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    Involuntary Presence: Copying, Printing, And Multiplying Line
    Frances Robertson

    Drawing, in particular sparse freehand line drawing, is often revered for its ‘immediacy and directness bordering on rawness’ (Craig-Martin 1995: 10). Against such original drawings, prints come in second place, as reproductions, substitutes, mindless copies. In opposition to these ideas, this article will argue instead for the primacy of print as a drawing medium, with a focus on the self-realising activities of more anonymous practitioners. I examine the re-working and transmutation of mark making at work within drawing for print, the ‘sympathetic magic’ of mimesis and re-invention (Taussig 1993: xiii) through copying and appropriation. Moreover when I celebrate the presence conjured through drawing for print, I also urge the creative force of apparently thoughtless doodling generated by webs of repetitive lines across the page. I will argue that printed multiplying marks, with their flourishes of ornamental space covering repetitions, create presence despite the artist who is merely their attendant. With reference to the informal drawing education practices of all aspiring visual practitioners in Britain in the period of industrialisation, we find that drawing and printing mediums ceaselessly inflected one another. In this paper I will focus specifically on photomechanical line processes such as line blocks, offset litho or Xerox, relatively crude mediums with little of the apparent presence associated with either original drawings or with carefully editioned artist prints.

    Involuntary Presence: Copying, Printing, And Multiplying Line: Frances Robertson

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    Biographical information

    Frances Robertson
    Glasgow School of Art, UK
    e-mail: Fr.Robertson@gsa.ac.uk

    Frances Robertson is a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. Her cross-disciplinary research embraces art and design theory and history, visual culture, cultural history and histories of science and technology, examining drawing as practice and discourse, as a means of shaping the three-dimensional world. She recently organised the conference/ research project Material Culture in Action: Practices of making, collecting and re-enacting art and design, Glasgow School of Art, 7-8 September 2015. Recent publications include: ‘Delineating a rational profession: the machine drawings of engineers in early nineteenth century Britain’ Textimage (2015); Print culture: technologies of the printed page from steam press to eBook (Routledge 2013); 'David Kirkaldy (1820-1897) and his museum of destruction: the visual dilemmas of an engineer as man of science', Endeavour 37:1 (2013): 125-132; 'Science and Fiction: James Nasmyth's Photographic Images of the Moon', Victorian Studies 48:4 (2006): 595-623.

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