Paper short abstract:

Originates a view that an independent tolerance allows a 'margin of error' as an implicit aesthetic measure, and that has an inexorable innate repercussion and complication in drawing's interventions and effects of making, and their indexical relation to the artist.

Paper long abstract:

One can argue drawing inevitably involves decision-making under conditions of subjectivity and therefore cannot always produce sure-fire interpretations or outcomes. With this in mind the text speculates that in any drawing practice an independent tolerance allows a 'margin of error' as an implicit aesthetic measure, and has an innate implication in drawing's interventions and effects of making. Curiously, seeing it crossway with a mechanical and certain idea of drawing and its doing, the writing aims to link this 'margin of error' to an enduring, if divergent, still in play authoritative 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 it brings in to the discussion Warhol and the printers' tear sheet as an aesthetic measure, which prefigures here a notion of a failure of reproduction and the production of its effects. Conveying these thoughts and the technologies of our time together, Hinsberg's subjective resistance and Warhol's failure of reproduction is placed alongside 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 drawing's most compelling message.