Catalogue Cover: Drawing Now
Drawing Now was an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976. It proposed that for the first time drawing had begun to be seen as a practice in its own right. In order to articulate this idea Bernice Rose wrote what was to be a very influential catalogue essay. She stated that there were four artists that at the time seemed
pivotal to what was happening both within drawing and within art itself. Cy Twomby, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were seen as central to her thinking.
Cy Twomby
Cy Twomby
Cy Twomby was cited because what he represented was a link to
Abstract Expressionism and the idea of the artist’s mark. Twomby had redefined the
artist’s gesture as a style or symbolic mark. In his hands it was no longer a
hard fought gesture, it was a sign of coolness. It was a mark designed to sum
up the artist’s signature mark. It was as if he has boiled up all those books
on graphology, seasoned them with ‘la patte’ or the artist’s mark and ate the
whole brew as nourishing soup. His trademark was indeed a trademark, he had
branded surrealist automatic drawing as a style instead of a process.
Masson
Masson: 1926 Automatic Drawing
(Masson often 'dribbled' paint over his surfaces in order to tap into his unconscious or uncontrolled brain, he is a key link between European Modernism and Abstract Expressionism)
This was
important because what Pop Art made people aware of was how signs were becoming
more important than things, and one thing art had was its own signs, one very
important one being the gestural mark. This mark was often coupled with an idea
of the artist’s signature style, in particular within Abstract Expressionist
circles, the paint mark could be the totality of the artwork. Pollock’s dribble
was what set him apart from Rothko’s stains or De Kooning’s brushwork.
In drawing this goes back a long way. You could
argue that it was drawing that that kept the idea of the individual hand signature
alive. Back in the Renaissance drawing was seen as an intellectual activity
associated with the diagram, with planning, with analysis and close
observation, but at the same time it was also seen as a record of
individuality, the area where an artist left his (and it was nearly always at
that time ‘his’) private thoughts, where purpose originated and ideas were seen
to gestate. Only in drawing was the artist working with the individual
signature of the hand and collections of artists’ drawings were made not just
for the purpose of copying them but as repositories of a singular individual’s
thoughts. Painting was usually done by the team; a master’s cartoons being
covered up as the paint was applied. Composition was far more important than
gesture, the organization of a perspective more important than local colour.
Even though this would change as Romanticism began to cultivate and celebrate
the idea of the individual genius, drawing as preparatory work for painting and
sculpture tended to be how it was thought of right up until the middle of the
20th century. However during this period what did happen was that
drawings were becoming more and more appreciated as things in their own right.
In particular the more a society valued the inner workings of the mind, the
more an ‘unfinished’ thought or scribble might be valued as it could reveal to
us how an idea came into being. Drawing was therefore both an arena for
conceptual thinking and a way for an artist’s individuality to come through in
the way they made marks or scribbled notes. (Think of the way that Leonardo’s
sketchbooks have become revered).
Twomby was just one aspect of this old tradition
re-forged into a contemporary notion. Joseph Beuys fitted another need. He was
tapping into an older shamanic tradition. His drawings were seen as
communal rituals, his blackboard drawings, diagrams of social possibility,
performed in front of an audience, his more self consciously gestural drawings
often using particular materials like fat or wax to carry messages of
transformation through ritual engagement.
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys: Blackboard
Beuys' work was another older ‘sign’ of art,
art as a spiritual and sociological glue, an activity around which people could
find meaning for the life they were living. Beuys drawings could be records of
performance as much as notations of thinking, many of his small drawings felt
like scientific notations as materials and annotations were put together in
some sort of spiritual equation. The individuality of the artist’s signature in
Beuys’ case now extending into the artist himself as trademark. His felt hat
and jacket being an inseparable part of the artist’s ‘look’.
The other two artists that were signaled out as ‘leaders’
in the new drawing movement were Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Both
these artists had been seen as pivotal in moving beyond the emotional
entrapment of Abstract Expressionism and both these artists were to be seen as
artists that understood that we were now living in a complex world of signs and
it would be the way we thought about this that would revolutionise the way we
would think about art.
Rauschenberg had for a while been using 'real world' objects and images in his 'combines'. He was looking for a drawing process that would allow him to do the same thing and he came up with 'solvent transfer'. If you put a strong solvent, such as acetone, (nail varnish remover) or lighter fluid onto a printed image it will begin to re-disolve the ink. If you dampen good strong drawing paper in such a solvent and place printed images face down onto the paper you can work over the backs of these images with pencils and crayons, so that their pressure transfers the images. What Rauschenberg also realised was that a mark passing through an image could both transfer part of the image and yet still be a mark in its own right. He had in effect worked out how to keep the gestural mark of Abstract Expressionism whilst allowing himself to incorporate photographic imagery from the media soaked world he was living in. The gesture could therefore also operate as a sign that photographic media was now so ubiquitous it even permeated the artist's handmade mark.
Rauschenberg: Solvent transfer drawings.
If you look at the drawing above, you can see that Rauschenberg's hand gestures pass through the images of the olympic wrestlers, his 'scribble' in effect capturing their image. Representation was thus allowed back into drawing. This way of working also relates directly to collage, and it has often been argued that collage techniques were the only totally new concepts to enter the drawing canon during the twentieth century. (Rose unpicks this in her catalogue essay) Greenberg's prohibitions had to be engaged with somehow and once figurative imagery was allowed back into the frame, there would be a whole host of people trying to make sense of this new/old world, not least the Pop artists.
Jasper Johns was another artist who had allowed figurative imagery to 'slip-back' into his work. But this time in a more conceptually 'knowing' way. A painting of a target is still a target, a painting of a flag or a number is still a flag or a number. The image operating in a sort of no man's land between art and reality. Johns was again interested in signs, art signs were part of a post-Duchampian game and Johns was a clever player.
Johns: 0 through 9
Johns: Numbers
Jasper Johns: Flag
Johns: Passage
The gestural marks that would go into making an image such as a flag could be read as Abstract Expressionist gestures, but this time the gestures are 'frozen' into their zones of stripes or stars. In a similar way he used graphite wash to heighten awareness of the material quality of the marks in 'Numbers'. In his paintings the use of encaustic would in effect 'freeze' his painterly marks. All was now a game, a game about surface, (Passage consists of his own hand print and mark formally arcing through and disturbing the field of existing marks), a game about how we use symbolic language, (is an American flag still a flag if it is no longer red, white and blue? or a game about reality status and mimicry.
You can get the original MOMA catalogue text here.
This exhibition, together with another Rose curated exhibition a few years later, Contemporary Drawing: Allegories of Modernism in 1992 also at MOMA, was seminal in that it began to define how drawing could now be written about, and written about separately from painting and sculpture.
For those of you planning for COP3 you will need to think through how you can articulate your own drawing practice. The catalogue essay might be a useful read as it will introduce you to several strands of contemporary thinking about fine art drawing practice.
Remember if you are thinking about putting ideas together for COP3 you can always use this blog to help navigate what is complex territory, and of course if you have questions you can always use the comments boxes.
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