What Do Drawings Want?

Abstract The idea the pictures want something evokes the belief that pictures are spirits, that they represent what J. G. Frazer called 'sympathetic magic'. The colonial response was to be suspicious of any such claim and regard it as a superstition held by the backward and the colonised, but dismissed by us advanced Westerners. This is the issue that W. J. T. Mitchell's most recent work plays with. This paper addresses these issues by explicitly taking up the question of drawing. Engaging with the writings of John Berger, and in response to the distinct lack of drawing by anthropologists, the paper asks what role does this sympathetic magic play when we actually make a picture. What can the act of drawing tell us about what pictures want?