in: Zeichnung heute IV, Thomas Müller (exhibition catalog), Kunstmuseum Bonn 2003

In drawing, no lie is possible anymore. When you write down this lofty statement, it sounds like a moral postulate. But who could talk about morality, about the moral qualities of drawing, when faced with a drawing? Here, lying is not defined from a moral standpoint, but understood from the immediacy, from the self of the drawn. Any drawing that aims at something external, that speculates on wanting to please, may even be described as virtuosic or decorative, but it will never reach that field of energy that moves the spirit out of the material, free of all meaning. Compared to painting, however, the material of drawing is extremely poor. What is a pencil line on paper compared to pigment-saturated oil spread by a brush on canvas? Although drawing has long been seen as closely related to painting, albeit only as an aid, it is almost the furthest thing from it. To put it bluntly, it is the opposite of painting, even if we speak of scriptural painting in the case of Cy Twombly, for example. Painting is never immediate, neither in the material, nor in the application of the paint, nor in time. In painting, we cannot and do not want to follow the process of its creation—it remains irrelevant to our judgment—but rather the psychology of colors and form. In drawing, we must become aware of its processual nature, pursue the expression of the line, which requires a high degree of sensitivity. Compared to other media of the visual arts, drawings are chamber plays, quiet performances that offer little sensation to the noisy hustle and bustle.
There has been much talk about the end of painting, but no one has yet speculated about the possible end of drawing. Perhaps this is because drawing, as a naturally light-shy medium, has fewer opportunities in the white cubes of contemporary modernism. Nevertheless, there are attempts to remedy this by presenting drawing as a narrative sensation, even in large-scale wall works such as those by Raymond Pettibon.
Thomas Müller’s drawings belong to a different tradition, which, despite this assertion, is difficult to name. I am reluctant to use established terms such as abstract, non-figurative, etc., as they fall short and evoke comparisons that are not accurate. His drawings definitely have something figurative, even narrative, about them and are not abstract, even if we do not see any of this; it is inherent in them.
Thomas Müller, who not only studied German language and literature but also has a strong interest in literature, tells stories in a different way. At this point, one might be tempted to attempt an unauthorized translation that transfers the concept of the poetic from literature to drawing. If drawings are poetic, then this has nothing to do with literature. Literature—and we are powerful in language—not only describes the space in which poetry arises, whatever its means may be, but transcends itself into the poetic. Literature erases the handwritten in the neutrality of printed letters—that writing is related to drawing remains undisputed—and thus, if you will, erases the drawing. The translation from the merely functional graphic form is primarily of a concrete nature, whereas the poetic remains in the realm of thought. In drawing, the poetic is bound to the materiality of the line; what disappears is a disappearing line, what rises is a rising line, and what falls is likewise.
We know that Schelling even spoke of a poetic physics, a term that I see as even closer to drawing than to literary poetry. What is closer to drawing than the written word, even though the written word itself serves a different purpose, is the musical score. The legibility of the score, its translation into music, is more closely related to drawing than to writing, which has only a psychological proximity. Of course, we can see a handwritten sheet of text as a drawing, sensing the author’s composition in the lines. But in all this, we remain below the sole desired result of wanting to put something into words and pass on its content. The musical score leads to a sound, to an audible spatial experience that remains as unreadable as a drawing. Looking at Beethoven’s late musical notation, after he became deaf, it is striking that seeing the music, hearing the drawn score, guided his hand.
Let us take a drawing (fig. p. 28) by Thomas Müller, a large sheet measuring 114 cm high and 180 cm wide. Chalk lines run at irregular intervals from left to right in gentle curves, like water lines on a lake when the wind is blowing moderately. (Another comparable image from nature that might come to mind is the flow lines of a fast-flowing river). From the top left, further lines flow steeply into the horizontal lines, finally merging into their horizontal course. To stay with water, we could think of a waterfall. However, it is not really the association with water that explains this image to us, but rather the flow of the lines themselves, their movement, which evokes a familiar situation in us. If we were to try to imitate the lines with our hand in the air, we would feel like a conductor and almost hear the sustained tone as it descends from a high pitch to lower pitches. What remains is the sensation of a pure sound that is sustained as a uniform line, a stay in the eternal stream of flow, in movement without any discernible time.
Another drawing (fig. p. 10), almost exactly the same size, uses chalk, ink, and oil pencil, with stronger lines and a flowing movement not from left to right—our usual reading direction—but from right to left. We see them falling, rising only when we look from left to right. However, the steeply rising lines prevent us from perceiving an upward movement; our convention forces us to perceive the direction of flow as a downward flow. The act of perception—and in drawings we are in a particularly high form of perceptual culture—requires above all mindfulness. Mindfulness of what is, not what we think about it. This intelligent process of stepping out of the actual and remaining only in the idea we have of the drawing is part of our inability to act mindfully. It is not enough for our analytical thinking to accept emptiness. Supposedly, there is no gain here that makes it worthwhile to look at something. In Eastern culture, non-thinking and emptiness are familiar concepts that serve solely to give life a higher quality. The sutra of the “Four Foundations of Mindfulness,” for example, seems to me particularly useful for feeling (not understanding) drawings (without wanting to fall into an esoteric attitude). Mindfulness here means entering into the immediate being of the line and perceiving the line as such without any distraction. In my opinion, the strength of these drawings comes from this very practice of meaning the line and nothing else when drawing. The sutra mentioned above is primarily a meditation practice that attempts to exclude everything that distracts us from certain regions of our body through mindfulness, especially our thoughts, which always want to draw us into their fleeting nature. As a viewer, one is initially faced with the task of giving meaning to the drawing, of extracting something from it for oneself. But if a drawing is unable to provide us with our usual (informational) yield, we must find a way to read it nonetheless.
No text would be able to provide a translation. It can only be an example of how a feeling could be formulated, which in turn is entirely bound to the person attempting to approach a drawing.
One of the DIN A4-sized drawings shows two small grid structures drawn in black ink on a white background. The structure on the left is denser, with the lower line even blurring into a smudge, while the lines on the right are clearer and more regular. A horizontal line is drawn between the two, reaching the middle of both figures. Three ink blots of different sizes, appearing almost accidental, float in the upper left and in the middle above this figuration. Our eye sees the blots together and invents a movement based on certain visual experiences. The lower blot gives the upper one a reason for its movement on the white surface, which we could understand as space in the logic of this interpretation. It is catapulted out, as it were. The two small ones above it are earlier in time and thus already further away. We see an arc and a production that apparently continuously releases black bodies into infinite space. The two interconnected lattices are the energy source, the power plant of this movement, which remains incomprehensible to us. Our willingness to perceive the sequence described is initially linked to our readiness to approach this reduced drawing, which is imperceptible as such to the untrained eye, with a sense of attentiveness. It is not only the narrative of a movement that makes us think of many real movements, creating a sense of familiarity, but, if we look even more closely, the psychographic moment of the drawing. It is part of our experience to know what it is like to put a pen, pencil, or similar instrument to paper and draw a line. This sensation of putting the pen to paper, of making immediate contact with the writing or drawing surface, and of the movement that leads to a line, circle, letter, note, etc., resonates as we read, or rather, as we see. It was enough to understand. A drawing actually only exists because the artist has transcended all thought. Our addiction to negating the universality of things by assigning them a place is a negative reception in relation to drawing. By returning to the conceptual, we rob the drawing of its radicality.
Let us turn to another sheet (fig. p. 23), also a DIN A4-sized drawing in portrait format. Dense layers have been drawn horizontally with a blue pencil, oscillating back and forth like seismographic recordings.
The word seismographic automatically makes us think of a recording machine that shows our heartbeat, the climate, or earthquakes. We can evaluate these mechanically composed drawings, assign data to them, and draw conclusions. In relation to our existence, we know that the horizontal line on a cardiogram would signify the end of our life, that it is capable of depicting the cessation of our bodily functions in a simple drawing. However, despite their existential symbolism, the lines of the needles have no character whatsoever; they are drawn uniformly and show us nothing more than scientifically usable data. Nevertheless, we do not read them rationally, but perceive their entire meaning; we feel the tremors of the earth, even if we have never experienced them, we feel the end of an existence before we ourselves have reached that end. But what do the blue, rhythmically drawn lines of the artist’s drawing tell us? On closer inspection, we feel the hand, we see how it breaks off to start again just above the lower line. We also see that the blue lines are not homogeneous, not drawn with the same pressure throughout, but become stronger and weaker, indicating that the pressure of the pen has changed. The artist’s hand is not a mechanically adjusted instrument, but follows a movement that is almost impossible for us to imagine, resulting from complex interrelationships. The result is a psychographic structure that primarily depicts states of mind for which we have no language. The seemingly simple rhythm that runs through the drawing registers the inner climate, the tremors of the person drawing, without a psychiatrist or neurologist being able to draw any diagnostically useful conclusions. It is not a decodable code, but an immediate transmission that can be perceived as an image of this inner state. The reception of this drawing in turn requires what led to it, the mobilization of a person’s inner world, in this case that of the viewer. The creation of such a drawing can only take place beyond the realm of thought—similar to what is required by the aforementioned meditation practice of the sutra “The Four Foundations of Mindfulness.” Meditation accompanied by breathing focuses attention directly on what is happening, without judgment. It allows what is to be and observes it without any ideology. The stroke or line of a drawing derives its power from the oneness of the hand with what is happening while drawing. However, what is happening finds its sole expression in the written record. It is not evaluated, it does not undergo any mental purification, but is what it is. This idea is extremely foreign to our dualistic understanding of the world. It means letting go of the analytical worldview that dominates us. Above all, it means letting go and not attaching oneself to an interpretation or an evaluation. Of course, a drawing can only speak in this way if it has itself emerged from this freedom. Thomas Müller’s drawings have this inner freedom. Their daring to remain in extreme reduction, to follow the uncompromising limitation of means, succeeds through the thought-free mindfulness of the act of drawing itself. Words, which are the expression of thoughts, have little place here; they are merely a revision of what wants to remain as it is, namely in the drawing and not in words or thoughts.

© Eugen Blume