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Vitamin D

VITAMINA D - DIBUJOS

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Luis Alberto Espinoza López
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396 vistas450 páginas

Vitamin D

VITAMINA D - DIBUJOS

Cargado por

Luis Alberto Espinoza López
Derechos de autor
© © All Rights Reserved
Nos tomamos en serio los derechos de los contenidos. Si sospechas que se trata de tu contenido, reclámalo aquí.
Formatos disponibles
Descarga como PDF o lee en línea desde Scribd
pe 3 “ od 3 3 ide re rae e vitaretvd af NEW PERS PECTPUPSEEANS AWING oe ota ae OS <(e : Jeeta \ enon aa GARTURO WERRERS) a OEVENORA BANHART: \ = 4 aa FRANCES RICHAROSOW sence SEMONE SHUBUCK 2 j : & HAYLEY TOMPKINS é SCHNEIDER KARA ae GEAASTIAN HANMWORNER)* 122-195 GRENTON DOYLE HANGOGK)* 126-227 CDEVENDRA BANHARD)*026-027 eis2=1s3 _—_ Gwe sranreartyro28-029 HRES JOMANSOW* 5 — (HANNON BOOLy* 020-039 (KERSTIN KARTSCHERD* 50 139 st 160-163 yra26-o38 )>296-297 (onsen Sinn) * 298 Gar SMTTI 202-305 NEDRO SOLAKDDS* 906 RILEY TOMPRIND "> r030-083 Cae woMTD 210-211 srocaapnres *336-34 ye244-247 YOSHITOMO NARA) 210-219 128-134 Gav penaovseHe24s-247 To DRAW IS TO BE HUMAN Drawing {9 everywhere. We are surrounded by it~ it $8 sewn into the warp and wart of our lives: we practice it as one of our earliest experiences as schoolchildren, ‘and as parents we treasure the drawings made by our off~ apring like nothing else. People draw everywhere in the World: drawing can even be used as 2 global visual 1an- Avage when verbal conmunication fails. As adults we use it pregmatically to sketch our onn mope and plans, but we also use it to drean—in deodlas and scribbles. Wie use drawing to denote ourselves, our existence within a scene: in the urban context, for example, graffiti acts 35 3 form of orauing within an expanded field. Indeed, drav- ing 43 part of our interrelation to our physical envaron- lent, recording in and on it, the presence of the hunan. It ie the means by which we can underotand and map, doci- pher, and come to terms vith our surroundings as we leave farks, tracks, or shadows to mark our passina. Footorints in the snow, breath on the window, vapor trails of @ plane acrose the sky, Lines traced by a finger in the sand—we Literally draw in and on the material world. Drawing 1s part of what st means to be hunan—indeed, it would be HHdieulove te apply this statement to other, more ep balized mecia, such a8 painting, sculpture, of collage. but somehow applied to the medium of crawiia, the idea ks easier to gresp. Consider the tuo principal aspects of drawing today, The first 1s the conceptual, theoretical discourse of drawing, in which Line, as on ebstrect mark! and its Felation to the sround enjoy a symbolic potency that ates back to the madiun’s primitive origins. Drawing interconnects us with our ancestors in a larger sense: {it ts there in a1] traces of humen activsty and presence, from Neolithic marks on cave walls to Lines of telephona wires. All can be Seen as @ form of drawing. This pared down, degree-zero conceptualization of drawing relates most directly to Conceptusl art of the 1960s and 1970s and ite many offshoots. This 4s partly due to tne attraction of Grexing's tautolcgous nature—drawing forever describes ito own making in ite becoming. Ina sence, drawing is nothing mere than that, and in its eternal inconpletion always re-enacts imperfection and Lncompletion. ‘Then there is the other, elaborately cultured aepect of drawing, not based upon 4 theoretical or philosopnical understanding of what drawing 1s per se, Dut on the areas of human experience thet drawing has. come to be aeccciated with: intimacy, informality, authenticity (or at least with authentic inauthenticity). Lmmediacy, sudjectivity, history, memory, narrative. We can have a very loose understanding of what drawing is, whatever the ground, oF whether pancii, nib, or brush is utilized. Drawing is a feeling, an attitude that Ls betrayed in Sts hendling es much as in the materials used. Recent theoretical writing about drawing tends to concentrate on the conceptual and process-oriented nature of the medium and hence ignores a very prevelent narrative-led, associative, and subjective tendency in Contemporary drawing. Tt is necessary, however. to explore beyond the primal ontological qualities of Grawing in order te look at other reasons for drawina’s recent secendancy. Described crudely, contemporary art Currently follows two main trajectories: the post- Conceptual and the neo-Romantic. Crucielly, it 1s within the Field of drawing that the inherent tensione and con- traciationa of these two directions are Intriguingly played out. THE PRIMAL SCENE OF DRAWING Drawing has @ primal and elemental character: it onjoye mythic status as the earliest and most immediate form of Smage making. The idea and execution of drawing has remained unchanged for thousands of years—as such st is an activity that connects ue directly in an unbroken Line with the first human who evar sketched in dirt or scratcned on the wall of a cave. Orawing has always been aosociated with magic ever since humane first depicted the animale on which their survival depended. Pablo Picasso could have been talking about drawing speciti- ally vhen he Gescribed art as a “form of magic, designed ac a medistor between this strange, hestLle world and us. a way of seizing the power by sivina form to Our terrors as well our desires... ~? It 4s still very prevalent to describe drawing as magical: for a young, Child, the ability to conjure instantly the image of Something (e stick figure rendition of mother, 2 Lollipop tree) at will is miraculous, With drawing, we naver lose that sense of wonder. ‘The primal qualities of drawing are also con- jared through the simplicity and purity of the blank sheet ‘of paper, wnile the act of drawing itself Deickens non festy and transparency—all the merks and tracks, whether Geliberate or not, are thare for all to eee in perpetuity. Any erasures or attenpts to change the line mid-flow are obvious—drawing 1s a form that wears its mistakes and ‘errors on its sleeve. Oil painting, by contrast, is an art of accretion and concealment. Tt is possible to paint an entirely different painting on top of another. Dramina 1s, Amprovisatory and always inmotion, in the sense thet it can proceed a¢ infinitum without cloture or completion, continually part of @ pracess that 18 never-ending. The Conventions of painting demand that every part of the. canvas bounded by the frame ia covered with paint, organized compositionally at the service of totality. ‘Dust as paintins’s Limits are set by its frame, so too the act of painting carries the sense that it can achieve completion and closure While paintina completely obscures 3ts ground, creating the L1lusion that the ground is not there at ali, ‘drawing enjoys 2 very differant relationship te ite back” around. The white backaround, according to art historian Norman Bryson, acts as a reserve, @ blank space, from which the image emerges, this blank apace being “per. ‘Ceptually present but conceptually absent? The reserva therefore functions as a device to keep at bay the desire for obvious structure, composition, end totelity, the foroae that painting is aupject to. As 3 pened moves ‘about the paper, its path is local and contined: freed {from the need to consider the totality, it can respond immediately to “where the hand 18 now in praesontiar In the essay *Painting, or Signs and Marks” (1917), Walter Benjamin expresses a related idea when he observes that the graphic Line is defined in contrast to area, which is both vieual and metaphysical. As Benjamin writes, “The araphic Line marks out the area and so defines it by attaching itself to it as its background, Conversely, the Sraphic Line can exist only againet this background, co that 2 drawing that completaly cavered its background would cease to be a drawing. ... The araphic line con~ fers an identity on its background. The identity of the background of a drawing is quite different from that of the white surface on which it is inscribed... The pure drewing will not alter the meaningful graphic function of ite Background by “leaving it blank’ as a white ground? In defining [Link] batween painting and drawing, according to Benjamin's logic, the watercolor atonds squarely between the two, As Benjamin writes, “The only instance in which color and Line coincide is in the watercolor, in which the pencil outlines are visible and the paint 49 put on transparently. 1n that case the back- around 42 retained, evan trough it te colored"? In another Short taxt, "Painting and the Graphic Arts” (1917), Benjamin draws attention to a far-reaching difference between painting and drawing, based on the way that drawings function physically within the world and how we experience then. He notes that paintinas denand to be viewed vertically, while drawings should be viewed Flot, Ande euggasts that viewing children's drawings verti- ‘cally “conflicts with their inner meaning... ."? He con Hnuest “We see here a profound problem of art and its mythic roots. We might say that there are two sections ‘through the substance of the world: the longitudinal sec- ‘ion of painting and the cross-section of certain pieces of graphic art, The longitudinal section coame repre: tational; st somehow contains the objects. The cross~ Section seems symbolic: st contains sians7 senjaman Concludes (as other theorists end observers have, too) that drawing existe at another level vithin the human psyche—it 1s a locus for signs by which we map the phys~ Leal world, but it 19 itself the pre-eminent sign of being. Therefore, drawing ie not 2 window on the world, but device for understanding cur place within the universe. ‘Benjamin's favorite artist, Paul Klee, understood this complex relationship between Line, place, space, land the poetics of discovery that are located in drawing. Has now famous opening comment in The Pedagoaical Sketchbook (1925) elucidates his perception of drawing os Sol LeWitt, Four-Color Drawing (Composite), 1970, ink on paper, 14 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches, 36.2 x 54 cm John Baldessari, Pencil Story, 1972-73, color photographs and pencil'on board, 22 x 27 1/4 inches, 55.9 x. 69:2 cm “An active Line on a walk, moving freely, without 2 goal. Awolk for a walks ake. the mobility agent ie 3 point, shifting its position forward” The Sketchbook connects Grawing with all the physicel phenomena of the world. Klee used the working relationship of bone and muscle, the flow af the blood stream, waterfalls, the flight of birds, the motion of the {ides as examples of “coordina~ ted Linear notion”? Drawing has an innate poignancy about st. The: writer Michael Nevman points out that drawing only Lightly touches ite surfaces, that each stroke isa sign of withorawal, of departure—unlike painting, mhich cov fers its surface and whose moment of making 16 hidcen. AAs Newnan puts it, "Drawing, with each stroke, re-enacts desire and loss. ite peculiar node of being lies between ‘the withdrawal of the trace in the mark and the presence of the idea 1t pretigures-# Contemporary artists Like Hayley Tompkino (pp- 310-311) continue to be fascinated by drawing's innate ability to suggest Joss. Tompkins Creates abstract watercolors in which she only 1igntly grazes the poper with color; instellatione that soeak of the temporality and fragility of the artist’s momentary touch: and works on paper that blur the distinction between draning as ready-made and craning as record of an intense and private moment. Frances Richardson's firawings emphasize in abstract form the relationship {alluded to by Wewman) between drawing and thought or Adea, a8 she weaves abstract fields from tracks of tiny crosses or marks. Daniel Zeller (pp. 232-335) and James Stena (pp. 292-283) explore throuan abstraction the con~ flation of inside and outside, micro end macro, thouaht and action, in their intricate wab-like and cell-struc- ture drawinas. These sorts of considerations—the relation ships between drawing and time and space, being ond baconing, figure and ground, and completion and incon- pletion have consistently Jed artisis to see drawing as fn ert of process that chimed with avant-garde practice in North America and Europe, first in terms of Abstract Expressionism, ut leter in terms of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Nid-twentieth-century ert challenged the very naturs of the art object steel*, overthrew netione of completion and failure, and saw the energence of per- formance and body art. Orawing naturally found favor in thie milieu among artiste who appreciated ite tranepar- ent and revelatory nature, as well as the fact that it Served as an unmediated record of an act. These artists responded to droning because of sts directness; in ite presentness, drawing becane allied philosophically to the phenomenology of Minimalist sculpture, as well as to Process ert, Ino femous intervien, Richard Serra says, “knything you can project ae expreccive in terme of draw ing—ideas, netapors, emotions, language structures— results from the act of doing Artists who were keen to challenge the materiol and substantive qualities of the artwork prized this tautologous or solipsistic quality fof draving, its eternal ancompletion, or the tact that it ‘90 perfectly enacted/recorded the actions of the ertist Sol Lastt's drawings from the 1960s show math matical precision in execution, demonstrating nis notion Of the ideo as machine to moke ort, but at the sane tine, hhis compositions are done by hand. Leniitt often consid- fered working drawings, with their visible erasures and calculations, to be his most successful works. Again, the procese of the act of drawing takes many forms. In the ‘case of Lenitt (although he never fornally allied himself to Conceptualism as a movement). the choice of drawina 29 a principle nediun conveys the ascetic, even puriten- Seal, anti-decadent aspecte of Conceptualiem. Critic Bernice Rose describes the gcal of Conceptual art as “the anbition to return to the roots of experience, to recreate the primary experience of symbolization uneon- taninated by the attitudes attached to traditional visual modes, whether representational or abstract Dranina fe the perfect medium for this eearch—pure, uncontani- ‘nated, lonly, diract. anti-monumental, and at times close to being te holy grail of the denaterialized object. In 1366 Mel Sochner orgenized en exhibition at the School of Visual Arte in New York called “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art” For this show, he borrowed numerous drawings and ether works on paper that would not otherwise necessarily be described as tarts The exhibition included not only working dranings by LeWstt, but also a bL11 from a supplier to Doneld Judd, 2 John Cage score, 2 mathematician’ calculations, and 2 page from Scientitic American, Bochner photocopied cach of these pieces of paper ephemere and then pre Sonted then inring-bound feldare, placed on plinthe ‘ike sculpture. Visitors had to nagotiate their way around the material presented and were Lett to ponder exactly where the art ley—wae it in the inauthentic pages of photocopied drawings, or was it 4n the concept ‘oF idea of the exhibition itsel{? “Working Drawings...” is often credited a8 being the firat exhibition of Conceptual art, a fact that places drawing at the center fof this deconstruction of both the art object and exnibi~ tion practice itself, But the show also marks the moment that drawing took on the form of the paper ready-made Qudd's BELL, for example). Tt also represents the moment when tecnnoiogy (the photocopier) allowed crawing an 207 way to Lose ite authenticity a0 a work of art, ALL THE WORLD'S A DRAMING The interest in process and in inconpletion in sculptural practice during the 19608 allowed drawing to Perticipate in post-Minimalist explorations of the brtieve encounters between hie or her body and the real World 1n booy art, performance art, oF Land art. Drawing. Like sculpture, was not just an appropriate medium either ‘299.9 tool or a8 en end-product of these explorations of process or action. Rather, it was drawing itself, with its innate qualities of provisionality end process, as well 25 its tautologous and thought Like neture, that offered 43 model of how art itself should be conducted. Approach- ing his work as a series of experiments or extended thought processes, Bruce Nauman's entire oeuvre can be ‘seen as a form of drawing. Whether the results appaar in Video, fim, sculpture, or print—or actual drawings themselves—nis artworks are 211 drawings in the sense that they are the results (and documentation) of his vari- us experiments with material, space, and Language, Drawina’s centrality tn Nauman’s overall practice 1s, demonstrated by the fact that he will often make drawings based upen a “conpleted* sculpture to analyze what h worked or not, thereby reversing the common notion of Graming 2s 2 preparatory medium. ‘At the came time, Nauman reverses ideas about the monent when a work is “finished” or what the most appropriate medium for that findshed work should be, Nouman's early film works (for example, Councing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, 1967-58), in which ne cocdles in space anc time ith objects in the studio, act as perfect illustrations Of Klee’s vision of the world ae an active site of drawing. More literally, in his various Art Make-up f11ms, also, hace betmeen 1967-68, Nauman uses his face as if it were 1 sheet of blank paper in the video installation Mapping the Studio T Fat Chance John Cage), 2002, he uses the real-time antics of a cat and mouse to create a chance- driven spatial drawing on video. Crucially, Naumon's placement of drawing on an equal footing with other edia has had a profound influence on younger artists tho present drawing as an integrated part of a multi- media practice ina variety of settings Land art is inescapably drawing. Richard Long's A Line Made by Wasking (1967) 18 a drawing nade by welk- ing upon the face of the earth, The idea ie eimply to Swalk back and forth until the grass is trodden into an evident Line! This work and others from the same period take on 9 strangely archaic espect, as the artist's inter ventions reveal the earth as a surface or ground to ba marked, etched, and scarred by the body as the instru- ment of drawing, toking the role of pencil or pen. Long A Line Made by Walking euggests that wo are all artiste when ve are walking, and from this point, there 18 only 4 short step to understanding body movement as the drawing of inviestle Lines in epace. In fact, this work proposes that our Lives ara a series of maps of lines, Detween points as we move from point A to 8 across a siven aree, Contemporery artists continue to explore rawing in euch an expansive and physical context Sy transterring the nethodolozies of Land art to the urban sphere, shedding the form of its latent romanticism. Robin Rhode [pp. 261-265) uses drawing in relation to his body a8 a means to explore the frustrations, illusions, ‘and realities of Life in tough areas of Johannesburg. fy Ul awitean 2° Bruce Nauman, Sex and Death/Double 69, 1985, pencil and watercolor on vellum, 85 x 52 3/4 inches, 216 x 134 cm Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967 Rhode interacts with roughly drawn objects rendered on a white or concrete background—oftan committing trans- Aressive acts (in one video, ne tries to “steal” a drawn Vehicle; in another, he urinates in @ “urinal” drown on the gallery wall}. The effact of these actions 42 to ren~ der the full reality of Rhode. as a black male subject. squerely in the foreground and to relegate the world of bigne and objects to the background. Rhode's drawings and actions give him the space to act powerfully within a fictional scene of his own making, Indeed, Land art was alweys about pover—Lons’s sorawinge” depended upon his sense that he could act in ang on the landscape by leaving a mart upon it, no matter how temporal. Gabriel drozco's drawings (pp. 238-239) are often based upon the found materiale produced within the matrix of a global Life, In his work, airline tickets, boarding passes, or banknotes are painted on or drawn on with the artiot’a own signature forme and devices. Despite the fact that Orozco uses photography, sculpture, instal- ation, viceo, and drawing, 11ke Nauman, Orozco ‘approaches ail his work as a form of drawing. This is because his methodology is so much based upon observ able physical phenomena and their relationship to thought processes. As Grozco says, his work 18 “about cencantration, intention, and paths of thought: the flow of totality in our perception, the fragmentation of the “raver of phenomera:~‘" For anstance, an early pnoto~ sraphicraning by Orozco shows the watery patterns repre fenting the tracks of hie bicycle tires in a puddle, Orazco wants us to See the world differently as a result fof encountering his art. Drawina's proximity to thouaht 38 ever present in its meanings a3 art critic Jean Fisher points out, “the act of drawing makes possible the magi- al ioentity Detween thought and action, Because to draw 35 the quickest medium end cen therefore protect the intaneity of thought. To draw 4s never a transcription of ‘thought (in the sense of writing) but ratner a formulation ‘or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment it translates itself into an inages"! In Francis Aljs's drawings (pp. 14-17), for instance, often made on tracing paper held together with masking tape, the connection between drawing and thought becomes explicit: suaaes~ {ve of the intangible, the mutable, the hesitant, the fleeting qualities of both. STATUS Historically within Western art practice, draw ing was regarded 08 on essential part of the training for any painter or sculptor. Tt was always the most basic tool tor the artist, a means of thanking throuah ang preparing in advance for completed works of sculpture or painting. As the sculptor Henry Moore put it, “Drawing is 9 means of finding your way about things, and away of experianc- ing, more quickly than sculpture allows, certain tryouts ‘and attempts?" Yet the nedium’s status hes almays been problematic, duc to ite servitude to the arts of painting {and sculpture, as veil as its association with preoara- tion and incompletion. However, as ¢ medium that was acknowledged to be the foundation of all aesthetic tech- niques and practices, drawing has also been highly prized. Ouring the Renaissance, the Italian term disegno came to mean the act of bodying forth the creative ide: Using line, as epposed to utilizing coler. This notion hac a spiritual dimension (Gravina always had an inhér- ently miraculous quality). Leonardo de Vinci believed dt to be 3 manifestation of the divine, providing ae st did 2 simulacrun of the works of God's creation, as well as 2 solence, In addition, the act of drawing mas the most practical way for artiste to learn from casts of classical, ‘culpture. In fitteenth-century Florence, informal gath~ erings organized by artists to study antique mogels quickly developed into schools end academies, where the drawings of ox-etudente such a8 Michelangelo, Donatello, Nasaccio, and Uscello vere preserved as models for new arrivals to follow. From the sixteenth century onwards, rumerous manuals established rules for drawing based upon a set of agraad precepts and gave information on anatomy. proportion. perspective, and geometry, the besic tenets of which we in the West (and, over time, globally) generally used and adhered to until well into the nineteenth century. hile most artists since the Renaissance prac ticed, prized, and acknowledged the special qualities of drawing in contradistinction to those of painting and sculpture, the current resurgence of drawing in recent years is perhaps the First moment 1n history when artists can opt for drawing as their principal medium, confident in the knowledge that their work will not euffer in statue 25 aresult. The tendencies to dismantle hierarchies that have been a by-product of avant-garde practice of the pact fifty yeare, ouch as performance and Conceptual art fn the 1960s, and more recently the ascendancy of video ‘and photography within the international art market, nave ellowed draming te follow in the slipstream to now find Mts moment in the ¢un, Art faire and Oiennales in the 1990s were notable for the preponderance of video and photography. In the past two years, however, end particu- Lorly in the United States, the situation has changod rnarkedly in favor of drawing. Goth the 2006 Whitney Biennial (at the mhitney Museum of American Art, New York) and the 2004 Carnegie International (at the Carnegie Nusoum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) noticeably focused upon drawing, with a large number of featured, artists working in the medium. Drawing came noticeably to the fore cirea 1995 when artists such as Raymond Pettibon (pp. 248-251), ockum Nordstrom (pp. 224-227), Toba Khedoors (pp. 464-165), and Paul Noble (pp. 220-223) became more widely known afd appreciated, specifically choosing drawing 28 their principal mecium. At the same tine, other artists who were chiefly painters, such as John Currin (pp. 70-71), Marlene Dunas (pp. 82-85), and Michaél Borremanc (pp. 4-35), toregrounded the role and importance of drawing within their practices. In the case of Ounas, drawing has always featured heavily in her exhibitions the juxtaposition between tha more final and “developed” form of painting and the immediacy of crawing Deins an essential element in the presentation of her work. In other casas, artiste such ae Elizabeth Peyton (pp. 262-258) and Katharina Wulff (pp. 330-331) nave blurred the ois Unetions furiner between drawing and painting, transter- ing some of the fragility and immediacy of draving into their painting, using thin paint or conbining media to eave the white ground uncovered, thus gaining an increased sense of immediacy and responsiveness from medium often associated with closure and ponderousness. Why 4s it drawina’s time now? Because drawing offers artists treedom, as an uncer-regarded ang under- theorized backwater, to explore hitherto overlooked or repressed aspects of creativity. Gut when drawing first started to enerse autononously in the mid~1990s, 1: was also the perfect [Link] contrast with the sort of art that precedes it. Circa 1996, contemporery exhibitions were doninated by 2 form of monumentalism, one that ironically trunpeted its deconstruction of tne monument yet eped the monument’s hunger for space, power, end the Berieality. This wae experienced not only in indivisual works, but also in exhibition concept and desian {in par- ticular, “Metropolis” at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 1991; *Doubletake” at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1993: and the 1991 Carnegie International] that responded to the work with room-sized installations, confronting. the visitor mith a series of often overwhelming physically ‘excessive experiences. Agsinst thie backdrop come the quietest revolution of drawing. No one ever declared that drawing was dead, os oritica, curators, and artiste did painting. Woo this because raving was S0 unimportant as to not warrant fmentLoning, or indeed was st because it was thouant to bbe dead already? Fainting became the medium that during ‘the 1980¢ undertook ite own revival. It did eo by aventu- ally seeing oft the negemony of installation art. by Virtue of positioning itself, uncer Gerhard Richier"s ‘2egia, a8 an indexically complex medium, and by colip- sistically referring to its own history, and measuring, itself constantly against its old nenesis—photography. Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas, Michael Borremans, and Wilhalm Sasnal, te name a fon, nave reinvigorated point- ‘ing in this maner. In painting's slipstream folloved the shy sibling, drawing, arriving without any apologies or explanation. Drawing had never been widely theorized in 3€8 own right, allowing the Field to be open for artists to make of it what they chose. Anoitier reason why drawing became popular among contemporary artists in the 19905 i He etanercept JANE ORDERS 4 BOMGE Fo« DESSEAT Feom 4 NEW CATERER wit USED TD woRK FoR THE Amy IN EXPLOSIVES tig vERY NostAmc., Karen Kilimnik, Bombe for Dessert, from the “Jane Creep” series, 1991, crayon on -paper with moiré ribbon, 11 x 14 inches, 27,9-x 35.6-eMm the ease with which it could be accomplished. It was Srt that one could make in a bedroom, art one could wake “inexpensively in the netropolis, vhere studio spaces mith copious square footage were expensive—especially fter the infleted economy of the American tech-stock 390m that deflated at the close of the twentieth century. Drawing requires no collaborators. no elaborate fabrica- “ton, no negotiation with others, a6 installation, photoa~ raphy (in tarne of printing labs), or even paanting (at Yeast monumental painting) does. All that drawing requires is imagination, creativity, and skill. In quch of the d-awing presented in this book, artists explore the special qualities most often aesocs- ‘ated with drawing: its anecdotal and narrative potential its inherent subjectivity, its leanings towards the popu- ar and the vernacular. Artists have found @ refuge in Grawing away from the rigors of Conceptualiem, post “structurazism, and critical theory. ence there nas been ‘an explosion of drawing based upon en aesthetics of an spparant return to the expreseion of emotion, expert. nce, and feeling, as in the wort of Sylvia BachIS (pp. 24-25), Susan Turcot (pp. 312-315), RYOKO Aoki (pp. 18-21), ‘and Anelie von Wulffen (pp. 320-321), or in the distinct Feinvestment of the unique authorial voice, vse the ‘Quirky and deadpan tone of the Thurberesque pop exis- Aentiolion of David Shrigley (pp. 264-207), Nedko Solakov (pp. 306-308), or Olav Westehalen (pp. 324-325), Perhaps ‘Specifically due to drawing’s critical and thecratical Anvisibility in the 1980s, and therefore its continued, Jowly status, it made the perfect arena for artiats to explore hitherto repressed notions of authenticity and expression, narrative, the unruly. and the irrational. nthe other hand, photography—the medium that had on ite arrival threatened to make drawing, 1ike paint- Ang. redundant—had since the 1960s become the nexus of all critical and theoretical debates about the nature of representation and the condition of modernity. Photography had bean 9 central tool in Conceptual and post-Conceptuel art practice. Gut drawina received no ‘Such ettention—its roots were perhaps 50 evidently archaic a¢ to maks ite relationship to contemporary art land life irrelevant. Thus the comparative obscurity and Arrelevance of crawing meant that it was the perfect medium (a8 well a3 cover! For artists who wanted to explore questions associated with drawing, euch ae nar- ative, subjectivity, and authenticity. All had long been repressed under the influence of post-structuralist ‘ckopticion, which doubted the posesbility of any hunan- ist consensus regarding axpraseion or intent ‘As part of Unis return, narrative and associations: ith the Literary have been powerful engines for the return of drawing. Artiste such ae Kara Walkar (op. 322-323), Raymond Pettidon (pp. 248-251), Paul Noble (pp. 220-223), and, more recently, Torsten Shama (pp. 298-298) fend 2ek Smith (pp. 302-305), create works that are inspired by or analogous to Literatura. Drawing hae ‘always deen closely allied with storytelling: from chil- Gren’s iLlustrated ooks to comics and cartoons. These artists have used drawing to convey the sense of @ nerra- tor's voice, suggesting a particular subjectivity, as well ‘85 conjuring the world of the Amagination in a way that tography o- painting cannot. In the late-eiahteerth ‘and nineteenth centurigs, when drawing wat freed from ite ‘role as a riaid repository of rules and traditions by the. ‘edvent of Romanticism, its qualities of immediacy and Antimacy cuggected it a the most apposite mecium for artists to express ideas of freedom and dissent, desire, ar, and disorder. Henry Fusel.'s drawings (such as Caricature of the Artist Leaving Italy, 1778), for exemple, ‘conjure a shadowy, cuggestivaly Sadean realn far more ‘ark and sinister than that of the artist's paintinas, and ‘the incised Lines of William Blake match Blake's fiercely jepondent will. The inherent honesty of the drown line Sit the best vahicle for the voice of dissent, The sts used draving a3 a means to create a world of the ination, 9 site of alterity and opposition te the fablished norms of behavior, tradition and religion. The current return of drawing has strong lints th a resurgence of Romanticism within contemporary art tice. Ab a precursor to Surrealism, Romanticiam lid be viewed as 2 valuable repository of powerful still-relevant cultural and political ideas, such as ty the sublime, and the unshackling of emotion and n. Many of these themes are enjoying renewed Anterest among younger artists, as the work presented in this book conveys. The inherent idealism of Aonanticisn is part of ite appeal: 20 the novelist Carlos Fuentes: describes it, Romanticism is “the last great all-encom- passing European cultural movenent” preaching a return to the wholeness of man, the unity of the origin, frac- tured by the history of greed, oppression, alienation?” The evidence of the importance of Romanticism to con- temporary drawing can be found not only in the explo~ ration ef the subline, a8 in the works of Cebestien Hanmwohner (pp. 132-135), Glexis Novoa (pp. 228-231), and Serse (pp. 280-261), for instance, out also in associated aspects of Romanticism, such ae explorations of national identity, mysticism, myth, and legend. These have emerged in Europe in the 1990s as nations re-evaluated Populer versions of Romanticism and Teutonse culture within a newly reunited post-connunist Europe, in which Romanticism has proven to be the unbrella for explo- rations of the popular, the folkloric, and the kitsch as well a8 found anonymous artifacts. Since the Velvet Revolution of 1985, European artists have frequently turned to teir own indigenous cultural traditions for motifs and narratives of the primeval roots of their cul- ture, exploring histery and personel and collective nem- lory—the drauings of Torsten Slama exemplify this sense. ‘Surprisingly, the Middle Ages nave become a source of a particular graphic style, @ forn of European Gothic revivalien. This style can be detected in the work of artists who seek to find an aesthetic language to chal- lenge the hegemony of Modernism, such as Katharine Wulff (pp. 330-331). On the other hand, an ertist like Nichaél Borremans uses surrealistic devices of distor- Won and disjunction to create a mysterious and threaten- ing world—the derker side of the Romantic legacy. The drawing then bocomas a relic of memory of the depict scene, itself irredeenably locked in an imperturbable and untouchable past, Drawing, through its loose association with per- sonal unfettered axnrassion, is the medium through whieh the past has often spoxen most clearly and directly. Via its early history, draming connects with a suppressed ‘shomanistic, atavietie, and pagan history of European culture, and again because of its tautolagous nature ‘somehow enacts that magical past in its ontology. Unruly dreams, desires, and fantesies jostle alongside bour- gecis rinsteenth-century impulses in the work ef Jockum Nordstrom, while Kaoru Arima (pp. 22-23) creates tantas~ tic Figures, cares, and syiphs based upon European anc Japanese folk-tele traditions. Drawing 1s the Lanavege best suited to the notions of revelation and Liberation; in its immediacy and its capacity for secrecy (a drawing con be easily rolled or folaied up and hidden) it 45 the Perfect medium to convey the experience and the voice Of the otner—of women, children, the autodidact, the slave, the prisoner, the oppressed. xara Nalker uses drawing and text to conjure the thoughts end feelings of her African-American historical subjects. As artists have ‘Soug)it out new narratives and new versions of history, these social histories have been best expressed through ‘the informal and anecdotal codes of drawing. artists have created various'alter egos to act as fictional authors or as alibis tc avoic accusations of naiveté in their expressive and nerrative based dray- ings. an act driven by the continued disparagement of narrative within art as an anti-Modernist device, Paul Noble's ambitious “Nobson Newtown” series incorporates ‘the devolopment of an elaborete conceit based upon the creation of an alter ego of the artist himself, a notion that Ls counterbalanced by the high seriousness of the drawings" monumental scale and seriel neture. By adopt ing pseudo-archaic forms of drawing, playing with notions of private nistories. and exploring ovarlooked or misunderstood espects of one’s own culture or history. artists have used drawing to blur the identity of the sub- ject speaking through the drawing. At the same time these artists obscure the subject's relationanip to the culture being represented, Drawing allows the artist to Speak not with the voice of authority, but in the some voice as the culture being alluded to or with a self- consciously subjective voice, whether through archly childlike drawings, medievalist fantasies, or teens jottings. In Elizabeth Peyton's drawings (pp. 252-255), the orks themselves suggest a maker who regards the works” subjects with reverence and awe, while at the same time Mike Kelley, Rainbow of Death, 1986, acrylic on paper, 60 x 59 1/2 inches, 152.4 x 151.2 cm ARE YOU LINGDLN? 08 IS 2SANTA CLAYS? BEAFOED Ole LOT He 5 ED. HANGING Dol MODERNIZED LINCOLN acrylic on paper, 60 1/2 x 72 inches, 153.7 x 182.9 cm the medium allows for the possibility of irony and self consciousness, Similarly, the use of alipis and alter eg03 as devices to convey authenticity of experience have blurred the definitions of the Other or the eel? in contradistinction, (One of the First proponents of deaw- ing as a primary mecium, Karen Kilimnik created in the carly 19900 a series of d-owings, Wane Creepy that con jures amalign author, voicing anvy and anger directed towards others more fortunate than the speaker—sone dramings Literally enact the relationship between draw- 4ing and magic, az they take the form suggestive of a spell or incantation.) Within the West, when artists choose drawing as a primary mediun, it is sometimes motivated by 9 desire to reconnect with the untutored, the authentic, and the “primitive?! Cultural eritie Marianna ‘Torgovnick calls this sense of want a “secular yearning. for the sacred, Lronic but yearning for the absolute, indivigualistic yet yearning for the wnolenees of commu- nity, asking questions but receiving no answers, frag mented but yearning for immanent totality’? Drawing provides the locus end means for this reconnection with aspacte of culture that ware often repressed under high Modernism. The drawings of Or. Lakra (pp. 165-169), for instance, @ Mexican tattoo artist turned fine artist, enact the conflicted and competing Gesires of differant communities and idecleaies. Tattocing the luscious bodies of the semi-naked models fon 1840s and 1950s found magazine covers, he covers the famale figures and their eurroundinge with images that suggest the unleashing of wild and abandoned Gothic fantasies, combined with the stock-in-trade imagery of Latino gangs. These drawings act as site for a battle between competing cultures: the inspired-by-America, celebrity-drivan, pseudo-clean-Living world of the crig- inal asplrant cover girl, pitted against the tettoos that euggect the release of her own private and subjective. desires or emotions, in tun pitted againet the sentimen- tal and residually Catholic imagery of a Latino community struggling for visibility ond to assert itself, Norking Lnder an accumad name, the artist craves the ambiguity of his relationship to both the art of the tattoo and the. underworld language and milieu 3t operates within. Dr. Lakra’s symbolic language reflects the preva: Lence of an offshoot of contemporary remanticigm in both North and South America: the Gothic. Romanticism’s popu- Lar sibling, the Gothic neatly acts as an aesthetic and cultural bridge between Curope and the Americas, most particularly tha United States. We continue to experience the American Gothic in films and oramas by David Lynch ‘and Gus van Sant, in photographs by Wiliiem Eggleston, and in novels by Donna Tartt and Anne Rice. North American artists turned to vernacular culture in all its multiplicity as a source of content in the Late 1980s and early 19903—artists euch ao Jin Shaw, Raymond Pettibon, Karen Kilimnik, and Jack Pierson mined rich vein of American vernacular that included rock culture and mem- orabilia, psychedelia, fanzines, film noir, comic books, and fundamentalist Christianity —in fact, the full gomut Of the cultural lives of millions of American teenagers growing up in comfortable suburbia. Drawing is therefore the chosen medium for many of those artists to express that sense of teonage anget, not only because draving 18 the bedroom art medium, spavning something that could ‘almost be called a school of “bedroom art? but also Because the act iteelf of intense mark-making suggests the suppressed violence, rage, and frustration of the maker, a8 in the drawings of Mike Kelley or Raymond Pettion, in which the choice of ink and nib somehow speake of the potential to stab, Artiate Like Steven Shearer (pp. 282-283) and Zak Smith craate drawings that mimic the graonse outpourinas of desire, dreams, and fantasies of a frustrated male teenage subject, Locked in his room either for his own privacy or ae punishment for ad benavior. In conclusion, drawing offers us the most extraordinary range of possibilities: st is 9 map of time recording the actions of the maker. It ie, a2 Michael Newnan writes, a record of “lived temporality: and in the sense thet # drawing is by essence always incom- plete. A line aluaye euggeste a continuation ad infinitum and thus connects us with infinity and eternity. A drawing. enjoys a direct link with thought and with an idea itself. te very nature is unstable, balanced equally between pure abstraction and representation; ite virtue fe ite ‘Fluidity. A drawing can be highly controlled and deli- cate, an act of homage, redolent of personal memory, history or desire, or it can be automatic, responding to irrational elements or chonce encounters of materials, ‘moving again from being an instrument of the divine to Something outside of the human, As Sibyl Moholy-Nagy ‘observes in her endnotes to Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook, "The dot, extended into 9 grepnic curve, cannot come to rast an the last page of the Sketchbook, It urges on to furtier explorations, both in space and apirit?™ Drawing chines with the needs of the moment, allowing us te dream an endless drean. Enna Dexter 1, Thave chosen not to get involved in discussions concerning, the differance between the mort, the stain, the aian, o” writing, For discussion on these, readers should Look at the texte by ‘Benjamin and Newnan cited Delow 2. Collier, Granan, Fern, Space ond Vision (Englewood Clifts, New Dorsay: Prentice Hal, 1963), 2 3. Bryson, Norman, °A Walk for a Walt’s Sate? in The Stage of Dramina: Gesture and Act (London and New York: Tate Publishing. ‘ang The Drawing Center, 2063), 351 ina 5, enjamin, Walter, Selected nritings, Volume I (Canbridae, Massachusetts: Harvord University Press, 1936), 83, 6. Tod. #4 Tote. 85 6, Benjamin, Welter, “Fainting and the Graphic Arts? an Selectea estings, Volume T, op. citn 32 6. Tose 10. toad. 1H. Klee, Paul, The Pedagogical sketchbook (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), 16 12. Monoly-hagy, SibyA, Thia., 433, Newnan, Michael, “Ine Marks, Traces, ano Gestures of Drawing? in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, Op. cit, $5 14. Quotad dn Haptman, Laura, “Drawing Le 2 Nour? sn Drawing Now: Exgnt Propositions Wew York: Museum of Nocern Art, 2002), 11 15, Quoted in Godfrey, Tony, Conceptual Art (London: Pnaicon Frans Limited, 1990), 59 16 thie. 17, sxrnbaum, Dansel, “A Thousand Words: Gabriel Orozco Talks bout His Recent Films? Artforum, Sunner 1996, 115, 1B. Fisher, dean, On Drawing, The Stage cf Craving, Gesture and Act, op. eit, 221-222 49, Lambert, Susan, Drawing, Technique ang Purpese (London: \istorie ond Albert Museum, 1964, 77 20. Fuentes, Carlos, “Introduction? The Diary of Frida Kahle (ew York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 18 21, Lippard, Lucy, “crossing Lato Unconnon Grounds,” tn Hall, Nionaeh, and Metcalt, Eugene, eds., The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture (Washington, DC: ‘Smithsonian instatution, 1994), 10 22. Quoted in Lipperd, Lucy, Told 11 23. Newnan, Hichael, “The Marka, Traces, and Gestures of raving? in The Stage of Drawing: Gasture and Act, op. cit. 96 24, Honoly-Nagy, SLb/l, 49 Klee, The Pedagogical sketchoOok, op cits, 63 Born in Fresno, California, in 1962, D-L ALVAREZ lived in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to New York City in the Late 1990s, and on to Berlin, Germany, where he currently lives and works. While he has made work in many different media—includ- ing, notably, sculpture and performance—a central aspect of Alvarez’s production over the last several years has been drawings that address the construction of personal memory and collective history through an investigation of visual perception, media, and the relationship between them. Working from archival photographic material, Alvarez's graphite drawings take nostalgia and loss of utopian ideals as their subject matter, while at the same time knowingly address formal issues inherent to high Modernist practice. Alvarez fleshes out these themes in two recent works—\ \\and 0 0—both of which come from an ensemble of delicately rendered drawings about the collapse of the optimistic ideals of the 1960s at the end of that decade. These works recall the event that for many people marked the death of an era: the Manson family murders in August 1969. By picturing Ruth Ann Morehouse, a member ‘of the Manson family known as “Ouisch? locking up hope- fully on a sunlit afternoon in the drawing \\\, the artist isolates the time immediately before the murders, as if to pinpoint the precise cultural threshold when utopian dreams and innocence gave way to darker realities. Indeed, Alvarez has written that his work “often spotlights that moment ‘just before a storm breaks?” Alvarez pictures another such Liminal moment in 0 0, a drawing of 2 dyina campfire (whose title is 3 visual logo for two ogling eyes). The campfire that burns out after the end of a long night on the beach refers, in Alvarez's iconographic repertoire, to the par- ties of the Manson family who used to, in Alvarez’s words, “dance barefoot on the glowing cinders of a dying fire to prove a state of mind over matter? By picturing the moments after the party ends, Alvarez not only sets an ominous mood for ail that is to follow, but also pictures a sense of belatedness common to much contemporary art that looks back to the 1960s, and to Moderniem generally, with a wistful glance. Such moments of Lost innocence and artistic belatedness are not just intrinsic to the subject matter of Alvarez’s drawings, but also are embedded in their formal elements. By painstakingly working from photo- graphic sources and rendering his images with hand- drawn grids, Alvarez addresses—or perhaps mourns —certain art historicel “losses” as well. That is, while his work reasserts the potency of the handmade object, ite inextricable photographic quality bespeaks an impersonelity end estrangement long associated with the “death” of painting (end drawing). Similerly, the hand- drawn gridded matrix that structures these drawings refers as much to the “failed” promise of abstraction as to the computer pixel and its own utopian claims—simul- taneously critiquing and extending the claims end procedures of high Modernism. As many contemporary artists do, D-L Alvarez permeates his work with nostalgia for the lost utopian ideals of Modernism’s avant-garde. — Jordan Kantor (1) (2) (3) \\\, 2004, graphite on paper, 38 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches, 98.4 x 69.9 cm, collection Museum of Modern Art, New York Walk, 2004, graphite on paper, diptych, each 15 1/4 x 14 1/4 inches, 38.7 x 36.2 cm Mary, Mary, 2004, graphite on paper, diptych, each 23 x 16 1/2 inches, 58.4 x 41.9 cm 0 0, 2003, graphite on paper, diptych, each 20 5/8 * 16 3/4 inches, 52:3 x 42.5 ‘cm, collection Museum of Modern Art, New York Cultivating forms of anonymity seems to be one of the main concerns of multidisciplinary artist FRANCIS ALYS. Precisely in opposition to the modern ideal of individualism, a state of anonymity provides an escape from historically determined cultural identities and prescribed social behaviors. Alys’s earlier inter- ventionist public actions presented the artist’s attempts to détourne (in the Situationist sense of the redirection of meaning) a rational self and its regular boundaries. Walking spontaneously in various cities, holding a paint can from which he dripped paint to trace his trail, or under the influence of narcotics, Alys attempted to dis- locate his usual identity within a public space. “The Prophet; an ongoing series (begun in 1992) of paintings and related drawings that Alys has created in collaboration with sign painters in Mexico City, explores the collective potential of art making. While this act of commissioning local artists to reproduce the artist's own compositions undermines Aljs's authority, the collaboration enables him to understand the visual elements of a contemporary “folk” art. The paintings— and drawings—suagest a strong sense of piety, without referencing a specific religious order. In spite of the works’ overall impression of studied artlessness, sug- gested by Alys’s simple lines and grayish pastel hues, the postures of his figures evoke the aura of a life guided by divine influences. The images—of a man falling from 2 cliff; @ girl with her foot in an urn; @ boy sleeping on the floor with his body curled, his chest bare, and 2 rifle nestling beside him—evoke a body of parables. The evocation of a larger narrative through a banal fragment is @ cheracteristic of modern allegory as defined by Walter Benjamin. In Alys’s tableaux, the associative power of the figures’ postures establishes a tie, a shared life, between the works. Physical poses are repeated in different situations, or executed by other figures: a falling man becomes a falling doz. for example, or boys afloat in water are pictured with dif- ferent skin colors in various compositions. The recur- rent postures of Alys’s characters together compile an index, ostensibly indicating an inexorable and common fate—or felicity. It’s as if in these works, Alys conveys that the imagined nature of a memory of a pose or an action does not render it inauthentic; its perception increases its certainty in one’s mind because it is evoked through the anonymity of physical reflexes. As Proust has written, the positions in which we fall asleep both dislocete us from an everyday context and yet re- establish a sense of belonging to 2 place, frequently transporting us, through bodily sensations, to essential scenes from our past Aljs's drawings provide a prototype for such simulation of remembered personal myths. Featuring neutral outlines, his drawings are empty vessels to be filled with meaning. Fragmented and frequently cut out and placed in various juxtapositions, they function like the most rudimentary narrative units of a folk tele. Mobile and anonymous, they reveal the basic stratesy of Alys’s détournements: to not only convey a destabiliza- tion of the rational coherence of the modern self, but also to examine @ breakdown of the mening of specific cultural symbols. By Going so, Alys quickens the process of the images’ (and their many possible narratives’) dissemination, while also indicating their possible Pecientl srettond.—didert Marsal 10 1/4 x 7 inches, 26 x 18 cm Study for Falling Dog, 2000, pencil on tracing paper, 7x 6 3/8 inches, 18 x 16 cm Sister with Skeleton, 2001, pencil on tracing paper, 11 7/8 x 15 3/4 inches, 30 x 40 cm Study for Falling Dog, 2001, pencil on tracing paper, 6 3/8 x 7 inches, 16 x 18 cm Untitled, 2000, pencil on tracing paper, 44 x 13 7/8 inches, 28 x 35 cm Instructions for A, B, and C; C for Tuning, A for Humming, B for Whistling, 2001, pencil and type on paper, 11 x 8 1/4 inches, 28 x 20.9 cm Study for “Lautodidacte?” 1996, mixed media on paper, 9 7/8 x 9 7/8 inches, 25 x 25 cm Rhinebeck, 2000, pencil on tracing paper, 11 3/8 x 8 7/8 inches, 29 x 22 cm Untitled, 2002, mixed media on paper, 14 5/8 x 10 1/4 inches, 37 x 26 cm a © for TUNING i = waesling Bwi Ctl oto! oto A wns, sar watt, they recognize vo Upon ‘ing, they watt A HUMMING: 6 ees q eX =~ al 5 yl Ade + (Ee gs 2 . ontagier /une.. vilie/waxetie Dywtt - Hes VOY ELLES (C¢ singitg) Phesik nd RYOKO AOKI’s unabashedly figurative drawings (the artist has also worked with sculpture, painting, installation, and animation) have had their references traced back to high and low sources in Japanese culture, both contemporary and ancient: from manga to traditional calligraphy, from kimono craftsmanship to whet curator Betti-Sue Hertz has identified as references to e-maki pictorial hand scrolls of the late Heran and Kamakura period from the second half of the thirteenth century. The drawings’ recurrent atmosphere is one that is feminine, even “girly? though not necessarily autobio- graphical. The delicate, often florid imagery presents 2 young female character exploring her blooming identity and sexuality, immersed in a very private and idiosyn- cratic world populated by obviously female bodies and plants, whether depicted in fragments or whole. Yet in what at first seems to be a dreamy, fairy-tale setting, figures take a particular critical posture: The recurrent mood is bittersweet. If, on the one hand, Aoki is unafraid to tackle the most stereotypical of figures associated with femininity, she does so both by conveying an infatu- ation with it and by exuding @ keen sense of giving new, more complex, and perverse meanings to that classic of girls’ favorite things: the flower. Aoki's common motif here is the blossom—rendered in India ink, watercolor, pencils, and markers of different colors; carbon copies, collages, or as cut-outs; appearing alone, in bunches, or in an all-over pattern; dead or alive. The recurrent themes here are bodies and plants, hiding and seeking, Life and death. Dead Grass (2003) is a case in point: a seemingly simple drawing made in black ink of a decaying flower, its imagery recalls traditionel botanical illustrations or sketches. The stems and leaves are collapsing in decay, and thus compose an unusual design that gives the drawing en odd formal twist. However, a closer look may yield a pair of legs, perhaps belonging to a young girl (or so her frilly, feminine socks suggest), intertwined with the flower’s drooping leaves. Yet what gives Aoki’s drawings distinction are her deft formal abilities. Aoki’s lines, traces, and deco- rative patterns are precise and deinty, end at times seem almost to fade, providing a sense of fragility to her figures and settings. The works reveal a handmade quality and, above all, a sharp concern with composition. Sewing Factory (2001) depicts a scene where several women are working with sewing machines on multicolored fabrics. The drawing is made with colored markers, yet the women's bodies and architectural surroundings are left blank. What remains is a series of patches and points of many colors, some of them geometric, others more pointillist. In some areas, the women’s clothes, their machines, and the fabrics that they sew all become undistinguished from one another. In a Marxist reading, the theme could be said to be “women’s work!’ yet its depiction has been fragmented to the extent that the workers, their machines, and their products have been dissolved and pulverized into each other by means of ‘one of Aoki’s favorite weapons: sharply colored patterns. —Adriano Pedrosa (1) (3) (4) (5) Dead Bamboo Flower, 2003, ink on pail, 10 x 14 ainehes,, 25.3 x 35.5 om Cowboy, 2004, ink on paper, 5 3/4 x 4 inches, 14.7 x 10.5 cm ’ Dead Grass, 2003, ink on paper, 11 x 8 4/4 inches, 28.2 x 20.8 em Flower Chaff, 2001, ink, felt-tip pen, and watercolor on paper, 7 x 5 inches, 17.6 x 12.4 cm Circle, 2004, ink and felt-tip pen on paper, triptych, each 14 1/4 x 20 3/4 inches, 36.5 x 52.4 cm Bodhisattva, 2004, ink and felt-tip pen on paper, diptych, each 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches, 29.7 x 21 cm Sewing Factory, 2001, felt-tip pen on paper, 6 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches, 17.2 x 24.1 cm Ze TAS Ze PEN VN \ wy os oS g \ KAORU ARIMA’s drawings function as tran- "scriptions of unmediated thoughts. Executed in a tenta- tive line, with a radical reduction and distortion of figures, his drawinas appeer to have been spontaneously generated. Such compound creatures as men with animal bodies, plants with human faces, and body organs giving birth to other organisms illustrate the fertile chaos of "the artist's inner cosmos. His deliberately amateurish execution, which resembles childlike graffiti, and his choice of inexpensive or expendable materials, like | craft paper or newspaper, emphasize the modest nature . . . . . of his forms. The paradox of a new microcosm evolving from such a humble medium is strongly embodied in what he calls shinbun-ge, or “newspaper drawings” These feature figures drawn in thin pencil Lines on white ereas painted first with correction fluid in the middle of a newspaper page, accompanied by an epigrammatic text written in Jepanese. Arima’s drawings translate the Symbolist and Surrealist visual languages into the eccentric idioms of his national suoculture. They clearly evoke Odilon Redon's human-faced nocturnal flowers. But they also suggest the haggard characters drawn in fragile lines that appeared in the underground comics by Shiriagari Kotobuki published in the 1990s. The studied poverty of Kotobuki’s art resonated with Japanese youth in the post- bubble-economy era, who responded to the comics’ philo- " sophical plots that dealt with existential issues and journeys into inner space. Arima’s drawings indicate an embrace of inde- terminacy, evident in his recurrent themes of adoles- cents and amphibians. The psychodramatic expressions of adolescent self-love and self-hatred explored in depictions of the violently self-mutilating actions of youth in his earlier series “Art Dracula” (1995) sive way to the comic hieroglyphs of his newspaper drawings, in which existential anxiety is overcome with a hope of constant renewal of the self. In addition, Arima projects a dream of coexistence as personal myth. In spite of their elusiveness, Arima’s drawings are sustained by their firm grounding in everyday imagery and themes. The contrast between the artist’s quiet, hand-drawn visual reveries and the loud assertion of bold graphics, paired with an overflow of information on the newspaper pages underneath, indicate their mutual interactions. Inspired by Arima’s simple Lifestyle in the medieval castle town of Inuyama, where he runs the alternative gallery Art Drug Center, his drawings evoke the style and spirit of giga, Japanese ink drawings by reclusive eighteenth-century monks and poets like Hakuin and Issa, who projected their vision of a holistic life through ostensibly incomplete forms and imagery. Nevertheless, Arima's expressions do not evade the impurity of a postmodern world. His ironic naming of the drawings as Neo-Giga indicates that his work confronts the confusion of contemporary life, playfully estranging our struggle for material success from any evocative traces of internalized chaos.—Midori Matsui (1) (2) (3) (4) Untitled, 1996, pencil and acrylic on craft paper, 28 1/2 x 20 5/8 inches, 72.4 x 51.6 cm Untitled, 2003, pencil, colored pencil, and acrylic on newspaper, 21 5/8 x 13 5/8 inches, 64.9. 34.5 cm Wind, 1994, pencil and colored pencil on craft paper, 23 1/4 x 17 5/8 inches, 58.9 x 45 cm Untitled, 2004, pencil and acrylic on newspaper, 22 3/8 x 15 5/8 inches, 56.9 x 39.9 cm SEITEN Wa ALLE 14 TAGE IN JOURNAL Spaderangebot | - a Ae ages 2d boo 2001, NADA GANO LA SERIE 23 Mexico, en un pozo sin fondo en Copa Davis Hons ernat (Paya ree ee Gatardovo¥io acer When considering the way SILVIA BACHLT works, it is always difficult to decide which piece among her production is a drawing and which is not, although she only works on paper. For nearly twenty years, her method has not changed much; she usually proceeds in three steps. First, with gouache, ink, or oil stick, she lays down images and signs on sheets of paper of various dimensions. Then, after a while (and a while usually means the next day or the next week), she comes back to this accumulated material, to which she occasionally adds images cut out from newspapers or magazines, as well as photographs, and selects what she deems valu- able. She either shows the chosen images as single sheets, or includes them in very meticulously devised wall configurations. Less frequently, she sets some of them, organized by subject matter, in horizontal aless cases. Bachli’s iconography might seem haphazard, ranging from what would be called the figurative (body parts, pieces of clothing, flowers, etc.) to the overtly abstract (grids, doodles, letters, and numbers . . . ). But it could be said that every object she draws, including linear grids and floral patterns that sometimes reach monumental dimensions, is part of her everyday environ- ment. Each is familiar enough to lose its image status (a status that implies remoteness) in order to become fully usable and open. These qualities prevail both for the artist and for the viewer. We no longer notice body parts and bits of clothing, except at a glance, because we inhabit them, wear them, touch them—or desire to do so (and desire does matter here). The artist’s subjects are never presented in full, which would suppose an objectifying disengage- ment. They are drawn less from a visual point of view than from that of the most direct of our senses (touch, taste, and smell) and the feelings that this familiarity generates in our minds and in our hearts. As for the abstract patterns, they seem to be derived naturally from their paper grounds, as if they were free-flowing deduc- tive structures (geometrical shapes that echo the edges of the canvas on which they are painted, such as Frank Stella's stripes). Moreover, Bachli’s wall configurations never transform the sheets they include into something else, as if elements in a purported narrative. The individual sheets do not become parts of a visual riddle or visual script but retain their autonomy, only they are now the conditional parts of a larger drawing whose lines and colors are found as much in the different sheets of paper that compose it as in the blank wall intervals between these parts. B&chli’s wall compositions, as well as the single-sheet drawings, all created from everyday perceptions and feelings, extend themselves, as if by centrifugal force, into the dimensions and spaces of the day-to-day world.—Eric de Chassey (4) Lily, 2004, gouache on paper, 78 5/8 x 59 inches, 200 x 150 cm Untitled, 1999, gouache on paper, 12 1/4 x 8 5/8 inches, 31 x 22 cm, collection Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain Haute-Normandie, Sotteville-lés-Rouen, France Untitled, 2004, gouache on paper, 12.x 17 inches, 31 x 44 cm View of the exhibition “Silvia Bachli,’ Kunsthalle Bern, 1996, from left to right: Ammassalik, 1995-96, fifteen drawings, gouache on paper, dimensions variable; o.T., 1995, nine drawings, gouache on paper, dimensions variable; hite, 1991, five drawings, gouache on paper, dimensions variable ws -\. a ff i (ls ca 3 1 [s Paty Us f / ag HH When DEVENDRA BANHART Starts listing his inspirations, he sounds like he is improvising: “Gustave Moreau, Paul Klee, Cy Twombly, Alicia McCarthy, Henry Darger, Louise Bourgeois... Sarah Kane, Joseph Beuys —not his art, rather his handwriting, his letters—Mark Bell, Indian art, plastic surgery, dogs, mosquitoes, tattoos, CocoRosie, Adolf Wé1fli” Once he gets goina, he seems like he’s singing. Banhart, twenty-three years old, is already well known as a psychedelic folk singer. His whimsical, stream-of-consciousness lyrics have characterized his record production since his debut album Oh Me Oh My... the Way the Day Goes By the Sun is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit in 2002, and the two recent follow-ups, Rejoicing in the Hands (2004) and Nino Rojo (2004). But music isn’t the only channel for Banhart’s creative impulses. He has been drawing daily since the age of fifteen. Today, he oscillates between singing and drawing; the two have become complementary. He explains by stating, “I sing what I can’t draw and draw what I can't sing. However, although Banhart has used his own draw- ings for the covers and inside booklets of his albums until now, he wants to break the habit, as he has become aware that his two activities, although necessarily inter- mingled, should have their own contexts of development. Banhart has created a highly original bestiary in his small, fine-grained ink drawings: odd creatures, often with wide eyes and mouths and feathered bodies. “Some appear fully formed before I execute them. They are always faces. It’s like their spirits appear to me with personalities and characters? Banhart says. “Others are more organic—I draw them just like a plant grows, as if they have roots, trunks, branches, and leaves” Many of his drawings are made on whatever paper is handy, often on pages torn out of books that he is currently reading. For a solo exhibition in New York in 2004, Banhart assembled a collection of what he calls “mosquito drawings” that he had done while staying in Saintes-Maries de la Mer, in the wild Camargue area in Southern France. “I found an unsettling energy in this region and especially with the mosquitoes, which I want- ed to express through this exhibition...” As are most of his drawings to date, these are inspired by Native American culture, but not on the formal plane: Represen- tation is not what is at stake in Banhart’s work. Rather, he approaches drawing from a more anthropological angle, focusing on the ways in which drawings can give life to imagined things or creatures; on the various, inter- twined roles of different media in a multidisciplinary artist’s practice; and on what effects drawings can have not only on the viewer, but also on the artist. —Hans Ulrich Obrist (6) (7) Untitled, 2004, ink on paper, 22 1/4 x 27 1/2 inches, 56.5 * 69:9 ‘em Spirit of Six Cloud People, 2004, ink on paper, 12 x 9 inches, 30.5 x 22.9 cm Untitled, 2004, ink on paper, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches, 14 x 21.6 cm Bob Marley, Indian Rasta Ghost, Skullface Indian, Babylon You Throne, Gone Down, 2004, ink on paper, 6 x 9 inches, 15.2 x 22.5 om Untitled, 2004, ink on paper, 5 x 7 1/4 inches, 12.4 9 19.7 em Untitled, 2004, ink on paper, 5 x 7 3/4 inches, 12.4 * 19.7 em Untitled, 2004, ink on paper, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches, 14 x 21.6 cm Taped to the wall of ANNA BARRIBALL’s stu- dio is a definition: “Draw: 1. to cause (a person or thing) to move towards or away by pulling” The artist wrote this out while planning a new video, Draw (fireplace), 2005. In an empty room, a large sheet of tracing paper is draped below an elegant mantel, obscuring the fireplace beneath; the paper mysteriously crumples and straightens periodically, Barriball created the effect simply by opening and closing the door in the room (off camera), creating a vacuum. The paper seems animated, breathing in and out. The work and the definition speak to many aspects of Barriball’s practice, to her concern with time, and to her approach to the relationship between drawing and objects. All of Barriball’s drawings are generated with objects, but she never illustrates them in the tradi- tion of the still life, in which there is a distance between object and drawing. Instead, she pulls the object towards the drawing, as it were, establishing an extremely intimate relationship between the two. Some drawings are made by rubbing pencils over a bumpy surface, picking up its pattern (One Square Foot V and Window, both 2002). Sometimes she lays paper over an object, covers her fin- gers in graphite, and traces its edges with her hands (Mirror, 2004). The repetitive and indexical processes in Barriball's works recall Process drawing of the 1960s and 1970s, but their iconicity distinguishes them from work of this period. Barriball's drawings often resemble the objects that generated them, but more inter- estinaly, her works can reverse and contradict their functions. For instance, to make Window, Barriball used a bathroom window designed to hide the naked body, but the drawing is skin-like and sensual. In Mirror, the edges of the Victorian looking glass have been traced, but its reflective surface is rendered only as a blank space. Drawing can be slow and drawing can be fast: another series of works from 2002 was made by flinging a graphite-covered rubber ball at a piece of paper, as in [Link]. The hit registers as a perfect imprinted circle, and the impact scatters graphite power all over the sur- face. This sensitivity to drawina’s different temporali- ties has informed two untitled series, one from 2002 and another from 2004, in which the surface is not paper, but found flea-market photographs (as in 36 Breaths, 2002, and Untitled IV, 2004). In these works, Barriball blows bubbles, made from a mixture of ink and soap, just above the photographs. The bubbles burst against the surfaces, forming circles of swirling pigment and ruining the clarity of the images. The action expresses the nature of the photographs themselves, recalling the snap of the photographic exposure, while the bubbles’ fragility matches that of the photographs. Cast aside in flea mar- kets, the significance of the images is no longer fixed by their owners’ associations; instead, their meanings have scattered like drops of ink across their surface.— Mark Godfrey Untitled VII, 2004, ink and bubble mixture on found photograph, 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches, 11.4 x 8.9 cm Untitled IV, 2004, ink and bubble mixture on found photograph, 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches, 11.4 x 8.9 cm 36 Breaths, 2002, ink on found photographs, 17 7/8 x 17 7/8 inches, 45 x 45 cm Window, 2002, pencil on paper, 22 x 19 7/8 inches, 99.5 * 50.5:em [Link], 2002, graphite on paper, 23 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches, 60 x 50.5 cm SHANNON BOOL often draws on the past in order to picture a present. She constructs her work ina fashion that is analogous to quilting, in which fragments are combined to create an open-ended whole. Her works ‘on paper, wall drawings, and collages all have an endearing fragility and lightness. They are usually presented with unassuming modesty, leaving open areas for her viewers to move among them and appreciate their subtleness. Her works borrow and reproduce eclectic source material, including ornamental designs and pat- terns, textile and wallpaper samples, found postcards and photographs, advertising images from the 1920s and 1930s, illustrations from fairy-tale books, and details from art-nistorical paintings. Her wall drawing placed in a corner, Origin/Inversion (2005), for instance, was inspired by a detail of an oriental rug as it appears in a Renaissance painting. Bool's works often look like they were born old, despite their fresh, lightly hued pastel palettes. They also show plenty of signs of conceptual weer and tear, such as cuts, drips, and other evidence of rupture, dis- continuity, and distortion. Bool’s technique, in which she often combines the drawn or painted line with the cut lines of collage, is characterized by a tentativeness that suggests meditative thought and the cultivation of a kind of knowing naiveté. She clearly gravitates toward and sympathizes with subjects that are disempowered or objects that have been discarded. In her drawings Fired from Wal-Mart (2004), depicting a guitar-playing fellow dressed in a country-and-western outfit, and Teenage Suicide Bomber (2003), a portrait of a veiled young woman in an ostensibly ornamental composition, Bool’s underly- ing thematic concern takes on a direct sociopolitical dimension. Other works, however, seem more about a mood than an obvious subject. The collage Crater (2003), for example, simply features a setting sun and a patterned hole in the ground. Melancholic gaps and absences, as well as fleeting appearances, also reoccur in other works, such as Walnut Trees (2004), depicting barren, nutless branches, and Six or Seven Wolves (2004), a work based on one of Sigmund Freud's famous dream interpre- tation case studies. When she installs her works, Bool generally does so in a manner that extends into the given exhibi- tion space. She transforms the gallery's walls and some- times the floor into a part of an overall composition in a way that lends a sense of contingency. Her exploration of ornament recalls that of such artists as Miriam Schapiro and the Pattern and Decoration movement of the late 1970s. There is nothing in Bool’s approach that suggests she would not be in accord with this movement's feminist reassertion of ornamentation as both an aes- thetic and sociopolitical rebuke to mainstream value judgments and male dominance in art. Bool’s version of imaginative postmodern mélange insists on the aesthetic equivalence of her sources. She invites us to stand back, allowing ideas and impressions to intermingle and abandon, or at least suspend, our desire for fixed meaning.—Dominic Eichler PNB, 2004, ink, acrylic, and oil on paper collage, 25 x 16 1/8 inches, 63 x 41 cm Blow, 2003, ink-and-paper collage on paper, 16 x 23 1/2 inches, 40 x 60 cm Fired from Wal-Mart, 2004, ink and acrylic on antique paper, 12 1/2 x 17 3/4 inches, 32 x 45 cm Two Wolves REMIX, 2004, ink and acrylic on paper, 11 7/8 x 7 inches, 30 x 18 cm Meir Wieseltier, 2004, wallpaper collage with pen- cil, crayon, and oil paint, 47 7/8 x 23 1/2 inches, 120 x 60 cm Origin/Inversion, 2005, pencil and gouache on wall, laminate sculpture, dimensions variable Walnut Trees, 2004, Chinese ink on antique paper, f.. 1/8 x Pancies, 30 We em Ryanair, 2004, ink and oil on paper collage, 19 7/8 x 13 1/8 tHehes, 50 x 35 om My House on Fire, 2003, ink and acrylic on paper, 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches, 40 x 30 cm G, Belgian artist MICHAEL BORREMANS’Ss small- format drawings—a corollary to his dark, psychologically complex portraits and ambiguous tableaux rendered in oil on canvas—exert a gentle yet insistent pull. Their diminutive size and dim palette lure us in close for intimate viewing; their accretions of opaque historical references draw us through time. Borremans culls his source material from a wide array of newspapers, books, and photo archives, many printed in the first half of the twentieth century. He fre- quently severs elements from their original context by zooming in on details, combining material from several pictures in one work or juxtaposing objects rendered in strikingly different scales. Characters are set loose in an austere, forbidding, and uncertain world, wherein they somberly enact strange rituals. Punctured or muti- lated bodies are a recurring motif, as are masks and hoods, architectural fragments and models, and food- stuffs. Although Borremans’s protagonists react impassively to their tasks and fates, pain and violence pervade his work. Yet the artist occasionally laces the glum atmos- phere with wry commentary (several earlier drawings fea- tured characters humorously narrating the scene at the center of the page). The meaning of these vignettes is left deliberately open-ended. As one critic writes, “Borremans’s work is saturated by the surrealist propen- sity to evade logical associations” Using varying combinations of graphite, water- color, and white ink, sometimes supplemented by washes made with coffee or hints of gouache and oil paint, Borremans works at Length on each drawing, often returning to a work after setting it aside for a number of years. Each piece maintains a diaphanous air, as bodies evapo- rate into the murky atmosphere or buildings and ground are outlined with just a few quick pencil strokes. Borremans’s dream world is provisional, seemingly ready to collapse at any moment. His earlier mixed-media works (wherein he used torn-off book covers, envelopes, and other scraps) have given way to more conventional renderings, yet his supports—small pieces of paper and cardboard marked with stains and notes the artist writes to himself—still impart a sense of history separate from the drawings’ content. Often they, too, seem on the verge of disintegration. Inconclusiveness permeates Borremans’s draw- ings. Neither time nor place is fixed; a search for narra- tive thrusts is thwarted; figures are often obscured or face away from the viewer, as in The (Courmajeur) Conducinator (2002). In interviews, he has asserted his frustration with passivity, namely modern society's lack of critical thinking. By frequently depicting emotional detachment and apathy, and by holding viewers responsi- ble for the interpretation of his art, perhaps Borremans can be seen as encouraging action, involvement, and, ideally, change.—Brian Sholis The Rotator, 2003, pencil and watercolor on paper, 12x 9 inches, 30.4 x 23.7 cm, collection Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Switzerland A Mae West Experience, 2002, pencil and watercolor on paper, 6 3/8 x 8 inches, 16.3 x 20.3 cm The Swimming Pool, 2001, pencil and watercolor on paper, 13 3/8 x 11 inches, 34 x 28.2 cm The (Courmajeur) Conducinator, 2002, pencil and water- color on cardboard, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches, 16.7 x 24 cm, collection Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Switzerland Terror Watch, 2002, pencil and watercolor on paper, 9 x 11 7/8 inches, 23 x 30 cm, collection Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Switzerland Los Angeles-based artist ANDREA BOWERS’S practice, which comprises drawings, video, sculpture, and installations, has for over a decade illuminated the ways in which seemingly strict borders become porous. She has examined the relationship between individual and collective identity, between passive spectatorship and active engagement, between physical and virtual reality, and between art history and broader social movements. Her uncanny ability to locate the seem where these ostensibly oppositional terms converge has con- sistently produced art as rich in associative meaning as it ts accomplished in formal presentation. When drawing, her primary tactic is isolation: Bowers, using large sheets of white paper, frequently leaves almost the entire expanse blank and pours an intense amount of con- centration and effort into the photorealistic recreation (in graphite) of a photograph’s detail. These fragments, excerpted from the broader context in which they inevitably get lost, focus on persons who are likewise passionately engaged. Bowers recovers specific, indi- vidual acts of agency from the twin dustbins of banal media representation (a crowd shot at a football game, for example) and history. Bowers began this exploration with a series titled “Spectacular Appearances; in which she presented individuals and small groups of audience members found in photographs of sporting events, concerts, parades, or other acts of communal celebration. A sense of ritual attends each of these gatherings, in which thousands of people converge and engage in private relationships with the performers—yelling at the disappointing outfielder, cheering on a solo guitarist—in public. In these situa- tions, temporary communities and alliances are forged in the shared investment of emotion and energy. Bowers's art acts somewhat like a microscope, individuatina whet would otherwise appear uniform, highlighting discrete connections. She returns a human face to the anonymity of a crowd More recent drawings focus on political protests enacted by a somewhat unexpected confluence of left- leaning Christians, environmentalists, and feminists forged during the late 1970s and early 1980s in response to the proliferation of nuclear power plants across America. Based on newspaper photographs, the images of these women—as the critic Katy Siegel has pointed out —are not the glamorous icons of the May 1968 resistance: They are emphatically ordinary and often present the women helping each other out (locking arms, hoisting each other over fences). In these works, our engagement with Bowers's subjects expands from empathy to a more complex response. By fostering in us an ability to pic- ture ourselves in these women’s shoes, Bowers encourages us to carry out similar actions in the present. Bowers's drawing practice is fueled in part by a fear of historical amnesia. Without edging into voyeurism, she rehabilitates neglected acts of social activism and, by placing them in the gallery, forces upon them an attention that also calls into question the artist's role in the construction of history. The drawings are simultaneously a meditation on how we perceive images, an act of commemoration, and, at their best. a galvanizing force for thought and action.—Brian Sholis “It's a small world” the old joke begins, “but you wouldn't want to paint it” For JESSE BRANSFORD, how- ever, the world is huge and heavy with the visual traces of imperfect frameworks for negotiating the complexity (and perhaps meaninglessness) of existence—much of which can be found embalmed on the World Wide Web, a symbolic vastness within the greater vastness. While he doesn't went to paint it, he does want to draw it—right on the wall, in wrap-around murals that offer galactic pile- ups of reality—mediating prisms to which someone, somewhere, is still clinging. His iconography, echoed in his more traditional on-paper compositions, ranges from defunct sci-fi visions of the future to crackpot reli- gious symbologies. from the coded imagery of heavy- metal album covers to occult talismans secreted within modernist architecture. Bransford, who has described his work as “a drawn clash of esoteric belief systems? says that he began by being “fascinated with the idea that all these subcultures constituted the reality of American culture, not the so-called consumer culture?’ His varicolored, Gepthless Linear drawings, first composed on the com- puter using Photoshop or Illustrator software programs before they are transferred by hand onto a wall or paper, have a provisional quality that facilitates engagement ‘and also gives Bransford’s chosen structures a provoca- tive sense of equilibrium. Paranoia Land, installed at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in 2000, featured a labyrinth studded with skulls and flying saucers, but its title didn't refer only to conspiracy theories and Neo-Goth tendencies. Bransford had purposefully posi- tioned his imagery so that there was no ideal viewpoint: With the space'’s columns serving as blockers, a detail was always hidden from sight. The viewer's generated nervousness is Brans- ford’s too. He works on walls because he sees architectural layouts as coercive and coded, often irrationally so. Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), a 2001 installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum, borrowed a glyphic motif from Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House—e symool drawn from Aztec mythology, which the architect secretly loved. As a result, the ancient reference opened up a fissure in the supposed rationality of Wright's practice, turning it into, as Bransford says, “an architecture of death and transformation” It was not coincidental that Bransford’s airy, pastel-toned frieze, laced with archaic dianiteries and tumbling skeletons, traveled downstairs and around a corner. It is this kind of approach that makes him far more than a connoisseur of obscure cultism. Where from Here (Gudip.01), 2002, a 360-degree wall drawing created for the Carnegie Museum of Art, incorporated imagery from the adjoining Carnegie Museum of Natural History: Seeing “the museum as the world? as the artist explained in a statement, he reshuffled it, juxtaposina crystals, magic mushrooms, salamanders, and socialist sculptures in @ seemingly occult but actually open-ended imagistic profusion. This amalgamation of references clarified Bransford’s twin insights: Formulations of knowledge are always provisional, and for shining examples of cranki- ness, you can't beat the mainstream.—Martin Herbert (3) 4) (5) (6) (7) (8) Imaginos, 2001-3, latex and marker on wall, dimensions variable Gestalt No. 25 (Apocalypse: The Tower), 1999, pen and ink on paper, 40 x 65 inches, 101.6 x 165.1 cm (BOC) Workshop of Telescopes, 2001, acrylic and ink on paper, 48 x 58 inches, 121.9 x 147.3 cm Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), 2001, acrylic, graphite, and marker on wall, site-specific installa- tion at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Where from Here (Gpdifror), 2002, graphite, marker, and latex paint on wall, site-specific installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Flower Trap, 2003, acrylic, ink, and graphite on paper, 33:1/2.x-50 inches, 85.1, x 127 om The Spector of Language, 2004, acrylic, ink, and water- color on paper, 42 x 68 inches, 106.7 x 172.7 cm Lux Aerterna (Singularity), 2002, acrylic and ink on FERNANDO BRYCE"s drawings follow a quite rigorous set of standards: they consist of copies, drawn mostly in black ink, with very little or no formal or technical effects, rendered in a relatively small scale. These are copies whose originals are selected from a wide range of invariably popular or quotidian sources: historical records, letters, magazine illustrations, newspaper clippings, tourist brochures, and more. It is this very stroightforwardness that lends Bryce’s drawings a candid and disarming quality. The result is simple and direct, but an attentive eye will unveil a more critical slant. One of Bryce’s most accomplished works is his installation Vision de 1a Pintura Ocidental (2002), which comprises thirty-nine photographic reproductions of offset prints and industrial lithographs of masterpieces from around the world. These constituted the collection of the Museo de Reproducciones Pictéricas (Museum of Painting Reproductions) founded in the artist's native Lama, Peru, in 1951, to coincide with the fourth centennial of the Spanish foundation of the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, the oldest university in the Americas, located in Lima. The installation also includes, more importantly, ninety-six drawings in which the artist has hand copied the diverse correspondence between the museum and sev- eral international interlocutors—donors, dealers, muse- ums, and governmental agencies—in order to acquire the pictorial reproductions. Another work, South of the Border (2002), is a series of twenty-nine drawings appropriating a pocket guide published in 1958 by the U.S. Office of Armed Forces Information and Education Department of Defense. The booklet contained instructions directed to govern- ment officials and military men on how to relate to “south-of-the-border people” The drawings include images of Guantanamo Bay, Tegucigalpa, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro, as well as images of so-called “South-of-the-border people” Also included are texts titled "How to Make Friends? “They are American Too? “Be Tolerant? and “Avoid Taking Sides in Local Politics” Bryce’s deceptively naive drawings assume a strong critical and political stance, with a particular focus on unveiling the colonialist undertones of certain political and historical narratives and iconographies. The artist takes on a strategy that he calls “mimetic analysis” Appropriation, that reputedly passé post- modern strategy, is here renewed in a complex and refreshing manner. In the accumulation of many series of drawings, Bryce the draftsman becomes a critical archivist. The archive must, of course, encompass the atlas, and Bryce’s largest work to date is precisely nis Atlas Peru, which comprises 494 drawings depicting the history of twentieth-century Peru though a varied range of images culled from everyday printed sources ranging from daily periodicals to advertisements. Th the end, Bryce is a heavy-handed editor and a perverse copiste, and to fully understand his archive, both personal and political, one must wait for an all- embracing survey or a full-fledged catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works to truly assess the complexity and scope of his oeuvre.—Adriano Pedrosa (1) La Reina de Hawaii (The Queen of Hawaii), one of eight drawings in a series, 2003, ink on paper, 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches, 42 x 30 cm Salon Esso, one of twenty-six drawings in a series, 2004, ink on paper, 11 5/8 x 8 1/2 inches, 29.7 x 21 cm Trotsky, one of ten drawings in a series, 2003, ink on paper, 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches, 42 x 29.7 cm Walter Benjamin, one of ten drawings in a series, 2002, ink on paper, 12 5/8 x 9 3/8 inches, 32 x 24 cm, collec- tion Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland Revolucidn, one of 219 drawings in a series, 2004, 11 5/8 x 8 1/2 inches, 29.7 x 21 cm Revolucidn, one of 219 drawings in a series, 2004, 11 5/8 x 8 1/2 inches, 29.7 x 216m The Spanish War, one of 117 drawings in a series, 2003, 11 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches, 30 x 21 cm South of the Border, one of twenty-nine drawings in a series, 2002, 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches, 42 x 30 cm Revoluci6n, one of 219 drawings ina series, 2004, 23 3/8 x 16 1/2 inches, 59.5 x 42 cm South of the Border, one of twenty-nine drawings in a series, 2002, 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches, 42 x 30 cm HER MAJESTY QUEEN LILIUOKALANI FERNANDO BOTERO First Prize, Painting , Colombia Fecnand Borero (932) studded tn his narive Colembia and \arer in Vraly , France aud Spain. iy addition ro sig individeal shows in Bogota Mexico and Washington ,his work hat appeared th many wnporranr exhibitions ln New York Venice, Sae Paulo, Barcelona Bal- rimore , Dayton, Dallas , Bogora” and ‘Barranquilla. Botero has received elghy moyor prizes Includii Peay, at the Barcelona Biennial and the Guagenlhelm Musedin add the Navional arr Prize tn Colom! bie» UNA PEDAGGGIA MATERIALISTA El cemempordien al leer una obra 42 historia, se da evence de coan large ho. sido la preparacion da ls migeria, que ly ‘eenbarge-y mogerat afte) Weter debe Ser una Conea enneencble al higtoriaior=reectaee adi el gran melita 48 $92 prapies poderes Ung histaria que educa ce este rade , na Causa melanicalia, Sins que properciona atmas a. \n gence. La penerracisn yacrualizacién dialetrica del pasado, Tal Come este conaeva con el presence, e% la prueba de verdad de la acci¢n presente.” wee. Che Guevara por Television De gran desarrollo P F econdmico los atios : . Iniciaremos construccidn P de siderurgia en 1968-69 N NOTICIAS DE f UN DIARIO AL SERVICIO DEL PUEBLO ANO XVI. NO.49 CIERRE: 11:00 TERCERA EPOCA LA HABANA, JUEVES 23 DE FEBRERO DE 1964 PRECIO:5 CTVS. Washington, November (965 : Provest againsr The Vietnam War. £804 THE OFFICE OF ARMED FORCES UNFORMATION AND EDUCATION. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE 1958. Buta recent years the meaning has changed . Today, modern progress is Cransforrmning most of the countries south of The border an Was made them truly “Lands of tomorrow? Latin Arnerica’s rate of induscrial growth tas almose paralleled that of the United Srates in the last 45 years Some Countries - such as Brazil, Colombia , and Venezue- ta- lave even topped the Uniced States race. The rate of industrializacion may be expected To increa se markedly, to Keep up with the rising population. Latin Ameritas population is now about equal to that of the United States and Canada combined, and within 50 years ir may reach a maximum of 500 million, Venezuela and Mexico are among the world’s Top oll producers, | tl RE nl ORGANO DEL MOVIMIENTO 26 DE ULI Lo dispone el Gobierno SERA CUMPLIMENTADA EN LA MANANA DE HOY ELICP INTERVENDRA LAS EMPRESAS S!_DESACATAN LA DISPOSICION indo det coberbicareh wanant & barmocles de Regie, Around 1984, in the city of Quanzhou in China's Fujian province—a region known for menufacturing fire- works—CAI GUO-QIANG first used gunpowder as a drawing medium. His early and highly experimental body of work signaled what was to become his focus and sig- nature style of art meking, bringing together drawing, painting, and performance as intertwined practices. Quanzhou, where Cai was born and raised, is situated directly across the Straits from Taiwan, a nation that had long been engaged in war with Cai's native mainland China. The ongoing conflict clearly left an indelible impression on the artist. Although the mid-1980s marked a turning point in the development of contemporary art in China's post- Cultural Revolution period, Cai, amongst others of his generation (notably Huang Yong Ping, Gu Wenda, and Xu Bing) left Chine for the West. In 1986, Cai first emigrated to Japan, where he received widespread support for his work; ten years later, he moved to New York. In 1989 he began a series of gunpowder-related pieces. Working with experts in the field, Cai has devel- oped projects that briefly create an explosive image in the sky (such as Ascending Dragon, featuring an undulat- ing Chinese dragon). In these works, art becomes a dynamic form that embodies the human desire to harness nature's energy and power as well as the human aspiration to rise freely above and beyond the earth. Moreover, in Projects for Extraterrestrials (1989), Cai created an image that turned the viewer's attention not only to the sky, but also to the realm beyond our planet, thus sug- gesting our place within a greater universe and the pos- sibility of other life forms in outer space. As part of this body of work, the artist also pro- duced a suite of eight large-scale (13-foot) drawings on rice paper. He still utilizes the same process today: He lays down trails and lines of gunpowder over large sheets of white paper, then ignites one end to produce a series of small explosions that leave behind marks and lines. These spontaneously produced images recall both the abstraction of Western Modernism and the lyrical forms of Chinese ink painting. While for Cai drawing first assumed a performa- tive dimension in the execution of his process, the artist also began to explore land as a form of draftsman’s ground, comparable to a sheet of paper. Conversely, the physicel drawings increasingly reference performances in which the artist detonated trails of gunpowder at various locations, including one close to a nuclear test site in Nevada and another near the Great Wall of China. The latter work utilized ten kilometers of gunpowder, laid down and exploded on the ground that stretched from the Western end of the Great Wall to 10,000 meters out into the Gobi desert. In more recent years, Cai has used the interior and exterior environs of the commissioning venues (rang- ing from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Shanghai waterfront) as. the principal sites of his firework projects. Throughout his career, the artist has demonstrated the capacity to speak to diverse audiences, combining Western, Modernist aesthetic traditions, namely postwar Process and Land art, with centuries-old Chinese customs, drawn together symbolically to suggest common values and aspirations shared across cultures.—Charles Merewether (1) (2) (3) (4) Tide Watching on West Lake, 2004, gunpowder on paper, 157 1/2 x 118 1/8 inches, 400 x 300 cm Earth SETI Project: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 0, 1989, ink on paper, 11 5/8 x 18 1/2 inches, 29.5 x 47 cm APEC: Ode to Joy, 2002, gunpowder on paper, 118 1/8 x 157 1/2 inches, 300 x 400 cm Fetus Movement II, 1991, gunpowder on paper, 78 3/4 x 267 3/4 inches, 200 x 680 cm $e 3 Geeky New York-based artist ERNESTO CAIVANO is currently in the process of telling an ongoing epic story. His recent drawinas are visualization of excerpts from After the Woods, a fantastical tale written by the artist that involves a man and woman, seperated for a millennium, who attempt to reunite in an unspecified post-apocalyptic future. During their time apart, he has become a knight with the power to aid the evolutionary development of plants and she a spaceship who symbol- izes (and fosters advances in) technology. Caivano’s protagonists consistently encounter exotic creatures throughout their journey, and even transmit messages written on the wings of birds the artist calls “philapores} who, incapable of normal flignt, travel through dust, water, and other matter. Allusions to art history (the prints and drawings of Albrecht Direr, the Romantic visions of William Blake, and early Modern explorations of abstraction), fractal geometry, contempo- rary telecommunications technology, advanced scientific inquiry, and the fables and fairy tales of medieval literature round out his bustling cosmolosy. The drawings, which vary from notebook-sized individual sheets to scroll-Like works that are over seven feet wide and two feet tall, are impressive feats of concentration and discipline: Each is a hyper- detailed accumulation of short, micro-thin lines ren- dered in black ink. Caivano’s meticulous, near-uniform blackness occasionally takes silhouette form, as in works like In Shadows With Knight (2003), or in passages that invert black and white, as in Traps, Screens, and Offerings (2004). Occasional flashes of brilliant color rendered in gouache and watercolor, usually a connective tissue between multiple larger elements in the work, irradiate his vignettes Caivano intersperses representational vignettes with smaller, more abstract details. After the Woods is a linear story presented out of narrative order—the artist likens his process to a filmmaker who shoots scenes * based on practicality then rearranges them in the edit- ing room; another critic likens Caivano’s tale to Julio Cortazar’s classic proto-hypertext novel Hopscotch—and Caivano readily admits he does not yet know how nis own plot will end. Perhaps this is as it should be, since thinking about his lead characters’ Odyssean striving plunges viewers into almost impossibly large topics. The story can be seen as a metaphor for our attempts to reconcile technological development with non-human life and the natural environment. A formal reading places the allegory's distinctive focus on bifurcation (man/woman, humans/nature, reality/fantasy) in Line with the slippery divide between abstraction and representation (or legi- bility and obscurity). Yet another avenue of interpreta- tion could focus on the adventure story behind the draw- ings and its relationship to various storytelling tech- niques. Although he has specific ideas about the world he has created and the place of each detail in it, Caivano is careful not to prescribe specific readings. Instead, like his mythical knight and princess, we are left to roam, grasping for clues, through his intricate and beautiful forest landscape.—Brian Sholis (4) (5) Kimono, Quicksand, and Feathers, 2003, ink on paper, 5 5/8 x 9 1/16 inches, 14.2 x 23.1 cm Breathing the Code, 2002, ink on paper, 8 3/8 x 5 3/8 inches, 21.6 x 14.2 cm Fraying the Ropes, 2003, ink on paper, 9 3/8 x 6 3/8 inches, 24.1 x 16.5 cm The Land Inhibited, 2003, ink on paper, 30 x 80 inches, 76.2 x 203.2 cm Traps, Screens, and Offerings, 2004, ink on paper, 18 3/8 x 90 3/8 inches, 46.5 x 229.6 em LOS CARPINTEROS (the carpenters) is the Spanish-language name for a collaborative group of Cuban artists, Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodriguez. Working together since 1991, they officially started to use their collective name in 1994. Although Arrechea left the trio, the others continued, producing over the past ten years a major body of work of sculpture and installations—and related drawings —that, as their name connotes, utilizes wood and ascciated building meterials not only as media (in the three-dimensional work), but also as subject matter (in the drawings). From its inception, the group has explored the relations between architecture and design; craft and art; and artisenal and fine art production to signify 2 conti- auity between contemporary artistic production and a social sphere of practice. The group’s name suggests an affirmation of the principle of collective work and, with it, a critique of bourgeois individualism. Furthermore, while the name suggests the local craft-based skills and low-production economy that can be associated with a Third-World culture, the work of Los Cerpinteros circu- lates within an upscale economy interested in a cosmo- politan, middle-class dedication to the fine arts. For Los Carpinteros, drawing has played an inte- gral role as a mock technical draft or form of blueprint that suggests not only a process of artistic elaboration, but also resonates with the communist idea of logical planning. In fact, the idea of “going back to the drawing board” has long been embraced by socialists as a princi- ple of revolutionary thinking, and with it utopian plan- ning, as well as programming in advance every aspect of social, economic, intellectual, and cultural life. At the same time, Los Carpinteros stage an ongo- ing engagement and critique of the aspirations and mate- rial conditions of contemporary international urban culture. This approach is captured in many of [Link]- ings, which take the form of architectural and carpentry plans that seem less than functional, bordering on the absurd, ironic, or nonsensical. The subjects seem to most sharply reflect on Cuba's urban environment, where the decaying elegance of colonial mansions and modernist apartments slowly give way to raw concrete communist-style government build- ings. It is a contrast that symbolizes a larger sense of impoverishment and dereliction of cities as much as the swallowing of people into the anonymity of the urban landscape. Yet, the significance of the group's work is their ability to both reference not only the locel but equally the global in which such cityscapes are not uncommon to other large cities from New York to New Delhi or Beijing. The titles of Los Carpinteros exhibitions, “Transportable City” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002) or “Inventing the World” (Tampa Bay Festival of the Americas, 2005), suggest the breadth of their ideas. Central to the group’s conceptual framework is the deconstruction of architectural and desian practice. To Los Carpenteros, these concepts are reduced to the point of non-functionality, thus evoking an outmoded, obsolete craft practice or an aesthetic gesture of little or no value. Drawing becomes then a utopian act that, while proposing a blueprint for the future, loses its power through the process of its realization. ina Reimaamiasy (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Biblioteca modelo/Model Library, 1997, ink on paper, 29 7/8 x 41 7/8 inches, 75.7 x 106.2 cm, collection Museo Extremefio e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporanéo, Bandajoz, Spain Pata de rana, tuberias de agua/Flipped and Aqueducts, 1997, pencil and watercolor on paper, 79 1/2 x 59 inches, 201.9 x 159.9 cm Someca, 2002, watercolor on paper, 94 x 60 inches, 238.8 x 152.4 cm, collection Museum of Modern Art, New York Proyecto de bloques.. ./Block Project... , 2001, watercolor on paper, 51 1/2 x 74 1/4 inches, 130.8 x 188.6 cm Luces de 100 W/ 100 W Lights, 2001, watercolor on paper, 41 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches, 105.4 x 74.9 cm Plano de La Habana/ Plan of Havana City, 2003, water- color on paper, 88 7/8 x 59 3/8 inches, 225.6 x 150.9 cm RAIMOND CHAVES uses drawing in the way that many Conceptual artists in the 1960s and 1970s used pho- tography: to document the social conditions in which art- works are received and circulated. Conceptual artists chose photography because it was a mechanized medium devoid of an artistic aura; Raimond Chaves, in contrast, has chosen drawing, a hand-crafted medium, only to sub- vert its aura by transforming it into a vehicle for con- veying information. According to Walter Benjamin, one measure of an artwork’s aura is its accessibility. Auratic works could only be seen by a few, while non-auratic ones, like pho- tography, were accessible to 2 large number of viewers. Chaves makes drawings accessible to a larger audience, as we see for example in 7 dibujo 24 hs (24-hour Drawing), a project first presented in Barcelona in 2000. The artist set up 2 booth on La Rambla, one of the city’s busiest streets, and displayed a sign announcing that free draw- ings would be made on demand and around the clock by a team of volunteer artists. The only rule: the works had to result from an active exchange between the artists and models. Fer from beina passive, the portrait sitters con- tributed ideas—or even sketches—in a truly collabora- tive process. Once finished, the drawings were displayed on the booth’s walls until the project concluded (usually after two to ten days). After the shed came down, Chaves mailed the drawings to the models. This project not only makes drawings accessible to a large, non-art-world audience, but also transforms the act of sketching from a solitary enterprise into 4 collective activity. It is an ingenious experiment designed to give drawing a more relevant, community- building function in today’s often alienating urban societies. In other projects, Chaves experiments with ways of dismantling boundaries separating art from everyday life. In 2000, he read an article in the Colombian press describing the theft of a truck carrying dynamite by a trio of rebels—one of the many acts of violence linked to the guerrilla war that has ravaged the country since the 1950s. Chaves began to make a series of drawings about the theft, focusing on the relations amongst the rebels, and eventually he published them as the comic book Los ladrones de dinamita (The Dynamite Thieves). This would be one successful example of what Jean-Paul Sartre called “engaged” work—art that does not turn away from the problems of the world in which it was created. Chaves has also experimented with ways of inte- grating his work into the realm of Latin Americen popular culture. In a series of stencils (which Chaves calls “drawing with a knife”) titled “La marqueta”—the Spanglish name given to supermarkets in New York's East Harlem—he illustrates the lyrics of an anti-consumerist pop song by Tego Calderén. “The things I have with me? sings Calderén, “are not for sale in la marqueta” This project suggests another of Chaves’s effective creative strategies to de-sublimate drawing, strip the medium of its aura, and bring it closer to a broader public. —Rubén Gallo (4) (5) El dibujo 24 hs (24-hour Drawing), April 2000, street shed, Barcelona El dibujo 24 hs (24-hour Drawing), October 2000, main coach station, Bogota Stop, You Must be ..., from the series “The Dynamite Thieves? 1998-2000, photocopy and ball-point pen on paper, 11 x 17 inches, 27:9 & 43.2 emi Notebook Drawings, 1999, ball-point pen on paper, each 6 x 4 inches, 15.2 x 10.2 cm She, from the series “La marqueta” (The Market), 2004, stencil on PVC, 19 x 27 1/2 inches, 48.3 x 69.9 cm 0S LADRONES pE DINAMITA |! Se tec ee CFE Wire warts, waste + vba I ACALCCOCCLCC 1 Rn SS races, Covrpin casio rover S| whoa se Za sar ee EY DE SE Rear haere ie Fae ean D Seimei eed? AAACALAAL oo ae i be wiv | {i an eg Ned i ee 4 ee Since the early 1990s SANDRA CINTO’s work has revealed 2 decisive vocation towards one specific medium: drawing itself. The work has evolved considerably in the last fifteen years, far from the early paintings of clouds, sometimes installed within other objects (such as an armoire), and installations with elements such as a chan- delier, a white carousel horse, a golden cage, and a sus- pended bed. The same fragile, intimate, and evocative features found in the sculptures, paintings, and instal- lations seemed all the more fitting for Cinto to fully develop in her drawing. With the drawings, Cinto is able to expand and render more complex her repertoire of images. These in turn can be divided into two groups: from the more blatantly figurative ledders, knives, chan- deliers, candles, lamps, light bulbs, trees, branches, thorns, mountains, abysses, end bridges, to the more abstract Lines, grids, webs, and nets. The separation between the former and the latter is not clear cut, and one of the interesting aspects of the work is how more abstract elements assume figurative traces in different contexts in Cinto’s drawings. Abstract and figurative elements are drawn with a black or silver felt-tip pen on paper, wood, skin (which is later photographed), or actual architecture, and some- times engraved in glass. The background may be white, mint green, skin color, transparent, or night blue. Cinto has developed a signature style that is simple, delicate, and precise: “elegant graffiti emitting a faint surrealist aroma; as Nico Israel has put it. Cinto’s work recalls a strange mix of sources: children’s drawings, Robert Gober's wallpaper, and the album covers Roger Dean designed for the rock group YES in the 1970s. Cinto’s drawings establish a play with visuality and narrative: One can speak of the compositions in terms of their mythical landscapes and how they simultaneously attempt to connect many elements into inescapably freg- mented and elusive narratives. In this sense, the draw- ings on sculpted bookshelves and huge piles of wodden books are indicative of the artist’s flirtation with liter- ature, and the impossibility of actually reading beyond the objects’ exterior appearance. Working on paper, in sculpture, installation, painting, photography, or inter- vening directly on architectural spaces and objects, Cinto engages in what could be called “drawing in the expanded field” Indeed, Cinto’s most accomplished works are those in which the artist has immersed herself and occupied a certain space that is already laden with his- tory. Two exhibitions in Brazil were particularly success- ful in this sense: one at Casa Triangulo’s former space, @ Belle Epoque building full of small rooms and parquet floors in downtown Sao Paulo, in 2002; and in 2003 at Museu de Arte da Pampulha, a museum in Belo Horizonte housed in a former Casino designed by Brazilian mod- ernist architect Oscar Niemeyer. The play with memory (the artist’s, our own, that of the space where the exhibi- tion takes place) is both poetic and nostalgic, overflowing with fabulous, oneiric, romantic or delirious innuendoes. eexikidihtatees Mamie (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Untit inka ed, from the series “Nights of Hope?” 2004, nd acrylic on painted medium density fiberboard (mdf), 110 1/4 x 74 7/8 inches, 280 x 190 cm Untit ed, 2000, ink and acrylic on mdf, 51 1/4 x 78 3/4 inches, 130.2 x 200 cm Untit led, 2000, ink and acrylic on mdf, 51 1/4 x 78 3/4 inches, 130.2 x 200 cm Untit ed, 2001, pen on painted wood, 9 4/4 x 13 1/2 feet x 14 1/2 inches, 2.8 x 4.1 m x 38.8 cm Table, 1999, pen on painted wood, 36 x 23 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches, 91.4 x 59.7 x 80 cm Untit ed, 2003, ink and photographs on walls, dimen- sions variable Untit ed, from the series “Nights of Hope? 2004, ink and acrylic on painted mdf, 35 3/8 x 27 5/8 inches, 90 x 70 cm Untitled, 2004, ink on painted wood, 110 1/4 x 74 7/8 inches, 280 x 190 cm Untitled, from the series “Nights of Hope,” 2004, ink and acrylic on painted mdf, 110 1/4 x 74 7/8 inches, 280 x 190 cm From our jaded, oversexed historical vantage point, the cover illustrations and advertisements fea- tured in Spanish-language magazines from the 1930s, through the 1950s constitute a lost world, Beautiful women smolder, smile, or smoke guiltlessly while dwarfish men fall at their feet: even the cheesecake models are ele- gantly, if barely, attired. But of course it wasn’t an entirely innocent era, and in the compulsive overdrawing that the Mexican tattoo artist DR. LAKRA applies to vintage covers and yellowing interior pages of such pub- licotions, a host of repressed demons comes flooding out. Plumes of smoke turn into devils. Sketched skeletons, as if summoned on the Day of the Dead, molest a stat- uesque and almost nude model. On the cover of a 1940s, edition of the periodical Vea, Dr. Lakra draws over the Likeness of a sultry brunette so that half of her face appears to be peeled back, revealing e grinning skull underneath. A text in Spanish beside it reads, “Death is the only truth” And everywhere, bodies are covered with a Gothic cornucopia of inked-on tattoos: cobwebs, horny devils, swastikas, bats But then what do we expect? Dr. Lakra, born Jeronimo Lopez Ramirez in Mexico in 1972, is a world- renowned tattoo artist, having practiced his craft for over 2 decade. He began as a painter, but only in recent years have his so-called magazine defacements been exhibited. He began drawing on the idealized figures in publications when there wasn’t a back or shoulder blade available for nis needle. It’s clear that what he does on skin is analogous to what he does on paper. Lakra breathes colorful, controversial life into material that might otherwise go unnoticed. Glorious, reactive, hallu- cinogenic irrationality is his modus operandi, whether he's taking @ butch man from an ad and gifting him with earrings and a baroque green facial tattoo or turning a masked Mexican wrestler into the Illustrated Man (the mysterious protegonist from a classic science-fiction story by Ray Bradbury, whose protagonist is a drifter whose torso is covered with enigmatic drawings). Lakra’s imagery also suggests, of course, a form of physical graffiti, and, like the spray-paint artists of 1980s New York, Dr. Lakra has been clasped to the bosom of the art world precisely because of his intercession between the arenas of popular and high culture. His work has recently become more “art-like? proceeding not always from a vintage page but sometimes from a blank new one. The phantasmagorical world he summons trans- fers easily: In heavy-lined drawings, nude and bosomy women ride on the backs of dragons while pumpkin-headed male figures swing from nooses behind them. Siren-Like vixens give the viewer a come-on while a sailor stands mournfully beside a crucifix. The designs in these works could themselves be stencils for tattoos, and it’s clear that Lakra has no plans to shut down his original business to become an art-world oddity. At an international art fair in 2004, he set up a tettoo parlor and, while his framed works quickly sold out in his dealer's booth, the artist spent much time covering willing human flesh with his elaborate and excessive designs. In this context, who could deny that his needlework is enduring art? —Martin Herbert (1) (2) (4) (3) Lyn May, 2003, ink on vintage magazine, 94/2 x 6 7/8 inches, 24 x 17.5 cm Untitled (Vea), 2004, ink on vintage magazine, 10 1/4 x 12 inches, 26 x 30.5 cm Untitled (Antonio Leon y Saul Montana), 2004, ink on vintage magazines, diptych, each 11 x 9 1/2 inches, 28 x 24 cm Untitled (Naglas), 2003, ink on vintage magazine, 12 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 31 x 23.5 cm Untitled (Hermanos), 2004, ink on vintage photograph, 13 3/8 x 9 7/8 inches, 34 x 24 cm Untitled (4.90), 2004, ink on paper, 9 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches, 25 x 50 cm OU A 1! Ya If it is a clear night in Malibu, California, then RUSSELL CROTTY is probably sitting in his homemade observatory, pointing his twenty-five-centimeter 1/6 Newtonian reflector telescope at an event millions of light years away. If it is daytime, he is most Likely in the studio, applying an India-ink-filled nib to the surface of a Lucite globe or to the pages of one of his immense books, seeking to inscribe what he saw up there. It is not easy straddling the worlds of art and amateur astronomy, but Crotty has been vindicated in both fields: Possibly uniquely, he has had both major museum shows and his work authenticated by the Association of Lunar & Planetary Observers. Trained as an artist (an awkward fact to grasp for those who have tried to locate him in a tradition of American oddball naif), in the 1980s, Crotty was, by his ‘own account, a cookie-cutter West Coast finish-Fetish artist—“pouring resin and sticking surf fins on canvas” until an artist friend pointed out that his homemade books of drawings featuring surfing imagery, stemming from a favorite pastime, outclassed his official artwork. Freed up, Crotty subsequently perfected a legitimate surf-based art (tiny, gridded studies of wave riders that nodded equally to classic Minimalism, quotidian plees- ure, and the individualist mythology of the West) before moving to Malibu to become caretaker of a 130-acre estate in the early 1990s. There, by chance, he reconnected with a childhood hobby: stargazing. The works Crotty has made since fuse a private obsession with something that is public property: the cosmic sublime These works began as lavishly detailed hobbyist books memorializing his observations of celestial bod- jes—a process that, as Crotty 1s aware, has roots in the approaches of nineteenth-century sky watchers like Edward Emerson Barnard. In form (some of the books are up to eight feet across), he was inspired by seeing epic antique volumes in the British Museum. After expanding these works into discrete “POV™ (point-of-view) drawings, in which his interstellar imagery was vignetted as if seen through a telescope, Crotty began to draw on paper- covered spheres. The expansion of media suggests an ongoing attempt to get Closer to the intimate experience of hands-on astronomy—an effect that is doubled by Crotty’s tendency to border his images with streams of diaristic text, a loquacious babble of observations on Light pollution, wind speeds, and heavenly events into which the earthly world (particularly the effects of cree- ping suburbia on the natural landscape) often intrudes, giving the work an ecological tinge. Throughout, end although there are continuing reverbs of minimalist practice (particularly in its focus on soothing repetition) Crotty’s work remains a one-off— a self-assuaging stab at lassoing the unknown through thousands of tiny, scratchy ink marks that coalesce into images that are both realistic and, finally, unfathomable, semaphoring the artist’s own pleasure in sending his eye out into space. Crotty has lately considered making art out of the scrambles around the local landscape that he makes on cloudy nights. He may have mastered the art of straddling author and physicist C.P. Snow's famous “two cultures"—and contributed, in a way, to their merging— but for Crotty, the sky is clearly not the Limit. —Martin Herbert NGC 5466 “The Ghost” Globular Cluster in Bootes, 2002, ink and watercolor on paper, 48 x 48 inches, 421.9 4121.9 on Hercules Over Knolltop Estates (Previously Chapparall), 2002, 48 x 48 inches, 124.9 % 4121.9 em View of the exhibition “Globe Drawings,” Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida, 2004 View of the exhibtion “Globe Drawings)? Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida, 2004 At first glance, it is very difficult to connect the dots between the strikingly eclectic components of Italian artist ROBERTO CUOGHI's art practice. He is perhaps best known for a decision he made in 2000 to assume his father’s identity. Fast-forwarding his life by more than three decades, Cuoghi gained a significant amount of weight, grew a beard, dyed his hair aray, and donned the mannerisms and clothes of his aging dad. Cuoght's transformation cen not exactly be classified as a performance—no “art works” in the form of photo or video documentation were produced. As the alteration of his appearance and behavior has been so extremely effective, though, it is now impossible to recognize the artist as a man in his early thirties. And it is impossible to read any of Cuoghi’s work without relating it to his radical metamorphosis. In terms of his more “orthodox” work, Cuoghi addresses seemingly disconnected subject matter and utilizes various media, including photography, diaital animation, painting, and holography. In 2003, Cuoghi began to experiment with an entirely unique technique that involved drawing on layered sheets of acetate and tracing paper using 2 combination of pencil, ink, char- coal, pastel, marker, spray paint, and varnish that are then framed behind glass. Creating images in a grayscale palette by progressively building up semi-transparent layers allows Cuoghi to produce 2 ghost-like effect fur- ther enhanced by his shadowy photorealist drawing style. An aura of mystery also emanates from the subjects that Cuoghi depicts—typically, his drawings represent a sin- gle object or person that at first appears to be com- pletely generic in nature. Take, for example, Untitled (Portrait) and Untitled (Portrait of e Woman), both 2003— two seemingly straightforward head-and-shoulders depictions of an older man and woman. Despite the incredible details, it is impossible to decipher any- thing about the individual identity of each sitter, nor about the era in which they live. The only information that can be derived from these captivating pictures are each sitter’s approximate age and gender. [Link] to portraiture, Cuoghi’s technique could be easily mis- taken for an antiquated form of photography. The optical effects created by the interplay of opacity end trans~ parency, as well as the work’s chiaroscuro surfaces lend these drawings the same haunted quality that Daguerreotypes nave when we look at them today. Cuoghi has also used this special drawing prac- tice to depict other subjects. He has singled out every- day objects such as e record player or a tree trunk, as well as a striking series of world maps. dust as with his human subjects, these object drawings exude an eerie feeling that stems from a sense of familiarity, paradoxi- cally suspended in an indefinite moment in time. More than inventing an interesting, new technique for its own sake, Cuoghi has seemingly invented this style of draw- ing to create works rooted in a strategically anachronis- tic space—much like he has done with in his own life choice to eternally suspend his youth to become his father.—Alison M. Gingeras (1) (4) Untitled (The Master’s Voice), 2003, gesso with tea, paper, enamel, spray paint, felt-tip pen, and acrylic on acetate, 14 5/8 x 20 1/2 inches, 37 x 52 cm Untitled, 2003, pencil, tracing paper, enamel, spray paint, felt-tip pen, gesso, and acrylic on acetate, 14 5/8 x 20 1/2 inches, 37 x 52 cm Untitled (Shark), 2003, pencil, tracing paper, enamel, spray paint, airbrush, felt-tip pen, and acrylic on acetate, 14 5/8 x 20 1/2 inches, 37 x 52 cm Untitled (Portrait of a Woman), 2003, pencil, carbon paper, spray paint, enamel, India ink, and felt-tip pen on acetate, 27 5/8 x 19 7/8 inches, 70 x 50 cm Untitled (Portrait), 2003, pencil, carbon paper, India ink, enamel, spray paint, cardstock, and tracing paper on acetate, 28 3/4 x 20 7/8 inches, 73 x 53 cm Similar to his paintings, JOHN CURRIN's draw- ings convey an inaeniously contemporary re-imagination of traditional, Old Master pictorial genres and tech- niques. His works on paper feature many of his signature exaggerations of the female form and strangely unresolved pairings of men and women, yet also feature more Classi- cal and conventional representations as well. Currin's complicated and multi-varied approach to depicting women inspires a volatile critical context around his work, yet his virtuosity and stylistic élan pushes an appreciation of his work beyond simplistic sexual poli- tics. Although he has incorporated aspects of his own facial features in his paintings, he has also noted that his execution of the male form begins with his drawing or painting a female figure. A serious and thorough under- standing of a wide range of figurative painting over the centuries also informs his practice and lends a strong sense of historical gravitas to the decidedly contempo- rary and often discomfortingly funny scenes, situations, and figures that he represents. Currin’s drawings range from capricious explo- rations of a particular theme or idea to works seemingly intended as preparations for paintings. The gouache The Golf Course Girl (1997), for example, is one of a number of the artist's depictions of women with impossibly large breasts. Such exaggerated imagery serves as a lampoon of male heterosexual desire at its most fetishistic while also pushing figurative representation into a strange new direction. In his paintings, these women usually possess faces composed with a thick impasto that cuggest the hypersexualization of the body, yet in The Golf Course Girl, the subject’s face is treated with the same care and deliberation as the rest of her body and her bucolic surroundings. Other works such as The Moved Over Lady (1994) and Autumn Lovers (1994) are directly related to completed paintings, providing Currin with the opportunity to explore the same scenes and subject mat- ter not only in a different, preparatory medium, but also in the more intimate format that drawing provides. His more recent drawings range from the poignantly exquisite Blue Rachel (2001)—a portrait of his wife, artist Rachel Feinstein—to other more uncon- ventional forays into portraiture such as The Clairvoyant and Anita Joy (both 2001) and the figure study Wedges (2000). The portraits mostly feature uncomfortably frontal views of women's faces that have a strangely square and stiff quality and exude a weirdly patrician sense of self-assurance and an awareness of a precise, present moment. Wedges, on the other hand, features ano less aristocratic subject. One might conjecture that she is standing on a beach, judging from the shoes she holds and her windblown dress. Unlike the hale, rosy-cheeked figures in most of Currin’s portraits, this woman appears to be emaciated and possibly anorexic; though she pos- sesses beautifully flowing hair, she also displays wobbly, knock-kneed legs and a mysteriously swollen hand. This figure study, while it differs in composition from his paintings, is archetypal of Currin’s practice as a draftsman. As this work exemplifies, drawing clearly allows him the opportunity to both re-examine a particu- lar social “type” and to experiment with lines, colors, and compositions to develop a broader formal range of possibilities.— Dominic Molon Anita Joy, 2001, Conte crayon on paper, 17 7/8 x 14 inches, 45.4 x 35.6 cm Mrs. So-and-so, 2000, ink and gouache on paper, 13 7/8 x 10 7/8 inches, 35.2 x 27.6 cm Wedges, 2000, gouache on paper, 10 x 8 inches, 29.4.3 20,3) Cm The Hobo, 1999, ink on paper, 11 5/8 x 7 1/4 inches, 29.5 x 19.8 cm Veiled Figure, 1998, gouache on paper, 12x 8 anjehes, 30.5 * 20.3 em \ aS ee dd SRS RS Pa The familiar and the fabulistic meet head on in AMY CUTLER’s precisely rendered, off-kilter drawings. Portrayed against blank fields of white, groups of women mend, launder, and fly kites—common enough sights except that they stitch up the wounds of sleeping tigers, iron one another instead of the laundry, and sail kites from the threads of their unraveling dresses. Cutler's narratives often invite comparison to fairy tales—think of Rapunzel letting down her hair Like a rope ladder or the miller’s daughter spinning straw into gold in Rumpelstiltskin. It should be noted, however, that her open-ended stories lack any happily-ever-after closure. What Cutler does have in common with the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen is a gift for injecting macabre details into everyday enchantments. Her deadpan—and often hilarious—scenes con- tain undercurrents of melancholy. In one drawing, a pro- cession of women snowshoe diagonally across the white expanse of the page, sensibly bundled against the implied cold in olive-green coats and patterned head- scarves, They pull sleds alongside them with buckets holding jacket-clad snowmen in various stages of melt- ing. The implication in Cutler’s world of women is that these (snow)men are little more than a burden—that is, until they disappear. One woman mournfully clutches an empty jacket and a carrot nose; others are “armed” with sticks that, until recently, were the limbs of their fast- disappearing companions (Cutler is fond of sly visual puns, as seen in the characters who literally “iron out” their conflicts, as mentioned above). Cutler's knack for detailed patternina—her fig- ures are outfitted in an eye-boggling array of striped, plaid, checked and floral prints—recalls eighteenth- and nineteenth-century costume illustrations. Her impeccably wrought small-scale drawings also have an obvious affinity with the jewel-toned intricacies of Indian miniatures. Royal tiger hunts were a frequent subject of such paintings, and Cutler's depiction of big cats slumbering in the laps of medically minded seam- stresses may be a winking acknowledgement of the genre's influence on her art. In this regard, Cutler’s work has an allegiance with that of Shahzia Sikander, who similarly updates the tradition of Mughal miniatures. For all their historical sources, Cutler's draw- ings also reference current events. She has admitted to finding inspiration in subjects as wide ranging as the hunt for Saddam Hussein in the wake of the U.S.-led inva- sion of Iraq and the reality television program The Swan, in which women compete for a plastic-surgery prize. Ultimately, though, the setting of Cutler’s ambiguous allegories is neither the past nor the present, but rather the free-floating now of a dream, slightly out of reach and continually open to interpretation.—Andrea K. Scott Trial, 2004, gouache on paper, 29 x 41 1/4 inches, 76.7 x 104.8 cm Campsite, 2002, gouache on paper, 46 1/2 x 47 5/8 inenes, 118.4 % 120.7 em Souvenir, 2004, gouache on paper, 29-x 41 1/4 inches, 76.7 x 104.8 cm Row, 2002, gouache on paper, 29 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches; 77 x 105.4 em To look at JEFF DAVIS's drawings is to experi- ence a sneaking sense of déj8 vu, like trying to mentally place an image cribbed from a famous sculpture or paint- ing. Scattered about the page like studies in an Old Master sketchbook—or doodles in the margins of a school notebook—his figures and fregments float in great swathes of white ground. In some cases, they're clearly derived from classical and academic sources, but they resist easy attribution. The closer you study them, the more you realize how twisted they are, restoring the gore and excess of ancient art that has been mostly eradicatec from our latter-day, cleaned-up versions of antiquity. The most prevalent images in Davis's lexicon are scruffy bearded figures (reminiscent of cavemen, Riace warrior bronzes, or 1970s hippie depictions of Jesus), human skulls, and a crouching figure recelling Atlas, the mythological Greek Titan who carried the world on his shoulders. With their ritualized actions and behaviors, Davis's figures seem like members of some decadent Roman mystery cult, or an ancient Paleolithic tribe. Odyssey and Oracle (2004) includes two figures and five bearded heads drawn in colored pencil in a loose circular composition on the page. Both of the figures sport erections—like the figures on centuries-old Greek vases or the good-Luck phalluses in ancient Roman art —end one of the men holds in his hand @ head whose drooping flesh recalls Michelangelo's famous self- portrait on the flayed skin of St. 8artholomew, painted on the Sistine Chapel's wall Davis also has a propensity for stecking objects—heads and figures and skulls—as in Untitled (CP 042) and Beacons of Song and Light (both 2004). These pile-ups of bodies and parts recall ethnographic totems, as well as Dali's apocalyptic stacks of severed limbs. Davis is more mystical than Surrealist, however. The col- cored pencils he uses create a line that is less distinct than ink, and his watercolors take drawing to an even more diaphanous extreme, with heads materializing (or perhaps dematerializing) before our eyes. These ghostly specters also recall the fascination with the supernatu- ral that’s often associated with popular spiritualism: the widespread instances of worshippers seeing the Virgin Mary's face in mist on @ suburban window, for example, or, more famously, modern-day pilarims flocking to see the likeness of Christ on the Shroud of Turin, Other contemporary artists delve into the nexus of popular culture and spirituality, like Jeffrey Vallance, who divines religious imagery in a variety of Rorschach- like stains. But where Vallance’s work reeks of irony, Davis's renderings are earnest and disarmingly sincere. Despite their orgiastic excess, his drawings evoke a reaction as nonchalant as that experienced when gazing casually at a group of mannequins in a natural history museum display. The figures are just practicina customs, going about their day. It’s easy to get caught up in the Rococo strangeness of his representations, however. Like a stoned teenager listening to music and doodling his way to salvation, Davis literally draws us out of this world and into another. But it’s a place that, even when reconfigured, seems strikingly familiar—like somewhere we've already been, or like something echoina images we've seen before.—Martha Schwendener (2) (3) (A) (5) (6) The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes, 2005, colored pencil on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches, 27.9 x 21.2 cm The Trumpets of Dawn, 2005, colored pencil on paper, 11% 8 1/2: inches, 27:9 x 24.2 em Birth of the Eternal Moment, 2005, colored pencil on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches, 27.9 & 21.2 cm The Cloud Makers Greet Hope in His Robes of Dawn, 2005, colored pencil and graphite on paper, da 3 18 AD anehes;.27.9 % 20.2°em Untitled CP 042), 2004, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches, 27.9 x 21.2 cm Evening Star, 2005, colored pencil on paper, 14 «(8 1/2 dncehes, 27.9 x 21.2 em Throughout TACLTA DEAN*s work runs the sub- ject of loss, whether related to the very process of mem- ory and remembrance, or associated with the passing of individual and cultural histories. The act of drawing is integral to how the artist seeks to recognize and stave ‘off the movement and slippage that occurs in the process of forgetting. From this perspective, Dean's drawings cannot be readily separated from her work in the medium of film. Yet, as the artist herself proposes, the drawings play a principle part in the articulation of her recurring themes. More specifically, her use of the blackboard as a primary support for both inscription and erasure are conceptually central to her overall practice. While making the film Disappearance at Sea (1996), based on a true story of a sailor who vanished, Dean attached a camera to a lighthouse beacon to follow the Light’s action of panning back and forth, as if in search of the missing sailor. The film was exhibited alongside blackboard drawings that evoke the traditional applications of the blackboard as film production story- board and as an instructional aid. Recalling both the legacy of the sublime found in J.M.W. Turner’s nine- teenth-century seascapes and Cy Twombly’s twentieth- century abstractions, the images draw us into the depth and swell of waves. But inscription is held in check by a sense of the threat of erasure. From this perspective, the artist neither moves beyond any attempt to reconstruct the overwhelming fac- tual events surrounding the journey to which she refer- ences, nor marks the beginning of the missing narrative Rather, the chalkboard’s black ground suggests a dark, menacing seascape, and, as suggested by the drawings’ collective title, “No Horizon? there is neither a horizon line nor any other anchoring point of reference to orient us. In later, monumental blackboard drawings such as Chére Petite Soeur (2002), though, Dean does add more representational elements. . More recently, and beginning in 2002, the artist has been drawing on alabaster using a fine-tipped nee- dle. Cutting lines into the soft, opaque rock, she follows the natural grain and meandering forms to produce com- positions that convey an element of randomness. Dean made one marble series during a residency in Tuscany. These works were shown in a church in Casole d’Elsa, in association with an eight-minute film she had directed. In the film, she interviews Mario Merz, a central figure in the Arte Povera movement. Interestingly, by exploring how Merz’s work emerges from his investigations of his materials’ inherent characteristics, therefore opening his creative process to serendipity and chance, Deen articulates a working method close to her own. Dean’s traces of the stones’ faultlines in the alabaster drawings that accompanied the film appear like signs of buried histories that hint at their origin but leave little by way of evidence by which to trace the past. Belonging neither to fact nor to fiction, drawing for Dean becomes a way of telling stories, whose unfold- ing plots can be neither predicted nor whose endings can be foretold.—Charles Merewether (1) Muse/Inspiration (part I), 1991, mixed media on paper, 12 5/8 x 14 5/8 inches, 32 x 37 cm (2) Muse/Inspiration (part II), 1991, mixed media on paper, 12 5/8 x 14 5/8 inches, 32 x 37 cm (3) Hypnos Thanatos II-V (for Mario Merz), one of four drawings in a series, 2004, dry needle in alabaster, 21. 5/8 « 21 5/8 inéhes, 55 x 55 cm (4) Chére Petite Soeur, 2002, chalk on blackboard, diptych, each 96 x 192 inches, 243.8 x 487.6 cm For the March 2004 issue of Artforum, TRISHA DONNELLY contributed the reaular “Top Ten” column. Delivering an eclectic brew of her favorite art, music, and historic events, Donnelly’s list gave readers a per- sonal, if sometimes deliciously opaque, view of her enthusiasms. Heralding, among others, the Dutch artist Daan Van Golden; Spirit, the lost robotic Mars rover; and Goblin's 1978 album I Fantastico Viaggio Del “Bagarozzo” Mark as particularly meaninaful, Donnelly's constellation was evocative and strange. Yet, perhaps the most intriguing element of the piece went largely unno- ticed: a half-dozen tiny asterisks denoting footnotes whose content appeared on one of the magazine's final pages, far from the article itself. The diminutive, strategically sited stars within Donnelly's otherwise conventionally formatted text referred to the artist's seemingly spontaneous addenda, ostensibly in response to her own words, Donnelly’s ref- erences included Marienne Moore's poem “Poetryy which both denounces and celebrates its own form; a short ono- matopoetic speculation by Donnelly on Richard Prince's mode of appropriation; and the artist's thoughts on the afterlife. All served to “supplement” Donnelly’s “pri- mary” text. Here, as is common, the asterisk denoted the presence of an absence. Donnelly’s practice—which includes performance, drawing, video, sound, writing, ‘and photography—is not dissimilar to text riddled with ‘asterisks: Forever referring viewers to yet another source, the artist effects an endless circulation (rather than resolution) of signification. For a 2002 exhibition opening, Donnelly enacted, astride a white horse, a live “demonstration” of Napoleonic surrender; what remained on view, however, made no direct reference to the event. A video, Canadian Rain, showed the artist earnestly summoning, via sorceress gestures, a downpour; a photograph depicted a mythological block wave; a sound piece carried the low howl of a wolf through the gallery; and a dozen pencil drawings lined the walls. The drawings. of rather aesthetically unappealing green tubes, looked to be hollow logs or simply twigs of dif- ferent thicknesses. The series of drawings were identi- fied as Untitled*, the asterisk alerting viewers that the work's deferred title was to be found on an audio CD available on request. Indeed, at the front desk, one could Listen to a drum riff that served as the work’s slippery, hon-linguistic moorina. That the artist nearly always incorporates an orel/aural accompaniment to her work is significant; like the asterisk, sound is tangible but tricky to locate. Speculating on the role of listening in art, Rolend Barthes once wrote: “What is listened to... 1s not the advent of a signified, object of a recognition or of a deciphering, but the very dispersion, the shimmering of signifiers, ceaselessly restored to 2 listening which ceaselessly produces new ones from them without ever arresting their meaning” For 2 2004 show, Donnelly dimmed the gallery lights, asked the audience to avoid looking at hor, and sang a lonesome love song while walking amonast the crowd, the objects, and the drawinas on view. The words, few, repeatina, end consciously clichéd, assumed a kind of shimmering status when sung. Addressed to all of us and none of us, they filled the room and then were gone.—Johanna Burton Untitled, 2004, pencil and ink on paper, 18°1/2 x 13 inehes, 47 x 33: om Karen/I Dinesen, 2001, graphite on paper, 14.4/4 x7 3/4 inches, 28.6 x 19.7 cm Untitled, 2004, pencil and colored pencil on paper, diptych, each 36 x 24 inches, 91.4 x 61 cm MATTHEW idling ng “whatever else my drawings speak about, they are about the vitality of gesture, speed and action. IT would like to make one-stroke ink brush paintings like the ancient Chinese aspired to. They call it painting and we call it drawing” With these concise words, MARLENE DUMAS—an Amsterdam-based, South-African born artist whose career spans some thirty-five years—willfully occludes an easy definition of drawing per se. Her works on paper prove that this blurring is hardly rhetorical; rather, it points to her particular mode of production While not actually executed in single strokes, her images nonetheless look as though they are procured in the same way a paper towel locks spilled fluid—by trapping all at once the contours of nebulous liquid within a flimsy fibrous grid. Indeed, it's often impossi- ble, when looking at a Dumas drawing, to locate where a gesture begins and where it ends. Even stranger, it's impossible to decide whether any one element belongs more to line or to color. Marks sLurrily denoting body or shadow, interior or exterior, are promiscuously ambiguous —any attempt by the viewer to pry apart contour and shading is 2 necessarily prudish (and pointless) act. Debates over the distinction between line and color ere, of course, hardly new. The seventeenth century saw 2 violent rift between the Poussinistes end the Rubenistes, with a heady Roger de Piles arguing on the side of color and its ability to deliver an “erotics of painting? Line, with its clear affinities to Classicism and even writing, was aligned with the rational and the mascu- Line. In contrast, color, whose properties were seen as contingent, shifting, and seductive, had, even since Plato, been dubbed the natural correlative to femininity and its many wiles. Those who dared join the ranks of the col- orists admitted their proclivities to excess, decoration, sensation, seduction, and confusion. There is little ques- tion, then, that Dumas quite consciously subscribes to the transitory, even shape-shifting, nature of color as such. And yet, Dumas’s color that is also line—and drawing that is also painting—works its seduction in surprisingly aggressive fashion. Stains and skeins of pigment that whisper come hither also repel; shivers of color promise to veil (this the precondition of seduc- tion) only to indecorously deliver the scatological, the sickening, and sometimes the sublime. Every innocent face threatens to coagulate into a less benign version of itself. In every instance, the artist delivers a flicker —images that are both this and that. Dumas’s “subject matter)’ if it can be pinpointed at all, cannot be dissociated from her experience as a white South African woman who does not ruminate on but rather within the complicated terrain of apartheid, racial stereotypes, sexuality, and religion. Her strippers and saints, singers, and self-portraits disallow any hard- and-fast meaning to accrue; as with her elision of line and color, Dumas seems to suggest that confusing the crisp readability of stereotypes is a political act worth pursuing. Smearing into temporary illegibility the edges of what is otherwise taken for granted, hers are paint- ings/drawings whose color/line knows no bounds. —Johanna Burton (6) (7) The Politics of Geometry Versus the Geography of Politics, 2001, inkwash and acrylic on paper, 17 71/8 x 13 7/8 inches, 45 x 35 cm An African Mickey Mouse, 1991, inkwash on paper, 11 3/8 x 8 1/4 inches, 29 x 21 cm Pissing Woman, 4997, ink, inkwash, gouache, and crayon on paper, 24 3/8 x 19 7/8 inches, 62 x 50 cm United Europe, 2003, acrylic and ink on paper, 12 5/8 x 9 3/8 inches, 32 x 24 cm De-Fence-Less, 2001, watercolor on paper, 88 5/8 x 35 3/8 inches, 225 x 90 cm Figment—Homage to Andy War Warhol, 2002, watercolor on paper, 90 1/2 x 35 3/8 inches, 230 x 90 cm Blindfolded, 2002, twenty drawings, inkwash on paper, each 13 7/8 x 11 3/8 inches, 35 x 29 cm F ey oS FF is % ~ @ Asked to define his art, SAM DURANT writes “Lenny Bruce said ‘Humor is pain plus time? I think that describes my work pretty accurately? The form Durant chooses—a quote from an irreverent American comic known for his politically charged themes—is as reveal- ing as the words themselves. The Los Angeles-based Durant uses multi-layered references to art history, pop culture, and social protest the way a comedian weaves together allusions with jokes: as material for his art. As is the case with many visual artists working today, drawing is just one piece in the overall puzzle of Durant's practice, coequal (in his case) with—and often accompanying—sculpture and installation. We might even dub this approach “Drawing in the Expanded Field? to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss’s groundbreaking 1979 essay on sculpture, from which Durant once lifted a diagram in order to map connections between the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain, and Robert Smithson. The latter is Durant’s most consistently invoked reference, and the two artists are certainly kindred spirits. The earthworks artist cast his own wide net of cultural allusions—in one essay alone, Smithson invokes Johannes Kepler, Edgar Allan Poe, Clement Greenberg, John Cage, and Dan Graham. Durant makes another complex homage to Smithson in Upside Down Pastoral Scene (2002), an instal- lation involving inverted artificial tree trunks grafted with real roots, fitted with audio speakers and installed stump-side-down, root-side-up on mirrors. The piece interweaves allusions to Smithson’s work (giving three- dimensional form to his 1969 drawing Inverted Tree), the struggle for civil rights, and music—from jazz and the blues to rap. Ever the politically aware comedian him- self, Durant works in a visual pun on Roots, Alex Heley’s best-selling novel about African-American slave history. This literary allusion is telling. Durant has an abiding interest in language, in both the meaning and visual properties of words. The 2001 drawing Standing ‘on Our Head depicts a stylized tree with the names of well-known authors (including Richard Rorty, author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), written in reverse. Another 2001 drawing Heap of Language (Soul on Ice), com- bines the title of a 1966 Smithson drawing with the neme of a book of autobiographical essays by the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. In the photorealistic drawing, stacks of Cleaver's book are piled on a table, reduced to a heap of “Language to Be Looked at and/or Things to be Read? to quote a line from Smithson. By contrast, text is only implied in Inversion, proposal for the Five Dollar Bill (Huey Newton), 2004, also an allusion to the Panthers. Despite the title's ref- erence to currency. no numerals grace Newton’s portrait, which appears above a similarly photorealistic likeness of Abraham Lincoln. Depicted upside down and below his counterpart, the emancipator of slaves is transformed into a reflection of the civil rights activist. Mirroring and inversion are leitmotifs in Durant's work. Even Durant’s use of humor can be seen as a mirroring strategy of sorts. As Baudelaire once suagested, “Laughter is the revelation of the double?— Andrea K. Scott

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