Martinez argues against the concretization of knowledge as some form of institution and instead sets out the roles and relations of force, \u201cof affect and power\u200a\u2014\u200aat a given historical moment\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> that establish both the conditions of knowledge and the way in which they engage the self. It is this understanding of knowledge as a condition<\/em> that resonates throughout each tentacle of Morelli\u2019s practice. The conditional, perhaps best described by the French tense conditionnel<\/em>, is a mode used to express a wish, a hypothesis, or, as its name suggests, a fact or action subject to a condition. Its temporality is not predetermined; it can operate in both the past and the present. It is from this place of potential that Morelli and I began this conversation, framed by the idea of the sketch<\/em>, a mode of production in sync with his holistic practice. It should be noted that we have been conversing for over ten years, and that, as exceptionally verbal people, our comments often develop in a way that does not necessarily result in direct answers. This text is offered, then, as its own kind of sketch. Our conversation is interspersed with project descriptions from Morelli\u2019s classes, which he recalled within the productive space of our dialogue. That he offers them to us is also indicative of the sincerity with which he teaches. Often, paid educators are miserly with their language, as they view (project) ideas as property. Intellectual property it is, but to tie the potential of thought to an individual and make it available only to paying customers is both to slow learning and to increase the capitalist haunting of our educational institutions. Instead, Morelli puts it all out there in a maximal, processual excess. It is this generative field that we query as a practice continuously in formation, ever coming to be: the prevision of the sketch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jake moore : <\/strong>The call for submissions for this issue of esse<\/em> describes beautifully the distinctions between the French word esquisse<\/em> as possibly figurative and the English word \u201csketch,\u201d which can expand to the theatrical. Both contain the idea of gesture, which I understand to be that which extends the self beyond itself, and performativity, a mode of bringing things into being through gesture<\/em>. Gesture here is not only physical, but can be textual, oral, sonic, etc. Within both linguistic frames there is a persistent connection to the body\/being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fran\u00e7ois Morelli : <\/strong>I began teaching drawing in 1980, and drawing is the subject I have taught and practised the most. For me, drawing and sketching were always synonymous and they provided a way to work through other disciplines. In the mid-1970s, I combined lens-based media with drawing materials to pursue conceptual work. In the early 1980s, performance and expanded sculpture became the focus of my practice, while drawing and theory were the subjects I taught\u2026 I write this because, while the figure and the body were always central to my teaching and practice, it was only in 2015 that I actually taught a performance-based drawing course when I conceived of Drawing From Sites and Actions, co-taught with Cynthia Hammond. Drawing has provided an opportunity to pursue an embodied form of material practice rooted in ideas and language. I have written\/drawn in public\/private spaces using my body as a surface, material, and tool to mark with\/on. Having always existed in-between two official languages, and never having spoken my third mother <\/meta>language,<\/meta>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Morelli\u2019s mother tongue is Italian. For an expanded understanding of the role family plays in his practice, see jake moore, \u201cThe Water Carrier,\u201d in Francois Morelli<\/em>, exh. cat. (Montr\u00e9al: 1700 LaPoste, 2017), 188\u200a\u2014\u200a209.<\/span> my discovery of drawing\/sketching when I was seventeen afforded a welcome respite to the inner conflicts and divides that confused identity and ownership. I have always made a distinction between the written word and the spoken word. I learned to speak French and English as a toddler. I learned to read and write in English, and only much later did I work on my written French. Orality was the privileged form of communication, given my socioeconomic and cultural differences. It became my way of negotiating the different parts of myself, as drawing would later become my way of dealing with the hybrid nature of my practice and the heterogeneous reality of a postmodern art world. Both became ways of mapping out a trajectory as an artist-teacher: make work, earn a living, talk the talk, draw the line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm : <\/strong>I am interested in the idea that language is often a sketch for artists, a way of mapping something out, something preliminary but not the thing itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM :<\/strong> Yes, language as an artist but also as a teacher; spoken sketches have been central to mapping things out. Furthermore, I have come to understand spoken language (orality) as the crucial component of my teaching. The performative liveliness and embodied nature of orality, like that of sketching, resides in the present and rests in its potentiality. Often provisional, it depends on openness and dialogical interaction. Like the sketch, the voice can be democratic in its economy and transparency. A spoken word, like the sketch, sits somewhere in between an idea and the thing. It\u2019s this in-betweenness and these contingencies of talking that make spoken language an empowering sketching tool for students and teachers to work things out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm : <\/strong>\u201cThe performative liveliness and embodied nature of orality, like that of sketching, resides in the present and rests in its potentiality.\u201d I would like to pick up on this a little more. I think this role of making potential evident is the absolute power of the sketch\u200a\u2014\u200ait provides the aperture to others that is required for exchange, and that exchange is the basis of teaching (at least in my approach to it). What do you think?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM : <\/strong>I have found the sketch ideal in planning studio class time, as well as for countering growing class sizes. The sketch enables students to begin to identify and share content while still developing ways of working out ideas, materials, and forms. Its ability to make potential evident is a first stage in stepping out and making manifest aspects of one\u2019s self to reflect on as a group. Because the sketch is as much about being in control as it is about letting go, it relativizes the skilling-deskilling debate and can open the playing field for students. A sketch, by eliminating and purging, often is structural, is constantly abridging and deconstructing to reinvent itself. Whether orchestrated as a group exercise or executed alone, it has the advantage of being charged with affect and deep psychological and physiological unpredictability. Its expeditious nature, uncensored and spontaneous, can both shortcut and short-circuit process. As it\u2019s a conceptually, physically, and emotionally demanding form of expression, I have used the sketch as a workout space akin to group gym aerobics, in which music, instructions, and breaks build and drive creative energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm : <\/strong>In our first email exchange discussing this interview, you provided a list of six definitions and responses to the word \u201csketch.\u201d The first was \u201csketch as a liminal space<\/em>.\u201d Could you please elaborate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM : <\/strong>The sketch is too often confused as the beginning of or origin for something more elaborate or final; I prefer to think of it as a state of being, a neither-here-nor-there. It lives a hyphenated existence based on multiple contingencies. In constant flux, it should not be confused with incompleteness or having a lack of direction. On the threshold and like an index, it points to things, suggests possibilities, and remains somewhat suspended, bridge-like, tunnel-like, connecting and interconnecting heterogeneous and at times contradictory possibilities. Non-judgmental, it should not be laboured with planning or hindered by censorship. It can be thrown away and started over. Its ultimate value is in its ability to ask questions and stir things up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm :<\/strong> Your second proposed definition was \u201csketch as a work space<\/em>.\u201d How so?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM :<\/strong> The sketch as an open space\u2026. A space where traces bear the mark of process and presence. A space for collaboration that questions authorship and signature. The sketch is always being used to communicate directions in the everyday. Building on its notational\/informational status, it can be built on by others, added to, commented on, and adjusted. It is not only open to being entered and interpreted, it is open to being used, changed, and adapted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n jm :<\/strong> Discussions of space have been central to conceptual and social practices; indeed, \u201cspace is understood as physical and social landscape which is imbued with meaning in everyday place-bound social practices and emerges through processes that operate over varying spatial and temporal <\/meta>scales.\u201d<\/meta>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Maarja Saar and Hannes Palang, \u201cThe Dimensions of Place Meanings,\u201d Living Reviews in Landscape Research<\/em> 3 (2009), <http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.12942\/lrlr-2009-3>.<\/span> French Marxist and spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre mapped out a trialectic of space: the perceived (per\u00e7u<\/em>), conceived (con\u00e7u<\/em>), and lived (v\u00e9cu<\/em>) seemingly come together in the space of the sketch. For me, this intersectional approach, when grounded in Marxism, is a possible method for understanding the labour of artists\u200a\u2014\u200anot an explanation of it\u200a\u2014\u200aas it points to our potential to create change and critically, how artists make space in both real and imaginary registers. Is there a politics to your teaching?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM : <\/strong>I have found that the intimacy and economy of the sketch, its subordinate status in the hierarchy of art things and summary form, allow for more freedom and opportunity. Both in my practice and in my teaching, its portability (books, scrolls, cards, and so on) has accommodated mobility and movement in and out of the everyday. The intersection with and meeting of individuals on the street and in the classroom have this third space in common with the sketch. I have come to understand teaching as fundamentally social. My role as a facilitator is to foster and nurture a sense of communitas <\/em>through shared and accumulated experiences, a space and time in which collective and individual growth are intrinsically based on change through reciprocity and dialogic work and play. The risk-taking inherent to learning and making as an artist can engender failure, embarrassment, and shame when made public in shared spaces. These are huge stakes to want to secure safe spaces of inclusion and difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm : <\/strong>Your third and fourth definitions begin to articulate embodied knowledges and positionality:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. Sketch in between body and mind, sense and idea, figure and abstraction\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. Sketch as a way to locate, position, orient\u2026 space and place<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This leads me to consider some of your durational and performative works. For example, would you suggest that performances such as La mesure<\/em> are sketches in their openness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM : <\/strong>Yes. First, La mesure<\/em> is an ongoing piece that I work on seasonally (weather permitting). It is made up of cumulative iterations of repeated gestures, of changing interactions and encounters. A summation of parts, in many ways it began before me with my grandparents as immigrants and their children walking on Ontario Street over a hundred years ago. Time ticking and me measuring increments (using the family yardstick), inscribing numbers on the sidewalk with a Sharpie\u2026 labour and task intersecting the everyday of La Promenade Ontario for its citizens to talk about themselves in the past, present, or future tense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm :<\/strong> Does this connect to the suggested English understanding of the word \u201csketch\u201d as a kind of demonstration\/performance of abstraction\u200a\u2014\u200aabstraction here meaning not representational of the whole, though evocative of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM : <\/strong>The bigger picture as viewed from ground level crawling and rolling on hands and knees\u2026 from the perspective of a point on a timeline stretching from Moreau to Viau moving east\u2026 stopping to remember my own history through sites and places, buildings and events\u2026. The drawing itself subject to weathering and erosion\u2026 a sequence of notational numbers from I to X changing with each corner and corresponding to the number of yardsticks in a city block. The resistance of my body and the felt marker against the pavement\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm :<\/strong> Your fifth definition was, \u201cSketch as a way to measure<\/em> and build (tectonics and structure).\u201d I am interested in the connection between the sketch as a way to come to know and how that knowledge remains unfixed. It is not a blueprint but an offering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM : <\/strong>The conditional and contextual states of La mesure<\/em> over time make each and every outing different yet connected. Knowing comes out of making. The knowledge is located in the body, my own and that of the other. Stepping back and looking at the marks is more about remembering, reminiscing, talking. Making is engaging\u2026 moving back and forth between marking and looking. There is a form of re-enactment in picking up where I left off, settling in and doing what I do until someone comes and strikes up a conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In teaching, the sketch can often feel like a pretext. Framing the sketch by introducing parameters allows me to focus on process without losing site of the bigger picture. Sketching as a generative process that can produce knowledge, which can in turn inform everything from meaning to \u201csa raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n jm :<\/strong> Your final definition described \u201csketch as both form and practice, instrument and methodology<\/em>.\u201d Do you see the sketch as interstitial? As hinging? Is it both the performance and the performative?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FM : <\/strong>I\u2019m also interested in sketching and time. Often quick and condensed, it can be about energy and release. In the moment\/present it is concentrated and focused. That said, it can be repeated and developed to build up rhythm and resistance. When exercised, it enters muscle memory and works from the entire body. As is done in many live art practices, you play the materials and ideas when you sketch. The opposite of between a rock and a hard place, I\u2019d rather think of it being between a hunch and a soft spot. Clearly floating, its ultimate value hinges on its lightness and relative uselessness. It hovers between the score and the action\/event, and needs both of them to exist. Traditionally understood as an outward gesture or movement (from the inside out), I prefer to think of it as a multidirectional web: the sketch at the intersection, creating nodes, swellings of differentiated tissues, feelings, and ideas. <\/p>\n\n\n![\"Morelli_Justaucorps\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO02_Moore_Morelli_Justaucorps-scaled.jpg\")
Justaucorps<\/em>, 2010.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Morelli_Tapis](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO02_moore_Morelli_Tapis-Volant-scaled.jpg\")
Tapis volant<\/em>, exhibition view, Galerie Joyce Yahouda, Montr\u00e9al, 2008.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Morelli_La](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO02_Moore_Morelli_La-femme-loup-scaled.jpg\")
La femme loup<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux, courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Morelli_La](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO02_moore_Morelli_La-mesure-scaled.jpg\")
La mesure, <\/em>summer 2013.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Morelli_Drawing](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO02_moore_Morelli_Drawing-from-Sites-and-Actions.jpg\")
D\u00e9tail de l\u2019atelier dans le cadre du cours Drawing from Sites and Actions<\/em>, session d\u2019hiver 2017.
Photo : Eva Meyer, permission de l\u2019artiste<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Morelli_Lassise_croquis\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO02_moore_Morelli_Lassise_croquis-scaled.jpg\")
L\u2019assise<\/em>, sketch, 1995.
Photo : courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Morelli_Assise\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO02_moore_Morelli_Assise-scaled.jpg\")
L\u2019assise<\/em>, 1995.
Photo : courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n