction and figuration and marked by tools and by decisions about tools, Wool’s ironic use of ›Warholian factory‹ techniques resolutely discriminate the hand encumbering the reasoning of the mind’s judgements and the fidelity of machined methods of reproduction ›more interested in ›how to paint it‹ than ›what to paint‹ Wool’s work embodies and encourages its own contradictions« (Goldstein 1998: n.pag.).
    After the conceptual transformation of the 1960s, formalism in mid-1980s, for many, was synonymous with self-indulgence and the decorative arts. In a way, almost a dirty word. In this climate, Christopher Wool radically quizzed and complicated solipsistic materialism, insular formalism and contextual signification, all the while avoiding the curbs of each. In Wool’s mid-1980s decorator’s embossed paint-roller work, with its misregister and material stuttering seen at first glance spontaneous, but in actual fact highly self-controlled, one can experience an arbitrary order of carefully achieved randomness. Similar to Hinsberg’s traced line, Wool also avoids spontaneous gesture and self-conscious compositional decisions. Instead, a disciplined yet perfunctory and repeated pushing and pulling of an enamel-loaded housepainter’s roller, simply tries to re-register its pattern to its previously positioned outline.
    Continuing his re-evaluation of ready-made imagery, pictorial reiteration and integration of automated methods, Wool reflecting further on the possibilities of decorative imagery, introduced to his means the rubber stamp. Using the rubber stamp as a tool for drawing, painting and printmaking, he was able to extend his imagery beyond the roller’s of-the-shelf inventory and engage with more intricate forms and silhouettes. Developing his involvement with a non-aligned composition, he would interlink the separate stamped images while varying the veracity of the rubber stamp’s image through overprinting and register deviation.
    Materializing issues of production through imaging Wool’s spatial and temporal interrupted contact with the protracted movements of the rolled and stamped images fail to keep a sense of certitude in its touch.

»In many works the image is so faint at times that it almost fades away entirely […] in ordinary life, […] variation implies change or development, and the viewer actually tries to read the imperfections of the process for meaning.« (Caldwell cited in Goldstein 1998: 259)

This mechanical failure of an automated method with the imprinted variations produced by the hand and doing invest a mechanical performance with a subjective dexterity and authority seemingly founded on the measure and judgement of the eye. When asked what influences his hand, Wool replied: »My eye. It is all in the eye. Muhammad Ali said the hand can’t hit what the eye can’t see« (O’Brian 2006: n.pag.).
    While it may not be possible to say what precisely these residues of imperfections bring to the works deliberation, what I see and sense here is that these interminable anomalies thrown up in the doings wake as an ongoing supplement. Able to respond (rather than simply accept) to the changes and the unforeseen events in the making of the work, operate perhaps as a kind of artistic acuity and deftness, reasonably aligning the work’s most compelling meaning one way or another towards a self-determined action of the artist’s hand (Boukla 2013: 66).
    Operating between processes of picture making and picture reproduction, Wade Guyton’s work combines reproductions of suprematism, de stijl and constructivism as well as ripped-out sheets of geometric abstraction from 1960s design books and interior decorator catalogues. Yet, in using them as support and source for his drawings and paintings, Guyton maybe simply reference modernism’s formal appearances rather than critiquing ideologies. »I’ve used a lot of images in my drawings – they are pages from a variety of books – so while I might be interested in some of them, I wouldn’t invest so much into any particular source« (Simoncelli 2013: 36). Likewise, guilelessly Guyton tells that while growing up he did not like drawing and felt that he »was never very good at art classes«,(3) the reason »why I don’t draw now and why I use the printer« (Armstrong 2009: n.pag.). Crucially, I see Guyton’s formative aversion to recognized measures of artistic skill perhaps echoes his ability misgivings and existentially compels the following detachment. »I’m always trying to pull myself out of the process« (Colman 2012: n.pag.). And as such coerces an attitude to art more drawn towards its conceptual practice, »what initially drew me towards art was the fact that it was engaged with language and that this language and these structures seem to always be in a state of fortification and dismantling« (Simoncelli 2013: 35). To illustrate, protecting and at the same time undoing the demarcated and recognized categories in art, Guyton casually »maintaining a tradition of material and contextual self-awareness« gives to the support element the potential to delineate the standing of the artwork itself, and he simply defines his printed works on paper drawings and his printed works on canvas paintings (Simoncelli 2013: 35).
    Bridging the long-established and the still-emerging processes of artmaking, Guyton deals with issues of image reproduction and draws on expanding image technologies and channels of information transmission. He designs his motifs on a computer and prints them via an inject printer inappropriately on primed linen, where randomly the ink rather than sitting conventionally on the top is absorbed into the porous material and inaccurately dispersed across the surface. Rethinking ideas and processes of craft with new technologies, Guyton deliberately mishandles the linen support and the printer’s colour deliveries, in jolting and pulling the material at the same time as the printer reads from a computer file, he creates unpredictable gestures of blurs, dribbles, scratches and pops.

»as the work is created it transcribes a visual record of the printer’s actions: the trace of movement of the print heads, the varying states of their clogged-ness, the track marks of the wheels on wet ink, all mixed with the scratches and smears on the paintings from being dragged across the floor to be fed back again into the printer.« (Pretzel 2007: n.pag.)

Like this, a circumscribed yet random series of malfunctioning of the operator and printer itself produces the ultimate mien of the work.

»Looking for the glitch in the functionality of a technological system and waiting for new qualities and affects to be generated by the malfunction, Guyton’s aesthetic of errors emphasise that it is precisely these infractions that give material aesthetic value to the digital data used in the production of his artworks.« (Boukla 2013: 107)

Furthermore, in this instance, when asked if the random ›digital artefact‹ effects ever disappointed him he answered:

»There is always some form of disappointment in making an artwork. In my case, there is some expectation, an attempt at translation. A struggle for some ideal – but that ideal may not always be clear, and it is likely in transition. Because of the process with the works on canvas, I must reject or accept whatever the results are […] There are moments during the process when I can intervene. I can add layers, but I can’t subtract or erase. So inevitably there are tons of rejections. But a rejection one day could lead to a re-evaluation a couple years later and generate a different series. Or a chance event could lead to a repeatable structure.« (Simoncelli 2013: 36)

The point I want to make here is, that contrary to pulling himself out of the process, Guyton’s aesthetic of errors derives from the subjective way he feeds, and re-feeds, a canvas through the printer and in his attachment to certain ideals (spontaneously formed through the recall to other accounts, imageries and his own work). Guyton’s expectation, acceptance and rejection of the materialized electronic disturbances effects, must in some way, conspire to bring a compulsory presence and participation of respective compositional values onto an inexorable uniform technological field – which, as far as I see, plainly point to an influential attending hand.
    To a greater or lesser extent, one might say that Hinsberg, Warhol, Wool and Guyton, originate their work from a reflection rather than observation. And within an artistic performance, assign themselves feasible objectives rather than romanticized ideals where, in effect, all of the decisions occur beforehand, and the execution of the work is a perfunctory matter. So, if primarily theirs is art about signs and sign-systems, to my way of thinking, all weigh the work not merely as an autonomous artefact that the observer can aesthetically contemplate, but a machine that calls upon the viewer to work it. In acknowledging a prominence given to process over end product, perhaps an implicit narrative in the discussed works is one of drawing attention to the viewer’s presence. Aware that we are looking at a process of making and material form, we are attentive to the artist-specific signals and marks – how they comprehend a work, how they attract our eye. Hence, our construing of the work is based not purely on ideological principles – an implied stance towards what a work shows – but on our aesthetic experience. Drawing the viewer into the work and casting the viewer back onto themselves, these signals and marks of production essentially procure a reflection on the awareness of the viewer’s looking correspondingly back to the maker. In a sense as a recall to other works, one will think of or connect to the actual world outside the work.4 Yet, these reruns are not matching to the original experience but are mingled with a cognizance of the present situation. Surely that recall is not set at the moment. And new information and suggestions become included into preceding memories over time and recalling these memories perhaps can be seen as an act of creative re-imagination, a mutable process where believing and knowing indivisible, meaningfully parts us from the past and from certainty. To put it more eloquently »we are never real historians, but always near poets« of our memories and their recall (Bachelard 1992: 6).

Conclusion 

With this in mind, Hinsberg’s, Warhol’s, Wool’s and Guyton’s preset ›margin of error‹, namely the planned visual failings of their programmed devices and accompanying marginalized hand, together incur and equally rest worth on the discriminating interventions and acceptance of the artist as much as an innate purpose of their machine-like vision and measure. Unequivocally, »there are things that happen on a pictorial level that always defeat language« (Ryan 2018: n.pag.).(5) Correlating here with the fact that machines can know things in the sense of having accurate information but they cannot believe in things and referring back to Schulz’s Being Wrong and the humanistic potential of error, one can situate an idea of error contingent on a belief, which links primarily to an act of faith that in this instance, I see suggestively determines a ›someone‹ over a ›something‹.
    In this manner, irrespective of how impassive, dry or deflated of meaning the work is, it seems to me, that doing here becomes a tacit ›I do‹ and to my mind must correspondingly bring the originator back into view. Considering Hinsberg’s deadpan and unreliable hand, it follows that its tracked performative ›margin of error‹ gives authority to her register of execution. Its reflexive ›graphic trace‹ no longer obscured in the uniformity of presentation, instead becomes more pronounced in the form of a visual error as it begins to become expressive plastic and belonging to the artist not to the world shown. In the same manner, Warhol’s blotted line seeming like a reproduction, gives the impression of yielding the immediacy and the singularity of distinctive artistic involvement. Though, as I see it, a personal originating aesthetic ruling »I didn’t like the way I drew« haunts Warhol’s aesthetic of technical error and impassive effect of industrial styling. Established on Warhol’s failure of reproduction, a self-critical judgement not belonging to the line that is to be reproduced becomes a mindful and aesthetic counterpart to the measure of the practised hand and, as I see it, implicitly returns to the artwork a sense of an original self. In this light, considering Warhol’s declared »I want to be a machine« (Swenson 1963: n.pag.), it is perhaps more significant for its desire’s presence than the objective possibility. If Warhol’s longing affects the act of a machine – which sees without reflection and reproduces without awareness an original identity – then Wool’s and Guyton’s conscious reflection on cultural materiality and history offers a situation ›about‹ the machine. Assuming the agency of reproduction as the paradigm for contemporary times, Wool’s and Guyton’s renewals of the aesthetic models of earlier American masters and the abstract classicism of modernism – their promise and failure – in their enacting a cold reprising, filter and shuffle their authoritative representational forms through industrial techniques and impersonal technologies. Insofar having (as Hinsberg and Warhol) a prerequisite for failing and refuting the measure based on a practised hand, I suggest Wool and Guyton never really give up its artistic mechanism. The hand there and not there at the same time wilfully pushing tools and technology beyond their limits, the faults, and errors, indubitably edited but expected and accepted; in this sense only flirting with its failure and wanting. As such, I consider they do not negate an ideology of the practised hand per se but rereading its past interpretation to fit current times crucially progress one idea of its touch towards another idea of its touch.
    Set alongside a dyad of success and failure, a situation of uncertainty brings into view a distinct and always present ›margin of error‹ vis-à-vis a process of performance and its aesthetic measure. The outcome of a certain methodological drive and a certain applied capability, where what and how negotiated by a certain tolerance, crucially diverge, become more accurately a question of ›what purpose‹ and ›what matters‹? as each impact on the other. Making a subtle distinction between artwork (aesthetic qualities) and content (idea), Wesley Cray meaningfully points out that conceptual and dematerialized »artworks are not ideas, but artefacts imbued with ideas« (2014: 235). In other words, an assessment of artwork cannot be placed on a concept and to the what end alone, but crucially relies on a belief of execution. It seems then that we are persuaded as much by what is shown as to what is told. And to come to the point, this execution entangled in a subjective tolerance in erring discloses that the belief in the artist hand as aesthetically significant and artistically distinctive still endures in a ›margin of error‹ tenured in the touch of an always certain if not practised hand.

1 A relationship and authorial gesture that shift somehow the anonymous nobody to a distinct self, as self-defining, as the art/ object one creates.
2 ‘Playing host to its own systems of entropy and breakdown, the […] [miss] registration assumes here a binary property: on the one hand, it is a sign of automation, bringing associations of a reification (regarding something abstract as a material thing). And on the other hand, it materially embodies an artistic effort, suggesting a physical referent occurrence, and it becomes necessary for drawing to function on a level of visual occurrence, and then after that to conjecture the significance of that occurrence. Accordingly, a thinking-doing project is usurped here by doing-thinking.’ (Boukla 2013: 108)
3 Growing up perhaps we tend to like what we’re proficient at and cultivate those particular skills to the degree that eventually they become our primary skill, perhaps Guyton’s dislike and self-doubt of his drawing and painting skills – seeing the computer doing a ‘much better job’ is at core (like Warhol) of a psychologically internalized ‘not good enough’.
4 ‘In science appears to be no real distinction between the act of remembering and the act of thinking’ (The Human Memory 2019: n.pag.).
5 To explain my point, I refer to David Ryan’s conversation with Jonathan Lasker, where Lasker curbs a structuralist proposition of language, which Ryan sees as prominently operating in his work. Lasker goes on to state the need (for him) that painting ‘operates on a level of visual phenomena’, which occurs only later one can surmise the implication of. At the same time acknowledging his having optimism around notions of the self, Lasker agrees on an individual level, with Derrida’s preferred ‘indeterminacy’ of writing over the (imagined) ‘stable’ authority of speech. Goes on to say he holds true, the ‘spoken utterance’ is always ostensibly a ‘subjective prejudice’. This meaningful core to a conscious being, going back and forth between origination and convention, which Lasker considers ‘the only way that we can proceed to construct meaning’ moreover ‘what we think, is not only how we construe things, but it is also what we wish to believe, and that is how we construct thought in the first place’ (Ryan 2018: 147).