Doodling is an informal and absent-minded mode of mark-making that occupies
pockets of time and space in meetings or during phone conversations, is engaged in by
many people who would never consider themselves artists, and because of its
unconsidered character is thought to reveal the unconscious pre-occupations of its
creator. The doodle is now so familiar that it seems to be a natural given; yet the term,
and the concept behind it, is a comparatively recent invention, dating from the late 1920s
and becoming something of a cult in the mid 1930s, when books like ‘Everybody’s
Pixillated’ (Arundel 1937) were an indication of its popularity. Despite the fact that there
seems to have been a recent revival of interest in the genre, no-one has looked at the
cultural background to this phenomenon, beyond its immediate history (eg Presidential
Doodles, Greenberg 2006), and this is what I want to do here.
Right from the start, the doodle combined several contradictory features: it was
supposedly a universal, democratic form of drawing, yet celebrity doodles by film stars,
politicians and businessmen are the focus of Arundel’s book; it is an amateur activity, yet
there are clearly leakages between it and the world of Fine Art; it was read as an
individual signature, yet at the same time was analysed in terms of impersonal processes;
it was allegedly unconscious, yet signs of intermittent conscious interference are present
in many doodles; and finally, the interpretative strategies brought to bear on doodles were
hybrid- part graphological, part Freudian symbolism and part gestural.
I want to suggest that there are multiple leakages both ways between the private
and slightly shameful activity of doodling and some of the more brazen experiments and
challenges of Modernism. If Dadaism, for example, asserted that the creation of a work
of art was a private affair, having little to do with responsibility or the need to
communicate; if early forms of abstraction, such as Kandinsky’s, justified themselves in
terms of ‘inner necessity’ and appealed to the innate psychological significance of forms
and colours, these can be seen as helping to prepare the ground that the doodle would
soon occupy. Conversely, doodles, like the child art contemporary with them, provided a
rich source of inspiration for artists such as Klee or Miro, as well as more recent artists
such as Cy Twombly. Typically, in this respect Outsider Art, whose creators often use
‘doodling’ as an alibi (‘It’s just a doodle’), is an in-between realm, where extended forms
of doodling, such as those characteristic of Mediumistic Art, can be found.
Marginal drawings, that can be seen as disobedient or escapist, have a long
history, from those in mediaeval manuscripts, via 18th century bank ledgers (Gombrich
1999), right up to the delirious ‘scribblings’ of early 20th century psychotic art (Prinzhorn
1922). In many of these examples there is a clear connection between what could be
called graphic truancy and a complex system of conventions that governed proper writing
and representation, and that kept ornamental excursions in restraint. Like them, the
doodle’s relation to these rules is both playful and aggressive, yet subliminally it is a
dependent one. Far from being completely free-range, most doodling involves shifting
between various registers- alphabetic, physiognomic, ornamental – each of which has its
own conventions. The extent to which this is a conscious choice is often undecidable: for
example, the disruption of alphabetic legibility by gestural or decorative elements (the
distinction between the two ultimately breaks down) that is supposedly symptomatic of
psychotic art could be seen as either compulsive or ironic, but its author’s silence leaves
us guessing.
Because of this paradoxical combination of the anarchic and the law-abiding,
doodling throws into relief many of the conceptual difficulties surrounding ‘automatism’
and the unconscious laws that are assumed to govern it. Like Freud’s verbal ‘free
association’, what appears to be free-range inscription turns out to display patterns that
can be seen as having a subliminal or ‘unconscious’ structure. There are interesting
questions here as to whether these ‘deep structures’ are mainly formal, or whether they
have a psychological significance, for example in terms of a primitive psychoanalytic
symbolism. Certainly the early vogue for interpreting doodles shows a popularised
version of Freudian ideas: as one of the best-selling doodle books put it
‘While doodles appear to be aimless pixillations they are in reality accurate
pictures of the Subconscious Mind. They are psychic blueprints of man’s inner thoughts
and emotions that have slipped from the deeps of memory onto paper.’ (Arundel 1937, p.
x)
Yet, as we shall see, most doodles have a mundane, and often clichéd character. This
could, of course, reflect the fact that our unconscious preoccupations- sex, money or
ambition, for example- are stereotypical; but it is just as likely to reflect the fact that even
the expression of our inner worlds is shaped by the same set of linguistic and pictorial
conventions.
Doodling is perhaps one of the most widespread forms of drawing, and one that
doesn’t depend on technical skill or professional experience: indeed some artists might
envy the doodler’s apparent innocence, or their supposed access to the Unconscious.
However, these images of the doodle are mirages: in reality doodling is also habitual,
banal or repetitive. In 1937 a London evening paper ran a doodle competition, resulting
in some 9000 entries. Collecting doodles is, as I know from my own experience, a
somewhat arbitrary business, and soliciting them is no more reliable; but, judging from
the samples illustrated in the paper published by three psychiatrists on this material
(Guttmann, Maclay & Mayer-Gross 1937) the trawl seems to have included many
doodles that could be called ‘average’ in both a statistical and an artistic sense. Their
analysis of the drawings is fairly basic, though this is not surprising in view of the size of
the material. One thing is obvious, and that is that doodles are hybrid and contain many
different elements on a small scale: so faces, writing and ornamental detail contribute
60% each, with objects closely following at 55%. Interestingly, there were few (12%)
purely ornamental doodles. In the end the authors ascribe the repetition and monotony of
motifs to a ‘primitive’ collective psychology.
If we go back to Prinzhorn’s ambitious attempt to establish a model for the
various directions that the ‘configurative urge’ can take, we find that its most
fundamental form consists of ‘aimless, unorganised scribbling’ (Prinzhorn p 14). But he
had to admit that.’…even the simplest scribble… is, as a manifestation of expressive
gestures, the bearer of psychic components, and the whole of psychic life lies as if in
perspective behind even the most insignificant form-element.’ (Ibid. p 42). A scribble is
certainly more rudimentary than a doodle, but what he illustrated as ‘scribble’ or
‘decorative drawing’ is often not just what we might now call a doodle, but is sometimes
a kind of graphic fugue, with a complex structure that it is hard to attribute to instinct
alone. From this starting-point Prinzhorn suggests there are three basic paths of
development: representational, symbolic and ‘ordering’ (ornamental). These categories
are not dissimilar from those arrived at by Guttmann and his colleagues; but in both cases
they are cultural as much as instinctual, though both could be said to be ‘unconscious’ in
a non-psychoanalytic sense. Just as verbal automatism is surprisingly obedient to
grammatical or syntactical conventions, so graphic automatism tends to play around
pictorial ones.
One problem here is how this automatism is to be reconciled with our interest in
self-expression. A great deal of everyday doodling reveals a popular or collective lingua
franca that is surprisingly anonymous. When we ascribe a certain repetition or
permutation of motifs to ‘instinct’, ‘automatism’ or label them ‘fundamental form
constants’ (Navratil 1978) we invoke mechanisms that are largely impersonal; but then
one could say the same of the psychoanalytic symbolism, whether Freudian or Jungian
that is sometimes applied to them. It is, rather, the individual inflection given to these
processes that interests us, and here graphology is a useful model (and it also made a
significant contribution to ‘reading’ doodles). A Masson or Pollock drawing, for
example, may display various prototypical modes of mark-making, but it is their personal
signature that we value most. This tension is only a more dramatic version of the one that
comes into play between an individual artist and the collective idioms of art.
At the same time, part of this fascination is with what could be called the image of
automatism or unconscious form production, with all its attendant fantasies about
inspiration, possession, compulsion and obsession. Doodling could be described as a
distant cousin of full-fledged automatism. It takes place with an intermittent ‘lowering of
consciousness’, a fluctuating level of self-awareness, whereas automatism is usually
associated with trancelike states, and these can be understood either as a cause or as an
effect of the unconscious creative process. This is partly due to the limitations of time and
space under which most doodling occurs.
When these no longer apply, when there is nothing to inhibit or interrupt it,
doodling is amplified, both in its scale and in its intensity. Perhaps the absence of
external constraints leads to an increase in internal ones: significantly, its more extended
versions in Outsider Art- most obviously in mediumistic drawing- are often said to
induce a kind of auto-hypnosis. I call such extended drawings ‘meta-doodles’ because
they have the same absent-minded and self-generating character as doodles, but in more
concentrated form. There is an obvious fit here with Spiritualist beliefs in dictation by
spirits: besides possibly providing an umbrella under which to shelter, these offer
explanations that match the artist’s actual experience as well, or better, than
psychological theories.
Like the label ‘doodle’, Spiritualist beliefs gave permission for unbridled modes
of inscription to run riot without having to risk being called ‘art’. As in doodles, the
idiom of these meta-doodles blends together alphabetic, physiognomic and landscape
elements with more ‘abstract’ coralline textures in which they are often embedded (eg
Lonné). We can clearly see a kind of divinatory or Rorschach process at work here,
where recognisable forms and shapes are read into suggestive textures, and there may
also be a converse effect whereby such forms are eroded or obscured by patterns, or by
informal mark-making, just as happens in doodling. Nevertheless, there are also examples
of Mediumistic art in which there is strict symmetry and stereotypical repetition (eg
Crépin, Lesage). Where their creators have left any accounts of their work, there are
predictable references to feeling that they are just acting as a conduit for forces that are
outside their control. Most of these explanations concentrate on the authority- usually
spirits- ultimately responsible for the work, rather than on the process itself; but then it is
in the nature of automatism that one can only really talk about the beginning and the end
of this dictation, rather than what goes on in between.
This brings me to another unexplored aspect of doodling: the phenomenology of
its creation. Because most doodlers are ashamed of their distraction (though recent
research from the University of Plymouth suggests that doodling can in fact help
concentration), and perhaps also on account of its temporary nature (the meeting ends,
the caller hangs up) there are few accounts of how a doodle comes into being: analysis
concentrates on the final result and takes little notice of the process. As with many other
kinds of drawing, the latter has to be deduced from the marks themselves. In looking at
any drawing, and also at handwriting, we cannot help a subliminal and embodied
identification with the gestures that we imagine to have been responsible for it. Most
right-handers, for example, prefer to cross-hatch diagonally from upper right to lower
left.
But doodling also offers us an inside view into drawing. Because we may have
used them ourselves, we can feel our way into some of the strategies of doodling: the
tension between rectilinear and curvilinear, symmetry and the escape from it, the
elaboration of geometrical forms, the invention of facial features and architectural
constructions, as well as more negative effects such as blacking out. Some doodling is
repetitive and soothing, some is restless or impatient; but, as in the case of fully
automatic work, it’s difficult to know the extent to which this is a cause or an effect of
the drawing process itself. We could almost see doodling as a miniature graphic gym in
which different movements and rhythms are exercised in succession, and these can soon
become habitual or second nature. Here, as we shall see, there are interesting analogies
with Klee, whose drawings often seem to set up rules or constraints in order to provoke
disruptions of them.
One of the most intriguing descriptions of these effects at work in doodling comes
from Worringer (1911): it is coloured by the opposition between the organic and natural
and the geometric and man-made that first appeared in his ‘Abstraction and Empathy’
(1908), and predates the official birth of the doodle. In tracing ‘beautiful, flowing
curves’, he wrote, ‘our inner feeling unconsciously accompanies the movement of our
wrist’, whereas in a contrary tendency ‘the pencil will move wildly and violently over the
paper and instead of the beautiful, round, organically tempered curves, there will be a
hard, angular, ceaselessly interrupted, jagged line, of the most powerful vehemence of
expression’, and here ‘the reflex sensation is not accompanied by any feeling of
satisfaction, for we have the impression that we are being coerced by some alien,
imperious will’ (p 43). Even more vivid is his detailed account of this:
‘At every break, at every change of direction, we feel how forces suddenly
checked in their natural course are blocked; how, after this instant’s arrest, they pursue,
with a momentum increased by the obstruction, a new direction of movement. And the
more frequent the breaks, the more numerous the obstacles, the more powerful will be the
impetus at the points of rupture, the more forceful each time will be the onrush in a new
direction…’
Here I am reminded of watching a video of Jochem ven der Spek’s Tekenmachine in
which a crab-like device crawls randomly about within a rectangular frame, bouncing off
its edges: it leaves a variable track of twin black lines, but two swivelling rods behind it
make white lines which can overlay or erase them. The result is a self-renewing and selfeffacing drawing that is like an infinite abstract drawing or doodle.
We’ve looked at some examples from the golden age of doodling, but what about
the modern doodle? The extent to which doodling may have evolved is an interesting
question. There are some obvious technical factors: the invention of the biro, for
example, has made more continuous drawing possible. The fact that the doodle has
become a recognised phenomenon has led to a number of popular books on the subject,
many of which, whilst purporting to facilitate doodling, are rather prescriptive. There are
also numerous on-line sites where people share doodles and exhibit their work: there are
even some programmes that will turn any drawing, no matter how simple, into an
increasingly complicated doodle-like form. Nevertheless it seems, from my experience as
a university lecturer, that the genre still persists in something like its original form.
This ordinary doodling conjures up a number of scenarios, and again whilst many
of these have to be deduced or imagined, they can also be corroborated from our own
doodling experience. Some perhaps start with testing a pen, others with some kind of
meander that may then engage in some kind of conversation with itself, generating
various textures and patterns (contours, hatching, grids, loops, tangles), then perhaps
elaborating some of these into frames or other territories that are claimed and more or
less fully occupied. At some stage bits of faces, bodies (human or animal), buildings,
machinery etc may suggest themselves (including shorthand versions of cartoon
characters), and these may begin to interact: weapons will shoot at targets, creatures
pursue one another. There can also be abstract ‘narratives’, in which, for example, curved
and rectilinear shapes fight it out, perhaps even reaching some compositional truce.
To what extent is any of this automatic? Or rather, what does using the word do to
our imagination of the doodling process? In its strongest forms, ’automatic’ suggests
something like instinctual pre-programmed patterns, autonomous mechanisms that, once
set in motion, tend to run their course unconsciously. But in doodling we often encounter
forms that have grown out of the working process itself, or that follow ‘automatically’
one from another only in the way that clichés or stereotypes do. If in a doodle repetitions
occur, patterns are generated and other kinds of formal elaboration engaged in, with some
sort of logic to them, these structures probably derive from something more complex and
interactive than a simply predetermined sequence. They may owe something to muscular
or kinetic factors, local associations of memory or coincidence, popular motifs that are
‘in the air’, as well as to some episodic sense of composition, such as filling in gaps and
avoiding monotony.
This is not unlike what happens in other kinds of exploratory drawing. Good
examples can be found in the work of Paul Klee. Despite his famous statement ‘A line
goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk’, anyone who attempts
this soon finds out how hard it is to stop the line from going somewhere, and hence
seeming to show some kind of ‘aim’, and the repetitive or banal nature of much doodling
confirms this. One solution is to allow something to develop, so that it almost seems to be
following some sort of rule, and then interrupt its progress or even contradict it, as in
Worringer’s description. Again, this can occur on a half-conscious level without having
to be purely automatic. In Klee’s case we have plenty of examples of graphic
perigrinations that behave like this; but we also have the kind of ‘laws’ that feature in his
pedagogical notes, which seem to offer an analysis of them. It’s often difficult to tell
whether these are descriptive or prescriptive: perhaps their relation to his work is not
unlike that of a doodler who knows something about the literature, but manages not to let
this interfere with the invention of his doodling.
Even in the case of drawings that purport to be fully automatic, such as André
Masson’s Surrealist drawings from the late 1920s, the same questions arise. Because
there is a deliberate choice to abandon conscious control, there is a performative aspect to
such drawing, even if this is private: hence it is perhaps the image of automatism, rather
than its literal reality, that matters here. Certainly Masson’s drawings from this period
have the look of automatism and resemble some mediumistic work (such as Raphael
Lonné) in their calligraphic texture. He manages to distribute cursory fragments of
bodies- nipples, eyes, hands, sexes- within a vestigial ‘landscape’ in ways that are
unusually even-handed. This is almost like the ‘even-floating attention’ prescribed in
psychoanalysis, yet here the artist applies it to himself, and, perhaps, paradoxically, only
a trance-like state of suspended attention enables this. As he later wrote
‘Physically, you must make a void in yourself; the automatic drawing taking its
source in the unconscious, must appear as an unforeseen birth. The first graphic
apparitions on the paper are pure gesture, rhythm, incantation, and as a result:
pure scribble. […] When the image appears one must stop. (Masson 1961)
Again, at its humbler level, the doodle has some supporting evidence to offer us: an
informal tangle of lines can suddenly suggest something, which a mere stroke can
confirm, But then the doodle may get caught up in this, and literally revolve around it,
whereas there is something slippery and polymorphously perverse about Masson’s idiom.
What I have tried to show is that the doodle, despite being promoted as a popular
non-art form of drawing, has its own subliminal connections with key elements of
Modernism, and can still tell us a lot about the processes- both graphic and
psychological- at work in ‘finer’ forms of art.