David Maclagan - Line Let Loose: Scribbling, Doodling and Automatic Drawing

Introduction

As young children, most of us were often involved in marking, scribbling and what we would later learn to call drawing. We struggled with lines and were sometimes carried away by them: they seemed part of us and yet strangely independent. We did this for ourselves, out of curiosity and the desire to quite literally make our mark on the world. Only later did we learn that there was an audience for our innocent experiments. From the outside it might have seemed that ignorance and lack of coordination set limits to what we could achieve; but the lines between habit and invention, accident and design, did not yet exist for us. We were exploring a territory beyond language and the intentions we would later learn to voice in it: adults, caught in its web, envied our apparent freedom and saw all kinds of creative attributes in our careless marking. In the course of growing up, most people gradually lose touch with this creativity, which at first seemed so natural and spontaneous but subsequently has to be coaxed out of its hiding places. Trained artists often have to un-learn their carefully acquired skills in order to do this, but there are ways in which even those of us who are not artists can catch a glimpse of this innocent originality, and scribbling or doodling is foremost among them.

Although there is a relatively brief history of childrens art, the notions of scribbling and certainly that of doodling seem to be modern ones: perhaps they are the obverse of the competence in verbal and visual communication that most of us acquire in order to get by in the world. There seems to be something backward or regressive about them: they ignore or subvert these modes of communication, either by outright denial, as in scribbling something out, or through the self-indulgent escapism of doodling hence the terms are often used in a dismissive or pejorative sense. But regression can also lead us back to the most elementary kinds of mark, to the very roots of drawing, and these are not just of evolutionary interest but are something modern artists have returned to in order to recover a spontaneity and energy that more sophisticated modes have lost.

In September 2011 Jessica Cooney, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, revealed that a number of the flutings in the Palaeolithic site at Rouffignac had been made by children between the ages of three and seven. Flutings are meandering marks made on the clay of cave walls, using between two and four fingers; previous research by Leslie Van Gelder and Kevin Sharpe, on the basis of comparison with modern digits, had even been able to identify a core group of individuals responsible for them. These flutings, dating from at least 13,000 years ago, occur alongside other, more symbolic, adult drawings, and at the very least they suggest that in some of the earliest human art there is already an area in between the informal, the playful and the more serious (some of the flutings appear to be rudimentary symbols or signs, called tectiforms).

In several ways these cave finger-paintings by children can be seen as ancestors of todays child art. Because of their composition and the coexistence in them of meanders and tectiforms they differ from chimpanzee drawings, which are in many other ways a comparable phenomenon. Though we can only guess at the motives behind them, they seem to be on the cusp between random, finger-traced macaroni marks and more deliberate markings, and in this they are perhaps also distant cousins of what we now call scribbling or doodling. The former are apparently aimless marks while the latter are marginal excursions from some other task in hand, but both have a similarly immediate and playful character. There are risks in extrapolating these modern concepts backwards in time, or sideways on to other cultures; yet our persistent interest in them is surely a curiosity about the origins or development of drawing, and these origins are not just historical.

Beginnings are not just a more or less hypothetical starting point: in a sophisticated culture like our own, they are also the vanishing point for images of a lost innocence, all the more if this innocence is something of a fantasy. The history of modernism was often coloured by a nostalgia for something cruder and more energetic, closer to what is original in several senses of the word. This is as close as we can get to the roots of drawing, and by the same token it also displays spontaneous invention and unselfconscious novelty. Often the two are conflated: we are fascinated by child art, primitive art, or work (such as that of the insane or of people with disabilities) that seems, through breakdown or short circuit, to have recovered this vital and creative immediacy. Such work is, by definition, beyond the conventional pale, and when first discovered it seems to have a force lacking in more sophisticated art hence it is adopted (kidnapped, even) by artists looking for ways out of what feels like the dead end of tradition. Yet this capture in itself, like the discovery of a previously unknown tribe, means that it will sooner or later be assimilated into the wider culture from which it once seemed to stand apart.

Scribble refers to a wide range of rudimentary marks, usually with a degree of attack to them, whose intentionality is uncertain, or at least non-artistic. Hence scribbling is on the threshold of what we might decide to call drawing. The marks made by chimpanzees in experimental investigations into primate art or by very young children are called scribbles because their status is uncertain. Are they just random, or is there an element of play or experiment to them, or are they the beginning of some kind of pictorial expression (and how can we tell the difference between any of these from the marks alone)? In common usage there is usually a somewhat derogatory undertone to scribble, as if our default response is that it is meaningless. However, one of the characteristic features of modernism is that the domain of meaning is constantly being redefined, and in this context the scribble has undergone a more radical re-evaluation than either the doodle or the automatic drawing.

In the early twentieth century the term scribble was a somewhat indiscriminate category that included the most elementary scrawls as well as more complex non-representational drawings that did not fit into established pigeonholes. In its most rudimentary forms, it was often treated as one of the basic building blocks of drawing and played a key role in theories about childhood development. Yet by the same token it soon became a sort of model (or anti-model) for the most spontaneous and impulsive form of mark, particularly under the influence of Dadaism. Resorting to scribbling also became a kind of device, just like the use of chance, used by artists to bypass conscious decision-making. However, the scribbles status was soon changed by the very modernist innovations it had partly inspired: gestural, non-representational marks now seemed to carry a charge all the more potent because they had been made spontaneously. These cousins of the scribble were soon seen as the hallmarks of unconscious form creation, and were a prominent feature of Abstract Expressionism, for example.