Drawing is still a kind of manual/corporeal mark of the inscription or the event on the surface. Today, however, we can, arguably or not, also talk about “drawing” as a spatial, temporal, behavioral or media event of input/output or insertion of the mark “somewhere” and into “something” (paper, canvas, dust, screen, software, skin, body that moves here and there). Drawing used to be the only archetypal visual expression that precedes the final work, and subsequently the secondary practice of registration. The contemporary drawing is primarily a diagram of the relations between the visible and invisible artistic production that gives the testimony of the inscription, or it is a diagram that verifies the potential of the project which is translated from the “idea” into the visual instruction.

Drawing is possible and hybridized.

We generally discern the aspects of the text as spoken, written, visual, spatial, aural, behavioral, screen-projected, etc. Drawing is a visual text generated by manual, mechanic or any other means of leaving the trace somewhere or in something or “through” something. Today, drawing is more an open work than a “strict visual technique” of manual/bodily inscription.

Drawing is a kind of visual text-event. Drawing as text is, generally, any structure of signs that negotiates the meaning and postpones the presence for the gaze – but drawing is more a flux of signs than a suspension of signs in the confident/unconfident draughtsman’s gesture. The traditional drawing was a self-contained structure of visual symbols. The post-structuralism considers the drawing as text to be an open symbolic structure that acquires its meanings through the instant relation with other signs or texts of the present, historic or private culture of the artist and the observer. Drawing is also considered to be any practice, regardless of the medium, of visual communication, production, exchange and consumption of the inscribed meanings. Drawing brings about the agents of meaning: a drawing hand, a machine that actuates the draughtsman’s hand, a stream of electrons falling on the cathode tube, a set of objects arranged into the “spatial line”, a digital rendering that relates in any sense to the histories/traditions of drawing and writing, a robotic arm that performs the drawing stochastically, etc.

A drawing textual production, therefore, designates the diverse, arbitrary and fictional cultural practices or procedures for the creation, exchange and consumption of the meaning-trace or the meaning-trace-affect that suspend the immediate presence of the artist’s body.

miodrag šuvaković, exhibition catalogue essay, dom kulture studentski grad, belgrade, 2009.